The New Muckrakers?

In Details Magazine's relatively unenlightening profile of New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin - for New Orleanians, anyway - says:

The mayor’s unwillingness to tolerate criticism hardened into a state of willful denial this summer, thanks to a scandal involving a program run by the New Orleans Homeownership Corp. News reports revealing that contractors had charged the city for work they did not do prompted the convening of a grand jury. Nagin doesn’t seem worried about the federal investigation, even though one of the program’s highest-paid contractors—S&A Construction—is run by his brother-in-law, Cedric Smith. He vows that Smith will face justice if he is culpable. “Everybody’s looking at it,” Nagin says with a smile, “which is great. Because now I’ve got professional investigators versus bloggers.”

Earlier this month, Salon's Glenn Greenwald documented the degree to which much of the mainstream media interpreted the opposition to John Brennan as a potential director of the C.I.A. as unfair criticism from bloggers.

Concerns over torture and rendition -- despite being widespread among countless military officials and intelligence professionals -- are uniformly depicted as nothing more than ideological idiosyncrasies from the dreaded Left ("left-wing hit job on Brennan"; "largely on the left"; "left-leaning bloggers and columnists"; "Obama's liberal base"; Obama's "most ardent supporters on the left"; "liberal critics"; "liberal bloggers"; "confined to liberal blogs"; "the Democratic base").

Evidently we are the new bad guys of journalism.

Santa Baby

"Santa Baby" may be the un-coverable Christmas song. That hasn't stopped people from trying it, but Eartha Kitt's sex kitten performance was so over-the-top to start with that there's nothing left for anyone to do but dial down the performance. Of course, that's not what people do. Instead, most takes are simply hammy, hammier and hammiest. It may one of the few Christmas songs written for a sexual woman, but still - just say no.

More Overkill

After blogging yesterday about my inability to come to terms with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's appeal, I talked with my wife about it and she went straight to Vegas and the spectacle of Blue Man Group. That certainly explains the success of the stage show, which is so popular that there are two TSO companies that travel the country during the holiday season. But it doesn't explain people buying the records - or maybe it does. Perhaps the songs themselves are best thought of in terms of spectacle, with Christmas songs and popular pieces of classical music arranged for two keyboards, two or three electric guitars, two electric violinists, a string section and five or six voices. The songs are taken out of their traditional contexts and given an arena-rock bigness and the crunch-lite of electric guitars. The songs are expanded in scope to an absurd degree to where they lose all of their intimacy, but they do have a grandeur - an empty grandeur, but a grandeur nonetheless - in the hands of the TSO.

Still, the audience's biggest applause was for Led Zep and Jimi Hendrix quotes, and Robin Zander's guest spot to do a couple of Cheap Trick songs, which suggests there are limits to the power of spectacle.

Trans-Siberian Overkill

Out of curiosity and a fascination with Christmas music, I took my wife to see Trans-Siberian Orchestra. I'd interviewed TSO's Paul O'Neill and heard in his answers a note of condescension toward pop and rock that inevitably leads to prog rock. But nothing prepared me for the visual onslaught. The Decepticon light rig (code name: Dazzler) yawned, sloped left, then right, fired lasers into the crowd, showered sparks on the stage, and the stage answered with three different types of pyro. My wife and I were in often in hysterical laughter, but no one else in the sold-out arena was, which was the problem. I walked away from the show trying to figure out how such a humorless, irony-free display of prog metal spoke to an audience. What was touched in people that this was a seasonal music they responded to? When I heard the TSO version of "The Carol of the Bells" as bed music on ESPN before a football game Sunday, I thought the music had found its proper context.

People around us were happiest when they quoted Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix, which made me think this is all about the rock, and that people will like classical and Christmas music if its recast into a more familiar vernacular. But many people weren't the standard classic rock audience - many significantly older. Is it that our culture has so focused Christmas on children that any holiday concert that isn't infantile appeals to an adult audience?

The show was so Vegas that it seems like the answer must lie in network of Vegas aesthetics, perhaps in a presentation of two musics that are suspect to a mass audience - Christmas music being a guilty pleasure based on what I've read on blogs - without the elements that make them unpopular.

Then again, no one seemed all that caught up in the show. People watched intently, but no one I could see was worked up, banging a head, or rocking around. It was definitely an emotionally remote show, suggesting that TSO wasn't a passion but the sort of thing parents take their kids to because they want to expose them to classical music because it's supposed to be good for them.

Obviously, all of those are possible, and they aren't mutually exclusive. The audience wasn't all there for the same reason(s), but it still feels like something's missing. Nonetheless, it was exceedingly odd to hear music I have a strong history with coming back to me in such an inexplicable form.

Why People Don't Like Christmas Music

I'm pro-Christmas music, and when people tell me how much they don't like Christmas music, it often comes down to the context in which they hear it. Recently, a friend said she hated it because she heard it relentlessly on an easy listening station in the office next to hers. Of course, there's little on an easy listening station she'd like the other 11 months of the year, so it's unlikely it would play Christmas music she'd like either. And any omnipresent music - even stuff you like - eventually wears you out, and if it's an unwelcome visitor from the next office, it's triply problematic. So often, we hear Christmas music in emotionally challenging circumstances - shopping, family get-togethers - which makes it no surprise that the associations we make with Christmas music are often bad ones.

Recently, I received an email link to an eMusic Christmas downloadable mix, and it suggested another problem. The playlist is:

1. Deck the Halls: Twisted Sister
2 Why Can't It Be Christmastime All Year: Rosie Thomas
3 Angels We Have Heard On High: The Brian Setzer Orchestra
4 Holiday Mood: Apples In Stereo
5 Little Drummer Boy: Shawn Lee's Ping Pong Orchestra
6 Something to Hold On To (At Christmas): Ron Sexsmith
7 Jingle Bells: Lisa Loeb
8 The Twelve Days of Christmas: Kidz Bop Kids
9 Bach: Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring: Angele Dubeau & La Pieta
10 Darlin' (Christmas is Coming): Over The Rhine
11 Noel: Robin Gibb
12 Auld Lang Syne: The Smithereens

I started to download it and stopped because I can't imagine ever wanting to hear that mix. First, all versions of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" are testers, but who but the most ironic listener would enjoy hearing "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" and Kidz Bop Kids and Brian Setzer and Twisted Sister? It's the sort of mix that guarantees a degree of antipathy toward Christmas music. Something more coherent like Jared Boxx's "Soul Santa" mixtape podcast makes a far more convincing argument for Christmas music as a satisfying listening experience.

Time Out for a Pet Peeve

MySpace pages that have become such works of art that they take forever to load.

More on Lists

[Updated 2:20]

I'm not a list person, so I'm not much of a year-end list person. But I'm fascinated by people who are. As I mentioned before, I've enjoyed watching Scott at Pretty Goes with Pretty rummage through a year of listening in a series of lists laced with self-scrutiny.

Geoffrey Himes wrote as clear a defense of year-end lists as I've seen, even if I think there's a straw man or two in his writing.

I love year-end 10-best lists. I love getting tips on albums I had ignored or never heard of. I love watching my colleagues forced out of the comfort zone of easy generalizations such as "This is good" and "That is bad" and compelled to make the finer, more difficult distinctions between the "good," the "really good" and "the really, really good." I love to see how other listeners organize the chaos of a year's worth of music into the architectural order of a list. I love the story - or at least the psychological profile - that emerges.

Me, I like the psychological profile, too, but more in how obsessive listers seem. PGWP has been at it for a couple of weeks now, and though Himes was asked for his Top 10, he listed and organized a full 100. Since I couldn't rank with any certainty albums 7, 8 and 9 in a list I'd make, I'm slightly in awe of his ability to sort out anything from mid-60s on.

... and here's another who knows the difference between No. 87 and No. 88.

Shotgun Marriage

In New Orleans, chewing on the Jazz Fest lineup is a ritual as time honored as throwing coconuts from the Zulu parade. Still, if I were festival producer Quint Davis, neither of these reader responses at Nola.com would make me very happy. A critic writes:

snoooooze...been there done that...no surprises and same old same old...look at who is touring this summer and look at all of the great acts we are missing out on....time for Quint to get out his little black book and make some phone calls and beg...wondering why almost all of the big name brit legacy acts from the 60s have avoided Jazz Fest like the plague since Katrina, but show up as spectators?

A festival defender writes:

Ever heard of the phrase, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."?
Might look like the same line-up from the past, but why change it if it satisfies thousands of other people - locals AND non-locals? And when did New Orleans become a city of "Keep Out Tourists"?
I've bought my ticket - proud to support my hometown (recession or not).

My guess is that Davis didn't get what he got because he didn't beg enough; the lineup features so many artists that have played the festival before that they have to be there by choice, not default. But when you trot out a talent roster that includes Aretha Franklin, Wynton Marsalis, and a host of other E ticket attractions and people are bored, it means you've leaned on these artists and their generation a little too hard - enough to make the prospect of seeing them unexciting.

The festival's defender's attitude is almost sadder - who cares? For many, Jazz Fest is a party, and the music is just the background. Typically, artists such as Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell and to a lesser extent Bob Dylan annoy this brand of festgoer because they don't want Van, Joni or Bob circa 2008; they want the hits to sound like the hits because that makes the party better. And presenting the usual suspects on a regular basis guarantees that the party won't change.

