Red, White, and Jennifer Aniston

The Secretary of Law

2011-04-06T17:14:00.000-07:00

The Obama Administration's decision to formally announce the president's intention to seek the party's nomination in 2012 coming hours before the Attorney General's decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in military court invites speculation about the actual reasons for going through with the latter, but before we talk about whether or not it was motivated for political reasons let's take a look at what the political reaction has been.

Jeff Sessions, the Republican from Alabama, said "while it is unfortunate that it took so long to make this announcement, I am pleased that the Obama Administration has finally heeded those who rebuked their decision and that the trial is being held where it belongs." Then he said Obama's initial plan to try them in civilian court was "built on the naive premise that softening America's image would somehow soften our enemies' resolve." Peter King called the decision a retroactive affirmation of George W. Bush's efficacy. And Mitch McConnell took advantage of the opportunity to say "the Obama Administration has actively sought to bring the 9/11 plotters into our communities," which he then quantified as a "horrible idea."

Democrats weren't a lot better, which is to say the ones with lines to the presidential agenda were made to contend with the same path the President's taken. Chuck Schumer, who has a constituency to think of, made a kind of admission that he'd been uncomfortable with the initial plan the whole time, and Lieberman, well, he did the president the favor of releasing a positive statement joint with John McCain. Patrick Leahy was alone in Senatorial outrage.

And the bloggers, or the voters, as I like to call them, were, well let me put it this way. Dahlia Lithwick at Slate wrote an article on Monday headlined "Cowardly, Stupid, and Tragically Wrong," and let me lessen the suspense, she wasn't talking about Paul Ryan.

This boils down to two basic reactions, either A. you were wrong from the start and now you're finally getting it right, or B. you have now proven definitively you are not the man I voted for. The A's wouldn't have voted for Obama regardless, whereas the likely situation for most of the B's is that they'll still vote Obama, but they'll do it without the illusory optimism that gave him the edge the first time. So politically motivated? Maybe. There are the voters, the 59% of them give or take that rely on polls to get their voices heard, who don't want Mohammed in this country at all, who think that trying him in civilian court makes him a civilian and not an enemy combatant, which makes this thing in Afghanistan a police action instead of a war. Let's talk about those people for a second.

Obviously this isn't the only reason. As far as our justice system is concerned we've already done enough to Mohammed to warrant his case's dismissal. But we're dealing with the case our Attorney General called the defining one of his career. We're dealing with the architect of the 9/11 attack. We're dealing with someone who admitted to 31 counts of terrorism against the United States and its allies. Our justice system is tremendous, the envy of the world, the fairest system of adjudication ever conceived, sure, dude is still getting tried. No judge, jury or politician in the United States is irresponsible enough to see him acquitted before his trial begins. No, what's brought out the voices is the symbolism. And the very foundation of the argument has expanded to fit the size of these post-terror symbolic debates: liberty versus safety, the establishment versus the fringe, civil rights versus American sovereignty, America versus Terror, etc....

There is also, however, the symbolism of the terrorism itself to consider. In 2001 the United States was attacked by a body of individuals trying to start a war. "When we made any war against America," Mohammed confirmed in 2007, "we are jackals fighting in the nights. I consider myself, for what you are doing, a religious thing as you consider us fundamentalist. So we derive from religious leading that we consider we and George Washington doing same thing."

We agreed. We went to war. But I wonder if by providing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed with a jury of Americans, we wouldn't have sent the message that his whole career, they're whole life, isn't even that big a deal to us. Like we can't even be bothered to make a war with them.

We'd still be at war of course. But just in reality.

P.J. Crowley

2011-03-13T20:14:00.000-07:00

After World War II and the beginning of the Cold War the heart of the art scene moved from Paris to New York, which debuted with something it called abstract expressionism. This movement was so wildly apolitical it caused certain people sincere paranoia that the CIA was funding it. The thought was that serious intellectuals wouldn't stop to consider what their government was doing because they'd be so caught up considering the expression behind this:

There are obviously a number of reasons why things probably didn't happen this way, but a couple of them are
1. Art is rarely political ever, and there's nothing about impressionism or cubism or dadaism or any other movement from before the war that's any more political than abstract expressionism. In fact most of the 20th century was about extracting the personal from the political, and it was stuff that happened during the Cold War that made anyone start thinking about getting back to macro concerns.
2. The suggestion that any branch of government could do anything remotely this effective goes against everything history has taught us about the government.
3. If the government wants to do something horrible, it just does it. It doesn't bother distracting anyone.

This has been, by any accounts, a fascinating quarter of the year. An earthquake and a tsunami created calamity about a nuclear meltdown which gave us primers in nuclear theory, and when the fears were debunked by SOMETHING EVERYONE ON EARTH SHOULD READ we were, or at least I was reminded of Michael Moore's conviction that the media traffics in fear. Meanwhile Scott Walker, Hosni Mubarak, and Moammar Qadhafi have played out in real time the unassailable property that power's only function is to sustain itself, and have demonstrated by their respective actions how class and standards of living dictate morality the exact same way that demand dictates supply. Essentially, we've had confirmed for us the practical realities of every theory we ever read about in college. We've also watched our socialist president become an ineffectual centrist, been exposed to the enormous hypocrisy of our Tea Party bandleaders, and had confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that Michele Bachmann really is as stupid as you think she is. Oh, and we got to add another name to the fascinating yet inadequately examined list of political assassins.

Today Barack Obama did something that isn't just shameful, but pointless. And while I don't see any Republicans giving him grief about it, I can't think of anyone it could have made happy. It's too convoluted to make him look not-soft on terror, it actually requires every member of his base to ask him why he's allowing Bradley Manning to be, not necessarily tortured, but badly kept, and why he's chosen to do something that is the exact same thing the dishonorably discharged previous administration did. It also provides an open invitation for anyone who wants it to compare him to George Bush, and to hold up statements he made condemning Bush for adopting a for-us-or-against-us attitude while in office. Furthermore, it won't do a thing to make anybody think the government is speaking with one voice if they didn't before. The only way I can look at it is as a terrible political move that will only hurt his image, made for terrible reasons by someone who is otherwise in full pandering mode, in a time where liberty is on everyone's tongue. In short, it was some terrible shit, the kind of terrible shit governments do because governments will do terrible shit whenever it's even an option.

Which brings me to Animal Collective, and the current art scene.

I chose this song for two reasons: 1. I really like it, and it's fully apolitical, and 2. it's video is one of the few that isn't permanently disturbing. That said, if you want some abstract expressionist apolitically gut wrenching art, check out any other video they have made.

Hipster culture is so insulated right now someone could make the argument it's been sanctioned by the CIA to keep people from paying attention to the news. Hipster irony isn't really even ironic anymore so much as it's a kind of paralyzing rabbit-hole of meaning and not meaning things. Wavves I think captures this well. They sing about their own inadequacy over music that's meant to convey apathy but also often tries to sound like Animal Collective, who are clearly perfectionists, and are more creative musically than just about anybody in the scene. And I'm not so sure the "we're inadequate but not really but really we are but everyone is and we're actually really proud of that" has any real end point to tether itself around. They're joking, they're not joking, they're not joking but they're not serious, whatever; they're not going anywhere. They're not saying anything about themselves besides that they subscribe to the culture of their generation, and they're certainly not saying anything about the world around them.

Which is fine. Art isn't meant to be political. I don't think it's meant to be our refuge from the political either. But today our president fired a perfectly decent employee of the government because he pointed out something the government should be embarrassed about. The government should be even more embarrassed now, but it won't be, because now it will speak with one voice again. So today I'm hoisting a picture of Mr. Philip J. Crowley. A man who got fired for doing the right thing. Tomorrow I'll give the government another chance, because it represents a country I love. Then maybe I'll listen to some indie rock.

How fascism works

2011-02-25T11:25:00.000-08:00

A cable released by WikiLeaks this week confirms for anyone still in doubt that by the second half of the last decade Gadhafi was fairly eager to help us fight terror. Interesting, because I hope this story becomes huge and the Republicans (by the way, I'm putting more credence into the possibility that there's an underground lair in somewhere like Arizona where the 12 most powerful Republicans meet and have total control over everything the party does. This could include Dick Cheney, David Koch, Grover Norquist, Thad Cochran, Roger Ailes, maybe John Boehner, some incredibly wealthy PR guys and consultants, etc.) have to start denying its validity. Even more interesting is Gadhafi's admission that when shit went bad in Africa, he'd go out in public and blame the United States.

What strikes me about this is that he's now blaming Al-Qaeda, and while that's essentially Orwell 101, seeing it applied to real life is fascinating.

2011-02-22T19:37:00.000-08:00

Today was an emotional day. A lot of things happened, good and bad. Let's review:

The Good

Rahm! Rahmbo. Mayor Emanuel. Maybe the happiest election result since Obama, and he'll be in there for like 20 years. I have to imagine Chicago is the place to be tonight, and if I weren't living like Joe Gargery these days I'd be popping champagne.

This morning's insane Gadhafi speech. Fucker is losing it, and while I'd like to see all those bastards fall over there, three is pretty good. I also have a feeling that Bahrain's king is going to punk out pretty soon. The resilience of these kids really is amazing.

In general, good vibes around the office. And I got to have a conversation with Salon's own Andrew O'Hehir, who, in addition to being an entertaining and astute film critic, is a legitimately stand-up guy.

The Bad

The Sarah Palin grind mill's most recent discovery that Palin has a personal facebook page that she uses for the most modest purpose ever, which is to like the official Sarah Palin posts she presumably writes. I'm as guilty as anyone, but let's leave this poor woman alone. She's vindictive, right, but to me this just seems like some lady from Alaska trying to have the tiniest semblance of a private life.

Sarah Palin writing the most offensively awful stupid thing maybe ever literally minutes after I start feeling bad for her. Libyans especially deserve their freedom because Gadhafi only recently started playing by our rules? Throw yourself down the stairs. Did you forget he has oil? Did you forget 97% of the population there is Muslim? We created a monster. Good, now let's kill it.

Also, it's fucking cold.

An addendum, this girl from Philadelphia has made me very, very happy

Also, they all had mustaches

2011-02-21T18:55:00.000-08:00

Maybe Scott Walker can be America's next governor. The Wall Street Journal ran a poll and he came out looking pretty good in it. That's the newspaper most Americans read, right? And the ones that don't will be sympathetic to his sad eyes. By this metric it's pretty simple. We're competing with China now. Maybe the 21st century will be the century of deunionization. Scott Walker in 2016? Get lost in those sad eyes...

But it's President's Day, so I spent the afternoon reading about James Garfield and Rutherford B. Hayes (who, incidentally, would have been a steadfast union man by now.) The two of them have in common--along with the other presidents from the late 19th century--reputations for honesty and committed patriotism that their legacies more or less confirm. Which is great because with the exception of Chester A. Arthur their accomplishments have pretty much been nullified over 120 years of political evolution.

Speaking of evolution, the parties have since switched places, almost entirely. And more interestingly, the international policy of the time was centered on the imperialist conquests of countries overseas. The question in the United States was should we take up what might be the next stage of grandeur and join the leagues of such sovereign empires as England and Spain, or is there a moral obligation to focus on the prestige of the homefront. In other words; do we search outward for more glory, or should we just clean up what we already have. You can spend a minute thinking about which party would pick which side now--I definitely did--but in fact its an unfathomable situation now. Both positions are impossible to rectify to the current global reality. World War II taught us to be capable of destroying absolutely everything contained within our schema, and technology has allowed our schemas to be virtually unlimited. We know everything and we're capable of destroying all of it. Interesting, right? Except its put us firmly on the retreat. Our decisions are actively fear-based, whereas before it was essentially a question of Teddy Roosevelt manliness versus Grover Cleveland sensible dullness.

Things change. Especially the media. In 1891 Grover Cleveland wrote a letter to a convention of New York Democrats expressing his interest in another run and they gave it to him. I don't know exactly how this works but my guess is that the right people receive said letter and run him and the two or three newspapers in the area report that the ex-president is giving it another go. Somebody draws a cartoon of Benjamin Harrison walking in through a front door and out through a back door and that's pretty much it. I don't know how the media worked then but I know that these fuckers campaigned from their front yards. If you've worked on campaigns ever you will laugh condescendingly at that.

(Another thing, briefly, that's changed, is that we were on a gold standard, which means there were so few people in this country that we could match every single one of their bank accounts with gold.)

Now, suffice to say, we're not. The technological information transmitters are omnipresent to suggest not a series of tubes so much as a vortex whereby the tubes are assumed as the first step towards a void of information. This has the tangible effect of every single person on earth interpreting the meaning of world events. The nature of evolution makes this unsurprising, but just read about 1893 for a minute and then come back. Back then people received information about what was happening in the communities that mattered to them. The more elite they were the bigger the communities were, and the bigger the communities were the more interpretation was needed, but by and large they were living in about three dimensions less than we are now.

Does this have anything to do with the global climate of fear? I don't know. But if it does its more theoretical than anything else. That imperialism gave the eastern world reason to hate us, and technology has made it easier to do something about it. I think that more its changed the lens through which we view politics. Hayes, Garfield and all them developed reputations as men of honor that survive to this day, despite the fact that honor isn't really a quality we seek anymore. The best thing anybody says about Obama is that he's smart and values compromise, and a lot of people have counted those as negatives. The omnipresent media and the public's world-conscious interpretation of events have given politicians every reason to be as pragmatic as possible. We assume their motives, and in doing so assume there's nothing else going on with them. So the fact that Tim Pawlenty's book has been christened with the meaningless platitude "Courage to Stand" is irrelevant because we'd assume regardless it was just some meaningless platitude to get him to Iowa to get him to voters to get him the presidency. The meat of the book, presumably about having courage and standing, is dropped. We don't care. Nobody cares. There's the valley of idiots who may or may not exist and then there's the 50 trillion newsmakers who've rushed into the tube network to proclaim that Tim Pawlenty wants to be president. This is the evolution of politics. And right now it is firmly entrenched in the postmodern.

PS. in 1877 Rutherford B. Hayes ran against Samuel Tilden for president. Voter fraud in the southern states meant both sides contested the election results, and the anti-slavery Republican party agreed to remove federal troops from the south if the anti-civil rights Democratic party would cede the victory. The Democrats agreed, and President Hayes withdrew the army, effectively ending Reconstruction. The interpretive result of this is that the honorable and progressive civil rights leader ended protection of black voting rights in exchange for the presidency, rights they wouldn't get back for about 80 years.

Dedicated to Drake

2011-02-17T18:18:00.000-08:00

I wrote a single verse of a rap. I was going to do more but I got lazy. Anyway the odds of anyone finding this good are astronomically small but if anyone has a spare beat around, let's lay it down. This is how I would rap if I were a rapper. Also it was built around a single line. Try to guess which one.

Nutmeg

Look both ways before you cross the street, I mean it
it’s not advice I thought I’d give on a beat, but I’ve seen it
It’s New York, and you’re pushing as fast as the screen
Through which somebody you don’t know doesn’t care that it’s scenic
I’m here I came back but before that I scraped
Cross the states I relate to Manhattan’s
well, not its diaspora, its inodus, it’s fate
that the block you created seemed so uninviting
But you made it you make it, now you’re in advertising
And you point out your Billboard by Holland you’re excising
Saying you better make it, otherwise you naked
See I’m Like Saul Bellow I’m from Chicago
I’m Like Saul Bellow’s mayor I was resurrected
In the Midwest my mixtape was checked education
Confiscated by doctors so we had demonstrations
I got drunk and backed into a dodge while police
Sat shotgun in two brand new leather bound seats
I’ll show my driver’s license to anybody that asks me
And you’ll see why the state’s been deferring to AFSCME
On the subway you saw me I’ve been spinning those tapes
Yeah I’m good, yeah I’m fine, glad you asked, glad you stopped by
I spent time in the west took shots of cops on boats
Blew a sewer in Vegas, took pictures of ladies
who laid dead on the streets, yeah they do that I swear
Then they wake up they’re made up its dreams they’re on welfare
Their food stamps are homeless I mean hopeless they’re godless
I mean our president is what? he said what about what?
I broke bread with the pastors, I’ve been every religion
Now I’m godless, I mean goalless, I peaced like Mubarak
Trained through the mountains, I mean Taggart, Guevara?
I mean not Taggart, Whitney, Asa Whitney, clearly
Three days in a salt mine, and two in a Wendy’s
There was snow on the ground and a breeze
and the window was down and I felt it, that winter
The redeemable god and the sins of our father
Which is Texas by night in the sun Oklahoma
You been to Oklahoma, yeah?
You’d bomb it too, right?

