Actually, you know what? I was just checking if the embed worked, and I planned to take ‘em down after that, but these are pretty great songs. I’ll just leave ‘em up there. Go Young Maths.

I’ve been feeling a little bit nostalgic lately. Probably not for any serious reason – maybe partly inspired by an article I’m working on for The A.V. Club that had me talking about some names I’d not heard in a while. Either way, I was thinking about songs I’ve known by people I’ve known, and I thought I’d share some.

These aren’t the absolute best songs I’ve ever known anyone to write, necessarily – though some of them probably are, I’m sure – and they’re not even all songs that I have a deep attachment to. It’d probably be a stretch to call some of the people who wrote them my friends, even – it’s been a lot of years since I’ve spoken to some of these guys. They’re just people I’ve known, played shows with or meant to play shows with, who’ve written songs that, for whatever reason, have stayed on my mind for a few years, or maybe even a decade or so.  I don’t know that they’ll mean anything to you, but you’re welcome to find out. No real criteria to the list, and they’re not in any order, but I mostly picked music from people who I haven’t heard a new song from in at least 3-4 years, but whose music I still think of fondly. 

Annie Palmer, “Ypsilanti, Won’t You Let Me…”

I met Annie four or five years ago in Ypsilanti, which is probably why this song is one of my favorites of hers – as far as I’m aware, she still lives in that part of Michigan, though I haven’t looked at her Facebook page in a long time, so who knows for sure? Either way, the limited history we share includes that town, so the fact that she has a song about it makes it feel a little more personal to me. All of her songs are very lovely – I could have picked “I Will Be The Fire”, this pretty, Will Oldham-by-way-of-U2 song she has, or maybe “The Prettiest Girl In New York City”, which really just aches in a way that few songs do, but this one’s about a place that I know, and where most of my memories involve either Annie Palmer or some of our mutual friends. I guess this song stands out to me because I know what she’s talking about in very concrete ways, where her songs about heartbreak are songs about the broken heart of a young woman I like a lot, but don’t know very well.

Charlie Daniels Death Wish, “Death Threats (to Thom Yorke)”

Most songs from Rio Grande Valley bands from the late 90’s / early 2000’s – the time that I spent down there – sound pretty dated. There’ll be some of those on this list, too – pop-punk and emo and hardcore and stuff – but “Death Threats” still sounds like it could have just happened. It’s unfortunately produced, as most of the band’s recordings were – too quiet and lacking the fidelity that made the band such a powerful influence on me when I would see them live – but it captures the song well enough. A ton of bands have gone on to do the sing/then scream thing that Donner does here (and it’s not like he invented it, either) but what I really like is that the song never stops being the same one, when it’s a fairly low-key ballad or when it goes all metal. I’m guessing that the date on this one is around late 2000 or early 2001. Fun fact – I recorded a cover version of it for the second Spent Shells album, but I don’t think it ever made it onto the record. I hope not, anyway.

The Spent Shells - “The Killer”

I know it’s kind of self-serving to have one that you wrote on a list like this, but that URL up there reads “dansolomon.com”, so what do you expect? Anyway, I have a hard time listening to the Spent Shells these days, though I don’t really try very often anyway. But the recordings all sound very weird to me. I can’t quite remember making them. I remember recording “The Killer”, though, because I knew that this was the one that I had to get right. I told Jim that I wanted it to sound like “Purple Rain”, but that wasn’t exactly right – I wanted it to be epic, and sad, but I wanted it to sound like “Faded” by the Afghan Whigs, maybe. We struggled with it for days, and then Tony came in and lay down that piano riff – super simple, six notes, and Jim built a song that sounded like Sigur Ros around it, instead. I always felt like “The Killer” was a piece that was very versatile – it worked pretty well on the page, and spoken aloud without any accompaniment, but I think it works best in this recording. I was never really in a true band, but the way everything became greater than the sum of its parts on this recording feels kind of like I always hoped being in a band might.

