Lies, damned lies, and NRA commercials

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtGOQFf9VCE

This is the National Rifle Association's new ad. Unfortunately, it's worth watching. It doesn't quite urge viewers to use guns to kill liberals, but it's so close. "They" {accusing me and many of you} "use their media to assassinate truth. They use their schools to teach children that our president is another Hitler... they use their ex-president to endorse The Resistance, all to make them march... to scream 'racism' and 'sexism' and 'xenophobia' and 'homophobia', to smash windows, burn cars,

Flat and manipulable

Last night's dream: I was evaluating the new batch of presidential candidates, and realized, in a blandly puzzled way, that I was having a specific hard time evaluating the three candidates who were pizzas, because none of them had made any speeches or taken any positions.

First realization on waking: now that I'm awake, it's obvious the pizzas are superior.

Second realization on waking: never mind, I can only judge the pizzas when I know who's been handling them, just like with any candidate.

Offical league rules for armageddon, second edition

1. Players must move continuously in the same direction except when in a widening gyre.

2. Only players with human faces may wear audio communication equipment; falcons and desert birds may not.

3. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold, but must snap the ball to the quarterback within 30 seconds or be charged with delay of game.

#396: Michael Jackson, "They Don't Care About Us" (1996)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNJL6nfu__Q

1. My brain has decided, when I read science articles that mention dark matter, to picture protest banners that blare "Dark Matter Lives". Thanks, cortex, I can tell this will be endlessly cogent and helpful.

2. At an Amanda Palmer concert back in 2012, one of the opening acts was two of her bandmates as a saxophone duo called Ronald Reagan, who played instrumental covers of '80s pop hits. They played "Take on Me" by a-ha; the crowd sung the choruses for them. They played "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey; the crowd sang every single word. Then they announced that would play a true gem of the 1980s, a song from the best-selling album of all time. As they blew into the opening riff, I turned to my friends and said "Weird Al Yankovic was popular but not *that* popular", then shrugged and bellowed along to "Eat It". Great rock song.

#397: Atom & His Package, "If You Own the Washington Redskins, You're a Cock" (2001)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tgwx_hBqxzo

To avoid redundancy, I'll get this song's politics out of the way quickly. Adam (Atom) Goren doesn't think "Redskins" is an appropriate name for a sports team. I agree. In case you're not sure you do, I recently argued in detail that it matters how we represent people of different races in stories, even if there's no immediate and direct harm done. Sports is all about the stories that unfold. "Redskins" is widely perceived as a racist name, racism is bad, and there's no equally good competing reason to use the racist name. "Political Correctness" is only an attempt to rename "Trying Not to Be a Dickhead" so it sounds scary.

The above paragraph is not one of the 425 best songs of all time. Yes, yes, I also recently argued that there's no such thing as objective rankings of music. The above paragraph is still not one of the 425 best songs of all time. So let's talk about Atom, his synthesizer (or "package"), his guitar, and his songwriting.

Emergency readiness goes boink: on The Defense of Thaddeus A. Ledbetter, by John Gosselink

The Defense of Thaddeus A. Ledbetter, by John Gosselink, is an "epistolary novel". That is, it's told as a series of letters and emails and journals and paperwork and drawings, by or to or concerning 12-year-old Thaddeus, who has been placed in In-School Suspension for the entire second semester of the school year. Thaddeus is the Misunderstood Victim of a Massive Injustice, and he writes primarily to himself, his lawyer uncle Pete, and especially his school principal Frank Cooper, who has never encountered anything like him. He is of course concerned with his own vindication, but he is selfless about it: even in exile, he shares his school improvement (and church improvement) (and scout-troop improvement) schemes, plus his handy educational Thaddeus Fun Facts, and even the official rules of Slug Bug with his persecutors.

Cooper and Pete share their own perspectives, which for some reason aren't always in exact accord. They seem over-worried about discipline forms where the "cause for referral" is a scrawled "HE TRIED TO SET ME ON FIRE!", and too little interested in the perspectives of, say,

Can music be objectively good and/or bad?: a conversation

(The following Facebook conversation was likely not intended by its instigators to turn into a discussion of the nature of art, but I think it came out interesting, despite starting with music albums I don’t have opinions about. All participants like each other. No universal truth was proven, though you can tell what side I'm currently on, so you have my invitation to join.)


John: Really pleased to see Run Devil Run (easily the most underrated McCartney solo and maybe solo Beatles album) and Back to the Egg get some love - but come on, Venus and Mars over Band on the Run is pure trolling.

Miles: I enjoy Venus & Mars more than Band on the Run.

Aaron: You're not the only one, but do you really think it's a better record? I mean..I enjoy Wild Life more than I enjoy Imagine. I don't think it's better.

Jeff: The whole "best" vs. "enjoyable" thing is puzzling.

Prone to silly examples

(Daddy reads passage in novel in which the Doctor "lies prostrate")
E (lying on back): "Is prostrate like this?" (rolls onto front) "Or this?"

Me: "Prostrate is lying on your front. Good job, knowing it's one of those! It's also called 'prone', which you can remember because they start with the same letters".

E (rolls onto back again): "What's the word for this again?"

Me (putting book aside): "That's 'supine'. You can remember because normally (lies on front on floor) those little quilly mammals are porcuprone. If they're porcusupine they need your help."

E: "Is there a special word for lying on your side?"

Me: "Probably! I can't think of any though. At some point you need to leave those poor porcupines alone. Also, it's definitely no good if after a storm, you go outside and the woods are full of supine trees".

#398: Topher Florence, "Some of My Best Friends are Black" (2010)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUc0vbSlanM

I warned y'all up front that I, unlike a real rock critic, will periodically declare -- not just declare, defend -- the greatness I perceive in some goofy novelty song or other. I haven't done that to you until now, but we might as well dive in at the deep end. "Some of My Best Friends are Black" is a hip-hop song by nobody I've ever heard of; or as portrayed, a hip-hop song by an argumentative computer refuting the nobody-I've-ever-heard-of's offhand dismissal of a TV show. The computer briefly describes, in rhyme, each of the two dozen black characters to have a speaking part in the 10-season run of the sitcom Friends. For extra topicality, the song came out six years after Friends was canceled.

I will talk about the lyrics -- and, it turns out, about the entire culture of gender- and race-based criticism, the nature of human memory, and two of my favorite non-sitcom TV shows, whee! -- but the beginning of my case is simple. I think "Some of My Best Friends are Black" is ridiculously catchy.

#399: Die Warzau, "Shakespeare" (1995)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxU1ShItt9s

"Shakespeare" doesn't have lyrics that warrant the title; as far as I can deduce, the title was free-associated from the "funk it and you funk it til your monkey don't stop" chant (if infinite monkeys dance on infinite typewriters, they will eventually choreograph the entire works of etc). It seems, furthermore, like an easy kind of song to make. There's barely any melody; the time signature is 4/4. It's fast, it's relentless, and how hard can fast and relentless be when you've got the security of a recording studio to fake both in? True, there's a variety of different hooks: different drum layers playing different rhythms, dextrous bass patterns, mechanical whirring noises, free-jazz saxophone. There's several lyrical rabbit holes for rap-mode Jim Marcus to plunge down, dislodging varying showers of gravel. But no element is individually that advanced. You listen to "Shakespeare" and it moves you or it doesn't. I bounce around all over the place, personally, flapping different body parts to different percussive flurries. Still, maybe kinesis doesn't seem like such an achievement.

