Splice Today

Yelling, Industry Standard

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 10:49:41 -0400

Okay so this is how it went down. I open my laptop and Login to Chase.com to check my bank balance, as I do everyday. I’m seeing that my Savings Account is way less than it should be, and I shake my head, crinkle my lips and start to take my earrings off. I flip through the history and notice that these bitches done charged me $40 damn dollars—of my own money—because I made a transfer from my Savings Account to my Checking Account. Say what? Will somebody please explain how in the hell I basically ended up charging myself $40 for transferring between my own accounts?

Oh uh uh—no ma’am. Let me call Chase, not now but right now.

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrring.

Cheery voice. Hello! And! Good! Morning! Thank! You! For! Calling! Chase!!!! How! May! I! Help! You?!

Don’t you hate that no matter how mad you are when you call the bank/cable company/a billing place, they’re always so damn happy.

I tell the lady what just happened, she feigns sorrow like clockwork. I tell her that before I switched to Chase I was with Citibank for three happy years and never had any kind of surprise fee. I tell her I only switched to Chase because there’s basically a Chase every two feet in New York. Doesn’t care. “Oh I’m so sorry to hear that sir”—and then the part that we all know so well—“but there’s nothing I can do about it. The charges are valid.”

Woo I am on FIRE now, like I’m so mad that I’m literally out of breath. So I pull the oldest trick in the book: “Well then I need to speak to somebody else.”

At this point I’m still eloquent and relatively calm, but not for long.

Most people would agree that customer service sucks. You sit there on hold f-o-r-e-v-e-r, listening to the same Vivaldi concerto play 200 times. And then they finally bring themselves to pick up. What is it about customer service/warranties/etc that the answer to your request is always “there’s nothing I can do about it” or “I’m sorry, but that’s not covered under our warranty.” What are these people doing if they’re not helping folks out?! That’s exactly why they do customer service over the phone, because otherwise somebody in a customer service booth would be getting punched out on a regular basis.

I used to make fun of my cousin for always getting charged overdraft fees. We’d be up at the Check Cashing Joint and I’m just like, “Girl why don’t you just get you a bank account!” Fees, that’s why. She may not be the most responsible person on earth, but I’ve heard so many horror stories about overdraft fees and other random surprise fees that just pop up when you least expect.

You want to know why the answer is always “there’s nothing I can do about it”? Because banks make major cash on secret fees. As the New York Times reported a few days ago, last year alone the banks scored roughly $20 billion dollars from overdraft fees. $20 billion dollars! But starting this summer, Bank of America will be the first bank to nix overdraft charges altogether. But don’t think they did it out of the goodness of their black heart—they did it because as of July 1, the Federal Reserve says it’s illegal to charge overdraft fees on deposit accounts without your consent. Finally! Apparently, too, there’s a reason I was never charged overdraft fees the three years I was at Citibank—because they have never charged overdraft fees! I knew I wasn’t crazy.

So I’m still on the phone with the lady from Chase and she still won’t give me my dollas back. So I only have one option left: get ghetto. It always works—just throw all that eloquence right out the window. I started cursing and telling her just how much I hated these fees. And every time she said something patronizing like “Well, sir, I’m sorry, maybe you should manage your money better because there’s nothing I can do about it” it was like pouring gasoline into a fire. I was lit up and said as angry as possible: “No no no. You’re not listening to what I’m saying. Let me say it again: I need my $40 back and I need it back now, and I’m going to keep saying it over and over again until you understand. So either you make it happen or we’re just going to sit here repeating ourselves.”

Aah hah! Then the bitch put me on hold. Two minutes later, I got my $40 back. Why didn’t she just dot that at first? This conversation could have easily been 2 minutes instead of 10.

I think that a huge percentage of calls to banks—maybe half?—are about some surprise fee or another. Hopefully, all banks will take Bank of America’s lead and nix their surprise charges. It’s not fair—and it’s your money!

But if customer service is still testing your nerves, just remember that getting ghetto always helps speed things up.

I'd Like To Meet Your Tailor

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:06:39 -0400

To start: I was guilty. And as far as I could tell, the people sitting around me in traffic court—the old man sitting next to me with his snapshot photo evidence, the penitent son with his reproving father, the young thug with a face that had been terribly burned, scarred, and reconstituted—before the Great Seal of California, all of us in the Beverly Hills Traffic Court, sat guilty. I would make a rather biased judge.

The court clerk turned to the bailiff and whispered, "Is she even in chambers yet?" The official clock was nudging past 9:00 AM for a session that should have commenced thirty minutes earlier. "Fridays," the bailiff said and returned to her phone call. While we sat contemplating our pleas, the bailiff was trying to quietly book a reservation at a shooting range.

Five months prior, I was pulled over for the kind of routine traffic stop that you just know is going to be costly. Thirty minutes and a short stint in the backseat of a cop car later, I had a ticket and a court date. My crimes were procedural: I'd lived in California longer than the 30 days required to head down to the DMV and apply for a CA Driver's License. And my registration wasn't up-to-date. These were not crimes inspired to draw out the sympathy of the officer who pulled me over. Actually, I was lucky he didn't impound my car on the spot. All I could do was to hope the cop would grant me one additional favor and sleep through the court date, or that the judge was more lenient than I would be.

But I had a plan designed to warm even the most wary of temperaments. "I'm not here to give you any excuses," I would tell the judge. I would say that she's heard too many sob stories and that I didn't want to waste her time. She would interrupt me to compliment my black two-piece suit and question me about the identity of my tailor. I had it all planned out.

Actually, choosing the suit was about as far as I had gotten in the planning process. For all the hundred or so episodes of Law and Order I've seen over the years, I quickly realized how lost I was when it came to actual court proceedings. The court date I booked months prior turned out to only be an arraignment, one of those familiar words I couldn't actually define.

The judge, a woman who like all female judges of a certain age, resembled Judge Judy, thankfully arrived to clear things up. "Of all the people gathered today in the courtroom, I can bet that I am the only one glad to be here," she said, starting a breathless half-hour lecture on the fundamentals of traffic court. I liked her right away.

