Heartache With Hard Work

Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand – Primitive Radio Gods

This one is almost the epitome of the forgotten classic. In fact, its been that way since the very beginning. It was an old demo that the band had basically abandoned, eventually made its way into the studio, and was then released to utterly no fanfare. Then, the next year, it suddenly got noticed and became a massive hit virtually overnight.

It’s quiet, deeply reflective, but also somehow apocalyptic.  The sort of song that you’d play while waiting for the heavens to unleash themselves.

It starts with the sound of a record player dropping – and then it shifts into that distant drum beat with that B.B. King sample. It’s a perfect amalgam of several decades of musical history. It marks the demise of the record – and its rebirth in a new form. It connects the legacy of the blues to the more downtrodden textures that would grow into trip hop.  And then there’s the glorious bit at the end when you hear the crackly voice of the phone call, the ringing of the bells, the music just starting to swell, and he sings out the B.B. King bit, with a passion that utterly reconfigures the line, turning it into somewhat triumphant.

Ezra Klein (among others that I’ve seen) goes after Tim Pawlenty for his apparently weak response to the ‘why are you running for president?’ question.

In one sense this is fair.  It’s a stupid question, but it’s one of those necessary hoops you just have to jump through.  Everyone asks it, and your willingness to take it seriously as a question is a sign of your willingness to take the whole process seriously.

On the other hand, it’s a REALLY stupid question.  People want to be president because they are ambitious, and they want to be the most powerful person on the planet.  It’s not complicated.  Clearly there are MANY people who don’t want to be president.  And those people aren’t running, or even considering it.  But I bet there are millions who, if they thought they had a serious chance, would run.

By the way, I don’t really believe Pawlenty’s answer – that he seriously considered not doing it.  He seems like he’s been running for years at this point.  And given the way the field is shaping up, he’s got every reason to want to.  At this point he’s probably got something like a 15% chance of being the next president of the United States.

Some Might Say – Oasis

In some ways, it seems weird to bring up anything from Oasis as a forgotten classic. After all, they are still massively big in the UK, where voters in ‘best albums of all-time’ polls get into fights about whether Morning Glory or Definitely Maybe is the single best album in rock history.

Still, over here in the States, Oasis hasn’t really been relevant for over a decade. And while people probably still listen to “Wonderwall” or “Champagne Supernova” when they want a bit of nostalgia, I doubt that very many people regularly revisit this track. Which is a shame because it is a great song, and embodies just about everything that made listening to this band in the mid-90s so glorious.

Big, brash guitars. Muddy mixing that makes the whole thing sound like it’s been blown apart by a tornado and hastily reconstructed. The sneering lilt of Liam Gallagher, who can somehow make the utterly banal sound meaningful (seriously, how bad a line is “I’ve been standing at the station, in need of education in the rain”).  This is rock music like it’s meant to be played: with limited precision and a whole lot of energy.

So I’m spending the next couple weeks digging back through the 90s.  This entails looking back at myself in that time period.  What was I doing, who was I, what did I care about?

One thing that I cared about a lot in the 90s, but have paid almost no attention to for the last decade, is basketball.  Which means I had totally forgotten about this song:

That’s the Presidents of the United States of America (remember them?!), doing the song “Supersonics” sung to the tune of their modest hit “Supermodel.”

Like I said, I haven’t really paid any attention to basketball since about 1998, but I’m still plugged in enough to know about the theft of the Sonics from Seattle.  And apparently the franchise  is currently in the last four of the NBA playoffs right now. Here’s hoping they crash and burn.

I try to do a CD-length (old habits die hard) mix approximately once a season, of all the new stuff I’ve discovered in that time.  It provides the background for my life – and it produces some pretty durable memories.

If I hear, for example, “Taxi Ride” by Tori Amos, my mind immediately jumps to the spring of 2003, sitting in the Pasco airport at 5 AM waiting for a flight, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes.  Or if it’s “Balcony” by Birdmonster I’m walking through the streets of Oaxaca in the summer of 2006.  Bob Dylan’s “Mississippi” puts me in a room at the Lexington Ramada (to which I will never return, inshallah). And so on.

I didn’t do a mix for the Spring, in part because I’ve been pretty low-key about listening to new stuff so far this year.  Very little has blown me away, and I haven’t really been digging like I usually do.   But another aspect of that is that I’ve been re-acquainting myself with some classics of my slightly-younger days.