Indeed, "Shakespeare" isn't the most obviously impressive song on its own album (Engine).

Asteroids will pter us apart, again

E was asking me today if I'd rather have one trillion dactyls, or one teradactyl. D, naturally, corrected him: they're *terra*dactyls, so named because they dragged huge clumps of earth with them as they flew.

I had to step in and explain that they'd never understand how to breed monsters at that rate. Worrydactyls came first, and it was only as their prey became more resilient and daring that they upgraded into the terrordactyls we all recall today.

#400: Refused, "Old Friends, New War" (2015)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o14i_8XGoAs

My first countdown playlist has been assembled, so my second begins here. While I flagrantly ignore Rob Fleming's mixtape rules from High Fidelity -- I'm at least as fond of a slow buildup as of a "corker", even before we deal with his "you can't have white music and black music together" -- I'm not sure I've started many mixes more stylishly than with Refused's Dennis Lyxzen reciting ominous poetry at the bottom of his range, in two simultaneous vocal takes a small fraction of a second separated, over what beatboxing sounds like when steam pumps do the breathing and keep their mouths open. The tightly synchronized drum and bass that enter could be saboteurs breaking into the factory, but trying carefully not to miss a word while doing so. We're 40 seconds in when the guitar starts, a tightly coiled riff that momentarily tricks me into thinking it's tugged along a small brass section or a large platoon of insects; fittingly, it cuts the oration off right before Lyxzen's final word. He starts howling in the close vicinity of notes, and we have a song.

An elegant song, actually, for being so fierce and loud.

YouTube playlist 425-401

I mentioned my desire to arrange the songs I've been writing about so that they would flow well as a YouTube playlist. After all, it's one thing to hear them singly while some dude writes about them; here's a chance to let the songs speak for themselves.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyORAFEqu24SKDLO8oPDCuI7cpVGi5Tur

Ultimate superbowl

E: "If if the earth were the size and weight of a bowling ball, would it be a good bowling ball?"

Me: "No. There's no holes for the fingers to go in."

D: "And it would be too bumpy".

E: "There'd be little spikes all over it, from the mountains".

Me: "I don't think there would, oddly. The tallest mountain is 5 miles high.

Inflicting excitement on others: eight observations on Calvin & Hobbes, by Bill Watterson

1. The two great insights of Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham were that monologues are more interesting if your characters move rapidly across a wide and dangerous array of terrain, and that you can tell a compelling story using only 50 different words. Bill Watterson was powefully influenced by the first of those insights, and not at all by the second.

2. Mo, the bully who torments Calvin, later went on to be Donald Trump's Nickname Strategist Timmy Jenkins, as interviewed by Steven Colbert. In kindergarten, of course, he was not normally that articulate, but he already had promise ("Hey twinky, give me a quarter... for the Let Calvin Live Through Recess Fund"). And the self-awareness to answer Calvin's philosophical challenges to his bully role with "Because it's fun".

#401: Sundays, "Hideous Towns" (1990)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQSGLVJU8p4

The fact that one of my favorite first-wave punk songs is expressed as an attempt to start a dialogue, though, hints at the real mismatch between me and punk rock: I don't, anymore, do self-righteous anger well. I used to, and certainly there are no shortage of worthy targets: too many of the world's nations are run by rank-hungry sociopaths, too much of its land and air and water is churned through in the ruthless pursuit of short-term private economic profit, and too much of its culture is run by cowards terrified of funding anything but the latest escapist sequel to an escapist sequel that had already lost whatever spark of individuation it began with. Anger is, as Johnny Rotten observed, an energy, and some extraordinary people (I.F. Stone, Lyndon Johnson, Ralph Nader, Walter Reuther, Catherine MacKinnon, Malcolm X, Cesar Chavez, Greg Palast, Glenn Greenwald, to name some post-WWII Americans) have clearly found it an endlessly renewable one -- but in my body it burns up too quickly, and gives off toxic pollutants. So even if I try to focus on the evils of the other, rueful awareness of my own imperfections gets in the way, or I veer off topic and find myself more interested in the good things about my allies than in the bad things I'm supposed to be fighting.

I was a low-level community organizer once, in poor areas around Boston. I was okay at it -- helped one neighborhood get streets full of horrible potholes repaired after a decade-plus of being ignored, helped another get some traffic enforcement on cars racing 50 mph through streets that were the only place their kids could play -- but the relentless earnestness and long hours made me miserable, and I doubt I could do it again any time soon. Too, I could try to be punk rock, but I would probably come out more like the Sundays' "Hideous Towns".

Calling on, inattentive

(I will refer to my sons on my blog, from here on in, as "D" and "E", although in real life their letters are in an entirely different font)

E, calling from kitchen: "D! Did you know that we're going to see our friends in Cary today?"
D, at computer: "..........."
Me, in kitchen: "E, you should stand by him and get his attention first. He gets very focused on his gaming, and isn't listening to us."
D, calling: "I don't listen to anyone when I'm at the computer!"
Me: "Wow. Maybe he did notice us. That was weirdly relevant to what we were talking about."
D, calling: "I don't have any idea what you two are saying!"

#402: Penetration, "Lovers of Outrage" (1978)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJjLUPBXAm4

In my Joni Mitchell write-up, I noted how the history of pop/rock music through the early 1970s had been, overwhelmingly, one in which only men had felt free to innovate. Punk rock arrived in the late 1970s, and in the usual histories, it too was a tale of white men -- or teenage boys, spiritually if not always calendrically -- blasting fresh hot air into stale, stultifying arenas (note to self: steal better cliches next time). In Britain, for example, we read that it was led by the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Damned, the Stranglers, Gang of Four, the Jam, the Buzzcocks.

#403: Sloan, "Underwhelmed" (1993)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkN_qkN5JLQ

Glenn McDonald, in one sentence, described Sloan's debut single "Underwhelmed" more accurately than I can improve on: it sounds like Ozzy Osbourne and band covering a lost They Might Be Giants song. Depending on your mental image of TMBG, if you have one, that could be deceptive: they have their educational songs ("James K. Polk", "Mammal") and their absurdist songs ("Hall of Heads", "the Guitar") and their gleefully petulant children's sing-alongs ("I Should Be Allowed to Think", "Boss of Me"), none of which he or I are referencing directly. But They Might Be Giants also have a romantic streak that leads, in some of their greatest songs, to the kind of relationship and/or character portraits that an over-educated, absurdist, self-awarely petulant romantic might write ("She's an Angel", "Ana Ng", "They'll Need a Crane", "Sleeping in the Flowers").

Sloan's public emergence came on the college-rock circuit in 1992 or 1993, depending where you live, either of which was in the post-Nirvana period of mandatory loud distorted guitars; but the Chris Murphy-penned "Underwhelmed" is exactly that TMBG sort of relationship song.

Guided evolution at 130 beats per minute

Notes on seeing Simian Mobile Disco in concert at Moogfest in Durham:

1. Moogfest 2017 is the first multi-day music festival I've ever attended. Electronica is not my field, but I owed K for dragging her to see Jesca Hoop and (although she'd volunteered) Ben Folds, singer-songwriters without even the grace to have English accents. In the specific case of Simian Mobile Disco, the act she was most eager to see, I even know that I liked their 2007 album Attack Sustain Decay Release. The album has songs, with guest singers, although Simian Mobile Disco themselves are two geeky white guys standing in front of banks of switches and knobs and faders.

