My world on the web
Tom Breihan from stereogum.comThe American recordings are a slightly misleading legacy. Johnny Cash wasn’t the mythic poet of darkness that those Rick Rubin records made him out to be — or, rather, he wasn’t just that. Cash was an entertainer. He could be funny and pious and corny. For decades, Cash thrived within the Nashville studio system; he was never an outsider artist. But those American records, American IV in particular, tapped into something powerful and primal about Johnny Cash’s voice and presence. They gave him a different kind of life. And that dark-specter version of Cash might be the one that people remember best today. Maybe that’s not fair to Johnny Cash, but Johnny Cash doesn’t care. He’s dead, and his legacy was secure long before American IV. In some of his last months on earth, Cash gave the world a profound meditation on loss and mortality, and even if the album only captures one side of Cash, that one side is heavier than heaven.
On the other side of such covers is how the original artists appreciated the covers. I find Trent Reznor’s response pretty funny:
When Reznor first heard Cash’s version, he still wasn’t sure what to think: “It felt like I was watching my girlfriend fuck somebody else.” (Trent Reznor isn’t always articulate.) But when Reznor saw Mark Romanek’s video for Cash’s “Hurt,” he immediately understood that “Hurt” now belonged to someone else.
Why do we post messages with text, images, and video online? Do we do it for attention? Do we do it to help educate and inform others? There are many positive and not so positive reasons we post messages online. I do not think many people publish text, images, or video online without intending to influence and communicate with one or many other human beings. I do it to get my ideas out of my head. I do it because I like crafting stories, and having a real or perceived audience helps with this process.
There are two things that stand out for me about The Go-Betweens second album Before Hollywood. Firstly, the addition of the piano and organ to there sound. I think it is significant that the organ comes in early in the opening track A Bad Debt Follows You. This sets the tone for me for the rest of the album.
The second thing was the contrast in intensity throughout the tracks. One minute there is an urgency, then there is not. Even with this though, there is always a hook pulling you back in.
In a review from the time, Clinton Walker argues that Before Hollywood is a ‘more complete’ album.
Where Send Me a Lullaby was fragile and occasionally faltering, yet still possessed of an uplifting resonance, Before Hollywood is a more complete album. Endearing as their vulnerability was, the Go-Betweens now play with confidence and solidity, though still with an edge . . . [here] they offer ten deceptively simple pop songs that pack an emotional impact just below a skin of finely wrought and realised melody and rhythmic attack.Page 209
It was interesting listening to this album as I grew up watching Cattle and Cane on Rage late at night, but did not really know any of the other tracks. On Cattle and Cane, I love the story about how McLellan used Nick Cave’s guitar and stole it’s only tune:
The album’s centrepiece, Grant’s ‘Cattle & Cane’, was a song born of a certain homesickness/nostalgia, and written on a guitar owned by Nick Cave. ‘So that’s why I could never write anything on it,’ Nick later complained. ‘Did I steal its only tune?’ Grant apologised. ‘I’ll give you a credit next time I see my publisher.’ Page 180
wiobyrne (wiobyrne.com)Each week I write a love letter to the Internet. You can subscribe here. Spoiler alert!!! It’s not all good.
Chris Aldrich (boffosocko.com)In the recent Twitter Migration, in addition to trying out Mastodon, I’ve been seeing some people go back to blogs or platforms like Micro.blog, WordPress, Tumblr, WriteFreely (like Mastodon it’s a part of the Fediverse, but built for blogging instead of short posts) and variety of others. They?…
Upon visiting the site—which is unaffiliated with either person—you’ll see AI-generated charcoal portraits of the two men in profile. Between them, a transcript of AI-generated text is highlighted in yellow as AI-generated voices simulating those of Herzog or Žižek read through it. The conversation goes back and forth between them, complete with distinct accents, and you can skip between each segment by clicking the arrows beneath the portraits.
