Unnecessary Observations

Chris Cornell/Timbaland FAIL

2009-09-30T17:40:00.000-04:00

OK, so Chris Cornell, the former lead singer of the 90s breakthrough grungy band Soundgarden, went solo back in 1998, released some lackluster albums, helped form the supergroup Audioslave, which, like so many supergroups, didn't overwhelm anyone but sold OK. But then someone had a genius idea: team up Cornell with mega-super-producer Timbaland. You can almost see record label executives salivating, with dollar signs bulging from their eyes. HERE is the breakthrough idea. This is going to be HUGE.

Scream is a disaster. The cover shows Cornell smashing his guitar ('cause the music is going to be all electronic - get it?). The album is rife with Autotune, and the songs are lackluster at best. It's an album that falls between the two stools without hitting either of them. Cornell fans (insofar as they exist) won't get the rockin that they want, and Timbaland fans couldn't care less about some rocker trying to make it commercial (and who ends up sounding like everyone else).

I'm sure Timbaland got paid a bundle and really doesn't care, but this will have a significant impact on Cornell, I'd think.

Hey, why not (1) write good songs, (2) find some creative partners who want to share their talent, and (3) have some fun? You know, the "formula" that helped you break out in the first place?

The Office of the Future!

2009-09-29T11:55:00.000-04:00

Following closely on the heals of Jerry Davis's proclamation of a "Cambrian explosion of organizational forms" comes this story from the LA Times: Telecommuters Cut the Cord":

Gruber and Consalvo are digital nomads. They work -- clad in shorts, T-shirts and sandals -- wherever they find a wireless Web connection to reach their colleagues via instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook or e-mail and occasionally by voice on their iPhones or Skype. As digital nomads, experts say, they represent a natural evolution in telecommuting.

Really, LA Times? Really? Are all of us Knowledge Workers going to be floating around, working from coffee shops and mountain tops? Some of us just aren't cut out for that (I like working in an office, mostly), and, more importantly, some things are a lot easier to do when you have a real physical organization around you rather than a virtual one. Everyone's ready to discount meatspace [1, 2], but it seems to serve us pretty well.

A Cambrian Explosion of New Organizational Forms

2009-09-29T10:52:00.002-04:00

That's the take-away from this interesting blog post at Org Theory by Jerry Davis (who teaches in the sociology program and business school at the University of Michigan).

The important paragraph:

If I’m right about the end of the “society of organizations,” or at least the end of the dominance of 20th-century-style encompassing corporations, then we may be on the verge of a Cambrian explosion of new organizational forms. This time, however, we may be able to escape the utter dominance of shareholder value. It’s happened before — consider the explosion of cooperative forms created in response to the first wave of corporatization, documented by the estimable Marc Schneiberg. We still have a surprising number of such non-corporate forms around, even in the US: State Farm Insurance (a mutual), Land ‘o Lakes (a producer cooperative), REI (a consumer cooperative) and the 8000 non-profit credit unions that enroll an amazing 86 million Americans. (It turns out the US is already socialist, but doesn’t know it.) And how about Wikipedia, Linux, and the various social movements that generate spontaneous collective action in the absence of a profit motive (e.g., Iran’s “Twitter revolution”)?"

This all seems overblown to me, but his consideration of org forms is interesting and something we should consider. Even if Jerry is right (and he's both smarter and better educated than I am), then I think the organizational form that dominated the 20th century (the corporation) still has lots of gas left. And, even more pointedly, the logic that lies behind the organization itself will still hold

Free-Range Kids

2009-09-16T09:40:00.002-04:00

Although I want to do a longer post (or series?) on the idea of free-range kids, I thought this post from StreetsBlog.org would get me started. nicely In short, parents want kids to get to school under their own power (walk, ride bike), school objects, parents ignore objections, school calls police, my head explodes.

50 Things the Internet Is Killing

2009-09-10T10:26:00.002-04:00

The Telegraph published a list article (sure it's linkbait, but it seems like an appropriate use of the format) on the 50 things that the Internet is killing. It ranges from "Your lunchbreak" (50) to "the art of polite disagreement." Quite.

