AMillionMonkeys

The end of AMillionMonkeys?

2011-08-19T15:34:00.003-05:00

I think I am done blogging here. I think I am going to post exclusively over at the Tumblr for now. If you don't hear from me again here, that is where I'll be.

"Down by the Water," The Decemberists

2011-08-09T11:06:00.001-05:00

In which Rep. Sean Duffy is a bit player in a magazine story

2011-07-18T13:36:00.002-05:00

Rep. Sean Duffy appears in this NYT Magazine profile of GOP whip Kevin McCarthy but I'm not sure how interesting it is to WI-7 folks. For instance it is not surprising that Duffy got leadership blessing to vote against defunding NPR. Here's something sort of interesting:

Sean Duffy spoke with McCarthy constantly throughout the campaign. So did a South Dakota farmer named Kristi Noem — though she received what she calls "good messaging advice" covertly, as Noem's entire campaign was based on her wholesale rejection of Beltway orthodoxy.

I suppose it shouldn't be shocking that Duffy got messaging advice during the campaign. But note the distinction there between Noem, who had to at least pretend that she wasn't communicating with party leaders, and Duffy who didn't. It does underline the point that Duffy is very much a team player, in-with-GOP-leadership kind of representative. I suppose your feelings about that will depend on your feelings about GOP leadership.

A more philosophical question is do you prefer for your representative to be someone who pretends to be independent but really isn't or someone who doesn't especially pretend.

Best singles of 2011 so far

2011-07-12T23:14:00.003-05:00

I feel like this list is really incomplete, still. What am I missing, please?

SINGLES

15. "The Show Goes On," Lupe Fiasco
14. "Just a Kiss," Lady Antebellum
13. "Helplessness Blues," Fleet Foxes
12. "Blow," Ke$ha
11. "Getting Ready for Christmas Day," Paul Simon
10. "Born This Way," Lady Gaga
9. "Trouble on My Mind," Pusha-T feat. Tyler, the Creator
8. "Remind Me," Brad Paisley feat. Carrie Underwood
7. “E.T.,” Katy Perry
6. "Gucci Gucci," Kreayshawn
5. "I Hate Myself," Lil B
4. "Calgary," Bon Iver
3. "Rolling in the Deep," Adele
2. "Yonkers," Tyler the Creator
1. "Till the World Ends," Britney Spears. (See my review here. Extraordinary for its total hypnotic emptiness.)

Best music of 2011 so far

2011-07-09T19:39:00.003-05:00

This week I listened to the Sound Opinions episode where they did their mid-year thing, so I guess why not, I can offer mine. This all can change a lot between now and December of course but just for fun.

ALBUMS

10. Fleet Foxes, Helplessness Blues
Haven't really listened to it much yet but it seems pleasant enough.

9. Tim Hecker, Ravedeath, 1972
Epic ambient.

8. Adele, 21

7. Brad Paisley, This is Country Music

6. Beyonce, 4

5. Beastie Boys, Hot Sauce Committee Part Two

4. Paul Simon, So Beautiful or So What
What a nice surprise! Really sincere and pretty and catchy. Kind of laid back and genuine, comfortable in its own skin.

3. Lil B, I'm Gay (I'm Happy)

2. Bon Iver, Bon Iver

1. PJ Harvey, Let England Shake
Telling an English story, interpolating found melodies. Very slept-on album in my opinion, perhaps because critics all want a primal scream from Polly Jean all the time. But this is a pretty, complete sort of record, and I've been surprised by how many times I have gone back to it.

DISAPPOINTMENTS

Radiohead, King of Limbs
I get that Radiohead is trying to get away from album-as-event, but this is pretty slight.

Tyler, the Creator, Goblin
I can see why Odd Future's punk/teenager rap thing seems interesting to a lot of people, and it was to me too for a couple of weeks. But really, this record is mostly bad and weirdly (or maybe, given its teenagerishness, not weirdly) self-serious. Yes, I know there are punchlines. That's not what I mean. Tyler has a good sound but he really needs to develop a sense of irony.

--
I am going to try to do singles tomorrow.

The Anarchist by John Smolens

2011-07-01T22:12:00.000-05:00

The Anarchist: A Novel by John Smolens

Pretty silly. I am sort of interested in the politics of the time (early 1900s) and thought it might be fun to read a novel about it. It was a little, small bit of fun, was all. Sort of a clumsy potboiler overall.

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Look over there

2011-06-30T16:50:00.001-05:00

Stuff has been going on over at the tumblr lately.

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

2011-06-23T11:06:00.000-05:00

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

Possibly I am a philistine but I read 20 percent of this one and I am putting it down. It has no plot! The sort of this-then-this-then-this picaresque is an intentional structure, I know, but that doesn't make it much more fun to read. The milieu of hardscrabble Great Depression Chicago is certainly appealing but this work isn't for me, not right now at least.

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Best nonfiction

2011-06-21T12:03:00.001-05:00

I always enjoy lists and I am a major fan of some of the books on the Guardian's "100 greatest non-fiction books" list -- Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Roland Barthes' Mythologies, Susan Sontag's On Camp. But like all non-bylined lists of this sort, it is also heavy on "important" doorstops like Critique of Pure Reason and Leviathan that are not really for actual reading by any actual human.

I prefer lists that don't pretend to take a view from nowhere. So just for fun and in no particular order here is a list of some of my own personal favorite nonfiction books. No claim that these are the best of all time or that this is comprehensive. But I liked them.

Robert Mentzer's Certified Finest Nonfiction Books:

MUSIC

Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson
A true investigation into what aesthetic taste is and how taste gets made. So smart and so honest and so useful. If it doesn't change the way you think about music and art, read it again.

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century by Greil Marcus
Cultural history from French Situationism to punk rock.

Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang
Terrific, rigorous hip-hop history. Pitch-perfect until he hits the '90s!

REPORTING

The Big Short by Michael Lewis
The story of the financial collapse through the eyes of those who saw it coming.

Boss by Mike Royko
The greatest newspaper columnist of all time chronicles Richard J. Daley.

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
Working poor in practice.

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Children by Philip Gourevitch
Terrible, terrible.

Them by Jon Ronson
Travels with crazies. Hilarious, sympathetic portraits of some very unsympathetic souls.

LITERARY

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
Best memoir ever.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
Does this count as nonfiction?

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
Not every essay in here is a winner -- "E Unibus Pluram: Television and American Fiction" is completely insufferable -- but the title essay is terrific, lots of fun and smart. The first essay "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley," which is set in central Illinois, still makes me nostalgic for home.

Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
Yep.

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
Read this probably 15 years ago and I still remember its description of kitchen work and soup-kitchen hopping.

Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do by Studs Terkel
Best oral history.

Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cape Town to Cairo by Paul Theroux
Travels in Africa and some worthwhile thoughts on the aid industrial complex.

PHILOSOPHY

Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard
This was the most moving, most deeply felt piece of philosophical writing I read in college. Really great as a literary work and really great and influential as a piece of philosophy.

Illuminations by Walter Benjamin
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" doesn't hold up well at all but the essays are terrific and "Theses on the Philosophy of History" is basically a masterpiece.

--
What are your picks? Please add in comments!

Complaining about parenting is some sort of new trend

2011-06-16T23:41:00.004-05:00

Hey I never got one of these:

Apparently, dadchelor parties are a thing. They’re pretty much like bachelor parties, except the person getting rowdy is about to be father, not a groom. A dude who recently attended one of these soirees called it a "farewell from the inner circle." They can also be called daddymoons and man-showers, and according to The Huffington Post, they’re becoming increasingly popular.

Actually that is a trend that I will believe when I see something other than some thinly sourced trend story about it, like for instance when I hear about one actual person doing it.

But here is a bona fide trend that really is sweeping the nation and with which I have actual first-hand experience: The trend of talking about this mock children's book Go the F--k to Sleep, which I certainly agree seems quite funny. People are posting it on Facebook, this Tom Scocca piece in New York Magazine considers its deep meaning and so does this Slate Culture Gabfest and so on.

I am not sure if Go the F--k to Sleep represents anything in particular about our culture's changing attitudes about parenting itself, but I do feel like there is something going on right now where openly complaining about how hard it is to be a parent is some sort of new frontier in anti-PC taboo-breaking.

I think of the comedy of Louis C.K., like this famous -- and actually groundbreaking and completely hilarious -- bit about how his 4-year-old daughter is an asshole:

No less a mainstream comedic voice than Tina Fey recently got in on the action, too, explaining that toddlers are total d-bags.

Really it is not so different from Bill Cosby calling his kids "brain damaged" or whatever, but it seems like a) there is a sharper edge on it in all of these examples and b) we are just seeing more of this sort of thing in general.

I like that the culture is now able to express some of the frustrations of parenting, but I am less sure that something like Go the F--k to Sleep is shattering any actual taboo. Maybe there was once a time -- probably before two-working-parent households were the norm -- when the culture thought only unrealistic happy thoughts about parenting and expressing negative feelings was truly something that just wasn't done. But this is not that time. In fact I wonder if the pendulum hasn't swung a bit far in the other direction, to the point that it's now more socially acceptable to talk about the frustrations and difficulties of parenting and it's somehow lame to talk about its joys.

Antibalas, "Rat Race"

2011-06-10T09:15:00.001-05:00

web tracks by Antibalas

Robert Mentzer (not me) getting married

2011-05-26T20:13:00.005-05:00

An update to my essay about Robert Mentzers Around the World. I sent a link to the Robert Mentzer from Lebanon, Penn., and he wrote back in a Facebook message after he read the essay:

THANK YOU FOR SHARING THIS WITH ME. AS OF TODAY I HAVE A FEW UPDATES. I GOT THE JOB I WAS GOING FOR, ME AND MY SONS MOTHER ARE BACK TOGETHER AND ARE ENGAGED. I HAVE BEEN VERY KEEN ON KEEPING BUSY TO STAY OUT OF TROUBLE, AND HAVE BEEN SUCCESSFUL THUS FAR, I THANK YOU FOR INTERVIEWING ME AS IT HAD AN EFFECT THAT WILL LAST A LIFETIME.

He is flattering me, I believe. Really nice guy. Enjoy married life, Robert Mentzer!

2666 by Roberto Bolaño

2011-05-22T13:49:00.000-05:00

2666 by Roberto Bolaño

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Pretty massive and magnificent. Better than Savage Detectives? Not to me, although to be fair maybe it is sort of ridiculous to talk like that. 2666 is a weird, multifaceted universe unto itself. It has its own rules and its own gravity, and the sentences! Oh, man. What a work. It is weird and disjointed and sometimes drawn-out and repetitive but boy does it move, hopping from scholars' love triangle to police procedural and on and on, and every single character is fully human even if only sketched in a phrase or two. Very immersive experience, you just have to give yourself up to it and let the sentences flow around you.

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Katy Perry, E.T.

2011-05-20T22:07:00.001-05:00

White rappers. Discuss.

2011-05-15T17:10:00.005-05:00

Bit of an odd argument by Jon Caramanica in the NYT today that white rappers in 2011 are proving themselves authentic by acting as super-traditional historians of the form:

[W]hite rappers are commonplace, if not ubiquitous or especially influential. And a recent crop of albums and mixtapes by white rappers shows a new strategy. Where in the past, the way to avoid ruffling feathers was to lay no claim to hip-hop’s center, now it’s by looking backward, studying up and making unimpeachable choices. Who can argue with the path already taken?

Caramanica's chief examples to bolster this argument are a) NYC mixtape rapper Action Bronson, b) SNL joke-rappers the Lonely Island, and c) the Beastie Boys.

I see a small problem with calling the Beastie Boys neotraditionalists, which is that they are actual old-school rappers. Also I don't get what Lonely Island is doing in the piece at all. They are super-funny, but the way they are funny is by being basically pitch-perfect mimics of contemporary rap tropes. That seems nothing like what Caramanica is talking about at all. It sort of seems like the opposite.

And in fact, I can name two dozen indie rappers who are a) black and b) defined by their neotraditionalism. Action Bronson is not strange in this respect! The zealously formalist underground rapper is pretty much its own subgenre at this point, and it ain't racially coded.

Here is the bit of Caramanica's piece that seems exactly right:

Eminem was probably the last true foreigner, arriving at a moment when mainstream acceptance of hip-hop was on the rise, following a decade of Dr. Dre and Puff Daddy, Biggie Smalls and 2Pac. He was articulating the outsider experience just as a whole new wave of fans — white fans — were experiencing it themselves for the first time.

But Eminem’s success meant that they didn’t have to be outsiders anymore — they could listen in, and also participate at the highest levels. And it wouldn’t be disingenuous: hip-hop has been around long enough that most young people don’t know a life without it. Their connection to the music, even if it’s just via consumption, is sincere and unavoidable.

Eminem’s success obviated the need for new Eminems.

That's an interesting point! Maybe the better conclusion to draw from it, though, is that these days white rappers are just less weird all around. They exist in the underground, in the mainstream and in the genre-of-one that is the Lonely Island. And some are good (Yelawolf) and some are terrible (Asher Roth) and pretty much that is it.

