NewPlasticWeblog

NewPlasticWeblog is moving!

2008-04-30T17:36:00.000-07:00

More accurate title:

"NewPlasticWeblog is dying."

Remember about two years ago when I posted a young, fresh-faced, optimistic explanation about the importance and excitement of my work with Hotel Workers Rising? Yeah, the average hotel housekeeper is still making $8.37/hr with no benefits. Still a lot of rising to do.

So I'm still too busy to do this at work, and too tired to do this at home.

BUT: check it -- we're moving everything under one roof. Camelliageorge.com, newplasticmusic (soon to be renamed and augmented with the first E.P. by my one man band), Natoma Studio (our DIY projects and other weirdness), and a brand new politics/culture feature called "Class Enemies."

This will happen.

Walking is still honest.
Human psychology is based on projection.
etc.

back in a month or two

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)

2008-01-15T15:00:00.000-08:00

Actually, this is easier than I thought it would be. There are some albums (and a few songs) that it feels like I heard before I heard anything else, if that makes sense. I know I listened to this record on vinyl, which was also how I learned to play records on a turntable. So, unlike the White Album, which I got when I was about 12, or Beatles for Sale, which I didn't even buy until high school, I have trouble putting Sgt. Pepper into context. I don't think I understood the difference between pop music and other kinds of music when I first began listening to this record. Actually, music wasn't even a very big part of my life when I played Sgt Pepper for the first time, so it took me a very long time to even think of "Fixing a Hole" and "Lovely Rita" as songs instead of, I guess, toys? Novelties? Fictional characters?

Anyway, sometimes I wish I had actually heard this record from the standpoint of a music fan, instead of returning to it as one. That's why I thought it would be difficult to evaluate -- who wants to refer to their beloved stuffed bear as "overrated?" Can your first pair of rollerblades, which skated you right to second base, ever be "underrated?"

But it turns out that there's no limit to the callous, clinical disinterest of a Beatles snob. See below:

Most overrated: "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." John Lennon was a master of using unusual juxtapositions to bring tension and truth to his songs. But I think sometimes (or, often), he just pasted two song ideas together and hoped they would both prove likeable. Now, the production and the performances are flawless...but is this song really profound? It's meaningless and fun to sing, which means it belongs with "Yellow Submarine" and "Everybody's Got Something to Hide..." in the category of great Beatles road-trip singalongs. It's has the feel of "I'm Only Sleeping" without any of the depth, and the wonderful imagery of "I Am the Walrus" without any of the bitter pathos. Maybe this comes from familiarity, but I don't really need to listen to this song, I just need to remember it. Kind of like early Pink Floyd. Great to know, but how badly do you need to hear it?

Most underrated: Everything on Sgt. Pepper is probably overrated in some sense, just by inclusion on what can only ever be an overrated album. (Quick rule-of-thumb: If your choppy, haphazard concept album with a bunch of great songs becomes a signpost for an entire revolution of thought and behavior, it's probably overrated...Nevermind, 36 Chambers, etc.). But "Getting Better" is really a masterpiece that feels like a throwaway, so it gets underrated as filler between the grand drug statements, the concept pieces, and the groundbreaking experimental pop. "Getting Better" falls right in with the sonically and structurally perfect singles of the same era -- "Penny Lane," "Hello Goodbye," "Paperback Writer" -- in that it builds remarkable rhythmic and harmonic textures for a fairly straightforward song structure, and lyrically it's more than it seems in the best way. Drones, Motown bounce, sparkling clusters of notes, deceptively difficult lead and background syncopations (try playing it on piano to see what I mean), and all with that exuberant Beatles feel that gets a little hard to find the deeper you get into the album.

spent all day at the holdiay inn trying to get out of bed

2007-12-03T12:37:00.000-08:00

I'm back from Las Vegas, after a pretty darn successful campaign. Sorry for the lack of updates, but there wasn't a lot to tell:

It was hot.

Las Vegas is not a good place to go if you like to eat a lot (or any) fresh produce.

It's possible, and actually somewhat reassuring, to plan your day around the Scrubs rerun schedule.

And last but not least...
If someone who, with appropriate respect to all professions, is very obviously a male prostitute knocks on your window and asks for Derek, explain that you are not Derek in such a way that he will not return the following evening and ask for Derek.

That's it. Oh, see the Walkmen, Joe Henry, and The Hold Steady if they're coming through your town. Three shows I attended recently which were excellent.

almost done with this

2007-09-27T11:26:00.000-07:00

But...re: the Episcopal House of Bishop's half-a-loaf response to the Anglican Communion ultimatum. I understand where the HOB is coming from, and it's probably true that no other path was possible from their perspective. But still, if the Rabbinical Assembly can manage to leave it up to the congregation without quite so much pandering to the bigots in their midst, surely the Episcopal Church can do the same.

Jeffords Schori had this to say: "Not everyone is 100 percent happy with every word in this document, but we believe we have found a place that all of us can stand together -- at the foot of the cross."

In her defense, that is a good place to be if you owe Jesus an apology.

Retract, dude! Retract.

2007-09-07T17:34:00.000-07:00

Guess I underestimated the Episcopal House of Bishops when I wrote about this last time. I was (justifiably, I think) disappointed with Bishop Kathleen Jefferts Schori for her statements recommending that Episcopalians acquiesce to the ultimatum set by the Anglican Communion (in brief: if you don't stop ordaining gay priests and performing gay marriages by September 30th, 2007, you can't fully participate in the Church). In reading my post again, the condemnations of Bishop Schori seem a little harsh. I reread her statement and I understand why she gave it, since the decision regarding a response to the Anglican primates isn't entirely hers, and she was trying to reconcile all kinds of factions in her church.

But still: what you want from a progressive leader at a moment like that is affirmation, not equivocation. i.e. "Gay and lesbian Christians are welcome in our church, and that's our interpretation of Jesus's teachings. We will do everything we can to make sure they remain welcome, and though we recognize this constitutes a minority opinion amongst the Anglican Communion, we will try to persuade the primates that we can preserve the integrity of the church without taking the drastic measures they've suggested." Bam, simple as that.

Regardless, the good news is that it looks like the Episcopal House of Bishops is not going to respond to the primates' request, even following the House of Bishops' September 20th meeting in New Orleans. It would be nice for the HoB meeting to produce a statement asserting the rights of Episcopal parishes to ordain gay priests and marry gay couples, but the truth is that the existence of those rights is more important than asserting them. If declining to respond allows the Episcopal church to continue its work and remain within the Anglican Communion (at least until the next ultimatum), then that's probably better for all concerned -- especially if, as one would hope, avoiding a schism would bring the Anglican Communion as a whole closer to tolerating gay congregants.

Anyway. Episcopal House of Bishops: more badass than I thought.

(title ref)

...ain't no place for a poor boy like me

2007-08-30T11:07:00.001-07:00

I'm in sunny, shiny, happy, plastic, recirculated, overblown, incomprehensible, unsustainable Las Vegas working on the hotel/casino contract fights here. Lucky for me, I love my job and any place is a good place to beat up on big companies.

But man. The food situation is a mess, and every day I feel socially irresponsible just by waking up.

I miss my home.

Blogging (as you've probably already seen) suspended till I get back.

(title help)

labor & boycotting Israel

2007-07-30T11:14:00.000-07:00

Following efforts by British unions to boycott Israeli goods and imports, the Jewish newspaper Forward ran an editorial about the U.S. labor movement 's "angry rise in defense of the Jewish state."

I'm kind of conflicted here. Not because I support the boycott -- the ubiquitous amnesiac comparisons to South African anti-apartheid boycotts drive me crazy, and the strategy is flawed if not outright inhumane. No, I'm conflicted because on one hand, the editorial reminds readers (both Jewish and not) of how crucial a role Jews play in the labor movement, and how crucial a role unions play in creating the just and decent society envisioned in the Torah. On the other hand, the piece slides a little too effortlessly between generalizations about supporting Israel and generalizations about what constitute progressive values.

Here's what I liked about it:

It points out that left-wing doesn't necessarily mean anti-Israel, and that there's no reason for people who support Israeli sovereignty to make that assumption in dealing with the American left. These distinctions need to be made more often, because the kind of moral absolutism that informs leftist ideology encourages them (us?) to assume a consensus about who is and is not an "oppressor" or a "victim." I've certainly encountered the expectation that people in the labor movement should "support Palestine" and be angry at some amorphous combination of Zionism and Israel (it's never quite clear which). And I can't blame them for assuming we all agree on the Middle East, since most of the coalitions on the left rely on the same kinds of pre-established consensus: HMOs are bad, the Iraq war is a bloody, greedy mistake, corporations are anti-union, rich neighborhoods hate homeless people, etc. By the way, "supporting Palestine" among leftists usually means "opposing Israel," and, I'm equally disappointed to say, vice versa. So it's good to have the balancing viewpoint highlighted by the Forward, though the labor movement remains divided on this issue. Or, divided to the extent that anyone considers it during the normal course of his/her campaign work, which, I have to say, I hope for the sake of the near-50 million people living without health insurance is an extremely rare occurrence.

I loved the description of Jews in the labor movement, harkening back to the early days of the the Forward and recalling just how many Jews lead America's unions. It's a good reminder that Jews in America are not uniformly wealthy, well-educated bankers, jewelers, economists, and professors -- we also "work for a living" and try to help others do the same. And obviously, it's rare for a major newspaper to refer to unions as "the single largest force for social justice and progressive values within American society." So that was nice to read.

Now what I didn't like so much:

Though the article stayed fairly clear of ideological issues in the Middle East conflict, it did present to the reader an subconscious (yet perhaps deliberate) conclusion, using a twist on the transitive property. If American labor is "pro-Israel," and American labor holds a truly progressive worldview, then true progressives should support Israel. After all, unions are the single largest force for social justice and progressive values in American society. If those progressive folks support Israel, you should too. Maybe that's a stretch, maybe not, but the editorial's narrative leads in that direction, and as I read it I wondered which of the articles subsidiary conclusions the Forward cares about the most, and what their aim was in writing an editorial that attempts to connect/unify pro-Israel and pro-union sentiments.

Personally, I don't believe that a truly progressive worldview -- one focused on the preservation of human rights, equality of opportunity, and a fair distribution of wealth throughout society -- would ever produce a pro/anti-type judgment on Middle East politics. In fact, the parts of the Jewish Labor Committee letter that appealed most to me were the paragraphs explaining why this kind of boycott doesn't work, and why the more humanitarian and rational course is to pro-actively support those organizations and leaders in both societies that are working towards peace and solidarity. Given the political volatility and addiction to violence that characterize discourse and action in the region, I'm increasingly of the opinion that a surge of progressive activity in the labor/social movements of both Israel and Palestine will be necessary to achieve any sustainable, enduring peace. And I wish the Forward had highlighted that aspect of the JLC statement a little more. As it was, the editorial kind of claimed the American labor movement for the pro-Israelites, which was neither accurate (I know 'cause I work in it), true to the JLC statement itself, or productive to the Jewish community's understanding of unions.

As for the deep connection between Jews and the labor movement, it always gratifies me to see that history preserved and (when appropriate) exalted. But, as the editorial rightly observes, that connection has frayed and somewhat disappeared over time. Now, I'm no expert on how the Jewish community makes decisions, or why it has evolved in the ways it has. I don't know enough Jewish history or have enough experience dealing with the most powerful Jewish institutions. But it doesn't seem to me that perceiving anti-Israel sentiment amongst unions would really explain why most Jews -- along with most Americans -- have little use for the labor movement.

The real reason is that most American Jews have embraced the American versions of capitalism, government, international trade, immigration, and neo-liberal economics. Our community has done well through those means, and with the exception of that progressive Jewish minority, we haven't done much to challenge them. So I'm very glad to see the Forward arguing that "guaranteeing general welfare" and "dispensing equal justice" are/should be core Jewish values and points of connection with the labor movement, but most synagogues shrink from active political participation in the community, let alone the kind of courageously progressive stands that we need and expect from progressive organizations. Of course, the same could be said for the moribund sections of the labor movement. But it's worth pointing out that American unions haven't just "declined" due to their own inaction or obsolescence. They've been abandoned by the American people, Jews included.

we can bring it back

2007-07-20T18:27:00.000-07:00

Last night I saw Sonic Youth perform the entirety of Daydream Nation. I almost didn't even get there. Having ridden BART across the bay up to Berkeley, and walked from Downtown across the entire campus to the Greek Theater, the last bit running because I was late, I arrived at the venue and there was no show. The way the theater is positioned from the North, you can't really see anything till you arrive, so it probably looked pretty funny to passersby when I jogged determinedly up to a completely deserted complex, then stopped and stared in horror and, I have to admit, some tiny degree of relief. I wasn't sure I could sit through all of Daydream Nation -- as cathartic and revelatory as some of it can be, the album still contains periods of prolonged boredom punctuated by Lee Ranaldo pretending that melody's gone out of style. What happened was, I'd bought tickets for the following night's show, at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles.

So I called Camille, and -- brief note: this is why I got married -- she tolerated a few minutes of whining, followed by a few minutes of fake, forced commentary like "Nevermind, it's not that big a deal" to cover my brokenheartedness, before finally getting on Craigslist and persuading me to walk over to the Berkeley Community Theater, where the show was actually taking place. It's actually about a block from the BART station, so not a huge sacrifice. Anyway, I bought a scalped ticket for $5 above face, displaying a phenomenal lack of haggling ability when, having gotten the guy to agree to face value (don't like to pay less, refuse to pay more), I realized I didn't have change and just gave him two twenties instead of insisting. I was so relieved. The only time I've been any good at haggling was when I was in Senegal, where it's just basic practice, but it didn't stick. Although I got pretty good at eating fishbones and unidentified beef chunks there too, so I guess I left a lot of skills behind.

The show was awesome. I actually have very little to say about it. a Kim and Kim and Kim and Kim was hot despite looking (as always) slightly reanimated. I hadn't realized how much of a "Hip Dad" vibe Lee Ranaldo puts out, but that was also entertaining. Thurston Moore is ageless and godlike, as Sleater-Kinney recognized awhile ago. The album felt more bombastic live, in part because the Berkeley Community Theater doesn't have the best sound system for a waves-of-noise band like Sonic Youth. Kind of the same problem with the Roots when we saw them there in 1999. "Teen Age Riot," "The Sprawl," "Total Trash," and "Silver Rocket" were incredible. Hearing Daydream Nation from start to finish reminded me how much of what I love in music these days came in some part from the bracing novelty of that album. I'm very glad I got a chance to see them do this somewhat unique tour.

Re: The Bridge is Over (10 Responses)

2007-07-09T14:44:00.000-07:00

Slate says Youtube is killing the hiphop beef, and endangering the genre as a whole. While I like Hua Hsu's observation that beefing over Youtube is just plain lame, the analysis (such as it is) deserves some more careful attention. Hsu's arguing that, instead of putting creative energy and effort into dis tracks, like they used to, hiphop artists just release crappy videos with no thought given to care or quality. Well, the conclusion certainly rings true, but there are a few flaws here:

1) Dis tracks are, on average, not very good. They don't tend to be well-crafted, incisive commentaries on their target. The beef between Nas and Jay-Z produced two really good tracks, maybe not even that depending on your tolerance for homophobia and for sampling the Doors. The rest were pretty "LAAAaaaaaaaame," and that particular beef occurred between two fairly gifted lyricists. What do you expect from writers like 50 Cent or Cam'ron? The fact that Youtube beefs involve weak, self-centered, poorly-conceived video comebacks should surprise no-one who's bought a mixtape or listened to Hot 97.

2) Beef isn't at the heart of hiphop, and the end of highly-publicized beefs on record will have no effect on the quality or the future of the music. People seem to confuse beefs with battling -- a legitimately crucial element to hiphop. We can trot out Shan/KRS, LL Cool J/Everyone, Biggie/Pac, but the truth is that the best hiphop doesn't come from beefs. Entertaining songs, album hype, identity politics? Sure. But at the core, hiphop is about projecting yourself, not critiquing someone else (unless you're applying your worldview to them (cf The Coup or "Pussy Galore"). Ask someone to tell you about The Chronic, they aren't going to mention the Eazy-E disses, because those moments are the least interesting and most forgettable on the album. Did beefing with Wrecks 'n' Effect put A Tribe Called Quest at the top of their game? How about Eminem or Tupac? Dis tracks usually end up the least memorable parts of an MC's catalogue, even the good ones. Obviously there are exceptions, but treating hiphop beefs as anything more than manufactured hype betrays the real nature of the genre.

3) The examples in this article are terrible. Were we really expecting a masterpiece from Fiddy? Or Cam'ron? Or Puff Daddy? We're worried because these guys didn't put any effort into releasing a quality product? Mainstream hiphop tends towards cookie-cutter, homogenously dance-able crap that leaves absolutely no taste in your mouth. Youtube is not the problem here.

How can you tell if a multinational media conglomerate has been using your computer?

2007-07-05T13:42:00.000-07:00

So, Andrew Keen's book The Cult of the Amateur has stirred up quite a bit of cyberspace dust recently, dividing the (fairly small) world of people who care about the cultural future of the web into the reactionaries (Keen et al), the evangelists (Tim O'Reilly et al), and everyone in the middle (me et al) who just want to watch the Pride of Arizona Marching Band perform "Fitter Happier" and remind Alex Trebek that he's sitting on a goldmine.

I can't decide what I'm more sick of: the webvangelists who can't stop telling us how Web 2.0 will revolutionize every aspect of human thought and culture, or the weblitists who've deluded themselves into thinking that Youtube is to blame for the collapsing standards of Western cultural discourse.

Keen has a disturbing tendency to red-bait, and a fundamentally skewed concept of the purpose of culture and its attendant industries. But I have to admit to sharing some of his panic at the explosion of Web 2.0, albeit for different reasons. Keen views the combination of narcissism, amateurism, and an infinite multiplicity of messages as a culturally corrosive force, quite akin to communism, in his framing. Those things don't bother me so much, since people were amateur narcissists long before Google, and using market strategies to discourage a culture of self-obsession seems bizarre and way off the mark.

What scares me is not a cultural collapse, or a cultural revolution, but a cultural grey-out. (check out Bruno Nettl's The Study of Ethnomusicology for the origin of the term)

Why? Because, as a recent Bear Stearns report confirms, the long tail is growing and user-generated content (UGC) is here to stay. Which means there's money in it. Which means it will aggregate and consolidate. Which means it will blend, desaturate, and flatten out. Don't believe me? Turn on the radio, or watch ABC for a day, or strike up a conversation about politics with someone at a bar. Or, for that matter, get on MySpace. Grey-out, be it rhetorical, aesthetic, ethical, or whatever, has become the norm in mainstream media and discourse, for all the reasons we're familiar with. It tends to follow market activity and, where a desire to consume can be monetized, it bleaches out all but the most palatable and deliverable hues.

There's no doubt that UGC exposes us to fresh and wonderful ways of looking at the world -- made fresh and wonderful primarily by their lack of resemblance to the stifling similarity of mainstream culture. It marks an incredible (if somewhat narcissistic and/or voyeuristic) sea change in our culture. But Bear Stearns knows what they're talking about, and when they anticipate the emergence of new "aggregation vehicles" to deliver this new form of content, they're also anticipating a structuralization and consolidation of UGC into consumable product for wider and wider swaths of the buying population. We might see Youtube as a friendly "aggregation vehicle" right now, with a vast library and a friendly tagging system to sort it, but how's eBay treating us these days? What about Starbucks? That's where the world of UGC is headed, facilitated in large part by the technology and the applied ideology of Web 2.0. Here I'm making a distinction between the anti-corporate, democratic, localized, user-focused ideals professed by Web 2.0 proponents and the reality of Web 2.0's existence in the marketplace -- MySpace (aka Murdoch), Youtube (aka Google), Flickr (aka Yahoo!), and Second Life (aka...well, Second Life. It corporatized itself).

Plus, though corporations play their crucial rule in grey-out, they are not the only actors, nor the most important. The bulk of the responsibility falls on us. I'm afraid that, to some degree, I support Andrew Keen's assessment of human beings as cultural agents. We're great at it, but also we totally suck. When our agency as consumers intersects with our agency as cultural practitioners on a massive scale, the former tends to win out. This, incidentally, explains why for me the struggle is to activate people as economic agents, where their consumption, labor, and values can clash together to a productive end. Ukelele videos and second-life avatars may teach us about ourselves by opening new paradigms of human culture and interaction, but ultimately Web 2.0 is permeated and controlled by consumption. The cost of the product happens to be (more or less) free at the moment, but the basic transaction remains the same. Folks who like to make money are attracted to transactions. They especially love short, repetitive, autonomic, pleasant and convenient transactions, because they get the most bang per buck. UGC fits that mold perfectly.

Is the greyout of Web 2.0 any more worrisome or destructive than the grey-out of FM radio? Not really. But the infuriating paradox in this case is that Web 2.0 is designed to connect you with your special niche in the long tail, giving you respite from the blandness of the rest of the curve. In the old days of Web 1.0 and bulletin boards, the simple effort of finding one's special spot on the tail transformed the action from one of consumption to one of identity formation. The people who made their way to the pre-net equivalent of melodicas.com weren't just melodica consumers, they were melodica people. They occupied their niche, protected it, strengthened it, grew it. The rich culture of thought and activity that surrounded each of these niches contributed to an overall cultural diversity that could give America both the Muppets and 2 Live Crew. When finding your niche becomes an easy, repetitive, temporarily-satisfying task, you become a consumer and markets get interested.

And your niche starts going grey.

(oh, and some help with the title.)

lolpolitics

2007-06-15T11:25:00.000-07:00

As usual, I'm about five months behind the bandwagon, but before this hyper-meme explodes beyond all recognition I thought I'd throw my effort in. No real way to explain the lol___ phenomenon, so you'll just have to see it for yourself. When you know that I cut that link list down to four from about, 20, you'll get a better sense of what I did last night while hopped up on Sudafed 12-hour.

Here's mine.

Sort of helps our image?

2007-05-25T13:26:00.000-07:00

The LA Times reported earlier this week on gang members entering the building trades to gain a secure economic future. It's a fairly run-of-the-mill human interest story, as they go, but a great primer for anyone trying to understand how some unions allowed their industry power to evaporate, and how they've responded.

There's some important subtext here as well. On the positive side, the story offers excellent evidence of how the fight to win and maintain high labor standards isn't about greed -- it's about opportunity, and those opportunities can create real change in peoples' lives. I wish the story had been a little more upfront about the fact that the non-union contractors who were eating up the jobs were also paying low wages with no benefits & protections. So the building trades' efforts to regain some of that share of the workforce, while perhaps motivated by self-interest, does drive the standard up and make the jobs available to gang members and undocumented workers good ones...which in turn can help strengthen and stabilize communities.

On the negative side, the article glosses over the fact that non-union contractors and the existence of a poor, available workforce were not shocking surprises to the building trades or anyone associated with the LA construction industry. The switch from 80% union density to 20% was not some magical, overnight occurrence impossible to predict or combat. It happened because the building trades were unable or unwilling to organize the workforce and the employers that flooded the industry. The article suggests that racial issues and insularity may have played a part, but I think complacency is probably more to blame than anything else. What's remarkable is the degree to which some unions will tolerate having their industry power and density stripped from them, as long as what's left of their piece of the pie still feeds their existing membership fairly well. When they get down to around 20% density (or perhaps much sooner) they start to see a real erosion of standards and loss of guaranteed security for their own membership.

If you're paying monthly dues to an organization and have authorized it as your exclusive bargaining agent, you'd hope for a little more foresight. I'm happy to say that this erosion hasn't taken place to the same degree in every sector -- due to a combination of circumstance, foresight, and outright resistance. Others have responded aggressively and are making small gains. But you'd be hard-pressed to find a union that hasn't struggled with density problems in some form.

baseball? world bank?

2007-05-25T10:33:00.000-07:00

What will Richard Levin's next career be? I always hoped he'd end up the baseball commissioner, under the rationale that a PC neo-liberal economist with no real sympathy or sensitivity to the damage done by market "failures" couldn't do too much damage in the MLB. Head of the World Bank is exactly the kind of position where Mr. Levin's impractical and dehumanized economic views would produce terrible outcomes while appearing (as at Yale) to be progressive in the economic sense.

