THE REFEREE ALWAYS WINS

Democracy opens up the possibility of "abandonment," and creates opportunities for men and women who understand how to play to or on that feeling.
John Mayer: Kid A cover (fan video, but the video isn't the point)

I call my parents twice a week, almost without fail. I don't know if that's more or less than the average twenty-something-- I know it's much less than my sister calls, sigh. Usually we just talk about what we've been up to lately, but I guess I was feeling a bit less frantic than usual last night and so my dad and I actually had a discussion. About ideas. I know, right?

He recently saw a history professor give a lecture on the New Testament. The professor talked about the multiple layers of meaning in the original Greek and also described the huge impact the Gutenberg press had on religious life. Apparently (and probably some of you know way more about this and can fill me in down in the comments section) prior to Gutenberg and mass literacy, lots of people had huge portions of the scripture memorized, and the gospels would often be performed, almost like a play. Once people had a printed Bible to refer to, they no longer needed to keep so much of the text memorized, and most of us have lost even the ability to do so.

A literate people, the professor went on, interacts with the scripture differently; I forget how, exactly. As McLuhan would note, the technology of the printing press was an "extension of man." And as Neil Postman observed, every new technology is a Faustian bargain: You get something, and you give something up.


Talent is an asset.
TRC feat. Zoe: Lately
(thanks to Smug Police, which has this and other bassline tracks in convenient mix form)

Caleb Crain has a fascinating article in the New Yorker's winter fiction issue, in which Crain imagines what life will be like if people stop reading. Literacy, it seems, wires people's brains differently than orality. And the act of reading is a special one, in that it frees up our ability to think critically while we digest information-- an ability which, as McLuhan would surely have been the first to note, is compromised when we're absorbed in more immersive, electronic mediums such as the radio or the television.

Apropos of my dad's story, Crain quotes Proust and the Squid author Maryanne Wolf agreeing that writing "freed the Greeks from the necessity of keeping their whole culture, including the Iliad and the Odyssey, memorized." However, we may finally be returning to a state similar to the way the Greeks were prior to mass literacy, Crain writes, noting that scholar Walter J. Ong once called this condition "secondary orality." It probably won't surprise you to learn that secondary orality would be bad news for a democracy.

[On the one hand, Ong's speculations about secondary orality have me convinced that the political journalists whom Bob Somerby so rightly pillories day in and day out must watch waaay too much TV. Crain writes:

Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories. According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to “think memorable thoughts,” whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.” Since there’s no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.

So that's why we're constantly fed scripts instead of news! (Look at the Washington Post's recent series of profiles on the candidates, which included articles about how they dress but nothing about policy-- and when the candidates DO talk about policy, you can count on either David Broder or young Dana Milbank to complain vociferously about how boring or smarty-pants those candidates are, while still failing to inform us about the policies.) Bush=would like to have a beer with, Gore=big fat phony, Obama=Obambi, John Edwards=$400 haircut, John McCain=straight talk, Rudy Giuliani=9iu11ani, Joe Lieberman=bipartisan, Huckabee=nice guy with a funny name, Mitt Romney=Mormon, Fred Thompson=Ronald Reagan, Dennis Kucinich=saw half as many aliens as Ronald Reagan, etc. Pundits have to recite these storylines-- because they lack the power of abstract thinking. If only they were better readers, maybe we'd have a better-functioning press corps.

On the other, and ultimately more important, hand...]

What's next? As to this point, Crain's conclusion is worth quoting in its entirety:

It can be amusing to read a magazine whose principles you despise, but it is almost unbearable to watch such a television show. And so, in a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with.

Self-doubt, therefore, becomes less likely. In fact, doubt of any kind is rarer. It is easy to notice inconsistencies in two written accounts placed side by side. With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information. The trust that a reader grants to the New York Times, for example, may vary sentence by sentence. A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching. Like the peasants studied by Luria, he thinks in terms of situations and story lines rather than abstractions.