2. Their performance, on the other hand, was 80 minutes of voice-less improvisation. "Electronica" is as large, encompassing, and (at core) distinct a genre as "Classical", "Jazz", "Pop/ Rock", or "Hip-Hop", and the first 15 minutes or so, I spent at an intellectualized remove -- dancing all the time, sure (and happily watching K and a large portion of the crowd do the same), but while trying to decide how to process the experience. In Simian Mobile Disco's favor,

Countdown bonus: Indelicates, "Sweet Sixteen" (2008)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcM9QsZNRxM

E (my 8-year-old): "Can you play the Indelicates video with the old people? What's it called?"
Me: "'Sixteen'. Sure."
E: "It's about people who want to be 16 and act like they're 16 even though they're much older".
Me: "That's right!"
E: "Why do they want to be 16?"
Me: "Well, when you get old, your body - well, if you're unlucky you die. But even if you're lucky, it stops working the same way. You remember having the energy and ability to do things that you can't anymore."
E: "But why 16? If I was old I would wish I were 10."
Me: "That's a possible thing too".
E: "Especially if I qualify for Lincoln Academy by then."
Me: "That could be it, though. Maybe the narrator didn't."

Framed by Roger Rabid

As we mourn the loss of Roger Rabid, longtime Fox News empire-builder, we may find his achievements easy to under-estimate, because they have been so often imitated since. But his creation -- a news network that freely mixed live-action humans with sketched 2-dimensional heroes, villains, and foils, subject either to reality's rules or cartoon logic as the plot dictated -- was at the time innovative, and a technical marvel.

My favorite of his lines comes from the scene were Roger and Slick Willie have been handcuffed to an enormous national debt for eight years, and suddenly Roger slips free. "You mean you could've freed our actions from the debt at any time???", a stunned Willie inquires. Roger shakes his head, and as he struts away, leaving Willie trapped, he explains "No, not at any time. Only when it helped rich people".

#404: Ian & Sylvia, "House of Cards" (1968)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riM0OdxBCT8

Given my over-complicated grown-up tastes, there wasn't much in my near-term upcoming queue that followed smoothly from the hippie sing-along "Free to Be You and Me", so my next selection is another from my mom's old collection that predates my birth. Ian & Sylvia represented well mom's taste in folk music, heavy on vocal harmonies, the kind of songs you get out the autoharp and sing together while snuggling cats -- Bob Dylan songs appeared in our house only when rendered by proper singers, Simon & Garfunkel or the Chad Mitchell Trio or the Byrds or, on-topic, Ian Tyson and Sylvia Fricke. (Dylan-loving friends I respect have tried repeatedly to sell me on his artful vocal expressiveness, and have failed.)

That said, Bob's "the Mighty Quinn" and "This Wheel's on Fire" are among the least interesting tracks on Ian & Sylvia's best album Nashville, most of which they wrote themselves.

Snot the difference

My ten-year-old, presumably introducing a joke: "What's the difference between a garden slug and a two-inch trail of snot?"

My eight-year-old: "1. Most garden slugs aren't two inches long. 2. Slugs are solid, snot is more liquid. 3. Garden slugs don't usually come out of your nose. 4. Snot would need to be enchanted to come alive."

Every once in awhile, I see my influence shining through *exactly*.

Baby, knit a sweater in my coupe; you make me want a...

1. My eight-year-old has correctly noted that if "sheep" is going to insist on being a plural noun, the singular ought to be "shoop". In which case there's a Salt-n-Pepa single that needs a dramatically overhauled video.

(My Facebook friend David said "I can't wait for the sequel where they teach you about chromosomes so you can clone your own shoop. 'Let's Talk About X', they'll call it". At which point I point out to the jury that

#405: the New Seekers, "Free to Be You and Me" (1972)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mU8gDKN5sE

If "Free to Be You and Me" were a brand new folk song, I have no idea what I would think of it. Maybe I'd be a fan. It's jolly and bops along at a pleasant pace; the group vocal harmonies, male and female and young-sounding, are nicely done; the banjo is Kermit-esque, and judging by the fact that I no longer own my Bela Fleck & the Flecktones album, being extremely talented at the banjo is a much less effective path to my heart than playing it like you're a green felt puppet.

The lyrics are ... uncomplicated. "There's a land that I see/ where the children are free/ and I say it ain't far/ to this land from where we are". Now, it's a children's song, but my kids have never shown much interest in children's music, so I'd probably fail to adjust much for that. It's also direct enough to be a national anthem, were it interested in anything as artificial as nations, but there are no national anthems in my countdown. It could also strike me as hippie-dippy sloganeering, and I could start parodying it almost without noticing ("There's a shop that's very nice/ where the children are half-price....", perhaps, or modifying "Take my hand, come along/ Lend your voice to my song" into "Use the wi-fi on the street/ give a share to my tweet").

#406: Adam Schmitt, "Elizabeth Einstein" (1991)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdxyXJqgvNI

We have another case where there's the artist's usual style, and then there's the song in question. Adam Schmitt's album World So Bright is, in general, an excellent collection of "power-pop". That's a species of indie-pop premised, I believe, on the idea that since the Beatles' Help! was an immensely charming record that everyone loved in 1965, and inspired dozens of soundalikes to record hits of their own, music inspired by it should still be loved by everybody today.

This is not, in my view, a completely silly premise.

Left tenant Sanders

I discovered the other day that it's still easy to annoy me, 3+ months into Donald Trump's presidency, by saying "Bernie Sanders would have won". Or at least by saying it really condescendingly; I might react better if it were said in other ways, but it doesn't appear I'll find out. The first problem with this claim is, of course, that we'll never know; our reality lends itself poorly to controlled tests involving experimental Earth and control Earth. But the other problem is that I *believe* the claim to be preposterously wrong. I think Bernie would have been crushed, solidly losing the popular as well as the electoral vote. Since my own politics are by American standards far left and anti-corporate, and basically share Sanders's goals, I think this delusion is harmful.

The case for "Bernie would have won" is, I admit, simple.

#407: Emma Pollock, "Hug the Harbour" (2010)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEPPnANgO4Q

Emma Pollock used to be co-leader of the indie pop band the Delgados, who released five interesting and tuneful records, each with some directionless songs here and there, but also occasional bursts of spectacular inspiration -- one of their songs by Alun Woodward will show up later on this countdown. After 2004 they stopped making records, devoting more of their time to record production (especially drummer Paul Savage) and running their own record label (especially bassist Stewart Henderson). When the band broke up, she could have fallen back on her honors degree in Laser Physics and Optical Electronics. Instead, she applied her scientific and technical skills to audio engineering, Pro Tools, and making albums full of precise, measured, careful, and often-lovely songs under her own name.

Concerts, lies, and memeing gone ape

The specific meme that prompted me to post my old Mary Timony concert review was one that dominated my Facebook feed for two days before slowing down. Its basic form: list ten bands/ artists. Declare "I have seen these ten bands -- but I'm lying about one of them". I don't understand why it was *quite* such a hit, but it had real charm. It was a chance to learn about your friends' musical tastes (if for some lame reason your friends don't write interminable blogs about their musical tastes), and let them re-live favorite concert memories for you. Some people also got into the guessing aspect, the "How well do I know this person?".

