Inconsistently Updated

On Health Care Reform

2010-03-24T02:43:00.002-04:00

14 state attorneys general, all but one Republicans, have filed suit to block health care reform from going into effect. While I have only actually read Virginia A.G. Ken Cuccinelli’s complaint, both actions (the other A.G.s filed jointly) are premised on the notion that the United States Constitution’s Commerce Clause cannot be used to compel citizens to purchase health insurance. The Commerce Clause, situated in Article I, § 8, states that “The Congress shall have the power…[t]o regulate commerce…among the several states….” This Clause, which has been interpreted broadly by the Supreme Court since the New Deal Era, allows Congress to regulate channels of interstate commerce, persons or things in interstate commerce, or activities arising out of or connected to commercial transactions. As the Court held in Wickard v. Filburn, and recently affirmed in Gonzales v. Raich, an activity needn’t be expressly “interstate” in character to fall within Congress’s regulatory ambit; rather, it need only have a non-tenuous effect on interstate activity.

No one, of course, seriously contests the fact that health insurance is, itself, a thing in interstate commerce. What opponents of the health care bill argue is that persons who will be required to obtain health insurance, or face a tax penalty, are not, by merely existing, themselves participating in interstate commerce. As Cuccinelli’s complaint contends, the “status of being a resident or citizen of…Virginia…is not even a non-economic activity affecting interstate commerce. It is entirely passive.” The logical extension of the argument (not made by Cuccinelli in his filing) is that if Congress can, by operation of the Commerce Clause, compel you to buy health insurance, why can’t it compel you to buy, say, a car from GM or Chrysler? Where does the line suggested by cases like United States v. Lopez (invalidating the federal Gun Free School-Zones Act of 1990) and United States v. Morrison (invalidating, in part, the Violence Against Women Act) ultimately get drawn?

Unless the courts (and, ultimately, the Court) elect to virtually repeal the New Deal by returning to a pre-Wickard reading of the Commerce Clause, this argument is unlikely to find purchase. Whether the mere fact of residence or citizenship is an activity affecting interstate commerce is not the relevant inquiry. What the courts are likely to find relevant is that all people are consumers of medical services. Indeed, what distinguishes compulsory purchasing of health insurance from, say, compulsory purchase of an automobile is that people are fulling capable of declining to purchase a car. However, people do not choose to use medical services in the way that they choose, or choose not to, buy a car. If an uninsured person suffers a heart attack, chokes on a fishbone in a restaurant, or gets injured in car accident, he or she will likely receive medical treatment. The cost of treating this uninsured person is a) borne by people who do have insurance in the forms of higher premiums, and b) shouldered by the taxpayers, who subsidize hospital’s emergency treatment of persons unable to pay; these are negative externalities which undoubtedly affect interstate commerce, and ergo fall comfortably within Congress’s regulatory ambit. Granted, there are libertarian arguments that we either ought to leave uninsured persons in medical distress untreated, or that we shouldn’t require hospital emergency rooms to treat all comers, or that we should simply refuse to subsidize such treatment (and consequently let many hospitals slide into bankruptcy); however, these policy ships have sailed. As long as we permit uninsured people to seek emergency medical treatment, not having health insurance will be an activity touching upon interstate commerce.

A broader philosophical point - one that would doubtlessly be rejected by conservative opponents of broad government regulation - is that health care is precisely an area where we should want the government to act. Our present health care crisis is nothing less than an epic collective action problem, and the transaction costs of fixing it privately are far too high to be surmounted. Doctors, patients, hospitals, medical schools, insurers, medical device manufacturers, and pharmaceutical companies all have competing, yet interrelated agendas that serve to drive the cost of health care higher and higher; this matrix of interests (perhaps analogous to the tangled, invisible web of toxic assets that dragged the global financial industry to its knees) is far too complex for the players to effectively unravel themselves. In such a situation, government is precisely the mechanism that we should turn to; only it is sufficiently empowered and democratically legitimate to impose a workable solution.

I suspect that among actual Republican policymakers that this is not, in and of itself, a controversial view. After all, many of them vociferously defended Medicare, basically government-run single-payer care, in their opposition to the far more market-friendly Democratic health care reform bill. However, congressional Republicans have, of late, been channeling their supporters in the Tea Party movement, an ideology so inarticulate and incoherent that it is hardly worth of the descriptor. Tea Partiers and their congressional sycophants view government with poisonous levels of suspicion; any expansion is not only regarded negatively, put as a violation of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, which simply announces that the federal government’s powers are limited. The Tea Partiers chronic mistrust of government goes well beyond healthy skepticism; it is the Reagan view that government is incompetent per se taken to its logical extreme.

But government programs are not de facto inferior to private solutions; a superior view is that government programs ought only to exist when there is no adequate private solution. This explains, for instance, the necessity for a Defense Department, or public schools, or Social Security: private alternatives on their own are not merely inferior; they are not feasible altogether. But note that none of these systems is wholly exclusive of private industry or actors: private military contractors are integral to the national defense; private schools serve those who prefer an alternative to the public model; and private retirement vehicles supplement Social Security income, and vice versa. So it is with health care reform: the government has eliminated certain insurance industry practices, will create a regulated exchange, and will impose the individual insurance purchasing mandate. Yet, at the core of all of this reform remains the existing network of private insurance companies, as well as the rest of the nation’s preexisting health care infrastructure. Indeed it is telling that Republicans have spent much of their energy launching wholly fictive attacks on the bill, claiming that it constitutes a government takeover of one-sixth of the economy, or that it will empower government “death panels” to deny health care to the elderly or the disabled. When you actually examine the bill itself, what you see is basically glorified regulation, coupled with the mandate and some subsidies; as President Obama himself noted, this may be “major reform,” but it is hardly “radical reform.”

All of this is not to say that there are no credible bases upon which to attack the bill. Cost is obviously a major concern: health care is projected to be a trillion-dollar expense over the next decade; its much bruited-about deficit-reducing qualities are largely dependent on Congress sticking to its guns and actually enacting the broad-based taxes needed to achieve those savings targets. Another interrelated concern is that it will not adequately control costs; the price of health care will continue unabated and taxpayers will be on the hook for a larger portion of the bill.

However, it is not credible to attack this bill as an assault on freedom, liberty, capitalism, or whatever other content-neutral value-laden buzzword one wishes to use. Government should act when markets fail, as the American health insurance market inarguably has. This is the entire purpose of having a government in the first place: in exchange for surrendering a certain amount of personal autonomy, we gain an institution capable of solving problems that we alone cannot. To assert that by its mere action government imperils our liberty and welfare is unsquarable with government’s very purpose.

The Best Albums of 2009 (in Haiku!)

2009-12-25T21:43:00.001-05:00

The Sound of Young America

50 records I enjoyed this year; as always, the ordering is arbitrary, and had this list been published yesterday or tomorrow, there's about 10–15 records bubbling under the surface that could have made the cut. And this year it's all haikus!

50. Sunset Rubdown – Dragonslayer (Jagjaguwar)

Is it possible?

Wolf Parade a side project?

All signs point to "yes"

49. Camera Obscura – My Maudlin Career (4AD)

Belle and Sebastian

Could stand to learn a lesson

From their fellow Scots

48. Dave Bazan – Curse Your Branches (Barsuk)

Au revoir Jesus

Goodbye Pedro the Lion

Life is full of doubt

47. Lil Wayne – No Ceilings (mixtape)

Stop selling albums

Lil Wayne gives it all away

Unbeatable price

46. Neko Case – Middle Cyclone (Anti-)

Crouching Neko Case

On a Mercury Cougar

No hidden dragon

45. Cass McCombs – Catacombs (Domino)

Keep on keeping on

Karen Black guests on a track

Like Family Guy

44. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – It's Blitz (Interscope)

Brooklyn survivors

She's probably not dating

That guy from Liars

43. Sonic Youth – The Eternal (Matador)

Zombie alt-rockers

Do not bury until dead

Put that shovel down

42. The-Dream – Love vs. Money (Def Jam)

Sexy, humorous

But that hyphen in "The-Dream?"

Unnecessary

41. Pajo – Scream With Me (Black Tent Press)

I love the Misfits

Sure enough, so does Pajo

Four-track recordings

40. The xx – The xx (Young Turks)

Dry and hollow sound

Why listen to that racket?

But you would be wrong

39. Micachu & the Shapes – Jewellery (Rough Trade)

The new bricolage

No one cares if it will last

The English love it

38. Morrissey – Years of Refusal (Lost Highway)

What about The Smiths?

Stop asking about The Smiths

Go ask Johnny Marr

37. JD Twitch – 60 Minutes of Fear (RVNG)

Yeah, it's a mixtape

But in the future, format

Is irrelevant

36. Pink Mountaintops – Outside Love (Jagjaguwar)

Black Mountains are great

This guy has another band

Pink Mountains are great

35. Mos Def – The Ecstatic (Downtown)

No more bad movies

Please stick to the rivers and

Streams you are used to

34. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart –
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart (Slumberland)

Band's name is too long

I'm stupid for choosing an

All-haiku format

33. Condo Fucks – Fuckbook (Matador)

Oh fictional bands

Still, they are funnier than

Flight of the Conchords

32. Double Dagger – More (Thrill Jockey)

As in "Baltimore"

When someone says "Drum 'n' Bass"

They do not mean this

31. The Rural Alberta Advantage – Hometowns (Saddle Creek)

Saddle Creek, you say?

And not a Bright Eyes album?

Hope for the future

30. Bibio – Ambivalence Avenue (Warp)

Sampledelica

Everything falls into place

The Campfire Headphase

29. Bonnie 'Prince' Billy – Beware (Drag City)

Lots of weird photos

The music is not so weird

Mr. Consistent

28. The Thermals – Now We Can See (Kill Rock Stars)

Perfect power pop

Move to Portland, Oregon

And stack that paper

27. jj – No. 2 (Sincerely Yours)

One million dollars

For a picture of jj

Please do not redeem

26. Green Day – 21st Century Breakdown (Reprise)

Obama's in charge

Everyone said "chill out," yet

The war continues

25. Yo La Tengo – Popular Songs (Matador)

Across the river

No Hanukkah shows this year

Is it Chanukkah?

24. Depeche Mode – Sounds of the Universe (Mute)

They're printing euros

Best Mode since Violator

Goth love never dies

23. Nirvana – Live at Reading (Geffen)/

Bleach Deluxe Edition (Sub Pop)

They were awesome live

The greatest rock band ever

At last, evidence

22. El Perro Del Mar – Love is Not Pop (Licking Fingers)

El Perro Del Mar

What does that mean in English?

"The dog of the sea"

21. No Age – Losing Feeling EP (Sub Pop)

Half the length of Nouns

I enjoyed it twice as much

Just my opinion

20. Mount Eerie – Wind's Poem (P.W. Elverum & Sun)

Hey Phil Elverum

Your underground secret lair

Must be a nice place

19. Reigning Sound – Love and Curses (In the Red)

Back to the garage

Where do these guys park their cars

Out in the driveway?

18. The Horrors – Primary Colours (XL)

Remember Strange House?

Well neither do The Horrors

Gravy train whistle

17. Bill Callahan – Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle (Drag City)

Dark, light, dark again

Who needs molasses indie?

This guy is funny

16. Best Coast – When I'm With You 7" (Black Iris)/

Make You Mine 7" (Group Tightener)

Suburban sprinklers

Let's give Real Estate a prize

While we ignore this

15. Amesoeurs – Amesoeurs (Profound Lore)

A marriage of French,

Black metal, and The Cure, that

Ended in divorce

14. Lady Gaga – The Fame Monster (Interscope)

Is she a genius?

Inauthentically brilliant

Like a bad romance

13. Handsome Furs – Face Control (Sub Pop)

At last Bruce Springsteen

Indie rock gives you your due

Skip Sam's Town, buy this

12. The Raveonettes – In and Out of Control (Vice)

White Stripes stole thunder

Not better than White Blood Cells

Better than Horehound

11. Cold Cave – Love Comes Close (Heartworm/Matador)

Signed to Matador

Interpol, or Early Man?

Only time will tell

10. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavillion/

Fall Be Kind EP (Domino)

You could have slept through

All of Two Thousand and Nine

Wouldn't have mattered

9. Raekwon – Only Built 4 Cuban Linx 2 (Ice H2O)

Branding failed Jay-Z

Better than The Blueprint 3

In Raekwon we trust

8. Hunx and His Punx – Gay Singles (True Panther Sounds)

More like "yes homo"

Beats Reatard at his own game

Not Monopoly

7. Brilliant Colors – Introducing (Slumberland)

Girls, girls, girls j'adore

Twenty-eight minutes and out

Leave 'em wanting more

6. Sunn O))) – Monoliths & Dimensions (Southern Lord)

Play this record loud

No one can live forever

Sonic Death Monkey

5. Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (Glass Note)

Yes, Phoenix are French

Hey, Mozart was Austrian

Pop or rock, who cares?

4. Girls – Album (True Panther Sounds/Matador)

Jerry Lee Lewis

If he were raised in a cult

Lover, not Killer

3. Emeralds – What Happened (No Fun)

Hypnagogic pop

Inapposite to describe

The beautiful float

2. Fever Ray – Fever Ray (Rabid/Mute)

More people would care

If this were released under

The Knife moniker

1. The Dutchess and the Duke – Sunset/Sunrise (Hardly Art)

Sounds like Side A of

The Rolling Stones' Aftermath

This year's number one

G(hostface) K(illah)

2009-10-05T17:49:00.003-04:00

Nice hat

Pitchfork: Can you talk about the direction you took on this one?

GK: The direction is more based around storytelling. It's poetry. You know, different situations and topics. It ain't all lovey dovey, you know what I'm saying? You do got your songs complimenting women, and songs where I fucked up, where I might have got a girl pregnant. Songs where I'm feeling lonely and shit, where my girl left me and there's another man that moved into my house with kids. And you got situations where you bump into a pregnant girl, but she's so pretty, and you wish you could have her, but she's pregnant and she's married. Just problems when I might have messed around, let the cable man come to my house, fix my cable, but two weeks later he's somewhere on my property in my guest house, screwing my wife. So it's just different topics on the album and shit. It's more mature; that's what I'll say.

Pitchfork: So it's really an album of grown-up relationship talk?

GK: Yeah. Growing up, relationships, and me just spitting game at women, complimenting them, things of that nature.

The Future Has Arrived

2009-09-20T20:52:00.003-04:00

Once Upon a Time in Nazi–Occupied France

2009-08-24T22:49:00.014-04:00

Putting out the fire with gasoline

In a 1972 film essay, Jean-Luc Godard asked, "How can cinema help the Vietnamese people win their independence?" In 2009, Quentin Tarantino asks, "How can cinema help the Allies win the Second World War?" and then proceeds, over the course of 2 1/2 hours, to answer his own question. Inglourious Basterds, like its nearest antecedent, Jean-Pierre Melville's brilliant, torturous Resistance film Army of Shadows, is a genre picture cloaked in the trappings of Nazi-occupied France. Unlike Melville's deeply personal gangster movie (he was actually a member of the French Resistance) however, Tarantino's Basterds is an inversion–his celluloid Nazis are not cinematic representations of the real thing, but deserve, in fact, to be bound in quotes.

Indeed, the line on Inglourious Basterds is that it takes place "at The Movies," as the Village Voice's J. Hoberman put it. The criticism isn't new; ever since the 1-2-3 punch of Kill Bill Vols. 1 & 2 and Death Proof, the knock on Tarantino has been that his films are nothing more than hyperliterate exercises in junk genre tourism: intricately observed, immaculately realized, but ultimately devoid of meaningful content. Yet those films were essentially advertisements for the careers of others, whereas Basterds, though it certainly rephrases great swathes of sub-classic cinema–Tarantino himself has characterized it as a Spaghetti Western, and he has the Morricone score to prove it–is more an act of cultural criticism than a simple synthesis of tastes. Tarantino recognizes what is all but explicit: as the ranks of the World War II generation continue to thin day after day, the living memory of Nazi atrocities presses closer to extinction; soon, all that will be left will be the movies–Nazism as mediated by cinema. What Basterds says is that the vision of National Socialism likely to persist will be the silver-tongued, jack-booted version articulated by Casablanca, by The Guns of Navarone, and by (appositely enough) Raiders of the Lost Ark. Abstracted from any sociological, political, economic, or historical context, all that his left is the so-call banality of evil; an evil that, in the hands of the cinema, is not so banal at all.

Since the actual story of World War II is far too complex, depressing, and ambiguous to turn into a straightforward action film, Hollywood and its global intellectual subsidiaries have elided, sending small, appealingly international cliques of movie stars to eliminate this faceless, but appropriately high ranking Third Reich apparatchik or blow up that fictional bridge, train, gun emplacement, et cetera, et cetera. Tarantino obviously modeled Basterds on this genre: The Dirty Dozen is simply the most obvious influence (right down to its destroy-gobs-of-high-ranking-Nazis objective), with Kelly's Heroes, Force 10 From Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, A Bridge Too Far, The Train, and others too numerous to mention serving as spiritual predecessors. Where Basterds departs from these pictures (at least content-wise; formally, Tarantino is all over the map) is 1) that it envisions Jews taking their revenge on the Nazis, and 2) Tarantino bends the moral arc of the universe so far that he pushes it completely out of alignment with history. Indeed, Basterds is a maximalist fantasia: rather than simply use the Second World War as a backdrop for his story, Tarantino rewrites it, subbing in the actual Nazi high command for the usual fictionalized cadres of German officers who get rubbed out at the end of these things. In ripping open this complete breach between the reality of the war and his fictionalized version thereof, Tarantino realizes a vision of the film Nazi as a trope existing apart from the inconceivable real-world atrocities; it is an unmoored symbol, wholly bound by a cinematic grammar that accrues from movie to movie as the reality beneath becomes totally obscured. Once the symbol is stripped of its actual value, the boundaries of what is permissible are exploded; hence Tarantino is free to have Hitler and Goebbels mown down in a hail of Basterd bullets as the rest of the Reich is incinerated "by the face of Jewish vengeance."

Thus it is that the criticisms–that Tarantino is insensitive to historical fact, or worse, exploiting atrocity–are defused. To be sure, the Nazis in Inglourious Basterds are evil, but their evil, typified by Christoph Waltz's insinuatingly brilliant turn as the charming, sinister Colonel Hans Landa, is discrete, bounded by what we see on the screen. The sense of menace that pervades the whole proceedings is purchased by Tarantino's artful manipulation of a cinematic grammar established by the hundreds, if not thousands, of war movies that have preceded, and informed, his. The mechanized death of the real Nazis, the death camps and armored hordes laying waste to one end of Europe while strangling the other under a yoke of occupation, has a presence insofar as it purchases our fear, our revulsion, and, Tarantino hopes, our unyielding hatred. These two points–the reality of Nazi terror and the urbane, gleaming film analog–bear relation to one another, but also repulse one another. That they never occupy the same point is Tarantino's revelation. That he uses this fact to take brutal, ahistorical revenge against his Nazis is the ultimate expression of their unreality and perhaps a more damning indictment of the legions of filmmakers who have used the Third Reich as mere wallpaper for their Boy's Own tales than any that could be leveled against his film.

On Paglia On Hate Crimes

2009-07-12T22:26:00.008-04:00

The debate, such as it is

Camille Paglia's latest assault on the senses (scroll down) stems from a reader's letter expressing the same old shopworn confusion about hate crimes: why do we not just punish people the same for the same net result? "If I am murdered, is that less heinous than a member of a protected class being murdered?" asks Steve Larson of Conejo Valley, California.

This question misses the entire point of hate crimes legislation by reducing the issue to "one dead black/gay/Muslim person > one dead white male." Hate crime legislation is not predicated solely on the identity of the victim, but on the motivation of the individual committing the crime: the victim must be targeted based upon a protected characteristic. Of course, the characteristics are all in fact race/gender/religion/sexual orientation neutral, but let's face it: people don't usually target white straight male Christians because of those particular characteristics, so the popular image of the law is that it protects African-Americans, Jews, gays, women to a greater degree and thus by implication lowers the relative value of everyone else.

The alternative image problem of hate crime legislation is the one Paglia addresses and embraces:

I have been on the record since the 1990s as strongly opposing hate crimes legislation. I think it is a totalitarian intrusion into citizens' thought processes. Government functionaries should not be ceded the dangerous authority to make decisions about motivation. They aren't novelists, psychologists or sibyls! Furthermore, there should be no special privileged class of protected groups in a democracy. A crime is a crime -- period.

Of course, crime is a crime – period. Murder is a crime. So is terrorism. If a person commits an act of terrorism that kills five people – plants a bomb at a shopping mall, say – and another kills his entire family in the confines of their home, also five people, are those equivalent crimes? Based on the raw loss of human life, you might say yes. Of course, terrorism is called terrorism for a reason: it's meant to instill fear in a targeted population, to extend far beyond the tangible consequences of the individual act and to disrupt society at large. The man who murders his family, on the other hand, though he may be a monster, is unlikely to have caused the same systemic shock as the terrorist. While each has taken the same number of lives, we instinctively feel that the terrorist is worthy of greater punishment, and by and large our laws presently reflect that judgment.

Terrorism is an instructive example, because hate criminals are basically terrorists. They target people based on a protected characteristic and then victimize them. The immediate victim suffers, but the broader audience for the act, intended or not, is all members of that protected group, and beyond that, society at large. When Emmett Till was beaten to death for addressing a white woman, it was an act of political violence reinforcing the deeply illegitimate regime of Jim Crow by demonstrating the impunity with which whites could victimize blacks. When Matthew Shepard was beaten and left to die, tied to a fence post, it was an act of political violence reinforcing heterosexual dominance by demonstrating the worthlessness of homosexuals.

I bring up Shepard because Mr. Larson and Ms. Paglia do. Curiously, Paglia, who considers inquiring into the motivations of Shepard's killers by the government "totalitarian," professes to give them the benefit of the doubt as to those same motives:

Although I am a supporter of the death penalty in extreme cases, I think there were ambiguities here: The aimless hooligans who beat Shepard and tied him to a fence perhaps didn't necessarily mean to kill him.

But "a crime is a crime -- period," right? Who cares if these "aimless hooligans...didn't necessarily mean to kill" Matthew Shepard – they did, didn't they? Yet Paglia believes, based on her perception of the observable indicia surrounding the case, that the killers – whom she reduces to "hooligans," as though they'd bashed in a couple of mailboxes instead of another human being – are worthy of some measure of clemency.

Hate crimes legislation is not thought policing. People are just as free to be bigots as they ever were, provided that they do not translate their poisonous beliefs into violent actions. By adopting hate crimes legislation, society recognizes this political violence for what it is – an attempt by private actors to demonstrate that the full rights and privileges of American citizenship do not apply to all Americans. Much like President Bush opined that terrorists "hate us for our freedom," hate criminals target their victims because they presume to be equal. When this fundamental equality is denied, it is only proper that a democratic society should demonstrate the legitimacy of its political order by raising the cost of that denial.

