I won't be writing any new posts here for at least the next two weeks because I'll be traveling, surprisingly enough, to India. Unlike the last time I warned about this, I don't think there would be anything monumental enough to compel me to write from abroad, unless there were an announcement that John Cusack and Minnie Driver were starring in a sequel to "Good Will Hunting." Enjoy December's end and January's start, and I'll return with my annual, boring post about which records I liked in the past year and thoughts on the trip.
Also worth noting: I set a personal record for posts in one year, with 91! And I thought I was busy...
Liking and disliking Mayor Bloomberg is easy. His two most noteworthy decisions of the fall highlight his ability to charm and irritate. First, he hired as New York's new chancellor of public schools Cathleen Black, a longtime friend and successful media executive who has no experience in education and never went or sent her children to public schools. (The Bloomberg administration eventually also promoted someone to the district's no. 2 position to focus specifically on academics, so that state officials would confirm Black.) Second, when New Jersey's governor, Chris Christie, shrunk from building additional lines between Penn Station and his state's Gold Coast, Bloomberg stepped in and decided to extend the No. 7 subway line farther west than originally planned, to Secaucus, N.J.
As an entrepreneur who went from the working class to one of the country's wealthiest people, Bloomberg believes in the private market's power and its benefits. He's been one of the finance industry's most vocal defenders during the past two years. He knows a woman who's run newspaper and magazine companies very well before, and assumes she will bring the same acumen and have the same results with the country's largest public school system. This is a nearly blind faith in the private market. Aren't there many educators who also know how to administrate? But then he realizes, as Christie misses, that for a place to remain relevant for the long term, it needs to make serious long-term investments in its infrastructure. Of course these projects are expensive. However, without them, places ossify and don't adapt well to new waves of businesses, people and investment. All three decide to head elsewhere.
Bloomberg understands the need to think comprehensively and strategically about what his city is today (or in the past, his company, and in the future, his philanthropy) and what it should be in 20 years, and knows how to work so that both visions are executed properly. Both sides of him are bold, more so than perhaps any other working politician today, which is why, even if one side is disagreeable and the other is winning, he always earns my respect.
Thanks to Spoon for inspiring the post's title. The record from which it comes has grown on me in the five years since it was released, not least because several acquaintances from my alma mater are in liner notes' main photo, standing in the front row at one of the band's shows.
What? Sasha Frere-Jones now works for Rupert Murdoch? For the past several months, Murdoch has apparently been planning a daily online paper for the iPad to add to his News Corp. assets, and has recruited Frere-Jones, the world's best music critic, to be the culture editor. The Times reports that Frere-Jones will remain at his day job, writing for the New Yorker, but it's doubtful that there's any more dissonant culture clash within New York media than the New Yorker and News Corp. Frere-Jones' writing is deft, nuanced, springy, fun and incisive. News Corp.'s attitude and reporting, best exemplified by Fox News and the Post, is superficial, bloated, histrionic and discardable. How this lasts is hard to see.
Anyway, here's to the good times: the video for "When I'm With You," by Best Coast, whose debut record is one of Frere-Jones' favorites of 2010:
Amid all the squabbling about President Obama's compromise with Congressional Republicans to prolong the Bush administration's tax policy and extend unemployment benefits and tax breaks for the middle and lower classes, few have called it for what it is: another stimulus package. Considering its size -- about $858 billion -- and general purpose -- sending people more spending money, albeit at a disproportionate rate to the wealthy -- it qualifies. (To give them credit, Paul Krugman and John Cassidy have seen this; the former, to criticize it as weak medicine, and the latter, to mildly accept it as needed.)
Republicans chose to use the first stimulus, way back in January 2009, to define themselves as the "Party of No," intransigently opposed to Obama's presidency because he's a socialist and to federal spending because it irresponsibly adds to the U.S. deficit. Economists' general consensus since then, including the opinion of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, is that stimulus measure worked by grabbing the national economy by the collar and saving it from sliding off a cliff. Without it, the alternate course is easy to see.
That's far from why Republicans support the second one, though, meaning their rationale falls on at least one of these two explanations: 1. They don't really care about the federal deficit as much as they profess; or: 2. They really don't care about the federal deficit when the top 0.1 percent of the country's wealthiest benefit the most as a result of the added debt. Obama shouldn't now start skewing policy toward the wealthy to earn Republicans' support on other priorities of his, but it's certainly frustrating that it took us so long to arrive at this point, especially when there wasn't anything particularly principled about the GOP's stand from the beginning.
On a related note, after Republicans made a great show of their decision following the midterm election to stop putting earmarks in the federal budget for pet projects, it turns out many of them still put earmarks in the federal budget. So, as much as I dislike this cliche: They were against them before they were for them. Or is the other way around?
I try not to clutter my Facebook page with too many of the presents, fan pages and other applications that have sprouted the past three years, but if any place deserved a spot, it was the Market, a small deli in downtown Pittsfield. Its brow was certainly higher than the city's typical store, with well-made sandwiches, salads and pastries, beer and wine, and nice dry goods for sale. However, there was nothing fussy about it; in fact, the aesthetic was eminently approachable, amiable and uncomplicated. The store's owners even know their fonts well. I favor anywhere or anyone that knows it has something good happening, but doesn't need to broadcast it loudly.
Perhaps that humility was the Market's problem. At the end of last week, the store's owners unexpectedly wrote in a bittersweet tone on their Facebook page that they were closing immediately. Opening a store like this in downtown Pittsfield is a tough sell. As much as the city has tried to re-position itself as an upcoming, artistic secret that's so good that you want to tell your friends but don't want to tell your friends in case it spoils the scene, there are not many people walking down North Street who would patronize a grocer like the Market. Trust me, I walked it every day for three months this summer.
Gentrification is often discussed as a linear movement -- once a neighborhood changes, it never recaptures what once was. But in many places, change is topsy-turvy, as steps happen in one direction but are then foiled; things remain the same for a long time, lurch in one direction and then jerk back to where they were. I don't object to a store like the Market establishing a gentrifying flag in the sand in a place like Pittsfield (or to me also putting one in by patronizing it and [briefly] moving there) because there are places that the market, as in the real estate one, is never going to discover naturally.
Western Massachusetts isn't Brooklyn, where every neighborhood adjacent to Bushwick is the next candidate for gentrification, in a process that seems to repeat itself endlessly. Without some people willing to create their own scene and to try something new in a quiet place like Pittsfield, it's probably only going to continue its post-industrial parabolic decline. Introducing the gentrifier here is fine with me because she's never going to overwhelm the rest of the city's character. Rather, she'll create a very distinct combination of the rough and the refined, which is a pair that's quite hard to find these days, making the place all the more special.
The education documentary "Waiting for Superman" is provocative and worth watching because it elevates a serious national issue -- the problems of urban education -- to a national platform. It's also not a very good documentary because the director throws lots of ideas together without examining them deeply. For example, the movie chastises teachers' unions as a bottleneck for reform, then acknowledges they've historically existed because teachers aren't paid well, but doesn't address this conflict. It also says there are countless underperforming teachers who need to be replaced, but doesn't wonder from where these replacements will come or why American society doesn't produce more high-quality teachers.
When Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of D.C.'s public schools, appears, all I could think was, Urban renewal. Rhee seems to take such glee in dynamiting the system, saying she can totally re-shape it because she only wants to be a chancellor once. (Ironically, she didn't realize how brief that one-time position would be: After she was interviewed, her patron, then-Mayor Adrian Fenty, was defeated in D.C.'s Democratic primary, which, as in most American cities, is essentially its general election. She then resigned.) She has no favors to ask or re-pay, and swiftly reorganizes the system, cuts the administration, closes schools, fires bad teachers, changes the union's contract, and sees results. How long those last is unclear, but it's clear the system needed to be changed.
However, her comments are also juxtaposed with a public meeting about the administration's plan to close some schools, where Rhee steps away from the microphone because there's no point in talking -- parents and students (and teachers and union members who mainly want to save their ranks) are shouting so loudly and holding signs in protest that Rhee wouldn't be heard. Obviously, parents are going to be pissed when their kids schools close, and it's impossible to transform any system without angering many people. But are the parents acting irrationally because they're scared of the impending change and, for several reasons, can't see the big picture, and Rhee is acting in their best interest? Or is Rhee overlooking something, that as bad as these schools are, they have a defined, longstanding community whose disruption is traumatic for everyone involved and shouldn't be discounted?
Urban renewal fits the same theme. In the postwar years, using money from the federal government, cities cleared neighborhoods, typically ones with minority-majority populations, that it declared to be slums, so that it could put high-rises, highways or large roads there instead. Even if residents objected, governments argued it was in their and the city's best interests to clean them. Many of the neighborhoods were in bad condition, but they were also functioning neighborhoods with communities of people -- and sometimes the judgment on their quality was truly subjective. The North End and SoHo, two of the most desirable places to live in the urban Northeast these days, were nearly cleared as part of urban renewal, before Jane Jacobs stepped in. Now, urban renewal is uniformly dismissed and has been for many years.
Rhee probably won't be Robert Moses, who led the massive redevelopment of New York City during the urban renewal years and was probably the most famous and controversial planner of the 20th century, because of her brief tenure. But she has many peers and followers implementing similar plans, and will probably at least advise powerful people in the future. It's hard to argue totally against them, but it's hard to argue totally for them as well.
Update: The Times reports that Rhee, after being considered for schools chancellor in Florida, New Jersey and New York City, is founding her own educational advocacy organization, to push her policies. That it's exploiting the Supreme Court'sCitizens United decision to raise more money from wealthy individuals and corporations than it could before only adds to the complexity.
Along the Boylston Street facade of its central library, the Boston Public Library has hung a sign apologizing for its minor construction. It's an insignificant marker except for the sign's title, "Cities Are Libraries." What an excellent anthem! It conveys so much depth in so few words: That cities are places of education, culture, history and exploration; that, like a library's obscure stacks, cities have countless undiscovered corners of treasures; that as much as the confines of a library have to offer, there's a whole world out there on city streets; that suburbs aren't libraries; that cities are where it happens.
Copley Square, where the BPL's main branch is located, is the perfect place for such a triumphant slogan because of its rich layers of urban architecture and history. It was created in the mid-19th century as part of the fill and street grid used to build the Back Bay. The Trinity Church, designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, and the BPL, designed by Charles McKim of McKim, Mead and White, are classic examples of ornate late-19th century American style. The Hancock Building, by Henry Cobb, is one of the most elegant examples of a modernist skyscraper. The surrounding hotels and office towers and retail of Boylston Street represent typical, postwar downtown development. The square has a wonderful public space for gathering and a weekly farmers' market, that favorite programming option for young adults' return to the city in the early 21st century.
Whoever coined this phrase, at the BPL or elsewhere, deserves gigantic credit. The above photo, found online, starts to capture the layers of Copley Square.
When a 20-something girl riding a Bolt bus to New York with me in September pulled a container out of her bag for a mid-ride snack of brussels sprouts, much to the surprise of the middle-aged woman sitting in front of her, I knew something was up.
Everyone has those foods they detest as a kid that they come to like once they hit their twenties and their palettes mature -- for me, mustard is one -- but brussels sprouts is the quintessential example. How many lame jokes are there about them and recipes promising that you'll actually like them this time? Yet brussels sprouts are having a better fall than even Sarah Palin's. I'm eating them at least once per week, thanks to my fiancee's near-obsession with them, and when I tell my friends this they seem to understand totally. When a few came over for dinner and I served brussels sprouts, they exclaimed about how much they like them (though maybe they were being kind about what I cooked). The Times recently included a recipe for them, via hipster chef Zak Pelaccio, in its annual edition of cooking for Thanksgiving.
Really, they're everywhere, which is intriguing because they don't rank high on a list of tastiest vegetables. Something about them is downright funky, though also filling and satisfying. Cool cycles are hard to understand, though it seems brussels sprouts, just like 42nd street, reached the point that they were so uncool that they were uncool again, perhaps even without irony. A mouthwatering photo of roasted sprouts is above.
Two years ago, I gushed about the Trail Blazers after they beat the Celtics in a hard-fought game. They were an indie gem at the time, perhaps rising to challenge the league's elite. But now that Greg Oden's career is dangerously close to its end, Rudy Fernandez pouts about la lluvia in Portland and several other players have left, that moment has dissipated.
Fortunately, the Thunder have coalesced to take their place. Obviously, they have Kevin Durant, one of the NBA's best players, but even without him here in Boston last night, they defeated the Celtics in a tough game, when they were also missing Jeff Green, their third-best player, couldn't make a shot for the whole fourth quarter, and faced a hostile crowd. It certainly qualified as a statement game, with gutsy play, led by point guard Russell Westbrook.
The Thunder find themselves in the same place as the Blazers did two years ago: They have a staggeringly young roster filled with lots of athletic, versatile players who seem to genuinely like each other and realize they can do something special together. Even better, the team gives Oklahoma City some cache and makes it seem cool; the roster is multicultural like the Blazers' was; and guard James Harden has an immense, awesome beard. In his most recent column, Bill Simmons, who also has overheated about the Blazers and the Thunder before, urged everyone to calm down about the Thunder after their start wasn't flawless, but why not get excited? This moment -- where everyone understands what's happening, appreciates the potential and starts to click with each other -- is an exciting one. It applies to plenty more moments than sports, even relatively mundane ones that aren't driven by celebrities.
Three weeks into the NBA season, the Miami Heat's season looks much shakier than it should -- a common insight. That their record is 6-4 isn't all that alarming because basketball seasons are long and teams sometimes start slowly. However, the two losses to the Celtics in those first 10 games are troubling. Good teams, even if they're only a few games into the season with a totally overhauled roster (though that overhaul infamously added three of the NBA's best players!), should be able to adjust to one of their top rivals for the second matchup and beat them on their home court. The Heat couldn't.
Listening to those games, I was struck by how well LeBron James played and how poorly his new teammates Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh did. Sure, Wade is averaging is 24.7 points per game overall this season, but against the Celtics, he's scored 21 points on 6-for-28 shooting in two games. Bosh is struggling mightily in general.