The Pale King is brilliant and annoying

2011-05-02T23:42:00.014-05:00

An odd thing about The Pale King that I guess speaks well of it is the fact that, when I came to the end, I found the ending to be something of a letdown. But what else would it be? It's an unfinished novel -- "An Unfinished Novel" is the subtitle! Maybe I expected it to seem finished, or at least unfinished in a satisfying way. But it doesn't, so. Just so you know.

The Pale King, which is David Foster Wallace's final, unfinished novel, comprises a main narrative involving the IRS interspersed with smaller, semi-unrelated or totally unrelated short stories. One of these mini-stories quite near the beginning of the book, is sort of a perfect distillation of some major Wallace themes, about a middle-school boy who is so considerate and so well-adjusted and so good that everyone loathes him, and then feels guilty and confused about their loathing, which in turn drives them all even more insane around him. It is a perfect little piece. It is also something like 10 pages out of more than 500. If you are undecided about this book or about Wallace, I would advise you to go to Barnes & Noble and read that story, which is chapter 5, and maybe just leave it at that.

The thing about reading David Foster Wallace in general and certainly The Pale King in particular is that, not to put too fine a point on it, there are a lot of unnecessary words and pointless digressions. Part of the point of his prose style is to flatten consciousness out in this way that allows for endless recursive self-awareness. It is prose cubism, dramatizing the way we are all always experiencing a near-infinite number of things at once -- external stimuli like sights and smells, awareness of our bodies i.e. hunger or feeling warm, consciousness, consciousness-of-consciousness, memories, etc. etc. He's not wrong! But actually reading all of it can be, well, kind of annoying and tedious.

At times! Not all the time! Still, it is not a great situation when there are long sections of this book that you really don't actually need to read. And I don't think we can pin that on the unfinished manuscript's editor, Michael Pietsch, because the fact is that it is a problem in most of DFW's writing***.

This Slate write-up is a good one, and nails a) the quantum leap between Girl With Curious Hair and Infinite Jest and b) the reason Wallace is so appealing to lit nerds, which is that he is both totally native to the world of hyper-educated academia and also sort of impatient and dissatisfied with it. He's got the cred, and he also captures that feeling that there must be more than this. Not coincidentally, the fact that he's native to the world of graduate-school seminars is also why he inspires real hatred from some people, possibly/probably/obviously a function of intellectual status-anxiety. Luckily it is not necessary to be either a fanboy or a hater. You can be an admirer with reservations, which is what I advise.

But seriously. You try reading the first couple of pages of The Pale King and not having your knees buckle. Here is the way the novel opens:

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb's-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod ... all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek.

I mean, damn. (By the way, notice the echoes of the opening lines of Finnegan's Wake there. Pretty.) And that is just part of what you get with a work by Wallace: You argue with it and feel infuriated even as you also fall under its spell. It's writing that can repel you and then also make you feel very special and cared for. Undeniable and also kind of maddening.

--
Background: Here is me, soon after his death, on my relationship with David Foster Wallace. Here is a longish review of Consider the Lobster I wrote in 2006 for Stop Smiling.

*** This is kind of an aside, but I think there is a sly joke in the fact that, with only a couple of exceptions, the only sections of the book that have footnotes are those written in the voice of an author-stand-in character named David Wallace, who claims repeatedly to be speaking as the "real" Wallace, but isn't. Putting footnotes throughout these sections and only these sections is sort of a funny way to indirectly poke fun at his own reputation.

The Golden Age of Television lasted from 2003-2006

2011-04-23T11:32:00.004-05:00

I know every age is a golden age and every golden age is also a time of terrible, debased junk, but I have been watching The Killing and Game of Thrones and Mad Men, and I can tell you that they are fine/good but they're just not exciting the way premium TV used to be. Sorry to Justified and Dexter and Modern Family, but they simply aren't as good as the best shows on TV used to be.

So when was the Golden Age of Television? Let's take a look***:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003)
Futurama (original run) (1999-2003)
Angel (1999-2004)
The West Wing (1999-2006)
The Sopranos (1999-2007)
The Wire (2002-2008)
Arrested Development (2003-2006)
Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009)
Veronica Mars (2004-2007)
Deadwood (2004-2006)
Lost (2004-2010)
The Office (2005-present)
Heroes (2006-2010)
Mad Men (2007-present)

What this data doesn't capture, of course, is that not every one of these shows was amazing for the entire length of its run. It's not really clear, for example, how many seasons of The Office really count as classic, for example. Obviously only the first season of Heroes was any good. Others like The West Wing and The Sopranos started to get a little questionable in their late seasons. Even The Wire, painful as it is to admit, had a weak final season.

So I would offer that the sweet spot here is from about 2003 until about 2006, maybe 2007. After that these shows were either no longer on the air or else noticeably grasping at straws.

Why am I wrong?

*** Not on this list: The Daily Show, the Colbert Report, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien, all of which were making terrific television at the same time period. For that matter, there were also a number of great reality shows on at the same time. It's just easier for our purposes if we stick with scripted shows.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

2011-04-02T12:23:00.001-05:00

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Very brilliant and very long. The Thomas More plot is sort of oddly submerged for much of the book but the novel ends on Thomas More, making you wonder if that was the point of the whole thing. Also, this business of always referring to Cromwell as "he" forces the reader to constantly second-guess who exactly is speaking. Also, why is this book named for Jane Seymour's Wolf Hall?

Quibbles. It is as sharp as a novel can be. It throws you into its world and holds you there -- no winking at the present day, no sly reveals of the many massive historical ironies we all know are in store for Thomas Cromwell, the main character, who is followed from childhood.

The novel positions itself at the moment of a great shift (the great shift?) in European institutional powers, namely Henry VIII's split with the Catholic Church. Cromwell is the bureaucratic operator most responsible for making it happen -- a canny, self-preserving social climber, yes, but also a real reformer with clear eye for making changes happen. In that respect, More is a foil for Cromwell: More is the self-righteous ideologue, Cromwell the ultra-pragmatist. That both would eventually come to the same end is sort of a grim comment on the nature of power.

And while Wolf Hall invites you to read it as the anti-A Man for All Seasons, to me is feels a bit like a 16th-century The Wire -- a granular portrait of big, creaking institutions, corrupt and massively powerful compared to the puny individuals they chew through.

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The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

2011-03-30T22:49:00.001-05:00

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The latest of the books I have read into Laura's belly, to the evident delight of the baby, who squirms and kicks throughout reading time. He is right about this one: It is really good. I had not read it since high school, and it is fairly magnificent. It is also about a time in America when James Gatz from North Dakota could turn himself into the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby, a possibility that has come to seem remote to us today. Although, as American Lit. students will recall, even Gatsby did not ever quite succeed in turning himself into Gatsby. Thumbs up to this book from me and the baby, and from Laura, too, although she slept through a lot of it.

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Tyler the Creator, "Yonkers"

2011-03-27T12:35:00.001-05:00

Inside Job burns with righteous moral fury

2011-03-15T00:20:00.004-05:00

Probably the most devastating segment in Inside Job comes in the last third when it discusses the lucrative off-the-books consulting careers enjoyed by many (most?) major academic economists. Economists from top schools are paid not just for speaking engagements but actually to write (or sign their name to) actual economic studies pointing to a client's desired result, and they never even disclose it because there's no rule at Harvard or Princeton or wherever that says they need to.

In an interview with John Campbell, chairman of the Harvard Economics Department, filmmaker Charles Ferguson uses this analogy:

Ferguson: A medical researcher writes an article, saying 'To treat this disease, you should prescribe this drug. Turns out, doctor makes 80 percent of personal income from the manufacturer of this drug. Does that bother you?

Campbell: I think it's certainly important to disclose the, um. The, um. Well, I think that's also a little different from cases that we're talking about here because, um. Um.

Brutal.

So I am late to seeing Inside Job, but I am guessing that I am not the only one who waited for it to come to Netflix, so a few thoughts:

The film is suffused with righteous moral fury, but also intellectual rigor. It's the best kind of polemic, and seriously I do hope Michael Moore and Davis Guggenheim were taking notes.
Part of the reason that the exchange above, like the entire segment on the corruption of academic economics departments, is so effective is because it really does present some new information. Somehow cornering a big-time financial services lobbyist with questions about CEO pay and lobbying dollars spent, which the film also does, is just not as effective. Maybe it's not as shocking or satisfying because Crooked Lobbyist is a character out of central casting, and besides, the lobbying guy knows exactly what he's doing in the film: He's there to provide slick, weaselly answers to pointed questions about his clients. The academic guys, by contrast, are so arrogant as to actually be shocked that they're even being questioned in this way.
It seems like most of the movie is made out of airplane shots of the outside of buildings, and yet it is still visually pretty great. I think they must've shot their Manhattan cityscapes early in the morning or right at dusk, because the light is terrific.
I think the film's argument is correct and well-constructed. The housing bubble was driven by Wall Street instruments and the crash was the result of a completely deregulated industry grown to monstrous proportions. But still this one, nagging thing: Ordinary people benefited from the housing bubble, and while it was going on they loved the housing bubble. Remember home equity loans? Remember the concept of home-as-retirement-fund? Remember the television program "Flip This House"?

Ferguson talks to exactly one homeowner, a Latina woman whose family was taken advantage of by rapacious, criminal predatory lenders. But there were hundreds of thousands of others who bought into the bogus idea that housing prices always go up and benefited from it.***

It is satisfying to see some of the people who were directly responsible for the bad economic theory that set the table for the crisis cornered on film. And it's telling to see the names of many, many others flashed across the screen with the perfunctory "declined to be interviewed for this film."

Of the questions that arise out of the 2008 collapse, here are some: Should more people have seen the 2008 collapse coming? Are we likely to see another cycle of bubble and collapse? Is last year's financial reform law likely to prevent the next crisis? With the swollen size of the financial services industry, is the government structurally likely to successfully recognize and head off such an event?

Inside Job asks these questions, or at least touches on them. But it seems to me that its main question is a somewhat simpler one. It is: Would the world be a better, fairer place if there were more accountability for the crooked Wall Street CEOs and the hack economists and the macho Type A traders and the government toadies who all, all together, failed us on an unprecedented scale? And the answer is, Yes, absolutely it would.

*** There is a Republican story about the financial collapse that blames it all on Jimmy Carter's Community Reinvestment Act and/or Fannie and Freddie. It is a false, pernicious, ridiculous story. And yet. Acknowledging the truth that derivatives run amok caused the financial crisis shouldn't mean denying that there was a sense in which even ordinary homeowners were in some ways complicit in creating the bubble. A bubble is a kind of mass delusion, and requires the participation of masses.

15 Songs About Parenting

2011-03-06T00:40:00.005-06:00

God willing, in a few months Laura and I will have a baby, a son. Today I came across the great Randy Newman song "Memo to My Son" and got to thinking about what were some other great songs about being a parent. Through a combination of Googling and also thinking about my own favorites, here is the playlist I came up with.

Lou Reed, "Beginning of a Great Adventure"
I love this one. Probably captures most closely the way I am feeling right at this moment -- anxious, excited, bemused, talking to myself a lot.

David Bowie, "Kooks"
So good.

Slick Rick, "It's a Boy"
Possibly my favorite new discovery of the day. Great music video includes a Lil Slick Rick, Lil Flavor Flav, Lil Kool Moe Dee and others! Rick the Ruler's take on parenting: "Hope I don't spoil a n**** rotten."

Talking Heads, "Stay Up Late"
Technically about being a sibling to a baby, I know. But so good that we're going to allow it.

Randy Newman, "Memo to My Son"
Wry, warm. Terrific.

Brad Paisley, "Anything Like Me"
About finding out that you are having a son. Ending of the song is a killer.

Loudon Wainwright III, "Daughter"
You remember this from the closing credits of "Knocked Up." Well, it's pretty great.

Harry Belafonte, "Turn Around"

Wu-Tang Clan, "Better Tomorrow"
Admittedly only partly about parenting. But the chorus -- "You can party your life away, smoke your life away/ but your seed grow up the same way" -- is definitely a way of thinking about how to be a parent.

Drive-By Truckers, "Outfit"

Lee Ann Womack, "I Hope You Dance"
Beautiful.

Cat Stevens, "Father and Son"

The Coup, "Me and Jesus the Pimp in '79 Grenada Last Night"
Not a fathering manual, this one. Maybe this is a good example of what you should not do as a father. Less depressing: "Wear Clean Draws" by The Coup.

John Lennon, "Beautiful Boy"

Sade, "Babyfather"
Pretty gorgeous song with a terrific video.

--
Honorable mentions:
Tupac, "Letter 2 My Unborn" (good, but like everything Tupac did, it is really all about him); The Beatles, "Hey Jude" (seems parental, but too oblique -- a song Paul wrote for John's son); Paul Simon, "Graceland" (involves a father-son road trip, though its real theme seems to be lost love); several Eminem songs.

--
Extra credit: 3 Songs About Pregnancy
R. Kelly, "Having a Baby"
Safe to say no one but Kells could pull off the gonzo playacting of an entire pregnancy in an R&B song, culminating in shouts of "Push! Push!" Good God.

R. Kelly feat. The Dream, Tyrese and Robin Thicke, "Pregnant"
Basically just biting a Tracy Morgan joke, but funny anyway.