I respect Levin as a theorist, in so far as his work (what I've read of it) takes a considered and methodical approach to navigating the intersections of political philosophy and economic reality. But his concept of what we're doing on this planet leaves a lot to be desired, which is why his version of democracy -- and, for that matter, his interpretation of what actually constitutes market economics -- differs so significantly from people like me. Being a such a careful thinker, I don't believe he ignores the pervasive and destructive influence of capital and the complicity of the state in ceding control. I think he accepts, perhaps welcomes the situation we're in, and constructs his ideas about markets and society with our current situation as a given.

Anyway, that doesn't make him much different than any of his many, many compatriots in the Academy or the international development community, but nevertheless I'm hoping that, to score PR points, Bush may appoint someone less loyal with more of a humanitarian record. Or, as I said before, I'd pretty much settle for someone with actual development experience. A lot to ask, though.

Updates

2007-05-22T10:58:00.001-07:00

A few additions to the sidebar:

Joe Mathlete Explains Todays Marmaduke: Pretty self-explanatory. Hilariously funny and sarcastic, though.

The Fart Party: Written and drawn by Julia Wertz, also known as the cute lady who works at Cafe Abir, our old coffeeshop. The Fart Party is like what you dream a minicomic will be.

Classical Convert: Totally entertaining diary/web resource of a guy about my age who discovered "classical" music a few years ago and is evangelizing like crazy. It gives a terrific look into how and why people from our generation can connect with a whole range of music not easily available or legible to us. I enjoy it particularly for its lack of concern about how one is "supposed" to approach the Western classical cannon. He treats Beethoven and Berg like college radio treats new bands, which ends up refreshing and insightful.

Malcolm Gladwell: I was pretty hesitant to put this up here, what with Gladwell having delivered a keynote speech on the other side of the San Francisco Hilton picket line last year, but the truth is he's a brilliant, accessible writer and I read pretty much all his stuff, so...

Wired editor Chris Anderson's Long Tail Blog, which elaborates on the subject of his book. I haven't read the book, but I did read his early article and I read the blog, so...you know. Reading this blog is extremely reassuring for people with phobias about the consolidation of culture industries. It's not so reassuring for people with phobias about cultural greyout. I have both, so it's a mixed bag, but fascinating.

Edge.org, homepage of the Edge Foundation, which is dedicated to blowing your mind. Not good if you're feeling particularly politically sensitive, since with few exceptions these folks are above all that. And the influence of Richard Dawkins also makes it a fairly hostile environment for religious thought, though not for spiritual ideas. I arrived at this site via their World Question Center, which is endlessly enlightening, frustrating, and entertaining in equal measure.

Five (Easy) Pieces part 5

2007-05-18T10:42:00.000-07:00

Parmegiani - La Creation du Monde

Don't buy this. I don't even know why I'm recommending it, except to bring a close to this preposterous exercise. Okay, maybe you should buy it. There's absolutely no other way to hear it, and people should hear it, because it's unlike anything humans ever really experience. It's sort of an amoeba's-eye view of geological time, from the first intercellular communications through World War III. Maybe not. If you want to read my actual, considered opinion on this utterly remarkable piece, you can. Recording available online from my beloved Aquarius Records here.

Five (Easy) Pieces part 4

2007-05-07T12:13:00.000-07:00

Steve Reich. Really any of his pieces will do, you almost can't go wrong here if you like rhythm, timbre, harmony -- basically if you enjoy anything related to the process of hearing sounds you will like his work. Some of Reich's work is more formalist, like the tape pieces and the counterpoint compositions, and some is pretty sprawling (You Are Variations, City Life, Desert Music). Music for 18 Musicians or Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ both offer good starting places. Then you can look back towards the instrumental phase pieces or forward to Different Trains, which has my vote as the greatest composition after WWII.

If all you've heard of "minimalism" is Phillip Glass, you might feel overwhelmed by its inhumanity, its clinical disregard for physiology and sense. Steve Reich will disabuse you of that right away.

This is the recording you want of Music for 18 Musicians, and here's a great recording of Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ.

For Different Trains, Kronos recorded the undisputed benchmark.

Five (Easy) Pieces part 3

2007-04-27T23:14:00.000-07:00

John Cage: Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano

These pieces for "prepared piano" contrast starkly with his one work for "unprepared piano," in which the piano's just sitting there peacefully in a room until the performer lunges in from behind and dropkicks it. People who have only a casual acquaintance with John Cage couldn't really be blamed for believing that last sentence. Prepared piano refers augmenting, dampening, or otherwise messing with the strings inside to produce different timbres and attacks. I think the best un-theoretical way to describe it is that Cage builds his own alternate piano universe, possessing a rare and strange cosmos of sounds, melody, harmony, and rhythm. Not at all to be listened to on the regular, but not to be missed...one of those records that is sometimes the only thing. I usually put it on when I need to hear something but I can't stand the thought of all the emotional and theoretical baggage that comes with, say, TV on the Radio or Orchestra Baobab. I like (but don't own) this version. I do own this version, also very satisfying. Okay, "satisfying" might not be the word. What's that thing where after you experience something you feel kind of hollow and young and slightly hopeless? It's like that. People forget that music (and art) don't always have to make you feel good, or better, or sad, or guilty. That's like always drinking water, milk, or soda. There's more stuff out there to experience, some of it pretty complex.

ribot = badass

2007-04-16T10:40:00.000-07:00

New York's remarkable experimental music venue, Tonic, closed its doors on Friday. Just the most recent in a long, sad list of music venues that don't book Fall Out Boy or charge $50/ticket to close due to skyrocketing rent. Everyone's not going to go to Avery Fisher to hear exciting new performers, and every exciting new performer isn't going to play there. So when the Tonics and CBGBs of the world get squeezed out by condo towers, and when the music itself is improvised/collaborated on/composed specifically for events at the venue, that music quite literally disappears.

Marc Ribot kept playing till the cops shut the place down, and got arrested because he is, in addition to being a truly gifted and bizarre guitarist, a straight badass motherfucker.

Hmm? What's that? What did I do for the world of music today?

Oh. While I was riding the BART to work, I composed a song called "Get Me A Donut," which, as should be patently obvious, has no verses.

Five (Easy) Pieces part 2

2007-04-05T16:42:00.000-07:00

(Sorry for the retroactive title edit -- took me a while to land on the correct title)

Osvaldo Golijov -- Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind: There's like an unwritten rule for composers that states: If you're going to write a clarinet quintet, you have to write it such that any prospective reviewer cannot avoid using the word "lyrical." So this piece, for clarinet and string quartet, fits the mold pretty well. It's actually for B-flat, A, C, and Bass Clarinet with string quartet, so there's all kinds of weeping, keening, shrieking, and squawking from the different sizes of black wooden tube. It makes a great fit for the subject matter, a meditation on the writings and the mystical posture of Isaac the Blind, a 12th-century French Kabbalist rabbi who was, among other things, blind and batshit insane. The piece draws on Jewish prayer melodies, klezmer tunes, and cantorial vocal style. It completely mesmerizes, even on recording. Kronos Quartet recorded it with my idol David Krakauer, and the St. Lawrence String Quartet also recorded it with Todd Palmer -- also a fantastic recording.

Five (Easy) Pieces

2007-04-03T13:41:00.000-07:00

aka "Five Pieces of New Music You Might Actually Like and Listen To Voluntarily."

Modern music doesn't suck. Contemporary composers are actually trying very hard to connect with an audience that has in large part abandoned the "classical" arena for popular forms. In some cases, all that's required is the same flexibility and open ears you need to appreciate TV on the Radio or Mogwai or whoever. You get my point, maybe. In that spirit, here goes:

Frederick Rzewski--Coming Together/Attica: These two pieces function together as Rzewski's commentary on Attica prison riots and their aftermath. I first heard Coming Together in high school, and it knocked me out of my chair. Rzewski sets an excerpt from a letter by Attica prisoner Sam Melville, who died during the riots. The poetic force comes mainly from Rzewski's "squaring" process, which gradually aggregates the text sentence by sentence, starting from the beginning, culminating with the full text, then "washing away" the words sentence by sentence from the start. The internal, circular connections between the different sentiments, and the ways that different ideas and emotions ground various sections of the piece, make it anything but repetitive. Attica, meanwhile, offers the other side of the coin, with a single sentence from released inmate Richard X Clark. When asked how it felt to put Attica behind him, he simply said "Attica is in front of me." Surprisingly, Rzewski's sets this fairly bleak pronouncement against a surging, cautiously hopeful melodic sequence that sort of devastates with its beauty and ultimate lack of hope. That's not a very lucid description. Here's an excellent early recording of both pieces, with some other stuff as well. Here's the Eighth Blackbird take on Coming Together.

Popularity Contest (vol. 2)

2007-03-26T09:16:00.000-07:00

Just to keep us all up to date, the Association for Dressings and Sauces announced their Dressing of the Year for 2006.

One of the biggest differences between me now and me two years ago is my healthy, growing obsession with cooking and food. This choice, like their last few (not that I'm following...), makes no sense to anyone who's not in the dressing industry. "Asiago Peppercorn...for that delicious, nostalgic taste that brings you back to your college dorm salad bar." No thanks.

Here are my recommendations, based on comparative sampling:

Mendocino Mustard: Camille hates mustard. It's like:
Me: Camille, quick word association, okay? "Karl Rove."
Camille: [no hesitation] Mustard.

But she eats this brand. She actually requests it, all embarassed-like. Mendocino Mustard is the shit. Suggested on a Rudy's hamburger bun with olive oil mayo, green lettuce, a Quorn fake chicken patty, and Morningstar Farms fakon. It gives a powerfully convincing feel of Jack in the Box except with really tasty hot & sweet mustard. My favorite customer quote from their site: "A refrigerator without Mendocino Mustard is not a refrigerator." That's some pretty powerful negation. Like, this mustard challenges refrigerator identity politics. Close second favorite: "I've never wanted to get up in the middle of the night and stick my finger in a mustard jar until now."

Pain is Good Hot Sauce: Despite the name, this hot sauce is actually easier to eat than normal hot sauce due to the richness of flavor. It's hot, but not punishingly hot, and there's this other flavor of sweet and tangy that totally toasts my nibbles.* Also the packaging is recyclable and the design is so killer that it wards off some of the "packaged food pangs" I sometimes get when filling up my cart. They've got a Keebler-esque production team made up of Bubba, Mo, GeeGee, Blondie, Juanita, and Buckwheat (seriously). Original Juan, which produces the Pain is Good line, also makes a line called Old Fart Baked Beans. For a host reasons, both legitimate and not, Camille will never, ever, EVER buy or allow me to buy a product with the word "fart" in its name.

Daddy Sam's BBQ: This website is ridiculous. I apologize for linking to it. The sauce is great though -- it's thoroughly replaced Sweet Baby Ray's as my go-to sauce for tater tots, poached egg sandwiches, and chili.

What about salad dressing, you ask? Fuck store-bought salad dressing. If I need corn syrup, sodium benzoate and dehydrated onions I know where to find them. I dress myself; I dress my salad. Okay, getting kind of sassy. Obviously I didn't get much sleep last night.

*This is slang is so new I only just now noticed the stripes. Trying it out.

that settles...something

2007-03-18T00:55:00.000-07:00

It's hard to make heads or tails out of the recent decision by the California Nurses Association to affiliate with the AFL-CIO. It doesn't help that this news isn't getting a whole lot of attention, even though it could have fairly profound consequences for both healthcare organizing and healthcare policy going forward. Not having a cohesive opinion on this, I'll just throw out some stuff to consider.

- The CNA has historically prided itself on its independence, touting its ability to rise above labor politics, bureaucracy, etc. to advocate aggressively on behalf of nurses and patients. The independence also allowed the union to maintain a sometimes-criticized purity in terms of its membership -- only nurses. Ask a PCA or an animal care tech. how nurses view other folks "lower" down the hospital chain and you'll get an idea what I'm talking about. I'm not saying that purity's necessarily good or bad, nor is it unique to the CNA among AFL affiliates, but nurses will have to know that most of their per capita dues are going outside the profession and outside the hospital.

- Will this limit their remarkable political effectiveness? Being subsumed by the bureaucracy (and sluggishness) of AFL-CIO politics could weaken and slow down anyone. If done smartly, the added AFL-CIO resources could make the CNA an even bigger player in both statewide and national politics. We'll see.

- Is this going to help or hurt their national organizing ambitions? I think their independence and RN focus generally helped them organize in other states, but I don't know much about their campaigns. I don't totally see why someone would want to join the AFL-CIO right now, since -- apart from the newly-joined CNA -- very few of the affiliated unions are actually growing or attempting to do so in a strategic manner. In my admittedly biased view, the most dynamic and promising national organizing campaigns are being conducted by Change to Win affiliates: Justice for Janitors, Hotel Workers Rising, the Teamsters Port Campaign, Walmart, etc. And many of the natural allies for those campaigns are represented by (or in bargaining relationships with) SEIU in the healthcare industry. CNA and SIEU may still have some animus left over despite their partnership, but joint organizing within the same federation would certainly solve a lot more raiding problems than getting on opposite sides.

- Is the AFL-CIO's position on healthcare reform enough of a reason to affiliate? I actually think this makes some good sense. The AFL will strengthen its position by adding thousands of union nurses and experienced healthcare advocates, and the CNA will probably get more influence in what happens nationally than they previously had.

Is this getting boring for anyone else? It's boring me. I'm out.

a legitimate improvement to national security

2007-03-06T22:37:00.000-08:00

I'm speaking here, of course, about Congress's decision to grant organizing rights to 45,000 airport screeners. Can we all agree that, of the hundreds of millions of working Americans, these people should be on the list of Top Ten Professions Who We Really Need Be Happy On The Job? I'm going to skip over the obvious reasons for this, and I'll refrain from ranting about Mitch McConnell's remarks, because what did we expect?, and same goes for Richard Burr's comically inept and insulting attempt at a soundbite, but I will say this:

Why is it so damn hard for our elected officials to just say "Collective bargaining is good. It improves operations, increases retention, and protects workers." Meanwhile, all the reassurances about what the union won't be able to do (strike, bargain for pay, etc.) don't do anything to make me feel safer. A weak union doesn't protect anyone.

I know this is well-trod ground. I think it's worth a reminder that, as with many jobs, DHS employees make sacrifices and enter into obligations as part of their work. No union has the authority or the power to curtail the TSA from doing what it needs to do in an emergency, and plenty of collective bargaining agreements contain whole sections devoted to those exceptional circumstances. Similarly, all the TSA needs to do to avoid an emergency labor problem is employ enough people and treat them well enough to ensure proper staffing, training, etc.

To my mind, this debate exposes the equally well-trod ground of how inadequate the labor standards are for DHS employees, and the shameful hypocrisy of Congress and the Bush Administration in trying to get national security on the cheap, at the expense of our safety as well as the lives of the people charged with protecting us.

Okay, enough of that.

Tonight's Special: Tolerance, Smothered in Weak Sauce

2007-03-01T13:11:00.000-08:00

In the middle of last month, the Anglican Communion primates met in Africa and issued an ultimatum to the Episcopal Church (its U.S. "branch"), asserting that if the Episcopal Church does not discontinue ordaining gay priests and performing gay marriages by September 30th, 2007, it will essentially be barred from "full participation" in the church. This has been brewing for the last four years or so, since the Episcopals began ordaining gay priests and allowing congregations flexibility to perform gay marriages.

Yesterday, in an act of stupendous cowardice, Kathline Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop, told 2 million Episcopalians that they should comply with this ultimatum. Now I recognize that we all regularly find ourselves in situations where we must tolerate the opinions and actions of others with whom we share common ground. In our personal lives, we may be compelled to tolerate or resign ourselves to the political beliefs of our parents, spouse, boss, etc. In my case, I often find that, to preserve solidarity and coalitions, I have to make peace with incremental reformers and latte liberals in order to remain an active participant in Democratic politics. I imagine that many SEIU members, and perhaps UNITE HERE members as well, have resigned themselves to accepting a somewhat watered-down immigration stance in exchange for a real seat at the table on immigration policy.

So I can understand why a progressive Episcopalian would not resign their membership in the Anglican Church, just as I can understand why a pro-choice woman would decide to take communion (not to mention any number of other examples). What I cannot understand, or for that matter stomach, is arguing that we should change our beliefs to retain our membership. One way or another, the Anglican Communion is trying to expunge the institutions and people that hold progressive views from its ranks. They want to kick you out for your beliefs, and your response is not to assert your right to membership and your beliefs, but rather, to buckle under, degrading both in the process.

With apologies to any Episcopalians out there, that frankly disgusts me. To position a "hunger for clarity" and an "intensity" of feeling as detrimental, as dangerous, in a religious context, simply seems disengenuous. After all, the Anglican primates aren't having any trouble with clarity -- they've made their views, and the intensity of their feeling about them, quite clear. I think it demeans Episcopalians to request from them more patience and less passion in the pursuit of Jesus's teachings. And to say that "We are being asked to pause in the journey, not to go back," is so flagrant a lie that I can't imagine how she kept a straight face. Tell that to the gay and lesbian Episcopalians currently in seminary. Tell that to the ones that have already been ordained, and to their congregations. It'd be like if, in 1967, Congress had come back to black Americans and said: "Look, I know you have voting rights now, but what with all the rioting and racial violence, we want to suspend them for a bit until we figure out a solution. It's not a step back for justice, it's just a pause until we can figure out how to live in harmony."

I admit that I feel rather uncomfortable judging the actions of one of the most progressive church leaders in the United States, and a critical ally in the fight for marriage equality and gay rights. And I don't presume to argue that those LGBT concerns should supercede the integrity and existence of the church. But how long can the church continue if it sacrifices its integrity and betrays its members? History would tell us, "A whole hell of a long time," but I prefer to ignore that. Here's hoping the Episcopal Executive Council and the House of Bishops will do the right thing.

Otherwise, they'll have to change their motto to: "The Episcopal Church [Conditionally] Welcomes You...Now with 50% Weaker Sauce!"

Statistics

2007-02-27T21:49:00.000-08:00

I'm taking an night class on Statistics at the UC Berkeley Extension, as part of my general "Preparation For A Degree That, For Some Reason, I Believe I Need To Get Before I'll Be Offered The Exact Job I Already Have" program. Below, for your amusement, an excerpt from last week's class. All you need to know in advance is that, when you're dealing with probability, you refer figuratively to whatever population you're picking from as the "box."

Prof. Jurkat: So, the first step is to draw the box with the different results. Then, second, we need to determine the proportion of those results in the box...like so. Does anybody know the third step?

Alek: [raising hand] Step Three...um, make her open the box?

The Middlebury Affair

2007-02-22T15:56:00.000-08:00

Lots of press flurries around the decision by the Middlebury College history department to ban Wikipedia citations in history papers. The most sensible response appears to come from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who simply says: "For God's sake, you're in college. Don't cite the encyclopedia."

Wikivangelists see this as the beginnings of censorship, which just proves that they need to spend more time on Wikipedia learning about what censorship actually is. That said, the Middlebury history department's response to Wikipedia use strikes me as both reactionary and narrow-minded. Don't get me wrong. The preponderance of inaccuracies (which the professors ascribe to Wikipedia, not to the students) is in fact a big deal, and requires an aggressive response. As with, say, large military conflicts, lots of people getting bad information from unreliable sources is a serious problem. But, in banning Wikipedia citations, Middlebury profs missed addressing that problem altogether.

Here are, I think, the putative reasons for the ban: 1) due to convenience, students are relying on a source of information that may expose them to historical inaccuracies, which they in turn embrace because (I guess) they're too dumb or lazy to know better; 2) relying on Wikipedia prevents students from distinguishing the difference between credible and non-credible sources, from developing a critical approach to historical information, etc. -- i.e. they fail to learn proper research methodology.

So what's the solution? Hold students accountable for incorrect information, as you would with any other statement, sourced or not? Actually teach research methodology, so students can independently evaluate sources and the information they provide?

Nope. They just banned Wikipedia citations. They don't, as far as I know, have a public ban on citing The Onion or attributing words spoken by Dana Carvey on SNL to George Bush Sr. But they single out Wikipedia almost, I think, out of spite for the damage they believe it causes to traditional scholarship. Now, despite the histrionics of campus free speech advocates, this citation ban does not constitute censorship in any substantive sense. But how does it help, exactly?

What Middlebury professors (and all professors) should be doing is teaching students how to evaluate information and build a supported argument, then holding those students accountable for what they write. I think they've chosen citation ban either to avoid doing those things, which is sad, or to send a figurative shot over the open-source bow, which is petty. I read the ban, in part, as a sign of how threatened the academic elite feel by Wikipedia and the like. In my view, the limitless benefits of community-created information repositories far outweigh the potential for inaccuracy, especially since rigorous editorial and peer review don't root out inaccuracies or bias by any stretch. But Wikipedia damn sure scares people who control knowledge production, and the anti-Wiki backlash (of which this citation ban is, I think, a part) reveals just how much.

One last thing. In some parts of the academy, Wikipedia is actually offering teachers a way to teach students about research methods (as noted in the linked NYT article). Assigning students to edit or create a Wikipedia pages seems like such a better solution to both of the problems discussed above. Lame.

Sneak Preview! Next month's issue...

2007-02-21T02:16:00.000-08:00

...of Least Ambiguous Song Lyrics Ever, featuring Arcade Fire's "Intervention":

"Working for the church while your life falls apart
Singing Hallelujah with the fear in your heart"

...which, is actually still less ambiguous than the earlier chorus, "Working for the church while your family dies."

Also, badass point to Win Butler for saying "Jesus Fucking Christ, we're in a church" during their performance at St. John's last month.

Deborah Lipstadt, my badass hero

2007-02-14T11:51:00.000-08:00

For the last week, I've been puzzling over an article by Frank Furedi in Spiked. Furedi argues that in the 21st century, the concept of "denial" -- in the critical sense, as in a "Holocaust denier," an "AIDS denier," or a "climate change denier" -- has become a secular replacement for heresy. The essay alternates between bold, compelling, insightful discussion of the relevant issues and a vague, thin, accusatory rhetoric that reveals a little too much about the author's agenda.

Here are the main points. I'm paraphrasing, and (in some cases) I think I'm presenting the point in a more effective manner, but anyway:

"Those who question prevailing cultural orthodoxies are treated as immoral, evil people, and their arguments depicted as a form of secular heresy."
Targeting denial isn't about the highly-charged emotional context of the issues (i.e. genocide, the environment, etc.), but about an intolerance towards free thinking.
Traditional heresy involves denying an article of religious truth, but those have been supplanted by articles of historical and scientific truth.
"Heresy-hunters" strive to follow the model of the ultimate 20th-century taboo, Holocaust denial, by constructing new taboos.
In this way, denial becomes a "generic evil," a "free-floating blasphemy" that can apply to anything.
Difference of opinion disappears in the context of debate, replaced by accusations of denial.
The perceived danger of taboo opinions makes it "responsible behavior" to repress those opinions. Hence the wave of existing and proposed anti-denial laws (anti-genocide in the EU, criminalizing AIDS misinformation, etc.)
These "denial" accusations deliberately conflate the psychological and critical definitions of "denial" in order to discredit a viewpoint, as well as the holder of that viewpoint. Being a denier is like being "in denial." So, as in the psychological case, denial is a disability that results in suppressed information and does damage to society -- which allows the people who subscribe to those articles of historical and scientific truth to justify censoring deniers.
Moreover, it's not really about the desire to affirm those truths, but about about "moral policing."
Finally, the secular heresy of "denial" constitutes a serious threat to freedom of speech and thought, one which outweighs the ultimately negligible positive effects of censoring taboo ideas.

On the whole, I find the arguments decent, especially the implied distinction between dismissal and debate, and the effort to point towards the resultant problems regarding free speech/censorship. I also have to reluctantly concede that I admire Furedi for wading into somewhat dangerous waters and sticking to his point, given the fact that he's essentially attacking people who try to speak for genocide victims, AIDS patients, and the health of every organism on the planet.

However, in claiming that accusations of "denial" arise from an intolerance of free thinking, Furedi shortchanges the social, political, and emotional context. People's motives as scholars and scientists are (of course) affected by what they care about and what they believe should take happen in the world. Though censorship might arise from a given situation, not wanting people to get inaccurate information about AIDS doesn't exactly describe an intolerance of free thought.

Which leads me to the article's major flaw: the lack of a critical qualitative distinction between good and bad scholarship or science. One's skill at scientific or historical research should not have any bearing on one's democratic right to free expression, nor should one's personal agenda. But these characteristics may start to explain the vehemence with which people attack revisionist Holocaust historians or industry-backed climate change skeptics. After all, bad science is bad science, and people invested in getting accurate information to the public concerning, say, epidemic disease, might be pretty invested in minimizing the influence of poorly researched, unsupportable conclusions. Again, no effect on the free speech issues, but the argument for the intrinsic value of free thinking loses some integrity when it tries to compare David Irving to Copernicus.

