I really enjoy liking things. Nothing makes me happier than seeing good work except for seeing people get excited when their good work is appreciated. Sometimes I do this by paying for it, but the best thing about the information age is that you can feel like a mini patron of the arts just by talking about things you like and hoping that somebody else spends money on it for/in addition to you.
Things I Like
Ramona Emerson writing for HuffPo – What I said about liking good work is doubly true for writers. Even moreso for writers who are not yet famous. It means that while I may not have their natural talent, dedication to craft, or many of the other prerequisite traits necessary to thrive in that competitive marketplace, I do have taste. It’s the equivalent of what Aziz Ansari’s character in Parks & Rec does when he says, “Game recognizes game.” I should really start saying that more often. And you should read some of Ramona’s work.
Braids – Beautiful. Short listed for the Polaris Music Prize.
Ian Rogers’A Step-By-Step Guide to Building an Online Marketing Plan That Works – A great presenation on building relationships with fans and giving them a reason to buy from you. The specific tips are really good, but the general philosophy behind it is even more important to internalize. I’m rarely excited by marketing related presentations, but Topspin is consistently showing me the future of online marketing I’d like to see. I don’t mind living within their system at all.
I saw this tweet the other day and saved it for later, after retweeting it. It’s an idea I really like on the surface due to the fact that, as a twenty five year old, – I’m working that into every blog post I write this year – I like feeling like a responsible patron of the arts without having to work too hard. Yeah, I pay five whole bucks a month to Rdio, and I get to feel like that money is going to the bands I listen to. That makes me feel like a stand up guy. But I also know that the amount of money each band is getting from me isn’t a whole lot. They rely on a bunch of listens. So instead of making me feel good about listening to a band, displaying the exact numbers is probably going to frustrate or discourage me as I see how little impact my individual plays have in moving the bar forward. (For some reason I see a progress bar that can never be filled all the way when I picture this. Sometimes it shows royalties paid out from me next to the average listener.) I still love Rdio and think it’s probably a great deal for artists at any stage in their career. I just think this feature would end up being counter-productive because of how people perceive numbers and what it takes to feel like you’re making a difference.
Interestingly, I didn’t run into any sort of mental block when I was using Flattr. I didn’t have a steady stream of income when I signed up for it, so my handful of Euros a month felt relatively generous. I also was opting in to a system that was totally voluntary and where there is no social pressure to buy the work. Direct payments for blog posts you can read for free isn’t really a thing. The authors post them knowing that they will be consumed for free. And readers expect ads to take care of the bloggers. Just like music subscriptions though, that requires huge numbers to be effective. If I only Flattred one or two different authors in a month they could receive a couple of Euros each, which isn’t a ton, but it’s more than a few clicks on some ads generate. Flattr also had the positive effect of being an encouragement to small talent. I meant each click of that button to be a heartfelt pat on the back and a congratulation of work well done. And I could decide at any given month to Flattr a bunch of items and have many more, smaller, amounts go towards giving someone 15 cents worth of, “Thumbs up!” I ultimately left Flattr not because I didn’t want to pay for posts, but because it wasn’t adopted widely enough for me to pay most of the people I really wanted to pay.
I’m still a young employee, trying to figure out the working world as I’ve found it from my own experiences and observing what my friends’ jobs are like. I work things out by writing and getting feedback, much in the same way that I propose ideas to my wonderful co-workers so that they will expose my assumptions and make me step up to defend my positions. I’ll probably write a few more pieces on work related subjects. These posts shouldn’t be read with my current employer in mind, as they are heavily influenced by the outside world.
Like many young employees, I have an interesting relationship with expereience. On the one hand, I want to believe that I have a fresh perspective on things. The notion that youth is valuable because it has not been become used to standard practices is understandably alluring. On the other hand, I am constantly confronted with the benefits of experience as my coworkers avoid distractions or deftly solve problems that take me much longer to understand. But there has been an idea bouncing around in my head for the last few days that just won’t go away – Experience in years is not an indicator of correctness.
