You Were A Little-Read Blogger And I Just A Rockette

I ended my college radio show with this song, so it feels right to do the same here, at least for the time being. You know, to make it my calling card.

Farewell, Ed Koch

As someone born in 1983, I obviously don't remember anything about Ed Koch's 12 years as New York's mayor. By the time he left office, I was six years old and my family had decamped to the suburbs. Nevertheless, I've found his death last week to be quite affecting. As many have written, he was a true representation of the city -- opinionated, outspoken, ethnic and accomplished, with his personality intertwined in all of those accomplishments. Much of the Times' appraisal of Koch's time as mayor describes it as a mixed success. He stopped the city from sliding deeper into irrelevance in the immediate aftermath of its near bankruptcy, led a huge charge on housing, and promoted equal treatment of gay city workers, but he wasn't much of a visionary, the paper wrote. He loved the city very deeply, which may be what a mayor needs more than any other quality to succeed. (It's probably what has kept Tom Menino as Boston's mayor for the past two decades.)

What I find most memorable about Koch's death is that he was the last mayor of New York when the city was still a wayward, slightly scary place. The Times' obituary mentions an idea Koch had to stop graffiti on the subway cars. No one would ever dare do such a thing now. In the early 21st century, New York's path as the wealthiest, most exciting city in the country is very secure, even if local conservative pundits suggest otherwise as they object to electing a Democrat in this year's election. But the idea that New York would return to such a pinnacle was far-fetched in the early '80s. Crime was high, streets were dirty, jobs weren't abundant, disinvestment was rampant, the Bronx was bombed out. If I'd told you in 1989 that I'd go to Bushwick for a weekend of recording music (as I did recently), because that's where all the cool kids live now, you'd look at me like I was absolutely crazy. But it's as natural as downing a glass of artisanal whiskey with a plate of locally raised duck terrine.

Maybe David Dinkins, Koch's successor, who's still alive, is the last link to this era. Crown Heights rioted when he was mayor. But there's a real passing of an era with Koch's death.

Laid On Your Back

In the midst of this weekend's monumental snowstorm, I watched "(500) Days of Summer," a satisfactory romantic comedy that tries a bit too hard to be quirky and self-aware. My favorite moment came in an opening scene, when, to establish the beautiful indie charm of the female lead, played by Zooey Deschanel, the narrator said that she quoted Belle and Sebastian's album "The Boy with the Arab Strap" in her high school yearbook notes. And so did I. I had to rewind the scene to be sure I heard correctly! Whereas Deschanel's character took from the title track -- "Color my life with the chaos of trouble" -- I excerpted "Sleep the Clock Around" -- "There's a lot to be done while your head is still young." I still find this line inspiring. Unlike Deschanel's character, my public display of affection for this album didn't lead to a spike in regional sales.

From browsing reviews of the move, I learned the meaning of "Manic Pixie Dream Girl." (Zooey Deschanel is apparently one of the archetypes, particularly in "(500) Days of Summer.") A film critic coined the term in the Onion: "That bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures." This is very funny, mainly because this is exactly the sort of woman I wanted to meet when I was 19 years old -- I had confused myself into thinking I was a "broodingly soulful" young man. It's probably why I liked "Grosse Pointe Blank" and "Good Will Hunting" so much, though that discredits Minnie Driver's fine acting and the writing in both movies. She was an ambitious, intelligent woman in both roles, unlike the stereotype, who is much less driven, as Deschanel's character was. The male leads, played by John Cusack and Matt Damon, sure were needlessly lost in their own thoughts, though, which is probably why I liked them so much. Luckily, that period is over.

Above is the trailer to "(500) Days of Summer." Thanks to Belle and Sebastian for the post's title. It's part of a lyric from the title song of "The Boy with the Arab Strap."

Barack Obama And I Are Practically Best Friends

Much to my delight, I read in Sunday's Times that Barack Obama also detests it when people use the word "impact" as a verb! In fact, according to the story, when he started slipping and doing it himself, his aides realized that Washington was wearing him down: "Even Mr. Obama's speech has changed a bit, close observers say. Though he still disdains Washington, he often sounds less like a disapproving outsider and more like a participant. One former aide was startled to hear Mr. Obama use 'impact' as a verb, a particular tendency in the capital." "Impact" is a noun, end of story. One can change or affect an  outcome, but one can't impact an outcome. One can only have an impact on an outcome. I'm so glad to know that President Obama and I share so much common. If we both dislike one specific word, imagine what other bonds lie below. I had to tell my wife quickly.

