The End Of Radicalism

Now that all of the major Occupy protests have been forcibly removed and Mitt Romney will very likely be the Republican presidential nominee, what happened to all of that promise of the popular masses changing national politics? On the right, freshman legislators elected in 2010 via the Tea Party didn't accomplish much: They may have forced some ugly debates, but in the end, never forced the government to shut down and always compromised. Romney, a Northeastern financier who has historically supported abortion, gay rights and health care access for all, is as liberal and corporate as it gets for his party, even if he tries to disavow his past positions. The Tea Party's cause is increasingly unpopular in national polls, as people learn how such a conservative government behaves. Their bloc generally pushed national politics rightward during the past year, but their politics and policy descend directly from George W. Bush's presidency -- a know-nothing approach to pretty much everything -- when they were supposed to reject it and purify the party.

The Occupy protests have become the litmus test of the left: Are you willing to go so far to support public encampments and a relatively socialist agenda? Sure, President Obama has adopted a more populist tone since September, which was about the same time the protests began. Yet the power base of the Democratic Party has essentially the same composition as before -- Wall Street + unions + the well-educated professional class -- and the party's approach to federal politics hasn't changed much, either. The mayors of big cities, nearly all progressives, also weren't able to cope with peaceful protest camps in their midsts. They chose to clear them, even when they were probably the only group of politicians who could've have gotten away with accommodating and managing them.

I'm not sure I can hurdle over the bar that the Occupy movement set. I was enthused that my generation finally mounted a sustained protest against something (even if I stayed at my desk job each day). We certainly had enough content to merit one, though maybe not quite as much as in the halcyon '60s, when there were the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. But, as Ross Douthat pointed out in a recent column, we could dramatically increase taxes on the 1 percent and/or forgive student loan debt, but ... then what? We'd collect more taxes and not more interest without thinking about the structural changes that are needed to lift the U.S. out of its three-year-old morass. More taxes aren't a good answer if they're simply used to support a status-quo system that isn't thinking about systemic change. What about increasing the capital gains tax, reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act, instituting a gasoline tax, creating a more flexible immigration policy, ending public pension systems or increasing the Social Security age, among other possibilities?

Really, the person who benefited the most from the Occupy movement was Jerold Kayden, an urban planning professor at Harvard. Turns out the park Occupy Wall Street chose is a privately owned public space and one of Kayden's academic specialties is New York's privately owned public space. As I listened to his lecture about this last spring, as he told our class about his exhaustive cataloguing of these spaces and the advocacy group that he formed for them, I could only think, This sounds like a bit much, no? (Though I realize academics across all disciplines have made more ado about less before.) Then I saw and heard his name everywhere for a month. Damn.

"More Europe!"

The "More Europe" refrain is trumpeted so often as the solution to save the European Union that I'm no longer sure what this means. Philosophically, sure, it implies binding the continent's monetary union to a political one so that Germany's currency isn't tied to Greece's without the premise that they'll also share fiscal and political decision-making. But practically, does it give the world a physical continent and political entity that's more socially and economically equal, committed to an environmentally sustainable future, and politically liberal? Or does it birth one that's more economically straitjacketed, bound by familiar voting blocs and out-of-balance demographics, and nervous about foreigners, particularly African and Muslim ones, in their midst?

That European countries long ago committed themselves to a thick social safety net isn't the sole reason that so many of them find themselves so desperate. In fact, the governments that are the strongest social democracies -- Scandinavia, minus Iceland -- are doing just fine, thank you very much. The numerous poor business decisions by the continent's banks, from subprime mortgage to subprime sovereign debt, are also very responsible, thus requiring governments to pledge billions of dollars to be the banks' backstops. Then again, governments such as Italy's, Spain's and Hungary's et al don't find themselves in such precarious positions because of global capital forces totally beyond their control.

The historian Tony Judt would often write that Europe's social welfare system was developed in the postwar years to guard against future economic crises creating political catastrophes -- out of the war, new shared identity and mission were born. However, such a moment hasn't yet happened in the post-September 2008 world. This is probably because the contemporary failings were, at least in part, of the personal checkbook. It's much easier to blame your Greek neighbors for living lavishly without earning it than it is to blame a whole country for being ruthlessly ruled by one of world history's most evil collection of men, no? What creates the spark for this needed shared identity is unclear to me, though. That takes much more than bimonthly political summits, no?

All the uttering of "More Europe" most strongly reminds me of the old "More Cowbell" sketch with Will Ferrell on "Saturday Night Live." A clip of it is above.

Play "Rainbow Connection"!

The Muppets' new movie is lots of fun, zany and charming, with a love of slapstick that's carefully done. The more I think of it, the more the movie reminds me of reuniting indie rock bands from the 1980s and 1990s than it does of any other new movie I've seen recently. The movie's plot is essentially a reunion show: Everyone reconvenes for one big gig, to save their museum from falling into the hands of a mean-spirited oil tycoon, while learning about the importance of lifelong friendship. The real-life commercial context is essentially the same: After years of inaction, when Disney apparently was unsure what to do with the characters, the Muppets have come back for a big show, which gets lots of knowing, fourth-wall-breaking winks through the film.

Kermit, Fozzie, Miss Piggy et al return to remind their fans from the early '80s, now all grown, why they mattered so much in the early days and to show the new kids that a lot of what they like these days comes from them. You know, exactly like Pavement, Sebadoh, Pulp et al have done during the past eight years or so. The Muppets play some of their classic material, including "Rainbow Connection," but also branch out just enough, with the help of actor Jason Segel, who spearheaded the revival and wrote much of the movie, so that the material is fresh yet comfortable. You recognize the hits, but there are enough new songs and jokes that the whole purpose isn't simply to repeat the past. And just as once obscure indie rock bands have found financial success now that their once penniless 20-something fans are mid-career professionals and Pitchfork sends their popularity skyward with those professionals' children, the Muppets' movie has proved to be a solid hit.

Let's hope this reunion is more like Mission of Burma's or Dinosaur Jr.'s, where they're inspired to release new records that build on the past, than like the Pixies', who've been performing "Doolittle" live for nearly eight years now -- and nothing but -- without writing new songs. The Muppets deserve it. Above is the video for "Man or Muppet," one of the movie's new songs that I thought was very funny.

Farewell, Jose Reyes

That Jose Reyes has left the Mets isn't all that surprising -- the team is deep financial trouble. Nonetheless, it was still startling to open the sports section one morning last week to see he'd signed a new contract with the Miami Marlins. Reyes had been the team's most exciting player for some time now, most especially after Carlos Beltran aged and David Wright's power dissipated. He's one of baseball's few players whose at-bats are always worth watching and is routinely thrilling on the base paths.

In many professions, including sports and urban planning, there's a constant debate between which approach proves the most transformative: incremental, homegrown accretion or large, high-profile splashes? The Marlins, for the past several years, had opted for the former, accumulating a good if unaccomplished collection of young players, which was largely dictated by financial constraints. Now they've abruptly switched to the latter, with a new stadium, new name, new logo and color scheme, and three new large contracts for free-agents, including Reyes'. (What changed about their financial position to allow this isn't clear to me.) Yet, most successful baseball teams during the past 15 years have grown over time from within. Even when the Yankees were vilified for spending obscenely, their best years came when their core consisted of homegrown talent and shrewd free agent signings.

Reyes and the Marlins will be interesting test cases this year. The former because as wonderful as Reyes is, his contract, at six years and $106 million, may be too handsome. He's been susceptible to injuries his whole career and even after his best year, he's not baseball's best leadoff hitter (that's Jacoby Ellsbury). The latter because the Marlins hope the new contracts will finally make the team relevant -- aside from the two years when they won World Series championships, they never really have been -- but they still haven't addressed a systemic problem of Miami pro sports: Too many Floridians are transplants who root for their former hometowns' teams. Lasting change starts at the bottom with a large group of people who actually believe, not only three people, and the Marlins have missed this important point. They want the quick fix, but often those two words don't fit together.

As for the Mets, it's hard to understand where they sit as a franchise. Three subpar seasons are now fruitless because as bad as those were, they're now worse, and they don't seem to have much of a plan or an opportunity to improve.

Neighborhoods In Reverse

My favorite part about Jamaica Plain so far is what you see when you step out of the Green Street T stop's northwest exit: a park and an apartment building (see the photos to the left). Then, you walk west on Green for 10 minutes and the only buildings on either side -- with one small exception, for a nearly socialist printing press -- are residential. Only after 10 minutes do you reach Centre Street, the neighborhood's commercial district.

JP is a neighborhood in reverse -- the subway stop is surrounded by quiet, attractive residential streets and the business strip is hard to reach. In Boston's historical context this is understandable because the right of way that became the Orange Line and the Southwest Corridor Park above it was originally intended for an elevated highway. No one wanted to build anything there, most especially a business, in the late 1960s, but then Massachusetts' governor at the time, Francis Sargent, did something very innovative in U.S. transportation policy: He listened to intense community opposition, declined to build the highway, stopped building all highways in metro Boston's core, and opted instead to allocate the federal money for mass transit, which was a historical first for such a change. (This is yet another reason why Boston is a very interesting place to work in urban design, development and planning.) Now, JP is one of the city's most desirable places to live.

One of my colleagues joked that JP is Boston's Portland, Ore., aka "the place that young people go to retire." I like to joke that it's a glorified suburb -- so many older couples, families with younger children, and cool 20-somethings at the mediocre Asian restaurant on a Friday night! But if it's a glorified suburb, it's the coolest one there is, with quite the exciting mix of people and a commitment to keep it this way. That a place can accommodate hipsters, well-off stroller-pushers, grizzled gentrifiers circa 1986, and working-class families at the same time -- and function so well -- raises the question: Why can't all suburbs be like this? I think if they all had four T stops, such that you were never more than 15-minute walk from one, they would be.

Takes One To Know One

For further proof that all real estate developers want to do is pave the world, see the most recent report from Columbia University's Center for Urban Real Estate. In it, the center recommends connecting Lower Manhattan with Governors Island, the former military base that the city has niftily turned into an outdoor and arts destination, by putting 23 million cubic yards of landfill in the city's harbor and creating a new neighborhood called, of all things, "LoLo." Disrupt the harbor, create mammoth but perhaps ultimately solvable infrastructure problems, spend billions planning for this? Why not? It will create 88 million square feet of development and generate $16.7 billion of tax revenue for the city.

Now let's assume that these two projections are correct -- even though in the great tradition of consultants they rarely are -- and this new connection solves all of New York's looming demographic, development and fiscal problems in one decades-long swoop. Everything else about is totally ridiculous: When perhaps the greatest problem facing the urban built environment in the early 21st century is the effect of climate change and rising seas on massive coastal populations, this idea decides to place hundreds of thousands more people at very close to, if not below, sea level. In addition, it promises to disturb coastal tides and marine wildlife for generations, when they're already likely to be warped by climate change. Most absurdly, the same center, according to the Times' report, has found that there are four billion square feet of unused development rights in New York, 765 million of which are in Manhattan! If the city were to effectively encourage redevelopment of the land it already has, the 88 million that would come from an environmental wreck would be irrelevant.

When Robert Moses is remembered wistfully, it's for all that he did -- new state parks, highways, bridges, housing, etc -- in the span of about 40 years. He had visions and executed them, which is very difficult to do now that every proposal, no matter how modest it seems, has an abutters' lawsuit following right behind it. The Center for Urban Real Estate's proposal is the most spectacular version of Moses-like thinking I've seen in awhile. Grand and bold, it promises something different. But it's a different kind of utopia, geared toward development rights, not the higher kind of living that Howard, Le Corbusier and many others all dreamed of (and didn't realize). Speed is also falsely alluring: Often enough, there are good reasons why the government shouldn't be able to embark on 10 new highways or a massive landfill project to connect two islands and finish it within five years. China might be able to build an entirely new subway system for Beijing in several years while New York takes decades to create a line for Second Avenue, as Thomas Friedman often likes to remind us, but then again, to oppose such a project in Beijing could also likely land you in jail.

The development opportunities that New York needs are much more likely to be latent in its existing landmass than in new landfill. They need creativity and patience to access, not lots of new permits from the Army Corps of Engineers. Maybe I'm being damagingly simplistic here and sure, it's very worthwhile to think boldly. But doesn't this contradict everything we've learned over the past 50 years about what comprises sensitive, reasonable and successful approaches to development, planning and politics?

Ten Years Later

It's hard to believe, but Beachwood Sparks' second album, "Once We Were Trees," is 10 years old now. When I realize that albums that seemed so new, obscure and different at the time I first heard them have now reached that age, I feel older. Beachwood Sparks is one of those bands disappointingly lost in the shuffle as one decade turns to the next. They were on Sub Pop, but only had a couple of albums and dissolved quickly; now, their brand of rock -- a combination of the faded sun in country fields and the mesmerizing size of the universe -- isn't popular or influential. Sometimes in Real Estate's songs I hear the same washed warmth in the guitars and an understanding that you can be sleepy-eyed and poignant at the same time, but Beachwood Sparks barely pokes its head through anywhere else.

"Once We Were Trees" is a great record, though. It's loosely Transcendentalist, sprinkling around lyrics about the pleasures of nature and the downside of commerce (e.g. "You take the gold and I'll take the forest / You can take what's bought and sold 'cause I can't take much more of this"), with a zonked-out approach to country. There are slide guitars and banjos, yet the album ends in a series of warped guitars and noise -- paradise lost, perhaps? Overall, it sounds like sitting around a campfire among the stars rather than gazing skyward at them. The band titled its final EP "Make the Cowboy Robots Cry," which I've often thought does the best job I've ever heard of capturing a band's sound in an album title. It suggest something western, something futuristic and something touching, all at the same time, which Beachwood Sparks somehow achieved.

Above is a 2000 video of the band that appears to be from a Spanish radio or television station. The quality is surprisingly high. Speaking of 10 years, I'm heading to my high school's 10-year reunion tonight. Yes! I get to see my friends!

So Much For All That, Part N+1

When Ohio's voters last week rejected at the ballot the state's new law barring public employees' longstanding right to collective bargaining, Gov. John Kasich said, chastened, that the law moved too far, too fast. What a common phrase this is among politicians this century: George W. Bush said some version after his attempt to privatize Social Security quickly imploded after his re-election as president. Democrats said some version two years ago when their relatively liberal agenda led to widespread losses at the ballot. And now, numerous ultra-conservative state ballot referenda have been defeated at the polls and Kasich's political partner, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who signed the first, most controversial anti-union bill, will likely be the subject of a recall next year. (His approval ratings are in the high 40s.)

Politicians, post-election, rush to the far reaches of their party's territory and voters yank them back the first chance they can, yet politicians don't seem to learn. It appears Congressional Republicans will avoid the same fate next year, only because President Obama is so tightly linked with our economic morass (which is fair, though he and many, many others share responsibility). But at least Congress' approval rating was somewhere in the 30s during the Democratic majority -- now it's at 9 percent -- and polls routinely show that people disapprove of Republicans' unquenchable thirst for laying waste to government while protecting, if not expanding, income tax cuts for the wealthiest. I assume they continue to rush there because that 9 percent, or whoever represents the base sitting at the extreme, is the most vocal of their supporters.

Paul Krugman often writes that to sit at the center is to be wishy-washy, valuing one hand and the other hand without ever settling on a definitive position. But to be at the center doesn't exclusively mean to be fuzzy and without conviction. It can mean having conviction in certain approaches, policies or beliefs, while recognizing that they don't have to originate from one party exclusively. The route to a goal doesn't always lie along one path. Convincing elected officials of this is quite difficult, though, which is why we keep running from one far end of the field to the other.

Update: In her recent reportage on Planned Parenthood, Jill Lepore snuck this in: "[Americans United for Life], like the Planned Parenthood Fund, is 'nonpartisan,' a word that no longer has any meaning." Well, it still has a literal meaning -- supporting specific policies and not caring from which party they come. But Lepore is right that it's now devoid of practical meaning because when you name a policy -- women's health care, the Second Amendment, etc -- you know automatically which party supports it and which one party opposes it. Nearly all overlap between the two has disappeared and everyone stays on his end of the field.

The Number Of Readers Of This Blog...

...Can be extrapolated from the photos to the right, taken at my wedding reception. At the time, my friend asked during his toast (given with his wife and another friend) for a show of hands of the number of people who read "Secret Knowledge of Backroads." I'd deduct about 30 percent of this photo for a more accurate number -- people probably didn't want to embarrass me on my big day with an anemic showing.

I don't know why I haven't posted this until now.

Maybe This Leggings Thing Is Nearly Over

Any time cargo pockets are attached to an article of clothing, you know it's popularity is very close to ending. Much to my hilarious dismay then to see this ad in the Times a few days ago. Cargo leggings? Who designed these? Who at Bloomingdale's think it's a good idea to stock them? Who would think, Yes, let's attach these clunky, unattractive cargo pockets to leggings whose whole point is to be sleek and curvy? Who would want to wear them? In fact, the cargo pockets are so egregiously ill-chosen, you almost don't notice the replica ribbed socks at the leggings' bottom!

It's been a good run while it lasted, leggings.

Innovation And Space

Of course every city wants to be innovative. Who wants to be the opposite, left on the side of the road? The more interesting debate is what sort of spaces facilitate innovation. There are "smart cities," whose infrastructure, aka "operating system" among aficionados, runs on constant feedback loops to maximize efficiency. But those are being built at the scale of planned cities, recalling modernist planning. There is New York's RFP for a new university to move to town, specifically with a technology-focused campus to jumpstart an industry that's never flourished there. But the Bloomberg administration's preferred location is Roosevelt Island, removed from the city's fabric.

Then there's the Innovation District in Boston, which the Menino administration coined about 18 months ago to revive the overly planned but never really executed redevelopment of the Seaport District. The greatest, most publicized triumph thus far was the decision by Vertex, a prominent pharmaceutical company, to move its headquarters into a new luxury office building on the waterfront. However, Boston poached Vertex from Cambridge using a host of tax breaks, which is boringly reminiscent of circa 1986 urban policy. As a friend said, the most innovative part is that Vertex's lease was dependent on the FDA's approval of a new drug. (It's been approved.) Instead, the Innovation District has a popular cluster of ho-hum restaurants.

Then there are two buildings Paul Goldberger recently reviewed in the New Yorker: the University of California San Francisco's new stem cell research center and the Rockefeller University's new science center (in New York). "At Rockefeller you can't reach any of the labs without going through the common space first. In San Francisco, lounges are set in between laboratories to encourage mixing," Goldberger writes. These architects and scientists are on to something, and not only because I tried to create a studio project one semester around a similar idea. Innovation happens when new groups of people, with overlapping but not uniformly like interests, interact regularly with each other. Enticing a science company's headquarters downtown sure helps the municipal property tax base, which is important, but doesn't create the ecosystem needed to generate the new thing.

Innovation doesn't equal smart engineers + venture capitalists + lawyers. Rather, there are complex series of interactions between tinkerers, entrepreneurs, professional supporters, academics, and seemingly boring but actually integral suppliers, middlemen and manufacturers, where ingenuity happens in the mutations that come from the products and interactions they share with each other. This is another sort of feedback loop, intellectually rigorous but messier in its evolution than a "smart city" would prefer, where experiments happen as new ideas take hold. Space takes on a very important role in this model. These groups of people interact, but not as often as they should, so buildings, as these two do, need to offer informal and formal points of collaboration that value the sparks that come from proximity; and on a broader scale, real estate has to be developed, and urban land managed, in a way that values the role of the the less glitzy and the workaday. The technologically and economically sexy can't exist without that. Innovation doesn't only come from Class A headquarters. Or, as Greg Lindsay put it in his recent criticism of "smart cities" in the Times, "the smartest cities are the ones that embrace openness, randomness and serendipity."

Three Record Stores In Three Weeks

After leaving the Bull Moose record store in downtown Portsmouth, N.H., a few weeks ago, one of my friends turned and said, Does anyone feel old after being in there? I felt old because of the whiny nth-generation emo they were playing inside, but she had that reaction after seeing so many CDs on display in one place. Of the five of us, only I still shop at record stores with any regularity -- and my wife to a lesser degree because I drag her there.

In my inbox today, as part of Newbury Comics' weekly promotions, its co-founder divulged the company is in substantial trouble and adopting a "hybrid model" -- selling clothes and other accessories in addition to music and movies -- in order to survive because people don't buy CDs or DVDs anymore to make such stores viable financially. Yet I still love walking in them, and find it hard to imagine a city being great without one. They're such an enjoyable place to quickly lose 30 minutes and realize they're are so many well-written songs to swoon over. Of course, this puts me in the small minority. Doesn't anyone like holding anything in their hands anymore?

The week after visiting Bull Moose, I went to Pure Pop Records in downtown Burlington. The week after that, I was in Other Music, the restorative pilgrimage that every music fan should make each year. Everything about it says, Yes, this is cool. When my wife bought a used Buffy Sainte Marie record as birthday present for a friend, the cashier nodded in approval and quietly said to himself, Oh, man, nice! I couldn't think of any greater confirmation of one's taste and coolness than that. I felt truly honored to be standing next to her at the time.

At the stores, from best purchase to worst, I bought:

1. Widowspeak -- "s/t"

2. Veronica Falls -- "s/t"

3. Wild Flag -- "s/t"

4. Twin Sister - "In Heaven"

5. The Jayhawks - "Tomorrow the Green Grass"

6. Stephen Merritt - "Obscurities"

Above are photos I took in Other Music and Pure Pop Records.

Metro Regions In Reverse

For all the hand-wringing in the Republican Party (and elsewhere) about whether the U.S. has become Europe, the closest resemblance comes in one characteristic that certainly isn't being discussed in the presidential primary: American suburbs are fast growing poorer. European ones have long been this way, as city centers throughout the continent have long been home to the wealthy for several reasons -- postwar flight never happened on the same scale, public transit is much more extensive, and historic preservation, a key to these cities' identities and tourism, limits real estate development and keeps property values high. Low-income communities, particularly immigrant ones, live on the peripheries, where large-scale public housing can be built, most infamously in metro Paris, where the riots of several years ago produced lots of soul searching and questions about now-President Sarkozy's tolerance.

Now, the Brookings Institution reports that the U.S. suburban poverty rate grew by 53 percent during the last decade and 55 percent of metropolitan areas' poor people live in the suburbs. This flip between urban and suburban poverty isn't generally surprising because coastal cities have seen large influxes of the well-educated and well-compensated; young professionals stay and older families return. Nonetheless, its rate is quite dramatic, which affects nearly every aspect of urbanism, including the property tax base, the school system, access to transit, the delivery of social services over dispersed settlement patterns, the increased popularity of dense development, and the question of what to do with unpopular subdivisions. (If managing vacant land in Detroit is hard, imagine how much harder it is the outer reaches of metro Northern California.) Spatially, there are a popular wealthy core and a popular wealthy outer ring, but the inner ring is at risk of being skipped.

I work in one of these inner-ring suburbs. And as disappointing as it is to hear about rapid growth in poverty anywhere, I find this city to be wonderfully full of possibilities, even if the large majority of its residents are in the working class, if not the working poor. Perhaps this is because this city has always been an immigrant hub and looked like Boston's neighborhoods (even if it's not legally part of Boston) since well before urban living became popular again, so the city's leaders know how to run it. Whatever the reason, every downtown storefront is occupied, the streets are active, new real estate development happens in pockets, and life feels alive.

It doesn't always look very elegant and there's enough not to like there, too (crime, lower-quality schools, the problems that come with being a tougher neighborhood), but overall, it's very instructive about how to harness a working-class community and turn it into a vibrant place. When suburbs change from upper middle-class enclaves to the welcoming port for immigrants, the policy and urban planning that happen in them have to adjust so the city recognizes and maximizes the potential value. The line is fine between improving a low-income community so that it's a high-quality place that everyone deserves and making it such an attractive place that only the wealthy can afford it (again). But such places serve a very important role in a regional economy and ecosystem and their worth deserves to be trumpeted.

Thanks to Spoon for inspiring this post's title.

And He's Staring At Me Like It's 2001

The DJ at the Paradise last Friday sure knew his crowd. He played Ted Leo, Sonic Youth and Britpop covered in muddied guitars -- you know all those songs you searched for when you bought music on CDs. People in the audience looked like self-assured professionals, not college students, with nice, if not elegant, clothes and a little paunch. I was even below the average age of the crowd! We were the ones searching those CD racks! With Eleanor Friedberger, who's most certainly a veteran now, on stage, followed by Wild Flag, a supergroup of former members of Sleater Kinney, Helium and the Minders, it felt like 2002 all over again, maybe even 1998.

The crowd clearly wanted Wild Flag's set to be a triumph, a confirmation of our youth perhaps, and it sure felt that way. Mary Timony didn't look particularly well, which probably wasn't surprising for someone who's made several solo albums influenced by medieval English psychedelia; Janet Weiss and Rebecca Cole looked particularly like moms; and Carrie Brownstein still looked like she could pull off anything you dared her to try. Yet the show worked because they all played so ferociously, vitally and expertly. At this stage in their lives, they have no reason to worry about their place in indie rock, so they produced a magnificent combination of raucous energy, confidence and precision. Each member kept the others from diving too deeply into the outer reaches of their musical digressions, which is exactly what you want in a band -- a unit that keeps drawing everyone back to the cohesive center.

Wild Flag's brilliance prompted me to think this week about my all-time favorite shows and last Friday's combination of music, crowd and overall atmosphere make it one of the top-five that I've seen. The others in this group, in no particular order, are:

* The Trail of Dead, Bowery Ballroom, March 2002: They were touring behind "Source Tags and Codes," one of the last decade's best records, and were still in their dangerous youth. The show ended with the crowd throwing beer and prescription-drug bottles on stage (the band had taunted everyone into doing so) and a monitor falling on the bassist as he writhed against it. And then the Bowery cut the sound and opened the house lights. Oh, and mid-set, Conrad Keely nearly killed Jason Reece when he flung his guitar at the drums.

* Pavement, Agganis Arena, September 2010: Aw, c'mon. No, you c'mon.

* Do Make Say Think, Middle East Downstairs, September 2007: One of the more revelatory artistic experiences I've ever had, with one beautifully structured song after another.

* Radiohead, Liberty State Park, August 2001: I remember it was a beautiful night and the New York skyline, on one of the last times it had the World Trade Center, was wonderful.

Above are two blurry photos from Wild Flag's and Friedberger's performances. Thanks for Friedberger for this post's title; it's a lyric in her solo record's first song.

Farewell, Terry Francona

Terry Francona's value as the Red Sox manager is well encapsulated in his endorsement of Bigelow Green Tea. That a professional sports figure would endorse tea requires confidence -- it's not exactly the most masculine product to profess to love. But it's also inherently soothing and reflective of Francona's calm personality and influence.

In the early 21st century, when nearly all players are financially secure the moment they sign their first free-agent contract and thus free to do as they please, a manager's greatest talent is shepherding the clubhouse, not any particular in-game strategy or decision. Francona was a very good tactician, though not renowned for it. He was better known for trusting his leading players, even when they were in deep slumps -- which usually worked, particularly for Dustin Pedroia early in his career and David Ortiz late in his -- because he and the Red Sox management understand that players' revert to their typical performance. And he was best known for preserving a calm atmosphere around the team, which is a fantastic accomplishment considering the fan- and media-created hysteria that surrounds the Sox daily. The way he deflected every question rationally and modestly was admirable and kept the team humming.

Perhaps it's not surprising that the Sox have descended into a foggy panic since Francona resigned at the end of a hugely disappointing to the end of the season. The franchise insinuated he had a prescription-drug problem, three starting pitchers spent games during the season eating chicken and drinking beer in the clubhouse and John Henry, the team's owner, did an impromptu 60-minute interview with one of the sports talk stations because he was so mad about what they were saying on the air. Even the beat reporters are squabbling with each other! Tedium, apparently, knows no depths. Without Francona -- and now Theo Epstein, who's about to leave as general manager while still only 37 years old, and also had a pleasingly rational and successful approach to the game -- there's no stabilizing force.

The Sox collapsed and missed the playoffs because their pitching collapsed. First, they had too many injuries. Then, no one performed up to their means, which partly comes from poor conditioning brought on by beer and fried chicken, but is also a matter of personal focus and execution that can be tough to pinpoint. It resembled the end of the Mets' 2007 season, when no one could be trusted, and Francona likely knew it. For four weeks (and two more at the season's start), the Sox were awful, but for the remaining four-plus months, they were baseball's best team and only missed the playoffs by one game. Their roster is actually in adequate shape heading into next year.

However, no one, particularly the press, believes this, so it's probably best that Francona left, as sad as it is to say. What I remember from the 2008 Mets, after that epic collapse the previous year (which I contend is more historic than the Sox's because the Mets wasted a lead that was only two games smaller in 10 fewer games), was nothing happened without the specter of the previous year hanging over it. Any time they struggled, everyone assumed Willie Randolph would be fired as manager -- and then he finally was at 4:15 a.m. EST on a weekday in June. Now, no one on the Sox can open their mouths without creating huge news because everyone is obsessed. The same situation will persist into spring training next year, until the team starts playing and winning games again, and it would've remained even longer if Francona stayed because any miniscule hint of trouble would've revived all of this fall's hysteria. Without him, there's a clean slate but not a mug of Bigelow green tea, steam rising, or careful decisions being made.

Oh, Boy

In what might me this blog's most heretical moment, I confess to liking Jonathan Franzen's latest novel, "Freedom," at best mildly. He still writes with immense talent, as he did in "The Corrections" -- the territory that individual sentences cover, in one of the sharpest tones around, is remarkable. He sculpts the plot well, too. But the zest is missing from this one. Where "The Corrections" perfectly captured the late 20th century through the story of one family, "Freedom" bogs down in the tale of one family, as the early 21st century happens around it. For example, the trip through Argentina and Paraguay for ancient truck parts was fun, but it wasn't as vital as the previous trip to Lithuania for a fake start-up company. Before, the characters were meant to be prototypes or windows of the era, but here, they're meant to be real people and they don't work.

There were two minor points I found to be spot on: First, the observation through the character Patty that flip-flops are a sign of contemporary indifference -- people my age don't care enough to wear shoes often and flaunt their casual thwacking in front of older generations. Second, in the scene at the Bright Eyes concert, the observation that people my age are too accepting. No opinion or personality is dismissed. The anger of the youth movements in the '60s and '70s is gone. Opinions aren't defined in opposition to others, but in agreement.

Even with good smaller points, I thought the book, overall, was too trying. Some outlandish, unlikely plot developments happen to the central family, the Berglunds. Yet I thought the main argument was that the Berglunds were no different than the very large majority of any well-educated contemporary family of working professionals -- and they're all surrounded by crushing depression and deeply unhappy, dysfunctional relationships. I think Franzen was trying to say, Every professional in the Boston-to-D.C. corridor looks successful and will gladly try to convince you of how exciting modern life is, but underneath a thin veneer, everyone is beyond screwed up, so let's acknowledge this and explore how we're all incomplete people.

This might be true. My friend, who loved the book so much that he began it again the moment he finished it, says that complaining that "Freedom" is depressing ignores what happens in the world around us. But to experience these emotions for 558 pages is a test of wills. Reading the book made me think I behave like these characters, too, and that I have great fallacies I don't acknowledge readily enough (this also might be true), which made me depressed each time I opened the book. I suppose these days I try to think more optimistically. Surprisingly enough, I liked when some of the characters had happy resolutions to their predicaments.

We'll Come Back For Indian Summer

The Times' editorial page, like me, has always had a sentimentalist streak when it comes to the rhythms of the seasons. Back in August, it complained that this year's didn't seem like previous ones -- too much traffic, too hectic a pace and not enough people fleeing the city to relax and tune out the office. Last week, the writers spun this gem about fall 2011. Editorial pages aren't meant to be so lyrical:

"There is no single way to measure the coming of autumn. Gardeners wait for the first hard frost, the one the blackens the basil and pulps the tomatoes still on the vine. For some, it's the smell of wood smoke or the sight of leaves flaming out one tree species at a time. In New York City, there are different measures. Fall begins when street fashion slips into thermal chaos -- down jackets, shawls, bermudas and flip-flops all on the same block. Fall begins, as it did this week, when the residual heat in the subway station feels strangely welcome.

"The approach to autumn has been murkier than usual this year -- a long, damp slog toward October, days of rain all across the Northeast. We can hope, after the first hard frost, for a week or so of Indian summer. But there is really no proper name for the slice of the season we've had so far. This fall has been made of moments from late May, a few gray days from early June, some Sundays that April discarded, and a week or so that seems to have orphaned entirely, with no month to call home.

"It will come, we hope -- the sky a Venetian blue, the days as crisp as a just-ripe, old-fashioned apple, an Ashmead's Kernel or a Calvill Blanc. That is the autumn we're waiting for -- not a prognostication of winter or a postponement of summer, but actual autumn, a season we hope will last as long as it can. It is a season of gnat-killing nights and afternoons when the sun's heat is becoming elusive. It is frost on the grass and your visible breath rising in the air."

Well, that Indian summer came last weekend in New York and it was much warmer than the Times' writer would've liked but glorious nonetheless. He or she clearly doesn't live in Boston, where any unexpected warmth and soaking sunshine is welcome. Even if it was a postponement of summer, it was wonderful to chase it down. Thanks to Luna, via Beat Happening, for the post's title.

The Last Song On The Bon Iver Record Might Be The Most Egotistical Ever

Dude, have you heard the last song on the new Bon Iver record? That it sounds like "Colors of the Wind" -- you know the lead single from Disney's "Pocohantas," sung by Vanessa Williams -- wouldn't be such a bad thing if the rest of the album didn't sound like Sting circa 1992 or Phil Collins circa 1986. With the ultra-processed setting on the synthesizer and the heavy Auto-Tune on the vocals -- um, isn't this supposed to be indie rock?

"Bon Iver" is, surprisingly, a bro record. There are thick emotions throughout it, but they're all somewhat amorphous, swallowed by the unintelligible lyrics, hefty chords and dramatic countermelodies in the orchestration and vocals. In the end, there are well-composed, cinematic scenes, but they leave the feeling of a sweaty hug after a tough party -- people feel sad and they know this moment is important yet they're not exactly sure why. Considering Justin Vernon made his reputation on the poignancy and mythology of Bon Iver's first album, recorded in the dead of winter in Wisconsin's woods, brooding over a woman and much more, I thought this album would have more content below the surface.

By the time that last song, "Beth/Rest," kicks in, it's almost as though Vernon dares you to like it. The song isn't a gigantic wink at the audience, either. Vernon has said before how much he likes Bonnie Raitt and Bruce Hornsby, for example, and he's always presented himself as an earnest guy (the latter of which is admirable). He executed one of the past five years' most beloved records, so why not try to sneak a synthesized 1980s adult top-40 pop song past you, too?

There is something compelling about the song. My friend says it's a great closer because it provides a refreshing sense of resolution to the album, and I somewhat agree. Vernon cares about the whole record, which is a pleasing throwback in 2011. "Bon Iver" makes the most sense when you listen to all of it and take the time to appreciate each song's structure and growth. In this context, "Beth/Rest" is a part of a little world Vernon constructed -- the final resting point. Nonetheless, the song takes the production values and careful constructions that are the record's strengths and and heads to murky, unknown territory. The sincere kitsch, introduced by that keyboard hook, is a step too far for me, and suggests Vernon thinks he can get away with anything and still make it meaningful because he's Bon Iver. Not necessarily so.

Decide for yourself: above is a relatively good video of Bon Iver playing the song live.

Pittsfield, Far Away

Go, Pittsfield! In its biggest splash yet, the city was featured in the Travel section of last Sunday's Times. Leave it to the Times, though, to homogenize such a varied place. Every neighborhood or city that's featured in this part of the Travel section -- called "Surfacing" -- ends up sounding exactly the same, whether it's in rural Massachusetts, a gritty part of L.A. or south Delhi, India. (When Hauz Khas Village in Delhi appeared earlier this year, my friend who lives there [and whose girlfriend was in one of the photos] wrote me to say that he didn't realize Delhi sounded so much like Budapest or Brooklyn.)

Each profile, without fail, includes some combination of a coffee house, a stylish ethnic restaurant where you can order small plates, an art gallery, bartenders with thick beards and cool glasses, people selling you something they made in their garage, and a park that doubles as a warehouse. Not that any of these are inherently objectionable as individual places, but it's squarely disappointing to realize that 21st-century leisure can be so easily boxed and sold. What was once meant to be intriguing is now rather familiar. I suppose this is also a byproduct of trying to capture a place's spirit via four stores and a quick write-up.

Pittsfield, of almost any U.S. destination to leap into this profile, shouldn't be susceptible to this. The city's combinations of buildings, people, industry, struggle, charm and delight are wonderfully distinct, and no fuzzy portrayal in the Times will change this. In the Times, the city comes out looking relatively uniform, but Pittsfield can shrug it off. Hopefully, the publicity at least entices more people to go and realize there's a lot more than the Times suggests. The city deserves the larger profile.

