Interaction Designer becomes military historian
Oct/070
How strange: Alan Cooper, noted interaction designer and author of About Face has become a military historian, at least according to Amazon:
The Sound of Our Town (Book Review)
Sep/070
Brett Milano, The Sound of Our Town: A History of Boston Rock & Roll (2007). $24.95. [Amazon
Brett Milano, frequent contributor to the Boston Phoenix, the Boston Herald, and other publications, has written a great little history of Boston rock and roll. If you have friends who saw a lot of local music in the 60s, 70s, 80s, or 90s, this would be a wonderful holiday gift: Tell them to start with the chapters on their decades. The opening chapters are more straight history, and the latter are a bit more of a “scene” history with insider anecdotes and reports of famously-gossipped-about events. You’ll learn something here about the key perfomers from the 50s to the present: Freddy Cannon, the Remains, the Lost, the “Bosstown Sound,” Aerosmith, J. Geils, Boston, the Modern Lovers, the Mezz, the Real Kids, DMZ, the Lyres, Mission of Burma,the Throwing Muses, the Pixies, Dinosaur, Jr., Morphine, Buffalo Tom . . . they’re all here. Much to Milano’s credit, he doesn’t fall prey to the mistake of Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me or Clinton Heylin’s From the Velvets to the Voivoids which provide the scensters way too much leeway to alter history with varnished versions of what really happened. Milano also knows many of the people he reports on as friends, and he does a good job of telling a true story that is also not inflammatory or embarassing to its subjects.
One thing Milano tunes into that was plausible to me but not something I’d cough up if you asked me to characterize the Boston sound is that Boston bands have written a lot of sad songs. Occasionally Milano mentions New England weather and overcast skies. He’s right. There is a real tradition of get-out-the-razorblades songs (many disguised with upbeat melodies).
There are some oddities: Salem 66 and November Group get their major mentions in the chapter on 1977-1980 (I guess because as gurls they get bundled in with Robin Lane and the Bristols, who are discussed in that era); the Neats are sadly neglected (a few brief mentions; they were terribly misunderstood and under-appreciated: I wish Milano had set the record straight here); ditto for Scruffy the Cat; Nat Freedberg doesn’t really get as much attention as he deserves; and Milano uses the Turbines “Wah Hey” as a way to introduce a chapter, but you don’t really get the details on why they were so compelling. But these are quibbles; having griped a bit here, there are bits that Milano gets so right. For example:
Most Lyres fans can recall the night they’ve dragged some music-snob friend, or maybe just a timid girlfriend to one of their less coherent shows and gotten only a puzzled look: you really think this could be one of Boston’s greatest bands? Damn right they are. You just have to see them on a good night, when those elemental chords are pounded out like the future of civizilization depends on it. (p. 110)
This is true. I was a lucky one who dragged someone to the Rat to see Lyres and they were spectucularly on and crazy, igniting a quasi-mosh pit frenzy. But talk about hit or miss . . . So everywhere in the book past 1980 or so Milano brings a valuable “you are there” perspective to what he narrates.
In fact, the book could (should?) have been twice as long, and I sincerely hope there will be a second edition (there has to be, right? Boston rock doesn’t stop!). There are a lot of opportunities to “drill down” on individual bands. Take Dumptruck, for example: Milano calls it Seth Tiven’s band (p. 190), but the shared leadership of Kirk Swan was crucial in their early years — and I can recall stories of their origins in two New Haven kids trading licks in their bedrooms: How else could you get that kind of guitar interplay? I am sure there was a page limit Milano was fighting against. Just for example, Milano touches on Big Dipper, but never mentions the connection to the Embarrassment; that’s a flaw, because there are going to be readers who are catching up on the Boston scene who know well the Embarrassment’s importance in mid-America. Yet another thing that would have helped would be to have given the street addresses of the clubs that have disappeared: Milano mentions the Unicorn, which was near the Pru. Really? Wow. Where!?
