Book Review: Chaos Monkeys: Inside the Silicon Valley Money Machine (2016). Antonio Garcia Martinez.

Chaos Monkeys is a gossipy but amusing personal account of life in the fast lane of post-2008 crash Wall Street investment firms, Silicon Valley startups, and Facebook, by a young man who experienced it, and was there in the middle of it as it was all taking off. It's cynical, funny and outrageous, with very good insight and commentary on how things really work in the high-stakes worlds of big money and venture capital.

It also contains the clearest descriptions that I have ever read of how online real-time advertising markets work in the virtual world of Facebook, Google, Twitter and others. These mechanisms and algorithms, which daily supply all those eerily relevant and timely ads on your smartphone, as you're browsing some seemingly unrelated app, are technologically impressive, at the same time they are truly disturbing and annoying on the level of the invasions of our personal privacy which are required to make them work.

Martinez's descriptions of how these uncanny and often creepy systems and markets were developed, and how they function, is crucial reading for anyone who wants to understand the strange social media and internet world all around us, which most of us now take for granted (although it shocked me today to recall that the iPhone and its ubiquitous smartphone descendants have only been around for about 15 years). Recommended.

Editorial: On Current Events, and Today's Abortion Rights Decision.

Hello, dear readers. Here on The Memory Cache blog, it’s once again Rock and Roll Friday, the fourth Friday of each month, where I try to post several reviews of books I’ve read and shows I’ve seen that relate to popular music and the music industry. In keeping with this tradition, I have posted a book review of Dave Grohl’s book The Storyteller, and the fascinating documentary interviews of Paul McCartney called McCartney 3,2,1. After all, the show must go on, and we need to keep trying to find joy in our lives, and things to celebrate and enjoy.

But it’s hard to feel celebratory in the wake of this morning’s expected but disastrous Supreme Court decision reversing Roe vs. Wade, and striking down abortion rights for women across much of this country. There is particularly ominous language in Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion, which states clearly that today’s decision, and its underlying legal theory, are laying the basis to roll back many other personal rights of privacy, and human rights, that we have enjoyed and come to depend upon for the past half century. Same sex marriage? Contraception? Interracial marriage? All of these rights and others we take for granted now hang by a thread.

At the same time, we have so many other deeply concerning issues confronting us. Of course, there is the lingering trauma and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic which has caused such havoc to our lives and the world for the past two+ years. There is the ongoing struggle over reasonable gun control measures, and the shock of the constant string of mass casualty shootings, and daily gun fatalities in neighborhoods across the country. There are the hearings in Congress that are revealing the full extent of the attempts to overthrow our democratic system of government in 2020 that led to the January 6th uprisings. There is the danger that these subversive strategies are ongoing, and are now aimed at completing successfully this fall, and in the 2024 election, the insurrection that failed the last time. There is the dangerous and destructive war in Ukraine. And then there is the inflationary moment in the economy, which hits many of us so deeply in our personal finances, and our everyday standard of living.

Behind all of these unending issues and worries sits the most catastrophic looming crisis of all: the climate change which is rapidly destabilizing the planetary environment upon which we all depend for our survival and prosperity. I fear the urgency of trying to solve this confoundingly difficult global problem is increasingly being lost in the noise about all the other more immediate and localized crises that hit the headlines every day.

I believe most of us are trying in some way to figure out what we can do to help. I wonder that too. I know voting for responsible people, and doing what we can to support good people in public service who are trying to fix things and make them better, can go some ways. Standing up to authoritarians who would undermine our democratic system is going to become increasingly necessary and urgent in the days ahead. We will all need to get more involved to save ourselves and the world we want to live in.

For myself, I intend to keep using this blog to bring useful information to your attention. Of course, some of it will be just for fun, and to help keep us sane, but as much as possible, I will be highlighting books and shows that call out problems, identify solutions, explain what’s going on, and fight injustice. I hope you’ll continue to come by the site, and see what’s new, and perhaps it can help you be informed and provide tools for understanding your own situation as it develops, and doing what you can to respond constructively to events as they unfold.

