Techno Is Nothing to Fear

Ann Arbor's Spectral Sound has released the official third installment in its Death Is Nothing to Fear EP series, burnishing its reputation as America's flagship techno label and perpetuating the greatest graphic design scheme in music today. Featuring tracks by Sami Koivikko, Seth Troxler, Kate Simko, and 2AM/FM. I suppose there are dance floors on the planet where this stuff would be in vogue, but it strikes me more as headphone music. Available for preview here.

While we're on the Ghostly/Spectral Sound tip, allow me to mention a 2007 record I rated last year but failed to discuss in detail. Matthew Dear's Asa Breed is a slow burner refocusing the scattershot quality of his duel 2004 releases Leave Luck to Heaven (the English translation of the word "Nintendo", evidently) and Backstroke into an even more pop oriented creation. Basically Dear comes off like a more cosmopolitan, less ironic James Murphy, with perhaps an even greater interest in Before and After Science-era Eno; tracks "Deserter" and "Don and Sherri" are both outstanding and representative of the subtle genius contained herein. Luckily, for those of you who did not hear Asa Breed when it was fresh, the folks at Ghostly have decided to reissue the record in a special "black edition", appending crack remixes by Hot Chip and Four Tet; available now on iTunes.

You Really Got Me

Some highlights from Stuff White People Like:

8. Barack Obama
9. Making you feel bad about not going outside
22. Being an expert on YOUR culture
28. Not having a TV
38. Arrested Development
44. Public radio
56. Lawyers
62. Knowing what's best for poor people
70. Difficult breakups
78. Multilingual children

Inconsistently Updated Is For the Children

Four friends and baby-sitting - what could be more fun? An appendectomy.

What makes a hit children's book? Harry Potter. Leonard Lopate interviews three people with the wrong answer:

"Best play ever, man."

Five best movies about Vietnam:

1. Apocalypse Now
2. The Deer Hunter
3. Platoon
4. Rambo: First Blood Part II
5. The last 15 minutes of Rushmore

Darjeeling Addenda

"I promise, I will never be your friend. No matter what. Ever."

Two more points about The Darjeeling Limited:

1. Wes Anderson's movies are notable for their soundtracks: Rushmore featured the lesser-known lights of the British invasion (most notably The Creation's incendiary "Making Time" which may be on the short-list for greatest rock song, period), The Royal Tenenbaums had the icy melancholia of Nico, Nick Drake, and Elliot Smith, and The Life Aquatic focused on David Bowie, featuring both his own performances, and more prevalently, acoustic Portuguese-language covers by Brazilian actor Seu Jorge. The Darjeeling Limited is equally meritorious, though not as thematically unified, owing to its cultural bifurcation: the incidental music is largely Indian (Mark Mothersbaugh, Anderson's typical musical collaborator, is absent here), while the scenes scored with actual songs feature Western pop, most conspicuously the Kinks.

Indeed, there are no fewer than three Kinks songs in Darjeeling: "This Time Tomorrow", "Strangers", and "Powerman". As with Tenenbaums and Life Aquatic (though less so with Rushmore), it is not unusual for Anderson to lean heavily on one artist . What is unusual is that all three Kinks tracks originate from the same album, 1970's Lola vs. the Powerman and the Money-Go-Round, Part 1. (Yes, the Kinks' most famous track shy of "You Really Got Me", the titular ode to a particularly unconvincing transvestite, is on the record). Lola et al. remains readily available at most reputable music retailers for a price between $9.99 and $11.99. Though perhaps not scaling the same highs as Village Green Preservation Society or Something Else, it is an excellent album by one of rock and roll's most gifted and, at least stateside, sorely under-appreciated bands. If you should catch the movie, and enjoy the outstanding songcraft therein, do yourself a favor and pick it up.

2. Right around the release of The Darjeeling Limited, it came to light that Wes Anderson filmed, back in 2005, a short film starring Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman called The Hotel Chevalier. Chevalier is a kind of prologue to Darjeeling, serving as a frame of reference for the longer film; it is also a stylish entertainment in its own right, a cocktail before dinner. For reasons unbeknownst to me, Fox Searchlight initially ran The Darjeeling Limited without Chevalier attached; sensing that the featurette could potentially garner an Oscar nomination for Best Short Feature, the company decided to tack it on to the front of Darjeeling so that it could qualify for consideration. The film was also made available as a free download on iTunes, which is how I first saw it.