James' career is starting to hint at that of Allen Iverson, the star guard from circa 1996-2006 for the Philadelphia 76ers. Iverson was one of the top scorers of that decade, running through teams to the hoop, but not really as a great player. He led the 76ers to the Finals once, but during his career, the Sixers searched in vain for an appropriate partner so they could burst through to the league's elite. Among Iverson's sidekicks were Jerry Stackhouse, Glenn Robinson, Larry Hughes and Carmelo Anthony. Aside from Anthony, none were very good players when with Iverson, but I think the nagging feeling that the Sixers couldn't find a proper supporting cast because there wasn't one is accurate.
The same seems to true of LeBron. The Cavaliers went from Mo Williams to Antwan Jamison and Shaquille O'Neal, hoping that one would fit with him, but none did. Now, the Heat are struggling. Like Iverson, LeBron is an phenomenally talented player and scorer, but perhaps his talent is so immense that it's overwhelming. Sure, personnel executives make the wrong decisions at least some of the time, but so do players. The Heat should be able to beat the Celtics the next time they play.
In a recent column, Peter Canellos, one of the Globe's highest-ranking editors, pined for a second airport for metro Boston an idea batted around through the 1980s, only to dissolve. Dulles Airport in northern Virginia, Canellos writes, birthed "a city unto itself," with "hundreds of office buildings emblazoned with the most dazzling names in global high tech," albeit a generic city "that could be anywhere." Meanwhile, Boston is static about 20 years later, and the decision not to build an airport looks like "a big mistake, the kind that separates the truly global metropolises from the boutique cities."
Forget whether an airport with hundreds of acres of open land around it, ready for development, is a good route to being a top-tier city in the early 21st century. This is a questionable assumption. Canellos misses the mark more widely when he says that Boston is a boutique city, not one of the "truly global metropolises" he wishes it were. With the country's leading universities, life science companies and finance companies, and great culture, sports, nature and general quality of life, Boston is a global city. If it isn't, only maybe five cities are (New York, L.A., London, Tokyo and Beijing or Shanghai), which seems too restrictive of a list. And if Boston isn't a global city, why do I have to walk around every foreign tour group in the U.S. on my way through Harvard Yard?
Boston is also a wonderful place to study planning. It's post-industrial but re-animated; it removed an elevated highway and is redeveloping its waterfront. Downtown includes some of the country's most notorious urban renewal projects; but downtown also doesn't include as many such projects as it could because the massive push back against urban renewal and inner-city highways began here. It is one of the starting points of the historic preservation movements and not surprisingly, has wonderful, charming neighborhoods. It also is one of the starting points of the CDC movement because of the city's rough neighborhoods. You don't need a car to get around. I could go on. But the main point is: Being here is much more worthwhile than Canellos suggests.
Update: The above photo is my favorite view of the whole city -- from the Longfellow Bridge, looking west at the Charles River, Back Bay and the Hancock Tower.
Now that Republicans have re-taken the House and national political momentum, the idea that either party can establish a long-lasting majority is unlikely. Here are the number of House Republicans every two years, from after the 2004 election to after last week's: 232, 198, 178, and 244. During this six-year span, the conventional wisdom has shifted from Karl Rove's establishment of a permanent Republican majority to Barack Obama's ascendancy and the Republican Party's death to the sweeping rejection of liberal Democrats. So much for all that.
If the shelf life either party has to produce results is two years, neither party is likely to produce results. Recovery from economic catastrophe takes longer than two years, though the Democratic Party and Obama administration certainly deserve responsibility for a rudderless recovery, as do others. While I certainly hope the U.S. economy is exponentially better in 2012, it'll be interesting to see voters' response if it remains where it is today. After dismissing Democrats, do we do the same to Republicans, only to realize that in a two-party system we don't have any other options? Hello, Ralph Nader, Sarah Palin or anarchy?
Despite these wild swings, the national political map looks quite similar to what it did in 2004, albeit with a Democratic president (and hopefully that feature remains): Republicans hold seat after seat through the South and the Plains, while no matter how much enthusiasm they conjure leading up to Election Day, they get wiped out along both coasts. For example, all but one of Massachusetts' Congressional delegation and statewide office holders are Democrats, in spite of the Herald's best effort at electioneering over the past two months. Talk about a place that doesn't waver on principles.
Not surprisingly, David Brooks had the best analysis of last week's election, focusing on the post-industrial Midwest, where Republicans made much deeper inroads than before -- the other big political difference between now and 2004. He incisively captures the paradoxes of Midwestern working-class voters while delivering this knock-out blow: "If America can figure out how to build a decent future for the working-class people in this region, then the U.S. will remain a predominant power. If it can’t, it won’t." This is why the Midwest is the most exciting place to be in the U.S. today.
Some things don't change. Last week, on stage at the Paradise, Corin Tucker had her band dressed in formal wear for its headlining set, yet she was wearing a simple and a bit worn, red-and-black plaid dress, with one strap routinely sliding down and a sticker of some sort near the hem. You can take the girl out of the Pacific Northwest, but you can't take the Pacific Northwest out of the girl?
The songs Tucker played were quite contemplative compared to the ones she played when she was the lead singer of Sleater-Kinney, that principled but fun trio that's been on hiatus for about five years. Not surprisingly, her best songs, from her debut solo album, let her voice escape into its trademark leaping roll that no one else does. When she played slow songs, they usually found themselves trapped in something syrupy or kitschy, though a strong guitar usually barreled through at some point, lifting the song. Overall, it worked and was an appropriate evolution for someone who's now a mom. As I've written before in these pages, I like bands that acknowledge they're aging and write wiser songs as a result. Tucker hit the mark.
The crowd was certainly small. Though it was a Monday night in the middle of the semester, which doesn't bode well in a college-dominated city such as Boston, the Paradise was only about half full. Sleater-Kinney wasn't an iconic indie-rock band at the turn of the century, but it certainly knew how to pack larger venues. (I saw them in fall 2002 at Irving Plaza, when, at the start of the show, they told all the girls to come up front and the guys to walk backwards, so that women weren't straining to see, which is usually the case at shows; the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, with only an EP and mountains of hype to their name, were the opener.) Not everyone's return gets to be as triumphant as Pavement's, I suppose, though Tucker's was worth it.
In fact, even more surprisingly, Guided by Voices -- which never represented a generational moment quite like Pavement did but was wildly loved in its late-90s heyday -- is only playing the Paradise when it brings its reunion tour to town Friday. At least that show sold out several weeks ago.
Above is my photo of the Paradise's marquee the night of Tucker's show.
Three weeks ago, when my fiancee and I were in Nashville, we drove to the city's outskirts to eat at Prince's Hot Chicken Shack, inspired by the liner notes of one of my favorite records. We arrived to find it closed on Sundays, a disappointing turn of events, especially considering we cajoled two much-less-interested relatives in driving us there. At least I compensated with spicy catfish and fried chicken for my two meals later that day.
