The Architect of my own Misfortune

I’m just coming out of a long period of stress and overwork. As I wrote about at length in the last few newsletters, it was a combination of child illness and job uncertainty, and a tiresome rerun of the same period exactly a year earlier. I’ve also written about how, once upon a time, this was a newsletter was about making music, but it has become about how to get back to a point where making music is even possible. Artistically, the biggest challenge I face these days is getting started on a project and then just getting buried for four months and not having the time to even look at it.

However, right now the dust seems to have settled! When the dust has settled in the past I have frantically tried to do as many creative projects as I can. You might notice that this newsletter is a bit of a flurry of activity, but actually I’m trying not to repeat that pattern this time.

What I’m currently trying to do is make sure I don’t spend the next few years in a constant cycle of worrying about when the current job contract ends, and getting completely blindsided every time the kids get ill. So even though I get to dip my toe back into making music (for my mental health mainly), it’s no more than that, for now at least.

That said, this month is a lot. Eight recommendations and three blog posts.

We’re covering everything from zines to wealth tax to Sherlock Holmes, via the Beach Boys and a large language model… from 1930. With blog posts about the end of an online golden age, being polite to AI chatbots, and why I might have been wrong about imminent US Civil War. And we’re also covering my favourite topic: writer’s block.

Shall we?

My Recent Blog Articles

As I mentioned, there’s been a bit of a flurry of activity in terms of my writing.

The first blog post is about how The Essay™ seems to be moving from video back to text – because video is too competitive, and text is so much quicker and easier to write. Which perhaps explains why, given a little bit more time, I’ve written a bunch of blog posts rather than anything else.

The second post concerns a funny (peculiar not ha ha) issue that I’ve heard people discuss privately but I don’t see it covered much publicly: how polite should we be to AI chatbots?

Finally, a return to The Quiet Part Loud, and a slightly more optimistic post: I think I might have been wrong about a US civil war or revolution before the end of Trump’s second term.

Recommended

GABRIEL ZUCMAN

Okay, let’s start with the big one.

Perhaps the most influential name in the wealth tax movement is French economist Gabriel Zucman. Scourge of the billionaires. Thorn in the side of the French government.

Zucman is a protégé of Thomas Piketty – arguably the most influential economist of recent times (along with Joseph Stiglitz, who is also a Zucman fan) – and his new (and pleasingly concise) book is simply called We Need To Tax Billionaires.

If you’ve read this newsletter before, you know this is something I’m boring about, but… why do we need to tax billionaires? So many reasons, many counter-intuititve, but fundamentally because billionaires (particularly those few plutocrats with hundreds of billions) are arguably more powerful than governments, and taxation is the most effective tool a democratic government has for reversing this.

However, this book is more than a mission statement.

In it he lays out the detailed plan for how a wealth tax would actually work. And he is in a good position to do this, having helped implement a similar plan which currently taxes corporations specifically (rather than their billionaire owners).

He also gives evidence-based responses for all the usual questions: no, taxing billionaires alone will not fund a government, and yes, wealth taxes in the past didn’t work (because, as he points out, the billionaires were always somehow exempt!)

His approach is known in France as, simply, the Zucman tax, and he certainly believes France will implement it relatively soon.

If it does then I think it will globally change the wealth tax debate very quickly.

Recommended

FILMMAKERS SHOULD MAKE ZINES

I’m not a filmmaker. And I don’t have the time or the patience to make zines.

But I love the idea of both!

(”What are zines?” DIY homemade magazines, basically, that have been popular in music subcultures for decades.)

I have to be honest: I don’t think there’s going to be a huge physical media revival that eclipse is digital media. Digital media is just too convenient.

But I think we need both, because physical media has properties digital media just doesn’t. It is tangible. It exists in the world.

And seeing this filmmaker’s photographs assembled by hand into these gorgeous paper booklets really brings this home for me.

Recommended

NOTEBOOK-LM PODCASTS

This is the first of a bunch of AI-related recommendations. Sorry folks, these are the times we are living in.

Actually, they all fall into the same category of ‘trying to find good uses for this neutral tool that is being so actively weaponised against us by a bunch of man-baby billionaire dickheads’.

Perhaps my favourite current AI tool is Google’s NotebookLM, because it will work with just the sources you give it. It answers questions, it make infographics… and, famously, it makes podcasts.

I have mentioned this podcast feature in my recommendations before, but I’ve come back to it in a big way – although, as to be expected with two AI voices chatting with each other, there is an element of Uncanny Valley to it.

But I realised recently that I could use it to search for online sources on the most complex and niche topics that I have wanted to understand for a long time but am unlikely to find a good primer for. Then I can feed those sources into this app, and have it to generate a 20 minute podcast which, I have to admit, is very very good at explaining complex topics in simple ways.

I’ve learned about the history of computer programming from Assembly to Rust. I’ve learned about the history of the Swiss Democratic system. I’ve learned about the ‘100 schools’ of Chinese philosophy.

If you want an introduction into a tricky topic, I highly recommend it.

Recommended

TALKIE LM

This one is fascinating. And bonkers. And particularly exciting for history nerds.

The bad news is it’s yet another AI chatbot. The good news? Here is the opening paragraph of the introductory blog article:

Have you ever daydreamed about talking to someone from the past? What would you ask someone with no knowledge of the modern world? What would they ask you? While we don’t have time machines yet, we can simulate this experience by training, in Owain Evans’s phrase, ‘vintage’ language models: LMs trained only on historical text.

Go check it out. It’s called Talkie LM particularly informative about cooperative movements, trade unions, and the kind of political machinery that fell out of faith in the late 20th century.

Also fun for folk music too.

Recommended

AI POISONING CONTINUES…

I’m still on the AI poisoning train, however, when it comes to music.

And although I haven’t heard about any advances in technology, it’s nice to stumble on a video like this by a young creator seemingly as determined as I am to find ways to damage the AI models that are stealing from us.

It feels like a movement that is picking up momentum.

(Another reason why I like that Talkie LM, as it’s trained only on content in the public domain.)

Recommended

YVETTE YOUNG COVERS THE BEACH BOYS

Yvette Young, who performs under the band name Covet, is a very particular kind of electric guitar player: the kind that gets their own signature model. (And with Ibanez too – the most underrated electric guitar manufacturer.)

She plays very complicated, very technical instrumental Math Rock-influenced music that is constantly leaping keys and time signatures.

This is a video where she is challenged to do a cover of Wouldn’t It Be Nice? by The Beach Boys in a few hours.

And it’s just fun. She decides to make it 90s shoegaze.

Recommended

JEREMY BRETT: THE DEFINITIVE SHERLOCK HOLMES

I think the dazzling reinvention of the Benedict Cumberbatch / Martin Freeman Sherlock made me forget that Jeremy Brett played the definitive Sherlock Holmes.

I stumbled on this YouTube video recently.

I think I had heard that Brett was obsessive about the role, but I had no idea what extent. It really did become all-consuming for him.

In fact, he set out to make meticulously faithful television adaptations of every story, and came pretty close, but didn’t live long enough – perhaps due to how hard he worked through a number of serious health conditions.

If you are even slightly a Holmes fan, this is well worth a watch.

Recommended

VOICE ACTOR EXPLAINS

I have never seen the Netflix TV series Euphoria, although for this video – in which Tawny Platis (a professional voice actor) breaks down characters, their accents and how they use them – that might be an advantage.

I had no idea that was that much detail.

It’s a pretty impressive insight into both the talent of the actors and the insight of the voice actor analysing them.

So now I finally have a bit more time. And although I have a million things to do, making music is such a necessity for my mental health (it has taken me too long to learn that).