That has included a major burst of R.E.M. – easily my most-listened-to band of the past six months – quite a bit of Oasis, loads of Nirvana, The Wrens, some of the deeper parts of the Modest Mouse catalog, Smashing Pumpkins, etc.  Basically it’s been an alt-rock binge.

But, it has just occurred to me, this isn’t a good reason to abandon a mix for the season.  It just means I should embrace the nostalgia of this moment.  So instead of making a mix of new things, I’m going to gather together a bunch of these slightly-forgotten tracks into one place.

It’s a tricky thing, because I’m not actually looking to populate the mix with my favorite tracks of the past 20 years.  I still listen to those regularly.  This mix will be for songs I adore, but which somehow fell off the radar for one reason or another.  So, no “Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine” or Neutral Milk Hotel or “Heart Shaped Box” or “Across the Sea” and the like.

Here’s a few to whet your appetite:

Your Woman – White Town
Time Ago – Black Lab
Female of the Species – Space
Enjoy the Silence – Failure

I’ll be posting somewhat regularly on this theme over the next week or two, as I take a stroll down memory lane. I invite everyone to join me.  And to offer suggestions!

Remind me of some one-hit wonders from the 90s, or b-sides from big bands. What’s your favorite deep track from The Aeroplane Flies High?  What song is most worth holding onto from the DGC Rarities record?  Which version of “Fake Plastic Trees” is the best?  The one from The Bends, the acoustic one from the Clueless soundtrack, or the live one from the Tibetan Freedom Concert?  How good did that No Doubt record actually turn out to be?  What’s the best early techno song?  Is “Bittersweet Symphony” still rubbish?

Mark Halperin gives odds on the GOP nomination.

Romney is his prohibitive favorite at 3-1, with Huckabee at 9-1, Daniels at 10-1, Pawlenty at 18-1, Huntsman at 20-1, Gingrich at 40-1, Palin at 60-1, and Crazy Michelle Bachmann at 1000-1.

A couple comments.

First, those numbers add up to a 69.2% chance of someone getting nominated. I’m curious who Halperin thinks makes up the rest of the 30%.  I’m guessing he just didn’t bother to add up the numbers, which is pretty irritating.  If you assume he thinks those are the real candidates and ramp it up to 100% odds Romney comes in at basically 2-1 to win the nomination.  Which is pretty bold.

Second, that’s a preposterously low number for Pawlenty, who I still think is the favorite to get the nomination.  Romney has some really serious problems, and most of the rest of those people are not real candidates (either because they won’t run or because they are vanity runs – like Gingrich).

Pawlenty has fairly limited baggage, and for whatever reason people seem to be willing to write off his flip-flops as genuine changes of heart rather than evidence of cravenness. He’s a reasonably good looking white guy of medium age.  He was a governor of a blue (but not too blue) state.

In a year when almost everyone else has gaping wounds, what’s the reason for him NOT to win?

Celebration Guns – Stars
Regret – New Order
Calm Americans – Elliott

So: the celebrations about the death of Osama bin Laden. What are we to think of them? There are a couple of strands of thought here. Some people want to criticize them for finding joy in murder. And there is a certain ghoulishness to the whole thing. Others want to say that people should feel free to express themselves in whatever way felt right. That there is no accounting for the sort of visceral reaction that the news might provoke. Others see nothing shameful at all in the celebrations. Some of these lament the immediate politicization, discussions about what it means, etc. They simply wanted to feel the unity of the moment.

My own reaction was somewhat muted. In general I am deeply skeptical and unhappy about the state wielding deadly force. That said, I’m no longer the total pacifist I once was. At least, I don’t think I am. And if there is anyone that a state has justification to kill, bin Laden has to be high on the list.

That said, I certainly did not respond with high-fives or any real sense of joy.  There was that fake MLK quote floating around, which has a sentiment that I can certainly get behind. But my thoughts actually turned more to a bit from Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five:

[T]here is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.
And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?
* * *
I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.

The thing I like about the Vonnegut quote (and the book as the whole) is that it doesn’t limit itself to simply making a moral judgment on the act itself. Massacre is certainly a bad thing, but that’s a pretty banal point.  For Vonnegut, the really complex problem isn’t the fact of massacres as much as it’s the glorification that it receives back home.

Must our enemies be killed? Perhaps. But if so, I tend to think the proper response should be Vonnegut’s quiet “so it goes” as opposed to cheers.

All that said, I don’t feel particularly comfortable criticizing those who responded differently. 9-11 never hit me with the same sort of pre-rational force as it seems to have struck many others. And while I do feel comfortable criticizing a lot of the policy choices that were legitimated or grounded in that primeval set of emotions (the war in Iraq most prominently, but there’s plenty more), I don’t want to necessarily challenge the validity of the momentary feeling itself.

