(He's fine.)

FOR FUCK'S SAKE.

Lovely link from Mossy: How queer and nonconformist creators are redefining what it means to be Nigerian.

It's a fairly upbeat, brief piece and the photos of each artist are delightful. (It does not really delve into the hard parts of being queer in Nigeria.)

Barry Freed is back in NY and would like to meet up. This Saturday at 6 PM, venue As Is on 50th and 5th 50th and Tenth (sorry about the typo!). Lurkers most welcome.

Personal note from LB: If anyone attempts to bring up the presidential election, I plan to begin weeping softly until they stop.

How freaked out are any of you about this? Like should I switch what we buy for the kids?

NickS writes: I had mentioned, in the previous thread, that I've found good music writing on substack, and thought I'd offer some examples.

I remember, in the early days of the blogosphere, people describing blog writing as "free ice cream" and these seem very much like free ice cream to me. In each case it's a little bit remarkable that someone would put the time and attention into writing this piece on older music, just because it's something they care about.

In each case I hadn't been familiar with the music before reading the post (though I had heard *of* some of the songs), and it inspired me to listen and pay attention in a way that I wouldn't have otherwise.

First, Kadrian Alvarenga on An Evening with Belafonte/Mouskouri

[September] is also the month of my wedding anniversary when my Latin family officially merged with my wife's Greek family. Coincidentally, this is somewhat reminiscent of another two people that met and merged their cultures together into one beautiful union.

I am of course talking about the iconic pairing of Harry Belafonte and Nana Mouskouri and their incredibly beautiful, lovely, and unique duet/dueling 1966 album An Evening with Belafonte/Mouskouri.

Second, Robert Gilbert on Laura Nyro:

In 1969, Nyro rhapsodized about [New York City] this way: "you look like a city / but feel like religion / to me." It forms the climax of 'New York Tendaberry,' the title track of her third album. It is the quietest song on a quiet LP. It begins with Nyro whispering the song title with the rest of the lyrics unfolding like a delicate tapestry. There is the grieving suddenness as she sings "I ran away in the morning" and defiance as she announces "now I'm back / unpacked." In the midst of that personal drama is a panorama of images: destitution, a fireworks display and finally, a collage of the millions who seek a life, a place, a space for themselves in New York.

Third: Ellen from Endwell on "I Say A Little Prayer"

Although Aretha wrote some of her own material, producer Clyde Otis noted that she "had a thing for covers...as an interpreter, she always felt she could outdo the original" (as quoted in the biography Respect, by David Ritz). He had warned her off doing Burt's melodies because they worked well with Dionne's softer, subtler approach, but "you're too strong for his stuff." Her producer at the time of the recording, Jerry Wexler, also advised her not to do "I Say a Little Prayer" for a similar reason, that the melody "was peculiarly suited to a lithe instrument like Dionne Warwick's--a light voice without the dark corners or emotional depths that defined Aretha." He also considered it "not smart business" to record a song only 12 weeks after the original hit the top of the charts. Wait at least eight months to a year, he told her.

Aretha ignored this advice, having already come up with her own interpretation and arrangement of the song involving a new groove for the Muscle Shoals rhythm section and a new backup vocal arrangement for the Sweet Inspirations. When Jerry listened to the recording (produced by engineer Tom Dowd), he thought "she blew the fuckin' doors off the song...turning what had been delightful fluff into something serious, obsessive, and haunting," but he still didn't think it was going to be a hit.

Finally Richard Elliott on Gladys Knight and the Pips:

'Midnight Train to Georgia' remains, for me, the epitome of what can be done with backing vocals. In fact, it's an arrangement that opens a whole range of questions about what even classify as 'backing' vocals. . . .

What happens when we take these words out of the brackets--and out of the song-- and present them without the 'lead' vocal? . . . [T]here's something that's more than just the ghost of a song here. One thing I notice by focussing on the Pips' words is how direct they are, brutal even. Where we might expect backing vocals to smooth the rough edges of a lead lyric, to offer some comfort or caress or perhaps empathetically confirm the sadness or joy of the song, what we get here is a no-nonsense summarising of the hard way life can be--he couldn't make it, he didn't get far--alongside affirmation of the solution: leaving, guess who's gonna be there by his side, I know you will, gonna board the midnight train and go.

Heebie's take: These are really charming.

Also: MIDNIGHT PLANE TO HOUSTON?!!

I keep seeing things like this about the absurd amount of energy that AI uses. It's irritating that it's being forced down everyone's throat in the most unhelpful ways and there's no option to disable it. Am I just falling victim to an easy media frenzy, or will bitcoin plus AI accelerate global warming catastrophically? Those are the only two options, sorry.

NickS writes: I've been mulling over Dan Davies' book for a while and finally wrote up my thoughts. A while ago I set up a blog on substack which seemed like the best place to put it:

One way to think about the insights of the book is to recall the reason that Brad Delong and Noah Smith gave, two years ago, for why it would be desirable for Elon Musk to take over twitter. Broadly speaking they argue that the then-current leadership of twitter didn't appear to have a good sense of the problems they needed to solve. They think that having someone who, "knows how to make things well" and is also an active user of the platform could be an improvement.

This book suggests that the challenge of building an organization that can be responsive to changing conditions (and, certainly, twitter found themselves in the position of needing to solve problems which were very different from the company's original strengths).

One of Stafford Beer's key criteria for establishing a viable system was that careful attention needs to be paid to preserving information when a signal crosses a boundary -- the 'translation and transduction' problem. There is always the issue of ensuring that information is received in a form and at a time which allows it to be part of the decision-making process, but it is also the case that communication is just difficult. As anyone who has tried to organize a moderately complicated set of meeting between people at different organizations knows, cross-purposes and misunderstandings are frightfully common.

A lot of the seeming redundancy in middle management used to be dedicated to mitigating this problem; extra capacity and processing power was installed at the communication boundaries, to make sure messages got through with the appropriate degree of nuance and content, and that wobbles and flutters would be handled at the appropriate level. This is one of the things that gets thrown away when companies outsource. By looking for activities in which they could be global leaders and outsourcing everything else, companies exchanged internal boundaries for external ones. Since a large part of the reason for doing so was to economize on management capacity, these relationships necessarily attenuated information -- that was the purpose of doing so.

Heebie's take: I, ah, do not have the smartliness for these topics. It is fascinating, but I lose the thread of what's being said too quickly.

I did like this quote that NickS pulled from Davies, though:

There's a very great danger in believing that either a) the whole problem is of a size that you can fit in your head, so understanding it is just a matter of working hard enough, or that b) the relationship between the amount of detail you know and your understanding of the system is positive and monotonic. This is often not the case.

I can think of several situations where more detail does not move you forward. I'm thinking of conversations where someone wants to litigate every detail. If you can't get a little meta, you aren't going anywhere.