Best wishes to you and yours, and try to stay positive. It looks like a bumpy road up ahead.

TV Review: McCartney 3,2,1 (Season 1, 2021). Hulu.

I recently had the opportunity to watch a marvelously understated little documentary mini-series on Hulu called McCartney 3,2,1. The “McCartney” in the title refers to Sir Paul McCartney, one of the two surviving Beatles, Wings bandleader, genius songwriter (with and without John Lennon) and legendary solo artist throughout the past fifty years of rock music history.

The documentary itself is incredibly spare in action, setting and appearance. It was shot in black and white, mostly in a simple music studio with a mixing board and not much else, and features nothing more than two people talking for the entire six sessions of the mini-series. One of them is McCartney, as he is now, the elder statesman and extraordinary maestro of the rock and roll music world that he and his band-mates in the Beatles played such a profound role in creating.

The other person is the interviewer, Rick Rubin. Many readers may never have heard of him, but for popular music historians and enthusiasts (present company included), he is also a legendary figure, for Rubin has produced best-selling records for and by many of the top stars of rock, country and hip-hop. He is a brilliant sound engineer, with a deep appreciation for the artists, studios, recording history, sonic qualities and music trends which have shaped popular music over the past 50 years, many times with his hands at the controls of the mixing boards during the recording sessions.

Rubin is the perfect interviewer to ask McCartney fascinating and in-depth questions about how some of the greatest Beatles’ songs and albums were created. He has a warmth and sense of humor which draws McCartney out, leading to fascinating personal anecdotes, and so many surprising stories about how iconic sounds in different Beatle songs came into being.

The two of them are also aided in this exploratory process by the fact that Rubin has some of the Beatle's multi-track song recordings loaded into the mixing board, so he can actually play and separate out the sounds in particular song mixes, and then talk with McCartney about how and why things were done as they were.

There are also plenty of personal reminiscences from McCartney about the Beatles’ experiences and influences at different stages of their years together, and their relationships within the band, especially his close personal and creative connection with John Lennon.

This may not be fascinating to people who aren’t Beatles fans, and particularly not if they also don’t know or care anything about the creative process by which original music is made. But for anyone who loves the Beatles and their music, and wonders how on earth they were able to write and record so many different kinds of timeless songs in a few short years, this is all very revealing, and it's an amusing, animated conversation between two old pros that we are privileged to see and hear. Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Storyteller (2021). Dave Grohl.

For those who don’t know who Dave Grohl is, he might say facetiously that he “was that other guy in Nirvana”, that is, the power drummer behind the drum set, who provided the pounding beat while Kurt Cobain was out front, playing guitar and singing the generation-defining Nirvana songs he had written, for those few short years until Cobain took his own life at the peak of the 1990s Seattle-based Grunge rock era.

As the band-mate and close friend to a tragically and prematurely deceased rock superstar, Grohl could easily have self-destructed, retired and vanished from the music scene, or chosen to switch to a different career. But he did none of those things. Instead, after a brief hiatus, he re-created himself as a guitar player, lead singer, songwriter, front man and bandleader for another top rock act of the 2000s era which he founded, The Foo Fighters.

Along the way, he did quite a few other interesting things too. He has produced several music-related documentary movies and TV shows, including a fascinating movie he made for Netflix, Sound City (2013), about a legendary old Los Angeles music studio, the stars who had recorded there, and the marvelous obsolete analog mixing board he ultimately rescued for his own home studio; a TV mini-series, Sonic Highways (2014) documenting a 20th anniversary recording tour for the Foo Fighters, during which they recorded at eight famous studios across the country; and a mock horror movie with the band, Studio 666 (2022).

He has also had various collaborations with other famous musicians, including a memorable performance on Saturday Night Live playing drums with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, which led to an offer from Petty to join the band, but which he ultimately declined in order to pursue his plans for the Foo Fighters band he had just started.