Also missing from this volume is a discographical essay. Brett! This is your chance to sort through it all and pick and choose and help out all of us hopeless record collector slime! An annotated discography would be a great thing (maybe one could be written for the book’s web site?); an accompanying CD would be even better.
The last thing I wish could appear in an expanded edition would be a “where are they now” section. Just for example, it has always pained me that people are still toiling away on the local scene with only occasional but sometimes astounding appearances (e.g., the Bags) — a word or two about how they’re still getting out there, what their day jobs are: That’s real life, and it has a place in a book that is so generous about the scene.
Brett Milano, the Sound of Our Town: A History of Boston Rock & Roll
Sep/070
I have seen a lot of Boston rock and roll, so it was a real pleasure to see that Brett Milano’s history of the Boston scene is now out. It’s called The Sound of Our Town: A History of Boston Rock & Roll. When I finish it I’ll have to review it here. I picked up my copy at Newbury Comics in Harvard Square. There was only one left on the shelf after I picked mine up. Brett is one of those people I call RRR (rock and roll royalty). I’ve been introduced to him a few times, but I don’t think he’s ever remembered my name, which is just as well cos I think I prefer that the RRR remain at a distance. He had a nice piece on Shepherdess today in the Phoenix — one of the best bands going locally right now, with the sublime Hilken Mancini (ex-Fuzzy) on vocals and lead guitar . . . but the Sheperdess album was not to be found yet at Newbury’s. Oh well. (For that matter, neither was the new Glenn Mercer, but they did have the new re-release of Young Marble Giant’s “Colossal Youth” . . .)
I’ll jump into the book in the middle, for the 80s scene I probably knew better than any of the other periods, though I am really looking forward to his take on the Remains and some of those other 60s garage rockers from Beantown.
The challenge with all of these scene histories is that they not let the players revise history. That was the problem with both the Legs McNeil book Please Kill Me and the Clinton Heylin book From the Velvets to the Voidoids. Both of those books let the subjects polish the past, which was especially wrong in the Heylin book because it positioned itself as more of a narrated history than an oral history. I doubt Milano will do that, because he is a real working journalist who knows how to get at the facts and the story.
Battling Intervals (Book Review)
Aug/070
Stuart Isacoff, Temperament: How Music Became a Battlefield for the Great Minds of Western Civilization (2001, 2003). $13.95. [Amazon]
Go over to your piano and play a middle C. Now play the next higher C. That’s an octave difference; the string for the lower C should be twice as long as the higher one. That’s a 2:1 ratio. Another ratio is to play the C, and then play the higher G. That’s a fifth, and the ratio of the lengths should be 3:2. Pythagoras — or his school — figured all that out in the 6th century B.C.E. But here’s the bad news. Produce a series of octaves where you keep halving the length of the string, and see what it sounds like after you’ve done it seven times. Now do the same thing with the fifths. This time, you will need to do twelve times. Pythagoras believed that you would arrive at the same final tone (i.e., tone with the same name) at the end. But guess what? You don’t:
The tones sounded by his two instruments were, however, almost the same, yet slightly — disturbingly — out of tune. The fact is, octaves and fifths, when created with Pythagoras’s pure mathematical ratios, are incommensurate: The further they move away from a common starting point, the more the structures built from these “perfect” intervals diverge. (40)
Thus ensues centuries of argument between those who seek to keep the standard octaves and fifths, and those who advocated something that came to be called “equal temperament,” where the distance between the tones are fixed, and, apparently, you can’t hear the slight dissonaces that are introduced. It’s this equal temperament that your modern piano uses. In this great argument are major players such as Descartes, Mersenne, Vincenzo Galilei (Galileo’s father), Rousseau, Rameau, and many others. They really go at it. I know these figures from the history of science and philosophy, and it was amazing to me to see how invested they were in music; this probably says something about how intellectual disciplines isolate their objects of study like so many individual bees — you forget the variety of flowers they serviced. On the one hand, it would seem, are those who might be called the Pythagoreans, who believe that there is some mystical force in the “just” intervals. And there are the moderns, who advocate equal temperament.
