Safe disregards: a less annoying way of recommending music

Looks like me and Al both woke up in the mood for music posts today! Looking forward to tackling his once I've had a coffee.

But anyway here's my very simple idea: recommending music (or indeed, any culture) to friends of our age is a delicate matter, as the very recommendation itself is often enough to put you off. What, another thing I feel obliged to go pay attention to?? But hey, it would be shame if we never talked about what we liked, or ever recommending anything ever.

I was talking to a friend who didn't like Breaking Bad, didn't really get it. I said give it a chance. He said he was well into series two - I said, give up, if you don't like it by now, it's just not for you.

This gave me the idea for a new form of music recommendation - basically, suggest one song that, if your friend listens to it and doesn't like it, they can safely disregard the band in question. This is really a mercy towards your friend, freeing them from obligation rather than putting more pop culture in the queue.

The song shouldn't necessarily be the best song, the smash hit - maybe the one that contains the band's most appealing characteristics AND more indulgent flourishes.

Without further ado, Safe Disregard #1: "Like Like The The The Death" by Silver Jews. If you don't like this, don't worry about Silver Jews.

Between the Creative Economy and the Economy of Creativity: Resistance and Radical Contingencies

No just kidding, although I have been challenged and enlightened by my odd, not-quite-dialogue with Final Bullet. I had almost 300 page views for my first post and around 40 for the second, I'd like to apologise to all those people. Normal service now resumes.

My mum is staying with us and we've told her about Bath. This is pretty much locked in now. I applied for a job in Bristol on Wednesday night and the recruitment consultant called me back Thursday afternoon. It's a PR agency, we'll see how it goes. Their employee perks include "bar open on Fridays stocked with free beer and cider".

"And cider."

So yeah we're going to give notice on our flat in August and move in with my mum September and October before finding a place in Bath/Bristol in November. I'd really prefer Bath but it's about £145 a month in train fares to commute between the two. Bristol is a great city but I need time and support to deprogramme myself from "I'm not in London, I'm missing out" syndrome - returning to my hometown, my birthright, feels like a natural step as opposed to moving to another city and constantly squinting my eyes in order to make it look like Camberwell.

Anyway I have to go, we're all going to the V&A for some fucking reason. Christ that place is filled to the rafters with "maker culture".

;)

4pm Update: The V&A was heavy. I'm usually pretty impatient in museums, but this time Jess and my mum were going to the exhibitions and I wasn't - I knew I had two hours to kill on my own, no more and no less. Also I didn't have a smartphone. I spent an hour in the first room, the Japan collection, looking at basically every single object. Then I checked out some tapestries in the Britain collection, then the small contemporary photography show by the main entrance. I felt I had the time to do it, there was no better possible thing to be doing under those circumstances, I couldn't sneak out for a cheeky pint or anything, not really anyway.

Brazilian Portuguese phrases for World Cup visitors

GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE EDITION

I know, I know, it's bad.
Eu sei, eu sei, é ruim.

Yes, it was the same before the London Olympics. Many people were displaced.
Sim, era o mesmo antes dos Jogos Olímpicos de Londres. Muitas pessoas foram deslocadas.

I bought my tickets before the protests began. I cannot get a refund.
Eu comprei os meus bilhetes antes que os protestos começaram. Eu não posso obter um reembolso.

Football is the people's game. FIFA are criminals.
O futebol é o jogo das pessoas. FIFA são criminosos.

We are spending our tourist money in independent businesses in the favelas.
Estamos a gastar o nosso dinheiro turística em empresas independentes nas favelas.

We must all work together for a global socialist solution.
Devemos todos trabalhar juntos para uma solução socialista global.

Don't worry, I'll pay for these.
Não se preocupe, eu vou pagar por estes.

Further unstructured thoughts on making and creativity

This kind of follows on from the last post but one, which was inspired by the Final Bullet post, but I'm unhitching the carriages on this train of thought, this post should in no way be considered as a response, intervention or critique of that post or subsequent FB posts, I'm just going off on my own tangent in light of my own stuff. And it's a dislocated thinking-through, not a step-by-step argument.

Why is creativity good?