Ghostface Killah feat. Raheem DeVaughan, "Baby"

--
Leave your own favorite parenthood songs in the comments, though if anyone says "Cat's in the Cradle" you are totally fired.

No particular reason

2011-02-28T23:12:00.003-06:00

Detroit, February 2011

2011-02-13T11:37:00.001-06:00

Detroit, February 2011 from amillionmonkeys on Vimeo.

How to Write a Sentence by Stanley Fish

2011-02-06T23:27:00.001-06:00

How to Write a Sentence by Stanley Fish

As a style guide, I'm not sure how much use it is. (I'm not sure it's not of use, either.) As a compendium of great sentences, it is a good time. My favorite unit of writing is the sentence, too, so I did enjoy these.

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Winter night

2011-01-26T01:13:00.001-06:00

winter night from amillionmonkeys on Vimeo.

Valerie Strauss is not an expert on documentary films

2011-01-25T13:15:00.008-06:00

Whoops. In a rush to gloat over the exclusion of Waiting for Superman from an Oscar nomination, Washington Post in-house anti-education reform propagandist Valerie Strauss makes a pretty embarrassing error today.

Strauss writes that the pro-reform documentary's Oscar snub was due to the Academy's discomfort with its "fake scenes":

The snub to Davis Guggenheim’s tendentious film was well-deserved, given that classic documentaries are factual and straightforward, and don’t, as did 'Superman,' fake scenes for emotional impact.

Right! We should applaud the academy voters for their rigid adherence to strict "classic documentary" values!

That's a fine way to score points on a political enemy, but anyone with even a passing familiarity with the films that were nominated knows that it makes no sense. I am pretty sure that Exit Through the Gift Shop was not nominated for how "factual and straightforward" it is.

Strauss hates Waiting for Superman. We get it. But her embarrassingly context-free, evidence-free gloating here does not inspire confidence in her ability to make a good-faith argument against the film -- or more to the point, against its message of reform.

P.S. ... On the actual merits of the "fake scenes" issue, you can read this NYT post and decide for yourself how serious an issue it is to you. To me it is not nothing -- I am with the Hoop Dreams producer quoted in the post -- and also not so troubling that I'd toss out the entire film.

P.P.S. ... By the way this response post Strauss links again today, "What Waiting for Superman got wrong, point by point" is breathtaking in its arrogance. I think every one of its points is simply an arguable proposition presented as a factual error. Annoying.

Snowshoeing with Mom & Dad

2011-01-17T23:04:00.004-06:00

A Week at the Airport by Alain de Botton

2011-01-01T10:48:00.003-06:00

A Week At The Airport: A Heathrow Diary by Alain de Botton

Neat little essay and a gorgeous paperback, even if it does not, for me, quite put get to what it is that makes airports the weirdest and most confounding of public spaces. But it's good, though, with neatly drawn scenes and observations about the travelers and the workers who make Heathrow go. And the color photographs set throughout the text are wonderful.

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Resolutions, 2011

2011-01-01T00:01:00.001-06:00

10. Get freelance work.***

9. Finish 2666.
This will be easy because it is freaking awesome and I am already 350 pages in. But it is very long, and I’m always reading more than one thing, so I am making it a resolution. Also, I sort of feel like this must be completed before June 17.

8. Make more audio stories.***

7. Continue to write fiction and send stories to literary journals.
I would say “get something published,” but I have been out of the game for a long time. A subcategory of this resolution would be something like “Get familiar with the universe of literary journals, especially online literary journals.”

6. Lose weight.***
This time I have a goal in mind.

5. Find fun and interesting ways to use the Flip camera I got for Christmas.

4. Make my website (www.robertmentzer.com) into something other than the frontpage it is now.
The problem is I don't really know what I want it to be. So this one could be a challenge.

3. Write more emails.
I miss email.

2. Floss.

1. Become a father. Be a good husband and father.

***Denotes also a resolution in 2010.

Evaluating last year’s New Year’s resolutions

2010-12-29T10:51:00.002-06:00

On January 1, 2010, I posted a list of resolutions here. How did I do? Let's see.

Resolution: Learn a lot about tax policy, in reasonably fine detail
Progress: Pretty decent. What is “reasonably fine detail”? I certainly have more to learn. But I have learned a great deal about tax policy and fiscal policy generally in the past year.

Resolution: Read more books
Progress: Good! Joining a book club helped. Even outside of the book club, I read a decent amount of novels and nonfiction books this year. This one was a success.

Resolution: Drink less alcohol
Progress: Bad, then good, then bad, then good. Mixed.

Resolution: Get more freelance work
Progress: Poor. This will be a resolution for 2011, again.

Resolution: Make more audio stories
Progress: Poor, and I will have this resolution again in 2011. But the asterisk here is that I had a lot of fun podcasting in 2010, on the Insophisticate and for a couple of months on the Daily Herald Politics Podcast as well. So while I failed to make audio stories, I did enjoy audio broadcasting.

Resolution: Take more and better photographs
Progress: Sort of poor to mixed. I was taking some in the early part of the year, but largely stopped after my (fairly nice) work camera was stolen and all I had to take pictures with was the iphone camera.

Resolution: Use more pretentious French, German and Latin phrases in everyday speech. I already use some, but I believe I could use more.
Progress: Pretty good! Weltschmerz, Weltanschauung, Gotterdammerung, ceteris paribus, l’esprit d’escalier -- I have used them all and more!

Resolution: Lose weight
Progress: This one was going really badly, but just in the last month I’ve seen actual progress in the right direction. I’ve lost nearly 10 pounds since joining Weight Watchers online last month, and I am enjoying it.

Resolution: Wear a tie underneath sweaters
Progress: Done. Piece of cake. Actually my fashion choices lately have swung away from wearing ties underneath sweaters. But it’s still a weapon in my arsenal.

Resolution: Write a novel. (Seriously.)
Progess: Stalled. But after I stopped working on the novel -- which I may still return to! -- I started working on these very short stories that I have been really enjoying writing. Have even submitted some to literary magazines. So while I haven’t written a novel, I have been writing fiction regularly again, which pleases me.

Overall grades: 4 resolutions accomplished (taxes, reading, language, ties). 3 with mixed results (drinking, photographs, weight). 3 failures (freelance, novel, audio stories) -- but 2 of those (novel, audio stories) have asterisks. In my view only 1 (freelance) is an absolute unmitigated failure.

I can live with this.

Robert Mentzer's Certified Finest Musicks and Things, 2010 (Pt. II)

2010-12-25T10:02:00.001-06:00

The saga continues...

Viral Videos

5. Tik Tok Star Trek
4. Phil Davison for Stark County Treasurer
3. Bed Intruder
2. Miracles
1. Trololo

Other video entertainment that was very good:
Nike World Cup commercial
People dropping cameras
Broken Bells video with Christina Hendricks as a cyborg
Words

Best Facebook thread on my Facebook page:
"I need a catchphrase."

One of the funnest things I did:
Livetweeting the Lady Antebellum concert

Best poster:

Best blog posts by me

"Unified theory of Ke$ha," January 26, 2010

"Favorite tattoos," Feb. 26, 2010

"A shadow narrative of a 1960s when crooners were still king," April 13, 2010

"Mike Allen's productive weirdness," April 25, 2010

"Sleep-talking, May 23," May 23, 2010

"This was done by a 10-year-old autistic boy I met," June 9, 2010

"Live from inside the beating heart of popular American music," August 4, 2010

"Travel diary," November 21, 2010

My top 11 tweets of 2010:
Here here here here here here here here here here here.

Best magazine stories:

"Roger Ebert: The Essential Man," Chris Jones, Esquire

"The Mark of a Masterpiece," David Grann, The New Yorker

"Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds," Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair

"The Man the White House Wakes Up To," Mark Leibovich, New York Times Magazine

"V-va-va-voom!" Tad Friend, New Yorker

"Man of Many Hats," Kelefa Sanneh, New Yorker

"The Trouble with Maya," Nitsuh Abebe, Pitchfork

"Come Party with Lady Gaga," Caitlin Moran, The Sunday Times

DJ Screw remembrance," Jace Clayton, Frieze Magazine

Robert Mentzer's Certified Finest Musicks and Things, 2010 (Pt. I)

2010-12-24T13:38:00.002-06:00

SINGLES

25. "Trillionaire," Bun-B
24. "Fuck You," Cee-Lo
23. "Queen of Lower Chelsea," Gaslight Anthem
22. "Roman's Revenge," Nicki Minaj feat. Eminem
21. "Written in Reverse," Spoon
20. "Love the Way You Lie," Eminem feat. Rihanna
19. "Trap Talk," Gucci Mane
18. "I Can't Feel," Matthew Dear
17. "Office Muzik," Lil Wayne/Theme song to "The Office" (Clockwork mash-up)
16. "Mine," Taylor Swift
15. "Hurricane J," The Hold Steady
14. "Laredo," Band of Horses
13. "What's My Name?" Rihanna feat. Drake
12. "Teenage Dream," Katy Perry
11. "The Ghost Inside," Broken Bells
10. "Pop the Trunk," Yelawolf
9. "All I Want," LCD Soundsystem
8. "Fo Yo Sorrows," Big Boi feat. George Clinton, Too $hort and Sam Chris
7. "Tik Tok," Ke$ha
6. "Monster," Kanye West feat. Jay-Z, Rick Ross, Bon Iver & Nicki Minaj
5. "Rill Rill," Sleigh Bells
4. "Dancing on My Own," Robyn
3. "Shutterbugg," Big Boi
2. "Need You Now," Lady Antebellum
1. "Runaway," Kanye West

ALBUMS

15. Gaslight Anthem, American Slang

14. Band of Horses, Infinite Arms

13. Matthew Dear, Black City

12. Eminem, Recovery

11. Girl Talk, All Day
Still fun.

10. Rihanna, Loud
The light touch is a nice surprise after the quite dark (though terrific) Rated R last year. Sexy and a lot of fun.

9. Gucci Mane, The Appeal: Georgia's Most Wanted

8. Janelle Monae, The ArchAndroid
A dazzling record, even if it is self-consciously going for "dazzling." It's a romp! She sings, she dances, she mashes genres together. Messy, overreaching, lots of fun.

7. Joanna Newsom, Have One On Me
Weird music tour de force.

6. Flying Lotus, Cosmogramma

5. LCD Soundsystem, This is Happening

4. Robyn, Body Talk

3. Sleigh Bells, Sleigh Bells

2. Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Yep.

1. Big Boi, Sir Lucious Left Foot... The Son of Chico Dusty
Absolute masterpiece. This album is so flawless that the skits are actually funny, and when is the last time you've said that about a rap record with skits? The beats are marvelously weird ("General Patton" is built on a church choir sample) and the rhymes are crisp like lettuce. Best rap record in years and the best album in any genre of 2010.

MOVIES

As always, my weakest category. I don't see many, and many that I see I don't care for. Also, I have odd tastes. (Also, I haven't seen Waiting for Superman or Inside Job, but given that both seem to be custom-made to fit my interests, I am pretty sure I will love them.) Anyway these movies were terrific this year:

5. Inception
4. Sweetgrass
3. Toy Story 3
2. The Social Network
1. Exit Through the Gift Shop

BOOKS

5. Wilson by Daniel Clowes
4. The End of Influence by J. Bradford DeLong and Stephen S. Cohen
3. Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
2. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
1. The Big Short by Michael Lewis

Insophisticate does 2010

2010-12-24T13:20:00.001-06:00

Part one here.

Listen

2010-12-04T13:28:00.002-06:00

Very happy with the newest Insophisticate episode, on which we discuss the new Kanye West record.

Please read

2010-11-21T15:39:00.001-06:00

my travel diary post over at my Tumblr.

Crossing Antarctica by Will Steger

2010-11-16T22:17:00.004-06:00

Crossing Antarctica by Will Steger

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book is not very good, but it is a chance to think about Antarctica and the limits of human experience for a little while, and so I read it one evening in the hotel room while Laura slept.

Antarctica! It is more like an abstraction than an actual continent. No one owns it, no one goes there save a handful of scientists, no one really knows -- really knows -- how cold and dark and unforgiving it can be.

At least, that is what everyone says, including the team of adventurers led by Will Steger who in 1989 became the first people to cross Antarctica by dogsled, traveling from the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, across the South Pole and all the way to Mirnyy Station on the Shackleton Ice Shelf. They made it, but still didn't unlock the continent's secrets. Not their fault! That's hard to do!

The book is structured like a diary of that journey and it gets sort of repetitive -- today we went 15 miles and the dogs are tired; today we couldn't go anywhere because of white-out conditions; rinse, repeat. Boy it sure is cold here.

"Antarctica's identity is starting to reveal itself to us, and it feels distinctly feminine," Steger writes on page 50. What does that mean? Who knows! He doesn't elaborate or return to the thought. Nor does he quite explain the math behind his conclusion that "Traveling in these conditions is 70 percent mental." When a member of the traveling party says he's having doubts about his decision to take the trip, Steger writes "That is the biggest difference between Jean-Louis and me ... I rarely question the path I've taken" and keeps things moving right along.

