The top several reasons not to read this blog

I apologize for my failure to post last week. I was drowning in year-end lists, you see.

When I told my non-music nerd friends that I was "drowning in year-end lists", I got a lot of blank stares. Turns out that assembling a list of one's twenty-odd favorite albums of the year, ranking them in order, and writing little hundred-word blurb about each is not something that normal people do.

We geeks are a different story. For us, the Top 20 Best ______s of 20__ is a yearly rite of passage. This ceremony is not exclusive to music nerds. Book nerds, TV nerds, video game nerds, and all manner of obsessive losers gleefully participate. Lower-ranking nerds post their picks on Facebook or their private blogs; the inner sanctum of nerdery distributes its lists via various print and web publications. The latter type of publication typically allows the hoi polloi to disagree via comment threads, and disagree they do. This dynamic has become so pervasive that NPR published a hilarious best-of list of best-of list complaints a few days ago.

I am privileged enough to belong to the music nerd illuminati (is 'privileged' the right word?), though I'm a low-ranking member. 2011 marks my seventh year in this dubious company, and so it was the seventh time that I produced a widely-viewed best-of list.

This was also the first year during which I participated in year-end feature writing for multiple publications. I wrote a personal feature for Metal Review, and scribed a couple of different things for Invisible Oranges. If you've never tried to sum up an album in a hundred words, here's a word to the wise—it's a lot harder than it sounds. I did most of my year-end writing in about ten days; if I don't have to boil down another record to public-service-announcement dimensions until December 2012, I will consider it a mercy.

Managing expectations

God help me, I've become one of them.

I occasionally read Cracked.com when I'm procrastinating. Cracked can suck away whole days of your life, and some of its content is so stupid that it may actually cause brain cancer. I understand these risks and am willing to accept the consequences of my actions.

In any case, I came across a Cracked article a few days ago entitled "5 Jobs Everyone in the World Should Have At Some Point." Of the types of jobs it recommends everyone try, I've had two. And of those two, I currently hold one. Surprise! It's waiting tables.

You can probably guess why waiting tables was included in the article. The reasoning is familiar:

"You learn a whole lot about people by serving them. How a person behaves to the guy fetching his drinks says a lot about that person. And you, as a waiter, start to figure out what kind of person you want to be. Are you the guy who makes eye contact with your waiter and speaks to him like a human, or are you the guy who hisses when he wants to catch a waiter's attention (happened to me)? Everyone on the planet should know what it's like to have to serve someone else. It's humbling, and sometimes terrible, and some other times mostly OK."

Incidentally, I actually had a customer hit me to get my attention one time. I made eye contact with her and then slowly walked away without responding. Any customer who presumes to lay hands on me gets the cold shoulder.

In any case, this stuff is the truth. Shitty people tend to treat service-industry folks badly because they can get away with it. Dealing with this fact on a daily basis is an edifying experience. But I feel like I've taken away more important lessons from my serving experience than this one.

Forgive the crowing

First, to briefly follow up on my previous post:

Joshua Holland, who writes for the very left-leaning AlterNet.org, has published a brutal takedown of Naomi Wolf's Guardian piece on Congress's "conspiracy" against OWS. In fact, if you haven't read my own post on the subject, then you should just skip it and read Holland's instead. He put in more time, did more homework, and produced a way better writeup. But at least I've proven that I know bullshit when I see it!

Second, a bit of self-congratulatory crowing.

My band's debut album was just written up in Decibel Magazine, America's best and most popular metal publication. We scored an 8/10 and a very flattering review:

"Quick history lesson: Pyrrhon of Elis was a Greek philosopher acknowledged as the father of Skepticism (the school of thought, not the Finnish funeral doom band). Many of the downstream effects of Pyrrhon's philosophies will be familiar to metalheads—doubt of inherited values, rational inquiry into the nature of things, disregard for that which cannot be empirically proven, etc.


What does all this have to do with Pyrrhon the death metal band? In many ways, these Brooklynites' debut LP, An Excellent Servant but a Terrible Master, embodies the ideas of the band's namesake. Doug Moore's lyrics deal a lot with the impossibility of making meaning in a society that doesn't value it. "All the debased logic/The spent, weathered values/And the ashes of intentions/Bear their witness against me," he growls on the godly "Idiot Circles," incontinence-preventing riffs flopping around underneath him.

OWS, again

To return to the circus that is politics in my country:

A lot of my friends and acquaintances have been circulating Naomi Wolf's recent editorial in the Guardian about Occupy Wall Street. The editorial is entitled "The shocking truth about Occupy," and it purports to expose a Congressional conspiracy to defeat OWS through brutal police crackdowns. As you might expect, most of the people who've been reposting the article are OWS supporters.

My reaction to the piece is split evenly between hope and frustration. Let's deal with the frustration first.

Wolf has a tendency to exaggerate and obfuscate by turns in defense of her point. Most people who feel strongly about a divisive issue do so, but it's still annoying. For instance, she calls the recent crackdowns "unparalleled police brutality." Some 50s-era civil rights activists may disagree. The NYPD and other police forces have horribly botched their responses to these protests, but perspective still matters.

She attributes this botched response to directives from the Department of Homeland Security:

"The picture darkened still further when Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests.

To Europeans, the enormity of this breach may not be obvious at first. Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalised police force, and forbids federal or militarised involvement in municipal peacekeeping."

Stamping on the passive voice, forever

I spend a lot of time writing. I also spend a lot of time thinking about writing. Of all the things I learned from my fancy-pants education, I use the ability to evaluate and craft prose most frequently.

Like any skill, your writing chops needs constant maintenance. A lot of my teachers used athletic metaphors—your writing muscles will atrophy and grow flabby if you don't work out. "Working them out" involves practice (which you're looking at) and reflection (which you're about to look at).