I can think of two, non-mutually exclusive reasons.

A] It's intrinsically good, an irreducible component of a good life, in some kind of Aristotelean sense

B] It's instrumentally good, there are always problems to be solved, there are things that really should change and we need creativity for that to happen.

Like I say, these can both be true. Also, from each it follows that we need to nurture spaces for creative people and creative activity, because the logic of capitalism will probably rationalise it away in the process of eating itself. But which kind of spaces, and how?

For-profit creatives and non-profit creatives, something something reciprocity economies

If we mostly follow A], then maybe we arrive at a kind of reciprocal, gift-type economy arrangement where I support your creative thing and you support my creative thing, and thus we are supporting Creativity and alternative, non-commercialised spaces. That sounds cool to me, I think you can probably have that without everything becoming too indulgent and sucky, people can still exercise taste judgements.

If we mostly follow B], then at some point we need to reconcile creative spaces with actual prospects for problem solving or social change. We should keep a very loose hand on the tiller, but there will be an underlying logic of investment and return. Doesn't have to be financial investment and return!! But some sense that the common good will increase, outside of the exercise of creativity for the sake of its own enjoyment. There is a "for-profit" element.

Changing things vs inspiring change

I spoke earlier about the "unanchored optimism" of some in the non-profit creative community. I suppose I mean more that there is often a sense of deferred optimism embedded in the various projects, mash-ups, products, memes. Look at this thing I've made - it will 'suggest new possibilities', 'open up a new way of looking at the world', 'inspire new approaches', 'prompt us to rethink' etc etc. I'm being very broad brush here, but I think this is a common feature. It creates a kind of circularity, or deferment. "Do/look at this creation because creativity".

What kind of creativity does actually change things? Consumer tech. It changes things in mostly banal, sometimes terrible ways, but it unquestionably induces behavioural change among the people exposed to it. It is pushing us towards new forms of social relations - ask anyone who has internet dated. There is a perceived "for-profit" element for the user, even if that profit is literally saving three minutes queuing at Subway by ordering ahead with an app. And from that flows great financial profits to the for-profit creative.

Back to the reciprocal economy

I first started thinking about this after the very funny New York magazine takedown of Brooklyn's faux-hyper-localised culture, described as something like "a borough of 1 million people, part of a 21st century global financial and media capital, pretending that it is an 18th century village". There was a Brooklyn goods store that wouldn't stock Brooklyn Lager because it is made slightly outside of Brooklyn, and an anecdote about a guy wanting to make local Brooklyn pickles but agonising over the question of whether to import cucumbers during the NINE MONTHS OF THE YEAR when they can't be grown in Brooklyn.

Anyway this notion of urban localism seemed interesting - I wondered from an economic standpoint whether it would less ridiculous if taken to its natural conclusion. Sure, all the artisanal stuff seems overpriced, but if we were all artisans selling overpriced stuff to each other, would it not balance out? And then we all escape boring corporate capitalism by creating a new economy through sheer force of will - through a type of Great Refusal?

Almost certainly not for many obvious reasons related to the cost of raw materials. But the thought experiment becomes more interesting when you apply it to the economy of ideas and the economy of attention, where the raw materials are cheaper and more evenly distributed. Can a new economy of creativity be forged, through sheer commitment to the cause of Creativity and opposition to the reductive forces of corporate capitalism, that will operate on non-profit, reciprocal principles and spread creative legitimation and self-actualisation to the many, not the few? What are the barriers to this? What infrastructure has to be in place? What does that commitment look like? Does crowd-funding have something to do with it?

An aside: The Lost Lectures

A while ago I heard about the Lost Lectures, where you pay about £10 in advance and then they announce the venue, lineup etc on the day by text message. I was so excited by the idea I emailed them to be put on the mailing list, and bought tickets within minutes of receiving first ticket alert.

A few days before the event I realised I had been taken in. I was looking on the website at past events, it was all quirky speakers e.g. a man who went around the world interviewing people while they sat in trees. You know, to "gain a different perspective", to "see things differently". I was going to pay for the privilege, just because they'd wrapped some bullshit 'speakeasy', fake-scarcity ribbon around the whole enterprise. Just that week, I'd been for free to a Gresham College lecture where the UK's foremost scholar of Keynesian economics described in detail how classical economists had sewn up the academy and suppressed dissenting schools of thought. That really did make me see things differently! I let my tickets go unused. Tree wanker.

