The Album that Changed My Life

The slightly grandiose title to this post comes from The Olive Reader, the blog of Harper Perennial (a book publisher), which is doing a promo for a book of theirs, Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers on the Albums That Changed Their Lives. On the blog they ask, “What album changed your life at 17? (Or whenever.)”

That’s easy. Here’s my answer:

It’s 1981, and I’m 15, a gawky, pimply, f*cked up soup of hormones, and I’m busting my ass on the subway to get back and forth to my new high school where no one likes me because I’m new and I’m not from the suburbs.

Reagan is president, I’m convinced he’s going to make me sign up for the draft in a few years, if he doesn’t annihilate us with nukes first.

The radio is filled with crap like “Endless Love” by Diana Ross and Lionel Richie, Kenny Rogers, Sheena Easton, Juice Newton. It’s worse than bad. It’s insultingly bad, like saccharine on a popsicle.

Then I discover the Clash. Specifically, “London Calling,” with its brilliantly dark, apocalyptic title track, plus “Spanish Bombs,” “Guns of Brixton,” and “Death or Glory,” just to name a few.

This is a punk band, yeah. I’m 15, I’m all about that. But there’s reggae in there, dub, rockabilly, ska, pop culture references … and POLITICS.

LEFT politics. These guys are playing Rock Against Racism, they know their history (”Spanish Bombs” is about the Spanish Civil War and fascism, “Guns of Brixton” is about the Brixton race riots) … and they can flat-out PLAY.

At 15 you’re right at the bottom of the trough, as awkward and angry and frustrated and drug-taking and screwed-up as you can be. And when Air Supply and Abba and Hall & Oates’ hair gel were all conspiring against me, along came Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon putting out music that was angry, vital, political, engaged, smart, and most of all, REAL.

And after a few hundred listens, you figure it out. It’s OK to be screwed up and angry, because you can be all those other things, too. Note by note and song by song, they showed me the way.

When It Is Spring, One Must Wear Daisies

I was in Toronto a couple of weeks ago, while the Stanley Cup was still in progress. That meant Hockey Night in Canada, and that meant color commentator Don Cherry. Now, Don has his problems, but if you’re going to be a color commentator, it doesn’t hurt if you wear something colorful.

Here’s his get-up the night I saw him on TV:

Daisies. I have nothing more to say.

Never Argue with a Pretty Face

My company is having a roundtable about sustainability, and on the home page of our intranet, I published a promo for the meeting, and a form so people could ask anonymous questions.

But when I built the page, the headline and text looked a little too stark. The page needed a photo. I looked on photos.com under “landscape,” and this showed up on the first result screen:

Landscape fail.

Not quite. So I went for something iconic and cute and kinda sustain-ity. I went with this:

The next day my boss came in to tell me she decided to swap out the photo, to generate some more questions for the round table. She swapped in photos of the three people hosting the event (the faces have been pixelated to protect the innocent):

Sure enough, the questions started rolling in. First question:

What happened to the picture of the duck? — end message

Second question:

I liked the picture of the duck better. — end message

Walter Kirn’s “Up in the Air”

Walter Kirn begins his clever, caustic novel Up in the Air with a little monologue:

“To know me you have to fly with me.” That’s Ryan Bingham, protagonist and veteran air traveler. “Sit down. I’m the aisle, you’re the window — trapped. You crack your paperback, last spring’s big legal thriller, convinced that what you want is solitude, though I know otherwise: you need to talk.”

Bingham is 35, a career-transition counselor for some vague Denver management company (his job is to travel around and fire people, and make them feel OK about it).

The plot, such it were, centers around Ryan’s monumentally trivial quest to reach the Holy Grail of one million frequent-flier miles. His obstacles: his disintegrating career, his ragged family (especially his sister’s impending marriage), the nagging paranoia that someone might be angling for his miles.

At times I found the plot a little confusing, and some of the dialogue — while awfully snappy — a tad bit too terse.

