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2007:03:30:08:00. Friday. NO!: THE LONG WINTERS (#244, MAR 22 2007).
This was the first song to really capture my attention on Putting the Days to Bed, and it's the only one of my big, rousing Long Winters favorites that I managed to record. According to the anecdote from yesterday's clip, at least one person thinks it's anti-feminist, but I'm not sure I see that. It's certainly harsher than most of their older material, but I think that's mostly true for the record as a whole.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:03:29:08:00. Thursday. NO!: THE LONG WINTERS (#243, MAR 22 2007).
To be honest, I'd totally forgotten this song even existed. I haven't listened to 2005's Ultimatum EP -- what the band calls a "studio experiment" -- in a while, but this song does a terrific job as the lead track of setting an atmosphere that wouldn't quite fit on any of their full-length albums. It's ethereal and icy in some ways, but also warm and welcoming in the tender calls of Roderick's vocals. This performance shot the song right back into my set of favorite Long Winters songs, and into heavy rotation this week on my iPod. (And bonus: the amusing story of one person's reaction to "Rich Wife"!)
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:03:28:08:00. Wednesday. NO!: THE LONG WINTERS (#242, MAR 22 2007).
One of the really awesome things about this show is that it reminded me just how many great songs they have in 3+ albums (2+ really, since their first was kind of tonally different). This is a song I sometimes skip when listening to When I Pretend to Fall because it follows three sublime opening tracks, and its just-pretty-goodness isn't always enough for me. Live, I was reminded what a terrific piece of work it is. Indeed, I said to Emily afterwards that they had enough great material that they didn't play ("Shapes" and "New Girl, come on!) to do an entire extra set that would stand up to the quality of the first. If only Zach Galifianakis hadn't been in town the next night, we might've followed them to Milwaukee to find out.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:03:27:08:00. Tuesday. NO!: THE LONG WINTERS (#241, MAR 22 2007).
After starting with a couple slower ones, the band moved into their faster, more rockish material with this song. From our position in the balcony we could see the crowd -- probably half a sell-out, not bad for a Thursday night -- beginning to get into it. This was the first of several requests solicited by Roderick, and you could tell that he was really connecting with the crowd right from the start.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:03:26:08:00. Monday. NO!: THE LONG WINTERS (#240, MAR 22 2007).
Normally I post my videos in the order they came in the show, but I'm bumping the opening bands this time because I can't wait to get these Long Winters clips out there. This set-opener is actually the last track on their most recent album and gives a nice taste of what they had coming. Frontman John Roderick's playful tone (and surprisingly Will Ferrell-like appearance) lit the show up from the very start, giving us probably the best concert of the year thus far.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:03:23:13:05. Friday. WHAT YOUR HEART CAN VOUCH IS TRUE. I'll have video of last night's Long Winters show going up next week, but I just want to note in the immediate aftermath of it that it was the most awesome show we've seen in ages, and I imagine it'll wind up being the highlight of the year. Could I have an undisputed favorite band for the first time since Everclear went to shit? Maybe. In other news, I'm shocked to find that the solo debut from Dolores O'Riordan of the Cranberries seems to be really good. The last two Cranberries albums were awful, but give her a few decent songs and her amazing voice does the rest of the work.
2007:03:23:08:00. NO!: OK GO (#239, MAR 13 2007).
OK Go did their "A Million Ways" dance in their encore, but first they played their second album's first single. Everybody kind of went crazy because it was the last song of a long night, and it didn't hurt that they blew off the confetti cannons a couple more times to make for probably a ton or so of total confetti blown out throughout the show.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:03:22:08:00. Thursday. NO!: OK GO (#238, MAR 13 2007).
The lads of OK Go are showmen first and foremost, and they always seem to have a great cover or two somewhere in their set. At Summerfest a few years back they played a note-perfect cover of Toto's "Hold the Line"; this time it was an amazing, rock-out on ELO's "Don't Bring Me Down," which found singer Damian Kulash traipsing out into the audience for the song's peak. This was the kind of thing they're really great at -- a big moment to drive through into the last third of the show.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:03:21:15:31. Wednesday. WHY GORE WILL RUN. Much has been made of Al Gore's post-2000 rededication, specifically, to the cause of sane environmental policy and global warming awareness. In fact, most pieces that conclude that he won't run for the presidency again do so on the basis of his unrelenting drive in this area. He's found the passion that works for him, and he believes his current path is the best one to follow to achieve his goals. The artistic, informational, commercial and politic success of An Inconvenient Truth (both the film and the book of the same name) has put him in the most advantageous position of his long pursuit on change when it comes to human activity and governmental policy that affects the climate. He made a splashy appearance before the House Energy and Commerce Committee today to talk about potential solutions to the crisis. He's even putting on a Live Aid-style event this summer to raise money for and the profile of the global warming issue. Meanwhile, he's got another book coming out in May, which will presuming involve numerous promotional appearances, signings, talks, etc. The book could've been a Truth follow-up of some kind, but it's not, at least not in any linear sense. The book is called The Assault on Reason and it appears to be nothing like the autohagiographic campaign books that most candidates and would-be candidates write today. Here's the description listed at Amazon:
At the time George W. Bush ordered American forces to invade Iraq, 70 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was linked to 9/11. Voters in Ohio, when asked by pollsters to list what stuck in their minds about the campaign, most frequently named two Bush television ads that played to fears of terrorism.
We live in an age when the thirty-second television spot is the most powerful force shaping the electorate's thinking, and America is in the hands of an administration less interested than any previous administration in sharing the truth with the citizenry. Related to this and of even greater concern is this administration's disinterest in the process by which the truth is ascertained, the tenets of fact-based reasoning-first among them an embrace of open inquiry in which unexpected and even inconvenient facts can lead to unexpected conclusions. How did we get here? How much damage has been done to the functioning of our democracy and its role as steward of our security? Never has there been a worse time for us to lose the capacity to face the reality of our long-term challenges, from national security to the economy, from issues of health and social welfare to the environment. As The Assault on Reason shows us, we have precious little time to waste. Gore's larger goal in this book is to explain how the public sphere itself has evolved into a place hospitable to reason's enemies, to make us more aware of the forces at work on our own minds, and to lead us to an understanding of what we can do, individually and collectively, to restore the rule of reason and safeguard our future. Drawing on a life's work in politics as well as on the work of experts across a broad range of disciplines, Al Gore has written a farsighted and powerful manifesto for clear thinking. [emphasis added] I can't help but contrast this with Barack Obama's rather weak-kneed decrying of "the smallness of our politics." Here's a man who, in the middle of a very specific and detailed campaign to get the public to understand a sometimes confusing scientific issue, steps back and looks at the context the debate is taking place in. What he finds -- not at all surprisingly -- is that our culture is epistemologically poisoned. That finding is so much bigger than any one issue, including biggies such as global warming and Iraq, that I cannot help but see his timing in presenting it as the opening volley of a campaign not just for the presidency, but for a true cultural revolution. More to the point, this is a kind of leadership that we have not had in the United States since... maybe FDR? Maybe Lincoln? I don't mean to sound hyperbolic here, but I have to believe this is something that can change our system in ways that tweaking emissions standards or US Attorney confirmation rules or the earned-income tax credit can't. For instance, middle-east "expert" and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman said again today that US forces have about six months to get things "working" in Iraq, or else. Friedman, you may recall, was a major booster of the war beforehand, and has declared "the next six months" to be crucial so many times since 2003 that the unit of measurement is now named for him. He is a joke (see Matt Taibbi's takedown for more), he has been wrong about any and everything to do with the war since before it began. He remains, inexplicably, a respected "expert" nonetheless, and has suffered no apparently consequences for his devastating wrongness. And he is not alone. Frankly, he is the product of a culture that does not value being right -- either before or after the fact -- but does value a) certitude, b) boldness, c) counterintuitiveness, and d) narcissism. The kind of leadership we need now is the kind that reconfigures our society so that the Tom Friedmans of the world come to account.
2007:03:21:08:00. NO!: OK GO (#237, MAR 13 2007).
One of the many pieces of unnecessary branded swag that Jack Daniel's handed out before the show was a light-up pen. This pen is designed such that when you press the button at the end -- the kind of button many pens have -- it lights up, but the pen tip doesn't emerge. You have to swivel the end to get the pen out, which is a totally brilliant design. Anyway, when I saw it I decided that it would be awesome to ironically hold up during a ballad, like maybe this song. My plans were thwarted, however, when the band asked that everybody hold up their phones, cameras and whatever during the second verse, which they obligingly did. So I filmed, while Emily held the pen up non-ironically amidst a sea of technology. And now we let the cats play with the pen.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:03:20:08:00. Tuesday. NO!: OK GO (#236, MAR 13 2007).
One of the treats of this show was an apparently rare performance of "A Million Ways," which the band got mildly famous for dancing to on YouTube. Never wanting to disappoint, they still ended their encore with the dance routine version. The bad part? I really wanted to hear the "fucking train song" that they mentioned not being able to play anymore. At least release a demo of it or something -- come on!
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:03:19:08:00. Monday. NO!: OK GO (#235, MAR 13 2007).
The thing about these corporate-sponsored free shows is that winning an "invitation" isn't enough to get in. To ensure that they get a packed house, they notify way more "winners" than they can fit in the venue, and the first 250 or so get in. Knowing this, we arrived and got in line about 40 minutes before the doors officially opened. My hope was to get a prime spot up at the front of the balcony, because I knew there'd be a lot of waiting around before the main event started and also because the sound on my Apples in Stereo clips was a little distorted from being so close to the stage. Well, come to find out just after we got in line that the balcony was reserved for the VIPs brought in by the sponsors. We wound up instead standing in just about the same spot as we stood for Apples, which was a decent enough spot, but again a little distort-y. Still, it's nothing that can't be overlooked in this clip from early in the set, which set the tone for the bombast and fun to come.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:03:14:13:57. Wednesday. MARKETED.
What really intrigues me is this: How can this possibly be a profitable marketing strategy for Jack Daniel's? Allow me to describe the extravagance of the evening. The High Noon holds 400 people -- including staff and roughly 100 VIPs, Jack Daniel's and Isthmus, the local sponsor, had 250 tickets to give away by random drawing. We won two sets of two, but that's probably not a good indicator of how many people's contact info they got for future spamming. We also opted out of future spam, as I imagine most entrants would have. In exchange for gathering these e-mail addresses, Jack Daniel's paid (in whole or in part) for: rental of the High Noon with full staff and with only Jack drinks available at the bar (and only Jack bottles on display), two free drink tickets for everybody in the building, OK Go to play a show with no gate and only a tiny merch area, local act Cats Not Dogs to open, a Peavey guitar as a door prize, an assload of t-shirts with all the dates on the Jack Daniel's tour on the back (about 30, with ours listed as "Madison, IN"), a smaller pile of t-shirts with "Madison" and "March 13" specifically on them, a huge pile of hors d'oeurves, tons of Jack-branded 1" buttons (some with "Madison" on), tons of Jack-branded guitar picks, many sets of Jack-branded drumsticks, Jack-branded regular pens, Jack-branded light-up pens, a searchlight and air-compressor-powered inflatable Jack bottle outside, and the loathsome "Jack Daniel's girls." Probably also some other giveaway trinkets that I'm forgetting. Also, custom Polaroid film, such as that seen above, which I imagine is the only way Polaroid can sell film anymore. The Jack Daniel's marketing team I'm sure has a good explanation for all of this: They're trying to cement brand loyalty among young consumers and become the liquor of choice among, if not hipsters, than at least yupsters. They also have a couple new malt beverages to push (which, FYI, are horrible), so putting some freebies in the hands of the cool kids might be a good idea, assuming they have confidence in their product. Looking around the room, though, you'd be hard pressed to find the kind of people they wanted. If there's a market out there looking to get hooked on the PBR of whiskeys, it's not going to show up at an OK Go show at the High Noon Saloon. More likely, the real reason this event happened (and why it will happen again, presumably) is that the marketing industry is a house of cards, which everyone's actions dependent on nothing so much as their perceptions of their competitor's actions. They may not actually gain anything in terms of sales or market share following this spending spree, but sweet Christ, think of what might've happened if they hadn't done this! Maker's Mark would be eating them alive!
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:03:11:18:34. Sunday. CYNISCHISM. I've just watching a piece on 60 Minutes about the Iraqi refugee crisis, and specifically about the Iraqis who worked with the U.S. Army during the invasion and occupation, but who are now being left to fend for themselves when it comes to, you know, getting killed by their countrymen. What strikes me as telling about this report and others like it is that so much of the mainstream reporting about the failures of the Bush administration is told from the perspective of a war supporter who feels duped upon realizing that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc. never really cared about doing a "good job." And yet, these stories belie a complete lack of cynicism on the part of the reporter. When you talk to a Ford administration official about the migration of over 130,000 Vietnamese, then to the corresponding Bush official about the 7,000 or so Iraqis we're willing to bring in -- along with every other screw-up, from body armor to Al Qaqaa -- it's hard to imagine why you don't come to the obvious conclusion. This is not a matter of good intentions paving the road to Hell, or of government failing, or of a lack of political will. Everything that is happened or not happened in Iraq in the last four years has been because of the unprecedented venality of a small handful of officer-holders. The worst President in American history. The Vice-President with the least respect for the Constitution and the American legal system ever. The Defense Secretary who is, frankly, one of the stupidest people on the face of the Earth. This lack of cynicism marks what I see as the ebb in an ongoing cycle of political dominance, and I think it's not coincidental that it's occurring at the same time as the Christian right is experiencing loud disagreements between those who want to go along with the impure Republican Party to get along in American politics, and those who want to extend beyond abortion, gay marriage and stem cells to encompass within their movement issues like social justice and global warming. Technocrats and cynics create ideologues to use as fuel, but the fuel tank explodes when it's too full. The problem for the ideologues that blow up the machine that created them is that cynics prosper in American politics, and there's always another cynical faction waiting to step up to the top spot. The Gingrich/Rove axis kept themselves just out of the red for about eight years, but they've lost many of the true-believer hawks and they're starting to lose the honest Christians. They're so mired in scandal that they can't even get a proper pushback operation started -- I'd wager the calls for Alberto Gonzales to resign are going to make it much more difficult to pardon Scooter Libby in the short term. Meanwhile, Halliburton is moving their headquarters from Texas to Dubai. Will any of our disillusioned press corps wonder if this has anything to do with Dick Cheney wanting somewhere to go in 2009 that doesn't have an extradition agreement with the United States? My guess is no.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:03:10:09:24. Saturday. DROUGHT. In the past week and a half I've had seven shows on my calendar and as of tonight I'll have skipped all seven (March is too busy!), so no new videos until after next week's OK Go show. Beyond that I won't be doing much of any updates until early April, when I plan to make the switch from Movable Type to Wordpress, and unveil a new site design.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:03:04:15:00. Sunday. DROWNING AND WAVING. A follow-up to yesterday's post, from the AP:
In one measure of news interest, campaign stories have consumed 95 minutes of attention this year through Feb. 27 on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts. That's more time than in the comparable periods for the previous four presidential election cycles combined, according to the Tyndall Report.
Presidential politics was so far off the radar in January and February 1991 that the three newscasts together spent less than a minute on the upcoming campaign. The study doesn't even take into account time chewed up by the cable TV networks, with their gaping 24-hour news holes. CNN was around in 1991, but Fox News Channel and MSNBC didn't exist. Neither did "The Daily Show" with "It used to be that campaigning was the interval between governing," said Bob Schieffer, host of CBS' "Face the Nation." "Now governing is the interval between campaigning." This doesn't even get into the issue of nearly-two-year-long House campaigns, which are already starting to ramp up.
2007:03:03:15:41. Saturday. SMART MONEY. Is there anyone in the 2008 presidential contest who doesn't have one or more major negatives in his or her profile? We presently have a field comprised of nearly 20 candidates, six of whom are considered, for whatever reason, "top tier" -- those six would be joined by Newt Gingrich and Al Gore if either of them were to enter the race. All six of these candidates seem to be objectively weak, in both the primary and general elections. Alphabetically: Hillary Clinton - The weaknesses fretted about by the pundits -- she comes with "baggage" (i.e., she is married to an extremely popular former president), she's a woman -- are non-starters. But the fact is, she remains the most hawkish Democrat in the Senate. She's basically topped out on name recognition, but most rank-and-file Democrats don't know her policy positions and probably won't like them. She's not a natural campaigner. She will have the support of the remaining centrist power centers in the Democratic coalition, but the new progressive base will do whatever it takes to keep her from being nominated. John Edwards - Lost twice in 2004. Only came around on Iraq after the second loss. Says his support of the Iraq war was a mistake, but appears to have learned nothing from it when it comes to Iran. Is developing a reputation as a fall-back candidate for after Hillary and Barack destroy each other. Seems to have been running since early 2005 because he has nothing else to do. Rudy Giuliani - Has been married three times, which is the second least popular of the demographic problems that five of these six will have to face. Lived with gay friends between marriages. Holds generally more liberal views than many prominent Democrats -- bad for the primary -- but is willing to jettison those beliefs for political expediency -- bad for the general. Is a "national security expert" with no expertise on national security issues. Was stupid enough to put NYC's emergency response center in the World Trade Center after it had already been attacked once. John McCain - Will be 72 next year, which is the first least popular. Is transparently pandering on every possible issue, including at times flip-flopping within a single interview. Authored the plan for a surge of 20K troops, then disavowed the plan as "not enough" when Bush threw in an extra 1500. Has a short fuse and likes to use the word "gook." Barack Obama - Is viewed as a political savior by many of his supporters, but the rest of us can't get a straight answer about what he would do as president that makes him so great. Seems to have inherited Ralph Nader's tin ear for progressives' concerns on social issues. Can't stop talking about unilaterally disarming the Democratic Party in order to fix "the smallness of our politics." Models himself after Joe Lieberman. Mitt Romney - If it's possible, a more egregious flip-flopper than McCain. Has spent much of his time since leaving the governorship of Massachusetts explicitly bashing that state. Is a Mormon. Has the endorsement of Ann Coulter, who provided that endorsement just after calling John Edwards a "faggot." No one knows why he's considered top tier. So the question is, where are the good candidates? Why can no Democrat stand up and condemn the war, or acknowledge that our foreign policy is beyond fucked and leaving options "on the table" can now only be taken a threat of invasion? Why are there no Republicans that actually believe -- and have a record of voting accordingly -- in core conservative positions? Well, there are such candidates, of course, and not just in Gore/Gingrich ponyland. Bill Richardson seems to have settled into a comfortable fourth place among the Democrats, in what many observers think is a bid for the vice-presidency (though any Democrat that does not demand Russ Feingold join the ticket is wasting a golden opportunity). He's repeatedly made the point that arguing about details while George Bush is still in office is irrelevant -- Bush has destroyed our diplomatic credibility, and anyone who goes along with the kabuki on Iran is just making things worse. On the other side, actual conservatives like Mike Huckabee and Sam Brownback are struggling to be taken seriously, presumably because they lack the Reagan-esque hair sported by Mitt Romney. These are candidates who lack name recognition right now, but who have the ideological credentials to win voters much more easily once their names are out there. And yet, here we are, over 10 months from the first ballots being cast, and the fields have already been set for two months. How can this be? I suspect part of it is an unprecedented obsession with early campaign metrics -- polling, money, hires, etc. The big liberal blogs are lousy with polling and strategy information that helps to reify the notion that Clinton, Obama and Edwards are the big three -- sometimes it's information about the whole field, and sometimes it's a focus on one or more from the top tier. What's ironic is that this is just the opposite of what I'd expect the community members of those sites to what their efforts to amount to. The democratic ideal case of Howard Dean (and later Wes Clark) is about as far as you can get from what the Democratic field looks like right now. Progressives are unable to coalesce around a single candidate, because neither of the big non-Clinton candidates are especially good fits, and none of the lower tier candidates count. What's worse is that it's only March 2007, but there's probably no one out there besides Al Gore who can step into that vacuum.
2007:03:02:08:00. Friday. NO!: THE APPLES IN STEREO (#234, FEB 26 2007).
In the second half of their set, with all their technical problems sorted out, the Apples began to really dive into their newer material. In particular, they played three of my favorites in succession: "Same Old Drag," "Skyway" and "7 Stars," which I think is probably my favorite track on the new album. None of the songs were quite the same as the recorded versions -- they lacked both the studio experimentation that got laid to tape and the female backing vocals that are scattered around the album takes -- but they all got huge responses from the crowd. New Magnetic Wonder had only been out for three weeks before this show, but the audience's familiarity with the new songs makes me think that not just a few people in attendance downloaded the leak that appeared online in late 2006.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:03:01:08:00. Thursday. NO!: THE APPLES IN STEREO (#233, FEB 26 2007).
When the band came out, they were led by one of their keyboard players, who, for whatever reason, was wearing some sort of space-magician outfit and glasses with blue lasers on the temples. We expected the rest of the band to also be dressed in some crazy way, but it was just space key guy. He would've fit better stylistically with the opening band, Casper & the Cookies, who played sort of a glammed up version of the Elephant 6 sound -- a little more Of Montreal than Apples. They were a good fit for a show and seemed to be pretty well-received by the crowd.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra |
We went to see a free OK Go event at the High Noon last night, put on by Jack Daniel's. This is the second or third such event they've put on in Madison -- they did one with the New Pornographers last year, and there was a Spoon show in 2005 that might've been them too. It was a good show, but I'll have more to say on that when the videos go up next week.