Late Night Takeaways

• For some reason, the Times is carrying water for NBC, first running Ebersol's clumsy attack on Conan and then an absolute cock-and-balls stroke on Zucker.
• WFMU has an epic post on past late night follies, starting with Jack Paar's on-air resignation from the Tonight Show and centering on the ill-fated Jerry Lewis Show.
• Jay Leno was for the transition to Conan before he was against it.
• No one on SNL is even capable of a halfway decent impression.
• The silver lining in all of this is Jimmy Fallon retaining his time slot, where brilliant bits like his impersonation of Neil Young covering "Pants on the Ground" will reach more viewers.

Orchestral Combat

No one can quite create an alternate reality like a PR flack. Regarding the contract dispute in the Cleveland Orchestra, the players' spokesman said that past cuts to the musicians' compensation "is why we keep slipping in the rankings".

Apparently, there's an AP/Conductor's poll somewhere that we've been missing out on.

The End Is Near(ish)

In the 2nd half of Eschatology 101, Peter Sellers lampoons the business of predicting the end of the world as a character named Jeremiah Fuller, Secretary of the International Flat Earth Association. He begins his run to the end of the bit with this exchange:

Fuller: By detailed study of the scriptures, my colleagues and I have ascertained that the world will be destroyed by fire on the 17th of this very month!

Interviewer: But the 17th was yesterday, Mr. Fuller!

Fuller: Alright, I'm a day out.

That moment came to mind today after reading the Chronicle's article about poor old Harold Camping, who has already incorrectly forecast that Christ would return on September 6, 1994. The reporter says Camping only allows "that he may have made a mathematical error", which is rather akin to Sellers' instant, unapologetic rejoinder, "I'm a day out."

In his view, the prophet isn't wrong, he's just messed up some mundane detail, which shouldn't have any impact on our respect for his authority. When you're hooked on the notion that there is some way of knowing the future, it must be next to impossible to resist the temptation to re-enter the fray and amend your failed prediction. Camping now insists that the rapture is due on May 21, 2011, and you owe it to yourself to see his reasoning why. It's too goofy and arbitrary to relate in full here, but when Camping 'realized' the date he claims that he 'just about fell off my chair'.

"You Should Not Be Here"

It's a pity that Avatar isn't more original. Unfortunately, it's just another excuse for James Cameron to indulge in his Vietnam fetish, and it also manages to be the umpteenth onscreen version of the warrior coming-of-age story. Thank God he also has a heroine fetish, because without Zoe Saldana's character, this thing would just be 10,000 BC.

Saldana's the great humanizing force of the movie. It's her emotional life that keeps the movie alive, despite every effort Cameron makes to suffocate it. What cliche do you want to see?

Grizzled military commander? Check. Voiceover? Roger that. Bad military dialogue? Hoorah.

That's not to mention the anonymous tribal drums and orchestral stabs of the completely unimaginative score, or the slurry of plots from Fern Gully, Alien(s), Star Wars and The Matrix. There's scarcely a moment that isn't derived from some other movie. To be fair to Cameron, when one of his characters explains that the Na'vi see all of life as an interconnected force, it's not as if George Lucas originated the concept. The essential difference is that when Yoda explains the Force it feels original, or at least, sincere. Here, nothing feels sincere except for Saldana.

Cameron does have a kind of unique spin on the Force, though. He gives all the inhabitants of Pandora a USB cable with which they can interface with any other being, including trees. It's sort of like R2D2's universal data arm which can access computer systems wherever he is in the universe. That Pandoran birds, horses and big cats would have all evolved the same cable defies belief, but it's a neat idea, as is the placement of their breathing holes. The big predators have their air spouts just below their necks, rather like jet turbines. It looks cool.

A lot of things in Avatar look cool, but the 3D is rarely a contributing factor. Cameron largely resists the urge to jab things at us, but he does put way too many stray branches in front of characters to establish depth. The depth of the visual plane is where he really focuses his exertion. The movie is made to look real, rather than gimmicky. This tends to work best when reference points are less familiar. When characters are floating weightless in space or climbing improbably airborne mountains, the added dimension of the 3D really works.

When two characters are just conversing in an office, it's pointless and distracting, because this 3D still relies primarily on illusions of focus. There's no real wizardry here: some objects are in focus, others are not. That creates the illusion of depth. The problem is that it's not how we experience 3D in real life, and what you end up looking at for 2 and half of the longest hours of your life is a screen crammed full of blurry images, just so that a few can pop out at you in high definition.

And now that we're having 3D movies come out at a regular clip, can we skip the premium for the glasses? Instead of paying $17 for Avatar, couldn't I just pay the $12.50 and bring the glasses I bought at Up?

What Are We Fighting For?

Obama's candidacy would have never made it past Iowa if he had not made this speech in October of 2002:

I don’t oppose all wars...What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income — to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

What's the principle behind Afghanistan at this point?

Protecting a Chinese copper mine?

Capturing Osama bin Laden?

By his own 2002 criteria, Afghanistan can't be judged as anything but a war of passion and politics at this point, rather than principle and reason.

Hopefully his meditations today on the sacrifices of American citizens in wars of both types will help him realize (as usual) Joe Biden is right.

Mike Bloomberg Has Us Over a Barrel

Bloomberg's latest ad has the requisite dulcet soundtrack as he recounts all the good that he's done for the city. We see smiling kids going to school, smiling fishmongers and construction workers, and then for less than a second, we see this cop cuffing someone on the hood of a car.

It's an inadvertent metaphor (or perhaps a subliminal reminder) of the position Bloomberg has the city in. We're powerless to resist voting him in to an illegitimate 3rd term. No one seriously thinks Bill Thompson would do a good job as mayor (not even Bill Thompson). So we're stuck with a billionaire who couldn't find another political opening to fill, and in true New York fashion, we quietly resign ourselves to the inevitable.

Obama At Hiroshima

Two competing perspectives from Japan:

Obama, as U.S. president, does not have to, and should not, visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If he does, then Japanese leaders must at least pay official visits to Pearl Harbor to apologize for killing innocent civilians there and for actually starting the war. -- MASANOBU SAITO

If Obama were to speak from Hiroshima (as no other sitting U.S. president ever has), this would allow the entire world to imagine a future no longer held hostage by fears of cold war, nuclear winter, or nuclear terrorism. As Obama has stated, political will and support for a nuclear-free world first requires imagination. An address from Hiroshima would be bold, historic and compelling.

Obama's groundbreaking April 5 speech in Prague — mentioned by many speakers at memorial events in Nagasaki and Hiroshima this past summer and widely reported in the Japanese media — shows just how closely attuned he is to the essence of Hiroshima's viewpoint -- JOHN EINARSEN

While I agree with the first author that Obama has no obligation to go to Hiroshima, a visit there certainly wouldn't require reciprocation by Japanese leaders. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not morally equivalent to the attack on Pearl Harbor, and moral equivalency is well beside the point.

I'm more inclined to agree with the second author. A visit to those sites would underscore his seriousness about abolishing nuclear weapons. (It would also prompt howls of indignation from the right that every time Obama goes overseas he apologizes for America, but they'll do that no matter what.)

Musical Tastes Are So Revealing...

It was an astute music critic for Stockholm's edition of Metro that called the Nobel for Obama in this morning's edition.

He noticed that Will & Jada Smith were hosting the gala concert in honor of the Nobel laureates and figured it was no coincidence. He also noticed that the other performing artists included several Obama favorites. So he wrote a piece saying Obama would win and placed a $150 bet on his conclusion. He ended up winning $7,000.

Pencils Down!

"It's like bearing a royal heir; everybody's watching and everybody's attendant at the birth. The piece ideally ought to be perfect on its first outing, and that's just too much to ask of a new piece of music, unless the composer just simply took the easy route and played to his or her strengths."

