The Fat-Headed Baby

2009-07-25T15:06:00.000-04:00

Mad Expectations

2009-07-22T20:45:00.008-04:00

I can only wonder how much aspiring actors envy Johnny Depp's career trajectory. He overcame fame and drug addiction in his youth, he dated Winona Rider only to turn around and marry a hottie french model (starring in indie fodder between presumably epic sex sessions), and now he gets to pull in the benjamins by playing ridiculous crazies in Tim Burton fetish fantasies. My expectations for Willy Wonka were high, and well..."fool me once, shame on you, fool me...you can't get fooled again."

NB: An entirely different discussion is warranted w/r/t the new push for 3D as the new industry strategy to bring in the bigger bucks. Releasing Captain Eo is the clear first step in creating upward synergies and robust revenue streams.

Observation

2009-07-16T21:00:00.004-04:00

Sometimes, white people are "cool". Othertimes, they're Thom Yorke.

2009-07-15T16:09:00.002-04:00

p. e. d. a.

2009-07-13T09:22:00.000-04:00

More Fighting

2009-07-10T10:40:00.003-04:00

ESPN genius Bill Simmons' new podcast is about UFC. I can listen to Simmons talk about anything, but I wonder and worry about UFC’s mainstream sustainability. My brother sent me an e-mail this morning including the phrase “double flying kneed.” Can we allow this to be the new “home run” or “slam dunk”?

Fighting

2009-07-09T12:01:00.005-04:00

An insect occasionally appears in my office building’s 6th floor men’s room the likes of which I haven’t seen anywhere else in the world. Imagine an armored ant-fly hybrid, superlean, with four wide-reaching spiderish legs. This bug intimidates at first sight both by its strangeness and apparent battle-readiness.

And it’s fast. To swat it, one combines the skills of a soccer goalie, who guesses which way to leap and stop a penalty kick, and a quarterback leading his pass to hit a receiver in motion. And that’s just for the jump; if this bug gets airborne, any attack is hopeless.

We have split our two epic melees. Once I expertly stopped him on the mirror. Satisfied, slowly pulling away the wad of tissue paper, I found him very much alive and in motion. Fearfully I dropped the tissue into the sink and—forgive me—opened the faucet. The bug climbed to floating tissuetop as water gathered, lifting his white island. He considered his options and—so help me—charged into the water, down to the tissue’s southern pole and down the drain. He took his chances in the rivering chaos of the drain! Then today I found one (the same?!) above the towel dispenser. I cocked the dispenser handle once, ripped, and struck. The enemy leapt onto my black jacket. Terrified, with my enemy camouflaged and close, I spun and shook (and screamed? who can remember?), inverted my pockets, hassled my sleeves. I caught sight of him on the floor and the firstlings of my heart were the firstlings of my foot; the worthy adversary lay flat.

I continue to do my bit for containment.

Up

2009-07-08T16:27:00.001-04:00

Check out Up director Peter Docter’s insights on storytelling and the image.

"Be constructive with your blues"

2009-06-08T17:25:00.007-04:00

The idea is simple: name the top 15 albums that have impacted your life. You can define this mandate however you like (e.g. albums that have influenced your sense of good music; albums that you associate with heart-felt and stoned pseudo-epiphanies; albums that still inspire you to put the proverbial headphones on the provervial head of Zach Braff). But please be honest. I am positive you can create a list of 15 albums that's incredibly esoteric and hipster, but this isn't an LES speak easy. Asshole.

Two rules:

(A) Comment with your own list. If you're embarassed, you can comment anonymously. (See (B) infra.)

(B) Don't list anything by the Eagles. I hate the fucking Eagles.

My list (stream of conscious):

(1) Neutral Milk Hotel - In An Aeroplane Over The Sea.
(2) Modest Mouse - The Moon & Antarctica

(3) The Beatles - The Beatles ("White Album")

(4) Pink Floyd - Meddle

(5) Radiohead - Kid A

(6) Beck - Sea Change

(7) Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - I See A Darkness

(8) Charles Mingus - Black Saint and Sinner Lady

(9) Elliott Smith - Either/Or

(10) Tom Waits - Rain Dogs

(11) Pavement - Terror Twilight

(12) Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

(13) DJ Shadow - Endtroducing

(14) Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers

(15) Sigur Ros - Agaetis Byrjun

Soda-Meyer

2009-05-27T13:01:00.007-04:00

Nice to see that the folks at the National Review blog, the Corner, have quickly eschewed boring substantive critiques of our new Supreme Court nominee in favor of their more finely honed habit of being enormous assholes.

Mark Krikorian (pronounced DOOSH-bag) says that since emphasizing the last syllable of Sotomayor is "unnatural" to the American palate, the good judge should stop being such a racist and put the emphasis on the first:

Part of our success in assimilation has been to leave whole areas of culture up to the individual, so that newcomers have whatever cuisine or religion or so on they want, limiting the demand for conformity to a smaller field than most other places would. But one of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that's not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch. And there are basically two options — the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there's a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.

It's a nice, succinct illustration of how the rightwing's rejection of "identity politics" is really a angry rejection of identities ("You can have your little culture, Paco, but just don't put it where I can see it").

Putting aside how grating it is to hear somebody who was born in New York in the 1940s described as a newcomer, there really isn't any single American palate for Sotomayor's name to vex--any linguist would tell you that there are hundreds of them. Hispanic-Americans, many of whose families have been here for centuries, have no problem with SotomaYOR. Neither, I'm certain, do most people in the Bronx and greater NYC, where Sotomayor and 8 million of her friends reside, nor do the millions of non-Hispanic-Americans who know Spanish, etc. Krikorian evidently thinks everyone talks like Tom Brokaw, or that the country would be better if they just would already.

His post is also a good example of how misguided you can be and still get prized conservative web real estate. Krikorian gives us two options: (1) they adapt to us or (2) we adapt to them. It's obvious, however, that for most people that idiotic binary is not how we live our lives. Learning a name is not "adaptation." It's learning. We do it all the time with new names at basically no cost to us. You only need to hear once that Ralph Fiennes is Rafe and then you move on. Justice Scalia is Scal-EE-ah and not SCAL-ia, and it probably took the world ten minutes at his confirmation hearing to figure out the syllabic shift. John Boehner shouldn't have to go through life with a hard-on stuck on the end of his John, so he doesn't. And Colin Powell gets to have an unprecedented and inexplicable pronunciation of his first name, no questions asked. This is the world we live in.

Adaptation would be asking people to roll the last R and pronounce the middle T with the soft "Th" sound preferred in Spanish. That would require Kirkorian to pick up entirely new consonants. Nobody, least of all Sonia Sotomayor, would require this of non-Spanish speakers. The good judge would surely bristle at hearing how badly people like Krikorian would butcher the r and the t (I'm speaking with a great deal of experience on this count--far worse than careless bumpkin mispronunciations of my name are those who try to roll the r and end up sounding like they're flirting with me).

Saying SotomaYOR is so incredibly easy that I get the feeling Krikorian's issue has nothing to do with pronunciation. I wonder what his real problem could be...

This Is My New Happy Place

2009-05-13T20:08:00.003-04:00

Damon sent me this link from the Amazon site. Have a look at the "also viewed."

Judge Posner on Conservatism's Decline

2009-05-12T17:10:00.006-04:00

Judge Richard Posner is one of the very few well-known contemporary conservative thinkers who I find consistent, humane and enlightening. He is not a conservative like Andrew Sullivan is a conservative (that is, one who loudly applies the appellation to himself while the entire tribe seeks to reject him); he is, in a true sense, a member of the club.

For that reason, I was impressed by this wistful post on his blog which reflects on the causes conservatism's decline:

The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.

Very well said indeed (although like Yglesias, I'm not sure abortion has been much of a liability). But his other point about the efficacy of the movement thus far is also well-taken, and I think defines the difference between reasonable conservatives and the unpalatable mission of the individuals who currently occupy the movement's vanguard (Palin, Kristol, Limbaugh, Beck, O'Reilly, Hannity, Savage, Yoo, Cheney, Glenn Reynolds, Joe the Plumber etc. etc.). While Posner's conservatism compelled him at a certain point to believe that the successes of the movement were adequate, and that further activism might constitute a slide into radicalism (a cardinal sin against conservatism if there ever was one), his movement's chief actors are incapable of such forbearance. Posner says:

By the end of the Clinton administration, I was content to celebrate the triumph of conservatism as I understood it, and had no desire for other than incremental changes in the economic and social structure of the United States. I saw no need for the estate tax to be abolished, marginal personal-income tax rates further reduced, the government shrunk, pragmatism in constitutional law jettisoned in favor of "originalism," the rights of gun owners enlarged, our military posture strengthened, the rise of homosexual rights resisted, or the role of religion in the public sphere expanded. All these became causes embraced by the new conservatism that crested with the reelection of Bush in 2004.
...
There are signs and portents of liberal excess in the policies and plans of the new administration. There will thus be plenty of targets for informed conservative critique. At this writing, however, the conservative movement is at its lowest ebb since 1964. But with this cardinal difference: the movement has so far succeeded in shifting the center of American politics and social thought that it can rest, for at least a little while, on its laurels.

But resting on laurels is anathema to political movements, which survive on momentum (unlike philosophies, which need only ideas). The four areas that he described as the causes of conservatism's decline are really just attempts to seek direction in the wake of the overriding success of the movement over the last three decades (success achieved, in my opinion, to the great detriment of the rest of us), lest the movement disappear. The advertised resurgence of conservatism in the form of raucous Palin rallies, recently restaged as tea parties, demonstrate that the more the activist segment of the movement reaches, the less likely it will be to seem a credible alternative.

Anyway, it's a good short read and well worth your time.

Patagonia, Atacama, Buenos Aires

2009-05-11T08:19:00.015-04:00

Back from a great trip to Chilean Patagonia, Santiago, the Atacama Desert and Buenos Aires and missing South America already. Will have more to say later about the trip, but I think we took some really good pictures (which gets me, a very mediocre photographer, very excited).

These first two are from el Cementerio de la Recoleta, a cemetery where Argentina's national heroes (mostly military and political, but also artists and business people) are buried. The cemetery is a couple of acres of elegant, often haunting mausoleums, arranged in a tight grid of walkways and alleys. There's this moving, almost theological contrast between the orderliness of the cemetery at eye-level and the chaos just above, created by a zigzag of statues of angels, Virgin Marys, Jesuses, gargoyles and crosses that litter the sky when you look up.