Obviously, it’s difficult to disentangle those things. But in this case the line between valid outpouring of emotion and problematic appropriation of that emotion is found in the “U-S-A! U-S-A!” chants.

To celebrate the death of bin Laden leaves me feeling more than a bit uncomfortable. But I can deal with that.  It’s the immediate translation of that celebration into the language of American dominance and hegemonic empire-building that concerns me.  I think that passes into the realm of destructive and vaguely disgusting political ideology.

To simplify: I don’t feel the desire for revenge as a sort of affective need, but I can understand those who do. I cannot find any modicum of respect, though, for those who immediately jump to nationalism as the filtering mechanism for this.

There is danger in framing bin Laden as having committed crimes against humanity (in terms of what then becomes possible and/or necessary as a political response). But that formulation at least implies the idea of a principle upon which our search and destroy mission was conducted. To chant “U-S-A! U-S-A!” is to declare that this whole thing has only ever been (and will always be) about nothing but naked aggression and power. It is, in short, to validate every criticism of the US as a hypocritical, tottering, imperial force.

The death of bin Laden does not prove the worth of the United States. If the US is great, it is in spite of our desire for vengeance and our capacity to wield mass death. It is in our capacity for restraint, in the fact that if we must kill we do so with some sense of regret.

All of which is to say: the expression of unfiltered joy at the death of bin Laden by itself doesn’t strike me as a serious problem. It is the celebration of that joy, its reification through self-congratulatory forms, that fills me with dread.

Fight Test – The Flaming Lips
Where Is My Mind – The Pixies
Fighting In A Sack – The Shins

Fight Club is a faux-intellectual, faux-authentic valorization of masculinity, hiding behind some sleek packaging. It’s the sort of film designed to make people feel like their socially regressive inclinations are actually hyper-cool and postmodern.

I’m not trying to make the facile critique: that it’s a violent movie trying to glorify that violence. This seems easy to refute.  You’re clearly meant to understand the main character as insane, and the eventual consequences as indicative of an out-of-control personality. And if you want to be especially generous, you might argue that the real point of the movie is to complicate all sides of the equation. That is: the fight club clearly goes off the rails, but it is a necessary product of bankrupt consumerist society. So there is a component of chickens coming home to roost, where the insanity of each element only feeds off the other and leads them both toward catastrophe.

There is something to all of this, but here’s the thing: it’s a really banal point. The world is absolutely stuffed with this sort of faux-critique. And it’s only become that much more of a cottage industry in the world of the War on Terror, which almost seems designed to elicit this sort of crap from Hollywood.  There’s clearly something far more substantial going on with Fight Club.

In my mind, the real message of the film is the following set of observations:

• Look how COOL it is to be authentic
• Being authentic means going back to nature, where everything is violent
• Society sucks SO MUCH that it can pervert even something so freaking awesome as this.
• The problem with the fight club is that it quickly becomes organized. That’s what paves the way for its corruption. Therefore, a blank slate of violence for its own sake and nothing else is the only genuine form of existence
• Finally, and perhaps most importantly, women couldn’t possibly understand. In fact, femininity is really dangerous because it exemplifies the weak-willed sort of liberal order, where people talk about feelings and are good consumers. It’s what makes us so crazy in the first place as well as what ruins us when we try to break out.

For its proponents, the takeaway point of the movie is either vaguely progressive or vaguely critical. If you parse out the plot, you can certainly make a case that the fault lies with excessive masculinity. Or you could argue that it exposes some deep-rooted incapacity for liberal society to eradicate violence. And so on.

But the vagueness, and incompatibility, of these points is precisely the problem. The conjunction of a somewhat progressive perspective with this sort of aesthetic nihilism ends up producing a massively regressive artistic object. As I wrote a few years ago, regarding a particular style of violent artistic depiction:

I don’t mean that they uncritically support this stuff, although there is some element of that. It’s just that if they are critical, it is only in the details – they still buy into the general ethos that there is something unutterably cool about violence, addicts, and the general wreckage of human lives. Sure, you’re not supposed to idolize these people, but you are supposed to get off on the catastrophe of it all. It’s like Fight Club, which wants you to think it’s a progressive movie, but is far too in love with how awesome all the violent scenes are to ever really get around to making an actual point. And when the movie’s over, all you really walk away with is a sense that fascism is kind of sweet.

