new (?) drink: the Ginny Weasley

Is it really possible that no one has yet invented a drink called the Ginny Weasley? A cursory googling turns up nothing ... so here's a recipe I'm toying with:

- gin
- tonic
- Pimm's No. 1

Pour equal parts gin and Pimm's No. 1 into a glass. Add tonic. Garnish with cucumber and blood orange.

new media

For this article on the inventors of the McNuggetini, the NYTimes took a screenshot of a YouTube video and used it to accompany the story:

change we shouldn't have believed in

Glenn Greenwald sums up the state of health care reform:

One finds [the corporatist trend] in far more than just economic policy, and it's about more than just letting corporations do what they want.  It's about affirmatively harnessing government power in order to benefit and strengthen those corporate interests and even merging government and the private sector.  In the intelligence and surveillance realms, for instance, the line between government agencies and private corporations barely exists.  Military policy is carried out almost as much by private contractors as by our state's armed forces.  Corporate executives and lobbyists can shuffle between the public and private sectors so seamlessly because the divisions have been so eroded.  Our laws are written not by elected representatives but, literally, by the largest and richest corporations.  At the level of the most concentrated power, large corporate interests and government actions are basically inseparable.

As well as the civil liberties situation:

So, to recap: we have indefinite detention, military commissions, Blackwater assassination squads, escalation in Afghanistan, extreme secrecy to shield executive lawbreaking from judicial review, renditions, and denials of habeas corpus. These are not policies Obama has failed yet to uproot; they are policies he has explicitly advocated and affirmatively embraced as his own.

He quotes Time magazine:

Beginning in the first two weeks of May, Obama took harder lines on government secrecy, on the fate of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and on the prosecution of terrorists worldwide. The President was moving away from some promises he had made during the campaign and toward more moderate positions, some favored by George W. Bush. At the same time, he quietly shifted responsibility for the legal framework for counterterrorism from Craig to political advisers overseen by Emanuel, who was more inclined to strike a balance between left and right.

And I have to agree---it is a crazy world we live in when extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention, and trial by military commission are considered moderate positions. It's the absolute nadir of the two-sides-to-every-story way of doing journalism, combined with the premise that the two available poles are What The Republicans Say and What The Democrats Say.

---

I got home to find this month's copy of Harper's, which begins with an essay (subscriber-only, I think) on regulatory capture. Here's how the state of the legislature is described:

The polite word for regulatory capture in Washington is 'moderation'. Normally we understand moderation to be a process whereby we balance the conservative-right-red preference for "free markets" with the liberal-left-blue preference for "big government." Determining the correct level of market intervention means splitting the difference. ... The contemporary form of moderation, however, simply assumes government growth (i.e., intervention), which occurs under both parties, and instead concerns itself with balancing the regulatory interests of various campaign contributors. The interests of the insurance companies are moderated by the interests of the drug manufacturers, which in turn are moderated by the interests of the trial lawyers and perhaps even by the interests of organized labor, and in this way the locus of competition is transported from the marketplace to the legislature.

The results:

... Mediocre trusts secure the blessing of government sanction even as they avoid any obligation to serve the public good. Prices stay high, producers fail to innovate, and social inequities remain in place.

Because the competition doesn't happen at the market, the current Republican rhetoric (pro-market, anti-socialism) is just a non sequitur---consumers can't exert any pressure on corporations to produce better products, and the emphasis on free choice is a red herring. And the Democrats, well, they've been captured. And apparently the whole business about a public option, the expansion of Medicare? Total sham. Obama and co. never wanted to do any of that---they just wanted to force people to buy from the insurance industry, with subsidy, i.e. funnel tax money to the very corporations whose inefficiency and protection from the market have made reform urgent.

From the start, assuaging the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries was a central preoccupation of the White House -- hence the deal negotiated in strict secrecy with Pharma to ban bulk price negotiations and drug reimportation, a blatant violation of both Obama's campaign positions on those issues and his promise to conduct all negotiations out in the open (on C-SPAN).  Indeed, Democrats led the way yesterday in killing drug re-importation, which they endlessly claimed to support back when they couldn't pass it.  The administration wants not only to prevent industry money from funding an anti-health-care-reform campaign, but also wants to ensure that the Democratic Party -- rather than the GOP -- will continue to be the prime recipient of industry largesse.