Above is a photo from Third Thursdays, the summertime monthly stroll in Pittsfield, when North Street, downtown's main drag, closes to cars and everyone enjoys themselves in the great Berkshires air.

Farewell, R.E.M.

As I've written in these pages before, R.E.M.'s 1992 album, "Automatic for the People," is surprisingly challenging -- little about it says pop. In fact, most of it asks for contemplation and maturity, which are two characteristics that don't readily lend themselves to selling millions of records. And yet, the record did just that, and R.E.M. deserves credit for it.

Accomplishing such a feat places R.E.M. somewhere on the family tree of the 1960s' great popular art, at least when basing it on the definition in Louis Menand's recent New Yorker essay about the midcentury critic Dwight Macdonald. The art was "smart and enjoyable, and it made money, too," Menand writes, describing what is commonly known as the middlebrow. Macdonald apparently detested it, but he came of age in an era when the middlebrow didn't exist -- what was popular was no good and what was avant-garde was too unapproachable. I think we're in a similar era today and R.E.M., particularly "Automatic for the People," is one of the last vestiges of a time when you could be both good and popular. (Other holdouts were "OK Computer" and "The Sopranos.") Sure, plenty of good and esoteric artists, writers, musicians, playwrights, etc, receive lots of attention and make more money today because of the Internet, but the cultural fragmentation that results from the Internet also sets the ceiling much lower. This is disappointing: The middlebrow is a powerful uniting force that shouldn't be ignored. What's so bad about the widely available being of a high quality?

R.E.M.'s members said last week they wanted to retire on their own terms, before they became irrelevant. Teasing them for this -- because they haven't released a monumental record in maybe 20 years or a very good one in 12 years -- misses the point. First, they've never had embarrassing moments parading on stage like, most infamously, the Rolling Stones do when they tour. Second and more importantly, R.E.M. has taught you can mine meaningful, confusing, intriguing territory all while figuring out how to make it appealing. This is a delicate trick to turn. Very few artists do it, nearly all wish they could, and R.E.M. has.

Above is the track "New Orleans Instrumental No. 1." No one in 2011 would be bold enough to put such a sweet two-minute instrumental in the middle of a record and still plan it would sell millions. Respect is due.

Red Sox, Meet the Mets

Boston's sports fans are notoriously hyperbolic and wildly spoiled during the past 10 years, so as much as I like following sports, I take such great pleasure when one of the four major teams here collapses. Cue the Red Sox, whose September is eerily reminiscent of the 2007 and 2008 versions the Mets: The team had a nine-game lead for the wild card on Sept. 3, led the A.L. East shortly before that, and were all but guaranteed to qualify for the playoffs, until they couldn't stop losing. After tonight's loss, they're only two games ahead of Tampa Bay for the wild card, with all of their momentum heading in the completely wrong direction. Even if they make the playoffs, it's hard to imagine them winning a series.

Rooting for the Mets is a perennial exercise in frustration, where little goes as planned. This once used to be true of Sox fandom, when the team was best known for its 80-plus years without winning the World Series and repeated catastrophic collapses. But since about 1998, the Sox have actually been quite good, with above-average records, multiple playoff appearances and baseball history's longest consecutive streak of sellouts. This month has been a total reversal: injuries have left the starting rotation embarrassingly thin; the bullpen is managed on the philosophy that everyone is removed at the first sign of trouble and pitchers barely last more than two-thirds of an inning; when the hitting is good, the pitching isn't and vice versa; and the losses come in breathtakingly disappointing ways. Maybe there's some good in this, though -- everyone needs to experience the bottom of the cycle sometimes, if only to truly appreciate what it means to be on top.

Boston fans, especially those under 30 (and I'm in this age bracket), have generally forgotten this because their teams have been so successful. It's hard to believe, but the Patriots, the paragon of football franchises, have actually lasted the longest of any of the city's franchises without a title -- their last Super Bowl victory was in 2005. This makes the Patriots' nascent season intriguing to me. As much attention and praise as they receive, they now have a slight hint of the underdog and a stronger one of urgency. The offense has been spectacular in the first two games, adding to the thrill they've often created the past several years.

Tom Brady has grown on me over the years: Once beloved for winning so many championships, he's now moderately derided (if not openly mocked) for his supermodel wife, elegant lifestyle, long hair, the time he spends with his family, and the great regular seasons but underwhelming playoffs he's had in recent years. Usually, I wouldn't be totally comfortable with this combination, either. But Brady plays against type and challenges the conventional wisdom of sportswriters and fans so well: His game says, Why can't you be aggressive and slightly feminine at the same time? Why can't you spend time with your family and excel on the field? Why can't your personality and private life change as you age without compromising your passion for your profession? Why would we demand of a sports star what we wouldn't demand of ourselves?

Tennis, Under The Lights

Novak Djokovic might've capped one of the best seasons ever in men's tennis on Monday by winning the U.S. Open, but my favorite moment of the tournament came last Thursday, when Andy Roddick upset David Ferrer in the fourth round:

After two consecutive days of downpours, canceling all the tennis scheduled to be played, Roddick and Ferrer were supposed to play on the second-largest court when water started seeping up through the surface. An hour of blowdrying and mopping the court was ineffective, so two of the circuit's top-20 players then moved to Court 13, on the periphery of the USTA's tennis grounds -- something like if Wilco were scheduled to play the Wang Theatre but then had to move to All Asia because the sound system sputtered. The Times photographed Ferrer and Roddick walking the grounds, surrounded by security guards, as fans rushed by them to grab a seat at the court, which had about one-twentieth the capacity of where they were supposed to play. Then, when they played, a viewer tried to scale the fence while Roddick served, a baby cried, and rock music from the concourse's speakers washed over the court. Roddick won in four sets.

I criticize New York often, but its dizzying pulse makes the U.S. Open so wonderful: The city puts the tennis on the hardest hard courts, in the midst of late August's sticky humidity, under the lights and low-flying planes, surrounded by noise, Flushing and an addictive throb. No other sporting venue takes a game and transforms its identity like New York does to the Open. The players were even particularly testy this year at the post-match press conferences (because of the tournament's poor administration during the rain): Rafael Nadal suggested players form a union! Los tenistas unidos jamas seran vencidos!

The Times' sportswriters focused on the ridiculousness of the fortnight -- the circus, the packed schedules, the poor planning, the outbursts, the overshadowed quality of the tennis on the court. But this ambiance has an appeal all its own. Tennis' gentility combines with a sneer that runs from Jackson Pollock to the Velvet Underground to the 7 train to create something thrilling that Wimbledon, for all its charming grass, just can't replicate.

Above are Roddick and Ferrer disbelievingly inspecting the court with tournament officials.

Since Everyone Else Is Remembering

On a self-absorbed blog like this one, writing on Sept. 11, 2011, about anything but the World Trade Center attacks seems mistaken. Some of my intersections with the 10th anniversary today are: the compelling interviews I heard on "This American Life"; a co-worker's friend telling me at the supermarket that she was planning to make a patriotic pudding for desert -- vanilla pudding, with strawberries and blueberries (considering this was in Harvest Co-op in JP, she was likely being ironic); a former classmate's appearance in an ABC News story because he was interviewed in 2001 by them while in 8th grade and the channel was revisiting people; and Facebook urging me to "like" "being American."

I suppose all that I'll add is I vividly remember the first plane struck while I was in the shower at Dana Basement, my freshman year at Swarthmore. When I left the bathroom, a junior who lived on my hall told me and I was struck with disbelief. I went to the dining hall for breakfast and told the few people with whom I ate. It was very strange news to relay. One class still happened shortly after, perhaps because on one of the country's most liberal campuses, in suburban Philadelphia, the meaning hadn't yet fully registered. I spent the whole afternoon watching the TV with the rest of the dorm, feeling lonely.

My Storm Is The Storm

Hurricane Irene didn't create much damage in Boston two weekends ago, nor as much as was originally expected in New York. (I remember one 30-minute period where the wind was strong and the windows rattled, but aside from what looks like a lot of pencil shavings on my Subaru, not much happened in my neighborhood.) As a result, by mid-day Sunday, before the storm had finished passing through the Northeast, plenty of pundits, from veterans like Howard Kurtz to simpletons like Michael Graham, had declared Irene to be the biggest media fabrication in recent memory.

In the end, the storm was actually quite powerful and destructive: About 55 people died, a few million lost power, parts of metro New York were flooded for days, and much of upstate New York and Vermont was ravaged. That the country's most populous corridor, from D.C. to Boston, was in Irene's direct path and potentially subject to a serious natural disaster merited plenty of advance coverage. The Northeast has a serious hurricane only about once every 20 years, so many are underprepared. (And that Irene came only several days after an earthquake was certainly bizarre.) Now, I don't have cable so I didn't see the widely described hysteria of local TV reporters and the Weather Channel, but considering the aftermath, maybe the coverage was underdone. Sure, it would've been a lot worse had Battery Park City fallen back into the harbor, but the consequences were serious.

The wild fluctuations in coverage highlight two telling phenomena about the early 21st century. First, as has been written many times before, the need to be out in front of a story is now more important than the need to be accurate -- setting the trend with an opinion or prediction is valued more than doing so with facts. Kurtz and Graham look foolish for anointing themselves right and everyone wrong when they're cast with the latter now too for writing before thinking. Second and somewhat related, Graham and everyone on Twitter and Facebook griping about the hurricane that wasn't miss the greater context. The storm wasn't bad for them, so, they conclude, it must not have been bad anywhere. Navel gazing isn't anything new, but when you can broadcast what's inside your navel to anyone you like as often as you like, it becomes carelessly myopic.

The damage Hurricane Irene inflicted on Vermont is certainly the storm's most disappointing result. Whole towns were isolated because their roads became too ripped to travel; vibrant downtowns had several feet of standing water; small rivers rushed over their banks, destroying farmland and dairy farms; covered bridges were torn off their foundations. Vermont is a special place with a very self-sufficient personality, but it also has a lot of industry, namely farming, where the margins are thin and the product unable to sustain such a monumental blow during the summer. In addition, the construction season only lasts into about late October, so the damage will be evident for many months. The state deserves all the help it can get.

Update: Local media pundit Dan Kennedy argues the same as I, though with less opining about the 21st century, here.

Adventures in Moving

That's my friend Ryder strapping my friend Jenny's mattress to the roof of my Subaru Outback two Sundays ago. Surprisingly, driving her mattress to Belmont was relatively easy and my car had no problems. My move, happening tomorrow, has been a long slog of packing, somewhere between John Cusack's line in "High Fidelity" that "It's not what you're like, it's what you like," and Fugazi's proclamation that "You are not what you own."

Fortunately, the move comes after a wonderful summer in Boston, brief tropical storm, earthquake and heat wave aside. There have been lots of crisp, sunny days that are a good reminders of why it's worth staying. And tonight is the Jimmy Fund Radio-Telethon, when the city comes together at a scale that it rarely does. I even fall for the mid-inning interviews with people from companies like Millenium Pharmaceuticals, but then, I'm overly sentimental.

Eleanor Friedberger Has A Sweet Forehand...

...And the best album of the summer. Friedberger's main band, the Fiery Furnaces, which she leads with her brother Matthew, sometimes deserve the criticism they take for their inscrutable and occasionally impenetrable whimsy. Their debut album, "Gallowsbird's Bark," had a wonderful rush to its pop songs, but since then, the Fiery Furnaces have switched styles and approaches so many times mid-song, mid-album and mid-career that I find it tough to keep up. They've also maybe been a bit too prolific -- seven albums in eight years

Not so on Friedberger's first solo album. It's playful, but also simpler, with a lovely, slightly sweaty pulse. There are still times where I want to tell Friedberger to take a deep breath and others where she loves the weird sounds her keyboards make a bit too much. But Friedberger knows what she wants the whole time and gets there in a direct and charming way. That this is a great summer album is no mistake -- it's titled "Last Summer," with personal references to her apparently wonderful summer 2010 and lyrical references to the places in outer Brooklyn you explore on hazy summer evenings. It sounds like it was recorded on her brownstone's front stoop (also suggested in this music video) -- a warm, sticky and carefree session, surrounded by friends. She also composes the song very well, with keyboards and saxophone arriving to provide lifts just when they're needed.

Maybe nostalgia is overrated, used to create an airbrushed past. But Friedberger realizes that the summer is the most nostalgic of seasons, when you remember running and swimming in the sun as a kid and staying out late, and when you create new memories. She's captured this perfectly here, with music sweet and tart, and the promise of a kiss in there somewhere. The music video for the single, which is by far the album's best song, "My Mistakes," is above. Her forehand appears at the 1:05 mark.

We Went That Way

No wonder our country finds itself in such monumental gridlock: In the New York Times' poll published shortly after Congress reached its compromise on the debt ceiling, 72 percent of respondents disapproved of Republicans' position on the matter, but 63 percent said the amounts of cuts weren't enough or sufficient, 44 percent said the bill should've relied on cuts alone, and 63 said they support raising taxes on households earning more than $250,000. Then there's Stanley Oland, a 62-year-old Republican from Kalispell, Mont., who told the Times, "Unless you have working people, you don't have revenue from taxes. If you cut spending, jobs will be eliminated and you won't get any revenue. Every dollar spent creates jobs."

It's impossible to rationalize these opinions: If you don't support Republicans on this fiscal policy, then you can't say the bill should've only consisted of cuts. Yet somehow 72 percent said the former and 44 percent said the latter; um, that adds up to 116 percent. And if you didn't find the cuts to be adequate in size, I doubt that you also want to raise taxes on the upper middle class. Trying to make these opinions compatible is remarkably difficult. It reminds me of goofy children's adventure movies where characters chase a bad guy, stop someone on the street to ask where he went, and the person replies, "He went that way," while pointing in each direction. When it comes to affairs of state like sovereign debt, it's very difficult to collectively support two stridently opposite positions at the same time and expect solutions. Politicians then find it easy to stay on the sidelines and shout, as they're wont to do.

As for Mr. Karabell, someone should send him a note telling him that one can't be a Republican in 2011 and believe that government spending helps create in jobs in some capacity. This is heresy to the party today. At least on fiscal and economic policy, what he believes fundamentally conflicts with the party's position. He should change his voter registration or otherwise he'll be a disappointed Republican for a long time.

Someone Call Sufjan Stevens

Paul LePage, Maine's governor, is a succinct summary of the present-day Republican Party: He ordered his state's labor department to remove its historical murals of mill workers, shipyard hands and other laborers because Maine's industrial past wasn't sufficiently pro-business for his taste. Yet LePage is thrilled by the number of private jets landing at small runways around Maine as parents leave their kids at summer camp because they may stay the night and spend some of their wealth shopping and eating (even though the point of renting a private jet is to leave as quickly as possible). "Love it, love it, love it," he told the Times. "I wish they'd stay a week while they're here this is big business." LePage shuns working families who live in Maine while hoping to cement the state's reputation as a vacation playground for the rich. Hopefully his economic development team has the courage to tell him that this approach is good economic development policy in reverse.

