Overheard in America

I’ve been in San Francisco for the last three days or so, exploring the various sights and sounds of the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, the trams and other postcard sites, and a fine city it is too, far nicer than Las Vegas, the only other US city I’ve visited.

Beyond this, though, I overheard two excellent pieces of conversation that I felt compelled to share (they’ve already appeared on Twitter, as live, and now here in more detail).

Walking out of Chinatown, I passed a chap on crutches, a phone tucked under his chin and wearing a bright green hoodie, the combination of which already made him stand out. As I passed he said, in his response to the other end of the call:

“You talkin’ about Ray Rakey, who played big bass and was my old high school teacher?”

This sentence just sounds so quintessentially American – the name, Ray Rakey, has musical, creativity connotations, like Big Bones Billy, or Sloppy Sue, and then the idea of him playing the big bass, (presumably the double bass?) - "...and Ray Rakey on the big bass!"... - and, more than that, he was this guy’s teacher too. Was he really called Ray Rakey, or was this a sobriquet of wonderful origin in a story of bizarre twists?

The second was not specifically American, but was just hilarious and my favourite overheard for a while: I was sitting in Yerba Buena park enjoying some sun when three dudes wandered past, all in hats and sunglasses, long baggy shorts, colourful t-shirts: a staple look. The one in the centre responded to a comment from a friend, which I didn’t hear, with:

"One review said, 'not that good', but then another review said, 'quite good', so, well, I dunno."

He sounded so forlorn as he reached this conclusion, so confused between the two voices of the ‘experts’ attempting to guide him in his understanding of this - what - film, book, TV show, restaurant? – that it was almost touching. 

What was even better though was the delivery, which started off rapidly, so up until the ‘quite good’ he was chattering away, then as he his the ‘so’ he realised the dilemma he had encountered and was forced to concede that, alas, he didn’t not know what to believe. A situation I am sure we can all identify with.

Working with your hands is great (if you can do it)

I read a great book recently about the world of work and why office life is not the luxurious evolution of years of toil we believe it to be, but is in fact a drab, unstructured place full of vague management speak, unsure ground and a complete lack of answers.

Many would not need a book to tell them this, but in Matthew Crawford’s The Case for Working with Your Hands: or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good he makes the case with allusion to philosophy while comparing it to his own experiences as an electrician, motorbike mechanic and other similar trades, and makes a compelling case that much of work in an office is bad for the soul when compared with the single-minded work of a fixer, builder, craftsman, who is set a task with a single, clear goal: to make it work, and can only be right or wrong.

So, when I bought myself a small, linen clothes bin, that required some self-assembly, I was ready to enjoy the task at hand, to screw a few screws, assemble some wood, pat myself on the back for a job well done. After all, it was only four pieces of wood and some screws: easy but satisfying.

Some 25 minutes later, frustrated, enraged and cursing the self-assembly Gods of Argos, I heard myself say out loud, “Couldn’t this thing just come pre-built!”. I recalled the book and its mantra of building, creating, self-fulfilment through doing, not thinking (as so much of modern work has become: “How do we measure the customer satisfaction of our latest loan insurance policy”? – I have no idea).

So I persevered and, of course, my brain taxed itself enough to actually get the stupid thing built and now I have a place for my dirty clothes – what a fun bank holiday. 

My Dad can build and fix most things, from cars to showers to cookers, while I am utterly bereft of such abilities, (despite many attempts at teaching). Where does this difference come from? Innately or self-taught, or both? Probably both, but then living in the late 20^th century, with its flat-packed, self-assembly fittings and pop-up tent camping gear, it’s not surprising I, and so many people my age, are clueless when confronted by anything requiring true craftsmanship or a working knowledge of woodwork, electricity, construction.

Furthermore, as Crawford notes in his book, nowadays designers and firms don’t want people tampering with their stuff. A friends’ Dyson vacuum broke the other day, but there was no way to take it apart as the screw sockets in use were bespoke, not suitable for an of the array of screwdrivers in his Man Box. Even our fleeting attempts at wanting to fix something, or try to understand it, proved impossible, instead being forced to get A Man to fix it.

Anyway, whether you love our office cubicle or feel it’s a prison by another name, I recommend the book, even if some of the philosophy went over my head at times. Not a philosophy, not a builder, not both as Crawford. What a failure!

A single piano run and Dire Straits coolness

Are Dire Straits cool? I can never decide what the general world census is on this, so many people’s opinions to take into account. There’s some sort of pervading sense that they’re not, due to headbands, some clunky lyrics, something vague ennui about them that I’ve never quite got.

Is discussing the coolness of Dire Straits relevant in 2012? Probably not. Anyway, I only mention it as lately I’ve been listening to Tunnelof Love quite a lot, mainly due to the lovely guitar solo outro which builds for about two minutes before being topped by a fantastic piano run in the final few seconds of the song, which my brother revealed to me is played by one Roy Bittan, the pianist of from the E Street Band, who regular readers will know I have already professed my appreciation of in a previous blog.

What is it about those fleeting moments in music where everything just swells together into a sheer moment of, well, what, elation? Joy? Genius? I don’t know, it doesn’t happen very often, but there are some songs – all within the ear of the listener on a personal, subjective basis – where you just feel enlivened, invigorated, perhaps even moved. 

It’s below, I think it’s worth the listen.

Green is not a creative colour

 A late night Vimeo session led me and my housemates to stumble across this piece of weird brilliance. For me it's the crow and his direct statements that makes it, as well as the line "Green is not a creative colour".

How do people generate such ideas? The images, words, music, characters, the desire to put it together: it's all the mystery of creation and the huge disparity of brains that exist in the world that mean some can create the videos like the one below, and some can become judges, and others brain surgeons and others carpenters.