Sitting with Intellectuals on the Subway

2011-02-16T19:01:00.000-08:00

It has recently come to my attention that people like Jamie Kelso exist beyond the abstract, that they actually go to CPAC and have YouTube supporters. At least 12. It's also come to my attention that the conservative youth are about as repulsed by visible vocal racism as the liberal youth, and putting myself in this position I think I'd just tell Kelso to go fuck himself and walk away, so props to these kids for actually trying to debate him. I don't want to hate on any of them; this is a teachable moment.

One thing though, sort of off topic; what did Haley Barbour say about amnesty? He doesn't support it, he just worked on it to get paid? Oh he didn't say that? He couldn't? People would find it uncouth? That a Washington lobbyist shirked the ethics of his party for a paycheck? For his slice of the pie? For the American dream? The Barbour situation underscores, to me, how irrational political foundations always are. And that's not really a criticism, just an observation. But once the self-proclaimed fat redneck said he didn't see people in terms of color. Later he said he didn't think Mississippi had been all that bad for black people. Then he said he couldn't denounce anyone, not even a founding member of the KKK, not even one that's been dead for 130 years. Then he went to Iowa to run for president.

My take on the Barbour situation isn't that he's racist like Jamie Kelso, or willfully ignorant like Steve King. He's too shrewd for that. I think he's seasoned, and cynical, and he doesn't really care if people think he's racist. I don't really care about it though. I like him as the governor of Mississippi. To be honest I like him. I like Mississippi. Faulkner lived there. It's way better than Oklahoma, which sucks. Fuck Oklahoma. And fuck white supremacy. But then there's this moment in the Kelso video about 8 minutes in where he makes a point about Irish unemployment and how it's exacerbated by Nigerian immigration to Ireland, and the young Republicans God bless 'em fumble for a minute because he's put the issue into a context they support. Republicans don't like exodus immigration because it hurts the native populace. White supremacists don't like it because it dilutes the ethnicity of the native populace. But a legitimate issue came head to head with an illegitimate one and everyone in the room was faced with the task of tracing their reasons to their logical ends. Again, opinions always end irrationally. Why did Haley Barbour represent a Mexican amnesty group? They paid him tons of money. Why is he a Republican? I don't know. I really don't, and I like him, but the racial gaffes and the amnesty charge he'll have to defend probably do indicate above anything else that he lacks empathy for the disenfranchised races, and the people that support him, particularly the young ones with the good intentions, are going to have to address that. What I mean is, they're going to have to trace their support for the cynically apathetic to some logical end. They might not be able to. They might just end up ignoring it. Which is when things get messy. And again, that's not a criticism, just an observation.

One more thing; if I were there, I'd probably have told Kelso to go fuck himself and walked away, but I hope now that I wouldn't. I like those kids, a lot. Dragged into the immigration debate though I'd be screwed. I don't have thoughts about amnesty or immigration. Not good ones anyway. It's one of the issues I defer to the party on.

The Greatest Show on Earth

2011-02-12T11:15:00.001-08:00

The spirit of mystery that pervades awards shows in general makes their decisions hard to argue with to the point where most people eventually give up. What was your favorite movie this year? Was it True Grit? Are you gonna be mad if The King's Speech beats it? But the Grammys are so unrepresentative of both quality and popularity that its mystique is irrelevant to the point of seeming like it would be embarrassing. The state of music today is as good as it was in the 60s, if not the best its ever been, and I think that has a lot to do with Pitchfork.

As far as I can tell Pitchfork came to prominence in 2004 with Arcade Fire who's success they claimed (probably rightly) to be responsible for. But now their status as tastemakers is undisputed, to the point where the backlash has reached the point where once I saw a guy checking it in public and when I asked what they were saying he clicked off it and started talking about something else. As part of the hip nexus, everyone has some relationship to Pitchfork, and I've noticed they fall into one of three categories. 1. I hate Pitchfork and whenever I check it it confirms my hatred by saying Nicki Minaj's pop album is disappointingly generic without entertaining the notion that probably what happened was that she decided she wanted to make ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS and it wasn't some dearth of creativity so get over yourself because you gave Tapes n Tapes like an 8.5. 2. I read Pitchfork compulsively but am truly ashamed of this and lie about it but if someone presses me I'll say I read it for the news. 3. After countless hours of soul-searching I have decided I am not ashamed of who I am and today I proudly stand up to say I love Pitchfork.

Pitchfork has become the Establishment and as such everyone is aware of its considerable faults. But consider what a world without it would be. Like all revolutions it came into existence out of a dissatisfaction with the status quo. In 1991 how many options did people have to hear about Pavement. Spin Magazine? Sure, maybe they were hipper. The aging hipsters who read Robert Christgau might have been aware of them. I suppose they were occasionally played on MTV. But the point is everyone was a lot more reliant on the mainstream to get their music choices. There wasn't a large scale alternative option. And I don't know what the scene actually was like back then, but I imagine it just created a more elite and considerably smaller brand of hipster that had less in common with everyone else.

Now alternative music is a huge culture, regardless of Pitchfork's flaws. This isn't the case with movies. In fact my suspicion is that what the music scene now would look like without Pitchfork is about what the movie scene looks like. We still get our movie options from mainstream sources. And I'm vaguely aware of an indie film culture, but it has no bearing on the decisions average people make. The Establishment still stands. Even heavily alternative-seeming movie websites like Chud that lean towards film-nerd culture still spend most of their time circulating Hollywood. So when the old white nepotists at the Academy release their ten best movie selections, that matters to us because they're pulling from the same pool we are. We're all watching the same movies, so they get to retain their status as tastemakers.

The Grammys on the other hand are just sad. There's still a feeling of legitimacy that they retain, but I only know this cuz I saw a video once where the white guy from TV on the Radio was complaining about not being nominated. Otherwise the alternative culture made the established regime so irrelevant that its started to kowtow to it. Which means this year, in addition to Eminem, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Lady Antebellum, Arcade Fire has been nominated for best album of the year. They probably won't win, but it doesn't matter; their inclusion spells the irrelevance of the award. Because if we are rewarding quality over popularity or likeability, why wasn't LCD Soundsystem nominated? Or Hot Chip? Or Broken Social Scene? Or The Fall? And on the other side, Arcade Fire has crossover appeal sure, but they're not huge. If you're trying to legitimize the mainstream, someone like M.I.A. who has become massively successful and still gets mad crit-love also released a record this year, and, voters, let me tell ya, it was pretty interested in the popular American psyche.

Mubarak is dead. Long live the army. I love it every time a blind stumbling dinosaur dies. Pitchfork and I have that in common. But just for fun, I want to go over my picks, from the options provided by Grammy, of the best music of the year. Here it goes, and if my choices here mirror what happens tomorrow night, someone let me know, because I can almost guarantee I won't be watching.

Album of the year:

"Empire State of Mind" was released in 2009, and I'm not a farmer or a Mayan, so I'm disqualifying it on the grounds that Grammy needs to figure out what years are. "Love the Way you Lie" is actually a great song and probably one of the most accurate accounts of spousal abuse one hundred million Americans are ever going to hear, but I just want Cee-Lo to win the award because he'd put it on his bookshelf and his friends would congratulate him on it. So I choose "Fuck You." Also I wonder if they're going to call it "Forget You" or if they'll just all get censored when they talk about it.

Record of the year:

A great collection. Between a washed-up Eminem, a country singer crossover (I'm just guessing based on sounds, I've literally never heard of Lady Antebellum before today) Lady Gaga and, Katy Perry, I suppose I ought to go with The Suburbs, but I won't. First off, I grew up in the suburbs, so I should relate to this record, but I don't because I don't live in a Victorian play, so I don't relate to anything Win Butler says. Second, its kinda boring, right? I want to give the award to Eminem to apologize for snubbing him for his great single, also I think he's a genius. I'm discrediting Lady Gaga because her success and the size of her spectacle make her the most establishment choice possible, and not only that, her talent and edge ensures that if she wins the one-dimensionalist capitalist villains who made it possible will get to congratulate themselves publicly. Mostly I hate all these options so I'm giving it to Katy Perry. Congratulations girl, try to use that enormous talent for good.

Song of the Year:

Cee-Lo! Just kidding. This one can go to Eminem. It really is a great song. Maybe someone can explain to me the difference between a song and an album. Does the album include the b-side? If so that might explain why Ray LaMontagne got nominated for something that sounds about as old as b-sides. Miranda Lambert, you're boring girl.

Best New Artist:

If you're still not convinced the Grammys aren't real, listen to this. Justin Bieber was nominated for an award. That means that a room full of people decided that a 16-year-old kid who's public persona is essentially an apparatus for show-biz women to make underage sex jokes about was the best something they heard or saw all year. I don't even see how this is something you can explain. Does his nomination mean this whole big award show is just a scheme to make money? Perish the thought, they also nominated Florence and the Machine and, wait for it, Esperanza Spalding. I nominate Mumford and Sons, who are new to me as of this morning, and really solid. In fact they're Scottish so I'm sure Pitchfork's said something about them.

Best Female Pop Vocal Performance:

"King of Anything" is a charming song I like just fine but I'm not sure it's a really strong vocal performance. If pop music is an objective barometer of any measure of ability it's pipes, and the hottest talents generally can sing better than anyone else. So with that I'm going with Beyonce for a song that I find generic and boring but that she really lays it out on.

Best Male Pop Vocal Performance:

Adam Lambert? I've never heard of almost all of these. Ergo I'm skipping a lot of categories.

Best Pop Vocal Album:

Katy Perry in a totally unpredicted sweep beats out Lady Gaga in every category. Guess dumb jock girl sentimentality beats Gaga's spidery affectations. Who would have guessed.

Best Solo Rock Performance:

John Mayer is literally the only person on the list under 60 years old. That said, he's also probably the least talented. My thing on Rolling Stone magazine isn't so much that they're pandering to a new audience as that they think they'll remain successful if they write about all the same people that made them successful in the 70s. A part of me thinks Grammy might be similarly archaic. Paul McCartney's not even being nominated for a new song. Apparently the version of "Helter Skelter" he recorded at a concert in New York is one of the five best rock performances laid to tape this year. I don't want anyone to win, I want them all to die. But the image of anyone besides Mayer walking up to the stage to accept the award is causing me to be upset. So give it to that dude.

Best Rock Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocals:

"Ready to Start" by Arcade Fire. I don't even like that song. I'm starting to really regret this project.

[I want everyone to know I'm skipping Best Hard Rock Performance]

Best Alternative Music Album:

Contra - Vampire Weekend

I quit. I quit before I got to rap. Drake is nominated for something. Thing is, Drake really can't rap. Please everyone watch a rerun of the Simpsons tomorrow night.

Common Sense

2011-02-03T17:10:00.000-08:00

Patriots!

I have watched events unfold in Tunisia and Egypt, and now Yemen and Jordan, as I’m sure you have. But I have also watched the reactions of our leaders, and I have to say I don’t understand them at all. President Obama is calling for the liberty fighters in Egypt to remain peaceful so that their despotic ruler can continue to oppress them. This of course did not surprise me, but I was appalled by the reactions of people who say they love freedom. Speaker Boehner and Senate minority leader McConnell condoned Obama’s words, and former governor Huckabee has been worse, asking the protesters in Egypt to stop, go on with their lives, continue to be oppressed by a power-mad autocratic dictator. Where are our Tea Party faithful? Where is Sarah Palin? Glenn Beck? Michelle Bachmann? Where are the people we’ve supported so vigilantly these past couple years because we thought they stood for the people? They have been silent, demurring to the voices of the establishment that fears the will of the people. I say, let’s not look at Egypt with fear, let’s look at it the way Egypt looked at Tunisia! Let’s look at it with respect, pride, even envy! Let’s look at our own oppressive system of government, and tear it down!

President Obama doesn’t fear the American people, because he is a fool. Sarah Palin chooses not to acknowledge the strength of the populace because she doesn’t understand it. For too long we have watched our country sacrifice its greatness in the name of more power for itself. For too long we have watched a corrupted president seize power over our minds and bodies in the name of a “good” that we know will really bankrupt our economy and destroy our jobs. A good that does no good for the people who love America and all good for those who wish to rule over it with the same hungry malevolence that Hosni Mubarak ruled over Egypt. No more! Patriots, the time is ours! Let’s throw down the shackles of our oppressors, take arms and march towards Washington and the White House. Let’s take this country back from those who would destroy it! George Washington said every citizen should be not only armed, but vigilant. But we have grown fat and complacent through government tyranny, and now is the time that we must throw that that tyranny off! Patriots, today I say let’s march towards Washington and revolt! Like our brothers in Egypt who love freedom so much they are willing to die for it, let’s take Washington back from the government! Let’s make it ours again!

Our demands are simple. We ask only for the liberty which was promised us at the founding of this country we love so much. But we will not be satisfied with anything less than what we deserve. We demand the following:

1. That President Obama relinquishes the power of the presidency, and that he leaves this country in exile.

2. That we put in his place a new leader, someone with no hunger for authority, who wants only for the citizens of this country to come together as individual parts of the constitution of a sovereign nation, each as great as the whole and each with equal responsibility for maintaining that greatness.

3. That we keep for this country a strong military, to protect the honor of it, and to defend it from the Arabic world that hates our freedom, hates our strength.

4. That we abolish the income tax, a tax on our livelihoods and our labors that benefits only those who have no livelihood, and who do no labor.

5. That to protect the strength and honor of our nation we restore the values that provide the moral strength a country needs; Christian family values, and as such that we outlaw practices of homosexuality, infidelity, and divorce.

6. That we establish an education system that strengthens the minds of our youth, and that teaches them not only the arts and sciences, but faith, charity, and patriotism. We will not teach the works of anti-American radicals such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Cesar Chavez, nor will we let the legacies of misguided patriots like Joe McCarthy be so fully tarnished.

Our demands are simple, but they must be met. Friends, the time of American oppression, masked by the smiling face of liberal equality grinning into our souls and nibbling softly at our hearts until they are mushed into a shapeless porridge of ignorance and acceptance, is over. Now we fight back. Like the heroes in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Yemen, in Jordan, and all over where freedom is trampled and authority reigns, we will accept our conditions no more. And because our aim is true, and our hearts pure, we will succeed.

Michelle Bachmann for County Fair Beauty Contest Judge

2011-01-26T13:53:00.000-08:00

This whole thing with Michelle Bachmann last night made something clear to me that I’d never considered before. Maybe the Tea Party doesn’t really have any aspirations to real power. It’s a huge movement, and it’d be impossible to sum up the political motivation of every office-holding member, let alone the wealthy middle class and Iowan supporters who we make fun of for being racist and wanting to own guns, but from the viewpoint of the establishment, and what the establishment looks like, maybe it’s really more about being a sort of very vocal peanut gallery, and there isn’t any real idea of taking anything over. I mean just looking at the differences between Paul Ryan’s speech and Bachmann’s; Paul Ryan is an economist turned politician with fears about the deficit that legitimately weigh on him. He’ll never have the charisma, but he used a lot of the same tactics that made us fall in love with Obama: he’s more direct than average, more willing to saddle blame on the system than on members of the system, and more willing to speak ideologically about specific issues. He’s not shiny enough to be the next Barry, nor is he savvy enough to be the next Nixon, but he’s ambitious, and we’ll be hearing from him for awhile.

Michelle Bachman on the other hand spent 6 minutes pretending that—given the forum and the circumstances of the night—the same points that go over at Tea Party pep rallies make an actual tenet-establishing speech. I won’t go into how she wasn’t looking at the camera. I don’t have to. I won’t even go into the fact that her ideas had no substance. What struck me is that they aren’t real on any platform in any reality. Nobody in this Matrix believes that Obama is going to sign a repeal on healthcare, which is why Republicans were talking about their mandate and not our future. And whether or not Michelle Bachmann believes in her heart of hearts that she’s doing the right thing, when she tells her supporters that that’s what Obama needs to do, she in the end accomplishes only personifying the symbol that the House meant to send with their repeal vote. She’s not interested in actually being change. Or maybe she’s just not capable; but I think the Tea Party representatives have a funny relationship with their representees that doesn’t necessarily require them to make change. Again, they want to make noise, and they’re glad they have such a huge platform to make noise, but I’ve seen no indication that they’ve ever acted like they’ll actually ever have any power.

