On slideshows…

I’m flattered MG Siegler would take the time to single out one of my slideshows for SAI as being interesting enough to read, but annoying when formatted as a slide show.

So. A few ideas to think about.

Bad slideshows are horrible, agreed. They’re forced, they’re boring, they feel like a cheap trick. Maybe this one was a stretch, although I thought that the discrete elements — Microsoft product x is like Google product y — made it kind of natural.

But when done right, they can be really fun. A couple recent ones I’m proud of are Steve Ballmer’s Nightmare and Microsoft Store vs. Apple Store.

The Ballmer one worked, I think, because each slide led naturally into the next one. There’s a small element of suspense at the end of each discrete step — wow, so what could happen next in this chain reaction to cause Microsoft to go out of business? (Sure, the story was helped by the crazy premise — Microsoft is a $70B-a-year company with operating margins around 30% and $60B in fucking CASH. And yet, I hear otherwise intelligent people in Silicon Valley say something along these lines every week or two.)

The Microsoft vs Apple Store one simply wouldn’t have worked any other way. Yeah, I could’ve written a 1,500 word article with photos interspersed but that would have been a different kind of story, and I think it would have been dead boring. The visual element and the competition in each category WAS the story.

Another fantastic slideshow is this story of a young homeless couple in New York put together by Robert Johnson. Does anybody really think he did that for the pageviews?

Funny, how come nobody ever objects to a photo essay in, say, the New Yorker? Or Vogue, which is more than 50% ads last time I looked.

A few more thoughts:

• Authors and writers might object to doing slideshows. But my job is telling stories. There are many ways to tell stories. One sentence and a video clip. An audio interview. Slideshows. A 1,500 word news story. A 20,000 word New Yorker story. All can be good or bad.

• In the news business, commerce and form have always been related. Why are newspaper stories a certain number of words long and laid out a certain way? Why are magazine articles split so you have to turn to the end to finish them? (Annoying as hell, in my opinion.) Why are TV news shows split into segments of two to five minutes? What is so sacred about any of these formats?

• Random: there’s a great chapter near the end of “A Visit From The Goon Squad” by Jennifer Egan in which the daughter of one of the main characters — a teenager in the not-too-distant future, say 2025 — keeps a diary in the form of, you guessed it, a slide show. Maybe Egan was commenting on the decline of traditional storytelling. Or maybe she was celebrating it. It sure seemed natural in the context of the book. (It’s a great read.)

• Every single slideshow we do has a “View As One Page” link at the bottom. If you really hate clicking, just use that link.

I dunno, maybe this whole slideshow thing is just a fad and in five years we’ll be doing all our stories as micro posts of 140 characters and an image. Or video blogs. Mini musicals performed on streetcorners. Telepathic messages beamed into your brain.

Right now, though, it’s one way I tell stories and I think it’s pretty fun. I used to write meticulously researched 5,000 word reports with diagrams and charts and sidebars, so hey, I’ve done the big deep prose thing too. I think I got pretty good at it. I’m still learning this….

 

10 Things I Miss About Seattle*

*Other than friends and family, which are the biggest thing.

So I’ve been back in San Francisco for 6 months, after living in Seattle for almost 11 years.

For the most part, SF is better — better climate, better food, better restaurants, better fashion, better beaches, prettier people. It’s a young city, kind of dirty, with vistas spectacular, hip, slow, and multiculti.

But still, there are some things about Seattle that can’t be duplicated. If you live there, give thanks. If you don’t, check them out the next time you’re in town.

Baguette Box. For some reason, I think of this gourmet Vietnamense baguette sandwich place whenever I’m working out. When i realize I can’t just drive over the hill to get there, I become sad.

Pike Place Market. Tourist trap, yes. But in the 9 months of the year when no tourists visit Seattle, it’s still there. It’s a real working market — the original farmer’s market. The Ferry Building? No comparison. The Stonestown Farmer’s Market? Please.

Seafood. Surely there’s a good cheap fish market in San Francisco, but I haven’t found it. So far, the only one I’ve come across was down in Half Moon Bay. It causes me physical pain when I see the weeks-old “salmon” that the grocery stores here sell for $25 a pound.

Oysters. I haven’t seen a fresh oyster on a single menu or in a single grocery store since I’ve been here.

Bakeries. There are a couple good ones here — Acme in Berkeley for bread, Ambrosia for French style brioche and croiassants. But Seattle punches way above its weight when it comes to bready goods — Le Panier in Pike Place, Bakery Nouveau in West Seattle, Macrina and Essential and Besalu — all world-class amazing.

The Purrs. If they had lived in New York in 2005 when their album “The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of” came out, they would be internationally famous. Start to finish, that record is better than anything that The Strokes or Interpol or any of those early 2000s New York bands ever did. It was always nice seeing them play. They don’t get down here much.

KEXP. I hate the radio, but if you’re stuck with it, 90.3 is really hard to beat. KFJC 89.5 in the South Bay is awesome, but you can’t hear it in SF. And they just shut down KUSF a few months ago.

Mount Rainier. The Golden Gate is incredible, as is the view from Twin Peaks. But there’s nothing quite like seeing that 14,000-foot ice cream cone on the edge of town. Hiking Burroughs Trail off Sunrise is still a peak lifetime experience.

The Stranger. Three out of every four issues were worthless. The other one was golden — witty, cutting, smart, hilarious. The SF Weekly and Bay Guardian are pathetic in comparison.

Summer. The 16-hour days, clear blue sky, and 70-degree zero-humidity is like paradise. It lasts from May through September, with occasional lapses into rain and other imperfections. All the hibernating Seattleites come out for three months solid of day-long barbecues and boating sessions and drinking on roof decks. In SF, summer is the time to get out of the city.