I'm sure there are things to quibble with between 1 and 50, but I'd be much more interested in a list of things that the Internet (social networking, email, web search, and so on) can *never* kill--or perhaps only complement. What are the things in this world (sex, eating together, supply chain management) that the Internet can't substitute for?

Poor Lego, part deux

2009-09-08T17:26:00.002-04:00

Interesting article in the New York Times this weekend on Lego and its expansion, and especially its Hollywood tie-ins. The article is almost entirely praiseworthy of Lego's business success (it is a story in the Times business section), but it feels to me like the company has moved from a realization that its fans own the brand to an attitude exemplified by this quote:

"Nowadays, Mr. Meyer says, 'you have to design for Lego. If you want to design for yourself, go be an artist.'”

I can almost see the smug, self-satisfied smile on his face as he says it.

You Remind Me of Home

2009-09-04T11:07:00.000-04:00

But not in a good way. Ben Gibbard, lead singer of Death Cab for Cutie (origins of name here), recorded this song on his EP Home, Volume V (with Andrew Kenny, Amazon). Beautiful tune disguises some ugly sentiment. After each repetition of "You remind me of home," he sings lines like

the paint cracks when the water leaks
from the rusty pipes that are just beneath my feet

the heater's warm but fills the room with a
potpourri of dust and gas fumes

a broken bed with dirty sheets that creaks
when I am shifting in my sleep

in a suburban town with nothing to do,
patiently waiting for something to happen

Ending with the sentiment, "You're wasting your life."

Bleak, bleak, bleak.

Sony's e-reader to go wireless - finally

2009-08-26T11:06:00.002-04:00

I have a Sony E-Reader (I can't find a picture of my version, which is a year or so old). As a reading experience, it works pretty well: the screen is crisp and clear, and I find that it works especially well for lighter fiction. But I dislike the interface of my version, which is ergonomically nonsensical (the buttons are all in the wrong places). The closed platform drives me crazy: I can't add webpages or newspaper or magazine articles that I want to read later. Great technology, badly executed. And it will never replace paper for reading proposals and manuscripts, on which I like to comment liberally as a I read.

The one piece that really seemed like a great mistake, though, was how you download books: plug in a USB cable and go to the Sony store. Why should I have to be attached to a computer?

The latest version seems to fix at least some of these problems. Is Sony finally listening?

Killed Book Jackets

2009-08-18T21:42:00.003-04:00

Few people outside the book industry--outside of the houses that actually produce books, really--know of the hair-rending angst that can go into making book jackets work. Book designers can be difficult to work with (says me, the editor), and editors oftentimes have ideas that are hackneyed or difficult to execute (or non-ideas that they think are ideas: "Don't use pink."). Sometimes no one is really sure what the focus on the book should be. And even if everyone knows exactly what they should be doing, lines of communication are dotted, especially when the in-house design manager is using freelancers, who may or, more likely, may not get any facetime with the person in control of the book. And at some houses the editor is taken out of the equation altogether--not even to mention the author.

More's the shame because packaging--the jacket, blurbs, copy on the flaps--is the single most important thing the publisher can do for a book.

That's all a lead up to why I found this article--Kill Your Darlings--on jacket revisions at Print magazine so illuminating. Print asked 8 designers to "show us their favorite runners-up, and to explain how and why these covers were nixed."

SNL Auditions

2009-08-17T15:09:00.003-04:00

Courtesy of Metafilter, a bunch of Sautrday Night Live audition tapes, including my all-time favorite, Phil Hartman. For some reason, it really hurt me when he was killed (May 29, 1998). I'm still not sure why it hit me so hard - maybe because he seemed so fundamentally decent.

The post above also includes Dana Carvey and Jim Breuer (if you must).