Which is why she shouldn’t have been broadcast on CNN last night. She didn’t even ask to be. She was perfectly happy broadcasting solely to her supporters through a website her supporters are probably checking anyway. Which makes me wonder, if the Tea Party doesn’t actually want to have real power, than would they if the average American wasn’t so lustfully fascinated with what they have to say? CNN decided to broadcast Bachmann, and I’m quoting a Salon writer now, because she’s “must see TV.” Because the chances that she’ll say something we can write about tomorrow are astronomically higher than they are with Paul Ryan, who throughout the day was quietly acknowledged for not fucking up and then we went back to talking about Egypt.

If Bachmann had only been seen by the 50,000 people that love her the most, she would have said what they wanted to hear, made them happy, kept them vocal and pissed off. Everyone would have been satisfied, and nothing would have changed. Instead she was broadcast to, let’s say ten times that number, and still nothing changed, except the rest of the world was given one more reason to hate a group of people that at the end of the day are self-containing. Not that they’re not bad. But maybe it’s not their fault we all know they’re bad.

2011-01-08T14:58:00.000-08:00

If you shoot six people including a nine year old girl and kill them whatever points you have to make about the failures of the system are void. You are a shithead and deserve to be ignored. I'm sure someone is going to turn this into a vendetta against the tea party as soon as we can prove Jared Laughner is a Republican, and by all means--I'm sure that Gabrielle Giffords is a great person, but I feel now the way I feel when anyone dies, which is angry. Obama says that she was a warm person. I don't doubt it. Henry Miller says we save our compliments for people who die. But there are five annonymous communities devastated by the loss of five annonymous lives that concern me more. Whatever the failures of the system, whatever the corruption of the members of the institution, if you kill five people, that's your point. You are a piece of shit.

The shooter's name was Jared Laughner. Somebody immediately went and made a youtube channel in his name that looks like this. We know it's fake because he spelled the name wrong. In fact the grammar makes the same mistakes that Craigslist con artists make. This makes me believe that there's a warehouse somewhere where all the terrible internet people in the world work.

Henri Matisse

2011-01-07T22:24:00.000-08:00

Henry Miller said once about Henri Matisse "He is a bright sage, a dancing seer who, with a sweep of the brush, removes the ugly scaffold to which the body of man is chained by the incontrovertible facts of life. He it is, if any man today possesses the gift, who knows where to dissolve the human figure, who has the courage to sacrifice an harmonious line in order to detect the rhythm and murmur of the blood, who takes the light that has been refracted inside him and lets it flood the keyboard of color. Behind the minutiae, the chaos, the mockery of life, he detects the invisible pattern...."

Now Matisse tends to paint like this:

I'm not sure I catch the fractal rhythm of the world's inner order, but I've always been more of a Cezanne man. Today Eric and I went to the National Gallery which provided ample opportunity to compare them both, along with Claude Monet, who earns a special place in my heart for a series of paintings of the British House of Parliament. Impressionist, of course. But they generally look like this and I generally like them a lot:

James Cameron said about Monet once "Look at the colors!" I love it when art does art criticism. T.S. Eliot writing poetry about Chopin, who I've begun playing at night when I drink tea, which I've begun making. They classify him as a romantic. He was, but ahead of his time. Impressionist, even. Listen.

2011-01-02T23:29:00.000-08:00

I'm going to start a literary magazine because I am sick of thinking that I can do it better than everyone else. I need time to figure out the specifics--the title will be a reference to something low-brow that happened in a high-brow novel, the writing will be distinguishable by being very good. I'm writing this here to ensure that I do it. Taking applications, we're looking for people who like politics but aren't ideological, people who haven't yet rectified the high-brow/low-brow conundrum, people who read, people who know that name-dropping Edward Said makes you sound like you just learned who he is, people who name-drop when they're drunk, people who swear a lot, people who are contrarian, people who have given serious consideration to the possibility that they are insane, nerdy bros, hysterical realists, ambivalent post-structuralists, people who are 23 and think they're getting old, people who smoke cigarettes, people that don't push themselves but ought to cuz they have the talent. We want the people who find themselves straddling the binaries of their lives, the ones who've yet to cave in to some given form or meaning that tranquilizes them. YOU KNOW EVERY ASSURANCE OF STABILITY IS WRONG. They're nets and they create intellectual derth; we want the ones who jump from falling mountain to falling mountain. We know you're tired. But we're going to set up a stage for you to prove every delusion of grandeur you've ever had, so write as well as you can and send it in. I'll have more on this soon.

A Brief History of Earth

2010-12-31T15:59:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time there was life and even though bad things happened it was basically good. For some reason though everyone was ambivalent about how good it was, and also they were bored, because even though they didn't realize it things were pretty good, and all that it seemed like they had to do was have sex with each other, which was pretty fun, and would have kept things on an even keel. But because they were ambivalent about their goodness and also stupid they decided to turn sex into something that they thought was bad, because of what it actually entailed and because of how it made people act. After outlawing sex though, which they did immediately (Society is made when a series of interpersonal relationships are formed between more than a few people, society builds language, society introduces an outlet for sexual energy, and society requires rules that must increase in number as the size of the society increases) they got even more bored and the procreative sex that they decided was still good started to seem really inconsequential, so they set about fucking everything around them instead. This was progress, and while everyone was really excited about it--and rightly so, because it taught them about awesome and fashionable things like wearing panthers as capes which made everyone really happy--some people realized that if things changed life might stop being good. At first these people were listened to, but they were ignored pretty quickly after everyone went home to have sex with their spouses and remembered how boring it was. So they kept fucking everything around them, and it was great for awhile, as technology grew to the point where a person, even a particularly weak person, could kill enough panthers to make everyone in his family fashionable capes. Then specialization happened so everyone only had to do one thing all the time and society grew and whenever somebody started to think that all this fucking was actually as pointless as fucking a spouse they would write or paint or make music the substance of which was designed to make life seem profound and meaningful. And even though a lot of new bad stuff started happening, everything was still pretty good. Except for sex, which was still considered really bad, probably to make sure everyone still fucked everything all the time.

Then after every known corridor of land had been properly fucked into submission everyone started fucking the ocean until it took them to new pieces of land that they could fuck. Except there were already people on that land, and rather than trade stories with those people about the different ways that these different societies had fucked their land, it turned out they hadn't fucked anything at all. Somehow they decided it wasn't that bad to just fuck each other for eternity. This obviously seemed weird and stupid, so everyone did the only thing that made sense and just fucked those people in addition to fucking their land. They'd eventually feel really bad about this, but not for like 400 years.

Now some people back home instantly felt that all this fucking had finally taken them to a terrible place, but those people were women, so their opinions were stupid. Things on the whole were still pretty good, especially art and music and writing, which had reached a fever pitch of economic profitability because by some good fortune it was decided that the most successful people of all--the fuckamosts, if you will--needed to understand the depth of life most of all. And I forgot to mention that at this point life was atrociously bad for a lot of people but they were all proles who didn't know how to read so none of them wrote about it. They just kept believing that sex was bad but they had it anyway and their lives were bad but they got to have a lot of sex. Eventually a guy named Friedrich Engels spent some time in a street overlooked by a lot of really shitty apartments and wrote a book that was a lot worse than anything Charles Dickens was writing about the same thing, but that had the extreme fortune of getting found by a guy named Karl Marx who was probably a genius (usually defined as someone who doesn't think it's wrong to have sex but still doesn't) who wrote another book that not only described how bad things were for most people, but also drew up a plot for how things could get changed. This plot essentially involved a worldwide revolution led by dumb people who couldn't read, and you might be shocked to hear this, but when people started taking it seriously it became responsible for a lot of terrible things happening. In fact, things got so bad, and the world order (which had by this time actually more or less settled down, thanks to the failed actions of a French Fuckamost and some geniuses who thought everyone should get back to the business of improving their own societies) started to look like it really might give way to a warlike new psychotic evil, that people started to think they really might have pushed life all the way towards just being a bad thing. They even got retroactively guilty about fucking all those people in Africa, and did the only thing they could think of doing, which was to let them vote. They still wouldn't let women vote though, because women were still stupid.

Anyway most of the evil anybody had seen yet paled in comparison to the super evil, which was personified by this German supergenius, who, by the best accounts of psychology, just had a bigger and better dick than anyone alive, and wanted to fuck absolutely everything harder than it'd ever been fucked before. He got pretty close, but he was stopped by most of the rest of the world because things really weren't that evil yet. Life was certainly capable of terrible evil, but people still were able to stop it. Everyone felt pretty good about that, and president of the United States decided to create a country for some people who'd been fucked over a lot, although how much exactly isn't clear because the people who were telling us they'd been fucked over for 5,000 years were the same ones who were telling us it was bad to have sex.

But he created that country, which pissed off a lot of other people because instead of creating it really he just took it from them. Those people went to the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union agreed that the United States definitely marked a wrong direction in the progress of the world, and before anyone could really celebrate the smackdown they'd just delivered to evil almost every country on earth was involved in a sort of Mexican stand-off that led to a lot of extraordinarily good books being written about war and paranoia. That was the 70s, which everyone thought at the time was a very bad period but they were wrong, because what came next was considerably worse.

Anyway during this Mexican stand-off a lot of Americans started thinking that the Soviet Union had it right even though most Russians were a lot worse off than they were. But someone started bandying around the expression "late capitalism," and a German semigenius who lived in San Diego wrote a book about how much America was suffocating all the things about life that made it worthwhile, and how at this point people couldn't even go back to sex because it would have been like making a cute joke to your wife who you haven't been civil to in 10 years. But I'm not here to debate the merits of any of these arguments, the point of all this, and why things are so much worse now than they were during the Cold War, is because about two years ago a couple of men were allowed by the government to come together, and given hundreds of millions of dollars by an American company, to meet with hundreds of other working professionals in the entertainment industry, including a couple extremely expensive American celebrities, to spend a year and a half of their lives, which they could have spent doing anything in the world else, to make a product that was well received by millions of Americans, made twice as much money as it cost, spawned billions of dollars worth of retail merchandising, cemented careers for two young individuals, and, though it was poorly received by them, taken seriously enough to be reviewed by film critics, who are the last arbiters of taste in this country. And that product, the endgame of positive human development, a cancerous, bloated, vile, vicious, ugly commodified product of anti-talent, a cultureless blob, a hackfest, spectacle so shallow as to suggest there is nothing beyond the spectacle, a gaping, raping pile of pure evil, was a movie that includes the line "What you are about to see is top secret, do not tell my mother." This is the bad. I've seen it.

The Unemployment Doctrine

2010-12-15T02:38:00.000-08:00

A Hasidic eight days since the national marathon and unemployment has already got me blogging at 5:39 in the morning. I actually don't have anything else to say, but this is good as any other way of announcing the theme this blog will take for the duration of said unemployment. The theme will be unemployment. Tomorrow we will get to Pitchfork's year end list, the press screening of True Grit, and myths I have uncovered about the Federal Reserve. Myth #1: the Federal Reserve is an institution I understand. Those are pretty much the only things I've thought about for the past week.

Christine O'Donnell

2010-10-13T21:01:00.000-07:00

You know what they say, why do you think I'd put out your fire, don't you know I breathe in fire?

New post

2010-09-09T19:50:00.000-07:00

I haven't written in my novel in almost a week now, and spare my readership the guilt I feel about that, in the interest of writing something, I'm throwing together this post. List posts are the easiest kinds for being rusty and getting back into it. Random thought collections are the second. So here's one of those.

I realized about three weeks ago that for the first time in my life I don't have the end-of-summer blues. I've in fact been looking forward to fall because it will get cooler, and because the swing seasons don't have stagnant thus horrible weather like the stagnant-thus-horrible seasons. And since I've got nothing going on that's ending now--summer break sex marathons which yes always happened--and nothing sucky that's beginning, I'm very pleased about having to wear sweatshirts to work. This fall excitement has exacerbated my happiness regarding the return of NFL season. I've completely made peace with Jason Campbell going to Oakland. I mean, I still think he's a natural born leader and potential hero, and I hope he brings the Raiders to the Super Bowl and goes home with his first ring, but Donovan McNabb is and always has been--though I was blind to it at first--a great addition to the team. Apparently Portis is afraid of Shanahan so is playing better, and Haynesworth will probably get traded. I'm not saying we're going to be good, but we might. Also I realized in typing that sentence that being a Redskins fan is like being a Palestinian. It will be many years before we get a home,--if we ever get one--but we'll still establish religious organizations that reject the existence of every other team that's better than us.

I've been trying to figure out which Magnetic Fields songs from 69 Love Songs are based on Stephen Merritt's reality. I think love is a fairly easy emotion to approximate, and well, by which I mean I think people can be insightful about it without actually having to go about the mess of experiencing it. I don't know why exactly, but I think its a testament to love's goodness rather than anything bad. So songs like "Book of Love" are more specific than maybe the average pop song ever gets, but there's nothing about it that strikes me as observed rather than merely intuitive. The one example of something that seems, if not true to Stephen's love life, at least true to Stephen, is "Grand Canyon." It definitely approximates a condition I will almost definitely never experience as a straight man, but I think a lot of what I'm ascribing to its legitimacy is in the vocal.

Drew Brees is one of the most athletic men in the United States. This is a fact, but it blows my mind when I see him throw a well aimed football 70 yards down a football field. Also if film and music critics were as good as sportscasters I would have Pitchfork stickers on my binder. And a graying Brett Favre has grown into the epitome of the fall season the way Charlie Manuel epitomizes the late-night American Oliver Stone terror and glory of Major League Baseball. As for who epitomizes football, I can't decide. I'm afraid there might not be anyone.

Who wants to go see The Town with me whenever it comes out?

Asking Men Things About Girls, Careers, etc.

2010-09-07T21:54:00.000-07:00

Having recently learned of the existence of askmen.com, I've come to find it's easiest understood as the brainchild of a master douchebag who's trying to take every other douchebag in the world out of the girl-chasing running.

Here it is, for your education.

Update: I actually take it back. Most of these articles are pretty fair. That one was clearly guest written by Tucker Max, for the above-stated reason.

2010-09-06T20:32:00.000-07:00

I don't really think of myself as a Democrat or a Republican. I don't really identify with a political party, President Obama said.

More stuff about music

2010-08-03T16:11:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I have trouble getting out what I really want to say, so, to clarify, I don't think James Murphy sounds tired on his new album, I think he's learning how to turn his limitations into art. That's why I think the album is so good. But pound for pound, song for song, the record of the year for me so far is TRANSFERENCE because A. Britt Daniel has bar none the best voice in music right now, and he's become a tremendous lyricist, B. Except for a couple long ones at the end, every song sounds great in the car, and C. Excluding ?uestlove, who sermonizes on an otherwise underwhelming Roots record, their drummer seems to be an unparalleled beast. And speaking of How I Got Over, in this post Kanye/Jon Brion world, a collaboration with Joanna Newsome didn't initially strike me as a brilliant stroke of inspiration, but having heard it a few times it makes a great deal of sense.

A Unified Scene

2010-07-31T15:15:00.000-07:00

If you're a very great deal like me, you've always been fairly dismayed at the current state of music criticism, but you've recently been convinced of the massive potential for rebellion afforded by the age of infinite information, and so have become retroactively psyched about the inherent democracy of posting criticism on the Internet in general, even if most of it either blows or proves definitively that you are not the talent you've always believed. That said, I don't see anyone who is writing about music the way I want it to be written about, and that includes my former public mentor Robert Christgau, who seems to have pseudo-retired (and also ceased to be be my mentor when he dickishly asked me if I knew what "legitimate" means). My mom and I made a bet at the beginning of the year to see who could go longer without buying a book, so most of the times I've spent in book stores for the past seven months have ended with me buying cds instead. Most of these cds have been new, and fairly excellent. No one is making music that is as good as the Clash. I will say that now. I think my biggest problem with music these days is that it seems to have agreed that it ought to be marginalized--no one is trying to change the world, and as a result, no one is. And say what you will about the genius of Animal Collective--besides that for me, they only really make sense when I'm exhausted or hung over or in any case in some somewhat altered state of mind--they do not exist on planet earth. Similarly my biggest problem with music criticism is that it seems to be the other party in agreeing music ought to be marginalized. My former public hero RC believed it could replace Shakespeare as the dominant means for chronicling intellectual culture, and my life hero Lester Bangs thought its artlessness was the essential way it remained the beating heart of our cultural soul. I don't want to diss Pitchfork too hard, because I want Larry Fitzmaurice to read this--I want everyone to read this--and I truly do believe them responsible for the abundance of more difficult rock on our radar--which I will illustrate by pointing out that Spoon's Transference (an excellent record released early this year I will not write about now) charted at I think 44, which is amazing, because I want those guys to live in mansions--but also the current wave of reviews that whether through insider snobbery or earnest attempts at consumer guiding resemble very much things written by writers confined to two-day deadlines (also, a lot of those people can't fucking write, but not you Larry, you're pretty good).