My Decade at Directions on Microsoft

I started at Directions on Microsoft on October 11, 2000.  I came from CNET in San Francisco, and was already getting the idea from conversations around town that Microsoft was still considered a big deal in Seattle. Dot-com Internet Silicon whatever. That was California. In Seattle, Microsoft was where the all the best and brightest worked, had worked, or wanted to work. People even pronounced it with a particular tone of voice, hushed but aweful, like people back East say “Harvard.” All-caps. “Yeah, he owns a coffee shop now. But he used to work at MICROSOFT.”

I didn’t want to work there. I’m not a programmer. But writing about Microsoft? That sounded interesting. For a couple years, at least.

About two weeks after I started, one of Directions’ cofounders, Jeff Parker, forwarded me a nasty e-mail from a mid-level Microsoft manager. He worked for Rick Belluzzo, the brief-lived COO and head of the company’s consumer business units, and he thought that an article I’d written about Microsoft’s consumer strategy was completely wrong. “Would you mind driving to campus and meeting with him?” Jeff wanted to know. “Maybe he can explain what Microsoft’s consumer strategy actually is.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but this guy (who still works there at a significantly higher pay grade) was known as a hothead. “A yeller,” one of my colleagues later called him, recalling an incident at an airport counter when they worked at Microsoft together.

I walked right into the shitstorm: an hour-long lecture in which he told me that not only was I ignorant about Microsoft and its consumer strategy, but that our monthly newsletter Update was organized in a stupid way. In particular, we weren’t devoting a section to all of the company’s consumer products, a disjointed array that included MSN, bCentral for small businesses, the recently announced Xbox game console, packaged consumer software like Encarta, and Windows. In other words, his group wasn’t prominent enough. He asked who our sponsor was. (Sponsor? Like AA?) He threatened to say bad things to that person.

“Wow,” I said. “So perhaps you could tell me what I got wrong and explain what your consumer strategy actually is.”

“Another time. That’s not what this meeting is about.” The harangue continued.

I listened sheepishly, drove back to the office, and told Jeff what I’d encountered. He laughed: “That’s the Microsoft arrogance. But you don’t have to sit there and listen to it.”

“But he made it sound like he could hurt the company.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

A year later, Belluzzo was gone, this gentleman had moved to a new role in a completely different part of the company, and the conversation was forgotten. Ten years later, Microsoft still can’t explain its consumer strategy.

The incident stuck with me not only for what it suggested about Microsoft and some of the folks who worked there. It also showed me that a lot of people didn’t understand the relationship between Directions, a tiny analyst firm with less than a dozen full-time employees, and the monster over the hill in Redmond.

Directions on Microsoft is not Microsoft. Microsoft doesn’t own any part of Directions. Microsoft doesn’t commission or approve any of our research. But the name confused people. The “yeller” wasn’t alone: a lot of Microsoft employees who rely on Directions to find out what’s going on outside their cubbyholes often thought we were part of Microsoft or answered to the company. Strangers hearing about my job assumed I worked for Microsoft. Confused callers would ring the office to ask for Microsoft tech support, then get angry when we couldn’t answer their questions about how to install a printer. The press gradually got the idea that we weren’t part of Microsoft, but only after we came up with a capsule description: “an independent IT analyst firm devoted exclusively to Microsoft technology and business strategy.” We repeated it every time a reporter asked how we wanted to be described.

Remember Kremlinologists? That’s what Directions on Microsoft is. Only about Microsoft. (One or our analysts, Michael Cherry, had a regular gag in which he Photoshopped Microsoft executives’ heads onto old shots of the Soviet leaders on the grandstand of the May Day parade, highlighting the fact that Microsoft’s organization often seemed to change as randomly and capriciously as the Soviet leadership.)

Luckily for Directions, Microsoft is confoundingly complicated, often misunderstood, and always changing. This gave us plenty to do, and created plenty of demand for our services. It also created some lively conversations. Our biweekly meetings were part McLaughlin Group, part Talmudic recitations of acronyms and software licensing rules, part running skit with regular references to Doctor Strangelove (our research director, Rob Helm, does a mean Peter Sellers imitation in both German and French accents) and Monty Python. We often debated filming and v-casting our meetings, except then we would have had to self-censor and they wouldn’t have been as fun. (Or useful.)

The folks at Directions are some of the smartest, quickest, funniest people I’ve ever met, and I’m going to miss working with them.

I’ve seen a lot of changes at Microsoft as well. The old arrogance is mostly gone, although it lives on in pockets. One tends to be humbled after ten years of antitrust litigation, product stumbles, and losing markets that you saw first (smartphones, tablet PCs, and even search; go back and read Bill Gates’s Internet Tidal Wave memo from 1995 and look at point number 5 for the Windows group). The company has more than doubled in size. The complaints about bureaucracy and endless meetings have become so common, they’re no longer noteworthy. Gates barely checks in these days. “Bet the company” initiatives like .NET, HailStorm, Microsoft Business Solutions, and online advertising have passed into the memory banks. It’s not even the biggest tech company in the world anymore by market cap, although it’s still the most profitable.

Don’t get me wrong: Microsoft is still relevant. Hundreds of millions of Windows PCs still sell every year.  Its innovations are often underrated–Xbox Live was a social network back in 2002 (they oughta make a movie) and Windows Phone 7 is a surprisingly fresh take on smartphones. (Will it sell? Don’t know.) Occasionally the company still hits a single, if not a home run. Cloud computing could present a tremendous opportunity, if the company executes. Lots of brilliant, interesting, and honest people still work there.