I prefer Deborah Lipstadt's take on this question (also from Spiked...hmm). She has no compunction about calling someone a denier, but she doesn't believe in criminalizing or persecuting genocide denial. She describes the proposed EU genocide denial laws as a "body blow to academic debate." And, though I don't want to revert to using someone's C.V. to support the validity of their claims, she does have a great deal of experience in this matter, and she pursues Holocaust deniers aggressively. But she doesn't want them in jail. because of freedom of speech, because of the need to avoid making deniers into martyrs, and because making a law against genocide-denying speech implies that we don't have the evidence to prove the truth.

I like the third reason best. She's basically saying that she doesn't want to censor deniers, she wants to beat them. Debunk their scholarship, destroy their credibility, prove that they're wrong, and let them "fade into obscurity." I can get behind that, because a) it's the right thing to do; b) it not only preserves freedom of speech, it encourages it; c) it keeps us focused on deepening our knowledge of things like genocide and pollution, thus keeping them in our minds and on our agenda; and d) it places the weight of the argument where it should be -- in the evidence.

I already noted how badass Deborah Lipstadt was, but it's worth mentioning again.

Apple week

2007-02-07T11:47:00.000-08:00

Holy cow. This is like in the Olympics when the acknowledged speedskating favorite, who's been just hanging in the pack, opens up like crazy and leaves everyone else behind. I don't really do too much Apple-polishing, but in the last week this company demonstrated why it consistently beats its industry competition like an old rug. Steve "Boom" Jobs may be a complete parody of himself, but like Ang Lee, his incoherence and goofiness are hiding something.

In the past week Apple settled its enormous dispute with Apple Corps., which has two consequences, one that might be sort of important for Beatle fans, and one that's likely going to help them secure a future monopoly on digital music delivery. Yeah, we'll be able to get Beatles songs etc. on iTunes, but the big deal here is the ability of Apple (Computer) to begin selling music via "physical media," which, despite all the online music hullaballoo, still represents something like 90% of music sales.

Meanwhile, after vigorously defending their Fairplay system (a Digital Rights Management program that "secures" content downloaded from iTunes), Steve Jobs has essentially reversed their position. He's now calling on the Big Four to acknowledge the DRM doesn't work (no duh) and abolish it. I found the essay lucid and fairly balanced, with the only flaw being a somewhat facetious argument regarding the degree to which Apple's software and hardware lock users into a consumer relationship with the company. This reversal comes after a wave of challenges to the iTunes DRM system throughout Europe, and increasing competition from other online music vendors (especially eMusic) which don't use DRM.

Anyway, Apple made huge, smart strides this week to stay ahead of the curve. The iPhone (even with its 150 kabillion contacts) pales in comparison.

i tried/i gave up

2007-02-05T12:09:00.000-08:00

After about two and a half straight years of concerted resistance, I gave in to my demons. See, I love Wikipedia. I feel about Wikipedia kind of the way I do about unions -- with all their flaws, limitations, legitimate detractors, they're still the best revolution we've got.

Anyway, I knew from the moment I first got on the site, back in college, that it could be poison. I'd just recovered from an addiction to the okayplayer messageboards, and now Jimmy Wales was offering impassioned know-it-alls like me an opportunity to weigh in on everything, fight out minor points on discussion boards, root out systemic bias -- it really seemed like a wikitopia. So, even though I use the site all the time, and I followed the recent wave of criticism and praise, and got into a number of intense discussions about the merits of collectivism in encyclopaedic context...I never actually made any edits. Because I knew that as soon as I changed something, it would be a slippery slope.

This weekend I let go like it was Raging Waters. I'd been reading so much about it, and debating it, and I just decided that I couldn't hold my position in these arguments if I wasn't a wiki author myself. So now I am. Oh well.

(title ref. help)

TAP Letter/Change to Win

2007-02-02T09:34:00.000-08:00

Harold Meyerson published an excellent column in the online edition of The American Prospect on Andy Stern, titled "Organization Man." TAP published my letter in response today, on their website. I didn't really imagine that they would, so I can't say that I cleared it with our communications staff. I think it's pretty innocuous, though.

Doing Something

Harold Meyerson’s recent column on SEIU president Andy Stern ("Organization Man," 2/1/07) makes a compelling argument regarding Stern’s political effectiveness and his similarities to former UAW president Walter Reuther. But, to strengthen the comparison, Mr. Meyerson likens Reuther’s failed Alliance for Labor Action to the recently-formed Change to Win Federation, which -- according to Meyerson -- "can’t really be said to have done anything, either."

Quite the contrary. Since the formation of Change to Win, SEIU organized 5,300 janitors in the union-hostile environment of Houston, TX, the UFCW mounted an effective nationwide opposition to Wal-Mart, and UNITE HERE, in an unprecedented victory, won organizing agreements with two national hotel chains. In fact, a year ago Mr. Meyerson published a Washington Post column on the revolutionary nature of the UNITE HERE campaign, which he praised for "opening a whole new front" ("Taking on the Hotels," Washington Post, 1/18/06). These milestones, along with the record participation of labor unions in the 2006 election cycle, clearly demonstrate the commitment of Change to Win members to the new federation’s founding principle of strategic, industry-based organizing. Change to Win may have faults to match its successes, but it is, without a doubt, doing something.

Alek Felstiner, Organizer
UNITE HERE Local 2

Matthew LaClair = Badass!

2007-02-01T11:00:00.000-08:00

This is the 16-year old New Jersey high school student who recorded his history teacher telling the class, among other things, that they belong in Hell if they don't accept Jesus Christ as their savior. So, we knew he was badass from the earlier coverage, and just by definition, but I didn't realize until I looked into it further this morning the degree to which he's exposed himself by taking on this fight. And I hadn't listened to the recordings, so I didn't realize how fearlessly he confronted his teacher on the hypocrisy of a loving, merciful God that cannot tolerate dissent. "Why would a loving God give up on someone after just one lifetime?...As a parent, if your child did something wrong, would you throw them in an oven and leave them there forever?" BADASS. He should join Carlton Pearson's church.

To me, the fact that LaClair's classmates and community don't support him strengthens his claim that without the recordings he would never have persuaded the school, district, and community that Paszkiewicz was doing something wrong. I mean, the man is teaching an 11th-grade history course about the US Constitution, and he says the following:

[God] did everything in his power to make sure that you could go to heaven, so much so that he took your sins on his own body, suffered your pains for you, and he's saying, 'Please, accept me, believe.' If you reject that, you belong in hell....If you reject his gift of salvation, then you're going where you belong.''

Yeah. People are defending that. Now, to be fair, Paszkiewiscz makes one (1) feeble attempt (on the NYT recordings at least) to say that this is his belief, and he makes a couple of references to interpretation of scripture being "your prerogative," which is good. But he still presents salvation, the sacrifice of Jesus, and the condemnation of the unsaved to hell as incontrovertible facts. Not so good.

Other highlights include the penetrating distinction that "Scriptures aren't religion," by way of arguing that all Christian religions believe in one book, "The Bible -- you should be able to bring that into the classroom and read it."

Another hilarious moment: Paszkiewicz asks the class, sarcastically, if "anyone ever observed" the evolution of simple life forms to complex life forms, like it's a ridiculous notion. Then he goes on to say, sarcastically again, "You can collect some data...like the fossil record." ....hmm. Yeah, that pesky fossil record, with its overwhelming mountain of observed data supporting evolution. Oh, also comparative anatomy, molecular genetics, geographical distribution...there's some observation going on. But, damn, scientists can't prove that life spontaneously generates, and they can't repeat it in experimental conditions, so it can't be a scientific fact! Wait, whoops, that's completely wrong because they can and have. It's one thing to present the scientific argument for evolution in an unbiased manner, then express your belief in another explanation of life, but lying about what's out there is just a shameful, criminal action from any teacher, especially a public school teacher.

Also good: Paskiewicz distinguishes faith from blind belief, saying that his faith is "rooted and grounded in Scripture" because of "Prophecy," which came true. What's his example? Moses says in Genesis (right) that Israel would endure 400 years of slavery, and, lo and behold, it happened!...When? In the next book of the Bible. Not really a prophecy so much as a clunky piece of foreshadowing.

I was disappointed to see that the most aggressive response from the school district was to ban unauthorized recording in class...which, okay, that's fine, but isn't there a larger problem here? If students have to surreptitiously record their teachers in order to fix drastic Constitutional problems with the curriculum, maybe the district can do better than a memo and some teacher education. Here's some evidence that they're on the wrong track. Paszkiewicz recently compared global warming scientists to Hitler repeating a lie often enough that people believe it. The school board's lawyer reported that the board didn't investigate the report (???) because the comment wasn't religious and didn't break any kind of law.

Um. I don't know where to start with that. He didn't break a law (assuming New Jersey doesn't have a statute requiring public school teachers to represent scientific and historical truth to the best of their ability). But come on, you've got recordings of this guy endangering your school district by violating the Constitution in a class about the Constitution, and you didn't feel the need to investigate an incident wherein that same teacher discredits science some more?

Leaving aside the wildly inappropriate nature of the Hitler analogy, global warming isn't a lie -- calling it one is. Also, much as we might like to believe it, Hitler's use of the "big lie" theory is widely misinterpreted. In Mein Kampf, Hitler attributed the "big lie" strategy to a conspiracy of Jews in media, bent on convincing the German people that they lost World War I (they did). Goebbels later appropriated it for his attacks on Churchill's "Lie Factory." So, Nazi leaders obviously believed in the effectiveness of the "Big Lie," and it may seem like the "Big Lie" concept played an obvious role in Hitler's propoganda strategy, but that latter point hasn't been substantiated. So, giving Paszkiewiscz the benefit of the doubt, we'll assume that he's not implicitly associating global warming scientists with an evil conspiracy of "Big Lie"-telling Jews. Instead, we'll just assume that he's adopting the common "Big Lie" myth that surrounds Hitler, and he's ignorant of WWII/Holocaust history.

That's cool, though, it's not like he's a history teacher or anything.

velveeta = still gross

2007-01-31T13:07:00.000-08:00

Kraft is finally going to split off from Altria (aka Phillip Morris USA). According to the NYT, Altria and Wall Street expect this to offer yet another boon to the morally bankrupt individuals and ethically compromised mutual funds that invest in Big Tobacco. The NYT and tobacco PR execs took the opportunity to explain why tobacco, as an investment vehicle, is basically impervious to government regulation, litigation, public opinion, and health concerns. David Adelman of Morgan Stanley noted that "people like to smoke...it's enjoyable and there's not an alternative product."

Well...that's just because you can't (yet) sell stock in living an extra 10 years. But, with all due respect to Adelman's market savvy, I don't agree that there's not an alternative product, and frozen dinners provide a poor analogy. For one thing, frozen dinners aren't just about food cost, they're about storage convenience, shelf-life, and preparation time. If frozen dinners become too expensive, people will certainly switch to another product, but only if it also possesses those other key characteristics.

It's the same with cigarettes. There's more too them than nicoteine delivery, obviously. There's a ritual/habitual aspect, and a social cache as well. I don't smoke, so that's just what I observe, but there may be (there likely is) even more there. Saying that there isn't an alternative product seems simplistic to me. To me, the market elasticity of cigarettes (that people will buy them regardless of price hikes) does less to demonstrate their addictive quality than it does to dramatize these intangible aspects. So, two conclusions:

1) I believe the addictive nature of cigarettes, as well as their other characteristics, could well be replicated in an alternative product.

2) The elasticity of cigarettes may be due in part to a hidden cost that hasn't made its way into public consciousness. Forget about the eleven minutes you lose each time you smoke -- getting treatment for heart disease or lung cancer is expensive.

Also a fun fact from the NYT article: I'd never heard of this Vice Fund before, but if you check out their website, it's pretty entertaining. Like they specifically set out to see how much morally reprehensible ideology they could cram into one website. Blech.

Music Misc.

2007-01-29T12:55:00.000-08:00

1) Obviously I dropped out of band way too early. Doesn't it keep you up at night, the fact that you've never heard "Crosseyed and Painless" played by a marching band? No longer (check youtube for clips).

2) A sensible, jargon-free, clear, concise, non-polemic from Sean O'Hagan about the effect of digitization on our relationship with music. I take issue with the idea that digitization removes music from context -- the contexts just change, and digital contexts are anything but information-poor. But I agree wholeheartedly that the change in context produced by digitization, one of space, time, interface, etc., may well squeeze out elements of emotional investment that shape our long-term relationship with music. By the way, I get the hypocrisy in praising an essay for its lack of jargon and then cramming a ton of jargon into my response. Also, Sean O'Hagan may be Irish.

3) Generally when people research music and the brain, they try to fit music into our structural understanding of neurocognition and behavioral science. They want to know what music can tell us about those fields, and thus about how our brains work. For a refreshing change, Daniel Levitin concerns himself with the opposite (in my view). He's interested in what our brains and behavior can tell us about the remarkable cultural phenomenon that is organized sound. The NYT gave him his due at the end of last month, and the article's been stewing in my head for a while. See Levitin Lab and Levitin's website for more.

4) It was a weekend of chock-full of culture. We saw Babel, a film so depressing that it's "upbeat" plot involves a deaf-mute recovering from her mother's suicide...which, yeah, you bet, she witnessed. We also saw Ladysmith Black Mambazo in concert. They are apparently back from Outer Space.

Revolver (1966)

2007-01-26T11:05:00.000-08:00

An excellent interview with Giles Martin on All Songs Considered prompted me to finally get back to these. Let me say that it has been a real struggle to fairly consider this Cirque du Soleil project. I mean, however much you dress it up, Cirque du Soleil is ultimately about transvestite clowns. The Magical Mystery Tour movie failed for a reason, after all. But I have to admit that Giles Martin is a very smart guy, and obviously possesses a talent commensurate to his father's. Based on the clips I've heard, the music is actually terrific. The staging appears to be a ridiculous skateboarding, breakdancing fiasco. Should have just been an album.

Anyway, Revolver.

Most Overrated: "Good Day Sunshine." This song has some wonderful rhythmic and harmonic divergences in the chorus, and an awesome fade, but basically it's lame enough that it seems like Paul wrote specifically for Kermit the Frog. It's cheesy enough to make "Yellow Submarine" seem mature and subversive. On an album with "I'm Only Sleeping" and "She Said She Said," it sticks out more than necessary. Overrated.

Most Underrated: "She Said She Said." Very easy choice. The correct genre title for this song (and its author, actually) would be "existential badass." It just destroys, but in this finicky way that's impossible not to love. I had a lot more to say about the structure of this song, and the meter-changes in the bridge, and the the brilliance of the verse melody, and the high dog-whistle organ mixed way in the back, and Ringo getting a fill in every verse to go apeshit -- but you can just listen to it.

Also, the song contains an excellent transcription of my internal monologue during English class at Yale:

"Even though you know what you know
I know that I'm ready to leave
And you're making me feel like I've never been born."

Dramedy

2007-01-19T13:43:00.000-08:00

The RIAA, once again demonstrating an unexplored capacity for willful ignorance, is now attempting a crackdown on mixtapes. Someone needs to explain to them that, from time to time, social, technological, or cultural developments by their very existence simply nullify certain applications of the law. Traditional copyright is not going to work for digital content, and people who deal with these issues as a matter of course discovered that a long time ago. But the music industry, despite its ostensible involvement in creating and defining the cultural vanguard, spends most of its time studying how to cash in on existing trends, instead of studying (or attempting to shape) the culture of subsequent consumer generations. So instead of reading the signs and designing a delivery system that would protect its assets, the music industry followed a "wait and sue" policy (I came up with that independently -- kind of disappointing to find out it's a widely-used phrase).

That was dumb.

For example, a careful (or even superficial) study of mixtape consumers would immediately reveal what the Times article points out: "part of the fun involves hearing rappers remake one another's songs and respond to one another's taunts; a great mixtape captures the controlled chaos that hiphop thrives on." Mixtapes have the potential to be incredibly lucrative, as any of those guys selling $5 CDs on the street can tell you. But, obsessed with shoring up a doomed section of copyright law, the RIAA decided to arrest DJ Drama. It's not going to work, it's not a deterrent.

Imagine how much the Big Four/Five would have made directly on online sales if they didn't have to enter expensive contracts with mediators like Apple et al. This will turn out just the same. The record companies have already missed the boat on mixtapes, and if/when they do figure out a way to enter the real mixtape market (DJ Clue doesn't count), they will likely do so in compromised, water-down fashion that won't make them much money.

By that time listeners will have moved on to someone or something else -- which the RIAA will immediately try to sue, or arrest.

The Albums I Bought and the Albums I Said I Bought...

2007-01-08T17:24:00.000-08:00

As part of my family's new budgeting process, I don't buy music anymore, really at all. See, the the only places I want to buy music are Amoeba, Rasputin, and Aquarius records, and I don't appear to possess the willpower necessary for me to buy fewer than 10 cds at a time. I used to have that kind of money because I spent literally nothing on anything else (I have been clothes shopping 3 times in the last 9 years), but now, instead of living in a dorm with Stanford graciously paying the bulk of my Yale tuition, I live in San Francisco and I've chosen the lowest paying job in my field, in preparation for the most expensive education available.

So no new CDs since some time in early 2005. And due to our environmental & energy concerns, plus the glorious move that put us two blocks away from BART, I don't listen to the radio in the car anymore. Given a choice, I'd rather see live music than buy another CD to add to the 1200 I'm still struggling to file. As a result I can't in good conscience make a "Best of" list for 2006 because I have only the vaguest notion of what went on, musically speaking.

But who cares. Here's my best of list, from the extremely limited perspective of someone with just enough time to invest in music he already likes.

Rainer Maria - Catastrophe Keeps Us Together. Well, apparently, catastrophe only kept them together just long enough to record and tour this album. Man, did that bum me out. The last time I saw them live it was at San Francisco's crappy Bottom of the Hill, where the sound and food compete for least appetizing aspect of the overall experience. But the album is wonderful, improved by its flaws (much like the band), and very hard not to fall in love with (much like the band's bassist and lead singer, Caithlin de Marrais). Incredible lead single, surprisingly affective acoustic numbers, Kyle Fisher's remarkable ability to shred a guitar wistfully (?) -- it all adds up to Rainer Maria. It's nice, and rare, for music to be actually affirming. Punk, Gospel, Beethoven, and "Getting Better" are a few examples that come to mind, but I'm surprised at how infrequently music will make you feel better about the future (as opposed to simply feeling better about the present). "I've got a plan/I'm gonna find you/at the end of the world," sings De Marrais on the album's phenomenal lead single. It's possible I'm just a sucker for the prospect of lots of time with a pretty redhead in a post-apocalyptic bomb shelter.

Walkmen - A Hundred Miles Off. This album disappointed folks who were expecting and hoping for another Bows + Arrows. That includes me. But, though it's not as good as the impossibly appealing Bows + Arrows, it succeeds at hanging together better and annoying me less. The Walkmen are like Robin Williams -- very good, but annoying at the extremes. The last album alternated between cuts that simply capture your whole being for 3 minutes ("No Christmas While I'm Talking," "The North Pole," the title cut, and of course "The Rat") and ones that appear to have been created with the intention of irritating us crosseyed. A Hundred Miles Off gives up the epic in favor of the effortless, which means I'll listen to it less frequently, but all the way through. Highlights include "Louisiana" (which has a distinct flavor of nightime barbecue outdoors), "Emma, Get Me a Lemon," which is about what it says it's about, and "All Hands on the Cook," which is about nothing, but Hamilton Leithauser does make a series of bizarre requests in the bridge, including a request to "stop talking to the neighbor's dog." The real star of the album is Matt Barrick, the preternaturally gifted drummer and expert in timbres, textures, and straight whaling on his trap. The lame lyrics of "Emma, Get Me a Lemon" only really work because of the music's subtext: "Emma, you might as well get me a lemon because, according to these drums, I'm about to be burned alive by a Polynesian cargo cult."

Mike Relm -- Radio Fryer. This is a cheat, as he actually released it in 2005. But he's Mike Relm. I love this man and his music. I'm pretty sure that, given the chance, my wife would leave me for him because he's that talented and charming. Which, writing it now, sounds like a compliment to me, but you know what I mean. If I had to pick a highlight from this 70 minute mixtape wonder, I don't know what I'd choose. "Relm and Josie," which pits the cheesiness of Outback against the cheesiness of pre-Cube NWA? "Amadeus is Passing Me By?" "Ain't Goin' Out Like Linus?" They're all good. Mike Relm succeeded in translating that remarkable capacity of live DJs -- making you enjoy a song more than you ever had before -- to what is, essentially, a very accomplished and complex blend tape. The only thing I could recommend higher than buying this album would be seeing him live.

Yo La Tengo -- I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass. I haven't bought this for myself (see above), but between downloads, the live show, Youtube, etc. I have a pretty good idea. Basically it's this decade's I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One. I said most of the relevant things in the review (linked), and in photoshop, but in case you didn't know, Ira Kaplan does feedback solos like he's plugging the meter.

Jay Dilla -- Donuts. Jay Dee's aesthetic sensibilities are so acute, he can make an aimless, incoherent beat tape like Donuts into a masterpiece. Sometimes Jay Dee was lazy, and sometimes his ability to effortlessly replicate styles led to some pretty generic production. But Donuts plays like the best of Slum Village or Common's fourth album -- by turns sloppy and finessed, exposed and submerged. It's like he's saying: "Here's everying you can do with hiphop production -- except you probably can't." R.I.P.

Smoosh -- Free to Stay. Smoosh will win you over. Is that a guarantee, you ask? I'll put it this way: if you don't fall in love with the opening single "Find a Way," then you probably won't like the way you look either. I saw these young women live last year, and the fact that I willingly stood in a group of 14-year old hipsters and their chaperones (along with, doubtless, the assorted pedophile) should speak for itself. Damn is this band fun.

Roots -- Game Theory. Foregone conclusion.

Why? -- Elephant Eyelash. Also from 2005, but started getting a lot more heat in 2006. So, so many reasons to love this album. "Crushed Bones," "Waterfalls" (which, though not a cover of TLC, is now the best song with that title, something I thought TLC had pretty well locked down), "Rubber Traits," "Gemini (Birthday Song)," the album is just stuffed with bizarre, unique, disturbing music that sounds something like what you know but not quite. Kind of Daniel Johnston, kind of Pharcyde, kind of Laurie Anderson, kind of Smile outtakes -- impossible to describe. See them live, get the album.

Afro Reggae - Nenhum Motivo Explica a Guerra. Speaking of music that sounds like nothing else. The cultural politics of this music is pretty complex -- seeing Favela Rising may help significantly, but you still need to draw your own conclusions about the medium and the message (which requires babelfish unless you speak Portuguese -- and that won't help too much because it's insanely fast hiphop and may include fairly specific slang from Vicario General). Great album, hard to listen to frequently, but overwhelming (in a good way) when it comes to atmosphere and scope.

Arab Strap - The Last Romance. Also foregone. I love this band, and the newest album is just packed to the top with bitterness, humor, resentment, desperation, resignation, and hushed lyricism. What they do best. Surprisingly, there are more "upbeat" tunes on this one than on any previous, including an undeniably happy closer in "There is No Ending" (my nominee for Best Song of 2006). Lots more thoughts on the album and the band in an earlier review. Probably don't go buy this album if you're easily depressed by music. Or buy this one, but don't buy any of the others till you're ready to hear Aidan Moffat ask for "something to wipe with."

That's all. Maybe 2007 will be the Year of Buying Albums from Last Year. Looking forward to it.

(reference help for the title)

photoshop thursday

2007-01-04T18:19:00.000-08:00

Inspired directly by what I find to be a hilarious observation on Weapons of Class Instruction:

Andre Benjamin Andre 3000

Walter Benjamin Walter 3000

Alternate title: "Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." (And Camille, being a newly-minted critical theory geek, would want me to add the more accurate translation -- "...in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility."

Don't be a (TARGET)

2006-12-13T09:40:00.000-08:00

So, I was having a terrific morning. Sitting at the iMac, multigrain flakes before me, last night's episode of Friday Night Lights playing to psych me up for work. Then I get on BART, to find yet another thinly-veiled abstinence poster. It's the usual stuff: "Defend your future...stay away from drinking, drugs, teen sex...only YOU can decide that you matter." The best part? "Don't be a (TARGET)," with a little bullseye. I assume the end of that sentence is "...for Satan's crossbow."

