Heartache With Hard Work

Inside/Outside– Tica Douglas

A synth line that unwinds itself slowly. It reverberates gently, and then is punctuated by a pitter-patter of drum beats. It’s got the deep cold feel of space, like a pop dream floating through the starry night. But when the bass comes in, things start to rattle and shake. And before you know it, everything has burst off into the distance. And all that’s left behind are the remnants of fireworks in your eyes.

Tica Douglas is traditionally a singer-songwriter firmly in the acoustic troubadour mold. So it’s particularly exciting to hear something that bursts out of those confines, stretches out her wings, and takes a serious leap into the great unknown.

Pick up this track here, or grab her Apollo EP.  One of her old songs was on my 2011 list, but this new stuff is her best work so far.

If you’re in New York, check her out every Sunday this month at Pete’s Candy Store.  Or on Oct 23rd at Cameo Gallery.

Vague Space– Stephen Malkmus

Romney certainly won the debate as a debate. Stylistically, he simply looked and sounded better – pressing his points and speaking clearly forcefully. In terms of content, he won the debate in the sense that he made a number of outrageous statements which Obama failed to deal with. And even when Obama did press his case, he didn’t do so in the context of the debate very well.

That is: he seemed to believe that Romney was obviously stuck defending his policies and ideas of the past 18 months. But the Romney who was on the stage kept claiming that he had nothing to do with those things. Now you and I, avid followers of politics that we are, know how dissembling Romney was being. But the average viewer: probably not.

For my debate friends, I think what we saw last night was Romney as a K debater. He was highly critical of Obama’s plan but categorically refused to state clearly what he would actually like to replace it with. He represented far right principles, but did so in a fashion that claimed to capture all the benefits of mainstream liberalism, while somehow evading all its supposed problems (in a series of 2NC floating PICs). By far, his biggest tactic was: ‘that’s not my Zizek.’ Obama’s accurate descriptions of Romney’s policies didn’t stick very well because Romney just kept asserting that there was no link.

Now, Obama’s best attacks were focused here: pointing out the voodoo math in Romney’s tax plans, the intrinsic vagueness of ALL Romney’s policy proposals, the inanity of Romney’s attack on Obamacare, etc. Even so, it took until the very end for this to develop into a real theme. If Obama had been more forceful at consistently identifying the problem of vagueness, this might have ended up being a bigger story coming out of it. It still might be, of course, and if the Obama campaign knows what they’re doing (which they do), they will press this hard over the coming weeks.

My takeaway from the debate is that Romney will certainly get a bump, and maybe even a big one. The polls that come out over the next week will tighten a lot, and we may even start to see a couple which put Romney in the national lead. But I also think there will be some long-term danger for Romney in all of this. Winning the optics last night was huge for him, and made it worth it, but it did come at the cost of saying quite a few things that will put him in hot water.

For example, the far right can’t have been excited about Romney basically conceding ‘yeah, I won’t actually push for tax cuts unless they can be offset’ (which they obviously can’t be). Romney’s attempt to say ‘no link’ to the fact that repealing Obamacare will crush people with preexisting conditions was a blatant and flagrant lie. And if Team Obama go after this, they can convincingly argue that the whole Romney health care house of cards necessarily collapses when subjected to the slightest bit of scrutiny.

The basic Obama theme needs to be: “promises are easy and Governor Romney is wonderful at telling people what they want to hear. But governing is hard, and when the rubber meets the road this stuff all has to add up. People need to EARN your trust that they will have your interests at stake once they take on the job. Otherwise, all the sacrifices will consistently hit you. You have to choose in this election whether you want to support the candidate who cares about YOU or the candidate who only cares about your VOTE.”

Shorter Massimo Calabresi: LOL, liberals think that voter fraud isn’t a real problem, but look at Florida where a Republican organization was engaged in massive voter fraud.  Now let’s pass voter suppression laws!

