Monthly Archives: June 2009

A Double Standard I Can Live With

Posted on June 26, 2009 | 3 Comments

The issue is this: I absolutely give Michael Jackson a pass on his personal morality and character (I just wrote him a eulogy!), while I think Mark Sanford should step down from office and never be heard from again.

Why do I turn a blind eye to MJ’s alleged messing around with kids and whatever else he did, while condemning the politician whose misconduct is arguable less hurtful?

It’s not because Sanford is a politician. There’s a debate raging on a friend’s Facebook wall (and on Twitter, and everywhere else) about whether personal infidelity disqualifies a man for office. I don’t think it does, nor do I think it’s particularly relevant during a campaign.

But there are justifiable exceptions. The first is, unfortunately, Republicans. Sorry guys, Democrats can cheat on their wives. You can’t. You’ve spent too much time talking up family values in order to justify anti-gay rhetoric (let’s call a spade a spade here). If you’re going to base your argument against gays getting married on the idea that marriage is holy, or moral, or good for society, you better WALK THE EFFING WALK, my friend. You do much more to devalue marriage in our society than a two-groom wedding ceremony ever could.

To talk up the sanctity of marriage and then run off to see your Argentinian girlfriend or schtupp some other dude in an airport bathroom should be grounds for resignation, yeah. Because you’re voting according to your phony rhetoric, and your vote is actually affecting other peoples’ lives. And because the people who voted for you might actually believe in those values you ran on, they probably don’t want you to represent them anymore anyway.

Sorry Republican philanderers, but at least it’s fair. Also, John Edwards, you’re in this group too. People were only voting for you because of your wife anyway.

The second exception is when the affair results in abuse of power. New Jersey Governor McGreevey can have all the homosexual affairs he wants, but when he tries to put his boyfriend on the state payroll as New Jersey Homeland Security Chief, it’s time to go. And don’t blame the gay sex, because that had nothing to do with it. You should be in jail.

Anyway, here’s some good analysis by The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post on the subject, and some ridiculously shallow analysis by The Associated Press.

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Posted in Uncategorizable

Don’t Tell Me Michael Jackson’s Death Doesn’t Matter

Posted on June 25, 2009 | 6 Comments

I know our culture and our media make too much of celebrity deaths. But when a true genius dies, that’s a big deal, whether he/she is famous or not. And MJ was indisputably a musical genius.

I’ve played and studied (and tried to write) music my whole life, and one thing I’ve noticed is that the absolute hardest thing to do in music is to write a catchy melody. There is nothing harder. I don’t say that based on my own experience of trying and failing at it—the evidence is on the radio right at this moment. Every songwriter in the world has spent the last year trying to write 2009′s “summer song”–this year’s “I Kissed a Girl” or “Umbrella.” So far, I haven’t heard a single melody that stands out as being catchy enough to fill that role. (Kelly Clarkson and Lady Gaga have come the closest, I think, though both of those albums have been out for a few months.)

We think of these giant songwriting factories churning out bubble-gum pop music for Britney and Justin and Rihanna, but the truth is, writing earworm pop hits is HARD, even if they’re formulaic. If it wasn’t, everyone would be able to do it and our Top 40 charts wouldn’t be so full of crap melodies.

So, writing a brilliant melody is extremely difficult. Pairing that melody with decent lyrics is even harder. Creating a winning combination of melody and lyric over and over is a feat only a few people on earth can do. And though he hasn’t done it in a while, Michael Jackson was among the best of those people.

His incredible list of songwriting credits is here, if you’d like to see which songs he actually wrote himself. The list includes Bad, Beat It, Billy Jean, Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough, Smooth Criminal, The Way You Make Me Feel, and others. (That link goes to a list of highlights, click the All Songs tab and sort by Artist to see the full list.)

Now then, even if he hadn’t been a performer, even if he’d spent his life in his basement writing songs for other musicians, I would have considered him a genius. But he was a superb vocalist. I wasn’t a fan of the vocal hiccups and stutters he overused in a lot of his songs, but go listen to some Jackson 5 records, or Thriller, or Bad, or that Free Willy song, or his Say Say Say duet in which he sings circles around Paul McCartney.

And yet, that STILL wasn’t the extent of his genius. He was arguably the best pop dancer/performer in history. Usher and Chris Brown are “good dancers” because they can imitate the moves he was doing almost 30 years ago.

Yes, he was a freak. Maybe he was a child-abusing sicko, I’m not sure. But even if you can’t mourn the death of the man, perhaps you can mourn the death of the genius, especially coming the way it did; after a long period of decline into craziness and irrelevance. A brilliant and creative mind like his deserved a better exit.

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Posted in Music Stuff

The Overwhelming Suckitude of June 2009

Posted on June 20, 2009 | 7 Comments

June sucks. Can I just go to sleep and have it be July when I wake up? It’s rained like every day this month. Two of our closest friends in the city, the lynch pins of our entire social circle, are moving at the end of the month—to L.A., no less! (What, a Laker championship isn’t enough, you greedy, greedy town?) And I just found out this week that some of my closest work buddies are leaving the company.

June sucks.

I’m blaming the economy. It cost my wife her great job back in the early days of it, it’s driven my friends away from the city to cheaper parts of the country, and it’s resulted in an incredible amount of job loss among friends of mine at work and in the media and tech industries.

I keep waiting for it to start feeling like The Grapes of Wrath or Cinderella Man or something—will it ever? There’s been a slight behavioral shift in spending habits and so on, and everyone’s a bit more pessimistic now, but at what point do we start internalizing the attitudes of the era, like our grandparents did with the Great Depression? Are we going to be a generation that comes out of hard times forever altered? Or does this particular point in history even qualify as a “hard time”? (After all, unemployed people lined up today outside the Apple Store to plunk down credit cards for a new iPhones; our grandparents would have boxed their ears for such extravagance).

Anyway, I now have first-hand knowledge of urban flight. Almost all my Wall Street friends and acquaintances have left (luckily, they all still read my blog), as have quite a few other young professionals that were supposed to be the future of this city.

So, didn’t mean to get all weird about it, just wanted to share my informed opinion that June sucks, and especially June 2009. If any of you can think of any redeeming qualities for June, please share. But know that if you tell me it’s sunny and nice where you are, I will respond with vitriol.

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Posted in New York Stuff, Work Stuff

Blogging is Scary!

Posted on June 4, 2009 | 7 Comments

It’s always scary when I write an article for a new outlet, and such was especially the case with my first post on By Common Consent post (it posted yesterday).

For those of you who don’t know about it, BCC is a…hmmm…I’d call it an intellectual Mormon blog, but they might chafe at the term “intellectual.” Who knows. It’s a place where smart mormons talk about smart mormon things, and it has an incredibly engaged and vocal audience of readers and commenters. If you say something dumb on there, they’ll nicely let you know (and back it up with chapter and verse, or sociological studies, or Kierkegaard or something). Anyway, I’ve been a fan and off-and-on reader of the site for a few years now, so it was a thrill and a horror to see my own ideas discussed by people much more intelligent than me–I learned a lot yesterday about the topic I wrote about.

The post is online here, if you’re interested. Not interested in the mormon stuff? I wrote a much less scary first post for a friend’s site called TheNYCityDish here, on my hunt for the best horchata in Manhattan. (it’s on the Upper East Side–bummer)

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Posted in New York Stuff, Random Links