The arraignment, I learned, was a preliminary session just for the purpose of taking down pleas—“guilty,” “not guilty,” or “no contest.” Our pleas would be heard and recorded in rapid succession, after which we'd all shuffle next door to the clerk's office to pay the court a fine for our guilt or to post bond in hopes of our innocence.

This was another thing I never fully understood: Regardless of my plea, I'd have to pay the full price of the ticket. If I admitted guilt, I'd pay on the spot. If I wanted a fair trial, I'd still have to pay the full amount in hopes it would be refunded to me if I won my case. It didn't matter that the cop who pulled me over didn't show up in court for the arraignment—he would only be summoned if I pled “not guilty” and went to trial.

The judge continued: Though we were sitting in a courthouse in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the state, court fines are set by the lawmakers in Sacramento. Once a defendant was charged, the judge couldn't do anything to ameliorate the fines. The fines themselves stopped at a maximum of $100, which sounded deceptively reasonable. What made them so much more expensive was the buffet of service charges and penalties added on top of the fine—sometimes seven times the cost of the original fine. The cheapest ticket came in at $20, which topped out at $141 with all of the additional fees. Ouch.

By the end of the judge's lesson, I knew how I would plead. Unlike a speeding ticket, my charge didn't involve a subjective opinion or questionable equipment. I hadn't taken care of the details; a trial wouldn't last long if the cop showed up. The last thing I wanted was to prolong this tortuous process, only to be justly defeated in the end.

I didn't have much more time to consider it. The speech was over; the hearing had begun. All twenty of us were called to the stand at once, lined up—a row of suspects in front of the judge. The first name on her list was leaning against the podium in a gray hooded sweatshirt, an obvious veteran of the court.

His charge was the most serious given in traffic court—driving without insurance—compounded by the hefty fine for skipping a previous trial. He was looking at bail money in upwards of a thousand dollars. He took this news with an air of indifference and requested an extension on his court date and then an extension on his bail payment. The judge, not even taking the time to look at the defendant, said, "You're wasting my time with these shenanigans. You didn't listen to my speech," and before the man could respond, she sent him down to the clerk to pay for his “not guilty” plea.

I didn't have much time to mourn: I was next. The judge was quick: "Forest Casey. Do you have a current driver's license in the state of California?" I dug my wallet out of my suitcoat and fumbled around with the license before handing it to the bailiff, "Here. Yes, I do."

"And do you have a valid car registration from the state of California?" Shit. My registration was back at home. All I had was an incomplete application and the proof of insurance that made it a valid registration, but—"Where are you trying to go with this?" The judge cut me off. I stammered while she clarified: "What are you trying to plead?"

"Umm, guilty. Guilty, your honor." She was filling out some paperwork on her desk and spoke between her notes. "I'm going to drop the first charge, Driving Without a Valid License, but you'll have to pay for the second, Driving With Expired Registration. The fine of the ticket is $50. Total price: $280. Go see the clerk."

I barely had time to register what happened; in under a minute, my arraignment was over. I walked out of the courtroom trying to put the pieces together. Though the service charges for my ticket were piled on like a Thanksgiving plate, I'd been spared the worst of it. I was expecting to pay double what I did.

So, ten minutes later, with my debit card swiped and my signature on a short receipt, I walked out of court guilty, though forgiven. It was 11:00 AM. Time to go find a beer.

INTERVIEW: David Manchester of Kadman

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:55:15 -0400

I'll just lay it all out up-front: Kadman is no doubt the best band around Baltimore you've never heard. A slowcore project fronted by David Manchester, Kadman sounds, well, like no one else who calls Charm City home—setting themselves far apart from the art rock weirdness of Wham City that tend to dominate these days. These Old Bones, Kadman's second album, out now on the Baltimore's fantastic Beechfields label, is as good an album as any you'll hear this year: alternately noisy alt-rock and dark indie folk (think: Bonnie 'Prince' Billy and Matt Sweeney's Superwolf), all dominated by Manchester's superbly haunting vocals. Manchester and I exchanged some emails the other day, and here's what we came up with:

SPLICE TODAY: Can you tell us how Kadman got started? Originally it was a solo project, right?

DAVID MANCHESTER: Yes. Kadman did start as a solo project. I guess I started playing this particular style of music towards the end of college. I had been in a few bands before this, but Kadman was my first venture into writing and performing my own songs. I had a lot of life changing events going on at that time, and Kadman became a creative and emotional outlet for all of that. It was almost like an audio diary. After playing solo for a few years, I mentioned to my wife that I really wanted to be able to take the music to the next level, but didn't really know how. I had been doing the acoustic singer/songwriter thing at coffee shops and open mics and was getting burned out. I wanted to do more, play clubs, live the rock-star life, to a degree. So, my wife and my brother worked together and organized both of the families to get together and buy me my first (good) electric guitar, the Gretsch I use now. It was amazing. In my head I thought, "well … no excuses, now." That's wh en I put together the first version of the full band, with Matt Smith on drums and my brother Mitch on bass.

"Mountain Song"

ST: I know you've changed the line-up a few times, how long has the current configuration of Kadman been around?

DM: The current configuration came together in two stages. James joined the band in September of '08, and Frank joined in, when was that … February of '09. So, it's still a relatively young group.

ST: Has the songwriting process changed much since you got started? How do you approach it these days?

DM: It has and it hasn't. I am not the kind of musician that can just sit down and write a song. A lot of times, songs come to me from my just fiddling around on the guitar in front of TV or while sitting in the backyard. I'll figure out a progression or two and then just build on it. Lyrically, this may sound odd, but a lot of times the song dictates the subject matter. Once I get the chord progressions and changes down, I'll ad lib. Sometimes it works, sometimes it is absolutely horrible what comes out of my mouth. Recently, though, I've been trying to put more thoughts into the lyrics and the subject matter of the songs. I've been trying to move from having all of the songs be about internal issues to looking at the outside world. Politics, current events, things that are more global, though I like to think that even the songs about personal issues and events can have a universal appeal, or can at least be interpreted to fit into the listener's own experiences.