Don’t Marry Her– The Beautiful South

A new poll suggests that partisan antagonism has severely calcified in recent years.  The crucial finding:

A pair of surveys asked Americans a more concrete question: in 1960, whether they would be “displeased” if their child married someone outside their political party, and, in 2010, would be “upset” if their child married someone of the other party. In 1960, about 5 percent of Americans expressed a negative reaction to party intermarriage; in 2010, about 40 percent did (Republicans about 50 percent, Democrats about 30 percent).

Kevin Drum finds this to be pretty disturbing.  I don’t really share his surprise, though. Some factors to consider.

1) While people seem to have grown more intolerant on this front, they have grown far more tolerant on many others.  Ask the same question about race or sexuality, for example, and see what you find.

2) The meaning of party identification has changed a lot over the last 50 years.  There are far, far fewer liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats are fading away.  It’s a lot harder for people to imagine someone who fits all your other expectations for a good match (shares your values, etc.) who just happens to be of the other party.

3) The fading of locality.  This connects with point #2.  Lots of people in the 50s lived in parts of the country where the local brand of Republican or Democrat was shaped more by geography than grand party ideology.

4) Building off the previous two points, people are far more likely to see the extreme pictures of the opposing party now than they once were.  If you’re a liberal Democrat, you just have to turn on Fox News to see what the other guys think.  And the crazy things said by a small minority come to stand for the whole party.  This is compounded by the ease of insular group associations provided by the internet.  If you’re at all inclined politically and have a settled party position, you will probably seek out like-minded people who will share your complaints about the other side.

Points 1-3 attempt to explain why this looks like more of a shift than it really is.  Point 4 argues that to the extent that there is a shift, it’s not too difficult to explain.

But I also want to suggest that #4 is not merely a matter of irrational dislike, of epistemic closure, or what have you.  To some extent, the changes in information culture have just made it easier for people to realize/express their preferences.

Which is to say: political identity matters!  It matters a lot to some people.  Why shouldn’t you prefer that your son/daughter marries someone who shares a worldview, a set of values, and a general attitude toward the world?  Party identification includes those things, especially these days.

That is not to say that all Republicans or all Democrats are the same.  Of course they’re not. There are plenty of Republicans I get along with great and would welcome into my family any time.  Just like there are tons of Democrats who are total scumbags.

But absent ANY other information, would I prefer my hypothetical child marry someone who supports my team?  Well, yes.  Would I be ‘upset’ about it?  Not precisely, but maybe a little.  Just like I would be ‘upset’ if my kid wanted to marry a Yankees fan, or someone whose favorite band is Nickelback.  And those things matter a heck of lot less than politics!

Paul Campos asks if there is any utilitarian case for voting. The context is a discussion in blog-land about whether single-issue voters (or ‘pox on both house’ voters) are being irresponsible for refusing engage in cost-benefit analysis about which candidate is better overall.

So: I think the easiest answer to Campos’ question is simply to deny that you NEED a utiliarian basis for voting. Casting a ballot, I think, is a matter of civic responsibility. Your goal shouldn’t simply be personal interest-maximization. However, I don’t expect the whole world to join me in that judgment, so here’s two quick reasons why utilitarianism shouldn’t lead you to consider voting completely meaningless.

First, the consequences are large enough that even a miniscule risk of tipping an election is probably still worth the very minimal effort it takes to vote. This is particularly true for people voting in elections expected to be somewhat close. My vote for Obama in November has (for all reasonable purposes) a 0% chance of making a difference. So it’s hard to make it count by this standard. But anyone living in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin, etc. has a non-zero chance of actually mattering. And if you think the difference in value provided by one presidential candidate over the other is even a modest gain, then spread that value out over hundreds of millions (even billions since we’re the global hegemon) of people. It adds up quickly. Let’s say you have a one in a million chance of tipping an election. Well, if your preferred candidate will provide one additional dollar of utility per citizen, then the payoff for your tipping-vote is 300 million bucks. Sounds like a good investment to me.

