To say that the record is significant is an understatement. No more needs to be written on it; it needs to be listened to. (I will add, very briefly, that when in the process of unsuccessfully attempting to license the record for release in the UK, I got to know Jeff Mangum a bit - many phone calls, a few in-persons - and he was one of the more self-effacing, genuinely kind geniuses I’ve had the pleasure of meeting).

In any case, while nothing more really does need to be written on the record, the above-referenced book is good. The author, Kim Cooper, wisely doesn’t attempt too much exegesis on the record. Instead, he focuses on the circumstances leading up to the record, the furor around the release/tour, and a bit (just a bit, thankfully) on Jeff’s “disappearance” post-tour.

If you’re a fan, you’ll like it (or hate it).

What hit me the hardest was the quote from band-member, Julian Koster, below.

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(Newer readers (listeners) have gotten a taste of his vocal prowess via his performance on a recent song sketch that can be heard HERE.)

Well, he’s been promoted. A weatherman no more. Now he’s on to the financial markets.

Here is his first report:

This is not a suggestion to buy or sell any particular stock. You need to do your own investing, come up with your own rules and exit strategies, and be familiar with the risks of stock investment.

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I spend many months of the year in Academia and am surrounded, most pleasantly, by, for example, economists who typify this obsession. While I have respect and admiration for them, I largely exclude them from the pantheon of those who obsess over minutiae, because economists, you know, make a living from their obsession.

No, what I’m talking about are those who get granular upon the asses of things like obscure 78s from some label in Murfreesboro that was run out of the sub-basement of a tool and dye shop.

Or, better, those who obsess over the minutiae of food and drink.

I was so delighted by, for instance, Cod when it came out, and its spawn, like, Salt (mmm, Salt Cod…Brandade… /Homer voice).

I spent a few happy late night hours the other night reading about the Piña Colada.

I can pretty much read about cheese all day.

There are a few grails in this gustatory realm that I seem to be constantly looking for clues to a riddle I don’t really want to solve. The origins, for instance, of the martini, the margarita, and … Caesar Salad.

We should not bother wondering why we quest for a deeper understanding of things like martinis and Caesar Salads, because to do so would shine an analytic light upon poetry. And who wants to do that?

Rather, we should encourage these quests. We should revel around them. We should whisper clues, sotto voce, and, depending upon the response, realize that we have found a fellow traveler, or just another who will never understand.

After domesticity fell apart tonight (my fault; shocking), and I was left home alone while M and the kids went to the beach, I determined not to wallow in my failings as a father, husband, communicator…human, and to make the best of the situation.

This meant using left over ingredients to cook for myself. Yes, there was a grilled pizza involved, but speaking of this is better left for another time (I do want to have a tweet up, meet up, pizza up at some point and grill pizzas for all of you - it is what I do).

No, this was about the Caesar.

You see, as I am the lone dissenter from all things vegetarian in our little house on the prairie, anchovies tend to remain in their tins around here.

Tonight they were liberated.

I took one and put it in a mortar with a little bit of a garlic clove and a little bit of olive oil, and bashed away. I created a paste.

I then took some good, local romaine (and this will be heretical to many in the trad Caesar world, but, I’m only getting started with my heresy as you shall see) and chopped it up and stuck it in the freezer.

I took some more anchovies, rinsed them, and stuck them in a ramekin filled with milk.

I then stirred a bit more olive oil in my mortar.

Once the lettuce was very cold, but not frozen, I took it out, put it in a wooden bowl, and lightly salted it.

I rinsed off the anchovies that were mellowing in the milk.

Applying the most ingenious technique I’ve come across in ages, I did the dressing-in-the-palm-of-my-hand trick and coated the chopped lettuce with my anchovy, garlic, olive oil mixture. I then squeezed a little lemon juice over it, and tossed with my hands again.

It was, by far, the best Caesar salad I’ve had … maybe ever. I’d say on a par with Musso and Frank’s.

No, there was no egg. No, there was no Worcestershire. No, there was no parm reg. (See…heresy.)

I know what you’re thinking: “Not a Caesar!” Perhaps you’re right, but man did it taste like what you want a Caesar to taste like.

It helped that I ate it with grilled pizza, while drinking a Bandol (even while my dear friend Tanya tells me, on the occasions when I’m stuck eating some crap in transit from one place to the next, that life can’t always be Rose and grilled pizza, I ask, why not?).

The quest continues - for the perfect Caesar/the “real” Caesar - but this was darn close.

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I’ve done OK with this, but I’m certainly not where I want to be in terms of frequency.

I was thinking about why my output hasn’t been what I’ve wanted, and some of it comes down to my damnable Virgo personality of needing to refine things rather than letting them be/go. While I’ve come to be largely OK with this, it does stand in contrast to much of what I preach with respect to getting stuff out there and refining.

What happens is, I’ll start with a sketch of a song or of a…er…sketch, and rather than keep it as just a sketch — a moment — I add layers.

The question is, do these layers really add anything? Isn’t the essence where it’s at?

I think the answer is that, yes, the essence is there…or it isn’t. Refining is not necessarily a bad thing, and, often, is absolutely necessary. But sometimes it’s more necessary to just create, and let the essence be what it is or isn’t.

I think if there’s something there, you’ll come back with a different eye, a different approach, and you’ll refine. If there isn’t something there, coming back to it a billion times won’t get you any closer to the truth.

To that end, I was taking a break from the jaberwocky a bit ago, and came upstairs from my office; the kids were running around in circles (not kidding), and I picked up my guitar. I’m fascinated and obsessed with staccato rhythms on guitar that imply melody, and am always on the hunt for these. A drop D and a capo later, I had the feel of something. I plopped my iPhone with the voice memo app running on my knee and banged it out.

My intention was to use this iPhone recording to just remember the idea of the tune. But then I started thinking of all the layers I would add to it, and it became less about doing something fun and cathartic and more about planning a time when the house would be quiet, the phone wouldn’t be ringing, etc.

Pretty soon I was tired just thinking about it.

So, screw it. Here’s the iPhone recording. Yes, that’s Henry running around in circles talking about monsters. Yes, that’s me breathing. Yes it goes out of time at one point.

mouse-with-pincushion
Mouse and Pin Cushion

Once again, I’m honored to use, with her kind permission, one of Kristin Hersh’s amazing photos as the title inspiration.

If you want to hear real songs, head on over to Kristin’s Site; lots of amazing things going on over there.

I hope those of you who read Ye Olde Bloggee don’t mind these little moments of internal contemplation and their collateral manifestations.

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It was sent to me via email, but I asked Sunnie if I could add it as an update to the blog, because, frankly, it’s better than the blog post, and shines the correct light on what I wanted to say/should have said, but am not yet evolved enough to do so.

Oh, but dear @gah650 you are yet to see the “code” you encoded into your lovely wife and fun-der-ful children. That perhaps being - though you much prefer to do other things and are in reality much more suited for other tasks and above all like the other tasks better - you did it for them. Maybe the very time you took to build bunk beds was a greater investment in them than you realize. Just think of the stories that will live in their minds plus the “new words” - the day dad built our bunk beds. Anyway, even if it didn’t register in their minds, it did in their hearts and spirits.

And if anyone ever wonders why any of us who blog do so, it’s because of moments of connection like these.

Thank you, Sunnie.

__

At the risk at coming across like some sort of second-rate Gladwell/Godin (both of whom I admire greatly), I want to relate a quick anecdote (see how “Gladwell-ian” I’m getting already) brought to the fore after a typically awesome conversation with Lauren Markow (that would be @sambarouge to many of you).

On Father’s day I was tasked with putting together the kids’ new bunk beds. I suppose this falls under my domain because I have testicles. I can promise, there is no other reasonable explanation for why my wife would consider me the appropriate person (or more appropriate than she) for this job. My “tool box” consists of one of those $3 screwdrivers that you can reverse from Phillips head to flat head and some of those left over Allen wrenches that come with things that must be assembled.

In any case, after much grumbling and the recruitment of my neighbor Charlie, who has such exotic (and required for this job) tools as a ratchet, off we went.

It took quite some time, during most of which I re-enacted precisely the “job” I had when my Dad would fix the car when I was a kid: handing him the wrong tool, trying to get out of the way, and dropping things. (My Dad, whenever I asked if I could help with these types of projects, used to tell my 9-year old self that I could “supervise.”)

We eventually finished, I offered to buy Charlie dinner, and we drank a beer.

I then headed to my laptop to try desperately to catch up on all of the things that I didn’t do while I was instead doing a miserable job at something I should never do.

You see where I’m going.

Building bunk beds is for me a terrible waste of time. It has what economists call high “opportunity cost” for me: while putting together bunk beds I couldn’t do any of the things that I am actually fairly capable of; things where I can add value.

In an era where we’re conditioned to think we can do anything, it’s important to remember what I tell people outside of Burgundy who are thinking about getting into the Vineyard business, “Just because you can make wine, doesn’t mean you should make wine.”

I usually can get out of the bunk bed building tasks around the house, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t build the metaphorical bunk bed too often.

For instance, two or three times a year I get so fed up with some technical issue that I decide — right then and there — I’m going to learn how to code.

The rub here is that while I’ll never be a great or even good coder, those weekends weren’t a loss. I’m now far more able to communicate with those who are great coders, and thus add value to projects by simply being a good point-person when coding is involved (I still wish I could just do it myself).

Another example: I had a real pivotal moment about five years ago when working on a project. We had hit sort of a wall, and - as per usual - the default answer to get us over this hump was to hire a publicist to help us generate more awareness. I disagreed vehemently with this approach, and it was not-gently suggested that I might want to consider offering an alternative rather than vitriol.

My alternative was to let me get an intern and explore the then-nascent social marketing techniques for three months. It changed the companies fortune…and my life.

Diving into social channels or coding isn’t exactly the same as building bunk beds; though it could appear that way at the time.

Learning to code a little (or at lease communicate more efficiently with coders) and understanding new ways to connect with constituents with technology relates directly to my core competency.

The key is trying to find those things that can expand our core competencies but aren’t adverse to them. Not easy. Building a bunk bed, literally, is never going to relate to any of my core competencies (unless something really radical, and, frankly, horrible, happens in my life).

Growing capability without falling into a trap of random acts of improvement is a tricky balance.

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I’m finding that increasingly, while they don’t yet know the terminology, many firms are increasingly thinking in terms of VRM.

To be sure, CRM continues to rule the day. There’s a zealous adherence to CRM, and it makes sense: it’s been related to KPIs forever.

What’s interesting is how VRM has sort of backed its way into the conversation (of course, when I’m in the room, it doesn’t exactly back its way into the conversation; it comes charging in).

Little subtle shifts in thinking about how customers interact with brands are driving this.

Consider, for example, a conversation from today’s session ostensibly on the topic of QR codes and AR. It led to an aside comment that went something along the lines of, “Customers are using these tools to feature and price shop; they scan a bar code, and then decide from which vendor to make the purchase.”

Or:

“We’re building a control panel that will allow users to opt in to the precisely offerings they want to receive from us.”

Not earth-shaking, I know, and in the scheme of some of the more high-level VRM conversations, this is child’s play.

However, children grow up.

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Salvaged it somehow by throwing a few things together for dinner for myself (M and the kids at a movie).

Boiled up a big ass pot of very salted water and cooked some shells.

While cooking, I toasted a few slices of day (really, two or three day) old bread, and put some good olive oil on it (I find it works better putting the evoo on after toasting/grilling the bread; reduces the chances of accidentally scorching the oil). Used a vegetable peeler to slice some Parm Reg over it.

Washed some really good local lettuce.

*Here’s the real take-away from this post*: Dressed it by putting a little bit of walnut oil in the palm of my hand and tossing the salad; then adding a little bit of decent vinegar to my hand and tossed again. Salt. Done. (This is by far the best way to make a dressing. I’m pretty sure it’s a Mark Bittman trick).

Shells done, I reserved a cup or so of the heavily-salted cooking water (important) and drained them.

Tossed them in a pan with a little butter, olive oil and one of those teeny little cans of tomato juice. Added some of the pasta cooking water.

Let it cook down for about 5 minutes. S&P, grated parm reg.

Done.

Lillet blond and soda to drink.

The weekend finished on a high note.

(Annabelle is currently eating the left-over shells.)

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This one comes on, and all I feel is Marci:

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