Newley Purnell

–My friend Colin R. recently launched a New York-based software development firm called Cyrus Innovation. If Cyrus’s excellent site is any indication of the work they do, then they clearly produce user-centered, high-quality stuff.

–I mentioned Richard Ford in my last post. He’s a writer I’ve begun reading recently. And man, is he good. I can’t believe I’ve been missing out on his work all these years. “The Sportswriter” is a brilliant book. Ford captures, better than anyone else writing today, what it is to be an American man. And I mean that. Here’s a profile of Ford, and here’s a link to “The Sportswriter.” I now put Ford on the list of my favorite writers, right up there with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Flannery O’Connor.

–The Chronicle of Higher Education is running a funny article about how some academics and publishers want to banish the colon from book titles. Someone once said that the problem with academia is that professors get paid to be clever–not to be right. (Related: Check out the Postmodern English Title Generator, which, I must point out, makes ample use of the colon.)

–Tom Friedman says 9-11 “amounts to World War III” and lays out some ways to ensure that Islamic militants can’t “erode our lifestyle.” I’m waiting for the day when Friedman, who’s so good at explaining big-picture stuff like globalization and terrorism, says he was wrong to advocate the Iraq war as an effective way to make America safer. I guess we won’t know for a while either way, though.

This is a topic I’ve been meaning to address for many months. I’ve been putting it off because I’ve felt I can’t possibly articulate how much I love the music produced by Wilco. But I’ll try.

I discovered the Chicago-based band about a year ago, when I attended, within the span of a month, 1) a screening of the documentary “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” about the recording of their latest album, and 2) a live Wilco performance at Washington, DC’s 9:30 Club. Several of my friends, notably Chris D., Chris H., and Miles B., had been praising the band for years, but I’d never listened to any of their albums.

After seeing the excellent film and then seeing the band live (they play a mixture of, and I know this is gonna sound ridiculous but there’s no way around it, alt-country/pop/folk/rock), I purchased just about all of their albums and have since come under their spell.

Why? Because their songs are both complex and catchy. Wilco’s music is multi-layered and well-conceived and well-played–but it always contains elements of pop. Wilco’s musicians value instrumentation, but you can always tap your toes to their tunes. If their albums were books, they’d be the novels of Don Delillo or Richard Ford: artful, intricate, and really smart, but accessible.

Wilco was formed when the alt-country band Uncle Tupelo split up in 1994. Jeff Tweedy, one of the singer/songwriters, formed Wilco, and Jay Farrar, the other, founded Son Volt. While Son Volt continued Uncle Tupelo’s tradition of alt-country–steel guitars and lots of twang–Tweedy and his bandmates have, with each successive album, embraced stylistic evolution.

Wilco’s first album was 1995’s A.M., which was straight-ahead rock/pop/country. Then, in 1996, came “Being There,” a resounding critical success: the double album featured, among others, gems like the heartrending “What’s the World Got in Store” and the driving, up-tempo “I Got You (At The End of the Century).”

Next, the band collaborated with Billy Brag to record 15 previously-unreleased Woody Guthrie songs; the result was 1998’s Mermaid Avenue, followed by Volume II, which came out in 2000.

In 1999, sandwiched between the Mermaid Avenue albums, Wilco released “Summer Teeth,” which was at once rife with bubble-gum pop electronic melodies and biting, dark lyrics (such as “I dreamed about killing you again last night / And it felt all right to me”).

And then, in 2002, the story of “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” emerged. It was, besides being Wilco’s best effort to date, a metaphor for the modern music industry: the band’s label, AOL Time Warner’s Reprise, heard the finished version of the album and said it needed to be changed–it wouldn’t sell. Wilco refused, was allowed to buy the album back, and, after a bidding war, sold it to another AOLTW subsidiary, Nonesuch.

Wilco, like so many other bands, wanted their artistic freedom; Reprise, like so many other labels, wanted a return on their investment–they thought the album would flop. They were wrong. And their short-sighted misjudgement caused them to lose (only to see their parent company re-buy) one of the best albums of 2002.

