. . . And we're back.

After a computer-less month, ladies and gentlemen we are once again floating in space.

The really bizarre part is how, before I even did anything on my new computer, I was able to plug my old hard drive in and upload every single file from my previous computer onto the new. So when the new computer started for the first time, everything was exactly the same as it had been on the dead machine - only, it was a lot faster. It even restarted Firefox with the exact same pages that had been open when the computer died.

The one brown spot on the whole experience was the fact that my old Microsoft Office suite, which I had used since I got the old machine in 2008, no longer worked on the new laptop: apparently the old program ran on something called Power PC that the new OS Lion does not support. Which seems odd, because the result of this was that Apple made me go out and pay $100 for a new Microsoft program: seems like strange and (almost?) certainly unintentional collusion. I mean, seriously, they don't actually expect me to use whatever type of janky bullshit word processor Mac is hawking, do they?

And as an aside, I even managed to get an iPhone despite myself. Let me explain: as a belated Christmas gift I bought Violet a new iPhone 4GS - she is basically addicted to her iPhone and her old 3G was getting more and more decrepit as the weeks passed. So, fine, we go into the AT&T store with the intention of getting her the new phone. And then during checkout the clerk asks if I want an iPhone. I say that no, I don't want an iPhone. She says that the old 3Gs have gone down to $30, and that putting a new phone on Violet's plan would be only $15 or so more a month to her bill. Well, so I got a smartphone . . . I'm still not entirely sold on the idea. I am against smartphones on principle. I didn't actually get a cell phone of any kind until 2008, at which point I got a $20 pay-as-you-go number that lasted three years until the battery started to go. At which point i went out and bought another $20 cheap phone. But now I've got an iPhone. Honestly, it's fun and all, but so far I haven't really done anything but customize a ringtone and set a background picture. I don't see myself becoming as dependent on the phone as some people are . . . I just hate looking down at the tiny screen and trying to read a webpage or my e-mail. But not every situation is such that I can whip out my laptop and surf the internet at will, either.

Within two days, therefore, I joined the 21st century.

So, back to the old grind. Next week is the eighth anniversary of this blog - slightly less impressive than, say, Mike's eight anniversary, seeing as how he posts every day and I barely post at all. And yet, it's worth pointing out that whereas most blogs at some point slow their rate of posting and eventually just peter out altogether - usually the old "boy, it's been a long time since I posted!" post is the death knell - The Hurting somehow always manages to survive and return from even the most protracted malaise, like a particularly indolent and occasionally sarcastic cockroach. I'm going to keep slouching 'til the wheels fall off.

Not Dead Yet

For those of you who don't check my Twitter feed with religious regularity, the dearth of posting lately has been caused by the fact that I spilled a bottle of Diet Dr. Pepper on the keyboard of my laptop. The good news is that I was able to salvage the old hard drive with no problems, and currently have it installed in an external drive kit I can plug into any available Mac machine. The bad news is that, yes, I am sans computer, save for Violet's laptop of which she so very graciously allows me the use for basic tasks such as the checking of e-mail and schoolwork. So, all the awesome posting I had planned for Christmas break - ka-blooey!

Anyway, one of the unfortunate effects of the accident is that I have had to put together my year-end top-ten list for the Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop as something of an afterthought. Usually in December I have plenty of time to catch up on all the music I missed over the previous eleven months, a process that involves discovering stuff I hadn't known about as well as reconsidering stuff I had dismissed. This year, because I didn't have a computer available for regular use, I had to put this together in a few spare minutes based almost solely on memory, my Last.fm charts and a quick look over the Pitchfork and SPIN lists to make sure I wasn't forgetting anything obvious. This is hardly the most adventurous list you'll read this year, and it's fairly predictable in many respects, but I've got a deadline and this is what stuck out at me.

I should point out, once I sat down to compose the list my #1 and #2 were obvious, but the rest was a bloodbath.

There's a lot of stuff I haven't heard that could conceivably have made the list but of which I can't in good conscience be any judge: the Field, the Roots, Zomby, Tom Waits, SBTRKT all spring to mind, all albums on my shopping list for the next time I go record shopping. And of course when I have the time, I need to do the usual go-through of all the other year-end lists to see the stuff I didn't know I was missing.

Albums that disappointed: Bon Iver (how the hell is such a mediocre album Pitchfork's #1?), St. Vincent, Hercules & Love Affair, Panda Bear.

Albums that didn't necessarily disappoint but didn't set the world on fire: Stephen Malkmus, REM, GaGa, Wild Flag (I'm as shocked as you), Wilco (better than Sky Blue Sky, some signs of life, but no home run), Mirah & Thao, Nicholas Jaar, Tim Hecker, Tyler the Creator (and wow am I surprised to see this left off so many Best-Of lists - or am I?), .

Albums that were shit: Fleet Foxes, Girls (considering how much I loved his debut it pains me to say that this new albums was a sleeping pill), Fleet Foxes, James Blake (this is supposed to be "good"?), Fleet Foxes. Did I mention Fleet Foxes?

