Bend, Ore as a haven for the Times' affluent readers

I skimmed this odd solipsistic piece in Slate last week, and in fact forwarded the link to my friend Joel:

Are Journalists Underpaid? - Pity the sad, broke New York Times reporter.
By Daniel Gross

The piece is about journalists (and other members of the "creative class") "suffering" from, Gross writes, "what David Brooks (in his excellent Bobos in Paradise phase) identified as status-income disequilibrium."

(Brooks was insightful back in those days. As I wrote to Joel, I regret I read half of "Bobos" and then set it down for some reason--it really is a good book. E.g., I set it down just after getting through a section about Jane Jacobs and her Amazon.com: The Death and Life of Great American Cities--another book that's been on the to-read list for a while.)

Gross went on to mention something I'd been noticing too--the Times has been going heavy into "reporting" on the lifestyles of those whose status and incomes are closer to an equilibrium--at high levels:

...much of the expanded coverage of both the Times (Thursday Styles, House & Home, Real Estate) and the Journal (the Friday weekend section, the Saturday edition) is dedicated to the sort of high-end consumption that reporters can't really afford.

Those sections mentioned above, plus Escapes, that pile up at the end of the week...as usual, the question is, who is it that can afford to live like this? The liberal elite, I suppose the populist right-wingers would say.

At times, this coverage tends towards self-parody. Last Friday's Escapes had a piece headlined "The Third Home Comes Within Reach"! The three featured couples for whom that 3rd home has come within reach: an elderly lesbian couple, a younger gay couple, and a token hetero couple (but interracial).

All this is prelude to another piece in that Escapes section. This installment of "Havens": Bend, Oregon: Where Timber Was King, the Golf Club Replaces the Ax.

Thought that one might be of interest. Plenty of real estate quotes sprinkled throughout, plus Pros ("Growth has brought big-name music - Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, Bob Dylan - to town, and restaurants appeal to sophisticated palates.") and Cons ("Bend is 94 percent white. The joke among locals is that diversity means Subarus of different colors.")

Performancing

Just wanted to wish all y'all a happy holidays. We've let this rot for a while here. As I just wrote over here, it's certainly not the case that I want to be spending more time on the web in '06. But I still think we need to have a forum for interacting--trading links, ideas, thoughts. B/c othw next thing you'll know it'll have been years and we won't know what to talk to each other about.

Here's something that might facilitate some action: Performancing for Firefox. First you'll have to download Firefox 1.5, which is where you should be doing your browsing anyways. Then install the Performancing Extension, and you'll be able to compose a post within Firefox while viewing any webpage--an editor comes up in the bottom half of a split screen--and send it to direct to Blogger. It's pretty nice. I'm posting from within it now.

happy birthday to the fatmango...

...one day late. I wanted to put together a mix CD for this occasion too--but I still
haven't done one for juniocooper's birthday. I may just have to roll it all into one
year-end mix that goes out to all of you. Once again, I'll post the tracklisting up in
here.

2005 almost done. "Time is moving on, you better get with it before it's gone." (g.u.r.u.)

Peter Scholtes in City Pages: PE, Prince, Mpls hip-hop

Clearing out some more of the weekly e-mail newsletters that fill up my inbox. Figured this link was appropriate to post, since we've had a running conversation about the historical significance and continuing relevance of PE and Chuck D:

Welcome to the Superdome
How Hurricane Katrina made Public Enemy relevant again
by Peter S. Scholtes
November 2, 2005

It was news to me that PE dropped a track titled "Hell No We Ain't All Right!" via shutemdown.com amid the Katrina aftermath.

That transitions into a review of two PE discs thave have just dropped: Power to the People and the Beats: Public Enemy's Greatest Hits and New Whirl Odor.

BTW, Scholtes seems to know what's he's talking about. I've come across two of his CP features from the summer of 2004 that were just mind-blowing:

One Nation, Invisible
The untold story of local hip-hop: 1981 to 1996
by Peter S. Scholtes
August 18, 2004

Who knew there was any story of Twin Cities hip hop from '81-'96??

And then there was this, which tells a story where you know the players, but their prehistory is amazing:

School of Funk
Jimmy Jam was a DJ. Morris Day was a drummer. Prince was a kid with a huge afro. Before they changed popular music, Mom told them to turn
that racket down.
by Peter S. Scholtes
July 14, 2004

That feature goes a large part of the way towards explaining something I've always wondered about: how did a genius of black music like Prince manage come out of Minneapolis, of all places?

last.fm - making the connection

Been listening to radio streams via last.fm every now and then at work. Just now, it served up James Brown's "The Boss", which is apparently on the "Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels" soundtrack.

Something about the horn and guitar on the track sounded famililar. Took me a second to place it: it's the basis for smoking beat behind Nas's "Get Down."

This bit of sample-spotting reminded me to suggest we resurrect a project me and Juniorcooper discussed but never got going--spotting lyrical allusions.

Following the GFoS in the radio stream: "Better Things" off of Massive Attack's classic Protection.

my new favorite track of the moment...

T-Pain, "I'm Sprung"--check the video here.

Made an impulse purchase of the track from the iTMS last night. Got it in heavy rotation this morning here at work.

Those deep south beats plus the Roger Troutman-style vocoder got me...sprung.

Now I just got to track down the Bay Area Remix--"Go Dumb"--which is in seriously heavy rotation on the radio up here.

happy b-day to juniorcooper

I'd been planning to put together a mix CD for the man's birthday, but not surprisingly it hasn't happened yet. At least I got a good excuse this time, what with all the chaos Anj and I have been dealing with over the last few weeks. In fact, I haven't even had my laptop through most of it--left it at the spot while we evacuated to the Fisherman's Wharf hotel that first weekend, and Anj took it with her to Berkeley this week--b/c her Powerbook's hard drive died the same week all this went down at our place! When it rains, it pours, and it just came down hard.

So I'll put something together this coming week/end. I figure I'll offer it up to the dillytaunt team, as a general commemoration of the date. Look for a tracklisting up here next week.

Def Jux DVD / Earplug / Flavorpill

This one is for Johnee.

I subscribe to way too many e-mail newsletters, and spend way too much time paging through them. I've got to cut cutting out ones that are low on the signal-to-noise ratio.