Of course, there are two problems with that argument. One I already mentioned: it only applies to those people who realistically can cast a vote with even a one-in-a-billion chance of making a difference. Which is a surprisingly small number of people. And second, it assumes that you want to measure utility at the social level. But if you’re purely self-interested, you might ignore those benefits. So the math gets a lot tougher.

So my second utilitarian argument for voting focuses on rule-utilitarianism. Basically: the rule of voting produces significant good compared to the rule of ‘some people vote and others free-ride.’ Even if this isn’t formalized with an actual law, the normative principle works, that one should vote because it conforms to the rule that best maximizes social utility.

World Spins Madly On – The Weepies

Alright, so we’re a little bit removed from the blowback surrounding a series of very stupid Romney comments. While I can’t help but feel just a little bit of glee about these things, I do want to talk a little bit about whether this stuff really matters. Unsurprisingly, I think that the effect is both understated and overstated.

It’s overstated in ways that are pretty obvious. This kind of thing doesn’t reveal who the ‘real’ Romney is. It doesn’t give us a window into his soul, nor does it clarify what the Romney administration would look like. Taken in a loose fashion, there is something to this argument, just not a whole lot. That is: it is potentially relevant to notice that Romney reacted pretty rashly to the attacks in northern Africa, and prioritized politics in that response.

But those are actually pretty insignificant issues. Romney isn’t occupying any office right now. He doesn’t have any REAL responsibility to deal with those issues. It doesn’t tell me much about what he would do if he faced a crisis while in office. We’re currently in the midst of an election; of course he prioritized politics. ANY response would have prioritized politics. The only thing we really have to complain about is that he did a poor job of figuring out what the political effect would be. Which does matter, just not that much.

As for the 47% comments, they mostly don’t matter insofar as they are just a really bad phrasing for something that we pretty much already knew. To wit: Romney isn’t particularly interested in improving the quality of life for the poor and middle class—and he knows that his agenda won’t be targeted at those goals. Which is not to say that he ‘doesn’t care about those people.’ Obviously he wants their votes and doesn’t believe that if he were president it would be terrible for those people. He just doesn’t prioritize their problems.

But again, we already knew this. That he has now stated it in such a damaging way is important to the extent that it helps the Obama campaign make this argument. And it certainly helps that it’s a clandestine video, where the blue team can spin it as revealing his true hidden desires.

But in most cases, that’s just about the limit of the importance of a gaffe. It needs to allow the opposing campaign to make an argument they were already trying to make in a more damaging fashion to really have much lasting effect.

These two events certainly provide some of that, and if Romney does end up losing they will probably feature prominently in the postmortem. But I think they only really matter because other things were already going against him. And I urge caution to my liberal friends who see these gaffes as putting a nail in the coffin of the Romney campaign. Don’t get me wrong, I am certainly now more optimistic about Obama winning than I was a month ago. But this is by no means settled, and it remains quite close.

I’d say there’s about a one-third chance of the gap widening, and this turning into a secure and easy Obama win. But if that doesn’t happen, we could end up very similar to the 2000 and 2004 results, where it comes down to just a few votes in a few states. And at that point it’s anyone’s game.

Tell Me Ten Words – Idlewild

Apparently the Romney campaign has decided that the ‘are you better off than you were four years ago’ question is going to be a big theme of their campaign. I get where they’re coming from here. It’s a metric that’s designed to frame the election as essentially a judgment about whether the incumbent deserves a shot to keep going. And given that the Romney campaign’s primary goal is to convince voters that they are just voting for Generic Republican, rather than a particular campaign, that makes a lot of sense.

Of course, the question itself is fundamentally stupid. It doesn’t really matter if you’re better off; the real question is ‘do you think you’ll be better off four years from now?’ After all, you don’t elect presidents in reverse. The point is to decide who will be the best option for the future of the country. And even if we were going to be retrospective, it would still be better to ask ‘are you better off now than you would have been with the other candidate?’ Elections, after all, are a comparison of options, not simply referenda.

