Koax! Koax! Koax!

Incident

2009-10-21T23:12:17Z

I was walking down 24th Street the Monday or Tuesday after Michael Sanchez was shot at 24th and Shotwell. It was about 11pm, and there was a group of young men and women all gathered around the corner store, drinking beer and talking. On the wall of the store were dozens of photographs and notes, and there were candles and flowers arrayed on the ground. I was just thinking that it seemed like a pretty sketchy crowd when I noticed a black-and-white had just parked on the other side of Shotwell.

The cop who got out of it was incredibly imposing: very tall, black, totally bald, hugely broad shoulders, ramrod-straight back. His uniform looked like he had just been ironing it in the car. He slowly walked across the street, and I was sure that he was there to tell the group that it was time to get on its way.

But that's not what he did. He didn't talk to them at all. He went down on one knee, produced a candle of his own, lit it, and set it down with the others. Then he went back to his car.

Lies, damn lies, statistics, and what the hell?

2009-09-03T08:37:17Z

Global Health Magazine is a publication of the Global Health Council, an NGO devoted to health issues around the world (particularly women and children's health issues, HIV/AIDS, infectious diseases, and health systems).

If you poke around in their kicky web site, you'll come across this shocking graphic:

Are you shocked? I'm shocked.

First off, the purpose of a pie chart is to represent relative portions of a whole, not comparative scalar quantities. If one wedge is made bigger, another is necessarily made smaller, and the whole pie represents 100%. This chart suggests, bizarrely, that one way we could reduce the amount of bad things happening in Jordan would be to collect statistics for more countries, since adding countries to this graph would make Jordan's slice smaller.

This is compounded by the fact that the wedges converge on a point that's not in the center, and the shape of the pie is not circular. So, Serbia and Georgia's wedges should be the same size, since one represents 6.2% and one represents 6.9%. Are they? Well, first off, what's their size, anyway? Is it the angle the two sides describe? Is it the surface area? In a circular pie chart whose wedges converge on the same point, these two things are one and the same; not so in this chart. I think that it may be the angle, and not the area, that represents the number, which is unfortunate because Serbia's wedge is noticeably larger than Georgia's.

Actually, now that I compare Rwanda and Jordan, I think that the person who drew this is just an idiot, because there's no way of looking at those two areas that makes one nearly twice as big as the other.

And now, another issue: What do Vietnam, Laos, Georgia, and Iraq have in common? What about Serbia and India? Nepal and Honduras? Well, nothing, or at least, nothing that makes any sense in the context of this chart. So why are Serbia and India black? Why are Nepal and Honduras red?

Let's not even get into the information-destroying jagged lines and concentric arcs.

And now let's move beyond the terrible, terrible graphic design to ask another question: why aren't Tajikistan, Kosovo, Guatemala, and Nigeria on this chart? Is this a graph of the 16 countries with the highest percentages of women who believe it's OK for their husband to hit them? Or is it just a sampling of third-world countries? I'd suspect the latter - I mean, not that I have it in for Sudan, but given that they're a Muslim country in sub-Saharan Africa, I'd think their numbers would be closer to Ethiopia's or Jordan's than to Serbia's or Belize's. But really, who can fucking say?

And wait, I'm not done yet. There's one more thing that bugs me about this. Why is Laos labelled as "Lao PDR"? Yes, the long form of the country's name is "Lao People's Democratic Republic," but I don't see "HK" in front of Jordan or "SR" after Vietnam. What's up with that?

The answer to that last question, at least, can be found in the source data, which for some reason singles out Laos for this weird special treatment. And while there are dozens of countries with percentages higher than Serbia's (so much for the top-16 theory), there's no data for Sudan. Too bad, Janjaweed wives, no statistical recognition for you!

Also, this data is even sketchier than I thought it is. The source for the chart is an appendix to a UNICEF report. Nothing wrong with that, except that as the data set makes clear, these numbers come from five completely different studies, which sort of makes the already suspect three significant figures even more so. Not that anybody involved with making this chart gave a shit, but would it have killed them to pick numbers from the same study?

Rather damningly, the biggest, most dramatic number on the chart - Jordan's 90% - is the only number in the entire data set whose source is not a study but a preliminary report on a study.

And finally, there's the little matter of changing the meaning of the data. This report doesn't list the percentage of women who think it's OK for their husbands to hit them. It lists the percentage of "girls and women aged 15–49 who responded that a husband or partner is justified in hitting or beating his wife under certain circumstances." It's like the difference between saying it's OK to steal money and saying it's OK to steal money from thieves.

This is a very bad chart.

After everything, after G.W. Bush, after 9/11 and the Gulf War and Katrina and Guantanamo, after the disastrous candidacy of John McCain, and after the splendidly appalling incoherence and subliteracy of Sarah Palin, I have one question for the GOP:

2009-07-05T20:53:41Z

That's quite an act you've got there. What do you call it?

Some thoughts on "Some thoughts on Michael Jackson"

2009-06-30T19:50:07Z

It's always an exercise in futility to try and clarify what you've written after people have read it, but here goes.