The first half of this book is great, as you see the Pythagorean ideal crumble when faced with the prospect of constructing a playable keyboard– the illustrations are outrageous (the key ones are woodcuts or engravings from Marin Mersenne’s Harmonie Universalle [1636-1637]; try as I might, I couldn’t find reproductions on the mighty Internet). The 2nd half gets a bit tedious, with many digressions, but still worthy if you can stick it out. There are nuggets all the way through, and having finished it, I can say that I’m just about dying to listen to a couple of things: Adrian Willaert’s Quid non ebrietas (16th century), which was apparently designed to show the pain of just intervals, and then some new pieces by Michael Harrison, a sometime collaborator of La Monte Young, which strives to evoke the mysticism and physical sensation of the early systems.
I’ll close this with a juicy quote from d’Alembert:
All freedoms are bound together and are equally dangerous. Freedom in music implies freedom to feel, freedom to feel implies freedom to think, freedom to think implies freedom to act. (223-224)
Amen.
Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (Book Review)
Aug/070
Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek (2007) . $19.95.
This is a provocative book which I hereby recommend to all of my friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and students . . . especially my younger friends. The book looks like a business self-help / how-to-succeed / make-money-quick book — the type of book my friend Paulina Borsook calls “business porn” — but it is subtly different.
In many ways the book is yet another book of organizational trivia: How to systematize your time, life, and money better, or, specifically, how to eliminate almost all of the tedium but still make your monthly nut. On this basis a lot of people would say that it’s a silly read, because there are a million books out there with all of the same stuff (e.g., all those little “getting things done” rules like don’t read e-mail right when you get to work; batch it, etc., etc.).
The main way the book is different is because of its existential realism about the reason for needing to escape everyday tedium (others would call this existential realism “cynicism” or “nihilism” or possibly even “atheism”). At the end of the book, Ferriss talks about how he deals with the “big questions,” such as “what is the meaning of life?” He suggests that if you (1) can’t define the meaning of the question with clarity, and/or (2) can’t define the consequences of what an answer would entail, then the question is pointless. With this stroke, he brackets a great deal of navel-gazing and anxiety. At the same time, he advises taking a spiritual retreat, but more to leave the world’s cares behind that to get answers. I was not surprised that this section of the book is headed by a quotation from Victor Frankl. All of this is smuggled in at the end. I think I know why.
Why? Because most people who are working 80-hour weeks aren’t in the position to even formulate a good philosophical question, let alone think about it or evaluate some answers. The reason to reorganize your life into a 4-hour work week is to give you the freedom to . . . do what you want, which might well include such philosophizing. As Marx said in the famous passage in the German Ideology (1845), we need a way of living that
makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
For Ferriss, the freedom he has gained through his method is devoted to learning and service, and I suspect he will have a lot more to say about such topics in future books. I suppose the sad fact is that Ferriss’s personal utopia is nestled within and enabled by what used to be called late capitalism, but at this point, that’s all we’ve got.
OK, as for the “content” of the book. The book says: Figure out a product. Why? Because if you’re in a service or consulting or wage-labor business, you’re always engaged in needless communication, and you don’t get the upside. The best thing about a product is that once it’s done, you just sell it. (And guess what, you can pay other people to sell it.) If you can get the profit high enough, you may be able to automate the whole thing. Ferriss provides lists of resources for creating a professional profile for yourself, creating “expertise,” getting a web-based presence, advertising your product, outsourcing payment and fulfillment: A 360-degree view of automating your business. (In the area of product definition and validation, the book is very much like a miniature version of Cooper’s Winning at New Products, with the key difference that Ferriss is trying to set up a business that will return a relatively small monthly return — a personal life-style business.)
After the business setup stuff, he gets into the fruits of that labor, i.e., what do you do during the rest of the week not occupied with your 4 hours of management. There are some interesting parallels here with the outsourcing argument in the business section: I.e., just as there are deals overseas to automate your business, similarly you can conduct geo-arbitrage to get deals for sitting on a beach or in a cafe.
