This “Shop Class as Soulcraft” book that has been getting a lot of attention lately bugs me for a lot of reasons. So it’s nice to see that someone has written a far more lucid essay than I could have, hitting all of my main gripes.

I mean, I get where the motorcycle repair guy is coming from. For the last 10 years I’ve either been a software developer or, abstracted one more level, a manager of software developers, or, abstracted one more level, a director of software development— the latter being so abstracted even I’m not really sure what it means most of the time. I spend most of the day communicating mostly electronically with often remote colleagues to build symbolic representations of things which are themselves symbolic representations of other things. So sometimes it all gets a little hairy, and when it does, I come home from the office, turn off the computer and do some gardening: I touch dirt, and cultivate living things that enjoy the sun. Or I mess around with my 3/4 ton cast iron letterpress built in 1925,  making physical things on actual paper using real ink that stains my hands, setting the type by hand, metal letter by metal letter. There is a definite satisfaction to manipulating things in the physical world for a change.

And when I talk about these things with people who don’t know me well, they often assume these are my true passions, what I’d spend 100% of my time doing if only I could throw off the golden handcuffs of my day job. They seem a little surprised when I tell them that I’d go totally crazy if I had to do either of those things full time, and that I find my real job far more stimulating. But it’s true. If I really wanted to grow things for a living, I’d have stayed on my parents’ farm, and if I wanted to do letterpress full-time I’d do it— I know many people who have thriving letterpress businesses.

But my job is sort of endlessly interesting: it’s basically to learn how a part of the world works and then to model it as software. When something becomes rote, you just write a program to do it for you. Or, as Alan Turing said:

Instruction tables will have to be made up by mathematicians with computing experiences and perhaps a certain puzzle-solving ability. There will probably be a great deal of work to be done, for every known process has got to be translated into instruction table form at some stage.

The process of constructing instruction tables should be very fascinating. There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself.

In the process, I have gotten to work closely with people from China, all parts of India, Ireland, Korea, France, Bangladesh via Saudi Arabia, England, Russia, and every conceiveable part of the US. While I do sympathize with the movement toward more local economies like the movement toward eating fresh locally grown food, and while I do get concerned at times at the really dramatic extent to which US manufacturing has moved overseas, I do know that my life has been enriched by developing personal relationships with people from all over the world. I have a hard time believing that this kind of international exchange of labor is a bad thing.

Back to the New Yorker piece: one of the things that irks me to no end about the “Shop Class” guy (whose book I have not read, but whose NYT Magazine article I did read) is his kind of shocking lack of historical perspective. The insight that mechanized or abstract work can be kind of alienating is not exactly new. While he does cite some influences (like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), he writes as if he never heard of, oh, the arts and crafts movement. The New Yorker piece does a decent survey of a history of this idea, all the way back to Adam Smith himself.

I guess, finally, what also bugs me is that I do agree with his basic premise: that “manual” labor actually requires creativity and can be a satisfying, valuable, and worthwhile way to spend your life. I just dislike that he seems to rule out the possibility that others mileage may vary, and would not find it so. But it seems like bashing white collar work seems to have struck a nerve with enough white collar workers to sell quite a few books.

[PS: To save you the trouble of looking it up, the title of this post is a Jenny Holzer Truism]

We drove to the Petsmart in Everett to get some wet food and some litter. The radio we heard there and back could have been taken from my casette collection in 8th grade. On the way we heard the end of “Aqualung” and then we switched stations to some kind of jazz thing on 91.5, which I think is Tufts University radio, but weren’t really paying attention. In Petsmart the woman with the purple fingernails so incredibly long they curve into themselves — I don’t know she bags heavy containers of pet food all day– made small talk with Terri about when her due date was and if we know if it’s a boy or a girl. When we got back to the car, Tufts University radio is no longer playing jazz, they’re playing “Thick as a Brick”. It’s not every day you hear the Jethro Tull on two different radio stations within 15 minutes of each other, and you pretty much never hear them on college radio– maybe all the music snobs have gone home for the summer? Anyway, we headed back toward home, and they cut off “Thick as a Brick” abruptly partway through and kick into “Nights in White Satin”. Now, the clouds were kind of thick and grey, but as we came over the crest of a hill on Route 16, the Moody Blues coming to a crashing, overblown symphonic crescendo, a huge break in the heavens opens up and beams of sunset light are shining down on us, and we both just started laughing because the moment could not have been more perfectly synchronized if we were in a car commercial. We decided to grab dinner at Cambridge Common, so we got to hear “Tuesday Afternoon” and the beginning of “Locomotive Breath”.

