Ladies and gentlemen, Lonnie Mack!
The death of Lonnie Mack is going to get lost amidst the rightful sadness over Prince’s demise, but I want to share a few words urging you to replay Mack’s The Wham! of That Memphis Man in between “Kiss” and “When Doves Cry” today.
The first of the guitar-hero records (this is from 1964) is also one of the best. And for perhaps the last time, the singing on such a disc is worthy of the guitar histrionics. Lonnie Mack bent, stroked, and modified the sound of six strings in ways that baffled his contemporaries and served as a guide to future players. Eric Clapton’s later take on Bobby Bland’s “Farther on Down the Road” outright swipes the version of the standard which Clapton first heard on this album.
But Mack is more than just an axe murderer. His singing is sure, full of knowing nuance, and soulful—his screams transform “Why” from an above-par breakup ballad into a run of psychic terror—and his brash arrangements insure that Wham! remains a showcase for songs, not a platform for showing off. Although Mack is a fine writer, the accent here is on songs written by others. Chuck Berry’s “Memphis” (Mack’s first single and an instrumental chart smash) and Dale Hawkins’s “Suzie Q” aren’t radically reworked, but Mack imprints both numbers with enough spiraling, sputtering guitar to distinguish them from their original incarnations.
Mack envelops himself in the ballads; “Where There’s a Will There’s a Way” and the climactic “Why” demonstrate his measured, thoughtful vocal eruptions to best effect. Still, it is Mack’s guitar playing that made his career and remains his most enduring legacy. He played fast and he played lots of notes, yet on Wham! he never went on too long or ground his gears by squeezing too much into a break. Mack, who produced this album, has never been given credit for the dignified understatement he brought to his workouts. In the mid-eighties he was rediscovered, thanks to Stevie Ray Vaughan and the good folks at Alligator Records, and thanks to reissue specialists The Wham! of That Memphis Man started to get some of the attention it deserved. Give it some today.
This Is What the End of The Boston Globe Looks Like
Support Ivan Julian
I found out today via Richard Barone and Sally Timms that Ivan Julian, founding member of the Voidoids, contributor to both The Clash’s original Sandinista! and my Sandinista! Project, is being treated for cancer and has pretty much the health insurance you’d expect. There are two benefits shows scheduled in New York with the usual downtown luminaries (one’s not sold out yet). If you’re not in NYC, you can still donate. I just did; you should, too.
Buck Owens on Merle Haggard
Many years ago, when I was interviewing Buck Owens for a project, I asked him a question I asked every country great I spoke to back then: “Hank or Lefty?” Without hesitation, in a stronger voice than he’d employed for the rest of our talk, he said, “Merle.”
The mystery of The Harder They Come
Since I bought it during high school, I’ve listened to the soundtrack of The Harder They Come hundreds of times, if not more. I’ve been listening to it more than usual lately, in part because it’s also an unofficial soundtrack to Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, which I’m currently re-reading, and in part because Eli or someone left a CD of it in Jane’s car. Anyway, one of the things I’ve always enjoyed about the record is that two of the outstanding Jimmy Cliff songs on it, “You Can Get It If You Really Want It” and the title track, repeat at the end. They’re not remixes or alternate version; just the same recordings. Today, nearly 40 years after my introduction to the album, I ask a question I never thought to ask before: Why? I have some theories but have been unable to discover why Island Records did that. Are there any reggae or Chris Blackwell or soundtrack enthusiasts who can help me?
What teachers do
I usually find something to laugh at on the front page of The Brookline Tab (a typical recent piece heralded the arrival of new burrito shops to our town), but “Brookline Teachers Cut Extra Work” hit me. Teachers are so committed to what they do for the children and the community that their idea of a work slowdown is to stop doing some of the extra things that they’re not even paid for. Just a quick reminder of how much dedication people bring to that job.
Best sentence of the day refuting conventional wisdom about a particularly odious Republican presidential candidate
This theory is a lot like that Red Lobster menu, seeming to present an endless array of options, but most of them are just the same limited palette of cheap ingredients reconstituted in different ways.
– Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight.com
Carrie Brownstein’s Sentences Stand Out
credit: Chad Batka for The New York Times
Most of the new crop of musician autobiographies is weak and one-dimensional: John Fogerty is still mad, with good reason; so is Kim Gordon; so is John Lydon. Two of the guys from Joy Division are still mad, without good reason; Neil Young misses some of his dogs; Patti Smith is tired from all that remembering. The most distinctive of the ones I’ve read recently is Carrie Brownstein’s Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl. As in her best Sleater-Kinney and Wild Flag songs, Brownstein wrote a memoir that simultaneously shares what something feels like in real time and considers how it’s different now that she’s had a while to let those emotions cook. Anyone who regularly comes up with sentences like
“I offered to be in a band with a cute and hip-looking woman whom I admired for her ability to pull off overalls, but she wasn’t interested”
or
“We were like Fleetwood Mac without the sex or drugs or hair or songs”
or
“My attitude may have been a factor”
has a sense of humor and sense of self that serve her book well. In its way, this tough, sweet memoir is as loud and ambiguously satisfying as the best of Dig Me Out, The Hot Rock, or All Hands on the Bad One.
When the gales of November came early
The good news: The Detroit News has published 16 pieces about the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
The bad news: Only one of them is mostly about Gordon Lightfoot.
Roadrunner, Roadrunner!
photo credit: Jon Bernhardt
I am often at my happiest when I am at my most ridiculous. I don’t act on that self-knowledge often enough, but I did today when I spoke before the Joint Committee on State Administration and Regulatory Oversight in favor of “Roadrunner” by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers becoming the official state rock song. An official rock song? Isn’t the whole purpose of rock’n’roll to upend that sort of thing? Maybe, but politics is the art of the possible and not the perfect. So is rock’n’roll, if you think about it. Regardless of the rock’n’rollness of the setting, “Roadrunner” is as close to a perfect rock’n’roll song as you’ll find. If we’re going to have an official rock song in this weird state, this is surely it. And I got to deliver my testimony as part of a hilarious lineup of a hearing that including two bills regarding clam chowder (one as official state appetizer, another as official state dish) and acts designating, among other events, Sleep Deprivation Awareness Week, Aviation Awareness Week, and Narcolepsy Awareness Day.
Here’s my testimony:
I am here as a longtime citizen of the Commonwealth to register my support for “Roadrunner” as our official rock song. Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers said all that needs to be said on the matter in four minutes and six seconds, so I promise I’ll come in way under that.
“Roadrunner” is profound and it’s profound in the way it celebrates the mundane. It makes art out of driving to a Stop and Shop, out of driving around your state late at night, listening to the radio, trying to make yourself feel better. Is there anything more American than that?
Or, to consider it another way, is there anything more American than wasting gas? “Roadrunner” was recorded in 1972, a year before the OPEC oil embargo, back when the stuff was cheap, $3 a barrel, and seemed to go on forever. Is Richman wasting gas? Or is he investing in gas? You can’t put a price on the feeling you can only get driving late at night listening to the radio.
That’s only one of an infinite number of mysteries in “Roadrunner.” I’ve got plenty more of ‘em, including one involving the Natick Mall, but I’ll just share a few reasons why “Roadrunner” is the only possible choice for official rock song.
It’s educational. Most songs only count off to 4, this counts off to 6. That’s 50% more math than most rock songs. At a time when communities are convulsing over math test scores, we should accept “Roadrunner” as a gift to the children of the Commonwealth. And, in lines like “going faster miles an hour,” it creates a whole new brand of English syntax — born in Massachusetts.
It’s for everyone. With only two chords and the occasional hint of a third, it’s a song almost anyone can learn to play. It’s been celebrated as one of about 1,000 songs that invented punk rock, but its influence goes way beyond that. It’s the only song that the jam band Phish, the electronic artist M.I.A., and punk stalwarts The Sex Pistols have all covered. If you’ve come up with something that Phish fans, M.I.A. fans, and Sex Pistols fans can agree on, you have truly captured the universal.
And it’s about triumph. You try shouting “radio on!” over and over out an open car window and not feel victorious. A little embarrassed, maybe, but victorious. Not that I would know from personal experience.
I admit it: There may be better bands from Massachusetts. There may have been better songs written and recorded in Massachusetts. But there’s no other song that so simply captures the complex delights of living in this beautiful, strange Commonwealth. It comes out and screams what no other song in the history of rock’n’roll ever has: “I’m in love with Massachusetts.”
Thank you very much.
Thank you to Joyce Linehan for making all this happen and to my friends for pointing out ways I could improve my testimony.
Most terrifying/of-the-moment first half of a sentence I’ve heard so far today
“In that open letter I wrote to Pope Francis on the Huffington Post …”
(Re)inventing the Truth, Featuring Malcolm X, Woody Guthrie, and Iceberg Slim
I read a lot of books as an impressionable teenager, but there were three autobiographies I devoured, all in the same semester, that inspired/fascinated/disgusted me with what I felt was their smart, savvy, sometimes brutal depictions and opinions of what “real life” was like: The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory, and Iceberg Slim’s Pimp. One was assigned for school; two I picked up at a used bookstore in Greenwich Village when my friend Mike and I were supposed to be in school. All contributed to my education.
Over time, I learned that much of what was in those books, while emotionally riveting and mostly true, was factually dubious. Freshman year in college I read Joe Klein’s Woody Guthrie: A Life and learned that Guthrie was both savvier and more mundane a personality than he wanted us to believe. Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention showed how Malcolm’s Autobiography was a brilliant, controlled, selective performance. And now Justin Gifford’s Street Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim tells a more complicated and less self-aggrandizing (though still pretty damn disturbing) tale than the official take.
Few of the revelations in those books (Marable’s were the most controversial when they were first published) diminish the story or the storyteller. Many of the deviations from fact in Autobiography of Malcolm X, Bound for Glory, and Pimp were made to improve and focus the story, but it turns out that messiness makes for a more complicated and even more engaging story than a slightly too-well-rounded version.
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” That’s the key line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and, in some ways, that’s the moral of the film and the three high school books I’m remembering. Sometimes, though, dumping the legend in favor of the fact can better serve the subject and the story.
Detail! Detail!
Sometimes a small, specific unexpected detail can pull you into a piece. Here are the first few sentences of a piece by Steve Coll in this week’s New Yorker about the deal recently reached between Iran and various world powers.
In the late nineteen-eighties, in Switzerland, Iranian officials met with collaborators of A. Q. Khan, the scientist who fathered Pakistan’s nuclear-bomb program. The parties may also have met in Dubai, where Khan maintained a secret office above a children’s store called Mummy & Me. In 1987, the Iranians received a one-page document that included the offer of a disassembled centrifuge, along with diagrams of the machine. They reportedly ended up paying as much as ten million dollars for information and materials that helped Iran advance its nuclear program during the nineteen-nineties.
I’ve boldfaced the part that made it impossible for me not to read the whole article. Illicit nuclear negotiations atop a children’s store! With a great name! Who wouldn’t want to see where this article goes?
Afterparties, Visual Storytelling, and Keeping the NSFW Out of Work
(While writing the following for work, I realized that a few moments in the accompanying video are NSFW in most workplaces, so I figured I’d post it here instead.)
I was just sharing with a colleague an example of a useful, entertaining brief animated video and thought I’d share it here, too.
This three-minute-long clip, in which musician and comedian Carrie Brownstein searches for a mythical good afterparty, has all the elements you want in a brief animation: a taut, compelling story (complete with surprises and reversals), images that reinforce and comment upon what’s being said (often with humor), and a design that fits well with the topic. It also features my favorite song from her White Flag project. Enjoy!
Remembering Johnny Otis today
I think about Johnny Otis a lot, mostly because I love his music (no Otis, no hand jive, people) and the ways in which he fought for racial equality. I’m thinking about him today in particular because of the unfolding Rachel Dolezal story today.
Consider these long-ago quotes from Otis:
Mr. Otis was also a political activist, a preacher, an artist, an author and even, late in life, an organic farmer. But it was in music that he left his most lasting mark.
Despite being a mover and shaker in the world of black music, Mr. Otis was not black, which as far as he was concerned was simply an accident of birth. He was immersed in African-American culture from an early age and said he considered himself “black by persuasion.”
“Genetically, I’m pure Greek,” he told The San Jose Mercury News in 1994. “Psychologically, environmentally, culturally, by choice, I’m a member of the black community.” (source)
Or …
Otis, who was white, was born John Veliotes to Greek immigrants in Vallejo, according to the Los Angeles Times. He grew up in a black section of Berkeley, where he said he identified far more with black culture than his own. As a teenager, he changed his name because he thought Johnny Otis sounded more black.
“As a kid, I decided that if our society dictated that one had to be black or white, I would be black,” he once explained.His musical tastes clearly reflected that adopted culture and even after he became famous, his dark skin and hair often led audiences and club promoters to assume he was black like his band mates. (source)
What is real? What is performance? What is wishful thinking? What is passing? What is lying? What is helpful? What is hurtful? What is truth? We’re just starting to unpack these and many, many other questions.
A Sandinista-flavored blizzard for you
My Massachusetts friends and colleagues are dealing with the biggest snowstorm since I moved here in 1986. It’s even bigger, the weather historians say, than the famed Blizzard of 78.
In my world, though, The Blizzard of 78 isn’t a storm. It’s the name of a terrific local band that contributed to my Sandinista Project (still in print! still cheap!) many years ago. They contributed a smashing version of the side six stalwart “Silicone on Sapphire,” which I’ve included below as a gift to everyone stuck in tonight because of the snow. Their version includes an unexpected but perfect contributor: dub giant Mikey Dread. Dread, of course, was an essential contributor to the original Sandinista!, producing some tracks, helping write some more, toasting over even more. Abe Bradshaw and I were honored to have him on the record and I’m particularly grateful to the adept Blizzard boys for making it happen. Now listen to this while the snow continues to pile up outside your window …
Viva Viv Albertine!
Forget that the stories tend to be self-aggrandizing and factually dubious; the actual writing in celebrity memoirs is often brittle and awkward, in part because they’re trying to capture the celebrity’s speaking voice. Jane reminded me of that this morning when she read me a paragraph she found online from the recent autobiography of Mike Huckabee (someone we don’t often quote around the house).
Even autobiographies from entertainers you like tend to be boring, which makes it all more exciting when you come across a paragraph as full of life as this one from Viv Albertine’s memoir Clothes Clothes Clothes Music Music Music Boys Boys Boys, in which she chronicles how the members of her band, the Slits, carried themselves:
When we were on a TV show in Holland, Mike Oldfield’s sister, Sally, was on the same bill. She had a single out at the time (“Mirrors”). Sally was dressed in a peasant gypsy-type dress and warbling away in a breathy little-girl voice. We went up to her afterwards and told her she was shit, that she was compounding stereotypes and doing a disservice to girls, that she should take a good look at what she was doing and how she was projecting herself and be honest about who she was. She burst into tears. We do that sort of thing all the time.
