Category Archives: This just in

Grind House, a little late

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Dear Quentin Tarantino,

I recently saw your latest locally available DVD, “Death Proof”. I missed it in the theaters. Hey, for the price of admission, I can own it forever. Or at least for the next few years, until on-demand or BlueRay kill the DVD format for good. Lucky me.

My reaction to your film: you’ve jumped the shark, man. You’re now making parodies of yourself. I bet it’s fun, lots of laughs, yuk yuk. Wish I was on your crew, bet it’s a blast. (I’m a hard worker, I’d give it my all. And I’m clean. Go on, make me an offer.)

Please make another “Jackie Brown”. The world needs it.

Your pal,

J.

Off to Onboarding

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Today I travel to Fairfax, Virginia to check in and prepare for tomorrow’s intake ceremonies at IBM. Thus commences a new chapter in my professional life. The Onboardiad is scheduled to last a week.

I’m struck by this composite word, which has been wrangled into acting like a verb, much like planing and deplaning, which I shall shortly do. “What did you do last week?” “I onboarded at IBM.” “Ah, nice.” I’m not sure I can imagine a younger person approaching me and saying, “Sweet, dude, you onboarded. Way to go.” There’s just not enough skater or punk in the term for my money. But I’ve heard several adults use it with a straight face recently, so I’m gonna let it go by. Best to start off life as a team player.

Don’t think though that I’m not taking this event seriously, all jibes at corporate jargon aside. I am eager to consume the content that awaits me. All the prep literature hints at a week of getting dipped by the heel in the river of corporate culture and values, and I’m hoping to somehow emerge with a smidgen of invulnerability, or at least more than a shred of confidence that I can do this gig well. All my recent bench time has been getting to me lately.

Last night I haunted Jamaica Plain after watching the Red Sox clinch their playoff berth. Aside: will the Sox ever learn to pull their pitcher before it’s too late? Daisuke went in to the seventh with 98 pitches under his belt and proceeded to put two men on, which resulted in our losing the lead, albeit temporarily. But I personally never put much stock in counting on twin home runs in the top of the ninth, especially with the Yanks so close in the rear-view mirror. Anyway, Jamaica Plain. It was balmy and kind of misty, and parties spilled out onto the sidewalks, and noise from the pubs floated in the air. I sought the Pond and took a lap around it, talking myself into relaxing and going with it, this new job. Once I get the rhythm of it down, I’ll understand where the music fits in. I guess I’m just scared that if this gig is too all-consuming or demanding, I’ll have no time to do any serious playing.

Joe Zawinul

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I heard the news from Robin Young on “Here and Now”, of all things: Joe’s taken a cab, too.

I was in the legion – and it seemed like a legion for a while – of kids who spent hour after hour shedding pentatonic scales and trying to figure out which pentatonic riffs worked over which chord change to make it sound more “out”, all thanks to Joe Zawinul. The quirky little sounds that he would coax from his 2600s are embedded in my musical DNA, and to this day, whether on guitar or mandolin or even the nowadays rare piano solo, I find myself catching a whiff of a Zawinul riff in what’s spilling from my fingers. Automatically. With no help from me.

Jammed up in that musical DNA is also the star-studded litany of fusion artists from the days before fusion became muzak: John McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Miles Davis, Jaco Pastorius, Stanley Clarke, Chick Corea…. in other words, all the artists I dug through the cutout and used bins searching for. Joe has a special place in there. I played the grooves out of a 3-dolla copy of “Tale Spinning”.

Joe drove me crazy. He had this, kind of, Alpine thing going on that I understood, based on a brief year in my youth in Switzerland. His lines made sense to me and resonated with the little mountain goat I still carry around inside. On the other hand, I grew tired of his compositions. “Birdland” struck me as bombastic and smug from the first time I heard it – and boy did I have to listen to it a lot in those days. It was on everybody’s turntable and even got pretty heavy radio play on the underground FM jazz shows. I remember years after hearing a smarmy arrangement of it in an elevator on the way to the doctor and just shaking my head. But one of my favorite mood pieces is “Boogie Woogie Waltz” – that was my signature cut in the days that I was a fusion DJ in the 70s.

