Briefly Noted for November 9, 2022

Taylor Swift told us in the Folklore studio movie that the 5th track on each of her albums holds a special meaning for her. It wasn’t exactly a secret, but the film confirmed it. The tracks include some of her best: “All Too Well”, “Dear John”, “Tolerate It.” Here’s a Spotify playlist of Swift’s 5th songs. The latest, “You’re on Your Own, Kid,” is the highlight of her new album.

If you like Marketplace on NPR, listen to this recent episode of the Pivot podcast. Kai Ryssdal, the host of Marketplace, joins Kara Swisher to discuss the latest business/tech stories. It’s great to hear Ryssdal’s distinctive voice in this more free flowing, opinion laden format.

I’m very grateful to have been nominated for election to the Board of the National Council on Public History. If you’re a member, I hope you’ll read my candidate statement and consider voting for me.

UConn has a top-5 recruiting class this year in men’s basketball. That’s big.

Hello (Linux) World

Feeling increasingly alienated by commercial software companies and increasingly uncomfortable with my absurd level of Mac lust, I finally decided this weekend to get off the Apple train and make the switch to Linux.

Until I’m sure I’ve worked out all the kinks, I’m running a dual boot setup of Ubuntu 8.10b and Mac 0S 10.5 on my MacBook Pro. It was a pretty simple operation, which took up the better part of my Sunday morning, but not much more than that. I more or less followed the Ubuntu support community’s MacBook Pro documentation line for line, and everything more or less seemed to work. A few quick Google searches showed me how to install Skype and a few other applications that aren’t included in the main Ubuntu repositories. Aside from a couple minor annoyances (e.g. “right-click” is confusingly keyed to F12 or a two-finger trackpad click) so far I’m very happy.

In the coming weeks, once I’m sure I have everything I need off my old system, I hope to leave Apple entirely. I’m a little worried about what I’m going to do about my music; I’ve bought quite a bit from the iTunes Store. But the fact that my music is locked up in iTunes shouldn’t be a reason for sticking with Apple. It is yet another reason to leave.

Currently I’m looking at a combination of a Dell Mini 9 and either a desktop or 15″ laptop. If nothing else, I have a whole new range of hardware to ogle.

Briefly Noted for December 21, 2007

NEH announces funding for Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities.

A Visit to Yesterland – The Discontinued Disneyland. “Did you ever wonder what happened to Disneyland’s Mine Train, Flying Saucers, or Indian Village? These and other attractions, restaurants, and shops are now collected in Yesterland, a theme park on the Web.”

The Museum of Bad Album Covers. “Currently displaying 156 awful album covers!”

1990 Mac ad deemed fake. (Via Crunchgear.)

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Schill, Scorpions, and Louis Gossett Jr.

We all know the Mitchell Report has been digging into ball players’ pasts. So, it seems, has Boston Magazine. In particular, they have found a few embarrassing skeletons in Curt Schilling’s closet. For sure, there’s nothing in the signed 1986 minor league program found by the magazine as offensive as performance enhancing drugs. But the young Schilling’s fondness for Scorpions, Iron Eagle, and Miami Vice comes pretty close.

Curt Schilling Rocks Like a Hurricane.

Thanks, Ken.

Bowie's in Space

One last music post before I return to Found History‘s bread and butter.

If you haven’t been watching HBO’s Flight of the Conchords, you’re really missing something. Take my word, it’s the best comedy to hit TV since FOX inexplicably pulled Arrested Development from the air more than a year ago. It’s way too weird to explain fully here, but it’s basically a story about a pair of New Zealanders—Bret and Jemaine—trying to make it as novelty musicians in New York. Between meetings with their agent Murray and chance encounters with their lusty “fan” (singular) Mel, the Conchords regale us with their truly awesome music videos.

This week the Conchords did some history—some freaky Bowie history. Three times during the episode, Bret is visited in his sleep by a vision of Bowie past: the 1972 Ziggy Stardust Bowie, the 1980 Scary Monsters Bowie, and finally the 1996 Labyrinth Bowie. This final visit launches the Conchords into “Bowie’s in Space” a brilliant parody of Bowie’s “Space Oddity”. Then, to top it all off, the video continues into the credits where the music changes from the 1970s space kitsch of “Major Tom” to the 1980s wood block and rolled up sport jacket sleeves of “Let’s Dance.” Too funny, man.

U2's Kite

I’ll stick with music for one more post.

“Kite” is one of my favorite of U2‘s more recent songs. In keeping with the title, Edge’s guitar is alternatingly lilting and soaring, and Bono’s vocals are more than usually impassioned. The chord progression is classic rock simple, but the rhythms are changeable and complex. In many ways “Kite” marks the high point or cresendo of the band’s return its rocking roots in its November 2000 release All That You Can’t Leave Behind.

However, the best moment for me—and not coincidentally the one that will be most interesting to Found History readers—is the song’s nearly spoken-word epilogue:

Did I waste it?
Not so much I couldn’t taste it
Life should be fragrant
Rooftop to the basement

The last of the rocks stars
When hip hop drove the big cars
In the time when new media
Was the big idea

That was the big idea

Buried just beneath the surface of this apparent afterthought is what amounts to an historical apology to fans.

Emerging from the same late-70s post-punk, post-prog crucible as The Police and The Clash, U2 outlasted its equally talented competition to become what many consider the band of the 80s. The high point of this success was undoubtedly 1987’s landmark release The Joshua Tree, which by almost any measure must rank among rock’s greatest achievements.

If the Joshua Tree launched U2 into the pantheon of rock and roll, it also presented the band with the familiar problem of finding a suitable second act. The Joshua Tree was haunting and profound, but it was also chokingly serious and unsustainably earnest. U2’s 1988 follow up album-cum-tour film Rattle and Hum presents a band that has taken itself too seriously. 1991’s sometimes brilliant, faintly inane, and thoroughly self-regarding release Achtung Baby gave us a band on the verge of collapse. Often mistaken to be a love song, the album’s biggest single “One” is in fact a desperate plea to keep the band together.

Yet what U2 recognized in Achtung Baby that nearly all top bands miss is that they had to stop taking themselves so seriously. It wasn’t at all obvious how to do this: the history of rock doesn’t provide many good examples of humility. Indeed a late-90s observer likely would have determined that U2 had failed. 1993’s Zooropa, 1997’s Pop, and the band members’ string of unremarkable solo projects took the inanity of Achtung Baby to new heights. In the increasingly fragmented media and music environment of the mid-1990s that now included Rap, House, Grunge, Electronica, Alternative and many more, U2s brand of Led Zeppelin-style superstardom just seemed all the more ridiculous.

In fact, consciously or not, U2 had hit upon an ingenious reinvention strategy. The only way to combat the overwhelming earnestness of The Joshua Tree and the art house self-seriousness of Achtung Baby was to tear the band down and rebuild from the ground up. Pop in particular was a scathing, humiliating, almost self-flagellating parody of wealth, fame, technology, and rock itself. Yet at the time it just seemed like a bust. Most late-90s observers would have determined that U2 was finished.

2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind was therefore and by all accounts a renaissance. With songs like “Beautiful Day” and “Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of,” the band returned to the tested formula of big vocals, socially aware lyrics, building guitars, and rock-solid bass and percussion that served it so well in the mid-1980s. (You find hints of U2’s earlier work throughout the album, for example the tinkling piano at the end of “Walk On” is clearly a throwback to 1983’s “New Year’s Day.”) This time, however, tempered by experience, they did it without so much (though admittedly still some – hey, they’re rock stars) ego and condescention. For long time fans—like me, if you hadn’t already guessed—it was a welcome return to the band’s roots.

This is the history told in the last two stanzas of “Kite.” In the first of these, Bono acknowledges the band’s mid-90s collapse and explains that its absurdist turn was at least partly intentional: “Did I waste it? / Not so much I couldn’t taste it / Life should be fragrant / Rooftop to the basement.” In the second, he provides fans with a rationale: “The last of the rocks stars / When hip hop drove the big cars / In the time when new media was the big idea / That was the big idea.”

Together I think these two stanzas prove I’m not totally off my rocker in pointing to the historical work being done by U2 in this song. In them Bono recognizes the essential anachronism of a 1970s stadium rock band (the “last of the rock stars”) in a world of satellite television, iTunes, and general media fragmentation (in the mid- to late-90s marginal hip hop artists truly “drove the big cars” viz. the Notorious B.I.G. and Coolio). He also recognizes that the only way to deal with the historical predicament in which U2 finds itself is alternatingly to embrace and reject that new media culture—that was the “big idea.”

In terms of found history, “Kite” shows not only that U2 has thought about and understands its place in the larger sweep of rock and roll history, but also that its long time fan base expects fidelity to that history or at least some explanation when it deviates from it. “Kite” also suggests that at this late stage, die hard fans may well expect U2 to make history and autobiography as much as they expect them to make good music.

Synchronicity

So the picture is horrible, but the show was great.

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Friday night I was fortunate enough to catch The Police in Hershey, PA, and I have to say it was one of the best reunion concerts I have seen. As this cell phone picture of the t-shirt tent attempts to show, both the crowd and the band exhibited their fair share of sentimentality and nostalgia: cover art from Outlandos d’Amour, Regatta de Blanc, and Synchronicity was much in evidence.

Despite the throwback visuals, however, The Police and their music seemed surprisingly fresh and relevant. You could almost imagine them doing something interesting in the recording studio—a claim you wouldn’t make of other recent reunion acts like The Who, The Eagles, or Fleetwood Mac. Sting in particular went a long way towards rehabilitating his rock star credentials and winning me back as a fan. After several tired years of tantric spirituality, bad lute music, and cheesy troubadour costumes, it was nice to see him rock out in spiked hair, a torn t-shirt, and a used up bass guitar. That, of course, is my own nostalgia at work, but as Rob MacDougall might observe, sometimes old is truly the new new.

Change Over Time

This is kind of creepy—it reminds me of Michael Jackson’s 1991 Black or White video, which is creepy on many levels—but it’s also kind of cool. Eggman913‘s 500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art provides a compelling and potentially telling history of the evolution of Western female portraiture in the space of three minutes.

It would be great if we had artists, titles, and dates to go along with the music and images, but even without them the video provides an incredibly rich visualization of how both painting and perceptions of women have changed since the Renaissance. Professional digital historians could take a lesson from this slick amateur effort.