In The Storyteller, Grohl doesn’t write a straight narration of every twist and turn along his path, or provide a precise chronological account of his career and life. Instead, he tells stories: anecdotes of different things he experienced, and things that happened to him that impacted him personally, emotionally and professionally. It’s occasionally a little confusing, because he sometimes jumps back and forth in time, but ultimately it allows him to connect the dots, and paint a convincing picture of himself as a man and an artist.

This is a worthwhile and self-reflective autobiographical sketch by one of the leading and most popular men of the contemporary rock music world, who survived a devastating personal and professional loss early in his career, along with outsized fame and celebrity at an early age, only to start over and succeed again on his own terms. Recommended.

Book Review: Becoming Bulletproof (2020). Evy Poumpouras.

A former female Secret Service agent combines stories from her career, protecting the lives of several presidents and their families, with insights on how many aspects of her training as an elite security agent can help individuals to be safer and more secure in their daily lives.

The author is particularly revelatory in her discussions of interrogation techniques, and how to tell if someone is lying. She is a believer in "soft" methods that try to build an empathetic connection between interviewer and subject, and describes the sometimes counter-intuitive approaches she would take in order to elicit confessions, and to know when the subject was lying or telling the truth.  She also suggests these techniques and insights can be used by others, to be able to avoid being deceived and victimized by others in the course of their everyday lives.

I've read several of these kinds of "how to be more secure" books. It is intriguing to learn the ways of thinking and the psychological techniques used by law enforcement and intelligence experts, which certainly could translate into normal work and life situations. But I also think that most of us don't have all that many opportunities to practice and learn these sorts of skills, and to develop the level of awareness of others and of our physical environment that a top professional like Poumpouras does in the course of a law enforcement career.

Still, it was an enlightening read, and I also enjoyed her perspective on various presidents and some of their family members from her close interactions with them on their protective details. Recommended.

TV Review: The Restaurant (from Sweden, Seasons 1-3). Sundance.

This series is the story of a multi-generational family and their employees and friends, beginning at the end of World War II and moving forward into the early 1970s, who work together and fight with each other in and about the family's fancy prestigious restaurant in Stockholm.

The Restaurant has sometimes been compared to Downton Abbey, for its themes of class conflict within personal relationships, intrigue and competition within families and friendships, and love and betrayal.

It’s pretty good entertainment, although some of the family members display really contemptible behavior toward each other (I guess that's what makes it good drama). With sub-titles (from the original Swedish). Recommended.

Book Review: A Gentleman in Moscow (2016). Amor Towles.

This is the beautifully written story of an elegant Russian gentleman and nobleman of the old order, Count Alexander Rostov, who becomes a "former person" when he is sentenced by the young Soviet regime in the 1920s to live out his life confined to the Metropol Hotel in Moscow.

It’s a remarkable tale of how he copes for years under a kind of luxurious house arrest, and finds meaning and love in the human relationships he builds in his tiny slice of Russian society. At the end, there’s a surprise foray into espionage, intrigue and danger, which adds delightful spice to the story. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Killers of the Blood Red Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (2017). David Grann.

This troubling but important book is a history of the murders, plots, investigations and ultimate convictions surrounding the violent deaths of many Osage Indians in Oklahoma during the 1920s, by which a few local white men conspired to kill off tribal members in order to gain control of the victims' shares of the tribe's fabulous oil holdings and wealth.

It's a story of despicable greed, betrayal, racism, conspiracy and the rise of the FBI, for which this was one of the first big sensational cases J. Edgar Hoover used to promote his new FBI organization.

A disturbing last chapter reveals that the author, through additional research beyond the main arrests and convictions which make up the book's narrative, discovered abundant historical evidence of the involvement of a much larger number of white participants than those convicted, in murder, theft and cover-up of many more crimes against the Osage Indians, over an even longer duration than that covered by the book. Recommended.