The Hypermagic Headphase

Divide and conquer

2011-12-09T12:18:00.004-05:00

A brilliant new bit of Republican strategy has come out just in time for the holiday season, as reported on by Rachel Maddow of MSNBC. In this time for goodwill toward your fellow man and the spirit of giving, the GOP is doing their best to crack the already shaky unity of the 99% down below.

What is being proposed is an extension of the payroll tax cut, a little bit of a boost for the extra expenses around the holidays. Like a Christmas bonus from the federal government! Sounds great! But how in the world are they planning to do this in the midst of an economic crisis that has nearly left the fed in default? By hacking off unemployment benefits at the knees. With the money they will save on unemployment spending by tightening eligibility and reducing benefit duration by almost 40 weeks, they'll toss us a few pence to spend on a scrawny Christmas goose.

The problem is that this pits us against our own. No matter how the vote on this initiative falls, there is going to be anger directed at exactly the people with whom we should be uniting. At any moment, in this economy, you can lose your job. There virtually is nothing like "job security" any more. If your company can find someone to do your work for cheaper, they'll have you out on your ass, saying something about "tightening our belts" and waving tiny American flags to show that they only meant it in patriotism. If this vote goes through, we've just forsaken our unemployed for a minuscule pay-day, leaving them even worse off than before and ourselves gaining very little at their expense. But I don't think that's what Republican leaders are counting on.

No, I believe they are counting on this measure being voted down, because it gives them more firepower than ever. If it is voted that unemployment benefits need to stand where they are, it will halt this tax break for the rest of the working and middle class. And that is a brilliant way to insinuate even more resentment and anger into the working 99%'s feelings against their non-working brethren. Divide and conquer. If you can get friends to turn against friends in need for their own self-interest... well, you've just reinvented the American Dream. Those defending unemployment will be socialists and those defending the tax cut will be heroes--who are you going to vote for? It's a brilliant see-saw measure that is worthy of some kind of complex-but-extremely-boring dystopian political movie plot. Shame that Philip K. Dick isn't still around to write it.

The myth of job creation

2011-11-03T16:02:00.007-04:00

You've been hearing it non-stop for the entire past election cycle (and, really, much before that), but now that the top-earning 1% in our country are coming under serious fire by the Occupy Movement, it's been trotted out more than ever: the claim that the rich create jobs, so for us to spur the economy, we must pretty much just let them do whatever they please.

Besides the fact that that is a ridiculously fatalistic view of economics, it's also an extremely twisted statement spiked with a logical fallacy. Yes, the rich do give us jobs. Without the companies that the rich own and operate, very few of us would have jobs indeed. Whether that is inherently fair or not is a different discussion completely, but it's just how our system works, so that much of the statement is true. However, the kind of talk that we're hearing now is a convolution of this fact. Rich people do not just create jobs because they are rich and run those companies who employ us. The fact that they are rich has nothing to do with the actual creation of jobs; they are simply the tools, not the catalyst. The catalyst that creates jobs is a basic principle of economics, one that has somehow been ignored as this argument has come to a boil.

It's called supply and demand.

Just because you have a boatload of money and a company that is doing well does not more jobs create. You've got the ability to hire more people, sure, but you're not going to do so unless the demand for your product or service is also growing. Herman Cain, the one who has reverted to this empty buzz-phrase the most, should understand this concept the best. He was the CEO of a major American pizza chain, Godfather's Pizza. Now, we don't have Godfather's Pizza in Pittsburgh, but we do have another local chain called Vocelli Pizza that I can reference as an analogous example.

There are, within the immediate city limits, three Vocelli locations, as well as numerous others out in the suburbs. The three city locations are in Lawrenceville, Oakland and Downtown, and have served the community for many years. If Mr. Vocelli wished to, with his power as a very rich man, he could "create jobs" by building a fourth location, say in Shadyside. But without the demand, what is the point of creating more supply? It would be a foolish move for him to open another location in the city, because the three locations that exist already supply plenty of pizza to fit the demand. Pumping all that money into another location when the consumer could simply drive five more minutes to the already existing Oakland location? That's a terrible business plan, one destined for failure. So he can't just create jobs out of thin air. If he did what the Republican candidates are claiming the rich business owners can do, there would be a Vocelli Pizza on every corner in Pittsburgh, and they'd all go out of business within months because they wouldn't each be selling enough pizza to stay afloat.

The fact that there isn't a floundering Godfather's Pizza in every single two-horse town in America goes to show that, no matter what he says on television, Herman Cain does understand this. There just isn't enough demand to drive that kind of growth and job creation--and the ultimate irony is that the 99% are not paid enough to create that demand. Maybe not in terms of pizza, but in the purchasing of many other goods and services. The less we are paid and more we are taxed (while the inverse is true for the richest Americans), the less we are able to buy. The rich can only create jobs if the rest of us are clamoring for the things that those jobs produce. And right now, we can't afford to do so.

The only way for jobs to be "created" outside of this system is for the government to do so, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt did with the Civilian Conservation Corps and many of the other New Deal initiatives. In the public sector, demand can be eschewed, the supply being not economic but a sense of greater good. Development of infrastructure, of highways and railways and parks, investing in our future rather than the immediate profits of now. That is the kind of job creation we should be rallying behind as we continue to see unemployment rise. We cannot depend upon corporations to look out for our best interests, and why should they?

Businesses are about making money, not about taking care of people. It doesn't necessarily make them evil, but it is a fact that we need to understand before we put them on a pedestal and worship their almighty power to provide for us. That's some 19th century, pre-union, company town crazy talk, but it's found its way into our national zeitgeist once more. And this time we're cheering it on! Have we really forgotten how hard we've worked to get away from selling our soul to the company store, as we now cheerlead for these companies and lay ourselves out on the altar, praying they toss us some bread? It is we that provide for them, not the other way around.

Tax Responsibility

2011-10-18T09:45:00.009-04:00

Looking back at yesterday’s blog, I believe that the graph I posted warrants a little bit more attention. What the graph displays is the difference in the percentage of tax to the upper-most and bottom-most brackets of our tax system over the last century, and as you can see, we have had a raucous relationship with the taxation of the rich, while at the same time, have found the taxation of the poor to be relatively consistent. The importance of this differentiation becomes readily apparent when you explore the deep canyons of the red “rich” line, and realize what events happen to fall within them. Namely, the Great Depression and then later, the Reagan/Bush tax cuts (and consequent 2008 Depression). For your convenience, I’ve now plotted both depressions on the graph:

Now, it would be silly and inaccurate to put the blame completely on the taxation patterns of the rich for our economic recessions, but the graph illustrates an undeniable trend. After periods of deregulation and “free market” expansion, in which the rich see their personal investments increase and responsibility to the greater good decrease, we have been left, as a nation, in dire straits. In response to the Great Depression (which barely made a dent in the pocketbooks of those supremely rich) Franklin Delano Roosevelt enacted the New Deal and increased the tax responsibility of the rich to bring the rest of our country back from the brink of extinction. That is what we need now.

“Tax responsibilty” would be a good phrase to use in the Occupation protests. Because that is what we are talking about when we talk about increasing tax rates. It’s not about wanting to tax the rich just because we don’t think they deserve the money—it’s about making them accountable to the country they live in. What the upper eschelons of society do now is take, take and take. We work for almost free, well under a living wage, for companies that have stifled our unions, cancelled our health care and cut back our benefits. We have come full circle to the days of Andrew Mellon and Henry Clay Frick, where workers are a mere commodity, easily replaced if they dissent.

And all the while, our masters have gotten richer and stronger, pulling more and more money out of the government whose strings they somehow still inexplicably pull. They put money into trusts, reinvest into tax shelters or simply keep money overseas, avoiding taxation on their wealth. They skirt the rules and avoid their civic duties and then have the gall to call us unpatriotic in our protests. We need to demand tax responsibility for all. If you make more, your responsibility to this nation should be greater. It is, after all, the freedoms of this country that allow you to make that money in the first place. The 99% pays more than our fair share--it’s about time we demand that the 1% do the same.

How this tax thing works

2011-10-17T10:12:00.006-04:00

It’s time for a little economics lesson.

Recently, it came to my attention that no one really understands how taxes work. Yes, we pay them to the government and they use the money to buy things, like war for example. Some people seem to forget that they also pay for things like street signs, street lights, sidewalks and streets, but that’s a topic for another entry entirely.

With the Occupy Movement starting up and people finally taking notice of how badly the economy of this country skews to the upper echelons, it is important that we understand not only where our tax dollars go, but also how they are paid in, and what creates the income disparity to begin with. This subject is extremely important to the discourse that needs to take place about the massive and continually growing gap between the super rich and everyone else, and it is often so convoluted by those who wish to devolve honest debate into the screaming of buzzwords.

The most important thing about the assessment and collection of taxes are tax brackets. You’ve probably heard of them before, and if you’re currently reading this, it is likely that you exist in the first one. Where you fall in the series of five tax brackets is based on your gross income (less deductions and such), and are divided as such:

Now, most of you probably already know this, especially if you file your own taxes. And you know that it is based on this bracket system that your income tax rate is determined. You’ve no doubt heard a lot about income tax rates in the recent months, and what you know is that with each increasing bracket, the tax rates increase as well, from the first bracket’s rate of 15% to the last one’s at 39.6%. What you’ve also no doubt heard is that this is unfair. Even if the rich do make more money, why shouldn’t we all be taxed at the same rate? How is it fair that they pay over double what the lowest bracket pays on their income? All that this tax scheme is doing is taking more money the harder you work.

It’s not, they don’t, and we do.

What is so often glossed over is how the tax brackets operate. If you make $100,000 a year (falling into the middle of Bracket 3), you don’t get taxed 31% rate on your entire income--the bracket only applies to the money that is taxed in that bracket. Namely, $10,850, or the difference between your $100,000 income and the cut-off point of Bracket 2. The same goes for Bracket 1. No matter how much money you make, the first $37k of your income is only taxed at 15%, then the next couple tens of thousands at 28%, and so on and so forth. It’s a graduated tax system, which means we all get taxed the same amount on the money that we similarly make. The head of BNY Mellon and I pay the same amount of tax on our comparable income, and it is only once he skips upward in the scale that he pays more. And as you climb into the upper reaches of the bracket system, the numbers become neglible.

No, really, look at how the margins shrink as they increase. Between the first two, we see a nine point increase, then as we climb into the realm of upper management and junior executives, the increases shrink to four points each. The final jump, to the world of the top-level execs making a quarter million and infinitely upward, isn’t even a full four points. What the fuck?

