A writing pal and I are going on a blinders-on fiction sprint in November, so I won’t be blogging or tweeting or Facebooking (?) or anything that month. (I will continue blogging and tweeting and Facebooking (?) for work, though, for the obvious reason.) Email responses will be slower than usual, too.

Seeya December 1. I’ll tell you how it went.

… and not just because it’s the second-worst album by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. The word “magic” is particularly annoying when applied to consumer technology, starting with Arthur C. Clarke’s oft-quoted “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” That’s pithy and pungent, but untrue. Air conditioner technology is quite advanced. We all know the difference between air conditioning and magic.

Bill Gates, during his post-CEO/pre-departure years at Microsoft, tried to push this word. I saw him use the term “magic” to describe what his company’s software did at many conferences, much as he does in this 2004 column for InformationWeek:

It’s the magic of software that will connect these devices into a seamless whole, making them an indispensable part of our everyday lives.

He’s describing Windows Update, a service about as magical as a doorbell.

And now Apple is playing the “magic” game. Its new mouse replaces its previous wireless “Mighty Mouse,” which was characterized mostly by its inability to hold a Bluetooth connection for more than 90 seconds. It’s called a “Magic Mouse.” It’s amusing to see the trendsetters at Apple picking up on a half-decade-old discarded Microsoft slogan. So much for thinking different(ly). But it emphasizes how much trouble computer makers are having selling their wares nowadays. With computers becoming more and more commoditized, it’s hard to get anyone excited about them for reasons other than design, at which Apple excels. So the companies who sell us computers and products that connect to them have to start making things up about them, like they’re “magic.” This doesn’t seem like much of an exaggeration anymore.

UPDATE: Now Google is playing this game, too.

I’m more familiar with Lydia Davis’s work as a translator than I am with her fiction, a deficiency I intend to remedy shortly. In an interview with The Economist’s Intelligent Life promoting her new collection of short stories, Davis talks about what she learned as a writer from translating Proust (her Swann’s Way is the strongest of the Penguin series a few years back):

She considered each sentence a “little puzzle”, and strove to stay true to Proust’s sounds, rhythms and word choices … “Translating makes me much more acutely aware of shades of meaning,” she explains. “You have a set problem and you can’t get around it by avoiding it. You have to pick just the right word.”

Jane tagged me in her meme about learning to write. At first I wanted to write three contradictory practices that illuminate my development as a writer. That’s hard for me, not because I have trouble telling stupid stories from my youth (I don’t, as my friends know all too well), but because because I feel like I’m still becoming a writer. Yes, I know I’ve been writing or editing for more than 25 years, long enough that I have plenty of work in the remainder bin or landfill, but I’m still trying to get good. So, rather than tell you about the 11th grade high school teacher who inspired me or the thrill when I heard my fiction read on the radio, I’ll tell you three things I’ve learned along my “twisted path to becoming a writer,” a path I have yet to complete.

1. Hate adverbs.
One practice I’ve picked up is to eliminate as many words ending in “-ly” as I can.
I’m writing a novel. To solve a problem I created for myself in the second act, I went back and looked at something similar I had written years ago. It was a terrible piece of writing. Trying to make the sentences more powerful than the story dictated, I loaded them with tricks. Some of them I had picked up from my years as a cranky rock critic (fellow travelers know the “comma, say, comma” formulation); others confused listmaking with storytelling. The worst of them was my reliance on adverbs and adjectives to do the jobs that nouns and verbs are for. The sentences was full of pairings like “astonishingly precise” and lots of adverbs like “actually” and “simply” that, most of the time, are just fancy ways of saying “very.” I even used the words “insouciant” and “insouciantly” in a 3,000-word section, which should trigger some sort of penalty.
Almost every one of my sentences gets better when I remove the adverbs. As I continue down the path, I’m learning not to put the adverbs in at all.

2. It’s not about me.
Go to bookstores. The local Booksmith, workplace of my favorite bookseller, has a wall of new hardcover fiction. I am a ravenous reader, but the wall is full of novels I’ll never read by authors I have never heard of and novels I’ll never get to by authors I have heard of. Even if I complete a novel worth reading and talk someone into publishing it and inserting it into such a display, most people who go to bookstores looking for fiction (a small percentage of a small percentage) will never notice it. This once made me despair; now it liberates me. Here’s why.
In the early ’90s, I had a difficult job with a difficult boss. Much of that boss’s direction was unhelpful, both to the financial and editorial health of the magazine I edited, but one of his suggestions was brilliant and has stayed with me. I was editing a music magazine that had its offices in Peterborough, New Hampshire, no center of pop culture. There were elements of the office’s physical location that were useful, but bucolic setting = cloistered attitude for some of the editors there. They were self-conscious tastemakers, out of touch with our readers. My boss suggested we talk to readers regularly and learn what they thought. My initial response was negative — no one knows better than I what my readers want, damn it! — but within the week I tried it. It was fantastic! Much of the feedback was obvious or mundane, but some of it was surprising, provocative, and essential in helping me understand what my readers wanted. Without it, I would have been unable to turn the magazine from one intended to please four editors into one set on entertaining several hundred thousand people.
Which brings us back to that wall of new fiction and the practice I draw from it. I’m only going to get a few people to notice my book; what can I do to make it stand out? Do I know what is my book about? Do I have characters, subplots, or themes that don’t support what that book is about? Are they there just to entertain me? What about the reader? There is a difference between what one writes for herself and what one produces for an audience. After I’ve written something, I ask: Will anyone who picked up this book because of what it is about care about this? No? Then why is it there?