The key phrase - it's buried in the penultimate paragraph, so my bad - is "in my mind." Of course Jackson was human. But he also appeared to be so utterly out of phase with ordinary human existence that he couldn't interact with it in any normal way. His response to the world, in general, seemed like it was intended to lessen his connection with what for want of a better word I'll call "humanity." But he was certainly human, for all that he appeared to be something else. Saying that he was "no longer really being human in any meaningful sense" is hyperbolic, to say the least. It's because he was human that what happened to him seemed so terrible.

On to the issue of molestation: I used the word "probable" for a reason. I have uncertainty about what actually happened. But at the same time it seems likely to me that if someone's attorneys let him pay millions of dollars to settle a civil suit, they have some reason for not thinking that he's not going to win it. Hence, "probable." But I don't know the truth, and I don't pretend to.

This brings us to the most important point about all: There is no way, no way in the world, that I know what Michael Jackson was really like. And not in the "we can never really know another human being" sense of not knowing what he was really like, either. Our word "fame" comes from the Latin fama, which originally meant "rumor". Virgil described Fama (the Romans' goddess/personification of rumor) as a hideous feathered creature who had as many eyes, ears, and tongues as she had feathers.

That's who told me everything I know about Michael Jackson.

My knowledge of Jackson is not only imperfect, it is also, almost certainly, fundamentally wrong. It's based on the crazy-quilt of public relations, gossip, art, and parody that hung between me and the real Michael Jackson. But even though it's fundamentally wrong, it's also all I have. And even though there's a crazy-quilt of myth hanging between me and the real Michael Jackson, there was a real Michael Jackson, a real person whose real outlines could be perceived through it.

So why bother? Two reasons.

First, he was literally inescapable. It was practically impossible to be a normal American growing up in the 1970s and 1980s and not be confronted with the idea of Michael Jackson. This idea was originally crafted with great care. It was the work of many hands. The idea's central objective was to be as known by as many people as possible. The people whose handiwork this idea was (including, it's essential to recognize, Michael Jackson himself) were extremely successful. I have ideas about who Michael Jackson was because it is close to impossible for me not to.

The second reason is that there was, at the core of this idea, a real person. That real person, what I could make out of him, seemed to be in misery for a very long time.

The understanding I've fashioned for myself about what caused that misery is, at the very best, contingent. I recognize that. But its contingency is not something to apologize for. It can't be helped. As Joan Didion pointed out thirty years ago, we tell ourselves stories to live. This is a strength, in that it lets us endure what she called "the shifting phantasmagoria" of our actual experience. It's also a weakness, because in constructing narratives, we impose an order on the real world that is not necessarily accurate or even present, and it is that distorted order, and not the real world, that we actually understand. The best I can do - the best anyone can do, really - is to remain aware of this process whenever I can, to remain aware that the stories I'm telling myself are, at best, only based on truth, and not the truth themselves.

I think the people who've called this posting "wonderful" (hi Cory!) and "smart" (hi Patrick!) are moved to do so because the narrative I've constructed for myself about Michael Jackson resonates, in some significant way, with the narrative that they've constructed for themselves. It's not because I'm in touch with the truth about Michael Jackson. If I'm in touch with any truth, it's the truth of what the emotional and intellectual experience of coping with the idea of Michael Jackson is like.

tl;dr: It's all shadows on the cave wall.

Some thoughts on Michael Jackson

2009-06-28T18:04:27Z

I'm not really any sadder about Michael Jackson's death than I already was about his life.

It was clear that this was a guy whose Maslovian pyramid took a sharp turn somewhere above "safety needs" and ended up with its tip pointing in a direction nobody else has ever been interested in going. It's always uncomfortable to see someone who's been ruined by fame; what was distressing about Jackson was that even though he was ruined by fame before his 20th birthday, he kept pressing the lever, and getting rewarded with still more fame, and still more ruination. Fame ruined him as an artist and it ruined him as a person, and then it kept on ruining him.

In one sense, Neverland is just a point on the same curve that connects Iranistan, San Simeon, and Graceland. But unlike its predecessors, the overarching sense that I got from everything I ever heard or saw about Neverland is not "this is what happens when you marry too much money to too little taste" but rather "this is an inarticulate expression of uncontained misery." Also, Barnum and Hearst and Presley held their citadels of damaged self-expression till the day they died: Jackson lost his. And he didn't seem too unhappy about losing it, either.

The saddest thing about Jackson was not just that his fame ruined him, it's that it continued ruining him even after he was essentially finished as an artist. In the last decade of his life he was no longer a great singer or a talented composer or a brilliant choreographer; he was someone who had once been all those things and was now Michael Jackson. Here was a guy whose entire existence from early childhood had been wrapped up with what happened when he did things that made other people happy and excited. And that was unavailable to him. He still could make people happy and excited by showing up and having his picture taken, but that's all he had left.

Someone on the WELL used a word about Jackson's probable history as a child molester that made me stop and think: "unforgiveable." It strikes me that it never even occurred to me whether or not to forgive Michael Jackson. In my mind, he was so far away from normative that the question of forgiveness seems totally irrelevant. Not that his no longer really being human in any meaningful sense justified his actions, or mitigated the harm he did, but that it makes no more sense to judge the morality of his actions than it would to judge Henry Darger's. Their creepiness, sure. But this was a man (it's a mark of how profoundly damaged Michael Jackson was that it feels strange to call him "a man", just as it feels strange to recognize that when he died he was older than the President of the United States) who spent every day of his life embedded in a matrix of perverse incentives. The terrain of his personal landscape was unrecognizable. I can understand the choices that my cat makes more deeply than I could understand the ones Jackson made.

