Hey! So the straw poll is today, and you may think that because of this I would dive this morning right into politics and maybe, if I was feeling lucky, make a prediction as to who would win.
No, for two reasons:
1. The election is already over for me. When asked on Thursday during the debate if they would not approve a deficit reduction plan that had $1 of tax increase for every $10 in cuts, they all raised their hands, which I took to be a unanimous salute to their inflexibility. Whether you agree with tax increases or not, I would argue that such stubbornness in our elected officials is not what this country needs in its leadership. My vote is already reluctantly cast for Obama in 2012, and any Republican would need to show a large shift to the center -- and dramatic increase in common sense -- to change my mind. John Huntsman may have the best chance of doing so, but based on the fact that he seemed to be the most pragmatic of all the candidates on display I don't give him much of a chance of getting to far. People just aren't "excited" and "fired up" about him, as if that is really the main criteria in selecting the person who leads what is still the most powerful nation the world has ever seen.
2. Football, and football, and football season is about to start, and while it may be more important to talk about politics it is much, much less fun.
I have my predictions for the football seasons lined up. So let's go.
Most importantly, the English Premier League starts up today! Sadly, I've got the nearly perennial favorites, Manchester United, to win the league this year. They have the strongest team, and more importantly their management is consistent, with one Sir Alex Ferguson at the helm. Wellington often said that Napoleon's presence on a battlefield was worth 30,000 men; Ferguson is the same way. Down the stretch in the spring, when points are tight and results are needed, he is the extra factor that will carry the day. Plus, I mean, he's a fucking Knight. No other team in the league, if in the world, has a Knight leading them onto the pitch. How can he lose?
As for my own favorite team, Chelsea....well, its too hard to tell. They have a new manager who did well at Porto, but he's no Knight. It will be interesting to see if they can get Torres scoring goals again...I don't think he plays well with Drogba and needs someone more creative working with him up front, probably some kind of attacking midfielder. The midfield and some of the defenders are getting a little old for professional footballers, but I have confidence in the defence and in keeper Petr Chech. I think they will be second or third, battling it out again with Manchester City.
Arsenal I've got finishing fourth, but I'll go out on a limb and say that finally, FINALLY, Arsene Wenger is going to win a trophy after a very long drought. It may be fourth place in the greater London area Football Managers of French Nationality beauty contest (what a nose that man has, what a nose!), but he'll pick up something.
Shortly after that, the Virginia Tech Hokies will take the field against...someone. I haven't got the schedule in front of me. Even so, it is my understanding that the schedule this year favors the Hokies. They finally got it through their heads that playing a difficult game at the beginning of the season doesn't really suit them, and they will get all the national exposure they can handle if they run the table, get to the BCS championship, and win. Win! The Hokies could be favorites in every game they play this year, which I believe is a first.
Unfortunately for the Hokies, I just don't see it happeneing. At some point in the season they are going to go unstable and drop a game, just because they always do and winning every game in a 12 game season, even when you are favored in every one of them, is just very hard. The question is, will the let down of disappointing themselves and all those fans again cause them to slip and lose more than one game? I say not this year. They go 11-1, win the ACC championship (again), get to a BCS bowl game (again), and get their asses handed to them by a superior team that has faced down sterner challenges (again). Sorry, Frank. I'd love for you to prove me wrong. You are a great coach, but you are not a Knight. Yet.
Finally, after that, is the start of the NFL. What do I predict this year? I predict that the teams with most touchdowns will usually win games. I predict there will be bone crunching trench warfare the likes of which has not been seen since the Somme. I predict the opening weeks will be very sloppy because of the lack of practice due to the lockout. I predict that shots of big breasted cheerleaders will challenge our sense of propriety and good conduct amongst our friends, making the more enlightened of us go silent in our own turgid reflections and the less noble exclaim what their intentions would be in a parallel, non-existent universe.
And who will win it all? That, dear reader, is between me and God.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
She Chopin Broccoli! And other Musical Adventures.
It's a rare thing that I listen to "This American Life", for a two reasons.
First, it's on at wierd times during the day here, and so I am never near the radio to listen to it. I used to download on it my I-pod but found I got so interested in the stories that it really became a distraction. Not as much of a distraction as Katie Morgan's "Having Sex with Katie Morgan", but a distraction nevertheless.
Second, David Sedaris sometimes features on "This American Life", and with all due respect to the man I really don't like his work. The reason I don't like his work is that, honestly, with some practice and the proper training, I always feel I could do just as well. Maybe not in the audio piece department, but certainly from a literary standpoint. The fact that he is out there and I am in here just kind of grates on my nerves. "This American Life" remindes me of this, and so I usually don't tune in.