ST: Can you tell us about this latest album, These Old Bones? How'd it come together?

DM: Wow … good question. I'd like to say organically, but that just sounds so trite. The songs on the album came in bits and spurts throughout the year after Sing To Me Slower was released. A couple of the songs like, "Portraits," "Lullaby," and "An Army Rises" were songs that were put together with the old lineup of the band. The other songs on the album pretty much trace my life over the next year. Once the bulk of the songs were put together, we contacted Mat and Mobtown Studios to start the recording process, which, took a little over 4 months. We really took our time with this album. We used three or four different snare drums, 5 different guitar amps, three different guitars, stand up bass, electric bass, a vast array of pedals. Some songs we had 7 tracks of guitar feedback alone. We really wanted to figure out what worked best for each song to really help it come to life. It was great that the whole band was so invested, as well as Mat at the studio.

I'm really proud of these songs.

"Anything"

ST: Who would you consider to be your biggest influences?

DM: Hmm … that could be a very long list. I try to listen to so many different bands and genres it's hard to figure out what the direct influences are. When I first started playing guitar I was really influenced by old blues musicians like Lightning Hopkins, Hounddog Taylor, John Lee Hooker. Take that and combine it with Alan Sparhawk from Low and Retribution Gospel Choir, Mark Kozelek from Sun Kil Moon and Red House Painters, My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth and I guess that gives you the music of Kadman.

ST: You seem pretty at odds with a lot of the music that's being made in Baltimore these days. Is there any part of the local scene, any bands, that you're really drawn to?

DM: Haha.. yeah. We seem to stick out a bit which is good, and bad. It's hard to classify us into a genre and it's hard to find bands we're similar enough with to put a good bill together. Of other local bands though, I'd have to say I absolutely love The Water. Amazing music, awesome guys. Monarch, er … I mean Wye Oak is another one. They give us little folks hope, too.

ST: What's next?

DM: Right now we're spending a lot of time trying to get the word out on the album, and we're working with some other bands, locally and regionally, to get a few mini-tours together in the summer and fall. We did a mini-tour of the mid-west a few months ago and it was a blast. I am really hoping to take the band from a local to a more regional, or even national arena. Then, just keep working on new songs and see where the music takes us.

Visit Kadman's at MySpace, and check out a Mobtown Studios Microshow.

We're All Numb, Numb, Numb

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:19:44 -0400

My roommate, fellow Splice contributor Gabriel Baker, and I have this game we like to play. It’s not difficult to follow. You see, we toss cigarette lighters back and forth to each other, catching them on the backs of our hands. Seriously. And then we try spins and elbow bumps and all the while tossing up the lighter and catching it on the backs of our hands like so:

At the Splice office, complete with beyond-wretched painting Study
of Martini and Cigar, left by John Lingan. Bastard.

If you’re already weeping for our lost senses of decency, join the club (Gabriel’s girlfriend is president). Now consider this list:

HANKY PANKY - Using only one hand, the competitor must pull tissues out of a tissue box one at a time until the box is empty.

JUNK IN THE TRUNK - A belt with an empty tissue box is attached around the competitor's waist and positioned against the contestant's back with the hole facing outwards. Ping-pong balls are placed inside the tissue box and the competitor must jump and wiggle to shake the balls out of the box without letting his hands touch the ground. All balls must be out of the box to complete the challenge.

EGG ROLL - Contestant must move three eggs across the floor and into a target area only by "fanning" the eggs with an empty pizza box.

BOBBLE HEAD - A pedometer is attached to the competitor's head and he must move his head to rack up a total number of steps to complete the game.

MOVIN' ON UP - Contestant is given a stack of 49 blue plastic cups with a red cup on the bottom. He must race to move the one red cup to the top by holding the stack and continuously moving the cups, one by one, from the top to the bottom through the entire stack.

If you think the above list of activities is straight out of a trying-too-hard Rainy Day manual from your parents, the Boy Scouts or a sad excuse for a summer fitness program, you’re sadly mistaken. Since The Real World and Road Rules ushered in the feckless genre “reality television” it’s difficult—and nearly impossible—to find one of those “mainstream television is an absolute vacuum of time and energy and attention and intelligence” examples because we’ve already been exposed to what seems like the worst of the worst: The Hills, Real Housewives, The Apprentice, The Weakest Link, Rock of Love, blah, blah and more blah.

Alas, the above list of veritably inane—indeed, the words ooze with smug knowing—relates to NBC’s newest show, Minute to Win It, hosted by that chef guy with the spiked platinum hair who’s in those TGIFridays commercials. Contestants compete on what has to be the same set as Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?: rippling displays of be-your-own-DJ-in-20-minutes lighting effects, Yamaha keyboard synths and an insignificantly sized audience.

I don’t feel the least bit uncomfortable telling you I have watched all of 10 minutes of this show. Seeing the previews (this was during what was supposed to be a relaxed bar-burger-beer experience) cut into the golf coverage was unsightly—look, that guy’s pulling tissues out of a box!; hey, man it’d be difficult to toss a pitcher of water end over end so it lands right side up on a table!—and after all of a dozen minutes of the actual show the bartender cut to a Canadian hockey game.

These tasks have all the depth of a 55-second YouTube video with, say, 25,000 hits, because sitting around flipping through utterly random YouTube clips happens. It happens—to all of us, and it’s OK. But Minute to Win It tries to take the parlor trick (and not even interesting ones!), the human pursuit of being the best at something (anything), the YouTube-driven desire to be famous for a few minutes, and the glow of cash (a cool million dollars awaits whoever masters all these things) all at the same time in the context of gameshow. It’s catastrophically depressing. (Also, the premiere was two hours long. How is it humanly possible to watch this show for two hours? The commercial breaks would have more range and depth of thought.)

It's possible Minute to Win It broke the bank of bad television, like a cicada shedding its exoskelaton and, along with its many billions of relatives, devouring small trees before huddling down in the earth to relax until the next insult to humanity.