Send Me a Lullaby is The Go-Betweens’ debut album. It was released in November 1981 in Australia on Missing Link as an eight-track mini-album. It was subsequently released in the UK on Rough Trade Records, an independent music record label (Missing Link’s UK distributors) in February 1982, as a 12-track album.
The band’s first official album, Send Me a Lullaby, produced by The Go-Betweens and Tony Cohen, on Missing Link in Australia, was released as an eight-track mini-album in November 1981.[1] Missing Link’s UK distributors, Rough Trade, released the album in the UK, three months later, with four tracks added.[2][5] Morrison provided the album title, in preference to Two Wimps and a Witch, from a Zelda Fitzgerald novel Save Me the Waltz.[8] The group had developed a subtler sound consisting of dry semi-spoken vocals, complex lyrics and melodic but fractious guitar pop influenced by contemporary bands such as Television, Wire and Talking Heads. Australian rock music historian, Ian McFarlane, described the album as “tentative and clumsy [with] its brittle, rough-hewn sound”.[2]
Andrew Stafford explains that it is very much reflection of the times.
Released in 1981, it now sounds very much of its time: jerky, influenced by all sorts of even jerkier-sounding British post-punk bands like Gang of Four, the Raincoats and the Slits.
It was interesting to read Robert Forster’s reflection in Clinton Walker’s Stranded:
Robert Forster: I think it’s really important, especially in Australia, that we’re seen as feminine in opposition to the across-the-board masculinity of Australian bands. But you see, I see the Birthday Party as feminine too.
I find it hard to imagine a world where The Go-Betweens are hand-in-hand with The Birthday Party.
It’s time to pull out Tools for Conviviality, perhaps, for a re-read, because I’m loathe to make the argument that email is, in fact, where we find technological conviviality these days. But that’s the direction I’m considering taking the argument. If I were to write about it and think about it more, that is.
Maybe I’ll just go for a run instead.
wiobyrne (wiobyrne.com)As we deal with the current situation, we not only need to consider F2F, online, and hyflex education, we need to think about what pedagogy could and/or should look like in a post-pandemic system.
Nineteen Eighty-Four (also stylised as 1984) is a dystopian social science fiction novel and cautionary tale written by the English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell’s ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, it centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance and repressive regimentation of people and behaviours within society.[2][3] Orwell, a democratic socialist, modelled the authoritarian state in the novel on Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany.[2][3][4] More broadly, the novel examines the role of truth and facts within societies and the ways in which they can be manipulated.
One of the things that really struck me in this rereading was the use of Emmanuel Goldstein’s book ‘The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism’ to build out the world of 1984. This reminded me of the way in which Raphael Hythloday retells his experience of Utopia in Thomas More’s book. One of the odd consequences of this is that although it is easy to imagine another character living in Eurasia providing a similar recount of life, it feels difficult to understand how any other character might actually respond to this world. For example, how might the novel be different written from O’Brien’s point of view? Or Ampleforth the poet? Is Winston alone in his thoughts? Are there others who actually feel the same way? What do other’s actually feel? Here I am reminded of the paranoia captured in something like Stasiland or The Matrix, but also the modern world of ‘templated selves‘, the world of likes and continuous observation captured in something like The Circle and The Every.
With a series of structural changes going on at work, I was asked how I felt about my job. I explained to my manager that I felt that a lot of what we do is thankless. This is not to say that schools are not thankful, but rather it feels like a large amount of our time is spent doing what feels like other people’s work. For example, this month, another buggy upgrade was pushed into production by the technical team without adequate testing or documentation. This meant that a large amount of my time was spent trying to figure out what was happening with all the problems raised by schools to raise with the technical team to fix.
On the home front, our yard redesign has somehow been completed even with the ridiculous amounts of rain that we have had. I remember raising concerns about flooding when we went to Albury, however it feels like things have only stepped up since then. It feels like a new record seems to be broken each week at the moment. Although it is hard to capture something that is so widespread, however I feel like the video of the Woolshed Falls near Beechworth summed it up for me.