But one time I was actually listening to "This American Life", probably in the car, and I heard an absolutly brillaint piece by Starlee Kine on break-up songs and why they make us feel better (mostly becuase they make us feel worse), and after examining the different break-up songs realizes that the only way to really deal with her own pain after a failed relationship was to write a break-up song herself. To do this, she contacts who she takes to be the undisputed king of the genre: Phil Collins. Really! And if you doubt the claim, Google (should that be capitalized??) the lyrics to "Against all Odds" (you know, "take a look at me now?"). If you have suffered a recent romantic misadventure, well, grab the tissues before you click the link. I dare you not to use them.
As for me, Phill Collins doesn't really cut it, becuase it (and other songs like it) are just a little too cheesy. Now, Kine says we must embrace the cheesiness, give in to the cheesiness, be one with the cheesiness. But it seems that the death of a relationship requires something a little more fitting. I mean, on Christmas Eve, do you want to listen to the guy in the first video, or the second?
Nothing really wrong with the first, I suppose, but as a matter of personal taste, I'll pick Andrea over Andrew while I plan my Christmas party, thank you very much.
So if I was to select a break-up song that seems to fit the occasion, it would have to be Chopin's Nocturne in E flat (Opus 9 No. 2). Muse fans may recognize it as the piano piece playing in the second half of "Eurasia / Collatoral Damage".
And I'll let you in on a little secret: Yes, I seem like a snobbish culturued prig, with open disdain for David Sedaris, Phil Collins, and whoever wrote that first awful, AWFUL Christmas song. But truth be told, I had never heard Chopin's famous Nocturne until I heard it on Muse's album "The Resistance", and I thought it had been written by Muse. I was so entranced by it, I was going to see if I could buy sheet music from the album so that I could learn how to play it myself. After several months of not knowing otherwise, I heard the actual piece on my local classical radio station and slapped myself in the head. Chopin! Of course. I cursed my stupidity, but rejoiced in the fact that I already had the music in a compilation of piano works I own. All this time, and it was already in the piano bench! However, shortly thereafter I was dismayed to find that it is well beyond my technical abilities as a pianist. It would take me...oh...probably 5 years to learn. After all, it took me three years to learn just the second movement of Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata, (just the second movement!), and I still haven't got it down.
So anyway. The Nocture, well, is just fantastic. It just has that perfect bittersweet balance of melancholy and beauty. It encapsulates so many different emotions, being at times incredibly fragile and delicate, at other times healthy, hopeful, robust. It's depressing, yet redeeming. Like the best works of art, the interpretation is open, the piece becoming a blank canvass which becomes awash in pain, longing, or the anticipation of a brighter day.
I just may become a David Sedaris yet.
First, it's on at wierd times during the day here, and so I am never near the radio to listen to it. I used to download on it my I-pod but found I got so interested in the stories that it really became a distraction. Not as much of a distraction as Katie Morgan's "Having Sex with Katie Morgan", but a distraction nevertheless.
Second, David Sedaris sometimes features on "This American Life", and with all due respect to the man I really don't like his work. The reason I don't like his work is that, honestly, with some practice and the proper training, I always feel I could do just as well. Maybe not in the audio piece department, but certainly from a literary standpoint. The fact that he is out there and I am in here just kind of grates on my nerves. "This American Life" remindes me of this, and so I usually don't tune in.
But one time I was actually listening to "This American Life", probably in the car, and I heard an absolutly brillaint piece by Starlee Kine on break-up songs and why they make us feel better (mostly becuase they make us feel worse), and after examining the different break-up songs realizes that the only way to really deal with her own pain after a failed relationship was to write a break-up song herself. To do this, she contacts who she takes to be the undisputed king of the genre: Phil Collins. Really! And if you doubt the claim, Google (should that be capitalized??) the lyrics to "Against all Odds" (you know, "take a look at me now?"). If you have suffered a recent romantic misadventure, well, grab the tissues before you click the link. I dare you not to use them.
As for me, Phill Collins doesn't really cut it, becuase it (and other songs like it) are just a little too cheesy. Now, Kine says we must embrace the cheesiness, give in to the cheesiness, be one with the cheesiness. But it seems that the death of a relationship requires something a little more fitting. I mean, on Christmas Eve, do you want to listen to the guy in the first video, or the second?
Nothing really wrong with the first, I suppose, but as a matter of personal taste, I'll pick Andrea over Andrew while I plan my Christmas party, thank you very much.
So if I was to select a break-up song that seems to fit the occasion, it would have to be Chopin's Nocturne in E flat (Opus 9 No. 2). Muse fans may recognize it as the piano piece playing in the second half of "Eurasia / Collatoral Damage".
