Thus every writer's motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am. - Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text
Everybody keeps asking how it felt, so: It wasn't a blur. We did get to eat. My uncle, the retired minister who officiated our ceremony beautifully, didn't even call anyone the wrong name-- an amusing occurrence at previous weddings of relatives. Thank you so much to the bride's parents, and to every family member and friend who made it to scenic Des Moines, Iowa, to offer support (all those who were there in spirit, too!). It was particularly wonderful to drive away after our little post-reception party while some of our buddies-- great people from high school, college, and New York, most of whom had only just met-- lingered in the parking lot exchanging hugs. Yup, I'm a softie.
For six days, my wife (!!!, etc.) and I kinda worried (only half in jest) someone might be more inclined to pull us over, ding our doors, or at least think we were oil baron fucktards because our rental Pontiac Grand Prix had plates from my mother's native Texas instead of from some famously nice state like, well, Iowa. Is this heaven? While on our honeymoon around Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park, we hiked up mountains, rafted down rivers, and saw marmots and elk and a dude walking a wolf on a leash. Not even a husky or an akita, dudes. Then, after we lost our car keys near the end of what turned out to be a 10-mile hike, a tale of clumsiness I was prepared to take to my grave, our "fellow Texan" happened. Oh sweet Irony. (Nottingham vs. Bear, other Texans: Hugs!)
Yeah, but the one thing I held back from doing before the wedding, I really should've done. I came up with a playlist for a pre-ceremony "brunch beverages" half hour (to which the girl added the Clientele's "I Want You More Than Ever" for extra length, a good choice even though she assumed I'd be too busy to notice; of course I noticed), and I also planned our prelude, processional, recessional, and first dance (plus managed to passive-aggressively nix a last-minute suggested parental dance involving "Wind Beneath My Wings"). I didn't come up with a comprehensive play list for the DJ because (a) I knew I'd obsess over it for months and never get anything else done and (b) the DJ was a friend of a friend of a friend and I wasn't supposed to act like a big-city know-it-all. The only flaw in a perfect day: He started to play the Midler tune instead of our selected first dance. Afterward, he played the Midler tune anyway. Then he played a bunch of mid-tempo '70s rock, kicking off with a little Kenny Rogers number, effectively clearing the dance floor until a younger relative recommended he play Motown (which we'd asked for many times over the previous weeks) (his response during the reception, apparently: "You mean, like Wild Cherry?"). My hilariously footloose high school buddy Brian unfortunately had to head back to his grandma's in LaCrosse.
They do have newspapers in the Rockies. "Umbrella" is not "just about perfect" (shouldn't we expect a tad more from perfection?); it's a hook. Then again, I don't remember hearing much of the pre-2006 summer songs mentioned in this article (in real time, anyway) even though I was still an actual person back when they I guess dominated the summer. Hey, look, Tom already wrote something kinda great about this! What's especially weird about the article, though, is a cheap Al Gore/global warming joke (even Bill Maher, no stranger to easy jokes, quips how easy these are in his new HBO special). The almost always on-point Kelefa (can I call you Kelefa) writes, "Al Gore's worst nightmare: 52 weeks of summer."
Dudes, if I may, an aside: Either we agree with virtually every relevant scientist and accept global warming as a serious problem, in which case such a joke is awfully silly. Or else we disagree, which is awfully silly. (Third possibility: Editors inserted the gag to meet the paper's Gore joke quota.) In any event, reducing the issue of global warming to whether or not you think you like Gore is a key strategy among reactionary types. If you're inclined to say, "Chill out, weirdo, it's just a joke," you might not realize yet what's been happening since the rise of Rush Limbaugh in the early 1990s, exacerbated by FOX News. Blowjobs, inventing the Internet, "earth tones", windsurfing, gentlemen with expensive haircuts. Rather than dispute the facts, right-wing talkers (and often mainstream journalists) bypass voters' rationality by reducing candidates to convenient punchlines-- which are then picked up by vacuous, nominally liberal punchline-repeaters like Maureen Dowd and Chris Matthews, or even hard-news reporters like the Times' Kit Seelye, who then might attribute the lines to "late-night TV hosts". There's your ManBearPig, Trey and Matt. You let me down. One time.