Some people, I gather, found it aggravating, and posted pictures of Batman slapping Robin and yelling that he didn't care what concerts Robin had seen. (I think this was from a late 1977 comic, when Robin was wearing safety pins and affecting a Cockney accent.) Me, what I liked best were watching the more affectionate variations get spun. Such as:

#408: Papas Fritas, "Hey Hey You Say" (1997)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ3BOfapvU4

The keyboard sets up a high synthetic run of 16th-notes, exact in their equal distances from each other; they strike me as the kind of sound I've seen reviews describe as "glassy", which I suppose means it's okay to pour wine on the synthesizer while it plays, but not to sing a loud, vibrato-heavy high C. An equally precise tambourine enters to match the pace, along with a slender bass line, not that different in feel from the one on "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes". Kick drums enter, tugging along human vocals: long drawn-out cries of "Yeeeeeeaaaaaah-ohhhhh". The verses play at the tension between rigid, pulsing music and a bounding enthusiasm: Tony Goddess's high, eager syncopated monotone singing joined, midway into every thought, by Keith Gendel and Shivika Asthana's roving harmonies. One of my beliefs about playlist-making is that transitions of mood should be disguised by song-to-song commonalities; here Modest Mouse's ominous beat for dancing has segued into a related ominous beat for twitching, and we've gone from one unreliable narrator (or several in a row, actually) to another -- unless you genuinely believe Goddess's chorus assertion that "Man on the telephone will never let me", and that would be easier if he ever finished the sentence.

That transition of mood, though: admittedly it's most obvious if you watch the video.

Faith, unknown pleasures, and one imaginary girl

(This is one of my favorite of my old Epinions.com music writings. It's a concert review from late 2003, so it's not remotely practical, but Facebook's been abuzz with here's-some-cool-concerts-I've-seen nostalgia, and re-reading this, I figured this can be my entry.)
 
In logical terms, I suppose there’s two reasons why you should want to hear about the Mary Timony concert I saw Wednesday night.  First of all, you might be a fan of the type of music she and bassist Jeff Goddard were playing.  Do you like the starkness of the Faith/ Pornography-era Cure and their drum machines, the weird but disciplined guitar howl of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, the fierce if muddy monolith that was Black Sabbath?  Then never mind, this was written 13 years ago, ha ha ha ha. Or, secondly, do you simply like Mary Timony: for Helium’s dissonant multi-guitar blur, or for the mediaevalized indie-rock of her solo career?  Then obviously you’d be curious to see how her songs transfer to other settings.

Neither of these, however, has much to do with why I found her concert so revelatory, or why I’m telling you about it.

#409: Modest Mouse, "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes" (2000)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EA5b3FNI4w

My Mom wouldn't have liked Modest Mouse, I feel sure. I don't mean the music, necessarily; once I introduced her to rock music, she developed some pretty interesting taste. Most of it was gushingly melodic, to be sure -- XTC and They Might Be Giants and Barenaked Ladies; sugar-rush bands like the Primitives and Stretch Princess; modern folkies like Dar Williams and Christine Lavin and Kate Jacobs; some punk-pop (she enjoyed her little moments as the white-haired woman in glasses carrying used Bad Religion and Vandals cd's to the puzzled young men at the counter). But she loved the jangle and the textural haze of the Church, and the sultry bass and sinister dance pulse of Shriekback, and you can triangulate to "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes" from that. That lithe exercise-friendly bass line, the Ennio Morricone guitar and violin stabs, the alarmed-rattlesnake-racing-through-cookware percussion, and the way Isaac Brock doubles every word he sings by simultaneously speaking it as close to the lowest audible frequency as he can manage: she might have found it perversely sexy, as she did Shriekback's Barry Andrews. It's conceivable.

Chicken vs. egg

Taking the "chicken or the egg" conundrum on its own intended terms, I've long thought it was an easy one: the egg came first. All chickens come from eggs, but at some point, historically, something we'd marginally class as a chicken was birthed by something we wouldn't. The real question is why I chose to accept the intended meaning at all, when my sons this morning found better ones.

For example: the egg came first. By hundreds of millions of years. Some tiny sea creature hatched.

Or: the chicken came first, because c comes before e. (I'll add that if someone starts selling the iChicken, it will also have come first:

#410: James McMurtry, "How'm I Gonna Find You Now?" (2015)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bE3DVMwjfw

Sometimes picking the searchable musical tags for these countdown posts is easy. "Indie pop" ropes in Los Campesinos! and Dowling Poole and Gentleman Auction House; "alternative rock" has both recognizable sonic characteristics and MTV certification for the Pixies and Mary Timony; "heavy metal" clearly fits Queensryche and Savatage. Joni Mitchell's "the Jungle Line" was tricky, but once I thought of "experimental pop" I immediately recognized several occasions I'll have to re-use it later in the countdown. James McMurtry ought to be straightforward: he's a country music songwriter, albeit a culturally rebellious one, so certainly here's the first use of the "folk/ country" tag I'd intended all along. But ideally you've clicked the link to play the song, in which case you can also sense the incompleteness of that label.

Shilling in the name

1. Now that it may no longer matter, it suddenly strikes me as weird that I don't think anyone, including me, ever renamed the longtime Fox News host as Bile O'Really.

2. Although since they didn't, I'll co-endorse Sean Thomason's quip: "Probably the most humiliating thing about being Bill O'Reilly is that most people think his name is 'Teenage Wasteland'".

3. Both Stephen Colbert and my friend Jeffrey-with-2-fs Norman independently joked that O'Reilly, the "nonfiction" author of "Killing Lincoln", "Killing Jesus", and "Killing Reagan", will have to make his next book "Killing My Career". Which is fine, as long as we understand that all of O'Reilly's "Killing Books" are about heroic figures torn down by pure evil. This pattern will continue.

One chatty dwarf and 2200 avid faces

Notes on last night’s Ben Folds solo-with-piano concert at Carolina Theater of Greensboro:

1. I had no idea he’s 50 years old. Dude looks real good for 50. Similarly, it’s snuck up on me how truly impressive I find his catalog. My blog’s countdown of my favorite songs has a one-per-artist limit that’s often easy to enforce, but he’s got fully ten songs that would qualify for me to write about — some funny and aggressive, some incredibly sweet, some thoughtful and a bit neurotic, one that helped anticipate and explain Trump’s presidency by six years. Even only playing five of those, he had no problem filling a 100-minute-plus-encore concert with excellent songs.

#411: Queensryche, "Revolution Calling" (1988)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNdOsL4Xe7Q

In high school, tales of dystopia are oddly thrilling. We're shown a dictatorial world in which teens are forced to memorize official fictions and have few choices over the content of their lives, and we get to pretend this is escapist fiction, full of heroic resistance, instead of our daily routine. (I suspect dystopia becomes a more and more attractive theme the more assigned homework a given student completes.) These days dystopias dominate Young Adult novels (the Hunger Games and Divergent and the Giver and Chaos Walking and Maze Runner series, and on, and on), and get turned into hit movies as often as not. In 1988, we mostly just had Aldous Huxley and George Orwell -- winning us over through sheer persuasive brilliance in the absence of targeted marketing. Joined, occasionally, by a rock band taking inspiration from them.

Cooked fish: the quiet tyranny

At Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump's favorite of the private clubs he owns, government safety inspectors discovered that fish intended to be served raw wasn't being inspected for parasites; that chicken, duck, beef, and ham were being dangerously stored at temperatures of 49 to 57 degrees F; and that the kitchen staff weren't washing their hands in a way that would sterilize germs. They learned this days before he was going to host Japan's Prime Minister there.