Like workouts of any sort, writing practice isn't especially glamorous. Sometimes I need some encouragement. And who better to provide that encouragement than that titan of taking things really seriously, George Orwell?

If you want a picture of a future where George Orwell catches you writing like an asshole...

The link above takes you to "Politics and the English Langauge," Orwell's immortal diatribe against sloppy, mealy-mouthed prose. Right off the bat, Orwell sets up writing well as a life-or-death sociopolitical struggle:

"Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers."

 Hell yeah! I'm feeling fired up already. Why wasn't I snidely quoting this essay at my classmates back in high school?

Bateman would be proud, apparently

American psychos!

Wow, I have really been dropping the ball around these parts! It's been tough for me to find the time and energy to write here as of late. Perhaps that's because, as Christopher Ketcham of Orion Magazine suggests, it's really hard for foppish artsy-fartsy types like me to get by here in New York:

"High rent lays low the creator, as there is no longer time to create. Working three jobs sixty hours a week at steadily declining wages, as a sizable number of Americans know, is a recipe for spiritual suicide. For the creative individual the challenge is existential: finding a psychological space where money—the need for it, the lack of it—won’t be heard howling hysterically day and night."

Art is hard, as Tim Kasher once said. And Ketcham's right—it's especially hard here.

The article in question, entitled "The Reign of the One Percenters: Income inequality and the death of culture in New York City," has been floating around in my psyche since a friend posted it on Facebook last week. The piece is a lengthy jeremiad about how finance and related industries have gradually been crowding out arts and culture in the Big Apple. Like most people who say bad things about New York, Ketcham gets me nodding in agreement quite a lot. And like most jeremiads, "The Reign of the One Percenters" gets way off-base at times.

Little bits

As you might have guessed from my reduced posting schedule here, I've been pretty busy as of late. Or maybe you read the last post, which kinda spelled it out. Either way, recent developments have considerably limited my leisure time. But it hasn't gone away completely. My girlfriend and I have been plowing through HBO's dramady (yes, I used that word) Six Feet Under. And I've been reading Don DeLillo's big book Underworld.

White Noise, DeLillo's most famous book, is probably the best novel I've read during the last couple of years. It quite literally changed the way that I look at the world. So I expected a lot from Underworld, which is fitting, because Underworld expects a lot from me. It's a long, dense book that features many characters, alludes frequently to 20th-century American history, and changes narrative focus and perspective at well. On top of that, it tells its fractured story mostly in reverse chronological order.

DeLillo is much beloved among American literary scholars, and Underworld is a case study of his academic appeal. It's the kind of book that's best read alone in a quiet room, with a pen in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other (and a browser window open to Wikipedia, if you know what's good for you). It begs for interpretation, elucidation, illumination.

HW

It's been an eventful couple of weeks for me. After extensive interviewing (seriously, five friggin' rounds of interviews), I finally bagged a job as an SAT tutor. Evidently the vetting process for SAT tutors is as more or intensive than the vetting process for most finance jobs.

Three of the interviews for this gig doubled as training sessions. I was given a lengthy curriculum less than a week before the first training sesh and told to prepare all three hundred-odd pages of it for a classroom environment in time for that first session. The five-day span in question was an exceptionally busy one in the first place. I thus ended up dealing with an academic time crunch of a sort that I haven't seen since I was actually, y'know, in school. By the time the third training session rolled around this past Wednesday, I'd put in dozens of hours of unpaid preparatory labor, and was so stressed by the weeks of evaluation that I was shaking noticeably during training. Fortunately, my performance wasn't as shaky as my limbs, and they hired me.

So now it's time for me to stop worrying about getting the job and start worrying about doing the job.

I stand corrected, sorta

Boo.

I have a lot of fashion-inclined friends. Given that I despise fashion myself, this state of affairs is a little strange. Maybe it's because I have a lot of female friends, or because I travel in circles where aesthetics are a big deal. Maybe it's both.

Since I like to antagonize those closest to me, I've found myself in a lot of arguments about the value of fashion as an art. Usually these discussions go something like this:

Me: I hate it when people talk about fashion as though it's some sort of high-art form. It's just clothing!
Friend/relative: Well, fashion has produced countless beautiful objects, and the way it plays with the human body's shape is definitely an art form. It's also a method of communication; the clothes we wear signify certain facts about our—
Me: NO FASHION IS STUPID SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP

And really, I haven't changed my mind. Most fashion is pretty dumb, and while it definitely involves some artistic elements, it doesn't deserve to be mentioned alongside the traditional 'fine' arts, literature, music, and so on.

Clothing really is an effective means of communication, though. Ordinarily I'm a dedicated T-shirt and jeans guy. But yesterday I had a job interview, so I dressed myself to the nines—in my case, a button-down shirt, khakis and non-sneaker shoes qualify as "the nines."

At least they're fucking tryiiiiiiiiiiiiing

It's really hard for bands to make money these days. Necessity is the mother of invention, and some groups have come up with novel ways of driving up revenue. Here's one example:

This little guy is called Juke-Bot, and he's an album. Specifically, he's a compilation of DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist's demo recordings called Hard Sell. Juke-Bot's got a built-in USB drive that comes with the demos on board. If you buy him, you can pop the music on your hard drive and then use Juke-Bot as a jump drive.

Four more bars

I saw the band Swans this past Tuesday. Swans are a New York band who spent most of the last 15 years broken up, and while this show wasn't a reunion gig, the band brought an extra-spiteful edge to this hometown performance.

Swans are one of the stranger bands that I listen to, which makes them really easy to write about. I could go on at great length about their performance. They've got a weird instrumental set-up, a quirky cast of characters behind the instruments, a deliberately confrontational set structure, and a range of unusual performance tics. They even had a heated argument onstage. These things all make for rock-writer wet dreams.

