The Vulgar Toothpick

Slate reports that the mysterious object of Henry James's novel The Ambassadors has been found out.

"It's a little thing they make—make better, it appears, than other people can, or than other people, at any rate, do," says Strether. When prompted to explain further, he again equivocates, describing the business as "a manufacture that, if it's only properly looked after, may well be on the way to become a monopoly." Impatient with Strether's "postponements," Gostrey asks him whether the article in question is something improper—perhaps even unmentionable?..

In the 1880s, Forster patented a revolutionary new machine that polished, rounded, compressed, and sharpened toothpicks. This new toothpick was a marvel, according to Petroski, "ahead of its time as a designed object." Now consider Strether's first impression of Chad Newsome, whom he hasn't seen in five years when he finally tracks him down:

Chad was brown and thick and strong; and of old Chad had been rough. Was all the difference therefore that he was actually smooth? Possibly; for that he was smooth was as marked as in the taste of a sauce or in the rub of a hand. ... It was as if in short he had really, copious perhaps but shapeless, been put into a firm mould and turned successfully out.
James had a habit of associating his characters with a specific piece of scenery or work of art, or, in The Ambassadors, manufactured object—recall Sarah Newsome Pocock's safety-match smile. Of Chad Newsome, it might be said that he was as compressed and polished as one of Forster's toothpicks.

The Poverty of Print

From Anthony Grafton, in a New Yorker article about the digitization of libraries:

If you visit the Web site of the Online Computer Library Center and look at its WorldMap, you can see the numbers of books in public and academic systems around the world. Sixty million Britons have a hundred and sixteen million public-library books at their disposal, while more than 1.1 billion Indians have only thirty-six million. Poverty, in other words, is embodied in lack of print as well as in lack of food. The Internet will do much to redress this imbalance, by providing Western books for non-Western readers. What it will do for non-Western books is less clear.

He also includes a 5000-year history of how librarians have tried to organize and circulate an excess of material. It includes a whole paragraph of the early Christian bishop/librarian Eusebius. If that doesn't turn you on, I don't know what will.

No Better Man To Strategize Your Online Products

The New York Times calls this article "An Advocate for TV That Viewers Create," but I totally prefer the International Herald-Tribune's "Al Gore's other cause: Current TV." Check out this quote, by our boy wonder blogger:

"If you build it, they will not necessarily come," Robin Sloan, an online product strategist for Current, wrote in a blog entry. "We have, a number of times, assumed that if we built the Web architecture for citizen journalists to send in their reports, they just would."

They didn't just quote Robin -- they quoted his blog, which is infinitely cooler.

Man, I've totally got to find a way to get my name into the paper of record.

Sasha Frere-Jones Advocates (Musical) Rape

You can't make this stuff up. From his blog:

I am also aware of, and comfortable with, the non-musical meanings of the word “miscegenation.” There are long American traditions of both advocating miscegenation (Ralph Waldo Emerson’s concept of the “smelting pot” is one of the better known tropes) and trying to prevent it, either by outlawing mixed-race marriage or banning representations of miscegenation in film. Also, I wanted the word to emphasize the rough nature of pop, a genre rooted in theft, jury-rigged machines, and barely legal alliances. The birth of rock and roll itself was not a happy event for everyone involved. Miscegenation involves sex (which, as I point out at the end of my piece, is the original meaning of “rock and roll”) but it doesn’t always involve consent. Miscegenation felt like the right word, warts and all.

I wrote before how I thought Sasha Frere-Jones's piece played off of racialized and heteronormative tropes about sex, but this is ridiculous.

I can't even sort this out. Is it a primitive black male sexuality that Frere-Jones wants to celebrate with a rape fantasy, or a kind of white slavemaster's prerogative over black music/women? Then again, there aren't any women in SFJ's account of rock and roll, up to and including its indie rock and hip-hop present -- so the whole thing could be a kind of butch, homosexual rape that somehow doesn't make either participant gay (since SFJ definitely wants to avoid that). So is Mick Jagger sodomizing Little Richard, or is it the other way around? One way or the other, as Snoop Doggy Dogg says on SFJ's favorite album of the 1990s, The Chronic, "I'm hollering 1-8-7 with my dick in your mouth, bitch!"

I'm suddenly reminded of a moment in SFJ's podcast when he complains that James Mercer from The Shins whines too much about lost love. SFJ's advice boils down to, "Grow some stones, stop singing like Morrissey, and show that girl what a man you are, R. Kelly style."

