don't see this
latest comments:
Chess Sets | edwardIn Defense of the Craft | dwight
Since everyone's being shy... | dwight
Make it so. | helena
$4 Million Gross | edward
How about 40 acres and a mule? | dwight
Yeah | edward
Hooray! We won Washington!
State, that is. Still, a great victory in a season of doubt.
So who’s your inner rock chick?
For the record, I’m happy to discover I'm Ani Difranco and/or Liz Phair. (My answers to the first six were C, F, D, E, D, E. But on #7 I keep switching between A—my first answer—and B or D—also likely candidates.) I guess that means I’m walking out in the rain, but only after I f--- and run.
Since the only thing better than one inner rock chick is two outer ones, try Tegan and Sara on for size. (Observant City Paper readers will remember they came through both D.C. and B-more around Thanksgiving; sadly I missed them.) The duo are twins from Canada with a nice double vocal sound (their voices are as—if not more than—identical as they are) that has a certain hard-to-categorize-jaggedness…maybe somewhere in the vicinity of The Breeders. Their lyrics are often troubled and loudly introspective—that of a girl asking pointed questions to someone across the street whose windows she is voyeuristicly gazing into. Nothing on the new album leaps out at me demanding to be a TYSBLTRN, but it’s all pretty good, and the previous album was downright great. Try “I Know I Know I Know” or “Walking With A Ghost” off of So Jealous, or the incredible “I Hear Noises” and “Living Room” off 2002’s If It Was You.
So, Ronald's going to purchase a house. Leaving yet another empty space to fill in the 'werkz. As usual, the goods are located right here. (I really should update some of those photos one of these days. All the work I've put in on the garden isn't even shown there!)
I'll throw up a craigslist ad probably over the break. But for now, I'm just using word-of-mouth. If you know anyone who's cool and who needs a spot, drop me a line.
I just know know that tons of people will ask me useless questions about the room. Let's take them in order:
- What room is available?
- Where is your house?
- Can I bring pets/wifes/children?
- Can I get an actual address?
- I promise to show up at 6 o'clock on Tuesday.
The answers, in order, are here:
- The Salmon Room. Like it says right here.
- That information is also conveniently located right here.
- Only for a visit. Never to stay. Unless your pet or wife is a fish.
- See #2
- No, you don't. You also don't plan to call to tell me beforehand that you're flaking. But you know what? I don't want people like you in my house anyway. If you have trouble lying to me, I doubt you can get your rent check in on time. So there.
By far, question #4 and statement #5 are the most annoying. The sheer number of people I have to direct to the webpage after they already looked at the webpage is staggeringly high.
The holidays are fast approaching...which means the number and quality of posts will likely decline.
To stem this flood of absence, if anyone would chip in a piece of two over the next two days I'd be extremely grateful. Thanks!
Lots of pop culture goodness to keep you distracted today…
Regarding my previous mention of Save Ferris’s kosher take on “Christmas Wrapping”: until the end of Thursday, 12/23 (when the file gets overwritten), you can find it on minute 21:59 of this mp3 (followed immediately by Atom & His Package singing about the International Jewish Conspiracy, called “What WE do on Christmas”). You can also hear SF’s cover of "Father Christmas"—which is better than the original—on minute 8:19 of this mp3.
There actually is an International Jewish Conspiracy, which I learned from Think You’re the Only One?: Oddball Groups Where Outsiders Fit In. I plug this book for three reasons: 1) the author, Seth Brown, went to school with many DW readers, 2) all you fans of the Post will be thrilled to know that the book was largely inspired by the Style Invitational Losers, frequent contributors to the Post’s weekly “Style Invitational” and 3) Seth Brown was also made famous in Gene Weingarten’s column when he and his roommate came down with scurvy. Anyone who catches a 16th century sailors’ disease deserves to have his book bought (available only at Barnes & Noble, sadly); alternately, you can visit his webpage and buy him a lime.
Since Luna is breaking up, many of you are no doubt wondering how their last show ever in D.C. went…but I can’t tell you, because I don’t give a figgy pudding about Luna and passed up several invitations to go.
Instead I went to Poetry for the People Baltimore’s 2004 People’s Poetry Awards. Now let me be clear, what I witnessed I can not call poetry—not really, for reasons that are too academic, elitist, and (let’s face it) white to go into (it doesn’t live on the page, relies too much on performance and the “I,” lacks concrete imagery, relies to a fault on near-rhyme, etc., etc.). But it was art, and I got to hear words truly at play (“play” here meaning “to play around,” but also as in “let’s put on a show,” and as in Derrida’s sense of differance). An example from Ad-Lib: “I hang my poems from the side of a bridge / You know: a suspended sentence.”
What was especially nice (especially after hanging out for 4.5 years with sardonic grad students trying to land professorships) was being around people who described poetry not as a job or craft, but as an essential survival mechanism. So if you like the particular marriage of poetry and hip-hop known as slam poetry, spoken word, performance poetry, or just spitting, this was the place to be. Names to drop: Dri Fish, Native Son, E. the poet-emcee, Archie the Messenger, and JaHipster (many of whom appear at Warm Wednesdays). Olu Butterfly didn’t live up to her hype, but Ad-Lib was true to his name, incorporating into his acceptance spit a tribute to, then trump of, all the other awardees. And it’s not just a “black thing”: one of the best works of the night (and the closest thing to my aforementioned oppressively normative standards of poetry) came from an Anglo named Grandma Dave who runs a Monday slam at Xando by the Hopkins Homewood Campus.
