I AM WAITING TO BE CHANGED

It's cold out there every day, what is this Miami beach not hardly.
Masaaki Yuasa: Mind Game (clip)

Just settling in for long winter's naps: High-school me would be pleased. Current me is mostly only embarrassed (ongoing awkward phase! terrible hasty uncritical pseudo-poetic blogspots! ...at this age?!). Never trying to cause headaches so pump up the volume, till the next episode. No time for anything else only time only this

One day we'll run out of puns.


Then the chorus sang about/ your shoulder
Felt: Stained-Glass Windows in the Sky


Now there's poetry in an empty Coke can.
Jeremy Jay: Airwalker (xpost via p4k)


Who needs a meaning, anyway? I'd settle any day for a very fine view.
Roy Ayers Ubiquity: Running Away (12" version)

P.S. Alain Finkielkrautrock just posted this "hippie not hippie mix" by Copenhagen's Djuna Barnes. Downloading now, looks interesting.

IT AIN'T ART IF YOU CAN BUY IT AT KMART

MP3s
Like it says on the T-shirt like it says on your face like it says on your heart on your sleeve on your bedroom wall on the cover of your zine on your bumper sticker.
Atlas Sound: You Belong to Me (track three from this free Altitude Sickness EP, via Deerhunter blog)


Next year, a film will be released showing the Rolling Stones performing as sexagenarians. It will receive mostly favorable reviews. Martin Scorcese directs, and, according to Mitch Glazer, editor of the New Yorker's recent "Movies Rock" special issue, the Rolling Stones "are playing with more daring and heart than ever"... Rock wants to be cool. So it flirts with death. Pop wants to be heard; sometimes this happens. Twee simply has other things to do... KEITH RICHARDS GETS CREDIT FOR TRYING.


Life is stressful when you're successful.
The New Birth: Dream Merchant

And now, your moment of zen of the industry of cool:

CHRIS MATTHEWS, host of MSNBC's "Hardball" (11/19/07): Well, let me tell you, let me tell you, there’s two—Michael, there’s a big difference between what happened to Al Gore and what happened to Bob—John Kerry.

John Kerry got hit unfairly by the Swift Boat, attacking his service to his country. They conflated his opposition to the war when he came back, which we can all argue about, and his service to a country, his country, which is not really arguable. They trashed him.

But, in terms of Al Gore, he is the one who said he created the Internet. He’s the one who put out the word that he was the subject or the role model for Love Story, that he pointed the—the country’s attention to Love Canal. He stuck himself into that story.

And when Martin Peretz’s daughter wrote that piece in the Vanity Fair a couple months ago, I’m sorry. She didn’t make the case. Gore got himself in those problem areas—

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: —by vanity and showing off and trying to make himself cool. But John Kerry got unfair treatment. I think there’s a big difference, guys, big difference in how those two were treated.

MICHAEL CROWLEY, of The New Republic: That may be so, but not—

MATTHEWS: Anyway, thank you, Chuck Todd.

CROWLEY: That’s not how most—many Democrats feel.

MATTHEWS: Well, why would you expect a partisan to think anything more than partisan? That’s what partisans do think.

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: Of course you think you were rooked.

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: Everybody that loses an election says they were rooked, OK?

CROWLEY: Sure.

MATTHEWS: And they blame it on the umpire.

CROWLEY: Right.

MATTHEWS: Keep it up. Thank you, Chuck Todd. Thank you, Mike Crowley.

CROWLEY: That’s the audience they’re speaking to. Thank you.

(End Scene)

WHAT DID YOU EXPECT, A TURKEY CARD?