His death has made me stop and think, but it hasn't made me mourn a loss. We lost Michael Jackson fifteen years ago.

Jim Cramer on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, 3/12/2009

2009-03-13T19:28:43Z

There's a reason commentators are using words like "bloodbath" and "slaughter." Though it reminded me more of one of those nightmares where you find yourself in your math class, on the day of the final, and you realize that you've been going to the wrong class all semester: the exam is covered with equations that you can barely recognize, you don't know where to begin, and for the next three hours all you can do is fail.

Cramer walked onto that show ready to defend himself against what Stewart had already accused him of. He was utterly unprepared for what he got. Which is strange, because what he got was really just an elaboration of what Stewart said in the original piece about CNBC and Rick Santelli: this network seems to be in league with the traders against the investors, it's uncritical to the point of appearing collusive, and that if the network actually has a purpose beyond entertainment (and, seemingly, telling the fish how to line up for the sharks), it has manifestly failed.

And Cramer had nothing to say to any of that. It was weird. It's like he's never in his life prepared for a midterm by looking at a practice test. The only thing he was ready to talk about was that sure, his predictions could have been better. It's like he focused on the one single thing in the original piece that made him look silly, and paid not the slightest bit of attention to anything else.

I actually started to feel bad for him at one point. Not bad bad, mind you - the clips from his 2006 interview that Stewart kept playing kept that under control. But he was in zugzwang very early on. Whatever ammunition he might have had to use in disagreeing with Stewart's criticisms of CNBC he left at home. His knowledge and experience and common sense, which he did bring with him, gave him nothing he could use to counter Stewart - largely because Stewart's fundamentally right and he knew it.

But if he couldn't disagree with Stewart, agreeing with him was even less of an option. Agreeing with Stewart would destroy him.

So he babbled ineffectively. You would expect that someone with his persona would be irritated if he got interrupted in mid-sentence by a long speech. But every time that happened to him he looked unperturbed, maybe even relieved. He was safest when he wasn't talking.

And so he let Stewart talk. And what Stewart let loose with was, seriously, the clearest and simplest articulation of what has happened to us, of who did what, and to whom, and how it was done, that I've seen anywhere.

C# LRU cache released

2009-02-09T00:01:04Z

Of the small set of people who read this blog, a vanishingly small subset will care about this:

Because I needed an LRU cache in the project I'm working on, and I couldn't find one anywhere, I built one. Since there's nothing proprietary in the code, and I'd like other developers to look it over and maybe even use it, I've released it as open source. You can find it at http://csharp-lru-cache.googlecode.com.

A little something for Thanksgiving

2008-11-28T03:33:00Z

Cain killed Abel, and the blood cried out from the ground - a story so sad even God took notice of it. Maybe it was not the sadness of the story, since worse things have happened every minute since that day, but its novelty that He found striking. In the newness of the world God was a young man, and grew indignant over the slightest things. In the newness of the world God had perhaps not Himself realized the ramifications of certain of His laws, for example, that shock will spend itself in waves; that our images will mimic every gesture, and that shattered they will multiply and mimic every gesture ten, a hundred, or a thousand times. Cain, the image of God, gave the simple earth of the field a voice and a sorrow, and God Himself heard the voice, and grieved for the sorrow, so Cain was a creator, in the image of his Creator. God troubled the waters where He saw His face, and Cain became his children and their children and theirs, through a thousand generations, and all of them transients, and wherever they went everyone remembered that there had been a second creation, that the earth ran with blood and sang with sorrow. And let God purge this wicked sadness away with a flood, and let the waters recede to pools and ponds and ditches, and let every one of them mirror heaven. Still, they taste a bit of blood and hair. One cannot cup one's hand and drink from the rim of any lake without remembering that mothers have drowned in it, lifting their children toward the air, though they must have known as they did that soon enough the deluge would take all the children, too, even if their arms could have held them up. Presumably only incapacity made infants and the very old seem relatively harmless. Well, all that was purged away, and nothing is left of it after so many years but a certain pungency and savor in the water, and in the breath of creeks and lakes, which, however sad and wild, are clearly human.

- Marilynne Robinson, from her novel Housekeeping

Georgia on my mind

2008-08-11T19:44:47Z

In case you're unclear on what just happened in South Ossetia, here is Gary Brecher to explain it all to you. I'm a big fan of the little creep (oh, come on, that's what he'd call himself), and I love, for instance, his breakdown of why the Pentagon condemned the Russian response as "disproportionate":

If you want a translation, luckily I speak fluent Pentagon. So what “disproportionate” means is—well, imagine that you’re watching some little hanger-on who tags along with you get his ass whipped by a bully, and you say, “That’s inappropriate!” I mean, instead of actually helping him. That’s what “disproportionate” means from the Pentagon: “We’re not going to lift a finger to help you, but hey, we’re with you in spirit, little buddy!”