Downtown Nashville is a strange combination, though not that atypical for an American city: There's the tourist stretch, this time with lots of country-music bars and country-music clothes (I certainly made sure to buy a cowboy shirt, my first non-faux, non-used one), the convention center and hockey arena that interrupt the city's fabric, the poorly sited football stadium, an underused riverfront park, and a Central Business District totally underused on weekends, with unfortunate architecture, namely the AT&T tower shaped like a circa 1994 cell phone. There's a clear and interesting tension between the city's desire to preserve its prewar architecture, for the sake of maintaining its identity as a charismatic Southern music hub, and opening parcels to the large floor plates needed for the contemporary professional services that generate the most tax revenue. Not that I didn't enjoy walking around, especially to the Southern Festival of Books.
The best part of the weekend, aside from the wedding that brought me to town, was a trip to the Family Wash, a restaurant and bar in a residential neighborhood that was zonked-out in all the right ways. The decor was a grab bag, the country music was from outer space, and the beer was relatively inexpensive. It all made me sad I couldn't be there on a Tuesday for the $10 deal for shepherd's pie and a pint. The place may be better than any in Cambridge. In one of my courses this semester, one of the main themes is how cities typically crash ashore while chasing grand schemes when the talent they need to produce incremental, organic, worthwhile, exciting growth is already living there, right in front of their eyes. The Family Wash might be further proof of that.
Thanks to Yo La Tengo for the post's title. I can hear the opening strains of "Return to Hot Chicken" now: "Bum bum ba da da ba, da bum da." (It's meant to be played on guitar.)
Vargas Llosa is surprisingly quite the conservative -- as Alma Guillermoprieto tartly summarized in her review of his memoir of his failed 1990 presidential run, "A Fish in the Water," he "had campaigned as if Peru were already Switzerland," which she dismisses as quite the folly -- for how piercing his writing is. In his more political novels, he fiercely takes down the excesses of power, suggesting he would associate more with the common man than the business class, which he actually does. In his romantic novels, he champions the life of emotion, fancy and the pen over that of masculinity, both of which would seem to fit the profile of a romantic liberal at the barricades, not the well-coiffed man on the Upper East Side (as he is these days, while teaching at Princeton).
That he straddles both and understands them so well is perhaps his biggest accomplishment. He has written one of the most bitter but exquisite opening lines to a novel -- "En que momento se ha jodido el Peru?", at the start of "Conversation in the Cathedral," which roughly translates as "When did Peru fuck itself over so completely?" But he also lovingly captures the madcap adventures of a fictionalized version of his young self in "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter," falling in love with his older aunt and holding together a Lima radio station by a shoestring as its soap opera's scriptwriter confuses reality, drama and dreams. Few do it quite like him, with such a deep knowledge of language.
Perhaps it's that extreme talent with language that makes Vargas Llosa's conservatism quite palatable. In a 1994 column for El Pais, the Spanish daily in his adopted hometown of Madrid, he swiftly takes down the first Berlusconi administration, which haughtily tried to assert its superiority over Bolivia. Not so fast, Vargas Llosa protested: "What surprised me most about Ferrerra's [a spokesman's] misinformation is that a good number of Latin American countries have already accomplished (and without making too much of a fuss about it) what his own government -- headed by Berlusconi -- has been trying to accomplish in Italy, without success," -- free-market reforms that unlock foreign investment and entrepreneurial potential, leading to economic and income growth.
I wonder what Vargas Llosa would say about Latin America today, when most of the countries that followed the free market's path didn't make out as well as it appeared they would in 1994. But his approach is always eloquent and rational, and perhaps closer to the center than he's typically given credit for, which is at least worth engaging. And even if one disagrees, there are always all those excellent novels.
On my Facebook page I like to have the "Favorite Music" and "Favorite Books" section of my profile reflect what I'm listening to at the moment, rather than my all-time bests. My tastes and fits of swooning shift too frequently for the latter. During my most recent update several days ago, when I substituted Blackstreet's "No Diggity," Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" and Bruce Springsteen's "My Hometown" for Real Estate, Stars and the Dismemberment Plan, I looked up and realized more than half of my favorite music were multiplatinum, ultra-mainstream musicians. Shock of all shocks! What happened to annoyingly elitist standards?
I think this shift happened because I increasingly like production standards. In "Landslide," the bass notes are so crisp and wonderful and in "No Diggity," the piano chords sway so fluidly, as though they're not piano keys, that they're impossible not to appreciate. There's something wonderful to be said for hearing each note exactly as it's meant to be heard, lo-fi production be damned. There's no reason to ignore a hook when it's staring you in the face, especially when it's those piano chords of "No Diggity," which no one can resist, even the most reticent of dancers.
Pop songs aren't inherently vapid because they're pop songs, either. In "You Can Call Me Al," from Paul Simon's"Graceland," also listed on my Facebook page these days because of its sheer brilliance as an album, the verses' lyrics are genuinely moving. They're just hidden by a non-sequitur of a rhyming chorus ("If you be my bodyguard / I can be your long-lost pal..."), a simple horn part that lends itself well to a harmony, a needlessly showy bass breakdown and a catchy music video starring Chevy Chase (which is above). A friend tells me that Jens Lenkman sometimes covers the song live, sans chorus, because he also appreciates the song's words and thinks the chorus only interferes. Lenkman knows what he's talking about. When Simon ends the song, singing about the lost tourist who "sees angels in the architecture / spinning in infinity / hallelujah," his melody jumps a few notes on "Hallelujah," as though the beauty of the world is sometimes too much bear. Simon's right about that.
Update: And my Facebook page's musical preferences are now all snobbish again.
In an interview on "Fresh Air" this past summer, the writer Gary Shteyngart said he chose to set his new, semi-apolcalyptic, fully satiric novel, "Super Sad True Love Story," in the near future because society develops so quickly in the early 21st century that if he had chosen the present, the book would've become outdated during the year between when he finished writing it and when it arrived in bookstores.
After finishing about two-thirds of "Super Sad True Love Story," I find its circa 2020 setting eerily similar to present day. The U.S. hasn't crumbled to the point that it's ruled by the Bipartisan Party's military regime, pegged its dollar to the yuan, and had its military kill homeless people living in Central Park to clear the city in anticipation of the Chinese prime minister's visit, as Shteyngart imagines. Even two years into national economic morass, I can't foresee that scenario happening -- nor does Shteyngart, I suspect -- but it does strike a very raw chord as we grapple with questions about America's long-term preeminence.
More relevant is Shteyngart's slashing into modern techno-culture. Over the past month, I've experienced a series of moments that I once thought were improbable but make me think he's right on target. The "Suk Dik" bodysuit that one of the protagonist's nemeses at work wears? Well, I walked past a girl on Cambridge Street wearing an "Adorable Bitch" T-shirt. The acronyms that make the protagonist's head spin? Well, I hung out with an old friend recently who used three in two sentences that I just couldn't follow, making me feel old. The distaste for books, which are generally accepted as smelly and unreadable? (People instead major in Scanning. The protagonist actually reads, making him an oddity.) Well, the University of Central Florida's new medical schooldoes not have a library. Instead, students are given iPods, "with access to online databases," the Times recently reported.