People seem to have a basic understanding that data is important. And data often takes the form of numbers. Therefore, they think using numbers will make them look better prepared, more respectable, and more right. But, while saying, “I’ve been doing this for x years!” doesn’t say nothing, it doesn’t really say anything either. The speaker is really trying to depend on a pretty heavy implication; that is, “I’ve been doing this right for x years.” If you aren’t familiar with the person or their work, this is a huge leap of faith for you to make, as you are operating without any data. What you can be pretty sure of is that they have managed to at least stumble through a career path without getting fired a ton of times to the point where they are deemed too big a risk to hire.
What would help everyone much more is if the employee/applicant said, “I did X, Y way, with Z results!” Now you have a real platform for discussion, and perhaps more importantly, for trust. You may still be uncertain if “Y way” is the correct way for the current task at hand depending on whether or not you think the projects are analogous, but you know some important things. You know how that employee attacked a different task in the past and you have a certain understanding of the level of success achieved.
So, one problem with invoking experience in years is that it doesn’t tell you anything about the task at hand. The other problem with that exclamation is that it tells you that they don’t want to learn. Because even if they aren’t wrong, and their idea is totally valid, this individual is discounting the idea that they could be more right. They believe themselves to be operating at 100% right levels. Maximum right. And I’m sorry, but that is never the case. The individuals who are going to be closest to that 100% right level are the ones who keep acknowledging that there may be a better way, and actually go looking for it.
In my last post about the craft of Twitter humor and storytelling I asked about the importance of the 140 limit. You know, because creativity loves restrictions. Well my old pal, and Xanga superstar, @Drakonskyr is making that text field look pretty roomy. For the last three days Daniel has been making the briefest of updates, only using one word each time and often limiting himself to a single syllable. This includes @ replies.
Intrigued.
A tweet’s relationship to time is an interesting thing. As I mentioned in my last post. @fireland‘s tweet “— end of side one — ” gains something in meaning for every second it is not followed by a new update. There is also a quality dependent on the notion that you are reading content as it is produced. Obviously, this is not a necessary part of the experience. A solid one liner is still a solid one liner. (As a matter of fact, I just starred a number of tweets produced months ago. Wuddup @JasonPermenter) Daniel’s stream, however, is completely dependent on time. At least relative to his other tweets. This is unlike any account I’ve come across before. There aren’t any jokes. There is no perspective being pushed though his observations. The updates simply are. I’ll give you an example. On June 1st his tweets read: “transportation”, “affinity”, “inspectors?”, “fail”, and “failsafe”. He ended last night with, “SUCCESS” and began this morning with, “gloating”. (British punctuation FTW.)
I couldn’t even get a monolexic comment about the origins of this shift or an estimate about how long it will run but I hope that when it reaches its conclusion there will be absolutely no attention given to it.
In other Twitter news, @Mike_FTW will be ruling Brooklyn Museum’s @1stfans account with an iron fist for the entirety of June. The number of readers who care will be exactly zero though, as the account requires you to be a BM 1stfans member. At $20 a year, it’s actually a pretty good deal for people who would take advantage of the “IRL” social networking that goes on but charging for access to Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter accounts just seems ludicrous. Maybe you think that challenging the notions of monetary value for things is still an interesting question to raise in the art world. I don’t. I only mention it because I’ve always wondered what their guest artists do with the feed and Mike was kind enough to post a screen cap of his early updates.
Frankly, I would love to see the rise of throw away or one off accounts that were dedicated to a single narrative. I think the people behind the retelling of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off over the course of a single afternoon via Twitter and Foursquare provided a good proof of concept there. It certainly helps that the story was already well known and loved but I don’t think it would take much to make an original story go viral.
Someone posted Sumerian Axe’s record By This Axe I Rule for download.
I know I keep posting about Grill ‘Em All but the dudes got interviewed by Tony from Municipal Waste and it’s way better than any of the other interviews they’ve done.
As you may know, Carmichael Gallery is my favorite gallery in L.A. and they’re moving. For their last show in the La Brea space they’re showing the works of Mark Jenkins and Aakash Nihalani
Grant Purdum is one of my (very) understanding editors at TMT and does work for a host of other music publications which allows him to do some pretty cool stuff. For instance, he gets to participate in the Village Voice’s Pazz and Jop poll.