And he may have even more trouble than Luria’s peasants in seeing himself as others do. After all, there is no one looking back at the television viewer. He is alone, though he, and his brain, may be too distracted to notice it. The reader is also alone, but the N.E.A. reports that readers are more likely than non-readers to play sports, exercise, visit art museums, attend theatre, paint, go to music events, take photographs, and volunteer. Proficient readers are also more likely to vote. Perhaps readers venture so readily outside because what they experience in solitude gives them confidence. Perhaps reading is a prototype of independence. No matter how much one worships an author, Proust wrote, “all he can do is give us desires.” Reading somehow gives us the boldness to act on them. Such a habit might be quite dangerous for a democracy to lose.

Aside from the journalistic and little "d" democratic ramifications of declining literacy, I'd be interested in discussing the implications of rising Internet use. For example, the written word freed the Greeks from having to keep their culture memorized, and Gutenberg freed the Christians from having to keep the scripture memorized; the downside is that few people can quote the entire Iliad or Bible verbatim nowadays, but the plus side is that anybody can access those texts, anyplace, anytime.

So what about Google? I consider that technology, as McLuhan likely would, another extension of man: Information that I know I can easily Google is information I can safely forget, like the Greeks could forget the Iliad and the Christians could forget the Epistle to Philemon. If, as Postman theorized, any new technology is a Faustian bargain, what is the downside of my reliance on Google? My dad points out that one ill effect might be a loss of the ability to connect the dots-- I can find all of the pieces of information, but I may lose the broader comprehension that allows me to see how they fit together. Because of this, it's also possible that I might not even look for the right things. And, as Crain writes of TV, it's certainly true that on the Internet I am exposed, more and more, to ideas with which I already agree; I think we all are, especially as we fill up our RSS readers.

One last thing: Internet literacy is inherently something possessed by an elite, at least these days. (Not everybody has a computer or has the time or inclination to use the Internet, etc.) So will reading and the use of technologies such as Google become skills for only an educated global class of information workers? If so, what becomes of everybody else?

And, crucially, if only a select few have access to the information that reading and the Web provide, what becomes of democracy? Or will Internet use gradually spread to almost every home, like TV and radio and literacy before it, and lift up the impoverished rather than hold them down? Maybe M.I.A. knows. I don't.


Coolness is having courage.
Hi-Five: She's Playing Hard to Get

I guess now it can't hurt to post this, although it's a couple of weeks old already. I decided that there are people reading this blog who know me from life outside of music journalism (imagine!) and don't really know what I do, so I've also included links to my reviews where applicable. This year, even 50 top albums just didn't feel like enough, and I can already think of albums I wished I'd included or ways I would change the order, but here goes:

1. Jens Lekman Night Falls Over Kortedala (review) (interview)
2. Deerhunter Cryptograms / Fluorescent Grey EP (review 1, review 2)
3. The Tough Alliance New Waves EP / A New Chance (review 1 / review 2)
4. Lil Wayne Da Drought 3
5. The Field From Here We Go Sublime
6. LCD Soundsystem Sound of Silver
7. Josh Ritter The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter (track review)
8. Panda Bear Person Pitch (review -- possibly NSFW)
9. Battles Mirrored (reviewed in Spin print edition)
10. V/A After Dark (review)

11. M.I.A. Kala
12. Jay-Z American Gangster (review -- possibly NSFW)
13. Sally Shapiro Disco Romance (review)
14. Feist The Reminder
15. The Honeydrips Here Comes the Future (track review)
16. Simian Mobile Disco Attack Decay Sustain Release (review)
17. Los Campesinos! Sticking Fingers Into Sockets EP (review)
18. Studio Yearbook 1
19. Black Lips Good Bad Not Evil (review -- possibly NSFW)
20. The Good, the Bad & The Queen The Good, the Bad & The Queen

