Design / The Beatles & collaboration

A lot of collaborative work goes on at Cooper (where I work). Designers team up to understand a problem, or to envision a better way of solving it. Sometimes, we collaborate with clients to figure out what's possible and where possibility and desirability meet. In any case, it's hard to trace back any particular idea to a particular person or moment; once an idea is out in the world, it gets pushed, pulled, disassembled, reassembled, and so on by everyone until it fits.

My friends and I used to argue over which Beatle wrote a particular song -- John? Paul? George? In most cases, it seems pretty clear cut. Cheesy lyrics and a bouncy rhythm? Paul. More complicated, layered lyrics with more straight-ahead rock? John. A sitar in the background? George. In some cases, however, it's much less clear. "With A Little Help From My Friends," for instance; or, "Got To Get You Into My Life." Both have recognizable earmarks of John and Paul.

Are these easy categorizations valid in any way? Is there any way of ultimately knowing who wrote what? I didn't think so. Until I Googled "beatles songwriting" and found The Beatles Songwriting and Recording Database, an obsessively categorized collection quotes about who wrote what, pulled from various interviews conducted over the last 40 years.

For example:

With A Little Help From My Friends

JOHN 1970: "Paul had the line about 'a little help from my friends.' He had some kind of structure for it, and we wrote it pretty well fifty-fifty from his original idea."

JOHN 1980: "That's Paul, with a little help from me. 'What do you see when you turn out the light/ I can't tell you but I know it's mine' is mine."

PAUL circa-1994: "This was written out at John's house in Weybridge for Ringo... I think that was probably the best of our songs that we wrote for Ringo actually. I remember giggling with John as we wrote the lines, 'What do you see when you turn out the light/ I can't tell you but I know it's mine.' It could have been him playing with his willie under the covers, or it could have been taken on a deeper level. This is what it meant but it was a nice way to say it-- a very non-specific way to say it. I always liked that."

Especially intriguing: John wrote "And Your Bird Can Sing," which (to me) seems to be the most obvious Paul song ever. Perhaps those earmarks I discussed earlier are less applicable than one would expect.

Thanksgiving remix

Thanksgiving 2006 came and went, attended by friends, family and the customary dramas.

An East Coast / West Coast feud flared up in the week before the holiday. Gabriel (East) sent what some in the West perceived as "a salvo across the bow" in the form of a PowerPoint presentation (a slide of which is pictured below). It contained a financial-style analysis of Thanksgiving: how Thanksgiving East has performed over the past decade, trends, projections, and outlines for future growth.

Some saw this as evidence of a diabolical plan; I was naive and asked for clarification on specifics:

Dear Gabe, TYs (Thanksgiving years) 2003-2004 were characterized by broad guest sector diversification. What is the likelihood that a diversified strategy, with exposure to the Shanahan sector, for example, will be pursued in the future? Secondly, to what extent will "value" guests (e.g., McClorys and Preslers) continue to anchor the portfolio? Will you pursue more (potentially) volatile "growth" guests in order to boost performance in the coming years?

Gabe replied:

Like other mission-related offerings, we believe that diversification is important for ensuring steady, dependable performance in any environment to protect against sector-specific risk. But our commitment to diversification goes beyond our concern for the bottom line: indeed, we believe that it reflects our group's core mission. We are convinved that when we serve a broad range of attendants and when our offerings range across the geographic and social spectrum, our Thanksgiving is ultimately stronger.

I want to emphasize that we consider all of our participants "core" candidates. Alas, our commitment to value--illustrated by our proven track record of offering Thanksgiving at a deep discount to its intrinsic value--means that we are not always able to serve as broad a constituency as we would like. For example, many of our sought-after participants fall outside of our geographic universe; we are particularly interested in opportunities in California.

Needless to say, this kind of talk elicited skepticism and cries of regional pride among the West Coasters, feelings which became even more acute when additional news arrived: The East Coast guest list had grown so large, so ginormous, that the hosts scrambled to find larger accommodations for their dinner.