But one aspect of Swans' performance caught my attention more than any other: the communication between frontman/guitarist Michael Gira and the rest of the musicians.

Probably both

It's been a few weeks. Time for me to write about a Democracy In America post!

One today's posts was about the classic utilitarian thought experiment known as the 'trolley dilemma.' A couple of Columbia psychologists recently published an interesting study regarding this dilemma. The dilemma goes about like this:

"There are five railway workmen in the path of a runaway carriage. The men will surely be killed unless the subject of the experiment, a bystander in the story, does something. The subject (of the study) is told he is on a bridge over the tracks. Next to him is a big, heavy stranger. The subject is informed that his own body would be too light to stop the train, but that if he pushes the stranger onto the tracks, the stranger’s large body will stop the train and save the five lives. That, unfortunately, would kill the stranger."

The notion of this scenario is that it exposes the chief difficulty of utilitarianism: its greatest-good moral calculus dictates that you should push the fat guy onto the tracks, but our guts tell us otherwise. The Columbia shrinks tested their subjects for signs of psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and low valuation of human life before exposing them to this dilemma.

It turns out that only a handful (10%) of folks would push the fat guy. Unsurprisingly, most of them show signs of psychopathy, Machiavellian thinking, or something else of the same unappealing sort. "Utilitarians may add to the sum of human happiness, but they are not very happy people themselves," the Economist writer summarizes.

Über-hotness

I'm currently plowing through the archives of a webcomic called Sub-Normality. The strip is mostly episodic and frequently focuses on characters that don't return or even have names. To the extent that has central characters at all, its two protagonists are a nameless, ditzy Canadian who's struggling her way through her semi-employed 20s and...an irate, man-eating sphinx who's struggling through her semi-employed 3000s.

For me, the comic's primary draw is its art. Strip creator Winston Rowntree (a pseudonym) renders his blocky figures in bright Saturday-morning colors. He's mastered the cartoonist's art of drawing believable expressions on unbelievable faces--his characters never look uncanny. He's like a cheerier, less disgusting version of R. Crumb.

Rowntree also has a knack for identifying bizarre-but-common social behaviors. He typically uses the sphinx as a means to point out and lampoon such practices, as he does in this strip.

But Sub-Normality has its fair share of flaws too. Many of the strip's episodes involve unapproachable walls of text. Rowntree himself has lampshaded this tendency with Sub-Normality's tagline ("Comix with too many words since 2007"). More annoyingly, he slams readers with heavy-handed liberal talking points and social critiques in every third or fourth strip, as he does here, here, and here. I lean way to the left of center, so I often agree with the thrust of these strips. The problem is that Rowntree drives home the point so forcefully that he insults my intelligence. You don't need a megaphone to preach to a choir that's sitting three feet away from you.

And sometimes he just baffles me, as he does in the strip shown below:

Well, this pretty much sums it up for America

You can skip to about 0:18.

Material girl, revisited

As we go about our daily lives in our media-obsessed society, we absorb a great deal of information that we would never have sought out on our own. If you're me, you consequently find yourself forming nuanced opinions about subjects that you really, truly don't care about.

One such subject is Lady Gaga. I don't follow big-name pop at all, and I don't hear her music much. It strikes me as marginally less annoying than most music in its vein, but I mostly avoid it (Meshuggah mashups aside).

Gaga's persona, however, is so ubiquitous that I've settled on a fairly specific attitude towards here. In short, I think that her business model is impressive and even revolutionary in some ways. However, most of her 'freak' credentials—be it her music, her appearance, or her way of presenting herself in interviews—are old-hat. This is a minority perspective, so I was pretty surprised to come across a Slate editorial that captures most of my thoughts about Gaga:

Father Judge

I keep my clock radio tuned to NPR. The radio turns on as soon as my alarm goes off. I find that trying to process speech helps me get my brain working in the morning.

When I woke up this morning, the local NPR affiliate was broadcasting a piece on Father Mychal Judge, the Franciscan FDNY chaplain who was the first officially-tallied casualty of 9/11. Judge was something of a legendary good guy, and his funeral was attended by some three thousand people just four days after the attack.

The radio broadcast part of the service's homily, delivered by a fellow Franciscan named Michael Duffy:


"Mychal Judge’s body was the first one released from Ground Zero. His death certificate has the number one on the top. And I meditated on that fact of the thousands of people that we are going to find out who perished in that terrible holocaust. Why was Mychal Judge number one? And I think I know the reason. I hope you’ll agree with me. Mychal’s goal and purpose in life at that time was to bring the firemen to the point of death, so they would be ready to meet their maker...
 
Mychal Judge could not have ministered to them all. It was physically impossible in this life but not in the next. And I think that if he were given his choice, he would prefer to have happened what actually happened. He passed through the other side of life, and now he can continue doing what he
wanted to do with all his heart. And the next few weeks, we’re going to have names added, name after name of people, who are being brought out of that rubble. And Mychal Judge is going to be on the other side of death, to greet them instead of sending them there. And he’s going to greet them with that big Irish smile. He’s going to take them by the arm and the hand and say, 'Welcome, I want to take you to my Father.' And so, he can continue doing in death what he couldn’t do in life."

Dopamine squirt

I say again: screens on screens

Last night, my girlfriend forwarded me this blog post/op-ed from the Harvard Business Review. In it, a presumably successful "strategic adviser to CEOs and their creative teams" (whatever that means) talks about why he returned his iPad. My girlfriend correctly gauged that I would find it interesting, given the constant state of technology panic that I live in.