The reason most of us are unaware of this issue is that we never get out of that first bracket. Ours, therefore, is a flat tax. No matter how hard you work, unless you’re getting a boatload of overtime, you’re paying in 15% for the rest of your blue-collar life. Unless you are consistently bumping up into Bracket 2, you’ll likely never even consider how the system operates, and you’ll surely never explore the piddling rate at which the upper brackets are taxed and how ridiculously unfair that is. It wasn’t always that way, either. With every new conservative regime that has taken control of our country, the upper rates have shrank and shrank. In the mid-80s, when my good friend Curtis Faith had an income reaching into the top-most bracket, taxes there were around 50%. Before that, they were much higher, as evidenced by the following graph:

As you can see, the rates throughout the “best years” of our country were gargantuanly higher. Not only have those rates shrunk significantly with the increasingly conservative, isolationist approaches government has taken toward our economy, but when the Reagan and Bush tax cuts went into effect three decades ago, we found the lowest tax brackets actually raised and the disparity of wealth increased as the gap in taxation shrank to an all-time low. Now, as economists try to argue for rolling-back the upper-end George W. Bush tax cuts and allow the top bracket to rise to a slightly more reasonable rate, conservatives argue tooth and nail against it, even as the evidence against the economic effectiveness of willy-nilly tax slashing piles up against them.

The reason we need to understand these things is to truly understand what we are fighting for. The Occupy Movement has a great thing going for them, and it is just beginning, but we need to be clear in our message so as to not be spun by those who wish for us to fail. We don’t want to tax people more, we want to tax them progressively. We want to tax them fairly. This discussion about income tax has not even taken into consideration the topic of capital gains taxes—the very bane of the rich and conservative set, which they have repeatedly tried to excise to further benefit themselves. But that, again, is a topic for another post.

To those Occupying, again this is my call: Be strong and be clear. Educate yourself and use that knowledge as a weapon. Be able to answer the questions that will be asked of you, and answer them with passion and with respect. This is how we win this war. We are not an angry mob; we are angry, but we come with purpose. Not to smash windows but to talk. To explain. To feel. And that is all we ask: for someone to listen, to understand and to feel for us as well.

Think globally, protest locally

2011-10-16T18:18:00.004-04:00

Yesterday began two brand-new legs of the Occupy movement: one in London and one here at home in Pittsburgh. The movement, which began on Wall Street mere weeks ago, has grown exponentially and is finally coming to represent a well-rounded anger that we're feeling, worldwide, at those who make all of the decisions for us, who tell us that we are nothing with their actions though they still pay lip service to our hopes and dreams. Unlike the way Fox News and USA Today have attempted to represent it, the Occupations are not anarchist rally, it's not a hyper-leftist movement--it is by nature a progressive stand, yes, but it has nothing to do with partisan politics. It is about class warfare, and there are plenty of Republicans, Democrats, Greens, Libertarians and Socialists alike down here in the muck to fight.

It took a while for Occupy Pittsburgh to find its legs, but now there are tens of tents set up, housing around a hundred people on the park in front of the BNY Mellon headquarters in downtown Pittsburgh. It also just happens to be located directly behind the hotel where I work. I was concerned about our local chapter of the revolution--that it may be met with apathy or that it would become a long, drawn-out discussion and never physically manifest itself. But the time that it took to get rolling was used brilliantly as an incubation period, and instead of a few more protesters trickling in every day, the march through the city ended with quite a sizable population now respectfully taking up residence on one of the largest American banking institution's front lawn.

The camp is also situated right on the corner of Grant Street and Sixth Avenue, one of the most significant thoroughfares in downtown, so a constant flow of cars is being funneled by the protestors holding signs, banners strung from poles and draped over tents. I was excited to see the Occupiers outside this morning, and I hope to be able to spend some time in the park with them: perhaps around noon or six when the general assemblies are being held. But as thrilled as I was, I worried about the response of the rest of the city. Walking out after work, I passed right by the protest on my way to the bus stop, chatting for a moment with a gentleman on the corner and offering my sincerest support. To my surprise, as I waited for the bus, cars upon cars that were fed from the highway down Grant Street were honking their horns in support. It was an almost-constant blare of horns, issuing from trucks and cars and even a large city maintenance vehicle.

I realized that Pittsburgh is perhaps one of the most interesting cities for this kind of a protest to take place. In New York (and particularly on Wall Street) that richest 1% is really much higher--maybe even 5% or 10%, when you consider the vast amounts of money that move through those particular veins of the Big Apple. Here in Pittsburgh, on the other hand, that 1% is probably more like a .5% or less. This city is built on, and vehemently proud of, its blue-collar ethics and traditions. Here, too, the income gap is much smaller than in New York or in Boston. There just aren't as many multi-millionaires per square acre. So the breeding ground for support is much broader. Provided the media pays fair attention to the protest and what it is about, not spinning it into some kind of anarchist nonsense as has been the case in the past few weeks of OWS, this is exactly the kind of sentiment that can take hold in Pittsburgh. And that warms my heart to an unreal degree.

In a single day of Occupation, before any media has really been by to explore, there is already respect and warmth to this protest. It is honest and it is true. It is simple. It is something we can all understand and something we all can feel. You are, as this revolution will soon show, either for us or against us; not in a pugnacious way, but in the truth of what this whole thing is about. Those people on the lawn, no matter whether you love them, join them, laugh at them or sound off against them, are fighting for your rights. It is selfless and it is true, and we should be so lucky to have people like them sitting in for our rights to be acknowledged.

For more information on the Occupy Movement here and abroad or to find out how you can help in the revolution, please visit occupypittsburgh.org and occupywallst.org, or just go down to Mellon Green, on the corner of Grant and Sixth in the shadow of the BNY Mellon Center and visit with the protesters there.

Occupation dedication

2011-10-13T08:04:00.002-04:00

I have not yet been deeply involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement (or locally, the Occupy Pittsburgh one--the irony being that my shitty job keeps me too busy to do so), but I have been keeping an eye on developments with it. It has warmed my heart to see it grow, and even though it may not be perfect, it stands for something important: that the vast majority of us are getting fucked.

Now, with the most recent Republican debate, the GOP candidates for 2012 have decided that they can see the advantages of steering this anger, much like they did with the Tea Party in 2010, and in less than a week, almost all of the polling candidates have changed their tune, coming to now “understand” the frustrations of the OWS protestors. But have they come out in support of the people on the street? Have they, too, denounced the record profits made and massive bonuses doled out during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression? Of course not. They’ve got the gall to suggest that protestors should be occupying Pennsylvania Avenue, not Wall Street. “They have basically targeted the wrong target,” said Herman Cain. “It should be against the failed policies of this administration, not Wall Street, is where they should be protesting.”

We live in a twisted world where demanding changes in the businesses that suck the blood of our working nation dry is viewed as “unpatriotic”, but the systematic destruction of our very government itself is something every red-blooded American should be chomping at the bit to do. At the heart of it, OWS really is a partisan movement. It is clearly geared toward the left, just as the Tea Party was geared toward the right. I don’t want to believe that, hoping rather that we can all be outraged at the current coddling big business receives from our increasingly more economically conservative system here in the United States--but I know it isn’t true.

However, we now begin to see OWS painted in a different light, and it is my sincerest hope that the protestors themselves remember those roots as the GOP tries to find a foothold to work their own angle. “I think the people who are protesting on Wall Street break into two groups,” Newt Gingrich said at the last debate. “One is left-wing agitators who would be happy to show up next week on any other topic, and the other is sincere middle-class people who, frankly, are very close to the Tea Party people and actually care.”

I see what you did there.

Occupy protestors the world over: Do not be misled. Your target is the right one. It will be attractive to let into the fold all of those who share your sentiments, your frustrations. But be careful, because some will come as wolves in sheeps clothing. You are the left’s retaliation against the astroturfed uprising of the neo-conservative right, and for that you should be proud. The media has said your message is unclear, but it is simply because the message really is so broad, so simple. Do not allow that to be compromised, to have your anger steered in the wrong direction. You have the roiling frustration of a nation behind you and it is growing with every day, so captain it well and maybe the change we have been so long waiting for can finally be made.

You'll never be rich

2011-10-12T18:21:00.009-04:00

Part of me is impressed that pizza mogul Herman Cain has gotten as far into this Republican primary three-ring circus as he has, and then the rest of me remembers that he's neck-and-neck with a Mormon robot and a woman who makes Sarah Palin look like a rational human being, and I go back to being completely appalled that we don't want people who should run our country running our country--we want ourselves to run our country. Because what's important to the presidency is relatability! Law degrees or experience in public policy? Sounds like some liberal elite faggot shit! What kinda beer does he like??

But Cain really blew my mind after this past debate session, when he explained that the Occupy Wall Street protestors and all of the people who back them, who have ended up tens of thousands of dollars in debt from college with no jobs or prospects to pay it all back, should "blame themselves" for being under- or outright unemployed. It is our own fault, he explained, that we are not rich. Anyone can be rich if they want to be. We're all just shiftless and lazy.

There is a lot wrong with what he said, and most of it is obvious. And better than I can explain that, Bill Maher can in his recent interview with Rachel Maddow, so why not let him?

However, the issue I have with Cain's interpretation of the overeducated and underemployed goes much further, because it is the feeling of many people here in America--not that people like me are necessarily lazy, but that everyonecan be rich someday. Not only is that impossible and silly, and just would not fuel any modern economy by any stretch of imagination--it is also a detrimental approach to our lives.

We live in a society that doesn't realize (and won't let itself realize) just how poor we are. Ask most people and they'll tell you that they're a part of the "middle class." They likely aren't, unless they're at least in some minor management position. Do they work in a factory? A hotel? A restaurant? They're grunts like you and me. But we're convinced we're just one great idea away from being millionaires. It's the American Dream: you work really hard and then you get everything you've ever wanted! We are not poor, we're just "pre-rich" and waiting for our big break. It comes out in how we vote on policy; no hard-working steel mill worker actually has any love for his union-busting company head, but he still votes against his own interests in a progressive tax system because someday he, too, will make $250k a year.

He won't. Most of us never will, even with college degrees. Especially with college degrees, at this point, with the market flooded and debt up to our eyeballs. And the sooner we all realize that, the better off we'll be. You are not a special little snowflake that is so wonderful and so talented and so full of promise. You are a grunt, just like me. At my current job, I make roughly $23k a year. That means it will take me ELEVEN YEARS to make that $250k we're all so sure we're gonna get, by golly. I'll have to work FORTY-FOUR years to make a measly million, and most of that will go into rent, loans, and if I'm ever stupid enough, a car and a house someday. Hopefully someday (soon) I'll find a better job that pays more, but there will still be people working at the hotel where I'm currently employed, working for the same or less than me, right up until the day they die because they can't even afford to retire. Don't believe me? Come on by and I'll introduce you to them.

They'll never be rich, and you won't be either. Not like the people you're protecting. So let go. Be proud of the work you do and understand your place in this life. It can improve the lives of many other people like you, whether you want to admit they're like you or not. We're the 99% after all. That's the majority of us.

Genuinely inauthentic

2011-03-20T16:54:00.003-04:00

I don’t even know if I should be writing this.

And that’s a weird thing for me to feel, or at least to admit. This entire blog is pretty much predicated on me being sure of things and then tearing into them with great and reckless disregard. My whole life is pretty much predicated on that. But I felt a tearing of my soul last night, a discrepancy in my own thought process that I can’t get out of my head.