21. Shocking Pinks Shocking Pinks (review)
22. Burial Untrue
23. Justice †
24. Spoon Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
25. Life Without Buildings Live at the Annondale Hotel
26. Ricardo Villalobos Fabric 36
27. Radiohead In Rainbows
28. Dan Deacon Spiderman of the Rings (review)
29. The Crayon Fields Animal Bells (review)
30. Taken By Trees Open Field (review)

31. Elliott Smith New Moon
32. Animal Collective Strawberry Jam (review -- possibly NSFW)
33. UGK Underground Kingz
34. The Twilight Sad Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters (EP review)
35. A Place to Bury Strangers A Place to Bury Strangers (review)
36. Grizzly Bear Friend EP
37. Black Kids Wizard of Ahhhs EP (review)
38. A Sunny Day in Glasgow Scribble Mural Comic Journal (review)
39. Lucky Soul The Great Unwanted (review)
40. Gruff Rhys Candylion (review)

41. King Khan & His Shrines What Is?!
42. No Age Weirdo Rippers (review -- possibly NSFW)
43. Thurston Moore Trees Outside the Academy (review -- possibly NSFW)
44. Säkert! Säkert! (review)
45. Dinosaur Jr. Beyond
46. Blitzen Trapper Wild Mountain Nation
47. Art Brut It's a Bit Complicated
48. The Postmarks The Postmarks (review)
49. Sly Hats Liquorice Night (track review)
50. José González In Our Nature (review)

As always, my favorite list-related tomato-throwing comes from Three Bulls!, which I believe is a website for Log Cabin Republicans.

And just for fun, here's a year-end list from the Musikbyrån, Sweden's "leading music news/live/info televison show", according to a kind Swede with whom I've been corresponding. Attention, DJ Martians and Largehearted Boys of the world:

1 Feist – The Reminder
2 Arcade Fire – Neon Bible
3 Jamie T – Panic Prevention
4 LCD Soundsystem – Sound Of Silver
5 Justice - Cross
6 Säkert! – Säkert!
7 The Hold Steady – Boys And Girls In America
8 Panda Bear – Person Pitch
9 The National - Boxer
10 Laakso – Mother, Am I Good Looking

11 Jens Lekman – Night Falls Over Kortedala
12 Pharoahe Monch - Desire
13 Familjen – Det Snurrar I Min Skalle
14 Band Of Horses – Cease to Begin
15 Jack Peñate - Matinée
16 Of Montreal – Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
17 Rufus Wainwright – Release The Stars
18 Interpol – Our Love To Admire
19 M.I.A -Kala
20 Radiohead – In Rainbows

21 Erik Enocksson – Farväl Falkenberg
22 CocoRosie – The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn
23 Robert Wyatt - Comicopera
24 Simian Mobile Disco – Attack Decay Sustain Release
25 Animal Collective – Strawberry Jam
26 Britney Spears – Blackout
27 Aa - Gaame
28 Modest Mouse – We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank
29 Kanye West - Graduation
30 Maps –We Can Create

31 Beirut – The Flying Club Cup
32 Bloc Party – A Weekend In The City
33 Skull Defekts – Blood Spirits & Drums Are Singing
34 P J Harvey – White Chalk
35 Shout Out Louds – Our Ill Wills
36 José González – In Our Nature
37 Klaxons – Myths Of The Near Future
38 No Age – Weirdo Rippers
39 Kent – Tillbaka Till Samtiden
40 Kate Nash – Made Of Bricks

41 Florence Valentin – Pokerkväll I Vårby Gård
42 Cut City – Exit Decades
43 Björk - Volta
44 Soulsavers – It’s Not How Far You Fall, It’s How You Land
45 Tegan & Sara – The Con
46 The Pigeon Detectives – Wait For Me
47 Calvin Harris – I Created Disco
48 Keren Ann – Keren Ann
49 UGK - Underground Kingz
50 The View – Hats Of To The Buskers

I'll walk the streets of London, which once seemed all our own.
Blur: This Is a Low

BEMUSED CONFUSED AND BEDRAGGLED

(via Sadly, No!, via Matthew Yglesias)


Just buy a ticket and take a train, you'll find yourself tomorrow.
Four Pennies: (When the Boy's Happy) The Girl's Happy Too
(embed via Fire Escape Talking)


I contributed to a couple of year-end lists recently:
Top 50 Albums of 2007
Top 100 Tracks of 2007

I might have time for a real post of some sort before the holidays, but I might not. I will be talking about stuff this week on PRI's Fair Game, for those of you who've always been wishing there were some way you could hear my ramblings rather than just skim them in your RSS readers.


It's dark and you're blushing, aren't you my love.
Riz Ortolani: Cannibal Holocaust score
(source for the Honeydrips' "Hej Då Karolin")


Now it's time to look for the summer in me.
Sean Kingston: Beautiful Girls

THEY'VE NEVER HEARD OF LOVE

I traded all the innocence I ever had for hesitation.
Candy Flip: Redhills Road (via El Popo, which also has their "Strawberry Fields Forever" cover)

Such a name, Azofeifa.

I'M REALLY SUPER SORRY THAT I'M ACTING SO MEAN

embedding disabled, sorry
If there's a throne, you're looking at a chairman.
The Mundanes: Empty Boulevards

[Tonight's post is transcribed straight from the chicken-scratch scrawl on the first few pages of a just bought, probably never-to-be-completed (like all the others) composition book.]



On the subway. A little drunk, but not that drunk. Left a holiday party because my wife didn't have her keys, and if I don't get home soon she'll have to face a roomful of 7th graders tomorrow on even less sleep than usual. Still left later than I meant to said I would, because my non-music bosses started doing a Christmas Carol skit based on the CEO, and dessert somebody put dessert in front of me. I wanted to see what they were serving if you ordered "not the cheesecake." (See, I like cheesecake, but the other thing had a funny name, like "profiterole" but more Italian, and starting with a "t." Good-sounding.) (What they served was some kind of tiny cup of vanilla like ice cream, very disappointing.) Now I'm on the subway. Thom Yorke's wordless hum. Air-clearing, still slightly on edge acoustic guitar. "Jigsaw Falling Into Place."

[I'm transcribing this, btw, while watching "The Grinch Stole Christmas." Your brain is for spiders, you got garlic in your soul, Mr. Grinch]

They say nobody talks about the music on In Rainbows. They The same ppl mention Radiohead and the Eagles in the same over-capitalized e-mails. (They're both business stories, right?) But the business-- which started killing itself once the acountants took charge at some always-to-be-unspecified date-- is dead. Never to be reborn until, perchance, it is. In the meantime music is all of ours. Yours and mine. Do it yourself!!! Why not? You can do it a zillion times better than the Eagles. Nobody would listen to you, because the marketing armies that launched those old fucks are defeated vanquished. But as the shittiest band in the world next to U2, those turds Coldplay, has already proven, nobody but nobody can do THIS -- Radiohead. What Radiohead does. It's a biiiiiggg cult, but it might be the last cult worth joining. (Jesus was two millennia ago, maaan.)


[transcribing, Simpsons ad, Homer singing about a "spider pig," YES!!!!!!]

If from here on out we're all nobodys, or at best nobodys pretending to be somebodys, Radiohead are somebodys-- major-label approved! w/ the emotive grunge-era one-hit-wonder one hit (in the U.S.) to prove it!-- who are unafraid to be loved by the nobodys. In the land of the nobodys, the last living somebody is king. There are more nobodys today than somebodys (see previous post). Radiohead is AWSOME.

[You have all the tender sweetness of a seasick crocodile. ...Arsenic sauce?]

Didn't think much about In Rainbows when I first downloaded it, I admit. Everybody else was thinking about it-- where's the fun in that?-- plus I'd just dropped $80 on some record I might receive in a couple of months, w/o even hearing it, so both expectation and embarrassment were running impossibly high.

Since I filed my main 2007 year-end list, In Rainbows-- ranked too low on my list-- has been the album I have played most, even more than new Drive-By Truckers or old Saint Etienne. Maybe it's the kind of record that needs to be free of year-end pressure for me, not least because OK Computer is practically the record that introduced me to the post-Beatles variety of the critically acclaimed Album of the Year. I was a kid from a foothill town in Northern California, with too few real friends in next stop Nashville, and not yet any real friends in next stop Arizona. What the fuck?

[It came without ribbons, it came without tags, it came without packages, boxes or bags.]

I'm listening to Videotape now, so I'll write about that. The halting broken piano chords. The electronic beats, spare, in between headphones. The off-kilter drums in the left headphone, the way you don't expect to hear from any band, not that you can expect anything from Radiohead after they had, first, innovated beyond your teenage comprehension (OK Computer, Kid A) and, after an album you never cared about as much as you wanted to, retreated into boring, depressive gloom-rock (that POS (for Radiohead) political album that came after Amnesiac). I don't know what it means but the sound comes before the sign, the sign before the signification.

[Maybe Christmas he thought doesn't come from a store. Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.]

It's just as well that I finally started talking about Disc 1 as Disc 1 ended, because Disc 1 is still something I admire, even adore, even maybe love, w/o ever feeling like I can touch it. The way Brent D. I think once described the diff between Loveless + OK Computer. Disc 2, which I thought I'd hear for the first time when my $80 slabs of vinyl beautiful vinly vinyl arrived in the mail, is what reignited my interest in this album when it finally leaked. From the mournfully percussive dark-side-of-the-moon goo goo goo joob of "Down Is the New Up"-- hit me, string section!-- w/ it's ladies + gentlemen, w/o a safety net , I shall now... -- to the "Karma Police" analogue "Last Flowers" -- regretful, fragile, and terrified where its precursor was accusatory and fuck you and terrified (appliances have gone berserk -- I cannot keep up... "snot-nosed little punk" is maybe a bit nicer than "arrest this man" for a "hitler hairdo" if not-- diff song-- kicking screaming Gucci little piggy) seeking relief like an old man, so like a fan of the Eagles, or the worst band in the world Coldplay, and fucking finding it, goddamn it, in the beats and drones and Climbing up the Walls and dystopian mists of Up on the Ladder climbing

to the deranged --

"Bangers + Mash"

to the perfect 4 Minute
warning

(everyone has a different favorite song on this, WTF?)

I'

I need to go let my wife into the apartment now. She is waiting for me, possibly in the rain. I have a Santa hat in my bag which will make her laugh. [I should've said it was on my head!] And only one more stop to go, so I'd better stop.

MySpace link, scroll down for song
He lay awake at night, tossing and turning underneath his printed quilt protector, tears welling in his eyes.
Dominique Leone: Nellie McKay

Context is everything, but context can be changed.

(What was yours is everyone's from now on.)


As the novel moves toward a purer, more private expression it will cease altogether to be a popular medium, becoming, like poetry, a cloistered avocation.
The Professor Brothers: The TA Interview

EVENTUALLY EVERYTHING WILL BE HAPPENING AT ONCE

Remember when the days were long and rolled beneath a deep blue sky.
Babycakes: Group Therapy

I'm still convinced the internet is changing everything. A pretty boring idea by now to anybody reading this blog, I guess. But like, everybody 20 years ago got their information from newspapers, radio, basic TV, cable TV, movies, CDs, tapes, records... many people still do. Not long before that, there wasn't even cable TV. As recently as a decade ago, even the most dedicated information junkies still had relatively few sources: just add to the list Salon, Slate, and the like, and online versions of news outlets from other mediums. (There were chatrooms and message boards, too, of course but those were different somehow, especially chatrooms. I'll have to think how -- this is a hole in my idea so far.)

Anyway, nowadays, as everybody has probably noticed, there are like a gazillion more voices. These new voices are less authoritative, maybe, but they also have revealed to us that the older media weren't as authoritative as we had assumed, so the shift is self-reinforcing. And just the fact that there are more of them opens them up to previously unheard or even suppressed perspectives (although the simple financial and social requirements behind computers and blogging still pose a class barrier of sorts, for now). I don't know whether it's all a good thing, for society, as an economic issue, or on an artistic level. But it's what's happening.

The blogosphere, too, is different than it was just a few years ago, with the discovery of an audience leading to corporate financing for some, copycat moneymaking schemes at others, and the entrenchment of publications you "have" to read because everybody else does, whether you like them or not. Just like the traditional media. And now, as more of us use RSS readers, the blogs that we actually read via RSS are privileged, too. We aren't as likely to see their comment sections, to interact with them, to click through their blog rolls. When we see random-ass, ugly, live journaly blogs like this one on Google, we're think of them as random-ass, ugly, live-journaly blogs-- different than the bigger blogs. As blogs become more established, we interact with them more the way we did with traditional media than the way we interact with a less-established voice.

But there's no requirement of expertise or journalistic responsibility, at all, for any of this. People sensationalize headlines worse than the New York Post just for clicks, and nobody writing or reading even seems to realize this is essentially lying for money and reprehensible. We can say whatever we want, hold forth on how, like, New Edition were sorely underrated, or how New Edition were totally shitty, and you have no idea whether I've actually spent time listening to the group for hours and hours or not (not as much as I should, mostly know them through the new jack soul-type groups they influenced and then the white boy bands that followed, but hope to revisit). Everybody can at least know all the names now, though, thanks to having so many sources at our fingertips. And everybody always has an opinion. But then again, how did we know "real" journalists weren't full of shit? We thought they weren't, we went to journalism school to be like them only better, but then the more closely you follow what went on in media right before the dawn of the blogosphere, the more ways you find out that people you respected let you down.

People used to sit for hours in front of, like, MTV. In the early 1990s, Disney was a big powerful brand. (People bought NEW Mickey Mouse t-shirts, unironically.) But now, as David Brooks, my sweet Brooksy, finally discovered, we're all deeply fragmented. The cultural capital is in knowing whatever is in the sources that the people you're arguing with don't also follow. So the process may be towards ever greater fragmentation, ever greater loss of authority by the existing authorities. Which brings me to a quote from an old New York Times clip from 2005 that was recently brought to my attention again.

"By weekend's end, it was clear that Intonation had succeeded on its own terms. But it was hard not to think about what was missing, namely the swagger and ambition and hunger of musicians ready to take over the world, or at least the country. Many of these acts seemed happy to stay right where they were, making music for fans who accept them as they are. Any park where Deerhoof is a crowd favorite can't possibly be a bad place. Still, two days is a long time to spend there, let alone a whole career."

What's weird is this was only two years ago. Almost all of us, even some of the most media-savvy, thought there was something bigger. There might not be ever again. It's possible that the age of the transcendent star is pretty much behind us for pop music, and the changes of the past few years are going to accelerate until the media universe becomes infinite, unprofitable, and unreliable. Or it could be that the sub-trend of the new-media establishment starting to act like old media will continue, and by decade's end culture will again be as stifling as it was under Reagan and Thatcher. Or maybe this is 1990, and next year we're going to get Nevermind and the year after that The Chronic. Until then, a successful band now is just a cult band with a really big cult. Bob Lefsetz, of course, doesn't get it:

"Radiohead is a cult band. The cult is quite large, but there's a distinct line around the group of people who care. Beyond that, no one gives a shit. Guy Hands and the media care about the business story, but they don't care about the music."

He contrasts this with the Eagles. Do people really care about the Eagles album? Well, yes. Do people really care about the Radiohead album? OF COURSE, it's great, especially disc 2, but Bob hasn't listened so he doesn't know. And I probably shouldn't admit this, but I haven't listened to the Eagles album.

This is how the future works. It's terrifying, but at least the Eagles are closer to dying than I am unless I die young or they live forever. Which is possible, given whatever deal they made with Satan to get them to the point where even some of the people closest to me kind of like them. It's you or me, Henley! Or David Brooks!

There was a new Robyn album out in 2005. It has since come out in the UK, and it will finally come out in the U.S. soon, or so I've read in the usual places. One way of succeeding in the new environment might be to constantly maintain your cult's interest through touring, blogging, new music, etc. Another way might be the Robyn route-- put out a really good album, and make sure everybody hears about it, so eventually you find the big cult you deserve.

Humpty Dumpty will not be put back together again.

Other recent clicking recommendations:
- This old piece about Bob Dylan (and lager) by David Stubbs. I like how he's honest about his meager background with Dylan (and I like lager).
- Bradford Cox is a better interviewer than I am.
- Jonas Game shows up on Sweden's P3 Live radio show, which is occasionally hosted by Hello Saferide and Sakert's Annika Norlin. Link is to the recent archives, where you'll find a few other familiar names, as well.


We'll forget the sun in his jealous sky as we lie in fields of gold.
Pete Townshend & the Deep End: Hiding Out

I FOUND MYSELF IN A BEAT-UP RECORD

Right cat, wrong litter box.
Kevin Ayers: Stranger in Blue Suede Shoes

The first rule of being a journalist is don't tattle on other journalists.

Paul Krugman just broke the rule. Good for him.

The traditional press is an undemocratic institution, so the least pundits and reporters owe the public in a democracy is some goddamn honesty. Not merely looking out for our own hides.

December 5, 2007, 9:23 am
Nonpartisan AEI

I have a lot of problems with this Kit Seelye piece. It’s kind of weird that the usual “both sides may have a point” reporting gave way to a clear declaration that one side is right — precisely on an issue where many, many health experts believe that Obama is wrong, and that mandates are both feasible and essential. Much better coverage of the issue, I’m sorry to say, in the Murdoch news.

But this takes the cake:

Joseph Antos, a health policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a nonpartisan group.

Is it really possible for a veteran reporter to believe that AEI is nonpartisan? Not even a qualifier, like “right-leaning” or “free-market-oriented”?

MP3/Stream via XLR8R
One might as well sculpt a statue from toothpaste.
Pikelet: Bug-In-Mouth (Faux Pas Remix)

I NEVER WANTED TO BE A SPATULA

I'm from the United States of kiss my ass.
Saint Etienne: You're in a Bad Way

"Little Drummer Boy". It occurs to me I really like it. I can think of plenty of reasons maybe it's not as good as other Christmas songs I really like-- it's not super festive, and there are some terrible versions-- so I guess it must be a partly sentimental attachment. My parents have this really old, like, antique toy drummer boy from my grandma, and if you turn the little key in his back the guy still beats on his drum. Hell, sometimes he does this for no reason at all, which I've assumed was just because he's so old, but which Joe Tangari points out probably means he's haunted.

Pa rum pum pum pum.

I wish I could remember all the Christmas tapes my parents would play in our house and car-- there were only three or so main ones, and we still play 'em every year-- but Julie Andrews was the biggie. And there was some kind of compilation; I forget who was on it. Oh, and another one was this nice man Stu Boyer playing the pipe organ. (I don't think I've mentioned it on here before, but my dad used to own a pizza restaurant in Sacramento called Pizza & Pipes, and there was a pipe organ in it.)


The life you save may be mine.
Thom Yorke: Last Flowers

Turns out other people have childhood memories of Pizza & Pipes-es of various names, too, from completely different parts of the country. The way they describe theirs-- long tables, families eating, pitchers of beer, often totally packed and awesome, worst pizza ever-- is surprising to me, because it's pretty much like my own recollection. (Also, like the beer garden in my old Queens neighborhood.) Except in my version it's the best pizza ever. (And at the beer garden it's kielbasa.) There was also a children's play area with games and rides and stuff. One of them was called the Chuck Wagon or something and still is what I find myself mentally picturing when trying to determine whether to say "off the wagon" or "on the wagon" when talking about pretty much anybody. I recall the children's play area, and the restaurant's being in Sacramento, turned out not to be the best ideas once the '90s hit and the world got so litigious that lobbyists could use the trend to turn public sentiment against the right to sue the rich and powerful when they do shitty things (not talking about mom and pop here, obv).

This is all as bizarre to me as it probably is to you. I imagine most people haven't even actually seen a real Wurlitzer pipe organ-- the info on this one seems about right-- but seriously, the whole setup was amazing. All those keyboards, all those pipes, lots of other fun instruments on the walls that the organist could control with a push of the proper pedal. I used to ask him to play "Tomorrow" from Annie.

So anyway, yeah, no idea why people used to do this except it must've been a way to go out and drink beer and still keep the kids entertained. Dad also owned one in Fresno, and I remember interviewing some band that was originally from there (forget which one, maybe they moved to Silverlake?) and them recalling getting high and going there. Anyway the economy went bad soon after, and my dad had to close both restaurants, and that was that.

Off to Nashville. "Are you a surfer." Naaahh I lived near the mountains. "Ohh a mountain surfer." Naaahh they have that it's called snowboarding. SCREECH BANG CRASH.

My days of free pizza were over.


Save yourself some misery and get away from here.
Eddie Rabbit and Crystal Gayle: You and I (karaoke version by Piet & Tonny Kamper)

but the funny thing is he read the tracks and said that guy may be french canadian because he thought a song was titled in french. the song was "Kanske Ar Jag Kar i Dig". that song is SO not french. its swiss. quit flirting and do your job guy at borders ! youre suppose to be intelligent and cultured. FOR SHAME !

...OR WERE THEY??? Stay tuned next week for more tales from Marc's past derailing Christmas critical musings, when I should be doing year-end stuff and everything else, ALL AT ONCE, and OK enough late-night coffee!!!!!!!!!!!

"Skinny Love" is to Edwin McCain as.

embedding disabled, sorry
I'm too full for tears, eat drink, sleep smoke, tobacco & coke.
Van Morrison: Streets of Arklow --> You Don't Pull No Punches, But You Don't Push the River (two Veedon Fleece songs, live in 2006)

I don't usually feel compelled to write about musician's deaths (last time may have been Elliott Smith). Maybe I've got a problem dealing with the idea of death, maybe most of the musical ones you read about have either lived long lives or done things that made their demises predictably self-inflicted, but I just can't add anything to the conversation without coming off cretinous either way. This Pimp C thing? Has me really bummed, doing boring pointless stuff like listening to "One Day" multiple times, and I still don't even want you to talk to me about it. Well, maybe just Tom. RIP.

THANKFULLY THEY STAYED AS NAIVE AS THEY WERE CYNICAL ABOUT IT ALL

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.


My past is my business.
The Honeydrips: Here Comes the Future (ft. Ring Snuten)

"Schizophrenic homemade pop with bluesy acoustic guitar, fragmented electronic beats, occasional beeps and whistles, and lazy vocals looking for a tune." -Listen.com

The worst part is the banality which is and this is the really banal part also the best part.

High School Me: Never Going to Happen (1998, from A Beautiful Waste of Time)

Judy Blume fans bonus


Have you anything to say? Hey, hey.
Pierre Bachelet: Emmanuelle

(photo thanks to kabir -- please e-mail if you'd like me to take it down)