Here's a candelabra cactus from the Atacama Desert in the northern part Chile on the Bolivia border where we hiked, biked and hopped between hot springs and very salty lagoons. Atacama is the driest place on earth, which makes the survival of massive cactuses like this more impressive. They say for candelabra cactuses, every meter represents a century of life, so we're probably looking at 400-500 years of cactus right here.

The moon, overlooking its namesake, the Valle de la Luna, also in Atacama. A lot of Atacama reminded me of pictures taken by the Mars Rover.

The Grey Glacier in Chilean Patagonia (named after a person and not the color--we were amazed at how many shades of blue were refracted when the sunlight hit the ice). Grey Glacier is a finger of the Southern Ice Shelf--its fingers are the architects of the entire Patagonian landscape (their handiwork can be seen in the pictures of the Cordillera del Paine, below). For a sense of how huge this particular glacier is, it's about 40 feet from that peak on the left side of the picture to the water. The glacier is about 2.5 miles across and spans about 15 miles from front to back.

Los Torres del Paine (also known as the Towers). We hiked about 12 miles up hills and steep mountains to get to this lookout.

A horse, with the Torres range in the background. It's cool how you can see four entirely different ecosystems in the same picture. Lucky horse.

The kids stay in the picture?

2009-05-09T13:24:00.009-04:00

Francis Ford Coppola doesn't have the most consistent track record. Although his best pictures are undisputedly engrained in the cannon of serious motion picture (Apocalypse Now, the first two Godfathers, the Conversation, the Rain People), his indulgences can be painful (Cotton Club, Youth without Youth, Dracula) and his sellout pictures (Rainmaker, Jack) make McG look like a bona fide auteur. It doesn't help that FFC hasn't made anything relevant since the 80s, and even that's being generous.

So I meet his latest endeavor "Tetro" with extreme trepidation. However, the trailer exhibits some engrossing cinematography, and I'm elated that FFC has been studying Fellini in between vintner seasons. The color dream sequences, the artsy family rivalry, the exotic femme fatale: it's all dripping in European pretension that makes me exited to see what will either be a complete clusterfuck or the revival of FFC's cinematic relevance.

Please compare to another master's latest retread: Whatever Works. Woody Allen's latest seems to have that same old "neurotic academic asshole meets nymphette" conceit, but with a twist: Larry David plays Allen's proxy. Fucking deep, man. For the record, Allen has always been best when he steals from Dostoevsky rather than Nabokov.

Tetro trailer:

Woody Allen's curbed enthusiasm:

The first three minutes of "Tetro".

Books, covers

2009-04-20T16:45:00.004-04:00

Denby here convinces me to see “The Soloist,” a movie whose trailer had the opposite effect.

More Julliard string student-errantry:

I Heart NYC

2009-04-16T11:01:00.007-04:00

As Crisco notifies me, looks like New York might be next up to rend our social fabric. Maybe a good thing given that the distressed look is supposed to be totally in this season. Paterson's speech pushing for a same-sex marriage bill echoes the type of "the-country-may-hate-gays-but-we're-better-than-the-country" rhetoric that I've enjoyed so much.

Strangely, gay marriage's most vociferous opposition in NY has come not from conservative upstate politicians, but from a downstate Hispanic senator, Pentecostal minister Ruben Diaz. Diaz forced Senate Democrats to table any plans to pass gay marriage this past session by pulling a Lieberman--he refused to vote for a Democratic majority leader until the party promised him it wouldn't pursue gay marriage.

Given the situation in the Senate, I wonder if Paterson knows he has the votes, knows he doesn't have the votes and wants to get the conversation going, or is just spitballing to see what goes down. In any case, I'm glad New York is throwing its hat back into the human rights ring.

They're as dumb as hell and they're not gonna take it any more

2009-04-15T09:33:00.005-04:00

This kid is getting his tea party game face on.

If you're not aware of the spectacle of conservative "tea parties" across the country, that's probably because they're irrelevant mini-tantrums by groups of evidently semiliterate survivalists who need a daily pep talk from Glenn Beck to keep from autoasphyxiating themselves with their GI Joe blowup dolls. If you have heard about them, it may be because, unlike the much larger pro-immigration protests, the significantly larger anti-war protests or the similarly-sized regular MoveOn.org national action campaigns, the news media, against reason and sound judgment, are covering these small and deeply irrational teabagging parties like they are actual news. Fox News is, not surprisingly, leading the charge.

I'll share a handful of thoughts and leave them to their scrotal dysphagia:

The vast majority of these assholes protesting higher taxes almost certainly paid lower taxes this year. That's probably where they got the money for all that tea.

Second, this has to be the worst reenactment of a historical event ever. These dipshits are purchasing tea from their local stores (on which they will pay all applicable taxes) with their own money and then proceeding to throw away their property in order to protest the acts of their duly elected representative legislature and executive, which has recently lowered taxes for the majority of the protestors. You showed us!

Third, I'm guessing this part of the thing won't be covered, but Talking Points Memo has a pretty solid breakdown of how this is more astroturf than grassroots. No real surprise there.

Fourth, new rule: you can't say you're sick and tired of not being represented when your party has just come off of 12 disastrous years of congressional domination and eight disastrous years in the executive. You've been set aside for three months! This reminds me of fifth grade when my entire class decided to ignore this asshole bully and he went to the teacher crying, saying we were being mean to him, when we were only ignoring him. Like big, fat, mean Pat M. in the fifth grade, this angry mob really doesn't understand the difference between being oppressed and being disregarded. The teabaggers literally cannot conceive of how we could run our government without their stupid ideas. I'm thinking they should have grief counselors on hand to help them work through their emotions, because four more years of this is going to be excrutiating.

Finally, I think it's interesting how the rightwing can't get mobilized about anything without resorting to violent rhetoric. If you look at many of the core, sine qua non positions of the conservative movement--vigorous defense of torture, war as the central raison d'etre of the state, fetishization of guns, the death penalty--they really boil down to a desire to use the state to channel individuals' appetite for violence. In this sense, maybe it's a good thing that they're having their little teabagging parties--this pretend revolution might get the violence bug out of the system of the movement's most extreme members so they don't bomb abortion clinics, federal buildings, and the Olympics like they did in the Clinton years, the last time they didn't have an executive branch that they saw as partners in their bellicose paranoia. Although this incident in Pittsburgh (where a very rightwing, very Fox News-watching lunatic killed three cops because he was afraid of the coming "Obama gun grab") does not bode well for the rest of us.

America

2009-04-12T14:13:00.001-04:00

Fuck yeah.

UPDATE. Jon Stewart, obviously an avid reader of this blog, steals my joke at 4:27.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

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Disappointed

2009-04-11T13:21:00.008-04:00

Glenn Greenwald has spent the last few weeks doing an incredibly helpful compare-and-contrast between the Obama and Bush administrations when it comes to executive powers and state secrets. The upshot? Almost no difference between the two. This is not contrarianism; it's the consensus among almost everyone who has advocated the right view of civil liberties over the last decade. Obama stopped torturing, and vowed to close Guantanamo (but then what?), but his administration's theories on wiretapping, government immunity, and transparency are virtually identical to the previous administration.

This is deeply depressing stuff, particularly for people like me who put in a lot of time and effort in 2008 with the hope that a left-leaning constitutional lawyer in the White House would mean a restoration of the balance of powers and the rule of law. I had a sense I was overly optimistic when Obama basically told civil libertarians to fuck off and get serious when he signed on to telecom immunity, but this really is a lot worse than I would have expected.

So honest question: what the hell do I do about it? I maxed out donating to Obama this last year--is there a good way to make clear that that is not happening again in 2012 unless the bullshit stops? Do they care that I probably won't work on the ground for them next time around? And aside from helping out Russ Feingold, the ACLU and the Electronic Freedom Foundation (who are now stuck with the unenviable task of mobilizing right-thinking people against the administration they probably fought hard for in the election), how do we fight this?

Or are we just stuck in the wilderness? In the sense of political mobilization in defense of the constitution, it seems like the next few years could be a lot worse than the Bush years, given that we have a seemingly insuperable coalition of Democrats who don't care about civil liberties, Democrats who will follow Obama into any ditch he drives them into and an entire Republican Party that, with few exceptions, never gave a shit about civil liberties in the first place.

UPDATE: Just received an email objecting, and I realize I should be clearer. I am talking about the legal vision of the role of the executive, the right to secrecy, etc. put forth by both administrations. Obama's administration's vision of its role and the checks on its power, as described in its Justice Department filings and confirmed in press conferences, is not nearly as different from his predecessor as I would have hoped. But, while he sees himself as having the same degree of unfettered authority as the last prez, there is little question that he will use that authority more prudentially (as seen in the new torture policy, the decision to close Guantanamo, etc.).

Nothing's Shocking

2009-04-10T11:54:00.002-04:00

I found this movie review provocative, with implications for storytelling.

The Rat

2009-04-07T12:28:00.003-04:00

Whenever I'm having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, I turn to angry guitar music to make the universe seem more constructive in its discordance. My favorite angry jam of late is The Walkmen's "The Rat", which includes the lovely and bleak bridge:

When I used to go out /
I'd know everyone I saw /
Now I go out alone /
If I go out at all

Take heart, Louisville.

2009-04-05T14:10:00.001-04:00

Miroir Noir

2009-04-03T17:39:00.008-04:00

"Miroir Noir": that's French for "my goatee is bigger than your goatee." Actually, it's an impressive documentary about the Arcade Fire's "Neon Bible". You can see it for free this week at pitchfork tv. In the vein of Wilco's "I Am Trying To Break Your Heart", Radiohead's "Meeting People Is Easy", and Pink Floyd's "Live At Pompeii", it rocks (one might even say it has good "rising action").

Hawkeyes Do Good

2009-04-03T12:35:00.004-04:00

These pigs are both dudes. Get used to it.

The decision is here [pdf]. A few points struck me while skimming it.