I’m not sure if any of my references to the complaint that Twitter ends up being a food blogging service have made it through my drafts section (That’s right, there is some quality control on here and there are roughly three posts sitting in my drafts folder for every one that sees the light of day. Think of what you could be reading and shudder.) but today instead of talking about being overweight I succumbed to the urge to keep everyone informed of what was going down my gullet (Or, more accurately what was going to go down my gullet) when I invited people to join me in tearing into some flesh at my friends’ marriage of metal and meat, the Grill ‘Em All burger truck. I’ve already posted about the truck here and while I wouldn’t miss an opportunity to plug them and say that my Waste Em All burger and H-100′s were delicious this isn’t a food review.
Hanging around after the lunch rush was dying down I caught a glimpse of how powerful Twitter can be and was really struck for maybe the second time at the relevance of the emerging real time web everyone’s been talking about. (The first being meeting people because we tweeted about being in the same place.) I don’t know how big food trucks are in other cities but right now in L.A. they’ve become quite en vogue and their owner’s have been pretty good at leveraging technology in some ways to reverse the food truck/customer relationship. Instead of trying to predict where hungry people will be and finding them, food trucks are making it easy for their customers to seek them out and there is a community of food truck hunters that have emerged. It would be silly to totally do away with concern for location and I’m sure all of these vendors are using a sort of hybrid strategy, maybe the best example being a food truck food court in Santa Monica — Or Grill Em All setting up shop outside of The Cha Cha in Silverlake (For the simple and awesome reason that that’s where they go hang out at night anyway.) This in and of itself isn’t any real news, businesses have been using the internet to bridge the gap between themselves and their customers for a long time now. But the speed of feedback, and the rate at which it’s received and responded too is something new.
While I was standing there the head chef, Ryan, had is phone out and was reading all the mentions for @Grillemalltruck. The nature of this kind of business and Twitter users’ enthusiasm for food makes this pretty stunning. People who were literally feet away were taking a bite or two of their burgers and taking out their phone’s to chime in, mentioning everything from the burgers to the music to the bullhorn Matt kids around on. The ramifications of this type of response may not be as big as we’d like to believe; lightning fast data always sounds nice but more often than not outstrips the pace of other aspects in an operation. For example, the speed at which data like the most popular burgers comes in isn’t really relevant because that data isn’t relevant until it comes time to order more supplies; but, since the boys could have their phones hanging up in the truck, anything about quality or preference can be immediately addressed. Plus, I’m sure it’s nice to read that people are liking your food while you’re making it too.
It seems like this usefulness should be obvious (and old hat) but I’m not sure that it is. I’ve been to a few events now that followed and/or displayed their own hashtag feed but I’ve yet to see them used effectively. Let’s take the simplest type of event which would just be a speaker. The display is always behind them and if it weren’t you wouldn’t want them reading it during their presentation anyways. Useful activity generally dies during the presentation because, on the whole, people are paying attention. In my experiences, what you end up getting are a bunch of people on their phones announcing “I’m at ‘cool web thingy’ with __,” or, “I’m leaving for ‘cool web thingy’ now,” followed by little recaps or appreciative tweets afterward. Perhaps this is different at conferences when there are multiple presentations occurring simultaneously or during staggered time slots and could be used effectively in different rooms to give a picture of what’s going on where. I couldn’t say because I really have no business attending such things.
Seeing Twitter and thinking about all the big things you can do with it in the abstract is exciting but I’m really happier every time I see someone using it for something on the small scale. I think we’ll find the biggest and most significant changes it makes by adding up all the little things people do with it. I think we can look at these food trucks and see just how great Twitter is by how natural and unforced the shift feels.
I don't think Marduk had anything to do with music but he's the type of dude Doc would know.
To the woman with the iPhone at the Mew concert at the Mezzanine in San Francisco on Sunday, December 13th:
I try to be fair so I will start by admitting that part of this is my fault. I made the mistake of poking fun at Doc when he tried to improve his vantage point by telling him that I come to concerts to listen with my ears. Either you heard me say this and took me at my word (perhaps you are Canadian?) or Doc is really good friends with some deity and they conspired to teach me a lesson. Perhaps it was a combination of the two and your natural impulses were simply encouraged by the “Solar Calf.” Divine impetus notwithstanding, you have managed to take what should be an awesome and powerful spectacle and turned it into nothing more than an incredibly expensive viewing of a Youtube video.