After dinner, back in the car, I’m the DJ because I had beer and so Terri is driving. Fresh Air with Terri Gross is on NPR, and she’s interviewing some guy who is talking some crap about relationships and the new song on his album and the guy is all “don’” this and “singin’” that (I admit that I tunred to Terri and said “sounds like this guy forgot to bring his G’s to the interview”) and talking about how insensitivity creeps into relationships and I assume it’s some folksy pretentious faux man of the people NPR darling like Steve Earle or some such, so I flip stations, but nothing else is on, so I flip back, and I swear to god, the words out Terri Gross’s mouth are “ok, so, Iggy Pop, now we’re going to listen to your cover of Jobim’s “How Insensitive” from your new album”.

!!?!?!!

And, during the clip, I’m thinking, while I’m not rushing out to buy this, it’s also not as bad as Rod Stewart’s standards album or the Billy Idol christmas album. At the end she asks him if he’s going to be doing cabaret anytime soon, and he says that he admits that pretentions of the Cafe Carlyle or the Rainbow Room are creeping in. She asks if the Cafe Carlyle called tonight would he do it, he says “you know, I might be tempted but I’ve done stuff like that before and I just hate singin’ with my shirt on”.

We went to Johnny D’s tonight because date night has moved back to Wednesday. Apparently.

Came home and my key didn’t want to go into the lock. I double-checked that it was our door that I was trying to unlock and not our upstairs neighbors. And recounted how many beers I had, yes, only two. So I guess there must have been some condensation in the lock and it froze in the past few days.

I eventually got the door open and came into the kitchen. Again, there was a quick second where I wasn’t sure I was in our home. All the kitchen stuff is in the dining room and the kitchen is pretty empty. We had our wall re-insulated and re-plastered, because there were some fairly huge cracks and crumblings in the old plaster.

Hm. What can all this home renovation mean?

Since John asked. Stuff that didn’t change my life but that I can turn on and instantly get immersed in a certain place or time.

• 69 Love Songs — The Magnetic Fields.  (speaking of trying way, way too hard, but occasionally pulling it off in spite of yourself)
• Greatest Hits — Biz Markie
• anything — The Carter Family (ok, this is in my “change my life” list too, but it’s OK. If you ever need a vacation from the modern world, nothing can snap you into a world of pre-media-saturation faster than a trip to the Appalachians with AP, Sara, and Maybelle.)
• Turn on the Bright Lights — Interpol (yes, sometimes I listen to this even when Terri isn’t around)
• Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy — Brian Eno
• Another Green World — Brian Eno
• The Sunset Tree — The Mountain Goats
• A Radical Recital — Rasputina
• Thanks for the Ether — Rasputina
• Eye — Robyn Hitchcock
• Moss Elixer — Robyn Hitchcock
• Luxor — Robyn Hitchcock
• Funeral — Arcade Fire
• Satanic Panic in the Attic — Of Montreal
• The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society — The Kinks
• The Sunlandic Twins — Of Montreal
• Muswell Hilbillies — The Kinks
• The Singles (1960-1975) — Ike & Tina Turner
• Speaking in Tongues — The Talking Heads
• Red Roses for Me — The Pogues
• If I Should Fall From Grace With God — The Pogues
• Rum Sodomy and the Lash — The Pogues
• Hell’s Ditch — The Pogues
• Trans Europe Express — Kraftwerk
• Highway 61 Revisited — Bob Dylan
• Bone Machine — Tom Waits
• Rain Dogs — Tom Waits
• Discography — The Pet Shop Boys
• Germ Free Adolescents — X Ray Spex
• Nixon — Lambchop
• The Modern Lovers — The Modern Lovers
• various, ranging from the sublime to the painful — Jonathan Richman
• The Pleasure Principle — Gary Numan
• IV — Faust
• Switched On, vols 1-2 — Sterolab
• I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One — Yo La Tengo
• Snap! — The Jam
• Blacknuss — Rashaan Roland Kirk
• The Inflated Tear — Rashaan Roland Kirk
• Weather Systems — Andrew Bird
• Thrills — Andrew Bird
• Tender Buttons — Broadcast
• Let’s Get Out Of This Country — Camera Obscura
• The Dresden Dolls — The Dresden Dolls
• In The Reins — Iron and Wine / Calexico
• Hot Rail — Calexico
• Vauxhall and I — Morrissey
• Louder than Bombs — The Smiths
• In the Aeroplane Over the Sea — Neutral Milk Hotel
• We Shall All Be Healed — The Mountain Goats
• Upstairs at Eric’s — Yaz

