McMinn & Cheese

Pinwheel: maps and dreams

April 10th, 2012

I really am starting to get confused, what with the similarities in name between Pinterest and Pinwheel. I recently joined both (out of professional interest), and had no idea whether I’d like them or not.

My default position is not, generally. I quite liked Path when I first got it on my phone, but then they “improved” it and I started to hate it. One of the key “improvements” that will always destroy a social tool is the insistence on Facebook integration. Today’s news is that Instagram, the pointless photo sharing service which was sometimes a convenient way to post a photo to Twitter, has been acquired by Facebook.

You look at social networking startups and wonder how serious they are, or whether the whole strategy is to create something vaguely popular that can then be acquired by Google, or Apple, or Facebook. Flickr was acquired by Yahoo, who then proceeded to do precisely nothing with it (bar changing your log-in). Which is fine by me. Flickr is still more or less what it was.

Caterina Fake, one of the founders of Flickr, has since moved on to found Hunch (which I joined and decided I didn’t much like, especially once the sponsored recommendations descended on it); and now she’s founded another startup, Pinwheel, which is nothing like Pinterest, except when it is.

Pinwheel is in private Beta (I think that’s the term: invite-only) at the moment, but more invites are being sent out to those on the waiting list every week (I have three to spare, if you want one). I joined it a couple of weeks ago and so far I like it a lot. I like it a lot more than just about anything else I’ve tried out of professional interest.

I still use Flickr, but only as a repository for what I consider to be my better photos, in case of hard drive disaster or something like that. I don’t do the social side of Flickr at all. You can only say, “Great shot,” so many times and in so many ways. What Flickr taught me is that any idiot (including me) can take a decent photograph.

Pinwheel fits into the Slow Internet idea (I posted about Slow Music yesterday), which is also in the air because of the new iPhone app Fish, which is worth a look.

Pinwheel about geotagging, and for me it works best when you have a picture of the place in question. Drop a pin on a map, write a story about the place (personal, public, it’s up to you), and add a photo to the entry. In this way, you can revisit memories, favourite photos, or just post useful information. I think the site will pay for itself at some point with sponsored pins, but at the moment I like the way it encourages you to pause and pore over a map and read something about that spot. It certainly suits the way I think, and seems to be a better place for those kind of blog entries you might post about your travels or even memories of childhood.

For some reason, it keeps making me think of Hugh Brody’s title, Maps and Dreams.
A few singles

April 9th, 2012

Hard Promises (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This months The Word magazine has an interesting article about music sharing and curating, proposing the idea that it might be right for a Slow Music movement to match the Slow Food movement.

I like this idea because I’ve thought for a long time that there’s something not quite right about the way music is being consumed these days. I’m not just being nostalgic when I say that for me as a teenager music was a precious commodity, the more so because it was relatively expensive and sometimes hard to find.

My daughter recently returned from a trip to Paris with a copy of Tom Petty‘s Hard Promises on vinyl – in spite of the fact that we do not have at home the means to play said vinyl. I think she instinctively gets it, though. She knows that vinyl is cooler than a download or a CD, and she is quite willing to wait patiently for the playback occasion to present itself.

I joined ThisIsMyJam because the idea of sharing just one song at a time appealed to me.

Everyone’s a critic these days and there are hundreds of blogs reviewing albums and gigs, making the traditional music press more or less redundant. When you read the kind of shit written by professional journalists these days (like this crap from Barney Hoskins in the Graun), it’s not surprising. I’ve published the occasional album review on blogs myself, but personally, I find it a bit of a bore.

Something that occured to me the other day was that the idea of reviewing singles seems to have died a death. Back in the 60s and 70s, the release of a new single was an event. These days a single, if it appears at all, tends to be just a pre-release track from a forthcoming album, part of the hype machine. But then I thought, why not? I’m actually much more interested in writing a review of a single track than I am a whole album.

So here are a few singles I’m playing at the moment. In no particular order:

So You Don’t Have to Love Me Anymore – Alan Jackson

Alan Jackson has released a few decent singles recently, probably from a forthcoming album, but I think it’s great to grab a track in isolation. This one is a slow tempoed ballad which gets to the heart of a certain type of male behaviour.

