Boing Boing » Jimmy Guterman

Gingerbread house Fenway Park

Jimmy Guterman — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 15:01:22 +0000

What's the best thing about working at Harvard Business Review? Some days it's improving the practice of management. Other days it's discovering that one of your colleagues has a family with a history of creating gingerbread structures. This year: Fenway Park. (Thanks, Justin!) Here's another look:

Mick and Keith: A love story

Jimmy Guterman — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 16:23:06 +0000

Eric often sends me links that crack me up, so my first response on Friday when I saw he forwarded me a parody response by Mick Jagger to Keith Richards's recent autobiography was to prepare for a good laugh. The alleged response, called "Please allow me to correct a few things," is, in fact, written by ace rock critic Bill Wyman, who has the novelty of sharing a name with the Stones' two-decades-gone original bass player. Wyman, who once received a legal demand by the bassist to change the name he was born with, seemed uniquely positioned to write a cutting fake retort. Then I began reading and realized this was No Joke. As a longtime Stones devotee (read Late night thoughts about the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world for one recent example), I've often wondered what the surviving original members really think about each other, how they work together, what their work means to them as they're aging. Wyman has clearly spent way too much time pondering this, too. I've never talked to Mick, but Wyman's faux-Mick response feels true to my imagined Jagger. The tone of the essay veers from hurt to self-righteous, apologetic to withering, the voice always taut. Fake Mick hates Keith as much as Real Keith hates Mick; this essay shoots down Richards's book Life but doesn't forget to point the gun inward from time to time. Yet, more than anything else, Wyman's version of Jagger is full of love for Richards, regretful that money, drugs, and narcissism tore them apart, grateful for what they had together before they devolved into mere business partners. He knows how much he owes Keith ("Without him, what would I have been? Peter Noone?") and how Keith's work can still touch him, no matter how far they've both fallen ("When a song is beautiful -- those spare guitars rumbling and chiming, by turns -- the words mean so much more, and there, for a moment, I believe him, and feel for him.") This is idealized stuff. It's unlikely that Real Mick's response to Keith's book, if there ever is one, will be as tough-minded and vulnerable. Wyman conjures up the Stones as we want them to be at this late age, but even we diehards know that's just our imagination running away with us. UPDATE: Wyman has written a postscript to his terrific piece.

Inbox infinity

Jimmy Guterman — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 01:46:53 +0000

Happy Monday. (Thanks, skgreen!)

Amy Rigby on Ari Up

Jimmy Guterman — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 12:19:14 +0000

Reader bklynchris noted the passing of Ari Up, lead singer for the Slits, a punk band originally known for being wild amateurs, now remembered as much for the inspiration they gave fellow young punks (mostly women, but men too) as for their their idiosyncratic, so-slightly-off-that-they-were-perfect songs and performances. The great Amy Rigby, who I've celebrated previously on this site, has written a tremendous farewell, particularly when she writes about

the effect The Slits had -- visually and musically. I saw pictures of them for two years before hearing a note and was captivated -- their messy hair, dark eye makeup, Ari with Jubilee underpants OVER leather trousers. There was no coyness. But it wasn't androgyny, the way Patti Smith could have been a girl or a guy -- it was very female. Their album Cut came out sounding so accomplished and together but live at Tier 3 they still made enough of an ungodly racket to give us all hope.

The last mystery of the blues: were Robert Johnson's recordings sped up?

Jimmy Guterman — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 02:07:38 +0000