Blood, Beards and Bros

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:43:09 -0400

On the deck of a sailing ship Manfried and Hegel Grossbart, two depraved German graverobbers, are bickering over the best way to kill a witch. It’s 1364, and the brothers have just fled a burning Venice in the company of a pirate captain, a kidnapped French knight, and a rabble of Italian thugs and sailors. The captain’s wife has, on several occasions, demonstrated eerie powers that compel people to drown themselves; the brothers suspect that she may be either a witch or a sea monster. Hegel feels that it would be most expedient to throw her overboard. Manfried disagrees: “Burnin’s what’s done with witches, as you well know from experience and common fuckin knowledge besides."

At this point, a good three quarters of the way through Jesse Bullington’s wildly energetic first novel, I realized exactly why I had been enjoying the book so much. Bullington has given Dark Ages Europe the Deadwood treatment, heaping profanity, humor, grit and violence on the shoulders of a wandering adventure through medieval Europe. The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart follows Manfried and Hegel as they flee south from the Holy Roman Empire, through Italy, and eventually into Egypt. The pair rob graves for a living, following the trade of their repulsive father, and they have internalized a family legend about the boundless riches of the tombs of Egypt, which they assume await their plundering.

Bullington makes this ignoble quest the occasion for a well-researched tour of the least savory parts of medieval Europe, from desolate mountain passes to plague-ridden monasteries. The Grossbarts themselves come across as a hybrid of Homer Simpson and Anton Chigurh: they take childish delight in food and drink, adore the Virgin Mary (Jesus they consider a useless milksop), both are sexually untutored and both begin the book as middle-aged virgins. As the narrative progresses they grow more and more comfortable with senseless murder, but Bullington adds light touches of remorse and layers on enough gore and silliness that they never seem utterly repellent (or, in fact, they seem utterly repellent from the first page, but in such a cartoonish way that they draw the reader in).

The Grossbarts blithely ignore Medieval distinctions of class and cheerfully bully priests, kings and merchants alike. They bicker with one another often enough that it becomes a motif, but not so often that it overwhelms the narrative, and their occasional forays into philosophy and philology are usually light and funny. So too is Bullington’s dialogue, which occasionally reaches the tart beauty of Deadwood but is often at least amusing. The brothers’ swagger and intimidation become tiresome, but Bullington clearly has limited interest in making his protagonists likeable, and every other character in the novel considers them repugnant bores.

Bullington clearly wants to communicate the grit and horror of fourteenth-century Europe, and he does so successfully, but he also introduces elements of fantasy with a distinctive, and horrific, modern spin. The brothers meet witches and demons and various monsters, all of which shed the stately safety of their medieval origins and emerge as terrifying grotesques—Bullington’s monsters don’t look like the two-dimensional illuminations of a bestiary:

Guessing from his sparse and wispy hair he held over fifty years on his wrinkled crown, but his teeth and eyes appeared hard and sharp. His face, however, did not hold their attention.

Under his chine any semblance of humanity was absent, his body instead akin to those of the panthers and leopards that stalk desolate regions. His mottled pelt bristled, contrasting splothces of naked skin.

Brothers Grossbart is a travel novel, somewhat resembling Blood Meridian or perhaps Stephen King’s Dark Tower series (though its themes are more modest and its language less powerful than either). Bullington has a gift for painting scenery with simple economy:

They were climbing a ridge spotted with boulders and what small patches of snow the sharp wind permitted. Hegel helped his brother to a hollow between two of the monstrous stones and they made camp.

In a memorable later sequence the brothers and a monk named Martyn eat some moldy rye and descend from these same mountains amid horrific hallucinations—Bullington treats these visions allusively and gently, which is somewhat surprising given the brutal frankness that he brings to most of the narrative:

For the demon-hunting holy man their travel led over mountains of ash and through clouds of sulfur, steam and venom raining upon them, the wails of the damned giving them no respite. His beloved Elsie remaind absent, but Saint Roch harried their wagon, his moldering corpse demanding the return of his stolen finger.

Bullington delights in wounds and mutilations, and the Grossbarts’ violence provides him with many opportunities to assault the reader with gory passages that are, frankly, gross. Some of the non-gory passages, such as an amorous encounter with a witch, will turn your stomach. Whenever things slow down Bullington has one of his characters vomit, an unusual touch that he repeats so often that it becomes rather funny. The action scenes that produce this violence are the novel’s weakest feature. Bullington writes sprawling, cinematic scenes of bloody conflict, but he recruits so many characters and details their actions so minutely that it becomes a confusing blur, giving the impression of men fighting with little for the reader to hold onto. The action of the novel begins with one of these scenes, an ambush on a narrow mountain pass. This goes on for much too long and is so badly told that an impatient reader will likely renounce the novel entirely.

That would be a shame, because Brothers Grossbart is, in its coarse and sanguinary grandeur, rather unlike any other novel I have ever read. Bullington does not dare complex themes—he treads lightly on class conflict, desires for paternal approval, prejudice, the weakness of knowledge in an age of ignorance and the indelible bond of the brothers themselves, but overall he sticks to brisk action and memorably grotesque showstoppers. The novel smacks of Blood Meridian, Army of Darkness, various westerns, maybe Umberto Eco, but despite its multiple influences it belongs wholly to its author.

Don't Tread On Me

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:08:25 -0400

Metal has always been an uneasy critical sell. Too uptight to be rootsy, too formulaic to be arty, too earnest to be clever, and too
remorselessly sexless to be sexy, metal has droned, trudged, and howled its own way between rockists and poptimists, occasionally hailed by one or the other, but never exactly embraced by either.

So it makes perfect sense that High on Fire is the critically validated metal It band of the moment—since, in most ways that
matter, the group isn’t really a metal outfit at all. Oh, sure, High on Fire has many metal trappings. The songs are long, loud, and prog-inflected. The vocalist growls as much as sings. There are guitar solos.

But despite all that, High on Fire’s energy is not metal. It’s punk. More specifically, it’s metal-tinged pop punk, in the vein of Guns N’Roses or Nirvana or all those grunge bands that critics loved because beneath the thin metal veneer they were actually trying to be rootsy, or arty, or clever, or sexy, or some combination thereof.