3. You can’t get to the 10 percent until you throw away the 90 percent.
The first two practices are about taking things about. This one is about putting things in. I think I’m starting to get good; I even have some external validation to support that belief. But most of what I write is still crap. Most of what everyone writes is crap. Tama Janowitz once wrote that the first drafts of her novels were 1,200 pages; the second drafts were 800 pages; the final drafts ran 400 pages.” Regardless of whether you’re a Janowitz fan, that sounds about right. You can’t have the best writing on paper until you put everything down on paper, including the dumb ideas, cliches, forced transitions, clever asides, and limp dialogue. None of that will be in the final/published version, but you can’t get to a good-enough final/published version until you have written out all the junk. My practice: Pour it all out, then sort it all out.

Chuck Berry is the greatest lyricist in the history of rock and roll. His unprecedented synthesis—blues (especially the jump-band variety), country, and swing funneled through his wry, nonlinear mind—extended ideas about what the new teen form could encompass. Berry took over rock and roll moments after its birth, and anyone who has subsequently picked up a guitar with the desire to write a rock’n'roll song that described real life knows that Berry provided most of the tools. He also coined the word “motorvatin’,” which counts for a lot.

His Chess recordings have a bit of fluff toward the end (Owen and I have already weighed in on “My Ding-a-Ling”), but not much. Those records showcase Berry in his prime, all train-track guitar lines and images of “coffee-colored Cadillacs.” Berry’s prime musical foil is his St. Louis compatriot Johnnie Johnson, a pianist with a blues background whose rhythmic style was so flexible and skeptical that it influenced Chuck’s fret work, not to mention his lyrical world-view. Piano and guitar hop over each other throughout this set, like grinning duelists. Detractors often claim that Berry’s songs “all sound the same,” but they’re referring only to the jump-start guitar introductions that were Berry’s duck-walking trademark—though even those were immediately distinguishable to seasoned fans. There’s a tremendous variety of styles on his Chess tracks: Listen to “Havana Moon,” “School Day,” “Dear Dad,” and “Have Mercy Judge” and hear a performer able to thrive in blues, rhythm and blues, straight rock’n'roll, and his own fusion of them all. The only thing that’s the same is the high quality.

Like Jerry Lee Lewis, Berry alternated between adult and teen topics as surely as he moved from adult to teen beats. Sometimes he could call up lines like the hilarious hyperboles in “No Money Down” (by the end of the song, he has an entire furniture store installed inside his new car) that rang true and immediate to both. Berry’s conversational singing is a major part of his appeal—everyone can understand what he is singing, although some couplets like “it’s way too early for the Congo/So keep a’rockin’ the piano” (from “Rock-and-Roll Music”) have defied attempts at explication for half a century.

Berry presented himself as a guy next door with a penchant for pungent and detailed singing, writing, and guitar-playing. He always considered himself an artist (he allowed none of the usual “It’s junk because it’s for kids” crap), and the most amazing thing about his wildly imaginative work is that there’s no condescension. Although the kids in the audience couldn’t comprehend the singer’s child-custody anguish in “Memphis,” Berry wrote the tune in such an open-ended way that everyone could be included. Everyone could be included: that’s Chuck’s genius in a nutshell.

Just a quick public thanks to Scott Kirsner for coming up with the idea for the Coffee for No Reason that we hosted. The attendance was much larger than we expected (thanks to Cosi for being kind about that) and I got the chance to meet a bunch of cool people doing cool things. Some I knew already; plenty I was lucky enough to meet for the first time. I shouldn’t have to be reminded than Silicon Valley isn’t the only place where tech innovation is happening.

However, if you do live near San Francisco and you didn’t fly cross-country for a cup of coffee, you can see Scott at a “Fans, Friends & Followers” workshop at BAVC on December 1. It’ll cost more than a cup of coffee but I’m sure it will be a bargain.

#CFNR

Jane is the primary coffee person in my life, but I’m going to host, along with the great Scott Kirsner, a coffee-for-no-reason gathering in Kendall Square on Friday, October 16. Scott has the details here, but I’ll paste in the highlights of his post below, in case you’re too overextended today to click on a link:

What if a bunch of us descended on the Cosi in Kendall Square to have coffee together for absolutely no reason?
That would sort of be fun, especially if it was a Friday morning.
Here’s how it will work:
Jimmy Guterman and I are hosting. We’ll be there from 9 to 11 AM on Friday, October 16th. We’ll try to grab a table in the dead center of the restaurant’s front room. You’ll find our pictures below so you can recognize us. Come up and say hi, or introduce yourself to someone who looks like they are part of this craziness.
I’m bringing a stack of brand new hardcover business and tech books that have been sent to me as “review copies.” Grab one that looks interesting. Jimmy is bringing a few free copies of an album he produced: The Sandinista Project.
(And if you have something you’d like to give away for free, bring it! There’s also an open WiFi network that usually works, in case you want to bring a laptop and do some demos.)
But mostly this is just a chance to meet some interesting people (most of whom work or hang out in Kendall Square) and introduce them to one another… and goof off on a Friday morning. No content, no sponsors, no agenda, no nothing. Just a social-media-driven coffee klatsch.
PR Folks: You’re welcome to come, but please don’t view this as an opportunity to pitch two of the dimmer members of Boston’s journalistic firmament. ]
The Twitter hash tag, of course, is #CFNR (Coffee for No Reason).