So, not a good book. Fine. Still, it is possible to step back from all that workaday sled-diary stuff and contemplate the incredible extremity of Antarctica. Temperatures of 80, 90, 100 degrees below zero. Blizzards and windstorms that come on in minutes and last for days or disappear in hours. Twenty-four-hour darkness followed by 24-hour light. Impossible. A place that for you or I exists only as an abstraction because we will never go there. A place that cannot exist and yet does.

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Question

2010-10-16T01:19:00.001-05:00

So what is good lately?

Letters to the editor are my favorite

2010-09-29T09:46:00.000-05:00

Yesterday night on Twitter I was making fun of crazy letters to the editor, such as the weird blast-fax screeds that make their way to my desk. Anyway it led me to a few further thoughts and I did a handful of tweets. Here they are unedited and in order in one place:

As much as I make fun of crazy letter-writers, I love letters to the editor, too. They were always my favorite part of newspaper growing up.

Still appreciate the way they are a) personal and b) public. And they get perspectives into the newspaper that otherwise wouldn’t be there.

My favorite thing is letters responding to other letters. I *like* that people take time to respond, wait for publication.

I am no luddite. But you know it is true: There’s a different character to this than posting a comment beneath a letter online.

Also good: Updates, like letter complaining of bird droppings at park, then (after a rainstorm) thanking person who cleaned up.

So, listen, I will always have fun with weird or nonsensical letters. Some are too funny or deranged not to share.

But for serious, part of what I like about them is they can throw you a curveball in a way the rest of the paper rarely does.

These have been some further thoughts about letters to the editor.

In Sweetgrass, noisy sheep and frustrated cowboys are the stars

2010-09-26T18:23:00.002-05:00

I wear clothing made of wool but I do not spend a lot of time around sheep, and I bet you $100 you are the same as me. But you need sheep to get wool, and people to take care of the sheep, and as a result there is a whole world, out west, of people whose job is to grow the sheep so they can grow the wool.

The business of wool is not the subject of Sweetgrass: the sheep are, and to some extent the people taking care of the sheep. Most of the movie follows two cowboys -- one old, lined-faced and taciturn, one young and more expressive -- as they herd the sheep through the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains in Montana and a little bit of Wyoming. It is a great movie and you should watch it on Netflix Watch Instantly as soon as you get a little time to devote to sheep.

Sweetgrass does its best work in close close-up or from incredibly far away: the tight shots of the sheep are fascinating but so are the mountain's-eye views of the herd as they're coaxed along and herded by the men on horses and their dogs. The landscape is beautiful, the pacing is deliberate, and there is more visual wit and flair than you might expect from a movie about herding sheep. (Though the digital film quality can be a little harsh at times -- for the majestic mountain vistas, you wish it were on Malickesque high-resolution 65 mm film. On the other hand it proves the point that a good eye and ability to go where the story are more important than technics.)

A great moment right at the beginning of the film: In close-up, a sheep idly chews cud. The bell around his neck rings a little as he moves his jaw. This goes on for awhile. Then he slowly turns his head, notices the camera and abruptly stops chewing, staring straight at us, head cocked to the side a little, waiting.

The sheep spread out some when they're grazing on the craggy face of a mountain, but when they move at least they really do seem to prefer to be together, in tight, tight herd. There is a poetry to the way they move, like a school of fish, although as we learn, getting them going is no effortless thing. And they are mad loud: The bleating seems to be constant.

Because there is no voiceover narration or any other form of exposition, really, to let us know where we are and what is happening, there are a bunch of questions that present themselves to the viewer. Here are a handful of answers, gleaned from Google: The herd the cowboys are working with comprises about 3,000 sheep. The drive that takes them out to pasture on a federal grazing permit was the last of its kind, and happened in 2001. The younger cowboy is named Pat Connolly and the older cowboy is named John Ahern.

In its second half, the story shifts from being mostly about sheep to being mostly about the cowboys. There is a striking scene where Connolly calls his mom from the top of a mountain and vents his frustrations with the long days, the toll on his body and his dog's body, the difficulty wrangling 3,000 ornery sheep and shooting at the black bears who come in the night to eat them.

"I'd rather enjoy these mountains than hate 'em," he says. "And it's getting to the point now that I hate 'em."

He's whining, yes, but you can understand where he's coming from, and it's a nice counterpoint to "home on the range" homily. Similarly, the scene where Connolly's mic captures him shouting all manner of nasty profanities at the sheep as he drives them up a mountain seems eminently understandable. You can see how the months-long drive could cause you to hate sheep, and hate mountains, and be ready to be home. Maybe that's why they cheer when they arrive in town at the end of that last drive, even though it means their jobs will no longer exist.

"The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" by David Mitchell

2010-09-21T00:17:00.003-05:00

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Pretty extraordinary novel. Meticulous about its historical setting -- Japan, 1799 -- but deeply deeply felt, intricately plotted, and in the end quite exciting. The first third is a bit of a slog but at some point there's a tipping point and the pages start to fly by. One thing it does pretty well is to leaven some of its more high-literary conceits with a handful of almost pulpy plotlines involving forbidden love and at least one super-evil villain who -- well, I'd better not say.

I have a lot of thoughts about this book but it is quite late at night so I am not going to write a whole bunch right now. I will say that of course the most impressive thing about this novel is how deeply it burrows into its historical setting, and I love how it embraces the full scale of the impersonal historical forces and massive-if-bygone social institutions at the same time that it captures the real interior experience of the individuals who populate them. The two things -- historical forces and individual actors -- aren't exactly opposed, but what I like here is not just the empathetically written characters but the (forgive me) historicity of the story. Terrific book.

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WDH politics podcast

2010-09-17T09:51:00.002-05:00

Hey listen to this. I made this podcast with ace political reporter Katie Foody, talking about politics in Wisconsin's 7th Congressional District and some of the other races we're following. Check it out below:

Tinkers by Paul Harding

2010-08-16T23:08:00.004-05:00

Tinkers by Paul Harding

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Here is Paul Harding speaking, in a New York Times profile, about having his manuscript rejected:

"They (literary agents and editors) would lecture me about the pace of life today," Mr. Harding said last week over lunch at a diner in this college town, where he is now teaching at the workshop. "It was, 'Where are the car chases?'" he said, recalling the gist of the letters. "'Nobody wants to read a slow, contemplative, meditative, quiet book.'"

Question: Do we believe for one instant that literary agents were asking Harding "Where are the car chases?" Is that obviously made up, chest-beating self-aggrandizement or what? It is my opinion that this smug, self-congratulatory attitude tells us something fundamental about the author.

Next. This book has plenty of nice sentences, some nice scenes. What it has none of is a story arc, a sense of characters who grow and learn things and change over time. It has no plot! There is a scene in Tinkers where a character pulls a rotting tooth out of a hermit's mouth. It's spellbinding. And then what happens? Nothing! The relationship is never developed. The book just moves on to the next fragmentary segment without bothering to actually develop anyone's relationship to anyone else.

Here is the thing: Novels ought to be the very best medium for depicting the long-term change of characters over time. The problem is that lately, high-end TV has actually gotten very good at doing long-form storytelling. I am filled with dread at the prospect that, instead of reacting to this, novels will instead retreat into this sort of ponderous Tinkersesque plotless wanking, ceding the cultural ground of quality long-form storytelling to, like, Mad Men. That would be a giant disaster -- not because Mad Men is so terrible, but because THIS, this Tinkers, is just an especially blindered, limited vision of what the novel can be.

P.S. I listened to a bit of this dude's indie rock band and they are hideous, exactly as slow and boring and sexless as you'd expect them to be.

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Radiolab, "Words"

2010-08-15T17:41:00.003-05:00

I had my mind thoroughly blown by this entire amazing Radiolab episode called "Words," and I totally recommend it to everyone who has ever had even a passing interest in language.

Possibly the most mind-blowing segment of the show, to me at least, was this one about the way a language developed over the course of a couple of generations of deaf kids in Nicaragua. I guarantee you will be fascinated and surprised.

Let's Talk About Love by Carl Wilson

2010-08-08T12:34:00.000-05:00

Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The beauty of this book is that though it is all about Celine Dion, it also works if you swap in whoever happens to be the nadir of cool at any given moment. It is probably the only book-length exploration of what "uncool" actually means, and it turns out the subject is complicated and surprising and not totally flattering to the "cool" in-group accustomed to having all the cultural capital. I brought it along in my back pocket when I went to the Lady Antebellum concert at the Wisconsin Valley Fair, which is maybe a little bit on the nose but whatever.

The arguments are not brand new to anyone following the debates about rockism, but crucially "Let's Talk About Love" is not an anti-rockist polemic, it's an actual exploration of questions about taste, popularity and aesthetics.

Simply one of the greatest books about music ever written. Incredibly well argued and, in the end, deeply felt.

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Midway

2010-08-05T18:15:00.000-05:00

Live from inside the beating heart of popular American music

2010-08-04T23:52:00.005-05:00

This was fun. I hung out at the fair all night tonight and wrote about the Lady Antebellum concert on my Twitter account. Here is the unedited transcript of my tweets, which I've rearranged into chronological order so you don't have to start at the bottom:

Reporting live from inside the beating heart of popular American music. Lady Antebellum, Wisconsin Valley Fair, 2010.

*

I wanted to keep it classy, so naturally I am dressed to the nines in a white linen suit and narrow tie.

*

Right now I am hiding behind the grandstand, where I may remain for the duration. Next to some drink vendors, also hiding.

*

What my view would look like if I were facing the right way. http://tweetphoto.com/36853665

*

And what it actually looks like. http://tweetphoto.com/36853862

*

My coworker friend Brian asked me what was the deal, I didn't seem like the type to like Lady Antebellum. "I contain multitudes," I replied.

*

The truth is the power ballad is a misunderstood art form. "Need You Now" is a terrific power ballad. Schmaltzy, shameless. But powerful!

*

"Schmaltz" btw is a technical term. The GREAT music crit book "Let's Talk About Love" by Carl Wilson traces schmaltz back to Italian opera!

*

Let's Talk Abt Love is required reading for all music snobs. All about exploring high/low music distinctions. Lady A vs Arcade Fire, say.

*

People still apparently filing in. I would describe it as "super crowded" but not yet "crushingly, inhumanely crowded." Head on down!

*

Ah, but this is no normal concert! RT @bradschjoth: Normal concerts don't require you to wait in line for 12 hours. Just sayin'. #Wausau

*

From the "used to be actually kind of cool" file: Rod Stewart's "Stay with Me" on the PA.

*

So, here's a question. If you are Lady Antebellum and you KNOW "Need You Now" is all anyone wants to hear, when do you play it? First? Last?

*

It would be funny if they just came out and played "Need You Now" like 10 times in a row and then said, "Goodnight everybody!"

*

RT @andylaub @robertmentzer everybody would be like BEST CONCERT EVAR

*

A cowboy with prosthetic legs is talking to a morbidly obese security guard.

*

.@bradschjoth honestly I imagine they cannot WAIT to get through these before-they-were huge county fair contracts they signed 10 mths ago.

*

.@bradschjoth They must be taking a BATH when you consider their going rate now.

*

Crowd confirms the often noticed fact that country music these days ain't particularly rural. It's suburban. Very well-heeled, these people.

*

"Middlebrow is the new lowbrow--mainstream taste the only taste for which you still have to say you're sorry. And there, taste seems less...

*

...an aesthetic question than a social one. [...] The abiding mystery of mainstream culture is, 'Who the hell ARE those people?"

*

Do I even need to attribute that quote? "Let's Talk About Love" by Carl Wilson, of course.

*

I play a sort of visual game of whack-a-mole. Every so often, someone stands up to wave at friend going by. http://tweetphoto.com/36867755

*

RT @bradschjoth @robertmentzer I appreciate your reporting style, though. Dive right into the madness, THEN try to figure it all out. I love it.

*

UGHHHHH Skynard on PA. Cannot go there. Guy near me is psyched about it, though. "SKYNARD!!!!"

*

Hey it's Outkast on the PA. THERE WE GO!

*

Radio dude: "HELLO WISCONSIN! WELCOME TO THE BIGGEST NIGHT IN 63 YEARS AT THE WISCONSIN VALLEY FAIR."

*

Boring boring announcements. I did donate to 4H on my way in though, as everyone should. WHAT MORE DO YOU PEOPLE WANT FROM ME?

*

Clearly the people were called to get on their feet too early.

*

Totally lackadaisical smoke machine.

*

Freight train rolls by. Hey, they are starting. And the first song is ... not "Need You Now."

*

Best I can do. http://tweetphoto.com/36872950

*

Hey I can see WDH photographer Xai Kha down in the front. Hi, Xai! He is not staying.

*

There are some people watching through the fence or listening from down the hill. Some in folding chairs in parking lot. Not too many.

*

Guitar solo is straight out of some '80s pop metal. AND I LOVE IT.

*

Had to loosen my tie. Rockin' now. Not sure about subbing "Wausau" into lyrics of "Free Fallin'." http://tweetphoto.com/36876158

*

They are playing "the first song we ever wrote together." Luckily, they did get better at it.

*

It is not online but there is a terrific Kelefa Sanneh piece in new New Yorker about Brad Paisley. Makes point that contemporary country...

*

...is largely contentment music. Songs about being in love with your wife, etc. May seem gauche but those feelings are real, too, after all.

*

"American Honey," nice tune.

