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.

In recent years, it became fashionable to trash John Updike, usually for being too white, too moderate, too old, too prolific, not progressive enough. Even the most energetic and successful of those takedowns, David Foster Wallace’s 1998 essay “Certainly the End of Something or Other,” later collected in Consider the Lobster, sometimes seems more concerned with political correctness and the likability of a protagonist than any literary or story failings.

It’s true that Updike’s later works are not the ones he’ll be remembered for (although I’ll argue that In the Beauty of the Lilies, from 1996, stands among his most ambitious and deeply felt). The last Updike story I loved was “Natural Color,” published in 1998 and collected in Licks of Love. It’s the pick of many later stories in which older men looked back on earlier romances, this time with withering results. To make sure I got the year right, I just looked up the story on a New Yorker DVD. The story is accompanied by the keywords “divorce,” “New England,” “sex,” “husbands,” “old age,” “winter,” “love affairs,” “redheads,” “hair color.” I tend to distrust algorithms when it comes to fiction, but that list sure offers a neat encapsulation of Updike’s interests.

The last novel Updike published while he was alive, Terrorist (2006), doesn’t work particularly well. The characters are unusually flat, speaking in topic sentences, Updike sometimes confuses his audience with that of his characters, and the climax hinges on at least two unbelievable coincidences. But it is by John Updike, so if you give it your attention you are privy to one brilliant section. Roughly two-thirds of the way through, pretty much out of nowhere, someone who I thought was a minor character, one Charlie Chehab, launches into a lengthy, hilarious, insane, and occasionally persuasive argument that the soldiers of the American Revolution were the Al-Qaeda of their time. I won’t quote an excerpt; it must be read in its entirety and it gains more weight later in the novel when we learn something new about Chehab. It’s a thrilling riff unimaginable from any other author. Even when he was allegedly past his prime, Updike could deliver something surprising, unprecedented, and unmistakably his. We should all age that way.

Good morning, friends. We made it. Eight years of lies, disregard for the Constitution, and world-wrecking incompetence are behind us, although I suspect we’ll all be living with the damage, direct and collateral, for decades. It is amazing, though: A man who two generations ago would have had problems being allowed to even vote for President in a large swath of this country is now taking the office. Obama appears to be thoughtful and interested in facts, which already places him far beyond the outgoing administration. The U.S. needs a little good news, and today, for a change, we have some.

Obama assumes responsibility for a unique collection of environmental, military, political, and social catastrophes. No human can reverse all that in a mere four or eight years. He can turn the country in the right direction, though, no matter how far behind course we are, no matter how far this country has to go to live up to its ideals. Better to be in the first few feet of a marathon in the right direction than to continue stubbornly limping in the wrong direction. Remember: If the election had gone the other way, even the committed atheists among us would have been going to sleep tonight praying desperately for four years of good health for John McCain so his vice president doesn’t take over. I am thrilled that Obama is being sworn in as President, particularly considering the alternative. And I’m thrilled even without that: the word “unimaginable” is overused in our culture, often used to mean “not very common.” But his ascendance, until very recently, was unimaginable. Nice to have an unimaginable positive surprise, for a change.

Obama is not leading us into Paradise. He is a conventional middle-of-the-road Democrat in many ways, and he has already begun backpedaling from some of his more progressive campaign positions. Despite his reading a good book about the last American president who was in a similar mess, it appears that Obama’s economic turnaround plan may be too timid for today’s emergency.

Timid for whom, though? I think for the country, but I probably mean too timid for those of us on the left side of most arguments. (I’ll be happy to see Gene Robinson up there today, but don’t get me started on Obama’s refusal to support marriage equality.) We on the left represent, at best, maybe half the country. Obama’s job is to rescue the whole damn country, not just approved-by-committed-lefties issues. If we on the left were not criticizing him for being too timid, he would not be doing his job leading the whole country.

Where does that leave me/us? With one foot inside and one outside. Is that enough? No. But it’s a tremendous improvement over trying to overcome an administration that built its legacy around torture, misdirection, and failure. The country tonight will be a better place than it was last night. Enjoy it. Throw a party. Sleep well. And tomorrow morning, come out fighting.