So I recently did the whole “15 albums that changed your life” meme on Facebook, but there are a lot of things I listen to again and again — Terri would say compulsively, no, she doesn’t say that, she asks “are you going to ruin this one for me, too?”. Anyway, there are a whole slew of albums that didn’t and won’t change my life, but that I return to again and again like a favorite sweater or a musical blanket.

“Strange Geometry” by the Clientele is like that. It’s not going to stretch your horizons. It didn’t change the shape of music. It’s derivitave, and like all Clientele records, it borders on being a precious affected 60’s period piece. But like all the Clientele’s best stuff, there’s a kind of surreal and dark and almost mystical undercurrent.

You can listen to this record and dismiss it, thinking “this is a little pretentious, and they’re trying too hard”. And it’s kind of true. While really great albums just do it and don’t sound so strained, this album manages to both try too hard and pull it off. A good example is “Losing Haringey“: it’s a spoken word thingy where the narrator finds himself in a photograph, and right when I’m thinking “oh, please”, a little turn of phrase will just twist the right way (”as if none of the intervening disasters and wrong turns had happened yet” always gets me), and it just works.

And “Since K Got Over Me” and “My Own Face In The Trees” are just great pop songs.

Somewhere in there, I also started a Tumblr blog. I really like the interface. Makes it easy to embed and link to media.

Watched The Adventures of Baron Munchausen this morning. I hadn’t seen it before, and it’s indeed eye-poppingly great. The adventure to the Moon was especially great; the scale and style reminded me of Little Nemo in Slumberland. It looked like it was shot on an amazing soundstage, and it turned out to be shot at Cinecittà.  How much realer do even the fakiest live-action special effects look (vs CGI)? I also kept thinking about how much it must have cost to make.

We made some grocery lists went to Johnny’s Foodmaster as the snow started.

And now Terri is knitting and watching the Celtics, and I’m writing this.

Dervala suddenly returned to her blog. I really enjoyed this post.

Also.

Lissa Harris, one of my favorite writers from the heyday of the Weekly Dig, started a blog called Women Do! which is just scathing and wonderful. It’s dedicated to finding and skewering examples of the “Women Do!” type of newspaper feature story:

Not every story about women–not even every story about women doing things–is a Women Do story….

Every proper Women Do story has three hallmarks, and they are three, and these are them:

1. Irrelevance. The true Women Do story is not about medical issues, or gender discrimination, or anything properly related to women qua women. Oh no. It is about the shocking spectacle of women doing stuff that people generally do. At its heart is typically an earth-shattering revelation that some women, for instance, like to drive motor-cars or eat ice-cream. The reporter sets about tackling this topic with all the barmy innocence of a two-year-old child, a Betelgeusian anthropologist or a time-traveler from 1769.

…

You should read the other two as well, but to do that I’m going to make you actually go read it yourself.

The sad thing is that when it started, I thought she was going to run short of material immediately. Sadly, this has not been the case. So far, women have become morticians, farmed, robbed banks, and much much more.

Also.

While I wasn’t paying attention my friend Abeer has become quite a writer. You should read her published stuff. And her blog.

So, things have been pretty quiet here at the ol’ blog lately. The usual busy-ness and business are probably to blame. But there are always times for the things you feel compelled to do, right? And lately I think my internet exhibitionism has been getting fulfillment in Facebook and Twitter. (I use Twitter as a front end to Facebook status updates, and since my Facebook network is huge and my twitter network tiny, it’s on FB where I get most of the comments).