Anyway, these are my thoughts on some of the key albums of this year. I don't write for Pitchfork, I don't even write for NYU Local anymore, so this is the only place you will find them. None of my opinions are any more valid than yours, but maybe I'll get a picture in the New York Times anyway.

M.I.A. - Maya

There are a number of things said on this album that make no sense to anyone at all, so before I get to the business of defending them lets get to my two favorites:

"They told me this is a free country/and now it feels like more like a chicken factory" A chicken factory, as in, a factory where chickens are made.

"If life is such a game/how come people all act the same?" No, these are two observations that could not be more unrelated to each other.

"XXXO" is the first single, with it's "tweeting me like tweety bird on your iPhone," which raises questions of its own. Maya Arulpragasam is one of the hippest people on earth, even if I had to looks up her last name. If she wanted to go to the hippest, most mythically impenetrable club in America tonight, it would take her literally 8 minutes to find it, and she would probably do so using twitter. Furthermore, when she showed up at this club (or party in a club, I suppose is more accurate) everyone there would be figuring out how to talk to her, and whatever bullshit she spouted off that night about people acting the same would be interpreted as Gospel. So it remains somewhat mysterious why she's pretending to be so clueless about twitter that she thinks its comparable to Tweety Bird.

Well, she's famous now, so she has an obligation to the noobs from McLean who mostly just really really liked Pineapple Express. And despite the fact that those people don't give a shit about the Tamil Tigers, she's shackled herself with a certain obligation to project the aesthetic she developed, which before now was about putting people on the map who've never seen a map. So an ignorance of something as bourgeois as social networking might actually be necessary.

The first single is "XXXO" but the one the public will take (or would if it was going to take any, which I don't think it will) is "It Takes a Muscle," which is also the only one she didn't write herself. Maybe you read the article where Diplo accused her of being first and foremost a collaborator, which I think in a certain way has an element of truth, but even Diplo admits he's something of a jilted ex. I think its more likely that she's like Isaac Brock or Craig Finn or anyone else we think is a pop genius who found themselves a part of the public consciousness in that she doesn't have a fucking clue what people like about her. "It Takes a Muscle" is a fairly lackluster pop song, and if it skates at all it will be on the goodwill she's accrued (in which case performing super-pregnant at the Grammy's against the concerns of me and I'm sure several doctors will have paid off), but its a nice melody and the subject matter is simple and acceptable territory for an American pop single, which to me is the conceptual focus of the whole album. It's stupid because rebellion is almost always stupid, and teenage American rebellion even moreso, and its schizophrenic and practically unhealthily obsessed with technology, and even more than that just the nature of the abundance of technology, because we are. This is her post-fame, finally-got-the-Visa-and-now-I-live-in-a-huge-house-in-LA-with-my-rich-husband-and-new-child album.

Not that it is consciously. I think a better way to describe M.I.A. than as a collaborator is as someone who really trusts her instincts, which this time out includes letting other people do a lot of the songwriting. So if she's not taking it as seriously anymore, which I don't think she is, and if she's bought into the style of her rebellion enough to think that somehow her sloganeering is smart, which I kind of think she has, she still understands innately that what made her last album such a masterpiece wasn't its incitement to rebellion or geopolitical insight but that it opened up to us hip-os who picked up the album rather than just buying "Paper Planes" on iTunes a really exciting new way of looking at these different parts of the world.

If Maya has a concept its the insanity of information overload, which she's literalized by making songs that are actively annoying. I do not see any other conversation that could have taken place when "Teqkilla" was being written than "Yes, that sounds like shit. Yes, it sound even worse if we add a beeping sound intermittently that sounds like a poor high school's fire alarm. This is going to get all of us laid." At first its grating. Then it congeals into a certain rhythm. Then whatever absolutely inane thing M.I.A. has chosen to put on top of it sounds like what it is--a disengaged, style over substance, obsessed with itself and its medium, appealing to the disaffected masses, jumble of political nonsense. How is that not the finest approximation of our current geopolitical condition yet? And all she had to do was get rich and famous.

Also it bears mention an article I read recently about how Iranian exiles are trying to maintain their political relevance with the Internet. If you're going to try to make the case that this album is in fact bad, you'd start with how its extremely possible she's trying to make an earnest case for the legitimacy of that mode of speech. The focus of the article was that it isn't really working. The potential of the Internet is also it's limitation--it's just too fucking vast. So I'm not saying this is the album of the year, I'm not being hyperbolic, I'm saying it really works, and after a couple spins, it starts to sound pretty great.

LCD Soundsystem - This is Happening

People think James Murphy is a genius because he's old enough to be cooler than any of the people who actually write about music and because his lyrics are about 900 times more specific than anything anyone else has ever written, which means he says things like "you can sleep on the plane or review what you said," and a generation of people who are still spending their time getting with the plan think what he's really talking about is saying a thing to someone and then thinking about it later to make sure it was appropriately cool/smart/witty which sounds incredibly insightful to us because we really do that all the time. Sure. And I think "All My Friends" continues to be his clear high point, but unlike other artists who hit their ceiling and then look like they aren't ever going to get back there, I think Mr. James Murphy probably has it in him to write another song that good. My friends and I liked those lyrics because they looked like they were describing growing up in a really accurate way, but we also thought "that's how it starts" was the perfect opening line, which it is, but only because the music and the way he sang it kind of rock. James Murphy writes in such a relatable way because he's kind of petty, but he's good anyway because he writes good songs.

This Is Happening seems to me to be the record where he realizes his pettiness and and the way that its inextricably tied to his coolness. You get quips like "Drunk Girls know that love is an astronaut/it comes back but its never the same" which are really fun and clever but also sound tossed off and definitely are, and in a larger sense you get songs the point of which is that as somebody who's devoted his life to being cool and then at forty not so much realized the inanity of that as gotten too old to really be cool, is now scraping together the wasted parts of his life and trying to turn them into something real. Maybe he's never fallen in love--"Can Change" and "All I want" sound like pretty broad approximations to me, but to be fair I've never really been in love either--but in both he subjugates himself to an emotion he at least means to be real. What I mean is, anyone who's ever tried to change themself to fit in will feel guilty about it later, but trying to change yourself for something as wonderful as love is kind of one of the best sentiments there is. Even if the description here is fiction. Even if its not particularly convincing fiction.

Probably its more likely that James Murphy is too petty and cool to be able to describe love than that he's never felt it. But every good writer knows--and he is a good writer--that vocal description isn't just an inert symbology for real things. Words are married to their meanings. And maybe when he looks over his life it upsets him that he can't not be hip and clever and more than he can write realistically about real things. But if he can't express himself, and if the reason he can't express himself isn't so much because he's too deep or strange but because if he does it'll become readily apparent how much he's just a totally normal average human being, then he can self-abnegate, which is as honest a thing as dishonest people can do. They aren't love songs really then, but they're not empty.

The Hold Steady - Heaven is Whenever

I'm probably doing them a favor even pretending this is a key album from this year. The Hold Steady had their time in the sun. And I'm not going to say anything anyone hasn't said, except that where I used to call this a good album, and other people said it was a disappointing album, now I think its a really unforgiveably shitty one. What he's doing here, I think, is trying to A. substitute specifics for mass appeal because thats what classic rock songs did, and B. be really modern because the modern era is interesting and needs to chronicled. As broad subject matter goes, this album does a lot to be particularly wordy and specific while writing about things as farreaching as scene-politics--the 21st century equivalent to Balzac's Parisian elite scene--which is impressive I guess, but who cares? Why do we want to hear Craig Finn try to relate to people 20 years younger than he is? Why do we want him to talk about scene politics? Remember when Almost Killed Me came out and his aesthetic was so finely developed people believed him when he said he was writing a novel? Remember how good lines like "its good to see you back in a bar band/its good to see you're still in the bars" were? And how it didn't even seem like he was trying? Like he was just a machine that generated 21st century poetry in a freakishly unique and interesting way? Remember how fucking apt and sui generis "everybody's a critic and most people are DJs" was? Remember when he didn't make me so angry I had to resort to a litany of questions about his former glory to properly express it?

Fact is once he got famous his charisma was converted into this avuncular empathy, and now that he's sort of trying to get back to being a writer he's just lost the plot entirely. Broad appeal of subject matter was never what made any of the greats great, and here they just make the songs weightless. A few of them are actively bad. They don't even sound good. I'm looking at you, "Our Whole Lives," which as far as I can tell is about a group of choir boys who dress like 50s greasers and think Bruce Springsteen is slightly above their pay grade.

As for his second goal, trying to modernize, he's fairing even worse. He sings about kids talking over the Internet like he thinks it's unfortunate they don't talk at shows instead. Thats all well and fine for someone who once said "hey sniffling indie kids, hold steady," but now its like those are the people he wants to write for. Except those kids don't talk at shows, or read pamphlets about Hare Krishna, or lose themselves in records with their friends, and no matter how much empathy he ascribes to their plight--which is in part about how they can't lose themselves in things like records--he's recording songs about people who may or may not exist, and who are certainly not modern.

I was gonna write about Justin Bieber or Ke$ha here as well, to compare the indie scene with the pop scene, but I'm afraid if I download a Bieber album my brain will punch me in the face. Suffice to say he's as alien to us as he is to our parents, and unless you exist on some alternate dimension of super-hipness like the one described by the homeless guy on 8th and Broadway when he told me and my friend Eric that fairies and dragons exist on a wavelength we aren't sensitive enough to perceive, you're being dishonest if you say you understand. Also this is way too long already. Thanks for sticking around.

2010-07-17T22:30:00.000-07:00

A storm warning cutting into SNL forced me to watch 4 Brothers on FX, which sent me to Andre 3000's IMDB page, and then to Be Cool's, then to Youtube to watch Cedric's N-word monologue, which was related to a series of Chris Rock videos, that made me curious about his personal history, the reading of which on Wikipedia brought up a reference Obama made to the Black People vs N****s sketch while on the campaign trail. Point is I found this video. I'd forgotten--it is unfathomable how good he was. Also how young.

2010-07-10T21:44:00.000-07:00

I realized today, happily, that it's more likely all the good things we think we've lost to cultural detritus are just momentarily displaced, or at least that sooner or later they'll be replaced with other good things.

Maybe related, maybe not, I imagine most critics guiltily suspected no one would ever again have anything new to say about the Catholic Church after Joyce, and I tend to believe that nobody did for 70 years, but Craig Finn's ideas on the subject owe nothing to anybody but Craig himself, and are as compelling and insightful as anything the drunk Irishman ever said. For whatever reason the suggestion that Kennedy was killed because he was Catholic is to me as good as writing gets.

The Bees

2010-07-09T23:34:00.000-07:00

The only way to appreciate this song is to assume it's about Wicker Man, which I think it actually is.

2010-07-08T20:06:00.000-07:00

I'm putting together a big Topic Music blog post which has taken a few days to organize and will be without question the most time I've ever put into a post, but today I learned is the day the Declaration of Independence was first read publicly, so here is something that seems appropriate. Yes, I wanted the Simpsons version, but watching this I'm realizing it has its own merits. Some of the lyrical decisions I think are very good. And teaching kids this is how bills actually become law is very similar to teaching creationism with the exception that this was meant to be a force for good. I'm trying to decide if the elderly aggressive gentleman with the hooked nose is the democrat or the republican. And I'm a big fan of "oh no!--Oh Yeaahhhh!"

2010-07-06T21:17:00.000-07:00

What kind of a world do we live in where a movie starring Jonah Hill and John C. Reilly is considered difficult and arty and only opens in New York and LA.

Looks good, right?

2010-07-05T19:58:00.000-07:00

I've begun work on a new novel, about the post-denouement of the fall of a powerful American family. It will be as modern as Hitler, and include everything I've ever thought or known.

Also, the fireworks outside my window just now were very fine.

Independence Day

2010-07-04T19:58:00.000-07:00

Last year I woke up in a detox clinic. This year I was assigned to march in a parade in Iowa Falls that got rained out. So instead I watched W. again. Like he is doing in a ranch somewhere, I'd like to say happy 4th of July, and god bless America.

Bradley Cooper

2010-07-03T13:17:00.000-07:00

Hangover star Bradley Cooper said recently about his upcoming film The A-Team "I always thought it was a really great show, but until a few months ago I never imagined that if it were made into a film I'd have anything to do with it!" But people here are talking more about his talent, a vast and wide-ranging force that was kept a secret until his breakout comedy secured $463 million last year. On preparing for the role of Phil Wenneck, the handsome and charismatic leader of the group of friends celebrating their buddy Doug's bachelor party, Cooper said "I would think about how [Phil] would do certain things, and then I'd think about how he'd do them if he were hung over. I kept that in my mind all the time."

This was completely unnecessary, and I apologize for it.

Vicariously Experiencing Harold and Kumar's Friday Night

2010-07-02T19:25:00.000-07:00

I'm watching it on TBS, so I'm missing the Battle Shits scene (hysterical!) and fagala (a vocabulary staple), but Harold and Kumar go to the White Castle is possibly the worst film ever made. Are we so desperate for comedy that we find an uncreative retard odyssey where the cool guy is also a genius and everything bad happens to the uncool guy including having less character than the cool guy subversive because the stars are Indian and Asian? How else do you explain the 64 (mostly positive) percent rating on Metacritic? Critics suck, sure, but this seems to be a deeper cultural affliction. Meanwhile Funny People receives a paltry 60 (mixed reviews), despite being a far more penetrating insight into the nature of loneliness than Up in the Air, while also having a far more believable cool guy than Qquoohmmaaar is. Up in the Air has an 83 (universal acclaim) and didn't win any major academy awards primarily because it wasn't about a pregnant teenager. People call me elitist because I think film is an inferior art form. Whatever.

That said, Neil Patrick Harris comes off very unscathed.

2010-07-01T21:43:00.000-07:00

2010-06-30T22:16:00.000-07:00

I'm starting to think the purpose of Remembrance of Things Past was to dispel the myth initiated by 19th Century Realism that the French aristocracy were interesting people.

2010-06-30T20:26:00.000-07:00

This one goes out to every girl I ever loved.

World Cup

2010-06-29T18:58:00.000-07:00

In a way the Olympics does not, the World Cup brings out everybody's closet Nationalism, and so viciously as to more or less explain the rampant European racism last time that kept Michael Wilbon from going to Germany (I'd imagine there aren't too many incentives to curb it in South Africa, but so far I haven't heard of anything egregious). I caught myself genuinely pulling for the United States at the tail end of the last Olympics, but this is something else altogether. The Olympics are a tribute to the glory of extreme hard work. They're meant to make people feel good about the inspiration that makes them do things that are hard--a kind of contest to reward all the shit you ever heard about pushing yourself. The World Cup is patently not. It's something supremely European; an impulsive and visceral tournament that doesn't preclude ugliness in any way and in fact sort of encourages it. Incidentally, much more people care about it. And even my friends who love all sports get angry and violent about the World Cup in a way they don't about Patriots games--absent a protective political force the world as its own stage is in a certain sense anarchy, and like we're told we will in that setting we all get pretty savage whenever we lock heads with anyone else.

So I was very satisfied last weekend when I left the comforts of the Court Ave. Brewery to smoke a cigarette and saw drunk bros (12:45 PM) shouting "U S A!" But now my country is out and in the interest of continuing to care about this thing, I've decided to choose which teams I like based on what I know about their politics/culture/history. It isn't much. But the breakdown looks like this:

Uruguay: All I know about Uruguay is that it broke away from Spain relatively early and that economically it does very well. It legalized gay marriage before the United States, which creates interesting drama as it prepares to play the team that beat the United States. Plus it gets additional points for being the country that Homer thought was called U R Gay. But who the hell actually is hoping for Uruguay to win the World Cup? Even Uruguans understand that because they're small and prosperous nobody knows who they are or cares. I hope they don't get farther than the semis.

