Georgia Hubley + 20 Years = Drew Faust

Last week, I had the pleasure of going to a lunch featuring Harvard's president, Drew Gilpin Faust, and Housing and Urban Development Secretary and GSD alumnus Shaun Donovan. Amid their interesting comments about public service and housing policy (and remotely interesting comments about how great Harvard is), I was struck by how much Faust looks like Georgia Hubley, Yo La Tengo's drummer, with 20 extra years. It's really uncanny, perhaps extra uncanny considering the age difference between the two. What is it that's so funny about people looking alike?

Hubley is probably rock's most charming drummer. While her husband, Ira Kaplan, Yo La Tengo's leader, has spastic moments on stage, she sits behind her kit, effortlessly rolling off her toms, hitting her high hat and staying on tempo, with her well-composed ponytail and look of bemused exasperation on her face. "Oh, boys," I imagine she always thinks about Kaplan and bassist James McNew, "you can exert all the effort you want. I'll sit here and be rock's most charming drummer without breaking a sweat." There's always a rough road and an easy road, and she makes me wonder why I would ever choose the rough one. Funny how I'm the one who has spastic moments on stage.

Not surprisingly, my girlfriend and her friend, our drummer, model their rock lives on Hubley. Or at least I think they do. Anyway, to the good times, here's the video for "The Summer," a splendid, delicate song by Yo La Tengo, from 1992, where Hubley provides backup vocals and a wonderful change in rhythm mid-song:

Go Away, A-Bombs from A-Rod

It seems nearly inevitable that the Yankees will win this year's World Series -- their lineup is too deep and C.C. Sabathia too good a pitcher every three days (which maybe only one or two other pitchers can do these days). Fa fa blip blip.

Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for Wal-Mart -- corporatism wins, independence loses, money trumps homegrown talent, the megalopolis defeats the hometown yet again. While fathers obviously don't want to inflict pain on their children, raising one's kids to be Yankees fan is almost like teaching them the wrong life lessons. "No need to persevere, son. Forget about the idea that you can go anywhere with talent. Throw enough money at a problem and you'll solve it. Without the money, though, you'll probably be thwarted. Heartbreak? You'll never know it," he says. "Why dad?" the son asks. "Because you're a Yankees fan," the dad replies.

The idea that the Yankess were going to abandon their free-agent-driven approach to team-building has proved short-lived. Thirteen years into the era of Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada and Andy Pettitte, the only other homegrown players to last successfully have been Robinson Cano and Melky Cabrera. After a one-year break, Brian Cashman et al are back to throwing money at the problem. Sure, other teams in all professional sports do this, but there's something overwhelming plastic and unlikeable about the players the Yankees select. The egomania of Alex Rodriguez and do-gooder talents of Marx Texeira are nauseating. While they sit on opposite sides of the spectrum, there's little genuine about either. It's almost impossible to be someone who yearns for the real thing and is a Yankees fan.

Thanks to the obnoxious home run call by John Sterling for Rodriguez, even more nauseating than the third baseman himself, for the post's title. A former co-worker said I do the impression very well, and watching Yankees games without me isn't quite the same. It's one of the higher compliments I've received the past couple of years.

"What Was It Like Back Then?"

In my challenging, occasionally obfuscating course on the history and theory of planning, the professor recently asked for our thoughts on the role of nostalgia in design. Several people, mostly in the urban design program, raised their hands to dismiss it. Here are my notes: "Nostalgia suggests an uncritical look at the past, distorting its memory; focusing on the past, instead of innovating and looking toward the future. But what about the desire to re-live? A puritanism tied to modernism, rejecting romanticism."

What about that desire to re-live? Surely there doesn't have to be something inherently hokey about fondly remembering the past. Nostalgia is a sign that perhaps something, however hard it is to define, might have been better back then. Is there always another peak coming around the corner or should we strive to hold on to what we've got?

On a related note, Kairos Shen, Boston's chief planner, told me and my classmates during a tour of his office last week that "most of the buildings we're putting up now are designed to fail in 25 to 30 years." (Someone asked him about his thoughts on historical preservation and, in his circuitously insightful way of answering questions, he landed briefly on construction quality. Obviously, he prefers the older over the newer.) I cite it because: If things were right in the past, build on them for improvement; don't reinvent them. Nostalgia can be productive, no?

The post's title is a lyric I wrote for one of our songs. It's about my favorite highway, but also, I think, about going home. Then again, there are only 38 or so words in the song.

Tom Cruise Was Filming Near My House

Tom Cruise's and Cameron Diaz's newest movie, an action film strangely titled "Wichita" for now, spent the day shooting about four blocks from where I live. The location is a stretch of auto repair and towing businesses, so perhaps they needed something "industrial-looking." (Unfortunately, my walk to school this morning didn't bring me close enough to see.)

Cruise and Diaz (and Katie Holmes and children, natch) have been traipsing around Boston the past month shooting this movie, as have many other actors working on other projects in about the past two years, because the Legislature decided to extend rather generous tax credits to the industry to entice it here. Productions have certainly come, with people such as Bruce Willis in tow, but the benefit are eminently debatable.

CW Unbound, the impeccable blog run by the impeccable think tank MassINC, has a very good summary of the state Department of Revenue's report on the credits. I give greater weight to the facts that Massachusetts collected 16 cents of taxes for every dollar of tax credit and much of the gross salaries are going to out-of-state actors, over the estimated $870 million of economic activity the credits have generated.

Sure, tax policy should be used to create incentives and persuade people and industries to do one thing instead of another, e.g. come to Massachusetts to do business. However, government has to be very careful about the industries it decides to favor. Movie productions' broader economic benefit is similar to the nature of the on-location shoots happening in metro Boston: They swoop into town, create a noticeable ruckus and then leave very quickly, leaving people starry-eyed in their wake. You'll talk about them for awhile, but won't have much to talk about. The downstream benefits are hard to identify because the business is very self-contained, hiring people who production directors already know and hiring them for relatively brief periods of times, without needing ancillary support for sustained periods.

Really, the biggest beneficiaries of this are the Herald's love-to-hate-'em "Track Girls," who run the paper's gossip page. Though, which makes for worse copy: Writing daily updates about what Cruise ate for dinner, as they do now that Boston is "Hollywood East" (as they like to call it), or writing about H-list celebrities and the wives of the city's sports stars, as they used to -- and still regularly -- do?

Thanks to LCD Soundsystem, which has made regular appearances on the blog the past couple of months, for inspiring the post's title.

Update: The WSJ has a good story in today's paper about Iowa's experience with subsidizing the film industry. It ended with directors using tax credits to buy Range Rovers.

The Sequel to "The Sequel to Your Life" Post

Prompted by Pavement's reunion, Sasha Frere-Jones and his New Yorker music critic pal, Kelefa Sanneh, weigh in on the the last five years' rash of them, and firmly come down on the side of bands that stick to the hallowed back catalogue. Sanneh says Dinosaur Jr. was "revelatory" when it reunited for a string of shows in 2005, but now, after two new albums, "is a band in a more traditional, less thrilling, and probably more sustainable sense: three guys with a strong track record and a new CD to flog."

Again, I don't see what's wrong with reconvened bands putting out a new record. Why not exercise your talents? Of course, the point it moot if time has eroded a band's skills so much that version 2.0 is embarrassing to watch. But, come on: Why not smoke 'em if you got 'em (as I'll never forget a referee saying to me and several others on the foul line during a rec-league game in sixth grade or so, as we waited for a player to shoot two free throws)? I find the reunion tour a crasser way to cash in on one's legacy than an album.

As further proof of Frere-Jones' skills, read the wonderful quips he placed next to readers' suggestions for other band reunions here and here. He must breathe witty insights into pop. I can't quibble with the lists he compiled, though perhaps will add Whiskeytown, the Dismemberment Plan and a circa 2002 concert of the classic Startime International lineup -- the Walkmen, the French Kicks and the Natural History. Not that any of those bands rank close to being my favorites, but it would recapture a certain mood. But there I go lusting after a concert...

The Language of Common Life

It's always funny when you realize that other people notice things that you thought only you thought about. The latest example: The Times' delicate handling of offensive band names, which I've written about in these pages before, is something other people think about! None other than Sasha Frere-Jones, Earth's best music writer, noticed the Times' ongoing dilemma with Fucked Up, the semi-melodic punk band on Matador, who recently won the Polaris Prize:

"The other upside to Fucked Up winning this prize is that we get to watch The New York Times figure out a way to report it," Frere-Jones writes, noting that the Village Voice's music critic Rob Harvilla has even more fun with it. Harvilla finishes his blog post by writing, "Thank god I wrote for an alt-weekly." Who knew the things that make me chuckle make them chuckle?

Banning Fucked Up's name from the Times makes much more sense than outlawing "Pissed Jeans," which prompted my original post. In fact, for those following at home, this is the first time profanity has appeared in these pages. Thanks to Fucked Up, whose prize-winning album inspires the post's title.