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It’s the End of the World as We Know It

“Just as much as synthesizers, hairspray and record sleeves in the Russian abstract style,” writes Paul Genders at TLS Online, “a major marker of the pop of the early 1980s and late 1970s, particularly British pop, was bookishness.”

He continues: “To anyone studying the downloads charts today—where you will search in vain for echoes of the English Renaissance stage or the Penguin Classics backlist—this idea will probably seem quite bizarre.”

Without waxing too nostalgic, I think he’s right. It’s not that no one else is making literate pop any more; it’s just that, these days, they’re “occasional activities largely on pop’s settled, adult-orientated fringes.”

For proof, listen to an hour or so of SiriusXM’s 1st Wave channel—The Cure, Joy Division, Depeche Mode, Spandau Ballet, Kate Bush—then spend five minutes on Channel 2 (Today’s Pop Hits!). It’s downright depressing.

What does it mean that books and writers no longer inspire popular music to the extent they did just a generation ago? I dunno. It feels like a loss, though.

Stop! Grammar Time!

Which pronoun is best when referring to a person: who or that?

For a long time, I’ve labored under that assumption that it’s always who—as in “Courtney is the one who always eats the last donut.” Clearly, that’s better than “Courtney is the one that always eats the last donut.”

But, as Paul Brians explains, my aversion to that “may be praiseworthily sensitive, but it cannot claim the authority of tradition.” He goes on:

In some instances, “that” is clearly preferable to “who”: “She is the only person I know of that prefers whipped cream on her granola.” In the following example, to exchange “that” for “who” would be absurd: “Who was it that said, ‘A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle’?”

This is yet another case where your ear should make the final determination. And to train your ear to make the distinction, you need to read. In fact, someone once told me that anyone interested in writing as a vocation should, instead of enrolling in one of the many MFA programs out there, read all the back issues of the New Yorker. The cost of the former? $30,000 at your average public university. The latter? A buck a week for access to their archives.

Quote of the Day

“No one ever taught me how to write, and I’ve never made a study of writing techniques. So how did I learn to write? From listening to music. And what’s the most important thing in writing? It’s rhythm. No one’s going to read what you write unless it’s got rhythm.”

Haruki Murakami, Absolutely on Music: Converations with Seiji Ozawa (Knopf, 2016)

Miscellany

Billy Joel, bald and glistening, looks like a big, smooth stone, as if the years and the sorrows, like so much water, simply polished its surface but failed to penetrate its core.”

Pork Chops and Apple Sauce: Appraising the Brady Bunch’s Art Collection

Uh-oh: Looks like the Russkies are growing an army of woolly mammoths.

George Saunders in the Guardian: “Simply knowing one’s intention and then executing it does not make good art.”

Ted Gioia on the importance of actually owning music.

Music for All Time

I vividly recall the thrill of discovering Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—with Toscanini conducting the NBC orchestra and the Robert Shaw Chorale—as an eight-year-old child. I also remember the first time, at 15, hearing Miles Davis’s intro to “Autumn Leaves” on the 1958 Cannonball Adderley album Somethin’ Else. And I’ll never forget how the genre-defying Yr, by Steve Tibbetts, introduced me to an entirely different way of thinking about guitar technique.

I bring these up because today marks the 30th anniversary of the release of U2’s career-defining touchstone, The Joshua Tree. To my mind, it’s a perfect album; a masterpiece not only of its time, but for all time. It made me realize that art can be found in the popular—something I would have vehemently denied up to that point—and that U2 could make serious (and seriously beautiful) music. It’s hard for me to even conceive of my sophomore year in college without this record.

Unfortunately, U2 pretty much peaked in 1987. Sure, Achtung Baby was good. But it wasn’t perfect. And by then I’d grown tired of the pretense and earnestness that, thanks to the likes of Bono and Sting, had become hallmarks of the era. But man, after listening to The Joshua Tree this morning—for the first time in a very long time—I still say it’s a masterpiece; a work of art that’s every bit as breathtaking today as it was 30 years ago.

Assume Nothing

I’m really, really sorry to bring politics up. But this is pretty dang interesting.

Someone restaged the 2016 Trump-Clinton debates with an actress playing the role of the former and an actor the latter. The assumption, of course, was that “the gender inversion would confirm…that Trump’s aggression—his tendency to interrupt and attack—would never be tolerated in a woman, and that Clinton’s competence and preparedness would seem even more convincing coming from a man.”