Less comprehensive (and funny), but no less informative, is Mark Ames's take on things, and in particular John McCain's delusional reaction to them.

By the way, I don't know if you were watching, but the Russians shut down The Exile back in June. Oh, I'm sorry, they didn't shut it down. They have a free press in Russia, after all. They conducted a surprise audit of the newspaper and scared its investors into backing out. First time they'd done that to an English-language publication, so there's another landmark.

Anyway, Ames was the editor of The Exile, so if there's anyone who'd be likely to take a less than sanguine view of the Russian government, it's him. You'll note he's not cheering for Georgia in this affair.

2008-08-11T19:42:49Z

Nancarrow? Nancarrow!

2008-08-06T05:12:00Z

I'm putting this story up because I just told it to someone the Sunday night, and then today Teresa Nielsen Hayden linked to one of Stephen Malinowski’s music animations on Making Light. Okay, so the universe wants me to tell this story. Here it is. It’s both pointless and kind of wonderful.

About 8 years ago, I was in Paris with a bunch of people including my friend Kay. Kay has friends who live in Paris, an American woman married to a French man. I should say a Parisian man, or more specifically a man of the 13^th arrondisement, because that’s where he holds court. Fabienne is one of those people who knows everyone, and whom everyone knows. He’s big and bearded and jolly, like a character in a Marcel Pagnol movie, and people love him. In the entire time I’ve known him, I’ve never been in a public place with him and not had two or three people walk up to him to say hello.

Fabienne is a tinkerer, and his neighborhood is full of workshops. One afternoon, he took us to visit his friend Pierre. Pierre was an intense little guy whose enormous workshop was an utter shambles of boxes and old furniture and the kind of detritus that you see at the Marche des Puces - mountains of discarded ephemera that look perfectly ordinary if you’re French, but alien and magical if you’re not.

In the middle of this mess was his creation. It was an old computer, connected to a cutting machine. The cutting machine, which was driven by software he’d written, produced paper rolls for a hurdy-gurdy. It took Fabienne (whose English is not terrific, though it is enchantingly weird) some time to get the point across, which was that Pierre had made this entire elaborate setup to make it easier for him to compose music for his favorite instrument.

At which point a switch closed in my head and I said “Oh! Like Conlon Nancarrow!”

Pierre looked up eagerly. “Nancarrow?”

“Nancarrow!” I said.

“Nancarrow!” he said.

"Nancarrow," I affirmed. It was beginning to dawn on both of us that neither of us could speak a word of the other’s language. This was as much conversation as we were going to be able to have. We were crestfallen.

When I got back to the US, I dropped Stephen (who I’ve known from the WELL for a long time) an email message telling him about the man who composed for the hurdy-gurdy. Pierre’s strips of paper, where the boxes tell the instrument what notes to play, are doing almost exactly the same thing as the rectangles in Stephen’s animations, which tell the viewer what notes are playing. Their pitch is a function of the vertical position, and their duration is a function of the horizontal length. Both men had turned to software to implement these oddly similar visions, though Stephen’s notes are bars on the screen and Pierre’s are holes in paper.

Stephen wondered if Pierre would like one of his animations. Of course he would, I said. Just be aware that Pierre doesn’t speak a word of English.

So Stephen sent Pierre a tape. And he included this note with it:

Stephen --> Robert --> Kay --> Fabienne --> Pierre

Rearrange your liver to the solid mental grace now! Ask me how!

2008-05-23T07:31:05Z

David Hartwell famously observed that the golden age of science fiction is twelve. There comes a point in one's life where it becomes extremely difficult to love certain things unironically. The narrow perspective of youth and inexperience makes beacons out of things that are merely shiny. You can't recognize meretriciousness when you haven't tasted it yet.

But then you learn a little more about the world, get burned once or twice, live a little, and you start to see what things are really like. This is a wonderful and necessary experience, because you develop a new, deeper, truer appreciation for the things in life that are genuine and sustaining. But you lose some things along the way.

And so it happens that Yes passes out of your life.

Even when I thought Yes was great, which I did, it was hard for me to find much that was admirable in Jon Anderson. The high voice: annoying. The fantastically stupid lyrics: annoying. And his whole mystical spirit-child persona, all unicorns and no fucking, was like what Stevie Nicks might have been like if she found sex icky.

I never dreamed I'd find something that turned me around completely on the subject of Jon Anderson. But here it is.

I had tears in my eyes watching this. It is so totally, brilliantly, unironically great. Okay, the backup singers are a little flat. The sound is muddy, and the image isn't all it could be. It doesn't matter.

They're kids. The keyboard player (yes! he's wearing a cape!) is better at playing glissandos than he is at shaving. They do this far better than you would believe possible, and they do it with a kind of love and enthusiasm that the band itself hasn't been able to muster for thirty years. I've watched it start to finish twice and it's just outstanding.

And it could never have happened if Jon Anderson didn't turn out to have qualities that are wholly admirable, like generosity, enthusiasm, kindness, and a complete lack of pretense. (It's very hard to imagine Peter Gabriel or Robert Fripp, say, doing anything this. Or Lou Reed, for that matter.)

From the fabulous Starland Ballroom in Sayreville, New Jersey, I present to you the Paul Green School of Rock Omega All-Stars, with Jon Anderson singing lead, performing, in its nutty entirety, all of "Close to the Edge". Part 1 is here, and part 2 is here.

