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

THE BUTTER WOULDN'T MELT SO I PUT IT IN THE HOT POCKET

I'm a great sucker for cheerful amateurism.
Primitive Radio Gods: Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with a Song Title That Makes for Easy, Invariably Awful Jokes

In case you needed any further evidence the '90s are back, some angry white man has a column in today's Wall Street Journal clucking about that foul specter, "political correctness." Daniel fox-in-the Henninger writes (reg. req'd):

"Some were brought down by it, and some have made a living from it. Today, there are people who even say that the satire on shows such as 'South Park' or the 'Daily Show' have made political correctness a harmless amusement. We have become so cool that we can simultaneously abide PC's merciless strictures against saying the wrong things about the right people even as we laugh at our subjugation to PC.

Despite the ironic mockery, political correctness still packs a punch. Say the wrong thing today and you can be gone tomorrow, your status as a top broadcaster, university president or politician obliterated. It happens in the small space of a sentence -- defrocked, banished, gonzo."

That's not what gonzo means! Henninger goes on to liken people getting pissed off at highly paid public figures saying fuckwit things to "burning witches"-- a comparison that certainly ought to be covered by Godwin's Law. I'm sure Henninger, as a white male and therefore someone who could potentially be called a "n***** guy," is sincerely concerned about this one disadvantage suffered by us white dudes: If you're wildly successful beyond your abilities but act like a moron, you might lose your easy, high-paying job. BOO. However, his reasoning is as dumb as a box of very small rocks.

It's hard to say, exactly, why Imus ever should've had a position of influence and power. But it's easy to see why he got fired: because he was acting like a douchebag, and because it's hard to say why he ever should've had a position of influence and power. If, for inst, Imus had had any real qualifications or special abilities to fall back on-- any unique redeeming qualities to offer the public-- perhaps he would've been spared. I mean,I didn't really care whether he lost his job or not, but either way some other talentless douchebag (or, novel idea: a talented, non-douchebag!) would be just as qualified to bloviate ignorantly about national affairs... So away Imus went. Yes, this could happen to other overpaid white guys. Eek!

Progressives need to start co-opting "political correctness"-- at this point an increasingly vague, invariably derogatory term-- and using it to describe the 21st-century PC police: all those who claim people who oppose the official White House foreign policy line (such as it is) are supporting the terrorists. The next time Joe Lieberman or Dick Cheney or The National Review or Brian Williams or Howard Kurtz calls patriotic Americans who disagree with them "traitors," the correct response is: "Take your 'political correctness' elsewhere, sir. Most Americans happen to agree with me on this. BTW, SUCK MY BALLS."

This dude totally doesn't watch Daily Show or South Park.


Oh I, M-B-V M-B-V M-B-V M-B-V M-B-V more M-B-V hi-fi.
Kraftwerk: Kometenmelodie 2

UPDATE: Jonathan Chait responds to the responders, and he and I agree: "My point is that the netroots have helped break down one epistemological prison but have created another. Neither the David Broder method of establishing truth nor the Markos Moulitsas method of establishing truth is very reliable. Yet the reflexive equivocators use the bloggers to justify their reflexive equivocation, and the bloggers use the reflexive equivocators to justify their reflexive partisanship. Alterman concludes that the netroots have made the country a better place, and my piece concurs."