8Sided Blog

the scene celebrates itself

Hitting the Links: Screwed Twitter Coffee Attack

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In the previous incarnation of this blog, I did a thing called Hitting The Links, a sort of ‘what I’ve been reading’ link round-up. Now that we’re riding the blog train again I’m bringing it back, perhaps as a weekend staple. God knows I read a lot of things and some of it is interesting. These lists could go long, but I’m limiting this one to four fun items of note.

First up, there was an excellent article in Popula by Chris O’Connell profiling Houston’s Screwed Up Records and Tapes:

Screwed Up Records & Tapes is not a normal business. It’s a brick-and-mortar record store that sells neither records nor tapes, but rather CDs. These discs are all by a single artist, the late DJ Screw, the inventor of chopped and screwed music, who has been dead almost two decades. […]

This is perhaps the only record store in existence where no albums appear on the floor. You order one off the menu, by name or catalog number, and Big A slides back behind the glass and grabs it for you. You cannot take communion until you have cash—only cash—in hand. I start scanning the whiteboard, but my eyes glaze over.

I remember the first time I heard a ‘screwed’ mix (It may have even been a recording of DJ Screw). It was around 1994, and I’m driving through South Beach Miami. I heard about Miami’s then-thriving pirate radio scene and thought I’d check it out. I spun my radio dial to a bottom frequency, and there was this crazy station playing 45 RPM R&B records at 33 (and then probably pitched down -6 — at least — on the Technics). I had no idea what I was hearing. It was mesmerizing, and I listened to that station every time I rode in my car during that Miami stay.

Jon Ronson had a freewheeling — and often emotional — conversation with Russell Brand on the latter’s Under The Skin podcast. Jon Ronson is always interesting to listen to (I’m a fan). And If you only know of Russell Brand as the MTV-approved comedian/sometimes movie actor/Katy Perry ex, then you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how thoughtful his podcast is. Taken from this discussion, here’s Jon Ronson on what went wrong with Twitter:

The problem is that we fell in love with a new weapon too much. So it became a place where people could become very unselfconscious … a level playing field … at the core was a utopia. And then when somebody transgressed on the outside … we could hit them with a weapon we understood and they didn’t, which was social media shaming. And so we certainly found that we had power. Voiceless people had a voice and powerless people had power … then what happened is that we fell in love with our new power too much. And a day without shaming felt like a day treading water. So the parameters of what we considered shame-worthy grew wider and wider … and then as a result of that, what happened — and what is still happening — is that instead of seeing humans the way we ought to which is (as) a complicated mess of positive and negative character traits it’s a stage for constant artificial high drama where everybody’s either like a hero or a villain.

Next, David Moldawer, in his must-subscribe weekly newsletter, lays out ‘the coffee situation’:

It doesn’t have to be good coffee. It doesn’t matter if the people there even drink the coffee. However, if the coffee is plentiful, easily accessible, and constantly on offer, you can count on a constellation of other factors related to good work, from a serendipity-boosting layout to an appropriately stimulating but non-distracting acoustic environment. The space itself doesn’t have to be pretty or clean, but it will be conducive. The coffee situation tells you a lot. […]

I’m not telling you to decide on a publisher—or on any other collaboration—based on whether you’re offered a cup of joe as you walk in the door. And then another one when that one’s finished. But, come on, shouldn’t you?

I’ll close out with this great profile on Massive Attack in The Guardian. Check out the photo at the top of the article — no one does ‘morose’ like those guys. Banksy — oops I mean Robert del Naja — addresses one of my favorite topics, a resistance to nostalgia:

“I don’t think I’ve got a problem with nostalgia, because a lot of the time things are self-referential. When you’re working in the way we do, taking things from the past and making them new, making collages…” He pauses. “I stopped feeling nostalgia for the moment because I imagine myself looking back on it from the future, which really freaks me out. I get this vertigo where I’m not thinking about the past, I’m thinking about how I’m going to feel in 10 years’ time.” Nostalgia isn’t as good as it used to be, I joke. Del Naja rubs a hand forwards through his hair.

