Heartache With Hard Work

Don’t Know How To Party – The Mighty Mighty Bosstones

Serious question: can anyone point me to an economist saying that the Obama jobs bill wouldn’t help the economy?  That it wouldn’t reduce unemployment?

I occasionally try to read the perspective from the other side.  My go-to is The Corner at The National Review – which strikes me as having a nice balance between vaguely reasonable and totally crazy conservativism.  So I stopped by there today to see the reactions to the jobs speech.  Not to find out if they liked any element of it – obviously they will not.  But just to see what rationale they could provide for rejecting it.

These are my findings:

Category 1: This bill is not as good as a more comprehensive thing that I support.  Ergo, it must be rejected.  Example.

Category 2: We already did stimulus and the economy is bad, lol.  Example.  Another example.  This category is the most infuriating.  It is taken as a religiously confirmed truth that stimulus ‘doesn’t work’ so it’s not even worth assessing the details here.

Category 3: I prefer to live in la-la land where ideal forms of private economic expansion are already taking place, so there is no need for the government to get involved.  Example: “We don’t need more federal spending on infrastructure. Instead, we need higher-quality infrastructure spending financed and built by the private sector. We need private airports, private air-traffic control, private toll highways. When the federal government spends on infrastructure, it often misallocates the funds.”  Yes, if such things were being built, it would be true that stimulus wouldn’t be necessary.  Because, you know, we wouldn’t be in a recession.

As far as I can tell, that’s it.  No evidence that the program won’t work.  No economic support for any of the claims.  Just snark.

Meanwhile, every reputable economist who has looked at it agrees that it would boost GDP something like 1-2% and produce a fair number of jobs.  That’s not great, but it’s a whole lot better than doing nothing.

The whole thing is really depressing.

The premise of parties relies on an underlying unity – on a lot of non-controversial things there is general agreement within the bureaucracy.  Fights take place at the level of how to implement general policy goals, rather than about the goals themselves.  This allows for the stuff where there is a genuine contrast in positions to be shown in stark relief.  The people get to express their will on those subjects, and those opinions filter down into the actual day-to-day business of governance, which mostly goes on in the background.

That ideal bears almost no resemblance to our current system.  On the major crises of the day, there appears to be no interest in the actual operations of government.  There is no background.  Everything is an absolute disagreement.

Look, I have no problem with Republicans being opposed to the plan.  But opposition and fingers-in-ears-refusal-to-listen are very different things.  Responsible opposition entails being able to distinguish between 1) those things that the other party is doing differently than you would like and 2) those things the other party supports that you absolutely reject.

If Republicans are intransigent on issues of genuine moral distinction, that’s fine.  But to be intransigent on the very idea that economics works is…stunning.

Putting on my political adviser hat: the best possible response from the Republican caucus will be to insist on breaking up components of the bill and passing a few of them.  To absolutely reject the whole package will clue in even the most inattentive observers that something is seriously wrong in the state of Boehner.  I’m genuinely curious to see whether the higher-ups in the party are capable of making this clear to the rest of them.

Of course, we’re talking about a party whose presumptive-ish nominee thinks (and thinks it’s politically useful for him to say) that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.  So who the hell knows.

Ignite – The Raveonettes

Sometimes it’s refreshing to hear a record that sounds exactly like you’ll expect it to sound.  Today’s example is Raven in the Grave, the newest output from The Raveonettes. For their last record I lamented that they had never quite put together the breakout effort I kept expecting from them.  With another album from them, I’m increasingly thinking that there is no breakthrough to be had.  They’re just going to keep turning out slight variations on the same theme, and that’s just fine.

The big hooks are a little bit more sparse this time around, with only really two tracks that jump out of the speakers at you (‘Recharge & Revolt’ and ‘Ignite’).  On the other hand, the excessive faux-grittiness that plagued the last record has also mostly been expunged. What remains is some very nice harmonies, and the washed out reverb of guitars turned up way too loud.  There’s the slow burner (‘War in Heaven’) and the girl-group harmonies (‘Forget That You’re Young’) and the gorgeous encore (‘My Time’s Up’).

The only real downside here is an occasional drift toward the soporific. ‘War in Heaven,’ for example, is a nice enough song but it drags quite a bit and doesn’t have the energy to sustain itself.  It takes over 3 minutes to really hit its stride by which time you’ve already drifted away.  Same goes for ‘Apparitions’ which never quite gets going.

By far the choice track is ‘Ignite,’ which exemplifies the very best elements of their sound. It starts with a real kick of a bass beat, which leads right into a nice big guitar riff, and an opening verse that offers their best Jesus and Mary Chain impressions.  And then there’s a surprisingly beautiful and tender chorus.  It’s a great song, the closest this album comes to ‘Suicide,’ their high-water mark as a group in my opinion.