It's not entirely clear why Paglia considers such a system to be totalitarian. Hate criminals commit an underlying crime – they are not being punished solely for their motivations. What makes a hate crime a hate crime is still very much oriented around the result: the terror the act inspires in the target population. Obviously, motive goes to establishing that a hate crime has occurred, but inquiring about a defendant's motivation is hardly thought policing; it is just plain old policing. Indeed, motive is, in large part, what separates a broken window from being vandalism or an attempted burglary. Surely Paglia would not suggest that we just have a "broken window" crime and leave it at that.

Perhaps it's the notion that hate crimes legislation suggests a correct, government-endorsed alternative political position. This train, however, has left the station. The federal government, to varying degrees over the past half-century, has been committed to full political equality for most minority groups (not counting the odious omission of gays). As the near-century of segregation following the abolition of slavery demonstrated, the equality guaranteed by the Thirteen, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution is not self-enforcing; robust governmental action was, and remains, at least insofar as Congress is concerned, required to make those rights a reality. People have the right to hold and express contrary opinions, but they do not have the right to hold them unopposed, even by the federal government. Thus Paglia's contrariness does not even hold up as a full-throated libertarian defense of the First Amendment, which is in no way impinged by hate crimes legislation unless you think it your constitutional prerogative to brutalize categories of people you don't like.

A crime is a crime – period. And our response to crime should reflect the true nature of the crime, not merely a mechanical reaction to quantity. To assert that hate crime legislation is unnecessary because, as the trope goes, "all crime is hate" is a profound misreading of what happens every time someone is victimized because of their race, religion, nationality, gender, or sexual orientation. To ignore that reality because we aspire to live in a "colorblind" society – indeed, if something so simplistic is what we aspire to – is to deny the direct challenge that hate criminals pose to our constitutional system. It is the epitome of wishful thinking.

* * * * *

It's not salient to my main point, so I didn't address it above, but special opprobrium should be reserved for Paglia's treatment of Matthew Shepard, which follows here:

Despite my abhorrence of the crime, I was a dissenter about the sanctification of Shepard, a charming young man with a troubled family background who had faced many difficulties in life because of his frailty and lack of conventional masculinity.
Only a week before, Shepard had expressed fears about being killed. Given that apprehension, it is still inexplicable -- if the case is examined only through a political lens -- why Shepard would leave a public place in the company of such blatant thugs. A hate crimes law that claims to be able to penetrate the mind of the perpetrator should be equally open to questions about the victim. If, out of fairness or pity, one avenue of inquiry is shut down, then the other must be too.

I'm not certain how to read this except to say that Paglia is open to the possibility that Shepard might have gotten what was coming to him. After all, I fail to see what "questions about the victim" might alter the moral calculus of what was done to him. Yes, it's possible that Shepard, a marginalized 21 year old kid, might have exercised poor judgment the night he was killed, if that's what Paglia is implying (and if it's not, than she ought to be more forthright about what she is implying). But implicating Shepard in his own murder is an act of moral bankruptcy that is emblematic of Paglia's misplaced intellectual vanity. Only she can see the truth, even when the truth is just her own opinion marinated in an unhealthy measure of self-regard. After all darling, don't you know she was a "dissenter" back when they were sanctifying that "charming young man with a troubled family background?"

Long May You Wavves

2009-06-29T15:22:00.007-04:00

Pitchfork: It's kind of a Lindsay Lohan thing where you get more famous for going out drunk than for making Mean Girls.

NW: Well, yeah. It's like the fucking indie TMZ or something. It's like all that I've done now up to this point is condensed into YouTube video that shows me soundchecking. I thought it was blown out of proportion.

Frankly, I completely buy Nathan Williams' a.k.a. Wavves explanation for his breakdown at the Primavera Festival - going from playing Little Rock w/ 25 people in the crowd to playing Euro festivals with thousands would probably put the zap on a lot of people, especially in today's internet-fueled era of fame-cycle hypertelescoping. Indeed, I'm shocked that more of these scuzz rock bandits don't go psycho when they hit the medium-time. Just listen to the music: its lo-fi production values no longer signify as we-couldn't-afford-it DIY; fuck, if you've got a MacBook you've got your hands on the means of production to make a semi-professional-sounding recording. Rather, lo-fi is an aesthetic that appears to symbolize intimacy - the ideal is playing basement shows and having your own little slice of the world, and that value system is deeply embedded within the music these bands make. If it's punk - a term so elastic that it no longer has descriptive value, in my book - it's punk in the way that people who make and sell handicrafts at the Artists & Fleas market are punk. Most of these bands (there are counterexamples, e.g., Times New Viking) seem to be opting out, or more precisely, they're opting in by opting out, consciously forming a subculture whose insularity is not a gesture of defiance, but perhaps not a gesture at all. Thus, while anybody who plays music for a living would be inclined to grab for that brass ring of (relative) fame and (relative) fortune, it's not a given that these bands are fundamentally equipped to make the leap. A lot of this music oxidizes upon emerging from the basement. That its practitioners, many cocooned in climate-controlled scenes until someone starts circulating ripped mp3s of their demo cassette, should go a little batshit when confronted with playing to massive crowds of the yet-to-be-converted, if not actively hostile, should not be particularly surprising. The following exchanges say it all:

Pitchfork: If you had your way, would you prefer to be playing warehouse parties instead of big festivals?

NW: Yeah! But then again, it's not that I don't want to play festivals or do stuff like that. It's just, I think, the realization of how big it is maybe overwhelmed me, and I needed to take a step back and see what was in front of me and try and figure it out. Also, I was extremely fucked up and made a series of really bad decisions.

*****

Pitchfork: Did you ever consider doing Wavves as something where you just recorded and didn't play live?

NW: In the beginning, that's all it was. And everything happened so fast. Ryan came out to play drums a month before I started touring, or a month before we started touring. And then until the day of Barcelona, we were just touring nonstop. So we practiced for three weeks, me and Ryan, and then we went on tour nonstop, so there was never really any time for me to like transfer the songs from recordings to how they would pan out live. And I still haven't had the chance to do that. It was just kind of: "OK, this is how the songs go. Let's just go play them and have fun." And that's when it was the most fun. It just got kind of... I don't know what it got.

I don't blame Pitchfork for becoming "the fucking indie TMZ," (a bit of an overstatement) much like I don't blame Marlo Stanfield for killing people and putting them in vacant houses; after all, the game's the game. It's not like Williams' breakdown wasn't what passes for news at the just-above-the-gutter indie rock level - what was Pitchfork going to do, not report on it? Turning around and lending a sympathetic ear is all in the game, too, a symbiotic exercise in public self-laceration that presumably benefits not only Pitchfork, which gets to reinforce its image as a leading news source (indeed, we are informed that this interview represents Williams "breaking his silence," as though he were Deep Throat or some shit) while giving Williams a chance to promote his modest career by flogging an upcoming tour and quasi-announcing a new record. Everybody benefits, even when you suspect, especially from Williams' frail, overawed demeanor, they don't.

1000 Times Nay

2009-06-26T01:31:00.013-04:00

Watched Christopher Weingarten's much tweeted (as opposed to bruited?)-about presentation at some Web 2.0 shitstorm wherein everybody tells you how much better your life will or will not be because of social media technologies that, in reality, only a very small, but very self-important segment of the population (myself included) abuse regularly. Basically Weingarten traces the devolution of music criticism from elite critics getting coke and vacations from record labels (his hyperbole, not mine), to the Web 1.0 era wherein young folk writing for Pitchfork and the sainted, departed Stylus became the outlet through which bands were broken, to today, when, because of leak culture, "All the review does now...is reinforce the opinion someone already has." This is bad because "crowds have terrible taste" thus enabling the rise of Fleet Foxes (about whom Weingarten and I are simpatico) in an NPR echo chamber because the "link economy" requires outlets to report on not what they want to report on but "trending topics" like Phish at Bonnaroo and so on and so forth. The general thrust is the oft-whispered (usually) refrain that bottom-up cultural consensus is bad because popular taste always regresses to some sort of mushy gray mean and that top-down outlets (like those that employ Weingarten, who is an outstanding critic, and certainly deserves to be employed by said outlets) are required to...I don't know...mediate popular taste? Validate it? Are we even talking about popular taste here? After all, Weingarten saves his invective for indie rock bands and the outlets who cover them; his example of the deleterious impact of "crowdsourcing" is Fleet Foxes – cited immediately after he bemoans the fact that his indie rock-fan friends are so self-segregated that they haven't heard of Lady Gaga, the present epitome of American popular taste.

Really, Weingarten's presentation was a grade-A rant, seeming more like a string of tweets at points than a coherent argument. "Crowdsourcing killed punk rock" is a wonderful bon mot, but what the fuck it actually means, I have no idea. Couple that with Weingarten's counterintuitive embrace of Twitter, which would seem to be the present epicenter of mediocrity and genre stratification, and you can reduce his speech to "things suck. Things will continue to suck. We will all be unemployed. Without gatekeepers, everything will sound like Fleet Foxes. In the absence of editors, a 140 character limit is a boon; anything worth saying can be said in 140 characters. I have a Twitter account. Make your tweets interesting." At the very least, though, it was certainly entertaining, and one detects that Weingarten has gotten at a core emotional truth: that those of us who enjoy reading rock criticism, and want it to have meant something, will have to do without in the future as crit is commoditized down into what Liz Colville aptly termed "the WHAT." Thus I cannot deny having derived great pleasure from watching Weingarten eulogize the dodo all the while staging a dance on its grave and hawking the very gun that wiped it out.

You can follow Christopher Weingarten @1000timesyes on Twitter, where he is the midst of reviewing 1000 new albums this year in 140 characters or less, and thus far has remained true to his own creed.

The King Is Dead

2009-06-25T18:44:00.007-04:00

Get On Your Boots(traps)

2009-02-24T22:44:00.005-05:00

Get back to work...at the job you don't have

I didn't watch Obama's faux State of the Union address, I admit. However, I did tune in on time to see Lousiana Gov. Bobby Jindal deliver the Republican response. Gov. Jindal is a rising star in the G.O.P.; a university president, congressman, and governor all before his 40th birthday, Jindal is obviously a man of great intellect, talent, and ambition, and it is easy to see why the Republicans would pin their hopes to him as opposed to many of the stale faces that make up the party's leadership within Washington. Furthermore, Jindal is the son of two Indian immigrants with something of a Horatio Alger background – presumably he, like newly-elected party chairman Michael Steele, serves as a shorthand for the rebranded G.O.P., willing to reach out beyond the Republican faithful and unprepared to cede to Obama the high ground of optimism.

Yet Jindal's message, rebutting the President's speech on the freshly-minted stimulus, was disappointingly trite. He opened with what can only be described as a curious mix of condescension – basically "Gee, isn't it neat-o that we have a black president?" – before attempting to co-opt Obama's mojo by reminding everyone that he, too, comes from what a shallower man would characterize as a "non-traditional" background. He then proceeded to engage in the kind of vacuous pro-America fluff that constitutes the G.O.P.'s message in the post-Reagan era, best summed up by the title of his response, "Americans Can Do Anything." What is "anything" you ask? Couldn't rightly say, although we got some great lines about how we need to pull together and how we're much wiser than the folks in Washington. A smart man might say, "Hey, governor, when we want to pull together – isn't that a core function of our federal government?" Of course, not, stupid: if you should have learned one thing from the ~~Bush Administration~~ New Deal Era it is that government is a self-perpetuating tumor destined by design to frustrate the incredible ingenuity of the American people. Nevermind the fact that we all have electricity now and there aren't any more cholera outbreaks.

While Gov. Jindal did not refer to the stimulus as the "porkulus" – Rush Limbaugh's preferred term – he did bemoan the inclusion of money for mag-lev trains and volcano monitoring as representative of its contents: frivolous bonbons that a money-drunk Democratic Congress couldn't help but stuff into government's pockets. Nevermind the fact that an effective stimulus by definition requires massive and quick amounts of spending, or that modern infrastructure or emergency warning systems – replace "volcano monitoring" with "hurricane monitoring" and you catch my drift – are precisely the types of investments government should be making. Also ignore the fact that Louisiana is slated to receive $3.8 billion in funding from the stimulus, though Jindal has indicated that he will only accept $3.7 billion on principle – doesn't want to have to raise taxes on business to support expanded unemployment benefits.

Speaking of tax cuts, why, if you guessed that they were Gov. Jindal's solution to the problem, well, you'd be right! Nevermind the fact that unemployed Americans don't typically have incomes and ergo don't pay income taxes. Or the fact that Obama's plan actually does contain enormous tax cuts in addition to the Bush legacy. Tax cuts remain the panacea that will fix every problem, dot every i, and put a chicken in every pot. Why, Bobby's cut taxes six times in Louisiana! Nevermind that sticky fact that the federal government – read: you and I – have been pumping money to Lousiana hand over fist since Katrina, or that we're chucking another $4B their way, or that Louisiana has some of the most grinding poverty in America, why cutting taxes works like a charm! You'd be a fool not to cut away! Also, while we're on the subject, can I interest you in some tax credits for exploratory drilling for oil and natural gas?

Jindal, like many Republicans, has also found religion on deficit spending: we mustn't borrow from our children in order to fund today's trillion dollar stimulus. Of course, borrowing from our children was a-OK when it came to funding an elective war in Iraq or cutting taxes for the Bernie Madoffs of the world. Frankly, I wonder if our children might not be happy that we borrowed from them if the choice was between deficits later or, you know, another Great Depression today. Naw, they would just say, "But mom, dad, don't you know that Americans can do anything? Don't worry about us, we love sleeping in the car and eating all of our meals out of a can! We can huddle next to each other for warmth! Anyways, we don't want you taking any of those soul-crushing, character-depleting handouts from our European-style socialist government on our account."

Most frustrating, perhaps, is either the complete disingenuousness or obliviousness that the G.O.P. continues to display in the face of its epic ideological failure. It breaks my heart every time I see a Republican pol like Jindal get up and tell some horrible story about how his father had to find an extra job in order to pay for Jindal's delivery at birth, and then, rather than saying, "Hey, we ought to do something about that," goes back to the same old bootstraps-and-ingenuity razmatazz that is basically G.O.Pig latin for "sink or swim." Essentially it implies that Americans who are unable to overcome serious economic hardships are somehow morally defective and ergo undeserving of having their most basic human needs met. The disappointment/absurdity was only compounded when Jindal assured the audience that the Republican Party stood for universal access to health coverage, and then in the very next sentence derided the possibility of a government health care scheme. To me, this sounds like, "The Republican Party stands for extinguishing fires, but not if it means adopting a big government solution like a fire department. I was thinking that if we gave the town's wealthiest citizens another tax cut we could convince them to collectively stand around burning buildings and urinate." Of course you know how the story will end: they'll take the money and still won't piss on you to put the fire out.

iTunes Game

2009-02-24T07:12:00.003-05:00

Hats with polo shirts? Why, it must be 2004!

To reassure you that I haven't given up (completely) on this space, I'm picking up on this from a whole bunch of different places:

Number of Songs: 17,728
Number of Albums: 1,593
Most Recently Played Song: St. Vincent, "What Me Worry?"
Most Played Song: The Thermals, "Pillar of Salt"
Most Recently Added Album: Juana Molina, Una Dia

First Song Alphabetically: Vampire Weekend, "A-Punk"
Last Song Alphabetically: Pavement, "Zurich is Stained"
Smallest Song Numerically: Animal Collective, "#1"
Largest Song Numerically: Patti Smith, "54321/Wave"

Shortest Song: John Mayer, "Blank" (0 seconds)
Longest Song: LCD Soundsystem, "45:33"

First Album Alphabetically: The Beatles, Abbey Road
Last Album Alphabetically: Neil Young, Zuma
First Band Alphabetically: A-Ha
Last Band Alphabetically: Zounds

First Ten Songs That Pop Up on Shuffle:

1. Duran Duran - "Wild Boys"
2. AC/DC - "Let Me Put My Love Into You"
3. The Police - "A Sermon"
4. Cat Power - "I Believe in You"
5. A.C. Newman - "Like a Hitman, Like a Dancer"
6. The Beatles - "I'll Cry Instead"
7. Dim Stars - "The Night Is Coming On"
8. Broadcast - "A Man Is Not a Bird"
9. The Rolling Stones - "The Lantern"
10. Animal Collective - "Turn Into Something"

Tumblr Censrshp

2009-02-18T12:26:00.005-05:00

Too small to be Blogger, too big to be Twitter

Tumblr has apparently instituted a policy of deleting blogs on its service dedicated to stalking other bloggers, reblogging their posts and adding demeaning, often profane commentary. This NYT blog piece focuses on one Julia Allison, who has characterized herself as "internet famous" (never heard of her) and evidently contributes to a widely-read blog. Anyways, somebody set up a Tumblr called Reblogging Julia, indexed on Google here, making fun of the actual Ms. Allison. Bearing in mind that I haven't read much of it, I wouldn't characterize anything I've seen as being beyond the pale. Mean-spirited, certainly, but crossing some sort of societal bright-line, no. At any rate, Tumblr has characterized the behavior in which "Reblogging Julia" engages "harassment" and announced a policy stating that "Accounts with the sole or primary purpose of repeatedly harassing or abusing specific members or groups within the Tumblr community will be suspended."

Isn't part of "internet fame" learning to deal with "internet criticism?" Even from the anonymous? (Frankly, the anonymity angle is played up in the piece, but I can't understand why; would it be better if Julia or whomever had a name or address or something? Would she send them a nasty e-mail, or attempt to change their mind about her? I mean, I know that anonymity is largely associated with cowardice – although I'd point out that the Federalist Papers were all written pseudonymously – but I'm not sure why that rankles so much in the world of internet snark. Btdubs, I just compared Tumblr hecklers with James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, et al.) Seriously, while I think that there can/should be limitations on internet fora, in terms of threats, posting personal data, etc., simply mocking someone who trades on their blogger celebrity seems not only to be relatively harmless but wholly within the spirit of what the internet is basically all about. Without Tumblr or services like it, "Julia Allison" wouldn't exist; the democratic beauty of the technology is that people who have an opinion about her one way or another have a platform with which to praise/discuss/disdain her which is equally accessible.

Admittedly, I feel a little bit like Campbell Brown here: I'm telling you something you already know, and, more than likely, I'm even having the same "well, duh" reaction as you. Still, it is kind of bullshit that the very same people who exploit the internet to go from essentially non-entities to elevating the most banal facets of their existence into "content" get pissed off when people actually take a couple of pot shots at the sitting ducks. E.g.:

Dan: People will not stop asking me about Mary's haircut.
Me: HAHHAHA are they talking about how I'm fat, too?
Me: I've been getting that a lot lately. "Julia looks like she's about to implode" was my favorite.
Dan: No, no one who talks to me says you're fat.
Me: Oh that's good. That's a plus.
Dan: They all agree with me that you hang out with too many people that are anorexically skinny. And if you are around normal sized people, you look tiny, because you are, in fact, tiny.
Me: I just feel like my face is fat. I feel sort of ugly and fat bc of fashion week. I think one tends to lose perspective.

P.S. Though I'm not really interested into going into it, evidently there's a personal connection b/w Allison and Tumblr CEO David Karp; plus Allison, though she denies asking Karp to take the offending blogs down, isn't exactly broken up about the whole thing.

Grow Young and Die Together

2009-02-16T08:43:00.007-05:00

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button could not have existed without Brad Pitt, and I mean that not only commercially (though it is difficult to see a major studio bankrolling this picture without a top-tier star attached), but artistically as well. The present day Pitt is the film's big reveal, what the audience is led to anticipate for the first two-thirds of the film's run time, and when he does arrive, Cate Blanchett's Daisy sums up the moment with almost hilarious economy: "You're perfect." After two hours of watching Pitt shed special effect after special effect, turning him from a prematurely-pruned toddler to a long-haired Donald Rumsfeld look-alike to a, well, 60 year-old Brad Pitt, the moment the man himself does arrive has the punch of every magazine cover that has ever borne his image behind it, eliciting a Pavlovian response that is much a comment on the demi-religious nature of celebrity worship as anything the picture itself might intentionally hope to raise. That most of the film's final third closely tracks a Calvin Kline ad – sailing, moonlight trysts on the beach, Brad Pitt – only cements the effect.

I liked Benjamin Button; many did not. All of the criticisms are deadly accurate: it's three hours long (nowadays a sub-Lawrence of Arabia film can only presume upon an audience for two); sharing a screenwriter with Forrest Gump, it sometimes too closely tracks the former picture, though Pitt never shakes hands with FDR or anything; and it seems almost perilously naive about issues of race given its setting in Jim Crow-era New Orleans. Yet none of these flaws are fatal, and none undermine what is essentially a simple love story, albeit one with quasi-sci-fi underpinnings and the sweep of much of the twentieth century behind it. Director David Fincher, who delivered his masterpiece last time out with the vastly underappreciated Zodiac, brings his impeccable eye for composition and visual detail to bear here, though the ostentatious trickery that marked his mid-period work (Seven, Fight Club, Panic Room) is largely absent. All in all, I imagine that once the intense scrutiny of awards season has faded (and after the equally problematic Slumdog Millionaire has claimed its Oscars), Benjamin Button will be more kindly reassessed as a small picture ensnared in the body of an epic. That it sheds the lugubrious trappings of self-importance as its runtime wears on – and distinctly improves as a result – is either the film's slyest metaphysical conceit or an extraordinarily happy accident.

The Middle of the Road Ain't a Bad Place to Be

2009-02-09T17:29:00.008-05:00

Is that a dude in a Robert Plant mask?

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss' Raising Sand is a perfectly fine, tasteful, modest little record; that it won the Grammy for Best Album last night is not surprising in the least, and even though I'd like to say that if it weren't for Plant's name on the plastic, it wouldn't have sniffed a Grammy, I'm not even sure that'd be true. Well, sure, Grammys go to names or sales (and Plant sold a million copies), but musically Raising Sand radiates a folkified West Coast pleasantness that signifies as middlebrow class. It isn't hard to imagine an academy of aging voters (a lot of these people were in the record business when Led Zepp were around) listening to the bombast of Coldplay, the willful obscurantism of Radiohead, the profane verbal gymnastics of Lil Wayne, and the detached loverman-ness of Ne-Yo, and settling on a well-executed minor-key bluegrass record for which they are the raison d'être. Still, even if you're miffed that Lil Wayne didn't walk off with the hardware after producing the consensus media event record of 2008, you can't be too mad at Robert Plant. Raising Sand is no Two Against Nature or Genius Loves Company; it's a record with a quiet vitality that suggests a path forward for its principals rather than a gaudy headstone for Led Zeppelin. Just listen to "Gone Gone Gone (Done Moved On)" and if it doesn't move you a little bit, well, there's a reason I don't do money-back guarantees.