Peter Bregman, the CEO adviser, gives his reasoning for returning the iPad:

"It didn't take long for me to encounter the dark side of this revolutionary device: it's too good. It's too easy. Too accessible. Both too fast and too long-lasting. Certainly there are some kinks, but nothing monumental. For the most part, it does everything I could want. Which, as it turns out, is a problem...The brilliance of the iPad is that it's the anytime-anywhere computer. On the subway. In the hall waiting for the elevator. In a car on the way to the airport. Any free moment becomes a potential iPad moment."

I'm with Bregman up to this point. If you own an iPad or know someone who does, you know that iPad owners tend to cart the damn thing around everywhere, and use it whenever it is remotely feasible. You also probably know that you/they use it at moments that border on socially inappropriate—for instance, when you/they have a friend over for drinks. Maybe I'm just old-school before my time, but ignoring a guest so you can play Angry Birds or pore over a box score strikes me as somewhat rude.

Trust, Truth and Tora-Tora-Tora

As part of my deeply slothful Labor Day yesterday, my girlfriend and I watched the first "episode" (read: 140-minute block) of The War, Ken Burns' World War II documentary.

Over fourteen sprawling hours, The War tells the story of history's greatest war. Rather, it tells enough of it for Burns' audience to consider themselves better informed afterwards. The series was designed for an explicitly American audience, and it interprets history through the lens of four American cities and their occupants.

The episode itself mostly dealt with facts and events that I was already familiar with. That said, I found the attitudes of its American interviewees quite interesting at times.

Rotten pocket

For someone who's nominally a death metal musician, I don't attend many purebred death metal shows. In this day and age, most metal bills are heterogeneous. This state of affairs is probably for the best. It's hard to absorb four straight hours of any style of metal, and death metal tends to batter the ears into numbness more quickly than most others.

So last night's lineup at Gramercy Ballroom was an oddity. Grave, one of Sweden's most stalwart DM acts, headlined a package that also included Norway's Blood Red Throne, California's Pathology, and Florida's Gigan. Gramercy is a large venue for bands of this sort, and its excellent sight lines and mercifully restrained volume levels exposed the dramatic differences between four bands who nominally play the same style of music.

The above song demonstrates how heavily Gigan relies on texture. Their compositions are zany--guitars squiggle and chirp over jittery blastbeats and baroque fills. Gigan codify their sound with their liberal use of effects processors and noise washes. Those digital squawks and drones transform them from "technical death metal" into "alien death metal."

Safe at home!

I wasn't much of a baseball fan growing up. Since I wasn't terribly coordinated as a kid, the precision that baseball requires escaped me. On top of that, I was something of a chunker, so I was naturally drawn to sports where I could throw my weight around. I ended up playing football, learning the game, and becoming an avid NFL fan. Baseball was outside my realm of interest throughout middle school and high school.

Over the last four years or so, I've become more and more interested in baseball. Two factors contributed to this development. The first was the rise of the Philadelphia Phillies, my hometown team. Nothing dials up a sport's interest level than a wildly successful local franchise, and I gladly hopped on the Phils bandwagon. The other factor was my circle of friends, which has included a number of serious baseball fans during the last half-decade. It's a lot easier to decipher a sport's logic and lingo when you have well-informed guides at your disposal.

Whenever I mentally compare the two sports, I instantly think of the famous George Carlin sketch on the subject:

Screen time

I spent this past weekend in Boston with my girlfriend, visiting her family. In the spirit of this quasi-vacation, I took along some light reading: Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, a copy of which I picked up on the cheap at a liquidating Border's.

The book's reputation had me expecting a shocking, polarizing experience. This was not the case. The sex and violence were graphic, but I've watched enough Saw movies and episodes of Dexter (the protagonist of which is reputedly based on American Psycho's Patrick Bateman) that cartoonish depictions of serial killer mayhem don't really faze me. The book's critique of consumerism also isn't anything new. Most people my age had recognized, internalized, and eventually rejected Fight Club's message by the time they were sixteen. All of that being said, the book was often hilarious and a lot of fun to read. Bateman is certainly an unforgettable character, in spite of his self-diagnosed vacancy.

A certain tangential passage from the book's second half caught my eye. Sandwiched between his posh hang-out regime and a line about deoderant:

"There were four major air disasters this summer, the majority of them captured on videotape, almost as if these events had been planned, and repeated on television endlessly. The planes kept crashing in slow motion, followed by countless roaming shots of the wreckage and the same random views of the burned, bloody carnage, weeping rescue workings retrieving body parts."

Achilles heel

I've always been a pretty healthy dude.  Sure, I've experienced a few hiccups here and there (I was a carrier of the streptococcus bacteria for a while as a little kid, for instance), but considering my degenerate lifestyle, my body has proven itself quite durable. I don't remember the last time I went to the doctor for anything other than a check-up or stitches.

That years-long winning streak has come to an end.

GOD FUCKING DAMMIT.

You may remember the post a few months back in which I mentioned that my right foot was bothering me. Well, despite my valiant effort to resolve the problem by publicly humiliating myself on the elliptical five times a week, my foot never healed. I finally got it checked out by a podiatrist, and it turns out that I have the dreaded condition known as PLANTAR FASCIITIS, the physical evidence of which can be seen above.

Us weirdos

An illustration of Faust by Gray, who also illustrated Lanark

It's come up in the past that I've been reading a lot of weird books since I moved to New York. The latest addition to my running series of weird novels was Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A Life in Four Books, which I actually finished a few weeks ago.

Gray's book is divided up into four smaller interior 'books,' as well as a prologue, interlude, and epilogue. The first two books comprise a fairly conventional bildungsroman (or, more accurately, a künstlerroman) about an artistic, emotionally constipated young man growing up in Glasgow during the 50s and 60s. The third and fourth books address an amnesiac who wakes up in an allegorical dystopian version of Glasgow called Unthank. It becomes clear that these two figures are the same man, and that the division between them is the result of a personal cataclysm that occurs at the end of the second book.

