People in Wisconsin are fucking weird.

Have y’all heard about those kids in Virginia who were arrested on terrorist conspiracy charges for leaving Joker’s cards with the date 8/15 written on them around town?

I’m not all that interested at the moment in defending them or condemning them for being stupid or whatever, but what’s absolutely fascinating to me is how, based on the ubiquity of a superhero movie, something that would have been more or less innocuous six weeks ago is now seen as a serious threat.

Six weeks ago, a bunch of Joker’s cards with a date and the word joker scrawled on them would have been seen as viral marketing, or maybe just some irrelevant weirdness.

Today, the concept of the Joker is enough of a cultural phenomenon that spreading a symbol associated with the character resonates with everyone on a base level, to the point where people are calling the police. Which is really compelling, when you think about it- everyone knows that the Joker is a fictional character, but people are afraid of him anyway. At the very least, it’s a reminder of what an effective image they created when they invented the character.

Ever since Obama sent out that email to his supporters promising them the opportunity to learn his VP nominee via text message instead of two minutes later on the Internet or television- which was fucking brilliant, by the way, now that they have 2 million cell phone numbers, which are political gold and making an Obama endorsement in any future election an even bigger deal than it might have otherwise been- it’s the number one question on everybody’s mind. Biden? Kaine? Daschle? Clark? Bayh? Sebelius?

Let me humbly submit that, while I find the topic roughly as compelling as the question of whether Kyle Orton or Rex Grossman will be lining up under center in the Bears’ opener (which is to say, really fucking compelling), the two have roughly the same relevance  to the world’s geopolitical scene. Because the office of Vice President is one of the dopiest in politics. It’s dumb and it doesn’t really matter and we’d be a better country if it didn’t exist. The chain of succession could just as easily bypass the middleman and go President - Speaker of the House - President pro temp - etc, etc.

I mean, I guess it’s a novel idea, if kinda morbid, that American Presidents get to hand-pick their own successor in the event of their own death, but the idea that most people seem to have of the office’s role is so wildly off-base that it results in a process that totally undermines that whole point.

The only thing that a candidate can accomplish by selecting a Vice President is a symbolic statement of which group he intends to focus on. That is all. There is nothing else. The idea of balancing the ticket is pointless. The Vice President isn’t the President’s tag-team partner, ready to step in if the head guy has a weakness. If Obama’s foreign policy is in question, picking a retired general to shore up his military credentials doesn’t actually accomplish anything. If he’s too inexperienced, picking a careerist doesn’t ensure that he’ll have all the necessary connections. If he’s too young, picking an old dude doesn’t suddenly average them out. If he’s too liberal, going with some anti-abortion nut from a red state doesn’t actually change Obama’s policies; if he’s too conservative, opting for Dennis Kucinich or Russ Feingold doesn’t mean those dudes actually get any say in governing the country. All the idea of picking a Vice President who fills in the nominee’s gaps is ensure that, if the actual President somehow leaves office, his replacement is someone who doesn’t have all that much in common with him.

Assuming Obama doesn’t die, his Vice President isn’t actually going to have much in the way of power, because the office has no actual power. Post-Cheney, that’s in question, but I’m going to hope that Obama-the-constitutional-scholar isn’t interested in investing whichever goofball he picks with bizarre new powers just for the hell of it. So there’s no point in picking anybody to shore up Obama’s perceived weaknesses. In fact, trying to do so only makes those things more pronounced. So what the hell?

All you can do is pick a Vice President as a symbol. Which is why I joined that anti-Evan Bayh Facebook group the other day. Because I don’t particularly care for the symbolism of a hawkish legacy Senator suddenly being Obama’s best-buddy until the Wednesday after the election, at which point they can ignore each other for 4-8 years. But you know what? If he picks Bayh? It doesn’t actually make a bit of difference. He’ll be as good a Vice President as Biden or Hillary Clinton or Ralph Nader or Jay-Z. Which is to say, totally ineffective by the design of the Constitution. So we’ve got that going for us. I have my own thoughts on who I’d like to see selected as a symbol, but you know what? It’s so irrelevant to the entire debate that I’m not even going to say who she is. What difference does it make? It might as well be your mom.

I tend not to get too nostalgic for the trends of the 90’s and consider myself a pretty forward-thinking dude, in most ways. This year, I’ve been making it a point to focus on listening to music being made right now, because I think it can be pretty educational- you learn more about the world as it is today by engaging in the cultural conversation of the moment (there are other reasons to listen to older music than nostalgia, but a direct, two-way interaction with the world as it is right now is not one of them), and 2008 is a pretty uniquely fascinating time to be hanging around the planet Earth. I want to hear what everybody has to say about it.

But man, I’m not gonna front- I do kinda miss the 90’s alt-rock power ballad. This is what you got when you took an ex-punk rocker who possessed a heap of scorn for the traditional late 70’s/early-mid 80’s power ballads, but who also secretly got chills every time he heard “Beth” by Kiss, and had him pour everything he had into a four minute, late-album track. And the results are still awesome.

Look, here’s proof!

These are maybe not the ten best 90’s alt-rock power ballads ever, but they’re ten perfect examples of the form. The 90’s were a time when even tacky concepts like the power ballad could be redeemed if you were just cool enough and had enough poise. It was magical, children….

But there we go, delving into cheap nostalgia, which is not the point of this exercise. Hell no. The point is- I dunno, to remind the whippersnappers of the glory of 90’s rock or something. Or, um, to contextualize the disparate movements in the guitar-based popular music culture of the 1990’s by examining a form employed by a number of artists who produced work during that time period (I’ve been helping my wife work on her dissertation this week, can you tell?). Because whether it’s Guns ‘n Roses or Jets to Brazil, the power ballad (which contemporary indie rock tends to eschew) was a unifying theme that tied the 90’s together. Examine:

“Don’t Cry”, Guns ‘n Roses
“Don’t Cry” effectively ties the 80’s power ballad, which was corny and intended mostly to convince very drunk young women with teased hair that a guy in leather and spandex was secretly deep, to the 90’s alt-rock that would follow. It It follows a more 80’s-style “quiet-quiet-quiet-LOUD” formula than the “quiet-loud-quiet-loud-quiet-LOUD” that would be popular among dudes who grew up listening mostly to the Pixies, but by the end of the decade it was back in vogue.

“Taillights Fade”, Buffalo Tom
Yeah, this is the stuff. I don’t know if Buffalo Tom ever wrote two great songs, but this one’s enough, really. The lyrics are concrete and Springsteeny, paeans to a girl and the urge to just get away from everybody and start fresh, which perfectly complements the powerhouse buildup of the chorus, which replaces the lyrical specificity with vague rhyming nonsense that the singer sells just cuz his voice is a little bit hoarse.

“Dollar Bill”, Screaming Trees
Mark Lanegan is an indie rock star these days with his own Mark Lanegan Band, his series of albums with Belle and Sebastien’s Isobel Campbell, and the Gutter Twins, with fellow 90’s-rock exile Greg Dulli. He’s also something of a mainstream rock star as the scary dude who emerges from a cloud of smoke for a couple songs during Queens of the Stone Age shows. But before all of that, he was just a really tall guy in flannel from Seattle. “Dollar Bill” was the apex of his early songwriting career, a spirit-of-the-moment sort of song that captures everything awesome about the grunge version of the power ballad.

“Mayonnaise”, Smashing Pumpkins
If you are between the ages of 23 and 36, you have spent at least two weeks listening to this song following a break-up. You have written letters to people who have broken your heart that managed to force in the phrase “try to understand / that when I can / I will”. It is time to admit to this secret shame and embrace it. You are not alone. (bonus- in lieu of an actual music video, this YouTube link was put together by a sad dude with lots of pictures of his ex-girlfriend)

“Big Empty”, Stone Temple Pilots
This was on The Crow soundtrack, and all of a sudden a bunch of people who hated the Stone Temple Pilots because they thought they were Pearl Jam rip-offs had to be all, wow, those guys are all right. This led them to buy the album that came out a few months later, which also had this song, and which sounded like a crappy Pearl Jam record with one good song on it. “Big Empty” rules, though. It’s kinda bluesy and rocks hard on the choruses, gently on the verse, in exactly the way the formula prescribes. Again, the lyrics are incomprehensible mush that becomes totally convincing because of the weird 90’s alt-rock mix of swagger and self-consciousness that makes you think that you’re either missing the point, or that the singer is so fucked-up on something that he can’t make it, and either way it’s hard to argue with.