*

Oh my. Thank you, dear. RT @shawncook: @robertmentzer this is for the record the best live tweet stream of a local event ever.

*

Wonder if one day Lady A will look back on time just after they got big but were still playing county fairs as a nice time in their career.

*

Dusk now. From back row, I can see glowing screens of everyone holding up their camera phones.

*

This "R-O-C-K in the U.S.A." business is pretty weak sauce. Crowd is eating it UP.

*

This is the part where they pretend they are going to leave without playing "Need You Now." Come back, Lady Antebellum, come back!

*

WE HAVE "NEED YOU NOW"!!!!!!!!

*

(Two bros in front of me just high-fived.)

*

Hey that was great.

*

Now they are closing out the night by playing "Hey Jude," I assume for the express purpose of making @bradschjoth's head explode in rage.

*

And now the lights come on, and we shuffle back to our cars and go home. THANKS EVERYONE! Good night.

*

[...]

*

Best feedback so far comes from a WDH commenter: "You geeks cant even watch a concert without getting on the net!" (continued!)

*

"What is wrong with this younger generation? The generation of pencil necked limp wristed pansy's" Nice, right? "pansy's" is a nice touch.

Footnotes:

- I really, seriously cannot recommend "Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste" highly enough. One of the best books about music ever written.

- It is true that Kelefa Sanneh's New Yorker profile of Brad Paisley is not online. (Here's the abstract.) But there is a podcast that is definitely worth listening to.

- Also, for those who don't know Twitter terminology, "RT" = "retweet" = reposting something someone else has posted, sometimes with your own comments added. So it is a way of having a dialogue with somebody.

- There was plenty of good-natured reaction even from the Lady Antebellum haters, but a great deal of online reaction (in WDH comments and some other places) was predictably, depressingly closed-minded, which just confirms my overall view that "taste" in music is primarily about signaling, i.e. tribal, class-conscious social positioning. I certainly don't believe that everybody has to like Lady Antebellum (though I think several of their songs are excellent and most are good). But when there is a mad dash of people defining themselves as absolutely, positively NOT into Lady Antebellum, I have to ask what is really going on there. It is like, HOW TOTALLY DÉCLASSÉ that anyone would like such a thing. Yeah, yeah, good job everyone. Of course the whole point of going to the show and writing about it was partly to observe the phenomenon and to look into what so many people do like about the group, which seems like a legitimate project to me. But nevermind. This is an old story. Just noting: Rockism ain't dead, yet.

Franco

2010-08-01T00:27:00.001-05:00

Good stuff:

My favorite Franco art project, the one that best combines all of his interests (high/low, gay/straight, earnest/ironic) is his work on General Hospital. It started as a joke between Franco and his artist friend Carter, who were discussing a movie in which Franco would play a former soap star. It occurred to them that it would be funny if Franco actually showed up, sometime, on a real soap opera. This fit nicely into a constellation of ideas Franco had already been thinking about: the difference between high art and mass art, the space between performance and real life, the vagaries of taste. So Franco called General Hospital, one of TV’s most popular and longest-running soap operas. The result is a small, double-edged pop-culture masterpiece—a black hole of publicity in which everything works both within the frame of the show and as a commentary on Franco’s career.

Franco’s General Hospital character is a transparent soap-world portrait of Franco himself: a dashing multimedia artist (graffiti, photography, performance art) named “Franco” who sweeps into town and fascinates, angers, seduces, and generally confuses everyone around him. Like Franco, “Franco” is obsessed with art that crosses over into reality: He re-creates, in galleries, actual crime scenes—until eventually the people of Port Charles come to suspect that he might be a murderer himself.

Inceptionblogging

2010-07-25T21:56:00.014-05:00

I was worried I would hate it, but I shouldn't have worried, because Christopher Nolan really is more than just a technician. Inception is good and I liked it.***

But I guess I do wonder why this movie, why now, which is something I always wonder whenever something becomes super-popular or a symbol of something or in some other sense a cultural event.

It makes sense that as real life becomes more information-saturated and we get better and more used to decoding a lot of information quickly, we'd ask for correspondingly more complex entertainments -- or at least entertainments with denser plots that have the appearance of being more complex. Inception is absolutely state of the art in this respect. And like previous state-of-the-art mega-hit The Matrix, it is also, at its core, basically a conventional action-thriller, though in this case a quite well-acted, well-constructed one where Matrix was always pretty schlocky.

The ideas Inception is working with -- reality, dream-reality, subjectivity -- are well-worn sci-fi movie tropes, to the point that it's sort of weird to me that this movie is seen as a mind-blower. (I think it's the density of the plot.) On the highbrow end, there is Solaris or Abre los ojos or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Lowbrow end would be The Matrix or Total Recall. There's Blade Runner, which is a bit of both. There are certainly dozens of others I haven't seen or am forgetting.

Film lends itself to what-is-reality mindfucks because on some level we always accept what we see on the screen as a "real" event. Inception makes a clever meta-reference to this in its own editing when a scene opens with Ellen Page and Leonardo Dicaprio sitting at a cafe, and the big reveal happens when Leo notes that dreams always begin in media res, then looks around and asks, "This cafe. How did we get here?" Good point: We're dreaming.

That's clever, but then again most of the movie is about vans going off bridges and people shooting at each other on skis and dudes running around the walls as gravity shifts. I think in some respects one of Inception's biggest accomplishments is that it does succeed at making the audience (me included) experience it as more original than it actually is.

The thing about what-is-reality stories -- at least the ones that become popular megahits -- is that what the audience really seems to want out of them is a kind of morality tale that reinforces the concreteness of the things around us. We want to be taken for a rollercoaster ride through many realities and then deposited safely back on terra firma, whether or not the characters are.

In The Matrix, the "real" world turns out to be fake, and what's really real is the crazy post-apocalyptic computers-vs.-humans wasteland. But reality itself is unimpeachable. And Inception -- which I really want to emphasize is better than The Matrix in virtually every way, it's just that the comparison presents itself -- is doing basically the same thing. If there is, in the course of the movie, a choice between real-reality and dream-reality, it's never presented as a particularly hard choice for its characters. You basically always want to go with what's real, the movies tell us. There is a real and a not-real and it's villainous to entertain thoughts otherwise. Just try not to get shot by the other dudes on skis so that you can be sure to get back to the real-real-real reality in time.

Hey, they're probably right! I don't really find fault with that message. But given that it's being delivered to us in the form of a movie, it does represent a weird type of movie-moralism: How dare you be so enchanted by these enchanting images?

***By the way, this does not contain any spoilers and is not really even a review. Also if you want Talmudic plot dissection you are better off elsewhere.

Rough n tough

2010-07-22T20:14:00.005-05:00

...

Ciao Wisconsin

2010-07-22T16:41:00.000-05:00

New favorite gubernatorial candidate.

Big Boi on Jimmy Fallon

2010-07-13T17:49:00.002-05:00

A veteran's story

2010-07-05T11:27:00.003-05:00

I wrote a Fourth of July story about an Iraq veteran who lost his right leg and his left eye in a 2007 battle. He is just now getting home:

Dale Cherney remembers a flash of light.

After that, he remembers nothing for more than two months.

Cherney was walking out of the chow hall at Camp Victory, the complex of U.S. military bases near the Baghdad International Airport, when the insurgents' rocket exploded. It was Oct. 10, 2007. By Oct. 14, Cherney, an Army Reserve sergeant, was in the intensive care unit of Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. The 45-year-old rural Mosinee man has been in rehabilitation, in one form or another, ever since.

The damage the rocket did to his body was massive. He lost his right leg, which had to be amputated below the knee. He lost his left eye. His stomach and many of his internal organs were blown apart. His body is riddled with scars, and there are pins and rods holding his left leg together.

"This should have killed me, too, this scar here," he said, running his finger along the faint scar that runs from behind his ear down to his chest.

Read the whole story here. And definitely, definitely view the excellent photos taken by freelancer Butch McCartney for the Daily Herald at his blog here.

California Gurls (Passion Pit Remix), Katy Perry

2010-07-01T23:08:00.000-05:00

Good remix, slows down the vocals just enough to make them sound robotic and bizarre.

06 California Gurls Passion Pit Remix Main by a1112099

The Cleanest Race by B.R. Myers

2010-06-20T18:00:00.003-05:00

The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters by B.R. Myers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Probably the psychology of anyone in a totalitarian state is in some sense impenetrable, but the experience of actual North Koreans is nearer to unimaginable. Even a book like "Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea," which does very important reporting on the facts of its subjects' lives, doesn't really get inside their heads.

This book gets us the closest yet, I think, by studying the propaganda and cultural product of North Korea for the messages they reinforce to the people there about themselves.

What it finds is a story that really doesn't jibe with outsiders' view of the state, which is that it is a brutal Stalinist dictatorship a la, say, Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe or any number of other places. The book's basic argument is that North Korea is more akin to a race-based fascist state than it is to a Stalinist one. And it's through that lens -- racial purity being all that matters -- that we can best understand its people's psychology.

Myers uncovers case after case of the North Korean texts that 1) regard their bloodline as the purest in the world, 2) feel that they are under constant threat of having that purity contaminated by assorted race traitors, and 3) view their leader as the single figure responsible for protecting that lineage. That is the story the regime tells North Koreans, and at least to a great extent it's the story North Koreans seem to tell themselves.

I'm especially convinced by Myers' evidence that Juche Thought is basically all B.S. and doesn't play much of a role in the North Korean psyche at all. I've seen a lot of writers look for the key in the so-called "self-reliance" doctrine of Juche, but Myers pretty devastatingly illustrates that it is basically just something the regime made up in the '60s to sound impressive, not anything that actually tells us about North Koreanness -- nor, even, something North Koreans think much about.

It is basically a pretty convincing case, and it certainly does a better job of explaining the behavior of both the regime and the citizens of North Korea than simple Stalinism. Of course this still leaves us pretty short on the question of what the U.S. government or any government can actually do about North Korea. But that may just be because there is no answer to that question.

View all my reviews >>

Uffie feat. Pharrell, "ADD SUV"

2010-06-19T16:09:00.000-05:00

I like this disco:

UFFIE - ADD SUV (feat . Pharrell Williams) HD from Uffie on Vimeo.

Via NahRight.

Bricks

2010-06-13T17:35:00.000-05:00

I'll ruin your name!

2010-06-11T12:30:00.001-05:00

Via TNR.

Singularity-heads and bodies

2010-05-20T23:10:00.003-05:00

I have been somewhat fascinated by the idea of the singularity, but ultimately I guess it seems kind of, I don't know, naive and messianic. So this Bloggingheads episode between a dude who works at the Singularity Institute and a philosopher skeptical about that sort of thing is a good listen for me. It is a fairly philosophically technical discussion, but it's also punchy and good exchange and I recommend it.

The core of philosopher Massimo Pigliucci's skepticism, basically, is that the singularity-heads, for all their quantum theorizing and nanobots and whatever, tend to neglect some of the very brute facts of biology. They have an understanding of a human brain that is fully abstractable, and there's no reason to think that's the way it is.

Early in the dialogue, Pigliucci uses photosynthesis as an analogy. We have a very good understanding of photosynthesis, he says. We know exactly how it works on a cellular level. We can map it out in exquisite detail and put all that information onto a computer hard drive. What all that data can't do, of course, is produce sugar. Why should human consciousness be any different?

Pro-singularity guy Eliezer Yudkowsky's view throughout the dialogue is, basically, no, it is just a matter of getting the data and that is it.

Here's a particular point in the discussion where it comes down to this nub. They're talking about the possibility of uploading human consciousness, and whether if you did this and then left your old body behind, you'd be guilty of murdering your former self:

Yeah, that does not sound right to me, either.

History

2010-05-10T14:32:00.000-05:00

...

Amazing

2010-05-09T21:30:00.001-05:00

Invincible

2010-05-01T10:27:00.001-05:00

The Big Short by Michael Lewis

2010-04-29T22:25:00.002-05:00

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
So this is a very good book. Michael Lewis is a wildly gifted writer of nonfiction narratives, and the word I want to use to describe the prose in The Big Short is "breezy." That is a particular accomplishment when your subject is mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations.

Here is the thing. At this point the book has sort of been outpaced by events. The SEC named one of the book's bit players, John Paulson, in its complaint against Goldman Sachs, and in general the notion that the short-sellers in the subprime market somehow have their hands clean in this whole mess seems less and less true each day.

The truth, so it seems right now anyway, is that the short traders played an indispensable role in inflating the bubble more than it otherwise would have been. This is basically Yves Smith's beef with the book in her lengthy, combative review -- which I think should be essential reading before reading "The Big Short," not after.

Also, this ProPublica/Planet Money/This American Life story about mega-short-seller Magnetar, which describes the same phenomena.

Lewis presents the short-sellers as sort of oddball heroes for taking Wall Street's received wisdom -- housing only goes up, CDOs are pretty safe -- and seeing it for the bullshit it was. And Smith makes the point -- and it's true -- that really, the shorts, too, were profiting from the many fictions of the subprime market. Fair point.