Honorable mention: Boston Spaceships (nice appetizer for new GBV!), Gang Gang Dance (if the whole album had been as good as "Glass Jar" they would have been a shoe-in), Mates of State (don't judge me!), Fucked Up (kind of obvious, but still good), Atlas Sound.

Top Ten of 2011 as of 12/22/12 -

10. Bill Callahan - Apocalypse
9. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake
8. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Belong
7. The Rapture - In the Grace of Your Love
6. They Might Be Giants - Join Us
5. Low - C'mon
4. Cut Copy - Zonoscope
3. Yacht - Shangri-La
2. Destroyer - Kaputt
1. tUnE-yArDs - w h o k i l l

If I can find some time over the next couple days I would like to write at least a few words on each of these albums. In the meantime, tell me your ideas of anything you think I missed or underrated.

He ended up really, really, really sad.



Lincoln

Within the first few seconds of the first song ("Ana Ng") the listener is aware that something is different. Everything that had been present on They Might Be Giants can still be accounted for, but perhaps it would be better to say that everything which was present had been amplified and strengthened. Whereas their first album had been occasionally sparse, intentionally discordant in places, and doggedly lo-fi, everything on Lincoln was arranged with absolute precision. The jagged guitar riff and stomping kick drum that open the album are perfectly compressed for maximum impact: the song hits like a hammer and never lets up for the space of three-and-a-half minutes. To say that "Ana Ng" is one of the duo's best songs is something of an understatement: the development and maturation of their songwriting and recording skills in the two years between their debut and their sophomore album - even 23 years later - is simply astounding.

They had a lot to prove with this record. They were a novelty act who had probably already outlived the most generous career expectations: a song on MTV and heavy rotation on college radio, all riding atop an album of strange synthesizer noises and a few classically formalist pop songs. They obviously had an idea of what kind of sound they wanted to produce but their first album was too scattered to fully realize this ambition. Lincoln was a bolt from the clear blue sky, a mature and disciplined statement dedicated to (seemingly) immature thoughts and random ideas. In the space between their first and second albums, They Might Be Giants discovered focus, and this was the key: you can get away with doing anything you so desire as long as you have the chops and the discipline. Lincoln is a forty-minute long laser beam, 18 songs in 40 minutes, a murderers' row of one catchy, complex, and deceptively melancholy ditty after another, marching in perfect military time. They Might Be Giants were essentially a hardcore group with a drum machine, and song-for-song I'd put Lincoln toe-to-toe with Double Nickles on the Dime any day of the week.



The problem with Lincoln is that all the copious skill on display only made it that much easier to underplay and undersell the actual content of the songs themselves. Because, yeah, the album is partially defined by a handful of purely silly nonsense songs, tracks like "Cowtown" and "Pencil Rain" that resist all but the most annoyingly abstruse allegorical reading. They're goofy songs built around tongue-twisters. If anyone wanted an example of They Might Be Giants as a joke band, a gimmick band of no real consequence who produce stupid ditties for the clever kids in the back of math class, well, those are the tracks to which one would go first.

But if there's one thing about which I am convinced after having lived with this album as a fixture of my life for over twenty years, it's that there's something real and haunting behind the glib facade. If you listen to the album without really listening to the album you might hear a procession of clever tunes built around puns and wry humor. You might think that some of the jokes are corny and some of the jokes are witty, and you might think that some of the attempts at pathos feel strangely hollow. But it would be a terrible mistake to hear the album as anything other than a holistic unit. It hangs together remarkably well as a unit because on Lincoln the Johns mastered the trick that would essentially make their careers: making deceptively happy songs that were, in fact and on closer examination, remarkably sad.

Listen to the album the first time and you might hear a remarkable assortment of tongue-in-cheek ditties, some great sarcastic pastiches and high-energy larks. Listen again in a different frame of mind and the whole thing takes on a decidedly darker pallor that becomes altogether harder to shake. You could dismiss one sad song, you could dismiss two sad songs, but a whole album comprised of (with only a few exceptions) unremittingly depressing, anxious, heartbroken, jaded, exhausted, and downright bleak songs? That's something that not everyone seems to get. There's real panic behind the mania.

Take a look for yourself:

Everything sticks until it goes away /
And the truth is, we don't know anything.

Somebody's reading your mind /
Damned if you know who it is /
they're digging through all of your files /
Stealing back your best ideas.

Should you worry when the skullhead is in front of you /
Or is it worse because it's always waiting where your eyes don't go?

A woman's voice on the radio can convince you you're in love /
A woman's voice on the telephone can convince you you're alone.

I know you deceived me, couldn't sleep last night /
Now my tear stains on the wall reflect an ugly sight.

I'm going to die if you touch me one more time /
Well I guess that I'm going to die no matter what.

It must be raining because a man ain't supposed to cry /
But I look up and I don't see a cloud.

Don't call me at work again no no the boss still hates me /
I'm just tired and I don't love you anymore.

What's the sense in ever thinking about the tomb /
When you're much too busy returning to the womb?

I love the world and if I have to sue for custody /
I will sue for custody.

If it wasn't for disappointment /
I wouldn't have any appointments.

