Links - Something Completely Different
A little break from the usual
It is good to shake things up. These three links certainly do that compared to my normal compendia.
We start with Adam Mastroianni giving us the harsh truth: We are all crazy people. Fortunately, he offers a solution to our nuttiness in the form of unpacking.
The Coffee Beans Procedure is a way of doing what psychologists call unpacking. Our imaginations are inherently limited; they can’t include all details at once. (Otherwise you run into Borges’ map problem—if you want a map that contains all the details of the territory that it’s supposed to represent, then the map has to be the size of the territory itself.) Unpacking is a way of re-inflating all the little particulars that had to be flattened so your imagination could produce a quick preview of the future, like turning a napkin sketch into a blueprint.1
When people have a hard time figuring out what to do with their lives, it’s often because they haven’t unpacked.
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When you fully unpack any job, you’ll discover something astounding: only a crazy person should do it.
Do you want to be a surgeon? = Do you want to do the same procedure 15 times a week for the next 35 years?
Do you want to be an actor? = Do you want your career to depend on having the right cheekbones?
Do you want to be a wedding photographer? = Do you want to spend every Saturday night as the only sober person in a hotel ballroom?
If you think no one would answer “yes” to those questions, you’ve missed the point: almost no one would answer “yes” to those questions, and those proud few are the ones who should be surgeons, actors, and wedding photographers.
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Some of you guys wake up at 5am to make almond croissants, some of you watch golf on TV, and some of you are willing to drive an 80,000-pound semi truck full of fidget spinners across the country. There are people out there who like the sound of rubbing sheets of Styrofoam together, people who watch 94-part YouTube series about the Byzantine Empire, people who can spend an entire long-haul flight just staring straight ahead. Do you not realize that, to me, and to almost everyone else, you are all completely nuts?
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That’s certainly true for me, anyway. I never unpacked any job I ever had before I had it. I would just show up on the first day and discover what I had gotten myself into, as if the content of a job was simply unknowable before I started doing it, a sort of “we have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it” kind of situation. That’s how I spent the summer of 2014 as a counselor at a camp for 17-year-olds, even though I could have easily known that job would require activities that I hated, like being around 17-year-olds. Could I have known specifically that my job would include such tasks as “escorting kids across campus because otherwise they’ll flee into the woods” or “trying to figure out whether anyone brought booze to the dance by surreptitiously sniffing kids’ breath?” No. But had I unpacked even a little bit, I would have picked a different way to spend my summer, like selling booze to kids outside the dance.
It’s no wonder that everyone struggles to figure what to do with their lives: we have not developed the cultural technology to deal with this problem because we never had to. We didn’t exactly evolve in an ancestral environment with a lot of career opportunities. And then, once we invented agriculture, almost everyone was a farmer the next 10,000 years. “What should I do with my life?” is really a post-1850 problem, which means, in the big scheme of things, we haven’t had any time to work on it.
Next is Erik Hoel in Part 2 of his Field Notes for a Child’s Codex: More Lore of the World.
Walmart
Walmart was, growing up, where I didn’t want to be. Whatever life had in store for me, I wanted it to be the opposite of Walmart.
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Now, as a new parent, Walmart is a cathedral. It has high ceilings, lots to look at, is always open, and is cheap. Lightsabers (or “laser swords,” for copyright purposes) are stuffed in boxes for the taking. Pick out a blue one, a green one, a red one. We’ll turn off the lights at home and battle in the dark. And the overall shopping experience of Walmart is undeniably kid-friendly. You can run down the aisles. You can sway in the cart. Stakes are low at Walmart. Everyone says hi to you and your sister. They smile at you. They interact. While sometimes patrons and even employees may appear, well, somewhat strange, even bearing the cross of visible ailments, they are scary and friendly. If I visit Walmart now, I leave wondering why this is. Because in comparison, I’ve noticed that at stores more canonically “upper class,” you kids turn invisible. No one laughs at your antics. No one shouts hello. No one talks to you, or asks you questions. At Whole Foods, people don’t notice you. At Stop & Shop, they do. Your visibility, it appears, is inversely proportional to the price tags on the clothes worn around you. Which, by the logical force of modus ponens, means you are most visible at, your very existence most registered at, of all places, Walmart.
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Cicadas
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After digging out of their grave, where they live, to reach the world above, where they die, cicadas next molt, then spend a while adjusting to their new winged bodies before taking to the woods to mate. Unfortunately, our house is in the woods. Nor is there escape elsewhere—drive anywhere and cicadas hit your windshield, sometimes rapid-fire; never smearing, they instead careen off almost politely, like an aerial game of bumper cars.
We just have to make it a few more weeks. After laying their eggs on the boughs of trees (so vast are these clusters it breaks the branches) the nymphs drop. The hatched babies squirm into the dirt, and the 17-year-cycle repeats. But right now the saga’s ending seems far away, as their molted carapaces cling by the dozens to our plants and window frames and shed, like hollow miniatures. Even discarded, they grip.
“It’s like leaving behind their clothes,” I tell your sister.
“Their clothes,” she says, in her tiny pipsqueak voice.
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Against our will the Bourbon Brood has scheduled something in our calendar, 17 years out, shifting the future from abstract to concrete. When the cicadas return, you will be turning 21. Your sister, 19. Myself, already 55. Your mother, 54. Your grandparents will, very possibly, all be dead. This phase of life will have finished. And to mark its end, the cicadas will crawl up through the dirt, triumphant in their true ownership, and the empty nest of our home will buzz again with these long-living, subterranean-dwelling, prime-calculating, calendar-setting, goddamn vampires.
Last is Scott Sumner (sorry, not sorry about another Sumner link this weekend). Here he is writing on the mid 1960s when music went supernova:
“It’s just boomer nostalgia.” Maybe, but I first started listening to music in the 1970s. Back in 1975, I might have cited 1971 as the best year. It’s only much later that I came to view the mid-60s as the key period. At that time, I was 10 years old and living in a non-musical household with no record player. Very little pop music was on TV. I had no idea that songs like Tomorrow Never Knows and Visions of Johanna even existed, and if I’d heard them I might not even have recognized them as being music.
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OK, so what makes the mid-60s special? Lots of things. This was when global population growth peaked at 2.1%, the highest rate in human history, and given current trends that fact will continue to be true for centuries to come. This was when the Great Inflation began, which is the event that more than any other shaped my views on economics. But today I’ll focus on pop music, specifically the roughly 14 months between the date when the Rolling Stones released the single Satisfaction (6/4/65) and the date when the Beatles released the album Revolver (8/5/66). Barely more than a single year.
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Indeed 5 of the 6 albums I’ve mentioned so far are in the top 32 of all time, and 4 of those 5 are in the top 11. All 5 were issued within a 14-month period. Even if you think its boomer nostalgia, why are they so bunched up in such a short period of time?
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But that’s not all!
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are also an outstanding songwriting duo.
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Paul Simon is another all-time great songwriter, and his first big hit (The Sound of Silence) came out in January 1966.
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The Byrds invented folk rock, and put out three albums during that period.
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The Who came out with the album My Generation, and its title track might be regarded as the very first punk rock song.
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Even this almost absurd cornucopia of riches overlooks all the singles that were not included on albums. Today, artists who wrote songs like Satisfaction and Positively 4th Street would not leave them off their albums. During this period the Beatles released We Can Work It Out, Day Tripper, Paperback Writer, and Rain as singles. (Listen to Ringo’s drumming on Rain.) Imagine how good Rubber Soul and Revolver would be with those songs added. Dylan left great songs like She’s Your Lover Now off Blonde on Blonde, and didn’t even bother releasing it as a single. They were tossing away songs that would be a crowning achievement of most pop songwriters.
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I haven’t even mentioned Motown. Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding The Temptations, The Supremes, the Four Tops, Martha & the Vandellas, Stevie Wonder, and Aretha Franklin. Many all time classic Motown songs that you still hear on the radio or in movie soundtracks came from the mid-1960s.
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Who can ever forget how Wong Kar Wai used California Dreaming (from December 1965) in the 1994 film Chungking Express? (Amazingly, the best French New Wave film was produced in Hong Kong.) Garage rock began in April 1966 with the song Wild Thing.
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Beginning around 1965, the pop music industry changed. Instead of performers, pop music began to be dominated by singer-songwriters. (In the 21st century, performers have come back into style.)
So how does one become a successful singer-songwriter? The answer is simple, be born in an English-speaking country in the early 1940s. The world has about 8 billion people. Roughly one half of 1% of the world’s population was born in English speaking countries like America, Canada, the UK and Jamaica, between the years of 1940 and 1945.
Pop songwriters born between 1940 and 1945 include: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Brian Wilson, Lou Reed, Mick Jagger & Keith Richards, Pete Townsend, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Van Morrison, Ray Davies, Smokey Robinson, Carole King, Bob Marley, Lamont Dozier & Brian Holland, and Randy Newman. That’s 17 of Rolling Stone’s all time top 30 songwriters, and 10 of the top 12. What’s the second best 6-year stretch of songwriters? I don’t know, who finished second to Secretariat in the Belmont Stakes?
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Occasionally, I stop by at a trendy independent coffee shop, to check out one of their new flavored concoctions. I always have the same problem. The young barista asks me some questions, and I cannot make out what she is saying. It’s a combination of the young woman speaking fast, me being a bit hard of hearing (too much rock music), and me not anticipating questions like whether I want oat milk, or whether I want the latte hot or cold. I feel like an old fossil amongst all the young people looking cool as they work on their laptops.
But then the music comes on and it’s from the mid-1960s. Ah ha! Maybe I’m not hopelessly uncool after all. Twenty years ago when sitting in a Starbucks, the music might also have been from the 1960s. But probably not from the 1940s. And forty years ago the music might also have been from the 1960s, but almost certainly not from the 1920s. And 60 years ago the music might also have been from the 1960s, but certainly not from 1905.
The post is a masterpiece.
As a favor to yourself, read all three of these links, please.