It’s the quote of the day.

Ad Will Employ Optimism to Sell Coke (WSJ)

Update: They’ve changed the headline to the bland “Coca-Cola to Uncap ‘Open Happiness’ Campaign”

After five years of selling DRM-crippled music, Apple is trying to get out of that business — except Steve Jobs and Associates want their customers to pay for the company’s strategic mistake. Even worse: it used to be that you could repair your broken files one at a time for 30 cents each. Now, as that imposing, solitary “BUY” button makes clear, regular customers of the iTunes Music Store can make up for five years of Apple’s music-selling mistake only in one expensive swoop. Wouldn’t Apple gain more goodwill (and, in the long term, more money) if it simply liberated files that its loyal customers had paid for already?

I know many Apple products have astonishingly good hardware and software design. But does that make up for the company treating its customers this way?

Regular readers of this blog know I’m a big fan of Ida Maria. It turns out that she’ll be playing two shows in New York in January (Jan. 15 @ Mercury Lounge; Jan. 16 @ Union Hall). I hope to go.

But there’s a catch. Aside from Maura Johnston at Idolator, who I’m sure will be at the shows without any problems, the only person I know who’s as big a fan of her as I am is my daughter, who will be a week shy of 13 the week I.M. is in New York and, no matter how she presents herself, no competent bouncer will let her into a 21+ show.

So I’m turning to the Internets. People: how can I get my Lydia in to see Ida Maria? Jane suggests I could arrange to get Lydia into the sound check. That’s an excellent idea, and I have a few almost-as-good ones I’ll try. I’ll contact the clubs and Maria’s management shortly.

But, first, I’d like to harness some collective intelligence. Internets, can you help us? What should we do? Can you help us?

Now that Caroline Kennedy is on her way to being appointed to her uncle’s old Senate seat, the analysts and bloggers and bloggers who think they’re analysts are arguing whether she is qualified for the gig. It’s early, but there are signs that Kennedy might be subjected to the full Palin treatment.

I’m not here to argue whether Kennedy is Senator-ready; to be honest, I have no idea (although I do think that starting one’s career as an elected official at such a high level is presumptuous and possible only to celebrities, including the current governor of California, who is related to Kennedy in a way too complicated for me to figure out).

I am, however, here to argue that these questions about qualification tend to be directed far more at women than men. If I lived in Minnesota, chances are I would have voted for Al Franken for Senator. But I’m under no illusion that anything in the guy’s history of ad hominem jokes about Republicans makes him qualified for the office. Harry Reid ran for Senate leader on a platform to end the war in Iraq and then was completely ineffective at that (and plenty of other things). No one talks about whether Harry Reid is qualified for his job. Why? Because he’s a man.

I’m a committed lefty. I’m relieved Sarah Palin is back in Alaska, where she can do far less damage than she could in Washington, D.C. But I have no doubt that plenty of the attacks on her were because she was a woman. Let’s not do it again, guys. Considering the moronic men who roam the Senate chambers, it’s just stupid.

A couple tweets recently from Officemate Sean got me thinking about this great record. Also, I’ve been thinking about Write Articles, Not Blog Postings, a smart essay from Jakob Nielsen that advocates smarter, longer text entries online. Since I’m microblogging anway, it makes sense to think long on the blog. I appreciate Nielsen for another reason: my rarely updated website stole its design from his frequently updated one.

Anyway, here goes:

In late 1977, 22-year-old British songwriter and singer Elvis Costello played his first dates in America. Those early performances were short and furious: “Revenge and guilt,” he told early interviewers who demanded his motives. Their shows climaxed with the guitarist and his band, the Attractions, drenches their audiences in waves of feedback as they vacated the stage. “I’m not angry,” Costello sang on his debut album My Aim Is True. That was a lie.