Asterisk-Rod

2009-02-09T16:14:00.005-05:00

Never gets old

Alex Rodriguez has admitted to taking banned substances in an interview with ESPN following news reports over the weekend that he had tested positive during a confidential survey test undertaken by MLB in 2003. The revelation is a bombshell: Rodriguez is the highest-paid player in the game with an astronomical 10 year, $275 million deal; he plays for the New York Yankees, the most heavily scrutinized franchise in professional sport; and, most importantly, he is the active player most likely – perhaps nearly certain – to surpass Barry Bonds' tainted career home run record, currently standing at 762. For all of his flaws both on the field – his perceived inability to perform in the clutch – and off – uh, getting caught on film with strippers who aren't his wife, evidently alienating the rest of his clubhouse, his general "I live in a bubble" mentality – he stood as something of a rejoinder to the Steroids Era. A-Rod's superhuman performance (though not super-superhuman, a la Bonds, McGwire, or Sosa) was attributed to a natural giftedness and an unparalleled work ethic. He stood for the proposition that the genuine article was possible, that Ruthian heights could still be scaled without the illicit shortcut afforded by PEDs. Well, as with Bonds, McGwire, Sosa, Roger Clemens (another one with a vaunted work ethic), Rafael Palmeiro, Miguel Tejada, et cetera, et cetera, A-Rod is now tainted, removing the last shred of doubt that much of the last two decade – probably the whole post-strike era – was a massive fraud perpetrated against baseball fans.

Frankly, I don't know whether or not A-Rod's scarlet 'S' will ruin his legacy the way it did Bonds'. A-Rod has already admitted to taking PEDs, thereby skipping the Giambi "weasely vague non-apology" apology and heading right for the Andy Pettitte "yeah, I did it but only because of x." Whether A-Rod's x, coping with the pressures of earning an insane $25 million a year to hit a ball with a stick, will equate to Pettitte's x, recovering from injury at a relatively advanced age, remains to be seen. My guess is that it's not even super relevant, at least to Yankee fans. As long as A-Rod didn't lie to federal investigators, and there's no suggestion that he's even spoken to them about PEDs, then he's in no real jeopardy of being sanctioned under the law or by MLB. (Of course, Congress could haul him in for a dog and pony show, but that's beyond anybody's control at this point.) This circus will go on for as long as the media wills it, which, given their love of A-Rod as a punching bag at home (and the already-simmering distaste/hatred for A-Rod and the Yanks on the road), will last at least through the rest of this season.

However, A-Rod is signed up to be a Yankee for the next nine seasons; furthermore, it's not likely that he'll approach the vaunted 763 HR milestone for at least another six or seven years – sitting at 553 homers right now, he would need at least five season even if he produced at a highly-unlikely 50 homer pace. The intensity surrounding this story isn't apt to last that long; by admitting to taking PEDs immediately, A-Rod has probably pursued the best course of action available in terms of putting this story behind him. Now speculation will likely be focused on a) how the other Yankees (most pivotally, Jeter) will react to the revelation, b) how Yankee fans will react to A-Rod, c) how fans on the road will react to A-Rod (Red Sox fans: I am looking forward to some clever signs), and d) who are the 103 other players who tested positive? Three of those four questions will answer themselves sooner rather than later, and the fourth concerns A-Rod only tangentially.

[Of course, there is one caveat to all of this, and that is the caveat A-Rod himself inserted into his admission: he claims to never have taken steroids as a Yankee. I expect, in part, that this bit of probable wishful thinking will catch on with gullible/willfully-blind Yankee fans who want to pretend that his achievements with their team are completely untainted. Of course there is always the possibility that new evidence will surface that A-Rod did in fact juice in pinstripes (oh what I wouldn't give for a photo of Jeter injecting A-Rod in the ass to surface), thereby ripping off what is already sure to be a very tenuous scab. If he gets caught lying now, it will be about 10 times as bad, if that is even possible.]

My gut feeling is that A-Rod's public act of contrition, coupled with a couple of clean piss tests and the passage of time, will put a damper on the public's appetite for opprobrium. After all, I think a large part of why America hated Bonds and Clemens so intensely was a) that both men behaved supremely villainously – in the WWE sense – both on and off the field and b) they refused to admit what was obvious to the rest of us. (To Bonds' "credit", he told a "take-it-or-leave-it" lie; either you believed him or you didn't. Whereas Clemens, apparently advised by his lawyer, engaged in an incredibly bizarre act of P.R. self-immolation, essentially staging an inconclusive show trial of his accuser and inadvertently hanging himself in the process.) A-Rod can ride this thing out now that the cat's out of the bag; it's difficult to imagine people really working themselves into a lather year after year, apart from the smattering of boos likely to greet him on the road with every first at-bat.

The real losers in all of this are the Yankees. The opening of their brand new Xanadu-esque ballpark, already tainted by tales of excessive abuse of the public till, will now be overshadowed by the year of A-Roid (credit to my Yankee fan friend Vinnie on that one). Their planned promotional push surrounding Rodriguez's drive to 763 homers will invariably have to be scaled back, costing the team potentially hundreds of millions in revenue. Vis-a-vis the actual team, we know from Joe Torre's book that A-Rod already doesn't have the best of relationships with his teammates; this certainly won't help matters. (Though it is delightful to imagine Mark Teixiera and C.C. Sabathia getting YES Network mics shoved into their faces and being asked about Rodriguez night in and night out – welcome to the Bronx!) Of course, as a Mets fan, the best thing that can happen apart from a Mets World Series win (sign Manny) is watching the Yankees devolved into some vintage Steinbrenner-esque chaos, so this is like a gift from the baseball gods.

U2, Brute?

2009-02-07T11:46:00.003-05:00

U2 - Get On Your Boots

"Get On Your Boots" is really no better or worse than the rest of the late period singles the band has intermittently pumped out since 2000's "return to form" record All That You Can't Leave Behind. Lyrically, it's no prize winner – "If someone's into blowin' up/We're into growin' up" – but then again, who could forget the "mole diggin' in a hole" from "Elevation" (or "El!Ev!A!Shun!")? Sonically, "Boots" is in keeping with promises that No Line on the Horizon would be a more adventurous record than its immediate predecessors: low end up front with the bass pushed to the edge of distortion, the vaguely "Sunday Bloody Sunday"-esque drum-stomp at the bridge, the substitution of fuzztone for the Edge's typically windchimey guitar – it's fair to say that U2 haven't tried to sound this interesting since Pop. On the whole, it will help the band sell 2 million copies of the record, and give them at least one new song they can play on their inevitable forthcoming world tour that won't send fans streaming for the restrooms. Given the recent Springsteen debacle, I suppose that's more than we can ask for from our rock and roll dinosaurs at this point.

On the bright side, "Get On Your Boots" gave me an excuse to listen to one of my favorite U2 songs, "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)". The video, directed by Wim Wenders and based upon his Wings of Desire, features, if possible, an even douchier Christ-complexified Bono:

Kickin Ur Dick In

2009-01-31T15:09:00.009-05:00

This is the greatest thing ever. I'm a late comer to hardcore – really, if you're over 15, you're a late comer – but it doesn't take an expert to see that JD Twitch has piled the cream on thick here, even if his definition of hardcore is a bit more expansive than most: The Pop Group? Swans? Sonic Youth? Hey, I'm all for inclusiveness; depending on your point of view, the only thing (well, not the only thing, but if you don't already own Minor Threat's Complete Discography...) missing is some Millions of Dead Cops or "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting".

Regime Change

2009-01-20T10:07:00.000-05:00

Look Back In Anger

2009-01-19T20:19:00.002-05:00

...Just About Sums It Up

2009-01-17T17:07:00.003-05:00

Quick! He's getting away!

Rep. Barney Frank's keen observation from the pages of the New Yorker:

More recently, he noted that Barack Obama’s continued insistence that we have one President at a time “overstates the number of Presidents we have.”

No Age For Old Men

2009-01-06T01:22:00.004-05:00

"Hey/Wait/I've got a new complaint"

From tinyluckygenius:

I am in the transcription trenches--Randy Randall, from the an interview I did with No Age in October, with a florid, extended mix 'n match metaphor:
"That’s the irony of this. The thing is that for decades there has been amazing underground culture in LA that has just been passed by media, we're in the belly of the beast, and thats been one of the reasons why it’s been able to exist. Because everyone has their eyes on the prize, chasing the dragon, we can just continue to exist, just be dirty kids hanging out at the Smell. And no one pays attention, and so we can get away with doing our own thing, and then suddenly the dragon turns it’s head on you and says “You belong to us! You are from LA, come into the fold.” We’ve been here the whole time and you didn’t want to know anything about us! We poked you in the eye and now you want to be our friend?"

I guess this means that if Kurt Cobain had to deal with Pitchfork he might have shot himself while Nirvana were still on Sub Pop.

Rabbit Habits

2009-01-05T10:05:00.009-05:00

Shave and a hair cut: two bits

These guys should have named themselves Your Girlfriend's New Favorite Band, because that's what they're gunning for, and their initial choice, Frightened Rabbit, is a Hall of Fame shitty band name. Basically, like a lot of these groups, Frightened Rabbit layer a little bit of quirk – Scottish accents, occasional earnest expletive in a chorus ("It takes more than fucking someone to keep yourself warm"), anachronistic references (they have a song called "Old Old Fashion", not to put too fine a point on it) – on top of the same U2-by-numbers that underlie Snow Patrol or Coldplay. It's the aural equivalent of wrapping your dog's heartworm medication in a piece of baloney so she'll eat it.

So the real question is: did I enjoy their album, Midnight Organ Fright, more than Viva La Vida? Well, Coldplay are at an advantage, freely admitting to world-beating aspirations (Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People is their fucking album cover for crissakes), whereas Frightened Rabbit from the name on down seem to be under the impression that they can con sensitive frat dudes and their dudettes into thinking they make bedroom pop, which they do if you happen to sleep in Madison Square Garden. Coldplay have progressed beyond communicating human emotions to rally-ready sloganeering, which is great rock and roll fun if you prefer Hannah Arendt to Elvis Presley. Frightened Rabbit still communicate human emotions, but not the kind real people have, at least not regularly; rather they convey the types of complex, grandiose Emotions that, in reality, are only regularly expressed in real life by someone sitting next to you on a packed commuter train into their cell-phone. FR fill the same workaday Wagner role as U2: if you ever want to feel truly self-conscious about the gap between your interior life and the genuine article, think about it the next time you are listening to "Where the Streets Have No Name" on your iPod while waiting in line at Starbucks.

Pop Idyll

2009-01-03T12:02:00.005-05:00

"Am I really all the things that are outside of me?"

By God, finally a pop record recognizable as such by the great unwashed; that is to say, by the great mass of folk who have yet to confuse Panda Bear with Justin Timberlake, or Brian Wilson, even. Merriweather Post Pavilion is the indie-rock event of our young 2009, and make no mistake you will be living with the consequences of this record, both musically and critically, for the entire year. Animal Collective have occasionally copped to a straightforward pop sensibility, most famously on the irresistible "Who Could Win a Rabbit?", "Grass", and "Fireworks", but this is the first entire album to push towards the mainstream, to make the "for-lack-of-a-better-word" Beach Boys comparisons tangible within the music and justify whatever reputation for genius the group had yet to actually earn. Songs like "My Girls" and "Summertime Clothes" have genuine hooks to catch fish upon (finally, the hope of coherently singing along with an A.C. song!); meanwhile a track like "No More Runnin" listens like the b-side to "Dream Baby Dream", repeating a half-resigned, half-exulted reading of the title against a watery, narcotic backing track, crosshatched by a lazy, barely palpable bass figure. I wish I could tell you what Merriweather Post Pavilion is about, insofar as pop records can be "about" anything in these days of mp3-enforced atomization. My guess is a vision of domesticity, not as an end result, but another theater of operations in which the intermixed anxiety and bliss of interpersonal relations – between spouses, partners, parents and children - plays out. Is our satisfaction ever attainable, or is its endless deferral an intrinsic part of the human condition? Animal Collective don't answer that question here, and perhaps they don't even mean to ask it; the great beauty of pop music, as Greil Marcus pointed out, is that it "says what it says, not what it's told."

"Do You Think This Is a Free Ride?"

2009-01-02T21:26:00.014-05:00

Oh I just want to see you smile

Listening to a bootleg of Springsteen's famous July 1978 set at Hollywood's Roxy, I found myself wondering what the lean young killer absolutely assassinating a club audience for three hours would think of the "myth-addled softy" – Joe Strummer's initial assessment of The Boss, according to Greil Marcus – shitting out fridge-magnet poetry like "Working on a Dream", the first single from his upcoming record of the same name. Sure, "Radio Nowhere" wasn't any great shakes, but what it lacked in lyrical precision it made up for in sheer insistence. On the other hand, with lyrics like "I'm working on a dream/ Though it can feel so far away/ I'm working on a dream/ Our love will make it real someday", "Working on a Dream" almost seems like a parody of Bruce the Blue Collar Saint; it's a song that will probably sell more life insurance than rock albums - an end we can no longer put past Springsteen, given the cash grab Wal-Mart-only "best of" destined to hit the monolithic retailer's shelves in time to capitalize on his impending Super Bowl performance. Regrettably, the comp will not include "The River", a fixture on Springsteen's two prior "greatest hits" collections: presumably "The Boss" – new connotation – would not consent to airbrushing the lines "And for my nineteenth birthday, I got a union card and a wedding coat" out of the song.

* * * * *

The flip side of the coin is Springsteen's live cover of Suicide's gorgeous, elegiac "Dream Baby Dream", recently released on a limited edition 10-inch on Blast First records. On paper, "Dream Baby Dream" makes "Working on a Dream" look like Proust: "They say that dreams they keep you free baby/Yeah you gotta make them dreams come true/Oh keep them dreams burnin' baby/Yeah yeah keep them dreams burnin' forever..." Yet where Springsteen's song sounds on record like a second-hand summation of his career by a third-rate imitator, Suicide's tune is a reinvention, taking what would otherwise seem like an amalgam of tossed-off cliches and investing them with an inarticulate emotional resonance. Suicide's original rendition is a surprisingly tender, if anxious, reading: Elvis coming down off of the speed. Springsteen's advantage as an interpreter is in his richer vocal instrument, which lends the song a sincerity – perhaps credibility is the right word – that elevates "Dream Baby Dream" into that rarified all-or-nothing territory; say what you will about The Boss, but when his losers lose, they lose big. But if Springsteen breathes new life into the song by locating it within the context of his own mythology, Suicide reinvigorates Springsteen by giving him a new dead end to drive to. In "Dream Baby Dream" he finds a new language in which to offer Jersey girls the old empty reassurances while sitting in a car that's forever parked in the darkness on the edge of town.

Why I'm Troubled That The Dark Knight May Be My Favorite Movie of 2008

2009-01-02T15:06:00.006-05:00

Ideologically unsound

Apart from Heath Ledger's updating of Andy Serkis' Gollum from The Lord of the Rings, Christopher Nolan's Bat-sequel was hotly-tipped for its core War-on-Terror metaphor; confronted with the cartoon equivalent of a bin Laden (or Mumbai suicide attacker), American audiences applauded torture - Bale's Boredman..er..Batman dropping Eric Roberts off of a fire escape in order to break his legs and cuffing the Joker about in a police interrogation room - and warrantless wiretapping all the while rooting for more more more murder and mayhem from Ledger's necro-pornographer. It was an odd dichotomy that I think says something either about our inability to grasp Nolan's central conceit or his inability to articulate it in a clear enough fashion. I get the sense that The Dark Knight's makers, unlike, say, the producers of 24, don't approve of the outgoing (how sweet it is) Bush administration's extralegal tactics; however, nothing in the film apart from a few weak-kneed mumblings from Morgan Freeman's character - here, as always, the voice of moral authority - communicates any type of counterpoint. Batman's brutality and illicit surveillance lead to the capture of the Joker before he can murder another clutch of innocent civilians, the apotheosis of the so-called "ticking time bomb" scenario that occurs only in 24 writers' meetings, Dick Cheney's imagination, and Fox News' running-dog round table discussions. In other words, Mitt Romney's words, we "ought to double Guantanamo."

Amazon.com Has the Rent Money

2008-12-24T17:12:00.003-05:00

Yeah, there's really no excuse for this
Yeah, so if you've, like, heard of a mainstream major label release this year, you can probably get it for $5 from the Amazon mp3 store, which just about pistol whips iTunes based on the facts that a) there is no DRM, b) its mp3s are 256 kbs vs. 192 kbs AAC files for iTunes, and c) it usually has some pretty insane deals, whereas iTunes occasionally has records you bought two years ago when they came out for $7.99 instead of $9.99. (In other words, Amazon gives you actual incentives to pay for music rather than just stealing it.) So, yeah, I just bought Ne-Yo's Year of the Gentleman because it was on sale, which makes me just about the biggest pussy ever. Ever.

Thou Shalt Not Steal

2008-12-24T13:51:00.004-05:00

Land of confusion

NOTE: This was originally written as a comment in response to this thoughtful post re: the Girl Talk phenomenon over at Riff Market. It is neither in full accord nor disagreement with what they have to say; nor is it wholly reliant on their post, but if you're going to bother to read what's below, you might as well read what Nick Sylvester and David Marx have to say, because it's one of the better pieces of music criticism you'll read all year.

Greg Gillis a.k.a. Girl Talk is like PT Barnum: 90% of his success is marketing. By positioning himself as an artist and not a DJ, he raises his product halfway out of the novelty muck and earns a level of consideration not typically accorded to DJ mixes. That other 10% is the problem. There's no argument that Gillis, if he's not doing something completely original (Plunderphonics, Dust Brothers, Jason Forrest, etc.), he's doing it in such a brash, inventive manner that college kids lose their shit when he rolls into town to rock their auditoriums. Most of this is obviously the nostalgia flavor, but I think it would be uncharitable to say that Gillis' ear for recontextualization and his aesthetic bent (repositioning rap lyrics against pop/rock backgrounds to unveil - or invent - emotional subtext) does not constitute a kind of art unto itself. This isn't to say that GT's art is qualitatively identical to the artistry of the people he's repurposing; we can argue all day about whether or not the curatorial can be considered artistic or what level of original contribution is necessary to make someone an artist rather than a DJ.

I also think it's freighting GT with more weight than he can bear to assert that his project, whether accidentally or by design, suggests that pop music is an undifferentiated mass that can be pulled apart and reassembled in whatever formation Gillis prefers and be identical content-wise. If we grant that Gillis' success is attributable in large part to the nostalgic, name-that-tune quality of his work, well, that nostalgia comes from somewhere. Listeners have built up emotional attachments to the songs Gillis is Cuisinarting; hence the ecstatic reaction of his fans to each clever beatjack. I don't think the average GT listener views what he does as much more than a sensationally well-executed parlor trick. In fact, I think that the positioning of Girl Talk as a "serious artist" (the pejorative quotation marks signal disdain for the phrase, not GT) derives mainly from Gillis himself and the critics who see him as both a Fair Use Moses leading the way into a promised land of IP recycling and the celebrant of the ultimate poptimist sacrament - mixing the high with the low and drawing out the undergirding commonalities. These views reek of self-justification, as if his records could not plausibly be considered worthwhile if everyone admitted that Gillis is an extremely gifted spaz whose success is largely attributable to his willingness to run so blatantly afoul of our present copyright regime.

It's tempting to defuse this conversation with a big "so what"; so what if Gillis thinks he's an artist, or so what if you think that he isn't. However, I think it's worthwhile to try and suss out a distinction between the taste-making and the art-making, if only because there must come a point where merely juxtaposing is no longer creating; indeed, the pro-GT counterargument would be that there is a point where juxtaposing does become creating. I appreciate what Gillis is trying to do in terms of elucidating connections between artists and genres; it's an extremely abbreviated version of what Greil Marcus tries to do when he writes a book presenting Pere Ubu, Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, and Twin Peaks as thematically interrelated. However, there's a difference between the guy who paves the road, the one who drives on it, and the one who sells the GPS. Figuring out in which one of these categories, if any, Gillis fits into is all the fun.

Years Never End

2008-12-23T09:07:00.002-05:00

"Your love is what I prefer, what I deserve/ Is a man that makes me, then takes me/ And delivers me to destiny, to infinity and beyond"

A craftier, more dishonest person would have gone back and altered the historical record, Winston Smith-style (or P. Diddy-style: "We Invented the Remix," after all). Yet all I can do is bemoan the fact that making lists having to do with 2008 before the year ends is an inherently disingenuous exercise, certain to lead to redactions, minor embarrassments, and mea culpas. So, first things first.

There was dearth of songs this year that demanded you hear them over and over again, excepting the Hold Steady's fantastic , propulsive (and apparently overlooked) "Stay Positive" and just about the whole damn Cut Copy album. Yet over the last two weeks, two songs have emerged that I feel an irresistible compulsion to play over and over again at deafening volumes. The first is T.I.'s "Live Your Life", an oceanic midtempo banger in the mold of 2006's nonpareil "What You Know" that sounds like the soundtrack to a 2008 highlight reel (look, there's Obama! Again!). With Rhianna co-staring (she does so much more than sing the hook here, more like John the Baptist, you know), T.I. acts like he isn't going to prison on federal weapons charges, but rather like he's showing 2008's enfant terrible Lil Wayne how to craft a real number one single. A truly bizarre c.f.: Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone."

The year's other probable future classic is Beyonce's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" which is really a filed down, less psychotic version of last year's "Ring the Alarm" and all the better for it. In Dreamgirls, Beyonce played Diana Ross on film and now she's playing her on record. Not a rehash or an update so much as an evolutionary step forward, it's good to see someone listening to Motown for purposes other than straight plunder. Plus you have to love what might be the most goofy, straight up retarded music video of the year. YouTube isn't just a medium, it's an aesthetic.

And of course there's a ton of worthy albums that I omitted from my year end list because I'm not omniscient, but shouldn't be penalized just because I only have two ears. The Up-Runners:

Eat Skull - Sick to Death (Siltbreeze)
Ponytail - Ice Cream Spiritual (We Are Free)
Clipse - Road to Till the Casket Drops (mixtape)
Lil Wayne - The Drought Is Over Part 6 (mixtape)
Young Jeezy -The Recession (Def Jam)
T.I. - Paper Trail (Atlantic)
Jenny Lewis - Acid Tongue (Warner Bros.)
Wavves - Wavves (Woodsist)
Luomo - Convivial (Huume)
Stereo Image - S/T (Frog Man Jake)
Women - Women (Jagjaguwar)
Thee Oh Sees - The Master's Bedroom Is Worth Spending a Night In (Tomlab)
Tallest Man on Earth - Shallow Grave (Gravitation)
The Fall - Imperial Wax Solvent (Castle)
Elvis Costello - Momofuku (Lost Highway)

Of course, the best record of 2008 that went unmentioned in my original countdown wasn't mentioned because it wasn't released in 2008. That would be The Ramones' Road to Ruin, which in their customary half-hour or so demonstrated the formal possibilities of rock and roll (the all-encompassing Christgauian definition) more fully than anything else that I heard this year. The best and most depressing evidence yet that things don't always have to get better (Wall Street takes second prize).

Did He Just Say "Figgy Pudding"?

2008-12-16T23:40:00.003-05:00

Apparently not this, but close

So Weezer, who used to be worth listening to until they stopped making stone cold classic albums and started making derivative shit-fests like "The Red Album", have recorded an EP's worth of new tracks for an iteration of Tap Tap Revenge, which is basically Guitar Hero for the iPhone, only you look even more like an asshole when you're playing it, because not only are you a Dweebus McGee tapping like a half-chimp manchild, but you're also engaging in that most-favored pastime of the douchebag, showing off your iPhone. (Attention iPhone 3G owners: you are now that kid who got a Starter jacket like two years after everybody else. No one wants to be your friend because you own a $200 cell phone that anyone can get by walking into a Best Buy. Now, if you had a Wii, that would be a different story.)