Blanketarms, “Heartbreaker”

Here’s a cute one. That’s not an insult - “cute” was the point of Blanketarms, a twee-as-fuck little ukulele pop two-piece by a couple of kids from Champaign-Urbana who were in love. I don’t think they’d even be offended if I called it a “ditty”. But that’s not the point – what I really liked about this song was how perfectly crafted a pop song it is. It’s barely a minute and a half dripping wet, but the easy rhymes and self-deprecating lyrics get at a neat truth that pop songs try to hide sometimes – that they haven’t got a whole lot to say, but that what they have to say is important. It just only requires 1:23 sometimes, and a catchy as hell hook.

Stiff One Eye, “America”

Speaking of perfect pop songs. Stiff One Eye was a Valley band from the late 90’s. Pop-punk, and great at it. This recording doesn’t do them much justice at all – it sounds pretty awful, in fact, especially the drum sound. But none of the bands down there had money, for the most part, and it wasn’t until The December Drive started that high-fidelity recording became a thing anyone cared about. But that doesn’t matter too much – “America” works despite the shitty recording, because it captures everything that pop-punk in the late 90’s was about: It’s vaguely political, but not really – it just mentions political things, like they want to be sure that you know that they exist. Which makes sense if you know the culture behind the band – in the late 90’s, Valley punk rock had a handful of very political bands, and a bunch of pop-punkers. Stiff One Eye’s brother-band was called We Suck – they shared a drummer and played together a lot – and they were the leading light of the political bands in the Valley. I always took “America” as Jason (Stiff One Eye’s songwriter and vocalist) trying to show We Suck that he knew what they were on about, but that he was on his own thing – yeah, politics, politics, culture – but what he really cares about is the girl. “Only in America do children shoot their friends and neighbors, only in America do we send rapists home for good behavior” – both assertions that are pretty debatable, but he’s rushing through them to get to the point anyway. America’s fucked up, but he doesn’t think about it much, and how bad could it be if he got a really nice girlfriend? It’s what most pop-punk bands from the era are about, in one way or another. Jason just said it directly.

The December Drive, “This Side You’ve Never Seen”

I have this song on a (fairly ancient) compilation of Valley bands, and it’s funny – because the recording quality of the other tracks is so awful, this one sounds pretty amazing by comparison. Clearly the dudes in the band weren’t satisfied, though, because they re-recorded it in the version that appears in this music video. Anyway, these guys were the game-changers for Valley music, really – the first band to tour significantly, to push to get their band some real national exposure. It didn’t quite work out (that’s a tall order, after all), but it led to good things for bands like Dignan, and it takes a lot of monkeys typing to produce the work of Shakespeare, so it all builds, in the end, to a worthwhile conclusion*. At any rate – I was 19 or so when this song was recorded, though these guys were probably 15 or 16 at the time. This meant that I was supposed to be too cool for them, since they were playing emo music and I was totally too grown-up for that. But come on – when the drums come in on this one? Awesome. The song is kind of a big Jimmy Eat World rip-off in other ways, but that never really mattered to me. They were kids, and kids are still looking for a way to use their influences in a way that makes something new. They got much closer to it in time, but this is the one that I remember the most.

Frankenixon, “Word To Confuse”

This one hardly counts as a friend’s song – I met this band one time, at a house show in Iowa City at a frat party, where I assumed the dudes would hate everything that was happening that night, but instead they were super great to us. Go figure. Frankenixon got it a little worse, enjoying the opportunity to be asked, “Hey, have you ever heard of Portishead/Fiona Apple/any band where a girl sings and plays piano” over and over. After the show, I was talking to Evelyn, the singer, on the deck, and some guy up on the roof peed on us. Punk rock! Excellent!
Anyway, that’s about where it all ends – we were going to try to play a show together again at some point, but it didn’t work out. We did swap CDs, though, and “Word To Confuse” became one of those songs I carried with me for years. How could I not? It’s so patient, letting Evelyn just build this song off of an easy piano riff until the mid-way point, where it erupts. The lyrics are all super specific and yet vague – “I love you / you are the good one / not like your brother”? The image is great, the meaning is pretty oblique. It gives you a lot to think about, and I’ve had this song in my head on and off for about six years because of it.