Ghana: Ghana put a premature halt to my own radical Nationalism and made me remember I generally vote Democrat, plus their president looks like the most affable man on the planet. Forest Whitaker will play him in a movie about their blessful independence and representative democracy. The most interesting thing about Ghana is that its surrounded by three of the most fucked up countries in Africa and yet remains fine, and I can't tell if their extended inclusion as the only predominately black team is creating more or less racism. If its less I want them to win; if more, let U R Gay take them out.

Netherlands: Netherlands has a king who I'm sure will be included in the winning ceremony if they win, so I truly hope they don't. Plus their hippie ways are responsible for every asshole on the planet talking about how awesome Amsterdam is, and they gave us the current incarnation of Joseph O'Neill. Their righteousness during World War II is roughly on par with Charles De Gaul's, and overall they were far better than Vichy France, but that's countered by their inability to decide whether to be called the Netherlands or Holland. I hope Brazil beats the shit out of them.

Brazil: As a vibrant and massive economy that breeds kids who grow up making soccer balls out of hay, they deserve to win. But the thing about Brazil is, it deserves to win every time, and it always does. They're like the opposite of every successful professional sports team in America. But then the main reason the Yankees are perpetual antagonists has more to do with their streaks than their inherent evil (though I suspect Jeter prays to some sort of malevolent deity). Brazilian Nationalism has more of a place in the 21st century's global stage than any European country, and I get the feeling they'd be modest about their success, without minimizing it. I'd get on with them going as far as the finals, but my love of upsets won't let me want to see them win.

Argentina: Birthplace of Che Guevara, who also went on to try to fuck shit up in Africa. Africa is rough though, he failed, and history is a tricky mistress. I certainly don't want it (history), or anything else Talib Kweli represented to be treated lightly. How do Argentinans feel about Che anyway? Isn't it illegal for Chinese people to say anything negative about Mao? Also whenever someone gets Argentina in Risk they always fuck me out of North America somehow. Let them lose to Germany, but let it be close.

Germany: As keepers of the EU I suppose I should admire their global prowess. Also they elected a woman chancellor which we have yet to do (though Iowa has a woman Lieutenant Governor, U S A! U S A!). But I suspect things are not quite as they seem in faraway Germany. First of all, why did their president resign for something that Congressmen in America do every single day? Steve King actually gets mad at people who call him racist when he says things that are, if not racist, abjectly retarded. Koehler's resignation is akin to if someone like Chuck Schumer resigned because he said deep water drilling provides jobs. Germany's turbulent past interests me, and I'd like to attribute a number of great writers to them but they're all actually from kingdoms that don't even fall inside modern German soil. I think Goethe was from the Kingdom of Germany, but the only modern German genius I can think is H----, which in itself makes a certain case about the nature of German nationalism. Not that they don't deserve it far more than Spain. overall, I say best of luck to them.

Paraguay: I know literally nothing about this country. Their coach is named Gerardo Martino and looks like the next-door neighbor version of Gerard Butler. Them winning would be the most boring possible outcome. Go Espana.

Spain: It's probably not fair but Spain bothers me, even though I've been there and liked it a lot. First of all, no one speaks English. Second, they strike me as the kind of European bastards who are responsible for all this violent racist soccer fervor. You just know that Spanish people are one Pringle shaped like Christ away from killing everyone on earth. furthermore, their epoch-defining late modernist cultural and historic period couldn't stop Ernest Hemingway from writing For Whom the Bell Tolls, which didn't really even try that hard to make any Spanish people look good. That said, they have more flavor than Germany, and if it comes down to the two of them in the semis I won't fall on one side easily. Germany & Brazil would be a more interesting clash of cultures, but Spain v Brazil would be a better game. I'll leave it to anarchy. Let the best country win.

Viva!

2010-06-26T22:37:00.000-07:00

20 billion ain't shit to you but that's how much these are.

2010-06-26T22:36:00.000-07:00

20 dollars ain't shit to you but that's how much they are.

2010-06-25T22:26:00.001-07:00

Some people really like meeting people, but I don't. And not for any badass or mythological reason, but because I'm not very good at it. I can't just saddle up next to someone at a bar and hear about their lives. In some ways this is preventing me from experiencing properly the Great American Road Trip, but I think I'd be able to pull off working for farmers in exchange for food and shelter.

2010-06-25T18:53:00.001-07:00

2010-06-24T20:45:00.001-07:00

She's an artist. Her voice is amoebic. She manipulates her tones in the subtlest possible ways, and every time accurate.

BP

2010-06-24T20:03:00.001-07:00

I'm wary of anybody getting the idea this is a news blog, or an opinion blog, but I couldn't not share this:

[O]nly 6 percent have a favorable rating of BP. In the history of the NBC News/Journal poll, Saddam Hussein (3 percent), Fidel Castro (3 percent) and Yasser Arafat (4 percent) have had lower favorable scores, and O.J. Simpson (11 percent) and tobacco-maker Philip Morris (15 percent) have had higher ratings.

Fortunately the Washington Post seems to appreciate it as much as I do.

Also if you listen to what Paul Kanjorski actually said there is literally nothing wrong with it. This is in no way the same thing as laissez-faire spokesman apologizing to the free market for being asked to take responsibility for its actions, unless you believe in acknowledging simultaneously the benefits of a completely free market destroying the planet. I read a review of Glenn Beck's new action thriller novel and it sounds an awful lot like The Fountainhead. I don't necessarily think that all libertarians believe people speak in ideologies, so probably he ended up borrowing some concepts from her, which is pretty awesome if he said "I think Americans really respond to literature in a way they don't to television," and somebody else said "yeah you should write a book thats fiction but is about real life and you should emulate Ayn Rand because she's very good."

It's highly unlikely, but if Nikki Haley ends up running against Obama there's a good chance I'll end up voting for her. The episode of Seinfeld where Jerry dates the hot model and uses it to get out of speeding tickets was on last night so I don't feel that bad about this. How do I feel about education reform anyway?

The Rolling Stone article about McChrystal is essential reading. I've linked it, but I read about how the internet is fucking Rolling Stone out of the story of the year, so I encourage you to go pick up a copy tomorrow. I don't have anything but disdain for the magazine, but the story of the year is the story of the year, and I empathize with their antiquated business model. The article uses the interview to paint a pretty clear picture of how unwinnable the war in Afghanistan is, but I think the reason McChrystal got fired really is that he called Holbrooke a fag.

We've had conversations at work about how there isn't anybody on the left that you could compare to the dumbest people on the right. There isn't, for instance, a Democrat Michele Bachmann. Its also true there isn't anybody on the right you could compare with the biggest pussies on the left. So while I think Kanjorski is completely justified, Harry Reid saying "we could have changed something, but the Republicans kept it from happening, oh well," is just about as bad leadership as it gets. I think the take home for this whole McChrystal thing is that after the economy rights itself Petraeus needs to run for president. He'll win. The last time a savvy political general was president was 1960, and I think we can all agree things were pretty good back then. Anybody who's actually sick of politics as usual would do well to vote for these people. They're born leaders, and their life stories read like wikipedia articles about Napoleon.

2010-06-23T21:58:00.001-07:00

Lady Gaga

2010-06-23T21:23:00.000-07:00

Two things:

Yeah, right, she gets her ideas from Madonna, who I'm far too young to remember doing anything but being the first woman over fifty I wanted to bang, but really when Lady Gaga spends 25 hours working on her public outfits and then when in public says that she spent 25 hours working on her outfit, is she not being a surrealist?

and

Is it possible to be a surrealist so far removed from when it was an actual movement?

For help with your answer, take a minute to remember how bad Un Chien Andalou actually is.

Des Moines Town Cont.

2010-06-22T19:52:00.001-07:00

The only suitable phrase to describe the clime outside right now is the shit. And I don't mean that in the way bros say it, but in the way that Vietnam veterans do.

Des Moines Town

2010-06-22T18:29:00.000-07:00

If I don't wake up feeling like death on Saturday I will go to a coffee shop that reminds me of New York and pretend that Des Moines has image. Then I'll go to the farmer's market that ends at the ungodly early hour of 12 o'clock and believe in the genteel goodness of simple folks. Moreover I'll believe in doing these things I accumulate soul. I suppose the original purpose of the blog was to talk about your life, so here, two and a half months into my tenure, is the state of the city where I reside. It's like a town in which the envious unhip sound prophetic and untouchably talented.

2010-06-22T16:22:00.001-07:00

The word of the day is slut.

2010-06-22T09:44:00.000-07:00

Over dinner, the father realizes his son is terrified of turning into him, and rather than feel sad he chuckles at the nature of inevitability.

Then one day that same man watches his son grow up and thinks what sadness is the inevitable, if he does worse than I did, I will feel more terrible than I ever have before, and if he does better, I will without question begrudge his success.

W.B. Yeats

2010-06-21T22:38:00.000-07:00

Only the Irish can take a legitimate poem and turn it into a song this good, but it loses a touch of its poignancy when you realize what he's actually talking about. It was written in the immediate aftermath of a relationship, which I've accepted as a certain justification for what newspapers would describe as "feminist interest groups who decry its misogyny," but If I'm not wrong the premise is that in falling in love he forgot how much better he was than any girl he'd ever meet. Well duh, you say, but men do stupid things for love, and in any case afterwards he came to his senses and wrote "on a quiet street where old ghosts meet" for the heavenly choirs. If you've seen In Bruges you'll recognize where I discovered the song, and probably ascribe to it an additional and shivering poignancy that I'd love to recreate here but the clip is blocked in "my country," which I half-suspect to be NBC's snobbish dismissal of the Midwest. You wouldn't feel so awesome if you didn't have 30 Rock, which has like one one-millionth of the viewership CSI Iowa does.

Lately though I've been reading a lot of William Blake and William Butler Yeats (yep, this is why), and while suffice to say Blake's world in a grain of sand is the best thing he's got going for him, Yeats truly was a marvel, and further proof that the Irish dominate all literary activities to an unfair degree. I understand though where people are coming from who think he's pastoral--maybe earthly wisdom, however benevolent, is eventually pointless. I see poetry run into this problem a lot, which is that in its attempts to distill the essence of the in-being-we-are-godly motif I think we all basically agree is more or less theoretically true it provides support for an outlook that doesn't necessarily serve any purpose. "A prayer to my Daughter," a poem described by Wikipedia as "decried by feminist critics for its well-meaning misogyny" is in reality a description of how he imagined a contended spirit would live. The contended spirit would not hold opinions of its own, nor would it speak for any reason other than to appreciate and let others appreciate the sheer joy of expressing its own contentment. In other words, it will be, and in being be godly. But this contending with immortality doesn't necessarily hold up in a world where people if given the choice would rather be on Shot of Love with Tila Tequila than attempt cosmic enlightenment. And even if, given the choice, we all went after the latter, would anything come from it? There's this idea I think that with enough meditation and spiritual enlightenment its possible to spin off the planet into Nirvana. To consciously arrive at an endpoint. Apparently Buddha spent the remaining years of his life in what can only be described as the cosmic equivalent of shooting heroin into your penis, but he still stayed on earth until some heathen poisoned his soup. Yeats, meditating in a time of war, realized for one instant that

One is animate
Mankind inanimate fantasy

Snap. wha-bam. But it reminds me more than I'd like it to of when Bill Hicks would try to turn his acid-oriented philosophy into something people could internalize as a joke (a ha ha with take-home ramifications that made me dislike him a lot until I learned he's among the school of people who refer to vaginas as "cunts," which I think automatically made you an intellectual in the period from 1963 to right before I was born. Also this is funny).

The premise of that poem however is that for one fleeting instant, a man--a sensitive, thoughtful man like Yeats--could have this revelation. The soul is real, he would say. I've seen it. And I think that was his essential purpose beyond anything else. I retain a nagging suspicion that he's being too generous with the human soul--that he still assumes an endpoint based more out of optimism than truth, or rather, that its poetry's essential flaw to be predicated on finality. T.S. Eliot doesn't have this problem because his writing resembles prose, and because he spins out into total bullshit before he ever gets to the end of a poem. I don't think "Not with a bang but with a whimper" was inscribed on his tombstone, but I'd like it inscribed on America's. It is, I think, the finest final line anyone's ever written.

The end question with art though is never "what is it saying?" but "how is it saying what it's saying?" In Yeats case, the answer is "better than anyone could have asked for." I don't know how the Irish do it. Inscribed on his tombstone is "Cast a cold eye/On life and death/Horsemen, pass by." It doesn't really get better than that, or wouldn't, except the preceding lines from the poem its taken from are actually him telling people that's how he wants his epitaph to read. But here's my personal favorite stanza of his. It's soul-identifying and humane and it counterfeits enlightenment--all that shit--but I like it because he was a writer, and its very, very good writing.

How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?

2010-06-19T19:13:00.000-07:00

Bob Dylan on Icing:

Apparently, a variation of this game is played within the upper rung of society. Except, instead of liquid sugar jizz, its with Hennessy. And instead of drinking it instantly, you immediately have to stop what you're doing, don a smoking jacket and reminisce.

We're having a really fucking good run Bros.

Week in Revue

2010-06-17T21:22:00.001-07:00

A part of me is starting to miss having a Twitter, so here are some things that have occurred to me over the past couple of days worthy of a tweet, but not of a post (some are more significant than others). It will be in rough chronological order, and many of them I am going to grossly approximate. Some I will make up on the spot.

6/12: My main reason for thinking I'll like Omaha is that I keep listening to this song about Council Bluffs (IA, you noobs).

6/12: I was sort of wrong about Omaha, but I did develop a grand appreciation for cut grass.

6/13: Oh yeah, I went to Omaha yesterday. Next weekend Kansas City.

6/13: I went to Omaha because I slept through the Farmer's Market yesterday. Hangovers and shit.

6/15: My new commute shaves ten minutes off my drive, but now I don't go past the donut shop.

6/15: This concerns me because I'm half-sure I was keeping him in business.

6/15: Just because I think Mad Men is amazing doesn't mean I want to talk or relate to anyone else who does.

6/15: It's just a good show. It's good. Not a masterwork of the West, just really fucking good, okay?

6/16: Today is Bloomsday. I have no commentary about this at all but I wanted it out there. Hey twitterverse!

6/16: Is anyone gayer than Marcel Proust?

6/16: Marcel Proust is a fine author of fiction, but Christ is he a gay, and not gay to mean uncool or gay, but gay to mean I'm afraid if someone

6/16: touches me in my solar plexus my limbs will fall off (fucking twitter).

6/17: Does anyone want to be British more than Brian Eno?

6/17: I met this motherfucker http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABToOl-xbHE

6/17: I watched youtube videos of Joe Barton to feed the hate but he was reasonable and funny in all of them. Politicians, I am your target.

6/17: I didn't really meet Joe Biden. I'm ashamed to have lied about this.

Lightning and no rain make Justin something something.

Oh but it looks like it's really about to start now. Good night everyone, happy Stephen Dedalus' Regretful Hangover Day.

As requested, Marshall

2010-06-17T21:15:00.000-07:00

As far as I can tell, nothing of even remote importance is happening in the world right now, so this one is dedicated in full to my sister Emily, who graduated from high school today. My family is now one of those old families. If you gave birth to a child today, he or she may call me Mr. Spees.

(it was a character!)

2010-06-11T21:10:00.000-07:00

I know girls who masturbate to their own rape stories. I know of girls who clipped their clitoris in protest of modernity.

2010-06-11T20:47:00.000-07:00

How is it, I wonder, that girls are willing to listen to music written by guys who think its a triumph of poetry to describe them accurately and then fail to do so. Is there anyone besides Lou Reed who actually knows how to write about women? Don't say Conor Oberst. Maybe Dylan, maybe.

Everything I know about girls comes from James Joyce (who was a man) and a letter I found recently an ex-girlfriend wrote me like four years ago that moves from missing me to thinking that she can't make friends with people if she feels ugly to describing in vivid detail watching some orthodox Jews pray.

I won't deny it, my vision of my own novel has girls in it, specifically a step-mother learning she's going to have a child of her own. In a moment of euphoria she realizes how little she cares about her step-children compared to this one. I slightly stole it from Joyce/Faulkner/America, but I think the words themselves could be better than the average pop song.

Not that I care really if pop songs can't describe the Female Condition.

A, men

2010-06-11T19:42:00.000-07:00

This, this, this, this, and this.

This:

2010-06-11T19:40:00.000-07:00

I'm a married man. So sometimes I whack off to LPs, I know people who stick their dicks in between pages in Lolita.

Barbara Boxer

2010-06-10T20:47:00.000-07:00

Don't listen to the haters, it looks great.

