kinde words

Dummy

2011-06-02T13:33:00.000-04:00

"... Looking at the facts: Look at the debt that has been accumulated in the last two years. It's more debt under this president (Obama) than all those other president combined."

Yes. The $3.7 trillion added to the national debt since the President took office is more than the $10.6 trillion debt he inherited from 'all those other presidents combined.' Because Sarah Palin, inspired by the Republican party's groundbreaking work in falsity over the last 20 years, has made exciting new breakthroughs in math whereby the opposite of truth is now 'fact.'

And yet I swear to God, it's not even half about the stupid shit she says. It's much more about the annoying fucking bitchy way she says it. "Hellooooo! I'm riiiiiight! How stupid Democrats must be to think different!" It doesn't seem possible she's still like this as a biological adult. Isn't that what high school is for -- to pound those obnoxious mannerisms out of you before you enter the adult world, where people are killed for less?

A sobering take on Memorial Day

2011-05-31T14:58:00.000-04:00

President Obama:

“It is my most solemn responsibility as President, to serve as Commander-in-Chief of one of the finest fighting forces the world has ever known.”

Sarah Palin:

“This is the greatest fighting force in the world, the U.S. military. It’s not just one of the greatest fighting forces. And I sure hope our president recognizes that. We’re not just one of many. We are the best.”

Ol' troy:

"For the love of Christ, will you just shut the hell up already?"

And now, some very important news ...

2011-03-24T15:20:00.000-04:00

Hello, beautiful ...

Start with a tour in the Army

2011-03-22T09:17:00.002-04:00

From Salon:

Sarah Palin's trip to Israel -- which has been covered a bit more extensively by the press than her trip to India -- has been a fairly predictable exercise. She said hawkish things and told high-ranking members of the Likud party that they should "stop apologizing" and she'll dine with Benjamin Netanyahu and she has repeatedly announced that she's on Team Jewish People when it comes to the various disagreements in the region.

Dear Sarah

No thanks.

Yer pal
troy (and friends)

And why the hell are we cheapening Kilimanjaro by comparing it to Olympus?

2011-03-02T12:46:00.002-05:00

As a teen, I enjoyed .38 Special's song 'Teacher Teacher', and for years now have had it in my head that it was a really good song. Well, all these years later, I can safely say ... that I have downloaded 'Teacher Teacher.'

My nuanced view

2011-03-02T11:40:00.001-05:00

I believe in free speech. And I believe this is stupid.

That is all.

Our girl!

2011-01-08T20:02:00.007-05:00

Getting people killed! No, wait, that's a poor choice of words. Kind of as poor as if someone had created this graphic ...

.. and then tweeted this:

Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: "Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!" Pls see my Facebook page.

One of those targeted districts was the Arizona 8th, where Gabrielle Giffords had twice been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Giffords somehow managed to win without getting shot, although she didn't dismiss the possibility:

The way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district, when people do that, they have got to realize there are consequences to that.

Today, a 22-year-old Arizona man shot Giffords in the head, and killed six people, a list that included one of Giffords's aides, a federal judge, and a 9-year-old.

In Las Vegas, you could place a bet that Palin would not only fail to accept any responsibility for this, but would attack the media for even suggesting a connection, but that bet now has been taken off the board.

If there's any positive slant on this, it's that it hasn't yet happened to the president, despite all the rhetoric to that effect that has come from scumbags like Palin.

Her favorite album of 2010

2010-12-12T18:44:00.008-05:00

"I made a mistake today" starts 'Weightless,' a 17-year-old song re-recorded more recently for 'Boduvt,' the album from Agents of Venus released earlier this year. The words are sung by Allen Towbin in a sort of ethereal way over a progressive sort of guitar arpeggio that hails from a happy-enough G major chord yet still sounds ominous. The overall effect is to suggest a very bad mistake indeed; even after several listens, even knowing where the lyrics are actually going, it is still difficult to hear Towbin sing that line without imagining the song unfolding like a musical version of Taxi Driver.

But that's not the direction in which 'Weightless' goes; that would be too easy for Phil Ristaino, my good friend and favorite lyricist of all time. Instead, the song continues thusly:

I made a mistake today
And gave my whole life away
To shoulder the burden of your trust
I don't care you think I'm wrong
I'd rather be left alone
Sifting the sand for light in dust

'Boduvt' is a big beast of a record, my favorite released this year, with a wide mix of pop and rock styles, expert playing by gifted musicians on inspired songwriting, and always the lyrics, which are never what the seem except for how they so often seem to be brilliant. Phil has begun posting them over at the site, when you can also hear most of the album. (Pro tip: A good introductory sampler would include Fall Off the Earth, Stereo, The Post Relevant Movement, and, of course, Weightless.) Phil was kind enough to write a few billion words for me about the making of the album and just what the hell he means on it.

* * *

Q: 'Weightless' is 17 years old. Was there any debate about re-recording it and putting it on the album, or was it universally popular?

PR: As far as I remember, there was debate about what version of Weightless to put on the album, but probably not much debate (at least between Allen and I) about actually putting it on the album. When we started the project 7 years ago, (2003, I think) we would write a song every once in a while, slowly amassing a potential collection of tunes over time. Weightless was a great song that Allen had written, (with help from myself, Mike Parillo the drummer, and I think Homey (Derrick Ogden) the bass player). It was post-Doctor Dolittle, meaning we were seniors in college and living in the same house together, but the old band had sort of broken down and wasn't going to be a viable thing in the future. Allen was recording this song on a cassette 4-track recorder (remember those?) and I don't know how it happened, but I ended up writing lyrics for it and singing on it with him. I even used an old piece of poetry as spoken text in one section of the song, sort of as a background voice. We were real into King Crimson around then, so I think this was a form of homage to the 80s version of that band (at least, for me). I think it was then re-recorded in the studio at Skidmore College, complete with this really cool, very heavy progressive rock composed musical part near the end of the song. Everyone we knew who heard it really dug it, but it was a sort of underground thing, in that it wasn't a band in particular that was recording it, it was more of a little recording project unto itself. I remember really digging that version.

At some point years later in the '90s, Allen and Mike were in another band together, along with another guitar player from Skidmore named Johnny Medalis, and they re-wrote Weightless to suit that band. The song was totally re-composed, if that's a word, and new verse lyrics were created. Mostly by Allen, I don't know if I helped at all, but I do remember reading Allen's new lyrics at some point in time. I am least familiar with that version of the song. I think anyone who knows that song is least familiar with that version.

Eventually that band broke up and Weightless was once again in limbo. When Allen and I started up the AoV project, Weightless was once again put on the table as a potential tune, especially since we had both participated in the writing of the original. We knew Mike and maybe Homey were going to record with us, so it made sense to use the song. The conversation probably went like this:

Allen: We should record Weightless.
Me: Yeah. We have to record Weightless.

or

Me: We have to record Weightless
Allen: Definitely, but we have to change its structure to make it more "pop" (meaning verse/chorus/verse/chorus no crazy avante garde jam in the middle and no poetry readings).
Me: Ok Ok.

I was a fan of keeping the heavy progressive rock part, but Allen was over it, so we went about writing it as a more straightforward song. I think Mike may not have wanted to change the song, I don't know, but it seems he came around. I re-wrote the lyrics, keeping a line or two from Allen's second version, but for the most part re-writing them all. Allen seemed to really know what he wanted to do with the music -- the part that builds after the cosmic guitar solo with the words "Do you know which side you're on?" he proposed -- and I figured out bringing that line back from the second verse, cause I find in rock when you reference something you already introduced lyrically in the song, it gives it more weight (no pun intended) and unifies the themes of the tune, even if those themes seem to be abstract. But I'm pretty sure Allen would have come up with that part and then I would have figured out what to do with it lyrically after I heard it. We were both interested in some kind of real kickass outro, and I think the idea of the main guitar line going on with Mike just freaking out over it at the end was part of the plan all along, sort of like the end of Steely Dan "Aja." (Allen is a big SD afficionado, I think they really inform his songwriting and the way he wanted to approach writing the AoV songs, especially.)

Probably the most controversial changes were mine, meaning that I completely changed the verses lyrically and changed up most of the chorus lyrically. Which meant I really changed up the meaning of the song, in many ways. I was never attached to any other form the song had taken on, so it was easy for me to go in and re-write it. Songs where Allen was singing lead were generally harder for me to approach as a lyricist, however, since he was a bit of a gentle taskmaster in getting the lyrics to work exactly how he wanted them to, and his aesthetic about how to sing vocals is a bit different from mine, so I was constantly trying to restrain myself -- he was always having me simplify the lyrics until eventually I figured out that was what he wanted and started to do it on my own. Often Allen would come up with a vocal melody for his verses or choruses and I'd strive to fit words into those melodies to his liking. I haven't written a ton of lyrics for someone else to sing, so it was definitely a challenge, but a good learning experience. Again, this version of the lyrics for the song reflects the Steely Dan aesthetic, if I can use those three words in sequence with you, and that aesthetic is this: The singer is singing about something very specific, with lots of details, but you (the listener) may be damned if you could ever really say what exactly the song is about. It's one of those songs you have to investigate, and hopefully you will use the lyrics to draw parallels to your own life and make a deeper connection to the song because somehow it represents you as well as me. I would be happy to explain the lyrics if you so desire.

What I've been hearing lately from those people that knew the original version of the song is that they were resistant to the new version, but after a few listens realized that it, too, was dope and were able to really enjoy it.

Q: Please go ahead and make with the lyrical explanation. You can see above that the topic fascinates me.

PR: Ok. The deal with Boduvt, in general, is that there is this theme running through the album, partially accidentally, partially intended, of mythology, taken partially from the Joseph Campbell school of thought that all cultures have mythologies, they are built on them, because the cultures use the mythologies to build their traditions upon them, these traditions become customs and laws, celebrations and funerals, interpretations of life and whatever comes after life. But Campbell says no matter what the details of each mythology is, within it is a structure that is repeated in each culture. The search for the father, for instance, is a repeated theme in many cultures' mythologies. Campbell posits that if we were to create a single mythology for the entire world, a single story of our beginning, there would be a unified culture and world peace. I'm inclined to think he is on to something.

With that said, Weightless is absolutely a song with mythological resonance. For whatever reason we wrote it all those years ago, the most important theme within the song is that of "becoming weightless when Atlas lets go of the world." What does that mean? Well, I'll tell you what I think it means.

Atlas according to Greek legend is a titan, who preceded the Greek gods, and he bears the weight of the earth on his back, literally. I believe the story goes that he somehow gives birth to a bunch of the major gods, like Zeus. (Also known as Jupiter to the Romans, let's call him Odin to the Norse myths, etc. etc. -- just as an aside, isn't it interesting that Odin is depicted as a god missing an eye, and the planet Jupiter is known for is giant eye-shaped storm -- coincidence? No, it is not a coincidence.) Atlas is also thought to have been a king of Atlantis, the legendary lost city and/or continent that surely was real (in my opinion) and predated known historical civilization. Supposedly Atlantis was destroyed during cataclysmic Earth changes/world war (probably both), so it becomes this idea of the idealized city/civilization that rose to a pinnacle of human potential and then was horribly wiped out/destroyed itself (probably both). Some even think the idea of the ego, that thing in your mind that tells you that you are separate from everyone else and that you should fear death, was created in the human soul or psyche due to this horrible Earth-wide cataclysm. Thus creating the Adamic fallen state the Old Testament mentions. So where does this leave us? Here, in this world, living our lives of quiet desperation, profoundly lost amid a sea of large and small threats to our mortality while being daily confused as to why we are here and what the purpose of life and humanity is. We must constantly overcompensate for myriad oppressive factors of existing, we must struggle to survive, we feel alone, we feel misunderstood, to varying degrees. We feel lost or separate. In order to survive, we must bear this weight, or so we think, we must bear the 'weight of the world,' an idea Atlas's task makes clear through mythology.

But what if it wasn't true? What if it was just a state of mind we adapted, but now are confronted with leaving behind? What if Atlas was allowed to take a holiday, so to speak? What if he let go of the world? What would happen? Destruction? Freedom? Both? The ... gasp ... unknown?

I find that as a society we are sort of made to police each other, to toe the line, so we can justify to each other our pain, our burdens, which justify our reason to be here. What if we dropped all the fabric of society that we felt didn't represent who we think we truly are? What would happen if you stopped paying taxes? Stopped following the speed limit? Stopped going to work in the morning? What if you let go completely and trusted the unknown to provide for you and just magically manifest whatever you needed to allow you to survive and thrive? What if the only justification needed for humanity to exist was simply that we actually do exist?

So ...

I made a mistake today
And gave my whole life away
To shoulder the burden of your trust
I don't care you think I'm wrong
I'd rather be left alone
Sifting the sand for light in dust

This first verse sets up the scenario: My (meaning anyone's as well as mine, but mine too) mistake was toeing the line for the other, meaning I've
subjugated my truth to earn your trust, because you (whoever you are) believe something different from me and maybe my belief contradicts your belief and creates anxiety around your reality, simply because someone else sees life differently and chooses differently. How do we reconcile these differences and, more importantly, do we have to? So therefore, I've chosen my own path and I don't care if you don't agree, I'm going to look for something better amidst the rubble -- the light in the dust.

Should I die for what is gone?
hanging on broken imagination
bear the heavy veil of freedom
defy gravity or sleep on as

Here, I'm justifying my choice. Should I follow a path I know is irrelevant to me? "Broken imagination" I like especially, since to me it's the idea of someone who has mistaken the truth of our existence in their own mind and now wants me to follow it -- their imagination is fractured or ruined, and now they want me to toe the line to satisfy their rule system. I think this is also where "heavy veil of freedom" comes in, cause it seems to me, at least in this country, that we are constantly told that we are free, but freedom isn't free (what the hell kind of logic is that, freedom, by definition, is free) but as far as I can see, you are only as free as you think you are, or as free as whoever is making and enforcing the rules wants you to be. Freedom doesn't need rules, that's again what freedom is. So our 'freedom' has a veil to it, a false mask, a weight. Should I stay asleep to the truth, as far as I see it, that as extensions of an infinite universe we, too, should be infinite, and therefore, potentially, maybe even literally, be weightless?

Thus the chorus:

Slaves chained to diamonds
carbon holding pearls
names heal the ages of facelessness
we become weightless when Atlas lets go of the world

This is the dichotomy of our existence: infinite and finite, gods and mortals, good and evil: We are carbon-based mortals holding the pearls of wisdom within us; which part of us will we listen to? The "names healing facelessness" is a little nebulous, I admit, but I think it's sort of like identifying the problem or problems within the psyche so we can heal them -- you need to recognize what's wrong so you can fix it. Also, if you put a name or a face on an individual, they stop being anonymous, they become more real to others, they are humanized, and once they are humanized, maybe you wouldn't want to kill them, steal from them, hurt them, destroy their civilizations, etc. etc. So if Atlas releases these expectations and rules, we all do, cause he's the king, he's the mythological model, and he is in each of us, driving us on to bear these burdens.

Nothing in sight forever
so Atlas shrugs and forgets the endeavor
wanders straight into the new sun
billions all tied together
a shift to the side and the old wreck goes over
left to rebuild or ruin

So here is our Titan, abandoning his post. The result seems to be completely devastating. This is the problem around changing oneself. If you do, will your whole world fall apart around you? Atlas has found his new sun, his better path, but he's leaving a trail of destruction in his wake. The "billions all tied together." Any move too far in one direction or the other may well be completely devastating to the whole world at this point in our history. If you look around, it seems we are reaping the whirlwind of our decisions as a species, what with all the pollution, war, starvation, etc. etc. If we let all our bad habits go, will there be anything left of us as people, and as a society? Will it all just fall to shit? And is this bad?

Do you know which side you're on?
Brittle leaves torn in a windstorm
either choice a weight is borne
defy gravity carry me beyond the ...

So here is the big question. "Do you know which side you're on?" On a physical level, there is the left and right, liberal and conservative, east and west, black and white. Which side have you chosen? Have you chosen? Take a minute to reflect. Either side is going to hell once Atlas has abandoned his post. Internally, this could be which side of your brain you favor, reason or intuition, control or love? All of it is "brittle leaves," meaning, in the context of the world, we are fragile little ants, could be dead in a second: A bridge collapses, an earthquake, a flood, a war. We've seen this time and time again. This leads to one of my favorite lines, "either choice a weight is borne." Gotta love the double meanings. That is what good rock lyrics are all about. The weight is created through choice, but maybe choice also makes us weightless, the weight is "borne" aloft, we are free. That is my choice, so I'm saying, help with my choice, help me become weightless, carry me beyond the slaves, God, or whoever you are that makes us go. Carry me above the false choice of one or the other, help me see the unity, the oneness, the peace and completion that we all know we can be but few actually find.

This brings us through another chorus, with my voice added low in the mix, so now our movement is building, more voices crying out for true freedom. This leads us to Allen's amazing solo, just spectacular. It soars AND it feels so heavy and sad. It gives me goosebumps. This is what good art does, it shows the contradiction in every word, every gesture, it demonstrates the meaning of life, in a way, by showing that we are gods AND mortals, we are big AND small, we live AND die. This is the holographic idea of life, instead of the hierarchical idea we seem to live: The whole of life is represented in every individual aspect of life. Nothing is greater than everything else because it's all contained in each molecule, each leaf, each human soul.

Wonderfully enough, this leads us to the repeated question: "Do you know which side you're on?" I'm really trying to take us home, here, cause I think the depth of feeling this song creates leads us to being able to confront this important question. The question is: Are you ready to release your need to choose a side? Are you ready to stop fearing the other? Are you willing to let go of your need to control the future and the past? Can you be here in the mystery without freaking out? Can you just be here? I feel like, by asking the question repeatedly, and then asking if you "know how to carry me beyond," it's like saying, can we leave the bullshit behind us once and for all and move forward into a world that has peace and love as its primary goal? And I'm asking this of everyone. The political leaders. The crooks. The cops. The dentists. The whores. The rich. The poor and oppressed. All of us. 'Cause, as far as I can see, Atlas is really and truly in the process of letting this world go. Are we ready to go along for the ride, or are we like Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangeglove, riding the A bomb down into hell, hollering and a-whoopin it up along the way. What's it going to be, World? What do you want?

I realize that there may be contradictions in the themes in this song, but I really can't help it, I have to put forth contradictions. Its the only way we can move past the mind and into the heart, 'cause the mind only seems to want to separate everything, and we see that that isn't the answer anymore. So maybe we need to let go of the mind (Atlas's burden) and see life through the heart (a new sun). Just sayin.

The thing that really blows my mind is that this song and its theme was originally conceived 17 years ago, so there is some part of me (and Allen and Mike and Homey) that needed to begin to explore this concept and let it gestate over time until it was appropriate to the times at hand to be revealed, as it were, to whoever wants to experience it now. And it fits with the rest of the record, and caps it really nicely, I think. I am very proud to have gotten to be a part of this tune.

Q: That kind of puts 'Weightless' with '33,' 'The Reason,' and 'Political Criminal,' which thematically form the three sides and base of a pyramid standing up out of the record and make pretty plain your worldview, or view of life in today's U.S., at least.

PR: Yeah, both '33' and PC have a political bent to them, though you can see me trying to work out the equation. I'm not just blaming the leaders for our world's predicament, I'm trying to put my finger on the movement of society itself and my place (or lack thereof) in it. PC is sort of an open letter to the political structure, saying that I know they are scamming us, and that a world of more and more rules makes criminals of us all. '33' is sort of the bottoming out, if you will, where I'm acknowledging that I feel like I have essentially failed in my mission to "be something," but I'm also saying that the direction the world is moving in makes it real hard to 'succeed' at this point. It makes it difficult to believe, too. There's only so long you can stare down the barrel of the gun until you feel like that's all that's left for you. The Bush administration really piled it on us for a while there, but I was already struggling with these feelings of inadequacy in the midst of the huge, relentless machine that is American culture in the '90s. Maybe I've always just felt overwhelmed by it all. 'Weightless' then kind of caps it by saying, "Look, I'm not the only one, we're all in this boat together, and it's just ... about ... to sink." So I'm going to reach out for a life preserver, to extend the metaphor, but that life preserver isn't going to come from the system that sunk the ship. It has to come from something more, higher, more loving, something with a larger perspective and deeper understanding of the mystery of this life.

The boat analogy that pops up in 'Weightless' is great, too, because I'm using it as a metaphor for the earth itself. The earth as a whole is sort of my muse for this record, seeing us from this larger perspective, and you'll see references to the Earth all over the record. So when the idea of 'Boduvt' came up, meaning, according to Felix the 4-year-old, "a round boat," it perfectly encapsulated several of the themes I was shooting for with this record. In this case, it represents the earth. A round boat. It's perfect. There are a lot of happy accidents like that surrounding the making of this record. It feels very much fated in that way.

Taking this one step further, people in the consciousness movement often say that the planet Venus represents the "soul of the Earth" in some way. Don't ask me how, I don't understand it yet. Maybe it's a higher dimensional version of our planet somehow. So, if I'm going to run with this analogy, I would say that to be an agent of Venus would be to be an agent of the next higher dimensional version of the Earth. The 5th-dimensional version, which is what the whole 2012 message seems to be about. That there will be a split between the old Earth that will fall and the new Earth that will rise into the 5th dimension, and this happens just about now, i.e., 2012. Now's the time to choose which one you want to be on, the one that rises above all our ridiculousness and into a world of peace, love and fulfillment, or one that sinks beneath the weight of our greed, hate, and stupidity. Do you know which side you're on?

That's not to say you have to even believe or care about what I might be thinking to enjoy the record. I don't think you do. But this is sort of more where I'm coming from, as a macro perspective.

'The Reason,' which I missed here, is really about having to do what you have to do to survive, and is any of it really necessary? Money is a theme I revisit often in music, cause I'm so perplexed by it. What is this stuff for? I didn't come to this planet to make money, I came here to make music, art, movies, love, fun, friends. But if you don't try to make money, you probably won't have too much of any of the other stuff. So the question is, is the pursuit of money part of the game of coming to this world at this time? Is this part of the illusion we have chosen to deal with? Is it a test for us, a rule or a means of control? Is this one of the things we have agreed to deal with in one way or another simply because we've chosen to 'be?' You can see I have lots of questions. Hopefully I'm offering some answers in there somewhere.

Q: The lyrics of those four songs read like an indictment of the politico-economical framework of the country and where they've led us, an indictment that includes both leaders and followers. 'The Reason' in particular seems to pass judgment on the latter. Yet you've always been a lot less "This is wrong" and a lot more "This is wrong for me." Am I right that I detect a bit of a shift here?

PR: Well, yes, I admit I don't really believe in the system we are forced to follow. It is anti-human, in my mind. It is designed with population control in mind. It is the full manifestation of the ego run rampant: paranoia, fear of the other in any manifestation, the need to control everything because it knows it can't really control much of anything. This is what happens when there is no heart to a society. I think money is a way of controlling the population, because we aren't allowed to just use the resources freely given to us by this planet, and we aren't really encouraged to use them wisely. War is promoted as problem solving. Competition is taken as a given, a dog-eat-dog world. We are isolated from each other, in our minds, and made to be fearful. We are raised to be functional parts of the industrial matrix. If we can't fit into the matrix, we are further isolated. Drugs are promoted as the answer to disease, yet are made illegal simultaneously. Even the leaders it seems we elect are only really allowed to come from certain lines of humanity, and many are actually related to each other. It seems we have free elections, but the Bush regime proved that those elections can be manipulated, and was probably designed to show us that our system is false and make us lose faith in that system, 'cause the dudes behind the curtain are done with this version of society and ready for the next version. There is a occult ruling class, hiding and flaunting their hidden knowledge in plain sight, lying to us every day through the controlled media. Don't kid yourself.

But I'm not just blaming them, because that, too, is a powerless state of mind. It goes back to that line from 'Weightless': the "broken imagination." This is all of us, failing to imagine a better way together. This is me, failing to harness my own power of thought and manifest my own true path. This is me, failing to "believe." In fact, the power system seems to be inevitable to anyone who is unwilling to take full responsibility for everything that happens in their life. Either you claim all your own power or you create a space for some psychotic person who is out of balance and wants to control more than their own destiny to step into that void and do the power harnessing for you. If energy is neither created nor destroyed, then it is always here, trying to maintain a balance to the universe, and sort of filling in the cracks, so to speak. So if the people, the 'victims' in this instance, are unwilling to claim their own true sovereignty as the inheritors of the unlimited reality of the truth of the universe, then the 'universe' is going to find those crazy people who want their power and your power and give it all to them, 'cause someone's got to deal with it, it's just there (the power, in this example). We each need to become our truest, fullest selves in order to really inhabit our 'puzzle piece,' so to speak, to fill the space we were truly created to occupy. This is a movement, not a static event. So things are always changing and readjusting to try to find a stasis, so this journey for us is a lifelong thing of striving to be our truest selves. And, of course, you can find contradiction for anything I just wrote.

But just to pedal back a bit. I'm not just blaming those in "power" (or maybe more accurately, those striving to maintain a large level of control). In 'Political Criminal,' I say "Two sides, the same disgrace. We wear each other's faces. I'd try to take your place but I hate what you do." Meaning, I know they (the politicians, in this case) are really me, too. They are the other side of the power equation. I'm tempted to overthrow their rule book, but I know it'll just turn me into them, and that's really not how I want to spend my life, trying to overthrow the government. Its the darker side of 'Hero with 1000 Eyes,' where I say, "Every life you're living is my life," meaning you are the version of me that does what you do, just as I am the version of you that does what I do, but this is in a more positive way, an acknowledgment that we are truly one if we simply understand the truth of it, if we see ourselves in everyone and try to take the perspective of each other, not be just merely 'selfish' in the truest sense of having a singular self.

As an indictment, well, I've never really set out to indict anybody. I'm just saying, this is what I seem to see happening. This is the conclusion I've come to at the point I co-wrote these songs. I want it to change, and it has to change. But I don't really blame anyone, you know? Shit happens. Here we are. What are we going to do about it? Can we do anything? What if this is just the way of things and we just have to sit back and enjoy the ride? It's pretty overwhelming to contemplate actually changing it all consciously. It's a real jungle out there, and if there's one thing I've learned, trying to control it all is really the biggest mistake we can make. It's the mistake we keep making. We can't control it all. It's too big. I can barely control myself from day to day. I've needed to develop faith that there is a reason I'm here to witness this all, and find ways to relax into the process of revelation from day to day and let the universe bring what I desire into my life at 'random' moments in time, to not know and trust that not knowing is ok. And when I say faith, this isn't a religious thing. It's more of a conversation with the aspects of the universe that are invisible to me but seem to be affecting the visible world. If reality manifests from the unknown to the known, then what's going on over there in the unknown part? They must know something I don't, 'cause all this manifestation is coming from there (wherever there is), so I need to start having a conversation with 'over there' if I want to see something different manifesting over here.

Q: Was your work on the album a reaction to anything/-one? Were you deep
into any writer/thinker/mindframe or affected by any events in
particular? The Bush administration and decline in the political
discourse seemed obvious, even before you mentioned him.

PR: If my mind could be into only one thing, I think it might be how to become God, meaning how to become unlimited, enlightened, better, maybe superhuman somehow. Or maybe love, how to find a true love. Or success, how to succeed in this world, what is success, victory. Or maybe it would be how to bring about peace. Or maybe escape, how to escape the traps this world seems to place, how to find the coolest diversions to alter my consciousness. Or music, how to turn all of life into something as cool as music.

But as you can see, my mind doesn't exactly focus on one thing.

I would say that this album was written amidst a long period of what I could only call premonition. This meaning: During the '90s, I had many profound experiences that led me to believe the world was heading towards a major change on all levels and I would get to be involved somehow. I came to realize that a big part of this change would be a lot of death and destruction. I've always walked with a certain level of nihilistic fever, in a way, where for much of my life I felt like I was essentially doomed. I know now this is really just a psychological/spiritual positioning, or simply put, a state of mind. As I pursued trying to essentially change or lose this state of 'doomedness,' I learned that my worries were not totally unwarranted. But simultaneously, I also learned to let go of all this fear I was carrying around with me and begin to just be here and enjoy being alive. Simply put, I learned that I could find a place inside myself where I could stop worrying. I think this album has been written during that transformation.

I've looked rather deeply into understanding the mystery schools, the western enlightenment schools, the eastern traditions a bit, the Kabbalist and Masonic thought, extraterrestrial theories and communications, forms of and ideas around meditations, crystal skulls, wormholes, Egypt, Atlantis and Lemuria, channeled information, the future, time travel, psychic abilities, the true history of Christ, world mysteries, the illumined masters, angels, near-death and out-of-body experience, conspiracy, lizard people, experimental alternative energy, mythology, end times, 2012, whatever struck my fancy that day. The occult, in a nutshell. The occult, of course, representing those things that are kept secret. Why are they secret? There are millions of reasons. But now they are all available to us. I believe this point, that they are now widely available to us, is incredibly significant. Why now? Why now?

Along with all this research, meditation, effort towards change, I found myself adrift in a life that I could not figure out how to properly improve. Try as I might, I couldn't seem to get things to move in any direction that felt very satisfactory, and that seemed to represent real progress. I deeply wanted to create a life that would represent what I imagined my true potential could be, but I really seemed to be incapable of creating it. I could see the mountaintop, but I could only sort of circle it from far away. Despite my best efforts, I seemed to be in a waiting pattern. In limbo.

An excellent example of this was the making of the record itself. I initiated this project with Allen as a project that could be made in between projects. This was going to be the album I made between my last band and my next band. Allen was insistent that the project would never turn into a proper live band, so I resolved that I would put a couple years into writing some really quality music with one of my best buddies and then sort of have that one under my belt, have a well made record to share and use it to promote myself to potential new bands, as a calling card to attract quality players and songwriters who really wanted to play out and build a body of original, epic, crazy creative stuff. It was an going to be a rebound girlfriend, if you catch my drift.

But for some reason, this project just kind of hung in there, and Allen and I slowly amassed material and just worked it and reworked it seemingly endlessly. We would have long breaks in between recording sessions. So I was left waiting, often for many many months at a time, to finish this transitional project. Many months turned into many years, and I did a ton of other stuff in the meantime, but all the while, this project kept hanging in there, slowly changing and improving. Little by little. Step by step. It always had a priority for me, and I knew for some reason I had to see it through. I don't give up easy, even though I do give up often. Usually giving up for me involves trying another tactic or attacking from another vantage point at the same or a similar problem in hopes of arriving in the same goal of being my idealized version of myself. I had lots of failures both inside this project and in my life during these 7 years. I had to learn to keep going, to be understanding, to keep giving, to be patient.

I had to learn to be patient.

Even in the midst of what seemed like certain annihilation. I had to be patient.

This feels like what I have ended up coming away from this project, maybe as a central theme that I studied by living it. I'm 40 now. I started this thing when I was about 33. Most of my thirties seemed to pass me by like a whisper. I thought this was going to be the time where I really got to live to my fullest potential. But I just couldn't make it all work for me, barely any of it, really. So I had to learn to let go. I can see now that this process of letting go IS the enlightenment process. And it's really not very dramatic, in a way, because drama comes from holding on to things, making them really really important, life-and-death shit. But letting go is like a whisper. It's small and quiet and kind. It's loving because it's so gentle, in some way, like Santa Claus, who leaves you presents while you're sleeping. Dig that as a metaphor. Saint Nick is a dude who creeps down your chimney in the middle of the night, like anti-smoke, and leaves you gifts, all for the price of a cookie. Nice dude.

At any rate, I think you might be able to look at the album as a whole as a record made by the fellas from Waiting for Godot; they never quite get anywhere, but the waiting is sublime. But at the end of this waiting period, for me, is the understanding of the arrival of the divine feminine, the female Christ, if you will. A lady buddha. It's like all the bluster and falderol has to be drained out of you so that you might become quiet enough to hear the little voice inside you that knows the mind of the universe itself, the life force that makes things, material, matter, the mater, the mother. She is always there if you want to hear her. But you have to slow down and listen.

Q: Speaking of your being 33 when the project started: '33' changed some; an earlier iteration that sounded album-ready had a lot of different choices and a different feel to it -- more whimsical and fun, where the album version is more matched to the content of the lyrics. How common was that on a project that was recorded over seven years?

PR: Fairly common, actually. We started off the project with no other musicians, and I think in 2006 or '07 we brought in Mike and Homey to play drums and bass, respectively, and that really radically changed the feel of half the album.

When we started writing the tunes, we were talking about creating a more hip hop-influenced album. Really, I thought we would be shooting for something closer to Beck's Midnite Vultures album, which Allen and I both really love. (I personally think it's his best one.) I was deep into hip hop at this point -- rock and roll had really lost me, all I wanted was rhymes and beats and cool keyboard sounds. Allen seemed to be down with the Midnite Vultures feel, but I think he'd actually been producing lots of hip hop projects and was sort of sick of it. I don't know, but I think this might be his first full-length rock album, really. I know he's recorded many of his own projects before this one, but I think this might be his first official full-on rock record where he's written and produced all the material. It seemed like, even though he was insistent on not having a band, he was jonesing for a real rock experience. So after a few years of writing tunes with programmed beats, he got the bee in his bonnet to bring in Mike and Homey and really turn 'Boduvt' into a rock record. Maybe that was always his plan, I dunno.

I was still keen on the programmed beats thing, and as you can see, there are still a fair amount of songs on the record with 'artificial' drum tracks. And of course, I was down with bringing in 2 & 1/2. (That's Mike and Homey's nickname as a rhythm section from the old Dr. Dolittle days, cause Homey is the size of 2 men and Mike is the size of 1/2 a man.) So once they came in and we recorded the basic bass and drum tracks over the course of a weekend, we now had a whole new series of songs to contend with, and they changed. Mike's feels on '33,' 'Political Criminal,' even 'Fall off the Earth,' are really much more rock than what we had going, and it really intensified those songs, gave them more gravity, to their advantage, I think. We even put had Mike just do different fills and rhythms on top of the programmed beats for 'Hero with 1000 Eyes,' and that totally changed the sound of the song. We kept the programmed stuff in there, but now suddenly 'Hero' is a rock tune, like a U2 song or something. I would love to do a few remixes of 'Hero,' I think that song could be approached in about 15 different ways and still work.

What I am bummed about losing, in terms of 33, was that great beginning with Lea Thompson and Crispin Glover from 'Back to the Future,' where he approaches her in the diner with a little notepad in his hand and tells her she's his density. I reference it later in the song, and actually, the reference was there before the spoken word stuff. I thought it was great, just funny and weird and it timed out perfectly into the beginning of the first verse. But by the time we had re-recorded the tune, it was one of those things we had to let go of, mainly cause it probably costs a fortune to license the audio from that movie, and probably partly because I think maybe Allen thought it was silly, you'd have to ask him, don't quote me on that -- or, at least, quote me saying 'don't quote me.' But using samples like that was part of the feel to the album I really wanted, like in the way P.E. or the Beasties really used to incorporate spoken recordings from film or tv or what have you straight into the tunes and it's not only perfectly placed, it's musical. That whole vibe sort of went out the window with the election to move more towards a rock record. And really, when you have a guitar player and singer like Allen, isn't it your obligation to maketh with the rocketh? Let me answer that for you: It is.

Overall, I've never been a part of a project that really labored over every little detail in every song the way this one did. There are dozens of versions of each song -- really, we documented the progression of the tunes pretty well, and the dozen versions are usually the development of a single version. Allen has this incredible drive as a producer to be constantly upgrading his knowledge, programs, and techniques so that each new development makes the tune that much clearer, [makes it] sound that much fuller, isolate[s] each sound and place[s] them in the right spot more perfectly. It was wild to watch him do his producer shtick. Some sessions I really felt like I was there just to keep him company while his brain feverishly communicated with his Pro Tools system. And yes, that communication frequently involved many, many explicatives.

Another cool aspect of '33' itself was how it turned into this sort of Radiohead song with a sense of humor. Between the two of us, we'd figure out the dynamics of the tune, where the guitars should be heavier, when the backup vocals should come in, when the tune should sound etheric and when it's a guitar army. Allen was really willing to listen to a lot of my musical ideas, and I'd say I have a strength at composing, sort of knowing what should go where when, even though I couldn't tell you if a song's in "A" or "Z." Or "V," I guess. But I did have perspective when Allen would get to zoomed into the details, and vice versa. Eventually '33' took on the epic quality it needed to get its point across, I think. It's sort of Radiohead meets Jellyfish with some Jimi Hendrix-type guitar soloing in there at the end. And I still think the song is kind of funny, but it's the funny joke you make after your house has just been hit by a tornado and you're standing in the rubble saying "where's my ashtray" when you know damn well your entire house is now an ashtray.

What I do find amazing is that even though say, 'Cobalt Silver' was mostly recorded 6 years ago and 'Alchemical Dependency' was finished last year, all the tunes seem like they belong together. I mean, stylistically, we are all over the board on this record. But somehow, and I really think this again is to Allen's credit as a freaking amazing producer, the album seems to flow nicely, and you can have AD going right into 'Political Criminal' and it works perfectly, somehow. 'Weightless' into 'The Post Relevant Movement'? Sure, why not. Here you go! Chew on that. This reinforces my idea that you can do anything with music and find a way to make it work. Shit, the Beatles were really stylistically diverse in their songwriting approach, and they had three different dudes writing tunes, yet somehow their records sound like they were carved out of the rock of eternity, fully formed and perfect. And that's the beauty of the same people creating the vibe together: eventually, no matter what they do, the songs all sound like, well, them, and they belong together.

Q: What were some of the other conscious decisions you guys made in terms of making this record?

PR: Deciding this was a rock record was certainly one of the most important decisions we made. The decision to keep at this record, when we really could have given up on it at any point in time, was a big decision. I actually decided to move away from NYC partially to sort of force Allen's hand, so he would have to finish the record. That was a major decision for me. There was one awesome metal song we wrote, Magic Pumpkin Room, that really kicked much ass, with Homey and Mike really killing it, but ultimately it was a little too metal for the rest of the record. A bummer, to be sure. I wish we could have finished it and put it out as a single, but it just didn't happen, not enough time to really deal with it. It was a monster. I will probably find a way to complete it someday. I consciously decided to hang back and try to fit my songwriting/lyric writing styles into something that would suit Allen's agenda and aesthetic for the first half of the project, and then Allen sort of came around to my way of thinking for the second half of the project and embraced my crazy, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink-and-the-other-two-sinks-underneath-it leanings. There was a lot of give and take, and we learned to trust each other. We really hadn't been making art together on almost any level for the bulk of our friendship. We consciously decided to make music that could be commercial -- something that could actually be used for commercials, movies, tv shows, licensing, etc. etc. I would sort of sabotage that every once in a while with a well placed 'fuck' or 'bust a nut,' but I would have done a lot crazier things lyrically or vocally if Allen didn't keep me in check. It really was a very collaborative experience. I don't think this album is what either of us was actually shooting for, but it kind of defined itself, in a way, and that is much cooler, really. We are the Hall and Oates of the Grunge Generation.

Q: You've said that Allen was very demanding regarding the lyrics. What can you tell me about that? And how did the reverse work -- how were you able to shape the music, both macro and micro?

PR: Allen seemed to have a different sense of what is proper lyrically than I did. That seems only natural, everybody has their own personal aesthetic. When he does write lyrics, he actually writes pretty good ones. All the lyrics for 'Stereo' are straight-up Allen. I love them:

(Stereo chorus)
There's a real relation you don't understand
Mythic box of complication opens in your hand
and as I wade through dissatisfaction
I know you lie.

Now, granted, those aren't simple lyrics. That's a sophisticated approach he's taking, and I especially like that he's relating TV to Pandora's box. It's great, and it's a real one-two punch thematically to go from 'Stereo' to 'Hero,' both referencing mythology, and with 'Stereo' saying "it's a clever scenario when you become your own hero" and then we describe being the hero in 'Hero with 1000 Eyes.' 'Stereo' was a song written by Allen and Mike in their late-'90s band, but just really worked thematically with our record.

But if you want to see the difference between me and him, check out the number of words in his lyrics compared to one of my songs. I am a word whore. 'Stereo' has 2 verses and a repeated chorus, and the verses are pretty terse and to the point. Compare that to an Allen-sung song where I wrote most of the lyrics, like 'Fall Off the Earth': It's verse part 1, verse part 2, pre-chorus, chorus, 2x and then that third part that references the title of the song. But the pre-chorus is really pretty wordy:

"Now everybody sings the songs they wrote for you to me
since you threw away the comfort of my company
serenaded by a dead-end symphony
and searching for a guarantee
guarantee
guarantee to the mystery"

That's just the chorus, but damn it's wordy, yeah? And I'm also singing extra stuff behind Allen's lead. And that was me trying to simplify. Allen would often, for the songs he was singing lead on, introduce a vocal melody to me and send me off to write words for it. I would ask him questions about what he was trying to say with the song. Then I'd try to write lines that felt less like me and more like him. That was the hardest part, my biggest point of resistance. I am used to writing lyrics that sound like me, that represent my personality, my perspective, my sense of humor. (That's a big one.) Inside of that, I tend to go wherever I want to, I like to vary it up, I like to throw off expectations inside of the lyrics that I've already built within the song, tell jokes, multiple meanings inside of a line, really whatever, and I tend to make wandering melodic lines that entertain me.

Allen had a very specific melody in mind for FOTE. I would come back with lyrics and he'd really know when it worked for his melody and when it didn't. I must have rewritten those chorus lyrics a few times until they congealed into what you hear on the record today. But again, it really was collaborative. In fact, 'Fall Off the Earth' is a story that combines his experiences with mine and turns it into a song about losing a single girl, but its really about a combination of experiences both he and I had separately in relation to 2 different girls over the course of a few years in New York City. Here's the story:

Allen had a difficult breakup with a serious girlfriend and then saw her walking down the street with her new boyfriend and it really freaked him out. I was actually walking with him when he saw her. So you have:

"Paralyzed when you walked by (Allen came up with this line, it was his initial idea when writing this song)
We were talking about you that day (which is true)
Careless coincidence left me behind
While your next victim lead you away" (what we were witnessing)

The chorus (now everybody sings the songs they wrote for you to me) is about an open mic night that I went to where I ran into someone I knew from the past who had written a song for an ex-girlfriend of mine and played it at the open mic night -- so he was singing a song he wrote for her to me, which you have to admit is pretty strange.

The second verse is about an experience I had:

I was in a diner (stoned, no less) and my ex-girlfriend (the same one from the chorus) walked into the diner as the song "Going to the Chapel" was playing -- it was weird, it all happened in slow motion (again, I was high) -- but the rub here is that I had recently learned that she was getting married, so this event really just cemented that knowledge. It was like the spirit world really wanted me to know that she was getting married. But the running theme here is these weird coincidences with ex-girlfriends.

So the real thing we are dealing with, in terms of 'Fall Off the Earth,' is letting go of a lost love, and how the universe seems to conspire to give you these weird coincidences to help you understand that the love is really gone, it's over. These coincidences become the "Dead End Symphony" (which is what I originally wanted to call the song) -- it's the spirit world talking to you, telling you that this is a lost cause, a dead end. Let it go. Again, a running theme in the enlightenment process, letting go.

The point I'm trying to make here, in terms of lyrics, is that Allen's approach in shaping words to fit his melodies until they felt right was the right approach, because what we ended up with for FOTE specifically and for the album in general were songs that felt very deliberate, more straightforward than maybe I would normally approach something on my own, but still retained levels of mystery or depth upon repeated listens and analysis. At least, that's my hope for the listener's experience. I was forced into a slightly more detached writing style, which is not so comfortable for me, cause I like to really invest myself in the lyrics emotionally so that they feel real when I sing them. But I couldn't really do that completely with half the songs, cause they weren't really about me. So then, how do I write something good while being sort of detached from it? How do I put aside my needs for the sake of the song?

Again, more letting go necessary here.

Another interesting story (to me), in relation to me writing words to Allen's music, is 'Hero.' In this song, Allen had composed the main part of that song for a commercial, in another key, I think. His music wasn't used for the commercial, so it just goes into his library as something to use potentially for some project in the future. Completely separately, I had written some verses and a chorus for 'Hero,' which was one of those songs that just sort of showed up on my doorstep in a fever, so to speak, like I figured out a good chunk of it lyrically/melodically all at once. I even wrote those lyrics as simple as possible, because I was intending it to be for AoV, and I knew Allen was responding to simpler stuff. When I heard Allen's composition, I realized that my verse and chorus fit almost perfectly inside his piece. Seriously, it was as if we had written the song together, which I assure you we didn't. They fit almost perfectly. When I sang the lyrics to Allen, he really responded to them immediately. So I knew I was onto something. That song, the actual writing of it, was fated. Which made sense, since it was pointing towards an awareness of a greater reality and the interconnectedness of our consciousness. It was like we had both tapped into the greater mythological mind and came out with two halves of the same song. Pretty cool, right?

Lastly, I would point to 'Her Favorite Song' as another good example of how Allen's "strictness" worked in the song's favor. I certainly went through many rewrites of the lyrics for this tune, simplifying every time, with Allen still saying "no that's not it" after each rewrite. So I simplified to point where the lines for a verse are two or three words each, and the chorus was pretty traditional, a legit pop tune. I would almost never do this on my own. But now, when I listen to that song, I can't imagine it being any other way. It's nearly perfect to me. It's a true pop song, but it's still a funny, interesting story with a great chorus and lots of little Jellyfish-esque flourishes all over the tune. It satisfies many of my songwriting needs and Allen's while being maybe a song that neither of us would have written separately, and is based on true events from both our lives (though embellished with fiction). If Allen hadn't insisted on simplifying, that song would not have worked as well as I think it does. You may disagree, that's fine, but I'm psyched about it.

I think in this same way, musically Allen would hit these compositional roadblocks and have to ask me where I thought the songs should go. Sometimes I have melodic ideas that I can sing for him and he responds to them. If he likes them, he might incorporate it into the music with a keyboard line or a beat or something. Sometimes he would ask me for advice and I'd literally have nothing, and we'd both listen to him noodling on guitar until one of us heard something we liked and we develop from there. Funnily enough, by the end of the record, I would be suggesting entire lines in his guitar solos, and sometimes he'd go for it. Like I'd sing a line that could be a part of his solo, and either he'd duplicate it and it would get on the record or he'd incorporate a couple notes and it would help him get to the other side of the solo. And there were just as many, if not more, of my musical suggestions that he'd disregard, just like I would wave him off if thought he was off-course either musically or lyrically.

I think eventually he learned to trust my instincts. I would push for more guitars, bring the bass up in the mix, let's do this counterpattern with backing vocals, let's throw in crowd noises here, etc., and very often he'd give it a go. He was game for a lot of my ideas, like having the record skip in the middle of 'Her Favorite Song.' I could sing how it should work and he would actually be able to make it happen! It was crazy, I think I really put him through his paces as a producer, and Allen would almost always try to make what I wanted to happen happen if it was something I was really insistent on. Shit, I got him to write 'The Post Relevant Movement.' I don't think anyone in their right mind would go near that idea. And Allen composed the crap out of that tune. I mean, I had a million ideas for that song, but he was the dude smart enough to say that we should sing the lyrics. I had written those words as a rap a long time ago, and it was always going to be a rap, but Allen kept insisting we sing it, like barbershop sort of, and he was right. It was exactly what that song needed. That song is a good example of the two of us just firing off ideas with a willingness to incorporate whatever is necessary and still make it work. Again, an example of something neither of us could have come up on our own. And if you notice, at the end of the song, there are sounds taken from 'Cobalt Silver' and 'Her Favorite Song,' so it sort of connects the last songs with some of the earlier songs and brings the album full-circle.

Q: You and Allen trade lead singing roles, backing each other up on some songs, backing yourselves up on others. How were decisions made regarding who would sing what?

PR: It all depended on who was singing what and when. I don't think there was really a plan, per se. The first song we wrote was 'Cobalt Silver,' with both of us singing lead, in a way like Simon and Garfunkel. The next song was FOTE, which was clearly going to be Allen singing lead. As that song developed, I began to tell him my ideas for backups, and he dug it, so I laid down what one might call a plethora of backups. I also came up with the vocal melody for the end of the song, I think, but then Allen sort of Allenized it and I came up with harmonies for his Allenization. Then he threw down the gauntlet with that awesome "fall off the eaaaaarrrrrrrrtthh" ending with that nice falsetto at the end of the song. So we would really build on each others ideas vocally.

Usually, if someone was singing lead, the other dude would tend to sing backup harmonies, 'The Reason' being a good example of that. Allen is matching my lead line-for-line with a harmony. I had the ideas for the clever little backup lines in the second verse, and I also had a lot of suggestions for the harmonies in general, and then would leave Allen alone to find it. He came up with all the harmonies in that section before the last chorus where I sing about all the things I would have done had I known what I know now. In fact, I think it was his idea to create a vocal part in that song that was reminiscent of the end of Foo Fighters' 'Monkey Wrench,' y'know, the "one last thing before I quit ..." part. I took that idea and extended it, so it turned into this long litany of regrets. It was a noble idea, I think. 'Stereo' was Allen all the way on lead, and I tried to hang back as much as I could with the harmonies, 'cause I thought his voice was enough for much of the verses. All the harmonies were me on that one. 'Hero' is more the opposite, where Allen sings both the high and low harmonies around my vocal lead in the chorus, an Allen vocal sandwich, if you will, and it's the same on the chorus of 'Her Favorite Song,' for the chorus: me singing lead and Allen singing above and below me. 'Hero' is cool cause sometimes he'd leave me to flesh out a harmony idea, and sometimes he'd introduce one, sometimes we'd both sing backups together. It seems random, but probably more to do with who had what idea. 'Her Favorite Song' seems very organized: me on lead and backups on the first verse, Allen on lead and backups in the second verse. We harmonize together on the chorus and through the bridge, then into this cool doo wop section, with Allen doing the higher harmonies and me doing the bass vocal under my lead vocal, then back into the second half of the third verse with Allen singing the higher harmony to my lead, I guess, and then chorus and Allen leading us out with his improvisation and my high backups and the occasional chorus vocal thrown in there at the end.

In a couple tunes the vocals have a more distinct split. 'Watershaker' is almost all Allen, and I just show up as the guest rapper. I pretty much decided to stay out of most of that one, cause he'd already come up with this great wall of vocals for the chorus and I really would have just mucked it up. Then we flip that with 'Alchemical Dependency,' where I'm doing all the rapping and Allen is the dude that sings the hook and that cool stuff at the end of the third verse. Allen had already written the vocal hook for that song when I got my hands on it, but didn't really have words to it, and I got in there and made it a silly rap song. I dig that tune though, it's pretty catchy.

'33' and 'Weightless,' the initial vocal melodies were introduced by Allen, but I would get in there and change them up as I wrote lyrics. In '33' I came up with the background vocals singing that other line behind the main chorus. I probably introduced a lot of the more Jellyfishy alternate lyric background melodies in that song. If you listen carefully to '33,' you may notice Allen and I switching places vocally in the middle of the choruses, where he goes from low to high and I go from high to low. There's a lot of clever vocal shit all over '33.'

Allen really wanted to sing both harmonies on the chorus of 'Weightless,' so he went for that and I eventually get introduced into the second and third choruses with a low and then high harmony. So each chorus on 'Weightless' has a new voice on it, helping to build the intensity of the song. Allen pulled off some really etheric solo voice work at the end of that song.

He was also was very instrumental in composing the vocal melodies for 'The Post Relevant Movement,' cause he had the vision that that song should be sung, not rapped, and then we probably built off of each other's ideas line by line as that song progressed. We switch up vocal duties a lot on that song, and by the end of the third verse we've switched positions, from me doing the low harmonies and him higher to him lower and me higher -- we do this right in the middle of the verse, which you could say is unusual. I came up with the chorus melody for that song and then Allen immediately figured out his part, which is really brilliant cause he is finishing my phrases in the chorus, and it allows us to each sing less words and extend longer notes while still saying what I wanted to say lyricwise in the chorus, all the while creating a cool Indian-type three-part harmony. Allen is so brilliant with harmonies, his harmonies on the choruses of PRM, 'Hero,' and HFS are exactly what I would want without me knowing that's what I wanted. I think we each think about melodies and harmonies just similar enough yet just different enough to actually enhance what the other guy is singing in inventive ways without detracting from the leads.

And that's Allen's voice singing those cool sped-up Indian type vocals at the end of PRM. I can't really pull off the vocal soloing like my boy can.

I guess in general, main vocals and harmonies would be developed with an acoustic guitar and us singing together to see what worked. Once someone laid down a lead on a recording, we would just come up with ideas until it sounded right. Whoever had the best idea won, and often we'd suggest notes to sing to each other if something wasn't working. Fortunately, Allen likes singing as much as I do, so he went for going overboard with the vocals more often than I thought he would.

To maybe answer your question slightly more directly, I think because I was writing most of the lyrics, I would tend to have a lot of influence over the direction of the vocals. But in terms of who sang leads, it was usually due to who wanted the song more. I really wanted to sing 'Hero,' and I'm certain Allen was going to be the lead vocalist on 'Weightless,' that tune is his magnum opus. In terms of how it all panned out on the album, who sang what seemed to just balance itself out organically, wouldn't you say? How does it seem from a listener's perspective?

Q: I would definitely use the word evolve, which would be a tribute to the sequencing, if who was singing what was a factor in that at all. I
don't know that I could recreate it song by song, but I remember first
thinking, on my first listen through the disc, that you were kind of
the Flavor Flav of the pair. But it's not more than three songs in
before it's clear you'll be showcased too (and not in a 'Cold Lampin'
with Flav' sort of way, lest you be tempted to take that reference the
wrong way). It's not always clear without your cheat sheet above, the
division of backups and harmonies, but it is clear often enough to get
within hailing distance behind the idea behind your collaboration.

What songs on the album stand out in some way for you, and in what
ways? For example, Water Shaker might stand out because it's different
musically, or some song might stand out because you feel you were
particularly effective communicating what you wanted lyrically.

PR: To me? I think a vague answer is that each song stands out to me in its own way, because in my opinion we succeeded in making an album that is stylistically diverse, so each song in relation to the others gets its own little personality, making each one stand out.

To be more specific:

'Her Favorite Song' stands out to me for several reasons:

It's a simple song that tells a simple story, and the story seems to make linear sense, in a way, and yet, despite (or perhaps because of) its simplicity, this is the one of the most singable tunes on the album, and I love love love listening to it. I get off on having made a real pop song that isn't stupid. And I really dig having been able to incorporate all the little audio illustrations into the tune (like the crowd noises, the record skipping, the little bloopy submarine noises, the doo wop section, Allen's little guitar army in his verse, etc). That stuff made me really happy, it's really a bit of my Jellyfish fantasy to incorporate those kind of things that can only really happen in the studio -- the Beatles did a bit of that, ELO, Zappa. But we did that and still (again, in my opinion) managed to keep it a pop song, with a modern feel and programmed beats! I dare say this is the most Phil/Allenish collabo, because it has those Jellyfish-esque flourishes (Phil) and a very Steely Dan-ish bridge (Allen) -- if you listen closely, Allen's strummy guitar [break] in the bridge is straight out of the Steely Dan playbook. I love the chorus, and I love the way the guitars build in the final chorus. I love Allen's extended, ridiculous vocal flourish at the end of his verse. I love that Allen's higher harmony in the third verse sounds like me singing, and that maybe I sound like him in that verse. I really dig the spacey tempo in the doo wop section, and the way that section sort of hearkens the song back to an old fashioned Fifties pop tune, signifying that this song is in the tradition of over fifty years of straightforward rock and roll. And I love that it is a song about playing a song, but not the song you are actually listening to. It's about playing someone else's song. So it's nostalgic and eternal, because "her favorite song" could be any song that a girl might love over the past half-century or more. But by calling it 'Her Favorite Song,' we are perhaps designating that this song on our album will hopefully become 'her favorite song." And, lyrically, I got to vent about the time wasted being a dj in a crappy bar, about girls I didn't get to sleep with, and about having to wait to actually make the song itself due to our tortoise-like recording process, and turn all those 'minuses' into a 'plus,' that being the song itself. It's really a celebration of everything I love about pop tunes. That song just makes me happy, and hopefully it makes other people jump up and down with glee when they hear it.

'The Post Relevant Movement' stands out to me because its really a spiritual song to me, and the lyrics were kicking around in my notebook/computer for years and years, with the intention of turning it into a song someday, but never knowing when that someday would be. And not only did we turn it into some kind of strange amalgam of Outkast's 'Hey Ya' and something off of Beck's 'Midnite Vultures' (which was what I was shooting for with the album to begin with), but it turned out to be a much more interesting song musically than I had ever imagined, much in part to Allen's brilliant production work and versatility as a songwriter. That was a song where Allen recognized that this was a Zappa tune, meaning it was complex and strange and funny and deep and crazy all at once. He got what I was going for and he embraced it. I think the result of the tune is something I haven't quite heard before, which is also an objective of mine. We are innovating. And the chorus: "I have seen windows to dreams feeding a glowing machine breathing underneath it all" is actually about my out-of-body experience where I had a seizure and left my body and found myself floating in front of a giant whirlpool of stars spinning in on itself and consuming two-dimensional rectangles. A voice said to me "these are dreams" (presumably in reference to the rectangles) and the noise this whirlpool made was like a hundred thousand machines working backwards underwater. Allen and I tried to recreate the sound at the end of the song, probably not successfully. But even the attempt makes for a cool way to end a crazy-ass song like PRM. So the tune is actually about trying to identify this transcendant experience, and how attempting to identify it creates a million metaphors, because this whirlpool is actually the place from where ideas arise, so it's almost formless, and allowing any and all form to arise from it. Also, since the sound or vibration of the whirlpool was so dominant in my experience, it seemed appropriate to try to illustrate the experience through sound, through song. Lyrically, it's a chance to explore a ton of ideas in one tune, and just be a little zany, if I can use that word with you. I have to admit that I love funny music, and I love bands like Fishbone, who can write really funny lyrics and yet still make meaningful music. Never underestimate the power of a funny tune. Finally, in terms of the themes of the album, with all its apocalyptic symbolism and end times scenario, The PRM is a perfect way to end the record because it is trying to explain a place that is beyond time, so it is sort of a victory lap after all the pondering and posturing and deep thoughts have been abandoned. It's what happens after you become 'Weightless,' which, we both know, is the song right before it.

'Alchemical Dependency' stands out for me because of the third verse, which I think feels right, it has an urgency to it, it sounds like I imagined it would, it bangs. The chorus bangs too. And I got to say "celebrity porn is like heroin to me." Again, it's an opportunity to make light out of something that could be potentially serious, that being addiction. But as I've stated before, 'Alchemical Dependency' is first and foremost about an addiction to change, which is life, really. Being addicted to being alive. I think that's a pretty neat idea. The symbols on the album cover are alchemical symbols. Alchemy is the ancient process of changing our perception of ourselves -- turning lead to gold is really just a metaphor for the enlightenment process, gold being a symbol for the soul, so it's sort of about turning the flesh to the soul. Becoming God, knowing yourself to be whole, loving, happy, one, an extension of the creative force in the flesh.

Really, there are alchemical ideas all over every song in the record. And I'll let you in on a secret; the record is designed to be a tool for enlightenment. It's a magic spell. An initiator. Hopefully something about the lyrics, music, and art combine to inspire the listener to become interested in the enlightenment process and take up the torch, so to speak. So the Boduvt metaphor becomes once again significant: the 'round boat,' the spaceship is there to lift you up, to raise your vibration. Hopefully it inspires an internal process that is literally enlightening.

'Hero' stands out because of what I described before, how the song was separately written by Allen and myself and came together to be one song, so it was really a song that was "fated" to be. Maybe Venus herself inspired it. You might want to ask her. But everything about that song works for me: Allen's guitar work is really inspiring, I love his theme in the chorus. I like again that the song incorporates a synthesis of programmed beats and live drums. I love the central musical theme Allen created, which is a keyboard line doubled and offset by a sixteenth of a beat from each other, so you have this trippy stereo pattern running throughout the entire tune. I like that this might be a song from another planet or that it might be sung by a robot. All the spacey soundscapes going on in this tune really heighten the intensity of the song, it's like a seven-minute build. And the weird vocal thing at the beginning and end is me singing "these are dreams" backwards and then reversed to be forwards, so it ties into the themes of the album and refers back to the PRM out-of-body experience, as well as creating a symmetrical feeling to the tune, this kind of geometrical perfection. I'm not saying that the song is perfect, but it implies this higher-level geometry.

I think 'Fall Off the Earth' stands out simply because Allen's voice is so perfect on that one. And how it gently leads the listener into the whole album with that cool fade-in. I've already spoken about its thematic and lyrical significance. Allen's guitar solo on that tune also blows my mind. When I listen to it, it kind of reminds me of every awesome classic rock guitar solo distilled and branded with a hot iron onto the belly of this tune. It also really reminds me of a Jason Falkner solo, maybe from the first Jellyfish album or Falkner's first two solo records. Just a huge thunderous magnitude to it. I would love to hear him do that solo live someday.

'Cobalt Silver' stands out for me because it is one of the clearest songs we wrote. Really well produced, very much less is more. Every musical idea feels very sound. I think our voices work very well together on this tune. It's clear and pretty, good beat, another very singable pop tune with a complex lyrical idea behind it, and it really encapsulates the album themes well, a good intro into the record.

'Stereo' stands out to me because it again is a very well written rock tune with an anthemic guitar solo and excellent vocal delivery by Mr Towbin. It's kind of a companion piece to 'Hero' and 'Fall Off the Earth.' Very clear musical ideas presented here. The guitar solo into the final chorus really builds to a powerful crescendo. It's a big rock tune and stomps around doing what big rock tunes do.

Lastly and perhaps most obviously, I think 'Weightless' stands out because it really is this kind of King Crimson-esque masterpiece. Allen's arppeggiated guitar line throughout the tune is beautiful and hypnotic, Mike's playing on that one is really incredible, and like 'Stereo,' his drums and Homey's bass really stand out and create the necessary depth and space needed to make this song BIG. Both songs ('Stereo' and 'Weightless') are excellent examples of perfect rhythm section performances. They make those songs rock, but they are rock in the way Zeppelin is rock, Soundgarden is rock, that lumbering giant or Godzilla deliberately stomping its way across the countryside, flattening telephone poles and mountaintops, unfazed and constant. Homey's fretless work on both these tunes kicks my ass. He does these slides that sound like a whale crying. The sense of dynamics on 'Weightless' is so important, and I think the musicians on these two songs really understand that and take us for a journey. There needs to be a sense of importance to a great rock tune, of gravity, and the listener needs to feel like they've been changed somehow by listening to a song. I think the playing on both songs is sensitive then moving then monstrous. And especially on 'Weightless,' there is this genuine sense of longing to that tune, both with the vocals/lyrics and the music. The music seems to build on itself almost line by line. Mike's ride and high hat playing is so delicate at times. Every chorus introduces a new voice so that its larger than the last one. There's a rising-and-falling, dreamlike quality to the whole song. And the end with Mikey and Allen going off is just freaking sweet, it reminds me a bit of something from Mahavishnu Orchestra or something. Lots of ground covered by 'Weightless.' To sound like Jack Black for a minute, these songs really understand the power of rock.