One that may or may not make the cut is Earplug, "a twice-monthly email magazine
dedicated to electronic music in all its incarnations". No idea how or when I ended up
on their website. In fact, I get not only Earplug, but also Flavorpill, which is a good weekly e-mail about interesting cultural happenings in your metro, and Boldtype, which is their literary newsletter. It's all sort of hipper than thou, but still good for info.

The latest had a short review of a new Def Jux DVD. I've never really gotten into that sort of hip hop, but I know Johnee is (or at least was). Scroll down in this issue.

Greg Tate and the Village Voice

I get the weekly e-mail from the Village Voice, and the latest issue is a 50th anniversary special. Looks like it's filled with a number of essays worth reading, but I had to start with, and may not get to much more than, Greg Tate's "License to Ill: Black journalism in the pages of the 'Voice' ".

Tate begins with recollections of reading Stanley Crouch in the Voice in the late-70s, telling him out in the hinterland what was happening in the metropolis. That hit me, because a teenage me, living out in the hinterlands, was somehow inspired to get a subscription to the Voice. And the writers I most remember reading were Greg Tate and Nelson George.

It was through the Voice that I read about hip hop, Public Enemy, Spike Lee--the zeitgeist of the mid- to late-80s. It was because of reading the Voice that I saw "Do the Right Thing" on the big screen at Har Mar Mall that hot summer that it came out, that I bought copies of "It Takes a Nation..." and "Fear of a Black Planet" on cassette tape. (I even bought the 12" of "Fight the Power", which I've got to dig up.) I read about De La (I remember taking to school the 1989 Pazz & Jop issue in which "3 Feet High" came in #1) and Tribe
(they gave "People's Instinctive Travels" a mediocre review--I wonder if it was Christgau?). I saved those couple years worth of Voice issues at my parents' place for quite a few years afterwards, every once in a while revisiting the music reviews, Tate's and George's essays.

At the time I even had pipe dreams of moving to NYC and working in alt-journalism. But I am no Greg Tate. I chose the UofC over Columbia, math over writing. I still haven't made it to NYC, though lately the idea has been rekindled.

Speaking of Greg Tate, I've been saving one of those weekly Voice e-mails since January, with the intention of posting the link to another essay of his. I got the impression that this one created a stir in that subset of the hip hop world that thinks and writes about
the culture:

Hip-hop Turns 30: Whatcha Celebratin' For?
Rethinking the populist art form, this "marriage of heaven and hell, of New World African ingenuity and that trick of the devil known as global hyper-capitalism"
By Greg Tate

That's relief--I can finally delete that e-mail.

But seriously, read the piece when you get a chance. No one write like Tate. How about this:

Hiphop may have begun as a folk culture, defined by its isolation from mainstream society, but being that it was formed within the America that gave us the coon show, its folksiness was born to be bled once it began entertaining the same mainstream that had once excluded its originators. And have no doubt, before hiphop had a name it was a folk culture--literally visible in the way you see folk in Brooklyn and the South Bronx of the '80s, styling, wilding, and profiling in Jamel Shabazz's photograph book Back in the Days. But from the moment "Rapper's Delight" went platinum, hiphop the folk culture became hiphop the American entertainment-industry sideshow.

Or this:

The fact that hiphop does connect so many Black folk worldwide, whatever one might think of the product, is what makes it invaluable to anyone coming from a Pan-African state of mind. Hiphop's ubiquity has created a common ground and a common vernacular for Black folk from 18 to 50 worldwide. This is why mainstream hiphop as a capitalist tool, as a market force isn't easily discounted: The dialogue it has already set in motion between Long Beach and Cape Town is a crucial one, whether Long Beach acknowledges it or not. What do we do with that information, that communication, that transatlantic mass-Black telepathic link? From the looks of things, we ain't about to do a goddamn thing other than send more CDs and T-shirts across the water.

I'll leave it to you to read the incendiary last half of the piece.

Speaking of the Voice and alt-weeklies in general, this screed by Jeff Chang ended up in my inbox as well. I haven't read it, but thought I'd post the link: "Eulogy For The Alt-Weekly"

I still got to do that August Wilson post...

Drezner's tenure decision

juniorcopper, thanks for posting that post from Eric Zorn's blog about Drezner.

(Does Zorn have a UofC connection? He does have a connection to the math world--his grandfather is the Zorn of Zorn's Lemma. I remember reading a column he wrote about his grandfather which must have ran when we were in HP--just around the time I was sitting in White Hall and learning Zorn's Lemma.)

Somehow I missed the news about Drezner's tenure decision, even though I'm subscribed to his RSS feed. Just tonight came across two of his posts which discuss it. The first one was titled "So Friday was a pretty bad day..." and the 2nd "Seven days later..."

It's amazing that he was blogging about this a day after getting the news. Here is a nice quote from the first entry:

"[How are you feeling? Are you bitter at the U of C?--ed.] I’ve felt better. And -- duh -- yeah. That said, I will miss the students. The undergrads have been wonderful, and the grad students have been razor-sharp. At the moment, my biggest regret about all this is the knowledge that I’ve taught my last class at the university."

Extra Action

Did one of you LA cats say you saw David Byrne at the Hollywood Bowl last June? If so, did a group called the Extra Action Marching Band open for them?

I'm hoping to catch Extra Action tonight at this street festival in the Tenderloin. They sound like quite an SF kind of thing. From their site I ended up at their Yahoo group, where a message from last June said that that were going to open for Byrne, and that they'd played with him a number of times before.

Heading out of the office soon--first going to walk down to Amoeba on Haight St, to catch an instore performance by Blackalicious. Then downtown to the TL for the street festival.

As I pimped via e-mail, get on upcoming.org. It's what convinced me to check out this street festival tonight. You can see my upcoming events on my user page. I even got jiggy with the html and incorporated upcoming's badge into my steadyblogging template--that inspired me to add a flickr badge too. So now my upcoming.org events and a random selection of my flickr photos get published on steadyblogging.

I brought my camera with me today, so look for some photos of Blackalicious and Extra Action to show up in my photostream soon.

Have a good weekend. I plan to.

a solve-everything tax?

