Bloc Party’s operatic themes

I haven’t been down lately — a little overworked, yes — but I’m still enjoying this downer of a tune from Bloc Party called Talons.

When people think of rock “opera,” they usually mean 20-minute songs. But this is operatic in style without demanding that the listener clear out a day to listen.

The most obvious interpretation of the song is a fable about AIDS, though that’s not necessarily the only interpretation. More broadly, it’s about guilt and death. The protagonist and his circle of friends have led entertaining but reckless lives, and they’re suffering the consequences.

What separates it artistically from the typical emo music is the change of moods. The verses are full of subdued regret. The chorus cries out against the same circumstances, dialing up the anguished self-loathing. “I have been wicked / I have been arrogant.”

The best part is the bridge, a final bit of defiance. “I didn’t think it would catch up as fast as I could have run,” they sing over a major key progression that sounds almost Wagnerian. Then they modulate back to the minor for the crushing line — “a new disease came in the post for me today.”

If you don’t buy all the aesthetic talk here, just know that it rocks. Enjoy.

 

A journalist’s resolutions

Specifically, mine, but many are applicable to other journalists as well.

1. Think broader, read deeper. Books in my in-pile include …

The Crusades: A Short History. Not that short, actually.

Bowling Alone. A study of Americans’ retreat from public life into their cozy homes, doing less in public groups.

The Unfinished Presidency. Douglas Brinkley’s study of the remarkable post-presidency life of Jimmy Carter.

Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline. I remember starting this and thinking the definition of “intellectuals” was a little too narrow. This might just be a complaint from the author that he’s never booked on TV talk shows because their attention spans are too short. Valid complaint, but not necessarily the right guy to make it.

Big Game, Small World. Alexander Wolff loves basketball in all its forms, and while I wouldn’t agree that it’s on the verge of surpassing soccer globally, I’d like to see what he found in checking out the rest of the world’s skills.

2. Don’t complain. Reinvent. For most journalists, this means ignoring sinkholes of insight like Gannett Blog (begging the question “These people were employed as journalists?”) and figuring out how to move forward in a difficult economy. For me, it also means getting in shape. I’m also planning to work on my writing this year. (I’ve never been one of those “find your voice and stick with it” people, especially not in this day and age.)

3. Get out of the rut. Journalists tend to get tunnel vision. Don’t we all? This is a good perennial. Go see something you don’t usually see.

4. Think about charity. For journalists, this means thinking beyond government when it comes to solving problems. NGOs rarely get much mention, though they work they do should often give us reasons to remember that the atrocities and misery of the world are exceptions, not rules. (Granted, there’s also a watchdog role to play in covering charities.) For me, it means remembering to support my organizations:

Schools: Athens Academy, Duke

Health concerns: Alzheimers Association, MS Foundation, Leukemia and Lymphona Society, Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund, Humane Society of Fairfax County

Relief groups: Red Cross, Episcopal Rescue and Development

Public life: WETA, Rails to Trails Conservancy, National Wildlife Federation

Local care: Capital Area Food Bank, Catholic Charities, Vienna Volunteer Fire Department

The gamut: Carter Center

5. Don’t waste time with pointless conflict. Equally applicable to my Web-browsing habits and journalists’ news judgment. Particularly on cable, where the easiest way to fill time is to get a couple of people to yell at each other. Sometimes, that’s utterly contrived — I had a fun conversation with Frank Shamrock about his appearance on Outside the Lines, in which he suddenly found himself being asked to defend the sport of mixed martial arts in light of the film clips of 7-year-olds wailing on each other in the presence of inattentive coaches and officials. (As opposed to earlier times, when 7-year-olds wailed on each other in the presence of inattentive parents and teachers.)

6. Enjoy every sandwich. Zevon lives.

 

Skipping "denial" — moving straight to "anger"

If you live near Washington and aren’t one of those total *^&#@s who despise all things relating to the Redskins, you’re grieving today for Sean Taylor, whose utterly senseless death has shocked the region.

But another death in the news caught my attention as well. Quiet Riot’s Kevin DuBrow, not an old man by any reckoning, suddenly passed away.

It’s easy to think of DuBrow and company as a little cartoonish. That was their image for a while, and it worked for them. But these are very real people. If you want a reminder, check the official site of drummer Frankie Banali, who shares his pain with an eloquence you might not expect from a guy whose band bashed out Metal Health back in the day.

I’ve been home with MMM Jr. today, and as entertaining and lovable as he is, I’ve been feeling kind of angry. The way I figure it, death and decay are always going to be in greater supply than any of us want. The great idiocy of mankind is that we invite more of them into our lives.

We don’t know the details of why Taylor was shot. We don’t know anything about DuBrow’s death. But at some point, the message has to sink in. We as a species are absolute failures in the most basic need of living creatures — taking care of each other.

I don’t hear any politicians talking about such things — they’re all reciting the same banter we’ve been hearing for decades, and the “citizen journalists” that are supposedly replacing those of us who are being bought out and laid off (speaking in generalities here — last I checked, I still had a job) aren’t doing any better at broadening the conversation beyond the same rhetorical tricks carefully coached by the Vogon warlords who serve as their strategists.

Can we do better? I sure as hell hope so.

(Back to more uplifting fare tomorrow.)

 

The mastery of Jon Stewart

While the news media (excluding my employer, which offers a wonderfully nuanced exploration of public life and terrific benefits) seem content to drag us along toward partisan oblivion, Jon Stewart is proudly doing what journalists should be doing to those who would turn politics into bloodsport. He’s calling bullshit.

We all remember when he did it to Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala on Crossfire, though that incident was often misinterpreted as a partisan act in itself. It wasn’t. Stewart’s point was that staking out two “sides” and yelling at each other is simply destructive.

Last week, Stewart did it again, this time to Chris Matthews. The Hardball host came onto Stewart’s show hawking his book, Life’s a Campaign.

Matthews does some worthwhile work with Catholic Charities, but as you can guess from his show and the title of that book, he’s one of those Beltway-insider journalists who sees beauty in the “game” of politics.

Stewart’s basic point: That’s a sad way to live. It’s bad enough that our political system operates that way. Must we operate that way in real life is well? “I’m not trashing your book — I’m trashing your philosophy of life.”

From a quick blog sample, it looks like some people got it and some didn’t.

- At MSNBC (scroll to 8:48), one guy is furious with Stewart for “turning on an ally.” What’s the emoticon for shaking my head and sighing?

- At the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, we see one commenter who thinks the whole thing just proves how rude “liberals” are. This is beautifully refuted by the next guy, who doesn’t even go for the obvious point that Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Hannity and company aren’t exactly models of polite discourse.

- My favorite comment refers to Stewart’s point that Matthews’ book has already been written … by Machiavelli: “Umm, Chris? The Prince is a cautionary tale, not a how-to manual.”

Stewart is neatly subverting the left-right conflict that feeds the 24-hour “news” monster. It’s a message that ought to be bigger.

My suggestion: In every Web conversation that ends up as a predictable partisan shoutfest, toss in a link to this video. Ask the brainwashed drones in the discussion if they’d rather be Stewart or Matthews.

Couldn’t hurt, right?

 

Albums that share this blog’s initials

Unfortunately, that would be Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, which doesn’t quite fall into the “so bad it’s good” category but rather the “so bad that decades of amusing conversation have not quite discerned what Reed was trying to do, but the theories are great.” I first heard of this album in the great book The Worst Rock and Roll Records of All Time, a must-have. This is #2. That’s an accomplishment.

They cheat a little with #1 — it’s an album of Elvis Presley’s between-song mutterings. I’d argue that’s a spoken-word album, which means Reed’s effort is #1. But maybe they’re cheating with this one, too. It’s basically guitar feedback minus the guitar playing. Like Elvis’ “work,” this is a byproduct of rock and roll packaged on its own, like having a big tub of MSG instead of the Chinese food it’s supposed to accompany.

This came up because the great music bloggers Jefito and Jason are doing one of their strange male-bonding things in which they send each other crappy stuff to read, hear and generally endure. I think Jason may have to concede now that Jefito has sent him MMM. (The album, not the blog. I hope no one finds my blog difficult to endure. Hee hee … pun on my last name. Anyway.)

But Jason makes the most of it. He took a bunch of pictures of himself listening to MMM, put it over the first 1:45 of the 64-minute epic and put the whole thing on YouTube. You can see Jason’s agony while experiencing only a small taste it. You could even experience none of it if you just mute your computer.

Enjoy (though it’s NSFW):

I’d say Jason’s as good an actor as he is a blogger, but he’s clearly not acting here.

So now I’ll offer a couple of attempted explanations what you just heard (or turned off).

The basic theories are: career suicide, a flip-off to Reed’s record label, a flip-off to music critics, a slow-motion drug overdose, an experiment in avant-garde classical music.

The latter isn’t that far-fetched. In case you wonder why classical music essentially died out as a creative force a couple of decades into the 20th century, it’s because the genre fell into the hands of people who were so busy trying to make grand artistic statements that they didn’t give a crap whether you listened to it.

This happened gradually. Everyone freaked out when Stravinsky unveiled Rite of Spring, but that piece stands up today as a viable piece of music. Then you have Carmina Burana, a very cool song cycle that pops up in ads and movies all the time (the blood-drinking scene in The Doors stands out). Then you have the WWII-era output of Aaron Copland. Anything after that, well, you’re not going to hear it on NPR anytime soon. You may have heard of Philip Glass, but can you hum anything by him?

I’ve met Philip Glass, oddly enough, through the professor who taught my composing class. And as proof that someone out there is still listening to classical music, that professor has his own Wikipedia entry, one that mentions the fine young composer Anthony Kelley.

So it’s not that the genre is dead — it’s just that the most famous guys created unlistenable music. In small doses, it’s amusing. You should’ve seen the sweet, innocent flute players in my music classes when the professor dropped some Stockhausen in the house. But I can assure my CD collection is Stockhausen-free.

And indeed, Stockhausen as an influence of this … um … work in the excellent Wikipedia entry, which refutes the Worst R&R Records notion that veteran mastering specialist Bob Ludwig deserves some special prize for withstanding this album. Ludwig apparently thought it compared favorably with the avant-garde classical people. That praise is fainter than that of a Class D star 50 billion light-years away.

Lester Bangs is credited with a great review seeking the bright side of MMM. But the Rolling Stone review is better because it calls bullshit: “Avant-garde artists (Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Andy Warhol) have been experimenting with ennui as a concept for so long that it’s no longer daring to tax the audience’s patience by being deliberately, intensely boring.”

In terms of avant-garde rebuttals, that’s right up there with Hobbes refusing to buy Calvin’s “found art,” despite its grand statements of the pointlessness of art itself, because it doesn’t match his furniture.

Wikipedia also has this: “The German new music ensemble Zeitkratzer have played Metal Machine Music in concert, with Lou Reed as soloist, using tradition classical concert instruments from a score transcribed from the original recording.”

Jason endured a listen, though he shared the experience with his cat. Bob Ludwig got throught it. Rock critics pride themselves on getting through it once. But the members of Zeitkratzer actually sat down and transcribed … something … out of this album.

To the members of Zeitkratzer — you are braver than all of us. Or perhaps you have powerful narcotics that should be studied as a possible cure for all human ailments. In any case, congratulations.

 

Why can’t anyone think?

A co-worker who shall remain nameless, musing on the lack of reason in many a Web discussion, points to an engineer’s blog post on logic and why most fellow humans don’t use it.

The answers aren’t bad. Any one could be fuel for a dissertation by some grad student. But I think two of the many good quotes sprinkled through the post come closer to the answer:

1. Steven Pinker: “One reason [why people often don't do so well at logic] is that logical words in everyday languages like English are ambiguous, often denoting several formal logical concepts. “

I love the Sting lyric “the gray sky, she angered to black” in The Wild Wild Sea. It’s beautiful imagery. But it’s totally illogical. The sky isn’t a “she,” it’s incapable of feeling anger, and no one angers to anything. (If you see a co-worker angering to black, please call 911.) You have to deconstruct the lyric before you can discuss it logically, and what’s the point in that?

2. William James: “A great many people think they’re thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”

That’s brilliant. And it explains much of what I see on the Web. People aren’t processing new bits of information to arrive at a conclusion. They’re processing that information on a superficial level, then fitting it into an ideology.

It’s tough to communicate with these people because they don’t see the problem.

Example: The Washington Post ran a kind obit on one of its own, the sports editor for Post.com., portraying him as a sort of eccentric intellectual. Now read what some sort of media watchdog blogger wrote about it: “Looking at his picture and reading the obit we thought, this was a pretty good guy. We only wish there were more pretty good guys at places like the WaPost, which might prevent some pretty bad intentions.”

Notice the assumption. This guy must be the exception. Not the rule. You can read down the left-hand column of the blog and see that we’re dealing with someone who has some deeply ingrained impressions of journalists, perhaps extrapolating that we’re all exactly as Dan Rather was for the last two decades of his career.

I can tell you that in 16 years in journalism, the eccentric intellectual is the most common personality type I’ve encountered. No. 2: The cynical blowhard. No. 3: The bureaucrat.

So what we have here is a false assumption. I think the reason that assumption is made — as is often the case on the Web — is that the blogger is an idealogue who doesn’t realize that other people may not be idealogues. I could be countering a false assumption with another false assumption, but … nah, you know I’m not, to paraphrase Don Henley.

The original post itself is precise and logical, as any good post on logic should be. He draws limits on logic, saying it’s more important to understand what’s logical and what isn’t than to scribble some Boolean statements for every decision in life. (“Hmmmm, carnitas or barbacoa ….”)

And yet the grammar and English-usage pedant in me trips over the line “That statement can be a bit confusion.” Not that I can talk — I almost titled this post “Why can’t anyone thing?”

 

"And I’d join the movement if there was one I could believe in"

Attention Spynotebook-ers — note two bits of Athens and Athens Academy content below …

One of the frustrations I have with the blogosphere is that there’s little respect for good old-fashioned intellectual back-and-forth.

In academia, here’s how it’s supposed to work: Someone raises a hypothesis and tests it. Others test it as well, perhaps offering refinements or even outright refutations. The person who raised the hypothesis then answers, conceding some points and defending others. Ideally, this is all done with mutual respect and honesty.

I can’t say how often this actually happens in academia — maybe Quinn can answer, since we share an alma mater and all. All I know is that it never happens in the blogosphere.

Two examples, both coincidentally linked from Down With Snark. (Michael does none of the damage here — I agree with what he posted about each of these.)

1. The Noka chocolate controversy. Michael sums it up well. A food blogger (mmmm … food blog …) started to wonder how this relatively new chocolate company could get away with outrageous prices on its chocolate, and he wrote a 10-part series that could double as a business-school course (BUS 302: Intro to Chocolate). Criminals are put away for life with less evidence than he compiles here.

And yet I have some sympathy for the company here. I could just imagine a happy couple enjoying the holidays, then coming back and finding that a blogger has destroyed their business. Besides, they’re hardly the first entrepreneurs to trump up their products with creative marketing. What the hell is “Corinthian leather,” anyway, other than something nice for Ricardo Montalban to pronounce?

That hasn’t happened, as far as I can tell. The only mention of Noka in the news is that they offering new keepsake packaging. That’s also the newest info on their official site and the only news posted since an August photo of the owners with Michael Gross. (Yes, the dad from Family Ties.)

In the blogosphere, you’ll find some discussion of an exuberant defender of the Noka brand who has since been hired by the Noka brand. Perhaps that’s shady, but you’d have to concede he’s being open about the ethical issues.

Up to a point, the discussion remains civil. The blogger — who doesn’t have comments on his blog but does run a messy message board — gives Noka a chance to defend itself.

Inevitably, the comments descend to the “gotcha” level, and I can’t help wondering why anyone would take such delight in taking these people down a peg.

The original investigation is impressive and informative. But Noka doesn’t owe anyone a retraction, an apology or an out-of-court settlement. I don’t see anything Noka’s doing here that differs from typical luxury branding. I’m sure someone could do the same investigation on Prada, finding that they use the same components as cheaper competitors. For better or for worse, creating status around a brand is a skill. The message behind Noka never really was “I care so much about you that I bought chocolate 10 times better than Godiva’s.” The message is, “I have money and will spend it on you.”

Besides, it’s chocolate. It’s subjective. Some people like Special Dark; some like Krackel.

(And yes, someone made a comparison of Krackel and Nestle Crunch, though it’s a little less serious.)

2. Goatse-ing the MySpace crowd. I’d never heard of “Goatse” until today, having wandered onto the Internet for the first time in 1995, just after the Usenet craze. If I had ever seen that word in the past, I would have assumed it was a misspelling of Goetze — Vicki Goetze, a schoolmate of mine and possibly the best amateur golfer of the past 30 years.

The link above is a safe Wikipedia entry, but if you’d rather skip any and all description, we’ll just say it’s a disgusting image that you’d have to be tricked into seeing. Unless you’re preparing it for someone else to see, which is a variant of the Teabaggers’ Dilemma — why should the teabagging recipient be any more embarrassed than the the teabagger?

So it seems one Jason Scott got ticked that a MySpace template was nicking one of his images. His post is full of techie condescension, but he has a point. He pays to host his images, and his bill ran up quickly when a template-maker made it available for MySpace users.

His solution: Substitute the “Goetse” image for his own. That’ll show ‘em.

We’d all agree the response was hysterical. The people who made the template told him he should take down the image.

Let’s repeat and recast: The people who “borrowed” his image without permission are asking him to change it. That’s like Vanilla Ice asking Queen to remix Under Pressure for better sampling.

Funny stuff. But when you read the comments on his site and at Digg, it’s easy to jump off the bandwagon. A sample:

If you have a child who browses MySpace… Kill them. You’ve made a terrible
mistake bringing them into the world, and society as a whole should not have to
pay for that mistake. Just stuff them in a burlap sack with a few bricks and
drop them in a river. No law enforcement agency would begrudge you. You’ve taken
a future scumbag off the streets and in so doing have saved them a lot of work.

Lovely.

In this case, Scott set the tone. He compares pre-1993 (in other words, pre-AOL newbie avalanche) Internet usage to the early days of air travel, when most people on a plane knew how to fly it. Today, he says, most people are like airline passengers and have no clue. Isn’t that a bit like saying the cavemen who invented the wheel should be the best race-car drivers?

Besides, MySpace isn’t totally useless, even if you can blame it for the decline of Dane Cook’s career. Just today, I found a nice archive of a great forgotten Athens band, Dreams So Real. (You may not find a better four-song blast of ’80s guitar pop than this.)

So once again, I’m stuck with reservations that keep me from joining the fun. I’m like the guy at the party who’s worried the cops are going to show up. (One day, I’ll tell the story of how a couple of us back in the office with the police scanner saved half my newspaper’s staff from certain arrest.)

Limit the blogosphere to a few safe areas, and I’m fine. I’m perfectly happy talking music with the music bloggers listed here and talking parenting with a few others. Like Earth in the Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy, we’re mostly harmless. I don’t see Blender going out of business because of my last few posts.

Does anyone else feel the same way? Is it “the more, the messier” on the Web?