Thunderous Woolshed Falls near Beechworth pic.twitter.com/OPYu5y8GqT
— Erin Somerville (@erinbsomerville) October 13, 2022
Personally, I managed to go to two concerts this month, Montaigne and Art of Fighting. Associated with this, I dived into the work of Daði Freyr and Montgomery. In addition to this, I have been listening to new albums from Carly Rae Jepsen and Taylor Swift on repeat with my daughters. In regards to reading, I purchased a two month subscription to Audible. I got halfway through Miriam Margolyes’s reading of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House and gave up. Instead, I then turned to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. I was also reminded about the fragility of my digital identity when I was hit with a handful of WordPress errors and reminded how important it is to have structured backups.
Here then are some of the dots I have been connecting together:
Andrea Stringer shares some thoughts on teacher retention.
Chris Aldrich talks about what we talk about when we talk about zettelkasten.
Deborah Brandt explains that learning to read has meant many things over time.
For me, Clive Thompson captures things best, explaining how working with all the variables to land a rocket is still a far cry from the complexity of grappling with 400 million Twitter users.
Ryan Barrett reflects upon the the potential of the blockchain and the importance of human trust.
Kaitlyn Tiffany reflects on the demise of GIFs.
Malcolm Harris explores why children today are so sad. Hint, maybe because we all are.
Oliver Quinlan reflects on productive learning in response to new situations as opposed to learning to cope with a dysfunctional workplace.
Katherine Wu reports on the tendency to discard mask wearing as a bad memory, instead seeking out a sense of supposed normalcy.
Stephen Muecke reflects on Bruno Latour’s life and legacy.
Francis Fukuyama applies his thesis that history ends with the prevalence of democray to today.
So that was October for me, how about you? As always, hope you are safe and well.
Chris Aldrich (boffosocko.com)What do we mean when we say Zettelkasten? There’s a specific set of objects (cards and boxes or their digital equivalents), but there’s also a spectrum of methods or practices which can be split into two broad categories.
Our definition of digital literacies is something created by a community and continually negotiated. More often than not, this definition is taken for granted, rarely given air. Belshaw does not identify the eight different elements as an answer, but as a point of discussion. The definition is start of this discussion.
Jan Boddez (jan.boddez.net)I want my microformats “baked into” my posts, so that if I were to ever disable this plugin, all of my existing content stays untouched. Current microformats plugins rely on PHP “front-end” hooks and such, which I wanted to avoid.
Midnights is the tenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, released on October 21, 2022, via Republic Records. Announced at the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards, the album marks Swift’s first body of new work since her 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore. Midnights is a concept album about nocturnal contemplation, written and produced by Swift with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff.
Inspired by the “sleepless nights” of Swift’s life, Midnights contains confessional yet cryptic lyrics, ruminating themes such as anxiety, insecurity, self-criticism, self-awareness, insomnia, and self-confidence. Musically, Swift experimented with electronica, dream pop, bedroom pop and chill-out music styles in the album, eschewing the alternative folk sound of her 2020 releases for a return to synth-pop. It is characterized by subtle grooves, vintage synthesizers, drum machine, and hip hop/R&B rhythms.
Midnights is not different. It is normal. Aggressively normal, aggravatingly normal, and, in its way, excellently normal. She has found the cultural status quo, and it sounds like that Glass Animals song that was in everyone’s TikToks last summer. What’s distinct about her return to synth pop is just the flavors she stirs in: oozing bass, surmountable melancholia, and the same type of confession and awkwardness that appears 45 minutes into an office happy hour. Transcending expectations is its own expectation, and Midnights makes clear, with modest poignance, that Swift has burned out on her own hype.
Alternatively, Ann Powers suggests that it offers a rethink of Swift’s habits.
Swift uses Midnights as a way to rethink the sonic rhetoric of first-person storytelling and shake off habits that have served her artistically and commercially for more than a decade. Sometimes she succeeds; sometimes she hangs on to her old habits. But the attempt intrigues throughout.