You can hear High on Fire’s actual sympathies in the opening title tune, with the repetitive, fist-shaking chorus (“Rise up! Fall
down!”) that gets lodged in your brainstem like an overcarbonated bleacher cheer. You can hear it in the emotive sincerity with which Matt Pike emotes like a cross between Eddie Vedder and a constipated pachyderm on “Bastard Samurai.” And you can read it in that damn name: High on Fire. That’s an inspirational slogan for your mildly edgy corporate event, damn it—it’s not a metal band.

Metal is about being ground into anonymity beneath a giant iron heel. Punk’s about raging against the machine. The latter is in general the option more likely to wow a cultural arbiter, since people, or at least critics, like to feel that they’re fighting the power rather than being devoured by it. And, you know, if you’re creative, smart, and funny—like the Dead Kennedys, or Motorhead, or even Nirvana—fighting the power can be really entertaining and worthwhile. High on Fire, though, has neither the wit of great punk nor the remorselessness of great metal. Instead it’s just lumberingly literal adrenal rush; music by which to run on your treadmill or invade a sovereign nation, or shout “Shit yeah!” while drinking yourself into a stupor.

Which is fine, I guess. But I wish they wouldn’t call it metal.

Put It On My Tab

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:20:00 -0400

Politicians used to be loveable rascals, the more colorful the more delightful and revered. The old muldoons knew how to get things done in their own peculiar ways, for themselves but especially for others, which was the secret to their staying power. Politics was a form of locomotion: it got people and programs from here to there. The council member, the state senator and delegate, and in the early ethnic days even the notary public, were masters of their domain. Political clubs and organizations ruled the districts and everybody and anybody belonged to one or the other, the extended families of their day.

Consider Baltimore’s late City Councilman Mimi DiPietro, the master of malapropisms, who once referred to members of the media as “you meteors” and who claimed to be the king of patronage for having sponsored more than 2,500 city patronage appointees, mostly immigrants, from his East Baltimore warren, the old First District.

And there was, too, Clarence Du Burns, locker room attendant, City Council member and president as well as mayor, who once announced that a high-speed train between Baltimore and Washington would be a “boondoggle for everybody.”

Contrast those characters with the over-stuffed, self-righteous marplots of today like, say, Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY), Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY) and Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) and it’s easy to see how far down the slope politics and politicians have fallen. Public service has given way to private self-interest.

Politics used to be a face-to-face business. Over the years, beginning in the 1960s, three things occurred to deliver us where we are in politics today—the expansion of the media into then unforeseen applications, the influence of money and the arrogance of a privileged class. Begin with the last. It used to be said that people in politics were pretty much like the people who elected them, hence the concept of the citizen legislator. But in today’s world, elective politics is dominated by lawyers, the wealthy and other pedigreed professionals who are far removed from the clubhouse and the extended family upon which local political systems were built.

For example, in the 1960s, Baltimore had three self-contained Congressional districts, which were represented by Democrats George Fallon, Samuel Friedel and Edward A. Garmatz, among the three most powerful members of Congress. Fallon was chairman of the House Public Works Committee; Friedel was chairman of the Government Operations Committee; and Garmatz was chairman of the House Maritime Committee. Put them all together and their combined total years of education didn’t add up to a high school diploma. Today we’re being flogged to death with PhDs, LLDs and MBAs.

The three were home in Maryland every night, schmoozing in the clubhouses and making the rounds of the bull roasts and crab feasts. These days the closest constituents get to their elected officials is on cable TV (C-Span), Facebook, YouTube, Twitter or some other form of the multi-fractured electronic town hall.

Second, the media has caused a massive fracture in politics and a realignment of the electorate that actually has little to do with individual politicians but more in keeping with the public bullhorn that vilifies the political system and those who populate it. The media has insinuated itself not as the medium delivering the message but as the arbiter of policy decisions as well as behavior. For example, Massa’s constituents had little to say about his bizarre conduct but Glenn Beck and Larry King performed the evisceration for them. Put another way, the TV box and the blogosphere have replaced the ballot box. Power no longer belongs to the people but resides with those who arrive via an electrical outlet in the wall.

Finally, money: obscene amounts of it, and even more to come, courtesy of the U.S. Supreme Court. Begin with a timeline on how far we’ve come: In 1970, Former Gov. Marvin Mandel’s winning campaign cost $1.3 million, considered an enormous sum at the time. Mandel’s 1974 campaign spent $1.5 million. William Donald Schafer’s 1990 campaign for governor spent $3 million and change. Parris Glendening’s first campaign in 1994 cost $6 million. And a recent Washington Post analysis showed that in 2006, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich (R) raised $19.6 million to outspend his winning challenger, Gov. Martin O’Malley (D), who raised and spent $16 million. Multiply those numbers by billions at the federal level.

Presidents, governors and political parties used to enforce discipline and party loyalty by controlling the flow of money to candidates and campaigns. Under the old laws, they were the primary sources of campaign fundraising and thus candidates at all levels relied on the party hierarchy for financial support. Under the new laws, both federal and local, candidates can raise huge sums of money on their own and are independent of the party structure as well as presidents and governors.

Until 1973, corporate campaign contributions were illegal in Maryland but union contributions, through their committees on political education (COPE), were legal and welcome. Corporate contributions found their way into Maryland campaigns through illegal, under-the-table methods. Corporations and businesses, for instance, were assessed certain amounts and “bagmen” would make the rounds every week to collect the money from office “petty cash” funds. Or there was the direct “white envelope” exchange exemplified during the administration of Spiro T. Agnew. The 1973 Maryland election law change brought corporate campaign money out into open by legalizing it within the strict limits of the state’s contribution laws.

