Fitful Murmurs

I came back to this blog after a few weeks away and found myself unaccountably claustrophobic.  (This isn’t entirely unlike my reaction to returning to a New York City apartment after spending time at home in California.)  Thoughts on the new layout, positive or negative, would be appreciated.  Thanks!

Gomez is my favorite band.  They have been since my friend Mark played me their Machismo EP eight years ago in our sophomore-year high school English class.  (Goodness knows where he got his hands on the thing, come to think of it.)  I bought In Our Gun when I was in London on an ill-chaperoned, mostly-drunken school trip when I was sixteen.  I took nine of my friends to a concert in Santa Cruz for my seventeenth birthday.  (Photographic evidence: here.)  Gomez and I, we’ve got history.

So I’ll concede that I’m coming to their new album, A New Tide, with rose-tinted glasses.  And there’s no denying that it’s a very different Gomez album than what’s come before it, and I can see how some people were disappointed by that.  But while A New Tide didn’t exactly exceed my expectations, it did subvert them, in a way, and I find myself enjoying the album more and more with each subsequent listen.

It is not, it must be said, a rock album.  This is not Split The Difference: there are no covers of dead Delta bluesmen; far fewer scuzzy electric guitars; and next to nothing that could reasonably be described as “raw”.  A New Tide is also neither as bluesy as Bring It On, their debut, nor as experimental as In Our Gun or Abandoned Shopping Trolley Hotline.  If anything, it is an impeccably polished album, and that it shares with its immediate predecessor, 2006’s How We Operate.  But HWO, more than anything, was concerned with creating perfect pop songs, with boiling down Gomez’s palette of influences to three minutes of radio-friendly ear candy.  A New Tide is no less poppy but a great deal looser and, under examination, a great deal stranger – a marriage of the freewheeling attitude of Abandoned Shopping Trolley Hotline with the craft of How We Operate, to greater effect than both.

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So this Australian-based artist has taken insect bodies and created pretty much the creepiest military assualt vehicles in the history of existence.  I live in perpetual fear of scorpions, and I don’t know why, but the idea of a scorpion with wheels is way, way worse than the idea of just a normal scorpion:

The bee-copter is also pretty creepy.

From the New York Times:

The White House announced on Monday that it is abandoning longstanding restrictions on family travel, remittances and gifts to Cuba, and is also taking steps to open up telecommunications with the island, a significant shift in policy that fulfills a promise President Obama made during his election campaign.

Under the new policy, Cuban Americans will now be allowed to travel freely to the island and send as much money as they want to their family members — so long as the money is not going to senior officials of the Cuban government or the Communist Party.

Second, the administration will take steps to open up communications to the island by allowing telecommunications companies to engage in licensing agreements that will support cell phones, satellite televisions and computers there.

Third, the president will reverse restrictions on gift packages imposed by his predecessor, former President George W. Bush, in 2004. The new rules will permit Cuban Americans to send clothing, personal hygiene items and fishing equipment to family members on the island — again, so long as the recipients are not government or Communist Party officials.

From an economic point of view, this couldn’t come at a better time for Cuba.  Tourism brings money to the island; so, too, do remittences, and the loosening of restrictions on both is big news.  The fact sheet provided by the White House can be found here, and contains a lot more specifics.  I was happy to see that the defenition of “family” here is a rather loose one – three degrees of seperation, or as distant of relations as second cousins, are free to travel.  (As a former traveler to Cuba, I’m also glad to see the 44-pound weight limit on luggage lifted – that was a real pain.)

The aim of these orders seems to be increased communication between Cuban-Americans and Cubans, both electronically and personally.  And I think that this is, overall, a good thing.  Cubans tend to take a rather dim view of their seperated brethren in the States: they blame them for much of the anti-Cuban government sentiment in America and suspect them (rightly, in some cases) of having designs on property and houses back in Cuba.  But the vanguard of Cuban-Americans who fled the Revolution is aging, and in their place are coming young people who are interested in visiting Cuba but not, by and large, in living there.  More communicaton between the Cuban population and these younger Cuban-Americans could go a long way toward building American support in Cuba.

My friend Madelyn, who blogs about music at A Dinosaur in Brooklyn, has a post up called “In Defense of Keane”, in which she says:

I’m just going to say it: I LIKE KEANE.

And I’ll tell you why.

I took the time to listen to them. I did not let “Somewhere Only We Know” inform my entire opinion. It was a hit, and was branded “adult contemporary” (whatever the fuck that means) and they were often mentioned in the same breath as Coldplay (fuck Coldplay). And if you only listen to that song, it makes sense. But the rest of 2004’s Hopes and Fears goes in more than one direction. It’s piano driven rock, sure, but it gets fast paced and even experimental and dark toward the end.

I will also admit to liking Keane, especially in their Hopes and Fears stage, although I don’t actually think it’s possible to like Keane and not Coldplay without having a predisposition toward the latter, since they sound exactly the same.  But in 2004 I was pretty into that, and my favorite song was actually “Bedshaped” which, listening to it now, is still pretty awesomely bombastic.

But my favorite thing about Keane is that the lead singer / pianist exclusively plays a Yamaha CP70 electric piano, which is pretty much my most lusted-after object.  It’s not an electric piano in that its sound is acoustic; it has strings and hammers.  But below those strings and hammers are pickups, like on a guitar, and instead of having to mic it the CP70 can just plug into any amp.  Also, it comes apart into three pieces for (slightly) easier carrying and storage.  It’s pretty much the most awesome piano ever invented.  So, nice job, Keane.

Andrew Sullivan, who has a blog for The Atlantic that I’ve linked to before, has a post up talking about “Obama’s Risk”:

Right now, there are all sorts of pragmatic reasons for bigger government. If this crisis eases, and when it eases, those reasons will dissipate, and a new conservative opening will occur.

The new cultural divide will not be on guns, gays and God. It will be between the makers and the takers, the producers of wealth and the recipients of redistribution. And it will be about tempering the over-reach that the Democrats will be unable to resist.

Some of this, I think, is Sullivan trying to retake his conservative credentials, which have been somewhat revoked by him acting like a liberal for the last year or so.  But I do think that if you are a fiscal conservative, then you will inevitably have a lot of problems with basically everything that the Obama Administration is doing right now, and Sullivan’s right that there will soon come an opening for a new conservative movement.

But I think that the way he chooses to frame his argument is strange, and his rhetoric might be a preview of what we can expect to hear about Obama over the next few months – namely, that his plans amount to nothing more than welfare, taking money from the hard-working rich and giving it to the lazy poor.  And I also think that the “producers of wealth” and the “recipients of redistribution” are, in fact, the same people; I would say, for example, that the cumulative efforts of the mostly-middle-class Google workplace did as much to create wealth as any of those AIG executives.  (And it was, you know, real wealth, as opposed to fake, only-exists-in-fantasy-land wealth.)  I might be twisting Sullivan’s words here, but that “makers and takers” thing rankled, and I think it’s a harbinger of things to come.