More importantly, Obama is restless: "Mr. Obama's entire career has been about getting to the next stage: if he could only become a lawyer, and then a public officials, and then a United States senator, and then president, he could create real change." I certainly want my president to be someone who always wants more. I sure do.

Piazza, New York Hall Of Famer

After receiving more than 50 percent of the votes in his first time on the ballot, Mike Piazza will likely be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. In fact, every former player who's been in this position before has made it there. And Piazza deserves it. The historically great benchmarks for reaching the Hall of Fame -- 500 home runs, 3,000 hits and 300 wins -- have lost their luster in a post-steroids era of statistics immersion, where offensive numbers were inflated by drugs and new statistics have created more refined ways of evaluating players, elevating some, diminishing some and confirming the talent of others. But to be even more qualitative, my key threshold is whether that player was his era's best at that position. If so, he deserves to be in because the Hall of Fame recognizes the game's greatest through each era. Piazza was baseball's best catcher from circa 1993 to 2003.

His 2000 season, when he led the Mets to the World Series, was incredible, with 38 home runs, 113 runs batted in, a .324 average and an OPS above 1.0. That last statistic is my favorite because it indicates whether a hitter is able to reach base frequently and hit for power. Only a couple of players pass 1.0 each year and Piazza did it four times in his career. He was the most feared player of his teams during that decade-long span, all while playing catcher, the most physically burdensome position in baseball. Finding great hitters who play first base isn't all that hard because they're positioned there specifically because first base isn't very painful to man, so it doesn't get in the way of hitting. Catching is very different. If everyone in baseball -- players, executives, fans, and writers -- recognizes a player as the best, most-dominant player at his position for an era, then that player should be in the Hall of Fame.

Of course, Piazza's candidacy is complicated by the steroids era. There have long been rumors he took them, though the only person to claim it was the sportswriter Jeff Pearlman, in his book about Roger Clemens. Piazza apparently avoided reporters for several years after retiring so that he wouldn't be asked, but he denies in his soon-to-be-published autobiography he ever took them. Even with the era's taint, I have to apply the same standard as the judicial system: innocent until proven guilty. Those players who at one time seemed to be surefire Hall of Famers but have been clearly linked to steroids, such as Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens or Rafael Palmeiro, shouldn't be admitted. The Hall of Fame exists to honor baseball and they fundamentally disrespected the game. But that doesn't mean that players who "looked big" or "performed better than expected" (or in Piazza's case, had bad back acne) should also be shut out on suspicion. That creates far too muddy a standard. Piazza hasn't been conclusively linked to using steroids and should be voted in unless proved otherwise or unless voters think that his talents truly don't meet the standards. I say the same of Jeff Bagwell and Frank Thomas.

Thanks to Belle and Sebastian for inspiring the post's title. Piazza will probably go into the Hall as a Los Angeles Dodger, though. His family was personally close to the franchise and his best early seasons happened there, even if he had great ones with the Mets and played one more year there. He sure was my favorite player through my teenage years, which I realize colors all of the above.

Nah, I'm OK With Growing Old, Part 2

A.C. Newman deserves large amounts of credit for his newest album, "Shut Down the Streets." He turns flutes, banjos and clarinets into pop; all manners of keyboards into hooks; and that scariest of topics -- growing old -- into a deeply satisfying rock album. Gone are the madcap whimsy of "The Slow Descent into Alcoholism" and the inscrutability of "The Laws Have Changed," two of Newman's more popular, early songs for the New Pornographers. Instead, his new album covers birth, death, deception, marriage, love, and the resigned feeling that art is hard and not all it's made out to be. In the opening song, he declares it's time to "abandon the search for an author of small works." It sounds a bit like a Roberto Bolano novel, with its mythical pursuits of cult writers, but also a bit like Newman describing himself, an author of small pop gems that have been adored for 10 years but never by all that many people. The arrangements here are really expert, layering and removing instruments with great instinct to create rich compositions. For all these reasons, "Shut Down the Streets" is easily my favorite record of 2012. Above is a video of Newman and his band performing two songs from the album. The first, "I'm Not Talking," is the album opener and just a fantastic song.