I am a person who loves music. Not all music but most. Especially good music, played by talented people who care about the music they are playing. That’s inevitably the best kind of music—-that which the performers truly feel. But what if the whole thing is an act? What if the great music they are playing, and really in themselves truly feeling, is just something they’ve created out of thin air? Something wholly and completely inauthentic to their own experiences? Does that negate the talent? The love? The sound?

I should specify: I’m not talking about metal music here, nor am I talking about rock or punk or even ska. Those genres, to me, can exist in a vacuum. You need not be from Providence, Rhode Island to play spazzcore art-rock (though it probably helps). What I am talking about is the kind of music that is born out of a specific culture—-one that resides firmly in a context that cannot (or at least should not) be shifted. I am talking about genres like reggae, blues or Irish balladry. Or, specifically in this case, folk and country.

The overarching name for this kind of music, regardless of its specific sound or historical context, is “roots” music. More often than not, it ends up as a starting point from which other similarly-inspired music branches out. But roots music is the core. It is created with urgency, in response to a time or a place, to a condition of a people. In the specific case of folk and country, you'll find the roots deep in the south, with songs about union strikes and God’s green earth, about whiskey and women and what it means to be poor and down on your luck. Through all the changes country music has gone through over the decades it has existed (changes I’ve railed on before in this blog), some of those core values have remained, though nearly invariably bastardized over the changing eras.

So when a brand new roots country band plays a show, I should be excited. The band that I saw last night was unbelievable. They played the crowd like you’d imagine Johnny Cash to have when he brought the roof down at Folsom State Prison. Their singer and guitarist was perfect: his twang, his antics, his rolled up high-water jeans and shit-kicker boots. He shredded through bluegrass and blues numbers, touching on a little bit of old-school white-soul in between with his organ player, and by the end of it all, had the crowd do-si-do-ing around the floor, stomping their feet and screaming wildly. So where’s he from? What is so deep in his blood to make him holler and jive like that? Memphis? Charleston? Denver, at least? Nope: the northern suburbs of Pittsburgh.

And now I have a problem.

Because he’s never lived on a farm. His friends assured me that it’s his dream to own a farm someday, and I assured them that after a single day of baling hay, he’ll haul his spurs straight back to the suburbs. I don’t know him personally, but I’ll gather that he’s never really had financial hardship in his life, a hard-knock blue-collar job or even cousins from the south. In the case of another local country-folk band, I can say without a doubt that all of these things are true, because I do actually know them personally.

But should that matter? I can’t tell. I have no idea. On one hand, it matters to me more than anything. Last night, knowing what I knew, I just couldn’t fully appreciate or enjoy the music. It smacked of such inauthenticity to me. Each pose the singer struck was out of a handbook; when he took a moment to put down his guitar at the end of the set and introduce each member of the band, it was like watching a parody of so many country bands that toured their way through my little hometown in the sticks of Central Pennsylvania where I actually have baled hay, where I’ve raised chickens and lived, for the first few years of my life, on a pig farm. And I don’t even think I’m real enough to make roots music without a proper sense of self-aware irony. If you’ve ever heard the country band I played with, you’ll quickly notice the lyrics are all matters of fiction—pieces of a mythology we created, not unlike that of Ziggy Stardust. We admitted the fakery, embraced it. We weren’t parodies but simply characters.

On the other hand, the band last night was really good. Is that what matters? It’s just music after all. Should I just take it at face value? I would with metal or rock or techno. But can you imagine a white reggae band that recorded an album without even having visited Jamaica or befriending a black guy? I can: they’re named 311 and are from Omaha, Nebraska, and they deserve to be the butt of any joke that you can think of. It’s hard to take roots music at face value, because it is, by nature of the very music itself, something that must be absorbed much more deeply.

But if the music is good, better than that of the “country” musicians that actually do hail from hard-luck families in the Deep South, which is really worth more? A college kid from Pittsburgh who can wail like Waylon, or a starry-eyed Alabama girl who croons like Christina Aguilera? Does authenticity count? And if it does, who is more authentic? Should this kid be forced to live in a decrepit trailer park outside of Shreveport for ten years before he's allowed to play another show? Would that be enough for me? If I'd heard that story, I'd have called foul even more. He just moved so he could make that music, what a load of hooey! So what would be enough? Would he need to be born into it? Or is just the desire and the love enough?

I’m not leading up to an answer here. Usually in my blog I’ll spit out a bunch of these leading questions to slam home my point in the end. But today there is none. I have no idea how I should feel. I don’t even know how I do feel, whether it’s how I should or not. I can’t form an opinion.

Jeez. What am I becoming?

Get on the bus, Gus

2011-01-26T18:15:00.004-05:00

The beginning of this year marked another service cut for the badly-limping Port Authority of Allegheny County. Routes were changed or cut and lots of bus drivers were laid off, and as winter grows steadily winter-er, it seems that another cut is on the horizon, possibly to include one of the brand-new routes that finally connected Lawrenceville to Oakland (aka, the Five Guys Express).

It breaks my heart, really, because I think that public transit is one of the most important pieces of infrastructure that can exist in a city. It's the veins through which a city's lifeblood flows. Buses allow a great number of us mobility enough to get to our jobs, to grocery stores--to fuel the economy of the city without being dragged down by the costs of owning a car. Frankly, I'd guess that most of us taking the bus couldn't even afford a car if we wanted to own one (I know I couldn't), so the bus really is the only viable option to get us back and forth between the places we need to go.

I, for one, depend upon the bus system here in the city. Without them, I could not get to work. I love to bike, but I can't do that in a suit, or when it's snowing. A car just isn't an option for me. If not for the bus system here in Pittsburgh, I'm not sure what I would do, and it is with that kind of great appreciation and understanding that I say this now:

Fuck the motherfucking bus drivers here in Pittsburgh. Fuck them to death.

You would think that they'd be on their best behavior, knowing that it could be them that next gets the axe. But these smarmy motherfuckers don't even understand the purpose of their jobs. They really don't, and it was proven to me yet again today. It comes with the territory, making up to $90,000 dollars a year. No wonder they think they're hot shit that can do no wrong--they are. But at the very least, making more than what many professors in Pittsburgh make, they should at least know what the fuck their role is. So I, as a concerned and level-headed citizen of this great city, am here to remind them.

You are here to take people from Point A to Point B, and often, back again. Remember that part up above where I talked about how we all depend on you to get us around? THAT'S YOUR JOB. What isn't your job is just driving around in a goddamn circle all day. You've got a route to run, yes--a route on which YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO PICK UP PEOPLE AND THEN TAKE THEM ELSEWHERE. If the city just needed someone to drive around in circles all day, they'd build a NASCAR track, you jackass. So when I'm a block away from the stop, running late to work, and I ask you what number your bus is because it isn't even prominently displayed on your beat old jalopy, you can at least have the KINDNESS TO ANSWER ME INSTEAD OF WAVING ME OFF WITH THAT LITTLE "PSH-PSH" HAND MOTION.

I understand that you've got to keep to a schedule, but really, let's be frank with each other: you don't. You get caught in traffic, you have emergencies. Sometimes you're a little late or a little early, but when you start showing up fifteen minutes early to a stop and cruising right through it, someone should reassess your timetable. If you're running early, chill out for a few minutes at the next stop and get back on schedule. If you're running a little late, put that gas pedal down and make up some time. Your timetable is set up so that you can auto-correct whenever you need to. You aren't a train.

Because you're not just running a route. People are depending on you, not only to get there relatively close to the time you're scheduled, but to pick them up at all. Would it be so bad to let us on a block away from the stop if we're running after you, screaming and begging to get on? Do you not get that that's your entire purpose, to let those people get on and get to work, even if it's not laid out, word-for-word in your job description? Do you have no heart? I hardly think you need to possess a passion for public transit to become a bus driver, but would it hurt to have a soul? At least the tiniest desire to help people get from place to place on the machine that you pilot? I mean, are we not paying you enough?

Here's a bat-ter idea

2011-01-23T17:39:00.005-05:00

It seems that Christopher Nolan has finally officially announced the third in his Batman reboot trilogy, and it is being called Dark Knight Rises, which, to no one’s surprise whatsoever, has really turned out the boner jokes in full force. But that’s not the important thing about this final installment: we all knew it was coming (ha!), the question has always just been over who he’d trot out as the big final villains this time around.

Batman movies have had a long and confusing relationship with the actual comic itself, following or breaking canon, directors picking out their victims pretty much willy-nilly. The first run of Tim Burton movies were solid flicks, featuring first the Joker, and then Catwoman and the Penguin. When Joel Schumacher took over the franchise, he added nipples to the batsuit and gave us an interesting pair in the Riddler and Two-Face, then decided to finish out his tenure with Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy and some vague attempt at Bane, much to the dismay of anyone with eyeballs and a memory.

When Nolan took over the franchise, he decided to go with a more realistic approach to the comics, one that was darker and more serious than Schumacher’s, but not as impressionistic or gothic as Burton’s. In that, he decided only to choose villains that fit to this standard. There wouldn’t be a Penguin or a Killer Croc, characters who fall too far outside the realm of realism. Instead we got the criminally underappreciated Scarecrow in Batman Begins, an excellent and untapped choice for a brand new start to the rather repetitive cycle in which Batman movies had begun to spin. Then, of course, with The Dark Knight, he brought us the Joker, the most iconic of all Batman villains, in perhaps, an even more memorable performance by Heath Ledger than Jack Nicholson’s in Tim Burton’s first movie. Along with him was a far more realistic Two-Face, one that really spoke to the horror of Harvey Dent’s twisted character.

All in all, Nolan had delivered astoundingly well on his promise, and it appears that in Dark Knight Rises, he will continue to do the same. In the announcement this week, we found out who our last pair of nasties will be: Anne Hathaway as Catwoman and Tom Hardy as Bane. An interesting pair, no doubt. I certainly can’t complain about Anne or Tom showing up in any movie. And yes, Catwoman is a classic, how could we expect him to skip her in what is likely the last of his Batman flicks? And Bane is yet untested, a favorite of the fan-faithful, and though he appeared briefly in Batman & Robin, his role should hardly be counted at all. So what do I think? Oh, I’ll tell you what I think…

At the end of The Dark Knight, we have Maggie Gyllenhaal gettin’ all blowed up, the Joker dying, and Batman feeling like a big fat sack of shit. While Catwoman is certainly a great prescription for Batman to find his mojo back, how about we actually tie these last two movies together a bit? Ever since I left the theatre at the end of the last film, I had one character in mind, and I knew exactly how I’d write her in:

Harley Quinn.

Stick with me now.

I know it wouldn’t be anywhere near canonical, but out of the rubble of the last movie, we see a new villain rise, hell-bent on revenge for the fallen Joker. She’s a mystery, her face shrouded in greasepaint, but she wants Batman dead and will take down Gotham with him, no matter the cost. Sure, she can invite Bane along for the trip, because frankly, Bane deserves a second chance. So Harley Quinn and her venom-jacked cohort wreak havoc through town at a level even the Joker couldn’t imagine as Batman struggles to know what he is, trying to come to terms with his loss of Rachel and his world crumbling around him. I mean, yeah, she's not Catwoman, but that broad's been done to death (sorry boutcha, Halle Berry). Nolan's not one to stand on ceremony anyway, and with Bane in the mix and his fresh, modern take on the franchise, Nolan could really do Harley well, especially as the movie comes to its teeth-chattering, explosion-filled close.

