Yes, it’s true, but not by us; but here are the lucky (and brave) pioneers.
For the record, we’ve been entirely satisfied with Quorn Roast as a vegetarian Turkey substitute.
The Internet Archive has a bunch of live Andrew Bird shows freely available. I’ve read that Mr. Bird does not mind taping & sharing of his shows, so feel no guilt.
Let’s just get my first and last “best of” list out of 2005 out of the way right now, before the avalanche starts next month, shall we?
The only award I’ll be giving out this year is for the Most Defaceable MBTA Ad Campaign of 2005. This handily goes to the Boston Globe’s “The Pulse of Boston” campaign. Most of the ads feature large thought balloons featuring one locally-oriented question. When someone is sitting under them, they look like they’re coming out of the T-rider’s head. I cede them points for cleverness on that front. But the fact that they’ve broken the fourth wall of advertising by directly using riders as props seems to empower people to write all over them, with what’s really on their minds. Well, the great big empty space right under the questions probably doesn’t hurt, either.
Here are my favorites.
Globe: Will the B.U. Terriers do well this year?
Graffiti: This is the Red Line. Why should we care?
Globe: President Romney? Governor Romney? Mr. Romney?
Graffiti: PRIVATE ROMNEY
Globe: Gillette, Hancock, Reebok… Who’s next to be sold?
Graffiti: Damon
The Dig, admittedly a biased critic in this instance, also has some more biting criticism of this campaign:
The campaign, which touts the Globe as “The Pulse of Boston”—not the finger on the pulse, mind you, but the town’s actual, throbbing pulse—puts a Rovian spin on the paper’s increasingly worrisome credibility problems.
…
On October 24, the Living/Arts page demonstrated its unique understanding of local youths with this fascinating exposé of urban subculture: “Ask college students for the time, and you’ll have to wait a few minutes as they rummage through their purses or backpacks to find their time-telling device: the cellphone.”Oh, snap! The Herald don’t tell you that kids don’t use watches no more! Who’s all up in your pulse now, Boston? What what?
And while we’re ragging on the globe, Bostonist points out that boston.com is actually losing readers. I am not one bit surprised about that. It’s an utterly clueless web site from pretty much every angle.
UPDATE: Universal Hub links to another great example:
Globe: Where’s Whitey?
Graffiti: The Suburbs.
There’s an almost Beckett-like purity to the tedium of Beavis and Butt-Head’s serenely empty lives; in one short, “Killing Time,” the boys wait out the two hours until something good comes on TV by staring at the gas meter outside Butt-Head’s house. “Time sucks,” Butt-Head finally observes. Beavis’ response: a chuckle, then silence.
The mind remains undetermined in the great void
Here the highest knowledge
Is unbounded. That which gives things
Their thusness cannot be delimited by things.
(from “Where is Tao?” in The Way of Chuang Tzu as interpreted by Thomas Merton).
What is Sovay anyway? I mean, besides the Andrew Bird song.
I have a lot of interviews and reviews to wade through before I find the answer, but preliminary research turns up the following:
“Sovay” is the name of the album’s first song, but don’t run off to look up the word in a dictionary; not knowing what the word means, says Bird, is what makes it so much fun. In an interview, Bird explained that the song was born during a time of writer’s block. Thinking that his muse had left him, Bird cracked open a volume of old English poetry and came across the mysterious word that serves as this song’s title. Bird had no idea what he meant, but, for whatever reason, the song seemed to flood him with inspiration, and the great songs began gushing out. It’s an easy-going, lilting little pop song about fighting back against the forces that seek to contain and confine creativity. It’s a song about the tricky nature of inspiration. It’s a song about something happening that’s never happened before… “and a word washed ashore…”
Of course, a straight Google search is instructive, turning up this:
Sovay, Sovay all on a day
She dressed herself in man’s array
With a sword and pistol all by her side
To meet her true love, to meet her true love, away did rideAs she was riding over the plain
She met her true love and bid him stand
“Your gold and silver, kind Sir,” she said
“Or else this moment, or else this moment, your life I’ll have”
Which has some interesting thematic resonance with Mr. Bird’s version; it’s a stretch, but perhaps that’s why I find it interesting:
sovay, sovay,sovay
all along the dayI was getting ready to consider my next plan of attack
I think I’m gonna sack
the whole board of trustees
all those Don Quixotes and their B-17s
and I swear this time
yeah this time
they’ll blow us back to the 70’s
and this time
they’re playin Ride of the Valkyries
with no semblance of grace or ease
and they’re acting on vagaries
with their violent proclivities
and they’re playing ride
Ride of the Valkyries
sovay,sovay,sovay
all along the day
My God, is Andrew Bird good. I was as excited to see him last night at the Middle East as I’ve been about seeing anything in ages. I was about as happy as a boll weevil in a cotton field. Despite the high expectations I was still blown away. I won’t belabor the point as I’ve already written about why I love him, and I have a feeling I’d veer off into hyperbole pretty quickly. And I feel like I’ve done my piece by making a small handful of converts by proselytizing in these pages (though I swear I’m not a BzzzAgent!).