It’s a bummer that this Massive Attack Mezzanine tour is coming nowhere near our Orlando home base. I think Washington D.C. is the closest stop. Massive Attack, Elizabeth Frazier, Horace Andy, Adam Curtis … I’m equally a huge fan of each, and here they are on tour together (well, Curtis’s visuals in his case). Alas.

🔗→ The Screwtape Records
🔗→ Porn, Sadness & Madness (with Jon Ronson)
🔗→ the coffee situation
🔗→ Massive Attack: ‘I have total faith in the next generation’

Appreciation for the Moka Pot

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Last August Caroline and I ventured to Ravello, Italy, for her nephew’s wedding. We had booked a reasonably priced apartment via Airbnb with the critical feature of a panoramic view of the Mediterranean. Upon arriving and surveying the scene, we were flummoxed by the presence of a Moka pot as the sole coffee-making device. We love our coffee (and I was a happy Aeropress snob for a while), but the Moka was new to us. Our morning brew was mandatory (especially with jet lag) and this Moka thing didn’t seem like it would deliver the goods. We weren’t even sure how to work it.

I know what my European readers are thinking: so typically American of us.

But there’s a fairy tale ending. After a few days trapped to the Moka, we fell in love with it. The look of it, the ritual, the sound it makes as it’s brewing, the anticipation. And the final product — delicious, thick espresso. Upon our return home, we immediately located and purchased our own Moka pot and now have the daily ritual of an early-afternoon espresso pick-me-up. The bonus is we’re reminded of our fantastic time in Ravello every time we rev it up.

It’s with interest and delight that I happened across this Atlas Obscura article on the history of the Moka pot. ‘Humble Brilliance’ indeed. Did you know its design is featured in the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum? I think it’s fascinating that design and function were combined in a popular product so early in the 20th century. Take that, Apple.

There are many other great tidbits in the piece, such as:

Alfonso Bialetti’s son, Renato, came back to Piedmont in 1946 to take over his father’s shop and decided to stop making everything except one product: the Moka Express. The newly low price of aluminum and coffee, and a growing middle class of people who could buy products like this, made the Moka pot a perfect device for the time. Renato was also a pretty shrewd businessman; in 1953, he commissioned the drawing of the company’s logo, L’omino con i baffi, “the little man with the mustache,” which has since been inseparable from the Moka Express. The Moka Express was “the first way that Italians could realistically make coffee at home that was some approximation of what they could get outside,” says {Specialty Coffee Association’s Peter} Giuliano.

Renato Bialetti ended up buried in a replica of a Moka pot. I don’t blame him.

The article mentions that — thanks partly to the international popularity of those infernal coffee pods — the Moka pot has hit hard times and the Bialetti corp is just hanging on. Thus I’m glad that, late in the game, I discovered the Moka and now advocate on its behalf. And advocate I will: if you have a coffee-aficionado friend who might enjoy an early-afternoon routine, buy him or her a Moka pot for Christmas. Or tell a loved one to get one for you if you’re the coffee fiend in question. Mokas are cheap, they’re fun, and they make great coffee.

So, that’s the 8-Sided holiday gift guide: buy everyone a Moka pot.

On a musical note, I’ve been working to the Ambient Arrivals Archive playlist. The curator recently included a cut from our artist More Ghost Than Man which clued me onto this. It’s a mostly beat-less collection, drone-y and spacey, the kind of thing I like in the background while writing and doing ‘deep work.’ That said, there are some distracting songs in there — including, by mistake (I hope), an AC/DC song — so I suggest copying the tracks into your own playlist so you can delete anything that will interrupt your flow state. But I’d say at least 90% of the 200+ songs are suitable.

Ending today’s post with festive gratitude: if you had told me when I was 22 that I’d someday end up with a beautiful woman who blasted “Venus In Furs” while making holiday cookies, I think my head would have exploded.