2010-06-10T19:49:00.000-07:00

Alcoholism is an addiction, a danger, and a weakness, but a man who comes home after a hard day's work, reads a nice book, goes on a nice run, and makes himself a nice dinner, is entitled, no, is obliged, to open up a nice beer.

2010-06-08T21:59:00.001-07:00

Terry Branstad, Definitively

2010-06-08T21:58:00.001-07:00

Bob Vander Plaats is the Tea Party favorite who didn't get Sarah Palin's endorsement. Hers went instead to Terry Branstad, who won the Republican primary tonight, thus kicking off what will shortly become a tremendously ugly gubernatorial race in the Hawkeye State.

CNN however has chosen to focus on Blanche Lincoln and Carly Fiorina, and--they both winning easily--now both California and Arkansas have two shitty candidates to contend with in November.

Some people have no faith in this country. Politically, we're in the process of reacting to focused conservative hatred uncharitably attributed to racism, but I think its more fair to blame things more intangible. On April 15th I watched a Tea Party activist tell a reporter that she's never been political before, but she finally got fed up with Washington. This is a statement I've heard before; if there was a Tea Party headquarters (which there isn't), that's what they'd been telling people to say.

Not that it isn't true, really. People flow; people exist hovering tensely in a state of uncertainty, and spend their lives trying to define themselves. A fortunate few of them do, but most people ebb from flashing light to flashing light, catching rays they like being associated with. Like the Revolutionary War, The Tea Party was a spontaneous development that exploded out of the remnants of a frightening recession, an unpopular government bailout, the conservative ability to tap anger, and blog culture. It caused people frozen in inaction to spark into action, which is why the same people who spend their lives in church or trying to stabilize their families are the ones who go to these rallies. They've found something to cling to, and they use it in the service of their self-definition.

I'm not one of those people who have no faith in this country. America is an entity, stronger than ideology, and forever resilient. I admire the Republican party's political dominance. Uncharitably, though not inaccurately, I attribute it to it's ability to tap into human anger. Anger induces focus, and it's very easy to project it towards people you'll never meet. At the end of day the country remains center right because everyone feels pity when they see pictures of ducks covered in oil, but anger is a more righteous emotion. It's more satisfying to feel.

Barack Obama galvanized the country by appealing to hope--"our better nature" he called it--which was both beautiful and brilliant, but it sets him up for a mass disappointment as people begin to realize he's just another Democrat. But I don't have faith in America because for one fleeting instant it did capture our better natures, or because it won wars against its oppressors, or because it triumphed over civil inequality, or because my coworkers can watch sellouts like Blanche Lincoln accept their party's nomination and still remain ideological. I do because regardless of what happens in it, it remains the place in which all our imagined projections huddle inside. It's realer than anybody or any thing, massive and wonderful and consistently alive.

2010-06-08T21:57:00.001-07:00

Some people have no faith in this country.

James Patterson

2010-06-06T17:09:00.000-07:00

Hack is one of those words that is easier to use than to define, but I think at the end it has to come down to intention. When James Patterson says he thinks collaborating yields better results, that seems to be the second hackiest thing anyone could possibly say.

The hack as artist who thinks he's being artistic when he's really full of shit strikes me as the best definition, but then I think of Ernest Hemingway writing about the you-and-now of love, and while he is possibly the most overrated American hero, I don't think you could really get away with calling him a hack.

A lot of people get overrated by a critical community eager to canonize contemporaries, and they generally begin to believe their own hype, but I don't think its fair to call Joseph O'Neill a hack either. Boring, certainly, and annoyingly under-talented, but it isn't his fault that his memoir-of-a-regular-ass-life got interpreted as a post-9/11 chaos allegory where entangled cultures come together in New York City as a symbol of modern confusion. It is that, in a way; it suffers from a failure to be compelling or insightful, but that's because it's not very good, not because O'Neill is a hack.

When James Patterson is responding to negative criticism he points to the fact that people say they don't read anything but him, and then says he doesn't think there's anything more important than getting someone to read. He clearly lives in a world as retarded as his novels imply exist, which is as good a barometer for genius as anything, but that defense is without question the hackiest thing a person could possibly say.

He apparently is the best-selling novelist of all time. By millions. He outsells J.K. Rowling as much as she outsells Gore Vidal. I really didn't know anything about him before I saw an ad on TV for his newest book. All hacks are either very hot or very ugly, so make what you will of his Midwestern aging child face. I think he looks like he has trouble standing up.

He saw in her eyes all the confusion that a young girl could possibly experience growing up manifesting in one single instant.

2010-06-05T20:56:00.000-07:00

I think the premise of this Saturday Night Live episode is to have sketches that don't even sound like funny ideas and hope Charles Barkley makes them wonderful, which he usually does, because he's apparently the most talented comic actor alive.

2010-06-05T20:17:00.000-07:00

2010-06-03T09:41:00.000-07:00

Falling victim to their siren charms.

Two words at work

2010-06-02T14:41:00.001-07:00

Old lady politicians getting intimate with their husbands.

Work jokes are about meetings going over long. Will this meeting end early? No. It won't. Ha. Some people won't make these over the phone--not with strangers. They think it's rude to someone. But at their core they are about human inefficiency. Totally relevant. As innocent as baseball.

2010-06-01T22:16:00.001-07:00

Idiots think I'm talented. Should I get a tumblr?

Bud Light Golden Wheat

2010-06-01T19:44:00.000-07:00

As of late beer commercials have become a pernicious evil--this being particularly egregious to me--this one is a mixed bag, and where the similarly musical Cheetos commercial affronts reality by playing the one great part of a truly terrible song, Bud Light has commissioned 15 seconds of the finest song ever, and no more. As in, the "Love at First Sight" song literally does not extend past this commercial.

Maybe it was because I watched the ad for it 400 times that I decided to buy the product in question. The bar for beer you generally buy in places called Kum and Go can only be so high, but Golden Wheat is the worst beverage I have ever experienced. If I were ever going to start a beer blog, it would have a rating system of negatives, where the best possible score would be negative ten Golden Wheats. For now I will write about it, which means this beer is so bad it inspired me to write in my blog.

They say they got it, and they got it. I can't fight this feeling anymore.

M.I.A.

2010-05-31T16:35:00.000-07:00

Awesome, more nine minute videos, and this one borrows from South Park.

Russia

2010-05-31T12:36:00.000-07:00

An eighteen hour road trip by yourself sounds like I think to any reasonably self-reliant person a pretty good prospect, and even better to anyone who's ever believed that motels are an essential component to establishing a credible fantasy in regards to their vacation is when your parents give you 600 dollars because they're afraid you won't be able to do all of it in one day. I however stupidly decided it would be more fun to see the city of Chicago for the first time than to stop off in Fort Wayne, and ended up sharing a couch with a drunk beardo who mistook my rejection of his advances for a personal revulsion while our mutual host injected heroin in his bedroom (Richard Daley would like me to know that I am welcome back anytime). The end result was that I experienced that moment people who have crashed into other people refer to as the split-second-of-falling-asleep-behind-the-wheel on the second day, and seriously under appreciated whatever CDs I spun for those miserable six final hours. A twelve hour road trip however--which is what it takes to get from DC to Chicago if you spend 30 minutes driving in the wrong direction for no reason--is pretty neat, and there are a few things I learned along the way, most of them having to do with the radio:

1. Every type of station across the country has a near-identical playlist, and every radio-wave radius has the exact same spectrum of types.
2. After a few hours of radio listening you will come to appreciate any musical innovation, no matter how small, and you will develop an abiding personal hatred for any voice that sounds like the Lifehouse guy, which means you won't be able to listen to any song whatsoever on the rock station.
3. Despite your upbringing's enforcement of the arrogance and immorality of Manifest Destiny, it will become incredibly obvious why we did it, and if we were ever given the opportunity to go back in time knowing what we know now, and promising to stay on the East Coast and not rape anybody's land, we'd do it again in about five weeks. And while this theory has largely been explained already as an aspect of power's necessarily corrupting nature, in this instance I think it comes from human beings' tendency to be irrepressible, and an urge I can't think of any better way to describe than as sexual to keep moving westward once you've started.

I'm halfway through Crime and Punishment (so I may end up flatly rejecting this post in a week, I will try to indicate in some sly way it that becomes the case) but I've finally gotten to the heart of the matter, the idea that I understand was the focal point of a nascent Dostoevsky's philosophical regimen. If you hate literature, skip this next part:

"The first category, generally speaking, are men conservative in temperament and law-abiding; they live under control and love to be controlled. To my thinking it is their duty to be controlled, because that's their vocation, and there is nothing humiliating in it for them. The second category all transgress the law; they are destroyers or disposed to destruction according to their capacities. The crimes of these men are of course relative and varied; for the most part they seek in very varied ways the destruction of the present for the sake of the better."

My understanding is that Crime and Punishment was actually a refutation of this belief, that in some ways it was the final rejection of an idea he'd entertained as a younger man. It isn't a stretch however to say that every great political innovator was only one failure short of being considered a criminal. The controversy stems from the conviction in a Calvinist determinism regarding who belongs in which category. And while a 19th century Russian caste system would provide a certain context for this idea, its something an American belief system would have a great deal of trouble rectifying.

My friend Eric, who incidentally is the one who loaned me this book about three years ago, and I debate frequently over the nature of reality. He says there is one and I say there isn't. I use our differing viewpoints in light of the same data as proof and then he suggests that proof itself proves the existence of a right answer. Up til now there has yet to be a clear winner, but my belief is the more American of the two. The American dream rests on the assumption that anybody, no matter how initially disadvantaged, can rise above their station to accomplish anything. As Americans we look distrustfully at any suggestion that we can't. This fundamentally comes down to a rejection of the past. We divorce ourselves from precedent, we dismiss fatalism and then we look to people like Barack Obama as heroes of the cause. And while as I write this it sounds like the kind of bullshit that caused my friend Eric to stop believing in God, even my most cynical friends will still reject any label you place on them that implies stagnation. Even if we can't envision a change for ourselves, we still refuse to settle on on the present.

Frankly, the suggestion that I'm destined to be part of an inferior, law abiding species is unsettling enough to get me to break the law. Its an idea suited for civilizations that have been around for thousands of years, who are cold as fuck all the time, and who have been taught to behave according to the class they were born into. It isn't appealing to a new and arrogant people who destroyed an entire culture because they felt a sexual satisfaction from expanding their landmass. The notion of social stability necessarily demands some people--whether they're minorities or women or just random people naturally ascribed to it--are going to get shorted. And I'm not saying that this idea is better or worse for people or that it's right or wrong, I'm saying it isn't American, and by extension, that we're the only country to have based itself on a truly modern sensibility.

Incidentally, as far as novels go, Europe trounced us during modernism, but we came back hard in post-modernism. Crime and Punishment is pretty good. France was coming out with Madame Bovary at the time, and we were doing Moby Dick. Think about that during the next Olympics.

Marcel Proust

2010-05-30T16:58:00.000-07:00

Historically authors have not been a handsome breed, and Proust is no exception, but this has quickly become my favorite of all the Wikipedia writer photographs.

JC Penney

2010-05-29T15:54:00.001-07:00

It has come to my attention that I will never again buy a t-shirt that I really like a lot. And while I endeavor to go my entire life without ever selling out, buying clothes is the first hat to drop, the first thing that feels like a compromise. Hi, Modern American life, please engage with me more freely, I have lots of time to kill. I've been writing things I think are cool on white t-shirts and this strikes me as both bold and sexy, but it's going to get ridiculous if I make too many. Two things I love, maybe the only two things, are keeping it real and considering my outward appearance as rabidly as a celebrity. So for the same reason I don't want a misrepresentative t-shirt, I don't want too many I made myself.

Three shirts I considered purchasing before satisfactorily concluding they weren't exactly right:

1. A Pepsi t-shirt. This is wonderful because its ironic and because Pepsi is delicious. But I put it on and feel like I'm just advertising for Pepsi. Perhaps in practice I've missed the irony. Perhaps it doesn't apply to real life, but in any case it looks like an endorsement, and wearing company slogans is definitely not keeping it real.

2. A Star Wars t-shirt. I'll take this opportunity to note that none of these shirts looked exactly like these photos. These photos are approximate, based on the most resemblant pictures I can find. Anyway this one is great because its ironic, it is dorky and a kids shirt, but, I actually love Star Wars, so I can undercut the irony while still showing that I understand it. I'm not dorky enough to wear an earnest Star Wars shirt, but I'm not just being a hipster fuck either. But when I put it on it just looks like a kids shirt, and it reminds me of this girl I worked with at summer camp who put on Hook one morning and yelled at people for not paying attention. It reminds me of those people who get ironic about their own nostalgia, and those people are definitely not cool.

3. A Ramones t-shirt. This one was almost perfect. Band shirts are above irony and this shirt is particularly fashionable and also I legitimately like the band. Plus I've been looking for a band shirt for some time. But I think if I'm going to wear a band shirt I want someone really cool, like Sonic Youth or Jesus and Mary Chain, at the very least the Clash, because if I'm wearing a band shirt I want it to indicate how cool I actually am. In fact the coolest band shirt I saw was the Beastie Boys but this is not Brooklyn, nor is it 1988, nor have I ever spraypainted anything in my entire life.

If you're noticing a common thread here, its the pervading influence of irony in places as unironically boring as Des Moines, Iowa. This is a phenomenon that John Leland has described as the post-internet revolution Everyone is a Hipster effect. But I wonder how many people even buy these clothes. Obviously I didn't even go into all the beer related shirts I briefly considered purchasing because that strikes me as far more ironic than anything else I saw, but they seem to be the mainstay of vintage purchases, and they seem to be worn pretty sincerely. In school I read an article by somebody, most likely a Marxist, possibly Karl Marx, about how fashion is something we cede to our superficial urges because it is necessary but doesn't really matter. We can buy clothes we're told to buy to upkeep our status and still feel like people who don't think about things like that. The only people who actually would feel okay about wearing shirts with Twinkies on them that say "the good stuff is on the inside" are people buying them from Good Will or that tribe in Chile that doesn't have adjectives in their vocabulary. Fashion is important to us because it's the one realm where we retain the rights to be superficial bitches. And while I will probably some day marry someone that isn't perfect for me I will always refuse to wear clothes that I think are even slightly uncool. Cormac McCarthy semi-loosely calls this the triumph of evil, and a McCarthy reference here is entirely unnecessary to any point I might be making but I wanted you all to think I'm smart.

What I think I'm trying to say, however, is that we battle between our egoistic urges and our life-is-beautiful, I-love-everyone moments, and our egoistic urges have the major advantage of being our saturday-morning, sugary-cereal (unless you're dieting, you queer), fetal-state habitats. I'm also saying that my sense of irony is too sharp and wicked for any shopping mall to understand. I really did consider buying a beer shirt. Who would get it? Then I considered ironically buying an ironic t-shirt. I'm in Des Moines, but my bros in New York would be down. But the best irony isn't really irony at all. If I see some fish farmer selling shirts out of his living room that just say Iowa on them in red and blue letters I'm buying five, because I dig American geography, because I'm a life-is-beautiful, I-love-everyone kind of guy, and because--here's the rub, cover your ears, saviors--my sense of irony is fucking evil.

Baby Bieber

2010-05-22T21:16:00.000-07:00

I like expensive hooks like I like Cuban cigars and Terry Branstad's mustache, but nostalgia so clearly purchased rings hollow, like an industry that doesn't have to deal with the repercussions of creating a pop star whose ideas about sex are only slightly more formed than the primordial sexual ebullience fangirls have for him (not that all my favorite midnight bowling-related memories didn't end up becoming breakdance competitions but afterwards we'd go home and fuuuuuuckk). I think Luda's part is really sweet, though. It's just a matter of time before he's embraced by the hipsters (if he hasn't already been, hey New York how are things over there), but the reality is that he's of a different time than are you and me and the people we know, regardless of who's pretending to be down with him.

But I usually dream about a unified scene, so Bieber if we can't be friends, I'll still send you a save the date to my annual barbecue. It's in Des Moines this year, city of heartlands and heart clogs, and Katelyn Epperly is singing the national anthem. She's an American Idol finalist, which is a TV show you'll soon be eligible to audition for. Also Tao Lin is going to read all 89 pages of his closeted manifesto about working at Urban Outfitters in Greenwich Village with the drug dealer who sold his friend Lina the coke she OD'd on. She survived though--it'll be fun.

