Miss Piggy Lunchbox

Via Daily Kos comes this imperative statement from McCain this last summer.

“We should be able to deliver bottled hot water to dehydrated babies.”

You know, parsing that statement, I can’t really find anything I disagree with.  So…yay McCain, you nailed that one.  Not so sure you want to make it a major part of your campaign, though.

(I swear I’m working on the SP20 recap.  Really.  It’s just taking forever.)

This is Jawbox’s last studio effort, and it seems they could never make up their mind about who they wanted to be. Or maybe they made up their mind that they wanted to be a bit of everything. Either way, as the band frequently vacillates between powerful melodies supported by mildly abrasive guitar, completely atonal talk-singing over nearly atonal, rapidly shifting songs, and slow attempts at setting a mood of darkness, the mixed bag that is Jawbox serves as a pretty good summary of the mixed bag that was Jawbox.

So was it intentional or accidental that so little of their catalog approaches “Spoiler” either in terms of style or quality? Did they want to write a bunch of disparate songs that weren’t as good as their hooky, powerful stuff? Or could they just not put it together all that frequently? I’m not even sure the band could answer that question truthfully, but given how great Jawbox members J. Robbins and Bill Barbot did when they went on to Burning Airlines three years after this album, I have to think it was just plain stubbornness. Who knows, though…”Iodine” is fairly low key, sounds pretty, and is easily the best song here, while “Chinese Fork Tie” is one of their least conventional, fitting into the atonal/off-kilter-rhythms category above, and I love it.

This is a borderline three-and-a-half lunchboxes CD. Even though they rarely get greatness from beginning to end on a song, overall the interesting moments outweigh the also significant portion of unnecessary sound. You also have to give it props for having five mix CD candidates, a very good number. It’s not the first time I’ve said this, and it certainly won’t be the last, but this might have even been four-lunchboxes good if they’d just cut four or five songs off, mostly toward the end. As it is, it’s still less than 45 minutes, so I guess I can’t accuse them of being motivated just by all the empty space on a CD, as they’ve left plenty.

Clearly, as the last two paragraphs reveal, I have some mixed and conflicting feelings about this album and the band that made it. In the end, Jawbox is one of the most frustrating band I’ve encountered. When they’re good, they’re so very good and ripe with potential, but when they’re bad they’re as meh as it gets.

Rating:

Mixers: “Mirrorful,” “Iodine,” “His Only Trade,” “Chinese Fork Tie,” “Spoiler”
Keepers: “Livid,” “Chinese Fork Tie,” “Won’t Come Off,” “Desert Sea,” “Capillary Life”
Filed Between: For Your Own Special Sweetheart and Jayhawks (Hollywood Town Hall)

“Well this sure is a crappy pity party.”

Bo Diddley: 1928-2008

(Photo CBC)

I’m not the only one who thinks the number of Puerto Rico’s delegates is crazy. Thankfully, other people even dig a bit deeper in their research. I’ll borrow some here from kos.

That’s 27 states that have fewer delegates than Puerto Rico does, even though Puerto Rico is not a state. Even if apportioned by population, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Alabama are larger than Puerto Rico.

As Cliff Clavin would say, “Seriously, folks. What’s up with that?”

And it wasn’t the first time, either. Via BarbinMD at Daily Kos, there is this craziness from the March 6 Time:

Q: One group that probably ultimately wouldn’t want it to go on too long is the Democratic Party itself. Can you envision a point at which — if the race stays this close — and with the difficulties that everyone has analyzed in accumulating enough delegates to get any distance ahead where party elders would step in and say “Senators Clinton and Obama, this is now hurting the party and whoever will be the nominee in the fall. We need to figure this out.”
A: No I really can’t. I think people have short memories. Primary contests used to last a lot longer. We all remember the great tragedy of Bobby Kennedy being assassinated in June in L.A. My husband didn’t wrap up the nomination in 1992 until June, also in California. Having a primary contest go through June is nothing particularly unusual.

And could it have been an accident it happened on the Friday before a holiday weekend, where it was enough to plant the seed, knowing the controversy would be old news by the time people got back to paying attention on Tuesday?

I just can’t give her the benefit of the doubt on this one. She’s too smart and politically savvy to make such a fortunately-timed mistake twice.

And besides, if what you’re saying is, “I’m staying in the race because, hey, you never know, somebody might assassinate Obama,” then really haven’t you made your own case for how ridiculous it is that you’re still in the race?

On a related note, I really like it when the media points out lies.

In the same editorial board meeting, Clinton said “it is unprecedented in history” for political activists to urge a candidate to withdraw when his or her chances of winning the nomination appear remote. In fact, such events have happened several times.

OMG.

Sen. Hillary Clinton referred Friday to the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968 Democratic campaign as a reason she should continue to campaign despite increasingly long odds.

We’ll start this review off with your music lesson for the day…or year, maybe, since I don’t do these as often as I intend to. Anyway, today’s topic is the delay. Here I’m not talking about the guitar effects pedal where what you play is delayed slightly for effect, but rather the delay in music theory.

This type of delay is when the movement in the melody lags behind the movement in the harmony. This usually happens at a cadence, the end of a musical phrase, where the harmony resolves to the tonic (that sound that lets you know a song, or phrase, is completed). In the case of a band like Radiohead, this means that everybody in the band will move onto the phrase’s closing chord, but Thom Yorke will continue to sing his previous note which was a part of the prior chord, before resolving to the tonic a beat or two later. It creates a sense of delayed gratification…like when you finally get with that girl from class after you’ve spent years repressing your mutual urges, releasing them only in occasional, light flirting in the hall.

It’s a relevant lesson for Radiohead’s 1993 debut, Pablo Honey, because you can hear Yorke developing skill in his melodic delays, something he would have perfected by the time the band released their third album, OK Computer.

While later Radiohead has mastered that kind of emotional manipulation, it’s fun to listen to how the band started off. This album finds them with a much more straightforward rock approach, with a bit of an edgier, more raw sound that, while good, doesn’t quite get as huge and symphonic as their later work would. The guitar distortion is kind of the standard rock distortion you’ll find in countless bands, and the song structures, despite some complexities here and there (the “She’s running out the door” part of “Creep,” for one) are fairly straightforward, too. They remind me a lot of early-ish U2, and Yorke’s held notes and mild warbles are definitely influenced by Bono’s likewise emotional style from that period.

Lyrically, “Creep” is not an aberration on this album, as most of the songs are about loneliness, timidity, sadness and anger towards ex-girlfriends and unnamed jock-like villains, and every other clichéd emotion the skinny indie kid should feel. And on the rare occasion that they do break out of that mold, it’s in some mix of ecstatic celebration or ironic sarcasm. In “Anyone Can Play Guitar,” you get the feeling that Yorke believes in the transformative power of creating art, but is trying really, really hard not to, or maybe just guarding against the trappings of rock stardom: “And if the world does turn and if London burns/I’ll be standing on the beach with my guitar/I want to be in a band when I get to heaven/Anyone can play guitar and they won’t be a nothing any more.” From isolation to reflections on rock gods…it’s like a Smashing Pumpkins album with good music.

Great music, in fact, but I didn’t want to put that phrase too close to that band’s name for fear of upsetting the powers that be in our universe.

Rating:

Mixers: “Creep,” “Anyone Can Play Guitar,” “Blow Out”
Non-keepers: “Creep (Radio Edit)”
Filed Between: R.E.M. (Automatic For The People) and Radiohead’s OK Computer

Normally this odd news stuff drives me nuts. It maddens me to think of the media ignoring the crimes of this administration while breathlessly covering a cat finding his owners after they moved hundreds of miles away.

However, as somebody who has had numerous surgeries on his esophagus and has spent countless hours in remote emergency rooms, this one from the AP caught my eye.

The 55-year-old Omaha man who performed a tracheotomy on himself with a steak knife says he did the same thing to himself two years ago.

Steve Wilder said Friday that his throat is shrunken because of radiation treatments for cancer. Those treatments ended four years ago, but scar tissue remains. He said seasonal allergies may have caused his struggle to breathe overnight April 30.

[Wilder said,] “I got relief right away. There was a big gush of blood, and I was able to start sucking in air.”

…

“I thought [the ambulance] might get here fast enough that I wouldn’t have to do that,” he said. “But I couldn’t breathe no more.”

He bolted for the kitchen and picked up a steak knife and made a quarter-inch incision.

“I knew that would chop it open pretty good,” he said.

I’ve never had to do anything like that, thank goodness, but on a beautiful June day in Minnesota they did send me home from the ER with a big chunk of food caught in my throat since I could still, very painfully, get water down. They didn’t want to call the on-call doctor in on a nice day, so they sent me home and told me to come back on Monday. The funny part is I was okay with that because I felt bad about calling in the doctor on a beautiful day. Man, the power of a Minnesota spring. I had a miserable evening, but when I woke up the next morning the food had made its way down on its own.

My problems are with my food pipe, not my wind pipe, so Wilder’s issues are even more critical. As if the ambulance coming slowly and me being sent home because the weather was nice wasn’t enough, how is this for an indictment of our health care system?

A tracheotomy, a procedure that opens up the windpipe, typically is done in a surgical setting. Wilder said he isn’t ready to perform tracheotomies on other people.

But his doctor told him that he did a pretty good job on himself.

“I told him we should split the bill then,” Wilder said.

Next thing you know we’ll all be expected to come in having done the major parts of the surgery with the doctor only providing “expertise” to prescribe antibiotics and do the final polishing.