The commodification of inspiration

Is that the barrier? If you're not selling/promoting actual change, actual utility, but possible inspiration towards people's own self-directed, self-created change - a deferred optimism - will people pay money for that? Maybe, in some circumstances. But should they? Or is that against the whole spirit of the thing - should it be reciprocal? I mean, if we're just doing it to mutually reinforce each other, rather than trying to solve a particular problem.

Anyway I warned you that I wasn't going to build a proper argument and I've stayed true to my promise!

Watching my iPhone 4 die

I got caught in a terrific rainstorm just now and my iPhone 4 got all wet in the pocket of my windbreaker. When I took it out the flash was stuck on - as in, the light on the back is continually shining, like a distress signal.

At first the screen worked normally, but insisted on being shut off (the "slide to shut down" thing appeared unbidden). This happened a couple of times. I left it for a while to dry, but the light kept shining.

For a while the phone became unresponsive - holding down the little button on the top right shoulder didn't do anything. Then, as I was on the train back to New Cross Gate, the screen turned on again - first as a very narrow vertical bar, grey in colour. Then it opened up into a lush blue pattern of vertical stripes, otherworldly and beautiful. I turned it over and the flash light was starting to pulse and fade, like the spirit was leaving the body. I flicked the "silent mode" switch on the left shoulder and saw that the phone was still able to vibrate in response - I did this a couple of times, as though using a defibrillator.

As I got home it suddenly made a text message sound, but the screen was still just a blue pattern, getting darker. It's sitting next to me now, the light still burning brightly in its final moments. I wonder what it is thinking about? Its life must be flashing before its eyes - its 14-year-old mother back in Shenzhen, its adolescence in San Francisco, where it was designed. Losing its eyesight through a scratched lens, and being replaced by a newer model. Shipped off to London for retirement, a period of quarantine before being unlocked by AT&T, and then a couple of years of faithful service before dying in a flat in New Cross.

Obviously this is a massive ball ache, but I feel like it's getting a dignified death.

A loose post about makers and making

I've submitted a few things to Leila's projects in the past (hi Leila) and I've followed her career with interest, or more accurately, a kind of morbid fascination, like watching a tightrope walker without a net. I'm not acquainted with anyone else who is forging quite that kind of path - I know plenty of people who are making less money than they could to do something they love (or at least enjoy), but they usually do so within the framework of existing institutions such as charities, think tanks or public sector bodies. I also know people who are unhappy with what they are doing and want to be more "creative", but don't really know how to make the first step - they are just sort of chasing a fevered image in their heads of a better life, without actually working towards it or making sacrifices.

In the same week that I was more or less making peace with the idea of plying my trade in the lower echelons of the Championship, her post on Final Bullet about doubling down on the route she's chosen had a strange, refracted kind of resonance with me. I came across it this morning and have read it several times.

I take a light interest in maker/hacker/art-tech culture, mostly just by reading Boing Boing, those guys all seem to be roughly on the right side, but I find the relentless, unanchored optimism a little wearing. To read someone from that culture take off that mask and lay out so clearly the economic realities of a congested, under-financed culture (the economics of both money and attention), to criticise not just aspects of the culture but themselves, is exhilarating, almost shocking. I don't how other people in that culture react to this kind of writing, maybe it's not as transgressive as it seems to the casual observer, but like I say I've read and reread it.

I don't really know where I'm going with this, I need to get on with my day. There's no conclusion, it's just something that struck me.

EDIT: I should say that the reason I take a light interest in said culture is because it seems to represent some kind of vanguard or frontier (of what, precisely, I'm not sure), and there is interesting stuff happening there.

UPDATE June 3: I see Leila has not just read but linked to this post! Hi Leila - I'm sorry if I breached any sort of internet etiquette by not contacting you directly about writing this, but it's basically just an anonymous blog about my job search / midlife crisis with an intended audience of about four people. It didn't seem appropriate to comment on your blog post because (as you can see above) I don't really have anything substantial to say, other than that the ripples just sort of reached my pond. Anyway take care and all the best.

