Adam Keys is Thinking

A couple things making me feel more productive lately:

Jot down a theme for the day: at the beginning or end of the day, I make up some kind of near-platitude to help me focus and get stuff done. Recently: “Hack like a writer”, “Finish like a shipper”, “Focus on code”. They’re a bit hustle-y, nearly cringe-y, and function only to get me back on track should I field a bunch of curveballs.

“Sync" written notes to a daily page: usually after lunch and before I wrap up work for the day, I transcribe any notes/sketches/todos/etc. I wrote down, on pen and paper, to a note (in Bear). This seems to help me keep a clear head and not get overwhelmed on hectic days.

A couple things that feel right but haven’t “stuck” as habits yet:

Set out clothes for tomorrow before I go to bed: check the weather, set out what I’ll wear tomorrow. I often forget, but when I don’t I thank myself the next day.

One big thing, a dozen or so little things: I don’t think I’ll go so far as eschewing a productivity/todo app, but using One Thing as a guideline when organizing my tasks often helps me reduce implausible lists to tractable plans.

Speaking of rowdy Springsteen: found this anachronistic and slightly surprising performance of “Ramrod" from the 2002 MTV Video Music Awards.

www.youtube.com/watch

Presumably he was out promoting The Rising, a sincere collection of 9/11 songs. Nonetheless, I guess he decided it was a good time to educate the kids about their rock and roll heritage.

Pitchfork: Talking Head: Remain in Light

By 1980, the conflict in music between what was thought and what was felt was in full cry. As disco continued to monopolize music you could dance to, rock reached a point of maximum theoretical sincerity. Pink Floyd’s The Wall, possibly the least ironic recording of all time, was the No. 1 album in America for 15 weeks. It was finally unseated by Bob Seger’s Against the Wind, which was knocked out of the top spot by Billy Joel’s Glass Houses. Ostensibly, these were works of deep sentiment. To a generation of punks, though, they were rock at its most bloodless and calculating. … The central insight of Talking Heads—what made them not just weird but exciting and relevant—was that their art-house affectation felt more sincere than a lot of American culture.

Completely unrelated but somewhat adjacent: the unseen magic trick Bruce Springsteen pulls off, for me, is to thread the needle between sincere storytelling, grandiose maximalism, and bar band raucousness.

Without Afrobeat, though, there is no Remain in Light. The central role of West-African polyrhythms in the album’s sound draws attention to a curious aspect of its longevity. Could a group of white musicians playing Afrobeat be taken sincerely in 2018? Virtually every genre of American music, including punk and especially rock, is taken from black forms. Afrobeat is not African-American, though; it’s straight-up African. The 21st-century sensibility finds something problematic in a band of white art-school types playing West African music. Earlier this year, the Beninese musician Angelique Kidjo released her own version of Remain in Light, which NPR described as “an authentic Afrobeat record” compared to the original. Given how closely Kidjo followed the Talking Heads’ arrangements, this description raises questions about what we mean when we say “authentic.”

This is a great review and a pretty good read.

Seth Godin, Get your memo read:

The unanticipated but important memo has a difficult road. It will likely be ignored.

I find this is one of the unexpected challenges of taking on engineering leadership responsibilities. First off, you have to do all the writing things right: use a clear and concise subject, say all the important things up front (probably in bullets!), and develop the important details in thoughtful prose. Even if you nail it there, some people just won’t read, retain, and/or care about the information you have conveyed to them.

Hence: Always Be Repeating Yourself. Always.