iPad: still not convinced (or even tempted)

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Xeni Jardin --- who is hip enough even for me, I guess --- has a gratuitously heady hands-on review of the iPad, sounding like a smitten fangirl. ("iPad fappery," one of the commenters calls it.) Well, her words at least make me wonder about my initial summary dismissal of the device. She assures us that the form factor is just right --- perfect in weight and tactile sensuality. That happens to be my greatest doubt about the iPad, i.e., that it could possibly have great ergonomics for much of what it is designed to do. We'll see. I still think it's a case of trying to improve Hostess Twinkies by releasing Giant Chocolate Hostess Twinkies. Or maybe more to the point, trying to improve a Ghirardelli 72 percent chocolate bar by releasing Giant Chocolate Hostess Twinkies. And anyway, just look at the docked iPad with that wireless keyboard: how does that go together, design-wise?

It's Bedtime!

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Here's a nighty-night song for the first summerlike day in my neck of the Corn Belt. I listened to it during an excruciating run through the sunny breeze wearing a Teflon-coated tee shirt inside of which sweat condenses and drains instead of wicking. The video accompanying "Don't Worry Baby" is totally wrong for the music. The tune is a sprightly but pensive teen beat, fraught with portent. Our hero has failed to keep his mouth shut when he bragged about his car, but he can't back down now because he pushed the other guys too far. But The Love of His Baby is promised to get him all horny for a win. Yet it somehow sounds both innocent and important if you sustain credulity. It's a sweet sound: barber shop quartet sounds for the Pepsi Generation, perhaps suitable for a nice fox trot in the back of the gym.

Now get back in bed and I don't wanna hear another peep outta ya!

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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A spring break edition for two very special little men. And also for that healthcare-loving, ballcutting harridan Nancy Pelosi, who has put The Fear of Grandma into bedwetting wingnuts everywhere.



A city I've never been to, but intend to visit on the recommendation of the lads. A place where the panhandlers are polite and even the meth-heads do their best to make a stranger feel welcome. And the only piece of litter to sit on the ground for more than 5 minutes was one that Beer-D and Big Rock Head threw there as an experiment, then later picked up and threw away just like all the townies do.

Good for Pelosi! [updated]

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She has reportedly told pro-sepsis Congressman Bart Stupak to go fuck himself regarding his anti-choice, pro-thuggery stance on the current healthcare reform legislation. Like Josh Marshall says, this is a major development if it's true.

Update:  Here's a little background on Pelosi's attitude, from The Politico (which is insignificant to me) via TPM (which isn't). It seems that Madame Speaker elbowed her way past the chiseled visage of Rahm Emanuel to get all simpatico with the President on HCR. Haha!

Driveway tableau [updated]

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The following is the transcript of a brief conversation, edited to eliminate digressions, between RubberCrutch and Rudy, the latter of whom having borrowed a shovel, had now returned it and was slumped against Big Rock Head's Mazda. His flesh was the color of window putty, but then again it is always that color. Big Rock Head and a neighbor who Rudy calls "Schmuck-meat" are bystanders and catalysts:

RC: Are you OK, Rudy?
Rudy: No.
RC (stoically, after a beat): You're not?
Rudy (irritably): Yeah, I'm OK! I always breathe like this 'cuz I have congestive heart failure!

[Editor's note: updated for narrative clarity.]

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting [updated]

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I regret that she never stopped by the house to sing this to me in person. Oh well.



Even though this tune is embedded in my substrate, memories are elusive, scrambled. And my memory check on the web transmuted it into a bit of an enigma. A month ago I'd have sworn it was a languid bossa nova composed for Astrud Gilberto by her erstwhile husband Joao. But it looks like memory conflated Dusty Springfield's 1967 performance with a too-upbeat, too-grandiose rendition by Sergio Mendez and Brazil '66 a year later. I know you all don't give a shit about my confusion, but some superficial googling only cleared up part of it yet revealed new puzzles. (I will file this post under a new label: "Thinking Too Much.")

One YouTube uploader claims that the backup band on this lovely arrangement is the Tijuana Brass, but it just sounds too tasteful and understated for that to be accurate. Yet a "long" version of the song, also posted to YouTube, is marred by a weird, tacked-on, muffled 20-second instrumental outchorus that sounds very much like the TJB heard through a bad earache. I've embedded a shorter edit here to exclude that audio carbuncle. The tenor soloist sounds like Stan Getz subtoning with Astrud Gilberto on "The Girl From Ipanema" several years earlier. But the performance seems weak, so it may be a Getz impersonator... from the TJB? Anyway, this arrangement, minus the expunged crappy outchorus, is fully carried by a quiet rhythm section: a guitar, an electric piano, and percussion. (So maybe that was how got a classy performance from the TJB back then --- send them all out to the strip club across the street except for the rhythm section, and give them a nice chart to play.) And furthermore, Dusty (to my ear) does indeed sound like Astrud to some extent in her breathiness and phrasing.