But the plot isn’t nearly as much fun as Kirn’s pitch-perfect anthropology:

I call it Airworld; the scene, the place, the style. My hometown papers are USA Today and The Wall Street Journal. The big-screen Panasonics in the club rooms broadcast all the news I need, with an emphasis on the markets and the weather. My literature — yours, too, I see — is the best seller or the near-best seller, heavy on themes of espionage, high finance and the goodness of common people in small towns. In Airworld, I’ve found, the passions and enthusiasms of the outlying society are concentrated and whisked to a stiff froth. When a new celebrity is minted in the movie theaters or ballparks, this is where the story breaks — on the vast magazine racks that form a sort of trading floor for public reputations and pretty faces. I find it possible here, as nowhere else, to think of myself as part of the collective that prices the long bond and governs necktie widths. Airworld is a nation within a nation, with its own language, architecture, mood and even its own currency — the token economy of airline bonus miles that I’ve come to value more than dollars. Inflation doesn’t degrade them. They’re not taxed. They’re private property in its purest form.

Despite his status as a damaged bit of luggage (divorced, accused of running from his family’s problems, lying to his mom about his location), Ryan is somehow engaging, despite being marinated in cynicism.

Besides, the real fun is in Airworld, where airport chapels are ”restful and perfect for catching up on paperwork,” and where interesting people share planes with him.

When General Norman Schwarzkopf goes to the lavatory, we get this: ”I feel a shift as all of us stop thinking about ourselves and wonder why that closed door is staying so closed. A hand-washer? Normal travelers’ diarrhea? It’s painful to picture the Big Guy so confined.”

I wanted to read this when it came out in mid-2001 … then had a thought that 9/11 must have been an odd thing to happen to this recently released book.

Then I forgot about the book for years and years, until I stumbled across Lost in the Meritocracy, a remarkable short memoir he published in the Atlantic (which is now a book).

That steered me back to Up in the Air. Good thing, too. As a satire of an odd little segment of Americana (airports and business travel), this book hits a bulls-eye.

Attention Writers: Win a Manuscript Critique

Attention all you would-be published writers: a literary agent named Nathan Bransford (he’s with Curtis Brown Ltd.) is offering a critique of a proposal (synopsis and first three chapters).

Nathan Bransford, literary agent

Nathan has one of the best publishing blogs out there, which builds community, educates writers, spreads publishing news, preaches the super-important gospel about how to write a non-crap query letter, and a zillion other things besides. He even made newspapers with his blog recently by taking a good idea and running with it: the Be an Agent for a Day Contest.

I mention this because it’s a great blog, and through it (and my other dealings with him) Nathan has proved again and again that he’s a good guy and a straight shooter.

So … how do you get such rare, personal attention from a high-flier such as him? Well all ya gotta do is bid for it. See, Nathan donated said critique to benefit diabetes research.

So tell all your writer friends.

How to Edit Even Goodlier

Ye Olde Bloge has been unusually quiet of late because I’ve been editing. I writ a book, book clunky, book needs revision.

So I reread. Hmm, thinks I. That sucks. I edit. It sucks a little bit less. I edit whole page. Page sucks less, but takes a while. Now I repeat process 387 times. Whole things sucks a bit less, but in a slightly different way. Eyes very glazed.

Yetsomehowduringallthis, I keep stumbling across goodly things about editing.

First, some advice on rewriting:

Next, the (karaoke) experience of rewriting with an editor:

And last but not finally, a word on the the impotence of proofreading (yeah, you read that right)

The Onion on Corporations Going Green

God, I love The Onion. I bow down to them for this:

The Oddest Book Title of the Year

Two weeks ago we heard about the finalists for the Diagram Prize, which goes to the oddest book title of the year. The short list of six had five strong contenders — and of course, controversy, as Excrement in the Late Middle Ages and All Dogs Have ADHD didn’t make the cut. Needless to say, FPI was all over this story like late-middle-aged excrement.

Today they’ve announced the winner: The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-Milligram Containers of Fromage Frais.

Yes, it’s odd.