And I'll let you in on a little secret: Yes, I seem like a snobbish culturued prig, with open disdain for David Sedaris, Phil Collins, and whoever wrote that first awful, AWFUL Christmas song. But truth be told, I had never heard Chopin's famous Nocturne until I heard it on Muse's album "The Resistance", and I thought it had been written by Muse. I was so entranced by it, I was going to see if I could buy sheet music from the album so that I could learn how to play it myself. After several months of not knowing otherwise, I heard the actual piece on my local classical radio station and slapped myself in the head. Chopin! Of course. I cursed my stupidity, but rejoiced in the fact that I already had the music in a compilation of piano works I own. All this time, and it was already in the piano bench! However, shortly thereafter I was dismayed to find that it is well beyond my technical abilities as a pianist. It would take me...oh...probably 5 years to learn. After all, it took me three years to learn just the second movement of Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata, (just the second movement!), and I still haven't got it down.
So anyway. The Nocture, well, is just fantastic. It just has that perfect bittersweet balance of melancholy and beauty. It encapsulates so many different emotions, being at times incredibly fragile and delicate, at other times healthy, hopeful, robust. It's depressing, yet redeeming. Like the best works of art, the interpretation is open, the piece becoming a blank canvass which becomes awash in pain, longing, or the anticipation of a brighter day.
But sometimes there is no room for hope. If you are more into sitting around and watching your world burn around you, then might I suggest Barber's Adagio for Strings, arrnaged for a Choir?
Try really, really hard to disassociate it from the movie "Platoon". I know it's hard, but try. This music is heavenly, ghostly, disconcerting, and at times when I listen to it, even if I am in a good mood, I just feel the bottom drop out of my heart. And yet even then, there is something about the piece that says even in the midst of crisis there is something that can redeem us.
Need more ideas? Go back into the world of pop. For pure pain, I find nothing answers like Nirvana. I own a large chunk of Nirvana's catalog: all three major albums, the unplugged album, their live album, their recently released box set, even one of the b-side albums. I can't say the same of anyother band that I have ever listened to. I would have bought the DVD of their show at Reading, but the whole thing is pretty much already on You Tube, so why waste the money? Were Kurt Cobain alive today, I think he would approve. Of course, that's not how his story ended.
I won't toe the line for Nirvana and say they are the greatest rock band ever, but I do think that Kurt Cobain was probably one of the great musical artists of our time, painting painful abstractions with his songs, supported admirably with Novoselic's poppy bass lines and Dave Grohls fucking fantastic (sorry, no other words will do) drumming. Nirvana is without a doubt the band I have listened to more than any other since I was 14. That sentence probably says more about me than any other single sentence I have ever written.
Still need more? Why my dear reader than you must try the Ramones. And it can't just be any old Ramones album (their studio albums, I find, suck royally). No. It must be the concert in London on New Year's Eve, 1977. I find it answers for any mood, any situation, provided you are not about to get it on.
Christ, that was a long one. This essay definetly lost its focus, which orginally was supposed to be mostly on Chopin and why I think he is superior to Phil Collins for the brokenhearted. The answer, by the by, is that at least with Chopin (and even with Barber) there is something about the music that won't let you entirely drown in misery. Be it the beauty of the pieces or the way they modulate emotion from despair to hope and back, there is something in them that won't let you go all the way down; they at least provide something, muscically, worth placing your bets on. Far better than wallowing in the cheesiness. The second two? Nirvana is pure angst, but there is something defiant in their music, and "Against All Odds" is to defiance what France is to NASCAR: it ain't. Even more defiant are the Ramones, who are a helluva lot more fun than Phil Collins.
So there is a conclusion for you. We got here, even if it took a long time and a couple of line changes to do so, and we did not end up at the Met but rather piss-ass drunk in a smokey club on Bowery and Bleeker. Maybe that's why I am not on "This American Life". Ah, but at least I have in a roundabout way brought us back to the beginning again, at the death.
So there is a conclusion for you. We got here, even if it took a long time and a couple of line changes to do so, and we did not end up at the Met but rather piss-ass drunk in a smokey club on Bowery and Bleeker. Maybe that's why I am not on "This American Life". Ah, but at least I have in a roundabout way brought us back to the beginning again, at the death.
I just may become a David Sedaris yet.
Monday, August 1, 2011
What Have the Romans Ever Done For Us?
Well, we are halfway out of this default crisis that WE (yes, we with a capital W and E) have placed ourselves in. If the Senate passes the "deal", which in my own inexpert opinion looks more like a capitulation of the President and a nearly unprecedented cock-up of our constitutional system (how can the minority party, with a hold on only 1 house of government, hold the entire nation hostage? Is that the way it is supposed to work? Then again, George Washington himself was kind of sort of hoping we'd have no parties at all....), we will avoid default.
