Author: Doug LeMoine

Categories
ideas music visual

Actually, *I* am the walrus

I've love info­graph­ics, and I've gone on and on about col­lab­o­ra­tion and the Bea­t­les before, so when I heard that some­one had cre­at­ed an info­graph­ic dis­play­ing the degree to which Bea­t­les col­lab­o­rat­ed on songs — well, "inter­est­ed" would be huge­ly under­stat­ing my emo­tions at the time. (Thanks, Dan, for the tip).

Beatles - Collaboration & Authorship Author: Michael Deal. Full image here.

"The Bea­t­les: Author­ship & Col­lab­o­ra­tion" is a nice­ly com­posed graph­ic, clear­ly break­ing down the con­trib­u­tors to each song, Bea­t­le and non-Bea­t­le. The songs are laid out chrono­log­i­cal­ly, and the over­all effect clear­ly reveals that the Bea­t­les col­lab­o­rat­ed less as they pro­gressed in their careers. (If any­thing is true of the Bea­t­les, it's that they grew apart over time). The chart's data is drawn from Beat­lesongs, which quan­ti­fies the degree to which each Bea­t­le con­tributed to the writ­ing of a song, using a scale of 0–100%.

Beatles - Collaboration - Octopus's Garden

I can't quib­ble with the desire to under­stand and visu­al­ize the degree to which each Bea­t­le shaped each song, but I find the quan­tifi­ca­tion bit a lit­tle — well — false­ly pre­cise. It makes for a nice info­graph­ic, but a mere skim through The Offi­cial Abbey Road Stu­dio Ses­sion Notes, 1962–1970 makes it clear that there was quite a lot of col­lab­o­ra­tion among the four Bea­t­les — not to men­tion the var­i­ous "fifth Bea­t­les," the "Black Bea­t­le," and their pro­duc­er, George Mar­tin. Per­haps there's a dif­fer­ence between "col­lab­o­ra­tion" and "author­ship?" In the exam­ple to the right, "Octopus's Gar­den," is said to be 100% Ringo? Yes, Ringo does receive sole cred­it for "author­ship," but it is wide­ly known that George had a sig­nif­i­cant role in shap­ing it. In fact, George works out the song on a piano in the Let It Be movie. How to rep­re­sent this soft­er sort of col­lab­o­ra­tion? Good ques­tion. Shapes? Sizes? Col­ors? Dimen­sions? What­ev­er it is, it should fair­ly com­mu­ni­cate the organ­ic nature of cre­ative col­lab­o­ra­tion. And dis­pense with the too-neat round numbers.

Categories
music tech

We come from the land of the ice and snow

Curi­ous about what songs I've lis­tened to most, I nav­i­gat­ed over to my last.fm pro­file and saw this:

Immigrant Song - Led Zeppelin - Last.fm

Do I love "Immi­grant Song?" Yes. Do I imi­tate its open­ing vocal, Robert Plant's rever­ber­at­ing war cry that gets as close to the heart of awe­some­ness as any lyric in the his­to­ry of rock? Fre­quent­ly. But have I lis­tened to it 3,000+ times in the past cou­ple of years? Rough­ly 5x per day?I mean, maybe? But there's some­thing about this ran­dom (and prob­a­bly wrong) sta­tis­tic that makes me won­der what kinds of facts and fig­ures will drift long into the future, passed from disk to disk, tied to my name, dis­cov­ered by future peo­ple and being puz­zled over. Some­one in some ver­sion of the future, comb­ing through old web stats, Immi­grant Song has become, like the nation­al anthem, and this per­son will think, "Doug LeMoine, man. What a maniac."

Categories
flickr photo tv

Let's put this matter to bed

That's what she saidGenius stitch­ing and polaroid by: That Kate.
Categories
food new york

Beefsteak!