The mainstream American pop audience first heard Costello during a Saturday Night Live performance in which he halted a familiar song and ordered the Attractions to start “Radio Radio,” a damnation of American radio that assured his longtime blackballing from it. The pair of albums that followed, the punk-inspired This Year’s Model and pop-deconstruction Armed Forces, established Costello as a resourceful songwriter who dissected domestic and political strife without anesthetizing audience or issue and his Attractions as a fiery yet tasteful unit that could attack reckless rockers and caress carefully constructed ballads with equal aplomb.

Following some drunken stupidity that for many years was all most American pop listeners knew about him, Costello then spent the better part of a decade scrambling for a niche, even though even an indecisive Costello has merit. The 1980 Get Happy!! was a sketchy tour though physical and moral expatriation with Stax-filtered soul; Imperial Bedroom (1982) wove an astonishing, ambitious collage of late-Beatles pop landscapes. But then, as if that expansive idea had claimed all his ideas, Costello traded wordplay for facility and his accompaniment, once terse and unforgiving, deteriorated into dilettantism, hopping among genres with the discretion of a sailor on leave. It wasn’t a complete fall; the personal venom and political acuity of early Costello occasional slipped through the cracks of his crumbling career.

In 1984, after Costello had completed recorded his most desultory album (not-too-subtly titled Goodbye Cruel World), he embarked on a solo tour and reclaimed his career. He shed the Attractions, whose lush backup had dulled what straightforward melodies and narratives he still conjured. He followed that tour with a short jaunt backed by the Attractions, but made clear that he had one foot out the door. “I was a fine idea at the time,” he sang on one of his new tunes. “But now I’m a brilliant mistake.” He got divorced and remarried and put the Attractions on hiatus. Then he recorded the album of his life.

Performers make different noises when they think — or fear — that no one is listening. King of America was the sound of a zombie coming back to life, or a life in fear of turning into a zombie. He identified the “kingdom of the invisible” in “Little Palaces” as the place where Prince William may reign one day, but that was where all these characters lived. Every line on the album was sung by narrators terrified that they will disappear, certain only that they don’t matter. No one worried about the world falling apart because they were convinced that it had already. The rockabilly “Glitter Gulch,” on surface a light poke at American game shows that ended with the winner taking up with the hostess, railed against the crassness in any relationship: “He climbed upon his honey and he covered her with money,” Costello spat. Amid these ravages, there was a hovering love (”I’ll Wear It Proudly,” “Jack of All Parades”) that never quite landed — but its proximity made the pain nearly bearable. The music was a lanky foundation, loose yet precise. Built around the core of Elvis Presley’s last band, here dubbed the Confederates, they squeezed inside the songs, nourishing them instead of inflating them. Several years after Almost Blue, a tentative and rather obvious set of C&W standards, Costello was finally able to incorporate the personal moral profundity of top-drawer C&W into the public ethical demands of his most lasting work. Child ballads, Chicago blues, waltzes: everything fit in, commented on other elements, and enhanced one another.

Costello produced the record with T Bone Burnett, another hyperverbal/cynical performer looking for a way to unclutter his mind and his music, and the combination resulted in as honest and direct an LP as Costello will likely ever record. They knew that embellishment would have been superfluous. The songs on King of America justified themselves without any of the insular alterations that a studio-weary Costello later employed to deflate some of his finest Nineties compositions. The distances — between performer and audience, between song and arrangement, between performer and song, between born name and jokey stage monicker — that have always fascinated Costello, even on many of his stronger outings, are almost totally absent on King of America, replaced by a singer and guitarist obsessed with paring away, telling a truth. Costello still loved words too much not to tinker with them; hence such lines as “Like a chainsaw running through a dictionary,” from “Our Little Angel,” an ominous country ballad, built around James Burton’s pointed, graceful guitar nudges. But this time Costello wasn’t hiding behind words.

To complete his public rehabilitation, Costello cast off on a wacko tour featuring him in a variety of configurations, some profound, most amusing. For the final encore of the tour’s last show, Costello chose “Poor Napoleon,” a slight, funny song about impotence from Blood and Chocolate, the rush-recorded-but-half-great reunion with the Attractions. As the tale reached its conclusion, the instruments stopped emitting notes and started shooting out distortion, until the noise turned painful. The feedback still filled the theater after the band left the stage for good and the house lights went up. Costello had brought both his band and his audience back where they had started, with noting resolved.