But back to Weezer. This EP is called Christmas With Weezer and as the title implies, it's six Christmas songs, all of which you should know if you ever bothered to leave your home between Halloween and New Year's. It's also by far the best thing Weezer has recorded since "The Green Album" back in 2001. I hypothesize that this is for three reasons: 1) Rivers Cuomo can't fuck up songs that he didn't write, 2) Weezer stick to that garage-meets-prom rock sweet spot that gave us "Suzanne" and "Buddy Holly", and 3) did I mention that Rivers didn't write any of the songs?

You Beat the Whole Damn Ga-ame!

2008-12-15T20:03:00.003-05:00

You have to burn the rope...literally.

The Endy of Irony

2008-12-12T09:47:00.004-05:00

"Back goes Chavez, back near the wall...leaping and...
HE MADE THE CATCH!!!"

One of the more underrated aspects of the above photo is the incredible mis-en-scene achieved by the presence of the advertisement behind Chavez; it's as if the caption were already included in the photo. There are two intertwined ironies here: 1) the ad is for AIG, the foundering mega-insurer which has received around $150 billion in government bailouts, and 2) this photo was insufficient on its own to forestall AIG's collapse. Sadly, since Shea Stadium is no more, this ad, which attained a Citgo sign-like landmark status, at least for this Met fan, is likely no more as well. (I doubt AIG will be making the trip over to CitiField.) Hopefully they at least gave Chavez the opportunity to keep the outfield wall; he could put it up in the backyard or something.

It's Like That Book The Secret Where If You Wish Hard Enough For Something

2008-12-11T08:18:00.003-05:00

They're not booing, they're...well, they're booing
The Mets acquired Seattle closer J.J. Putz, presumably to serve as K-Rod's set-up man, in a three team deal with the Mariners and the Indians. The Amazins parted with Endy Chavez, Joe Smith...and AARON HEILMAN!

Yes friends, ding dong, the witch is dead. No longer will the first strains of "London Calling" cause a Pavlovian tightening of Mets fans' sphincters; no longer will we have to see that dead-eyed look in our reliever's eyes as a lead-blowing three run homer sails over the wall. There is no doubt that Heilman was the most hated current Met, a status I ascribe to a) the fact that he sucks, b) all we would hear about was how much he wanted to be a starter (which seemed ludicrous given his inability to routinely get through one inning, and stoked suspicions that he wasn't giving his all because he was unhappy), and c) that Yankee fan-esque complaint that the fact that Heilman sucked didn't seem to bother Heilman all that much (no punching of the water cooler). Simply by offloading him, let alone drastically upgrading their bullpen by adding both Francisco Rodriguez and J.J. Putz inside a 48 hour span, the Mets have radically improved their relations with this particular fan - a tall order considering the Grand Guignol finale to the 2008 season.

On a lighter, sadder note, we would be remiss not to pay tribute to Endy Chavez, the bench player responsible for the greatest Mets moment of the past decade. So here's a warm-up:

And here's the main course:

Lonely At The Top

2008-12-10T22:53:00.003-05:00

Someone's gonna be having a parent-teacher conference

Item: Sabathia conditions bailout of auto industry on development of edible Oscar Mayer Weinermobile prototype.

Eat Skull - Sick to Death (Siltbreeze; 2008): Punk house band from Last Year at Marienbad; stole Times New Viking's bike, will not return. A-

Kanye West - 808s & Heartbreak (Def Jam; 2008): I drunkenly advocated for a song about RoboCop at a Taboo party a few months back, and all I have to say is: "Who's obnoxious now, jerks?" B+

Pavement - Brighten the Corners: Nicene Creedence Ed. (Matador; 1997, r: 2008): Better than the Beatles if you're a contrarian, and if you like Pavement, you're probably a contrarian. A+

Boston - Boston (Epic; 1976): That this album keeps going at all after "More Than a Feeling" and "Piece of Mind" is a testament to its Christ-like genius. A+

Lines - Memory Span (Acute; 2008): Aggregation of singles, EPs, and other errata from fantastic, obscure English post-punk band; basically the same "Sex Pistols to weird Jamaican dubs" story as everyone else, but it may be the greatest story often told. A-

The Replacements - Don't Tell a Soul (Sire; 1987): You be me, and I'll be Paul Westerberg. A-

Fleet Foxes - S/T (Sub Pop; 196...er...2008): I stopped smoking weed a couple years back, but when I did, I was playing James Bond: Agent Under Fire, not listening to - what's the catchall phrase nowadays? - bromantic jammy music. B

Arthur Russell - Love Is Overtaking Me (Audika; 2008): Arthur Russell now rivals Tupac for most posthumous releases; amazing countrified pop music, little disco, he slipped the cello in where he could. A

School of Seven Bells - Alpinisms (Ghostly International; 2008): Pleasant is a good start. B

Freudian Slip

2008-12-10T08:53:00.003-05:00

Inconsistently Updated Kaption Kontest! U B the Judge!
a) "Yankee fans, for $140 million, all this can be yours!"
OR
b) "$140 million sure would buy a lot of hot dogs!"

From ESPN.com, "Sources: Yankees, Sabathia Near Deal":

"While a deal is not done, the source said there are 'zero major road blocks' that would prevent the Yankees from reaching agreement with the Yankees."

I'm pretty sure this isn't intentional, but with Hal and Hank Steinbrenner at the helm, one never knows, does one?

Oh Right I Oh You One

2008-12-09T14:04:00.002-05:00

"...and I turn 'round and there you go"

Singles/songs/didn't put too much thought into it/don't read a lot into it:

1. The Hold Steady - "Stay Positive"
2. The Juan MacLean - "Happy House"
3. Ida Maria - "Oh My God"
4. The Dutchess and the Duke - "Strangers"
5. Cat Power - "Metal Heart" (Jukebox version)
6. Cut Copy - "Lights and Music"
7. No Age - "Sleeper Hold"
8. T.I. - "Whatever You Like"
9. Katy Perry - "I Kissed a Girl"
10. Fleet Foxes - "White Winter Hymnal"
11. Estelle feat. Kanye West - "American Boy"
12. Raveonettes - "Aly Walk With Me"
13. Guns N' Roses - "Better"
14. Lil Wayne - "3 Peat"
15. Vampire Weekend - "Wolcott"
16. Hot Chip - "One Pure Thought"
17. Jay Reatard - "See Saw"
18. The Killers - "Spaceman"
19. M83 - "Kim & Jessie"
20. Magnetic Fields - "Courtesans"
21. Santogold - "L.E.S. Artistes"
22. Silver Jews - "Party Barge"
23. Ting Tings - "That's Not My Name"
24. Weezer - "Pork and Beans"
25. Grand Archives - "Sleepdriving"
26. Kanye West - "Paranoid"

The Best Albums of 2008

2008-12-05T00:01:00.002-05:00

Even though there remains roughly a month left, 2008 is straight bodied. So, as we do every year (which is now two years if you can believe it), a rundown of the 50 records we liked best.

50. Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago (Jagjaguwar)

This sad bastard apparently spent a winter holed up in a cabin making this paean to lost love. A certain un-indie like soulfulness, Bon Iver's music sounds bizarrely like an acoustic TV on the Radio. Girl, he misses you.

49. Harvey Milk - Life...The Only Game in Town (Hydra Head)

Whadda year for Harvey Milk: great movie (supposedly), great record...if the man himself had been alive, we might have dodged that Prop 8 bullshit (seriously, California, seriously). HM the band play an amalgam of heavy metal, hardcore, and prog, not merely content with succeeding as an aural assault, but, once you get past the bullshit, a pretty fucking neat classic rock record. "Motown" is damn near My Morning Jacket if you'd a thunk it.

48. Wire - Object 47 (Pinkflag)

I seem to recall Greil Marcus's faux Mick Jagger news conference, wherein the rock icon "said" something along the lines of "We do what we do and we're going to do it forever." Certainly, that sentiment does not apply genre-wise to the famously metamorphic Wire, who went from Sex Pistols acolytes to post-punk obscurantists in under three years. From the perspective of how they make their listeners feel - or, more to the point, intend to make their listeners feel - it's spot on. It's not clear why a band that thinks so little of humanity feels compelled to seek an audience, but I guess using misanthropy to attract a paying crowd is a kind of performance art unto itself.

47. Sic Alps - U.S. EZ (Siltbreeze)

I guess I would call what these guys do "garage deconstructionism." Therefore, if you enjoy fuzztone and incompleteness as much as I do, well, meet the Beatles. Or, if you prefer, Pavement trying even less. With ace tunes.

46. Gentleman Jesse & His Men - Gentleman Jesse & His Men (Douchemaster)

The Exploding Hearts pretty much died when their van flipped over, killing three out of four members. They were a brilliant band with a limited output; if you wanted to hear more, and who didn't, Gentleman Jesse is here to pick up the pop punk slack. Mostly fun for games of name that tune ("Black Hole" = "Summertime Blues"), Jesse's s/t record is like Mom's apple pie: it's a recipe but that shit is delicious as hell.

45. Nine Inch Nails - The Slip (self-released)

Far be it from me to stick up for meat-hooked multi-millionaire pretty boys, but Trent Reznor has gotten suspiciously little credit for a) releasing his best album since The Downward Spiral and b) giving it away for free. No tip jar, no "pay what you want" - free. The A-side, if mp3s can have an A-side, is superior industrial mope rock, but the B-side is where it gets supremely interesting: everybody knows Reznor's a Bowie-worshipper, but is it just me or is it fascinating how closely The Slip's latter-half tracks Low's side 2?

44. Titus Andronicus - The Airing of Grievances (Troubleman Unlimited)

An adamantly Jersey band, Titus Andronicus do sound like a cowpunk Bright Eyes, a comparison they've attempted to refute a fortiori. Well, sometimes you have to call a spade a spade, as TA themselves freely admit - The Airing of Grievances sounds like Lifted (Bright Eyes' best record) on meth, with rattle, clatter, and outright hysteria tumbling over every inch of plastic. Extra props for nicking "Promised Land" on the opening of "Joset of Nazareth's Blues."

43. Flying Lotus - Los Angeles/ L.A. 1x3 EP/ L.A. 2x3 EP (Warp)

Instrumental hip-hop is still mired in back-packer land, cut off from the mainstream by its lack of vocals and preference for outre experimentation. I guess if you don't let a rapper do the talking you've got to let the music do it, and like the brilliant Dilla and DJ Shadow before him, Flying Lotus has carved up a soundscape that does not want for a vocalist because it speaks volumes on its own. Borrowing heavily from the dubstep movement presently flowering on UK shores, FL's jams are somewhat more humanized by his willingness to engage mainstream hip-hop and r&b; it's as if he's holding a dialogue through a one-way mirror. Two EPs (one of remixes) and a great album this year - the choice is yours.

42. Vetiver - Thing of the Past (Fat Cat)/ More of the Past EP (Gnomonsong)

In retreating to the past with this covers album of semi-obscure folk/psych/etc. from the '60s and '70s Andy Cabic and Vetiver put their most forward foot forward. There's nothing "freak" here, just a meandering album made for fireside listening or listening during whatever you do to relax, like reading the newspaper or something.

41. Pop Levi - Never Never Love (Ninja Tune)

In the pages of The New Yorker, pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones opined that Levi was one iPod commercial from hitting it big on these shores. I don't know about that; after all, the straight-ahead T. Rex-ian glam stomp Levi emulates never really did carve out a foothold on these shores until it was polished-up and married to metal by erstwhile Aquanetted practitioners like Poision and Motley Crue. But given Levi's obvious tunesmithing abilities and pop ambitions, he may one day find himself rocking out in silhouette with a pair of white earbuds, and if Chairlift can move units when so situated, well, we're dumb fish if we don't take better bait.

40. Air France - No Way Down EP (Sincerely Yours)

Ah, Gothenberg, Sweden's twee-pop capital. Air France combine elements of techno, hip-hop, and mostly pop to create the aural equivalent of cotton candy skies on a night in June. Basically, if someone made an EP out of the Orb's "Little Fluffy Clouds" besides the Orb.

39. Guns N' Roses - Chinese Democracy (Geffen)

I'm not fucking kidding. After 17 years, Axl Rose emerged with an album that was not only superior to what everyone anticipated, but was actually a legitimate Guns N' Roses album - this is the true heir to the Use Your Illusion records, complicated and messy as they were. Yes, yes, Chinese Democracy has its share of overdubs, overproduction, and hyper-pretension, but if you open your heart, you'll discover that songs like "Shackler's Revenge", "Better", and "There Was a Time" (TWAT, geddit) fulfill the legacy. The return of the king – but where is the throne?

38. Silver Jews - Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea (Drag City)

"Come see a legend while it's still bein' made," intones lead Jew Dave Berman on "Party Barge", the straight-up goofiest track on his latest sojourn into the recesses of his...uh...superego? A welcome respite from the creeping depression the lapped at the edges of 2005's Tanglewood Numbers, Berman comes here with, if not his most accomplished, then at least his most accessible set of rock tunes. Presumably, there's a point where functioning rockers, if they intend to have a longish career, can't treat every record as an opportunity for psychic disgorgement; I can't say if that's the case here (or was Berman's case ever), but if it is, disgorge more please. We're happy when you're happy.

37. Jamie Lidell - Jim (Warp)

More comfortable in his own skin, and with the idea that Warp won't drop him for being a straight-up r&b horndog, Lidell cuts loose on the aptly-titled Jim, giving his love to everyone. A joyous follow up to the skittering schizophrenia to Multiply, and further proof that constructs like genre and identity ought to be perceived less like boundaries and more like school buses to be jumped over with your nitrous-powered rocketbike.

36. Atlas Sound - Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel (Kranky)

Bradford Cox had a good 2008. So good, in fact, that I bet he must greet people, brandy snifter in hand, with a thick 'n' smarmy "So how was your year?" I won't keep you in suspense; the album with Deerhunter, his main gig, appears further down the list a piece. But with LtBLTWCSBCF (it's even a pain in the ass acronym) Cox has one foot in the land of "can do no wrong", a status he is coming to share in my book with Ryan Adams (who, with this year's lazy daisy Cardinology has one foot out of it). As weirdly self indulgent as the record can be, from the title to the opening recording of Cox as a child telling a ghost story, it's never less the 100% musically captivating, moving closer to the gauzy 4AD sound (incidentally, the label that puts out his recs outside the U.S.) than his main gig. Inviting in its opacity.

35. Of Montreal - Skeletal Lamping (Polyvinyl)

I can't figure out the near-venomous reaction to this LP in some quarters. To these ears, it sounds like a funked-up lesser cousin to 2006's Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, which is like saying that K2 is a lesser mountain next to Everest. The curse of high expectations, I suppose (I'm guilty as well; see no. 31). Ignore all the "Georgie Fruit" gender-bending psychobabble - note to Kevin Barnes: Prince showed where you tell - and latch onto the rhythm, and you find one of the year's richer indie pop efforts.

34. Nachtmystium - Assassins: Black Meddle Pt. 1 (Century Medium)

Goddamn it, whatever happened to boundaries? Not for purists, this is a metal record that features a saxophone dead smack in the middle of a suite of instrumentals. It's like the Dave Matthews Band or something. These guys' pop instincts are too good to stay underground for too much longer.

33. The Killers - Day & Age (Island)

This motherfucker: "Are we human or are we dancer?" is an execrable lyric. Once you get past the embarrassment of listening to the record that prominently features it, you'll find that the Killers are essentially the genius pop-rock band of our time: there is no earworm they will not exploit, no production trick they will not entertain in order to deliver that shot of dopamine your brain is seeking from the Top 40. Given the death of the monoculture, you may escape this record, but it's many, many future singles will do their damndest to hunt you down.

32. Black Mountain - In the Future (Jagjaguwar)

"RIYL Led Zeppelin" is not something that should be scrawled on a CD's shrinkwrap lightly. Too often, what people mean by that is "RIYL Audioslave". Black Mountian, on the otherhand, while not approaching Zep-like levels of maximum cockrock transcendence, do hook into the mothership's more, well, transcendent side, marrying two ton riffage to a far proggier impulse, akin to - dare I say it? - Pink Floyd's massively-underrated Wish You Were Here. No Page, no Plant, and no Roger Waters, but your weed is going to dry out waiting for that soul train. Worthy of a couple bongloads in the interim.

31. TV on the Radio - Dear Science (Interscope)

Probably the only album that made this list that I would categorize as a disappointment, simply because of past performance. Return to Cookie Mountain was good album that augured greatness; Dear Science doesn't deliver greatness. What it does deliver is TV on the Radio at their loosest and most pop-oriented, which, believe me, is not a demerit in my book. The issue is that TVOTR's "most pop-oriented" should be even more pop-oriented; they should be assaulting the charts like Normandy on D-Day. They make this list because Dear Science is still a very, very good album. The problem is that TVOTR is a band from whom we expect very, very great things.

30. Joel Alme - A Master of Ceremonies (Sincerely Yours)

Listening to this yesterday, I was trying to figure out who Alme sounded like, and crossing Lafayette Street, it hit me: Jonathan Richman. Seeing that Alme is Swedish, the temptation is to plug the 'x' in the "Richman + x = Alme" equation with fellow Swede and indie kingpin Jens Lekman (much like every Icelandic act "sounds like Bjork"). Though such a comparison wouldn't be too far off, it's not too far on either; Alme's music is more like a union between Phil Spector, Gamble and Huff, Bruce Springsteen, and Billy Joel, which is to say that it sounds like something you've heard a million times before in the best possible way.

29. Destroyer - Trouble in Dreams (Merge)

Every now and again, Dan Bejar puts down whatever side-project he's embroiled in - New Pornographers, Swan Lake, Hello Blue Roses - to put out a gorgeous solo record. Since Bejar's average is above-average, this record was a lead-pipe cinch for inclusion the day it was laid to plastic, so allow me to take this opportunity to recommend to you 2004's Your Blues and 2006's Destroyer's Rubies as well. This one's another worthy arabesque of seprentine wordplay, pleasant-buzz rocking, and that voice.

28. Diplo & Santogold - Top Ranking (Mad Decent)

Nothing succeeds like excess: global sound collector/impressario Diplo makes a dancehall-heavy mixtape w/ vocals from Santogold's S/T debut sprinkled about. At home he's a tourist; everywhere else he calls it a career.

27. Fucked Up - The Chemistry of Common Life (Matador)

I've already invoked it this year, but "Wish You Were Here + hardcore" is too tempting a description not to set down in writing. It's nice to see a punk band get to that leg-stretching My War phase of their career w/o all of the audience antagonism and angst. No need to engage in the process of weeding out; more like weeding in, this keeps up.

26. Taylor Swift - Fearless (Big Machine)

Much like Miranda Lambert's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend became known as "the token country cross-over album on everyone's year-end list" last year, Fearless seems slated for a similar fate in 2008. Well, you know what? These albums cross over because they're pretty fucking good. In fact, I put it to you that Swift's latest is more of a pop album with country flourishes than the other way around - a claim I would not have made for Lambert. To draw a clumsy analogy, if Tha Carter III is the Purple Rain of 2008, then Fearless is the Born in the U.S.A. Which is to say that 2009 is going to be Swift's year to lose.

25. Lykke Li - Youth Novel (LL)

"Donce, donce, donce..." or not.

24. Hercules & Love Affair - Hercules & Love Affair (DFA/Mute)

Brooklyn's Andy Butler has returned sex to disco, which is a lot like saying that someone returned wet to the ocean. Of course, when we say "sex" what we really mean is gay sex, tracing the music back to its true subcultural roots. Normally, I'm not one for cultural politesse or so-called authenticity tropes; erecting barriers is the precise sort of thing music stands irrevocably against. But H&LA aren't about authenticity, but rediscovery - this album is in a sense an excavation of disco for an indie audience who is used to hearing it only as a prefix affixed to "-punk." Thus if we posit former DFAers The Rapture (who themselves went less punk and more disco on 2006's Pieces of the People We Love) as the gateway drug, well, here's the smack. The star here, apart from Butler's widescreen orchestrations, is Antony Hegarty, of Antony and the Johnsons. Recontextualized from his main act's somber tenor, Antony is recast as a full-blown diva, his characteristic emotionalism drawing upon the music's pulse and simultaneously fortifying it, achieving a kind of symbiosis: unitarian disco, if you will.

23. Jay Reatard - Matador Singles '08 (Matador)

What is the Reatard agenda? Here, we have the most accessible set of songs the man has ever done, a pleasing mixture of power pop, punk, and a tinge of country. In fact, Jay was so kind, that he and his record company decided to free these tracks from the six limited-edition 7-inches they were initially released as, and make them available digitally. Yet the man I saw at the P'fork Fest was the misanthrope's misanthrope: I'd never felt the contempt from a performer towards his audience that Reatard positively radiated during his set. I don't know whether or not it's affected, or the consequence of playing before a couple of thousand people after routinely playing for a couple dozen. At the very least, it's confusing. And intriguing. I imagine this is how Guns n' Roses fans felt circa 1991.

22. The Juan MacLean - Happy House 12" (DFA)

Yes, Happy House is not an album; nor is a tomato a vegetable, technically. Yet at 28:02 (the title track plus two remixes), it's pretty damn close, time-wise. Anyway, if you can argue for the inclusion of EPs on album lists, then this discussion is a moot point; anyway, I'm not going to disadvantage the year's best dance track just because of a little thing like nomenclature. This one's got it all: killer piano loop, funky Stevie Wonderesque bassline, Nancy Wang diva-affected vocal. There's no telling how many discotheques have been leveled in the wake of this track. To quote: "So excellent."

21. Gang Gang Dance - St. Dymphna (The Social Registry)

Gang Gang Dance suggests a band that makes music for dancing, and so they did previously, in sort of a tribal, drum circle way. For some, that'll cut the mustard, for others there is St. Dymphna (named for a bar on St. Mark's Place), which introduces pop texturing and structure to the mix. So it's a pop album, but a pop album in the way that Animal Collective makes pop albums, and as a wise message board commenter once said, "Some people treat Animal Collective like they're fucking N'Sync or something." How's that for a cryptic warranty?

20. The Gaslight Anthem - The '59 Sound (SideOneDummy)

For some, the idea of pop-punk mixed with blatant Springsteenisms is catnip. For others, it is akin to ingesting ipecac. For those of us in the former category, I give you New Brunswick's own The Gaslight Anthem, who have cooked up twelve songs that fulfill every breakneck promise this putative microgenre could possibly make to each and every Mary (namechecked) and Bobbie Jean (ditto) out there. So yeah, if you're sitting there in the parking lot of the Menlo Park Mall or trying to pick out which chain to wear over your sweater before heading out to Jenkinson's then, yeah, this is your favorite album ever. Except for, you know, Born to Run.

19. Kanye West - 808s & Heartbreak (Def Jam)

Kanye West + Junior Boys instrumentals + heartbreak. This proposition does not sound inviting for everyone, and the actual result doesn't exactly throw the gates wide to Kanye's built-in audience, which following 2007's Graduation, seemed to be everyone. 808s is retrospective, introspective, maudlin, self-absorbed, spiteful, and ice cold virtually throughout; following the death of his mother and break-up with his fiancee, West was at an emotional nadir, and it shows. Of course, his ego shows too: that's where the dramatic tension comes into play, and why it pays to listen to Kanye's records. Closest thing to a Kid A in mainstream hip-hop yet.