(For more on the Slits’ influence, you may wish to see the brief note I wrote for BoingBoing after Ari Up died, in which I quote the great Amy Rigby.)
I am now at work, blogging about blogging about blogging for work
My latest post for work: A new theremin, a new way to learn, a new way to work together
My latest post about blogging for work: Blogging for business: you are no longer just you
The trick, even if you are no longer just you, is to figure out how to bring as much of yourself as you can.
Enjoy the recursion …
Best three sentences in a book review by an 11-year-old of all time of the day
I think it was in the Old West because there were Indians, and it was dusty and stuff. He married this Indian girl, this guy’s daughter, and he kept yelling off a cliff, “I am Pete!” I don’t really don’t know why he was doing that.
— one of the twin daughters of Paul Gleason
Father and son
Now 65, Richard Thompson lives in Pacific Palisades in a cottage with a small pool in back, as well as a modest guesthouse with an island theme — a surfboard lodged in the rafters, sofa cushions with a palm-frond pattern, a mural of Polynesian bathing beauties smiling down from the wall. Teddy briefly lived in the guesthouse when he was first starting out in the music business, but now Richard uses it as a recording studio. As they set up, Richard and Teddy untangled cords and fiddled with equipment. Richard worked barefoot and wore black cargo pants; Teddy, who has his mother’s expensive tastes, wore skinny jeans. They talked about some sounds they were going to try out later that day, including the hurdy-gurdy, of which Richard is a fan. “It’s very easy to play,” Richard said. “It’s simply hard to play well.”
“Which one will you be doing?” Teddy asked.
— Teddy Thompson’s Folk-Rock Family Reunion (Susan Dominus, NY Times Magazine)
Prince, “Partyup”
It’s hard for me to describe at this late date how exciting this was in 1981: funkiest thing around, outstanding antiwar song, all of George Clinton’s promises finally coming true. Prince hasn’t done anything that’s moved me since the 1996 double-shot of Chaos and Disorder and Emancipation, but this is still thrilling and I’m grateful to this site for unearthing it.
http://www.wat.tv/embedframe/104123chuPP3r9868041
In which one gifted journalist sizes up a giant
Mike Lien/The New York Times, 1971
The effect on the business was profound, as if Chuck Berry had walked into a Glenn Miller show and started playing guitar.
— One of many, many wonderful sentences in David Carr’s remembrance of Ben Bradlee
The whole column is worth reading and probably worth memorizing, but if you’re in TL;DR mode at least read the full paragraph in which that sentence arrives:
So in 1969, [Bradlee] conjured Style, a hip, cheeky section of the newspaper that reflected the tumult of the times in a city where fashion and discourse were rived with a maddening sameness. The effect on the business was profound, as if Chuck Berry had walked into a Glenn Miller show and started playing guitar. He expanded the vernacular of newspapering, enabling real, actual writers to shed the shackles of convention and generate daily discourse that made people laugh, spill their coffee or throw The Post down in disgust.
A brief note on an unexpected encounter
Earlier tonight, right after dinner, in an attempt to delay having to clean the kitchen, I took the dog for a walk. One of the places we stopped was a convenience store across the main street, a place where the employees are reasonably friendly to me and exceedingly friendly to the dog.
At the convenience store, I saw that the clerk was having trouble communicating with a young woman who was unable to explain to him what she wanted to buy from the store’s small drugstore section. She spoke only Spanish; the clerk spoke only English. I handed her my smartphone, thinking she might type what she wanted into the search box. Then, maybe, the phone could translate and we humans could figure it out together.
She took the phone, and typed, without hesitation or error, “pastillas para el periodo menstrual,” I directed her to Midol, used the smartphone to translate the words on the box into Spanish, and she was soon on her way.
That young woman was remarkably poised for someone who was in menstrual pain and likely not enjoying talking, or trying to talk, to two strange men about it. I didn’t consider it at the time, but now I realize how impressive she was in the moment.
Because she spoke only Spanish in a place where no one else did, it was quite a lot of work for her to advocate for herself and get what she needed. I hope it ended well, but if it did there was some luck involved.
That got me to thinking about some of the unluckiest people at the edge of our country right now, the many thousands of unaccompanied children from Central America desperate to get away from the violence in their home countries and into the U.S. One of their biggest problems right now is that they don’t know how to communicate in English, the language of power, making it much harder for them to advocate for themselves.
When I hear the anger and outrage so many express against these children, I want those who people who feel that anger and outrage to imagine what life might be like for them, only partway through a long and tortuous journey, having trouble describing their most basic and personal needs. And then I want them to think about how they might want to be treated in such circumstances if they faced similarly bad luck.
Media diet, summer 2014, part 2: music
Dialogue guaranteed reported verbatim:
Other person: You posted your first media diet piece more than a month ago. Where’s part 2?
Me: I have job, a family, a house …
Other person: No, really. How long can it take to do something like this? It’s just a damn list.
Me: I don’t want to publish a list. Lists are boring.
Other person: Two of your books are just lists.
Me: (pause) Oh. I’ll get to it right now.
Other person: Good.
—–
Here’s what I’ve listened to most recently, according to the Recently Played playlist on my phone. All records listed here are definitely endorsements.
William Onyeabor, Anything You Sow (extra-scratchy-downloaded-illegally-from-the-Internet version; track for track it’s almost as solid as the Luaka Bop best-of)
Brand New Wayo (more early-’80s Nigerian funk, but less precise than Onyeabor’s; ideal running accompaniment and rigorously documented)
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Hypnotic Eye (what a band!)
Country Funk (terrific compilation that lives up to its name)
Istanbul 70 (strong introduction to Turkish rock)
Debo Band, Flamingoh (almost everything they do is great: just pledge already)
Courtney Barnett, The Double EP (Dylanesque, hilarious, cutting)
Iggy Azalea featuring Charli XCX and other people, “Fancy” (hilarious, cutting, not at all Dylanesque)
Wipers, Is This Real (exquisite Northwestern punk; Eli got me listening to it again)
Camp, WRUV, Graveyard Shift 1, July 29, 2014 (late-night college radio at its dreamiest)
Joe Grushecky, New Project Demos (sorry, I can’t give anything away)
Gyedu-Blay Ambolley, Simigwa (1975, Ghanaian funk at its funkiest)
Nils Lofgren, Face the Music (all I’ve heard is the alternate take of “Keith Don’t Go” that they’re teasing; maybe Concord will send me the whole thing?)
The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Vol 1. (mysteries inside mysteries inside mysteries inside …)
Lucinda Williams, 25th Anniversary Version (the remastering helps you hear that the performances are as outstanding as the compositions)
Bob Dylan, Down the River (random bootleg, includes one outtake with the world “polka” in it)
Old 97’s, Most Messed Up (tales from the road, often — but not always — with insights that rock as hard as the rhythm section)
Drive-By Truckers, Dragon Pants (Chuck Berry lives!)
Antibalas (Fela lives!)
Bruce Springsteen, American Beauty (you’d expect an EP of outtakes from an LP of outtakes to be bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, but you’d be wrong)
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Brisbane 2-26-14 (greatest. e street setlist. ever.)
This Is Marijata (more ’70s funk from Ghana)
Graham Parker and the Rumour The Up Escalator (it’s no Squeezing Out Sparks — what is? — but this showcases a band at its peak, which led me to listen to …)
Graham Parker and the Rumour, Official Bootleg Box (six CDs of similar setlists is more than a normal person might want to hear, but I’m not a normal person. Steve Goulding!)
Rough Francis, Maximum Soul Power (Burlington VT’s hardest-rocking band — but not featuring my favorite bass player in Burlington)
Purple Snow: Forecasting the Minneapolis Sound (the world that created Prince, along with the sound of Prince creating himself)
Ariana Grande and a bunch of other people, “Problem” (wonderful combination of items that shouldn’t fit together but does, like finds at a yard sale)
The Replacements, Let It Be (the reunion tour bumbles into Boston next month)
Lorde, Pure Heroine (the beginning of a long, satisfying, twisting story, I’m hoping)
The Mekons Rock’n’Roll (Steve Goulding’s other band at its peak)
Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Psychedelic Pill (probably their last, featuring the greatest song ever written that takes place in a Ramada Inn)
Bob Dylan, Now Your Mouth Cries Wolf (I’m holding out for a complete “She’s Your Lover Now” someday, but I’m not optimistic)
Media diet, summer 2014, part 1: podcasts
I’m trying, and half-succeeding, to read less and write more. I read more than enough. (You don’t want to know how many times I’ve been through Proust, for example — one of the good things about having a tablet is that it’s easier to hide my habits/obsessions.)
I’m trying to cut down my inputs dramatically so I can focus more on my output. But someone asked me earlier this year to be part of a media roundup she was assembling for some editorial people. I never got around to it, but I thought it might be useful, for me anyway, to write down want I’m reading/listening to/seeing this summer. I’ll start with podcasts.
Here are five I recommend highly. There are far more great ones than anyone with a job, a family, or creative aspirations could listen to, but here are five I listen to regularly every week with consistent pleasure.
Song Exploder, in which musicians take apart their songs and share how they put ’em together in the first place. Not all the music is to my taste, but the discussion of what it takes to construct a work is engaging and sometimes inspiring.
Joe Bussard’s Country Classics, in which the legendary record collector (and Fonotone proprietor) digs into his bottomless pile of ’78s and reveals outstanding cut after outstanding cut of pre-WWII country, blues, and gospel, augmented by authoritative commentary, brought to you by the geniuses at Dust-to-Digital.
99% Invisible, a design podcast that digs deep into a topic every week, full of surprises and insight. And this uses the broadest definition of design possible: last week’s episode was all about the history of skyjacking.
TLDR is a blog about the internet, associated with On the Media. The producers are funny, share their wonder, and have a strong moral sense that doesn’t get in the way of entertaining.
On the Media is better known as an NPR show, but I listen to it on podcast just to make sure I don’t miss it when it’s on the local public radio station. I’ve listened to this media-news-and-comment show for years and still learn or am provoked by something new almost every week.
Listen!
Paragraph of the weekend (c/o Roddy Doyle)
Jimmy hadn’t been accurate when he told Barry that there were only ten in the audience. There were twelve. But that figure grew to thirteen when the drummer left the band halfway through their crowd pleaser, ‘Your Happiness Makes Me Puke,’ but hung around for the rest of the gig so she could drive Barry home.
— Roddy Doyle, The Guts
My inequality essay for TED
The good folks at TED asked me to write something about income inequality, a topic close to my (everyone’s?) heart.
My shortish essay asks and attempts to answer the question Why Is Inequality the Big Hot Issue Right Now?
Revealed: the Flannery O’Connor/Lucinda Williams connection
Lucinda Williams once chased Flannery O’Connor’s peacocks … When Williams was kindergarten age in the late ‘50s, she and her father, the poet Miller Williams, drove from Macon, Ga., to Milledgeville, Ga., to visit the great Southern Gothic writer Flannery O’Connor as invited guests. “She had a strict daily schedule when she was writing,” Williams said … “She wasn’t ready to receive guests when we got there so we sat on the porch until she finished writing. I chased her peacocks all around the yard. My father loves to tell that story.”
Lucinda Williams draws from where the spirit meets the bone (Tallahassee Democrat)
Best insult of a workplace environment buried in a profile of Spotify of all time of the week
Aside from walls made from whiteboards, it feels like a place where people would go to sit around, smoke pot, and listen to John Legend.
Spotify Hits 10 Million Paid Users. Now Can It Make Money? (Businessweek)
Favorite Dropbox error message of all time of the week
I don’t enjoy it when Dropbox version control fails, but I do enjoy that doing so appends “Jimmy Guterman’s conflicted copy” to the name of the file. Instead of a technical error, it makes it seem like I’m conflicted about the copy I wrote or edited, which is sometimes often true.
Best premise for a science fiction story of all time of the week
On Wednesday, Mr. Roth told the crowd that next week he would be getting an honorary doctorate from the Jewish Theological Seminary, “where I will be introduced by Mae West.”
Stephen Wolfram’s Excellent Adventure
The last freelance assignment I took before I joined Collective Next last year has just been published. It’s a profile of Stephen Wolfram for strategy+business, a magazine that was published by Booz and Company when I did the work and is now published by PwC. (Long print publishing cycles means your magazine might get bought out while your draft is in proofs.)
The idea behind the profile was to write about Wolfram not as a scientist, which has been done 10 zillion times, but as the idiosyncratic and very successful founder and CEO of an idiosyncratic and very successful company. I had a lot of room to riff on everything from Isaac Newton’s back-cover book-quote policy to what it’s like to run a company via the phone.
My only disappointment with the piece (which was edited, expertly, by Paul Michelman) is that it isn’t accompanied by this photograph, in which MacArthur Fellow and TED speaker Wolfram stands alongside former Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash, who probably hasn’t read all 1,192 pages of A New Kind of Science:
Stephen ‘n’ Slash
You need Don MacDonald’s Machiavelli in your life
I’m a fan of Don MacDonald, in particular his graphic novel about Machiavelli. I wrote about it on BoingBoing, I had Don come and talk about it at TEDxBoston, and now that it’s done he’s offering it via Kickstarter. I ponied up; you should, too.
Greatest sentence fragment of all time of the week, Barry Bearak edition
From “As Cubs Wander Into the Bronx, They’ve Never Been Worse,” in this morning’s Times:
… they last won a pennant in 1945, when the able-bodied men were still off at war.
(Apologies to my dear friend and dear Cubs fan Mark Caro.)
Ted Hawkins covers Jesse Winchester’s “Biloxi”
In which one of my favorite singers covers one of my favorite songwriters. Beautiful beyond description (or at least beyond my ability to describe). Peace to them both.
Greatest sentence of all time of the week, A.M. Homes edition
Regularly on this gradually-coming-back-to-life blog, weekly I hope, I’ll share the occasional sentence that thrills me. I’ll present them without comment; it’s for each reader to get what he or she gets out of those sentences without me imposing any interpretation. So …
I am my mother’s child and I am my mother’s child, I am my father’s child and I am my father’s child, and if that line is a little too much like Gertrude Stein, then I might be a little bit her child too.
— A.M. Homes, The Mistress’s Daughter
(Thanks to Jane for taking this book out of the library, reminding me how much I adore this sentence.)
