A love letter to Radiohead from an overenthusiastic fanboy

Radiohead are ready to release their 8th studio album, The King of Limbs, in a couple days. Like In Rainbows before it, it comes as a sudden surprise for fans. Radiohead have taken charge of every aspect of their career, and I couldn't be happier for them.

Their release methods isn't a lesson in subverting the label system, it's their reward for a long, successful career. They get to finish albums and drop them on the unsuspecting heads of their fans, with no leaks, no media hype, no six month wait, because they've been critically and commercially successful on a level that's almost unheard of these days. They can announce on Monday that their new album will be coming out on Saturday, and every rock and roll nerd in the world will be alternating between holding their breath in anticipation and clapping their hands with glee. They don't have to spend money promoting their new album, because they just have to update their website, and the news reports will flow from there. They don't have to do SNL, or emerge from an egg at the Grammy Awards, or make music videos, or do anything other than let their music speak for itself.

As a longtime fan of theirs, it's gratifying to see them so in control of their own destiny. It's almost reassuring in a way, seeing consistent brilliance pay off so handsomely. The music world is filled with superstars undeserving of their wealth and fame (Black Eyed Peas), brilliant songwriters who work in relative obscurity or cultdom (Robyn Hitchcock, Robert Pollard), and great artists forced to submit to a reunion they're not interested in because that's their most financially sound option (Stephen Malkmus, oh good lord, Stephen Malkmus).

To get to the point, Radiohead are a special band, and we're lucky to have them. I have no clue what The King of Limbs sounds like, and neither does anybody else in the world, but there's no doubt in my mind that, at the very least, it's going to be very good. Their legacy is firmly secured at this point. This new album, and anything else they might do, is a gift, and I'll treat it as such.

the joy and pain of sports

One of the interesting aspects of being a sports fan is the way our expectations rise and fall with teams' fortunes, especially the relative joy and disappointment that comes when those expectations are or aren't met.

What I'm realizing is that the better your favorite team is, the less you enjoy when they win, and the more it hurts when they don't.

For my entire life, the Philadelphia Phillies have been my favorite team in my favorite sport, and for the past few seasons, they've been among the best teams in baseball. Accordingly, expectations are high, and failing to make the playoffs would be a devastating disappointment. Never mind that prior to their run of division titles starting in 2007, they'd made the playoffs exactly once in the previous 23 years.

Contrast this with any of those 23 years. In 1993, when they went from a last place finish in 1992 to a division title and a National League Championship, it was completely out of the blue, and though their eventual loss in the World Series was devastating, the players on the team that season have engendered a wealth of goodwill that lasts to this day. Even Mitch Williams, run out of town by Curt Schilling after the blown save that broke the hearts of the city, is now a frequent guest on Philadelphia-area sports shows. Just try to watch this clip without getting angry or sad (unless you're from Toronto, in which case you can enjoy this clip while Roy Halladay is on the mound tonight in a Phillies uniform):



Likewise in 2001, when the Phillies made an unexpected run for the NL East title, faltering in the final month of the season and finishing just two games behind the Braves. If the Phillies of 2010 had held the division lead for almost the entire season before blowing it at the last minute, it would be a cause for outrage. Coaches would be fired, players would be shipped out of town, and the pitchfork-wielding masses would gather outside Citizens Bank Park with the name "Cliff Lee" on their tongues. In 2001, it was a pleasant surprise, a memorable ride that fell just short.

Or take 2008, when the Phillies were expected to do well, and won the World Series. For fans like myself, who hadn't even been born the last time a Philadelphia team won a championship (I missed the 76ers 1983 title by six months), and for a franchise like the Phillies, with no World Series titles since 1980, and only one in the previous 125 years, it was elating. And I knew even then that if they did it again the next year (or if they do it this year), it'll never be as good as it was in 2008.



This is a fairly simple equation when you think about it. The more you expect of your team, the worse it feels when they fail, and the less you expect, the better it feels when they exceed expectations.

So imagine the crushing joylessness of being a fan of the New York Yankees, a perennial favorite every year since the mid-'90s, a team that expects to win the World Series every year. Maybe not having won it since 2000 made it better when they won last year, but it has to be tough being invested in the only sports team in North America for whom five championships since 1996 is considered disappointing.

