How The New Yorker is different from The New York Post

Since the IJG dabbles in musical satire and potentially offensive comedic bits from time to time, I try to cut other similarly-inclined artists a lot of slack. Many of my own cultural heroes have pissed somebody off at some point, and I get how that's an occupational hazard for anyone interested in playing around on the fringes.

That's why I didn't say much about the New Yorker cover that caused such controversy during the last presidential election. I mean, on the one hand, I could understand why people were so offended by it.

But I also understand that while politics is a field that calls out for clarity, good art, alas, is often ambiguous. I don't know if the New Yorker cartoon was good art, but it was certainly ambiguous, in that multiple interpretations could be credibly attributed to it. One of those interpretations -- that Obama was a terrorist looking to destroy the US -- was indeed offensive and racist. And the last thing anyone needed at that moment in the campaign was another instance of a fundamentally stupid assumption recklessly tossed into an already volatile discourse. The fact that there was an alternate interpretation of the same cartoon -- a Cleavon-Little-in-Blazing-Saddles interpretation, in which Obama, looking directly at the viewer, seemed to be saying "excuse me while I whip out, and taunt you with, every ridiculous preconception you have about me" -- was less important than the fact that the very people who didn't understand that Obama wasn't a terrorist in the first place would probably never understand that take on the cartoon.



In any case, the bigger point is that with the New Yorker cartoon, at least there was a credible alternative to the racist interpretation. Which is more than can be said for this travesty published by the New York Post.

When pressed about the possible comparison of Obama to a dead chimpanzee, Post editor, Col Allen, provided this rationalization:

The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington's efforts to revive the economy.

Allen is right that sometimes the juxtaposition of seemingly unlike things can lead to witty social commentary. I seem to remember a political cartoon from the 1980 presidential campaign, in which Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Walter Mondale were pictured as the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion, singing, respectively, "If I only had a brain," "a heart," and "the nerve." But that cartoon worked because there was a connection -- a surprising, funny connection -- between the three candidates and their three unexpected doppelgangers from the Wizard of Oz. In the end, the illustration eloquently and elegantly summed up some of the political criticism that was floating around at the time.

The Post cartoon also makes a connection between two seemingly unlike things, but it is not the connection the paper so disingenuously claims -- that both stories merely happened to be in the news at the same time. Any idiot could create a cartoon using that technique -- and, say what you like, the cartoonist in this case, Sean Delonas, doesn't seem to be an idiot. (He does, however, seem to be a bit of an asshole.)

No, the specific juxtaposition speaks volumes. I mean, shit. Instead of a dead chimp, why not choose other topical and current images of demise? Why not the geese that flew into the engines of the Hudson plane, for instance? Why not the latest kid to get booted off American Idol? Why not the (unfairly) disgraced Michael Phelps? Couldn't the caption "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill" have worked equally well in any of those scenarios?

No, there was a particular reason Delonas chose to link the chimp story with the story about Obama's stimulus package -- which was, incidentally, how the bill was described ad nauseum in the weeks leading up to its passage, so no claiming that the unnamed author of the stim is actually Pelosi (as if murdering a different politician would somehow be more palatable). The idea of a "police shooting" comes ready-made with certain associations. The idea of using a chimpanzee as a stand-in for a human being comes ready-made with certain associations. We may not want to admit those associations to ourselves. We may want to pretend that they refer to ancient history. But pretending and denying are not viable (or sane) responses to pathological phenomena.

And don't kid yourself: if we still have this sort of thing floating around in our national psyche, then "pathological" is really the right word.

Everything suddenly got less interesting, and then more interesting again

Everybody's favorite left-wing, named-after-a-rock-guitar-god, Zappa-loving radio host is now off the air. Again.

I understand that some people hate her, and some people love her. But in terms of the overall picture of media bias in this country (which leans pretty far to the right once you get out of the big cities), I'd say on balance that this is a bad development. Though I imagine RR will soon be broadcasting again from somewhere else. The woman is clearly a survivor.

In other news, porn star Stormy Daniels seems to be engaging in a kind of performance art. Hooray for performance art!

(Or maybe it's for real? Nothing wrong with that, in principle. I mean, if this guy can be president...)

Sometimes you can see the steam coming out of his ears

Alright, here I go again.

Why do I get so mad at the TV people? And why in particular do I get maddest at the very TV people whose hearts I know are in the right place, and with whom I tend to agree, politically?

Cue Keith Olbermann's show last night, and his opening report, on the (apparently insane) governor of Illinois. There were two moments that irritated me about this thing. The first can be found at around 2:40 in the following vid:



To wit: Obama, in footage from an exchange with the press, responds to the Blagojevich nonsense, but declines to go into any detail. Olbermann (back in the studio, of course) interjects:

Olbermann outburst number 1: "Oh, no, not four more years of not commenting on ongoing investigations, not that crap, that's not change we can believe in. Surely there's something the president-elect could say about his involvement without compromising Mr. Fitzgerald's efforts."

[Cue to footage of Obama doing exactly that]

Olbermann outburst number 2: "Now, was that so hard?"

