Don’t Make Decisions Based on Sunk Costs – Management Tip of the Day – October 24, 2011 – Harvard Business Review.

But so difficult to do!

In the post-YouTube world of everything-all-the-time access to popular culture, the concept of ‘cool’ is all but redundant. Sometimes this is A Good Thing, especially now that we don’t need not bore ourselves with questions along the lines of whether it’s Ok to like Abba.

It is a truth almost as universally acknowledged – except possibly in France itself – that the French never gave a camel’s arse for the rest of the world’s definition of cool. For instance, Jean-Michel Jarre’s son et lumière was kind of impressive but it was also kind of ridiculous, and saying as such to my French friend simply resulted in the rise of his louche middle finger. It was precisely this insouciance that elevated the early work of Daft Punk, Phoenix, Justice and – yes – M83 above pretty much everything the Anglophone contingent had to offer at the time.

So far, so good. Relativism isn’t only tempting because it allows us to be lazy. It opens our minds, enables us to try other perspectives on for size. But it is a truth even more universally acknowledged than either of the universally acknowledged truths above, that you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. And, much as it pains me to jump ship on the Versailles massif after all this time, I’m drawing mine roughly a third of the way through Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming.

Double albums are necessarily somewhat hit and miss. That’s part of their pick’n’mix charm. But M83 mostly miss me here. For each post-‘Kim and Jessie’ slice of pungent Eighties-rehabilitation pop cheese (‘Midnight City’, ‘New Map’) there are two tracks that sound just how you’d imagine Eighties Genesis (I did briefly consider actually listening to some Eighties Genesis to corroborate this, but as I’ve said, you’ve got to draw the line somewhere). For each enjoyably blatant Lemon Jelly rip (‘Raconte-Moi Une Histoire’, ‘Year One’) or modest Eno-recalling interlude (‘Where The Boats Go’, ‘’Another Wave’, both of which echo ‘The Big Ship’) there’s a track where you fully expect Jim Kerr to descend from the gods hooting and dressed as a flower. And for every reminder of the ineffable power of ‘uncool’ in the right hands – Propaganda’s relatively unsung 1985 classic A Secret Wish comes to mind on several occasions (en)during a sit through Hurry Up We’re Dreaming, as does Felix Da Housecat – there’s something that sounds like it was left off The Final Cut because the bloke with the funny face out of Level 42 was playing the bass.

Gentle readertards, who would prefer fans-turned-critics to only ever write about things they have already decided to like, may breathe easy here. Honest guv, I was up for this. Certainly, I wouldn’t concur with the Radiohead fanboy contingent who thought Saturdays=Youth represented a dilution of the M83 aesthetic. More pop is usually A Good Thing in my book. But here the impulse is more towards the portentous, Fairlight-raddled, heart-on-sleeve vacuity of mainstream Eighties transatlantic rock-lite than the soaring-indie stylings of Saturdays… or the more songlike portions of its predecessors, and I’m afraid it mostly leaves me froid.

Lighter, smaller, cheaper – the new Kindle is the best yet. The Amazon ebook monopoly continues…

We are old enough and ugly enough to build a better future for ourselves.

It happens without warning. At some point between the first time you hear an ironic remix of the cartoon theme tunes of your childhood and the expiration of your Young Person’s Railcard, you wake up one morning and something has changed. Under the puppy fat and pimples, your face has begun to emerge, and so has your future. You have become, however inadvertently, an adult.

By the time I finish this column, I will be 25 years old. Growing up is always an odd process, but since I graduated from university, it has become more convoluted than usual. For many people my age — including most of my friends — secure, meaningful employment, marriage and home ownership all seem as distant and unimaginable as they were when we sat our GCSEs.

While we’ve been finding our first wrinkles and filling out our first dole forms, all the normal things that were supposed to make up for theuncomfortable position of suddenly having to take care of oneself have been confiscated by the forces of world finance. Little lifelines like the Future Jobs Fund and the Education Maintenance Allowance have been cut to save costs, just as university fees have been trebled by an administration happy to hand billions in subsidies to the investment banks that created the crisis.