Two other little things that stand out for me, lyrically:

1. The rap in 'Watershaker' is essentially about a Sumerian blood-drinking ritual that was supposed to create immortality in the imbiber. Watershaking in this instance is about drinking menstral blood of a queen, which was thought to have life-extending qualities. So that was sort of a clever little bit of weirdness I slipped in there. I don't think I even really understood totally that's what I was writing about when I wrote it. That's not what the whole song is about, the song is using water as a metaphor for energy (the spirit) and renewal. That's why the Age of Aquarius has some sort of significance -- the water bearer is pouring out water, but it's the spirit, not actual water. If everything is made of energy, then spirit for us would be like a fish in the ocean: We are completely surrounded by it to the point that it is invisible to us. Allen, as a little side note, is an Aquarius, making him the appropriate watershaker to sing the song. I don't put too much stock in astrology, but it is significant to me, and again, has mythological properties to it, as many of the myths or symbols are actually signifiers referencing astrological bodies in the sky. I do think this Sumerian blood-drinking thing might be where the idea of the Holy Grail comes from. The womb being the grail, the blood being the "wine." The idea of a royal lineage that has existed through the ages being significant because their bloodline literally was thought to hold the secrets of immortality when consumed ritually. Yet another connection to Venus and the big V ...

2. The second verse of "The Reason" is noteworthy in that I found a way to reference 6 Beatles songs in two lines, along with an XTC song that reminds me of a Beatles song:

"I'll melt the mirrors till my fire's smoke and sand
I'll earn enough for us if you trust me to be your man (8 days a week)
I'll work a hard day's night, the paperback rains help (I need somebody)
to feed the heaven's underneath my frozen over (hello hello hello)"

So you have 'Earn Enough for Us' (XTC) and then 'Eight Days a Week,' 'Hard Day's Night,' 'Paperback Writer,' 'Rain,' 'Help,' and 'Hello Goodbye.'

Q: You also snuck 'I Wanna Be Your Man' in that verse, if only subconsciously.

What are some of your favorite moments on the album? Parillo's work at the end of Weightless is dynamite, for example, as you noted.

PR: Moments that stand out:

1. Allen creates this really trippy keyboard line in 'Cobalt Silver.' I think he introduces it in the second half of the first chorus, then brings it back the beginning of the second chorus, and it stays throughout the third chorus/end of song. It has this sort of tumbling feeling to it, hypnotic, and there is probably some kind of filter or volume control making the dynamic of it fluctuate as it plays. So you have this clean but hypnotic-sounding keyboard line playing off of the reggae style guitar chunking in the chorus, and it creates this very bizarre feel that totally sort of unhinges you as a listener. Cause that song is very predictable, in a way, if only in that the beat is real consistent, the verses are probably all the same length, choruses vary slightly but you're more or less promised to get a similar experience in each part of the song. But that keyboard line really throws it all off somehow, even though it too is consistent. I think that keyboard line is what really makes the whole song stick together, but it is also the x factor that sort of throws the listener off balance simultaneously.

2. Allen saved an old phone message I left for him from the Nineties, where I leave him an unbelievably long series of #s as the phone # at which to call me back. This was sometime in the mid-to-late Nineties. Way before we decided to make the record. So it's a nice artifact of our friendship, and seemed appropriate to go onto the album. But what I think is cool about it is the way we recorded this track (Dr. Dan Dogenstein, Medical Dog). We were probably just fucking around, riffing on what Allen should say for his part of the answering machine message -- we decided to do the outgoing message to create the context for the message I then leave. So Allen records himself leaving the outgoing message, and you can hear me correcting him at the end and us cracking up before the beep happens. The weird part, the part I actually think is notable, is that for some reason, Allen is recording us (with a live mic in the room) listening to the outgoing message (the part before the beep) and you can hear us cracking up listening to ourselves trying to do the outgoing message (where you can also hear us cracking up) which then leads to the oldest part of the message, the one I left over 12 years ago. So there's like 3 layers of nonsense going on, and I think it creates this strange effect of a kind of fractal joke, if you will -- you, as the listener, are listening to someone listening to someone listening to someone leaving a message. I don't think any of that was actually intentional. It's just one of those weird things. Does that make sense?

3. In 'The Post Relevant Movement,' there are lots of little details to enjoy. Some notable ones:

a. Homey's crazy slap funk shit at the end of verse two

b. Allen and my voices sped up laughing, along with canned applause and several of my voices taken from the beginning of 'Her Favorite Song' and plunked into the space in the music on PRM between the words "repeat a clear pause" and "applause, thanks!" We've also taken sounds from 'Her Favorite Song,' all the vocal and sound effects used at the very beginning of 'Cobalt Silver,' and lots of slowed-down water and machine sounds and combined them at the end of 'The PRM' to create the swirling whirlpool effect I was hoping for to close out the song. The intention was to recreate the sound I heard when I had an out-of-body experience that is the actual subject matter for PRM, as the chorus states: "I have seen windows to dreams feeding a glowing machine breathing underneath it all." In my out-of-body experience, I saw a huge glowing whirlpool made of stars, and it made this crazy loud machine-like breathing sound. I wanted to recreate it at the end of the song. I don't think we were truly able to mimic the sound I seem to think I heard, but I like what we made as purely a sound collage and a cool way to end a tune, and I like that we managed to incorporate parts of other songs on the album into it. It serves as a nice little thematic review of the record, sort of bringing things full-circle.

c. Allen created this great harmonic effect at the end of the song by repeating parts of my sung phrase of the chorus and harmonizing that with part of his repeating sung phrase from the chorus. It creates this very neat repeating harmony that is slightly subliminal because there's so much going on in that part of the song, but if you really listen for it, its a really brilliant idea.

d. During the last verse of the song, Allen and I switch places in terms of who's singing the higher and lower harmonies. Normally in PRM, since I'm singing lead, I tend to have the lower harmony. But at this point in the verse, Allen and I switch places, with him taking the lower harmony and me the upper one, and it seems to really change the feel of the verse, sort of focuses it, and Allen creates more space instrumentally at that point, too, so it's this really nice dynamic that's created, a strong finish to the last verse. As that part of that verse goes on, a delay is added to our voices, and the delay effect rises slowly as we sing, so the end of the verse gets trippier and trippier as we approach the end of the tune with all its Indian-inspired hypnotic full-tilt sprinting towards the finish line of the song and the album.

4. Homey's playing on 'Weightless' is very Tony Levin-inspired, in my opinion. Lots of nice fretless note dips, definitely using less-is-more to great effect, I think. The mark of a smart bass player, tastefully choosing to play longer notes in comparison to all the busyness of Allen's arpeggiated guitar lines.

5. I just love the piano in 'Fall Off the Earth.' I love the way that song starts with piano, voices, and the guitar swell. It's such a cool way to enter into the album. Allen also plays some wonderful, melodic basslines on this song. Allen's bass part writing on the whole album is pretty fresh, in general. He wrote the bass parts in FOTE, CS, Hero, HFS, AD, and parts of 'The PRM.'

6. I totally dig how heavy 'The Reason' gets at the end.

7. Allen's super trippy lead guitar sound on 'Stereo'

8. The higher "I will find our way hooooommme" harmonies in the bridge of 'Hero' came out like I was hoping they would.

9. 'Her Favorite Song,' I was really pleased with the record skipping part. Somehow I was able to figure out how to interject two little harmony segments from the chorus and make them work melodically in the verse, and when I explained what I was hearing to Allen, he totally got it and it just worked perfectly. I also think that's a pretty good pop bridge in that tune. I feel like that song stands up as a whole, fleshed-out idea. It's a pretty simple idea, but so much work went into making it sound like what I would call "accessible." There's a ton of thought that went into that song, I don't think there is a second of song wasted on that one. I also managed to work in the words "soda jerk" into a verse. That's probably a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

10. Getting Allen to immitate our friend Emiliano from college on 'Alchemical Dependancy' was cool -- "uuhh, we should go out for coffee sometime." It's a sort of nonsensical bit, but it's one of those things that hopefully people hear and crack up over and wonder what the hell it's there for. I'm also proud of the way the third verse sort of heightens the stakes of the song. The first two verses are pretty silly or slight, lyrically, though I'm trying to throw out some interesting turns of phrase. But really, those verses are just set up for the third verse, where it gets a little more serious, and I think it's cool to trick the listener into "getting into it" by the third verse of the song. Sometimes I feel like songwriting is a little like sleight-of-hand magic tricks, where you set up expectations and then maybe break them just long enough to make the eventual payoff really pay off.

Q: I agree with your observation about the bridge of HFS. I want to say it's even sort of Motown. I also never noticed Honey's dips in Weightless before you brought his work on that song to my attention. They're awfully good. Should have seen that one coming.

Your lyrics are regularly fraught with sufficient gravity that there's this phenomenon that crops up, when one is married to the right song. Such a song will musically highlight (usually in part by isolating, although sometimes merely with a dramatic passage) a particularly effective line or verse and create some kind of unholy synergy between the two that gives the lyric even more weight. The most obvious example from this album is from 'Cobalt Silver,' where you guys have highlighted Allen singing the lines "Know me in your heart as I feel you in my mind ... I feel you in my mind"; the effects on his vocal, its coming at the climax of the song, the way the music drops out and isolates the vocal, and the line itself combine in a magical way. That must be an incredibly rewarding feeling to hear something like that come together, having created it.

PR: We are the modern makers of mighty marvel magic! Seriously tho ...

There are moment that give me chills on this record. That's one of them, when in the right frame of mind, it feels a little like the universe is talking to you in the music. I think it works especially there because we really change it up in that verse, subvert a lot of the instrumentation and regular patterns. That verse starts with just spacey keys, I think, and then we created this effect simply enough by putting a copy of the vocals on a separate track, heavily effecting them, and then offsetting those vocals from the main vocal line by placing them a second in front of the main line, but lower in the mix. So there's this effect of deja vu, really (one of my all time favorite Monty Python sketches). It gets so spacey that you start to feel like you are just a lightbody floating over time itself, displaced by the front echo, the deja vu. So when you get to Allen alone, it's one more subversion of the duo vocals -- we sing in tandem for the whole tune -- and then we have Allen subvert a basic but very personal idea of knowing your lover in the heart and feeling them in the mind, obviously the opposite of what you'd expect. And it's those two final subversions that sort of twist the whole tune up into a nice little zen koan of sorts, and it causes the listener to be transported. Yes, it is cool to get to do that.

I guess this leads me to something I just generally want to point out, that because we are exploring mythic themes throughout the album, and the way the title of the record and the band name came from just being immersed in the project and/or just chillin and it sort of appears ping **** oh, here's a little 3-year-old writing the album name on Allen's window. The band name, the way that was chosen, it was near the end of us throwing out band names for years and it never materializing, never sticking, and then once I threw out Agents of Venus, Homey called us that in a return email, as if it had been chosen by the god Atlas himself (I always pictured making a drawing of Homey as Atlas, walking away from an earth that's been dropped onto the ground, partially smashed), and once I considered it as the real name, I realized the subject matter was multidimensional, it had so many different meanings and relevances. The fact that it took us 7 years to make it, it was really like making some kind of fine wine -- we will sell no album before its time -- something about the album at times takes on this sort of cosmic relevance. Which is what I personally am really after, and I bet Allen is keen on it. And I look at this record as having the strength at times to really resonate with the times, strangely enough. Which gives me this feeling that it was mean to happen this way, and it was meant for this time right now. That's really what I'm trying to say. This record really feels like right now to me. What's happening in our world now. And that feels like success, somehow. Like we built a sculpture in time, and it was supposed to be finished now and heard now. I think that might be what you are feeling when those moments in the songs happen. This is something an artist hopes for, to make something that seems to be relevant. I'm not bragging, I'm sure this sounds like bragging, but I'm just trying to say that I feel fulfilled to have made this, this is one of the reasons I make music, because of how deeply I love it, how deeply it has transported me throughout my entire life, and I want to be part of that continuum, and this record makes me feel in some small way that I am. Music is the best.

Can the Washington Redskins still play football? Can Notre Dame? Can West Point?

2010-11-22T09:24:00.004-05:00

I struggle with my feelings about organized religion. A Reform Jew, I enjoyed my Temple experiences as a kid and teen. Then I stopped being observant (even for a Reform Jew) because I didn't like the menu choices for Passover. Which just goes to reinforce the degree to which my feelings about organized religion are not about organized religion but about me. Now I'm raising a son to be a Reform Jew, thanks to a very giving Catholic wife. And I don't feel like my Temple/Hebrew School/etc. experiences scarred me in any way, short of maybe making it impossible for my heart to ever side with my head and go full agnostic with a side of atheism. I can't point to anything I was ever taught at Temple that I really disagree with.

Like many of the people I despise (or whatever), my feelings about my own organized religion differ from my feelings about other organized religions. I know my fair share of friends and family who are deeply religious (well, the fair share for someone from the Northeast; probably a Bible Belter would have different ideas), and I worry sometimes that my concern for them is symptomatic of some kind of Squeaky Wheel syndrome. I have no issue with someone who takes great strength from their faith, especially in times of need. No, I have an issue with someone who won't shut up about God/Jesus. I don't think it's polite to subject others to constant outbursts about any passion to begin with, really; if someone doesn't respond enthusiastically to my "How 'bout those Patriots!" I'm not going to keep saying it. Worse, these people turn out to be human as the next guy, usually, and there's an especially rotten element, for me, to the person who talks about living up to Jesus's ideals but consistently has trouble walking the walk. These people, of course, deserve all the slack for their failings that I would hope to get for mine, but I find it hard to be that generous with someone who acts like they are asking themselves what Jesus would do at every turn and then sharing their answers with the rest of us.

As I mentioned, this is all likely unfair, at least a little. How many deeply religious people do I know who do not talk about it constantly? (And clearly, I am thinking of organized religion here at an interpersonal level; religious extremism is a much more serious charge for which organized religion has to answer, but not the one that interests me today.)

I also think organized religion gets used as a mental crutch. In the U.S., at least, there are far too many people who are against certain rights of the disenfranchised because their priest/minster/pope/whatever said to be, or because the rest of their congregation is. How many of these people, outside of the influence of their particular organized religion (but rather applying their own interpretations of Jesus's teachings), might have been more human in this way? But they never had a chance.

When I have arguments with the voices inside my head on this subject, they tend to ask me what business it is of mine, my last point notwithstanding. If I want some Southerners to stop worrying about a bunch of gays and pregnant women they don't know, and what those gays and women want to do, probably I should stop worrying about a bunch of Southerners I don't know and what they think, although that's a particularly tough Mobius strip from which to find the exit. This issue excepted, though, the voices ask, what is it to me if some minds seemingly got warped by some reverend?

And that's when some doofus GOP Representative steps in to crystalize the issue. Thanks, doofus!

We've missed you. Have you missed me?

2010-11-07T11:20:00.003-05:00

Backstory here: Apparently Sarah Palin's stupid reality show is about to start airing, and someone at Huffington Post was nice enough to watch it so we didn't have to. The incredibly stupid quote that follows is the incredibly stupid Palin on her seemingly stupid family's reaction to writer Joe McGinniss's moving in next door while working on a book about her: They put up a fence, prompting Palin to wane poetic. Now she's explaining that they otherwise would have had to stop doing whatever they were doing before, which, wouldn't you like to know, amiright? Anyway, Palin, big thinker that she is, is ready to lead again, with the help of her magic fence:

"I thought that was a good example, what we just did," she says. "Others can look at it and say oh this is what we need to do to secure our nation's border."

Because, you know, it's the same thing.

Dear bigots

2010-08-20T11:21:00.003-04:00

Thank you for voicing all of your stupid opinions on the 'Ground Zero Mosque' that is not a mosque, or at Ground Zero, or a hell a lot of your business. Those of us who actually work with or are friends with Muslims have really enjoyed being embarrassed by our more 'patriotic' fellow citizens. If you'd like to give Muslims, gays, and your other frequent targets a break, I will volunteer for a return to the good old days, and some tried and true Jew baiting.

Yer pal
Troy

Not a joke

2010-08-09T12:17:00.004-04:00

The Polish have this very nice custom, as do some Spanish cultures and no doubt others, where you can tack letters on to a name to make it a diminutive to express affection; Aneta becomes Anetka, for example, the way my wife and her family tack on an -ito or -ita. I think this is something we should adopt here in the U.S. That way, I could call you Anetka to let you know that I'm fond of you, or call you Aneta to let you know I think you're an asshole.

A little love and understanding

2010-07-13T12:12:00.002-04:00

Let me see if I've got this straight: George Steinbrenner's dead. He was an enormous asshole, I didn't know him, and now he's dead, just like just about everybody else who was ever born. He was a dink who wasn't as important as he thought he was except in a very small sphere, and even there he wasn't as important as he thought he was except that he wouldn't shut the hell up, the way a tooth you otherwise needn't pay much attention to could suddenly become important by sheer dint of how much it was annoying you. That about cover it?

Analyses of Frost's Mending Wall from eliteskills.com users

2010-05-30T09:03:00.003-04:00

I really like what seems to be the central question - the speaker's willingness to go deeper in asking why he does this every year. Why do fences make good neighbours? What are we walling in, and what are we walling out? The missed conversation is the point at which the speaker and his neighbour could truly become better friends, and the darkness he speaks of later could be lifted.

At the time of publishing Frost was living in England with his family, having moved there a year before (in 1913). At this point in history the world was gearing up for the first world war, and perhaps the two neighbours are Britain and Germany, who had an arms race from 1912 onwards. Frost could be questioning why there always has to be separation and competition in society, and whether it is or isn't necessary. The wall keeps breaking as the tension between the two nation heats up, and at some point someone is going to try and knock down the wall, possibly an allegory for invasion. "Good fences make good neighbours" could simply mean it is important to stay out of one another's way. Obviously that is what kicks off the war when a nation executes Ferdinand. It could quite easily be compared and contrasted with Frost's 'Neither Out Far Nor In Deep'.

We think the poem mending walls is about ponies and his desperation to have a pony.

I believe that this poem is much deeper than the surface. if you look at the time this poem was written World War one had just started and the cival war was only fourty years prior. I see this as Frost's way to look at segergation.

i think,this famous poem of frost has more deeper meaning. poem not only after the good fences make good neighbors it is also up to something.!

If Frost lived where i do with punk ass neighbor kids leaving their shit in my yard[toys, bikes, footballs etc] he would burn that poem

I personally believe that educated people read poems. Poems are art and if you cannot appreciate them then you need to shut the hell up. You guys are idiots... I love Robert Frost. If you want a life lesson read "The Road Not Taken".

I think that Robert Frost doesnt really like his neighbor at all. I think that he just uses the "spring-mending time" as a chance to mess with hie neighbor. For *-sake he wants his neighbor to think that Faires are the ones tearing down the wall. (I have no problem with Faires either. They are awesome!!) Whats up with this Liam dude anyways???

Did anyone ever think that perhaps there is no neighbor? there is just the wall. Maybe Frost was being more literal than one may believe at first. Maybe, the wall literally made a good neighbor too him. The supposed neighbor character says practically nothing throughout the whole poem except that "good fences make good neighbors" which could have easily been not the voice of the character but rather the narrator's opinion of the wall. I believe that another valid interpretation could be that Frost is speaking to the wall and not the neighbor and addressing it with confusion about it's existence and why it separates him from from the rest of the world. perhaps the wall is a metaphor for the barriers between mankind such as race or religion which nature, in the form of the swollen, frozen, earth is trying to eliminate so that mankind may be one.

kill robert frost.. kill his neighbors and destroy the wall.... jajajaja...
by zombies....
ive gonna eat your brains...

This poem talks of various barriers that man has created among themselves to separate from one another. The barriers may be race, caste, religion, colour, etc. Nature does not approve this artifictial separation. It wants man to be united not be separated. Man tries to get separated going against the wish of nature. 'The wall' symbolises these barriers while 'the something' symbolises nature.

this poem is about keeping a wall between you and your wife

Here there are no cows

2010-05-25T10:58:00.003-04:00

Our girl gets a new neighbor -- a journalist (if you want to take her at her word):

Welcome, Joe! It’ll be a great summer – come borrow a cup of sugar if ever you need some sweetener. And you know what they say about “fences make for good neighbors”? Well, we’ll get started on that tall fence tomorrow ...

Dear Copernicus

Please, for the love of God: Stay the hell out of the poetry. At the very least, ask an assistant who knows where a bookstore is to get you Cliffs Notes.

Yer pal
troy

Classing up the place

2010-04-03T17:45:00.002-04:00

Sure, you should watch this. It's the funniest thing I've ever seen Colbert do, the Daily Show do, the funniest thing I've seen probably since Monty Python. It might not look like much, or as much, now, because it set the template for every Daily Show piece in the 10 years since it aired. So you should watch it, yeah. But mostly, I'm just linking to it so that I can watch it whenever I want.

The Cooperation Nazi

2010-03-22T13:40:00.002-04:00

I'll admit to being paralyzed the last couple of weeks; with the healthcare reform 'negotiations,' there really has been too much preposterousness for me to process, much less post. But back on the horse with everyone's favorite totally not-senile recent presidential candidate, John McCain, speaking today on repercussions:

"There will be no cooperation for the rest of the year," McCain said during an interview Monday on an Arizona radio affiliate. "They have poisoned the well in what they've done and how they've done it."

Um, two questions: Was there cooperation before this? Because I think I missed it. And "for the rest of the year"? Seriously? Was there a meeting, at which this time frame was agreed upon? Did they put Mr. Happy Fun Guy in charge of making that decision? Who's got the fly-on-the-wall stuff here?

My absolute favorite euphemism ever

2010-03-01T19:03:00.002-05:00

... comes from Tom Schaller at fivethirtyeight.com, and it needed a perfect storm to come into being:

Those qualifiers aside, in 10 of the top 12 Senate race states, Democrats are in a better registration situation today than they were going into the 2004 elections. The two exceptions—Arkansas and Kentucky--are not particularly surprising, given that they include many of those 22 percent of the counties nationally where Obama underperformed relative to John Kerry in 2004.

I'm a great admirer of artfully constructed sentences, and this guy is my new hero. He takes the state of the economy in 2004, the state of the economy in 2008, George W. Bush's performance in his second term as president, John Kerry's appeal as a presidential candidate, and Barack Obama's appeal as a candidate running against John McCain and Sarah Palin, and somehow comes out of it with the new Some of my best friends are black. "I'm not racist; I just happen to live in a county where Obama underperformed relative to John Kerry in 2004!" That's exactly how I would say it. You know. If I were racist.

Riiiiight ...

2010-02-19T16:39:00.002-05:00

Thanks for that, Miss.

About a Train

2010-02-16T09:19:00.001-05:00

When I lived in the next town over, I took a train that got in to the lower level of Grand Central. We would all trudge upstairs to get to the grand concourse or whatever it's called -- the main part of the terminal. You were an ant in a line, next to other lines of ants, with some man or woman's ass in your face as he climbed the stairs in front of you, and all that implies. It felt kind of 1984, although I haven't read that novel in a couple of years, so maybe I've got the message wrong.

Now I live in the town next to the next town over, and there's a different train that gets in to the main level. You get out of the train and go on your way. You don't feel like Winston. (Or O'Brien, depending on your job.) Just those 60 seconds you save not going up those stairs anymore, along with that sense of conformity and confinement, turn out to make a world of difference -- perceptually, anyway. And I guess that's what I'm wondering. Am I a blind chump, thinking that my day is materially different for forgoing that one minute that used to start it? Or is a large part of life genuinely these little differences?

That's not really 'Little Kobe' ...

2010-01-24T18:29:00.002-05:00

RUN!!!!!!! RUN, ABBY CADABBY, RUN!!!!! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!!!!!!

Here kitty

2009-11-14T18:43:00.002-05:00

Come on, you guys, I need a little support here. Please tell me it's OK to laugh out loud for as long as I did after seeing this science fair project:

But enough about you

2009-11-01T20:54:00.002-05:00

When I've had time to think it over, and maybe calm down a little, I usually am willing to do whatever is best for my wife, even at my expense. But in the moment, especially when I have not calmed down, I tend to pick me; I am unlikely to sacrifice any for someone with whom I am angry, as I lose any perspective outside the angry moment, blind to history and to the future.

Relatively inexperienced and therefore somewhat retarded, relationshipwise, I have only just come to understand what this means. It means that if we are to be honest here, I love myself more than anyone else, but that I know I should love the people close to me more than I love myself. That I will make the right choice, given time, means I even want to love them more. I have little hope of ever evolving toward perfection in that area, but at least now I know what I am.

I like puppies

2009-10-29T11:07:00.003-04:00

Give Fox News credit; they are excellent at framing the debate, no matter how loudly they have to shout to do it. Here's a piece recapping an exchange with Fox Lite's Campbell Brown, who asks the stupidest questions I've regularly heard. I mean, say what you want about Bill O'Reilly, but you can tell that guy thinks through his questions in advance, to make them as insidious as possible. Campbell Brown just bulls into the intellectual china shop. In this instance, she continued criticizing the White House's 'attack' on Fox News, asking senior advisor Valerie Jarrett "Do you also think that MSNBC is biased?"

Perfect. Just the complete and utter lack of nuance that is Campbell Brown in a microcosm. Because there's no degree of things like bias. Putting aside for a moment the comparative biases of the two network's actual news presentations, as opposed to the nighttime talk anchors, I just love the question. Isn't MSNBC also biased? Awesome. Join us next week, when Campbell Brown takes an in-depth look at murder:

"OK, so you're for murdering everybody indiscriminately. And you, sir, you're against? So you admit you have a bias?"

HA!

2009-10-15T09:39:00.001-04:00

I love when this happens.

Say YES to Rush & the Rams!

2009-10-14T22:09:00.004-04:00

I want Rush Limbaugh to become a prominent investor of the St. Louis Rams football franchise – an owner, if you will. I want this to happen as much as I wanted Barack Obama to become president. Maybe I want this a little bit more.

This absolutely needs to happen. For America.

Limbaugh, a Missouri native, most certainly has the cash. The politically ultra-conservative radio showman is a hugely successful businessman. He’s a passionate football fan. He even has previous administrative experience working for a pro sports franchise. And he is a household name, and this helps a team draw attention and ticket sales.

The team needs help. It currently owns the league’s longest active losing streak (14). And ever since Rams wideout Ricky Proehl, proclaimed “The dynasty starts tonight!” to an NFL Films cameraman shortly before the kickoff of Super Bowl 36, St. Louis has a sorry 33-63 record with 2 playoff appearances, 1 playoff-game victory, and no championships. No dynasties, either.

Part of me believes this is simply too good to be true, that Limbaugh’s ownership bid is going to end before it begins. Opponents of the great man's politics are currently going batshit over this, and it’s clear the NFL doesn’t have any stomach for this type of publicity. And you know the shit is hitting the fan when the sports columnists start writing about politics and racism. This thing got ugly fast.

Sadly, all that might come out this is another hot, heaping serving of undeserved attention for El Rushbo, and more "proof" that a left-wing political/media conspiracy is out to crush him and his “dream” of owning a football team. Because, after all, the liberals are all trying to snuff out the American way of “capitalism, liberty, and rugged individualism” (Rush's words, not mine).

Why can’t there be room for El Rushbo in the owners' box? Shawn C. Carter, aka Jay-Z, has made millions of dollars churning out controversial rap hits (with lyrics like: “You know I thug 'em, fuck 'em, love 'em, leave 'em / Cause I don't fuckin' need 'em / Take 'em out the hood / Keep 'em looking good / But I don't fuckin' feed em / First time they fuss I'm breezin' / Talking 'bout what's the reasons / I'm a pimp in every sense of the word, bitch …) …

… and he’s co-owner of the NBA’s New Jersey Nets. Also, liberal political commentator Keith Olbermann is the pre-game co-host of NBC’s “Football Night in America.”

Let Rush own the Rams. Please. I’m begging.

Because just as Limbaugh proudly said he hopes President Obama “fails,” I want Rush to step out of his fabricated radio universe and once again fail at a real-world endeavor. I quote a paragraph from Charlie Pierce’s book, “Idiot America":

“The track record indicates that when the world he’s created comes into contact with reality, Rush fares rather less well. His TV show was a debacle. A guest shot hosting Pat Sajak’s late-night show ended with him nearly booed into the Pacific and sweating like a whore at high mass. And he had a brief stint as an NFL analyst on ESPN that foundered when he divined a liberal conspiracy to promote the career of Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb. … [Limbaugh] has since largely eschewed events not of his own devising.”

I want Limbaugh to be true to himself as an NFL owner. And I’d hope – no, demand -- that he:
-- Lash out at the league’s socialistic salary-cap system;
-- Treat us to a tirade about TV revenue sharing and how it’s a travesty how the worst team receives as much money as much as the best;
-- Fight to abolish the “Rooney Rule,” which smacks of a blatant affirmative-action agenda;
-- Convince fellow team owners to abolish the welfare state that is the NFL draft, which allows a team that did badly one year to get first crack at the best new players coming in;
-- Ridicule the minimum-salary guarantees that were established by the union;
-- Enlighten us, as an OxyContin abuser, how the NFL could maintain its strict drug-abuse policies.

Then let's see once again how this warped f*ckhead fits in.

At best, he’d be true to his radio character and horrify the NFL and the entire country, and his brief reign as an owner would end in disgrace. … You thought, the ancient “quarterback option” offense was back in vogue? Here comes the all-white roster, cornerbacks and all! ... Dallas vs. St. Louis: America's Team vs. White America's Team. ... African-American stars refusing to play for the Rams. Talented coaches and GMs staying away from the organization in droves. Picketers outside the stadium on game day! ... Yes, let Rush the radio character own a real team. Limbaugh would make Geroge Preston Marshall look like Branch Rickey!

(And honestly, how fun would it be to root for Limbaugh’s Rams to lose – no, get absolutely CRUSHED – every autumn weekend? I’m giddy at the thought.)

Or Rush the Empy Suit would exclude himself from the day-to-day workings of a pro sports franchise, prove himself to be the cowardly blowhard he really is by simply enjoying the view from the owners’ box, shutting his big stupid mouth, and having nothing to say about the "socialism" of the NFL ... and ultimately keeping with my favorite American ideal: the separation of politics and sports.

Either way, we win.

Another open memo

2009-10-12T09:51:00.002-04:00

To: Ross Douthat, NYT
From: troy, Head of Development
RE: Your column, or whatever

Ross

Read your piece today where you join the chorus saying that the president should give back his Nobel Peace Prize, because you don't think he's earned it.

I have spoken with the president, and we are in agreement. He has promised to give back the award -- just as soon as you give up your column. If you can't figure out why, please see me.

Yer pal
troy

Open Memo

2009-10-09T10:59:00.004-04:00

... to Michael Steele and everyone else who'll be 'weighing in' today on President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize:

Hi.