"I never want to do that. I want to make my music an opportunity to extend myself, and my language." -- John Adams, on the premiere of a new commission.

When I was promoting Iron Composer on WCLV, Mark Satola prefaced one question with a remark that we usually think of classical compositions like symphonies as taking years to complete. On my way over to the studio, I had been thinking about that very facet of the competition and wondering which composers would benefit the most from writing more in the Iron Composer vein.

At risk of igniting another firestorm of indignation, Leonard Bernstein was the name that came to mind. Speed isn't the issue, so much as intent.

Striving for greatness was Bernstein's artistic cul-de-sac. If he could have let go of more of his music without overthinking it, my hunch is that his final tally would have included a few more highly regarded compositions.

While Adams disdains taking the easy route on a commission, I'd argue that most composers would be better off by 'playing to their strengths' on a commission. We'd end up with better new music on average, and the chances of the commission ever getting played again would increase.

Mozart was fast, legendarily so. He often had to write quickly to give himself something to perform. If he set about each new piece with the goal of 'extending himself and his musical language', no doubt we'd have gotten less great music out of him.

Not everyone is Mozart, in fact no one is. But the reverse is also true. Unless you're another Mahler (which you aren't), if you are spending a year or more writing a symphony, chances are that the extra time is not yielding the results you think it is. Who knows, maybe it's taking that long because your day job is in the way, but if you are equating a long gestation period with greatness, think again.

Every new piece doesn't have to break new ground.

Being In The Zone ≠ Loss of Self Control

Simon Barnes has a unique take on Serena Williams' ugly breakdown last night:

It happens. It will happen again, especially in tennis. And it doesn’t happen because athletes are spoiled brats, especially in tennis. It happens because many athletes reach exalted levels of brilliance by means of a certain abnegation of self-control.

It’s called being in the zone, an almost mystic state. This is not to excuse grotesque behaviour: but to explain that extreme behaviour is likely to arise from any extreme form of activity. Tantrums are notorious in artistic circles; the performance arts in particular, are full of feuds and squabbles, loves and hates, screaming sessions and hissy fits. That’s because art is also an extreme activity, demanding that its exponents give more of themselves than they can conveniently afford.

It is the same in sport. We ask huge things of great athletes. We demand a level of intensity that will inevitably lead sometimes to tears, anger, absurdity and violence. The astonishing thing is not how often, but how seldom it happens.

A neat idea, but wrong.

Being in the zone results from relentless self-control. When the mind and the body are disciplined thoroughly, occasionally, you can lapse into a kind of automatic sensation, where everything seems to be happening without any real effort. The key word being 'seems'. The brain is still telling the body how to move. The muscles are still exerting themselves completely. The artist or the athlete is still exerting an incredible degree of control over his mechanism. The only difference in the zone, as opposed to out of it, is that the brain shifts its focus elsewhere.

A theist would say that being in the zone allows the soul to take over, because when this happens in music, we are then free to concentrate on what we want to say. We've stopped thinking about mechanics, and we are free to start thinking about expression. You feel like you can do anything with the music in the zone. It's the same way that a great basketball player in the zone can switch shooting hands or execute a no look pass. The brain and self-control mechanisms don't switch off, rather they switch into a higher gear, with increased function.

What happened last night was the same thing that happened to Ron Artest and to LeGarette Blount. It was a breakdown in impulse control. Serena Williams has the best serve in women's tennis. She is more than capable of serving her way out of the 15-40 hole she dug for herself with the foot fault. The most sickening part of the incident is when she breaks from preparing for her next serve and decides to go after the line judge. At that point, we're watching someone indulging their id, which is never a pretty sight.

Yes, we have blowups like this in music all the time, but the notion that they are natural results of 'being in the zone' is a lame excuse for bad behavior. Simon's astonished that there aren't more meltdowns because of his clever theory, but what that fact should tell him is that most people know how to keep their impulses under control.

"I've Seen Things You People Wouldn't Believe"

In 2007, we programmed ARTSaha! around futurism. For the most part, that meant Marinetti & Co, but the final concert was devoted to the more traditional meaning of the term. I love reading dated futurism, predictions of tomorrow that never come. (Can't recommend the Paleo-Future blog enough for that, if you need a fix)

People who make a living (or a name) at predicting the future usually follow a standard playbook which dates back to prehistoric times. The Old Testament prophets' schtick has been updated countless times by anyone with a vision of the future they want to sell.

I picked on Al Gore by way of demonstration in a pre-concert talk. In his documentary about global warming, he hits all the standard beats of any decent prophecy. There are too many to discuss in this post, but one of the most important is the notion that the visionary is the only one in possession of a certain knowledge. At one point, Gore refers to the future as a 'door', and describes it as being opened just for him. It's no small coincidence that, as he says this, the image we see is of him walking onstage in the full glow of a spotlight, which looks like a halo around his silhouette.

So, if you're into this nonsense, there is no better place to get your fill than on Fox News at 5 pm EST M-F. There's this nutjob on every night who can't spell and who is raking in unbelievable ratings by making vague predictions of a totalitarian future in America. He relies very heavily on the personal revelation gag. He's always saying things like, "I don't want to know the things that I know," and in the clip below, he gives a little art history lecture for his audience. The basic theme is that his rivals at NBC work in Rockefeller Center which is draped in fascist art.

In typical Glenn Beck style, he doesn't just hint at the idea that he's the only one who knows this stuff.  He shames his sound engineer, Jack, to bully the point home, tent revivalist style:

"Jack, our sound engineer, how long you work in that building, Jack?"

(muffled response off camera)

"29 years, he's been walking by that stuff. He said, 'I never even seen it. I've never noticed it.' Of course not...until somebody points it out. Now that I've pointed it out, Jack, I guarantee every time you're walking with somebody, you will see it, and you'll point it out! That's your job. I'm trying to show you the things that seem to be hidden, but they're not. They are out in plain sight. Those with eyes will not see, and those with ears will not hear. You're awake. You need to see the things that are hidden in plain sight."

"Then the LORD reached out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me, "Now, I have put my words in your mouth." -- Jeremiah 1:9

Mozart Died From Strep Throat....or scarlet fever...or kidney failure...

File in the 'totally pointless stories written about someone famous to garner a headline (and subsequently a blog post)' bin:

"Our findings suggest that Mozart fell victim to an epidemic of strep throat infection that was contracted by many Viennese people in Mozart's month of death, and that Mozart was one of several persons in that epidemic that developed a deadly kidney complication," researcher Richard Zegers, of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, told Reuters Health.

Zegers and his colleagues said this "minor epidemic" of step throat, or streptococcal pharyngitis, may have begun in the city's military hospital.

According to witness accounts, Mozart fell ill with an "inflammatory fever," which is consistent with strep throat, Zegers and his colleagues wrote in their report.

The composer, who wrote more than 600 works during his life, eventually developed severe swelling, "malaise," back pain and a rash, consistent with a strep infection leading to kidney inflammation known as glomerulonephritis.

Zegers said it was also possible that Mozart had scarlet fever, which, like strep throat, can be caused by infection with streptococcal bacteria, but this was less likely because witnesses said Mozart developed a rash near the end of his illness and with scarlet fever, the rash appears early on.

Thanks genius! Your guesses about how Mozart died closed the case on a 200+ year mystery!

Our favorite theory about how Mozart died? Mutant zombies from outer space...

Mad Men Drives Me Nuts

When Mad Men launched, AMC ran non-stop ads that featured Matthew Weiner and members of the cast rhapsodizing about how accurate the show was. In one spot, Weiner is almost beside himself talking about how a set of glasses or hand towels or something were the same exact ones his mother had when he was a kid. At the time, it struck me as an exasperating and didactic angle for a TV show pitch: "I'm supposed to watch this thing because you got your 60's brands right?"