Home – Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros

I may be literally the last person on earth to have realized it, but this song is really damn catchy.

I’m sure I must have heard it a dozen or more times over the last two years, but it was not until today that I finally got around to noticing it for real.  The whistling!  The madcap feel of it!  It sounds like it was recorded in a barn with 50 of their best friends, and it’s glorious for just that reason.  Hipster artifice combined with pure naïveté – somehow it just works.

Why are they called Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros anyways?

Modern Inventions – The Submarines

I read the Freakonomics blog, but occasionally I wonder why.  About one in five posts seems to offer some interesting little tidbit that merits some attention.  Unfortunately, many of the rest offer pseudo-economic pablum and increasingly geriatric complaints. Today’s example is a post about how how reading standards have fallen since the 18th century.  The evidence: Common Sense sold 500,000 copies in 1776, and books don’t sell nearly as well anymore.

Why this is supposed to be evidence for ‘literacy,’ I have no idea.  Surely the author is aware that people engage in a massive amount of reading in the modern world wholly unrelated to books.  The internet, for example, contains quite a few words.

Beyond that, Common Sense was written in the midst of a revolution that affected the lives of everyone in the fledgling country.  Is it really that surprising that works of political philosophy feel less urgent to the citizens of this country these days?

The post also remarks favorably on “the sophistication of the writing and reasoning” in Common Sense.  Which is also strange, since I’ve always thought Paine’s writing was hackneyed and poor, not to mention pretty simplistic.  The whole premise of Common Sense was to take the complex ideas of the Enlightenment and strip away the musty philosophical notes.

If you want evidence of the 18th century public operating at a higher level of literary and political awareness a far better example would be the Federalist Papers, which are genuinely good pieces of pragmatic political thought in addition to being tremendously important for shaping popular consciousness.  But even there we’re talking about a vanishingly small number of people who were genuinely engaged.

The basic point I’m making here is that people in 2011 have a massive number of things they need to be smart about, and a massive number of possible avenues for learning and self-expression.  This obviously means that in some respects we are going to look inferior to previous eras on the issues of their focus.  But people today can speak coherently about the strengths of the West Coast offense, about the psychological motivations of Tony Soprano, about the wonders of the umami flavor, about the emotional resonance of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”  They can follow earthquakes and hurricanes in real time.  They can imagine what it is like to live on the other side of the planet.  They can beat Angry Birds.  And, if they are so inclined (and they should be!) they can read Thomas Paine.  In fact, they can read it easily since it’s in the public domain.

There is, of course, some danger that if aesthetic and imaginative possibilities are too easily grasped we come to lose appreciation for them.  But I think there are more interesting words being written today than at any point in history.  I think there are more interesting songs being written today than at any point in history.  And they can far more easily be shared with the rest of the world, too.

Rockets – Moby

I had a brief interlude with Moby in the late 90s.  I enjoyed Play and re-discovered Everything is Wrong (and had my mind blown by “Everytime You Touch Me”).  But it faded fairly quickly and I never really returned.  But I listened to him guest DJ on NPR’s All Songs Considered in March, and was reminded of what intrigued me about him as an artist.  So I picked up his newest record Destroyed, and was pleasantly surprised to discover…it’s pretty good!

There are plenty of somewhat unnecessary indulgences (as you might expect on a 70 minute record from the guy), but more than enough jewels to make it worthwhile. Opener “The Broken Places” is spacey, but in the best of ways: delicate and measured.  The following bunch of tracks is a step down, with a few decent ideas stretched out too thin.  But the real core of the album shines through in the middle.

“Rockets” is a perfect example of what Moby does best.  There’s an absolutely beautiful singing sample–so wispy that it feel likes it’s being heard at a distance of 100 years–held up and sustained by a network of electronic cables.  It’s a wonderful balance of old and new, past and future.  And the line being sung “it’s gone…that’s alright” feels eerily prescient.  See “The Right Thing” for another great example of this aging effect.

“The Day” is a far more straightforward song, with a relatively simple verse-chorus-verse form.  The result is something that lacks a bit of sophistication, but provides a rousing upbeat element.

Elsewhere, “The Violent Bear It Away” is a bit overlong (almost seven minutes) but packs a tremendous punch in its slow build.  By the end, when the strings are swelling and beat marches on, there is a powerful urgency to its movement that remains completely self-contained.  And “Victoria Lucas” offers a similar them, but this time building off of a low-key but rousing electro-dance beat.

I could do without some of the tracks here (“Blue Moon” seems wholly unnecessary while “Lie Down in Darkness” just feels like a weaker version of the albums’ good tracks), but the good work more than makes up for the inessential.  It makes me think I might need to re-visit some of the intervening years in Moby’s work and see what I missed.

