SCALES #53: small silver wreath
Hello!
Welcome to the extremely aughts coffeeshop playlist edition of SCALES. Definitely haven’t heard this warbly Bright Eyes song (feat. Emmylou Harris!) since high school. An old Modest Mouse gem too.
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So I was listening to…
…Alex Blumberg interviewing radio master Ira Glass, which I found interesting for all sorts of reasons. First as a radio/podcast junkie I liked learning some about Glass’ early career, and how This American Life got going. (Hot tip: to become very popular with local public radio affiliates, do a great job helping with pledge drives.)
But what made it different from any old interview was the latent father figure psychodrama of the interviewer–interviewee dynamics, with Blumberg having gotten started in audio working for Glass at This American Life and having since founded his own audio empire in the form of podcast juggernaut Gimlet. At times in the interview, Blumberg’s questions seemed more driven by trying to achieve closure with his old boss than necessarily thinking about his audience’s interests—but this still led to Good Tape, as someone in the know would say. Why was Glass so okay with his talented employees going off and finding their own success? Had Blumberg ever communicated his appreciation for Glass’ help enough before? (In Blumberg’s view, no.) And wow, now having been on the other side of the expert/trainee divide, how often was Glass secretly super angry when someone didn’t ask the follow-up question in an interview that in his mind should have been obvious. (A lot.)
The Tape that for me was the most Good, though, was in a discussion of leadership styles, and of how influential Glass—who, à propos of nothing, I just re-remembered is related to Philip (!)—was to Blumberg. Glass is pretty infamously a control freak, and Blumberg gestured to how, in what I think is a pretty common move, if anything his leadership style at Gimlet developed in reaction, erring on the side of being too hands-off with people.
What amazed me in this section of the conversation is how Glass mentioned he is still, over twenty years after TAL got its start, semi-regularly staying in the office until 10 at night to give the hyper-specific mixing notes that buff an episode to its final sheen. Laborious details like, needs another 0.3 seconds of silence at the end of the sentence at 14:23. Only now is Glass thinking about handing over this work to someone else!
Reader, this stressed me out. Right now in lab I’m doing my best to facilitate as graceful of a handoff as possible to the next grad student, and the process has made me painfully aware of how much with time The Way the Experiment Works has curled itself around The Way I Work. All of these little fiddly quirks about the setup that developed over the time I was the only one working on it. The needle, the inkjet cartridge go just so. The data workup requires this particular incantation of command line commands, not another.
Glass’ defense of his behavior was along the lines of, “Well, I care deeply about my craft, and someone has to do this labor so that the quality of the craft rises above the mediocre.” Which, fine, but right now I’m feeling like there’s a quality about working on anything that’s not a solo project that both Glass and I have mostly gotten away with ignoring until roughly now: is the workflow adhered to a single person’s quirks loosely enough that the project can exist independently of the person?
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Recommended reading
An inquiry into the genre of “Spotify-core” by Liz Pelly, who has been thinking about this topic deeply, and what the incentive to be streambait has done to pop music. (An aside: My focus in listening to last year’s Soccer Mommy album has moved on from the immediately catchy singles to the more pensive bookending tracks, and I’m not sure whether I would have spent enough time with the album for the rewards of the deeper cuts to have been revealed to me if I had been always listening in Spotify and constantly distracted by its infinite buffet, instead of listening within the fixed edges of the Bandcamp app and my laptop mp3 collection. (Yikes, do I sound ancient.) But I’m also not sure whether I would’ve gotten obsessed enough with the album to add it to the culvivated garden of my collection without first having the exposure on Spotify.)
ARGH this infuriating story about a Honduran refugee high school student on Long Island being deported for “gang activity” along the lines of doodling his high school’s mascot.
Jo Livingstone on Old English kennings: “Banhus [‘bonehouse’] is made of two disparate nouns, left to reconcile with each another in your head. A kenning is like a Rothko painting. It doesn’t make sense at first, but then it unfurls a beauty born of texture and contrast.”
Helena Fitzgerald’s griefbacon newsletter always features the kind of strong, lyrical personal essay I wish I could pull off.
That burnout piece, and AHP’s follow-up newsletter broadening the conversation.
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So I was listening to (these other) podcasts…
Realized there’s quite the backlog of noteworthy episodes I meant to mention last time…
Fascinated to learn about the Meigs Elevated Railway: an experimental steam-powered monorail in East Cambridge in the 1880s that might have been built out in Boston if not for opposition from the streetcar industry.
Samin Nosrat of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat on Longform illuminating her thoughtful approach to food and writing, and discussing the Bay Area scene that directly influenced her work: Chez Panisse, Michael Pollan.
Aria Code unlocks a lot of the lore about opera that is kind of orthogonal to how I usually think about classical music: the plotting, the human psychology, the human voice. And it’s hosted by Rhiannon Giddens, so how could I say no? (Though I agree with a review pointing out the musical selections play it incredibly safe.)
Switched On Pop has a remarkable segment on Non-Holiday Songs that Feature Sleigh Bells. The whole thing felt like that selective attention psychology research video where the gorilla slowly ambles across the screen and you can’t believe you missed it: sleigh bells in “Total Eclipse of the Heart”? …Pet Sounds? …OK Computer?? …Illmatic???
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Science!
“Surely You’re a Creep, Mr. Feynman”
Extremely cool: a surprising discovery of lapis lazuli embedded in medieval teeth as evidence for nuns’ role in manuscript illumination.
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These beans!!
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—Adam