It’s a junk food kind of internet exhibitionist experience.  I know a lot of people think it’s great to force your thoughts into 140 characters, to have a constant stream of what’s going on right now.

But a lot of the things that are going on right now aren’t really going on right now. They’re slow moving things that need more context than you can get from the faster moving currents near the surface. Things that need more than 140 characters. (Hence my most recent tweet).

It’s all a pre-packaged kind of Internet presence, and there’s some value to that, but sometimes it’s also nice to get off the paved roads. I resisted blogging for a long time because that felt a little too readymade a format, and now in comparison, the blog feels like a huge blank canvas.

Anyway, I have been craving doing some longer writing, so I’m back, at least for now.

One of my favorite (and highly underappreciated) early 80’s post-punk bands. Someday I’ll rip the couple of Rip, Rig + Panic albums I’ve managed to find on vinyl (as far as I know, none of them are available on CD or mp3 yet!). A couple of videos have turned up on YouTube, though. Yes, that is a young Nenah Cherry (yes, that Nenah Cherry) fronting. Her dad, Don Cherry (yes, that Don Cherry) appears on several tracks on the first album.

And then, naturally, there’s the appearance on the Young Ones which was the first time that I encountered them:

Thursday nights are date night with me and dubs. We haven’t really been out alone with just the two of us since well before Christmas, probably well before the whole Advent season. So it was good to resume date night tonight. 

We met up at Johnny D’s and I got there early for a change, and so I got a Harpoon IPA and chatted with Willie. Willie used to be a barista at the Someday Café. Actually, he’s also a barrister (and that was mostly what we chatted about). I’ve probably blathered about Willie and the Someday enough in previous years. But Willie’s got a lot going on.

After dinner, after we walked home, I checked the sidewalk around the house. We’ve had 3 or 4 big snowstorms in the last 4 weeks (depending on if you count the one that lasted 3 days as one storm or two). And the usual lovely mix of snow that changes to rain that makes a nice couple of inches of slush that will refreeze if you don’t deal with it.

I’ve been more diligent about making sure the sidewalk is clear and not icy in the mornings lately for the kiddos walking to the school that’s down the street from us. Maybe I’ve gotten more responsible with age. Or maybe I feel the stern disapproval of the crossing guard (who leaves the engine in his Lincoln running from about 7am - 8:20am, and sits inside it to warm up when there are no kids comming). Or if I’ve been living next door to our snow-removal obsessed neighbor G— too long. Whatever the reason, I’m less inclined to just let nature take it’s course (”it’ll melt in a few hours anyway!”) and have been out there with shovel, salt, and sand before I shower in the morning. I plot strategies: I wait to shovel until the exact moment at which the snow changes to rain, so that I don’t waste my time shoveling before all the snow is down, but while it’s still light snow, and before it has a chance to re-freeze. I take a weird glee if I can get my sidewalk clearer than G—, or sooner than G—. It kills me a little when he gets the jump on me because I can’t start until I get home from work (he’s retired).

Anyway, after we walked home tonight, Terri went inside, and I stayed out to check the sidewalk. There were a couple of patches of black ice, so I put down some salt and walked across the street to refill our sand bucket from the nice big municipal drum that the City of Somerville puts out at intersections.

“It’ll be five dollahs for that sand!” a guy who’s stopped at the intersection in his jeep yells to me. And then he starts to giggle uncontrollably, as does his girlfriend in the passenger seat.

“Hey, I’m doing a public service here” I say.

“At least our city can still afford sand!” he says, as the light changes green. He gives me kind of a thumbs up, and the laughing couple drives away.

That’s the thing. People say that it’s the harsh climate here in the Northeast that makes everybody so grumpy and on edge. But my experience is the opposite. It’s only when the weather is bad that people are most civil. The first big snowfall of the year, you walk down the street, and everybody you walk past actually looks you in the eye. They even say “hi”. Or if they’re chatty, they’ll say “this is something, huh?”.

“Feeding the chickens again?” the crossing guard asked me this morning, as I was sowing salt on some ice.