Seance

2010-05-19T17:09:00.001-07:00

Last week I along with twenty of my closest friends and our spiritual advisor performed a seance, during which we conjured up the spirit of Thomas Pynchon. He came out cloudy, smoking a cigarette and looking pampered. Christophonos is the oldest of us--he's twenty-seven. He looks approachable generally, bearded but he smiles a lot, which is the key. We threw whistles into the air. Thomas asked us what we wanted. Alexander shouts you look fatter in person and Thomas blushed. Next question he says. Do you think anyone can do it Mr. Pynchon or were you born with special powers? Pynchon looks up towards God, back at us and frowns. Just me, no one else. I've burnt half-finished manuscripts before. He tells us they get all of them. I don't want to cast dispersions, we've all heard the story about Nabakov, but most of the shit we get is just shit. It's about character, guys. He holds his hands out and shakes them for emphasis. You need ideas. Most of you people are just running ragged with nothing. Your origin story is interesting but the way you describe it, well, this is your life, guys, not something you've already read, or seen on TV. Jedidiah pulls a spirited Joe Wilson. He's offended now, an avid chronicler of his own life. Tom asks hey, has anyone got a cigarette? They don't have them in heaven I keep taking these unlicensed trips to hell. What about New York City?! someone shouts. No no no, I didn't live there. California? Nope. We name check every major city we can think of. Boston, Minneapolis, Berlin. Spent time in each, couldn't settle on one. I'm a shape-shifter, he says. Nothing contains me. His short beard mugs his jowls. He talks like a cartoon. Next question. Let's keep things moving. Nicholas offers up a lighter. The noise of breaking glass chimes through the room, coming from the smoke. We're having a tea party upstairs, he explains. How do you feel about the Iowa Preservation Act Nicholas asks quietly. Next question. Amberlin picks up a candle from the back and walks with it held over his face, chanting lines about ghosts from old horror movies. Shun the creator and all things created. Spare the rod spoil the child. Pynchon looks around for a chair. Points to one, bring that here, he says. We throw it in the kindling and it rejuvenates him. He flickers, comes on more brightly. Fuller colors. His skin is phosphorescent. His clothes are lime green. Tell us about God, sir. Yeah man, WHAT'S THE SECRET! Kettles. Pots and kettles. From behind the candle Amberlin shouts DO YOU WRITE YOUR OWN STUFF? Tom looks nervous. Some of it. YOU GO TO COLLEGE TO LEARN WHAT A HOOVER IS? Preparatory school actually. First time I lived alone. And it's getting late. It is. Our spiritual advisor shakes his head. TELL US ABOUT GOD!

Pynchon shuffles his feet and looks down. He inhales like he's about to tell a story. God, he says, God is a manifestation of light. The finest of all beings. Energy beyond kinesis. A real swell mother fucker. Human or intangible? Personified. Black or white? Mind your business. And Christ? Black as night. I've tried to live my life by a certain code of ethics. You find out when you die what that code signified, and how well you held to it. Someone, our advisor says in monotone, please remind the representative from heaven he is in fact not yet dead. What will we tell the newspapers, sir? Tell them whatever you will. There is a pause while we reflect. It costs a lot to live so free. Feeling the weight of his responsibility our spiritual advisor begins to usher the writer out: everybody wave goodbye to the author now. More breaking glass. Things are getting rowdy upstairs he says, sounding excited, somebody's opened up the liquor cabinet. The fire flickers. One more thing, he says, I've balled all of your mothers. They each were fantastic. A mischievous rose rests on his orange hue. Adieu. Adieu adieu adieu. He vanishes. The fire dies. A pile of ashes rested on the wooden floor, and we watched them fall through the cracks into the dirt below. A moment of silence ensued. And then someone, Jedidiah I think, shouted Again! Who now? Mussolini! The Italian Fire Eater! We went to the library the next day for books about his history. We gave up when we found out he was a pretty bad dude. Some things are sacred, I've learned.

Dog Soldiers

2010-05-13T00:04:00.000-07:00

"...in the single moment when the breathing world had hurled itself screeching and murderous at his throat, he had recognized the absolute correctness of its move. In those seconds, it seemed absurd that he had ever been allowed to go his foolish way, pursuing notions and small joys...Around him was the moronic lobby and outside the boxsided street where people hunted each other. Take it or leave it. I'll take it, he thought."

- Robert Stone

This is the finest refutation of Sartre, and to a much lesser extent, Pynchon, that I have ever witnessed. Fuck Ernest Hemingway, seriously. Robert Stone should have won that Nobel Prize.

Coalition

2010-05-12T22:23:00.000-07:00

I thought about watching the Gordon Brown fairwell address at work earlier. I read an article in the New York Times about how incongruent his weepy fairwell was put up against his notorious reservation, but then I read about David Cameron's slick British charisma and his charismatic commencement address, and thought that'd be more fun. Later though I read another article about his youthful sexy parties and daliances with mari-ju-wana, and that seemed like an appropriate place to leave off for the day. It's not that I don't find this coalition interesting, and for the first time ever I felt glad to have spent time over there, but if you're looking for the ultimate British political video, you're looking for this guy.

The night George Bush formally announced the troop surge in Iraq I went over to Eric's house with Phil. We just wanted to jam, but his parents guilted us into watching the speech. After a minute Eric got bored and started recording it with his tape player. He pressed the fast forward button along with the record button so when he played it back Bush sounded like a yeti. Just like he wasn't then, I'm not making an ideological statement now when I say that I remember this as being an entirely appropriate response.

I'm glad we're being asked to care about England's election though, if only because two years ago they cared about ours. We gave them a black badass who makes NCAA predictions. They gave us a young guy with youthful daliances into mari-ju-wana. Conclusion: we're becoming a more comfortable globalized village. That's pretty neat, I think.

Harry Reid

2010-05-12T19:49:00.000-07:00

When Harry Reid is in his campaign office, feet on his desk, yelling at his finance director to turn the heat down, I wonder if he uses whiny pathos arguments on the phone with his donors, or if he instead laughs with them about how gay he must seem on TV.

Getting Accustomed to the Ride

2010-05-11T20:59:00.000-07:00

This one goes out to the kids in our parking lot who beat someone in the head with a wooden board and put him in the hospital. Solidarity, my brothers.

I find it odd that all the most creative and intelligent people I've met introduced themselves to me in our parents' unflavored suburban community and not in New York City, where they all theoretically are supposed to end up. They're scattered around the country now, not quite banking on their promise, instead bringing up questions about what it takes to be a successful artist. It's easy to be fatalistic about other people's promise and not your own, but there are a few people I know, not the same people, who just seem to shine brighter than everyone else, who make me wonder what it is they're thinking about because they haven't done anything fantastic yet either. Maybe they will. They seem like they will. They ought to.

I met a cop last night who knew I'd been drunk, but who didn't even bat an eyelash when he brought it up, and then wrote me a ticket for Failure to Comply with Accident Requirements. A ticket. I have to pay a fine in court. My insurance will go up. Then I drove home in the rain. I have poison ivy on my eyes that makes them swell up and go red so I look like I'm detoxing, but I guess I feel pretty good these days. It was cold tonight, but it wasn't raining, so I went for a run, and when I got back some good looking townie drinking a Steel Reserve in a chair outside the hotel entrance asked me how I felt. Pretty good. I smiled. I walked around the hotel building and saw three separate groups of two kids hanging around in crevices by the cars. Each time I made eye contact with one of them I looked away. Three times, like Peter. I went inside and a half hour later when I came out again there were police cars and two ambulances. The good looking townie said someone had been hit by a two-by-four and was bleeding in the street. A few people came out to see what was going on. Apparently the kids who'd done it had run off. People had seen them speed past their windows. That's what had brought them out. Now they were standing around, smiling like bad cops. They'll talk to anyone who has any idea what happened (hot townie boy, meet hot townie girl). Our landlady's husband was walking somewhere quickly. I wonder how common this is for him. I didn't see any blood.

An interlude: I play that song "The Obvious Child" a lot. It makes me think about conversations I'd have with girls who also like Paul Simon. We'd sing it in the car and then when it ended she'd disappear because I like the fantasy but I get bored with it.

My dad says "killed" even when he's talking about inanimate things, like "he was killed in a car accident." A coworker's step-brother was murdered in Philadelphia by a gun a few years ago. His wallet was still in his pocket when he was found but his iPod had been taken. How easy it is to break the law. How easy it is to not consider the implications of reality. I don't think life exists in the doing so much as in the considering, but I guess as a creative I'm prone to consider. So here is tonight's thesis. A simple one, primarily a mechanism for coping with this poison ivy shit. It's more important to me that I succeed than that everyone else doesn't fail too hard, but you fucking nihilists, you idiots, you babies with your sociological excuses, don't ever fucking ever hit other people with two-by-fours. And you, Justin, the obvious child, don't ever get drunk and back into someone else's car again.

Ziggy Stardust

2010-05-07T22:19:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it's a myth that the closed-off ones can open up. Perhaps they've nothing to show.

Canyonero

2010-05-07T20:04:00.000-07:00

12 yards long, two lanes wide.

5 Records in 6 Years

2010-05-04T18:41:00.000-07:00

Heaven is Whenever was released today. Starting now I can talk about it officially.

Also today Chet Culver was in DC. According to my Dad the restaurant hosting the event over there is nice (Johnny's Half Shell, go check it out ya townies), but here in Des Moines things were pretty slow.

Wal Mart

2010-05-03T21:01:00.000-07:00

The main thing I forget about going to a school where I had an "individualized concentration" is that not everyone has read Theodor Adorno, so if you never wrote a paper on Robert Downey Jr., he was a German Marxist from the 30s who believed pop culture was late capitalism's mechanism of control over the working class because it created a suitable level of luxury. My understanding is that he thought there were secret overlords controlling the whole process, which is why he was wrong, but its pretty clear that the end result of our current cultural detritus is the same. Though it's not hip to say it, there is a paucity of critical theory, and a trend towards mediocrity in every popular medium that has all the smart kids thinking they're more talented than the talents who've made it in the field they care about. Even most blogs are pretty benign, and blogs are so democratic that even if one of your friends had a great one you wouldn't really care. We still look towards popular success when we're gauging how to instinctively feel about people and ideas, so though most icons of popular entertainment are I believe at least relatively sincere, we still in the end basically suck as a culture. And not in the sense that we're going to fall apart, which would be exciting, but that we're going to continue to stagnate digging further into this commodified sinkhole and we'll continue to make biodegradable Sun Chip bags and build wind farms so we can pretend we're headed in a better direction even though we just destroyed an ocean.

This sounds bitter, and I'm not bitter, but in the context of Ke$ha, who I've spent the past two nights researching, by which I mean I looked up the name of that song I like last night and I looked at pictures and watched her video tonight, I have to just give up treating popular music as anything but a nerdy collectible. I have a crush on Katy Perry, I think Lady Gaga is interesting, even Miley Cyrus I can dig as a Wal Mart spokesman, Ke$ha resignates only in the sense that she's the first person who's released music that I like but feel no desire to defend, because I don't care about it. It's there. Music is math and certain chord structures are innately appealing. "Tik Tok" even is slightly more original than like a Beyonce song, but ultimately it's a worse "I've Gotta Feeling," and my support for it is analogous to my support for the 7th piece of Big Red in an 11 piece pack.

And now I'm going to talk to Obama for a minute, because you are someone we got right, because you can be in bed with corporations all you want and still be a face for the country that we can take pride in, I liked seeing you address things at the state dinner that presidents don't ever address, it made me feel like I was a little bit closer to you than I have been to your predecessors, like maybe things were looking a bit transparent, but it takes away from the effect when your delivery is so bad. There's no reason to sound like you don't know what a joke is, even if you don't. I'm sure you were funny in college. Also Sarah Palin does not call it socialized media. Sarah Palin loves Facebook.

Pitchfork

2010-04-30T20:26:00.000-07:00

A few things to mention right off the bat:

--Michelob Amber Bock (Rock?) tastes like sweat. Looking forward to drinking the remaining five of you boys.

--I got an offer to apply to Pitchfork as a reviewer by a very love-over-fear brother Larry Fitzmaurice who for whatever reason has been encouraging my music writing since the day I met him (Larry, if you're reading this, you da man.)

--Craig Finn is going to become the high school guidance counselor of the indie cred swimming pool ("you can't tell people what they want to hear if you also wanna tell the truth"). I'm okay with this on the principle that he's something of an idol for me, but for as long as I'm being objective it's a pretty strong argument for the Kill Yr Idols school of thought.

In all honesty the decision to actually apply to Pitchfork is a no-brainer; it's easily one of the most popular websites for my demographic, it's prestigious as fuck in the online-journo world, and god help me if it doesn't get me laid. I already work for a governor, so moonlighting as a professional rock critic is more successful already than I ever imagined I'd be in college. But the ethical quandary that caused me to momentarily defer my decision is that Pitchfork really is quite bad, and I say that meaning I very literally don't read it anymore for any reason except for their year ends lists which always end up being underwhelming cuz I haven't heard of any of the bands they like but I still look forward to them because I desperately consume even bad lists. So I sent as writing samples an anti-Animal Collective blog post and a considerably hyperbolic review of 808's and Heartbreak, which I've not listened to since I reviewed it because, still being objective, and also not a zebra, it sucks. The point is, if I get hired, I am the king. And I work for a governor. Hello, ladies.

New York Jonathans

2010-04-26T19:58:00.000-07:00

My last post was published on Eric Epstein's birthday, so this one goes out to him. Like he did in the universe of his preference it starts with a girlfriend, because I sort of want one but with the abundance of older than me but still young girls in this state who are fucking married or engaged, this might actually be more difficult than dating in New York. Also, here is a picture of Jonathan Richman when he was young, which is when I'm obsessed with him. Really I just wanted to see what he looked like and used it as a fool excuse for a blog post.

Not that I don't like old Jonathan Richman or anything. Young Jonathan Richman looks kind of like that noob, this guy.

It was in the car where I realized that it is as simple as who you relate to, and, like I've thought forever, that people who don't relate to people relate to art instead. And I'll always love those old heroes, those war heroes, but at 23 I want a connection with life. If those last two sentences didn't sound deep to you, read them again but do it while playing this song. See what I mean? Everything becomes illuminated.

So what is the point? Why am I blogging? It's practice, can you tell? Another reason I left New York, a quick insight into my life, its cultural hegemony struck me as antithetical to the bohemian position I imagine a writer occupying, a position I slowly came to believe is fantasy anyway, but fantasy is fun and in any case here is my blog, strewn out into the void in a statement about voids you've heard and know. I have had many blogs over the years. If you're reading this you clicked on the link from my facebook page. Welcome, thanks for reading. Nice jacket.

Tonight's purpose? Questionable. Another insight into my life--these things are short, but they take ages to write. Honestly, I just wanted to say something about that song. I love it when he goes "G I R L F R E N" and I don't know why. I love the guitar solo too. I love it emotionally. And when he says "that's something that I understand," it feels like the weight of the universe falling into place. It isn't, you see, old ladies still get giddy at the sound of my boss, but that's what's so fun about music. I relate to it. I dig it.

Barely Breathing

2010-04-23T21:19:00.000-07:00

As Facebook tries to be Twitter YouTube is now trying to be Facebook in a decision that makes no sense because YouTube is the best of the three. But in case you're married to the newest of new media, I tend to like this one the best.

I feel like now that I'm sort of established it's become less important to post one-liners of mine on the Internet. I'm not as wary of the Internet as I was in college, but I'm less interested in the possibilities it allows for perfecting the virtual image, that 21st century young American dream. And if Twitter has other purposes, I still don't understand what they are, except that I think Steve could potentially have a following like a television show.

My facebook updates for the most part now are things I think would be good in novels, which I'm not writing because I have a job. I miss writing though, so I try to elevate the language in letters we send to constituent donors. Then I came home and wrote this blog post after trying to figure out what to say about this song:

I think it's immense, exactly where I want Craig to go since I'm not paying attention to his lyrics anymore. But mostly I had to learn how to embed videos now, since YouTube is altered, to be more like facebook.

Later I'll pour myself a drink and read White Teeth. It gets off to a rocky start, but its postmodern contrivances add rather than detract from the overall effect, and her points about scattered nationalities are extremely timely. By blog standards though, her book is ancient. As proprietors of the future and marshals of the present, both extremely timely and blog-time matter only to us. Which means, I think, that we're being forced to make decisions about whether to move the culture or understand it. Me? I like books. I choose to watch. That's part of why I left New York. I mean, college was great, but what a huddled group these Internet kids are. Whatever, bloggers. Whatever, blogs. Your mom goes to college.