For me, the most interesting feature of this year's lineup is the apparent schism between the producers, Festival Productions and AEG Live. Jazz Fest has had a traditional problem dealing with modern times, and for the most part, it tried to acknowledge and attract people under 40 by presenting the jam bands. That made a certain amount of sense, but now that the jam wave was receded, the void has been filled by such un-Fest-like bands as Kings of Leon and Spoon, bands for whom Davis' fest-defining phrase "the heritage of jazz" seems stretched in the extreme.

It looks from the cheap seats (I have no inside knowledge) as if Davis hopes as he seemingly has always hoped, that the soul/R&B/blues stars of the mid-1960s to mid-1970s will always draw and will always find audiences large enough to sustain the festival, while AEG Live is looking to keep younger fans coming in the door, even if the fit's a rough one.

The Old Days Never Go Away

I was sorting through the "maybe" pile of CDs on my desk and ran across a self-titled album by Ladyhawke that brought to mind a conversation Scott from Pretty Goes with Pretty referred me to. A post on the Vivian Girls prompted a conversation in which he wrote:

I feel like I've heard a bunch of bands in the last couple weeks--Wavves, Gaslight Anthem, and Deerhunter, among others--that immediately send me back to another era. Even a specific band from another era. (That Gaslight Anthem record - wow, is emo already making a comeback?) Similar to what Dave is pointing out about Vivian Girls vs Tiger Trap (though I'm taking him at his word). That's not necessarily a recipe for disappointment, but it's still a little deflating.

The conversation crystalized my thoughts on this New Zealand electropop album. The songs have hooks and I'd be lying if I said I didn't have some fun listening to the album, but I kept wondering, "We need another Berlin album ... why?"

A Downloadable Soul Christmas

'Tis the season, and while I've been sorting through this year's Christmas CDs (particularly impressed by Ledisi's It's Christmas, and I'm always impressed by the intelligence of Harry Connick, Jr.'s arrangements, this year on What a Night).

Still, I keep returning to soul and doo wop Christmas music, and I'm listening regularly to Daptone Records' "Soul Santa" free podcast. Alison Fensterstock at Gambit Weekly turned me on to Sir Shambling's Soulful Christmas Web site, where I downloaded a bunch of songs including Marvin Gaye's brilliant "I Want to Come Home for Christmas." I'm not always sure HipChristmas.com is all that hip - or "hip" is defined as "anything that's not Andy Williams". Still, you can hear a lot of Christmas music there, and they post a bunch of downloadable mp3s, the highlight of this year's batch is the Phil Moore Trio's "Blink Before Christmas," a hipster version of "The Night Before Christmas".

Although the song's aren't downloadable, the dean of Christmas music sites is Christmas Music Everyday. As the title implies, the site has a new Christmas song every day with only the occasional relatively known track (today's, for example - Dean Martin's brilliantly lecherous "Baby, It's Cold Outside").

A Good Use for Lists

I'm not into Year-End lists because I don't think in terms of lists, and as the raw amount of music, media outlets and listmakers have expanded, lists tell us less and less. Still, I'm fascinated by the year-end meditation at Pretty Goes with Pretty, where our writer has spent most of this week reflecting on his year's listening. There are lists, statistical analyses, personal trends and thoughts on the year and his own interests. I admire the obsessive self-interrogation and reflections on his personal perferences, even if I'm not that into the CDs he's crazy about. I like Fleet Foxes but can't go crazy for it, and Andrew Bird's output has generally had the fingerprints of serious, self-conscious artfulness, which ultimately seems akin to art/prog rock to me in the message it seems to convey, which is that rock is not enough.

Ponderosa Stomp lineup announced

I don't normally reprint press releases unless it's for unkind, mocking or derisive purposes, but the Ponderosa Stomp's a cool enough event and the Stomp folks do good work putting some money in legacy musicians' pockets and presenting them in their best lights, so for them, I make an exception:

The eighth annual Ponderosa Stomp will invade the House of Blues New Orleans April 28 and 29, 2009 as it further strengthens its mission to shine a light on the unsung heroes of American music. The 2009 edition will be the biggest and best Stomp to date, with an expanded three-day conference of panel discussions and a Ponderosa Stomp-curated exhibition at the Louisiana State Museum at The Cabildo in New Orleans.

The full lineup:

Wanda Jackson, Roddy Jackson, Alton Lott, Carl Mann, Johnny Powers, Jack Earls, Dale Hawkins, James Burton, Dan Penn And Bobby Emmons, Howard Tate, Otis Clay, The Hi Rhythm Section, The Remains, Question Mark And The Mysterians, The Legendary Stardust Cowboy, Bobby Patterson, Wiley And The Checkmates, The Bo-Keys, Lil Buck Senegal And The Top Cats Featuring Stanley "Buckwheat Zydeco" Dural, Dennis Coffey, Robert Parker, Jivin Gene, Ray Sharpe, Long John Hunter, Texas Johnny Brown, Little Joe Washington, James Blood Ulmer Trio, L.C. Ulmer, Little Willie Littlefield, Lil Greenwood, Jerry McCain, Kenny And The Kasuals, Classie Ballou, Deke Dickerson And The Eccofonics, Roy Loney And Cyril Jordan Of The Flamin Groovies Backed By The A-Bones, Lazy Lester

The Stomp's stroke of genius has been to put classic R&B, soul and rockabilly singers with younger bands that loved their records, so they play the songs with the passion and sonic fingerprints recordings that are 30 or so years old. As such, older artists that have disappointed with bands of contemporaries that tried unsuccessfully to stay current - losing what was great about their songs in the first place - often sound as urgent as they ever did.

Musicians Bringng Musicians Home IV

My coverage of this benefit event at Tipitina's last night for RollingStone.com.

The Cost of Looking Electable

Sarah Palin's bills are once again in the news, as the New York Times reports that Palin's hair stylist made $42,000 and her makeup artist was paid $68,000. Add to that $55,000 for a fashion stylist and the now-infamous $150,000 for clothes, and you've got a very expensive vice-presidential candidate.

In general, I think this is a bullshit issue. I don't feel too badly for Palin because when her campaign chose a dishonest, anti-intellectual, faux populist strategy, spending more money her hair than many of the voters she was trying to woo made in a year left her open for a karmic whip.

There hasn't been any double standard here since John Edwards was called out for the cost of his haircuts, but the whole issue's phony because it presumes candidates are just like us, which they're not - certainly during campaigns. They can't easily arrange their campaign schedules around the availability of their stylists' at home; they likely pay their stylists to make themselves available at the candidates' convenience, and that costs more. And they're not making the choice between Supercuts and an Aveda salon; people running for office are likely getting their hair cut by top professionals, who cost more under normal circumstances.

There are ways where they are like us. When we apply for important new jobs, we dress the best we can and if necessary, spend what we realistically can to look like the person our prospective employers would want. They do too, but they can afford more (or get others to afford it for them).

The whole issue is part and parcel with the "Who'd you rather have a beer with?" notion of voting, where the president's just another average chucklehead like us. But he's not, he shouldn't be (as we learned in the last 8 years), and busting him or her for spending more than we would on clothes ignores a host of realities that we ought to deal with and get over.

Out of Time

I wish I could take up Robert Christgau's challenge in a recent ARTicles blog post. He asked for a defense of prog rock:

What I'm looking for is a ringing, systematic, polemical defense in which the perceived shortcomings of danceable rhythms, blues changes, and foursquare structures are articulated. Not just that they're old hat, but that their old hatness signifies in substantively undesirable ways. That way everybody understands more clearly what's at stake.

It would be an interesting academic task, but my heart wouldn't be in it. I enjoyed reading the Jon Pareles piece on the Mars Volta that Christgau refers to more than than listening to the Mars Volta.

Still, I'd be faking if I shunned Genesis 1970-1975. The release of the box set has brought out closet Genesis fans in the critical world, and the recent issue of Mojo includes a buyer's guide to Genesis. One fairly empty night in a music club here in New Orleans, the bartender took a break from the subdudes and the Radiators to spin Selling England by the Pound, singing along when "I Know What I Like in Your Wardrobe" got to the line, "Me, I'm just a lawn mower. You can tell me by the way I walk."

Growing up in Southern Ontario, I was in one of the prog hotbeds in the 1970s, with Yes, Gentle Giant, King Crimson and Genesis getting regular airplay on CHUM-FM in Toronto. As I went through high school and discovered punk and arena rock, I bought cut-out copies of Nursery Cryme and Foxtrot, which typified what was right and wrong about Genesis for me. No matter how weird the idea or time signature, Tony Banks and Steve Hackett could figure out how to put something beautiful on top. At the same time, Peter Gabriel made sure that things were never simply lovely. That was all good, but the same odd British-ness that once drew me to those records explains why they don't speak to other records of their time or sense for me.

With the exception of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, the albums all seem isolated - in time, and from other music. They may have had some anxiety about their Limey past and present, but when exactly the past represented by Nursery Cryme took place is tough to nail down, and Selling England by the Pound may have been more contemporary, but that doesn't make it modern, much less post-modern. More than anything else, when I hear Genesis, I hear lonely prep school boys who discovered the musical equivalent of Dungeons and Dragons, something that could theoretically help them meet girls except that girls couldn't dance to it and they sat down like wallflowers or hid behind keyboards.

On the other hand, as impenetrable as the concept behind The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway may be, the music is often dense and clattering, mimicking the New York City streets they imagined from the British countryside, and some of Steve Hackett's uncharacteristically gnarled tangle of notes would predate much of what Robert Fripp would do on his brush with punk and new wave, Exposure. There are passages that consciously build a melodyless tension, emphasizing texture and drama on a low sizzle instead of the grand sweep of "Firth of Fifth" or "The Cinema Show".