So, okay. But here is the other thing. Shorting the real estate market in 2006 still actually did take a particular kind of oddball character, and there weren't that many of them, and there is something inherently compelling about Lewis's cast of weirdos. There's a one-eyed genius investor with Asperger's syndrome, there's a self-promoting banker with bushy sideburns, there's a money manager who is rude and confrontational by Wall Street standards. And after all, these guys did bet right, and they did have that moment where they saw something that no one else was seeing. You don't have to buy the version where they're anti-market heroes of the little guy to find that a compelling story.

So the book is very good and it's probably good that it's the first thing a lot of people are reading about the crash. It really shouldn't be the last, but that is not something we can hold against Michael Lewis.

View all my reviews >>

Mike Allen's productive weirdness

2010-04-25T17:09:00.006-05:00

I realize I am predisposed to like this piece because I am a sometimes political journalist, though obviously not on anything like this level, but still let me recommend Mark Leibovich's profile in the New York Times Magazine of Politico's Mike Allen, he of the daily Playbook emails and the dozens upon dozens of scooplets and sometimes real scoops. It's a great piece of magazine writing and a great character study of a really odd and interesting character.

Mike Allen is famous in Washington, which is not the same as being famous-famous, but which still means that there are concentric circles of political junkies who know who he is and already knew many things about him even before this long piece. (I am one of these!)

Here is who he is, or seems to be. He is an extraordinarily successful political journalist. He sends out Politico's Playbook emails early-early each morning, seven days a week, and they are always very long and packed full of interesting/important/agenda-setting national news. He writes a ton of stories, goes on TV all the time and knows everybody in both political parties in Washington. He gets Washington stories that others don't get.

What makes this an interesting magazine profile is that he is also a person who has made professional virtues of every one of his many personal eccentricities: obsessive workaholism, hyper-sociability, total voraciousness toward political information, a desire to write thousands of words every week and no apparent need for regular sleep habits. He is a hoarder, an obsessive rememberer, and he works so much that the people around him routinely worry about is mental and physical well-being.

He is extraordinarily successful, in other words, in part because he is extraordinarily odd.

I see many of my own personal characteristics in this guy: I, too, have an obsessive, workaholic streak, I am more hyperactive and busier than I'd like because, for whatever reason, I am compelled to do what I do, despite certain costs to my personal life. Maybe you also can relate.

But you and I, we are only human. Sometimes we get tired, or we get annoyed, or we temporarily lose our motivation, or don't feel like attending that party or event that we really ought to attend, and we don't keep up those personal relationships that sooner or later will benefit us professionally. Not Mike Allen! Not ever! And look where it's gotten him!

At the same time, you read this piece and you ask yourself, could I ever be like this guy? What is even the point of being like this guy?

What makes this a fascinating profile is that Mike Allen is an absolute outlier in all of these personality traits that are actually fairly common among your driven, ambitious professionals. But in Allen they're maxed out, to the point that they are barely recognizable anymore as the type of standard-issue workaholism and obsessiveness that we lesser political junkies experience. And we are all lesser political junkies than Mike Allen.

***

A lot is made of the pernicious influence of Politico culture on political culture, and it's not all the way wrong. The scooplet-driven, constant conflict, who's-up-who's-down philosophy that Leibovich critiques does indeed have some big holes to it. Politico is annoying, in other words, and it's often shallow.

But I also think at least some of the criticism of Politico has to be seen as, you know, jealousy and highbrow snobbishness. The fact is that there are political junkies, and they do want to follow all the little ins and outs of the game in the same obsessive way that football fans freak about about the draft and baseball fans want to drill down on every little statistic. Politico, in other words, fills a genuine niche.

The bigger issue is whether who's-up-who's-down political coverage comes at a cost, and I think it's hard to argue that it doesn't. You need a news culture and a political culture that is able to see the bigger picture and not just the minutiae. But I am not sure there is anything mutually exclusive about having some people whose focus is on the minutiae while others are focused on bigger stuff. It makes sense to encourage big-picture thinking, but I am not sure that the existence of play-by-play guys like Mike Allen necessarily make that easier or harder to do. It's always going to be hard.

Good/bad, not art/not-art

2010-04-25T12:40:00.000-05:00

We touched on this in the new Insophisticate podcast about Roger Ebert's trollish videogames post, but I don't feel like I explained this point very well, so I'm going to make another run at it.

I am against the aesthetic view that writes out of art the art that isn't very good. In other words, a movie like The Godfather is art while, you know, Little Man is not just bad art, it's actually not-art.

The reason I don't think that's right is that it is too narrow a view of art. If "art" only means "successful art," then 99.9999 percent of the creative product out there is excluded, and that doesn't seem right to me. I think the better way to look at this is just to allow for really broad categories of good and bad art.

I also happen to think that the "art/not-art" school of aesthetic classification places too much power into the hands of, well, critics and tastemakers. It's not exactly that quality is a subjective thing (it really isn't), it's that it's complex and has a lot of different aspects to it. And it changes over time, as stuff that was universally derided or dismissed turns out to be lauded later and vice versa.

Buses

2010-04-21T21:25:00.000-05:00

"It's the home of cheese."

2010-04-18T20:54:00.002-05:00

Check out this video I made for work:

Thanks Dino for help filming these.

A shadow narrative of a 1960s when crooners were still king

2010-04-13T22:36:00.001-05:00

Or, "Pop Memories of the '60s" is arresting and perverse

So Laura and I were watching TV the other night and somehow she came upon this incredible extended infomercial hosted by a guy in an awesome mustache and a mock-turtleneck and a sort of bizarro Florence Henderson type, and it was advertising a 470-disc Time-Life box set called "Pop Memories of the '60s." This does not have the hosts, but it should give you a flavor:

Now, I am going to be honest and explain, this is the sort of thing I always like because I happen to believe that the dead center of the middle of the pop mainstream is almost always more revealing of culture than the stuff that is edgy or critically acclaimed or enjoyed by the fancy people and hipsters and therefore ends up being canonized in the long run.

And as you can clearly see above, "Pop Memories of the '60s" is nothing if not a portrait of the unhippest, boringest pop mainstream imaginable. But it's also somewhat arresting and, I don't know, kind of funny because of the ways that it seems to represent a kind of shadow narrative of 1960s music. In the same year that Hendrix played the national anthem at Woodstock, Glen Campbell released and recorded "Wichita Lineman." See what I mean?

So instead of the '60s being about the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Dylan and Hendrix, this box set it's about Bobby Vinton, Petula Clark, a little Dionne Warwick, some late-period Elvis and early-period Stevie Wonder

This is pop music that is still heavily influenced by the crooner era, and dominated by smooth, way-out-in-front vocals backed by a full orchestra. That's not so unusual -- Elvis and a lot of other early rock 'n rollers always took certain cues from crooners, at least in their slow songs. But there is still something striking about how totally alive and well the big-band, crooner, smoothed-out sound was deep into the '60s. I would have to think about this more, but maybe this is the last stand of the popular crooner, at least as a standard pop music figure.

Just to put my cards out on the table, with certain exceptions (Little Stevie Wonder!) this is not really anything I would actually, you know, listen to. I am not going to invest the $7,430.99 + $299.99 shipping and handling to purchase the full box set. But it's an interesting document all the same for anyone like me who is interested in the counter-narratives that are woven into popular culture. Your parents might have loved the Rolling Stones, but at the same time there were millions of American households who much preferred to spin some Roger Whittaker, thank you, and that is a true fact about that decade, too.

P.S. ... You know what else? This makes me view the Trololo guy as a little bit less weird. His manner and presentation are definitely run through a ridiculous Baltic-Lawrence-Welk filter. But he's not really so far away from a Glen Campbell or a Wayne Newton or somebody who would have been roughly his contemporaries.

Places

2010-04-12T08:46:00.001-05:00

...

Confederate History Month

2010-04-10T10:40:00.001-05:00

Thank you, The Onion:

"Slavery shouldn't stop us from celebrating Confederate History Month anymore than terrorism stops us from celebrating Bin Laden’s Day."

Whither whiteness?

2010-04-07T23:03:00.008-05:00

For reasons I really don't need to get into here, I have had occasion to think a lot lately about whiteness -- not just who counts as white but what makes whiteness substantively different from blackness or brownness or whatever else, and indeed whether whiteness can even be considered a positive identity at all.

So I am interested to see this new New Yorker essay by Kelefa Sanneh, one of my favorite music writers since forever, examining whiteness and the dubious concept of "white culture" today. Ultimately I find that this essay is a bit gentler than it needs to be, but it gets some big things right and besides that deserves credit just for taking on the subject.

This is a relatively minor point in the essay, but it's well stated and hits directly on what I think is an increasingly common phenomenon. (Nevermind the mention of Glenn Beck in this graf, it is just one example.):

In fact, [Glenn] Beck's slippery concern with racism -- outrage over false charges of anti-black racism, combined with outrage over anti-white racism -- seems central to a certain kind of white-identity politics. This professedly anti-racist argument is about as close as anyone comes to articulating a mainstream political agenda that is explicitly pro-white.

Obviously it is perfectly logical and consistent to oppose anti-white racism as well as other forms of racism. But when it's combined with aggrieved suspicion and outright anger at virtually any mention of anti-black racism -- an example of this would be Andrew Breitbart's latest crusade -- it is hard to avoid the conclusion that concern with racism per se is not the real motivating factor in the matter. And again, this is something that has become very, very common.

I think that Sanneh's conclusion is interesting but perhaps a little too pat:

[I]t's getting easier to imagine an American whiteness that is less exceptional, less dominant, less imperial, and more conspicuous, an ethnicity more like the others. In the Obama era -- the Tea Party era -- whiteness is easier to see than ever before, which means it’s less readily taken for granted. If invisibility is power, then whiteness is a little less powerful than it used to be.

Is this true? Couldn't it also be the case that we're seeing the revival in the U.S. of some semi-dormant strain of genuine white supremacy? And that instead of receding into just another sort of soft tribalism, whiteness, fueled by its many narratives of victimization, will actually attempt to rise back up to reclaim its dominance? In short -- isn't there real reason to worry about the path we're headed down?

"Che" is not about what you want it to be about

2010-04-03T17:04:00.004-05:00

There is a moment deep into in the second half of the two-part, four-hour epic biopic "Che" when Che, in the middle of the jungle in the midst of his badly failing guerrilla campaign in Bolivia, turns to one of the other guerrillas and says, "I'll write Sartre and Bertrand Russell to establish a worldwide fund."

Of course, we know how the story turned out, and it wasn't good for Ernesto "Che" Guevara. And by that point in the movie, it's obvious that he is making a desperation move. But while it's a stray comment that the movie never revisits, it's also a very clear indication that Che, by this point in his life, had himself bought into the myth of Che. I'd argue that this is one of the central themes of the movie -- how Che came to believe in the same romanticized guerrilla-hero pap that has launched a million t-shirts and dorm-room posters. And, ultimately, how badly that myth served him and the other revolutionary fighters, and indeed the people of Bolivia and elsewhere.

A lot has been made about the fact that "Che" is a movie with virtually no emotional content, an "anti-biopic." And it's true -- in this respect it's the opposite of "The Motorcycle Diaries," in which Young Che was portrayed as an empathetic, sensitive champion of the peasant farmer whose travel experience as a young man launched him on the path to glorious revolution. I hated "The Motorcycle Diaries" more than I hate most biopics, but the basic problem is the same throughout the genre: over-reliance on facile psychological explanations for every single decision made later by the character. "Che" does none of that at all, and that's a good thing. It's much more concerned in the "what" and the "how" -- battle tactics, the military campaign's movement from place to place -- than it is with the "why."

The first part of the movie is the Cuban revolution, ending with victory over Batista; the second half is in Bolivia, ending with Che's execution. Its central purpose is to provide a study in contrasts between the two -- differences it underlines with differences in form between the two, in color schemes and even technical things like aspect ratio. But also in the facts it dramatizes: In Cuba, revolutionaries brokered deals among peasant groups and got their buy-in. Their forces grew, and their tactics won the day. The wind was at their backs. In Bolivia, meanwhile, everything that could go wrong did. Peasants rebuffed Che. The government forces were well-organized, and the CIA was involved. The guerrillas' numbers dwindled and Che died a failure.

But while the second half is simply a chronological the story of the campaign, the first half of the movie is intercut with scenes of Che's speech at the United Nations in 1964, and with his interviews in New York with fawning journalists asking questions about what it's like to be the personification of the revolutionary warrior, how it feels to be so awesome and so on. Those sections of the movie are about the creation of Che-the-myth. And in the movie's second half, we see the result of it.

Now to be sure, it does seem like director Steven Soderbergh, one of my favorites, and actor Benecio Del Toro, also an amazing actor, were playing a sort of double game in the promotions of the movie. Both of them said some stupid things about Che, and they held off from actually making moral judgments about Che. They promoted the movie heavily in Cuba and Latin America (including with a fairly disgusting meeting between Del Toro and Hugo Chavez), and especially given that the movie is in Spanish, you have to assume there was a bit of a commercial motivation for not coming out and saying, you know, "Che was a brutal murderer and no one should aspire to be like him." But who knows. Maybe they actually don't believe that.