1. First, this new genre of jurisprudence--the striking of discriminatory same-sex marriage bans on state constitutional grounds--makes for wonderful reading, and not only because it offers judges an opportunity to speak forcefully on the side of an ethical and moral right. Since the US Supreme Court is packed with bigots who would probably spend oral argument for the appeal making gagging noises and masturbatory hand gestures, the states that have overturned same-sex marriage bans have had to do so on the basis of their state constitutions' equal protection clauses (which are not reviewed by the US Supreme Court). Forced to square the disparity between their decisions and federal precedent like the upholding of DOMA, state supreme courts (in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Jersey, California, and now Iowa) engage in the only acceptable type of jingoism: the passionate appeal to why their state is better to its minorities than all the other ones. For example, we learn this about Iowa:

In the first reported case of the Supreme Court of the Territory of Iowa [17 years before Dred Scott], we refused to treat a human being as property...[Later, in 1868 and 1873] we struck blows to the concept of segregation long before the United States Supreme Court's decision in Brown. Iowa was the first state in the nation to admit a woman to the practice of law, doing so in 1869. (at 17-18)

Nice one, Iowa!

2. Next, there is the succinct and methodical evisceration of every argument put forth in support of the objectives of the law, and here it's interesting to see how closely the judicial debate mirrors the public debate. It's also nice to have these (entirely unassailable) findings be the law of the land right smack in middle of the country. First, the county (the bad guys) says "maintaining traditional marriage" is a sound objective for government. The court rejects the argument outright, pointing out that this leads to a sort of circular reasoning where the desire to uphold an unconstitutional law becomes the explanation for why it is in fact constitutional. The County makes the specious "optimal child rearing" argument, which the court knocks down in two ways, (1) stating both that there is absolutely no scientific evidence for the position, and (2) making the obvious point that even if this were a rational basis for a law, denying marriage rights would have no cognizable effect on the ability of gay couples to have and raise children. The court handles the County's goal of "promoting stability in opposite-sex relationships" with a paragraph that could be shortened into: "Are you fucking serious?"

3. Courageously, the Iowa Supreme Court does something in this decision that it didn't have to do to resolve the case. No religious argument was presented to the Court by either party. But supreme courts don't just rule, no matter what Scalia says; they also teach. And the court takes this opportunity to teach a point that most Americans seem incapable of understanding: civil marriage and religious marriage are different things. No single fallacy has made our country stupider on this issue than the conflation of these two, and it was bracing and surprising to see the Court address it so squarely when it didn't have to:

The sanctity of all religious marriages celebrated in the future will have the same meaning as those celebrated in the past. The only difference is civil marriage will now take on a new meaning that reflects a more complete understanding of equal protection of the law. (at 67)

4. The line that is in some ways the most eloquent in the whole opinion is the last one: "All justices concur." I'd recommend you read the whole thing. It's not as brilliant as Goodridge [pdf] (I mean, Iowa's fine, but Massachusetts--now there's a great state), but it's still a good read.

Wow.

2009-04-03T10:29:00.003-04:00

Great news out of Iowa.

UPDATE: It seems likely that we're going to see a push for a constitutional amendment, which would go to the people in November of 2010. About thirty seconds of research tells me that the bar for amendment is relatively low--you need a majority of both legislative houses and a majority of the vote in the next general elections. Both of Iowa's houses are run by Democrats, but party really isn't any protection with this issue (the best hope for a stop is in the state senate, which Democrats have 30-20). Based on some Big Ten polling numbers [pdf], it looks like if the vote were held now, Iowa would be back to marriage segregation.

That "next general election" rule for putting amendments to the people is a very big deal though. Three weeks from now, gay couples across Iowa will start getting married, and people will have 19 months to get used to it before they'll vote on the constitutional amendment. If Massachusetts is any indication (and the states are not as different politically as mapmakers would have you believe), that time period will see an emerging demographic of people who weren't for gay marriage but don't like the idea of taking rights away and another group for whom support for civil unions slides inexorably into support for civil marriage (about 60% of Iowans support either gay marriage or civil unions, so this slippage is key). If California is any indication, the good guys need advocates that are actually competent and not totally afraid of actually using any real gay people in their organizing effort.

It'd certainly be nice to see Obama take the impressive Iowa organization he put together in 2008 and use it for some good, but that's probably as likely than Obama getting gay married himself.

19 months. Start the clock.

As I Cross the Macon County Line

2009-04-01T23:59:00.003-04:00

I'm stuck at work late, which is when I like to hear something punchy. I give you "Going to Georgia" by the Mountain Goats.

Lyrics:

the most remarkable thing about coming home to you is the feeling of being in motion again--it's the most extraordinary thing in the world.
i have two big hands and a heart pumping blood and a 1967 colt .45 with a busted safety catch--the world shines as i cross the macon county line, going to georgia
the most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it's you and that you're standing in the doorway
and you smile as you ease the gun from my hand and i'm frozen with joy right where i stand--the world throws its light underneath your hair, forty miles from atlanta, this is nowhere, going to georgia
the world shines as i cross
the macon county line going to georgia

Darnielle has this thing he does of giving you a novella in a couple of stanzas by accelerating between really strong images. Hands, heart, blood, Colt 45, busted safety catch, sunshine, Macon county line. And then smile, gun, hand, frozen, doorway, light, hair. Both stanzas run you breathless from close physical detail out into the fresh air, almost into abstraction, to the open road and the open door 40 miles from Atlanta, wherever that is (all of this as his hard consonants give way to long, highway vowels). Not a lot of songs make me want to write a short story and rob a bank at the same time, but I guess that's the genius.

The Quality of Mercy

2009-04-01T10:14:00.007-04:00

AG Holder drops the charges against Ted Stevens (he of the "series of tubes") due to pretty flagrant prosecutorial misconduct by the Bush DoJ. Stevens is a crook and a scourge to progressivism and decency in government, which is why it's so refreshing to see a Democratic DoJ let him off for no other reason than that it's the right thing to do. This is how the good guys behave.

Hopefully they'll have a look at Former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman next. If Stevens got screwed by the DoJ, Siegelman got fucked by a car full of DoJ circus clowns.

Blame Canada

2009-03-31T18:32:00.005-04:00

Does anybody watch "How I Met Your Mother"? Crisco turned me on to it and Barney (NPH) doesn't disappoint. He suits up and chooses awesomeness. These are virtues beyond dispute. Lily and Marshall are solid, and Ted is the necessary douchebag in the middle of it, like Hamlet or Dan Humphrey or Zack Morris.

Robin, for her part, is crazy hot, and this season delivered the best television news sign-off since "Go fuck yourself, San Diego": "May the road ahead be lit with dreams and tomorrows. Which are lit with dreams, also. Stand tall, New York. Trustworthy. Recycling. Wear a condom." If I get hit by a car on my way home, somebody make sure that's on my tombstone (under the sculpture of me in an American flag bathrobe).

But I have a creeping concern that Robin is becoming to Canada what Rose Nylund was to St. Olaf, Minnesota, or Phoebe Buffay was to homelessness. Like the writers just leave blanks in the script for random not-funny Canada jokes and fill them in to make sure there's no dead air between commercials. Am I alone here?

Yeah

2009-03-30T21:14:00.003-04:00

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs throw down. The Sauce and I like the new single, "Zero" (it's how the 80s wanted to sound but couldn't). There's something about the way she hits those high notes that's totally not safe for work:

Zero - Yeah Yeah Yeahs

On the old album YYY were like Chrissie Hynde got eaten by Dinosaur Jr. and now sings angry songs from the inside. I doubt they'll ever top "Maps":

The Harder They Fall

2009-03-30T09:43:00.007-04:00

Here's a very incisive analysis of what it is that ails our economy by Simon Johnson, the former chief economist of the IMF. He used to work to reform crony capitalist emerging markets like Russia, Indonesia and Argentina (ideally, to make them rational and responsive--the IMF's shoddy track record is for another post). Regardless of the Fund's success rate, it should make us really nervous that he sees the massive government capture by the financial services industry that has taken place in the United States since the early 80s as effectively indistinguishable from the problems that ailed those emerging markets.

Johnson's essay touches on why I think the AIG kerfluffle is a good thing. If nothing else, the outrage might signal a paradigm shift, where for the first time in decades it's not in Congress's best interest to indiscrimately favor its patrons in the finance world over the interests of just about everybody else. And if people seem too angry about all of this, I think Jimmy Cliff has an idea why that might be. As a country, we bought in hard. Reading Johnsons's essay, it's difficult to see how our collective mentality over the last 20-30 years has been any different from the backwards economies Johnson describes:

Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit—and, most of the time, genteel—oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders. When a country like Indonesia or South Korea or Russia grows, so do the ambitions of its captains of industry. As masters of their mini-universe, these people make some investments that clearly benefit the broader economy, but they also start making bigger and riskier bets. They reckon—correctly, in most cases—that their political connections will allow them to push onto the government any substantial problems that arise.

...

Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or—here’s a classic Kremlin bailout technique—the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk—at least until the riots grow too large.

Speaking of monsters

2009-03-28T09:58:00.003-04:00

Blake Griffin is better than I thought. And I thought he was pretty good.

Where the Wild Things At?

2009-03-27T16:38:00.005-04:00

Amazing.

Did I mention Spike Jonze is directing and David Eggers wrote the screenplay?

One for the Money, Two For P**** and Foreign Cars

2009-03-27T13:06:00.009-04:00

My Facebook page has been atwitter with postings of this resignation letter from an AIG Financial Products vice president, with the majority saying it explains why the "mass hysteria" about AIG bonuses is uncalled-for (on a side note, I propose a moratorium on the phrase "mass hysteria" unless it follows "Nasty Nas in your area / about to cause"). DeSantis decries his cruel treatment at the hands of an unruly mob, an unsupportive CEO, and foul, villainous state attorneys general. To protect his honor and dignity, he resigns in the face of this cruelty and decides to give his million dollar bonus to charity. I could write a dissertation about why I think DiSantis' letter is a case study in rotten entitlement, but I'll throw up a few points from an email I sent to a good friend who passed the letter along:

First of all, there is the general claim that DeSantis didn't know what was going on in other parts of his division and that he never made a dime off of AIG's legalized Ponzi scheme. Uighur, please. We are talking about a division made up of 300-odd employees (making it slightly bigger than my wedding guest list) that was responsible for financial instruments valuing in the hundreds of billions of dollars and accounting for mushroom cloud growth on AIG's books. Yet, like every other executive who steps into the spotlight, our man DeSantis is an innocent; he had no idea where the money was being made. If it's true that victory has a thousand fathers but defeat is an orphan, AIG is starting to look like a halfway house for deadbeat dads.