Baby I knew about it I just didn't care.
A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving


Just when you want it baby baby baby.
The Tough Alliance: Silly Crimes (re-posted from May)

This year, I'm thankful for:

- writers who know the word is "cachet," not "cache"
- writers who don't write about lame stuff like "cachet" (writing about Google caches is still A-OK; writing about the words "cachet" and "cache," probably not)
- "good guy character[s] with a maniacal edge"
- Finnegans Wake for $10 on W. 4th Street
- superficially music-oriented David Brooks columns to remind people who don't usually read the Times' political punditry that Brooksy is a lazy, disingenuous hack, and to hasten the day of our long-threatened rap battle
- bloggers correctly calling out out the empty rhetoric of bizarrely overpaid pundits and city-school chancellors alike
- non-pimps remembering what Pimp C taught them
- "Surfer Dude Stuns Physicists With Theory of Everything"
- everything I care about that hasn't been turned into a mockery by James Blunt


P.S. Love this life.
Air France: Beach Party


P.P.S. Love this life.
The Honeydrips: Fall From a Height (The Field Way) (cross-posted from p4k)

EVERYONE AGAINST THE WAR IS GAY

So hood that Ludacris should've been on the original version.
X-Ray Spex: Identity (live in 1977) (via Dennis Cooper)

You all know the cliché that music critics are just failed musicians. What I've also seen bruited, though less often, is the notion that political journalists are really just failed music critics. Makes sense to me, sort of. Looking at the work of the Washington press corps' highest-paid, it's tough to tell who are the ones supposedly collecting checks just for telling people what's cool to think (in the parlance of our times), and who are the ones talking about, I dunno, stuff that actually matters.

The oft-cited (around here) Bob Somerby recently posted some old Lexis-Nexis excerpts that are pretty illustrative. A typical scene on Chris Matthews' influential MSNBC show (oxymoron?) "Hardball," back when Al Gore was on the campaign trail:


MATTHEWS (7/29/99): Is Al Gore just incapable of putting, like, one foot in front of the other in this campaign? He’s a professional politician—

REP. JOE. SCARBOROUGH (R-FL): Yeah. He’s awful.

MATTHEWS: —who acts like an amateur. I don’t get it. Did you ever see the movie “Altered States?” I mean, his face is, like, getting contorted in some of these—there’s bubbles coming out of his forehead!


So now every journalist at the D.C. cocktail party will totally know about that snarky zero point zero concept review young Matthews just handed out. Watch the zany Irishman go:

MATTHEWS: What mode was he in? Was he in, was he in the quiet mode, or that sort of Clutch Cargo craziness he gets into, or was he—

MARY BOYLE (former Democratic Ohio Senate candidate): No, no, but he was—

MATTHEWS: —or was he in the “Altered States” where the head starts to bubble? What state was he in today?


And the highbrow policy discussion continued. Pay these men millions of dollars, please:

SCARBOROUGH: She says, “Al Gore was loose.” That’s when he’s at his worst. Remember the Olympics, when he was clapping like this? And you’re, like, “My God, the guy can’t even clap.” Did they—what—did they teach—

MATTHEWS: OK.

SCARBOROUGH: I mean, he—he’s in trouble. And it feeds on itself and he looks more like a dork than he, than when he’s not trying.


One of Matthews' favorite lines was to say Gore was the White House "bathtub ring." At one point, Matthews would opine, "He doesn't seem very American, even." Why, Gore would lick the bathroom floor to be president! (His opponent, by contrast, obviously had no interest in wielding power.) Women probably think Gore is a "wimp," Matthews would muse. This went on for the two years leading up to the closely fought election of 2000.

Pretty much every journalist in Washington, D.C., (update: even ones I respect!) would like to be on dude's show. We're not talking about Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or William Kristol, or even their more polite face, David Brooks. We're talking about Chris Matthews, who actually has some pretense of objectivity because he was once an aide to Tip O'Neill. Joan Walsh, editor-in-chief of the ostensibly left-leaning Salon, wrote earlier this year about how much she just luvvvs Matthews-- and by golly, now she's a regular on his show. This is how your George Bush / Fred Thompson / Rudy Giuliani sausage gets made. They're bringing 1888 back. Everybody else is totally not cool, and I mean like A.R.E. Weapons or Jet here. Or Plain White T's.


