Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Archives

About

Greatest hits

Forever Young

by

Tonight I heard parts of Terry Gross’s interview with Neil Young. I’ve been listening to Young’s music since I was young myself. As an 11-year-old, in 1970, I’d bop around my room to those endless jams on “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere.” As a 14-year-old I would cut phys. ed class and hang around outside the gym singing the lyrics to beloved obscurities like “Don’t Let It Bring You Down.” I finally heard Young play live in the late ’70s on the “Rust Never Sleeps” tour. But in all those years I’d never before heard an interview with him.

The show is a shambling, illuminating ramble through the mind of this amazing musician, who belongs right up there with Dylan and Reed as a sort of deathless chthonic spirit of popular music. Here is the exchange with which it begins:

  GROSS: You’ve said that you like to destroy what you’ve created and then move on. Would you talk about why?

YOUNG: Did I say that?

GROSS: Yeah.

YOUNG: When did I say that? I probably did. I certainly can’t say I didn’t.

GROSS: Maybe you’ve destroyed that statement and that statement isn’t true anymore.

YOUNG: I’m working, all the wheels are turning a million miles an hour, I’m trying to come up with a quick answer here. I really think that, you know, you’ve got to move on, whether you tear it down, whatever you built, whether you tear it down — it’s just, you know, I don’t want to destroy what I’ve done, but I want to destroy the feeling that I’m going to do it again. I don’t want people to think that just because I did this, that I’m going to do that, that I’m going to do it again, that they can say now I’m this, and that’s what I should do, and that’s where I fit. I hate fitting.

Misfitting becomes him well enough.

The users are revolting!

by

Rob Glaser of Real Networks, Lisa Gansky of Ofoto and Shane Robison of HP are talking about “user-generated content” here at PC Forum, in a panel moderated by Hank Barry of Napster fame. There’s lots of talk about monetizing content and tools and rights (including some slaps at Steve Jobs for keeping ITunes and the IPod a closed system), but I think they’re all missing the point. Newsweek’s Steven Levy asked, “Are we going to enter a renaissance of alternatives to the media with homegrown stuff, or is it going to be more of an ‘American Idol’ kind of thing?” He didn’t get much of an answer.

Glaser talked about a “shortage of narrative storytelling skills” and a “dearth of creative talent” when it comes to users creating longer-form video content. Technically, perhaps he’s right. But so what? “User-generated content” isn’t about creating some sort of big farm team for the pros. The long-term value of “user-generated content” isn’t in the businesses — not necessarily those on this panel –that no doubt will figure out how ways to generate revenue from it. The value is to individuals, and society, in the sheer number of previously silent voices that will sound, in the previously unheard stories that will be told, to whatever size audience. We’re slowly but steadily increasing the breadth of human experience and expression that is recorded and available to others. Next to that sort of social good, somehow the implementation details of different business models seem trivial.

(These issues have been hashed out for years at the Digital Storytelling Festival.)

Spot the fallacy

by

Valdis Krebs’ neat chart showing how people who read books by Joe Conason and people who read books by Ann Coulter don’t tend to overlap much in their choice of reading was a useful reminder of how polarized our political culture has become, and it coursed quickly through the blogosphere when it was first published.

It made the New York Times today. In the accompanying article by Emily Eakin you will read the following:

  [Krebs’] finding appears to buttress the argument made by Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago, in his influential study “Republic.com” (Princeton University Press, 2001) that contemporary media and the Internet have abetted a culture of polarization, in which people primarily seek out points of view to which they already subscribe.

This sounds good until you think for a nanosecond. Yes, Krebs’ chart is a vivid indication that our culture is divided. But it doesn’t offer much help figuring out how we got there. Sure, it’s possible that “contemporary media and the Internet” are at fault, but how does Krebs’ chart buttress that argument? (Note, also, how two very different forces are lumped together in that phrase. “Contemporary media” includes Fox News, which does its share to polarize America; but when it comes to the Internet, I lean more to David Weinberger’s argument, which points out that the Net provides more opportunity for cross-camp dialogue than any other medium, even if we don’t use it as much as we might.)

The logical fallacy in the Times piece is a simple one: Krebs’ chart is about book purchases. Books are wonderful things, but they don’t exactly fit under the rubric of “contemporary media and the Internet.” If we’re blaming media technologies for political polarization based on the Krebs study then we’d better start pointing fingers at the dreaded printing press. Let us restrict the flow of ink! Or, more sensibly, we should stop blaming technology and start looking at the content of our communication. It may be that our readership of books today is polarized because our nation is deeply and fundamentally split about very basic subjects and ideas.

Last night on Fresh Air I heard Terry Gross interview the lunatic Tim LaHaye, author of the appallingly popular “Left Behind” novels about the apocalypse and the end days and the coming of the Antichrist. LaHaye believes I’m going to burn in hell because I don’t believe in his god. It’s very hard for me to think that there is any overlap between his idea of America and mine. But he sells many more books than Salon ever has, or probably will. We’re beyond polarized — we’re living in parallel universes that happen to share the same continent and electoral system.

Get your Goats

by

It’s been a long time since I posted on music. Last year I spent much of my limited listening time close to home, with old familiars like Frank Black, Tobin Sprout and Guided By Voices.

I’m finally out and about again exploring some new bands. My find of the moment is the Mountain Goats — a “group” that seems largely the work of one guy and his pals, though the current album, “We Shall All Be Healed,” features a band on many tracks. John Darnielle sings in an adenoidal clip — as if you took the voices of either of the Johns from They Might Be Giants and stre-e-e-tched it high and wide. The full-band tracks take tried-and-true Velvet Underground riffs and layer sharp, angry poetry over them, half spiritual yearning and half cold-water-in-the-face reality. The solo acoustic tracks push that poetry at you without the rhythm section’s consolation, in simple threadbare grace. (One song, “Mole,” begins, “I came to see you up there in intensive care — they had handcuffed you to your bed,” with the narrator repeating the chorus: “I am a mole, sticking his head above the surface of the earth.”) Sacred and mundane get thrown together even in the song titles, like “Palmcorder Yajna,” which weds its obscure name to an almost unbearably catchy tune.

Now I need to go explore the rest of the Mountain Goats catalogue, which, from what I’ve read, seems to feature a lot of solo-acoustic recordings made on a whirring boombox in a bathroom. If they’re half as good as “We Shall All Be Healed,” I’ll be happy.

Bonus find: If you loved the Feelies as I did, you’ll be glad to know that you can now get specially custom burned CDs of Feelies spin-off band Yung Wu’s solo full-length effort, “Shore Leave,” here. Different vocalist, same great guitars — and cool covers of Brian Eno obscurity “Big Day” (that bouncy song about Peru from his collaboration with Phil Manzanera) and Neil Young classic “Powderfinger.”

UPDATE: “Palmcorder Yajna” appears to be available as a free download on Amazon. Beware — it’s one of those songs that plants itself in your brain and stays there.

Mario is a rope over an abyss

by

Many years ago, in 1991, I wrote about Nintendo’s Mario as an existential hero in an extended essay for the San Francisco Examiner, peppered with Nietzschean epigrams and marked with my own infatuation with these videogames’ worlds.

Now someone has produced a trilogy of short Flash films giving this concept animated life. These shorts rely on the crude pixelated sprites of the early Mario games, and derive their emotional charge mostly from heavy dollops of movie music. The spirit here may be more Ninja than Nietzsche, but I loved ’em.

Part one: The death of Luigi! Part two: Assault on the Mushroom Princess’s castle! Part three: Mario returns! Somehow, all this would sound better in Italian (“Il Ritorno di Mario!”).(Links courtesy Metafilter)

Bush Yoga

by

I am trying to pull together my notes and thoughts on ETCon but keep getting distracted.

In the meantime, just for fun, here is (courtesy Metafilter)

Bush Yoga!

I stared at this for a little while trying to figure out the site’s intent; after all, a set of presidential action-figure yoga poses shouldn’t necessarily be construed as mockery. Then again, the film clip that is the site’s only other content makes its politics pretty clear.

Finally, I wonder if they chose not to show the president in “corpse pose” (savasana) for fear of provoking the attention of the Secret Service.

Dean Scream remixes

by

This site, Deangoesnuts.com, from a Dean supporter, collects a plethora of Dean Scream remixes. That’s fun. Also interesting is the link it provides to this video, shot from the crowd’s perspective at the now infamous event. If you watch this, interestingly, the famous YEAAARGH is nearly inaudible, and certainly not the Yowl Heard Round the World.

There, there, my dear

by

San Francisco has the most erudite graffitists. Seen in chalk on the sidewalk at Market and Fourth St., near the BART exit:

There’s no there here either

Gertrude Stein, of course, famously said “There’s no there there” about her native Oakland — though the line was intended less as the put-down it is so often understood to be than as a regretful comment about how “you can’t go home again.”

In any case, someone from the East Bay clearly wants to even the score.
SLIGHT CORRECTION: It seems that I’m wrong to call Stein an Oakland “native.” She was born in Pittsburgh, but spent much of her childhood in Oakland.

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog”

by

While we’re on the subject, I can’t resist repeating a quotation about writing that Cory Doctorow recently posted on BoingBoing. It’s by E.L. Doctorow, and, well, it’s just the truth:

  Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing. . . . Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.