Category: Personal

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[critical confusion]

Okay, so what the hell is wrong with Sasha Frere-Jones?

I recognize that SFJ, the pop music critic for the New Yorker, is an anti-rockist, and not much of a rocker. His opinions on UK hip-hop have been revelatory, at least to me, alerting me to the thrilling music of M.I.A., Lady Sovereign and Lilly Allen. His efforts to expose the US to the London grime scene are to be applauded, even if I don’t quite share his passion for Dizzee Rascal.

But when it comes to rock, it’s like the man’s retarded. Back in June, this is what he had to say about Radiohead:

I seem to know about a hundred [Radiohead] fans, and they constantly urge me to give the band a chance. Until recently, I hadn’t seen much point in doing so.

Okay. Fine. Not everyone has to like Radiohead. I would have been willing to let it pass — especially considering that the review was ultimately positive — except that this week, SFJ has chosen to go all jelly-kneed over Deftones, of all bands.

SFJ rightly puts Deftones in the nu metal camp, which also includes such wanky bands as Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit and Korn. (Apparently hip-hop spelling techniques are a hazard of the genre.) I dabbled in nu metal back when I was a metalhead, and I found it to be the musical equivalent of staying in your room to get high and jerk off: it sort of feels good even though it’s also sort of depressing, and even though it occasionally seems meaningful at the time, it leaves you with a hollow feeling of life wasted.

The thing is, of all the nu metal bands, Deftones sound the most like Radiohead (who could conceivably have been considered nu metal back when they were still a guitar band). First, check out the video for Minerva, by Deftones, from their fourth album, which SFJ calls “nearly perfect.” Wanky, right? But Chino Moreno’s voice somewhat resemble’s Thom Yorke’s, and the wall of heavy sound is a tool Radiohead also has in its arsenal.

Then check out the video for Radiohead’s Paranoid Android. (The point here is really the music, so just listen, don’t necessarily watch.) The song moves through moods and phases and episodes with precision, depth and clarity. Its odd noises are better, and so are its soaring melodies, its quiet bits, and just about everything else.

So what the hell is wrong with SFJ? I mean, freaking nu metal? It’s one thing to be an iconoclast, and certainly rock critics as a group are always in need of deflation. But Deftones is simply not that clever or deep or sonically interesting. The only thing I can think of that makes them worth the New Yorker’s page-space is the fact that they are not worthy, so that reviewing them anyway seems a little daring.

It isn’t. They’re just a mediocre band that sounds an awful lot like a number of other mediocre bands. SFJ has gotten away with praising a pet band of his in the New Yorker, but at the cost of revealing once and for all that he hasn’t the foggiest notion of what makes for good rock.

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[more great news]

Rummy is out!

Choice quote from Bush: “Actually, I thought we were gonna do fine yesterday. Shows what I know.” Indeed. “I thought we were gonna do fine” has been the approach of this administration — and of Donald Rumsfeld — throughout the protracted disaster that they wrought in Iraq.

Other great news: John Tester has won for Senate in Montana! That means that the Senate will be, at worst, split 50-50, with Cheney as the deciding vote. And so far, Webb is still the leader in Virginia.

Meanwhile, as Rummy is shown the door, let us remember all that was best about him: his poetry and his fighting techniques. Kung fu fighting, that is. His war-fighting techniques are horrible.

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[peace in nepal]

Fantastic news! After ten years and 13,000 deaths, Nepal’s civil war is over.

The leader of Nepal’s Maoist rebellion, Prachanda, today renounced the path of violence and agreed to dissolve his parallel government that operates across much of Nepal once a new constituent assembly and constitution are adopted.

In return, the rebels will become the second-largest party in the new assembly, which will decide the fate of the king by simple majority vote at its first meeting.

I sincerely hope that this is really, truly a new dawn for this lovely, welcoming, beautiful country.

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[victory]

As my cousin Louise put it, “It’s not an election, it is an intervention.”

It seems to have worked.

In October of 2001, just weeks after 9/11, Jenny and I left the country for 18 months. While we were away, the Patriot Act was passed, a plane crashed in Queens, a sniper terrorized the Mid-Atlantic states, mysterious parcels of anthrax appeared in the offices of the mainstream media and elsewhere, shoes in airports were rendered ominous, the specter of Iraqi WMDs was raised, the UN was pushed aside and a war was begun. Just days after our return home, the president stood under a “Mission Accomplished” sign.