I read once in Keyboard magazine that Joe had a special Yamaha upright that he had modified to add resistance to the keys, making it harder to depress them. I always figured him to the the Arnold Schwarzenegger of the keyboard, and I pitied his OBX with its delicate little keys.

I broke up with Weather Report before they broke up with themselves. Fusion was in decline, I was listening to Talking Heads and Adrian Belew and Elvis Costello and Iggy Pop and the Police and I was trying to recapture the rock thing in me. It was becoming obvious to me at the time that I just didn’t have the chops to be a real jazzer.

I found that I was a rocker who, without warning, would bust out with some Zawinul-sounding licks.

See ya, Joe. By and by.

Rotary Club CD on its way

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Today, I’m shipping artwork to Tom Devaney for the CD cover for his new release “Vis-a-vis”. It’s been a lot of work, but it looks like we’re done with it. Stay tuned for more details about the Rotary Club World Tour Of Two Cities – we’re playing NYC and Boston on November 2 and 3, respectively.

It felt good to do a print production job once again. It was a blast from the past – including all the typos, omissions, corrections, design changes, etc. Just like the good old days…

Jukebox in the sky

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The Washington Post informs us that Wal-Mart is undercutting iTunes in the marketplace by engaging in a price war over non-copy-restricted mp3s.

I can’t help but shake my head and feel the coming rain in my bones. You see, I’m old enough to remember the sensation of flipping through 12″ vinyl records every weekend when I had accumulated enough allowance or chore money to go on a spender. Albums were it – sure, there were cassettes and eight-tracks, but albums are what sounded the best, providing they weren’t covered in dust or scratches. I had friends with expensive, complicated record cleaning systems and expensive, very sensitive turntables. They would perform a strange, assiduous little ceremony every time they’d throw something on. It was funny to see how the ritual deteriorated as the evening wore on and we got weighed down with beer and talk and stuff. I tended towards the cheap-and-loud systems, myself.

In case you didn’t get the memo, iPods and their ilk are out. They will be as obsolete as the buggy whip and the cassette Walkman by 2010. Everything will converge on the cell phone, as competitors rush to market with their version of the iPhone. Enjoy them pods while you can, before their batteries die.

Is there any good news in all of this? Maybe. Apparently, sound quality will improve. That’s a plus for the listener. But how about for the independent artist? What’s the future model for fame, success and in-store appearances? Will you be seeing Nickelback at a Wal-Mart near you sometime soon?

Aptitude tests and headhunters

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I have good news. I’m waiting for an offer to be extended from a rather large company. I don’t want to jinx it, so I can’t say whom. But all the signs are good.

As part of the application process, I was asked to take an aptitude test. The questions were about things like number sequences, math word problems, and matrix pattern recognition. The test is designed in such a way
that it’s pretty hard to finish it before the timer runs out. I think the idea is to get some kind of metric that describes how well you can reason logically under pressure.

That’s not the only test I took yesterday. Here’s the setup.

Consider a fictional company – we’ll call it StreamSmart. Exciting new start-up, loads of VC, hiring like mad, groovy offices someplace downtown. So, way back when I first started out on my jobless journey, I got a call from a recruiter – let’s call them Hungadunga. After a few hard sell phone calls from one of their reps, I agree to go down to Hungadunga’s posh offices for an interview.

You forgot a Hungadunga!The interview takes place between me and the rep. Let’s call him Kenny. He’s a nice guy, much younger than I am, and I can tell he likes to hit the clubs at night. He probably golfs on his weekends, has a few beers, takes it nice and easy. He takes me through my resume, makes plenty of thoughtful notations in the margins, explains to me how Hungadunga is well placed directly with Hiring Managers in many Really Important Companies, and promises to get my resume over to StreamSmart right away.