Two photos to celebrate Flannery O’Connor’s birthday
Earlier this month, the family spent several days in Savannah, Georgia. I’d always associated Flannery O’Connor with Milledgeville, Georgia, the town she lived in as an adult. I’d forgotten that she grew up in Savannah and was pleasantly surprised when the proprietor of a used bookstore directed Eli and me to her childhood home. To celebrate her birthday, here are two bad snapshots I took in her home that speak to something about her.
Here’s a page from a book she read and wrote in as a child. Her annotation: “not a very good book.” Nicely captures her attitude.
And here’s what she saw outside of her parents’ bedroom window. That she started writing almost in the shadow of a steeple should come as no surprise.
Happy birthday, Mary Flannery!
Steve Martin remembers — or does he?
Finally got around to reading Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life, a straightforward, mostly serious consideration of his formative years. What struck me most, aside from the occasional hilarious deadpan observation, was how he described being aware of developing in his craft even when he wasn’t successful or even very good yet. But now that the book is done, I wonder whether Martin is accurately reporting what he felt about his process at the time — or if he’s making sense of his development in retrospect. When you’re in the middle of getting good at something, but not yet good at it, do you know how everything fits? Or can you only look back at that?
Why I’ve joined Collective Next
I’ve enjoyed my latest two-year stint running The Vineyard Group. Nearly all of my clients, large or small, established or startup, treated me to challenging and rewarding work — and each client’s needs have been sufficiently different so each day has delivered surprises. Earlier this year on this blog, I shared some lessons I learned from my client work (Make it new again, On providing editorial services to noneditorial professionals, Business casual: an editorial manifesto, and Editing as strategy — and why it’s not the same thing as editorial strategy) and I hope to share more here soon, although now I’ll be doing it from a different perch.
One of those clients has been the consultancy Collective Next. I became aware of the company from working alongside its founder and CEO, Matt Saiia, as a fellow curator for TEDxBoston. (This year’s event is next Tuesday. It’s long since sold out, but you can either watch the livestream or listen to it live on WBUR.) I found in Matt someone fun to argue and develop ideas with, and a good guy to stand next to at Gorillaz and Hey Ice Machine shows. Then I found out, one by one, that the company was stuffed with people who consistently (a) made me think harder and (b) cracked me up. Collective Next specializes in helping companies collaborate better, and even the briefest visit to Collective Next HQ would show you how they live what they teach. I’ll be doing a lot of different things for Collective Next: client work, developing new products and bringing them to market, and the usual publishing and editorial work.
One of the biggest things I miss from my last job is getting to work every day in a big, open room stuffed with creative, brilliant, challenging, hilarious, likeminded people. I think I have that again. Joining Collective Next has been like joining a gang — in a good way. The hazing has been limited (so far) to good-natured spreadsheet-hacking. I’m ready for a big long-term challenge and Collective Next seems like the ideal place for me to share what I know, learn from people with different skills and passions, grow, help other people grow, get into creative trouble, and fight our way out of it together. Onward!
Audience!
I’m tightening the ideas and removing the crap from a presentation workshop I’m running on Monday. It would be bad, after all, to give a bad presentation about giving good presentations. While doing so, I realized I wasn’t emphasizing audience enough: understanding who you’re presenting to and what they need, focusing on their needs and not yours. Whenever I want to show clients the value of obsessing over what the audience wants and needs, I call in a great quote that you can find in Nancy Duarte‘s outstanding and welcoming HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations. In her book, Duarte quotes Ken Haemer, presentation research manager at AT&T:
“Designing a presentation without an audience in mind is like writing a love letter and addressing it ‘to whom it may concern.’”
Think about that the next time you’re in front of other people. Or the next time you’re writing or doing anything for other people.
Help my 17-year-old see Beyonce’s sister (in which Jimmy begs for help in an uncharacteristically direct fashion)
Hi Internet friends. It’s Jimmy. I need your help. Again.
You helped me once before. Back in late 2008, I wrote Ida Maria and how the Internet might be able to help me make a 12-year-old girl happy, in which I begged for ideas on how to help my daughter Lydia get in to see an artist we love, Ida Maria, even though Lydia was nine years too young to get into a 21-and-over gig. We got some advice from friends and from kind strangers at Idolator, and eventually a high-level meeting of two wonderful singers took place.
Four-and-one-half years later, Lydia wants to see Solange Knowles at the Paradise next week. Alas, she is 11 months too young to get into the show, which is 18+. I had heard of a state law asserting that those under 18 can get into 18+ shows as long as they’re accompanied by a legal guardian. I asked a manager at the ‘dise about this and she said no way. I’ve asked some friends and friends of friends who work or worked at various clubs around town; some say they vaguely remember the rule but can’t cite it definitively. Google, for once, has not been helpful.
In some ways, it’s easier to get a club to let a 12-year-old into a show she’s much too young for than to let in a 17-year-old who’s only a bit too young. The various attempts to get her in — not all of which I’ve listed here — have not worked. If anyone has any ideas — and if anyone is owed a solid from someone at the ‘dise or Live Nation — please get in touch with me. It would keep my daughter’s faith in me and my faith in the Internet. So, Internet friends, any ideas?
I will post major progress here and minor progress on the Twitter. As my buddy John Lennon used to shout, Help!
UPDATE: We got in!
Editorial as strategy (and why it’s not the same thing as editorial strategy)
This is the fourth in a series of posts covering some lessons I’ve learned as an editor. You can read the first entry here, the second entry here, the third entry here, and a list of all the posts in the series here.
Question Jimmy gets asked regularly after he explains to people what he does for a living: So that means you do editorial strategy?
Answer: No. I don’t work on editorial strategy so much as I work on editorial as strategy.
Follow-up question: What?
And then a conversation begins. The difference in wording is subtle, but I think the difference in approach is a big deal. Here’s an attempt at a longer (but still brief) answer to the “what do you do for a living” question.
When you’re developing and executing an editorial strategy, your job is to solve problems. Maybe it’s a media or publishing company and the projects you’re working on are core to the business. Maybe it’s not and your focus is on some internal or external communication effort that supports the core business. Either way, your day-to-day work is centered around short-term questions: Are the topics I’m covering relevant? Am I presenting them in a way that my audience can understand and act on? Do the author/presenter and audience have conflicting needs? Is what I’m publishing or presenting helping my audience get great at something they need to be great at? On good days, you come up with good answers to those questions. But they’re short-term answers that change as conditions change.
When you think of editorial as strategy, you’re considering a company’s business through an editorial lens. That means using tools commonly associated with the editorial process to build a more coherent and precise strategy and make better decisions to support it. It means, for example, being brutal to every idea, while being kind to the people expressing those ideas. It means creating a series of rules that an organization will live by no matter what, while marking off the areas in which it’s good to get weird. Style guides don’t say to use a serial comma unless it’s difficult to use one; they say to use a serial comma. Similarly, while there are areas in which businesses can and should improvise, explore, and experiment, there are also areas in which there must be agreement to move forward. It’s much easier to advise people to stick to the plan if there’s a well-vetted plan. I suppose it’s similar what Clay Christensen said in a different context in How to Measure Your Life: it’s easier to stick to well-thought-out rules 100% of the time than it is 98% of the time. And it’s especially easy to do so if you’re clear on where you have to drive straight and where it might be fun to swerve and see what happens. By viewing a business’s strategy through an editorial lens, with all the editorial tools for structure and iteration at your disposal, you can see things that both traditional strategy consultants and meme-of-the-moment consultants miss.
Editorial strategy is, of course, part of editorial as strategy, and I don’t want to suggest that getting a corporation’s editorial strategy together is anything but a good thing. But if all you’re offering is what you’re packaging as “editorial strategy,” chances are that your work is tactical and will have only a limited impact on the organization you’re trying to influence. You can best help a client think big by thinking big yourself.
Business casual: an editorial manifesto
This is the third in a series of posts covering some lessons I’ve learned as an editor. You can read the first entry here, the second entry here, and a list of all the posts in the series here.
I tend not to trust ideas when they come too easily. While I sort-of buy the Allen Ginsberg notion of “first thought best thought,” I believe that getting where you want creatively takes practice. John Coltrane’s off-the-top-of-his-head improvisations were masterly precisely because he’d been testing such ideas for years. His “first thought” in a solo was built on millions of thoughts before it. (This was the way Ginsberg created, too, if you get past his famed aphorism.) But one offhand term I blurted out at a meeting last summer has turned out to help some of my clients develop their editorial and strategy, so I’m sharing it here.
I get nervous when nonwriters talk about “voice” and “tone,” in part because it turns out oftentimes that they mean something different from what my editorial colleagues mean when they use those words. But there I was, in a meeting with people who hadn’t taken an English course since they got freshman comp out of the way (yes, I checked), talking about the best way to describe something to the employees of a large firm.
The existing document and presentation described a coming change in a manner that was off-putting, because it was stuffy, and I said so. I went from “stuffy” to saying “you sound like a stuffy butler in a tight tuxedo” to “what you need to do is communicate this in a way that’s less stuffed shirt and more business casual.” I hadn’t intended to use the term “business casual” before I opened my mouth, but the people around the table acted as if I was dispensing some well-worn wisdom so I decided not to challenge that reaction. I’ve thought more about applying the term “business casual” to editorial and strategy and I’ve heard clients start using the term, so I’ve accepted, reluctantly, that there’s something there and I’ve developed the idea far beyond what I can convey in a brief blog post. But here are some quick notes about viewing editorial and strategy through a “business casual” lens.
The notion of business casual in the American workplace annoys me. It merely replaces one uniform with another, identical suits replaces by identical khakis, and I’ve worked or consulted at places where a “business casual” or “casual Friday” policy was enforced pitilessly.
Yet the metaphor works. Everyone knows what business casual means, which is a key to quick understanding. A business casual voice is serious but light, focused on ease, deliberately avoiding the stuffy. Business casual is more interested in what it is doing for the audience than the writer or performer. Business casual is about communication, not obfuscation. Some may find this approach as limiting as being forced to wear well-pressed jeans on Friday, but it’s the sort of limitation that will result in more effective communicating. I’ll leave it to you whether you want a business casual clothing policy at your business, but I’ve seen that a business casual editorial approach can reshape the way people in many different kinds of businesses tell true stories with impact. When it comes to communicating, khakis are the way to go.
On providing editorial services to noneditorial professionals
This is the second in a series of posts covering some lessons I’ve learned as an editor. You can read the first entry here and a list of all the posts in the series here.
Much of the consulting work I did over the past year was more about strategy than pure editorial, helping companies with processes as well as product. But I was able to do a lot of editing in 2012, nearly all of it with people whose job was never to be a writer or journalist. I had the opportunity to help nonwriters get better at the writing craft, with the understanding that I was there to help them create effective documents and presentations that satisfied their current business demands, not to help them get their petrarchans into The Paris Review.
Since I was dealing with people who were more familiar with Samuelson than Strunk and White, I expected different issues would come up while I was helping them find and tell their stories. I was wrong. It turns out that editing these people is not all that different from helping fellow pros or aspiring pros improve their work. Here are three guidelines I’m trying to follow. They may help you manage the needs of nonprofessional writers — or nonprofessionals in any areas when you are the only pro in the room.
Meet them where they are. Terms like “lede,” “nut graf,” and “TK” don’t mean much to people outside the editorial world. Just as jargon is bad in the documents and presentations you’re helping people present, it’s bad in your interactions with these people. Talk their language; help them understand the tips you’re giving them in the language most familiar to them.
Focus on audience. I once attended a launch party for a magazine, back when there used to be launch parties for magazines. I remember the founding editor at the microphone telling the publication’s origin story. “I woke up one morning,” he said, “and I realized there wasn’t a magzine for me.” Of course that magazine didn’t last; it was an overfunded vanity publication. Any editor or writer needs to have a firm idea of who she is publishing for. Asking nonpro writers who a document or presentation is for makes it much easier to tell the story that matters the most to that audience. The work is for the audience, not the author.
Focus on focus. In business, documents and presentations are designed to have impact. They’re supposed to lead to better decisions and outcomes. The best way to do that is to tell the most relevant story for a particular as clearly and concisely as possible. The job is to persuade, but that doesn’t mean making things up. There’s nothing more messy than the truth, but there’s also nothing more persuasive than the truth. One of the great pleasures of this work is helping someone develop an idea until it’s bulletproof and than help someone present that idea in a way that the audience can’t help but nod along to. Keep the focus on what you want your document or presentation to accomplish; anything that doesn’t serve that goal directly should get cut.
This is, with few significant alterations, the same advice you’d give “real” writers. The incentives are different, but the goal is the same: clear, precise, authoritative communication. So, editors, don’t treat your nonwriters differently. Why shouldn’t an editor’s nonprofessional writing clients get the same quality of advice we give self-identified writers and journalists?
Make it new again
Last year I worked to become a better editor; the next several posts here will share some of what I learned. I’ll use personal stories to tell most of the lessons, but most of this one comes from some books I read last year.
Editors frequently hear from writers that an assigned topic isn’t a good one because it’s been done already. On a surface level, that might make some sense. No one wants to read another article about Taylor Swift’s love life or the death of print or the popularity of the baby name “Nevaeh.”
Or do they? The problem isn’t that Swift’s amorous adventures, a dynastic shift in media, and that damn name are played-out; it’s that they are uninteresting topics. Chances are the first story about them wasn’t particularly interesting, either.
Yet some writers (you know who you are, or, to be more accurate, I know who you are) claim that we should declare a moratorium even on topics of considerable weight. Over the past year I’ve heard people complain that everything from global warming to the failure of U.S. financial regulators to do their jobs for 30 years or so was “over” or “done to death” and please would I not make them write about it.
What they meant, I have come to realize, is not that the topics had gone dry. It’s that their imaginations had. If the topic is worthy, it might also be worthy of another angle.
Here’s an example, drawn from what turned out to be the two books I read in 2012 that satisfied me the most: Stephen King’s 11-22-63 and Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power. The central event in King’s novel and Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson is the same: the assassination of President Kennedy. Over the past 50 years, there may have been no single event in American history argued about or covered more than the JFK murder. As we move toward the 50th anniversary later this year, I suspect we’ll be confronted with more evidence that the story is far from over and far from settled.
There has been plenty of crap written about the assassination, yet half a century on King and Caro had plenty new to say about it. Why? Because they looked at it in ways their predecessors hadn’t thought to. King’s 11-22-63 follows a time traveler as he seeks to prevent Oswald from pulling the trigger (the time traveler also discovers that messing with the space-time continuum is a very bad idea). Caro’s The Passage of Power (you can read a relevant except here) considers the day, in unprecedented detail, from the point of view of Vice President Johnson, pinned under a Secret Service agent on the floor of his car while the bullets flew, gathering himself in a hospital cubicle and on a grounded Air Force One. We see a fuller picture now, because we see it from someplace we never stood before.
