It's 2011. Are personal blogs still relevant?

Man, these folks really steam my tail.

Dear Governor Kaine,

No, you can't send me a sticker.

I mean, Are you serious? "Democrats: Change That Matters"?! Really? That's the best thing anyone could come up with? Is there anyone, anyone at democrats.org who really thinks that sticker will do anything at all to rally the footsoldiers and make the undecideds stop and consider their choices?

Perhaps if you had a sticker to send me with some substance, some fight, some life in it, I might be interested in displaying it. But this sticker you're proposing to send me is about the most boring, most say-nothing piece of marketing I've ever seen. It is emblematic of the deep embarrassment I feel over my party's dogged impotence, its persistent refusal to fight back in the face of dilutive "collaboration" with Republicans who won't support the bills being debated anyway, its jaw-dropping inability to get the word out about what little has been accomplished since we've been in power.

I am gravely concerned with the state of the country right now, especially in light of this week's primary wins in Delaware and New York. But I have to say that part of me actually hopes that these tea party dingbats actually win their general elections, if only because of the very slim chance that such an occasion might make Democrats realize that, oh, we actually have to actively do something about the right wing because somehow sitting around on our duffs just doesn't seem to cut it.

Don't worry, I'll still give the DNC a donation in this election cycle, and I'll do my duty and vote in the general election. But by no means will I let you waste precious resources sending me a worthless sticker. Instead please take that $.50 or whatever and put it towards, say, growing a spine and getting an actual message out.

Once again, a composition from my favorite feline poet, Garfield:

Labor Day, shmabor day.
What a dumb day.
To hire some jerk,
Then send him away.
To celebrate work
By playing all day.

if you're a human being we're in business

Consider this post a cry for help:

I don't have any Elliott Smith records. Where should I start?

just some quick thoughts

The W. in George Bush's name stands for "Who?"

Headline in Le Monde: "Le changement est arrivé en Amérique"

I wish Tim Russert was still with us tonight.

countdown

From time to time, Keith Olberman breaks his leash and broadcasts a "Special Comment". Invariably, the results are nothing short of spectacular:

all i ever wanted all i ever needed

The latest reason I've been so quiet is here:

http://www.immediatetheatre.org

And a song is here: Depeche Mode - Enjoy the Silence (reinterpreted)

with scarves of red tied ’round their throats to keep their little heads from fallin’ in the snow

Just in case you really like My Morning Jacket but think they just don't listen to enough Beach Boys, now there are Fleet Foxes!

Fleet Foxes - White Winter Hymnal

stacy can't you see you're just not the girl for me

It's a big day around these parts. I woke a few times during the night last night, fitfully thinking that it was all over and I had to check the results immediately.

I voted a week ago in North Carolina's nifty early voting, but I wish I hadn't. That is to say, I wish I'd waited and gotten more information on local races before casting a ballot. The local board of elections put out a pamphlet in which candidates were able to give one-paragraph personal statements, but I read all those statements, and you know what? It turns out that candidates for Insurance Commissioner all want to work to lower insurance prices, judicial candidates all believe in fairness and responsibility, potential school superintendents believe the children are the future and we should teach them well and let them lead the way, etc. Which is to say, that pamphlet wasn't the slightest bit helpful.

And then when I got into the voting booth, I saw a section on the ballot for a U.S. Senate primary. Five or six names, and I knew none of them. But it's just the U.S. Senate, not a big deal at all. Long story short (too late), I felt like I wasted most of my ballot, voting for a presidential nominee and a county commissioner, but leaving the rest of it blank.

And the very next day, the local weekly did a huge spread on local races. Local politics coverage is where papers like that are really worth their salt.

Early voting is a wonderful thing; it really makes the whole democratic process that much more democratic. And it felt good to get out there and get it done early, and I'm glad not to have to wait in line today, but I'll be sure to investigate a little more next time, and I'll wait for more information if I need to.


Completely unrelated song for today: Sigur Ros - Leit Af Lifi (recycled by Sigur Ros)

and i know that you'll find, love, i will possess your heart

The poet's name is Robin Robertson, and this is from the book A Painted Field. Reprinted here without permission, but I'm saying, if you like it, buy the book.

STATIC

The storm shakes out its sheets
against the darkening window:
the glass flinches under thrown hail.
Unhinged, the television slips its hold,
streams into black and white
then silence, as the lines go down.
Her postcards stir on the shelf, tip over;
the lights of Calais trip out one by one.

He cannot tell her
how the geese scull back at twilight,
how the lighthouse walks its beam
across the trenches of the sea.
He cannot tell her how the open night
swings like a door without her,
how he is the lock
and she is the key.

(Sarah Vedrody introduced me to this poem back in the late 90's. I wonder whatever happened to her...)

it's looking like a beautiful day

Here's the difference between finance professionals and music lovers: if you're a finance professional, you divide the year up into quarters, and April, rather than being the fourth month of the year, is the first month of Q2 2008; whereas if you're a music lover, you wonder what the hell took 2008 so long to finally give you some really great music.