The managers are on my case, and are waiting for me to slip up.
Hello Saferide: I Wonder Who Is Like This One

Criticism, especially pop music criticism (though maybe it only seems that way because pop crit is, well, what I do), gets derided a lot. "Dancing about architecture," or "people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read," etc. But done right, articulate expressions of how another person is affected by a piece of music can be an integral part of how we process it, and come to appreciate it, ourselves.

For instance, I can tell you that when I set out to write about a record, well, sometimes there are definitely those fortunate instances where I listen to something once or even a few times and all of a sudden I feel as if I understand exactly how it works for me. So then I write about that. More often, though, I have to listen and listen, take tons of notes, and then reflect carefully on the experience to pick out the most interesting aspects of the music, the elements that helped draw me into it.

Writing about those points should ideally become a key to help other people enjoy the music, too, or at least understand why it affected you a certain way and compare/contrast their own experience. Like a cheat guide to a video game, but an inexact, subjective one. If the elements that turned you onto a certain record are things that another person hates, then they'll know they are probably going to disagree with you.

I didn't really see the appeal of Burial's previous effort, even though I'd read the praise in Wire and heard the next-big-thing hype revolving around dubstep. What I never saw (maybe I just missed it) was much writing explaining clearly what people actually LIKED about the stuff; I remember presuming it must just sound awesome if you're at a club with great subwoofers, but maybe not at home. It's not so much that people need description of what music sounds like, or a context for why the artist is hip or, god help us, "important"-- if you're like me, anyway, you just want someone to point out why a song is aesthetically pleasing (or not) to them, and show you what to listen for to feel the same way. In some cases, the hooks are obvious, but not always.

Burial is an imperfect example. Much of the writing out there, even by people I really like, remains of the "It's genius, duh! Plus, I heard it first!" variety. Still, the more I've read about the new one, the more it has made sense to me-- thanks, Philip. (Of course, this album is an especially imperfect example because Burial made this one easier to "get", by adding vocals and trimming out a good deal of the fat.) Or, like, if someone sends you the Atlas Sound album and you don't know where to begin, I can point out the track that seems like a good entry point, and why.

Whatever, I'm not getting paid to write this and in fact should probably get back to writing what I'm paid for before the Bobs have to threaten to stop bringing in Dunkin Donuts on Fridays.

A big chunk of writing that includes my own has been decried as "pretentious" or "elitist." But even to whatever extent those charges are true, I'd like to think I'm usually pretty populist about it-- not, ugh, "middlebrow" (now there's a LOADED term), but rather, just someone who helps make those flashes of unfamiliarity accessible for bigger numbers of people, by laying out one person's path for making them familiar, how one dude made these moments part of himself. As we all get exponentially more inundated with new media, technology, and ideas all the goddamn time, I think that's a pretty useful metaphor for how we increasingly go about our lives. Not horse- and buggy-era (rich, influential, computer-illiterate) geezers like Larry King, maybe, but certainly those of us who spend a portion of our working and personal lives that once would've been embarrassing-- and now seems only typical-- on the internet.

Larry Kudlow is a Steve Martin character, not a real person.


And I don't even have time to practice.
Josh Ritter: The Temptation of Adam (live at Webster Hall)

USUALLY I DON'T DO THIS, BUT UH

"Tampon rock"
Barack Obama: Jefferson-Jackson Dinner

Quoting directly from Bob Somerby:

LOST BOYS OF THE LIBERAL PRESS CORPS: We’ll admit it! We’re the ones who e-mailed those articles to Digby, the ones she discussed in Wednesday’s post. Since some of her commenters didn’t seem to “get” why the reports were worth discussing, we thought we’d suggest a few points.