Many (most?) of us think we know what happened that day in Dallas, but both King and Caro make us consider 11-22-63 in different ways. They take perhaps one of the most-overcovered topics in our nation’s history, look at it differently from all before them, and make it new again. If the topic is interesting, chances are there’s a new way to look at it. There’s also an excellent chance that whatever topic you’re wrestling with hasn’t been covered as much as JFK’s death. Keep moving until you find the new vantage point. It’s a sure way to deliver something people feel they have to read, no matter how much about the topic they’ve read before.
What to expect on Jimmy Guterman’s blog in January 2013
I’ve spent much of the past year learning about editing and trying some new approaches in my editing work. Over the past month, I’d like to share some of what I’ve learned. Here’s what you’ll find this month on the revived blog:
January 4, Make it new again
January 9, On providing editorial services to noneditorial professionals
January 14, Business casual: an editorial manifesto
January 23, Editing as strategy (and why it’s not the same thing as editorial strategy)
Happy new year.
Two ways to Proust
I’ve outed myself as a Proust nut (1, 2, 3, 4) and people occasionally ask me how they might best enter that big and forbidding-to-some book. Someone just did that today, so I’ll share two plans that may work for you while you are reading In Search of Lost Time.
Follow the tweets. Patrick Alexander, who wrote the useful companion Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time, recently completed tweeting the whole damn Search. Took him two years and 3,000 tweets. They’re very good and very funny. He’ll be starting another cycle on November 1.
Follow the master. William C. Carter’s Marcel Proust: A Life is the pick of the doorstop Proust bios; he offers a self-paced online course covering the novel and its creation. Carter knows pretty much everything there is to know about Proust and the Search, but he doesn’t let that knowledge prevent him from having fun with the work.
Banging two sentences against one another
The tale of how New Jersey’s method of privatizing jails went so wrong is is not a funny story in any way, but I am pretty regularly in awe of how Gail Collins deploys consecutive sentences for devastating comic and commenting effect. Recently she delivered a real winner:
“The program costs about half as much per inmate as a regular jail. This may be in part because the prisoners keep escaping.” — Political Private Practice
In so many great pieces of writing, each sentence moves off the previous one, sometimes revealing a new truth behind the previous sentence, moving the whole damn thing forward. Bang two sentences against one another and you’d better get far more than each one could deliver separately.
Scared straight
From Skills Honed in Illicit Trades, and Put to Better Use:
Tardiness, informal footwear, or talking out of turn will earn students a punishment that they call an “A.P. Style,” which means writing out a section of The Associated Press stylebook by hand. It takes, they say, four hours.
Why French politics is more fun than American politics
“Valérie Trierweiler, the partner of President François Hollande, supported a Socialist Party dissident who is trying to defeat Mr. Hollande’s former partner and the mother of his four children in Parliamentary elections.” — An endorsement from France’s First Lady causes a stir
How to give a TED Talk (and how not to)
I’m recovered from my TED Talk (transcript, TED blog coverage), so I thought I’d share a few thoughts on the experience of giving a TED Talk, what I learned from it, and what you might want to do if you’re in a similar situation. (Other speakers have been sharing their insights, too.)
It was thrilling, of course, a brief chance to leap onto a stage where I’ve seen so many great talks. It was a chance to embed myself deeper into a community I’m grateful to be part of. (I am doing more with TED now, as I’ll report in upcoming posts.) I was part of a session that included three giants — Andrew Stanton, Billy Collins, and Michael Tilson Thomas — so I was comfortable delivering a brief palette cleanser between the bigger, weightier, presentations.
That doesn’t mean I treated the advice in my talk as a joke. I hope it came across with humor — using Tina Turner as an example for business comebacks was supposed to be funny — but the comeback advice was meant sincerely. Tina really does have four very useful lessons for people and companies pulling themselves back up. The TED Talks that have moved me the most have had a combination of authority and vulnerability and I tried hard to capture that. My job was to show what Tina’s lessons taught me, but without the talk turning out to be about me.
Some advice I got before I went onstage from two pals who nailed it in their previous short talks turned out to be prescient: Paul Kedrosky said “it would be over before you know it” and Jim Daly said I’d feel like I was “shot out of a cannon.” Right and right. And after the talk, all I got was positive feedback; anyone who thought I wasn’t any good wasn’t going to come over to me and tell me that. A week later, I have a more balanced view of how I did (especially after seeing some warts-and-all video). Which brings me to the venerated TED Commandments.
The Eleventh Commandment
There is some excellent advice TED gives potential speakers on this page supporting TEDx speaker prep, but the physical “TED Commandments” it sends to event speakers (on a heavy plaque that’s somewhere between a tablet and a large tile) was a particularly helpful collection. There’s an older version of the “physical commandments” floating around the web. Here are the current 10 (I’ll leave out the descriptive text and just list the commandments):
I. Thou shalt not steal time.
II. Thou shalt not sell from the stage.
III. Thou shalt not flaunt thine ego.
IV. Thou shalt not commit obfuscation.
V. Thou shalt not murder PowerPoint.
VI. Thou shalt shine a light.
VII. Thou shalt tell a story.
VIII. Thou shalt honor emotion.
IX. Thou shalt bravely bare thy soul.
X. Thou shalt prepare for impact.
Pretty great advice, no? I followed it as best as I could, but I want to offer up an 11th commandment:
XI. Trust thyself.
In the days before the event, I must have practiced the talk 100 times, to everyone from friends I spotted in various Long Beach lobbies to my own reflection in the hotel bathroom mirror. I had the talk well-memorized and my presentation was adequate for someone who makes his living as a writer and an editor rather than as a performer. But, the afternoon before the talk, I wanted to be certain that all would go well if I had a brain freeze on the red circle, so I added presenter notes to my few slides. If there was a problem, the answer would be on the “confidence monitors” at my feet. Seemed like sensible backup for all but the most unexpected catastrophe.
But a funny thing happened to me when I had my chance on the stage: those monitors distracted me, like TVs in a bar when I’m trying to have a real conversation with a fellow human. As you can see from this cameraphone shot my fellow TEDxBoston curator Danielle Duplin took of the big screen at the TEDActive simulcast, I didn’t look down at the monitors all the time, but I surely looked down at them too much. What I thought would save me if I had trouble actually caused trouble. I should have trusted myself more.
Most of the time I was up there, though, I followed the advice my host June Cohen gave before the talk: enjoy yourself. I had a story I wanted to tell and I had a chance to tell it to an audience that could do something with it. I feel very, very lucky.
Everything I need to know about business comebacks I learned from Tina Turner: my 2012 TED Talk
After I’ve had time to recover from being shot out of that cannon, I’ll write about the experience of preparing for and delivering my talk at TED today. But a bunch of people have asked me to post a transcript right away, so here it is.
Everyone of a certain age has felt washed up. Your old tricks … are old tricks. Whether in your business or personal life, whether you’re talking about a country, the environment, a world economic system, there comes a time when all you want is a big, dramatic comeback.
Not too long ago I found myself without my job, a job with a lot of meaning, working alongside people I loved. I was uncertain what to do next, some days not so sure I had much to offer anyone.
Turns out there’s plenty of comeback advice out there, a small subset of it based on empirical evidence. As I took responsibility for my own comeback, I found the conventional models unsatisfactory. I needed a sustainable model. What I needed, I realized, was Tina Turner.
Now you might think that the woman who wrote “Nutbush City Limits,” the woman who double-timed “Proud Mary” into the Top Five, the woman who taunted Mel Gibson in the thunderdome, might not be a model for businesspeople. Well, I studied plenty of business comebacks while I was sweating out my own and I’m here to share four lessons from Tina Turner that can help any individual or organization.
1. Comebacks take a long time.
When Tina hit with her version of “Let’s Stay Together,” it was the first time she’d entered the Billboard pop charts in nine years. Nine years. That’s about three lifetimes in pop music. During that decade, she’d done everything she could to keep going: Vegas gigs, Hollywood Squares. But even when she was doing corporate events to pay the rent, she was doing her job. She kept going.
2. Comebacks don’t come all at once.
Private Dancer, her comeback album, was her fifth solo record after she left Ike. She tried different approaches until a younger generation of British producers caught up with her. She experimented and refined, experimented and refined, until she got it right.
3. You can’t do it all yourself.
On Private Dancer, Tina Turner was able to surround herself with top collaborators because her previous work earned her so much goodwill. People who need comebacks had something good going before they needed to come back. The people who’ll accompany you on your comeback? Chances are they know about you already.
4. Be yourself, but be current.
Private Dancer worked because the voice sounded like Tina Turner, but the music didn’t sound like the Tina Turner you remembered. Everything you loved about her was still there, but this wasn’t nostalgia. She was making up-to-date hits, with way more gravity than the kids on the charts. Stick to your strengths, show ’em off even, but employ them in a modern context.
I’m not Tina Turner. No matter how well your legs have held up, you aren’t either. But the steps Tina took to not merely come back but surpass her impact the first time around — they’re steps any person, any business, can use right now. It wasn’t until her comeback, after all, that Turner had her first Number One record.
And, best of all, after you mount a successful comeback, you can get away with looking like this:
Thank you so much.
Why I’m sending money to Rupert Murdoch, who embodies everything I hate in media
Every year around this time, the subscription to the online Wall Street Journal comes around and I send money that winds up in one of the infinite number of bank accounts controlled by one of the worst men in media. Each year the decision gets harder — the A-heds get shorter and less surprising, the wall between the news and opinion operations gets knocked down a bit more, and the paper continues to let its focus on financial journalism go fuzzy — but in the end I renew my subscription. Even in its reduced state, the paper offers some strong journalism, particularly in those occasional areas where the Murdochs don’t have glaring interests or conflicts of interest. But each year I have less trouble imagining a world in which I don’t need the WSJ to get my job done. Maybe next year?
Tell Mama
Etta James died today, and I’m listening to my favorite album by her, the spectacular Tell Mama, which Chess put out in 1968. Conventional wisdom states that the great rhythm-and-blues singer never recorded an album as massive as her talents. As usual, such conventional wisdom is grounded in an iota of fact and then turns out to be completely wrong.
As it did with all of its female singers, Chess Records had much trouble placing James. They tried her out on big-band ballads, straight blues, and the uptempo rhythm-and-blues hits with which she had scored in the fifties, like “Dance with Me Henry.” But no matter what the style, she wasn’t generating any hits, though many individual tracks were sinewy and harrowing.
Producer Rick Hall believed in James enough to fly her down to Fame Studios, in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a place where soul smashes were being cut every day, it seemed. The idea was to get a rough, smoldering album out of her—very much in the mode of Aretha Franklin, who had recently broken out of a similar rut with churchy soul. The result, Tell Mama, is the only soul-bandwagon record that can stand with Lady Soul’s classics from the period.
The big rhythm-and-blues hit on Tell Mama was the Clarence Carter title track, a compressed explosion of affirmation and generosity. The acknowledged standard is “I’d Rather Go Blind,” in which James takes standard better-dead-than-unloved banalities and exposes them as true. Turn the volume as low as you like; she’ll still overtake everyone in a loud, crowded room. Even the album’s giving songs sound generated by hurt; James sings as if she knows that alleviating someone else’s sorrow won’t lessen her load one bit. R.I.P.
My daughter, a cult guitarist, and how journalists can become semicompetent programmers, pretty much in that order
Warning: this is a much longer post than what usually shows up on this blog, but it’s an attempt to answer an important question I get asked all too regularly.
I was in the living room, listening to Lydia’s computer in the dining room. She was listening to “Hammond Song,” my favorite performance by the Roches, and I was lost in Robert Fripp’s guitar solo. After that, I was hungry to hear some more Fripp (the only other Roches song I felt like listening to was “Losing True,” which moves me but is damn near the same song as “Hammond Song” so I passed). I’ve enjoyed Fripp’s work with other people (Bowie, Blondie, Talking Heads) although I’ve never owned a King Crimson record. I saw Fripp live twice in the early ’80s, once at Irving Plaza leading his sharp, funky League of Gentlemen, once six months later at a WXPN benefit in Penn’s Houston Hall, when he was in Frippertronics mode. And that joint interview he did with Joe Strummer around the same time had an enormous influence on me as a beginning interviewer of rock stars.
I looked up Fripp on Spotify and was greeted not by music, but a recording of a keynote address he gave to a conference of motivational speakers, among them his sister. I found the talk engaging, adventurous, and practical; if you have Spotify, check it out.
Among many other gifts, the talk offered a great contradictory lesson. Several times during it, Fripp talked about how important it is to work with people who are better than you. True, and I try to do that whenever I can, but Fripp delivered insight after insight during the talk; he wasn’t learning from anyone else there, he was helping everyone else there. It’s a lovely, humble talk about mastery.
As I continue to get not younger, I understand more and more the value of surrounding myself, both in my work life and in my life life, with people who are better than me. But every now and then I get the chance to help someone else — I have learned a few things — and this blog gives me a chance to pass on what I’ve learned publicly. Here’s a question I get asked at least weekly, both by fellow veterans and newcomers to my profession: I’m a journalist and I’d like to continue being employed as a journalist. Everywhere I read that an employable journalist is as competent with 0s and 1s as I am with nouns and verbs. Does that mean I need to become a computer programmer?
Back when I helped out at GNN, O’Reilly’s early online service, and Delphi, the first of many online services that Rupert Murdoch’s ownership ruined, I thought there might be a brief opening for an editorial person who “got” the web. (Fortunately, almost two decades later, that window hasn’t closed yet.) One of the ways I’ve been able to make a go of it has been to learn how to program.
The idea is to make computer programming one of the tools in your journalistic kit, something that makes it easier for employers or clients to work with you. I once pitched a project conducting an online survey for a syndicated research firm and one of the reasons I got the gig was that I was able to do the whole project myself, not just designing the survey and interpreting the results, but also getting a working survey onto the web. These were in the pre-SurveyMonkey days when you needed to be able to do some grunt-level coding (in that case, in Perl) to create an online survey. I did plenty more work with that company in the years that followed; most of it was straight editorial, but knowing I could solve a technology problem independently made my client more comfortable keeping me around.