And heaven knows, if it weren’t for chatter about snow removal, about comparing notes on what kind of rock salt works best or a new kind of silicon spray that you put on the auger of your snowblower to deal with the heavy snow, G— and I would probably have nothing to talk about.

I was doing a little work tonight and had a movie on TCM in the background called Brighton Rock. As I was watching the credits roll by at the end, it occurred to me where I knew the characters’ names from:

Oh, so much I’ve missed posting about.

November. Wabash lost the Monon Bell game. I went to the Boston Monon Bell party, and lo and behold, Bert Stern, one of my English professors, was there. He lives in Somerville now. Small world indeed. I also met Kevin McCrea, who is a force of nature and who deserves a post of his own (he’s in the construction business but his bigger claim to fame is his lawsuit(s) against the Boston City Council for corruption). His blog is absolutely worth a read. When people talk dismissively about citizen journalism, about bloggers being essentially parasites who merely link to fruits of the deep research that can only be done by folks who are paid (by advertising money) to do the glamourless job of poring through civic records and attending dull local town council meetings, well, counterexample is Mr. McCrea, whose simple, almost Socratic, modus operandi of actually reading stuff and calling people and expecting answers— the same unglamourous stuff that supposedly only the “real” media can do— has time and again scooped the “real” local media.

December. The Bazaar Bizarre. This year it was at the Castle. We made about half of the dough we’ve made in previous years, though we got about as many chuckles at this year’s lineup. As usual, Terri’s designs (this year, the “you look like a monkey” birthday cards) outsold mine (this year, the “Hail Santa!” Christmas Cards).

January 2009. TBD.

Happy New Year, scant readers.

We handed out treats to the neighborhood waifs on Friday night. Probably had 25 or so. In the lag times, we watched “Spririts of the Dead”, on TCM, which was 3 short films from 1967 based on 3 Poe stories, directed by Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini. Terri (kind of amazingly) liked the Vadim one. I liked the Fellini one, but the ending reminded me a little too gruesomely of a motorbike accident a junior high classmate was in.

On Saturday, we went to a party at some friends’ place in Arlington. They used to have this standing Halloween party, which went on a bit of a hiatus while they were preoccupied having kids and buying a house and the like. They started it up again this year, and suddely, all the same people who used to come to the party showed up again, except they all had offspring (except for a few holdouts like us). It was a little odd, but, the kids were pretty adorable, and Mme Dubs are pretty much kids ourselves.

So, here was the costume. I went as a Yuppie NASCAR driver:



I whipped up the “Arugula Growers of America” logo in about 15 minutes yesterday morning. Their trandemarked tagline is “what the elite meet to eat!” The back got destroyed before I got a photo of it, but had logos for the New Yorker (including the dude with the top hat), Whole Foods, and repeated the logos for NPR, The Arugula Growers of America, and Starbucks. The right sleeve had logos for Design Within Reach and my token offering for the tobacco lobby, Nat Sherman.

Mme Dubs had a baby shower today, and I spent my stag time doing work, listening to some of the mountains of vinyl that we got from Mme Dubs’s dad this summer, going to Taco Bell, doing some work (since I was so busy this week doing things that are Not Officially My Job at work that I didn’t get to do some things that are officially my job that I actually really needed and wanted to do), talking to my folks, and reading things I have written in various notebooks for the last two years.

Now Dubs is home and I’m trying to figure out where to hide while she watches the Penn State game at 8pm.

I spent a lot of the time on the phone with the parents today talking politics– and in the middle of the phone call they got robo-called by Hank Williams Jr. campaigning for McCain. Must be nice to be in a swing state– all we get are people begging us for money so that the Democrats can write big checks to the radio and television stations in the swing states.

Facebook still turns up people from my past who I never thought I’d hear from again, but who ended up doing amazing things with themselves. But there seem to be diminishing returns; I feel like for a while there, I was finding someone new every day, and now it’s about one or two every two weeks.

So maybe I’ll be blogging more.

Had a lovely dinner last night with various peeps, and I ran my Halloween costume idea past them and it seemed to go over well, so it is a go. Summervillain even lent me a fabulous orange jumpsuit that he had left over from two bands ago to make it happen. More on that next week…