Let me get this straight. Olbermann, reading from a teleprompter, knew, before making outburst number 1, that outburst number 2 would be following a few seconds later?

He knew, in other words, that outburst number 2 effectively made outburst number 1 irrelevant? He knew, while he was insisting that Obama "say something about his own involvement without compromising Mr. Fitzgerald's efforts," that Obama had already said something about his own involvement without compromising Mr. Fitzgerald's efforts?

What the fuck?

Later, Olbermann interviewed Jonathan Alter:



And here we have irritating moment number 2: a glimpse of the sort of power trip that comes from manufacturing drama out of thin air. It starts when Olbermann pursues the Obama connection (or non-connection):

"Well, to that point, eleven minutes into a nightly news broadcast tonight was the headline 'Barack Obama's First Scandal,' and it was eleven minutes into one of the British news casts, ITV. As much of an oversimplification as it is, and as much as it's contradicted by what Blagojevich said on those tapes, is there a risk of the implication sticking to the president-elect that this is his first political scandal?"

Okay, I have to ask: when a broadcaster gets into "is there a risk of the implication sticking" territory, specifically concerning an implication that has not yet stuck, how exactly is that different from the classic politician's gambit of deftly raising questions about an opponent -- especially guilt-by-association type questions -- without ever coming out and accusing them of anything? Isn't it the same dynamic? Plant the seed, and then step aside while it grows (or dies) -- never thinking about or owning your own responsibility in the process?

If the "Obama involvement" angle was discredited from the get-go (and Fitzgerald himself insisted that it was), why even raise it here? Until and unless new, contradictory evidence emerges, I have to ask, again: what the fuck?

It's amazing to me how much of what passes for news these days is actually the anticipation of news. So much of what journalists (especially broadcast journalists) do is wrapped up in the pseudo-science of making predictions. In part, that's the ruthlessness of the media-industrial complex's bottom line: you have to have enough "stuff" to fill up the hour, and if you don't actually have all the data on a story by air time (but you know you're dealing with a big story), you want people to continue to believe that you are "the most trusted name in news" or whatever. So you have to convincingly extemporize your way through the subject. You want to appear authoritative, right? You don't want to appear to be as clueless as the people watching at home, do you?

(Incidentally, note to networks: my ability to trust you is inversely related to the number of times you tell me that you're trustworthy. If you have to tell me you're cutting through the bull, I'm sorry, but I'm going to think you're bullshitting me.)

At what point does this mania for prediction help to create the news? At what point is the media getting in the business of self-fulfilling prophecy? Not out of a vindictiveness toward any one politician or party, but just because it has become standard operating procedure?

Look: Obama should not be protected from media critique. (Duh! Of course.) But these broadcasters need to get a new game. Because four more years of this shit is not change I can believe in.

Ugly details

This becomes even more annoying in the cold hard light of sobriety.

A depressing possibility, from Ezra Klein:

I've yet to hear a plausible scenario in which Clinton wins the superdelegates. Just about every serious path to the presidency requires Obama to utterly implode, to be rendered non-competitive for the nomination. In that scenario, the fact that Clinton remained in the race might make her a likelier nominee than Gore, but her continued campaigning doesn't have much of an impact. What she is doing by a mounting a basically hopeless but still quite furious campaign is exposing Obama's weaknesses. McCain's folks might have suspected that they target states like Pennsylvania and Ohio and Florida, but now they have a precinct-by-precinct map of where he underperforms, ready narratives to activate in their negative campaigning (they don't have to grope around to create a line of attack), and a media that's now convinced of his vulnerabilities.

A spot-on complaint from Hunter, at Daily (and nightly) Kos:

Listening to Clinton campaign surrogates on television, before the PA votes ever started to trickle in, was truly painful. Suddenly one state was the only state that mattered. All those other states were merely prelude: if Clinton could eke out a victory in this state, trailing in the delegate count would no longer be significant, and it would be a brand new race, and Obama would be on the ropes, and Clinton would suddenly win a billion dollars, a pony, and the moon; attention must be paid. It is not enough for Obama to simply be winning the nomination according to the rules laid out in advance: no, he must win the "right" way, according to the Clinton campaign and surrogates, or it doesn't count. He has to win the "right" states. And he has to win primaries, not caucuses. And he has to "close the deal", shutting Clinton out of remaining wins entirely, or it proves something ominous (the fact that Clinton has not been able to "close the deal" against him, and is instead trailing him badly and irreparably, barring superdelegate do-over, somehow does not count against her own merits.) And he not only has to win the "popular vote", but he has to win that, too, the right way, which is to say by counting only certain states and not counting others. And he has to win small towns, not just big population centers, because winning big population centers is elitist. Except that if he wins small towns in the West and Midwest, that doesn't count, because it's more important to win the big population centers. And all of this somehow proves that Clinton is a better candidate against McCain than Obama is, even though the polls to date have consistently shown Obama is a better candidate against McCain than Clinton is.

[...]

More irritating is that the negative attacks presented are, well, stupid, and seem increasingly to be predicated on the notion that voters, the press, the pundits, and we political hangers-on are all idiots seeking to cling to the most shallow of accusations. The press and the pundits? OK, I'll give you that one. The rest of us, however, weren't born yesterday.