And for anyone who would look to "Che" as some kind of comprehensive biography of the man, it must be said that there are some unforgivably large omissions. The defining characteristic of Che's character was sadistic brutality. As a revolutionary, he made his name and his reputation as an enforcer, a staunch Stalinist ideologue and, finally, an enthusiastic executioner of dissidents, political enemies and anyone in his way. This movie deals with that side of Che very little, and that's an understandable disappointment for people who want to see a film that grapples with the actual moral content of the man's life.

Still, there's a big difference between this movie and the pastel, romanticized Che of "The Motorcycle Diaries." That movie did take a strong moral stance and just happened to get it exactly wrong. No doubt some critics wanted to see something more like a corrective to that vision of Che, and Soderbergh's movie isn't that.

But then I think, would I really have wanted to see the movie that is all about the many summary executions Che oversaw, his ideological rigidity and his Soviet allegiance and narcissistic martyrdom complex? I am not sure I would. As opaque as it can be, this movie is actually in a lot of ways more compelling than that one would have been. And in some some subtle ways, this "Che" does depict the man who actively built his image as revolutionary hero, and who ultimately was brought down when he came to believe in it himself. That's a more complicated story than either the one that casts Che as a Christ-like hero, or the one that is all about what a villain he was. Che was not a good man, but "Che" is a good movie.

Lil Wayne vs. Dwight Schrute

2010-03-22T22:00:00.002-05:00

Now this is what I'm talking about.

Party and Bullshit in the USA

2010-03-17T22:52:00.001-05:00

Well this is terrific:

Joanna Newsom on Jimmy Fallon

2010-03-15T11:01:00.000-05:00

A couple weeks old I guess, but new to me. I am loving "Have One On Me."

Journalists are not priests, and other observations about opinions and the news

2010-03-14T13:31:00.003-05:00

I keep having some variation of this conversation with people, mostly but not exclusively journalism people, and I thought it might be worthwhile to get my basic argument on paper. To clarify my own thinking if nothing else. I am obviously not the first person to think through this stuff, but I should say that my views seem to be at odds with much of the newspaper industry, and specifically with my own bosses. So just so you know, this is just me talking.

...

I don't know what it is like at other newspapers, but editors and reporters at the newspaper where I work spend a lot of time thinking about impartiality, and making sure to keep opinion separate from news, and fretting about what reporters might be posting on Twitter or Facebook, and generally worrying about whether, at some point, newspaper people might slip up and say something that betrays the fact that they're human beings with human thoughts and feelings.

I understand this, and I don't totally disagree with it. It's very important that the newspaper, especially a small local newspaper like where I work, be seen as an honest broker. But my basic position is that journalism is not a priesthood. Isn't and shouldn't be. Newspaper writing should allow for much more space for personal observations, for independent judgment and, yes, for a certain amount of opinion.

Let's start out with a couple things that I am not advocating. I do not think local newspapers should turn into partisan media outlets, or that newspaper reporters should double as political pundits like Keith Olbermann or Rush Limbaugh. That's not what audiences want, and it's not a good goal for journalism. At it happens, I am a fan of partisan media -- TPM, Hot Air, Daily Kos, Redstate -- but they obviously have a distinct niche and are practicing a different sort of journalism than the daily newspaper is practicing. I do like English newspapers, which slant one way or the other, but that is really not it, either. That model might make sense for some of the big national newspapers -- NYT and WSJ, mainly -- but I doubt it would work for smaller papers.

What I would like, instead, is for newspaper writers to be allowed to be something more like human beings. Very often, reporters have completely interesting and insightful opinions about news stories they've covered in detail. You gather the information, you talk to the principals -- you're human, and you're going to form some sort of judgment about the topic. And in newspaper writing, readers aren't allowed access to any of that. I don't see how that serves readers or the overall cause of journalism.

Because judgments of any sort are considered verboten within the conventions of newspaper writing, what usually happens is that reporters are forced to adopt a sort of phony cluelessness about the topic they're writing about. This is typified by the much-scorned he said/she said style, which everyone seems to hate and with good reasons. Party A says the earth is warming, Party B says it isn't, who knows, whatever, the end. That's a very frustrating sort of story for readers, who are naturally seeking not only what the opposing sides are saying but also which claims are actually true. In many cases it's frustrating for reporters, too.

I'd say that a certain amount of he-said-she-saidism is inevitable, especially when you're talking about complicated topics that people disagree about. That's not a disaster. The disaster is that journalistic conventions can make it very hard to provide the reader with important context. This can be: What are the political angles here? What is the mood in the room? Which people really seem to hate each other? Who is a known self-promoter and who is a humble, behind-the-scenes kind of guy?

None of these things are impossible to provide within the accepted conventions of a news story. But they're hard, and they tend to go through a sort of institutional linguistic wringer that drains them of meaning. In a story about Joe the Plumber's visit to Wausau, I wrote flatly that he'd made some claims that were "untrue." They were. The sentence was changed by an editor to read that JtP "glosses over facts." To me that reads like he just sort of innocently left some things out. Not the same thing! By sanding the edges off the judgment made by the reporter, the newspaper also removed some of the story's bite, and I would say made it less true.

The problem of the priesthood is that there are a lot of reporters and editors who have internalized this belief system so thoroughly that they self-censor and prune their own opinions even from themselves in the pursuit of journalistic purity. Some of them are incredibly good reporters and editors! My friend Brian Reisinger, now writing for the Nashville Business Journal, is one of these who believes in trying to a achieve a kind of blank-slate approach to news. Longtime Washington Post Executive Editor Len Downie, who once spoke to my j-school class in Washington, D.C., said he didn't even read the Post's opinion page. Some reporters don't even vote. The idea is to live a sort of monastic existence free from opinion -- the better to honestly report the news.

This impulse definitely grows out of a desire to be honest and even-handed. Still, I say it is a pose. It's a vanity. Judgment is not independent of perception; it's part of perception. There is never a time when there are "pure" facts and no judgments. Facts always, always come in context. The shape of that context is what judgment is.

That is a fairly abstract formulation, so let's get concrete. What would newspaper reporting look like shorn of its pretensions to total purity and impartiality?

It would take a much, much looser approach to storytelling. The first and biggest change would be a lot more first-person, especially in non-hard-news stories. Sometimes the best way to describe what someone or some experience is like is to describe your own reaction to it. That doesn't mean the story is all about you or that it should be some kind of journal entry. But there are some newspaper stories that ought to be a little bit more like magazine profiles, which allow for a certain amount of participation. I'd think a lot of cultural coverage could go this way, or a lot of profiles. Some news coverage would be closer to some column-writing.
More ability to weigh the relative strength of various claims on the news pages. Not, like, "By the way, my name's Rob, and here's what I think about that thing I just reported." I am thinking of sentences more like, "Person A's strongest argument is _____ because _____." and "Person' B's weakest argument is _____ because _____." If readers disagree, that's fine. It's great! They can write letters, they can blog, whatever. In 2010, readers have plenty of ways to make their voices heard, and that is a good thing. So let 100 flowers bloom!
Understand that newspaper writing is just another literary form, like a magazine story or a short story or a blog or a tweet. The conventions of newspaper writing aren't set in stone or handed down from on high; they're just conventions. The journalism industry now knows that it needs to be reporting across many different platforms. That's not good enough. You can't just chop up news stories into 140-character intervals. You need to understand different forms and their own internal conventions, and you actually need to be able to think within those forms. That's also going to mean that sometimes different conventions spill across the forms.
Stop trying to be all things to all people. It's excessively defensive. All this stuff, picking at people's personal Twitter feeds or worrying about who we are befriending on Facebook, it is unnecessary. Reporters are human beings. If their stories are written in good faith, that will show up in the work and readers will respond to it. Period.

One of the things I find consistently weird is how many daily-journalism types believe that admitting any form of opinion into journalism necessarily means operating in bad faith. There are contrary examples all over the place -- in magazines, in weekly newspapers, on the Web, on the opinion page of the newspaper. But for some reason, what applies in other places can never apply -- even a little -- to the news pages of a daily. I find that a little frustrating, and actually a little arrogant -- like these pages are sacrosanct and have nothing to learn from other forms. Not true. Let's have the newspaper be a place that hosts all sorts of different pieces of writing, from straight-down-the-middle coverage to personal stories to straight-up polemics -- and let's have them be lively, interesting, diverse.

The End of Influence by Brad DeLong and Stephen Cohen

2010-03-07T09:41:00.000-06:00

The End of Influence: What Happens When Other Countries Have the Money by J. Bradford DeLong

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Super-good narrative of recent history of international economics, including how the financial crisis is going to matter going forward. Very readable, very interesting, and you don't have the feeling that it's mainly about scoring political points or pushing an ideological agenda. You will be smarter when you finish it. Really good book.

View all my reviews >>

The Insophisticate

2010-03-06T12:06:00.002-06:00

The podcast I do with two other guys just gets better and better. Check it out here at insophisticate.com.

This latest one is about the new Windows phone operating system, and also sort ofabout phones in general. We've done recent episodes about shoes, Lady Gaga and a freestyle of different topics.

Or, subscribe to us on iTunes.

Takin' over

2010-03-04T08:37:00.000-06:00

...

Poem (fragment)

2010-03-02T08:07:00.000-06:00

Milwaukee Ave.

2010-03-01T08:06:00.000-06:00

Squares

2010-02-26T08:09:00.000-06:00

Favorite tattoos

2010-02-26T08:07:00.001-06:00

...

No words

2010-02-24T23:12:00.000-06:00

More Ke$ha!

2010-02-24T18:48:00.002-06:00

For Ke$ha enthusiasts, this new Ke$ha video goes along with another sort of mystifying, pretty-much-terrible song.

Airplanes

2010-02-08T10:36:00.001-06:00

Air traffic over a 24-hour period:

Thanks to Flynn for the link.

How long, Punxsutawney Phil?

2010-02-02T22:57:00.007-06:00

(If I get this post up while it is still Groundhog Day, it counts.)

How long does Bill Murray's character spend reliving Feb. 2 in the movie Groundhog Day?

This guy comes up with 8.7 years. This guy says 4 years. Harold Ramis says 10 years -- except when he says 30-40 years.

I like the writer's (supposed) original concept, that it could have gone on for more like 10,000 years.

Personally I am going to say: 150 years.

I think the criminally undercounted portion of Phil's stay in Punxsutawney is the first stage, which he spends living out his every hedonistic fantasy. Phil is a phenomenally shallow person, and he is what, 40 years old? If existential boredom and despair about his life's meaninglessness haven't set in yet, they could take a very long time indeed to appear. I would think a guy like that would spend quite a bit of time in the eat-every-cake-and-dessert-in-the-diner phase.

Also indicative of a very long timeline is not just learning French or learning to play the piano, but a.) the sequence where he tries to save the old man and b.) the fact that he learns to catch the boy falling out of the tree. To me those things are not just a matter of practicing skills -- they're matters of complete awareness of the town of Punxsutawney. Hard to quantify, but probably a very long time.

Last but not least: "I have been stabbed, shot, poisoned, frozen, hung, electrocuted, and burned." I am guessing that some of these things did not happen on consecutive days. And even though we know that at certain points Phil tries to kill himself, the clear implication to this line is that at least some of these things were done to him -- which makes them even less likely and therefore probably spaced further apart.

The Fourth Hand by John Irving

2010-01-31T11:29:00.000-06:00

The Fourth Hand by John Irving

My rating: 2 of 5 stars
First book I've read by this guy. It is funny and stuff, but I guess I did not connect with the characters or the story all that much. I feel like that's somewhat intentional? The voice of the narrator is always intruding, half-bemused, in a way that lets us know not to take any of this too seriously. Which to me at least had the effect of sort of lowering the stakes in a way that was not necessarily desirable.

My other impression was that as a media satire, the book's 1999 vision of cable news as "the disaster channel" is pretty far-removed from the all-partisan-all-the-time cable environment of today. That's not really the book's fault, necessarily. But it does have less bite today.

View all my reviews >>

Unified Theory of Ke$ha

2010-01-26T00:59:00.004-06:00

What you have to understand about Ke$ha is this:

a.) Ke$ha is incredibly popular. Her song has been No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for weeks. As I type this, she is #3 on iTunes.

b.) Ke$ha is omnipresent. "TiK ToK" was played on the radio 11,224 times last week -- the most of any artist ever. She was just on Jimmy Fallon. She is going to be a presenter at the Grammys. Like it or not, we live in a world where Ke$ha is an enormous celebrity.

c.) Ke$ha's rap skills are not tight. Her voice is incredibly annoying. Her lyrics make no sense. And yet, the lines do kind of stick with you. They do.

d.) Ke$ha once appeared on "The Simple Life" as one of the hicks that Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie went around insulting. Later, she vomited in Paris Hilton's closet. I learn this from Wikipedia. Also, she considers herself "the antithesis of (Paris Hilton)." That's obviously an insane thing to say -- really? the antithesis of Paris Hilton is a mega-popular blonde pop rapper? -- but it does tell you an awful lot about Ke$ha's cultural positioning, especially as regards social class.

e.) In some sense, Ke$ha is out-Gagaing Lady Gaga. The two artists have exactly the same narrative: Girl obsessed with fame confronts a grotesque celebrity culture, etc. etc. But Lady Gaga's game is to put a bit of performative intellectual distance between herself and her Gaga-ness. Ke$ha has zero intellectual distance. She is just doing the thing Lady Gaga is performing or sort of enacting.

