Emusic is not my beat, but I will fearlessly address something of no interest to anyone anyway.

"Gordon" does a much better job with emusic than I do, but here are some thoughts nonetheless:

One of the great things about emusic, which this catalog addition will irreversibly change, was the fact that you were somewhat limited in your choices. The fact that you had prepaid for the month or year meant that the money was essentially a sunk cost, and it allowed you to take chances that you otherwise might not have. With a $7.99 transaction cost, I would never have discovered a band like the Rural Alberta Advantage:



It's a lovely little indie debut - heartfelt, awkward, largely about failed relationships, growing old, and moving to a big lonely city. And it's an album that feels totally mine, because I stumbled across it on emusic and thought, "why the hell not?" It matched the number of downloads I had left for the month, and it was "use it or lose it." If they're competing for my attention with canonical things that I never got around to picking up - say, Neil Young, or Prince - I'm probably going to be more likely to spend those downloads on musical vitamins than I am on a wild gamble.

Of course, I'm blaming emusic for my own behavior here, but there was something really liberating about the emusic outlook, and the idea that you're choosing music from a slightly skewed catalog. The constraints were nice, actually, because it meant that I could be current on whatever pitchfork's flavor du jour was, and I could also get a little wacky:



Why the hell not, right? Plus, given the lengths of each track on the Lindstrom - Prins Thomas album, you were looking at a real deal. And this brings us to the other problem I have with the pricing scheme: Fela Kuti albums are no longer 2-4 downloads. Jazz albums - many of which are under 50 minutes in length and no more than 5-7 tracks - will cost the same as a 14-track, 65-minute long indie record. Theoretically. The upside is that, potentially, hip-hop albums will carry less of a penalty (given all the skits, non-musical tracks, etc.) A lot of these trends had actually started once emusic moved from downloads to credits, but I'm afraid that the move to actual dollar values will continue this trend. If a Fela Kuti album is 12 tracks, I'll look for a hard copy in the discount bin instead of getting it from emusic.

Citizens Against Government Waste Apparently Not Against Stupidity

I caught this ad on Sunday, right before “Meet the Press,” and found it to be pretty jawdroppingly ugly. But what I failed to realize was just how stupid the ad is.

 

To sum it up: CAGW believe that in a few decades, a random Chinese professor would interpret the collapse of the American economic empire the exact same way that a current teapartier does. WHO KNEW, right? It’s analogous to how Scalia knows that the right way to interpret the Constitution is exactly the way a Regan conservative would interpret it.

 

To review: China, who have a GDP of 4 point some trillion dollars, and enacted a stiumulus bill of 600 or so billion dollars, will be deriding the US’s foolish, 900 billion dollar stimulus? (The US GDP is, of course, in the neighborhood of 14 trillion.)

 

To continue: a Chinese political scientist or economist would mock the US not for deregulation of the financial sector, not for two unaffordable wars, not for fealty to a corporatist interpretation of the free market, but for borrowing from China? A country with a highly centralized economy dictated in stringent terms by the government would mock America for turning its back on practices that do not currently exist in China?

 

The ad doesn’t quite indicate whether this Chinese academic had his “come to Jesus” moment on free market economics, but a small government conservative think tank can dream, can’t it?

 

(Full disclosure: I got into an argument with a CAGW lobbyist a few months ago in class. Who was right about Stupak, huh? The one of us who said he needed support from single issue voters, or the one of us (ahem, me) who said maybe, just maybe, he really did oppose funding for ending pregnancies for purely moral reasons? Incidentally, what makes this story great is that he announced he wouldn’t run for reelection the day after our argument, proving me right.)

 

 

Concussy bruise!

No one asked for this, but you’re getting it anyway. This post-concussy bruise didn’t start to fill in, colorwise, until a few days after the incident. It started out with those pointy bruises you can see, in the shape of a semi-circular series of puncture wounds, not unlike a half-bear-trap, if such a thing were possible. As the days went on, it started to fill out with red hues, and then purple, on to black, and, finally, as the healing gets underway, a yellow tone suggestive of pus. Who wants breakfast???

Concussy

So, I went to a glorious Pavement gig on September 21 with none other than Herr Gordo. It was great catching up, having a raucous night in the city, and feasting on some Nobu afterward.

 

However, a concert that was largely about celebrating the work of a great 1990s band wouldn’t be complete without another kind of flashback – to the Dinkins days, as Malkmus jokes in the liner notes to the S&E reissue. Evidently, I took a vicious blow to the back of the head that left me feeling concussy (as in, memory loss, profound disorientation, etc) and bloody, and staple-y (9 in the back of the head to close the wound.) I got the staples taken out today, and lord do I feel better than I did at around 7 am last Wednesday morning, when I woke up in Bellevue with nary a clue as to how I arrived there.

 

What have I learned? Well, basically, beyond the need for caution and occasional modesty about my levels of alertness after scotch, I’ve learned that it’s absolutely insane to allow football players to get back into a game after a concussion. The experience of thinking a thought but not being able to integrate it into the rest of my brain was incredibly confusing. I would think of an obligation, or something I wanted to do in the not-too-distant future, and instead of having that thought “downloaded” (for lack of a better word) and integrated into the rest of my brain, into whatever I was doing, the thought would just kind of float out there, with no apparent relationship to me or to my thought process.

 

Not having any memories is sort of a blessing, from a PTSD standpoint. I’m still fighting with Bellevue to get a copy of my medical records faxed to my doctor – a process that is unnecessarily difficult and laborious given the flintiness of the hospital’s medical records staff. Given that my wife works in a hospital, she’s aghast at the exchanges we seem to have with Bellevue every day. It seems to unnecessarily add salt to the wound of what was already a pretty harrowing ordeal.

 

Oh, and there’s no way they should have discharged me that morning. My memory of the morning is very episodic – Memento-esque, if you will – and not at all linear. I don’t know what kind of operation they’re running over there, but it’s not one that appears to put a premium on patient safety…

The "real" America

So, here's a feeble attempt at returning to some semblance of regularly writing here, or at the very least, addressing one of the central topics of this blog: American-ness and non-American-ness.

The other day I found myself in a strange situation, talking to someone at Bethesda Naval Hospital. He was a Vietnam vet, and was classmates at the USNA with Jim Webb and Oliver North (whom he called "Larry North.") He actually told a fairly engaging story about how they all used to box each other, because they were in the same weight, and that Webb fought North in the USNA championship bout - a bit after North had completed a full recovery from a nasty leg fracture. Though Webb knew North couldn't turn to the side of his healed leg, he refused to sneak into North's blindside and give him the business. The rest of the boxers couldn't believe Webb was going easy on a guy with one functional leg. Amazingly, there's a reference to this fight on wikipedia.

Anyway, it turns out this guy's son-in-law is the famous cigar marine. And he is VERY proud of his son-in-law, who is evidently running for office on a cookie-cutter tea party-type platform.

The reason I'm talking about this chortly gregarious fella is because earlier I heard someone ask him if he'd left the United States recently, and he said, "No, I have not left the States. I haven't been to DC." I wasn't sure what he meant at first - was he acknowledging DC's non-stateness? If so, that seemed like a pretty unlikely political statement for this guy to make - but then it dawned on me that he was simply repeating the Palin-type trope about how there are real parts of America and not-so-real parts of America.

I thought about this as we packed up the Smart Car for some tailgating on Labor Day. We went to support Ms. AC's hokies in this debacle. (I should hasten to point out that the game itself was actually highly entertaining despite the result - several lead changes in the second half, etc.) We packed up some beers in the back of the car (there's actually storage back there.) We hopped in our little city car and drove out to some big stadium. We may not have had flags adorning our car, and maybe we mostly don't eat meat. Maybe our pregame music is NPR and rather than Bon Jovi, and maybe one of us wasn't even born here. No matter. What we were doing - packing up the car on a national holiday and heading to a football game - should be eminently recognizable to any American.

I thought of this guy as we loaded up the car, of his conception of America somehow excluding us. I can tell you that, in the parking lot, we chatted with strangers, answered (yes) questions about the tiny car we were driving, and even got chummy with some Boise State people. I still don't understand why our existence in America is any less real than anyone else's.

But which version of "The Office"?

This story is pretty undeniably cool, until you get to this paragraph:

To relax at night, Stafford said he has downloaded podcasts via Internet satellite phone by British comedian Ricky Gervais and episodes of the TV show "The Office".

Perhaps my lack of interest in the American version of "The Office" makes me an oddball. But if it's lame that this guy is watching "The Office" in the Amazon - which it is, I think - it's twice as lame if he's watching the American version.

And with that verdict, hopefully I set a new record in the "nitpicking an otherwise impressive achievement" category.

A song for your Wednesday

Delorean's "Ayrton Senna" ep is epic. Too bad they didn't take the high road and follow it up with an ep called "Nelson Piquet." (Wonder about the Venn diagram overlap of people who are into Brazilian Formula One drivers from the 1980s/1990s and people who like electro pop...?) This is off their follow-up album, which is still pretty good.

Linearity, jamming, and soccer.

So, I went to a Dave Matthews Band show, and while I wasn't necessarily super into the idea, I do enjoy some of the band's music. I was of course dreading the utter abundance of douchitude, but it wasn't terrible, crowd-wise.

What caught my attention was that this was very different from the other improv-oriented rock band that I like (Phish.) Phish structures their shows into two sets. No opening act, just about 2.5 hours total of Phish. The first set typically contains more songs, with creative soloing but not necessarily a lot of improv that changes the musical structure of a song. The second set, on the other hand, tends to have longer songs that are broken open and which completely depart from the song's original mold. This makes sense to me: you start with the familiar, you play around with it, and by the second set, you see openings, cracks in songs, that weren't there before.

One of the endearing things about Phish, though, is that sometimes they have no idea how to structure a show. Because these concerts are often held in sports arenas, a friend of mine once referred to them as "a sporting event for hippies." That's not entirely off, though I don't thing likening anything to a sporting event is pejorative (I think Doughboy did when he made that statement, though.) And sports in America are - generalization alert - largely about the ending of the game.

Michael Jordan, John Elway, Doug Flutie, a pre-injury 2006 Gilbert Arenas - they were all inspiring and engaging to sports fans because of late-game heroics. Even Landon Donovan gets on that list now, with the miraculous finish against Algeria. Now, what does this have to do with seeing Dave Matthews at Nationals Park? Well, for starters, the crowd was sitting down for most of the show. I like sitting just as much as the next person, even if it will kill you, but I also enjoy standing quite a bit. I'd say I'm 50/50 on the sitting/standing thing. But at a show? I believe firmly in standing.

So, I noticed that the crowd was basically very complacent - sort of like a first quarter basketball crowd, or a third inning baseball crowd. Why get up? Why get into it? What happens early doesn't matter. It's all about the finish. And of course, as it became clear that the band was playing the last song, everyone was standing and behaving as though they were at a rock show.

What this has to do with soccer is that, in the context of how much ink has been spilled over the question of whether there is something fundamentally un-American about soccer or not (whatever the hell un-American means, right? Harvey Pekar was radically American, and so is Dick Cheney) and one thing that I think most scribes have missed is that in soccer, what happens in the first minute can make all the difference. In American football, there are so many possessions (and the possibility for half-scores in the form of field goals) that a good team can put themselves in position to remain competitive. Same in basketball, where a team can go on a sudden 12-2 run and make a game suddenly competitive. But in soccer, there are no half-scores, and no linear progression.

Put differently: a good drive in football that takes you 80 yards down the field can get you 7 points or 3 points. Unless you mess up, you'll get one of the two. A great possession in soccer can only result in a goal or not result in a goal. There's no reward for good effort - there's only the goal or not the goal. Similarly, a goal scored in the first minute of a game can be decisive. If you believe that the important stuff needs to wait until the end of an event to take place, you may find yourself sorely disappointed by a game where you can be locked into a bad outcome in the first minute, and spend 89 hapless minutes fighting to change that.

Besides thinking about this stuff, I also overheard a great conversation in the men's room, but I'll save that for later.

This Merkin Life

Every now and then, I get to actually spend more than an hour getting to or from somewhere in a car, and my default setting is to check out a “This American Life.” We were driving back from Roanoke this past weekend – also known as the town in a place where every town is a town you know from a bluegrass tune, like Flint Hill – and Ms. AC chose this episode to listen to. The second story is unbelievably sad and moving, and when we got home and had a so-called “driveway moment” (though the “driveway” was actually Kalorama Road, but whatevs), I thought I was in for a lesson about the importance of not staring an episode of “This American Life” when you’re too close to home. Typically, if they have a downer story, there’s a third, uplifting story to follow, and I thought, “Oh, if only we had another 12 minutes of driving, we could let Ira Glass finish us off with an unlikely tale of bonhomie and wit.”

 

Long story short, we timed it right. There was no third story. Just this horribly sad one, which went on and on and on, and which grows increasingly weird and transgressive. You can get curious by looking at this picture, or, even better, don’t look at the picture now. Listen to the show first, and then click through to the picture. Stupid Temerlins.

Have I been gone for a while? You bet I've been gone for a while.

But I haven’t gone anywhere, really. Just been way too busy to carve out the time to do anything meaningful that isn’t either school- or home improvement-related. Also, the World Cup was kind of a time drain, but Brasil’s loss did give me the perfect excuse to watch the film version of “The Road,” which was lovely and truly inspirational when you hate humanity.

 

One thing I’ve been fighting for at work, for quite some time, is a fair and broad telecommuting policy. I could have secured a separate peace several months ago, but I kind of decided that I wanted to make my office a better place to work. And in the process – though it’s been miserable and I’ve been confronted with idiocy and small-mindedness at virtually every turn – is realizing that I’m sort of a company man. Not in the boomer “stay with one company forever” sense of the word, though that may come to pass…but more in the sense of enjoying the belonging-to-an-organization part of work.

 

To be clear, I hate most people, especially those in my office. And not having to suffer these kinds of people is exactly one of the things I envy the most about people who freelance. But what’s not for me is the feeling that I’m only in it for me. The organizational behavior, changing the culture of a place, trying to do a small thing to help senior management realize the world is changing – I really enjoy that part of things. I can’t quite say why.

 

Sure, it’d be nice to have more autonomy. But I have the obligation of going to work every day to thank for a number of friends (not to mention a spouse) and other adventures. So, even though at times it’s really bad, I’m having a moment of self-satisfaction with the fact that I work in a building with people. But please, let me get this telecommuting policy implemented already…