Terri got some fantastic photos by pushing her way to the front of the stage armed with her trusty D70.
I agree with Terri that If you have any interest whatsoever, go see him live. He goes completely crazy, and the studio versions of his songs, while nice, just don’t do them justice. If you can’t make a live show, there are several live records as well as a full video of a concert available from this venue in Amsterdam.
The Downstairs was packed, the crowd was really into the music and was about as diverse as a crowd of white people at the Middle East gets.
By the way, I did some resesarch, and indeed, the reason that the live version of “i” is so much different from the album version on Weather Systems is indeed that Sony, the copyright holders of the “we all live in a capital ‘i’” Sesame Street song, were going to charge him usuriously to use just that one phrase. Also, while I’m doing some linkery, Ed emailed me a nice bit about Mr. Bird from the Boston Globe.
Margaret, I hope to have a full concert report from Pittsburgh in a couple of days.
Small Update: I forgot to point out as proof of how excited I was for this show that Editrix and I jumped the gun and walked to the Middle East at lunch to buy tickets the day that they went on sale. In fact, we mistakenly walked to the Middle East at lunch a week before tickets were on sale. And I also was remiss in pointing out how nice it was that John could make it down from Portland, that it was lovely to grab some grub at Cambridge 1 with him and Mr. Villain and Editrix.
Bostonist notes a Globe article with news that a land swap may break the gridlock.
What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer by John Markoff
I was going to wait for softcover on this one, but when I saw it used on Amazon for $5, I went for it.
I’ve actually thought the world was long overdue for a book devoted to this topic. Any history of Silicon Valley or Xerox PARC ends up touching on it. But I think there’s something worth exploring about how the culture of the Bay Area in the 60’s and 70’s led to a lot of ideas in computing that totally changed the world in a way that East Coast computing, which had somewhat of a head start in the 40’s - 60’s, did not.
This book has lots of good anecdotes, and I learned a thing or two (did you know that Stewart Brand ran one of the video cameras at Douglas Englebart’s famous Demo?). But I still might be waiting for the definitive book on the topic. Despite the book’s ambitious subtitle, the introduction immediately sets expectations downwards by saying that it’s not actually going to actually try to explain exactly how the counterculture shaped the personal computer or offer a comprehensive history, but to merely relate some anecdotes.
Fair enough, but if it’s going to be anecdotal, it would have been much better organized as, say, anecdotes. Instead, its adherence to chronological order (with arbitrary chapter breaks) is so stringent that it’s extremely difficult to follow any individual story lines. New people will be introduced, who have no connection to the previous paragraphs, who have no connection to the following paragraphs, but they did something that happened at the same time, so they are just stuck in there.
Again, Terri has the main concert review and I am left with a couple of pot shots.
First, the best moment of the awful first band was when Terri turned to me and jokingly said of the lead singer, “I bet his mom’s here.” Shortly after, I think we indeed spotted her. The two guitarists had these huge integrated multi-pedal units. So I pointed out that his mom probably bought their fancy effects pedals, too. They definitely didn’t seem to have much memory of music earlier than Jet or the White Stripes.
And, yes, I have nothing snarky to say about Hail Social. Besides that I think they should have come up with a better name. They are just totally what you wouldn’t think would be my thing– I mean, they play electric guitars, for starters. But it’s solid, peppy, rockin’; they’re pretty tight, and consistently good without sounding canned. I agree that they’re totally underrated. If there were a fantasy stock market for rock bands, I would be buying lots of shares of Hail Social.
After all I’ve blathered about Ikea, I suppose I should go on as I’ve started. We did not make a pilgrimage to the opening yesterday (20,000 people expected; 1,200 parking spaces), and very well may not make it for the next couple of weeks. But here’s the roundup from the local newspapers.