Or maybe I'm just covering up for how much it hurt when the Phillies lost to them last year, and preparing myself for the same possibility this year.

A new look for a new decade... or something

I decided to fool around a little with the layout of this here thinger, since I hadn't changed it since I started it in 2005. It's still pretty bare-bones, which is how I like it. There's a new follow button that I'm not expecting anybody to use (seeing as how I haven't gone out of my way to let people know I'm writing again since I started writing again, and thus nobody is reading this), and there's a "share" thing that nobody will use either. But hey, at least they're there.

I might still do some more tinkering, because in my browser, the page looks like it's 75% empty space (EDIT: done, empty space reduced to 1/3). I think the sans serif font is a hit, though. Any suggestions from my imaginary readership are more than welcome.

booze makes the economy go 'round (and then vomit)

I used to go to a lot more concerts when I was younger than I do now (my heyday was probably age 17-19 or so). I liked getting there early, and standing as close to the stage as possible. I liked staying after the show and trying to meet the band, or at least get a set list off of the stage. It was an exciting ritual.

A lot of the time, at these shows, after standing outside the venue for an hour waiting for the doors to open, then standing in front of the stage for an hour, waiting for the first band to start, I used to look at the crowded floor around me and wonder why they didn't just start the damn show already. Everybody was there, what was the holdup?

Then last week I went to a show at the Electric Factory for the first time since I saw the Flaming Lips there in the spring of 2003, when I was 19. As a 26-year-old, my show-going habits are much different: roll in as late as possible just before the show starts, head straight to the bar, and lurk around the back of the venue, where I can actually see the stage, and I'm not packed in on all sides by sweaty hipster kids. In fact, the bar at the Electric Factory is in a separate upstairs section, which I'd never seen before because I'd never been there as an adult. (And no, 19-year-olds are not adults, and I think the only people who would argue that they are would be either 19 themselves, criminal prosecutors, or a military recruiter, but that's for a different post.)

It was up there, with a couple hundred people waiting over an hour for the show to start, every one of them holding a $7 plastic cup of Yuengling, that I realized the answer to the question that my 19-year-old self could never figure out. It seems obvious now, but I guess I'd never really thought that much about it, since most of the shows I go to now are either at all-ages venues that require pre-gaming at a bar down the street, or are at actual bars.

Why I don't care about an "Arrested Development" movie, even though I love "Arrested Development"

1. It's simply too late. At this point, the show has been off the air for longer than it was ever on the air. Even if they started production tomorrow, a movie wouldn't be hitting theaters for AT LEAST 18 months or so. What makes anybody think that something made so long after the end of the show would even be any good? At that point it's not a continuation, it's a reunion, the type of cheap, cynical stunt that I would think fans of Arrested Development would mock.

2. The series finale was a perfectly good ending. It not only wrapped up pretty much every loose thread (although it's been a while since I've seen it, so let me know if I'm forgetting anything), but it was explicitly designed as a mirror image of the pilot episode, or the completion of a circle. Anything else is going to be sort of a sideways tangent at best (like reissuing Thriller with bonus tracks) or an infuriating legacy-stainer at worst (like the fourth Indiana Jones movie).

3. Arrested Development's pace and tone won't translate to a movie. A feature-length film would be roughly the length of at least four sitcom-length TV episodes. I know as well as anybody that Arrested Development is one of the most endlessly re-watchable shows ever made (maybe second to The Simpsons), but have you ever watched four in a row, with no breaks? It's a tiring experience. The 21 minute sitcom is the perfect format for a show with such breakneck pacing. Stretch it out to an hour and a half, with no commercial breaks or breaks between episodes, and it's either going to have slow stretches in the middle just to break things up for the viewer and pad out the length (like the Simpsons movie) or it will be so frantically paced that by the end nobody will be able to pay attention and the plot will seem too nonsensical and convoluted (like the Futurama DVD movies).

So there's that. I promise that sooner or later I'm going to write about something I like, instead of whining about how everything sucks. So far the Tom Smash Blog rebirth has consisted of thoughts that wouldn't fit into facebook updates, so this is what we've got to work with.

Redefining the term "diminishing returns"

For a band that took a four year hiatus after its second album, Weezer has been hitting us with new jams at a pace that's almost distressing, at least to those of us who have since come to wish they'd broken up after their unbelievably brilliant second album, which looks more and more like ether Matt Sharp was secretly in charge of everything, or it was just a freak accident.

This week Weezer are dropping yet another shit bomb on an unsuspecting public, and yes, I'm dismissing it with the term "shit bomb" without having heard a single song. See, every time Weezer puts out a new album, I hear enough people say "it's not that bad" that I end up checking it out, even though I know it absolutely will be that bad, and thus far, each one has been even worse than the one before it.

When the post-Pinkerton comeback started with a second self-titled album (the so-called "green" album), Weezer were mired in a genre that I just made up called "safety rock," songs assembled from an interchangeable grab-bag of bland verses, bland choruses that were loud enough to be distinguished from the verses, and guitar solos that were simply the verse melody, except on a guitar. The next phase, represented by Maladroit and Make Believe, found Weezer trying on a couple of different but equally radio-friendly hats: faux-pop-metal, faux-new-wave, lazy approximations of "El Scorcho" with added studio polish.

These albums were terrible, but not completely beyond hope, as they occasionally yielded a dull but somewhat pleasing single ("Island in the Sun"), and in one case, a brilliant pop song that remains the sole post-90s beacon of hope ("Keep Fishin'").

Since then... well, I think comparing the third self-titled album (the so-called "red" album) and Raditude to the Jonas Brothers or Katy Perry would be charitable, in that those are acts that make music that is competently performed and recorded, designed to separate teenagers and tweens from their parents' money before they grow old enough to discover better music. And they've engaged in a myriad of promotional stunts that are so numerous and so embarrassing that I don't even want to list them.

Now comes Hurley, with its gimmick title and gimmick cover, the latter being a possible attempt to cover up a sponsorship from the Hurley clothing company (and yes, when you're as rich and famous as Weezer, it IS still possible to sell out). As for me, I've learned a lesson I would have learned years ago, had I not spent so many countless hours of my childhood with Weezer's first two albums: Hurley is a steaming pile of shit until proven otherwise. Unless ten different friends of mine come to me begging and pleading to give it a chance, because it really is that great, it's an F, a 1/5, a 0%.

And with this new album comes the news that Weezer are contemplating a tour in which they play each city two nights, once playing their self-titled debut (the so-called "blue" album) in its entirety, and once playing Pinkerton in its entirety. I'm going to make the same easy joke everybody else is: apparently even Weezer have no interest in hearing new Weezer material.

The ethical conundrum of watching football

I've been a Philadelphia Eagles fan for as long as I can remember, but over the past four or five years, as the NFL season approaches, I feel more and more ambivalent, although I always end up watching anyway.

To start with, modern NFL football is damn near unwatchable. Between injury timeouts, penalties, replay challenges, and increasingly long commercial breaks (the latter made possible by the NFL's apparently limitless popularity), any sense of flow or momentum is thoroughly stifled. Add to this the fact that football, more than any other sport, is already inherently slight on action compared to the time it takes to play the game, and you end up with a game that takes over three hours to play, with as little as 11 minutes of actual football action.

To me, though, that's just the start of the problem, because I think there's a real ethical dilemma in being a fan of the NFL. I'm aware that the players are well-compensated, and that nobody is forcing them to play football, but I have doubts about how seriously many of them take the health risks.

It's certainly true that awareness of the reality of concussions has increased over the past couple years, but I don't see anything that suggests more than a token acknowledgement of the issue. The tough-guy warrior mentality that the NFL works so hard to foster has been ingrained for decades. A player who doesn't try to play through an injury is considered soft by coaches and fans alike, and it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that right at this very moment, there are players with concussion symptoms who aren't reporting them for fear that it might put their jobs in jeopardy. Worse, that fear might not be irrational.

Just today, the Eagles lost their defensive centerpiece (Stewart Bradley) and their offensive centerpiece (Kevin Kolb) to concussions. When Bradley took a hit, tried to get up, and then collapsed like a sack of potatoes, I literally felt sick to my stomach. Between Kolb and Bradley today, Brian Westbrook's troubles last year, and the lingering feelings over the suicide of Andre Waters, I'm starting to wonder how much more I can take. With every incident, I feel a little more like I'm personally responsible, along with everybody else who pays lip service to concern for the health of the players and goes back to demanding faster action and bigger hits.