But the quote that really brings into relief the bait-and-switch that DeSantis is trying to pull is on p. 2: "We have worked 12 long months under these contracts and now deserve to be paid as promised. None of us should be cheated of our payments any more than a plumber should be cheated after he has fixed the pipes but a careless electrician causes a fire that burns down the house." I have no doubt that DeSantis believes this analogy is appropriate, which to me is symptomatic of a certain type of blinkered thinking that you tend to find only in Midtown, Wall Street and on CNBC. Here's the correct analogy:

We have worked for years and have been compensated for that work at a rate that situates us at the top .5% of American workers. None of us should be denied our $1.2 million of excess payments on top of our salaries any more than a plumber should be denied payment after he has fixed the pipes and his boss has burned the house down for pay and compensated the plumber out of the proceeds of that crime, after which the owner of the house is forced to keep the arsonist's plumbing business afloat for fear of the consequences of its failure.

I don't think you have to believe the plumber is a crook to believe that he shouldn't get a cent more than he's been paid already.

And, yes, Liddy promised to give his minions loads of cash to stick around. But this appeal to the sanctity of contracts is hard to take, particularly from a vice president at an insurance company. Pretty much nobody, not even the unions themselves, grandstanded about the sanctity of contracts when, after fighting hard to be the last class of blue-collar workers not completely screwed by an anti-union political zeitgeist, the UAW was forced to walk back its bargained-for contractual rights as a precondition to any government bailout (and let's not forget that it'd take about 20 UAW workers' annual salaries to add up to the bonus that DeSantis is bitching about--even taxed at 90%, you're talking about two well-paid auto workers' salaries).

It's amazing to me that after the disaster that was wrought in no small part by AIG's financial products division, after all the layoffs and cancelled pension benefits, after the thousands of foreclosures that took place because people's mortgages were so securitized they couldn't find a counterparty to negotiate their payments with--after all that, this guy still looks at his $1 million+ bonus as an entitlement.

And if you think that things are getting fixed so we should stop being so damn angry, then have a look at this. Sometimes the pitchforks have their place.

UPDATE: "Anonymous" offers a rebuttal in the comments (i deleted and reposted to take out personal info about me). I haven't bothered with all of the arguments, but have a look if you like.

East Side!

2009-03-27T10:13:00.003-04:00

I think maybe they should have just replaced the Sweet Sixteen with the Big East Conference. I mean, Georgetown would have still gotten its ass kicked (receiving non-reciprocal ass-kickings is the new Princeton offense), so this isn't self-interest speaking, but it feels like wasted time to have to listen to commentators pretending that the Michigan St./Kansas game is in any way interesting. I'm predicting an all Big East Final Four--Lousiville, UConn, Pitt and Syracuse.

And let me be clear (as our President says every time he's about to be unclear): I want only bad things to happen to maestro Jim Boeheim and his cast of operatic whiners, so if UNC takes them out that would be great, but I don't see Oklahoma getting the job done. Blake Griffin is good but Syracuse's 2-3 zone will mean that he'll have two serious defenders--Onuaku and Rick Jackson--giving him full-time attention. I'd triple-team him, quadruple-team him if it doesn't get too crowded--the rest of OU is just not that good.

The Baby is alright.

2009-03-26T18:35:00.001-04:00

Posting has been light. But they baby ain't dead; it's just sleeping.

Manifold Destiny

2009-03-13T23:31:00.000-04:00

the gloating

2009-03-10T01:39:00.002-04:00

i've had a rough time of it at work, but i'm triumphantly returning to gloat about an earlier post. it looks like slate has recently jumped on my bandwagon of skepticism about the health benefits of red wine.

too little, too late, slate.

Think About the Future.

2009-03-02T12:30:00.007-05:00

A few things I’m excited about:

Shakespeare at BAM
Especially The Merchant of Venice—Propeller’s all-male Twelfth Night a year or so back was the best Shakespeare production I’ve ever seen.

The Chun-Li movie
Hopefully E. Honda will drop in.

The bilingual West Side Story
Original librettist Arthur Laurents found earlier stage versions wimpy and the famous film “bogus” and “terribly acted.” Surely he was thinking of the sappy, lip-synching leads, not Rita Moreno as Anita (oscar win), or the guys who played Bernardo (oscar win), Riff (robbed! he does flips!), Action and Ice! At ninety, Laurents is directing the current revival; if he has conjured performances better than these, the show will kill.

Gomorrah at Film Forum

Modern Guilt

2009-02-25T17:04:00.007-05:00

Normally, covers albums are pretty bad. The new "Heroes" compilation might be the exception: everything I've heard thus far does a nice job of honoring the classic tune while injecting some modern twang. It helps that for each song, the original artist selected their contemporary analog to do the tune justice.

The Hold Steady's full-bad version of the Bruce classic "Atlantic City"

Duffy does "Live and Let Die"

TV on the Radio do Bowie

Hot Chip do Joy Division:

Beck does Dylan

Facebook

2009-02-19T09:57:00.003-05:00

Check this out, Facebookers.

This "new" privacy issue aside, doesn't Facebook just suck recently? Remember when it was college students and young professionals, clean blue lines, pictures, and text? Remember the days before the gross new format was forced on you? Remember the days before the chains (25, 40, 100[!] random things about me!) took over your newsfeed? I used to distinguish between Facebook and "trashy" Myspace, but no longer can.

2007: I got you, 2008

2009-02-14T14:25:00.006-05:00

I share the Oscar ennui expressed below. Unless Penn and Milk clean up, it’ll be a disappointing year. Since they won't, for my money this year’s only category is Best Documentary. (Go Werner Herzog!)

Still we have cause for joy and debate. While laid up with the flue for the past few days, my head in a vice grip, I casually-valiantly decided that 2007 (represented in the 2008 Oscars) was the greatest year for movies ever. There Will Be Blood, Michael Clayton, Into the Wild, The Bourne Ultimatum, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Zodiac (probably the best of them all save Anderson’s and Day-Lewis’s masterpiece), Ratatouille, No Country for Old Men, and 3:10 to Yuma lead the campaign. Movies I didn’t particularly love (like Juno, The Savages, American Gangster, Sweeney Todd, and Elizabeth: The Golden Age) were still impressive by any standard. My list excludes work like La Vie en Rose and Away From Her, critically lauded movies I haven’t seen. Despite its deep and annoying flaw, the here’s-what-this-image-means voice over, The Assassination of Jesse James was visually stunning and well-acted. Finally, Transformers, without rust after the shitstorm from critics, haters, bloggers, and just about everyone, remains hilarious, technically wonderful, generous, the only movie to ever actually remove me from my seat, thrilling, and gently self-conscious of its same over-the-top aspects people never tire of ridiculing.

So yes: Down with The Reader, authentically offensive and offensively bad. Down with Benjamin Button, the bad, too-long joke Fincher played on us all. Down with the Oscars for slighting The Dark Knight and—ludicrously, in a category with three nominees—Bruce Springsteen. But up with ’07, the best year ever in film. I’m sure you all agree.

hugh jackman

2009-02-11T15:54:00.006-05:00

the sauce is absolutely right about the oscars. they're so worthless that even thinking about how best to bitch about them is boring. what's more, they're apparently being hosted by hugh jackman--the subject of one of my favorite photographs. the longer you look at it, the funnier it gets:

My Vote

2009-02-11T12:27:00.001-05:00

Are we living in a dream world? Was Leneshe Young really cut from American Idol last night? The judges elected to keep Tatiana, the guy who forgot lyrics and stormed off stage waving goodbye, the whining- and weeping-prone “Disturbia” kid, Nick/Norman (whose dual personalities both disappoint), and even the unwatchable new judge, but passed on the once-homeless young woman whose killer voice you hear here on a superfresh song she also wrote?

Cinema Cowboys

2009-02-11T12:01:00.007-05:00

I'm a rabid film junkie, and I don't often apologize for imposing my cinematic taste on unwitting victims. In that vein, I wanted to write something long and harsh about this year's Academy Award race, but I bored myself somewhere in the process. Film in 2008 was remarkable largely in its mediocrity. There were definitely good films: The Dark Knight provided redemption for popcorn movies, Slumbog made everyone feel good (even this surly frenchman) for at least five minutes. The Wrestler was superb and underappreciated as a film, as was Rachel Getting Married. And Wall-E's first half was a brilliant kick-back to Buster Keaton-era cinema. I haven't seen Milk yet but I hear it's pretty clutch (I have to forgive Gus Van Sant for "Gerry" before I'll let myself buy a ticket for Milk). But The Reader, Revolutionary Road, Doubt, Frost/Nixon, Vickie Christina Barcelona, Benjamin Button...well, it's hard for me to get excited about any of these contenders.

But the Oscars are kinda a joke anyway, and I suspect everyone knows it. The same goes for the Grammys, or hell, any awards show. Expecting an awards show to track artistic merit is like trying to determine whether "reading" or "hanging out with friends" is more fun by recourse to a statistical sampling of facebook profiles. People's aesthetic tastes, in the aggregate, are pretty lame, and serve only to validate the great white middle. It's the same dynamic that justifies why elevator music exists at all: nobody really likes it, but no one is too offended by it either.

So, instead of giving you my aimless opinion about the Oscars, I'm recommending a few sites that are focused on great cinematography:

Best Cinematography from 2008

Best Cinematography from 2007

Cinematography in opening scenes

For my money, Roger Deakins is the messiah.

Eight Fat-Headed Babies

2009-02-10T20:19:00.006-05:00

I've listened to everyone with a microphone and half the people in my conference room at work bitch about the ninebabylady, and the concern has, for the most part, bemused me. Kerry says exactly what I was thinking (I mean, she says it better and probably more coherently than I was thinking it, but it makes me look smarter when I say "exactly" so I'm sticking with it). It really is strange how casually people lose the language of reproductive choice when they don't agree with the choice being made.

Mad Casio Beats

2009-02-10T14:00:00.004-05:00

I was listening to the new Peter Bjorn & John single yesterday ("Nothing to Worry About"), and debating with myself whether it's highly irritating or highly awesome. Awesomeness won out. However, it reminded me of how tough it must be for these reject computer science PhDs to come up with algorithms that tell us what sort of music we should be listening to (think: Pandora, iTunes Genius, etc.) Sure, there's probably some sharp aesthetic criteria I use to filter pop music: I hate Auto-tune and 99% of distorted vocals. I love reverb. I like female vocalists when they're cute, but rarely if they aren't. Can science do that filtering for me?

Anyway, these guys used science and whatnot to come up with the most annoying song ever. What do you think? Worse than Usher?