Because, finally, in the most climactic scene of the entire trilogy, when Batman at long last has a chance to do away with this menace to society that has so definitively broken him, Harley’s makeup is smeared away, and she is revealed to be none other than Rachel Dawes. She didn’t die in the explosion at all. Instead, suffering from a hyper-intensified state of Stockholm Syndrome, augmented by perhaps drugs (let’s tie ol’ Dr. Crane back into this!) or by a head injury or just the Joker’s own insanity, she fell in love with the Joker and went bat-shit (pun completely intended), when she found out he was dead, dedicating herself, along with all of the Joker cronies and Gotham under-dwellers left, to utterly decimate Batman once and for all.

Can you imagine that moment? When Batman has nothing left to live for, a completely broken man, about to go back on his moral standard and actually kill Harley Quinn, only to find out that she is Rachel? That she doesn’t remember him, and that, as they are struggling high atop Gotham on some precarious ledge, she is still wild-eyed and spitting as he is falling back in love and has no idea what to do because she is no longer herself?? He can’t kill her, he can’t even arrest her. WHAT DOES HE DO?? ARE YOUR PISSING YOUR PANTS YET?? It wouldn’t just be the most amazing possible end to the movie, but such an epic, heart-breaking, all-encompassing end to the trilogy that would feel so complete, so perfect, that someone might actually leave the franchise well enough alone for a few goddamn years for once, goddamnit.

So Nolan, get at me brother. There’s still time to change a couple of things around. Tell the Academy to start etching your name on that Oscar.

On the road, again

2010-08-25T21:14:00.001-04:00

Since I moved back to Pittsburgh in April, I haven't had much use for a car. Which has been convenient, because I don't have one anymore. Yes, I sold the Red Devil to my parents for a hefty sum of $400, not a bad deal since, y'know, they bought it as my high school graduation present anyway. So it's been to the bike and bus with me to get everywhere. I've debated buying a skateboard so I can traverse short distances conveniently, even while in my suit for work (especially while in my suit for work), but I've been significantly deterred by the fact that they are like a hundred plus goddamn bucks now? Are you serious? Also, I can't do an ollie to save my life.

I prefer biking, but I've got to take the bus to work so I'm not sweaty and gross when I show up to the ninety-four-year-old four-star Grand Dame hotel where I work. The management wouldn't like that very much. They don't even like when I show up with a little stubble. I don't like that I suddenly have to shave every day. What kind of bullshit is that? I still can't grow a full, magnificent beard like I've always dreamed of, and never will be able to--but I now have to shave some dinky little patch on my chin every single day? Adulthood is a crock. Ugh.

But, whenever I've got a day off here and there, I do almost all my travel by bike. Some days I don't even have a place to go, I just make up some pointless errand, invent a need for new socks (I love new socks!) and head out to some far-flung store that might carry them or maybe not, who cares. That's how I almost hit a deer the other weekend. I wanted to get a new copy of FIFA 10 since mine kept freezing up, and the closest available copy was out at the Waterworks Mall in Aspinwall. So I jumped on my bike, directions written down my forearm in Sharpie, and took off. I got lost on the way, but eventually looped and re-looped back around the Zoo before crossing the Highland Park Bridge. Trying to keep up with the flying traffic as I came up on the bridge, I barely saw the dead deer laid out on the median before I slammed on (and popped) my front brake. Inches from face-planting into the carcass, I screeched to a halt. It's an adventurous way to get around, to say the least.

Urban cycling is a life-affirming fucking thing. I've biked through Manhattan and felt like a superman while doing it, but even riding in Pittsburgh, a city where the car-driving populace still doesn't quite get the fact that people use bicycles as transportation and not just to be target practice for their massive 4x4 Chevy Landfuckers, is positively exhilarating. And I can hold my own, I'd like to imagine. As long as you respect that I exist and weigh in at approximately 4% of what you and your tank-sized spaceship on Goodyears does, I get along just fine. Whether you're hurtling down the road or taking up three parking spaces along the curb, just keep in mind that I'm tiny and fragile and we'll be friends. Especially when you're parked, actually, because I live in constant, nail-biting, panic-attack-inducing fear of getting my ass doored into oblivion. All I ask is that you keep from killing me, not treat me like a three-year-old.

You see, over a year ago, I wrote a blog that I titled "On the road" that wasn't, in fact, about how much I hate Jack Kerouac (though I could write an entire, wandering, purposeless, self-involved book about that). It was about terrible drivers, and focused, in the end, on my very least favorite brand of them: the Good Samaritan. You've dealt with him, the driver who gives of himself to help you (oh holy day!) when you plainly do not need any helping, messing up the flow of traffic and being a general nuisance while thinking smugly to himself that he is just such a good guy, gee whiz!

I thought I'd seen the last of the Good Samaritan drivers when I traded my four wheels for two, considering most drivers here are content to just kill you on your bike, rather than give you a cute little wave-on. But yesterday I actually got one again, one who just couldn't help herself from being soooo helpful. She was in an SUV (duh) and two cars ahead of me on Smallman Street, slowing down at a green light with her right blinker on. Naturally, not wanting to get flattened by her veritable locomotive when she turned, I slowed down, coasting up past the cars on my left... which had come to a complete stop, because the woman had braked to a halt in front of the intersection. At a green light. The cars behind slammed on their brakes and laid on their horns as I slowly crept up beside her motionless vehicle, expecting to see what she obviously saw: an ambulance flying down the street, a car zipping through the red light the other way, anything that would have warranted a sudden halt. But as I inched up, I saw her, smiling broadly, waving me on with two fingers. Go ahead, young man, I see you on your little bike and I want to make sure you get home safe!

C'mon lady.

You almost caused an accident, you confused the hell out of me, had everyone slam on their brakes, and I'm not on a goddamn tricycle here. I'm paying more attention to the road than you are, because my life depends on it. The last thing I want to do is come rushing up the side of a massive sport utility vehicle with a huge blind spot and a light that is blinking, saying, "HEY WATCH OUT I'M COMING THE FUCK RIGHT INTO YOUR SHIT!" So when you think you're doing me a favor, stopping up traffic to let me come by you... you're not. That's exactly how my friend Jason got nailed in Philadelphia and the paramedics had to cut his clothes off. His clothes from Urban Outfitters; dude lost like four hundred bucks that day. And almost died. So again, please, you pridefully patient pricks and sons of smug-ass bitches: just drive. We don't want your favors, we don't need your kind gestures. We just want the flow of traffic to... well, flow. Can we just be settled at that?

Onward and upward

2010-08-22T12:14:00.004-04:00

I'm constantly looking for something better. I suppose it's the human desire for more that drives me, for something that challenges and surprises at every turn. I don't think it's greedy, or at least I hope it's not. I hope it's just me pining to find something that I truly want to do for the rest of my life. Ultimately, I'd love to be a professor of English, a job will allow me to educate while educating myself, constantly changing, looking for and learning things new. I'd also love to live in the Scottish Highlands, own a vintage Jaguar and have a seasoncard for Manchester City, but those are just for fun. I don't know how realistic these things are, or how far away they are if they even are realistic, but this constant desire for upwardness and onwardity makes it hard to be satisfied, no matter how satisfied I am.

It's why I can't stay in a job for very long. And I don't mean that I quit and stomp around lazily, wishing the world would present me with better opportunities. I certainly do the latter, but I work toward it. I am always attempting to get promoted, or move into a job more in my field, in my interest, or just plain more interesting. But that's difficult. Especially in writing, or in radio, or in tv. I've picked a bunch of winners to have as passions--jobs that, more than any other, you are judged less on what you can do than who you know. My last tv job was working as Master Control at a small cable studio--but my younger brother had to get the job for me because he knew people and I didn't, despite the fact that I'd done that kind of work for four years in college.

My most recent attempt to move upward was with Apple. It has always been a dream of mine to work for Apple, whether selling, fixing or desiging their computers. Two out of three of those possibilities are highly improbable, seeing as I know virtually nothing about the computers other than that I quite enjoy using them and prefer them to PCs. But selling I could do, and Apple offered me a position to do just that about a month ago. And after six years of pining and three of trying, I did the impossible and turned them down. They couldn't pay enough, and for probably the first time ever, I didn't make a step toward my constantly changing definition of Satisfaction. It was a hard decision, a lot of weighing of options and discussing with Carly before they called me to schedule a training session and I said, "I'm sorry, I just can't accept the offer." They were not as disheartened as I had hoped. And now, even if a better-paying, more advanced position ever becomes available, I'm sure I've been blacklisted through infinity and beyond.

Did I make the right decision? The hotel industry isn't the place for me, but I keep finding myself in it, trying to weasel my way upward despite my utter indifference to it all. I like people, I love hotels and travel, but it's just not my passion. At all. Computers are a lot closer, but still nowhere near. Plus, the busiest the hotel gets has nothing on how crazy the Apple Store in Shadyside is constantly. The thing I hate most about working at the hotel is the overwhelming crowds with their overwhelmingly stupid questions; that's all working at the Apple Store would be. And yet, there would have been upward mobility, which borders on a narcotic for me. But no. I stayed put. If not a little bit because I like the kickbacks that roll in for me here, from the cash tips to the restaurant gift certificates to just people really honestly enjoying when I help them out.

And now, most recently, the biggest kickback of all. The reason I ultimately decided I should stay at the hotel, just stay put a little bit longer. I figured, of all the places to be, with all the elbows that need to be rubbed, staying here should offer me more opportunities than wearing a blue shirt and selling myself to a cult of personality (as delicious as that Apple-flavored Kool-Aid might taste). So it has.

I'm not talking about Paul McCartney (who just left here) or the cast and crew of One for the Money (who has been here for months). The other weekend, a man was staying here while touring the United States to look at colleges with his daughter. He came to me wanting to know how long it would take to drive to JFK Airport in New York, and whether, with his less-than-reliable rental car, he should make the trip in two legs. We decided that was best and I set him up with a hotel room in Harrisburg for the night, about half-way there. When I gave his information to the agent at the hotel, I finally said to him, noticing his address, "Oh, so you are from Germany!" to which he responded, "You could tell from my outrageous accent!"

"Deine Englisch ist besser als meine Deutsch," I said, and he looked surprised: "Du sprichst Deutsch!" We spoke a bit in German, then I wished him luck with his trip and he left. Excited, as I always am to speak German, especially with someone from Germany, I began telling one of my co-workers how great the man was when he came back. I had forgotten to give him the address of the hotel in Harrisburg, but he also brought with him a piece of paper with his name and email and the website of the school where he teaches, and informed me that I should email him on Monday when he is back in his office, because he was so impressed with my German (particularly, my accent) and he would like to take me on as a teaching assistant, to help his students with economic case-studies in English.

Onward and upward.