But it’s not MICROSOFT anymore. It’s just Microsoft. Even in Seattle.

I’ll continue covering Microsoft and exploring all these issues in my new job as West Coast Editor for Silicon Alley Insider, which starts on Monday, ten years to the day after I started at Directions. But I’m also going to be writing about a lot of other companies and products, and heading back to the great tech melting pot of Northern California. I can’t wait.

The Newbie’s Guide to Weather in Seattle

“Doesn’t it rain there all the time?”

I get this question all the time from friends and business contacts in other cities, including some who’ve considered moving here.

The simple answer is “no.” In fact, Seattle gets fewer average inches of annual rain than most major cities on the East Coast, including New York and Miami. (Check out this comparison tool, which uses NOAA data.) And I would gladly argue that the weather in Seattle is much more pleasant than in most of the Northeast or Midwest–there’s zero humidity in the summer, and it seldom drops below freezing for more than a few days.  Big snow is rare enough to cause city-wide shutdowns.

So where does Seattle’s reputation as the bad-weather capital of the world come from? Several factors are at play.

First, while it doesn’t rain all the time, and the city gets plenty of gloriously sunny days, especially in the summer and fall, it can rain any time. The weather reports are notoriously unreliable, and there’s no safe month to plan an outdoor event like a wedding. Seattle natives all have stories about freezing their butts off in the drizzle on the 4th of July, and I personally played an outdoor show at a Seafair party on the first Sunday of August where I had to wear a coat to protect myself from the cold. I remember one summer when I was a kid where every one of my outdoor swim meets took place on a freezing overcast day–that’s six weekends in a row in June and July.

Second, while Seattle’s weather is much more pleasant than, say, Chicago’s, it sucks compared with California’s weather. And most Seattle immigrants come from California.

Finally, Seattleites love to talk about the weather, and while you’ll certainly hear people comment when it’s a glorious day, they’ll also complain about everything. We even complain when it’s too sunny in the summer! It’s a point of pride.

With all this in mind, I’ve decided to put together this month-to-month guide of weather in Seattle. These are personal recollections based on my living here as a child from 1976 to 1987, and again as an adult from 2000 through 2009. (If you want to check actual statistics, Beautiful Seattle has them.)

January: brutal. It seems unfair to start in the middle of the winter, but New Year’s Day in the Northern Hemisphere comes a scant 10 days after the solstice, and January is one of the uglier months in Seattle, with short dark days–East Coasters don’t realize we’re farther north than the northernmost tip of Maine, which means the sun sets around 4:20 on Dec. 21st–compounded by lots of overcast days with rain and wind. A few days of snow are possible. January does have one saving grace, however: there’s almost always a cold snap. That means a few days or maybe a week of exceptionally clear, beautiful skies with great views of snowy mountains on all sides. And low temperatures in the teens. Bundle up!

February: false hope. The first two or three weeks of February continue in much the same way as the last three months: short days (but getting longer), overcast skies, and lots of wind and rain. Like December, it’s a common month for big snows. There might also be another week of clear, very cold weather. Then, about three weeks in–often around President’s day–the skies clear. The crocuses and plum trees bloom. The temperature creeps up into the 50s, then the 60s. One year, I saw a bank thermometer reading 70 degrees in February. Shorts and sandals and spring dresses begin to appear. I always laugh when I see the hope in their eyes–they know not of the February Fakeout. It ends brutally. With March.

March: the worst. Unrelentingly bad. Non-stop wind and heavy rain and very little sun. I’ve lived here most of my life and I’m still surprised by how consistently terrible the weather in March is. The beginning of spring feels like winter renewed. In like a lamb? Maybe we’re just a little early here, and the lamb-like weather comes in February instead. Out like a lion? Yes.

April: schizophrenic. You want bright blinding sun? Freezing rain? Sleet? Hail? Snow showers? Rainbows? Balmy tropical fronts from Hawaii? Long sunny days at the park? You’ll get it all in April. Often on the same day.

May: the sleeper. This is when spring really begins. The days are getting very long–the sun sets after 8 by the end of the month, and it can be twilight almost until 10. The flowers have been blooming for a couple months, but the big glorious rhododendrons and azaleas are in full bloom in May. You’ll almost always get your first legitimate day of shorts and barbecue weather, and it often lasts a week or two. Some years it’ll be gorgeous all month long. Unfortunately, it seldom lasts.

June: the backstabber. June sucks. Year after year after year. The clouds roll in. The drizzle starts again. The days stay light until 10:30 or later, but the light is diffused under a thick layer of stratus clouds. This is the month that transplanted Californians put their houses on the market. This is the month that every wedding planner dreads. (“You really ought to have an indoor backup.”) This is the reason why the University of Washington starts and ends its school year so late. Once every few years, you’ll get a strangely beautiful June–2009 was amazing, and 2006 had a couple stretches of hot weather–but for the most part, June is unreliable and disappointing.

July: beautiful. Depending on the year, early July can be a continuation of June. (My dad, who’s lived here now for 33 years, always says you can’t count on summer until July 15.) But eventually, summer comes. The temperature gets hot–the all-time record of 103 was set in July, and highs seldom drop below 70. This is the month when Seattleites emerge from their collective hibernation into a crazed period of barbecues and outdoor parties, when the beer turns from dark to light, and when all the people with boats suddenly have new friends.

August: yeah. August is usually the same as the last part of July, but occasionally a cold front blows through, dropping a few days of cool rain, particularly toward the end of the  month. Thunderstorms are also pretty common. But by and large, it’s a great month for barbecuing and boating.

