Perhaps Not So Inexplicable

I’ve written before about songs I find inexplicably perfect. Crooked Still’s “Orphan Girl” is another one of them.

Perhaps some of it can be explained by the band’s curious combination of style and instrumentation. Depending on who you ask, Crooked Still is a progressive bluegrass band, a folk ensemble, or a string band. This particular track’s lyrics and prominent banjo certainly would incline one towards that type of assessment, and lead singer Aoife O’Donovan’s vocal style always puts me in mind of Alison Krauss. Not a lot of bluegrass bands have a cellist, however, and at the time Hop High — the album “Orphan Girl” is from — was recorded, the group didn’t have a fiddler. So there’s certainly a sense of the exotic about it.

The song itself is not particularly remarkable. Its lyrics are simple and fairly repetitive. The chord progression is very close — if not identical — to Pacabel’s Canon, which means I occasionally try to sing the lyrics to Green Day’s “Basket Case” over it. Then again, I’m a blues fan, which means that I don’t demand a huge amount of structural variety from my listening.

And I think that’s where the real answer lies. I’ve talked before how I love to see performers take something and make it their own, and my collection of cover songs bears that out. One of the things about a simple musical and lyrical structure is that it leaves so much room for personal expression — and in fact that’s often all you have to work with. You can’t hide behind cleverness or artifice. I can’t help but be drawn to that kind of purity of expression.

Which applies equal well to the Leo Kottke cover of “Corrina, Corrina” that just started playing here.

Doctors Agree

I shared a quote from Dr. Carol Dweck the other day about valuing things enough to work towards them. Today, as I was taking notes on Daniel Pink’s Drive, I was reminded how much I love the context that I discovered it in:

As Carol Dweck says, “Effort is one of the things that gives meaning to life. Effort means you care about something, that something is important to you and you are willing to work for it. It would be an impoverished existence if you were not willing to value things and commit yourself to working toward them.”

Another doctor, one who lacks a Ph.D. but has a plaque in the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, put it similarly. “Being a professional,” Julius Erving once said, “is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them.”

The Future of Business (I Hope)

One of the few podcasts I still listen to is the HBR Ideacast, a weekly, twenty-minute show — usually an interview — put out by the editors of the Harvard Business Review. “Business” is a pretty broad topic, so not every episode grabs my interest. The last three, however, have resonated powerfully with me.

In the first, Michael Beer talks about the kind of business that I want to work for, ones that put priority on their social impact, and do well financially as a result. In the second, Nancy Koehn discusses how our understanding of capitalism is shifting and that businesses are discovering that just as important as what they do is how they do it. In the third, Heidi Grant Halvorson breaks some misconceptions about and shares research-based techniques for achieving success.

The first pair is obviously linked, with their focus on the social footprint of today’s enterprises. I found a subtle connection between the first and third, as well. When Heidi talks about how we get our best results when we emphasize getting better rather than doing well, I heard echoes of Michael’s thesis that the sorts of companies he and his co-authors profiled performed well financially precisely because they didn’t make it their sole objective. It put me in mind of Peter Drucker’s writings about the nature of businesses, that they did not exist solely to deliver shareholder value, but that they necessarily existed to serve some purpose and that profits were a byproduct of that activity. Nancy’s comments on the emerging notion of “shareholder capitalism” give me hope that those ideas might actually take hold.

Update

Fitness: Rest day

Lessons from the Workroom

So I’ve mentioned that I’ve started watching Project Runway. Something happened on the episode that aired last night that really resonated with me. Here’s Carolyn Kellogg’s writeup that captures the relevant details:

Hot on the heels of creating hippie-ish outfits for a band, this week comes another challenge that sends the exasperated contestants straight back to the ’70s: They must create an outfit inspired by the “sophisticated ’70s” for sponsor Piperlime.com. The twist: At the last minute they’ll have to also create a second accompanying garment.

Contestants who’ve watched the show — all of them — are ready for this kind of “twist.” They’re also ready to create something for the mass market using a limited amount of dollars: $100 for the first outfit, $50 for the second. What they’re not used to is dropping that $100 somewhere in Mood, and not getting it back.

That’s Anya. She stands in Mood crying. This has never happened before, a contestant losing Mood money. Her mascara smears.

Tim Gunn tells her she can make her outfit with the muslin from the workroom and she can ask the other contestants for help. Only Anthony Ryan has yet to be rung up, and he gives her his change: $11.50. That’s all she can spend.

OK, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea for Anya to carry her envelope of money tucked into her dress above her breast, but it was the most interesting thing to happen all episode. The season is shaping up to be just plain dull, so Anya’s freak-out provided much-needed drama. Yet an Anya freak-out doesn’t last long: She cries, she worries, and then she gets to work.

I’d already decided that Anya is my favorite person on the show. She’s definitely got design chops. It’s obvious she has a great eye for composition and geometry, her use of prints is great, and she tends to make choice that push the envelope yet don’t make you wonder what planet she’s from. She’s a solid competitor, even if I think she won’t win the whole thing. But it’s her approach to the endeavor that’s really won me over. She seems able to honestly appraise her own work, something that some of the other people on the show don’t seem able to do at all. She’s one of the few people on the show who is willing to admit — in front of the judges — when she’s made mistakes. She doesn’t get involved in the drama that invariably breaks out between the contestants. And when things go wrong, as they did in a huge way this week, she knuckles down and does the work.

That’s the way I want other people to describe me.

Update

Fitness: Rest day
Sun, Moon, and Stars: 380 words, 347 seven-day average, 287 average, 52721 total, 279 to go for the week; 6-day streak

Virtue in the Kitchen

My love for cast-iron cookware goes beyond the purely practical and into the philosophical.

A few years ago my friends Ted and Christina got me a large cast-iron skillet. I started out using it for stir-fries, because most home cooktops don’t produce heat to really get a wok hot enough for great stir-frying and the heat-retaining properties of cast-iron help compensate for that. As I got comfortable with it, it became my default cooking vessel, because it did a great job with just about everything. That’s the practical part.

The philosophical part has to do with how cast-iron cookware changes over time. As you use it, it seasons. It becomes more non-stick, easier to work with, and better at giving things you cook in it a tasty finish without burning them. Unlike my chef’s knife, which gets duller as it is used, my frying pan gets better with use.

In the Classical period, the Greek philosophers talked about arete — usually translated as virtue — as a measure of how fitted to its purpose a thing was. Aristotle used the notion of arete as the basis of his system of moral philosophy. The idea that my skillet improves its virtue with use resonates with me. And, of course, I want to see myself as less like the knife and more like the frying pan.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go apply some virtue to some steaks.

Update

Fitness: Ran 5 miles
Sun, Moon, and Stars: 503 words, 353 seven-day average, 286 average, 52341 total, 659 to go for the week; 5-day streak