The Diagram Award’s administrator had this to say about the book:

“What does the future hold for these items?” Mr. Stone asked, speaking of fromage-frais cartons. “Well, given that fromage frais normally comes in 60-gram containers, one would assume that the world outlook for 0.06-gram containers of fromage frais is pretty bleak. But I’m not willing to pay £795 to find out.”

The New York Times (from whom I quote) has a good write-up on the winnings, including interviews with some of the red-carpet finalists.

But the best bit is actually a quote from the judge:

Publishers are not allowed to nominate their own books, so as to prevent them from giving books willfully odd names. That is pretty much the only rule. Anyone can nominate a title, and the public is invited to vote online at thebookseller.com. The prize’s administrators try not to read the books, Mr. Stone said, because doing so might “cloud our judgment.”

Funny, when a reviewer tried not to read my book and still reviewed it, things didn’t turn out so well.

Still, kudos to M. Fromage Frais. After all, when you’ve beat out books like A Pictorial Book of Tongue Coatings, Waterproofing Your Child and Cheese Problems Solved, you must be doing something, uh, right.

Links to What Distracted Me from Working This Week

This week, I read someone talking about legal threats to bloggers linking to the New York Times. The writer made the comment that the Web is basically a giant copying machine. How true, how true.

In that spirit, links to some of the stuff I happily distracted myself with this week:

On the highbrow end, not one but two interesting pieces about online reviews. First, from the Economist, this discovery:

a handful of bad reviews, it seems, are worth having. “No one trusts all positive reviews,” he says. So a small proportion of negative comments—“just enough to acknowledge that the product couldn’t be perfect”—can actually make an item more attractive to prospective buyers.

And this one: A company that researches this “shows that visitors are more reluctant to buy until a product attracts a reasonable number of reviews and picks up momentum.”

Know who does this really well? Amazon.com. One company estimates that one little feature of reviewing on the Amazon site is worth $2.7 billion of new revenue. Wow.

On the middlebrow end, I wrote my sustainability tip this week about how green cigarettes are, based on an excellent article by Nina Shen Rastogi, a.k.a. The Green Lantern, a columnist on Slate.com.

Long story short, cigs are a disaster. 27 million pounds of pesticides every year in the U.S., nearly a half-million acres of forest and woodland cleared every year for tobacco farming, 84,878 tons of fine particulate matter (bad stuff!), 1.7 billion tons of cigarette butts … yuck.

Also, British project is showing the effects of traffic pollution. Using a network of wireless sensors near major roads, they collect data on carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, other pollutant levels, temperature, humidity and noise levels, as well as a count of vehicle passages. The result is a real-time “pollution map” of London, to help people choose travel routes, and government officials figure out solutions.

In lower brow fun, The New York Times has a great article about kooks who do like Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, right down to the costume, and building replica chairs. The photos are priceless. I’d run one, but the New York Times is pretty ornery about that nowadays.

The UK’s Telegraph has a list of 20 the most ridiculous complaints made by travelers to their travel agent.

One of my favorites:

A tourist at a top African game lodge overlooking a waterhole, who spotted a visibly aroused elephant, complained that the sight of this rampant beast ruined his honeymoon by making him feel “inadequate”.

On that note, courtesy of the Boston Globe’s Braniac blog, I also had to laugh at one of the funniest faux-self-help books I’ve ever seen. (Which is not for the more prudish of your friends and relations.)

And last but not least, some clever Brits did their take on what the publisher’s meeting might have been like for the Harry Potter books. Which is funny as hell if you’ve every tried to pitch a book.

Fulminating against the Local Fish Wrap

The Oregonian, Portland’s big daily paper, laid an egg the other day when covering a proposed change to Oregon traffic law regarding cyclists. It’s so bad, in fact, you can’t even grasp the subtleties of the proposal. (BikePortland does a much better job.)

I was so disgusted at the newspaper’s coverage, I posted a response on the O’s public blog. If you have a minute, wander over there and add a supporting comment, eh? (Login required. It’s free.)