perfidy

The Onion has a pretty good featurette on songs that work as stories. I don't know all their choices, but the ones I do know are top notch. A couple of my personal favorites, not on the list, are "Can You Fly" by Freedy Johnston, which is about a farmer and his son who find an angel lying bleeding in their field, "Wreck of the Old 97," which by now has transcended everything to become part of the American DNA, and "Poncho and Lefty" as written by Townes van Zandt.

That last one's just amazing. Let's look at the lyrics.

Livin' on the road my friend, was gonna keep you free and clean
And now you wear your skin like iron, and your breath is hard as kerosene
Weren't you mamma's only boy, her favorite one it seems
She began to cry when you said, goodbye, and sank into your dreams

Poncho was a bandit boy, his horse was fast as polished steel
He wore his gun outside his pants, for all the honest world to feel
Poncho met his match, you know, on the deserts down in Mexico
Nobody heard his dyin' words, but that's the way it goes

All the Federales say
They could have had him any day
They only let him slip away
Out of kindness I suppose

Lefty he can't sing the blues, all night long like he used to
The dust that Poncho bit down south, ended up in Lefty's mouth
The day they lay poor Poncho low, Lefty split for Ohio
And where he got the bread to go, there ain't nobody knows

All the Federales say
They could have had him any day
They only let him slip away
Out of kindness I suppose

The poets tell how Poncho fell, and Lefty's livin' in cheap hotels
The desert's quiet and Cleveland's cold, and so the story ends we're told
Poncho needs your prayers, it's true, but save a few for Lefty too
He only did what he had to do, and now he's growin' old

All the Federales, say
They could have had him any day
They only let him run so long
Out of kindness I suppose

A few grey Federales say
They could have had him any day
They only let him go wrong
Out of kindness I suppose

The way I see it, the narrator of this song is some middle-aged guy who's seen it all, probably missing a finger or two. He's talking to some 22 year old punk he's known since he was a kid who thinks he's hot shit and is bragging about how he's gonna knock over the mail stage or something, he and this other guy you see, this real tough son of a bitch. And our narrator sighs, kicks back, and tells him all about how bulletproof Poncho thought he was, how badass Lefty thought he was riding with Poncho, and how he was there that day when they laid Poncho low, and saw Lefty piss himself behind a rock, then crawl out as the Feds closed in, snatch the moneybag, and light out for God only knows where. And down through the years, word has gotten back to Colorado how so and so saw Lefty one December in a bar in Cleveland, looking like shit and still waiting for the hammer to fall, with the money long drunk up and all the good parts of his life behind him. And then our narrator gets up, tosses a buck on the table, and leaves the punk kid to contemplate whether any deed is worth a life spent hiding out in Cleveland.

[cue Paul Hogan....] Now that's a knife.

Die Welt reports that the fat bastard Belgians are teaching their children that Ataturk, revered father of the modern secular Turkish state, was a total homo. Not surprisingly, initial response from the Bosporus is not receptive to this claim.

No time to translate the whole piece- feel free to work on it yourself and update as appropriate.

I've started using this tool to generate names for the beers I make. In fact, just last weekend I kegged a batch of Paul Newman's Portentious Sharks With Fricking Laser Beams Tied Their Heads Pale Ale, and it's positively delish!

Hm. I'm flaming today. Fascinating.

Anyway, here is the recipe I used:

5 lbs light dried malt extract
1 lb wheat dried malt extract
1/2 lb Crystal malt 60L
5 oz lb Crystal malt 135L
1 oz northern brewer hop pellets
2 oz Crystal hop pellets
SAFbrew #33 dry yeast - 2 packets
Nature's Pride Spring Water

Steeped grains in 1 gal water at 140-160 degrees for one hour. Sparged in 3 gallons of water heating in brewpot. Added steeping liquor. At boil added both DMEs and Northern Brewer.
At -40 added 1 oz crystal hops
at -15 added 1 oz crystal hops
at -1 added 1 oz crystal hops

Removed to ice bath and cooled to 90 degrees in 30 minutes.

Added about 2 gallons cold spring water to carboy and placed near open door to keep cool (during which I forgot to attach the airlock to the carboy, risking contamination of the beer). Strained wort through funnel, with again plenty of opportunity for contamination. Added water to make about 5 1/4 gallons. Pitched dry yeast with the last water addition at about 60 degrees- very low.

[wik] Despite the numerous opportunities I gave everything to contaminate, nothing bad happened; just a nice vigorous fermentation at 68-70 degrees. I let everything sit for about two weeks in the carboy, and kegged directly from primary. I used Munton's KreamyX (which sounds so DIRTY!!) to prime this batch, because I want a nice thick creamy head. (That's what she said! (haw!!))