I see this stuff around all the time, and it's definitely part of our national culture now, thanks to Bush, Tommy Thompson, and the Christian right. What bugged me so much this morning, apart from the fact that abstinence-only doesn't work, and that it promotes rampant misinformation, and that it definitely doesn't work unless you at least mention the concept of not having sex, is that I've always been proud of California for being the only state never to take federal funding for abstinence-only education programs. As Planned Parenthood's Mary Jane Wagle wrote in her op-ed to the LA Times a while back, abstinence-only education is like a driver's ed class where the teachers show students scary photos of accidents but never tell them to how to buckle a seatbelt.

But it kind of defeats the purpose if HHS and regressive school districts can take the back door and contract directly with all these unctuously named groups like Teen Esteem and FirstResort. Despite a 2004 California law that mandates comprehensive sex education (including birth control & abortion), the abstinence-only movement is still making gains in places like Fremont, Concord, Mt. Diablo, and Newark (not to mention all over central and southern CA). Hence the poster on BART. It was produced by a non-profit CBO called Await and Find, for which a more appropriate title would be "Await (Three Weeks) and Find (Out if You Got Pregnant)."

On a related topic: did anyone else feel mildly jealous of other teenagers pledging abstinence, like their opportunities for casual sex were so myriad that they had to make a formal, public vow in order to avoid it? When I was sixteen years old I didn't need Teen Esteem to make sure I remained abstinent: I worked on the literary magazine, had a job at the Mall, and played clarinet in a youth orchestra. The whole "not having sex" thing was pretty well taken care of.

That would have been a good slogan for the orchestra, by the way:

"El Camino Youth Symphony: It'll take your kid at least two extra years to get laid."

Badass pt.3

2006-12-08T10:00:00.000-08:00

Hotel workers are three days into a hunger strike in the Century corridor at LAX. That is pretty badass, not least because (according to my sources on the ground) they're staged directly outside the Westin LAX restaurant. So guests eating breakfast are looking right out at them, and employees from the hotel are coming out on breaks to support the strikers.

LA recently extended its 1997 minimun wage law to cover the Century corridor by the airport, an unusual and somewhat controversial legislative move. UNITE HERE Local 11 fought hard to get the law passed, and the hotel owners/operators and other business will likely mount a referendum challenge. This hunger strike emphasizes the crying need to enforce that law, and also the workers' need for a seat at the table with airport hotel employers.

I don't have much commentary here, except to call attention to the new ground broken by this minimum wage extension. There's not much legal justification for mandating wages in the private sector for a particular geographic area or industry, though it isn't (in California) specifically prohibited. There are certainly economic and moral arguments for implimenting as wide-ranging a living wage as possible, but the legal dimensions remain murky.

My favorite moment in the press coverage:

"This is discriminating against 12 hotels in a very small part of the city," says Harvey Englander, a lobby consultant to the Los Angeles Hotel Association.

Proponents claim that the ordinance is justified because the airport generates the business for these hotels. But the city's "Staples arena generates business for downtown hotels," counters Mr. Englander. "Does that mean City Council should come in and set their wages and benefits?"

He said it, not us.

this week in the n-word...

2006-11-28T14:54:00.000-08:00

Jesse Jackson makes a fool of himself again (by the way, I'd originally come up with an individual link for every word in that sentence, but I ended up needing to split two of them in half to accommodate all the links, so I decided I should scrap it for being too hard to navigate).

Putting aside the bizarreness of the priorities here, and the general distastefulness of straining to politicize this issue, can Jesse Jackson et al truly be claiming the word "nigger" as "unprotected" by the First Amendment? Really, honestly? Even if you grant the existence of hate speech, and grant it an exception to the Constitution, and grant the word "nigger" a place in the hate speech lexicon, can there be any way to construe it as unprotected without context? Chaplinsky set the bar in this regard, outlining a First Amendment exemption for "fighting words," or words that could incite an immediate breach of the peace. Since then (1942) other cases (R.A.V., Doe v. Michigan) have expanded and qualified how the law ought to view these kinds of exemptions, but in every instance the context plays a fundamental, determining role. If Jesse Jackson actually attempted a legal argument for "nigger" -- the word alone, isolated from other words and its usage context -- as unprotected "hate speech," I imagine he would end up completely buried by the mountains of contradictory evidence. Hell, you could probably win the other side of that case using That Nigger's Crazy (Richar Pryor, 1974) alone.

One last thing on Jesse Jackson. Think about the last, say, 20 times you've heard the word "nigger" used in some sort of public context, or in some artifact intended for public consumption. I'd be shocked if it occurred in anything besides a) a hiphop song, b) a comedy routine (that includes Richards, despite him being profoundly unfunny), c) a journalistic piece on the topic (though you'd be hard pressed to find the word itself, unfortunately), or d) some form of white-pride bigotry on a short-range AM talkshow or a website. With the exception of the last one, which people in the "entertainment industry" have virtually no control over, can you think of a single instance that would meet any of the requirements of an exemption? Me neither. This is a waste of time, and each time Rev. Jackson does something like this, it makes me feel less honored by having marched with him various times.

If you really want to prevent a breach of the peace, take away DR Period's MPC sampler. I've barely even been in a fight, and the "Ante Up" remix makes me want to yap fools.

There's another entry to go with this, on John Ridley's Esquire "Manifesto," but that'll have to wait till tomorrow.

Rubber Soul (1965)

2006-11-22T11:57:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the delay on this. It's due to the fact that I had a lot of trouble deciding about this album. Rubber Soul is comprised of songs that live up to their stature ("Drive My Car," "Nowhere Man," "Michelle," "Norwegian Wood," "In My Life"), great songs that get a little lost amongst the tall trees ("Girl," "I'm Looking Through You," "Run For Your Life"), good songs that a bunch of folks know but were still album filler ("You Won't See Me," "What Goes On," "Wait!"), and George's songs, which contribute to the feel of the album but remain forgettable to most people. I played "If I Needed Someone" about five hundred times, but that was mostly for the harmony and guitar line.

Rubber Soul, as a whole and song-by-song, has received about the right amount of adulation. So looking at over/under-ratings becomes more dependent on personal preference. As if it ever involves something more formal -- it's not like I do in-depth public opinion research. The methodology runs more along the lines of:

Overrated: When this song comes on, how guilty do I feel skipping to the next track?
Underrated: When this song comes on, how indignant do I feel about its shameful neglect by mainstream music audiences?

Anyway.

Most Overrated: I actually almost put "In My Life," because as great as it is, it has still been elevated by critics and fans beyond all hope of honest assessment. Mojo named it the greatest song of all time, when a better assessment would be "greatest song on Side 2 of Rubber Soul." Its slight plodding feeling in the bridge always bugged me a little, as does the vague schmaltzy-ness (and the obvious gestures at Smokey & the Miracles). But the organ solo, guitar lick, and above all the lyrics -- there's no way to describe those without using the word "timeless," so I couldn't in good conscience claim it to be overrated. Plus it's almost Thanksgiving and I'm going to have to spend about three days with my side of the family, and picking "In My Life" over basically anything else in the catalogue would create problems. So, "The Word" it is. Yeah, this song has never done much for me. As a "political statement" it's pretty bland, and Paul's lively bass playing doesn't redeem a kind of boring structure. Mainly it's overrated because it foreshadows later compositions by John; "All You Need is Love" in particular, but also stuff from his early solo years. Meh - I always skip it and don't feel the least bit bad about it. [(c) Butch]

Most Underrated: "I'm Looking Through You." Easy. This is one of those McCartney compositions that exhibit the highest degree of "form," in the sense used by Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein referred to "form" as a "magic ingredient" that exhibits a "breathtaking rightness" and "inevitability." According to Bernstein, Beethoven possessed an "inexplicable ability to know what the next note has to be," and I think the same accurately applies to Paul McCartney. To paraphrase from Bernstein's essay: "When you get the feeling that whatever note succeeds the last is the only possible note that can rightly happen at that instant, in that context, then chances are you're listening to a mid-period Beatles song by Paul." "I'm Looking Through You" belongs on that list with "Yesterday," "Penny Lane," "Eleanor Rigby," etc. The leap and fall of the melody matches the lyric perfectly, as does the performance. But under the surface, the song's buoyancy grates against a gentle, resigned bitterness that I find hard to characterize. "You don't look different, but you have changed" cuts to the heart of, I'd guess, the vast majority of romantic problems. And to couple that with "You don't sound different, I've learned the game," allows the second verse to imply an emotional history of deteriorating communication. What kills me about that line is the narrator having already figured out that what he hears is different from what's being said, and the resignation apparent in that admission. The honesty and intimacy has simply disappeared overnight, and isn't going to return. This is true of every song, but it bears repeating that the effectiveness of "I'm Looking Through You" lies in the juxtaposition of the music and lyrics -- in this case, their wild difference in tone. Thanks to McCartney's writing, the band's performance, and Martin's production, it comes across as a complete package, and somewhat spontaneous, inconsequential one at that. Beware of those songs -- they're the ones that will burrow into your mind and replace all your emotional referrents. Fair warning for people who don't own Rubber Soul.

Classical music + Jeans = Badass

2006-11-20T19:35:00.000-08:00

A lot of badass stuff has taken place since the last time I posted on this, but here's the thing. Those linky-linky blogs always disappoint me a little. It feels like you're a teacher in a college seminar where, instead of reading responses, the students brought in "cool rocks" they "found in the yard."

So even though this particularly badass thing happened a while ago, I haven't had time to settle down and think about it. I don't have time to do that now, either, but irregardless it's totally badass and not only that, but when you read about it you might even describe it as urgently badass. Probably that will not happen.

Eric Edberg is a member of the music faculty at DePauw University. Along with being a cellist, he also describes himself as a "Drum Circle Facilitator." I have no response to that, because it speaks for itself. I will say that, although many things about this story are badass, facilitating a drum circle is not.

But in August, he did something pretty badass. He put on a concert of "classical music in jeans," which he describes as an "'informal/interactive musical event' -- a recital with the usual rules of concert etiquette suspended." Okay, that description isn't likely grabbing you by the throat, but think about it:

1) Live music is something you have to go out of your way to see. Unlike TV, radio, internet, wireless media, digital storage, and most of the other things it competes with in the entertainment field (not to mention alcohol and parlor games), experiencing live music requires a relatively substantial investment of time and money in advance. What did they do to punish you in first grade? They made you sit quietly and do nothing -- sometimes in the dark. (Or at least, the time-out room was always less well-lit than the others. I spent some time there.) So why would you voluntarily submit to that, especially for an experience you're likely unfamiliar with, only to find yourself too embarassed to divulge it on Monday at the water cooler. With the rigorous etiquette suspended, classical music becomes a lot more like a visit to the museum, the theater, the movies, etc. Add a big red cup of beer and some fried appetizers and you'd see frat guys there in no time.

2) Classical music hasn't been "classical" for about 150 years. Even when it was, it had plenty of waltzing, stomping, balladry, and even some groove. All the elements that characterized popular music have become more and more a part of so-called "classical" music, to the point that the "classical" moniker, which meant nothing at first, means even less now. Unlike jazz, hiphop, punk, etc., the vast cosmos of music that falls into the "classical" category at this point has very little uniting it into a cohesive genre, and very little separating from its counterparts across the record store aisle. Longer format (although not really), different instruments (although not really), lower volume & lack of amplification (although not really), distinct separation from folk/popular music (although not really) -- well, you see where I'm going here. At this point, and actually for about the last 75 years, the only things really separating classical music from everything else were its conventions and its audience. No reason not to change the former in order to increase the latter.

3) Many of the pieces currently experienced in worshipful, darkness were originally greeted with cheers, boos, rioting, etc. They didn't give you cough drops outside the theater. They didn't patronize you by announcing the rules at the beginning. If you coughed during the slow movement, you didn't worry about having your car keyed after the performance. I'm not saying I don't find these things disruptive, and it actually is distracting for people to pay $50 to see a concert and then talk straight through it. But that is, and always has been, the price you pay for being alive and not a hermit farmer. The idea of doing everything you possibly can to replicate the original sound, including period instruments and deep score research, only to perform the piece in a context completely alien to its original life makes no sense whatsoever. We need to give it up.

4) Up above you might have been doubting my assertion that beer would be enough to lure frat guys to a classical music concert. First off, just re-check your math there. But also recognize that people's musical tastes are forever broadening, and audience divisions are disintegrating accordingly. We have the internet and progress in musical innovation to thank for that. Unfortunately, classical music audiences are behind the curve in this respect (no evidence for this, though I've read various things in the past). Even though the DePauw concert was certainly a novelty, and this attracted more attention than it otherwise would have received, the audience response demonstrates that the concept worked. People are not allergic to classical music, and if presented in a format which they can relate to, they'll listen. Amplifying the performance and looking at less traditional venues could probably do more to build the audience and shape the experience.

5) People who care deeply about classical music (me, yup) stand to lose little to nothing with these kinds of changes. None of my favorite performances (either as a participant or a listener) took place in a darkened concert hall -- and most involved no tuxedo at all. Anyone who has seen Radiohead or Public Enemy live knows that you don't need etiquette to be serious musicians and convey your music well. If it's a less of a sacred experience because the pianist's wearing sneakers, then you need to reexamine why you go to concerts in the first place. You don't need a classical concert to see solemn people in formalwear make pained expressions: just go to the junior prom.

Here's the video footage of the concert. See how, without all the pomp, it becomes obvious that Haydn (I think it's Haydn) wrote a piece for people to get up and dance to? Yeah, the dancers are awkward and maybe trying to get attention, but just the small etiquette changes (jeans, cheering, etc.) make it seem a lot less bizarre than it would.

Conclusion: Badass.

Update & URL change

2006-11-20T16:08:00.000-08:00

NewPlasticWeblog has migrated fully to Blogger Beta now, which -- like many things in my life -- was a stupid thing to do, but, being done, isn't worth attempting to reverse.

If you're here you've already noted the new address, but on the offchance you use bookmarks, or link to this blog, please (take a look at yourself and) make that change.

no accident

2006-11-13T17:09:00.000-08:00

There's a lot flying around regarding the role of organized labor in the recent election cycle, including Greenhouse's recent NYT piece. I worked professionally on this cycle, and I work professionally in organized labor, so there's a limit to what I'm willing to post for public consumption. That, for Ana and others out there, is why I haven't written anything about our political climate -- because, even given my extremely minor position in the grand scheme of things, anything I post makes me a spokesperson for our union and I prefer to leave that to the communications professionals. Plus I don't trust the blogosphere.

Anyway, three things to point out:

1) Despite all the objections and worries last year regarding organized labor's reduced political might after the split, labor played a larger role (nationwide) in this election than any in recent memory. So much for that Republican wet dream.

2) In splitting off from the AFL-CIO, Change to Win representatives cited a desire to spend more effort and resources organizing and less on political work. Yet the Change to Win unions played a huge role, not just through grassroots mobilization but through endorsements, contributions, etc. For people who care exclusively about organizing campaigns, that's not entirely good news. But I've only met a handful of people who fit that description, and almost none in the labor movement. The truth is, government plays a fundamental role in the workplace, and it becomes very difficult to win battles (organizing or otherwise) there without some modicum of government support. It's not impossible by any stretch, but as the labor movement tries to rejuvenate itself through industry-wide fights, operating without decent legislation and friendly electeds may prove not just difficult but prohibitively difficult. Also, even given CtW's heavy political focus in the last 6 months, there's still a significant difference in platform between the AFL and CtW. For example, the Employee Free Choice Act (which Change to Win pushed hard throughout this cycle) has a lot more to do with organizing than the various trade and outsourcing restrictions which the AFL-CIO will likely push in the new session.

3) Labor's critical role in this election did not arise by happy coincidence, nor did it come about because the AFL-CIO and Change to Win signed an agreement to cooperate on the 06 election. The grunt work of these campaigns took place at the local level -- usually in labor councils, federations, and other organized union coalitions. Last year these coalitions had to fight to remain united as our national movement fractured, and those that refused to be weakened by the split were able to mount effective mobilizations for Democrats. In other words, they (and not so much Anna Burger and John Sweeney) deserve the credit for labor's success this cycle.

That's all. Back to the Beatles.

Help (1965)

2006-11-10T17:36:00.000-08:00

This is going to get harder as we go along. We’re moving into the period where the albums become so good that it’s impossible for anything to be overrated, and so beloved that it’s impossible for anything to be underrated. It might take a second to get your arms around that last sentence, but – even though I’m very, very tired – I ran it down the belt a few times and it seems right.

Anyway.

Most Overrated: “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.” I know, I know. I promise I didn’t choose this for Pitchfork-style anti-cool shock value. I honestly believe that this song receives more reverent praise and attention than it deserves. Granted, Lennon wrote an incredible lyric that balances subtle emotions – he's imitating Dylan, but he gets beyond the wordiness to very Lennon-esque direct honesty. Unfortunately, the Dylan-imitation on the rest of the song succeeds far less well. The Beatles can do Brill Building, they can do Motown, they can do Gene Vincent and Sun Records, and (later on) they could do blues and soul. But they really weren’t folkies. At best, they made folk pastiche – kind of like Brahms writing gypsy songs into his string quartets. Anyway, “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” is just too obvious of a grasp towards the Dylan of a year or two before the record came out. And, though the song has some bite, it lacks the venom that it needs. It's a fairly bitter song about shame and isolation, and the Beatles delivery is a little tame. Blah blah blah. Bottom line is, it’s a good song transformed into a great song by fans, which makes it overrated.

Most Underrated: “I Need You.” This song is filler. It’s a completely non-grand statement from George, in the middle of huge contributions from John (“Help!”), Paul (“Yesterday”), and the two together (“Ticket to Ride”). The thing is, this is a perfect song. Perfect songs are very, very hard to write. Unfortunately for George, he was in a band with two other guys who knew how to do it, and who could even create new kinds of songs to perfect. So “I Need You” gets looked over all the time. But its elements work so, so well together. The quiet vulnerability of the lyrics, matched with the frail pedal-tone guitar motif and some judiciously placed dissonances. Alan Pollack points out (and man, do I wish that I’d come up with this insight) that the verses ending in dissonance feel a little like sentences you can’t finish. They need the guitar motif to (figuratively and literally) resolve them. Also noteworthy: the ending gives a prime example of George’s odd sense of harmony, and the small trick – switching around the rhythm of that pedal guitar motif to resolve things in the last second – just wraps it all up so flawlessly that you don’t even notice. That’s ultimately why “I Need You” is filler: 10 seconds into “Another Girl” you’ve forgotten all about it. But without this song, the emotional balance of the album would be all thrown off.

Beatles for Sale (1964)

2006-11-08T14:55:00.000-08:00

Most Overrated: “Eight Days a Week.” This song is overrated not because it’s bad, or even mediocre, but because it doesn’t overall live up to its moments of brilliance. If the song was comprised solely of its title, its four-bar intro, and the parallel 5^ths in the bridge, it would be accurately rated as a clever, harmonically revelatory gem from the period when the Beatles made better music than they got credit for. Unfortunately, the lyrics (apart from the title) are lame and repetitive, and not in the way that makes you want to sing them over and over – a la “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” Its shortness does help disguise its lyrical and structural predictability, but it remains a disappointment – to me, at least. The rest of my family loves it, and Beatles musicologists regularly point to it as evidence of the group’s maturing sound. I dunno.

Most Underrated: “Words of Love.” Again, an easy guess for my friends, because of my enduring obsession with Buddy Holly and (in particular) this song. I even recorded a version of it for Camille, with me on all three harmony lines and a charmingly bad facsimile of the solo. You will never hear this version, ever, ever. My original picks for most underrated were actually “I Don’t Want To Spoil the Party” and "Baby's in Black," which I’ve always felt (and still feel) have been unfairly ignored. But I realized that I mostly love those songs for their bizarre feel (“Baby’s in Black” = malformed hillbilly waltz) and their unexpected, open-interval bridges. Plus neither of those songs are really underrated, they’re just unknown by most and liked by a few people for whom the overwhelming feel of “Beatles-ness” is enough. I’m included in that crowd, by the way.

“Words of Love” is too often dismissed as a faithful tribute with a few quirks (e.g. Ringo playing a packing case). Like I sort of got around to arguing before with “Please Mr. Postman,” the early Beatles reveal a lot of their energy and personality through covers, however stiff or approximate. This Buddy Holly cover replicates the original closely, but somehow the Beatles stamp remains all over it. Could be the faux-Holly vocalizations, like “tell me love is real-ah," or the ingenious piecemeal switch from humming to singing during the coda. Wait, I want to explain that last thing because though I normally just throw out musicological tidbits, this one deserves an explanation. Throughout the song they’ve been humming the between-verse refrain (with more care and finicky attention to the harmony than Holly, as you’d expect), but at the end of the last verse, in preparation to ride out on the refrain, they gradually change from humming to singing “Ah.” It would be physically impossible to produce a sound between a hum and a note sung open-mouthed, so instead they switch one by one from humming to singing, so that by the end of the third refrain they’re all singing. Coupled with the precise fadeout, this technique ends up building momentum into the final moments of the song in an odd, uplifting way that bears no relation to Buddy Holly’s sensibility. It’s pure Revolver, a little preview for the outro to “Good Day Sunshine.” I hope that made sense, because “Words of Love” earns its Most Underrated status for those 15 seconds alone.

Of course, the rest of the thing deserves close attention too. In particular, I enjoy how the Beatles' predictably stiffer version reins in the Buddy Holly shamble to show off the beauty of the melody and the simple joys of the structure. Which isn’t to say I prefer the Beatles version – Buddy Holly and the Crickets cannot be outperformed, as was indisputably proven by the Rolling Stones’ version of “Not Fade Away” – just that if the songwriting is as good as it is on “Words of Love,” talented people will find new wrinkles to exploit. All of which goes to show that along with being an underrated Beatles song, “Words of Love” is also an underrated Buddy Holly song and an underrated song overall. Go find it.

Badass

2006-11-03T19:42:00.000-08:00

It occured to me that I'm always noting things to post about, but they never seem substantive enough to merit the time it takes to even log into the Blogger website and think of something to say about them.

Yeah, I know, most of the things I do post fit that description pretty well, too.

These are usually items of interest which would, for one reason or another, cause me to say: "oh, that's badass." In fact, if I was using a different blogging program I could just tag them "badass" and be done with it.

Instead, I'm going to use them as filler to keep fresh posts up here. So, without further ado, here's two things that struck me as badass in the last 24 hours or so:

1) Last night Camille told her students that if they needed to vote in the evening on Tuesday, they could come to class late...provided they bring their voting stub. Badass because a) she's letting students out of class to make sure they have no excuse not to vote, and b) she's making them bring their stub. I'm surprised she's not having them defend how they voted on Prop 85.

2) The Why? song "Dumb Hummer" has a line about "walking right out of the bike gate at the MacArthur BART," which is badass enough, but the song actually argues that this activity should be regarded as cool. Even better, when I heard the line I realized that their description is accurate. I've never taken a bike on BART, but the people who do have an unmissable aura of cool, and when they blast through that bike gate I always think to myself "God, I'm such a lazy bastard." Also badass: the video for "Dumb Hummer" is no more than a cute, slightly nerdy chick doing a completely shameless mirror-dance in front of her garage.

two quick things...

2006-10-27T14:53:00.000-07:00

Originally, to explain the uneven frequency of content on NewPlasticWeblog, I wrote a fairly unconsidered (and ill-advised, though no one advised me) comparison between the website and the movement to Free Mumia abu-Jamal. I'm kind of tired right now.

I'll just say that, given that the election season is upon us, I have to suspend posting until around Nov. 7th. You should all vote, but I'm guessing you will, so what you should really do is a) volunteer with a legitimately progressive, well-organized GOTV effort, or b) make sure all your friends and family review the issues and get to the polls.

Anyway, two quick things:

1) On the bus back from Yo La Tengo (ca. 1:30AM), there was a burned-out acid case dude with long hair, mustache, denim, funky smell, etc. He rambled and rambled, accosting people in a friendly way, then turning sour, then back to friendly with no apparent prompting. His best line of the ride: (reading the placard on the window) "'No eating, drinking or smoking'...What the hell am I doing on this bus?"

