6/24/2004
BUSTED.
The redoubtable Bryan (springing off of this from Signifying Nothing) says I’m getting a little too predictable and nasty:
There have been times when I’ve swung too far in the critical direction. I think Mark Hasty is there these days. But I generally leave well enough alone. I’m not dependent on the pop charts, but I’m not totally dismissive, either. (well, except for some acts that deserve scorn like the backstreet boys and their ilk)
I’m guilty, I’m sure, but I like what I like and I don’t like what I don’t like. I’ve played in bar bands for years, and after a few hundred times through “Bad To The Bone” and “Friends In Low Places,” I think I’ve earned the right to be picky.
For the record (heh), I don’t think a song/artist is bad because it’s popular. There’s plenty of mainstream artists I like and respect–Aerosmith, John Mayer, Hootie and the Blowfish, Fleetwood Mac, Sugar Ray, etc., etc. I’ve said kind things about ABBA, Barry Manilow, and even the Backstreet Boys. And, while I am a Mike Nesmith fan, I think the tsunami of praise being offered up to The Monkees is silly. With only a few exceptions, their songs were product, and everybody else does those songs better than they do.
The point of being critical about music, especially if you’re an amateur, is not to be “indier than thou.” For cryin’ out loud, I’m a 30-something pastor in the Midwest; everybody is hipper than me. But what am I doing if I tell you that a lot of people will probably buy the new Avril Lavigne album because it’s pleasant to listen to? Or that Elton John still has all the qualities which have appealed to rock fans since the early 70s? I’m not doing anything other than confirming the public’s judgement. And what’s critical about that?
Does Roger Ebert talk about whether the explosions in an action movie are cool? Do book critics nitpick the details in Tom Clancy’s books? Would any architecture critic mention the bathrooms in a new office building? Do art critics ever speak ill of any painter’s technique? No, no, not often, and no. Ebert’s reviews aren’t for people who just want to sit in a dark room and watch things blow up. You don’t need a review for that; all you need is to see the trailer. Most book critics wouldn’t know the difference between an Apache helicopter and a mohawk haircut–is anybody NOT going to read a Tom Clancy novel just because the New York Times didn’t like it? Architecture critics don’t sweat the functional details since they don’t live or work in the buildings they criticize, and art critics seem not to care how an artist creates so long as the end product is controversial.
Well, it’s the same deal with music critics. I don’t know why people buy Blink 182 albums; they just do. My point in nitpicking popular music is not to convince you that your taste is bad and mine is excellent. Because, frankly, my taste is middlebrow at best. Blink bores me, but the Velvet Underground and Roxy Music (to name two bands that critics think can do no wrong) bore me more. The only reason I praise the obscurists and run down the popular artists is because I know what it’s like to think there are no alternatives to what the top-forty stations are playing.
When I give an opinion, the only opinion I can give you is my own. It’s biased; it’s horribly biased. But what can I tell you beyond “it’s got a great beat, you can dance to it, I’ll give it an 85″?
Lots. I can tell you what worked for me and what didn’t. I can tell you what influences I hear in the music. I can tell you when somebody’s pouring out their guts, and when they’re fulfilling the A&R guy’s request. Do I suffer under the delusion that all this stuff is endlessly interesting to you readers? Of course not. There are tens of thousands of blogs out there; this is one of them, and if you come here, you’re occasionally going to hear that Britney Spears is not a very good singer, because that’s what I think.
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I for one have always enjoyed your reviews, whether it’s of music or football or whatever else. Part of it is that you provide a different perspective - but part is also that you’re a good writer, which I think is far more important.
Comment by Dave — 6/25/2004 @ 1:43 am
I agree with Dave — I think you’re the writer James Lileks wants to be (and wishes he could be.)
I’ll post my novella on pop music shortly, but I think you’re right on. I don’t think it’s a question of hipness, really. I noticed that once I turned 30 I started to hate pop music. It didn’t speak to me anymore. My omnivore musical tastes changed to where I knew what I liked and damn any hipster in the cafeteria line who looked at the Jello on my tray and shook their head in a “you’re too old for Dashboard Confessional Salad” way.
Comment by dw — 6/25/2004 @ 12:38 pm
Oh, and I do like the new color scheme, though the stylesheet still makes Internet Explorer unhappy.
Comment by Dave — 6/25/2004 @ 12:41 pm
(A couple of caveats - I don’t actually use IE, and most MT blogs out there break IE, so it’s probably not a big deal.)
Comment by Dave — 6/25/2004 @ 12:43 pm
Thanks for all the kind words. I appreciate them, and I also appreciate what Bryan wrote.