And in Maryland, there are the so-called “continuing committees,” whereby incumbent officials do not have to abide by separate campaigns but can continue stockpiling unlimited amounts of money year after year. Thus we have legislators amassing campaign accounts containing hundreds of thousands of dollars that can be used for anything that can be vaguely construed as political. Need a new car? Claim it’s necessary for constituent work. Want to take 10 people to dinner? Why, of course, it’s a meeting to discuss neighborhood issues. It’s all on the campaign contribution tab.

At the national level, corporate money began rolling in through political action committees (PACs), a loophole that was created in the campaign finance reforms following the Watergate scandals in the mid-1970s. The next wave of corporate money followed in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act, which allowed outside organizations to fund advertising as long as a campaign theoretically had no knowledge of it (the Swift Boat commercials against John Kerry in 2004). And the latest round is the Supreme Court decision which gives corporations the right of free speech (unlimited campaign contributions) by treating them as individuals, thus overturning 90 years of existing law which prohibited corporate contributions to federal campaigns.

So through mechanisms created by legislators themselves at all levels of government, they have quietly taken control away from the voters and passed it on to lobbyists and special interests such as banks and the health care industry in exchange for money, further separating the electorate from the political process.

Bad behavior is bipartisan. Is it any wonder, then, that people feel powerless and ticked off? They watch Massa, a Democrat, unravel on TV as he talks abut “tickle fights,” “snorkeling” and “fracking.” And they see Bunning, a Republican, wage a one-man campaign against extending unemployment benefits. In New York, Gov. David Paterson, followed Eliot Spitzer in his fall from grace, while Harlem’s Rangel waits to see what’s in store for him after getting caught with his fingers in the tambourine. And the long line of Republicans—Rep. Mark Foley, Sen. John Ensign, Sen. David Vitter, Gov. Mark Sanford and Sen. Larry Craig—and the apparent brothel they ran on “C” Street, a chip shot away from the nation’s capitol, tug at the nation’s moral sinew and the fragility of the political system.

In one of those ironic twists, at the same time politicians posture for more transparency, that elusive goal is exactly what brought many of them down. So when it comes to transparency, the political flavor of the month, too much of a good thing can be bad for politicians.

Mystery Achievements

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:34:24 -0400

Laugh if you will, but I derive a not inconsiderable amount of pleasure for a skill at what one of my four brothers mocks as “the minor, if amusing, trivial sports,” specifically miniature golf, croquet and bocce. Sure, I was a pretty fair baseball player as a youth—decent bat, good glove, an absolute donkey on the base paths—and not bad at touch football, but bombed out at basketball, soccer, lacrosse and hockey, and as for tennis, well, I never had the patience to even get started. Never been skiing either, probably because as a youth that was frowned upon as a “rich kid’s” indulgence which carried baggage; as an adult I hate cold weather and don’t feel like breaking any bones. In addition, I’m a so-so swimmer, and can’t recall if I’ve ever jumped off a springboard. Pathetic. While two of my brothers earned university scholarships for their athletic prowess in high school, along with top-notch grades, I tried out for the LAX team at Huntington High School and was cut after the first day. Suited me fine, since I reckoned there were far better ways to spend my time, but my parents were distraught that my college applications would have a large he-man blemish, and it took several days to calm my mother down over this failure.

Nonetheless, at mini-golf I’ll gladly take on all comers. Obviously, it’s all in the mastery of putting—not unlike croquet, where the utmost concentration is required when you’re caught between two opponents at a back-end wicket—and that’s a talent, such as it is, that I learned as a squirt. One of the older boys in my family had a summer job at a mini-golf course in Northport on Rt. 25-A—this was 1961 when I was six years old—and a couple of times a week he’d take me along for company. Since it was in the early evening and the owner wasn’t there, I had the run of the traditional 18-hole course, decorated with windmills, ponds, gingerbread houses, funnels and other obstacles that took a lot of cunning to figure out. It’s said, and there’s no reason to doubt it, that golf—real golf, that is—is a matter of lifelong practice, and while I never had the time to develop a strong drive, at mini-golf I played that Northport course over and over and over, and emerged as an ace.

Mini-golf isn’t really of modern times, yet another pastime that’s been superseded by speedier pursuits, whether inside or outdoors, and it’s likely that most Americans under the age of 25 (at least those who live in urban areas; I can’t speak for the states that time’s forgotten, such as Ohio, Missouri, New Hampshire and Wisconsin, no condescension intended) won’t experience the thrill of sinking a ball on one stroke at the 18th hole, which usually wins the participant a free game and, more importantly, a fleeting moment of glory. As it happened, I took this hobby somewhat seriously and played a lot as a teenager, sometimes on group dates, sometimes hanging out with my hippie buddies, or just by myself, strictly for grins.

On one occasion, while spending time in Europe as a 20-year-old Mr. Nanny for my niece and nephew, the five of us played a meticulous mini-golf course at the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. After 14 holes, I was creaming my oldest brother—whose competitive streak is daunting—and we took a brief break. My sister-in-law, mindful that dinner afterwards could be a grumpy affair if her husband was defeated, pleaded with me to throw the game. Zounds! I didn’t care what dark cloud was on the horizon, there was no way I’d take one for the team. As it turned out, the interruption screwed up my timing and I wound up losing by a stroke—choked!—a bitter turn of events that’s still brought up at family reunions.

In the mid-80s, as co-publisher of Baltimore’s City Paper I was invited for several years running to the Mayor’s annual celebrity mini-golf tournament, held each June outside of City Hall. Now, that was fun; most of my fellow “celebrities”—local television clods, City Council members, gossip columnists for the city’s then-three daily newspapers, advertising agency directors and so on—were real duffers and showed up for the schmoozefest, which seemed redundant to me, since in Baltimore, like all cities, professional glad-handers are always on duty, traipsing to this or that charity event, opening of a new boutique or hotel, and all sorts of other absolutely horrid events which were ripe, if that’s your shtick, for getting your picture taken.