2) I lost my wallet about, um, 2 months back? Still haven't replaced it. Instead, inspired by my brother-in-law, I'm using a thick rubber band. In my case, I got it from a bunch loose broccoli. So, twisted around my billfold and credit cards is a purple band that says "Organically Grown." I noticed this on the way up the stairs from BART and I thought to myself: "Bet your ass it was."

Yo La Tengo at the Fillmore 10/21/06

2006-10-23T15:29:00.000-07:00

I love Yo La Tengo. How much? They beat out the Beatles, Percy Sledge, Springsteen, and everyone else as the song choice for the first dance at my wedding. With a cover of a forgotten disco song by George McCrae. That’s how good they are. Which explains why I’ll always see them live despite their tendency to do 15-minute-long feedback jams. Last Saturday was no different. Since I don’t yet own their new album – I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass – I was especially excited to hear the new material live.

why? opened the show, and they killed. The crowd was actually into the opener and disappointed to see them go, for a change. In fact it shouldn’t surprise me too much, since why? hails from Oakland, and the Bay Area certainly isn’t hurting for Anticon fans. Is there a succinct way to describe this band? They sound kind of like Lou Barlow fronting Steve Reich and Musicians. One dude plays drums and vibraphone simultaneously, one dude plays keys and guitar simultaneously, Yoni Wolf leads the group, plays organ, snare drum, and various little pitch/feedback boxes. He also beatboxes. They all sing and go crazy. Yoni Wolf is more or less what you’d expect from an Anticon member: he's Jewish, he loves hiphop but has better sense than to make it, he has a warped sense of language, and displays no respect whatsoever for genre boundaries. Hearing why? live was remarkable and unique, and when CDs come back into the budget I'll definitely buy the albums.

Yo La was their normal, withdrawn, awkward selves, but with a little more chattiness. Over the course of the night they proved -- as the new album title suggests -- that they aren’t afraid of shit. They opened with “Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House,” not too much of a barn-burner but nice to hear. Georgia had kind of a raspy, unwarmed-up quality to her voice that coupled with Ira’s geeky rocking-out on the organ to crank the endearing quotient right up. But the show didn't really start until James launched into the monster bass vamp of “Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind.” Holy cow, is that song menacing. Props to James for playing the same riff for 12 minutes without phoning it in, and props to Ira for making the various solo sections sufficiently different from one another while still getting across the overall message: “I Am Not Afraid of My Guitar and I Will Beat it to Death with My Hands.” After that, a happy detour for “Beanbag Chair,” segueing us into a piano section dominated by songs from the new album (which relies heavily on piano). They breezed through "I Feel Like Going Home" and “The Weakest Part,” pausing to channel Prince on “Mr. Tough.” Then into “Flying Lessons (Hot Chicken #1).” Not my favorite song but exhilarating to see live. The obsessive minor-key vamp gives Kaplan so much space to do crazy feedback solos. Also not my favorite thing, but for one night every year or so I’m willing to listen to a 4-minute feedback solo and Ira Kaplan's the guy to provide it.

In other news, the Fillmore got rid of their ice-cream sandwich desert…very sad, but I had apple pie. Highlight of the evening: me getting back to the floor, mouth full of apple pie and ice cream, just in time for Ira blast the intro to “Sugarcube.” I almost cried, because the sentiment of “Sugarcube” – trying to do better, or at least do whatever’s necessary to make someone happy – just resonates with me. It was one of the harder parts of growing up into a man and husband (so to speak). Doing what’s “objectively” right (or imitating the concerned nice guy on TV doing what's "right") is one thing, and I did that unfailingly for my first 3-4 relationships. It takes a lot more courage and risk to actually look at your own behavior, acknowledge the aspects of it that prevent you from being happy, and commit to change. Which isn’t to say that I’m an expert, just that I first heard this song around the same time I was trying to figure out how to be together with (as opposed to just in love with) Camille. So the song gets to me.

Then they played “Tom Courtenay,” which I love equally but I haven’t even bothered to learn the lyrics to (beyond the first and last few lines), so double good for me. One of my favorite Yo La Tengo tricks: Ira Kaplan singing over his own shrieking guitar squall, while Georgia and James hold the rhythm and harmony together. The end of “Tom Courtenay” offers an awesome example of this, with Ira repeating “I’m thinking about the needle” over and over. Have I mentioned how much I love Ira Kaplan? Yeah, I have.

The set proper closed with “The Story of Yo La Tango” [sic] and “Blue Line Swinger.” Live, “The Story of Yo La Tango” is damn near unlistenable because it’s so loud and screamy. I love the lyrics, though, and I suspect that (as with “Cherry Chapstick”) a very beautiful acoustic version is floating around somewhere. Actually, if I’m being honest, I know there’s some kind of acoustic version because Yo La Tengo appeared for about 15 seconds on the Gilmore Girls, playing that song. I didn’t watch the episode, I found it on Youtube. Really. I've watched Gilmore Girls, I admit, but it's not like I watch it. I already married into a family of smartmouth women who talk too fast -- why would I voluntarily watch one? Anyway, I think plays this tune so loud and squall-y because they want the audience covering their ears, scowling, leaving the venue, etc. They have cred to maintain.

“Blue Line Swinger” was perfect, and I mean perfect. It's such a unique song. The intro purposely turns off the crowd, with the endless organ loop and drum pageantry. Over time, the chord change gets burned into your head until you don’t even notice it. And the audience gets so used to hearing Ira’s guitar squeal and Georgia whanging away out of time that even people who know and love the song (like me) give up any hope of it improving. Then, when the beat finally kicks in and the organ loops line up with the drums and guitar, and James starts powering the low end, the wave of relief cannot be described. A good approximation would be "Woooooo!" Then Georgia starts singing the sublime melody, and you can never understand the lyrics when she sings, so it's fine for them to devolve into “Ba-ba-ba-dah” and ultimately fall apart. For that special feeling of having your brain put through a washing machine, buy Electro-Pura or just download “Blue Line Swinger.”

First encore: the theme from the new movie Old Joy, which Yo La Tengo scored, “Demons” from I Shot Andy Warhol, and a blistering cover of Bob Dylan’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” which is a lame song (and it rips off the Beatles verbatim) but they put it over.

Second encore: A bad song by Stoneground (I don’t know anything about this San Francisco band from 30 years ago, and there appears to be a reason for that), “My Little Corner of the World,” and a heartbreakingly beautiful version of “Take Care.”

Third encore: “Big Sky” from Yo La Tengo’s first album Ride the Tiger. This song, like the others on that album, is almost good but not quite. It still made the diehard fans happy, though, and the fans like me who only listen to the band's good material got a timely reminder that almost-good Yo La Tengo’s still better than the rest.

A Hard Day's Night (1964)

2006-10-20T14:07:00.000-07:00

Most Overrated: “And I Love Her.” This is supposed to be an early McCartney masterpiece, because of the melody and the complex harmonic structure. Yeah. Well, that’s all fine, but the lyrics suck. They suck so hard. People want to overlook this because a bunch of the early Beatles hits have simple/repetitive lyrics, but take note: there’s a difference between simple and bad.

“From Me to You” = simple

“And I Love Her” = defective

The faux-bossa thing does not help, and the crappiness of the lyrics make the song more boring than it should be given the harmonic interest. It’s actually a pretty boring song. Siegfried Baboon (aka Robert Anwood) of The Truck Drivers Gear Change suggests that the Beatles added that bizarre modulation for the guitar solo in order to make sure that George would definitely be awake to play it.

[By the way, The Truck Drivers Gear Change is an excellent website about songs that use the cliché of half/whole step key changes to keep them interesting. Lots of Barry Manilow, but don’t worry, no audio clips so it’s worksafe]

Most underrated: This is something of a toss-up, because “If I Fell” has all the harmonic and melodic complexity of “And I Love Her” with actually great lyrics, plus it’s underplayed, no question. But I guess “underplayed” is different from “underrated.” So the most underrated award goes to “I Should Have Known Better.” A better title for this song would be: “I Should Have Been Released as a Single.” Three things I want to say about this song:

1) The dissonance between the harmonica line (w/F-natural) and the D-F#-A dominant chord gives an unmistakable edge to the song. It gets even better when John uses F# to get to the end of the first verse, and just barely avoids superimposing it over the harmonica F-natural at the beginning of the second (“Oh-Oh I…never realized what a kiss could be”).

2) The bridge is perfect. Unlike the verse, which stays pinned securely to one note, it jumps all over the place harmonically (including the huge jump into falsetto in the middle). Even better, and this is something you only notice subconsciously (or at least, I only notice subconsciously – I didn’t realize it before reading Alan Pollock’s notes) – the second time through John’s vocal isn’t double-tracked. So, on repetition, it sounds both more intimate and more insistent.

3) Best scene in Hard Day’s Night, hands down.

With the Beatles (1963)

2006-10-18T07:55:00.000-07:00

Most overrated: The whole album. The production is great, as are the performances, but the album is mostly filler and covers. It's overrated because it sold incredibly well, and has an unforgettable cover (the four Beatles, unsmiling, faces half in shadow). Unfortunately, "All My Loving" is the only original that lives up to the quality of the previous album. Their rendition of "I Wanna Be Your Man" is a little tame, and comes off even more so given that the Rolling Stones released an earlier, scratchier, more desperate version that makes the song feel like a Keith Richards composition even when though it isn't. If you buy all the Beatles albums, you will play this one the least frequently, guaranteed.

Most Underrated: "Please Mister Postman." Like most Beatles covers of black music, this version is a little stiff. In fact, the Anthology editors chose to place footage of this song immediately following George Martin's commentary on the substandard quality of song choice on With the Beatles. But the song obviously doesn't suck, and the performance -- though slightly stiff compared with the Marvelettes -- absolutely kills. It really does. Lennon did the vocal, and I suspect that his affinity for the voice of Ronnie (soon-to-be) Spector began right around this time. "Be My Baby" had come out earlier that same year, and you can hear it in his inflection. The intro stamps the song "Beatles," because no one else has the goofy sincerity you hear on the handclaps and shouts of "Wait!," plus the aforementioned stiffness which you have to love because they're still cutting loose and doing their best. The best part of the song comes (of course) in the breakdown: "You gotta wait a minute, wait a minute, oh yeah, you gotta wait a minute, wait a minute, oh yeah..." In that moment -- and this is a tribute to both the songwriting team and the Beatles' performance -- "Please Mister Postman" achieves the classic Motown transcendence wherein a desperate plea for love transforms into a celebration of hope itself, the original object of affection all but forgotten. If that's a little high-minded, what I'm talking about here are songs like "Ain't Too Proud to Beg," "Oh, Girl," etc. Also good: "Po-whoa-whoa-ostman."

hotel workers should fire me

2006-10-16T12:14:00.000-07:00

So here’s the deal. I have some trouble concentrating at work. Especially now, when the exact parameters of my job have become gauzy and vague. So I’ve decided, rather than learning to discipline myself, to try to focus my goofing-off time into something marginally more productive than watching Ronaldinho clips on Youtube. The key word here, as you’ll soon see, is “marginally.”

Having quoted Chuck Klosterman in the last post, I started thinking about one of his finer (and more stupidly titled) columns, “Give Me Centrism or Give Me Death.” It presents, for no real reason, the Ten Most Accurately-Rated Bands of All Time. Folks who know me would probably guess that my favorite part of that article was his assessment of the Beatles:

4. The Beatles – The Beatles are generally seen as the single most important rock band of all time, because they wrote all the best songs. Since both of these facts are true, the Beatles are rated properly.

It’s funnier (and a little touching) in context, but it's wishful thinking. The Beatles are overrated – a fact which John Lennon took great pains to point out as time went on. Of course they're overrated. They’re also underrated, or at least some of their catalogue is. Which brings me to the diversion at hand: I’m going to try to channel my laziness into the inconsequential exercise of discussing the most under- and overrated songs on each album. Just to be clear, this is a useless pursuit. So if Blogger has a mechanism to clear out its dead weight, its driftwood blogs dragging down passengers on the information superhighway, NewPlasticWeblog will probably be gone before I get to Revolver.

Anyway, without further ado:

Please Please Me (1963)

Most Overrated: Such an easy choice. “Love Me Do” is not a good song. It’s drivel. I wasn’t alive, but I think it was universally recognized as drivel then. The harmonica saves it from being unlistenable, but it remains wildly overrated (and, I would think, a little embarrassing for the surviving members, or at least Paul, since Ringo only plays tambourine on the album version). If you ever see footage of a live performance, or a “live” studio performance where their guitars aren’t even plugged in, they do sort of sell the song on cuteness, but it’s still boring and basically bad.

Most Underrated: “There’s a Place.” I think this was one of those tunes that made musicologists of the time think The Beatles were up to something fishy. Verse chords so bright and sunny, then they keep veering into startling harmonic territory. It has that slightly asymmetrical harmonica riff, and the stuttering start. It’s also too short for a real chorus, but it doesn’t need one because all the energy (and background harmonies) goes into the verse. I remember right around the time when Nas’s Stillmatic came out, I got tired of hearing it and Nelly on constant rotation in the dorm, so I used to open our windows and blast this song when the college tour groups came through the J.E. courtyard.

Comments welcome as always.

I'm nothing if not uninformed

2006-10-09T13:51:00.000-07:00

(c) Chuck Klosterman.

It seems that the Stills album, Without Feathers, is indeed a reference to the Woody Allen book. And moreover, that shouldn't have been too hard to catch, since they also have a song on their first record called "Love and Death" -- named presumably after the Allen movie.

By the way, Love and Death is definitely underrated. It's a little annoying, but the more you know about Russian literature, the less annoying it gets (I'm told -- I know some, found it funny, my dad knows more, finds it hilarious). The last scene, where the main character blissfully dances away with the Grim Reaper to the "Troika" from Lieutenant Kije, is an uncharacteristically liberating moment. If you've been assigned to read Anna Karenina for college, I recommend getting that movie to lighten things up a little. Also good, the planetarium scene in Manhattan. Wait, all the scenes in Manhattan.

[Chuck Klosterman's quote in the title refers to a Dixie Chicks concert review in which he described Natalie Maines as "chunky" with an "odd sense of fashion," only to discover after the fact that she was pregnant]

Stills @ The Independent 10/5/06

2006-10-06T13:34:00.000-07:00

We went back to our old neighborhood last night to see The Stills at The Independent, which is tied with Café du Nord for best live music venue in San Francisco (no fries, but better sound & stage). Camille and I have loved the Stills since 2003, about six seconds into “Lola Stars and Stripes.” Wait, that’s not accurate. She’s loved them since then, but at the time they released Logic Will Break Your Heart (their debut) I was engaged in an aggressive boycott of New York haircut bands. So I dismissed them like so much unnecessary conditioner.

You remember that era. Strokes, Hives, Vines, Doves, etc. I had this suspicion that, despite the improbable catchiness of Is This It?, these bands had no shelf life and secretly sucked. And I didn’t want to get too invested. It also really bothered me that Rolling Stone would “predict” some band like The Vines to be "the next big thing," then two months later would put them on the cover – like, See, we were right! It's always been that way -- just in the past, I'd had the time and inclination to investigate the music and figure out what I felt was actually good, separating it from the garbage. Now, even though I still have no time, I've got better sources. But then, I had to give up on pop music altogether. Anyway, I was right about the shelf life of all those bands, but wrong to lump the Stills in with them. For one thing, they’re from Montreal. They only look and sound like a New York haircut band. And, really, they don't sound too much like that -- their record was produced that way (in Brooklyn, no less), and they were certainly marketed in that way, but it doesn't fit well. They don't fit well with the slightly more recent Canadian invasion either, but no one fits these labels in the first place, and there's no such thing as a metropolitan music "scene" anyway, so forget I said anything and let's move on.

The band killed. Like every other mainstream popular rock band right now, The Stills are five white guys, aged 25-28 in suits/ties/formalwear of some sort, with camping hair. Left to right:

A guy who was too French for the Strokes, a guy who was way too French for the Strokes, fat Steve Caton, and my 13-year old cousin Benjie. [aka Tim Fletcher (Vocals/guitar), Olivier Corbeil (bass), Liam O'Neil (keyboards), and Dave Hamelin (Vocals/guitar)] Drummer Julien Blais isn’t pictured – but that’s fine. During the show Camille summed him up fine: “He’s kind of cute…wait, I can’t see him.”

You have to hand it to this band, though. They understand the difference between a song formula (boring) and a song recipe (tasty!), they know that it’s easier to rock out to simple melody & complex harmony, and they play tight new-wave arrangements in a loose, bombastic manner. Best of all, when their lead guitarist left, their drummer switched to rhythm guitar and took over half the vocals while their lead singer/rhythm guitarist switched to lead and made space for a new voice. It’s rare to have multiple lead singers of the same gender, and especially rare for the singing lineup to change three years in. What’s even more rare is when the less-attractive, less charismatic singer with a dorkier voice gets to sing a larger percentage of the songs on the sophomore album. But we loved him. He wasn’t totally comfortable on the guitar, so at first, due to his awkwardness and concentration, Camille starting referring to him as the “boy genius” of the band. It made sense later when we found out he’s not the regular guitarist or singer. It gave the band a more democratic feel, which is always nice.

They started with “It Takes Time,” from their new album Without Feathers (no idea whether they named it after the Woody Allen book or not – probably not). Great, but just a warm-up for “Lola Stars and Stripes.” Three years ago I would have thought the Kinks had mined that name for all its catchy singability, but obviously the Stills found unexplored potential. It’s impossible not to like that song. The follower, “Gender Bombs,” tried a lot harder to be dark and unlikeable, but since everyone in that club plays Smiths and Galore when they’re doing dishes, no luck there. Other highlights from the old album included “Yesterday Never Tomorrows” with sparkling keyboards, “Love and Death,” and a propulsive, snarly “Changes are No Good,” which Dave Hamelin (aka “Boy Genius” or “Teeny Weeny Rock Star”) prefaced by saying: “I wrote this one about a party that I wasn’t at, and wasn’t happy about it.” Camille leaned over to say “Yeah, cause you were at Hebrew school.” Buuuuuuuuuurn!.

About halfway through the show they announced that they were about to blow our minds, then revved up “Retour a Vega” and Tim Fletcher (who's hot enough as it is) started singing in French. Macy's panties department instantaneously made $900.

The songs from the new album got enthusiastic treatments too, which I always like to see. Nothing’s worse than a band that doesn’t commit as hard to its new material because of the crowd’s unfamiliarity. “The Beginning” had that bright, sunshiney epic feel, and their intense delivery of “Helicopters” helped bring out the lyrics’ lurking paranoia. I love lurking paranoia:

So keep this song
Till you catch diseases
And wait them out
Till the tundra freezes

Helicopters are chasing
Animals through the fields
Helicopters are chasing
Our spirits into the sea.

Can't front on a song about helicopters chasing animals through the fields, especially when it's set to soaring harmonies in a coda that makes you scared and elated at the same time. Good stuff. Also good: the rollicking guitar/drums/tambourine version of “Oh Shoplifter,” which offers a completely different take from the Smiths on that five-fingered art.

All in all, excellent show by a band with just a little more talent and depth than their hype would suggest. Don’t miss them if they’re coming to your town.

photoshop monday...

2006-10-02T12:09:00.000-07:00

Some music-related fucking around on Photoshop:

Inspired by what I thought was a hilarious comment on a Youtube clip.

I love Yo La Tengo, and I really love Ira Kaplan, aka the Jewish Jimi Hendrix.

And, following a discussion last week with my coworker Matthew, some commentary on how much Audioslave has let us down:

it ain't in my plan to make moves without the fam

2006-09-27T11:20:00.000-07:00

Here's a few links to friends and family who make music. It's all good or I wouldn't recommend it.

Tom Frampton -- You can find music from my Yale classmate (and current UNITE HERE organizer) Tom Frampton on his Riotfolk page. More old songs on the old Riotfolk page.

Steve Espinola -- My cousin Steve is a completely unique songwriter. I'm going to say this later about Jeff Louie too, but if there were any justice in the world, Steve would be on everyone's iPod, and known all over instead of just among his Antifolk fanbase and the people for whom I've made mixtapes. (If you've got the Moldy Peaches album, he plays on "Jorge Regula" and might be on your iPod already).

Jesse Kriss -- This guy has the distinction of dating Camille before me, about a hundred thousand years ago. Also a friend of ours from middle and high school. I don't know whether you can still find mp3s of his composition on the site, but the multimedia projects are terrific.

Matt Fitzgerald (aka Fitzgeezus) -- A Yalie, and veteran of the residential college hiphop beef wars. You'll have to take my word that it was a lot less ridiculous than it sounds...though still funny. He's part of the Sky Beneath crew. You can find their stuff on iTunes, and check out the killer soccer tribute video.

Jeff Louie -- One of my Greenwood camp counselors. Like I said, if there was any justice, Jeff's songs would be right next to Steve's on your iPod. If you like Stevie Wonder's harmony, or you like mid-period Beatles, or you wish Elliott Smith wasn't so depressing, buy Jeff's albums and check out the acoustic demo downloads.

Studio Sportsnight on the West Wing of the Sunset Strip with Tommy Schlamme

2006-09-19T11:22:00.000-07:00

Why was the Studio 60 pilot vaguely boring to most Sorkin fans?

The short answer is, we've seen almost everything in it before, written by the same guy. Still effective, just recycled. I didn't mind at all, since it was good and it'll certainly get better. But for the record, here's a fairly comprehensive list of things that should ring a bell.

Meta stuff (poorly disguised references to the real-life writer/director team of Sorkin & Schlamme)

Writer-director team return to save failing network 4 years after being "shown the door."

Harriet Hayes=Kristin Chenoweth, the multi-talented blond entertainer dating the writer of the show, who makes an album of spiritual music and goes on The 700 Club, leading (maybe) to the breakup

Sorkin/"Tripp" drug problems & getting bonded to work in Hollywood

Matthew Perry/"Matt Albie" on Vicodin (kind of below the belt, right?)

"Tripp"/Sorkin dating a Maureen Dowd-type reporter

Jordan McDeere=Jamie Tarses (formerly McDermott), past NBC president

Censorship/network vs. talent meta-discussions -- Sorkin uses characters to complain about the network trying to dumb him down

"Tripp" in rehab 11 years ago – Sorkin addicted to crack in 1995 (11 years ago) till he went to rehab.

"Ricky & Ron" = John Wells, the hack they brought in after the real talent left

Situations (same old dramatic devices)

Offending Christians (see Sportsnight w/Jerry Falwell, WW pilot w/Mary Marsh)

Offending Christians with an unscripted outburst on live TV (see, again, the WW pilot)

Offending Christians with an unscripted outburst on live TV and being in danger of losing your job (see, again, the WW pilot, as well as the Sportsnight pilot for someone about to lose their job over problems with the network)

Network guy argues with producer over who's in charge of what aspects of the show

Back medicine making someone totally high and incoherent

Main character suddenly thrown back together with ex-girlfriend

Recycled dialogue (definitely heard this before)

"Playing with pain" (SN)

"Eat em up"/"Good show" (SN)

"Anything you can say to make me feel better about..." (SN)

"Breathing guts" (SN/WW)

"We’re blowing off _____" and everyone in the control room's disappointed (SN)

"One of us is gonna screw up/be angry at a time, it's gonna be me" (SN/WW)

"We don’t have that kind of time" (SN, maybe WW)

The falling out of a chair gag (SN pilot and WW)

“Our boy” (SN/WW/probably everything else he's done)

High as a paper kite (SN)

Going to hell in a handcart/speedboat/hula hoop (SN/WW)

You’re up on router #, have a good show. (SN)

Who am I offending? (SN/WW)

So, what's missing? We need a character whose parents split up after a long time, preferably because the father had a prolonged secret affair. We need something to be, sarcastically, a "barn burner," and we need someone to ask if you've fallen on your head. We need a season one finale that will actually answer the question "What Kind of Day Has it Been?" We need a character whose younger sibling died, and who blames him/herself for it in a repressed way. We need legs that go all the way to the floor, and Shakespeare the way it was meant to be played. We need to make someone happy by coming home at the end of the day. We need someone writing a letter because something that was supposed to have ended (tennis match, filibuster), is going on way too long. We need someone "raising the level of debate." We need smart people who disagree with you. We need a fight over the supposed significance of an anniversary. We need, when the fall is all that's left, for it to matter a great deal, and we need to know that the fact that we want to please you, pleases you. We need underwear in an inappropriate place. We need you not to talk to us like we're "other people." We need someone complaining about the lack of admonishment from the clergy over religious violence. We need people accidentally saying the wrong word to someone important, then obsessing over it.