But revisiting and reconsidering Genesis isn't enough to make me want more. I now have the little prog I care about - these albums, King Crimson's Red and USA, 801 Live and Kevin Ayers, but they're another sort of art-rock, really. And when I received the Yes Live box a few years back, I decided the drugs must really have been better back then because I found it unlistenable. Ultimately, I too am a prog dabbler at best.

What's the Problem?

Seriously, what's so outrageous about Beyonce's "Sasha Fierce" side that it has to be cordoned off on its own EP-length disc? (At least buyers aren't paying two-disc prices for the album). And what does it say about her that she feels like a dance club side is such a radical thing that it constitutes a second identity that requires its own name? I'd say it sounds like she's gone Hollywood, but she's always been Hollywood. More likely, it sounds like someone who's forgotten what first made her interesting ("Bootylicious").

What's Fair?

Today's New York Times reports that for the first time, Atlantic Records' digital sales surpassed their CD sales. According to Tim Arango:

At the Warner Music Group, Atlantic’s parent company, digital represented 27 percent of its American recorded-music revenue during the fourth quarter. (Warner does not break out financial data for its labels, but Atlantic said that digital sales accounted for about 51 percent of its revenue.)

With the milestone comes a sobering reality already familiar to newspapers and television producers. While digital delivery is becoming a bigger slice of the pie, the overall pie is shrinking fast. Analysts at Forrester Research estimate that music sales in the United States will decline to $9.2 billion in 2013, from $10.1 billion this year. That compares with $14.6 billion in 1999, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

One of the more revealing quotes came from John Rose, a former label executive at EMI:

“It’s not at all clear that digital economics can make up for the drop in physical,” said John Rose, a former executive at EMI, the British music company, who is now a senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group.

Instead, the music industry is now hoping to find growth from a variety of other revenue streams it has not always had access to, like concert ticket sales and merchandise from artist tours. “The real question,” Mr. Rose said, “is how does the record industry change its rights structure so it captures a fairer percent of the value it creates in funding, marketing and managing the launch of artists?”

The word "fairer" jumps out of that last sentence, as if none of these artists would exist or find a market without them. That's true to an extent. A lot of perfectly good music never finds mass audiences, while a lot of mediocre nonsense blows up, but "fairer" implies that somehow the artists they signed hoodwinked them into bad deals, and that the poor, babes-in-the-woods innocent label executives are no match for all those sheisty, conniving artists out there who live to take advantage of them.

Besides, Julie Greenwald, president of Atlantic, says later in the article that the labels are spending less on artists than they used to, which makes the concerns about fairness even more dubious:

“I think we’ve figured it out,” said Julie Greenwald, president of Atlantic Records. “It used to be that you could connect five dots and sell a million records. Now there are 20 dots you can connect to sell a million records.”

In making that transition to a digital business, the music business has become immeasurably more complicated. Replacing compact disc sales are small bits of revenue from many sources: Atlantic Records’ digital sales include ring tones, ringbacks, satellite radio, iTunes sales and subscription services. At the same time, record labels — Atlantic included — are spending less money to market artists. In the pre-Internet days, said Ms. Greenwald, “we were so flush, we did everything in the name of promotion.” Among the cutbacks are less spending to produce videos and to support publicity tours when a new album is released.

Reunited and it Feels ... ehhh, Not Bad

Queen + Paul Rodgers: The Cosmos Rocks (Hollywood): Queen minus Freddie Mercury, John Deacon and pomposity. Paul Rodgers minus the the mathematical power chord precision of Mick Ralphs. The result gives generic a bad name.

Drumbo: City of Refuge (Proper): Magic Band members minus Captain Beefheart, but with Drumbo/John French doing his Beefheartian best on vocals. But they're not Beefheart's, nor are the compositions as rhythmically mad as his. As much as writing on Trout Mask Replica and that era attributes the sound and musical ideas to the band, this says the central musical idea was his and his alone.

Mark Olson and Gary Louris: Ready for the Flood (New West): The two songwriters and vocalists for Americana heroes the Jayhawks during their Hollywood Town Hall heyday reunite, and they're good for each other. The songs they perform together seem far more effortless than those they have made independent of each other, and the low-fuss production makes the album sound like two old friends playing songs together - sometimes with a band that's picking the song up on the fly.

Labelle: Back to Now (Verve Forecast): The reunited Labelle manage the delicate feat of sounding contemporary without giving up what they were or capitulating to the sound du jour (with the exception of the Wyclef-produced "Rollout") which is also the album's weakest track. Sympathetic producers Lenny Kravitz and soul geniuses Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff focus the tracks on their voices, but not at the expense of the songs, which are never mere launching pads for vocal histrionics. In fact, Patti LaBelle's restrained (by her standards) and conscious of both her partners - Sarah Dash and Nona Hendryx - and of the songs themselves, almost all of which Hendryx had a hand in writing. A sharper lyrical edge would help the songs, but Back to Now is a reminder that old school soul based on songs can sound modern and be immensely satisfying.

The Trouble with Lou

I really wanted to like Lou Reed's Berlin: Live at St. Ann's Warehouse, but as is so often the case since Songs for Drella, he sings as if he knows every word is capital A art. Usually, that means he oversells the drama and in this case, it was far better served by his distant deadpan the first time around.

The Nonsense You Have to Put Up With

Robert Christgau once wrote that he did few interviews because none should have to put up with the shit you have to deal with to get and do the interviews. Unfortunately, that extends to many aspects of our jobs these days including trying to review albums that can only be heard at record-listening parties or in the label's offices, or even trying to see a concert.

Last night, I went to the New Orleans Arena to see Down open for Metallica at the invitation of Down's publicist. After the invitation was extended, though, communication fell off, then yesterday afternoon I learned that there weren't actually tickets for me, but if I went to the media entrance and called the road manager, he'd walk me in. That sounded dubious, but I went for it. I genuinely wanted to see Down, and I've never seen Metallica before, so whatthehell.

At the door, I called the road manager, got his voicemail, and never heard back from him. I called a friend/photographer who was already inside and she came out with someone - likely arena production staff, but maybe the guy I was supposed to find - and he literally walked us to the arena floor and said, "There you go." No wristband, no sticker, no laminate. He basically snuck us in. That was fine as long as being on the floor was the only place we wanted or needed to be, but when my friend needed to go to the washroom a few songs into Metallica, he was thrown out because he had nothing to indicate that he was in the show legitimately. That ended the night.

Bottom line - if a band wants press, it has to at least meet a minimum threshold of civility. It doesn't have to want press. I don't begrudge anybody who chooses a strategy that works around the press, but if you want coverage, you've got to try just a little.

The show: The Sword opened, were handicapped by working with a fraction of the PA, and sounded pretty by-the-numbers, with one song that held my attention. Dumb thing: playing without ever introducing themselves or songs so that people could buy or download something the next day. Metallica: Not very coherent (what little I saw). Opened with the opening tracks from Death Magnetic, then cut short a version of "For Whom the Bell Tolls." That was okay, but the first song featured a wild laser show. A song or so later, polished metal coffin/light banks lowered from the light rig, did nothing interesting, then returned to their positions. A song later, serious columns of flame (with no members onstage or anywhere near them) and mid-song, a row of flame columns down the center of the stage (with no one nearby save Lars Ulrich, and they stopped a safe distance from his kit). That's a lot of hamburger helper for a show, and any one of those special effects - the lasers or the pyro or the metal coffins - would have been better. I'm sure they all did cooler shit later, but I didn't get to hang around to find out. Down: They were good, but since they couldn't work up the energy to scrounge a sharpie and date stickers for us, I'm having a hard time finding the juice to say more.

Aging Semi-Gracefully

Julien Temple can't make a boring film about the Sex Pistols because he knows them too well and has known them too long. He made The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, the excellent documentary The Filth and the Fury, and now the live DVD, There'll Always Be an England (Freemantle/Rhino). The show's good, and Temple regularly chooses two valuable camera shots--one on the audience that emphasizes how the show is far more of a communal event than a concert, and one from the back of the stage that makes the band look small, de-emphasizing anything mythic about the Pistols.

The show itself does some of that, too. Steve Jones is stocky with a mug's mug, and if Paul Cook was sitting behind a desk instead of a drum kit, you'd negotiate a home loan with him. Musically, they're better than ever so the versions are solid, but even John Lydon's performance has an element of self-satisfaction that plagues most older bands still playing. No matter how punky they were and still are, at some point there's at least a moment that says, "How cool is that we can still do this?" The pleasure Lydon takes in the audience's roaring affection says that over and over.

More interesting is the Sex Pistols' tour of London that makes up the DVD's bonus materials. In it, you get a much more dynamic, complex experience as you watch the meatier, financially successful Pistols walking through their old haunts with varying degrees of self-consciousness. Naturally, they find that much of the world they knew in 1975 isn't there anymore, so they do a lot of pointing at shop fronts that aren't what they once were talking about the adventures they had there. Watching them, you can't help but be aware of how much has changed for them, which makes their more performed moments all the more curious. They often seem genuine when they engage their past, slightly imprecise and chuffed with themselves for all the good times they got away with, but when Steve Jones nips upstairs in Soho seemingly for sex with a prostitute, it seems designed to remind everyone he's still a rogue. When he starts jawing with a barker selling half-priced theater tickets, it seems similarly calculated to underscore his Sex Pistol-ness because he can never escape the quasi-celebrity with a unique pedigree that he has become. Similarly, Lydon's rage at Arsenal's stadium in Finsbury Park comes camera ready; far more convincing and revealing is his reflexive, snide comments about Malcolm McLaren made while driving past the store that once housed Let it Rock! and Sex. Each impulse would be less engaging without the other.