Even though I'm gen­er­al­ly a West Coast kind of guy, I devour books about New York — its chaot­ic begin­nings as a law­less, crazy quilt of neigh­bor­hoods and gangs; its trans­for­ma­tion into a mas­sive mod­ern city; the pecu­liar dynam­ics of its organ­ic growth. If New York didn't destroy me every­time I vis­it, I think I'd prob­a­bly live there.A few weeks ago, the New Yorker's Twit­ter stream point­ed me to an excel­lent Joseph Mitchell essay about a (most­ly) van­ished New York tra­di­tion, the beef­steak. Mitchell laid out the basics in his clas­sic 1939 essay, "All You Can Hold For Five Bucks:"

The foun­da­tion of a good beef­steak is an over­flow­ing amount of meat and beer. The tick­ets usu­al­ly cost five bucks, and the rule is "All you can hold for five bucks." If you're able to hold a lit­tle more when you start home, you haven't been to a beef­steak, you've been to a ban­quet that they called a beef­steak. From Up in the Old Hotel, an amaz­ing col­lec­tion of Mitchell's New York­er essays

We've missed out on the beefsteak's prime, so to speak, but the Bea­con Restau­rant start­ed a new tra­di­tion 10 years ago. The New York Sun's account of the 2004 edi­tion includes cours­es very much like those Mitchell describes — tiny ham­burg­ers, bacon-wrapped lamb kid­neys, dou­ble-thick lamb chops, and of course steak — "huge roast­ed Cer­ti­fied Angus shell loins that had been cut into thick slabs and doused with melt­ed but­ter."This year's beef­steak is in Feb­ru­ary. I'm intrigued, though I'm sure it will destroy me.

Categories
flickr photo san francisco

Transbay bird swirl

Transbay terminal San Francisco birds

Perched among the tall build­ings in down­town San Fran­cis­co, my office can feel like a nest in a tall tree. Yes­ter­day evening, the birds that live atop the Trans­bay ter­mi­nal swirled up to, and around, the win­dows of our con­fer­ence room, and the aerie-like feel­ing was stronger than ever. One bird even land­ed, briefly, on the ledge of the win­dow. I have no idea what kind of birds they are, what brought them to us, or what they hope to achieve. But I am in awe of them.

Categories
california ecology outdoors

Mommy, where does Capilene come from?

I tend to obsess over out­doors gear. The pin­na­cle (or nadir, as the case may be) of this obses­sion was the spring/summer of 2001, when I hiked the Pacif­ic Crest Trail. Over four months, I sam­pled a ton of gear — six pairs of shoes, a few dif­fer­ent shirts, jack­ets, socks, shel­ters, cook­ware. I had dozens (maybe hun­dreds) of con­ver­sa­tions about this stuff, spent hours dis­cussing the var­i­ous qual­i­ties that dis­tin­guished some lit­tle piece of back­pack­ing equip­ment or appar­el as the light­est, strongest, dri­est, most com­fort­able, most long-last­ing, most whatever.What did I take away from these dis­cus­sions? Two things: (1) At some point, ratio­nal eval­u­a­tion becomes reli­gious debate. Gear nerds have deep, com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ships with their hard­ware, and we have a hard time remain­ing lev­el-head­ed about the stuff saves our butt dur­ing a thun­der­storm, or keeps us con­sis­tent­ly com­fort­able as tem­per­a­tures change. And, (2), for me, Patag­o­nia appar­el last­ed longer, bounced back bet­ter, fit bet­ter, dealt with rain bet­ter, and just gen­er­al­ly worked bet­ter than the oth­er stuff I tried. Oth­ers poo-poo-ed it as "Pata-guc­ci." Froofy, high-end cou­ture pos­ing as out­door gear, i.e. stuff that "real thru-hik­ers" wouldn't be caught dead in.All of this is good and well, but I recent­ly came across anoth­er excel­lent aspect of it. (And I still wear it).

Patagonia - Footprint Chronicles - Nano Puff - OverviewCalled the Foot­print Chron­i­cles, they're a series of detailed accounts of how indi­vid­ual pieces of their gear are made — where the mate­r­i­al is sourced, how fair labor prac­tices are ensured, how the gar­ment is assembled.
Patagonia - Footprint Chronicles - Nano PuffThis exam­ple takes you through the design and con­struc­tion of the Nano Puff Pullover, made from recy­cled polyester.