I'm speaking, of course, of M83's new record, Saturdays = Youth. It's a record that makes me glad I lived through its target era, even if the glance backwards only works as well as it does because of a smarmy, gritty, thoroughly po-po-mo reverence for the way we were. But that topic has been covered and then covered some more.

Not to waste a post, though, I'm also talking about the newest Elbow release, The Seldom Seen Kid. Somewhere along the way, Elbow quietly became reliable. The first record was good, but if you paid attention you noticed out of the corner of your ear that each record that followed was better than the last. The trend continues here. I used to describe them as a stopping off point between Coldplay and Radiohead, but they've outgrown that simplification rather well. The production on their records tends to reach towards opulent (especially after cast of thousands which seemed to have been knocked into a vat of Polyphonic Spree and then hurriedly fished out just before it shipped), but they always manage to keep at least seven or eight toes firmly on the asphalt. What's new here is that someone slipped happy pills into their tea. The result is lucious and beautiful. The band is now embracing its ability to uplift rather than simply flirting with it as they've done in the past. Not that it's all treacly wine and roses; a dark playfulness still balances things out, as in lyrics "I have an audience with the Pope/And I'm saving the world at eight/But if she says she needs me, she says she needs me/Everybody's gonna have to wait" or "I've been working on a cocktail called grounds for divorce", and the band finds plenty of dark corners in which to hide. In the end, though, it's a record that should make a receptive listener glad to be living through this time, right now, twenty years before the benefit of nostalgia.

Elbow - An Audience With The Pope
Elbow - Weather To Fly

i'm 15 years old and i feel it's already too late to live. don't you?

To answer Xtian's question, no, M83 did not sound this 80's before. They used to be a bit more ambient. But it's not just 80's that they're going for here, it's 80's teenagerdom, and that's what makes me so ecstatic about it. Allmusic.com's review says it sounds like "the soundtrack to the most glamorous film John Hughes never made", which is about right. As if to drive that exact point home, the video for "Graveyard Girl" looks like a clip from said movie:

http://www.pitchfork.tv/node/466

you obviously you didn't want to stick around

Note to IAH:
Well, the Pappadeaux seafood lunch buffet jumped up a couple dollars in price, didn't it? No matter, it's still well worth it, and I hope I can always be seated right there at the railing, looking out over some gates - where are all those people going? - and the big windows to the runway.

I've said it before, IAH is not a bad place to spend the better part of a day, at least as far as airports go. But your B-terminal is a throwback in more ways than one, and I suspect the carpets haven't been cleaned since the days when lit cigarettes with growing ashes being neglected by distracted smokers stayed burning from the gate area down the jetway and into the smoking sections of old DC-9's, yeah, separate sections, as if the smoke could be sectioned off in a little metal tube with recirculating air.

And then comes this welcome news, and I say to you: best wishes. A 7 to 10 year project? I hope I'll be able to check in on your progress at least a few times along the way.

Songs for today:
Kate Nash - Foundations
Kate Nash - Merry Happy
I really enjoy this record, but I have no idea what sort of company that puts me in. I'm going to see her perform on Wednesday; will I be the only bona fide adult in attendance? (You can take 'bona fide adult' to mean anything you want.)

they have a secret world in the twilight

This may surprise you, but I'm a regular reader of Patrick Smith's "Ask A Pilot" blog, and I often end up sharing his articles in my feed reader (someone says I should share in FriendFeed as well, but I don't know, it all sounds very complicated, and might make it just that much easier for the robots to find me). But today's is particularly good, especially regarding the safety record of commercial aviation in America. Money quote:

The system, as it stands, is remarkably safe. Although airlines have been through fiscal hell and back over the past several years, and despite their status as the most consistently dogged pariahs of the postindustrial American economy, they and their regulators have managed to maintain an astonishingly reliable transportation system. Here we are amid the safest-ever stretch since the dawn of the jet age. The last large-scale accident involving a major U.S. carrier was that of an American Airlines A300 in November 2001. That was approximately 43 million flights ago.

43 million flights. I mean, great googly-moogly. Now, sure, deep-down, everyone is a little bit afraid of flying, and I've certainly nursed my share of irrational fears in the past. But 43 million flights is quite a lot, and it just makes me a little bit giddy to think about how well the system has come to work, safety-wise. It doesn't mean there haven't been close calls, and it doesn't mean an airliner didn't run off the runway at Chicago's MDW and crush some poor soul in their car not too long ago. But it does mean that, current FAA tribulations notwithstanding, there has been an effort to make things safer, and as in the auto industry that effort seems to be paying dividends.

And like Patrick Smith, I'm glad the FAA is under a magnifying glass right now, because without it that kind of record can't continue.

M83 - Kim & Jessie (This may surprise you, but I'm obsessed. You'll swear it's 1987 all over again...)

i'm not lyin' sure it seems like i'm tryin' to get back at you

Note to BNA:
I noticed when I got off the plane that the gate area smelled like sauerkraut. What's with that? I didn't see any places selling the stuff or anyone cooking it on a camp stove, so where was it coming from?

Generally, you're about what I would expect from an airport in a medium-sized southern city. Pretty friendly overall, but nothing spectacular, no cutting edge to be found. But I did expect a little more from you because you're Nashville. What I mean is if Vegas can put slot machines everywhere in its airport, then can't/shouldn't Nashville provide country singers? It would make arriving travelers happy to get there and departing travelers sad to leave, and shouldn't that be any airport's highest aspiration?

Also, your security checkpoint seems like an afterthought. It could benefit from a little more deliberation in the planning. Here, I've done some for you already: instead of have loooong tables leading up to the point where ID's and boarding passes are checked, and then really short tables where carry-ons are parsed and binned for their trip through the x-rays, switch those two thing around. ID check first, then long tables for plenty of space and time to get ready for the big show, see?

Also, when I went to leave Nashville, there was that sauerkraut smell again. I'd forgotten about it, but the reminder was enough to make me remember so well that now I'm even writing about it on the Internets. I may be half German, but I'm here to tell you it's not a pleasant smell for an airport. A better idea would be to pipe in some of the jet fuel fumes from the tarmac. Mmmm, jet fuel.

Song for the day, conspicuously missing from some music libraries I know: Wilco - Say You Miss Me

something is happening in the world

The contrasting '3am' videos and the pitter patter of MSM analysis:



What nobody is talking about, however, is that the narrator of Obama's ad is quite obviously the same narrator as on Paul Hardcastle's classic "19" (you know: "In World War II the average age of the combat soldier was twenty-six. In Vietnam, he was nineteen. In-in-in-in-in-in-in-in Vietnam he was nineteen"). Surely that's relevant.

who imposes the terms of the battle will impose the terms of the peace

Redbelt, new film from David Mamet. The trailer is here. With Joe Mantegna, Rebecca Pidgeon (mmmm, Rebecca pidgeon), Chiwetel Ejiofor, and... Tim Allen?!!

That's right, boys and girls, Tim Allen in a real film with a real director, almost as if he was a real actor. I'm shocked, shocked I say, but I'll withhold judgment until I've seen the whole performance. Deep down, though, I'm hoping Mamet put him in the picture just to humiliate him. We shall see...



Songs for today:
Goldfrapp - Road to Somewhere
Goldfrapp - Caravan Girl
Xtian told me to look out for this record. It's not bad, but it doesn't really alter the meh of 2008 just yet. It sounds like they've been listening to a lot of Saint Etienne, which can't hurt. Also, I hope the Beach Boys steal is intentional. It has to be, right?

stevevaiyesecholyn

Pamelia Kurstin is the theremin star you always wanted to be.

so the sign says "ok"

Well it seems that my activity in these environs has been, at the least, lacking. Here's the briefest of updates:

Primaries!
Xtian asks who's the bigger loser, Hillary Clinton or Jeff Tweedy (nominated for a Grammy but didn't win). I have to give this one to Hillary: at least Jeff Tweedy was nominated!

But seriously folks. I really, really hope Obama's momentum continues. I'm done with the Clintons. Both of 'em. And I was enough of a fanboy that I got up early the day Hillary's book came out so that I could pick it up on my way to work.

But more than that, it Hillary wins the nomination, I'm done with my party. I don't dislike Hillary as a person. In fact, it's hard to find anyone involved in this current contest that I really dislike as a person; I even think Gomer Pyle Mike Huckabee, though an idiot, must be an okay guy to be in a room with, same as anybody else whose name doesn't end in Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld, or George W. Bush. But if my peers in the Democratic party can't figure out that (a) nobody unites the fractured Republican party like Hillary Clinton and (2) it's time to get past the divisiveness of race- and gender-based politics, then I'm willing to vote for McCain just to punish the Dems. But so far there's reason to be optimistic...

Writers strike!
Woo-hoo! Writers are back!

Woo-hoo! Studios and networks figured out that the producers (and not just the distributors) of content should get paid for their work!

Woo-hoo! Maybe Friday Night Lights will come back (oh please oh please oh please)! Some people might feel sorry for me for not being a football fan and therefore not being able to enjoy the latest Big Game. And to you I say: it's not that I dislike the game itself, it's just that I can find nothing compelling about the NFL's version of 'sport'. But if the Dillon Panthers are on the field, I'm glued to the tube/lcd/plasma/ether.

Something else!
I'll be starting a new, more focused blog soon. It won't mean the demise of this one, it's just an idea that's been getting too big in my head to ignore. So it's a second blog along the lines of, like, a hockey blog or a tech blog (that wasn't given nearly enough time to find its audience, if you ask me) that might be started by any random blogging chump, but it won't deal with either of those subjects. I'd tell you what it will deal with, but I haven't come up with a good name for it yet. In the meantime, feel free to speculate wildly in the comments.

Song for today!
I think I may have posted this one before. I could do a simple search and find out, but instead I'll just risk repeating myself.
Interpol - Rest My Chemistry