Trump, like any of the other Republican candidates would have (and like the Republican congress has repeatedly voted to do), is dramatically slashing the number of government safety inspectors, and attempting to repeal many safety regulations altogether.

Black and Armond White and named all over

Had a pleasant walk last night around nearby Bennett College, and couldn't help enjoying the fact that this (historically black, high-quality) college features Race Administration Building (named for John H Race), Black Residence Hall (named for Ethel F Black), and B Player Hall.

Which reminds to wonder if my kids have figured out yet that the Brown Building, on Market Street, probably isn't named after its crayola-perfect color. (Probably isn't, I say -- I should check.)

It also put me in the mood for the movie I saw after, "CB4", a fun hip-hop mockumentary which claims, diagetically, to be "a rapumentary by A. White". The character A. White is, of course, a cluelessly enthusiastic white frat-bro sort. On the other hand, one of our leading real-life film critics is also named A. White. He's black.

#412: Savatage, "the Wake of Magellan" (1998)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k1TMhUxEgY

Switching from Joan Armatrading's unpredictable piano rhythms and soft washes of guitar to Jon Oliva's unpredictable piano rhythms and Chris Caffery's soft washes of guitar, we transition smoothly from jazz-pop to heavy metal.

I sometimes explain my musical tastes to myself (rightly or wrongly) as a logical consequence of my growing-up environment.

#413: Joan Armatrading, "Tell Me" (2013)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m33icE2L0tQ


Joan Armatrading, like Joni Mitchell, began her recording career before my birth as a folk and folk-pop artist -- distinguished at first in Armatrading's case by her soulful contralto voice -- and then stretched out. Joan's career progression was an unpredictable one, experimenting on different albums with Elton John-style rockers, disco, reggae, collaborations with Springsteen’s E Street Band, perky New Wave synth-pop, and — as her voice got deeper and richer — roots-rock and blues, although those rootsy explorations were made unconventional by her increasingly novel chord sequences.


The style-hopping meant that it was easy to enjoy one of her albums and be put off by the next,

Now keep the terrible truth to yourself: on the movie "Sausage Party"

1. For me, watching TV or movies is a social experience: half the fun is discussing/ joking about/ expanding on what I've seen after, so it's not something I do by myself. This means, of course, that I do not always pick what to watch. So sometimes the Decline of Western Civilization is the title of a documentary I watch, and sometimes it's just the phenomenon I'm experiencing. 

2. Sausage Party is beautifully animated. The food items, rendered as living talking beings, have the usual googly eyes, and gloved hands, and strikingly unusual limbs the thickness of popsicle sticks, but everything colorful, expressive, and as almost-convincingly 3-dimensional as any computer art I've run across yet. An exceptional amount of loving care has been put into bringing jars of mustard that yell "Holy shit, I've been chosen. Booyah, bitches!" to life.

#414: Joni Mitchell, "the Jungle Line" (1975)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF2_1Jfgo4I

For most of the 20th century, songwriting innovation in the Western world was an extremely male enterprise. This is, of course, a way of saying that there was only half as much musical innovation as a saner society would have allowed. Or at least, judging by *my* studies, the modern history of pop music, through the end of the 1960s, featured women largely in roles as singers, and as mainstream or genre songwriters (Patsy Cline, Carole King, Loretta Lynn, Judy Collins -- all except King were more noted as interpreters than writers anyway, although at least King stood out, according to Joe Queenan, as the harbinger of the Yuppie Apocalypse).

Joni Mitchell first came to attention writing folk songs. She wrote strong, unconventional melodies and strikingly well-observed lyrical details,

Lizard King, wizard bling

You know that I would be untrue --
You know that I would be a liar --
If I said I'm the kangaroo
Who played Bunk Moreland on "the Wire".
Please turn on the stove-top fire.
My hot dog's name is Oscar Meyer.
Sometimes my rhyming's uninspired.

*****
People are strange when you're a stranger.

Yes, but can we stand United?

I have Facebook friends linking an article about how what's wrong with the United Airlines incident is what's wrong with America. As anti-corporate as I am, my first inclination was to disagree here. It refers to a case in which United Airlines realized it needed space on a passenger flight in order to emergency-transport its own employees; offered $800 plus a free room at a nice hotel to anyone who volunteered to be moved to a flight the next afternoon; then, when no one accepted, it called in police force to eject randomly-chosen passengers (including a surgeon who had an operation to do the next morning).

My immediate feeling is that while the resort to police is a problem, I've been

Synonym toast

James: "To whoever stole my thesaurus, you made my day bad. I hope bad things happen to you. You're a bad person."

Me: "I vouch and authenticate, esteemed sir, that the iniquitous and nefarious perpetrator of the aforementioned malfeasance was veraciously not myself. But you have my unfeigned aspiration that the deed's elucidation and subsequent redemption are forthcoming imminently."

(What will happen next? Tune in next week, when you learn that the entire incident was a joke with, one fears, an extremely limited lifespan!)

#415: Xenia Rubinos, "Mexican Chef" (2016)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u1VAa1HBpM

Where disco music encourages athletic, flashy, gracefully stylized dancing --  y'all's Facebook suggestions from my Gloria Gaynor post have been much appreciated, and even caused three small transfers of money from me to iTunes -- I personally feel more comfortable moving to beats that encourage a bit more stomping, a bit more herky-jerkiness, or just some more straightforward swagger. "Mexican Chef" is from the second album by Xenia Rubinos. While she generally suggests to me what Bjork might have been like as a rowdy young NYC Latina whose Dad for some reason collected Emerson Lake & Palmer records [example]), this marks her first direct foray into just that kind of dance energy.

Maybe the signal is the noise: on U.S. standardized tests, from best to awfulest

I have three part-time teaching jobs, one of which, for Princeton Review, involves preparing students for standardized tests. Friday night, the Princeton Review job also involved me staying awake the entire night and taking three Advanced Placement tests in a row (because I hadn't been able to find any other free time to take them in), and reflecting how exceptionally well-designed they are, in comparison to the highly dubious tests I often help with.

Since teaching is one of my passions, and tests are a key force shaping (or mis-shaping) teaching in the United States, I'll share some of my opinions on the tests I'm familiar with. Ranked from best to worst:

Mini-Snoopy Batplane!

My 8-year-old is singing to himself a song he made up about a "mini-Snoopy Batplane" while flying a toy plane around. That's not the odd part.

The odd part is that he's singing it in the persona of his new toothbrush, and interrupting himself in the voice of the plastic package the toothpaste came in, which wants him to stop singing, and is getting increasingly upset that he won't.

#416: Gloria Gaynor, "I Will Survive" (1978)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYkACVDFmeg

I don't entirely get disco, it seems. It's certainly not that I'm against it: there will be four disco songs on the countdown. That said, all of them were massive hits and obvious choices. (I also considered "In the Navy", although it wouldn't have been the radio version: it would have been the one from the Muppet Show sung on a coastal village raid by Viking pigs.) Chuck Eddy has argued that disco succeeded in achieving progressive rock's goals -- of bringing together unlike forms of music from across the world -- far beyond prog's own powers, and I find it plausible that he might be right. You'd have to link me favorite examples in the Comments, though, because most of the disco songs I've heard *other* than those mega-hits strike me as bland.

"I Will Survive", though, works, and it's definitely eclectic.

#417: the Bobs, "Art for Art's Sake" (1983)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4HRbkTx8n4

"Art for Art's Sake", by the Bobs, is not the only a-cappella song that will appear in my favorite songs countdown -- if I'm not overlooking any, there'll be five all told, plus most of a sixth -- but it's the one where I think the fact that no one's playing any instruments is most remarkable. It's why I've linked a live performance by the quartet: I consider it well worth watching. Because it's a New Wave pop song: the first thing we hear is the bassline (sung by the guy with the glasses), and later the chorus is helped into immortality by the glossy synthesizer hook (or that's what Foreigner or Night Ranger or Loverboy would've made it, and you can hear it that way in your head with no effort, although in fact it's sung by the same guy). The guitar solos are sung by the guy with the mustache; they're rather hair-metaly, but brief, and decidedly more fun for their unusual format.

Just so-so story

I've helped my 10-year-old brainstorm, as an English assignment, an original "just-so story" myth explaining the origin of an Earth custom; he chose, ambitiously, the origin of war. What we've come up with is that village disputes used to be settled by dancing competitions judged by the gods.

With the competition that became the first war, one problem was that the god in charge of deciding the dispute was widely rumored to be in love with a girl from one of the villages (and indeed, ruled her village the victor). But the other catalyst was that the dispute, taking place at a giant dinner party, was over proper table manners and utensil usage. The losing side, who felt that they had in fact danced better, were all "Never mind, the correct way to use sharp knives is like THIS *stab stab*". The old system never aroused enough trust again.

#418: Dowling Poole, "Empires, Buildings, and Acquisitions" (2014)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIBbNEFOSpY

In one of my favorite Doctor Who stories, "the Empty Child/ the Doctor Dances" (set in WWII Blitz-era England), Christopher Eccleston's Doctor realizes that a teenage girl he's interacted with has been using the air-raid sirens as a chance to lead a group of younger homeless children into suddenly-abandoned houses to eat the food off the table of well-off Britishers while the residents are hiding from the bombs. She asks if he plans to stop her; he replies "It's brilliant! I'm not sure if it's Marxism in action or a West End musical."

Ugh jobs at good wages

Whatever we think of the Trump Administration's crackdown on illegal immigration, it bothers me to see immigrants on farms praised for doing "work Americans won't do". That phrase is an evasive way of saying "Work that plenty of Americans will do, quite eagerly, *if* you pay enough".

Is the farm work that illegal immigrants do unpleasant, exhausting, health-damaging, and low-status? Absolutely -- even Stephen Colbert has tried it and vouched in person. I bet it's even worse than working at an Amazon.com warehouse (although worse in degree, not kind). All of those are great reasons not to take work.

On the other hand,

#419: Gentleman Auction House, "Book of Matches" (2008)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLB0JQThdaE

I'm guessing you haven't heard this one: click the link, and enjoy a bouncy indie-pop song, firm thumping beats around pockets of air over which Eric Enger's high, conversational singing voice (and Kiley Kozel's soft girlish harmonies) can enunciate. The music builds nicely into (and out of) jubilantly defiant choruses, filled in by organ notes, fiery but precise guitar, and massed singing.

Intentionally or not, the song comes across as a reply to Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire".

#420: Tom Petty, "Don't Come Around Here No More" (1985)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0JvF9vpqx8

I call my list "favorite songs", but technically it's "favorite *recordings* of songs", and those can be quite different. To make the case for Tom Petty as one of our great mainstream rock songwriters, I have a decent array of options. Few hit songs have ever sketched a character as efficiently and wittily as "She's a good girl: loves her mama, loves Jesus and America too. She's a good girl, crazy about Elvis; loves horses, and her boyfriend too". "Into the Great Wide Open" needs just two verses of AAABCCCD rhyme to tell an entire VH-1 Behind the Music biography ("His leather jacket had chains that would jingle/ They both met movie stars, partied and mingled/ Their A+R man said 'I don't hear a single'/ Their future was wide open"). "She was an American girl/ raised on promises" summarizes a person and a country in eight words.

Potemkin charm and wit: on Balsamic Dreams by Joe Queenan

(Originally written/ posted 2004. One of my favorite of my old reviews, of a book I bottom-lined as "Funny, rude, sometimes right, sometimes insightful ... (T)he first 50 pages are both interesting and a blast. Sadly, it's 200 pages long." The review starts with an extract from Queenan's introduction.)

**********
”Late in the summer of the Year of Our Lord 2000, I began to suffer from a nagging cough... [it] had me thinking in terms of lung cancer. Confronted by my own mortality, I began to lament all the things I had not yet accomplished with my life.

#421: Janet Jackson, "Velvet Rope" (1997)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeO4Da3J-sM

Neither the album Velvet Rope nor the title song were anything I expected, in 1997, to like. I've mentioned that my songs countdown is going to under-represent black artists; it's nothing to do with malice, and quite a lot to do with the simple fact that at least in the United States, white and black listeners are exposed to different musical traditions (on average, obviously with many exceptions, but my musical listening growing up at home was *entirely* white). One broad difference, as I perceive it, is a traditional white-music emphasis on composed melodies, versus a traditional black-music emphasis on dance rhythms, bass, and melismatic vocal improvisation. I had no use for Janet's Rhythm Nation 1814, nor do I now, and I wouldn't have expected to from the title (although the "1814" part sounds intriguingly specific; I've never figured out its referent, sadly, and the socially conscious lyrics throughout seem vague and limp to me).

Velvet Rope on the other hand puts more emphasis on tunes. Every song has a good beat,

ObamaCare, RepubliCare

A quick note on language and U.S. health care: "TrumpCare" is a TERRIBLE name for the Republican Party's health care "plan" (which at best will deprive 15-20 million Americans of functional health care, or even 26 million, and at worst end the individual health insurance market altogether). Please don't use it. The shorthand has to be "RepubliCare".

Donald Trump doesn't know or care about health care legislation -- RepubliCare is a creation of the Republican Party. Which doesn't care about it either, except the fact that it'll repeal the tax increases on the rich that Obama's Affordable Care Act put in place. Trump is a figurehead, and one who might be gone in a couple years anyway. The party that made him powerful is the toxicity's source, and it's high time they started being called on it.

**********
When I posted the above on Facebook, I got a lot of support, but some inclination to offer alternative names. Unfortunately, as lovely as individual opinions are in almost any context, politics rewards unified messages, and all the alternatives, while better than "TrumpCare", are worse than "RepubliCare":

#422: Mary Timony, "Blood Tree" (2002)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VL0EaJTYGjA

Mary Timony's first prominent-ish band Helium were, like the Pixies, a Boston-area band who got played on 120 Minutes -- they also got her lusted after by Beavis and Butthead. They were largely immune to Pixies lessons about dynamics. They began as a multi-guitar noise-and-drone band (even Timony's singing had a flattened, droning way to them and was kept back in the mix), the American version of bands like Slowdive/ Swervedriver/ Ride/ My Bloody Valentine who won't be showing up on this countdown because too many thick guitar sounds hurt my ears.

But when I moved to Boston, Helium suddenly released

Dons, drums, and details

Don Felder, former Eagles guitarist, says that while recording 'the Long Run', Don Henley spent four weeks of studio time personally reviewing and personally signing off on every single drum beat on the record, on every song.

All I can think is: That's a lot of supervision to put into every detail of a record without noticing "oops, crap, it's full of Eagles songs".

Cast off like the dorky sweater her mother made her wear: on the Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris

(Originally written summer 2006 for a now-defunct website. I'd've written it a bit differently now, as a divorced father of two sons. But I think it holds up well, and my parenting experience strengthens, not weakens, my belief in the book's premises.)