One of the reports in question appears on-line at The New Republic. Headline: “Jenna vs. Chelsea/Who's the least virtuous first daughter?” The other report appears on-line at Newsweek. Headline: “Who’s the next Jenna Bush?” In the latter, a half-witted fellow named Andrew Romano sniffs his way through the underwear drawers of nine female relatives of politicians (including one who is 6 years old). He is trying to judge who wins the right to serve as the slut of his latest thigh-rubbing confection.

Comments:

Brainless: Do you have any idea how dumb you have to be, as a male, to write panty-sniffing garbage like this in the year 2007? How mindless a magazine has to be to put this rot-gut in print? According to Newsweek, Romano “graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton University in 2004 with an A.B. in English and a certificate in American Studies.” Simply put, that’s a tragic admission.

Endless: Alas! Though culture is always part of the mix, the sense of male privilege driving these pieces (“droit de sophomore”) seems to be bred quite deep in the bone. Omigod! Absent appropriate guidance, each generation of young, callow males turns out just as dumb as the last one. Almost surely, many progressives thought this type of churlishness had been snuffed out by the early 70s, at least among “liberal” men. But these attitudes return with each generation. We gentlemen are just more resentful—therefore, dumber—each and every time.

Consequences: Do you trust a magazine which would print such a piece to cover the White House campaign of the first viable female candidate? In the past few weeks, Clinton has been trashed by Chris Matthews in astonishing ways; his lunatic conduct continued last night. (Tucker Carlson is little better—although he’s less influential.) Few “liberals” have found the heart to complain—or even to notice what’s happening. But then, our liberal leaders have long ignored Matthews’ woman-trashing, going all the way back to the late 1990s (more on these topics next week). This is A-OK with our tribe. Absent the unusual person like Digby, our tribe doesn’t even notice.

Speaking more specifically, the ugly sexual trashing handed to Naomi Wolf during Campaign 2000 did tremendous damage to Candidate Gore. Needless to say, the high-minded boys at your “liberal journals” didn’t say a word about it; it was left to several major conservatives (William Kristol, William Safire) to speak up on her behalf. You have already paid a gigantic price for the empty hearts of these weak, empty boys. The sexual trashing dished to Wolf was astounding. It did tremendous damage to Gore—and it passed without liberal comment.

A final note about consequences. When you see a collection of liberal scribes who think it’s OK to trash young women this way (down to age 6), do you think they will ever defend you against the wider values of their plutocrat bosses? Over the course of the past fifteen years, your interests have been shipped down the river at “liberal” journals as the plutocrat press corps’ major fixers have trashed a succession of Major Dems, including (for two years) Candidate Gore. Do you think a bunch of boys who sniff their way through underwear drawers will ever stand up to the Russerts and the Matthewses? To the powerful interests which hired them—which stand behind them? Their empty hearts and outstretched hands are perfectly clear as they publish this swill. They’re letting you know who and what they are—a lesson we liberals have had a hard time absorbing in the past dozen years.

Go ahead—sniff your way through that pair of reports. Good grief—you’re gazing on the souls of the lads who are supposed to be defending your interests! Then, see THE DAILY HOWLER, 3/3/03, which conveys a small sense of the sexual trashing handed to Wolf in November 1999. After scanning this pair of new reports, perhaps we all understand why “liberal” journals said nothing about this in real time—and perhaps we finally see how Bush ended up in the White House.

P.S. Audio from that Josh Ritter show is available over at Solitary Show Goer.