“I’ll be the bad guy / I’ll take the black eye / When I walk out you can slam the door

I’ll be the SOB / If that’s what you need from me / So you don’t have to love me anymore”

Like all Jackson’s records, the production values are high, and the instrumentation is traditional country: a beautifully mixed ensemble of piano, fiddle, guitars, drums, and vocals. The electric guitar solo is a fine piece of work, and the dynamics of the track rise and fall in a subtle way to the plaintiff ending. The lyrics carry the song (written by Jay Knowles & Adam Wright): he’s happy to leave her with plenty of excuses to complain about him to her friends because he knows she needs to stop loving him. Classic country.

Slow Me Down – Cyndi Thomson

I was pleasantly surprised to see Cyndi Thomson making a comeback. Her first album and single, back at the beginning of this century, were big hits, but then she withdrew from the music industry, feeling unable to take up the promotional grind for a follow-up album. She released a five-track EP in 2009 (“This Time”) and then this single in 2011. It’s another downtempo number, starting with arpeggioed acoustic guitar, piano, and her vocal. Thomson’s voice is sweet and clear, and instantly recogniseable. A string arrangement joins as the track builds. The lyrics could almost make this the theme tune of the Slow Music movement.

Georgia Mud – Joanna Smith

Guitars, mandolin, vocals. This is a typical product of the Nashville scene. A pleasant enough vocal, hard to tell apart from the liks of Carrie Underwood, Kellie Pickler, Julianne Hough and the like. This could have been released at any time in the past 15 years. One of the reasons I’ve always liked Country is that it has this timeless quality. Like Julianne Hough’s song “That Song in My Head“, and hundreds of other country tunes this is one of those songs which are nostalgic for some event in the recent past, in this case some kind of sexual adventure involving mud in, er, Georgia. I like it by the way, which isn’t to say that I can’t see what a construct it is.

Come Home – Faith Hill

Had to acquire this by nefarious means because it’s still not available on the UK iTunes. Faith Hill is by now country royalty, and has clearly had other things going on in recent years. Her last studio album of original material was way back in 2005. She’s released a few singles in the meantime. This is a typically baroque production (there are probably 90 tracks in the mix). I believe Hill’s vocals are always double-tracked, one dry and one wet, and that’s before you get to the layered guitars, backing vocals, pounding rhythm section. Her voice, like husband Tim McGraw‘s, has a lot of exciter on it, so that the track positively fizzes. It’s a masterful production though, building to a massive climax and the strange intrusion of some Beatles-style backing vocals in the fade. Great track.
The best thing on TV right now?

April 1st, 2012

Anything on Sky is excluded because I don’t get it and will never get it. So I won’t even include Fringe, even though I do buy the boxed sets. Boxed sets are not on TV. In no particular order:

1. Justified is back. Season 3.

2. Homeland is silly but has Morena Baccarin in it. I will watch for Morena. I quite liked Damien Lewis in Life, but I also watched Life more because of Sarah Shahi. Life wasn’t as silly as Homeland. I don’t care about terrorism or any of that shit.

3. When I saw ITV had bought Danish drama Those Who Kill, I said to myself, “Well, if ITV bought it, I bet it’s crap.” And it is. It’s just serial-killer-of-the-week, every week. Yeah. Serial killers. *Yawn*

4. Saving Grace. Final season (3) is on More4. It is brilliant, and pisses all over anything liked and praised by the Guardian.

5. The Mentalist/Castle are both light entertainment fun. Nice Firefly tribute from Nathan Fallon this week.

6. CSI/NCIS. Yes, getting old. But CSI has been reinvigorated by having Sam from Cheers in it. Try it, it’s fun. Waiting for a George Wendt cameo.

7. Inspector Montalbano. It’s only average, but it’s a pleasant break from serial killers. Can be quite funny. I quite often just listen to it and don’t bother with the subtitles. I don’t care what they’re saying.

8. Suits. Yeah. Lawyers. It’s all right.

9. The lying game. Preposterous plot about twins separated at birth. But at least it’s not cops, docs, or lawyers.

And what is best? A toss-up between Saving Grace and Justified.
Gretchen Peters, Hello Cruel World

April 1st, 2012

I like some of Gretchen Peters’ songs, but usually prefer them recorded by other people. I’m always vaguely disappointed in Ms Peters’ own albums and this is no exception.