Hope to see you there! No pitching!

Report from BIF-5 in Providence

Eli and I have fantasized about a full-band-with-horns version of the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army.” We never got around to it and now it’s too late: Idolator reports that Kelly Clarkson, of all people, is performing such an arrangement of the song live. Yet another reminder that a good idea isn’t nearly as important as acting on your good idea.

“They took a light from a honky-tonk/Put the gleam in your eye,” Carl Perkins howls on “Honky Tonk Gal,” one of his many amazing performances on The Classic Carl Perkins, a stellar five-CD boxed set that includes all his recordings for Sun Records and those shortly thereafter. (I just pulled out that box for the first time in many years.) With such a line, Perkins neatly encapsulates rockabilly’s concerns and fears.

Rockabilly, that reckless, primal thrash of honky-tonk country-and-western, is all about conflict—between rural and urban, between barroom adventure and home comfort, between the headfirst sin of Saturday nights and the heartfelt repentance of Sunday mornings. The honky-tonk gal Perkins adores is both his joy (she’s hot stuff and knows it) and his pain (she’s no longer a demure housewife). She’s the conflict of rockabilly personified.

Perkins treats this dilemma the way any self-respecting rockabilly cat would: He blazes out fiery riffs and drives through the quandary in fifth gear. He’ll deal with the consequences of his rampage tomorrow. Even lost in the thrill of taking his Gibson guitar for an unexpected joyride, he knows that somewhere down the road there will be a price to pay. Rockabilly is about release, but its release always has limits—that’s the form’s country birthright. That’s also what makes Perkins, a pure rockabilly performer then and always, different from Elvis Presley or Roy Orbison, rockabilly cats who expanded into straight pop and, in doing so, uprooted themselves. “You could never take the country out of Perkins,” veteran Sun-reissue compiler Colin Escott wrote in one of his many expert liner-note essays, pinpointing what set Perkins apart from Presley and what prevented him from achieving Elvis-like success. Presley, for all his indisputable greatness, sold out for pop success in every way imaginable. Perkins, even in his most banal countrypolitan settings, never surrendered.

This massive set has no fluff. Perkins’s gracious, quavering tenor carries some magnificent country ballads; among the most noteworthy are “Turn Around,” his first professional recording, and “Let the Jukebox Keep on Playing,” the most understated expression of honky-tonk regret and paralysis in post-Hank Williams country music. But Perkins’s meat is his rockabilly, “Blue Suede Shoes” and all that, in which he repeatedly drives full speed to the edge of his world, leans over the cliff to enjoy the view for a brief second, and then, as he knows he must, pulls back and carefully heads home.

“Rockabilly sure takes me over the edge,” top Stray Cat Brian Setzer countered when I threw that idea at him a long time ago, in suburban Massachusetts. “It’s the most menacing music. Heavy metal is kid’s stuff compared to it.” Yes, but Setzer and the many legions who adopted pompadours in the late seventies discovered the music and the accoutrements, not the culture. It’s no accident that most of the rockabilly revivalists came from northern urban areas. To them, rockabilly is Gene Vincent’s leer and Eddie Cochran’s shake without regard for the honky-tonk imperatives behind them. The Stray Cats, since reduced to beer commercials, can afford to shoot over the edge; Perkins and his contemporaries, who didn’t have the luxury of growing up in a society that had already been liberated by rock and roll, had no such romantic alternative.

Yet on “Dixie Fried,” his greatest uptempo composition, Perkins comes as close as any rockabilly performer to going over the edge and living to tell about it. His guitar flashes like the barroom-fight switchblades his tale chronicles; his voice dances with the wobbly exuberance of his brazen, drunken protagonist. “Let’s all get Dixie fried!” he screams, shattering any pretensions to caution, or civilized behavior. The violence escalates and the song smashes to its head-on conclusion, not with the law, but with the inevitable. Perkins may have the gleam of the honky-tonk in his eye, but his eye is fixed on home, where he prays his honky-tonk gal has returned.

Everyone rocks together; everyone suffocates together.

(What are these sentences?)

Sure, Paul Kelly’s influences keep popping up. Kelly sometimes seems like a rock-critic-invented mixture of Joe Strummer, Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan, Graham Parker, Bruce Springsteen, and a half-dozen other significant white male rockers, but this is not why he is so little known in the U.S. (I don’t think that Post, one of his early records, ever came out Stateside. Please let me know in the comments if I’m wrong.) Maybe his eclectic arrangements (Kelly seems to be a big fan of Sandinista!) and leanings toward literature (he named an album after a Raymond Carver story) have seemed forbidding to many. Yet there is nothing dense about Kelly, a Woody Guthrie fan who aspires to similar plainspokenness. His gestures and observations are tiny, unexpected, perfect motions.

Post is Kelly’s third album. He normally records with a band, once called the Messengers. Before then its members answered to the Dots and the Coloured Girls, but Post is a solo acoustic album that emphasizes the dark side of life. Before you start yelling Nebraska, know that the pessimism here is more specific than the broad-minded Springsteen would ever allow. (Also know that Kelly gives himself the marvelous luxury of occasional accompaniment, however spare.) Many of the songs here are lyrically grounded in the first stages of recovery from drug addiction. “White Train” and “Blues for Skip” are explicitly about heroin, and all sorts of junk—drugs and otherwise—thwart the soft vocalist throughout the record.

