Surprise, It's Columbus

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.

Actually, damn straight: "Surprise, It's Columbus."

When The Hair On Your Head Doesn't Move

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 two albums, 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.

R.E.M. and the 20th Century

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 Reviews notes 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."

Farewell, Tony Judt

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.

When The Open Road Is Closing In

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."

Thanks to the Magnetic Fields for the post's title.

Pitchfork's Rolling Stone Moment

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.

Welcome To The Tribe, Amar'e Stoudemire

Clear out the front page: Amar'e Stoudemire feels Jewish!

In what can only be described as the funniest turn of events this summer, Stoudemire, the Knicks' new star center, who is 6 feet 11 inches tall and black, took a vacation to Israel to explore his spirituality. After the Knicks stopped Stoudemire from playing in the World Championships because his new $100 million contract is not insured and he has a history of knee problems, Stoudemire created his own Birthright trip to see the country. Like all the Jewish 20-somethings who go there for a personal "Real World: Judaism," he had a great time, telling the Times he feels spiritually and culturally Jewish, loved visiting the Western Wall and the Mount of Olives, and knows some basic Hebrew sentences. (The last two are more than I can say. I've never traveled to Israel and Hebrew School's lessons never stuck.) He also posed for the most unintentionally hilarious photo ever, which is above.

Isabel Kershner and Ira Berkow report Knicks executives were apparently worried that Stoudemire's trip would be viewed as a shameless marketing scheme by the team's Jewish fans, which is probably about 40 percent of the base, considering there are more Jews in metro New York than in Israel (or anywhere). The Knicks should embrace this! After squandering the franchise for the past decade, with terrible contracts, awful personnel decisions and a horrific sexual-harassment lawsuit and trial, this is exactly what the team needs. Something goofy buy heartfelt to give the team a spark. I've only watched the team with bemused disgust the past several years, but am now genuinely interested again. Why deny faith?

Sure, Stoudemire is taking a religious turn that's a stereotypically shallow one for pop stars and usually heads toward born-again Christianity or Islam for black athletes, but he seems genuine enough. Stoudemire doesn't have any actual Jewish ancestry through his mother, as first rumored, but considering his biography includes all the worst postmarks of urban black athletes' childhoods -- multiple high schools, absent father, etc -- maybe what he needed (and still needs) is an overbearing Jewish mother to keep him on the right track. Why anyone would think that someone who can play ball like Stoudemire would be any more 1/132 Jewish, I don't know. But that's not the point. He's maturing, which is very important.

And the Knicks can be the first NBA team with a Yarmulke Night, while Stoudemire davens with Sandy Weill and Bloomberg at Temple Emanu-El.

Grilling Like Deval

Confirmation that I've lived in the Berkshires for the summer: an unplanned siting of Deval Patrick! (His family owns a second home in Richmond, Mass., and spends most weekends here.) Yesterday, as my fiancee and I pulled into the Big Y parking lot in downtown Pittsfield, there was Patrick, walking with a bag of Full Circle's All Hardwood Lump Charcoal in hand and two state policemen nearby. Considering the charcoal was on sale at a 50 percent discount and good enough for our state's governor, we bought it. As we struggled to light it, we wondered if Patrick was vigorously blowing at the flames too so the grill was warm enough for cooking. (That's Patrick, above, looking concerned about his barbecue.)

In these pages I've been very ambivalent about Patrick as a governor, though three months away from Election Day, my opinion is rising. His Republican opponent, Charlie Baker, has opted for an ill-fitting populist route rather than embrace his intelligence. Don't people want their political candidates to be themselves and be smart, and if one candidate is both, all the better?

On the other hand, Patrick gets all the small stuff wrong -- e.g. charging the state for new office drapes and a new Cadillac, skipping town to sign a book deal on the day of an important vote on casinos -- but has successfully oriented the state toward a future where education, public transit, renewable energy and innovation matter deeply. His administration has kept the state's finances above water and Massachusetts' economy is recovering faster than those of other states. He deserves credit (and votes) for these things.

Update: On a related note, Vetiver, the psych-folk band that pals around with Devendra Banhart (I only know of them from Banhart's song "When The Sun Shone On Vetiver") also appears to be vacationing in the Berkshires this summer. Their label Sub Pop lists their next tour dates as this weekend in North Adams, as part of Wilco's festival, and then the following Saturday at the Dream Away Lodge in Becket, Mass. This can only mean that Vetiver is spending the intervening week hiking the same paths and swimming in the sames lakes as me! That Vetiver is booked to play Becket (though the lodge's Web site has no mention of the show) can only be because of all the hipster dancers and interns who work at Jacob's Pillow for the summer, a job that sounds wonderful.

Welcome Back, Jonathan Franzen

Nine years have passed since Jonathan Franzen published "The Corrections," which is the collective favorite novel of my band. The book is so excellent because Franzen captures the turn of the 21st century in stupendously dizzying yet accurate fashion. Wealth, social decorum, affairs, post-Soviet disintegration, pharmaceuticals -- it's all there in one long sweep written so fluidly that the pages turn without thinking. Since then, he published a collection of essays and a memoir (both of which I own, one of which I've read), but it just isn't the same.

Then, last year, a short story appeared in the New Yorker. In the May 31 issue there was another one, which I read last night, featuring the same characters, indicating they're novel excerpts, and on the Contributors page, news that Franzen "will publish his fourth novel, 'Freedom,' in September"! The excerpt has the same trademark sweep that makes his work so great. Such as:

"Patty's mother was a professional Democrat. She later became a state assemblywoman, the Honorable Joyce Emerson, known for her advocacy of open space, poor children and the Arts. Paradise for Joyce was an open space where poor children could go and do Arts at state expense. She was born Joyce Markowitz in Brooklyn in 1934, but apparently disliked being Jewish from the earliest dawn of consciousness...Joyce got a scholarship to study liberal Arts in the woods of Maine, where she met Patty's exceedingly Gentile dad, whom she married at All Souls Unitarian Church on the Upper East Side of Manhattan."

Franzen somehow combines the irritating, pathetic, winning and lovely personality traits everyone has into his characters so that they veer towards stereotypes but always land in the territory of natural emblems of 21st-century life. No one else does that these days.