In the liner notes for Belle and Sebastian's debut record, "Tigermilk," there's a passage about how Stuart Murdoch wrote all of his best songs in 1995, which is why the year is mentioned in them. "What will happen in 1996?" they asked themselves. I say, Don't overlook 1997! Do you realize how many excellent records came out that year? Belle and Sebastian, in fact, was in the midst of releasing its first trio of EPs. Then, Yo La Tengo had "I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One," Pavement had "Brighten the Corners," Modest Mouse had "The Lonesome Crowded West,"Cornershop had "When I Was Born for the Seventh Time," and Radiohead had "OK Computer" (link not really necessary). Those are six of the most essential albums in my entire collection, and I'm sure there were a number of other good ones from that year that I've overlooked. Mainly, it's hard to believe that was 15 years ago.
Above is Cornershop performing its big single, "Brimful of Asha," on Jools Holland's show. What a great song, even if it made them a bit of a one-hit wonder.
Now that 38 Studios, the video-game production company founded by Curt Schilling, has collapsed, the most unexpected development is how often callers on sports radio want to talk about the industry. There's discussion about whether Schilling should've been able to attract more venture capital firms, the cycle of creating new games, the growth potential for multiplayer fantasy games, and of course, how much blame Rhode Island's state government deserves for its $75 million loan to the company, which has apparently turned into a $112 million bill on the state budget. (How $75 million became $112 million within about two years confuses me, even when the loan's interest is added. This sounds usurious.) Listening to Joe-in-the-car's dissection of raising venture capital makes me miss the hourlong discussion earlier in the week about whether Adrian Gonzalez, Kevin Youklis or Will Middlebrooks should move to the outfield to make room in the lineup for Youklis' return from injury.
Not surprisingly, I don't object to the concept that Rhode Island chooses to provide loans (or loan guarantees) to different kinds of businesses, fledgling or mature, entertainment or manufacturing. In economic development, the state can interject itself into the market to steer certain policy, backstop companies that could have trouble getting off the ground, or supporting companies that employ people in a certain of line of work. This is reasonable. 38 Studios was a more questionable decision, considering it was founded by Schilling, who while a great baseball pitcher was a very inexperienced video game businessman indulging a personal passion. The $75 million also apparently consumed the Rhode Island economic development department's entire budget for such matters, which isn't a prudent decision. The governor at the time, Donald Carcieri, was probably distracted by Schilling's fame, particularly in New England, and the headlines his company's move from Massachusetts would bring.
The richest part of this mess is that Schilling is an ardent conservative, of the same feather as those who say the country's spending is out of control, the national debt is our gravest problem, and President Obama is trashing the country. Not only has Schilling, a notorious loudmouth, been silent through this affair, he also apparently believes government money should only be spent and the free market should only be corrupted when he's the beneficiary. His predicament would certainly be this month's most prominent example of "you can't have it both ways" if it weren't for Joe Ricketts. He's the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade who's contemplating multiple ways of smearing Obama via a super PAC during the presidential campaign because Ricketts abhors Obama's fiscal policies. At the same time, his family, which owns the Chicago Cubs, is asking the City of Chicago to subsidize its $300 million renovation of Wrigley Field. Not surprisingly, Mayor Rahm Emanuel isn't amused. Sometimes it's too hard to make up this sort of stuff.
As much as I chide New York and celebrate Boston these days, one of New York's greatest advantages is its abundance of summertime outdoor arts. After reading the Times' calendar of upcoming events, I felt jealous: the Philharmonic across all five boroughs, Beach House at Summer Stage, Wild Nothing and Grimes on a Hudson River pier, Shakespeare at the Delacorte Theater, and so on, to the point that you could probably find an intriguing performance outdoors three nights a week there, if you wanted to work hard enough. Not so much in Boston, though, where little like this happens.
There are a few reasons. In the end, this is a very large college town, so students and many 20-something leave town for the summer. The Sox ultimately capture everyone's heart in the summer. It doesn't get quite as hot here, so everyone doesn't have to find refuge in a park. (Have you ever walked down a Manhattan avenue on a July weekend? It's unbelievably hot and empty.) And the older cultural set decamps for the Berkshires, where Tanglewood, Jacob's Pillow, the Williamstown Theater Festival and the Barrington Stage Co. et al happen. At least this is to Boston's credit: Its summertime retreat has a wealth of exciting art rather than that of New York -- the Hamptons -- which is about as artificial as it gets.