" 3. The advantage of twins is…

a. Having a spare in case one blows out.

b. Having both a control and experimental group to test out your theories on nature versus nurturing, love versus neglect and human parents versus wolf pack.

c. Fooling your neighbors into thinking you’ve mastered the science of teleporting children across the room.”


- from ‘Parental Standardized Aptitude Test’, by Francesco Marciuliano

**********
Judith Rich Harris’s the Nurture Assumption – a book about why people end up with the personalities they end up with – may well be, in my opinion, the single most brilliant work of scientific argument I’ve ever read. I mean brilliant in the sense of “original”, of “superbly constructed”, of “fun to read”, and, especially, of “persuasive”.

#423: Pixies, "Monkey Gone to Heaven" (1989)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHC9HE7vazI

My countdown's introductory post specifies "Don't take the rankings seriously" and "I'll arrange the list for nice song-to-song segues", and starts a longer thought by saying "The list will progress slowly from Songs I Love". I bring this up because, while many of the songs I nominate will be unused to widespread honors, sometimes I'll do something like place a Pixies song at #423. I want to make sure the take-away, as readers, is "I love this song" (true!) and not "I'm dissing one of the most important and admired bands in Alternative Rock by putting 422 other songs by other acts ahead of them". Everything on my countdown, I list out of fondness, full stop.

If they'd made their first record in 1979 instead of 1987, the Pixies would likely have been

#424: Los Campesinos!, "For Flotsam" (2013)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7_u0DbW1Dw

As segues go, it's hard to resist going from 1980 and "Blame it all on VTR" to a 2013 song whose first verse begins "You say you are an old cassette that has gone and split its spool".

These aren't the opening words of Los Campesinos!'s "For Flotsam", quite. It starts just with softly ringing synthesizer and Gareth Campesinos’s twee-yet-vigorous alto singing what turns out to be its chorus: “Knees knocking and blood flowing, so/ I want you to know that I want to”. So it's not an *exact* segue: Gareth is romanticizing a female friend, not a pre-sentient machine. That's why Trevor Horn gets cool oversized sunglasses while Gareth gets stuck with the percussive legs.

Valid exorcist math

I doubted my 10-year-old when he claimed he could turn his head 360 degrees, but it turns out he can! Holding his neck still, he moved his body around in a tight circle.

Impressed, I dared him to turn his head 360 degrees while holding the rest of his body still. "I can", I promised. He gave up and asked me to demonstrate. I turned my head sharply to the right, forward again, sharply to the left, and forward. 90 x 4 = 360.

Hey, when a store promises to be open 24 hours, I'm not gonna kvetch if I get there and it's closed - unless they promised "in a row"....

#425: Buggles, "Video Killed the Radio Star" (1980)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwuy4hHO3YQ

MTV, obviously, set the precedent here back in August 1981: if you're going to present a bunch of unrelated songs to an invisible public with no clear path to accomplishing anything, start with "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles. It's structured superbly for an introductory song: first the gleaming, reverberating washes of synthesizer. Then the soft but sprightly electric piano and the sad vocals, distorted over cheap transmission; the cooing female "Oh, uh oh" hook; the thumping quarter-note drum that starts 24 seconds in, and the first quick tease of that switched-on-Bach style of sprightly keyboard two seconds later.

My 425 favorite songs: introduction and index

In order to push myself to write small, easily-digested blog entries -- and to serve the well-documented popularity of lists -- I hereby announce my blog's first long-running project: the countdown of my 425 favorite songs, limited to one per artist. While my blog will continue to feature other things, I will also, every day or two, post a YouTube-linked song that I love, and a couple of paragraphs about the song and artist.

This should be simple enough to not psych me out. Plus, if a few of you make a habit of listening to the songs and sending me thoughts about them, it should also be a lot of fun.

A few quick Frequently Imagined Questions with Answers:

Ad hominem

"Untimely Meditations" has its first troll! I'm excited. My troll does not seem to know, among many other things, what "ad hominem" means, although he uses the phrase a lot. So for fun, here's a reminder to us all, in the context he chose.

"Ad hominem" would be "You can tell Steven Levitt is an asshole because he wears his shirt collars all folded up for a bow tie, but is too gutless to put the bow tie on". "Ad hominem" would be "Freakonomics Boy did his academic training in Chicago. Obviously he shoots people, so of course his ideas about the crime rate are crap". "Ad hominem" would be "His essay on prostitution makes it sound like a great career choice, so I won't believe he means anything he says until he sucks cock for a living himself".

My argument was "Levitt has repeatedly published unreliable and misleading social science, so his social science work should be distrusted". That's called "inductive reasoning". It's nowhere near as fun to write, so it better have some advantage.

One curiosity. My troll is opposed to ad hominem attacks, so the following must not be one: "Impugning a liberal, to you, is far worse than rape or murder". Noted!

Keeping warped minutes: on Popular Crime by Bill James

While this review will be unwieldy — I'm not sure I've ever reviewed something about which I had so many conflicted things to say — and parts of it will be negative, my basic attitude towards Bill James’s 2011 book Popular Crime is enthusiasm. It is fascinating, insightful, and fun. I recommend it highly.

It is not an easy book to summarize, and later I will take my time helping you through its odd structure. But to start with samples of its topics, my favorite sections include the ones where Bill James, who made Time Magazine’s list of the 100 Most Influential Thinkers in 2006, argues

* that Lizzy Borden was innocent (she never took an ax and gave her father forty whacks);
* that John F. Kennedy was accidentally killed by a Secret Service agent who was flustered by Oswald’s shots;
* that Sam Sheppard, the kindly doctor-on-the-run who inspired the TV series the Fugitive, in fact hired and collaborated with the killer of his wife;
* and that JonBenet Ramsey’s parents were definitely innocent of her killing, and likely framed by an intruder deliberately trying to ruin the dad’s life.

That would seem an immodest project already, perhaps. More ambitiously, and to varying degrees of success, James

Turing the White House

I'm seeing tweets of people doubting -- and this really shows you how the dishonest left in this country treats a sitting president, a popular president -- doubting if I could pass a Turing Test. Now maybe you've heard about the, look, the mainstream liberal media reports the Turing Test all wrong, for one thing. Alan Turing, brilliant man, a heroic veteran, one of the first computer scientists; I had an uncle who was a computer scientist, very smart, one of the smartest, met Turing, had deals with Turing, I have nothing but good things to say about him, but the Turing Test was about men and women. That's what they don't tell you.

Small is de-uglified: on how to dramatically improve the U.S. prison system

From pages 425 to 435 of Bill James’s sprawling, unpredictable (but brilliant) book Popular Crime, James outlines a dramatic reform of the prison system that is, in my opinion, exactly correct.

It would be a huge step forward: in terms of crime reduction, fear-of-crime reduction (not at all the same thing), in-prison behavior, and the integration of former criminals into society. I say that as a guy who’s come up with dramatic prison-reform schemes of my own, purely as a hobby, btw (my profession is teaching): his scheme is better than mine ever were. Because my forthcoming review is struggling not to be as sprawling and unwieldy as the original book, I’ve decided to write up his proposal here.

In very short form:

Apples to oranges, dust to dust

Apple-centric comparisons ranked from least to most valid:

"You're comparing apples to the single-Doppler velocity retrieval technique".
"...apples to dark matter".
"...apples to James K. Polk".
"...apples to Applebee's".
"...Apple commercials to John Hodgman's self-penned comedy".
"...apples to Snapples".
"...Apples to Apples to Cards Against Humanity".
"...apples to Delicious Apples".
"...apples to oranges".

