Another Week: Number 111

My first apartment was a unit in Camelot Apartments on Kenosha’s north edge back when I was an aspiring Kirby vacuum cleaner salesman.

I had a sleeping bag and little else. When the guy from Wisconsin Bell came by with my telephone, he told me that living alone can make you a little nutty — and he demonstrated how he sometimes gave acceptance speeches into the kitchen sink faucet.

I am used to the TV and the radio talking to me; they have done that since I was a kid. After I gave up on vacuum sales and moved back to my mom’s basement, the guys on the radio became my friends — and eventually provided me with health insurance and flew me and my wife to Mexico and Hawaii. At one point, the actor John Malkovich was on the red carpet before the Oscars mentioning that he regularly listened to me.

Now I’m living alone again and watching the Grammy Awards by myself. Celebrities are talking about manifesting this and manifesting that — but that’s easy to say when you’re standing on the red carpet, isn’t it?

I have always sensed some canny counterpart handing me books I ought to read — but what spoke to me on Wednesday morning was my steam iron, and it was spot on. (If I explained this, you’d think I was bananas.)

On the other hand, my smartphone was way off. I got a notification from Apple on my iPhone telling me that it’s almost Valentine’s Day and I should buy something for my special someone. If Apple was paying attention, it might have noticed that Amy hasn’t used her iPhone or her Apple Watch in over a year.

Google News is one of the most aggravating apps that’s ever existed — but this week it did turn up several articles that spoke directly to me, right in my bed.

One was by the staff of Ars Technica documenting the ongoing enshittification of the internet. Granted, it’s only few examples.

Another concerned a Salesforce commercial for their “Agentforce” AI service. This ad, starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, has plagued my TV for weeks, stirring all sorts of incredulity and sarcasm that, lacking a corroborator, I have never verbalized.

So imagine my glee as I read “Salesforce Is Using A Hallucination To Sell AI,” a Defector piece in which Alan Kluegel savages the silly-ass spot better than I ever could have on a gallon of coffee.

To think that someone else is throwing similar darts at his screen gives me the strength to carry on.

Nevertheless, I walked zero miles this week.

Clapping on the one and the three

Another item I read this week was on the Musicradar website, covering Billie Eilish’s interview of Ariana Grande and the notion of adding hip-hop drums to the song “Perfect” in the movie version of Wicked.

Grande objected, and she used a musical analogy to describe her character’s disposition:

It’s just, there’s a time and a place and it’s not with Glinda, because she claps on one and three — and that’s OK — but we do have to be in character, and she doesn’t have that kind of rhythm.

This reminded me that Jason Isbell’s song “Last of My Kind” laments “Everybody clappin’ on the one and three.”

Of course, popular music generally has four beats to a measure, and clapping on the second and fourth beats — the backbeat — is commonly preferred as the hip and soulful way to keep time.

There’s a famous clip of Harry Connick Jr. suffering through an audience clapping on the one and the three — until he ingeniously throws in an extra beat to trick them onto the right track.

But actually, as Ariana Grande suggested, clapping one way or the other is not necessarily “right” or “wrong” — it just establishes a certain vibe that may or may not be in keeping with the feeling the musicians want to evoke.

This led me to an outstanding tutorial by Aimee Nolte which goes into the deeper and subtler aspects of this debate — including the example of Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets” as groovy 1 & 3 clapping.

And I will add that, although clapping on the one and three is often associated with unhip white people, “Bennie and the Jets” was a big hit on R&B radio and got Elton John onto Soul Train.