September: will the glory never end? Another beautiful month. The beginning is indistinguishable from August–hot and dry, with the occasional weak little front–and by the end the leaves have started to change and the evenings will be golden and it’ll be even drier (although a little cooler) and you’ll start to forget what winter was like. Hey, Seattle’s not so bad after all!

October: uh-oh. It may last a few days. It may last three weeks. I’m talking about the glorious fall weather–still dry, often warm, with beautiful leaves and a crisp snap in the air. Sure, you’re getting a few more fronts now, and they seem to last a bit longer, but the beginning of October feels like more September. Then you see it. A line of low grey clouds moving in from the southwest. This is different from the puny little storms that have occasionally passed over since August–this is serious. Dark. Heavy. Moving fast. It hits and drops a ton of rain, often warm and tropical-feeling. (The all-time 24-hour rainfall record was set on Oct 19 and 20, 2003–more than 5 inches in 24 hours. I remember because it was my birthday and we’d just moved into our house and I was wondering if the roof would hold up.) Nothing’s the same after this. You might still get a few more nice afternoons and evenings, but take advantage of them.

November: winter’s here. At some point, the fronts start to run into each other. The ratio of sunny to rainy is reversed–now, when the sky’s blue in the morning, you’re surprised and you race to take advantage of it with dog walks or hurried drives to the park. The sun never lasts more than a day or two. The wind starts in earnest–all the leaves will definitely be down by the end of the month, and you may lose power. It might snow. Very occasionally in an El Nino year, November will remain unusually dry and warm–I remember it being like that in 2000. But by and large, you’re in for it.

December: blah. Cold. Wet. Windy. If you’re getting a crippling week-long snowstorm, like happened in 2008, it’ll probably be in December. If you’re getting 100-mile hour winds that knock your power out for days, like happened in 2006, it’ll probably be in Decmeber. The days are so short you hardly have time to wake up before it’s getting dark again. Fortunately, the month is bookended with Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, so there are plenty of opportunities to drink yourself into a stupor and forget how crappy it is outside.

http://www.outflux.net/weather/noaa/No

Bing-Windows Mobile “conspiracy”, with screenshots

Yesterday in our Directions editorial meeting, another analyst noticed how Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, offers a “Reference” search option (on the top toolbar, click “More” then “Reference”) that returns “enhanced” Wikipedia pages, right on the Bing site. (See the example entry for “Microsoft.”)  You can still click through to the original Wikipedia entry, but he thought it was odd that there was this extra page. Following Microsoft and being subject to their bizarre efforts at spin is enough to give anybody a conspiratorial mindset, so he checked the “enhanced” entry for “Microsoft” against the original entry on Wikipedia. There was no evidence of foul play–the Microsoft “enhanced” version was identical to the original, including negative references about the company.

But that got me wondering. What about regular search results? Might Microsoft be tempted to tweak them a bit to put its other products in a more positive light?

To test it, I entered “Windows Mobile 6.5 reviews” on Bing. The latest version of Microsoft’s OS for smartphones launched on Tuesday, and if you follow the mobile space at all, you’ll know that it was almost universally panned. (The Gizmodo and CrunchGear reviewers were particularly brutal.)

Search results change frequently for the same queries as indexes are updated, so I conducted the search this morning and took a screenshot, which is here.

Bing results for the query "Windows Mobile 6.5 reviews," as of about 11 a.m. on 10/9

Lo and behold–the first page of search results is surprisingly neutral, with neither of these brutally negative reviews anywhere on the page, and very neutral headlines. While clicking through to some of these headlines leads in fact to a fairly negative review, the headlines and exerpts themselves reveal nothing about the widespread negative sentiment being expressed about Windows Mobile 6.5.

Now compare that with the equivalent Google results:

Google's results for the query "Windows Mobile 6.5 reviews" as of about 11 a.m. on 10/9.

Ouch! The top news headline notes how the product has been “stung with bad reviews.” That’s followed by the Gizmodo headline (“There’s No Excuse For This”), TechCrunch headline (“It Still Sucks”), and, toward the bottom of the page, a PC world headline (“Mostly Disappoints“).

One possible conclusion you could draw: Google is purposely over-weighting negative reviews because it’s a Microsoft competitor. So I did the same test with two products that have gotten mostly positive reviews, Windows 7 and the new Zune HD.

Here are Bing results for “Windows 7 reviews”:

Bing results for "Windows 7 reviews" as of 11 a.m. on 10/9.

The top news result is striking for its complete irrelevance–it’s a story about a tapas restaurant in Nebraska–but the other results on the page include at least one positive headline from Computerworld, although the story’s very old (“This time Microsoft gets it right“), alongside various other more recent reviews with neutral-to-positive headlines and summaries. (For what it’s worth, when I did this search yesterday, Walt Mossberg’s mostly positive review came up tops in the news results.)

What about the Google results for the same query?

Google results for "Windows 7 reviews" as of about 11 a.m. on 10/9.

Also mostly positive, although the top news story is actually criticizing Mossberg. But overall, lots of positive headlines like “Mossberg Says Windows 7 is the Best Version…” and “You Can Quit Complaining Now.”

Last test. Here are Bing’s results for “Zune HD reviews”:

Bing results for "Zune HD reviews" as of about 11 a.m. on 10/9.

Oddly enough, here the top Bing news result is…talking about poor reviews for Windows Mobile 6.5! But below that, the first link is a positive headline from a Zune fan site (“Sets Zune Apart“), and the other headlines are mostly neutral.

Here are the Google results for the same query:

Google results for "Zune HD reviews" as of about 11 a.m. on 10/9.

Very positive headlines, including Donald Bell’s “tears of joy“ (from a preview glimpse; here’s his full review, which also shows up on page 1 of results) and Ars Technica’s “Third time’s the charm.”