Last time I was here, I speculated on how country blues genius Charley Patton held his guitar. Indeed, I'm a huge fan of pre-war country blues and that led me into an interesting (but failed) project a little while month back. I don't do much magazine work these days (except for the one that pays my mortgage, of course), but I had an idea for a magazine article that wasn't right for HBR. It went a little like this: Robert Johnson isn't merely the best-known and most popular blues singer ever; he's the performer through whom millions of people have been introduced to the form. For most people who hear Robert Johnson the first time, it's the voice that grabs them. High-pitched, on the edge, filled with authority, lust, and fear, that voice inspired everyone from Eric Clapton and Keith Richards to generations of lesser performers and enthusiasts. There's only one problem: that voice might be a fraud. Much of Johnson's life is semi-known and extrapolated (including his tragic death at the age of 27 in 1938), but his recordings and the thick shadow they cast on all blues that followed them were the part everyone could agree on. No more. A group of diehard blues fans are claiming that Johnson's recordings (he was recorded twice; once in San Antonio in 1936, again in Dallas the following year) were sped up as much as 20 percent for release. That speed increase is not enough to rename his signature album Alvin and the Chipmunks Sing the Blues, but it does make one wonder whether one of the most important American musicians of the century is known to us only via some sort of falsifying technical manipulation. The theory, which may have started in Japanese collector circles (it goes back at least to 2002; I'm still hunting for the original source) and has been taken up by several people in the UK, most notably John Gibbens, a poet and musician who has researched the matter and produced alternate versions of the recordings in which he slows down the existing recordings roughly 20 percent. We still hear those amazing words and that tough, doomed voice, but we hear a dramatically different Robert Johnson: his voice sounds more like the masters who preceded him (Charlie Patton, Son House) and his guitar playing, while still intricate (Johnny Shines, another outstanding bluesman who travelled with Johnson for a time, once claimed Johnson used a bizarre seven-string guitar), is more deliberate and dour. He sounds older, nastier, as if the hellhound on his trail that he sang about had caught up to him already. He sounds, in essence, like a different man. Speeding up the recordings, if it happened, changes how we hear blues and rock history. If Gibbens is right, this would change the way we hear and understand the blues. Johnson's raw, on-the-edge voice? Fake. The wild guitar runs that made thousands of aspiring guitarists' fingers bleed? Ditto. Theories abound on why these manipulations might have occurred: It was an equipment failure, perhaps. Some say the recordings had to be sped up to fit on 78-rpm records, which, at the time, had a maximum playing time of three minutes. Others contend it was a conscious decision to make the songs more commercial. Think of the article as CSI: Delta Blues. There's no question that it's possible the recordings were sped up. The performances sound credible at both speeds. The question is whether they were and, if so, how. I'll talk to people who know how records were made in the 1930s (indeed, a few of the people who made them are still with us and I have begun consulting with them) and I will work with original equipment to figure out how it happened (if it happened). I'll take the reader with me as I experiment with a wide variety digital recording and manipulation technologies (both those I can use on my MacBook and those that necessitate a full-fledged recording studio) and learn from the many people who have devoted their lives to blues research to discover more, go deeper, and find the answer. I intend to solve this mystery once and for all, through both audio forensics and old fashioned journalism; this will be a mix of the cutting-edge and the hand-made. Regardless of whether the sped-up theory is true, this is a deep, broad story about how we hear things, how technology, memory, and culture change the way we hear things. Have we, at last, found the first authentic way to listen to the most authentic of American musicians? Or are people just trying to find a new excuse for not being able to play the guy's breakneck guitar parts? That was the pitch. I developed the article with an enormously helpful editor, but the magazine passed on it, in part because it wasn't clear where the story would take me. So before I submitted it elsewhere, I figured I'd do some more research. If I knew for sure that the recordings were altered, I'd have a much stronger pitch. If not ... well, I might not have a story. Good to know that before I promised something to an editor. It was hilarious how quickly the theory fell apart. A quick listen to the recordings of the Light Crust Doughboys, who recorded the same weekend as Johnson in Dallas, reveal no such speed weirdness. And there were some mild fluctuations in tempo that are easily heard in the existing recordings: the version of "Hellhound on My Trail" that came out originally was the off-tune one. Even more damning to the theory, Johnson recorded two versions of "Crossroads," released the faster one, and there's hardly any change in the tone of his voice between takes. Something similar happened with "Stop Breaking Down Blues." There's also the problem that no one who heard Johnson play in real life ever suggested the recordings were sped-up. Johnny Shines told Pete Welding, more than 40 years ago, "most of the time [Johnson] sang in a high-pitched voice." I've got plenty more evidence (Elijah Wald has published a conclusive summary of his own research), but I won't bore you with it. Just because it sounds possible doesn't mean it happened. So why does this theory still float around the Interweb? Because we want a mystery. Like many people who learned about Robert Johnson, I did so as a teenager, a time when boys are particularly susceptible to mythmaking; all that talk of selling his soul to some supernatural entity or another makes the music sound more enticing when you're 14 and looking for a way in. But as we learned more about Johnson from some dogged researchers and developed a more nuanced view of his music and his life, the romantic accoutrements fell off. He was a smart, ambitious man with diverse tastes and extraordinary talents who didn't want to be a sharecropper. The records are amazing, without ridiculous stories that seek to claim a different Johnson for a new generation. That should be enough. The songs still sound great even when someone with a theory plays 'em at the wrong speed. Well, that just shows how great Robert Johnson still is.