Although there are particular skills a programming journalist needs, what the ability to code offers a writer more than anything else is a way, an approach, even more than specific, problem-solving skills. To be a competent computer programmer, even for relatively simple web-based programs, you have to be able to break down a complex problem into small, manageable pieces. That’s a career skill, a life skill, and it’s something that programming forces you to do if you want to get any good at it. I’ve never been able to code for hours as if under a spell, which professional programmers can do easily. I can get into that zone as a writer, but not as a programmer. As someone who’s more journalist than programmer, that will likely be the case for you, too, so you will not spend hours under headphones, able to keep disparate parts of a large coding matter in your mind at the same time. You’ll break your pseudocode into small, manageable chunks, and then go from pseudocode to real code.
And chances are you’re not just writing code, you’re editing code someone else has written. Whatever problem you’re trying to solve as a programmer/journalist, there’s a very good chance that you are not the first person who’s had to solve this problem. Any popular language you are working with will have repositories all over the web of publicly available code that can solve at least part of your problem with only minimal customization, and, more important to your development, show you how other people approached the same issues. Curious journalist/programmers don’t just paste in code; they read it over — just like a beginning journalist reads John McPhee or Robert Caro — to learn how the pros do it. Then they make their own way.
That’s how you might want to proceed conceptually. Here are some admittedly idiosyncratic recommendations regarding what particular skills a journalist/programmer could use. (And I mean use practically. My favorite language to work in, the Lisp dialect Scheme, as taught in the beloved wizard book, is a learning language only. I’m more likely to get paid as a theremin roadie than as a Scheme programmer.)
The foundation: HTML/CSS/HTML5. Thanks to visual tools, journalists can work in web publishing with minimal exposure to HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). That’s not a good thing; it prevents journalists from knowing even the rudiments of the platform they’re working on. It’s hard to produce a vivid sound recording without knowing how to work a physical or virtual mixing board; similarly, how can you make your story work best on the web, tablets, and mobile devices if you don’t have a basic understanding of what the formats can do? HTML isn’t even full-fledged coding. It’s more page layout. Understanding HTML is not much harder than understanding how to use early DOS word processors like WordStar and XyWrite, programs that made you explicitly underline, etc.
The two steps after HTML are CSS and HTML5. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) gives more precise layout tools and makes it easier to separate content from layout. HTML5, the latest version of the HTML standard, is still under development, but it’s already being used on many websites and in many web applications, particularly those aiming for tablets and mobile devices. There are an avalanche of useful new commands in HTML5 that make it much easier to integrate multimedia (HTML5’s ability to do this is one of the reasons Adobe’s more cumbersome Flash format is going away).
You don’t have to memorize too much HTML(5)/CSS syntax; there are plenty of online and offline resources. And don’t worry about learning explicitly what every last command parameter can do. The key is to know what tools are available and have a general sense of which one will get you out of which types of problems. You don’t have to know everything; you’ll know when you know enough.
You also need to know how to manage a database. In the late ’90s, when I got serious about educating myself as a journalist who could program, I became a great fan of Philip Greenspun, particularly his book Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing. In addition to being a physically beautiful object (Greenspun is an accomplished and very opinionated photographer), the Guide spelled out what anyone who had aspirations of becoming a web programmer had to know. Greenspun’s knowledge and style placed his book high above the “Teach Yourself TK in 21 Days” books that were popular at the time. He was rigorous, he was funny, and his approach made you want to learn. In particular, he showed why being able to manage a database was the key to building and maintaining any real website. That’s still the case: the fancy content management systems journalists use today, from bare-bones blog-building systems like WordPress to the more bloated “enterprise” systems, are customized databases. Many database systems are built around SQL; Greenspun has a guide to SQL, too, but don’t attempt that before you’ve got a good grounding in web technologies.
Finally, learn one language, any language (parenthetical removed; see why in the comments). There are plenty of arguments for learning plenty of different languages, but I think journalists entering the word of programming are best-served by learning Python. The tools you pick up are reasonably transferable to other languages, Python is built into OS X so you don’t have to install it, and how can you dislike a language with metasyntactic variables (spam and eggs) that clearly came from Monty Python?
Best of all, Python is a strong learning language. MIT uses it to teach people how to think like programmers. You can download the course text, How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning With Python, to get a sense of how Python is a useful vehicle for starting programming. Python is also used as the entry language for my alma mater O’Reilly’s useful and entertaining Head First series for new programmers. Python is a powerful scripting language for web apps, but for someone who intends to be a journalist first and a programmer second (or tenth), it’s just a smart way in.
I am far from a professional programmer. Folks hire me because of my editorial and consulting skills, not because I can code kickass regular expressions (I can’t). But learning how to program lets me understand a problem from more sides and makes it more likely that I can help a company figure out how to solve it. Learning how to program has helped me and I hope it helps you too. I also hope this answers the question of how to become a journalist/programmer adequately; I’m going to point people who ask me that here from now on.
Even if you’re a journalist who never wants to write a line of code professionally, you can become a better digital journalist if you understand the technologies without which no one could ever experience your journalism. And the best way to understand is to do. One of the aspects I enjoyed most of the Robert Fripp talk I wrote about at the top of the post is that it captures the joy of learning something, getting better at it, and mastering it. While I was finishing this post, I heard the Roches’ “Hammond Song” coming from another room once again. But my daughter wasn’t listening to the Roches anymore. She had mastered the song and now she was singing it herself.
Sunday papers, lost and found
I don’t want to have any print newspapers dropped onto the sidewalk in front of our house, but I have two of ’em now waiting for me on Sundays. Turns out it’s less expensive to have Sunday print + digital subscriptions to The New York Times and The Boston Globe than to get digital-only subscriptions, so to save a few bucks I’m doing the ecologically wrong thing by having someone drop yesterday’s news onto the sidewalk.
But I’m not here to complain. I’m here to wonder: Is there an opportunity here for newspapers to use their Sunday papers as something other than necessary add-ons during this transition period when print readers are worth so much more to publishers and advertisers than digital readers? Let’s pay a visit to our most ridiculous 2012 presidential candidate for a hint.
Saturday afternoon I was doing some laundry in the basement and wanted some news to keep me company during the mundane task. It was the hour that the Herman Cain am-I-done-yet? announcement was expected, so I tuned into a livestream and started sorting the clothes. Cain wasn’t onstage yet, but a series of supporters, probably not knowing that he was about to desert them as they dedicated his new campaign headquarters, made the case for him.
One of those speakers got my attention more than I’d expected. He spoke of going on a recent Sunday to a store to pick up a copy of his local paper, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. There was a sign noting that copies of the AJC were available only behind the counter, which he hadn’t seen before, so he got in line to buy the paper. The woman in front of him in line needed some extra money to complete her transaction, so she went to her car to get more cash and he stepped up to the register. He asked why the newspapers were behind the counter, and the cashier told him that people were stealing the coupons inside the paper and leaving the rest of it. Then the woman who needed extra money returned and completed her transaction: she was buying six copies of the day’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The speaker used this story as a way into an indictment of Obama’s economic policies (it was a reach), but I heard something different: a chance for print newspapers to grab relevance at a time when the few bucks it costs to buy a Sunday paper is a purchase millions of Americans have to think over. I know it’s stupid to suggest action based on a sample size of one, especially if that sample thought Herman Cain was a genuine candidate for president, but think about it. As my pal Scott Kirsner pointed out to me last week, the best newspapers create value for their readers: they uncover corruption, they keep people informed, they save readers from bad restaurants. And in these tough, tough times, newspapers can save readers money. Embrace that! Who in this age wouldn’t spend $3 to save $30? Newspapers could promote the quantity of the savings along with the quality of the coverage. And that gives newspapers more readers to give to more advertisers, who would buy more ads with rmore discounts. Everyone wins, in the short term. It’s no solution to the big issues newspapers have to face, but it’s a short-term fix that does no harm and may bring in new readers. Come for the discounts and we’ll give you the news, too!
P.S. Just as science fiction beats real science to the punch, the newspaper satirists got here before real newspapers: The Chicago Tribune moves to an all-Beyonce-and-coupons format in one of the greatest-ever Onion videos.
Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs
I’m in technology transition. I had to hand back my MacBook when I left HBR last week and I haven’t gotten around to ordering a new one yet, so after a few days of trying to use the iPad as a comfortable input device (stop laughing) I’m using a circa-2007 IBM ThinkPad that until recently was sitting under several inches of file folders. When I switched to the Mac after more than 20 years as a DOS/Windows user, it was like escaping a long-term abusive relationship. Suddenly everything was easier, more pleasant. So moving back to Windows software and Windows-inspired hardware, even for just a short time, has been unsettling and frustrating. I can’t wait for it to end. (My pal Ania Wieckowski has a tweet this morning on the matter, sort-of.)
It’s taken as self-evident that working on a Mac is superior to working on a PC. We’ve personalized that, in everything ranging from the “I’m a Mac” commercials to the relative merits of Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Apple founder Steve Jobs. (Some of the comparisons are absurd.) I’m partway through Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Jobs, in which nearly every quote from Jobs about Gates exudes condescension and envy. Everything from the experience of using Gates’s Microsoft products to the business tactics Microsoft deployed to maintain its monopoly offended Jobs’s inextricable design and moral sensibilities.
But what is Gates’s mission on the planet? For decades, he must have thought it was a computer on every desk, and he made great progress in that endeavor, even if in both his DOS and Windows products he delivered experiences that only software architects who aspire to the complicated, idiosyncratic, and confusing could admire. But I suspect that over the long-term, the value for society created by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will more than compensate for any first-world unhappiness we feel in having to click a “Start” button to make something stop. Bad memory management is no match for working to eradicate malaria.
Jobs was a firm believer in his own immortality; the authorized Isaacson biography and the publication of his sister Mona Simpson’s eulogy for him are merely opening salvos in that campaign. Jobs still competed with Gates even after Gates went on to other endeavors (you could see it in their last joint public appearance, as I reported here). I am willing to bet the value of the MacBook I will soon order that Jobs has some sort of insanely elegant posthumous philanthropic venture that we’ll hear about shortly. It will be beautiful, no doubt. It may even be effective.
I know Jobs was a genius. I know his contributions to technology outstrip Gates’s. We know what Jobs will be remembered for hundreds of years on. I suspect our great-grandchildren will remember Bill Gates as an inspired philanthropist who brought tremendous resources and imagination to a handful of the 21st century’s most apparently intractable problems. How did he make his fortune in the first place? I suspect our great-grandchildren won’t know. That won’t be the thing about him that will be worth remembering.
Thank you, Greil Marcus
I’m no fan of the Doors — Owen’s and my paragraphs on them in the intro to The Worst add up to one of the few parts of that book I still like — but Marcus is the guy who wrote Mystery Train and Invisible Republic, so I read when he writes a book about them. Marcus hasn’t changed my opinion of the band’s built-for-condemned-Econo-Lodge-cocktail-rooms music, but he did crack me up, something the Doors never did (intentionally). At the end of the short chapter about “The End,” the most theatrical of the band’s solemn, unfriendly songs, Marcus slips in a perfect reference to the Firesign Theatre, my favorite comedy troupe other than my kids. A whole volume of The Doors is a bit much, but anyone who can find room for the Firesign Theatre in Jim Morrison, territory that should repel the Firesigns’ welcoming humor but in Marcus’s hands fits perfectly, is a writer I will follow anywhere.
Which Steve Jobs are you writing about?
My friend Brian Johnson, the only human (as opposed to corporation) who regularly sends me physical mail, sent me the “A” sections of the San Jose Mercury News and San Francisco Chronicle the day after Steve Jobs did something simultaneously unthinkable and inevitable. If you’ve been away and off the grid: Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple, the company he founded, was fired from, and returned to at its near-death nadir to make it one of the most successful and influential companies of the past half-century. Both sections gave Jobs all their above-the-fold space, and the saturation coverage continues everywhere (including on the HBR Blog Network, where I hang my hat).
It seems like every media outlet on the planet is considering Jobs and his legacy. There is overload already, but that’s because there are almost as many ways to look at Steve Jobs as there are apps for his devices. There’s the entrepreneur, the visionary, the Bob Dylan fan, the competitor, the Microsoft taunter, the Disney tamer, the control freak, the presenter, the user advocate, the cranky communicator, the media tycoon, the media manipulator, the difficult negotiator, the design obsessive, the executive, the aphorist, the … well, you get the idea. We’ll read all these stories because there are so many different ways of considering this complex, damn-near-iconic character.
I don’t get to the west coast much these days and Jobs hasn’t appeared on the east coast in many years, so the last time I saw him in person was at a joint appearance with Bill Gates at the D Conference in Carlsbad in May 2007. The Microsoft-taunting Steve was on display during that exclusive meeting of technology and media bigwigs — the night before the joint appearance he likened iTunes software on the Windows platform to “a drink of ice water in Hell.” (Which makes Gates the Devil?) During the session with Gates, Jobs spoke of what happened at Apple while he was exiled at NeXT. When he said in-between CEO Gil Amelio thought Apple was a ship with a hole in the bottom and sought to fix it by turning the ship in a different direction, the unhappiness of decades ago seemed raw and very present. Unlike his many perfected product presentations, Jobs came across like a real, unmediated, complicated human being. As we consider the lessons we can derive from his work, let’s not lose that human being.
Early Sunday morning thoughts on Clarence Clemons
This will be short.
One of the few good things about death is that it shuts you up. Death is both incomprehensible and inevitable; it’s hard to capture that terrible combination in words. So last night, when the first reports arrived that Clarence Clemons is dead, I did what I often do when I’m trying to figure out what I’m thinking: I tried to write. I thought about his great early triumphs like “Kitty’s Back,” his defining numbers like “Jungleland,” his move to a new sound starting with “Bobby Jean” and climaxing in “Land of Hope and Dreams,” the roles he played onstage. But nothing came out of my fingers. It was time to think and listen, which I’ll do today as well. Today I’ll keep my mouth shut, I’ll be grateful for his work, I’ll celebrate Father’s Day, and I’ll live.
A sentence reporting on a sartorial challenge
The tie they decided on was so wide it might as well have been a bib.
In which I accidentally friend the bass player of the Rolling Stones
A while back, I accidentally friended on Facebook Bill Wyman, the former bass player for the Rolling Stones, instead of Bill Wyman, the rock critic, the person I meant to connect with. (I wrote about the latter Wyman on this blog late last year.) Didn’t seem like good karma to unfriend the guy who played bass on “19th Nervous Breakdown” and several dozen more of the greatest songs in all rock’n’roll so I stuck around. Mostly his Wall offered tour dates, although he would occasionally touch on photography, archaeology, his books (did you know he wrote seven?) and setting scores.