So here’s a quick recap of this very unscientific test. For a Microsoft product that has received almost universally negative reviews, Microsoft’s search engine doesn’t show the worst reviews and gives no first-glimpse impression of the widespred negative sentiment about the product. For two Microsoft products that received mostly positive reviews, Microsoft’s search engine showed at least one headline that clearly conveys a positive first-glimpse impression of the product.

Bias or innocent? Let’s look at how this could be happening.

The first and most likely scenario is that Bing indexes and ranks reviews differently than Google. If you look at all three sets of search results, Bing seems to offer on a higher proportion of what I’d call relatively obscure sites: Ubergizmo? WMExperts? Asktechman? I’d never heard of any of these sites before finding them on the Bing results for Windows Mobile 6.5 reviews. Same with Windows7Review.com for the Windows 7 query, and Blogoncherry/boncherry.com (which turns out to be an invalid result) for the Zune HD review. Bing results do include some higher profile sources like Engadget, CNET, and Computerworld, but overall there’s a high proportion of obscure sites. Google, in contrast, sticks primarily with the tried and true: Gizmodo, CNET, Engadget, PC World.

This might be a purposeful choice on the part of Bing’s engineers–perhaps they feel that consumers want more variety of opinion, so purposely pull in less-popular sites. Or it could be a flaw with Bing’s relevance-ranking algorithms, which may not be as good as Google’s. (That Omaha tapas restaurant review and the boncherry.com page suggest the latter.)

The second possible reason–less likely–is that the Windows Mobile team did some serious search engine optimization as part of its marketing for the launch of Windows Mobile 6.5 this week.  SEO is a dark art that I don’t understand very well, but it might be possible to influence which results appear near the top of particular search queries by judicious use of cross-linking. For example, if Microsoft wanted certain positive or neutral results to appear more highly in results, it might create its own Web pages that link to these reviews. (I’m not alleging they do this, nor that it works–I actually have no idea.) In this scenario, the conclusion would be that Google is more resistant to efforts to game the system than Bing is.

The third possible reason, which I’m almost sure did not happen, is that somebody in the Windows Mobile team called up Bing engineering and told them “hey guys, can you please tweak your algorithms to suppress those really negative reviews of Windows Mobile 6.5?” Equally unlikely is that somebody on the Bing team did this of his/her own accord, reasoning that Windows Mobile needed all the help it could get. Why am I almost sure this didn’t happen? Mainly because Bing and Windows Mobile are in completely different parts of the company. Microsoft’s product teams are notoriously averse to cross-company coordination–they’re not evaluated on it, and therefore have no incentive to help out like this at the expense of hurting their own product. If the Windows Mobile team were craven enough to make such a call, the Bing team would almost certainly tell them to pound sand.

Whatever the reason, this simple experiment shows me that Google, for whatever reason, does a better job of delivering an accurate snap-impression of queries related to Microsoft products.

Farewell, Crocodile

It’s official: Seattle rock mainstay the Crocodile was closed suddenly on Sunday, and the owner has put the club up for sale.

I didn’t live in Seattle during the Croc’s grunge heyday, but I played there several times with Half Light, and I liked it better than the only other mid-sized club I’ve played in Seattle, The Tractor. The soundguy, Jim, is justifiably famous for his exceptional competence and decency, and the stage is big, comfortable, and well-grounded.

But I can see why it’s closing. Half Light never played to more than 50 people, and I’ve been to plenty of other friends’ shows there with the room 3/4ths empty.  It’s great that the Croc supported local music by giving little bands a chance to play on a big stage, but if you’re not selling enough drinks to cover salaries and utilities for the night,  eventually it adds up. There are plenty of smaller venues–The Rendezvous down the street, for one–where smaller bands can feel big by packing the room.

As a fan, I used to go to the Croc every so often to see Local Heroes and College Radio Darlings–Kinski sticks out as a highlight–but now I tend to find myself at Neumo’s or the Tractor (which are usually packed) for those kinds of shows. I guess there are only so many mid-size music venues that Seattle can support, and we’ve already got Neumo’s, the Triple Door (too corporate), Chop Suey (horrible sound), Nectar (horrible scene), the High Dive (meh), and the Tractor.

Too bad. If only I had a spare million or two lying around, here’s what I’d do with the place.

1. Get rid of the kitchen. It breaks the flow, and there’s no margin in food, even fast food–the only reason to serve food is to get people to drink more, and that’s not necessary when most people are there to see music and buying their drinks from one of the bars.

2. Expand the bar. (See 1.) Or have multiple bars. In one of them, fill a jukebox with nostalgic and insider-y selections that will appeal to the indie rock crowd. In the other, have a small stage and book jazz or blues or DJs. Use the rooms for special events. Like the Green Room at the Showbox, or the Turntable at EMP, or the bar upstairs at the Triple Door.

3. Cut the main showroom in 2/3ds, get rid of the 80s-SF-metalclub black-on-black decor, and don’t book a show unless you’ve got a headliner that you know will draw. The rest of the time, keep the big room closed and let the bar be the draw.

Nothing particularly innovative, but most people want to hang out with music in the background a lot more often than they want to focus on the music for a night.