An explanation from Sara Smith at Wonkette:

This morning, millions of sad, youthful Obama voters are waking up and wondering what the hell happened in Pennsylvania. Here's the scoop, little ones: Pennsylvania's elderly are so old that they make John McCain look young, and they're so numerous that you'd think they were still capable of reproduction. In fact, the only state with more elderly residents is Florida, and at least those old people moved there. They want to be in Florida. Meanwhile, old people in Pennsylvania resemble the humble sea cucumber: sessile, rooted, a prisoner of the very earth that nourishes them. Naturally, these people vote for Hillary Clinton.

Dick Morris, former Clinton advisor and current Clinton foe, puts it this way:

"Pennsylvania Democrats, in other words, suffer from future shock. They welcome old, established ways and embrace dynasties happily because they are so familiar. (Look at the Bob Caseys - dad was governor, the son is senator.) [...] But don't expect the open primaries of Indiana and North Carolina to behave like Pennsylvania's geriatrics. Both states are younger, especially North Carolina, and independents can vote in each primary. (North Carolina is where a lot of the young people who fled Pennsylvania winters and job losses ended up)."

Poor, poor Pennsylvania. Even when it wins, it loses. We look forward to youthful, vibrant Indiana and North Carolina finding a new and different reason to avoid voting for Obama.

Well, that last one made me laugh, anyway. Thanks, Sara!

Early AM addenda

DrumsnWhistles: Not this time.

And lo and behold, she's right. Minutes after finishing her post (with its predictions about the media response), I found this on the AP.

Related (in a stream-of-consciousness way): a few months back, I happened to believe Oregon wasn't going to matter much in this primary process.

Now it appears things might be otherwise.

You don't need me to tell you this, but what the hell: Oregonians, please be sure you've registered to vote.

Cuz you know:

UNLESS someone like you
cares a whole awful lot
nothing is going to get better.
It's not.

(You know the source, right?)

That's right, cling to it. Cling, cling, cling.

The tour post is still in the queue, but in the meantime, I needed to vent about this, which I have watched evolve into a miserable excuse for a "story" over the last hour or so.

Is it "looking down on someone" to acknowledge their frustrations or unhappiness?

Or is the issue even deeper than that? Are Clinton and McCain suggesting that the working class in this country is not bitter?

Exactly how self-deceptive are we willing to be? Doesn't it become, you know, exhausting after awhile?

UPDATE (Saturday)

Wow, watching this play out has been like watching manic, parched drunks fighting over an ounce of Miller Lite.

Or, as Ezra Klein put it:

[I]t's one of the depressing realities of our media landscape that it is both a) totally predictable that they will devote hundreds of hours to this story in the next few days and b) utterly unimaginable that they will give the candidate 3 minutes and 44 seconds to clarify his comments. And why would they? That might kill the story!

And in a later post (this is even better):

This may sound odd, but man am I disappointed that stuff is happening again in the presidential campaign. These last few weeks of relative quiet have been terrific. All the older reporters tell me that this is supposedly the greatest campaign of my lifetime and the thing that makes political journalism worthwhile, but seriously, look where we are today: Discussing an off-the-cuff comment in which one of the Democrats suggested that economic anxiety manifests in cultural conservatism.

[...]

It's worth saying that I'm not defending Obama here. I see nothing that he needs defense from. There's no actual attack being levied that anyone can rebut, or ideas being tossed out that anyone can argue. Instead, Obama has said something Politically Damaging. And it will Damage him. And we'll all watch to see how badly.

But let's be clear: It's not damaging because we think it foretells him doing something harmful to the country. It's not damaging because it suggests his policy agenda is poorly conceived, or his priorities are awry. If you think of policy and politics as two circles in a Venn diagram, this is damage that only exists in the politics circle, and doesn't even come close to the area of intersection. We reporters have to cover it, of course, because it's Really Important, and matters more than the housing plans of all the candidates put together. But it matters in a completely self-referential way, it matters only because it matters, not because it means anything about Obama, or illuminates anything about his potential presidency. It's a hollow scandal. Those housing plans, by contrast, don't "matter" in a way that convinces the media to cover them, or to relentlessly hound McCain about the inadequacy of his proposal. They don't "matter," but they are meaningful. And this is why I don't like writing about the campaign. It's full of hollow scandals and ignored travesties. But you have to cover the hollow scandals, because they're are blown up until they're definitional in the campaign. And that leaves me writing about high-profile non-events in a way that helps cement their importance, even if I'm writing to deride their legitimacy.

That doesn't sound odd to me at all. It sounds spot-the-fuck-on.


If you haven't seen it, here's Obama's initial response, which I thought was pretty good:

Old habits

I'm sorry. I know it's not fair of me to presume to read the mind of another human being.

But in the aftermath of the Obama speech, every time I have heard the right-wing machine attempt to spin it as "not enough," or as "political posturing"; every time I have heard of "collective groans"; every time somebody says the content was "grating" -- every time, I am reminded of the following clip, and every time I suspect that this is what these people are really thinking:

Fearless

Ezra Klein is right. The power of that Obama speech -- the power of the candidate himself -- is traceable to a characteristic so rarely seen in politics: honesty.

As I listened, I was reminded that, for all of the left-generated criticism of Obama as "not progressive enough" (do you remember how common that was back in the Fall?) -- there is simply no way a Dennis Kucinich or a Ralph Nader (both of whom I admire greatly) could put the issue of race on the table so deftly, respectfully, and forcefully.

Whether you think race is our crucible issue as a nation is up to you, of course. I happen to think it is.

Klein also rightly points out that the speech was pretty measured and formal -- not the dramatic stump oratory that Obama is well-known for. But can you imagine the mindset it must take to be able to execute a delivery like that under such intense political pressure? I don't think I heard him trip over his language once (though, since we were getting Thandie ready for school, I probably didn't hear every single word). How many of us would even be able to think clearly in those circumstances?

The man is unflappable -- and not the "idiot's haze" unflappable of a George Bush. No, this is the good unflappable -- the kind that says "I'm patient enough to work things out with you in an open and respectful way. Let's not be deterred by the bullshit."

Ironically, one measure of the speech's success is the fact that the right wing critique of Obama is spinning out of control in response to it. You know the subtext by now: these folks reeeeaaaaally want to run against Clinton in the Fall. I suspect that they thought they had finally found Obama's fatal flaw -- and until now much of the mainstream response to the Wright controversy may have supported that conclusion. To watch that slipping away... well, it must be pretty goddamned frustrating.

But I hope you'll forgive me if I say I don't care.

Media, by ass

Yet another example of how I am so far out of the loop that I don't even know where the loop is:

Most Americans don't read political blogs.

One of the more surprising and counterintuitive observations of that piece: "The generation most likely to read such blogs are those age 63 or older." (Although something about these numbers in general seems misleading -- perhaps it's the absence of context.)

I was also surprised to learn that "blogs often adopt a specific point of view," and that that is what makes them different from "traditional, mainstream media."

Woah!

Maybe I'm crazy, but I think it is very rare indeed to find a media source (mainstream or otherwise) that attains the much-touted ideal of journalistic objectivity. C-SPAN comes pretty close, at least in terms of its framing device (low-key, evasive hosts, minimal graphics, inoffensive music, a let-everyone-get-their-say-and-then-we-move-on approach). But even there, bias inevitably (if unintentionally) creeps in -- as evidenced by a comment at this post on Greta Wodele:

I have awakened many mornings to check C-SPAN's Washington Journal, and if it's Greta, I don't care what the topic or who the guest is, I'll watch in amazement for a while.

So if you're liberal, and the guest is Karl Rove, do you suddenly find yourself less angry at his stupidity just because Ms. Rodele is hosting? Yikes.

Code can be objective. Words, images, sounds? Not so much.

Seth Godin video

Haven't had a chance to watch it yet, but it's almost guaranteed to be a winner.

Thank you...

...to nolalily and Jim Newell for writing this and this, respectively.

Newell does us the favor of including the footage of the interview, and nolalily links to hilzoy's spectacular overview of Obama's legislative record, which is as solid a refutation of this silly charge (that Obama doesn't have the experience or know-how to make laws) as I've seen.

But neither includes anything about the way in which, immediately after cutting back to the studio, Keith Olbermann (co-anchoring with Matthews) gently pulled the rug out from his pompous desk-mate by asking (I'm paraphrasing here): "To be fair to Senator Obama, can you name anything that Congress has accomplished in the last eight years?" At which point the real bluster began (Matthews responded with something to the effect that "That's too broad of a question to answer here"), and after a few more awkward exchanges, they were off to a commercial. I would've loved to have been on that set in the moments afterward, let me tell you.

(As I said, I'm paraphrasing the exchange -- YouTube it in a few days and I'm sure you'll find the clip.)

Anyway, so gracias to Olbermann too. I had been growing less and less fond of his reporting in recent weeks -- his stance on the Obama-Reagan thing and his seeming approval of Shuster's suspension were particularly annoying to me. But this is a welcome return-to-form.

UPDATE:

Crooks and Liars has the clip.

UPDATE #2:

hilzoy's response is beautiful. And the comments point toward Kirk Watson's own (pretty goddammed gracious and mature) take on what happened. (Watson is the guy Matthews grilled).

Little victories where you can get them

So I bit the bullet this week (well, last week) and joined Garageband. Actually, I re-joined -- I had submitted a few tracks from our first album, Hardcore, way back in 2001, but because that was such a (relatively) long time ago (and because I "dropped out" of the Garageband scene shortly afterwards), I had to create a fresh account for the new stuff I'll be submitting. Hence the distinction between The Industrial Jazz Group and Industrial Jazz Group (yeah, I know, I should probably fix that at some point).

You can still read the reviews we got for the two Hardcore tracks I submitted: "Plus or Minus Eleven" and "Cozy 'n Tooty". They're kind of, well, funny. (For some reason the word "cute" pops up a lot, which I don't understand, but nevertheless find amusing.) Of course, you can also listen to the songs if you've never heard them.

This go-round, I've started with "The Job Song." Which, now that I think about it, allows me to do an unscientific comparison of the promotional usefulness of Garageband and Amie Street (where I uploaded the same tune a short while back -- as described here).

My first impression is that although both sites rely on user reviews, Garageband (which is, incidentally, connected to the "social music discovery service" iLike, and is the brainchild of ex-Talking Head Jerry Harrison) provides more tangible evidence that people are actually interacting with your work (and of course that's useful from the standpoint of getting to know your audience). This is possibly because the metaphor for Amie Street is "store" -- it is essentially a warehouse for MP3s, where prices are determined by demand (which is in turn reflected in user recommendations, or RECs -- all of these sites simply must have their own lexicon, I guess). So far "The Job Song" has received only one "REC" at Amie Street -- which may partly be because I have done very little to actually promote it on the site. But it may also be because of the site metaphor. I have no doubt that the folks who use the site are passionate music fans, but the M.O. seems less-than-urgent: users are simply browsing an online store.

In contrast, the metaphor for Garageband is "contest," with all of the trappings that entails: charts, the possibility for negative and positive reviews (remember, Amie Street only allows "recommendations"), a comparatively elaborate protocol for reviewing, and "prizes" like "track of the day."

Which, incidentally, is what "The Job Song" is going to be tomorrow (on the jazz page).

I don't know if that little accomplishment means anything beyond the (possibly lucky) fact that our first three reviews were pretty good (and also humorous -- apparently I should be writing musicals), but it does feel nice.

Um, what?

Like Hilzoy, I have wanted to avoid piling on. But this is just too crazy not to post.



No, really. That's an official promo spot.

The couple who follows the horse race together...

...well, let's just say it's a good thing we share the same political affiliation. (Though she is a bit more of an Edwards fan than I.)

Anyhow, we recently got some discursive mileage out of the following topical items:

First: Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post. How wonderful to see a progressively-oriented journalist who finally had the cajones to not only point out the aggressiveness of the Clinton campaign, but to contextualize Obama's controversial comments on the asshole-in-chief who helped make my adolescence so unpleasant (you know the one):

Obama's candidacy not only threatens to obliterate the dream of a Clinton Restoration. It also fundamentally calls into question Bill Clinton's legacy by making it seem . . . not really such a big deal.

That, I believe, is the unforgivable insult. The Clintons picked up on this slight well before Obama made it explicit with his observation that Ronald Reagan had "changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not."

Let's take a moment to consider that remark. Whether it was advisable for Obama to play the role of presidential historian in the midst of a no-holds-barred contest for the Democratic nomination, it's hard to argue with what he said. I think Bill Clinton was a good president, at times very good. And I wouldn't have voted for Reagan if you'd held a gun to my head. But even I have to recognize that Reagan -- like Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union -- was a transformational figure, for better or worse.

Bill Clinton's brilliance was in the way he surveyed the post-Reagan landscape and figured out how to redefine and reposition the Democratic Party so that it became viable again. All the Democratic candidates who are running this year, including Obama, owe him their gratitude.

But Obama has set his sights higher, and implicit in his campaign is a promise, or a threat, to eclipse Clinton's accomplishments. Obama doesn't just want to piece together a 50-plus-1 coalition; he wants to forge a new post-partisan consensus that includes "Obama Republicans" -- the equivalent of the Gipper's "Reagan Democrats." You can call that overly ambitious or even naive, but you can't call it timid. Or deferential.

I was completely in earnest with my above characterization of Reagan -- I found it very tedious (and often miserable) growing up amid the cookie-cutter dreariness of not only his political leadership, but also the cultural tone he set for the country. So I understand why even the mention of his name inspires wrath in the progressive community. But even my second-favorite living newcaster, Keith Olbermann -- my first favorite is Bill Moyers -- was basically unfair to Obama in the aftermath of the Reagan comments, framing the story with a downright scolding tone, and utterly failing to contextualize it (as Eric Zorn rightly points out, Obama never spoke approvingly of the actual content of Reagan's ideas). Up until that point, it seemed very much that there had been a kind of hunger building in the mainstream media, a sense of anticipation that could only be fulfilled when Obama finally tripped up somehow. And if he didn't trip up? Well, at the time it almost felt like somebody wanted to push him.

How interesting, incidentally, that this has become the close-reading, new critical election! (Thank heavens for transcripts, eh?) Silly me, thinking that a PhD in English Literature was worthless.

Item number two is this hilarious item from that paragon of quality journalism: C-N-fucking-N. Interestingly, it's a self-critique (I suppose when it comes down to it, CNN doesn't care whether you love or hate them, as long as you watch / read what they publish). The flap is essentially over the cable station's somewhat simplistic argument that black women will have a hard time choosing their candidate in this year's democratic primaries, because they will be conflicted over going with a racial choice (Obama) vs. a gender choice (Clinton).

Daphne's favorite part is also mine:

An e-mailer named Tiffany responded sarcastically [to the original CNN report]: "Duh, I'm a black woman and here I am at the voting booth. Duh, since I'm illiterate I'll pull down the lever for someone. Hm... Well, he black so I may vote for him... oh wait she a woman I may vote for her... What Ise gon' do? Oh lordy!"

* * * * *
And how 'bout them campaign theme songs?

Romney has used Elvis Presley's "A Little Less Conversation" as his entrance music to convey his can-do style -- in other words, less talk, more action. But Romney's supporters might just want to ignore the part of the song where Elvis tells his paramour to "close your mouth and . . . satisfy me, baby."

Now that's going to give me nightmares for sure.

One at a time (part 2)

An Oregon woman is suing the RIAA:

A disabled single mother from Beaverton has filed a federal lawsuit against the Recording Industry Association of America, claiming that she is the victim of abusive legal tactics, threats and illegal spying as part of an overzealous campaign to crack down on music pirating.

The recording industry sued Tanya J. Andersen, 44, in 2005, accusing her of violating copyright laws by illegally downloading music onto her computer. Andersen claims in a suit she filed last week in U.S. District Court in Oregon that the recording industry refused to drop its case after its own expert supported her claims of innocence.

This is exactly the sort of case that those in the "copyright consensus" -- the portfolio of corporate interests who since the advent of the "digital age" have been busily pushing for more and more egregious copyright laws -- assume they will never have to face.

And with good reason. What kind of personal threshold must one have crossed (or have been pushed over) in order to be willing to take on one of these behemoths? One only has to notice that when things flow in the other direction -- e.g., when an individual or a small company (such as an indie label, or a community orchestra) is sued by a multinational corporation like Disney -- it almost doesn’t matter whether the “little guy” has a good legal case. In fact, it almost doesn’t matter what the law actually says. The only “known” in such a situation is the guarantee of exorbitant legal fees. The actual outcome is up for grabs, thanks to an erratic judiciary and the new, untested quality of the laws (some of which, it should be noted, are fairly ambiguously worded).

The worst case scenario involves financial ruin (legal fees plus tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines) and the possibility of jail time. No wonder nobody wants to be the guinea pig.

Until now, anyway. What can I say? The lady has a lot of guts, and I wish her the best.

One at a time

Yes! Score one for the public domain.

For a sense of what is at stake here, I quote from the opinion:

Each plaintiff in this case relies on artistic works in the public domain for his or her livelihood. Lawrence Golan, for example, performs and teaches works by foreign composers including Dmitri Shostakovich and Igor Stravinsky. Before the CTEA [Sonny Bono's law extending the term of copyright, sometimes also referred to as the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act"], plaintiffs anticipated that certain works would soon outlive copyright protection and enter the public domain. The CTEA delayed this moment by 20 years. Prior to the URAA [the Uraguay Round Agreements Act, another egregious update to copyright law -- which in this case was being used to pull works out of the public domain], each plaintiff utilized or performed works by foreign artists in the public domain, such as Sergei Prokofiev’s renowned “Peter and the Wolf.” Since the passage of the URAA, plaintiffs must pay higher performance fees and sheet music rentals as well as other royalties. In many cases, these costs are prohibitive.

The primary gain here (at least for those who are interested in copyright sanity) was to set up a potential challenge to the URAA. As far as I can tell the CTEA comes out pretty much unscathed, but the URAA must now pass First Amendment scrutiny upon review.

I know there are bigger political issues out there, of course -- I doubt any of the presidential candidates are going to be making stump speeches about copyright any time soon. But I happen to think it's a big fucking deal that there are people trying to stop media conglomerates from executing what James Boyle calls a "second enclosure movement" -- an enclosure, that is, of the "intangible commons of the mind."

Other reasons you should give a shit:

The love of our little Johann Sebastian for music was uncommonly great even at this tender age. In a short time he had fully mastered all the pieces his brother [Joseph Cristoph] had voluntarily given him to learn. But his brother possessed a book of clavier pieces by the most famous masters of the day—Froberger, Kerl, Pachelbel—and this, despite all his pleading and for who knows what reason, was denied him. His zeal to improve himself thereupon gave him the idea of practicing the following innocent deceit. This book was kept in a cabinet whose doors consisted only of grillwork. Now, with his little hands he could reach through the grillwork and roll the book up (for it had only a paper cover); accordingly, he would fetch the book out at night, when everyone had gone to bed and, since he was not even possessed of a light, copy it by moonlight. In six months’ time he had these musical spoils in his own hands. Secretly and with extraordinary eagerness he was trying to put it to use, when his brother, to his great dismay, found out about it, and without mercy took away from him the copy he had made with such pains. We may gain a good idea of our little Sebastian’s sorrow over this loss by imagining a miser whose ship, sailing for Peru, has foundered with its cargo of a hundred thousand thaler. He did not recover the book until after the death of his brother.

As you may have surmised, the subject of that anecdote is one JS Bach (from an obituary, as quoted in Christoph Wolff's bio). Sounds to me like he was engaging in a primitive version of what we would now call P2P. (And Joseph Christoph sounds an awful lot like the RIAA.) Heavens to Mergatroy!