Cats -- Not That Powerful

2009-02-07T17:18:00.003-05:00

The Sauce and I saw Cat Power at the Apollo last night, mostly because I love the venue. It was the single worst live performance I've ever seen (with the possible exception of a very drunk Badly Drawn Boy in DC accompanied for two songs by a phonograph that he was unable to synch with, consequently turning the show into a John Henryesque showdown between man and machine). I feel bad trashing any performer, because it's not easy getting up on stage. But I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone make it look harder than Cat Power did last night.

Some things I wish someone had mentioned to Cat Power before she went on:

Leaving an audience alone with only a keyboard and bass is like leaving a baby alone with a trash bag in its crib--it's not certain to be a disaster, but it's still never a good idea;

If your backing band is much more talented than you, mumble your way through it and let them run the show (this approach has worked well for Dylan for half a century);

There's a recession on and your audience just paid $40 for a ticket. If I had known you were planning to play the first half of the show with no lights on I would have just bought a radio;
Write songs that are more enjoyable to listen to.

The Inebriats' History of the United States of America

2009-02-07T13:38:00.005-05:00

Thanks to a stellar recommendation from an anonymous poster, I can share "Drunk History" in all its epic glory. The following clips feature Michael Cera (the holdout on hopefully-forthcoming "Arrested Development" film), Jack Black (John Belushi's brother), Danny McBride ("Fist Foot Way") and Paul Schneider (who was awesome in David Gordon Green's stuff, and solid in that Brad Pitt flick nobody saw). Kate Winslet, eat your heart out.

Vol. I

Vol. II

Vol. III

Vol.IV

Little Help

2009-02-04T21:33:00.011-05:00

I find two metaphors more difficult than at first I thought. Would anyone care to try and unpack either or both? The first is from Abraham Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum: "Geography is the eye of History." The second is the image above.

Ask a Surly Frenchman (Volume 1)

2009-02-04T20:56:00.010-05:00

Volume 1: Shape without form, snark without substance

I haven’t read David Denby’s book “Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation”, but I’m fairly confident I disagree with it completely. Of course, the fact I’m willing to take a position contrary to Denby’s without shelling out $15.95 for his hardcover probably violates one of the book’s cardinal principles (something like: commentary without research is lazy). But I’m going to attempt to defend snark anyway, at least a little, without calling Dendy an elitist asshat more than three times.

Denby’s point as I take it is that “snark” (“nasty, insidious, rug-pulling, teasing insult[s], which makes reference to some generally understood shared prejudice or distaste”) has pervaded American discourse. The influx of snark has destroyed the great American dialetic. You remember the American dialectic? It’s that phenomenon of back-and-forth communication where we as a people reach “true ideas”, like that racism is a bad thing, or that Diet Coke tastes better than Diet Pepsi. By reducing communication to simple, dismissive, and baseless objections, the dialectic isn’t revealing shared truths. Instead, snark breeds more snark --communication is reduced to assorted blips, moans, and expletives.

Denby seems to argue that blogs and many internet sites are the teet from which snark most often suckles. Regardless, the debate isn’t specific to any forum, but applies to any means for cheap, fast, easy communication. I’m reminded of old quote from J. M. Barrie: “The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.” I think the upshot is that whenever we open up a new, cheap, and effective mode for conveying ideas, with it we increase the ability to tarnish reputations and additionally diminish the intellectual efficacy of the English language.

If I’ve done Denby’s argument any justice at all, at this point you should feel like Holden staring at the word “fuck” etched in the restroom stall. Isn’t snark a parasite on the pragmatic value of free expression? Is it holding our discourse back from achieving a larger truth?

But this surly Frenchman thinks Denby is an elitist asshat. For starters, snark is a symptom more than a disease. Snark is merely illustrative of a modern appreciation for solipsism – people understand that singular, guttural reactions to a given topic are meaningful as expressive devices. It’s hard to locate the exact appeal of solipsism, except to say there is an innate value to intuitive reactions being expressed. Much in the same way that a plaintiff in court derives a satisfaction in having her side of the story voiced to peers, or that a blog commentator desires having his opinion interjected into a debate, the value is to the speaker as speaker. People get off on getting their voice heard. What value does Perez Hilton derive in drawing semi-erect penises on candid celebrity photos? It doesn’t matter - it’s always your prerogative not to participate in whatever joy comes from seeing semi-erect penises on candid celebrity photos.

More than that, snark can also positively contribute to the pragmatic virtues of discourse. Snark is really a populist approach to voicing disapprobation publically -- call it the layman’s approach to contrarianism. Perhaps some issues deserve delicate syllogisms, but oftentimes crass brevity can be more honest and effective. Think that girls are given absurdly difficult physical criteria to realistically execute? Comment on Perez’s site that Kate should eat cheeseburgers more regularly. Think that popular blogs tracking the daily affairs of major law firms are intellectually inert and borderline yellow-journalism? Post a comment declaring “[Tahitian vernacular for anal felatio, whatever that may be]” three times over. With an exclamation mark at the end.

Finally, and especially in an age where mass media communications are increasing homogenized, formulized, and censored (not formally, but insofar as they are meticulously tailored to accrue the money and approval of the American middle class), there must be counterpoint minutia for listeners to be exposed to in turn.

For example, if advertisements can sell me on Britney’s new LP or “zero down, zero financing” death cabs, why can’t an internet user sell me on the (perhaps valid) opinion that Britney Spears is clinically crazy but actually a victim of her caretakers? Why can’t I be told that Cindy McCain is cursed with a permanent “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” countenance? Or, more recently, that Michael Phelps has a distinct preference for Northern Lights over Sour Diesel? Since modern times means being constantly exposed to messages of varying degrees of depth, sophistication, and veracity (e.g. “buy this shampoo”; “all Democrats are secretly socialist”; “reduce your calorie intake or men won’t sleep with you and certainly won’t call you again”), all for the purpose of guiding our approbation and stealing our paychecks, why shouldn’t these messages be counterweighted by other quick, cheap, and crude fodder?

Perhaps the problem with Denby’s argument is his net isn’t wide enough. If snark is bad for us, then let’s not forget advertising. If we believe that lowbrow, personal polemics are a problem, then so must be mass market media messages which hide under the guise of tempered objectivity. When Denby targets the crass, under-informed, contrarian commentary without also assailing the just-as-bad-for-us-and-often-as-uninformed “useful” commentary , he does us the grave injustice of leading of leading us to believe that we’re too smart for snark, but not smart enough to differentiate that it’s snark.

Plus Denby is an elitist asshat.

Cheer up, Sauce.

2009-02-04T16:02:00.006-05:00

Here's a great, sartorially-enhanced rendition of “Forever Young.” The awkward transition between songs resulted from Dylan’s on-the-spot decision to get over his crankiness and actually be a part of The Last Waltz. They ended up playing “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” twice (surely to the audience’s confusion, but to our benefit). In any case, the Super Bowl wasn’t his first eye-roll-provoking moment (although neither was this).

How nasty is Robbie Robertson? He kills throughout, but I really love the few seconds after 3:52.

Don't Look Back, It's Alright

2009-02-04T15:21:00.005-05:00

I'm confident I wasn't the only person whose soul was a little crushed after seeing this video during the Superbowl. Keep in mind, this is the guy who sang (in one of his more accomplished ditties):

Disillusioned words like bullets bark

As human gods aim for their mark

Made everything from toy guns that spark

To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark

It's easy to see without looking too far

That not much

Is really sacred.

I suppose this isn't the first time Dylan joined the flesh-colored-Christs market. All I know is that after twenty years of schooling, they got me on the day + night shift.

On Bipartisanship

2009-02-04T10:34:00.009-05:00

Imagine a custody hearing that went like this:

The father took the stand, talked for an hour or so about getting the kid down to a size where he could drown it in the bathtub and muttered incoherently about how the kid needs to toughen up and scrap it out with his classmates. When asked where the kid was living, he said he'd been putting him up an asbestos-filled FEMA-trailer. He rambled on about spending the kid's college money on souping up his buddy's IROC-Z, which is pretty sweet and would be sweeter by the time he was done with it. When he was asked about feeding and educating the kid, he screamed about family loyalty, leapt off the stand and tried to beat the stuffing out of his ex-wife with his bare hands, only to be restrained by the bailiff and returned to the stand, panting and disoriented.

Mom took the stand and was basically like, yeah, I think the kid needs to get fed and learn some responsibility, without all of this fighting all the time. And I'm worried about the kid, that he's about to hit adolescence in his dad's house and he's gonna turn into some kind of insane violent monster who has no idea how to take care of himself.

Then they brought the kid in. The judge was like, shit, ok, this kid has burns on his arms, has been left alone in its room for hours at a time with a loaded firearm, hasn't had a shower in months, and has been forced to rumble in baby street fights so that his dad could make some cash on the betting. So yeah, the judge said, I'm gonna go ahead and give full custody to the mom. It's a no-brainer.

And then, out of nowhere, two months after the hearing, for no good reason, the mom calls the wasteful, child-abusing, psychopathic, reckless bastard and says "Hey, how does joint custody sound to you?"

It's like battered-spouse syndrome or something.

UPDATE: And now the news that future Commerce Secretary Gregg intends to recuse himself from the stimulus package vote (which in the Senate is the procedural equivalent of a "no" vote). If I wasn't so filled with hope, I'd be totally fucking confused.

Legos are shovel-ready

2009-02-03T17:39:00.003-05:00

New York in legos. Awesome.

Poems and more / To explore / If bored.

2009-02-03T12:19:00.003-05:00

Dig this. Go CUNY.

And Pity NSinNY

2009-02-02T13:29:00.003-05:00

Also, It's not N-Sinny, although it would be if I were an evangelical hip-hop superstar. It's NSinNY. That is all.

Pity Newton too

2009-02-02T12:28:00.002-05:00

I saw this quote from Isaac Newton on the V train today and it got me thinking about Crisco's post about the Menashe poem on Friday:

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Pretty close, no?

Menashe

2009-01-30T16:16:00.012-05:00

Pity us
By the sea
On the sands
So briefly

On a crowded bus leaving the seashore, a friend directed my attention to the poem above, relegated to the dust jacket of Samuel Menashe’s awesome Library of America “Neglected Master” edition.

Now “Pity us” is the first poem I show my students. I ask: Does the poem have meter? Is it metaphorical? What kind of sounds does it have, and to what effects? Today they focused on the unvoiced s's and f ("like listening to waves"), and the final line's surprise beat ("brief") and unstressed rhyme on the third syllable, and how those sounds reinforce the poem's meaning.

