Miss Piggy Lunchbox

Finally.  After months of waiting, wondering, worrying, getting advice from all corners, reading the tea leaves, and generally obsessing over what the future would bring, we find ourselves at a wondrous, joyous resolution.  Sometimes it seemed inevitable.  At other times, we had doubts we could pull it off, plagued by self doubt and assured ourselves we could only fail.

That’s right, both news stories I’ve been obsessively following for the past several months resolved on the same day.  Yesterday afternoon the Twins announced they signed Joe Mauer, and late last night the Democrats sent Health Care Reform to Obama’s desk.  Now I can finally get some restful sleep.

It’s time to fix the Senate.  The way you fix a howling male dog.

Republican Senator Richard Shelby has put a blanket hold on EVERY one of Obama’s 70 nominations currently on the Senate calendar for confirmation.  Because he can’t get some pork project for Alabama moved through.  Because, yeah, this is clearly what those rules are set up for.

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has put an extraordinary “blanket hold” on at least 70 nominations President Obama has sent to the Senate, CongressDaily (sub. req.) reports. The hold means no nominations can move forward unless Senate Democrats can secure a 60-member cloture vote to break it, or until Shelby lifts the hold.

…

According to the report, Shelby is holding Obama’s nominees hostage until a pair of lucrative programs that would send billions in taxpayer dollars to his home state get back on track.

…

A San Diego State University professor and “Congressional expert” told the paper “he knew of no previous use of a blanket hold” in recent history.

This is exactly the problem with our government.  Each senator has too much power.  You wouldn’t dream of writing up a system of government where you have 101 Presidents, yet that’s essentially what we’ve got, where any single Senator with a bone to pick can bring the government to a screeching halt.

Break up the Senate.  Blow up all of their rules.  Get rid of this individual hold BS, and destroy the filibuster so badly that it never ever comes back.  Hell, get rid of the chamber all together…what a waste of breath those people are.  Except for Franken, my all-time second-favorite senator.  He’s cool…and he holds the same seat as my all-time favorite senator: Paul Wellstone.

And Jesus H.  This is the group that thinks they’re going to design a college football playoff system?  I mean, even beyond being a waste of their time, I can’t even imagine what a playoff system would look like if it were designed by the same a-holes who crafted the Senate rules.  So let’s see, there’s 8 teams, and one-third of those teams changes every two years, and you have to beat six of the other teams in order to win the championship, and if nobody beats six other teams then there is no champion.  And there’s only a championship held every two years because everybody’s scared to play anybody in the year when the new playoff teams will enter so really there’s hardly ever any change in membership.

So that happened.

Defeat -> Jaws of victory -> Vikings -> Snatch!

The Red Sox of the NFL strike again, managing to get oh so close and once again amaze us with their ability to lose in new and unimagined ways.  Our biggest rival’s greatest player ever joins us to be thwarted by a 12 man in the huddle penalty to push us out of field goal range?  Wow…didn’t see that one coming.

I’m very sad, natch, but am handling this one in stride, much unlike the disaster of 1999.  It’s just who the Vikings are.  If they were different, they wouldn’t be the Vikings.  It’s just their way…you don’t know what it’s like when we’re alone together.

Besides, since 1999 I lived through the W presidency, and two financial crises (and two respective turns of unemployment), and the health care reform and Haiti disasters of the last two weeks served to provide some immediate perspective as well.  So I’m not completely distraught, and I’m not disowning them like I did for a few years after 1999, either.  I’m owning them, wearing them like a battle scar, a badge of…not honor…but a badge of something.

The Vikings are like sun spots, managing to lose NFC championships in stunning, painful, head-shaking fashion every 11 years.  1988, dropped pass in the end zone.  1999, the best Vikings team ever lost as the only field goal kicker ever to make every kick in a season missed a relatively easy kick indoors.  2010, well, we’ve covered that.  And don’t forget about that one year we needed to beat an awful Arizona team in the last week just to make the playoffs and we let them score a last second touchdown on something like 4th and 25 from midfield.  I’ve got money on an excessive celebration penalty in 2021.

How can you not?

Wuttaweek.

Also, I love the Dome.  Again, how can you not?  It hosts four must-win games in a row with a Monday night match-up between Favre and the Packers stuck right in the middle.

Like I said, wuttaweek.

Recently a friend asked me, when I told him about the misery I had immediately in front of me in my listening queue, “Why do you do that to yourself?” I sighed and admitted my own puzzlement, but now I remember…this is why I do it. Because there are gems out there that time and circumstances have let fall by the wayside…gems that should be discovered and treasured, not forgotten in the dustheap…some of which even sound horrible on their first couple of listens.