There's a wonderful moment in part 2, at about 5:20 where the keyboard player switches over from the pompous dramatic pipe organ to the silly mini-Moog-like lead, and the person taping this (a parent, I'd bet) has zoomed in, and at the edge of the frame you can see one of the backup singers, and she's cracking up. And it's completely cool.

This is all progressive rock really ever needed: to be comfortable with the fact that from time to time girls are going to laugh at it.

On Elliott Smith's "Can't Make A Sound"

2008-04-06T20:30:20Z

The verse-chorus form of pop songwriting, part anchor and part foundation, reminds me of Clifford Geertz's observation that the webs of significance that comprise human culture both constrain us and support us. The structure that this form imposes seems very rigid if you look at it on paper, and it is very small in scale. But because of its limits, it has also given thousands upon thousands of modestly able musicians a space in which they can use their small fund of talent to craft something indelible.

It's hard to know what kind of musician Elliott Smith would have been in another time, or had he had a different life. But he grew to maturity working in this simple form, and he never left it, even as his modest talent developed into an astounding profligacy. It's all on display in this song, a pop song that's four minutes long and six hours wide.

The first statement of the verse is, in its arrangement, spare and simple: an acoustic guitar playing through its seven chords with a simple strum on every quarter note, and Smith's voice, double-miked to pick up a little reverb, presenting the song's melodic line. The arrangement may be simple, but the melody is not: there's a statement, an elaboration, and then three repeated responses, helpfully called out for you by the phrasing in the lyrics:

I have become a silent movie
The hero killed the clown
Can't make a sound
Can't make a sound
Can't make a sound

If you listen to the first thirty seconds of the song, those five pieces should be very clear in your mind. And at any rate, to make sure you are familiar with them, he repeats the five pieces again in the second verse. The arrangement broadens in the second verse, with sustained strings filling out the simple strumming, doubled by a subtle vocal descant starting in the second phrase.

Now, there's something else to notice in this melody, which this repetition helps us with. The second syllable of "movie" descends three notes, but "clown" stops on a single note. The first two "sounds" bend down, the last one doesn't. The melisma in this song seems casual, but it is in fact deliberate and careful: the descending notes at the ends of these phrases signal that continuation is coming, that they're a part of a longer gesture. These notes are present again in the second verse, in the same form: "doing" is sung just as "movie" was, with the same three note drop-off in the last syllable. These seem like ornaments to the melody when you first hear the song, but they're intrinsic.

After the second repetition of the verse, we get the chorus, and again, because we're being introduced to the song still, it's done nakedly: the strings and backing vocals go away, and we're back to the simplicity of acoustic guitar and voice.

The chorus holds two surprises in store: after the first line, there's a little guitar riff, the first time in the song where the accompaniment, and not the melody, stands out. And then the second line, with the highest (and loudest) notes sung so far, reveals that the chorus is not nicely divided into halves: we're suddenly led into the second verse a little before we were expecting.

The second verse is where it all comes together.

The arrangement here shifts: up until now, we've been in coffeehouse-folk mode, with a singer and an acoustic guitar. Now, though, we have a rock and roll band: drums, bass, rhythm guitar, and lead guitar.

And what a lead guitar it is. The lead guitar line here is played with every subtle gesture of tone and dynamics that Smith infused the first verse's vocals with. The call-and-response, the descending melismas at the end of the phrases, all present here, played with a fluency and grace that George Harrison spent his whole life working towards. Harrison would have been proud to play the rhythm guitar here too, which has expanded the open chords of the first verse into syncopated descending arpeggios, played so precisely that it's easy to think that both lead and rhythm are being played on the same instrument.

The lead ends the second phrase with a flourish of ascending groups of sixteenth notes that may be my favorite guitar riff ever: instead of ending the second phrase with its descent and a pause, the melody is turned around and opened up. These notes announce that the structure of the song is breaking open. The first two phrases of the verse, the statement and elaboration, now get to develop in repetition before the response arrives.

Born in the role, but he can't stop
Standing up to sit back down

go the vocals (and yes, there's that three-note descent on "stop"), now firmly backed by the drums and rhythm guitar. But then the last line's melody repeats again:

To lose the one thing found

with vocal harmony suddenly appearing, an ascending alto contradicting the descending tenor, "found" ending on a mordent that leads right into a repetition of that beautiful guitar figure.

And then the verse starts for a third time, with the harmonizing vocal line now almost taking the lead:

Spinning the world like a toy top
Till there's a ghost in every town

...and with strings swelling to fill the harmonies even fuller, until the response finally comes:

Can't make a sound
Can't make a sound
Can't make a sound

...this in a form essentially unchanged from its first appearance. Except that it too gets an elaboration, one more

Can't make a sound

to lead into the second chorus.

But the chorus is not expanded at all, it's still the same two lines of melody that were present the first time. What's different in its repetition, though, is the stomping guitar line, that overlays it, the arpeggiating rhythm guitar now asserting itself into the lead. The long notes of the melody -

Eyes locked and shining

have turned into a root that the guitar is now playing against. The guitar's phrase fills the space after the first line, and the end of this phrase leads into the second:

Can't you tell me what's that burning?

