Elvis Costello, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, March 8

As promised, a few more words about yesterday’s concert. But first a word about setlists. Elvis has such a deep back catalogue that anyone who claims to know every song he’s done is either lying or has very deep pockets. Or at least that’s my story. So I apologize when I will inevitably omit some songs from my retelling of the show.

Elvis opened the show with “45,” my favorite from his second to most recent album, When I Was Cruel. “Green Shirt” was next, then two other relatively uptempo songs. But most of the session was dominated by ballads, mostly drawn from North.

Mostly, but not all; Elvis’s performance of “This House is Empty Now” from his collaboration with Burt Bacharach brought the house down. Stripping away the layers of cheese-pop instrumentation that bloated the original recording, this version was just acoustic guitar, the magic touch of Steve Nieve on piano, and voice. And what a voice. Elvis stepped out from behind the mic after effortlessly nailing the high note in the bridge and sang the rest of the song unamplified. The performance brought the audience to their feet—remember, this was only about half a dozen songs into his set.

Incidentally, Elvis repeated the stepping away from the microphone trick a few more times during the set, which gave me a chance to notice that his unamplified voice was more in tune than his amplified voice. Maybe they screwed up something in the monitors. The acoustic in Benaroya was something to behold, by the way. Partway through the encore (which lasted 90 minutes!) he sang “You Left Me in the Dark,” and you could hear a pin drop. To be precise, you could hear the ventilation system of the hall, and the collective intake of breath as he sang the last phrase.

About 45 minutes into the first set, a latecomer took her front row seat, and Elvis, who had been vamping a bit on the guitar, leaned over and said, “The story so far…” After the laughter died down, he said, “…we’ve played a lot of sad songs.” But it wasn’t all cabaret. Elvis brought down the house with a broadly played version of “God’s Comic,” which he interrupted after the second verse with a moment of acidly political stand-up. (Sample: “God is everywhere, like CNN. And CNN was at our hotel in Florida because Dick Cheney was there. I saw him headed for the all-you-can-eat buffet, and thought, ‘Oh no. What if he eats too much, has a heart attack and dies? Then there’ll be nobody running the country!’ (a beat) And they’ll have to prise his cold, dead hand out of the arse of that Texan puppet of his.”) And his deconstructed version of “Watching the Detectives,” which veered from cabaret to reggae to feedback-drenched Hendrix, was brilliant, as was the rockabilly shuffle version of “Pump It Up.”

Again: for my money, one of the two or three best concerts I’ve ever attended. Get tickets and go. Now. You’ll thank me later.

The hardest working man in show business

Just got back from the Elvis Costello show. Two and a half hour concert—no intermission—that sounded at times like a mix tape; except all but a few covers were from Elvis’s own repertoire. One of the two or three best concerts I’ve ever seen.

No time to write down everything now, but hopefully I’ll be able to point to a set list and write some more tomorrow.

Which Elvis?

And by that I don’t mean Presley vs. Costello. What I’m specifically wondering is: which version of Elvis Costello will I see at Benaroya Hall tonight? Will it be the downbeat romantic balladeer of his most recent release, North; the angry young man of 1978’s “Radio, Radio”; or something in between? The review of the LA show suggests it will be a blend—EC performed there with a mic, an acoustic guitar, and Steve Nieve on piano, but heckled back unmercifully when an overzealous fan shouted a request from the balcony.

I’m guessing Benaroya tonight will be more of the same, which is mostly fine. Some of Elvis’s ballad performances are among his best songs on record, even some of his covers like the stunning version of Burt Bacharach’s “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself” that he recorded on his last big outing with Steve Nieve. Which, I am amazed to note, is available for purchase from selected Amazon marketplace sellers starting at $150. I did’t realize this box set was so rare. I’ll have to be more careful with it.

More early Schulziana on the way

li'l folks - the first comic strip by charles schulz

I got a postcard late last week from the good folks at Fantagraphics. Apparently the first volume of The Complete Peanuts has slipped its publication date by a month, to April 1 (no jokes please). But it’s not all bad news. They offered a bundle with a new, first-time-ever collection of all Charles Schulz’s pre-Peanuts work, including both the trailblazing “Li’l Folks” strip and his single panel work. Was I interested? Oh yeah. This is the good stuff, the ur-Peanuts, so to speak, before the characters evolved into their familiar (copiously merchandized) selves.

Side note: I have been consistently impressed with Fantagraphics, both as a publisher (the Krazy and Ignatz collections have been consistently excellent) and as a business with consistently excellent customer support and communication.

Happy birthday, spam. Don’t expect a card

The Register points out it’s been 10 years since what is generally considered the first-ever unsolicited commercial electronic communication, also known as spam. It was ten years ago on Friday that arch-fiends (and US law firm) Canter and Siegel cross-posted to over a hundred newsgroups offering a chance to participate in the Green Card lottery.