As though the divided-plot thing wasn't weird enough ("Perhaps the author believed that one large book would make a bigger splash than two smaller ones," Gray quips), the above segments appear in the following order: Book 3-> Prologue -> Book 1 -> Interlude -> Book 2 -> Book 4 part 1 -> Epilogue -> Book 4 part 2.

Still here

It's been a while since I posted! This is a brief update so I can limber up my blogging muscles.

I just finished an eleven-day vacation, much of which was spent at my parents' house in suburban Philly. I hadn't left New York for a substantial period of time since January, and by July I was starting to feel approximately the way Smeagol feels after finding the Ring.

Now that I've spent some time outside of the city, I've remembered the sound of (non-manicured) trees and the softness of the (garbage-smell-free) wind, and I plan to start updating this here blog on the regular again.

I've also switched from full-time to part-time at my restaurant job. Seeing as how I've been there for over a year and derive absolutely no pleasure from the work, I'll be looking for different employment for the next few months (hopefully it doesn't take more than a few months). I'll likely have more time to update here under these conditions. Look forward to some self-effacing and/or panicked discussion of my job prospects, along with the usual half-baked rumination on books, music, and other people's political blogs.

It's good to be back!

Too many characters, too little focus

One of the reasons I've been posting infrequently as of late is my addiction to George Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. I mentioned several posts ago that I'd read the two books, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings. In the five weeks since, I've blown through A Storm of Swords and most of A Feast for Crows (as well as the unrelated Lanark: A Life in Four Books, which I'll discuss in a different post).

Martin's series increased pretty rapidly in pace and scope during its first three volumes. During the fourth, it's lost a great deal of momentum. Martin constructs his sweeping narrative out of a series of third-person-limited chapters, each of which follows one of a rotating cast of characters. He's killed off plenty of characters who've had their own narrative chapters, but as the series has gone on, the list of active characters has grown considerably. A Feast for Crows focuses mostly on characters who initially played minor or tertiary roles in the plot. The series's center of gravity has shifted, and while the reader gets to see much more of Martin's well-developed world, a number of compelling major characters have been out of pocket for the entire book.

Kafka dream

Well, I just went a whole week without a post. Whoops. No excuse this time--there were just other things that I elected to spend my time on instead. I guess that's what happens when the most pressing reason to write regularly is "because you ought to."

Last night I had a dream that's become recurrent over the past three months or so. I tend to dream pretty frequently, but it's exceedingly rare that I have the same one multiple times. And as with most recurring dreams, this one is easy to read into.

In the dream, I'm working in a dingy neighborhood in some major Northeastern city. It's not clear whether the city is New York or Philly. The job I'm working is some sort of menial desk job--I typically spend the day correcting someone else's spelling and grammatical errors. The office I work in is cluttered, cramped, and without air conditioning, so I sit sweating through my work shirt while fans ineffectually push the air around.

Working hard outside of work

At the risk of turning this blog into a series of responses to Democracy in America posts, I'd like to briefly highlight a post from the beginning of this week entitled "Work for Post-Materialists."

The post is mostly a discussion of the idea of 'threshold earners' and their place in today's rather shaky economy. Threshold earners are, according to the excellent Tyler Cowen essay on American income inequality cited in the DiA post, "someone who seeks to earn a certain amount of money and no more...That person simply wants to 'get by' in terms of absolute earning power in order to experience other gains in the form of leisure--spending time with friends and family, walking in the woods, and so on."

I say with the (as ever) unnamed Economist writer: "This is me. I don't want to maximize income. I want to maximize autonomy and time for unremunerative but satisfying creative work."

Machine gun

A band called Burnt By the Sun played their final show in New York City last night. They split up once before in 2004, reunited for a farewell album in 2009, and have now thrown in the towel for good. I considered them my favorite band during the first half of high school, and it was a thrill for me to see them again one last time.

I've seen BBTS four or five times in total, and this was easily their best performance of the bunch. When rock music gets this discordant and overdriven, tight performances and well-run sound become much more important. The band and the sound guy were on the same page for the entire show, and BBTS handily reproduced their recorded material. I found myself wondering why they'd break up when they appear to be at the peak of their powers.

Seeing Burnt By the Sun again was also an opportunity for me to reflect on the impact they've had on my life and my perspective on music.

Former athlete

One more entry in the frightened-or-baffled-by-the-news series here.

Yesterday's New York Times featured a story entitled "Across Nation, Budget Talks Stir Pessimism." The gist of the story is approximately as follows:

"A quick, informal selection of voices from across the country over the weekend found both pessimism and cynicism about the state of negotiations in Washington, resignation about the partisan jousting and more confusion than conniption about what exactly will happen if the president and his Republican opponents cannot make a deal to raise the debt ceiling by Aug. 2. And neither side, they say, looks good."

 The story carries on with a series of man-on-the-street interviews, largely with professionals of various stripes. As the writer tells it, even people who work in fields that will be directly affected by a default care very much. "I have no interest in it," says a woman who works in a financial services office in San Francisco. A financial-products trader describes the possibility as "a storm out in the gulf" and goes back to drinking in a Manhattan bar.

Meanwhile, I ("a waiter living in Brooklyn," the Post writer might say) am pretty freaked out. What do these people know that I don't?

Cannibal sounds

So I guess this is going to be my only post this week. I'm experiencing a serious energy shortage right now and I haven't done much of anything for the past few days. Sorry about that.

I'm a pretty avid music fan, but not the most thorough rock historian out there. There are plenty of extraordinarily influential albums from the period between 1950 and 1990 that I've never heard from start to finish. Until last Friday, I could count the Beach Boys' 1966 album Pet Sounds among that number.