The Hotel Chevalier is included on the DVD of The Darjeeling Limited: you are given the option to watch the two in conjunction, or separately. Though I had already seen Chevalier, I opted to watch them together, and I do believe that it does make a significant difference as to your understanding and enjoyment of the feature. If nothing else, it's another opportunity to look at that ridiculous set of luggage, designed for the film by Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton.

Strangers on a Train

Of The Clash's famously uneven 1981 triple LP, Sandinista!, Robert Christgau once wrote, "if this is their worst--which it is, I think--they must be, er, the world's greatest rock and roll band." While I do not consider Wes Anderson the world's greatest auteur, I would make the claim that if The Darjeeling Limited is his worst movie, as many have stated, then he must be at least near the top.

There are two chief offenses for which Anderson's fifth feature has been cited: 1) how closely it hews to his established template (slow-mo shots, British invasion soundtrack, precious tableaux, quirky characters typified by an overarching sense of monied ennui), and 2) its expropriation/exploitation of India, its signifiers, and its people.

Both charges are difficult to defend against, for entirely different reasons. The first because it is completely true. Wes Anderson has developed a heavily regimented, instantly recognizable style, and he seems disinclined to evolve in another direction, either vis a vis form or function. If you liked Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and (especially) The Life Aquatic, the odds are high you will connect with The Darjeeling Limited. If you hated these films, or you feel that their subsequently diminishing returns (an undeniable truth) will preclude your enjoyment of another helping, look elsewhere for entertainment.

The second charge, that Darjeeling is guilty of post-colonial condescension at worst, cultural tourism at best, is difficult for me to respond to simply because I am not among the potentially offended parties. I can certainly see how any film tightly focused on three white main characters set in a primarily nonwhite local can be potentially loaded; certainly Anderson's film does itself no favors by having Jason Schwartzman's character have sex with a gorgeous Indian stewardess aboard the train (it's obviously consensual, but you can't duck the charge of third-world fetishism) and having no Indian characters of real consequence.

Allow me to backtrack: the set-up is that the three Whitman brothers, Peter, Jack, and Francis (played by Adrien Brody, Schwartzman, and Owen Wilson respectively) are traveling through India on the titular train, in a nominal attempt to reconnect with one another after not seeing each other for a year following their father's funeral. The Whitmans are obviously one of those fading ancien regime families, akin to Anderson's Tenenbaums - comfortable in their wealth, though not ostentatiously so, yet completely unmoored by their material security. None has any type of vocation to speak of, and all are self-absorbed to the point of eluding adulthood. Francis (who has a hidden agenda I needn't spoil for you) organized the trip as a faddish attempt to commune via mutual spiritual enlightenment - you know, visit the shrines, walk among the people, engage in the rituals.

Anderson and co-scribes Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman are savvy enough to know the "white people amongst the beautiful, child-like foreigners" trope is a poison pill, and their script actively combats that perception by embracing the obliviousness of the characters, and supplying no "child-like foreigners" apart from, well, actual children. Unlike most "Americans abroad" comedies, little friction is derived from any "clash of cultures"; the Whitmans, urbane experienced travelers, more or less roll with the punches. Yes, of course they behave like tourists, because, well, that how tourists behave. Indeed the very underpinning of the tourist trade is visiting something that is quotidian or sacred, either in a religious or secular sense, to the locals, and oohing and aahing because it's exotic to you. Certainly, it is desirable to be respectful, and there's little suggestion in Darjeeling that the Whitmans are anything but. I fail to see the difference, thematically, between this film and an actual vacation to India, save that the film is acutely aware that its tourists' ambitions re: the spiritual effects of a journey in an alien land are faintly ridiculous. So yes, there are things to offend those seeking to be offended. However, it is possible, perhaps even likely, that those offended parties went into the movie seeking offense; surely Anderson and his collaborators do little to give any.

In an era where the term "indie movie" is coming to refer less to the method of production and more to content, the director of Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums remains the chief influence. Yet where imitators pour quirks and signifiers into empty vessels and consider the resulting collections of ticks and affectations characters, Anderson never neglects to give his tin men hearts as well. The Darjeeling Limited is thus another curious curio, visually sumptuous and emotionally muted, its protagonists the last of a dying breed.

William F. Buckley, Jr. Vs. Noam Chomsky

Nerd fite pt. 1

Nerd fite pt. 2

William F. Buckley, Jr. Is Dead

William F. Buckley, Jr., godfather of the modern conservative movement, was found dead this morning in his Connecticut home at the age of 82. He was seated at his desk.

In describing the National Review, the journal of opinion he founded in 1955, and by extension the conservative movement whose intellectual home it was, Buckley wrote: "It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it." It is perhaps the most economical synopsis of a system of political thought ever delineated. In one brief sentence, Buckley identified both the appeal of conservatism and the source of opposition to it.

One need not be a historian to understand that, across the long haul, America, and most of the rest of the world, has become progressively more liberal. Indeed, the United States was born in a fit of radical liberalism - a violent revolt against the British crown followed in short order by the establishment of a republic. Certainly, the liberalizing effects of history have not been uniform, either on a global basis or within our own nation. Institutions develop progressively (American democracy vs. European monarchy) while social attitudes do not (pan-European abolition versus America's retention of slavery), or vice-versa. Nor is progress traceable on a straight line - where, for example, does communism - a theoretically economically progressive ideology wedded to a repressive one-party political system - fit? It is against this general trend which conservatism "stands athwart."

A charitable analysis of conservatism cuts in two directions: 1) progress is not the sole preserve of liberalism, and 2) rather than attempting to bring history to a halt, conservatives are like brakes on a car - you want to get where you're going as quickly as possible, but you also don't want to spin out on a tight curve or collide with the driver in front of you. Such conservatism is useful in our society as a (more often than not) dissenting voice; a doctrinal second-opinion, if you will. It is more inclined to view the entrepreneurial aspect of American society as essential to its ongoing vitality; it is more apt to argue for the good of the individual being as worthy of consideration as the good of the whole. This strain of conservatism is not fundamentally Republican or Democratic, though it may be more often identified with the former party. In fact, when Americans on the leftmost end of the political spectrum argue that the Democratic Party has moved too far to the right, it is, in no small part, this influence they detect.

I do not know enough about Buckley's overarching political philosophy to ascribe to it such a moderating character. However, I do know that though the movement he has birthed has not stopped the march of history in this country, it has diverted its course. Buckley's ideology underwrote the candidacy of Barry Goldwater in '64 - a political insurgent both in his party and his country - which begat the presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose ascendancy marked both the end of the New Deal era and the arrival of conservatism at the center of our political discourse. Buckley's war against the hegemonic liberalism of his day made these men possible - and by extension laid the foundations for George W. Bush.

It is in President Bush and his coterie that Mr. Buckley's conservatism met its apotheosis and antithesis - the breaching of its outer limits. The religious conservatives cleaved to his defense of traditional values but neglected his exhortation of reason as the conservative's sword and shield; the neo-conservatives took his anti-communism and directed its energies toward an elective war of nation-building and perpetual commitment. Bush himself, though happy to stand athwart history, is too intellectually weak a leader to either adhere consistently to conservative doctrine, or adapt pragmatically to extenuating circumstances. Buckley himself, drawing a fine line between his intellectual tradition and mere reaction, said that Bush was "conservative, but not a conservative."

But perhaps Mr. Buckley's conservatism had found its electoral high tide, and Mr. Bush's chief sin was to try to cannibalize it in the name of perpetuating Republican dominance at the polls. After all, Bush tried to package his mishmash of social obstinacy and aggressive unilateralism as something verging on futuristic. He and his chief political architect, Karl Rove, sold their vision not on the basis of Main Street, U.S.A. revisionism, as Reagan had, but rather as a way forward: that is, as history itself. Bush Republicanism ultimately faltered because it was incoherent - G.O.P. detractors refer to it as "big government conservatism", a dialectical impossibility in their eyes - and because the practical ramifications of his rule pointed not towards the sturdiness of conservatism as an ideology but its ultimate frailty when confronted with the exigencies of reality. Conservatism could not save the citizens of New Orleans, trapped on the roofs of their homes, nor can it furnish us with a solution to our health care crisis.

Indeed, if there is one central aspect of Buckley's conservatism that Bush has cleaved to, it is the idea that perhaps government is not supposed to meet these challenges. Ultimately it is this prizing of ideological purity that may be Buckley's chief bequest to the conservative movement - this deeply ingrained belief that principle should always triumph, even when that principal - that "organic morality" he once wrote of - runs contrary to the very tide of social progress and human necessity. It is a perverse inversion of the greater good, that inequities should persist and people should perish so that the idea can live on. Mr. Buckley, the man athwart history, did not subscribe to such a view of his work, saying "A conservatism that cannot find room in its folds for the actualities is a conservatism that is not a political force, or even a twitch: it has become a literary whimsy." It is a shame that the movement conservatives on whom he has left an indelible stamp have taken such doctrinal inflexibility as their primary inheritance.

The New York Times' obituary is available here.

Out Here in the Real World

Charles Prince, I feel your pain

Courtesy of the War Room blog over at Salon.com (subscription probably required), an item about Sam Zell, the real-estate billionaire who now owns, among other things, the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. Zell alleged in a CNBC interview that Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are attempting "to create a self-fulfilling prophecy" regarding the recent stumbling of the U.S. economy. He elaborates:

We have two Democratic candidates who are vying with each other to describe the economic situation worse.

The reality is that if you live on Wall Street and you're in the credit markets the world couldn't be worse. If you're a farmer and you're getting $25 for your wheat, you're having a great time. If you're a CEO and you've got a balance sheet that's bullet-proof, you're in a great position. This whole thing is way out of control, way out of hand.

Allow me to highlight the pertinent information for you:

The reality is that if you live on Wall Street and you're in the credit markets the world couldn't be worse.

Those would be the same credit markets, mind you, that gorged themselves on derivatives backed by subprime mortgages. You remember, those subprime mortgages with the usurous back-loaded interest rate hikes that banks doled out to people who couldn't possibly afford them. Those subprime mortgages that those same people are now defaulting on en masse. Now, those people, many first-time home owners, are being foreclosed upon in staggering numbers, their credit destroyed, and the neighborhoods they lived in declining into despair.

Now, I am no Marxist - a great many people who took out subprime mortgages were not as responsible in judging their financial situation as they should have been, and nor did they exercise sufficient caution or scrutiny regarding the terms of the mortgages themselves. While I support government efforts to educate people about home financing, including options for refinancing, and attempts to pressure lenders into renegotiating loans along more favorable (i.e. realistic) terms, these steps should not be interpreted as absolving people of responsibility for their financial affairs.

Yet it is beyond ludicrous to suggest that for those who "live on Wall Street", or rather those who work on Wall Street and live in Manhattan co-ops or posh suburbs where there are no foreclosures, "the world couldn't be worse." Oh, I guess it sucks to blow billions of dollars on an idiotic bet. (It's worth noting that Goldman Sachs, widely considered one of the world's smartest securities firms, has been largely unaffected by the subprime crisis.) However, I note with disdain the number of CEOs who have been felled as a result of their poor judgment and wafted out of their corner offices on platinum parachutes. Though their honor might be stained (which I doubt), surely they will never feel anything resembling economic pressure again. Meanwhile, they need only cast a glance northward to the Williamsbridge section of the Bronx to see what their profiteering has wrought in a place where "the world couldn't be worse."

As for Mr. Zell, who seems oblivious to the fact that the nation is sliding into a recession, I would suggest that the Democrats, unlike the present occupant of the White House, are simply telling it like it is. Oh, I forgot, if "you're a farmer and you're getting $25 for your wheat" or "a CEO and you've got a balance sheet that's bullet-proof," you're doing just fine. Problem is, most Americans aren't.

Stack (News)paper

"What have I/What have I/What have I done to deserve this?"

The Pulitzer Prize for Public Service Journalism. A reminder that today's media sleepwalked through the run up to the Iraq war, when even your most fried meth-tweaked liberal arts drop-out knew the president was lying through his teeth. In any event, Leonard Lopate interviews Roy J. Harris, Jr. on his new book, Pulitzer's Gold: Behind the Prize for Public Service Journalism, which is about what it says it's about, fool.

In Alabama, TV Watches You

I fought the law, and the law won

Evidently, a CBS affiliate in Northern Alabama blacked out a 60 Minutes story critical of the U.S. Justice Department's political railroading of that state's former Democratic governor, Don Siegelman. You can watch the offending piece, which details a litany of gross abuses of prosecutorial discretion and a pattern of political manipulation of the justice system leading all the way to Karl Rove. If it all sounds familiar, that's because Siegelman's case was a sideshow in the three ring circus that was last year's Congressional investigation of the Bush administration's, shall we say, questionable handling of the U.S. Attorneys.

From the New York Times' media blog The Lede:

...many Alabamans did not see initial broadcast of the report, which included new allegations that Karl Rove, President Bush’s former top adviser, waged a campaign against Mr. Siegelman.

Instead, just before the segment was to start, people in the northern part of the state who were tuned in to WHNT-TV, Channel 19 in Huntsville, found this on their screen instead:

We apologize that you missed the first segment of 60 Minutes tonight featuring ‘The Prosecution of Don Siegelman.’ It was a technical problem with CBS out of New York.

Upon hearing reports of the missed segment from readers, Scott Horton, a writer blogging at Harper’s, phoned CBS headquarters in New York, which offered him a startling contradiction:

“There is no delicate way to put this: the WHNT claim is not true. There were no transmission difficulties. The problems were peculiar to Channel 19, which had the signal and had functioning transmitters.” I was told that the decision to blacken screens across Northern Alabama “could only have been an editorial call.”

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, American troops continue to fight, and die, nominally to secure the blessings of liberty for the people of Iraq.

You Drank My Milkshake

Well, the Coen Brothers cleaned up, with No Country For Old Men winning for Best Adapted Screen Play, Best Director, and Best Picture (Javier Bardem won Best Supporting Actor, as well). At best they seemed bemused; at worst, positively indifferent. Seriously, though, who wouldn't kill to see Henry Kissinger: Man on the Go?

The Real Best Picture

I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE! I DRINK IT UP!

Hexed and Vexed

Los Campesinos! are an indie rock band from Cardiff, Wales who sound like a less Fisher-Price-ified Architecture in Helsinki, with a male vocalist with one of those real flat, sour-milk regional accents, a yelpy female vocalist who occasionally interjects (you can picture her in day-glo Keds), and annoyingly lugubrious/precocious song titles like "This is How You Spell 'Ha Ha, We Destroyed the Hopes and Dreams of a Generation of Faux-Romantics'" and "....And We Exhale and Roll Our Eyes in Unison". There is much to despise about Los Campesinos!

So you may be surprised when I report to you that the debut LP, Hold On Now, Youngster..., is actually a fairly good record. Retained from last year's Sticking Fingers Into Sockets EP are centerpiece and 2007 highlight "You! Me! Dancing!" (my! teeth! are! clenched!) and "Don't Tell Me to Do the Math(s)'; the rest is new. Well, not new...scratch that, not original: the influences here are knee-deep from the twee-core boy-girl point-counterpoint of Beat Happening, the DIY shambolic-ness of fellow Cardiffers (?) Young Marble Giants, and the rhythmic lockstep of that effervescent lodestar of post-2000 UK rock, The Strokes. Hold On Now, Youngster... works like a steam engine held together with spit, bubblegum, and a wish - the minute it stops running, it falls apart. Luckily LC! keep it moving at max speed throughout; a good thing, as I imagine a ballad by these guys might border on intolerable. There are a few dud lyrics (uh, "It's you! It's me! And there's dancing!" springs to mind), do your best to ignore 'em. I might hate this record in a month.

Unsealing History's Indictment

“Now, this is the way we give them the water cure,” he explained. “Lay them on their backs, a man standing on each hand and each foot, then put a round stick in the mouth and pour a pail of water in the mouth and nose, and if they don’t give up pour in another pail. They swell up like toads. I’ll tell you it is a terrible torture.”