The soft singing is never intended as quiet comfort. The singer in “Adelaide” rethinks his childhood, all detail and foreboding (“Dad’s hands used to shake but I never knew he was dying/I was thirteen, I never dreamed he could fall”), and when he stumbles into the present as if it is a bad dream, he tosses off lines like “I own this town” to convince himself that someone is listening to him. In “Incident on South Dowling,” a junkie helplessly watches his lover overdose before him, and then he ponders the layout of the tiny apartment they shared. Precise observations, punctuated by tragedy.

The meanest song on Post is its truest. A self-satisfied rock-god-in-training sings “Look So Fine, Feel So Low,” the tale of an up-and-comer living off the kindness of an innocent (“She buys me things/She wants to take care of me/And all I gotta do is sing, sing, sing”) while a millimeter under the surface he detests her (“She’s so easy to impress/When she asks me dumb questions/All I gotta do is say ‘yes, yes, yes’”) for his predicament. Kelly’s character signs in a voice so drenched in derision he is oblivious to his inhumanity. The title lines are attempts to show remorse, but the kid is kidding. What the kid doesn’t know is that revealing himself ensures his eventual eviction. He looks so wise, but he’s really a fool. These deceptively complex characters are the folks Kelly wants to write about, and their multidimensional nature is part of why their stories don’t ring on radios from coast to coast. Kelly subsequently rerecorded rousing full-band versions of many of the songs on Post, and those takes are often exhilarating. They’re great performances. But on Post, they’re revelations.

“There are fellowships, rings, kings, and towers everywhere.”

(What are these sentences?)

Here’s today’s example:

The Management Lessons of Las Vegas (MIT Sloan Management Review)

“I’d like to work with you,” Jack says, “but you have to promise never to serve me a meal again.”

(What are these sentences?)

Part of that history, alas, is a Hampton Inn in an industrial park.

(What are these sentences?)

The more she chews, the more bitter it tastes.

(What are these sentences?)

Perhaps, he thinks, he should have kept that one in his head.

(What are these sentences?)

We’re redoing the blog at MIT Sloan Management Review. One of the changes is that I’ll be contributing to it more. Here’s my first entry.

He names them all that way.

(What are these sentences?)

Everyone in my family is a fan of Ida Maria, especially Lydia (1, 2) and me (3). As someone who wants to hear new music from her I was delighted when she tweeted recently that she was “sunburned and ready for The Last Tour Ever with Fortress Round My Heart.” That was the good news. The bad news is that this last tour behind her debut is a package tour helmed by the pointless Perez Hilton. Oh well, I figured, in these days of there not being any record industry anymore, you accept help from anyone.

That tour came through town on Monday. Lydia and I couldn’t go, for a variety of reasons, and I’m glad we didn’t. Turns out, as laid out in Idolator, that she abandoned the stage early on in the set, came back after a delay to deliver an apology, most of one more song, another apology, and left again for good. She is now off the tour.

This seemed like a typical flameout from someone who’s toured too much. Nothing new to see, just move along. But then I saw a video of part of the truncated show (start watching it at 2:33):

This performance of “Keep Me Warm,” even as viewed in a tiny YouTube window, is hard to watch. It’s dark, deep, discomforting, and terrifying. She’s crying, she is desperate to sing but sometimes can’t, and after the punk-rock-guitar-break-in-the-middle-of-a-ballad part she is so far gone she holds notes so long you fear they will never end. Her singing is so loud, so raw, so hard for her to do but it’s all she can do until she can’t even do that anymore, that you feel some relief when she finally gives up, although in her apology at the end you know relief is the last thing she’s going to feel for some time.

People who love rock’n'roll sometimes think about authenticity, wondering: was that real? did that feel real? Of course, we consider authenticity in the context of performance. Rock’n'rollers on stage aren’t being real; they’re on a stage, performing. Sometimes they may really feel what they’re doing, but it doesn’t come across that way. Sometimes they may be bored or distracted, but they’re such pros that the performance feels authentic. Either way they’re on a stage, performing. I suspect what I find most poignant about this clip is that I’m watching a terrific performer trying to perform, trying to turn whatever she’s feeling into performance, but she can’t. What we see is something real, someone in trouble.

No one on stage is thinking of Middle Eastern food or depressing dressing rooms or motels without even basic cable or interviewers who don’t show up or missed connections or flat tires or hemorrhoids from sitting in the van too long or unchilled beer or guarantees unmet or promo people who don’t show up or girlfriends who don’t call or ex-girlfriends who do call or the real reason the first marriage broke up or the disappointment that hovers over them every time they see a family member or the deal they should have signed or the deal they’ll never get.

(What are these sentences?)

It was more like a fried-beer sandwich, with a bit of cod thrown in by accident.

(What are these sentences?)

When I’m not working or writing or sleeping or trying to be useful around my family, there’s a good chance I’m reading Proust. I’ve written here plenty of times of my love for his big novel, so I won’t repeat myself. But I’m almost halfway through my every-other year exploration of it, things come to mind, that’s what a blog is for, so here we are. I know I should be writing when I’m reading, but sometimes reading leads to better writing. I hope it does, anyway. Anyway…

Something I read in The Guermantes Way reminded me of a passage from William C. Carter’s welcoming biography of Proust:

“This relationship set a pattern that Marcel would follow with future couples: he would ‘fall in love’ with the fiancee or mistress of a man who appealed to him. Such an arrangement had a number of examples: he could love the woman from a safe distance, exchange confidences with the man and woman about each other, observe the dynamics of sexual love, and have the illusion that he was an active participant experiencing all the joys, enthusiasms, and jealous sufferings of both partners. It was also an ideal vantage point for a novelist.”