Our rental car came with free XM Radio-- the Alamo advantage. It's pretty much the cable TV of radio, in a YouTube and DVR age. We did hear a bit of good stuff ("Lipgloss", "Stuntin' Like My Daddy", "Buy U a Drank", the one twiddly guitar bit in Creed's "Higher") amid a lot of extremely terrible stuff ("I'm Going Home", "I'll Stand By You", anything by Linkin Park, the rest of Creed's "Higher"), but I don't think there's anybody who tunes into the '90s channel during a Nirvana song who sticks around for "A Whole New World". The '60s, '70s, and '80s channels were worthless, too. No P4k-y stations on the dial, despite AOL's two (as of 2003!) Internet indie-rock radio stations. A day or two in, the only station we could listen to without switching channels in disgust (despite the occasional lame New Country crossovers... y'all, Travis Tritt ain't interested in bein' politically correct!) was Track 14, Bluegrass Junction. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. BEST NEW MUSIC.
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.
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
Contrary to the e-mail addresses of anonymous tipsters to certain music blogs.
See? I'd never wear three-quarter sleeves. John Mayer: Covered in Rain
I'd like to link directly to Mayer's post about his "Light Green" philosophy of a "third way" on global warming, but the guy's blog setup is major-label whack. Let me just say I went through a huge Mayer phase in my first couple of years of college that I'm not quite ready to explain yet (OK, the melodies and his uniquely vivid, sympathetic rendering of a certain twentysomething anxiety), but which I certainly don't feel the need to apologize for-- except insofar as he has utterly failed to live up to my high hopes for his music. He was better than you think, but the man steadfastly refuses to prove me right.
Mayer's "Light Green" idea-- essentially, "Hey, I've got a huge public platform to speak my mind, but you know what, I don't think this issue is important enough to give up my Porsche SUV or private jets or bottled water" (wait, what does bottled water have to do with global warming again? oh)-- also sums up what his approach has become to music, which is essentially: "Hey, it'd be nice if people liked better music, but they don't, so I'm going to come to them. Sure, let's do everything we can to make 'Your Body Is a Wonderland' marketable! Also, did I mention I'm really good at the blues?"
I mean, it's not like I'm doing as much as I think I should on this incredibly important issue, but at least I'm not minimizing the problem in front of a sizable audience of impressionable readers. And even I think "Daughters" is the (second-)best single of his lame preachy phase (i.e., the last four years).
We're all hypocrites, sure. Particularly on his most recent album-- which, mind-bogglingly, even the old guard of critics seems not to hate-- Mayer actually seems proud of this.
"...forget racism, what strikes me about our media elite [is] how profoundly stupid they are." - Atrios, 4/13/07
Meant to weigh in on the Don Imus dust-up. Y'all hear this shit? Rich, powerful, unexceptional white guy-- crony of other rich, powerful, unexceptional white guys-- gets booted out of a job for talking like a cracker. And he's not even politically conservative? Bro got famous with booze and coke streaming out his nose!
Jesus, the way Frank Rich tells it, it's almost worth telling. Free speech under fire! In a slow post-holiday week, too. Rich Boy, learning from David Brooks, makes a show of admitting his own hypocrisy in order to distract from his other hypocrisies. But c'mon now, scribes and Pharisees: First off, I don't care whether Imus stays on the air or not, but what he said was uniquely fucked. Second, Imus has been airing significantly more hateful thoughts about people of (sorry!) much greater importance for years now, getting his rocks off with the fraternity and poisoning your discourse. Third, Imus's firing shouldn't have a chilling effect on free speech because Don Imus is uniquely, profoundly stupid.
Oh I know we're all actually sitting around in our parlors calling various women "nappy headed hoes." Wait, no, we're NOT. It isn't as if this phrase is something "everybody thinks" but most ppl are too politically correct to say. It's not even the kind of language a traditional bigot like South Park "n----- guys" Mark Furman or Michael Richards might find accidentally running out of their mouths. It's totally weird. About anyone. How did these words even get in a man like Imus's brain? The Rutgers basketball team's blamelessness helped them win over the media, but that isn't why the insult was so disturbing. Guy even looked all smirky and proud of himself as he was warming up to deliver his new phrase (vid).
Only reason I come around is for the double-dutch. Lil Mama: Lip Gloss
Back in the reality-based community, this is how the "Gang of 500" who run our national political discourse like to talk about everyone all the time. Especially women, but especially Democrats. Over at The Daily Howler, Bob Somerby remembers Imus "always" calling Hillary Clinton-- i.e., the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination-- "Satan" ("Satan"!) and dubbing Al Gore-- i.e., the man who was right all along about the two biggest issues of our time, Iraq and global warming-- simply "the most evil man on the planet." A more dysfunctional press corps could hardly be imagined. If a major political commentator were to use either phrase to describe John McCain or Rudy Giuliani-- or, more revealingly, Jack Welch-- do you think frequent Imus guests like Tim Russert, Jeff Greenfield, and Chris Matthews would still show up on that honky's show? Yet they kept hanging with Mr. Imus, at least until all us meddling non-millionaires had to go and get our race/gender panties in bunches.
Fact is, these and other figures of the Washington Establishment share the same hateful views, which aren't far removed from batshit Ann Coulterism. Our pundits would rather be Howard Stern than Walter Cronkite; "liberal bias" is an outmoded and rarely applicable term these days not because of FOX, but because of a deep-seated animus among the likes of the Washington Post, New York Times, and NBC toward all signs of intelligent life-- particularly from anybody linked to icky slicky Blowjob Bill. Bummer everyone who actually wants a career writing about this stuff is too desperate to work for those pubs to expose their prospective employers' journalistic malfeasance, huh?
"My daddy mentions me in his New York Times columns." Rich Boy: Boy Looka Here
So you may not know that prominent Iraq war critic and former Democratic aide Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's Hardball, has called Hillary Clinton "witchy," a "stripteaser", and, to him perhaps worst of all, "ambitious", even falsely claiming hubby Bill has called her an "uppity woman." You may not know Matthews' long history of unprofessional petulance toward Gore: calling the former veep Bill Clinton's "bath tub ring", or a man who "doesn't look like one of us... he doesn't seem very American, even", or someone who would "lick the bathroom floor" to be President and wears troubling, troubling suits ("My joke is, “I'm Albert, I'll—I'll be your waiter tonight'").
You also may not know that, beginning in 1997, ostensibly liberal New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd for years wrote columns from the point of view of Gore's "bald spot"-- including a pre-election column on Nov. 5, 2000 called "I Feel Pretty." Now she complains a lot about Bush and interviews billionaires who accuse Hillary Clinton of being "ambitious." Aww.
Further, you may not know that Dowd wrote about seriously substantial issues like health care and Al Qaeda during the all-important summer of 1999, when the stage was getting set for the 2000 election. Wait: July 28: Dowd described her recent lazer eye surgery. August 1: Dowd reviewed the movie "Runaway Bride." August 4: Dowd discussed a Talk magazine piece about the Clintons' marriage. August 8: She interviewed Bob Dole on the prospect of being "first gentleman." August 11: She compared the Talk magazine piece about the Clintons with an auction of Marilyn Monroe memorabilia. August 15: Will Warren Beatty run for president? August 18: Bush and the question of youthful drug use August 22: Bush and the question of youthful drug use August 25: Dowd reviewed a Showtime movie about Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas. August 29: She ruminated on the life story of John McCain. "Never have so many men wanted to run," she mused, "to prove they are worthy to larger-than-life dads." September 1: "I ran into Kato Kaelin the other night," she wrote—at the start of a piece about Monica Lewinsky's fashion business. September 5: Dowd penned a review of the Paris, the new Las Vegas casino-hotel.
Airplane food was on the plane, airplane coffee too. Karin Strom: Klaustrofobi (plus great remixes over at Discobelle)
You may not even know that Frank Rich himself, the former theater critic who so skillfully bobbed and weaved on the Imus issue this weekend-- the devilish wag who makes you so happy in his Bush-bashing Sunday missives-- is the same dude who in 2000 called Gore "about as different from [Bush] as J. Crew and Banana Republic" under the headline "Survival of the Fakest", who mocked Gore's focus on actual policy ("Dingell-Norwood, anyone?") and pronounced the then-veep "the truly stupid one"; Rich is the shameless schmuck who even recently, in a column admitting An Inconvenient Truth is right, found it far more notable (troubling!) (phony!) that the film includes multicultural audiences, people who laugh at Al Gore's jokes, and the fact Al Gore once owned a gun. Did you know Rich helped make up the falsehood that Gore falsely claimed he and Tipper were an inspiration for the film Love Story, even though the story's author said the Gores really *were* an inspiration? Rich probably still thinks Al Gore said he invented the Internet. "Frankly, that's Rich."
Always focused on the big issues, today Rich Boy is miiighty concerned over Imus's canning. "If we really want to have this conversation" about the ugliness of the disgraced jock's words, Rich muses, "it also means we have to have a nonposturing talk about hip-hop lyrics, Borat, South Park and maybe Larry David." The fuck? I'm all in favor of Rich, Imus, Coulter, or any other moron having freedom of speech-- in the privacy of their homes, or on sidewalks and subway platforms (wild-eyed and spittle-flecked, haranguing passers-by)-- but the biggest difference between Imus's brand of humor and the stuff Rich mentions, aside from the fairly huge distinction between first-person speech and character-driven art, is that Imus's joke wasn't funny. At all. Who could defend it? As Different Kitchen notes, conservatives too are blaming the Imus brouhaha on rap. Do you think this man listens to rap? Does Michelle Malkin?
My dad models SN3 not HO scale but pretty close. Tokyo Police Club: Cheer It On (Ryan Dombal's take at Blender)
Borat looks at the world from the perspective of a casually offensive outsider in order to highlight our own casually offensive ridiculousness (part of the joke is the fact we even have to write all these big serious words about it, let alone the fact that kneejerk, joke-missing tuttutters like Frank Rich and David Brooks despise it)-- though, as Nick Sylvester notes, sometimes a blowjob joke is just a blowjob joke. South Park ventures into taboo territory on the premise that "either everything's OK, or nothing is"-- the freedom to transgress is what separates us from the Taliban (cancel Family Guy and the terrorists have won!). Larry David is pretty OK, I guess.
The rap question gets a whole lot more complicated. I've already touched on it in dealing with Devin the Dude's sometimes hateful new album, but I do get uncomfortable about the misogynistic/homophobic language and attitudes of yr fave rap clips. When Lil' Wayne is treating his objects like women, man, on the "It's Me Bitches" remix or on the really exciting so far Da Drought 3 mixtape, I squirm even as I can't help but be dazzled by his verbal acuity and charismatic delivery. In rap, you can kinda write stuff off as being spoken in character, but maybe it's just a music that-- like South Park, or more like the way rock used to be-- requires transgression to thrive. It's hard for rap to be good without being "bad"; that's why M.C. Hammer became instant kitsch (surely it wasn't the pants). Rap's moral ambivalence probably isn't going away anytime soon, but it doesn't have the least thing to do with the rich white guys at the top of the Washington, D.C. political journanimalism establishment being fuckwits.
Something else you probably didn't know: Dick Cheney was a major-league Imus fan. Yeah, big time. Cheney's spokeswoman once explained, "He has the same sense of humor that Imus has. He thinks Imus is funny. He gets good guests on. And he asks good questions. It's not really strategic or complicated. Not everything we do has to work on 50 different levels." (She totally loses me with that last part.)
You dudes gotta stand in the mirror backwards cuz you can't face yourself. My boy John Mayer, circa 1999
Look, the only reason this matters is because if we don't understand the forces that have driven our discourse for the past 10-plus years, we can't begin to push back against them. The same hateful millionaire world view will be inflicted upon Obama, Edwards, or Richardson should they defeat Clinton, just as it was upon "phony," "French-looking," "wind-surfing," "effete" John Kerry-- another recent Imus victim (vid). In any other profession, such malpractice would've put these pundits out of a job long ago.
When Chris Matthews made the following statement last month, which fearless speaker of controversial thoughts might he have imagined nodding in cowboy-hatted agreement?
"You know, somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean, I think there might be a giant, green, ugly, horny monster. A gigantic, gigantic monster of anti-Hillary, and anti-woman Hillary, anti-liberal woman Hillary, some real ferocious beast out there that says no matter what happens between now and Election Day, they're not going to let her win. Men, some women, are just not going to let this woman, this woman win the presidency. I don't know whether that monster's out there. All men I meet are afraid to talk like that. You only hear criticism of Hillary from smart, college-educated women. They're the ones that always have a problem with her now."
HEY PUNDIT CLASS, RAPPERS AREN'T THE ISSUE HERE.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO TOUCH MY GIGANTIC MONSTER?
...As for Wonkette, she doesn't deserve to live. Husker Du: New Day Rising and It's Not Funny
Elsewhere: Kelefa Sanneh compares Nine Inch Nails' noisy new Year Zero to '90s cyberparanoia.
Eric Harvey pondersGrindhouse, "art-enjoyment-context," and the Washington Post's novel panhandling experiment involving acclaimed classical violinist Josh Bell.
My Love of Diagrams review over at Playboy; my Mice Parade review at Pitchfork.