Now [East Coast Thankgiving] reports that their 2006 expansion plan has been so successful that they're relocating to a BAR for their festivities. clearly the bar has been raised. are we going to let presler corp. outdo us at what we do best? we have to rally around the turkey and show the east coast who rules this holiday.

Would cooler heads prevail? Some West Coasters called for "focus."

i hate to say it, but this whole thing reeks of a ploy to take us off our game. start chasing the presler-yamadas with this whole thanksgiving at the bar thing, and next thing you know you'll be doing blow off some stranger's anatomy at 5am while realizing that you forgot to even *buy* a turkey. we have to stick to what got us here. the fundamentals and an easy-going attitude that there's no reason to get stressed out because our moms are at least like a thousand miles away ... focus, people.

Of course, Thanksgivings of yore were characterized by spontanaeity that often resembled chaos. (See right. More here.). To this end, there were appeals to pull together:

If Robert Altman taught us anything it's that great works of art are NOT created with scripts, business plans or PowerPoint presentations. We will honor his tradition and follow our usual free-flowing, improvised pattern. We will create a richly layered Thanksgiving that will touch on all of the major themes of modern life in a heartbreaking, at times comical, at times violent, but always incisive way. Like Altman, we are not afraid of failure. However, it's also true that some great works of art were created with blow (John Belushi, the DeLorean, Dwight Gooden) ...

In the end, there was focus and togetherness on the West Coast, and, by all accounts, steady growth with dividends in the East. A wise man once said: "Let love rule." It shall.

NYT / JFK to Manhattan on foot

“People don’t know where they are anymore, “ [the writer Will Self] said, adding: “In the post-industrial age, [walking] is the only form of real exploration left. Anyone can go and see the Ituri pygmy, but how many people have walked all the way from the airport to the city?”

This is from A Literary Visitor Strolls in From the Airport, a New York Times account of writer Will Self's walk from JFK to his hotel in Manhattan. Self walks 20 miles through a colorful cross-section of Queens, taking photos and chatting about his philosophy of perambulation. Cars (and TVs and computers and so on) have imposed a "windscreen-based virtuality," he says, effectively cutting us off from the landscape around us. The NYT writer name-checks psychogeography in connection with this discussion, but doesn't elaborate. Apparently, psychogeography is a common, everyday concept in which everyone is conversant. (I would guess that it's not). Also discussed: Self's seat-of-the-pants route-planning (he relied upon native New Yorker Rick Moody), and his experiences in the less-traveled parts of the borough:

Not long after negotiating the Cross Bay Parkway overpass, Mr. Self decided to go “off piste,” as he put it, borrowing the term used to describe [the act of leaving] groomed ski runs [to explore wild terrain]. He ignored Mr. Moody’s instructions and headed straight west on Glenmore Avenue, through East New York and Brownsville. Glenmore at this point slices through a long, grim stretch of low-rise apartments, pocket-size auto-body shops, razor-wired vacant lots harboring high-strung dogs, and a surprising number of churches, including one, Glenmore Avenue Presbyterian, that featured a Sunday-morning “Apocalipsis” service.

“What could be more suitable?” said Mr. Self, who had just been discussing the apocalyptic theme in his own novel and those of H. G. Wells.

A related personal account: Once, in the fall of 1997, my flight had arrived late to JFK, and I was racing to catch the last Delta commuter flight to Boston, which was leaving from a different terminal. When I arrived at the curb, the security guard told me that the shuttle bus had just left, and that I'd probably miss my flight. He mentioned that the terminal was "just beyond that big TWA hanger over there," and I thanked him and set off walking. Needless to say, there weren't sidewalks connecting the two, and I spent much of my time "off piste," scurrying along the shoulders of frontage roads and across parking lots. It was scary and fun, with planes periodically screeching just overheard, but I arrived just in time, and since then I've always wanted a chance to do it again.