Proust had it both ways. Another of his biographers, Edmund White, calls him a “playboy-monk.” He lived life, but he also observed it from a distance, eventually retreating, alone, to his bedroom. But throughout In Search of Lost Time, he describes it intensely and intimately. For the reader, it doesn’t matter how he got his information. And, as with so much else in his life and work, Proust found an unexpected, roundabout way of gathering that information and using it to build something weird and new. A step away, the distance somehow brought him closer to his subject. His book never stops revealing mysteries, perhaps because so much of what he wrote about was mysterious to him, too.

And then, as always, Izzy.

(What are these sentences?)

The last time he heard anything by her was on a compilation album called A Devil Put Aside for Me: The Punk Rock Tribute to “Bohemian Rhapsody”.

(What are these sentences?)

(Just found this when I was looking for something else.)

And now he’s dealing out of the back of an abandoned Quiznos near the Tappan Zee Bridge.

I’m going to try to post a new one every work day. (What are these sentences?)

Couldn’t sleep last night when I wanted to. Eli’s got an afterschool job, so he’s working late on homework and I don’t want him to be the only one in the house still awake. Thought I could work or write for a bit, but I wound up watching part of Shine a Light and I wrote the following:

It’s almost embarrassing how exciting the opening of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” still is at this late date. The greatest rock’n’roll band in the world, ladies and gentlemen, the Rolling Stones.

I’m not delusional. I realize, as I write this in 2009, that the Stones, the great Rolling Stones, haven’t released a thrilling album since Some Girls (31 years ago) and they haven’t released a good one since Tattoo You (29 years). I also realize that Mick and Keith and probably Charlie care only for themselves and their bank accounts. They’ll whore themselves out for any product and they’ll put out any piece of crap, cut any corner, to make another unnecessary buck. All evidence suggests that they’re creeps. To which I respond: So what? The sound of Keith’s guitar and Charlie’s drums and Mick’s harp is smarter, slyer, truer than anything anybody can say in words. They’re as full of life and potential as a screaming newborn. I believe that. As people, the remaining Stones stand for no one but themselves — and sometimes even that seems like too much work for them. But when that guitar and those drums lock in, even on one of the many crappy songs from the past quarter-century, that primitive genius Keith playing exactly the wrong note at exactly the right moment, it’s something to believe in.

I mean that. I’m sure I would detest the members of the Stones if I spent much time with them, but I feel as close to their music as I do with almost any person. And I do have fulfilling, intimate friendships; I’m not looking to music for something I can’t get in real life. Even when the Stones don’t believe in what they’re doing (1981-present), I do. The sound of “Street Fighting Man” or “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” or “When the Whip Comes Down”: that’s what makes life worth living. The novel I’m trying to write (i.e. the novel I should be writing this very minute) is the story of people who know that or who are afraid of what it might mean. All these people made a choice whether they were going to live normal lives or go into rock’n’roll. Decide one way and you can’t go back. The people who said “yes” to something different feel paralyzing self-doubt on an ongoing basis. They fantasize what it might be like to live like civilians, but for all their protestations they know there’s nowhere else for them, nothing else -– except for love, for some of them, sometimes -– worth bothering to believe in. When their work or their lives dip, it’s because they’ve lost their faith in those guitars and those drums. Same with Mick, Keith, and Charlie.

For years he was so nervous about performing that he would throw up before every show. Now he throws up after every show, which everyone around him feels is an improvement.

Ethan Lipton is a wonderful songwriter and performer, one of those sly guys who seem to be entertaining you but in fact is moving you. New York magazine calls him the city’s best lounge act but that captures only part of what he can do. I first heard him at a Pop!Tech back in ‘05 and promptly begged him to appear on that Sandinista thing.

Lipton and his band want to record a new album on the Jill Sobule plan: his fans fund it. So, I urge you to follow this two-step plan:

1. Listen to the music on his shockingly un-ugly MySpace Page.

2. Learn about his new project and contribute to it.

You won’t regret it.

Last week I reported that I “just came up with a reissue/tribute idea that could be even less commercially successful than The Sandinista Project.” I’ve done some research and realized there’s no way I’d be able to pull off the new project, so I’m about to move on. But, before I do, I thought it might be fun to share what I had in mind.

In 1976, John Fogerty, the genius behind Creedence Clearwater Revival, recorded his third solo album, Hoodoo. It was a diverse album, ranging from the classic Creedence sound to very of-the-moment disco. For a variety of reasons, both aesthetic and commercial, the record was pulled at the last minute, and Fogerty began the first of his two long silences, not releasing any new music until 1985. I didn’t hear a bootleg of Hoodoo until just before Fogerty’s Centerfield comeback, and it is one weird record. “You Got the Magic,” for example, which snuck out as a single before Fogerty and/or his label put the kibosh on the full album, mixed Fogerty’s usual approach with a production approach that anticipated whole chunks of Saturday Night Fever. There are some low points on the record, but at least two of the cuts — the ballad “Between the Lines” and the rocker “On the Run” — rise to a level with his best work.

This was my idea for bringing Hoodoo back to life: a 2-CD Hoodoo Project set. The first disc would include the original Hoodoo and some non-album Fogerty recordings from the period; the second would be a Sandinista Project-style re-do of the nine cuts on the record, by nine different performers. The package would accomplish two goals: bring to light an unreleased, half-forgotten record (disc 1) and show how strong the songs are when placed in unexpected new settings (disc 2). Seemed like a fun project, a chance to turn on people to something they hadn’t heard, might even come together faster than the four-years-from-idea-to-release Sandinista Project.