The whole tour of London literalizes the passage of time - how it affected them, how it affected London, and how it affected their legend. A room on Denmark Street that was once Jones and Cook's apartment is now a design house, and the caricatures of band members, McLaren and Nancy Spungen that Lydon drew on the wall have been carefully preserved and are part of the office decor.

The Confluence of Things

I've been reading Dave Thompson's I Hate New Music: The Classic Rock Manifesto, and for the most part it's disappointing in its dumbness. Tim Gebhart summarizes Thompson at Blogcritics.com and inadvertently gets to the heart of the problem:

Regardless of the blend any reader may think he uses, the ultimate message is the same: rock music has lost something crucial and we're worse off for it.

The vagueness of that doesn't get us closer to the problem - presuming a problem even exists - so the book breaks down to a "things were better in my day" that too often supports itself with easy and false wisecracks.
The classic rock period is a really interesting one, and when Peter Frampton blames himself for killing rock 'n' roll, there's some truth to it. Frampton Comes Alive and Fleetwood Mac's Rumours demonstrated in a big way what musicians and companies were slowly learning in the early 1970s - that there was more money to be made from rock 'n' roll than anybody had previously imagined. The '70s see the birth of rock 'n' roll as a business, and that changed everything. Yes, the growing importance that was put on studio recordings and the technological changes that made "less human" recordings possible affected music, but those changes happened for business reasons, not because musicians were better, more artistic souls then and they're callow sucks now.

Any then-vs.-now argument cheats because all crappy artists who put out lousy albums back then have been forgotten. So far, I haven't seen any discussion of Angel, for example. Many of the trend-following albums and artists have faded from memory, leaving the great hard rock bands to stand seemingly as a posse of Camaro-powered greatness next to which all the pale and nerdy that have followed them seem puny.

That said, during the time I've been reading Thompson's dismissal of contemporary music, I've had doubts about modern music. To pick an example at random, I received three emails from publicists for Sebastien Grainger & the Mountains asking me if I'm going to review his new album on Saddle Creek Records. Grainger was part of Death From Above 1979 and the CD's a perfectly likeable album of guitar-oriented new wave dance rock. The bass is punk rock insistent and the songs are often little more than chord progressions, but they become anthemic and are fun.

Still, I know a year from now I'll have forgotten I own this CD, and I wonder if any of the publicists working the album will think of it again this time next year. And I wonder if my thoughts here have more to do with the business of rock 'n' roll than Grainger himself. He came to me as an example not because the music was so memorable - though again, I enjoy it when I hear it. Find it at an mp3 blog at and check it out - but because someone treated it like it was important. And next month will treat another slate of releases as important, and another. That machine-like cycle suggests that something has changed and not for the better, which is about as far as I'm willing to go with Thompson right now.

Letting it All Sink In

Now that the reality of Obama's election is starting to sink in, people are contemplating what it means. Here in New Orleans, letter writers to The Times-Picayune are complaining that his election means we're in for a radical redistribution of wealth (duhhhh). Salon.com's "War Room" asked a number of writers and bloggers "What Does Obama's Victory Mean?", and not surprisingly, the answers are more provocative and nuanced than that. My favorite:

It means the 9/11 era -- of dealing with the world 9/11 created rather than using 9/11 as a political club -- has finally begun.
-- Brad DeLong, economics professor, UC-Berkeley

In the Spirit of the Moment, Pt. 2

No sooner than I wrote about the desire to enjoy this moment when six kids ranging from 7-ish to 12 or so in my neighborhood marched down the street drumming and chanting, "O-Ba-Ma, ooh na nae / O-Ba-Ma, bom-ba-yae."

In the Spirit of the Moment ...

... I'll focus on the second half of John McCain's concession speech - which sounded genuine in a way he hasn't for over a year - and not the first few minutes, which seemed to minimize Obama's accomplishment as simply a feat for African Americans. I'll also make little of the squalling people who attended McCain's speech, who couldn't simply boo, and the role of McCain's campaign in creating that sort of fractious mess. This is too good a day to spend time chipping on McCain.

I'd rather simply enjoy the moment.

Everything Comes Down to Numbers

I'm not sure why this statistical breakdown of the requirements of Madonna's "Sticky and Sweet Tour" seems so appropriate. All spellings and notations are straight from the press release:

MADONNA'S STICKY AND SWEET NUMBERS
100,000 Feet of electrical cable
3,500 Individual wardrobe elements
1935 Model of Auburn Spedster Car brings Madonna and dancers down stage runway
600 Pieces of Luggage for Tour Members and production staff
350 Tons of Equipement Travel from Venue to Venue
120 Powder Puffs
100 Pairs of out-of-stock fishnet pantyhose in old-style weave purchased for Madonna via Ebay and small local dance shops
100 Pairs of Knee Pads
71 Guitars for Madonna and band on tour
36 Different designers contributed to onstage wardrobe of Madonna,
band and dancers
28 Performers on stage during biggest numbers
16 Caterers prepare meals for travelling party
12 Travelling trampolines used by Madonna and dancers for warm-ups
10 Large Flight Cases of Medical Supplies
9 Different hydraulic lifts used as part of the stage show
5 People change Madonna in precision timing in between songs (lucky them)
5 Keyboards on stage for Kevin Antunes, Musical Director
4 Large freezers carry ice packs for Madonna and dancers
4 YSL Lipsticks will be used by Madonna by end of tour
4 Minutes to Save the World (we only got)
3 Romanian Gypsy Musicians perform with acoustic instruments
3 Shu Uemura eyelash curlers travel on tour
1.5 Minutes - Shortest time required to change Madonna's costume
1 Chiropractor
1 Masseuse
1 Set of Swarovski crystal ear phones for DJ
1 Playroom for Madonna's children at each venue

The Creedence Question

The Creedence Clearwater Revival catalogue has been reissued and I've just finished listening to it - easily done since the albums are about a half-hour each. Even if you take into account that some John Fogerty riffs were pretty similar, it's still an impressive feat: six albums in under three years, and all are at least good. Yeah, you skip through Pendulum, but there's a song or two I'd skip on all of them except maybe Green River.

The question that the liner notes for the album hints at is why Creedence wasn't bigger. Why isn't the band beloved? So many good songs, so many hits, such a distinctive sound, but somehow, that hasn't translated into a stronger legacy. If you know the band's story, maybe you chalk it up to a band that was hard to love as personalities, but for me, it's Fogerty's inability to sound dark. For all of the apocalytic imagery of "Bad Moon Rising," the music is still a hoedown and sounds just as emotionally burdened as he does on "Travelin' Band," "Fortunate Son" and "Hey Tonight."

Maybe it was a physical limitation or perhaps it was a conceptual one in that he wanted to be successful too badly to cast songs in darker, less commercial lights. Whatever the reason, CCR almost always sounds perky, and they sound perkier with time.

Voodoo 2008: the Election Edition

Here's my round-up of New Orleans' Voodoo Music Experience for Rolling Stone.com.

A few post-Voodoo observations that didn't fit:

The Bingo! Parlour was the coolest venue at Voodoo - enclosed enough to feel like an environment, but open enough that you didn't have to be inside it to hear. It was also a coherent space, where the theatrical set up framed bands such as the New Orleans Bingo! Show, the Tin Men with the Valparaiso Men's Chorus, and Quintron and Miss Pussycat perfectly. You were cued as to how to appreciate the music in the process, and the setting seemed to bring out the best in the performers. That sort of intelligence also highlights that many of the bands that played there aren't just music creators but art concepts, where the music and the theater are only parts of the whole package.

It was clear by the lack of applause of recognition and singing along that TV on the Radio has yet to penetrate the Gulf Coast consciousness.

The coolest set that 100 or so people saw was DJ King Britt's tribute to Sister Gertrude Morgan. It felt like a contemporary notion of rock 'n' roll with Britt manipulating her voice and other recordings - including Barack Obama's at one point - while a live band accompanied him. "Power" had dub's boinging echo chamber at its heart, while the next piece was a tech-savvy second line. The DJ wasn't just a guy to scratch along to band compositions or spin samples; he was a part of the band and a part of the collective music-making process, and it sounded more modern than a lot of contemporary rock bands on the main stages.

Erykah Badu's set sounded like a perfect merger of music and personality. It was never clear that there was a place where the person left off and the performer began, or that the person left off and the song began. As such, it was an uneven musical experience, but another two hours of expression that personal would have been fine by me.

Non-Apologies

At the Washington Post, Chris Cillizza commented on Michele Bachmann's mea culpa ad. He writes, "What's odd about this ad is that it doesn't seem to know what it is. Is it an apology for her comments last week? Or not?"

What's worse about the ad is that it isn't an apology or an acknowledgment of what she'd done. She says, "I may not always get my words right but I know my heart is right because my heart is for you." She suggests that she misspoke when she called for an investigation of anti-American Democrats in government and kept on misspeaking.

The Real America

I don't live there, so I suppose I'm not a real American, but I can't imagine anyone who lives there feels anymore love than I do right now for someone who spent more than their annual income in one trip to Neiman Marcus.