It’s also silly for its faux-precision. The precise identification of a president’s term in office with his/her responsibility doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. After all, four years ago today the economy was still stumbling along, but in the following six months went through the biggest catastrophe it’s seen since FDR. That we’re basically back to where we were four years ago is a decently strong endorsement, actually. On the reverse side of things, Clinton skated to re-election in 1996 in part because the recovery which had started in 1992 was going full tilt by that time. But it’s kind of silly to give him full credit for that.

All that said, it’s a fundamentally stupid question that still has some reasonable grounding. It’s not a literal test, it’s more of a proxy question. Predictions about the future are notoriously difficult, particularly when it comes to the economy. So rather than expecting people to make complicated judgments about which economic approach is best-suited for a particular moment, you just use a very simple test ‘does your stuff seem to be working?’

It’s clearly not the best sort of judgment you could possibly put together, but it’s not a terrible thing for politicians to know that they’re going to get stuck with the blame for what happened on their watch.

Still, you’d hope that people would filter that general attitude through some understanding of the particulars. Which, to be fair, is I think what people generally do. They’re willing to hear some explanation of circumstance, but will only put up with a certain amount.

In the case of the 2012 election, it doesn’t take a lot of mitigating circumstances to make a strong case for Obama. The extremity of the inherited crisis, the lack of relevant solutions offered by Romney and co., the intransigence of the Republican opposition, and so on.

I’ve been watching The West Wing, and the campaign to re-elect Bartlet is essentially defined by one side churning out 10-word slogans, while the other side wants to debate the details. I really hope life imitates art and the simplicity of the 10 words ‘are you better off than you were four years ago’ is not enough to overwhelm everything else at stake. Like I said, it is totally reasonable to make a larger argument built around this premise. But the premise alone isn’t much of anything. If Team Romney is able to DO something with it, then they might be in business. Though, I’m not really sure what they CAN do without providing some more detail about how they can fix the problems better.

Hi all, it’s that time of year again where election season kicks into gear. Which I guess means it’s time for me to get the blog back up and rolling. I’ve got a ton of good music to post about, which will come as soon as I can find the time. But election season really gets my hackles up, so it’ll mostly be political stuff for the next few weeks, as I take breaks from writing the dissertation and applying to jobs to write about whatever thing is infuriating me at the moment.

Today, it’s all the postmortem complaints about the conventions. They’re totally staged, there’s no real news, everything is a foregone conclusion, etc. All of those are true, of course, but why is that so damning?

Conventions used to fulfill one purpose, but now they do something different. If you’re expecting them to all be battles a la 1940 or 1968, you’re clearly going to be disappointed. But while the point of the modern convention is a lot simpler, it’s still pretty important. Namely, conventions are an opportunity for the candidates to present their best face, to communicate their story. The conventions start to lay out the key narratives for the last two months, they identify weaknesses and strengths. And, partly as a matter of timing, they signal an important point in the campaign. For a lot of people, the convention is the time to genuinely start paying attention.

Of course it’s all staged. But so what? Staging is a big part of politics, and we expect the people who are running for this office to be reasonably good at politics. If they can’t successfully put on a good convention, it’s not a very good sign for their candidacy. Much like the guy who doesn’t bother to shave or put on nice clothes for an interview, small failures on less important things provide a market of a larger unwillingness or inability to meet expectations when it comes to more important things.

Instead of complaining that the conventions have no real news, focus on the choices about what to emphasize, what to frame and what to ignore, how they include various elements of the platform, the detail of their commitments, etc. These things all ARE the news.

Near Light – Ólafur Arnalds

Songs composed and performed in a living room, made quickly and then immediately performed. It’s a gimmick, to be sure, but a gimmick that manages to work brilliantly.

Ólafur Arnalds is an Icelandic composer, who makes precisely the sort of music you’d expect on hearing that description. It has none of the bombast of Sigur Ros, but all of the attention to detail. In this case, the self-imposed limitations of environment and composition allow for a deep sense of intimacy and introspection.