As for the stylesheet issue, Dave, I create and view this blog with IE 6.0.2800, and it’s always worked just fine for me.
Comment by Mark Hasty — 6/25/2004 @ 2:24 pm
If you make the browser window slightly narrower than usual, the entire right sidebar jumps down below the blog. There was some really weird stuff before, but I think fixing the div around the Wiscoblogs section fixed it.
I’m actually really surprised about the markup that MT generates. Why, for example, does the main blog use normal text elements (h1, h2, h3, p, etc.) but the sidebar and comments use all div’s? Why does the main text float - especially when IE has serious trouble with floating elements? Why does it use CSS heavily in some places, but put formatting info in the tags in others?
Strange.
Comment by Dave — 6/25/2004 @ 2:52 pm
BUSTED.
Sometimes I find that it only takes a little prodding to get the creative juices to flow, as excerpted below: The redoubtable Bryan (springing off of this from Signifying Nothing) says I’m getting a little too predictable and nasty ……
Trackback by Arguing with signposts... — 6/25/2004 @ 2:58 pm
Part of the reason that the MT template design is messy is because of the nature of how it gets published. It annoyed me that each post is enclosed in its own div, until I realized that by wrapping them in a block level element each posting is a piece unto itself.
The new templates for MT3 are a lot cleaner, and they fixed the “hidden text” problem Hasty’s blog has when you view individual entry pages. I think that’s fixed if you add “position: absolute;” to the CSS for .blog, but I’m very forgetful lately and may be completely off. Dave knows what I’m talking about and can correct me.
Comment by dw — 6/25/2004 @ 4:35 pm
Re: the MT layout having each post enclosed within its own div - it’s really a matter of taste, since each post would be a self-contained unit even without a wrapper element. I personally prefer not to do it that way, since (a) it clutters the markup, and (b) it adds another unnecessary place to add style info. What’s odd about MT is that the sidebars aren’t consistent with that - unlike the body, where the text elements of each post are wrapped in one big div, the sidebar has no text elements, and each heading and each body are separate divs. That makes very little sense to me.
There are actually three issues with IE. One is the “peek-a-boo” bug, or hidden text bug, that happens when there are floating elements followed by an element that clears right, left, or both. The bug causes the floating elements to disappear or to be rendered incorrectly, blocking out other content. The way to fix this bug is to (a) use as few floating elements as possible, (b) give each of the floating elements and clearing elements the style “position: relative” - note that this is not always possible - and (c) try to clear with non-graphical elements like the br tag (that is, instead of having a paragraph that clears, clear with a br with the appropriate styles set, and then add your paragraph).
It’s much easier to demonstrate the IE bug workarounds than it is to explain them. If you want, I’ll get you some pages I’ve been working on that fix the problem without cluttering the markup too badly.
The second IE bug is that the browser doesn’t calculate window width percentages correctly. You’ll notice that if you browse the page using Mozilla, Firebird, or Opera, the colums resize gracefully. If you use IE, the colums resize at large browser widths, but if you bring the width in, the boundary between the colums stops moving (but the right margin of the text in the left column continues to shrink).
The third bug, which is related, is that IE handles overflow badly. When you shrink the window too much, the calendar disappears (actually, moves below the blog) - even though the right margin of the blog text continues to shrink! The reason is that the blog and sidebar are floating elements, and IE can’t handle overflow (in this case, the width of the calendar becoming larger than the sidebar) gracefully. Instead, one floating element displaces the other, but only partially, so the margins break.
There are two solutions: make the position of one or both of the columns “absolute”, and set the margins and/or widths to achieve the desired effect; or put the sidebar first in the markup, float it right as a block with a fixed width, and let the body text wrap around it. Since I didn’t want to change the markup at all, I used the first solution in re-writing your CSS (see here, and the stylesheet code here).
Oh, and it would be nice if you could change your link color for comments so that you can tell it apart from the text better (or you could just add underline).
Comment by Dave — 6/25/2004 @ 7:23 pm
Okay, I’ve incorporated as much of your stuff as I could understand, Dave (and the fact that I didn’t grasp more of it is my fault, not yours), and I think I’ve solved it, sort of. You can now narrow the window as much as you want without sending the sidebar under the text. In fact, you can narrow it so much the sidebar covers the text, but only at extreme narrowness. And since even my mom’s got an 800×600 resolution on her monitor, I don’t think that’s really an issue.
I added underlines to all the links. This looks a little sloppy in some places, but it solves the readability issue with the calendar.