I hope your friends say “Oh, I understand exactly what they show must have been like.” Tack on “for those immediately behind you” and they’d be right. Actually, that’s not completely true. There were plenty of occasions where my view consisted solely of your arms because you turned sideways to take pictures of the projector screens. During the time you spent waffling on the decision to photograph the left or the right screen you could have actually been enjoying the show.
I don’t want this to become personal. I hate you in the aggregate. I hate all cell phone/point and shoot camera people at shows. (At least SLR people tend to care enough to get in the front row. And I find that the possibility of their pictures turning out ok makes their behavior seem less boorish.) You are all the woman with the iPhone to me. But you specifically, woman with the iPhone, outdid yourself last night, as did your friend. At first I thought you were alone. Who else would have nothing better to do than take pictures of screens and specks of musicians? Not once in the first forty minutes of the set did you seem to motion to another human being or share a moment, so engrossed you were in your archiving and memory banking. It became clear though that you did had a companion once she started “shhhing” the couple behind her for talking. I was standing next to them and could barely hear them. You know, over all the music and everything.
I have been lamenting the trend in live reviews involving the skewering and blaming of crowds* and I still think it should be next to impossible for a crowd to ruin a show just based on simple unresponsiveness and especially on scene/demographic (aka hipster presence) but in this case one individual, you, made my experience less pleasant than it otherwise would have been.
*Exhibit A
*Exhibit B
I just don’t understand. You were obviously a fan. You knew the words. You repeatedly said how awesome they were. Why wouldn’t you want to see and experience it for yourself instead of fumbling with your phone. Help me understand, ladies with the iPhones. What could you possibly get from this?
“San Francisco has made me great at peeing,” my Room mate to me this morning.
Last night the realizations that I had failed to interact with another human outside of the magic box in front of me in the last three days, that I had live review deadlines rapidly approaching, and that my clocks were an hour fast, making me the recipient of a bonus hour to my evening, all spurred me into pants and out my door towards the Rickshaw Stop.
I met some cool people and my night got progressively better with the quality of music. I was, however, under the distinct impression that one of my new acquaintance’s happiness declined in direct proportion to my own enjoyment. I’m not so vain as to think that this was my doing but I’m not so as insensitive to completely dismiss the possibility that I am the Dorian Gray of concert going. This post isn’t about the show though. It’s about the aftermath of the show. As it was winding down, I began checking the time and asked if anyone knew what time the last train out of Civic Center was. I thought it was like 12:20 (turns out it was 12:21) but I wanted to catch the end of the set and, as I wasn’t sure that the train stopped at 12:20, I allowed myself to be convinced very easily that 12:20 was too early for a city’s train to stop running. I figured it wouldn’t really be a big deal if I missed my train anyway and that I should probably see what happened if I did at least once so I could gauge whether it would be worth it on future occasions.
What happens when you miss your train is this, you go back upstairs and talk to the teller. He stamps your BART ticket and you ask him about an all night bus your room mate told you about. He says that he doesn’t have that schedule, he’s not sure if there’s a transfer from Oakland to get to North Berkeley, and that it’ll take so long you might as well just take the train at four. All of that seems reasonable and you decide to look for an all night diner.
On my way to Happy Donuts I was still in pretty good spirits. I had an excuse to eat donuts and was actually LOLing at those Window ads about not being denied. I stayed at Happy Donuts until three, when I was going to be kicked out for dozing off, and my time there was pretty uneventful. I heard two Russians talk about how hard it is to get wi-fi in the mother country, one man complain about a lack of bear claws, and a traveling salesman talk about jewelry with cashier. (He had a Rolex but he was afraid to wear it because he’d mess it up. They also talked about how you know it’s a good place when they have all the bulletproof doors and chambers because the stuff is definitely real.)
