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In which grievances are aired
Monday, 4 May 2009, 9:35 PM (permalink).
The weekend before last, I made an excursion to Louisville to see my fellow New Jerseyans, Titus Andronicus. I was recently introduced to this band through a gift of their The Airing of Grievances (2008), and I'd been digging the album (especially "My Time Outside the Womb," "Titus Andronicus," and , so I was looking forward quite a bit to the show.  The evening got off on the wrong foot, however, as I sauntered into Headliners about 9:40 to find Titus Andronicus already playing. It hadn't occurred to me that the band I wanted to see would not necessarily be the headliner (which was the Memphis-based Lucero). I also seem to have lost my feel for concert timing: I was working on the assumption that no self-respecting hipster venue lets any music start before 10pm. So I was wrong on two counts, which cost me at least a couple songs worth of entertainment. As for the show itself, it was, honestly, kind of a letdown. Musically they were good. I don't know if I would go so far as to say tight, because that's not really the sound Titus Andronicus is going for, but definitely together. Vocals were pretty sloppy though: ranging from OK-I-guess-sloppy-can-be-an-aesthetic to ouch-this-is-kind-of-embarrassing. I couldn't quite decide if the lead singer was actually stumbling drunk or if it was just part of his schtick (I am leaning toward the former), but I've reached the stage of old-fogeydom where I find such antics immature and tiresome. At times, they managed to cohere into the angry cyclone of sound that one would hope for from them; but these flashes of brilliance didn't last very long. At the risk (well, certainty) of sounding condescending, I have some hope that if they can stay together and grow up a little, they could make for a great live act. My fingers are crossed for them.
The actual headliners, Lucero, were sort of interesting. I'd never heard of them; Wikipedia calls them country-punk, which seems accurate enough. I spent the beginning of their set doing my best to dislike them in retaliation for Titus Andronicus not being the top bill, but somewhere past the midpoint I managed to get into it a little. Even at their worst, they managed a brand of country rock that I'll admit is competent even if I don't especially like it. I think mainly, I had difficulty with the lead singer, whose primary vocal style seems to take its inspiration from Wolfman Jack (or, to be more generous, a more gravelly version of Marah). I liked him best when he forgot to do that. The lead guitarist from Titus Andronicus joined in on a few songs to good effect. The singer did too but seemed even more embarrassingly drunk/incoherent than in their own set. Maybe part of my grousing has to do with the crowd, too. A bad crowd demeanor can really put me off a show, and there was an unpleasant ratio of beefy redneck-looking types posed with one arm perpetually raised and clutching a beer bottle as they cheered songs about drinkin' and chasin' women. I got to watch one guest get escorted out the door in a headlock. Again, I'm past the point where all this aggression and posturing is anything but off-putting.
Perhaps the most distressing thing about the concert is that it was the third straight time I've come away from a show at Headliners feeling disappointed. One of these was The Hold Steady a few years ago, which I've already written about, and the other was Vampire Weekend last fall. Three quite different bands, three quite different crowds, all vaguely dissatisfying. Am I just getting too old for the club scene? Are Those Kids Today ruining the scene? Am I just setting the bar too high? Is Headliners cursed? Am I? I really don't know. I've got semi-formed plans to go see Wussy play in Columbus later this month, and I'm hoping to change my luck there. File under: Music, Travel, Grouses.
Broken permalinks
Thursday, 12 Mar 2009, 9:21 AM (permalink).
Uh-oh. it looks like the Tinderbox 4.6 HTML export is building links differently than it used to, which means permalinks are going to be broken until I can tweak my templates. But I am updating the main page anyway, just 'cause.
File under: Geekery, Metablogging.
Shameless placeholding post
Thursday, 12 Mar 2009, 9:05 AM (permalink).
Well, Phase 2 of The Great Adventure is drawing to a close: I am sitting in the Hannover airport waiting to head home. I've been trying for two days to write something that would (a) serve as some kind of thoughtful reflection on this experience and (b) break my latest unplanned blogging hiatus before I actually left the country. It's obvious now that I won't be coming up with (a) any time soon, so I am settling for just (b). Voila! Hiatus broken! (Thoughtful reflections possibly to follow once I am back in the US of A. File under: Ego, Metablogging, Travel.
Il mondo cambia
Tuesday, 11 Nov 2008, 1:32 AM (permalink).
Almost a week later, the significance of this year's election is slowly starting to dawn on me. My initial reaction was a feeling of anticlimax. I was in Rome on election day with only the most tenuous of Internet connections, and in any case polls had not even closed on the east coast by the time I went to bed, so I missed out on the actual deciding moment and had to wait until Wednesday morning to get confirmation of Barack Obama's victory. And while the training I've had as a supporter of the Phillies and other lost causes has taught me that failure is always a possibility, the tea leaves and entrails had been pointing pretty decisively toward the result for the past month, so I wasn't exactly at the edge of my seat. Mostly, I felt relief that the whole thing was finally over. But I am coming around to the view that this was, in fact, a watershed moment. Perhaps it was this poster  , which kept popping up in Rome over the following few days, that got me thinking. The world has changed. Holy Shit, We Elected a Black President
In the sheltered cocoon of academia in which I've spent most of my adult life, where everyone pays lip-service to the notion of equality (even if they aren't all that interested in actually promoting it), it is easy to forget just how big a deal race continues to be in America. And although race alone is not a qualification for being President, it will be hard for anything Obama does over the next four to eight years to overshadow the monumental importance of the breaking of the color line in the country's highest office. The Onion (of all places) captured the staggering significance of this event:
A black president for a nation whose entire history has been haunted by the specter of slavery and plagued by racism since before its inception. That this happened in our lifetime is remarkable; that it happened within 50 years of a time when segregation was still considered an acceptable institution is astonishing. Absolutely astonishing. This is an achievement on par with the moon landing.
Skeptics may complain that a President needs to be more than just a symbol, and I agree. But symbolism does matter. Firsts matter. We can never go back to the unstated assumption that the White House was an exclusive club for old white guys. Everyone from unreconstructed segregationists to black militants now has to adjust their understanding of the world to include the fact that a black man can be elected President of the United States.
Welcome Back, America!
Conservatives are dismissive, if not outright defiant, of world opinion, but many of the most urgent problems America must face (terrorism, the environment, the financial crisis) are global issues, and we will need friends around the world to address these problems. The damage the Bush administration did to America's reputation abroad is incalculable, but this election gives us the chance to turn the page on that legacy and begin again, if not with a clean slate, at least with the benefit of the doubt. In my interactions with Europeans the last few years, the most common attitude I've encountered has been less hostility than bemusement. We've been that guest at the party who's being rude and belligerent and whom everyone figures might actually be a little bit crazy and hopes will just leave before things get nasty. By electing Obama, we have signaled to the world that we have regained our senses and are ready to behave ourselves again. With any luck, they might even welcome us back. GOP Will Eat Itself
This is the point on which I am least certain, given that I seem to be chronically out of touch with the mainstream of American politics, but I am cautiously hopeful that this election was the death knell for the current incarnation of the Republican Party, by which I mean the curious alliance of big business plutocrats, evangelical theocrats, and jingoistic militarists which seem to have constituted the party since at least the Reagan administration. This has always struck me as an unlikely and fragile coalition, bound together by mutual hatred of "liberals" than anything else, and the backbiting and recriminations already spilling out from Team McCain suggest that defeat will not bring them closer together. As for the electorate as a whole, it remains to be seen if there's really been a "realignment" of the political map or just a temporary shuffling. The pessimist in me keeps pointing out how many things had to tilt in the Democrats' favor to produce this victory: an unprecedentedly unpopular outgoing Republican president; a major economic disaster only weeks before the election; a poorly organized and often contradictory campaign on the part of John McCain. On the other hand, most of those factors are in fact the direct result of cherished Republican policies (trickle-down economic strategies, rampant deregulation, international belligerence) which demonstrably failed under George W. Bush, so it does seem plausible that Americans have finally put two and two together.
I am especially encouraged by the fact that Republicans tried just about everything in their usual bag of campaign tricks (accusing their opponent of being elitist, of pandering to criminals, of being unpatriotic, of being a socialist) without success. And the naked racism and xenophobia that started bubbling out in the waning weeks of the campaign (Obama the secret Muslim, Obama the terrorist, and so on), while dispiriting to see, I think actually dragged out into the open some of the more shameful sentiments that have been fueling the Republican base for some time. People will remember the smears and the ugliness for a while, and as long as they do, it should be harder to deploy them again.
So here we are. The world has changed. Changing the world has not made our problems go away, but it just might be the first step toward solving them.
File under: Politics, Ego, Travel.
Of two minds
Sunday, 26 Oct 2008, 10:33 PM (permalink).
Phase 2 of The Great Adventure is now in full swing. I've managed to get into something like a routine in my new career as a telecommuter, and it is going surprisingly well. Indeed, the thing that I thought would be hardest—simply disciplining myself to 'go to work'—has actually been quite easy. School/daycare for the kids, as well as other domestic obligations, provide a built-in structure to the day and working just becomes part of that, much as it was back home. I also have the advantage of being able to hole up in Sylvia's university office on her non-teaching days, which helps with focus. And of course, I am quite aware of the fact that I've been given something of a gift by my employer being able to do this, so I'm all the more motivated to prove to them it was not ill-advised. The part that is taking some getting used to is a sense of being divided, literally of two minds, one of which is trying to function in Morehead, KY, while the other functions in Hannover, Germany. Part of this has to do with he time difference. Since I am in regular communication with people in the US, I am constantly having to calculate the time there, whether to plan a time for a phone call or just to gauge when I might get a response to an email. And with the six-hour time difference, I am reaching the end of my workday right about the time that people are rolling in and becoming active in the US. (With the Phillies in the World Series for the first time since 1993, the time difference is especially painful: tonight's game starts at 1AM my time. Sleep can wait until after the playoffs.) Another source of strangeness is language. I've never been dedicated enough to do a 'total immersion' language experience, but normally when I spend time in Germany, I spend a fair amount of time hearing, reading and speaking German. I'm far from fluent, but I can communicate and to a certain extent think in German. But my working hours basically involve going into an English-only bubble for seven or eight hours at a time (even when I am at the university I don't really interact with people there except for the occasional foray to the Mensa to get coffee). When I leave that bubble at the end of a workday, it feels doubly strange to suddenly be surrounded by this whole other language and culture.
As a result, I sometimes feel guilty that I'm not having a sufficiently 'German' experience while I am here, although in the few weeks we've been here I've been to the Opera and the Sprengel Museum, toured the Altstatdt and the Eilenriede, gone to the movies and browsed the markets. I have nothing to complain of, it's just the difference between visiting a place and living there, and I am doing the latter, if only temporarily. File under: Ego, Travel.
The great adventure: Phase 1 complete (Thank God)
Monday, 29 Sep 2008, 11:02 PM (permalink).
So, the first phase of the Great Adventure wrapped up 10 days ago, when I again made the trek from Kentucky through New Jersey and thence to Germany and rejoined the family in Germany. While Phase 2 carries with it its own set of challenges (notably my adjustment to telecommuting and learning to function in Germany at something above an advanced tourist level), my feeling is that this is going to be a piece of cake compared to the previous two months, which were, in the final analysis, pretty sucky. What I learned during my period of enforced bachelorhood is that I've become completely unfit for single life. Living with someone in a relationship (as I have with Sylvia for some 14 years) changes one considerably; having a child changes one utterly; having another child changes everything yet again. Large parts of myself are invested in these three other people, and without them around, I feel literally empty. I don't just miss them, I miss a part of me that only exists when I'm with them.
I'm not writing this to boast about what a devoted husband and father I am. There's actually something kind of disturbing about this. Put in the worst light, I think I may use my family as a crutch to get myself to do things that, as a supposedly functioning adult, I ought to be able to do under my own power: things ranging from the mundane (eating healthily and picking up after myself) to the existential (leaving the house and talking to other people). I'm not saying I was completely unable to do these things without them there, but I'll admit they took a more conscious act of will to accomplish than otherwise.
(A more charitable version of the above might be to say that one's family becomes part of the fabric of one's life, and just as with a real fabric, one cannot arbitrarily remove some threads without damaging the whole. This may be true, but it also raises the question of why some types of cloth unravel more precipitously than others.)
Well, self-pity and philosophizing aside, I am ecstatically happy to be reunited, and that is carrying me through the inconveniences entailed by the transplantation. I expect I'll be grousing about them plenty in time, but for now I am just appreciating feeling whole again.
File under: Ego, Travel, Grouses.
Tiny changes
Monday, 22 Sep 2008, 2:23 AM (permalink).
I'm not sure if it is a measure of how much I miss my family or just an indication that I am going soft in my old age, but when a friend pointed me, some weeks ago, toward the following video for Frightened Rabbit's "Head Rolls Off," I found myself sitting in my office, transfixed and teary-eyed. And what's a little bit odd about all this is that I'd already been listening the hell out of the album it comes from—Midnight Organ Fight (2008)—for several weeks, and this song hadn't particularly impressed itself on me ("The Modern Leper," "Good Arms vs. Bad Arms," "Old Old Fashioned," and "Keep Yourself Warm"—to name a few—had all gotten my attention by that point). But now, thanks to a rather low-key and, frankly, nonsensical video of kids dancing madly (but also looking bored and even distressed) to a song about Jesus and the dead in Heaven, pulling at my heart-strings for reasons having nothing really to do with the song, I am positively obsessed with it. In particular, I've been dwelling on part of the refrain: "But while I'm alive / I'll make tiny changes to Earth."
Music does weird things.
File under: Ego, Music, Digital culture.
42.5 minutes of hope
Wednesday, 3 Sep 2008, 1:35 AM (permalink).
For almost three decades—my entire adult life and then some—I have been utterly baffled and frequently saddened by American politics. I just cannot fathom what it is about the Republican Party's melange of fear-mongering, intolerance, and plutocracy that "average Americans" find so comforting. Nor have I understood why the Democratic Party has been more or less in retreat ever since Reagan's landslide election in 1980 (yes, I am aware of Bill Clinton's presidency). Feeling so completely alienated from this climate, I've watched my own politics devolve into a mixture of cynicism and naiveté: expecting little from politicians and still finding ways to be profoundly disappointed by them.
So it's maybe not surprising that I did my best last week to ignore the Democratic National Convention. There's no question of how I am going to vote, so all I stood to gain by listening to speeches, I figured, was increasing my already vast reserves of disillusionment.
And I almost made it. But on the night of Barack Obama's acceptance speech, I got hit by an atypically strong case of insomnia that carried me well into the wee hours of Friday morning. Somewhere around 4:00 am, I landed on the video of the speech posted at Talking Points Memo ( official campaign copy of the speech here). For the next 42 and a half minutes, I was captivated as I don't think I have ever been by a piece of political oratory. Here was a politician, a candidate for president no less, suggesting such political anathemas as the idea that we should help the unfortunate, protect the vulnerable, and be tolerant of others. Doing so unapologetically and indeed forcefully. There has been, of course, a torrent of analysis, praise and abuse unleashed on the speech; it is sometime conservative Andrew Sullivan that comes closest to matching my feelings:
It was a liberal speech, more unabashedly, unashamedly liberal than any Democratic acceptance speech since the great era of American liberalism. But it made the case for that liberalism - in the context of the decline of the American dream, and the rise of cynicism and the collapse of cultural unity. His ability to portray that liberalism as a patriotic, unifying, ennobling tradition makes him the most lethal and remarkable Democratic figure since John F Kennedy.
For those 42 and a half minutes, and for maybe half a day afterward, my cynicism buckled, and I allowed myself to bask in the glow of the basic decency and good sense of that speech, to harbor a little hope that America actually is "better than the last eight years."
Of course, the next day, McCain announced his vice-presidential pick and the tawdry circus that has erupted over Sarah Palin, her past, and her family has dragged American political discourse back into the cesspool that seems to be its natural habitat. My cynicism is back in place, and I am hiding from political speeches again.