But no. Turns out Fogerty still hates either that record or that time of his life, and even if I could get the rights to the record from whoever/whatever owns it now, I’d never want to force out an unreleased album over the objection of a performer who wanted it to stay unreleased. So it’s on to the next thing. Ninth-generation copies of the unreleased record remain available via the usual dubious online sources, and I think I’ll still be able to live a full life even if the country-punk version of Hoodoo’s “Marchin’ to Blarney” I hear in my head never comes out. Onward!

When I’m not working or blogging or trying to live my life, I steal some time to work on my fiction. I use a fine program called WriteRoom that makes a computer writing environment much less distracting than the Microsoft Word norm.

The developer of WriteRoom has written an iPhone version of the program. I don’t use it as much, but it has been the subject of an fascinating price experiment. I bought WriteRoom.iPhone soon after it came out, for $4.99, but since then the developer has been testing different price points, with conclusive results:

08/20/2009 9 @ $4.99
08/21/2009 4280 @ Free
08/22/2009 7166 @ Free
08/23/2009 4901 @ Free
08/24/2009 88 @ $0.99
08/25/2009 56 @ $0.99
08/26/2009 119 @ $0.99

Looks like strong evidence for Chris Anderson’s contention that there is an enormous difference between almost free and free, even as Joshua Benton has noted that anyone who can afford an iPhone or an iPod Touch likely can risk 99 cents on an app without falling into a lower tax bracket.

I’ve got my own story to tell about free. As regular readers of this space know, last week I made The Sandinista Project available for free for roughly one day. The record went up at 12.01am on Friday and came down around 9am on Saturday. Here are the stats:

Total number of views of the page with the download link: 17,664 (13,834 Friday, 3,830 Saturday)
Total number of completed album downloads: 7,577 (6,772 Friday, 805 Saturday)

This is not what traffic is usually like on my blog, as this traffic report from WordPress makes embarrasingly clear:

The day of making The Sandinista Project free flattened my traffic for every other day this month. (Thanks to boing boing and others for pointing to it, by the way.) Indeed, the 7,577 free album downloads exceeded the number of physical albums we sold in the two years since the record came out. I’m not sure how many legit digital albums we sold via iTunes, Amazon, etc., but much of that business is in single tracks so I suspect the digital full-album sales were negligible. It’s hard to figure out how many unauthorized copies are out on the Net, but the week before the download experiment, I checked the numbers on Pirate Bay and two other prominent torrent sites and extrapolated at the very least 6,000 torrented copies. So, between the free authorized download last week and the free unauthorized downloads of the previous 28 months, most of the copies of The Sandinista Project that people are listening to weren’t paid for.

Yet people are listening to it. In the week since the free download, more than 300 of them wrote me to either thank me or complement the work. The trolls came out, too, but we all know what to do about them. So … there is some audience of people who want this music. They just don’t want to pay for it. For this project, that was not a big problem. We weren’t expecting to get paid, and what little we did make we intended to give away. It was, I guess, an art project. We weren’t doing it to make a living. We were doing it to get heard. Mission accomplished.

But what if The Sandinista Project was intended as a money-maker? The success of the free download suggests that there is an audience interested in the work. A popular policy nowadays is to give away something of value in the hope that it will serve as persuasive marketing for something that is for sale. A free download of this record could have been a come-on for a concert, associated merch, or some high-end physical version of the same product. Not sure how well that would work. Let’s use the WriteRoom.iphone example: when the price rose from zero to 99 cents, downloads all but stopped: the worst day at the free price was 4,280 downloads, the best day at the cheap price was 119 downloads, and let’s not forget that a typical day at the original price of $4.99 was 9 downloads. There is no substantial business there.

Thanks to the lethal combination of breakthrough technology, changes in consumer expectations, and industry-wide incompetence so overwhelming that a business school could build an entire degree program around it, I suspect the existing music industry is too far gone to build a business out of a we’ll-give-you-something-for-free-and-then-sell-something-else-to-you model. The attitude at traditional entertainment companies, that we’re the geniuses and the tastemakers and you’ll buy what we tell you is good, is nearly the opposite of the Net’s relatively bottom-up approach to popularity. There will still be some very popular performers who can sell more than a million copies of a traditional album in physical or virtual form, and there will be many, many indie performers who can garner a devoted audience on the Net while covering some subset of their expenses. But for those in the middle, neither superstars or hobbyists, people who want to make a living as musicians, the current model offers little. Giving something away and hoping someone will pay for something else somewhere down the road looks more and more like a business model that’s both cynical and hopeless. The fat, spent music industry needs a punk rock of business models the same way it needed punk rock in the mid-1970s. And, as with punk, none of the incumbent powers will be the ones who figure it out.

UPDATE: The 24 hours is over; thank you all for participating.

Happy Joe Strummer’s birthday

Joe Strummer of the Clash would have been 57 today. So today seems like a good day to give Clash fans a present.

It’s been two years. Does anyone remember The Sandinista Project?

In May 2007, Abe Bradshaw and the crazy geniuses at 2 Minutes 59 Records let me put out a borderline-insane track-by-track tribute to the Clash’s Sandinista!, with a different artist performing each of the album’s 36 songs. (You can read Abe’s version of the origin myth here.) We received mostly positive reviews from publications ranging from The New York Times to Pasadena Weekly, although someone told me that Robert Christgau hated it. More important, it was a great experience: I got to work with many of my favorite performers and create something.

The Sandinista Project is free for a day

The Sandinista Project didn’t set any sales records. Indeed, the number of copies distributed by unauthorized file-sharing sites was greater than the number we sold. We didn’t undertake the project to make ourselves any money (it was a charity record) so I didn’t mind that it was available everywhere for free. That’s the record biz nowadays. But it did bother me that so many of the versions available on torrenting sites (yes, I downloaded a few; depressing research) sounded like crap. They were encoded at low bit rates and sample rates, sometimes there were digital skips, and there was never any packaging. Guys, if you’re going to steal from us, at least make us look and sound good. Please.

To rectify this situation, for one day only, we’re offering, without charge, 256K versions (in M4A format, which works in iTunes and elsewhere) of every song on the record, as well as one bonus cut and PDFs of the CD booklet and packaging. So now, if you decide to steal this, it won’t sound quite so bad. You’ll still be stealing, but you won’t be stealing junk. And hurry up: this is a 24-hour offer. At midnight Pacific Time tonight, I’m taking down the big file.

UPDATE: The 24 hours is over; thank you all for participating.

Over the weekend I finished Wrestling With Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City. It was a pretty good book about the battle between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs over the future of Manhattan. The author is clearly on Jacobs’ side, but he shines light on both positions.

This was a big battle with big stakes, fought by people with big personalities. Anthony Flint lays out those stakes well, but I left the book disappointed because there was never any in-person confrontation between Moses and Jacobs. This isn’t Flint’s fault — it never happened, and he wasn’t going to make it up — but if I ever read a novel about such a high-stakes battle, I’d be disappointed if there was no direct meeting. I want to read about conflict rising and resolved. Yet another case, I suppose, in which fiction is more satisfying than real life.

Tim Krekel died today. He was a magnificent songwriter, singer, and guitarist. His career extended back to Crazy Love for Capricorn in the late 1970s, but I met him in the mid-1980s when he fronted The Sluggers, part of the Praxis family, that genius cluster of performers and entrepreneurs in Nashville who casually invented the next few generations of American rock’n'roll. Two of his songs for Jason and the Scorchers, “I Can’t Help Myself” and “Greetings from Nashville,” stand among the most exhilarating and hard-headed American rock’n'roll I’ve ever heard. They will last as long as people care about music: i.e., forever.

One of the great pleasures in making The Sandinista Project was reconnecting after a long, long time with performers I knew back when I made a meager living on the outskirts of the music industry. Tim was one of the first people I asked to contribute to the record, and he responded promptly with one of the collection’s standouts: a swamp-soul reworking of “Version City” (M4A format). The performance captures Tim’s deep knowledge of many kinds of American music (I got goose bumps the first time I heard the horns kick in), his original take on anything you could throw at him, his humor, and his knockout guitar and arrangements. He was an artist and a gentleman, a rare combination.

Back in December, I tried to make this happen. Tonight, I finally did. Visual proof:

Those of you who know me know I’m a Marcel Proust nut. I’ve read the monster novel several times in several translations, I once started a dummy email address with his name in it that stuck because I never figured out how to merge Google accounts, and I even made a failed attempt to learn how to read French so I could go at the Search in the original. It’s almost obsessive, I know. Sometimes Proust’s audacity and control inspire me in my own work; sometimes they remind me how much my own work stinks. Either way, there are far worse things a guy could obsess about.

I read a lot about Proust, too, and some of those books get pretty obscure. Take The Memoirs of Ernest A. Forssgren, Proust’s Swedish Valet, which will never be made into a movie by Jerry Bruckheimer. It is a minor book, interesting only to true nuts, but what makes it worth mentioning are the hilarious annotations by William C. Carter (who wrote a strong Proust bio a decade or so ago). Carter understands the historical importance of Forssgren’s thin memoir, but it’s clear he thinks very, very little of Forssgren. He can’t mention that Forssgren “was an amateur linguist” without following that with “with the emphasis on amateur,” and the book is full of footnotes such as “This statement is very suspect” and “This is simply laughable” and regular digs at Forssgren’s memory and writing ability. My personal favorite: “Forssgren apparently intended to attribute this line to Proust but forgot to enclose it in quotes.” Or maybe it’s “We can see from this document that Forssgren was capable of misspelling the simplest, most common French words — even ‘France’ itself.”

At first Carter’s asides seemed gratuitous, like the comments a frustrated academic would make in a Nabokov novel. But Carter is no frustrated academic. He’s quite a successful one, a master of his material. As the book dragged on, it was Carter’s notes that kept me reading, not Forssgren’s writing. The commentary was as funny and pointed as the core text was meandering and confusing. It was like an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000: the wiseasses in the theater are more entertaining than what they are watching.

Before we leave Forssgren, probably forever, let me mention that early in the book there is a list of his items donated to the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Most of it is what you’d expect — the typescript of his memoir, some signed Proust books — but one made me laugh out loud: “a copy of Forssgren’s proposed phonetic alphabet to reform the spelling of the English language.” Good luck with that, Ernest.