We need Josh Malina.

in 25 words or less...

2006-09-18T15:51:00.000-07:00

So, San Francisco MUNI has been advertising its new after-hours schedule, with the tagline:

"Get around after midnight."

They had one with a close-up of Cinderella's slipper getting onto the bus, and one with Frankenstein.

At the 16th & Mission stop for the 49 Mission-Van Ness, there's one with a picture of dracula.

It looks more or less like this, except it's in color, he's holding on to the bus handrails, and there's an ad for City College visible above his head.

Someone scribbled the following onto the poster in magic marker:

I'M DRACULA
I drink blood
I get women
I smoke weed

what kind of power?

2006-09-15T14:11:00.000-07:00

After two years, a strike, a lockout, $100 million lost due to the boycott (ahem), lobby takeovers, sit-ins, rallies, VERY early wake-up calls which I won't miss at all, and about a hundred bargaining sessions...

...San Francisco hotel workers have a contract.

It's a great contract.

No, really, you would not believe how good this contract is.

There are literally no takeaways, which is worth repeating. No healthcare cuts, copay increases, elegibility restrictions, or two-tier systems. No subcontracting, no outsourcing. No increased split shifts, no mandatory overtime, no vacation/sick pay restriction schemes. No takeaways. People should understand how rare that is for labor unions right now, especially in the private sector, especially in a volatile industry.

But it's better than that. We also won a higher cap for prescription drugs, and vision care for dependents (now Camille can get glasses for $10).

Pension guarantees ($30/yr service/month) and a window benefit ($35) for folks retiring during the contract term.

$3/hr increase non-tipped, $1.50 tipped over the next three years, plus ~$1/hrs worked since 2004 retro.

Workload reductions for room cleaners and ergonomic improvements for cooks

Ironclad (or as good as it can be) successorship and subcontracting protections

Plus more union leave time, solidarity language for the building trades, and a contract term that expires with Chicago in 2009. So we're already lining up for the next coordinated national fight.

And the most important thing we won, the best contribution we made to the future of hotel workers: Card check neutrality with Hyatt, Hilton, Starwood, Intercontinental, Omni, and Four Seasons on new and acquired properties for all of San Francisco and San Mateo county.

So 4,000 workers fought it out and reminded the rest of the labor movement (and the San Francisco progressive community) that when you're disciplined, aggressive, and you never give up, you can actually win.

But there's still 5,000 others without a contract, so I have to go back to work.

More frequent blogging to come, I hope.

(also, folks who don't know the response to the question posed in the title need to spend more time on a picket line)

in case there was any doubt

2006-08-31T13:39:00.000-07:00

this is why I married Camille:

Me: So I read this article about how the Tenderloin is San Francisco's next hip neighborhood. It's supposed to be the "new Mission."

Camille: Right.

Me: The "New Mission." What does that even mean?

Camille: It means there's pee on the ground but white people will still live there.

which implies...

2006-07-27T12:07:00.000-07:00

Chicago's new retail living wage law is another kick in the pants for Walmart & other big-box stores. It's especially effective because it challenges those stores to live up to their assertions -- i.e. big-box development supports local economies and creates quality job opportunities. The fact that Walmart, Target et al see this legislation as a significant barrier to store development demonstrates clearly that poverty wages & benefits are part of their business plan. Their low prices (and enormous profits) depend on extremely low labor standards both here and overseas, and these companies remain completely unwilling to compromise on either side.

When John Simley, Walmart's spokesperson, argues that this legislation "means that Chicago is closed to business,” that's what he's saying. A more honest statement would be: "Chicago's closed to our exploitative, damaging business model."

The Brennan Center has detailed information on the ordinance, including the actual language.

back in a few.

2006-07-24T11:33:00.000-07:00

When SF hotel workers have a contract, I'll get back to the blog.

Until then, sporadic updates if any.

You'll be able to see what's happening with me here.

pride

2006-07-14T10:45:00.000-07:00

San Francisco's Pride weekend took place a few weeks ago. Here's a picture of me, more or less in my element, during the hour or so that we stood around before marching. Later on, I got a beer from Ed Dietrich at the Public Defenders office (I guess they were drumming up business?) and drank it before we turned onto Market St.

Not pictured: Camellia George, Danny Glover (who just chilled and marched with us), tons of Google employees who were squinting in the unfamiliar, outdoors natural light.

In the back of the picture you can see a "Sleep with the Right People" poster. Check that site out, it's pretty great.

I have no plans to make this a lame photo blog. However, I'll just contrast the photo above with this one, which 2004 election campaign staff in Oregon captioned "Alek at his Best."

Not sure how to take that.

minor design flaw

2006-07-12T11:11:00.000-07:00

Vaguely inspired by our renovation projects, I've been reading William McDonough and Michael Braungart's Cradle to Cradle. For people (like me) without experience in cutting edge industrial design philosophy, this book legitimately deserves to be described as "mindblowing." It did actually blow my mind.

I won't get into it in any depth, but the passage on how to design housing for Bedouin communities led to the following discussion last week:

Me: "...and I thought that was fascinating, how the Bedouin tents are perfectly designed for their users. 'Cause they're nomads, so the tents can be easily transported and repaired on the fly, and the shape means they draw heat up and out the top. Plus, when it rains, the fibers are all woven together and they swell up to become watertight? That kicks ass. The only real downside is --

Camille: [interrupting] -- they smell like yak butt.

I was wondering...

2006-07-10T10:39:00.000-07:00

...why no comments on the last post, given all the Jews who read this.

Comments were broken. Now fixed.

("fire baaaaaaad")

i don't even believe in jeebus

2006-07-10T10:28:00.000-07:00

[DISCLAIMER: The discussion below refers specifically to my personal experience as a Jew in Northern CA. Much of it could apply equally to other religious contexts, and none of it is intended to propose Judaism as singular in possessing the problems discussed -- it's just where I'm at]

So, there's been a lot of hubbub around the Jews For Jesus summer 2006 campaign. It's the culmination of a five-year evangelical effort. (Maybe they got the idea for the timing from UNITE HERE?)

Anyway, to describe my feelings on this issue as conflicted would be really understating the case.

However, as usual I don't have the time to put something coherent together, so I'll just make a few observations and number them, like the order matters.

1) I hate to admit it, but in practice, Jews for Jesus bothers me the exact same amount as the Orthodox hassidim who evangelized on my college campus regularly. At first, when I started contemplating it, I thought -- "No, that can't possibly be true. After all, Jews for Jesus purposely twists Jewish theology and tradition to persuade more people to accept Christ as their savior." But in reflecting on it, the judgements they make about my personal faith were no more presumptious or insulting than those of the Orthodox evangelists. And at least Jews for Jesus did not (in my experience, can't speak for others) approach me because I "look Jewish" and try to sell me a menorah. Whatever. At the heart of this lies the judgement that my faith, whatever it might be, will leave me incomplete if I don't change the nature of my spiritual commitments.

2. Which leads to my next point. Antimissionary groups like the JCRC's Spiritual Deception Prevention Project fret constantly about the irreparable damage done by "Hebrew-Christians" when they distort Jewish theology and appropriate Jewish symbols, tradition, etc. to convert people. I would ask, is it any worse than the damage done by anyone who stands in judgement of another because of their difference in beliefs? Personally, I'm a lot more worried about the behavior of Orthodox (and, for that matter, Conservative) jews towards homosexuality than I am about whether someone thinks Jesus is the Hebrew Messiah and wants me to have a bumper sticker. If you want to talk about damage to the Jewish community, let's take a look at the CJLS Consensus Statement, which expressly welcomes homosexual jews into congregations but refuses to ordain or marry them. It definitely ruins our reputation as an ethical people, if nothing else.

[By the way, I've heard all the rationales behind this, including those about rabbis being models of Jewish law, and about there being 612 other mitzvot to do, so homosexuality is only as bad as driving on Shabbas. Well, it's one thing to have high standards, and another for religious doctrine to welcome someone but expressly forbid them from exalting God through mitvahs & covenants. Go find me a conservative rabbi who won't marry someone because they drive to the synagogue on Saturday]

3. Which brings me to my last point. Nothing about this makes me feel good. My own community will accept and embrace me, even though I don't practice much Judaism, don't believe that many events in the Torah actually took place, and don't subscribe to the Jewish conception of God. However, someone who believes in the Old Testament and views Christ as their personal savior? -- they can't go to day camp at the JCC.

I don't know whether Jews for Jesus represents a legitimate danger or not. I can't speak for the damage they do. They threaten me, and my beliefs, exactly not at all in the slightest. When they appropriate Rosh Hashauna holiday, it just makes me glad that someone's celebrating it. If they think we break Matzah to symbolize how Jesus was broken, well, I grew up in California: on the scale of Pesach re-interpretations, that's pretty tame.

They're engaging Jewish youth with "contemporary music"? They're visiting senior centers and luring in recruits by offering them "meals, companionship, and a sense of being part of a caring community?" They're targeting the most vulnerable by adopting and caring for children with special needs? Those bastards!

That's facetious, obviously, but still. Because Jews are being targeted, some perceive a serious threat of "corruption" -- of the individual, of congregations, and of Judaism as a whole. Provided no assumptions are made about the legitimacy of these folks as people of faith (and that's a big proviso, so watch out already), I can respect that. So, in response, the JCRC does counter-leaflets, and takes out ads, and generally does their thing. But, in the process, they also find it necessary to define the "Jewish Community." Here's where I start to feel that familiar chill of confusion and alienation wash over me.

I've got no doubts about myself. To the extent that I'm a Jew and identify as one (which is, not to trivialize it, about the same extent to which I identify as a Democrat), no amount of consensus statements or rabbinical pronouncements will change that. If I was the only Jew on earth, that'd still be who I am. And if my mother's mother hadn't been Jewish, but I'd been raised the same, I wouldn't give a fuck. What sickens me with (unnecessary) anxiety is the impact of these pronouncements on my family. I'm left with the knowledge that those evangelizing Hassids who came to Yale would never sell my Catholic wife and I a mezuzah for our new home [She, by the way, really wants us to have one, whereas it barely even occured to me because I was worried about us having a working faucet]. I want her to continue her willingness to embrace my faith and expose our child(ren) to those ideals and traditions. I want to raise my kids to be both Jews and critical thinkers -- which means I'll have to hope that they choose either a conservative congregation or a same-sex spouse, but not both. Sucks for them.

To their credit, the JCRC and other critics of Jews for Jesus have, in addition to publicly debunking the "Hebrew-Christians," have also made it a priority to encourage participation in and commitment to Jewish life as an antidote, and to try to remain inclusive while incorporating antimissionary education into various programs. The crappy rhetoric remains, but it seems like a decent compromise given their choices. What bothers me is this: Jews for Jesus prompts people to defend and sanctify these particulars of Jewish life that supposedly determine inclusion in our community. But in the end, if I feel included at all, it's not such a great feeling.

what you're missing...

2006-06-19T12:13:00.000-07:00

The reason there hasn't been content up here for a week or so isn't that there's nothing going on in the world, or in my life -- it's just that what I'm doing is staggeringly boring and self-involved (painting doors, building shelves, back and forth to the hardware store...etc), plus it warps my sense of everything else going on.

Finally, since 2002-03 I've been anticipating the summer of 2006 and the hotel workers campaign, which I'm now lucky enough to be involved in. Until we settle a contract in San Francisco, I won't be able to spend very much time at all on stuff that isn't my job, new house, or new marriage. I can't really offer many intimate details of the campaign, and I've already written plenty about the broad issues at stake.

So, like Tip said: hold tight.

why Prop 82 went down.

2006-06-09T10:04:00.000-07:00

The failure of Prop 82 to pass in California this past Tuesday was the result of a set of suckily converging factors. Had it passed, Prop 82 would have funded universal pre-school for every four-year-old in California through an income tax increase on the state’s wealthiest one percent.

It got creamed, though. Here are a few of the reasons why:

Following years of questionable ballot initiatives, and a completely unnecessary and costly special election last November, Californians have developed a deep, lovingly nurtured grudge against the propositions in general. More and more voters simply vote no on every proposition in an effort to discourage people from bringing them to the ballot. I don't agree entirely with that philosophy, but there's no doubt that it's an inherently flawed system that's getting worse as more people with money and agendas enter the fray. Prop 82 was one of the genuinely good laws that, unfortunately, became a casualty of that legitimate resentment.
Rob Reiner has a reputation as a politically unsophisticated Hollywood liberal meddler. I’m not convinced that reputation is really deserved. He’s got a niche, just like Harry Belafonte and Charlton Heston. But the opposition used every opportunity it could to refer to Prop 82 as " the Reiner Act," until it started to seem like he was hijacking the legislature.
Prop 82 was billed not as an increased funding initiative for preschool programs, but as a “universal” preschool program. That opened it up to the same familiar barrage of attacks that greets all proposals dealing with universal coverage of any kind: handouts to the middle class, failing to focus resources on the most needy, threatening private providers, etc.
This proposition involved taxing rich people, for no reason save their income. Good night.

This all sucks, because like I said it was a good law. It would have affected less than 1% of California taxpayers. It addressed the critical issues in the preschool crisis (teacher training, school construction, underserved areas). And it is a crisis, which our electeds, unlike in other states around the country, were completely dragging their feet on -- so it's actually a fairly legitimate use of the ballot initiative. I'm sure it'll be pursued in Sacramento now.

One last (obvious) thing: Voters seem to feel that pre-school, unlike kindergarten, is not worthy of public funding to make it universal – despite the fairly indisputable evidence that pre-school leads to better reading skills, lower dropout rates, higher incidence of matriculation, decreased crime, etc. It matters, and like kindergarten, pre-school represents a critical social investment that affects every member of any community. That’s why most industrialized countries have universal public preschools as well as universal public K-12 (or equivalent).

But not the U.S. Instead, preschool, like health insurance, college education, and affordable housing, has become a luxury item reserved for folks with money.

I have confidence that eventually, California will follow Illinois, Florida, Oklahoma, and Georgia in providing universal preschool. And I hope it'll be through legislation, so the Gap CEO Don Fisher and his crony all-star team can spend more energy finding tax loopholes and less hiring actors to play gentle, pragmatic, authoritative school principles (ethnic minorities preferred).

Search (Silly-) Strings

2006-06-02T11:09:00.001-07:00

To hold y'all over until we've bought our new place and I can get back to goofing off at work.

Here are the choice strings from May '06.

not the same ben folds
I assume they're talking about the song, but it might also be this.

laurie anderson superman
Everything I love about this song, Camille hates with her whole heart.
But here's a nice ode from someone who shares my regard.

tumba palo cucuye is a song
Yes.

super timberlands that make you look taller
That's not what they do.

boo la migra
No astute comment, this just cracks me up. What search results would satisfy the originator of this string? Not to minimize the sentiment, but this is kind of the equivalent of getting up and typing "I'm hungry" into the Google search bar.

its not what you look like when you're doin what you're doin
Indeed.

evaluate article corporate social responsibility clive crook
Yeah, somebody should.

globalization affects old traditions.
No kidding, how about that?

By the way, I'm aware how self-referential (and self-congratulatory) these things are sometimes, so, a little humility:

janel moloney in her underwear
At first I kept wondering why this string appears over and over, month after month -- till I realized that they were all my searches.

riding to work two days ago...

2006-05-25T14:11:00.000-07:00

Alek: "So, do you think we need to do that today?"
Camille: "No, it's not necessary."

[pause]

Camille: "It's unecessary."

[pause]

Camille: [quoting] "It's so necessary."
Alek: "..."
Camille: "Did you know I'm Jay-Z?"

[then, in the most surreal moment of my marriage to date...]

Camille: "But you can call me Hova."

AFL-C ya later

2006-05-22T16:06:00.001-07:00

That pun in the title belongs to my sister, who's one of the flying purple people eaters.

Anyway, the Laborers (LIUNA) have broken from the AFL-CIO, which means 700,000 fewer members. They had been straddling, retaining membership in both the AFL and the Change to Win coalition, but no longer.

Now, this is good for a number of reasons. It diminishes the degree to which service sector unions dominate Change to Win, by adding construction workers to the farmworkers (UFW), truckdrivers (Teamsters), and carpenters that had already joined.

By freeing the LIUNA from AFL-CIO per capita dues, it allows the Laborers to fully make good on their commitment to prioritize organizing. They've been moving in that direction for a while, and growing fast, so now they will have a chance to put more ambitious programs into place.

Finally, it shows that the AFL-CIO's scare tactics don't work. Earlier this year, after the United Farm Workers disassociated, AFL president John Sweeney formally barred UFW locals from participation in labor councils. Apart from being bizarre, unfair, and possibly racist, a lot of folks speculated that the AFL was trying to send a message to other unions (particularly the Laborers and others in the building trades) about the consequences of disassociating. So much for that.

Quick Note: As part of the AFL/CtW agreement on political cooperation, the UFW was allowed back into the labor councils...so maybe that had something to do with this, but I doubt it. The LIUNA has been making noise about leaving for a while, and even set up their own building trades council separate from the AFL. Maybe they were waiting to see if the two federations would sort out their differences on the 06 election cycle, or maybe they just finally got it together.

Being the last person alive without cable television...

2006-05-18T16:11:00.000-07:00

...I won't be able to watch Sorkin's new show when it debuts this fall.

But they did just release an extended 6 min. trailer on youtube.

I am wetting my pants.

I hope our new place has cable.

broker/therapist

2006-05-17T09:14:00.000-07:00

Normally I don't just comment on press pieces, but this one hit pretty close to home. Since Camille & I are right smack in the middle of buying our first place, the headline "My Broker, My Therapist" naturally attracted my attention.

The article's definitely accurate in its contention that buying a home brings out the absolute worst in everyone involved. Anything that can be dredged up, will be. But, that said, a few quick things:

1) What kind of person (and especially what kind of spouse) complains, when her husband is buying a $3 million summer home for the family, "I wish you had a good job so we didn't have to live like this"? What would a "good job" be, exactly? And when you say "like this," what horrible circumstances, the result of your husband's sucky job, are you struggling to conceal? This doesn't seem like an instance of real estate offering a quick glimpse into someone's dark side -- this woman is suffering from compulsive greed and I doubt real estate has anything to do with it. Unless, of course, she was being sarcastic, which would be pretty funny.

2) What kind of person chooses an open house to reveal that she's pregnant? And who would do it in such an oblique way? It's one thing to keep it a secret for good reasons, but why decide, on the spur of the moment, to insist that you need a bigger apartment and then rub your belly in a significant way while saying nothing, like Charades? That's bizarre.

3) Somewhere in this article, it should have been mentioned that these people need actual therapy.

In other news, the Georgia Supreme Court is fine with you being a bigot, but you need to parse your bigoted arguments with a little more subtlety. What they really need to pass in Georgia is a statute that allows voters to hold utterly hypocritical views, thereby avoiding this "single-rule" nuisance.

lynx

2006-05-15T16:41:00.000-07:00

I cleaned up and updated the links bar, so there's more & better stuff available.

alternate title: once upon a mattress

2006-05-12T14:12:00.000-07:00

Following up on this rant, more news from the world of luxury bedding. UNITE HERE published a report last month on hotel housekeepers, their workload, and the amenities arms race currently being conducted by luxury hotel chains. It gathers data from recent surveys and publications, and also presents information from a multi-city survey conducted by the union itself.

Here’s the link to the report, and an accompanying summary of facts and figures which documents all the findings, and provides extra details on the industry as a whole.

I think this report does an excellent job of clearly and accurately presenting what’s at stake for hotel workers’ health and safety, without exaggeration or (too much) melodrama. The anecdotal testimony from housekeepers makes abundantly clear the need for workload reduction, but even more persuasive is the list of tasks per room that a hotel housekeeper is expected to perform:

Bedroom Tasks

✔ Remove all room-service items from room
✔ Strip bed(s) of all sheets, blankets and duvets
✔ Place bottom sheet on each bed and tuck 4-8 times
✔ Place top sheets and blanket on each bed and tuck 4-8 times
✔ Spread duvet on bed
✔ Remove 4-8 pillowcases per bed and stuff pillows into fresh cases
✔ Dust all nightstands and desk
✔ Carefully restock and arrange pens, papers and other written materials (i.e. room service menus) on desk
✔ Dust armoire or dresser, including behind the TV
✔ Clean TV screen
✔ Retrieve TV remote and rearrange TV channel guides
✔ Pick up trash and empty bedroom’s wastebasket
✔ Wash and dry ice bucket and rearrange on counter
✔ Collect, wash and dry dirty glasses
✔ Dust vents
✔ Put away all ironing boards and other equipment
✔ Vacuum all floors

Bathroom Tasks

✔ Pick up soiled towels and place on cart
✔ Replace soiled towels
✔ Clean and disinfect toilet bowl
✔ Wipe down top and side of toilet
✔ Restock toilet paper
✔ Wipe down counter tops
✔ Clean sink(s) and polish faucets
✔ Replace and arrange toiletries (i.e. shampoo, soaps)
✔ Clean bathroom mirror
✔ Wash and dry coffeepot and cups and rearrange on counter
✔ Scrub inside of bathtub
✔ Clean/replace shower curtain or scrub shower door
✔ Clean bath and shower walls
✔ Pick up trash and empty bathroom wastebasket
✔ Mop floor
✔ Dust vents

A few things to keep in mind. Many rooms have more than one bed, doubling some of the bedroom tasks. Some housekeepers are expected to clean 20 of these rooms a day, giving them about half an hour to complete a room. Inspectors visit their rooms regularly, and any incomplete task from the list above is grounds for discipline. Obviously these conditions improve markedly in union shops, but the workload issues still persist. In particular, all tasks that require maneuvering bedding become much more difficult – and dangerous – when the hotels upgrade amenities.

This issue has gotten a lot of press recently, and for good reason. The industry is posting record profits due to the amenities arms race, and in the process, literally breaking apart the bodies of the women who do the actual work.

Tom Hanks knows how to fake-piss

2006-05-09T10:04:00.000-07:00

I just saw The Green Mile last night, and without doubt Tom Hanks' finest moment in the film is the tight shot of blissful relief spreading over his face during his first piss after John Coffey heals the urinary infection.

It reminded me of his endless pissing scene in A League of Their Own, which, until I saw The Green Mile, I considered his finest on-screen performance.

So, is this, like, his hidden specialty? I didn't see Philadelphia -- does he piss in that?

favela rising

2006-05-08T10:27:00.000-07:00

Just a quick plug for Favela Rising, which Camille & I saw at the SF International Film Festival last week.

It's playing a lot around the country -- worth going to see, without question. Great material for people interested in music, community organizing, urban policing, etc. etc.

One disclaimer, though: It's not a particularly balanced or intellectually rigorous documentary, nor was it intended to be, I'd imagine. Just a good thing to keep in mind, especially if you don't know much about the subject matter.

U-M can finally eat food

2006-05-03T12:20:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, UNICCO workers at the University of Miami won the freedom to choose a union through a variant of card-check neutrality. This will, I hope, continue to inspire other student groups to pursue campaigns like this on their campuses. It’s especially critical that these type of student-labor alliances flourish on Southern campuses, where neither the unions nor progressive students can rely on a union infrastructure. This just rocks so hard.

On a related note: I’ve heard educational institutions described as a “soft target,” for any of the following reasons:

Their “product’s” value relies largely on the kind of prestige susceptible to public pressure.
If public, they are funded directly by taxpayer dollars, if private, indirectly through grants.
They are not perceived as profit-seeking enterprises, nor as vital engines for economic growth, so the imperative to reduce labor costs, especially at the expense of service to students, appears unseemly.
They are expected to operate in an ethical manner and set that same example for students.

One theory goes that it’s not always good to focus on soft targets, since changing them has little effect on the “regular” targets that drive down standards and control industry. This argument holds water in some situations – like efforts to organize public employers while ignoring the vast private sector labor market. But in the case of universities, the “soft target” label doesn’t fit very well. For one thing, they often sub-contract with the largest operators in the service industry (like Sodexho and Aramark in food service), and universities may offer an opening foothold in unionizing these companies wholesale as opposed to contract by contract. For another – and this argument is as older than the hills round these parts – universities are grounded capital, growing in urban areas, and expanding services and jobs. So, in many cases, they can set local or regional standards in places where no other employer (or industry) could do so. They're increasingly emerging as the economic backbone of cities abandoned by other, more mobile industries. Finally, there’s all the ancillary benefits of having a unionized campus: training new activists, affecting the course of knowledge-production and research, etc. etc. etc. Those arguments take a lot of rhetorical energy to put together, and since I’m not organizing students I don’t have to make them anymore, thank fancy Moses. Go here for more.