The country we came home to in 2003 was a very uptight place — uptight in a 1950s way, though the threat we faced was much smaller than that posed by the Soviets, and the trauma we’d come through was also much smaller. In 2004, the ongoing war was invoked to keep Bush in power.

Now, though, the war has dragged on for another two years, and it has become clear that no one in charge has any notion of how to end it. Katrina, I think, was a tipping point: people saw that our government, given days of advance warning, couldn’t deliver food, clean water, electricity or medical care to thousands upon thousands of its own citizens in an emergency on its own soil, which raised doubts about how well they could deliver those things to millions of Iraqis in the midst of an ongoing war. Since then, things in Iraq have only gotten worse.

Americans like to think of ourselves as good, and we like to have fun. The war is no good and no fun. I hope that America lightens up again in the coming years — that we give up the illusion of perpetual war and recognize the basic reality that we are in fact living in peace, albeit a peace that requires constant vigilance (and when has that not been the case?). The war in Iraq is a disaster that should be ended, while the War on Terror is an amalgam of military, law enforcement and diplomatic efforts that should be much better coordinated and shifted away from their emphasis on brutality.

I want peace. I want it and I think our country should strive for it. I’m hoping that at long last, this point of view will no longer be labeled traitorous.

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[in other news]

I know, I know. Elections. Elections, elections, elections. But buried under all the hoopla, we’re missing the real news: Britney and Kevin are getting divorced.

I know. I’m in shock too. But somehow I’ll pull through. Let’s just hope our liberal media aren’t so obsessed with a major election that they let this important story fall through the cracks.

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[for what it’s worth]

Here’s how I intend to vote tomorrow.

Governor: Eliot Spitzer (D)
Spitzer was a strong, creative attorney general for the State of New York, holding corporations accountable for their malfeasance. He was fortunate to inherit a well-run office from his predecessor, Rudolph Giuliani — good fortune that will not be repeated upon his arrival in the Governor’s Mansion in Albany. Nevertheless, his demonstrated competence and the grim state of New York politics combine to make Spitzer the obvious choice.

Lieutenant-Governor: David Paterson (D)
Okay, I’ll admit it: I’m a yellow-dog Dem this year. But why vote for a lieutenant-governor who will hamstring your choice of governor?

Comptroller: Alan Hevesi (D)
In this season of accountability, it pains me to say that I’ll be voting for a candidate I know to be corrupt (Hevesi had the state pay to chauffeur his wife around for years). Here’s my admittedly twisted logic: Hevesi is likely to be forced to resign after the election, at which time he’ll be replaced by an appointed Democrat, whereas electing his opponent, Chris Callaghan, means having a Republican in office for the next four years. And even if Hevesi does stay put, see my endorsement for lieutenant-governor.

Attorney General: Andrew Cuomo (D)
Another no-brainer. Cuomo leaves much to be desired, but the alternative is a Republican attorney general, and I really, really, really don’t want a Republican setting the priorities for law enforcement in New York.

Senator: Hillary Clinton (D)
I genuinely like Hillary Clinton as a Senator. She’s worked hard to serve her constituents and to build bridges to Republican leaders Upstate. I see no reason not to send her back to the Senate, where I hope she will serve with similar focus and competence for another six years.

Congress (11th District): Yvette Clarke (D)
I voted for Yassky in the primary, but Clarke is the Democratic candidate, we need a Democratic Congress in this country, and besides, she’s going to win by a ridiculous margin anyway. Who else would I vote for? The Freedom Party candidate?

State Senate (25th District): Ken Diamondstone (Working Families)
Diamondstone lost his primary bid against veteran State Senator Martin Connor, but as with Joe Lieberman in Connecticut, Diamondstone has a second chance. Diamondstone opposes the Atlantic Yards project, while Connor does not. More importantly, Connor is part of the stasis in Albany that has made our state governance so abysmal, while Diamondstone would be a fresh voice. From what I can tell, Diamondstone has already given up, but his name is still on the ballot, so I’m going to pull the trigger for him, just like I did in September.

State Assembly (52nd District): Joan L. Millman (D)
Woof! Woof! Heeeere, yellow dog! Have a tasty vote! Enjoy a delicious assembly seat! Good yellow doggie!