Scratch that. I’m actually more disappointed in this one. It all sounds a bit wet.

I almost didn’t buy it because Ms Peters’ Twitter feed already put me off her. I went to see her on the Wine Women and Song tour last year (with Suzy Bogguss and Matraca Berg). I started following her on Twitter, but noticed that she did a lot of retweeted compliments. A lot. You know, someone says something nice about her, she retweets it.

So I stopped following and almost didn’t buy the record.

I’ve listened to it a couple of times; nothing much jumped out at me, apart from a jarring use of the n-word in one of the songs.

Now, I appreciate that the word is used in the song to make a point. And I take the point. But once the point is taken, I don’t want to keep hearing the word – know what I mean? It’s as if a friend kept saying it over and over again to make the same point – over and over again. Like being slapped in the face repeatedly.

It’s a difficult balance, the use of profanity in a song. In some genres, yes, you expect it. But, for example, when Chely Wright dropped the F-word in a song on her most recent album (to make a point and to separate herself from her Nashville past), it stopped being okay for me after a few listens. It comes on in the car and I want to skip that track – and not just when the kids are in the car. I’m not a prude, and I swear like the proverbial trooper, but what I don’t do is say the same sentence over and over again with the same profanity in the same place. With each repetition it sounds more artificial and more forced and self-knowing and calculated.

The use of the n-word jarred the first time I heard it. And now I don’t ever want that song to come on every again. This seems like the kind of crass miscalculation that someone who retweets compliments about herself would make.
See 1 for why

April 1st, 2012

A few comments on what’s been going on.

1. Pasties

Apart from distracting us from more important things, the media’s rationale for banging on about hot pasties is because they think it illustrates how out of touch with working people the public schoolboys in charge of the country are.

Sure.

My own take on this is that it’s much worse than being out of touch. Actually, I think they know exactly how much financial pain working people, pensioners, and the unemployed are. And they don’t care. They know that working class people are carrying more of the burden of paying for the bailout than the people responsible for it. And they don’t care.

2. Fuel Panic

I think a lot of the queuing at petrol stations probably came down to timing. It is the Easter holiday, and maybe people who were planning to go away on day trips or holidays didn’t want their plans ruined by running out of fuel.

However, if you were queuing because you were worried that you wouldn’t be able to get to work, you’re an idiot. (See 1 for why.)

You also have to understand that, quite a lot of the time, when the government speaks, they’re not speaking to you. They’re speaking to their supporters. They actually believe they’re sending coded messages to their friends, and don’t realise that because of the internet the rest of us are able to intercept and decode these messages.

3. Granny tax.

Boomer tax. Pensioners are a sacred cow, because they’re the only people who regularly vote. But the baby boomers and the generation after are a bit of a demographic bulge, and there’s too much wealth tied up in the bulge. Baby boomers are hitting retirement age, hence the tax hike.

I think it’s fascinating that this is a real tax increase coming from the anti-tax Tory party. But of course there’s no such thing as a tax cut (look at the various dates for Tax Freedom Day under various governments of different colours and you’ll see that nothing really changes). This tax increase was needed to fund the tax cuts for corporations and the very rich. (See 1 for why.)
Budge It

March 21st, 2012

I truly hated the last government, but I admit I’d forgotten just how fucking horrible it can be to have a Tory government. With every move they make they show that they’re nasty, ruthless, and nakedly greedy. I’d never say they were out of touch with reality or real people because I don’t believe that they are. I believe that they know exactly what they’re doing, every inch of the way.

They know that a portion of the population will always vote against their self-interest; they know that a portion of the population will never vote at all; they know they can get away with all this because the political and economic argument has moved so far away from anything remotely resembling equality and social justice that nobody who expresses unthinkable socialist or egalitarian ideas would ever get elected.

First, they get their friends in the right-wing media to soften up the public by ranting about non-existent problems like immigration, benefit cheats, and terrorism; then they rant on about inefficiencies in the NHS and other public services, bad schools, poor teaching, and so on.Teachers are aways poor: even though the national exam results have shown continual improvement for year, somehow the teachers are always in the wrong. They’re gaming the system, or cheating, or teaching to the test, or turning students gay. Having poisoned the public debate with all these straw men, they then start to chip away at equality, ensuring at every turn that their rich friends benefit.