Well, the non-stop PR push for the series launch turned into a full-blown mediagasm once people finally saw the show. Apparently, it was the best thing on TV since the Soprano's, and I tried. I really tried, but for me, the show was just as heavy-handed and insufferable as all those ads with Matthew Weiner. Characters say things to each other like, "It's 1960, the man doesn't have to ask you out anymore!" Historical events are pile-driven into almost every episode, for no reason other than to shout at people, "THIS SHOW IS TAKING PLACE IN THE SIXTIES!!!"

Alessandra Stanley's review of the upcoming season sums up the show's ethos quite well:

Retrospective winks at past ignorance are what makes “Mad Men” so funny and, at times, so chilling.

As someone who watched General Hospital religiously until his mid-20's, I've got nothing against soap operas, and key to any soap opera is a good gimmick, whether it's a hospital in Port Charles or ranchers from Dallas. An ad firm in 1960's Manhattan would be fine, if they'd just let the hook breathe instead of smothering it with all the historical nonsense.

Near the end of the last season, a character picked up a newspaper that had a banner headline about Marilyn Monroe's death. In the next scene, all of the women in the office were talking about it. This was a few episodes from the end of the season, and I predicted to my wife, who watches the show, "They'll end on the Cuban Missile Crisis." Sure enough, the melodrama of the final episode unfolds under the specter of the Cuban crisis.

So, I got to thinking about the next landmark event of the 60's they'd use as a narrative backdrop: The March on Washington? The Beatles arriving in America?

Then I realized my stupidity. There's no way the creators of Mad Men would miss the opportunity to revel in JFK's assassination. Look for it in the season finale.

"Now, More Than Ever..."

James Oestreich read a bad book about Mozart and the Times let him spend 1,000 words bashing it. There's little doubt that Carl Vigeland's book is as unctuous and fawning as Oestreich says it is when he pulls quotes like this about the Jupiter Symphony:

“Stupendous. Unbelievable. Beyond superlatives. Maybe simply: miraculous. This perfect piece..."

That kind of writing definitely would grate at book length. In fact, it's hard to imagine how language like that could even be stretched to fill a few hundred pages, but it's not like Vigeland is the first guy to write poorly about Mozart. What's most memorable about the article is Oestreich's halfhearted dash for cover under the 'Death of Classical Music' banner:

Mindless, clichéd, indiscriminate cheerleading is the last thing classical music needs just now, as it finds itself increasingly challenged to prove its relevance in the multicultural, anti-elitist, pop-saturated arts climate of the 21st century.

Let's get this straight: glorified copywriters like Vigeland are the real threat to the future of classical music? Hardly. If anything, the world of classical music could use more "mindless, clichéd, indiscriminate cheerleading". Oestreich's editor shouldn't have bothered with such a lame swipe at legitimacy. Nothing wrong with using the Times as a sledgehammer. There's no sense in trying to dress the article up as an 'ideas piece', when it's just a hatchet job on another writer.

Reading it brought to mind David Cross' old bit about 9/11. He says, by way of setup, that there was so much bad art done in the name of not "letting the terrorists win", and then he imagines the backstage deliberations of a Texas comedy group over whether or not it's too soon to perform. They come to the conclusion that "if Houston's Assaulted Nuts Improv Group doesn't perform, then the terrorists have truly won."

Dinner For One

One of the inestimable pleasures of the Stockhausen courses is the people that you meet. For the past two years, I've stayed in Biesfeld, which is two towns over from Kuerten. It's just a 3-mile walk, but the last half mile is up a God-awful hill that never seems to end.

Anyway, at the house this year, we had a Brit from Bristol, a Czech, a Berliner, a trumpeter from Mainz, an American ex-pat living in Germany, and a newly minted conservatory graduate from St. Petersburg. Our host lavished food upon us and restocked the fridge in our quarters with beer every day. After the evening concert, we'd always find our way back to the upstairs living room to shoot the breeze over a few bottles.

The Brit, an incomparable fellow named George Platts, was one of those guys who always renews my faith in the power of music. Here was a guy with no specialized training in the craft (he was a product of the British art schools), but he understood the most sophisticated concepts of modern music. He could tell you that the dramatic arc of Satyagraha peaks in the second act. He'd also been to the 1985 staging of Donnerstag in Covent Garden, as well as the 2008 Proms tribute to Stockhausen. George is, at heart, a fan of music, nothing more. He's not what other musicians would consider 'trained', but he gets it. Without any of the tools we have in our dop kit, he gets it. In his vocation (art therapy) he employs music without hesitation. He'd traveled to Kuerten to hear the multi-channel music of Stockhausen projected properly, simple as that. It was a life goal of his, and he achieved it.

For the rest of us at the house, one of the side benefits was his seemingly bottomless well of stories. One of the remarks he made to our friend from Mainz was, "I never realized that Germans all watch a British film on New Years' Eve that the British have never heard of: Dinner for One". In his numerous travels through the country, George had encountered more than a few Germans who were fond of this film, which is British.

The hour was late, and we were on our 2nd or 3rd round from the ever-replenishing fridge, and a friendly disagreement ensued about the nature of the film. The ex-pat insisted it was about a blind woman who's fooled by her servant into thinking that her dinner table is full of colorful guests, while the friend from Mainz more accurately related that the servant and his Mistress engage in a mutual deceit. (Apparently, Germans really are fond of this film!)

I'd intended to Netflix it when I got home, and I was surprised to see that it's a short, entirely viewable on YouTube. Thanks to George for teaching me, and by turns, you, what Germans watch on New Year's:

Some funny things

I came across two really funny things recently. One is Not Damien Hirst's blog (http://hirstdamien.blogspot.com/)


Thoughts on Eternal Life by Someone Living a Mundane Life in a Tiny Flat
Description: "A physical presence of a not too typically looking ladybug which I found dead in my room a few days back and remembered that I probably saw it perfectly alive a few days before that when I even wondered what was a ladybug doing in my room and how did she got inside it since I mostly keep my windows closed and I don't have any flowers on a white plastic windowsill" on a photograph
Dimensions: 10 x 15 cm
Price: 1€

...And the other is...

Stalagpipe organ

How Are We Going To Pay For It?

It's a question that is on everybody's mind. One that we hear over and over in a variety of contexts: health care, the two wars, our defense budget... I heard the other day that California is the wealthiest state, (in fact, if it were considered a separate country, it would have the seventh largest economy in the world) yet it can't pay its own government workers.

Naturally it doesn't stop at the door of the music world. Our orchestras are making panic grabs at keeping above water. St. Paul is taking a 12% cut, Phoenix staff/musicians/director is taking a 17% cut. In Minnesota, they are cutting back on their renovation plan and the staff is taking cuts and layoffs.

Detroit's music director says the musicians don't need to paid in the summer.

Regardless of what the Baltimore Sun says I happen to know that the Baltimore Symphony musicians started to bail out first with a million-dollar concession package, followed by 2 furlough weeks this year, and another million-dollar-plus package of concessions next year (which is at least a 17% drop from what they were planning on with the contract in place). Administration jobs at the BSO have been cut, and the remaining administrative employees are taking a similar cut to the musicians.

The Cleveland Orchestra is doing things the opposite way. The CEO and music director led the bailout with an 15% and 20% cut respectively. It still remains to be seen what the musicians will have to take, but in the meantime the fundraisers in Cleveland are suggesting that all of their regular contributors give 100% more than usual. If that isn't possible, they can give 50% more.

Cleveland's fundraising letter is accompanied by a laundry list of items where they are cutting expenses to get through the hard economic times.

Similarly, Baltimore is cutting its overall budget by 13%. I'm guessing this will include cutting some recordings (One has to wonder what the plan is with their choices in recordings anyway... How well can another Dvorak or another Rite of Spring CD sell these days?) and flashy bits from pops shows... maybe negotiating lower visiting-artists' performance fees (like Cleveland), and lower rent at their Bethesda home.