Now you're the only one here who can tell me if it's true /
That you love me and I love me.

The reason Lincoln is their masterpiece, why this is the one They Might Be Giants album more than any other that exemplifies why they are such great and gifted songwriters, is that this is the album on which the line between energy and anxiety was most neatly effaced. They're not singing jerky, fast jingles because they're having a great time: no, they're actually quite miserable, desperately unhappy, and it's only by going so fast that they lose their breath that they can actually begin to express the deep discontent lying underneath the happy exterior.

The last third of the album (from the final breather of "You'll Miss Me") is one long sled ride down the hill from paranoia through despair right on to delusion. The album's climactic track, "Kiss Me, Son of God," is perhaps the single most demented kiss-off ever written by someone who wasn't actually in a padded room. It's They Might Be Giants's version of slamming the mic on the ground and walking offstage after delivering a ferocious "fuck you" to everyone who ever kicked their shins in gym class. The only ways you could possibly follow-up the end of Lincoln would be to hang yourself from the rafters or sign a major-label deal. You know the score, but anyone coming to Lincoln fresh might legitimately worry for the mental health of the men who wrote it.


Some "scamp" took down the album version, so here's an OK live version.

All of which might well be summed up as supremely conceited and self-satisfied . . . and you'd be 100% correct in doing so. That's the point: one of the reasons - perhaps the main reason - why They Might Be Giants took off the way they did was that the spoke to the dramatic self-absorption and feigned martyrdom of the American teenage nerd in a way that no other musical group or cultural phenomenon had ever quite done before. This is something that no one under a certain age - say, 25 at the youngest - can really understand without having to be told: until very recently, nerd media was mass media, and it only stuck with nerds because they were too stupid to realize that sci-fi TV shows and fantasy books were not things that grown men (and women, but let's be frank, the Android's Dungeon was a boys club for decades) should care about. It was all well and good for normal people to love Star Wars, but to keep caring about it long after you left the theater - and to obsess about it long past grade school - that took a special kind of willful suspension of disbelief in the way life was "supposed" to be lived. And the people who went to sci-fi conventions and traded VHS tapes of dubbed anime and played AD&D and listened to Tarkus long after anyone else cared about ELP - they did so because they needed something else to fill the void in their lives, because all the things that "normal" people were supposed to care about in the industrialized west just weren't cutting it.

Is the image of the self-hating nerd a cliche? Is there any truth to the stereotype of the basement-dwelling troll with Cheeto-stained fingers and a soiled "I GROK SPOCK" T-shirt, awkwardly fumbling through gym class and desperately ashamed of the fact that he can't really complete any aspects of the President's Physical Fitness Test to satisfaction? Perhaps in its most extreme forms this is an exaggeration, but there's no doubt whatsoever that until very recently - as in, within the last decade and change - nerds were decidedly off the mainstream. And they - hell, who am I kidding? we - were self-righteous about the fact that we had been excluded from the mainstream. Even if the only people who had excluded us were us. We had our reasons, or at least we believed that we did.

And this is what They Might Be Giants got. Being young and brilliant also sometimes means being a self-absorbed asshole. Sometimes, being stuck on a loop in your own head can be a fate worse than death. When I was younger I thought that the best track on Lincoln was "They'll Need A Crane," and while I still think that's a fantastic song, as I get older I see that the album's real masterstroke is "Snowball in Hell." It's a great song about growing up and being desperately unhappy with your life, a sentiment that can best be summed up in the phrase "money's all broke, and food's going hungry." It's a song about unhappy adulthood that somehow sounds wistful without seeming maudlin, and defiantly chipper despite increasingly dire circumstances. It's a better song than it has any right to be, considering just how unlikely They Might Be Giants ever were.

Anyone who cared to pay attention past the goofs and the weirdness was rewarded with a shimmering gem of a pop song: but in order to pay attention you had to have the patience, and in order to have the patience you had to care. Being able to care about something as nerdy and unimportant as a weird indie rock album was definitely a sign of deep commitment, and once They Might Be Giants found a way to broadcast directly to those fans with a heavy investment in being deeply committed . . . well, the rest was history.


(out of five)

When they kick down your front door, how you gonna come? /
With your hands on your head or on the trigger of your gun?



Longtime readers of this blog know that I'm poor. Before I went back to school in 2007 I spent much of the previous decade shuffling around a handful of low-paying, dead-end jobs, getting some degree of satisfaction from working part time as a freelance writer but generally dissatisfied with the shape and direction of my life. In hindsight it's obvious that I had no one to blame for this state of affairs but myself - I made a few precipitous decisions in my early twenties that had great, far-reaching unpleasant consequences. Usually this is the part where someone says, "I made some mistakes but I don't regret anything!" That's bullshit: although I have learned to regard my past with something resembling a sanguine wistfulness (for the necessity of my own fragile mental health, if nothing else), that doesn't mean I don't live every day with a sensation of definite regret hovering somewhere in the vicinity of my conscious thoughts.

That's not a bad thing. Regret is a strong motivating force. Everyone makes mistakes: it is how you react to these mistakes that defines your character.

Being poor tends to clarify and focus your thoughts. I actually read a really great article about this recently in the most unlikely of places: Cracked.com posted a funny list earlier this year of the "5 Things Nobody Tells You About Being Poor." Oddly enough for a humor site like Cracked.com, this is actually one of the best, most astute and completely unvarnished examination of working poverty in America that I've ever seen. One of the reasons it's such an effective article is that it doesn't flinch from showing just how "funny" so many of the daily humiliations of the Poverty Grind actually are. Being poor means your life is essentially a long string of ironic Catch-22s, one after another forever and ever. You get some money from a tax refund? Guess what, your car needs a new timing belt. You want to go back to school? Guess what, the only way to qualify for substantive student aid is to live far below the poverty line. Gallows humor comes with the territory.

So you go back to school and work hard. Even though everything else in the world appears to be crumbling, you still wholeheartedly embrace the belief that education and hard work will allow you to rise up from poverty and to enjoy the fruits of a moderate middle-class life - the fruits of which amount, in this case, to simply living a comfortable life that doesn't require the constant counting of pennies in order to be able to eat lunch. Because we all know that there's no such thing as social mobility anymore. If you're born poor you're likely to remain poor, and if you're born rich it is almost impossible to not remain rich. Growing up we were never destitute in terms of complete abject poverty, but I think it's fair to characterize my upbringing as definitively poor, in money if not in spirit. There were fat times and lean times. We never went without essentials and we always had food to eat, but despite what the Heritage Foundation might want you to believe, being poor in America doesn't mean being perpetually hungry (although that can be a part of it - I've been hungry in my time), and it doesn't mean not owning a color TV. It does mean having to constantly scramble, and knowing full well at all moments that if your next paycheck (or pension check or SSI Disability check) doesn't materialize for whatever reason, you are screwed in a very real, concrete, and non-abstract fashion. I always like to say: some days you get the spider, and some days the spider gets you.



As might be expected from the above, being poor also means being frightened all the time. Being poor means that the police aren't your friends. I've often wondered what it must be like to live a life without constant fear of the police as a real and valid threat. I should mention that I'm perhaps the most law abiding person I know. I feel guilty about going even just two or three miles over the speed limit on the freeway - even when everyone around me is going 10-15 miles above - not just because I'm deathly afraid of getting a ticket I can't pay and having my preciously low car insurance rate raised, but because I've been in severe car accidents and I don't want to die behind the wheel of an eight-year-old Subaru station wagon. I don't declare deductions on my taxes above the bare-bones household deduction, in the interest of keeping my tax profile as simple and unobtrusive as possible. I know from firsthand family experience that once you fall under the government's purview, it's almost impossible to extricate yourself without falling into a bureaucratic sinkhole of the kind that the phrase "Kafka-esque" was specifically designed to describe. Being poor means living in constant fear of falling on the wrong side of the government: we don't get to have lawyers on retainer or even lawyers, period.

If the system was working properly, education would be the means by which individuals could lift themselves out of lowered circumstances through hard work and perseverance. As it stands, university education has become the bare-minimum prerequisite for most people to be able to qualify for middle class jobs and incomes, and those very same university educations that are necessary in order to produce an economically productive citizenry carry with them the near-certainty of prohibitive debt. You need to go to school in order to be qualified for the jobs that will enable you to pay off the student loans you accrued in order to pay for school. Setting aside the more intangible cultural consequences of forcing the large majority of college graduates to view university education as glorified job-training, there is the basic fact that any institution responsible for saddling society's most potentially productive demographic with immense debt right out of the starting gate will act as a monstrous drag on economic growth for the foreseeable future.

Spiraling debt is one of the symptoms of a capitalist system in terminal decline. Governments, companies, and people are (often literally) mortgaging present circumstances on future dividends - ignorant or in denial of the fact that the negative effects of debt are compounded with time. If capitalism was able to function the way it "should," the way the economic apologists on the faculties of almost every major public and private university in the United States would have us believe, reasonable debt levels would be easily erased by periodic upturns. In reality, contemporary debt levels across all levels of society are untenable and simply cannot be repaid. As we have seen in Greece (and France and Italy and England, et al.), countrywide austerity programs necessarily inflict unacceptable collateral injuries across society. On the most basic level, governments establish legitimacy through the maintenance of order. As soon as recognized social protections begin to fall away, society erupts from the bottom up. Law enforcement practices become harsher and more repressive as income disparity rises - by necessity, since economic disparity creates unrest. There is no amount of police repression capable of suppressing dissent in a representational democracy. Every attempt to suppress dissent creates an environment of harsher repression which in turns inspires an increasingly vociferous dissent movement. There's no way to stop the cycle without abandoning any pretense of political liberty and instituting a police state - and oops, sometimes that happens anyway when you're not even paying attention.

Most people in the United States (and dare I say the rest of the world) possess an express desire to live quiet lives unaffected by political turmoil. Protest movements are historically unpopular in this country because anything that threatens to overturn social and political stability on the national stage is unavoidably seen as a potential threat to local stability. So there is a very real possibility that the Occupy movement will have a deleterious effect on the short-term prospects of liberal politics on the retail level. That makes perfect sense: the Tea Party, inasmuch as it was a "real" populist protest movement, was still essentially contiguous with the values and goals of the mainstream Republican party. The Occupy movement, however, rejects the Democratic party, and even those Democrats seemingly most amenable to aligning themselves with the goals of the Occupy movement, such as the very liberal Democratic senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, are still essentially corporatist technocrats dedicated to preserving the economic status quo through smarter regulation. The Occupy movement is far beyond the reach of the Democratic party. One of the country's most historically liberal politicians, Jerry Brown, is once again governor of California, and his complete silence in the face of increased radicalization across the University of California system has been deafening. (It is worth noting that our Governor during the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s was Ronald Reagan, and his unambiguously hostile reaction to the protests in Berkeley during that decade was a crucial factor in helping Reagan gain credibility with national conservatives in the years leading up to 1980.) There is no way any politician on the national stage can possibly align themselves with the Occupy movement on anything other than the most vague and equivocal basis, because the whole point of the Occupy movement is that capitalism is failing in stark and unambiguous terms.

I'm not going to bother reiterating the facts regarding skyrocketing tuition - they're on the public record for anyone to see. But I think it is worth looking out for a moment from the specific circumstances of the moment and towards other aspects of the same problem.

If you have not already done so it is worth your attention to set aside the time to read Taylor Branch's recent article, "The Shame of College Sports," published in last month's issue of The Atlantic. It's a long and extremely interesting article, and so any attempt to summarize it would be necessarily reductive. But at the risk of doing violence to Branch's central thesis, the article lays out the case against college athletics and the NCAA in extremely methodical and unmistakeable terms. College athletics - particularly basketball and football - are such a remunerative enterprise that successful athletic programs effectively take over the schools to which they are attached. In the process they commit a variety of tacitly accepted crimes against the players who participate in college ball in the hopes of using it as a means of reaching the brass ring of a fat paycheck with professional sports. The way money circulates in the NCAA system distorts the educational mission of public and private universities to such a degree that any arguments regarding the economic benefits of college athletics are mooted ten times over by the deleterious effect of college sports on the reputation, educational quality, and dignity of the institutions in question. Many are already calling for the NCAA to be either dissolved or cut free entirely from the university system to which it already seems a pressingly terrible fit.

For any proof of the potential negative consequences of college athletics - consequences that go far beyond even vastly important questions concerning the ethical treatment of college athletes and the parasitic relationship between large athletic departments and large research universities - you merely need to look at the crisis at Penn State over the last month after it was discovered that a long-serving assistant coach for Penn State's storied football team had allegedly raped multiple children over the course of many years. The behavior was known and a cover-up of indeterminate dimensions in place for a long time. If you want to understand why and how such behavior could be allowed to continue on any basis, it is best to ask the most basic question: cui bono? Who benefits? Follow the money.

In the weeks leading up to the current campus crises, all graduate students, postdoc researchers and faculty in the UC system received a new patent contract. (I got the same patent contract myself since I'm a graduate student, even though the humanities obviously don't produce much in the way of patents.) Universities count on revenues from industrial patents to produce a surprisingly large percentage of their income. Current patent law apparently was such that existing contracts were not proof against loopholes, so new contracts were drawn up to clarify the University's ownership relation to all intellectual property created under its auspices. For those of you paying attention at home: scientists and engineers working for research universities are employed on a work-for-hire basis. Money gained from research income - be it in the form of patent revenues or industrial grants - is increasingly not funneled back into further research or education. It "disappears" into the administrative budget.



The problem is that there's no quick fix. The problem is that "the problem" is systematic and ultimately points to the most basic questions of how our society functions and how people pay their rent. The problem is that for an increasingly large percentage of the population, society isn't functioning quite so well, and a lot of people are having trouble paying that rent. President Obama was only ever going to be a centrist conservative Democrat: anyone who ever believed differently hadn't done even the most basic research required to read this excoriating New Yorker profile from 2007. There's no hope of redress at the highest levels of government, and so the dissatisfaction will continue to seep outwards and upwards.

It doesn't take a lot to radicalize leftist humanities students at public universities. When you actually get the scientists to pay attention to issues of social justice, you're working overtime to make enemies. There is no good reason why college athletes shouldn't be protesting for the exact same reasons that professors, graduate students (who teach and research) and undergraduates (who pay steep tuition) are: we make a lot of money for this university, cui bono? Why is tuition so high? Why are citizens of the wealthiest nation on the planet being asked to pay so much for an education that is an essential prerequisite to being an economically productive citizen? If people stopped sending their kids to college in high enough numbers, the economy would suffer for lack of educated workers to staff non-manual positions.