About the only good thing to come out of this is that Gabrielle Giffords has returned, miraculously, to the House and cast her fist vote since surviving a horrific attack.
I will say one thing; we have seen hard headed idealism at its finest. Never mind the fact that the founding fathers were certainly idealistic enough to embark on an Independence movement to secure their rights, but not idealistic enough to end Slavery. Never mind that the constitution itself, which some people think must have been written by God himself, is really a hodge-podge of compromises hammered out between excellent, though fallible, men. Nope, the entire nation has been held hostage to prove a point. And that point seems to be the Government is awful, and taxes are the Devil himself.
Point taken, Republicans. I've learned a valuable lesson here, and I agree with you; taxes are awful. So I'm going to stop paying mine.
However, it only seems fair that if I am not going to be paying taxes, then I should no longer be using government services. After all, I am not a freeloader (Benjamin Franklin on the other hand...sheesh).
So I guess that means I will stop using our nation's highways and roadways. But that's okay, because I like walking. And if someone comes up to me and demands my money or my life, I'll shoot him in the knee caps and hang him myself. Vigilante justice was good enough for Dodge City, and its good enough here too.
I will try to put out the fire with water from the water hose...but that's right, I can't use the town's water services anymore because I refuse to help maintain them. Guess my house will just have to burn to the ground now. Education? I believe in the self-made man. I got an Encyclopedia Britannica in the garage...which has just burned down now. Shit. Guess I'll have to buy a new one. Hope the bookstore takes gold ingots as currency. If not, than maybe silver will do?
Look, I think you get my drift. I don't disagree that budgets need to be cut, and I for one am wholeheartedly in favor of some kind of entitlement reform. Programs set up in the 1930s just don't work very well in 2011. We should change them. Then again, ideas that worked in the 1780s also sometimes don't work very well in 2011, and while history is great I think maybe we need to cling less to aged ideals with sometimes debatable merit and look for solutions that make more sense today.
Remember that some of the greatest things we've ever done as a nation, from the Battle of Yorktown to the Emancipation of slaves to the liberation of France and the Marshall Plan to the moon landings to the end of the Cold War, were done with massive amounts of tax payer dollars. Some people say perhaps we shouldn't have done some of those things. I'd say its all money well spent.
Enough is enough. Next election cycle, I intend to look past the idealist and try to find more of a pragmatist. I hope many of my fellow Americans will do the same.
About the only good thing to come out of this is that Gabrielle Giffords has returned, miraculously, to the House and cast her fist vote since surviving a horrific attack.
I will say one thing; we have seen hard headed idealism at its finest. Never mind the fact that the founding fathers were certainly idealistic enough to embark on an Independence movement to secure their rights, but not idealistic enough to end Slavery. Never mind that the constitution itself, which some people think must have been written by God himself, is really a hodge-podge of compromises hammered out between excellent, though fallible, men. Nope, the entire nation has been held hostage to prove a point. And that point seems to be the Government is awful, and taxes are the Devil himself.
Point taken, Republicans. I've learned a valuable lesson here, and I agree with you; taxes are awful. So I'm going to stop paying mine.
However, it only seems fair that if I am not going to be paying taxes, then I should no longer be using government services. After all, I am not a freeloader (Benjamin Franklin on the other hand...sheesh).
So I guess that means I will stop using our nation's highways and roadways. But that's okay, because I like walking. And if someone comes up to me and demands my money or my life, I'll shoot him in the knee caps and hang him myself. Vigilante justice was good enough for Dodge City, and its good enough here too.
I will try to put out the fire with water from the water hose...but that's right, I can't use the town's water services anymore because I refuse to help maintain them. Guess my house will just have to burn to the ground now. Education? I believe in the self-made man. I got an Encyclopedia Britannica in the garage...which has just burned down now. Shit. Guess I'll have to buy a new one. Hope the bookstore takes gold ingots as currency. If not, than maybe silver will do?
Look, I think you get my drift. I don't disagree that budgets need to be cut, and I for one am wholeheartedly in favor of some kind of entitlement reform. Programs set up in the 1930s just don't work very well in 2011. We should change them. Then again, ideas that worked in the 1780s also sometimes don't work very well in 2011, and while history is great I think maybe we need to cling less to aged ideals with sometimes debatable merit and look for solutions that make more sense today.
Remember that some of the greatest things we've ever done as a nation, from the Battle of Yorktown to the Emancipation of slaves to the liberation of France and the Marshall Plan to the moon landings to the end of the Cold War, were done with massive amounts of tax payer dollars. Some people say perhaps we shouldn't have done some of those things. I'd say its all money well spent.
Enough is enough. Next election cycle, I intend to look past the idealist and try to find more of a pragmatist. I hope many of my fellow Americans will do the same.
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