(This is a reworking of something I wrote long ago — late 1986, I think, for The Nation, which accepted it but never published it. A revised version of it appeared in one of my books. Reading it now, I realize I was lucky enough to have written about Costello at his peak.)

(Thanks to my colleague Tom Davenport, whose excellent article in the forthcoming MIT Sloan Management Review provoked this image.)

Work is heating up (hence my presence in front of a computer on a Sunday afternoon) and one of the things that’s gotta give over the next month, until we get the new MIT Sloan Management Review website up and stable, is blogging. But don’t fear: I’m still going to deliver useless information to you. It’s just that for the next month I’ll be doing it in 140-character increments, i.e. via Twitter. In recent weeks I’ve found it to be a good vehicle for making one point quickly and then moving on. This is not one of those occasional hiatuses (hiati?) I pull here every few months. You’re welcome to follow me on Twitter. And I will be back here on a regular basis once work permits. And, face it, 140 characters at a time of me might be all you need most days.

(For those of you who follow my updates on Facebook, I use Ping.fm to update Facebook and Twitter simultaneously and identically. You don’t have to subscribe to both.)

The site won’t let me embed the video, but you must see this.

“Clean coal is like healthy cigarettes – it does not exist.” — Al Gore

Remember the Milk – Temporarily Unavailable

In May 2003, I wrote an essay about a posthumously released John Fahey CD, Red Cross. I just came across a copy of that review. I’d forgotten I wrote it. In part because my blog entries from 2003 are long trashed, I have no idea whether I published this anywhere. But I know it’s online now.

The myth of John Fahey is a heady thing. The late guitarist, writer, painter, entrepreneur, heckler, rescue mission resident, and ornery comeback king, full of contradictions in every role, could easily be used as a vehicle to tell many good stories: The rise and fall of American independent labels (he founded Takoma and Revenant), the era of rediscovering blues giants (he found long-lost Skip James and Bukka White, among others), and the advent of New Age music, which happened on his watch at Takoma, to name but three. As for that last one, don’t judge Fahey too harshly; it would be like blaming the Beatles for the Knack.

Fahey’s life has a strong narrative arc. It begins with a Maryland kid buying old records and rebuilding the careers of some of the performers on them; it ends with Fahey’s own rediscovery after some down-and-out years in Portland and him casing used record stores full of his 40-plus LPs. And there’s something fascinating about someone so deeply, unstoppably verbal (read his collection of essays How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life) who doesn’t sing.

The myth isn’t nearly as complex or rewarding as Fahey’s music. His greatest critical success came from the first six records he released in the 1960s, most of them with the word “Death” in their titles, as he fused blues, ragtime, and bluegrass solo-guitar styles with methods of song structure that had more in common with classical composers than his fellow folkies. Those records seem austere and peaceful during an initial distracted listening, then you get pulled in, listen more and more, and realize how eccentric and ravaged they are. Sometimes listeners didn’t get past the surface: Fahey’s greatest commercial success was a solo-guitar Christmas record in which he pushed Yule standards through a peculiar Delta blues funnel.

Fahey’s music keeps showing up in record stores, again and again. Fahey is not as productive in the afterlife as Tupac Shakur or John Coltrane, at least not yet. Diehards welcomed last month’s reissue of Old Fashioned Love, an uncharacteristic 1975 set in which Fahey’s solo performances jostle alongside some wacky, full-band Dixieland exercises and three strong duets with fellow guitarist Woody Mann. Also out within the past year from Fantasy, which now owns the Takoma catalog, is an expanded version of The Best of John Fahey that covers the early Takoma recordings sensibly.

The most enticing piece of recent Faheyiana is a “new” record, Red Cross (Revenant), much of it recorded in the months before Fahey’s death in February 2001. The posthumous set pulls together most of the strands of Fahey’s restless career, makes some clever connections, and offers a pair of revelations.