Battles

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

These guys may be the best musicians in rock today, especially the drummer. It’s three guys with samplers and live instruments–guitars, bass, keyboards, all switching off. One of them will start by playing a figure, then feeding it into a sampler so it forms a loop. Other loops are added, crossing over one another like desynhcronized windshield wipers, or like a heavily amplified version of Steve Reich. Somehow, the drummer, John Stanier, finds a beat out and starts hammering it home. The guy is simply amazing, he doesn’t play anything too showy–he’s not Neil Peart or some jazzbo–but his ears are amazing and his tempo is perfect, speeding and slowing to find that seam. The other three play fast, driving, occasionally ornate cascades of notes over the beat, all while adding and subtracting and manipulating the loops. Once in a while, one of them sings into an tape echo. It doesn’t matter what they’re saying–I think the lyrics to their “hit,” “Atlas,” are “the singer is drunk, whoa-ee-oh”–it’s all part of the music. It doesn’t always work–sometimes the echoes are so fluid that it falls apart, and people in the audience look confused, but it always starts back up again.

If I had to compare them to anybody, I’d say they combine the best aspects of the Butthole Surfers, Nine Inch Nails, and Yes. But that doesn’t do them justice–they’re completely unique and unlike anything else I’ve heard.

Junior Brown & Cuong Vu

Last Wednesday the 24th, I went to see Junior Brown at the Tractor Tavern. The man is a monster of rockabilly, and plays a double-necked invention that came to him in a dream–a half guitar, half steel-guitar, that he calls the guit-steel. The man plays fast. Tears it up, even. But there’s only so much country-and-western type finger picking (an old guitarmate of mine called it “chicken-pickin”) that I can listen to. And the timekeeping seemed elastic at best, like the rhythm section was starting too fast and Junior kept fighting them to slow down. He did throw in a credible Albert King cover, and some heartfelt Jimi/Stevie-Ray blues rock, but when the show was over, I was ready for it to be over. I hate genre-defined music fans, but the simple fact is no matter how much Seattle loves country and all its offshoots, I just don’t.

I tend to like jazz, though, so it’s a good time of year to be in Seattle: Earshot time. Cuong Vu is a trumpeter and composer who I knew only through a single song, “Vina’s Lullaby,” on a Knitting Factory compilation from a few years back. It’s a beautiful number, starting with long haunting notes (a little bit of echo) like a summons from across the water, gradually descending into a punk-jazz freakout propelled by monster bassist Stomu Takeishi, eventually coming back out to a sad melody and clocking in around 11 minutes.

Last night, he played for about 100 lucky listeners at the new Seattle Art Museum auditorium. Apparently he was just hired on as an assistant professor of jazz at the University of Washington, so he noted how nervous he was that his boss and his students were. He needn’t have worried–the compositions and playing were both incredible. Takeishi was outstanding, garnering a larger range of sounds from his pedals than most entire rock bands get–clicks, squeaks, rattles, echoes, delays, fuzz, chords, distortion. He doesn’t wear shoes–I think it’s so he can turn the knobs with his toes! The drummer, Ted Poor was spot-on and obviously a big contributor–he wrote the last song of the night, which started with just a few subtle clicks and whirs and gradually built into a percussion-driven bang-up then went back down, stopping in the middle of a beat. Cuong Vu himself coaxed as much beauty out of a trumpet as anybody I’ve ever seen, although he occasionally blatted and squeaked like any good downtowner should.

The compositions were rhythmically complex but not impossible to follow, with a clear shape, lots of triads, and not too much dissonance. Perhaps it’s too approachable or too rock for purists, as he complained some influential critics had labelled him as “not jazz.” (To which he responded, “Now I’m a professor of jazz, so I guess I get to say whether it’s jazz or not.”) I kept thinking of being out on Puget Sound on a semi-cloudy winter evening with the snow-covered Olympics disappearing into the background, and also of standing in front of a large white concrete wall.

Sometimes they were a little too good–I almost could hear them counting the subdivisions in their head. Every skilled musician counts like this, but it’s almost like you have to break away from the good habits to get back to a more organic sound, where the musicians know the beat just by breathing.

He also made a comment about how dark the times have become for music. (Overall, he talked too much.) I’m not sure if he was talking about file-sharing and technology and declining CD sales, or simply about a perceived disinterest in “high” culture. But I’m not seeing it. In Monterey last month, I couldn’t buy a ticket for the Jazz Festival (I scored a free one from the concierge at the hotel at the last second). There were 20,000 people there, all ages and colors, to hear people like Ornette Coleman and Sonny Rollins. (And, OK, Diana Krall, but there’s no accounting for some people’s taste.) I listen to more new music now than I have in years, and sure, a lot of it comes from friends ripping a CD or throwing a few files my way, but in the end that means I go to more shows and–if I really like it–buy more records. So maybe he’s alluding to some particular trend in the jazz world, but I’d say overall there’s more interest in music than ever.

The ladder of success

(Note: this is a revised edited version of an older post. I published it as a guest blogger on the Line Out blog hosted by Seattle newsweekly The Stranger There, it was split into separate entries, making it hard to read start to finish. So here it is all in one.)

God, what a mess, the ladder of success. Take one step and miss the whole first rung.
–The Replacements, “Bastards of Young.”

So you’re in a band. Who isn’t? What I really want to know is are you in a band, like, in your mind? Or is it a real band where you actually write songs and play instruments with other people? Do you play out? Where do you play? Who have you played with?

Amusing anecdote: I once told the co-owner of a small local label that I was playing that night. She wanted to know where. The Rendezvous, actually. Her response: “oh, how cute.” It turned out to be a fun show, and well-attended. But. You know. I was beneath her.

My point: after a while one gets sick of hearing (and asking) these types of questions to assess one’s place in the Seattle music scene pecking order. Hence, I’ve developed a shorthand which I call the “Ladder of Success.” I will be presenting it to you over the course of the day in hopes of shortening these conversations so we can get down to the business of doing whatever comes after these conversations are finished. (“Buy me a drink” is a good place to start.)