But also:

f.) This is why Lady Gaga will have a longer shelf-life than Ke$ha.

And:

g.) It is very, very difficult to see what Ke$ha's second act is.

And those are the things you have to understand about Ke$ha.

Spoon on Conan

2010-01-20T14:34:00.002-06:00

doing the best song off the new Spoon album, which I think is good but not as good as Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga.

Perils of ping-pong

2010-01-18T10:40:00.004-06:00

Democrats are making it clear that a Coakley loss in Massachusetts will not derail health care reform -- the House will just "ping pong" the Senate bill. I think this is probably true. White House and Democratic leadership have shown a willingness to expend a tremendous amount of political capital on the bill, and at the end of the day Speaker Pelosi can probably muster the votes for passage.

The "we'll play ping-pong" message coming out of Washington today could demoralize Mass. Republicans, who were fired up by the idea that a win for Brown would kill the whole enterprise. And I assume this is part of the reason that we're hearing about it now -- as an attempt to tamp down at least some portion of Republican enthusiasm.

Just asking: Couldn't it also give Massachusetts Democrats less reason to turn out tomorrow? By all accounts, nobody is excited about Coakley. And if health care reform isn't truly in peril, why not sit this one out?

UPDATE [1/18 8:16pm] ... Why it is probably over for Coakley: Nate Silver says so. And why it might not be over for Coakley: Nate Silver says so.

2010-01-13T22:55:00.000-06:00

R.I.P. Teddy Pendergrass.

Leno Victims Unit

2010-01-13T10:10:00.001-06:00

"A movie whose human sympathy is enormous"

2010-01-09T17:04:00.002-06:00

Hey look, NYT columnist Ross Douthat agrees with me about the best movie of the aughts. It's The New World, which Douthat sort of interestingly calls "the anti-Avatar."

So are they or aren't they?

2010-01-04T16:45:00.003-06:00

The problem with the he-said-she-said style of reporting. This just landed in my inbox, from NBC's First Read:

Are health insurance mandates constitutional? NBC's Doug Adams rounded up opinions from conservative legal scholars (who say they aren't) and liberal scholars (who say they are). http://bit.ly/4Trmfw

Great, very helpful. There is some more information at the link, but not much, really.

Best book of the decade

2010-01-02T16:14:00.002-06:00

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño, published in English translation in 2007. Easily, easily the greatest work of literature I've read in the last 10 years. I haven't read 2666 yet but I kind of can't imagine it's better.

Blogging up a storm

2010-01-01T12:34:00.001-06:00

Uncharacteristically heavy blogging lately. Here's your guide to getting to where you want to go:

New Year's Resolutions, 2009

2010-01-01T09:51:00.003-06:00

One decade ago, on NYE 1999, as the clock struck 12 a.m. I was running down the street at full speed with my friends Mike Perillo, Bob Alstrum-Acevedo and Bryan Preston. I am scheduling this post in advance, and I am hoping to be doing exactly the same thing, with new friends.

10. Learn a lot about tax policy, in reasonably fine detail
9. Read more books
8. Drink less alcohol
7. Get more freelance work
6. Make more audio stories**
5. Take more and better photographs**
4. Use more pretentious French, German and Latin phrases in everyday speech. I already use some, but I believe I could use more.
3. Lose weight**
2. Wear a tie underneath sweaters
1. Write a novel. (Seriously.)

These are not all of them. I have some other resolutions I can't tell you about.

** Denotes also a resolution in 2009.

Robert Mentzer's Certified Finest Musicks of the Aughts: 50+ songs & 35 albums

2009-12-30T22:02:00.007-06:00

Well, this certainly was a lot of work, and almost certainly not worth the effort. Please argue your own point of view vehemently, quibble with my rankings shamelessly and nominate your own most slept-on favorites! That will make it all worthwhile.

SONGS

Honorable mentions: Beyonce, "Irreplaceable"; Rich Boy feat. Polow da Don, "Throw Some Ds"; Christina Aguilera, "Ain't No Other Man"; Bright Eyes, "Old Soul Song (For the New World Order)"; M.I.A. feat. Bun B and Rich Boy, "Paper Planes (Diplo Remix)"; Burial, "Archangel"; Crooked Fingers, "New Drink for the Old Drunk"; Kanye West, "Can't Tell Me Nothing; Loretta Lynn feat. Jack White, "Portland, Oregon"; Jay-Z, "Dirt Off My Shoulder"

50. Jay-Z, "Izzo (H.O.V.A.)"
You could have been anywhere in the world tonight, but you're here with me. I appreciate that.

49. Amy Winehouse, "Rehab"
Great song, though pretty sad and hard to listen to knowing what we know now.

48. Rihanna, "Russian Roulette"

47. Radiohead, "Nude"

46. Justin Timberlake, "My Love"

45. Gnarls Barkley, "Crazy"

44. Usher, "Yeah"

43. Franz Ferdinand, "Take Me Out"

42. Missy Elliott, "Work It"

41. LCD Soundsystem, "All My Friends"

40. Brad Paisley, "Then"

39. R. Kelly feat. T.I. and T-Pain, "I'm a Flirt (Remix)"
Let me remind you that I am the king of R&B.

38. Lupe Fiasco, "Kick, Push"

37. The Dixie Chicks, "Not Ready to Make Nice"

36. The Gaslight Anthem, "High Lonesome"

35. Jay-Z, "Takeover"
One of the great battle raps in rap history.

34. Outkast, "Bombs Over Baghdad"

33. Kanye West, "Stronger"

32. Kylie Minogue, "Can't Get You Out of My Head"

31. The Roots, "Get Busy"
I just love Questo's drums on this track.

30. Three 7 Mafia, "Sippin' on Some Syrup"
I eat so many shrimp, I got iodine poisoning.

29. The Hold Steady, "Your Little Hoodrat Friend"

28. Spoon, "The Way We Get By"

27. Britney Spears, "Toxic"

26. Wilco, "Jesus Etc."

25. Young Jeezy feat. Kanye West, "Put On"

24. Dizzee Rascal, "Fix Up, Look Sharp"

23. Mike Jones feat. Paul Wall & Slim Thug, "Still Tippin’"
I had them play this song at my wedding reception, at night after the grandparents had gone home. Badass driving music has never been so relaxed.

22. Brad Paisley, "Alcohol"
Sung from the perspective of alcohol!

21. Rihanna, "Umbrella"

20. Lil Wayne "A Milli"

19. Outkast, "Hey Ya"
An obscure, little-heard track, but I thought I'd include it here just to confuse people.

18. Dr. Dre feat. Eminem, "Forgot About Dre"

17. R. Kelly, "Ignition (Remix)"
"After the show, it's the after-party. After the party it's the hotel lobby." This song also, if I'm not mistaken, introduced the favorite Kells habit of announcing that you are listening to a remix version.

16. Lil Wayne, "Shooter"

15. Sufjan Stevens, "The World's Columbian Exposition/Carl Sandburg Visits Me In A Dream"

14. Kelly Clarkson, "Since U Been Gone"

13. Kanye West, "Gold Digger"
One of pop music's greatest exercises in disingenuousness. "I'm not saying she's a gold digger..." Really? What are you saying, then, Kanye?

12. Justin Timberlake, "SexyBack"

11. Beyonce feat. Jay-Z, "Crazy in Love"

10. The White Stripes, "Seven Nation Army"
Going to Wichita, to work the straw.

9. The Hold Steady, "Chips Ahoy!"

8. Eminem, "Stan"
One of the great story-songs ever, with beginning, middle and end. And, as has been pointed out, it's the only love song on the Marshall Mathers LP.

7. Radiohead, "Idioteque"

6. Flaming Lips, "Do You Realize?"

5. Outkast, "Ms. Jackson"

4. Jay-Z, "99 Problems"

3. Modest Mouse, "Float On"
One of my personal favorite songs, and I think still the most frequently played songs in my iTunes library. Drifter pop with an optimistic twist.

2. UGK feat. Outkast, "Int'l Players Anthem (I Choose You)"

1. Missy Elliott, "Get Ur Freak On"
Released in 2001, this is the song that announced the new millennium. And while this decade did not exactly turn out the way it should have, this is still the sound of how things could have gone. And it's a weird pop masterpiece. The Timbaland beat is masterfully multicultural, and Missy does a start-stop rapping thing that is just ... impressive. This is future music, still.

ALBUMS

35. Fugazi, The Argument
34. Three 6 Mafia, Most Known Unknown
33. Madvillain, Madvillainy
32. Josh Rouse, 1972
31. Lil Wayne, Tha Carter III
30. Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
29. Outkast, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
28. Sufjan Stevens, Illinois
27. Brian Wilson, Smile
26. Kanye West, Late Registration
25. Arctic Monkeys, Whatever People Say I am, That's What I'm Not
24. UGK, Underground Kingz
23. Spoon, Kill the Moonlight
22. Jamie Lidell, Multiply
21. Ghostface, Fishscale
20. Radiohead, In Rainbows
19. Dizzee Rascal, Boy in Da Corner
18. J Dilla, Donuts
17. The Streets, A Grand Don't Come for Free
16. R. Kelly, Double Up
15. Modest Mouse, Good News for People Who Love Bad News
14. Missy Elliott, Miss E ... So Addictive
13. The Hold Steady, Boys and Girls in America
12. Amadou & Miriam, Dimanche a Bamako
11. Justin Timberlake, FutureSex/LoveSounds
10. Clipse, Hell Hath No Fury
9. Gaslight Anthem, The '59 Sound
8. Lil Wayne, Da Drought 3
7. The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
6. Brad Paisley, American Saturday Night
5. Radiohead, Kid A
4. Kanye West, Graduation
3. Eminem, The Marshall Mathers LP
2. Outkast, Stankonia
1. Jay-Z, The Blueprint

Bad juju in O'Hare Airport on the day after Christmas

2009-12-29T21:58:00.011-06:00

Late at night, things began to get weird on the F Concourse of O'Hare International Airport. December 26, 2009. Snow outside. On the F Concourse, children roamed unsupervised, giving wet willies to stranded passengers who were sleeping on the floor. I saw a stooped 90-year-old lady win a fistfight against a Mexican teenager. I think she may have had a knife. She pivoted on a heel in front of the Departures/Arrivals screens, asking "Who else wants a piece?", ready to level all comers.

At one point an eagle swooped through the concourse in pursuit of a team of white laboratory rats, causing travelers to trip over their luggage to get out of the way. The fact that there were rats running through the airport was easy enough to explain -- they could, for example, have escaped from the luggage of some traveling experimental scientist. But where did the eagle come from?

In fleeting moments, there was a sort of camaraderie among the passengers, us against the airlines. (Which reminds me: DO NOT FLY UNITED. DO NOT GO TO O'HARE. Those are my pieces of advice to you.) But we also turned on one another, Lord of the Flies-style. I am guilty myself, though I am not the only one. A reasonably nice guy bound for Stevens Point, Wisconsin, started talking about how United ought to open more customer service stations and I said, somewhat snidely, "Yeah, you should really say something about that." As if his perfectly reasonable complaint were just too stupid an observation to verbalize.

Hours earlier, a group of people bound for Fort Wayne, Indiana, were marched out through the snow, put in their plane, where they sat for hours. Then they all came back inside. Then they sat at the gate for hours longer. Then their flight was cancelled. And they were shocked that they would not make it to Fort Wayne, Indiana that night. I watched it happen. This was the essence of the experience of that day.

I saw a young woman with curly hair sobbing as she walked through the concourse pulling her bags behind her, tears streaming sideways across her face.

They opened a third customer service station and a murmur went through the line, as if things were finally beginning to look up. A group of teenage girls tried to cut in line -- pretending they were just starting a new line in front of the new service station instead of joining the one long line we'd all been shuffling through like dead-eyed zombies for more than two hours. As if they had discovered a secret the rest of us didn't know. They got a lecture over the loudspeaker from a bearded customer service worker. Not that it would have mattered, anyway. The new station saw exactly one passenger before the bearded man disappeared into the back room again.

I believe the F Concourse of O'Hare International Airport was only hours away from devolving into a sort of post-apocalyptic universe of powerful warlords, robust trade in sex and illicit drugs, violence and contagion throughout the land. And I was prepared to fall in line with any charismatic leader who could promise me things. Not so much promises of escape -- it was too late for that, we would be in the airport forever -- but rather the promise that we the passengers could rise up to punish our oppressors. I would have been down for that.

Luckily, I have a permanently reserved private suite at the O'Hare Hilton, to which we now retreated. We were pursued by a pack of filthy travelers pleading to share our bed, offering inducements -- sex, chocolate, a controlling interest in various major companies. Laura had to mace a number of them as we ran for the elevator.

In the room, I opened the curtains and looked out across the snow and the parking lot on the other side of the airport, and I saw vagrants gathered around a fire they had started in an oil drum, and in the snow on the top level of the parking deck, in tremendous letters visible only from above, the message was spelled out: DO NOT FLY UNITED. DO NOT GO TO O'HARE.

Laura and I sprawled across the silk sheets, ordered two of every item on the room service menu and two bottles of Dom Perignon and then fell asleep without eating or drinking a thing.

[Note: This account has been lightly fictionalized.]