I'm trying not to compare this to the Roman gladiators, but... well, I'm having trouble coming up with another comparison with the appropriate gravity.

long time no blog

I kind of want to get the ol' blog started back up again.

I'm not entirely convinced that I have anything particularly interesting to say, but to be fair, I felt the same way back when I used to post on a regular basis. I guess the problem I'm having is that every time I feel a renewed energy toward writing, I come here, start a post, get about a paragraph and a half into a topic, then say to myself, "this is boring," and delete it. It's pretty similar to the way my songwriting process has been going for years now. However, I've gotten the songwriting process started up again to a modest degree, and if I can force myself to just plow through and finish things there, I can do it here, too.

With writing songs, I found the key was not to worry less about why I was writing, or what the point was, and more on the song itself. I've got a handful of completed songs now, some of them recorded in various stages of completion, but no real idea of what I'm going to do with them, and I'm ok with that. I'm not in a band right now (or at least nothing worth taking too seriously), and I don't see that changing soon, but even if few people will ever hear these songs, it feels good to have written them, and it is an important form of self-expression, a form of therapy. Even if I go out of my way to write impenetrable lyrics, they're still personal to me.

So maybe there's something comparable with this blog. I do like writing, when I have something to write about. Something about simply the feeling of my fingers flying rapidly across the keyboard is incredibly gratifying. Instead of worrying about whether or not I'm saying something "important," or how many people will read it, or if it will eventually lead to anything, I need to just get it, say my piece, and get out. I'll be happy I did.

I feel like there's something to be said for the blog format as well. I'm still not entirely comfortable with the word "blog" (although that issue was resolved for me by the general public years ago), but I still remain convinced that anything worth thinking about probably won't fit on Twitter or a Facebook status.

So, if you're reading this, you can hopefully look forward to seeing some things here soon. I still don't expect my blog to have a "theme" other than whatever I happen to be thinking about, even though these types of personal journals have mostly fallen by the wayside (I can't think of any that I check out on a regular basis). I'm thinking about dusting off and posting some journals that I wrote on a couple trips around the country. So maybe that first, I don't know.

List With Unreasonably Specific Criteria, Grizzled Veterans Edition

Bands With at Least 10 Years Under Their Belts That Are as Awesome Now as They Were When They Debuted:

- Radiohead

- Do Make Say Think

- Super Furry Animals

- Flaming Lips

- Wilco

- Of Montreal

- Air

- Stereolab

- Yo la Tengo

- Deerhoof

- Portishead

Bands that I want to include but won't because their debut is so damned perfect and their recent work is only half-excellent: Mogwai

List With Unreasonably Specific Criteria, Leaving the Nest Edition

Solo albums by famous band members that everybody should own:

Dig it:

- Brian Wilson - Smile

- Dennis Wilson - Pacific Ocean Blue

- George Harrison - All Things Must Pass

- John Lennon - Plastic Ono Band

- Paul McCartney - Ram

- David Byrne - The Catherine Wheel

- Jonny Greenwood - There Will Be Blood OST

- Jeremy Enigk - Return of the Frog Queen

- Lou Reed - Coney Island Baby

- John Cale - Paris 1919

- Nico - Desertshore

- Syd Barrett - The Madcap Laughs

- Paul Simon - Graceland (that mostly counts, right?)

Artists not included on account of being far more famous as a solo act than as part of their former band: Bjork, Elliott Smith, Ryan Adams, Robyn Hitchcock

Tom is

Tom isn't so sure Eric Bruntlett can play center field.

Tom would gladly pay a handsome sum for Van Morrison to follow him around singing about his activities. "Tom wakes up, he goes to work, he's WOOOOOOOOOOOOOORKIN' WORKIN' WORKIN' WOOOOOOOOOORKIN'."

Tom's money is on the Celtics to repeat.

Tom's cockatiel is laying eggs, which is cute but also weird and slightly stressful, and he wishes she would stop because he misses just hanging out with her on his shoulder, because she doesn't want to do that anymore.

Tom watched an episode of Family Guy last week, and he isn't sure if his sense of humor has changed drastically in the past eight or nine years, or if Family Guy has always been just God fucking awful all along.

Tom would much rather be texting than talking on the phone.