As I left the room after class (and the students’ remarkable and diverse explications) a young man asked if those ten words were really all, if I had excerpted the poem from some longer work. That’s it, I told him. He said, “it’s mind-blowing.”

a friendly message from the makers of welch's grape juice

2009-01-30T14:30:00.000-05:00

the new yorker's got another smashing satirical piece, written by noah baumbach (writer/director of the squid and the whale, among others). it's absurdly funny, but also raises an excellent question: why are there so many articles on the health benefits of red wine? and why isn't white wine getting any love?

apparently, it's because white wine actually doesn't have red wine's miraculous qualities. resveratrol, the compound responsible for the bulk of the aforementioned health benefits, exists in large quantities in the skins and seeds of dark red or purple colored grapes. as the mayo clinic's cardiology department rather meekly and sweetly points out, this means that grape juice probably confers the same protections as red wine. so really, the panacea being touted may be any product rich in dark grape skins--and not just red wine.

but you can't blame news outlets for going with the sexiest possible headline, can you? and if you've got the chance to get a lab full of mice hammered, why not take it?

Public restroom etiquette (for dudes)

2009-01-30T14:07:00.008-05:00

Consider this a public service announcement. Men: there are rules to relieving yourself in public restrooms.

1. At the urinal: Don't talk to the person next to you mid-stream. Don't make physical contact at any time, even if it's a pat on the shoulder. Attempt to aim. Don't be twitchy, because others will worry about your aim. Whistling is unacceptable but mildly amusing. Don't put your hand on your hips and lean back, like you're feeling really accomplished with your effort. It's weird when even you are afraid to get near your penis.

2. In a stall: Don't talk to the person in the stall next to you. This includes commenting "to yourself" on the progress of your efforts. If you bring in a paper or other reading material, take it with you. Don't use the stall to urinate - it makes your stall use highly suspect.

3. Wash your hands.

This isn't Lord of the Flies - let's be civilized.

P.S. Did anybody follow up on the George Castanza idea to create a Zagat-type guide for NYC public restrooms? I truly believe you could make good money selling such a publication.

I'm pretty sure 3 is the magic number

2009-01-30T13:43:00.003-05:00

I prefer my miseducators wear flannel.

Learning to Count

2009-01-30T13:05:00.003-05:00

Much respect to Doc McJames and Stevie Wonder, but the hottest Sesame Street jam is by The Pointer Sisters.

“12” may have been a magic number for Jill Scott. I hear the “1, 2, 3, 4, 5…12” cadence in her “I’m bout to go off i-n your face, girl; you betta chill" and "You betta back down before you get smacked down; you betta chill." You judge.

The End of the Sausage Party

2009-01-30T11:22:00.009-05:00

Clarence Thomas's peanut butter.

A contrast from Feministe.

It's actually amazing that the Ledbetter bill even needed to be signed. The Supreme Court, with a blistering dissent from its only woman, ruled last year that if a company is successful in hiding evidence of pay discrimination against women over the course of years, a woman who later discovers the company's wrongdoing can only sue for damages for the most recent part of that discrimination. It may sound like a technicality, but calling it that is unfair to technicalities.

Something tells me that the five dark hats on the Supreme Court are the kind of assholes who would crash at your house, eat all your peanut butter except for the last spoonful leaving insufficient peanut butter for your sandwich, and then not offer to pay for more peanut butter because they didn't finish it. And because you're a woman. Trust me--that analogy is flawless.

Never mind the alphabet. Have some brass.

2009-01-29T21:55:00.000-05:00

Learn your alphabet

2009-01-29T21:44:00.000-05:00

RIP John Updike

2009-01-29T13:00:00.001-05:00

In the vestibule of the Worcester Public Library, they used to have a rack of donated books that you could buy for a dollar. When I was 14, my mom dropped me off at the library while she ran a few errands around town. Mulling around, bored, I picked this stark, yellowed paperback copy of Pigeon Feathers from 1960 off the rack and thumbed through the pages (thinking how strange it was that the price of the book hadn't changed in 30+ years). I think I had exactly a dollar at the time, but when I went to pay at the front desk the librarian looked at the book, smiled at me and waved me off. I read that book of short stories in three days. Then I read it again.

It was revelatory. In part it was how Updike's characters were so purely American at a time when I had begun to feel less so (when I first saw a picture of him years later, I was taken aback by how accurate my mental impression of him had been while I was reading--the man had a visage like a mound of snow piled high and wind-swept). And yet, despite their easy Americanness, his characters were colored with the same quiet self-doubt that I was--it's an obvious point now, but I remember it meaning something important then.

Mostly though, it was the shock of reading his prose. Throughout his writing life, Updike labored at finding beauty when nothing much was happening. I was a bored teenager when I was reading Pigeon Feathers, and newly concerned that maybe nothing interesting would ever happen, so there was comfort in Updike's reverence for small insights, for excavating detail from banality. At the end of "The Astronomer," one of my favorite stories in Pigeon Feathers, the narrator recalls gazing out his window after an awkward dinner with an old friend:

In memory, perhaps because we lived on the sixth floor, this scene--this invisible scene--seems to take place at a great height, as if we were the residents of a star suspended against the darkness of the city and the river. What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

Even at 14, I can remember thinking that that clarity of vision was worth emulating, and not just in writing.

Fertilitinis

2009-01-29T10:59:00.003-05:00

Just about the only thing more disturbing than the Daba Girls blog the Times reported on yesterday (which Sujan posted about) is the American Fertility Association's "Manicures & Martinis" event soon to be held here in NYC. How dare 20- and 30-somethings put their eggs at risk by selfishly focusing on their careers and financial stability, not to mention personal development, before having kids? I'm looking forward to hearing my dear friend and women's reproductive rights advocate Kerry Howley chime in on this campaign.

Hands

2009-01-29T08:28:00.004-05:00

When I hear people clucking about hand-chopping in the Islamic world or whatever the latest is in exotic draconianism, I wonder if they have ever considered what the hell kind of country they're living in. (The first link is what has gotten me surly. Unbelievable).

Via the indispensible Glennzilla.

Listen - Hector Lavoe - Salsa Master or Latino Barry Manilow?

2009-01-29T02:20:00.003-05:00

For the past few weeks I've been listening to a lot of Hector Lavoe. I've had about 8 of his albums sitting on my computer for the past 3 years and just haven't gotten around to listening to them. To give you a quick summary, Hector Lavoe was a salsa singer and overall pioneer of the genre during the '70s. The guy led a very interesting life that's certainly worth a quick read.

Lavoe recorded almost all of his albums with bandleader/arranger Willie Colon. In fact, these two recorded together so much, that it's almost silly of me to try and talk about them independently. I could even throw guitarist Ruben Blades in the mix, but now I'm just being ludicrous.

I found myself mostly listening to two of Lavoe's albums; Comedia, and De Ti Depende. For the most part, the songs on these albums follow your typical head, break, head format. The breaks generally feature trumpet/trombone interplay and do what breaks are supposed to do. The songs are extended, but with instrumental ideas that are related to the main theme NOT direct copies.

Take the song Pericodio de Ayer on De Ti Depende. After the emphatic band introduction, the song starts with Lavoe. His diction is so good, I can make out the words he's speaking. Now, my Spanish is nearly non existent so that's gotta say something. His tone keeps its quality whether he's speaking or venturing into his upper range. He sings with a lot of emotion without going over the top. He just gets it right.

The musical interlude almost begs you to get up and dance; the way a New Orleans brass band knows how to do. The only thing really stopping me from making an ass out of myself is the string section that's thrown into the mix. My guess is that the strings are added in for studio recordings but were rarely if ever used in a live show. There are some cheesy youtube videos that kinda confirm my hunch.

All in all, I'm a fan. You'll notice that I haven't made any comparisons with Mr. Manilow as the title would indicate. Really I just mean that both of these guys sang pop; Lavoe just happens to be Puerto Rican and has a little more soul/funk in his work. But I'll let you ponder if any of that matters at the end of the day.

Suggested Recordings
From Comedia
El Cantante, Tiempos Pasados, Bandolera
From De Ti Depende
Periodico de Ayer

the league of extraordinary bitches

2009-01-28T13:30:00.005-05:00

the new york times metro section clocks in with what has to be the greatest schadenfreude-riddled chronicle of downfallen finance sector douchebaggery since the bonfire of the vanities. the piece, stunningly titled "it's the economy, girlfriend," describes the hardships of a cohort of impeccably manicured new york city socialites that see their lifestyles change as their boyfriends and husbands--all erstwhile junior varsity titans of the banking, trading, and wealth management industries--are affected by the global economic crisis they helped create. author ravi somaiya masterfully combines pitch-perfect elements: a hilarious title, an inspired cast of characters (one dawn spinner davis is employed as a "beauty writer"; another, simply and devastatingly enough, is named "alexandra pennington"), and a drily and clinically journalistic tone, leavened only by a nearly imperceptible sarcasm that's subtle and sly enough to give the narrator of barry lyndon a run for his money. i could gush all day, but the article speaks for itself--i'll end with two of my favorite paragraphs (i couldn't pick just one):

"Once it was seen as a blessing in certain circles to have a wealthy, powerful partner who would leave you alone with the credit card while he was busy brokering deals. Now, many Wall Street wives, girlfriends and, increasingly, exes, are living the curse of cutbacks in nanny hours and reservations at Masa or Megu. And that credit card? Canceled."

"One frequent topic among the group is the link between the boardroom and the bedroom. 'There’s actually the type of person who has a bad day on the trading floor and they want to have sex more,' Ms. Spinner Davis offered as she sipped a vodka gimlet, declining to say how she knew."

Crickets

2009-01-27T23:40:00.001-05:00

Some Kind of Special Moustache

2009-01-27T13:14:00.005-05:00

"America's new flag is just a white flag, but there's a picture of a burning American flag on it..." From Get Your War On, the single best thing on the Internet. This one's a couple of months old, but it's gotta be the funniest thing to come out of Obama's victory. There's some profanity, if that's the sort of thing that concerns you.

Girls

2009-01-27T10:31:00.005-05:00

I'm a sucker for poppy girlpunk, so the Vivian Girls are right in my wheelhouse. I'm not saying they're good, just that they're awesome. They're playing the venerable Apollo with M. Ward on February 19, and I may just get tickets (anybody interested?).

