What’s that you say? The best theme song for any movie ever made? It’s not something that I’d necessarily argue too much against, I have to admit (Just listen to that guitar; the production on this song just makes me smile so broadly, it’s crazy. Plus, the line about “If knowledge hangs around your neck like pearls instead of chains, then you’re a lucky man” is just the right side of 1970s indulgence and faux wisdom for me). Considering the exhausting marathon of work that today has ended up being, this seems like a good one to leave the internet with for the day. Time to go searching for the meaning of the truth in this whole world…
No Time, No Time At All
Most of us journalists have one great idea every few months, maybe two if we drink industrial levels of caffeine. For professional thinkers like Gladwell and Lehrer, the key to maintaining a remunerative career is to milk your best ideas until there’s no liquid left and pray you’ve bought yourself enough time to conjure up new ones.
Given that continuous cycle of creation and reuse, blogging seems to have been a bad idea for Jonah Lehrer. A blog is merciless, requiring constant bursts of insight. In populating his New Yorker blog with large swaths of his old work, Lehrer didn’t just break a rule of journalism. By repurposing an old post on why we don’t believe in science, he also unscrewed the cap on his brain, revealing that it’s currently running on the fumes emitted by back issues of Wired.
– From Josh Levin’s Slate piece about Jonah Lehrer’s self-plagarism coming to light.
I’m too filled with deadlines (Blogging deadlines, of course) to respond to this story the way I want right now, and my brain is too scattered to come up with the coherence that I’d need anyway, but I wanted to pull out that above quote nonetheless. I find it particularly compelling because it points out the weird unforgiving cycle of blogging versus fresh ideas, and how exhausting it is; talking to Kate this morning about everything that lay ahead today, I told her that I owe Time a new set of pitches for next week’s essay, even though this week’s only went live this morning. “You need to do that already?” she asked. It is, admittedly, a strange and exhausting rhythm to find yourself in.
“Streets Bunched Like Fists, Treacherous with Brutal Youth and the Trembling Old…”
This may be the greatest opening page to a comic that I’ve seen in years, both in terms of writing and visuals. Just wonderfully ambitious and evocative; you know immediately whether you’re in or out for the whole thing from this one page alone (It’s the first page of Zaucer of Zilk by Brendan McCarthy and Al Ewing, which ran in 2000AD recently and hopefully will get a collected edition sooner rather than later).
366 Songs 151: What’s The #?
There’s something in Robert Schneider’s vocals in every The Apples in Stereo song that feels as if it turns what could be a classic, sparkly and sparky pop song into something far sleepier. Listen to the rifftastic opening to “What’s The #?” and keep going until Schneider starts singing, and you can feel the energy in the song shift downwards. It’s a weird and wonderful gift; even when he starts screaming “‘Bout you and me!” at 1:28, there’s still something really laidback happening.
Robert Schneider, then: Power-pop’s most lethargic frontman.
“No Longer Are We Working Long Hours Because We Want To, But Rather Because There Is An Expectation We Should”
In the early days of my career, when I was young, I used to happily work long hours and regularly pull all-nighters. It was fun and I enjoyed my job. However, this set a habit in my working life that continued far longer than was healthy. Eventually I became stressed and fell ill. In the end things became so bad that I was completely unproductive.
This high-intensity working also sets a baseline for the whole industry, where it becomes the norm to work at this accelerated speed. No longer are we working long hours because we want to, but rather because there is an expectation we should. This kind of work/life balance can only end one way, in burnout. This damages us personally, our clients and the industry as a whole. It is in our own interest and those of our clients to look after our health.
This means we cannot spend our lives sitting in front of a screen. It simply isn’t healthy. Instead we need to participate in activities beyond our desks. Preferably activities that involve at least some exercise. A healthy diet wouldn’t hurt either. Getting away from the Web (and Web community) offers other benefits too. It is an opportunity for us to interact with non Web people. Whether you are helping a charity or joining a rock climbing club, the people you meet will provide a much more realistic view of how ‘normal’ people lead their lives.
This will inform our work. I often think that, as Web designers, we live in a bubble in which everybody is on twitter all day, and understands that typing a URL into Google isn’t the best way to reach a website. Not that this is all we will learn from others. We can also learn from other people’s jobs. For example, there is a lot we can learn from architects, psychologists, marketeers and countless other professions. We can learn from their processes, techniques, expertise and outlook. All of this can be applied to our own role.
Replace “Web designer” with freelancer – or creative person – of any kind, and I think this is true (From here, by Paul Boag).
366 Songs 150: The Man Don’t Give A Fuck
There are songs you here, and just know that – no matter what else – you’ll always love their creators for. Such it was with “The Man Don’t Give A Fuck,” a song that should, by all rights have disappeared into limbo, but instead became the song that made Super Furry Animals’ reputation.