Though I'd never heard the album, I knew plenty about it by reputation. Brian Wilson retired from the band's touring lineup in order to compose it. It was among the first and most influential psychedelic rock albums of the 60s; it helped to codify the notion of 'chamber pop' with its complex and layered arrangements; it introduced a whole new musical vocabulary to a generation of rock songwriters.

I also knew that it was a central influence for a lot of modern indie rock bands. I didn't realize exactly how central until I sat down with it.

Paranoia revisited

As I said on Wednesday, my worldview can lean towards paranoia at times. Here's an example.

New York's subway system sells ad space in big blocks. You'll see the same four or five ad campaigns plastered all over every train for a few months, and then those ads will disappear in favor of a different set of campaigns.

One of the current campaigns includes a spot that I find terrifying:

 

I mean, seriously. Yikes.

Teetering

Carrying on the theme of yesterday's post:

Between 2006 and 2010, the political and economic shape of the world changed radically. So did my understanding of it. I was in college during that period, and while my education was genuinely eye-opening, I didn't like everything I saw. Ultimately, the experience destroyed my faith in a number of ideas, values and institutions that I had previously held dear.

The Economist's excellent Democracy In America blog published a post today that highlights a couple of them:

"Unless you buy the Nouriel Roubini argument, and I don't, China is going to be the world's largest economy within ten or 15 years, bigger than America or the euro-zone. And, in case anyone has failed to notice, it's a Communist country. Every year China continues to grow, the case that countries need to be democracies in order to become wealthy and developed becomes more tenuous. In fact, what's happening both in America and in the EU at this point is raising the possibility that democratic governance may in some modern situations be inimical to competent economic stewardship. The incentive structure created by democratic political competition in an internet-era media society may actually be driving countries towards fiscal self-destruction. We're increasingly getting a polarised, viciously divisive, intellectually bankrupt, wildly irresponsible populism that lives up to every negative caricature of multiparty democracy that a CCP ideological hack could dream up. That's certainly what the behaviour of the tea-party-driven GOP and the Party for Freedom suggests."

Not the alien invasion movie

Yesterday was Independence Day. I worked for most of the day (serving French food to European tourists) and didn't really have any plans to celebrate. Nonetheless, my girlfriend and I ended up sitting on our roof, which offers a spectacular view of the Manhattan skyline from the right angle. We drank prosecco and watched the municipal fireworks display, which actually took place on the opposite side of the island from us. It looked like the explosions were going off among the high-rises.

Drink makes me even more prone to rumination than usual, and my thoughts took a predictable turn towards my country and what exactly I was celebrating.

A few years back, I would have described myself as a patriot. In modern usage, a patriot is someone who loves his country. I no longer call myself a patriot because I don't love the United States in the sense that so many of my countrymen mean when they use the word. 

Well-executed

The conclusion of yesterday's post got me thinking a little more about the importance of execution in music.

I've got a fondness for the left-of-center in music. Most of my favorite artists are, or were at one time, on the musical fringe. This preference isn't quite a matter of principle, but it's at least partially ideological. I want rock to keep being interesting for me well into the future, and it has to keep attracting fresh young talent to do so. In order to draw in young people, rock music (which is far and away my favorite genre) must constantly reinvent and expand itself. That means that I like it when bands push into uncharted territory.

That being said, I listen to tons of bands who don't forge out into the unknown. In fact, some of them consciously adhere to established standards, and are all the better for it. Here are a few examples.

Tasty, tasty cannibalism

Under most circumstances, I despise mashup culture. Artistic recombination of older ingredients is fine, but the wholesale cultural cannibalism that's so frequently on display on Youtube and in dance clubs cheeses me off most of the time.

But occasionally the mashup fad produces something that even killjoys like me can enjoy. For instance:

The nuclear option

DO NOT WANT

Sometimes you don't notice that a topic is on your mind until it emerges in conversation. For instance, the topic of procreation--more specifically, the topic of vasectomies--came up for me at least three times.

This is not to say that I am planning on getting a vasectomy as soon as possible. The option is on the table for the future, but going for the snip as an emotional young man seems ill-advised. Regardless, I'm sure it kept coming up because I've been thinking about the decision to (or not to) have children.

Dino Sr

So my Monday post was late, and then my Wednesday post didn't happen at all! I am terrible at this whole rigorous-discipline thing.

In my defense, I've had a lot of non-work-related activities to deal with this week. Last night, for instance, I saw Dinosaur Jr (along with a wild supporting cast) play a show at Terminal 5 in Midtown West.

In fact, the composition of that supporting cast was almost as interesting as Dino's set. Few experiences are so surreal as walking into a slick Manhattan club, complete with $8 domestic cans and bouncers wearing fingerless weightlifting gloves, only to see Keith Morris reliving his early-80s glory days on the tricked-out stage. 

Winter done came already

Boromir Stark of Winterfell

So this is my first late post! I slept way the fuck later than I meant to yesterday, and by the time I remembered that it was Monday and I was supposed to do a blog post, I was already at work. Instead of using my few waking hours at home writing, I finished off A Clash of Kings, the second book in George Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series (known popularly by the name of the first book, A Game of Thrones).

As I understand it, fantasy mavens afford Martin's work a great deal of respect and have done so for years and years. Like The Lord of the Rings before it, A Game of Thrones recently exploded into the popular consciousness by way of a screen adaptation--an HBO series rather than film, in this case.

A Game of Thrones strikes me as something of an odd choice for such a high-stakes wager on the part of HBO's executives. Not because of the weakness of the source material, mind. Martin's books are brilliant page-turners set in a vivid, distinctive alternate reality. They're intensely character-driven, but don't depend so much on inner life that they seem impossible to transliterate into a cinematic format.

Screens on screens

I watched the last game of the NBA finals this past Sunday. I'm not a basketball fan, but the opportunity to watch the biggest douche in sports go down in ignominious defeat was irresistible.

