Two, no, three little things that happened not so long ago

First, anyone who missed theBloggess' heroic, fantastic holiday gift drive, check this out and think to yourself, next year I'll do something like that. Here's an article about it in the Washington Post. I also consider her daily bloggings to be among the best there is on the net but mileage may vary.

Second, another kind of serious entry in the media flow: an open letter in response to the statements by Michael Moore. Lashing out is more fun than waiting for things to run their course, and it gives less press. That's not a very good starting point for deciding what's right or wrong, though.

Third, if you're the tech type, you didn't miss this, but maybe there's still someone around who would be as fascinated, awestruck by this as I was and who hasn't seen it yet - so here's that babel fish iPhone app.



Freakin' awesome.

The meteoric rise of inanity

Stupid idiom: "meteoric rise."

Meteors go down. It's what they do. It's all they do. If they don't, they're not meteors, they're just rocks.

I am aware that technically, it is possible for a meteor to be a so-called earth-grazer. This is a one in a many-billions event, and none of you have seen one. So, nyah.

Don't call anything that's moving upwards "meteoric." The word you're looking for may be shining or brilliant, it may be ballistic or rocket-like or just upwards. Anything but meteoric.

Meteors go down.

Leonid meteor. Wikipedia image.

Bruce, pt 2

I'm mildly disappointed by the Promise box. My expectations weren't very high about the actual content, it was to a large extent more paying homage to my own past - but I did expect more after all the talk before-hand. I saw journalists handing out full score reviews left and right, and I just don't think that's fair.

There are some parts to look at when reviewing the whole package that is The Promise, let's take them one by one.

First, it's a remaster of the best record ever. That's a 5/5, how could it possibly be anything else.

Second, it's a double CD with discarded songs from the Darkness sessions. This is where I think journalists didn't quite think, step back and really think. It's a bit magic to hear these recordings. The first time we can hear them in highest possible quality at the very least, and several of them truly never heard before. But hey, guys? These songs seem mostly like... well, discarded stuff to me. Really discarded stuff. Sure, Fire and Because are pretty tight and finished, but they're not really news, and - heresy - I never really liked either of them. They're filler for me. They illustrate perfectly why none of these songs made it onto the Darkness album. Most of the songs are heavily cannibalized for lyrics and often for score as well. As can be seen in the DVD material, the band made several other songs during this period that did eventually make it onto the River, and justifiably, because those songs are all superior to anything on The promise: Sherry darling, The ties that bind, Independence day, and more.

Two other songs are worth mentioning: The "rock" version of Racing, so dubbed by journalists. WTF, "rock"? How can a journalist call this a "rock" version of anything when it's a reject from the album that starts with Badlands and Adam raised a Cain? Second, The Promise. I'm sorry, this may be the best of the songs on its own, but it's also too sentimental, it lacks a point and it lacks musical push. It would have made sense as a single somewhere around the time of Darkness but it suffers heavily in comparison to the collective works that make up Born to run and Darkness and in this context, even The river.

Taken as a new or forgotten Bruce double CD, The Promise is maybe 2 or 3/5. As add on material to Darkness, 4/5.

Third, The making of Darkness DVD. This is awesome. 5/5.

Fourth, The Houston house cut. 4/5 for afficionados. It's a shame there's apparently nothing better to release from the Darkness tour era. The Library of Congress should have intervened. For outsiders, 2-3/5. There are several better full concerts released already.

Fifth, the 2009 DVD. Hmm. A curiosity. I can't imagine why a non-fan would want this.

Finally, more scattered extra material. Not rating that, just noting that it's there.

The box is for fans, and it's a treat. It's no earth-shaker though. It's a boon and I'm glad I have it. I'm gonna leave it at that.

Why? Why?

One of the deepest mysteries of the net, to me, is how all weird page hits happen. Why are there suddenly a dozen page hits from some company's IP range, hits that leave no trace whatsoever except those page hits? On the rare occasions that you find an explanation it's always unromantic and unfantastic and very down to earth - but unexplained, these occurrences are so utterly baffling.

Bruce

I just bought a CD that cost about $100. I already have the record, I’ve owned it since before 1980. I’ve bought it on vinyl (though the first was given to me - I have two) and on CD (ok, three. Four in a day or two). (Ok I give up, I have no idea how many I have. It's less than a dozen.) The new one isn’t rare or a collector’s item. Why would I do this? Am I not grown up now? I’m not a collector or a fan of that maniac sort, never have been.  (No, really. Really!)

The answer is that this record doesn’t represent part of my youth. It is part of my youth. Part of my life happened in that record instead of within the day to day life where I walked and talked. Dozens of records have been important in my life, but none as important as this one. This is the one.

Having been a Springsteen fan will never make me cool. I can live with that.  It wasn’t being cool that made me one when I was 12 and it wasn’t being cool that kept me coming back for more.

Back side cover.
CD version, I dare say.

- You're born with nothing

 and better off that way

Darkness on the edge of town has been if not my Favorite Record, then at least one of my top 5, since the same week I got it. In an amusing twist of fate, it was my rock-o-phobic father who gave me the record – I’m sure he regretted it many times. He’d asked for advice from a colleague who was more down with the kids as to what music he should give his oldest son. The answer was Born to run, on my 11^th birthday. It wasn’t an instant success or instant love but it stuck. The lyrics were on the gatefold sleeve and they were… enough. Yeah, I’ve known the lyrics to Jungleland by heart, straight through, since I was 12. Dad noticed I played the record, and a short while later, he came home with the next Springsteen record. I think it was the day school was out for summer and me and my brother each got a record to congratulate us and encourage us to keep being nice boys. I hadn’t even figured out that there might be more records from the same dude that made Born to run. I was completely unaware of the drama in Springsteen’s life and career. I think this was before The river had come out, probably spring 1979. I put the record on straight away. I noticed the lyrics were there, I saw the sparser and grittier tone on the sleeve. And then I heard the drums opening Badlands for the first time. When the last song died down I knew I had a new favorite song and a new favorite record.

I don’t know how many times I played the record that first day. I know I played it a lot those next weeks, that whole summer. It was something I did on my own, nobody else I knew was listening to these things.

The past months I’ve seen a lot of essays, articles, reviews and interviews that all talk about the dark tone of Darkness, usually compared to the predecessor. It’s not rocket science, the analytic skill needed to see the difference isn’t vast. I saw it, felt it, when I was 12.

I understand this is what the new one looks like.

Darkness was to set the bar for me for what constituted good music. Its balance between musical and lyrical expression. The amount of jaggedness in the music, the balance between melody and rhythm. The relative adrenaline content of expression. Almost every one of my later favorites follow just this pattern. You know how some say Like a rolling stone transformed music? That's what Darkness was to me.

- Some guys they just give up living,

and start dying, 

little by little, piece by piece.

I was 12 and this was what I heard. I think it scarred me a little, made me older than I was. Then again maybe that’s just how I am. I took to that anger and despair and made it my own, instantly. I actually added it to my own experience. It was as though I had lived the lives of those guys in those stories.

In the years afterwards, I often briefly mistook misbehaving for that jagged edge I wanted, that level of honesty in pain that makes a lyric just so and that slight disharmony and off-beat rhythm that keeps the bland melody from getting boring. The human touch that makes music come alive. Like most teenagers I thought that revolt meant hurting others. It was lucky that I had already done my share or revolt – I had screamed there in the darkness on the edge.

- And I hope that you're happy now

I have one other record that competes in my mind for the top #1 spot on my list of the best records in my life, just one. It’s not similar, except for being too rough for soft radio stations and not quite loud enough for wild teenagers making statements. It’s Elvis Costello’s Blood & Chocolate, and overall they share almost every quality. The big difference is that Darkness is done seriously, Blood & Chocolate is this weird mix between agony and laughter, drunken libation and agonizing.  Blood & Chocolate isn’t serious though. It isn’t serious, the way drunken misery isn’t serious. Darkness is sober, and it wouldn’t be cured by getting stiff drunk. Everything would still be there in the morning.

- Till someday they just cut it loose, cut it loose or let it drag 'em down.

Bruce become Bruce with me during those months when I played that record over and over. Eventually The river came out and though I wasn’t old enough to see the shows in Stockholm that was when I stepped over into fandom. I stayed with Bruce from then on, and though I didn’t always pay attention I never really left.

The original.

As I think back on all those years and think about what made me faithful, I’m as certain as ever that what made me stay, what made it possible to stay friendly and loyal to Bruce was that he was always faithful and honest to his listeners.  Not only not doing ass-hat stuff, but always fair and sensible, upstanding and often willing to help, not greedy and on top of it all managing to pull it off without being holier than thou or preachy. Being that, to me, is truly something worth admiring.