Recently on his wall he turned to a regular topic for him: his assertion that it was he, and not Keith, who wrote the glorious riff of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” He mentioned that the inspiration was “an obscure Chuck Berry single I had called ‘Club Nitty Gritty.'” (He may have mentioned this in Stone Alone, the only one of his books I read, but it was really long and it was only a seven-day-limit library book so I probably read it too quickly and I don’t remember.)
I won’t wade into Wyman’s claim about authorship, but I do want to go on a bit about Chuck Berry’s “Club Nitty Gritty.” There are two reasons it’s obscure (Wyman is surely right about that). One: it’s not very good, a lazy list of dances that could turn Alvin Ailey into a wallflower. Two: it appeared as the last track on what may be Chuck’s worst-ever record without a song about his ding-a-ling on it: Golden Hits, a 1967 collection of mediocre rerecordings of his early hits, plus “Club Nitty Gritty” buried at the end as a booby prize. So the song’s not very good and it deserves its rarity status. Only deeply committed Chuck Berry fans (like these guys) would have heard it. And it does boast a riff that could be an antecedent of the brutal “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” theme. Whoever pulled that riff out of the air took something shapeless and built a universe out of it.
The lessons here? You can find inspiration anywhere, not only in canonical classics but in trash. And pay attention. The next piece of crap you hear may make your career.
Wars? What wars?
There are 22 stories on the front page of NYTimes.com right now (Sunday night, March 13, 2011, 815pm). None of them are about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
There are 64 links on the front page of NYTimes.com right now, not counting navigational tools or administrivia. None of them lead to stories about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Two videos that have made me enormously happy over the past week
Girl Walk // All Day from jacob krupnick on Vimeo.
Yeah, I know. But, as Clay Shirky would tell you, some of our cognitive surplus has to be directed to pure, life-affirming fun. Onward!
My latest at Harvard Business Review
I don’t write as frequently as I like/should for HBR — hey, editing takes time — but here are some recent posts I’ve published there:
Consulting for the Evil Empire (blog)
Enticing the Next Generation of African Leaders (blog)
Why Do We Need Leaders? (blog)
Sharing Links and Hors d’Oeuvres (about TED; published in the January-February issue; forgot to note it here)
Remember the Milk and Outlook sync, at last
I just checked my blog server logs for the first time in many months and I discovered that I still get plenty of traffic for posts I wrote years ago wondering when Remember the Milk, my task manager of choice, would ever synchronize with the tasks in Microsoft’s Outlook. Most people know that a solution has existed for months: MilkSync. It runs reasonably smoothly and accurately (as in I haven’t lost any data), although neither Outlook nor RTM are anywhere near perfect services.
Soap for the troops
On Friday night, Jane, Grace, and I went to a party to celebrate the return of our friend Scott from a year in Kuwait and Iraq. Rita, Scott’s wife, asked us to bring some toiletries and entertainment that they would send on to those remaining in the war zones. So we bought some soap and contributed some music.
It was fun trying to think of music that could appeal to different groups of people. The Beastie Boys might please the kids, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss might delight the olds, and, really, who doesn’t love The Sandinista Project? I had doubles of some solid recent records that I included as well; I expect they’ll all find good homes.
As I was assembling the discs late Friday afternoon, it hit me that, with one exception — a piece about the return of Moktada al-Sadr to Iraqi politics that floated across my news feed that morning — I hadn’t thought about Iraq or Afghanistan, where hundreds of thousands of American troops are at risk, all day. I pride myself on being “informed,” but it was another day in America when there was a war going on (hello, two wars going on) and, except for the sliver of people in this country whose lives are directly affected because they have friends and family in the game, we don’t have to confront evidence of what is happening in our name around the world. I hate these wars, and I will be happy when the day comes when the reason we’re not thinking of the wars is because everyone we’ve sent to them, like Scott, is home and safe. Sending excess CDs and sparing a thought for them feels insufficient, but complaining about the wars a few times a year on one’s blog is insufficient, too.
The high point of the party (aside from seeing Scott back and not having to make dinner) was dancing. We couldn’t get Grace interested, but Jane and I danced for a while, something we don’t do enough. I am not a particularly good dancer but no matter how self-conscious you are (and by “you are,” I mean “I am”), you’ve got to drop it and give in to the music if you’re going to be a good partner. Dancing, especially to a song you’ve moved to for decades (“Love Shack,” some Motown stand-bys), can trick you into thinking that everything is OK for a while. But here’s the thing: it’s not a trick. While the music is on, everything is good. Maybe if we keep dancing, everything will stay OK.
When the kids were younger and more easily refocused when they were unhappy, I used to call everyone into the same room for a dance party that would, in short time, cheer them up, turn them around. I would look ridiculous when I started, but eventually the others would join in. DJ, heal thyself. Turn it up! Don’t stop! Where’s the iPod?
Some recent posts from elsewhere, two of them almost entirely bereft of text
Some things I’ve written lately:
Stephen Wolfram and the Science of Business (Harvard Business Review)
Inbox Infinity (BoingBoing)
Gingerbread House Fenway Park (BoingBoing)
Coming next week: my essay about TED that’ll be in the upcoming HBR and … something else
Desperation takes hold
“Love Will Tear Us Apart,” a 30-year-old song by the British post-punk band Joy Division, is in the air. Or, at least, it’s in my air. Yesterday a colleague posted a video of it to his Facebook page. Last week a friend sent me a clip of a live version of Arcade Fire and U2 attacking the song. Peter Hook, the bass player on the original, is touring with a new band that’s playing pretty much all Joy Division songs. (I contributed, too, with this silly excuse for a post on BoingBoing back in October.) And this morning I happened to be listening to yet another version of the song while I checked on the news and learned that one of Bernie Madoff’s sons just killed himself the same way Joy Division singer Ian Curtis did. Not quite a trend, I know, and the dots connect only in my idiosyncratic head, but everyone’s head is idiosyncratic and isn’t that what blogs are for sharing anyway?
Why does this song have such a hold? I don’t cherish most Joy Division songs the way I do much of the 1980s work of New Order, the smart, austere band that emerged out of Joy Division after Curtis hung himself. Although drenched in punk, much of Joy Division’s work was grandly overdramatic (think Jim Morrison with a better rhythm section), but on “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” the band transcends pretty much every limitation. Sure, it picks up added weight when we learn what Curtis did to himself while love was tearing him apart, but the song doesn’t need any rock’n’roll myth to burn into your memory. The lyrics are pretty clear: routines bite hard, ambitions are low, resentment rides high, emotions won’t grow, and all that happens before the first verse is over. By the time the song reaches its peak — Curtis singing “Desperation takes hold” with corrosive resignation — you’re so far into the song that you don’t even notice its grip tightening around you.
Musically, the record is that rare of-the-moment British pop song from 1980 that doesn’t sound dated. The song breaks open with a jagged bass line, an ethereal synthesizer both soars over Curtis’s singing and mocks it, and drummer Steve Morris introduces that astounding snare-shot overdrive move that every ’80s band, from the Pretenders to Modern English, U2 to the 10,000 bands that tried to be U2, picked up on, eventually turning it into a cliche, almost as bad as Auto-Tune is nowadays. But on “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” the innovation is fresh. The whole damn song is. It’s a tale of romantic disintegration put across with an energy that makes something new out of the singer’s hopelessness. Thirty years later, there’s still nothing like it.
Writing, all over the place
My guestblogging stint at BoingBoing ended a few weeks ago, but they’re allowing me to stay on and contribute regularly. So far I’ve showcased the silly, but I’ll also be covering Real Stuff. Much more to come, I hope. I’m also blogging occasionally for my job and will continue to do so as much as I can. Some examples: When Storytelling Isn’t Enough, a conference report, and When The Longtime Star Fades, a fictional case study that appeared in the September HBR. The latter includes what is, to my knowledge, the only reference to A Flock of Seagulls in the history of Harvard Business Review.
I hope to write more, everywhere, including here (thanks, Shayne, for the nudge to come back). Why? For a selfish reason, I think. As with exercise, another habit I haven’t developed as much as I should, I feel better on the days that I write than on the days that I don’t. So I’ll keep writing.
Best line in an obituary this weekend
From The Economist‘s appreciation of the Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin:
“Tenses and cases rarely agreed when he spoke in public: not because he was illiterate, but because he was trying so hard not to swear.”
Mick and Keith: a love story
Eric often sends me links that crack me up, so my first response Friday afternoon when I saw he forwarded me a parody response by Mick Jagger to Keith Richards’s recent autobiography was to prepare for a good laugh. The alleged response, called “Please allow me to correct a few things,” is, in fact, written by ace rock critic Bill Wyman, who has the novelty of sharing a name with the Stones’ two-decades-gone original bass player. Wyman, who once received a legal demand by the bassist to change the name he was born with, seemed uniquely positioned to write a cutting fake retort.
Then I began reading and realized this was No Joke. As a longtime Stones devotee (read Late night thoughts about the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world for one recent example), I’ve often wondered what the surviving original members really think about each other, how they work together, what their work means to them as they’re aging. Wyman has clearly spent way too much time pondering this, too. I’ve never talked to Mick, but Wyman’s faux-Mick response feels true to my imagined Jagger. The tone of the essay veers from hurt to self-righteous, apologetic to withering, the voice always taut. Fake Mick hates Keith as much as Real Keith hates Mick; this essay shoots down RIchards’s book Life but doesn’t forget to point the gun inward from time to time.
Yet, more than anything else, Wyman’s version of Jagger is full of love for Richards, regretful that money, drugs, and narcissism tore them apart, grateful for what they had together before they devolved into mere business partners. He knows how much he owes Keith (“Without him, what would I have been? Peter Noone?”) and how Keith’s work can still touch him, no matter how far they’ve both fallen (“When a song is beautiful–those spare guitars rumbling and chiming, by turns–the words mean so much more, and there, for a moment, I believe him, and feel for him.”) This is idealized stuff. It’s unlikely that Real Mick’s response to Keith’s book, if there ever is one, will be as tough-minded and vulnerable. Wyman conjures up the Stones as we want them to be at this late age, but even we diehards know that’s just our imagination running away with us.
UPDATE: Wyman has written a postscript to his terrific piece.
UPDATE 2: BoingBoing has reprinted this post.
The sentences return (again)
You can’t see how tired she is until you get real close.
Gallows Humor Quote of the Day
Much of what WikiLeaks has uncovered is enormously unsettling, but I just laughed out loud when I read this quote from a NYT profile of WikiLeaks head Julian Assange:
“When it comes to the point where you occasionally look forward to being in prison on the basis that you might be able to spend a day reading a book, the realization dawns that perhaps the situation has become a little more stressful than you would like.”
It’s a bit of welcome gallows humor in the midst of a story of two stupid wars that should be making us all angrier by the day.
Return to Boing Boing: Week One
My return stint at BoingBoing is now half over. Here’s what I wrote about this week:
Skit Ideas Not Even Good Enough for Saturday Night Live
Greatest Song of All Time of the Day: “Blue Monday,” New Order
Curating a TEDx (or, From Arrogance to Humility)
Mr. T: Gold Salesman. Supposedly Legitimate Financial TV Network
Yeah, I know, not a lot compared to last time. But I’ll have plenty more next week. In particular, I’m curious what BoingBoing readers will make of my day job.
Michael Been
The Call had pretty much everything a rock’n’roll band would want: a taut and original sound, support from masters (the Band’s Garth Hudson, who you’ll see in the first video clip below, was a de facto member of the band in the early ’80s), and, in Michael Been, a distinctive and original songwriter and singer who could take on matters of the heart and politics with similar authority and surprise (vocal similarities to David Byrne didn’t hurt, either). What the Call didn’t have, unfortunately, was hit records, although that didn’t stop Been from having a long and diverse career, including a small but important role in The Last Temptation of Christ and having one of his songs (see second video clip below) made the theme song of Al Gore’s 2000 campaign. (I worked briefly with Been in ’91 when I wrote the liner notes and helped compile a set of the band’s best work for Mercury.) Been died on Friday, of a heart attack, at a rock festival in Belgium, where he was serving as the sound man for Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, a group that features his son Robert.
Been has fascinated me for years: for the quality of his work, for his ability to continue doing engaging work even after it was clear that he was not going to be the rock star he deserved to be, for his kindness and openness when we worked together, and for his ability to unite, in a fashion, his personal and professional worlds by working with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. He seemed, from a distance (we spoke maybe three times in the past decade), a full man despite his being a credible rock’n’roller, something none of us see all that often.
“The Walls Came Down”
“Let the Day Begin”
Second week at Boing Boing
It was a thrill contributing to BoingBoing, but now it’s time to return to real life. I’ve linked to my first week’s posts already. Here’s Week Two, in reverse chronological order:
Chuck Berry, “Tulane” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day
Son House, “Death Letter” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)
Richard Thompson, “For Shame of Doing Wrong” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)
Striking new Edgar Allan Poe collection
Free ebook download: Scott Kirsner’s “Fans, Friends & Followers”
Boyoyo Boys, “Back in Town” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)
Did Charley Patton play that way? (this one in particular had great comments)
Amy Rigby, “Balls” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)
Nina Simone, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)
Free download returns: Tribute to The Clash’s Sandinista!
Design thinking tips from the masters
Ida Maria, “Oh My God” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)
The Sandinista Project, once again free for a limited time
UPDATE: The free download is over. Thanks for participating.
A few years ago, I produced The Sandinista Project, in which 36 performers each covered one song from The Clash’s Sandinista! It was a fun and crazy project. Last summer, on Joe Strummer’s birthday, I made the record free for a day. The free download was a great success although what I learned from the experiment was more mixed.
I’ve been having a wonderful time on Boing Boing during my guestblogging residency and I’d like to say “thank you” by making the record free again, for a limited time. Instead of making it free for one day, which slowed the hamsters running the guterman.com servers to a crawl because everyone downloaded at once, I’m going to make the record, along with digital images of the packaging, available until midnight U.S. eastern time on Sunday night, so you’ll have plenty of time to download this before it goes away.
First week at Boing Boing
For those of you who had better things to do the past week than follow my posts on Boing Boing, here they are, in reverse chronological order:
Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs, “Wooly Bully” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)
Ennio Morricone, “Once Upon a Time in the West” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)
Thomas Dolby and ETHEL: Music for the morning after
The physics behind flying sharks who can destroy airplanes
Jorge Ben, “Ponta de Lança Africano (Umbabarauma)” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)
“Ten Dollar Cover,” an excerpt from a novel-in-progress/disarray
How did Garth Hudson defeat gravity?
Mekons, “Memphis, Egypt” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day
How to write about self-washing, self-flushing cat boxes? With passion!
