Seven Red

So the book goes like this: if you’re into anything Indie music-wise, you must go out and buy the Arcade Fire’s new album The Suburbs. It’s like a requirement, the analogy being if you’re into contemporary fiction, you have to go out and buy Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (the review in the New York Times this morning was syrupy, to say the least). So I dutifully did that. Now, don’t get me wrong. I think Funeral is a great album, and I think Neon Bible is a good album, despite moments of painful and pedantic preciousness (see, for example, “Antichrist Television Blues”). But I thought I’d listen to The Suburbs with a kind of grimace. In my business, we call this a “mildly hostile audience.”

I also had to buy the album because of the in-your-face nostalgia with which the band promoted it. In this New York Times story, they essentially give the old fuck you to the flailing and smug nonsense promoted by New Media peoples about the fate of the album itself. True, they fall back into the other nonsense promoted by so many leftists, that if only we made “real things” anymore, we wouldn’t have all these problems:

“We recorded it on tape, we press it to vinyl, and the digital is the archive of this physical thing that exists in the world,” Mr. Butler said. “We’re preserving it and using digital as a mode of distribution, but ultimately there was something real that was made.”

I’ve about had it with both positions. On the one hand, you have these purveyors of the New, who hawk neoliberal claptrap as if it’s radical philosophy. On the other, you have wacked out old Labor hands pretending that the production of physical commodities was some kind of Utopian exercise. That said, as I noted in this post, I’m well ready to see a little push-back on the now prevalent position that the mode of distribution automatically transforms the genre of the LP, even if it’s a rearguard action, ultimately. So off I trundled to iTunes to make my stand for commodity production in the old style. Summary: mildly hostile audience.

I’m ready to admit it. I’ve listened to The Suburbs for two weeks now. It is a brilliant album. A desert island album, really. It’s The Queen is Dead, which suggests we’ll still have something like a Strangeways Here We Come out of Arcade Fire, and that’s no mean feat. The tempos great. There are at least 8 great songs, and the rest are at good to very good. “Empty Room,” “City with No Children” and “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” are revelations. They return to a theme (a fucking theme!).  There’s a moment in the middle of the record, in “Half Light II,” where the lyric goes something like “pray to God I won’t live to see the death of everything that’s wild,” and then we get this utterly unexpected “Woo!” And it’s the moment that crystallizes the record for me. It’s fucking smart. And good. And it’s an album, cohesive as an  LP without being a concept record. And I want to punch myself for saying it, because I want to drop snide remarks and say, “Oh, fucking Arcade Fire, whatever.” But I can’t, because they made a brilliant record.

Judiciary Committee Republicans, a note. I’m sure it must be very sad to sit in the minority on such an important committee, with nominees coming at you left and right, and nothing to do but grumble and delay. I get it. I think we all sit on non-functional committees at some point, or occupy roles on other committees that simply cannot move an agenda forward. And yes, we all get run over by the opposition from time to time. So I know where you’re coming from.

That said, a piece of advice. I have no doubt that legitimate differences on legal philosophy may exist between you and the late Thurgood Marshall. I have no doubt that legitimate debate could be had with his adherents and admirers about the role of the Federal judiciary, and the conduct of sitting judges, and the criteria for ruling on cases. Have at it, for reals. However, if your intent on any given day is to call Justice Marshall’s judicial conduct into question, it’d probably be a good idea not to place Jeff Sessions (or as Joan Walsh calls him, hilariously, “Jefferson Beauregard Sessions”) at the tip of the spear for that attack. When you’re roughing up the cat that argued Brown v. Board of Ed, you probably don’t want to put the good Senator from Alabama – who looks for all the world like he’s just stepped out of a lodge meeting featuring Bull Conner as the guest speaker – in the lead position. Two cents, people.

You just knew that The Roots new album would be excellent, and it is. As a bonus, the first single remixes a song from the Monsters of Folk album, and features Jim James in the video. Plus, reworking Nas throughout. Nice. Enjoy.

I know a sports post should be on anything but mid-season baseball. The Blackhawks here just won the Stanley Cup for the first time in 49 years, and the city is berserk about it. The World Cup is on the teevee upstairs, and will be for the next month. So, yeah, mid-season baseball seems like small stakes next to all that. But still. I want to say a couple of things: first, the Mets jumped the Phillies last night in the NL East standings. There’s a reason for that; for the last four weeks or so, the Mets have been a better team than the Phillies, and it’s pretty hard to deny. The Phillies are the far better team on paper, and I have no doubt they’ll be the better team at year’s end, but for the last few weeks, the Mets have been better. Why? Pitching. I also think it’s hard to deny that the Mets’ pitching – such a thorn in their side the last few years – is tight as hell. Pelfrey is having a career season; where he’s been a weak link in the past, he’s completely stepped it up: impressive at 8 and 1. Santana’s record doesn’t reflect his ongoing quality, though he’s been a little skittish from time to time (that inning against the Phillies in Philadelphia was a nightmare like I’ve never seen from him). Even Nieve – with a terrible 6.00 ERA – has started to light it up; it went largely unnoticed, but he damn near threw a perfect game the other night, retiring 27 of 28 in a one-hit complete game shut out. And Dickey even looks like the real deal with that wacky knuckler. And, and, and, the relief hasn’t completely collapsed: the Mets have actually won some extra inning and one-run games, which is a relief after last year’s endless late inning shenanigans. The Mets have the best home record in baseball by far. Hypothesis: we’re seeing so many triples and odd doubles at Citi Field that it’s clear many teams don’t know how to play outfield in the big park. The problem is that they have one of the worst road records. If this team can start winning on the road, they’re going to be trouble. I still think that Ike Davis can’t save us, as it were, at least this season. But the Mets actually look good, which is, to say the least, a surprise.

Dang. Missed a whole month. What will the archive think?

Looked at the page a few times over the last month or so. No energy for it. So I’m forcing myself to rev up the engine again with something easy here, as I’ll do from time to time. As is well known in Seven Red Land, I’m a complete fanboy of The National, so I just wanted to post a little about High Violet. Needless to say, I’ve given it more than a few listens since its release a couple of weeks ago, and of course I love it. I also loved the review on Pitchfork that says it’s a good album, even if you’re not an “upwardly mobile stiff with minor social anxiety,” a pretty hilarious description of what might be presumed to be The National’s fanbase. The Pitchfork review also notes that Matt Berninger sometimes seems to be auditioning to replace the current Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man in the World,” which made me laugh. Yeah, dude.

Yeah, but even so. I remember having Alligator on a loop when I was first working up the diss – and Boxer on a loop as I was finishing, so there’s just a history there for me. I can’t hear “Daughters of the Soho Riots” without that sinking feeling I had when I basically trashed most of the first version – haven’t told many people about that yet, either. Now, High Violet, and I think most of the reviews bear this out, is a very different record than Boxer, even if it plays out a consistent trajectory. I guess it’s a cliche to say it’s darker, but it is – slower, driven by repetition in a way even Boxer wasn’t, where the delayed adolescence that really drives Boxer thematically hits the wall, maybe. But maybe that’s it. If I was right there with Boxer, I’m probably right there with High Violet, too, as much as I hate the identification model. I wouldn’t, like the Pitchfork snark (hey, it’s good snark) call Berninger’s lyrics cryptic so much as aphoristic. You have to follow them out: “I defend my family, with my orange umbrella.” What a comedy of contemporary middle class fatherhood! And I think there’s refreshing honesty in even saying “I’m Afraid of Everyone” in a culture that promotes fearlessness as if it is some kind of trump virtue.

Part of the hype around High Violet has gone something like this: here’s a band that still makes albums in the age of the download, and by albums, they mean a kind of coherent aesthetic product at the larger unit level, supposedly a by-gone product tied to vinyl and then CD distribution models. I’m so-so on this claim, mainly because a lot bands still make “albums,” just like a lot of people still write novels, despite the various kvetching, celebration, and other New Media fetishism that sees them as a “print-age form,” or some other such gun-jumping declarations. So, I don’t think it’s anything remarkable as a formal matter to have crafted a well-ordered and arranged album – but High Violet certainly is one. Anyway, here are two off High Violet, both of which I’d rank pretty high, though I can pretty much listen to the whole record without interruption. Enjoy your upwardly mobile stiffdom. And your minor social anxiety.

This live version of Sorrow from Berlin is great.

On NPR’s Marketplace this week, “business writer” John Carney had about the most ridiculous rhetorical defense of Goldman Sachs that I’ve heard yet. It went something like this: the Securities and Exchange Commission civil suit against Goldman is “overstepping its bounds” because the SEC should be protecting the “little guy” rather than “German and and English banks” (to wit, ABN AMRO – now part of Royal Bank of Scotland – and IKB Deutsche Industriebank, the major investors in the ill-fated ABACUS2007-AC1 CDO). What’s Carney drawing on? There’s some measure of truth to the ideas that he deploys as support for this move. Securities laws were put in place to protect so-called ordinary investors (the haha little guy), and qualified institutional buyers are assumed to have more knowledge, so some requirements are waived for QIB’s from time to time and for very specific deals. So this little nugget of truth gets blown up into the rather absurd notion that Goldman had no reporting requirement on the ABACUS deal for the question at the heart of the case: did Paulson select some portions of the reference portfolio for the purpose of taking a short position on them, and was this disclosed to potential counterparties?  Indeed, we’d think that QIB’s would be even less likely than the ordinary investor to enter into this transaction had proper reporting been done on this point. The canard that QIB’s know there’s “always somebody on the other side” of the transaction has also been floated as an explanation; that may be, but QIB’s don’t usually think that the party taking the other side of the transaction has fixed the result from the get-go, or even had a chance to do so. As is fairly obvious, this is the main reason for splashing ACA’s logo across all the deal documents while never mentioning Paulson at all. Let’s leave out the real problem here that has nothing to do with the transaction itself: these deals – whatever their specifics at the level of finance – were all about a massive structure that promoted impossible home ownership and therefore sank countless “little guys” into debt, foreclosure, and misery. It’s easy to miss this basic point when people talk “ratings arbitrage,” “short positions,” and “QIB’s.” These deals traded on misery; they hurt people – and continue to hurt people. It doesn’t get much more complicated than that, whatever the complications of the transaction structures.

But let’s leave all these questions aside. More remarkable is Carney’s utterly laughable rhetorical positioning. We know that the rhetorical context is anti-bank and, well, pro-little guy. So, how does one leverage this rhetorical context to defend Goldman Sachs, the most vilified “bank” on the planet? Well, you represent the government agency that’s trying to bring Goldman to account as “on the side of” the big banks, and vaguely “against the little guy.” The SEC gets transformed into the Big Government Entity flacking for the Big Banks, while Goldman shuffles and whistles its way out of the room. It really is a breathtakingly cynical maneuver – impressive in its sheer brazenness. There’s no wonder that the Tea Party imbeciles are so turned around and confused.

Witness the spin here

One of the more compelling arguments for the value of social media is Clive Thompson’s Wired piece, published – stunningly – almost three years ago, titled “How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense.” I remember reading this article when it first came out, and just intuitively agreeing with his thesis. Constant updates (on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.) allow a group to develop what Thompson calls “social proprioception,” a kind of feeling about what everybody’s up to that can spark “weird, fascinating feats of coordination.” Here’s Thompson:

When I see that my friend Misha is “waiting at Genius Bar to send my MacBook to the shop,” that’s not much information. But when I get such granular updates every day for a month, I know a lot more about her. And when my four closest friends and worldmates send me dozens of updates a week for five months, I begin to develop an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me.

It’s like proprioception, your body’s ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.

Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.

It really is a fascinating article, and worth the read. And I think Thompson’s one of the best commentators on social media – and the social effects of social media – out there today, so read his other stuff, too. So that should be enough to say that I think Thompson is quite right about this, but I want to suggest that “social proprioception” also costs us something, and I hope I can do that without sounding a nostalgic or mournful tone. I really don’t want to be the grumpy Luddite on this point, largely because I almost always disagree with grumpy Luddites, so hopefully this is a sufficient qualifier.

So, what gets lost? I think to some extent, what gets lost is the art of catching up. By catching up, I mean those times when you sit with somebody you haven’t seen in some time, and you exchange stories. There is, to my mind, an art to such occasions and performances, and they require a whole set of language and mental abilities, an everyday narratology. You can’t just tick off a list of updates; you have to blend them into a well-told and entertaining story or set of stories, you have to pick up on connections, and make the particular story you tell at any one time relevant. The negative and degraded version of the art of catching up can be seen in any airport, when people who don’t know each other start talking to each other. Almost invariably, they will hit on a topic (say, their kids’ sports participation), and will then proceed to talk exclusively about themselves, not even really listening to the other people, except to the extent that whatever is being said might furnish an entry for them to talk about themselves again. It’s conversational masturbation. But the art of catching up, though ostensibly about the self in the same way, always includes a history with the other person or people, a repertoire of shared knowledge and experience that is specific to the group, maybe even care. Together with shared knowledge and experiences, you have some absence that you need to fill – that’s the catching up. But you have to tell your story in the context of these shared experiences, and you have to make it entertaining. That’s why it’s an art.

Maybe I just grew up in a story-telling culture; most of the time I spent with friends was occupied with either story-telling or insults – and both require equal shares of creativity. People make fun of the New Yawkah version of “Howyadoin’,” but it’s really not a greeting; it’s an invitation. Tell me something funny.Tell me something new. Tell it well. And you’re judged, socially, by your skill in telling a story, the way you shape a narrative, your descriptive capacity, your skill with language. This all goes on miles, metaphorically, from any creative writing or composition classes, and it’s even possible that the best storytellers would immediately flunk in either of those settings. But you’ve all seen it – sitting around in a bar, and somebody starts in on some tale, and they’re gesticulating and assuming roles, hitting punchlines with exquisite timing, saving connections for maximum impact, and you’re hooked in and laughing and the whole thing is so perfectly constructed. Good narrative is not rare. These are the sources of value in any oral culture.

What I’ve been noticing lately is that the social proprioception thesis actually seems to hold, but what you gain in positive knowledge comes packaged with what you lose in terms of that absence to be filled, the negative space that provokes catching up. Just one example, although I could post many. A bumped into a guy I know from graduate school at a conference recently. He’s one of my Facebook friends, though, admittedly, he came in several years behind me, so we were never really that close. So we’re sitting at a table, and he starts telling me how he’s gotten really into Korean cooking, and making really complicated dishes, and etc. The problem is that I know all this already – he posts about it constantly. What could otherwise have turned into an interesting conversation about Korean cooking just ends up being a recitation of the already-known. I don’t mean to pick on him; he’s a good guy, and the example should be generalized. The more “granular” the update apparatus, the more effective the installing of social proprioception, the more tedious become these opportunities for narrative. If that’s the case, it strikes me as a serious loss indeed, not least because the skills required for telling good catching-up-stories appear to me to be generally valuable. Of course, the same updating regime may lead to better stories, and it’s probably never fine-grained enough in practice to really eliminate the art of catching up. But I’ve seen it happen again and again in the last few years, and maybe this is where I’m at my most nostalgic, but it worries me.

Forgot how much I liked this until my brother posted it the other day.Grew up with some dogmatic hate of country, but Old Time and alt-country is alright now.

I like this, from our friends at Loungerati:

Since reading about the 500 year anniversary of DOM Benedictine contest last year, I have been tinkering with my own recipe that honors the liqueur but also tips the trilby to the iconic Italian macchina, the Fiat Cinquecento (“500″ in Italian). In other words, DOM meets MOD, a drink that you could have in Torino or West London or Brooklyn. May I introduce a delicious new aperitivo!

Head over to Loungerati to get more on this, including the recipe for The Cinquecento. Just as a note, she and I always make fun of the Fiat Cinquecento. We were listening to NPR one day, and it must have been the 50th anniversary  of the iconic car, because they had some guy on with a thick Italian accent who said something like, “You know, many people in Italy were told that they were conceived in a Fiat Cinquecento.” Wink wink. Hahaha, said the otherwise serious NPR journalist lady, the implication being Oh those crazy Italians with the sexy and the passion! Needless to say, she and I cracked up, since this remains the way “Italy” functions in the American imaginary, even on Marketplace. So now, whenever we see a commercial or news report that draws on the same trope (“Italians are soooo passionate”), we immediately break into Italian accents and say “Did you know, non per niente, that I wuza – how you say – conceived with the bang bang in a Fiat Cinquecento, which izza the funny, yes?, because it is such a smallah car!”

Just as a side note, one could easily index the production of the Fiat Cinquecento to the whole of postwar economic development – and corresponding labor struggle – in Italy. It was through the Cinquecento that the Mirafiore Fiat plant expanded into its giant form; it would become one of the primary sites (along with the Pirelli rubber works in Milan) of the labor uprisings of 1968 (at Pirelli, especially), the Hot Autumn of 1969 (with the occupation of Mirafiore), and the culmination of that cycle in 1973-74.  (Production of the Cinquecento shifted away from Mirafiore in the mid-1960′s, in a deal with Pirelli, Fiat, and Bianchi/Autobianchi). We also see in the production of the Cinquecento the problem of the rapid rise in output in the factories (indeed, the 1957, 1960, and 1965 numbers for the Cinquecento show something like an 80 degree curve, upward), which required the mass migration of southern workers to the industrial valleys of the north, produced the mid-level “pink collar” class of technical workers that would become crucial for autonomist arguments against traditional union structures, and pointed up the problems of intensified labor exploitation together with stagnating wages, the very conditions that made the CGIL accomodationism that much more dramatic. Certainly, there were other industries that shifted the composition of the Italian working class during this period (the development of the massive petrochemical plants in Porto Marghera industrial corridor, for instance), but it would be hard not to see the development and popularity of the Fiat Cinquecento (especially during the 1960′s) as contributing directly to the transformation of the Italian labor movement in the 1960′s and 70′s, which of course comes to us today through people like Negri (Potere Operaio’s role in the Mirafiore strikes of 1973 are especially important for understanding this trajectory). I guess it’s more fun to say “My mama said she makuh the bang bang in the Cinquecento!”

So, to the Cinquecento. I’ll ask Loungerati’s cocktail specialist to make me one when we get back east, and I know what I’ll be drinking to.