Midian, “She Marks Me”

Wow, this song has been around for nearly half of my life. 1996, and I was in high school, and some of my friends were in a band, which was super cool. They weren’t a great band, though, by any means – Art was the singer, but it’d take him 2-3 years to learn how to really sing; Jim played rhythm guitar, but wasn’t much of a songwriter yet. Just a high school band, nothing special, but with some talent that’d develop later. “She Marks Me” was a remarkable high school opus, though – 8 minutes, because they had so much to say, after all – and the sort of epic mid-90’s hook that all of those bands looked to write.
For me, it’s the drums that really sell the song. Right before the chorus comes in, there’s this really muscular, powerful drumming that you don’t expect. So much of the song fits a template, and then something doesn’t – it’s kind of magical, really, and then at the end, for the final jam, there’s more magic. Normally I wouldn’t describe a jammy outro as “magic”, but when this song was recorded, I was sixteen, and they were my friends. Today, listening to it, it’s pretty impossible to separate the way I felt when I heard Art sing “I’ve lost my faith in so many people” and wanting to know what that felt like from the experience of hearing the song now. But no one’s paying me to have an opinion on it, so I can just enjoy it without having to think too much about it. I was sixteen when I heard it, and it was just about what it made me feel.

All Choked Up, “Sucker”

Another thing I did when I was nineteen, besides be too cool for The December Drive, was attempt to manage bands in the Valley. It was short-lived, and I only really did it because my friend J was doing it, and we’d worked together on a magazine for a year or so. When the magazine vanished, I wanted to keep working with J, so I jumped into his band management business. It wasn’t a good fit, and I think I probably lasted six months, tops. All Choked Up was my big failure from that period. Stupid shit – they were a punk rock band, and I was trying to get them gigs that paid real money at clubs that usually booked cover bands. They managed to play about 3 songs at their first gig before the owner looked at me and told me they had to go right the fuck now. I told them to cut it before a bouncer started unplugging shit, and they got rightfully pissed – no money, and cut short? Awesome job, Dan. It actually took a while for things to smooth out, but I think we’re all cool now, not that I’ve spoken to anyone who was in All Choked Up in ten years or so.
Regardless, the reason I was so excited to try to get them into a club that liked cover bands was because Blink 182 was all over the radio, and I thought “Sucker” was at least as good as those songs were. Again, it’s got that specific imagery without any context - “I’ve been this way for the past six years”, the song opens, and I still think that’s a hell of an introductory line. What were you like before then? What made you like that? The hook’s great, catchy and fun, and Monica’s voice sounds great, even so many years later. I wonder if she’s still making music.

Dustin and the Furniture, “In The Spirit Of The Wilderness”

I hope Dustin’s still making music, too, though I’m sure he is. I met him when he was really young – probably 19 or so (which is funny, since that’s the age I was when I was way too old for The December Drive), and I was 25. I was struck by the wisdom he had in some of his songs, and this one was probably his wisest. The theme is basically “This too shall pass”, which is a fair bit of wisdom on its own, but framed in a very Dustin-specific context. What happens, happens, and you can leave god out of it – it happens in the service of the wilderness, nature acting as nature does. Everything’s natural, and that means that if your bike was stolen, that was just nature acting in the service of the wilderness. It’s not exactly pre-determinism, but it’s about acceptance. When Dustin wrote this song, I was ready to hear some ideas about acceptance that came from a 19 year old, and it’s still a nice thing to think about, sometimes. It beats most of the alternatives I’ve found, anyway – it’s not an excuse to stop trying, but it’s a good way to remember that you can’t force things.

Like a lot of people, I’ve devoted a decent amount of brain power to trying to understand what the hell exactly happened with the economic meltdown of 2008. I’ve read a ton of articles and a couple of books, and I’ve been able to grasp it in a sort of ineffable, abstract sense, but not really hold it in my hand as a concept that makes sense to me in real terms. I got it, kind of, but couldn’t explain it to anyone else.

I was reading Matt Taibbi’s latest piece in Rolling Stone last night, and I think something clicked. He wrote:

I learned to derive some entertainment from watching politicians scramble to give floor speeches about financial reform without disclosing the fact that they didn’t have the first fucking clue what a credit-default swap is, or how a derivative works. This was certainly true of Democrats, but the Republicans were way, way better at it. Their strategy was brilliant in its simplicity: Don’t even bother trying to figure out the math-y stuff, and instead just blame the entire crisis on government efforts to make homeowners of lazy black people.

I kind of know what tranches are, and what the derivatives market is, and how a credit-default swap works, but I can only really grasp it by metaphor. I think I have a metaphor that works now, though.

So, let’s say my wife and I are in Las Vegas, and I’m in the sportsbook room, and I decide to bet on every NFL game that week. I bet on the Colts to beat the Raiders – pretty much a sure thing; I bet on the Saints to beat the Vikings – a tough bet, but reasonable; and I bet on the Lions to stomp the Chargers – inexplicable, but I hate Philip Rivers’ stupid face and can’t imagine rooting for him in any case. My wife gets concerned that I am risking so much money, and someone from the casino approaches her: “Ma’am, would you like to take out an insurance policy on your husband’s bets?” And they offer her a deal where, if she pays up-front, and then I lose catastrophically, they’ll cover my losses. Other wives throughout the casino, sharing her concerns about their own husbands, who are high-fiving me in our mutual hatred for Philip Rivers, also sign up for this.

Then, some pro gamblers watch what’s going on. They see that, while there’s money to be made betting on the football games, the real money would be on taking out insurance policies, if they knew they would fail. So they start arranging the bets – the bet on the Colts over the Raiders is an AAA bet, the bet on the Saints over the Vikings is an AA bet, and the bet on the Lions over the Chargers is an A bet. They talk to the insurance people and say, “Hey, can we take out policies based on the bet’s rating, rather than on the person doing the betting? We’ll buy policies for the AAA bets, which is pretty much free money, and that’ll cover what you might lose on the AA and A bets.” The casino agrees, and sells them the policies – the insurance on the A bets are really expensive, but different gamblers buy different amounts on the different ratings.

The casino signs up for this because it’s a ton of money coming in. They know that the Colts are likely to beat the Raiders, so all of the AAA insurance policies are profit. They also know that, because the bets on the Lions to beat the Chargers are so expensive, that even though they’re risky, that risk is mitigated by how much they have coming in.

Soon, the guy at the casino whose job is to decide what an AAA bet is, what an AA bet is, and what an A bet is gets overwhelmed by the number of people betting, and has a hard time keeping track of the games. Sure, maybe the Lions over the Chargers is an A bet, but then some of the gamblers start whispering in his ear that Philip Rivers has come down with a case of whooping cough, and Matt Stafford has been possessed by the ghost of Johnny Unitas, and the Lions have a real, live silverback ape who’s going to start for them at defensive end. Don’t you think that means that that’s really a better bet than an A bet? He nods, and they convince him that, really, every bet is an AAA bet in the end, because the human spirit is so indomitable that any team can win on any given Sunday.

So now, every bet – whether it’s on the Colts to beat the Raiders, or on the Lions to beat the Chargers – is an AAA bet, according to the casino. Most people don’t notice the difference, but those professional gamblers start taking out huge insurance policies on the Lions/Chargers bets.

