Heartache With Hard Work

Will My Feet Still Carry Me Home – Elf Power

Check out the new digs.  I finally bit the bullet and made the switch over to Word Press.  The always looming threat of getting my service yanked by Blogger was just a little too much to bear.

Potential problems: I really have no clue about graphical design and so the more ‘powerful’ system here in some ways is going to create more problems than it will solve.  Bear with me while things go through the housecleaning stage.  Also, importing the old posts from Blogger seems like it might be more confusing than expected.  They’re all here right now, but most of the comments didn’t migrate so I’m going to mess around with that a bit and see if I can’t find them.

Anyways, most of my readers just get the feed, so this should produce very little change for y’all.

The one other big switch is that I’m canceling my old hosting service.  And I’m not going to make the effort to re-load a bunch of the old MP3s.  So most of those are going to be dead from now on.

The Concurrence Of All Things – Big Tree

It doesn’t sound like anything ‘natural’ but there’s definitely something strangely organic going on here. The folk undertones give it a sense of personality, while the jazzy movement translates personality into something far less coherently situated. And the bridge ascends to a post-rock plateau that lets you look back down on the miles and miles of undulating waves.

The composite product is a wonderfully poppy little slice of odd time-signatures and jittery bumps and dives.

This song is from their EP Home(here) due out in June.

J.K. Rowling says she’s happy to pay taxes, because of a commitment to the welfare state. Matt Yglesias responds:

I’ve seen this quoted on a number of progressive sites, but you’ve got to wonder how real the second reason really is. Suppose Rowling moved to a tax haven, hired an accountant to tell her how much money that would save her, and committed to donating the savings to Oxfam. Would that be contemptible? Would it do less good for the world? Of course it really is contemptible for multi-millionaires to take action designed to merely increase the volume of personal consumption that they get to engage in and I hardly fool myself into thinking that your average tax evader has the high-minded motive of increasing his Oxfam contributions. But the point is that purely altruistic-motivated taxpaying doesn’t make a ton of sense, a genuinely altruistic person could always find some other way to use their money to help.

That doesn’t make any sense at all, as far as I can tell. There is a pretty clear normative difference between charity and state welfare. Those of us who consider paying taxes to be a positive obligation think that not just because we expect OTHER people to have to contribute to the public welfare but also (for many of us) because there is something intrinsically distinct about publicly designated social spending.

The charity I choose to donate to may or may not fulfill an actual public good. The significance of the state as provider of social goods is precisely that it constitutes the basic terrain of public goods. When you commit to supporting it, you’re not just supporting the particular policies that it carries but also the broader normative idea that the basis for provision of welfare ought to rest in some sense on a shared solidarity among people.

In the terms that Yglesias uses, the crucial element of tax-paying isn’t altruism but instead is the way it constitutes our most material support for the idea that there are certain elements of life that deserve general – rather than individual – support.

My Eyes To See – Alcoholic Faith Mission

With a name like Alcoholic Faith Mission you know this band is going places. And this song provides solid evidence for that thesis.

It starts like a cool, misty night with distorted pianos and a background of cracks and hisses. As the mood is just starting to turn – growing softer and more gentle – the song proper kicks in. Driven by an insistent drum line that calls to mind The National, and suffused with guitars that rise and fall like flares from the sun. Add in some big, boozy major chords and you’ve got yourself something special.

And then there’s this unexpected turn. The chorus drops sharply away – it’s the eye of the hurricane in the midst of the electronic storm. Just a little weird…but in a great way.

In fact, what this whole description makes me realize is that this is the best Broken Social Scene song in half a decade.

In the grand scheme of things it’s probably not the most important thing to be worried about, but…

I’m really angry at how the tea partiers have ruined the ethos of tea for the rest of us. I read today that there’s a new term floating around: “coffee conservative.” The basic idea is that “you can’t be a screamer, a name-caller, a loud-mouthed zealot or somebody whose idea of politics translates to jabbing a sign in the air, red in the face.” As in, you can’t be a tea party conservative.

Which is just infuriating because, as we all know, tea is the drink of sophisticated, considerate individuals. As compared to coffee which is, you know, not.

Anyways, this whole tea party thing makes me wonder what’s next. A bunch of Ron Paul-ites decided to co-opt yoga and Volvos? Angry nationalist meetings organized at vegan restaurants? Dogs and cats not just living together but working jointly on building a fence across the border? The new album from Sufjan Stevens being an exegesis on the unconstitutionality of health care reform?

Gah. It’s been a disastrous couple of weeks for posting on the blog, and given how busy my upcoming 14 days are, I can’t imagine it’s going to improve much. Still, in the interest of not completing abandoning y’all, here is a great song that I have been listening to more or less constantly for the past week or so.

Right Direction – The Dirty Diamonds

I’m not usually one to quote a press release, but this one so perfectly encapsulated the sound of this record that it convinced me to listen, so I’m going to lay it on you: “If Passion Pit was caught in a time machine, met up with the Supremes and had babies, nine months later The Dirty Diamonds would appear.”

That really does just about cover it. Great harmonies, an awesome underlying beat, a call and response bit at the end that’s just gleefully self-aware (“when I say Dirty, you say Diamonds”). It’s everything I love about 60s doo-wop acts combined with everything I love about electro dance pop. And it’s a right good time.

Right Direction is from the upcoming Monster Ballads EP (due out later this month from YM! Chicago).

So health care reform actually made it. I feel like I should write something about how great this is, some ebullient prose in honor of the biggest legislative accomplishment of my lifetime. But I feel like it’s all been said already.

It’s not a perfect bill by any stretch. But it is a very good one. And it lays the groundwork for putting together a reasonably universal approach to health care, helping to drag this country into the modern world on that subject.

There is one thing to the post-reform coverage that’s been rubbing me the wrong way. One example here, from Monica Potts at The American Prospect:

We Knew This Would Happen. It’s just shocking that it’s happening so soon. Sen. Chuck Grassley is sending e-mails trumpeting a component of the health care reform bill he ultimately voted against.

People seem to think that this is some huge hypocrisy but I don’t really see it.

The argument made some sense with the stimulus, where the GOP was simultaneously declaring that the bill created zero jobs and also taking credit for the jobs it was bringing to their home district.

But with health care reform, Grassley is touting some measures he got the Dems to insert into the bill on charitable hospitals. He’s not claiming that the whole bill is good; he’s saying that it’s better than it would be without him. That he was able to get the Democrats to insert stuff that he wanted without actually having to vote for it seems to be a good demonstration of his political acumen. Which is precisely the point, right?

On the other side, this is one episode which demonstrates that the health care changes were in fact ‘bipartisan,’ as long as you focus on the content of the bill rather than the casting of votes. Which is to say, lefty folks should be applauding Grassley for identifying ways that the Democrats incorporated Republican ideas, not mocking him for being a hypocrite.

As for the longer term, I predict that the health system still has many, many flaws – ones which have little or nothing to do with the newly enacted health care law – which some people will attempt to cast as failures for Obama. But on the whole, things will get better, and within a few years this reform will become standard, accepted, and set in stone. For the midterms, I’ll stick with what I’ve been saying for months: Democrats will lose seats in both houses, will hold onto the Senate with a few seats to spare, and are about 60/40 to hold the House.

But really, passing health care just means that they now retain the chance to hold serve. It’s ultimately going to depend on the economy more than anything.

Now – Bill McGarvey

Today’s the big day it seems like.

Even Stupak is now on board, so all the pieces seem to be falling into place. But I’m not going to feel confident until I see a 216 show up on the big board.

Watching things on CSPAN right now, I’m reminded of how ridiculous our formal structures of government are. We’ve got 18th century habits for a world full of X-boxes and punk rock.

When it’s all said and done – if everything does work out – I think we’re going to look back and marvel at Nancy Pelosi, who is (Sam Gamgee style) the clear hero in this whole saga.

I Can Make the Pain Disappear – Fear of Tigers

Synths, the pitter-patter of heels on a dance floor, big pop hooks, and crystallized droplets of sound. What else can you ask for?

The band is Fear of Tigers and you can download their whole record at their Facebook page.

You want more? Well how about a remix of a Fear of Tigers track by Yes Giantess. In spite of my general antipathy to remixes, it’s hard to argue with this one (made available via Neon Gold Records).

The Ruins – Yes Giantess

You’ve got to listen through the whole way, too, because it really starts to fly about three minutes in.

Man, Bart Stupak is a real character isn’t he? Today, he made the cardinal mistake of politics and accidentally told the truth, namely that the health care bill is a good idea and is already extremely restrictive on abortion even without his stupid amendment, but that he still is going to vote against it. Why? It’s a matter of principle of course. “Principle” in this case is code for: “people with vaginas aren’t people. Unless they’re fetuses. In which case, they count double. Also, people with terminal diseases aren’t people, either. Oh, and when I said fetuses were people, I meant in theory, not like, actually.”

Jon Chait has a good read on this: “Bart Stupak sounds like a man who has backed himself into a corner, realizes he’s wrong (which he is), but can’t quite admit it.”

Still, I’m not quite sure that’s right. To explain, let me begin by mentioning that I’ve been thinking that I need to start using Stupak as an insult. As in “man, he really Stupaked that up.” Or “that guy is a total Stupak.”

Roughly speaking it means the sort of person who thinks it’s infinitely more important to make a fuss about being a principled guy than it is to actually have principles. It’s not about hypocrisy so much as it’s about bullheaded, self-indulgent incapacity to understand what’s going on. Hypocrites are people who espouse a belief but violate it. Stupak does that, of course. And doubly so actually since the bill he’s going to vote against a) will provide life-giving health care to literally millions of people – something a Catholic really ought to value and b) will REDUCE abortions compared to the status quo.

It’s the second that’s the real key here. See, it’s not that Stupak claims to care about values but in fact only cares about one particular value. It’s that he’s too stupid (or arrogant, I guess) to even bother to sort out what will be best for the thing he values. And that’s what’s infuriating about him and people like that. The firmness of conviction that is so strong it doesn’t seem to require any actual consideration about what to do. The fact that you value X means that whatever you support is de facto the right thing for people who care about X to support.

How it affects living, breathing people doesn’t matter. You’ve already decided that you’re right, so who really cares about actual people?