No TYSBLTRN this post. Instead, I’m wondering what your favorite winter tracks are. Holiday-wise, you already know my feelings about The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York” (which The City on Film do an OK job of covering on the second My Pal God holiday comp; try minute 51:05 of this mp3, and check out Harvey Danger’s great "Sometimes You Have to Work on Christmas" just before it). But in terms of secular songs about winter, my vote goes to The Virgin-Whore Complex’s cover of "The Coldest Night of the Year." Any other nominees?
After reading this post on Talking Points Memo something stood out at me:
That's too bad. Because without aggressive, outside-the-box thinking and action, this will all go very badly. The same-old-same-old mix of press conferences and reports and 'coalitions' won't amount to anything.
This has been rattling around my head for some time now. Basically, I just don't understand what JMM calls the "same-old-same-old mix" of public relations, coalitions, visibility work, etc. I never have. To me they embody an approach that has never worked. The dirty little secret of advertising (feel free to disagree, Dwight) is that it isn't effective: most consumer advertising can, at best, shave off a few people from using another product and onto yours. But brand identities, now more than ever, are losing steam. Advertising is notoriously bad at getting people to purchase a product they have no interest in already.
In the past, purchasing a "brand" product meant the security and safety of getting the best. Buying a box of Tide meant buying the cleanest clothes. Now, instead, the marketplace is ruled by price. If I see a generic version of a product (and Consumer Reports agrees with me) then I'll pick it up instead.
But back to politics.
Tons of work is done every day by different groups on the left, about labor, the environment, health care, etc. Many of the groups are somewhat duplicative of each other, and so often form "coalitions" to advance their agendas. Many also have in-house lobbying shops to help move friendly legislation forward. A large amount of money then, is raised to be spent on public relations to convince the news media to treat particular issues as "news", which will in turn raise public "awareness" which will then create "pressure" on legislators to alter the laws (or keep them!) on the books.
To some extent, this has worked in the past. But in many cases, it doesn't. And increasingly, the cases where it doesn't seem to be on our side. The large demonstration marches from before the Iraq War began are a great case in point: tons of people mobilized from around the country to travel to D.C. to show the world America was having second thoughts about going to war.
Yet we did.
More importantly, many Democrats felt at the time that failure to support the war was political suicide. Think about that. Now, of course, everyone and their cousin says things in Iraq are "going badly". Yet if anyone had painted an exact picture of where we are today, two years ago, many would've said the person was crazy. The surprise, of course, shouldn't be that the war has gone badly. The surprise should be that so many people thought it would go so well. This isn't a failure of evidence: all the evidence was there. It's a failure of public relations.
What do I mean? Well, simply put, legislators often need "cover" to vote for a certain measure. If public support is against a particular issue, legislators can claim they are acting as their constituents wish. (Yes, yes, we live in a republic, not a democracy, and no one polls their actual district, anyway, but ignore all that.) Democrats, as a party, failed to provide cover for the vote on the war in Iraq.
Sure, I hear you saying, but it was political suicide. Nonsense, I say. The risks were there...but the real risk was in acting timid. Americans aren't able to judge facts well. This is at the heart of the problem. Most Democratic organizations seem to feel that if we come up with a list of the reasons for something being bad or good, that the public will agree with us. It's not the message, guys, it's the messenger.
Americans love a straight shooter. When Rummy's popularity soared after 9/11, it was because he held news conferences daily and gave straightforward answers. Bush, by contrast, has dropped each time he's gone on the air because he can't give a straight answer. How does this affect Democratic P.R.? Well, forming a "coalition" sounds grand, but accomplishes little. So does having a march. Or issuing a "press release" and desperately trying to get the news media to pick it up and turn it into "a story".
Instead, we need to have people tell things like they really are. Let's ask the simplistic questions: "are you for Social Security?" "are you for working folks?" "are you for Medicare?" Yes, these questions shouldn't be boiled down to yes/no propositions. But they must, because we need to frame the GOP as it really is: the party against Social Security, against working families, against Medicare. Let's also ask another important question: are you for the federal debt? Democrats need to start pounding down a simple meme: socially liberal, fiscally conservative.
On the p.r. front we need to start taking plays from the other side. GOP Astroturf is rampant in the print world. Let's make it easier to write letters to the editor. The FCC was recently punked by the "Parent's Television Council" to the tune of almost 100% of its complaints. We need to do the same.
Almost all of our recent success have come through internet campaigns like the one to boycott Sinclair. We didn't need press releases. We just needed properly channeled outrage. There are tons of things we are already outraged about. So let's start channeling...
I probably should've worn a hat today.
Until my ears warm up, enjoy these delicious floating logos. Yes, you've probably seen them already.
Of course, almost no snow and a high of 28 isn't exactly heartwarming...
The district in the snow is breathtaking.