Reminds you of the bank bailout, doesn't it?

philosophical platitudes

So I just realized today, while looking at this review of Roger Scruton's Beauty, that there's a thread in philosophical method that leads from today's Anglophone philosophy all the way back to Aristotle: begin with platitudes.

- David Lewis: Collect all the platitudes about x, then construct a Ramsey sentence from those platitudes.

- Bertrand Russell: "The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it."

- Hegelian dialectic? Not sure about that one.

- Aristotle: dialectical reasoning begins with endoxa, the widely accepted opinions (or reputable opinions, or reflective opinions, depending on who's translating).

And maybe we can count Plato, who doesn't self-consciously endorse this method (iirc, he doesn't like the doxa), nonetheless has Socrates e.g. bothering Euthyphro for his thoughts on piety, which might count as an extraction of received opinion.

This is a pretty short list. And it ignores everything from Aristotle to Russell, as well as contemporaries of Russell like Husserl, who invented his own method. So I'm making a pretty weak generalization, but nonetheless I'm struck by the ancient heritage of this method, and I suspect we could add more philosophers to the list. (E.g. probably the pragmatists would fit here, too, and maybe Moore's "defense of common sense.")

three (or so) links

- Michael Walzer argues that the war in Afghanistan is just, as is Obama's planned prosecution of it.

- How could I forget to link to the Wheaties Fuel website?

- The results from the PhilPapers survey are in. I was at first amazed to see that on the question of classical vs. non-classical logic, 33% of target faculty said "other," including 5% who said "both." My first thought was how could you fail to choose one or the other? either it's classical or it isn't ... and then I remembered what happens when you give up classical logic.

but he can't be a man, 'cause he does not smoke the same cigarettes as me

Still working on a follow-up to the last post. In the meantime ...

---

Every time I read one of President Obama's speeches I'm impressed. I don't know how much credit goes to Obama himself, as opposed to this guy or any other White House speechwriter, but they're solid and organized and often nuanced. So I looked forward to reading the Peace Prize speech, wondering how he'd talk his way out of the fact that he's got two wars running, and had just decided to escalate one of them. It was a pretty good job, I thought, considering that he wasn't going to give an academic talk on just war or foreign policy. But what really surprised me was this:

And most dangerously, we see it ["identity"-based violence] in the way that religion is used to justify the murder of innocents by those who have distorted and defiled the great religion of Islam, and who attacked my country from Afghanistan. These extremists are not the first to kill in the name of God; the cruelties of the Crusades are amply recorded. But they remind us that no Holy War can ever be a just war. For if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will, then there is no need for restraint -- no need to spare the pregnant mother, or the medic, or the Red Cross worker, or even a person of one's own faith.

Could we really be hearing an American president say that religion deranges people? Let's read on:

Such a warped view of religion is not just incompatible with the concept of peace, but I believe it's incompatible with the very purpose of faith -- for the one rule that lies at the heart of every major religion is that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

Dang. Apparently no true Scotsman would believe that religion requires violence. And also the very purpose of faith is ... to follow the golden rule? Man, I don't know. What about this episode from 2nd Kings?

From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some youths came out of the town and jeered at him. "Go on up, you baldhead!" they said. "Go on up, you baldhead!" He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths. And he went on to Mount Carmel and from there returned to Samaria.

I don't know that I generally agree with Richard Dawkins, but on the Old Testament god we agree: batshit crazy. Of course there are lots of examples to pick on, but sending bears to murder children is one of the more entertaining ones. Anyway I just don't know how anyone can say that religious killers are somehow "warping" their doctrine---the violence is there, right in the books, God-sanctioned and God-wrought. Sure, you can marginalize it and say that the golden rule, or the sermon on the mount or whatever, is the "heart" of some religion, and I do think that those are better lessons to follow than the ones about holy violence. But that, too, is a warping of religious teaching; it's cherry-picking the parts that fit your favorite worldview.