“Lover, You Should Have Come Over”, Jeff Buckley
Jeff Buckley seems to kind of transcends 90’s rock in some ways, but if you listen to this song in the context of all the others here, you’ll have a hard time making that argument. The ballady part is longer and quieter than most of the grunge-era songs, but the drums give it all away every time the song crescendos. When it finally comes around to the end, it does that “Don’t Cry” thing where everything blows up, from the heavy guitar riffs to Buckley’s soaring voice, and it’s probably the best song on this list. (another bonus- bad student film project in lieu of official music video!)

“Smog Moon”, Matthew Sweet
I have no idea what this song is about at all. A… smog moon, I guess? I think it’s a metaphor for something. It’s not the point. At this point, we’re kind of post-grunge, which you can tell by the piano buried in the mix. Everything here is textbook 90’s power ballad, with enough interesting flourishes to keep you from feeling like you’re listening to “Taillights Fade” again, and it proves that this phenomenon extended past the grunge era. (note- this is apparently the only song ever not to be on YouTube. A dansolomon.com exclusive! Also, a free batch of homemade cookies to anyone who makes a YouTube video for this song. Bonus points if it includes pictures of an ex-girlfriend.)

“Motorcycle Drive-By”, Third Eye Blind
Third Eye Blind don’t get a whole lot of respect, which is mostly well-deserved, but this is both a rare 90’s alt-rock power ballad that makes lyrical sense and a damn fine song that nearly elevates a mediocre artist to something special. Nearly, but not entirely- like most of its peers, this song draws a lot of inspiration from 80’s rock, with a general Jane’s Addictioniness running through the whole thing and a total Cyndi Lauper-style vocal tic that the singer does a couple times during the power part, all of which serves to make it feel just a little bit redundant.

“Guitar and Video Games”, Sunny Day Real Estate
Emo was the 90’s power ballad’s last hurrah, but it got embarrassed of it early into the new millennium. While there are bands that kept at it throughout the 00’s, there wasn’t really any innovation in the form from this point on. Emo bands from the middle of the current decade were pretty much just biting Sunny Day Real Estate, who manage to tie 90’s post-grunge into contemporary indie rock in much the same way Guns ‘n Roses successfully bridged shitty 80’s rock and grunge. And like GNR, Sunny Day Real Estate flew too close to the sun and went out with a silly, pompous last album that rendered them pretty much irrelevant for the years that would follow. But none of that matters right now, because “Guitar and Video Games” is perfect in every way possible.

“I Typed For Miles”, Jets to Brazil
Jawbreaker, which spawned Jets to Brazil, practiced the 90’s power ballad form earlier in the decade, but it’s interesting how Blake Schwarzenbach brought a new spin to the style here. The formula is largely unchanged, but there’s a consistent intensity throughout the song that the secretly-Kiss-loving dudes who defined the power ballad a couple years earlier shied away from. “I Typed For Miles” is the last great 90’s alt-rock power ballad, but it’s a good one to go out on.

There’s a pretty heartbreaking article up on the NYTimes site about Jenny, an elderly elephant who has lived at the Dallas Zoo for the past twenty-two years. She’s had a pretty rough life, and suffers from what they describe as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder as a result. Because elephants are basically people.

The story on her is about the fact that she’s being moved, in light of her companion’s death and her own aging. The question is where she’ll go.

I’m not an anti-zoo person, really. I like zoos and know enough about them to understand that there’s a lot of good work that happens outside of visiting hours and viewing areas. I get that they instill in people who might otherwise not have them a sense of respect and understanding for animals, and inspire conservation efforts through the education they provide. But it’s pretty fucked-up to keep an elephant like Jenny in a zoo when there’s an alternative.

The story comes down to zoo association politics, apparently, because any broad understanding of the concept of politics dictates that everything is politics. The director of the Dallas Zoo had arranged to send her to a safari park in Mexico, essentially a drive-thru zoo full of exotic animals, with 300 acres for their expected three elephants. Elephant experts and activists want her to go to a sanctuary in Tennessee with seventeen other elephants on 2,700 acres, where she’ll be free from visitors outside of the staff.