Brent Sirota, at the time of the album’s release, said it best:

So does Yankee Hotel Foxtrot justify the controversy, delay and buzz? Everyone, I think, already knows that the answer is yes; all I can offer is “me too” and reiterate. And after half a year living with a bootleg copy, the music remains revelatory. Complex and dangerously catchy, lyrically sophisticated and provocative, noisy and somehow serene, Wilco’s aging new album is simply a masterpiece; it is equally magnificent in headphones, cars and parties. And as anyone who’s seen the mixed-bag crowd at Wilco shows knows, it will find a home in the collections of hippies, frat boys, acid-eating prep schoolers, and the record store apparatchiks of the indiocracy. No one is too good for this album; it is better than all of us.
…
Beneath the great story of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, there are all the tropes and symbols and coincidences of a little mythology; but under that is a fantastic rock record…

Of course, not everyone shares my enthusiasm for Wilco. My impression, though I haven’t met anyone who feels this way, is that some people think the band’s self-consciously hip–that they try awfully hard to be cool. As someone wrote on Metafilter when the buzz surrounding “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” reached fever pitch,

Wilco — and I’ve tried, honestly I have — have always struck me as like a moody blurred charcoal drawing, and if such things appeal to you, then bravo. As it is, I appreciate the occassional concrete detail, I like to be compelled to dance or something rather than be moodied on, I don’t like the marriage of songcraft with mopiness, and I don’t get such apparently-obvious concepts as what, say, the phrase “summer teeth” is supposed to evoke. Or, for that matter, “I assassin down the avenue.”

Okay, that was a rant. Wilco’s all right. But they do cause overreactions among people who think that blakck-and-white film and uncapitalized titles are Very Arty Indeed.

But I think you’d be hard-pressed to find many people who agree with that sentiment.

Looking ahead, Wilco has recorded a new album; it should be released this spring.

I can’t wait.

I’m back in Beaufort, South Carolina, after my new year’s sojourn in DC and Vermont. Lots of fun. Got a chance to catch up with a bunch of friends I hadn’t seen in a while.

And, besides doing some snowboarding at Stowe Mountain, where we rented a condo, I toured (and stuffed myself on samples from) the Vermont Cabot cheese factory store AND the Ben and Jerry’s headquarters. Does life, I ask, really get any better than good company, snowsports, holiday libations, cheese, and ice cream? I surely cannot imagine it does. (Unless you throw in a TiVo.)

The one bad thing about the trip: on Sunday night, not less than 30 minutes after arriving in DC and parking my car streetside at Jack W.‘s apartment on Capitol Hill, someone smashed the back passenger-side window and attempted to steal the stereo. Luckily, some thoughtful citizen called the cops, who swooped in and arrested the thief. The police then towed my car to their station for safekeeping. I got it back that night and thanked the officers involved, but my stereo remains a guest of a nameless DC Metropolitan Police Department property room.

I tried for several hours to get it back, but was sent on a wild goose chase (calling around and trying to track it down) of absurd proportions. At one point, a DC desk cop actually directed the following phrase at me: “Oh, in order to get that radio back you have to put your name on the list with the US attorney general’s office.” Then they told me I needed to talk to the arresting officer, who would be reporting for duty in two hours. So I killed some time and waited around. When I came back at the approprite time, I was informed that, oh, yeah, sorry, he’s not working today.

And I thought Ecuadorian bureaucracies were inefficient.

At any rate, I’ll track down the thing when I return to Washington next week–I’m heading up there to begin some Web consulting work which will last though February. Beginning in March, as I mentioned earlier, I’ll start teaching in East Asia. I’ll write more about that soon.

I won’t be posting for the next week. Tomorrow morning, I’m driving up to Washington, DC, where I’ll meet up with Newley.com political analyst Jack W. On Monday morning, we’ll pick up Win L. and make our way up to Vermont, where we’re meeting a group of friends for new year’s celebrations. Yes indeed, I’ve got some long hours on I-95 ahead of me.

I’ll be back in DC on Sunday, January 4th, and may stick around our nation’s capital for a day or two. I’ll be back online here in South Carolina’s Lowcountry somewhere in the neighborhood of Tuesday, January 6th. (And then after that, well, I’ll let you know as soon as I know. I’m working on short-term employment in Washington from mid-January until the end of February, after which I shall be setting sail for E. Asia, where I’ll be teaching English. More details soon. I promise.)

Happy new year in advance, everyone.

Josh Marshall points out this snippet from David Brooks’s column in today’s New York Times:

I remind Oakeshott that he was ambivalent about the American Revolution, and dubious about a people who had made a sharp break with the past in the name of inalienable rights and other abstractions. But ours is the one revolution that worked, and it did precisely because our founders were epistemologically modest too, and didn’t pretend to know what is the good life, only that people should be free to figure it out for themselves.

Because of that legacy, we stink at social engineering. Our government couldn’t even come up with a plan for postwar Iraq — thank goodness, too, because any “plan” hatched by technocrats in Washington would have been unfit for Iraqi reality.

It just so happens that I’m in the middle of Howard Zinn’s leftist screed historical survey of our nation from 1492 to the present, “A People’s History of the United States.”

Zinn makes the compelling argument that the American revolution wasn’t about “inalienable rights.” In fact , it was about the ruling class’s desire to free themselves from British taxes so as to become richer. End of story.

Sure, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men are created equal.” But that didn’t include the Indians who were systematically exterminated, it didn’t include slaves, and it didn’t include women. The colonies broke from Britain not, as we’ve come to believe, because of ideological necessity, but because the white guys who were running the show wanted to retain their power.

Zinn’s theories are steeped in gender and identity politics, yes, but he’s pretty convincing. I agree with Marshall: America has a long and rich tradition of “non-ideological pragmatism.” It’s shaped every international conflict from the revolution to the war in Iraq.

I’ve edited the links on the left-hand side of this page. I’ve removed some superfluous stuff and added some new blogs. They are:

—Baseball Musings, the title of which speaks for itself;
—Jim Henley‘s Weblog, which covers politics and culture;
–Reason Magazine’s Hit & Run Weblog;
–Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, in which he reflects on political happenings;
—Obernews, Brooke Oberwetter’s entertaining blog;
—The Devil’s Excrement, a Weblog written by a fellow Southern Exposure blogger, Miguel Octavio, who lives in Venezuela;
—SCHotline, which summarizes news from my adopted home state of South Carolina;
—Matthew Yglesias’s Weblog, in which he opinies on politics and culture;
–the always-juicy Romenesko’s MediaNews, an oldie-but-goodie; and
–a non-blog, JournalismJobs.com.

Read and enjoy.

UPDATE (Sat. afternoon): I’ve added two more–these’re sites I’ve been reading for a long time but am just now linking to: BravesJournal, which covers my favorite underperforming baseball team, and The London Guardian’s TEFL news, about teaching English to non-native speakers.

A few interesting photos from around the world this Christmas day: Saddam decked out in his holiday getup, Blitzen gets frisky in Alaska, Santa camel in Egypt, Santa monkey in Tokyo, ice lamps in China, workers take a smoke break in Hong Kong, and an Indian army solider executes a jump on his motorcycle in Calcutta.

Best wishes to everyone for a happy Christmas and an enjoyable 2004.

This is the best Festivus present I ever could have asked for: “ALF” is returning to TV!

E Online: “This just in from the home office in Melmac: The 7,385 signers of the “Bring Back ALF” online petition letter have finally gotten their wish.

The furry, cat-craving extraterrestrial star of the 1980s NBC sitcom, most recently spotted slumming it for long-distance services 10-10-220 and 1-800-COLLECT, has just landed his own show on Nickelodeon.”

As 2003 comes to a close, here’s an excellent article about what’s on the horizon for online news and journalism.

Rolf Potts, a travel writer I admire, has just published the first in a series of articles about his exploits in Central America. Check out his inaugural dispatch from Granada, Nicaragua; Slate will continue to publish his thoughts as he makes his way, as part of the Drive Around the World expedition, toward Argentina.

(Side note: you may remember that a few months ago Rolf was kind enough to link to my article entitled “How and Why I Moved to Ecuador.” His excellent book “Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel.” is one I recommend wholeheartedly.)

Safe travels, Rolf, and keep the stories comin’.