I would amend that a little bit now. It’s not that the only message you end up with is ‘fascism is sweet.’ You also might read it as saying ‘fascism is bad! (but only because it keeps having to deal with liberalism. If you could really eradicate all the ‘fake’ parts of society, we could all be happy fascists together)’

Fight Club is the perfect mirror-image counterpart to gung-ho action movies where violence is awesome, but only when deployed by the hero and in the name of justice. In either case, the essential point is the glorification of violence and the condemnation of weak-willed (feminine) values which get in the way. That this perspective is more oblique in Fight Club only makes it more dangerous.

Kinder Words – The Mighty Mighty Bosstones

I think I’ve made a variant on this before but I’m too lazy to scour the archives to figure it out. So I’ll just say it again:

It strikes me as strange that liberal folks tend to be in favor of negotiating with enemy regimes. They push grand bargains where both sides give up something in exchange for concessions from the other side. It’s a very liberal form of internationalism, with actors driven by rational interest rather than by implacable, pathological hatred. On the domestic front, however, the same general class of people are deeply skeptical of the value in negotiating with Republicans.

I’m not saying it’s hypocritical or necessarily incoherent. I get that there are differences. But it still seems a little weird. If you’re willing to believe that Saddam Hussein or Khamenei or Kim Jung Il can be dealt with, is it really so difficult to think the same of Boehner?

You saw it in the debates over the budget and forward-looking discussions about the debt ceiling. Commenters argued that the Republicans were taking the American society hostage. Claims of ‘we shouldn’t negotiate with hostage-takers’ rang out. But wouldn’t some of these same people support negotiating with ACTUAL hostage-takers?

And if the appeasement argument is true, where giving in only emboldens Republicans to keep demanding more, then why isn’t the same true of rogue states? Won’t they just pocket concessions and leave America weaker?

Again, I’m not saying this is an impossible problem. There are clear differences, and it’s also surely the case that all-or-nothing approaches in either case would be bad. I personally find myself very much on the side of grand bargains in IR and much more skeptical of them with Republicans. So I include myself as someone who should make more effort to think through these issues.

Alabama Pines – Jason Isbell
Codeine – Jason Isbell

I used to think I liked the Drive-By Truckers. In the last several years I’ve realized that I never really did. It turns out that what I like is Jason Isbell. Most of the Truckers songs I really loved were his. And while I don’t hate the work of the others in the band, they have very few songs I come back to with any regularity.

This distinction has become blindingly clear this year, as both have released new records. The DBT record is fine, but seems very rote in its application of their existing form. On the other hand, Isbell’s Here We Rest is fantastic, full of energy and passion and pierced through with the sort of raw emotion that defines the very best of the genre.

The general theme of the album is loss. Each song offers a vignette on the subject. Sometimes the loss is positive, and often it is complicated. The loss of childhood, giving up on a broken dream, the abandonment of fear. There’s “Tour of Duty” which tells the story of a soldier returning home, and the awkwardness of coming back into the normal world of everyday life. “We’ve Met” is about meeting a long-forgotten love, and the self-reflection it demands. “Stopping By” gives us a peek into the heart of a long-absent father trying to make amends. He doesn’t ask us to fully sympathize with the father, simply wants us to see the pain of someone who knows they’ve done wrong. And “Codeine” is a tour de force, an ambling country-tinged ballad about getting dumped because someone else can get access to better drugs.

Isbell says very little that we haven’t already heard. Which isn’t the worst thing. There’s something to be said for doing something well and not worrying about trying to guss it up. In particular, Isbell’s voice is pretty limited. And the album’s best songs are the ones which work with that fact, rather than trying to step beyond his range. His weary utterance of the chorus in “Alabama Pines” (‘somebody take me home, through these Alabama pines’) is glorious for its capacity to evoke a disenchanted southern spirit. The limitation in his voice betrays a larger limitation in worldviews and possibility. And it’s perfectly counterpointed by some achingly sad guitar work.

The album’s weaker tracks fail to walk this line so well. “Heart on a String” is the sort of straightforward contemporary rock music that 30-somethings ate up in the 90s, which is a bad place to start. But then it’s combined with a terribly unfocused vocal performance from Isbell. Elsewhere, “Never Could Believe” is roots-honky-tonk-by-number. It’s not terrible, just dull. And “Daisy Mae” is just Isbell and his guitar, and verges on genuine pathos but can’t quite connect.

These few tracks aside, this is a very composed work from one of the best performers of good old fashioned country rock out there these day.