For the last week, we've been in touch, trying to hammer out the details to such a deal. He likes me a lot and is trying his best to find a place for not only me, but also Carly, so that we can move to Kaiserslautern, just east of the French border in Rhineland-Pfalz, where my family emigrated from in the late 1600s. I don't know what will happen, if we'll be able to come to a solution that works out. But it's a possibility. It's a start. Moving to Germany would be a far bigger dream coming to fruition than just tooling around with computers. Teaching, in Germany makes that dream even bigger. And I'd get a free Master's of Science out of it too. So there's that. An M.S. in International Finance, in fact; a degree that should, theoretically, help me with the even bigger dreams that I've got.

I think, just maybe, I made the right decision.

And here's to making more.

Gimme yo' shit

2010-08-06T00:48:00.005-04:00

As those of you who read my blog regularly already know, especially after long droughts in my writing here, it usually takes something that makes my blood boil to get me to write again. It's been a few months (May and June being the first and second months I've missed completely since I started this blog, actually) since I've last written. In that time I've moved to Pittsburgh, got re-hired at the Hilton, abruptly quit the Hilton (no two weeks notice, just a two-page-long hand-written letter of grievance on my manager's desk the night I left), got the same job only better at the Omni, moved to Lawrenceville, and am now attempting to get a new job at one of the three Apple Stores we have in Pittsburgh (for the second time). It's been a busy month, and fittingly so, I haven't had much of a chance to blog about it. Especially because my new place just off of Butler Street only recently got internet. And also, frankly, because I haven't been angry enough about anything to sit me down here with venom in my fingers. Life's been pretty good lately.

So what got me going? What's got my knickers all in a twist? My panties all in a bunch? My hats... on my head?

I got mugged, of course!

Lacking internet at my new house, I decided to do what any forward-thinking young buck would do and I rode my bicycle down Butler, finding a few park benches only a couple of blocks from my house: what luck! And seeing a number of bars and apartments all around me, I sat down and opened up my laptop to find a veritable smorgasbord of unsecured internet options. I did this one evening after arriving home from work, and all was well; I took care of some emailing and talked to some friends, checked on the status of my impending internet (when would they finally turn on the ol' internet hose, and how long would it take after that for the juices to start flowing down the pipe?), and packed up and went home. Slick.

But two days later, when again, I had to check how life on the webternets was progressing (silly me), things did not so smoothly go. It was about 9pm and I was in the middle of doing exceptionally important Facebook reconnaissance when two youths passed by ne. I didn't pay them much mind, in their long t-shirts and baggy jeans and crisp baseball caps that had (apparently, right?) just been bought that balmy evening at a fine local habberdashery. They crossed 42nd Street, and there conversed for a spat as I leisurely eyed my surroundings, enjoying the cool night's breeze, thinking of how wonderfully convenient the economic geography of my new home was. Then, one of the young gentlemen crossed back over in front of the park benches, and in one quick moment, grabbed the screen of my laptop!

Instinctually, I grabbed the body of the computer as I leapt off the bench. Obviously surprised, the gangsta-ass-mothafucka growled: "Gimme yo' shit." But in and of itself, such a request was not the most convincing argument to bring to the table. He did not, in so many words, have a very captivating debate presence. Upon failing to flash "a piece," and considering that he was no larger or scarier than me, I responded in turn: "No."

Even more confused now, he twisted at the screen, trying to yank it away with force. I said, in an admittedly rather pathetic voice, "Dude, my whole life is in here. What the fuck?" And with a half-hearted last yank, he finally let go and sort of... moseyed away. Across the street at Hambones, two drunken men shouted after the rapscallion and his comrade as they made their way up 42nd Street and disappeared. A hippie crossed Butler and asked if I was okay, and I had to confess that I was more confused than anything. At 9pm, with people across the street, with others on the benches but ten feet away, in the middle of one of Pittsburgh's busier nightlife streets, some fuckin' kid tried to pull a grab-n-run?

I wished, if anything, that I'd thought faster. I would have wanted to have a little philosophical discussion with him. "Gimme yo' shit," he had said. But why? In that little directive he admitted to all involved parties that it was, in fact, my shit. Why, without an outstandingly convincing nine-millimetre argument, would I surrender my shit? Even if I had been more willing to part ways with my entire digital life; what gave him the right to take it? Just because he wanted it? I wanted it enough to spend $1300 on it and more. Because he was scary? I, frankly, am scarier than he was. Because of his immaculate fashion sense? True, my clean white MacBook would have quite matched his spotless Air Force Ones. But that's not really cuttin' the mustard for me.

Given not enough time to have such a discussion, however, I wish I had punched him in the mouth.

Cuz fuck that guy. That was my shit, goddamnit. And when he twisted that motherfucker, the asshole broke my screen. I had to take it up to the Apple Store, who tried to charge me $750 for the repair until I explained to them that I actually got mugged, I didn't just drop it while trying to eat a giant bowl of spaghetti on a ferris wheel. I wish that I'd punched him in the mouth, but all I did was talk about it on the internet and report it to the police who didn't seem to give much of a fuck at all, despite the fact that this kind of shit has been happening all over the East End. Despite the fact that there are apparently CCTV cameras over the tiny park where I was sitting, trained directly on the park benches where the whole thing went down. I haven't even gotten a call back from the detective who was assigned to my case. Whoever he is. If he is.

Yet again, my hate of police bubbles through this whole thing like bile, making me almost as mad as a guy trying to steal my laptop. Ineffectual? Uncaring? Just plain lazy? I don't know, but the streets of Pittsburgh have erupted into this kind of crime this summer, and I have yet to see an effort to quash it, and for that I am scared and appalled. I, for one, am shopping for a billy club online; something that I can carry openly, hanging from my belt, a bright neon "Fuck You, Don't Fuck With Me, Thanks." Someone's got to do the job. It sounds like such a ridiculous cliche, but we need to take back the streets. We shouldn't have to be afraid to use our computers at sidewalk cafes after the sun goes down; we shouldn't have to be afraid to walk around listening to our iPods. What's mine is mine and what's yours is yours. It's a matter of respect--and when that falls short, it should be a matter of broken fingers.

The Box

2010-04-06T13:51:00.003-04:00

There's a box on the table. It's got no hinges, no top or bottom--it's completely impossible to open. Solid steel faces; no seams, no cracks. But when you knock on the side, you can hear it's hollow. Not necessarily empty, but hollow. In fact, that's the whole debate.

What's inside there? It could be nothing, but why would anyone even make a box to hold nothing? That doesn't make sense. So something must be there. Never mind how impossible it would seem to have gotten anything inside there in the first place. Something must be inside, but what? When you shake the box, it doesn't make a sound. Perhaps it's filled with cotton balls. Or helium.

Those would be the logical answers, at least. Of course there are others who say what's inside is a baseball. But you'd hear that bouncing around, wouldn't you? Still, they insist it's a baseball and always has been. It's an immutable fact, they say, so why even argue? But others say it's a cat. Some say it's a dead cat, others say it's alive. Some philosopher says you can't ever know, but no one is listening to him anyway. One person insists it's a piece of lapis lazuli, the biggest ever. Another insists it's a gun. Both of them have conviction unwavering. They're certain. The lapis lazuli people say the gem is inside there to represent peace. The gun people say it means war. Each lives according to their self-prescribed philosophy, and if you question what they've got to say, they'll both be ready to throw down with you at the drop of a hat--even the pacifists.

They'll tell you all about how they know, when plainly it is impossible to know at all. They'll give you their facts, their reasons--a cocktail of half-truths, assumptions, interpretations, ambiguities and outright lies--and expect you to come over to their side. If you don't, they'll spit in your face. It will be bad enough if you decide there is a cat inside there, because then you'll have to decide whether it is alive or dead, of course. And what color it is. And whether its name is Jingles or Tiger. Because not only will the people with their gems and the people with their guns be angry with you, but the thousands of different iterations of cat people will be even angrier. They'll be so frustrated that you have the right idea, but you've just got these details wrong, why won't you just open your eyes? His name is Mr. Skeeter and he's a grey tabby, goddamnit.

But worse than all of those would be to choose nothing. Because then you are denying the idea that the box is important at all. You're saying that it's just a box. Maybe it's not important at all. You can't know what's inside it, but the simple fact remains that we can get along well enough without knowing, and that all this fighting we're doing over a completely unsolvable variable is downright barbaric and just as silly. But that's pushing too many buttons. That's calling into question the very existence of some of these people who have put their entire lives campaigning for the lapis lazuli, the gun, or the thousands of different cats. And so if there is anything that those disparate groups can agree on, it's that you are the scum of the earth and should be strung up out in front of town hall.

And yet, all signs point to that box just being empty. It doesn't make a sound when you shake it, it hardly weighs anything, and there's not even a way to get something inside it as far as we can tell. Of course, you couldn't say for certain that there is nothing there. It could be those cotton balls, but there's no real way of knowing. It might be that helium, or even a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. Just air. Would that really be any different from nothing at all? Even if you somehow could open this impenetrable box, the contents that had been so hotly contested for so long would just disappear undetected into the rest of the air around us. And we'd never know or appreciate it, because all along we've been surrounded by that air and we didn't even notice it anyway.

So what's the point of fighting about it? I have no idea what's in that box, but what's more: I know that I can't possibly know. As convinced as I may be that there is nothing in there because all of the empirical evidence points in that direction, I still can't say for certain, just for pretty sure. What I know most is that I refuse to fight about it, kill about it, even get angry about it. I just don't care about your weapons, or your gemstones, and I don't care about Mr. Skeeter, no matter what you think he can do to me with his all-encompassing knowledge and command of fate. Plus, if he really does have everything in his paw, completely under control... he's kind of a dick. He's definitely at least not the embodiment of pure goodness. Seriously now.

There is enough of world outside of that box for me to worry about and try to take care of while I'm on this planet, so I'll stick to worrying about that. You can fight over a stupid fucking box.

Burning down the house

2010-03-10T09:03:00.004-05:00

Your house is on fire. What do you do?

Everything around you is burning up. All of your belongings are melting, bursting into flames, turning to ash before your eyes. If you don't act fast, everything you've ever loved will be gone. You reach for your cellular phone in your front pocket as you burst out the front door, escaping the smoke-choked building just in time. You punch in the digits 9-1-1 and the phone begins ringing. The line picks up, a voice: "Hello, 911 Emergency Service. What is your emergency?"

"My house is on fire, please send someone to help!"

"Right away, sir. What is your credit card number?"

"What?"

"Your credit card number, sir. We accept Visa, Mastercard or American Express."

"I have no idea, my wallet is inside! Send the fire department! My house and everything I've ever owned and loved is burning away!"

"I'm sorry sir, but without verifying your credit card, we can do no such thing."

"You have got to be kidding me!"

"Well, unless you happen to have your checkbook. I could use your routing and account numbers to verify your information with your bank."

"What the hell are you talking about? Just send a fire truck!"

"I'll tell you what, sir. You seem to be a pretty nice guy, and I really do feel for you, I do. Do you know who provides your homeowner's insurance?"

