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.