I really think that The New Yorker needs a new pop music critic. One who actually listens to pop music, and writes to the standards set by Alex Ross, Joan Acocella, David Denby, Louis Menand, Calvin Trillin, James Surowiecki, Seymour Hersh, George Packer, Malcolm Gladwell, David Remnick, and Peter Schjeldahl. Think about what those writers write, and then think about Sasha Frere-Jones. I know we don't have a country full of Lester Bangses right now, but I bet that if you made an offer to Greil Marcus, he'd say yes. It's enough to make you sad.

The Rural Midwest Is A Real Sleeper

Andrew Bird and the band Dianogah have a free set of mp3s available from their Daytrotter session. (Be sure to also visit this link to download "The Giant of Illinois.")

Armchair Apocrypha's "Fiery Crash" gets a much-improved full-voiced treatment from Bird, along with a richer, fuller acoustic texture, even if it loses some of the propulsiveness of the original studio release. "Lull," from Weather Systems, still my all-time favorite of Bird's recordings, gets similarly drawn out, becoming "a little too laid-back," as Sylvia noted, but still astonishingly beautiful. Let's hope the promised re-take on the next album is more "Skin (Is My)" than "I"/"Imitosis."

The instrumental "A Breaks B" adds some much-needed energy, with Bird's frenetic violin helping tilt the sonic resonance from mid-period Tortoise to a less-electric Books. The sound recording on "Plasticities" is a little buzzy, but it still highlights that song's lovely, inspired introduction and verses, which gobble up the once-electric chorus. I wish Bird had rethought this section altogether rather than dropping the musical change outright. The guitar line in Armchair Apocrypha might be the dumbest riff ever, but this version, at over seven minutes long, is too samey and shapeless, even with Bird's fine multitracked solo at the end.

The song that will attract the most attention, though, is the delicate, slightly melancholy "The Giant of Illinois," a strong companion to Bird's "Don't Be Scared," penned by the same band. Go check it out.

Musical Analogy of the Day

If, as I believe, Animal Collective's Feels is a polymorphously perverse Pet Sounds, then AC's Avey Tare is a fusion of Mike Love with those two most eclectically perverse of frontmen: Damo Suzuki from Can, and The Pixies' Black Francis.

The Love and the Theft Never End

First of all, I am not Tim Mohr.

However, judging by this post he wrote for the Playboy Blog on Sasha Frere Jones's "A Paler Shade of White," either he read my post on the same subject (in which case I should be upset) or we (Mohr, Slate's Carl Wilson, and myself) are all on to something.

And that something is (and here I'll borrow Tim Mohr's words): Sasha Frere-Jones is a jackass. And a sloppy one, at that.

(Via Stereogum.)

Give Me Your Poor

You know, since I read Carl Wilson's "The Trouble With Indie Rock," I've been thinking a lot about his thesis that the real change in indie rock, perhaps more in this decade than the last, has been in the class background and identity of the artists and audiences, rather than their ethno-musical pedigree. This argument picks up on page 2 of Wilson's essay, where his analysis of Frere-Jones's essay diverges from mine. Here is a good summary section:

Ultimately, though, the "trouble with indie rock" may have far more to do with another post-Reagan social shift, one with even less upside than the black-white story, and that's the widening gap between rich and poor. There is no question on which side most indie rock falls. It's a cliche to picture indie musicians and fans as well-off "hipsters" busily gentrifying neighborhoods, but compared to previous post-punk generations, the particular kind of indie rock Frere-Jones complains about is more blatantly upper-middle class and liberal-arts-college-based, and less self-aware or politicized about it.

With its true spiritual center in Richard Florida-lauded "creative" college towns such as Portland, Ore., this is the music of young "knowledge workers" in training, and that has sonic consequences: Rather than body-centered, it is bookish and nerdy; rather than being instrumentally or vocally virtuosic, it shows off its chops via its range of allusions and high concepts with the kind of fluency both postmodern pop culture and higher education teach its listeners to admire. (Many rap MCs juggle symbologies just as deftly, but it's seldom their main point.) This doesn't make coffeehouse-indie shallow, but it can result in something more akin to the 1960s folk revival, with fretful collegiate intellectuals in a Cuban Missile Crisis mood, seeking purity and depth in antiquarian music and escapist spirituality. Not exactly a recipe for a booty-shaking party. While this scene can embrace some fascinating hermetic weirdos such as Joanna Newsom or Panda Bear, it's also prone to producing fine-arts-grad poseurs such as the Decemberists and poor-little-rich-boy-or-girl singer songwriters who might as well be James Taylor. This year even saw several indie bands playing in "Pops" concerts at summer symphony programs; that's no sin (and good for the symphonies), but it's about as class-demarcated as it gets.