One of the many reasons I produced The Sandinista Project was to show how The Clash’s music, decades after the demise of the band, could go in new places. Looks like I wasn’t the only one with that idea:

A new wave of Latin stars is paying homage to The Clash in a concert featuring versions of their songs put though a blender of salsa, reggae, Mexican and other flavors. “Spanish Bombs: A Tropical Tribute to The Clash” debuted at London’s Barbican Theater this week. Backed by a 15-piece band complete with horns, congas and cantina-style accordion, guest singers tore through a repertoire of Clash favorites from “London Calling” to “Guns of Brixton” in true fiesta spirit.

(Source: Reuters, This Is Radio Clash, Latin-Style. Thanks, Owen, for letting me know about this!)

Music this thrilling and ambitious can’t help but live on, evolve, and inspire new generations. The future is unwritten!

First it came out in Europe and it looked like this.

It didn’t get the attention it deserved. Then Ida put it out independently with the track listing moved around and expanded and it looked like this.

It didn’t take over the world in that iteration, so now it’s out on a new label with yet another messed-with track listing. It looks like this.

Most important for my stateside friends, this last version is available in the Lower 48 at reasonable prices. Get Ida Maria’s Fortress Around My Heart, which was my record of the year last year and is looking to duplicate the feat.

Over on PaidContent, Staci Kramer, ace reporter and Jill Sobule fan, reports AP Launching Newspaper Industry Campaign To ‘Protect’ News Content. Oy vey. If the people running newspapers and wire services (both now antiquated terms) think that aggregators stealing their content, rather than their own inability to navigate the dynastic shift I mention here, is their biggest problem, maybe they do deserve to go away. Those aggregators are giving the newspapers new customers. Why don’t the newspapers welcome (and focus on monetizing) their new customers rather than hope to sue away new technologies and business models? I’m having a how-the-record-industry-treated-Napster-in-a-way-that-hastened-its-own-demise flashback.

UPDATE: Staci has a super analysis follow-up today. I reproduce the lede in full: “Those of you who have never owned a mercury thermometer and a tiled floor at the same time probably won’t get this but the Associated Press campaign to “protect” news content is the online equivalent of trying to pick up mercury after you drop the glass thermometer. It’s virtually impossible to pick it all up and maddening to try. The AP and the news industry won’t be able to pick up all of the ways news content is used, even with the most sophisticated tagging or other technologies. And even if they manage to do so, they won’t be able to stop it all.”

By the time The Boston Globe arrived Saturday morning with the ominous headline Times Co. Threatens To Shut Globe, it was old news and that’s the problem. The story had been broken the day before by Adam Reilly at The Boston Phoenix and Monica Brady-Myerov at WBUR, both via electronic media; by the time the newspaper landed with a very light thud at homes and newsstands, the story had moved along. On Saturday morning, the initial shock had moved on to questions about management’s negotiation tactics and other meta-issues. The bloggers and microbloggers had taken over the story.

The Boston Globe is an inconsistent newspaper. Some sections, particularly Washington and Metro, are strong; others, like Sports, are driven by personality and trivia; still others, like Living/Arts, are so full of factual and conceptual errors that they rise to mediocrity only on a very good day. But none of that may matter when considering the survival of the newspaper. The life-threatening problem facing The Boston Globe is not, primarily, a content problem. The Boston Globe is middling and The New York Times may be the best in the English language, but they both face the same problem: a combination technology and business problem that adds up to a dynastic problem.

It’s the end of the print dynasty as the primary delivery mechanism for the content typically housed in a newspaper. Although papers as different in quality as The Boston Globe and The New York Times have shrinking print readerships, they have strong and, in many cases, growing online readerships. People want their product — just not in the wrapper that the newspapers currently offer as their primary product. Indeed, the costs associated with delivering the newspapers on paper are so extraordinary that one enterprising reporter has imagined a dramatically different and provocative way to spend that money.

If I’m right that this is a dynastic problem, not a content problem, then better content — although always desirable — will not solve the profound problems facing newspapers. The businesspeople charged with saving the Globe, whether it be the current ownership or a new team, must confront the truth that cutting down trees, printing tree-based products on large machines, and delivering smaller packages via trucks, is a dead business model for the delivery of timely news.

I’m not arguing that print as a general medium is dead. I am arguing what should be self-evident, but isn’t to many in newspaper management: that print as a way to deliver timely news will soon be over. Smart folks at the Globe and the Times may well dream up tough-minded, profitable print products, but those print products will be expensive, low-volume, premium entries, not mass-market ones. There is a small but sustainable audience that will pay a premium price for a high-quality physical item, so long as it plays to the strength of a physical item, such as permanence, portability, and higher, more controllable production values. But that print product will be secondary to its electronically published siblings. Once publishers stop wrestling with that, they can focus entirely on building the future rather than resuscitating the past. Even those of us who see the Globe as far from perfect want it to survive — but the powers that be on Morrissey Avenue and across the street from Port Authority had better understand that the only way it can survive is in a far different form. Newspapers: you wanna live? Give us new products. Now.

(Disclosure: Between 1998 and 2006, I served on and off as a consultant to boston.com, The Boston Globe’s website, and over the past 15 or so years I have written a grand total of one book review and two op-eds for The Globe, none more recent than 2005. )

Have something interesting to say about how being sustainable gives your business an advantage? MIT Sloan Management Review wants to know. Email me at my work address: jimmyg AT mit DOT edu

I’ve lost my copies of the two Richard Thompson Doom and Gloom cassettes. Anyone out there have ‘em? A fan waits and hopes …

UPDATE: Thank you, Internet, as always.

I’m at TED this week for MIT Sloan Management Review. First post: TED: A manager’s introduction

UPDATE: There’s now a landing page for all my TED coverage.