It may be hyperbolic to directly connect a society's downfall with its increasing love of the digital and its ignorance of the printed word. But as wonderful as the 21st century's connectivity is, there's a certain level of illiteracy that develops from always staring into one's iPhone. (And, boy, do I detest how people hold them -- delicately cupped in their palms so they can quickly run their pointer finger across the screen without smearing it.) Shteyngart gets it perfectly. When people care less about complexity, intimacy, the slow road and articulation, in favor of reductionism, superficiality, warp speed, and indifferent conversation, society is diminished.
Since Carl Paladino vaulted from a wealthy real estate developer in Buffalo to the Republican gubernatorial candidate in New York one month ago, the endless stream of his missteps has been nothing short of befuddling. He has a vindictive, irascible personality. He bullies his way forward. He doesn't seem to have much going for him except for his frank opinions. And he captured the thick strand of national voter discontent so well that he zoomed past the state party's preferred candidate, Rick Lazio, a former congressman, to crush him in the primary.
Paladino's politics resemble the cacophony of the online comment boards at the bottom of news stories. There are the cute word games with opponents' names, such as "Status Cuomo" for his Democratic opponent, state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, which Paladino's campaign manager coined. (This is actually mildly funny.) There are the promises of physical violence and name-calling, such as promising "to take a bat" to Albany and describing Sheldon Silver, New York's Assembly Speaker and a devout Jew, as the anti-Christ. There are the homophobic comments and e-mails forwarding racist jokes. And there's the hypocrisy of railing against insiderism and government spending while using his campaign donations to curry favor for project approvals, using state subsidies to help finance development, and using his campaign account to pay companies directly connected to him. (None of this is remotely funny, particularly the homophobic comments, considering the past month's wave of antigay crimes in metro New York.)
Comment boards, which never do anything more than insult, love to vent, kick and scream, as does Paladino, but rarely offer anything productive beyond that. There are no ideas, no alternatives and no solutions. Paladino rarely talks about anything substantive on the campaign trail, and when he does, he often can't help but scream mean things over it, so that's all the press writes about. He's little more than a cranky, bitter man, like so many of the people who comment on articles, but somehow he's riding a political wave.
On his political journey, Paladino has tapped into the same vein of unhappiness as the Tea Party has nationally, though he isn't quite a Tea Party darling in the way Rand Paul or Christine O'Donnell are. Also, some people who pledge allegiance to the Tea Party have articulated ideas about the nonexistent, fiscally conservative role they believe all government should have, unlike Paladino, who doesn't seem to have ideas. But the Tea Party is similar to online comment boards' writers because both have a fundamental desire to blow up the whole system and watch where the shards fall -- without seriously thinking about what that means and why those shards, when glued together, might serve some valid purposes.
Now that the Tea Party and online comment boards are having their political moment, it will be interesting to see if the voting public will be comfortable, six or 24 months down the road, with the contempt and incivility it's chosen to breed.
For those who obsessively follow the Times like me, the change in its Weather Report's fall foliage report is most unwelcome. The map of the Northeast, with its color scheme of "still green" to "past peak," is still there, but the accompanying caption is disappointingly different. Instead of the romantic prose about the range of oranges, crimsons and yellow draped across the area, there's now rather drab commentary about the region's weather. From today's page:
"Cloudy, wet weather will span much of the Northeast and Middle Atlantic States and reach west into Ohio. The weather will improve from south to north over the next couple of days. By the weekend, the entire region will be dry, save for a few showers and some winds across northernmost sections."
Who cares about the conditions for viewing leaves? It's what the leaves look like that's truly important, especially for those of us stuck in urban settings and unable to drive into the rolling hills and valleys of interior New England. Above is a photo from Cheshire, Mass., in the Berkshires.
No one is surprised Jerry Manuel and Omar Minaya were fired yesterday as the Mets' manager and general manager, respectively. Manuel seemed to draw the most displeasure through the season because he couldn't dial up his relaxed attitude to respond to the team's disintegration after the All-Star Break and its subsequent two-month-long sleepwalk after that. But Minaya really was the one whose time had expired.
The roster is now full of his questionable signings, including closer Francisco Rodriguez, who combines circa 2001 Armando Benitez's unreliability with domestic abuse; second-baseman Luis Castillo, who has become indifferent to running, hitting and fielding, yet complains about being replaced; and Oliver Perez, who makes Castillo's play look inspired. Carlos Beltran is also close to jumping in this muck, considering his contract's size, his production the past two years, and his defining moment as a Met is watching Adam Wainwright's curveball for the last out of the 2006 NLCS. My uncle, however, is right to point out Beltran was superb between 2006 and 2008. Pedro Martinez gets a pass, I suppose, because while he only had one good year out of four, he had to be signed to revive the Mets' relevance (which sounds like the typical argument used to argue for massive public subsidy for sports stadiums; just replace "Martinez" with "tax dollars" and "Mets" with "city").
But Minaya had also proven by this point he isn't good at being an executive. He fired Willie Randolph in 2008 at about 4 a.m. EST so it wouldn't make the next day's papers. He allowed his friend and former fellow executive Tony Bernazard to challenge players to fights on the team bus. He strangely embarrassed reporters who asked tough questions during press conferences. He didn't know Beltran was having knee surgery last winter until after Beltran had it. The Wilpons, the team owners, had essentially stopped allowing him to give press conferences and be the team's public voice, which isn't a good sign.
A general manager first has to judge athletic talent well, but second, has to know how to run a team responsibly, and that slipped past Minaya. As it is with any mess, there's plenty of responsibility for lots to share, but Minaya probably deserves to be at the line's front. It's tough to see where the Mets go from here, but they've been here before and recovered, so I know they will again. To know peaks one must know valleys. A cliche, but a true cliche.
Among my most foolish moments involving spicy foods: biting into a raw jalapeno pepper after the first few bits I'd diced didn't seem spicy, which required two yogurts and a lot of pacing to control; neglecting to ask the kitchen at Zoe's to temper the spiciness of their beef-with-chilis dish, which required about three quickly downed bottles of beer and a lot of pacing to control. My body was so contorted after that dinner I had to skip the Wrens concert I was planning to see later that night.
Thankfully, the Times came to the rescue last week, with a story explaining my lust for spicy foods. A psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania theorizes that the medical benefits of eating chili peppers -- lower blood pressure, better salivation -- are too small to explain their appeal. Instead, the attraction is a "benign masochism," in which we take pleasure from testing our taste buds' tolerance for pain. Another psychologist, from Yale, told the Times, "Philosophers have often looked defining features of humans -- language, rationality, culture and so on. I'd stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce."
Though the researchers acknowledge they don't have enough scientific evidence to back this up, add me to the database of anecdotal proof. There's something fun about the challenge of tolerating spicy food. While no daredevil, I like the extra level of flavor and sense of adventure it adds. Perhaps it adds a little sense of danger to the day. (Though a friend recently checked in with an e-mail to say he's now rock climbing, skydiving and hoping to travel to Pakistan this school year as part of his work at graduate school. He trumps me in the danger category.) I no longer have to be embarrassed by my ill-advised requests for spicy food. It's a sign of my evolution!
Update: In the more awesome category of my adventures in spicy foods, I pickled a hot pepper last week. I think I should've let it sit for longer, but it still tasted very good.
At the end of Pavement's rendition of "Unfair" during its show Saturday at Agganis Arena -- as the band's wild card, Bob Nastanovich, lunged at the crowd shouting, "I'm your neighbor / And I need favors," the rest of the band ripped through their parts, and the surprisingly professional light show flashed -- I thought for the first time about Pavement, They sound like a really big, professional, muscular rock band that could've been huge.
Pavement's publicity has rocketed the past week. Not coincidentally, after six months of shows across the globe, their reunion tour reached the East Coast. They've played on "The Colbert Report" and Fallon's show, been teased on the Times' front page, and are in the midst of five consecutive sold-out shows in Central Park and Williamsburg, which have been gigantic and lovingly reviewed exclamation points. Most of the comments note how loose and happy the band seems, which apparently couldn't have been said for their previous tours (I don't know; I was too young when they broke up in 1999), and that these shows feel like a long victory lap.
Maybe Pavement's victory is convincing everyone that they could've been huge if they wanted ... but they never wanted to take that route. If they first emerged in present-day, they likely would be huge, even over their objections, because the music industry has changed so profoundly that great Internet buzz quickly builds a national fan base and sends groups skyward. For example, see the present positions of the National, Sufjan Stevens, Vampire Weekend, et al, though admittedly they will always be much more palatable than Pavement, and then compare them to those of Yo La Tengo, Guided By Voices, Sunny Day Real Estate, et al in the 1990s.
Then again, Pavement's sound and culture never would've flowered in the 21st century. When Stephen Malkmus told Stephen Colbert that his musical inspiration was Ronald Reagan, I don't think he was joking. Pavement sprouts directly from -- and in opposition to -- the monoculture of suburban California where he and guitarist Scott Kannberg were raised and was nurtured by the Clinton era's slacking full employment.
Maybe my final word should be, Who cares? Saturday's show was the best I've ever seen. The songs were great, the band was proficient and funny, the crowd was excited, and seeing them fulfilled every expectation and my 10-year-long yearning to see them. This blog is now more complete. Here's their performance there of "Cut Your Hair":
In my microeconomics textbook, the author, N. Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard economist, former chairman of Bush 43's Council of Economic Advisers and pal of Mitt Romney, opens a chapter on taxation with a quote from former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: "Taxes are what we pay for civilized society." Holmes' comment is, not surprisingly, quite eloquent, and Mankiw uses it to demonstrate "that some level of taxes are necessary."
That Mankiw, given his conservative credentials, acknowledges the importance of taxes is noteworthy, even if his acceptable level of them is likely lower that that of many others. However, in the context of Republican candidates for major offices this fall, his admission that taxes are necessary and purposeful pushes him further to the party's center than he probably ever expected. Among Sharron Angle, Rand Paul, Carl Paladino and Christina O'Donnell (who are only a small handful of candidates, by the way, but plenty representative), we could probably eliminate three-quarters of the federal government and New York state government in one swoop, based on their collective desires. I doubt Mankiw thinks the same.
Holmes' insight could be plotted on a curve like the supply and demand ones I've been studying in these early weeks of the semester. If taxes are what we pay for a civilized society, the fewer taxes someone wants to pay, the less civilized he is and the less he cares about civilized society. No wonder we have these strange, Know Nothing political protests and rants nationwide, where everyone shouts for no taxes, no government, no experience and occasionally, no one but white people. (What other subtext can "Take Back Our Country" have?)
Sure, this Holmes curve resembles Laffer's -- there's a point where it reaches diminishing returns, and the more taxes someone wants, the more he too departs from civilization. It's called communism. But these days, large chunks of the country seems stuck in the curve's lower-left corner -- the no-taxes-no-civilization part -- and the Republican Party seems quite happy to have that be its official position. I don't understand why.
Kevin Durant, the Oklahoma City Thunder's star forward, is quickly ascending the ranks of unbelievably cool athletes. He finished his summer by leading the U.S. basketball team to the gold medal of the World Championships, which, while a less significant tournament, proves he can take charge of a team and perform superbly in crucial games. After he hit one crucial shot, the Times reports, he popped the "USA" logo on the jersey's front and gave a salute to the camera -- his tribute to Sept. 11, which, considering the context, is as simple but charged as can be. (The game was played Saturday and he also wrote "9-11-01" on his shoes.)
His game is casually brilliant. He hits jump shots easily; he works in the post; he plays defense; he scores his points through the game's natural flow, without hogging the ball and spotlight. He spent the previous five summers dutifully playing on the U.S. national team and deferring to other stars before reaching this year's peak. His teammates uniformly like him. He rides the University of Texas' public buses, even when he returns to campus a multimillionaire with his pro teammates because he wants them to experience the school as he did -- and declines when a university official offers him a ride. What urban planning student doesn't swoon over that?
Equally important, Durant, with little fanfare, signed a long-term extension with the Thunder this summer. Not only was this a refreshing contrast to LeBron James' egofest, but it helps solidify the Thunder's young, exciting lineup and proves Durant is a humble man who cares about loyalty, hard work and the importance of secondary cities. He could've easily jumped to New York or another megalopolis, but, to refer to an earlier summer post of mine, opted for accomplishing important things in an out-of-the-way place. Durant realizes you don't have to leave your roots to blossom into something wonderful.
With Steve Nash's career nearing its end, there will be a need for a considerate, entertaining player to take his place. It sure seems as though Durant is the one who will do it. And, oh yeah, in 10 or 12 years, it's quite likely we'll discuss whether he's superior to James and Kobe Bryant and the best player of this generation.
Update: Yes, Bill Simmons yesterday published a column about Durant's performance Sunday and his accompanying ascension. I promise I had no idea about it until after I started writing this, though Simmons has loved Durant for longer than I.
As New York's civic and business leaders tried to ensure the city didn't slip as the global financial capital -- though, obviously, that's not a title of distinction these days -- it successfully became the U.S. planning capital. Typically, such a feat doesn't receive much attention, but the Times has recently hopped on the urban planning beat with an appreciated, relative vengeance.
Not only is Times Square only open to pedestrians and mildly tacky furniture now, as shown in the above photo, but Broadway, one of Manhattan's and by extension, the country's, most renowned streets, is losing travel lanes as people overtake cars on the totem pole. As Michael Grynbaum reports, in the past two years three-and-a-half miles of travel lanes have been eliminated, as have many parking spaces, replaced by bicycle lanes and picnic tables. At the same time, the city is creating two "aging-improvement" districts in East Harlem and the Upper West Side, which means more benches, better lighting and better drainage, among other simple but important things that makes seniors' mobility easier. The city has also closed long stretches of streets on weekends for recreation and devoted lanes to buses, so they travel faster.
These are not simple things to accomplish. The first time the Bloomberg administration tried to demote the car, with congestion pricing, it stalled spectacularly in the New York Legislature. Saying no to cars, when everyone seems to ride in them, even if they do so much less in Manhattan than in the rest of the country, is bold. Emphasizing walkers, bicyclists and quality streetscapes is difficult to accomplish because they can be expensive endeavors that don't create the kinds of benefits the immediate-to-react demand, i.e. jobs. Jobs matter, of course, but so does a place's desirability and safety. The aging districts might actually be more important because with them, the Bloomberg administration realizes that U.S. cities haven't been well designed or governed for anyone but the postgraduate, approximately ages 22 to 35, for at least the previous 30 years. The districts openly acknowledge that cities only function at their peak when people of all ages and backgrounds can live there comfortably.
Mayor Bloomberg sure deserves credit for having the vision to implement this, as he does for many other things (which I've written often about), but so does the city's transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Kahn, and the countless number of planners on her staff who come up with these don't stand behind the microphone at press conferences.
The tuition for Dean Wareham's son must be coming due soon because Wareham's two most recent projects are racked with the sort of nostalgia that pays the bills. The first, a collection of songs for Warhol's series of "Screen Tests" films, isn't objectionable. Wareham and his wife, Britta Phillips, who was Luna's bassist during the second half of the band's life, have been performing live accompaniments to Warhol's movies for several years now, and ever since Wareham moved to New York to start Luna around 1992, he and the band were viewed as the stylistic descendants of the Velvet Underground -- cool, pulsing, New York.
But for the second, Wareham has decided to head on tour playing songs from Galaxie 500, his beloved first band. This seems to make sense, considering the band's oevure was recently reissued .... on the label owned by Wareham's two former bandmates, who only speak to him out of professional need and haven't seem in his years because Galaxie 500's breakup was so bitter. Rather than allow for a proper reunion, which the band has long said won't happen, Wareham now just seems to be cashing in. They're great songs, but not only his and not the same when played by only him and a backing band.
Also worth noting is the tour schedule: While New York, Philly, Chicago, L.A., San Francisco, San Diego and Atlanta get the requisite stops, Boston, Galaxie 500's hometown, is noticeably absent. Perhaps Wareham's heart would've ached too strongly if he returned to his post-collegiate home to play the triumphant songs of his 20s without his bandmates behind him. Perhaps those bandmates, Damon and Naomi, who still live in town, would've shown up in the crowd just to spite him, glare at him, or egg the crowd into chants of a reunion only to walk out the back door. Perhaps they actually would've played the encore together.
You can go searching for past glories, but fully confronting the past is tough.
Anyway, to the good times, above is Galaxie 500 playing "Tugboat," their great single, in April 1989 at a school in Boston. Thank you, YouTube.
New York and tennis don't quite mix, which is what makes the U.S. Open, that sticky punctuation mark at summer's end, the year's best tournament. The courts are hard, the crowds are demanding and sometimes uncouth (in fact, earlier this week there was a fight in Arthur Ashe Stadium), the weather can be unbearably hot, the moods swing and even the outfits players wear are brash and unkempt.
As cultured a city as New York is, it's not a genteel one, forcing tennis to adapt after two highly proper Grand Slam tournaments earlier in the summer -- the French Open and Wimbledon. It produces wonderful, gutsy tennis straight from Queens, an inherently tacky and mixed-up place. My favorite victory of Pete Sampras' came at the U.S. Open in 1996: He puked in the back of the court during a fifth-set tiebreaker in a quarterfinal match against Alex Corretja. Sampras wiped his mouth and then won the match. That about summarizes the U.S. Open.
This year, for the second consecutive Open, Roger Federer pulled off a behind-the-back, between-the-legs winner! See the above video for the sheer brilliance. New York inspires the inspirational and produces compelling play. Those who don't wilt amid the noise, smell, heat and general chaos of the city play strongly and excitingly, which is always fun to watch. The worst part about starting school in August's last week is how hard it is to find time to follow along.
Thanks to Wild Nothing, who've released the debut record of the year, for the post's title. It's a lyric from the first song, which refers here to those trick shots of Federer's. How else could he pull them off?
Another trip to Columbus, another blog post about it:
Columbus isn't all that different from other secondary cities in the U.S. It has several large corporations, one major league sports franchise, a sprawling metro area, a state house, some wealthy neighborhoods with good schools, some poor neighborhoods and bad schools, and a general sense it's overlooked. As my mother recently said, unless you know someone from there or have business there, you probably wouldn't go. She and I fall into the former category.
The Times recently captured city leaders' anxiety about Columbus' lackluster national position (though the article didn't generalize Columbus' situation, making it a strange story for the paper's National section -- a piece simply on what's happening in Ohio's capital). Columbus has "no image in the national marketplace," lamented Paul Astleford, the director of Experience Columbus, which promotes tourism and conventions. There are no iconic draws and nothing that immediately pops into one's mind when Columbus is mentioned. Apparently the city is on its Nth round of branding, after slogans such as "Discover Columbus" and "Surprise, It's Columbus" didn't resonate as hoped. Actually, "Surprise, It's Columbus" is too hilarious and now a running joke among a few friends. You'll next see that slogan somehow incorporated into my wedding.
Indianapolis, a city I've never visited but is probably in the same boat as Columbus, has apparently "raised its profile by describing itself as the amateur athletic capital of America," the Times writes, which is a model that interests Columbus' leaders. My memo to Columbus' leaders: "Say, 'Thanks, but no thanks,' to that route. Really, all the building blocks for attracting people and businesses are right here."
To wit: Columbus has one of the country's most-respected public universities, a few great downtown neighborhoods and an overall commitment to interesting downtown redevelopment, nice parks, easily navigable roads and airport, a low cost of housing and living, and seemingly nice people. (The Times story mentioned nearly all of these.) These combine to create a very good place to live. The tourism is ancillary. In fact, maybe what's best about Columbus is the city's charms can't be captured by branding and that the city reveals itself to be an overlooked pleasure the more time one spends there.
After a summer of ambivalent listening, my problem with the National's new record, "High Violet," is that it's too well composed. No note is struck or noise created without careful thought. More importantly, no emotion is created without deliberate calibration. There's excitement, resentment and wonder on the album, as well as all the other emotions one associates with art that tries to capture being a young adult in the young 21st century. But the emotion never destabilizes the song or unsettles the listener. It's packaged exactly as the band wants it, nothing more or nothing less, which might point to the National's skill to execute what they envision, but also creates an album that is, above all, buttoned-up.
Jon Pareles, the Times' chief music critic, noted in a recent concert review, that for all of the band members' confessions to constant tinkering and endless versions of their songs, "the National keeps ending up in the same place." Pareles referred largely to the band's sound, but this also applies to its overall resonance -- busy but overly cautious. The National's sound has gradually bent toward the stately bluster over its previous twoalbums, regardless of Pitchfork's egging on with excellent reviews and the higher sales. However, now that the band has arrived there, they sound more straitjacketed than they should. No more yelping background vocals for them, which they had to such great effect on "Secret Meeting," which opened the 2005 record "Alligator."
The National knows what it wants and executes it well, but when you're expertly composed and the hair on your head doesn't move, ossification is too close for comfort. Anyway, form your own opinion. Above is a live performance of "Lemonworld," one of the new record's better songs.
Three weeks ago, my friends and I listened to three R.E.M. albums consecutively, all from different eras: "Murmur," the genre-defining debut from 1983; "Automatic From the People," the multi-platinum hit-filled blockbuster from 1992; and "New Adventures in Hi-Fi," from 1996, which was the start of the "difficult part" of the band's career, shortly before drummer Bill Berry retired, but is surprisingly excellent.
It was the first time I'd listened to that much R.E.M. in such a short span in at least several years. What struck me the most was how unusual the sound of "Automatic for the People" is for how commercially successful it was, in a way that popular albums can't be today, when the short-attention spans of the 21st century dictate hyper-paced stuffed songs and people. "Automatic for the People" is actually filled with lots of well-composed midtempo ballads and dirges that don't populate top-40 records anymore. The record's best song, "New Orleans Instrumental No. 1," is a simple instrumental that builds over an organ and horn section until it gently fades after about two minutes and 30 seconds. Brilliant.
"Automatic for the People" demonstrates how the 20th century, all of 18 years ago (from when the album was released), is such a distant era from Aug. 19, 2010. First, no band sells 3.5 million records anymore. Second, I think the listening public was able to warm to such a depressing song like "Everybody Hurts," which was the smash single, because its music video was so captivating. And who watches those anymore? Third, the number of people who have the patience for albums to reveal themselves slowly as this one does has shrunk exponentially. How 20th-century.
In one of its posts, Pitchfork Reviews Reviewsnotes how the Pavement song "5-4 = Unity," from "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain," (1994) would never be included on a record released in present-day because the song so royally screws the album's momentum that everyone downloading it in on iTunes (or wherever) would uncheck it and not buy the song. He's right the song is a gigantic drag, but, then, that misses the greater point of why Pavement was a great band. They required you, the listener, to find the brilliance in the rough -- and that the rough was part of the brilliance. They weren't a band for a-la-carte downloading. They also never took themselves too seriously and would gladly place a song of messed-up noodling in the midst of a barnburner because that's what countercultural bands do and that's what made them so good. If you don't get that, you probably don't get indie rock.
R.E.M. also started as an indie band, before breaking through with a sustained run of commercial success. Its 1990s' output was slicker than that of the previous decade, but nonetheless meaningful and widely accepted by the popular masses. Like Pavement's oevure, R.E.M.'s is another demonstration that the 20th century is fundamentally different from the twenty-first. Anyway, above is that video to "Everybody Hurts."
Tony Judt, the well-regarded liberal essayist and professor of European history at NYU, died last week at the age of 62 from complications of Lou Gehrig's disease. He last scholarly book, "Postwar," published in 2005, won lots of critical adulation and awards, but his essays and book reviews, published in the New Republic, New York Review of Books and other literary publications, made him most famous for his ability to elucidate and eviscerate. Several years ago, the New Republic removed him from his masthead when he drastically diverged from the magazine's position on Israel, which apparently caused quite the kerfuffle in those circles.
I always thoroughly enjoyed reading Judt's work. It was scholarly but super-engaging and its prose zipped along, unlike that of most professors, which tends to weigh them down. I usually agreed with his opinions, though not always (and I didn't always understand what he wrote about, especially when he delved into the minutiae of postwar, European intellectual history), but I think the greatest lesson he teaches is that the power of the written word should never be underestimated, even in the 21st century.
The end of summer -- which, now that we're past August's midway point, is here -- always has a strange feel to it. The sun sets earlier, the nights are cooler, the movies get worse, the air doesn't know what to do with itself. Just last night, the temperature was a crisp 55 degrees or so, but today was humid, with the fiercest downpour yet this summer. In his most recent novel, "Sag Harbor," which was the perfect novel for this summer, Colson Whitehead captures these two weeks better than anyone else I've ever read:
"Ninevah Place, the dead end to the beach the rest of the year, was today the dead end of summer. We could go no further. The next day we'd close up our houses, pulling in the lawn furniture, winding hoses around forearms in messy lopos, leaning on faucets with all our might for the extra bit that meant piece of mind for nine months. School, work, autumn. As if autumn was not already here. Nights we zipped jackets to the neck, and days gooseflesh popped on our legs as we tried to squeeze one more use out of shorts we'd never wear again."
The Arcade Fire's third record, "The Suburbs," released earlier this month, was ripe for a critical takedown by Pitchfork. Over the past six years, since its debut, the band has shot from precocious indie thriller to accepted mainstream act. It made eight different covers for its new record. The Washington Post's music critic (who, by the way, used to be in Q and not U, remember them?) trashed the new album in an early review, writing, "It's a billowy showpiece that embodies everything wrong with 21st-century rock music: the joyless grandiosity, the air-sucking humorlessness, the soggy sentimentality, all those fussy string arrangements." And just a few weeks earlier, Pitchfork KO'd the new album by M.I.A., who's in a very similar career position.
Instead, Pitchfork blessed "The Suburbs" with a "Best New Music" designation and an 8.6 rating, saying, among other things, it's "powerful art." In the past two weeks, the Arcade Fire has also sold out two shows at Madison Square Garden, which were ravishingly received, and topped the Billboard charts with 156,000 copies sold in the record's first week.
Now, the Arcade Fire (and their label, Merge) deserve all of the accolades and money they make from this: They're better than anyone else who can hit No. 1 or sell out MSG these days. Their debut was easily one of the past decade's best albums, so good that even if things fell off a cliff from there, they'd earned enough good will to last a very long time. Pitchfork hasn't, though. Maybe its willingness to continue leading the Arcade Fire's bandwagon, while helping remove the wheels of M.I.A.'s, proves that it's still all about the music for them.
Interestingly, within Pitchfork's review of "The Suburbs" is the admission that the Arcade Fire's previous record, "Neon Bible," wasn't very good. Ian Cohen writes that record was "sometimes bogged down by overblown arrangements or pedantic political statements" and heavy-handed. But, oh, wait, that record was named "Best New Music" with an 8.4 rating when it was released in 2007. Praising an established band's new record when it's clearly a misstep, only to admit later you knew all along it wasn't up to par after the general consensus turned out to be lukewarm, is a very Rolling Stone thing to do. It does it all the time for bands like U2, Tom Petty, John Mellencamp, Pearl Jam, etc (who are, not coincidentally, the polar opposite of Pitchfork's aesthetic). Usually the review includes a line such as "best record in a decade," even though the reviews of the previous decade's records didn't suggest anything was that amiss.
Of course, Pitchfork isn't Rolling Stone and the Arcade Fire isn't any of those above bands when it comes to popularity across the whole American cultural spectrum. They're fiercely influential within a specific part of it. (Selling 156,000 copies in a record's first week wasn't very impressive during those bands' peaks.) But Pitchfork is reaching a maturation point, where it's image and reach are well defined, if not static, the former much more so than the latter, as "indie culture" occupies an increasingly central cultural ground in a "long tail" society. Apologizing and protecting titans is probably the last thing it wants to do.
Then again, I also criticize Pitchfork for exacerbating hype cycles, which may be the exact opposite of this criticism. How can it win when I move the goalposts? Maybe I should just buy "The Suburbs." To simplify things, aka focusing on the music, above is part of one of the Arcade Fire's recent shows.
Those fall days in Boston when it gets a bit warmer and the leaves are a deep color but the sun hits at a lower angle and everyone is out walking and you need an extra layer at night. Corners and layers and reverb.