But even if there are reasons to explain it doesn't make it easy to accept. Above is a photo of M. Ward performing at Summer Stage.
My good friend suggested earlier this week that I start another blog, analyzing obituaries. As I may have mentioned in these pages before, one of my favorite games is guessing where someone's obituary will land in the Times -- on A1? above or below the fold? There's little greater confirmation of the value of one's life than knowing that one's death becomes one of the next day's six most important stories in the world's most prestigious newspaper. My friend says I could comment on the famous and quasi-famous, and expand beyond the Times to scan how small towns treat their local community leaders and captains of industry, such as in Dubuque, Iowa (which is apparently a much more livable place than I'd expect). He recommended for titles frontpageobits.com and somebodycooldiedtoday.com.
This week turned out to be a rich one. Not only did an obscure, one-term senator from South Dakota, James Abdnor, die, prompting the question of how it played in the Argus Leader (here's coverage of the memorial service). But Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican man of letters, and Donna Summer, the Dorchester (who knew?) queen of disco, also died on successivedays, prompting an interesting comparison. Fuentes' life, though remembered lengthily, only landed on B14; meanwhile, Summer's obituary is on A1 today, below the fold, in the spot typically reserved for very famous artists and pop cultural icons.
That Summers was featured so prominently, but Fuentes wasn't, surprised me. Now, I'm not such a pretentious cultural elitist that I can't appreciate the lowbrow value of pop (after all, I'm in a rock band), and I now realize Summers sold millions upon millions of records. But was her imprint on the cultural landscape really so profound, or even that much more profound than that of Fuentes, who was an author of great novels, a frequent contender for the Nobel prize, and one of the last public intellectuals? She was a very popular musician during the late '70s and early '80s, but didn't leave a huge legacy in subsequent generations of pop. If she's below the fold, then Madonna is certainly above it, if not one of that day's two biggest stories, which strikes me as a little overblown. I mean, shouldn't the lede and counterledes be saved only for heads of state and the like? Where are your standards, New York Times?
The opening act for Washed Out at the Paradise three weeks ago was a bit too excited when he started to hype the headliner. "Washed Up is coming up next," he said. Snarky music bloggers would've laughed if they heard it. Three years ago, when bedroom-based, one-man electronic indie rock got big, critics loved the warped pastiche of pop, R&B and dance music for its contemporary relevance. Its creators were often underemployed in the recession, creating music alone and frugally, singing about the ambivalence of the mid-20s, and writing somewhat nostalgic songs that had been eaten away by a toppled economy. It was also catchy. Now the scene has moved on, as scenes do because they're fickle, to new splinters of indie rock.
Nonetheless, Washed Out easily sold out the Paradise, the venue in Boston that signals a band has more or less arrived. Ernest Greene, who started his solo project at home in rural Georgia when he couldn't find a job after graduating with a master's degree in library science, rose to the top of the wave and stayed. He deserves to be there -- in concert he's charming and his LP and EP are both very good. On record, Washed Out's songs are much more contemplative on record than they are live, when the strains of R&B, hip-hop and even club music are more firmly in the foreground. Everyone danced during the show. It was my first time, though, seeing such an electronics-based act, which was an adjustment. Even though Greene recruited a full band for this tour, including a drummer and bassist, there was too much pre-recorded material for me. Greene triggered a lot of music from his iPad. He and another bandmate spent much of their time sharing three keyboards, but they rarely played full melodies. Instead, they held long chords and slight changes seemed only to launch new loops. The suspicion was too strong that not much work was happening. The curtain was pulled back and the computers kept working at full steam.
The next week was WU LYF, a young British quartet who sold out Brighton Music Hall. They're not part of any scene, though they're equally lauded for what they call "heavy pop," or muscular but earnest, noisy but faithful rock. The lead singer gesticulated and gesticulated in nonsensical but exciting ways. He was wearing a denim jacket so torn that it must've been the thousandth time he wore it. He apologized that he'd lost his voice, but based on the online videos I've watched since then, I think his singing is always that husky and unintelligible. The band's music also combines unexpected strains -- punk and aggressive rock, but also the ringing guitar lines that made U2 famous and maybe even a little reggae or Caribbean rhythm. The crowd ate up every moment and did a good job catching the lead singer when he heartily dove off the stage. I'd only heard a handful of songs before I went, but it was hard not to be captivated by a band that clearly gave so much of themselves.