P.P.S. Contra Digby in the post linked by Bob, I believe Jonathan Chait is one of the most astute political journalists working today. I also think it's silly and idiotic to use one stupid thing published by a magazine or website to somehow supposedly contradict the work of another person who writes for that magazine or website. By doing this, Digby is proving Chait's point: Apparently, Digby isn't serious about ideas, only about winning an argument by whatever demagogic means necessary. Average bloggers in not understanding the difference between what they do and what a guy like Chait does shocka. To be sure, plenty of professional journalists are equally non-reality-based. But just because every asshole has an opinion, it doesn't follow that every asshole with an opinion takes care to back it up logically and with thorough research of the facts at hand. Chait typically does; he is a pro in every sense. If we try to turn the internet into a medium for tendentious propaganda, the geezers with the most money to sponsor such propaganda will always win; see talk radio, FOX News, Maureen "Al Gore is so feminized he's practically lactating" Dowd, or Tim "There Once was a Man from Nantucket, I mean, Buffalo" Russert. Ultimately, democracy would be better served by having more Jonathan Chaits-- people who will make articulate, reasoned arguments about the issues based on careful reportage (even when we may disagree with his conclusions)-- than by more DailyKoses or RedStates.

P.P.P.S. Matthew Yglesias, another political writer I'd consider worth emulating to an extent, has more on Tim Russert and why it's difficult for us whippersnappers to respect any journalist who considers this pathetic social climber (a man who, with his wife, has succeeded so well at said climbing that he's now BFF with his Nantucket neighbor, Jack Welch -- even while writing books asserting his blue collar-ness and work ethic) worthy of their respect. In short: "It's true that Tim Russert is a tough questioner... But while I wouldn't want to say that 'tough questioning' is a bad thing, making toughness the goal is perverse. The goal should be to inform the audience." Matt overlooks here (as, Bob Somerby would argue, most young liberal journalists do, perhaps because it increases their future employability among millionaire pundits who really do respect Russert) that Russert's questions are inevitably tougher for politicians with whom Jack Welch disagrees, and that Russert is a serial liar about Social Security, but still.

And with that, enough procrastinating.

OK, P.P.P.P.S. The Quick and the Ed quotes a Washington Post piece opining that "peer review" is the ideal way to get rid of crappy teachers: "Since teachers are harder on each other than any principal, he says, having them review each other's teaching practice, assignments, exams and lesson plans would result in evaluations that 'weed out the incompetent while preserving the basic idea of tenure.'" When this Quick and the Ed post was read aloud here on the sprawling offnotes campuses, the low-income-school teacher in our life LOLed, adding, "That's terrible!" So there you have it-- the WaPo columnist has been teacher-reviewed.

P.P.P.P.P.S. Digby, save your mockery for that self-impressed simpleton Michael Crowley, who apparently still doesn't have offnotes in his Google Reader.

JOSH RITTER: BETTER THAN LIARS

I saw Jens Lekman at Webster Hall two weeks ago. Lekman is one of my favorite music-type dudes out there these days. I saw Josh Ritter at Webster Hall last night. He was better, and the crowd-- notwithstanding the douchey dudes next to me who kept talking loudly about Goldman Sachs right through the encore, until I kinda threw a cup at them, and they said, "That asshole again?", because earlier they were talking loudly about getting another beer and I said I'd take one, too, thanks-- was even more fun, singing along to pretty much everything, even the old stuff ("Harrisburg"!).

New York Timesmen, if it turns out you were there too I owe you a free coke.

Eric Bachmann, thank you for playing "New Drink for the Old Drunk" and for being so graceful in front of an audience that had probably mostly never heard of Crooked Fingers OR Archers of Loaf.

HERE WE ARE NOW ENTERTAIN US

Congratulations, you've been selected to win a free Apple iPhone.
R. Kelly: Bump N' Grind

I went to see Jonathan Messinger lead an installment of his "The Dollar Store Show" reading series a couple of weeks ago at McNally Robinson. Jonathan and I worked together a few years back in the now-defunct Chicago offices of AOL CityGuide (formerly AOL Digital City). The system that brought us together was pretty messed up, even by today's permalancing standards; technically, we worked for a temp agency, which meant we had to leave after a year so AOL wouldn't become obligated to treat us as actual employees. The revolving door and surprisingly fair pay made for a young, collegial staff. Everyone I worked with was talented and clever, with diverse and fervent interests outside of work. We threw going-away parties constantly, inviting current and former staffers. We took long lunches on Tuesdays to walk down from the John Hancock building to the Virgin Megastore on Michigan Avenue and browse new CDs. We shared our favorite albums on the company server. We grumbled about that morning's Pitchfork reviews. Fritz and I started a blog. Jonathan turned me onto Jonathan Richman. It was one hell of a first job.