As in pretty much all aspects of life, things got far more interesting when I got off the internet and went outside. I’d made it about a block before a well to do looking guy in a Mercedes tried to pick me up on Market St. I briefly weighed my options but ultimately declined. I was already aware that I resemble a “man of the night” but what I didn’t fully understand about San Francisco is how absolutely impossible it is to relieve yourself in a legal fashion. Nobody here wants anyone using their bathroom, not even paying customers like me who may or may not be male prostitutes. In “The Childcatcher” (Lycanthropy, 2003) Patrick Wolf declares that we are living in the “age of constipation.” Now, either he was wrong, the age has passed, or he was trying to make one of those things that people use in poems; because what I saw was closer to the “age of defecation.” Everyone was letting fly with with their bodily functions left and right. I myself had to embark on two different stealth pee missions. The first of which was far stealthier than the second, emboldened as I was by my new peers’ disregard for privacy and by my own fatigue. Seriously, the first time, as I channeled my inner Batman in the shadows next to a mural, a man cut through the parking lot banging two drumsticks together. He dropped one and it began to roll in my direction. Ninja that I am, I went unnoticed and set out behind him on my way back down the street. I progressed maybe a block before running into a woman taking a shit on the front of a cafe. Across the St. there was a man proudly standing on the raised stone platform in front of a fountain, urinating into it in a way not unlike how Hank Venture did in the ghost pirate ship episode. There was more but it was pretty much more of the same. Thankfully, the fountain marked my arrival at the all night Carl’s Jr. I was migrating to and I didn’t have to watch too many more people turn the world into their bathroom.
The Indian woman behind the counter was very stern and made it clear that you had to order something before you were allowed to sit. I took my time thinking it over and settled on a cup of coffee but can easily see how someone who had to go through this routine regularly might become overweight. While in line I heard one man plead, “I got a house, talk to me.” I saw a man choke another man for no reason I could figure out; although, when he released him, there didn’t seem to be much in the way of hard feelings. I saw a couple share a Carl’s Jr. breakfast over a bottle of white whine and I saw a woman knock over that bottle of wine. No one cried over it. A man played Spanish radio off of his phone and no one seemed to pay any notice. One man hunched over and finished off the very end of a joint he’d obviously been saving. Two men discussed whether I was homeless or a hipster. The point of contention seemed to be the cheap headphones around my neck. When they discovered that the headphones were attached to an iPod, the consensus quickly became “hipster.” God, I need some new pants and a shower.
The only other things I can tell you about my night is that when you’re spending a few hours waiting for a train, Johnny Cash’s songs start to become even more interesting and sometimes when you’re trying your best to stay awake you turn off Bitte Orca and put on Love Gun. It’s been a long time since I walked around a city that tired, watching the street lights melt, but the soundtrack doesn’t really change all that much. You’re destined to play the songs you used to play, and for me that turned out to be The Honorary Title’s debut. It might have something to do with the fact that Bryan Sheffield was talking about their farewell show on Twitter this week.
It is my birthday, and so far it has been awesome. Technically my birthday has consisted of: twenty minutes standing on a train platform, forty minutes riding that train, one hour watching t.v., six hours sleeping, fourteen minutes and twenty seconds talking to my mother, one minute and forty seconds talking to my father (we got disconnected,) another hour falling in and out of sleep, and around five minutes with Doc concocting the most disturbing body we can for him out of animal parts. And it has been awesome.
I personally think giving gifts is really fun but that’s because I rarely take into account what the other person needs or wants. That is not to say I don’t try to give them something they will like. A gift is supposed to cement social ties and say “I know who you are, I was thinking about you, and I like you.” That said, I have never tried to get a gift for my own child, especially one that lives in a grown up-ish body. I would imagine that would be hard because everything they have is already a gift. You are a river unto your people. It’s hard to play on an inside joke because since you live in another city you probably miss the funniest stuff that happens. I mean, I tried to convey the humorousness of the time I got handcuffed in Dallas by the DART police to my parents but instead of laughing they just told me I was an idiot. I also just don’t want as much stuff as I used to. In fact, I only want things in the way Miss America contestants do; i.e. things ludicrously out of reach.