See the constellation

On a rowboat in rural Hillsborough last night, I found myself looking at more stars than I've ever seen before. I started identifying constellations: the Fallen Skier, the A-Frame, the Wire-Sculpture Dachshund, the Hastily Scribbled Mountain Range, the Dented Interrobang, the Paper Airplane, and the Literal Fast-Moving Airplane.

My friends kept finding dumb-sounding stuff like "the Sword of Orion". I think their imaginations were running away with them.

Real crowd pleasers: the best music of 2016, part last

(continued from part three)

Best live show(s) you saw in 2016
I'm tempted to say Le Vent du Nord at the National Folk Festival in Greensboro in October. Sociopolitical Quebecois folk songs, in French, are not an easy thing to make a North Carolinian general audience enjoy, understand, and sing along (in a foreign tongue) with, and Le Vent have some impressive tricks to make it happen. Also, it was an outdoor show and the weather was beautiful.

But I'm gonna pick Shearwater, the Cat's Cradle, December 14. Their singer's public presentation is like mine -- a somewhat sheepish but agreeable storytelling voice, explaining cryptic lyrics, telling little jokes that sometimes go somewhere, and willing to make carefully-worded exploratory leaps. For example, I didn't know "Backchannels" was about "This little voice I sometimes get in the back of my head -- hopefully it's just me -- that says 'Hey, Jonathan, you've had a really nice run, and maybe now you should kill yourself". But it takes a lot of grace to tell that in a friendly, non-worrisome way and make it about "the last taboo, something we're not allowed to talk about in polite society, and maybe we should be. I suspect it's gotten pretty common since November, like I could bring it up and strangers would say 'Yeah! Me too!'. Like we should  bring it into the open and reveal for the tiny, impotent thing it really is".

No, I never feel that way. But what a useful speech, and what a tremendously fond, chatty concert it all was. The covers of David Bowie's Lodger era -- and of "the national anthem", by which Meiburg meant "Scary Monsters and Super Creeps" -- were odd and utterly inspired as well.

Most overrated artist/album

Whistle-and-bell-o-rama: the best music of 2016, part three

(Continued from part one)
(and from part two)

Most welcome surprise
I gave Esperanza Spalding some out-of-my-genre listens back in 2010. It turned out that I admired her Grammy-winning jazz on Chamber Music Society, where she was already starting to fold in gentle pop, classical, and world music influences — but I never got around to liking it. This year, Emily’s D+Evolution became my favorite album by anyone since 2012.

Spalding’s newer influences — Jimi Hendrix, funk, high-energy Latin musics, hip-hop, even high-speed a-cappella — grabbed my attention in a much more direct way, making it easier for me stick around and love the gorgeousness of her jazz chanteusery. The lyrics, not in the grand Grammy tradition, turned out to be smart and intriguing whether about love and lust, race and self-assertion, or the mythologies and missing toys and erratically-kept promises from which we build children into people.

Plus she ended with a Veruca Salt cover. I’d be delighted if I meant the alternative-rock band; they’ve made some great songs. But I’m as happy to mean, no, Veruca the little girl. Wonka had quite the year, come to think.

Biggest disappointment
Psalm Zero, Stranger to Violence. Charlie Looker's previous band, Extra Life, were an amazing blend of heavy, theatrical music with Charlie’s ancient madrigal singing style. Now he sings some like some generic alt-rock singer, and his new band is heavy in an efficiently harsh way. Boring.

Best video

Walking through paradise: the best music of 2016, part two

(Continued from part one. The list is immediately followed by actual writing/ blogging, I promise.)

Single of the Year
1. Regina Spektor, “the Trapper and the Furrier”
2. Shearwater, “Quiet Americans”
3. Esperanza Spalding, “Good Lava”
4. Saul Williams, “Burundi”
5. Aesop Rock, “Blood Sandwich”
6. Xenia Rubinos, “Mexican Chef”
7. Deerhoof, “Criminals of the Dream”
8. Anderson / Stolt, “Knowing”
9. Emma Pollock, “Dark Skies”
10. Anna Meredith, “Taken”

Single honorable mention(s)
Aesop Rock, “Dorks”
Aesop Rock, “Rings”
Beyonce, “Formation”
Birdeatsbaby, “Mary”
Blackpink, “Whistle”
David Bowie, “I Can’t Give Everything Away”
Dear Hunter, "Gloria"
Death Grips, “Giving Bad People Good Ideas”
Dowling Poole, “Rebecca Receiving”
Everything Everything, “Distant Past”
Field Music, “the Noisy Days are Over”
4Minute, “Hate”
Jesus Jones, “How’s This Even Going Down?”
Julie Ruin, “Mr. So-and-So”
King Gizzard + the Lizard Wizard, “Robot Stop”
Knifeworld, “High / Aflame”
Let’s Eat Grandma, “Eat Shiitake Mushrooms”
Marching Church, “Heart of Life”
Melt Yourself Down, “Jump the Fire”
Momus, “Fuck This Year”
New Model Army, “Devil”
Overlord, “Mission to Mars”
Sleigh Bells, “I Can Only Stare”
Esperanza Spalding, “Unconditional Love”
Regina Spektor, “Small Bills”
Kate Tempest, “Europe is Lost”
Tribe Called Quest, “We the People”
Kanye West, “Ultralight Beam”
Jane Zhang, “Dust My Shoulders Off”





Regina Spektor emerged this year as one of our great protest songwriters. The “protest” is surprising. “Great” shouldn’t be, yet

Elevate or operate: the best music of 2016, part one

(Every January, the talented songwriter/ music journalist Tris McCall conducts a detailed survey of his music-geek acquaintanceship about the year in music just passed. Starting with best albums, and best singles, he proceeds to a wide array of categories more specific — best singing, best concert, best liner notes, etc… — and often more potentially snotty, from “song that would drive you craziest on infinite repeat” to “hoary old bastard who ought to spare us all and retire”. He encourages not just votes but explanations, rants, and jokes.

The following is part one of my ballot, which turned out to be the most informational and least over-excitable. It’s simply my favorite albums of 2016, first a list, then paragraphs of description / discussion below to cover anyone I didn’t end up discussing at length later in the ballot. For each album I’ve linked to a song I consider representative of its strengths.)

Album of the Year

On the Decline of Western Civilization (the 1980 movie. not the ongoing story. mostly.)

I watched the Decline of Western Civilization, Penelope Spheeris's classic 1980 L.A. punk documentary, last week. It is, as reputed, great. Want a current-events hook, beyond the title? It’s a movie that — between songs — sympathetically shows you poor-to-struggling white people, few of them very articulate, explaining their world in sometimes-racist, sometimes-violent, us-vs-them terms. Just like so many NPR/ Times election features in 2016! Like those features, “Decline”’s release was followed soon by the ascent to the presidency of a lying far-right ignoramus with a mean sense of humor.

Notes specific to the movie:

* X, as I expected, were far and away the musical highlight. Even without Ray Manzarek of the Doors producing and playing organ like he soon would on their classic debut Los Angeles, they were a genuinely sharp and energetic band that played their instruments well, had snotty/ clever/ searching lyrics, and blended the voices of two incompetent singers into bizarrely attractive harmonies.

What I hadn’t realized was