This is a dif­fer­ent kind of mar­ket­ing, clear­ly: Doc­u­men­tary accounts that high­light the qual­i­ties of the com­pa­ny, rather than the per­for­mance of the gear. I'd be inter­est­ed to know how (or if) they mea­sure the return on invest­ment of this kind of thing.

Categories
baseball photo

Absolutely undeniable proof that you belong in the Baseball Hall of Fame

Nolan Ryan - Robin Ventura

You auto­graph pho­tos of your­self using Robin Ventura's head as a speed­bag. And, they sell for $100 each on ebay.

Categories
music

Morning Harrison

Jim James of My Morn­ing Jack­et has record­ed some pared-down, reverbed-up cov­ers of George Har­ri­son songs under the name Yim Yames. I've includ­ed one here: "Long, Long, Long" from the White Album, and I appre­ci­ate the qui­et, def­er­en­tial treat­ment that Jim James gives his songs. Good stuff, "Yim."Here's a good sto­ry in the engineer's notes from the orig­i­nal record­ing of "Long, Long, Long" on Mon­day, Octo­ber 6, 1968:

There's a sound near the end of the song [best heard on the right chan­nel] which is a bot­tle of Blue Nun wine rat­tling away on the top of a Leslie speak­er cab­i­net. It just hap­pened. Paul hit a cer­tain organ note and the bot­tle start­ed vibrat­ing. We thought it was so good that we set the mikes up and did it again. The Bea­t­les always took advan­tage of accidents.

From the indis­pens­able Bea­t­les Record­ing Ses­sions by Mark Lewisohn.

Categories
cinema visual

Extremely bloody, extremely funny

Ever since I heard about Bat­tle Royale, I've want­ed to see the film … Quentin Taran­ti­no has called it "the best movie since 1992," so it's prob­a­bly not sur­pris­ing that it's both extreme­ly bloody and very dark­ly fun­ny. The premise: Adults fear the rise of youth, and each year they put the most bad­ly behaved kids on an island and force them to bat­tle each oth­er to the death. 

Battle Royale - Batoru RowaiaruLike Tarantino's movies, the set­up is quick and effective.
Battle Royale - Batoru RowaiaruThe humor dark­ens: A baby-voiced Japan­ese teen explains the rules of the game, includ­ing the fact that the col­lar worn by con­tes­tants goes "boom" under cer­tain circumstances.
Battle Royale - Batoru RowaiaruEach "play­er" gets their own weapon. As the plot unfolds, the "play­ers" learn who has what, and fig­ure out how to work with what they have.
Battle Royale - Batoru RowaiaruFinal­ly, there are lib­er­al amounts of blood, and much killing. Mixed with the sar­don­ic dia­logue, it's easy to see why Taran­ti­no loves it so much.

Despite the nihilis­tic milieu, the sto­ry focused on tra­di­tion­al stuff — loy­al­ty, trust and friend­ship; and in the end, it was actu­al­ly sort of sweet, much sweet­er than bleak 60's and 70's films like McCabe & Mrs. Miller or The Wild Bunch. Worth see­ing, just for that weird juxtaposition.

Categories
aside

Et tu, John and George?

Jour­nal­ist Mikal Gilmore dis­cuss­es the research of his Rolling Stone cov­er arti­cle, "Why the Bea­t­les Broke Up."

What I found most trou­bling, most trag­ic, in all of this was two things: Both Lennon and Har­ri­son (Lennon, clear­ly, in par­tic­u­lar) did their best to sab­o­tage the Bea­t­les from mid-1968 onward, and when it all came irrev­o­ca­bly apart, I believe that both men regret­ted what they had wrought. I don't think that John Lennon and George Har­ri­son (but Lennon, again, in par­tic­u­lar) tru­ly meant the Bea­t­les to end, even though they might not have known it in the moment. I think they meant to shift the bal­ance of pow­er, I think they meant for the Bea­t­les to become, in a sense, a more casu­al form of col­lab­o­ra­tion, and I think they clear­ly intend­ed to rein in Paul McCart­ney. But they over­played their hand and — there's no way around it — they treat­ed McCart­ney shame­ful­ly dur­ing 1969, and unfor­giv­ably in the ear­ly months of 1970.