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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.

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.

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.

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.