And how 'bout this recollection by Mr. Zappa (the media is different, but the gist is the same):

By the time I was really into high school [… m]y real social life revolved around records and the band I played with. There wasn’t much work for us then. We’d get a job maybe, every two months at a teen hop, but most of the time, I was back in my room listening to records. It was the records, not TV, which I didn’t watch, that brainwashed me. I’d listen to them over and over again. The ones I couldn’t buy, I’d steal, and the ones I couldn’t steal I’d borrow, but I’d get them somehow. I had about six hundred records—45s—at one time, and I swear I knew the title, group and label of every one. We all used to quiz each other.

That's right, folks. Frank Zappa was a filesharer! (Cue the Dragnet theme.)

Of course we artists have to make a living. But if you fence in the commons of the mind, where are tomorrow's artists (or at least the ones who, say, can't afford a CD habit at $15 a pop) going to go to find out what has come before them?

Well, YouTube, of course!

(That bitchen photo of Lessig c/o Ian White, by the way.)

Art of the mix tape: no. 1

Here I go again, delving into that oh-so-troublesome activity -- you know, the one which I have inferred in the past is a complete waste of time (or at least something about which I am fairly conflicted) -- writing about music. What's my problem? I'm an addict, I guess.

I'm pretty sure I have already mentioned the working title of the next IJG release (which is currently in process) somewhere in this bloggy mess. But if not, I've been calling it The Art of the Mix Tape, vol. 1. There are numerous references going on there, but the literal one is most relevant to this post, as I hope that what follows will be the first in a series of bloggified mix-tape tracklists (sorry, I'm not ready to start uploading completed mixes yet, though CD-R copies are a possibility if there is an interest).

Like I said, what's my problem? I guess it started with the realization that, of late, I rarely listen to complete "albums" (a term I'm using in the metaphorical, not the LP-specific sense). Maybe in the car once in a while -- but if you're driving, car listening is not really "listening," unless you're being reckless. And usually I'll play albums around the house during the day, but of course I'm always multitasking when I'm "around the house during the day," so that's more like a background music sort of situation too. When I really want to sit down to do some focused (or "deep") listening (usually long after everyone else has gone to bed), it's generally a "surf iTunes" kind of affair. A little bit from column A, a little bit from column B -- kind of like a private radio show with me as both the host and the listener.

This jumping around may be a weakness of mine, I'm not sure. I suppose it sounds a little like evidence of a short attention span, but that wouldn't explain the fact that I can listen to music in this way for hours. And I should point out that there are certain pieces (string quartets, say) where I feel like I'm cheating if I haven't digested the whole thing in a single sitting -- whether or not "the whole thing" takes up an entire disc. But in general I suffer from an urge toward eclecticism.

(Incidentally, sometimes I wonder why so many CD-producers seem consistently compelled to "fill up" the entire available 74-80 minutes with sound, as if somehow the listener is being duped if the content is any shorter? Have we forgotten that there can be as much beauty in well-deployed succintness as there is in an expansive work like Beethoven's Ninth (which, incidentally, is probably the source of the original 74-minute length of the medium)? My own tunes are generally between 5-10 minutes (which, compared to the Ninth is not very long at all), but IJG albums (and many of our live sets, now that I think about it) haven't yet gone longer than an hour, because sixty minutes is about as much of my own stuff as I can stand in a single sitting.)

Anyway, much of my listening time nowadays is taken up with a type of activity that I actually consider a kind of composing: devising mix tapes. Here too I am using the media term in a general, not specific sense -- of course my mixes no longer go on cassettes but end up as either iTunes playlists or, if I really like them, as CD-Rs. But magnetic tape seems the right metaphor for this process because it was this technology that first provided the widespread opportunity for listeners to assemble their own albums out of whatever shorter pieces they saw fit. When I was a kid, "mix tapes" (helpfully organized with dopey titles like "Billy Bang's Bawdy B-Sides") were how I kept track of the music that mattered to me, and how I shared my love of specific artists or pieces with my friends. The ones that survived endless replays still serve as useful touchstones for specific moments of my musical development.

I recently realized that the idea of a "mix tape" also resonates for me as a metaphor for what I am after as an artist. I have been trying like mad for several years now to divest myself of the impulse to view music as a linearly-evolving phenomenon in which the artist's role is to come up with the next innovation -- a pursuit that must of necessity repeat itself every few years (thus the concept of successive artistic "schools" or "movements," all developing in some relation to a timeline, and thus all beholden to varying notions of "progress" or "retrenchment"). I do see the value in linearity (obviously one of the main engines driving the development of western music for the last few centuries), but as I get older it has become less interesting to me than the more, well, "wholistic" (call it totalist if you like, but that wouldn't be exactly right, and besides, it sounds too much like "totalitarianism") approach of trying to look at everything that has been done, and attempting to incorporate it all (or even, say, a generous smattering of it) into a personally distinctive, generous, celebratory hybrid. Truly innovative musical developments seem (in their rhetoric, at least) to resist hybridity to some extent -- typically casting off the "shackles" of some preceding idea -- but I'm after hybridity in my life, and I'm after hybridity in my art. Which is not to say that I've achieved either, or that either is thoroughly possible (it's always a question of degree, I guess) -- just that this is my current modus operandi.

I know I'll need to say more about this "postmodernism-through-zen" (huh?) thing at some point (I'm still figuring out what I mean by it, anyway). But for now, enough blather. On to the mix! It's a work-in-progress (as they always are), and it's heavily weighted in certain directions, but I've tried it out in a few contexts, and it's a good listen. I'm gonna attempt to be sparing on the commentary, but on most of these, I can't resist (damn you, left brain!)...

Art of the Mix Tape No 1

[Note: I started with the intention of linking all of these, but that proved to be too tedious a task. A simple google search will yield up something interesting on most of 'em.]

1. Rene Hall's Orchestra And Willy Joe: "Twitchy"

Your basic out-of-tune call-and-response rock-and-roll goodness. The unitar riff does indeed sound like it is twitching (a unitar is a one-string guitar: get it?).

2. Gene Pitney: "Town Without Pity"

3. Gene Pitney: "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance"

Bombastic and melodramatic as hell, Gene Pitney was one of the poppier of the early rock idols. It's hard to hear this stuff now as anything other than camp, but some would argue that Pitney preceded the Beatles in his presentation of new textures (sitars, for instance) for pop music. Like another dude on this list (see no. 6), his voice was heavily vibrato-fied. So sue me: I love the over-the-top mood of these.

4. Bob Landers With Willy Joe And His Unitar: "Cherokee Dance"

See track one; add vocals.

5. Katie Lee: "Will to Fail"

Something about the transition from the gutteral stomp of "Cherokee Dance" into the sweet, showtune-ish "Will to Fail" (with its celebration of underachievement) really works for me.

6. Tiny Tim: "I Got You, Babe"

He sings both roles: Sonny and Cher. Beware the fake applause at the end.

7. The Techniques: "Queen Majesty"

8. Rashaan Roland Kirk: "The Entertainer [Done in the Style of the Blues]"

Kirk, playing tenor, proves he can do "gutbucket" with the best of them. Yes, this is the Scott Joplin tune: an amazing, raunchy version, which pulls out the "country" potential of what is essentially an "urban" tune (that's not a very good description, but I don't know how to improve upon it).

9. R. Crumb & His Cheap Suit Serenaders: "Get A Load Of This"

Visual art isn't the only thing R. Crumb does well. Here he is playing tenor banjo in a fine 1970s string band revival outfit (except that here they are doing an original tune about, well, junk food).

10. Midlake: "Roscoe"

I don't usually go for modern indie pop (is that what they're calling it now?). If it has guitars, good-looking singers with perfect hair-dos, heartfelt lyrics, hip art, and youth on its side, chances are I'm going to be turned off immediately. But this tune (which arrived at my ears via a most circuitous route) has been played and replayed by me the proverbial umpteen times. I'm at a loss to explain its appeal -- particularly since it seems to reference what I think may be one of the most overrated bands of all time: Fleetwood Mac.

11. The Maytals: "Six & Seven Books Of Moses"

12. Lee Dorsey: "Working In The Coal Mine"

(Incidentally, I recently learned that this New Orleans icon spent a good deal of his youth living in Portland, OR. Wow!)

13. Hombres: "Am I High"

They probably were, as the talent-depleting effect that drugs can have seems evident here.

14. The Holy Modal Rounders: "Boobs A Lot"

Did I mention that obscenity (and its cultural importance) is an obsession of mine?

15. Herbie Nichols: "House Party Starting"

I know what some of you must be saying: at last, something like "real jazz."

16. Henry Mancini & His Orchestra: "Something For Cat"

17. Gerald Wilson: "Bluesnee"

18. Gary McFarland Orchestra with Bill Evans: "Relections in the Park"

Gary McFarland and Gerald Wilson: underrated, but in different ways. Throw in Herbie Nichols (and what the hell, maybe Roland Kirk as well) and you get a certain theme emerging here...

19. Ganimian & His Orientals: "Come With Me To The Casbah"

20. Folkes Brothers: "Oh Carolina"

Maybe one of the first reggae recordings ever?

21. Marianne Faithfull: "I'm a Loser"

Current MF is sort of Marlene Dietrich without the sex appeal. But she put out a live album a few years back that I simply adored (not least because she took on Weill, to great effect). In any case, don't forget that she once sounded like this. Wispy, breathy, girly -- I think "twee" is the term -- yikes. Anyway, it's not the best rendition of this quintessential Lennon tune (the chorus suffers from the absence of one of the swingin'est basslines Paul McCartney ever played), but it's got a certain beat charm.

22. Doodles Weaver: "Eleanor Rigby"

Why is this here? Apart from the obvious Beatles link to the preceding track, I think I dig this one because I am interested in failure as an aesthetic strategy (it offsets success oh so nicely). This rendition of the classic fails over and over again as Mr. Weaver attempts to remember the lyrics, and, instead of doing so, interpolates his own ridiculous words. (Ah, Doodles. Did you really kill yourself at 72?)

[Photo credit: thanks, "Stupid Nick" (if that really is your name).]