Franklin

2010-04-19T20:14:00.000-07:00

In case anyone was wondering, this is what has got me giggling at my computer at work.

John Ensign

2010-04-18T20:21:00.000-07:00

Whereas the simple fact of the case was it was simply a case of the husband not being up to the scratch with nothing in common between them beyond the name and then a real man arriving on the scene, strong to the verge of weakness, falling a victim to her siren charms and forgetting home ties.

Tina Fey

2010-04-11T13:28:00.000-07:00

I liked Tina Fey on SNL last night because it reminded me that she's not just a dorky sexless weirdo, but a working professional, and a very successful one. Curious about how her relationship has evolved with Jimmy Fallon since they did weekend update together, I went back and watched her appearance on his show the night before. Suffice to say their relationship now is strictly professional, which is a bummer for him because he has his own show too, but entirely his fault, because he was so nervous and tongue-tied if it had been a bar she'd have gone back to her friends afterwards and said "yeah he's cute, but no. Where have all the men gone?"

It's also interesting to see her now as the host of a show she used to write for, and I want to say it meant she could just segue back into doing sketches for them, which I assume is a more challenging discipline than acting in a sitcom, but that didn't happen. I'm sure she was glad to be back and I'm sure Lorne is happy for her, but her Lonely Single Woman Who Appears in Every Sketch had me convinced that she's convinced she's above this now. And maybe I'm being unfair, but if I'm not, she's not being unfair either. She is above it. And not because she has a TV show that critics love and people ignore, but because she is, I think, the most successful woman in show business now.

Here's what I mean. For the past week I've been in Des Moines, Iowa. The first thing you need to know about Des Moines is that many people are obesely fat. I believe the term is morbid. The second thing you should know is that everyone is very friendly. Third, beyond whatever characteristics exist here that I haven't picked up on, it is in many ways like my perception of the south, where I have never been beyond my tenure in the town of Radford, Virginia, which is unrepresentatively shitty, and my briefer tenure in the much more representative Marlinton, West Virginia, where we pretend the locals are great people but we secretly feel better than them for the simple reason that we are more cosmopolitan.

In any case I am in Des Moines because I work for Chet Culver, who is the governor and a man in the most Boy's Club sense. But all of my direct superiors are women. This was also true during the three days I worked for Michael Bennet. And now, the point of all this, I moved from New York City, where everyone my age who is successful is a girl or gay. I've been told that in 2012 the Teutonic balance of power is going to shift in favor of women, and while that may or may not end up happening, I think it's safe to say they have more power and influence now than ever before. As progressive individuals this is obviously supposed to make us happy, but the problem with new wave feminism is that the process of shifting towards gender equality is too complicated for a political interest group to handle. As a big proponent of art, I'd say that achieving true equality is the province of intelligent female artists. It's still very complicated, but the question remains, why do New York women, the vanguard of hip successful chicks nationwide, love Tina Fey as much as they do, and why has she become such an immense force in the public sphere?

First of all, this is Lady Gaga:

I'm going to do a lot of projecting now when I talk about her because she and I went to the same school, and I'm pretty sure that the person she is isn't too different than any of the girls I met who want to be her now. Lady Gaga is younger and hotter than Tina Fey. She's creative and savvy enough to have fronted a band in college that had great hooks and a marginal East Village fanbase. She enjoys good sex, wishes she had more of it, remembers her first time fondly, and has at least one guy in her life that treated her like shit for no good reason. As a talent, she's aware enough to perceive the pop landscape as being very female-centric, and as a creative force, and as an intelligence, she realized that while female-empowerment pop became increasingly overt, it continued to be flawed by its retaliatory starting-point. What I mean is, if dinosaurs like Britney Spears were finally writing songs about anger rather than hurt, and if Katy Perrys were being mechanized to sling insults at their ex-boyfriends, they still were retaliating against a guy that had hurt them in some way. I think these songs generally are simple and stupid, but fairly honest (as a side note, if we're going to keep in mind that behind every detached girl stands a dick boyfriend, we need to keep in mind that behind every dick boyfriend stands a girl who made him feel like he was toothless. The battle of the sexes rages on for eternity). Gaga's music isn't more complex, unless you think her materialism is ironic, but it is more self-conscious. Similarly it's less honest. "Telephone," beyond being insane, which it is, is about a girl who wants to have fun in a club and is cock-blocked repeatedly by her boyfriend who keeps calling her. Throughout she makes brief allusions to something troubling, a reason for why she needs to lose herself for a night, but the suggestion is never made that her problems have anything to do with the guy she's with. So what Gaga is instead is a girl with feelings and emotions completely apart from her relationships with men, signing the clarion call for all romantically inclined girls embittered towards the opposite sex by some hurtful experience. Rather than retaliate, she castrates, because she's the dominant force in the relationship. The problem with this kind of music is that its wish-fulfillment. It's dishonest. Not the narrative--this kind of thing happens every night I'm sure, men have never been as powerful as their villainy suggests--but in the intended satisfaction of the fanbase. Girls who dig the sexually aware independence are going to be ones with axes to grind, whereas Gaga is talking about a place where she doesn't even know that what she's doing is a power move, she's just keeping it real. This isn't a place that she comes from; her gift to her legions of fans is an empowering fantasy without real world application, except now that the song is out more girls are going to be blowing off their guys on the phone. And I also want to make it clear that I don't think Lady Gaga is doing this because she's a marketing tool, I think she has a good heart and wants to give girls something they'd like to have.

The inherent difference between Lady Gaga and Tina Fey is that Lady Gaga is younger and hotter, which is a tremendously sexist way of saying Lady Gaga (tragic flaw) utilizes sex and Tina Fey (conquering hero) does not. Tina Fey makes the boys from the Boys Club uncomfortable because she suggests the possibility that women truly don't need men, that they can be dorky and sexless and eat fast food, and above all, be people, by themselves. It amazes me that it's taken this long for someone to say this, but I suppose that has something to do with the fact that Tina Fey, unlike Lady Gaga, works far less on her image, or at least did before she started saying "there's more 30 Rock, thats like finding one more french fry at the bottom of the bag!" which I basically blame NBC for but her artistic independence means she is complicit as well. Tina Fey has created an honest to god independent woman out of a character who appeals to female actions and desires that are completely separate from sex. She's advancing female equality in a way that has real-world implications. She's done this with Liz Lemon, a Female Hero who's so weird and dorky that I actually really dislike her despite loving her show (my opinion is clearly irrelevant on this point but Red, White, and Jennifer Aniston is mine) so I liked seeing her be kind of a badass last night. And the way she treated Jimmy Fallon was just shit I see every time I go out.

Of course, I live in Des Moines where everyone is fat and my sister, who's going to Penn State in the fall, hates Lady Gaga and I doubt knows who Tina Fey is. Sometimes its important to remember that New York is an island.

If Anyone Knows of Any songs or movies about Iowa please let me know about them

2010-04-08T22:39:00.000-07:00

A lot of work goes into any good writing, but I'm just waiting for my clothes to dry so I can go to bed, some time near one o'clock. Here's the thing about Des Moines: it's cold as fuck, sort of. The best thing I can say about being here is that it makes me want to live in as many places as possible. They told us about this place, the United States, and I want to see each one. And if you ever wondered why everyone in New York and MCLEAN VIRGINIA is hot its because all the ugly people go everywhere else. They file into places that aren't near colleges so they won't be near sex. Sex makes them feel queasy. There's a school though on my way to work and coming back from lunch I saw high school girls smoking. That is a sight I enjoy tremendously.

I don't want to give the impression I don't like Des Moines because I do. I actually like it a lot. For instance, there's a bulldozer outside my window. It looks something like this:

Like a smoking colleague of mine (not hot I mean, addicted) pointed out, the cigarette smoking people are an increasingly endangered species. They're still welcome in my apartment complex though. Sometimes one takes advantage of this when the internet is extremely slow. Like now. It is, alas, a symptom of living in a motel, which is to say my room looks something like this:

I'm going now to check my laundry, so I'll bid you farewell. As Jay said one sleepy evening to Beyonce, good night.

A New Beginning

2010-03-29T19:13:00.000-07:00

Before I go outside to have a cigarette and urinate and ponder the nature of infinity I want to announce my return to Red White and Aniston. In two days I'm going to move to Des Moines, where this blog will slowly develop a subtle Midwestern accent. I will refrain however from writing about my sole Iowan hero Chet Culver, except to post pictures of his opponent Terry Brandstad.

Anyway because I've no longer any remote interest in writing about movies and old bands, I'm in a sort of purgatory while I try to develop a new authorial personality. My two current focuses are Terry Brandstad and the Aurora Borealis. The Aurora Borealis is caused by the ionization of Nitrogen atoms somewhere near the top of an outer level of the earth's atmosphere that looks like this:

And this is Terry Brandstad:

I know, I've bet on the wrong horse.

The Decade Herein Referred to as the Naughty Aughties

2009-12-07T16:02:00.001-08:00

No more list posts if someone can get me a job.

Munich is the film of the decade. Not because I really care about the terrorism debate, but because of
- Daniel Craig
- Geoffrey Rush
- The dinner scene, and the madly pimped out French dad
- Bana sex face
- Capable cinematography at every beautiful place in Europe
- The not-that-drawn-out theme about Israel being the eternal Jewish mother that Philip Roth definitely wishes he came up with
- The scene where Bana runs in front of that kid when the Israeli army is raiding the hotel in Beirut and shouts "NO NO NO DON'T SHOOT!" The confluence of acting and writing does not get better
- The blood mixing with milk and wine shot after the first kill
- The CIA assassination sabotage
- "That's it! There's no ceremony or anything!"

And like a hundred other things too. The movie is perfect.

I also thoroughly enjoyed The Departed, Lord of the Rings, No Country for Old Men, and what the hell, There Will be Blood.

The movie of the year was obviously Inglourious Basterds, in which Quentin Tarantino proves he understands all the things that are cool about Thomas Pynchon and violence. But the best theater experience of the year for me was seeing ultimate movie star George Clooney and then ultimate character actor Philip Seymour Hoffman in the same day with back to back showings of Up in the Air and Pirate Radio. If you don't have friends, be friends with these people.

Interpol

2009-12-03T14:03:00.000-08:00

Interpol and I are in a good place right now, so forgive my past claims against their talent when I say that they win the Interpol vs. Strokes showdown that clearly has been coming this entire decade (which, incidentally, I'm trying not to care about.) Interpol rocks harder, A., and their sound embodies the lush fatalism of an epoch that Don Delillo is saying won't make us stronger even if it doesn't kill us. The Strokes on the other hand sound like rich white boys, and if this decade has taught me anything, it's that the apocalypse will be brought about by rich white boys (and girls. Especially girls.) So Interpol gets the edge for their foresight, that bigger picture analysis. Also, they rock harder. And I didn't even listen to The Strokes when I wrote this. I listened to Yo La Tengo, because we're in a pretty good place these days.

Of course, both Interpol and Don Delillo get paid to write about disconnect. I don't get paid at all. WOAH-OH-OH!! You're a lush, and I hate it.

Bath haus of Gaga

2009-11-14T13:29:00.000-08:00

I have not written in a long time because I have no internet connection from my apartment and it's weird to blog from the NYU library, which is why I'm keeping this one short. But reading the conversation Paul posted on facebook (Paul is a dickwad, don't worry about him), I was reminded how much I like writing about music. Also, I'm trying to apply for jobs writing about music, so I promise I will write in this, once I get internet, which will be in like December, because fuck Verizon.

This video is only necessary if you're the kind of person who still tries to scare people on Halloween. I'm posting it because, despite how batshit unhot she is, I'd definitely hit it. And also because it's the first new song I've heard since "Party in the USA." Not as good though.

5 Separate Videos set to Shawn Michael's "Sexy Boy"

2009-10-17T21:40:00.000-07:00

401(k) Version

Achilles to Youth Version

Gratification Version

Usurper Version

Spongebob Version

Proto-nerdism

2009-10-16T19:54:00.000-07:00

Having learned that the original meme Hamster Dance has been castrated into oblivion by the powers that be and apparently think it was a viable enterprise and not something people visited one time for 45 seconds when they were 8, I was reminded of a flash video I found in 8th grade, when these things were actually sort of an esoteric project. In my mind nothing on the internet since has improved on this video.

John Fogerty

2009-10-15T04:54:00.000-07:00

In case you find yourself perusing the tracklist on John Fogerty's new record and get stopped up by track 11, "Haunted House" is in fact about moving into a haunted house. "What's the point?" some will ask, "beyond the affirmation that John seems to be doing well," as if that isn't enough.

I also read that Rudyard Kipling poem with the "You're a better man than I am" ending

2009-10-15T00:54:00.000-07:00

Here's what's going on: throw your hands up if you've ever spent all night spinning poorly-received Lou Reed solo albums from the 70s but not really listening so it all sounds fine but not great because Lou really isn't into hooks, either because he doesn't have the knack or he thinks they're beneath him, and oh yeah the lyrics, Poet Reed, even though any halfway honest person will tell you that yeah, he's probably a smart guy but who the fuck would validate this as poetry, and what the fuck is this smart business anyway, as if equating love with time or drugs with dysfunction is really that profound, oh, poor guy's in love and has problems, when I was on the subway last weekend guess what I didn't want, songs that try to prove nihilism by being detached and aesthetically conscious, I wanted songs that sounded alive, like Jackie Wilson, who released Higher and Higher the same year Lou released Heroin, the grand statement of which is that heroin isn't good or bad it's just a thing for people who can't deal with the homeless problem or whatever, which isn't profound as much as it's lazy, so yeah I spun the love song and bounced all over the subway platform which is as far as I can tell a superior consequence of m-u-s-i-c than the smug egotism that comes after validating cynicism and believing that process is somehow beautiful and sincere because it's expressed well (though not as good as getting a boner that rips through your pants, and immediate pleasure being so instantly equated with sex is probably the best thing I can say about Lou Reed because he was sad enough to perceive some general need for ironic distance within consumer culture that would manifest itself casually that way to his super-fans a generation later, but I'm still down with it because I like music way more than I like sex, and while we're on the subject, on good days I feel like making the Geico Cavemen into a tv show is the best form of market subversion we're going to realistically get behind, (especially since that show didn't succeed, because it was bad I hear), not better than ranking the recurring characters from advertisements in order of likeability on your personal blog, but better than avoiding the television altogether), and then at four o'clock realize you've wasted the past 2 hours and can't decide whether to go outside or try to sleep or put on Almost Famous because you're rewatching all your dvds to justify their purchase. Yeah I should probably move.

They've been playing all night so I can't really parse specifics, but he does get off some hot tracks on some of these records. "She's My best Friend" for example, off Coney Island Baby, could do some damage.

A Serious Man

2009-10-13T22:35:00.000-07:00

Everybody gonna dance tonight. Everybody gonna feel alright. Everybody gonna dance around tonight.

Party in the USA (For Real)

2009-10-12T00:01:00.000-07:00

OH GOD there are so many things to say about this video that I've watched 800 times, so I'll just stick with the two most important ones. First, it's so good how she throws her hands up every single time she says "put my hands up." Second, this party is without question taking place in a Walmart.

This is the Infinite Jest. You will never stop watching.

Party in the USA

2009-10-11T19:46:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I have very bad ideas for things to write about. And sometimes when I have nothing to write about except for these bad ideas that're only still in my head so that I can imagine there are critics who talk about the good and the bad of my vast well of inspiration, I write two sentences in my blog about absolutely nothing.

Also Miley Cyrus erased her twitter because she was sick of gossip sites reporting on things she said she was doing on it. She used the phrase "lame gossip sites," which makes me wonder if somewhere there are people who fully support the unlameness of gossip sites, and are offended when people perpetuate this stigma they have.

A Series of Difficulties

2009-10-10T23:02:00.000-07:00

An oddly necessary song. Let's see, what could it soundtrack I wonder. What did I do today? Saw an apartment in Spanish Harlem. Yeah, that works well enough.

By the way if I ever at any point claim this album is good its because it overwhelmed me with sheer insanity.

Bruce Springsteen

2009-10-07T22:36:00.001-07:00

I realized that Bruce realized one day that his wife and family was more important than his music. That's great for him, but it's why no one gives a shit about Lucky Town.

Shout out hotness where hotness lies though: