Thursday, December 27, 2012

Me And My Chilean Cardigan Down By The Schoolyard

Another tough departure from my wardrobe happened two weeks ago: I gave away my light blue, zip-up cardigan with the thin navy blue stripe across the upper ribcage. I bought it nearly nine years ago in a Santiago department store, either Fallabella or Almacenes Paris, and wore it very often for a long time. In fact, I wore it so frequently that at my first reporting job, when my co-workers created a fake front page to say farewell, the cardigan made several appearances. I mistakenly put it in the washing machine once, which stretched it out, and with time, the sweater became so stretched that its waistline became amorphous and mushy. Then, the zipper completely broke so it was essentially an undefined piece of wool that still hung around my arms and shoulders well but flailed everywhere below that. Despite its poor condition, I brought it to Boomerang's rather than put it in the trash. I couldn't bear to do it myself. Like those great brown Reeboks that I bought in Santiago, the cardigan's small details were strong enough that I haven't found a similar sweater here. I had to hang on to it as long as I could.

Above is a photo of the sweater.

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Sometimes It Seems Like I Live In Vermont



For example, three Saturdays ago, when a light snow fell through the early afternoon, dusting the late-fall vegetables for sale at the neighborhood farmers' market. The pears, apples, squashes and broccoli all had bits of wet crystals on them and the sky was a pleasantly husky gray. As everyone on Centre Street ran errands -- as usual, I was only one of a handful of people without a stroller or a dog -- the embrace of early winter reminded me of how I imagine people in Burlington manage Saturdays in January. Or for example, when walking east on Green Street in fall or winter mornings, toward the eponymous subway station, and the sun shines sharply through trees, to the point that I have to squint or cross the street into the shade. In the distance beyond the subway, the street climbs a hill on its way to Franklin Park; a church steeple and brick buildings reflect the glare. It makes me think I live in Waterbury, or another of Vermont's large towns (relatively speaking), where the central square is a collection of late-19th century buildings and the sun always falls attractively on them. Then I hop on the subway with about 75 other people and another 600 or so who join at the subsequent stops. That the city simultaneously feels so distant and present, so rural and urban, so intimate and unfamiliar, is wonderful.

Above are photos of Jamaica Pond and the farmers' market.

Monday, December 24, 2012

Onwards and Upwards

One of the Oklahoma City Thunder's five losses so far this year came against the Celtics on Thanksgiving weekend. The Thunder had flashes of excitement and fluidity, but couldn't quite put enough together for a victory. There was a bit of a stutter to the game that stopped everything from coalescing. I closed the TV wondering if they could be the same without James Harden, their star guard who was traded to the Houston Rockets because the Thunder's management decided his impending new contract would've been too expensive to afford. So much for that: The Thunder have the NBA's best record now, at 21-5. That their winning so often without Harden doesn't demonstrate that he was irrelevant to their excellence. Harden is carrying an otherwise unimpressive Rockets team to a .500 record, and the Thunder probably could've traded guard Russell Westbrook, their other secondary star, and not missed a step this year.

If any team could justify the importance of professional sports in urban policy and planning, the Thunder are probably it. With their rise has come a pop in stories about Oklahoma City's resurgence, most noticeably in the Times' Sunday magazine last month. Downtown housing, redeveloped mills, re-designed streets, and a talented basketball team that's popular nationwide and raises the city's profile. Basketball is the most urban of the top-four professional U.S. sports, so perhaps this correlation makes sense. (Or maybe the improvements in Oklahoma City have to do with a cast of thousands who shape its policy, development, culture, lifestyle, and neighborhoods.) The city takes pride in its team and the team takes pride in its city, and it's hard not to be charmed.

The Thunder's current roster is at a stage similar to where Beach House or Grizzly Bear sit these days -- at the peak of their powers, with even more potential and growth laid out in front of them. But they're no longer a secret to share among your cool friends. The word about their talent is out everywhere, so the fan base is much larger. And as hard it is not to be able to keep them to yourself any longer, you're still so happy for all that they've done. The difference between the Thunder and Beach House is that while the Thunder will compete for the championship for probably the next five years (if not more), Beach House probably only have one or two more great albums left before they become repetitive. That's because basketball seasons are played every year while one record is released every two or three years, and because art is hard, maybe even harder than professional sports.

Above is a photo of Kevin Durant, the Thunder's star and the league's sweetest player.

Saturday, November 24, 2012

Return to Hot Chicken

Nashville is a very cool city. In fall 2010, I spent one of my most enjoyable weekends of travel there, which I previously wrote about in these pages. Its reinvention as a relatively hip place is well chronicled: neighborhoods have revived; a food scene bloomed; bands, not all of them playing country music, have grown popular; the population has continued to grow; and the city has rediscovered its core rather than only expand horizontally. Its urban planning and policy are an interesting microcosm. Nashville already had a long-running and clearly defined identity as a tourist destination -- "Music City," aka the home of the country music industry -- which surely draws tens of thousands of visitors every year. Marry that to all the resident-based developments that have happened during the past 20 years and one has a great place to live.

Yet in the past two decades Nashville has also been susceptible to the two classic features of "growth coalition" planning, professional sports and convention centers. The city convinced Houston's football team to move there and built an arena on spec, ultimately receiving an expansion franchise from the NHL. That team, the Predators, has struggled financially ever since, though it's had a number of good seasons, and nearly moved to other, equally unexpected locations for hockey. (Nashville is probably in the group of several markets that the NHL should never have expanded to, which is one of the reasons why the league is mired in another lockout.) Most recently, the city financed a $620 million convention square center, with 350,000 square feet, downtown. It's also spending $128 million for a new hotel next door. The chamber of commerce's president told the Times that the new convention center would "create a vitality that just radiates across downtown."

The debate is endless about whether a professional sports franchise is necessary to be a first-class city. Stadiums, except in the rarest occasions, simply don't generate their promised economic development. This is as settled in academic research as evolution is. Nonetheless, I'm willing to say that a team creates qualitative city pride that's important for a city's reputation. Convention centers, on the other hand, are practically impossible to defend. The overall business has been declining for years, yet city after city builds larger and larger ones to chase the biggest shows, which are relatively few in number. When the center doesn't do well, the city's leadership concludes this is because there's no hotel next door, so it commits millions more for a Hyatt or similar brand. (Nashville beat most places to the punch by building both at once! And the metropolitan area already has two convention centers! But they're smaller!) Lastly, they're terrible urban design, massive boxes that occupy multiple city blocks, are hostile to pedestrians outside, and dead when they're not being used. If an architecture firm ever figures out how to design one that fits in an existing urban fabric, they deserve the Pritzker.

The last comment in the Times' story, by a local city councilor, is enlightening: "The previous mayor believed that it was residents that drove economies, not buildings. The current mayor believes that attracting tourists, attracting visitors, is the key to making the city grow." I had the pleasure to meet and interview the previous mayor, Bill Purcell, when he worked at Harvard. He told me that three things mattered to him when he led Nashville -- jobs, the public schools, and public safety. If those did well, the rest would take care of itself, he said. His feelings about pro sports were mixed, as he valued the importance of the status that teams confer. I was persuaded that he was a politician who put his city's people first.

Spending $750 million of taxpayers' dollars on a convention center and hotel is the easier political option, believe it or not, because it generates headlines, campaign contributions, and fancy events. Focusing on a long-term turnaround of schools, transit and housing is more difficult. It yields an attractive place, but it also requires patience, vision, skill and a belief that everyone living in a city deserves to benefit from it. Yet Nashville's construction is in a city that already had an identity as the home of country music, a popular, durable market. Why the current mayor, Karl Dean, believes this path is the winning one confuses me, when logic points elsewhere. Not surprisingly, the rest of the city councilor's comment goes like this: "It's hard to believe that the convention center will create a particularly hospitable environment for living." That's what building-focused cities become.

Above are a few photos of my trip to Nashville. Thanks to Yo La Tengo for the post's title. If you're interested in more of my musings about downtown Nashville's development, I have a 5,000-word term paper to share.

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

About That 47 Percent

For his six-year campaign for the presidency, much was written about who Mitt Romney truly was intellectually and politically. But based on his infamous comments at a fundraiser and campaign debrief conference call, I'm willing to conclude that he's the classic country club Republican -- successful in business, generous to those he knows personally, cruel to those that he doesn't, and unaware of the world's complexity. Both times Romney assumed he was speaking privately, only for his thoughts to become public unexpectedly. That he was nasty and remarkably uninformed both times is enough for me to comprise a record of his true self. Wouldn't he have spoken in a very similar way all those other times when the doors were closed but the conversation didn't leak out?

In the two weeks since the most recent revelation, much has been made about how Romney didn't understand the national electorate's changing demographic. But what struck me most forcefully was his interpretation of President Obama's "gifts" to different population groups -- his support of gay marriage, protection of the children of illegal immigrants from deportation, and extension of health care coverage to young adults under their family's plan to the age of 26. I call those policies, part of Obama's platform for expanded civil rights, recognition of immigrants' contributions to America, and health security. Under this terminology, Romney offered many gifts too, such as a 15 percent tax rate on capital gains that applied to hedge fund managers' income because he classified it as "carried interest." It just so happened that more of the country found the Obama campaign's policies -- sorry, gifts -- more appealing then those of Romney, probably because they emphasized greater equality (income and otherwise), access to education and health care, a social safety net, growth over austerity, and balanced foreign policy. When one's gifts are designed largely to favor the top 5% of the country's wealthiest people, one is probably going to lose the election.

Paul Ryan attributed his loss on the lower half of the ticket to the large turnout by the "urban" vote. In this context, "urban" is typically a euphemism for "minority" or "black," as in "urban music" is a very delicate way of saying "rap music." I suppose Ryan thinks he lost because more black people than he was expecting were motivated to re-elect the country's first black president, or that more poor people of color than he was expecting headed to the polls because they feared losing their government-dependent lifestyle. In a small way, Ryan is right: The turnout is urban precincts was very high and voted overwhelmingly for the Obama-Biden ticket. But that "urban" vote "looks" very different than it did 25 years ago, which Ryan might not realize while living in the suburban Wisconsin town of his youth. Superficially, the urban voting bloc is whiter than it used to be, but aside from only worrying about government subsidy, it almost uniformly cares about issues like a woman's right to choose or government spending on public education and transportation infrastructure, and just can't stomach the contemporary Republican Party's embrace of irrationality and know-nothing-ism. That philosophy is expanding well beyond urban cores to encompass much of cities' metro areas (see Northern Virginia for what's probably the most prominent example in the country).

I'd be quite glad if the Republican Party chose to continue down this path. Unfortunately, many of its next generation of leaders have rejected Romney's and Ryan's explanations, though perhaps only because they don't want to be associated with the election's losers. There's lots of talk among conservatives about the need to embrace immigration reform. Who knows exactly what that means. I was quite pleased that I was able to go to bed on Election Day shortly before midnight, already knowing who would be president for the next four years. I didn't expect the country to reject Romney so swiftly, but I certainly wasn't complaining.

Saturday, November 10, 2012

At Least We Now Know Who Did What In The Fiery Furnaces



That first record of the Fiery Furnaces, "Gallowsbird's Bark," holds up surprisingly well after nine years. It's a bit bluesy and a bit operatic -- and very eccentric, with weird lyrics and a madcap spirit that tries on idea after idea. But every time it slides too close to the precipice of chaos, it pulls back. The pulsating rhythm guitar, the wash of keyboard behind lead under Eleanor Friedberger's vocals in the chorus of "Two Fat Feet," the lyrics about complicated romance in "Worry Worry," the acoustic guitar and tweeting birds in "Tropical Ice-Land" -- all signal an appreciation for pop, too. At the time of the album's release, the Fiery Furnaces were compared to the White Stripes because they were also a brother-sister duo (even if the Friedbergers were the only real pair of siblings), but I think their album is the better one. Complex but charming, it conveys that the fun of traveling lies in the adventure.

Now that the Friedbergers are releasing their own solo albums, it's clear where all those winning qualities came from. Eleanor released a record last year, which I've praised before in these pages. It's whimsical but smart, and wonderful. Whenever it gets too close to the precipice of pure pop, it pulls back with a small dose of chaos. Matthew Friedberger opened for the Sea and Cake at Brighton Music Hall three weeks ago with a set that left me wondering why the Sea and Cake consented to the tour. He set up two desks with folding chairs, a laptop and a keyboard. He started by signing "Happy Birthday" to himself, tried to improvise a song, and then cued his pre-recorded backing tracks, paced the stage, spoke lyrics, and pounded dissonant chords. I've never seen something so conceptually and practically bad and watched the room clear more than I did Friedberger. It seemed to be the closest I'll come to witnessing an Andy Kaufman performances, and apparently Pitchfork had the same reaction upon hearing Friedberger's first proper solo album. (That record got a 4.9, though if it had been reviewed in Pitchfork's bolder days, it would've been a 0.0, just like "Blueberry Boat," the Fiery Furnaces' bizarre second album, got a 9.6 in those heady days.)

That two personalities could co-exist like this in a band is pretty amazing. One so appealing and the other so challenging, but somehow they ended up with something that struck just the right balance in "Gallowsbird's Bark." The record is practically an affirmation of Hegel's dialectic. But when given the choice of pulling back from the edge of pop with some moments of strangeness, or diving off into a canyon of oddity, wouldn't you always choose the former? That's what make indie rock so good, no? It's catchy and charming, but you have to work for it. There's no need to fly to Mars to confirm your avant-garde status. You can still do it while remaining earthbound and appealing.

Above is "Inca Rag," quite an interesting journey of a song.

Saturday, November 3, 2012

Online Footwear Urbanism

Now that Tony Hsieh has made his fortune via Zappos, he's apparently becoming an urban planner. The Times had a fascinating profile two weeks ago, chronicling Hsieh's "Downtown Project," in which  he's relocating Zappos' headquarters to downtown Las Vegas and becoming the neighborhood's largest real estate developer and business investor. He's leased Las Vegas' old City Hall, bought 15 buildings, started 16 new construction developments, and in exchange for investing in start-up companies, he's requiring that the companies and their founders relocate to downtown Las Vegas. The story is full of the conceptual ideas that make an "innovation district" (but are missing from many cities' actual attempts to create such districts): the "serendipitous interactions" that happen because of urban density; the flexibility of space to be personal and professional; a belief in place-making; betting on youth and imagination; "return on community."

Hsieh clearly believes in cities and their power as economic engines, and I'll never complain with that. But as Jane Jacobs would quickly point out, cities derive their power from their amalgamated layers. They function as resilient, vibrant places because they juxtapose people and activities. One way this happens is through numerous champions, investors, and property owners. As much as Hsieh loves downtown Las Vegas and as much as I want him to do well, he's the only one there (or so the Times makes it seem, aside from the very poor, another complicated factor). Places with one developer tend to be uniform, no matter how hard they try and even if they're large places that have different building types. (See University Park in Cambridge for another sort-of-tech-driven example of this phenomenon.) Hsieh has located his utopian vision within Las Vegas' urban setting, but it's still a utopian vision, a place apart, when cities are supposed to be flowing currents.

The greater question is, Why isn't the City of Las Vegas creating any strategies or policies that encourage more progressive-minded investors like Hsieh to invest in downtown? Such an approach would create the  energy, commitment, and balance that would make an experiment like this endure. I suppose the answer is easy: Las Vegas is committed only to tourism and casinos, which, as much as MGM Resorts International would like you think otherwise with its City Center project, are antithetical to urbanism. Which leads me to wonder why Hsieh didn't choose another city in which to locate his ambition. It would automatically have had a far better chance of succeeding.

Monday, October 29, 2012

Rainbow Season

After spending the entire day inside my apartment because of Hurricane Sandy, I could use a rainbow season like this. I haven't been this antsy in a long time. Thanks to the woman who hosts KEXP's in-studio sessions for the title. ("You just named my next blog post." "You can keep that one.") And the National Hurricane Center has just downgraded the storm to a post-tropical cyclone. That sounds like a new, indie music genre blowing up on the Internet.

Saturday, October 27, 2012

In Which I Spend The Weekend At Brighton Music Hall



As much as I dislike Allston-Brighton, the city's best music venue is there now. At Brighton Music Hall, good sight lines are easy to find, the sound is mixed cleanly, the beer is well priced, the shows are run punctually (which is important for an aging show-goer like me), and they're consistently booking very good indie rock, from stalwarts to up-and-coming bands. I saw one of each last weekend, the Sea and Cake on Saturday and Dum Dum Girls on Sunday, in the midst of what was an unbelievably excellent run of shows last week. (Among others, the Walkmen and A.C. Newman were also in town.)

The crowds were surprisingly sparse, half full at best. I realize that the Sea and Cake are on the downside of their career's popularity, even if they're still making good albums. In fact, the friend who joined me the next night said when I told him of the show, "They're still around? Are they on a reunion tour?" And I realize that Dum Dum Girls played on a Sunday night, right around midterms, in a city where the audience depends on college and graduate students. But the turnouts were still disappointing, confirming why veteran bands don't always stop in Boston on every tour and why hotly tipped ones will always be sure to go to New York but not here when they're on their hype-building debut tour. The depth of interest just isn't the same in Boston. I'm surprised that there aren't more venues in Cambridge targeting the indie rock market, especially now that the Middle East has fallen off the map. More students who like indie rock live there and getting to Allston-Brighton via the Red and Green Lines is always a pain.

Not much bound the Sea and Cake and Dum Dum Girls to each other. As mentioned above, one is nearing the end of its career and the other has the promise of a rising career in front of it. One is a quintessential '90s band -- from Chicago, inclined to write precise compositions, fond of jazz, skilled musicians, and not fashionable. The other is a great band for the moment -- stylized and attractive, with a pastiche of music that dips into the parts of previous decades that they want to borrow. Dum Dum Girls have quickly reached a level of confidence that belies their youthful career, and Sunday's crowd loved it. My favorite part of the two nights was how ably the Sea and Cake's replacement bassist filled in for the band. The parts were remarkably hard, but then again, he's also the bassist for Tortoise, whose songs are even more complex. There were also a few moments when everyone else in the band had to send obvious cues about when he should join or stop playing, which made me laugh hard. Even at that level, rock is still sloppy and fun.

Above is a video of Dum Dum Girls performing "Always Looking" last Sunday.

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Maybe, Maybe Not

The most fascinating part about Mitt Romney's latest turn to moderation is how baldly misleading it is. After five years campaigning for president as a "severely conservative" candidate, including the first half of this year's general election, the first day that he says he supports taxing the wealthy, public education and access to contraceptives just happens to be when 70 million people are watching him debate Barack Obama. This is the same person who said he'd like to make immigrants "self-deport" themselves, claimed that 47 percent of the country is dependent on government subsidy, and refused to accept a deal where one dollar of taxes would be raised for every 10 dollars of cuts. The juxtaposition doesn't make sense, but then again, Romney has always liked to change his opinions based on the audience. Like a good consultant and private equity executive, he just wants to close the deal. (I might act the same way as a real estate developer.)

Even more fascinating is that this moderation is what catapulted Romney back into contention, when it seemed unlikely he could become president. And there are a surprising number of Senate races, such as in Connecticut, Massachusetts and North Dakota, where the Republican candidates are pledging their faithfulness to bipartisanship and centrism. (I saw a TV ad last night where Scott Brown promoted his support of allowing gays to serve the military.) Of course, all campaigns have featured for many years the "turn to the center," where after winning the primary with positions loved by the party faithful, candidates temper their opinions to appeal to those alluring independent voters. But in an era when the Tea Party, gerrymandered Congressional districts, and dig-in-your-heels politics are supposedly ascendant, leading to a hyper-partisan government, it's telling that these paeans to the center are what will decide the most crucial campaigns. Moderation still appeals somewhere.

Then again, come January, the House will still be led by the likes of John Boehner and Eric Cantor, to say nothing of their GOP colleagues who are more anonymous but even more strident in their conservatism, and unchallenged this fall and for many more to come. This is probably the most unacknowledged part of the presidential race: That when either Obama or Romney take office, they'll have to work with a Congress that won't budge very far. If Obama remains, Republicans will be even more adamant in their opposition, perhaps with the Senate in hand, too; and if Romney is inaugurated, Democrats in the Senate would filibuster and filibuster. Perhaps the biggest lesson is that voting isn't a seasonal responsibility. Candidates promise to be centrist leading up to November, but then once those deciding voters check out come April 2013, we're back where we were. There needs to be a more consistent way to hold candidates to their rhetoric.

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Raul Ibanez? Really?

One of the overlooked details of the Yankees' 17-year dominance in baseball is their uncanny ability to find aging veterans with just enough talent remaining to contribute to the team. Starting in the late 1990s, with Chili Davis, Ruben Sierra and Darryl Strawberry, the Yankees have had a steady stream of power hitters who were once multiple-time All Stars -- but certainly not Hall of Fame candidates -- sign on for a year or two and outperform their expectations. Do you realize that Glenallen Hill had 16 home runs and an OPS of 1.11 in the final 40 games of 2000 for the Yankees? This year's squad is full of such examples: Andruw Jones, Eric Chavez, Ichiro Suzuki (who looked finished for the Mariners but then hit .322 after being traded to New York), and, yes, Raul Ibanez. Ibanez was a good outfielder for the Mariners and Phillies; he hit 33 homers, had 123 RBI and batted .289 in 2006. But, really, Raul Ibanez hit a game-tying pinch-hit home run in the bottom of ninth and the game-winning home run in the bottom of the twelfth of Game 3 to beat the Orioles? Unbelievable.

The Yankees deserve a begrudging amount of credit for so shrewdly finding these players. That they've had so much success with them is probably a combination of their large payroll, which allows them to take the risk; the extensive talent on the team, which allows them to use such players sparingly, typically as the designated hitter, so they can maximize their effectiveness; and the promise that they'll be in the playoffs, which probably inspires players to perform better. Whatever the case, the Yankees do this well.

With the playoffs' first round now complete, it's tough to see that all the charming teams -- the Athletics, Nationals, Orioles and Reds -- are eliminated. Those left -- the Yankees, Tigers, Giants and Cardinals -- are the ones we've come to expect to do well in the playoffs in the past five years. These games were really exciting to follow but ultimately ended up where they were expected to, which isn't all that exciting.

Sunday, October 7, 2012

Way To Go, Ohio, Indeed!

Only a few years ago was Ohio viewed as a starkly declining state, reliant on a fading manufacturing sector, and older and undereducated compared to the rest of the U.S. Now, Ohio's unemployment rate has been lower than the national rate for quite some time, the automobile industry no longer looks so anachronistic, its cities are relatively popular places to be for Midwestern urban centers, and its capital and my wife's hometown, Columbus, is neatly aligned on the higher-education-health-care-government-arts axis that has proved quite successful for cities in the early 21st century. It all culminated last month with a lengthy cover story in the Times magazine, where the big question was who deserves the praise -- President Obama, the relatively new governor, Republican John Kasich, or its big cities' mayors, such as Michael Coleman? I'm glad that so many people have joined me on the bandwagon.

Ever since I was in college, I found Ohio to be a great slice of America. It's not quite as representative of where the country is heading, as Virginia and Colorado are, but an amalgamation of lots of different people and places that nearly captures it all. There are traditional industries, like cars and steel and coal, that evoke nostalgia for mid-20th century American commerce, and the contemporary ones mentioned above. There are long stretches of rural farmland and three large cities. Among its Congressional representatives are John Boehner, the House speaker and quintessential Country Club Republican, and Dennis Kucinich, probably the most liberal one of all 435 (though he's leaving soon). Columbus is a surprisingly liberal place, where the gay pride parade is one of the country's biggest and longest-standing, and Ohio's voters rejected by referendum a recent attempt to eliminate public employees' bargaining rights, after Gov. Kasich tried to emulate his Wisconsin counterpart.

That Ohio has ended up as a crucial swing state for four consecutive elections (and for Republican candidates, 100 years) is fascinating. How can an entire state end up so evenly divided so often? The more common contemporary trend is that like-minded people cluster together, skewing their politics to one side. Ohioans must have a particularly strong genetic disposition to moderation, or something like that. Ohio also isn't like that other famous swing state, Florida, where the southern edge of Miami is so wildly different from the northern half. Instead, everything is stitched together in a patchwork way. And since it's on the western edge of Eastern Standard Time, the sun sets nearly an hour later than it does in Boston! The days last until about 9:30 during the summer's peak. What more do you need?

Above is a photo of the Columbus skyline, taken from North Bank Park.

Update: There's a good, tough response in the comments (from Jake, perhaps?). I still say there's something more interesting happening in Ohio than the other states with which it's typically grouped -- Indiana, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Kentucky.

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Yom Kippur Rock Action


As my siddur eloquently explained last Wednesday, "Avinu Malkeinu," one of the centerpiece prayers of Yom Kippur, captures the duality of Judaism as well as any. Translated to the English, it means, "Our Father, Our King," referring to God -- the intimacy of family, the distance of royalty; the biased and supportive father, the unaffected judge; the nearness of faith, the fleetingness of faith; God is close and here, God is distant and everywhere.

Funny enough, Mogwai covers "Avinu Malkeinu." It traditionally closes their ear-splitting shows and they released it as a 20-minute, one-song, all-instrumental EP in 2001, under the slightly incorrect title "My Father, My King." The prayer's familiar melody, one of the best on Yom Kippur, which already has some excellent melodies, doesn't appear until minute nine, after several minutes of weaving picked guitars that build into crescendo number one. By the 10th minute, Mogwai has draped fuzz pedals across it and come the 14th minute, the prayer is totally unrecognizable, morphed into distortion and faintly recognizable instruments that head down a long decrescendo of loops and sputtering noise. Rock, classical music; faith, irreverence; quiet, majesty; solitude, sound; melody, noise; beautiful and ugly. Mogwai does an excellent job of capturing the prayer's symbolism musically.

Above is the first half of the song performed live.

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Wait, Which Percentage Am I A Part Of Again?

This time last year, when America's social divisions neatly cleaved along the lines of the 99 percent and 1 percent, it was easy to know where one stood. Were you a captain of industry, heavy-hitting financier, or someone else? The answer to this easy question put you in one of the two categories. Leave it to Mitt Romney, who's run a very muddled presidential campaign, to confuse matters. In his now-infamous comments at a fundraiser in Boca Raton, Fla., he split the country into 53 percent and 47 percent of its population. The latter, according to Romney, doesn't pay income taxes, is supported by government aid and would never vote for him because they want to stay tethered to their subsidies, rather than advance in the world. The former category is everyone else.

But that 47 percent, something of a favorite number of conservative think tanks, is more complicated than Romney suggests. Does it include the working poor who pay federal and state (and in some instances, local) payroll taxes but not income taxes because of the earned income tax credit, a policy that has been supported and expanded by Republican administrations dating to President Ford's, as a way to encourage work? And does it include elderly households who paid income taxes throughout their working lives but don't any longer now that the majority of their small income comes via Social Security? The important shades of this classification have been extensively explained by many pundits ever since Romney's comments were divulged last week. Unfortunately for Romney, the world isn't split into black and white, as George W. Bush also liked to think, to his detriment. Not only was Romney's comment wrong, but it also drastically misunderstood who his supporters are. Plenty of them are in this category too.

More profoundly, that 53 percent of income taxpayers is tied to government largesse too. There are the wildly popular tax deductions for mortgage interest payments and health care premiums, the first of which particularly favors the wealthy because they own larger, more expensive homes with larger mortgages; the U.S. defense budget that supports a very large industry; local property tax breaks that are given to businesses so they can expand their buildings; and so on, without even getting into policy matters such as the lower tax rate on capital gains, which favors the most wealthy because they're much more likely to earn income via investments than salaries. For a candidate who claims to love discussing the outsized role of government in contemporary American lives, Romney seems quite bashful about addressing how all levels of government are also quite interested in supporting that 53 percent. In fact, I might be one of the 53 percent who's least reliant on the federal government -- I'm young, I don't have kids, I rent. But then, I work in affordable housing, so my job relies on federal tax credits and subsidized housing loans. Never mind.

Monday, September 17, 2012

Minor League Baseball Urbanism

Asheville also has a great baseball stadium for its minor league baseball team, the Tourists, a Class A affiliate of the Colorado Rockies. The ballpark seats a few thousand people, looking out on the woods, with a number of the city's microbreweries on tap. It feels very much like a product of the city's culture, with an emphasis on local pride and a friendly community. In my road trip this summer to Asheville, Charleston, S.C., and Savannah, Ga., I found this to be true of all the parks -- they have a ambience distinctly tied to their place. In Charleston, my wife and I ate boiled peanuts (apparently a product of the Civil War) in a sharp-looking park that has the South Carolina marsh as its backdrop. The experience felt very much like the New South, as did our three days there.

Minor league baseball is a valuable entry point to exploring places. Our road trip began as an attempt to satisfy a craving I've had since I was 13 years old, when a colleague of my father's gave me, as a Bar Mitzvah present, a Fodor's guidebook for minor league baseball-themed vacations. The baseball, even if it's sometimes overshadowed by the between-innings entertainment, is good enough, the action is close, and the evenings, at least in the South in August, are wonderful. After flipping through that Fodor's guide many times, wondering if I ever could replicate a trip, I did it and might do it again sometime later.

But the trip quickly became an excuse to visit three places with excellent examples of urban planning, urban design and architecture. Minor league teams are often situated in secondary cities, if not tertiary ones and below, where major league teams are rare, so the lower circuits become a point of pride in town. And they're often in places that have quite a bit to offer over the course of a few days. In fact, the point might be that they're not on the Acela corridor: They have a surprising amount of vibrancy even if they're smaller, a defined sense of place, and interesting layers to uncover. Then again, I'm romanticizing small cities, as I often do. Tulsa, Okla., also has a baseball team.

Above are photos of each team's mascot: Ted E. and Mr. Moon, from the Tourists; Charlie, from the Charleston River Dogs; and Nate, from the Savannah Sand Gnats. Unfortunately, Nate was by far the most underwhelming mascot, though as a sand gnat, he isn't starting with a good baseline of material. The Sand Gnats are an affiliate of the Mets, whose Mr. Met is at the pinnacle of mascots. You'd think that the franchise's spring training would be a bit more rigorous.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Keep It Weird Urbanism

Why live in Burlington, Vt., when one can live in Asheville, N.C.? Both are small cities situated in the mountains, surrounded by plenty of natural beauty yet surprisingly cosmopolitan, where one can go for a tiring hike just as easily as eating a great meal. Yet Burlington's average high temperature in January is 27 degrees and Asheville's is 47. That about clinches the argument for me, though I suppose there are plenty of people who like to ski. (I'm not one of them.)

There are a surprising number of cities like Burlington and Asheville, where in addition to the natural splendor and high-quality food, there are also strong downtowns, a busy public realm, politics that are very liberal and a little hippie, and a huge pride in patronizing everything local, from food to art to businesses and so on. These are the cities where you often see bumper stickers pledging to "Keep [Insert City Name] Weird." Locals are vigilantly on guard to make sure homogenizing forces aren't on the march -- no J. Crew, Panera or waves of bank branches. Other examples that quickly come to mind are Boulder, Colo., and as more urban examples, Austin, San Francisco, and my neighborhood, Jamaica Plain, where the outdoor activities aren't quite so close within reach but all of the other characteristics are in abundance.

I find these cities are often thought of as niche markets -- great places to visit but not to live, saddled with a reputation for outdated '60s idealism, where it's a bit confusing to the outside world about how it all sticks together and works. But now that the general consensus of neighborhood development focuses on streets, public spaces, local businesses, and equal access, weren't these places about 20 years ahead of their time? Keeping it weird probably now means, "Keep It Distinct," which is the goal of practically every meaningful American city in the early 21st century. Weird is no longer on the countercultural fringe, but rather now a synonym for creating place, which means it's a blueprint to follow and an aspiration to pursue.


Above are photos of Asheville's art museum and a public bike-repair station that I took on my recent visit there.

Saturday, September 8, 2012

Farewell, Andy Roddick

Andy Roddick's decision to retire at this fortnight's U.S. Open was an appropriate one. Roddick is brash, foul-mouthed, passionate, talented, and married to a beautiful woman, like most New Yorkers. His racing pulse was much like that of the tournament -- tennis' coarsest and most vivacious. He also did a good job of balancing humor and emotion at the press conference where he announced his retirement and in his interview after the last match. It made me a bit emotional too, even if Roddick was never one of my favorites.

It's a shame that Roddick couldn't execute a deep, magical run like Pete Sampras did in 2002, winning his final tournament, though Roddick was never quite as good as Sampras at their respective peaks or at their respective ends. But something makes me think that if Roddick's fourth-round match against Juan Martin del Potro had happened at night, instead of being delayed by rain to the next afternoon, Roddick would've hung around for at least another round. Strange things happen on the Flushing courts at night, where tennis is played into the tiny hours, just like how New York is lived, and the atmosphere is electric. Roddick always fed off it.

Monday, September 3, 2012

What Do Lena Dunham and Ryan Adams Have In Common?



They're both hopeless romantics who wear their hearts on their sleeves. Most of the chatter around Dunham's show, "Girls," focused on the sex and forthrightness of 20-something girls, but she really seems to have a soft spot for love. She's an unabashed Nora Ephron fan, but younger and tailored to the early 21st century, where everyone lives in Brooklyn's up-and-coming outposts and your (boy)friend's mother comments on your Facebook photos. In the bits of "Girls" that I've seen, Dunham seems to be most concerned about romance, the quirks of longstanding friendship, and the difficulty of being honest, not merely sex, fashion or pop culture. Her recent essay in the New Yorker about her college boyfriend was appealingly sweet in a way that I wasn't expecting: "All my explanations for this behavior are purely conjecture at this point, because, four years later, it's so hard for me to tap into the well of desperate emotion the relationship unleashed in me. I'd spent my entire life getting my kicks from various esoteric hobbies (fashion illustration! Shrinky Dinks!) and quality time with my nuclear family, but here he was. My only pleasure. I told him I hoped we would die at the same time in the mouth of a lion."

I've only seen one full episode of "Girls," which I thought was pretty lame -- the one where all the characters go to a warehouse party in Brooklyn. The party almost seemed like the depiction of one in Brooklyn that would have been on a CBS sitcom. There's a rave! An indie-rock band plays! Someone does crack! There's a fight between punk-rockers and a dad! All these signifiers of young urban cool are here, in one place, at the same time! I'm pretty lame too, but I'm pretty sure parties don't unfold like this Nonetheless, I agree with Dunham when she jokes in the show that she might be "a voice for a generation" (after her attempt at describing herself as "the voice for her generation" falls flat). She portrays better than anyone else what it means to be 20-something post-Lehman Brothers, capturing an era of deep uncertainty that's only magnified by living through the most amorphous, unclear part of your life.

Above is the trailer for "Girls."

Saturday, September 1, 2012

Ben, From Kenmore Square, You're On The Air

That the Mets went from a wild-card contender in late June to 20 games out of first place in mid-August wasn't all that surprising -- aside from David Wright, there wasn't any position player who had much of a record of success, and the pitching staff looked very thin. Everyone played over his head for three months, cobbling together wins. Now only R.A. Dickey is still doing that, maybe en route to the Cy Young Award, and the main hope is that come 2015, the team will have a few prospects establish themselves and its finances will be steady enough to sign some effective players. So it goes when rooting for a bumbling team.