Machiavelli Is Everywhere

Jimmy Guterman — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 01:45:36 +0000

Maybe it's the times, but I'm seeing references to Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince everywhere. Jeffrey Pfeffer's new Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don't mentions him only briefly (in a section titled "Likability is Overrated," natch) but Machiavelli's notion that he's describing the world as it is and not as we'd like it to be is Pfeffer's point as well. (If you want to read the original, there are a zillion translations; my favorite is the one by David Wootton, with an introduction that kicks off with Machiavelli being tortured by Florentine authorities.) Writers like Pfeffer are reinforcing how contemporary Machiavelli's ideas are, and now we have a new way to see Machiavelli, too. Artist Don MacDonald is working on a graphic novel that shows how the real mid-level diplomat in 15th-century city has no relation to the evil opportunist he's painted as in the popular imagination. That's not the only reason I'm following Machiavelli as MacDonald is publishing it online a little at a time. Not only is MacDonald telling the story of the famed author in a new way, but he's using tools we don't often see (well, I don't often see) in English-language graphic novels. There's no superhero stuff, no manga influence. Indeed, it's influenced most by the pen and ink styles of artists in preindustrial Europe, especially the Renaissance and Mannerist artists. It tells an important story in an unexpected way; it's a fascinating project, expertly done. Look at it!

A sign even Ian Curtis would find funny

Jimmy Guterman — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 00:58:58 +0000

Last week, I posted about a New Order song. OK, I guess, but wouldn't a matrimonial law firm named after the band that yielded New Order be even better? (Hat tip: 33 1/3)

Does Michelle Obama Control the Fashion Industry?

Jimmy Guterman — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 11:04:14 +0000

No, this isn't another vast right-wing conspiracy. I think. Nevertheless, Harvard Business Review is glad you asked. (slideshow)

Mr. T: Gold Salesman. Supposedly Legitimate Financial TV Network.

Jimmy Guterman — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 04:21:01 +0000

(Video Link)

You're welcome.

Too Much Darkness?

Jimmy Guterman — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 02:28:54 +0000

"Stick!" My favorite part of The Promise, a documentary about the making of Bruce Springsteen's 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town that was on pay TV this month and will be available for sale next month, is when we learn that one of the many reasons recording took longer than it should have is that Springsteen felt he could hear the sound of Max Weinberg's stick hitting the drum. That ruined the sound of the song for him, and many hours were devoted to making the drum sound all drum and no stick. Springsteen sits in the control room, says, monotonously, "stick ... stick ... stick" as he hears the playback, and you can feel the whole recording operation grind to a stop. There are two responses to this. First, it's fascinating to watch an artist so dedicated to his work that he's willing to put everything on hold until a minor mistake, one few in his audience would ever suspect is there, is fixed. Second, he's nuts. How much attention to detail is too much? I've spent my career working with creative people and often the hardest part of such an exchange is knowing when you're done, when you've taken it as far as you should, when it's time to share it with other people. Different people have different ideas about when it's done. Sometimes, going obsessive gets you Proust's In Search of Lost Time, which seems like a fair trade. Sometimes, though, sculpting a work of art for way too long gets you Guns N Roses' Chinese Democracy, which didn't work out for anyone. The Springsteen documentary leads to another question: How much of a good thing is too much? It's part of a six-disc boxed set coming out next month, which also includes a remastered version of the original Darkness on the Edge of Town, two CDs of outtakes from those sessions, two concert films, and some more video esoterica. I've written at length about Springsteen, so I won't bore you here with an extended analysis of Darkness (brief synopsis: breakthrough sound and songs, unified tone, overdramatic singing that he dropped live). There are people very excited about this, who can't get enough. There's nothing wrong with serving the most dedicated parts of your audience (hence this), but I wonder whether all these additions, however worthy, distract from the 10 taut performances at the core of this repackage, the record he decided was worth putting out in the first place. The dessert is now much bigger than the main course. In the early days of CDs, a reissue of Richard and Linda Thompson's amazing Shoot Out the Lights came out with a bonus track tacked onto the end. It was an adequate song, but nowhere near the quality of the performances on the originally released record. It was meant to add to the original; instead, it subtracted. There was a reason it was left off the original release. When that reissue was reissued, as seems to happen every few years with many records, the extra track was gone. The last song on the record was still the last song. Everything was as it should be. And now the record is coming out again, in its fourth CD incarnation — as part of a boxed set.