The impetus behind this year’s uprisings in Egypt has been partly ascribed to the frustration of young adults unable to afford the transition into work, marriage and independence.

It’s tempting to frame all this as a generation war, an immense and predictable kick-off between the baby boomers, who enjoyed every benefit that the postwar consensus brought its fortunate children, and Generation Y, the ragtag, loosely defined group of late-cold-war babies who are old enough to have been promised a future of permanent growth and young enough to have been shafted when that future failed to emerge. This interpretation is madly convenient for many who would prefer not to engage with the realities of geopolitics. It is also wrong.

It is wrong because it allows the enormous crisis of capital and democracy sweeping Europe, the US and the Middle East to be reconfigured as an intercontinental temper tantrum. With a bit of imagination, it's easy to see all the strikes, protests, riots and revolutions accompanying the disintegration of late capitalism as merely the international equivalent of a bedroom door slammed in fury — a worldwide whine of: "It's not fair!"

In fact, it's a little more complicated than that. Property, privilege and profit are not the sole preserve of the "power generation" now easing its way into precarious retirement.

Disaster capitalism

There are baby boomers who have lived all their lives in poverty, and baby boomers who were marching, striking and fighting against the numbing tide of disaster capitalism when today’s activists were still in nappies; just as there are members of Generation Y who’d take a Jack Wills hoodie and a job at Goldman Sachs over global revolution any day.

Something larger and far more frightening is going on. The struggle going on across the world is not between old and young, but between the possessed and the dispossessed — most of whom just happen, like 52 per cent of the world’s population, to be under the age of 30.

Three years ago, I turned 22 just as the world’s stock markets were tumbling. Watching the news, I realised, like so many other middle-class young people in the west, that the future we had been promised would not be delivered after all, at least not without a fight that would finish far too late.

For many of us, it is already too late. Denied the trappings of adulthood, we grew up anyway, into unemployment, anger and disillusion, into a world that didn’t want us.

When I was 22, I was angry. Now that I’ve been 25 for a whole ten minutes, I’m still angry, but I’m also hopeful. All around me, and across the world, people are organising, educating themselves, building new, alternative communities, joining resistance movements, and starting to talk about the possibility of a future that our parents never expected.

Fed up with waiting for a better future to be delivered, we have realised that we are old enough and ugly enough to build one for ourselves. It’s not
a generation war — but the power generation has every reason to be frightened.

www.newstatesman.com – I’ve turned 25, but the world won’t let me be a grown-up

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs 1955-2011
Commencement address at Stanford University on June 12, 2005

Wilco just set themselves a record. The Whole Love, the group’s eighth studio album, is the third in a row with its current six-man lineup – a feat of consistency that makes its previous decade of member shakeups look like a bad dream. The group’s last effort may have been dubbed Wilco (The Album), but they should’ve saved the title for this one: it’s their most richly personable effort yet.

“This is just probably the best balanced presentation of Wilco,” says Mikael Jorgensen, chatting by phone from the pre-show hours of the band’s gig in Indianapolis, Indiana. “We all… have that sixth sense about what each other is going to do.”

That’s evident as soon as album opener “Art of Almost,” a seven-minute gauntlet throw that builds and shimmers and squeals around a Glenn Kotche drum fill.

“The song started like a Neil Young, Tonight’s the Night kind of vibe, really subdued and slow,” he says. “Somewhere along the line, Glenn did a drum overdub the same time I did a synthesizer overdub. We were like, ‘Oh, let’s put the drum beat — the signature rhythm of the song – why don’t we put that in the verses and see if the song can withstand this completely new direction? That’s a good example of let’s just see what happens – and then, holy moly, this is a totally different beast then it was minutes ago. And those are the really exciting moments.”