State governors offer insightful but overlooked windows into politics and governing. D.C. has imploded this summer because so few congressman, most especially Republicans, are willing to move off their party lines and there are so many of them -- 535, House plus Senate -- that compromise is too difficult to coordinate. But in states, the legislatures are small and often only in session for part of the year, leaving their governors to take some of their party's most strident positions and their states' quirks and run in strange directions. Most infamously this year, Republican Scott Walker tried to end Wisconsin's public labor unions. Texas' Rick Perry, who's about to join the Republican presidential primary, presided over a massive prayer session, which is the most bizarre twisting of the First Amendment that I can remember. Here in Massachusetts, Deval Patrick advocates to allow illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition rates at state colleges, which I support but I also suppose is on the far left flank of the Democratic platform.

In Florida, Rick Scott's approval ratings have been hammered into the low 20s as he tries to rip apart any semblance of the social safety net. This disproves the generally accepted storyline of the past two years that the voting public has forcefully rejected the Obama administration's expansionist view of domestic policy. Floridians have seen austerity up close and even more vehemently said no (if one can use approval ratings, where Obama's are still much higher than Scott's, as the barometer). That the man who led a company responsible for one of the country's largest frauds ever in the health care industry would mishandle his state's health care system isn't much of surprise. Unfortunately, Florida is learning this the hard way.

Scott says his anemic approval rating is the consequence of making tough decisions, though I think this is good evidence that the rest of the country doesn't welcome austerity, as federal Republicans claim they will. People have much more direct relationships with their governors than they do with Congressional leaders. They see their governors on TV nearly every day and know their names, while Congressmen, even those as prominent as Boehner, Cantor and Pelosi, are still from foreign districts. Consequently, when governors make drastic changes such as Scott's, they react genuinely. When the Republican Party emerges from its minority position, either by taking the White House or both houses of Congress next year, I think people will respond to national austerity the same way and reject it even more angrily than they have the stimulus bill.

Not surprisingly, the two governors who seem to be doing best these days, Chris Christie of New Jersey and Andrew Cuomo of New York, embody their state's personalities better than anyone else. Christie's brash conservatism doesn't fit New Jersey's traditional politics, but then, he's an archetypical New Jersey guy -- blunt, a bit overweight, loves Springsteen and wants to get it done, diplomacy be damned. Cuomo is much the same, but trimmer and with a greater love of working on his car. Governors can reflect their states, but federal politicians can't do this -- there are too many people to represent, so they can't win the day on charm.

Sufjan Stevens, he of the aborted 50-album cycle about each state, probably has greater insight into this than I do. He was right to recognize that each state has rich veins of the political and personal to mine. For now, I'll settle with the above video of his song "For the Widows in Paradise, for the Fatherless in Ypsilanti."

My Wife's Cell Phone

My wife has bought a new cell phone for the first time in at least nine years! She bought a new one after the old one's reception began to falter and on two separate occasions this year, waiters in restaurants marveled at her phone sitting on the table, wondering aloud that such phones still exist and work. Her new phone even includes a camera -- the most basic of features these days that the old one nonetheless lacked. Even for someone who rarely buys new technology, I was pretty astonished how long her phone lasted. Then again, I don't understand many people's urge to continually buy new gadgets: Why the regular need for the upgrade? What does it genuinely improve? Isn't obsolescence much further away than we typically claim for these products?

Above is a photo of the ancient phone, taken with the camera on my relatively rudimentary cell phone.

When Photo Albums Were Still Around

Already there's a tribute album for "Is This It"? Sure, I think the record captured a moment in time better than any other of the past 20 years has. But its songs, no matter how catchy they are, aren't expertly written, and that moment seems almost quaint now, with New York on edge, the country united around it, and the U.S.'s economy and international status relatively secure. In the end, the Strokes flamed out around 2004, and even when cultural cycles zoom by at hyper speeds, 10 years is a brief amount of time to wait before canonizing a piece of art.

Released at the same time as "Is This It," but to much less fanfare, was Death Cab for Cutie's "The Photo Album." No one should make a tribute album for this one, either, but it might actually be the record with the longer-lasting influence. Surprisingly enough, Death Cab for Cutie's career arc has become the template during the past 10 years for how indie rock bands ascend to widespread popularity: Value production quality from the start; write lyrics that appeal to teenagers but are nonetheless meaningful; have your songs featured in the background of TV shows and commercials (for Death Cab, it was "The O.C."); jump to a major label when the timing seems right; release a wildly successful side project (though I'd take lead singer Ben Gibbard's EP as All-Time Quarterback, with a great cover "Why I Cry," over the Postal Service; good luck finding that one!); and tour, tour, tour. Over time, you become erudite and ubiquitous.

At the time of its release, my friend Drew and Pitchfork wrote in their reviews that "The Photo Album" was an appropriate title for the record because photo albums are there for you to leaf through and recall treasured moments, and "The Photo Album" reminds you that "We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes" is the easily superior record. Nonetheless, "The Photo Album" stands the test of time well, with its nostalgic, pensive opener, "Steadier Footing," the sweetly drum-machine-heavy paean to sunny early spring spring days, "Coney Island," and the shredding of L.A. in "Why Would You Want to Live Here?" That this album is also now 10 years old makes me feel old. I remember listening to it freshman year of college, as I dived too deeply into the world of indie rock. That was 10 years ago?! I probably have a photo album somewhere to memorialize it, though not on Facebook.

Coincidentally and humorously, after listening to "The Photo Album" two consecutive nights this week, the next day standing outside the bike shop in my building was a young man wearing a Death Cab T-shirt, looking right at me. I wonder if he knew I was listening to the record. Above is an independently made video of "Coney Island."

Farewell, Carlos Beltran

It's not only that Carlos Beltran looked at the final strike of the 2006 NLCS, ending the Mets' last serious chance at a title with a whimper. He was also often the best and the highest-paid player on a team that, for seven years, could never get out of its own way. There were the epic collapses of 2007 and 2008 when no relief pitcher could get more than two outs, the firing of Willie Randolph at 3 a.m. EST, the mishandled concussions of Ryan Church and Jason Bay, the recurring injuries to the stars, Beltran's secret knee surgery that sparked a feud with management, the badly designed new ballpark, the punches Francisco Rodriguez threw at his girlfriend's father, Fred Wilpon's ripping the team in the pages of the New Yorker, and the team's severe financial weakness because of the Wilpons' investments with Bernard Madoff. The team had a quite a few well-paid stars (and a few more well-paid non-stars), but never the ability to figure it all out. When the pitching was up, the hitting was down, and so on in many permutations.

Nevertheless, Beltran had three excellent seasons with the Mets, from 2006 to 2008, when he had between 112 and 116 RBI and an OPS between .876 and .982. He was an All-Star five times, too. This year, when he should be starting his career's decline, he's been pleasantly productive, and I'd found myself ambivalent about the likelihood of a trade. (The trade happened Thursday, to the San Francisco Giants.) Beltran was never particularly emotional as a player, but he wasn't obnoxious either and was relatively easy to root for. That he's now traded is one of many signs the past couple of years that the Mets are far away from contending again for the playoffs. They've played surprisingly well so far this year, but at this point, the only above-average players on the roster are Jose Reyes and David Wright. The team always seems to play better when the expectations are low.

And I don't think anyone could've hit that curveball Adam Wainwright threw to end Game 7.