Curating a TEDx (or, from Arrogance to Humility)

Jimmy Guterman — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 04:34:02 +0000

Arrogance is an enormous turn-off in personal relations, but sometimes it's a pretty good motivator to do good work. It's what turned this music fan into a critic and producer: the (sometimes quite incorrect) belief that I could do something better. Arrogance is one of the two dueling ingredients of ambition, which is, after all, a combination of arrogance that you can do something better and humility in the face of so many people who inspire you. One of the best places to witness that combination of arrogance and humility is TED. I've been lucky enough to attend the TED conference several times and I've been intrigued by how the organizers are trying to extend it via videos and independently organized events, collectively know as TEDx. (I've been thinking about both the elitism and openness of TED and will publish an essay on it early next year in HBR.) This year I served as one of the curators of TEDxBoston, along with four tremendous colleagues. It was a chance to step out of the audience for a change and see what it might be like from the other side. Like many who spent a lot of time in a particular audience, I had ideas on what I might do differently if given the chance. It's the same impulse that leads people to call in to radio shows to say how they would have handled that 4th and 1 situation better than Bill Belichick did. It was a thrill to help develop and organize the programming, but what struck me most, after we picked the speakers, all of them enormously ambitious, was how humble the best of them were. They inspired people by telling stories about what inspired them. Some of my favorite talks from the day: Bill Walczak, a Boston legend, showed how a new model for urban healthcare and education can change a culture of despair into a community of opportunity. Plenty of TED speakers talk about how they want to change the world; Bill showed us how he actually did it. Vibha Pingle of Ubuntu at Work told how microfinance doesn't help women out of poverty; it merely helps them cope with poverty better. And she pointed toward a real way out. We've covered previously Eric Mongeon's work to bring Edgar Allan Poe back to life. Here's his talk on how he did it, with a hat tip to Boing Boing. There's plenty more. In particular, I was moved by Ann Christensen, whose talk, as well as some recent work by her father, Clay Christensen, I'll celebrate in a post later this week. (If you like these and want to sample some more, you can see 'em all here.)

Greatest Song of All Time of the Day: "Blue Monday," New Order

Jimmy Guterman — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 03:29:04 +0000

Happy Monday. There are plenty of terrific songs about Mondays: Fela Kuti's "Monday Morning in Lagos," Marshall Crenshaw's "Monday Morning Rock," T-Bone Walker's "Stormy Monday," Fleetwood Mac's "Monday Morning." And then there's The Boomtown Rats' "I Don't Like Mondays," which captured a moment but hasn't aged particularly well. Indeed, most synthpop from the early '80s has aged as well as the haircut from that guy in A Flock of Seagulls. It's cold, distant, more about technology and production than any human emotions. New Order, at its best, was as precise as the best synth-pop but almost painfully warm, playing tension-and-release games that were exciting, welcoming, and irresistibly danceable. Their top songs ("Temptation," "Age of Consent," "The Perfect Kiss," to name a few) didn't merely express emotion; they were all about expressing emotion: how hard it is, how rewarding it is, how scary it is. You could hear it in the approach/avoidance lyrics and the skyscraper-high wall of colliding rhythms. Synthesizers and drum machines sped up, slowed down, spun out of control, emerged from chaos right on the beat, as a very human voice teetered between revenge and regret. As singer Bernard Sumner asks here, at once both deadpan and ready to explode, mirroring another singer who liked to work the same fields: How does it feel?

Skit Ideas Not Even Good Enough for Saturday Night Live

Jimmy Guterman — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 02:30:06 +0000

Thanks for the welcome, Mark. It's good to be back. I hope to deliver posts with substance. This, though, won't be one of them. The Internet loves lists and it loves witnessing people get embarrassed. So let me start my stint with a list about a failure of mine. I recently got a new Mac at work, and since I'm one of those losers who needs to have everything he has on a local hard disk (you never know when you're going to have to watch a scene from This Is Spinal Tap right now), I ported everything over from my Mac (now my son's) to the new one. But the new one has a slightly smaller hard disk than the old one, so I had to go through some directories to purge some files. A few big files were easy to get rid of (I am never going to listen to Metal Machine Music again), but I wound up looking at some directories I hadn't seen in a long, long time. How long ago? Before Axl Rose started recording Chinese Democracy long ago. In one such directory, there was a file called SNL.DOC. What could that be? I double-clicked. In the mid-90s, I worked for Delphi, an early proprietary online service. We were Rent-a-Wreck to AOL's Hertz. We had some significant firsts (one day I'll tell the story of how we talked the Rolling Stones' reps into making us the band's official online service for free) and we were briefly overfunded (News Corp. bought us during one of its intermittent sessions of new-media panic), but the venture failed. For a brief time, before I went solo, I was living in Massachusetts (where I still am) while my job had migrated to Manhattan, so I went back and forth from home to job a few times each week. This went on for only a few months, but it felt like a long time at the time. Hey, that is a long time to be away from your family. Anyway, from my hotel I could see the NBC building, and one gets bored sitting alone in a hotel room at night, so I started writing ideas for NBC shows. (Then as now, I didn't watch much TV, so I got most of my story notions from the ads for the shows I saw around Times Square.) One night, after a session of Coca-Cola and sushi, I scribbled several dozen ideas for Saturday Night Live. Fueled by insomnia, homesickness, caffeine, sugar, and probably mercury, I thought so much of my ideas that the next day I snuck into the floor at 30 Rockefeller Plaza where the show's offices were and dropped off a package. I returned to the Delphi office, certain that the phone would ring ... right ... now. The file SNL.DOC contained my proposal to Saturday Night Live. It sketched out 36 skits. Most of them were sub-mediocre at best. The worst involved the viewers' knowing what McHale's Navy was, a dubious proposition. Here are the least bad of the pitches:

Much like a driving test, a teen couple that wants to become sexually active has to pass a test with a tester in the bed with them, grading and commenting on their every move.
Hollywood executives convene a pitch meeting for the Speed sequel, with ridiculous concepts, such as Sloth, in which the bus must stay under 10 mph.
Folks sit in a movie audience and their entertainment is not the film itself, but trying to guess who on the screen is gay.
Chris Farley is a Mary Kay salesman. (Hey, this was a long time ago.)
A couple eats lunch at a McDonald's set up like a high-end eatery; they ask the waiter questions like "How is the root beer today?"
A Schindler's List parody called Schneider's List, based on the character from the sitcom One Day at a Time
An ATM dispenses items other than money, such as taxis, advice, and photos with NBC celebrities
Folks watch absurdly interactive TV, where viewers can do wild things with a remote.
A bona-fide emergency happens on the set of ER and disasters ensue.

The joke, if there was one, was on me. I hadn't watched SNL regularly since Emily Litella was a recurrent character, so I had no idea whether these ideas for skits would have made any sense for the show. I was surprised the day after I dropped off the package when I didn't hear back. I was disappointed the second day. By the third day, I was on to the next scheme.

Hello, I must be going

Jimmy Guterman — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 03:38:32 +0000

Has it been two weeks already? This has been fantastic. Those of you who read and comment on this website may suspect that the people who run it are the coolest people on the planet; turns out your suspicions are absolutely correct. This has been a wonderful place to blab on about all sorts of issues and I hope I get the opportunity to contribute again. Thanks in particular to Mark for helping me not get Boing Boing sued, and Xeni for turning me into a YouTube-embedding ninja. In the unlikely event that you're still interested in anything I have to say after these two weeks, you can find me on twitter, my blog, and my website. You can also find me at my new job, which I'll be able to reveal in a week or so.

Chuck Berry, "Tulane" (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)

Jimmy Guterman — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 03:19:04 +0000

"Tulane" wasn't Chuck Berry's last great song -- that would be "Oh What a Thrill," from Rockit -- but it's awfully close. Recorded for Back Home, the 1970 album he recorded for his return to the Chess label after a few years at Mercury that we fans are still trying to forget, "Tulane" both sounds like classic Chuck (you have heard this guitar intro before) and completely up-to-date (it's about a head shop raid). On the album, Berry follows it with "Have Mercy Judge," one of his sharpest blues performances, the tale of what happened when Tulane got away from the cops but the singer didn't.

Hanging Out with Kim Jong-il

Jimmy Guterman — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:09:13 +0000

Like many in the insulated west, I've long been fascinated by North Korea, what life is like in there, and what will happen to the peninsula after the walls come down. (Of course, I'm half a world away, so I have the luxury of being fascinated with North Korea. Life inside the country, I suspect, is beyond rough and might get even worse in the first years of inevitable reunification.) I've read extensively on the country, enough so that I almost understand the concept of juche. And I've explored the country a bit in my fiction. My novel-in-progress has a sequence in which an over-the-hill rocker is invited to perform a goodwill concert in Pyongyang, although I'm not sure the subplot it's part of will earn space in the final draft. My hometown website boston.com (disclosure: I used to consult for 'em) has a terrific feature called The Big Picture that tells news stories in photographs. A year and change ago, the section ran a gripping Recent scenes from North Korea, a collection of 32 photos, all taken in 2008, some from wire services, some from freelancer Eric Lafforgue's then-recent trip, some shot inside the nation, some shot across the border. And now you can see On the Spot with Kim Jong-il, 31 photos from North Korea's state-run "news" agency, showing Dear Leader, usually in a parka, inspecting various industrial facilities. It's an astonishing series of portraits of a man and a culture disconnected from reality, surveying an empire that does not exist.