That’s the thing about assumptions, though: they’re often wrong. Joe Salvatore, one of the people behind the production, explains:

We heard a lot of “now I understand how this happened”—meaning how Trump won the election. People got upset. There was a guy two rows in front of me who was literally holding his head in his hands, and the person with him was rubbing his back. The simplicity of Trump’s message became easier for people to hear when it was coming from a woman—that was a theme. One person said, “I’m just so struck by how precise Trump’s technique is.” Another—a musical theater composer, actually—said that Trump created “hummable lyrics,” while Clinton talked a lot, and everything she said was true and factual, but there was no “hook” to it. Another theme was about not liking either candidate—you know, “I wouldn’t vote for either one.” Someone said that Jonathan Gordon [the male Hillary Clinton] was “really punchable” because of all the smiling. And a lot of people were just very surprised by the way it upended their expectations about what they thought they would feel or experience.

I don’t bring this up to score political points one way or the other, but simply to point out—as this exercise seems to demonstrate—that Trump won the election not because of racism or sexism or jingoism or whatever -ism gets your dopamine levels to where you need ’em to be, but because he delivered a message that people responded to. And because, well…Clinton was a less-than-likable candidate.

Or maybe it all just comes down to this:

Sign of the Times

Wandering the aisles of Target over the weekend, I came across this curiosity: a section of products developed for the care of “multicultural hair.” What, pray tell, does that mean?

Turns out I’m not the only one confused. In its page on multicultural hair care, Sally Beauty trips all over itself in an effort to not assign certain hair types to certain ethnicities, saying, without a trace of irony, “Don’t look at your skin tone, take good [sic] look at your hair!”

OK. Then don’t call it “multicultural hair care.”

I shouldn’t be surprised. The English language has really taken a beating over the last 20–30 years. Diversity used to mean difference or unlikeness; now it seems to apply only to varying degrees of melanin content rather than actual differences in philosophy, experience, worldview, education, religion, or socio-economic background.

Hate is another one. To a growing number of individuals, it now means “expressing an opinion I don’t like.” Then there’s justice, the latest dilution of which must surely be vexing to the Super Friends.

So what’s the solution? I dunno. Everyone tells me that English changes, and I should just get on board with it. Maybe so. But that doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.

Proof of Purchase

Last weekend I ran across a receipt that tells a bit of a story from my days as a design student at Spokane Falls. RA-TEL’S Art Supply, owned and operated by Darrell and Karen Sullens, was one of only two local art supply stores back then—a place where students could buy sketch books, pens, markers, paint, special papers, spray mount, and so on for their school projects. Though it was a small store at the time (they later moved to a larger space) RA-TEL’S was one of my favorite stops. It was like my very own Cheers: friendly faces, funny stories, and lots of laughs. The kind of place where you lingered a little longer; where relationships were formed that outlasted the immediate need for student supplies. In fact, over the years, both Linda and I remained friends with Darrell and Karen, who, sadly, recently passed.

Going Swimming? Urine for a Surprise

How much pee is in our swimming pools? Up to 75 liters, it turns out. Which seems like a lot—until you realize that it’s only about .009 percent.

Which seems positively infinitesimal, until you realize that .009 percent is about four teaspoons of pee in a 55-gallon drum of water. Would you drink from that? Me neither.

Here’s a little more perspective:

•  rivers and lakes make up about .009 percent of Earth’s water
•  .009 percent is the CPSC’s limit for lead in paint or surface coatings
•  driving impairment can begin at blood alcohol levels as low as .009 percent

On the other hand, back in October, “analytics guru and political prognosticator” Nate Silver claimed that only about .009 percent of the world’s data is actually useful—while at the same time predicting that the Cubs would lose the 2016 World Series and that Democrats would win a majority of U.S. Senate seats in the upcoming election.

Guess Mr. Silver should’ve paid closer attention to the less-useful 99.991 percent.

Odds and Ends from an “Arch-Genius”

David Gelernter, Yale University computer scientist and subject of one of the stupider (not to mention more lazily partisan) newspaper headlines in recent memory,* has some pretty interesting things to say in a recent Atlantic piece.

On whether beauty is objective: “Take any civilization, ask for its artistic masterpieces; today, they are almost guaranteed to be valuable all over the world. There’s almost nothing less subjective than the sense of beauty.”