That’s why the twenty bucks they surprised me with in the mail was so great. As someone who has no money of their own, but still manages to have quite a bit of stuff, this may sound weird but it has been a long time since I had that kid feeling of “this is mine, all mine, and I’m going to blow it!” Like an eight year old Wil Wheaton with five bucks in his pocket, I thought of a myriad of ways to spend it. I could wait until Friday and share my wealth with people at The Broken Record in the form of fifty cent Pabsts. Do you know how many beers that is? Forty! (Minus tip) I, like Wil Wheaton before me, thought of saving my money and putting it towards something later but that is a slap in the face to the spirit of the gift. After calculating how many lemon drops I could buy, I ultimately decided to spend the entirety of my fortune on w00tstock and watch Wil Wheaton talk about how awesome having five bucks could be.
There was a brief moment where I wondered if I was geeky enough to go to this. Generally we like to think that geeks are a friendly and accepting bunch; but, as more and more people come into the geek fold, there are those who suffered for their preferred recreations who are wary of people who didn’t pay their dues. And I’m a kind of cheap guy. I watched my friend Patrick get kicked out of D&D club because he wasn’t a serious enough geek and, for my part, was never even allowed to play a game. To this day people laugh when I say not playing D&D is a regret of mine but I’m 100% serious. It was my own fault though. I can still remember the day when I told my friend Michael that we probably shouldn’t talk about Star Wars so publicly anymore. I remember guiltily looking on as Leif was mocked for trying to explain the difference between an AT-AT and an AT-ST to someone who mislabeled them. (I actually remember being a little confused as to why I should have to jump in since I thought everyone already knew the difference.) In high school I quickly learned that correcting people, in general, was just a bad idea. Sure, I still memorized most of the items in Diablo II and could call them without the use of an ID scroll but I was coordinated enough to skateboard and experienced a pretty decent and stigma free adolescence. Plus, as long as we’re being honest, video games are geek amateur hour. They’re almost the new football at this point. In high school my friend “D” made graphs plotting what he was going to do per level with his Diablo characters; he also carried a switch blade, was actually on the football team, and had his hands in a number of illicit ventures.
My fears were completely unfounded and the fact that there were so many moments of mixed laughter coming from different parts of the hall only served to remind me that there is no one type of geek. There were word geeks, programming geeks, gaming geeks, young geeks, old geeks… I could go on and on.
I started this post with the intention of talking about how much fun I had at w00tstock. I wanted to talk about the feeling of belonging and how funny everyone was, including the audience, but instead I wound up talking about geek guilt and thinking about labels. I wasn’t sure I could live up to the title of a Geek last night and today I don’t think it matters. I feel like today there are more things than ever to be interested in but instead of viewing ourselves as a huge ven diagram (the kind that Wil Wheaton and Paul of Paul and Storm made when designing W00tstock) we are defining ourselves and each other more narrowly than ever. “I’m a geek,” we say, or, “She’s the vegan one.” Maybe Chuck Klosterman is right and it’s all The Real World’s fault for casting stereotypes and editing people into one dimensional characters. I don’t know. What I do know is that there are vegans out there who love shooting guns and there are English scholars who still watch T.V. So yes, we should celebrate the fact that everyone at The Swedish American Hall last night wanted a secret passageway activated by book and we should hold on to that feeling of saying “ARRR!” with a roomfull of other people; I just don’t want to forget that all those people were different.
Today is my birthday and for the first time in twenty three years I feel different than I did the night before. (Unless you count nausea.) Thank you Wil Wheaton, Adam Savage, Paul and Storm, Molly Lewis, Kid Beyond and every single person in attendance last night for making me feel like I was a tiny part of something and bigger than it at the same time.
Moments from w00tstock
I got my w00tstock poster signed! Adam Savage laughed at my friend Josh Wood in print!
Kid Beyond was the only one with a pro body-graph stance and no one had given him the chance yet. I was happy to oblige.
The happiest and saddest song
Paul and Storm from the night before
Molly Lewis
The previous Kid Beyond link was for his official site but I recommend checking out his blog My Idea of Fun which focuses on the supervocalic (and has cool videos pulled from the youtubes)