There are many of those moments on The Whole Love, which should win over “Dad-rock!”-decrying doubters of their more, ahem, laid-back recent releases, Sky Blue Sky and Wilco (The Album). After the migraine-clouded guitar wasteland of A Ghost Is Born and art-pop opus Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, there was some disappointment when the band released an album or two of “just” songs was probably to be expected. But Sky Blue Sky in particular wasn’t unambitious, just misunderstood: the influence of new additions Nels Cline (genuine guitar god) and Pat Sansone (bassist John Stirratt’s longtime bandmate in soft-rock side-project the Autumn Defense) merely steered the band toward the simpler pleasures of the analog ‘70s. But there’s nothing basic about the new record, which took advantage of the constraint-free comforts of home at Wilco’s Chicago studio – the Loft – and more modern recording options.

“We made the record all on the computer so we had unlimited track opportunities-slash-curse,” Mikael says. “For me, I placed a limitation on myself – I’m not going to play piano on this record, I really want to try to use my synthesizers and technology and create a different texture or different emotion. Patrick [Sansone], he was an experienced record maker and he brought a lot of his vision to the production side of it… background vocals, further overdubs editing and paring down the stuff, which was a new role for him in the band and I think he did a great job.”

Only frontman/songwriter Jeff Tweedy and Stirratt have remained constant since the band’s 1994 inception, with its sound accordingly mutating from the by-the-numbers alt-country of A.M. to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s critically beloved high water-mark and beyond. Yet The Whole Love recalls much of the band’s history: ‘Born Alone’ follows in the footsteps of Summerteeth’s Beach Boys-influenced rockers; the desolate ‘Rising Red Lung’ evokes the folk gloom of Being There; ‘Capitol City’ is closer to the sweeter, sillier moments of Wilco (The Album). That feeling of the familiar may be as far as revisiting musical memories go as Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s 10-year anniversary looms next spring.

“Wilco isn’t a band to necessarily get too nostalgic,” Mikael mused. “Perhaps there’s going to be a—I don’t really know, to be honest. It would seem like [we’d do] maybe a greatest hits or something, but does that even count, do we have hits? If we had to do the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot-only tour like Sonic Youth has done the Daydream Nation tour, I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

The Whole Love is also Wilco’s first step into its music industry future: it will be released on the band’s own dBpm Records, an independent shift that’s all the more notable for the label flip-flop of Foxtrot sharply chronicled in I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco.

“My feeling is once our Nonesuch contract was up, it was like, should we go find another label and see what’s out there, or just try to do this ourselves? We have a studio, we have the ability to make records that we want relatively inexpensively,” Mikael says. “Ultimately a record label is just a weird bank.”

It’s not like the band has a shortage of fans — The Whole Love was a trending topic in Brazil (!) during its 24-hour streaming debut earlier this month, and the former Americana torch-bearers have become an international enterprise.

“I think perhaps the most recent and most awesome new audience is Spain,” Mikael says. “They’ve really just welcomed us. We did a tour in 2009 where we toured two weeks just in Spain and it’s the greatest, they’re so amped for us. It’s such a great energy to anticipate when you’re playing a show and reciprocate as well.”

So take your dad to the show. Hell, take the whole family. An album ago, Tweedy sung “Wilco will love you” and meant it; its burn-outs behind it at last, the band’s not just going to fade away.

“It’s something that we all have to do in order to keep sane,” Mikael says. “It’s our therapy, it’s the thing that balances our psyches.”

The Whole Love is released on 26th September 2011 through their own dBpm Records.

http://www.cracktwo.com/2011/04/25-abandoned-soviet-monuments-that-look.html

taken 1898

Black & WTF is an odd, strange and downright bizarre archive of black and white photos and every other day or so a new photo is added – there’s currently a 176 pages for you to browse.

1955 - Blondie the pet lion looks up as her owner, Charles Hipp, places his baby granddaughter Karen on her back

Hat Tip: Very Short List.

So after a factory reset I’ve finally got my phone working again.I’ve had to re-install everything a major pain.

VAT’s about to go up to 20% – and Lansbury’s Lido reminded me of the Con-Dem’s election posters.