Comment by Mark Hasty — 6/25/2004 @ 8:13 pm
Looks nice, Mark!
May I make a suggestion? Since your blog body is positioned absolutely, instead of specifying the width as a percentage, you can instead specify the right margin to be slightly more than the width of the sidebar. That will make sure the right side of the blog text is always flush to the sidebar. Again, if you have any questions, just email me or post here, and I’ll get back to you.
Comment by Dave — 6/26/2004 @ 1:52 am
OK, Dave, give me some code that will do what you’re suggesting. Thanks.
Comment by Mark Hasty — 6/26/2004 @ 9:13 am
This should work with your current CSS layout. Substitute the following code for the #content style:
#content {
position:absolute;
background:#CCCCCC;
padding-right:265px;
margin-right:20px;
}
This works very well on both Firefox and IE.
Comment by Dave — 6/26/2004 @ 11:21 am
Much better. Thanks!
Comment by Mark Hasty — 6/26/2004 @ 11:32 am
Hasty jabbing
Let’s say you knew someone who was a good enough drummer to play in bands for numerous years. He grew up along with a burgeoning music scene in Minneapolis, Minn. Not only can he recite lyrics from Poi Dog Pondering,…
Trackback by Arguing with signposts... — 6/26/2004 @ 8:13 pm
Dave discusses three IE bugs without discussing the main IE bug, that being IE itself.
Comment by Bryan — 6/26/2004 @ 8:17 pm
The problem with IE is they need to come out with another version that has the features that other browsers have - namely, popup-blocking, tabbed browsing, cookie control, etc.
Comment by Dave — 6/26/2004 @ 9:00 pm
As an afterthought, I wonder if MS hasn’t just given up on IE.
They already have a near-monopoly, just because Windows machines come with IE. They’re never going to get the Mac users. They’re never going to get the people who know enough to use Opera or Firefox/Mozilla now. The bugs aren’t so bad that Web developers can’t get around them (and even if a new version came out, pages would still have to be back-compatible). And, there are enough tools out there now to block popups and tracking cookies that they don’t really need to spend time building in extra security.
It’s really not worth it to them. What’s unfortunate is that computers don’t come with one of the other browsers installed too, so the average user would know there was an alternative. On the other hand, if everybody could block banners and popups, the advertisers would have to get even sneakier, so maybe it’s better the way it is (for me at least - heh).
Comment by Dave — 6/26/2004 @ 9:11 pm
OK, maybe I’m crazy, but I have a problem with banner-blockers. I can understand popup blockers; in fact, I use them. But isn’t seeing some advertising just part of the price we pay for all this basically-free internet content? I wouldn’t expect to watch a whole evening of TV without seeing any commercials, for example.
Some sites take it too far, of course, but still, don’t we have some minor obligation to allow the people paying for the bandwidth to send us a little message?
Comment by Mark Hasty — 6/26/2004 @ 9:46 pm
Depends. I never block banner ads on blogs or Web comics I read. On the other hand, a lot of banners set tracking cookies, which I feel is a violation of my privacy. I also dislike ads that are a visual nuisance, move in front of the text, or - the worst - make noise.
Bandwidth is also an issue. A majority of what a regular Web surfer downloads is ads, especially of the static images on the page are cached. Since I use the Internet for other things, like streaming audio, and since I have somewhat limited bandwidth, it doesn’t make sense to let them bump up my usage 900%.
Largely, though, I block ads on pages like CNN and ESPN where I am already watching their advertising on television, and I don’t want to wade through the crap online.
It’s also important to put things in perspective. If I were to use a PDA or a text-based browser (or just not download Flash Player) I wouldn’t see 95% of the really annoying banner ads that I block. Instead of not installing Flash and Shockwave, I could just tell my browser not to display images - most of what I do online doesn’t require them.
Web advertisers know that nobody is being forced to download their ads. It’s kind of like going to the bathroom or making yourself a snack during commercials in a TV program. Think of AdBlock as TiVo for your Web browser.
Comment by Dave — 6/27/2004 @ 2:19 am
As an aside, the streaming audio I usually listen to is a radio broadcast, complete with the usual commercials. So I probably download more in commercial content per day than most people.
Comment by Dave — 6/27/2004 @ 2:20 am
The aging of my musical tastes
Yet another quote from the Good Rev:The point of being critical about music, especially if you’re an amateur, is not to be “indier than thou.” For cryin’ out loud, I’m a 30-something pastor in the Midwest; everybody is hipper than…
Trackback by Client and Server — 6/28/2004 @ 8:48 pm