A chunk of Fahey’s later work, some of it recorded with Sonic Youth’s Jim O’Rourke, sought to replace his unerring sense of melody and calm with an almost-as-unerring sense of noise and terror, and the near-title cut “Red Cross, Disciple of Christ Today” builds a rickety but passable bridge between his more accessible and more experimental recent work. The guitar figures rise and fall in waves of echo and decay, creating an eerie, moaning late-night feel that’s equal parts Highway 61 and Twin Peaks. Similarly, “Untitled With Rain” is a spooky evocation hovering over organ, chimes, and sundry effects. On the more traditional side, a mow through “Summertime” starts straightahead and then we get to ride shotgun with Fahey as he shows how much he can mess around with well-worn melody and meter but still deliver the Gershwins’ composition in recognizable form.

Midway through Red Cross, Fahey fans are back in familiar territory. Extremely familiar, it turns out. The sly, percussive “Annanaias” is extremely reminiscent of Fahey’s classic “American primitive” style, and it’s a hissier recording (on headphones, anyway) than the songs that precede it on the CD. Those two clues led a Fahey discussion group on the Net to conclude, correctly, that despite the CD credits, “Annanaias” and another piece, “Charley Bradley’s Ten-Sixty-Six Blues,” were in fact put on tape in 1977 around the height of Fahey’s performing career (if a bit past his compositional apex). In particular, the compact “Charley Bradley’s Ten-Sixty-Six Blues” is outstanding. You can hear Fahey use a lighter touch than later work, playing sprightly and deftly – and then he surprises you with an unexpected section, at first apparently unrelated to the previous sections of the song, that he reconnects to the main theme. That’s the key to Fahey’s greatest work – surprise – and that’s why the two quarter-century-old cuts rise so high and cast a shadow over the rest of Red Cross. Most of the collection is very good, but back in 1977 Fahey was far beyond very good.

(May 2003)

Are there coyotes in those woods?

(What are these sentences?)

In work and life, we put off things we have to do forever and ever until they are causing us so much stress that we have to DO THEM RIGHT NOW. After we do, we’re surprised how little time, effort, and imagination we needed to draw on to get everything done. I’m having this experience right now. As I wrote in Remember the Milk fails to serve its Outlook users — or does it understand its audience perfectly? and the followup post Remember the Milk forgets me … but is it my fault?, I wrote about how hard it was getting the online task service Remember the Milk to work with Microsoft Outlook and I realized — after promptings from two of my smarter Friends on the Internets — that the problem was my reliance on Outlook. At MIT, I was finally working in a technology-agnostic environment. I wrote, “I’m going to move my work life to the cloud slowly and carefully.” I’d been working in Outlook for many years, ever since a client forced me to leave my beloved Eudora. The plan was to move slowly and calmly, so I didn’t lose any data or screw up my workflow more than it’s usually screwed up.

It took about a day.

I am a bit embarrassed about how easy it was. I won’t bore you with the particulars (fortunately for you, this is not one of those blogs that talks about the intricacies and idiosyncracies of secure POP-to-IMAP transfers), but I can tell you that (a) I’m not the world’s most tech-savvy blogger and (b) after about an hour I didn’t miss Outlook. Sure, there are compromises in getting the new system to work my way, but there were compromises in getting the old one to work my way, too. (One compromise I didn’t have to make: the most essential of my Outlook add-ons, Anagram, is available in a more lightweight version for Gmail and Google Calendar.)

Until the past few weeks, I understood on an abstract level that the computing world was moving inexorably from desktop-based applications to cloud-based ones. When I was editing Release 2.0 I reported from the front lines of the transition. But I didn’t truly grok it until I uninstalled Microsoft Office and looked for myself. Web apps have nearly all the functionality of desktop apps, they’re infinitely lighter and more portable, and they’re a whole lot cheaper. It’s pretty clear up here in the cloud. And, as Brian pointed out, I never have to wait for Outlook to open ever again. Microsoft is going to have to do a lot more than get funnier jokes out of Jerry Seinfeld to beat this.

I’ve been trolling “about” pages as I’m writing one for the MIT SMR website relaunch, and I just came across this:

“We’re still in beta, which means we still suck.” — from the “about” page on Business Sheet.

Great atttitude.

I’m a big Philip Roth fan (maybe for some reason I am particularly interested in Jewish writers from New Jersey), but Indignation isn’t very good: slight as best, exercise at worst. It’s not that the main character is unlikable; all Roth protagonists are jerks in one way or another. It’s that this jerk narrator is boring and what happens to him is uninteresting. He complains, he reacts to things that happen to him, he dies. That’s it. For an author who excels at creating repulsive protagonists you want to read about forever (hello, Mickey Sabbath!), this is disappointing. But even greats produce subpar work (among New Jersey artists, this is known as the Human Touch rule).

I write that having just finished it in one evening. So what am I doing dismissing a book I devoured all at once? How bad could it be, really, if I couldn’t put it down? It’s because of what Robert McKee identifies as the difference between literary talent and story talent. Roth’s spectacular literary talent grabbed me and pulled me through the book. His sentences are elegant, highly charged, surprising, as always. But the story is hackneyed, tossed-off, nowhere near as considered as the words Roth uses to tell it. Technically, Indignation is strong and lots of fun. But those marvelous words and sentences and paragraphs are wasted on a character and a story unworthy of them. Literary talent isn’t uncommon; story talent is. Roth has both by the truckload and it’s a surprise when the latter abandons him, even if only this one time. In traditional fiction, it doesn’t matter how thrilling the sentences are if they’re not in the service of a story.

I, of course, don’t have a fraction of Roth’s story talent. He’s written 25 novels, most of them of the top rank, and I’ve written, oh, let me count … zero. So feel free to ignore me. But maybe novices can be heartened that even their heroes don’t knock it out of the park every time. And that reminds me: I have something else I should be writing right now…

Turns out the Guns N’ Roses record Chinese Democracy is more than a mere 16 years late. As you can see from this undercover cameraphone shot taken by Eric “Who’s he gonna open for next summer?” Hellweg at the Harvard Club in NY City, people were worrying about when this record would come out, back in 1953, nine years before W. Axl Rose was born:

Harvard Chinese Democracy

Like many in the insulated west, I’ve long been fascinated by North Korea, what life is like in there, and what will happen to the peninsula after the walls come down. (Of course, I’m half a world away, so I have the luxury of being fascinated with North Korea. Life inside the country, I suspect, is beyond rough and might get even worse in the first years of reunification.) I’ve read extensively on the country, enough so that I almost understand the concept of juche. And I’ve explored the country a bit in my fiction. My novel-in-progress has a sequence in which an over-the-hill rocker is invited to perform a goodwill concert in Pyongyang, although I’m not sure the subplot it’s part of will earn space in the final draft.

So it was a delight this morning when I saw that my hometown website published Recent scenes from North Korea, a collection of 32 photos, all taken this year, some from wire services, some from freelancer Eric Lafforgue’s recent trip, some shot inside the nation, some shot across the border. I won’t reproduce them here, but they are diverse, surprising, and well worth seeing.

Theremenists for Obama

(Thanks, Brian)

Sara Palin Baby Name Generator

(Thanks, Sean)

Lucinda Williams Plots Protest Songs EP (Billboard)

Jason and the Scorchers are receiving an award later this week and will perform, probably for the last time ever. (See Jason and The Scorchers get their due in The Tenneseean for details; ego warning: I’m quoted in the article.) The Scorchers are an important, under-recognized band and it should please me, a longtime fan, that they’re getting some attention. Instead, it’s making me angry. They should be getting a lot more than just an award from an organization specializing in the “Americana” radio format. After all, Jason and the Scorchers were one of two bands in the early ’80s that invented the damn form. The awards I want them to receive are gold and platinum records, the audience I want them to have is the arena-sized one they have earned.

I remember in late 1983, Jason Ringenberg, the band’s lead singer balanced himself on a rickety stool in the basement of a now-boarded Philadelphia dive and wished aloud what he wanted his band to sound like. “Like a religious service,” he said wistfully, “only a lot dirtier.”