On taking new architecture seriously: “Take a chance, dammit.”

On raising children without comprehensive ethical views: “…a recipe for one of the riskiest experiments in history.”

On understanding artificial intelligence: “The people who know the mind best aren’t neurobiologists, they’re novelists & poets.”

On music: History’s greatest composer is Franz Schubert, but “Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, his op 110 and 111 sonatas, his string quartet in C# minor and the Gross [sic] Fuge are the greatest music of all.”

*It was just a year ago that Time magazine called him an “arch-genius.”

Answering Life’s Important Questions

In an effort to “establish, once and for all, the absolute best fast food items in America” the fine folks over at The Ringer have thoughtfully provided a list of the top 50. And while they’re mostly correct, I think it’s important that we right a couple of obvious wrongs.

First of all, this is America, not France. A hamburger of some sort should top any list of the best fast food. As much as I love Chick-Fil-A waffle fries, their position at no. 1 tells me the Ringer team isn’t taking this job all that seriously.

Second, McDonald’s fries have a half-life measured in nano-seconds. Sure, they’re delicious at first—but as they cool, they begin to take on a chalky texture, and after about a minute they’re are all but inedible. Their no. 3 ranking can only mean that those who participated in the survey were drunk.

As for the rest, it’s…pretty spot-on, though I’d rank both the Egg McMuffin and KFC chicken higher and remove Chipotle entirely from consideration (seems a bit shi shi for this list). And where’s my beloved ButterBurger?

In the same spirit, we conducted a totally scientific study here at helveticka world headquarters to determine, “once and for all,” the best local hamburger joint. By “local” we mean anything worth driving to; by “hamburger” we mean pretty much anything but the hoity-toity $15 offerings featured in a recent Spokesman-Review article.

Here are the results:

Zip’s
Sporty’s
Wolffy’s
Burger Royal
Ron’s

Maybe next week we’ll tackle the region’s best breakfast.

Miscellany

Happy Twin Peaks Day, everyone.

Hearty recommendation: The History of English Podcast. I mean, dig this Indo-European Family Tree.

Whatever happened to Greenland’s Vikings? “You can do a lot of things right,” says archaeologist Thomas McGovern. “You can be highly adaptive; you can be very flexible; you can be resilient—and you go extinct anyway.”

So apparently it’s OK to end a friendship based on political differences now. What an amazing world we live in.

Etiquette tips for graphic designers. (Well…not exactly. It’s just that each is accompanied by a helpful illustration. And there aren’t any big words.)

It’s Almost Like Magic

Here’s how an idea for an illustration begins. After copy is written, a super-quick chicken-scratch is created on literally any nearby surface, using whatever colored markers are within reach—followed by a reasonably focused iPhone photo that’s immediately emailed to the artist. Total elapsed time? Maybe 90 seconds, if that.

These sketches are usually done while on the phone with the illustrator discussing the concept. In this case, that would be our long-time, Seattle-based collaborator Don Baker. He can take any half-baked idea and make it beautiful (which, of course, is the magical part).

Here are three examples of Don’s work:

The Coolest Story You’ll Read All Day

“As I scurried down a frost-covered slope into the cave, I couldn’t shake the distinct feeling that I was stepping into the maw of a prehistoric beast.” That’s Mark M. Synott, writing in the March 2017 issue of National Geographic, about a 31-member expedition put together to explore what could very well be the world’s deepest cave.

Called Dark Star, this “monstrous limestone cave system inside a mountain in a remote corner of Uzbekistan” was first discovered in 1984—but another six years went by before a British team reached it and began exploring the system.

The whole claustrophobia-inducing account, complete with great photography and a video, is available online here.

Pardon the Fanboy Moment

Brian Eno’s long been one of my favorite musicians in any genre—I’m listening to his 1993 album Neroli as I write this—so I was happy to see Philip Sherburne’s lengthy interview with him over at Pitchfork. “Whether talking art or politics or philosophy,” Sherburne writes, “everything in the world seems suddenly much more interesting in Brian Eno’s company.”

And, I imagine, much more profound. Case in point: “[M]odern jazz wouldn’t have existed without recording, because to make improvisations sound sensible, you need to hear them again and again, so that all those little details that sound a bit random at first start to fit. You anticipate them and they seem right after a while.”

I’ve been listening to jazz for 35 years. And that had never once occurred to me.

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