Also, they have the best name in music. The real (though imaginary) Vivian Girls are pictured above. They are the subjects of a sprawling, violent, intricately-conceived epic of war and summer dresses that was Henry Darger's life work, "In the Realms of the Unreal" (also the title of an amazing documentary about Darger). It is 15,145 pages of text and scrolled illustration. In it, the alternately fierce and coquettish, occasionally transgendered Vivian Girls stage a child slave rebellion against their adult overlords.

It's really one of the strangest and most haunting works of art I've ever seen, and a testament to the oddities that can emerge out of an extremely solitary life (Darger was such a loner that the three people who remembered him and were interviewed in the movie couldn't agree on how his name was pronounced).

Stampede

2009-01-26T17:23:00.003-05:00

Happy Chinese New Year. That means as of a few hours ago, it's the year of the ox. I like how Chinese astrology divides it up by year, so it's like each age cohort is another new wave bringing its characteristics to bear on the rest of the menagerie. It's all nonsense, of course, but I like the idea better. This year, prosperity and fortitude. Bring it, oxen!

on the brighter side

2009-01-26T16:19:00.001-05:00

TV on the Radio is untouchable: "Heroes" (David Bowie cover)

u2 bloody u2

2009-01-26T14:43:00.012-05:00

My old roommate Adam once came home from a hard day spent skipping classes, got drunk by himself, and proceeded to color dye my dog's tail blue. I didn't expect much more from a guy who thought he could build a ski ball machine into our couch.

That being said, sometimes my expectations are completely off. Take the new U2 single "Get On Your Boots", sure to become featured in a smash iTunes ad (how will the commercial convey a silhouette of Bono reducing all world poverty, I wonder). This is possibly one of the worst singles I've heard in the past lifetime or so.

I mean, I grew up on U2. These guys started off as bad-asses, and then made the impossible possible by getting even better (i.e. teaming with Brian Eno to make their own fucking brand of arena rock). PLUS Bono is trying to single handedly save Africa AND the Edge has a distinctive, assured guitar sound AND they're non-alcoholic Irishmen AND they were completely uplifting during the recent pre-inauguration show in D.C. So much potential! And then this!

Hey Bono, next time why don't you duet with Usher while covering The Fray and just put that "worst song ever" competition to rest? Hootie can play harmonica.

Listen - The First of Many Posts

2009-01-26T12:19:00.006-05:00

Listening is something everyone knows about but few people do. Just about everyone and their grandma has an iPod these days, but I'd be quite surprised if any of them knew much more than the artist's name that's currently playing. And if asked why they like a particular artist of song, the response will range from the dismissive "Oh I dunno, I just like him" to the insightful "Cause he rockx brah". These folks don't listen to music, they hear it.

I have no problem with these people. Continue hearing music at the gym or on the subway or in your car. In fact, if you are listening to music in your car you are an irresponsible driver. Stop putting innocent babies in danger you reckless bastards.

I make this distinction because these "Listen" posts will be a reflection on who I'm listening to this week. Any artist is up for grabs here. I listen to a pretty wide range of genres, though if you're looking for some slick Hip Hop recommendations, I'm not your man. If you can spare $9.99 for an album, I can promise you'll add something interesting to your iTunes library (or better yet, get the cd from amazon). Otherwise, I'll try and highlight a particular track so your ears can get a taste for $0.99. Thirty second clips almost always suck, so if you're on the fence I encourage you to listen to a full track. You really need to listen (or hear) this stuff for yourself.

Six Syllables

2009-01-26T12:03:00.004-05:00

NSinNY’s post below reminded me of the six-syllable verse form Yvor Winters invented and practiced. When you master the six-word novel and memoir, try your hand at these short poems. Below are a few of Winters’s. (Titles allow a little stretch room.)

The Hunter
Run! In the magpie’s shadow.

No Being
I, bent. Thin nights receding.

May
Oh, evening in my hair!

Spring Rain
My doorframe smells of leaves

the half-coalition of assholes

2009-01-26T10:57:00.007-05:00

both on last night's bill moyers journal and in the wall street journal, thomas frank's made some great points on obama's attempt to obtain bipartisan consensus on his economic stimulus package. frank summarized his position pretty eloquently while talking to moyers:

"[Obama] wanted a majority of the Republican votes in the Senate for his stimulus package as well as, of course, the Democrats. And I read that, I was, like, well, why? You just gave them a whooping that they're not going to forget in a long time, you know? You are in charge."

even if it's simple, i like that point: unless you actually need their support to get the job done, there's no need to cater to the desires of assholes. if you try, all you'll end up with is a coalition half-filled with assholes, and legislation that partly reflects their asshole interests.

WWZD?

2009-01-26T09:38:00.012-05:00

Watch the greatest living Zbigniew get loose on Joe Scarborough.

Six words

2009-01-26T09:38:00.011-05:00

Smith Magazine has a site and a book full of six-word memoirs. It could be apocryphal, but it's said that Hemingway thought this was the best story he ever wrote: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." Now that's a solid short story.

I think memoirs are less amenable to the form; it's a writer's prerogative to quickly dismiss others, but it reads like low self-esteem to do the same to yourself. The best entries in the book--which is my bathroom reading--are either flip ("Brought it to a boil, often," Mario Batali) or esoteric ("Eat mutate aura amateur auteur true," Jonathan Lethem - I like how he hid the word "mature" in there without using it). Not many of the very serious entries are successful (notable exception: "I still make coffee for two" Zak Smith).

Composing six-word stories has become a writer's game, and it's fun for the subway when there isn't a crossword handy. Which there wasn't this morning. So here's my work product from the V train.

The story of a rehabilitated kingpin: Lost the G's in his Rolodex.

A tale of Iroquois retreat: They packed when the drumbeats quickened.

A presidential biography: He didn't know and didn't mind.

A statement of personal belief: I believe in miracles, like evolution.

Anybody care to add?

UPDATE: Serendipitously, the NY Times got in on the action this morning with this masterpiece: "This is William Kristol's last column." Rejoice!

Tales from the Crypt

2009-01-25T23:25:00.005-05:00

Saturday night, after a lovely meal at a wine bar in the East Village, I saw Theatre is Dead and So Are You by Stolen Chair Theatre Company. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should share that I'm good friends with one of the cast members, Liza Wade Green.) A bit like Weekend at Bernie's meets Cabaret, the play has a clever plot: The leader of a traveling vaudeville troupe dies, but the show must go on—so the entertainers incorporate his rotting corpse into the performance, developing "a death-defying act of death defiance." The macabre premise allows for some sardonic musings on mortality and many funny moments, the best one being a reenactment of the tomb scene from Romeo and Juliet with the recently deceased still headlining. By the end, the emcee is panting and sweating from inelegantly hoisting Romeo's lifeless body around the stage.

This kind of physical theater, Liza tells me, is more common across the pond. Indeed the best example of it I've seen was The National Theater of Scotland's production of Black Watch, which had its second sold-out run in Brooklyn last fall. The script was okay, flawed in some pretty unforgivable ways, but the show's exceptional choreography—not quite musical numbers but much more than basic stage blocking—was incredibly powerful. In the final scene, the hope, horror and heroism of combat is communicated in a startlingly visceral way through an extended sequence of soldiers marching. It brought tears to my and Ben Brantley's eyes.

I hope to see more of this blurring of the lines between drama and dance in the future. And I'm not surprised that Stolen Chair is experimenting with movement in this way. Theatre is Dead... is noteworthy because it suggests the birth of a breed of theater that's new to many New Yorkers. The show closes this Saturday, and the final three performances may already be sold out.

sexology

2009-01-25T21:52:00.006-05:00

this week's new york times magazine has a great piece on the psychosexual bases of female desire.

if i could go back and choose a different career path, you can bet your ass that "sexologist" would be in my top five.

"The genitals of the volunteers were connected to plethysmographs — for the men, an apparatus that fits over the penis and gauges its swelling; for the women, a little plastic probe that sits in the vagina and, by bouncing light off the vaginal walls, measures genital blood flow. An engorgement of blood spurs a lubricating process called vaginal transudation: the seeping of moisture through the walls. The participants were also given a keypad so that they could rate how aroused they felt."

i frequently think about how much i hate getting up in the morning, dressing myself and going to work; lately, i'd come to worry that i was just naturally lazy and that i'd be unable to muster up the energy to succeed in any occupation. but if my job was to hook people's genitals up to beeping arousal indicators and make them masturbate to copulating bonobos? that's the kind of job i could put on pants for in the morning.

maybe someday, in the distant future, human beings will live in an advanced and peaceable society that values scientific knowledge, where high school and college students will be better informed of the wide variety of possible fields and interests that they could legitimately pursue, and where career options like sexology or space piracy will be more widely available to all.

here's hoping.

Let Us Now Praise Giant Fat-Headed Baby

2009-01-25T17:52:00.002-05:00

This was in Dublin, too far into winter to turn back. Stadam had finally broken up because we had no more music left.

Dave was living under a bridge, and Nirav was living somewhere nobody would ever want to go. Mike was doing weird experiments out of strange old books, and making things happen that I couldn't understand, and didn't want to, and now Greg had disappeared in a puff of smoke. You would go around to the usual places asking about him but you always got the same story. Someone was looking for me, too, but I didn't know it yet.

What do I remember? Mostly streets like tunnels, long and deadly, topped by a low-hung, stretched-out, soggy canvas that was supposed to be the sky. I remember wanting to get the band back together. And there's a lot I don't remember at all: the gray of the houses huddled under that sky; the people who lived in those houses and who looked at you and each other like they wanted badly to ask some terrible, insulting question but knew they would never work up the nerve; the damp, living smell of things; what exactly it was we thought we were trying to accomplish. These are some of the things I don't remember very well at all.

Who would play music here? Who would want to?

There were other lads there that morning, the same cast and crew you saw in the windows of the buses as you stood there in the wet trying to light your cigarette, or from the windows of buses as you sat there trying to see through the rain crawling down the glass. When you saw them you knew them. Yes, they were skinny, but somehow more than just skinny, because something inside them was shining right through their pale, taut skins, watching the world. They were angry because they didn't know yet what it was, and happy because they didn't now yet what was to become of them. I don't remember them, either, and I don't want to. Their smudgy faces are now completely erased.

But the Baby wasn't angry, nor did he speak; the Baby wasn't skinny, nor did he move. And when he did move, when he did get angry, when his voice did open up like a train coming out of the empty insides of a mountain, you felt found, finally. We saw him and knew the band was back together. I remember him.

Safety School

2009-01-25T15:44:00.003-05:00

This VH1 show's existence is a credit to the American appetite for watching other people engage in obviously futile public attempts at self-improvement. Tool Academy! The slogan they use to dismiss the tools is not subtle, but it's awesome: "We're sorry. You're just a complete tool." Seriously.

The good news is that this is another step in the inexorable march toward the reality tv ideal, MILF Island ("We're sorry, Deborah. We no longer want to tap that.")

Overcooked

2009-01-24T21:29:00.007-05:00

Re NSinNY's Sam V. Otis post: Props to Steve Cropper and the horn section, but Cooke’s version of Change cleans Redding’s clock. Cooke treats a melody right. NSinNY tries valiantly, but can’t cover for Redding’s beat-you-over-the-head style.

The closest anyone came to beating Cooke at his own song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBzDkgLxpHw&feature=related.

Here’s the G.O.A.T. The album version is better, truer. The impatient can skip to 2:35.

Soylent Green Is Chickens

2009-01-24T17:46:00.005-05:00

I can't wait until this whole guilt-free meat from a petri dish thing gets going. No animal killing, smaller environmental footprint, what's not to like? (Well, maybe the taste, which for all I know could be awful). Also, lab-grown protein probably prefigures a bleak dystopian future, which is a bonus.

Sam v. Otis

2009-01-24T15:48:00.004-05:00

In a moment of drunken clarity, Mike said a few months ago that Otis Redding is a "liar" and that Sam Cooke keeps it "honest." If he means what I think he means, then I think he's definitely something. It's a fun inquiry given that both artists put in their finest vocal performance on the same song, "A Change is Gonna Come":

Everything you need to know about Otis Redding comes when he hits that first chorus. He hits the "looooooong" with a little left off of it and then pushes the note harder, loses it midway and starts the word over, like it wasn't enough the first time. And that's Otis--he troubles the note, prods its, strays on little melismatic detours as if he's singing to convince himself that he's going the right way.

Sam Cooke, on the other hand, isn't trying to convince anyone. He's got the truth before he hits the note, a straight, solid "looooong" and when he stops and picks the word up again, it's not a question; it's an argument. Like he knew that's where he was going all along.

Sam Cooke is Matisse--strong line, bright color--and Otis is Picasso. I'm an Otis guy all the way--liar or not.

Los xenofobos pierden en Nashville

2009-01-23T18:13:00.003-05:00

Nice to see the fine folks of the Music City convincingly reject an "English Only" measure that would have banned government use of foreign languages for everything except public health and safety (whatever that would have meant). Proponents hid their xenophobia behind two fig leaves: savings and integration. The first argument--that translation services are an undue burden on the city purse--pretty much self-immolated once voters figured out that the special election was going to cost them $300,000 (more than twice the annual cost of city translation services).

The second argument--that an English-only government would encourage Spanish speakers to learn English--is just batshit crazy to begin with. Immigrants want to learn English. And if they didn't want to learn English in the face of a massive financial incentive to do so (called the labor market), it's a little optimistic to think English-only board of education meetings would push them over the edge, isn't it?

Talking About You

2009-01-23T17:05:00.003-05:00

Starbucks, Herald Square

A woman approaches the counter.

Barista: She like one of those girls that think they pretty but they not.
Woman:
Barista: I wasn’t talking about you.
Woman: You were. You thought I couldn’t hear you--strange, with a voice like yours.
Barista:
Woman:
Barista 2:
Woman:
Customers:

Sun Kil Moon

2009-01-23T14:00:00.002-05:00

Responding to Evan's post yesterday, friend and indiegirl extraordinaire Casey had this say about Sun Kil Moon:

sun kil moon is great for putting on your big indie-kid headphones, staring out at the gray clouds, and knowing that you don't have to slit your wrists bc he's doing it for you, musically, and in the most absurdly beautiful way possible...
do you have "april"? it's such a love letter to san francisco, it had me all nostalgic when i was moving away from there. there's a line in the first song about "houses adorn so beautifully the marin headlands" that contrasts with a line in a later song, talking about italy i think, where "houses row the hills like yellowing teeth". same image, but one at 'home' and the other far away... gah, he kills me. now i'll have to listen to that on the plane today...

I don't have April and haven't listened to enough Sun Kil Moon, but that's about to change... (Safe travels, Casey).

Not Suozzi!

2009-01-23T11:59:00.003-05:00

It's Kirsten Gillibrand. Glad it's a woman, but am a little baffled that Paterson went with a Blue Dog. She's spent a lot of time on farm issues, and God knows how underrepresented they are in the Senate. Blergh.

UPDATE: It's possible I'm overreacting and Gillibrand will start moving left for us city-folk. This, for example, is a good sign.

That's Hot

2009-01-23T10:03:00.004-05:00

I took this picture at the City Palace in Udaipur--it's a massive solid gold sculpture of the Sun God, before which the Rajput kings of Mewar made lavish offerings at sunrise (which reminded me of that scene in Ocean's Eleven when Don Cheadle is watching a casino getting blown up on TV and you can actually see the building going down through the window behind him--if you want the sun, and it's sunrise...).

Really, I post this only because it confirmed what I'm sure we've all long suspected: the sun has a bad-ass handlebar moustache.

Rock and Roll could never Hip Hop like this

2009-01-22T17:25:00.008-05:00

Dearest Music Aficionados,

While I anxiously await new releases from Animal Collective (I recommend "My Girls") and Andrew Bird, I figured I'd drop a few links to other acts that have made an impression on me lately. I would greatly appreciate further recommendations, so I can check them out and explain to you why you're wrong.

In no particular order:

Sun Kil Moon. Intimate folk rock, nice gentle meanderings.
Passion Pit. Harvard pop electronica (assuming such category exists). I only recently received this recommedation, but it's already better than Hercules & Love Affair which somehow ended up on every 'best 0f 2008' list despite its proclivity to sucking ass. Thanks to Andy Orr for confirming.
Delta Spirit. Cock rock, in a loving way. Their myspace page is being temperamental, but here's a quality production.
Blitzen Trapper. '60s pop rock.
Seabear They're so chill, they're icelandic. Thanks Andy, again.
Walkmen. Still awesome four albums in. You'll love or hate singer Hamilton Leithauser's voice. I find him dreamy.
The Dodos. "Cocaine's a hellofa drug".

New "The National", "Bon Iver", "Grizzly Bear":

The Case Against Clevinger

2009-01-22T16:09:00.005-05:00

Glenn Greenwald has a nice overview of the very positive steps the Hopeful One has taken in his first days, and the concomitant bedwetting by the Washington Post editorial board, which argues that the only system that ought to be used to try Guantanamo detainees is one that is guaranteed to let in all the evidence. This is exactly the sort of fashionable "moderate" position that is for all practical purposes indistinguishable from the most extremist position.

If the only evidentiary rule is that you go to whichever court will guarantee a conviction, then who cares whether the trial takes place in Guantanamo or the federal courts? Obama's delay ("deliberation") in deciding what to do with Guantanamo inmates makes me think he's closer to the Post's side than he is to mine.

Also, I think that this euphemism from the Post editorial does nothing but make us all a little bit stupider: "For those for whom traditional prosecutions would not be feasible, he should ensure robust due process, whether in courts-martial or a version of existing military commissions." There's a much more succinct way to describe "those for whom traditional prosecutions would not be feasible": "those who have been tortured."

Plus the pillow talk is all eloquent...

2009-01-22T11:39:00.007-05:00

(Thanks Danimal)

I just can't believe America is so enamored with the Obama marriage.

Wait, did she say "fisting"?

Impressive

2009-01-22T11:08:00.005-05:00

This sort of article is why I subscribe to Wired. A father who happens to also be a part-time geneticist has a daughter whose muscular/skeletal disease evades diagnosis. So he does what any good father would do and maps the hundreds of thousands of base pairs that make up her DNA (he focuses on transcriptome actually, which is a cross-section of the genome writ large), searching for the needle in the haystack mutation that is causing her condition. Except that he really has no idea what a needle would look like. My dad coached my soccer team, so there's a lot of ways to be a good dad.

Suozzi!

2009-01-22T09:57:00.007-05:00

So it looks like Caroline Kennedy is out, which is good news to anyone who thinks that senators ought to have actually done stuff other than inheriting really charming genes. David Paterson is doubtless looking to this blog right now for a little guidance on whom to appoint. I say Tom Suozzi, the hypercompetent policy wonk Democrat who is the county executive of Nassau County, probably the best run county in the state of New York.

Suozzi talks a little moderate for my taste on issues like abortion, but he's all about fighting Albany bullshit, which continues to be the best thing a NY politician can do. More importantly, he is committed to smart infrastructure spending (like digitizing medical records and accelerating the 2nd Avenue subway project). Among his really good ideas is his proposal to immediately transfer the burden of Medicaid spending from states to the federal government. It'd free up local money for projects and transporation, avoid statewide budget crises, and be a healthy first step towards universal coverage. Suozzi was on the Brian Lehrer show a few weeks ago and impressed me:

If nothing else, a Suozzi appointment means that there would almost certainly be a contested primary in 2010 which would eliminate the the possibility that we'll be stuck for 8-14 years with an uncontested senator who had been appointed by a non-democratically elected governor.

Also, Suozzi sounds like Swayze and ladies love themselves some Swayze.

great balls of fire

2009-01-21T18:15:00.005-05:00

that's some bad ass shit. you know you've made it when you wake up in the morning, put on a crisp suit, go downstairs, and greet an enormous woman bedecked in a cape emblazoned with your face and the continent of your ethnic origin, topped off by a cap screaming out your last name in all caps block lettering. if i had the money, i would pay several enormous women to ride the subways all day wearing sujan trivedi-themed regalia. so to sum up, you'd best pray that i never acquire any significant amount of disposable wealth.

Matt Taibbi to Tom Friedman: "Suck. On. This."

2009-01-21T12:43:00.005-05:00

Great to see Taibbi back at the NY Press (which has been worthless since he left).

After this article, nobody really needs to write anything about Thomas Friedman, including Thomas Friedman. Money quote: "This is Friedman’s life: He flies around the world, eats pricey lunches with other rich people and draws conclusions about the future of humanity by looking out his hotel window and counting the Applebee’s signs." Really, it's worth reading the whole thing.

And if you're wondering why Friedman is contemptible and not just bemusing, take a look at this unhinged, unlettered call to war crimes from 2004. Totally unforgivable.