Right after I read this, I put my contrarian hat back on and rattled off three counterexamples to Wilson's thesis. But those counterexamples started to bother me. Wilco, Modest Mouse, The Flaming Lips -- these were all older indie bands, old and successful enough not to even be indie anymore (all three are on major labels). They were all a part of the early-to-mid-nineties wave of wide interest in punky, alternative, blue-collar rock inaugurated by bands like The Replacements, Husker Du, and above all, Aberdeen's own Nirvana. These weren't bands started by record-label scions, art-school composers, or post-graduate hipsters with nothing better to do. These were small-town losers with nothing to do at all but get stoned or drunk and make music. And almost all of your favorite indie and alternative acts were like that: Elliot Smith, Pulp, Guided By Voices, Neutral Milk Hotel, Slint, Built To Spill, The Jesus Lizard, The Breeders. Even the rest of the Pixies (besides Kim Deal, who never went to college) were college dropouts.

The question is, where are those small-town losers now? If you really think about it, the big indie bands that can claim or at least represent some kind of blue-collar background are all older, and they've all been around for about ten years or longer: Besides the bands above, there's Chan Marshall, Bill Callahan, Will Oldham, Jack White, and a few others. Has indie rock been ceded to the college kids in the metropolis? And if so, why is that?

Philadelphia Comes Ugly, Minneapolis a Utopia

According to Travel and Leisure magazine, Philadelphia ranks dead last for attractive people in the city. Reuters has the story:

For unattractiveness, Philadelphia just beat out Washington DC and Dallas/Fort Worth for the bottom spot. Miami and San Diego are home to the most attractive people, the poll found.

But [senior editor Amy] Farley pointed out the results don't mean people in Philadelphia are ugly or the city is a bad place to visit.

"We were asking people to vote on attractiveness, not unattractiveness. Travel & Leisure editors believe there are a lot of attractive people in Philadelphia," she said.

"The relative attractiveness of its residents is only a minuscule factor in evaluating a city's merit."

Bear in mind, Philadelphia isn't the ugliest city in America -- just 25th out of the 25 cities they surveyed. (Minneapolis is 8th? I've gotta fly out of that airport more often.) But Reuters rubs it in:

Philadelphians' self-esteem has been undermined by national surveys showing they are among the fattest people in the United States. The American Obesity Association ranked the city in the top 10 for overweight people every year between 2000 and 2005.

And sporting pride in a city known for the fierce loyalty of its fans has been hurt by not having had a national champion in any of its four main sports since the 76ers won the National Basketball Association title in 1983.

That is just cold blooded.

Philadelphia also ranks 20th out 25 for friendliest cities, and 14th out of 25 for most intelligent. Minneapolis is 3rd and 2nd, respectively.

That's it -- let's spring for parkas and a minivan, and move.

* Hat Tip to PON for the link. Cross-posted at Young Philly Politics.

He Recycles

I'm not always a fan of the New York Times's Vows section, but Deneta Howland and Bryan Sells' story is one of the better ones I've read in quite a while.

Bryan Sells knew he was attracted to Deneta Howland the moment they met in 1989. She was the first person he saw when he arrived as a freshman at Harvard for a community volunteer program. “My cab door opened, and Deneta was there to greet me,” said Mr. Sells, now 36, remembering the sunny day and the vibrant smile of his group leader.

They were both native Virginians and shared a passion for social justice, becoming friends while painting a mural at a homeless shelter in Boston.

My favorite part, though, is this: "Mr. Sells worked up the courage by the next summer to invite her to an Anita Baker concert. Dr. Howland assumed his interest was platonic. He assumed Anita Baker would put anyone in a romantic mood. They were both mistaken." And I can tell you -- in 1990, Anita Baker was the move any white guy would have made. It took Mr. Sells another decade of dogged persistence to seal the deal.

My wife spotted and read this article to me, and after we talked about it for a little while, I asked her to show me a picture of Dr. Howland and Mr. Sells. I said about Dr Howland, "She is six kinds of attractive." She said of Mr. Sells, "He needs a beard." All of this tells me that my wife and I are perfect for one another.