In a vacuum, it would be fair to ask what the president did to earn this honor. But we are not operating in a vacuum. Your criticism, bound to last at least throughout the weekend, comes on the heels of celebration that Chicago did not land the recently awarded Olympic Games. The U.S. lost out on hosting the Olympics, and you dinks celebrated -- because it meant the president 'lost.' I swear to God, I saw for a second this morning that CNN was following up 'coverage' of the Nobel with a piece on the president's previous vow to end Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and with sound down, I honestly wondered whether CNN was warning the right about the president's intentions or citing the fact that DADT has not yet been repealed as a failure on the part of the president, and criticizing him for it. That is how crazy CNN and the other loud voices on the right have become; it seemed totally reasonable to me that CNN might be resorting to "Oh yeah? Well maybe he won the stupid Nobel Peace Prize, but he hasn't repealed Don't Ask, Don't Tell, has he?"

So the president's supporters could be forgiven for ignoring Steele and the rest of the freakshow, but again, in a vacuum, I think it's a fair question. So let me decipher this development for the banshees: The guy YOU got elected, the one whose decisions, torture authorization, warrantless wiretaps, and economic legacy you still support ... he was SO bad that the Norwegian Nobel committee gave the guy who succeeded him the prize just for not being the other guy. So, you know, maybe shut up for a minute, let the man try to fix the economy, health care, and everything else he inherited.

I saw a poll yesterday saying Republican congressmen had an approval rating of 29 percent. I mean, just stop already. It's insulting how stupid you must think we are that you assume we don't see right through you.

This is amazing

2009-10-06T10:43:00.001-04:00

... and awesome.

Some Thoughts on The Beatles in Stereo

2009-09-17T10:56:00.005-04:00

I ordered the stereo set before I wised up and ordered the mono set, which hasn't arrived yet. The following is partly about the stereo discs, partly about controlling expectations, and might prove helpful to anyone considering buying the stereo set, were they ever to come across this site.

The stereo mixes tend to be clearer than the 1987 editions, with better separation of instruments. It's possible to pick out more details. But I wouldn't say every 2009 remaster sounds mind-blowingly better than its 1987 counterpart. With the second disc of the White Album, much of Let It Be and Abbey Road, and the last few tracks on Past Masters II left to listen to, I'm finding that there are four categories:

1. The remaster sounds almost the same, but not as good. On the stereo set, this usually has a lot to do with the bass being less present, at least up through Rubber Soul, and even parts of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper.

2. The remaster sounds different, and not as good. Sometimes separation of instruments is bad. Sometimes the instruments teamed to create a sort of undifferentiated instrument track, so that you're hearing the bass and guitars and sometimes piano as one entity. Hearing all the instruments separated can be jarring; maybe in the future I'll get used to this as the standard, but for now, I'm not preferring it to the '87 issue. I'm finding this to be the case with some of the songs I like the most. I liked the unisound I got in '87 a lot, so change seems bad. Hey Bulldog is a great example of this, and so is the end of Dear Prudence.

3. The remaster sounds different, in an interesting way. Too early to tell if I prefer it to 1987, but the instruments I'm hearing anew make for new information, and it's exciting. I didn't know that John yawned in I'm Only Sleeping, and I didn't know that's what John's guitar was doing in I Saw Her Standing There; on the 1987 disc, it sounded like it only had one string. This tends to happen more with songs I like but don't love; I noticed it on several tracks on the White Album. My favorite example so far has been Hey Jude; it seems basically the same as the 1987 master, maybe a little warmer, but at the end, Paul's scatting is more audible, and the track fades completely out just a little later, so you hear more of it, which corrected my impression of his last scat on the 1987 version, the "I said a-na, na na na na," which I would have scored one way before but now see he's singing differently. Also in this category are the stereo mixes of albums formerly in mono, most notably For Sale, which I find interesting, but am not as enthusiastic about as I would be if the bass were more prominent.

4. The remaster sounds very different, and much better. Some of the old masters just seemed mixed poorly, or mastered poorly, or produced poorly. The two chief examples were I'm Looking Through You, where the keyboard was too trebly and harsh, and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, where the keyboard also seemed a little abrasive. In the latter remaster, the guitar(s) in the right channel are now louder, and the mix is perfect*; with the former, it just sounds like they maybe took some of the brightness off the keys, or the channel. Also a lot of Paul's Rickenbacker bass work in the second half of the output is now more audible, including the high end, which salvages even tracks that otherwise might not be preferable to the '87 masters. And toss in songs where voice or classical instruments are prominent -- Eleanor Rigby, Yesterday, and most notably Blackbird, which I previously thought featured a subpar vocal performance. It's transformed on the new stereo set, I feel. On first listen, there aren't too many songs like this that are just in every way better now; Piggies comes to mind as another one.

So ultimately, I agree with the reviewers with early access who posted in the weeks before the stereo set's release: If I weren't a hardcore fan, I wouldn't replace all the discography right now. I might pick out a few favorites, especially Sgt. Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, and, I assume Abbey Road, and leave the rest until my kid lost or scratched my 1987 discs. But if you're crazy-go-nuts for the Beatles, there are enough improvements and enough interesting differences to make the purchase worthwhile. A person with much more time than I have might have a lot of fun mixing and matching between the 1987 and 2009 releases for a discography that combines the best of both.

* I keep saying 'mix,' so I want to go on record here that I know the difference between mixing and mastering.

Late update: Obviously, it was stupid to post this before I'd listened to everything. So let me add here that Cry Baby Cry remastered is a landslide winner, and that it's great to hear the detail on Come Together; if you didn't believe John was saying "Shoot me," you will now.

Beatle album touchstones

2009-09-15T14:16:00.005-04:00

Facility with snappy heds? Yup, still got it. Anyway, I was musing on the different albums, and how some fans like some albums more than other fans do, and I wondered if there wasn't a song on each record that made the difference between 'I dig this disc' and 'BEST ALBUM EVER WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!!??!' I mean a specific song, kind of the same song for everybody (in theory), you love it, you love the LP, and if you don't love it, you only like the LP. Hopefully it will become clearer as we go along. I've also got a working hypothesis that there's a second touchstone that makes the difference between 'I dig it' and 'No, really, you can borrow it. Return it whenever.' Let's find out! Warning: I don't think I start making my point until A Hard Day's Night, so bear with me until then.

PLEASE PLEASE ME
You gotta love: There's A Place. If you love this song, I mean really love it, you are a fanatic who would applaud a bag of 2-year-old Julian's poop. It's funny, many people who really love this record point to it as the best chance we have to hear what a Beatle concert would have sounded like, but this isn't the rockingest record.
No, really, you gotta love: Boys. If you can't enjoy the energy on this track, you're really just into the Beatles for the psychedelic stuff.

WITH THE BEATLES
You gotta love: Don't Bother Me. If you're willing to buy what George is selling here, this becomes a pretty deep album.
No, really, you gotta love: It Won't Be Long. No album with John singing full-tilt like this can be all bad.

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT
You gotta love: I Should Have Known Better. If you're not the biggest fan of this song, A Hard Day's Night only has a couple of highlights. A lot of strong middling material, sure, but if you're making a mixtape, you're probably only putting the title track, Can't Buy Me Love, maybe If I Fell on it. But if you love I Should Have Known Better, then you probably love all of side A.
No, really, you gotta love: You Can't Do That. A standout on side B, and a nice close to the album with I'll Be Back.

FOR SALE
You gotta love: Baby's in Black. Because if you're all about this song, it's because of the harmony, and that means you're going to love Eight Days a Week, I Don't Want to Spoil the Party, No Reply, Every Little Thing ...
No, really, you gotta love: No Reply. The missing link between She Loves You and A Day in the Life.

HELP!
You gotta love: You're Gonna Lose that Girl. If you can get into this, you can probably get into The Night Before, and suddenly side A is looking really deep, flipping over for Ticket to Ride, and now you're one of the "Help! is really underrated!" people.
No, really, you gotta love: I've Just Seen a Face. If it weren't for the sweet melody and harmony, a lot of people would skip from Ticket to Ride all the way to Yesterday ... and a lot of them probably wouldn't even do that. Though there's only a 10 percent chance of that.

RUBBER SOUL
You gotta love: In My Life. I want to say Run for Your Life, which is a personal favorite, and also shows how the Rubber Soul sound sounds when the writing isn't top-notch, but for sheer numbers, I think they key is In My Life. People who love this song not only really love it but also are predisposed to dig Girl and Michelle (which the stereo remasters were very kind to, by the way), and now you've got a seriously deep LP.
No, really, you gotta love: You Won't See Me. Because if you like that, you like I'm Looking Through You, and of course you like Drive My Car and Norwegian Wood and Nowhere Man anyway, and probably The Word, so now you've got half of the album down. But everyone likes those songs. Is this conceit starting to make sense?

REVOLVER
You gotta love: Good Day Sunshine. I mean, I'm assuming there's no one who doesn't love Revolver, so the divisions are between those who would die for it, those who think it's the best music ever made, those who merely really love it. If you like Good Day Sunshine, you like For No One, and of course you like Eleanor Rigby, and that means you pretty much like everything on the disc.
No, really, you gotta love: And Your Bird Can Sing. Again, there are so many like songs on the record, like Taxman and Doctor Robert -- some worse, some possibly better -- that if you open up this vein, there's plenty of good stuff therein. I mean, I'm just assuming She Said She Said is a given.

SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND
You gotta love: Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! Kind of the There's a Place of the middle period. If you love this, then whatever the Beatles are selling, you're buying. And when I say that, I don't mean it's not a good song. I mean that this song is not universally loved, yet it epitomizes their spirit and philosophy, in a way, so if you love this, then the group itself is right in your wheelhouse.
No, really, you gotta love: Getting Better. Tough to keep it going after the first three songs that open the record, but Getting Better gets it done.

MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR
You gotta love: Blue Jay Way. Maybe the most underrated song in the canon? As with the others, if you like this song a lot, the album gets a lot deeper, even if you hate half of Paul's contributions.
No, really, you gotta love: Baby You're a Rich Man. Sort of the latter-half version of a Beatle 'work' song, the songs John and Paul would sit eye-to-eye and write in an hour because they needed three more for the album they would finish recording that week. It's not inspired, but it's the two big kahunas throwing a hook each at the wall, and you know that can't be bad.

THE BEATLES
You gotta love: Blackbird. As before, if you count this among your favorites, it joins the roster of standouts from this release: Dear Prudence, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Happiness Is a Warm Gun, Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey, Helter Skelter, Revolution 1, Back in the U.S.S.R., Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da ... suddenly it's a seriously deep track listing, no?
No, really, you gotta love: Sexy Sadie. Clearly all John's idea, which makes it a poster child for the White Album, but you still hear everyone else's contributions.

YELLOW SUBMARINE
You gotta love: All Together Now. Because if you do, you love at least five of the six originals, and what record has a better hit ratio than that?
No, really, you gotta love: It's All Too Much. Seems like everybody does these days anyway.

ABBEY ROAD
You gotta love: Sun King. This can be an acquired taste, especially if you first listen to the Beatles as a kid, but once you drink the Sun King Kool-Aid, the whole second side is transcendent, and suddenly you're looking down your nose at a side with Come Together, Something, Oh! Darling ...
No, really, you gotta love: You Never Give Me Your Money. If you're not listening to this twice a day, you're missing the whole point of the record.

LET IT BE
You gotta love: Dig a Pony. As with other records, this song has enough sisters -- I Me Mine, I've Got a Feeling -- that you're really opening up Let It Be's world if you're down with it.
No, really, you gotta love: Two of Us. Without this, you probably only like Let It Be and Get Back. Maybe Across the Universe.

Still not winning them over, but maybe starting to at least play the same game

2009-09-06T19:58:00.004-04:00

This post was going to be just a comment on a previous post. Worth rereading, for the context. Someone wrote in yesterday to respond to that post, and she commented as follows:

Hi Troy, I'm JaneLovesJesus. It's kinda' weird that I even stumbled upon your post ... it being months old and all and I'm sure we've both moved on to other things.
But, what the hey? Since I did stumble on it, I thought I'd respond.
One thing: Did you really think I was equating Palin to God? I mean, if I say "I like ice cream" and "I like freedom" I'm not equating ice cream with freedom, right? I may 'have faith' in Sarah Palin, in general. But please be assured that it is not that kind of 'Faith' -heh.

I also don't think she (or me, Lord knows) -- or any Christian -- has some sort of infallibility cloak around them so that every thing we do is necessarily 'God's will' or something. We -- perhaps not unlike you, read, think, research, go to Harvard sometimes (but not me!)ask questions, discuss, try, fail, and try again in the course of trying to seek truth and make wise decisions.

I can admit when I'm wrong. I used to be a liberal Democrat -- and I was a Christian back then as well. Let that bounce around in your head for a while. I do hope that you -- and all people -- find faith in Christ, because I believe it is true. I don't think Christians, even the right wing species, are the strawmen you seem to make us out to be.
Take Care, Jane

So I wrote the following response, which I tried post as another comment to the original post, but apparently I can get a little wordy, and Blogger didn't think the Comments were the right forum, so I repackage it here as a new post, which hopefully will draw JaneLovesJesus's attention better than the original intended comment ever could have. But enough, already. Here is what I wrote in response:

Hi JaneLovesJesus. I want to respond to a couple of your points, but more than anything, I want to thank you for taking the time to elaborate/clarify, and for the classy manner in which you did so.

I obviously take your word for it on equating your faith in Palin with your faith in God. My response here is only in answer to your question, did I really think you were equating God and Palin. And, I mean, obviously, the answer is yes, so the response is more to explain why. To wit: You talked about your faith in Him and in her in the same sentence. And you said you were 'at peace' over her decision to resign, which is a phrase I hear far more often describing one of God's decisions, as it were: death. As in, in case I am not being clear at all, someone being 'at peace' with their coming death. And lastly, you said you did not need to know Palin's plans. Again, this is a word often used in the context of God by people with Faith: knowing God's plan, or His plan for me. Again, totally willing to accept your clarification at face value, but hopefully you can see where it seemed to me like you viewed them in the same light. I never thought you equated God and Palin, but in the context of the original post on which you were commenting -- "why they hate her, and Him, and why she, and He, will be back" -- I assume you can see why I interpreted your comment the way I did.

But I do want to say this: Even if I got it wrong about your Faith and faith being the same, I think what I extrapolated is true of many others. I think if it would be possible to take yourself out of my post, you might see where my conclusions would maybe describe some other people we know.

But I think all that speaks to the part of my post I worded most poorly: I generalized. Again. Which isn't as bad as it seems, I don't think. I mean, the mindset I described apparently was not yours, which robs my words of much of any power of truth, but as I said, I think they do apply to a number of people. And it is those people I feel I understand better now that I read your words all those weeks ago, even if, ironically, you were not one of them. And so this was a good thing that came out of this, if I'm right; if I now better understand a number of people with whom I radically, fundamentally disagree, I don't see how that can be a bad thing. No meaningful discourse can ever take place between two people who fail to understand each other, I don't think, and I much prefer it to just thinking they're dumb. If I did that, the shortcoming would of course be mine, but again, I think it's at least a little understandable. Until I had that revelation, I assumed that people who had access to the same facts I did and yet came to the opposite conclusion (i.e., McCain/Palin over Obama/Biden) were incapable of using logic -- their brains, would be another way of looking it. Now I believe that some of those people employ logic in other scenarios, but don't believe logic is the most important quality to apply in major decisions in politics and life. I believe that they believe that the most important thing in the world is faith in God, and they make it a point to keep their own faith in him, and certainly God is infallible. My faith is not the same as the faith these people have, but I believe I understand it; I believe there is a kernel that is common to their faith and to mine. When life is at its most challenging, I am known to tell those I care about that the bad things in our lives happen for a reason. I believe that the people I was writing about two months ago believe this too, and maybe have a more complete worldview thought out, and for them, this translates to people like Palin being something like God's instruments on Earth. Palin believes the things they believe, and she is prominent in the political party they support, and so she cannot fail, because that would be a misstep by God. There must be some way to explain away what seems to us haters like a failure, to frame it as a good thing.

Again, I am not saying this is true of you. And I thank you for your words on that other site and on mine, which I feel have helped me become a fairer if not better person. But at the very least, I hope you will leave here knowing that really, none of 'us' hate Sarah Palin because God loves her. Most of us who hate her actually hate her because she rose to a prominent position in one of the two major political parties in this country and then snarkily belittled an opponent who as near as I can tell is smart, hard-working, talented, and progressive. He seems to me to want to put the country in a better position, he seems to know what that better position is, and to boot, he seems to believe a lot of the same things I do, to which I'm sure you can relate. After the previous two Democrat candidates for president (and certainly after his predecessor as president), he seems like a rare animal -- and Sarah Palin belittled him and spread lies about him and influenced what at times seems like half the nation to hate him, made his job exponentially harder after he was overwhelmingly (for a presidential election) elected, and now he can't address friggin' schoolkids without a large swath of the right thinking he wants to turn them into socialists. And she does it smugly and snarkily while stepping in crap every time I read about her. It's like the guy who sunk AIG coming into my office and criticizing one of my financial decisions. I'm not clear where she thinks she earned the right to speak on the topic and be taken seriously. The only place God comes into it is that a lot of us think she's using her faith in Him to manipulate these people I've been writing about. If she truly loved Jesus, we believe, it would show.

Ay, Papi

2009-08-15T14:00:00.004-04:00

I wanted to write about David Ortiz's Great Steroid Adventure, but didn't before now for time constraint-related reasons that no one need give a crap about. But Papi said most of what I wanted to say, as excerpted in this Joy of Sox post:

These past few weeks have been terrible for me. People want to [mess] up your reputation ... People always want you to be a good guy, but at the end of the day nobody gives an [expletive] about you.

You know why? Because when this [expletive] came out, this news [the leaking of the positive drug test], no one –– I'm talking about no one in general –– stood up and said, "Let's wait to see what David Ortiz has to say. He's a guy who has been tested 18 times, and why would you believe any of this [expletive]" or "He's a guy who has been playing the game clean and let's wait to hear what he has to say." No. It was, "I'm not surprised he got caught. He did this, or he did that." David Ortiz has never been involved in any kind of trouble. So why do I have to be the bad guy? Why can't anyone stand up for David Ortiz? ...

All these [media members] I've been dealing with through the years, guys who have come to me and tell me, "You've made the difference in this clubhouse because you might be the only superstar here who makes our life easy. When we want to talk to you we can talk to you. You're a nice guy and you do nice things." All that [expletive] went in the garbage when this [expletive] came out. That hurt, bro. ...

It's something that before you come out with things like that, you should sit down and think about, hey, what if somebody did this to my kids or to a friend of mine or to myself or someone else that I know? It's not going to be a good feeling. People talking [bad] about me, I've heard it before. Even I come out and say it, [it's] "He better come out and say that he did it. He better come out." Come on, people. Why don't you say this guy, you know, he is different around here as a player. So let's wait to see what he has to say.

Like I always say, I come in one day, I'll go out another. When I get to be gone, I won't give a flying [expletive] about nobody, period. Nobody going to give a flying [expletive] about me. But I see where all the media and player situation here come from. That said, I thought it was different. It ain't, though. ...

I know that I've been tested 18 times. Nobody talk about that. Have you heard anybody talking about that? Nobody talk about that. But the bottom line is all people care about is selling bad news. Bad news is what makes the money, but sometimes you've got to sit down and think about things before you make that as a truth.

I came out and said what I said. If you want to judge me, it's on you. If you believe me, it's on you, too. It's confusing [stuff], but that's how it is.

I've seen nothing but attacks on Ortiz since the test result was announced. There seemed to be two stances: He did it, and I don't know if he did it but you can't be blamed for thinking he did. The attacks seem to be based on his not admitting guilt or providing more details or knowing every ingredient of every supplement he took at a time when whatever got him to test positive seems likely to have been legal in baseball, or at least not outlawed, if that somehow isn't the same thing.

I think it's fair to say there's no chance Papi will ever see this post, which is a shame. I wish he could know that one person out there trusts him. I admire how he's handled the whole thing, and I only disagree with one thing he said. He seems to feel that because he is unique as a player and as a Red Sox, he should be given the benefit of the doubt.

I think everyone should be given the benefit of the doubt. I mean, I'm not stupid or a liar; there's no denying that I trust Papi because I'm a Sox fan. But I'm not talking about trust, I'm talking about the benefit of the doubt.

I think fans and writers are so pissed off at having been fooled for all those years, they've swung back the other way. Why? Isn't that even more stupid? Barry Bonds was on something, Mark McGwire was on something, Alex Rodriguez was on something ... so Ortiz was too? He needs to just admit it so we can move on? Why? Because they're all baseball players? Now, anytime a player is reported to have tested positive, it's a done deal? No way a report is erroneous, a test is wrong, a player took something that wasn't expressly banned but had an ingredient that landed him on the list? That's fucking nuts. Let's sign all these people up to rejuvenate the newspaper industry, because that's exactly the evenhanded kind of treatment with which I'm looking to infuse my worldview. All Arabs are terrorists, all Ethiopians run fast, and me and the rest of the Tribe will be with you as soon as we finish counting our money. Are these people totally insane? Just because they don't want to give someone the benefit of the doubt, only to be proven wrong again, and feel foolish ... so the answer is to decide anyone suspected is guilty? Out of their frickin' minds. And we haven't even gotten to the complexity of PEDs and PED detection, especially the scientific aspects of it. Yet here are all these writers and radio hosts and radio callers and bloggers weighing in like they have the first clue, like Lady Sarah of the Death Panels.

I don't have the first clue either. It's why I don't leap to conclusions.

Why we hate her

2009-07-22T18:58:00.003-04:00

I sign HJR28 Oppose Restricting Oil/Gas Devlp;we urge President to promote US resource devlp.Pretty simple, Mr.President & Congress:choose safe clean American energy&jobs or force our reliance on foreign countries;what more to ponder,oh wise Washington?Where's DC's common sense?

This is why. Not because she's Republican. Not because we "feel threatened by her." Not because she's smart and talented, obviously, and not -- my favorite -- because she's beautiful. She's not. I find her incredibly unattractive. If she were at all physically attractive, it'd be awfully hard for me to see it through the cloud of ick.

No, we hate her because of this. It's not "I believe this would be best," or even "this would be best." It's "Pretty simple, Mr. President and Congress," and "what more to ponder, oh wise Washington? Where's DC's common sense?"

Where to begin? Not with the fact that it's "O wise Washington," instead of "oh." What about the "pretty simple" -- because, you know, most political issues are supersimple. It's why everyone agrees on everything in this country. No, I guess you begin with the fact that the 'politics of personal destruction' that she said made her resign couldn't be much better typified than braying sarcastically about someone else's intelligence in the course of disagreeing with them over policy. So let's begin there, but please, let's make sure to leave enough time to discuss the idea that this woman is calling ANYONE's intelligence into question. There are bugs smarter than her.

I've learned a lot from following her twitter stream. I've learned a lot about how Alaska is the greatest, and is in a strategic position on the globe, and how it epitomizes everything great about the U.S. And I've learned that every single issue can be broken down to right or wrong based on whether it's good for Alaska. She doesn't even hide it, half the time; she says the president or the U.S. Congress or someone should do whatever it is she wants because it is good for Alaska. I've learned that the ethics complaints (except maybe the one she initiated against herself? No, she seems to be against that one too) are an abuse of the system, which, let's face it, who's a better judge of that? And I've learned that this country is more divided than it has been since the Civil War. If we should laud those who would speak civilly to the other side and try to reunite it as much as possible, we should at least note when someone prominent does the opposite. There have been citizens convicted of treason whose actions caused the U.S. less harm than have Sarah Palin's.

I love this woman

2009-07-16T10:12:00.003-04:00

That's right, baby; now that you're quitting, you can REALLY let your freak flag fly!

Great day w/bear management wildlife biologists; much to see in wild territory incl amazing creatures w/mama bears' gutteral raw instinct to protect & provide for her young;She sees danger?She brazenly rises up on strong hind legs, growls Don't Touch My Cubs & the species survives & mama bear doesn't look 2 anyone else 2 hand her anything; biologists say she works harder than males, is provider/protector for the future Yes it was another outstanding day in AK seeing things the rest of America should see;applicable life lessons we're blessed to see firsthand

Remember; smart AND talented. I love the idea of the 'nuts all nodding their heads as if they know exactly what she means.

That's not right. It isn't even wrong.

2009-07-14T11:01:00.004-04:00

I also love all these tweets where she selects a quote and acts like it means she's right:

"Criticism is something easily avoided by saying nothing, doing nothing, being nothing."Aristotle Don't fear it;it means u make a difference

Hey, Governor: Aristotle just called. He said that he didn't mean that criticism is never founded. Especially criticism of you. And that you're dense.

Translator! Can we get a translator over here?

2009-07-14T09:15:00.003-04:00

Woodward ... Bernstein ... Palin:

Unfortunately, many in the national media would rather focus on the personality-driven political gossip of the day than on the gravity of these challenges. So, at risk of disappointing the chattering class, let me make clear what is foremost on my mind and where my focus will be:

Yes! You sure showed us! We would rather talk about your personality than policy, but you taught us the error of our ways -- by framing the column in terms of "what is foremost on [your] mind."

Those who understand the issue know we can meet our energy needs and environmental challenges without destroying America's economy.

Oooh! A little rubbing it in! If only we hadn't elected an intellectual lightweight, but rather someone who'd shown that they could understand issues! Someone like ... oh, I don't know ...

The ironic beauty in this plan? Soon, even the most ardent liberal will understand supply-side economics.

The Americans hit hardest will be those already struggling to make ends meet. As the president eloquently puts it, their electricity bills will "necessarily skyrocket." So much for not raising taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year.

Electricity bills skyrocketing equals raising taxes? If that's how the ardent liberals will understand supply-side economics, count us out.

We can safely drill for U.S. oil offshore and in a tiny, 2,000-acre corner of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge if ever given the go-ahead by Washington bureaucrats.

Bureaucrats don't make laws. People do.

The writer, a Republican, is governor of Alaska.

When? Also, you don't have to tell us when the writer is a Republican. The disagreeing with everything Democrats want to do, along with blaming on Democrats the sins of previous Republican administrations, almost always gives it away.

Why we'll never win (them over)

2009-07-13T12:37:00.003-04:00

As a prefacetory aside, I'm aware that Sarah Palin's defenders -- especially those who don't actually know her -- think there's something wrong with those of us who can't drop the whole Palin thing and 'leave her alone.' They're missing out on a key truth here: The Palin thing has allowed her supporters to talk freely in a manner that we Palin attackers can understand in a way we never could understand before. Their points are no longer abstract, but rather start with specifics and then allow us to extrapolate in the abstract. In this way, the Palin thing, as it plays out, reveals important new information about this country and one of its biggest rifts. Anyway:

Andrew Sullivan's people lead us over to this ... uh, thing. It seems, on its face, to be breaking new grounds in crazy:

Sarah Palin loves God. God loves Sarah Palin.
And that is why they hate her...and Him.
And why she -- and He -- will be back.

Also, we look down on them because they didn't go to Harvard, and they look down on us because we don't know what God wants, while they, of course do ... blah blah blah. OK, I guess it's chiefly the beginning where new ground is broken. We hate God because He loves Sarah Palin. And we hate her because she loves Him. Or because He loves her. I'm not gonna lie, I didn't read this thing too closely. You mostly want to maintain a distance in instances like this.

No, the part where I really got enlightened was in the comments. I went there expecting to be entertained, but first I was set straight. Turns out I was only half right when I wrote that Palin supporters say the preposterous things they say because they don't want to admit they're wrong. There's way more to it, and 11:36 on Saturday night, someone wrote in under the moniker JaneLovesJesus to explain it to me:

it's weird, but maybe because of her faith in God, and MY faith in God, and my faith in HER, I feel at peace and energized over her decision to resign. Even though it would have never been something I would have expected. I don't have to know Sarah Palin's plans. I know she is not going to back down from the greater fight for America and for freedom.

Honestly; you could spend days thinking about what JaneLovesJesus wrote. The parts where she equates Palin with God are awesome in the most literal sense of the word. They deserve your consideration.

But I can't get over her main message in her first sentence. It's not that JaneLovesJesus and like thinkers have some issue with admitting when they're wrong. It's the conflation of that with faith that's the problem. Such people do not choose McCain and Palin over President Obama and Vice President Biden after thinking the issues through and making a decision. Their candidates stand for what they (their supporters) believe in. Like God. The decision is made for them. It is turned over to God (or, more commonly, I imagine, Jesus). Evidence that McCain/Palin was the wrong decision, of which many of us can't help but observe there is no shortage, would be evidence that God got it wrong. That's why JaneLovesJesus is 'at peace' (you're feeling my massive self-restraint here, right? Please say you are) with Sarah Palin's decision. It's because God is making sure everything Sarah Palin does is the right thing (or, possibly, because Sarah Palin believes in God so much, she can't help but do the right thing every time). I'm not 100 percent clear on why we can't trust God with the actual election outcome as well, and with controlling what the current administration does, but I imagine it has to do with the president being immoral, as the post's author noted.

But Palin's God-fearing. And so is JaneLovesJesus. If you criticize Sarah Palin in any way, you are challenging God's decision-making or his power -- or JaneLovesJesus's faith in Him. It is times like these that I wish this site had a bigger readership, to increase the chances that I could entreat a logician to diagram all of this. But I can tell you this much: When the right appeals to the fundamentalists on the basis of morals, not policy, they're locked up. Republicans can botch the economy, foreign policy, or whatever you want. As long as they're against abortion and gays, they'll have the fundamentalists sewn up, and if you try to free those Christianists up through logic, they're going to view it as an affront to their faith in Jesus. And that's why we'll never win. Move to Amsterdam if you don't like it.

Make it stop

2009-07-10T11:00:00.005-04:00

Two-parter! That's right, a thought so deep and worth sharing, 140 characters couldn't quite cover it:

Anxious for Fairbanks radio visit tomorrow re: 2nd Amendment! We have rockin' surprise guest. Candidly, I love radio vs some newspapers bc......"Most newspapermen by definition have to be liberal; if they're not, by my definition, they can hardly be good newspapermen" W. Cronkite

No, that's not true. You love radio vs 'some' newspapers because you're fucking stupid. Probably too stupid to read. Probably two and a half years of having people read you every document to which you had to affix your signature (via stamp, or possibly 'X') wore out your precious little ears, and that's really why you're resigning. Maybe.

I'm sorry. I hate to be that ugly. I'm just so tired of it. Like she even has the first fucking clue what Cronkite meant. Like she doesn't prefer radio because talk radio is where you can seek out people who agree with you and listen to them rant for three hours without having to exercise your mind the way a good newspaper (or good radio) can make you. More to the point, I guess, she 'loves' radio because she can talk only to preapproved hosts who are known to be sympathetic, and speak about the topics she wants to speak about, unedited and un-fact-checked. No need to get nervous, like when you're facing off against a journalistic behemoth like Katie Couric, or hard-nosed, objective reporters like Charles Gibson. Not that they're in newspapers. But you get my drift. Ah, I gotta go lie down ...

I'LL give you some 'personal destruction' ...

2009-07-08T15:11:00.003-04:00

On Time magazine's Web site, for Christ's sake:

You're going to see Obama increase those taxes on small businesses — whether he admits it today or not, he's going to. One thing reporters aren't asking the Administration is — it's such a simple question and people around here in the real world, outside of Washington, D.C., want reporters to ask — President Obama, how are you going to pay for this $1 [trillion] or $2 [trillion] or $3 trillion health-care plan? How are you going to pay off the stimulus package, those borrowed dollars? How are you going to pay for so many things that you are proposing and you are implementing? Americans deserve to know what the plan is to fund these things, health care included.

1. It's President Obama. I believe "Mr. Obama" is also permissible. Give him the respect you don't deserve, the respect he earned merely by keeping you the hell out of the White House. The thought of you in the White House still gives me chills, to the point that I don't even think they should let Alaskans go on the tour.
2. YOU? YOU are going to talk about what reporters aren't asking somebody? In the course of the same "interview," no less, where you are asked whether quitting your job will "catapult" you or, alternatively, is more of a self-sacrifice? Like it's got to be one of the two? YOU are going to tell us what Americans deserve to know, about answering "such simple questions"? You, who refused to even say what you read? The only time you've ever told the truth to the public was by accident.
3. I almost forgot the best part: Sarah Palin, implying she has the intelligence to know what Barack Obama will do -- and that he's lying about it. The arrogance. I can't even ...
4. I really think you should stick to Twitter. I keep going back and forth on this. I want to hear more, I don't want to hear more, I can't look away, I can't bear to look ... maybe if it were only on Twitter, the rantings of the psycho on the street, instead of in the guise of an interview, which suggests discourse. She has at least that much of a point: The same 'reporters' who are interviewing her would be doing a service to this country by trying to pin down the president on how 'he' plans to pay for the health care plan. Then they wouldn't be giving this freak a forum, and my country would be a better place.

New rule no. 1

2009-07-08T10:09:00.002-04:00

The twit:

Kotz trip gave Labor Commish & me opp to speak to young AKns re resource develop. jobs we want AKns to have 1st shot bc work ethic is there

Dear Sarah: If there should come a time, perhaps many years in the future, when it becomes OK for you to speak on the topic of work ethic, we will let you know. Yer pal, troy.

We should get us one of those

2009-07-07T15:18:00.003-04:00

Palin tells ABC news how much better things would be (for her) if she were V.P. All those ethics complaints she was forced to try to answer, eventually 'driving' her from the governor's office?

I think on a national level, your department of law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we've been charged with and automatically throw them out.

Yeah, but she's smart and talented, right? I mean, that's what I keep reading on the internet.

This is up there with her interesting, um, interpretation of the First Amendment, chronicled elsewhere in this space. Yes. What we need around here is a 'department of law.' It would look at things we got charged with and automatically throw them out.

I think we have to consider that it's at least possible Palin thinks she's living in, and was running for the vice presidency of, some other country. It would explain at least some of it. But I salute her for her first real contribution to this country. I plan to refer to the Department of Law all the time now. Remember on Seinfeld when Elaine was offended that the restaurant hired only waitresses with large breasts, and informed the owner that she was sure the "department of, you know ... whatever" would be very interested? Who knew Elaine was qualified to run for V.P.?

There's almost no chance I won't be weighing in on this more as it continues to sink in. All those defenders saying she's smart, and all those other defenders who said it didn't matter how smart she was, just because she wasn't 'elitist.' Maybe the group she was trying to reach was 4-year-olds? Because I'm trying to think who else I know besides my kid who doesn't know better. A 'department of law' at the White House that can dismiss charges. Anyone finds the interview where she said we could have won in Iraq by bringing in our crack brigade of magical fairies mounted on unicorns, lemme know.

Just awesome

2009-07-07T15:11:00.003-04:00

From deadspin. I'm too dumb to make it display right, so just click through to get the whole image:

I'll shut up if she will

2009-07-05T14:57:00.003-04:00

From yesterday's statement:

The response in the main stream [sic] media has been most predictable, ironic, and as always, detached from the lives of ordinary Americans who are sick of the “politics of personal destruction”.

... which you instigated when you started accusing people of 'pallin' around with terrorists.' How might things have been different had you tried out classy, and kept your criticism of now-thank-God-President Obama to legitimate issues?

I shared with you yesterday my heartfelt and candid reasons for this change ...

Yeah, you know, I read the whole statement, but I must have missed the candid reasons.

I’ve never thought I needed a title before one’s name to forge progress in America.

This profile in grammar courage is just for Megan.

She claims to want to know why she's held to a different standard, and she's just dumb enough that the claim might be legitimate. Then again, she also claims to be some kind of Christian, but her bible apparently doesn't include this quote attributed to Jesus: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Had she conducted herself with any kind of dignity, she might be seeing some come back her way now. Instead, she launched personal attacks, tried to belittle her opponent (I'm giving her credit probably due her speechwriters here), and really launched the "politics of personal destruction" into a whole new level. A level where, by my observation, abortion-performing doctors and ... well, guys who work security at museums commemorating the Holocaust die. If she doesn't think she helped to incite those murders, she's dumb or deluded.

It's been fun to see her fight back against her 'critics'; less so 'liberal critics' now, because liberals (and we moderates) aren't attacking her, we're just laughing at her. The attacks are coming from the right-wingers who were taken in last year but are determined they won't get fooled again. You know, our girl's parents get reached for statement from time to time, but no one seems to ask them what I'd like to ask them. One of the most important lessons my parents taught me was that it's usually not everyone else who's wrong; if everyone else disagrees, it's usually you who are wrong. Why didn't her parents teach her that?

Crazy to the end

2009-07-03T18:28:00.003-04:00

It would be fun to speculate why Sarah Palin announced her resignation as governor of Alaska today. I refrain not out of compassion, but because if I've learned anything, it's to not try to get inside that woman's head. I might never escape. And anyway, this isn't the place to go for substantive discussion of politics. This is the place where we pick apart her words and mock them.

Even that could take all day, so I'll let alone the Alaska history lesson and the complexities behind her preposterous treatment of the ethics charges and say:

Over the past nine months I've been accused of all sorts of frivolous ethics violations - such as holding a fish in a photograph, wearing a jacket with a logo on it, and answering reporters' questions.

What? She's been accused of answering reporters' questions? Bizarro says "Me very confused."

... it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: "Sit down and shut up", but that's the worthless, easy path; that's a quitter's way out.

Unlike, you know, quitting.

And so as I thought about this announcement that I wouldn't run for re-election and what it means for Alaska, I thought about how much fun some governors have as lame ducks ... travel around the state, to the Lower 48 (maybe) ...

What, like to Indiana for pro-life rallies? Or to Washington, D.C., for pro-life events? Or to New York for ...

Let me go back to a comfortable analogy for me - sports ... basketball. I use it because you're naïve if you don't see the national full-court press picking away right now: A good point guard drives through a full court press, protecting the ball, keeping her eye on the basket ... and she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can WIN. And I'm doing that - keeping our eye on the ball that represents sound priorities - smaller government, energy independence, national security, freedom! And I know when it's time to pass the ball - for victory.

Yes; victory. I think that's what we all associate Sarah Palin with. Especially after her quitting. And, you know, dragging the Republican ticket down even farther last fall.

It hurts to make this choice but I am doing what's best for Alaska.

Pretty sure that's the first true thing she's said since she came to the public's attention.

Now, despite this, I don't want any Alaskan dissuaded from entering politics after seeing this REAL "climate change" that began in August ...

I actually know what this means; she's-- nah, I got nothing.

In the words of General MacArthur said, "We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction."

For our part, we promise not to follow.

Can I do her epitaph? I mean, she's dead, right? There's no way even she could think she can run for anything after not finishing out her first term as governor. OK, good. Sarah Palin epitomized what went wrong with the Republican party in so many ways. She was the end-product; even if you lacked the patience or knowledge to say where it went wrong, you could point at her and say "Well, I can't put my finger on it, but certainly we can agree that this isn't what we were aiming for." And she stayed true to that to the end. Her resignation speech was a textbook example of how the GOP has reduced itself to talking points. The talking points don't have to be true; they merely have to be words that supporters can repeat to soothe themselves. I mean, they're not convincing, but they're not for us, whether 'we' are liberals or moderates or even non-partisan. (That 'even' was for you, Sarah!) No, the talking points are purely for the talkers. They can repeat the points to the rest of us and go home convinced we were merely not open-minded enough to hear them.

It seems obvious to me, but enough minds I respect (like Andrew Sullivan's) continue to ask, almost daily, what these Republicans and right-wing media freaks can be thinking when they say the description-defying things they say. They seek an explanation but they premise the whole thing on honest discourse. Which confuses me.

So no, no compassion here, even if any of the Trig accusations were real. Both while and after losing the election, Sarah Palin tried to make it as difficult as possible for the opposition to govern the country. She actually made honest discourse more scarce than Bush did. She might be as hard for the Republican party to recover from as he was.

Bachmann-hysteria overdrive

2009-06-28T09:47:00.007-04:00

I mean, I can't swear she's consciously and actively engaged in a contest with Palin, but we can all be forgiven reaching the conclusion.
This on the climate change bill the House passed Saturday:

But what is worse than this is the fact that now because of this underlying bill, the federal government will virtually have control over every aspect of lives for the American people.

Does that include grammar? Because if the government can clean up the way Bachmann speaks, I might be willing to sacrifice my Twinkies or light spanking or whatever it is Bachmann thinks they want to take away from me.

I've also reached a new hypothesis about the representative for the lucky state of Minnesota: Is it possible she just is lazy? If she overreacts like this to passage of a climate change bill, it seems reasonable to assume she would oppose, if more temperately, just about any bill. She clearly thinks the role of the federal government is not to make law or, you know, govern. And yet she's a U.S. representative! Why did she become one? What is it she thinks she should be doing with her time, short of campaigning for re-election? If they come for me in the night, you'll know I was on to something with this.

Me, I smiled on Nov. 4

2009-06-24T09:26:00.001-04:00

The twit:

Smile AK! Signed Adult Dental bill (HB 26) over weekend. Now more AKns can get checkups & prevent costly dental problems before they begin.

I don't know. That sounds dangerously like socialism.

The world is full of energy

2009-06-12T19:11:00.001-04:00

The twit:

EIA estimates US energy consumption will INCREASE by 44% in next 20 yrs. We MUST utilize our local energy sources.

Oh, totally. Either that, or, you know, maybe rein in our energy consumption a little.

'More and more frightening'

2009-06-10T20:22:00.003-04:00

Congrats to Shep Smith for putting this together.

The guy who's not Shep Smith leads Shep Smith over to the blogosphere, and Shep Smith follows him, but he's already connected the dots. Sure, bloggers have said some crazy shit, and I don't restrict that to right-wing crazyblogs. But 'socialist' -- that didn't start on the Net. That started with McCain, and Palin, and Bachmann. Certain politicians acted in concert with the crazyblogs to whip people into a frenzy, and by the time McCain looked startled at his rallies and scolded his supporters that no, Barack Obama was a good man who happened to disagree with him, it was too late. Seemingly normal people were already yelling 'Kill him!' at the rallies of the Republican candidate for President of the United States. And the lunatic fringe was way too far out there to reel back.

I am not blaming any politicians directly for the madness at the Holocaust Museum, or the shooting of Dr. Tiller at church. Neither of those guys was a sane and rational man expressing his views coherently. (Although if you wanted to blame Bachmann, I'd probably hear you out for a while.) And I don't want to politicize this too much, not today. But McCain and Palin, they pandered to people like this. The last president, he spoke in code to people like this. I take no issue with serious criticism of liberal or Democratic politicians, and I don't claim that the right has a monopoly on the unserious criticism. But the unserious criticism of Republicans doesn't get people killed. Al Gore and John Kerry were far from inspirational in their campaigns, but they weren't going for a frenzy of hatred. If Bachmann and the others get what they want, there will be a great, great deal to mourn on that day.

Purple prose of Cairo

2009-06-04T13:35:00.003-04:00

Just kidding. I'm a fool for wordplay.

I've read the President's speech, and a lot of synopses of the reaction to it, mostly courtesy of Andrew Sullivan. I thought the speech hit all the right notes. I also think that it's sad that this is such a big deal. As Obama himself said, these were only words. Yet they reveal the clearheaded, honest, and right thinking of which no president has been capable in my 38 years. Some wanted more constructive proposals, and in theory, so do I. But high-level meetings, more than this speech, are probably the place for them. And like so many things about this president, our past shame makes his baby steps bigger than they seem to his detractors.

Most of the criticism I've read -- especially from Israeli hard-liners -- misses the point tragically. It betrays the expectations the speakers had of the speech going in, and they come off like some idiot parent making noises of disgust when his kid strikes out in his first Little League at-bat. More, it betrays a complete lack of nuance. Nuance was the subtext of the speech; it was a call to see things in shades of gray, if not color. Many of the critics you can read today failed to answer, showing a lack of some combination of imagination, integrity, fairness, and intelligence. I now see why Sullivan is spending column inches writing off the Israeli hawks; they sound increasingly like the wingnuts in this country. The wingnuts are draining their party of supporters; fewer identify themselves as Republicans every day. Politicians and commentators in Israel, which I once supported blindly, would do well to pay attention, in the interest of survival, if they can't manage any interest in fairness.

Eyes wide crazy

2009-05-21T20:21:00.003-04:00

I love what Dick Cheney's done with September 11. He's come a long way. Lemme see if I've got it right: President Obama will be to blame for a future terrorist attack if he doesn't follow the Cheney playbook religiously. But before anyone even thought to blame the administration that was in power ON September 11, 2001, Cheney's minions found a way to blame that attack on the PREVIOUS president. So Cheney and his li'l buddy deserve credit for every day there wasn't another attack, but no blame for the day there was an attack, and President Obama would deserve blame if there were an attack tomorrow, even though he's been president for fewer days than Cheney was president as of September 11.

I say a second attack would be Cheney's fault, and not for all the logical reasons related to how the previous administration alienated fundamentalists even further. No, I bet somewhere out there, a terrorist is about to go rogue just to shut Cheney up. I'm American, and I can barely stand to hear him speak.

Priorities, people

2009-05-21T11:12:00.002-04:00

Twit:

Pleased Congress passed bill permitting loaded firearms in nat’l parks & wildlife refuges, as subject to state law.

Yes, I think we're all pleased that the House and Senate took time out of their day to worry about this issue. My favorite part:

The provision was included in legislation placing new restrictions on the way in which credit card companies deal with consumers.

I love my country.

This probably should have stayed a draft

2009-05-19T09:27:00.004-04:00

If you read many sites/blogs with comments, you've probably been exposed to the 'first' phenomenon. There are commenters on your more popular sites (and by more popular, I mean more popular than this one, anyway) who take great joy in leaving a comment that notes that they are the first to comment. Often, that's all the comment says. And often, the comment is not in fact the first comment. There were no comments when the commenter started writing 'First!' but somehow, in what little time it took to click OK or whatever, someone else with something more substantial to say snuck in there.

Some of us readers find this phenomenon infuriating. Over at the Onion A/V Club site, not only is a not-first first (or 'firstie') mocked, there's a meme going on where anyone who succeeds or fails at firsties is wished a combination of cancer and AIDS. One commenter there started his own parodic blog devoted solely to his travails as a firstie. Point being, unlike everything else that makes me crazy beyond all reasonable proportion, I'm not alone on this one. But I was just wondering, after seeing a firstie on Joe Posnanski's awesome-beyond-all-reasonable-expectations blog, why. Why do I hate firsties so much?

Then I figured it out. Firsties are like climbing a mountain (in my case, a small mountain) and reaching the summit and as you prepare to take in the view, you see some jackass has written 'First!' with white spray paint on a rock. It's not clear what benefit the jerkweed got from doing it, but everyone else who utilizes the site (or mountain) is going to be at least a little bit annoyed by it.

Now I can move on to more pressing issues, like why the people in front of me walk so slowly during rush hour. I mean, it's called 'rush hour,' you know?

What does that even mean?

2009-05-15T16:05:00.003-04:00

Late on this one, but too good to pass up. The president said last week that he'd like Justice Souter's replacement on the U.S. Supreme Court to be capable of empathy. Michael Steele, the RNC chairman and my first choice to entertain at my kid's birthday party, went on the radio to respond:

Crazy nonsense empathetic! I'll give you empathy. Empathize right on your behind. Craziness!

Now, lest you accuse me of taking the quote out of context, allow me to assure you that I would LOVE to see the rest of what he said. I am seriously considering quitting my job and following this guy around, because I think he's just getting to the really good stuff now, and I think it's gonna bring all the thrill of a volcanic eruption without any of that pesky ash.

But -- and maybe this is because I'm taking a break from rewatching The Wire and am in the middle of season 1 of The West Wing -- doesn't talking to the public about the president like that make Steele what my dad would call "a total dink"? I don't know, probably there were Democrat politicians and officials who said worse about the last president; I don't want to make it sound like that party's gonna wear white at its wedding. But "Empathize right on [President Obama's] behind"? Is that really necessary? Can we have Leo go talk to him?

The only other excerpt from the linked story: "I don't need some justice up there feeling bad for my opponent because of their life circumstances or their condition and shortchanging me and my opportunity to get fair treatment under the law."

If that doesn't sum up the Republican party right now ... well, wait five minutes, and someone else will, in even more hysterical fashion.

From the twit

2009-05-12T20:07:00.002-04:00

Yet ANOTHER ethics complaint filed & dismissed! Unfair to AKns that state dollars are wasted dealing w/these malicious complaints...

Agreed. Of course, if you'd just admit to all the crap you did, people could stop charging you with stuff you didn't. And chin up: So many of those state dollars come from other states' pockets, it's like free entertainment.

Sourcing

2009-05-08T09:37:00.003-04:00

I mean, she's a journalism major, right? At like, five different colleges? That's plenty of exposure to the fundamentals. So why would she use her tweet ...

Outraged Obama's budget includes major cuts to missile defense programs, when N. Korea refuses to abide by UN regs.http://tinyurl.com/c56xyh

... to link to a CNN story that concludes by noting that she wants money for it? Also, when she's all crazed, marking up which parts of the stimulus package she's willing to accept and which parts she isn't and which parts don't, technically, exist but, in her expert opinion, should, do her advisors just glance at each other uncomfortably, like Hitler's in his last days in the bunker, or are they egging her on like Tiny Elvis's coterie?

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is that we continue to develop and perfect the global missile defense network. Alaska’s strategic location and the system in place here have proven invaluable in defending the nation….

Is that like when Bush supporters point out that we haven't been attacked since Sept. 11, all smug as if they just proved something? If someone can point me to evidence as to precisely how Alaska's proven 'invaluable,' that'd be great. I'm not saying we wouldn't retaliate if North Korea sent missiles at Alaska, but if Ol' Crazysides keeps yapping, wouldn't we at least want to think about it?

Also, I'm not saying the 'cuts' are non-existent, like when Obama was panned by the right a month ago for 'cutting' defense when, in fact, he just wasn't increasing the defense budget as much as the 'nuts would have liked. I'm merely saying that when I google 'obama cuts missile defense,' the only links I get are right-wing crazy sites and the CNN piece. Which is ironic, since when it comes to Alaska, Sarah Palin is a socialist.

Oh, wait, I found the press release, and I think the CNN story left out the best part:

Today, the Defense Department said it wants to study the merits of ground based missile defense before it commits to an expansion at Fort Greely. This is absolutely the wrong message to send to our adversaries.

This is art, people. Are you even appreciating it while she's still alive? Maybe we can divert the missile money to the National Endowment for the Arts so she can get the showing she deserves. Although anyone in North Korea doing a Web search for 'obama cuts missile defense' is already getting 'absolutely the wrong message.'

Better use a lifeline

2009-05-06T14:32:00.003-04:00

Straight from the twit's mouth:

Due to intense spring floods, I've declared a disaster for Interior AK; this opens doors for govt agencies to better assist AKns in need.

Are you sure? I bet there're all sorts of strings attached. I bet the damn government's gonna want you to use that disaster money to, oh, I don't know, handle the disaster. YOU GONNA LET THEM TELL YOU WHAT TO DO WITH THEIR MONEY?!?!?

Who's got a link to one of those maps that shows how Alaska and other 'red states' get the most federal aid per tax dollar, and the blue states pay for it?

Another Beatles scoop

2009-05-06T14:23:00.002-04:00

Our second this week! Man, if people were actually reading this blog, we'd be famous.

Anyway, the internet is bemoaning the news that guitar controllers for the Beatles' Rock Band entry will be sold separately, reportedly at $99 each for John's Rickenbacker and George's Gretsch. They believe the $250 entitles them to more than just the game, Paul's Hofner, Ringo's drums, and a mic stand.

But if you go to the game's home page ... I don't know. That looks like John's Epiphone Casino to me. Wouldn't that mean it's in the bundle as well?

Straight from the twit's mouth

2009-05-05T20:05:00.003-04:00

I stand by grave concerns fed pkge prohibits opportunities for AK to develop, eg. require AK to adopt new energy codes to accept more funds.

Dear Sarah

Good to hear from you. I'm really enjoying this new phase of your madness. Before, we were at the mercy of the media to hear more crazy. It was very frustrating, relying on the media! Although hey, who'm I tellin', right?

Yeah, so the rest of the people who aren't crazy asked me to try to explain this to you. I said "Hey! I don't speak Stupid!" But they insisted I was the man for the job. So here we are.

OK. I understand your grave concerns, and your standing by them. I think we should all stand by our grave concerns. If we do not stand by our grave concerns, well, where do we stand? Am I right? I honestly can't tell. Anyway, from what I can make out, you are still having trouble with this whole federal stimulus thing. It's funny, I remember some Southern governor going through this. He wanted to do the same thing you're trying to do now: accept only part of the stimulus allotment for your state. I remember the president saying it wasn't going to work that way. It was in the papers and everything. I guess you no longer read "Oh, all of them." Because now you're pulling the same stunt, saying you don't want the funds for the state energy office.

Oh, sorry about linking to the Times there. Don't worry, looks like they won't be around much longer anyway. The media, huh? Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em:

Yeah, so anyway, you're saying you want the stimulus money you want, but not the stimulus money you don't want. Or something. No, wait, I know. You're saying you don't want the energy money because you don't want to strengthen your building code, because ... uh, because it's not in Alaskans' common or individual interests of ... um ...

You know what? Fuck it. I got no idea what your problem is. You make no sense. I've been trying to treat you with kid gloves here, like a mentally disturbed person who somehow got hold of a gun (get it?), but I gotta come clean here, you're all over the road. You're a freak, and most of what you do is geared to framing yourself as some sort of right-wing hero. I mean, the Democrat president wants to give you money, for fuck's sake, and you're turning it down. Face it: You're a contrarian wack job.

But lemme try to explain this to you: You can take the money. You can turn down the money. You cannot take some of the money. You should not take the money and bitch about it. That'd just be bad form. But what you absolutely cannot do without looking like a complete idiot is take the money and bitch about the giver of the money mandating that you adopt a new building code if you want even MORE money!!!! I mean, you might've heard, there's a recession or something going on. People are hurting. Remember how mad they were about their money going toward banker bonuses? It was kind of a big deal, here in America. They don't really want to hear about your not liking what few conditions are attached to your taking their money.

Also, they want to know if you've returned the clothes yet.

And I don't think it's meant as a euphemism for 'condom,' either

2009-05-04T12:40:00.002-04:00

On twitter, our girl announces an initiative that she supports "... to protect (Alaska's) daughters ... ." The link she offers is to an Anchorage Daily News story about the initiative, which "make[s] it illegal for teenagers to get an abortion without telling their parents."

I've long come to terms with the fact that Sarah Palin and I speak very different breeds of English, and so I ask the following question completely devoid of snark: From who or what would this initiative 'protect' Alaskan teen girls?

Beatles, for sale (again)

2009-05-04T12:04:00.001-04:00

Haven't seen this anywhere. Just noticed that the remasters are up on amazon.com. I had been wondering where they'd be priced.

Prices:

Please Please Me: $13.99
With the Beatles: $14.99
A Hard Day's Night: $13.99
For Sale: $13.99
Help!: $13.99
Rubber Soul: $13.99
Revolver: $13.99
Sgt. Pepper: $13.99
Magical Mystery Tour: $13.99
White Album: $19.99
Yellow Submarine: $14.99
Let It Be: $13.99
Abbey Road: $13.99
Past Masters (33 tracks): $22.99

Box sets don't seem to be listed.

Who has a guess as to why Yellow Submarine and With the Beatles are a buck extra?

More Palin please!

2009-04-30T13:10:00.003-04:00

Oh, yay! She's got a twitter feed! You'd think she's got someone writing this stuff for her, but here is her first post ...

This is my official Twitter feed - from here I’ll provide updates on issues concerning Alaskans. Learn more about AK at www.alaska.gov.

So we're establishing that the purpose of the feed is to write about issues concerning Alaskans. Because, you know, she's the governor. Of Alaska. Remember?

So yeah, a feed by an Alaskan, for Alaskans. But then her very next post ...

AP gravely misquoted my staff, saying I 'changed my mind' on the stimulus package. For accurate info, go to http://tinyurl.com/c7v84t.

Contradicting one sentence with her very next sentence? It's her! It's really her! Whew! Baby, you had us worried there! I thought maybe this would really be about Alaskan issues, and not just a chance to put more of your 2012-focused nonsense out there! Thanks for always being there for us, Sarah Palin. Even if 'there' is in outer space.

On Connecticut State Senate Bill 349

2009-04-30T11:13:00.003-04:00

SB 349 would change possession of small amounts of marijuana from a misdemeanor (punishable by jail time) to an infraction, which would be merely ticketed.

I followed some link and sent my state senator, Toni Boucher, an e-mail asking her to support SB 349, which has passed the senate's Joint Committee on Judiciary. Senator Boucher wrote back and relayed her testimony before the Committee against the bill.

What follows is my response to her, on which I CC'd Governor Jodi Rell.

Toni

Thanks very much for writing back. I respect that your views differ from mine. It's why I voted for the other guy in November. But the way I understand it, you represent me nonetheless. So I hope you will not impose your own views on the state, but rather aim to represent the majority's will. You might know that a Quinnipiac University poll this year indicated that 58 percent of Connecticut voters favor SB 349.

It would be even better if I could sway you by illustrating where your thinking is, in my opinion, misguided. Since you were kind enough to relay your views to me, I offer the following rebuttals.

You cited a couple, many years ago, who lost their son to drugs. You do not say that the drug on which the son overdosed was marijuana, and I imagine that's because it wasn't the drug on which he overdosed. To my knowledge, marijuana has never killed anyone. This, of course, is not true of alcohol or tobacco, two legal substances. In fact, you call marijuana a gateway drug, and say it was identified by the parents as "the real killer," which again I assume is merely evidence that it was not the real killer. Perhaps you also favor illegalization of alcohol and tobacco, as any 15-year-old can tell you that these are the gateways to marijuana use. Most people against marijuana legalization don't favor outlawing cigarettes and alcohol, and therefore are guilty of hypocrisy. Perhaps you are the exception; I have not researched your views. But the state of Connecticut has not outlawed alcohol or tobacco; it instead has satisfied itself with laws governing the two substances' use.

The same should be true for marijuana. It is not physically addicting, the way tobacco and alcohol are, and so there is no evidence that there would be health issues -- especially where marijuana is potent enough to deliver its effects with minimal substance ingestion. If one could feel the effects one desired from as little alcohol or tobacco, there would be no health issues with those substances either. I'm afraid any studies you cite are going to be of extremely limited value; most are conducted or sanctioned by the federal government, which outlaws marijuana in the first place, and what few remain relied on government-supplied marijuana, which of course is not representative of the many strains available to users. Have the studies looked at both indica and sativa strains? For what other variables have these supposedly scientific studies accounted? I also find that critics draw highly spurious conclusions from these studies, like the 40 percent statistic you cite. If marijuana increased the risk of developing mental disorders by 40 percent, there would be a great many college graduates with mental disorders in this country. Assuming relationships to be causative is a fallacy that extends far beyond drug studies, but it certainly is a popular one among anti-marijuana lawmakers.

There absolutely are people who have other issues -- motivational, organizational, social -- related to their marijuana use. Marijuana does not cause these issues. It sometimes enables them. A shut-in who doesn't answer the door because he's high would be a shut-in without marijuana. And he likely would seek some other substance instead -- doubtlessly a more dangerous substance, since marijuana is the least dangerous of illicit substances. Rather than trotting out a story of a couple, many years ago, who lost their son to some other substance, I suggest you talk to more marijuana users. You can find many of them achieving at the highest levels of our country -- although some are not free to admit their use, thanks to stigma of the drug's illegal status -- as well as working at the nearest Burger King. Talk to former users, too, including those who say their lives were miserable while they used. Many of them will tell you that they came to realize that the drug made it easier for them to avoid working out the issues that challenged them, but that in most cases, when they stopped smoking, they still needed to work out those issues. And while you're talking to them, see if those serious and costly long-term health effects you presage have come to pass. I also would love to the the sourcing for much of what you cited in your testimony to the Joint Committee. Sixty percent of Connecticut drug treatment center admissions are for marijuana addiction? I'd love to hear more about that.

You worry that SB 349 will overturn decades of progress "combat[ing]" marijuana use. How are you measuring that progress? Is progress combating measured in arrests? In prison sentences? This kind of "progress" is easy to achieve. Do lower percentages of the population use marijuana? Impossible to measure, of course, since respondents would need to admit to lawbreaking. But anecdotally, I can tell you there has not been significant progress of anything. I can direct you to any number of peers who use habitually, and others who did for years before stopping. They are not in hospice care, or mental wards. If you are against adults' being legally allowed to smoke marijuana, I assume you are not aware which of your friends and family are smokers (although if you did know, I imagine you would prefer they be ticketed for marijuana use, and not put into the criminal system). I urge you, for the purposes of researching this issue, to widen your circle. And the percentages of college kids who smoke marijuana today will not be appreciably lower (if, in fact, they're not higher) than they were 20 years ago when I was in college. So I wonder what kind of progress you had in mind.

I would like to give you the benefit of the doubt regarding the statistics and purported evidence you cited in your testimony. But it is not easy. It reads like the boilerplate claims I've seen elsewhere so many times from other lawmakers who were closed on the issue. These "facts" fit their argument, and these were the "facts" they were sticking with. I hope you will consider it your responsibility to seek out the other side of the story. I suspect it would lead you to question some of the "evidence" that seems so compelling to you now. I believe you owe it to yourself, and I am certain you owe it to me and the rest of your constituents.

Yer pal
troy

No, seriously -- shut the @&#^ up

2009-04-28T19:51:00.003-04:00

She's baaaaack!

"I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president Jimmy Carter," said Bachmann. "And I'm not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it's an interesting coincidence."

Note that her sentence construction is starting to resemble our girl's; "... back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then ..."? Even? Also, it might not surprise you to learn she's wrong. I don't think that's an interesting coincidence.

Ranking the monsters of rock my damn self

2009-04-22T09:17:00.000-04:00

I came kind of late to rock. I remember bringing in a cassette to fifth-grade art class and playing a song on it for the whole class in one of those school cassette players you remember if you went to elementary school in the '70s. Why art class? And why did the teacher let me? I suspect the answer to each question is the same: She hated me. The song was 'Stairway to Heaven.' I don't really remember anyone in class thanking me for showing them the light. I do remember my ears turning red, so red I didn't need a mirror to see it.

This glorious debut had a couple of follow-ups. In sixth grade, I found my Dad's 'The Best of Bread' cassette, with the song 'Freedom.' I didn't get mocked too much for playing it at recess. No, I got mocked more for playing the tape on this candy apple-red 'portable' stereo that was like a Walkman, except I insisted on bringing in the speakers that came with it. A little unwieldy. In seventh grade, when we had to do a project for The Fellowship of the Ring, I went to my guitar teacher's basement, where he had a four-track and makeshift studio, and wrote and recorded a song called "The Road Leads to Nowhere." I still don't get why that wasn't a good idea, although I do still remember everyone laughing at me so hard, I slammed the door shut on my finger running out of there. Hurt like hell, too.

By the end of high school, I was listening to Metallica and Celtic Frost and M.O.D. and S.O.D., so I'd more or less caught up, having already found Rush, AC/DC, Zeppelin, and of course the Beatles. I pretty much stopped listening to all of the classic rock bands except the Beatles at one point or another, although Zep and the Police certainly got airings from time to time, but recently, I've been filling in the gaps in my collection. Last month, I downloaded my favorite Cheap Trick. A couple of nights ago, I found some free Kinks on emusic. And I was thinking of how the Kinks had aged, and that got me thinking about how I perceived the bands back when I was a teenager and how I perceive them all now. Of course, if I want to post about it, I have to rank them. So here's one man's thoughts, in reverse order of how much I want to listen to them today:

16. Kiss

Never liked 'em.

15. Black Sabbath
Then: Seemed a little scary. I mean, even when I was listening to Celtic Frost and looking for the scariest metal I could find, I was a little afraid to check out Sabbath.
Now: Well, of course I eventually checked them out, and they're still a little scary; Ozzy would scare me if he were a temp working for me. I find that I really like what I really like by them, but they don't go as deep (in terms of quantity of quality songs) as I would like.
Songs I still like: Supernaut; Fairies Wear Boots

14. Yes
Then: I liked these guys. The musicianship was impressive, and I have a prog side to me. I liked 90215.
Now: Seem a little silly.
Songs I still like: I thought I liked "I'm Running" off Big Generator, but it turns out not so much.

13. The Kinks
Then: Seemed like a kind of generic classic rock band. I liked them OK, liked some of their songs a lot.
Now: I still admire the songwriting, but the music hasn't really aged well at all; it sounds very dated now. Don't like the arrangement, don't like the production. And that tends to make Ray Davies sound silly, even on a potentially good song like 'Living on a Thin Line.' Dave Davies is woefully underrated though.
Songs I still like: Tired of Waiting for You

12. Queen
Then: Wasn't interested.
Now: I admire the musicianship, and the production was good. And you've got to give it up for the ambition of Freddie Mercury. Most songs don't really resonate for me, though.
Songs I still like: Under Pressure

11. The Who
Then: Liked 'em fine. I really liked some of their songs a lot. I owned tapes of theirs, although you kind of had to back then. I remember really loving "Athena."
Now: They're definitely passe, and I can mock a Who fan as well as the next guy, but I suspect I'm due for a renaissance with them, where I'll pick up some of their hits. But my strongest feeling about them is that they had no heart.
Songs I still like: The Seeker (helped by its appearance in 'American Beauty'), and I guess Join Together and Who Are You.

10. The Doors
Then: See The Kinks. I liked some of what they did a lot, though. But overall, they weren't anything special.
Now: I came to be a big fan in college, bought all the discs, and when they were on, they were on. But I don't have anything by them now, and don't plan to.
Songs I still like: Peace Frog; Soft Parade

9. Cheap Trick
Then: See The Kinks. Liked them well enough.
Now: I really like their best songs. They really influenced the distorted-guitars brand of power-pop that I love, bands like Sloan. They just don't go all that deep. I've come to want to be entertained for every second of a song. I don't want it to take two minutes to warm up. I don't want it to go on one verse and chorus too long. And I don't want a pedestrian rock song. I kind of feel like too many of Cheap Trick's songs fit that last category; I only bought four of their tracks. In their favor, they aged great, especially if you like "Tonight It's You," from their '80s resurgence, which I do.
Songs I still like: Dream Police; Surrender; I Want You to Want Me; Tonight It's You

8. Rush
Then: Had to respect the greatness in the writing, and the proficiency of all three guys, but I found some of their stuff a little goofy, like Yes's. I mean, 2112 and 'The Trees' were a little silly, right? Or was I missing something?
Now: I really like the songwriting, which turns out to have been a big influence on my own, especially their '80s hits. But the production sounds a little too '80s. The 'classic' '70s stuff aged better.
Songs I still like: The Big Money; Time Stands Still

7. AC/DC
Then: Mostly I just gave props to Back in Black, which was a really deep album. I mean, they buried "Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution," you know?
Now: I later came to love the Bon Scott stuff, but after a while, a lot of it sounds a little pedestrian, bar band, and formulaic. I have all the Bon Scott stuff, but only because I got it free off Napster eight years ago.
Songs I still like: Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution; Highway to Hell; half of Powerage

6. Pink Floyd
Then: I was a huge fan of the "Wish You Were Here" album and selected stuff off The Dark Side of the Moon, and LOVED "Comfortably Numb" and "Hey You." But I only listened to what I heard on the radio.
Now: I guess they're kind of a band I'm keeping in reserve, that I can always get more into someday when I've got no one else to listen to. But I wouldn't mind getting my hands on "Wish You Were Here" again. Not really into the Syd Barrett stuff, or the The Division Bell era.
Songs I still like: Breathe; Shine On You Crazy Diamond

5. Van Halen
Then: I mean, any teenage guitar student is going to be into Van Halen. The first song I ever was taught to play was "Dance the Night Away," which I don't know why, because I'd never heard it at that point; my teacher chose it, probably because it wasn't hard. I eventually got into all of it, especially lesser known stuff like Van Halen II and Women and Children First.
Now: They lost me when Sammy came aboard. I still like the old stuff that got second-tier radio play, but only have it from Napster, and don't listen very often. Still sound great though; it's usually the writing that damns the weaker Halen.
Songs I still like: Little Guitars; Beautiful Girls

4. The Rolling Stones
Then: I mean, I knew they were bigger than The Kinks, but I wasn't much more impressed with them than I was with The Kinks. You know?
Now: I admire their oeuvre and everything, but after hearing everything I needed to hear 100 times, well, that was enough. When people say they like the Stones better than the Beatles, I get confused, and tilt my head, the way a dog will look at you.
Songs I still like: Gimme Shelter; The Last Time; Miss You; Only Rock 'n Roll

3. The Police
Then: One of the first albums I ever got was "Synchronicity." I really didn't hear any of the early non-radio stuff until college ...
Now: ... when I got really into it. Great songwriters, and great players, and it still holds up today. They wrote more songs that I like than a lot of other bands, but not everything they did was up my alley.
Songs I still like: Can't Stand Losing You; Next to You; Don't Stand So Close To me; Driven to Tears; Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic; Does Everyone Stare; On Any Other Day; Synchronicity I

2. Led Zeppelin
Then: Maybe my first love. The Beatles, I had those stupid Red and Blue albums, and you really miss out on the color that makes the Beatles great if that's all you're hearing -- no "And Your Bird Can Sing," and "For Sale" is just woefully underrepresented. On the other hand, I had the first five Zeppelin records in high school, and thought they were the balls; I listened to Houses of the Holy every night when I went to bed for like two years.
Now: More than anyone else above them on this list, they stand up. Still sounds great to me, although I know they've been remastered. The songs were just excellent, and diverse for classic hard rock.
Songs I still like: Immigrant Song; Celebration Day; Since I've Been Loving You; Battle of Evermore; Misty Mountain Hop; Song Remains the Same; Rain Song; Over the Hills and Far Away; Custard Pie; The Rover; In My Time of Dying; this is getting a little ridiculous, isn't it?

1. The Beatles
Then: I knew what I was hearing was amazing in terms of sheer quantity of quality, but I really think you've got to own them to get them. On those two greatest hits records, you got stuff you didn't like (well, I didn't like) like Michelle and In My Life instead of Hey Bulldog and, you know, pretty much anything great from Abbey Road. (I think the White Album choices are awful too.)
Now: Well, I mean, they're the freakin' Beatles, now aren't they?
Songs I still like: Um ...

OK, you may go now

2009-04-21T12:24:00.003-04:00

So suddenly, Dick Cheney's got a lot to say:

"What I find disturbing is the extent to which [President Obama] has gone to Europe, for example, and seemed to apologize profusely in Europe, and then to Mexico, and apologize there, and so forth.

“And I think you have to be very careful. The world outside there, both our friends and our foes, will be quick to take advantage of a situation if they think they're dealing with a weak president or one who is not going to stand up and aggressively defend America's interests.

“The United States provides most of the leadership in the world… I don’t think we have much to apologize for.

Well, depends who you mean by 'we.' Me and my friends? Not so much. But 'we' as in Dick Cheney and, well, anybody Dick Cheney might have anything to do with? Let's just say that if he would apologize -- or, you know, wouldn't have done all the messed-up stuff he did -- the current president wouldn't have to.

Cheney said that as long as we're going to start declassifying memos showing what sick twists he and his puppets were, we should also declassify the ones that show that the torture was entirely productive. “And I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was, as well as to see this debate over the legal opinions.”

Yes, I think we'd all like to see those. Cheney also knows how we should deal with Central and South America, parts of which, for reasons unkown, also don't like us much lately:

“You have millions of people all across South America who are watching how we respond. And if they see an American president sort of cozying up to somebody like Daniel Ortega or Chavez, I think it's not helpful. I think it sort of sets the wrong standard.”

“I've seen Hugo Chavez in operation before, and Daniel Ortega down in Nicaragua. These are people who operate in our hemisphere, but who don't believe in and aren't supportive of basic fundamental principles and policies that most of us in this hemisphere adhere to.”

“Basically, the position we took in the Bush administration was to ignore it. I think that was the right thing to do.”

"OK, now I'll take some questions. Yes?"
"Uh, yeah, Mr. Former Vice President/Torture King, troy from kinde words here. Can you please cite the evidence of 'ignoring it' being 'the right thing to do'? And I have a follow-up."

“The United States provides most of the leadership in the world. We have for a long time. And I don't think we've got much to apologize for. You can have a debate about that."

Gee, you think? Cheney also said he never got a chance to share his thoughts with Joe Biden, who didn't ask Cheney for his insights. Go figure.

Move over, crazy, there's a new crazy in town

2009-04-13T11:19:00.001-04:00

Can this really be her first appearance here on kinde words? I find that hard to believe. Anyway, Sarah Palin's chief competitor for ... um, whatever had this take on the president's recent G20 summit appearance:

I think that there may have been agreements made behind closed doors that we aren’t even aware of, that could be ceding American sovereignty.

Can't he just cede Minnesota? Or Congress? Bachmann continued:

That would be very frightening.

She would know.

I have seen ...

2009-04-02T14:20:00.000-04:00

... this black SUV. Up close. From behind.

Sorry to say

2009-03-31T09:47:00.001-04:00

I'm still a little afraid of Germany.

Next up: The GOP budget proposal

2009-03-29T18:17:00.001-04:00

My favorite NCAA Tournament phrase: "score the ball." I'll also except "score the basketball."

Brush with oldness

2009-03-28T14:19:00.003-04:00

Was cutting through town today with my peeps, heading to the library for a pickup, when an SUV stopped in front of me, hazards blinking, on a stretch where there was no way around him. The driver hops out and rushes to open the door behind his seat, and pulls out some books. Meanwhile, an older woman is slowly progressing out of the passenger-side door in front. We're in front of the library, so I interpret what I'm seeing as a guy stopping traffic (i.e., me) so he can let out some old lady to go to the library - even though we're surrounded by parking lots that abut the library; we're in between two right then. So I make a face, just a little impatient face, not the full-on where you throw your arms up in the air at the injustice of it all. And the woman, now coming around the back of the SUV, gives me the dismissive wave, like the wealthy alumni used to give at Rutgers basketball games when a ref made a call against us. The "ah, go bite yourself" wave. You've seen it.

"That's Martha Stewart!" yells my wife. And sure enough, the driver -- chauffeur, actually -- hands the books -- cookbooks -- to the old biddy, and off she ambles to the sushi restaurant across the street. The driver clears out of there quickly; I definitely got a hit of harried off him. I imagine I'm not the first driver he unwillingly annoyed. I hear she's not too popular around here. Probably the black Chevy. She couldn't afford a Lexus? Or an Escalade? Anyway, I guess I'm lucky I escaped without getting a shiv in the ribs.

Fast becoming my new favorite Palin

2009-03-26T20:26:00.003-04:00

From TPM:

"So I'm looking around for somebody to pray with, I just need maybe a little help, maybe a little extra," said Palin. "And the McCain campaign, love 'em, you know, there're a lot of people around me, but nobody I could find that I wanted to hold hands with and pray."

Where to start?

1. "Maybe a little help, maybe a little extra"? Just a little? Like, almost? As in maybe, with just a little extra, you're right in that thing?

2. The idea of Sarah Palin thinking God wants her to be VP easily replaces the previous titleholder for Most Ridiculous Example of Someone Thinking God's Pulling For 'Em, which was held by professional athletes for at least 50 years until the 2000 presidential election.

3. Which god do you think Sarah Palin prays to? I like to think it's not my God. Can we wake up Dana Carvey for this? And how about her patron saint? St. Jude? St. Rita of Cascia? St. Dymphna? St. Catherine of Sweden, of course. St. John Chrysostom?

4. Dear Sarah: If we were on a plane, and it was going down, and there was no one else on it, and I was looking for someone to hold hands and pray with, I would look at you, and then I would look out the window, and then I would look at you again, and then I would shrug and say "Fuck it, I guess we're going down." Which is to say, I didn't poll the McCain camp or anything, but I bet the feeling was mutual.

Yer pal
troy

Tony Atlas Shrugged

2009-03-23T16:04:00.007-04:00

What would happen if fans stopped attending sporting events, presumably because tickets prices are too high, which is presumably because athletes’ salaries are too high?

And what would happen if the commissioners of the major sports leagues told their athletes they were making too much money, and the salary system was going to change immediately.

What would happen if the athletes went on strike and the team owners, and presumably the fans, refused to budge on the ideal that athletes should not be allowed make millions of dollars more per year than the average worker?

Is that something we’d be interested in?

Because a recent ESPN/Seton Hall University poll proclaimed that the majority of its respondents (40 percent) said that baseball’s biggest problem is players making too much money.

Huh? … What? … Whuh?

Not steroids? Not the prices of tickets? Not the length of ballgames? Not the length of the season? Not the dwindling numbers of African-Americans playing the game? Not the “Viva Viagra” commercials played incessantly on TV to young viewers? Not the fact that the most important games of the season aren’t decided until hours after little kids have gone to bed?

It’s not Bud Selig? It’s not even Jeannie Zelasko?

The biggest problem in our national game — and no, historically and culturally, the American Rugby League (a.k.a., the NFL) is not our national pastime, but that’s a post for another day — is that Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez make too much money??? That Scott Boras is too good of an agent?? That the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers spend too much money on salaries???

Oh sure, millions of people are outraged right now over bailouts and economic nationalism and unseemly bonus money, yadda, yadda, yadda. And, oh boy, was there an outcry from many of these same people when Candidate Obama suggested that people making more than $250,000 per year should pay a larger percentage in taxes than those who are comparatively closer to the poverty line! (Remember those idiotic chain e-mails, supposedly based upon an "actual" classroom exercise by an “actual” high school teacher that likened tax hikes on the wealthy to an entire class automatically getting C’s?)

But you ask these same millions of nimrods if there should be salary caps in sports, they say Yes. Definitely yes! Why? Because it’s “not fair” that large-market teams like the Yankees have a major financial advantage! The playing field, in baseball, is “not level!” I’ve stopped counting how many dummies I know who say they enjoy football more than baseball because the American Rugby League “has parity” and doesn’t allow teams to simply outspend everyone else.

Though, when you look at the past 10 Super Bowl champs …

(Pittsburgh, New York, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, New England, New England, Tampa Bay, New England, Baltimore, St. Louis)

… And the past 10 World Series champs:

(Philadelphia, Boston, St. Louis, Chicago, Boston, Florida, Anaheim, Arizona, New York, New York)

… I’m not exactly seeing much of a difference in “parity.” If anything, the playing field looks a tiny bit more “level” in baseball, the sport without a salary cap. Just sayin’.

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand argued that individual achievements (and the financial fruit of that achievement) enable society to thrive, and that, over time, coerced self-sacrifice cheapens and ultimately destroys a society.

Listen to any hard-core football fan (or better yet, Steve Young or Emmitt Smith) long enough, and you'll hear them complain about how the best NFL teams of today can't compare to the old Steelers or Niners or Cowboys juggernauts. Why? The salary cap.

So let Manny and A-Rod get their money if somebody’s willing to pay them. Let the teams from New York and Boston and Los Angeles outspend everyone if they have the resources to do so. Who cares if a left-handed pitcher or a trash-talking wide receiver breaks the bank? Why do you really care?

Or then, let’s not pay the very best athletes a dime more than your average CEO — still a pretty sweet salary, if you ask me — and let them walk off the playing field in disgust. Let them quit.

And then let’s not pay any attention to sports, and let’s start watching a hell of a lot more CSPAN, and let's start paying a lot more attention to how our children do in math class, which probably is something we should’ve been doing all along …

Wow

2009-03-21T22:35:00.000-04:00

Duke really still gets all the calls, huh?

I want to make it clear

2009-03-12T12:59:00.006-04:00

I am NOT mocking an 18-year-old girl whose single momdom just got a little more firmly entrenched. No, I'm mocking the delusional woman who wrote this, which was released under Bristol Palin's name ...

"Unfortunately, my family has seen many people say and do many things to 'cash in' on the Palin name," she said. "Sometimes that greed clouds good judgment and the truth."

... and thought anyone would be fooled into thinking it wasn't she who wrote it. I understand other right-wingers might write something like this purely for their base, but Sarah Palin really expects you to believe it. Just as soon as you figure out what the hell it means.

Dancing about architecture

2009-03-09T09:37:00.005-04:00

So I'm trying to get in on the Animal Collective Madness; the critics are very big on Merriweather Post Pavillion right now. There's a lot to like about it. And I'm getting into the lyrics, which I often ignore, but there's something about the way they juxtapose with the type of music the band is making on this record. I was reading an interview with the dude who sings (and presumably wrote) the first track, In the Flowers, and he's definitely of the school where he doesn't want to get into too much detail, because the words should mean whatever the listener thinks they mean. Anyway, the lyrics to that song fascinate me. Here's one posting I found of them:

A dancer who was high in a field from a moment
Caught my breath on my way home
Couldn’t stop that spinning force
I fell into you
Everything drowns you to giggle
You are up with the flower and I care

So the dancer who gets wild to the deep reveling rhythm
But I am always away for weeks
that pass slow like mind gets lost
Feeling envy for the kid who danced in spite of anything
And we’re out in the flowers and feel better

If I could just leave my body for the night

Then we could be dancing no more missing you while I am gone
Then we could be dancing and you’d smile and say I like this song
And then ours would meet them we will recognize nothing’s wrong
And I wouldn’t feel so selfish I won’t be this way very long
To hold you in time
To hold you in time
To hold you in time
To hold you in time

And we’re dancing, early hours drunken days finally ended
And the streets turn for pillowcase
And I fumble all good lie
Then the ecstasy turns the writhing light through our windowpane
Now I am gone, I left flowers for you there

I'm not convinced these are 100 percent right, not by a long shot; I'm willing to believe they're purposely fragmented and incoherent, kind of in a 'this, not linearly, is how we experience life' way; it's more that I'm saying when I listen to the song with the words in front of me, some of the phrases seem like a reach. But I'm willing to work with them.

So I was talking about the freedom to interpret the lyrics as we please. I don't think I'm going out on a limb to say that the guy sees some kid who's obliviously dancing away, and the singer is feeling a little sorry for himself, because he's lonely and can't forget it, unlike this kid, who surely has worries of his or her own but has seemingly put them behind him for now. And, the way almost anything can, it reminds the singer of his girlfriend or wife, and how much he misses her, and he wishes he could be with her now.

Then we could be dancing no more missing you while I am gone
Then we could be dancing and you’d smile and say I like this song

I love this part, and while obviously "this song" could be whatever song the two of them would be dancing to, I immediately came to think of it as *this* song, In the Flowers. And the way it resonated with me is it made me a little jealous. I've made some music, and I've married a woman with whom I have little in common culturally. She doesn't much like my kind of music, although she is kind about it. So I was a little jealous of the guy, imagining he had married a woman who liked his music, and who wanted to share it with him. I mean, that's why a lot of us started making music. All of us, really, did it to connect with someone, if not someone specific.

Anyway, I was thinking about the song again on the train in this morning, when I realized the singer could mean something else. I mean, he's fantasizing that she's there, dancing with him (and that 'nothing's wrong'). Maybe he's also dreaming about her liking the song. Maybe they don't connect in that way, and that is part of the fantasy too. I'm in the throes of new fandom, so I'm reading everything I can get my hands on about these guys. A couple of reviews of the album have denigrated the lyrics. But I think the lyrics to this song might be perfect.

Dear Jackass

2009-03-05T13:17:00.003-05:00

OK, I get it. You've decided not to like David Foster Wallace. Or, seemingly, decided to hate him. It's fine. With me, I mean. For you, it's a loss. Your loss. But I respect your experience: You didn't like Infinite Jest -- felt violated, or felt some trust violated, by its ending, or by its length and the promise you felt went unfulfilled. I mean, sure, he also wrote some excellent essays/reportage. And the short stories. See, even I am not a total Infinite Jest convert; I love the last two books of short stories, and the essays, but didn't absorb or connect with Infinite Jest on my first read through. Of course, in my case, I assume the shortcoming is mine, where you assume it's DFW's. This might be connected to your oth-- the other issue. Let's not call it your other issue. The other issue is that Wallace knew a lot of words, and what they meant, and what they connoted, and in each instance he preferred to use the one he meant. You seem to regard this as a sort of showing off, intellectual braggadocio or something. Well, that's fine too. You don't have to care that other people like the writing. I don't know, maybe you think no one should write about astrophysics, because you don't get that either. Probably you're against the existence of Popular Mechanics. Is Popular Mechanics even around anymore? Well, if it's not, that just proves your point, am I right? Anyway, I also know he has a vocal following, and that can be annoying too. I'm sure it seems quite daring to be in the vanguard of a blacklash against it. You think the footnotes were cutesy. Any or all of the above. It's not important.

So OK, we've established that you hate DFW, even though you've read either very little or none of his work. And seriously, I'm OK with that. How could I not be? You want to seethe over footnotes? Have at it. I just have one favor to ask. Could you please shut the hell up about it? Could you please stop being so proud of it, or of being contrarian, or of whatever impulses have led you to write about it? I don't like Madonna. I don't like tomatoes. I don't like my cousin Mervyn. I also don't write 1,000 words about it. I mean, who would care?

Ranking the Presidents my damn self: Hail to the Chef

2009-03-04T15:32:00.007-05:00

Happy March 4th, everyone! In case you forgot, for 148 years, starting with John Adams in 1797, this was the traditional date the Chief Justice would swear into office the President of the United States.

And in case you forgot, we’ve got a new president. And depending on which AM radio stations you’re listening to, his name might be Something Hussein Something. Whatever.

Between Mrs. Tonto’s request that back on Jan. 20th I cook a special Inauguration Day dinner featuring selected items on President Obama's luncheon menu, and CSPAN ranking the presidents from worst (Buchanan) to first (Lincoln), and Ol’ Abe turning 200 a few weeks ago, and Washington turning 277 a couple weekends ago — the White House has been on my mind quite a bit lately.

Not to be outdone by Kimo Sabe’s recent college-campus-quality cyber-lecture about almost everything the Beatles ever burped or coughed …

… Here’s my list of the Presidents of the United States, from worst to first. (Hint: It might or might not seem eerily similar to CSPAN’s. I don’t really know, because I didn’t really read it.)

44. Herbert Hoover (1929-1933)
Probably not the absolute worst president we’ve ever had, but tell that to the Joad family. And residents of Hooverville. And all those who pelted his motorcades with eggs and rotten fruit during the ’32 campaign. The final months of his lame-duck administration were so terrifying we eventually decided March 4 was too long to wait for a new president.

Favorite food: Corned beef hash with tomato sauce.

43. James Garfield (1881)
Got himself shot by some crazy guy inside a D.C. train station barely four months into his term. Lingered for 80 days before dying in his sickbed at the Jersey Shore of a heart attack, which was followed by blood poisoning and bronchial pneumonia. Died with a bullet still in his body because back in 1881, even though we were smart enough to invent a metal detector, we were still too dumb to realize that the brass coils in Garfield’s bed kept setting the damn thing off. Probably would have lived if several doctors hadn’t inserted their unsterilized fingers into the wound to probe for the bullet. Holy crap. This is wayyyy too depressing.

Think about this for a second: What was the quality of life like for the people who weren't president?!?

Favorite food: Bread (Again, just depressing.)

42. Andrew Johnson (1865-1869)
What was Lincoln thinkin? Ol’ Abe received so many death threats before his first inauguration that he snuck into D.C. in the middle of the night. So for his second term, Abe taps Andrew Johnson, a pro-union Southerner who promptly shows up drunk at the inauguration. As luck would have it, Lincoln becomes the first president to get assassinated, Johnson takes over and turns out to be a fervent white supremacist hell-bent on destroying Reconstruction. Oh yeah, and he got impeached.

Favorite food: Spanish-style stuffed eggplant. (Served by a Klansman.)

41. Barack Obama (2009 - present)
Don’t get all upset, kids, I voted for him. In fact, I even stuck one of his campaign signs in my lawn this past October, much to my neighbors' chagrin. But, he’s a president, and that means he’s gotta be on the list, even if my rankings are published a handful of weeks into his term. So that’s why he debuts on the charts a couple notches ahead of the guy who liked bread. It’s only fair. Time to get to work.

Favorite food: Chili.

40. James Buchanan (1857-1861)
A Northerner who sympathized with the South. Failed to avert the Civil War, which is cited by scholars as the single-worst failure by an American president. Despised abolitionists and was believed to be personally involved in the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision. Normally ranked last on most lists.

But hey, it could’ve been worse: Pat Buchanan could’ve been president.

Favorite food: Pennsylvania Dutch stuffed shoulder of pork. (Maybe it’s because I didn’t eat lunch today, but this sounds really yummy.)

39. Bill Clinton (1993-2001)
Man, this asshole really had us fooled, didn’t he? And I voted for him TWICE. First term inspired Rush Limbaugh’s and Newt Gingrich’s rise to power. Second term inspired Dubya to defeat the guy who invented the internet. Bubba's presence during the 2008 campaign inspired us to turn against his wife’s presidential bid. In sum, this guy is a horse’s ass.

Favorite food: Chicken enchiladas.

38. Martin Van Buren (1837-1841)
I dunno. He just sounds like a dopey president.

Favorite food: Huguenot torte.

37. Chester Arthur (1881-1885)
Him, too.

Favorite food: Mutton chops.

36. John Tyler (1841-1845)
Him, too.

Favorite food: Sally Lunn. (It’s the name of a teacake. We think. … Hey now!)

35. Rutherford Hayes (1877-1881)
Truly a dope. Stole the election from Sam Tilden and had to take the Oath in private for fear of public rioting at the inauguration.

Favorite Food: Roast Beef.

34. Benjamin Harrison (1889-1893)
Booooorrrrrrrr-ing. ... See his grandfather (No. 6).

Favorite Food: Fish chowder.

33. Franklin Pierce (1853-1857)
Man, in the 19th Century it was pretty much “Lincoln and Jackson and pray for rain,” wasn’t it?

Favorite food: Boiled lobster.

32. James Monroe (1817-1825)
They named a doctrine after him or something. Or maybe I’m simply confusing him with somebody else. (See No. 11.)

Favorite food: Gumbo.

31. Andrew Jackson (1829-1837)
Fell 25 rankings from the last time I did one these polls back in 1978 for the sole reason that I’ve since learned that I had him confused with the guy nicknamed “Stonewall,” which I’m sure we all agree that this is a pretty damned cool nickname whether you’re 7 or 37. “Old Hickory” is OK, I guess. …

Was first president to have his wife accused of past bigamy by the press. (And they were right!)

Was one of our most influential chief execs, but it’s going to take me a while to get over the fact that he’s not “Stonewall.”

Favorite Food: Roast leg of pork.

30. Zachary Taylor (1849-1850)
Got elected because he was a war hero or something.

Favorite food: Crabmeat on shells.

29. Ulysses Grant (1869-1877)
Him, too.

Favorite Food: Roman punch. (What is this? A food? A drink?)

28. Dwight Eisenhower (1953-1961)
Him, too.

Favorite Food: Quail hash. (Tastes like chicken.)

27. Millard Fillmore (1850-1853)
Every time I see his name I think of reading the Sunday funnies as a kid, and there, toward the back with the tire ads was “Mallard Fillmore.” I didn’t really follow it, but I thought Mallard Fillmore was a hilariously funny name. I still chuckle about it.

Favorite food: Roast capon.

26. Richard Nixon (1969-1974)
Honestly, when I watch a TV show or movie that includes someone wearing a Nixon mask while performing a bank robbery, it just makes my week.

Favorite food: Beef Wellington.

25. Warren Harding (1921-1923)
Women and the press loved him. Died of a stroke midway through his term. His administration was the reason why most of us were forced to learn about the Teapot Dome Scandal back in high school History.

Favorite food: Roast filet mignon with sherried mushrooms.

24. George H.W. Bush (1989-1993)
Never really looked at Dan Rather the same way after Poppy got through with him. And we never really looked at Poppy the same way after he wet his pants with excitement over the technological improvements at grocery stores.

Might or might not be true, but it’s entirely possible he hated Dubya’s presidency even more than the rest of us did.

Favorite food: Broiled steak with baked potato.

23. Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929)
A popular, small-government conservative who restored public confidence in the White House. He pretty much was what Reagan fanatics mistakenly believe what Reagan was.

Presidency was tarnished somewhat by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 when Coolidge basically reacted in the exact same fashion as What’s-His-Name did after Hurricane Katrina.

Favorite food: Baked beans.

22. William Taft (1909-1913)
The only president to weigh more than 300 pounds. The last president to wear facial hair. Was also the only former president to serve on the Supreme Court.

Favorite food: Lobster Newberg.

21. Gerald Ford (1974-1977)
A vice president and president, and never won an election for either office. Because of this man I can look my slightly-above-average children in the eyes and honestly say, “Yes, play your cards right and be a nice guy and someday you, too, can be President of the United States of America. Or at least play Big Ten football."

Favorite food: Spaghetti and meatballs.

20. James Polk (1845-1849)
Often listed between eighth and 12th in most of these types of rankings. Greatly expanded the geographic size of the country, lowered tariffs, defeated the Mexicans, scared off the British, established a treasury system that lasted for 60 years, and nearly purchased Cuba(!). But I’ll never forgive him for opposing the Wilmont Proviso. Never.

Favorite food: Tennessee ham.

19. William McKinley (1897-1901)
His favorite food was bacon and eggs. This alone will put a man in my Presidential Top 20. Somebody please pass me the toast and jelly!

18. John Quincy Adams (1825-1829)
Took the oath of office on March 4, 1825 with his hand on a book of laws as a symbol of the separation of church and state. Why more presidents don’t do this escapes me. ... Like his old man, served only one term. Like his old man, failed to figure out that you really were not supposed to put political enemies in your Cabinet.

Served in the House after his presidency and is perhaps the only major figure in American history who knew the Founding Fathers and Abraham Lincoln.

Favorite food: Baked codfish pie.

17. Lyndon Johnson (1963-1969)
He tried. He really did.

Favorite food: Chili.

16. Ronald Reagan (1981-1989)
Right man at the right time. Inspired millions of white people to be proud to be Americans again. Does it matter that the Soviet Union would have collapsed even if he weren’t president? Nahhhhhhhh.

Favorite food: Broiled swordfish with lemon butter.

15. John Adams (1797-1801)
That was a nice job by A-Bart’s kid in that HBO miniseries. A NICE job. Almost made us completely forget what a pompous ass Adams was.

Favorite food: Baked salmon.

14. Jimmy Carter (1977-1981)
I don’t care what anyone says, he was wicked smaht.

Favorite food: Brunswick stew with buttermilk biscuits.

13. Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921)
Him, too.

Favorite food: Roast turkey with cornbread stuffing.

12. Harry Truman (1945-1953)
The original Decider. The Japanese never quite looked at us the same way again. He (and we) can thank David McCullough’s 1992 biography for Harry’s rehabilitated modern image.

Favorite food: Tuna noodle casserole.

11. George W. Bush (2001-2009)
The most fanatical of the GOP apologists claim history will vindicate Bush and Cheney just as it exonerated Truman and Marshall. So let’s pretend for a moment that they’re correct. (Scary, huh?)

Favorite food: Tacos.

10. Josiah Bartlett (1999-2007)
His great-grandfather’s great-grandfather was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. An expert economist. Nearly studied to become a priest.

Granted amnesty to illegal immigrants from the Americas, appointed the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice and first female Chief Justice, negotiated a peace settlement between Israel and Palestine, created millions of new jobs, provided strong support for alternative energy, orchestrated a Social Security reform plan, and dealt with major foreign policy crises in Haiti, Colombia, Bolivia, Equatorial Kundu, India, Pakistan, China, Taiwan, Russia, Iran, Syria, Israel, and Qumar. He got censured. (He got over it). He got shot. (He survived). His youngest daughter got kidnapped. (She was rescued.)

Yeah, I know this was a TV show. But it got me through the Dubya Administration with most of my marbles intact.

Favorite Food: Didn’t like French people, but loved their cuisine, as evidenced by the “Stackhouse Fillibuster” episode.

9. Grover Cleveland (1885-1889 & 1893-1897)
CSPAN ranked him 21st, which probably means he wasn’t all that great and he wasn’t really all that awful. Regarded as a classic liberal, he is the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms. Seriously, even Billary couldn’t pull off that trick. That is greatness, my friends.

Favorite food: Turban of chicken.

8. James Madison (1809-1817)
Our shortest president (5-4) and the Red Coats lit the White House on fire on his watch.

But he spoke fluent Latin. Graduated Princeton in two years. Pretty much wrote the Constitution. And the Bill of Rights. And cranked out a good portion of the Federalist Papers. Plus, Dolly was a total babe. This guy had skills.

Favorite food: Williamsburg pound cake.

7. Franklin Roosevelt (1933-1945)
"He lifted himself from a wheelchair to lift the nation from its knees.”

Generally regarded as a lock at No. 3 on these types of lists. But I’ll say this: Having Hitler, Stalin, and Tojo in his foursome turned out to be an advantage. Who’s not going to come out looking great after 18 holes with those guys? And falling asleep at Yalta – or was it Malta? – was a bad job.

But honestly, name one other candidate who could get re-elected even though most of the country expected him to be dead within six months. That too, my friends, is greatness.

Favorite food: Boiled salmon with egg sauce.

6. William Harrison (1841)
“Old Tippecanoe” croaked 32 days after taking office. Honestly, we could’ve used a few more presidents like him. Seriously.

Favorite food: Roast wild duck.

5. Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909)
His face is on Mount Rushmore. They named a genre of stuffed animals after him. And that Panama Canal thing worked out pretty well. And until Gov. Palin ascends to the Oval, he remains the last president who knew how to field-dress a moose.

Favorite food: Roast suckling pig. (And I betcha he ate it with his hands!)

4. Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809)
A statesman, architect, archaeologist, horticulturist, inventor, and founder of the University of Virginia.

The tinfoil hats in CSPAN’s poll had TJ listed as seventh. And I know, I know, as a political administrator he had his shortcomings. But gimme a break. Not in the Top 5? He was a thinker – did you READ the Declaration of Independence – not a politician, and he grew to detest the office of the presidency. Honestly, I don’t think his bad mood wasn’t anything modern central-air conditioning could have fixed.

Favorite food: Wine jelly. (Interesting.)

3. John Kennedy (1961-1963)
Big Red Sox fan. And in the early 1960s chicks really dug the long ball, if you know what I mean (wink, wink).

Favorite food: Fish chowder.

2. Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865)
OK, this is how smart ol' Abe was: After he died they scooped out his brain and weighed it. Just to see if it was bigger than everyone else's.

One of America’s great thinkers and writers, he only had about a year’s worth of formal education. He preserved the Union and freed the slaves, and managed to do this with his crazy wife yapping in his ear.

Abraham Lincoln personifies the values of honesty and integrity, as well as respect for human freedom. And his monument is awesome.

Favorite food: Apples. (As in, how do you like them apples? Or something.)

1. George Washington (1789-1797)
As a lad, he admitted to chopping down the cherry tree and he didn’t blame it on the King or the House Democrats or Rush Limbaugh or the Taliban or the Jews. His favorite food was beefsteak and kidney pie – a MAN’S food – and he used wooden teeth to chew it up with gusto.

Washington is the absolute standard all American presidents and military leaders are measured against.

The historians and perfessers usually save this spot for Ol' Abe, the same way classic rock stations rig it so that Stairway is No. 1 in their Fourth of July Weekend “Firecracker 500” programming. So consider this one of those rare years that Teenage Wasteland (Babba O’Reilly) wins.

Or you can consider this: If the father of your country isn’t even ranked No. 1, how great is your country?

Thank you.

You're laughing

2009-02-28T19:26:00.003-05:00

... while I'm nodding. Unless the video gets pulled down. In which case, you're cursing, while I'm laughing.

I'm a born lever puller, me

2009-02-28T17:06:00.003-05:00

I was just missing London, sort of, where I've been once for pleasure, and for something like seven weeks for business. But I wasn't missing the Eye or Veeraswamy or the chicken wings at the Japanese place near the Sanderson or even walking through St. James Park on my way to the office from one hotel, or how I'd always try to pick a different route to and from the Sanderson from and to the office. I can remember fondly the feeling I got when someone would ask me directions, and I could help them, but I'm not missing that, or even the feeling of heading in from Heathrow (although with all the traffic on the A4, it wasn't anticipation that was the prominent feeling there).

I'm remembering the ride back to Heathrow. More specifically, I'm remembering the moment the car came up on Harrods. I'd gone with the missus on my first visit there, and it was the last landmark I'd recognize on my way out of town, and the last part of town I'd know I was in. Harrods is in Knightsbrige, and then what? Well, Kensington, but I'd never been in much of it, and not on Brompton Road, which is what the car was taking out of the city. Passing Harrods was goodbye to London, and some kind of forlornness related to whether I'd ever return, even when I knew I'd be back three days later. Maybe on those occasions, it had to do with a return to routine back home. Maybe I was thinking of Veeraswamy, subconsciously, but it was more feeling than thinking.

The feeling is of a piece with my feelings about Amsterdam. I've been there three times -- the last two alone, the first with a "friend" with whom I got along so famously, I opted to spend the last half of our week there alone. Amsterdam was my first trip outside North America, and still kind of envelops my prototype feelings about Europe. And when I decided to treat myself to nine days of vacation, by myself, I decided to spend a couple of days in Paris, and 24 hours in Brussels, having never been in either city -- and five days in Amsterdam. Again. And I was lonely there, and I enjoyed it very much. Maybe most, I like going to the Dam, the big open square in front of the Royal Palace, hard by the Nieuwe Kerk. I always go in winter, and I like to go to Dam Square at night. Short of maybe captivity, I think there must be no easier place to feel alone.

This is all somehow related to how I felt when I started The Suffering Channel, the last story in Oblivion, the last book of DFW's that I had yet to read, and realized I would never begin another DFW book or story in a DFW book again, but I'm not a deep enough thinker to put my finger on how.

Anyway, I wish I were in London. I'd like to get about three orders of those wings.

DFW kills me

2009-02-23T08:47:00.003-05:00

I'm reading Oblivion, his last collection of short stories, for the first time. Which means you should be jealous, whether you've already read it or not. Just the beginning of Good Old Neon:

My whole life I've been a fraud. I'm not exaggerating. Pretty much all I've ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It's a little more complicated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it's to be liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the idea. I did well in school, but deep down the whole thing's motive wasn't to learn or improve myself but just to do well, to get good grades and make sports teams and perform well. To have a good transcript or varsity letters to show people. I didn't enjoy it much because I was always scared I wouldn't do well enough. The fear made me work really hard, so I'd always do well and end up getting what I wanted. But then, once I got the best grade or made All City or got Angela Mead to let me put my hand on her breast, I wouldn't feel much of anything except maybe fear that I wouldn't be able to get it again. The next time or next thing I wanted. I remember being down in the rec room in Angela Mead's basement on the couch and having her let me get my hand up under her blouse and not even really feeling the soft aliveness or whatever of her breast because all I was doing was thinking, 'Now I'm the guy that Mead let get to second with her.' Later that seemed so sad. This was in middle school. She was a very big-hearted, quiet, self-contained, thoughtful girl -- she's a veterinarian now, with her own practice -- and I never even really saw her, I couldn't see anything except who I might be in her eyes, this cheerleader and probably number two or three among the most desirable girls in middle school that year. She was much more than that, she was beyond all that adolescent ranking and popularity crap, but I never really let her be or saw her as more, although I put up a very good front as somebody who could have deep conversations and really wanted to know and understand who she was inside.

Just the tip of the iceberg, of course; then of course he goes off in fourteen different dimensions in ways I never could. If you've never read him, add my voice to those of the masses: Go to the Howling Fantods site and read one of the essays or short stories they link to over there and get started.

Next up: finding WMDs in Iraq. Again.

2009-02-19T12:55:00.004-05:00

Think Progress said this better than I will, but I wanted to get a record of it here. Rick Santorum, having capped a brilliant career in gay studies with his work showing that homosexuality and bestiality are the same in the eyes of God, has moved on to the comparatively light subject of Islam. After claiming that Americans know too little about the faith:

The Quran is perfect just the way it is, that’s why it is only written in Islamic.

Trust me: In context, it's even weirder. Plus, you wouldn't understand it anyway, unless you speak Jew.

Ranking the Beatles my damn self: the final analysis

2009-02-13T13:52:00.001-05:00

The top 12 Beatles songs (subjectively) break down like this:

Magical Mystery Tour: 3 songs
Revolver: 3 songs
Sgt. Pepper: 1 songs
For Sale: 1 song
Past Masters vol. II: 1 song
Abbey Road: 1 song
Rubber Soul: 1 song
The Beatles: 1 song

Obviously, there are issues with the stats; Hey Jude was a single, and so were some of the songs that also were on albums, most notably the songs on Magical Mystery Tour. But we have to work with the data we have.

Let's expand it to the top 25:

Revolver: 5
Abbey Road: 4
The Beatles: 4
Magical Mystery Tour: 3
For Sale: 3
Sgt. Pepper: 2
Past Masters vol. II: 2
Rubber Soul: 1
Help!: 1

Wouldn't have thought Abbey Road would be that well represented. I knew the heavy For Sale representation was coming, but I'm surprised there isn't more from Rubber Soul and Help! Probably worth doing a top 40:

Revolver: 6
Abbey Road: 6
The Beatles: 5
For Sale: 4
Sgt. Pepper: 4
Help!: 4
Magical Mystery Tour: 3
Let It Be: 2
Past Masters vol. II: 2
Rubber Soul: 1
With the Beatles: 1
Yellow Submarine: 1
A Hard Day's Night: 1

Definitely worth noting that there are four more Rubber Soul songs from 41 through 50, which explains a lot. I'm still surprised by Abbey Road, and happy that they went out on top. Help! is more where I expected it, too. But I didn't know Abbey Road would be right there with Revolver. Revolver, I probably knew.

Know what? Let's do down to the point just before where I stop loving songs. That's the top 100, conveniently enough:

White Album: 16
Abbey Road: 12
Sgt. Pepper: 9
Revolver: 8
Past Masters vol. II: 7
Rubber Soul: 7
Magical Mystery Tour: 7
Past Masters vol. I: 6
For Sale: 6
Help!: 5
With the Beatles: 5
Let It Be: 4
A Hard Day's Night: 3
Yellow Submarine: 3
Please Please Me: 2

Thoughts: I bet your list is mostly in that order ... I might have Rubber Soul a little higher than you and Past Masters vol. I, Let It Be, and Please Please Me a little lower ... Most albums flesh out between the top 40 and the top 100 pretty much the same, with the exceptions of the White Album, which explodes; Abbey Road, which continues its dominance; Sgt. Pepper, which I probably rate lower than most (meaning you might have it higher in the top 40, and therefore not growing as much over the next 60 slots); Rubber Soul, which has a real solid great middle; and With the Beatles, which I think I appreciate more than most.

You'll also remember we promised to revisit the songwriter charts. I broke down my bottom half like this:

Paul: 28
John: 26
George: 13
Ringo: 9

Well, here's the top half, unofficial count:

John: 72
Paul: 49
George: 12
Ringo: 0

Not giving Ringo credit for songs John and Paul wrote. I counted these backwards too, and things were pretty even until the end, which means I suspect John dominates the top 25 and 40, if not the top 10. Let's find out:

Top 40
John: 28
Paul: 10
George: 2

Top 25

John: 19
Paul: 4
George: 2

Top 10
John: 7
Paul: 3

But the top 6:

John: 3
Paul: 3

The data speak for themselves.

So that's it, I think. Thanks for exploring this extremely unimportant side of me with me.

Ranking the Beatles my damn self: the final countdown

2009-02-12T14:27:00.000-05:00

I just want to thank everyone/anyone who's read this far. I've enjoyed it.

12. A Day in the Life (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band)

I've seen interpretations of the lyrics as portraying mundane daily life, but I'm unconvinced. They're a little incoherent and meaningless. Just saying why this song isn't in the top 10, which surprised even me. Everything else about it, of course, is perfect, and its groundbreakingnesshoodosity cannot be overstated. One of the most perfectly arranged songs ever.

11. Dear Prudence (The Beatles)

The arrangement is spare in parts, and that makes me want to dock it, but it sets up the end so nicely, especially the fullness the piano adds, I'm going to credit them for doing it intentionally. One of the biggest influences on me as an arranger; it just builds so inspiredly.

10. No Reply (For Sale)

Ah, the top 10. No guilt anymore, right? Wrong. This song is so amazing, I *still* feel guilty. The music creates a tone here like they rarely were able to again -- a precursor to Ticket to Ride, in that way. But I think this song is a little more interesting. Not to mention that it took the spurned lover lyrical bit into new (stalker-y) territory.

9. I Am the Walrus (Magical Mystery Tour)

I again am guilty of valuing historical significance over subjective likingness. Although I surely loved this song the first 100,000 times I listened to it. But I love No Reply even now in the second 100,000. The most experimental of their real songs, no?

8. All You Need Is Love (Magical Mystery Tour)

I've read where John used this melody -- often referred to as the "Three Blind Mice" melody -- repeatedly; we're talking about the "Love, love, love" melody (and progression) here. I don't see it, unless people mean all songs with that descending, Dear Prudence-y progression. I want to give this bonus points for John and the band's coming up with it on such short notice, so it could be broadcast as part of a global special, but they did that all the time, didn't they?

7. Nowhere Man (Rubber Soul)

Just enough points for historical impact to keep it above All You Need Is Love, which is saying something. It's maybe the song I think of first when I think of that era of having instruments panned one way and voices the other. In some ways, John's most candid piece of writing, with the possible exception of his contribution in the top two. And the beautiful backing vocals, and the guitar sound so shiny ...

6. Got to Get You Into My Life (Revolver)

The first appearance of those horns, right? Paul's second-best melody of his career, and a vocal performance to match it. That descending progression again in the "Ooh" part. A tastefully timed appearance by that electric guitar. And the wonderful, wonderful fadeout. It was very hard to rate this below the song above it, maybe the most difficult call of this project.

5. Tomorrow Never Knows (Revolver)

Because the top five, I mean, that has cachet, no? Anyway, this might have made top five even if it were a capella. Then again, so should A Day in the Life, right? But what a wonderful vocal, for which we are also crediting George Martin, especially for the stunning second verse. The instrumental 'break' is so perfectly constructed out of so many different parts that could have been arranged differently (by which I mean less effectively). And that awesome vocal fadeout, which makes it every bit the match of Got to Get You Into My Life.

4. You Never Give Me Your Money (Abbey Road)

By far, the biggest surprise of this project for me is this song's not being number three. I mean, before I sat here and thought about it, I wouldn't even have thought about it, you know? This is kind of Paul's analog to Happiness Is a Warm Gun, but more coherent. And it's got those guitar arpeggios. Not the ones at the end that get reprised at the end of the record, though those are awesome too. I'm talking about the ones that sound like chimes, after "Oh, that magic feeling, nowhere to go." I think it might be my single favorite Beatle 'part.' It seems like I should have a lot more to say about this song; I love it very much. My one reservation is that I don't think it was produced as well as it could have been. Either I disagree with some of the guitar and keyboard sounds they chose, or they could have been mixed better. I don't think they would disagree with me; there are lots of tics and screw-ups, tons on Sgt. Pepper's alone.

3. She Said, She Said (Revolver)

I'm as surprised as you are. Do other people have this in their top three? It's just really really well produced; the tone and sound are consistent. I love the sound, which has a lot to do with the bassline in the verse and the ... is that a tamboura? Nice feel by Ringo on the "And she's making me feel like I've never been born" parts. The progression for the bridge is just inspired, and I still have trouble figuring out the tempo changes. And then there's the fadeout.

2. Strawberry Fields Forever (Magical Mystery Tour)

It must be my love for John's work that made me try so hard to land this in the top spot. I also think it's a better song than the top song, from a songwriting standpoint. And, of course, I love it, so that's a tough combination to best. I think Norwegian Wood ends up winning for best-conceived lyrics, but the message here, which I read as against closedmindedness, and against thinking you're right all the time, or that there even is a definitive conception of anything, including reality, is my favorite, a more eloquent further exploration of what John was saying in Rain. I find the top song to be a lyrical complement to this song, too. The progression here is better than the top song's; John worked harder in writing this. The song builds so wonderfully in its arrangement. And then of course all the work that went into mixing the "Beatle" half and the "orchestra" half, maybe George Martin's biggest achievement. And props to John, too, for expecting the impossible in that regard; he got it.

1. Hey Jude (Past Masters vol. II)

Not that this doesn't have a nice progression. Not that there isn't a lot of good stuff going on in the first half of this, from the pacing to the harmonies. And not that these aren't some unique lyrics for Paul. But let's be candid: This song is all about the anthemic second half. Four chords (three, really; the first is repeated as the fourth), over and over. This song formed me as an arranger; I've been trying to recreate it ever since. And we'll never know if this song could have taken the top spot without that words-can't-describe vocal performance by Paul in this half. I mean, everything he did (everything he did that stayed edited in, anyway) worked. He was in the zone. I never counted, but I read that the four chords are repeated 17 times. Maybe that's how many it takes, although I'm bouyant from the very second Paul's scream takes us into the beginning of that coda. As long as it takes to fade out, has anyone ever wanted it to end?

* * *

Discuss: These 12 songs would make a pretty cool album, am I right?

Ranking the Beatles my damn self: snake eyes!

2009-02-11T13:47:00.001-05:00

Ah, I got nothing ...

24. Getting Better (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band)

Awesome from the opening notes, supposedly produced by striking the strings of a piano, and recorded to sound different by George Martin. Musically, the verse stays on one note (G, if I'm not mistaken) and is never boring. And again, awesome use of tamboura. Brutally frank treatment in the lyrics, this marked a new plateau in honesty and candor as they moved ever farther away from the 'bubble gum' lyrics.

23. Savoy Truffle (The Beatles)

Ah, the saxes. My God, the saxes. Cool progression, too. And the organ sound is supercool. But the saxes ...

22. Sexy Sadie (The Beatles)

This didn't have much in the way of dynamics either, did it? I honestly think John either was kind of lazy by now or was too focused on the song and not bothering about songcraft or production. Possibly both. But the song is perfection, from the opening piano notes to the descending/ascending/descending progression. I love the way John sang it, too; an excellent performance.

21. Polythene Pam (Abbey Road)

I honestly almost raised it over Ticket to Ride just because of the way John says “Great!” toward the end. But Ticket to Ride’s beat put it over the top. The guitar sounds (and mixing) in this are beautiful, though. In some ways, this is Abbey Road in microcosm.

20. Ticket to Ride (Help!)

I really can't believe this isn't in my top 10. Did any Beatle song create a mood as effectively as this song did? Ringo talked about his drumming in Rain as if he were temporarily possessed, but this might be his most inspired beat.

19. Baby's in Black (For Sale)

It hurts, people. It hurts not to have this in the top 10. If this were purely about singability -- if iPods could only make playlists 10 songs long, and I wanted one of Beatle songs just for singing, this wouldn't just be on the list, it might be the first song picked for it. The harmonies are plotted out, almost stately; they don't move around too much, but they're so great.

18. Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey (The Beatles)

This kind of could have been ranked almost anywhere; more than a lot of other songs, I really had to keep moving it up and asking "Do I like it more than ..." whatever song I'd temporarily vaulted it above. I don't know that I would have guessed it to be so high at the outset. That would have been fun, actually, guessing at a top 10 or 20, giving myself only two minutes or so to compile it. This song is so in-your-face frenetic, which you can tell because someone keeps screaming in between "Take it easy"s.

17. Mean Mr. Mustard (Abbey Road)

Obviously the medleys create ranking problems. I’m pretending they are full-length songs and giving them credit for what else they might have done in that time, assuming it wouldn’t have been just more of the same, like just a third verse and extra chorus – in other words, I’m dividing awesomeness by time and then extrapolating.

This is my favorite of the three pieces: John's voice is superbad, the tambourine comes in at a nice spot, the Moog sounds great, Paul's harmonies in the second verse are spot-on, and the lyrics are tight, yo.

16. Because (Abbey Road)

I have to fight the urge to penalize this song for having so few parts to it, for some reason. Luckily, the singing and mixing are so genius that even a dink like me is floored. The lyrics are great too, if you don't take them too seriously.

15. Rain (Past Masters vol. II)

No other Beatles song sounds like this one, which isn't true of a lot of others. I love the rhythm guitar sound, and what Paul is doing on bass. I love John's vocal, and the production. And I love the message, maybe more than any other song's.

14. Taxman (Revolver)

Which should just about do it for George. If you don't know, that's Paul playing what as far as I know is his best guitar solo in the band's career. By the way, I wanted to vault each of the last four songs over this, but I just couldn't, because of that iconic bassline. That bassline is as influential as anything.

13. And Your Bird Can Sing (Revolver)

OK, remember how I was saying I shouldn't let alternate versions factor into the countdown too much? Well I'm granting myself an exception. The Anthology take of this, where John and Paul can't do a vocal overdub because they're either too high or tripping, could cheer me up no matter how down I was. As for the album version, it's got the great guitar work, and it's so much fun to try to sing along with John (and Paul, when he shows up). Also, the bridge of this might be the first instance where they used their trademark descending chord progression.

* * *

Join us tomorrow for the wrap-up. I might not surprise you with my favorite, but I'll surprise myself with my third-favorite.

Ranking the Beatles my damn self: Bar-Mitzvah

2009-02-10T14:48:00.001-05:00

Today I am a fountain pen:

36. Let It Be (Let It Be)

The song so good, they named the album after it. George's solo on this shaped me as a guitarist. The surreal backing vocals boosted this above You've Got to Hide Your Love Away.

35. I've Just Seen a Face (Help!)

Kind of the precursor to All Together Now, in that it's in the argument for most singable Beatles song. Is it annoying when I say "great harmonies"? Are you like, Yeah, I *know* it has great harmonies, it's the friggin' Beatles?

34. I Don't Want to Spoil the Party (For Sale)

How is this only 34 when I love this song so much? The melody, and where it goes for the third line of the verse ... the awesome harmonies in the bridge ... the way they change up the beat in the bridge ... the intro and outro ... if this were the best song the Beatles had ever done, they might still be my favorite band. You know what? No way this is 34.

34. If I Fell (A Hard Day's Night)

So John is actually singing the harmony in this, right? The high part's the melody? This was the Beatles' first beautiful song, isn't it?

33. Eight Days a Week (For Sale)

I can't rank this song objectively. I've got summer camp dance memory issues; I don't remember who I was dancing with, but I remember the song. And then they put the alternate takes on the Anthology disc, the ones with the different intros they tried, and that couldn't have been more fun to listen to. When I think of their early hits, their breakthrough hits, I think of She Loves You, and I Want to Hold Your Hand, but this is my favorite, hands down.

32. Help! (Help!)

Help! Sorry. So I try not to give too too many context points, but I do admire this song (and rate it accordingly) knowing what a breakthrough it was for John lyrically. I think I read that he was sorry later he made it so catchy, that it obscured what he was saying, but that's the beauty of the Beatles' work. Maybe by now he'd have come around on that stuff.

31. Across the Universe (Let It Be)

Helped by some of the recently released alternate takes, especially the one with the tamboura in it. Took me a while to appreciate this song. Maybe I just needed to grow up. Maybe ... maybe we've all got a little growing up to do.

30. Sun King (Abbey Road)

Think I underrated it. Can't explain how much I love the "Everybody's laughing" part. Have you heard the backwards version on the Love CD? I think that part works even better backwards.

29. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band)

The song so good, they ... saw that one coming, didn't you? I became a bigger fan of this track after hearing the Yellow Submarine version, where the guitars are mixed higher up in the chorus.

28. She Came in Through the Bathroom Window (Abbey Road)

See, why did Paul waste time with those other songs when he could write melodies like this? Props to as many Georges as it took to get that guitar sound in the verse.

27. Hey Bulldog (Yellow Submarine)

This is not a luxury; this is a necessity. I can imagine someone thinking this song is just a lark, but it's so joyous (and such a cool riff), the mix is so great, the solo is so great, and the end ... again, I would have overrated a recording of John and Paul pooping in 1969 as long as it sounded like they were having fun doing it.

26. Please Mister Postman (With the Beatles)

It is to my eternal shame that I did not get this into my top 25. I can't look past the fact that the whole song is the same progression, the same four chords over and over again, with no variation. So it's this high for three reasons: the energy, the opening, and maybe the best vocal performance of John's career.

25. I Don't Want to Spoil the Party (For Sale)

There, that looks better, doesn't it?

* * *

Join us tomorrow for this week's long-distance dedication.

Ranking the Beatles my damn self: twelve Beatles Beatling

2009-02-09T15:59:00.001-05:00

Not a lot of back-and-forth in the comments lately. Let's try to pick it up, people.

48. Twist and Shout (Please Please Me)

Another heroic performance vocally by John; you've likely heard that they cut this record in one day, and this was the last song recorded, after John's voice was shot. Thank God, huh?

47. You Won't See Me (Rubber Soul)

A favorite of mine, this would be higher if the production and playing weren't so choppy. Fun bassline to play along with.

46. Come Together (Abbey Road)

The hook that opens the song (and recurs) is just brilliant producing. You have to be a real student to know which sounds are in the mix, so well do they mesh together. Paul singing the low harmony in a song always puts a hop in my step too. Would've been higher with a more frenetic guitar solo, but I respect them if that's not what they were going for.

45. I'm Looking Through You (Rubber Soul)

Yeah, see, I think I probably like You Won't See Me better, but this is better mixed, if not better played. Once again, I've been unable to restrain myself for giving extra credit for an alternate take, in this case the Anthology cut that begins like it's going to be Magic Bus.

44. Happiness Is a Warm Gun (The Beatles)

So I've been fighting a nagging feeling for a while now that I'm paying more attention to how 'great' a song is when the original premise was how much I liked each song. I'm reconciling this by stating that I like ALL these songs, a lot. I mean, when you're comparing Happiness Is a Warm Gun with Norwegian Wood, you're going to need *something* to differentiate them. So in this case, let me say that, obviously, I love this song, but it's not entirely coherent. And that I bet by the end of the project, I'll be valuing likability over songcraft again.

43. Drive My Car (Rubber Soul)

Not the most complex song, but lots of fun. The harmony at the end of each verse is excellent and unexpected, and the riff is undeniable. It will have its way.

42. Here Comes the Sun (Abbey Road)

One of George's finest. Probably his best song, in my opinion, and I love the Moog experiment he performed on it.

41. Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) (Rubber Soul)

In case you were accusing me back around number 46 of not appreciating a tasteful and laid back piece of playing, I think this was maybe George's finest sitar work, despite how much better he surely must have gotten at it in subsequent years. I'm also going to nominate this for best lyrics in a Beatles song right now, just as a hypothesis; we'll see what ends up knocking it off as we move on.

40. Doctor Robert (Revolver)

Sorry, I just like to sing it. Not a big fan of the bridge, but I'll sing that too, just you watch.

39. With a Little Help from My Friends (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band)

One of the best marriages of Paul's bass playing to a song; he's done better stuff, maybe, but it's unobtrusive here, and really fits in. Some cool theory going into the bridge, the way it hearkens back to the refrain.

38. Cry Baby Cry (The Beatles)

I don't know if I know enough to talk instructively about this song (though why should it be any different?). Lot of interesting things going on, from the arrangement to the piano part to the game you can play wondering how many minutes John spent on the lyrics. You know what song it kind of reminds me of, in a totally-the-opposite kind of way? I'm Only Sleeping. That song's tone and dynamics are constant. This song really builds nicely through its arrangement without relying solely on volume.

37. You've Got to Hide Your Love Away (Help!)

The precursor to Norwegian Wood, this has more feeling, doesn't it? Probably by design. Relatively simple, but no denying it works. You might notice that John is flat on one of his "Hey!"s, but if you've never done so, *you* try hitting them all.

* * *

Still a couple of surprises to come, including a couple of songs that probably aren't in your top 30.

Ranking the Beatles my damn self: This one goes to 11

2009-02-06T16:24:00.000-05:00

Originality was never big on my list of things to be.

61. All Together Now (Yellow Submarine)

This song isn't catchy, it's infectious. It's contagious. It's communicable. OK, I'm not sure what that means. Plus it's got Paul and John working together, which is always nice. I used to think John was singing "Jump the tree." I'm still not convinced he shouldn't have.

60. You Can't Do That (A Hard Day's Night)

See, I went and said I LOVE Run for Your Life, so now what word am I supposed to use for this song? I love love love this song. The harmony in the bridge -- hell, the melody in the bridge -- is so unexpected. I love the tone of the lyrics too. And the harmonies in the verse.

59. I Saw Her Standing There (Please Please Me)

Awesome opener for the first proper Beatles album. Interesting, too, in that again, John was really the lead singer at that point. And an insecure man. A testament to the song, then, that he made no recorded complaint about letting it lead off. Or did George Martin take that decision out of the band's hands?

58. Every Little Thing (For Sale)

I can't entirely explain why this is so high. It has a lot of what I find appealing in I Don't Want to Spoil the Party, which you might just now be noticing I haven't listed yet. I like the chorus, and when John sings "I will love her forever," well, I get a funny feeling in my tummy.

57. You're Going to Lose That Girl (Help!)

John's vocal vaults this so much higher than it deserves to be. Is there anyone who doesn't love singing this song? Does everyone else sing both the melody and the harmony response, or is that just me?

56. Carry That Weight (Abbey Road)

Yeah, so here we are. The first countdown guy kept this part of the medley together, and probably he was right, but it seemed like the idea was to rank each track. I won't deny that I considered each one in context, but I tried to rank each one individually. The fact that I ended up grouping them so close together likely means I failed. But at least I got to rank each against the other.

In that context, this is the bottom of the three. Of course, how short the song is has something to do with that. Basically, I added points for the anthemic part of the song, but the reprise of You Never Give Me Your Money suffers for being a reprise, although the guitar arpeggios lifted from the same song do not. I ranked it above Get Back, so I don't think I short-changed it, but not as much to recommend it as there is in the other two parts.

55. Golden Slumbers (Abbey Road)

Just a stronger composition overall, even if I like the Carry That Weight line better than any individual part of this track. Why is this soooooo much better than The Long and Winding Road? I can't really figure it out; it doesn't seem so terribly different. I might have to tuck into Alan W. Pollack's study. Great job by Ringo and Paul on the chorus.

54. Revolution (The Beatles)

The rhythm guitar sound they came up with is just awesome. Nice keys, too, of course.

53. A Hard Day's Night (A Hard Day's Night)

They're still trying to figure out that opening chord. Props to John and Paul for the interplay between them as the song transitions from Paul's bridge to John's verse. Just as I am unable to forget hearing some alternate takes and versions of some songs, how can you separate this song from the open of the movie, and the frenetic feeling the whole thing had?

52. Lovely Rita (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band)

I don't know how much credit I give this song for the sound they got for the opening notes, but it's a lot, for sure. Beautiful sound, and Paul complements it perfectly vocally. I like the chorus a lot too, really the harmonies throughout the song. And the ending.

51. I'm Only Sleeping (Revolver)

I listen to this less and less often these days, but what a great song, what a great bridge, what a cool idea with all the false stops, and how nice a job they did finding a totally different sound for this track. That's a hallmark for this album, isn't it? Maybe even moreso here than on Sgt. Pepper. This, Yellow Submarine, She Said She Said, Got to Get You Into My Life, Tomorrow Never Knows, Taxman ... and that's not to mention all the songs I don't really listen to.

50. The End (Abbey Road)

Great idea, so well executed. It's so much fun to hear them all soloing, with the bonus of George's best lead playing of the band's career, in my opinion. And then the beautiful sentiment at the end, so beautifully done. Paul's "... you make" and George's guitar lick right after ... a lot of the songs, I ranked them where I did for a nice moment, and there really couldn't be a nicer or more fitting moment than that one, from two Beatles who did not get along by that point, to end their release output.

49. Something (Abbey Road)

I might have ranked this lower than The End if The End were a 'full' song. I'm not this song's hugest fan, but I appreciate the excellent melody, and how great that George turned in such a world class bridge, which really is the highlight of the song for me.

* * *

Yup, only 13 songs. With quality like this, we don't have to pad anything. We're really going to mine the middle period on Monday.

Ranking the Beatles my damn self: minyan

2009-02-05T13:50:00.001-05:00

Get it?

75. I'm So Tired (The Beatles)

I was very surprised I didn't rank this higher. I think one thing this exercise has done is make me see that I really like some songs just because.

74. I Feel Fine (Past Masters vol. I)

What the hell is this doing on this disc? How is it different from Day Tripper and Paperback Writer? I used to really love this song; terrific vocals the whole way through.

73. Paperback Writer (Past Masters vol. II)

Why higher than I Feel Fine? For the production, I guess, the mixing, and the lyrics. I Feel Fine certainly has an argument, and might be more fun to sing.

72. This Boy (Past Masters vol. I)

Christ but he sings the ass off that bridge. He described Yes It Is as a knockoff of this, and I don’t know that that song is inferior to this one, but he definitely puts more energy into the bridge.

71. All I've Got to Do (With the Beatles)

I love the dynamics of this song; the way the verses are so languishy, and the bridge or chorus or whatever it is so energetic. Credit John's vocal and Ringo's drumming, I think.

70. I'm a Loser (For Sale)

I am sure I'm underrating this. Such a great song. If it weren't sandwiched between two even better songs, who knows where I might have put it?

69. Within You Without You (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band)

Songcraft wins out over singability. I mean, hands down I like I'm a Loser much better than this. And I'm not too crazy about George's vocal here. But you've got to admire what they did in that studio.

68. Baby You're a Rich Man (Magical Mystery Tour)

Discovered it late, and still haven't listened to it too much, which helps. It's good to still have songs like that.

67. Get Back (Let It Be)

A shining jewel on this album. But why is Paul the only one who looks like he's having fun playing it? Even Ringo looks like's he's a session player.

66. Revolution 1 (The Beatles)

I like the production. Might go on just a little too long, but that befits its tempo, maybe. Some people seem to think John's "... out ... in ..." is a copout, but I think it's eloquent.

65. Run for Your Life (Rubber Soul)

LOVE this song. Awesome guitar sound, and nice chorus harmonies. Superfun to sing. Tough to explain the lyrics to a 3-year-old, though.

64. Back in the U.S.S.R. (The Beatles)

Helped immensely by the "Back in the U.S.- Back in the U.S.-" stutter part, which I still haven't figured out.

63. Fixing a Hole (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band)

My first instinct is to say I've underrated this song a great deal, but I just scanned the ones above it and no, there really are 62 songs arguably even better than this one. This song seems like Paul is fighting the demons that made some of his songs a little hokey and old-timey; do the opening notes and the "Really doesn't matter if I'm wrong I'm right" parts much match the verse and the "Silly people" parts? What would I think of this song if it were all like the latter and not like the former?

62. It Won't Be Long (With the Beatles)

Could this be the most underrated of all Beatle songs ever (by others, not by me)? Does anyone even have this album who doesn't have all the Beatle albums? Is this song the best album opener of all time? What would I give to sound like John does here? How much worse would my mood be today if they hadn't started selling Cadbury Creme Eggs by now? These are all good questions. Rare personal note: Played this last night with the 3-year-old, and watching him try to time Paul and George's "Yeah!"s is just the right amount of fun to have at your kid's expense. Any more would be inhumane, like that redneck who filmed his kid freaking out from the anesthetic at the dentist.

* * *

Join us tomorrow, when we examine whether Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End should be broken up or not -- or even if they can. Watch with delight as I come up with two different answers! It will astound and amaze you.

Ranking the Beatles my damn self: number nine ... number nine ...

2009-02-04T12:06:00.001-05:00

Obvious to you, perhaps, but I just thought of it after writing the last post.

90. Old Brown Shoe (Past Masters vol. II)

A throwaway for many, I'm sure, maybe even for George, but always a minor favorite of mine. Underrated solo, too.

89. Day Tripper (Past Masters vol. II)

This song is more than its riff. The song structure is admittedly a little weak, but the vocal performance is terrific.

88. Lady Madonna (Past Masters vol. II)

We could almost knock off this whole disc here, no? Anyway, I'm trying not to do this, as I think I mentioned, but I probably rated this a little higher than I would have were I taking only the final cut into account. I can't help it; I've heard some of the alternate versions and takes, and some of them, especially the one with the dynamite sax solo, make me look upon this song a little more kindly. There's another one of these coming.

87. The Word (Rubber Soul)

I'm not sure; this is either the first song where I thought How can this be only No. 87?!? or the first song I reevaluated strongly due to this exercise and came to a radically different conclusion. Which is to say, I always enjoy this song a lot, but I had to admit it wasn't as good as a lot of other songs.

86. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band)

You bounder! You cheat! What can I say? As with some other songs, I concede its greatness (and rarely skip it) but don't love it. I also might have issues with either the mixing or the choices they made for some of the guitar/organ sounds. Points for what John does with his voice in the bridge.

85. Yellow Submarine (Revolver)

Not much point talking about this song. I'll say only that it's this high thanks to the great chorus harmonies. Was listening to it this weekend, and there were times I thought Ringo and the others were switching back and forth as to who was singing the melody and who the harmonies.

84. Yes It Is (Past Masters vol. I)

If it was a surprise to rank The Word so low, this one actually hurts. I love this song. The bridge is so awesome in so many ways. And I like the guide vocal version on the Anthology CD single, where John goes silly.

83. Penny Lane (Magical Mystery Tour)

Flawless execution, and a great song, and I do like it; I just never reach for it. Very nice vocal that's fun to sing, though.

82. Money (With the Beatles)

John's vocal is so charismatic and propulsive that it actually plays tricks on my mind; when I play this, I expect it to be more raw and hardcore instrumentally, because that's how I remember it. Good harmonies too.

81. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da (The Beatles)

Lady Madonna's half-sister. There's an alternate take with a really full-bodied acoustic guitar featuring prominently, and either that take or another has more sax in it than the album cut, and I can't really discount that no matter how I try.

80. Two of Us (Let It Be)

Why? I don't know. And I don't care if it's really about Yoko or Linda or whoever it's supposed to be out. In my mind, this song represents something, and no matter how simple, it's well done.

79. She Loves You (Past Masters vol. I)

I am certainly giving this one greatness/breakthrough points; I listen to the songs we've already covered today far more frequently. But I listened to it a lot once -- too much, I guess -- and haven't soured on it, just tired of it.

78. It's All Too Much (Yellow Submarine)

It is too much, or at least a little too long, and I'm not sure how coherent it is, but it's always held a soft spot in my heart -- the harmonies, the weird drum sound, the psychedelic electric guitar sound, the harmony, the horns ... I read on a bootleg site yesterday that there's actually an eight-minute version.

77. Martha My Dear (The Beatles)

I like this a lot. He meant this. I don't know what he meant for sure, but he definitely meant it more than some of the more widely known stuff. Maybe the similarly styled songs of his that I don't like were just him going to the well one time too many.

76. Rocky Raccoon (The Beatles)

Another song that was fun when you first heard it and you never forgot it. This song is unique in some ways.

* * *

So there; we've crossed into the material that I love. Some of my favorites coming up tomorrow, although I imagine I'll be writing that every day from here on in.

Little advice

2009-02-04T11:48:00.002-05:00

I've never experienced writer's block, but if any of our readers have, here's a sure cure: Take some melatonin. You'll be writing all kinds of weird stuff in no time.

Ranking the Beatles my damn self: IIX

2009-02-03T13:57:00.002-05:00

One time, at the start of a gig, a friend of the singer's either felt compelled or was conscripted to introduce us. I don't remember all of his introduction -- it was funny, but lengthy, and I eventually cut him off, concerned no one had told him we had limited time for the set -- but I'll never forget the beginning: "These guys ... these guys are not my favorite band ..." It was funny, and it was said with love.

That's kind of how I feel when I look at today's set. These songs ... these songs are not my favorite songs ... but they're so much fun. Again I'm struck by how your 100th-favorite song by a band can be so much fun.

106. When I'm Sixty-Four (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band)

This song ... OK, enough of that. But my fondness for this song comes 75 percent from whatever they did to John's voice, and how the harmony of that line works. (George again gets a nice part.) The other quarter comes from how much my kid enjoys when it comes up during the Yellow Submarine film, but I promised myself I wouldn't overdo the personal-life shtick.

105. Good Morning Good Morning (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band)

It seems preposterous, but with the exception of John's voice when he's singing balls-out, I am unable to think of a Beatle 'sound' I enjoy more than the crunchy saxes. I know he wasn't fond of this song, but he was missing out. Damn lyrics aren't everything.

104. She's a Woman (Past Masters vol. I)

I'm not entirely sure what Paul's trying to do with his voical here; it never struck me when I listened to this song all the time 12 years ago, but it's kind of strange, isn't it? He must have been imitating someone.

103. We Can Work It Out (Past Masters vol. II)

This kind of marked the end of the transition from the early period to the middle period for me. I mean, first of all, it backed Day Tripper (in the UK; in the U.S., it was the A-side). Second, it was released in between Rubber Soul and Revolver. The only Rubber Soul single released in the U.S. after We Can Work It Out was Nowhere Man. And the next single was Paperback Writer/Rain, so clearly they were firmly into the middle by then. Not my favorite track, this, but it does mark the end of the early period, where the music sometimes had this infectious upbeat energy that I think it rarely if ever had again.

102. Ballad of John and Yoko (Past Masters vol. II)

I really have no idea why I like this song as much as I do. The part where John sings "Think!" is pretty awesome, though.

101. Baby It's You (Please Please Me)

John's vocal is meant to be tender but just sounds earnestly -- and endearingly -- goofy. Nice moment right at the end of the verse where they go all-out vocally. Doesn't have much to do with the Beatles, but Smith did a fascinating thing where they recreated that effect, but with the whole ensemble, not just the vocals. If anyone knows how I can get my hands on that track without buying the whole disc, hit me up.

100. I Want to Hold Your Hand (Past Masters vol. I)

More fun, and a big breakthrough, of course, but this song hasn't been the same for me since high school, when a band I was in would play "Just What I Needed" by the Cars and it turned out to have the same progression in the verse. That wasn't the problem, though; the problem was that our singer, who otherwise did a fine job, sounded like Henry Kissinger when he sang that song. (No bet on what I sounded like playing guitar.) So now that Bminor-y chord that's the fourth and eighth lines of the verse (in I Want to Hold Your Hand) saps some of the appeal of the song. Probably you had to be there. If my 100th-favorite song wasn't going to be one I loved, I'm glad it could be one so iconic. Because, you know, the Beatles still desperately need me to make their case for them.

99. Blue Jay Way (Magical Mystery Tour)

I might have overrated this; I'm into it right now.

98. Magical Mystery Tour (Magical Mystery Tour)

The album is uneven as anything, and we won't even talk about the film, but the song goes to some nice places. Has it been established who's singing the first verse? Sounds like Ringo and John together to me.

97. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise) (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band)

I really like Paul's vocal here; it makes this song much more interesting than it deserves to be. The thought and effort are apparent.

96. Helter Skelter (The Beatles)

This song moved around the rankings some before settling here. Doesn't benefit from repeated listens, but you have to respect the things that gave it such impact the first time you heard it. I didn't like Paul's late screamers much, or his screaming on the later songs, but he's great here. And the riff in the chorus is aces, the guitar sound prefiguring AC/DC by seven years.

95. I'm Down (Past Masters vol. I)

I normally don't go in for 12-bar blues unless Hendrix is involved, but a fun track. There's something about the lead vocal that's not perfect, and it's cute. And John's playing the organ with his elbow ... what evokes the fun period better?

94. Blackbird (The Beatles)

I mean, sure, I like the song. But can we all admit that this wasn't his best vocal performance?

93. Glass Onion (The Beatles)

Great use of strings. My take, unless I stole it from the original countdown guy: John was trying to talk people into taking his lyrics less seriously. I love "Listen to me." Oops; I just checked, and I did steal that from the first countdown guy, although he researched his piece, so he might have gotten it from someone else. Kind of like the Beatles!

92. Bad Boy (Past Masters vol. I)

Discovered this late, and never lost the sense memory of hearing for the first time this or any other song where John sings like this.

* * *

Tomorrow's set should see some genuine affection creeping in, after we dispense with a couple more songs that many others love but I just like.

Why did no one tell me about this?

2009-02-03T13:37:00.003-05:00

I totally would have put one of these in my yard.

Ranking the Beatles my damn self: se7en

2009-02-02T13:54:00.001-05:00

We got Eleanor Rigby out of the way, so you must have some idea of what's coming today. I won't make you wait long for it.

120. I Will (The Beatles)

This song, Blackbird, Rocky Raccoon (well, half of it), Mother Nature's Son, Honey Pie ... am I wrong, or is the McCartney stuff from the White Album more "solo" than anyone else's? The rest of the band were clearly necessary for Dear Prudence, Happiness is a Warm Gun, Savoy Truffle, Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey ... but a lot of Paul's stuff sounds like demos. Weird, as he gets the rep for trying hardest to keep the band together.

By the way, I love Paul McCartney. That maybe wasn't clear.

119. Yesterday (Help!)

And there it is. Why? I don't know. Just not fun to sing, listen to, think about ... maybe I'm just not very deep. A musical hedonist.

118. The Night Before (Help!)

Nice vocals by everyone on this. As with other songs from this album and A Hard Day's Night, maybe not the strongest track, but benefits from the material around it, instead of getting shown up by it.

117. I'll Be Back (A Hard Day's Night)

Major/minor/major/minor. And it works! This in some ways typifies how I think of the early Beatles. John was clearly the lead singer, and Paul did harmonies when they thought he should. I know he sang plenty, and they sang plenty together, but look at this album, for example. How many of the songs did John sing? He dominated all or parts of 9 of the 13 songs.

116. Tell Me Why (A Hard Day's Night)

The first of the really great songs on this album. The music isn't much, but the vocals from everyone are just superb. I really think Matthew Sweet must have listened to this and to With the Beatles a lot.

115. It's Only Love (Help!)

So John later said he didn't like this song very much. And it's maybe a bit corny. But there's something genuine in the chorus. And I would listen just for the way he sings the words "to make it up girl".

Speaking of John saying he didn't much like this song: I was watching A Hard Day's Night yesterday, and I figured out why it bugs me. It occurred to me during the film-ending 'concert' medley. More specifically, during the 'performance' of I Should Have Known Better. If you watch John singing it, his smile seems forced. And maybe this isn't fair; I could be wrong, and there could be other reasons for the smile seeming forced -- oh, I don't know, the idea of spending a day lip-syncing comes to mind. But when he poo-poos the material, you start wondering Did he like any of it? Certainly the simpler, earlier songs? Was he just being mercenary about it, not writing what he liked but what he thought would sell? It brings out the cynic in me.

114. Love Me Do (Please Please Me)

Great song? No. But as a first song? Sweet. George Martin didn't like it, not as a single, and the Beatles rarely mined this Everly vein again, but it's the perfect opener for them; one of the other strong songs from this record might have raised the bar too high, and shown up some of the filler.

113. Can't Buy Me Love (A Hard Day's Night)

Just blues, man. Great vocal performance by Paul. George Martin was big into starting hits with the chorus.

112. Long Tall Sally (Past Masters vol. I)

Christ but Paul could sing, no? And he made it seem so effortless.

111. Don't Let Me Down (Past Masters vol. II)

Lots of writers refer to three-chord songs. They usually mean the verse has only three chords, or the chorus does. This song has three chords.

I tend not to favor John's simpler later compositions. He was moving in a more direct direction, and I respect that. But I think he did himself a disservice in interviews in later years, acting like It's Only Love wasn't any good, and Run for Your Life was filler, and why were they always messing in the studio with his songs, like Strawberry Fields Forever and Tomorrow Never Knows? Yeah, 'cause I'm sure the first time he heard Tomorrow Never Knows, he thought it was 'alright.' He was blown away by it! *Everyone* was blown away the first time they heard that song. Not to mention, John wanted it even weirder. Oh, OK, I guess John didn't show up in the studio saying he'd accidentally played Rain backwards as he was passing out the night before, and could they do that on the cut. Probably he wanted to do I Am the Walrus with only a single kazoo for accompaniment.

110. Rock and Roll Music (For Sale)

Follows No Reply, I'm a Loser, and Baby's in Black. I mean, can you imagine if they weren't cutting two albums plus however many singles a year back then, if they could have done all originals? The originals on this album are unreal. Fortunately, he had that voice, so even if he was singing someone else's song, he made it sound like this.

109. I'll Get You (Past Masters vol. I)

Might have rated this this highly solely for what little harmony is in this song -- the "I've imagined I'm in love with you" line and the bridge. Mostly that one line. People who ignore the early stuff are missing out.

108. Love You To (Revolver)

I'm bad, skipping around on this album, but I should listen to this more. The harmony is awesome, and I can't hear him sing "I'll make love to you" without laughing; he sounds so much like the master of all he surveys.

107. One After 909 (Let It Be)

Nice swing. I might not be able to explain why I like this song this much. It might actually benefit from being on a weaker album.

106. I've Got a Feeling (Let It Be)

More for John's part, and the part where each sings his part at the same time, than for Paul's part.

* * *

We've kind of knocked off the middle-grade stuff from Please Please Me, With the Beatles, A Hard Day's Night, For Sale, Help!, Revolver, the White Album, Yellow Submarine, Abbey Road, and Let It Be. You can be sure that tomorrow we'll be doing the same for the Past Masters discs, Magical Mystery Tour, and Sgt. Pepper.

Super Bowl 'thought'

2009-02-01T20:20:00.002-05:00

I would like to see the great Springsteen.

Question: Why does a man ask me to kill him and lie about dying when he's not really dying he asks me to kill him? Question:

2009-01-30T15:12:00.001-05:00

How am I to feel when the Chasids spot me and peg me on the street?

Ranking the Beatles my damn self: Dallas 24, Miami 3

2009-01-30T13:42:00.001-05:00

So somewhere in today's list we hit the point where I genuinely like all the songs. I thought it might be instructive to tally composer credits up to that point, for comparison with composer credits past that point. Unfortunately, I lack the time, energy, and other resources to research who truly wrote each song, so I'll just pretend whoever wrote it sang it. John deserves credit for singing Please Mr. Postman, doesn't he? So, the results for the lesser material:

Paul: 28
John: 26
George: 13
Ringo: 9

And now? On with our countdown.

135. She's Leaving Home (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band)

I know this song is revered, but I would probably skip over it if not for John's vocal.

134. Mother Nature's Son (The Beatles)

I don't know how this is different from some of the Paul songs that bother me, but it is. I think he's hurt by how insincere he seems. Not that he isn't allowed to play characters. But his all seem fakey, where John put some of himself -- or at least some of his craziness -- in his songs. When he's singing about someone creepy, he's exposing his inner creep. Paul is exposing his inner 4-year-old girl playing dress-up.

Or is that too harsh?

By the way, if you haven't caught it, seek out Colbert's interview of Paul. I've never seen someone seem so feeble-minded and so quick at the same time.

133. Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill (The Beatles)

Likes: When John tells us children to sing. Dislikes: Yoko.

132. Only a Northern Song (Yellow Submarine)

Well, we're in. I genuinely like everything from here on in, and probably as far back as Bungalow Bill. Tha's amazing. Ten discs' worth. I couldn't make 10 albums of material that I liked, much less anybody else.

131. For You Blue (Let It Be)

I always had a soft spot for this and for Old Brown Shoe, which also maybe had something to do with discovering them relatively late. But I dig 'em.

130. Hold Me Tight (With the Beatles)

So much to love here, from Paul's energy in the vocals to the descent in the "chorus," to whatever effect he's going for in the bridge; we don't have to know what it is to laught at it. I'll be candid, a song can be helped some by the album it's on, too. With the Beatles didn't have so many standouts, so if I liked a song on it, I maybe liked it more than you might.

129. Kansas City/Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey (For Sale)

More for the Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey part. The vocals by everyone on that couldn't be better.

128. I Want You (She's So Heavy) (Abbey Road)

You might be thinking I've ranked this a little low. Well, I might be thinking I could have used a little less of it. To be honest, Ringo really saves it from a worse fate.

127. Thank You Girl (Past Masters vol. I)

Harmony. I remember listening to this disc whenever I drove to job interviews in the mid-1990s. Maybe I ranked this song higher because I remember listening to it en route to interviews, but maybe I listened to it en route to interviews because I liked it so much.

126. Any Time at All (A Hard Day's Night)

Another way a song can benefit from the record it's on: I like this album enough that I'm disinclined to skip much. It's a very even disc. If you graphed it, it'd make for an almost straight line.

125. I Call Your Name (Past Masters vol. I)

John's vocal -- not the melody, just his vocal -- saves this from a lower ranking.

124. The Inner Light (Past Masters vol. II)

I like George's vocal here. And I know I said I don't give much extra credit for lyrics, and I don't here, but there's an effect from them, something you get from them subconsciously without even having to process them on the surface. Am I making any sense here?

123. Things We Said Today (A Hard Day's Night)

I like the harmonies, and I like the bridge, Paul's melody in it. Otherwise, not my favorite song from this album.

122. Another Girl (Help!)

The verses and chorus are fun, and possibly even funny. But I really love where it goes in the first half of the bridge.

121. You Really Got a Hold on Me (With the Beatles)

This was once a favorite of mine. I probably would like it again if I listened to it more. I'm pretty sure I was singing George's part in the harmonies; he really was given some fun parts.

* * *

Join us on Monday, when I'm almost certain to ask "Can you believe this isn't in my 100 favorite songs by them?"

Ranking the Beatles my damn self V: one for the thumb

2009-01-29T13:23:00.001-05:00

I highly recommend this exercise for every avid Beatles fan. Not the blogging; I certainly wouldn't steal the first guy's idea so blatantly if I thought more than two people were watching. No, just the ranking. It's very fun to see both the sliding scale -- the way you can go from a song you'd never think to listen to purposely up 20 songs to one you listen to a lot but don't love without even noticing the jump -- and the gradations: Starting with this song, I never skip, or this song marks the beginning of where I start having emotional attachments for songs.

150. Piggies (The Beatles)

Be honest; were you waiting for it? Were you thinking Man, he likes Piggies better than Eleanor Rigby? (Answer: yes.) This song has some charm for me, but doesn't cry to be heard more than a couple times a year. What's funny is how many better songs he was working on, and even demo-ing for the band, at the same time. Instead of this, we could have had half of All Things Must Pass, or even Sour Milk Sea, which I like a lot.

149. I Me Mine (Let It Be)

Has its moments, but too whiney. Why you gotta be such a downer, man?

148. In My Life (Rubber Soul)

Probably you saw this coming too. It's a good song, no doubt, but it must be composed around some scale that doesn't do much for me. It should be obvious by now, too, that I am not factoring lyrics in very much for this countdown. I like a nice pair of lyrics, and they can definitely add a lot to a song that's also otherwise strong, like Strawberry Fields Forever. But to the people who say the lyrics make this a good song, I say no, the song isn't good enough to be helped that much by the lyrics, which I don't think are so groundbreaking anyway.

147. Dig It (Let It Be)

I guess for some of these, I need to start justifying why I've ranked them this high, rather than so low. I'm kind of a sucker for late-period stuff where the guys, especially John, seem to be having fun. Hell, I'd put Los Paranoias higher than In My Life.

146. Oh! Darling (Abbey Road)

Could have used one less run through the bridge and verse. The Beatles were who taught me you don't need three verses. I wish they had followed their own example here.

145. Maggie Mae (Let It Be)

*Sigh.* Yes, higher than In My Life. See the notes for Dig It.

144. I'll Cry Instead (A Hard Day's Night)

There are a lot of songs like this on this album; they're so similar in tone, it's remarkable I didn't rank them all next to each other. This is one of the weaker of the bunch, but still eminently listenable.

143. Dig a Pony (Let It Be)

Very strong vocal performance here. Did John play the solo? I'm not good with that stuff. A nice George solo would have lifted this even higher.

142. Maxwell's Silver Hammer (Abbey Road)

OK, so between you and me, I kind of like this song. But the backstory of how many takes of it Paul forced the band through drains something from it for me. Also, this isn't so involved a song. Why were so many takes desired? I don't think I've heard them; were they significantly different, like the ones for Lady Madonna and Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da?

141. Slow Down (Past Masters, vol. I)

I'm serious; before 1964 or '65, all I really require is John singing like his scrotum was on fire or something. I'm simple like that.

140. Her Majesty (Abbey Road)

Silly, but admittedly catchy.

139. Little Child (With the Beatles)

Seriously, I'd like to talk to George Martin about this. What were they doing to his voice, beyond double-tracking it? And could they still do it to mine?

138. When I Get Home (A Hard Day's Night)

Early Beatle funk, and if I knew more theory, I could tell you what John was doing with the melody that was so effective. I also enjoy the last three track titles on this record: When I Get Home, You Can't Do That, and I'll Be Back -- all kind of menacing, even if only the middle one follows through on the threat, lyrically.

137. Till There Was You (With the Beatles)

Surprisingly fun to sing. I would never skip this.

136. Honey Pie (The Beatles)

On the one hand, harmless. On the other, catchy. This is maybe my saturation point for Paul's hokier stuff. I think this is how other people feel about ALL his stuff.

* * *

We'll pass another marcation tomorrow, as we take on more of the great middle.

Ranking the Beatles my damn self: IV

2009-01-28T13:17:00.004-05:00

Eleven more albums' worth of material to go. You can expect frequent observations like "10 albums of material better than While My Guitar Gently Weeps!" out of me the rest of the way.

165. Yer Blues (The Beatles)

I am suspect of people who defend this song too vigorously. Although maybe they're just big Lennon fans; this was kind of the precursor to his early solo work, no?

164. Your Mother Should Know (Magical Mystery Tour)

Sometimes I eye this song rather suspiciously, like another McCartney track I detest on this album, but it seems harmless enough.

163. Wait (Rubber Soul)

Not bad for end-of-the-record filler. Good chorus, and I admire that they tried to do something different with the verse, but it didn't work for me.

162. Birthday (The Beatles)

Too dumb.

161. I Need You (Help!)

I usually won't skip this song. Harmonies save it.

160. Mr. Moonlight (For Sale)

I have a soft spot for any song where John is wailing like he is on this song. It's not the greatest-constructed song, but his voice could be a powerful weapon on the first few albums. If you think I've overrated this one, wait 'til you see where I put Please Mr. Postman.

159. Julia (The Beatles)

Ooh! Sacrilege! Just a little too long. Also, for a Beatle to play a song himself -- just his voice and accompanying himself on one instrument, with no overdubs -- well, the material's got to be pretty strong. The main 'riff' of this song is great, but I've been there and done that four seconds into the song. Everywhere else the song goes, I don't feel much urge to follow it.

158. While My Guitar Gently Weeps (The Beatles)

Ooh! Sacrilege! I know it's good; I'm not arguing that it's not good. I mean, Mr. Kite, I could argue that it's not good. Not the case here. I just don't seem to want to listen to it much. Dreary. By the way, right about here is the cutoff; anything higher than this, I'll pretty much never skip when listening to the album it's on.

157. I Should Have Known Better (A Hard Day's Night)

This seems kind of like a bizarro I Want to Hold Your Hand; it has the same structure, the same number of twists and turns, but what works in I Want to Hold Your Hand doesn't here. Obviously, at this point, and for a little while now, my criticisms have been expressed to justify low placement, not to say the song isn't any good.

156. From Me to You (Past Masters vol. I)

A stronger song, I think, than Please Please Me, or even Love Me Do. I like it largely because of the bridge. I think if I had been alive and listening to music at the time, it would have seemed like more of the same formula, but in retrospect, it rises in stature.

155. Tell Me What You See (Help!)

Great harmonies, but this song really avoided a worse fate because of the humming at the end. Sometimes four seconds like that can make a song.

I don't listen to this one so much because the bottom of this album is a little skip-around-worthy. But holy crap, what about side 1? I include Ticket to Ride, which I'm sure kicked off side 2 of the LP, but with the magic of CD and mp3, that's seven straight songs without any real temptation to skip. If you can stomach Act Naturally, you can just about make it through the whole album if you want, but those first seven ... I'll have to keep an eye out whether any other album has a stretch that impressive.

154. Anna (Go to Him) (Please Please Me)

Another one from the era where you would listen to John sing the proverbial phone book if they put it on record. Fun to sing.

153. Octopus's Garden (Abbey Road)

Might've overrated this. Doesn't do much for me. But that transition between the verse and chorus is a nice touch -- well arranged.

152. Long, Long, Long (The Beatles)

I wasn't even sure how to rank this. I think I like it, but I never listen to it. Does that make any sense?

151. Eleanor Rigby (Revolver)

Ooh! Sacrilege! I'll skip this every time, although I certainly listened to it enough when I was younger. I'm not saying that this is a great song, and that I'm just burned out on it. I did like it a lot, and I did listen to it plenty, but I think this song's overrated. Good production, but not what I'm looking for in a Beatle song. I'm pretty sure I'm harder on Paul's missteps than John's. Also, looks like I lied about never skipping anything ranked higher than While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Let's say on the greatness scale, this is probably 151, but on the me-likey scale, it'd be lower.

* * *

Join us again tomorrow, when we knock off half of Let It Be and half of Paul's stuff from Abbey Road.