please…make…her…stop

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

is this hillary’s attempt at mobilizing young voters via viral video?

if so, it’s hard to imagine a more tone-deaf attempt.

if not, the campaign should have had the foresight to not let a camera anywhere near this spectacle. or, indeed, not produce the spectacle in the first place.

i can live with that

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

so mitt romney is out, which means that john mccain is the republican nominee.

I’ll probably still vote for whoever the democratic nominee is, although if hillary is the nominee i will give mccain a good hard look. if obama is the nominee then there’s no question — he’s my man.

(and to all that vice-presidential talk floated by the clintons to lessen obama’s perceived stature: don’t do it. i don’t want him tainted by them in any way, and anyway, he’d be #3 behind bill)

as someone said to me last night, it’s nice to know all your choices are decent candidates and you are choosing the best from among them, when usually you are holding your nose and picking the best of a bad lot.

there are few issues with which i am in complete agreement with john mccain, but most are moderate enough that i would not drive off a cliff if he were elected. we need a different direction in this country, and he would be different enough for me. he’s certainly a different republican than most we’ve been seeing, and his fical conservatism is right up my alley. god knows that just the fact that he drives right-wingers crazy is enough for me.

for me to actively vote for him, hillary would have to be the nominee, and i’d have to consider whether that fiscal conservatism was enough of a mitigating factor to outweigh his negatives. versus whether hillary’s positives on the issues are enough of a mitigating factor to outweigh what would be four/eight more years of slash-and-burn politics.

still, today, with these particular three little indians remaining standing, i’m pretty optimistic about the future of my country. each of the three has at least something i can like.

not bad after the last eight years of nonsense, i’d say.

mike gravel, i hardly knew ye

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

voted for barack obama this morning, as i thought i would.

but then, of course, with perfect timing, i later ran across this jezebel.com interview with mike gravel.

i vaguely remember a few digg stories about how well gravel did in early debates. and, like some of the story’s commenters, i once did an online candidate chooser, and his name came up on top along with dennis kucinich. and, much like them, i paid attention to kucinich, ignored gravel, and figured out how closely i agreed with the candidates i was leaning towards. name recognition value, and all.

but damn, is it a shame. gravel makes a lot of sense.

from the article:

What I want us to do is to take our place as an equal in the world and commit to the United Nations and work for world governance and world peace. We now have globalization of the economy; of science; of the ability to destroy the planet; and of the environment. You can’t just turn back time. [Ron Paul is] steeped in that redneck philosophy that we can’t give up sovereignty. I’m suggesting that we move some of that sovereignty away from the nation-state structure and into a world governance structure. We will never have peace on earth until we have global governance. The United Nations is a good charter but it’s not functioning on its charter, it’s become paralyzed and non-functional as states seek to use it to protect sovereignty at all costs. That’s not how to get to world peace.

now how many candidates are calling for world government?

or this:

If you vote for power over substance, then you won’t ever get either. You’ve got to vote for substance regardless of who you think will win, because you’ll see that substance will win out in the end.

damn right, and the reason i voted for rev. al in the last presidential primary.

so, why didn’t i vote for mike gravel? damn good question. as it turns out, he wasn’t on the ballot in new york. too expensive and complicated, i suppose. and even if he was on the ballot, i’m not sure i would have voted for him. his main issue is to start having ballot initiatives on the federal level, and my initial reaction to that, without researching, is disaster. i lived in florida for too long, where every goofball organization that wants to ban gay marriage or whatever can just bypass the legislature.

i’m glad i voted for obama, especially since it’s so close with hillary. i’d say that i voted for a viable candidate (obama) rather than potentially voting for a non-viable candidate (gravel, for instance), but that’s a dangerous path.

i don’t regret my vote.

much.

listening to hillary

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

kirk and i don’t have cable tv, and our tv doesn’t have a tuner, so no television for us. but we have wanted to see one of the debates, so we tuned in to last night’s debate between hillary clinton and barack obama. tuned in via cnn.com, which provides a live feed.

a very tiny live feed, in a window that can’t be made full screen on the computer. a computer which is maybe 10 feet away from the couch. so, rather than crowding around the computer to watch micro-hillary and mini-obama, we just turned up the sound and listened.

and, i have to admit, hillary didn’t bug me as much when i wasn’t looking at her. kirk said the same thing. i’m sure it’s my prejudgment of her that i need to get past. but she sounded strong, effective, wise, informed, and remarkably relaxed. and she had the best line of the night:

“It did take a Clinton to clean after the first Bush and I think it might take another one to clean up after the second Bush.”

a bit too pat and rehearsed and poll-tested, but still, there’s a point there.

i’m still supporting obama. hillary still exhausts me. and, i never thought i’d say this, but after bill clinton’s recent antics i’d prefer to keep him away from the oval office in any capacity.

but.

i think i could live with her being president.

i think i could live with john mccain as well, though that bears further investigation.

obama would be a dream.

morning in america, indeed.

update: on the other hand, ann coulter said yesterday that if mccain is nominated, she will actively support hillary. maybe i need to rethink all this.

confirmed: i’m supporting barack obama

~ jamie ~ 2 Comments

i’ve been thinking about supporting obama. i liked his book, and following his campaign i’ve liked what i’ve seen.

two things have pushed me over the edge toward full-fledged support.

the first was caroline kennedy’s endorsement yesterday.

I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.

she doesn’t mince words. it doesn’t get much more direct, or moving, than that.

the second thing was in today’s paper, a story on gay democrats and the primaries:

In an address last week honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at a black church in Atlanta, Senator Obama made waves by lecturing the audience about homophobia. “We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them,” he said during the speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. King served as co-pastor with his father.

Joe Solmonese, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay lobbying group, said he thought Mr. Obama’s speech was the first time a presidential candidate had brought up gay issues in front of a nongay audience without being prompted to do so. “This is dramatically refreshing,” he said. “It’s a great day when we can look at a field of candidates and determine that we are comfortable with all of them on gay rights and move on to other issues.”

i’m not a single issue voter. but gay issues are important to me, and obama’s choice of raising of this issue in this arena shows real leadership. it shows he puts his truth ahead of his politics. it’s a telling anecdote, and that’s enough for me.

stimulate this, congress

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

i like getting money as much as the next guy.

and a $600 check will certainly be welcome, and if/when i get my stimulus check from congress, i will put it toward a credit card balance.

but the idea that we have to send everyone checks to stimulate the economy is nonsense. you’d think it was an election year, the way that congress is nakedly pandering to the electorate.

perhaps stimulus is needed, although i maintain foresight and planning would have been better. but given this bunch of fools, that’s too much to ask. it was apparent to anyone with half a brain that the real estate runup was a bubble that would burst, just like the internet bubble and, indeed, tulip mania before it. wiser people than me could have figured out how to avoid all this, although i’m sure that most of the people who saw it coming were busy figuring ways to profit from the downturn.

i’m no financial genius, but even i knew better than to get one of these foolish interest-only balloon-payment mortgages. we got a thirty-year fixed mortgage for an apartment we could comfortably afford on just one of our salaries, in case anything drastic ever happened. and now i’m expected to smile while my tax dollars bail out idiots whose greed led them to buy more house than they could possibly afford, signing mortgages they now claim not to have understood. know what? you signed it. your decision. your fault. you pay the consequences, not me.

but i know that we live in a financially interconnected world, and if everything goes to hell i will be affected, and we’re all in this together, and what not. it’s offensive to me that our prosperity, and our financial rescue, will come at the hands of countries like china, who finances our debt while millions of their own people live in abject poverty. every time i buy something frivolous i don’t need, it comes directly from the blood of some poverty-stricken third-world person.

but, i’m comfortable, and it’s easy to ignore that, so i do, along with everyone else. when will the ultimate reckoning come? someday. i hope not in my lifetime. at some point, though, this country’s prosperity will come to a sudden, screeching halt, and it won’t be pretty.

in the meantime, we will stimulate the economy with $600 checks, plus $300 extra per child for the breeders. and now the retirees are complaining that they will be left out, so i’m sure someone will see to them as well.

michael kinsley and joe klein touch on this in their columns in time magazine this week. i especially like kinsley’s take, comparing the situation to a drunk’s bender:

I think we should sober up first. Plenty of people are still partying as if it were 2006. Right-wing radio talk shows are still dominated by ads for second mortgages. Every day’s mail still brings fat envelopes from companies begging to issue you a credit card. Every TV commercial that isn’t about some prescription drug for a disease you never heard of (but may well have, now that they mention it) seems to be for payday loans. Always borrow responsibly, they say. A little late for that.

Here’s a thought. Suppose we don’t go further into debt in the name of fiscal stimulus. Suppose we stop selling ourselves piece by piece to foreigners (and suppose we stop blaming the foreigners for problems of our own making). Suppose we use taxing and spending to show the world that we can behave responsibly, see how the world responds to that, and let the Federal Reserve Board supply the stimulus with lower interest rates. If we must have a fiscal stimulus, let’s make sure it’s not too enjoyable. Build some rapid transit; don’t give away any tax breaks.

joe klein comes to much the same conclusion. build some infrastucture. use the money to insulate buildings, make things more energy efficient, build mass transit. give us some energy independence, so we can perhaps avoid some of the troubles that got us where we are now. that’s too much vision to ask from our oilman president, of course, but we can dream.

in the meantime, i guess i’ll wait for my payola to arrive.

my florida friends and relatives: don’t vote for giuliani

~ jamie ~ 2 Comments

it doesn’t look like he will win, and it looks like losing may knock him out of the race for president.

but, my fellow floridians, take it from a former floridian who lived in new york under giuliani for a time: you don’t want this guy as your president.

the new york times summed it up this morning:

The real Mr. Giuliani, whom many New Yorkers came to know and mistrust, is a narrow, obsessively secretive, vindictive man who saw no need to limit police power. Racial polarization was as much a legacy of his tenure as the rebirth of Times Square.

Mr. Giuliani’s arrogance and bad judgment are breathtaking. When he claims fiscal prudence, we remember how he ran through surpluses without a thought to the inevitable downturn and bequeathed huge deficits to his successor. He fired Police Commissioner William Bratton, the architect of the drop in crime, because he couldn’t share the limelight. He later gave the job to Bernard Kerik, who has now been indicted on fraud and corruption charges.

The Rudolph Giuliani of 2008 first shamelessly turned the horror of 9/11 into a lucrative business, with a secret client list, then exploited his city’s and the country’s nightmare to promote his presidential campaign.

if you are voting in the republican primary, and you want someone who will best defend this country from its enemies — pick anyone but this guy, who is in bed with many of our enemies for personal profit.

anyone.

please.

everyblock.com: this could get addictive

~ jamie ~ 3 Comments

via gawker, i found out about this new site, everyblock.com, that aggregates information about your neighborhood from various sources.

right now, it’s only new york, chicago, and san francisco, but i could see this scaling up into national coverage.

there’s lots of great info about my neighborhood. i learned not to eat at tony and val’s pizza, at least not in the near term. i learned that we had 24 total crimes last week. i learned that some clueless yelptard trashed the riverdale garden, which we love.

this site gets priority bookmarking.

jonny greenwood and “popcorn superhet receiver”: no oscar for you

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

jonny greenwood’s score for “there will be blood”, which i discussed in my previous post, has been disqualified from consideration for an oscar this year.

when the nominations came out this morning and he wasn’t on the list, i assumed that he had just been overlooked for his amazing work, which was in my estimation not just the best score of the year, but one of the most effective film scores in my memory.

turns out that apparently people voted for him, as he was included on the academy’s reminder sheets that were mailed to voters over the past few weeks. but because his score included previously used music — some in the public domain, some from his own “popcorn superhet receiver” — the score was declared ineligible just a few days ago, and all the votes for the score were ignored. too late, of course, for any appeal.

boy is this crap. i’d be hopping mad if my vote was wasted because the academy couldn’t get their act together to make a timely ruling.

and i’m furious for jonny greenwood, whose amazing work deserved better treatment.

as did he.

popcorn superhet receiver

~ jamie ~ 3 Comments

kirk and i saw “there will be blood” recently and came out raving about the score, which was by jonny greenwood of radiohead. i thought it was the best thing about the movie, daniel day-lewis included. kirk didn’t go that far, but that’s what makes the phone book.

so when i got a ny times email about the wordless music concert featuring jonny greenwood’s composition “popcorn superhet receiver”, i immediately got tickets.

and the associated article discussed his love of messiaen, a composer that kirk and i love.

sometimes, serendipitously, all signs point to yes.

last night’s concert was a marvel. the venue, an acoustically outstanding church, was filled to overflow capacity with an atypical crowd for orchestral music — lots of groovy williamsburg types who looked to be fleeing for the “l” train afterwards. what an attentive audience, though — much more attentive than the old folks normally attending these things. absolutely rapt, and appropriately so given the well-planned program. each of the three pieces built internally to different climaxes, as did the three pieces taken as a whole.

the first was “sinking of the titanic” by gavin bryars — based on the music that the band played as the boat sank, and interspersed with tape of survivors’ interviews and ambient noise. a bit somnambulant, but relaxing and engaging.

the second was “christian zeal and activity” by john adams. a bit more active musically, and this time the interspersed tape was jimmy swaggart preaching the story of the healing of the man with the withered hand. loved this, because it took me back to that great jimmy swaggart sample in “welcome to paradise” by front 242 (hey poor! you don’t have to be poor anymore! jesus is here!) this piece was shorter quiet sections that built to quick crescendos and repeated the theme.

the last piece was “popcorn superhet receiver”. i’ll excerpt the ny times review to explain:

Mr. Greenwood has described “Popcorn Superhet Receiver,” named for a shortwave radio, as a study in white noise, the electronic whoosh you hear between radio stations. But it also contrasts old and new technologies: white noise is approximated by antique instruments made of wood, horsehair and catgut.

And where pure white noise is an undifferentiated hiss, Mr. Greenwood’s score, even at its most densely atonal, has a consistently alluring shimmer and embraces everything from lush vibrato, glissandos and sudden dynamic shifts to slowly rising chromatic themes. Toward the end his clusters give way to a prismatic full-orchestra pizzicato section: imagine the scherzo of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony on steroids, or acid, or both.

what he said.

all i know is that it was, for me, far and away the most engaging and exciting piece of the evening, mr. greenwood’s celebrity-ness notwithstanding. it had the feel of someone with unlimited talent being finally let loose to express himself in a new medium, to startlingly good effect. the whole evening had a “moment in history” feel, as if you had been in the audience for steve reich’s first performance or something.

i think this greenwood kid may have a future.

update: jonny greenwood is in the scott walker documentary. another artist we’ve discovered and love. this keeps getting weirder and more coincidental.

apple tv: i am [not] moved

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

lots of cool new stuff from apple. including an updated apple tv, which is the thing i’m most likely to buy, but i think the wallet is staying in the pocket for the short term. longer term, there’s a small possibility of an apple tv in my home.

» the apple tv can stream photos and music to your tv. i can do that with the wii and wii transfer.

» the apple tv can show me you tube videos on my tv. using the wii’s browser, i can watch you tube videos on my tv as well.

» the apple tv can feed me audio and video podcasts. i can’t do that on my tv, but i’m not sure i need to. i need to look at the video podcasts that are out there and see if they are compelling.

» the apple tv can let me buy tv shows and rent movies. the buy tv shows bit intrigues, but the rent movies part doesn’t. netflix is cheaper. you can rent hd movies using apple tv, but i’m not sure there’s enough of a visual difference between regular dvd quality and hd quality to make that a reason to shell out the apple tv bucks.

although the apple tv does make me pretty sure i’ll never buy a high definition/blu-ray dvd player. i would buy an apple tv first, i think, and just rent the hd movies if i for some reason just had to have high definition movies.

but i don’t think i do need them, especially since i’m viewing content on a 23″ lcd screen. and i know i can bittorrent shows and movies and encode them and transfer them and burn them and whatnot, but who the hell has time for that? and anyway, call me a nerd, but i like to keep it legal.

i am attracted by the slickness and the interface, though. although there’s much of the apple tv’s function that i can presently replicate, it has a cobbled-together feel and doesn’t work perfectly.

for a while, i thought i might like to get a mac mini to hook up to the tv, instead of the apple tv. but you can’t rent hd content using a computer, only the apple tv, because of the copy protection inherent in the hdmi connector which the computers don’t have. even though i don’t think i need hd content, i think you buy hardware looking forward, not back. i don’t want to lock myself into not being able to get hd content. so, it’s apple tv, or nothing.

with a caveat — my tv doesn’t have an hdmi connector, just a dvi connector. if i can’t rent hd content with the apple tv hooked up that way, it’s a non-starter. i’m not buying an apple tv and a new tv as well.

i’ll do the taxes (we might get a big hit this year), let the dust settle, let others be the guinea pigs, and then we’ll see.

this-and-that

~ jamie ~ 3 Comments

» today is anniversary #8 with kirk. you can read all about it. love ya baby.

» next tuesday is the stevenote at macworld, which means lots of new apple stuff to potentially spend money on. in case you just stumbled here, i’m a big apple fan. what could get me to blow the dust off of my wallet? perhaps an updated 3g iphone — kirk could get the new one and i’d take his old one. perhaps something more useful than apple tv to hook up to the hdtv, since we don’t have cable tv. maybe it’s the whatever-they’ve-come-up-with-that-noone-has-thought-of. maybe the wallet stays intact.

» i’m starting to get more political again — i find myself going to more and more political news sites and blogs. i get geared up every election cycle, and this one promises to be no different. i’m sure to bore you with my mumblings and rantings, but i gotta be me. still liking that obama guy. but i may change my mind. maybe i’ll even vote republican this year. it could happen. you never know.

» via kottke, a great article by kevin smith about his new movie, “zach and miri make a porno”. anything by kevin smith is a must-see for me (chasing amy is on my top-ten favorite films of all time), but with a title like that i can hardly wait.

» have a great weekend! i mean it. no excuses.

hillary exhausts me

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

so against all odds, she won in new hampshire. by, shocking to me but also instructive, winning the blue-collar vote.

i still like obama, and frankly i like having hillary as my senator but i’m not sure about her as president. i really think we need a less partisan breath of fresh air. after 20 years of bush-clinton-bush, another clinton strikes me as a bit too dynastic. and i think hillary would be divisive, and stir up too much of the left-right-red state-blue state conflict. we’d spend four or eight more years with too much carping and not enough unity. and we’d all have to hear about vince foster again, and all that clinton baggage crap.

that said, i’d rather have hillary than any of the republicans. but that’s a real hobson’s choice.

my next task is this, though — all her blue-collar support intrigues me. i need to look deeper.