Tom is 25 years old and loses sleep at night worrying about how old he has become.

Tom thinks the Phillies and Mets both benefit from playing the Nationals and Braves 20 times each every year, but not the Marlins, they're a sticky bunch of bastards.

Tom will likely go the rest of his life without seeing a movie better than Vertigo.

Tom thinks that being a bird owner might be teaching him some bad lessons for parenthood, such as, "If I just stick their cage in the closet, they'll stop screaming."

Tom's personal picks for best album covers of all time are Nebraska, On the Corner, Standards, and Graceland.

Tom still doesn't understand why Twitter is anything that anybody would be interested in.

Live from New York, it's tedious mediocrity!

Have you ever seen that one SNL skit where there was this recurring character who'd been on the show five times before doing the same exact thing, except this time they were doing the same exact thing in a department store or a family dinner or something, and the guest host was in the skit playing a character extremely similar or identical to the one that they were famous for playing, and the whole thing went on at least three minutes longer than was really necessary, and then there was a commercial break that was actually longer than the preceding skit?

Man, that was great. I hope that show stays on the air for another 35 years!

Tom's favorite music of 2008

Christ, is it February already? I've been planning, apparently for 2 full months now, to post this, and give a good in-depth write-up of everything, but the thought of doing so is off-putting, and really, I don't have the interest in this that I once did. I'm sure that comment is going to be great for the prospect of future readership here. Oh well.

What I'm doing now is the lazy version of a Top 10 list. This is in the same format as it would have appeared in the more labor-intensive version (i.e., the version where I actually wrote a lot about why I like any of these), it's just arranged as it is because the idea of a "competition" every year for Best Album or whatever seems increasingly pointless and irrelevant.

These are my Very Favorite albums of 2008 (in alphabetical order):

- Deerhunter - Microcastle - Also getting this year's "Most Improved" award (this is 1000% better than 2007's Cryptograms), Deerhunter have created an atmospheric masterpiece combining their usual shoegaze style with an increased emphasis on melody and ambiance.
- Of Montreal - Skeletal Lamping - After a career making wacky lo-fi Beatlesque indie-pop, Kevin Barnes has spent the last few years skewing into a unique world of electronic disco funk rock, or something like that. Taking the sound of 2007's Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer to its most extreme endpoint, Barnes (and his alter-ego Georgie Fruit) has created a kaleidoscopic and dizzying ode to the human libido.
- Portishead - Third - With one fell swoop, Portishead threw out any notion of them being bound to the idea and sound of "trip-hop", while still being immediately identifiable as Portishead. If it took them 11 years to make an album this good, I'd like to urge them to take another decade to make the next one.
- Brian Wilson - That Lucky Old Sun - Brian Wilson's still got it. This is the best album of new material he's put out since 1977's The Beach Boys Love You (since Smile was mostly written in 1966-67), and it certainly serves as a nice bookend to his career. More importantly, it's a strong, unified album that works well as a whole. It makes me wish I lived in Los Angeles. That's how good it is.

There are some other Very Good albums (by my standards) from 2008 (in roughly descending order, with one sentence write-ups):

- Kanye West - 808s and Heartbreak - The lyrics are questionable at times, but they are as consistent as the always-compelling music at creating a mood of regret and grief, a lament to good times never had.
- TV on the Radio - Dear Science - Melody comes to the fore, and TV on the Radio hit a new career peak with an amazing hybrid of funk, disco, and Radiohead.
- M83 - Saturdays = Youth - The devotion to the sound of the 1980s here is almost disturbingly thorough, but it works, but mostly because M83's flair for the dramatic (and melodramatic) remains fully intact.
- The Week That Was - The Week That Was - I downloaded this on a whim based on a single positive review, and I don't really know the first thing about whoever is making this music, but I've come up with the formula for these guys: early XTC + Steve Reich + Talking Heads + Peter Gabriel, and if that sounds like an awesome combination, you're right, it totally is.
- The Hold Steady - Stay Positive - Craig Finn's lyrics over the four Hold Steady albums have created a dense weave of recurring characters, stories, and themes, a web as intriguingly byzantine as their music is (and has always been) straightforward and immediately engaging.
- Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks - Real Emotional Trash - Lifelong indie kid blasphemy: I honestly prefer the exploratory but never masturbatory jams of Real Emotional Trash to any Pavement album.
- Stereolab - Chemical Chords - These guys have been wringing unpredictable results from the same old formula for so long that it should go without saying that Chemical Chords is yet another variation of 60s pop + 70s Krautrock + 90s post-rock, this time with the emphasis on concision and directness.
- Hot Chip - Made in the Dark - Hot Chip make most downright goofy dance music that can still be legitimately called dance music, with bonus points awarded this time around for the total music-geek Todd Rundgren sample and the lyric "half nelson, full nelson, Willie Nelson."
- Mogwai - The Hawk is Howling - Mogwai have been making more or less the same album since 2003's Rock Action, but this one, with its extended song structures and devastating climaxes, comes closest to that holy grail of all post-rock, their debut Young Team, while still retaining the subtlety and texture of their work in the last decade.
- Coldplay - Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends - See earlier review.
- Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago - An album of mopey, bitchy breakup songs redeemed by an unstoppable wave of gorgeous melodies and harmonies.
- Beach House - Devotion - Every one of these songs is pretty much the same, but they're all unspeakably beautiful.

So there you go. If you'd like some of my favorite individual songs of 2008, here's a list, in the order I thought of them, with their own individual awards listed next to them:

Vampire Weekend - "Oxford Comma" - Most Cheerful Pop/Rock Song
Mogwai - "I'm Jim Morrison I'm Dead" - Most Devastatingly Majestic Song
Hot Chip - "Bendable Posable" - Weirdest Danceable Song
Fleet Foxes - "White Winter Hymnal" - Prettiest Crosby, Stills & Nash style harmonies
Animal Collective - "Water Curses" - Purest Expression of Joy
Goldfrapp - "Clowns" - Most Heartwrenching Song About Breast Implants
M83 - "Kim and Jessie" - Most Devastatingly Majestic 80s Throwback Song
Portishead - "Machine Gun" - Most Brutally Rhythmic Song

2008 year in review

In the year 2008:

- The Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series
- A black man was elected president
- Guns 'n' Roses released Chinese Democracy
- My Bloody Valentine went on tour
- Portishead put a new album out
- The Flaming Lips finished Christmas on Mars

These are all extraordinary occurrences, right? I didn't wake up 11 months ago in some weird alternate universe where this sort of weird shit is commonplace, right?

2008 music posts coming in a couple weeks, so shtick around.

"World's Oldest Person Dies" is such a non-news headline. Just from a statistical standpoint, is there anybody in the world who could possibly be more likely to die at any given moment than the world's oldest person?

"you talkin' to me?"

Last week I bought the newly released "Coppola Restoration" box set of The Godfather and its sequels. A purchase well worth the money for anybody who doesn't own those movies already (which was me before last week).

I was watching Part II tonight, and thinking about how much I love watching Robert De Niro do anything, even just stick his hands in his pockets and stare into space, and I eventually landed on his Wikipedia page, and I realized that his career is a neat little oversimplified microcosm of Hollywood filmmaking over the past 35 years.

And if you want to illustrate the difference between the "film school brat" era of the late 70s and the "sequels, remakes, and formulas" era of the past ten years or so, De Niro's filmography charts it perfectly: The Godfather Part II, Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter, and Raging Bull then, Analyze This (and Analyze That), Meet the Parents (and Meet the Fockers), Rocky and Bullwinkle, and Shark Tale now.

This isn't meant as a criticism of De Niro (if you asked me who my favorite actor of all time was, it would be De Niro in a walk, issues raised by yesterday's entry aside), and it isn't meant to say that there were no awful and overly familiar movies back then, or that there are no sweeping, method-acted epics now (or that there are no film school brat types now). It's just a funny thought I had.

"half of what I say is meaningless..."

I was at a party last weekend, and I was approached (cornered) by a young woman, who had apparently been told by one of my friends that if she wanted to talk about music, I was the person to talk to.

I would probably dispute that notion, by the way, because while it's true that I do love talking about music, and I know more about pop music than most people (because that's what I busied myself with in high school and college while the rest of you had friends and such), I tend to be very opinionated and sometimes dismissive. This can end up hurting people's feelings if all they wanted to do was talk about, say, Band of Horses, and I dismiss them as "Death Cab for Journey" and immediately switch back to ranting about why John Cale is the greatest musician of all time, or whatever people like me like to talk about. And I don't really hate Band of Horses, or care about them one way or the other, and it doesn't bother me one bit if anybody else likes them or even thinks they're the future of rock music. I'm just an asshole sometimes, that's all.

Anyway, this girl asked me who my favorite band is. I don't like that question, because it's not really an interesting question, it's reductive of anybody's musical taste, and mostly because that changes from hour to hour with me, and probably most other people.

I deflected the question back to her, in hopes that she would say something that could spur the conversation on, and get me out of reciting my boilerplate list of favorite bands.

"I would have to say the Beatles," she said.

My response, because I'd had a few drinks and didn't really care if she thought I was an asshole, was, "Well Christ, of course your favorite band is the Beatles, but you can't say that. There's no discussion to be had about that. Everybody's favorite band is the Beatles, there's nothing interesting about that."

It got me thinking later on: first of all, I don't actually think for a minute that everybody's favorite band is the Beatles. I know a lot of people who somehow made it to adulthood without spending their entire childhood digesting every single Beatles song and album, for hours and hours (again, this is what I did as a kid instead of socializing). But still, they were a phenomenon unique in the history of music, a result of improbable circumstances and talent that resulted in unbelievable popularity of an unprecedented scale, that left behind a catalog that is essentially perfect, from the first song on their first album to the last song on their last album. They were insanely prolific, provided countless innovations that still bear effect on pop music, were surprisingly eclectic within the course of any of their albums, let alone their whole career, and had nary a single misstep from start to finish.

But are they my favorite band? Purely from the standpoint of which single band or artist has provided me with the most rewarding listens, who stand up to hundreds of listens without diminishing, who've provided me with more entertainment than anybody else, the Beatles are the obvious answer, but there are artists whose work I cherish more, who provide a more personal connection. The Beatles, in part because of their massive global and cross-generational popularity, and in part because they're so perfect and unassailable, are hard to pick as a favorite.

We like to root for underdogs, we like our heroes flawed, and we like to feel unique. Picking the Beatles in that situation is just too obvious, too safe, like listing Beethoven as your favorite classical composer, Citizen Kane as your favorite movie, and Shakespeare as your favorite poet. Sure they're good, brilliant really, and I would never doubt the truthfulness of anybody who did list all of those, because they're so good, but that's the point. Everybody knows they're good. It's damn near impossible to dispute their greatness without looking like the world's most obnoxious contrarian, and with good reason. But holding those up as your personal favorite doesn't say anything about your personality.

The tragedy of John McCain

Anybody who knows me even a little can probably vouch for my status and an unabashed liberal. I will pretty much automatically vote for whoever the Democrat is in any statewide or national election, although if I had my way we might actually get stuck with a President Kucinich.

But I actually feel a little bit sorry for John McCain.

It's not that he's waited so long for his chance and now appears to be on his way to defeat (although, by the way, let's not count our chickens before they hatch here, we still have to go vote for Obama tomorrow for him to win). It's that even if he does win, he's given himself over so thoroughly to the demons of Rove-style right wing politics.

The lesson that McCain took from George W. Bush's victories was apparently that playing to the base (and/or the lowest common denominator) wins, especially if you do so in the lowest, crudest, most misleading, and plainly insulting manner possible. Bush sunk McCain in the 2000 primaries with the most shamelessly sleazy campaign ever seen, and McCain, having absorbed this information, has been applying it to his 2008 campaign against Obama, robo-calls and all.

What he didn't realize was that Bush's victories in the general elections were by fractional margins (the national margin in 2004 was 2.4%, and of course he famously didn't even win the popular vote in 2000), against Democratic opponents far less organized and less convincing than Obama, in times less turbulent than now. So while Rove politics did edge out Kerry in 2004 (the Swift Boat controversy comes to mind, although that was not strictly from the Bush campaign), in 2008 the entire economy damn near collapsed, and McCain's campaign is still flailing about hoping that people are going to care about Obama's "involvement" with William Ayers that happened 7 years ago. Obama has clear, agreeable messages about tax reform and the economy, and McCain has Joe Biden's words taken out of context against images of rallies and soldiers in Arabic countries. Obama speaks for crowds of tens of thousands of people, and McCain acts as if Obama's massive popularity and eminent likability is somehow a negative trait.

It would be just another dirty campaign run by a Republican, except for the fact that McCain is actually NOT just another Republican. McCain's nauseating repetition of the word "maverick" is actually justified by his actions in the Senate. He has consistently stood up to his party, worked for smart bipartisan compromises, and shows a willingness to listen and learn that Bush would probably find foolish (this is a compliment). He's stubbornly resisted the extreme right wing of his party, taking moderate (and, dare I say, liberal) stances in the past on abortion, campaign finance, and immigration, among others. He's the one who publicly called Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell "agents of intolerance." He was still pretty solidly conservative, but he was the type of conservative I could actually respect, even if I'd never vote for him.

And now here he is, at the tail end of a campaign marked by misleading statements and outright lies, fearmongering, anti-intellectualism, subtle racism, hypocrisy, and, of course, Sarah fucking Palin, the ultimate physical manifestation of ignorance, and for what? If McCain loses, he can't flip a switch and go back to the McCain who was in the Senate in 2000, pretending that he hasn't done what he's done and said what he's said for the past year and a half. If he wins, he's bound to the far right wing of the Republican party that will have put him there, which means no pro-choice Supreme court justices, no immigration reform, and no courting the Democrat-controlled Congress with the reasonable compromises that are his specialty. Win or lose, John McCain has sold his soul.

All of which is to say...

Vote Obama.

"hockey moms" are the new "NASCAR dads"

There's been a lot of talk lately about Sarah Palin, and I'm sure you're all sick of hearing about her by now, so I just have two quick questions about her that I don't think anybody else has asked so far, and then we can all move on to bigger and better things:

1. Is she related to the Monty Python guy?

2. How many moose has she fucked, and is this more or less than the average Alaskan?

Hopefully we can get this all cleared up, and she can resume her campaign against Barack Obama to become the next president.

I'm just not sure about the speech this guy MacCane gave last night. He sure did talk a lot about himself. I don't think it's going to benefit Sarah Palin very much in the polls.

Lucky Old Sun's got nothin' to do but roll 'round heaven all day...

You know, I think among my friends, my undying devotion to/worship of Brian Wilson is well-known enough that they would probably joke, on the subject of Brian Wilson's That Lucky Old Sun, which was released on CD today, that I probably heard it over a year ago. And in this case, that would almost be true, as the work was premiered as a whole by Brian and his band live in September 2007, and I had it shortly thereafter through the magic of internet distributed bootlegs.

I stopped in my favorite record store to buy it anyway today, of course, and, like with Smile (although in an altogether more low-key fashion), I avoided listening to the studio versions until I could pop in the CD and hear the whole thing all at once. Actually, I was only mildly excited to hear it, as I had decided based on the bootleg that That Lucky Old Sun was a pleasant but inconsequential bookend to Brian Wilson's life and career.

Then I actually listened to the damn thing, and man, I forgot how much I really do love that man's music. A good handful of the songs are middling and forgettable, but every so often an amazing melody or harmony jumps out of the speakers, and it just floors me. And the songs that are really good are breathtaking, on par with anything he did 40 years ago.

Speaking of which, holy shit, "Can't Wait Too Long" is on the album! He's been sitting on that one for 41 years, actually.

Anyway, it is a pleasant bookend to Brian's career, but not inconsequential. The symbolic values are enormous, maybe even more than his final vanquishing of his Smile demons. With That Lucky Old Sun, Brian returns to his love of California, the only home he's ever known, invoking specific memories of his past with an agreeable nostalgia. Brian has conquered his demons, made peace with himself, and is finally learning to enjoy life. Not bad for a guy who probably should have been dead several decades ago.

At this point in his career, though, everything about Brian Wilson has a huge symbolic value. The references in the lyrics to "Summer '61" (when the Beach Boys formed), how Brian "turned out the lights" at age 25 (when the Smile debacle occurred), or had "a dream singing with my brothers in harmony" (a reference to his deceased brothers and former bandmates Carl and Dennis) would be typical lyrical oddities for any other artist, but out of the mouth of Brian Wilson, they're almost insider references, nods to the people paying attention who "get it."

But maybe I'm thinking too much. At it's simplest, That Lucky Old Sun is a fine example of sunny California pop from the man who invented the genre.