As always, there's plenty to talk about: the Miers nomination (let's get the e-mail dialogue up here), the baseball postseason, the upcoming Iraqi constitution referendum. Amidst all that, I didn't want August Wilson's passing to go unremarked. I saved the NYT obit and also this appreciation piece. I just started reading the obit this morning on the bus. I'll post my own perspective on Wilson and his work this weekend.

The other NYT piece that I read on the bus this morning that caught my attention was this Tierney column. Some of his stuff has been annoying, but some of it seems reasonable. More evidence, I suppose, that I'm moving to the center on stuff, leaving behind the leftism of my youth. In particular, I'm moving towards Tierney's position of being distrustful of "big government", and beginning to think that market-based solutions often make more sense.

(Whether this is a cause or effect of me studying finance and economics for the first time is unclear to me.)

In particular, tell me what's wrong with his "modest proposal to fight global warming, save energy, cut air pollution, ease traffic congestion, reduce highway fatalities and, while we're at it, reform Social Security": a "Solve-Everything Tax" of 50-cents per gallon of gas, with the proceeds going to private (or personal, if you will) retirement accounts.

Granted, I'd rather see the proceeds of such a tax go to public transportation. But I'm finding I'm not a priori opposed to the personal retirement accounts idea. Heresy.

"Ray"

Anj and I slept on this joint for way too long. We should have caught it in the theaters when it came out. Missed it then, missed it at the Parkway, missed it at a Monday movie night at the Independent (formerly the Justice League for you heads; might head back there this Thursday night for a timely Rebirth Brass Band show).

But we finally moved it to the top of the Netflix queue (connect to us if you're on there), and it arrived while we were in SoCal. So we started it last night--got about an hour in, and did another hour earlier this evening. Maybe this is some irrational exuberance, but this may be the best movie I've seen in years.

Watching it has reminded me that I've never really listened to the man's music. Another huge gap. Time to remedy that. Just trying to decide whether a 2-disc Ultimate Hits collection suffices, or whether to spring for the full 5-disc Genius & Soul. Both are Rhino productions, so they're probably both quality collections. But then there's the Atlantic box set, The Birth of Soul (3 discs). The breadth the Rhino collection is appealing--but the Atlantic stuff is what I'm most interested in hearing, so that could be a good way to go for now.

OK, just impulsively bought the Atlantic set off of Amazon. Maybe I'll have the cream for the Rhino set someday in the future.

Anyways, the four days in SoCal were good. Well, San Diego was a journey to the heart of emptiness. As I posted here on Yahoo 360, (get on there as well and connect to me, and start feeding in your content)--Gertrude Stein ought to be directed at SD, not Oakland. But hanging out in Hermosa and Manhattan Beach with some buddies was surprisingly fun.

We'll have to get down there again and hang with you Dillytaunters. Maybe we can even get juniorcooper out to the west side sometime soon, have ourselves an editorial meeting.

one market under god...

I don't if it's the long descent into middle age, finally making more than a grad student stipend, or just getting out in the world...but I'm no longer the raging leftist I once was. I'm even hearing the siren song of market-based solutions, and feeling a distrust of "big government." Peep Tierney's column from a week ago and tell me what you think. Here's the concluding paragraph:

"Private flood insurance has come to seem quaint in America, but in Britain it's the norm. If Americans paid premiums for living in risky areas, they'd think twice about building oceanfront villas. Voters and insurance companies would put pressure on local politicians to take care of the levees, prepare for the worst - and stop waiting for that bumbling white knight from Washington."

BTW, the subject line is the title of Thomas Frank's other book.

the most important time in history...

Crazy and interesting times we're living through. Just finished Roth's "Plot Against
America" a couple weeks ago. One of his central themes: history tramples over the lives of those ordinary folk living through it.

Is Katrina and New Orleans a historical event on that grand scale? Just to remind you what else we got going on: Two openings on the Supreme Court, including the Chief Justice spot--and a nominee for that spot that could occupy the position for the next 30-40 years. A war in the heart of the Middle East. China's central bank controlling the fate of the US dollar. A nation with a nuclear arsenal headed by a military dictator, who could be overthrown and/or assassinated attempts by the ascendant Islamists in his country (and whose intelligence agency quite clearly proliferated the hell out of their
nuclear technology, and who sits across from another nuclear power.)

As for that subject line, check the full text here.

Juniorcooper, I know you like that line. Which reminds me: we've got to resurrect that project of building hip hop's lyrical allusion network.

Drezner reads "Proof"

Have any of you read or seen "Proof"? A production came through Detroit a couple years ago, to the Fisher Theatre, but we never made it in to see it. (The only production we caught at the Fisher was "Copenhagen".)

I was reminded of it by this Drezner post:

This month's general interest book is in response to the question I get asked on occasion-- "So what's the University of Chicago really like?" The work that I've seen best capture the spirit of the place is actually a play -- Proof, by David Auburn. The drama won a Pulitzer and some Tonys, and has been made into a movie that will be released this month (click here to see the trailer).

The movie's director, John Madden, was smart enough to shoot the film on location on campus and in Hyde Park, and even in the trailer you get a strong sense of place.

Take a look at the post for his other reading selection.

Currently reading

Here's what currently in rotation: this and this.

First one came on recommendation from fatmango. Anj tore through it in a week or so, and really enjoyed it. I'm only about 50 pages in--it's good already, looking forward to the rest.

Here's an odd fact: while I was growing up, our family visited Little Falls, MN, where Lindbergh was born, a handful of times.

Why that second one? It's not only b/c I have a scholarly interest in the stochastic calculus and Black-Scholes. More on that later...

Independence Day mix / last.fm

With all this talk about music up in here, we ought to start sharing some actual music.

JuniorCooper recently asked me to send him a copy of Nuyorican Soul. I'm finally going to get that out to him this week. And to pay for the delay, I'm going to throw in a copy of a compilation I threw together the morning of July 4, when fatmango was up here. Gave him and Arj copies that day, and I've been playing it myself a fair amount. I uploaded the tracklisting to my YahooBriefcase--look in the Music folder. I'm interested to see whether you guys can grab it--YahooBriefcase has been unreliable.

Got to give credit where credit is due. The opening Coke Escovedo burner is a d/l from SoulSides, a few of the tracks are d/ls from SoulSeek, and the Maxayn cover of "Shelter" is something JuniorCooper himself e-mailed me a couple months back.