Yes, the first spam was on Usenet, not email. I remember it well. It raised such a stink across almost all the groups I was reading that one could read nothing else for days. I sometimes think that this spam, coming less than a year after the AOL floodgates opened dumping thousands of new users onto Usenet who showed neither inclination nor capability to learn the culture, was the penultimate hammer blow that sealed the end of the golden age of Usenet. (The final blow, of course, was the emergence of the Web, which technically started in 1993 with the release of Mosaic.

Keiretsu update

Around the block:

About vinyl

What is it about vinyl? Really? (Yes, I’m talking about records, not clothing…) I found a good used music store in the U-District tonight and walked out with a handful of records—all stuff I had on CD, all early and mid 80s records: the Police’s Synchronicity and Ghost in the Machine, Sting’s first solo album, U2’s The Unforgettable Fire.

Common thread? The CDs, made early in the technology, sound … a bit thin to my ears now. I want to hear what the vinyl, made at the most mature stage of that technology, sounds like.

And Simon and Garfunkel’s The Graduate soundtrack? That’s just for kicks.

Why blogs matter, by the Kennedy School

The next time someone asks you what blogs are good for, tell them, “Well, according to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, they kept the heat on Trent Lott for his racist tribute to Strom Thurmond and forced Lott’s resignation as speaker of the House.” Read the case study (PDF) here; it may be the most impressive write-up on the power of weblogs that I’ve seen yet. (Courtesy Scripting News; and of course Dave’s fingerprints are all over this case.)

Letter to Jack Spicer

Dear Jack,

In your first book, After Lorca, you wrote a letter to Lorca saying you wanted to make a poem out of a real lemon, not the description of a lemon. Very good; Jenny Holzer has done stranger things. You also say

I would like the moon in my poems to be a real moon, one which could be suddenly covered with a cloud that has nothing to do with the poem—a moon utterly independent of images. The imagination pictures the real. I would like to point to the real.

Today we can do that, Jack, kind of. This letter is a poem that points to other poems, other poets. But links break and rot just like your lemon does, Jack, and I’m not sure that what’s left is still in correspondence (as you say with those sly italics) with the lemon.

There are search engines, Jack, whose job it is to help you find the real lemon. Unfortunately, some of them don’t understand me.

I am building a house on sand, Jack, and trying to build it high enough to touch the sky. But the sand keeps slipping out from under me. And my words turn into other languages and are lost.

What to do?

Love

Tim

What kind of death march are you on?

Great article in Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine about “death march” projects. Object oriented guru Ed Yourdon taxonomizes those difficult, never ending, no room for error projects according to happiness level and chance of success. High happiness, high chance of success projects are “mission impossible”—everyone wants to make the project succeed, against all odds. There are also “suicide,” “kamikaze,” and “ugly” projects; see the article for the descriptions.

If you have spent any time in the IT industry at all you probably recognize some of those project descriptions. You may even have managed one or two. This is the interesting part for me: Yourdon’s book, Death March: The Complete Software Developer’s Guide to Surviving “Mission Impossible” Projects, gives guidance for managers on how to manage these projects.

Credit where due: link courtesy of Scoble.

On knowing the Dog

Someone asked me last night to describe what my depression was like. It was interesting; except for sessions with my therapist I never had tried to put it in words to anyone.

I said: I found it hard to get out of bed in the morning. Sometimes I found it impossible to sleep at night. I lost interest in my work, in reading, in eating, in writing.

The worst part, though, was what my brain was doing. Or rather, not doing. I would stare at a computer screen for hours, berating myself for not doing anything constructive, then berating myself for wasting time berating myself. I would find myself confused and angry for being so stupid as to waste my own time and work, to spend days doing nothing and finishing nothing, but when I tried to do anything I would convince myself that it was such bad work that I could hardly bring myself to finish it.

I think this is what most studies of depression miss. Over time, it turns into a self reinforcing loop, a cycle that tears the sufferer apart.

The tyranny of numbers

Jakob Nielsen’s latest column, about the dangers of quantitative studies, is out. In a nutshell, he argues that numbers lie. Misrepresentation of statistical significance, confusing correlation and causality, ignoring covariant variables, over-simplifying analysis, and out and out distortion of the measurements are of course all potential pitfalls in any research, and it’s good to point them out. Of course, I have a copy of How to Lie with Statistics on my bookshelf that made the same point fifty years ago—and made it more entertainingly.

There’s also an interesting connection to Mark Hurst’s column from two weeks ago about the “Page Paradigm.” Nielsen, who has been advocating breadcrumb navigation and other usability features for years, rises like a brook trout to Hurst’s bait that breadcrumbs, unless they help the user fulfill their one purpose in visiting, are useless. He makes cogent points about users who drop into a site from a search engine or other outside links, or who might want to revisit a site, but still I have to wonder whether the timing of that particular discussion is coincidence.

Still, I have to agree with his fundamental point that quant isn’t everything. I was recently in a situation where we had mounds of hard quantitative data—we were, almost literally, drowning in it—but couldn’t solve our fundamental challenge. Had we been able to run a few focus groups, we could have zeroed in on the problem much more effectively.