Son House, "Death Letter" (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)

Jimmy Guterman — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 23:48:06 +0000

I could go on all weekend about Son House, one of the top and longest-lasting country bluesman, but I'll be kind to you and get to the music quickly. His original recordings are messages from a foreign land, his sessions and concerts after rediscovery rival Skip James' (hear an interview with John Fahey and the future Dr. Demento from that period), and both his lyrical and guitar styles are slashing and unforgettable. "Death Letter" is as deep as country blues gets. National resonator guitar!

Richard Thompson, "For Shame of Doing Wrong" (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)

Jimmy Guterman — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:45:35 +0000

Almost every Richard Thompson song could be subtitled, "Watch out!" You never know where it's going next and you always have to be wary, even when he's having fun. Thompson is as familiar with the dark end of the street as any songwriter, he's a singer of uncommon emotion, and as a character in High Fidelity, the first novel by closet rock critic Nick Hornby, notes, he's "England's finest electric guitarist." Thompson is both tasteful and wild; one of three (so far) overlapping box sets of his recordings includes a disc labelled "Epic Live Workouts" that includes precisely zero wankery. "For Shame of Doing Wrong" is one of Thompson's strongest compositions. It began life on Pour Down Like Silver, one of the '70s recordings he co-headlined with Linda Thompson, they recorded it again for the sessions they abandoned in favor of the Joe Boyd-overseen Shoot Out the Lights (a strong candidate for Greatest Album of All Time of the Day), and this version, recorded live in 1985, is Thompson at his best. The lyrics overflow with regret without turning maudlin, the band rocks, and the only thing wrong with the extended guitar solo is that it isn't long enough. Enjoy!

Striking new Edgar Allan Poe collection

Jimmy Guterman — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 06:26:30 +0000

Boing Boing readers are interested in Edgar Allan Poe (examples 1, 2, 3, and 4), so I suspect you'll want to be the first to know about 4 by Poe, an upcoming collection of four Poe stories designed and illustrated by Eric Mongeon. Mongeon is best-known 'round these corners as a fabulous magazine designer and art director (and as the man behind the look of a record that's particularly close to me), and this is a new project for him, although one that has haunted him since design school. Each story will be published quarterly as an individually-bound limited-edition softcover volume. Mongeon promises surprises:

"4 by Poe isn't going to be yet another cinderblock tome, printed on crummy paper, typeset by a designer who dares you to actually read the text, and embellished by an illustrator who operates from a safely detached position of irony. This is going to be an illustrated collection for us grown-ups. One that approaches Poe's stories of murder, mystery, and mayhem on their own beautiful, sensationalistic terms. One that highlights the black humor, celebrates the philosophical insights, and yes, revels in the violence ... Poe's deviants lived in the real world, and that's how I'm going to show them."

Subscribe. I just did. 4 by Poe: A collection of four short stories by Edgar Allan Poe

Free ebook download: Scott Kirsner's "Fans, Friends & Followers"

Jimmy Guterman — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 05:38:20 +0000

To coincide with South by Southwest, journalist Scott Kirsner is making his 2009 book Fans, Friends & Followers: Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age available free, in digital form, for the duration of the festival. You can download it here. Lots of folks you've seen at SXSW are featured in the book, including artist Natasha Wescoat, pioneering videoblogger Ze Frank, singer-songwriter Jonathan Coulton, Burnie Burns of "Red vs. Blue," comedian Eugene Mirman, documentarian Curt Ellis, DJ Spooky, and plenty more. And, if you're at SXSW this year, Kirsner will be conducting a "fireside chat" with Ze Frank on Saturday. Scott Kirsner's "Fans, Friends & Followers" (PDF) mirror site if the link above is slow or cranky

Boyoyo Boys, "Back in Town" (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)

Jimmy Guterman — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 04:59:19 +0000

Everyone from Malcolm McLaren to Paul Simon heard something in South Africa's Boyoyo Boys that they wanted to appropriate. Their '80s records are lively and surprising, both original and emblematic of their time. You can hear where whole chunks of popular American music, from Graceland to Vampire Weekend, were born and raised. After listening to "Back in Town," you'd have broken a UN boycott to work with them, too.

Sex, technology, and diabetes

Jimmy Guterman — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:58:11 +0000

"A $6,000 insulin pump with an on-board computer chip is not alluring. Neither is the white mesh adhesive patch on my naked abdomen or the length of nylon tubing that connects the patch to the pump. There is only illness, and there is no way to make that sexy. After several years as a medical device wearer, I know."