18. Beach House - Devotion (Carpark)

Sad bastard music. Man, I don't know what a Beach House show is like, and I don't want to know. This is bedsit music in the extreme, made for bedsitters by bedsitters. But if you're going to have a genre, you have to have exemplars, and Devotion, in that sense, is canonical. The Beach Boys to Low's slowcore Stones.

17. No Age - Nouns (Sub Pop)

The signature sound of 2008 was sonically-adventurous punk rock and LA's No Age were the vanguard of that movement, dropping the notice-serving EP collection Weirdo Rippers last year and now serving up Nouns, their full-length debut for Seattle's Sub Pop. If this record were "Sleeper Hold"x 12 it woulda made the top 10 if not number one; to paraphrase Judge Ricahrd Posner, my job is to police a range, not a point. This one's a gem, and in a few years (or weeks) I'll look and feel foolish for stuffing it back here closer to the middle of the pack than up front; such is the vagary of the list-making enterprise. Buy w/o reservation.

16. Santogold - Santogold (Downtown)

Santogold, nee Santi White, is having a great, if shamefully under the radar 2008: whoever made the mistake of marketing her to the Pitchfork demographic (are those Converse ads w/ Julian Casablancas fucking serious?) ought to be shot. Fortunately, as M.I.A. has recently proved via "Paper Planes", course correction is available. Not that I want to get into the Santogold vis-a-vis M.I.A. debate, which misses the point a bit, but of the two Santogold is the more Top 40 ready. Indeed, is it that difficult to imagine that with better promotion and different cover art (that spitting gold shit is not moving your Wal-Mart consumer) that this album could float to the upper reaches of the charts based on straight-killers like "L.E.S. Artistes" (ignore the title), "You'll Find a Way", and "I'm a Lady?" I sense a "Maps"/"Paper Planes" type breakthrough down the road a piece.

15. Blood on the Wall - Liferz (The Social Registry)

If the Pixies impregnated Sonic Youth, the resulting offspring would probably sound like Blood on the Wall. (Needless to say, using the Google image search for this band proved nauseating.) Liferz is perhaps the best of a crop of undersung indie rock albums this year that put the rock before the indie. 2008 was a year that saw aggression - or at least loudness - return as virtue on the indie circuit, and Blood on the Wall's destructive musical impulses deliver impeccably dissolute tunes on the crest of a wave of distortion. Probably the least-feted essential album of the year.

14. Paul Westerberg - 49:00 (self-released)

It's true that I've not heard everything put out by the former Replacements front man since that group's unhappy denouement, but I daresay that of what I have heard, 49:00 is his best since 1987's Pleased to Meet Me. Sold as a single, 49¢ mp3 on Amazon, 49:00 is an entire album, programmed to run like a schizophrenic car radio: song fragments, mostly in Westerberg's favored country/punk/classic rock mold, blur into one another in a haze of distortion, or just snap into place instantaneously. The effect is brilliant - a pirate transmission from inside the mind of America's foremost rock and roll never-was. The coup de grace: despite the title, the whole things only runs 43 minutes and change.

13. Deerhunter - Microcastle/New Weird Era Cont. (Kranky)

There is entirely the possibility that Deerhunter may end up being one of those bands with seemingly impenetrable beginnings that spends two or three albums barrel-rolling its way towards the mainstream and Radiohead (or at lest Decemberist) sized audiences. Last year's Cryptograms was gauzy out-pop gem, wherein the songs seemed to eclose from their electronic pupae the longer the album went on. Microcastle starts out in the alternative sweet-spot and stays there for all twelve of its tracks, sounding like the next step on the way to a universally-renowned classic third album. Plus an album length bonus "EP" of pretty much the same quality! The best band in the world whose name starts with "Deerh–".

12. Okkervil River - The Stand-Ins (Jagjaguwar)

Will Sheff and his band are a rambling, emotional wreck, constantly in search of purchase, which only seems to last until the next song, and sometimes not even that long. 2005's Black Sheep Boy was brilliant but slept on; last year's The Stage Names, shorn of a clear concept (though I'm told there was one) seemed to clue more folks in. The Stand-Ins plays Amnesiac to that record's Kid A (check the interlocking cover art): complementary, contemporaneous, but far from afterbirth. "Pop Lie" says it all: "All sweetly sung and succinctly stated/Words and music you calculated/To make you sing along/With your stereo on." Sounds like a plan.

11. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend (XL)

At the beginning of the year, Vampire Weekend were a battleground in the class war, with Ezra Konig's taste in ridiculous dog sweaters as potent an evaluative tool as actually listening to the record. Most infamous, to my mind at least, was Julianne Sheppard's tart dismissal in the Voice: "Trust-funded or not, VW's music, lyrically and sonically, emits the putrescent stench of old money, of old politics, of old-guard high society." Yes, it's true that VW's brew of bleached out afro-pop and Lacoste communicates a kind of cloistered, naive elitism. ("Old politics" though? Dudes rock for Obama.) But it's also true that to criticize VW on this point alone is to recapitulate tired rockist cliches about "authenticity" - that somehow deprivation breeds "realer" art than wealth. Which may well be true, but I don't think this record is masquerading as art. It's a pop record fueled by a bright, literary energy that manages to avoid pretension by eschewing ponderousness in favor of, well, fun. Yeah, it's polite, but it's not like you're always going around swinging on chandeliers and shit.

10. Portishead - Third (Island)

Well, this one won't be soundtracking any yuppie dinner parties. Before Third's release early this year, Portishead, like their triphop contemporaries, appeared set to fade into the footnotes of pop history; maybe people would recall "Sour Times", but that's about it. Yet absence seems to have made their hearts grow colder. Third is a more direct effort than its two predecessors, less interested in creating a mood than assaulting the listener, as if to suggest that audiences missed the point during the '90s. Whereas back then the form was perhaps a little too sedate to match the emotional content, a song like "Machine Gun", which concludes with an almost-Suicide-esque barrage of hissing percussion, is unlikely to be misunderstood as a mere signifier of good taste. Attention must be paid.

9. The Magnetic Fields - Distortion (Nonesuch)

Its dolorousness and pith are characteristic of creator Stephin Merritt; what makes Distortion special is, well, the distortion and the prominent return of singer Shirley Simms, who was sidelined on the band's last proper effort, 2004's i. Simms is given the album's flat-out best moments - the jauntily vindictive "California Girls" (not a cover), the sacreligeous "The Nun's Littany", and aching album closer "Courtesans" - and she makes the most of her star turns, delivering the everygirl emotionalism that has turned her into Merritt's foremost interpreter. This is not, of course, to detract from Merritt himself, who wrote these wonderful songs, and conceived of the titular conceit - smothering his standard compositions under layers of feedback, an homage to the Jesus and Mary Chain's epochal Psychocandy. Interestingly, Merritt, a tinnitus sufferer, was unable to mix the disc at high volume. Hence, perhaps, the happy accident that Distortion is Merritt's most sonically adventurous release to date without relinquishing any of his typical listenability.

8. Lindstrøm - Where You Go I Go Too (Smalltown Supersound)

I like to listen to this album while food-shopping at the Morton-Williams by school. It makes the supermarket feel like the future, which it kind of is.

7. Lil Wayne - Tha Carter III (Cash Money)

I will be the first to admit that I do not enjoy TC3 as much as last year's Da Drought 3: legitimate product inevitably sheds that illicit, ad hoc flavor that keeps hip-hop bound to the streets in a good way. Still, there was no more glorious moment for rap in 2008 (a bleak proposition, but still) that Wayne's ecstatic precognition on "3peat" that "You watch me!/ You watch me!/Cause I be Weezy/Must see TV!" before selling over a million in week one. He should consider it back pay for the truckload of free music he dropped on fans leading up to TC3, and record labels should consider it an instructive lesson on how to treat their customers.

6. The Hold Steady - Stay Positive (Vagrant)

A couple of slots ago, we reached the point on the list where you could hit "shuffle" and whatever the result, I don't think I'd have a problem. Placing the Hold Steady here, as opposed to the pole position, was an act of calculating cowardice on my part - after all, 2009 could be the year the band release an even better, more worthy album. Consistency, they say, is the hobgoblin of small minds; perhaps even more so, it is the hobgoblin of bands who do what they do so well that the audience takes their craftsmanship for granted. So allow me to say that Stay Positive is a brilliant, biting record from a band that does nothing but release brilliant, biting records. I worship at the alter of Craig Finn. And undoubtedly, I will be back here this time next year, or in 2010, or 2011, telling you the same shit on a different day.

5. Erykah Badu - New Amerykah Part One (4th World War) (Motown/Universal)

New Amerykah is the epitome of difficult art, sonically dense and lyrically complex, part of a rich tradition of avant-garde black political pop traceable to Sly Stone, Miles Davis, George Clinton, and Public Enemy. Badu is widely regarded as one of the progenitors of neo-soul - that is, soul updated with hip-hop signifiers - and New Amerykah persists in that vein, probing at its outer boundaries in search of something ineffably new; tracks that begin as straightforward songs end as sound collages, riven by expropriated dialogue ("Twinkle" concludes with a near-straight lift of Peter Finch's famous monologue from Network) and meditations on the religious philosophy of Clarence 13X Smith, the leader of a Nation of Islam splinter group assassinated in 1969. It's an imposing-sounding work, but thanks to Badu's ear for pop, which here doesn't necessarily translate into hooks, it remains an engaging, satisfying listen throughout.

4. Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours (Modular)

New Order did not release a new record in 2008, and if they did, it probably would have sucked ass anyhow. Cut Copy got tired of waiting for the return of the kings and decided to do it themselves, and frankly, given that NO were never a tremendous album act, In Ghost Colours might just sidle its way up to a Technique or a Low-Life without anyone batting an eye. Surely no one else this year is connecting on a heart-ass level like these guys. Case in point: I stood in the pit at the P'fork Fest this summer through all manner of insane noise band offenders - HEALTH, No Age, King Khan - but not until Cut Copy showed up to play a truncated set (customs issues) did I fear for my life. It was as if someone had set off a 100 megaton groove bomb and the kinetic energy of 5,000 sweaty, tired kids was unleashed in one sustained pulse. Messianic, in a good way.

3. Fennesz - Black Sea (Touch)

Christian Fennesz seems to drop by every few years to shit out a game-changing electronic album. 2001's Endless Summer, 2004's Venice, and now Black Sea - these are not merely great records, but genre-defining signposts. Yet Fennesz is not some kind of enigmatic Madonna acting as a subcultural curator; he's not Columbus, "discovering" a continent were millions of people were already living. He's by himself on another planet, occasionally sending burst transmissions containing his coordinates back to Earth. Not that anyone appears capable of following him. We don't have the technology.

2. The Dutchess and the Duke - She's the Dutchess, He's the Duke (Hardly Art)

A list like this is plainly the product of personal preference, and there's no denying that The Dutchess and the Duke hit a very personal sweet-spot of mine. In this case, they approximate the Rolling Stones circa "Playing With Fire", when they telegraphed menace and sex before trying to distill the concept into a formula a la Windex. So, yes TD&TD practice transparently louche revivalism; then again, so did the White Stripes. So do Cut Copy. Fuck, this is the 21st century! Recycling is good. Especially if you're good at it. So I invite you to think of TD&TD as Andy Warhol silkscreening Campbell's soup cans, as opposed to Snow Patrol photocopying The Joshua Tree. If you require further convincing, head over to their MySpace and listen to "Reservoir Park". If you don't like it, well, you just wasted your time reading the previous 48 blurbs and should close this tab before getting to no. 1.

1. M83 - Saturdays = Youth (Mute)

The truth is there was no true no. 1 album in 2008. Not because it was a bad year for music - which it certainly wasn't - but because unlike (some) previous years where there was a consensus pick (or consensus picks) - 2008 seemed slightly interstitial. A ton of bands came out with ton of great albums suited to the lineage of great albums they'd previously released; newcomers served notice that they had arrived and that even greater goods were on the way. Saturday = Youth is an apt choice because, in a way, it's strangely understated. It's not M83's best album (Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts holds that mantle), and though it's still hyperemotional, it's a step back from the histrionic pyrotechnica of 2005's Before the Dawn Heals Us. Allegedly inspired by the gauzy melodrama of John Hughes' '80s teen flicks, Saturdays = Youth seems a futuristic piece of nostalgia; like Cut Copy, M83 seemed to be reaching for the New Order brass ring, but from a different angle. Where Cut Copy wanted to move your ass, M83, not to be too corny about it, wanted to move you. So where the former made a record of great NO singles, M83 cut to the emotional core of what made its chief influence a great band: humanity co-equal to technology, not subsumed by it.

All I Wanna Do Is BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM

2008-12-03T22:05:00.002-05:00

Grammys: legit? Never. But "Paper Planes" for Record of the Year? That shit is righteous like the wrath of God. Seriously, indie types: get your songs into movie trailers. Red Bull for your career.

Chinese Democracy Is a Masterpiece

2008-11-24T08:40:00.001-05:00

YEEE33AAAH!!1!! YEEEEE33333AHHH!!!!1!!!

THANK YOU AXL.

When Tyler Durden Said "Our Great Depression is Our Lives" He Might Have Spoke Too Soon

2008-11-20T09:23:00.004-05:00

They say it's your birthday/Well it's my birthday too, yeah!

60 days 'til O-merica: can he put down his BlackBerry? What kind of cupcakes did he get Joe Biden for his birthday? WHERE'S THE DOG??1!

One sentence-or-so/grade each:

Fennesz - Black Sea (Touch; 2008): Sound of God speaking through a vocoder. A+

Flying Lotus - Los Angeles (Warp; 2008): Sound of God rapping through a vocoder. A-

Lil Wayne - Dedication 3 (internet mixtape; 2008): Sound of Lil Wayne rapping through a vocoder, badly. Sound of Lil Wayne's friends rapping without vocoder, badly. D

Belle and Sebastian - BBC Sessions (Matador; 2008): Early B&S, which is like the part of the biopic where Buddy Holly's got the band in the garage back in Lubbock, looking for that damn cricket. Before dying in a plane crash with the Big Bopper and Richie Valens. B

Black Lips - Good Bad Not Evil (Vice; 2007): Good things happen when you put down the sugar packets, write songs. B+

Squarepusher - Music Is Rotted One Note (Warp; 1998): The album Miles Davis never made because he's dead and not into techno. A

Wire - Document and Eyewitness (Mute; 1981): Band slags fans live with bizarre unrecorded material; worth it all for the "12XU" bait-and-switch. B-

John Martyn - Solid Air (Island; 1973): GF: "Is this guy black?" B

Lou Reed - Street Hassle (RCA; 1978): LR: "I wanna be black." BS: "Tramps like us, baby we were born to pay." B+

The Beatles - The Beatles ("The White Album") (Capitol; 1968): Credit where credit's due: there is no 40th anniversary edition of this record, so you're already caught up on the plot. A+

America Has Just Elected Its First Bla...OOH LOOK CDs!

2008-11-10T11:52:00.003-05:00

The last time anyone got anything done with a guitar

Thoughts:

Black Flag - Live '84 (SST): Found this in the used bin at Other Music where some asshole traded it in for cash....SUCKA. I now own two Flag albums, the other being 1981's Damaged. The reason for this shortage on my part is that for some reason, no matter where ya go, Black Flag records list for $15.99 or better (except for on iTunes and Amazon mp3, but subcultures thrive on tangible objects as a neat visual shorthand for transgression, so fuck it). Live '84 is a mammoth 70-minute document of a show in San Francisco featuring the Ginn-Rollins-Kira-Stevenson line-up, and hostility is in the air. First up is "The Process of Weeding Out", a clangorous eight-and-a-half minute instrumental that reads as the virtual antithesis of hardcore-the-music, but might evince hardcore-the-attitude more than any other track on here. "Weeding Out", from an instrumental EP of the same name, was intended to do just that: cull the ranks of Black Flag fans of unworthies I suppose. The rest of the record is more traditionally straight-ahead, but traditionally straight-ahead for Black Flag was to wrap a length of razor wire around the audiences neck and tighten it. A good night for a punch up.

Crystal Stilts - Alight of Night (Slumberland): The record label should have tipped me off. If the Raveonettes are the Jesus and Mary Chain taken one step closer to Spector-esque girl-pop glory, Crystal Stilts are JAMC with both feet in the ~~grave~~garage. Alight of Night is pleasant enough, but if there were an Ambien-rock genre, these guys would be Elvis and the Beatles all rolled into one. I'm not well-versed enough in New Zealand rock history to know if these guys are firmly established in any national tradition, but they certainly are part of the larger indie-rock tradition: strip away the echo and the distortion, and this might be a Travis album or something. Of course, Crystal Stilts pile the effects higher and higher, so bonus points for that. Stifling a yawn.

Lou Reed - Berlin: Live at St. Ann's Warehouse (Matador): The soundtrack to Julian Schnabel's rock doc about Reed's 2006 restaging of his failed 1973 glam-popera follow up to Transformer. The original Berlin was decadent, attempting to spin Reed's junkie chic into, I don't know, Tommy or something. The result, though studded with gems like "Lady Day", "Men of Good Fortune", and "Caroline Says II" was, for the most part, lugubriousness incarnate, a tour de force of depression and misanthropy. Needless to say, it tanked back then. Here, however, Berlin comes off as a minor work of genius. The difference is in Lou Reed's voice, which has been ruined by years of neglect, misuse, and abuse (it even seems to have developed a little bit of a...twang?). Rather than the jaded omnipresence of his younger years, Reed now evinces regretful hindsight, investing his story-songs with a previously-lacking emotional resonance. Old wine in new bottles.

Yes We Did

2008-11-04T22:47:00.004-05:00

Well, nobody's got any excuses now.

Yes We Can

2008-11-04T00:34:00.003-05:00

Just a friendly reminder tO gO Out and vOte tOday.

Five Days

2008-10-30T21:09:00.001-04:00

Soon She May Be Calling Him "Barack the President"

2008-10-29T08:44:00.003-04:00

Red

Hendrik Hertzberg on socialism and hypocrisy:

For her part, Sarah Palin, who has lately taken to calling Obama “Barack the Wealth Spreader,” seems to be something of a suspect character herself. She is, at the very least, a fellow-traveller of what might be called socialism with an Alaskan face. The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist.

Satanic Panic in the Day-Glo S&M Chamber

2008-10-21T08:52:00.004-04:00

Eat Skittles and puke

To describe Of Montreal's new album, Skeletal Lamping as a Prince-ified version of 2006's acerbic-yet-saccharine Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? is perfectly valid. That record, which ostensibly dealt, in part, with front man Kevin Barnes' divorce, was a minor masterpiece, leavening its heavily psychedelic bent with power pop concision and a handful of emotional truth bombs, including the epic, scarifying "The Past is a Grotesque Animal." It's therefore tempting to view Hissing Fauna as the chrysalis and Skeletal Lamping as the butterfly - a perspective reinforced by the latter's underlying conceit: Kevin Barnes, 34 year-old white male as alter-ego Georgie Fruit, a middle-aged black transsexual, a transformation alleged to have occurred halfway through Hissing Fauna and carried on here, with gusto. I guess you had to read the lyric sheet.

In all seriousness though, evaluating Skeletal Lamping based upon the Georgie Fruit concept is akin to saying that you liked Ziggy Stardust because of the plot. What you hear on the record when you're not sifting through the entrails for astrological data is pure stylistic hyperbole, the kind of stop-on-a-dime shifts in tempo and mood that the Fiery Furnaces, to beat a well-loved dead horse, would kill to be able to pull off. Songs on Skeletal Lamping bend, blend, and coalesce to the point where you have to keep checking iTunes to see what song actually is playing (a treat for all you mix tape makers out there); the effect is a non-danceable dance record, which may seem a contradiction in terms, but enables Barnes & Co. to connect not only with the id (read: ass), but on a higher intellectual plane as well (not a value judgment about dance music, I assure you). Sure, Skeletal Lamping fails to raise the emotional stakes that made its predecessor so unexpectedly harrowing, but no matter. It's a logical step forward for a band sloughing off indie rock conventionality for pop omnivorousness, and only someone gorging on Hater-Ade could begrudge Of Montreal the leap. After all, girls, and evidently middle-aged black transsexuals, just want to have fun.

P.S.: For today only, you can pick up the record fo $3.99 at Amazon mp3.

I Know It's Only Rock and Roll

2008-10-17T20:08:00.003-04:00

All my heroes are weirdos

I like old rock and roll. Not to the exclusion of the more modern variety: I have high hopes for Jay Reatard, Fucked Up, No Age, The Hold Steady, Vampire Weekend, Okkervil River, etc. They're good bands (Jay Reatard might as well be a band), and though it's debatable how forward-looking any of them are, each practice their craft with a fundamental dynamism, a vitality, that renders innovation, well, somewhat beside the point. Nor do I consider it innately superior to alternative genres: hip-hop, pop, electronic music, country, reggae, hell, klezmer - great music has a nagging tendancy to ignore boundaries, and if that's truly the case, than it should go double for us listeners. At least if you're serious about your pleasure.

But oh I do like old rock and roll. My definition is a bit elastic, time-wise; I doubt many other folks would consider the Clash "old" rock and roll, along the lines of, say, Chuck Berry, even though they might find the musical debts of the former to the latter readily apparent. My cut-off isn't punk, or the first Britsh Invasion, or the end of the sixties, or any of that stuff; hell, perhaps there isn't one. After all, are you going to listen to White Blood Cells and tell me that's not good old fashioned rock and roll? Where's the distinction?

Where indeed? Sure, you could argue that the Berry formula has been amended throughout the years, but what we call rock now is pretty damn close, on a geological scale, to what was called rock and roll way back when. There have been departures - the Beatles injected music hall, Dylan literariness, the Stones menace, the Velvet Underground perversity, the Doors pretension. There has been apostasy, as professionals seeking middle-brow respectability begged, borrowed, and stole jazz and classical music tropes in a bid to move from the garage to the den. There has been Reformation: the Stooges and New York Dolls were martyred, the Ramones nailed the 95 theses to the church door, and the Sex Pistols made sure the breach was irreparable. Even to this very day you have real bona fide rock and rollers making bona fide essential rock and roll music. They're standing on the shoulders of giants, sure, but the only time anybody really cares about that, at least anybody who's not being a spoilsport, is when the tunes are in absentia. Yeah, yeah, the new Oasis sounds like the old Beatles, but next to nobody gave a shit about that when the old Beatles were "Don't Look Back in Anger" and "Wonderwall". Bringing it back to Jack White, I could list you a hundred acts that his band "sounds like", but I can't name you a single other band that's put out "Fell In Love With a Girl".

