The Guardian justifiably criticizes Avril Lavigne’s promo shot for her new album (while linking out to other pictures of attractive women hiding behind musical instruments). As the writer, Leonie Cooper, says:
So what does this particular pose mean? A number of things, actually, none of them particularly heartening.
I read an interview with a female classical trumpeter who disliked the princess getup she was photographed in for her CD cover. She said she had fought so many battles with the label to record the music she wanted, that she compromised on the outfit and photo. I’ve not seen Lavigne’s side of the story; it would be interesting to know her take on it.
Pete Seeger wrote the liner notes to his 1966 release Dangerous Songs?, a collection rather loosely grouped under that theme.
Any work of art, from a Michelangelo painting to a Beethoven symphony to a play by Shaw, has a point to make. If we disagree with its point, we call the art “propaganda.”
A lullaby is a propaganda song, in the opinion of the three-year-old who doesn’t want to be put to sleep.
A hymn is a controversial song. Try singing one in the wrong church.
Even the singer of bawdy songs is protesting — sanctimoniousness.
The author of “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams and Dream Your Troubles Away” penned the most common propaganda of all.
His final paragraph:
You’ll have to decide for yourself about all these songs: who they are dangerous to, and what for, and whether they are dangerous to you. We all know there are two sides to every question. There are two sides to a piece of flypaper, too, but it makes a great difference to the fly which side he lands on.
Yours stickily,
Pete Seeger
I quibble with some of this — not every work of art has a “point”, not all questions have only two sides — but there may be more in common between 1966 and 2019 than I’d like to acknowledge.
Austin Kleon remembers great advice from Jeffrey Tambor (“Worrying is not preparation”) and wonders what we can learn from people we used to admire:
It’s like they say in A.A. and Levon sang in The Band: “Take what you need and leave the rest.”
The need I will take is the teaching. The rest I will leave is the teacher.
In the meantime, I will keep looking for and learning from better men, or better yet, better women.
(Take time to read Austin’s sketchnotes from Tambor’s talks. They’re good.)
Doug Toft, in writing about the possibilities and limits of enlightenment, includes a depressingly long list of spiritual teachers whose destructive behavior wrecked their students’ lives.
Harlan Ellison often cited a quote: “Never meet an artist whose work you admire. The artist is always so much less than the art.” (Ellison is a person whose spirit and work ethic I always admired from my teens to adulthood, but whose work and personality I left behind. As Kleon notes, we’re infatuated by our ideas of the images these people project, but we’re also infatuated by our ideas of who we think these people are.)
I believe that teachers, artists, and those public personalities we admire share with us the best part of themselves. That’s what touches us and that’s what we latch on to. Separate the teaching from the teacher and the art from the artist — the good art and teachings will stand on their own.
I’ve always hated cutting grass, from my teenage years when it was my only source of income to being a homeowner. And of course, they’re biological and chemical nightmares:
“I’ve heard lawns compared to a biological desert … That’s really unfair, because deserts can be very diverse places.”
Many years ago, I attended an exhibit on American lawns. A few squibs I remember:
Lawns are status symbols. A large expanse of lawn shows you’re rich enough to own such a large property and to tend it.
Lawns are security buffers. A large expanse of lawn, sans trees or bushes, means no one can sneak up on you without being seen. High-security institutions have big open fields around them.
I cannot wait for the day when I can sell off my lawn mower and never walk behind one of those damned things again.
In my twenties the question was never “What do I want to read?” but rather “Who do I want to be?”—and bookstores were shrines I pilgrimaged to for answers … Now when I wander the aisles, it’s not just some future self I imagine but a past one. There aren’t just books to read but books I’ve already read. Lives I’ve lived. Hopes abandoned. Dreams deferred. The bookstore is still a shrine but more and more what I find aren’t answers to questions but my own unwritten histories.
Later on, he discovers folks in the bookstore who do not seem buffeted by these gales of self-interrogation:
They scan titles and pull books from the shelf and study dust-jackets in deep concentration: older folks in their fifties, sixties, seventies, and beyond. People with far more stories than my meager few. Lifelong readers. Book addicts. I watch them sometimes and wonder what drives their choices. How does reading evolve? Are books to us as leaves are to trees, feeding us while we hold them, then decomposing and feeding us again after we’ve let them go? I’m heartened by my elders. Humbled. I wonder if instead of asking “Who do I want to be?” they ask themselves, “What do I want to read?”
If I read PG Wodehouse to answer the question “Who do I want to be?” then I was definitely asking the wrong question. But I think I was still reading the right book — for me, on that day, at that time.
At 57, my advice to Steve would be to follow Randell Jarrell’s imperative: “Read at whim! read at whim!” And relax, for God’s sake.
Callow American reporter — and skeptic — Jack Walser ponders “half-woman, half-swan” Sophie Fevvers’ trapeze act and remembers ancient tricks he saw performed when he traveled the world:
In Kathmandu, he saw the fakir on a bed of nails, all complete, soar up until he was level with the painted demons on the eaves of the wooden houses; what, said the old man, heavily bribed, would be the point of the illusion if it looked like an illusion? For, opined the old charlatan to Walser with po-faced solemnity, is not this whole world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.
Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (1984) (Penguin reissue, 1993)
Just what tech-induced ailments do we suffer from, and how do we describe them? To answer this question, we conducted an extensive analysis of Google search trends and traditional media to identify how people talk about their conditions and how they search for relief.
