Music Video Meltdown: Electronica

At the behest of my loyal, sometimes frightening fans, I’m posting regularly again and trying to develop some running themes to distinguish this blog from the billions of other, lesser blogs. With that in mind:

Many Fridays ago, I posted some music videos because I was feeling too lazy to compose brilliant scratchings. It’s Friday again. Enjoy this Electronica-themed Music Video Meltdown!

Junior Boys – “Last Exit” (excerpt)

Modeselektor – “Ziq Zaq” (homemade vid.)

Beck – “Bit Rate Variations in B-flat (Girl remix)” (The regular song is great, but this is pure uncut fucking magic)

Cutting Through the Hype

Originally posted on One City, blog of the Interdependence Project

Regular readers know I’ve been swept up in the cacophony of chatter surrounding the race for the Democratic presidential nominee. Some of my commentary, I feel, has been worth reading, mostly for it’s entertainment value. Some, not so much.

On my morning blog cruise, I read this post by Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic. He says,

Pollster.com’s Mark Blumenthal has got me all guilty about reading meaning into randomness.

Curious, I read Blumenthal’s analysis of Gallup and Rasmussen’s polling data for the last 8-odd weeks (a warning to liberal arts types – it’s not technical, but it does contain numbers), and I realized just how wrapped up in the media hype I’ve been. I came away with the following conclusions:

1. Accounting for statistical methods, Obama and Clinton are essentially tied in the polls. They have been for weeks. This means:

2. The media has been using meaningless ups and downs in the polls to create fake news. Example: Last week’s mini-media-storm on Obama’s poll numbers immediately before and after his speech on race (given to address the also-meaningless Rev. Wright controversy).

3. Conclusion: Don’t trust the media. And don’t trust me. Discourse about actual policy has been hijacked for the past several weeks by empty drama.

A corollary observation: Obama’s oft-touted momentum may also be largely illusory. It feels real because I’m surrounded by ObamaHeads; I also seek out campaign videos and visit Obama’s campaign website (what better place to shore up my feeling that my guy is winning?). The reality of the race, however, is told in the popular vote and the delegate count, and Obama is winning both (although not by a great margin).

Endgame: It is mathematically extremely unlikely that HRC can catch up in pledged delegates, and politically highly unlikely that Superdelegates will defect to her en masse, thus handing her the nomination. In other words, it’s not a close race, it’s a done race. Everything else is narrative.

I’m no longer worried about Hillary rising in the eleventh hour like a zomboid Obama-killing robot; I’m worried about my own impressionable brain soaking up spin like a dry sponge. I am the liberal blogosphere’s ideal consumer and, in a way, I feel like I’m just waking up from a bad dream, where the landscape is constantly shifting, voices are shouting discordantly, and advertising is the only real constant.

Bio: Scribblerist writes for whoever will read him, like an ugly puppy that nobody wants. He holds no degree in Political Science from Harvard and is singularly unqualified to comment on matters political.

Update: The incomparable George Packer cuts down the hype with style.

Crush? Apply Poetry, Rinse, Repeat

This morning at work, bored as usual, I started Googling. I tried “Best Angry Song Ever,” but the only results were for bands with names like Puddle of Mud, DeathCoxxx, and Mothers of Holy Darkness. Not what I was looking for. Next, I tried, “Greatest Love Poem Ever,” and this page on Poetry.com was the first hit. Poetry dot com may have started out with genuine artistic aspirations back in 1995, but whoever owns the domain name has since retired to the Bahamas, supported by revenue from the ads plastered all over the homepage. I wish I had possessed the foresight at 13 to buy up simple, broad domains like air.com, bigbooty.com, and hybrid.com. I, and every other person with internet access, was sitting on gold and we didn’t even know it.

It’s not really our fault, guys. No one knew how big this interweb thing would get. Witness: Newsweek circa 1995.

Anyway, the above-embedded page of poetry may be on a site for hacks and stupid people, but it has some legitimate poetry. Check it out. Mend that aching heart with the balm of words. Or whatever.

Six-Word Memoirs: Brevity In Action

SMITH magazine is a welcome discovery for a scribbler like me. It’s an online magazine that acts as a “home for storytelling of all forms and kinds, with a focus on personal narrative. We believe everyone has a story, and everyone should have a place to tell it.” Admirable!

SMITH recently published “Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure” and I’ve passed pleasurable minutes reading some of the entries. Consider this, the profound:

Diapers, rompers, shorts, jeans, suits, diapers.

 Or this, the silly (but still a little profound):

Business school? Bah! Pop music? Hurrah

And this, the moving and profound:

I still make coffee for two

Enter: Lizzie Widdicombe’s review in the New Yorker, an exercise in literary discipline. It opens:

Brevity: a good thing in writing. Exploited by texters, gossip columnists, haikuists. Not associated with the biography genre. But then—why shouldn’t it be? Life expectancies rise; attention spans shrink. Six words can tell a story. That’s a new book’s premise, anyway.

Do you get it? The entire review is composed of six-word sentences! I know because I counted each one, with my eyes.

I need to bring this Widdicombe person on as a guest blogger. I wonder if, in place of her position as a staff writer at the most prestigious magazine in the nation, she’ll accept $100 a week and unlimited use of my David Sedaris home library. Lizzie, if you’re reading this, let me know.

The Next President Will Be Left-Handed (Like me)

And to think, back in Hester Prynne days, I would’ve been burned at the stake.

Read it here.

Brothel Management and Marketing: Spitzer’s Fall

People are talking about Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s catastrophic implosion everywhere today – in the elevators, on the street, huddled around water coolers (it’s true, I witnessed one such water-vessel caucus). The media is frenzied. The blogosphere is crapping its pants. These are the kind of lurid, juicy scandals that we love so much because it offers an opportunity to chatter publicly about the taboo. A secretary in my office told me confidently, “That’s nothing special. There’s dozens of brothels uptown in all those fancy townhouses.” I can only imagine.

And that’s the point, isn’t it? I see two threads in the Spitzer narrative. First, the voyeuristic details that were front-and-center when the story broke; details like Spitzer’s code name, Client 9, and the eerily mundane phone conversation between the call girl and her handler (“I mean it’s kind of like…whatever…I’m here for a purpose…”) bring this story out of the stratosphere of power and into normal life. These are exactly the kind of minute particulars a fiction writer sweats blood to dream up.

Perhaps more compelling, however, is the familiar story of power that leads to hubris that leads to a fall. Spitzer was powerful, but also egotistical. He embraced the nickname Eliot Ness, no doubt for the theatrical value, but I got the sense from various profiles that he actually believed it. The unwashed masses, myself included, derive a small, hard packet of moral self-satisfaction from shaking our heads and thinking, Jeese, I’d never do that, all the white wondering I wonder what it’s like to have that kind of life.

In any case, Slate has some excellent advice for those of you licking your greedy, exploitive lips at the prospect of pimping $3,000-an-hour prostitutes.