And the chorus has again performed its function: again it ends with unexpected abruptness, again it leads us into a change in the character of the song.

Instead of the spare simplicity of the first verse, and the baroque elaboration of the second, the third verse begins with a furious barrage of jangling strumming on the electric guitar. And instead of subtle developments in the arrangements, we just get the two lines repeated again and again:

Why should you want any other
When you're a world with in a world

with the entire ensemble: drums, bass, guitars, lead and backing vocals, strings, all turned up to 10 (and still, reliably, the last syllable of "other" is those three descending notes). They repeat four times, and then the last few repetitions are left to the strings alone with the guitar.

There's something haunting about the sound of the guitar at the end of this song. Its tone is raucous and round and harsh, but it's also played with precise voicing, down to the mordent at the end (where the last "world" was sung). The strings balance it with sweetness, and help it come to earth in the last few notes, from which there's a subtle fade-out to silence.

You see the word "Beatlesesque" used to describe Smith's work. I suppose that's good as a convenient shorthand, but it really doesn't begin to get at what he's doing in this song. This is a song whose arrangement and melodies and harmonies are in constant movement and development, and much as I love the Beatles I can't think of anything they did that compares to the ambition or accomplishment of this song.

I think that on his good days, Elliott Smith had as much talent as any three Beatles. I wish he'd had more good days. I wish he were still having them.

Two critics

2007-10-19T03:34:03Z

First the sublime:

On the flowering of classical-music blogs, though it is true about so many other things, many of them not rhyming with "Ron Paul":

Those who see the dawning of a new golden age should bear in mind the "Snakes on a Plane" rule: things invariably appear more important on the Internet than they are in the real world.

-- Alex Ross, in The New Yorker (10/22/2007)

Now the ridiculous:

A protege of Dr. Dre's who spent part of his youth in Detroit, [Eminem] had to be better than the local black competition simply in order to be accepted - a fascinating inversion of the racism that many blacks have encountered in the workplace.

-- Sasha Frere-Jones, in The New Yorker (10/22/2007)

Here is a man going out of his way to tell you that he finds the obvious to be fascinating. A fascinating inversion! What on earth could be fascinating about something so ordinary? And savor the rest of that sentence: "that many blacks have encountered in the workplace." The days are gone when you'd tack on something like that as a result of a query from Mr. Shawn, concerned that the reader might not be familiar with the problem. No, I feel like Mr. Frere-Jones is one drink away from telling me that you know, just because Diahann Carroll got her own show doesn't mean that racism's a settled question in this country.

This is a person who's decided he's up to the task of explaining that it's okay to dislike the Arcade Fire and Pavement because they didn't listen to enough of what the radio stations used to call race music. (You're not going to hear any mention of Stephin Merritt, but you knew that.)

This is a person who name-checks the Decemberists and then, not long after, cries, "Where is the impulse to reach out to an audience - to entertain?" God in heaven. You can say any number of bad things about the Decemberists (or the Arcade Fire, for that matter), but if you think they're not trying to reach out to and entertain an audience, you're dumber than I've already alleged you to be.

Just as a rule of thumb: if your entire corpus of public works is deracinated and etiolated (and no, liking Kanye West does not suffice), you probably should reconsider the wisdom of publicly attacking people for for being too white.

And for God's sake, you shouldn't close your argument like this:

Rock and roll was never a synonym for a polite handshake. If you've forgotten where the term comes from, look it up. There's a reason the lights were off.

Or to put it in the terms of one of Frere-Jones's heroes: "White girls they're pretty funny/sometimes they drive me mad/black girls just want get fucked all night."

Inconvenient truths

2007-10-09T20:15:07Z

I don't know what motivated him to do this - I suspect it's that nobody's paid attention to him in a while - but a few days ago Michael Medved got it into his head that it was time to set the record straight about the history of slavery in the United States.

A movie reviewer who has built a career as a right-wing pundit by crusading for decency, Medved is about as qualified to write about the history of slavery as he is to pilot the Space Shuttle. The result (found here) is comedy gold.

Come with me and we'll take a little trip through what he's calling six "inconvenient truths" about slavery.

1. SLAVERY WAS AN ANCIENT AND UNIVERSAL INSTITUTION, NOT A DISTINCTIVELY AMERICAN INNOVATION.

This first section exposes us to the Medved method, which is to assemble a loose set of unrelated facts and organize them so that they're all pointing in the same direction without giving too much thought to their deeper implications.

For instance, he's exceptionally pleased to have found a tribe in South America that not only enslaved its captives but ate them. Well boy howdy, that's something we can hang our hat on: "America: We Didn't Eat Our Slaves!" There's also some great back-of-the-envelope math here (we'll see more of this when he gets into economics), proving that the Islamic world is worse than America because they enslaved more Africans than we did. Which is true, if you don't count children born into slavery among the enslaved, and though it did, as he admits, take them more than a thousand years to accomplish this.

The question he doesn't trouble to ask himself (though David Brion Davis, whom he name-checks, does), is: was there anything distinctly different about the American institution of slavery? And, why, yes, yes there is, and it's the core of a problem that Medved spends the whole piece tiptoeing around: the basis of American slavery was race.

The Greeks and Romans enslaved people they defeated in war. Their justification for slavery was, as The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly put it, that there are men with guns, and men who dig. Growing up Corinthian during the Peloponessian War meant you had a pretty good chance of ending up a slave yourself. (The Greeks, whose wars involved a little more commitment than ours do, didn't have a word like "chickenhawk.") But when slaves bore children, those children weren't enemies captured in a war, they were children born in Rome or Athens. And as such, they were free to become citizens.

Not so in America. Our justification for keeping African slaves wasn't that we beat them in a war: it was that we thought black people weren't fully human.

Since they weren't fully human, their children weren't fully human either. Slavery may be a "timeless norm," as Medved blithely puts it. But enslaving people because they were subhuman, that was new and different.

It had lots of implications that didn't exist in the Greek or Roman versions of the institution, too. Romans didn't consider their slaves to be livestock. They didn't try to cross different strains to get better field hands. They didn't breed slaves for sale. The Greeks didn't have words like "mulatto" or "quadroon," either. They didn't need to figure out what race a person belonged to in order to determine what rights the person had.

The American version of slavery is especially arresting because it fixed African captives and their descendants as less than human in the eyes of the law at the very same historical moment that we were founding a new nation based on universal human rights. Those are the two central facts of our nation's history. The American idea is founded on ideals of liberty secured by men who considered non-white people to be subhuman.

This doesn't mean that you should therefore hate America. Far from it. But if you don't understand this central truth, your love for this country is like the love of a wife who tries not to think about what her husband does when he's drunk.

2. SLAVERY EXISTED ONLY BRIEFLY, AND IN LIMITED LOCALES, IN THE HISTORY OF THE REPUBLIC – INVOLVING ONLY A TINY PERCENTAGE OF THE ANCESTORS OF TODAY’S AMERICANS.

Medved is delighted to find that in all the time that the US was a going concern, slavery was legal for 89 years and not for 142. See? We win! We're not bad anymore!

(Here is more of Medved's facility with numbers: the century and a half before 1789 doesn't count, because we weren't America yet. So we get a pass on that. He hasn't really thought this through, either. Let's suppose we let him keep his thumb on the scale. How bad could the world of Islam really be if it took them ten centuries to take more slaves than we did in 89 years?)

He also notes that "slavery had been outlawed in most states decades before the Civil War." This should give you an idea of his qualifications: he doesn't know that this isn't true, and he doesn't know why it isn't true.

Slavery had been outlawed in exactly half the states until exactly one decade before the Civil War. The balance between slave and free states was, for instance, the basis of the Missouri Compromise in 1820: Missouri got admitted as a slave state at the same instant that Maine was admitted as a free state, keeping the Senate balanced between pro- and anti-slavery votes. The only way California got admitted as a free state in 1850 was that the new state sent one pro- and one anti-slavery Senator to Congress. It wasn't until 1858, when Minnesota was admitted as a free state and Kansas's admission as a slave state was blocked, that the balance tipped. Not coincidentally, secession followed two years later.

But that's just ignorance. Let's move on to cant.

The cant is in that bit about the "tiny percentage." America can't be held responsible for slavery today, Medved is arguing, because so few of us are descended from slaveowners.

Look, pal, your nation's history is your nation's history. Suck it up. You'd heap scorn on anyone who said that modern America doesn't get to bask in the glory of Washington and Jefferson because so few modern Americans are descended from them. If you're going to lecture people about morality and honesty, the least you can do is be moral and honest. Which brings us to:

3. THOUGH BRUTAL, SLAVERY WASN’T GENOCIDAL: LIVE SLAVES WERE VALUABLE BUT DEAD CAPTIVES BROUGHT NO PROFIT.

Here the argument takes a decidedly loopy turn. What makes America great? "We're not genocidal, given the proper incentives!" Well, I do feel better about my country now.

Medved is weirdly happy to report that, unlike the short-sighted Nazis, who worked their slaves to death, America had the good sense to keep them healthy enough to breed. This strikes me as a remarkable thing to find worth celebrating.

And, as is so often the case, Medved hasn't really thought through the implications of the "inconvenient truth" that cheers him so. For instance, the same economic motivation that kept slaveowners from indiscriminately working their property to death also led captains of slave ships to throw sick slaves overboard and then try to collect on their insurance. That's the sort of thing that happens when you think human beings are fungible.

4. IT’S NOT TRUE THAT THE U.S. BECAME A WEALTHY NATION THROUGH THE ABUSE OF SLAVE LABOR: THE MOST PROSPEROUS STATES IN THE COUNTRY WERE THOSE THAT FIRST FREED THEIR SLAVES.

Ultimately, sure. In the long haul, producing raw materials isn't going to make as much money as producing finished goods.

But that doesn't mean that the US didn't become a wealthy nation through the abuse of slave labor. The US became wealthy because of the development of its roads, its canals, its ports, and its manufacturies, without which it could neither have produced the goods it exported to the world nor gotten them to market. That development is the basis of all American wealth before about 1875.

What paid for that development was the great influx of foreign capital during the late 18th and early 19th century. Overwhelmingly, that capital came from the exportation of cotton, tobacco, indigo, sugar, and rice.

And guess how we raised all those great cash crops?

5. WHILE AMERICA DESERVES NO UNIQUE BLAME FOR THE EXISTENCE OF SLAVERY, THE UNITED STATES MERITS SPECIAL CREDIT FOR ITS RAPID ABOLITION.

Well, bully for us.

There's so much wrong in this particular piece of his argument that it's hard to know where to start. His characterization of the Civil War as being one between Confederate soldiers, "very few of whom owned slaves," and Union soldiers and sailors "proudly risk[ing] their lives for the emancipation cause" is probably a good one.

Medved's trying to craft a bold new narrative for the Civil War: one in which neither side was defending slavery. This leads him to say, with a straight face, that 364,000 Americans - "the stunning equivalent of five million deaths as a percentage of today's population" - died in the service of freeing the slaves.

No, seriously. That's his argument. The Civil War was a war to end slavery, he says, and we should stand in awe of the number of Americans who died.

Well, I for one do stand in awe of the number of Americans who died in the Civil War. But I recognize that one half of them went to their deaths for the principle that a bunch of politicians in Washington had no right to tell Georgia whether or not it was allowed to keep its Negroes in chains, and the other half of them went to their deaths for the principle that they weren't going to let their country be split in two by the slave power.

How do I know this? Because, as David Cross put it in another context, they fucking said so.

You have to be monumentally ignorant of the Civil War to assert that the Union was moved to war by abolitionism. Even at the dawn of the Civil War, the idea that slavery should be abolished because it was wrong was a crazy fringe movement. Abolitionists occupied about the same place in the political spectrum of 1860 that PETA does today.

Unionists didn't hate slavery because it was morally wrong. They hated it because it provided unfair competition. The whole basis of the Free Soil movement, for instance, was that the decent American yeoman farmer working his land didn't stand a chance against the powerful men south of the Mason-Dixon Line with their armies of slaves.

When Abraham Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, with great reluctance, in 1863, what spurred him to action was not the moral imperative of abolition, but the economic necessity of total war. Lincoln set the slaves free for exactly the same reason that Grant, one year later, let Sherman burn everything in his path in the march to Savannah.

But okay, let's put that behind us. Let's move on to an even more impressive demonstration of Medved's acuity. This is good enough to quote in full:

Moreover, the economic cost of liberation remained almost unimaginable. In nearly all other nations, the government paid some form of compensation to slave-owners at the time of emancipation, but Southern slave-owners received no reimbursement of any kind when they lost an estimated $3.5 billion in 1860 dollars (about $70 billion in today’s dollars) of what [David Brion] Davis describes as a “hitherto legally accepted form of property.”

That's right. The almost unimaginable cost of liberation. Let us just savor that for a moment. Let us, to use Joan Didion's turn of phrase, enter into the argument on its own spooky level. Wow. $70 billion eliminated with the stroke of a pen. That does sound like an enormous cost for the nation to bear.

Okay, back to reality. Here's some more math that Medved hasn't bothered to do. If you're going to assert that the economic cost of emancipating a million slaves is $70 billion, you are also asserting that the economic benefit of giving a million people their freedom is: $0. This is certainly the way slaveholders looked at the balance sheet. Apparently Medved does too.

6. THERE IS NO REASON TO BELIEVE THAT TODAY’S AFRICAN-AMERICANS WOULD BE BETTER OFF IF THEIR ANCESTORS HAD REMAINED BEHIND IN AFRICA.

For someone who claims to be a crusader for decency, Medved sure has some weird ideas about morality.

I mean, seriously. Let us suppose, for instance, that someone swept up Medved and all of his living relatives deemed useful enough, threw them in a cargo hold with hundreds of other people, and let them spend a couple of months living in their own filth, during which time a quarter of them sickened and died. When he arrived at the destination, we'd take his surviving kids away from him and sell them. If he had a daughter of the right age, we'd clean her up nicely, because they always fetch a good price. His wife might luck out and get sold as a domestic. Medved's best hope would probably to be a field hand on a cotton plantation, where he'd be much likelier to survive than if he got stuck growing sugar or rice. But that wouldn't be up to him.

So, thousands of miles away from everyone he's ever known and everything he's ever owned, stripped away from his people and his language and his family, Medved would then spend the rest of his days doing back-breaking work. Eventually, at the end of his days, he might learn to stop thinking about who bought his daughter and wondering if any of the new quadroon girls his owner just came back from New Orleans with were his grandchildren

The thing is, this is all okay. Because one of those quadroon girls is going to have a grandchild of her own someday. And that grandchild might go to college.

Just so that we're clear on what a beastly and immoral assertion this "inconvenient truth" is.

This "inconvenient truth" carries the odor that permeates Medved's whole argument. He doesn't want to face up to this, but everything he's saying here derives, one way or another from a central idea: black folks are just like you and me, only worse.

Breeding them and selling their children: hardly worth mentioning. Writing their fundamental inhumanity into the Constitution: not worth our notice. Setting them free: a big economic negative for the poor slaveowners, but what are you going to do? And look at what a dog's breakfast they made of Africa.

We knew going in that Medved wasn't qualified to write about the history of slavery. What this piece reveals is that he's also not qualified to write about decency.