"We need more zydeco ..."

"... on the Rachel Maddow Show," MSNBC's Rachel Maddow said last night. Prompting this basic truth - what TV show wouldn't be improved by more zydeco? - was a video she aired of a pro-Obama zydeco song, "Oui, On Peut (Yes, We Can)." You can find it here, and those interested in zydeco will recognize a band that includes Dirk Powell and Christine Balfa of Balfa Toujours, Linzay Young of the Red Stick Ramblers, Zydeco Joe, Jeffery Broussard of the Creole Cowboys, and Corey Ledet.

All the Talk

Girl Talk's House of Blues show was the most rock 'n' roll show I've seen this year, and only partially because of the music. Actually, what was rock 'n' roll about it was only partially connected to the music. At the sold out show, I was the only person I saw over 40, and I saw few obvious thirtysomethings. The crowd was young, and most everybody there was dressed to be a star. The wardrobe choices drew heavily from '70s and '80s notions of glam - a lot of shiny material - but all were more interesting and energized than the handful of people in rock 'n' roll black T-shirts and shorts.

This was the sort of show that drew the Us vs. Them line good rock 'n' roll draws, one that marks who's cool and who isn't. The line's unstable and who's cool depends on the show and the crowd, but the night was charged with the electricity of people who were all quite confident they knew something their elders and the uncool didn't. Two people in line had to ask me (with equal incredulity), "You know Girl Talk?"

Girl Talk - Gregg Gillis - doesn't actually do much onstage. He hunches over a table and rocks while manipulating the tracks in his sonic collage, but there was more genuine danger onstage than I've seen in a long time. Anyone who wanted onstage was welcome, so it was soon packed with people, some dancing, some nodding, some simply into their moment onstage. People were behind Gillis, and at one point people bodysurfed the back of the stage crowd. When he revved up the energy, the crowd onstage surged, so much so that people had to hang on to his desk so that it didn't get pushed into the audience. At one point, two legs were knocked out from under the desk and it banged to the ground with an ugly electronic fart.

As for the music itself, it brought to mind the poet Ted Berrigan's Train Ride. In the book-length poem, Berrigan described what he saw looking out the window while on a train, but he didn't provide the markers to indicate the passing of space. He simply responded to what he saw each time, giving the work a loose coherence - because things don't change that quickly - and a surreal quality as disconnected places and thoughts become connected. Girl Talk's show was a speeding train through the back half of the 20th Century, and his combinations of tracks spoke to each other in different ways. It's hard not to think of the irony of hip-hop voices matched with classic rock, the latter often the musical hiding place for those who hate rap. He also wasn't above easy laughs, at one point alternating between Paul McCartney crooning, "I love you" and 2 Live Crew shouting "We want some pussy."

But Girl Talk's most radical move was to treat all pop as equal. Classic rock, pop hits and hip-hop were equally loved and mocked, equally valuable building blocks for his music. And whether they knew exactly what was going on or not, the audience knew they were seeing something, and they were hearing inclusive values enacted. And they could put their arms around their pals' shoulders or waists celebrate a collective moment. It was a rock 'n' roll thing.

Lost in All the Shit

John McCain and particularly Sarah Palin have been asking who the real Barack Obama is, and even though Obama explained his relationship with Ayers, repeating the question implies that they know differently. That's the strategy after two years of campaigning - Barack Obama, Man of Mystery. That's the line they're pushing via robocalls, and it's the line that the foot soldiers are going with.

The first post-debate sign of what John McCain is going to focus his campaign on came on Late Night with David Letterman. When Letterman asked if Sarah Palin said Barack Obama palled around with terrorists, McCain says point blank, "yes, and he did" (this line of questioning starts at 19:23 on the video clip). No more dancing around or trying to cast veiled aspersions. McCain has gone all-in on the threat that we may be on the verge of electing the sleeper-est of all sleeper agents president of the United States. Ooooh, that Osama's good.

If Rep Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is a harbinger of things to come, the last two weeks of the presidential campaign are going to get ugly to such an extent that some souls will be stained beyond measure. Friday night, Bachmann's appearance on Hardball was a particularly loathsome, naked appeal to the fear of Obama the Boogeyman, pulling out Ayers, Wright and Tony Rezko. Chris Matthews' started down the right road with her - trying to anatomize the distortion - but it would be nice if someone would have the stick to pursue the crucial step: What exact evil was William Ayers plotting when Obama knew him? What was so dangerous about knowing him when Obama did?

Then again, if there's no answer to who Obama really is, I guess no answer and no line of questioning matters. We've gone through eight years of devaluing information and turning everything into a matter of belief. In yet another way, McCain promises more of the same.

The Louisiana Story

I'm sure other cities face the same issue in varying degrees, but in southern Louisiana, the question of how to deal with musical traditions in contemporary music is central to the art. I touch on this tension and the omnipresence of rock 'n' roll in a new piece on the Cajun band the Pine Leaf Boys in today's San Diego Union-Tribune.

One bummer, though - one of my favorite stories in the piece bit the editing room dust. Guitarist Jon Bertrand told the story of walking the red carpet into the Grammys this year, when the band's Blues de Musicien was nominated for Best Cajun/Zydeco Album. He explained that someone with a white-erase board walks in front of you as you go down the red carpet so the media know who you are, and so the designated cheerers in bleachers know who they're cheering. He was so amused by the experience that when he finished his trip down the red carpet, he slipped out of line, went back to the front and did it all over again.

McCain's Tear Ducts

A lot has been made this morning of John McCain's blinking last night during the debate, but more disturbing was his grin each time he thought he'd just zinged Obama. Football coaches try to get players who score touchdowns to act like they'd been in the end zone before, and McCain could have used some similar advice.

Really, though, more telling was how often McCain ended a segment with a non-sequitur. After Obama laid out his tax plans and how 95 percent of the country would see tax cuts, McCain followed that by simply asserting that Obama wants to raise our taxes. After Obama pointed out what a small percentage of the budget earmarks make up, McCain reiterated the importance of cutting earmarks. After Obama conceded that McCain had differed with Bush on torture - but only for a while, I'll add - he voted consistently with Bush on economic policy. McCain responded by naming a number of non-economic issues where he split with his party. These exchanges allowed him every opportunity to confront Obama's plans and charges, and in these cases and many others, he had no meaningful, substantive response.

Last thought - hands down, the best debate format and best moderator.

Education Gaps

I knew of the Weather Underground, but I felt a little dumb considering the media's offhanded treatment of William Ayers' Weather Underground membership, as if this was common knowledge along the lines of the team Babe Ruth played for. In David S. Tanenhaus' Slate feature, "Barack, Bill and Me," he admits that he didn't know of Ayers' background in 1990. He writes:

I'm embarrassed to admit that when I first met [Ayers], I had not heard of the Weathermen, let alone its militant offshoot, the Weather Underground, famous from 1970 to 1975 for advocating violent protest against the Vietnam War. I had no idea the group had planned and carried out bombings of the Pentagon and the New York City police headquarters and that its members, including Ayers and Dohrn, had appeared on the FBI's Most Wanted list.

Some of this was naiveté on my part. But it was also generational. Vietnam belonged to history by the time I got around to studying it in college. The books I read were either social histories of soldiers' experiences, such as Al Santoni's Everything We Had, an oral history, or accounts of the decisions that led to the war's disastrous conclusion, like Larry Berman's Planning a Tragedy. The culture of protest and dissent, particularly fringe groups like the Weather Underground, was not part of the curriculum.

He goes on to put Ayers in the context of his work in Chicago - hardly a man of mystery - but I wonder how many people on Fox News knew of the Weather Underground prior to this non-story.

A Word from Bobby Charles

I have generally avoided cross-referencing my blogs, but since I haven't figured out how to put an mp3 up on this one, here's a link to my more New Orleans-centric blog, where I posted a new song by Bobby Charles, best known as the writer of "See You Later, Alligator," "Walkin' to New Orleans," "Tennessee Waltz" and "But I Do." "Take Back My Country" features Lafayette's Sonny Landreth on guitar, and it only scratches the surface of Charles' attitude toward politicians. For more on Bobby, go here.

What is Real?

At a point when McCain and Palin are asking, "Who is the real Barack Obama?" - a question that implies, "Someone other than the person you think you know." - it grabs your attention to run across the line, "This is the story of the real John McCain" in Tim Dickinson's "Make-Believe Maverick" story in the current Rolling Stone. Considering Rolling Stone's lead time, the phrase had to have already been written before the McCain campaign picked it up, but it mocks his effort to stain Obama and is a yet another reminder about the value of remembering who you are and what you've done before going after others.

By the way, Dickinson's story is pretty brutal, going into the up-to-now no-fly-zone of McCain's military record, which he finds to be as, ummmmm, checkered as McCain's political career.

More Cold Truth

[Note: Skip Down to "Words to Live By" and read up to this. They're related.]

More PR 101: A publicist is talking about how brutal sales are. "Record labels are dead," she says, telling people the money's in the live show. Now the audience is starting to peel off and go.

Regionalism

More PR 101: I'm going to stop doing this (I think), but this became more interesting than it was when I sat down. Another guy - damn, name signs would be useful - contends that corporate rap is dead and rap's regional again, and that once again, all business is local (my phrase, not his).

A Real Honest Moment

Still at the PR 101: A rapper from Houston told everybody to keep talking about the things they want to rap about and not worry about what the professionals - specifically the guy connected to Nas - say because they'll be out of jobs in six months. It's funny because it's true.