Ivory Coast – Pure Bathing Culture

I know almost literally nothing about this band.  They have a bandcamp site set up, with three songs on it. They appear to be from Portland.  And they call to mind the very best of the old Sarah Records catalog.  Listening to “Ivory Coast” is like stepping into a warm bath of ringing guitars and gentle melody.  It’s a song that aches for summer love and wistful smiles.  And it’s easily one of the most beautiful things I’ve heard this year.

King Of Diamonds – Motopony

I want to give up on this song, for its silly card-based metaphor, for its simplistic chord progressions, and effusion of bells. But something here is utterly irresistible, turning a bunch of composite parts that don’t strike me as particularly fruitful into a solid whole worthy of repeated listens. I think it’s the moebius-like underlying rhythm that ties it all together, giving the whole track a slightly unearthly feel.

The song is from their self-titled Motopony, which came out this spring.

Well, my ‘Tim Pawlenty is the best bet to win the Republican nomination’ prediction didn’t turn out so well did it? With that in mind, take the following statement with an enormous grain of salt:

I think Mitt Romney gets the nomination.

Here’s my reasoning: 1) Michele Bachmann is a certified lunatic. That she is being talked about as anything remotely like a serious candidate is just a sign of how miserable our democracy is right now. But even the loony fringe is not going to let Mrs. McCrazy actually try to run against Obama. 2) Rick Perry is experiencing his honeymoon phase, and is already stumbling quite a bit. He may appear to be the more ‘reasonable’ of the crazy candidates, but that is a thin veneer and I don’t think it will hold up. I’m also skeptical of his ability to run for president well, based in part on the fact that he waited so long to even get in the race. That strikes me as the act of someone who wants to win cheaply rather than someone who really understands what it takes. 3) everyone else in the race is a vanity candidate, at best. 4) the more the economy is terrible (and it doesn’t look like improving much in the next 14 months) the more the Republican establishment is going to see 2012 as a genuine opportunity to unseat Obama. Which means getting someone who isn’t going to self-destruct.

#4 is the big one. My premise that they wouldn’t accept Romney stemmed mostly from the belief that the crazy wing of the party was going to exert its dominance in the nominating process. But the more that Obama looks vulnerable the more that the (relatively) moderate side of the party is going to flex its muscles.

There’s a new record from The Strokes.  It’s just about what you’d expect, from a modestly-good band attempting to re-create past glory while simultaneously insisting on their potential to become something new.  Which is to say: it studiously refuses to sound like Is This It? while revealing that The Strokes are constitutionally incapable of actually sounding all that different from Is This It?

The mixture that results isn’t bad – though it isn’t all that great either.  There are a lot of tracks that seem to be trying to do something interesting, while still adopting the form of a classic Strokes track.  The problem, of course, is that the form of a classic Strokes track is incredibly simplistic.  It provides an exceptionally dully background against which to work.  The magic of the band was never any musical sophistication – it was the energy they could squeeze out of basic tropes.

Under Cover Of Darkness – The Strokes

There are some good songs, though.  Most notably this one, which is lanky and joyful and unencumbered by the sort of pretension that ruins some other tracks.

Anyways, while we’re on the subject of bands working off the old Strokes blueprint, why not take a listen to Soft Pipes?

Stay Pretty – Soft Pipes

I heard this song at Knox Road, and my first impulse was to wish desperately that the new Strokes record sounded like this.  The movement here is relentless, but measured, and with great purpose.  Just like it’s supposed to be.

It’s a day for rebirths.  The summer is ending, but that means I’m back home and ready for an exciting new year.  The blog has been untouched for a couple months – as I’ve been pretty busy – but that means it’s ready for a resuscitation.  And what better way to mark that principle then to post a NEW SONG from my favorite band in the world (all member still alive category).  That’s right, after 7 years of silence, Carissa’s Wierd are back recording together.

No word yet on whether this is a one-off thing, or whether they’re planning on reuniting for good.  But they’ve got a show scheduled in Seattle for late September, and promises of more to come.  And they’re dropping a single on September 13.  The A-side is called ‘Tucson’ – after their original hometown.  And the B-side, called ‘Meredith and Iris,’ is available to hear now.

Carissa’s Wierd – Meredith & Iris by hardlyartrecords

You can hear the development of their style, for sure.  This sounds a lot closer to the songs they recorded for the never-finished fourth record – with bigger, more swooping movements, and a bit of electric buzz.  It also has a tinge of their post-breakup work.  But, most importantly, it is utterly beautiful.  And while I will always love the wispy early stuff from them the very most, there is something powerful about the harmonies that Mat Brooke and Jenn Ghetto are capable of these days.  It gives me shivers to hear…

In all honesty, my excitement at hearing new music from this band could only really be matched by the re-incarnation of John and George – and the prospect of a new Beatles record.