Yet there was one fellow, a tough-as-toenails City Councilman named Mike Curran who took this tournament very seriously, as did I. He was rather amiable once you’d established a relationship and we’d lay down a gentleman’s wager each year on the outcome. I won the trophy two years in a row, ’86 and ’87, and a City Paper photographer was there to record the magic; Mike took home the made-in-China-for-a-nickel prize the two previous years. What was great about this one day was that any reporter/politician squabble that may have been brewing was forgotten; it was all about the game. Two days later, Mike or one of his colleagues might call the office to call me a low-down rat over a column I wrote about the City Council’s typical ineptitude, and that was fair enough.

Nearly five years ago, The Wall Street Journal’s Joseph Rago wrote a splendid column about—all true, I swear—that summer’s upcoming New York Championship Open, in which 50 touring professional mini-golfers competed for a measly purse of $1,000. (In stark contrast, Rago notes, to the maligned sport’s popularity in Europe, where in 2005 that continent’s world championship in Vienna attracted thousands of spectators and rewarded the winner with $100,000.) Rago also gives a capsule history of miniature golf in the United States, writing: “At the height of the 1920s, four million Americans played every day … Revelers wore furs and formal attire and wielded silver putters [on Manhattan rooftop courses] … More modest courses proliferated, and by the 1950s there were as many as 50,000 across the nation, eventually giving rise to the classic Americana of windmills and whales.” Rago, a Journal summer intern at the time, is now a top-drawer editorial writer at the daily, concentrating on ObamaCare, a task that earned him, for better or worse, a spot on The Daily Beast’s Top 25 Conservative Pundits.

It’s been four years since I last played, one Father’s Day at Mitchell’s Golf Course in Reisterstown, MD, and I sort of won. The sun was brutal, my sons were both duffers who took about 10 extra shots, pissing off the party behind us, and so we knocked off in mid-game. But I still have the scorecard of that aborted contest, and although my eyesight has steadily declined, even with powerful glasses, this mini-golf champ can still sink a putt from a long distance. Not the stuff of superstars, admittedly, but I’ll take it.

Psychological Alchemy

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:39:06 -0500

Since her 2001 split 7" with Songs: Ohia, Scout Niblett has been putting out minimalist indie folk that runs nicely along the early Cat Power axis: nothing but a Fender Mustang (inspired by Kurt Cobain) and a distortion pedal, with the occasional drummer or piano backing. Niblett has earned a dedicated following, and found a not-so-surprise hit with 2007's "Kiss," a heartfelt duet with Will Oldham. Her lyrics are known for their dark and painfully honest introspection, and often follow the same simple structure as her songs—the howling refrain, "We're all gonna die!" on the b-side "I'll be a Prince," for example.

Her new album, The Calcinations of Scout Niblett, out now on Drag City, is her first since 2007's This Fool Can Die Now, and though upon first listen the two albums don't stray too far from each other—minus Will Oldham of course—Calcinations is an important move for Niblett, no doubt thanks in part to her continued collaboration with producer Steve Albini, known for his inspired work with Nirvana, Pixies, Mogwai, Manic Street Preachers and on and on.

"Cherry Cheek Bomb"

"Just Do It" opens the album with some slow fuzzed out guitar tapping riffs before turning into a fairly typical (albeit excellent) Niblett slow-burner, a subdued sound that carries over into the album's second track, "Bargain." But it's the raucous guitar wail of "Cherry Cheek Bomb" that really sets the tone on the album: perhaps angrier and more aggressive than anything Niblett has done before -- fiery is no doubt the word, as the album's title refers to a kind of purification by fire. As Niblett told Jessica Lewis in a recent interview for Round Letters:

I think the main bulk of the album was realizing I was going through a transformation of sorts, where I’m basically looking at myself in a critical way to try and work out what parts of myself are kind of dysfunctional so that I can sort those out. I’ve been reading a lot about psychological alchemy and the way that you have to really look at yourself for a change to happen and you have to deal with your shadow and the dark parts of yourself that you don’t really want to look at ... You are literally putting a fire under you; you’re bringing a light to your personality to really kind of dissect it and look at it.

Niblett's esoteric reasonings aside, Calcinations surely holds together better as an album than This Fool Can Die Now, and will no doubt remind the listener more of Fiona Apple than anyone else. Calcinations is harrowing and exhausting and beautifully complete as an expression of Niblett's power as an artist: perhaps best summed up in the nine-minute album closer, "Meet and Greet," a song about the frustrations of music and touring, which drifts from ambient droning guitar to crescendos of clanging drums and distortion. In the end it's a difficult listen, but a thoroughly rewarding one.

Born With All You Need To Know

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 11:34:31 -0500

Some facts about Super Mario 64 (Nintendo, 1996), the best video game ever made, and its creator: It’s either the eighth or the 10th game in the Mario series, depending on your standards, and the fourth or the sixth to be designed directly by Shigeru Miyamoto. Miyamoto is the kind of guy, like Herodotus or Francis Bacon, who is called the “father” of something, in this case modern video games, and though his isn’t an indisputable paternity suspicious evidence certainly abounds. Miyamoto’s original Super Mario Bros., in which a small cartoon Italian plumber runs and jumps through environments inhabited by malevolent creatures, created a genre whose basic mechanics infiltrated a great deal of subsequent genres, with a star character who has become one of the most recognizable icons in the world despite (or perhaps because of) having a skeletal personality constructed entirely of ethnic clichés.

SM64, the first 3D entry in the series, is and isn’t much like its predecessors. In the mid-90s, as technology first began to allow 3D environments to be created on-the-fly by computer processers priced such that your mom could be convinced to buy you one, game designers tried several times to extrude platform game design into a third dimension, without much success or much indication that they knew exactly why they were doing this or what could be accomplished. SM64 was the first wholly successful 3D platformer—where the player spends a lot of time jumping from platform to platform trying not to fall—and the first to transport the running-jumping-head bopping style into a 3D environment and leave behind the bits that simply didn’t fit. Like all of its predecessors, it sent Mario through a series of self-contained levels on a very vague quest to rescue a princess.

Like only some of its predecessors, it was a masterpiece.

Some notes on structure. SM64 relies on what’s usually called a “hub world” or “overworld”—a relatively placid environment from which the player can access the game’s levels in the order he likes. Hub worlds vary greatly in complexity; some games use them as glorified menus, asking a player to open a door or enter a room when he might as well be selecting a level from a list. Others sprinkle the hub with interactivity out of what sometimes seems a sense of guilt: you can fiddle with this or that, you can watch your character watch TV or pretend to eat or you can take some time off from the game proper. (Designs of this type sometimes seem to be unaware that when most people want to take some time off from something, they stop doing it.)

SM64’s hub is one of the most detailed and best integrated in the history of gaming. At the game’s beginning, Mario stands outside a sprawling, empty castle full of galleries of living paintings that act as portals to other levels; halls, gates, basements, attics, courtyards, trapdoors; a moat (which, once drained, reveals a few extra secrets); and an apparently empty room with a secret door to a slide. It’s probably larger than any other environment in the game. It’s also fun to explore.

Exploration was never a part of earlier Mario games. Even the near-flawless Super Mario Bros. 3 invariably directed the player left-to-right across two-dimensional landscapes, and the goal of every level was to reach the point of extreme rightness.. This was a design decision, but it was also a limitation of technology—games like the original Legend of Zelda had large environments through which the player could wander at will, but they did it by reducing Mario’s two dimensions to one: a player would look straight down at the top of his character’s head, and move him left and right, up and down, with both axes representing movement along the same plane. The Mario games, which centered on jumping, didn’t have a dimension to spare. The move to 3D meant they had an extra one lying around, and SM64 drops Mario into expansive worlds through which there’s no prescribed direction of motion: the player wanders, he explores, he finds secrets and enemies under, around and behind things, rather than questing always for Extreme Rightness*. SM64 rewards care, curiosity, and perception as much as can a game that’s still mostly about stomping on the heads of ambulatory mushrooms.

The game’s detail isn’t restricted to environment. It’s a testament to Miyamoto’s imagination that SM64’s characters, which do not inhabit anything like a coherent universe and exist only in their relationship to Mario—which aren’t characters at all, really, but collections of hindrances**—nevertheless have personality. The ghosts who shrink and vanish when Mario faces them but swell with malevolent glee when he looks away are first and foremost a problem, a dynamic to master: the player has to exploit their shyness to keep them away, and make sure he doesn’t turn his back for long. There’s nothing excessive or ornamental in the mechanic. But it’s fundamentally human, and when it’s introduced the player doesn’t think of it as a dry piece of design but understands it immediately, subconsciously: Oh, I see, they’re shy***.

It’s the subtlety and efficiency with which Mario games teach the player that allows them get so complicated while staying simple. By the SM64’s late levels, an eight-year-old kid can find himself ascending a tall chute by ricocheting off its parallel walls with precise timing, aiming a kick towards an approaching monster on the way up, and jumping onto a moving flying carpet from which the game will immediately begin trying to dislodge him. He will do all this using no techniques or moves not available to him from the very beginning of the game, because unlike other games which ramp up their complexity by rewarding the player with new moves as he progresses, the Mario of SM64 never learns how to do more than the half-dozen available to him at the beginning, none of which are very complicated. It’s the player who learns new things: new ways to interact with his environment, new implications of its details and new uses for moves he thought he fully understood. Adding new moves to a game is a way of simulating mastery—the character gets better at what he does as he progresses through his adventure. SM64 uses no such simulation; it’s about real mastery. Mario doesn’t get better—the player does.

Which brings us to the word “art.” Devotees of video games have always been eager to apply this word to their hobby, and outsiders have been predictably resistant in the disinterested and slightly annoyed way**** that tends to inflame true believers into goofy proclamations. It also tends to inflame game designers, who fight back by stuffing reams and reams of (usually pretty turgid) plot into their games, hoping the values of literature and cinema will carry them to the plateau of Seriousness. Concerning games like this, the dissenters are absolutely right: the requirements of video-game interactivity get in the way of drama and character in so many disastrous ways that the use of literary trappings has always been and can only be ornamental. John Carmack, the designer of Doom, said that a plot in a video game is like a plot in a porno: it’s there, but it’s not why you’re there. This only pretends to be Philistine.

But of course drama and character aren’t what video games are about. They’re about mechanics, about grace, about the subtleties and difficulties of teaching a player how to do something, about the working relationship between the designer and the player—a relationship that’s part love affair and part antagonism. In SM64’s elegance—in the purity of its mechanics and in the detail of its environments, which exist to challenge but never confound the player; in its deft, simple characterizations—there’s the same kind of tingle induced by, say, a Pollock painting: another artifact bereft of Ideas but full of the same mechanical confidence, the same playful push-and-pull between artist and audience. Understand that this isn’t a way to classify every decent video game as great art. I love a lot of games but there aren’t many games like this, since this is the best one ever made.

——

* This remained the case for SM64’s less luminous sequel, Super Mario Sunshine, but not so much for the Wii game Super Mario Galaxy. Mario’s still leaping through 3D environments in Galaxy, but the player’s much more likely to spend an entire level more or less being told exactly where to run—the return of Extreme Rightness, disguised by the showy twists and turns 3D allows. In this, Galaxy is more a (terrific) sequel to Super Mario Bros. 3 than a successor to SM64.

** In 1993, when the live-action film version of Super Mario Bros. tried to pull all of the series’ iconography together into a functioning fictional world capable of supporting a narrative, they ended up with a stunningly ghastly Blade Runner thing in which steaming taxicabs navigate a dystopian Manhattan and Dennis Hopper forces his enemies into a “de-evolution machine” which, for some reason, reduces their heads to prosthetic nubs atop incongruously hulking bodies. This is what happens when you think you have source material but actually don’t.

*** See also the Bob-ombs, Platonic bombs with metal feet, rotating wind-up keys and blinking anime eyes, who putter in pointless circles until Mario approaches, whereupon their fuse ignites and they barrel after him in kamikaze desperation.

**** The most famous dissenter is probably Roger Ebert, who wrote that games’ interactivity precluded artistry, which was ironic because Roger Ebert also wrote one of the smartest and most enthusiastic game reviews ever written, about an obscure game with definite artistic ambition.