Oh, Poor Lego

2009-08-17T15:08:00.002-04:00

David Weinberger is one of my favorite authors on information and the interweb. He creatively picks apart truisms with great insight and then is kind enough to share his thoughts with the rest of us. (He also wrote parts of The Cluetrain Manfesto, which everyone needs to read but doesn't know it.) His discussion of Staples and how it arranges its goods for sale is, dare I use the cliche, a tour de force and a good example of how his brain works (I think). (You can find that bit at the beginning of Everything Is Miscellaneous.)

Anyhoo, David recently wrote a blog post on how LEGO, one of my favorite companies--a company that revived itself by choosing to listen to its customers--has taken a giant step backward by pissing off the people who spend lots and lots of money buying its bricks. Not a smart move. I hope it's not a sign of more cluelessness to come.

How Americans Spend their Time

2009-08-17T13:26:00.005-04:00

This is a fascinating info-graphic courtesy of the New York Times. It's based on the American Time Use Survey, "which asks thousands of American residents to recall every minute of a day." (The data here is for Americans over 15.) Fun to play with. I found it surprising that more people weren't at work--but maybe that says more about me than the rest of America.

All-You-Can-Jet Pass from jetBlue

2009-08-17T10:09:00.003-04:00

This is pretty incredible. You can buy a pass on jetBlue for $599 which will allow you to take any available seat on nearly any jetBlue flight between September 8 and October 8. I'm glad I don't travel as much as I used to, because, you know, I like to stay home and actually interact with my family. OTOH, it's a sweet deal.

They must be really hurting (which I suppose goes without saying) or they have some model showing how they're going to make a bundle if x number of customers don't fly as much as they think they will when they buy the pass. Or both.

Sadly, the Undead Can't Exist

2009-08-17T09:08:00.005-04:00

There's a mathematical argument for why vampires and zombies are impossible. Essentially, the speed with which they would need to feed and reproduce would outstrip human's ability to reproduce, so the number of zombies or vampires (or maybe zombies and vampires, 'cause then we could have undead wars, which would be awesome) would rapidly overwhelm and wipe out the human population. (For details, click through here.)

I think we can know safely divide the world into four groups:

1. those who find this convincing evidence that the undead cannot exist,
2. those who are not convinced by the mathematical proof,
3. those who find it silly to engage is such proof, and
4. those who say, "What about werewolves?!"

Models without Makeup

2009-08-13T10:39:00.001-04:00

I love sites like Photoshop Disasters, which showcases all sorts of professional (or I guess that should be "professional") Photoshop attempts gone wrong (additional fingers, heads that don’t fit bodies, stretched out features, etc., etc. – very entertaining).

In contrast to that trend - photoshopping models until they're hardly recognizable as humans, a trend that only adds to unrealistic body expectations - comes this exhibit, which shows models posing without any makeup. Hey! Guess what? They look like real women - which is to say, good.

HT: kottke

New Radiohead Song

2009-08-13T10:38:00.000-04:00

In memory of the last British veteran of World War I to die, Radiohead has released Harry Patch (stream).

Allegedly, there will be no more Radiohead albums in the near term, so their music will come out like this, in dribs and drabs. That makes me sad.

Foot Patrol

2009-08-13T10:33:00.000-04:00

I pay attention to almost everything Peter Moskos says. He’s a Harvard PhD in sociology and teaches at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice. He blogs about things cop- and bike-related, and his mind (like so many thinkers I find engaging) works obliquely from mine. He blogs here. I recommend his book Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District, which just came out in paperback.

One of my favorite sections of the book describes how 911 services and car patrol made neighborhoods less safe. Moskos advocates foot patrol as an old-fashioned solution, and has a new article on the subject at The American.

Moskos also gets into how poorly thought out incentives lead to the arrest of more black men - no discriminatory behavior necessary - since when officers must fulfill quotas, drug corners make for easy picking.

Inspiring Leadership

2009-08-13T10:30:00.000-04:00

I found this quote in a Netflix powerpoint deck about its corporate culture:

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” -Antoine De Saint-Exupery

You go, little prince! If the deck is truly reflective of the culture at Netflix, it sounds like a terrific place to work (unless, I suppose, you work on the line processing DVDs all day).