Anyway, congratulations to the U-M workers, SEIU, and the students who fought so hard throughout for this precedent-setting win.

The Go! Team

2006-05-02T12:41:00.000-07:00

Great American Music Hall
4/28/06

I saw The Go! Team last week, the night after Sekou Sundiata. But I decided, instead of reviewing the show, to just develop a list of all the relevant terms, ideas, comparisons that have accumulated over the last 2 years of unrelenting hype for this band. Originally I was gonna list them at the beginning of a longer review, to get them out of the way, but once done with the list I realized that I didn’t have much else to say. Feel free to explore these at your own leisure – Pitchfork, RS, VH1, et al have all covered the group.

Cheerleading
70s cop show soundtracks
Mixing issues (album & live)
Crowd participation
Original vs. US release
Record vs. live lineup
Why do they use sampled horns?
Ninja works the crowd
Two drummers
Buzz Band
Fatboy Slim/Public Enemy/Motown/etc./etc.
Experience/Exuberance

The show was a total rave-up, and the crowd was more into the band than any I’ve seen since the 2001 Okayplayer tour. So that was great. But intentional or not, mixing was pretty horrible. Based on the arrangements, I'd assume the density is intentional, but that's all the more reason for a good mix. It did help cover Ninja’s lame lyrics, but I thought the lame lyrics were sort of the point.

Swedish psychedelic rockers Dungen co-headlined. They look like they just left the Shire and grew 14 feet, and they play a weird, Scandinavian breed of hairy, stompfoot Viking rock. I think Jethro Tull would be the closest analogue, but that might just be the flute solo talking. The bassist, who we could barely see through the hobbit-fro, had the line of the night:

“Excuse me. We sing in Swedish, so if you do not understand…

...then that is the reason.”

Sekou Sundiata

2006-05-01T10:38:00.000-07:00

Sekou Sundiata is basically a poet, of the spoken word variety as opposed to the Edna St. Vincent Millay variety, though in the last few years he’s transformed into more of a performance artist. I went down to Stanford last week to see the world premier of his new performance piece, The 51^st (Dream) State, which he’s been developing during a residence. As the title suggests, it’s sort of a dreamy rumination on American identity. The performance set-up for this new piece fairly resembles that of his critically-lauded blessing the boats: a full band on stages, vocalists, and Sundiata moving about speaking poetry and prose with musical backing. They had also erected a series of screens at the rear of the stage, which projected dancing, photo collage, and interview footage.

I can’t speak for the music in the last one, but The 51^st (Dream) State ran the gamut from jazz to gospel to raga and back again. I find this kind of hodge-podge wonderful to enjoy in the moment, and less memorable as time goes on. Programmatic music needs a pervading musical sensibility -- not necessary a strict genre, just a style and tone -- in order to communicate and sustain whatever themes it's intended to accompany. The Hindustani improvisation over Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” was jarring and beautiful at the time, but its disturbing effect fades in memory and the cavalcade of other musical styles that preceded and followed it effectively prevent listeners from gaining an understanding of its function within the whole. That's a major problem, and an easy way to make your audience into a bunch of glassy-eyed trout.

The same problem extended to the poetic content, unfortunately. When poetry is presented well (not that I’m much of a judge, but I have some experience due to my parents’ occupation and my own early aspirations), an audience over the course of an evening gains a sense of how the poet interacts with the world, and what he/she would like to reveal to you about it. Sundiata’s poetry, at times transcendent, at times aimless, did not accomplish this, at least not for me. He prefers to inundate you with words, imagery, and rhetoric, which may entertain you but will only communicate something substantive if he's exercised discipline in putting them together. I loved his trenchant re-vamping of the tired cliché “Everyone’s a nigga if you look at it right," and so did the rest of the crowd. Meanwhile, his first-person narrative of the confusion and horror immediately following a terrorist attack left the audience (included me) shocked and clammy – his character describes recognizing brain tissue, amongst the carnage, because it’s “ticking like a watch.” You don’t hear that everyday. Even the juxtaposition of taped interviews with a Japanese internment survivor and a post-9/11 Arab-American, heavy-handed as it was, did a good job bringing our struggle with American identity into relief.

Sundiata's weaker material simply rambled through a variety of clichés about facing up to our own injustice, greed, etc. I hate to say this of a respected poetry professor, but he sometimes kind of sounded like a sophomore AmStud major doing a book report on Notes of a Native Son. Which isn’t to say that the sentiments aren’t appropriate for the times, given the current, volatile conflict over what is and isn’t American. This was just a classic situation of trying to address much more than anyone could cover in two hours -- especially through the medium of song and poetry. Camille described it well when she said, leaving the theater, "I just wanted them to follow up something."

One last thing I’ll say: one thing I admired about The 51^st (Dream) State was that, of all the art I’ve seen in the last six years, I think it was the most comfortably situated in the 21^st century. It made no effort to be timeless, or to explore history separately from its relation to the present. It avoided various dated paradigms of race, gender, colonialism, etc., while confronting head-on violent acceleration of culture, commerce, and empire that has characterized the last decade. With more focus, any of these topics could have made for a challenging (and memorable) theme.

As it was, all I can say is that I saw Sekou Sundiata perform last week. I’m not too sure what he did.

Rainer Maria review

2006-04-26T12:56:00.000-07:00

Catastrophe Keeps Us Together
Grunion Records
4/4/06

I was so far behind on this band, that when I became a fan of Rainer Maria, it was during not their first, not their second, but their third wave of popularity. It was about a year ago, when I saw them at Café Du Nord, which was both my first time hearing their music, and my first time eating Du Nord’s super-crispy Kennebec fries with chili ketchup and garlic aioli. Awesome night.

In the intervening year, I’ve developed a medium-sized obsession – somewhere between my consuming devotion to the Magnetic Fields and my vague infatuation with MF Doom. They’re from Wisconsin…which is nice. Not because they have a particularly Midwestern flavor, but because they don’t have the permeating (and infuriating) aura of being from New York, or the Bay Area scene, or – worst – fucking Montreal.

I love three-pieces, especially G-B-D types. Rainer Maria works on basically the same formula as The Who, although the content, performance, etc. are plenty different. Really virtuosic performers, who just tear into their instruments like they just bought them yesterday, filling up as much space as possible. I also have to admit that I like female bassists. Don't know why.

The new album is called Catastrophe Keeps Us Together, and it’s...sorta different, sorta not. The band smoothed out the sudden changes, abrasive vocals, and dissonance from the previous albums, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I love their last LP, Long Knives Drawn, because it sounds so much like their live show, full of careening energy and furious attacks. The new one is more controlled, more carefully arranged, less muddy. For the songs with depth, of which there are a handful, the added care improves the material. For the more banal songs (this poetically-themed band occasionally writes some pretty lame lyrics), the cleaner mix and simplified lines pushes the music dangerously close to modern-rock territory. On previous albums, slightly juvenile melodrama was well complimented with punk abandon. And you can’t fault bands that make this kind of music for writing simple lyrics – as with Sleater-Kinney, or The Walkmen, complex verbal exploration wouldn’t fit the tone or the style. That said, modern-rock + simple lyrics = Hootie, so you’ve got to be careful.

As with the last two albums, the first cut serves as the anthem, (see Long Knives Drawn’s “Mystery and Misery” or “Artificial Light” from A Better Version of Me). Cashing in on the post-millennial, pre-apocalypse tension, “Catastrophe” opens the album with a vaguely political alarm call/love song. It’s the best cut on the album, and even got me a little misty at the end, when Caithlin De Marrais repeats over and over: “I’ve got a plan/I’m gonna find you/at the end of the world.” What can I say, she’s hot and I’m a sucker for screamy professions of love against the odds.

Other album highlights: “So Terrified,” which would be cheesy if it weren’t so earnest and resolutely anti-cliché. “Bottle” is a great love song that employs the charmingly Garth Brooks-ish metaphor of love like a bottle to the head. “Already Lost” has a mounting anguish that purges itself through lots of thrashy chords and desperate wail, along with trademark "I'm sad/I'm ok/wait, am I?" lyrics:

I waited up all night
And my thoughts were all of desolation
But the best part of waiting up all night
Was in the morning when I didn’t feel a thing.

There’s some familiar stuff here, too. “Life of Leisure” is basically “Ears Ring,” a little watered-down and Interpol-ed (Peter Katis, the Interpol’s producer, did the first two cuts). “Clear and True” has a generic catchiness that I know Camille will love, and I’ll endure and probably sing along with mindlessly. Unfortunately, William Kuehn’s wild drumming can’t save “Make You Mine” from lines like “I’ll make you mine/Cause I love you so, tonight,” and Kyle Fischer’s endlessly inventive guitar work can’t save “Burn” from similar problems.

But the album as a whole is great, and I’m sure it’ll grow on me, because De Marrais’s voice is so affecting, and they play so well. If you don’t own a Rainer Maria album, and you’re interested, I’d recommend Long Knives Drawn or A Better Version of Me, to get a sense of what their best songwriting sounds like un-handicapped by “sophisticated” production. Also download “Catastrophe” from iTunes and try not to sing it under your breath.

Oh – also, Rainer Maria are going on tour to support the new album, and I can’t recommend their live show strongly enough. I’ve been seeing live music long enough not to trust the frequent impulse to buy an album as soon as the show’s over. But I did after the show last year, because they were having such a blast on stage, dancing around and tearing into the songs. Kyle Fischer, especially, is not to be missed. It probably depends on the mood, but on the live DVD, and at the show I saw, he was just shredding and doing some killer Pete Townsend moves.

Tour dates

Band website

Ask New Plastic Alek

2006-04-24T10:36:00.000-07:00

I stole this idea from Alex Ross, though of course I've seen it elsewhere. I wouldn't have done it myself, but after finding "new plastic alek" among the search terms that returned my website last month, I figured that if I've got a nickname, I should answer some questions.

Yes, immigrant housekeepers are underpaid: find out more.

I'm no expert, but I think if the chorus of a song is "I'm Black and I'm proud," it probably does exemplify black power.

Janel Maloney is not ugly -- consult a physician for your problem.

Hey man, once you found Angelo Badalamenti's theme for Twin Peaks, weren't you wishing that someone had remixed it?

Wouldn't we all love to read the Nice & Smooth blog? Greg Nice's posts would probably be pretty similar to his lyrics. "Today I bought some Timberlands. Does that make you jealous, per se wishing you had some? Don't get p-noid like Sigmund Freud. By the way, I love women. Do the seats recline in your car?"

To whoever was looking for the main idea of Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic as a counterculture of modernity, let me know if you find it. Same goes for Sahlins' history of conjecture.

At least those folks are reading my college essays, instead of just downloading them from swipe pages.

For the millionth time, I'm a heterosexual white Jew: I know next to nothing about black male sexuality.

If you're an aspiring drum major searching for tricks, you've come to the wrong place -- unless you consider being tall and sick of band class a "trick."

And if you want to know what caused the holocaust, you've really come to the wrong place: try my mom.

Finally, this is all I know about your topic, sir. But they're newborns and they can't fly, so you can probably catch one and study it.

times is changin'/young niggas is agin'

2006-04-18T15:29:00.000-07:00

Bloggin's gonna be spotty for a week or so more. Camille and I are looking at properties (or, in the proper parlance, "units") to actually buy with money and live in.

I can't describe how far that is from my youthful ideas about what I'd be doing at age 25. Not that this is worse. I thought I was going to be trying to make it as a professional clarinettist. Which meant, presumably, that when people asked me what I do for I living, I would have had to say "I'm a clarinettist." Glad I dodged that bullet.

I'm married. I have a cat, two fish, and a monthly car payment. I'm about to have a mortgage, and in a year and a half I'll be starting law school.

Things just ain't the same for gangstas.

*bends over, hands on knees, breathing deeply in and out*

aqui estamos y no nos vamos

2006-04-14T11:01:00.000-07:00

A few reasons why Monday’s immigration rally in San Francisco was good.

1) It was short.

2) It had a mix of broad and narrow scope, i.e. Broad: Everyone deserves justice and citizenship in our country, regardless of where they came from or how they got here. No human being is “illegal.” Narrow: Boo HR 4437.

3) Our union was keeping things live with chants adapted (on the spot) for the occasion. "El pueblo-Arriba! La migra-a bajo!" etc. Local 2, baby.

There’s been tons of coverage on this issue already, obviously, and I’d expect that pretty much everyone reading this will be familiar with the relevant stuff here anyway. What interests me is the relation between the massive pro-immigration demonstrations (for lack of a better term), and the anti-war/anti-Bush mobilizations last month.

Leading up to, and following, the March 18 protests, I spent a lot of time talking with other folks in the movement about the effectiveness and utility of "mass mobilization." I’ve been complaining for a while now that, instead of being a focused demonstration of support for a particular change or set of changes, these anti-war mobilizations end up turning into Lefty-Con 2006. Hardly a rare complaint on the left, or anywhere else of the political spectrum for that matter, but no less valid for it. These are basically just large gatherings of people with similar, or related, or at least non-conflicting interests (like vegans and First Amendment advocates). That's why the proper term is "mass mobilization," as opposed to "protest." Well, really, I'm just splitting semantic hairs to prove the point -- I don't actually care what you call them. Anyway, Ben Adler wrote an article in Campus Progress last year about the September mobilizations, which I think sums it up very well:

Here we have the opportunity to bring together tens of thousands of Americans to implore someone (the president) with the power to grant a specific, achievable request (withdrawal from Iraq), and it may well be wasted. Where activists could demand a policy change that has significant and growing public support, too many choose to protest every U.S. policy under the sun.

…this view, in its attempt to be all encompassing, is in fact quite myopic; it trades actual gains for people suffering under occupation for the immediate satisfaction of unloading invective on every aspect of U.S. foreign policy for a day.

Should we resent people for believing in Lefty-con, or even just enjoying it? Well, obviously not -- and I admit that the part of myself I'm not crazy about frequently prompts me towards derision, either because I've decided to be holier-than-thou for the moment, or because I'm guilty about doing little to challenge US military aggression, or because I have a jerky knee despite my best efforts. But regardless of how mature I feel like being on a given day, I still don’t go to “mass mobilizations” as a rule. I don’t get much out of them, they’re rarely effective in my view, and I believe my time could be better spent working on focused campaigns, or taking a break from work on focused campaigns. And I won’t be arrogant enough to say I’ve heard every counter-argument to my position, but I’ve heard plenty. Think globally, act locally. Show the rest of the world visible resistance to the Washington consensus. Give activists a chance to communicate, recharge their “batteries,” get pumped. Etc. etc. etc.

Here’s the thing: it seems like whenever I ask organizers and attendees a few direct, strategic questions, things get way too murky for my taste. Who’s in charge of making the change you want to see happen? What do you think is most likely to influence their decision? Assuming they’re not inclined to make the change of their own volition, what do we believe will persuade them, threaten them, or leave them no option but to make that change? Those are the critical strategic questions to me. If you want to win change, as opposed to just demanding it, then strategic questions should be at the center of every action you perform and every dollar you spend.

If, for instance, I thought that mass mobilizations of leftists had any significant impact on the people who set U.S. military policy, then I would attend them. Unfortunately, even if they did have an effect, the mass mobilizations would still require a focused aim. The goal of gathering a whole lot of people in one place, or multiple places at once, ought to be to demonstrate that an enormous number of people were capable and willing to join together to push/oppose a particular course of action. And either the numbers, the demographics, the location, or the activity (ideally all) should demonstrate to people in power that they need to heed the will of the gatherers. Meanwhile, all that Lefty-Cons demonstrate is that thousands of leftists understand how to operate a listserve, and are willing to indulge each other for a short period of time. I know that sounds harsh, but it's hard for me to imagine how this kind of event would inspire someone (in an accountable way) to further action. I’m all for it if it does. And if there’s literally no other way to transform that person into a progressive, critically thinking, active member of society, then all the more reason for mass mobilizations to take place. I'm trying to work the scorn out of my system, and replace it with bland support, or at least indifference. But without clear, persuasive answers to the strategic questions I posed above, you will not find me there.

All that said, the immigration protests were the exact opposite of Lefty-con. There's pending legislation in Congress that will profoundly affect millions of immigrant families, communities, and the U.S. economy. Moreover, it will set the course for future federal decisions in this area, and public opinion is in flux.

Should we have a march for immigrant rights, human rights, no more sweatshops, organizing rights, and fair trade? No. We should have a march opposing the crappy legislation, and supporting a humane, just immigration policy to be implemented now, or at least begun now, while there’s a window. We’ve got legislation that’s up in the air, a critical wedge issue in the 2006 midterms, and a group of people that haven’t had any voice on the national stage since 2003. Politicians who are in charge of drafting and approving this legislation are watching their constituents because they know what's at stake. They're seeing business and labor unite on lobbying day, and they're seeing huge numbers of "legal," voting immigrants (and the naturalized-by-birth children of "illegals") turn out across the country. They're seeing the politicization of immigrant communities that are less than a generation old, and growing at enormous rates in hundreds of major cities. That covers who's in charge and who/what might be likely to influence their decision. It's clear that the organizing is there to make this one of the crucial political issues of the next ten years, and that leaves people and powerful institutions with no choice but to address it. Also, sad to say -- it's here in town, not across the world. Unlike US foreign policy, we have immediate and effective ways to confronting the injustice in our own communities, which means that voters, workers, taxpayers, and consumers can be mobilized to exert pressure directly on the folks that make these decisions.

RIP William Sloane Coffin Jr.

2006-04-12T17:41:00.000-07:00

I tried a few times to summarize Sloane Coffin's life, or express the lasting impact his work had, and will continue to have, on everyone that struggles for social justice.

But it's the end of the day and I'm wiped out. And tonight is Pesach.

So instead of waiting a long time to gather my thoughts, I'll just echo his most famous quote, in the hopes that it causes you to pause for a moment and mark his passing.

"The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love."

(In fairness, his most famous quote is probably the one about winning the rat race and still being a rat, but this one seemed more appropriate)

pesach

2006-04-12T09:58:00.000-07:00

Passover begins tonight at sundown.

Josh, as usual, has put a lot more thought into this than I would have (or at least he linked to previous moments when he'd put thought into this).

I'll just add that the janitors at the University of Miami are entering their second week of a hunger strike for organizing rights, and that when we feast tonight we should remember not only those who hunger in a world of plenty, but also those whose hunger for justice has brought us -- and continues to bring us today -- ever closer to the promised land.

In case that was a little preachy, I'll also point out the the UM students straight GAFFLED an idea from the Better Way Village at Yale. Look at this picture, taken at UM last week:

Now look at this one, taken at Yale in April 2003:

I know, the mock negotiating table idea has been used before. This was too blatant to pass up, plus the 3-year anniversary of the BWV is coming up on Friday.

kid koala/mike relm

2006-04-10T10:26:00.000-07:00

Kid Koala/Mike Relm/J-Boogie
Independent
4/1/06

Have you ever been to a “turntablist” concert?

That’s right: “No.”

You should go to one. If you like dancing to music, and aren’t ashamed to be a geek, it’s likely to be more fun than whatever live music’s available that night, and way better than CSI: Milwaukee (or whatever).

Turntablism: the record player/mixer as musical instrument. A lot of people have trouble accepting the pretense, but I think you’d be hard-pressed to find someone holding onto that opinion about after seeing a show like the one I went to last week.

I’ll skip J-Boogie, because I always get bogged down in the openers. But Mike Relm is more fun than a barrel of Fun-Dip. Seriously, DO NOT MISS HIM IF HE COMES TO YOUR TOWN. He’s a dorky guy in glasses and a black suit, with a sense of humor, a lot of ridiculous things on vinyl, a fairly pointed (but not always apparent) political sensibility, and the innate DJ ability to make any record kill. And in his newer shows, he’s introduced the Pioneer DVJ-X1, which is a scratch-able DVD “turntable." A while back Pioneer developed some kind of algorithm to simulate vinyl manipulation and match it to a physical "scratching" interface, the size of a 45 record. That was a revolution, and now they've applied the same process to DVD audio, and built a parallel system for visual data. Imagine what it might look like on screen if someone was moving the spindles of one of those old reel-to-reel projectors back and forth, and you'll get the idea.

Relm already had made visuals a big part of his show, but with the scratch-able DVD, and a DVD burner, they can become totally integral. Video/audio clips include: Bjork’s “Human Behavior” video (where she sings at her Cheerios and gets chased by a stuffed bear), the “O face” and other scenes from Office Space, a mix experiment using the “Twist” scene from Pulp fiction (you can find video of that here), “99 Problems,” Peanuts/Peewee’s Playhouse, Fight Club, School of Rock…you name it. Plus blends of Led Zeppelin, the Cure, Public Enemy, John Lennon, Rage Against the Machine (two cuts!!), RJD2, etc. etc. etc. etc. I was in heaven. You can get a taste of it on his website , and check out some fan-recorded visuals at YouTube (they’ve even got clips from the SF show).

Kid Koala was also awesome. Folks will know him from Handsome Boy Modeling School, Deltron, and of course Gorillaz. Also Bullfrog. Koala’s set includes elaborate mood pieces, frenetic B-Boy workouts, artsy stuff, and lots of humor. He’s in the vein of other hiphop renaissance men, like Prince Paul, DJ Spooky, etc. He’s a cartoonist and composer, with clear designs on a niche market that has slowly become acceptable in the mainstream: geeks. Which isn’t to say he didn’t rock hard or get everyone dancing. But what stays with me was his Plunderphonics-style reworking of “Moon River,” his performance of “Drunk Trumpet” (in which he uses the turntable speed and vinyl surface to create his own jazz trumpet solo over a rhythm section), and his “spooky” set, which mixes Slayer, RATM – it was a good night for them – and various scary sound effects. It’s impossible not to have fun when this guy is playing. I can’t say enough about his creativity and the freshness of his approach to the instrument. Go get his first LP, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and listen to it with open ears.

And see him when he’s in your town.

I know I say that about everybody. I guess what I’m recommending is more live music. It’s the best possible way to spend your entertainment money. Do you remember any movies you went to in 2005? You’ve got maybe a dim memory of buying Milk Duds, right? Live music is interactive, and it stays with you much longer. Though, by the same token, it takes much longer to wash a bad show out of your brain than a bad movie. So do what I do – once every 1-2 months, spend an hour combing through Citysearch, or the events listings of your local paper. Alternately, you might make a list of the venues that you enjoy in your town and comb through their calendars. Then buy a set of will-call tickets in advance, and write it into your calendar. That way, you’ve already spent the money and blocked out the time, so you’re committed and you’ll make it out the door (which is the hardest part).

Plork

2006-04-05T12:58:00.000-07:00

Introducting Plork.

Should I change careers?

I don't know, I feel like Della Fitzgerald (that's my laptop) would be intimidated by the Powerbooks. Signal processing is not her thing. She's better equipped for simple things, like searching for screencaps of Janel Maloney in her underwear from last week's West Wing (don't bother, I already looked).

Some information & relevant questions, from the site:

The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) is a newly established ensemble of computer-based musical meta-instruments. Each instrument consists of a laptop, a multi-channel hemispherical speaker, and a variety of control devices (keyboards, graphics tablets, sensors, etc...). The students who make up the ensemble act as performers, researchers, composers, and software developers. The challenges are many: what kinds of sounds can we create? how can we physically control these sounds? how do we compose with these sounds? There are also social questions with musical and technical ramifications: how do we organize a dozen players in this context? with a conductor? via a wireless network?

It's too early (obviously) to tell whether this will turn out to be a novelty or the start of a widespread phenomenon. Computers have been a critical component of new music for decades now, and of live performance for nearly as long. Their capacity for use in an interactive context is based on the quality of the hardware design and the software programming. Plork is currently composed of people who participate in all aspects of the process, from research to design to composition. The success of this model beyond Princeton will rely on the quality of the ideas at all these levels. Will non-CS majors be able to learn & perform this music? If so, will the software for instrument design be flexible and friendly enough for them to design and play their own instruments? Will composers without a background in computer music be able to do the same?

