It Explains So Much

I am going to keep this brief.  In an interview with Matt Lauer, our former president, George W. Bush, said that the lowest moment of tenure in office was… (wait for it)… the time that Kanye West called him a racist.  Which wasn’t actually what Kanye said, but that is not important.  Let’s table the fact that I actually don’t think that Kanye was right (George Bush didn’t seem to give a shit about poor folks of any color, not just African-Americans).  Are you telling me that of all the terrible things that happened from 2000 until 2008, a rapper that just about no one takes seriously at this point calling you out is rock bottom?  If this is true, we are frankly lucky that even worse calamities did not befall us during the first eight years of the new millennium.  We should get these two crazy narcissists together for a beer summit moderated by Bret Michaels or Tila Tequila, because that is about where we are at as a culture.  And here I was thinking last night’s Tea Party victories were a sign of bad things to come.  I had forgotten that we’ve already lived through even more surreal times.  Thanks, George Bush, for reminding me of just how bad a leader of the free world you were.

This Could Get Me In Trouble…

…but it is absolutely hilarious, so I don’t care.  In 1957 Shepherd Mead published the book How to Succeed With Women Without Really Trying: The Dastard’s Guide to the Birds and Bees.  Like his previous book, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Mead’s guide to matters of the heart is a satirical self-help book for men trying to make sound decisions in the respectability and status-obsessed 1950s.  Portions of both books were originally published in Playboy, and the chapter “Beware of Hasty Marriage” was re-printed in the volume The Permanent Playboy (1959), which is a collection of essays and short stories that appeared in the magazine during its first five years of existence.  Incidentally, William Faulkner owned a copy of The Permanent Playboy, so you know it’s high-brow stuff.  If you’d like to learn how to become a scoundrel, rake, bald-faced liar, elegant dirtbag, unreconstructed louse, or magnificent bastard (or if you just have a sense of humor that hasn’t been deadened by years of political correctness), you will no doubt enjoy Mead’s advice on succeeding with the fairer sex, which can be found in its entirety here.  If you do not want to become any of the above mentioned types or do not have a functioning sense of humor, I advise forgetting you ever read this post.

So Meta

If you haven’t done so already, I recommend that you check out Ben McGrath’s profile of Nick Denton, the impresario behind the Gawker family of sites.  As someone trying to do this whole blogging this, I am embarrassed to admit how little I knew about Denton before reading this piece.  By and large, I find the Gawker sites, particularly Deadspin, Gawker’s sports site, entertaining, but I have tended to avoid most of Denton’s other sites for a variety of reasons.  Original Recipe Gawker was for a time simply too “New York” for anyone who didn’t live there, and the fact that it seemed to take a special glee in shitting on LA while also hosting the “Gawker Stalker” struck me as ever so much slacker-elitist bullshit.  I appreciate snark, irony, cynicism, and the like as much or more than the next guy, but at a certain point it all seems to become a tiresome meta-game of “I Know You Are, But What Am I?”  And this is to say nothing of Jezebel, Gawker’s site for women, which features a mix of gross-out personal stories, regurgitations of the brand of 1970s feminism still taught in most English departments, and the underlying idea that anything that sucks is the direct result of sexism.  Not exactly my cup of tea, but entertaining (at times).

The above would probably lead you to believe that I think very little of Denton, but on the contrary, I thought McGrath’s article made him sound like someone with whom I’d actually like to have a conversation.  Perhaps it’s simply that New Yorker-style biographies appeal to me.  Perhaps it’s that I am tired of all this election season crap.  But then perhaps it’s the fact that, whether or not one likes the content Denton’s sites produce, that he has managed to create a media empire similar to those of Hearst and Mencken makes him a compelling figure.  Whatever the case may be, you should read McGrath’s profile, and then feel free to never look at one of the Gawker sites again.

Danced Myself Clean

So I’ve been back in LA for a week now, and I must say, it’s nice to be in a city again.  Santa Barbara is great in many ways, but it simply can’t compare to the trashy elegance of its massive neighbor to the south.  I am looking forward to a year of writing, eating, drinking, and minor celebrity sightings.  Rick Moranis is my white whale.

Last night I attended the LCD Soundsystem-Hot Chip-Sleigh Bells show at the Hollywood Bowl.  My friends and I got there a bit late, so we didn’t end up seeing Sleigh Bells, but I will be seeing them on Monday at Soho in Santa Barbara, so I was not too concerned.  I hadn’t been to the Bowl since I saw Grace Jones and Of Montreal there over a year ago, and I’d forgotten how pleasant it can be.  For an outdoor venue, the sound is amazing, and when the music is right, the place turns into a 15,000 person dance club.  Needless to say, the music was right last night, as both Hot Chip and LCD Soundsystem gave amazing performances.  Highlights included Hot Chip’s “I Feel Better,” of of their latest album, One Life Stand, and LCD’s closer, “Home,” off of their incredible album This is Happening.  Below you will find a stream of One Life Stand in its entirety, and I urge you to listen to it if you have yet to do so.

Can It Be?

Great job, Los Angeles!  You managed not to make the list of the 25 most dangerous neighborhoods in the U.S. In fact, nowhere in California cracks the top 25, while Las Vegas has 3 neighborhoods in the top 10, and Atlanta has 4 in the top 25.  While this study is far from definitive, I expect to see video billboards all over LA touting the city’s new found safety.

I Know, I Know…

…I have left you all hanging, again.  I am still moving though.  By next week, I will be much more settled, and my LA blogging will begin.  In the meantime, check out this awesome picture from this year’s Ryder Cup tournament.

Well played, Tiger.  Well played.

Now Hear This

As anyone in Southern California can attest to, yesterday was miserably hot.  It was 113 degrees in downtown LA, and 96 in Santa Barbara.  I ate a burger and watched Monday Night Football in a bar that felt more like a sweat lodge.  Thankfully, this heatwave is a small one, and is supposed to pass by the end of the week.

If you find yourself unable to move much before the heat breaks, I suggest you give a couple albums a listen.  Over at NPR, they are streaming the new Sufjan Stevens album,  The Age of Adz.  While Stevens can be a bit precious for me at times, I thought the same thing about Joanna Newsom until I saw her in concert.  I have not listened to all of Stevens’ new record, but I like what I have heard so far.

One album that I have listened to (several times) is Deerhunter’s Halcyon Digest.  Pitchfork has already given it a glowing review, so I’ll just add a brief layman’s opinion: it is one of the best guitar-based records I have heard in years.  NPR is also streaming Halcyon Digest, so stop reading this and listen to some Deerhunter.*

*When NPR takes down this free preview, you can listen to Halcyon Digest, and pretty much whatever other music you desire, at Grooveshark.

Where Do You Live?

So I’m going to be busy as hell over the next few weeks (moving, applying for jobs, writing a book, etc.), so my posts may be shorter and more sporadic for a little while.  That said, I will try to at least post interesting links, and my first offering is a series of maps portraying the racial pocketing of major American cities.  The dots each represent 25 people, and the color breakdown is as such: pink dots are whites, blue dots are African-Americans, orange dots are Latina/os, and green dots are Asians or Asian-Americans.  Above is the map of Los Angeles, and for anyone who has lived there, it probably isn’t that surprising.  Los Angeles has long been a heavily segregated city with some surprisingly mixed pockets sprinkled about.  Still, seeing it represented in this way is instructive, as it shows the seemingly arbitrary nature of where one pocket of ethnic homogeneity ends and another begins.  Both Mike Davis and Norman Klein have written about the role of real estate developers in creating and maintaining these sorts of ethnic divisions, and I recommend that you read their excellent books whenever you get some spare time.  I know that it is in short supply these days.

You’re Projecting

I hadn’t been to the Wiltern Theater, at Wilshire and Western in Los Angeles, in over five years, but I am certainly glad I decided to make my return trip the latest Southern California Dirty Projectors show.  By now everyone has listened to their album Bitte Orca, and there’s little I have to add to the accolades it has received.  That said, they way I tend to judge a band is largely in relation to how their live show conforms to the expectations created by their recorded material.  It’s almost a cliche to say that you like Radiohead, for example, but having seen them live a few times, it’s hard to consider them anything other than brilliant, because their live show far outshines their incredible records.  In fact, it’s not even close.  On the other hand, having just seen Panda Bear at the horribly run FYF Fest, I’m not sure I would pay to hear him live again.  I like his music, but seeing it live didn’t add much to my enjoyment.

The Dirty Projectors are firmly on the Radiohead side of the spectrum, as their live performance made me appreciate the poppiness that undergirds their experimentalism.  Bitte Orca was a challenging listen for me at first, as the clash between dissonance and harmony fractures the traditional pop song structures.  Although I have come to love the album for some time now, actually seeing it all come together on stage was instructive.  Guitarist, vocalist, and conductor, Dave Longstreth, has created a band that functions like an adaptable machine, with interchangeable components: plugging in all of the inputs allows the band to achieve a kind of aural thickness seldom heard in live performances; unplugging most of the components allows the Dirty Projectors to play with foregrounding and silence in equally compelling ways.  The band’s two obvious signature elements are the vocals of Angel Deradoorian, Amber Coffman, and Haley Dekle, and Longstreth’s noodley guitar work.  However, it is the band’s rhythm section that actually moves the music forward and firmly grounds it in the world of R&B/pop.  This radical re-imagining within a genre is a hallmark of most good art, but it took seeing the band live to appreciate the balance and productive tension that Longstreth has created with his instruments, both animate and inanimate.

And, for the record, Angel Deradoorian is absolutely adorable.

Nerd Alert!

So this might appeal to very few people, but if you are interested in watching a civil, intelligent debate about tax policy, I invite you to check out the Bloggingheads showdown between Annie Lowrey and Reihan Salam.  Lowrey is the economics blogger for The Washington Independent, and one of the best spokespeople for liberal/progressive ideas on taxation.  Unlike a lot of lefty bloggers, she rarely strays from talking about money, which I appreciate.  Not everyone should pretend to be an expert on everything.  Oh, and did I mention that she is really really pretty?

Reihan Salam, on the other hand, is not quite so pretty to these eyes, and I really don’t love his politics most of the time (he writes for The National Review), but I do respect him more than just about any conservative/libertarian blogger working right now.  While I have huge problems with a lot of his proposals that incentivize marriage and child-rearing, and frankly disagree with most of what he writes (particularly on education-he’s another one who’s way too gung ho on the whole online education thing), I respect the fact that he actually tries to argue real points, avoiding both straw men and ad hominem attacks.  It’s refreshing to see the place that publishes Jonah Goldberg, a guy whose articles I use in my composition classes as examples of how not to write, also publish someone whose work is rhetorically honest.

(Sorry I can’t directly embed the Bloggingheads player.  Using the bare bones, web-based version of WordPress precludes this sort of fanciness.)