There are two currents in my love for instrumental music. Part of what I enjoy is the simplicity, the elimination of artifice. I enjoy being able to to experience the sounds cleanly and let them wash over me. On the other hand, I also appreciate the intense capacity for layering and precision. The first category tends to include ambient and drone styles – where each note is given the space to breathe and exhume itself. The second category is more classical: Bach concertos and orchestral sweeps.

But the division is not quite so clean. The best work of one category is always informed significantly by the other. The complexity serving not to produce dense layers but rather to construct a platform on which the most simple forms are pushed to the front.

Living Room Songs is a great example of this symbiosis. What are at heart incredibly simple movements expand outward like crystal formations–moving at a glacial pace but taking on the most unexpected of hues.

The synth-keyboard which forms of the heart of “Near Light,” for example, is incredibly simple. It is literally 5 or 6 keys, struck slowly and deliberately. But somehow, in the surrounding mix, it sounds like a revelation.

“Ágúst” is similarly built around an incredibly basic progression on the piano. But the intrinsic solitude of that single piano line is enlivened by the delicate infrastructure of the strings. Together, they combine to suggest the frisson of doubt at the core of our daily routines: is this really all there is, to trace these steps over and over? But rather than casting a dark shade with that question, they invite you to see the depth of possibility in even the very simple.

“This Place Is a Shelter” is the quiet, perfect conclusion to the record. It’s the sound of safety, of knowing that there is at least one place in the world that is your own – and of the joy that comes from sharing it with those who matter to you.

The Sting – Vanessa Peters
Copilot – Vanessa Peters

Vanessa Peters has been one of my favorite artists of the last few years, with two fantastic albums on the bounce (and a nice Christmas record last year). Her most recent album The Burn The Truth The Lies was just released and very much lives up to expectations.

It has a little bit less of the grandeur that some of her other work had displayed. But in its place is just a wonderful summer record, full of sun-dappled jangly guitars and choruses that are just begging to be hummed. Once you dig in a bit, you start to realize that it’s actually a bit darker than you’d first sensed. But after a few more listens, the fundamental optimism takes back over and you start to hear the stories about loss and doubt as part of a broader narrative about the importance of connections.

It’s the sort of record that would slot perfectly into a road trip, right in between an old Gram Parsons record and a new Aimee Mann one. Which is to say: it doesn’t really sound like the music of 2012, but neither does it sound old or dated. There’s a sort of timelessness to these sort of songs–I can imagine that I would have loved this record as a kid, but can just as easily picture myself sitting in a rocking chair listening to “No Decision,” content at a life well-lived.

It’s a record without any true standout songs; there are no single tracks that I find myself returning to much more than the others. For someone who is ever-more focused on single tracks–I live my musical life primarily through mixes–that sounds like a problem. But it’s really not. As much as I like to vary my musical experience, there’s something really wonderful about a record that really FEELS like a composite entity.

So while there is no one standout, there are plenty of highlights.

“The State I’m Living In” offers a sense of peaceful contentedness, hemmed in by a wonderful little acoustic rhythm and counterpointed with bit of slide guitar. “Grateful” is precisely what you’d expect from the title: a song that just makes you feel happy to be alive.

“The Sting” might be my favorite song on the record: quiet, beautiful, just a little bit ambiguous. It’s like falling in love just a little more quickly than expected. The bit of tension there–the recognition that you’re opening yourself up to real pain–is just part of what makes it special.

“A Good Judge” moves on at a deliberate pace–and there’s no sense of surprise when it finally breaks out of the shell at about 2:30, just the necessary next step.

“Copilot” embodies more than any other song the sense I discussed above: of happiness, tinged with a bit of dread, but ultimately emerging into the sunlight. A little bit weary, but happy to be there.

And that’s pretty much my takeaway from the whole record. It’s a real joy to get to experience it.