See, the wealthy got scared by the 2008 banking collapse. They realised that the inefficiencies of capitalism are no substitute for the sure thing of profiting from essential public services. While commercial businesses can always fail, there will always be a need for healthcare, education, roads, waste collection. So all these things are targeted for privatisation.

While the NHS changes have hogged the headlines, the government have set up education to be privatised. First of all with “Free Schools” – schools run by complete nutjobs independent of local authority control. Nobody cares about the kids in this scenario. The important thing is to get out from under the democratically elected local council and use a non-professional, non-unionised teaching workforce to babysit the kids for longer hours than a normal state school. Grateful parents will then move their kids to the school with the longer babysitting hours, and if they can afford it will pay for a private tutor to get the kids through their exams.

Apart from nutjob free schools, there are sponsored academies, which pay their management boards enormous salaries to manage consortia of schools. Not “better” than local authorities, but “privately”. They may claim to be “not for profit”, but when you’re paying each other over £100k, you’re sure to benefit. Again, the babysitting hours are longer, and the terms and conditions of the teaching staff can be changed.

Finally, they send OFSTED in to make sure that state schools resisting the academy route (and facing competition from the nutjobs) are hammered into the ground. There are so many hoops to jump through that it’s a joke. Not a very funny one, though. Every single subject, from Art to Science, has to include literacy, numeracy, citizenship, moral education, and how to bake a cake in every single lesson. Furthermore, OFSTED will only observe you for 30 mins (max), whilst expecting you to demonstrate progress being made and hand over fifteen kilograms of paperwork to prove that you’re not a communist.

And in the middle of this Orwellian nightmare, we have to deal with their mathematically impossible insistence that everybody must be above average and that a satisfactory school is far from satisfactory.

Is it any wonder I’m getting fat?
Stress-related eating

March 21st, 2012

Current high pressure at work makes me grumpy, but also means that I can’t stop eating. It’s not a question of hunger, but of craving the comfort of food.

I often wonder if I’d been raised differently, if food hadn’t been such a big thing in our family, if I’d be doing something else for comfort, like buying shoes or shirts. Or just sleeping. Or writing songs.

But food was always a reward and a punishment in our house, and all my life I’ve treated myself when I feel stressed.

Or when I don’t.
Introverts of the world, disunite

March 4th, 2012

Susan Cain’s TED talk on the power of introverts (I’ve been looking forward to this all week – I’ve already ordered the book).

In a culture where being social and outgoing are prized above all else, it can be difficult, even shameful, to be an introvert. But, as Susan Cain argues in this passionate talk, introverts bring extraordinary talents and abilities to the world, and should be encouraged and celebrated.

via Boing Boing.
The Artist

February 16th, 2012

Image via Wikipedia

As a general rule, I try to avoid all films that are discussed too much in the media. Especially if something ends up as a Guardian reader’s dinner party discussion topic, I avoid them like the plague. My friend Roy put it best years ago when he said of a film (can’t remember which one), “I feel like it’s been watched for me.”

The Artist has been one of those films, but my wife wanted to see it. What can you do? The few films I’m ever interested enough to want to see au cinéma are never of the kind that she would want to see. I always look at the cost-benefit ratio and decide it’s not worth it. It’s never worth it, especially if you end up having to endure the rancid fat smells and the rancid teenagers at the local Cineworld.

But we went to see The Artist. I knew all about it, too much about it. Colleagues at work had mentioned it to me, expecting me to be interested. Red rag, that, when someone thinks they know you well enough to predict that you’ll like something. Like people who give you crappy CDs because they think they know your genre.

Here is a plot synopsis from IMDB:

A movie star helps a young singer/actress find fame, even as age and alcoholism send his own career into a downward spiral.

Of course, I tricked you there. That’s the plot synopsis of a different film. Here’s another plot synopsis:

A silent film production company and cast make a difficult transition to sound.