Meanwhile, the casino is stoked. There’s all this money coming in, not just from the bets, but from the insurance policies on those bets, where super rich gamblers are paying a ton of money for policies on what the casino bosses think are sure-thing, Colts-beating-Raiders bets, even though they’re actually bets on the Lions to beat the Chargers. In fact, the casino is making so much money, they start to add new games. Rather than just betting on NFL games, you can bet on UFL games, you can bet on Arena League games, you can bet on flag football games in the park. They start looking for people on the street – “Hey, you ever think about playing football?” – and recruiting as many players as they can. Suddenly, the kid who played McLovin is the starting quarterback for the Tulsa Teabaggers, and he’s facing off against Tom Brady and the New England Patriots.

At this point, the gamblers have recruited thousands of people in the casino to start placing bets on Tulsa to clobber the Patriots with a 12-point spread, and they’re taking out insurance policies on those bets, which are still rated AAA, because every bet’s AAA, thanks to the indomitable human spirit.  The casino, happy to be selling so many AAA insurance policies to the gamblers, are offering the people who place those bets stacks of free chips, and they’re letting them gamble with the house’s money.

Then the games are played. The Colts crush the Raiders, the Saints squeak by over the Vikings, the Lions are annihilated by the Chargers, and McLovin’s head is ripped clean off of his body by Junior Seau in a 243-3 blowout that will forever doom Tulsa as a place where no football should ever be played again. The entire casino goes broke, the gamblers run off with the money that their insurance policies gained them. Me and the dudes betting on the Lions to beat the Chargers lose our money. The people who bet on the Teabaggers to beat the Patriots don’t, because they were playing under different rules.

Gameday was the meltdown. And, when I tested the metaphor on Kat last night, I asked her if she could tell who the “lazy black people” who became homeowners were in the metaphor. She said they were me and the other dudes betting on the games, but that’s not right.

They were the football players. The fact that people couldn’t afford the mortgages that they should never have been approved for in the first place isn’t what caused the meltdown anymore than the fact that McLovin was a shitty quarterback bankrupted the casino.

And I knew all of this in a theoretical sense while reading, say, Michael Lewis’ (mostly terrible) book on the meltdown, The Big Short, but I couldn’t explain to someone else why the people taking out the loans weren’t responsible for what happened to the global economy. The people who offered them the loans – me and my fellow bettors – were, to some extent, but even more than them, it was the people – the professional gamblers – who built such a fevered demand for the insurance policies (the credit default swaps) that the casino (the banks, and AIG) found as many ways as possible to create them.

The only place the metaphor hiccups, I think, is where me and the bettors fit in. The casino represents the banks, but so do we. The people who were placing the initial bets (i.e., offering the loans) worked for the casino. It’s not a perfect description, but it makes some sense, at least to me.

Andrea Grimes at the Dallas Observer reported yesterday some comments from the chief of the Dallas Police Department about the city’s staggering 25% increase in the number of rapes (according to Chief Dwayne Brown, that’s the actual number of people raping, not just the number who are reporting it). Basically, he cautioned women to be careful about drinking in public and make sure their friends are looking out for ‘em, so they don’t get raped. It’s become a controversy because you may notice that he didn’t say, “Men, stop raping so much”, or even, “Men, keep an eye on your bros, so that if you’re out drinking, you can make sure that your friend doesn’t rape somebody”.

Understandably, people are pissed. Jezebel ran with the story yesterday, and again today. DPD clarified that it was all those evil bloggers’ fault somehow, and they never blamed the victims for rape (they just put the onus for preventing it on the victim, which is apparently totally different).

All of this has been pretty well covered, and I didn’t think I had much to contribute to the discussion. It’s all pretty obvious - men do the raping, so telling women that they need to stop drinking and keep their friends close is blame-shifting. If you want to create a social pressure to watch out for rape in the situations Chief Brown talks about, you should focus on the men who hang out with the rapists. And it’s dangerous to suggest otherwise, because it implies to the dudes who are palling around with rapists that their bro isn’t such a bad guy, because the woman didn’t take the steps advocated by DPD, so she clearly couldn’t have wanted to not get raped that badly.

Like I said, basic stuff. But what moved me to comment is one of the cop blogs I read as part of my work at Sumpter & Gonzalez. The ex-cop in question wasn’t talking specifically about the DPD thing, but about a report from Baltimore, where he worked as an officer, that claimed that “since 2004, Baltimore has led the country with more than 30 percent of rape reports marked ‘unfounded’ by detectives, meaning police believed the victim was lying.”

I won’t get into the meat of the post, but something that sheds some real light on the way a police officer thinks about rape appears within:

One time when I was police there was an actual stranger on young-woman-walking-down-the-street-going-to-work kind of rape. It’s the only one like that I can remember from my brief time on the street. I was surprised at how all we normally cynical cops swung into action and worked hard to catch the bad guy. At the time, I asked a few in my squad why they suddenly cared so much about this rape as opposed to all the others “rape” victims we deal with. “Because she really was raped,” was the generally answer.

First off, check out the self-congratulating about how hard they worked to catch the rapist, when it’s “real rape” - clearly, these guys are the best cops ever. He goes on to contort himself into weird positions that describe “not real rape”, including when a prostitute isn’t paid by a john, when a woman having a consensual affair is afraid that her piece-on-the-side is going to tell her husband and thus reports it to cover herself (”How often does this happen? More often than you probably think,” he decides). He goes on to explain the options a woman has when she’s been “real raped” by somebody she knows - to “become a rape victim” (which he admits cops discourage - “most cops will do their best to talk everybody, potential rape victims included, out of going to the hospital because of the inevitable hours of waiting involved”) or to “talk with friends or family or a councilor, maybe have a stiff drink or three, cry, and then take a very long shower and try and get some sleep”. After all, there’s nothing that can’t be fixed with a good cry, right, ladies?

He goes on to say that he doesn’t know which is the right option, that he can’t make that decision as a dude, it’s up to the lady involved to decide for herself, and how paternalistic would it be for him to convince her to report the crime that happened when she just needs to cry, plus who has time to wait at the hospital? If you read the post, you might conclude that it comes off as kind of disingenuous.

So let’s cut to the chase, as it relates to Chief Brown’s comments and the DPD: The reason Brown puts the task of stopping rape on the shoulders of the victim is because he probably doesn’t believe that it’s “real rape”, probably would rather not have to deal with his officers having to wait around the hospital for rape kits (and knows that you’re a lot less likely to request one if you’re convinced that it’s at least partly your fault), and since you can just cry it out if it happens, why should anyone else have to bother with stopping it from happening?

Been meaning to update the site again, but if you’re prone to long breaks, you want to come back with something good, right? How ‘bout drama? The Internet loves drama.

Yesterday, a piece that I wrote for the Austin edition of the A.V. Club went live, garnering responses ranging from “BS” to “This article is incredibly pedantic, lame, and a huge bummer in general” to “I don’t know what your goal was in writing this piece” to “Go fuck yourself”. This savage attack on the sensibilities of so many people that I wrote was, um, a promotional article for an experimental music festival called the New Media Art and Sound Summit from a local collective I’ve written about a few times in the past, Church of the Friendly Ghost. The article was one in a series called “Faking Your Way” that I came up with back in November of 2008, and which has gone on to become a repeated formula throughout the A.V. Club. I’m pretty proud of it, as I think it’s a funny and fairly unique way to promote events that are otherwise under-the-radar or which seem inaccessible to the sort of people who read sites like the A.V. Club.

The beef that people had with the piece was two-fold: One, a source interviewed for the article insisted that he was “asked to provide ideas and information that would be helpful” and he was offended that it ended up in an article with the tone that mine had. We even had a little bit of back-and-forth bickering in the comments, where I felt the need to quote from the email I sent him before the interview explaining the piece and how his words would be used. To put it plainly, I don’t think he has any reason to feel misled.

The other reason people took umbrage to the article was because they felt “it comes off like you want to make the musicians and the people who watch them look like pretentious tools”. This echoed an email I received from a guy who I’d approached about being a source for the article who declined, saying, “The idea that experimental music is for specialists and those ‘in the know’ is why people are afraid of/turned off by the kind of music that I have devoted my life to making.”

(To be clear, I had no problem with the guy opting not to be interviewed, and I appreciated him giving me his reasons. The “Faking Your Way” series can be pretty snarky sometimes, and I deliberately toned that down in this case after considering his email.)

But here’s what’s weird to me: Audiences already feel like this kind of music is weird and not for them. I didn’t invent the attitude that these guys are describing. I didn’t call anyone a pretentious tool, or make them so defensive that they read that into the article I wrote. If I wrote, “The Church of the Friendly Ghost’s NMASS festival is super accessible and sure to be just what you’re in the mood for, with twenty-minute triangle solos and performance art pieces in five movements for the whole family,” the guys who are pissed at me right now might instead feel validated. Hooray, see, what we do is for everybody! But people who hear that an experimental jazz ensemble is playing as part of a festival aren’t going to take the A.V. Club’s word for it that it’s suddenly right up their alley – they’re just going to ignore the article and go read about that verse Lil Wayne recorded via telephone for the Drake track while locked up in Rikers Island somewhere. Ignoring the fact that people are intimidated by experimental music isn’t the same thing as making them no longer intimidated by it.

The point of “Faking Your Way” is to acknowledge that not everything is for everybody. The series has included articles on subjects like the BCS Championship Game that explained who Colt McCoy was – something that a solid 60% of Austinites could have explained in their sleep. We ran it because we were speaking to the other 40%. These acknowledgments don’t make people who don’t know anything about the subject – be it football, or experimental music, or comic books or theater or art – look at it and say, “Nope, not for me.” If they feel that way after reading it, then they were going to feel that way even if I wrote that the event was awesome awesome awesome and everybody should go. People are fucking smart, especially when you’re trying to sell them something like this.

But what the piece can do is educate people who don’t have any background in a way that acknowledges, “Hey, you know what? Watching a grown-ass man scrape a piece of paper on a drumhead as part of a festival performance is something that may make you feel left out.” And when they’ve been approached like this – on terms that respects where they’re coming from – they can decide if they’re interested in the event or not.

For a reader, the first question isn’t, “Will this festival be something I’ll enjoy?” It’s “Is this article about this festival something I should read?” If it’s framed in a way that respects their position, then they may read it, and then ask the second one. If it’s not, then they won’t even know the festival is happening, and whether they’re likely to hear the sound of a guy doing nothing but playing the triangle and think, “That’s how I feel inside all the time” or not, they won’t feel as though they’ve been invited.

So, apparently there’s an old Nintendo game called Stadium Events that’s kind of a big deal. As in, only 800 were ever released, and the people who want one are willing to pay a fortune for it.

A lady with one of those “re-sell yard sale crap” on eBay businesses listed an original NES with five games earlier this month. As it happens, one of those five games was a copy of Stadium Events. Just kind of a golden ticket type thing. The Nintendo collectible gaming community, apparently with saved eBay search notifications set to “stadium events nes”, found out about it quickly. A forum, on NintendoAge.com, pointed the ad out. A few people there posted about how they offered her side-deals for a couple hundred dollars on the game (which she was selling as part of a lot for $9.99), but mostly the forum is full of people looking out for her, inviting her to learn more, and warning her not to let anyone low-ball her. Around page 3 of the post, the seller – a grandmother – turns up, and the forum gets really protective and helpful.

It’s nice, really. I mean, everyone getting excited about the fact that it’s happening, and all of these fanatics who would gladly pay thousands and thousands of dollars for an old video game working with this lady to make sure she gets a fair deal. Not important, in any sense of the word, but just neat to see a bunch of random Internet people put away greed and opt for a bit of kindness. Presumably they were also interested in learning exactly what the game is worth these days, but curiosity and kindness are often intertwined, so it’s cool.

Incidentally, the game sold for a little over $13,000.

When I was nineteen, I worked in a record store. Not like a High Fidelity thing – it was just the Sam Goody in the mall in the Rio Grande Valley. I had a manager there named Eddie. Nice dude, kind of a cokehead, in his early thirties. Long-haired rocker guy, could kick your ass at Guns N Roses pinball. Would have ruled at Rock Band, too, if it’d been around back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Anyway, Eddie spent a lot of his time going to concerts – he’d drive to San Antonio or Houston or Austin, whatever it took, to see Queensrÿche on their latest tour. The guy loved Queensrÿche. And man, was he stoked when Sammy Hagar came to the Valley for a show. He had strong opinions about the latest Dream Theater record, too.

It wasn’t that Eddie ignored all new music, he just wasn’t really interested in new music that wasn’t made by people whose records came out when he was younger. A new Queensrÿche record? Eddie was first in line, listened to it a dozen times the first weekend he had it, really gave a shit about it.

I’m turning thirty this year, and I’m afraid of becoming Eddie. I’ve only heard a handful of 2010 records so far, and all of ‘em are by musicians whose records I was listening to, like, ten years ago. They’re pretty good and all – the new Retribution Gospel Choir album’s real strong, and the Eels record is kind of a bummer, but in a nice way. I love that Lil Wayne rock record too, without a lick of irony (though apparently I’m in the minority there), and I’m just about to check out the new Massive Attack, which looks promising.

And I could have written pretty much that same paragraph back when I worked with Eddie.

So, um, help? Give me new music. Give me things with 2010 release dates, preferably made by people who were too young to ever be on Friendster – maybe even on MySpace. Because here’s a thing – unless you’re Tom Waits, your sixteenth album is not going to be anywhere near as good as your third. I want music that’s not just new to me, but new. I want to figure out what 2010 sounds like.

About a year and a half ago, Glenn Beck did this bit that I thought, at the time, was the dumbest thing ever written. I was googling for some specific info on health care reform today, and I found a link to his site. I thought I’d click on it because – in all sincerity – I’m so mad about this, I thought it’d be neat if this were actually the one spot on the Venn diagram on which Beck and I overlap.

It’s not. But he does manage to make a comparison to the NFL again – as he did in the previous bit – that’s supposed to be convincing, but which is actually totally fucking clueless about the subject on which he speaks.

This time out, he compares the NFL’s helmet policy to health care, insisting that, since players in the NFL get the best helmets in the world, they’re reckless when playing and thus get more concussions. In Australia, meanwhile, they don’t wear helmets, and are therefore cautious, meaning they suffer 25% fewer concussions – and uninsured Americans are just like Australian footballers, being super cautious not to do anything that can get them sick.

While that’s absolutely absurd on its face, it gets dumber when you notice two important details.

1. There are twice as many teams in the NFL as in the Australian Football League, nearly a thousand more players, and the season involves 80 more games.

2. American football and Australian football are two totally different games that just have the same name. This would be like insisting that American poker, where you sit around a table and play cards, is safer than Australian poker, which I just made up, and in which players bash each other in their helmeted heads with fireplace pokers, because Americans are naturally more cautious when engaging in sport. The reason there are fewer head injuries in Australian football is because giant men aren’t running into each other from dozens of yards away at full speed. They don’t do that because the games are totally different and one of them is naturally less likely to cause head injuries.

So, yeah. It’s not exactly news that Glenn Beck is a fucking idiot, but it makes me feel better, sometimes, to point it out.