Those are the opening sentences of "Tethered to the Body," an essay the writer and teacher Jane Kokernak wrote about her adjustment to wearing an insulin pump and its affect on her sense of sexual self. It connects disability and sexuality in novel and moving ways (it also introduced me to the term "disability erotica"). The essay, which originally appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, has been reprinted in A Sweet Life, a site for the "healthy diabetic." The story is close to me for many reasons. I'm diabetic, too, although I am not insulin-dependent, and, more important, Jane is my wife, so the sex she's talking about in the essay is with, well, me. You may wish to consider my recommendation with that in mind, but I guarantee you that this will be the only piece you ever read in which the two tags are "Insulin Pump" and "Sex."

Amy Rigby, "Balls" (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)

Jimmy Guterman — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 05:54:57 +0000

When she's not dropping everything to catch up on Twin Peaks, transatlantic troubadour Amy Rigby sings, writes, and performs some of the funniest and some of the most heartbreaking songs you've ever heard. Sometimes she does both in the same number. "Balls" is an all-out rock'n'roll barnburner that captures the frustration and excitement of desire with anger and several great punch lines. It's nasty, it's welcoming. It's as confusing and wonderful and awful as your life. Did I mention the slide guitar? Did I mention how Amy tosses off the aside "this one's gonna hurt"? Did I mention it's on two great albums: The Sugar Tree (along with "Rode Hard," another greatest song of all time of the week candidate and perhaps the most convincing argument for bad behavior on disc this side of "Dead Flowers") and 18 Again (a terrific greatest hits record, but all her records are greatest hits records)? WARNING: The YouTube clip below, however worthy, is not the version I've just raved about. It's a live solo acoustic version, the only take available on the Interwebs. Rigby's song is great in any context, but you've got to see and hear her as a bandleader to get the full sense of how brilliant she is. Anyone out there got any full-band footage to share? The rest of you: invest 99 cents and buy the song at your favorite online outlet. It'll be the smartest and longest-lasting buck you spend today (do you really need another cup of coffee)?

Did Charley Patton play that way?

Jimmy Guterman — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:30:22 +0000

Over the past seven years, I've had the outlandishly talented country blues singer and guitarist Charley Patton looking over me. (Don't know Charley Patton? Hear him here and then buy what may be the greatest CD box set ever.) For many years, a photo of Patton was as hard to come by as a pic of Robert Johnson, and -- as with Johnson -- the legitimacy of the image has been challenged. For our purposes today, let's assume that this is Patton. I draw your attention to his left hand, how it is posed over the frets like crab legs. Patton's style has always felt a bit eccentric compared to other country blues purveyors, and I wonder whether he might have fingered the frets in an unusual way, too. Now I know there are plenty of other guitarists from the 1920s and 1930s who have posed in similar ways, but I wonder: does this photo reveal something about Patton's style. I know there are a lot of guitarists here (hey, the guy who let me in here builds 'em), so I'm eager to hear any theories, no matter how dubious. And to learn more about the fellow in the photograph, see R. Crumb's comix history of Patton. (The Patton pic above belongs to Blues Images.)

Nina Simone, "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)

Jimmy Guterman — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 01:43:30 +0000

In the 60s, Columbia ran a "Nobody Sings Dylan Like Dylan" advertising campaign. It's absolutely true that Bob Dylan's unprecedented voice is the ideal way to deliver his unmatchable compositions, but it's also true that the guy is one of greatest songwriters we'll ever hear, so it's no surprise that a long list of top voices have wanted to wrap themselves in his words and music. For example, everyone from Neil Young to Bryan Ferry have performed ace interpretations of Dylan's "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues," which I present here in Nina Simone's version. I recognize that Simone's RCA years aren't among her best, in part because she performed too many songs intended to ingratiate her with a young audience and this recording was probably part of that attempt. But this slowed-down take brings the original new places, most of them both luxurious and unsettling. I couldn't find a clip of Simone singing this song, but Jesse Dylan did locate a weird mashup on YouTube: Simone's performance as the soundtrack for clips from an unfinished Marilyn Monroe movie. (It's very mildly NSFW.) "Somehow it works," Jesse notes.

Free download returns: Tribute to The Clash's Sandinista!

Jimmy Guterman — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:30:53 +0000

A few years ago, I produced The Sandinista Project, in which 36 performers each covered one song from The Clash's Sandinista! It was a fun and crazy project. Last summer, on Joe Strummer's birthday, as reported by Mark, I made the record free for a day. The free download was a great success although what I learned from the experiment was more mixed. I've been having a wonderful time here during my guestblogging residency and I'd like to say "thank you" by making the record free again, for a limited time. Instead of making it free for one day, which slowed the hamsters running the guterman.com servers to a crawl because everyone downloaded at once, I'm going to make the record, along with digital images of the packaging, available until midnight U.S. eastern time on Sunday night, so you'll have plenty of time to download this before it goes away. The Sandinista Project, once again free for a limited time

Design thinking tips from the masters

Jimmy Guterman — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:48:03 +0000

As Mark noted in his post introducing me, I'm winding down a stint as executive editor of MIT Sloan Management Review. One of my greatest pleasures during that assignment was developing a special report on design thinking. Most of what gets published about design thinking focuses on getting analytical types to think more creatively. Usually there are a bunch of examples from Apple and IDEO, leaving CEOs and CFOs more confident about arguing over which shade of mauve to use as the background on a web page. Instead of taking that approach, we wanted to deliver some more practical and global lessons. Thanks to my fellow editor Sean Brown, two of my favorite elements of that special report, usually locked behind a paywall, are now available to all. In How to Become a Better Manager ... By Thinking Like a Designer, I talk to two of the smartest people on the planet when it comes to presentations, Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds, and we talk about how to influence and persuade in different ways than executive usually do, regardless of whether you ever have to communicate via PowerPoint. In How Facts Change Everything (If You Let Them), I sit at the feet of the information design giant Edward R. Tufte. He explains how businesses would think better, make better decisions, and present themselves more powerfully if only they would learn to talk -- both internally and externally -- in facts. (Late-breaking Tufte news: he has just been appointed to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. In other words, someone whose whole career has been about promoting accountability and transparency will now be able to do so in the context of public service. We're lucky to have him.) I hope you enjoy these newly freed articles. And I hope you learn something from listening to Duarte, Reynolds, and Tufte. I know I did.

Ida Maria, "Oh My God" (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)

Jimmy Guterman — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:44:52 +0000

Regular visitors to my blog are likely sick of my outsize enthusiasm for the songwriter, singer, and guitarist Ida Maria; now it's time for you to suffer. I've written about the excitement of discovering her debut album, trying to get my then-12-year-old daughter into a 21+ club to see her (I received some hilarious help from the Internets on this front), succeeding at getting said daughter into a show, and my sadness at Maria's apparent genuine breakdown onstage one night. If you haven't heard Ida Maria, start here. "Oh My God" is ferocious in every way a great rock'n'roll song can be ferocious, climaxing with a scream as frightening as Johnny Rotten's and as powerful as Roger Daltrey's. There are few better ways to start the week.

Lawrence Lessig scares a room of liberals

Jimmy Guterman — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:09:33 +0000

I should say upfront that I'm a big fan of Lawrence Lessig's causes and his presentation techniques. My favorite might be his 2007 tour de force at TED about John Philips Sousa, Jesus singing "I Will Survive," and the joys and dangers of remix culture. A few days back he spoke at TEDxNYED about what conservatives can teach the free culture movement. I may be getting into trouble recommend a talk about conservatives here -- some of the email I received last week suggests that a good percentage of the readers here might find a Kucinich-Sanders ticket to be hopelessly middle of the road -- but this talk is classic Lessig, from its "I Was a Teenage Republican" opening to his real-time Wikipedia fix, to a reminder that Republican Walt Disney (the guy, not the company) was something of a remixer. There's plenty to argue about here and he presents in black and white some issues that are full of grays, but chances are you won't spend 20 minutes today with a smarter person. It's worth watching and thinking about even if, like me, you agree with only part of it.

Magazine marketers give up on marketing magazines

Jimmy Guterman — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 05:11:24 +0000

I fly a lot less than I used to (and I never flew that often), so I was surprised when I received this piece of mail that seemed to be about frequent flyer miles expiring. It was either open the junk mail or keep cleaning the kitchen, so clearly I had to open the junk mail right away. I was surprised to learn that the direct mail had hardly anything to do with frequent flyer miles; it was a solicitation to restart my subscription to FORTUNE. This is how bad it's gotten for at least one prominent print publication: It has to masquerade as something other than what it is to entice customers to open an envelope. Time Inc., the newly AOL-free owner of FORTUNE, has a history of misleading marketing offers (example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4, example 5), but this particular maneuver feels like desperation. It's as if the marketers realize that their best chance to get readers to return to their product is to trick them. The marketing says, "Yeah, we're doomed."