"State Farm, I think--"

"Okay, I am going to forward your call to State Farm and you can talk to a representative about this. See, what they'll do is call us back then, and between the three of us we can all work out a payment plan. You know, figure out how you'll get this all taken care of."

"What? A payment plan for what?"

"Well, for our services, of course. It's rather expensive to run a fire department, you know. Bake sales don't cover all of our costs after all."

"Isn't that what taxes are for?"

"Indeed they are, sir. But President Palin abolished all taxation, don't you remember? In February, her first order of business. You mustn't watch the news much. Just like the police department, road repair and the hospital system, the fire department has been privatized. Sure, it provides a service (and a well-needed one at that, considering your situation), but it's still a business. And businesses are in it to make a profit, sir. Surely you can understand that."

"But--"

"That's just how the free market goes. Honestly, you should have been saving up for a situation like this. It's no one's responsibility but your own to take care of such matters, sir. Who else should be held accountable for you wasting your money elsewhere and not having enough to save your poor house from burning down now?"

"I have cancer! All of my money goes into paying for treatment! Thousands of dollars every month!"

"An unfortunate situation. I'm sorry to hear that, sir."

A horrendous crash sounds as the second floor of your house collapses. A plume of smoke puffs out from a hole in the sagging roof as flames lick higher, hungrier up the walls.

"Sir, are you still there?"

"I... yes. I'm here."

"Alright, I'm going to forward you to Erie. I hope to hear back from you soon, and we'll get that fire taken care of right away."

"...Okay."

A click, the voice is gone and you're on hold, waiting for the insurance company to pick up and negotiate what is left of your life. In its place is music, an upbeat song that you recognize as Talking Heads, the last song in the world you could possibly want to hear right now.

Domestic abuse

2010-02-19T20:55:00.011-05:00

Yesterday an American software engineer named Joseph Andrew Stack flew a plane into a government building in Austin, Texas after leaving his personal and political manifesto/suicide note on his company's website for the world to read. What are we to make of this news? His rantings against the government, against health care reform and the IRS? This boiling anger and hatred that ultimately lead him to have no other choice but to do something that "has been coming for a long time"?

If you're the newest United States Senator out of Massachusetts, Republican Scott Brown, you shake your head sadly and say it's a real shame. He was just frustrated with our government--how can we blame him? "No one likes paying taxes obviously," said Senator Brown on Fox News following the tragedy. It is sad. It's a real shame that someone felt that this was the only thing they could do, to kill themselves in the process of attempting to kill other people that they did not even personally know, to send a message to the United States of America. But you know what else it is? It's fucking terrorism.

Before 9/11, the largest terrorist attack against the United States came in the form of one Timothy McVeigh when he bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people. Timothy McVeigh was a terrorist, and at the time, everyone pretty much agreed. A domestic terrorist; one of our own, gone rogue. Hmm... I wonder where I've heard that word a lot lately? At these Tea Party rallies I've been seeing on the news, the sorts of sentiments the protesters are voicing are scarily close to what McVeigh acted upon. In fact, at more than one rally, I've seen people toting signs with the Thomas Jefferson quote that was printed on McVeigh's t-shirt in his mugshot after the bombing.

Like McVeigh before him, Stack is a terrorist. He isn't wearing a keffiyeh and he spoke no Arabic, and that's where Senator Brown seems to be getting confused. And confused is hardly even a strong enough word after Brown called his former Senatorial opponent, Martha Coakley, “naïve” on terrorism, saying she possessed a “deeply troubling lack of awareness and understanding of the threats facing our troops and on our national security.” A lack of awareness and understanding, indeed. For the last eight years, we've been able to point at dark-skinned people with turbans and scream, "TERRORIST!" And it's felt pretty good for those who have to be able to classify what is going on at all times--we've got a "war" on "terror" now, a ridiculous classification for what we are attempting to quell: a series of unconnected-but-similarly-minded gangs the world over. Terrorism doesn't have a face, it is not easily recognized and fought by the very nature of what it is. It can be executed by anyone--that's why it's not a war at all. There aren't organized fronts.

But the Tea Party movement, or at least parts of it, will no doubt herald Joseph Stack as a hero, proud that someone had the guts to tell it like it is. To show the government that we're in charge, not them. And other assorted catchphrases that have made it onto their t-shirts and signs. They want our government to fight the threat of terror, while at the exact same time condoning terrorist actions of their own. And they still can't see the irony in that.

And with their newly crowned king, Scott Brown, weaseling out of using the T-word for what had happened--despite the scene looking eerily familiar to events from less than a decade ago--mark my words, the more extreme of the Teabaggers are going to take this as a call to action. They've got more in common with the "enemy" than they'd like to admit. Both groups want to destroy America as we know it, have an affinity for airplane attacks, and make shitty videos for the internet. The only difference is their names and skin color. If Stack's last name had been al-Habib, Ahmad or bin Kasim, we'd be playing a very ballgame right now. And that ballgame would be called "torture"--consequently, another thing that isn't what it really is when white Americans are the ones doing it. Funny how that works.

ChatRoulette: Welcome to the End of the Internet

2010-02-11T18:23:00.004-05:00

Last spring I discovered and blogged about a website called Omegle (Parts I and II) that was still relatively new to the internet. On it, you are randomly connected to a stranger somewhere in the world and invited to chat with them. At the time, I thought it was one of the most novel and brilliant ideas that had hit the web in years--a place for bored (and more often than not, horny) people to go and find someone just as bored (though unlikely as horny) to entertain themselves with. But as great as the site still remains for what it's worth, we have officially reached the end of the internet.

Enter: ChatRoulette. I found out about this site last night, and a subsequent article from New York Magazine (that managed to move seamlessly from talking about porn to referencing Walt Whitman--impressive) hot on its heels. It seems the site has only been around for a few months, launching just earlier this winter. But last night when I logged on around midnight, there were over sixteen thousand other users--more than triple what Omegle averaged at any given moment. But why? What could possibly bring people in the droves to this brand-new site (that translates, accidentally of course, to "CatWheel" in French)?

Much like Omegle, it randomly connects the user to a stranger somewhere around the world. Completely unlike Omegle, it engages your computer's microphone. And webcam. As you cycle through random people all around the world, you find yourself staring right at them. In their rooms. Often without pants. That part I can't exactly figure out. See, the users of ChatRoulette are overwhelmingly male, and there is a cross-section of them who are eternally whackin' it on screen, showing off their man-meat to anyone cycling through. I just don't understand their approach. Just like in Omegle, this service can easily be used for pornin'--but guys, if you wanna get your jollies with some sexy lady from across the sea, you might not want to introduce yourself with a paw around your yogurt-slinger. You gotta schmooze! This is like a virtual bar! Buy her a drink, don't just saunter up to her and unzip!

ChatRoulette is the most surreal experience on the internet--quite possibly in my entire life--that I have ever had. I only lasted fractions of a second with most other users, owing to the fact that I am not a girl, but on the ones where I'd last longer, and actually start talking to the people on the other end, it was almost more weird. I quickly became desensitized to the hundreds of penises and tens of frat guys flipping the bird that populated the site, and my brain all but turned off as I was cycled through by bored looking guys and the occasional junior high-aged girls who had nothing to say to me. But when I lasted more than the typical half-second with a couple of hipsters from Alabama, I wasn't even sure what to do. My parents were asleep, so I had my microphone off and I typed with them for a little bit. But it all felt so intrusive that I finally hit the "NEXT" button myself, sending me back into the maelstrom of dicks, sad-faced college kids and giggling girls who just weren't that into my face. Apparently.

Of course, there are some normals on there. I talked to a guy who was originally from Pittsburgh who thought I looked like Matthew Broderick. And a girl from Australia who was in college and liked Air and might even be reading this blog right now. They might be few and far between, but they make it all worth it. To connect with people like that. It's amazing. It's everything the internet is and should be, and at the same time, everything we've been warned about the internet becoming. The NY Mag article asks if this is "the future of the internet, or its distant past." I think neither. This is the end. This has achieved all that the internet has ever hoped for, but done so in the most frighteningly intriguing way possible. I am only glad that I got to witness this kind of thing in my lifetime. It's brilliant and horrifying, and one of the best things I've ever seen.

Maybe I'll see you on there. Don't worry, even if you don't know me, you'll recognize me. I'll be the guy with his pants on.

Charles Templeton - Farewell to God **

2010-02-03T18:19:00.006-05:00

My father is always buying religious literature, littering our bathroom and dining room with it, trying to get me to read it, to just "understand where he's coming from." So I picked up Charles Templeton's Farewell to God in retaliation, more for him than for me. I was hoping to pass it along to him after I finished it, to finally see "where I was coming from." Of course, my dad isn't much of a reader, and is already steeped in his own library of works, so it might be a while until he gets around to this one.

As for my own read of the book, as much as I agree with each and every of Templeton's points, I can't help but think I could have argued them more convincingly, given the chance. Templeton is a former minister, and a famous one at that, old friends with Billy Graham. He worked in the ministry for quite a few years, but the glaring disparities he saw between what Christianity was and what it loved to say it was ate away at him slowly until he could no longer bring himself to say the words he was being paid (on television by that point, no less) to say.

Templeton attacks Christianity from a stance inside the religion, a different approach than famed atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens who come from scientific and philosophical backgrounds. What Templeton's book does is pick apart the Bible and the greater doctrine of the church, piece by piece, holding each story and each consequent inconsistency up to the light of an inquiring mind. He does not claim to know more or be smarter than others, just to have come to understand the horrors in the faith he'd dedicated his life to. It's really a rather sad tale when you step back from it, and I applaud the man for finding the strength enough to write such a book.

But as it goes, the writing is pretty pedestrian. It's hardly even a book for the Beginning Atheist; it's much better suited for someone who is finding themselves confused about the religion they've been raised in, looking for answers to why things just don't quite make sense. Farewell to God a simply written book, and it gets its point across expertly, so I can't knock it for that. But for someone as angry as me, it comes off a little soft. Templeton doesn't even classify himself as an unbeliever--he's a vague agnostic who insists that he still believes in "something." Perhaps he is referring to the god of Einstein, the ultimate power of the universe. Or of the aether, in its ever-flowing, almighty ambivalence to mankind. Or so I can hope, because to look for more would unhinge his entire argument, whether it came through a church, a mosque or a synagogue.

The truth of the matter

2010-01-26T16:49:00.003-05:00

Back in November, my mother ran for tax collector of Clay Township as an unopposed write-in, and naturally she got the position. Despite her support of free choice. What does a tax collector have to do with women's rights? Nothing, of course. But while my mom stood outside the township building and talked to voters, a man apparently approached her and asked her if she was pro-life. My mother's surprisingly level-headed response was that she herself could never live with getting an abortion, but she felt there were situations in which the procedure was acceptable. The man considered this, then went inside to vote; on his way back out to his car, he stopped with my mother again, informing her that he did not vote for her, because she supports the murder of innocents. As tax collector.

But it didn't matter because my mother, the baby-killer, won anyway with an overwhelming majority of votes (seriously, like eighty-four or something), and so last week she had to go to the Lancaster County Courthouse and be sworn in as a civil servant. My dad went with her, and at her swearing in ceremony, he was appalled. Why? Because she was given the option to swear on a Bible. The option. Meaning she was not compelled to, she could have sworn on anything, or on nothing.

My father was incredulous. What could just plain swearing achieve? If you didn't swear on a Bible, then what was the point? That made it so you had to tell the truth. Apparently. Or what? Be struck by a lightning bolt and sucked straight down into Hell? It was a sign of where our country is headed, he told me, shaking his head. And I agreed; we are growing more and more diverse and less and less superstitious with every generation. What would the point of me, as an atheist, swearing on a Bible? If I'm not going to tell the truth on my own, putting my hand on a book that I don't put an ounce of faith into isn't really going to influence me to do any better. What about a Muslim or a Jew or a Zoroastrian? They might as well swear on a ham sandwich, I said, for as much good as it would do to swear on a Bible. To which my mother's friend who was over responded that an adherent to the Jewish faith probably wouldn't go for the ham sandwich thing. Touché.

I've never really understood the whole swearing on the Bible thing anyway. Especially for people who are being accused of murder or embezzlement or just about anything that involves dishonesty, hate or violence to have done in the first place. As if they'll have a moment of clarity when they see the book; it sends a shock up through their arm to remind them that the Ol' Surveillance Camera in the Sky has, indeed, got its red light on. If you need to touch the Bible to make you tell the truth, you've got some bigger issues at hand to deal with first. Because you are a sociopath. And you probably shouldn't be on the stand for anything.

As for me, if I ever need to take any kind of oath, I think I'll bring my own book for the ceremony. You can have your Bible or your Qur'an, but the only thing that is going to make me be a little more truthful is Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. What book would you swear on? Let's make this interactive.

Why do horrible things happen to good people?

2010-01-14T17:48:00.005-05:00

In an effort to waste no time whatsoever in becoming the most insensitive fucking person in the world about the massive earthquake that leveled much of the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, infamous hate-mongering televangelist, Pat Robertson, has spoken up. Who is to blame for this horrible tragedy? Well, the Haitian people, of course. But not because they're harboring homosexuals (they're not) or because they are filthy heathens (they're Catholic, close enough), two things that Pat has been quite outspoken about his God's distaste for in the past. No, you see, to understand the reason God is punishing the tiny island nation of Haiti, you have to have a bit of a history lesson. Stick with me here, I promise it pays off.

The island of Hispanola, the narrow landmass that makes up Haiti and the Dominican Republic was once populated by the Arawak Indians, a culture probably most famous for being enslaved by famed world explorer, Christopher Columbus in the late 1400s. In the centuries that followed, the island became a stopping place in the international slave trade and was eventually divided into the basic regions that we see today, amongst the French (Haiti) and Spanish (Dominican Republic) military forces that occupied it. However, there were still some indigenous Haitians hanging around (how troublesome!) and in late 1700s, they started to revolt against the French for independence. The fighting would not cease for over a century, and the French military, led under the control of Napoleon Bonaparte, and on the ground by his brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc, eventually fell to the rebel forces of the slave rebellion.

A pretty amazing story, not? A handful of slaves revolt against one of the most powerful militaries in the world and come out with the upper hand, emancipation, and liberation. Really a story of hope, that the downtrodden can fight back their oppressors and find freedom and liberty of their own. Inspirational, really. How could have such a rebellion succeeded? It's almost like they'd have needed a divine hand to assist them.

Well, I don't believe that, because hate and vitriol and fighting for one's life can do quite a bit for your morale--but Robertson certainly does believe it. But not how you'd expect. See, the Haitians got a divine bit of help... FROM THE DEVIL! That's right! They made a pact with the Devil, and that is how they defeated tens of thousands of French slave-traders and military men! And that, of course, is why now, three hundred years later, God decided he was pretty sick of the nation of Haiti just being poverty-stricken, illiterate, and constantly harassed by missionaries--it was time to take it up a notch and toss them a big ol' earthquake to show them he really means it. It's not God's style to just forget all about a Satanic pact to defeat the French and gain political and civil independence. Not Robertson's God anyway.

But why listen to me, a silver-tongued liberal who is twisting around the words of such a good man to make him sound horrible? Let's let Robertson do his own talking:

"True story." I couldn't have said it better, Pat. Thank you for answering my question, of why such terrible things could happen to a country of people who already are living in absolute squalor. I'm glad your God has a plan and that he sticks to it. It's an admirable trait. But I have one other question to pose to you, Reverend Robertson. Or maybe it's more of a request: Why can't horrible fucking things happen to you?

The price of kindness

2010-01-07T02:58:00.004-05:00

Working at a local television station that does a live news broadcast twice a night, I hear a little bit about what's going on around me every once in a while. Usually a week or two late, because it's a very small, under-funded television station--but when I'm not engrossed in catching up on Lost or reading a book or just trying to entertain myself in any way other than actually watching the news in front of me... sometimes I watch the news.

Such was the case this evening, and again during the replay, and again during the late broadcast, and again during that replay, and with every reiteration of one particular story, I found myself getting angrier and angrier. A few months ago, Akron Borough, a small town adjoining my hometown of Ephrata to the southwest, was in talks to build a Christian-based drug and alcohol rehabilitation center within its jurisdiction. If you've ever read my blog before, or worse yet, met me in real life, you'll know how I feel about attaching that "Christian" word to such a venture, but all things considered, I was pretty excited that Akron was going to have a chance to build a center to help so many people. You might think a cute little town like mine would be immune to the problems of drug and alcohol addiction, because that's exactly what cute little towns like mine would love to have you believe. However, in the Nineties we had quite a heroin epidemic on our hands. So much so that our cute little town of just around 20,000 inhabitants had a clean needles program.

No matter who was to run it, this rehab center would no doubt provide a much appreciated positive influence on my town and surrounding communities--and an even better influence on the people it would inevitably help. So of course, the residents of Akron jumped at the opportunity to help out their fellow man, even threw in money to help bet the center funded and built... right?

Of course not! In fact, the organization that was working on the center has now pulled out in disgust, because the residents of Akron completely shot the whole project down. They refused to have such a thing built in their neighborhood because of: decreased property values. That's right, sons of liberty, the goodwill of mankind and the chance to help out some people sorely in need has been commandeered, yet again, by the Almighty Goddamn Dollar. Not even by money itself, but by the very idea of it. We can't have dirty drug addicts coming into our town making it "unsafe" while they work out their troubles and maybe Find Jesus to boot! Think of what that'll do to the resale value of our townhouses! Putting in that above-ground pool out back won't have done a thing!

It saddens me. I'm hardly even angry, really. I'm just so frustrated that this kind thing, when our greed overrides our empathy (if we even have any of that left at this point). It's the same thing that put a boot to the throat of our health care reform. You've heard that bill was going to get passed, right? Not in its original form--but not with a public option, not even with an early Medicare buy-in like they talked about when the bill was sounding its swan song. Let alone what should have been in the bill and wasn't, like what Congressman Kucinich included in his H.R. 676 which I really can't even say was swept under the rug when it didn't even make it to the floor. We care more about what's going on in our bank accounts and our wallets than what is going on in the bodies of our neighbors and friends. And much more than we do about the people we don't even know. They're not our problem. They'll figure something out, they just have to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. They're just lazy and if they want health insurance they'll figure out a way to get it--and if not, we'll fine them for it. No seriously, we will. Somehow, that made it into the Senate health care bill.

Money > People. Learn it, live it, love it.

Some Loose Ends: The Rest of the Music of 2009, Pt. 2

2009-12-31T23:37:00.011-05:00

A lot of music happened in 2009. Some of it was great, some of it was good, and some of it... well, it was neither of those two things. Not just some, either--lots. Lots of music that fell into that last category, though really in most cases I hesitate to call that stuff music at all. For example, Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood and Miley Cyrus are still releasing music, which consequently means that none of them has been eaten by wolves yet. That's no good. The same goes for the Jonas Brothers, who I had hope for when they released an album entitled Lines, Vines, and Trying Times because I thought for sure it had to be about drug addiction (or at least the jungle). Not so, and a great disappointment. And who the fuck is this "Owl City" guy? When I hoped that The Postal Service would put out another album, I actually hoped that they'd be the ones putting it out. He's paying royalties, right? I'm pretty sure that's illegal.

Point is, people get mixed up. So on this, the last day of the year of 2009, I feel as though it is my duty to clarify for those of you who get your music news from such flawed sources as Pitchfork, Spin, Rolling Stone or Hunter Korchak. Because all of those sources seem to have this thing where they forget that they are supposed to make lists of good music and not just popular music. So they all end up with the same albums on their lists, and they all don't fucking belong there in the slightest. Spin put the new Kiss album on their list. At number forty, sure, but I have the entire Kiss discography and I love them to death and I still don't think they should have been put on anyone's top anything list since ten years before I was born. It's hardly even the same band! Those new guys should have to pick new facepaint designs at the least. And what the hell is with Rolling Stone putting U2 as their number one album of the year? When the fuck were those old self-important bastards last relevant? I'm pretty sure it was War. And that was three albums in. You see my dilemma here; as someone who is never wrong about anything, I'm obligated to remedy this situation. So now, without further ado, let me take you on a little trip through...

The Top 5 Albums That Everyone Else Says Were Great But Really Weren't At All, So They Must Have Been Mistaken... of 2009

#5
Phoenix
Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

Easily the best of the five, but the fact that they got ranked so high on every single list this year puts them in my crosshairs anyway. It's not "bad" per se, it's just... pointless. Blah blah, they're French and hip. I liked this album way better when it was called Satanic Panic in the Attic. Or when Jason Schwartzman released it two years ago. Either one of those, really. Points for referencing two different classical Germanic composers in the course of your single and album names. Is that supposed to let us know that you're "real musicians"?

Phoenix - Lisztomania

#4
Girls
Album

Another band I won't necessarily hate come next year, but the pretentiousness of calling your first album "Album" paired with your fake British accents despite the fact that you are from San Francisco--it just gets my knickers all in a twist. So you used to be part of some stupid, half-assed cult and now you let loose by doing drugs all the time and making the video of your big "hit single" some kind of rejected American Apparel ad porno or something. You wanna make a porno music video? Talk to Rammstein about that one.

Girls - Lust for Life

#3
Dirty Projectors
Bitte Orca

Here is what should have been done with Dirty Projectors' single, "Stillness Is the Move": it should hae been air-express mailed up to Björk's fucking ice palace that I'm sure she lives in and she could have made it into at least an endearingly unlistenable piece of weirdo shit. "Bitte Orca" means "Please Killer Whale" in German and I can only assume that what the band means to say by that is, "Please Killer Whale, come and tear our bodies limb from limb and consume our raw flesh so that we can never ever do this to music again."