This isn't to suggest that making the Plork idea available beyond the Princeton CS department is a necessary or even a good idea. But the unbounded nature of computer technology (not to mention wireless networking) prompts these kinds of questions. Friendliness and flexibility are two of the main advantages "meta-instruments" ought to have over the conventional variety, and the same should go for sound design and composition. To my mind, the prospect of those open, unexplored vistas (and not the novelty of 15 people sitting on pillows with Powerbooks) is the most exciting thing about Plork.

PS: I found while browsing around that, in Dutch, the word "PLORK" can also be used to describe a girl with a "Prachtige Lichaam, Onwijs Rot Kop" (sp?), which translates into English as "wonderful body, unbelievably ugly face."

In my freshman dorm room, I regret to inform you, the preferred term was "butter face." As in, "She has a nice body, but her face..." I don't think I need to explain that I never used this term. It's just one of the many gifts I received from Eric Eskenazi.

Mad for Sadness

2006-04-04T15:10:00.000-07:00

Arab Strap
Cafe Du Nord, San Francisco
3/25/06

Wow, what a difference. Camille & I last saw this band at the Guinguette Pirate in Paris, which is actually an old Chinese junk docked on the banks of the Seine. It's a horrible venue for live music. Woozy, cramped, navy toilets. They have the right idea, in that it resembles an awful dive bar, but at least in an awful dive bar you don't have to walk down the gangway for fresh air, or wonder if there's sewage in your drink.

This was the summer of 2003. Arab Strap had released Monday at the Hug & Pint the previous April, and was touring on it. They were not happy. Which, to anyone who's heard their music, will seem like a redundant statement. But they even seemed unhappy beyond the general level of gloom and disgust for which they're adored and/or detested, depending on your view.

The concert in 2003 was pretty awful, what with the sound problems and onstage bickering, but I've come to love this band deeply since then. Somehow they made it onto the list of artists whose releases I will always buy new, not used, as soon as they come out. I don't know what it was about their sound that got to me, but it was something. Slow, echoing fingerpicked guitar, plodding drum machine, and half-sung, half-growled, half-whispered lyrics about alcolhol and one-night stands in an impenetrable Scottish brogue. Occasional strings, plinky pianos, effects.

I know, I know, it sounds irresistable. But Arab Strap will seduce you (like fruits and vegetables, or a woman – (c) Oliver Babish). Lead singer Aidan Moffat has a Serge Gainsbourg-like delivery, and a rather distinctive way with a couplet. From “Packs of Three,” off Philophobia:

It was the biggest cock you’d ever seen
But you’ve no idea where that cock has been
You said you were careful, you never were with me
I heard you did it four times and johnnies come in packs of three

Meanwhile, guitarist Malcolm Middleton seems to have an endless supply of reflective, slowly-winding guitar backdrops. Rather than developing chord structures, bridges, etc., he strings these long lines together, so the overall effect is something between a guitar and a music-box drone with flange. It's distinctive, and immediately unsettling.

Over the course of the last ten years, the band has cautiously added new elements to their palette. Strings, bagpipes, music boxes, percussion. Each album gets a little more conventionally “listenable.” I actually like that they seem to work slowly and deliberately on their sound, rather than making a constant effort to fling themselves into new areas. They’re the perfect example of how doing the same thing over and over can work. Like the Morgan Freeman of Scottish indie rock.

Alright, the show. The first opener was A Whisper in the Noise. They courageously started with a 10-minute long slow tune. I leaned over to Camille and said “Side one of The Wall called, and they want their shouty, echo-y vocals back,” which she thought was funny. Then I told her I needed to remember that for the blog, and she retracted her statement, saying it wasn’t quote, “funny enough for the internet.” To which, of course, I had to respond: “If yeh don’t eat your meat, how can yeh have any pudding? How can ye have any pudding if yeh don’t eat your meat!?” I guess I don’t remember much more about the opener. They didn’t particularly pique my interest. Kind of detached and plodding for my taste. I feel bad saying that, since they suffered some misfortune later on in the tour, but being weird is not the same as being good. And even though I like weird music, I don’t like it because it’s weird. To be fair, I was hungry and waiting at the bar with my wife, who was also hungry (and a little cranky), so who knows.

His Name is Alive had the middle spot. I can’t get into their music too much. Some of it is terrific, some is just boring, wandering nonsense. “I Thought I Saw,” from their new album Detrola, is a super singable Motown-type shuffle, with horns and scratchy guitar goodness. It got the patented Camille head-bounce, which is hard to earn. But that song proved an exception during the show, and is probably an exception in their overall catalogue. The majority of their music left me cold, bored, and annoyed that I didn’t spend my money on something else. It’s worth noting, though, that their recorded output, from what I’ve sampled on ITunes, seems more varied than what they presented, and might offer more to eclectic ears. Unfortunately neither the songs nor the performance had the immediacy to translate well in a live context. Worse, their setlist was sequenced funny. It didn’t have much variety, and it didn’t build. ¾ of the way through, when you should be warming up to a band, getting comfortable with their sound and style, I was wishing HNIA would get off. That’s never a good sign.

Oh, right, the headliner. Well, they fucking killed. They’re in rock band mode now – no strings, two guitars, bass, and live drums instead of a machine. The concert opened with “Stink,” the snarling first track on their new LP, The Last Romance. The buzz on this album is that it’s more “upbeat” than the previous ones (true), but it’s comforting to know that even with sprightlier tempos, they haven’t strayed too far from the template. The first line of Stink is “Burn these sheets that we’ve just fucked in,” and it goes pretty much downhill from there. They are not Kool & The Gang. They tore through some new songs, including the new LP’s first single, “Dream Sequence,” as well as “(If There’s) No Hope For Us” and “Don’t Ask Me To Dance.” Like the older material, these songs explore the claustrophobic, disorienting nature of love and the need to escape, or at least get your bearings. But the upswing in pace and rock-ier instrumentation makes the music’s hopeful side a little more credible. Listening to the earlier albums, I had trouble believing that Aidan Moffat actually wanted his drunken, destructive lovelife to change. If he wasn’t addicted to wallowing, he was at least sincerely committed to it. The Last Romance, on the other hand, has a struggling, driven aspect to it that fundamentally alters the perspective – to me, at least. It’s just more hopeful, there’s no other way to say it.

As the show progressed they dug back into their ten-year catalogue for “Pyjamas,” “Who Named the Days,” “New Birds,” and “Packs of Three.” Though “Who Named the Days” is a gorgeous, whispered ballad, the overall crowd response & rapt sing-along leads me to believe that it’s become a minor anthem despite their best intentions. They closed the set with “There is No Ending,” an absurdly catchy uptempo dance number with a big trumpet hook and reluctantly optimistic lyrics. Yeah, it talks about pedophiles and nuclear holocaust, but it still falls squarely into the “love song of resistance” mold – sort of like “No Surrender” being covered by the patrons of a sports pub in the Northern UK. You know – “Love will keep us together…again.” My favorite part:

If you can love my growing gut, my rotten teeth, and graying hair
Then I can guarantee I’ll do the same as long as you can bear.
If you love my little poofy hands, my skinny arms and reeking feet
The way I dance the way I eat…

Plates may smash and doors may slam, my comments may be less than kind
But that won’t mean I’ve changed my mind
I’m a huffy prick the best of times, I love to sulk and shout and squeal
But please don’t doubt the way I feel.

For the encore, Aidan and Malcolm came back with an acoustic guitar and took requests. It offered a great window into the heart of the band, and a picture into how they must of looked, felt, and sounded back in the mid-nineties. I’m one of the fans that’s always glad (so far) to see them change their approach to music, and how it reflects their outlook on life, but it was nice to get a glimpse during the encore of the bare elements that called critical attention to Arab Strap a decade years ago: brutal honesty, dark humor, and passionate longing of the very modern, urban variety.

So Arab Strap was great. As for the other openers? Well, I’ll put it this way. They were not Scottish.

plus i'm scrambling...

2006-04-03T14:32:00.000-07:00

...to review shows I've seen recently. This last week was the NoisePop festival here in San Francisco, so it'll be a while before I get them together, but keep checking back.

Arab Strap should be up today or tomorrow.

Kid Koala/Mike Relm should be up later this week.

Smoosh should be up next week.

Planet Asia/Rasco will never be up, because the show was two weeks ago and I can't remember enough. It was slightly above average for a hip-hop show, but the sound was still weak and the crowd wasn't too familiar with Asia's new, worse material.

Superman is a dick.

RIP Norm Leonard...

2006-04-03T14:08:00.000-07:00

In the vein of people whose death I missed because reading the Obit section depresses me almost as much as the Fashion section, I wanted to mark the passing of Norm Leonard. Over the last few months I've been having this conversation:

Some guy: So, you're going to law school?
Me: Yeah, I think so.
Some guy: What kind of law do you want to practice?
Me: I'm not sure I actually want to practice law, but...
Some guy: Then why are you going?
Me: Well, there's a lot of other things you can do with a law degree, but I don't know...I might practice law. If I did, it'd be, like, labor law or law directed towards social justice.
Some guy: You mean, like A Civil Action?
Me: No.

Well, if I did practice law, Norm Leonard would be the blueprint to follow. I'll link to the LA Times and SF Chronicle obits.

Here's the short summary of his work, from the Chronicle:

Mr. Leonard's cases included his 1954 defense of Harry Bridges before the U.S. Supreme Court, in which he successfully got the labor leader's perjury conviction overturned. Other cases included the defense of activists who picketed in spring 1964 at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel to protest a whites-only hiring practice; the defense of UC Berkeley students during the fall 1964 Free Speech Movement; conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War; and the representation of people subpoenaed before the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings for alleged Communist Party activity.

I had the good fortune to work for three months at Leonard Carder LLP, Bay Area firm started by Norm Leonard and his partner Bill Carder. I even attended a holiday lunch with Mr. Leonard in 2004, where he spoke forcefully about the importance of carrying on the work. His colleagues at the firm were an inspiration to me, and helped show me what could be done with a legal education. So, if I do end up practicing law (and again, I don't know if it's likely or not), it'll be due to that as much as anything.

Glad I got the opportunity to see him in person.

MJ in his prime...

2006-03-24T11:39:00.000-08:00

So, because of all the wedding hoopla, and work, and my successful attempt to disconnect myself from Okayplayer, I didn't find out about the tragic passing of James Yancey (aka Jay Dee/J Dilla) until last week. For folks who don't know Dilla's music -- it might turn out that you do. He barely promoted himself at all, even in his solo career, but he made some of the best and most distinctive hiphop in the last 20 years. Amongst heavy-duty hiphop fans he was totally revered, to the point of fetishization.

I've been wanting to write something about him for the last week. But his history, and his struggle to make music through the illness, are well documented in articles by the Detroit Free Press and MTV.com. And you can hear a lot of his live music at TheRootsLive.com, which recently produced a tribute (this link also gives you the uncharacteristically personal and emotional statement from Roots MC Black Thought, which is a must-read).

I guess I don't have a whole lot to add. Dilla's work demonstrates, even on first listen, that he had one of those minds just built for music. There aren't too many composers out there whose music you hear, then right away understand their personal connection to sound and rhythm. And that quality obviously extended to his collaborations with other musicians. He had a talent where whoever he was working with -- Tribe, D'Angelo, Common, Talib Kweli, Madlib, Badu, Busta, etc. -- it seemed like the perfect match, and at the same time his music brought so much new out of those artists that they seem deeper and stronger with him behind the boards.

Anyway, I've also been thinking about the signature Dilla "sound," if there is one. Dilla was versatile almost to a fault. He went from producing R&B (Janet Jackson's "Got Till It's Gone", D'Angelo) to jazzy boom-bap (Common's "The Light," "Dynamite," for the Roots, etc.), to sparse, percussive bangers ("So Hardcore," the best track on Busta Rhymes' When Disaster Strikes). And that doesn't even count the entirely new style of beatmaking he introduced for his own group, Slum Village -- which I don't even want to try to describe. Whatever he made, it was usually characterized by the absence of instruments rather than their presence. That's one of the ways you can tell a Dilla beat in the first few seconds. The archetypical Jay Dee beat is uneven drums, with a sloppy hi-hat and a too-loud snare, an expressive bassline so weird that no one would play it in real life, and a loop filtered beyond recognition. Overall, his beats tend toward purposeful sloppiness, but the good kind. The kind practiced deliberately by jazz and funk bands in an effort to get further into your guts. Hearing (and feeling) a good Dilla beat makes you worry that your heart rhythm will go out of synch with your lungs. Or, if that doesn't make any sense, it's like the experience of patting your head, rubbing your stomach, and chewing gum while you're walking down the street. Discombobulating and exhilarating at the same time.

What I really wanted was to write a sort of blow-by-blow review of Dilla's work, and make a list of his incredible innovations and moments of genius. But ?uestlove already did it here, and much better than I would have. So if you like hiphop, soul, jazz, or funk, go get Fantastic Vol. II. Get Like Water for Chocolate. Get Donuts, get Jaylib, and Mama's Gun, and Voodoo, and Labcabincalifornia. You'll have Dilla fever soon enough.

One last thing:
I've noticed that it really seems to get to me when people with remarkable, unique approaches to creating music die. Elliott Smith's is another that comes to mind right away. I think my sense of good in the world, more than I'd care to admit, is inextricably tied up with my sense of good in the world of music. The existence of people like James Yancey and Elliott Smith is sometimes what gets me up in the morning. The gratitude I feel for their music, and the hope I hold for the things they haven't written yet. I'm discovering that the indescribable feeling you get, tearing off the shrink wrap, is hard to live without.

James Yancey's music gave me that feeling, no question. But obviously I can't describe it very well. If you want to pay your respects to Mr. Yancey, find the music and listen to it. I'm sure that wherever he is, or isn't, that would make him happy.

"it's unbelievable..."

2006-03-20T16:07:00.000-08:00

Man.

This is a huge settlement, both in financial terms and in terms of its impact on future litigation. Not only did Bridgeport win a high-profile, lucrative sampling case in a what has become murky territory for the law, but they actually got the album pulled from shelves and the radio.

A number of things entertain me about this. Where the RIAA is insanely vigilant against piracy, they regularly appear on record and in amicus briefs in opposition to restrictive sampling law. And now we see why. I don't know Ready to Die's current sales volume, but imagine if this happened to the Blueprint or College Dropout. Pulled off the shelves and ITunes for sampling violation? Damn. Of course, it wouldn't happen to those artists because the modern-day sample climate in mainstream hiphop is incredibly paranoid, especially since the 2004 ruling I linked to above, but breakout hits from lesser-known (and less cautious) labels often emerge from the underground, and those're the people who don't have the budget to clear the samples, but could be seriously exposed in a situation like this.

I really want to know how they made this case, considering that the samples would be pretty hard to recognize and identify for your average jury. Maybe Bridgeport music hired Questlove as a jury consultant.

Anyway, this quote piqued my interest (from the Tennessean) .

"We're glad the jury listened very closely to the evidence and found appropriately for Westbound and Bridgeport."

I'm trying to imagine prosecution: "So, here, you can clearly hear a half-second of the guitar lick, right before Biggie says 'I put the 12 gauge to your brain/Make your shit splatter.' Listen very closely to this evidence."

But of course, there was probably never any contention over whether the sample was used, but rather whether the sample falls under fair use guidelines. I think it does, but obviously the jury was following the 2004 ruling that even one second of recorded material, regardless of use, should be actionable. For what it's worth, there's no question in my mind that the fair use doctrine applies here. After all, we're not talking about "Ice, Ice Baby."

P.S. I'd be remiss if I didn't link to Jesse Kriss's History of Sampling 1.2, a graphic representation of sampling's history. It requires some serious Javascript but it is awesome.

Anna Eshoo chronicles...

2006-03-13T17:47:00.000-08:00

Josh makes reference to Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, (D. CA) as an aside to his recent piece on Mark Warner's press coverage.

That prompted me to recall my various encounters with Congresswoman Eshoo. By the way, keep in mind that whenever I use phrases like "which prompted me to..." in this blog, what I mean is: "I was bored and someone or something provided me with the thinnest of pretenses to stop working and write a NewPlastic post."

The first time I saw Anna Eshoo, I was, no joke, a drum major in my junior-high marching band. I wasn't one of those fancy drum majors who do twirls and tricks and stuff. A week before the May Day parade, my band teacher said that we needed a drum major. By the way, for people not in the know, the only reason a drum major exists is because marching bands walk on flat ground, with no conductor, so you need a big long stick to show the folks in back where the beat is. I have a suspicion that the band teachers approached me to do it because I was an inch away from quitting the band, and somehow they knew that, in my little world, even the role of drum major was superior to plodding along in a line. We were not one of those tricksy marching bands. We walked and played, simultaneously, and we didn't even do that very well.

Anyway, after the march was over, Anna Eshoo came down the parade route after us. I was with my mom, who, when the Congresswoman appeared, shouted:

"YAAAAY!! Womens' Suffrage!! Whoohoooo!"

That's a verbatim quote. Believe me. I was with my then-girlfriend, Caitlin Levin, who thought I was weird enough as it was (I think that was why we were dating), and she heard the whole thing. I hid behind a tree.

Come to think of it, that encounter wasn't particularly impressive or edifying. And that's the best of the bunch.

Speaking of female members of Congress, and my mom embarassing me, it reminds of the time my parents held a living-room fundraiser for Barbara Boxer. Caitlin wasn't there to document the mortification of that particular occassion -- but she didn't need to be.

Why?

Because I still have my pair of "Barbara Boxer" boxers.

They say "Barbara Boxer" on them.

...

Back off, ladies. I've got a ring on my finger now.

also re: fortune cookies...

2006-03-10T16:37:00.000-08:00

I was looking for other things people add to the end of fortune cookie fortunes, and I came across this site.

I was, to put it mildly, STOKED.

Why? Because I have, for the last few years, held on to a hilarious, weird, horribly bleak fortune cookie that simply read: "Everything is not yet lost."

Things didn't stay tubular for too long, though.

Scroll down.

Dammit!!

fortune cookie suggestion...

2006-03-10T16:13:00.000-08:00

So, you know how people play that stupid game where you add "...in bed" or "...between the sheets" to the end of every fortune cookie fortune? The claim is that this addition always seems to both work grammatically and transform the fortune into something more risque. But of course, what usually ends up happening is you get something like this:

You: "Wait, wait, lemme read mine! I'll go, I'll go!...Ahem: 'You will be traveling to distant lands for business purposes'...IN BED!!"

(silence)

You: "...huh."

Anyway, a few days ago in the car, inspired by recent conversations/blog entries, I came up with a better fortune cookie addition. I hereby present it to you, free:

Upon completing the recitation of your fortune cookie, append the phrase: "...at the RENFAIR!"

Wait for hilarity to ensue.

Taos Music...

2006-03-09T17:24:00.000-08:00

Taos, NM has a remarkable music scene, for a town of around 5,000 people.

I don't know how to describe it. It's not "Americana," though that'd definitely be the record-store genre classification.

Maybe AmeriCaneToad.

Taos is known for having the highest per-capita number of art galleries of any city in the world. But its quotient of mandolins and bouzoukis is probably pretty damn high, too, if the CDs and the live music are any evidence.

I was very happy.

Camille & I went out and saw a bunch of live music while we were there, and I bought three CDs of local artists, though there were plenty more to choose from. Taos Music is a good introductory website for the scene, and you can also buy music through it (getting more money into the hands of the local artists).

I brought back Am I Born To Die, a collaboration between Chipper Thompson and Mason Brown, which has been in non-stop rotation in the car since then. Their version of "Pretty Peggy-o," I'm sorry to say, puts Bob Dylan's a little bit to shame. It's got a sweetness and delicacy that Dylan missed, and the whole fun of the song (to me at least) is in the mix of gentleness and surprising brutality. Their takes on "Banks of the Ohio" and "Oh Death" are also terrific. I think these kinds of albums are important for people whose sense of traditional American music has been deadened by the post-O Brother, Where Art Thou flood of "roots" releases.

I also brought back a collaboration between Thompson and Roger Landes, a Southwestern bouzouki master and founder of Zoukfest (no relation to this). Fans of Uncle Tupelo have heard a lot of bouzouki, because it was all over their third album, March 16-20th, 1992, which is incredible and a must-have. Go get it. Bouzouki has a lute-ish sound. When Camille heard the album, she said "One word: Renfair." Then we argued about whether it really sounded like a Renfair, even though neither of us has been to the Renfair. The whole Renfair thing came up because I described the band Big Country as "U2 meets up with Talking Heads at the Renfair." That's actually a good description, by the way. Moving on.

Bouzouki's been a mainstay in Irish music for a while now, though it's actually Greek in origin. When you think about it, "bouzouki" does sound like the kind of thing you'd marinate in garlic and lemon juice and bake wrapped in filo. It also sounds like a slang word made up by Missy Elliott to describe some bodily area she wants to inform us she's shaved. Anyway, the album I brought back is called The Janissary Stomp, and it's good if you've got a high bouzouki tolerance.

Finally, I bought an album by "Dulcimer Dan" Arterburn, who is, believe it or not, one of multiple "Dulcimer Dan's" out there. The album's called Just Pickin'. I assume the "...Ma" is implied. This album is only for folks that are seriously addicted to the twangahol. I doubt I'll be playing it too often in the car. Because even though I loved it at first listen, it's pretty infrequent that I feel like pretending I'm in the Blue Ridge Mountains ca. 1904. Even more rare that Camille wants to take that little trip. But I'll have the album just in case.

One last aside: I have no idea how these guys keep their instruments in tune when there's literally no moisture in the air at all. It'd be like playing bluegrass in an airlock.

advice

2006-03-07T17:15:00.000-08:00

I'm back from my honeymoon.

In case anyone's interested in honeymoon advice -- make sure you ask whoever takes your room reservation about the bathroom situation.

I'll give you some tips.

Wrong way to conduct this conversation:

You: So, you have a room for those dates?
Other guy: You betcha.
You: Does it have its own bathroom?
Other guy: (pause) ...yes.
You: Sounds great! See you then!

Right way:

You: So, you have a room for those dates?
Other guy: You betcha.
You: Does it have its own bathroom?
Other guy: Sure.
You: Is the bathroom significantly separate from the rest of the room?
Other guy: Yes.
You: Not to belabor the point, but by "separate," do you mean "Right on the other side of a waist high adobe wall?"
Other guy: Nope, it's completely separate from your bedroom.
You: Okay. And, just to cover the obvious loophole here, it's not located in someone else's bedroom, right?
Other guy: Don't worry.
You: Ha ha. One last thing. Will people sitting in the hammock outside be unable to avoid looking directly through a window at the toilet, or, failing that, the shower, resulting inevitably in awkward eye contact?
Other guy: (pause) ...no.
You: Forget it. We're going to Cancun.

And...SCENE!

long time coming...

2006-02-21T12:44:00.000-08:00

David Irving's been sentenced to three years in Austrian prison, for holocaust denial.

In some ways, this is terrific, because one of the first things that comes to mind when you hear about his brand of disgusting, irresponsible scholarship is: "there oughta be a law against that."

In Austria (and eight other European countries), there is.

So in my heart, I hope he serves every day and I hope it's awful.

But in my head, I wonder about whether this is a fair or appropriate use of the criminal justice system.

Bad scholarship shouldn't be illegal, nor should being an unrepentant bigot.

Scholarship that meets the legal standards of inciteful hate speech or libel should be illegal, and it is.

I haven't read too much of Irving's material, but I've read excerpts, and while there's no doubt he's a holocaust denier (which in my book puts him just below oil-company lawyers and Fred Phelps in the seventh ring of hell), I don't know whether his writings ought to classify him as a criminal. Obviously, in Austria and Germany the legislatures feel that the damage caused by Holocaust denial is significant enough to represent a threat to freedom, health, or safety. Or, at least, they perceived that threat when the laws were passed.

I have no trouble seeing the damage caused by holocaust denial, just as I have no trouble seeing the damage caused by expressions of racial or ethnic prejudice. These actions present a threat to the psychological health of individuals and their communities, as well as a threat to the integrity of current ideas and the historical record. But that's a risk inherent to the preservation of free speech. Without demonstrating a clear and present danger to freedom, health, security, etc. (not manufacturing one, as the Bush administration did with the Patriot Act), the anti-Holocaust denial laws do not seem justified.

Irving's nemesis, Deborah Lipstadt, agrees that the free speech concern should take precedent. But she manages a nice dig at the end of the article, which I think is warranted considering what he put her through.

Nothing is served by having David Irving in a jail cell, except that he has become an international news issue. Let him go home and let him continue talking to six people in a basement. Let him fade into obscurity where he belongs.

Ice cold!!