Today, I bought, used, Robert Quine's official Velvet Underground bootlegs. The tapes, recorded on a portable equipped with a hand-held mic, sound like shit. This is a bootleg in the way that Bob Dylan's official bootlegs aren't really bootlegs. Still, through the hiss, echo, and distortion come the Velvets circa 1969, no two songs the same, excepting three epic renditions of "Sister Ray", clocking in at 24:03, 38:00, and 28:39 respectively. (Rock and roll is here to stay: I have it on good authority that My Bloody Valentine's concert-closing version of "You Made Me Realize" has been known to go upwards of 45 minutes.) Lou Reed et al are weird; that is, after all, their primary contribution to the canon. But they are weird in a distinctly rock and roll way, and given how they rip off "I'm Waiting for the Man", "I Can't Stand It", and a scorching ten minute "White Light/White Heat" here, it's hard not to imagine the dozen or so folks in the club boogieing until the pills fell out of their pockets. Fuck, even "Venus In Furs" fulfills the basic requirements. "Heroin", too. This isn't surprising. The Velvet Underground weren't there to tear rock and roll down. They were coming to the party, too, even if they weren't invited. They wanted in. Even if they had to sneak in through the back door. Or by the window. Or tunnel in through the basement. They rocked. Perhaps more importantly, they rolled.

(I'm) Stranded

2008-10-14T08:41:00.000-04:00

Back when the platters that mattered were platters

Stranded is a rather famous book among a very small subgroup of humanity. Mostly written in 1978, published in '79, and edited/curated by rock/cultural critic Greil Marcus, Stranded purported to ask 20 rock critics to name their so-called "desert island disc", i.e. what was the one album they would have to have if forbidden all others. Some, like M. Mark, chafed at the conceit of the question: he protested that he would not choose any single one of his beloved Van Morrison records, before grudgingly giving in and selecting the live double LP It's Too Late to Stop Now on the basis of sheer volume. Nick Tosches, whose scabrous essay opens the collection like a howitzer battery discharging in a rest home, treated the assignment as an excuse for a autobiographical exegesis intermittently featuring the Rolling Stones: "Next to me in the emergency ward was a boy who held a Maxwell House coffee can to his neck, to catch the blood that dribbled from a cut in his throat. In his lap was a cassette recorder playing the new Stones album, Exile on Main Street." (Tosches ended up settling on Sticky Fingers.) Jim Miller's choice, Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica, seemed to be an excuse to circumvent the album-centric nature of the project in favor of the good ol' fashion 45 rpm vinyl single, as well as an opportunity to rebut the myth that Ronnie Spector sprang fully-formed from the skull of Phil Spector. Dave Marsh creates a mix tape for masturbation, which, after all, "is the secret reality of rock sexuality - what all rock listeners have in common - which is probably why so many of us have Catholicism and Judaism in our backgrounds." Most, after the obligatory sarcastic preamble (best, by Paul Nelson: "Doing a piece with a desert island premise is like writing a suicide note and then sticking around to cry over it."), just answer the damn question.

The book arrived right at the punk/rock schism (the only schism, as Robert Christgau put it in his re-introduction to the 1996 edition, that was gonna be acknowledged by a bunch of entirely white, overwhelmingly male rock critics in '78) and, with the exception of a handful of pieces, reflects the pre-punk consensus. Marcus' original preface notes the conspicuous absence of any records by the Beatles, Elvis, Chuck Berry, or Bob Dylan, artists whose presence would be notable, perhaps even hailed as somewhat courageous, in today's obscurity-fetishizing climate. Venerable '70s dinosaurs like Jackson Browne, the Eagles, and Linda Ronstadt all merit inclusion, an outcome that would have been difficult to fathom had this book been compiled a mere year or two later. The Stones, still a going proposition in 1978, having just released the brilliantly profane Some Girls, scored 1968's Beggars Banquet and the aforementioned Sticky Fingers.

Still, a nascent critical shift is discernible. Tom Carson, the youngest contributor by "a good five years", according to Christgau, picked the Ramones' then-fresh, still-classic Rocket to Russia; the Dean himself chose an English import bundling the New York Dolls' two Mercury LPs, New York Dolls and In Too Much Too Soon; Langdon Winner elected that oldie-but-goodie, Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica (still don't get it myself); and Ellen Willis picked a Velvet Underground comp. At just under of the quarter of the pieces present, a reader in '78 could be forgiven for dismissing these contributions as outliers from the steadily-plotted Rolling Stones-Van Morrison-Neil Young-Bruce Springsteen axis running through the book. A reader in 1980 might have been convinced that Carson, Christgau & Co. were especially prescient; a reader today might say they seem downright visionary - after all, who really was more Rock and Roll Future: Bruce Springsteen or Joey Ramone?

Regardless of your predilections taste-wise, much of Stranded's enduring genius lay in that good rock writing is good rock writing, regardless of what one thinks of the underlying subject matter. Grace Lichtenstein's deeply personal take on the Eagles' Desparado urges you to reevaluate a band that has long since passed into FM ubiquity. Simon Firth astutely diagnoses what's politically troubling about the Rolling Stones, which is that they've got no politics beyond "a contempt for the masses that they share with any respectable small shopkeeper." Tom Carson deftly describes the cynical, arty pretensions of seventies' corporate rock as "icing with the cake shot out from underneath it." So, yes, you can laugh at the notion of being trapped on a desert island for all eternity with Linda Ronstadt, but the type of emotional reaction that would occasion a thirty page disquisition on Living in the U.S.A., such as John Rockwell provides herein, is not so easily mocked. If anything, the latter-day unfashionableness and triviality of some of the records and artists represented in Stranded serves as a reminder of the ultimately ephemeral nature of critical taste. If the book came out in 1980, somebody probably would have listed The Clash's debut LP; if it came out in 2008, somebody might well have picked Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, which in '78 would have required you to flee to a desert island to escape it. If "[o]ne of the chief delights of rock 'n roll is that it's trash music," as Tom Carson has it, well, one man's trash is another man's treasure, after all. Every dog has its day, etc.

"'Twas The Poor Who Killed the Economy!"

2008-10-10T22:09:00.004-04:00

Neil Cavuto: "Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster."

Daniel Gross has a great piece over at Slate detailing and rebutting the right's unsubtle attempt to lay the present crisis at the feet of the Democrats by way of pinning the whole thing on Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as the Community Reinvestment Act, a piece of a Carter-era legislation requiring depository banks to make greater efforts to lend to minority and low-income Americans. Many of his points are simple common sense: most of the prominent players in the mortgage crisis weren't regulated under the CRA, and certainly nothing in that legislation required them "to offer loans for no money down, or to throw underwriting standards out the window, or to encourage mortgage brokers to aggressively seek out new markets." Mortgage lenders lent money recklessly because they thought they could make more money doing so. That so-called "free marketeers" would imply, as Fox Business News' Neil Cavuto did, that "[l]oaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster," is not only a borderline racist smear, it's manifestly untrue. The CRA has been in effect largely without incident for over thirty years - it's only in our era of extreme deregulation, when financial institutions have been free to operate unfettered by meaningful oversight, that all of the sudden, mortgages have found their way en masse into the hands of unqualified borrowers on one end, and mystery-meat complex derivatives on the other.

The best part of Gross's piece, though, is his righteously indignant counterpunch:

On the other hand, lending money recklessly to obscenely rich white guys, such as Richard Fuld of Lehman Bros. or Jimmy Cayne of Bear Stearns, can be really risky. In fact, it's even more risky, since they have a lot more borrowing capacity. And here, again, it's difficult to imagine how Jimmy Carter could be responsible for the supremely poor decision-making seen in the financial system. I await the Krauthammer column in which he points out the specific provision of the Community Reinvestment Act that forced Bear Stearns to run with an absurd leverage ratio of 33 to 1, which instructed Bear Stearns hedge-fund managers to blow up hundreds of millions of their clients' money, and that required its septuagenarian CEO to play bridge while his company ran into trouble. Perhaps Neil Cavuto knows which CRA clause required Lehman Bros. to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars in short-term debt in the capital markets and then buy tens of billions of dollars of commercial real estate at the top of the market. I can't find it. Did AIG plunge into the credit-default-swaps business with abandon because Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now members picketed its offices? Please. How about the hundreds of billions of dollars of leveraged loans—loans banks committed to private-equity firms that wanted to conduct leveraged buyouts of retailers, restaurant companies, and industrial firms? Many of those are going bad now, too. Is that Bill Clinton's fault?

The "old capitalist" maxim was that "he who reaps the profits shall bear the losses." Considering that our federal government no longer believes in that principle, at least when it's multi-billion dollar corporations doing the losing, perhaps, at least, we can change it to "he who reaps the profits shall bear the responsibility." But as long as Wall Street and its fellow travelers on the right insist on palming off the blame on the poor while pocketing six-figure bonuses and strapping on platinum parachutes, you can be sure that that ain't gonna happen.

"My Fellow Prisoners"

2008-10-08T17:43:00.000-04:00

McCainiac(s)

2008-10-08T11:23:00.001-04:00

Swallowing bile

Has anyone ever sounded unfriendlier than John McCain when saying the words "my friends"? It's like how when a guy on the street calls you "buddy" or "pal", he really means "hey, shithead!"
Evidently the McCain campaign has been sequestering the media from the crowd at its campaign events. It's unclear whether this step is being taken to prevent the media from catching McCain's supporters using racial epithets on the record or otherwise venting hysterically, or for the reporters' own protection - according to the Washington Post, after Sarah Palin made reference to her now-infamous Katie Couric interview in Tampa, "supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, 'Sit down, boy.'"
McCain, who stuck to a mantra of "cut spending, cut spending" when asked initially how the economic crisis would affect his White House plans, yesterday unveiled mid-debate a hugely ambitious $300 billion plan for the government to buy bad mortgages, essentially refinancing them in an effort to keep people in their homes (and taking them off bank balance sheets). Not a bad idea, perhaps, although it's hard to see how it squares with any other aspect of McCain's proposed fiscal policies, which to this point have pretty much centered around making Bush's tax breaks for billionaires permanent. Also, for what it's worth, Obama claims to have thought of it first.
Also in last night's debate, McCain launched attack after attack on...George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, the presidential ticket he endorsed heartily in 2004. Really, I know we're not supposed to play the "blame game" here, but between swallowing/authoring the lies that landed us in Iraq in the first place, backing Bush and Cheney, and picking Sarah "What does a vice president do?" Palin to be the dauphine...where exactly is this record of "sound judgment" McCain and his cronies keep referring to? Is it enough to say that you have good judgment ad infinitum if your most high profile decisions continually belie that notion?
We're reminded again and again what an expedient, effective tactic blaming the media is, but whatever happened to the age-old maxim about not picking fights with people who buy ink by the barrel? McCain once enjoyed such a solid relationship with the press that he routinely referred to the cadre of reporters covering him as "my base"; now they're his most implacable enemy. There's been a lot of speculation that the media figures who have the longest-standing relationships with McCain are disgusted with his apparent abandonment of his personal principles, as well as the manifestly dishonest character of his smear campaign against Obama. More to the point, though, I think that there is a direct causal link between McCain and Palin's decision to open an Eastern front against the media, and the media's decision to treat the McCain campaign's every action with an intense skepticism. After all, I guess there's only so many times that virtually every pillar of the mainstream media establishment can stand being blamed for Sarah Palin's inability to evince basic competence in the standard TV interview format.

Banner Day

2008-10-07T20:45:00.005-04:00

Locked in tight, out of range

Today I managed to "acquire" three of the best "rock" records of 2008 I have yet heard: Department of Eagles' BNMed In Ear Park, Jay Reatard's Matador Singles '08, and the eighth entry in Bob Dylan's seemingly-inexhaustible Bootleg Series, Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989-2006.

Pitchfork likened the Dept. of Eagles record to Sgt. Pepper - sonically, not qualitatively - but the Beatles I think I'd pick would be the minor-key cuts on The White Album ("Martha My Dear", "I'm So Tired") and side 2 of Abbey Road. Throw in the opening credits to Deadwood and last year's super-bizarro, oddly compelling Rise Above, The Dirty Projector's track-by-track reconstruction/reimagining of Black Flag's Damaged, and I think you start to get the picture. DoE is tied to Grizzly Bear through common member Daniel Rossen, and both bands share a common attic-core aesthetic (see also: Beach House), but where the latter's lauded 2006 effort, Yellow House, was maddeningly unfocused at points, In Ear Park is more committed to pop's notions of structure. Whether or not this constitutes an improvement depends on whether you prefer your medicine with a spoonful of sugar, or straight up.

* * *

Jay Reatard's functionally-titled Matador Singles '08 is technically a compilation, collecting the limited-run vinyl-only singles the Tennessee punk savant has periodically dropped throughout the year since joining the top-tier NY indie label. Of course, this is a little chicken-and-egg: the comp was in the works from the start, so far from serving as a historical document, it listens more like the cogent, pre-conceived full-length it probably is. The Reatard who appears here is more restrained than the white squall terror leaping from the speakers on Blood Visions; indeed, though I recognized a few of the tracks from Reatard's, uh, frenetic performance at this year's Pitchfork Festival, the incarnations on record are closer to the late Exploding Hearts than Black Lips. The production is cleaner, providing more separation between the instruments and foregrounding Reatard's signature helium-imp squeal. The result is a set of effervescent songs with hooks that actually catch, like the jaunty "An Ugly Death", the New Pornography of "Always Wanting More", and Westerbergian elegy "No Time". Reatard is still mining a if-you-don't-like-this-one-well-here's-another vein, but the possibility that you won't like this one is virtually nonexistent.

* * *

Bob Dylan's voice, once an instrument of revolution in and of itself, has been worn to a nubby croak by some combination of age, use, and American Spirits. No longer able to credibly play the accusatory oracle - that's a young man's game, anyhow - he is now America's foremost carnival barker, applying his gifts to the song forms that initially inspired him: blues and country-western. His last two LPs, 2001's masterful Love and Theft and 2006's somewhat-less-so Modern Times, seem like outright rejections, not only of modernity, but Dylan's own past pretense. This is not to say that he is a bitter artist: he has simply exercised his option and abandoned the Delphic mantle. At the time of 1969's puzzling Nashville Skyline, Dylan (who was not yet quite through being "Dylan") professed his desire to be a "song and dance man"; of late he has finally achieved that goal. The result is that Dylan has not retreated into his past but a past that he never inhabited, a past that he damn well may have invented for himself.

It is this period of retooling that Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989-2006 covers, and it is a testament to its subject's creative fecundity that its rich content belies the title's curatorial promise. Chockablock with alternate takes that seem less like left-overs and more like roads-not-taken (a Dylan trademark; see the Bootleg Series Vol. 2 version of "Idiot Wind"), stray soundtrack cuts (see the mournfully majestic "'Cross the Green Mountain", exiled to the Gods and Generals - ?! - OST), and live versions, Tell Tale Signs is a hodgepodge organized around the idea of Dylan as both irresistible force and immovable object. In turns he is wizened, mercurial, raunchy, valedictory, equally comfortable wearing the masks of comedy or tragedy. While it would be a mistake to peg Dylan as consistent - the liner notes to this set reference Dylan's own roundabout dismissal of his '80s output from the memoir Chronicles - the "trash" presented on Tell Tale Signs would be treasure to any of his remaining contemporaries, most of whom have been circling the drain of cultural irrelevance since the '60s and '70s. Indeed, it may well be treasure to the man himself; after all, this is the guy who evidently withheld the jaw-dropping "Blind Willie McTell" off 1983's Infidels on a whim, releasing it nearly a decade later on Bootleg Series Vol. 3. (The liners, by longtime Dylan scribe Larry "Ratso" Sloman, recount the author's profane outburst upon listening to the final, sequenced Infidels with Dylan and discovering that the song had been omitted; the singer's response: "Aw, Ratso, don't get so excited. It's just an album. I've made thirty of them.")

Eventually, perhaps, Dylan will dip too deep into the vault, and we'll hear the dregs. Yet, if Tell Tale Signs' title is to be believed - and its contents suggest as much - such an outcome is far from inevitable. This record is an achievement in its own right, a portrait of the artist as an old man traveling farther down a road that no one's quite gotten around to paving just yet. Probably just as well if no one ever does.

Saturday: A TV WasteWonderland

2008-10-04T14:56:00.005-04:00

Convalescing here, watching some dinosaur fight porn on History Channel about Tyrannosaurs that has me thinking about a few things:

Those tiny arms are a pretty interesting argument again evolution, right? I mean, what would be the point of making a giant bad ass killing machine and giving it those ridiculous tooth pick thingys? It's like a Thalidomide baby the size of a VW bus.
How do they know that Tyrannosaurs were about a smart as house cats? What's the basis for that claim? How smart are house cats, anyway? Maybe we've just been testing stupid house cats. There are stupid people, after all.
Also, "It's name was Tyrannosaurus Rex" is a patently false statement. We named it Tyrannosaurus Rex long after the last one crapped out; for all we know, back in the day it went by Fred or Big Tooth Scary Thing. As in:

Triceratops: "Holy shit, it's Fred! Run motherfuckers!"

Expert Debate Analysis

2008-10-03T12:32:00.008-04:00

Gehrig and Ruth, Ortiz and Ramirez, Obama and Biden?

A pair of baseball analogies, if you will:

Let's say it's game six of the World Series, your team leading 3 games to 2. You're at bat leading 3-1 in the bottom of the eighth inning, and your closer's up in the bullpen . He's a good closer - a Brad Lidge-type, say, but not a Mariano Rivera. You can win with things the way they are, but you'd like some insurance runs to ease the pressure. Obama's standing at third with one out, and Biden's to bat. All he needs to do is loft a sacrifice fly to drive in the insurance run. Instead, he ropes a double, not only picking up Obama, but putting himself in scoring position as well. All with only one out. The big inning is still alive.

Now let's say that the visiting team is up to bat in the top of the ninth, with the home team's closer on the mound, throwing smoke. The visitors are down 5-1, with one out and McCain on first. Palin, who hit the game-winning homer in Game 2 but is 2-for-15 in the series overall, steps to the plate. She gets down 0-2 early, fouls off a couple of pitches to stay alive, takes a ball, and then lines out sharply to the shortstop. Hey, whatever, after she fell behind two strikes, you were sure that she was going to go down swinging. Anyway, it's still two outs, McCain's still at first down 5-1, a hairsbreadth away from elimination.

Emotional Fascism b/w Tonight's the Night

2008-10-02T17:30:00.003-04:00

Ready, steady, go

While I know that a good number of my political co-religionists are salivating at the prospect of VP whack-a-mole that they expect will unfold mere hours from now in St. Louis, I admit to apprehension: it's a little like "Parker Lewis Can't Lose", right? Expectations for Palin have declined to the point where, instead of clearing hurdles, it's more like trying to avoid slipping on a banana peel. As long as she's upright at the end of the evening, she can declare victory. And if she actually displays any sort of competence, it could go a long way to restoring the gloss that has been wiped away by weeks of "holy shit is she not ready for the presidency" revelations. Obama/Biden is almost better off not debating her, though Team McCain already tried to pull off that trick last week, and look where it got them. Of course, shit is crazy awful for the GOP right now, with the hypercapitalist juggernaut they stoked for the last eight years on the verge of total collapse and Obama pulling away in the polls (Today McCain declared defeat in Michigan, once viewed as a top target owing to its large number of potentially Obama-averse blue collar voters). It's possible, as it seemed after last week's debate, wherein Obama won on the merits and McCain on style, that reality is actually dictating the course of the election and, as events are decidedly pro-Obama, no matter what Palin does people will view it as a loss for her. Having to parrot, or in her case, speak with deep seated conviction about, the Republican line won't help matters; hard to look competent even if you're spouting that nonsense verbatim off of a teleprompter.

Yeah, I'm probably just being pessimistic.

ARE YOU ARE MISSING WINNER?

2008-10-02T17:06:00.005-04:00

Here and here. And I guess here, too

[. . .]

(I suppose it would be churlish to point out that the final track is supposed to be the-far-less-oblique-in-context "Theme From Shaft.")

Identity Politics, Etc.

2008-10-01T13:09:00.006-04:00

"Thanks, Mike." "Don't mention it, Barack."

As of today, I will be able to tell my hypothetical children that I cast a ballot for the first black President of the United States. Or that I voted for the first black presidential candidate to lose a general election. Or that I voted for the first vice president from Delaware. Or that I voted against the first female vice president. Or that I voted for...

No Tomorrow

2008-09-28T18:07:00.001-04:00

Ya Gotta Believe

2008-09-28T09:06:00.003-04:00

Paul Newman Is Dead

2008-09-27T12:40:00.002-04:00

No other actor blurred the line that divides the dangerous from the merely mischievous, the rogue from the renegade, like Paul Newman. So great were the sum of his parts that his characters - from Fast Eddie Felson to Butch Cassidy, Hud Bannon to Reg Dunlop - seemed like facets of the real Paul Newman; he was not a chameleon because he did not need to be. Newman was the real McCoy, one of the last real movie stars, back when that term wasn't considered implicitly distinct from "actor." He leaves behind a body of work - 65 films, many of them among the greatest in the history of the form, over a 50 year career - that is simply without peer. More than that, he leaves behind a legacy of charitable endeavor that marks him out as a truly exemplary human being, and perhaps that is what we will miss most: as Mr. Newman himself was quoted in the New York Times' obituary as telling a reporter, “We are such spendthrifts with our lives. The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”

"A good manager doesn’t fire people. He hires people and inspires people. People, Ryan. And people will never go out of business."

2008-09-25T13:11:00.000-04:00

Dunder Mifflin: better run than Lehman Bros.

Just a reminder that as America's financial system teeters on the brink of collapse and our president tries to sell the nation on the virtues of democratic capitalism, The Office returns tonight at 9 p.m. Confidence restored.

Er, Uh, She's Needed to Address the Financial Crisis in, Uh, What's the Capital of Alaska Again?

2008-09-25T09:18:00.005-04:00

Why you duckin' me man?

A new day dawns and so too a new gimmick: now the McCain camp wants to postpone the vice presidential debate, currently scheduled for October 2 in St. Louis, if there is no deal on the bailout. Now, since Sarah Palin is governor of Alaska and not a member of Congress, it's not exactly clear what purpose postponement would serve in her case, as opposed to Senator McCain, whose wealth of economic expertise is desperately needed back in Washington ("Fire the SEC commissioner! Restrict executive pay!"). Perhaps we can then infer that this too is a political maneuver, that the McCain team, which has been restricting access to Palin like she's Dick Cheney in the bunker or something, doesn't want her to get on a stage and have it be known that in addition to knowing next to nothing about foreign policy, she knows next to nothing about market economics. As reality has intruded on the campaign, the need for leaders who can actually handle the job of being President of the United States has become more and more abundantly clear; just as clear is the extent to which Palin, who may well find herself a heartbeat away, does not fit this particular bill.

GimmickCain Bails Out of Campaign

2008-09-24T20:01:00.006-04:00

Don't worry America: they're on the case

When confronted with danger, a possum plays dead; a turtle pulls inside its shell; an armadillo curls up into a ball. John McCain, it seems, resorts to gimmicks. Following the success of the Democratic National Convention, McCain resuscitated his seemingly moribund campaign by plucking the inexperienced, untested Sarah Palin from obscurity to be his surprise (and quite possibly, surprised) running mate. Now, confronted with the collapse of Wall Street on his party's watch, an event playing into Obama and the Democrats' collective wheelhouse, the foundering McCain has again pulled a wild card, suspending his campaign and calling for the postponement of Friday's presidential debate so that he and Obama can go back to Washington and work on President Bush's $700 billion ~~giveaway to the super wealthy~~ bailout package.