Professional sports telecasts usually feature commercials for cars, beers, and the latest gadgets. The modern generation of gadgets has given birth to the dread nightmare that is screens on screens.

SCREENS ON SCREENS ON SCREENS ON SCREENS

Apple advertisements especially love inducing vertigo by putting screens on your TV or computer. Sometimes you're just seeing a screen on a screen (an iPhone screen on your TV screen). Other times, you're seeing so many screens that it's like standing between two mirrors set facing each other. You're watching a TV (one screen) playing an ad for iPads that has two iPads on the screen at one point (three screens). Each iPad is playing a movie in which the character is watching a movie on an iPad (five screens) that is playing a movie in which the character is watching a movie on an iPad (seven screens) and SCREENS ON SCREENS ON SCREENS.

This feeling is what my band is about.

Mandatory quiet time

Sometimes I lie there listening to The Residents.

I've been having difficulty sleeping straight through the night for years. My insomnia started during my early teens and continues to this day. For a long time, I thought it was the product of various stress factors. Now I'm pretty sure that it's just a feature of my psyche.

My sleep disruptions adhere to a common pattern. I usually go to sleep without issue after half an hour or so of lying in bed. Two or three hours later, I wake up. Oftentimes I'll wake up thirsty, needing to pee, or with some other mild discomfort. But even when this discomfort has been taken care of, I'm still awake.

I then proceed to lie in bed without sleep for anywhere from one to five hours. Occasionally I'll give in to boredom and get up for some reading or internet-ing, but usually I just lie there and think.

Not a pressure cooker

Fig. 1: Heat stroke victim.

It was extremely hot in the Northeast last week. Temperatures hit an unseasonable 95° on Wednesday, and on Thursday the mercury crept up near an even 100°. As a cavemanly type who prefers cold temperatures to warm ones, I found this situation distressing.

The situation became even more distressing when I considered that I'd have to venture into the subway in order to get to work.

If you've never lived in a major city or relied upon an underground metro system for transport, it's probably not clear why this might be the case. If you have, you are aware of the rather intense sensations associated with venturing below the streets on a hot day.

My band could be my life

Last night I finished reading Our Band Could Be Your Life, Michael Azerrad's punk/indie bible. It deserves its reputation as required reading for anyone playing underground rock music, and I'm somewhat ashamed of myself for not getting to it sooner.

The book is loaded with inspiring passages. It takes its title from "History Lesson (Part II)" by Minutemen, who have long been one of my favorite bands. Bassist Mike Watt explains the intended function of the song during the chapter Azerrad dedicates to Minutemen:

'Plenty of punks thought the Minutemen were mocking them and their scene (and sometimes they were). But as "History Lesson (Part II)" made clear, they were just three guys who had grown up together and were making music they thought was good. "I wrote that song to try to humanize us," says Watt. "People thought we were spacemen, but we were just Pedro corndogs--our band could be your life! You could be us, this could be you. We're not that much different from you cats."'

Coming from one of my favorite musicians, this is an intensely moving sentiment to read. It makes me want to sell all of my worldly possessions (except my guitar, of course) and buy a van.

Playing death, feeling alive

I've now been listening to death metal, or at least music that's closely related to death metal, for about ten years. That's a lot of time spent on blastbeats.

It goes without saying that I really enjoy this style of music. Exactly why I enjoy it so much is a little more difficult to parse, even for me.

Prima facie, death metal faces a lot of damning criticisms. Most well-known death metal relies on simplistic and sometimes reprehensible subject matter. It's often sexist, both in content and in practice. It depends on mindless speed and volume. It worships technique--or, alternately, guitar tone--at the expense of songcraft. Much of it is derivative or self-referential. It's gone for almost fifteen years without any widespread aesthetic developments, despite a number of inventive bands who've played in the idiom. It encourages its fans to focus on the worst aspects of the world. The vocals are dumb. The riffs make no sense.

And yet some of the most joyous, transcendent experiences in my life have come from this music. How?

Greenpoint Santa

Every urban neighborhood I've ever lived in or spent a lot of time in has 'its' homeless person. While there may be quite a number of homeless people who frequently hang around in that neighborhood, it seems that there's always just one who dominates the landscape, usually by way of his or her larger-than-life eccentricity.

In my current neighborhood, the signature vagrant is unquestionably Greenpoint Santa.

Way less charming than this guy.

Greenpoint Santa takes his name from his bushy white beard and the large satchel of 'presents' he totes around with him. He was so dubbed by a few friends of mine whose stoop he likes to sit/sleep on. Greenpoint Santa bears the dubious distinction of being the most revolting homeless person any of us have ever come across.

Real problems that I face every day

I've been running regularly for about six years now. Though I'm not a competitive runner, I do take my fitness very seriously. Running regularly also allows me to eat whatever the hell I want. I get to act like a fat kid and look like an athlete at the same time.

How I feel when I run.

Running is also an important emotional release for me. I've gotten reasonably fast over the years, despite my rather not-built-for-speed frame. Cranking out a few miles in quick succession is an empowering experience in my otherwise rather servile life.

Unfortunately, I can't run right now. There's something wrong with my right heel; I suspect that it's either a minor stress fracture or a bone bruise. Since I work as a waiter and can't very well stay off my feet altogether, I figure it's best to spare my foot the abuse of running. But I also can't stop working out altogether, because I'm now thoroughly addicted to endorphins and would suffer total mood collapse if I didn't get my fix.

So I am faced with an odious choice: the exercise bike or the elliptical.

Josh Ritter, happy accident

Josh Ritter started his career as an acoustic singer-songwriter. He eventually pulled a Dylan and now plays with a full band, but they perform under his name and the emphasis is squarely on him. I’ve been listening to the guy for about a year, and his album So Runs the World Away has become a favorite.

