NO MORE TIME FOR SPECTATING

This opens a new chapter in our relations with all nations of this hemisphere.
The Lucksmiths: Great Lengths
(live; please bear with the slight distortion!)


Not so much antic despair as desperate antics.
The Lucksmiths: T-Shirt Weather (live)

I participated in an American tradition this weekend. I spent hours stuck in traffic getting the heck out of the city. Like many Americans, the other people in the car and I whiled away our time listening to music. I don't have a road trip playlist or anything, and anyway I wasn't so fortunate as to be driving. However, I did listen to Blur's Parklife for the first time in years. Still sounds good, even if the Syd Barretty stuff has worn a bit, and "Trouble in the Message Center" always felt a bit tossed-off. Nothing was better, though, than listening to Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville on a screened-in porch with friends, reading and overlooking a mountain lake.

Today education blog The Quick and the Ed basically did what offnotes does in reverse. Instead of starting off talking about some random thing or other and ending up talking about some random music thing (or other), blogger Kevin Carey gets music out of the way first, then talks about some edumacation thing. But not before dropping this pearl o' nugget:

"The challenge of the information age isn't in gaining access to information, it's making sense of it. It's not figuring out how to buy CDs, it's figuring out which CDs to buy--and which not to. Those are issue of judgement and taste, which only people can provide."

Exactly! That's why, ultimately, just racing to promote every old thing without stepping back to assess what really works is a doomed proposition. Yes, the MP3 era has probably changed listening habits in some ways permanently, but particularly if people's music collections continue to grow at such an exponential rate, listeners will still probably be interested in some help finding music that appeals to them. Given how irrational and subjective music fandom can be, I'm less confident than perhaps my colleague Chris Dahlen in the extent of technology's ability to meet the challenge.

I leave my pajamas to Billy Budapest.
MP3s: King Khan & the Shrines: "Welfare Bread" and "No Regrets"
[from the forthcoming What Is]

Jonathan Chait notes (free reg req'd, or bugmenot) that some right-wing thinkers are moving from "the conservatism of Paul Wolfowitz" to "the conservatism of Montgomery Burns." In other words, conservative thinkers are leaving behind the small-"d" democratic values the Iraq war was supposedly fought to promote, instead seeing the virtue of authoritarianism now that our own democracy isn't swinging their way. An economist from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Kevin Hassett, rather enviously compares dictatorships to our democracy, noting that the former are "are not hamstrung by the preferences of voters for, say, a pervasive welfare state." Yeah, democracy really blows that way, don't it chief?

Lastly, I'd be remiss if I forgot to point out the great work Bob Somerby has done in the past week or so at the Daily Howler. (I know, I probably link to him every time, don't I?) In short: "Al Gore said our discourse is broken. And his critics rushed to prove that he's right." Somerby looks at the way reporters for the Washington Post and the New York Times have responded, as Gore wrote they would in his new book, not to the substance of his arguments, but with Maureen Dowd-esque irrelevancies. Chris Matthews is getting paid millions of dollars to speculate about Gore's possible plastic surgery (there, now even I have spread this rumor... this is how coverage of prominent Democrats works-- remember Gennifer Flowers? Kathleen Willey? "Clinton's New Girl Friend" that the Google Ads promise to tell me about? ...Botox?). Somerby has also written about the way Matthews, the Washington Post and others have rushed out to hype the possibility of negative info about Hillary Clinton in a pair of new books. In doing so, these high-paid pundits have treated former Timesman Jeff Gerth as a reputable source-- despite the fact the man not only concocted much of the Whitewater fable, but was eventually fired from the Times for his shoddy reporting in the Wen Ho Lee story. Look it up.


Waiting for you is like waiting for the man in the moon.
R. Kelly: The World's Greatest

I'M JUST A BLUE-COLLAR GUY FROM BUFFALO

Sasha Frere-Jones gets serious like crazy.
Natasha Bedingfield: I Wanna Have Your Babies (mp3 at Obtusity)


Don Imus don't wanna kiss the bride, he just wants your lucky charms.
Tim Russert: Comedy Gold

There's an essay-length rant in me about this week's embarrassing Maureen Dowd columns, the concept of backstory in pop music, and basically how everybody is always obsessed with the wrong damn superficial things. You think I have time for that? Well, maybe, but instead I'm just going to humbly suggest you catch up on last night's Bill Moyers examination of the media coverage leading up to the war. Maybe it'll air again? UPDATE: Of course there's totally a snippet on YouTube.

Key points: Knight-Ridder stuck to its guns and kept reporting stories skeptical of Administration intelligence; the facts were out there, but the New York Times and Washington Post preferred to stick to big-name sources; Tim Russert would've included more skeptical voices on Meet the Press-- if only his phone had rung.

Oh, and pretty much everybody who got paid for telling us false things about the Iraq war is doing even better now. William Kristol and Peter Beinart have been rewarded with space in Time. Key Bush speechwriter Michael Gershon scored a Washington Post column. Thomas Friedman is still Thomas Friedman. Charles Krauthammer is still... well, I could tell you, but then he'd have to make a psychiatric diagnosis about you.


It was easy it was cheap GO AND DO IT.
Jarvis Cocker: Running the World

Elsewhere: My Arctic Monkeys album review, Lucky Soul track review, Aliens album review, Franz Ferdinand track review, and Ghosthustler track review on Pitchfork.

Over at TAPPED, Paul Waldman does superlative work debunking Roger Simon's small-minded mythologizing of Bernard Shaw, and expands on his point with some much-needed historical context here-- including David Broder's dumbfounding admission he's basically a world-class bullshitter (via Bob Somerby).


They come here alone, and they leave in twos.
The Teenagers: Homecoming