Some excellent ahhhhh song endings

Some songs have lovely, long languid outros in which the vocal's echo on for an age, in this sort of Ahhhhhhhhhhhh way, and I really like good songs that do this, so here our a few of my favourites...why not?

Simon and Garfunkel - The Only Living Boy in New York: possibly the best example, with the whole song fairly "ahhhhh" throughout, and then really driving it through until the end. Good old Garfunkel and Simon. Starts at 2:50 odd.



Sufjan Stevens - Chicago: I find Sufjan a bit tiresome, so twee and whimsical, but you can't deny (well, you can if you want) the lovely ahhhhhhness of the ending to this song, complete with twinkly piano notes. Starts at five minutes dead.



The Flight of the Conchords - Ladies of the World: Comedy song, yes, but musically excellent and a nice ahhhh moment which comes back into the song unexpectedly, catching you off guard and giving you a nice, bonus ahhhhhhh. Ah, that's nice. Starts around three minutes.



Any suggestions? Know I'm missing some but these were the ones that I could recall with relative ease...

Tumblr and Bruce Springsteen

The trouble with all these new media platforms is that I have no idea whether I should post stuff to here or there (Tumblr) or go somewhere else entirely - Pinterest I guess.

Anyway, I do like the quick share functionality of Tumblr, so I've started using it, which you can see here, and recently included a post about Bruce Springsteen and Racing in the Street, which you can read over there, but I'll add the video here, because it's worth sharing widely.

The endless advertising dystopia of Waterloo Station

I know complaining about advertising is dull, and unoriginal, but I feel I’ve reached a threshold, a limit, a breaking point, with it all. It’s all the fault of Waterloo Station.

Every day I wind my way in to the station and on arrival head down into the underground walkway that links the train platforms to the underground’s maze, and along this concourse I am visually assaulted by an almighty slew of adverts that line the passageway for its entirety.

I’ve walked down this section probably 250, 300 times in the last two years or so and, suddenly, I’ve become absolutely sick of it. I actively try to stare directly ahead, or keep my eyes cast down, so as to avoid the gaudy, idiotic text and images bearing down on me. I feel a personal sense of desire not to succumb to the incessant dross, as we all march our way to work, no doubt many of us all caught up in the creation, display and measurement of advertising.

It’s not just the adverts existence on its own that frustrates me, as adverts are everywhere, but what’s being advertised too: it all reeks of the lowest common denominator, of treating us with contempt.

There are always several books being touted with tag lines like, “A dead child, a missing mother, a killer’s revenge – read the stunning new thriller from Steve Smith”, often proclaiming this chap “The new Stieg Larsson”.  And it makes me think, why on earth would anyone want to read that, it sounds horrendous, I’d rather read nothing.

Then there’s always a bunch of adverts for the DVDs of Jimmy Carr and Russell Howard and Lee Evans and all that and again, almost for no reason, I just want to tear them down: can we not go five minutes without endless plugs for more merchandise from tired old comedians who spend every spare moment on panel shows rehashing mean or lame gags? Does it have to be everywhere?

Then there are cookery books, the worst of which is The Hairy Bikers Pie recipe book from Christmas, with the unbelievably pathetic line of “A pie is not just for Christmas but for life”, which every time I mistakenly see I think; Who came up with that, who approved that, who got paid for that, what does it even mean?”

But this is the odd thing, when I have negotiated this Versailles of adverts, and reached the underground, where the adverts continue to come thick and fast, I just don’t feel so frustrated. I still role my eyes at the lame puns, the clear attempt at trying to make you believe you need something in your life that you don’t, but I just don’t feel the same animosity, the personal affront that the Waterloo adverts draw out of me.

Can they not just give us fifty metres of architecture, of nothing, of walls? When are we going to stop and decide we don’t have to plaster every empty space with posters for crap? We can just let a wall be a wall?

Complaining about adverts is, as I have said, a pointless thing to do, like trying to catch the wind in a sieve, but there we go.

A key decision when shopping for a piano

Not what I bought, but maybe one day...

Having survived the first few weeks back of the New Year after a relaxing, enjoyable and pleasingly economical Christmas it seemed appropriate to head into London and reward myself for working for three weeks in a row by making a purchase on the trusty credit card.

The object of my desire was a keyboard – a piano keyboard, not a computer keyboard – in order to help continue with my efforts at home over Christmas at trying to learn the infernal instrument some eight years after I gave up lessons while living at home.

My brother being a bit of a whiz on the old Joanna meant I had free tuition for several days and many aspects of the instrument that had always confused me before – what’s different about the black keys (answer: nothing), how do you make minor chords (answer: invert the 4/3 finger pattern for major chords to 3/4 (simple right?)) – I thought I should give the thing another shot.

So I wandered into Denmark Street – the music shop district of London – and this left me facing a bewildering array of choices at all manner of price points and styles. Some with light up keys, some with terrible tinny soundings keys, some with stands, some without, and prices from £50 to £300 for “beginner” models.

In the end I went for…nothing, as I was so overcome with choice I didn’t know what to do and thought I should check with my hermano (that’s Spanish for brother, I don’t know why I know that I studied French for four years) to see what he thought.

His answer: have my old keyboard. Ah, well, that’s an idea that should have crossed my mind when I was at home, but didn’t. Still, never look a gift-horse in the mouth, especially one that can play the piano – imagine that, a piano-playing horse.

So, now I am the proud owner of a second-hand keyboard and can happily tinkle away learning tunes such as Mary Had a Little Lamb and other nursery rhyme classics. What?

Still, at least my credit card survived a hit: well it did until I ended up splashing out on a new blazer instead for about the same price. It was in the sales, though, so was a bargain really…