The traditionally wealthy Philadelphia Orchestra has already cut 20% of its administrative staff. Even though they recently celebrated surpassing the goal of its $125 million endowment drive, remaining staff members are taking at least a 10% cut in salary. Amazingly, the musicians will get a paltry raise.

So, to answer my question: Sometimes the administration is paying for it, sometimes the musicians are paying for it - in rare cases (like Cleveland) even the management will pay for it... but in all cases the smart orchestras are stepping down their expenditures and stepping up their fundraising campaigns.

related articles:
Houston
indystar.com
charlotteobserver.com
Minnesota Orchestra
Milwaukee Symphony
Dayton Philharmonic

The end of the current production-manufacturing economic model

Interesting article over at Fast Company, The Desktop Manufacturing Revolution by Jamais Cascio - The end of the current production-manufacturing economic model may be on the horizon. But what if nothing's ready to replace it?

Clay Shirky recently described revolutions as situations in which "...the old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place." He was talking about newspapers, but the insight can apply much more broadly. Advertising, for example, seems to be going through its own revolution, with existing models falling to tatters without a clear successor waiting in the wings. Education is another example, and some would argue that a similar process is underway in the realm of international power and politics.

Shirky's observation came to mind while watching a recording of Bruce Sterling's closing keynote for the ReBoot conference last month. Late in the talk, Bruce tosses out this line: "Objects are print-outs." He goes on to discuss how to rethink one's relationship with material possessions in an increasingly precarious world, but the "objects are print-outs" line stuck with me. It encapsulates not just an attitude towards material possessions, but--in one pithy phrase--one possible shape of the next economy.

via MAKEzine

40 years is just the tip of the iceberg...

You may not be sympathetic to the 'homosexual agenda', but I defy anyone to remain unmoved after even the lightest reading about the Stonewall riots, which started 40 years ago today. By all accounts, the palpable sense in the air that night was that 'enough is enough'.

I think that same sentiment is welling up again, but this time, it's more widely shared. It's not just gay Americans who've had enough of Don't Ask Don't Tell, DOMA and Proposition 8. Enough already.

The Power of Sound

One thing I'll always regret is watching the video of Nicholas Berg being decapitated. It's a horrifying sight, and I couldn't get it out of my head for days afterwards. I still think that watching it rearranged some molecules in my head in a way that will never be the same.

Watching the video of Neda Agha-Soltan die has the same searing effect. As this Gawker contributor put it:

I first saw the video of Neda's death on Sunday afternoon at around 2PM. For the remainder of the day and up to this point, I've failed every effort, and there have been many, to get it out of my head. Even when I went to the gym late in the day, a place of solace where I'm usually able to blast music in my ears while exercising and just forget about everything going on in the outside world, I found myself unable to remove Neda from my mind.

My coping mechanism is analysis. I find solace in deconstructing my reaction to determine what gets me so rattled. I've found that as with Nicholas Berg, it's not the images, it's the sound.

Both videos are the types of gore that we've all seen countless times in horror films or war epics. There's nothing in the images themselves that is any more disturbing than what we see in an Eli Roth or a Steven Spielberg film. Our eyes are accustomed to glossing over such graphic violence, but there's no way to trick the ears. The anguish of Nicholas Berg and Neda's friends is far too real to the ear to dismiss it. The stylized sound of the cinema allows you to wrap up violent images and store them away as fantasy in your mind.

The horror of these clips is driven home by the unmistakable sound of human suffering that no actor or sound designer can ever replicate. We know it's real because we hear it, and that's what makes it so damn hard to shake.

The Real Legacy of Hillarycare

The standard takeaway from the Hillarycare debacle is that such a large scale policy can't originate from behind closed doors in the White House. By not consulting with the Hill and throwing elbows to anyone who interfered, Hillary doomed her bill to failure.

It's a good theory, but Dick Cheney, who's got the sharpest elbows in Washington, did the same thing with Bush II's energy policy and got what he wanted. Closed doors and cronyism are well nigh best practices in D.C.

Unfortunately, Obama's let Congress take the lead on the bill, priding himself on having learned from Hillarycare's defeat. This has set him up for another debacle, like the stimulus bill. As Camille Paglia put it this morning:

...the monstrous stimulus package with which this administration stumbled out of the gate will prove to be Obama's Waterloo. All the backtracking and spin doctoring in the world will not erase that major blunder, which made the new president seem reckless, naive and out of control of his own party, which was in effect dictating to him from Capitol Hill.

When you let Congress draft a bill of this magnitude, you are ceding your mandate to a sea of micro-constituencies that have no vested interest in genuine reform. The real problem, however, is the notion that a massive bill is needed in the first place.

That's the real legacy of Hillarycare: maximalism doesn't work.

Passing a bill that would provide the massive overhaul that our health care system needs would require a mandate far greater than Obama will ever have. The best approach would be the incremental one. Pass an insurance requirement. Build on the electronic records initiative championed by both Hillary and Newt. Create stronger consumer protections. Take baby steps, and we'll all end up in a better place than where we are now.

All Obama has to do is look back 4 months to see what a gargantuan bill generated by Pelosi's Congress will do for him.

* It's on days like these when living in New York feels like being held hostage.

Pixar At the Crossroads

Somewhere back in its early days, Pixar had to have struck a devil's deal which insured glowing press for its films. There's just no other way to figure how something like Up could be received with such breathless criticism. It's being hailed as the 'best film of the year'. It's not even the best film released this month.

The Wall Street Journal pinpointed its central weakness as a lack of coherence. There's far too much weight placed on the back story of the old man. The montage which summarizes his marriage to his childhood sweetheart is told through a series of pictures. (BTW, am I the only one who gets creeped out when movie romances start in early childhood? These kids are six or seven years old when they meet!)

This montage has been as warmly received as the wordless opening of Wall-E. From the same WSJ review:

"It's the essence of daring, the sort of thing that only Pixar would try to do, let alone do wondrously well."

That's funny, because Zach Snyder dared to do the exact same thing a few months back to relate the back story of Watchmen. These montages are never silent, either. Dylan blared over Watchmen, and an extra syrupy Chaplinesque waltz is drizzled all over Up. For some reason, when it comes to Pixar, critics are not only quick to reach for their superlatives, they are also more than eager to abandon any grasp they ever had on film history. Pixar is seemingly the first and best to do anything.

The wordless sequence is now shtick for Pixar. Wall-E's opening sequence, which apparently broke all kinds of new ground, was actually, if anything, over-scripted. Not a second goes by that the little robot doesn't tweet or whir in a way that's adorable, and whenever you slap giant expressive eyes on anything, it becomes infinitely more likable. Whatever emoting is not done by Wall-E's sound design is ably picked up by his ever changing eyes. There's probably a snowball's chance in hell that human beings would design a robotic trash compactor with such adorable eyes. But then again, what are the odds that an alien from Brodo Asogi would have ginormous blue eyes?

To me, both E.T. and Wall-E would have resonated more if they were more alien to us. But if I were tasked with creating a blockbuster family film, I'd use googly eyes and sound cues too. With Up, it's just not clear what purpose is served by the heavy handed approach to the old man's marriage. The purpose of talking, adorable dogs is quite obvious, even though it's just as transparent a manipulation as the montage. The whole film feels like an endless series of pokes at your emotional buttons. Most of them provoke the desired response, but the feeling you're left with after all that button pushing stops is fairly hollow. The whole film is like a sugar rush, just a lot of empty calories.

You can skip the premium for 3D, too. The most eye-popping things in 3D are the fabrics of ties and curtains, actually. Everything else is barely an advance over Jaws 3. It's just an endless search for excuses to have things zoom straight at the camera. If this is the 3D that James Cameron has been working on, I might have to stop looking forward to Avatar.