Dirty Projectors - Stillness Is the Move

#2
Neon Indian
Psychic Chasms

God, isn't this Eighties thing over yet? Even Pacific Sunwear (I'm sorry, "Pac-Sun") is carrying flannel now. Can't we give up on this synth-pop horseshit and move on to some kind of grunge revival already? This album is so boring that it effectively kicked Grizzly Bear off the list, and I really wanted to sit and list all the shitty other Woodsy-Type Animal-Named bands there are stepping on each other's toes nowadays. Like Deertick and Deerhunter and The Deer Hunter and Deerhoof (even though they're good). Oops, looks like I did anyway!

Neon Indian - Should Have Taken Acid With You

#1
The xx
xx

Holy shit. The only band that could out-bore Neon Indian--and I think they're trying it, too! What's with all the off-key talk-singing and whispering and shit? Naturally, my dad heard them on the radio and thinks they're "pretty cool" and totally "the kind of music you listen to, Jeremy." Ugh. Just look at them! It's like MySpace started a band, complete with Hot Topic jewelry and Kelly Osbourne cameo. You know who isn't in this band though? E.E. Cummings. Capitalize your fucking letters, assholes. It's not artsy, it's just as stupid and boring as you are.

The xx - Basic Space

There you go. The best of the worst. Or the worst of the best. I don't even know. I'm going to go open a couple of veins and hope for better in 2010. Happy goddamn New Year.

Some Loose Ends: The Rest of the Music of 2009, Pt. 1

2009-12-29T19:36:00.008-05:00

Just because my Top 5 is finished doesn't mean I'm done. Hell no! There are definitely still a few loose ends to tie up this year. Too many, in fact. So I'm going to have to split 'em up into two parts!

In what is quickly becoming a tradition for my End of the Year List-Making, I must now go back and scratch the whole last week or so of posting, because it turns out only one album counted this year. And just like Peter Fox's Stadtaffe last year, I only heard about it once my countdown was winding down and didn't have a place to put it. Besides, putting it anywhere on any list would be pointless: this album needs to be put on a list all its own. So just who in the world could have released something so mind-blowing that it would shame all of my other entries this year into the muck and mire of unimportance?

Why, Andrew W.K., of course! It's been awhile since I'd heard from the man. He released Close Calls With Brick Walls in 2006, but only in Japan (it was later released in the U.S. on Load Records, the Providence, RI home of Lightning Bolt and White Mice), and after that I'd heard he was working on three albums at once, but nothing ever surfaced on my radar.

Those three albums turned out to include a disc of covers of fourteen of the most popular J-Pop and J-Rock songs of recent memory (not mine), fittingly entitled The Japan Covers and a party-rock reworking of the soundtrack to the influential, decade-spanning anime Gundam. Both of those albums include translated lyrics, in very broken english. He's... sorta really into Japan, I guess. I just hope he leaves the creepy stuff to Rivers Cuomo.

But the most important of this trilogy does not have a thing to do with Japan. It doesn't have much to do with anything at all. Especially anything you've come to expect of Mr. Wilkes-Krier. Because 55 Cadillac is an album of classically-inspired, improvised instrumental piano pieces. Eight of them in total. All of them with names like "Begin the Engine," "Night Driver," and "Central Park Cruiser." All of them fucking beautiful and unbelievably brilliant. All of them ready to make your head explode because you had no fucking idea the guy who sang "Party Hard" could play the fuck like this. Unless, of course, you've seen him live, in which case you've seen him do exactly that and when you told all of your friends later, they didn't believe you in the slightest.

Well, now you've got proof. All but forty minutes of proof. Forty minutes of some of the best piano-playing you've probably ever heard--or at least the best piano-playing you've ever heard from a guy with long, greasy black hair, ripped up old basketball shoes and matching sweat-stained white jeans and t-shirts. Just go listen to it. Right now. That's all there is to say, because words do not do it justice. I've said my piece.

Oh, and watch this and this too. He's pretty much the coolest guy ever.

Top 5 Albums of 2009: #1

2009-12-27T18:44:00.007-05:00

The Flaming Lips
Embryonic

After 2006's disastrous At War with the Mystics, I wasn't sure what to make of The Flaming Lips anymore. I love Wayne Coyne and his merry band of psychos, but they just seemed to let go a bit too much. It was a generally accepted fact that Mystics was disjointed mess, with some of the worst songs The Lips had recorded since before Wayne even joined the band--but most critics simply looked at it as a bump in their otherwise pretty flawless discography. I, however, being the natural pessimist that I so often am, got worried and I retreated back into their mid-Nineties recordings--the ones that had gotten me into the Lips to begin with. While the rest of the music world wrestled with Mystics, I hunkered down with Transmissions from the Satellite Heart and Clouds Taste Metallic, trying to pretend that their latest abomination had never existed.

And so, fast-forward to two years later, I wasn't all that terribly excited when the new album was set to release, but I downloaded it illegally as a dutiful fan must (well, not too dutiful--I need that fifteen bucks to eat, mind you) and braced myself for the Oklahoma City boys to slip farther down the rabbit hole. But... hark! What is this? This fuzzed out bass! This twangy, distorted guitar! These bottom-of-the-Grand-Canyon booming drums! This wasn't the Flaming Lips of the past decade at all, with their loopy pop songs and obsessions with Japanese girls (let that up to Rivers, Wayne, 'cuz it's kinda creepy). This wasn't like that at all! It was like stumbling upon eighteen separate B-Sides from "She Might Be Jelly" that were dredged up from the Lips' vault and pressed in platinum by the holy hands of Thor and Jimi Hendrix.

Here I was, for the last two years, barricading myself with the Lips' heavier acid-rock albums, so worried that one of my favorite bands of all time were long gone from me--but apparently they were doing the same the whole time. And what they came back with is, without a question in my mind, their best album of all time. Some of these other albums on my Top 5 this year and in my Top lists in the past, have sort of hinged on the fact that you even like the kind of music that the band plays. Whether it be psychedelic chamber pop, frenzied spazzcore, or politically-driven ambient downtempo, you sort of have to want to like it, or you won't appreciate it at all. Which is fine, because I'm not reviewing albums based on how many plays FM97 is giving them, or how good their chance at a Grammy is--I'm reviewing them on their musical worth. And frankly, there is a whole lot more musical worth in some guy punching a de-tuned guitar for three hours than half the shit that is on the radio. But Embryonic is just plain awesome, regardless of what you like and don't like. And if you don't like it, I'm sorry for your loss. It's the best Lips album in history, and one of my absolute favorite albums of all time, so being the best release this year is kinda small beans, really.

From start to finish, the hour-long double album does not misstep. Crunchy, wah-pedaled guitars intertwine with rumbling bass parts and shotgun snare hits, as Wayne's over-chorused voice lilts in just above the clean, full sounds of keyboards and chimes, sometimes singing, sometimes just shouting nonsense along with the beat. Every song is filthy with distortion, even the pretty songs--where tracks on The Soft Bulletin could sound saccharine-sweet and overly-catchy, Embryonic plays out beautiful songs like "Evil" and "If" while still keeping the spirit of the album very alive. A spirit, perfectly represented in tracks like "See the Leaves" and "Worm Mountain" (which features last year's Top Album winners, MGMT), that makes me want to do a five-gallon bucket of heroin in a dark room and then die there in a puddle of my own sweat and vomit. In fact, the entire album is ridiculously consistent, and that's one of my favorite parts coming off such a haphazard release as At War with the Mystics, and even a rather wandering concept album in Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots four years before that.

A double album, especially one where the band admits that they just threw in the kitchen sink in not wanting to cut anything, can be a very scary thing. So many double albums in the history of music should have been run through the ringer one last time, by some third-party, not so attached to the music, perhaps. Do I dare ask to direct your attention to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness as proof that sometimes the editing floor needs to be a bit more littered with snippings? I don't even have the heart to do that. It's become tradition for bands to get bloated with self-importance and then release these multi-disc supposed epics that are just So Brilliant They Couldn't Figure Out Which World-Changing Songs to Cut. And then we get maybe three single-worthy tracks and 27 others that could have been shot directly into the sun for all they were worth. Well, let me be the one to tell you, that's not the case on Embryonic. It's brilliant, and at eighteen tracks, however long each may be, there really wasn't a need to cut anything anyway. And I'm glad that the Lips didn't, because every one of them is worth a listen. Because it's the best album of the year.

The Flaming Lips - I Can Be a Frog (featuring Karen O, over the phone and high as a kite)

Top 5 Albums of 2009: #2

2009-12-26T18:45:00.002-05:00

Matt & Kim
Grand

The first time I heard Matt and Kim was soon after their self-titled debut was released in 2006, and in so many words, I was not a fan. The duo seemed like they were trying a little too hard, the production value was thin at best, and Matt's voice grated on my nerves (if not slightly because I had a bunch of classes with an obnoxious kid named Eric who sounded just like him). So I wrote the band off, forgot about them until I heard the song "Daylight" on a Bacardi Mojito commercial. Instantly I recognized Matt's voice, but this time I found myself nodding along instead of wanting to throw myself into traffic.

So I gave their newest album a chance. And really, "a chance" is all I could really call it, because I listened through it once or twice and thought, "Well that was pleasant I suppose," and promptly forgot about it all over again until I happened to see the video for Grand's second single, "Lessons Learned" online. And I was hooked. In no small part, I'm sure, due to the fact that Matt and Kim are both rather attractive people and end up getting very naked in said video. I went back and listened through the album again, and something inside me clicked. My icy heart melted and I fell in love with the cute hipster couple from Brooklyn.

You see, it's all about context. I initially thought them no more than a bunch of trust-fund, art-school clowns going out of their way to make peppy dance music to get popular with the tragically hip Williamsburg scene. But what came off as so Cool to me was actually just plain... well, cool. Their songs are upbeat because they're upbeat. Their lyrics are about how awesome life is because their lives are awesome. How couldn't they be? Here are two twentysomethings that are living their absolute dream, playing music and living in New York City and being ridiculously, adorably in love with each other. They've found something that few people in the world can ever find, and it gushes forth in their music.

It also doesn't hurt that the production on Grand has been ramped up considerably since the couple's last album. With just a drummer and a keyboardist, all sorts of places on the equalizer can get missed, and with Matt & Kim, they did. The album was all mid-range, with sounds tripping over each other to be heard. Now, there is bass! Not the instrument, of course, but the range--a booming low end that rings out with the thump of Kim's drums and the rumble of the left-most keys on Matt's keyboards. Add in some more delicate numbers than were found on their sugar-pop first release, and you have a record that gets more to the heart of things: namely, their hearts.

Every single song on Grand sounds like summertime. Like riding your bike around town in cutoffs and a v-neck, sitting on your filthy, broken porch watching the world go by without a single care. Probably because most of the songs are about exactly that. And they touch me because, frankly, that's exactly what I'd like to be doing at any given moment. Some people might not take Matt & Kim seriously because of how much fun they are having, because their music isn't "serious" enough, but it's the loss of those people. This album does for me what people talk about Pet Sounds or Workingman's Dead doing for them. This is most definitely a Desert Island Disc for me, because it just makes me feel better when I turn it on. And I feel like, as brilliant as, say... Sleepytime Gorilla Museum's Of Natural History may be, I might want to have something to cheer me up a bit. Y'know?

Matt & Kim - Daylight