Back to music means back to my incredibly complicated notes on all the incredibly complicated ideas I want to incorporate.

Except that this time I have been away so long that they had all gone from my short-term memory. And for the first time in a very very long time, this felt liberating. Instead of taking refuge in complex structure, I felt like, this time, I might be able to just sit down and write.

Here’s the thing: I have written a lot of professional library music, and although some of it was tricky to write, I would pretty much always be satisfied with the result. Yet whenever I tried to write music just for myself I would end up abandon it.

So this time I just sat down and started writing, but with a different attitude: I wouldn’t expect to get it right straight away. I would just do a first draft, and accept it wouldn’t be perfect. Then I would move onto another one. But I would come back, see what could be improved, and then rinse and repeat until the track was done.

So that’s what I did.

Did it work?

Of course it fucking didn’t.

I haven’t been lost in complex structures for over a decade for no reason. And I feel like this detour helped me to understand what the reason has been.

Thanks to years of making library music, it turns out I find it very easy to come up with ideas. I know I’ve quoted this Paul Simon line about a million times in this newsletter, but here it is again: writers’ block is not about ‘not being able to come up with ideas’: it’s about only being able to come up with ideas that let you down.

I found it pretty easy to come up with ideas when writing professional library music, because they weren’t my ideas! I was just recycling other people’s.

The music I have always wanted to write for myself is different. All my musical heroes have a sound. Sometimes many different sounds. It’s not about one or two new ideas: it’s about creating a whole sub-genre.

I keep forgetting this and rediscovering it, but this month I came up with an analogy which sums it up, and which will hopefully remind me in future.

It’s like I’ve always wanted to be an architect. One with my own original bold inventive style. It’s like I grew up loving architects, and studying them, and trying to work out why they made the choices they made.

And eventually the way I decided to work towards becoming an architect was by starting out as a builder.

I would work on construction sites and home renovations. And I would do this for years, to the point where you could put me into any situation and I would understand the engineering, the materials, the budget, the time-frame…

But when I would start trying to build my own structures from scratch, I would always abandon them. I just couldn’t get them right.

And the reason is because I was approaching them like a builder, and not like an architect.

A builder implements someone else’s design, even if that means making a number of smaller design decisions.

But an architect has to think about the whole system and how it fits together. That’s really the difference: it’s not just about solving problems, it’s about building systems that fit together.

And an architect who wants to do something radically different has to do a great deal of work testing new potential systems to see where they might break down. Because if you don’t get them right in the planning stage, you’re not going to be able to fix them in the build.

So, yeah, I think this is why I keep abandoning the music that I start. You can’t just spontaneously build a house by, like, putting up a front door and then seeing where inspiration takes you.

Back to the drawing board.

And now for something completely different. (Although it is also about learning how to stop abandoning things early.)

This month’s revelation concerns why I’ve stopped watching television.

Or, to be more specific, I have stopped watching narrative fiction on a screen at home. I will still very occasionally go to the cinema when I have time, but I don’t find myself watching movies or television shows at home. Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV and so on.

I just haven’t been able to find anything that keeps me hooked. Occasionally I find something that’s interesting enough for me to watch maybe 10 minutes of, but no more than that.

Well, I think I’ve found out why. And it’s nothing to do with the quality of the shows.

On a whim, I decided to watch something on my desktop computer, sitting in my comfortable desk chair… but with the lights off.

I was amazed to discover that, even though what I was watching was fairly trashy, I was able to get immersed in the story. Just like in a cinema.

Really, that was all it took: sitting in the dark.

Now that I’ve noticed what a difference the environment makes in my concentration, I’ve also noticed that I basically don’t read physical books anymore. It’s always an audiobook. But maybe, in a similar way, if I was to take the time to create an environment where focus is easy, that might be something I can get immersed in too.

I don’t want to emphasise that this is not about smart phones being attention killers.

I think it’s about new technology breaking good habits I let atrophy years ago that need to be rediscovered.