[alsø wik] In all honesty I was going for a brown ale on the lighter side of the style with a serious hit of hop flavor and aroma without much bitterness. What I ended up with was a dark pale ale with a noticeable but tasteful hop presence. In fact, it tastes almost exactly like Ipswich Pale Ale, which fellow New Englanders will recognize and a very fine example of the style. So, what the hell. It's just beer.

[alsø alsø wik] Speaking of beer, I now have portions of five batches of homebrew in my basement, making a total of approximately 18 gallons. My wife is pregnant and thus is no help; I can no longer fit in my pants what with the constant "sympathy-eating" I'm doing. So, I beg of you, all of you-- please come to my house and drink all of my beer. I'll make more!

Apropos of recent music wonkery by Johno, I got to thinking about vinyl albums...erm, "alba"?...Maps, "alba"?...and was trying to recall the last vinyl record I bought.

As longtime readers may recall, I worked one summer in a record store ca 1997. It was at the end of the Old Ways, when most of the store was CDs but there was a cassette wall at one end and, no crap, a small bin of re-issued 45s (that's as in "rpm", Buckethead, not "ACP"- if only!) opposite the register. The experience was good in many ways- heard tons of great music, got some decent swag, decent discount on the few things I bothered to buy- and terrible for all the usual reasons that come from dealing with the public, fortified by that public's complete resistance to buying anything good. I swore that if I sold one more single of Butterfly Kisses I was going to start replacing the discs with Straight Outta Compton. But that summer was spent right on the terminator, where forever after music would be dominated by digital collection and players.

Which brings me back to vinyl. I'm pretty sure the last vinyl I bought was a real nice specimen of Axis:Bold as Love- because I do like to wave my freak flag high, although not as often as I used to- but that was purely for its own sake. I was trying to remember the last one I bought because it was the best medium available- I didn't have a CD player yet, and always thought tapes sounded like poop so tried to refrain from those. I'm pretty sure it was Iron Maiden's Somewhere in Time, ca 1986.

What about you?

[wik]In other reflections or musing about digital musics, I've just learned that if you're copying a CD into itunes while writing a Ministry post, and, once copied, take it out and put in a new CD, your entire post vanishes. I wasn't sure how to build that into a digital-music-hates-the-analog-Ministry riff, so I just left it alone and rewrote it as best I could recollect.

Ok. We all know that I'm THE seething ball of estrogen here at the Ministry, but you'll have to indulge me my girlish shrieks over the star of Shaun of the Dead, Simon Pegg. I saw him LIVE AND IN PERSON not 5 feet away from me on Friday night. No. I didn't rugby tackle him down asking him to marry me, but he wasn't much bigger than me. I could have done it if there weren't a table and some chairs in the way.

This weekend I saw a sneak preview of Mr. Pegg's new film, Hot Fuzz. I absolutely adore Shaun of the Dead and have a right dead crush on our hero, Nicholas Angel. After all, he can leap fences like nobody's business, and the handspring stunts in the greenhouse, set my heart a flutter. Two gun, Johnny Woo action with Nick Frost. It's more than a girl can bear. Yes, he's a twit. A fascist adherent to the law, but the film is hilarious.

In a word, BRILLIANT.

It will be opening in the US soon. Meanwhile, any of you minister lads have his original show, Spaced on DVD?

The Palestinians, infamously, are a people that bad things happen to. Whether from the perfidy of others (Jews), natural causes (Jews) or their own tragic flaws (planted there by Jews) calamity seems to stalk the Palestinian people like some loathsome stalking thing. Latest in a long line of humiliations and embarrassments is this: "Five dead in Gaza 'sewage tsunami'". Many people get hit by tsunamis. But only the Palestinians would get hit by a sewage tsunami.

[wik] I am truly sorry for those who perished, and for their families. But I can't help seeing this as one admittedly noisome piece of a larger picture.

In a followup to my thoughts the other day about the self-destructive tactics of the music bidness, the New York Times has an interesting article about the sunset of the album as the dominant commercial musical medium. Last year, digital singles outsold physical albums for the first time, which is bad news for the labels as their per-unit take on digital singles is several orders of magnitude lower than on traditional album sales. In a fascinating turn of events, the Times article also profiles a young group who have signed a singles deal with Universal, and who are thrilled at the low-risk exposure they'll get for recording three to five songs, total, for a major label. The majors in turn are contemplating turning this sort of contract, previously reserved for novelty records and one-off all star fiascos, into one of their most common deal structures. This is a surprising and ironic turn of events.

Well, perhaps it's not surprising to you, but it sure as hell is to me. Not six years ago I sat in a room with the management team of the label group I worked for and listened to them announce that we would be getting out of the singles business forever.