Now the Nas guy is trying to defend his approach along the lines of "integrity" - good friggin' luck when dealing with popular music of any stripe. Things are getting more engaged now that the Nas guy and the Houston guy are starting to get into a North/South spat, "serious" hip-hop vs. Southern "party" hip-hop. The Nas guy put his foot in it when he talked about Luke and 2 Live Crew only having one hit; everybody in the room started naming other songs that were regional hits.

Someone else has the mic now and points out that Ja Rule, Nelly and many northern hip-hop artists can't chart because Southern rappers are dominating and influencing hip-hop charts.

Another woman has people nodding their heads because she says hip-hop's dead because no one wants to be individual and be the first to do something. "Don't be afraid to be the first to do something because others think like you." She also inspired some guy who's obviously in his mid-20s to say "exactly" when she says Soulja Boy's not for her ... at 28.

Stop Making Sense

Still at the PR 101, and a guy who I think is associated with Nas - no signage on the table - is telling people that they need to be real and realize that music might not be for them. He was advocating people having something fresh to say and/or have a back-up plan. Very sensible advice, but guys at a table to my left are shaking their heads. They and most of the room know their music is strong and the people who shouldn't be making music are somebody else. This isn't an R&B/hip-hop thing; when indie artists from around the country approach me about sending their CDs for review, I tell them only to do so if their musically absolutely kills because regional genre-based artists that don't travel beyond their region are low priorities for us. They all send their CDs anyway. And none of those CDs have killed.

Words to Live By

Funny - I'm sitting right now in a "Professional PR 101" session, an urban/hip-hop-oriented seminar/educational event put on by a PR agency (don't have the name in front of me - a PR mistake, I'd say). The panel has spent much of the last half hour emphasizing professionalism, which is good. Oddly, the agency that put the event together called and mispronounced the names of two invited members of our editorial staff - referring to "Jan" as "Jane." The email press release was similarly full of vague connections, but it didn't have basic information like a schedule. The information coming from the panel all sounds right, but the shaky effort by the PR agency might be the reason there are only 25 people here.

Is It Just Me ...?

... or did John McCain often seem like an old man? At some points during the "debate," it was merely awkward - his weird attempts at jokes - but never worse than when he said yet again that Obama won't admit that he was wrong about the surge. Every time he hits that "he won't admit he was wrong" riff, he sounds like half of a spatting couple that chews on decades-old petty beefs.

Ugly in the Echo Chamber

The video of McCain and Palin appearances and the hostility and suspicion toward Obama is appalling, but it's hard to imagine that playing well outside of the party faithful. This campaign started absurdly early, so people have spent more than a year seeing and hearing Obama. Are the moderates and undecided going to really decide that this calm, seemingly measured guy is really a terrorist? An enemy of the state? Similarly, it's hard to imagine that Ayers and Wright will have any traction outside of the faithful because the stories themselves are old news having first come up months ago during the primary season. McCain and Palin don't have fresh news, or even fresh spin on them; all they have is greater volume and urgency, brought on by the nearness of the election.

Who are moderates and undecideds going to go to - the guy who has seemed on message and engaged in issues for the last year-plus, or the guy who has skittered erratically from crisis-oriented decision to crisis-oriented decision in radical steps? And will they really believe that the guy who thought Palin was a good idea, who gambled and tied himself to an economic crisis that's likely to get worse before it gets better, and who runs as an outsider despite a quarter-century in Washington when he tries to tell voters they don't know the real Obama? I think the polls are telling us the answers. Desperation is sad stench, and it's strong on him.

Word of the Week

Thankfully, the "Main Street/Wall Street" variations have worn that hackneyed phrase out already, but "pivot" seems to have become the political verb du jour, used to describe what politicians do when asked questions they don't want to answer. It seems like I heard it two or three times last week, and the Huffington Post quotes Sarah Palin using it to criticize Katie Couric's interview:

"The Sarah Palin in those interviews was a little bit annoyed," [Palin] said. "It's like, man, no matter what you say, you are going to get clobbered. If you choose to answer a question, you are going to get clobbered on the answer. If you choose to try to pivot and go to another subject that you believe that Americans want to hear about, you get clobbered for that too."

What should Couric have asked her? In an interview with Fox News, she said:

"In those Katie Couric interviews, I did feel that there were lot of things that she was missing in terms of an opportunity to ask what a VP candidate stands for, what the values are represented in our ticket. I wanted to talk about Barack Obama increasing taxes, which would lead to killing jobs. I wanted to talk about his proposal to increase government spending by another trillion dollars. Some of his comments that he's made about the war, that I think may, in my world, disqualify someone from consideration as the next commander in chief. Some of the comments that he has made about Afghanistan -- what we are doing there, supposedly just air raiding villages and killing civilians. That's reckless. I want to talk about things like that. So I guess I have to apologize for being a bit annoyed, but that's also an indication of being outside the Washington elite, outside of the media elite also. I just wanted to talk to Americans without the filter and let them know what we stand for."

Evidently in Alaska, "interview" means "opportunity to say whatever shit you want to say without question."

The Truth as Comedy

It's a bad sign for Sarah Palin that Tina Fey's impression of her has become so popular. Gerald Ford admitted after he left office that Chevy Chase's sketches showing him to be a bumbler changed the way people thought of him, and George H.W. Bush says he never said, "Naat gonna do't," but the phrase and Dana Carvey's almost absurdly consonant-deficient Bush pronunciation became the starting point for anyone who wanted to mock him. In their cases, Chase and Carvey presented extreme versions of their subjects; this weekend, fuly half of Tina Fey's lines as Palin came directly from the debate. Palin at her best was the butt of a joke, and it's not a reach to expect that something radical will have to happen to keep her from being seen as anything but a version of Fey.

Getting it Right

DJ Z-Trip has posted his "Party for Change Obama Mix" and while there's a lot smart in it, there's no more perfect moment in it than when he backs a clip of John McCain speaking with "Yakkety Sax." After his frantic activity last week surrounding Wall Street and the will he/won't he debate, the image of McCain as Benny Hill seems spot on.

The Breaking Point

There are any number of basic problems with the McCain candidacy starting with someone with 26 years of experience in Washington - most of it in the party in power - running as the outsider. But the moment last night when I had to stop my TV and yell (thanks to the miracle of DVR) came when Fargo Palin told Joe Biden that sometimes the government can't solve a problem; sometimes it is the problem. How can McCain and Palin seriously run for office when they view the office and the government as a bad, intrusive thing? The current financial crisis and the post-Katrina Gulf South illustrate the product of a government driven by a self-hating ideology.

One last thing - today the press is giving her credit for having better answers and a better command of the details than she did with Katie Couric. That was easy, but would she have done as well without her notes, which you could often see her refer to? Even with them, she got the name of the commander in Afghanistan wrong twice, and her vice presidential answer was one of a few that still had some Miss South Carolina in it.

Details, Details

For the last week or so, we've marvelled at Sarah Palin's remarkable inattention to details. She can't name Supreme Court decisions, magazines and newspapers she has read, or regulatory stands McCain has taken. Contrast that with Barack Obama's appearance this morning on ESPN's "Mike and Mike." He casually and comfortably talked about the teams he grew up watching, the White Sox pitching rotation and ABC's The Superstars. It's not genius stuff, but accessing a memory really shouldn't require finals-like cramming for anyone, and certainly not for someone in one of the most important jobs in the country.

Drive-By Truckers in Baton Rouge

When Wall Street's in freefall, the housing market's a mess and economic uncertainty makes cranky bastards of us all, the band for the moment is the Drive-By Truckers. Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley specialize in the Battle Hymn of the Working Class, nowhere more precisely and powerfully than in last night's "People on the Moon," which benefitted from an arrangement that racheted up the tension during the verse.

Even before John Neff sat down at his pedal steel, the Truckers struck me as 21st Century Honky-Tonk band, playing the guitar rock that people drink, fight and fall in love to, and that was certainly the vibe last night at the Varsity, where three guys brawled like a wrecking ball through the crowd to my right, and one couple took every occasion to slow dance that they could find.

The set focused on Brighter Than Creation's Dark , and the fragmentary nature of the songs made them feel less like Big Rock and more short story-like - not what I always want from the Truckers, but it's a nice step away from precipice of Bigness for Bigness' Sake that they flirted with in song styles, song lengths, show lengths, and raw sonic poundage.

The oddity in the set was a cover of Tom Petty's "Rebels." At first, it seemed superfluous. Every song Hood and Cooley write is obviously southern, and there's no escaping the south in their voices. But in the set and in the Varsity, it was something smarter than that - it the interior monologue of the people in the songs and the people in the room. It was people finding a simple, fixed identity to claim and hang on to when everything else in their lives was unstable and complicated. It's a semi-truth that will do when you're not quite sure how rich assholes can fuck up on such a large scale that they get bailed out to the tune of billions while you can't get out of doghouse for getting drunk tailgating before the LSU game and puking in the window of your girlfriend's father's car.

Michael P. Smith

Photographer Michael P. Smith passed away Wednesday [Sorry - Friday]. Smith documented in black and white photography New Orleans music-based cultural practices in pictures that accorded dignity and vitality to Mardi Gras Indians, second line paraders, jazz funeral marchers, gospel singers and musicians. His photos record the early days of Jazz Fest, and they've presented some of the lasting images of artists such as James Booker, Professor Longhair and George Porter, Jr. Smith's photographs did what Jazz Fest has done - suggest that the music that came from New Orleans street/neighborhood culture was more than a Sunday afternoon racket, and popularized it by helping it reach beyond the city limits.

There's a good sample of Smith's work at his Web site.

Rock 'n' Roll is Hard to Do

Recently, Shout! Factory put out yet another repackaging of Mott the Hoople, Old Records Never Die: The Mott the Hoople/Ian Hunter Anthology. The twist in this two-disc set is that the second disc draws from Ian Hunter's post-Mott solo career, though many of the songs might as well have been Mott songs.

By coincidence, I finally found a cheap copy of Hunter's Diary of a Rock and Roll Star, which chronicles Mott's American tour after the release of All the Young Dudes. The book's a throwback to the days when rock had yet to become an industry of its own, and because like so many British glam bands from the early 1970s, Mott had a hard time making an impact in the States. Once the band gets away from the coasts, it's out of place and struggled through shows where soundcheck and billing issues along with their own nerves meant the shows were often disappointing by Hunter's standards.

The common theme between Hunter's song and book writing is his dark take on the rock 'n' roll myth. "Rock 'n' roll's a loser's game," he sings in "Ballad of Mott the Hoople," The good days were always some point in the past, and Hunter always found himself looking back with disappointment, so much so that John Lydon's "Ever have the feeling you've been cheated?" would have suited him well. At the same time, the songs' riffs are so big and melodies so memorable that there's no resignation in the songs.

Today Mott sounds a little quaint because so few bands aspire visibly toward bigness, and because it's so unlikely for most bands to reach for a mass audience. There are surely rock 'n' roll queens still out there looking to bed members of bands, but "groupies" seems like a part of a bygone era. But the rock 'n' roll mythology still has power and Mott captures the mixed feelings we all have toward it as engagingly as anybody does.

Inside Baseball

Get music writers together and eventually, they'll mope about the towers of promo CDs that threaten to swamp their desks and consume all the available space in their cubicles/offices/bedrooms/apartments. The stacks become emotionally taxing as they represent people's hopes, and each stack represents a dream ignored.

The not-so-secret secret of promo CDs is that they often end up in secondhand stores or being resold on the Internet. The L.A. Weekly's Randall Roberts gets as into the issue as his sources will permit, revealing his own standing in the story and the sort of personal ethics you only face if you have a box of CDs that you can't imagine listening to serving as an end table:


Normally I use any money I receive to buy more music, and in this way I feel that I’m funding an arts grant writ small. Each dollar gained from swapping out mediocre music goes into a pool that I disperse to worthy musical geniuses. (These days, South American and African reissues, and black metal.) Also, I have a few hard-and-fast rules. First, I never sell a promo sent to me by an L.A. band. I don’t sell promos sent to me by small, interesting L.A.-based labels. There is also a list of artists and record labels with which I’m so philosophically attuned, that it would feel like a betrayal to sell one of their CDs. And I never sell a CD before its official release date, because I think leaking music on to the Web is lame, and does way more damage than selling a measly promo.

There are parts of the story that you have to be a music writer to care about - I think - but as the story pertains to the major labels, particularly Universal, things get more complex. He examines the disclaimer attached to Universal promos, which claim the label still owns them, even though they sent them to reviewers, frequently unrequested. In answer to a suit, on reseller of promo CDs found a legal analogy in the pages of Harry Potter:

In Roast Beast Music’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit filed against it by Universal Music Group for auctioning promos, lawyers introduced their argument with a dialogue from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:

Bill Weasley: To a goblin, the rightful and true master of any object is the maker, not the purchaser. All goblin-made objects are, in goblin eyes, rightfully theirs.

Harry Potter: But if it was bought—

Bill Weasley: Then they would consider it rented by the one who had paid the money. They have, however, great difficulty with the idea of goblin-made objects passing from wizard to wizard.... They consider our habit of keeping goblin-made objects, passing them from wizard to wizard without further payment, little more than theft.

Theresa Andersson

Preparing for an upcoming television show appearance (WLAE Wednesday 7 and 9:30 p.m. in New Orleans)reminded me that I never got around to writing about a recent Theresa Andersson show at the Republic. Andersson's new Hummingbird, Go! is her most idiosyncratic album, speaking in a more personal, less genre-oriented voice than she has in the past, and it's more interesting for it. The songs are small, in some cases fragments, and they're firmly rooted in indie rock though, as her show made clearer, they embraced where she's been as well. She opened with "Mary Don't You Weep," a song consistent with her self-titled roots rock EP, and her version stands solidly beside Springsteen's Seeger Session recording. For the album and tour, she developed a circle of instruments and pedals to allow her to loop parts so she can accompany herself, the version of "Mary" grew in power and richness, while Springsteen's is unquestionably powerful, but is the case of so much Springsteen, his recordings hit one level of intensity and stay there.

One measure of success of the show is how quickly people stopped pointing at the pedals and whispering about them - how quickly the method of production became secondary to the music - and how effectively she used the looping technology. Too often, the live process of building and layering parts is inefficient, and good three minute ideas become slack five minute songs as the first minute or so is spent laying down parts. In Andersson's case, she builds the layers as quickly as possible, and the parts she adds were almost always musically interesting at the moment she added them. They felt like more of the performance, not the capturing of a part.

In fact, the show became a form of performance art, a sort of dance she performed as she moved from drums to guitar to pedals to pedals to microphone to her violin, and so on. It became hard to see which movements were expressions of the joy of playing and which were purpose-driven. It all came together for the set's most ecstatic moment, "Birds Fly Away," the album's highlight. She reminded us she's a New Orleans musician when she snapped on a sample of a drum loop of Smokey Johnson playing a portion of "It Ain't My Fault," but like Stereolab, she immediately adds parts that recontextualize the beat, in this case making it sound more Motown than New Orleans. Like Stereolab, there's a cool, mechanical precision to the sound, but her vocal in the chorus is anything but remote. The natural vision obviously reassures her ("Birds fly away / they seek shelter. / Trees stand tall / they don't falter."), so much so that she extends the song to repeat the chorus a few more times, singing it like a spiritual revelation. She returned to the song for an encore, but the magic was spent the first time around.

I gather the process of recording and looping was designed to make traveling cost-efficient; what's impressive is how successfully she took a challenge and made something personal and rewarding out of it.

Earl Palmer

The obituaries for drummer Earl Palmer are flocking in - I've linked to a few interesting ones here - but most simply recount his resume, rhyming off the number of hits and hitmakers her was connected with. Backbeat, his memoir, addresses the central question in Palmer's life for music fans: Why leave New Orleans where he was making groundbreaking records to become a session drummer in Los Angeles, where he was faceless? Having a white girlfriend certainly played a part, but Palmer's takes on playing provides some insight:

Palmer on Ornette Coleman: "Ornette was a drag to play with, man, he sounded terrible. Whether he knew the right changes or not, he didn't play them. Played the bridge in the wrong places; sometimes he didn't eve play the bridge."

Palmer on Ray Charles: "We avoided Ray Charles too. There was a time when Ray and Big Joe Turner and Al Hibbler was all hanging around the Dew Drop doing nothing. ... When we come in after a gig, Ray would be waiting to jam with us. I thought he was good and played a hell of a lot of piano; it's just that all he wanted to do was his Nat Cole imitation and we'd played Nat Cole all night long. Came to the Drop, we were ready to play some bebop."

Palmer on Lee Allen: "Lee Allen ... was a honking tenor player. Lee was from Denver, he came to New Orleans to play football and basketball at Xavier. He played the shit out of the blues; any other tunes, he had trouble with the chords. He didn't have the knowledge of the chords to be a first-rate bebop player. He didn't read music very good."

Palmer on Shirley and Lee: "When Shirley sang, you felt around to see if you was cut - that girl sang sharp! Lee always sounded like he was trying to compensate by singing flat."

Palmer on Fats Domino and rock 'n' roll: "What was rock 'n' roll to me? I lived in a jazz world. ... It's something that we did that was not important to us musically."

Palmer on cartoons: "When it dawned on me that I could do this was when I had to play cartoon music, the hardest music I ever had to play. ... Tom and Jerry fucking cartoons. I'd think to myself, 'Here I am playing music I used to be scared to listen to, let along play!' At one time I was doing damn near all the cartoons Warners made. That music looked like fly shit, notes all over. ... I took pride in trying to do it as fast and good as I could."

The common thread in all of that is the level of challenge from a musical perspective - what's hard, what isn't. It's a way we're not used to valuing music, but it was more important to Palmer than anyone would imagine.

A Belated Gustav Thought

The national media has understandably moved on to Hurricane Ike's devastation, but overlooking Hurricane Gustav because there was minimal physical damage is wrong. Its economic impact on New Orleans has been brutal. Think of it this way - the entire city was forced to go on vacation at the same time whether people had money to go or not. That forced many people to spend money they didn't have, which meant they came back needy and in danger of missing bill, mortgage and loan payments. That also meant the city's businesses for the most part lost a week of business, and because people were financially strapped after the storm and evacuation, no one did good business after opening with the exception of places like Sam's Club and Wal-Mart. That sort of financial blackout at the end of the worst time of year for New Orleans - the summer - may not be devastating on the order of Katrina, but it has been much harder on the city than anyone who isn't living here realizes.

What to Do, What to Do?

A friend and I have often half-joked that the last person who can tell what's happening in a piece of art is the artist. Right now, I'm facing the question of what to do with the memoir-like liner notes for Carla Bley's new Appearing Nightly, her version of a big band album. Typically, such notes make writing about an album easier, but what if she's not being entirely truthful? I saw her twice in Toronto a year apart, and she played one piece that she hadn't recorded at the time - I think she introduced it as "Battleship" - and when she played it the second time at an outdoor venue on the shores of Lake Ontario, she announced that she composed the piece the night before after seeing a nearby ship. Since that sort of sly humor and riffs on genres and tropes are central to her work, I didn't - and still don't - find her lie anything but entertaining, and it played on the notion that somehow something said in introduction to a piece helps us get any closer to it. Even if she were telling the truth, would the idea that a song was inspired by a ship tell us anything about the song?

In Bley's case, she makes her art - and by extension, her career - sound like a prolonged adventure in stumbling from right move to right move through luck and intuition. There's probably as much truth in that as there is for most musicians, but there's also a defense mechanism in that similar to one I encountered when I interviewed her with a friend who introduced me to her work. After 10 or so minutes, she decided she was more interested in him and interviewed him about his research - he is a scientist - instead of talking about herself. I asked the question in the recent Dylan piece that I wrote: Who really wants to explain themselves? At least in her case, she deals with the issue entertainingly ... which Dylan still does too in his post-modern way. Can any of it be taken seriously? Is there anything real in her discussion of her days as a bad lounge pianist? Probably. Enough to hang a review on? Maybe, but there are better ways to go.

By the way, I'm dabbling in Jonathan Cott's anthology of Dylan interviews, and what's interesting is how Dylan's mechanisms of avoidance changed over the years, but also how some voices have hung on. He seems more friendly and open when he talks to Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner after the release of John Wesley Harding, but he deflects Wenner's questions at every turn, seeming "Aw shucks" about everything, as if the world's a crazy place that's confusing for a country boy. A variation on that voice turns up in Chronicles.

Maybe We're Wrong on Sarah Palin and Foreign Policy

Maybe she is the part of the ticket with the foreign policy moxy. Maybe the ability to see Russia from your shore gives you insight. Evidently John McCain's years in politics haven't done him much good. Here's the transcript of his interview with a reporter from Spain's El Pais newspaper. In it, he's either not sure who Spain's president is, or where Spain is, or he's prepared to screw Spain as an ally.

QUESTION: Senator, finally, let's talk about Spain. If you're elected president, would you be willing to invite President Jose Luiz Rodriguez Zapatero to the White House to meet with you?

MCCAIN: I would be willing meet, uh, with those leaders who our friends [sic] and want to work with us in a cooperative fashion, and by the way, President Calderon of Mexico is fighting a very very tough fight against the drug cartels. I'm glad we are now working in cooperation with the Mexican government on the Merida plan. I intend to move forward with relations, and invite as many of them as I can, those leaders, to the White House.

QUESTION: Would that invitation be extended to the Zapatero government, to the president itself?

MCCAIN: I don't, you know, honestly I have to look at relations and the situations and the priorities, but I can assure you I will establish closer relations with our friends and I will stand up to those who want to do harm to the United States of America.

QUESTION: So you have to wait and see if he's willing to meet with you, or you'll be able to do it in the White House?

MCCAIN: Well again I don't, all I can tell you is that I have a clear record of working with leaders in the hemisphere that are friends with us, and standing up to those who are not, and that's judged on the basis of the importance of our relationship with Latin America, and the entire region.

QUESTION: Okay... what about you, I'm talking about the President of Spain?

MCCAIN: What about me what?

QUESTION: Okay... are you willing to meet with him if you are elected president?

MCCAIN: I am willing to meet with any leader who is dedicated to the same principles and philosophy that we are for human rights, democracy and freedom, and I will stand up to those that do not.

Much has already been made of that gaffe, but the other disturbing part of this is this quote:

I would be willing meet, uh, with those leaders who our friends [sic] and want to work with us in a cooperative fashion

The idea that we only meet with allies is insane. It has been the Bush way, and look where that got us.

Wearing Out a Point

Today, NPR's "Morning Edition" included tape from a McCain/Palin appearance, and during it, a woman gave Palin a chance to explain her foreign policy bona fides. I'm paraphrasing the answer - but not that much - and said she's ready because she believes you have to be ready and we have that readiness. If I, a writer by trade who last took science classes in Grade 11, argued that I'm ready to remove your appendix because I believe I am and I have to be ready when I put scalpel to skin, would you let me cut?

One of the more insidious ways that the Bush White House has injected spirituality into public policy is to reduce everything to a matter of belief - the central tenet of Christianity. Facts are the things he believes; the things he doesn't believe are subject to debate, and Palin is more of the same in so many ways. Thankfully, every time Palin opens her mouth on foreign policy, the emptiness of that approach becomes evident.

Bobby Charles

My story on Louisiana songwriter/legend/man about music Bobby Charles ("Walking to New Orleans," "See You Later, Alligator") is in the new Blurt digi-zine. I've interviewed him twice now, and he's one of those guys who seems to know everybody - Dylan took a break from the Rolling Thunder Revue to party at his house in Abbeville, he helped Neil Young pick out a beach house, he's known Willie Nelson since forever - and has a million stories. Getting him to connect all the dots and tell you how he knows them all is tougher.

The First Casualty of Elections

As I finish my morning blog-reading, I'm naturally depressed by the possibility that the country really doesn't give a shit about the truth. At The Nation, Ari Berman refers to a Ron Suskind piece from 2004 in which a Bush aide said:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality--judiciously, as you will--we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Also at The Nation, Adam Howard celebrated the tough-ish questioning John McCain received on The View, which emphasizes the point that the way to reach voters is not through CNN or traditional news outlets, and the voters people are after aren't reached or appealed to through traditional means.

I hope the Obama campaign is shifting out of Sarah Palin mode, and rather than catching her in lies - which obviously isn't working - use her to illustrate John McCain's shaky judgment. With all the Republican talent available to him - male and female - he chose one of the least known and least prepared to assume the presidency should something happen.

Don't Stop Believin'

I've attributed Bush's election and re-election to the fact that no voter feels stupid next to him - a variation on the idea that people voted for the guy they'd most like to have a beer with. I understand comfort and how it's a more driving force than anybody would like to admit, but seriously - are you qualified to run the country? Are any of the people you drink with at the bar? At the coffee shop?

Today's transcripts of Charlie Gibson's interview with Sarah Palin show the shortcomings your buddy, the candidate. The news today is that she doesn't know the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive defense, and how she inadvertently put America's foreign policy in the Middle East in the hands of Israel, and by admitting Georgia and the Ukraine to NATO drawn America into war with Russia. But let's go beyond such trivialities as details. Joan Walsh at Salon.com made this connection:

Talking to Charles Gibson tonight, Palin sometimes reminded me of poor Miss South Carolina, who, asked why many Americans can't find the U.S. on a map, famously said: "I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation don't have maps. And I believe that our education, like, such as in South Africa and the Iraq, everywhere, like such as, and I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., or should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for our children."

This statement from Palin about Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is better, but not hugely: "I believe that under the leadership of Ahmadinejad, nucular weapons in the hands of his government are extremely dangerous to everyone on this globe, yes. We have got to make sure these weapons of mass destruction, that nucular weapons are not given to those hands of Ahmadinejad, not that he would use them, but that he would allow terrorists to be able to use them. So we have got to put the pressure on Iran."

I thought more of another, more generic sad sack when I read this transcript:

GIBSON: Governor, let me start by asking you a question that I asked John McCain about you, and it is really the central question. Can you look the country in the eye and say "I have the experience and I have the ability to be not just vice president, but perhaps president of the United States of America?"

PALIN: I do, Charlie, and on January 20, when John McCain and I are sworn in, if we are so privileged to be elected to serve this country, will be ready. I'm ready.

GIBSON: And you didn't say to yourself, "Am I experienced enough? Am I ready? Do I know enough about international affairs? Do I -- will I feel comfortable enough on the national stage to do this?"

PALIN: I didn't hesitate, no.

GIBSON: (INAUDIBLE -- Didn't that take some hubris?)

PALIN: I -- I answered him yes because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can't blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we're on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can't blink.

The gobbledygook logic of that last statement - her rationale for believing she's ready to be vice-president and if necessary president - boils down to, "I believe in me because I believe, and I have to believe." Usually we hear some variation on that logic from a teenager talking to Ryan Seacrest just before he or she walks into the American Idol tryout room to be crushed and sent to therapy by Simon, Randy and Paula. Or on the tryout show for America's Next Top Model, where the poor underfed dears explain that they're going to be America's next top model because they really want to be America's next top model. Not surprisingly, the women who actually win have more reliable attributes like good bone structure, a consciousness of their bodies and a sense of how they present themselves for photos.

We've just spent eight years with a president who reduced every issue to a matter of belief; another candidate who believes because she believes really isn't change.

Here's the interview.

Obama Art

A friend who was in Denver for the Democratic National Convention sent me photos of Obama-inspired art from a Manifest Hope show that was surprisingly good. Much of it riffs off of established graphics and styles, and it embraces the cultures that have come together to support Obama. I'm trying to decide what speaks to me more: the Warholesque Obama-as-Lincoln, or the pair of Air Obamas.

Go here for photos, and an account of organizer Shepard Fairey's arrest for postering to hype the show.

What's Wrong with Me?

Am I falling down on the job because I haven't yet typed a few thousand words of love for the new TV on the Radio album? All the cool kids seem to be doing it.