The Missive #65
GIFs are cringe now. Killing open plan offices before they kill us. Darker still!
Hello, and welcome back to a very music-heavy Missive!
“The vanity and unkindness of individual men is rarely read as a critique of men in general, let alone of the legitimacy of their access to the public sphere. But the girlboss and her transgressions became fodder to condemn whole swaths of feminist history and thought, if not the whole of the feminist project itself. She was held up as a prime example of all the ways feminism had gone astray, a sentiment that was usually expressed in a rhetorical question: Why would you want women to have more power in an unjust system?”
— Moira Donegan, “What Was the Girlboss?”
“All of this meaningless, poisonous panic comes down to capitalism’s total misunderstanding of loyalty. One can unite people under a mission, and they can believe in that mission and work hard for that mission, but real loyalty is a two-way street. If you want people to work harder, give them a tangible reward for doing so - a clear-set path to progression in the organization or, indeed, money. If you want people to work harder, make it clear that they are rewarded for job performance, and be crystal-clear as to what the result of good job performance is.”
“The ideology of open plan workplaces associates walls and rooms with authoritarianism, hierarchy and social isolation. If you put people together in one big room, or in low cubicles, the popular thinking goes, they will collaborate, a spirit of egalitarian togetherness will reign. This high-minded theory nicely dovetails with the somewhat less idealistic logic of cost per square foot.
It turns out that if you take out physical walls, people will create norms that discourage communication, what Bernstein and Ben Waber call a “fourth wall.”
— David Brooks, “The Immortal Awfulness of Open Plan Workplaces”
“Putin’s propaganda machine, like the rest of his regime, is funded by revenue from oil and gas exports. The current Russian order, in other words, depends for its existence on a world that has not made the transition to sustainable energy. Russia’s war on Ukraine can be understood as a kind of preview of what uncontrolled climate change will look like: petulant wars waged by mendacious hydrocarbon oligarchs, racial violence instead of the pursuit of human survival via technology, shortages and famine in much of the world, and catastrophe in parts of the global South.”
— Timothy Snyder, “Ukraine Holds The Future: The War Between Democracy and Nihilism”
Reading
Daniel Kahneman, “Thinking Fast and Slow”. It’s a design classic for a reason, but my smartphone-ruined brain found it hard to read.
Paul Callaghan, “The Dreaming Path: Indigenous thinking to change your life”. I realise me reading this book skirts dangerously close to the cliche of “white lady approaching middle age dabbles in spirituality”, but I did enjoy it. I’d love a perspective on it from some other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Listening
We’re in a golden era of Aussie music, and music in general.
Brissy/Melbourne dance act Confidence Man have a new album out. 90% of their schtick is their so-bad-they’re-good dance moves, and this video of them covering DJ Sammy’s “Heaven” does not disappoint.
This video clip is what I think all the Melburnians who moved to the Gold Coast to escape lockdowns thought life would be like up there.
NPR just notched up its 1000th Tiny Desk Concert, and celebrated in style with African diva Angélique Kidjo. It’s joyful — and keep an eye out for a special guest.
Melbourne punk/rock band Press Club played the first show I saw after 20 months away from live music, and it was glorious. Their new album is out next month and I reckon it’ll be their best yet. This video taken in their early days is also a fun watch — it also makes me nostalgic for the Oldie and the Tote even though nothing made me question my life choices like using the Tote’s toilets. 🤮
In case you’ve somehow missed it, this video from the memorial show for Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins is a tear jerker. Taylor’s teenage son Shane takes his dad’s place on the drum throne to play “My Hero” and plays his broken heart out. The tears are obvious, but the joy comes from seeing his Dad’s bandmates beaming with pride through the whole thing. It got me thinking of this quote from comedian Dave Chapelle:
“I went backstage and hung out with the Foo Fighters, and I met a kid who must have been 12 or 13 years old. Chappelle continued to say that he had asked the child if he skated because he was wearing skate shoes. “He said, ‘I don’t skateboard cos I don’t wanna hurt my arms’,” he said. “I said, ‘What the kind of fuck answer’s this? A simple yes or no would have sufficed’. The kid said, ‘I wanna be a drummer, like my father’.”