Without further ado:

Rung 0: Some Guy With A Guitar. You go to Guitar Center and buy the cheap knockoff version of the guitar that the guitarist in your favorite band plays. You place an ad for musicians who sound like your favorite bands, or at least have heard of them. Or you ask your friends if they know anybody, or failing that, try to talk them into playing the secondhand drum kit you’ve got set up in your basement. You meet a lot of wannabes and flakes, but at least you get some good drug hookups. Or maybe you make it to…

Rung 1: Garage Band You find other people who play instruments and aren’t total assholes. You practice once a week in your garage or a pay-by-the-hour studio. You get the money together to record a short demo, either on the Band Yuppie’s laptop or with a recording school student at some old hippie’s hobby studio. You send the demo out. Your only responses are that bar that’ll hire anybody and a struggling club in a bad neighborhood that has a pay-to-play new music night every Monday. All your friends show up to the first gig and it’s great fun. But your second gig is sparsely attended, and the bookers eventually stop returning your e-mails. The band breaks up and you start over again, or you give up in frustration and sell your gear on eBay. But if you’re any good, you should be able to get to…

Rung 2: This Band I Know. You get a call from a decent club, and not only do your friends show up for the first gig, but the soundguy or bartender or club owner decides they like your music, as do a couple of strangers who work in other bars or play in other bands. Word spreads, and you begin to get gig offers through your MySpace contacts and e-mail inbox. Even though you’re not making any money, you decide to spend several thousand dollars to record a full-length album at a reasonably well-known studio staffed by a Professional Producer who’s worked with some Local Heroes (see Rung 4). When you’ve spent approximately twice as much time and money as you expected (mastering? what’s that?), you print up several hundred copies and send it to local college radio stations and weekly newspapers and boutique record labels who specialize in music like yours. They ignore it. You continue to get offers to play on Wednesdays at the small-but-prestigious club where the staff is competent and pleasant, or on Saturdays at the bar where the soundguy’s paycheck comes out of your door take. Eventually, your friends stop coming to shows and get sick of hearing about your band. The guitarist’s hissy fits are getting on your nerves so you fire him, and the drummer starts spending more time with his other band. You’re stuck with a closet full of very expensive and immaculately designed drink coasters. Or, if you’re really good, and a little bit lucky, you might get to…

Rung 3: I’ve Heard of Them. Complete strangers sign your mailing list, then actually attend future shows. Sometimes they bring their friends, who also sign your mailing list. Your hometown college radio station spins your designated single a couple of times and features you on a local new music hour. The local weekly writes a quick show preview in which they pigeonhole you into the same category as some of your favorite bands and use mostly positive words like “thunderous” or “world-weary” or “pop sensibilities.” A small independent label agrees to distribute your album and offer tour support, which consists of renting you a van that breaks down only in the precise middle of nowhere. On tour, you play small clubs in front of 50 or maybe 100 paying customers, most of whom are there to see the headlining band from their home town. Some of them like you enough to buy merch and sign your mailing list. A handful of them like you enough to offer you sex, drugs, or sleeping quarters. You end the tour in the hole, but return to a triumphant hometown gig with a Local Hero in that big club you always wanted to play. You repeat this cycle for two or three or five years, earning just enough to pay for band expenses and drugs. Then the bassist gets pregnant and quits, and the keyboardist gets a promotion at work that requires more travel. When the band finally disintegrates, you put “formerly of” on your bio, raising the odds that club owners and college radio program directors will listen to the first track on the first album of your new project. Unless you’re one of the lucky few who makes it to…

Rung 4: Local Hero. In your hometown, complete strangers show up at your shows after seeing your name in the paper and buy your CDs from the independent record store near the university. The local college radio station plays several tracks from your CD for several weeks after it comes out, and you get a 100-word review in a local weekly, complete with a clever numerical rating (three stars=frottage; four stars=gloryhole). A national indie label or the boutique imprint of a major label offers you distribution, and you begin to headline shows in nearby cities. Somebody convinces you to hire a manager and a lawyer because everybody else does. You earn a couple thousand dollars per night as the opening act on a national tour for a College Radio Darling, during which other people haul your gear and tune your instruments before you take the stage. Pitchfork gives your album a respectable rating. One day, scanning the “Musicians Wanted” section of the local weekly, you see yourself named as an influence. The music critic for the hometown daily writes a short article about you and begins placing a star next to your shows in the calendar section. You begin to get Aribtron reports with your name on them and BMI royalty checks for $10.38 or $45.12. Your label announces that you’ve sold a respectable multi-thousand CDs, and offers to front the recording costs for the next one. Your band members quit all their side projects and begin taking fewer shifts at work or trading their full-time jobs for temp positions. When you fill out your tax form at the end of the year, you proudly write “Musician” in the “Employment” box, and your accountant introduces you to all sorts of useful and interesting tax deductions. You continue through a few more albums and several lineup changes, but one day find yourself opening for a band that’s younger, better, and more popular than you’ve ever been. The drugs aren’t fun anymore, you can’t maintain a relationship because you’re always on tour, you discover that the music business is filled with criminals and former frat boys, and corporate radio still sucks because they won’t play you. Eventually you move on to become a band manager or radio engineer, and occasionally people recognize your name and ask “weren’t you in that band, what were they called?” Or perhaps you rise into the rarified air of…