Charlie Harding, Nate Sloan, and Reanna Cruz touch on the seeming return of the T-drop, but they also explore some of the newer ingredients that help set the scene, such as Reese bass.
NS: I think Reese bass is sort of equivalent to the sandworms in Dune. It’s under the surface; you almost don’t really hear it clearly, you only see the sand moving. You only get a sort of hint of what that creature — that sound — might look like. You get the sense that if you turn up your speakers to hear the bass more clearly, you still wouldn’t be able to. It’s always a little bit out of reach. Maybe it’s something about the way it’s filtered or side-chained … I don’t know. But something about it is untouchable; it’s unreachable.
Tom Breihan continues the vibe on atmosphere suggesting that the album “fills the room and makes the air taste better.”
My colleague Chris DeVille described the album as “just folklore with synthesizers instead of acoustic guitars.”
…
These songs are not anthems or earworms, but they fill up a room and make the air taste better. I would love to hear some more immediate top-down endorphin-rush Taylor Swift jams, but her downbeat burbles can be just as effective, and there are some really, really good downbeat burbles on Midnights.
One of the intriguing questions that seems to be addressed throughout the commentary is what is actually wanted or expected from Taylor Swift in regards to her evolution over time? Ann Powers discusses how, unlike Adele and Beyonce, Swift does not have a child and in our patriarchal society, this seems to matter.
Sam Sanders – I don’t see Beyoncé as 17 and in Destiny’s Child anymore. I don’t see Adele as being 18, doing those first small songs and albums. Different people, right? But we still do this thing where Taylor is 15. It’s a Taylor thing, and I can’t put my finger on it, so I want you to.
Ann Powers – I do have an answer for this, and it goes into a sensitive place. I think about the great song by the Pretenders, written by Chrissie Hynde, “Middle of the Road,” where there’s a line in that song where she says, “I’m not the cat I used to be / I’ve got a kid. I’m 33.”
Taylor doesn’t have a child. And in our patriarchal society, when does a woman change? When she becomes a mother. All the women you mentioned became mothers, and maybe one of the main reasons why we don’t accept Taylor as an adult is because the childless woman remains a strange figure in our society. We don’t know how to accept childless women as adults. I’m gonna thank you, Taylor, for not having kids yet because we really need more childless women out there showing their path.
Some criticism has also taken aim at Jack Antonoff. Kornhaber makes the case that although Antonoff co-wrote 12 of the albums 13 songs and co-produced all of them is it is misleading to suggest that the album is the way it is simply because of Antonoff. Kornhaber describes Antonoff as a ‘therapists-slash-craftspeople’, someone who provides the conditions to flourish:
The term producer can refer to a whole range of activities. Some producers mostly just capture the sound of artists playing their own music in the studio. Some, by contrast, are like one-person bands who whip up accompaniment for a vocalist. Some producers are beatmakers who deliver their contributions by email. Some are tyrants who use the singer as a mere ingredient for their own creation (and, in many cases historically, exploit or abuse the singer in the process). And some are therapists-slash-craftspeople, coaxing an artist to pour out their soul and then helping shape the results.
By all accounts, Antonoff falls into that last category.
For me, what I like about the album is how contained it feels. I wonder if this is what Antonoff brings?
Place between Lorde and Halsey.
“It was such a lost learning experience, because the pandemic itself has been a great opportunity for students to figure out who they are and to question their assumptions about continuity, t…
As the world changes, often in accelerated and in unanticipated ways, so do our considerations and assumptions, much of which are grounded in the past. Shifting our mental models and maps from the rear-view mirror to the windshield allows us to release thinking we’ve entrenched in a world that no longer exists, so we can begin to creatively confront the uncertain and unknown futures that now await us. And the more sophisticated we can be in that journey, the more open we will be to the emergence of the diversity of futures that lie down the road.
This touches on the call to ‘build back better’. As much as I agree with the point that “one image of the future, may give you security, but it’s a false sense of security”, I worry that security is the least of our problems when some schools struggle to even get teachers to staff their classrooms and simply build back.