*Winston McCall voice* DARKER STILL!
Parkway Drive are my favourite Australian band, and they’ve just released their seventh album, Darker Still. It’s also the first time in 10 years that I haven’t been able to publish my opinions about a new Parkway release in a national publication — so you’re getting it here. How will the generally indifferent general public cope without knowing my opinions? I’m sure they’ll be fine.
Parkway aren’t an intergenerational Aussie household name like Cold Chisel or Midnight Oil, but they’re huge. They’re soundtracking Fox Footy’s rugby league coverage, they’re playing huge areas in Europe with lots of pyro, and the Beetoota Advocate has articles summing up every interaction I’ve had regarding Parkway Drive over the band’s nearly two decades of existence.1
Metallica are lead guitarist Jeff Ling’s favourite band and biggest influence. It makes sense then, that Darker Still is Parkway’s Black Album and Some Kind Of Monster moment. Making Darker Still nearly destroyed the band, and like Metallica, they ended up cancelling a planned American tour in order to spend weeks in professional mediation and counseling.
“We’ve grown up in the band with a concept of ‘if everyone is nothing then we’re all equal’ – so rather than lift each other up we just tore each other down,” he says. “We didn’t acknowledge any of our success or our ability. There’s been passion and calculation in everything we’ve done. It just wasn’t acknowledged because you’d be scared that you’d be called a wanker,” frontman Winston McCall told the Guardian.
“We used to pick on each other and bully each other, and we just had this – I hate to say it – toxic masculinity environment,” lead guitarist and principal songwriter Jeff Ling told Kerrang. “We were pretty full-on – especially in the early days. But a lot of us are turning 40 now and we just don’t really want to be silly little boys on the bus anymore, basically (laughs). And the cool thing is that everyone’s in the same boat – everyone’s like, ‘We need to pick each other up here, we don’t need to pull each other down.’ Because life’s not a big joke anymore, like it used to be with us. We’re learning how to process these things, and learning how to speak to each other.”
I found this fascinating. There’s a real movement around Aussie men at the moment to shed the shackles of booze-and-drug driven “man up” culture. Numerous AFL footy teams have risen from wooden spooners to premiership winners by sacking toxic old boomer coaches and bringing in mediators to teach their players how to navigate their feelings and be respectful and vulnerable with each other. Shifting a culture from “win at all costs” to “acknowledging which costs you’re not willing to pay” is not a small task, but it’s important. How much of a “win” is it when you achieve a goal at the expense of your wellbeing?
So, how is the music?
I love Parkway because of how their band makes me feel. I remember hearing The Siren’s Song for the first time and feeling the same way I did when I heard Chop Suey for the first time: full of energy and ready to joyfully punch someone. The fact that they came from a small town and created their own scene made me feel like I could find and create my own creative communities too.
The older I get, the harder I find it to overcome my analytical brainworms and just enjoy music for what it is. Living in Melbourne did not help. Like every Parkway album since 2015’s Ire, my reaction to the new stuff has been:
Wow, this is cheesy. What is this shit? I’m so embarrassed.
I mean, good on them for extending themselves creatively I guess. I respect it.
Ok, this is pretty catchy.
One life, one shot, give it all you GOOTT! / Welcome to a world of PAINNNN! / I feel a glitch in the CORTEX! Like a ghost in the SHELL!
The film clip for Darker Still’s second single The Greatest Fear was the first thing to puncture my shell of too-cool cynicism. I finally got it — it’s Triple M rock/metal about death and how it comes for us all. It’s written for the tradies, the Millennial mosh retirees, the European metalheads and people who watch Fox Footy — ie, the majority of rock lovers who don’t drag around a ball and chain of pretension when listening to music. They just like what they like.
It’s taken Parkway 20 years to go from a “cry me a fucking river, bitch” pit call to a 7-minute-long epic with strings and multiple guitar solos, but they’ve done it. Their ambition to cast off the ideas of what Parkway “should” be is as inspiring to me now as their DIY venue in Byron was to me 15 years ago.
My verdict? Go on, just enjoy the cheese.
More
The lifecycle is “I know the Parkway boys” to corporate mosh to dad in mosh retirement.