Rung 5: College Radio Darling. College radio stations play your music even when you don’t have a new record out. When you tour, music writers and college radio program directors in other towns call your manager to set up interviews. You’re playing 1,000-seat clubs and some of your shows sell out, and even if not, you always sell enough tickets and paraphernalia to pay your roadies. You manage to keep your recording budget down in the mid-five figures, pleasing your label overlords enough so they offer you a tour bus and try to bribe commercial stations into playing you. You sell enough CDs to cover both your recording costs and advances, allowing everybody to earn a buck or two of profit from each additional sale. From time to time, you’re featured in Spin and Rolling Stone, and VH1 plays a couple of your videos late at night. Your BMI checks might actually help you pay rent. Other artists give interviews in which they cite you as an important influence or slag your last album as overrated. Your parents are no longer ashamed to tell their friends that you’re a musician. If you’re lucky enough, good enough, and smart enough, you can continue along this path for ten or fifteen years, earning enough along the way to buy a house in Portland and medical insurance. Years after you break up, you will be asked to play the occasional reunion show. Unless you get suckered into climbing to…

Rung 6: Almost Famous. An aging hipster with expensive clothes approaches you after a show and claims to be an A&R man for one of the Big Four. Much to everybody’s surprise, including your lawyer’s, he’s legit. You sign the contract, live off the advance, and spend several months in New York or LA or Nashvile, recording with a producer whose name appears on the back of several of your favorite records. Market conditions change, and the label decides to sit on the recording. And sit on it. And sit on it. Any money you earn from shows or paraphenalia goes toward paying back your $500,000 advance, and your contract prohibits you from recording or touring under any other name or with any other musicians. Too late, you realize that Steve Albini was right! Your keyboardist quits to take a job at Microsoft and your guitarist commits drug-assisted suicide. But not all is lost: several years later, after a Wednesday night show at a small club with your new band, you recount your story to a tatooed anti-corporate type, who takes pity and goes to bed with you. You move in together, find a day job that’s not so horrible, and begin to raise a family, all while occasionally playing with friends or making recordings on the side—just for the hell of it. Or maybe you’re lucky enough to ascend to…

Rung 7: One-Hit Wonder. The label releases your catchiest song as a single and bribes every radio station in the country to give it a couple spins. Despite this corporate backing, Nic Harcourt plays it. KROQ’s program director hears Nic play it and adds it. Viacom sees that it’s been added on KROQ and starts playing the video on VH1. Clear Channel sees that it’s on VH1 and adds it to their light rotation list. Kids call in every time The Song is played, and they move it up to heavy rotation in several cities, causing VH1 to play it more. The Song appears in various charts, dragging your album into the top 100. You’re suddenly playing 3,000-seat theaters, where you quickly learn to save The Song for the end so people won’t leave. You open your first BMI statement after The Song has been in heavy rotation for a few months and your jaw drops. You call your responsible older sister and tell her to invest half of it in something you’re not allowed to touch for ten years, then spend the rest on musical equipment and partying. Soon, your label owes you money rather than the other way around, but they convince you to put all of that money—and then some—into your next recording, which they and your friends and your lawyer and your accountant and your manager tell you is going to set the world totally on fire. Except it doesn’t. Suddenly, you find it harder to ignore the critical sniping from the local weekly and the jaded indie-rock fans who stand up in the front during your set with their arms crossed. Five years later, you can’t get a gig in your favorite hometown venue. Your label sells The Song for a TV commercial, and the BMI checks continue to trickle in for a few years, keeping you from the dreaded day job. Years later, a TV call-in show with a vaguely insulting name asks you to reunite and play The Song so a bunch of kids who have only heard it at weddings can vote on whether you are better or worse than a bunch of other one-hit wonders from the same era. But the money’s too good to say no. Occasionally when you’re drunk at a party, you pick up a guitar or sit down at a piano and bang out The Song, and your friends look away. Unless you had a string of hits, in which case you made it to…

Rung 8: The Big Time. You’re all over the radio and TV. You mess with interviewers by answering the same boring, predictable questions differently each time. You show up late to photo shoots, or not at all. Teenagers sleep beneath posters with your picture on them. Your grandparents brag about you to their friends. An entire cottage industry springs up around you, complete with hangers-on and sycophants. You realize that there’s very little difference between playing for 3,000 and playing for 20,000, except that the lighting is better and the audience is louder and farther away. And your drummer always wears a headset and plays to a clicktrack that’s synchronized with the lights. And you occasionally use triggers and backing vocal tracks to cover the parts you know you’re going to fuck up. But you don’t care if people say that you really suck because you can buy any car you want, as well as a nice house in your hometown and a second home in New York or Hawaii. Even if you never work or play another show again, you will always have enough money for you and your children to live comfortably for the rest of their lives. And someday, you might make it to…

Rung 9: Legend. Your label releases greatest hits albums with words like “Legendary” in the title and nobody mistakes it for irony. You’re embedded in the pop cultural DNA—your songs are familiar even to people who don’t like music, while music fans are required to have an opinion about you. You have your own tribute band. You’re rich, famous, and a total sellout.

Animal Collective

This reviewer’s a twit, trying to claim that he’s got some bead on what makes music “good.” Animal Collective’s recordings are beautiful and complex, and just because they’re too experimental for this guy, he writes them off. Are the Butthole Surfers good music? How about Steve Reich? But this is typical of the Seattle music aristocracy, who are way too into three minute pop songs and garage rock.

But he’s right about one thing: the show was terrible. I didn’t go to see three guys (one guy was missing, having suffered a sickness or death in the family) twiddle knobs for two hours. It was like a hip hop show, all the way down to how one guy was walking with the mic, and while I can sometimes appreciate hip hop on record, I find most DJ music to be really boring live. I’m old–I want to see people playing instruments, feeding off one another and improvising and communicating. Anyway, the show got better halfway through when they started doing some calypso-type stuff–it almost sounded like The Police on a few hits of acid–but samples are samples. And even if they’re fascinating, well-constructed samples, they’re still samples.

Like so many of today’s indie-rock darlings, I guess Animal Collective’s a studio band.