I USED TO SAY DUMB THINGS I GUESS I STILL DO

It was a disappointing sunset, only 'cause my hopes were much too high.
Harpo: Movie Star

Via Greil Marcus (again) via Simon Frith's Sound Effects via Roland Barthes: I wonder if part of what attracts me to Jens Lekman's wonderful Night Falls Over Kortedala (9.0 from this schmuck) is the sense of what Barthes called signifiance (not a typo). As Marcus puts it:

"Barthes argued that the thrill of music is not a result of one's consious or subliminal response to 'significance' (the rendering of an important idea, emotion, moment in time, or whatever -- think of how you've tried to make sense of your response to 'Like a Rolling Stone' or 'Gimmie Shelter'); rather, the thrill comes from one's response to signifiance. This odd and intriguing word has baffled Barthe's translators (some, as if to say the hell with it, have rendered it as'significance'), but Frith handles the word best: signifiance refers not to a sign but to 'the work of signification'-- not to meaning, but to 'the making of meanings'. We do not respond to symbols (doom in the dark chords and apocalyptic lyrics of 'Gimmie Shelter,' escape and release in the rising choruses of 'Like a Rolling Stone'), though we seize on such symbols and connect them to historical events or personal situations in order to explain our response; we respond to symbol creation."

Marcus/Frith go on to hold up Elvis Presley as the prime example; who the hell knows what he stood for, but sure as Memphis sits on the mighty Mississippi, Elvis stood for something: standing for something.


If we all decide that there are five pints in a quart, that's objectively true. (And a bargain!)
Jens Lekman: Interview in Paris

So if Elvis stood for signifiance, then maybe Lekman's album stands for the possibility that we can be in control of the process-- that we can make our own symbols, just as he shores these pop fragments against our 21st-century cultural ruins. I don't really have this all pinned down yet. See in the above interview (posted yesterday) how Lekman sort of makes a similar point to the one in my review-- he says the wealth of unedited music on the Web allows us all to edit out our own favorite tracks, decide for ourselves which matter, create our own Jens Lekmans and have them, Whopper-like, our way.

Side note: I love how on "Shirin", he sings, "I won't tell anyone," just as he is telling, um, everyone.

Something capable of revealing that point of access which provides a shortcut to the magical realm behind this spectacle.
Mainly Spaniards: That's What Friends Are For

Here's something worth getting political about. In Vanity Fair, Evgenia Peretz goes on at length about what the indefatigable Bob Somerby calls the press corps' two-year "War Against Gore": the one where the brightest, best-paid pundits at The New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, and MSNBC-- not just FOX or crazy right-wingers-- falsely convinced you that Al Gore said he'd invented the Internet, claimed he personally discovered the infamous Love Canal toxic-waste site, invented that he and Tipper were the inspiration for the novel "Love Story" (the author has said they were), changed into "earth tones" at the behest of Naomi Wolf (Wolf has denied this, the original reports were based on speculation by disgraced former Clinton aide Dick Morris, and besides, who doesn't occasionally wear "earth tones"?), etc. etc. etc.

A sample of the kind of misconduct which, in any other profession, would get someone fired or possibly sued:

"MSNBC anchor Brian Williams went after Gore's clothes at least five times in one week. 'Here is a guy taking off his suits.… This is the casual sweater look—what's going on here?' … 'He would have been in a suit a month ago.' … 'He's wearing these polo shirts that don't always look natural on him.' Williams's frequent guest Newsweek's Howard Fineman later chimed in: 'I covered his last presidential campaign, in 1988. One day he was in the conservative blue suit, the next he was playing lumberjack at the V.F.W. hall in New Hampshire.'