Godzilla at the Hackney Picturehouse

Went to see this last night, I recommend it! Watched it on a small screen in 3D. I always enjoy 3D for the first 20 mins and then totally forget it's in 3D, my brain just takes it into account.

We walked from Dalston Junction to Mare Street on the way over, along Dalston Lane so I could point out to Jess where the band rehearses. I haven't written about the band yet: basically we rebooted last November after spending three years as a project-y collective very much oriented to recording music on computers. We didn't play live, we couldn't actually play live as I was on both vocal and bass duty and can't physically do both at the same time. We all got a bit fed up with that, it was just a lot of sitting in front of computers and fiddling with music software, and of course we all became bad at our instruments because we weren't playing in a room together very often. So in November I moved to lead guitar and vocals, the rhythm guitarist moved to bass and the lead guitarist moved to a sort of rhythm/lead hybrid. We brought in a guy we know from our old school on drums and we rehearse once a week (annoyingly, on Mondays, which often leads to the "Test Match Special" of drinking on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday nights). We have six songs and hope we can start playing live soon, just some little gigs in bars would be fun, e.g. the Bird's Nest in Deptford if they will have us. Like a New Jersey bar band, kind of, but sounding like Pavement. But most of all I've just really enjoyed actually playing songs live in the rehearsal room, drinking the obligatory Red Stripe and making a racket, feeling ourselves get tighter and tighter at the songs through practice. It's like the difference between working out every day and doing a token run once a fortnight, I guess.

We're losing a little bit of momentum lately - basically when you write a song in a (our) band:

• Writing the first 25% feels great, that's the eureka moment where something clicks 
• The next 25% is quite fun as you improvise and elaborate around the original idea in a loose, non-committal way
• The next 25% where you start to hone it down is harder work but still satisfying, you are using your experience and musicianship
• The remaining 25% is then just suddenly a massive ball ache, you disagree a lot more at this stage, little niggling problems just seem impossible to fix (and there might be disagreement about whether a 'part not quite working' is because of the part, or because other people in the band are not playing it properly), and often the original thing that got you all clicking in the first 25% has been changed or no longer has the same impact in the context of the rest of the song and everyone's just a bit tired of it. 

Anyway - we've reached the final 25% on a lot of the songs, and are kind of going in circles. Worryingly, not because we are at each other's throats about how long the solo should be etc., but because everyone is kind of shying away from taking the initiative on pushing forward their ideas for the final 25%, there's a lot of displacement activity. We're a bit older, we just want to have some fun and pursue our own personal musical thing, there's a danger that our relative lack of youthful hunger might see us run out of steam. It definitely felt a bit more vital two months ago, I was actually looking forward to practices for days in advance.

our rehearsal room in Dalston

Speaking of displacement activity, I had no intention of writing this much about the band when I started this post. I have to skip to the end now! I was going to do a whole elegiac thing about walking to Shoreditch High Street via London Fields and Broadway Market and feeling myself come detached from London. But anyway on the way up to the film, we hatched a secret provisional plan to move to Bath at the end of August. We might change our minds so don't tell anyone, we don't want to look stupid. Me and Jess are really bad at announcing plans and then scrapping them. But we will make the final decision on August 1, when we decide whether to give notice on our flat. I have to stress again that this is a secret for now and may change, I'm not supposed to tell anyone but I don't see how I could continue to write this blog without getting it out there, the blog is obviously part of the process getting me there. Don't tell anyone. Especially my mum, she'd be devastated if she thought we were moving and then we didn't. Maybe next week I'll write a blog post about why I changed my mind and am staying in London. This is how rolling news works!

But the job market out there looks reasonably healthy. For some reason the idea of working in comms - even, horror of horrors, for a PR agency - doesn't seem to bother me if it's in Bath or Bristol. I suddenly feel much more relaxed about everything: money, work, the future, everything. My wife can get a dog and I can get a Bath City FC season ticket.

People from Bath joke about it being "the graveyard of ambition". Die without perishing!!