Rod Stewart doesn’t play good Rod Stewart music anymore, but these guys do
A change of scenery (for two weeks)
For the next two weeks, I’ll be at BoingBoing. Please visit me there.
It’s Whitesnake Day!
Well, sort of. Lydia is in the cast of Madame White Snake, an opera that will have its world premiere in Boston this evening. And, in the City of Boston, today is Madame White Snake Day. Happy Madame White Snake Day, everyone.
Of course, for people of a certain age, as Jane just pointed out, when you read the term “Whitesnake,” you think of only one thing: Tawny Kitaen on a car hood.
I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to future generations for the ’80s.
Some good writing advice from a not-good writer
I’m not one for finding wisdom from writers who don’t inspire me, but I’m grateful enough for inspiration to take it from any quarter shy of Thomas Kinkade. Anyway, a few weeks back, I read a profile of the popular novelist James Patterson. It was a long magazine piece, more interested in matters other than writing (i.e., money and success). But, buried in the article, I found this:
“I don’t believe in showing off,” Patterson says of his writing. “Showing off can get in the way of a good story.”
Inarguable. Show a little less love for your sentences; show a little more love for your story. Story. Story. Story!
God Only Knows
If you followed my TED coverage last week (or if you’ve talked to me since I’ve come back), you know that one of the great pleasures of the conference for me was the string quartet ETHEL: agile, imaginative, energetic, surprising. The afternoon after the event ended, I met Ralph Farris, ETHEL’s artistic director and viola player, in the lobby of my hotel and told him to his face how much I love his band. (Am I allowed to call a string quartet a band?)
After we got the fanboy stuff out of the way, Ralph and I talked for a bit about string quartets and rock’n’roll. Conversation bended toward The Juliet Letters, the 1993 collaboration between Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet. Then and now (I listened to the set again after it was reissued in 2006), I find The Juliet Letters arch and overly polite: in a word, precious. Each part of that union has done remarkable work (here are some notes I took on Costello a while back), but the project remains too self-consciously inoffensive to take off, despite some soaring moments here and there (more from the Brodskys than E.C.).
I do enjoy, however, some of the other songs the unlikely quintet played to fill out their shows, particularly a brittle take on Costello’s “Pills and Soap” and, especially, their version of The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows.” On that classic, Costello’s singing is, more or less, as mannered as it was in general for that project, but it finds a place in the strings, gliding between the instruments, eventually soaring above them with one facile but still perfect “you” at the end.
On the flight back to Boston on Sunday, I listened to Pet Sounds, a record that has kept me good company on long trips before; it’s one of those albums that doesn’t seem to have a physical place so it feels apt when I’m in some container above the world, nowhere near anyone I love, not really anywhere at all. I was half-asleep from my last night at TED and half-surprised when “God Only Knows” appeared midway through the set. I’ve never been a member of the Beach-Boys-were-as-great-as-the-Beatles cult, but what a record Pet Sounds is, even after you have heard it 500 times. On songs like “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” lushly produced but still insular, and “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder),” whose strings carry it between a Phil Spector teenage symphony and an almost unbearable expression of yearning, it feels like you’re listening not to the sound someone made in a studio but the sound inside someone’s head. There’s enough humor and drama and unexpected reversals in the two-minute song “Pet Sounds” to fill a pretty good novel, and it doesn’t have any words, just feeling. Pet Sounds is all emotion on the edge of repression, just barely expressed and the more powerful for it. It’s masterful pop music. I bet it made Costello and the Brodskys feel grounded after their more abstract journeys.
Listening to Pet Sounds got me thinking about another version of “God Only Knows” that I treasure:
Petra Haden is, wrongly I think, sometimes considered as a purveyor of novelty: her best-known recordings are a capella recordings of classic pop songs, among them Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” all of The Who Sell Out, and “God Only Knows.” They’re formidable technical achievements and enjoyable to listen to regardless of whether you know that every sound is generated by a soulful human voice. We hear the original the way she heard it and we hear parts of the original that we didn’t hear until she brought them to our attention. Something new in a faithful version of an overplayed classic: that’s a gift. And, if you buy my argument that Pet Sounds is a record happening inside someone’s head, what could be more right than a precise, robust version of “God Only Knows” in which one inspired person overdubs herself over and over and over and over and … ? She makes us hear familiar songs in new ways; she makes us feel one of the most familiar pop songs of the ’60s in a new way.
TED 2010: Day 4 and Wrapup
First, some notes on earlier talks here.
Yesterday I wrote about Bill Gates’ presentation. The video hasn’t been posted yet, but you can read an insightful slide-by-slide rundown by Nancy Duarte (who we’ve featured previously in MIT Sloan Management Review). And a few days back, I mentioned another Microsoft-related talk: Blaise Aguera y Arcas’ demo of a new mapping technology employing augmented reality. It really works and you can see it here:
And now, notes on the final day of TED 2010. By the last two sessions of the conference, after three days of one 18-minute marvel after another and three late nights of talking over those marvels with fellow attendees, you need something energetic to keep you sitting up straight and tall in your seat. And Saturday’s sessions offered some of that. Highlights included:
Sir Ken Robinson. His previous talk, from 2006, about rethinking education, was one of the first TED videos liberated for public viewing and remains the most-seen. This year’s talk went deeper in the same territory. If anything, it was even more iconoclastic, starting with the notion that reform of a broken model (what he considers the current public school situation in the U.S.) is insufficient and discussing how difficult it is to “disenthrall” ourselves from the “tyranny of common sense.” His talk will be up shortly and it’s worth seeing in its entirety; his notion of moving from the current approach to public education, which he terms industrial and linear, to a more “agricultural” and holistic (without the new age trappings) one is provocative and, after a while, inarguable.
Another superstar of the day was James Cameron, best known for films about 10-foot-tall blue people, big ships that sink, and what Arnold Schwarzenegger is really like. His autobiographical talk wasn’t short on self-regard, but it also wasn’t short on inspiration. Those looking for tips on how their movie might make a billion dollars got a few of them (he wanted a global audience, regardless of language, so he made the story of Avatar play primarily visually and emotionally), but he also celebrated what anyone can do: curiosity, imagination, respecting your team and being respected in turn. Cameron stuck close to his favorite subject — himself — and it would have been good if he had found some examples for his points that were not about him, but they were points worth hearing nonetheless.
Many of the talks in the first session were about simplicity — simplicity in design, thought, and how we live our lives — and they were all lively and engaging, but TED is really the wrong place to talk about simplicity. If anything, TED is a celebration of complexity, an exploration of what can be connected to something else in a new, delightful, and useful way. The stage was full of people who said they craved simplicity, but I’m pretty sure this audience could tolerate that only in small doses. In just the last session alone, emotion bounced from Cameron talking about Cameron to a young woman talking about the brain tumor that will kill her shortly to a satirist lampooning the past four days to a preternaturally mature child imploring the grownups to stop screwing up everything.
Again, these are highlights, only a taste of an experience hard to convey in the narrow confines of a blog. You don’t want to read about Thomas Dolby and the astonishing string quartet Ethel make a Sheryl Crow song sound more lively than Crow did herself two nights earlier; you want to hear it in person. You don’t want to read or hear about how someone’s life changed, for good or ill; you want to be in the room and share the moment. May you all get that opportunity.
The intricate stage is down, the final parties are over (well, it’s Sunday shortly after 6 a.m.; I think the final parties are over). It’s time to go home, once again, and see how I can apply what I’ve learned here to what I do every day. I’m glad I had the chance to share some of what I’ve picked up here, and I’ll let you know when talks I’ve cited are available for viewing.
TED 2010: Day 3
Yes, it’s elitist. Yes, sometimes the presenters and their audience can be too full of themselves. But I’ve yet to attend a day of TED when something hasn’t made me rethink something. We had all of that today.
I am disappointed to report that, unlike yesterday, no one on the stage destroyed any mosquitoes with a bright green laser. But, except for one very wrong move (inviting the far more unfunny than uncomfortable Sarah Silverman) and the occasional dud (people: don’t read papers and call them speeches!), the long day was full of delights both profound (George Church’s investigations into synthetic biology) and ridiculous (you have not lived a full life until you’ve seen a tattoo of Maury Povich and Bigfoot shaking hands).
One of the day’s strongest talks was by Bill Gates. He’s spoken at TED previously on a variety of topics, among them education and malaria (last year he set free some mosquitoes from the stage to make a point about the latter). Today he directed his mind toward energy and climate; in particular how to get CO2 levels to zero. He builds that on what has become conventional wisdom among sustainability scientists: that the temperature will keep going up until we cut CO2 almost down to nothing. He presented an equation in which
Total CO2 = People x Services Per Person x Energy Per Service x CO2 per unit of energy.
So, if he’s right, one of the variables on the right of the equal sign has to go down to zero. He argued why it won’t be any of the first three and focused on the last one, CO2 per unit of energy. I suspect TED will post Gates’ talk soon; we’ll point to it and let the man speak for himself. But he looked at what needed to be done — reducing and converting fossil fuels, managing nuclear energy in ways that are safe and don’t promote proliferation — and concluded we still need “an incredible miracle.” He’s investing in these areas and he was clear that he’s early on in thinking about his problem, but one hopes he uses the same precision of vision he used for everything from organizing his foundation to vanquishing the Netscape browser.
One last note on Gates’ talk: when he used the term “innovating to zero,” it reminded me of Valerie Plame Wilson’s talk yesterday about nuclear disarmament, in which she advocated getting nuclear weapons to zero, too. Those are laudable sentiments, of course, but especially in a room filled with technology executives, it’s hard to imagine a world in which an entire technology stops being used. The world only spins forward, of course. The challenge may be one of managing what exists, rather than eliminating what won’t go away.
Provocative in another way was Temple Grandin, whose known for being an expert in animal behavior, a designer in more humane storage and slaughter facilities, an advocate for the autistic, and an autistic person herself. She had a big point she wanted to make — “The world needs different kinds of minds to work together” — but she also had precise, deeply considered stories about how to treat animals and autistic children in much more helpful ways. When this talk is posted, it might make the same sort of impact Jill Bolte Taylor’s talk in 2008 about experiencing her own stroke; Grandin’s talk brought the audience into an unfamiliar world and made it, for 18 minutes at least, coherent.
Quickly (because there’s another event about to begin): John Underkoffler, who invented the Minority Report screens that have led to such real-world gestural-interface systems as the Wii and the iPhone, showed some incremental advances in his work, often turning away from the audience like a conductor to summon images out of his giant screens; Wired‘s Chris Anderson showed a demo of his magazine in tablet form that (a) seems fluid and promising (b) crashed midway, which offers a neat metaphor for print publishing. Font designer Marian Bantjes delivered a very similar talk to the one she delivered at Pop!Tech in 2008, but once you got past the repetition you hear a fascinating message true for both artists and managers. When she does a work of art, she asks: Who is it for? What does it say? What does it do? She didn’t say this, but if you don’t have good answers to those three questions, you might want to ask a fourth: Why am I doing this?
As with yesterday, I wrote a longish post but left out most of the day’s entertainment. One of many highlights today: David Byrne joined Thomas Dolby and the string quartet Ethel for a run at Talking Heads’ “(Nothing But) Flowers.” More on that later, because it is time for the next event …
A bit more TED before the next session…
A few quick notes before I run into the next session:
One of the best TED-U sessions was Derek Sivers on what it takes to be a leader, with a shirtless dancing guy as the news hook. Treat yourself to this three-minute talk.
I wrote about Jamie Oliver’s TED Prize talk on Wednesday night. See his talk (below) and read Garr Reynolds’ trenchant commentary.
And, finally, do you want to give a TED talk? The guy who decides whether you will has advice.
TED 2010: Day 2
Longtime TEDsters know that sometime during the second day, attendees give up hope of taking in everything that is shooting their way. There’s just too much to keep up; every 15 or 20 minutes, there’s another talk that directs an axe toward something you have assumed was true your whole life.
It wasn’t just ideas that were shooting out. One of the biggest crowd pleasers on Thursday (I’m writing this Friday before the first morning session) was former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold. He’s the prototypical TED polymath — several years ago he talked about how waves off the coast of Hawaii could take out the state of California (alas, not posted on the TED site) — and he spoke this year on the work his firm is doing to battle malaria. He offered some possible solutions, and then he got to his big idea to battle the terrible disease: shoot mosquitos out of the sky with lasers. And, this being TED, we were treated to a demo of just such a malaria-eradication plan. Much of a TED audience grew up on Captain Kirk and Han Solo, so you don’t have to guess what the reaction was to scientific advance that involved a green laser and a very satisfying wisp of smoke after the laser hit its target.
There were other dramatic moments. Kevin Bales, director of Free the Slaves, spoke soberly about the state of slavery on the planet: slaves as destroyer of the environment, political corruption as the primary reason slavery persists, and the dark economics that show how some people have gotten so cheap. Stanford’s Mark Z. Jacobson and longtime environmentalist Stewart Brand tried something new for TED: a debate over whether nuclear power should have a role in America’s power mix. Brand, the mind behind The Whole Earth Catalog, has in recent years converted to a pro-nuclear position, and the crowd was with him at the beginning. Jacobson was no match for Brand’s presentation techniques, but he had pulled some more of the crowd his way by the end. Also on the nuclear tip, Valerie Plame Wilson spoke about nuclear disarmament. She’s best-known for having been outed as an undercover CIA agent, but even those of us who followed her story didn’t really know what she worked on for the CIA. Turns out it was nuclear disarmament; she was part of team that brought down Pakistani proliferation criminal A.Q. Khan. This being TED, Plame was also there to promote Countdown to Zero, a documentary film about the ongoing attempt to eliminate nuclear weapons.
There was more. Elizabeth Pisani, who several years ago wrote The Wisdom of Whores, spoke incisively about the ramifications of various AIDS policies, and Seth Berkeley showed how far we are — and how far we have to go — down the road to creating a AIDS vaccine. And Mark Roth earned a standing ovation when he detailed his work in suspended animation.
And there was an enormous amount of fun. League of Extraordinary Dancers lived up to their name, performing a daring aerial ballet with enough gravity-ignoring moves and seemingly impossible slow motion that it felt like watching a live-action version of The Matrix. Thomas Dolby’s stage-setting covers with the string quartet Ethel continued to marvel, and Microsoft unveiled a new version of bing maps that lets you explore a landscape with a historical overlay or a real-time overlay. One of the most intense responses was after a demo of the Google “Nexus One” phone, when TED curator Chris Anderson announced that all attendees would be getting a free one. Amazing: the vast majority of this audience has no problem either paying for (or getting their company to pay for) a very expensive conference, but they were screaming their happiness about getting a free phone.