Let me know if you want a copy and I'll mail out.

OTOH, if you want some streaming radio, check out last.fm. I may have e-mailed some of you guys about this a few months ago. I played around with it for a while back then, but gave up on it b/c it seemed to be early in the beta stage--lots of bugs and slow servers. The servers are still not blazing, but the interface and reliability has improved. I haven't paid for an upgraded account that would allow a personalised radio stream based on my listening profile. But any user gets to listen to "Neighbour Radio" for free. My last.fm page is here, while JuniorCooper's is here. If you open up an account, add us as friends.

BBC Selector: Common

Common choosing up an hour of (excerpts of) classic tracks here.

Tracklisting:

Grandmaster Flash - The Message
Eric B and Rakim - Paid in Full
Krs 1 - Stop the Violence
NWA - F**k the Police
Pete Roc and CL Smooth - The Reminisce Over You
Common - The Light
D'Angelo - Lady
Lauryn Hill - Ex Factor
Nas - The World is Yours
Public Enemy - Shut em Down (Pete Rock remix)
Kanye West - Jesus Walks
Mos Def - Umi Says
Common - I Used to Love H.E.R.

Online until 16.08.05

I'm recording it right now, thanks to iRecordMusic, while also transmitting it to the stereo via AirPortExpress and Airfoil. Technology is miraculous.

LA-SF by high speed train

In a previous post, I mentioned that I've been obsessing about public transit, and slipped in a mention of the proposal, the idea, the dream--that someday there could be a high speed rail line btwn downtown SF & downtown LA. No more dealing with the I-5: downtown to downtown in report from Sacto:

"The Legislature initially placed the bond measure on the November 2004 ballot, then decided the state's budget woes made a 2006 vote look better. Now a bill that would delay the vote until November 2008 has passed the Assembly and is awaiting action by the Senate.

The bond measure would provide $9 billion for high-speed rail, about half the money needed to build a line that could carry passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco in about two and a half hours."

Now my math says that means about $18 billion for that train. Though the same article later quotes a price of $35 billion. Maybe something to do with inflation..

In any case: damn, we need that train..but taanstaafl, for sure. Who is going to pay for that sh*t? We've got to, somehow.

Cassette tape DJ

Cassette tape DJ
Originally uploaded by kde-head.

Put the link to this in a comment to juniorcooper's nice post below. But figured I might as well take advantage of flickr's capabilities and blog it.

Obituaries...

Good to see some action up in here. Johnee, thanks for reposting that e-mail.

Peter Jennings is the big obituary of the week, but there are always remarkable people passing on from this world. Brady and I kicked some e-mail back and forth a couple weeks ago about how there was a spate of soul men who died in July: Luther, Obie Benson of the Four Tops, Eugene Record of the Chi-Lites.

I'm becoming one of those people that find the obituaries among the most interesting parts of the paper. Wasn't it in Fortress of Solitude that Abraham would read Dylan the obituaries over breakfast every morning?

Notes on Hip Hop

(repost of recent email):
I think that there's this authenticity trap that I fall in to, wherein I like to say that I was down with whoever at whatever time. Yeah, I had the Black Moon "Enta Da Stage" joint when it was blowin' up blocks in BKLYN. I look at our UofC years and think that there was so much original hip hop at the time, that I was cool b/c I listened to Digable Planets and GangStarr (or whatever)...then I'm out at a show and see some kids who were born in the late 80's talking about how fucking Ludacris or Eminem were on some pioneer shit, and I'm like WTF??!! I mean, I'm even a little ambivalent about Jay-Z--it's like he was the best rapper and the most popular rapper in the world when he went out (I feel kinda corny actually saying that--part of it is having lived in NYC, you see the direct street impact from somebody like him in his moment).

Anyhow, I get how invested we are in this argument when I get together with Brady and Novy and Arun around a few beers and try and decide the most important hip hop albums ever--what a fucking night! Gets back to the question of what hip hop is--I prefer KRS-One's more ecumenical, inclusive approach--there's a long and deep richness to be mined. But then there's the bullshit repugnant, repetitive taste of ass that is on every city's Hot 97 and MTV--I mean, it that's hip hop...?

There's something about hip hop that we all want to own, perhaps because for many of us it was a transformative music that appeared at an inflection point in our lives (high school)...who can forget pumping your fist to PE driving in your mom's car on the way to pick some piece of 11th grade ass up? Or waiting for Tower Records to open so you could cop the first copy of "Fear of a Black Planet"? Some kernel of that stays in you, and so much about who you are from that point on in life is somehow invested in the music you were listening to right then. I ran in to Chuck D. on an airplane about 6 years ago. All I said to him was "Thank you." That's all that needed to be said.

Summer jams

Good to see some posts by Johnee, incl the photos.

It was a lazy Saturday morning. I had the TV on while doing some bills, and happened to come across VH-1's video countdown. Number one was Mariah's "We Belong Together". Like everyone else, I've been hearing bits of this here and there all summer. As Anj will tell you, I got a predilection for sappy but catchy R&B like that (prime example: Jaheim's "Put Your Woman First"). But I didn't realize it was Mariah, or that it was the summer jam. There's something about it that sounds familiar, as if it came out years ago. Maybe it was just the presence of that line, "If you think you're lonely now..."

I couldn't even place that line, and it took Google to remind me that it's Bobby Womack (I hadn't listened closely enough to pick out that Mariah names him in the lyrics). A nice thing is that Womack got songwriting credit on Mariah's song for that.

Odd coincidence: Google also led me to this article by Kelefa Sanneh from Thursday's NYT Arts section, about how Mariah's track is indisputably the song of the summer.

Brady Rockin' the Vegas Pimp Lifestyle/holdin' down/all he needs is a crown/gettin' props from the brown
Posted by Picasa

Rockin' the Ramen Tokyo Style!
Posted by Picasa

Who Shot Ya?

Saw Mos Def at the Bowl last weekend, and reminded me of Brady's Biggie mention in his last post. Cops is trippin', everyone is trippin'. Mos opened up with a live band (some good cats), and a rambling, syncopated cover of "Stakes is High" that resonated up through the bowl like whispered prophecy. In the middle of the set he got on the piano and rocked a freestyle that culminated in him shouting "Who shot my mans, Suge?" repeating it over and over until the crowd was feelin' it.