Oh, look, I tricked you again. Here’s the plot synopsis of The Artist:

A silent movie star wonders if the arrival of talking pictures will cause him to fade into oblivion, and sparks with a young dancer set for a big break.

I edited it a bit to remove the specifics (names). You can detect a slight similarity, I expect. The first plot synopsis was for A Star is Born, the 1954 Judy Garland vehicle, which was remade with Barbra Streisand in the lead role. The second was for Singin’ in the Rain, the Gene Kelly vehicle.

But there’s nothing new under the sun; everything is a remix. That doesn’t bother me. I’m sitting in the cinema watching a largely silent film about silent film. The woman behind me, who keeps kicking at the seat back for some reason (there is a lot more room than that in cineworld – you’ve got to be really trying to piss somebody off), keeps chuckling at the dog, every time the dog is on screen doing something. It’s as if it’s the dog she’s come to see. And the dog, honestly, is not even that funny.

The thing about visits to the cinema, you do end up being bothered too much these days by other people and their inability to behave themselves in public. Getting up and down to go to the toilet, or for snacks, kicking the back of the seat, simpering every time a dog is on the screen. One woman got up to go to the toilet after 20 minutes of adverts and trailers, as the film was starting. What? What? I’m reviewing the audience now, and not the film. I’ve got nothing against the film, it was all right. I could wish there had been less media chatter about it, but I’ve seen it now, I’ve joined the chattering classes.

I don’t want to talk about it, though.
Tate Modern

February 15th, 2012

I’m not keen on museums, galleries, National Trust properties, family days out in general. Too much childhood boredom baggage I carry around. Feeling sick in the car, feeling bored when we get there. I never developed that adult interest in things I was dragged around as a kid.

Instead, I see the whole edifice as an excuse invented, in the early days of motoring, for somewhere to go in the car. Earlier than that, an excuse for a trip on a train.

When not everybody had a car, when it was something special, then people wanted to get in and go. What do you do when you get there? Wander around looking at stuff, have a picnic, then head off home.

The family wanted to go to London. So, having recently refused a walk in the f*cking sn*w, I felt obliged not to object. Kid 2 wanted to go to see the dinosaurs. Nobody else really wanted to. We’d got as far as sitting in the station waiting room without having much of a plan, beyond that I wanted to try some of those fancy London “gourmet” burgers (recession comfort food). Then someone tweeted something about the Tate Modern, and I suggested that.

Kid 2 sulked. We ended up going to the dinosaurs anyway, but she didn’t know it at the time.

We went to The Diner off Carnaby Street and had a burger (though Time Out had complained they were over-cooked and took too long to arrive). It was all right. Not overcooked. And didn’t take half an hour. Place wasn’t too busy (as a family we always eat early). Kids liked it.

We made our way to Southwark. By the time we arrived, my ankles and knee joints were hurting (drug side effects, I think), but we walked around. Amazing to see the number of families there with very young children. I could see my own childhood restless boredom, right there. Kid 2 is 11, and would have appreciated some of what we saw, if she hadn’t been sulking. She’s too old for dinosaurs, fucksake.

I like some of it. Some of it was a load of old wank. Some of it made me laugh. There were too many hipsters around. I mostly enjoyed things I’d seen before, years ago, when there was just the Tate. I didn’t think much of the place, or the space, though that’s probably because you shouldn’t try to see too much in one visit. Or at half-term.

Afterwards, we walked in the rain and then got on the tube to the Natural History Museum. It was half-term. There were 97,000 people in the queue, which was only really a queue to reach the queue to queue to view the dinosaurs. It was a joyless experience of shuffling forward, surrounded by screeching little boys and Russian tourists with a flexible idea about queueing. (They thought they’d spotted a way to cheat, left the queue, got turned back, and then rejoined the queue in exactly the same place. I’m sorry, comrade, but in Britain we have this thing called a sense of fair play.) But I didn’t say anything, not wishing to create a diplomatic incident.

My left shoe was fine. Fitted perfectly, snug and comfortable. My right shoe was slightly too big, and my foot slid around a bit. So I ended up with a bit of a blister.

I bought a pair of jeans, which might be a mistake for someone my age. My daughter, who had her Vespa bag with her, bought a Lambretta bag in the Lambretta shop.