A very clean set of infographics and analysis breaking down the search terms related to the most searched-for ailments of the (from most- to least-searched) thumbs, elbows, neck, eyes, and shoulders. Plus, which states searched the most on which type of ailments. North Carolina appears to be all thumbs, which is no surprise if you know our State Legislature.
Honorable mentions: nomophobia, phantom vibration syndrome, and smartphone pinky.
I evaluated Boomerang for this option but Boomerang added too much overhead and clutter to my Gmail experience. However, Boomerang had a couple of neat options I’d not run across before: it could pause delivery of email to the inbox for a specified period of time (for when you really don’t want to be bothered by email) and it could deliver batches of email to the inbox at intervals defined by the user.
I’m the classic inbox-checking personality type, so withholding email from me so that I checked it less gave me a nice break.
Search on “pause gmail” and you’ll find a couple of paid options and a couple of free Chrome extensions that can handle that task for you.
I didn’t know about those options before implementing the following free, though techy, approach to roughly the same thing. MIT student Kenneth Friedman wrote a few lines of Google Scripts code that diverts incoming email from the inbox to a new label then, at a specified interval, moves the emails in a batch to the inbox.
Friedman’s code relies on Google Developer Code for the timing trigger, which is not as fine-grained or customizable as the commercial options. The commercial options let you specify specific times of day when email will be moved to the inbox (every 10am and 2pm, for example) and can make it easier to let emails from specific senders slip through the filter.
The Google Developer Code is not that flexible. I need to tweak the Gmail filters myself if I want to be sure to receive emails from specific people. And although timing intervals can vary (by seconds, minutes, hours, and so on), Friedman recommends selecting an interval of every 4 hours. Intervals of 2, 6, 8, 10, and 12 hours could be selected instead; finding the right interval is a personal call.
I chose an interval of every 6 hours; I think the 6-hour intervals began after I saved that choice, but I am not sure. In any case, my emails get delivered four times a day at roughly midnight, 6 am, 12pm, and 6pm. That’s a nice spread for me. (And if I really really need to check email urgently, it’s easy to just click on the All Mail label.)
If you’re not interested in technical challenges and mucking around in Google Scripts code, then don’t bother with Friedman’s process. Go for Boomerang or Inbox When Ready and pay $5/month; it’s easier, more precise, and a little less nerve-wracking.
Update, 2019-02-14: I’ve been involved in some intensive committee work that has been sending lots of emails my way and required me to check and answer my email more often. The way to cheat on this batching Gmail method is simply to view All Mail, which will display all the mail queued in the batch. I still like the system, though, so I’m changing the delivery time from 6 hours to 2 hours. This will allow me to respond in a decent amount of time without subverting the system. More later.
I bought a 4TB external drive last year. I created two partitions: one to hold a Carbon Copy Cloner backup of my iMac and the other to be a generic external drive.
CCC has been working great but I have had the devil’s own time simply copying files to the external partition.
For security reasons that were a holdover from my MacBook days, I have created an Administrator user account and a Mike user account (which I use all the time). The Mike user does not have all the power of the Administrator, by design: if some bad software wants to write to the drive, it will not have the permission to do so. When installing software or making some changes, I have to enter the Administrator credentials to carry out the operation. It can be tedious sometimes, but it does not happen often and I’m used to it.
I think, too, Apple’s recent emphasis on security in its operating system releases have raised some barriers that weren’t there before. I don’t remember, for example, having this much trouble doing simple file management operations on an external drive. Even simply creating a folder or copying a file required me to enter my Administrator credentials for every single operation.
I finally got fed up this morning, Googled around, tried some things, and discovered the fix.
The second thing I did was so incredibly simple I almost wept: from the partition’s Get Info window in the Finder, check the option “Ignore ownership on this volume.” I checked the box and immediately was able to create folders, move and copy files, etc. O frabjous day! Thanks, Larry Jordan!
I tend to rate songs or tracks in iTunes or iOS Music with stars, as I’ve written about before. As Kirk McElhearn explains, recent versions if iTunes automatically calculate song and album ratings for an entire album even if you’ve manually rated only one song. This totally ruined Kirk’s — and my — smart playlists.
The only surefire way to solve the problem is to use Applescripts to clear the imputed album and track ratings — that appear in iTunes as gray stars — so that the only tracks that are rated are the ones I’ve manually selected — blue stars.
Two good solutions are the Album Rating Reset script from Doug’s Applescripts (I select “None/clear”), or the ClearAlbumAutoRating script from this Apple Support forum thread (scroll down to the post from “turingtest2”, which links to four Applescripts that both clear or restore auto ratings).
When I’m poking around inside iTunes and browsing albums, I find the ClearAlbumAutoRating script to be the easiest and quickest to use. Just select the album or a track, run the script, and the despised album rating disappears.
But for playlists or large selections of multiple albums, I like Doug Adams’ script. The beautiful aspect of Doug’s script is its simplicity. Run the script to display the Album Rating Reset window. Select a playlist or group of albums and the script gathers all the necessary track and album info; it told me, for example, that my 2-star playlist contained 125 albums. I selected an album rating of “None/clear”, clicked Apply, and saw my beloved playlist cleared of those gray-starred blemishes.