To be fair, it made sense at the time. Back in early 2001, the music industry was even farther away then it is today from figuring out how to make money off of digital downloading, and sales of physical singles had dwindled. The singles floor racks of the 1960s had shrunk in the 1980s to a singles wall, and by the turn of the millennium was just a couple singles next to the checkout counter. Albums ruled the day. All across the industry, labels were getting out of the singles business as sales dried up. Sure, there were a couple markets where they still moved, but for the most part, it was dead as disco. Digital media wasn't even a blip except insofar as it could help market traditional CDs.

And that's the central insight that I think is missing from the usual narrative of how the music industry is hidebound, venal, greedy, etc. etc. etc. (all true anyway no matter what, but still...). For fifty years or more, the music industry has been able to dictate, or at worst, adapt readily, to major shifts in media. This is because new form factors came along at a slow pace, and were never all that disruptive to the current status quo. The grooved record had more than three quarters of a century in the sun, from its introduction in the early years of the 20th century to the late 1970s, before it was supplanted by the tape. Tapes too, had a good twenty-year or more run before they were indisputably tackled by the compact disc. And the compact disc, again, had about twenty years between its major commercial adoption and the current seven-year slow strangulation the industry is currently undergoing.

And this time, it's not just form factor and playback technology that's changing. This time it's the entire distribution chain that's been upended, the very business processes that the labels and their affiilated industries (manufacturing, distribution, commercial radio, retail) have built their success around for, in some cases, a hundred years. That's hard to understand, much less accept. I can't imagine any industry agile enough to turn on a dime like the record industry should have when Napster first came on the scene, so a few years delay in getting their act together is no surprise. But now that seven years have gone by, it's still pretty clear that the industry as a whole is still trying to sell buggy whips to consumers who have never even seen a horse.

As for the irony, I do find it ironic that what seemed like a very sound business decision in 2001 - shutting down the singles shop because singles don't sell - turns out to be an early indicator that the music industry was not only unequpped to adapt to the implications of downloadable music, but at the time the technology matured were actively shutting down the only parts of their business that could even comprehend any part of what the future would hold.

Via Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings, the greatest student complaint ever recorded. Just a taste:

I appreciate you taking your inconvenience to instruct us but I really had some problems in your class and I would like to explain them to you now. Every day I wanted to discuss with you about the way you grade my papers and the way you teach the class, but I could not because the things you say in class and your words disturb me so much I can not. You make me completely uncomfortable with the little things you say in the class like how you talk about television or how you talk about when you are grading our papers and trying to be fair. You do not seem to care about our grades only that they are up to your too high standards and I can not talk to you because you make me completely uncomfortable. For example, you say you will talk to us about our grades but you really will not because of how uncomfortable you make me feel with your words and what you say.

I will plan to contest the grade you have given me in this class when I get it because I know it will be much higher with any other teacher. I am a very religious man and you are not a bad person but you do not choose your words with enough care like a teacher should. You try to be objective and the very attempt becomes your flaw because you try so hard to grade fairly and comment wisely that you become biased to your own ideas. You criticize our writings because we are college students and young but do not realize that you offend most of us when you do this. I am always offended when I go to your class and have been on many occasions but I never tell you of my offense because you make me completely uncomfortable so I never say a word.

--snip--

I am a very religious man and I love every one but I will forward this letter to the head of your department so he can see that I am a serious student who does not deserve the grade you will give him because I write so very well.

According to the person who shared this partially redacted note (so as to protect the innocent), the writer of this missive, who writes so! very! well! is indeed a native speaker of the language, indeed one whose background suggests access to the very best schools. So, any lack of command of the language is entirely his or her fault, as is the stunning lack of socialization or introspection.

Let's all point and laugh!

A corporate relocation firm has ranked the states in order of their putative business friendliness. All well and good, I suppose. I wonder if its any coincidence that the place of my birth ranked 49th, and the state of my current residence ranked #1. Probably not. Full list, for your perusing convenience, below the fold.

1 Virginia
2 South Carolina
3 Florida
4 North Carolina
5 Utah
6 Wyoming
7 South Dakota
8 Alabama
9 Georgia
10 Nebraska
11 Idaho
12 Nevada
13 Maryland
14 Oklahoma
15 Tennessee
16 Kansas
17 Washington
18 Iowa
19 Missouri
20 Oregon
21 North Dakota
22 Pennsylvania
23 Arkansas
24 Texas
25 Connecticut
26 Delaware
27 Montana
28 Massachusetts
29 Arizona
30 Mississippi
31 Michigan
32 New Mexico
33 Colorado
34 Vermont
35 Hawaii
36 New Hampshire
37 Louisiana
38 Indiana
39 Minnesota
40 Illinois
41 Maine
42 New York
43 New Jersey
44 Wisconsin
45 Kentucky
46 Alaska
47 Rhode Island
48 West Virginia
49 Ohio
50 California