Over the past week or so, Senator McCain has articulated no policy position on the bailout and Wall Street's profligacy that has not seemed either incoherent ("Fire the SEC chairman!") or too much like me-too bandwagon jumping ("Restrict executive pay!"). He has previously copped to not understanding economics; unlike foreign policy - which seemed poised to dominate this election cycle at the outset - it is not an area where he thrives. One of his chief economic advisers, former Sen. Phil Gramm, once proclaimed Americans "a nation of whiners," unable to appreciate the fact that the economy, regardless of their personal experiences of it, was fundamentally strong. Indeed, McCain, too, has embraced this notion of fundamental soundness - though to his credit he has allowed that "people are hurting." Of course, as we now know, the economy was not fundamentally sound. Indeed, it is so fundamentally unsound that $700 billion in taxpayer subsidy is required to salvage it.

The American electorate has sensed McCain's weakness (and more profoundly, detected his party's complicity in fomenting this crisis); they have decided increasingly to place their faith in Obama. McCain's staff, who know how to read a poll, decided that, well, something had to be done. After all, their man seemed unable to extricate himself from the quicksand merely by explaining what he might do in this situation - in common parlance, this is known as "talking about the issues" (syn. "Straight Talk" ha ha). So another gimmick: Senator McCain, who has no idea what the hell he's talking about, is desperately needed in Washington to work on the bailout. Perhaps his mere presence will imbue the proceedings with a glow of bipartisanship and comity. Who knows. At any rate he'll be in Washington, being above the fray (the fray nowadays consisting mainly of his own outrageously mendacious campaign ads). Being, we are meant to infer, presidential.

Mr. McCain Goes to Washington is, of course, not a suspension of a campaign but a continuation of it by other means. Getting off the trail stops the bleeding, and changes the tone: McCain is a doer, not a talker. He's not willing to put political aspirations above the public good. McCain wants to duck the debate scheduled for 9 p.m. on Friday not because he genuinely believes that he's going to be doing anything worth a damn doddering around the Capitol, but because he doesn't want to risk Obama thumping him in his moment of weakness and driving him into a deep hole from which he might never climb out. Worse yet, the first debate is set to be about foreign policy, McCain's strong suit; even if they stick to the script and McCain pulls off a victory, who the hell is going to care? Who wants to hear about how things are going in Gaul when Rome is burning? Putting off the debate is pure strategy, not wanting to risk getting exposed in moment of weakness, not wanting a presumptive strength to be sapped away by extraordinary events. The calculus, in any event, is thoroughly political: Obama's credibility > McCain's credibility.

Obama, himself on the way back to Washington, has not taken the bait. He has rightly insisted that there is a pressing need for debate: “Part of the president’s job is to deal with more than one thing at once. In my mind it’s more important than ever.” Put another way (about 2:30 in):

F-4 Interceptor

2008-09-22T22:04:00.003-04:00

Chances are that if someone catches this ball, he won't be wearing a Jets jersey

Seeing Brett Favre in a Jet uniform is like taking a detour into a bizarre alternaverse; it reminds me of those What If? comics they used to put out that used to posit these fanboy-argument provoking hypotheses, like What If The Hulk Killed Wolverine? The academic nature of the question allowed you detached intellectual pleasure in something you would otherwise be emotionally invested in, because, you know, it's not really happening. Like a cosmic Get Out of Jail Free card. Given these circumstances, the fact that Favre seems to have zero familiarity with the Jets' playbook and is heaving interception after interception, that doesn't bother me. It's like by adding Brett Favre the Jets were conceding the 2008 season was going to be a one-shot issue stamped with a really gaudy hologram foil cover; not part of the ongoing continuum. My favorite team has been reduced to a prop in Favre's ongoing post-faux-retirement melodrama, and you know what? I could care less. I was forecasting 8-8 before the season began, so what the hell did I have to lose? Two or three more games? At least I can now comfort myself with the thought that the Favre experiment has so divorced this season from any plausible sense of continuity with the Jets organization I have rooted for for, oh, seventeen seasons, that I have no reason to be emotionally invested in the team. This is only a bad thing if Broadway Brett leads the Jets to a Super Bowl title, in which case...ah fuck it if he leads the Jets to a championship I'll give him my first born. Otherwise, given the way things are going, I'll at least avoid an ulcer. Oops, San Diego just scored again: Chargers 38, Jets 14, early 3rd quarter.

The Lazy Way They Turn Your Head/ Into a Rest Stop For the Dead

2008-09-22T17:18:00.001-04:00

Not priced out yet

Not too sure what I think about this. After three straight days of listening to Dear Science (not sure if the comma is in the title, per Jon Pareles, or out), the newest record from TV on the Radio, I still can't get my head all the way around it. Granted, sometimes you can't force yourself to digest art, there will be an epiphany down the road, etc. Yet with TVOTR's previous outings, I was always able to get a bead after a couple of listens - 2003's Young Liars EP and 2006's Return to Cookie Mountain each sounded rich, complicated, crespuscular right off of the bat, making plain the tensions and anxieties undergirding the music and lyrics. Each were strongly thematic works, aesthetically and philosophically, centered on a marriage of indie rock, hip-hop, Motown, and noise in the first instance and an extreme sense of dislocation in the latter. Even 2004's inferior Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes - one wonders if the band would have profited by confounding expectations and allowing the superlative Young Liars stand alone as their debut - is insistently unitary in its purpose and execution.

In Pareles' interview with TVOTR's principals, he insists on Dear Science's cohesiveness. Indeed it is his thesis vis-a-vis the album: "In an era of disposable downloads and ring tones 'Dear Science,' is a coherent collection of songs made for repeated listening." This remark implicitly places Dear Science in a pop continuum, as opposed to the confines of the indie rock scene wherein TVOTR have achieved their most enduring success, and where the album format still retains significant currency. Certainly, this is a context Dave Sitek, the band's lead guitarist and sound manipulator, embraces:

“If you’re going to reach for it, reach all the way for it,” Mr. Sitek said. “Albums like ‘Purple Rain’ and ‘Thriller’ and those kind of records, you had to reach far above the din of cynicism and modern living to get to that place, against all the odds. The industry used to support that kind of record making, and just because the marketplace of the industry doesn’t support it now doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still try for it.”

Thriller and Purple Rain are shorthand for pop ambition; well, not just pop ambition but the desire to reach an audience so broad as to be all encompassing. The kind of reach event records like Thriller and Purple Rain had before the concept of an event record evaporated in the late '90s, early '00s (I direct your attention to No Strings Attached and The Marshal Mathers LP); the kind of reach that is now the exclusive, if diminishing, province of event films like The Dark Knight. (Unless you count Google as art. Takers?)

Granted, I don't think that Sitek or his bandmates seriously countenance the possibility of Dear Science reintroducing the pop record as unifying cultural event - frankly, they're on the wrong side of the musical polyglot divide, the omnivorous Timbaland presently occupying that particular high ground. But Dear Science is their pop move, make no mistake about it. The rough edges are there, but sanded down - abrasive in the mold of former label and tourmates Nine Inch Nails. The addition of horns courtesy of Brooklyn's Antibalas obliterates the band's assiduously cultivated air of sonic claustrophobia. And one could go positively batshit trying to count the myriad clever appropriations of Top 40 technique. The cumulative effect is that even at its least direct, you never lose sight of the fact that Dear Science is foremost a big pop record - a statement meant to be received in the same manner as Thriller, or Purple Rain, or, to cite a more proximate example, Justin Timberlake's FutureSex/LoveSounds.

Thus, the question might be: does Dear Science succeed on this, its chosen field of battle? Well, therein lies the rub. You hear the pop record, that much is undeniable; whether we're talking about a well-placed, uncharacteristic ballad like "Family Tree" or its boisterous follow-up, "Red Dress", there is no obscuring the fact that TVOTR is pushing all the right synaptic buttons. Yet what set the great mega-albums, the enduring pop lodestars apart was that they all came equipped with killer singles, and lots of them. Purple Rain produced "Let's Go Crazy", "When Doves Cry", and the title cut. Thriller birthed no fewer than seven monster singles, including "Billie Jean", "Beat It", "The Girl Is Mine", "Thriller", "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'", so on and so forth. (In fact, that was always the knock on Thriller: it sounded too much like a singles comp and not enough like a cohesive album, which is ridiculous, insofar as having too many good, eminently replayable pop smashes on your record could ever be considered a demerit - sounds more like a dentist admonishing a child against sweets than a rock critic evaluating an album to me.) The beat goes on: Born in the U.S.A. (title track, "Dancing in the Dark", "Glory Days"), So ("Sledgehammer", "Big Time", "Red Rain", "In My Eyes"), Slippery When Wet ("Livin' on a Prayer", "You Give Love a Bad Name", "Wanted Dead or Alive").

Dear Science, there is no other way to put this, never quite achieves orgasm. You have a string of superlative album cuts, and not one of them seems to get out in front and lead the parade. As such the album never quite catches the ear, never trips those subliminal wires that cause you to automatically tune into it when it's playing in the background. There is no earworm, no calling card for the id to recognize. You can either dedicate yourself to listening to Dear Science or you can ignore it - no middle ground is afforded you.

Certainly, it's not fair to demand that TV on the Radio turn into a singles band; though they're more than capable of producing one - "New Health Rock", "Wolf Like Me", "Staring at the Sun" - the album is more their metier. (Perhaps this explains the band's avowed interest in preserving the form.) Nonetheless, Dear Science is a manifestation of TVOTR's ambition to move beyond the cultural backwater that is Pitchfork's readership (sorry, but the road goes both ways) and into the mainstream; in order to fulfill that ambition they needed to bring at least one killer ap single to the party - a concession, perhaps, to the kids and their "disposable downloads and ring tones." One reads about the supposed flexibility of their deal with Interscope, the major label that underwrites them (and fellow [former] Williamsburgers the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, leading me to wonder whether there was a quip pro quo at work or some A&R guy figured he'd get all his Christmas shopping done on Bedford Ave.), but the facts are these: a) no one signs with a major label without some pretense of getting bigger (unless you're Sonic Youth, perhaps) and b) if you don't get bigger, you're gonna get dropped. Clearly, from a commercial perspective, and no doubt an artistic perspective as well, going pop was the right move. While Dear Science is doubtlessly a good album - how good, I can't yet say without incurring the risk of doubling back on myself - it's not good enough, not accessible enough, not insistent enough that you're going to hear it on the radio. Or the TV.

So When Do Daniel Murphy Jerseys Go On Sale?

2008-09-20T09:47:00.003-04:00

The Cooperstown Kid lifted his average to .374 (5-for-11 as a pinch-hitter) with a go-ahead two-run double in the 8th. The Mets went on to beat the Braves 9-5, moving a half-game into first place.

I Wasn't Here Last September, So I Don't Know What You're Talking About

2008-09-19T08:06:00.002-04:00

Mets 7, Nationals 2

Hamburglar Screaming 187 on a Motherfucking Cop

2008-09-18T22:45:00.003-04:00

Indie Rock Album Title or Subject Line of Solicitation E-Mail From MLB.com?

2008-09-18T13:22:00.002-04:00

You be the judge:

The Days Are Numbered But What Days They Will Be

Sooooo...How 'Bout Those Yankees?

2008-09-17T08:28:00.002-04:00

We Must Stop Congratulating People For Making Stupid Art

2008-09-16T18:03:00.002-04:00

Listen, no is looking forward to the new TV on the Radio album more than me. Well, okay, perhaps that's not true, but judging from the band's sales, I'm in the top 100,000. However, the video for lead single, "Golden Age", is pretty shit. It's cheesy '80s video effects, dancing cops, and people turning into hunky half-animal, half-men (or manimals, if you prefer). Idolator had this to say:

Sure, it has references to Joy Division and the Care Bears, to the Village People and to Voltron, all of which are played out on a blue-sky background that's seemingly within reach at any moment. But what I can't stop seeing is a clip that feels like the only culmination of a long life spent inhaling the culture (and "culture") of the cable-TV era, from the time of those clicky plastic boxes that could descramble the Playboy Channel if you hit the right buttons all the way through to the HD-ed out present.

Granted, perhaps I am either not old enough to know from this "clicky plastic boxes" era of TV, though I do get the references to Voltron (huge fan back in the day), Joy Division (ditto, though not to the point where I automatically associate dudes in robes w/ the "Atmosphere" video), and the Village People. Yet this seems like excusatory boosterism to me: the "this-video-would-suck-but-for-the-grace-of-TV-on-the-Radio" approach. Let's face it, folks: DIY can and has sucked in the past. Goofy charm is not a quality conferred automatically by a low budget and gumption. Compared to the awesome clip for "Wolf Like Me", it fairly reeks of we're-not-trying-itis.

NSFW

2008-09-12T22:19:00.002-04:00

Left: Kate Moss in Interview; Right: Sarah Palin in The New Yorker

I am reading the latest issue of Interview and listening to New Order's Technique LP (Factory, 1989) while intermittently looking in on the Kansas-South Florida game progressing like molasses in January on ESPN. I ate a cheesesteak from BB Sandwich Bar (120 W. 3rd Street), which famously only serves this particular cheesesteak, which is a very particular cheesesteak indeed, if you are well-acquainted with the traditional Philadelphia iteration. The BB take is served on a kaiser roll rather than a hoagie roll, with white American cheese in lieu of cheez whiz (trad.) or provolone (best for taste, I'm told), rib eye steak vs. the usual indeterminate meat, a ketchup-vinegar-red pepper relish (no analog), and marinated onions (no difference). The sandwich is kind of a reorientation -- it's a cheesesteak, but it definitely doesn't fit into the extant continuum; it's sweet, with the onions and relish foregrounded, as opposed to the typically dominate cheese-meat-bread troika that governs the paterfamilias. Recommended. $5.

I have a new shelf stereo system, a refurbished Sony something-or-other I bought at a factory outlet in Delaware. As I am unable to extend the NYU network using my Airport Express, the stereo is hardwired to my laptop; my CDs are all languishing in storage, probably for at least the next year or two. Lately, apart from the New Order, I've been listening to Lou Reed's Berlin, Sonic Youth (EVOL, Sister, Daydream Nation, and Sonic Nurse), My Bloody Valentine, The Dutchess and the Duke (it's becoming more and more difficult to justify why I don't think this is the absolute best album of 2008 so far), and Television's Marquee Moon. There's a strong guitar theme running through these selections, veering from virtuosity to sheer distortion, and I can't help but wonder if that's owing to the relative sonic strengths and weaknesses of my setup. Additionally, there's a subtle New York meme at work, but I'm not willing to read anything into this, especially since I find that living in Greenwich Village is a lot like living on South Street - the romance is gone, although from 6 to 10 most nights (weather permitting), the guy playing rudimentary sax with wanky filigrees for change nine stories below tries to bring it back.

If You Read This Between Now and Midnight...

2008-09-12T18:47:00.003-04:00

Dis not news to THIS GUY

Greatest Kiss, the Kiss greatest hits album, is on sale for $1.99 at Amazon's mp3 store.

MVP MVP

2008-09-10T08:16:00.002-04:00

Handing out one way tickets to Citi Field

New Non-Mets Related Content

2008-09-10T08:10:00.000-04:00

Democrats: Keeping it Reality

David Frum has an interesting piece over at the Times arguing that income inequality is bad for the G.O.P. and that they ought to concern themselves with rectifying it. His premise departs from the fact that areas with a pronounced degree of income inequality tend to vote Democratic - regardless of which side of the gap the voter is on, while areas where incomes are more evenly distributed tend to vote Republican; hence the split between urban Democratic strongholds and Republican exurbs. He cites the recent electoral experiences in D.C.'s Virginia suburbs: once solidly Republican, they delivered a victory to Democrat Tim Kain in the 2005 gubernatorial elections, with a larger margin for Jim Webb in 2006. The theory goes that as income inequality spreads, the Republican vote will erode, and G.O.P. politicians will pay a price for ignoring this fundamental problem.

Frum's argument is noteworthy because he suggests that the Republican's need to re-orient themselves on the issue of income inequality: it's about inequality of opportunity, rather than inequality of wealth. The former plays into the G.O.P.'s wheelhouse - as long as everybody's doing better, who cares that some people are doing better than others? The latter, and where the Republicans get crossed up on the issue, suggests a desire to "pancake" wealth distribution. Savvily, Frum grasps that, from an electoral perspective, income inequality is a geographic issue: he wants to preserve the harmony in the exurbs. This allows him to skirt the idea that in order to reduce income inequality, you might have take positive steps to redistribute wealth through, say, the tax code, which has proven to be an effective tool in the past. His posited solutions are more targeted, and presumably somewhat more palatable to conservative opinion: target undocumented workers, who depress wages at the low end of the scale while providing a proportionate benefit for those at the top, and fix the heath care system, which Frum avers has devoured the sizable wage increases of the Clinton era.

In his piece Frum pays the most attention to the middle and upper-middle classes: the relatively well-educated denizens of suburban America who formed for decades the base of the Republican Party. He argues that as these people begin to feel the strains of income inequality - as their relative homogeneity is disturbed - they will, and have already begun to, vote Democratic in increasing numbers. Most compellingly, he argues that these people have begun to expect government to, well, work, and may be increasingly reluctant to hand the reins to politicians whose central thesis seems to be that government is destined to fail. This dovetails with a point that I have been making recently: that educated middle-class voters are increasingly voting Democratic because they view the Democrats as a pragmatic alternative to the strident ideology of the national G.O.P. It's not a novel argument to suggest that in pursuing a strategy of maximizing the social conservative vote at the expense of coalition-building, the Republicans have alienated a significant swath of voters whom do no share their constrictive values. Beyond this, though, I think that a growing portion of the electorate, in light of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and increasing evidence of climate change, wants leaders who view issues not through an exclusively ideological prism, but attempt to craft workable, realistic solutions that address the facts on the ground. To paraphrase an infamous Bush-era quote, they want politicians who live and work in our shared actual reality, not ideologues preoccupied with manufacturing their own counterfeit edition.

Thus I would suggest that the 2006 election, wherein Democrats did not seek to challenge the underlying values of voters - they ran a slate of conservative, pro-gun, anti-choice Democrats for seats in traditionally G.O.P. areas - was in large part a referendum on competence. Democrats won because they seemed to be in better touch with reality than the Administration or their Republican opponents. Likewise, I think Frum is arguing that for the G.O.P. to succeed, it must address itself to presenting serious solutions tailored to real problems, such as working to reduce the cost of health care instead of falling back on a doctrinal view of the tax cut as a panacea. While the implication of his argument - that the Republicans can furnish solutions to these problems comporting with their existing ideological outlook - is debatable, it is a superior alternative to what exists for conservatives in 2008: a choice between a Democratic party with a better grip on reality but a disagreeable ideological framework, or a Republican party with an inflexibly dogmatic viewpoint and a virtually nonexistent relationship with reality.

They Call Him "The Tourniquet" Because He Stops the Bleeding

2008-09-08T07:55:00.003-04:00

Mets 6, Phillies 3

Eight Is Enough

2008-09-04T20:58:00.000-04:00

What Does This Even Mean?

2008-09-04T20:20:00.002-04:00

Page views, we need them not

From Quietus' interview w/ Metallica's Lars Ulrich:

Do you still maintain that St. Anger is a ‘punishing’ or ‘challenging’ album, rather than just a horribly bad one?

“I’m so beyond ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Terminologies like that don’t work for me. I know a lot of people don’t think it’s a good album, I appreciate that and I respect it. I know a lot of people find it very difficult. What I am 100 percent sure of, is that if it wasn’t for St. Anger, Death Magnetic wouldn’t sound the way it does. St. Anger had to happen: if you can’t find anything musically to appreciate, which I respect, at least respect St. Anger’s existence.

How Sweep It Is

2008-09-03T17:45:00.003-04:00

Mets 9, Brewers 2

"Well if it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break"

2008-09-01T09:56:00.001-04:00

Palin Comparison

2008-08-29T16:52:00.003-04:00

I bet that even McCain was surprised, it was so gosh darn surprising

John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin today is perhaps the most nakedly political decision in a campaign that has been disappointingly rife with them. With Palin, McCain managed to fulfill three objectives:

She's a woman, allowing him to both woo disaffected Hillary supports as well as slather his own moribund candidacy with the gloss of commodified change.
She has a reputation as a maverick, taking on Alaska's Republican kleptocracy by knocking off Frank Murkowski, the unpopular incumbent governor two years ago
She's a certified cultural conservative, especially strong on the issue of abortion: when she discovered during her last pregnancy that her child would be born with Down's syndrome, she carried the pregnancy to term.

Perhaps, on her face, Palin would be a welcome change in Washington, provided that she were not tethered to the increasingly doctrinaire McCain. Yet for a campaign that, when not busy casting aspersions about Barack Obama's character and patriotism, spends most of its time questioning his preparedness, the decision to place someone with virtually no experience a 72 year-old's heartbeat away from the presidency is utterly unconscionable. Beyond that, it is utterly incomprehensible: how can McCain, who has made much of his superior judgment during the campaign, judge someone who, less than two years ago was mayor of a town of less than 10,000 people, and presently governs a state of less than 700,000, someone with absolutely no foreign policy experience whatsoever, fit to govern the United States of America? How could Governor Palin, who is essentially being chosen to await McCain's death or incapacitation (as it's virtually incomprehensible that someone with such a slim resume would have anything of substance to add to McCain's own voluminous "experience"), conceivably be better prepared to assume the office than Senator Obama?

What McCain has done here is precisely what he has done his entire candidacy: he has said one thing and done another. He has criticized Senator Obama for his perceived inexperience, and then, out of sheer political calculation, has nominated as his running mate a politician with far less of it. (It's worth noting that Obama, recognizing his weakness in foreign policy, went out and made the unsexy pick in choosing Joe Biden, the seasoned Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, as his running mate; which choice seems the product of better judgment to you?) Palin may well make a fine vice-president - though in a country already choking to death on Bush Republican dogma, I sincerely doubt it. Yet, in choosing her, McCain is continuing to demonstrate that he has learned well the lessons of political expediency and duplicity. It seems to me that all of that "third Bush term" rhetoric may prove less far-fetched in the long run than utterly prophetic.

The Wright Stuff

2008-08-21T23:15:00.003-04:00

It's a bird, it's a plane...it's...

Super Met

The Power Out

2008-08-21T21:35:00.005-04:00

Today your toothbrush, tomorrow your laptop

Re: this, and more specifically this:

On Thursday, the chip maker plans to demonstrate the use of a magnetic field to broadcast up to 60 watts of power two to three feet. It says it can do that losing only 25 percent of the power in transmission.

It's great that Intel may one day rid us of need to run a billion cables around our homes in order to enjoy the fruits of electrification, but is a technology that "only" loses 25 percent of power in transmission something that we should be considering at this point in time? Granted, it's not like this is right around the figurative corner, but is there any doubt that functionality, and not efficiency is going to determine when this technology hits the marketplace? God only knows how much power the average American household is already wasting, with those TVs and lights left on in vacant rooms, and air conditioners running with the windows open; imagine if we had a plethora of appliances that, if they were used properly, wasted a quarter of the electricity devoted to charging them. The Times doesn't address this timely (pun intended) concern in their puff piece; presumably, it also went unaddressed in Intel's press release.