Over the past year, it has become evident that there are key weaknesses at the core of seemingly strong authoritarian states.
Fukuyama argues that history should be viewed as an evolutionary process, and that the end of history, in this sense, means that liberal democracy is the final form of government for all nations. According to Fukuyama, since the French Revolution, liberal democracy has repeatedly proven to be a fundamentally better system (ethically, politically, economically) than any of the alternatives,[1] and so there can be no progression from it to an alternative system. Fukuyama claims not that events will stop occurring in the future, but rather that all that will happen in the future (even if totalitarianism returns) is that democracy will become more and more prevalent in the long term.
On the flip side, he considers the many authoritarian failures.
Supporters of liberal democracy must not give in to a fatalism that tacitly accepts the Russian-Chinese line that such democracies are in inevitable decline. The long-term progress of modern institutions is neither linear nor automatic. Over the years, we have seen huge setbacks to the progress of liberal and democratic institutions, with the rise of fascism and communism in the 1930s, or the military coups and oil crises of the 1960s and ’70s. And yet, liberal democracy has endured and come back repeatedly, because the alternatives are so bad. People across varied cultures do not like living under dictatorship, and they value their individual freedom. No authoritarian government presents a society that is, in the long term, more attractive than liberal democracy, and could therefore be considered the goal or end point of historical progress. The millions of people voting with their feet—leaving poor, corrupt, or violent countries for life not in Russia, China, or Iran but in the liberal, democratic West—amply demonstrate this.
The big question, Fukuyama suggests, with all this is the United States. Although democracy is the end state, it is still something that we must struggle for.
The passage of time almost demands that we tell some sort of story: there are certain ways in which we can’t help changing through life, and we must respond to them. Young bodies differ from old ones; possibilities multiply in our early decades, and later fade. When you were seventeen, you practiced the piano for an hour each day, and fell in love for the first time; now you pay down your credit cards and watch Amazon Prime. To say that you are the same person today that you were decades ago is absurd. A story that neatly divides your past into chapters may also be artificial. And yet there’s value in imposing order on chaos. It’s not just a matter of self-soothing: the future looms, and we must decide how to act based on the past. You can’t continue a story without first writing one.
Some Thoughts About How And What Mastodon Is
Towns and distinct places. There was a great analogy I saw, that Twitter is like a big city. It contains super interesting stuff, a lot of people, in some cases it is quite dirty and could do with being cleaned up, but there’s a mass there and the ability for serendipity that doesn’t exist in a smaller space. The city analogy feels much more apt than the town square, not least of which because a town square with tens of millions of daily active users isn’t something for which we have a mental model. A city, though? Yeah, that fits: they’ve even got people who’ll hurl abuse at you and, in theory, people who might have an opinion about whether that’s okay and do something about it. You might move to the burbs or to a nation state that has a better opinion about, say, paid family leave or not having a death penalty, but every so often you might still want to visit that big dirty noisy city just to have a look around.
This has me thinking about Dron and Anderson’s discussion of nets, sets and groups.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (nesslabs.com)In their book Surfing the Edge of Chaos, Richard Pascale, Mark Milleman, and Linda Gioja explain that there are four cornerstone principles to chaos in nature that we can also observe in chaotic times in our lives and at work:
- Equilibrium is a precursor to death. “When a living system is in a state of equilibrium, it is less responsive to changes occurring around it,” they write. This state of equilibrium is highly dangerous, putting the system at risk of not adapting quickly enough.
- Innovation usually takes place on the edge of chaos. It’s when they face a threat or are excited by a new opportunity that living systems tend to come up with new ways of living through experimentation and mutation.
- Self-organization emerges naturally. As long as a system is sufficiently populated and properly interconnected, a new self-organization will emerge from chaos.
- Living systems cannot be directed towards a linear path. In dynamical systems, an attractor is defined as a set of states toward which a system tends to evolve. The direction is discovered rather than dictated by the living living system.
These principles are crucial to keep in mind when surfing the edge of chaos.