Saturday Nite's Allrite for Blogn

I have been neglecting my blog, which is far better than to neglect, say, a houseplant, as the blog will go on with or without me, and the houseplant needs water and sunlight and such. Not that I provide the sunlight, exactly. But I will sometimes move a plant around when I think it needs more or less sunlight and, thus, a different window to sit near. So here's a list (not all-inclusive) of things I haven't written about since my last post:

• I attended the opening reception for "How We Dwell", an ongoing (though possibly defunct by now, I haven't checked) series of art installations in a lady's apartment. The installation I was present for featured photographs of the artist trying on all of the hostess's clothes. There was a young girl also at the apartment that evening who played Beethoven's Ode to Joy on the keyboard and talked about making sauces with Grape Jelly. It was kind of weird, but in a really nice way.
• I just bought a record by Of Montreal, which I thought might be the new one, with the single I like, but it turned out to be an older one, with "Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games" which is already being loosened from the grip of its association with Outback Steakhouse. (Incidentally, I would never had cried sellout against OfM, if only because the use/corruption of this song was such a vast improvement on the drunk-Paul-Hogan-impersonator jingles of Outback's prior campaigns.) So, anyway, it's just exhilarating to have any new (to me) record on my turntable, and it's a nice bonus that this one is just awesomely good.
  
• Went duckpin bowling again a few weeks back. I haven't gotten any better at that. But it was nothing like the Special Olympics. I'm not even going to say "Special Olympics"
• Spring started happening. I saw robins in Hoes Heights and daffodils blooming along the side of Druid Hill. Spring is far and away Maryland's best season, and I'm psyched.

Naw, naw. Whatchu gotta do is t' free up more capital.

Thanks to all (one of you) who voted in last week's poll. I shall indeed write this post "about" the economy.

I've been reading some newspapers and blogs and whatnot, and it seems to me everyone is looking to report on the silver lining that surrounds this massive cumulonimbus mess we've got hovering over us. I've seen reports about how cobblers are having increased business as more people look to mend their shoes. Saw something today about how there are less divorces during hard economic times (though I don't know if the marriages preserved solely by depressions are walks in the park). And I'm sure we're just months away from the "hobo-chic" trend sweeping the runways in Milan.

But despite all these sunny goodtime scenarios, I'd like to nominate another candidate as one of the worst spinoffs of the current downturn -- people trying to talk economics. People who shouldn't. People who aren't, by any stretch of the admittedly already-loose definition, economists.

I'm a real big hater on cable news generally these days, but man -- unleash these blabberlips on the subject of fiscal stimulus or capital markets or protectionism or anything this side of missing 3-year-olds and they instantly make clear that they don't know what they're talking about -- even to me, who also doesn't know what they're talking about.

In my line of work, I find myself privy to the musings of a pretty broad cross section of the public. These people are not idiots. When we tackle the usual small-talk niceties, they just nail it. I mean, when it's a cold day out, by God, they aren't going to tell you it's hot. Y'know? When the Ravens looked overmatched against the Steelers the next weekend, they weren't coming in crowing about Baltimore on Friday -- and they showed reserve enough not to tell me "told you so" on Monday.

But, dude, people I run into at work and in my own life are letting some under-their-breath things slip about what they don't like about the stimulus bill or about TARP or about the plan to bail out homeowners. If their complaints were only that the plans were too obtuse, that would be one thing. But people have watched just enough cable news to think they know something. By and large, I think most people in the country are just letting the educated guys and gals we asked for (or didn't) give things their best shot. Some are hoping for success and some are hoping for a perception of failure that lasts at least long enough for their political advantage. This is all well and good. I just cannot take much more of the vocal minority of people who loudly express their barely-informed opinions on matters which learned economists themselves struggle to grasp the complexities of.

Nevertheless I reserve the right to vet my ill-considered remedies for our malaise whenever I see fit. Perhaps I will next discuss nationalizing the banks. It's my blog. Suck it.

If it's Tuesday...

...it must be singing cartoon horses. I'm about a minute and a half in, and I'm not tired of it yet.

Scape goats...er, fish

When I was much younger, I had a couple of goldfish. I know that I told my family, and I believe that I told myself that these fish preferred whatever the "soft rock" station out of Atlanta was at the time. I also made it clear that I didn't particularly care for the music, but I would occasionally switch over to the soft rock station for a while, in deference to my fishes'...um....wishes. I think I knew at the time that this was all a fraud -- that I just kind of wanted the soft rock now and then, but it sure helped to have the fish around to explain this away.

And We Will All Splash Down Together

I don't presume myself to be the first to either have this thought or publish it online, but here goes anyway.

The idea I want to explore is not exactly that the USAirways flight that ended in the Hudson River the other day was quite a bit of good news, nor that this Sully guy is one hell of a pilot, nor that Canada Geese (unverified culprit as yet) can be quite problematic.

What I've spent some time thinking about is why this story resonates so strongly right now. Why I'm still thinking about it a day and a half later. Why Chris Matthews gave the pilot something called "the Hardball award" (he was pretty excited about this story, but apparently didn't quite reach the point of chills or thrills going up his leg). Don't get me wrong, I know this is a fantastic story that would get a lot of play no matter when it happened. Still, I think that a lot of people are looking at this wanting to read it as a metaphor for our whole situation at this moment in history. This plane crash is not just significant as one of the happiest accidents we've seen.

You don't have to watch CNBC these days to feel like the American economy -- hell, the world economy -- has lost both engines, and we find ourselves passengers aboard what has become a mammoth glider, the controls of which we don't understand. While our pre-crash moment is stretched out over months instead of minutes, we've heard the "Brace for Impact" announcement, and nobody's flipping through the SkyMall catalog anymore (not that we don't still secretly lust after that hot dog roller they sell). Most of us board planes without any real understanding of how the things get airborne, and investors have made and lost money investing it things they couldn't begin to explain.

I think many people have accepted that we're going to have to ditch this plane, so we're inclined to take a lot of comfort in this crash, where a couple legs were broken, and, of course, the plane was lost, but most everyone came out just cold, wet, shaken, and thrilled to be alive. People are putting a lot of faith in a new president to steer us away from the skyscrapers and come in at precisely the right angle so we don't crack up completely. We know that things are going to get even more chaotic once we're down, and the cabin starts filling with icewater. We know that it's not going to be particularly orderly, and that some people are going to block the aisle trying to retrieve items from the overhead bin (alright, so I'm not sure what that's a metaphor for). But with enough people looking out for others, we might all come out alive.

Isn't that a nice thought?

Happy New Year! (so ten days ago)

Kind of hoping that the word doesn't get too far out, but Baltimore's 34th st kicks Times Square in the dropped ball, 'sfar as I'm concerned. While my new years eve plans have rarely moved past the point of eating Too Much Chex Mix -- and still haven't really gotten much better than that -- I did actually find myself out and about on this last December 31. We wandered the cold streets of the neighborhood of Hampden until we got to the famous (well, just a little) Christmas displays adorning a certain block of 34th st (think nativity scenes with Minnie Mouse, multiply that by "what?", and you're almost there). See a video someone shot here -- not sure what's going on at first, haven't been inclined to find out -- the ball drop commences around the 4:50 mark).

Things I liked about this:

- It was awesome

- You could arrive about 4 minutes to midnight and get a great vantage point

- Some hippie-ish types with a guitar and (?? - some spoons, a coffee can, don't remember) were asking one another "what could we sing that we could get everyone singing along to?" and then sang Beyonce's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)" -- and none present let not knowing a word of the verse stop them. Good song, and great that night.

- I got just inspired enough to yell "BALL!" several times, at the absolute top of my lungs, by way of encouraging said ball to drop.

- I still got to eat Too Much Chex Mix

Happy New Year Everyone!

live-blogging the new Vic Chesnutt record!

Happy interregnum! Thought I'd take a moment as we sit here between holidays and presidents to weigh in for a first time on Dark Developments, the newish LP by Vic Chesnutt, Elf Power and the Amorphous Strums. I am so listening to it now. Or, if listening is too active a verb, then you can at least count on the fact that it's on in the background as I write.

This is my second time through, and I like it almost (but not quite) three times as much as I did the first time. And it's not that I was just crankier the first time and feel much better now thank you. The album is now a bit more familiar, and a little bit of familiarity -- at least with music -- can go a long way. With halfway decent music, I do get something of a rush from being able to think, "oh yeah, here's this song that goes like this." And you don't get that the first time through -- even if a piece of music is terribly derivative, I find myself having to discover the specific ways in which it's derivative. I guess what I'm trying to say is that even "Oops, I Did It Again" probably had to grow on me through a listen or two.

I don't think this can be a proper album review, because either you're going to listen to Dark Developments or you're not, and yes, perhaps I could sway your fate a little one way or the other, but I don't think I particularly want to do any convincing. Thus, I don't feel like saying too much about the album itself (not that commenting on the actual musico-lyrical content is any sort of requirement in most album reviews anyway -- I mean what am I going to say? "It sounds like Chrissie Hynde dry-humping a bust of Shostakovich"? Because, fwiw, it doesn't sound much like that.)

I will say that I'm grateful to the good folks at Orange Twin records for getting my mail-ordered copy of the album to me after an apparently unsuccessful first attempt -- I wonder if my mail-lady secretly hearts Vic Chesnutt.

I will also say that I cannot listen to the closing track, "Phil the Fiddler", without inserting "Joe the Plumber" into every stanza. The album came out, to the best of my recollection, just before McCain tried to revive the medieval name-article-occupation formulation. In this weird time of experienced people coughing up "depression" every now and then, this is an album worth reading some portent into. In a way that I haven't quite heard since Dylan's Modern Times, it opens itself up to a little interpretation -- feeling like a message in a bottle from someone stranded in the very near future (like three-days-from-now near). It's obtuse without being particularly obstinate. (I don't know what that sentence means, exactly, and I'll have you know that I wanted to work "oblong" in there somewhere, but it just didn't cut it.)

And I think I will be returning to discuss this album again. What's everyone else hearing these days?