This summaries leaves out more than half of the able presenters. Some that you must see when they go live on the TED site in the weeks ahead: Nicholas Christakis talked brilliantly about obesity clustering, David Byrne mused on whether artists create more based on context than passion, Jim Daly talked about man-eating plants, Jane McGonigal found what was good in video games, Sam Harris confused science for religion, Kirt Citron imagined the news thousands of years from now, and Michael Specter, celebrating the scientific method, trying things out, seeing what works, fixing what doesn’t, as the greatest achievement of humanity, nothing then when “people wrap themselves in their beliefs, they wrap them so tightly they can’t break themselves free.” Every few minutes, it’s another insight, another surprise, another jaw dropped. In some ways, it’s intellectual camp. Time for another day…
TED 2010: Day 1
I’m at TED this week. I’m sending daily reports for the blog at MIT Sloan Management Review. I’ll post the unedited drafts of my missives here.
Here we are again. As we did last year, MIT Sloan Management Review is in Long Beach, Calif., to cover the TED conference. If you’re not familiar with TED, a high-end event that aims to bring together the world’s leaders in technology, entertainment, and design and share ideas worth spreading, see our introductory post from last year. We’ll be sending daily posts through the end of the event on Saturday.
Last year, we aimed to cover TED from a management point of view. In retrospect, that seems too narrow. Sure, there are talks here that are not explicitly about management that have direct management implications. But many of the provocative talks here have nothing to do with management or business, yet are fascinating. For example, during this morning’s TED-U session (that’s “TED University,” a series of low-key peer talks rather than full presentations from the mainstage luminaries), filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy spoke eloquently and ominously of the suicide bomber recruiting techniques she learned about in Pakistan. No one is going to become a better manager based on her talk. But managers have lives outside their careers; they’re interested in plenty of things in addition to being better managers. So, in the spirit of trying to capture the breadth of the event (and because this is the last TED your correspondent will be covering for MIT Sloan Management Review), we’ll try to cover all we experience at our seventh TED, from the most management-relevant to how dozens in the crowd started checking their email on iPhones and BlackBerrys while Sheryl Crow sang a painfully earnest ballad about compassion. We won’t mention every talk or try to capture every second of this packed event — there are many bloggers and twitterers doing that . Rather, we aim to give, at reasonable length for busy readers, a feel of what it’s like here.
Before we move on to the main event, let’s quickly note some of the other highlights from the too-early-in-the-day TED-U session. Robert Cook, vice president of advanced technology at Pixar, took aim at one of the technorati’s favorite constructs, the singularity, provoking a few mild boo’s from around me, Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan showed what was wrong with Bill Gates’ website — with the Microsoft chairman in the audience — and Tom Wujec of Autodesk showed how kindergarten students are better at some creative tasks than CEOs.
The first session of the full TED kicked off with the conference’s musical director, Thomas Dolby (you know him for “She Blinded Me With Science,” but much of his work is more diverse and challenging), dressed like Snoopy ready to take on the Red Baron, leading the string quartet Ethel through a spirited version of Verve’s “Street Corner Symphony.” That first session, called “Mindshift,” offered two speakers worth remembering. Daniel Kahneman, founder of behavioral economics (he won a Nobel for it) gave basically the same sort of talk we’ve seen the more famous behavioral economists — most notably Dan Ariely and the Freakonomics twins — give in recent years. Kahneman has much to say about how individuals think about happiness and memory, but his talk, so similar to that of his disciples, reminds one how early on in its existence behavioral economics is. There’s a lot more to learn.
More modest about what we still have to learn — and more compelling for it — was Esther Duflo, a development economist and founder of the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. She gave a version of her usual talk, updated to include some references to Haiti, showing how randomized control trials can have an enormous impact on helping aid agencies determine what works and what doesn’t work.
After a lunch in which your correspondent listened to an editor from The Economist hype his own, decidedly sub-TED conference about innovation, came the second session,called “Discovery.” We learned more about how spiders spin silk than we ever wanted to know, a promising report from William Li about how angiogenesis research may deal a death blow to some cancers (Mark Frauenfelder at BoingBoing has good coverage of this talk), and others, among them former failed pornographer Philip “Pud” Kaplan. Most impressive of the lot was Dan Barber, a chef who loves fish but is having trouble keeping fish on his menu because so many stocks are gone or almost there. His tale of finding a remarkably sustainable fish farm in Spain is too detailed to summarize briefly (at least at the late hour at which I’m writing); we’ll point to the clip when TED posts it.
The final session for the day before the evening’s social activities, called “Action,” revolved around the awarding of this year’s TED Prize, the conference’s attempt to celebrate and support the work of one person whose ideas the organizers believe can change the world. The prize has gotten somewhat more pop in recent years, to the point at which today’s awardee, the formidable British chef , activist and writer Jamie Oliver, is the star of an upcoming American network TV reality series. But the battle he wants to fight — against American obesity — is an important one, and he has smart, unexpected plans for that fight. Dressed in a flannel shirt, black jeans, and white sneakers, pacing the stage furiously, his carefully out-of-control hair making him look like a member of The Alarm, he wants, most of all, to act. “Ideas are very well but what the world needs now is action,” TED curator Chris Anderson said early in the final session, right after Dolby and the string quartet Ethel assayed a majestic version of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir.” He’s right. Later this morning, though, we’ll be back to ideas.
It was a full, full day. And I didn’t even get to mention the African nuclear physicist who said “education is the husband that will never let you down” or the fellow who played “Bohemian Rhapsody” on his ukulele. Onward …
I’ll be on BoingBoing
I’m thrilled to report that I’ll be guestblogging on BoingBoing, one of my all-time favorite websites, during the first two weeks of March. In the guidelines, I’ve been told “We don’t allow nudity in the images, except under special circumstances.” Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Internet peoples, you have been warned.
And now, part of a conversation, guaranteed repeated verbatim:
Lydia: What’s BoingBoing?
Jimmy: A site where interesting people write about interesting things.
Lydia: But you’re not interesting.
We’ll see. I have a month to prepare.
Brief notes on taste and entertainment: A shark, an octopus, Celine Dion, and Batman
Until Runaway American Dream, the book of mine that got the most attention was The Worst Rock’n’Roll Records of All Time, which I wrote with my friend Owen O’Donnell. Almost 20 years later, I have mixed feelings about that book. Working with Owen was a great pleasure, but the book now feels more mean and less funny than it should have been. (You could say the same for the book that inspired us, the Medved Brothers’ Golden Turkey Awards.)
I hardly ever think about The Worst anymore. I get the occasional email asking me when we’re doing a sequel or defending Bon Jovi, but that’s it. Questions of awful art and how we treat awful art zoomed back to front of mind earlier this month when I read Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. It’s a wonderful short book, part of Continuum’s 33-1/3 series, and it focuses on a Celine Dion record that Wilson, an ace rock critic, doesn’t think is any good. Yet he spends more than 100 pages finding interesting things to say about it and finding aspects of it that are not as awful as other aspects. He finds it a tremendously flawed work of art, but he also finds it a work of art.
In most of The Worst, it was easy to sneer at the performers. Owen and I didn’t break much of a sweat making fun of Billy Joel and his ilk. (If I remember correctly, we broke more of a sweat playing handball in the street in front of my house when we should have been writing.) Sometimes, though, the sneer didn’t come so easily. I’m thinking in particular of when we wrote about The Shaggs, a group of sisters best-known for their inability to stay in tune. Yet there is joy in their playing, an artless love of life in their songwriting, and I think Meg White listened to them when she and Jack were dreaming up The White Stripes. Can they play? Not really. But their enthusiasm is infectious. If the Shaggs’ music gives me so such pleasure, how can it possibly be bad? Why would I make fun of someone who is creating art that is moving me?
Which brings us to Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus. It’s a disaster film that came out last year. Don’t worry if you missed it; almost everyone else did, too, even though it is, I think, the only film in which Lorenzo Lamas and Deborah Gibson (yes, she of “Shake Your Love”) both appear, the latter as a submarine-stealing oceanographer. The film was originally entitled Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus in 3D, but the filmmakers had to change the name when they couldn’t get enough funding to shoot in 3D.
But let’s see a bit of the work itself:
That’s right; you just saw a shark jump thousands of feet out of the ocean to attack a jetliner (it could happen). And you should see what the shark does to the Golden Gate bridge:
And don’t forget the “octopus” part of the title:
We self-appointed tastemakers tend to consider work of this level wanting. But what does bad mean here? All three of those clips bring me pleasure. Every single person I’ve shown the clip with the plane has responded to it. How can that be bad? No, the pleasures aren’t as deep as a film by Bergman or Kurosawa might bring, but they are pleasures nonetheless. The filmmakers sought to entertain me and they succeeded. How can such a pleasure be relegated to a guilty one?
Speaking of guilty pleasures, I cannot end this post about a shark attacking a plane without a reference to my until-now favorite shark moment on film, which, of course, involves Batman:
And now I’m going to decide whether I want to reread The Guermantes Way or Seagalogy: A Study of the Ass-Kicking Films of Steven Seagal.
Taking a quick break from writing fiction to writing about writing fiction
First, some words from two of my favorite Russian writers:
“Everything I am writing at present bores me and leaves me indifferent, but everything that is still only in my head interests me, moves me, and excites me.”
— Anton Chekhov
“I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child. “
— Vladimir Nabokov
Several times a day, I get an idea. I think it’s good. I write it down. I read it. It isn’t good. I work at it for a while and sometimes it gets good (or, at least, good enough). But it’s never as good as it was in my head. I can’t just connect a cluster of cords from my brain to my readers, Navi-style, so I have to keep writing until I get closer to what I first heard in my head. Will I get there? Probably not. Will I get close if I try hard? I’d better.
Newspaper trucks deliver their own obituaries
This morning, on the corner of Mass. Ave. and Comm. Ave., I saw a Globe delivery truck. On the side of that truck was an ad for one of the many things that will make such delivery trucks disappear. (It won’t be the anemic Globe Reader that kills the physical-newspapers-to-your-home service, but it will be something delivered in a similar manner.)
Twenty or 30 years from now, when I tell my grandchildren that news from the day before used to be dumped by a truck at the end of a driveway, they’ll roll their eyes. Old news? By truck? There goes the crazy old man again…
On a cold, cold day …
… you may need to spend a few minutes with some of the hottest music ever broadcast via a television:
Yet another example of one of my kids being my role model (fiction-writing version)
This year I’m going to finish the novel. Really. I’m hoping that announcing it will make it more likely that I’ll do it. We’ll see.
One person not having any trouble getting her writing going is Grace Guterman, age nine. On New Year’s Eve, out of nowhere, Grace decided to use her whiteboard to show us how to write a novel.
First, as you see in the picture, you have to pick a genre. She went with fantasy. Then you have to figure out who the characters are. She likes to start with pairs of characters, such as a boy and a girl, a horse and a cat, or a doll and a teddy bear. She considered many combinations, decided on a boy and a doll, and started writing.
A second draft comes next, followed by the final one. “I usually write two ‘draphts’ and then go on to the real thing,” she advises. Although she started with a boy and a doll, she switchd to a boy and a horse. Her premise: “The boy was a prince and the horse had diabetes.” The story had medical complications and a trick (O. Henry-ish) ending. Did I mention that Grace is nine?
She’s also writing another novel, apparently, about the three most important things in life:
Last sentence of the year
He sure wasn’t playing arenas now.
Have a great break, all. I’ll be back here after Jan. 4. If I have enough stamina, willpower, and luck, it’ll be the last year I have to inflict these novel-in-progress sentences on you.
Jim Duffy wants you to listen to The Black Hollies
The more you find out about someone, the more interesting that person turns out to be. Jim Duffy is a perfect example of that axiom. I met him when he was an ace copyeditor for The Industry Standard and begged him to join us on our quixotic post-Standard attempt at independent publishing.
But that’s only part of what he can do. He’s a smart, swinging, surprising pianist, bandleader, and songwriter. He’s recorded two records, the fine Side One and the new, even better Mood Lit. He was kind enough to contribute a smashing version of Mose Allison’s “Look Here” to The Sandinista Project, a great performance also included on Mood Lit if you’re one of the billions on the planet who has yet to buy or steal The Sandinista Project.
As you’d suspect from such a tasteful player and writer, he has great taste in other people’s music too. He was the first person to direct me to Dengue Fever, a band who longtime readers know I rave about, and he has another recommendation, The Black Hollies. Let’s let Jim make the case:
Just saying hello again, and to perhaps tip you to a band I like, plus a thought about how music is consumed these days…
The Black Hollies, from Jersey City, may have a misleading name. They don’t sound like the Hollies, but they do sound like the Yardbirds, or the early Kinks, or the pre-Tommy Who. They stepped out of a time machine, from the era when bands had long hair but still wore suits — 1965 or ’66, but not ’67. They’re young-ish guys, too, playing vintage gear. My girlfriend Amy and I first saw them as an opening act, and they were way better than the headliner.
We’ve gone back to see them a couple of times, and they put on a tight, well-put-together show, one song right into another, and they have a lot of good tunes. In fact, on their first album, Casting Shadows, I like every single track.
So, first of all, check out the Black Hollies. Second, even in this era when so much music is available for free, if I like a band, I want to buy something, and I don’t think I’m alone.
A couple of weeks ago, we saw them play an early set, and the cover charge was very low. And they wailed. They played a set that gets you rocking and puts a smile on your face. When the set was over, I wanted to buy something. So I’m at the merch table, talking to the guitar player (I don’t know these guys at all), and he, very wisely, starts talking and talking about the band’s wares, how they make their records and so on. So I buy the band’s new album, Softly Towards the Light, on vinyl, for $10. And it’s a fine record.
What’s the point? In this day and age when music is given away for free, and when there’s so much of it that you can’t possibly get to it all, then when you find something you like, you don’t mind paying. Or at least I don’t. I’d rather pay for something, to feel like I’m supporting it or participating in making it happen, in some small way.
Not a very original observation, but a data point, at least.
Keep ’em comin’, Jim.
Nabokov agrees with me from beyond the grave, sort-of
A few weeks ago, I used this space to argue against the posthumous publication of pieces of the novel Vladimir Nabokov was working on before his death. Just today I was reading Nabokov’s introduction to his poetry-free translation of Eugene Onegin, in which the great man himself weighs in:
“An artist should ruthlessly destroy his manuscripts after publication, lest they mislead academic mediocrities into thinking that it is possible to unravel the mysteries of genius by studying cancelled readings. In art, purpose and plan are nothing; only the results count.”
Jimmy Guterman's blog 
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