The political component is two-fold- first, sending animals between zoos is how zoo directors further their careers, in that chummy sort of you scratch my back way that most careers are furthered. Second, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, which accredits zoos in North America, sees the push to have Jenny moved to a sanctuary as a push against zoos in general. Which isn’t far from the truth, as the same activists who want Jenny moved to Tennessee tend to think that keeping elephants in a zoo is unethical, generally.

There’s a strong argument for that, but I won’t make it, because it’s all complicated and I haven’t made up my mind. The AZA’s position, though, is basically a slippery slope one, that if they send Jenny to a sanctuary, then it’ll be hard not to send any other elephant to one, because, basically, they’re better for them.

So, politics. It’s everywhere.

Meanwhile, here are some elephant facts. What? It doesn’t have to be all this guy’s a douche and john mccain’s campaign. We can learn, too.

[Read more →]

For reasons that are way too boring to get into, I haven’t got a UK bank account, and UK banks are very different from American banks. Like, you know how, if you have good credit, you can usually go into an American bank with some money and open a checking account, which’ll be active pretty much immediately? Here that process takes three weeks. Also, the notion of signing a check over to someone else is entirely forbidden. What this means is that when I get paid for something in pounds, as opposed to when I work for American companies and get paid in dollars, I have to take my check to a pawn shop or one of those shady check-cashing places to actually see the money, even though my wife has a perfectly good bank account.

“Living off the grid” is not something that the United Kingdom encourages. I know that Americans under George Bush tend to assume sometimes that they’ve got the worst deal when it comes to civil liberties and stuff, especially compared to the bountiful harmony of Western Europe, but let me assure you, it’s worse over here. What with the truly crushing number of CCTV cameras dotting every street of the entire country, the Oyster Card system that allows the transit police to track your movements- which they do, sometimes just for fun*- and the penalties imposed for cashing a check if you plan to, like, keep your money under the mattress instead of putting it in a bank like a proper citizen, the creepy V For Vendetta eyes of the state peer into your life in ways that would give John Ashcroft such a boner he’d uncover the breasts of lady Justice and rub ‘em for good luck.

The end result is that I had to go to a check-cashing place today and pay £66 ($128.81) just to get the damn thing cashed.

The place I went to was called The Money Shop, and I went there because they advertised a 2.9% rate, which is pretty good for England, even though it’d be outrageous in America. It turns out that the rate is only available if you bring in a coupon that has to be obtained from a troll who guards a bridge out in Lincolnshire, and so I didn’t have one. The young woman at the counter informed me that I’d have to pay 4.99%, and I sent her back to call the head office.

“Okay, they can do 4.5%.”

“Go on back and ask ‘em again. Tell them I threatened to leave.”

“They said 4%.”

“Tell them I got really sad, and mentioned something about feeling betrayed. Tell them I was going to go to the pawn shop across the street.”

“Three and a half.”

“One more time- do you want me to call? Tell them that I know they can give a 2.9% rate if they want to. It says so on your sign. Tell them I’ll wander around the streets of Turnpike Lane until I find someone who’ll give me that rate, if it won’t be them.”

“They’re budging at 3%. It’s a £6 difference. Do I need to-”

“No, that’s fine. They win this round.”

“Thanks. Now, I just need a little bit of information for our records… What’s your occupation?”

“I’m a race car driver.”

Yes, this is how I make myself feel better about the hundred and thirty bucks I have to pay just to get my own money. But what the hell? The way the dollar’s moving against the pound, I’ll lose at least that much by Monday by the exchange rate alone.

Anyway, the point of this is not for my bitter ranting about the unfairness of the current exchange rate policy. Jesus, who would want to read about that? Instead, I’ll offer an observation.

The Money Shop pretty much exists for the sole purpose of catering to the needs of a desperate immigrant population. The way the young woman who helped me with my business today squealed when she saw my American passport may inform you that your narrator, while technically something of a desperate immigrant, is rather non-exemplary of the typical Money Shop patron. Mostly it’s people from Africa or the Caribbean (and occasionally Poland) who are working over here without the necessary paperwork (and it’s a lot of paperwork) to open a checking account.

Yet have a look at their advertising:

Gosh, that’s a lot of young, attractive, fresh-faced white people for a usurious enterprise that caters to desperate migrant workers. I’m not really sure what they’re going for here- do they think that, like, upwardly mobile-looking white folks like the ones in the ads are gonna be all, oh, the money shop is for people like us! Screw the bank, where I’m not charged downright criminal fees for simple transactions, the money shop is my shop! How about showing some poor elderly Eastern European man with his pockets hanging out? Because I met that guy in the shop today, but there wasn’t a single person in there forking over 5.99% of their paycheck while holding a beachball.

(*I was stopped once by TfL agents who just wanted to be sure that the picture on the card looked enough like me.)

(picture of Money Shop franchise inside converted church just outright stolen from this person’s Flickr)

In eight days, I’ll be aboard an airplane to Chicago, and shortly after that, the whole experience of living as an American overseas comes to an end for my wife and I as we sign a lease on a place in Austin and see how home looks with fresh eyes.

Something that comes up from time to time, especially with friends who are at home and haven’t had the chance to live abroad yet is whether I’m sad to be going, to have a big adventure like this one must surely have been wind down. And sometimes I feel bad about it, like I haven’t appreciated it enough, but the answer’s no, not sad at all. But I can be kinda a neurotic dude, and so the question is, like, should I be?

Two things on this.

One, home is a concept that doesn’t get enough play among people who’ve made it a point to blow out of the town they grew up in and did their best to stay away. It can feel like a dirty word- like the two poles are home/boring and away/exciting, and you’re choosing the former. But I was talking with a new friend a couple weeks ago, a guy named Archie. He’s from Zimbabwe, but he’s lived in the UK for a decade, came over as a teenager. He started in Glasgow and came to London five years ago. He asked if I got home often, and I told him that I’d be returning for good pretty soon, and he nodded, a little jealous. “If I could,” he said, “if there were a job that paid even a fraction of this for me back home, I would go tomorrow.” We all know how realistic that dream is, but it struck me that if home, as a concept, holds such appeal for a guy who’s had most of his adult life to get used to living away, and the place that he came from is as unstable as Zimbabwe, then there’s no reason to feel like looking forward to going back is anything to feel bad about.

(I told him to come to Texas instead. What the hell? There’s plenty of room, and you know how well-accepted Anglicized African men are in the Lonestar State.)

Two, I saw this video on Bob Harris’ blog today:

It’s from a disability awareness night at Fenway Park that the Red Sox sponsored a little while back. They invited a young man with Autism to sing “The Star Spangled Banner”, and around “whose broad stripes and bright stripes”, he sort of lost the words and started giggling. And the entire crowd, 38,000 sports fans who were there to watch a ballgame, came in to help him out.

Because while America’s the place where silent majority campaigns and dog whistle attacks are designed to cater to people at their worst, the people at their best can be pretty fucking remarkable. And going back to that isn’t anything to feel bad about.

Hey, you know who’s still a douchebag? That James Frey asshole who wrote A Milion Little Pieces.

I read a Vanity Fair article about the guy a month or two ago and thought, you know, maybe he’s not so bad, he probably deserves a second chance. And then I opened this week’s issue of TimeOut London and saw that there was an interview with him in the books section, read it, and had confirmed for me- yup, still a douchebag. But don’t take my word for it- take it away, Frey-guy:

“no book has ever been investigated or picked apart the way mine has, before or since.”

No book? Ever? People investigated your book more than they did The Bell Curve, or The Population Bomb, or Holy Blood, Holy Grail? Or, I dunno, fucking Mein Kampf? I know that his point is that most memoirs don’t get the same sort of scrutiny that his did, but the way he talks about it makes it look like he thinks he’s the most specialist writer in the whole world who just got picked on so unfairly.

“if you look at memoirs in general, any one of them that’s readable is going to have the same issues that mine had.”

Well, not exactly. When Frey started publishing, he tried to pick a literary fight with Dave Eggers, so let’s compare A Million Little Pieces and A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius. Okay, A-1, Eggers’ book’s central concept, that a twenty-something kid had to suddenly raise his little brother after the deaths of both of his parents, is true. Frey’s book’s concept, that he got so fucked up on drugs that he ended up in jail and then met a bunch of strange characters in rehab, including a girlfriend who killed herself, is untrue. So no, any readable memoir can exist without wholesale fabrication of the events of the author’s life. Furthermore, Eggers (who isn’t the first author to do this) included in the paperback edition of the book a full appendix of errata, explaining where the facts of reality differ from those of the book. Voila, even Frey’s literary nemesis was able to write a memoir without those “issues”.

“A Million Little Pieces was written as a novel, and its intentions were all literary, all artistic. It was meant to be an insult to self-help books, and somewhere along the line it became one, and I was really uncomfortable with that. I was like, this is me spitting on self-help books… I got put on this pedestal as a recover and addiction superhero, and that was not at all what I wanted… I don’t want to be a guy on TV talking about addiction. Fuck that.”

The incredibly douchey thing about this statement is that it makes it seem like all of that shit was just stuff that happened to him, rather than things he actively sought to do. He didn’t get ambushed by Oprah in the middle of the night and forced to appear on the show to talk about addiction and recovery; he didn’t have to turn his book into a brand for a certain school of self-help; he jumped on that pedestal the second it was offered to him. Which is telling, because addicts who haven’t taken any responsibility for their addiction do the exact same thing. Claiming that all of the things that happened to you just happened, as opposed to being stuff you did, is a telltale sign of an unrecovered addict. Which is pretty funny, considering who it’s coming from.

“most of the writers I love were notorious writers: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Hemingway, Celine, Bret Easton Ellis, Mailer…”

Yeah, but guess what those guys are notorious for? Hint: it’s not lying to Oprah. I get that the guy needs to tell himself that he’s some rebel outlaw, but be real- do you think Celine would have ever taken the Oprah’s Book Club stamp on the cover of Death On The Installment Plan? Mailer wasn’t “notorious” because he fabricated events and got caught- shit, Mailer was steadfast in his dedication to keeping fact and fiction distinct. He didn’t try to pass off The Armies of the Night as straight non-fiction, and he was happy to call The Executioner’s Song and Harlot’s Ghost and Marilyn novels. Trying to pass yourself off as an heir to that when the very thing you’re notorious for flies in the face of what he was all about? Douchey, douchey, douchey.

“one of the joys of this being classified as a novel is that none of it has to be accurate or real, and if people want it to be, they can fuck off… I saw the book being discussed on ‘Newsnight Review’ and one of the guys was like ‘well, this information better be real, I feel like he’s conning us again,’ and I’m like, ‘you fucking dumbass. It’s a fucking novel. None of it has to be real.’ Frankly, he reacted just the way I hoped.”

This is in response to a question about his new book being full of facts and history that are totally made-up. And yes, he’s technically correct, a novel does not have to have any true things in it if the author doesn’t want it to. But check it out- if you’re making up the history of Los Angeles  and the facts about the city, then you’re not writing about Los Angeles. You’re writing about a made-up place that exists in your imagination. You might as well be writing about Metropolis. If you have to reimagine the place in order for it to fit into your novel,  then your novel is not actually about LA.

And the douchiest thing in the interview? It comes as a response to a question about whether he wished he’d been more emphatic about how A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard were meant to be classified.

“there were mistakes made, sure.”

For a writer who’s not really known for using the passive voice, this is a pretty unique statement. Mistakes were made? Who made them, James? You know, what’s funny about this is the whole construction of the sentence is pretty familiar. Pretty much any time someone fucks up and doesn’t want to admit that it was their fuck-up, they’ll dip into the passive voice for a response like that. Check out the number of Bush administration dickheads who used it to explain the Iraq War, the attorney firing scandal, civilian bombings in Afghanistan, etc- General Richards, Richard Perle, Alberto Gonzales, George W Bush himself, and even John McCain- and you’ll see how powerful a linguistic device it is for people who want to avoid admitting that they fucked up.

So in a single-page interview, Frey manages to avoid admitting responsibility for the lies in his books, treat himself as a victim for having appeared on Oprah, complain about all the unfair scrutiny his made-up memoir received, argue that everybody else does it, so who cares, equate himself with Norman Mailer because he got famous for something that violated one of the main principles of Mailer’s writing, and giggle about the dumbasses who expect that a novel that’s set in Los Angeles be about the real LA and not the Narnia-LA that the author needed to create for the narrative to work. So, yeah- in case you were wondering, James Frey is still a douchebag.

(cross-posted to mightygodking.com)