That’s the category of this release by Sam Iam, an early 90’s band from Minneapolis. I don’t have any more bio on the band than that, really, but I wanted to make it explicit because you can’t imagine how much effort it took just to learn that. You see, this band is not to be confused with the Berkeley punk band Samiam, who is thanked in these liner notes, nor the rapper Sam I Am. Add those other artists into the mix with the phrase’s ubiquity (as well as that of the album’s title) and Sam Iam’s obscurity and you’ve got a band and album that are pretty well Google-blocked.

Now, this isn’t a discovered gem of the same caliber as Jump, Little Children’s Magazine, which literally put a spring in my step for a few weeks about a year ago. This disc hasn’t changed my life. Still, I’m glad I’ve heard it, especially “Moon And Stars,” “Die Alone,” and “Skin And Bones,” the three best songs here.

Sonically, Sam Iam played pretty straight-forward rock with an emphasis on melodies and some funk and rap elements thrown in. The backbeats hit hard when they want them, too, many lines are more rapped than sung, and much of the guitar work is wah-wah based. This gets overdone at times, like the overt plod of “Drop Your Drawers,” a tale similar to that of “Darling Nikki,” by fellow Minneapolitan Prince, or their medley of Ohio Players’ “Brick House” and Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion,” which is arranged well, but should have been left to be performed by the original artists.

Still, there are plenty of moments where this band finds their space and nails it. “Skin And Bones” is a real nice groove, and “Die Alone” is musically fantastic even if it’s “Ghost Of A Chance”-like (Rush) lyrics veer pretty close to wince-inducing cheese (a problem that also mars “Corporate Couple (Get The Funk),” which features the third-grade phrase “beautiful on the inside”). “Warm Bunny, Soft Blanket” is almost a bit of a joke on death metal, but I love the 45 seconds of noise and the chugging guitar riff. “Tupperware Party” isn’t the greatest song, but its innuendo-filled lyrics about solutions for keeping your lettuce crisper display a wit that absolves the bands of their other lyrical transgressions. I’m even entertained by “Bus,” a tale of the features and travails of the best public transportation Minneapolis had to offer in 1991.

So this is why I listen to so much crap…because it’s a volume game for me. I just listen and listen and listen and sometimes I run into something I never would have found without doing so much listening. Given the new distribution model for music, there’s got to be a better strategy than my five-times-per-CD approach, and I’m definitely moving more in that direction, but still…I never would have found Sam Iam without the all-CDs-welcome methodology I currently employ.

And it’s still a surprise to me how I encountered this. Why did this end up in benefactor J-mez’ collection, who didn’t move to Minneapolis until 1999?

Rating:

Mixers: none
Non-keepers: “Corporate Couple (Get The Funk),” “Drop Your Drawers,” “Windows,” “Sweet Brick House Emotion,” “Tie Dye Tuxedo”
Filed Between: Saint Etienne (Foxbase Alpha) and Samiam (Soar)

Minnesota finally has their second Senator.  And after all that, I got nuthin’.  (Sorry, I’ve been a bit sick lately.)  But the next 5.5 years look very entertaining.

As a final note, I have to note that Talking Points Memo’s TPMDC had the best coverage, and I have to thank that site for keeping me informed.  I checked their MN Senate page several times a day over the last five months.

In preparation for Sub Pop 20, I loaded up just about every Sub Pop CD I owned to my DMP so I could immerse myself in the performers’ catalogs prior to that show. Since these were albums I owned prior to MPL and my DMP, they never went through a formal review, nor do I plan to formally review them. That means, then, that these albums, along with a bunch of others I’ve loaded up for other reasons, still have all their songs loaded on there, even if they may not all be keepers.

Obviously, this must not stand. So I’m introducing pruning. For albums that were owned prior to my DMP but loaded on because I liked listening to them, I will give them a truncated review, consisting of little more than an estimated rating and the categorization of the tracks, in order to prune off the non-keepers.

The first of these is Secret Name by Duluth’s Low, which, every time I listen to it, strikes me as way better than I remember it being. I love this album.

Estimated Rating:

Mixers: “Two-Step,” “Missouri,” “Immune,” “Will The Night”
Non-keepers: “Home”
Filed Between: Loverboy (Wildside) and The Lucky Stars (Hollywood & Western)

The Irish Brigade is a duo of native Irishmen who now ply their trade via the Midwest interstate, doing turns in the Twin Cities, Omaha, and St. Louis.  I saw them at least a couple of times at St. Paul’s Half Time Rec and remember enjoying myself but also being kind of worn out on Irish music after an hour or so.

This CD is about 56 minutes, so I’m not tired of it by the time it finishes, but it’s still pretty ‘meh.’ The liner notes don’t have many details, but I get the feeling this is rich with original compositions and short on the traditional Irish canon I remember from their shows. That may have something to do with the meh, or it may be that these guys just thrive on a drunk, participative crowd. Either way, once you get past the mixers and keepers, it’s enjoyable but flat at its best (“Jigs,” “Black Is The Colour”) and downright aggravating at its worst (“Westmeath Bachelor” and “The Voyage”). The fidelity is fantastic.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Keepers: “Rose Marie,” “Barleycorn And Reel Tarbolton,” “Lonesome Boatman,” “Boolevogue And Reels,” “Home Away From Home”
Filed Between: International Pop Underground Convention and Iron And Wine (The Shepherd’s Dog)

So, you might remember that Al Franken beat Norm Coleman for one of Minnesota’s Senate seats.  Thanks to funding from Washington Republicans, Franken still hasn’t been seated due to Coleman’s appeals.

To recap, Coleman was up by a mere 215 votes on election night, triggering an automatic recount.  Coleman said that if we were in Franken’s shoes he would concede because “the healing process is so impoatant.”  Screw that noise, Franken said.  After the recount, during which Coleman tried to keep votes from being counted, Franken was up by 225 and declared the victor.

Then Coleman, despite his earlier rhetoric, appealed.  And, naturally, during the court appeal reversed course and tried to get some 4,000+ rejected ballots counted.  The court decided that 351 of them had been, indeed, improperly rejected.  So they were opened and counted.  The results? Franken 198, Coleman 111, Other 42 (there was a strong third-party candidate in this election, as there has been in most statewide elections in Minnesota since Ventura’s success).  So now Franken leads by 312.  Nice appeal there, Normie.

Of course, Coleman is taking the appeal to the state Supreme Court while 63% of Minnesotans say he should concede and newspapers that endorsed him during the campaign are calling on him to do the same.

To those ends, the DNC is asking supporters to post these fliers all over the state.  Here’s my part:

Coleman has never done anything good.  St. Paul was a miserable, miserable place under his reign as mayor, making its fantastic comebackas a place you would actually want to go only after he left.  He lost in the gubenatorial race to Jesse Ventura, then served as Bush’s lap dog in the Senate for years.   His accomplishments amount to zilch…how he has risen this far in life is beyond me.  Thankfully he won’t be around much longer.

Sometimes in my continuing quest to listen to everything, I run through a stretch much like the current one where everything is swimming in mediocrity. When that happens, I give serious consideration to giving up, to just hunkering down with the music I know I love for the rest of my life. Invariably, though, if I keep fighting through it, I come across something that makes it all worthwhile, like the new album from Minneapolis avant-garde jazz trio The Bad Plus.

This is everything I love about discovering new music. It’s appealing at first, and on repeated listens opens itself up to your ears as they get to know each song’s individuality, finding and loving every hidden nook and cranny that you can only appreciate after experiencing it several times.

This album is 12 tracks of 11 cover songs. The original artists run from Yes to Milton Babbit, from Pink Floyd to Stravinsky, from The Flaming Lips to Ligeti. It’s as amazing as it sounds and even better than the similarly-themed album by Brad Mehldau Trio I reviewed three years ago.

These covers aren’t just curiosities. This group of musicians, now joined by the wonderful, smokey-voiced Wendy Lewis, adds a completely new spin on all of them. They haven’t just replaced the electric bass with stand-up and drum sticks with brushes: these songs have been ripped down to their foundations to be rebuilt in the image of The Bad Plus. Instead of soft-to-loud, the chorus of Nirvana’s “Lithium” is set off from the rest of the song by emphasizing piano. Heart’s “Barracuda,” which I hate, is fantastic here, with a slow-down-speed-up rhythm at the end that is so awesome it has me “down down down down on my knees.” I don’t quite get the scream on “Comfortably Numb” being transformed into silence, but the cascading waterfall of the piano perfectly illustrates the song’s dreamlike quality and the immaculately-controlled chaos at the end reveals the protagonist’s illness and situation better than even Floyd did.

I’m not familiar with “How Deep Is Your Love” by The Bee Gees, but the version here is the Best Song Ever. Heck, these guys even make me love “Radio Cure,” originally from Wilco’s forgettable Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Literally forgettable: I had no idea I’d ever heard the song before until I looked it up and realized I own it in its original form. The only track I’m not getting into is Roger Miller’s “Lock, Stock and Teardrops,” which, like a lot of these tracks, starts off very languid, but never really pulls itself together save for a few seconds of Lewis drawing me in by nailing the high notes with nearly enough feeling in them to carry the entire tune.

Thanks, Bad Plus, for pulling me out of my most recent musical funk. You’ve been the bright spot in a gloomy week.

Rating:

Mixers: “Lithium,” “Long Distance Runaround,” “How Deep Is Your Love,” “Barracuda,” “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate”
Non-keeper: “Lock, Stock and Teardrops”
Filed Between: The Bad Plus’ Give and Badlands – A Tribute To Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska