I Have My Books and My Music To Protect Me

Okay, I changed the lyric slightly.

That was my song then, and in a different way it’s my song now.

But then again, this was always one of my favourite ever songs.


Because it showed me how I could be feeling. One day. If only.

(Not my photo of the Queensborough Bridge)

Don't Learn to Play Like Someone Else

I’ve been watching some of the 80/20 Drummer recently. It took me a while, because I’m quick like that, to realise that he’s primarily a hip-hop drummer.


He’s interesting and not a techno-flash kit-banger. Oddly, he admires techno-flash kit bangers.


In one of his lessons, he was talking about drumming like Tony Williams.

Whoa.

Nobody can drum like Tony Williams. Tony Williams was playing with Miles Davis when he was seventeen years old. We’re all way older than seventeen already.

Here’s my question: did Tony Williams got that good and original at seventeen by spending hours trying to sound like Elvin Jones? Or learning Philly Jo Jones licks? No. He could probably listen to both the Jones’s and hear what they were doing, but then he went away and did it his way. I’m sure Williams could play a flam triplet as well as any military drummer, but why would he want to, when he could play his version of a flam triplet.

I realised what had been niggling at me while watching a lot of You Tube music videos.

They are all about how to sound like someone else. Or play chord-scale, which makes everyone sound like everyone else.

There’s nothing wrong with learning a couple of Larry Carlton licks, so you can throw them in now and then as a joke: the great jazz saxophone players all did that. There is everything wrong with spending days of hours trying to play like Larry Carlton.

(And no, Steve Vai didn’t spend hours learning to play Frank Zappa guitar solos. He has better ears than you and me: surely he had to work on the really tricky bits, but mostly, I bet he listened and played right off. The old-school jazz world had many musicians who could hear a solo, and play it right back at you.)

What you’re supposed to be doing is learning to play like yourself. Part of that is listening to a lot of music until you hear someone doing something, and you get a direction in an instant as Miles said. Or maybe you just find yourself doing it. Who do you think Stevie Winwood was copying? Nobody. That guitar playing on Medicated Goo is all him. No stories about it being some jazz session guitarist.

What happens if you don’t have a self to play like? That’s the whole point of playing, dummy. So you develop a personality. That’s why jazz fans can listen to five bars of a track they’ve never heard before and rattle off the names of the players. Because back then, everyone developed their own sound. One reason was that the damn jazz degree didn’t beat it out of them. The player’s sound was what we would now call their brand. You want that sound, you hire that man.

But shouldn’t a professional musician be able to read the charts, play in a neutral style, or however the bandleader wants, and vamp the changes behind the soloist? As well as solo as the song, genre and audience require?

You know anyone who’s making a living as a selfless professional musician? Outside a couple of dozen orchestras? Aren’t many of those gigs left now. The people who make money have voices of their own, because their audience wants that voice, because the other members of the band heard ten other guys before this one, who just had the sound they wanted.

Maybe all those You Tube music videos are for nerds who don’t want to think about the responsibility of developing a musical personality. Maybe they think it’s silly, given that they play, like me, hobby guitar and will never play in public, and they just want to sound like one of their heroes for ten bars.

To the contrary, I would say. For those of us with day jobs, spending a lot of time in shut-down mode travelling and dealing with the outside world, that hour or so of hobby guitar may be the only time we get to be ourselves.

Social Media Banning the Right-Wing is Just Business

WTF is it with all the Anti-Semitism and crude racial comments on the American alt- / Far Right? And the European Right for that matter? Then complaining that they get de-platformed, un-monetised, shadow-banned and generally shut down.

Their explanation is to do with conspiracies.

It’s business. Everything is business, especially when they tell you it isn’t.

The alt-Right think that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and You Tube are the media equivalent of a common carrier, which is, to quote Wikipedia:

...distinguished from a contract carrier, which is a carrier that transports goods for only a certain number of clients and that can refuse to transport goods for anyone else... A common carrier holds itself out to provide service to the general public without discrimination... A common carrier must further demonstrate to the [government] that it is "fit, willing, and able" to provide those services for which it is granted authority. Common carriers typically transport persons or goods according to defined and published routes, time schedules, and rate tables upon the approval of regulators. Public airlines, railroads, bus lines, taxicab companies, phone companies, internet service providers, cruise ships, motor carriers (i.e., canal operating companies, trucking companies), and other freight companies generally operate as common carriers.

That is, social media should carry on its website anything any member of the public wishes to put there, provided that the content is not illegal.

However, social media are not common carriers. They are advertising billboards. Not advertisers. Not advertising agencies. Not publishers. Not even printers. You Tube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter: all they do is own the billboards by the roadside. Different billboards for different media types, but still billboards.

The advertiser is the user. The billboards are used by the user, who posts content: look at my small business / product / brand / band / body / fabulous lifestyle / whatever.

Advertising is wasted on men. Men buy via word-of-mouth, reviews, and trial. We simply don’t see most advertisements, and when we do, it’s only to ask ourselves how dumb the agency and client must have been to run the campaign.

Advertising is aimed at women. Women are not gullible, but they are pervious to advertising.

It’s about more than chocolate, shoes, make-up and YOLO holidays. An attractive woman whose looks and upbeat presentation gets her a product sponsorship deal is advertising herself and gets a useful response. A photographer who is hired on the basis of his Instagram portfolio is advertising and getting a useful response. A woman who posts holiday pictures and gets complimentary comments is advertising herself and getting feel-good responses.

Anything that threatens to alienate that female audience gets banned. This is business. Anything that keeps that female audience engaged gets to stay. So a male-run account that gets the right level of OMG fake-outrage from women may actually stay. OMG fake-outrage is a little hormone hit all its own and some people love it.

The alt- and far- Right and their conspiracies and bad language alienate large chunks of the female audience. That’s not allowed: the horses must not be frightened.

The far-Left extremists say extreme and often violent things, but these delight a large chunk of the social media audience. Hence they don’t get banned.

Banning the creepy, foul-mouthed Right wing is just business. Not a socio-political programme or conspiracy.

Facebook: Business Done Badly

Facebook took down a 1,000,000+ follower page belonging to high-protein / low fat Crossfit guys and gals. It was critical of government health and diet advice, as it should be, since all government diet and fitness advice has to be made with an eye to how much it costs compared to the minimum and median wages in the country. Since there are a lot of poor people in the USA, the US government diet and health advice is dreadful.

The user page went back up pretty quickly, but not before the central Crossfit organisation read Facebook the riot act and closed all its pages.

The commenterati saw Facebook’s take-down of the Crossfit as censorship: how dare the sheeple criticise the government and offer diet advice that Big Sugar, Big Carb, Big Farming, and Good Vegans Everywhere don't like?

Here's a much better explanation. Facebook is in dire need of decent middle-managers who know how to do this stuff properly.

Facebook offshores the censorship function. Many of those people regard eating meat, especially the meat of the cow, as a Very Bad Thing. My guess is that Offshore Guy saw a page a) criticising received dietary advice, and b) advising much consumption of the meat of the cow, and took it down as obvious crankery and for saying Bad Things. A while later, when the sticky stuff hit the fan back home in the USA, Offshore Guy was soundly beaten around the head and told that this wasn’t Bad, and even though it did say people should eat much of the meat of the cow, that is not Bad In America.

If Facebook had any actual decent middle-managers working there, they would have set up some rules like:

For the Offshore Team:

a) Pages identified by the software as frauds, bots and other junk: immediate take down.

b) Beheading videos, massacre videos, (add other obvious horrors here): immediate take-down, pass on to Head Office

c) pages with 500 (or whatever number counts as ‘a small number of followers’) or less: ignore

d) pages with 1,000,000+ (or whatever number translates as 'a large number of followers'): refer to Head Office if it meets the criteria

e) pages belonging to anyone on this long list of big corporations, political organisations, Celebrities and Very Important People; or anyone followed by more than twenty people on that list: refer to Head Office

f) Other pages: follow the guidelines and act accordingly. Send summary of the day’s banning to Head Office in time for opening of business wherever Head Office is

For the (Onshore) Head Office team:

a) Anyone on this list of Heads of State, Central Bankers, Facebook Shareholders, EU or UN officials, Major Stock index board members, religious leaders, or Friends and Relatives of same: to be decided by Mark or Sheryl personally

b) Anyone else on the Offshore List of Important Poeple and Organisations, or anyone worth more than (enter Facebook-related financial criteria here) or with 5,000,000 or more followers (or whatever number makes sense): to be decided by the Facebook Deliberation Committee

c) Anyone followed by more than twenty people on the list in criteria a) or b): also to be decided by the FDC

d) Anyone else: use your best judgement

This works if you can get a large enough bunch of people who might loosely be described as well-informed grown-ups with good judgement and a sound understanding of the politics, culture and PR environment of the language-users and main audience for the page.

Good luck finding enough of those people. And even more luck keeping them for more than, oh, six months.

Facebook cock-ups.

No conspiracy. No grand plot to censor free speech.

Just business.

Done badly.

On Holiday

No posts this week. Taking a break.

65 and Still Going Strong

The government shifted the age at which I could claim State Pension by eight months. The official retirement age at my employer is 60 - but the law says they can’t push me out and have to show cause, or I can retire myself. My chequered employment history has left me without a nice final-salary (or defined benefits) pension, or indeed a consistent record of payments into a laughably-titled defined contribution scheme. I’m still working.

I remember reading a man saying that he did manual, but not back-breaking, work, and at 60 was still in there humping. To the point where he thought he would go on way past 65. He got to 65, he said, and he was wrecked. The body’s strength recedes no matter how much we eat well and exercise.

That story stuck with me, and may have set up some expectations I don’t need. I’m not doing manual work, but I do have to get up at crazy hours, commute and keep up with the 20/30-soemthings I work with. I do not want to work with people my age - I don’t look, think or feel my age.

For most of our lives, my generation believed we would be able to stop work at 65 and live reasonably well, if quietly. They came for the blue-collar workers in the 1970’s and 1980’s, but we were students and then white-collar, then they came for the white-collar workers in the 1990’s and got me, and then they came for the final salary pension schemes. Very few people now are going to retire on a decent fraction of their salary, and I’m not one of them. Retired people have to pay Council Tax unless we get an exemption, and we don’t get discounts on water, gas and electricity. This is a chunk of overhead.

As 65 looms up like a lamp-post I’m going to hit, I’ve felt a change of mood that I can’t quite describe.

One small part of it is the £15 movie ticket, the £20 mid-quality evening meal, the £50 stalls seat in the West End, £10 or so for a ticket to the current show at the Tate or the RA, £40 for a decent seat at the Wigmore, £35 for a chamber concert at the QEH, and £150 for a stalls or dress circle seat at the ENO for The Marriage of Figaro. WTF?! This is bonkers, because there just isn’t the quality of work coming out now. There isn’t one artist in any media now creating anything new worth those prices.

Some of it is slower recovery from physical exercise. I do at least three sessions a week at the gym and walk five-six miles on a working day. I’m not bouncing out to get to the gym Saturday morning.

All that training and walking gets my pulse to around 65-75 and my blood pressure to 125 / 75 when resting. (This is astonishingly low for a man in his sixties.) It’s even lower if I’m on a warm Piccadilly Line train at the end of the working day. It takes me five minutes of treadmill to get pulse and blood pressure up to operating level. So when I’m resting, suddenly bursting into action can be quite scary.

Some is the consequence of having to go to bed so darn early, so I can wake up early, work 8-4 and avoid the worst of the crowds on the commute and in the gym. I stopped going out on Saturday, except very early, because I cannot stand the crowds of parents pretending to be civil to each other and having fun taking their children to whatever it is.

I need my five sleep-cycles. This stops me going out in the evening. I have to be getting ready for bed when you’re thinking about having the next pint, or Nandos, or whatever you’re doing at 21:00 on a weekday evening.

I have to watch what I eat, so I can’t have enjoyable chocolate binges.

Everything I do is about what I’m going to do after that, and it’s been that way for a very long time.

If only I was having a bit more fun.

I don’t mean dodgems at the travelling-fair fun, or fancy-fress party fun. As an ACoA, I have a doctor’s certificate exempting me from that stuff. I don’t even mean watching-The-Marx-Brothers fun. I mean what I think of as fun. Which is more about the way I react to things than what I’m doing.

I feel I have to drag myself everywhere. It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything with a light heart and a sense of will-it-won’t-it anticipation.

Fun for me would be to do things that aren't about something else.

Self-improvement makes everything about something else. Will what I am about to do contribute towards better health / fitness / knowledge / skills / whatever? It’s easy to slip into the idea that self-improvement has to be earnest, protestant work-ethic-y.

That’s where most of what this mood comes from.

Curing it is mostly about attitude. And of course, there’s the whole bit where I stop beating myself up because I’m not a Frisky Fifty anymore.

But get this straight: I would far, far rather be this 65 than my father’s 65. Or a lot of other men’s 65. Or the 65 I would be, if I was even alive, if I had not found AA and gotten sober. I really, really am glad I’m not that 65.

So, yeah, 65 and still going strong.

Do It, Don't Say It, and Other Ways of Not Hurting Delicate Feelings

Hot Guy is doing the rounds of the girls at a party. He spends some time talking to Wendy, an attractive woman with bright blue eyes. At some point she says something about childcare, and Hot Guy asks dead casual about the husband, who, Wendy says is no longer around’. Hot Guy nods in what looks like sympathy, and about three minutes later tells Wendy it’s been a pleasure meeting her, and moves on. Never talks to Wendy again. Next up is Wanda, another attractive woman with braids and a funky vibe. She mentions a club she goes to, which Hot Guy knows is a favourite of guys called Tyrone, and he nods and says he’s heard it’s a cool place, and she smiles and says she knows so many of the regulars there, and about three minutes later he tells Wanda it’s been a pleasure meeting her, and moves on. Never talks to Wanda again. There was an overweight girl with a deep chuckle there, but Hot Guy didn’t even look in her direction, same way he passed by the unemployed woman, and nixed his approach to the Princess when he overheard she worked in Publishing, and would therefore be chronically underpaid.

Now read this guy who says: no single moms, no mudsharks and no lazy bums. Outraged? Think he’s a douche? (Edit: you can’t. Heartiste was de-platformed by WordPress on the 11/5/2019.)

Which is odd, because he’s Hot Guy. And you weren’t outraged by Hot Guy’s behaviour.

To channel Dick Cheney: there are things you can do and say; things you can say but can’t do; things you can do but can’t say; and things you can’t say and can’t do. Some of those lists come from social conventions, and the rest each of us makes up according to our precise degree of snowflake.

Red Flags can be acted on but not talked about.

Why? Because Red Flags are used to filter out. Filtering out is discrimination. People with Red Flags say so.

We are supposed to select in. As if you can hire the skill but not the character. The hand but not the worker.

Absence of Red Flags is one of the things we look for in anyone. Unless we are being very unscrupulous.

Why do we screen out Red Flags? Red flags indicate poor judgement and bad decisions. The consequences of poor judgement and bad decisions are permanent, irreversible and mark our lives forever. I have lived that life and I approve this message. The consequences of good decisions vanish in our sleep. Good decisions have to be made over and over and over. Bad decisions only have to be made once.

Red Flag people need some solid shaming on their side. Selecting-in is meritocracy, selecting-out is prejudice. You should focus on the Good In People. Everyone Makes Mistakes. Look, people deserve a second chance. Not douche-bags, or creeps, or Invisible Guys, or that bitch (insert name of Worst Enemy Forever here), or Hitler, or Trump or…. but you know, people. Meaning, as always, the speaker. After all Good People can do Bad Things, and Nobody’s Perfect, and like, gimme a break, I was nineteen, okay? You’re so judgemental.

Yep. Unlike Douchebag Guy, I don’t get judgemental out loud. I do what all sensible people do. Do it, don’t say it. It’s better mannered, but it’s just as exclusionary.

Red Flag people don’t need to hear they made a bad decision. They live with it every day. They expend huge amounts of energy rationalising it every day.

Like you don’t? they may retort.

Hey, Nobody’s Perfect, and like, gimme a break, I was fifty-five, okay? You’re so judgemental.