Terri has a good summary of last evening’s rock show. As she points out, when I saw Gravenhurst’s gear, I did worry that I was in for 45 minutes of white indie-rock boys kneeling in front of their effects pedals. But they were pretty good. She thought the singer/guitarist looked like a young Andy Partridge; I didn’t see it, but I did think the bass player looked uncannily like Ray Davies. The only funny thing about them was that they seemed to need every single song to be both soft, and then LOUD; very slow and then FAST; all in one song.
Broadcast were good; I find their albums to be a bit overwrought, but they were a little more rockin’ live.
I hadn’t been to the Paradise in ages, and it wasn’t as bad a venue as I remembered. Only bad beer, though. We were standing right up by the stage (for the better pictures, of course). From there, we could see the sign taped to the pillar in front of the stage that said “Boston, Mass. ‘Paradise Rock Club’” to remind the band where they were.
Good night, Springtown!
Our pal Matt Shaw, man about town, hipster, quantum physicist, and all around renaissance man, was in town this weekend. While we were catching up last night, Colin pointed out that a talk Matt Shaw gave earlier this year had been mentioned on BoingBoing. If you actually want to hear his talk on quantum computing, you can follow the link and get an mp3. Fantastic Physics fun!
I’m finally trying to skim through the stack of 3 weeks worth of Wall Street Journals that have piled up by the door (there’s a reason that I don’t subscribe to daily newspapers unless they’re free), and there have only been a couple of articles that have caught my eye.
First, the Google founders are buying not just any jet, but a Boeing 767. That doesn’t bother me so much; I think it would be fun to have a 767. What kind of torques me off is this:
Larry Page, quoted in the article, said “part of the equation of this sort of machinery is to be able to take large numbers of people to places such as Africa. I think that can only be good for the world.”
Oh, come on, Larry. Just drive everybody to Africa in your damn Prius if you care about what’s good for the world. If you want to buy yourself a jumbo jet, just buy yourself a jumbo jet and say you’re buying yourself a jumbo jet. If you really want to ship people and gear to Africa, why are you renovating it to have two luxury staterooms and only hold 50 people?
Second, I actually found an article, yes, in the WSJ, stating that global warming is a fact. Not an unproven matter still disputed by scientists, but an observable demonstrable fact. In the science section? No. News? Nope. Editorial? <snort!>
No, it was in the travel section. “Climate Change Island Guide: As weather and geological disasters add new risks, we rank 40 destinations”. It even has an info graphic called the “Dow Jones Island Index” which goes through about 30 destinations and gives each a risk score and the change in degrees of in its average ocean temperature between 1974 and 2004.
While taking notice of environmental phenomena only as it impacts your vacation plans seems like an unbelievable cartoon of self-interest, I’m ultimately not going to knock it. Whatever makes people take notice and do the right thing. I think that business types are still basically rational humanists. I still just don’t understand their support for faith-based nut jobs.
Snobbery is as woven into the human fabric as the sexual and aggressive impulses it seeks to refine. It’s no accident, then, that Rock Snobbery emerged just as young people started dressing in blue jeans and pretending that social class didn’t matter. Adolescents simply found novel ways—ways more acceptable to their newly egalitarian pretenses—to marginally differentiate themselves from one another.
Ouch! But I basically agree.
The article also brilliantly rebuts another argument I’ve heard:
It’s even been argued recently that the advent of the iPod spells the death of the Rock Snob. True enough, thanks to the digital revolution, nonsnobs can now filch 20 years of compulsive squirreling with a single drag-and-drop.
… I think such fears are overblown, myself. I’d love to say it’s because genuine pleasure—that enemy of both snobs and satire alike—will always take precedence over the need to condescend. But the reality, alas, is otherwise. At some point, drag-and-drop deposits will overwhelm even the most cavernous hard drive; a person will have to choose, and then their true colors will out: The Killers? Lenny Kravitz? Dave Matthews??? Because let’s face it, only one thing is more incorrigible than my snobbery, people, and that’s your indefensibly crappy taste in music.
Yes. Beyond just filling up your hard drive, there’s the simple fact that life is still finite, and music still takes time. With my new laptop, I’ve started ripping my music collection from scratch. So far, I’m about 2% done, and I already have 2.2 days worth of music. And also, while difficulty of acquisition of rarities may be part of it, I think knowing more than the rabble was always more the point. And while the digital revolution might give the rabble more access to knowledge, its given the same to the Rock Snob, who still has the advantage of wanting to know more.