Here are a few other records I enjoyed last year:

* Hospitality - "s/t": The bouncy songs are good, but the slower ones that take longer to reveal themselves are even better. When Amber Papini, the leader, sings a wordless vocal line over a brooding bass part at the end of "Julie," it feels momentous. This album was too overlooked. Still disappointed with myself for passing on their show at Great Scott last week.

* The Tallest Man on Earth - "There's No Leaving Now": I'm in the minority choosing this one over its predecessor, but I like the how the keyboards add a softer edge and bit more complexity.

* Beachwood Sparks - "The Tarnished Gold": It's not a surprise that the best songs are about realizing that the best things are what you had right in front of you all along. Even if I recently realized for the first time that they shamelessly mimic the Byrds, the album comes from a place of sincerity that not many bands choose to mine anymore.

And a few other smaller pieces I liked:

* KEXP's radio sessions: The catalogue is impressively large and has become a great way to discover new bands. Their collection makes me thankful that YouTube exists.

* The first song on DIIV's album: Everyone compares them to the Smiths and Nirvana -- and the songwriter says one inspiration is Malian guitars -- but that first song sounds like vintage Yo La Tengo in all the right ways.

* Video parodies of "Call Me Maybe": They're always funny, whether crudely or carefully produced, especially this one by the Big Ten's mascots. And the hook isn't bad, either.

I Went Over The Fiscal Cliff And I All I Got Was This Dumb Blog Post

I spent the past month dutifully reading the Times' stories about the fiscal cliff and am exhausted. After weeks of negotiating, bickering, failed votes, and trying to understand the finer points about how the Congressional Budget Office calculates tax policy, I know that my taxes will be higher starting this year, even though my household earns less than $250,000, because of a slight increase to the payroll tax rate; the federal government will raise more tax revenue than it would have if it had kept the Bush tax cuts in place, but the bill that ultimately passed Congress will add to the deficit, compared to if they'd simply done nothing; and the House's Republican caucus is truly unsound and totally incapable of governing, professing to want to lower the deficit but not interested in approving any legislation that would actually do this. At least Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who's one of that chamber's most conservative Democrats (in one campaign ad, he used a rifle to shoot down Obamacare), had the insight to say, "Something has gone terribly wrong when the biggest threat to our American economy is  the American Congress."

The entire "fiscal cliff" debacle was full of irony. Its name, coined by who-knows, is misleading. It suggests that if Congress hadn't acted, the federal deficit would've ballooned, when in reality, doing nothing would've closed the deficit by the greatest amount in the past 12 years. There was no cliff, either, but rather a gradual press on the federal budget and individual wallets. The former would've been subjected to budget cuts and the latter to tax increases, which affect behavior over time, not on the first day. And after four years of Republicans screaming for austerity, they wanted to do all they could to avoid it once the chance to impose austerity presented itself. Then, after despairing about the effect of large cuts to military spending, they were OK with them once Democrats also wanted to avert those cuts. All of it was in the name of protecting historically low tax rates on those earning at least $1 million.

Most ironically, if any politician emerged a winner from the past month, it was former President George W. Bush, whose tax policy was largely made permanent. Sure, the marginal rate on households earning more than $450,000 increased from what it was under his administration, as did the rate on capital gains and the country's largest estates. But the large majority of his rates are now in place for good (or at least until Congress can pass another bill that raises taxes, which seems quite unlikely in the near future), as is his misguided belief that lower tax rates raise more revenue and boost the national economy. His policy was meant to expire after 10 years, but was designed to be tricky to undo -- a smart political move. At a time when the Republican Party claims to have rejected the Bush decade for its unfunded mandates, deficit spending and "compassionate conservatism," the party actually embraced it.

At least we only have another six months, if not 10 years, of such political and fiscal battles facing us. I can't wait to be beaten down by the Times on the subway in the morning.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.