What does seem clear about the provenance of "The Look Of Love" is that it was a musical highlight in the 1967 James Bond parody version of Casino Royale (starring Peter Sellers), and that there are two recordings of it (movie soundtrack and single). And that the title ditty to that same film, called "Casino Royale" of course, was recorded by Herb Alpert and the TJB, and it charted much better than Dusty's version. And that the 1968 Sergio Mendez recording did much better in the states than did Dusty's definitive rendition.

So who the fuck knows? I was expecting this to be a three-sentence post. Anyway, just listen to Dusty Springfield's pensive treatment of the Burt Bacharach/Hal David composition. (More news to me!) But this is not "lounge music" or "easy listening," as it is glibly labeled by various DJs and fans. Not at all. It's an American standard.

[Editor's note: updated to provide some sorely needed coherence.]

Economic fundamentals that are ridiculously simple

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It's Friday evening so I don't want to get too deep into anything, but here's what I consider to be a huge idea that is simple enough for a high school economics student to understand. It's called The General Theory of Second Best, the title of an article explaining an economic model referred to by economists as "Lipsey-Lancaster." I first heard of it a week or two ago on Eschaton in a sort-of throwaway post by Atrios (who is an economist). I'm a nonspecialist in pretty much everything except Simple Country Editing (TM), but this theory is so darn simple that it seems impossible to argue with. That is, I don't see why it's not declared a Law instead of a mere Theory.

The crux of the theory, as I understand it, seems to be this: we don't exist in a perfect world, so therefore it is inevitable that many aspects of it are unavoidably non-optimal. That seems like a noncontroversial statement. Well, so what?

This: for 30-plus years U.S. public policy has been driven primarily by the myth of the perfect free market, and how this myth applies not only to economics but purportedly every other domain of life (such as "the marketplace of ideas"). The ideologies of laissez-faire economics (and its pernicious soul sister, Libertarianism) are based on the concept that if we all just leave everything alone, selfish individuals will collectively behave in the greater interest of society because the Free Market Faeiries (as Atrios calls them) will make everything function perfectly. Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate and fan of all things dumb such as South Park, refers to certain shibboleths of free market economics as The Underpants Gnomes Theory of [Fill In]: Phase 1 --- declare that free markets are perfect; Phase 2 --- ???; Phase 3 --- a ideal economy!

The unwavering belief in the failed ideas of free-market economics by our ruling elites has poisoned the public discourse, bankrupted governments, and enabled financial services corporations to loot the wealth of the U.S. middle and working classes... repeatedly... for decades. And these ideas are based on a demonstrable (if not provable) fallacy: that free markets always function perfectly without government intervention or regulation. But it seems that over 40 years ago, some guys named Lipsey and Lancaster put forth the outlandish idea that we don't live in a perfect world, but instead in a second-best world. Nothing can always be "optimal." And sometimes, lots of things are very sub-optimal indeed. And that unless your idea of an ideal market is one that deliberately creates speculative bubbles to scam wealth from middle-class investors, and your idea of enlightened self-interest is to profiteer while almost 20 percent of the population is unemployed or severely underemployed, then someone has to do something about it.

Lipsey-Lancaster seems like such a simple, bulletproof idea in its basic form that it's hard for me to understand  (1) why a well informed person like me never heard of it until 2 weeks ago and (2) why it isn't invoked as a knockdown argument every time some know-nothing wingnut policy wonk lectures us about "government takeovers."

[Editor's note: the previous essay was hastily written and not meticulously sourced because the author is late for his Friday Evening Prayer Meeting. Also, it's too long because he didn't have time to write a short one.]

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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The tune is new to me, but Rosetta Tharpe and Lucky Millinder sure ain't.



"Now he's my king / he makes me sing / four or five times."

Rosetta Tharpe, usually referred to with the prefix name "Sister," spent most of her career shouting gospel over her own guitar accompaniment. The Wikipedia writeup refers to it as "early rock and roll" guitar, but she was playing this style as early as the 19 fucking '30s! You have to hear it to believe it. Either she invented it, or one of her direct influences did. (The Wikipedia article seems poorly edited, incomplete, and lacking focus, so don't take it as the "gospel" truth nyuk nyuk nyuk BONK d'0h! So I'm writing some of this purely from a partially faulty memory.)

Anyway, Sister Tharpe brought her manic gospel shouting style to popular music early in the Big Band era, and I believe most of her recorded performances were with Lucky Millinder's band. In this setting she sang purely secular songs, or tunes that might be interpreted as either secular or sacred (like the Staples Singers did decades later). It should also be noted that Sister Tharpe was quite a showboat even in gospel settings, and her third marriage was sanctified in front of 25,000 paying customers at Griffith Stadium in Washington, DC, 1951. That ceremony was followed, of course, by a gospel set for the crowd.

Lucky Millinder is one of my favorite big band leaders. He wasn't an artist with a capital A like Ellington, and he didn't create a whole new jazz-blues sound like Basie, but he was everywhere for a time, backing up big-name vocalists (in the "race music" industry) like Tharpe, Wynonie Harris, Bull Moose Jackson, and others. Millinder and his ensembles provided dance music and entertainment without lofty artistic pretensions. The charts popped, the bands swung with the best, and everything (to my ears) always sounded tight and ultra-professional.

It's Bedtime!

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This is what it looks like on a clear night at Mauna Kea, Hawaii, if you're Dr. Manhattan. Now get back to bed and I don't wanna hear another peep outta ya!


The White Mountain from charles on Vimeo.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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With the sun climbing to about 35 degrees at high noon these days here at the 40th parallel, I'm already starting to get nostalgic about Winter 2010. How about you? Good. Here:



"Shh! Don't tell my mother. She still thinks I'm in the army."

SM requiscat in pace

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StuporMundi is no more
     for what he thought was H20
     was H2SO4

This is the second time I've borrowed that rhyme from a Scholastic Book Service volume of dumb kid humor. The first time was when I was in 4th grade, and that "borrowing" was in fact my one and only act of plagiarism ever (that I can recall).

Long live RubberCrutch. Best wishes to the rest of you, too.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting [updated]

Ladies! Just look at these Invasion-era cutie-pies: The Walker Brothers!



Check out the bouncer who pushes a coupla kids away at the lower-left side of the screen right at the beginning. "Sorry lads, strictly business, you know." Lots of teenie-boppers of all genders probably wanted a piece of Scott, John, and Gary "Walker" in their heyday. In fact, in this clip it looks like most of the audience members are dudes!?! Anyway, personally, I'm partial to Scott's casual-yet-gentlemanly "mod" suit, but I'm sure plenty of you can't take your eyes off that electric ant hill John is packin' below the belt, not to mention the tantalizing glimpse of midriff. Gary, on traps, is wearing a sweater that Big Otis might have purchased at Zayre in Canterbury Gardens to jazz up his sophomore junior wardrobe.

The acoustics in the TV studio are just celestial, and when the crowd does sing-along backgrounds on the chorus it sounds like a host of archangels. Can't figure out where they stashed the orchestra, though.

To my 5th-grade 7th-grade ears, this sounded like a Very Important Song, and I imagined the Walkers to be grown-ups just like Frank Sinatra. But they appear to have been expatriate American surfer dudes who found a niche in Swinging London. I could, and have, listened to this song over and over again. But even as a runt I felt that the composer wasn't even trying when he penned that lame bridge. (Even if you don't know what the "bridge" is, you'll know it right away in this song; it's the part where it sounds like a page of the score was missing so everybody just faked it for eight measures. Too bad the nice German man talks over the out-chorus, but I still think it's a primo clip.

Update: temporal references corrected, with thanks to Big Hussein Otis.

It's Bedtime!

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Enough is enough! I have had it with this motherfucking snake and this motherfucking baby! Now get back to bed and I don't wanna hear another peep outta ya!

Obama's "hypercompetitive bantam rooster"

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Dan Froomkin, who formerly authored a very popular liberal political blog for the Washington Post before being fired for... authoring a very popular liberal political blog... published a piece today at HuffingtonPost that considers the contributions of Rahm Emanuel to Obama's "success" as a political leader so far. As the President's Chief of Staff, Emanuel has more access to Obama than any other person in the administration. Of the President's "hypercompetitive bantam rooster" Froomkin says

He is a Bush Democrat in that he has allowed Republicans to traumatize him into submission. Emanuel operates on a battlefield as defined by Republicans, where the terrain is littered with the specter of imaginary but profoundly terrifying GOP attack ads. His reflexive approach is the strategic retreat.

You can see Rahm's pernicious influence again everywhere: in the White House's failure of leadership (until last week) on healthcare reform, or its fetish with "bipartisanship," or any other failure by Obama to even look like he is trying to act on behalf of the people who elected him.

Cenk Uyger, also at HuffingtonPost, has an interesting hypothesis about Rahm's future that is supported by the flurry of hagiography Froomkin refers to in his article. I do hope that Cenk right.