OTHER: Self Esteem and Dressed Up Hubris

When I was a kid, I was a shabby, shlubby thing.  A certain untidiness has carried over into my adult self but it was really bad when I was a kid.  My mom always thought that my sloppy dress and general disinterest in my personal appearance was a sign that I lacked self-esteem and confidence and she was probably right.  I had (and still have) very little in the way of an opinion of myself.

What's striking to me in retrospect is how I had come up with this idea a lack of self-respect is a virtue.  I should rephrase that -- I felt a lack of pride was a virtue.  I remember an encounter with my mother once when I was in eighth grade where she shouted in an exasperated voice "Don't you have any pride?" and I shouted back that pride was one of the seven deadly sins.  She rolled her eyes and percussed a loud sigh.  She didn't get where I got these ideas.

For reasons I don't totally understand myself, I never valued self-reliance or individualism much.  I might well have been a product of television shows and my teachers lessons' that kindness and cooperation trumps all or maybe I'm just an enormous wuss and its easier to work with people than to strike out on your own.  In any case, from a young age I developed what seems to be a very non-American outlook on the nature of individualism that has carried me through to this day.

Just recently, in a conversation with my Nanny (my father's mother) I found myself explaining my decision not to go to law school.  In a post on this very blog about 8 months ago I was all raring to go, fulfilling what I had been taught was my long-delayed destiny.  However, a commentator on that post pointed out that I likely was likely not going to be able to gain the qualifications for what I'd like to do through law school.  Law school, it seems, is only for those who want to become attorneys.  If that seems axiomatic and obvious to you, it certainly wasn't to me.  I watch and listen to all manner of professionals with law training who don't actually practice law but I guess either those days are over, or those are the lucky few who ascend to the top of their profession.

Anyway, a near endless deluge of people I know in law or law school telling me not to go to law I simply chalked up to their thinking law would be a more prestigious profession than it turned out to be.  Since I had been working for years in grouphomes and as an appraiser any job after law-school was going to be a pretty big upgrade.  However, after reading this article in the Times, hearing one has to make more than $60,000 a year just to stay ahead of their law school debt and hearing about a recent poll (if anyone could find it, I'd appreciate it) stating that the majority of people working in law would recommend those considering going into law not do so.

Anyway, you can read more about this at this blog but the upshot is law school is filled with kids who think they're going to be the one to land the big-time job when all the statistics point to the irrefutable fact that that is very unlikely.  Furthermore, the unlikelihood grows with each passing year.  At first, I ignored people telling me to rethink my plans but after reading this open letter to the Boston College dean I finally had a panicked moment followed by some clarity.  Finally, I gave real credence to the idea that law school would not be the best idea.  I saw a lot of myself in this student and I really felt his pain at having this expensive degree without being about to find a job.  In it, he writes:

"I write to you from a more desperate place than most: my wife is pregnant with our first child. She is due in April. With fatherhood impending, I go to bed every night terrified of the thought of trying to provide for my child AND paying off my J.D, and resentful at the thought that I was convinced to go to law school by empty promises of a fulfilling and remunerative career. And although my situation puts the enormity of the problem into sharp focus, there are a lot of us facing similar financial disasters."

I found this particularly striking because I could never, in a million years, get into a school as good as BC law and yet, here was someone who was in exactly that position couldn't provide for his young family the way he needed to.

To get back to my Nanny - I read that letter and my heart aches for the guy, I can picture myself 3 years from now in the exact same position.  Meanwhile, my Nanny, upon hearing me recount the story has no sympathy at all.  In an individualist's head success, jobs, money, prestige - these are the things we use to keep score and if you're not a success then you deserve your lot.  There is no luck, there is only success and not.

The fact that I read the above and thought that law school sounded more like a lottery system then a solid path to providing for my future wife and family represented weakness in the eyes of my family. In my eyes, it represented prudence and the almost-wise learning from other people's life experience; and thus, making adjustments in my own life.  For the individualist, those who are strong do; they do without regard of caution. In other words, if I had true confidence, than I would succeed no matter what.

I guess I'm not strong, so while I study now to the end of a PhD in government management and public policy (a degree that carries none of the esteem of a J.D. in my family), I'm reminded that instead of meeting my challenges head on, I tried to circumvent them, because I lack self-confidence.  But if that means I also don't have a lot of hubris, I'm ok with that.

"Modern American parents teach their children that they can be anything they want to be; in ancient Greence such overweening of confidence in the individual's ability to shape his or her own fate was the sin of hubris, and it brought the protagonists of many Greek tragedies to bitter ends." -Stephanie Koontz

MUSIC: Tyler the Creator is an Idiot

http://www.avclub.com/articles/today-in-tyler-the-creator-tyler-the-creator-respo,56143/

As a rule, I don't like the idea of telling people what they can and can't say, but Ms. Quin makes a really good point. If Tyler, the Creator was spitting racist shit in the same way the he's spewing misogynistic shit he'd never, ever, ever get away with it.

I know some really liberal, sensitive people who don't bat an eye at the rampant misogyny in hip-hop which seems to me to be a very special kind of racism. The kind that somehow thinks black artists are so special and so genius that the normal rules for how to conduct themselves as human beings don't apply.

"If Tegan and Sara need some hard dick, hit me up." That's his fucking response. The only bigger idiot could be the person following him like the pied piper, calling his shit brilliant. How brilliant could he possibly be with that "hard dick" comment? I'm gonna try not to get fooled again

POLITICS: Korematsu: A Case You Might Not Have Heard of That Could Be Used to Substantially Limits Your Rights

A man of Hawaiian-Pacific descent is arrested and charged with violation of Executive Order 9066.  A civil rights lawyer bails him with $5,000 against a misdemeanor charge, but even after the bond is posted, the accused man is not released to his attorney but is sent hundreds of miles away to a camp in Utah where he is to remain for an indefinite period of time with others people of the same group of which he is accused of belonging. 

The man is a United States citizen with no criminal record.  He is engaged to an Italian-American woman who is also a citizen.  There is no specific question of his loyalty to the United States beyond his violation of the Executive Order. He is 23 years old.

Fred Korematsu was a testing ground for fighting the Japanese American internment in the western U.S. during World War II. He lost.

Justice Hugo Black, writing the majority of the opinion said :"It should be noted, to begin with, that all legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect."

“It is said that we are dealing here with the case of imprisonment of a citizen in a concentration camp solely because of his ancestry, without evidence or inquiry of his loyalty or good disposition towards the United States… Regardless of the true nature of the assembly and location centers… To cast this case into outlines of racial prejudice, without reference to the real military dangers which were presented, merely confuses the issue.”

The Justices of the Supreme Court in 1942 used the Constitution, a document which is meant to grant an entire universe of rights and liberties to American citizens and deny and disparage none, to inter a man against his will who was accused of no felony, for an indefinite period of time because we was Japanese. In fact, no Constitutional provisions were included in the majority decision, because none could possibly justify Mr. Korematsu’s internment.

At this point in history, only Mr. Justice Murphy’s dissent is considered to be important.  Saying that the exclusion of Japanese peoples from the western United States “goes over ‘the very brink of constitutional power’ and falls into the ugly abyss of racism.

This decision is something of a black eye for the Court and is rarely referred to outside certain Constitutional Law circles.  But it’s very, very important.  Here’s why:

“That this forced exclusion was the result in good measure of this erroneous assumption of racial guilt, rather than  bona fide military necessity is evidenced by the Commanding General's Final Report on the evacuation from the Pacific Coast area.   In it, he refers to all individuals of Japanese descent as ‘subversive,’ as belonging to ‘an enemy race’ whose ‘racial strains are undiluted,’ and as constituting ‘over 112,000 potential enemies . . . at large today’ along the Pacific Coast. In support of this blanket condemnation of all persons of Japanese descent, however, no reliable evidence is cited to show that such individuals were generally disloyal.” (emphasis mine)

But this is the kicker. Despite Justice Murphy’s eloquent eloquence on behalf of the Japanese people and really, all aggrieved minority races - the troubling bit is that Korematsu remains active and uncontested precedent. 

I want you to take a second and think about that. 

This case has not been overturned, moderated, mitigated or even really discussed  in any substantive official capacity by the United States government. Ever. The law of your land right now - at this very second – is such that the President may choose to inter U.S. citizens on racial grounds during wartime.  And guess what?  In September, we’ll have been in wartime for ten straight years with no end in sight. 

Korematsu himself sought to have his own conviction overturned and President Clinton eventually awarded him the Congressional medal of freedom, which I’m sure was a very nice token of recognition for Mr. Korematsu.  The problem is, our enmity for the Japanese has melted into a cuddly, prosperous and culturally open relationship. 

Unfortunately, our relationship with the Muslim (especially Arab and Persian) world lacks the same warm tones.  A video which was shown to Navy recruits during World War II and tell me you don’t hear some familiar language:

"The army of Japan is a well-trained and sternly disciplined force of fanatics filled with reckless courage inspired by a primitive moral code that promises a man who dies in battle an immortal life among the Shinto Gods.”

Let me replace a couple words:

"Al-Qaeda is an wholly indoctrinated and sternly disciplined force of fanatics filled with reckless courage inspired by a primitive moral code that promises a man who dies in battle an immortal life among 77 virgins in the loving embrace of Allah.”

Honestly, the rhetoric is nearly identical and the justifications all the same. 

I don’t think I’m wrong in assuming that most people in this country consider the Japanese internment an embarrassing part of our shared history – a humiliation of overreaction.  And yet, here we are with this Goddamn ticking time-bomb of a case that says we’re only willing to grant rights to any given race insofar as we perceive no threat from them.

The only thing more embarrassing than the internment itself is the fact that we stand ready -  at this moment – to repeat the mistake should the circumstances turn.  

OTHER: Some Designs I've Done

MUSIC: Eisley - Valleys

I always wonder why critics reacted to Fleetwood Mac so harshly back in the halcyon days of FM radio in the 70s. Even if as the soft-rock will-they-or-won't they aesthetic might have rubbed some the wrong way as trifle and licentious I wonder how they could have missed - what sounded to my ear today anyway - a sound so sophisticated. Those subdued harmonies, the sad/major chord progressions, the never-overwhelming but still affecting mix of all the instruments: it must have been incredibly difficult to achieve and it always surprises me that the critics back then couldn't hear that. You can string a thin thread from those albums to what Eisley is trying to do today with Valleys. But while the trifle persists from the 70s, the sophistication never really materializes, particularly in the pastel-colored first half.

The voices lilt and ooh in satisfying ways but the unbroken, fluent connection between how proximately pretty and ultimately vapid the proceedings are prevents any real enjoyment.

When the target is "plaintive" the execution is usually something more like "exasperated." Similarly, "joyful" begets "saccharine." Every emotion is scrambled to the point that an album that's ostensibly aimed at adult listener never comes across in the manner intended.  Everything lacks subtext, nuance or anything that feels grown-up.  It's not unlike a teenager demanding a curfew change by throwing a hissy-fit.  The content doesn't match the execution.

By the time "Better Love" arrives midway through achieving a pleasingly solid execution of what can only presume was the intent all along, the die has already been cast. This is, at its core, a pretty lightweight album. Lightweight doesn't have to be a bad thing, female fronted indie acts superficially similar to Eisley have made some of the best pop in recent years without trying to shoot the moon thematically: Tegan & Sara, Camera Obscura, Imogen Heap; but there's an atmosphere of grandiosity that implies Eisely was gunning for more. To hear this distinction embodied, take "Mr. Moon," which begins with a lush and very sad verse building genuine stakes only to let all fall away into a nothing of a chorus.

There could have been something here but Eisley squandered any possible goodwill by mixing in pretensions (delusions) of Important Things with a swill of too-sugary soft rock radio.

MUSIC: Best Albums of 2010

1 - Ali & Toumani - Ali Farka Toure
No record before has ever captured the sound of death - beautiful, haunting and easily accessed, even by my ruined pop-music-loving, American ears.

2 - High Violet - The National
More about mood than it was about great song-writing, but what a mood! The National does dark better and easier more than any band save maybe Radiohead.

3 - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy - Kanye West
Overwrought, over-the-top and even downright silly at times. In a lot of ways, it's Use Your Illusion for the rap world. I haven't actually said anything good about yet: the work of a Beethoven-esque genius or Brian Wilson-esque madman, but we'll still be listening to this album in 20 years.

4 - The Lady Killer - Cee-Lo Green
Cee-lo seems to be a one man standard-bearer keeping Motown and first-wave soul alive for pop music audiences. A valuable endeavor, indeed.

5 - The Guitar Song - Jamey Johnson
I'm not going to act like an expert about country but to my ears, it has all the usual heart and expressive storytelling while really minimizing the cornpone corniness that comes with your average middle-of-the-road Nashville release.

6 - Shadows - Teenage Fanclub
Pop music, simple, pure and a delight through and through. The Fanclub still, pound for pound writes the best love song going right now.

7 - Apollo Kids - Ghostface Killah
With all the usual Wu-Tang alums making an appearance, I'm surprised the best guest turn of the year on any record was Black Thought. Ghost's best and most energetic since Fishscale

8 - Spiral Shadow - Kylesa
It's easy to miss with Dillinger Escape Plan, Future of the Left and many others, metal is in sort of a little niche golden age right now with some of the most creative releases every year coming from that milieu

9 - Swanlights - Antony & the Johnsons
A lot has been written about Antony and his ghoulish, vibrato-laden tenor. You love it or you hate it and I fall squarely in the former category.

10 - Special Moves/Burning - Mogwai
If The National does dark the best, then Mogwai does dreamy as well as anyone.


P.S. A little late, I know

MUSIC: ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead - Tao of the Dead

Deep, analogue bass pulse through and around your inner ear. At the same time, a half spoken/half sung monologue conjures cosmic imagery in a low whisper before the guitar crackles like an old photograph lit on fire descending into a pink nose reminiscent of the ending of "Karma Police." Before long, the noise stands aside for a bright acoustic guitar confidently strumming sunny chords before they themselves are standing aside for a blast of thick, forward-leaning distortion.

If all that sounds like an exhilarating experience, it often is and you should sprint to your local record store and pick up Tao of the Dead. And if you think that sounds like a formless, chaotic mess, well, it's that too and you and I should totally party because we think a lot alike.

Even by the ADD addled, too-many-studio-toys Pro Tools-modern standards, this is a restless album. It's progressive to be sure, but that's not especially new. That's  a direction Trail of Dead has been heading for some time. The music is joyous first and sort of pointlessly fidgety second. There seems to be little agenda from moment to moment (the demarkations of the songs themselves aren't exactly arbitrary, but they're close) other than to do something different because they did the same thing for too long consecutively.

It seems it's not enough to move to a B section with a new melody or arrangement. Why not just announce it with an unexpected blast of feedback and an enormous slow-down in tempo? Ideas are never bad in that it's always better to have too many than not enough but when you try to do everything you're not really doing anything and frankly, Trail of Dead spend a good portion of the Tao of the Dead trying to do everything with a playbook that's actually pretty limited. After the 5th sudden breakdown into crashes on every downbeat and the 4th descent into electronic pads and beeps it gets a touch wearying.

Ironically, for such a self-consciously 2011 album, the big choruses, when they do come occasionally, have a very 90s alt-nation vibe - Smashing Pumpkins with a slight Jane's Addiction flavoring. But that's part of the grandiose charm.  It IS joyous and that makes it much pleasurable an experience than it would have been had they used the same tactics to make a dark or muddy record. Tao of the Dead is never, ever muddy; it's clean in it's production. Maybe pathologically so... clinical, even, like an early Minus the Bear effort.

I'm at once having a hard time finding a kind word to say about the emo-elderstatesman's effort. but at the same time, I can't say I didn't enjoy it and maybe that's the lesson to be taken away: If you do something and don't succeed but do it enthusiastically and joyfully it will make for a pleasurable experience.

But it won't necessarily be good art.