The only way this situation makes sense in the long term is if you accept that the logic of capitalism is self-defeating: debt begets debt, and a society burdened with debt will collapse because excessive debt makes growth impossible. The moment capitalism stops growing, when economic systems stagnate and contract, it enters a spiral of quickly diminishing returns from which it cannot extricate itself. Government regulation could probably temporarily arrest or slow the decline if the legislative will was present, but no one can acknowledge the existence of the problem, much less propose economic solutions predicated on the understanding that capitalism can't sustain itself indefinitely with a minimum of regulation. Eventually someone, somewhere, will simply stand up and refuse to pay their debts: it's already happening in Greece, and we have seen the consequences of even just one small-ish, relatively unimportant economy refusing to play by the rules. Any larger default would existentially imperil the entire financial system. When that happens, all bets are off, and all of our lives will be immeasurably worse for the duration of the crisis.

All of which brings us back to the photo at the top of the post, of a helmeted police officer hosing down nonviolent protesters with pepper spray. I walk along that pathway every day on my way from the bus stop in the Student Union to my office in Voorhies. I know those people, some of them at least: one of the men in the foreground who I recognize was seated across a conference table from me in class not three hours before the photo in question was taken. I know from class he looked exhausted: he'd been involved in many of the protests both on campus at Davis and ninety minutes away at Berkeley. I went home that afternoon after class and took a nap: it had been a long week with minimal sleep (that's graduate school!) and I knew going into the weekend that the next week, right before the Thanksgiving holiday, was going to be fairly intense. My Chaucer students have a term paper due in twelve days for which I can't help worrying they are woefully unprepared: I'm most concerned right now in being able to plan effective paper-writing workshops in the very busy week after we return from holiday. I slept all afternoon and woke up to find that Something Had Happened.

It's a bit weird to wake up and realize that you've been placed in a fishbowl. Suddenly a campus protest movement which had previously appeared vaguely desultory was the flashpoint for international attention: it hit Reuters, it hit the AP, it hit the BBC. The pictures and video of the pepper spray incident have shot around the world. Why was this such a revelation, when things like this had happened just a few days earlier in Berkeley? And this was happening in Oakland? Why was this happening here, in a college town to which I had moved with the specific understanding that it would be a quiet place to burrow down for a few years of extremely taxing intellectual labor?

I would never describe myself as an active member of the protest community: that would be doing a great disservice to those people who are extremely active and important in the organization and implementation of dissent on campus and in the community. But I'm a member of a Graduate Student Assembly that is responsible for formulating official responses to these events, I'm represented by a union that stands in solidarity with political activism, and I'm an individual surrounded by good friends who are deeply involved on every level of the process. We stand united and we roll deep.

But as an individual I'm frightened, terrified. I look at the pictures and watch the videos and hear the slogans and I know that things have reached a fever pitch: the demonstrations are going to get bigger and the political ramifications, at least for those living under the UC system as it stands now, are potentially massive. It's one thing to see these things played out on a TV screen from hundreds or thousands of miles away, but another thing entirely to see images taken in what is essentially your home being broadcast across the world as symbols of political repression. There's that old creeping fear of law enforcement which my parents instilled in me. My mom worked for the police as an emergency dispatcher and (when she couldn't possibly get out of it) a jail warden. She was exposed to policemen at their best and their worse - as first-responders to accidents and incidents of domestic abuse, as people who worked hard to catch violent criminals and support their community, but also as people who could be bigoted, sexist, violent, and abusive, who exploited the authority of their badge and their position of trust in every conceivable fashion. After working with the police for ten years she told me in no uncertain terms: avoid the police. There are two types of people who become police: good people who want to accomplish the good things associated with police work, and people who become corrupted and compromised by the very real ethical dangers of a career in law enforcement. When you're being pulled over for a busted taillight you can't know which type of cop your getting, or what kind of day that cop had, or any number of other variables.

(An aside: one of the best days of my life was the day a cop actually apologized to me for pulling me over without a reason. He ran my plates on his computer when he was driving behind me on a country road and his computer told him I didn't have a drivers' license. He pulled me over and I showed him my valid license. He looked at it, handed it back and apologized for stopping me.)

I know, I know: I'm not saying anything here that any black or hispanic citizen wouldn't be able to tell you. Here I am, "free, white and twenty-one," whining about the existential threat posed by police violence against middle-class graduate students at a well-esteemed public research university in the richest country in the world. But the fact remains: if you're poor, you know (or should know) that the police can do a lot more than ruin your day. They're dangerous. They represent the potential for unchecked and completely arbitrary exercise of dangerous power. So if they put a handful of police officers on indefinite leave, good for them - that's a start. But (and this shouldn't be taken in any way as an absolution for those individual officers responsible for the event at every step of the chain of command) the problem is not a few bad apples, but a system that has been designed with the express purpose of being abused. Urban police forces across the country have been militarized for decades, as a direct result of the never-ending stream of bad consequences resulting from our ruinous "War on Drugs." Cops dress like Navy Seals to cross the streets: when you give someone an assault rifle and body armor of course they're going to walk the beat like they're grinding a tactical sim on their Playstation.

