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.

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.

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.

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.

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.