It's a Blast, Blast, Blast From the Not-Too-Recent Past

2008-08-20T17:39:00.004-04:00

We Were All Thinking It

2008-08-15T13:42:00.002-04:00

I prefer to get my revolutionary politics from Audioslave

From Pitchfork, regarding Rage Against The Machine's decision to play a festival protesting the Democratic National Convention in Denver in addition to their previously-planned protest gig at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul-Minneapolis:

Let us just take this opportunity to say it's a good thing Rage are protesting during both conventions, because limiting their condemnation to Republicans only would just be hypocritical. You know, hypocritical like making bank off of music that preaches anti-capitalist revolution to suburban teenagers.

Metric(s)

2008-08-13T17:16:00.000-04:00

"Dead Disco"
Saw Metric at the Highline Ballroom in Manhattan on Friday night (actually, given the starting time, it was technically Saturday morning). All bands fronted by a sole attractive female (Blondie, No Doubt, Yeah Yeah Yeahs) are de facto vehicles for the singer, at least in the eyes of the audience; from that perspective, Metric is three Canadian dudes and Emily Haines, who, though she has an actual solo record of her own (credited to Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton), did nothing to disabuse anyone of the notion. Wearing a gold lamé...uh, dress, or jumper, or something, Haines basically gave the audience what they wanted, tarting out (in an affirmative manner, of course) over her band's slicked-up superflat rock-disco hybridizations, and then, in a show of solidarity with her back-up ba...er, fellow band members, walking off the stage to thunderous applause well before the final song of the encore ended. No need for modesty or unity when the other three dudes quite correctly realize that they'd be sooner sleeping under a bridge than playing the Highline Ballroom without you, I guess. In any event, Metric were good in the sense that they never bored and kept the room's energy level up throughout their set, but why anyone would prefer Metric to the dozens of milquetoast soundalikes who specialize in similarly professional, just-this-side-of-albino danceable indie rock escapes me.

The Gospel of Wealth, 2008 Edition

2008-08-11T11:11:00.001-04:00

Watching the above, I'm struck by that fact that Maher's criticisms of hip-hop aren't centered on profanity, violence, misogyny, or homophobia, the latter two of which his foil, the intellectual Michael Eric Dyson, is left to bring up. No, Maher is fixated on rap's tendency toward the self-referential, towards what he perceives, condescendingly, as "the virtues of the ghetto": criminal prowess and materialism. Dyson's response is first to introduce examples of "positive" rappers like Mos Def and Common, which is like defending rock and roll in the '50s by appealing to Pat Boone and Ricky Nelson (not an aesthetic judgment on my part); he then draws an amusing parallel between hip-hop's braggadocio and the cottage industry dedicated to churning out thousands of redundant histories lauding the brilliance of the Founding Fathers, which he suggests is chicken soup for white America's collective ego. The debate goes limp as Maher and his fellow white panelists, Congressman Rahm Emanuel ("These are great artists who don't use all their talents," whatever that means) and author Pete Hamill (who curiously cops to preferring Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday, thus reducing respecting black culture to liking music produced by African-Americans half a century ago), attempt to get Dyson to concede that there is something innately defective about mainstream hip-hop; it occurs to me that a group of 40+ year-old white men have about as much of a chance of embracing the rap idiom as their parents would have had assimilating the Sex Pistols.

Perhaps a more effective counterargument would be to point out that the self-lauding aspects of rap serve the same function for its adherents that the Sunday Styles section does for the readership of the New York Times. Each is an orgy of materialism tailored to its audience: rappers rattle off clothing brands, automobile manufacturers, jewelers, and champagne houses; Sunday Styles investigates artisinal ice cubes (I shit you not), a 103 year-old mansion picturesquely perched on Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay, and an ecological product line designed by Philippe Starcke (who designed this lamp, which, for those of you who like closed circles, would not at all look out of place in a rapper's boudoir). This connection may not seem intuitive, but perhaps this is because of the disconnect between white America's conception of the appropriate way to display or savor wealth and achievement - what Bill Maher terms "modesty" - and rap's more direct approach. The distinction, perhaps, is that while it's verboten to brag that you spent a million dollars on a chain from Jacob the Jeweler, drank a case of Cristal, or have a nice set of rims on your car, it's perfectly acceptable to flaunt your material success and possessions if the New York Times (or HGTV, or Martha Stewart Living) calls you up wanting to do a story.

Obviously, the above comparison is somewhat inexact: unlike the Times, a great deal of hip-hop is also focused on violence, criminal activity, explicit sex, misogyny, and homophobia. The latter two qualities I, nor anyone else, can convincingly defend; if those are two qualities you understandably can't look beyond, then broad swaths of mainstream rap are not for you. However, it is worth noting, with regards to misogyny, that rock 'n' roll is no better: for proof, listen to the Rolling Stones' "Under My Thumb", or Elvis Costello's This Years Model, or read Jess Hopper's superlative, insightful "Emo: Where The Girls Aren't". As for the former, well, rap is primarily a ghetto music, and there is crime and violence in the ghetto. Certainly a great deal of rap glorifies violence and criminality; so does the movie Bonnie and Clyde, what's your point? More to the point, so do much of the blues, concerned as they are with figures like Staggerlee, who killed Billy Lyons with a .44 pistol over a Stetson hat in a thousand saloons from New Orleans to Memphis to St. Louis. Granted the lingua franca has become more profane, taking the blues' thinly-veiled suggestiveness - like Robert Johnson moaning about the lemon juice running down his leg, an image so ideally filthy that thirty years later Led Zeppelin was able to import it wholesale without losing any of the punch - and rendering it explicit. Yet the connection is undeniably there; rap and blues both create and transmit a kind of folklore that is not, as Chuck D put it, "the CNN of the streets," but a kind of underhistory, a main circuit cable through American black culture. It is not, as Dyson astutely notes, the whole story of the inner city by any stretch, but it is kind of a negative image, communicating a quotidian reality all its own.

Ghostface Killah's verse from "The Heart Gently Weeps" on the Wu-Tang Clan's 8 Diagrams (2007):

Yeah, yo
I brought my bitch out to Pathmark, she's pushin the cart
Headed to aisle four, damn I got milk on my Clark's
That's what I get, not focusin from hittin that bar
My mouth dried, need plenty water quick, I feel like a shark
In the aisle bustin them paper towels and wipin my Wally's down
I stood up to face a barrel, he's holdin a shiny pound
It's him, he want revenge, I murdered his Uncle Tim
I sold him a bag of dope, his wife came and copped again
[singing] That bitch is crazyyyyy
And uh, she brought her babyyyyy
She knew I hard the murders, a smack
It killed her man though, now I got his fuckin nephew grippin his gat
You's a bitch - [singing] you better kill meeeee
You know you're bootyyyyyy
You pulled your toolie, out on meeeee... motherfucker
First thought was to snatch the ratchet
Said fuck it and fuckin grabbed it
I ducked, he bucked twice, this nigga was fuckin laughin
I wrestled him to the ground, tustle, scuffle, constantly kicked him
He wouldn't let go the joint, so I fuckin bit him
Shots was whizzin, hittin Clorox bottles
Customers screamin, then the f----- ran out of hollows
I had to show him what it's all about
Next thing you read in the paper, "A man who came to kill gets knocked out"

"Stagolee" as performed on a 1928 recording by Mississippi John Hurt:

Po-lice officer, how can it be?
You can 'rest everybody but cruel Stagolee
That bad man, oh cruel Stagolee

Billy DeLyon told Stagolee, "Please don't take my life
I got two little babes and a darling, loving wife"
That bad man, oh cruel Stagolee

"What'd I care about your two little babes and darling, loving wife?
You done stole my Stetson hat, I'm bound to take your life."
That bad man, oh cruel Stagolee

Boom boom, boom boom,
Went the forty-four.
Well when I spied Billy DeLyon
He's lyin' down on the floor.
That bad man, oh cruel Stagolee

Gentlemens of the Jury,
What you think of that?
Stagolee killed Billy DeLyon
'bout a five-dollar Stetson hat.
That bad man, oh cruel Stagolee

Standin' on the gallows, head way up high
At twelve o'clock, they killed him, they's all glad to see him die
That bad man, oh cruel Stagolee

Our President, George W. Bush

2008-08-10T20:58:00.004-04:00

"Oh, it's a dirty job/But someone's gotta do it"

I flipped over to NBC, expecting divers or gymnasts, and instead I got Bob Costas interviewing George W. Bush. He spoke on China, stressing the need for tolerance of religious practices but counseling that our interests are best served by remaining engaged with the economic giant; on the Russian-Georgian conflict, noting, when queried on his conversation with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, that he also spoke to "the president of that country," Dmitry Medvedev; and he dissembled on the need for the host country to pressure the Sudanese government regarding the ongoing genocide in Darfur. It was a jarring moment, wherein I realized that President Bush was no longer a figure of the future but of the past; for the first time, he came across, to me at least, as the president he always wanted to portray himself as (which is to say, a president I still don't want, but, to quote Bono, even better than the real thing). There is nothing at this point that can redeem the incompetence, arrogance, and corruption that has characterized his administration, yet his appearance reminded me of the bizarre, ineffable process wherein all of our presidents are absorbed into history as a representation of the Americas they governed. The words were right, the sentiments perhaps naive (Vladimir Putin is no friend of the United States), the actions depressingly lacking; could it be that President Bush himself has subtly become a walking critique of the America he has led down the wrong path, the expedient path, the path for those unwilling to confront the realities of the world, be they far afield or right in our own communities? The fault, as they say, is not in our stars, but in our selves; perhaps, in other words, we get the government we deserve, not the government we think we deserve.

Brett the Jet

2008-08-07T13:32:00.004-04:00

Next stop: East Rutherford

Through the looking glass, indeed: Brett Favre, the NFL's all-time leader in passing yards and touchdowns, a man synonymous with the Green Bay Packers, a quarterback who led his team to the last year's NFC title game, has been traded to the New York Jets for a conditional 4th round pick in the 2009 draft. If nothing else, the trade has transformed the Jets from a reloaded team - they spent a collective $140 million in free agency this offseason - without a starting quarterback into the NFL's number one sideshow, sure to garner all manner of attention from the media and the league despite being far and away the second best team (on paper) in the AFC East. Chad Pennington, the Jets' number one, oft-injured QB option for the past five seasons, he of the Rhodes Scholar head and noodle arm, is undoubtedly on the way out, either via trade or release. Kellen Clemens, drafted to be the QB of the future, will now spend at least one season, and - with Favre, who knows? - possibly more, under the tutelage of one of the league's all-time great field generals. As for Favre himself, it's fairly clear he would have preferred to play somewhere else, probably in the NFC where the way to a Super Bowl is far clearer than in an AFC where the Patriots and Colts stand as perennial obstacles to such ambitions. Yet, he is in New York, the number one media market in the league, the biggest of stages, a place where he will have the opportunity to wrest the spotlight away from Eli Manning and the defending champion Giants. He is also (and what a sad commentary this is) without playing a down in green and white probably the best player to put on a Jets uniform since...Mark Gastineau? Broadway Joe Namath? Hell, by the numbers he's better than either. In any event, since I brought up the Giants' improbable Super Bowl title, what that little miracle (which, it should be noted, cut off Favre's own championship ambitions off at the knees last season) tells us is that in the NFL, any team can win in any year, given the right chips falling where they may. The Giants were not, by any stretch of the imagination a great team; by all rights, they should have honked it in Dallas, or a frigid Green Bay, or, Lord knows, in Glendale facing down the mightest juggernaut in the history of the league. Yet they emerged triumphant, an emphatic rejoinder to a destiny that had seemed written in the stars, or at least in the Boston Globe. So, for the forecasters running down Jets' fans' dreams by prognosticating a Wild Card at best finish because of the big, bad cheating Pats, let us all remember who won the NFC East last year.

Killing Joke

2008-08-06T14:54:00.002-04:00

Srsly

Having let it sit for two weeks while vacationing, I guess the issue with The Dark Knight, like Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ or most pornography, is that it functions better as a conveyance than as a movie. The Joker, played, as if you didn't know, by certified Dead Hot Celebrity Heath Ledger, is easily the most captivating character in the piece, re-envisioned here as a nihilist-anarcho-terrorist whose raison d'etre is to destroy and kill - a point he proves emphatically in the film by burning an enormous stack of money, thus symbolically placing himself outside of the capitalist-criminal continuum and in the realm of villains who exist solely because Batman's appearance as an arbiter of moral order in Gotham City has summoned them into being as a sort of cosmic rejoinder. Director Christopher Nolan, who wrote the film with his brother, realizes The Dark Knight as a game wherein the stakes are continually raised: how many charred bodies is the Joker going to stack before the forces of good - Harvey Dent (played by Aaron Eckhart as Himself), Lieutenant Gordon (Gary Oldman, as the most normal character in the film), and, of course, the Caped Crusader himself - buckle under the mounting pressure to disavow their principles and use Any Means Necessary to restore the order the Joker is self-consciously critiquing and deconstructing. Unfortunately, Nolan's film ends up being morally incoherent, seemingly unable to choose between endorsing extraordinary measures - transparently linked to Bush's perpetual War on Civil Lib...I mean, Terror - and disavowing them, settling in the end on "Okay, but just this once...", which is no answer at all to the questions the filmmakers fancy themselves to be raising. Yet a muddled message is a comparatively venal sin next to The Dark Knight's greatest shortcoming: when Ledger is not onscreen testing the boundaries of the PG-13 rating, it's kind of boring.

You see, The Dark Knight is really two movies: one wherein Ledger's psycho clown blows things up, tortures people to death, and generally engages is outlandish acts of ultraviolence to the delight of moviegoers everywhere; and the afterbirth, wherein Nolan attempts to wrap the Batman brand around the experience, allow the good guys to win (sort of), prove the Joker's moral philosophy of the lowest common denominator wrong (in a scene ripped pretty much out of Spider-man 2), and, of course, establish an opening for the inevitable third installment of this apparently inexhaustible cash cow. I empathize with Nolan insofar as the former film, without the latter, would be nigh unwatchable. Even as Americans hath loved Ledger's Joker too well, there's no natural end-point to his immolation act, and The Dark Knight, with its Domino's Pizza tie-in, required a set of brakes; bombs get boring after awhile, and what was he going to do for his next trick, rape a pack of nuns? Plus, consider the commercial imperatives at work: you can't have a Batman movie without Batman, so we're saddled with the fact, which most of the audience seems content to ignore, that Bale's iteration of said Dark Knight is rather dull; it's rather like watching Patrick Bateman (only one letter off, for you conspiracy theorists), Bale's character from American Psycho, if he were on Klonopin and didn't kill women and the homeless. He broods and broods some more as Bruce Wayne, a part whose contours were more effectively explored in the origin story that was Batman Begins, and when donning the bat-suit, he comes off as utterly ridiculous, sounding like a fourteen year-old feigning a deeper voice in an ill-fated attempt to convince the liquor store cashier that he actually is 23, like it says on his fake ID. In a way, it's compelling meta-theatre: whereas Ledger seems (ironically, in retrospect) liberated by his part, Bale wears his like a straitjacket. Unfortunately, the franchise sinks or swims with the latter, an inevitability made all the more so by Ledger's untimely passing. If Batman survives into perpetuity as a dramatic proposition, it's going to have to do so on the strength of its villains - a possibility made all the more likely if the whispers about Philip Seymour Hoffman signing on to play the Penguin are true.

Yeah, I'm Gonna Have That Pitchfork Festival Post Up Annnny Day Now

2008-07-26T10:24:00.000-04:00

"Yeah, it's a good feeling/Yeah, it feels pretty good"

2008-07-22T17:58:00.006-04:00

More on the Pitchfork Festival to come in the next few days (after I fully recover). But for now, if you take a gander at the above photo of Craig Finn taken during the Hold Steady's superlative Saturday afternoon set, you might see a familiar face:

Yes, that handsome, pixilated blur is me. And, yes, we will return with photos where I don't look like Ms. Pac Man documenting our Chicago adventure, wherein we braved the Ohio Turnpike, Goose Island IPAs at 11:00 in the morning, rambunctious teenagers, and the motherfucking, currency mutilating King Khan...and lived to tell the tale.

As James Murphy might have said: I was there.

I Got A Girl/Drug Problem

2008-07-15T18:04:00.006-04:00

That is the least accurate depiction of Mark E. Smith I have ever seen

This week sees the release of The Believer's annual Music Issue, the time of year when the magazine detours from all things of the page and focuses on that other favored pursuit of all the sad young literary men: indie rock. Well, usually anyway: this year the corresponding CD comp spotlights music from "beyond the bounds of post-Shins indie rock," as Pitchfork has it, keeping with the issue's focus on the intersection of western artists and their non-western inspirations. As such, we have tracks from Tartit, Googoosh, Mahmoud Ahmed, and Ya Bounma, none of whom I, or people who actually read The Believer regularly, have heard of; of course, by way of a life preserver, we also have indie standbys Animal Collective, Gang Gang Dance, and Dirty Projectors, but even these choices decided do not fall on the "post-Shins" continuum. Now, I haven't heard the CD (trying to track down The Believer in suburban N.J. has proven surprisingly difficult), but Michaelangelo Matos, who would presumably know from such things, has declared the comp "probably the best cover-mount CD [he's] ever heard." Also, the magazine itself - you know, the reading part - includes features on such worthwhile topics as Ian MacKaye (most famously of Minor Threat and Fugazi, but that Embrace CD is pretty fucking mind-blowing), Norwegian black metal (is that...Brandon Stosuy's music I hear?), and rap CDs purchased on the street. Probably worth looking into, that.

So, back in 2005, I went on a magazine subscribing binge: The New Yorker, The New Republic, Index, Foreign Affairs, and The Believer. Of these, I still receive The New Yorker and The New Republic, Index apparently folded (and still owes me either two issues or my fucking money back), Foreign Affairs at roughly $32 for six issues seemed like a lot of money for so infrequent an experience, and The Believer...well, as it turns out, I didn't really read enough books to make a magazine predominantly preoccupied with the medium worthwhile. (I will say this - I checked out Dennis Cooper's God, Jr. due to The Believer and it remains one of my favorite novels. After all, how many books basically take place inside of a copy of the N64 game Banjo-Kazooie?) Still, in summer '05, I got the Music Issue, and the CD that entails.

Intriguingly, the conceit then was au courant bands covering their peers: Spoon covering Yo La Tengo, Colin Meloy covering Joanna Newsom, Wolf Parade covering Frog Eyes, et cetera. And believe me, there was some brilliant shit on there. The Constantines' cover of Elevator to Hell's "Why I Didn't Like August '93" might just rate as the best 2 minutes, 5 seconds of rock and roll this decade (Mick Jagger disclaimer: "That's not really true"). CocoRosie's recorded-on-an-answering-machine rendition of Damien Jurado's "Ohio" is unequivocally the best thing they've ever done, allowing them for once to fully realize the implications of their ghost-hop aesthetic. And hell, while we're at it, Devendra Banhart's rollicking version of Antony and the Johnson's "Fistful of Love" actually made me forget why I wrote off Devendra Banhart; probably because on this record he sounds as loose and sexy as he thinks he does when he's sloppy and irritating. Also worthwhile: The Shins' reading of labelmates Postal Service's "We Will Become Silhouettes" (originally included on the EP of the same name) and Jim Guthrie's muted interpretation of The Constantines' "Nighttime/Anytime (It's Alright)" (man, it's easy to forget how "big" they were in 2005 before Tournament of Hearts failed up Shine a Light's ante). Good times.

If you can still find it anywhere, the issue is worth picking up for the CD alone (unfortunately it doesn't appear to be available via the McSweeney's store). Plus you also get a flow chart laying out the hierarchy in the kingdom of singing drummers (Rex: Phil Collins, Regina: Mo Tucker), Douglas Wolk's meditation on The Fall's six disc Peel Sessions box set (which remains the least explicable yet wholly unregretted music purchase I've ever made), and an interview with Smoosh (pronounced smush), a pair of sisters - then 13 and 11, now 16 and 14 - who played reasonable rock and roll and were thus embraced by the Daniel Johnston/Wesley Willis crowd. Fucking twee bro.

The Last Action Hero

2008-07-11T07:39:00.002-04:00

Number one in rock and roll heaven

Sub Pop, the independent record label which needs no introduction, has turned 20 years old. For me, the Sub Pop story begins and ends with Nirvana, who were my first real favorite band (before that: Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, and Bill Joel for "Beat It," "Born in the U.S.A.," and "Uptown Girl" respectively). Cool kid that I was in sixth grade, I didn't get into them until after Kurt Cobain's suicide, meaning that my worship was consecrated in overdramatic douchebaggery: lines which seem lifted from Mystik Spiral b-sides - "I miss the comfort in being sad" or "Throw down your umbilical noose, so I can climb right back" come to mind, though that's just because I was listening to In Utero this morning - seemed like cosmic totems of profound insight, a perception sealed when Cobain, unable to ascend directly into heaven in corporeal form, opted for plan B. You can trace a not-so-straight line of hysterical devotion from The Smiths and The Cure through Nirvana on to emo stalwarts like Dashboard Confessional and Jimmy Eat World (whose "Bleed American" reads like "Teen Spirit" run backwards) before ending up at My Chemical Romance, whom blogger hate-object Ultragrrrl once characterized as "this generation's Nirvana." Her assessment, widely ridiculed at the time, largely by the "35 year old men writing for other 35 year old men who think they're actually writing to 21 year old college kids" she was calling out, is resonant because it keys in on where MCR fits in the lives of today's teenagers, which, I imagine for a good lot of them, is precisely where Nirvana figured in my own adolescent passion play. I had the posters of Kurt, Krist, and Dave, as well as one of the cryptic In Utero cover (a title whose provenance I mightn't have discovered until much later in life were it not for the album); I listened to the albums religiously, making tapes of them to listen to on my Walkman during car rides of even the shortest duration; for a brief time I even dressed in flannel and tried to part my hair the way Kurt did - a period from which I am eternally grateful no photographs survive. Nirvana meant everything then, and even though there have been other flames - Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead, Elvis Costello - maturity, critical distance, whatever the hell you want to call it, has kept me from the same unquestioning adoration. Of course, it could just be that none of those guys is as good as Nirvana was, a notion that would doubtlessly be contested by those that were there with their heads on straight, the clinicians who have seen it all and chart every blip on the rock and roll continuum with perpetual bemusement. Then again, if you actually happed to be at the Sermon on the Mount or the Last Supper, you would probably wonder what all the goddamn fuss was about, too.

Me Too. It Was Gross!

2008-07-10T08:15:00.002-04:00

Yeah, this song is ridiculous and exploitative, I guess. I don't know who Katy Perry is and I really don't care. We have to agree, as Americans and human beings not to get worked up about this shit from now on. Anyway, it's kinda catchy; I'm guessing that six months from now "I Kissed a Girl" will attract its share of poptimist revanchists trying to heave it up the Pazz & Jop. My only complaint is that the video sucks: she doesn't kiss a girl, and she wakes up in bed with a dude - as in, she had a naughty dream about lipstick lesbianism, but deep down she's all about the dick. You know, misogynist douches get their ideas somewhere.