I'm afraid of the fact that I can't decide to just "opt-out" of capitalism at my convenience, because somewhere on the other end of these decisions is a man with a badge and a gun who has been specifically deputized to protect the rights of private property. I have made decisions in my life with an eye towards monetizing the few skills I have in order to lift myself out of an indefinite future of grinding poverty and towards something resembling a comfortable middle class existence. I'm afraid of losing this chance, and that is exactly what the system takes for granted: when it becomes almost impossible to pick yourself up after falling down, the negative consequences of tripping over your own feet become inconceivably grim. I'm old enough that I'm fully aware of just how much I have to lose. I look at the pictures of my friends being assaulted not fifty yards from the cafeteria where I eat pizza on Thursdays and I can't help thinking of exactly what is at stake: this is a systematic breakdown. This is not an isolated case of police abuse or a small group of disaffected agents provocateurs inciting violence. This specific incident may eventually fade from immediate memory and the specific provocations may be swept under the rug, but the only way for the problem to go away is for the systematic inequalities that form the bedrock of our country's economic system to go away. And that's not going to happen, not without a lot more turmoil and possibly more bloodshed. It's only going to get worse before it gets better, because the problems are only going to keep getting worse for so long as people lack the political will to step up en masse and change the system with their own bare hands.

When you've been poor for a long time you pay a lot of attention to issues of class. You can look around and get a pretty good read for issues of wealth and poverty, just from how people carry themselves, the type of clothes they wear, the attitude they adopt. Poor people know how much money they have in their bank accounts at all time. People who haven't lived like that can't understand just how much energy goes into keeping yourself afloat when you don't have the confidence of being able to fall back on wealthy relations or substantial savings. When you're poor you realize just how much you have to lose because you know exactly how much you have. Those who have the least have paradoxically the most to lose. I feel like I have a lot to lose, and I'm frightened to see the system fraying in front of my eyes. I wish I could say I didn't see it coming, but you don't need to be a Marxist to have seen just how badly things have gotten. (Although, if you've read Capital, you have a pretty good idea of how it happened. More than a few mainstream economists have been circling around Marx's ideas for the last few years, unable to bring themselves to actually utter the name of the man who, whatever some of the specific faults of his analysis might have been, was able to predict many prominent features of our present moment with startling accuracy.) I'm scared for myself but I'm also scared for my parents who are dependent on the government for their retirement income, my friends who receive their paychecks from the government, and anyone who needs to pay bills with money backed by the full faith and trust of the increasingly repressive and completely unresponsive United States government. You know, everyone.

At the most very basic level, we have to ask a simple question: does capitalism work? For a long time capitalism worked well for an impressively large number of people, a large enough number that you could probably ignore the seepage around the edges if you so desired. But it has now ceased to work for an increasingly large number of people. The reflexive response from both sides of the mainstream political dualism has been that localized problems should not be confused with systematic problems: if you fail, it's your fault and not that of the system. The system works. Both major political parties seem to differ only in the degree to which they posit government action as a remedy for the localized shortcomings of capitalism. The American political system as it is presently conceived is simply unable to process the possibility that current problems are not localized, and that they may very well be systematic and progressively degenerative. Right now I believe it is safe to say that, despite whatever economic problems they may be experiencing in their own lives, the mass of middle America has not been sufficiently radicalized to be able to see any continuity between pictures like the one above and the circumstances of not being able to pay their bills and feed their children. People remain isolated and aloof for so long as they feel afraid, and a lot of people feel very afraid right now. They're more afraid, however, of not being able to pay their bills than they are of the government. All that needs to happen in order for that to change is for the government and its representatives to keep on doing what they did last Friday.

I'm saddened and shocked to see these things happening in my own back yard, but it had to start somewhere. Might as well be here.

Everything Right Is Wrong Again



They Might Be Giants

Anyone listening to They Might Be Giants' self-titled debut album without any knowledge of the duo's later career may have been justified in the belief that there was no way in hell these guys should ever have been allowed to make a second album. To say that They Might Be Giants is a weird album is an understatement considering how often the word "weird" is abused and misused: there's something downright scary about this album in a way that can't entirely be dismissed by recourse to ironic distance. For all the chirpy energy and mutant power pop songwriting chops on display, this isn't even remotely happy music. These are murder ballads disguised as bubblegum synthpop, telegrams of self-loathing broadcast from the interior of a strange subterranean prison. If this juxtaposition does not perhaps seem quite as strange now as it did in 1986, it is to They Might Be Giants' credit that they have effectively created this subgenre unto themselves.

I am consistently surprised by Robert Christgau's longstanding affection for TMBG: to put it mildly, they don't particularly seem like his type of thing. And yet love them he does. He's actually more kind to their debut album than I am inclined to be:

Two catchy weirdos, eighteen songs, and the hits just keep on coming in an exuberantly annoying show of creative superabundance. Their secret is that as unmediated pop postmodernists they can be themselves stealing from anywhere, modulating without strain or personal commitment from hick to nut to nerd. Like the cross-eyed bear in the regretful but not altogether kind "Hide Away Folk Family," their "shoes are laced with irony," but that doesn't doom them to art-school cleverness or never meaning what they say. Their great subject is the information overload that lends these songs their form. They live in a world where "Everything Right Is Wrong Again" and "Youth Culture Killed My Dog."