The weird part is that I’m not supposed to like this music.

More precisely, I’m not usually interested in singer-songwriters or in poppy rock music that depends heavily on lyrics. But I’ve become a Ritter fan anyhow. Thanks to my incessant introspection, I’ve frequently asked myself what’s so special about this fellow.

Political Animal

I've followed politics since I was in middle school. I've also been politically inert, more or less, since middle school.

My younger sister is currently working on a high school assignment in which she is required, as I understand it, to interview just about anyone on a civil rights-related subject. I interned for the Council of American-Islamic Relations one summer while I was in college, so she asked if she could interview me.

I complied, with some misgivings. My internship at CAIR is my only experience with political activism of any sort to date. It left a bad taste in my mouth. Not because of the work I did, mind--it was a relaxed work-from-home internship in which I wrote a report on various discriminatory tactics practiced by American law enforcement agencies. While the backlash against the American Muslim population post-9/11 has never been as severe as I feared, there's no question that the U.S. government has found a variety of ways to officially screw over Muslims. The manner in which the FBI and the DHS have ridden roughshod over their civil liberties colors my perspective to this day, and researching the subject was an eye-opening experience for me.

Maryland Deathfest

This is my life. These are my peers.

I'm currently on my way to the ninth annual Maryland Deathfest. This will be the fifth year in a row I've attended "America's biggest metal party of the year," as it bills itself.

And this year, like every year, I find myself wondering how exactly I ended up involved in such a wacky culture.

The Importance of Not Knowing What You're Doing

I've been spinning Corroded by Drugs of Faith quite a lot over the last month or so. I've known of this band for years, largely because they share vocalist and guitarist Rich Johnson with Agoraphobic Nosebleed, where he does vocals and plays bass. But because of my tendency to ignore bands that haven't released an LP, I never listened to them until they dropped their debut longplayer via Selfmadegod Records earlier this year. My bad.

Drugs of Faith call their music "grind'n'roll." I like this term, but it's misleading in their case. Drugs of Faith never lapse into bluesy swagger, as bands like Leng T'che do. Johnson does use lots of big, ramshackle chord voicings that defy melody and key. Call it "noise rock'n'grind."

When you watch videos of Drugs of Faith playing live, you can see the abandon with which Johnson plays his instrument. Unlike most metal guitarists, he whacks away with inefficient whole-arm swings. He hits tons of open strings, washing even simple chords in a dissonant drone. He plays like a guy who has no idea what he's doing.

Of course, Johnson--and the rest of Drugs of Faith--know exactly what they're doing. They're a tight, rehearsed band that's composed of veteran musicians. But theirs is a sort of closeted professionalism. Punk and metal are supposed to be feral, animalistic. It's music about losing control that, ironically, requires a great deal of self-control to perform properly. Drugs of Faith have found the perfect balance between these two competing tendencies.

Slickness: 1, Failure: 0

I live in a comparatively fashionable part of Brooklyn. Like most fashionable parts of Brooklyn, it used to be crummy, and like most fashionable parts of Brooklyn, it likes to think that it still is crummy.

That's not to suggest that my neighbors wish that they could still buy heroin from the old dope peddler down the corner. Most of them would probably call the cops if they so much as saw a hypodermic needle lying on the sidewalk. But as a whole, my neck of the woods is still very attached to its gritty aesthetic, however gritless its inhabitants might be.

Like Donald Trump's dick slapping you in the eye.

In recent years, this neighborhood's cognitive dissonance has been made manifest by its growing population of large, modern condominiums. These condos are not gritty, you see. They shine in the sunlight. They are in compliance with New York's many building ordinances. Their elevators work, and quickly. They have doormen and electronic key fobs. Thurston Moore would furrow his brow in disgust behind his Wayfarers at these buildings (and probably has). Nonetheless, real estate developers continue to build, and presumably rent out, these eyesores.

Words Like Riffs

I sometimes feel as though college was an exercise in realizing how little I (and most of the people around me) know about the world. That being said, I got more out of school than an ego check and a dim view of people who claim to have conclusive solutions for major social problems. Among other things, I improved my ability to read 'difficult' novels. Note here that I really mean read, not wholly understand.

Since my current job doesn't offer much in the way of intellectual challenge, I've been gobbling up weird books steadily for the last year. Some of them, like Bolaño's 2666, proved extremely enjoyable, even if I wasn't quite sure I 'got' it. Others, like Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, were chores to get through.

But the weirdest book I've read in my year of weird books is definitely The Orange Eats Creeps, by Grace Krilanovich.

AND SO IT BEGINS

Hello!

In this blog, I will contribute to the infinite reserves of idle talk already available on the internet. I've been writing steadily for most of my 'adult' life, and since I'm currently between active writing ventures, I need a place to practice. Practicing in public where people might provide some feedback is more satisfying than practicing in private, so that's what I'll be doing here.

I aim to adhere to a rigorous Monday-Wednesday-Friday update schedule. Beyond that, I have no ambitions or goals for this here blog. It's easier to make yourself write when you don't have to write about anything in particular, so I'll just discuss whatever's been on my mind. I expect that many, if not most, of the posts will have to do with music. Some others will have to do with movies, sports, politics, and the vicissitudes of urban life.

A little more about me:

A view often romanticized by people who aren't me.

I'm a recent college graduate living in New York City. You might say that I ended up here by mistake. I had no professional or academic plans when I graduated, but I was (and still am) involved in a band based in Brooklyn, so I moved here so I could get more involved in playing music. I'm currently supporting myself by working at a well-known restaurant--a job I have little natural inclination towards, but it pays the bills. I'm a big nerd and I like nerd things. I also read the news a lot.

If you're reading this, chances are you know me already, so that little spiel was probably redundant. I like to cover my bases, though.

And we're off! Thanks for reading.