(N.b. the golden rule is actually a pretty bad moral precept: if you think that you'd rather die than live as an infidel, you're all set to start murdering.)

---

There's this thing by Dave Eggers I ran across, which I'll probably quote again soon, but part of which needs quoting now:

Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy.

It reminds me of a thing I read David Foster Wallace quoted as saying, which I can't seem to find right now, but is something like "making art requires finding the voice inside you that is willing to love."

---

Hey, here's an explanation of that Elisha business. The whole thing is worth reading, but here's the punchline:

In summary, 2 Kings 2:23-24 is not an account of God mauling young children for making fun of a bald man. Rather, it is a record of an insulting demonstration against God’s prophet by a large group of young men. Because these young people of about 20 years of age or older (the same term is used of Solomon in 1 Kings 3:7) so despised the prophet of the Lord, Elisha called upon the Lord to deal with the rebels as He saw fit. The Lord’s punishment was the mauling of 42 of them by two female bears. The penalty was clearly justified, for to ridicule Elisha was to ridicule the Lord Himself. The seriousness of the crime was indicated by the seriousness of the punishment. The appalling judgment was God’s warning to all who would scorn the prophets of the Lord.

He couldn't have warned people by, I don't know, ridiculing the demonstrators back? God's omnipotent, right; he could probably make them feel just really ridiculous.

---

I've been reading some of this guy's reviews, and while I don't share his sense of humor, this has got to be the best summary of Devo's cover of "Satisfaction":

(0:01) Stilted 5-hit drumbeat begins
(0:03) Speedy palm-muted two-string five-chord guitar line begins in right speaker
(0:05) Two strange zooming guitar noises appear in right speaker for no reason
(0:07) Ultra-catchy bass line starts up
(0:11) Hideous Chuck Berry lead guitar parody begins in right speaker and slowly makes its way center
(0:21) Vocals begin
(0:36) Second guitar line (a pattern of eight strange individual notes) appears in left speaker to interplay with the original riff
(0:57) A synthesizer begins doubling the second guitar line
(1:48) Singer begins saying "Baby"
(1:58) Singer finishes saying "Baby"
(2:08) A third (fuzzed-out) guitar begins playing the three rising notes of Keith Richards' original "Satisfaction" riff, but only one time each
(2:12) Backup vocalists begin chanting "Satisfaction"

---

Someone deserves a prize for this headline: "For Those Who Want Their Cereal Extra Manly". Some of the credit belongs to General Mills, of course, who took it upon themselves to create the male-oriented breakfast cereal market. Why set foot in heretofore uncharted terrain?

“Nobody in this enormous category is speaking to men,” said David Clark, a marketing manager at General Mills. “Men don’t use their wives’ razors or deodorants; why would they be eating their cereal?”

Indeed! Indeed.

top ten albums of 2000--2009

Is it Albums of the Decade time already? The Guardian and Pitchfork are on the job already. Here are my favorites:

1. Deerhoof - The Runners Four (2005)


Deerhoof made a lot of good records during the last ten years, but this one is probably my favorite, and it's certainly the deepest. It's got ideas that grab you on first listen as well as some that surface only after many replays, and the more I listen to it the more I'm amazed at the way it sounds. Compared to their other records, it's crisp and lonely, like they recorded it in a walk-in freezer, and the mix is unusual (guitars panned stereo pretty hard, bass to one side, drums a bit low). But like the rest of the catalog it's brimming with ideas you've never heard before, arranged in a way that's often hard to predict but makes all kinds of sense once it unfurls. Raising melody + chords by a half-step for a quick bar in the middle of a phrase? Yes. Extending a phrase just a little beyond the point where you expect it to end? Check. In fact, phrases show up in all kinds of lengths that aren't integer multiples of 4---like the Dismemberment Plan and the Pixies and lots of bands I admire going back to the (late) Beatles, Deerhoof is just excellent at trimming the fat.