So much going on. Just got back from Dallas where stakes is high and you just have to pretend that you're in a foreign country to get through it. However, I thought it would be only fitting to bring along the new Cormac McCarthy novel No Country for Old Men. It's a beautiful, dark little piece of work that polishes pieces of the author's subconscious with his sandpapery border ethos. It feels a bit like Blood Meridian on a noirish Ellroy vibe, but with a belief in some kind of humanity, some kind of hope--especially in its apparent absence--perhaps making you hungry to eat the kind of meals McCarthy describes. Nobody makes you want to eat a biscuit and drink coffee like McCarthy. Perhaps the line that rings in your ears throughout the whole book in various forms is: "I won't tell you you can save yourself because you can't". Ok, so there's alot more to discuss in this book...would love ot hear from anyone who is reading it.

Not to mention re-reading "Leaves of Grass" while I was in Maui...more to come.

Greider on Fogel in the Nation

I def want to see us follow up on JC's post about the Roberts nomination. Problem is, I don't anything about the guy. And I don't think I'm the only one. The American Progress Report arrived in the inbox yesterday morning with the subject line "The Nominee You Know Nothing About."

But for now, I got a UofC reference for you. I've been working through a backlog of Nation issues, so just getting through the cover story of the 27 June '05 issue:

Riding Into the Sunset: It is time for a serious solution to the problem of retirement
security.
William Greider
The Nation (June 27, 2005 issue)

The 2nd half of it repeats the usual sort of progressive complaints about corporate/free-market approaches to these issues. But the interesting part is the first couple sections, which presents an alternative to the CW that aging population and ever-increasing life spans are a "monumental problem." Instead, Greider frames his article with the themes from a recent book by Robert Fogel, "a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago and a septuagenarian himself." Here's Greider's summary of Fogel's thesis:

America, he reminds us, is a very wealthy nation. The expanding longevity is not a financial burden but an enormous and underdeveloped asset. If US per capita income continues to grow at a rate of 1.5 percent a year, the country will have plenty of money to finance comfortable retirements and high-quality healthcare for all citizens, including those at the bottom of the wage ladder. When politicians talk about raising the Social Security retirement age to 70 in order to "save" the system, they are headed backward and against the tide of human aspirations. The average retirement age, Fogel observes, has been falling in recent decades by personal choice and is now around 63. Given proper financing arrangements, he expects the retirement age will eventually fall to as low as 55--allowing everyone to enjoy more leisure years and to explore the many dimensions of "spiritual development" or "self-realization," as John Dewey called it.

"What then is the virtue of increasing spending on retirement and health rather than goods?" Fogel asked in his latest book, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism (2000). "It is the virtue of providing consumers in rich countries with what they want most." What people want is time--more time to enjoy life and learning, to focus on the virtuous aspects of one's nature, to pursue social projects free of economic necessity, to engage their curiosity and self-knowledge or their political values. The great inequity in modern life, as Fogel provocatively puts it, is the "maldistribution of spiritual resources," that is, the economic insecurity that prevents people from exploring life's larger questions. Everyone could attain a fair share of liberating security, he asserts, if government undertook strategic interventions in their behalf.

Fogel's strategic interventions are modelled on pension systems such as (specifically) TIAA-CREF, calling for compulsory saving, but would be adminstered by the federal government. And interestingly, Fogel also calls for a progressive redistribution of wealth. Not the kind of thinking one expects to be coming out of the UofC econ dept. Read the piece for more details.

Arun and I were saying a couple weeks ago that it was really silly and stupid of us not to have taken a single econ course at UofC. Intellectual snobbery induced by all those budding I-bankers.

Speaking of UofC economists, I'm hoping to make it to the Commonwealth Club next Thurs for the Levitt and Dubner event. After going back last week to hear one our city Supervisors speak, I decided to splurge on a membership to the CC. Here's one speaker I'm looking forward to: the RZA in a few weeks.

One last link for those of you that stuck with me this far: a live Moodymann mix I got through the 313 list. Moodymann's known as a deep Detroit house head, but this mix starts out with some funk (check out at least the first track, a twisted Prince-like track titled "Freaky Muthaf*cka") and then segues into some live vocal jazz.

London bombings: Richard Clarke, public transit, Ian McEwan

Some thoughts following the London bombings, in brief outline:

• How is it that this hasn't happened earlier, in the US, and to a much more destructive and deadly degree? Related to that, I've been meaning to post this fascinating but horrifying article by Richard Clarke that was the cover story of The Atlanic a few months ago:
  

  Ten Years Later
  "Then the second wave of al-Qaeda attacks hit America." A leading expert on counterterrorism imagines the future history of the war on terror. A frightening picture of a country still at war in 2011
  by Richard A. Clarke
  

  
  There's also an accompanying web-only interview with Clarke:
  

  Fatal Vision
  Richard Clarke talks about his frightening scenario of an America hobbled by terrorism—and what we can do to avoid it
  

  
  My bet is that most of the American public, if we've heard of Clarke at all, think of him as a disgruntled whisteblower. But Johnee was highly recommending Clarke's book last year, calling him an American hero, if I remember correctly. The article above of his impressed me greatly--essential reading, I'd say--and makes me want to pick up the book. (BTW, if you're wondering what Clarke is doing these days, beyond writing and speaking through the media: he's chairman of Good Harbor Consulting.)
  
  
• To what degree are we (or should we be) willing to sacrifice our civil liberties in order to deter attacks like this? I'm thinking in particular systems of surveillance like Britain's CCTV--which makes the state closer to Big Brother, but in this case turned out to be essential to finding the perpetrators. There was a NYT Mag story about CCTV, published one month after 9/11 (not coincidentally, I imagine). Thanks to Google, I found the full text here--on the City Pages site, ironically (CP was my first alterna-weekly, as a teen back in the Twin Cities). That piece ever so briefly cites Bentham, Foucault and their concept of the panopticon.
  
  I was independently obessessing about public transit in the week before the London incident--spurred by the near-BART strike we had up here on July 6. Got much I want to write out on this topic (anyone for a high-speed train between downtown LA to downtown SF, with a 2.5 hour travel time??) For now, I'll just post this Sarah Vowell column from Sat July 9's NYT op-ed page: Our Faith-Based Train Rides".
  
  Well, I'll also put up the SFCityScape link, which I've been digging through in the past couple weeks--fascinating stuff. The plan for a high-speed train from SF to LA is mentioned in passing in an article
  on there about the much-anticipated Transbay Terminal to be built downtown SF: "Now imagine this: Caltrain will keep going past its current southern terminus in Gilroy to Salinas in Monterey County, two hours south of the city. High-speed tracks will have been laid up the Peninsula, alongside Caltrain's, allowing passengers to board a train at downtown L.A.'s Union Station and arrive in the Financial District two-and-a-half hours later — or vice-versa." Got to cite Matt Smith of SFWeekly on this as well--my other main source for SF transit, planning, & development issues. Check this column of his from last summer about the political battle over the development of the Transbay Terminal.
  
  
• Finally, anyone up for reading McEwan's Saturday? We got a copy that Anj's dad left with us last month. Here is McEwan's essay that ran on the NYT op-ed page on Friday July 8: "The Surprise We Expected".



• With any of the NYTimes links above, let me know if you want to read the full text. By now, they've disappeared into the paid archives. But I've been using Yahoo's new MyWeb feature to store local copies of the html pages on their servers.
  
  Similarly for the Atlantic links--the full texts are restricted to subscribers. So if you want to read them, let me know and I'll e-mail the full text to you.
  

Why aren't we writing?

Can't sleep, so here I am doing a post. It's been quiet again up in here. What's the problem? I know the primary problem is that folks are busy--significant others, jobs, kids, etc. I got none of the latter, and am seriously unfocused on what I do have of the 2nd category, which perhaps explains why I find the time to get on here once in a while.

But I'm sure it's not just a lack of time--I know we're all finding time to read random sh*t on the web and watch random sh*t on TV. Maybe it's a lack of desire or ability or self-discipline, to sit down and write out some cogent thoughts. I'm finding that hard to do--to set aside some time and mental space to really write something out. Case in point: I've been wanting to write up something about our trip to Ukraine and Istanbul. Nothing serious or deep or insightful, but just something to communicate and record where we went, what we did, and what we thought of it. But here it is a month and a half later, and I got nothing.

Part of the obstacle is setting the bar too high. With my travel log, I feel like it should be deep and insightful, which stops me from getting started. It may be a similar case with the paucity of posts up here--we feel like we got to have something "official" before we show it to the world, or even to each other (b/c there's not anyone else getting over here, are they?)

But I feel free to put up these stream-of-consiousness rambling posts. Better than nothing--I tell myself.

Another piece of writing I'd been meaning to do and post up here is a "currently reading/recently read" account. Something that we floated over e-mail a couple years ago--if not actually a book club, at least a book bulletin board. I've been maintaining a recently-read list over at my old geocities site. When I'd started the list, I'd even included a few sentences recording my impressions of the book; but that soon puttered out, so all I had was a list of books and dates that I read them. Better than nothing.

Again, I'd been meaning to work in more about what I'm reading into this blog or my other one, but it hasn't happened. It's partly due to the reasons given above--reasons that are personal failings. But it may also be a failure of the format. A blog is what I want--a log that I'll keep on the web--but this linear format we're stuck in here may be holding us back.

With respect to our team effort, maybe what we need is some sort of forum software--an interface and format that allows the back-and-forth that we had, and still occasionally have, over e-mail.

With respect to the idea of a BookLog, I've got a new tool: TiddlyWiki.

Came across the URL a few weeks ago--via del.icio.us, actually, now that I think about it. But I didn't take the time to play with it until today. In fact, I actually worked with it--after playing with it, me and the grad student I'm working with on this model decided we're going to try to collaboratively draft a paper using it.

While putting our outline into a TiddlyWiki, it occured to me that non-linear personal notebook is what I need for a BookLog. So check it out a first draft here.

Just start clicking on the links, which open what are called "tiddlers"--small bits of (hyper)text. Figure out how to close them too, and that's all there is to reading a TiddlyWiki. There's no particular place to start or to end, no particular order--just jump in and around. Just like the web itself.

Ego Trip's Race-o-Rama

Got off the phone with DMSB earlier this evening. Among other things, we talked about some possible topics to put up here, such as the passing of James Weinstein. I learned of him through the NYT obit. What caught my eye at first was that he had founded In These Times. But I was surprised to read that he'd also founded one of our neighborhood institutions, Modern Times. Google turned up this more extensive obit.

After DB had to sign off (Terra alert), I cracked open the laptop with the plan to do some work. But I also turned on the TV for some background noise, and found an episode of Ego Trip's Race-o-Rama playing on VH-1...and felt compelled to do a post on it. (Which brings to mind a phrase I caught in another Daniel Drezner post: "Maybe the Internet is not the nirvana of Habermasian discourse, but the academic version of crack." That's chimes in on two recent posts--in addition to linking to Drezner last week, I slipped in a reference to the idea of the web as a Habermasian public sphere here.)

But back to the topic at hand. Have you guys seen this Ego Trip show? I read something about it when it premiered--it may have been this Ta-Nehisi Coates piece from the Voice--but hadn't caught one until now. Seems to be worth seeking out--where else are you going to find folks talking about race in this manner on TV, now that Chappelle appears to be on extended hiatus. (In fact, I thought of characterizing the Ego Trip show as an extended and expanded version of Paul Mooney's Ask a Black Dude/Negrodamus segments on Chappelle.)

That VH-1 put something like this on shows they're not completely culturally bankrupt, as Johnee seemed to imply in his last post. Though it's an odd coincidence that the Ego Trip crew was previously best known (to me, at least) for their book of lists (thanks to DB for hooking me up with that one a few years ago). But they showed there that the list format needn't be intellectually bankrupt.

Spin Top 100 or Why You are the Son of Incestuous Union

Two words: fuck Spin. I've been meaning to say that for about the last 10 years, but never got around to it. Let me also say that the brief existence of the magazine Raygun should remind us all that music journalism, atleast the way I see it, has fallen way off. Raygun was the ultimate medium-as-message for an entire subculture. Spin sucks alot of corporate dick, has abysmal circulation and is perpetually trying to jerry-rig their editorial focus around a shapeshifting demographic that they lost touch with years ago (to understand this, see the part about sucking alot of corporate dick...). Not to mention that Spin has been reduced to a collection of "Top 100" lists, much like VH1--when you have nothing new to say, why not retread the pages with nostalgia and pictures of pretty boy bands (Killers, The Bravery blah blah et. al)? Ok, now that that small editorial conceit is finished, here's what I really think about the partial list released today...

Brilliant so far. OK Computer is the closest thing to a perfect album ever produced--while I detest some of the self-indulgence of subsequent Radiohead, this album is completely worth it. I think a case can be made for Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as a very close #2 here, or even #1 (just saw Wilco live at the Greek, and it was lifted).

Everyone loves these lists, though, because it's like hoping your team will win, and at the end of it all we're all snobs who saw the Pixies when they were just doing college shows or the Germs or whoever--we all want to claim that sliver of authenticity that a rabid fandom can afford. There's always that moment when you hear something on KROQ or see the cover of Spin and you know that it's over, that now, your love affair with this group or artist has become without exception a "guilty pleasure". The subculture slips in to the mainstream as repackaged market-speak. But just like sports radio, this is all about "legacy" of an album, a musical marker of a moment in time.

So I will start the nominations here for other albums that should be added to some list, somewhere, even if it's just the one in my ipod...

My Bloody Valentine "Loveless"
Ice-T: "Power"
Neil Young "After the Goldrush"
Sonic Youth "Goo"
Smashing Pumpkins "Gish"
N.E.R.D. "In Search of..."
Oasis "What's The Story..."
TV on the Radio "Bloodthirsty youths..."
Helmet "Meantime"
NAS "Illmatic"
Black Moon "Enta Da' Stage"
RUN DMC "King Of Rock"
Notorious BIG "Ready to Die"
Superchunk "No Pocky for Kitty"
Bob Mould "Workbook"
U2 "The Unforgettable Fire"
Wilco "A Ghost is Born"
Dinosaur Jr. "Green Mind"
Hole "Pretty on the Inside"
Ministry "Land of Rape and Honey"
etc................

Drezner on White Sox & Moneyball

Since the fatmango seems to have become quite the White Sox fan, thought I'd post this link to a Daniel Drezner post. The post is mostly an excerpt from a front page WSJ article about how the ChiSox are having trouble filling the seats in Comiskey (er, the Cell??) even though they have the best record in baseball. (Though check the first comment, where a South Sider rips into Drezner.)

I made the Garfield+DanyRyanEl trip from Hyde Park to Comiskey only twice, I think. One of those was in Sept '91, before my first year had even actually started--I met a couple high school friends there since the Twins were in town (and come to think of it, it was only a few weeks before they would go on to win the World Series--I vaguely recall watching that famous Game 7 sitting in Woodward on a Sunday night, dreading a physics problem set that was due the next morning). That was new Comiskey's first year in existence--I also recall that I was a prospie on campus in April of that year, just as the first games were being played there.

For more on Drezner, who's a poli sci prof at the UofC, check this post I put up last month.

BTW, I'm still highly recommending Rojo if you're trying to keep up with any blogs--that's how I came across this.

del.icio.us, furl, Google

There's been little action up in here lately, so thought I'd share a few random links. I do have a couple ideas for more substantive posts--almost started one yesterday on C Hitchens, actually, after reading this in Slate; and got another one in mind on Sartre and existentialism, after reading this Norman Mailer piece in the Nation. And I got a way of bringing Brother West into the Sartre piece, thus following up on Johnee's post from a few weeks ago.

Speaking of which, it's dawning on me that the blog structure--or maybe it's just the Blogger structure?--isn't that well-suited for the kind of chime-in, threaded conversations that I'd like to see us having here. Stuff just gets buried in the comments. Any ideas for a better interface that facilitates that kind of thing?

Which brings to mind another link I was thinking of throwing up--the recently launched TPMCafe. In particular, some folks up there had been name-dropping Habermas and his concept of "the public sphere." Check here and here and here. Interesting stuff. In any case, TMPCafe is something to keep your eye on.

But back to the random--but hopefully useful--links I was going to offer up. Last month I e-mailed a few of you about del.icio.us and Furl--new and seemingly trendy takes on the idea of creating on-line bookmark managers. I recall that there were a couple such attempts to build such sites in the late '90s; I was particularly interested in them then, b/c I was always getting on the web on random machines around campus, and thought it would be useful to get at my bookmarks wherever I happened to be. And more generally I've got an archivist streak in me, which is why I started blogging in the first place--to save all the fantastic links one comes across. But the interesting links keep coming up faster than I can blog them; hence the need for a place to save them in the meantime.

Del.icio.us and Furl are interesting b/c they take advantage of tags--useful both for classifying/searching your own bookmarks, and for connecting with what other links user's have bookmarked and tagged (i.e., the "folksonomic" aspect of tag-based systems).

So I created accounts on both sites, and installed the "Post to del.icio.us" and "Furl it" buttons to my browser. I've been using the del.icio.us more regularly--you can see the links I've saved here--although Furl does have the advantage of saving a copy of any page you link on their servers. (Useful for grabbing NYTimes articles, say, before they go into the paid archives!)

However, I did randomly log in to Furl yesterday, and found that they display a list of popular links, which led me to these two useful Google-related links:

• this OSX-style interface for a variety of Google tools


• this quick reference to Google's advanced operators for searching

Finally, I came across a mention of this recently, which is still in GoogleLabs--a way of personalizing Google's search page. Esp useful if you're using gmail.

Another sign that Google is so much more than search. Actually, I think I read about the personalization experiment in an article that claimed that this is evidence that Google aspires to be a portal. But as I've read in a few places, they aspire to much more than even that. I was impressed by this piece that I came across last year, about how Google may be building an OS for the web. (It occurred to me after reading it that Google would be a good long-term investment--how I wish I'd acted upon that that thought and picked up a few shares of Google then.)

Then there is Google's much-hyped initiative to build a virtual library; see for example this MIT TechnReview piece, titled "The Infinite Library" (to bring it back around full circle, just last week I was wading through one of Hitchens' typically dense and cryptic literary essays in The Atlantic, this one about Borges). Finally, I came across this blog entry about another fascinating idea Google is working on. (Note that that's from the blog of the same writer who wrote the TechReview piece. He's got a piece in the works on "continous computing" for the TechReview, for which he's been conducting an experiment in "participatory journalism" on his blog.)

There is some interesting stuff happening out there...

Motown Remixed

motown-remixed
Originally uploaded by suman_ganguli.

I was thinking of doing a post about this new Motown Remixed comp that just came out anyways, but in a nice coincidence, Soul Sides has a few audio snippets, plus the usual insightful commentary (here specifically).

Go the official site to listen to all the tracks, seemingly in their entirety.

I was skeptical when I heard a few weeks ago that Motown was jumping on the remix compilation bandwagon. (Following Verve, with their Remix series, now up to 3 volumes; and Blue Note, with both their Blue Note Revisited and Madlib's Shades of Blue. A lesser-known precursor to these is the Blue Note Remix Project.) So I'm pleasantly surprised to read Soul Sides opine that this may the most consistent of these compilations.

The tracklisting does look tasty: ?Love redoing "Grapevine", Jazzy Jeff taking on the Tempts (sounds great), Spinna doing an Eddie Kendricks track...

I first heard about this disc via an e-mail that came a couple of weeks ago, promoting a release party that took place in the D last weekend (with the flyer above attached).

The party was just one of hundreds of afterhours in the city last weekend, in what's become a Detroit Memorial Day tradition, what with the 5th installment of an electronic music festival taking place on Hart Plaza (oddly called Fuse-in this year, after originally being DEMF and subsequently Movement.) The Free Press had this article about this year's turnout and this review; check also this link that I've been saving since last June.

Just noticed that the Motown party was at the Johansen in Eastern Market actually--the site of the first of the few Detroit afterhours that Anj and I made it out to. On a frigid night in Feb 2001, we rolled in around 2am, with--unforgetabbly--"Sharevari" booming over the system. We were at the Johansen one other time, the following summer--our first time seeing Theo Parrish spin. That night was also memorable b/c we got to Eastern Market too early (midnight), so we got a bite to eat and listened to some seasoned jazz cats blow next door (what's the name of that joint?).

Update (June 9): Just came across this City Pages review of the Motown disc, plus a couple more remix joints (Curtis Mayfield and Atlantic).

Shock and Awe

Yeah. Hello world. Now we are up on some shit, "like they bringing' '88 back, listening to the new track "Shock and Awe" with Z-Trip and Chuck D. Tingle down the spine when Chuck steps in to the ring, when I hear the basso profundity. Now we got Chuck on our side, no irony that the apotheosis of PE occurred during the last "morning in America" administration. Something clicked, like, ok, it's time to listen again. Chuck, we welcome you. Cornel West makes this great point in Democracy Matters that basically you can understand the Patriot Act and 9/11 through the long lens of racism...bear with me here:

The ugly terrorist attacks on innocent civilians on 9/11 plunged the whole country in to the blues. Never before have Americans of all classes, colors, regions, religions, genders, and sexual orientations felt unsafe, unprotected, subject to random violence, and hated. Yet to have been designated and treated as a nigger in America for over 350 years has been to feel unsafe, unprotected, subject to random violence, and hated.

Getting searched a the airport, having your phone conversations taped, being kicked in the thigh so many times that a blood clot reaches your heart and kills you, getting flown to Nigeria for torture... just a messy sidebar in the great American experiment.

And what of this experiment we have here, on the page? I say, bring em' on.

Blogging from Kyiv

hey y'all, I'll be trying to do some (more or less) steady blogging while we're travelling--we arrived in Kyiv just a couple hours ago, late Sunday night (it's 1:50am now). Check over there for updates: steadyblogging.blogspot.com (for some reason the blogger buttons don't show up on my sister's computer, so I can't create links).

NYTimes series on social class

I haven't had a chance to read any of the three massive articles from this past week that have kicked off this series the Times is doing on class in America. I plan to read them on the plane to Kyiv tomorrow night.

Hopefully they won't disappear into the pay-to-play archives starting Sunday. Speaking of which, did you catch the news that the Times is going to start asking for a subscription fee to read their Op-ed columnists online. The nice thing is that subscribers to the print edition will get not have to pay the additional online subscription fee--and it seems that the online subscription will include access to the archives! So even though I think it's a bad move for the Times to limit online access (read Salon on the move here, and Kos on it here), it works out well for Anj and I.

Finally, on the topic of class in America, I borrowed a book titled Class (I think it's this one) from my man Jon Groat when I was in Ann Arbor last summer (see this SteadyBlogging post for some of the backstory). He highly recommended it, but I haven't read it yet (same with the other UofC classics he lent me).

Common Knowledge

I'm going to defer to Arun to post a grand mission statement for DillyTaunt (or at least an explanation what he has in mind with the name).

In the meantime, here's some Common info I was going to e-mail out anyways:

Seems like Common's got the promo push behind him for the new album. I was pleasantly surprised to see the street team had got some BE posters up on Mission last week. (I was going to snap a photo, but they got papered over by a new set of promo posters this week--I've got to start packing the camera on the regular, taking some photos around town.)

Also, Gilles had Com live in session this week. Tracklisting here. (But instead of messing with BBC's wack audio player, load this link into RealPlayer to listen to Worldwide as a Real Audio stream!)

Got an e-mail earlier this week from Common's website, in advance of next week's release of BE. Click here to get to a nice little pop-up player that plays snippets of each of the tracks on BE. You can also find the player here, along with the videos for "Go" and "The Corner."

Brady sent this story from the Chicago Trib a few weeks ago, which verifies and fleshes out Brady's reaction to "The Corner" video--that this album represents a homecoming to the Chi. (My e-mail reply to Brady's forward was that I came across a funny account of "The Corner" video shoot written by one of the okayplayer guys, in which he mentioned filming at 79th & Cottage Grove and in Washington Park...where "We could smell Harold's Chicken from up the block"! Go here and click on the Feb 2005 link in the navigation sidebar.)

It'll be interesting to see if Com can finally go platinum on this one. Having Kanye behind the decks (and his name featured prominently in the promos) can't hurt.

Finally, I'm sure Brady won't mind if I post this (Flickr is lovely; click through to see what little I got in my photostream):

Common Knowledge
Originally uploaded by suman_ganguli.