"And Gore just kept going on about issues. Alluding to five speeches he made in two months on education, crime, the economy, faith-based organizations, and cancer research, [the Times's Katherine] Seelye wrote, 'Mr. Gore becomes almost indignant when asked if his avalanche of positions might overwhelm voters.' The Washington Post's David Broder later found Gore too focused in his convention speech on what he'd do as president. 'But, my, how he went on about what he wants to do as president,' wrote Broder. 'I almost nodded off.' As for the environment, while Gore was persuaded by his consultants not to talk about it as much as he would have liked, whenever he did, many in the media ignored it or treated it as comedy. Dowd wrote in one column that 'Al Gore is so feminized and diversified and ecologically correct, he's practically lactating.' In another, referring to his consideration of putting a Webcam in the Oval Office, she wrote, 'I have zero desire to see President Gore round the clock, putting comely interns to sleep with charts and lectures on gaseous reduction.'

"The trivial continued to dominate during the postmortem following Gore and Bush's first debate, on October 3, 2000. The television media were sure Gore won—at first. But then Republican operatives promptly spliced together a reel of Gore sighing, which was then sent to right-wing radio outlets. Eighteen hours later, the pundits could talk of little else. 'They could hear you audibly sighing or sounding exasperated as Governor Bush was answering questions,' Katie Couric scolded him the next day on the Today show. 'Do you think that's presidential behavior?' For the Times's Frank Bruni, the sighs weren't as galling as Gore's familiarity with the names of foreign leaders. 'It was not enough for Vice President Al Gore to venture a crisp pronunciation of Milosevic, as in Slobodan,' he wrote. 'Mr. Gore had to go a step further, volunteering the name of Mr. Milosevic's challenger Vojislav Kostunica.'"


These people are still among the most prominent, highest-paid people in my profession. They are responsible for George W. Bush. They are responsible for the Iraq war. They do not care about you. And they will not do their jobs (John Edwards has fancy haircuts! Rudy Giuliani is Mayor of America! Fred Thompson is hung like a mule!) unless we stand up to them.


Final thought: If anyone knows where to find the "dub" version of Shai's "If I Ever Fall in Love" that Diplo uses on this insanely awesome mix, please, for the love of Christ, hook a writer up.

WHO WOULD JESUS BOMB?

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.

*love*

WE HAVE A WORLD OF PLEASURE TO WIN, AND NOTHING TO LOSE BUT BOREDOM

Come as you are as a friend as I want you to be.
The Honeydrips: (Lack of) Love Will Tear Us Apart (feat. Hanna)

"[W]e commented from the outside looking in. And that's what a lot of people have difficulty doing nowadays. There is no longer an 'outside'. They have no idea what the outside is. Some people think the Gap is outside."
- Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, in the July issue of The Wire

Name one person who thinks the Gap is "outside".


We all gotta live with the fact that we aren't Bob Dylan.
Hot Chocolate: It Started With a Kiss

Better never than late: Chinese Democracy. Better late than never: your offnotes RIFFMARKET Status Ain't Hood Quarterly Report, mid-year albums edition (traxx list ideally finally arriving before my wedding date).

1. Deerhunter: Cryptograms/Fluorescent Grey double-LP


2. LCD Soundsystem: Sound of Silver


3. Lil Wayne: Da Drought 3


4. The Tough Alliance: A New Chance


5. Josh Ritter: The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter


6. The Field: From Here We Go Sublime
7. Panda Bear: Person Pitch
8. Sally Shapiro: Disco Romance
9. Feist: The Reminder
10. Simian Mobile Disco: Attack Decay Sustain Release

11. Justice: †
12. Art Brut: It's a Bit Complicated
13. Battles: Mirrored
14. Los Campesinos!: Sticking Fingers Into Sockets
15. Various Artists: After Dark
16. The Good, the Bad, and the Queen: The Good, the Bad, and the Queen
17. Lucky Soul: The Great Unwanted
18. The Tough Alliance: New Waves EP
19. Air France: On Trade Winds EP
20. The Twilight Sad: Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters

PLUS:
A Sunny Day in Glasgow: Scribble Mural Comic Journal
The Clientele: God Save the Clientele
Dan Deacon: Spiderman of the Rings
Gruff Rhys: Candylion
Gui Boratto: Chromophobia
Dinosaur Jr.: Beyond
King Khan & the Shrines: What Is?!
The Postmarks: The Postmarks
Lullatone: Plays Pajama Pop Por Vous
The Crayon Fields: Animal Bells
Sakert!: Sakert!
Spoon: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Blitzen Trapper: Wild Mountain Nation
Deerhoof: Friend Opportunity
The National: Boxer
Electrelane: No Shouts, No Calls
The Studio: Yearbook 1
Okkervil River: The Stage Names (probably with a bullet)
Taken By Trees: Open Fields
Pantha Du Prince: This Bliss
David Torn: Prezens
Marnie Stern: In Advance of the Broken Arm
Bowerbirds: Hymns for a Dark Horse
Matthew Dear: Asa Breed
The Tuss: Rushup Edge EP
Lil Wayne: The Greatest Rapper Alive
The Manhattan Love Suicides: The Manhattan Love Suicides
Junior Boys: Dead Horse EP
Young Jeezy: The Inspiration
No Age: Weirdo Rippers
Klaxons: Klaxons
Kathy Diamond: Miss Diamond to You
The Capstan Shafts: Her Versus the Sad Cold Eventually
Liars: Liars
!!!: Myth Takes
No Age: Weirdo Rippers
Sea and Cake: Everybody
Frog Eyes: Tears of the Valedictorian
A-Trak: Dirty South Dance
Ne-Yo: Because of You
Deerhoof: Friend Opportunity
Grinderman: Grinderman
Nas: Hip-Hop Is Dead
Stars of the Lid: And Their Refinement of the Decline
Ricardo Villalobos: Fizheuer Zieheuer
Arctic Monkeys: Favourite Worst Nightmare
Amerie: Because I Love It
Swizz Beatz: One Man Band Man
Boris with Michio Kurihara: Rainbow


Want you to turn the lights off, me on.
Gorillaz vs. Men Without Hats: The Safety Dance

TOO SOON TO CALL:
Animal Collective, Super Furry Animals, all the stuff I really like that I forgot

MY DOUBLE THOUGHTS ARE CLEARER NOW THAT I AM SEEING DOUBLE

The string section's screaming like horses in a barn burnin' up.
Josh Ritter: Rumors (clip)

Got soap in my eyes yesterday. Stang like a pissed-off hornet. I half-remembered the reason pain probably hurts so much more when you're very young. It's because you're not old enough yet to know it won't last forever. Cue the waterworks! Now there's just a grimace and a few blinks, maybe a "fuck". Fuck. No more tears.

It's gonna be hard to believe if you know me today, but there was a time in college when I swore I didn't believe in love. Naw, man, it's just, like, a fantasy people make up to rationalize sex. Or, like, a brand the advertising firms and Hollywood sell us now that God is only friends with Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson. I just believed in John Lennon.

I count myself lucky to know one dear friend, in particular, who would not let my bullshit on this stand. He'd already loved and lost, hurt like hell, knew of what he spoke, and my words must've been salt in his wounds. Soap in his eyes.


You're free to push me, and I'm free to fall.
Chromatics: In the City

Of course, everything changed when I met a girl who could put up with me. Belief is funny like that. I'll never forget my friend saying, even early on, something like, "So, do you still not believe in love?" Haw haw.

Now I'm getting married in, OMG, about three weeks. Love is real, and there's no way I deserve it more than this guy. I don't want to get exploitative here and go into too much detail, but: I'm sorry, man. Bro grabs.


The worst crime that I ever did was play some rock 'n' roll.
Bird Names: Damnation

The New York Times' Patrick Healy can eat squirrel poop. (Irish! Good man, Chris Matthews would say.)

The Washington Post's Alan Ehrenhalt can eat Healy's squirrel-poop poop.