That the Red Sox imploded this year is incredibly more unexpected. Heading into the season, I thought the management was wise to keep the team together (even if they did so because they couldn't afford to acquire new players): For 85 percent of 2011, the Sox were the best team in the majors, and then they had a historic collapse during September. That final month was a gigantic statistical oddity, so why not keep everyone together and hire a new manager whose fiery personality would keep everyone focused, when the previous manager's calm demeanor had apparently grown stale? Well, the team blew a nine-run lead to the Yankees in the three innings in April, Dustin Pedroia called out that new manager, Bobby Valentine, for being too fiery, essentially rendering him powerless, and the beat writers have been writing much more about melodrama than baseball since early June. They'll very likely finish below .500 for the first time I can remember, maybe even well below .500.

Kudos to Ben Cherington, the Sox's general manager, for pulling off the most audacious trade I can ever remember. The closest comparison is probably Fred McGriff and Tony Fernandez for Joe Carter and Roberto Alomar, but as my dad said, that was a like-for-like deal instead of a house-cleaning. Adrian Gonzalez is still a great player, but Josh Beckett and Carl Crawford are at best injured ones, and the Dodgers now shoulder $250 million more in contracts, which I can't understand. If the Sox had to lose Gonzalez to lose the other two, I understand. It all sounds like one of those crazy trade proposals from a caller to WEEI: "How about Gonzalez, Beckett and Crawford to the Dodgers, for a bunch of prospects?" But it actually made lots of sense, which may have led to the scariest development of the 2012 baseball season: Those callers to WEEI might just know what they're talking about.

Friday, August 24, 2012

Election Day Is The First Tuesday That You Want It To Be

I'm one of the 93 percent! Not that famous 90-something percent, but the other one who, according to the Pew Research Center, has already decided who they'll choose in the presidential election. Why we couldn't hold the vote next Tuesday, as opposed to the first one in November, confuses me. Nothing will happen between now and then that will change either candidate or the election's context: Obama and Romney have already defined their positions in stark opposition on nearly every issue -- with the exception of some corners of foreign policy, where Romney has had trouble distinguishing himself from the incumbent because Obama has been very popular and good there -- and aren't going to propose anything new or surprising before the election; and the U.S. economy seems very likely to stay on the same path, with slow growth and an unemployment rate around 8.1 percent. We spent two weeks this summer arguing whether Romney left Bain Capital in 1999 or 2002 and a number of weeks more about whether he should release more years of tax returns. Either way, Romney is a great emblem of the dislocation of contemporary capitalism and he has aggressively -- but probably legally -- shielded his tax liabilities, as many wealthy people do. Can't we hit the fast-forward button and compel the other 7 percent to decide already?

Well, perhaps the one remaining decision that could still sway the race is Romney's running mate, Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. Many have criticized the choice as too dramatic. Noam Schieber, of the New Republic, was the most hysterical, writing that Romney's team chose Ryan knowing that Romney is too far behind to win, so they wanted to hang the loss as much on the party's conservative wing as it already it is on Romney's amorphous core. I'm not so optimistic (or pessimistic, depending on one's perspective). Romney is shrewd and careful, one reason why people don't like him much. And Ryan is young and attractive, and he puts Wisconsin in play, considering his relatively popularity there and the state's willingness to vote for an extreme but smooth conservative. Equally important, Ryan's unabashed, frightening conservatism is somewhat hard to understand. It involves changes to Medicare, budget assumptions and projections, revenue projections, and so on that aren't very easy for voters to understand or for political consultants to package into brief, effective jabs. But Obama's stimulus was $787 billion of government waste, taxes are rising, the government is spending more, and the economy isn't better -- or so the Romney campaign can quickly say. There are plenty of swing voters everywhere who think that Obama is a good person who hasn't fixed the economy after four years, even if Congress was stubborn, so it's time for the next candidate.

The most interesting development of Ryan's selection is that we may reach the end game of the past four, if not 30, years of conservatism. There's no moderate like Dole or McCain molded by years of compromise in the Senate and no "compassionate conservative" like George W. Bush. The ticket is very squarely defined by a Republican who has carefully articulated his policy remedy to the country's long-term fiscal problems so that it blows up the government compact of the past 80 years and draws the playing field anew deeply in favor of corporate entities and the wealthiest individuals. There's no question about it, though Ryan's humble personality does a good job making it all seem palatable. Voters can stare into the abyss this fall and jump in, or pull back, vote for Obama, and choose to solve it differently. Sure, with either option there will still be a Congress that could stop the gears, but voters will have profoundly spoken.

From that flows another end game: Should Romney lose, the Republican Party will conclude that its pattern of anointing relative moderates whose time has come is over, and in 2016, will nominate a Goldwater for our time. Then they'll lose in a breathtaking landslide and in 2020, the political hysteria of the past four years (which could possibly become another eight more) will finally be over.

Thursday, August 23, 2012

#CSAbummer

The Times has had quite a streak this summer writing about the problems of being a well-educated, relatively young urban professional living in the Acela corridor. First there was the debut of the food column about how to persuade your children to cook and eat well. Then there was the story about the weekly looming catastrophe when one's CSA share arrives: "What to do with all of those greens, beets and zucchini?!" The most conspicuous example was the story about gay-marriage-in-New-York fatigue, where it just seems that every weekend you have to attend the nuptials of your two male (or female) friends, dress nicely, dance, and eat and drink too much. Boy, is life tough now that tolerance is legal.

Even if all these stories in the lifestyles pages, which are meant to be light-hearted, isn't the Times the paper that has championed gay marriage, particularly in New York, for a countless number of years? Isn't gay marriage illegal by constitutional amendment in about 34 states now? What's the problem here again?

Update: One of my favorite activities of the summer has been inventing hashtags, such as the opposite of this post's title -- "#CSAhero" -- you know, the person who figures out how to appealingly cook all those greens, beats and carrots. Or, "#DOLO," the dog's equivalent of "#YOLO," and their feline antagonist's equivalent, "#ninelives." Here's the tweet: "Just jumped off a roof, landed on my feet #ninelives."

Further Update: Man, that CSA column was titled "Raw Panic." Really?

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Languid Urbanism


My fondest memory from my trip three months ago to New Orleans was walking through the side streets of the Bywater neighborhood on a sticky weekday night with two good friends. We were walking in the middle of the streets because there were barely any cars driving past or any sidewalks on the side of the road, which is apparently quite common there. (I've tried to adopt this around JP, but it's harder.) The small houses were very colorful and a few kids played in the neighborhood park. With the sun setting, it felt as though we were in a remote Southern corner rather than a city that, even if it's a fraction of the size it was 10 years ago, is one of the country's best known. When I returned in the mornings to my business conference and heard of people's trips through the French Quarter, I knew that my friends had shown me exponentially cooler times. (Among other things, we unknowingly dined next to Michael Fassbender at Maurepas Foods' bar.)


New Orleans' mix of people is inimitable: there are so many leisure and business tourists like me that the French Quarter felt a bit like Cusco;  there are also old-time wealthy and poor white people, old-time wealthy and poor black people, ambitious young professionals who want to help rebuild the cit, and young punk-rockers who can live cheaply (or squat) and push the boundaries because a fair amount of the city is still unattended. These aren't necessarily reconcilable demographics.

When I toured a few housing developments one afternoon, I saw the immaculately new apartment complex next door to broken-down houses and tastefully renovated shotgun houses next door to gutted, abandoned houses. As nice as the latter was, why invest on a street when the rest of it is absent? This is certainly one of the knottiest questions in urban planning, which was thoroughly debated in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, with multiple rebuilding plans that had various levels of sensitivity. Those who remain often want to stay because their lifelong community is still theirs, even if it's in disrepair . And some of those remain don't have another option, are the most vulnerable, and are in need of care. I get it and sympathize deeply, but looking at it in the moment also exposes the ambiguity. When the pace of a city moves so slowly, to where should we divert the currents?

Above are photos from New Orleans of a salvage construction materials store and of the latter juxtaposition of new investment and ignored, washed-away investment.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Ladies And Gentleman, The Bronx Is Gentrifying

Adam Davidson, in his recent Times Magazine column analyzing why the Bronx hasn't gentrified at the same clip as Brooklyn (or even Queens), may have expertly summarized turn-of-the-century urban development in one quick swoop: "These neighborhoods [in Brooklyn] fell on hard times during the 1970s, but their expensive [housing] stock was perfectly positioned for revitalization as the Manhattan boom of the past few decades pushed young professionals across the river. The Bronx, however, never developed its own economic drivers. It became, by the late 19th century, a haven for immigrants attracted to (but unable to afford) Manhattan. The borough developed far fewer wealthy areas, and many neighborhoods became devoted to less-gentrifiable housing units."

If its housing stock keeps its original details, a neighborhood always at least has chance of reviving because people always care about where they live and because real estate can always appreciate. Well, that and a neighborhood's proximity to downtown via public transit. (North Brooklyn is much closer to downtown by subway than any part of the Bronx.) These two factors govern every neighborhood revitalization in major Northeastern cities. In Boston, the South End and Jamaica Plain are the classic examples, while a place like Chelsea, as much as I love its urbanism, won't be Fort Greene anytime soon (not that this is necessarily a bad thing; see my previous posts about the city) because its transit access is mediocre and its housing stock has too many decrepit triple-deckers. Charlestown's gentrification has always puzzled me -- it's so isolated that I don't understand the interest in living there. Expand one's view to the rest of America, where public transit systems are much thinner, and housing is left alone as the deciding factor. It easily explains German Village in Columbus, for example.

Thanks to Howard Cosell for inspiring the post's title, even if he apparently never truly said "Ladies and gentleman, the Bronx is burning" during a World Series broadcast that caught one of the Bronx's many late-1970s arsons in a skyline shot. As for whether the Bronx would gentrify, Davidson seems to think, Maybe one day. I think that New York's real estate market exists on some other loopy planet, devoid of any known rationality, so it'll probably happen in the next 15 years, if not 15 weeks.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

From Woody Allen, With Familiar Tropes From His Oeuvre


So, "To Rome With Love," Woody Allen's newest movie isn't very good. The plot largely combines a cheerier version of "Celebrity" with "Deconstructing Harry," two of his most bitter offerings from the largely depressing turn he took in the late 1990s, with a little bit of "Mighty Aphrodite" -- a better movie from the mid-'90s -- thrown in. There are some zany comic moments, though Allen saves most of the best lines for himself, but you have to sift through a hefty amount of aimless scenes to enjoy them. Nonetheless, "To Rome With Love" also synthesizes many of Allen's most familiar themes, which, even if they aren't presented so enjoyably in this movie, resonate true and endear me to him:

* The number of beautiful women in the world is infinite. If someone as attractive as Greta Gerwig can be cast in as meaningless a supporting role as she has in "To Rome With Love," where she's only given three lines that are a variation on how nervous she is that her boyfriend, played poorly by Jesse Eisenberg, will leave her, then there must be an endless number.

* Culture's lowbrow has as much value as its highbrow. Each has pleasures that should be appreciated, whether it's shower-bound opera singers or balding Italian TV studs, as in this movie, or guilty pleasures of any stripe in music, movies, TV, and so on. Scoffing at the former because you think only the latter has meaning ultimately makes you foolish and shortsighted.

* As a corollary of the above: Knowledge can be found in all corners. It's not a surprise that Allen lets a chauffeur deliver the most lesson-filled line of the movie, in which Allen surprisingly admits that the celebrity life isn't so awful after all. Nor is it one that Penelope Cruz's high-end call girl proves to be the movie's steadiest, most instructive character. There are many different kinds of knowledge and one needs an open mind to learn.

* Death and suffering are forever in the foreground of life. That doesn't mean one needs to fear them, but one should acknowledge them and adjust life's daily rhythms accordingly.

* Be restless. Allen's character here equates retirement with death. That's a bit hyperbolic, but I like the idea of releasing a movie (or the white-collar equivalent) every year into my late 70s. Head to the top and then stay there.

Above is the trailer for "To Rome With Love." At this point in his career, Allen probably doesn't have to invest much in trailers -- you already know if you're going -- which is evident here.

Monday, July 16, 2012

Yogurt Is So Hot Right Now


Leave it to the Times' business section to write 950 words analyzing the yogurt market's explosion. If the story weren't so boring, it would be ripe for parody -- the long-missing "wanna have it" factor of yogurt and the Greek variety's chalkiness; PepsiCo's joint venture with a Saudi Arabian private equity firm to buy out a Russian dairy company; the cola wars becoming yogurt wars; stock analysts sweating about Pepsi's infamous healthy foods strategy; and so on. Since when is dairy a growth market? Doesn't every infant eat it? My life sounds so boring when even my choice of snack is reduced to average consumption rates, packaging that promotes ease of eating, and growth potential.

Fortunately I've been religiously eating yogurt from Sidehill Farm the past few months. Their maple and vanilla varieties are the creamiest yogurt I've ever had (talk about the "wanna have it" factor) and their packaging has a very cute cow with either a maple leaf or vanilla flower in her mouth, as well as a little narrative about how their cows stay happy! Sidehill is a small farm in Ashfield, Mass., and I buy their yogurt at City Feed, where it was discounted for all of June. When you stop over-thinking and eat food that's made well rather than targeted to focus groups, it just tastes better.

Above is a photo from Sidehill Farm's Facebook page of their baby cows' first grazing trip during the spring. There are more adorable ones on their page.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Thank You, Homage

Maybe one day Jon Caramanica will tweak Homage for designing T-shirts that are a tad too long -- one of those slight digs that he loves to give to tastefully nostalgic retailers in his shopping reviews in Thursday Styles. It seems plausible enough to me that Homage could reach such heights, with a store on the Lower East Side and a profile big enough to catch the Times' attention. Their calling card of comfortable, well-made T-shirts featuring vintage sports logos is easily appealing and easily adaptable across state lines. They sometimes stare into the Urban Outfitters abyss with cheeky catchphrases, such as one encouraging you to surf the Olentangy (which is impossible), but they never jump into it because they root their shirts so deeply in Midwestern places, times and sports. I could easily see the model applied to small colleges, minor league teams and minor celebrities in any state, though their authenticity is solid because they're Ohio kids making Ohio T-shirts.