I don't know what I've heard before of new material on The Promise. I know I used to have the title song in both live and studio versions. When the Tracks box came out, it didn’t have much that I hadn’t heard before, even the studio tapes had been leaked decades earlier except some very early stuff. Getting decently high quality live recordings from the era that was always my favorite in the bootleg archives would have had me drooling back then and I look forward to listening to it. A good remaster of the main record is the main draw to me though.

So when I bought a CD that cost about ten times what a normal CD should be worth, I did it out of loyalty, I did it because I recognize in myself that this part of my life is something that I can be totally honest about and live with.  I will never wish that this part of my life had not taken place, that something better had gone instead.

There's something magic about that. 

You can buy The Promise box directly from the artist/company. There are a couple versions to choose from. Bruce's official home page is at brucespringsteen.net (I think the lyrics for every single published song is there), and he's also on twitter (@brucespringsteen.net), though I wouldn't go so far as to say he's active on the net in person. The canonical fan site is backstreets.com.

Buying the box directly halfway across the world gets prohibitively expensive (in my case, around SEK 1300 instead of SEK 850); it's available on most online shops. Check out all the alternatives - there's even a free essay download for kindle users. Just so there's no confusion, the expensive CD I bought is "The Promise:  The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story".

Things not to name your blog

Don't name it /dev/random. Don't name it /dev/null either. Both have a tiny fraction of the coolness you ascribe to them and neither have even a tiny fraction of the originality you ascribe to them. No, coolness and originality are not the same thing.

For the nerdliness-challenged, don't name your blog anything that has "PC" in it. It's not cool and if you need help understanding that you either need to not be blogging or you're so cool you don't need any advice anyway. 100% in the first category will believe they belong in the latter one.

Everything really is a bitch.

The big issues

When it came to wearing-purple-day, I was completely foiled by my laziness. I read enough US media to have been aware of the deaths well ahead of the spirit day, but maybe I'm just a bad person cause when it comes to really really obvious things, I just can't work up the energy to go out and protest. Not even write a little bloggery. So I guess I didn't follow the threads enough. When people starting discussing how and why they'd be wearing purple, I though they were actually doing it right then and there. Silly me. I ended up thinking people talking about it yesterday had missed the actual occasion by a week. Some friends probably thought I did it on purpose (that wouldn't have been the first time).

As everybody knows, Clint McCance (no linkie, seems he deleted his facebook account. Brave man.) is so last week's news. I could say, hopefully he'll be history in a lot of contexts, like the school board. That particular aspect actually does have me nearly working up energy to protest a bit. I mean... how sick can belief in magic actually make you? (Björn Kjellström: kolla de riktiga humanisterna. Det är i kyrkan de bor.)

I won't say I hope Clintboy decides to kill himself from shame, because I'm just a better person than he is, but I will say I hope he's embarrassed enough to quit yipping in serious media like facebook. We'll just leave it at that.

In comparison, Marie Claire is a Burning Issue. One anorectic's crusade against fat people on tv, now what's not worth protesting there?

Occasionally I will make jokes about almost any group of people. Probably tasteless and possibly hurtful. I never mean for them to be denigrating. Like a lot of people, I probably fail. I rarely get excited over fat people either way and like most handicaps I usually find the things people write on the issue to be turning the blind eye to the issue or just plain dumb. Possibly the best blogger on the planet, Bloggess, pointed a re-tweet toward Jennsylvania's blurb on the fat-people-on-tv-thing, and guess what? It's so great I could sign it. So I guess you should read it.

So I didn't wear purple. In what parallel universe would I own anything purple to wear, anyway? Guess I'll have to proclaim: I find the idea that it would somehow be ok to harass anyone, kid or adult, for their sexual preferences so offensive and blatantly stupid, anyone actually embracing that view can just imagine I spit in their face.

The majority or the world's population still believing in magic, that's worth being upset over, even for me. That somebody can still claim to be my king, that's worth being upset over.

1500 words

The most important, A number one, motivator for a writer - at least for me - is readers. If my income depended on my writing unrelated to any readers, perhaps I would find motivation in that but we'll never find out since any economic incentive is pretty likely to be dependent on, yeah, that's right: readers.

So, with mixed feelings, today I'm saying goodbye to my constant bad conscience. Let me explain very briefly.

I haven't written much since around the time I turned 20, but about 2 years ago the desire to tell stories awoke in me again. I think it's a year ago but it may actually be slightly longer, that Sean and I spent a rather long time talking about writing on one of the company parties (a.k.a. "mingles").

Suddenly I realized I had stories I wanted to tell and once I realized that, I also realized that I loved telling stories. Actually, what I love is dominating other peoples' minds, but nevermind that.

When Sean and I were sitting there we agreed (I think) that we'd actually, finally, write stuff and we'd show each other and keep reading and supporting. I'm a bit hazy on what we actually said but this has not stopped me from considering my part of the deal as binding. So since that party, I've thought about what I was writing in my head every time I passed Sean at work, with a pang of bad conscience for not putting enough on paper to show.

Sean must have had at least some similar memories of the evening, cause he's the only follower this blog has.

I just said goodbye to Sean at work, since he's leaving for a new job. That sort of leaves me with less of an incentive to write. We can't have that. So I think I'll sign up for NaNoWriMo, which is shorthand for National Novel Writing Month, which is a campaign to encourage people to write. (I'm not very "national" where the campaign exists but I really couldn't care less) The aim is to help people get a novel written - you write at least 1500 words every day in November, and tweet your page count twice a day. Like so.

1500 words is less than you think, once you start rambling. It's also more than you think, once you start to apply standards and being selective. This, for instance, is too little, and probably not good enough.

Cheers Sean, good luck!

I present to you: The Future

In interweb parley, the future is often examplified with flying cars. It's like the litmus test for reality being the future or not. No flying cars, future not yet here.

I'd like to offer something that's very real and which exists right now and which is almost as cool as flying cars. Not quite, but almost. One of the recurring conversation jokes for years has been "e-something". E-exercize, just download it and get a workout without moving your butt. The E-stuff is even funny for people with very modest technology footprint, like my mom, who still finds the e-wine (USB wine tap) ad hilarious.

Almost like e-candy, a company that operates vending machines in the Stockholm metro has hooked their machines to the necessary networks, with the result that you can actually message the machine on the platform, from your phone, and get a drink or chocolate bar.

I'm sure similar things are happening all over. I read about the MIT coffee pot in the Hacker's dictionary and I don't think Stockholm is that exceptional. My point is simply this: Carrying a communication device in your pocket that lets you not only communicate with other people's similar devices but also to interact with various other devices around you to the point of making a purchase and getting a snack - that's the science fiction I grew up with. That means my future is here.

I stop to look at those machines almost every time I pass one. It's kinda distracting.

True pretenses

I'm incredibly disappointed I didn't think of the name True pretenses when I created this blog. On the other hand and then again, it would have been too bad there was already a book by that name so I would probably have been called a hack and been sued, so good thing I didn't think of it.

Vi hälsar er!

So, the UN is appointing a head of aliens relations. (*)

Mazlan Othman of Malaysia, director of the UNOOSA is now the appointed space ambassador for alien affairs. The UNOOSA? The UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, duh.

I have only one gripe about this: I saw V. I know that the one welcoming the lizards is a Swede. He even speaks Swedish.

* So, this seems to have been a 100% fabricated piece of "news". Sunday Times seems to be the culprit, making up news out of thin air. UNOOSA still exists and Othman is its head, but there's no "space ambassador".

The proper way to greet aliens is still in Swedish.

Update: This piece of news has now risen to The Onion. How cool is that? "News" propagating from The Onion, that I've heard of, preferably by way of Chinese authorities. But "real news" achieving "unreal news" status, that's new to me. Maybe that ask the people thing is always based on real news, I just don't read the Onion enough to know.

Wrath, clenched teeth

Eight or nine months have passed since I quit smoking, and about three since I started working out. Since the beginning of June I've been working out or trying to do real physical labor more or less every day. The only exceptions I have allowed myself have been days when I've been in too much pain to do anything. Along with my neighbor, friend type dude, Patrik, I had decided to sign up for an event this past weekend, a piece of new highway being taken into use and they were holding a competition event before letting the cars on. Runners, cyclists, inliners, wheelchairs and roller skiers.

And what do you know, I come down with a freaking cold. My frustration made me very irritable the whole weekend. By Monday, I was getting all itchy just because I hadn't been working out for 5 whole days.

Patrik found another event next weekend, right on election day. So now I'm dead set on doing that. Nothing's gonna stop me this time. Did a few kilometers earlier this evening - cold, almost dark, stormy and rainy. Ick.

Damn it felt good afterwards. Soon it'll be even colder and darker, and then I'll kick on the sauna before I head out. Hah, take that, darkness.

Leveling the playing field

You know what sucks about wanting to talk to people, social media and blogs?

When you find someone you want to relate to but who doesn't want to be part of the blogosphere or social media, that's what.