Then as now, this is not an attitude that brings major labels running, and Jason and the Scorchers were the great lost band of the eighties, making the great lost American rock’n'roll band ever, starting great and getting even better with each record, though fewer and fewer people heard them each time around. In the eighties, the music industry was simply not geared to handle an original group like Jason and the Scorchers, a ferocious hard-rock band with a strong grounding in country-and-western. (A few years later Kentucky Headhunters, a group with similar sources but none of the wildness, founds itself among the most-loved bands in Nashville. If any traditional rock’n'toll band in the eighties was ahead of its time, it was Jason and the Scorchers.

The Scorcher’s debut EP, 1982’s Reckless Country Soul, is the sound of Joe Strummer hurling a wrecking ball through the Grand Ol’ Opry. Its standout, “Shot Down Again,” starts with Ringenberg screaming, “Look out London — here come the Scorchers!” Pop-music historians will recognize this as important early evidence of the anti-eighties-hair-bands-from-England backlash.

Fervor, recorded the following year, elaborates the band’s strengths. Drawing from both their country-and-western and rock-and-roll sources, the Scorchers burn a country-rock path such poseurs as the Eagles would never have found even if their dealers had given them detailed directions. Drummer Perry Baggs and bass player Jeff Johnson give Ringenberg’s edgy songs a solid foundation while Warner Hodges slides from delicate lap-steel to dirty guitar-hero styles without allowing either to sound like an afterthought. The record, full of, well, scorching originals and a knockout version of Bob Dylan’s “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” had the immediacy of the group’s live show. Although Hodges wasn’t standing at the edge of a stage sucking a cigarette and Ringenberg wasn’t dancing like Ed Norton on methamphetamines, Fervor came across just as hard as the group did live.

And, as far as the record industry was concerned, that was it. At first, being signed to a major was good for the Scorchers: it gave a reworked Fervor (the Praxis original didn’t have the Dylan cover) a second chance. But despite terrific record after terrific record and blazing show after blazing show, the band was too direct and unpretentious to thrive commercially.

I know that for many years I made my living as a critic and all I should care about is the quality of the work in question. But Jason and the Scorchers are/were one of America’s greatest rock’n'roll bands and it makes me mad that they didn’t get all they deserved.

(Disclosure: I produced a now-out-of-print Scorchers compilation — there’s a pic above of the cover I’ll post the liner notes if/when I find ‘em — and Ringenberg contributed a cut to The Sandinista Project.)

James Taylor Writing Songs For Next Album (Billboard)

I raved about it last week and I love the record more now. There’s no U.S. release of the CD planned anytime soon, I’ve learned. But for now (thanks to a video Lydia found), we can watch a three-year-old dancing while she watches Ida Maria on TV. That counts for something, doesn’t it?

U.S. to Pull 8,000 Troops From Iraq Early in ’09 (NYT)

Only in the seventh paragraph do we learn:

Mr. Bush will also announce a decision to increase American force levels in Afghanistan by about 4,500 troops, according to the draft of the speech.

It’s not a troop reduction. It’s a redeployment.

Thai Premier Forced Out for Hosting Cooking Show (AP, via NYT.com)

More and more, it’s hard to tell whether you’re reading an Onion headline or a legit one.

I own the domain guterman.com. You’re visiting this blog at blog.guterman.com. But that’s not enough for WordPress. Every time I log in, it suggests URLs I should buy. F’rinstance:

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I am very happy to have moved this blog from Blogger to WordPress. But, Web 2.0 fans, it’s worth pointing out that sometimes the algorithm is flat-out wrong.

Radical Mormon Cult Financed By Selling Of Bob Dylan Bootlegs (Idolator). Not actually true, but what a headline.

“You are not authorized to remove yourself from this mailing list.”

A few weeks ago in this space I celebrated “Wooly Bully.”

Well, it turns out that someone else from New Jersey has been enjoying this lately, too (MP3 from August 30 show, audience recording so don’t get too excited, 3.1M).

I, too, am having trouble getting non-college-educated whites to agree that I should be their leader. Granted, those three non-college-educated whites are my kids, but I feel Obama’s pain.