My Spin review of Swizz Beatz. (Better than squirrel poop!)

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 TRIED TO WAKE YOU WITH A REALLY LOUD COUGH

If I had the money to go to a record store, I would.
The Tough Alliance: First Class Riot (cross-posted from Pitchfork)

"STOP TREATING MUSIC LIKE IT’S YOUR STICKER COLLECTION."
- Chris Ott, guest-posted in Nick Sylvester's RiffMarket

In the early '80s, my cousin Kent gave me a 1981 Topps Joe Montana rookie card. Kent lived in Iowa, so he was more of a Green Bay Packers fan, and he knew that his younger cousin-- not yet old enough to appreciate the gift-- was a drooling San Francisco 49ers worshipper. Also, Kent is awesome. My mom, witnessing the destruction I had wreaked upon my collection of more contemporary cards from 1983 and 1984, wisely stashed the card away in a drawer, where it was never seen again until I was old enough to take care of it. I once sent it to Joe Montana himself to autograph; he demurred, saying that signing a rookie card can actually diminish its value. The card now sits beside the 1990 Pro Set card he signed instead, in a frame at my parents' house (until I'm old enough to take care of it).

At its early-'90s peak, as I recall, that beautiful slab of cardboard was worth more than $200, at least according to Beckett. Of course, considering I would never sell it, the card is both worthless and "priceless," like that 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card Bob Costas lugs around in his wallet. The value of the card lies in what it represents to me about my most beloved football team of all time, the Montana-era Niners, and the many happy hours I spent watching and obsessing over them. Is it a little pathetic to fetishize a piece of paper depicting a dude who named his first three kids Alexandra, Elizabeth, and Nathaniel so their full names would all have 16 letters, matching the number he famously wore as quarterback? Probably.

In conversation, I've complained as much as anybody about the current blog-o-matic tendency to treat bands like collectibles. Many writers seem to pack in as many posts per day with as many up-and-coming artists as possible, but their words usually show little love, appreciation, or understanding for the performers they so tirelessly promote. What are the Cold War Kids about? My Pitchfork review revealed one interpretation, but I'd never seen any of their supposed online fans ever give the idea much thought, something that to me seems irreconcilable with normal fandom. How do they sing along? Further, the obsession with collecting seems not just shallow but also narrow, excluding, as Ott notes and Nick observed recently in a piece on Matt LeMay's Get Him Eat Him, a broad swathe of great bands (more on this in a future rant).

All those criticisms still stand. But reading Ott's post, I'm beginning to wonder if the "sticker collector" gripe might not be, probably subconsciously, a proxy for bigger worries. After all, the phrase "record collection" is common parlance, and even if it implies something different than music appreciation or fandom, broad knowledge/ownership of records hardly seems like a negative (except perhaps in the case of "record-collector rock"). Aside from the superficial, no-commitments way many people approach this stuff, I'm not sure what's wrong with a record collection per se. Don't we WANT kids to listen to more music?

Now, I'm sure Ott is being sincere, but it's particularly convenient for a guy like him-- whose "collection" might be said to include the likes of Joy Division, the Clash, Pink Floyd, Arab Strap, Stephen Malkmus, the Constantines, and uh Carlos D.-- to tell today's fervent young music acquirers to cease and desist. Imagine the parallel: A geezer with a yellowing hoard of '60,'70s, '80s and '90s baseball cards starts insisting that people shouldn't bother collecting anything he doesn't already own. If people follow this dude's advice, his collection will become more valuable, and theirs will become worthless. It's common knowledge that more music is put out today than ever; so, too, will the old guy avoid having to learn and obtain the endless varieties of premium and superpremium baseball cards and inserts released in recent years. Lucky that guy!

But bands aren't baseball cards, obviously-- or pogs, or stickers. I've never claimed to have always known as much about music as the modicum I know even now, and Ott certainly wasn't born clutching a 1952 Mickey Mantle. Someone had to give it to him. Instead of wishing technology would slow down or telling young music fans how they suck (and sometimes they do!), it would be more productive to help explain to them why we value certain older records, to help them appreciate new and old music rather than merely compete to own it. This is the function of a good music critic. It's in all of our collective best interest to foster a new generation of people who care about music as passionately as we do, just as it's in-- pardon me for again comparing art and commerce-- the best interest of the National Football League to inspire the kind of passion I had for Joe Montana's 49ers.

Of course, it's always in the best interest of an individual critic to be a dick. Otherwise, how would you get other bloggers to whine about you?


We got our own jihad if you know what I mean.
Bill Richardson: Job Interview and Tell Me

Elsewhere:

Via Bob Somerby, Jack Welch's well-paid Nantucket boys make a joke of your Democratic and Republican presidential debates. Brian Williams, the guy who made you rich is a billionaire douchebag-- do you still let him kiss you good night?:

BRIAN WILLIAMS, OPENING QUESTION (4/26/07): Senator Clinton, your party's leader in the United States Senate, Harry Reid, recently said the war in Iraq is lost. A letter to today's USA Today calls his comments "treasonous" and says if General Patton were alive today, Patton would wipe his boots with Senator Reid. Do you agree with the position of your leader in the Senate?

CHRIS MATTHEWS, OPENING QUESTION (5/3/07): In the NBC-Wall Street Journal poll, just 22 percent believe this country is on the right track. Mayor Giuliani, how do we get back to Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America"?

Williams tells us Patton would "wipe his boots" with a top Democrat, then asks Clinton if she supports such a treasonous wimp. Matthews implies the country was last on the right track under a Republican, using the Gipper's own marketing slogan. How do we get such utterly bizarre behavior from a so-called liberal media? Make your own inferences from a recent Poynter item: "Journalists shouldn't be part of a royal class in America."

A recent article in The New Republic by Joseph D. Becker raises important points about the growing divide between the nobles and the peasants in our glorious democracy:

BECKER: Last year, the president of the United States--the CEO of the country--was paid $400,000, with a $50,000 allowance for expenses and up to $100,000 for travel. The amounts are fixed by statute and do not vary with the success or failure of his administration. With responsibilities hardly comparable to the president's, the CEO of Citigroup made nearly $26,000,000 in 2006 (counting all benefits). He may have done better in his job than the luckless president did in his, but surely not 47 times better. Further, if the average annual wage of non-executive employees of Citigroup was, say, $50,000, the CEO made 520 times their salary. There are dozens of such astonishing cases. As a member of Congress recently said, "The average CEO makes more money before lunch than the average worker earns all year."

Becker goes on to call for a study group (how bold!) to look into ways to restrain surging public-sector compensation. However, his critics will point out that this will only cause executives to jump to the private sector, where their pay ISN'T restrained, or even public. And they'd be right. This problem goes way beyond Wall Street.

In a startling development, noted policy wonk Jonathan Cohn calls for more policy wonkery. I'm a big fan of Cohn's policy prescriptions, but I'm skeptical of the politics of this post. Earnestly or not, Cohn is basically the latest guy to carry the Edwards campaign's memetic water, insisting that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton need to give "details" on how they will implement their health care policies, when any honest answer at this early stage would have to be "it depends." Presidents don't enact health care legislation; legislators do. Matthew Yglesias gives an historical view of the subject.

Meanwhile, Colbert isn't just parody, folks. Wall Street Journal columnist Stephen Rademaker recently published a column attacking the "Blame America First" crowd. Subscription required, because people pay for this shit. Murdoch knows what's up.

Finally, there is no God: MC Rove might be an atheist. [UPDATE: He's also toast.]

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."

FOUR IS A MAGIC NUMBER, BUT SO IS FIVE

"...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 ponders Grindhouse, "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.