State Supreme Court Justices: Abstain
For 80 years, New York has had a corrupt system in which parties nominate judicial candidates at show-conventions, giving voters essentially no choice. This year, for example, we have two candidates to choose from and two votes to hand out. What this has to do with democracy is anyone’s guess, but the party nomination system was recently ruled unconstitutional, so let’s hope we have some competitive judicial elections in the future.

Civil Court Judge (1st District): Abstain
In this case, it’s one candidate for one slot. Ick. See above.

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[joelicious]

Josh and Jenny at Joe's ShanghaiNew York City life is not all politics and broken windows. With Jenny working these days down near Wall Street, I thought it would be nice to end our week by meeting somewhere in between for dinner. My colleague Young decided to join us and suggested an excellent Chinatown restaurant we’d never tried, Joe’s Shanghai.

Tucked away on narrow Pell Street, Joe’s is pretty much the quintessential New York Chinatown dining experience. There’s only the barest stab at decor, you have to wait for a table that you’ll share with other parties, and the service is rapid and minimally communicative. The only thing that could possibly distinguish Joe’s from a dozen similar joints is the food, and Joe’s pulls it off.

The specialty, of course, is soup dumplings (pictured above), which are filled with ground meat swimming in their own little pools of rich, vinegary broth. But their other dishes were also exquisite. We tried the shrimp fried rice cake, which consisted of chewy medallions of sticky pounded rice that was somewhere between a noodle and a dumpling, and bean curd home style, which was exquisitely crispy on the outside and creamy on the inside. Joe’s Shanghai is definitely worthy of return visits!

On our way back to the subway, we stopped for our usual Chinatown desert of egg tarts, this time opting for the Portuguese style, which involves caramelized sugar on top.

I love Chinatown.

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[how i spent my saturday morning]


We park our car on Lena’s Place. This is not the actual name of the street. The actual name is Huntington Street, and we park in the alleyway that dead-ends at the Gowanus Canal, with cement factories on either side and the elevated F-line subway looming overhead, wrapped in its protective black matting to prevent chunks of decaying concrete from falling on peoples heads (and cars).

The block where we park is not a pleasant block. There are piles of broken glass, random garbage, heaps of charred refuse. Lots of used condoms. With no residents, no one seems overly concerned that the city does not in fact clean this particular block. Ever. Which is why we park there: anywhere else and we’d have to move the car for weekly alternate-side street cleaning. But not on Lena’s Place. Also, the street is wide enough that we are less likely to get sideswiped and lose a mirror than on other blocks.

The reason we call this block Lena’s Place is because that’s a better name than Crack Alley, which is what we were calling it before. I have never actually seen anyone do crack on Lena’s Place, but it seems like the sort of thing one would do there, or the sort of place where one would do that sort of thing.

In any case, Lena’s Place was the name we gave to a restaurant in our little neighborhood of Seoksu Sam-dong back in Korea. We never worked out the restaurant’s proper name, but for some time we’d been calling it the Staring Place, in reference to an uncomfortable meal we’d eaten there during which an elderly Korean woman sat across from us and watched the entire time, occasionally giving us complex verbal instructions that we obviously couldn’t understand. The restaurant was, however, not half bad, plus they had worked out how to deliver to our apartment without giving us trouble. So we decided we needed a better name for the joint than The Staring Place. It turned out that the owners were the parents of one of my students, a young girl who used Lena as her English name (so we didn’t even have her name right). In honor of this middling student whom I occasionally caught cheating, we began referring to the restaurant as Lena’s Place rather than The Staring Place.

Unfortunately, renaming can take you only so far. When I went out to the car today to run some errands, I found that the window on the passenger-side door had been smashed in, filling the interior of our car with tiny bits of glass. The vandals had stolen almost nothing — our change tray was tossed on the floor and the change was gone, but a dollar bill was left sitting on the seat, as was a pile of admittedly not very marketable CDs — Pimsleur Russian, a Boss Hog album, some Central Asian music. But the window was gone, glass was everywhere, and worse yet, there were downy feathers all over the interior of the car. Either some pigeons flew in and made sweet love, or else the vandal tore his down jacket on the broken glass. I hope it was the latter, both because that’s far less disgusting and because the fucker deserved it.

Fortunately our insurance will cover it. I sort of assumed that if we parked on the street, eventually we would lose a window, so I got the deductible waiver for glass repair. I took it to a place on Fourth Ave. where a pleasant, balding fellow named Mohamed took care of everything in a couple of hours.

So with all the windows back in place, I took the car back home and parked it — where else? — right back on Lena’s Place.

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[musical friends meme]

So I picked this up from my cousin Louise over at her blog: What music do I link with my various friends and acquaintances? Metallica reminds Louise of me because she knew me back in my middle school days, when I was convinced that Metallica was the greatest band in the world. (I was a serious true believer.)

So I’ll start with Louise, and work through other friends to see what I come up with.

Louise: Schoolhouse Rock. I’m just a little too young to have caught Schoolhouse Rock as a kid, so I was introduced to it by Louise.

Jenny: This is a tough one — we’ve spent so long together now that a lot of music reminds me of her — but after her semester in Salamanca during college, she came home with a CD that she played, slightly apologetically, of a Latin pop star she’d really come to like: Shakira.

Daniel: Daniel and I were music buddies for a long time, and he was instrumental in shaping my current tastes, so as with Jenny, it’s kind of meaningless to pin it down to one particular artist. But of all the artists I didn’t like until Daniel taught me to hear them, probably my favorite today is Talking Heads.

T: We also shared a lot of music during our long relationship, but two artists in particular stand out: Yukari Fresh, a treasure she found in Japan (and whose music is woefully underappreciated in America), and Solas, the Celtic band good enough to get me to go with Thekla to the town of Doolin in County Clare, Ireland, and while away the evening in a pub, sipping Bulmer’s cider and listening to very, very good Irish musicians. (It was a brave sacrifice.) I also think of Thekla in association with Erin McKeown, whom we first saw at the Postcrypt coffee house on the Columbia campus (where I met Thekla) when Erin was just a 19-year-old bundle of hippie wool tumbling in from Brown University to blow our minds at an open stage night, and Noe Venable, who went to high school with T.

Lori: This is the Eskimo one, who I dated back in college, and she’s the one who convinced me that I should really give Everclear a try (the band, not the beverage). Their album Sparkle and Fade is the only good thing they ever did, but it’s a lyrically rich, underrated gem from the mid-nineties era of post-punk, post-grunge hard rock that would’ve been working-class except nobody had a job. (Did we really elect a second Bush?)

Berit: The lyrics of Everclear’s “Santa Monica” are a good summary of how I felt about my relationship with Berit as it collapsed over the summer when I met Lori. But the musician who brings Berit most strongly to mind is, of course, PJ Harvey, whose power to make Berit squirm with erotic delight was something I could never match.

Lorie: This is the non-Eskimo Lorie, the one I’m still friends with (and really need to call). Back in high school, when we first dated, I spent a lot of time lying in her room, inhaling second-hand cigarette smoke and staring up at her magazine photos of Mike Patton’s torso (which was very nice in those days). Lorie and Ashley were rabid fans of Mr. Bungle, Patton’s first band (Ash even had the side of her head shaved, just like Mike), and also fans of Faith No More, whose “Epic” video is a classic document of the late-eighties thrash-funk moment, when dressing like Arsenio Hall while rapping over heavy metal briefly seemed like a great idea. (Trivia: Though FNM T-shirts insisted that “THE FISH LIVES!”, the fish in fact died. And the answer to the question “What is it?” was widely agreed to be “Losing your virginity.”)

Ashley: Ashley was also a music buddy for many years, so there’s a ton of music I associate with her, especially all those obscure Bay Area bands we used to go see: Bluchunks, Fungo Mungo, the Limbomaniacs, the Deli Creeps, MCM and the Monster, Dizzybam. But it was later, after I’d come to New York for college and Ashley had moved to Norwalk, Connecticut, that we would spend weekends in her odd little attic apartment above a flower shop on a windswept highway intersection, drowning our loneliness with Rolling Rocks, excessive flirtation and hours of listening to Soundgarden (What is it with Ashley and fish-abuse videos?) and Morphine.

Lauren: Bhangra, yo!

My father: Stan Getz. Lester Young. Oscar Peterson. Miles Davis. Slim Gaillard. Lord Buckley. Crosby Stills & Nash. Sly and the Family Stone, who he and my mom used to see live at the Electric Circus.

My mother: All of that, plus Ray Charles, who played at the first rock concert she ever went to.

My sister: Little Mermaid. Sorry, Shana. I know you’re older now — heck, I’m going to your college graduation this spring — but you did watch your Little Mermaid video about 10,000 times.

Did I miss anything obvious? I don’t think so — at least not involving anyone I still know. Enjoy the music.