Tom Waits and Doritos • Javanese Soul sounds • Falconry in Unexpected Places • Every Genre in the World • A Moral Argument for Originality
Indonesian rhythms. Breezing through the sunny port city of Surabaya in a vintage Mercedes W123. Apparently, that’s the best way to listen to Thee Marloes. Based in Indonesia, this group is doing something fresh with vintage soul sounds. Songs sung in both a Javanese dialect and English. Highly recommended.
“Skip intro.” A seemingly harmless button. But if you skip the credits and the narrative scene setting, what are you missing? What if you did that to another human? “Skip small talk.”
Acknowledging mistakes. 80,000 Hours, a thoughtful and intentional philanthropy, has a section in the footer of the website entitled “Mistakes.” When you click, the page does indeed include a long list of organizational mistakes. I’m not necessarily recommending that you read all the content, but it made me wonder — should we all have a page entitled mistakes? Idk, seems a little exhausting. I suspect most humans evaluate their mistakes quite naturally, whether they want to or not.
Every genre in the world. In case you want to sample some Finnish Tango or Cape Breton folk or Florida death metal or Chattanooga Indie or Kyrgyz hiphop, this website lets you sample snippets from every imaginable genre. Based on spotify data and the creator seems to be a former spotify engineer.
Chicago pigeon abatement idea: hire falconers. Falcons are natural predators to pigeons. To be clear, proper abatement includes relocation, food source elimination, and culling of eggs (see urban Switzerland). That said, some professionally trained falcons would really accelerate solutions (and attention) for what appears to be an intractable problem. Some cities release feral cats to manage rodent populations, right? Also, it’s probably not that expensive compared to infrastructure changes. Falconry would be designed to change the infrastructure of pigeon behavior.
A moral argument for originality. After a recent talk I gave about originality and restraint, I was thinking further about why, as a principle, originality even matters. I think there are many reasons, but here’s one. Much of our vocabulary contains recycled thoughts — memes and cliches largely extracted from popular culture. Language becomes a vector for ideas. Those ideas may be good, they may be bad. But you will never know unless you cross-examine the language. Encoded language affects our understanding of the world. If you blindly accept cliche, you risk blind acceptance of the embedded ideas. Originality forces you to think for yourself. Originality insists that every idea has been vetted and is defensible. Originality thrusts you out of the echo chamber and closer to some form of truth.
Tom Waits and Doritos. Yes, there is a relationship. In the late 80s the Frito-Lays company launched a radio commercial that clearly contained an imitation of his voice and singing style. Waits would sue and won nearly $2.5 million dollars. “It’s like having a cow udder sewn to the side of my face,” the musician said of having his music used for commercial purposes. By this, he meant it was “painful and humiliating”. I suspect Mr. Waits is relishing every dollar of this settlement, although he claims to have spent it all on candy. You can hear the original ad for Salsa Rio Doritos right here.
Jitterbug Boy is one of my favorite Waits’ songs. Like a scene from a lost Edward Hopper painting, you meet a character who seems to be an archetype of the yarn-spinning loner. But Waits takes a familiar figure, uses familiar phrases, and reformats them into something new.
The song is about a boaster, who may or may not believe himself, but it’s also about luck. Good and bad. And accepting the fact that chance is going to influence our fate, whether we care to admit it or not.
—Michael Neault • written in the early hours, Friday, June 18
PS. I have a new article, published in the last 48 hours for Yolo magazine (a travel focused publication). It's Father day weekend. Travel with kids is the best. This is our story of returning to Oregon for a high desert road trip.
Michael Neault