My resume is not a great fit for StreamSmart, and I know it. They’re really looking for someone in their late 20s to early 30s who’s a total Flash head, not a senior dude with management experience trying to dial down into an individual contributor role. But I figure, what the hell, this is the price of admission to Hungadunga’s pool of Really Important Companies.

So, imagine how underwhelmed I am when Kenny from Hungadunga calls me and tells me that there’s no interest over at StreamSmart. OK, I say, what else have you got for me? Nothing at the moment, chirps Kenny, but we’ll keep you posted. Your resume is at the top of my pile.

As the weeks go by, I get approached by a horde of headhunters using the same tack. I’ve got the job for you, come out and interview with us, send us the updated resume, bla bla bla. One recruiter told me that it was her company’s policy that they couldn’t work with anyone they hadn’t met face-to-face. I suppose that I could have just refused on the spot to continue, but she was a nice kid, so I took the morning and drove to Burlington to meet her. It turns out that the more I learned about the position, the less I wanted it. Guess they didn’t want me either. She calls me on occasion to “check in”, but she’s got nothing for me. Nice kid.

Meanwhile, I’ve gotten in to a few conversations through direct contact with a couple of actual HR managers at different companies, and these conversations are actually going someplace. I’m totally in the clear in these dialogues, not a whiff of a technical recruiter in the wind. I’m getting in the door for interviews. Stuff is happening.

Conversations with recruiting firms get me nowhere. Conversations with companies that are hiring get me somewhere.

Slowly, a trend develops. I start getting calls from recruiting firms that I haven’t heard of yet, but the jobs they are pitching to me sound very familiar. Note that recruiters are very guarded up front about telling you which job they’re shilling for. After all, if Kenny from Hungadunga told me at first about StreamSmart without getting me to agree to have him represent me, I could just go straight to StreamSmart and apply for the job – cutting out Kenny and his fat commission. But since Kenny has already put my resume in at StreamSmart, it’s a bad idea for me to pester StreamSmart directly. Even if I succeeded in persuading StreamSmart to hire me – with no help from Hungadunga – StreamSmart would still have to pay a finder’s fee to Hungadunga. And the fees are steep.

Here’s the real deal: if you get in the door through a recruiter, you are less attractive a hire than someone who sails in under their own power. Think of it from the hiring manager’s point of view: if Candidate A, represented by Hungadunga costs an extra 40K to hire than Candidate B who just walked herself in the front door, and both candidates are equally as good, which one would you choose?

Think twice about who you agree to have represent you, and how many representatives you have out there “working for you”. It’s like real estate – they’re not really working for you. They’re working for themselves.

Which leads me to the other test I took yesterday.

Craig from Cubitron Staffing (the names have been changed to protect the innocent) contacts me about an exciting position with a start up firm doing great work with video and Flash. Am I interested? You bet. Does Craig tell me more about the company? Not enough to trigger any red flags. Craig tells me, the client has set up an online test, to screen for knowledge and aptitude. Am I willing to take it? Sure, I say, thinking that worst-case-scenario is that I’ll learn how well I stack up against the client’s expectations. That kind of information might come in handy. Somehow. Not sure how. But I’m still game.

So I log in to the test site, and I have an hour to complete 42 questions about Flash MX 2004. I buzz through it in 16 minutes, knowing that I got a few wrong, but I played fair and didn’t look stuff up in the reference books. I send Craig an email telling him I’m done, and asking him how well I did. He and I are on for a face-to-face next Monday by the way, the usual take-me-through-my-resume meeting, I’m sure.

Craig calls me, tells me I got 71% correct, which puts me in the 80th percentile, which is OK enough to send me over to StreamSmart. Hm. Okay, waitaminnit. I tell Craig that Hungadunga has already introduced my resume over at StreamSmart. All of a sudden, Craig is no longer my good buddy. He cancels the Monday meeting. He gives me the usual weak promise that if he sees something that’s a good fit for me, he’ll call me right away. He’s obviously pissed.

I come away knowing that after five years of doing something completely different, I still know enough about Flash to put me in the 80th percentile on his little test in 16 minutes without cheating. So maybe it wasn’t a total waste of time….