Where I think Christgau gets it precisely right is the statement that "their great subject is the information overload that lends these songs their form." At a certain point, after having listened to this album enough times, the sheer profusion of different styles and attitudes threatens to overwhelm the understanding or enjoyment of any individual song. Track for track, this is one of the weakest albums from their early period. But taken as a whole the confusing multiplicity of styles and genres - to say nothing of the anomalous un-musicality of truly bizarre tracks like "Chess Piece Face" and "Boat of Car" - makes the album seem better as a composite whole than as the sum of its parts. Like Marshall McLuhan, They Might Be Giants (unintentionally) foresaw the negative consequences of information overload in a fractured and infinitely refracted society. You're not supposed to be able to focus on any one object: the best way is simply to absorb everything all at once and hope for the best.



The difference between They Might Be Giants and a group like Negativland, however, comes from the Johns' steadfast removal to engage with the world beyond their own horizons. There aren't many overtly political songs in the band's discography; one of them, the weak "Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head," is the second song here. They seem more or less constitutionally unable to discuss politics with conviction. (One of the better songs on their next album, "Purple Toupee," addresses this problem in explicit terms.) So immediately we're trapped within the confines of a narrow, hermetically-sealed universe populated by strange characters defined by varying degrees of depression and psychosis. I believe this was actually a brilliant decision on their part: as opposed to someone like "Weird Al" who has alway been tied to explicit parody as his primary subject matter, TMBG don't really engage with the outside world. Devo by their very nature were extremely political: they were (and are, since they're amazingly still a going concern) persistently hyper-critical of contemporary life. They Might Be Giants are certainly persistently critical and overtly parodic, but not of society or or pop culture or other musicians. Their metier, the inescapable target of their relentless criticism, is themselves. There's a reason why mind control, hypnosis, and delusion are the most consistent subject matters in their oeuvre: nothing makes sense for these guys outside the realm of their own heads. For better or for worse, They Might Be Giants are extremely narcissistic songwriters. That does however not mean that they aren't at all times completely willing to abase or humiliate themselves.

To put it another way: They Might Be Giants became successful because they created their own world, and each album was an exercise in fantasy world-building that differed from the likes of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd not in kind but in quality. This wasn't about power fantasy, this was about routine powerlessness inflated to ritual proportions. The trials and tribulations of everyday banality were reflected and distorted to funhouse-mirror proportions: take another look at "Absolutely Bill's Mood" and "Alienation's For the Rich," and you might perhaps be able to discern a spiritual resemblance to the work of Harold Pinter. Some of the best songs from their early albums actually resemble one-act plays or character sketches, brief expository passages intended to illuminate the lives of people trapped by the circumstances of their own misfortune. Even "upbeat" songs like "Everything Right is Wrong Again" and "Nothing's Gonna Change My Clothes" are, on closer examination, abrasive acts of self-mortification.

All the people are so happy now, their heads are caving in,
I'm glad they are a snowman with protective rubber skin,
But every little thing's a domino that falls on different dots,
And crashes into everything that tries to make it stop.

There's a reason why these guys became so popular with nerds: they appeal to young nerds' inflated sense of self-importance, the irrefutable conviction that everything going on inside their heads is far more important than whatever might be going on outside. Attempts to communicate are most likely doomed by the subject's inability to look beyond the frame of their own neurosis in order to acknowledge another person as more than an appendage ("Don't Let's Start"). The most genuinely affecting song on the album - "She's An Angel" - is less sincere than it might appear on first blush, inasmuch as it is built around the lyrical conceit of taking a commonplace romantic compliment and weaving it into a sci-fi fable. They Might Be Giants would have very little material if it weren't for their nigh-autistic ability to literalize familiar idioms in a clever, albeit occasionally maddening fashion.

When you're following an angel
Does it mean you have to throw your body off a building?
Somewhere they're meeting on a pinhead
Calling you an angel, calling you the nicest things.
I heard they had a space program,
When they sing you can't hear, there's no air.
Sometimes I think I kind of like that and
Other times I think I'm already there.

What saves them from their own worst impulses - and what will alway save them - is their skill as songwriters. This album appears at times to have been conjured up out of thin air: it's lo-fi and doggedly minimal, using energy and enthusiasm to cover the fact that the whole album was recorded with no more instruments than two people could carry on the subway. My patience for odd vignettes like "Chess Piece Face" and "Rabid Child" was never particularly strong, and the many weird interludes that dot this album do not seems to have grown less annoying with age. But at the same time the effect of these interludes is countered by the handful of truly great pop songs that dot the album. They Might Be Giants are and have been almost from their inception gifted songwriters in the great tradition of formalist power pop. There's a reason why "Don't Let's Start" made it onto rotation on MTV despite the fact that it was a terrible video by a no-name indie band with a weird name: it's a catchy song constructed with exacting precision. Everything is exactly where it should be: the intro, the chorus, the middle eight, the way it seems to go a little bit faster for the final chorus - this is how you write a pop song, this is how you build a tiny ladder to transcendence on a 4/4 scaffold. Even when their subject matter betrayed them their skill saw them through. If on their first album this skill is occasionally obscured and diffused by a surfeit of ambition, their second album would see the duo tighten their songwriting focus with the methodical precision of a laser.




(out of five)