2. Converge - Jane Doe (2001)


Jane Doe has got to have one of the more aggressive album openings ever: five seconds of fuzzed-out tritones, ten of guitar stabs on the upbeats, then a quick atonal run into a wall of screaming guitars, screaming vocals, and near-blastbeat drums (watch the video in the last post!). There are metal bands who can do things faster or heavier, but Converge's mathy/punky/hardcore blend hits hard and fast and precisely in a way that straight-up death or doom or sludge metal doesn't. Fantastic stuff if you're into that sort of thing.


3. Matmos - The Civil War (2003)


Matmos put a version of "The Stars and Stripes Forever" on this record, and it's sort of a miniature version of the whole thing: a swirling, evolving stream of timbres that makes equal use of thumpy acoustic instruments, glitchy electronic noises, wheezing, choked filters, and unsteady field recordings. You've got choruses of slightly-detuned reeds, gentle rocking drum-machine kicks, marching-band bass drums, things that sound like prepared pianos. Autoharps or zithers or something, bright electric guitars, crazy shuffling slithery things that might be leaves or sandpaper or samples of fire. I'm making it sound like mere audio collage (writing in sentence fragments probably doesn't help), but there's really a purposeful, musical sequence of ideas here, at both the track and album levels.


4. Enon - Believo! (2000)


Some reviews of this record tout it as a) a bellwether for the indie rock of the '00s and b) the sort of thing that wasn't even possible until 2000. I'm tempted to agree with those, even though I can't think of any clear examples of Believo!'s influence on future albums, and even though I can think of a few similar records that showed up earlier (Cibo Matto's two LPs, 1996 and 1999; Self's Breakfast with Girls, 1999; maybe Portishead's self-titled, 1997). But those are late-'90s albums, and even if Enon's influence isn't directly visible, Believo! is nonetheless a prototype of '00s-rock features: a suitcase full of unconventional sounds and instruments; dalliances with dance genres (in this case, jungle and downtempo); synthesizers used for fatness, grit, and fuzz; digital modulation of vocals. Subsequent Enon albums refine these things, but part of what I like about Believo! is its unrefined bits. The production has this hazy feeling to it, and a lot of the tracks lurch along on a sludgy bass. Plus the songs are, with a just a couple exceptions, straight-up pop songs at their cores, and good ones at that; it's the noisy delivery that takes them from good to holy-crap-how-did-they-make-it-sound-like-that.


5. Animal Collective - Sung Tongs (2004)


This album is just about two albums in one. For the most part, the first half is melodic and (relatively) concise; the second is mainly long textural tracks that move sort of aimlessly through acoustic fog. But both halves share an aesthetic of computer-burnished organic sounds, like if Voltron had been made of wooden robots and lived in a cabin recording songs. The guitars and autoharps in particular sound brilliant and springy, and the digital effects gurgle and sparkle like a stream. And an occasional indulgence in odd meters and unusual song structures aims Sung Tongs right at my musical predilections. I've heard other Animal Collective records, but none of them are quite as exuberant as this one.


6. Fantômas - The Director's Cut (2001)


It's too bad that this record will probably appeal only to metal fans; it's so much more than a metal record. Metal is certainly one of the vocabularies that Fantômas deploys on The Director's Cut, but they make equally good use of choral hymns, Morricone twang, symphonic percussion, big band, and (speaking literally) various bells and whistles. It will probably come as no surprise to some listeners that half of Fantômas was also in Mr. Bungle. But while the latter band's genre-hopping seemed partly an end in itself, Fantômas's use of different vocabularies is more restrained, and always serves the songs---which on this record are all themes from horror or suspense films. If you ever wanted to hear the heaviest possible rendition of the theme from Rosemary's Baby, this is the place to find it. (Or, um, here.)


7. Radiohead - Amnesiac (2001)


For some people, Radiohead died after OK Computer. I disagree---I think they got far more interesting---but it's hard to single out one of the post-OK records as the best one. So having to make a forced choice, I'd go for Amnesiac. At this point Kid A feels too controlled and sappy, Hail to the Thief is uneven, and In Rainbows is like the chiclet of the Radiohead catalog: insipid pretty soon after the first taste. But Amnesiac has only grown on me, and it's enjoyable from beginning to end. (Even the stuttering "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors", which struck me as a bunch of digital wankery at first.) And like Enon's Believo!, there's a hazy, dark feeling to the production that sounds amazing, especially with the synths (dig the bassoon-y thing in "Morning Bell/Amnesiac").


8. Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Yanqui U.X.O. (2002)


Some Godspeed records draw my ear directly to the Godspeed formula: build build build build build some more build BUILD BUILD ok come down for a while now build build etc. And then it's like watching a card trick when you know how it works---it can still be interesting, but it's hard not to think about the manipulation that's happening. Yanqui U.X.O. never does that. I'm always waiting impatiently for the triumphant dissonant guitar lead at the end of "Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls," with the screaming tremolo strings and the wah pedal sweep and the thumping, crashing drums. Every time.

9. Stereolab - Sound-Dust (2001)


From the Pitchfork review of the Stereolab EPs collection Oscillons from the Anti-Sun:

More space winds up occupied by newer material, much of it from after the point where some fans (this reviewer included) fret that Stereolab's output began to feel vaguely academic; something always seems to have gone amiss when a band that could float gorgeously on two chords starts throwing in pedal-steel interludes just to keep you interested.

To which I say: come now, rag on Margerine Eclipse if you want, but not Sound-Dust! (Pedal-steel interlude is at 1:36 on track 3.) There's no question that this record is late-period Stereolab, more cool/cerebral than fuzzy/urgent, but it's not as if it's merely an exercise in producing a record in the style of late-period Stereolab. The whole thing fits together more strongly than any of their other records; each idea within a song leads right to the next one, and the end of each song cues up the beginning of the next, like a perfect Stereolab mixtape.

10. Fugazi - The Argument (2001)


Fugazi spent the '90s putting out good and great records, and by the time they made this one they clearly knew their stuff. I can't think of another band that wrings so many different textures out of the standard guitar/bass/drums/vocals lineup, and on The Argument they put that versatility to work in service of pure craft. On occasion they help themselves to some extra things: a second drummer, a piano, whistling, maybe a Rhodes; but most of the time they're just getting sounds out of their normal equipment. Seriously, I'm not sure it's ever occurred to me to admire a straight-up rock band's skill at arrangement until I heard Fugazi. (If you've never listened to Fugazi, or maybe tried once but got turned off, this is the album to go to.)


11. Dillinger Escape Plan with Mike Patton - Irony is a Dead Scene EP (2002)


This gets the bonus #11 slot for being an EP rather than a full-length album. (If Dillinger's Calculating Infinity hadn't been released in 1999, it would certainly have made the top five.) Irony is a Dead Scene is in some ways a different animal from Calculating Infinity, most of those ways being the presence of Mike Patton, whose vocals add a variety of personalities to Dillinger's otherwise studious aesthetic. There's a bit of Patton's old Faith No More-style rap/barking, but there's also gasping, screaming, monkish chanting, whispering, and melodies both tonal and atonal. The band itself also makes more extensive use of synthesizers and samples, and in general the song structures are less verse-chorus-repeat than anything they've done before or since. In the same way that the 1998 Under the Running Board EP laid out the major elements of the DEP's vocabulary in less than 10 minutes, Irony is a Dead Scene set the tone for all subsequent Dillinger releases in just under 18. (Though I wish I could say that latter-day Dillinger's Patton-band pastiche is anywhere nearly as good as this EP.)




Honorable Mention:

- Mastodon - Leviathan (2004)
- Starlight Mints - Built on Squares (2003)
- Autolux - Future Perfect (2004)
- Mew - And the Glass-Handed Kites (2005)
- Tortoise - Standards (2001)
- Hot Snakes - Audit in Progress (2004)
- Queens of the Stone Age - Songs for the Deaf (2002)
- The Unicorns - Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? (2003)
- Aphex Twin - Drukqs (2001)
- Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? (2007)
- Tin Hat - The Sad Machinery of Spring (2007)
- Mylo - Destroy Rock & Roll (2004)
- Coalesce - Ox (2009)

best of the '00s, part two

#s 1--5: