The Schema
There are two types of DIY music — that which is done by choice and that which is done by necessity. It’s all very well to display your fiercely independent spirit when everyone is clamouring to hear you, less so when you’ve received a thousand rejection slips.
So what about The Schema? Their schtick is that they have been formed to self-release a record in order to write about the experience in a newspaper article. This might lead you to believe that they are doing it by choice. On the other hand, the man behind it is Rhodri Marsden, whose last record — burdened with cover photography by yours truly — sold poorly.
On his myspace, Marsden catalogues the costs of producing the record, making a website, designing the “sleeve”, and arranging for a video to be made. He doesn’t catalogue the mental traumas but I’m sure there are plenty.
What really comes across though is how the music world has changed over the last ten years: DIY used to mean posting your 7″ record to a few fanzines. Now it involves prostituting yourself on thousands mp3 websites, searching for a long tail.
The song itself is pretty good in a catchy, soft rock way. The video, though, is great.
How to eat a car
This week I have been thinking about eating a car. The idea is that however impossible something seems — whether it’s eating a car or completing a massively overwhelming project — you can do it if you break it into small enough chunks over a large enough period.
My problem with this metaphor is that I really wouldn’t know about how to go about eating the car. Where would I store it? How would I break it into small enough chunks? Aren’t the paints toxic? I think my revulsion would make me eat only a microscopic piece of the car, so little that it would take me decades to eat the thing. You would have to really want to eat that car.
Isn’t there a better way to describe this ability to do big projects without being overwhelmed? Perhaps it is better to not think about the revolting enormity of the project at all. Instead, have a mind like water, a mind like the sea, which flows and erodes silently, whilst going about its business. This is akin to Kaizen, the Japanese word for continual improvement, whereby you make small adjustments to your practice rather than starting anew.
It is rare in web design to actually make slow, small, gradual improvements to your site. Far easier to just rip up the stylesheet and start again. The only sites I can think of which have emphasised continual improvement are Daring Fireball and Kottke.org, both of which look fantastic. Wouldn’t the web be a far better place if people followed their lead?
I reactivated my facebook account on Sunday evening after discovering — via a random search — that the girl I first ever kissed on the cheek was on there. After twenty years, I felt impelled to say hello and find out how her life had worked out. I would, I told myself, deactivate the thing immediately after. Alas, by the time she replied I found myself sucked into its addictive clutches: adding friends, writing on walls, sizing up my peers.
The popularity of Facebook is deserved I think. Like Myspace, it is very good at presenting all the essential information about a person’s identity into one generic page. It excels Myspace by automatically limiting the dispersal of that information to those people you are “friends” with. This means that if there is someone you are interested in you can’t just be a voyeur, you have to make an approach. This makes it a far more potent source of social validation and anxiety than its rivals. It’s almost like being at school.