This 3D is not much of an advance over stereoscopes. A few items are rendered in sharp focus in the foreground, and everything else is rendered in slightly less focus in the background. It's a neat effect, but it mainly feels like you're looking at a diorama. No matter where you look, there's still a 2D backstop to the visual. There's a struggle atop a dirigible at the end of the film which had a very real sense of danger to it because the 3D so effectively characterized the altitude of the action. I actually got a bit of vertigo, but for the most part, the 3D wasn't worth the extra $5.

Your Next American Idol:

Kris Allen!! 
I mean, it has to be, right? There just can't be any way that America is truly gaga over Adam Lambert, is there?

Is he super-talented? Yes. But I just don't see our everloving tweens buying what he's selling.

When he puts on his "Oh" face and trots out that paint-peeling screech, it takes me right back to 1986, but is that what the kids are in to? Seems to me like Kris is right up their alley.

If you ever needed to explain to aliens what tastelessness sounds like, you could show them Adam's version of "A Change Is Gonna Come". While you can make a career out of bad taste (and remember, I am a fan of it), the Kelly Clarkson/Carrie Underwood-level of fame is gonna elude a guy like Adam. Kris, on the other hand, could totally grow into that kind of a career.

"Even in a land of uprightness they go on doing evil"

Robert Draper's article in GQ doesn't reveal much of anything new about Donald Rumsfeld. We already knew he was a "fucking asshole".

What we didn't know was that those oft-cited daily security briefings that Bush got were slathered in Biblical imagery. In all those fawning exit interviews, when Bush was asked, "Can the average American know how hard it is to be President?", he'd shake his head and say, "You can't understand it unless you're in the office. I start every day with a security briefing, and I know how many threats there are against us."

Turns out, the cover pages for those briefings had pictures from the previous day's events in Iraq and a Bible verse. The pictures are invariably pleasant, and whoever chose them had a serious soft spot for tanks in sunsets. On a few occasions, the verses and the pictures combine to stomach-turning degree:



It's little wonder that with cover pages like this, Bush slipped and referred to the war as a 'crusade'.

Meet the New Boss, Same As the Old Boss

The change, it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the foe, that's all
And the world looks just the same
And history ain't changed
'Cause the banners, they'd all flown in the last war 
It's too easy to dump on Obama right now. He's had another awful week, scurrying away from campaign promises about gay rights, detainee abuse, and military commissions. He also aggressively began to lower expectations for health care reform, going from this:

I am absolutely certain that, generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless, this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.

to this:

We have, historically, a tradition of employer-based health care...and you've got a system that's currently in place...We don't want a huge disruption.

But the man is just making the necessary shift from soaring campaign oratory to mundane policy implementation. Compromises will always need to be made. Saving a political fight like 'Don't Ask/Don't Tell' for a day when you're less overwhelmed isn't the same thing as breaking a campaign promise.

Odds are that 'history ain't changed', but Obama shouldn't be a genuine cause for disappointment to any of his supporters yet.

Congress, on the other hand, has nowhere to hide. During the GOP's reign, the House Ethics committee was a sad punchline. Stripped of a quorum by Denny Hastert, it sat idle, like the FEC. The ethical black hole that was the Republican Congress functioned with impunity until John McCain came along with his relatively obscure committee on Indian Affairs. In 2006 and in 2008, the Democrats were handed back their majority in the belief that they would change things for good.

Instead, they are busy furthering the notion that Congress is incorrigible. The Democrats are dragging their feet when it comes to investigating their own. My Congressman, Charlie Rangel, still chairs the Ways and Means Committee despite a myriad of ethics violations. Jack Murtha has a lengthy history of corruption, but he continues to evade scrutiny, not to mention Jane Harman.

Where the Democratic Congress should remain on the offensive, they have shifted to the defensive. Jim Clyburn was reduced this week to threatening fellow Democrats against voting for an investigation of Murtha. Unless they're interested in losing their majority, this is not what the Democrats should be seen doing. In 2009, CYA means taking on scofflaws like Murtha and Rangel, not protecting them. America is tired of 300-lb men taking bribes and getting away with it.

While Obama can get away with punting on issues like Gitmo ('we'll fix it in a year'), Congress doesn't have that luxury on ethics. They are taking baby steps right now, and if they're interested in being a majority again in 2010, they need to start taking some giant leaps. Their poster girl just spent the whole week looking like a shifty Nixon in front of the cameras, needlessly digging herself a hole over CIA briefings. They can't keep this up. Something's gotta give, and if history is any lesson (which it always is), they'll be swept out of power unless they get serious about cleaning house. No one wants to get fooled again.

Operation: Annihilate!

There haven't been many bad reviews of Star Trek ouside of the New Yorker, and there probably shouldn't be. However, it is significantly flawed. There's a fundamental incoherence to the whole thing that can be seen on all levels of the film, starting with the narrative structure.

It's fine to reboot the series by essentially wiping the slate clean. No one's quibbling with that, but I couldn't help but wonder what hardcore Trekkies thought about the annihilation of Vulcan. It's sort of like writing a prequel to WWII where Italy is wiped off the face of the Earth. What actually came to mind when I was watching the film was the end of Newhart. By establishing this alternate Star Trek universe, you jumpstart the next phase of the franchise, yes, but you also diminish everything before it. Realizing that the events of the original Star Trek series and movies never happened is just as unsatisfying as it was for Robert Hartley to have dreamed everything that happened to him at that inn in Vermont.

Leonard Nimoy's scenes were some of the best things about the movie, but to also assign him the matchmaking task of seeding Kirk and Spock's friendship was overkill. The plot with Nero was enough. If Kirk and Spock are friends only because future Spock intervened, that sort of puts a damper on the whole thing, dontcha think?

The action sequences were well-conceived, but as with Mission: Impossible III, poorly filmed. Abrams dearly loves to shake the frame to convey jarring action, but he relies too heavily on the gag. For the most part, the camera is too close to give a proper sense of scale or even to convey what's really going on. On TV, closeups on actors' faces are par for the course, but on film, it's claustrophobic and an ill-advised use of the real estate, which brings me to the lens flares.

Yikes. Where do you start with that? They were in every scene. And when they weren't in a shot (which was rare), there was something else obstructing our view of the characters. When great action directors like John McTiernan use lens flares, it conveys a sense of scale for the events. It appears like there's more going on than what the camera can capture. Abrams said he also wanted the flares to convey that the future was just 'so bright'. Unfortunately, what you end up with is a sense that the crew is in an unsafe working environment that could end up leaving them blinded. There are so many flares of light that you grow accustomed to the characters' faces getting regularly obscured, which is a shame because there were some terrific performances underneath all that excessive light.

Actually, the whole film feels like that. It seems like underneath all its excesses, there's a pretty decent Star Trek buried in there.

Manny Being Manny

Right now, the tenor of the coverage is all slanted towards disbelief at Manny's claim of ignorance. It does seem ludicrous to believe that someone as well-compensated as Manny Ramirez would get a prescription from a doctor and not check to see if the substance was banned. Plus, with all the lame excuses like 'I thought it was a Vitamin B shot' that we've heard over the years, there's no reason not to be skeptical about this being an honest mistake.

However, there's also plenty of reason to believe that it was. There were 45 drugs on MLB's original 'non-exhaustive' list of banned steroids. That list is pegged to the Federal statute on Controlled substance, which is 'amended from time to time'. That's not a very black and white situation.

As easy as it is to believe Manny's lying, it's also not hard to imagine his doctor checking to see if the substance was banned only to miss some revised schedule of drugs filed by the DEA or the FDA.

Yeah, that's right: The list of controlled substances is maintained by two federal agencies. Between the FDA, the DEA, and MLB, there's ample potential for misinformation.

The only real moral here is that MLB has, as usual, shot itself in the foot with this suspension. Instead of offering clear guidelines to its players, and making a crystal clear announcement about the suspension, we get shaded truths that only reap a whirlwind of controversy. You've got some sportswriters who are screaming for Manny's head right now, and others who are defending him. None of them know exactly what happened, and that's not Manny's fault. It's Bud Selig's. Manny's just being Manny.

BSO Skips the Usual BS

Mad, mad, mad props to the members of the Baltimore Symphony for doing the damn near unthinkable. They saw the massive wave of debt rolling over their company and decided to take ownership of what they knew was coming. The players committee came up with the idea of cobbling together a million dollars in savings through a menu of wage freezes, furloughs and other measures. They put the idea to a vote among the orchestra members, and it passed.

Voluntary concessions like these are becoming de rigeur in this economy. However, they are usually instituted by the management, and in the orchestral world, players are almost never willing to voluntarily give up pay. Though the starting salary in the BSO lands you comfortably in the middle class, the workload is extreme. It's little wonder why orchestral musicians get touchy when their bosses ask them to take less money.

Such requests by orchestra management invariably spark a torturous process of advances and feints that's as predictable and awkward as a mating ritual. Before it's over, there's usually the threat of a strike, and in the end, someone always gets screwed.

By skipping the foreplay, the BSO took a positive step towards increasing their job security, and they also put the ball back in the management's court. This being the non-profit world, the players' wage concessions are being called a 'donation', and the BSO has correctly seen it as a fund raising challenge, which they announced today.

An Inconvenient Truthiness

For those of us who chortled at the credits of Al Gore's documentary, a book like David MacKay's Sustainable Energy - without the hot air is welcome reading. Gore undermines his urgency with all those pithy suggestions during the credits such as turning down your thermostat and replacing your light bulbs with CFL's. (Let me get this straight: I put on a sweater around the house, and New York City doesn't get submerged in water?)

But the problem with mocking Gore's alarmist film, which won an Oscar and helped him win a Nobel Peace Prize, is that you can't help but get lumped in with the reactionaries who think global warming is a hoax. It's difficult to hold Gore to account (which he richly deserves) without being counterproductive. For stoic centrists, the problem isn't with the notion that the environment is imperiled, it's with the essential truthiness of Gore's pitch. It just rings false that the terrible danger of the world's oceans 'dying' could be averted by buying carbon offsets.

What MacKay does is approach the problem with common sense and a calculator. For instance, while wind energy is a fantastic alternative to CO²-emitting power plants, he calculates that there simply isn't enough landmass in a country like the UK to make even a dent in consumption through a switch to wind power. His typical approach is to take the surface area available for offshore wind turbines, calculate the maximum number of turbines that could be squeezed into that area, and total the amount of power those turbines would generate: 120 GW, or 48 kWh/d. That's not even half of the 125 kWh/d consumed by the average European. McKay continues to eviscerate by subtracting from that total area the space you'd need for fishing and shipping lanes, whittling the figure down to 16 kWh/d. Not a very impressive number, considering that you'd still have to cover an area twice the size of Wales with wind turbines to achieve it.

As the title implies, McKay's goal is not merely to poke holes in conventional wisdom, but to offer practical solutions. He settles on the following:

First, we electrify transport. Electrification both gets transport off fossil fuels, and makes transport more energy-efficient.

Second, to supplement solar-thermal heating, we electrify most heating of air and water in buildings using heat pumps, which are four times more efficient than ordinary electrical heaters.

Third, we get all the green electricity from a mix of four sources: from our own renewables; perhaps from “clean coal;” perhaps from nuclear; and finally, and with great politeness, from other countries’ renewables.

If you like to look at charts and tables and have always found the prevailing eco-math somewhat fuzzy, this book is for you, and in a truly sustainable vein, it's available for free as a pdf. Maybe the ardor of the radicals and the reason of centrists like MacKay will marry, and we'll end up with some genuinely practical solutions for our environmental problems.

He Didn't Start The Fire (But It's His To Put Out)

Robert Gibbs gave an admirably nimble response to the concern that his brand new administration is trying to do too much in the face of such a massive banking crisis. He compared the country's plight to a house that's on fire, and joked that you wouldn't ask the fire department to put out only specific parts of the blaze. You just want the fire out.

True.

But his metaphorical logic comes up short on one key point. Again, staying with the fire metaphor, if you look at the National Fire Protection Association's standard #1710, which deals with the protocol for the 'Deployment of Fire Suppression Operations', the problem quickly becomes clear:

5.2.1.1* On-duty fire suppression personnel shall be comprised of the numbers necessary for fire-fighting performance relative to the expected fire-fighting conditions. These numbers shall be determined through task analyses that take the following factors into consideration:

(1) Life hazard to the populace protected
(2) Provisions of safe and effective fire-fighting performance conditions for the fire fighters
(3) Potential property loss
(4) Nature, configuration, hazards, and internal protection of the properties involved
(5) Types of fireground tactics and evolutions employed as standard procedure, type of apparatus used, and results expected to be obtained at the fire scene

-- NFPA 1710

Our current 'On-duty fire suppression personnel' consists of one guy:



That lonely name on the Treasury Department's website is Tim Geithner. It is abundantly clear to anyone with a TV that Geithner is stretched beyond his capacity. He does not have the resources to provide even a halfway decent response to a fire, let alone the several that are raging across our economy at the moment.

And Geithner's problems are Obama's problems. Much as I like Obama (especially how he plays small ball), he may well be sealing his fate in these first few weeks by not focusing all of his efforts on putting out this fire in the banking industry. Like all newly elected Presidents, he has embraced the mirage of political capital. By way of buzzkill, he need only look back 4 years to when Bush declared a non-existent mandate which he promptly squandered on a Quixotic attempt to privatize Social Security. He was a lame duck before his second town meeting.

Health care can wait. Education reform can wait. Everything. Can. Wait.

Our Federal Reserve just dumped Weimar-esque amounts of currency into the economy because of Obama's lack of focus. We spent the past week talking about garroting AIG staff with piano wire. The House has channeled the collective outrage into a bill of attainder. The political chatter next week will certainly center around Timothy Geithner's ability to stay on at Treasury, and none of this will inch us any closer toward the exit of our current crisis.

Obama needs to summon the strength that eludes him most: practicality. Instead of talking about food policy (which was the subject of his last weekly address), he should actually go back and listen to how plainly FDR spoke in his Fireside Chats. Skip the flowery rhetoric, skip the nuanced long-term outlook, and hunker down on concrete details. Explain the AIG collapse, apologize for the bonuses, promise to work ceaselessly to get a functioning Treasury Department in place and restore the vitality of the American banking system.

His rival in the election sealed his fate when he notoriously 'suspended his campaign' to return to Washington to focus on a solution to the banking crisis. That was half a year ago. If Obama can echo McCain's sentiment that the fundamentals of our economy are strong (which they are), perhaps he can also embrace the wisdom of actually shifting into crisis mode. The collateral damage of idiotic acts of Congress and blathering talking heads is unimportant, but in order to keep it strictly collateral, he has to actually address the crisis head-on. If he doesn't, Obama will be a lame duck faster than his predecessor, and the country will be on a fast track to even greater calamity.

Look, Up In The Sky! It's Capt. Sanctimony!

The pile of crap that passed for a Daily Show tonight was an anticlimactic end to an obnoxious week of television. Jon Stewart flogged his feud with CNBC nightly, while cable news stoked the fires by day. Jim Cramer, who never seems to shine outside of his Mad Money set, went in to take his shaming, à la James Frey.

And Stewart, sadly, indulged himself as much as Oprah did. What was the point of any of that rambling nonsense?

People are mad. We're looking for scapegoats. It's a fine way to fill 22 minutes of TV, but a whole week? Let's hope this is the last of it.

Crazy Has No Party

Last month, the Daily Show ran a hilarious piece about two ministers who think Obama is either the next Hitler or the Anti-Christ:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Unusual Suspect

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Economic Crisis

But just in case you think this kind of crazy has a political affiliation, here's a clip of David Icke interviewing a woman who claims to have seen George HW Bush, Madeline Albright, Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Jimmy Carter, the Queen Mother, and Queen Elizabeth II at Satanic rituals around the world. She claims that she was escorted to these rituals by Josef Mengele, who, like everyone on this list (except for Hillary Clinton), was also a shape shifter.

You see, Icke and this woman believe that the world is run by The Illuminati, which contrary to what you've been told in your grandfather's pansy-assed conspiracy theories, is actually a race of shape shifting reptilian beings from another frequency range. The woman claimed to have seen Presidents Ford and Johnson, as well as both Jeb and George W. Bush shape shift at these rituals.

[The talk about famous leaders at the Satanic rituals starts at the 8'30" mark of the clip, if you don't have the patience to listen to the whole thing.]

Bush At His Best & Worst

An administration that was defined more than anything by its use of the bully pulpit deserves to be memorialized by its best and worst public statements:

Speech to the UN on September 12, 2002

Call for a Constitutional marriage amendment on February 24, 2004

I'm not buying it:

The Economist's article about the origins of music prompted three letters from musicians who argued against the magazine's theory that music evolved as a mating ritual. Neither argument strikes a chord with me:

SIR – I appreciated your article on human evolution and music (“Why music?”, December 20th). However, I am a composer and none of the theories you posited helped explain my evolutionary development. I do not compose symphonies to get the girl. (I did play guitar songs to woo the girl in my teens, but with very limited success.) Indeed, you missed the vital reason why humans create and listen to music: joy.

Your suggestion that “little else would change” if music “vanished from the species” assumes no tangible loss of joy, which is relevant to human activity. Joy is both a perception of and response to beauty. We perceive beauty in all manner of diversity: a sunrise, a trout flashing in a stream, the grand impression of a 1965 Mustang in cherry condition; and we create beauty in ten thousand ways, all of which are important. Like visual art and dance, music remains an expression of human thought, separate from, and perhaps deeper than, our written or spoken languages.

Beauty must surely be essential to our lives and our evolution, even though the perception and creation of beauty are two abilities in human evolution that have nothing to do with sex, or social clans, or “cheesecake”.

Charles Roland Berry
Seattle

What To Expect When You're Expecting A War

It's open season on Bush II, right now, with every columnist and their mother rehashing his every misstep. Bush bashing is usually good fun, but the chorus has turned into an echo chamber. (Plus, I think most people would rather look forward to Obama right now)

If you're really in the mood for Grade A, knicker-twisting, get-you-madder-than-Yosemite-Sam Bush bashing, the go-to resource still has to be Thomas Ricks' Fiasco. The title says it all, and Ricks spends 500 pages detailing just how completely Bush II failed to plan for a war of choice. It came to mind this week when I read the following passage from a book about Sumner Welles:

A few days before the end of 1939, [Sumner Welles] established a formal "Advisory Committee on Problems of Foreign Relations" to explore the possibility of peace terms and to study postwar recovery...

According to the State Department, the planning committees would seek to "survey the basic principles which should underlie a desirable world order to be evolved after the termination of present hostilities, with primary reference to the best interests of the United States." The planners added that, in "light of the principles indicated above and of past experience, [the committee would] determine policies which should be pursued by the United States in furtherance of the establishment of such a world order, both as a basis of our own action and of our attempts to influence other nations." Thus, roughly two years before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, State Department planners, under the leadership of Welles, began to study the prospect of shaping a postwar order consistent with American interests.

Oof...

By the way, the complete book is readable online as part of the Guttenberg series.

Microsoft, Please Make It Stop!!!

It's astonishing how badly Microsoft can roll out even a cool product like Songsmith. A software that will instantly match your singing with a harmonic progression? Pretty sweet.

Not after you watch this commercial. I guarantee it'll be the most painful 4 minutes you spend today:

Plus...Isn't that a Macbook in the ad?

Happy Golden Anniversary, Cuba

The Revolution turns 50 today.

With any luck, President Change will ignore the powerful anti-Castro lobby and lift the tragically ineffective embargo.

How History Gets Bundled

Two separate exchanges about the economy this week has me thinking about a favorite subject: historiography.

In the first, a friend who oversees bond traders commented about how any of the given stories in the past week would be fodder for a month of coverage under normal circumstances: T-bills trading at negative interest, China's negative growth, the collapse of Marc Dreier's fake bond scheme, the implosion of Bernard Madoff's massive Ponzi scheme, the saga of the auto bailout, or the Fed's last-ditch rate cut. However, times are so turbulent that these absolutely massive occurences are being swept aside by the next day's headlines.

In the second, my grandfather cited a Detroit historian who researched local media coverage of the Great Depression, "...the wire services and local coverage treated each report of trouble on its own, even Black Friday and the handful of suicides. One gets no sense of doom-and-gloom, certainly no sense of an overall Depression, until the early 30s."

We're in a similar place now. The National Bureau of Economic Research pronounced that our economic recession began a year ago, but all of these gargantuan stories have a life cycle of their own. The media aren't synthesizing each different crisis into a holistic narrative about a larger economic peril, despite plenty of people like David Obey who said today, "These are calamitous events. While I think people know the economy is in trouble, I still don’t think they have a full appreciation of just how close we are to falling in the pit."

To me, what's fascinating is that, should we fall into the pit, historians will most certainly return to this period and dissect any one of these individual crises for clues in constructing their narrative. But in the best case scenario, (for instance, GM takes its interim loan, scales down its costs and emerges a smaller and healthier company by the end of next year) these stories get relegated to curiosity status and most likely forgotten.

And that's to say nothing about the arbirtrary nature of any given historical narrative, which is a whole separate topic. For instance, the NBER (which is looking solely at the numbers) cites the end of the Depression as 1933, a date which most Depression historians would laugh at.

Other Than That, Mrs. Lincoln, How Was The Play?

There is everything to like about the YouTube Symphony Orchestra project. It's a neat idea, they threw all the right resources at it, and it's completely democratic (not even an age restriction).

But dear sweet Jesus, how can you ignore the garbage Tan Dun handed in for the commission? The guy is capable of brilliance. This is not it.

If they wanted James Swearingen, why not just hire him? The piece is five minutes long and calls itself Internet Symphony 'Eroica'. So, it's no surprise that the music is bargain basement film music. Its spiritual ancestor is Mr. Holland's 'Opus'.

What's on the rest of the program? Probably Beethoven, right? Anyway, it's a great idea, YouTube. Too bad about the score.

I'm Speechless

Coldplay vs. Satriani

This seems like awfully slender evidence for copyright infringement. These kind of coincidences happen all the time in music (See Alex Ross' ingenious observation about Queen & Copland), and what's at issue here is so simple and common a pattern that Satriani can hardly lay claim to inventing it.

In the clip below, both songs are played side by side and then juxtaposed with pitch alterations to match them. They both are a variation on an escape tone pattern, where the 7th of the chord steps up and then leaps down to the 5th of the next chord. You could hear this basic lick about 30 different times a night in a jazz club. Though the rhythm and character here are strikingly similar, is this really what copyright is meant to protect? My hunch is no.

Ranking Composers

Vent your spleen, and you can expect people to react in kind. So, the comments on my post about Bernstein's Mass haven't come as too much of a surprise (aside from the charges of homophobia). What seems to have given the most offense is my assignment of Bernstein to the 3rd rank of composers. AC Douglas sagely advised that the middle of a 90th anniversary tribute to the man probably isn't the time to expect such an estimation to be calmly received.

On my shelf is a fun little book titled 'The 50 Greatest Composers and Their 1000 Greatest Works', in which the author gamely tries to put a rank order to classical composers based on a number of factors.

My personal ranking system only has one factor: quality. How much great music did a composer create? That will tell you where to rank him. A fellow like Mozart was a different kind of composer than a fellow like Mussorgsky. Mozart wrote 'as a sow piddles', in his own words. Mussorgsky was a struggler and in a similarly short life, produced far fewer works than Mozart. But in his small catalogue, there are a strikingly high number of Grade A pieces. So, his stock goes up in my book.

A guy like Bernstein wrote one of history's greatest musicals and a handful of other works that are unimpeachable, in my view. However, his great music is outweighed by too much fair to middling music; so, he joins the third rank with folks like Leo Delibes, or Alexander Borodin.

This system is entirely personal, and I could defend it for hours on end with a pint or two in my hands. But that's all it is. This isn't math. There's no right answer. If Bernstein ranks higher for you, so be it. Anyway, here is a snapshot of my rankings of the first 21 composers that pop into my head:

FIRST RANK Bach Beethoven Mozart Brahms Wagner

SECOND RANK Stockhausen Mussorgsky Cage Schubert Shostakovich Verdi Ives

THIRD RANK Delibes Borodin Bernstein Milhaud Cowell Delalande Birtwistle Smetana

Totally pointless, I know, but I thought it was worth sharing. We all have our own way of organizing these hierarchies of taste.

Palin Prank Call

Palin got pranked by some Canadians. It's Cute stuff.

Shouldn't she know better though, since she can see Canada from her house or something?

Vote McCain!

One of the most isolating positions for a musician or an academic is to openly admit to being a conservative. I have had wonderful working relationships turn ice cold and even caused a cocktail to be dropped in astonishment once upon announcing that I was a conservative.

The loneliness of my political bent is exacerbated by two things. First, I am a political junkie, devouring every news cycle as if it were my last. Second, my field tends to attract not just liberals, but far-left liberals. The combination of impassioned fellows like Darcy Argue (whom I admire) and my own addiction to political news makes for an unstable mix. If I had no interest in politics, it wouldn't be difficult to ignore the politics of my peers, or tempting to engage them in a discourse. But I inevitably take the bait, and feel the worse for it afters. I just can’t help myself; so, here goes:

Vote McCain!



I have grown weary of this Presidential race which began nearly 2 years ago. One of the great pleasures of being on tour since August was not having the opportunity to follow the news as closely as I would at home. When McCain suspended his campaign, it struck me as the big October Surprise of 2008, and it seemed like he'd mishandled the moment. As we enter the last week of this interminable campaign, it seems like everyone is shifting into neutral, and Obama's election is a foregone conclusion.

I've written before about how little regard I have for Obama. I find him supercilious, and the one reason I would vote for him is the one reason we're not supposed to: his race. As much as I think it would be a mistake to elect him to the Presidency, I will be happy as a clam to see a black man of African Muslim heritage presiding over the White House. Truth be told, I think Hillary's election would have been the more transgressive move, and out of all of the candidates, on both sides, she was my first choice.

Fire-breathing, emasculating, far-left Hillary?!

Yep.

She's my Senator, and when she ran for office in 2000, I couldn't have been more opposed to her candidacy. However, over 8 years in the Senate, she's demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to work across party lines and on behalf of her constituents. She's a serious political thinker and an exceptionally hard worker. The country would be lucky to have her as President.

But right from the get-go, Hillary was a favorite target of both the left and the right. The Daily Kos and Huffington Post were behind Obama from the beginning, and Hillary was the whipping boy for millions of disgruntled liberals. It was no fun to watch her lose to Obama, which brings me back to McCain.

While most of the vitriol on the left seems reserved for Palin (which strikes me as odd, since she's as much of a cream puff as Obama is), McCain has come in for his fair share. Like Hillary before him, he has been outfoxed by Obama's campaign, and in the face of a tough, smart opponent, he has withered. Since he’s no longer his own best advocate, I do feel it's worth pointing out what an extraordinary figure John McCain is. It’s become fashionable to dump on the guy, and that just violates my sense of fairness.

For conservatives, Bush II has been a nightmare. We believe in smaller government. On every front, Bush II has violated our core principles. He's spent money like a drunken sailor, and right before he left office, he whipped out the credit card one last time to rack up another $700 billion (and counting) in federal debt. He's run headlong into an ill-conceived nation building project, and he's cynically proposed amending the Constitution to prohibit hyper-specific social behaviors.

In the eight years of this God-awful administration, its most vocal opponent has been John McCain. When Donald Rumsfeld was still stubbornly trying to 'transform' the military amidst a two-front war, McCain was calling for his head. While Bush was busy redacting government reports to eliminate evidence of global warming, McCain was pushing for caps on carbon emissions. And perhaps most heroically, when his party was knee-deep in corrupt excess, it was McCain who exposed the extent of their misdeeds with his investigation into Jack Abramoff through his Committee on Indian Affairs.

During the primaries, McCain's candidacy was deader than dead. At one point, political blogs were mocking him by posting pictures of him carrying his own luggage, but he soldiered on and that's always been part of what I admire about him. (It's also what I found endearing about Hillary: her ability to keep her game face on in spite of the most withering criticism.) When McCain made egregious ethical errors early in his Senate career, he learned from his mistakes and became a tireless proponent of campaign finance reform. When all of the political will in this country was focused on getting out of Iraq as quickly as possible, he never swayed from his stance that more (not less) troops were needed to keep casualties down (he was right, btw). When his party was foaming at the mouth to kick all of the illegal immigrants out of the country, he went all in on a politically reasonable solution which nearly killed his candidacy. When Senate Democrats were threatening to go nuclear over Bush's judicial appointments, McCain was in the thick of the bipartisan negotiations to avoid a political meltdown.

Barack Obama has not been similarly tested and has avoided taking any politically risky stances. While there's no reason to suspect that he will wilt in the face of adversity, there's also no evidence to suggest that he won't. Therein lies the issue. He has no credentials to speak of, and that seems to me be an awfully big risk, especially when his opponent has all the bona fides one could ever desire in a President.

The next President will face an ungodly federal debt, a war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and most likely, will preside over the transition of the US out of its role as the sole superpower. John McCain will be an able hand at the wheel in such tough times. He has proven his mettle time and again, and I think the country would do well to elect him.

Truthfully though, I wish we could fast forward to next Tuesday and be done with this whole thing and let whoever the next President is get down to the business of cleaning up after Bush II.

Does This Utility Belt Come With Final Cut Pro?

For 3 weeks in Germany, the only time I felt like I was really missing out on something back home was when The Dark Knight opened, but it turns out I wasn't.

What a snoozefest! Lee Smith should never work in Hollywood again. Did any footage not make it into the film?

You can't blame the 3-hour running time all on the editor, though. 3 hours is no big deal, but when all that is for the sake of tacked on chase and fight sequences, it becomes downright criminal. If this thing is the movie of the year, why is it so boring?

The Oscar talk is what really tipped the scales in Kuerten. When those articles started cropping up, it seemed like there was just a major event happening Stateside.

Turns out, it was just talk. Heath is fine. Does a good crazy by licking his chops and laughing a lot. There are some wonderful moments in the film. A lot actually, and this shot of him sticking his head out the window like a puppy dog is a gem.

With rock solid fundamentals like that, the filmmakers should have trusted themselves. Leave the Joker's psychosis at that. But I guess that's hard to do when you are entrusted with the big summer blockbuster; so, they gave Heath a God-awful speech. It's not enough to show him murdering people without motive, or to actually have him imitate a dog in a car, they have to make him sit down and explain to someone that he's crazy, all action and no thinking, a dog that wouldn't know what to do with the car if he caught it.

Ugh. The script is the real culprit behind the running time seeming like an eternity. What an abysmal heap of nonsense.

It was fascinating to hear Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard employ a virtually identical device as Jonny Greenwood for scoring dementia. The microtonal cluster buzzing that everyone slobbered over in There Will Be Blood was just as deftly deployed here, but I guess you have to be in Radiohead for anyone to think your score 'reinvents what movie music can be'.