File under: Politics, Ego.
"She moved so easily, all I could think of was sunlight"
Monday, 28 Jul 2008, 8:20 PM (permalink).
At the risk of looking like I am bragging (when, really, I am just trying to bask in some reflected glory), I have to announce that Sylvia's been awarded a Fulbright fellowship for the coming year. This was part of the plan for the Great Adventure all along, but the Fulbright people took their sweet time in making their decision, so we had to decide whether we were going to go through with it regardless of the result or not. Obviously, we chose the former, and we were prepared to make it work that way. But the award makes it all easier, not to mention more glamorous. Mostly, I am happy for Sylvia because it provides the culmination of tremendous effort and initiative on her part. In the 15 years I've known her, I've never seen her fail to accomplish something once she put her mind to it. I am proud to know her, and if the fact that this intelligent, dedicated, and consummately professional woman allows me to associate with her casts me in a somewhat better light, well, I'll ride those coat-tails as far as they'll take me. File under: Ego, Academe.
The great adventure: Single life begins
Saturday, 19 Jul 2008, 2:16 PM (permalink).
With base camp more or less established and my annual allowance of vacation consumed, I am back home again. Nothing very remarkable to report about it all, except that it took a damn long time (from 4:30am taxi pickup to arrival at my doorstep here, with stops in Moorestown, NJ and Elkview, WV, was about 60 hours). This week has been spent getting caught up at work and vaguely trying to reorganize myself for the next couple months.
It's extremely weird being on my own here. Aside from a few days here and there, this is the first time in about seven years since before we had children) that I've lived on my own. I won't lie: there's something very liberating about the prospect—no interruptions, no delays, no being responsible for anyone's needs but my own. But most of all, it feels tremendously empty: I keep having these twitches of expectation that Sylvia and the kids are about to walk through the door, followed by a sinking realization that they aren't.
The biggest challenge of the next few months will be keeping myself on some kind of reasonable schedule. I've become so accustomed to the patterns of (mostly child-driven) family life structuring my day that I find myself turning in circles wondering what to do with myself next. Work gives me some structure, but with it being summer, the university is half-deserted and works feels almost as fluid as the rest of my day.
And that's where things stand. If nothing else, basic survival needs will dictate that I do a few things like shop for food, which is the currently the most pressing item on my bachelor agenda.
File under: Ego.
Adventures in Wi-Fi poaching
Monday, 7 Jul 2008, 11:36 PM (permalink).
Day 7 without internet, and panic is starting to kick in. Yesterday, I made a solo expedition down the Lister Meile, a long shopping street extending, spoke-like, from the Hannover Hauptbahnhof out to the edge of List (our neighborhood), ostensibly for the purpose of obtaining a couple useful things (money and a subway map), but really an attempt to track down an Internet café or otherwise get myself online. After a couple hours of marching past closed shopfronts (it was a Sunday after all), I finally managed to land in a restaurant that, while not exactly advertising itself as an Internet cafe, did offer free wireless access. For the price of a cappuccino and having to endure an episode of MTV's That's Amore! with German subtitles, I was able to connect long enough to do some emergency email maintenance and download some new podcast episodes (which should make my return flight a little more bearable). I did not get around to uploading blog entries, however. Ah well.
Today, I found a two-square-foot area in the corner of our bedroom where for a few hours, I managed to pick up a fairly continuous (and unprotected) wireless signal from, presumably, one of our neighbors. Unfortunately, this window of connectivity fell during the late-afternoon to kinds' bedtime gauntlet, so I wasn't able to make the best use of it. I caught up on my web comics, Twitter, and a few favorite blogs and that was about it. Again, did no get around to updating Donut Age. Sorry. I'm starting to feel a bit like a digital hobo with all this grubbing about for wifi signals. I'm not just being cheap, though. I'd be happy to pay for my Internet. Its just those sluggards at Deutsche Telecomm who can't be bothered to come out and give us a phone and DSL in less than 2 and a half weeks.
File under: Geekery, Ego, Travel.
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