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Currently playing:Mudhoney "Touch Me I'm Sick"

Inside and Out

I like this Feist cover right now better than the BeeGees' original classic. She makes the acheyness equal if not greater to the sweet sexiness. It feels as if she's going through something heartwrenching. Nice touch.

Apple Pie on Steroids

Bigger, Stronger, Faster is a surprisingly clever, nuanced look at steroids and American culture. The first time director, Chris Bell, comes from a family of short fatties, three brothers, raised on ‘80s action heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger and pro-wrestler’s like Hulk Hogan. The brothers funneled feelings of inadequacy into an enthusiasm for bodybuilding and, in the case of his two brothers, habitual use of anabolic steroids. The film is the Michael Moore playbook, w/ a little Morgan Spurlock thrown in, but it’s done w/ a light touch, by turns charming, funny, tirelessly journalistic, searching, poignant, never settling for pat conclusions and, for its expose on a subculture formerly alien to me, totally fascinating. In his first effort, at least, Bell betters Moore or Spurlock at drawing from his interviews, a cast ranging from gym rats to congressman and celebrities, an uncannily guileless candor. You won’t walk away from the film concluding anabolic steroids are a muscle massing wonder drug. Even if there is plenty of evidence to show that the dire health threats posed by steroid use are greatly exaggerated (OMG, my shrunken testicals!). And that’s because there is something unmistakably desperate and unhealthy about most of the users in the film. One guy, known for the biggest biceps in the world, who started taking steroids to achieve the kind of build that appealed to women, confides that he is now viewed by women as monstrous, but won’t quit. It’s who he is: a gnarly little guy with grotesquely big biceps. At another point, talking about the possibility of quitting steroids, the director’s brother, Mark, says “once I’ve benched 800 pounds I can’t go back to 700.” It’s an obsession. Bell’s other brother Mike, who reportedly died this past December from substance abuse complications, less than a year since the movie was released, confides that he was “born for greatness.” Anabolic steroids can be a drug incredibly effective at building muscle or the latest compulsion for the American Dream— muscle cars and lush babes— in pill form. But if using anabolic steroids is cheating then why aren’t other performance enhancers like Tiger Wood’s laser eye surgery, Carl Lewis’ “herbal supplements,” (Dock Ellis on acid!), classical musicians using beta blockers, cortisone shots (another steroid), amphetamines, caffeine, or all those hot dogs Babe Ruth consumed? One answer is because as performance enhancers go steroids are so damn effective. And so in the high money stakes of professional sports (I mean, really, what are the alternative salary prospects for your average pro athlete?) this is why they are such a big deal. The biggest fear behind the steroids menace in baseball would seem to be the pressure their effectiveness as a performance enhancer places on aspiring athletes, young people. In the movie, even a chronic user like Mark Bell, married with kids, coaching at a high school, doesn’t want his players to know he uses because he doesn’t think they should have to make the decision as to whether they want to use steroids until they are adults. It’s not the pro athlete on steroids that frightens or offends so much, but the steroid addicted suicidal teen or the aging gym rat at Gold’s Gym who lives in his van. It's someone you know. For the baseball fan or anyone interested in the steroids issue or American culture over the last few decades Bigger, Stronger, Faster is a must see.

Currently playing:LL Cool J "I Need My Radio"

MERSY MERSY ME

Another one of those peculiar subplots that keep popping up in the economic crisis.

As early as last fall I recall talk ab homeowners who were facing foreclosure but could not locate and talk to a bank or mortgage company or business entity of any kind holding their loan. They would try to talk to the organization to whom they sent their monthly mortgage payments but they were not the lender, and most bizarrely, could never tell the desperate homeowner who the lender was.

Part of this story, it turns out, involves a small company called MERS, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems. This small entity, only 44 employees, owned by big boys like Citigroup and Wells Fargo, holds 60 million mortgages on American homes, and has reportedly saved banks a billion dollars over the last decade by creating electronic records that have dramatically reduced the need for loan paperwork. That all sounds good but the screwy part is that MERS operates under an agreement of confidentiality w/in the mortgage backed securities industry. So, frequently, MERS has initiated foreclosure proceedings but won't divulge to borrowers the lenders they are foreclosing for.

On the face of it, something like MERS seems to be Obama’s favorite pet project for modernizing the health care system. Perhaps this story should give us pause. Securitization should not be such a problem in health care. But it’s already apparent that health care profiteers are going to fight tooth and nail to sabotage any public alternative to the HMOs. I wouldn’t put it past them to game any electronic records system for their ends.

At any rate, MERS is just another layer of confusion for stressed borrowers trying to hold onto their homes. Another layer is the 3,000 “servicing” firms that file mortgage loan records with MERS. These are the people you send your mortgage loan payments to, but they are not your lender either. If you talk to them, apparently, they will almost always claim that “investor guidelines” preclude the possibility of renegotiating a mortgage loan.

So, in the end, there is no longer a lender, just a borrower, a home loan, and some investors, who do not want to be identified, but who want to get paid.

Tracking Loans Through a Firm That Holds Millions

Currently playing:OMC "How Bizarre"

Iron and Wine "The Trapeze Swinger"

Samuel Beam, aka Iron and Wine, is one of the most hummable singer-songwriter's going. The yearning in his sound is velvety as an ardent lover. It's a mellifluous comibination of voice and melody, but he might as well be humming b/c I rarely connect w/ the words. This song is no exception. The words, in this case, don't annoy, although the title is obtuse at best. Most the lyrics never rise above the murmur of a babbling brook. (And this might be a good thing?) ("Fuck the man," brings a cheer live, but it doesn't sound right comin' from the folkie Barry White.)One line that pokes out in repetition here is, "Remember Me." If by "me" we can assume Beam is only trying to give voice to the melody,I will. I still return to his debut, The Creek Drank The Cradle, most, but he's good for a sweet tune now and then. Hear for yourself. BTW, is Beam the guy that started the beard revival?

Little Man With A Gun In His Hand

The Minutemen: D. Boon, Mike Watt, and DJ Bonebrake. From 1984, Washington DC, 9:30 Club.

Torture Porn in the U.S.A.

I’m a squeamish horror fan at best, preferring suspense to torture-porn, so I haven’t followed U.S. forays into torture since 9/11 as closely as one might, but this is a story that should not be missed. An assortment of security officials are sitting around a table in ’02 establishing policy. Hundreds of enemy combatants have been apprehended but no one knows what to do w/ them. After some talk, it’s decided that b/c they’re Muslim fundamentalists the only form of interrogation they will respond to is extreme terror. Some guy at the table knows somebody in a U.S. military unit that submits special operations military trainees to torture techniques they might face if captured. So, some legal documents are drawn up and authorized by Bush and Cheney, a manual is distributed, and interrogators start going to town on detainees w/ waterboarding, etc. Six years later NOTHING substantial comes out of these interrogations. And, after some recent investigation by some NY Times reporters, Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti, it turns out the torture techniques were long discredited relics used by communists during the Korean War. Evidence abounds that the techniques used rarely elicit truth but, in fact, tend to drive detainees to confabulate stories. The mix of hubris and extreme stupidity in this story is astounding. It’s like something right out of the Manchurian Candidate and yet not completely surprising when the ruling ethos of American leadership in crisis is more concerned w/ appearing to be doing something, anything, appearing to be men of action, rather than actually taking the time to do the right thing. It’d be funny if it wasn’t for the torture victims and the shameful human rights example this episode has presented to the rest of the world. Meaning, it's not very funny at all.

In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into their Past Use

Tea Party for Kooks, Demogogues, and Right Wingers

I’m almost relieved to learn the Tax Day Tea Parties were organized by Fox News. Watching reports, listening to people’s complaints, checking out the anti- government spending signs, I'd hate to think this was a honest-to-goodness grassroots movement. But if the O Team’s bank plan doesn’t work this Astroturf happening might still grow organically into something more. (Even if it makes even less sense than O’s bank plan!) Obama is already lowering taxes for 95% of Americans, or so he’s said so upteen times, so the anti-tax angle makes no sense. And government spending and deficits, right now anyway, are NOT our problem. Sure, what the government is spending money on— bank bailouts instead of more stimulus (that creates jobs, redirects the economy to green manufacturing, cuts corporate profits out of health care costs, etc)— that would be worth raising a ruckus about but I didn’t see a sign or here a peep ab that. There is a crackpot conservatism afoot that behaves like the housewife continuing to make the bed and dust the day after Armageddon. Karl Rove, in the Wall Street Journal, suggested the other day that Teabaggers go back to Reagan basics, getting the word out about the value of tax cuts and lowering government spending to stimulate the economy. Uh, the jig is up on the supply side cant, guys. First, right, this isn’t the time to be raising taxes, but lowering government spending when consumers and businesses aren’t spending is just plain stupid. And, in general, smaller government, or stripping the government of its ability to officiate what bankers do with other people’s money, more specifically— the Reagan Revolution— is a big part of what brought about the current catastrophe. If, like me, you find your blood boils at the idiocy of this stuff, check the Robert Reich link below for the cool reasoning you need for family and that guy at the coffee shop (or the cute chick who takes pride in reading cue cards).

A Short Citizens Guide to Kooks, Demagogues, and Right-Wingers On Tax Day

Skinny Love: The Annotated Lyrics

Skinny Love
1. His love is skinny, skating on thin ice.
2. Her love is skinny, always close to giving out.
3. His beloved is skinny (and drinks too much); singularly, perhaps endearingly so.

Come on skinny love just last the year
Pour a little salt we were never here
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Staring at the sink of blood and crushed veneer

(Hang in there, it’ll get better. Pour a little salt for luck, we’ll leave this dark place behind. (Or pour a little salt on the wound, as if our love never mattered.) Our protective veneer has been destroyed. I can’t stop looking at the wreckage.)

I tell my love to wreck it all
Cut out all the ropes and let me fall
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Right in the moment this order's tall

(I don’t want her pity but the thought of losing her frightens me.)

I told you to be patient
I told you to be fine
I told you to be balanced
I told you to be kind
In the morning I'll be with you
But it will be a different "kind"
I'll be holding all the tickets
And you'll be owning all the fines

(He resorts to hectoring. Fine=okay, alright. She has trashed the relationship beyond repair. It’ll never be the same.)

Come on skinny love what happened here
Suckle on the hope in lite brassiere
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Sullen load is full; so slow on the split

(Nourish your love on my skinny chest; or she’s taken up with a lesbian with small breasts. I still want you even if I know I should split.)

I told you to be patient
I told you to be fine
I told you to be balanced
I told you to be kind
Now all your love is wasted?
Then who the hell was I?
Now I'm breaking at the britches
And at the end of all your lines

(Now you’re bitter. It’s not going your way. And now I'm getting fat eating my despair and cringing inside each time you speak.)

Who will love you?
Who will fight?
Who will fall far behind?

(What will happen to us? Who will love you, if not me? Which of us will fight for our love? Who will give up first?)

By Bon Iver
1. In French Bon=Good.
2. In Seattle Iver=Ivar’s Fish & Chips
3. So Bon Iver is a Good Fish.

The performance is singer-songwriterly minimal: a jangly old Silvertone guitar with an echoey metallic sound and Justin Vernon’s thin tenor. His tone is pleading except in the “I told you….” verses when he bites off the lines in exasperation. It’s one of those kinds of songs almost impossible not to sing along to, even when the lyrics strike you as obtuse. Like a James Taylor tune. So “Skinny Love” is Bon Iver’s “Fire and Rain.”

TV on Drugs

If you’ve been watching TV since b/f the late-90s I’m sure you’ve wondered at one time or another what unleashed all the advertising for drugs of the last decade. In 1997 lobbying by media companies (like Time-Warner) finessed some FDA rule changes by the handle of “Direct to the Consumer Advertising (DTC).” This opened TV to an avalanche of advertising dollars smothering consumers w/ medical fixes for everything from high cholesterol to depression. In the ‘90s drug companies were spending $55 million on DTC ads; by 2005 the number had skyrocketed to $7.5 billion. There is, apparently, credible evidence that as many as a third of consumers see an ad for a drug on TV and then talk to their doctor about it. Half of those end up w/ prescriptions. In short, a highly lucrative number of people who watch these ads believe them, even when the words addressing risks, read in a low-key rush, outnumber the sales pitch.

Harlots High and Low: A Foul Saga in The History of Network TV, By Alexander Cockburn

Suspicious Minds

“That bad music is played, is sung more often and more passionately than good, is why it has also gradually become more infused with men’s dreams and tears. Treat it therefore with respect. Its place, insignificant in the history of art, is immense in the sentimental history of social groups.” -Marcel Proust

No Fun in Adventureland

On its own, Adventureland is sweet if both implausible and predictable. But compared to Superbad, writer/director Greg Mottola’s previous outing, it’s surprisingly lackluster, to say the least. First, the implausible. James, our protagonist (Jesse Eisenberg doing his best Michael Cera), smokes pot, parties, has made it all the way through college, it’s 1987, and he is still a virgin? I got out of college in ’82 and I realize AIDs changed everything shortly thereafter but this much is hard for me to believe? The summer between high school and college, sure, but after four years of dorm life and various extra-curricular “experimentation,” the guy has not been laid once!? This incongruity isn’t helped by the fact that James’ early childhood friend, Frigo, still acts like he’s 13. I mean, you will assume that this must be the summer before starting college until forced to accept otherwise and the realization is vexing. Next up, the predictable. The frightened, sex-crazed coming of age tale needs some twists and turns; some character grist, family and/or relationship dysfunction. All the parents here are all tasteless, paralyzed by disappointment, and uncomprehending bores but never step out of the background. Likewise, Ryan Reynolds as an over-aged lothario, Mike, the mouth-piece for the macho biological imperative, is a boring caricature. The other Adventureland character roles (especially Joel as a pipe-smoking, Gogol-reading lifer at the fun park) are amusingly colorful and so the start is promising but outside some random anti-semitism there’s not much frisson; no homoeroticism, no kinky sex proclivities. The heart of the story with James’ brooding love interest, Em (Kristen Stewart), and the gum-popping bimbo, Lisa P, has thorny potential but its resolution is preposterously Hollywood. Which, alas, is also the sweet part. Turns out, again, love conquers all. Love is the ultimate high in this journey called life the movie confirms, despite all the evidence to the contrary along the way. Love is transformative, etc. (Or until outside forces intervene and/or internal resolve gives out once the camera stops, says the jaded single inside.) Truth is, even though when you haven’t yet it feels so, falling in love isn’t so hard. It’s sustaining love that’s hard. Not just staying together, riding out the rough stuff. But keeping alive that flame, or at least contact with the fuse, the possibility of fireworks. That achievement is a sweet cliché I’d stand up and cheer for but you have to start somewhere, I guess. Finally, I actually hurried to see the film mostly because I heard Yo La Tengo did the soundtrack. But outside an instrumental bit over the closing credits I’m pretty sure there’s no Yo La Tengo music in the film. Making matters worse, the soundtrack is a period-appropriate mix (lots of Lou Reed, Husker Du, “Rock Me Amadeus,” etc), but the music isn’t integrated into the action. As a bag of songs they’re fine but they don’t resonate cinematically the way songs do in a Wes Anderson or David Lynch or Scorsese film. Adventureland isn't offensive but it is a bit of a dud. Wait for that video night when you want to catch up on some youth flicks. Or, for sure, if you haven’t, by all means, see Superbad instead.

You! Me! Dancing!

Don’t mean to belabor my rock and roll lecture of the other day, which as an issue at this point in music history is hopefully quaint, if not still tired. (Became quaint and no longer tired back in 1992?) But, dang, if I didn’t have another rock and roll moment the other day. Went to see Welsh seven-piece Los Campesinos at Neumos Friday. (A peculiar thing ab the live performance is that despite the fact that I can probably count on one hand the number of live recordings I treasure seeing an act live can dispel in two or three songs questions that might linger for years on record.) Los Campesinos are a pop group, not a punk group. Punk, see, is their “idea” of rock and roll, captured best in lines like “don’t tell me to do the math” and “eyes wide open” and “I’m better off with artificial intelligence.” They’re more Belle & Sebastian than X Ray Spex. Think mid-90s Chumbawamba. If you’re a record geek think the kind of UK punk pop group that K Records would celebrate in the ‘80s: Flatmates, Pastels, Shop Assistants, Vaselines. Part of the Love Rock Revolution, or something like that. Most of Los Campesinos live set, though, was a not quite tuneful, but never tuneless, din. But in one song, the din purged in a long tension building intro, the disco ball twirling, a bouncy new wave beat propelled the crowd to uncontrollable urges. The singer guy, Gareth, in his best cockney yelp carrying on ab how he “can’t dance a single step” to girls, Ellen and Aleksandra, softly taunting “ooh ooh oohs,” until (despite themselves) they (or was that the audience?) were jumping up and down, shouting, soccer chant stylee, “You! Me! Dancing!” It was sublime. Like I said, a rock and roll moment. Don’t know what better to call it. And in six minutes worth the price of admission.

Oil Giants Party On

You know all those ads on TV in the past few months peddling the notion that the oil companies, Shell, BP, Chevron, etc. are way committed to developing a greener, more sustainable energy future for us all? From a piece in the NY Times today called, “Oil Giants Loath to Follow Obama’s Green Lead”:

In the last 15 years, the top five oil companies have spent around $5 billion to develop sources of renewable energy, according to Michael Eckhart, president of the American Council on Renewable Energy, an industry trade group. This represents only 10 percent of the roughly $50 billion funneled into the clean-energy sector by venture capital funds and corporate investors during that period, he said.

Until businesses are charged (yup, that means taxed!) for the carbon dioxide emissions they generate there is little incentive for them to diversify. The “free market” is a free-for-all that leaves a mess for others to clean up. For the oil giants, it’s like they get all the door receipts for puttin’ on a big party but don’t have to pay for any of the clean up. There is still way too much profit to be made from oil to waste their time and money on anything else, whatever the consequences to the planet.

Ending Banker's Holiday: Greed and Stupidity

In a column last week, “Greed and Stupidity,” NY Times columnist David Brooks outlines the development of two narratives to the economic crisis. One, called the greed narrative, locates the crisis in the overreach of an investment banking Wall Street oligarchy elite, growing from 16% to 40% of corporate profits betw the ’80s and this decade, and extending its power into government. Brooks cites Simon Johnson as chief explicator of this narrative. The second, called the stupidity narrative, suggests the collapse was caused by an over-reliance on the diversifying trick of securitization (bundling and reselling loan assets) and inflexible mathematical models that ignore inevitability of historical shocks and the unexpected tendency of the internet to accentuate runs. Elaboration of this position is provided by Jerry Z. Muller from right-wing think-tank the American Enterprise Institute. The odd thing ab this supposed narrative split is that if you’re even casually familiar w/ the literature tracking the crisis you’ll note that the stupidity narrative is already part of the greed narrative. Brooks even admits that the reform measures for the financial markets proposed by both narratives are more or less the same, with one important exception. The greed narrative describes an insider, collusive, dysfunctional relationship betw Wall Street and Washington (Geintner, Summers, Bernanke, etc). To effectively recover from the current mess, Johnson argues that it is essential to sever the backroom ties betw Wall Street and Washington, nationalize and breakup and reorganize the banking system so that banks can no longer be too big to fail. Meaning, at least temporarily, a bigger government role. This is anathema to Brooks and conservatives raised on 25 years of Reagan Revolution free market BS, who, at this point, sound like flat-earthers. Even if we got into this crisis b/c of arrogant Wall Streeters who didn’t know what they were doing it’s those same people now in Washington serving up the weak sauce concerning the bonuses and sheisty accounting rules and black hole bailout plans. Brooks would have us believe that changing a few rules and recapitalizing (meaning: more taxpayer bailouts) will do the job. Even if Wall Street hubris has got us into this mess we should still fear even more Washington hubris, argues Brooks. All of which just seems like fodder to extend the dithering by the O Team and stem the tide of calls for breaking up the Wall Street lock on Washington. Meanwhile, job news is increasingly dreary; 663,000 jobs lost in March. Unemployment has reached 8.5%; the underemployed (that includes people w/ part-time jobs who’d rather be working full-time) is over 15%. News from the Washington state proposes huge cuts in public education. Everyone at work is bracing for layoff notices in May.

Rock and roll-- If I Can't Have You...?

The other day a classroom teacher neighbor asked me what I’d been playing loudly in my room b/f our meeting. “Gawd, was that Kelly Clarkson, Jack?” she inquired incredulously. It wasn’t. “It’s this Swedish pop singer Robyn,” I said, embarrassed. My dear work mate is a indie rock queen of idolatrous proportions. She’d heard Robyn or heard of her, I didn’t catch which, she responded w/out the tone of derision directed at Clarkson. Was the new tone of respect b/c she’s European, I wondered? Some cache unavailable to an American Idol grad, from Texas, no less? It was a small exchange that was ended by the arrival of everyone else for the meeting. But, as is often the case when something hits me wrong in conversation, I replay it over and over later, pondering what I coulda woulda shoulda said. These are a few notes to that effect.

I think I understand her general antipathy. As winner of American Idol’s first season Clarkson is the epitome of crass commercialism. She’s made at least one movie I stumbled on once and watched long enough to tell you it looked like an Old Navy commercial, an AI sponsor. Her weight fluctuates wildly, perhaps from periodic coke and pop tart binges, two other major AI sponsors. She appears on Oprah. Yeah, American Idol is one big fat schmaltzville, no doubt. I can’t sit through the show. Still, mining the golden oldies songbook is not such a terrible thing per se. The Rolling Stones’ “Time Is On My Side” is kind of schmaltzy, too. Once and awhile they do a Smokey Robinson or Dolly Parton proud. (Check out David Archuleta’s “Shop Around,” for instance.) I get how being too commercial can be like wearing too much makeup: it can mask over any humanness, leaving only a glossy caricature. But, really, Clarkson has humanness in abundance. She is more than AI schmaltz. One of the interesting aspects of her career has been her struggle to find her own voice apart from producers and industry flack. Like her weight she’s a little all over the place; messy. And what ab “Since U Have Been Gone,” really? A pop song so irresistible that indie stalwart Ted Leo had to cover it.

And as it happens, I have heard Clarkson’s latest, All I Ever Wanted, a couple times now. Truth is, so far it feels like it is less than the sum of its parts. There’s some edgy riffage ala “Since U Have Been Gone.” There’s Kelly’s ain’t-no-Mtn-high-enough voice stretching beyond the horizon. There’s angsty sentiments aplenty (“I Don’t Hook-Up” will get picked up by some for the title alone). There’s some Pat Benatar-esque toughness and some Abba-esque harmonies and some Stevie Nicks-ian ethereality. But it sounds like all the parts were recorded in separate takes and don’t gel when heard as a whole, not only betw songs but w/in a given song.

That’s after a couple of listens, anyway. But one song, “I Can’t Have You,” I adore, and I’ve been playing it semi-obsessively for a week. I love this song b/c it is what I will call rock and roll. What I mean by this is several things. Let me explain.

First, that it is danceable; it has a beat you can dance to. Not like disco (this is not an update of the great Yvonne Elliman/BeeGees song by the same name) or world beat, although both have more to do w/ rock and roll than most indie rock. The beat in “If I Can’t Have You,” and rock and roll, is steady, insistent, slightly forced. Anyone can pick it up, and no one is going to lose it, just as Chuck Berry would have it. Rock and Roll rhythms are like that: more pushy than seductive; more train-kept-a-rollin’ forward motion than funky polyrhythms. I’m not saying a rock and roll beat can’t be sexy but it doesn’t beat ar the bush; it’s enthusiastically blunt, no need for foreplay. The Beastie Boys first album is rock and roll. King Sunny Ade’s Synchro System, while great, is mostly something else.

Another thing ab rock and roll is that it has to have something rough ab it: gnarly guitar riffs, stomping beats, swaggering non-singerly voices, etc. Something rough and unpolished sounding. Examples abound, from Chuck’s “Around and Around” to Blondie’s “X Offender” to Biggie’s “Mo Money Mo Problems” to LCD Soundsystem’s “Tribulations” to The Shaky Hand’s (yeah, indie rockers can rock and roll, too) “We Are Young.” The reason for this is buried deep in rock and roll myth. The roughness is the sound of the democratic spirit at the heart of rock and roll. It’s what Pete Townshend was getting at once when he said rock and roll was playing your song, dancing in the rain, w/ a broken guitar. The genius of rock and roll is the inexplicable joy, the emotional grandeur, created by such simple, crude, humble means. Its expression might possess elements of the classic tragic hero (noble everyman faces confusing, trackless world) but I don’t want to go there right now. The important point it that its virtuosity is always circumscribed by an element of roughness. It sounds hifalutin but it is at least in part a very simple, physical, tactile thing. Rock and roll has to have that rough feel.

In Clarkson’s “If I Can’t Have You” roughness is in almost every part of the song. The brrr in Clarkson’s voice feels country in a song that is frantically citified. All the electronics are turned up to “11”; they sound purposefully distorted. The buzzing guitar-like opening riff is catchy. The heartracing keyboard fills in the chorus are thrilling. The production sounds like kids plugging in their Radio Shack synth and duct-taped 808 and rocking out like fiends. The sound reminds me some of Rihanna’s “Disturbia” and recent Britney Spears and might be part of some vogue (or should be!) production sound I am not familiar w/ but it is very rock and roll. Kelly Clarkson is not just a glossy commercial pinup in this song, anyway.

Finally, another thing about rock and roll is there’s rock and roll and then there’s great rock and roll. It’s not all the Clash. And not all the Clash is “great” rock and roll. And, BTW, the Clash were a commercial stunt from the gitgo. (And I’m not ab to try to define “great” any more than I’m gonna go into the cathartic tragedy stuff of RnR at the moment.) Still, while this combination of uptempo danceability and tactile roughness that I’m calling rock and roll is by no means the only sound or kind of music I like it’s been a touchstone since I can’t remember when. Sure, sometimes it’s only rock and roll, Frat house party music, Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride” or Plastic Bertand’s “Ca Plane Pour Moi,” but I like it, indeed I do. The notion that all commercial music is a glossy inhuman shil is no more credible than my contention that too much indie rock is mopey misanthropic trustafarianism. Kelly Clarkson’s “If I Can’t Have You” rocks! You paid for your Vampire Weekend album too, no? But is “If I Can’t Have You” great rock and roll? Maybe. But whatever gets you through the night. (Or pumped up for meetings at work!)

Ending Banker's Holiday: Part Six

Totally unfuckingbelievable, really. It’s coming out more every day that over the last ten years arcane financial regulations have been bent, mutilated, or abandoned for the sake of “free market” interests in the investment banking industry. (To what end, we now know!) But now, after all the revelations of the last six months?! Yesterday the Financial Accounting Standards Board— Wall Street retirees and cronies, no doubt— changed a mark-to-market rule so that banks could now determine the value of their assets on their financial statements. The mark-to-market rule required that assets be valued at the price they are worth on the open market— in other words, what people would pay for them. But banks, upset that their assets are being undervalued by the current down market, have won the right to value their own assets according to what they believe they would be worth in more “normal” market times. Gawd, banks, reportedly, already have numerous ways in which to keeps assets and debts off their balance sheets altogether (for what good reasons I do not know) but now they need more ways to make up their own numbers?! This at a time when it is generally recognized (if poorly understood) that the banks were taking wildly leveraged risks, stretching their capital to debt ratios (that’s how much real money they keep ar in case some of their investments/debts go bad) way beyond sound financial practices. And this measure, of course, will only make it more difficult to hold bank risk-taking accountable. ‘Don’t worry,’ says Mr. Banker, ‘we’re capitalized w/ all these valuable assets over here’ (read: that nobody else wants right now but, hey, if we ever really need them to cover our debts taxpayers will pay our prices for them!). See today’s report in the NY Times. Note the subdued yet strained tone, especially in the quotes. Pay attention to it: it means we’ve been screwed again, folks.

(Banks Get New Leeway In Valuing Their Assets)