But this post isn't about that job. It's about Jonathan's new book, Hiding Out, which I've had since the reading but only had time to get through this weekend while up at a friend's cabin in the Adirondacks. The whole thing is, well, GREAT-- poignant and off-kilter, witty and warm, haunted by strange phobias but all the more human for them, told in the voice of the sort of ultimately optimistic but still slightly cynical friend who might turn you onto Jonathan Richman. The humor is the kind that hurts, in your guts and chest both.


Fool me into believing, I don't care if you're deceiving me.
Red House Painters: Katy Song

I hope Jonathan won't mind my posting this brief snippet:

It’s all because of my poor reflexes. A case of having little physical skill, sure, and maybe a short attention span. But there I was, hungover on a Sunday morning, in one of those indoor sports facilities that you never think you’ll see the inside of, with the walled soccer fields and artificial turf like hot steel wool. Huge pictures of athletes you’ve never heard of adorn the walls, tricking you into thinking you look like them. But you don’t, you look like me; tired and still not entirely clear on why you’re playing in this league, some five games into the season. Unshaven, unenthusiastic, nearly undead. My headache, the one from the hangover, had me running in zig zags. Every time I turned I would flinch and my body would lurch in another direction. So it wasn’t a surprise, in retrospect. It took me off-guard, but I should have known it would happen.

There was a guy on the other team wearing the Brazil national team jersey—it didn’t even say Ronaldo on the back. It was some obscure player, I found out later, the guy was such a fan. But for a moment, I stared at the back of his jersey, at the name, Azofeifa. Such a name, Azofeifa. Beats the name on the back of my T-shirt, Terry. I was staring at the name Azofeifa, wondering if this guy, Azofeifa, if he could possibly be a member of the Brazilian team, his shorts blue and new enough, his socks pulled high enough. And as I was thinking this, just watching him, Azofeifa—such a name!—wondering if I was in the presence of greatness and playing against a World Cup competitor, as this thought crossed my mind I saw the ball emerge, in the air, in my peripheral vision, and I saw Azofeifa take two confident strides away from me and then, something magical happened—and I’d like for you to understand the magic of it before I tell you the consequences, because the magic is the best part—Azofeifa took two confident strides away from me, and as the ball knuckled through the air, no spin at all, just a flat and boring thing, I watched Azofeifa leap, his left leg kicking in front of him like a ballerina, and I noticed that his thigh muscle, I believe it’s called a quadriceps, was of such girth and animal litheness that I quivered, but then, his torso realigned, so it looked like he was reclining in the air, parallel to the ground, just buffeted by the wind, gravity at the whim of Azofeifa, and as his left leg hastened back down he lifted his right so that it emerged above him, an obtuse angle on the Azofeifa plane, and again with the suppleness of the quad, and the kick, connecting with the ball and sending this object, appearing two-dimensional before he touched it, but now, in Azofeifa’s universe, it was a living thing, spinning with a celestial speed and growing larger by the second, it could only be described as magic, this bicycle kick that defied physical laws in a most real way, and the ball now coming alive and growing so large that it was there, in front of my face, and here we see the consequences of my momentary obsession with Azofeifa, my reflexes so poor, my headache so monstrous, my fleeting love for Azofeifa so pure, that I couldn’t even shutter my eyelids, and the ball hit my bare yellow eyeball and it is here, of course, that I stop remembering.

You can read a longer excerpt of the story in PDF form here. But you should really buy it here.


See you next Tuesday, you is a punk.
McCarthy: Keep an Open Mind or Else