The song was originally meant to be a b-side to “If You Don’t Want Me To Destroy You,” the final single from the band’s first album, but was pulled at the last minute when Steely Dan refused to approve the sample that’s the basis for the song’s chorus (That “You know they don’t give a fuck about anybody else”? That’s from Steely Dan’s “Show Biz Kids”:
“Showbusiness kids/Making movies of themselves/You know they don’t give a fuck/About anybody else,” it goes, in a lovely 1970s accusation of a culture that’d really take root a decade later. Oh, friends, you were so far ahead of your time, and no-one really listened anyway). Weirdly, wonderfully, the band persisted in trying to get the sample cleared, eventually giving Dan’s Donald Fagan an impressive 95% of the songwriting royalties and releasing the track as their Christmas single for 1996, complete with a sticker telling listeners with sensitive ears “Warning! This track contains the word **** 50 times!”
It also contains doo-wop harmonies, sleigh bells and the first sign of the anger that would come to the fore in later releases: “Out of focus ideology/Keeps the masses from majority,” the second verse goes before it complains about “Experts, brainwashed, tumble-dried.” The result? A protest song that’s never entirely explicit about what it’s protesting, and so becomes a wonderfully versatile fuck-you to authority and oppression in general, an expression of anger as an energy that you can dance and shout to as much and as loudly as you want. Wonderfully, despite being entirely unsuited to radioplay – There were edited versions that either removed the numerous “fuck”s, or in one great instance, replaced them with someone saying “monkeys” – it made it to #22 in the top 40.
Never underestimate people’s desire to have a revolution they can dance to, apparently.
Worth pointing out: When this song was played live, at least for the period where I’d be seeing the band as often as possible, this would be the final song of the night, and would last somewhere in the region of 10 minutes or so at least, with the band leaving the stage after the song as it sounds here, but Cian Ciaran keeping the Steely Dan loop going and seeing where he could take the song from there. We’d dance for as long as we could.
366 Songs 149: Slow Life
I first heard this song as a bootleg, downloaded from some site ahead of the release of Phantom Power back in… what, 2002? 2003? And I remember thinking, at the time, that this really was the ultimate Super Furry Animals song – It’s got the trad band bit, with the harmonica and the electronic piano and the guitars and drums with Gruff singing sweetly over the top (Even if what he’s actually singing is somewhat less than sweet: “I see/Televisions/Pretty pictures/Of starvation,” he sings at one point, almost making it sound an attractive proposition. Also, “I see fractures/I see fragments” remains one of my favorite lines of anything, ever), as well as the techno breakdown and the 1970s retro moment and everything that the band does so well. As a song, it’s a wonderful journey, evolving from the sampled circus sounds at the start to the glamorous, Bond theme-esque strings at the end that fall apart, drip into nothingness. In many ways, it was all downhill for the band from here – Certainly, the next album, Love Kraft, was a disappointment when compared to Phantom Power – but, really, what an incredible way to go out.
366 Songs 148: Ice Hockey Hair
There’s something about the guitar sound in “Ice Hockey Hair,” especially the opening noodling, that makes me think of songs from the 1970s, when guitarists weren’t afraid to attempt long-haired, looping beauty instead of riffs or distortion pedals or noise. I say that semi-jokingly, but there’s something appealing to me about the lack of self-consciousness in prog-rock that feels missing in the post-punk music that followed, and that indescribable something is one of the things I like so much about Super Furry Animals; a lack of embarrassment in following their musical bliss, perhaps, even if said bliss takes them into places like a seven-minute long song about table tennis and unfashionable haircuts filled with autotuned vocals (back in 1997, before they were everywhere!), Stooges-esque choruses and a wonderfully inviting schizophrenia when it comes to what decade the song belonged to. The answer, of course, was “the decade you’re living in right now.”
Now that you’re here, tell me you’re a non-believer, as the song says.
Color Me Interested
Apparently, some kind of teaser for the new song Damon Albarn unveiled this past weekend (Skip to 2:38):
Considering everyone was convinced that the previously-teased “Under The Westway” was going to be the final Blur release, this is a surprise… and perhaps suggests that rumors of a new Blur album may not have been entirely out there after all.
366 Songs 147: Music Box
“Mr. Zebra” almost always, without fail, takes me to “Music Box,” for some reason. The quirky female singer-songwriter with a piano connection, maybe? Or perhaps that this song feels as short and as playful – or more playful – as the previous Tori Amos one, with Regina Spektor just playing around, throwing her vocals around (The lyric becoming vomit noise towards the end) and telling the musical equivalent of a shaggy dog story. It’s hard not to be charmed by this, at least for me.