When I was in their store on Brickel two weekends ago, there was more bros than I was expecting. But at the same time, I was also quite happy for the founders: Two years ago, their profile was quite low. I discovered their shirts in the Columbus Clippers' gift shop at Huntington Park. Now, their store is always crowded and I have four shirts -- the Clippers, Riverfront Stadium, the Toledo Rockets, and the Ohio State University. There's nothing wrong with Columbus kids blowing up, especially when their T-shirts are so fun to wear. I think they could easily have successful stores in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and maybe another Big Ten university town in the next year. From there, who knows?

Above is Homage's collection of Clippers T-shirts. I own the one in the top left corner.

Sunday, July 8, 2012

What Does Anyone Want But To Feel A Little More Free?, Part N+1

Ellen Barry, the Times' Moscow bureau chief, published a news analysis in Wednesday's paper, positing why Russia's president, Vladmir Putin, has been so adamantly opposed to foreign intervention in Syria's cruel civl war. Is it because of his KGB days, when he watched the Soviet Union dissolve? His distaste for the post-Soviet states' "color revolutions" during the last decade, when the West supported administrations that turned away from Russia? Or maybe he doesn't want to lose the large arms buyer that Russia has in Syria?

But isn't the answer much simpler: That eventually Russia's growing, liberal middle class will rebel against the country's thin democracy in such numbers that Putin (or a like-minded successor) will have to face the same choice of repression or resignation, and he won't want the West to intervene when he chooses the military as his defense? And can't the same be said to explain China's support of Syria these days, on perhaps an even larger scale? This probably a very simplistic opinion, but I think Putin's administration recognizes that this is in the realm of possibility and it needs to keep all of its options available. Strategy is sometimes only self-preservation, no?

Thanks to Godspeed You! Black Emperor for again giving this post's title.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Take Care



Quietly but surely enough, Beach House has become one of the best American bands making music today. With "Bloom," their newest album, they've done something very few bands do -- they've made four consecutive, consistently strong albums, where each one builds upon the last. In my generation the best examples of this are Yo La Tengo, from "Painful" through "And Then Nothing Turned Itself Out"; Wilco, from "A.M." through "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot"; and Spoon, from "A Series of Sneaks" through "Gimme Fiction." Today, the Walkmen, TV on the Radio, and the Arcade Fire belong there too, and Fleet Foxes and Vampire Weekend will probably get there (and I'm sure I'm missing a couple of other young bands). This is very good company, where everyone writes rock records with a well-understood mission and relatively easy appeal -- but not one that's too easy because, after all, this is indie rock.

Beach House, as they've noted in interviews, have had a career arc that isn't very common anymore. Their first two records, as promising as they were, weren't incredibly popular, ablaze in Internet buzz. They could take their time on tour learning their strengths, rather than having to perform prematurely on large stages, as so many bands have to do now. In fact, their albums follow a classic pattern: demo to sad sophomore release to harnessing a bigger sound to then smoothing it out to reach a larger audience. And now there's an evident confidence and comfort in their work that gives them a big lift.

I preferred "Devotion" and "Teen Dream," when their songs rocked so hard for being so slow, fuzzy and dreamy. "Bloom" is just a bit too smooth in its lyrics, melodies and its placement of crescendos -- a bit too clear that, yes, this is Beach House's moment. (And what a moment it is: "Bloom" was the best-selling album at Newbury Comics when I bought it there last month!) But it's quite good nonetheless. My favorite song is the final one, "Irene." Not surprisingly, it's the one where Victoria Legrand starts singing about strange paradises. Above is a live version from the recent tour, in Charlottesville, Va., where it stretches and stretches.

Thanks to Beach House for the post's title.

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Kevin Durant Makes Me Want To Move To Oklahoma City

It's not only that Durant is the most magnificently smooth player I've seen, always seemingly assured of making the basket. It's that he -- and the rest of Thunder's core players -- are younger than 25 but already so ascendant. To revisit what I wrote in November 2010 about the Thunder (and two years earlier about that brief era of the Trailblazers), they're "athletic, versatile players who seem to genuinely like each other and realize they can do something special together," in a moment "where everyone understands what's happening, appreciates the potential, and starts to click with each other." And now, the Thunder have fully arrived, looking great in the NBA Finals! So rarely does the fleeting promise of greatness coalesce like this, so rarely does the indie phenomenon reach the big stage and stay true to who it is. There weren't any compromises and there didn't have to be.

The central question is: Are the Thunder cooler because they're in Oklahoma City? I have to answer, Yes, because Oklahoma City is otherwise so anonymous. In an era when basketball stars apparently only want to play in cities with some combination of great weather, exciting nightlife, and low income taxes, Durant and his co-star, point guard Russell Westbrook, have already signed long-term lucrative contracts to stay in Oklahoma. (The team's two other young leaders, guard James Harden and forward Serge Ibaka, haven't yet and it's unclear if the Thunder can afford them all.) Durant's and Westbrook's decisions reveal their personalities -- mature, sensible and fantastic. They've chosen a homegrown, organic scene over an expensively assembled one, place over placelessness, and the local over the imported. It's almost as though the Thunder are urban planners.

By the way, did you hear that Oklahoma City is redesigning its downtown streets?

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

History Is A Fluke

The Mets satisfied a 50-year drought last Friday night when Johan Santana, once their star and now their folk hero, threw the franchise's first no-hitter, against the St. Louis Cardinals. The next morning, fans were calling WFAN congratulating themselves for finally reaching reaching this milestone -- the San Diego Padres are now the only team without a no-hitter -- and the Times had more stories about the game than the news pages do about Syria's civil war on one of its busier days.

But no-hitters are a funny thing: They're so clean and wondrous yet the ultimate fluke; it just can't be predicted when they might happen. There are plenty of great pitchers who have them and some who you thought would always have a chance at throwing one with each start -- Justin Verlander circa 2011, Pedro Martinez circa 1999, Nolan Ryan circa 1973-1985, Sandy Koufax circa 1963. But then neither Verlander nor Martinez threw one in those years and plenty of unsuccessful pitchers have thrown them too (see Philip Humber, once a Mets flop who had one for the White Sox earlier this season). On the other hand, they still feel great. Santana's was like an early birthday present for my father, who turned 60 today and has been a Mets for all of the team's 50 years. He called me at 10 that night after the game finished, very excited. To think, a game where everything went according to plan, where each batter came to the plate and didn't have a hit. 0, 0, 0. How refreshing.

The funny thing about Santana's no-hitter is how jagged its edges were. There was Santana's shoulder, which is only a year from major surgery that forced him to sit out all of last year. Everyone, most especially manager Terry Collins, was very worried that Santana threw too many pitches to reach the end, though it was a promising sign when he raised his arm above his head the next day to give a high-five. There was reliever Ramon Ramirez, who injured his hamstring running to the mound to celebrate. There was the fan in the Gary Carter jersey and jean shorts who rushed the field in celebration and was arrested. The Mets pitchers the next two days also threw superbly (if not perfectly). But then, the team lost last night when Jordany Valdespin (who?) committed two painful errors at shortstop in the bottom of the 12th as Elvin Ramirez (double who? but not Ramon) pitched, thwarting them from entering first place, and they lost again today.

One way that baseball mirrors life is its length. Even when wonderful things happen, they recede. There are no hot streaks that can be ridden all the way, as in football or other sports' playoffs. Peaks happen and slumps happen, so it's best to stay level.

Update: Thanks to the new version of Blogger, where I've learned how to insert photos midway through a post, instead of only at the usual top.