Not too much connects these two shows, except that I saw one after the other and perhaps that they reinforce the lesson that genuine emotion, live instruments, and commitment win in the end. Above is a video of WU LYF's performance on "Letterman" earlier this year. The funniest part is when they shout an obscenity and then leave early, leaving Letterman befuddled.
Five years since it opened, Highland Kitchen, in Somerville, is still a wonderful neighborhood restaurant. In fact, it might be my favorite restaurant in town. It includes a number of the culinary trends popular in restaurants during the same time span -- local ingredients, somewhat Southern comfort food, carefully considered mixed drinks -- but without any of the shtick that so many restaurants have. The ambience is so pleasingly free of pretense. When I was there most recently for dinner, two weekends ago about 6:30, the crowd went from a surprising number of young children to older couples to younger hipster couples to neighborhood residents quite easily -- and they played "Being There" as background music. Few restaurants succeed so effortlessly.
For some reason, my wife and I ordered two servings of their buffalo brussels sprouts appetizer. At first blush, this is a pretty gross dish, but it's actually quite satisfying: Sometimes, spicy buffalo sauce hits the spot and this version delivers it without having to eat subpar chicken at the end; instead, you get brussels sprouts, which are always a winner. It's also remarkably heavy. Then again, I'm traveling to New Orleans in two days, where the food makes buffalo brussels sprouts seem positively airy.
Two planning friends and I saw the new documentary "The Pruitt-Igoe Myth" a few weeks ago, which chronicles the rapid rise and fall of the public housing development in St. Louis that became the infamous example of failed government-sponsored housing. Pruitt-Igoe opened in 1954, in a relatively brief span of years when the federal government spent money on a large scale in housing, but was demolished in 1972 when it was decrepit and substantially empty. I recommend the movie to anyone interested in housing or planning, if only because it's a treat for there to be a documentary about public housing. Urban history students will find much of the narrative about the broader, postwar American context familiar, with passages on growth coalitions, economic restructuring, highways' construction, and federal policy's favoritism for suburbanization. Nonetheless, I had two reactions:
1. Real estate isn't everything. This is a much more widely accepted concept today than when Pruitt-Igoe was built; in fact, it's about as mild and widely acceptable as blanket statements come. In the mid-1950s, the modernist dream held that design would lift people out of poverty. Now, it's readily understood that much more is needed to do that -- jobs, education, all these very knotty, intertwined issues. I work in real estate development partly because it's very fun to have such a direct, pulsating tangible impact on the built world. But community development is a very different concept that's much more comprehensive, lasting and important
Yet housing development of the past 20 years -- particularly the only brand still largely sponsored by the federal government, HOPE VI -- strongly prefers a specific style of real estate development: relatively suburban townhouses that value human scales, personal spaces and bright colors, which can generally be lumped into New Urbanism. When this type of design is criticized, it's for its cultural conservatism and its smaller scope, which produces fewer units than what were in knocked-down projects, not for the specific design flaws that have been readily found in those towers. Yet because most towers failed doesn't mean they all did and doesn't mean townhouses succeed. (Michael Kimmelman references this in his review of the documentary.) I wonder if in 35 years, we'll speak of HOPE VI projects' design in the same derisive tones because poverty and the need for quality low-income housing will still be prevalent.
2. On a related note, what are the massive policy mistakes that are being today, just like urban renewal was in the postwar era? Of course it's very hard to answer this question well when one is in the middle of unfolding history. My friend suggested the subsidies for sports stadiums and convention centers, whose obviously questionable public merits somehow don't hinder governments' desire to routinely throw money at them. But he added that these aren't as directly harmful to the poor as urban renewal was. They're only harmful in the indirect sense because they represent badly allocated spending, not the immediately disruptive policy of the 1950s. He's right to identify stadiums and convention centers. In general, I think this is a very important question that younger professionals should always think about.
Those fall days in Boston when it gets a bit warmer and the leaves are a deep color but the sun hits at a lower angle and everyone is out walking and you need an extra layer at night. Corners and layers and reverb.
