Matthew Yglesias

Noted Without Comment

Via Ross Douthat, this is amusing:

Indie-rock sensation the Arcade Fire wowed Radio City Music Hall when the group performed with David Bowie at Fashion Rocks, appeared on Letterman, and ruled the CMJ Music Marathon with another triumphant, Bowie-bedecked set—all in the past month. It’s a long way from the Grill, Phillips Exeter Academy’s on-campus snack bar, where front man Win Butler (class of ’98) honed his skills to the general indifference of his fellow boarding-schoolers. “Somebody was always buying a Diet Coke or getting Doritos for an all-nighter while we’d be trying to perform,” recalls classmate Brittany Butler (no relation). These days, Exonians remain apathetic to Butler’s musical stylings. “What is ‘indie rock’ really, anyway? I’ve never heard of Arcade Fire,” says Steve Wolfe, a New York investment banker who lived in Abbot Hall with Win. (He remembers that the budding hipster’s concession to Exeter’s dress code was a duct-tape tie.) Butler’s sophomore roommate Sam Bradford now owns a software company in Syracuse. Says Bradford, “I don’t remember much about Win playing the guitar except that I wanted him to stop.”

Also puzzled by the use-mention implications of "'indie rock'" in quotation marks.

Equality Knocks

I was, I believe, a sophomore in high school when Bound with its promise of hot girl-on-girl action was released. Needless to say, my friends and I were excited. When I went to the Serenity premiere the other day, I was in line in front of two girls of about that age. On the wall next to us was a poster for Brokeback Mountain and these two girls were excited. Not about the stellar credentials of Ang Lee, Annie Proulx, and Larry McMurtry but, much like my own Bound anticipation of eight or nine years ago, at the prospect of Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger getting it on. I suppose Ariel Levy wouldn't approve, but it seemed to me like an important blow for equality.

Babes in Warland

Didn't really expect to see this byline on someone I was in college with:

Roman Martinez recently served as a political adviser to U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, and as director for Iraq at the National Security Council.

Admittedly, he was ahead of me in school, but still seems a bit young for the job, eh?

Freedom and Liberty

An awful lot of the sci-fi fans are also libertarians, so they naturally enough are eager to smoke out the awesomely libertarian themes in Firefly and Serenity. The movie unquestionably makes an anti-paternalist point. On the other hand, the specific act of government-sponsored paternalism is question is so grandiose that I don't really think it does a great deal to cut against people who favor, say, a paternalistic tax on junk food. SPOILERS.

I mean, obviously, "avoid paternalistic schemes that feature massive downside risk unless you're really, really certain your scheme will work" is a sound principle of political action, but to term it a specifically libertarian principle is to cast a rather wide net. On the other hand, I think the Firefly theme song lyrics capture something important about the general theme of the show:

Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don't care, I'm still free
You can't take the sky from me
Take me out to the black
Tell them I ain't comin' back
Burn the land and boil the sea
You can't take the sky from me
There's no place I can be
Since I found Serenity
But you can't take the sky from me...

This is unquestionably a show (and a song) about freedom but I don't think it has a huge connection to political liberty. What's the distinction? Well, there's a clear sense in which I enjoy more freedom in my life than does a typical married-with-kids middle aged bank assistant manager living in Concord, New Hampshire. But that sort of freedom doesn't follow from the notion that I enjoy more political liberties than does said bank manager. Indeed, I probably have somewhat less in light of the District of Columbia's relatively strict tax-and-regulatory environment vis-a-vis New Hampshire. I'm just not particularly tied down by anything, my job offers me a like of flexibility in terms of hours, my boss is quite relaxed about demeanor, etc., etc. The crew of Serenity -- and Mal Reynolds in particular -- are clearly people who value the kind of freedom I enjoy. Reynolds has a lot of autonomy. He gets to "do his own thing" and make his own rules. He's got an anti-authoritarian personality. But that's not the same as saying he places an especially high value on basic political liberties, especially not the sort of controversial political liberties that divide libertarians from other people in the American political context.

Pornographers Love Me

Thanks to the good people at Reason I (and others) can now actually read the Playboy article, in which I'm named as one of "five winning blogs." Good stuff. In other porn-news, I foolishly failed to buy tickets for The New Pornographers' show before it sold out and nobody seems to be offering any on Craigslist. I also disliked Female Chauvinist Pigs much less than I'd anticipated.

Serenity

Well, I saw it and I enjoyed it. I think it works both as a stand-alone bit of sci-fi action and as a successor to Firefly, though I actually think it does a good deal better as the former than as the latter. My other observation involves a bit of a spoiler so it's below the fold.

I think unmasking the Alliance as a cartoonishly evil empire was a mistake. The presence of a certain amount of ambiguity about whether it was really a terrible regime, or else -- like the US government -- a basic legitimate entity that's frequently annoying and occassionally bad was, I thought, an important part of the story.

Giants Offense

Amazing series of third down conversions at the end of the third quarter / beginning of the fourth for Eli Manning. Why can't they play this well on the first two downs?

Serenity

Okay, this is totally corrupt, but apparently I can get free tickets to a screening of Serenity if I agree to post the following summary:

Joss Whedon, the Oscar® - and Emmy - nominated writer/director responsible for the worldwide television phenomena of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE, ANGEL and FIREFLY, now applies his trademark compassion and wit to a small band of galactic outcasts 500 years in the future in his feature film directorial debut, Serenity. The film centers around Captain Malcolm Reynolds, a hardened veteran (on the losing side) of a galactic civil war, who now ekes out a living pulling off small crimes and transport-for-hire aboard his ship, Serenity. He leads a small, eclectic crew who are the closest thing he has left to family –squabbling, insubordinate and undyingly loyal.

As I was saying the other day, Firefly, the short-lived TV show on which this movie is based, was great. So the film version should be great too. So you should go see it. And the Serenity people should give me free tickets. For what it's worth, I think Serenity probably should have been the title of the TV show, too. And word on the street is that if the movie's successful the show may come back to TV or else the story gets continued as more movies or something.

Operation Ceasefire

In case this has somehow escaped your attention, the Operation Ceasefire concert will be tomorrow afternoon/evening after some kind of anti-war rallying. As Lorelei Kelly notes, this will no doubt be a counterproductive spectacle from a political point of view. On the other hand, free performances by Ted Leo, Le Tigre, Bouncing Souls. So you see what I mean. Also "socially conscious" hip-hop, which I despise. The whole point of hip-hop is that the rancidly mainstream stuff is actually good. Whatever -- go to the concert! I figure the more non-weirdos who show up, the less counterproductive it'll be....

Choices and Feminism

Down in comments here, Martin Weiner remarks:

It seems to me that Kieran is upset because these young women are making choices (and the whole point of feminism was, I thought, to widen women’s choices) [...]

This is a very common rhetorical move, I don't quite know where it came from, and I have to say that it's rather silly. It's obviously true in some sense that "to widen women's choices" was/is the point of feminism, but I think it's equally obvious that to read a commitment to that goal as requiring feminists to foreswear criticism of any choice made by any woman. Maybe some women want to break into the traditionally male-dominated field of serial killing. Surely we can criticize that choice. Less extravagantly, the fact that feminism has already accomplished a lot has opened up a lot of opportunities for women, especially relatively prosperous women, to more-or-less free ride. Since nobody expects anyone to totally ignore their own self-interest, it's genuinely silly to get too trenchant about complaints of that sort. But at the same time, no social movement that still wants to accomplish stuff can afford to become totally complacent about free riding. Actually achieving a world in which women have as many choices open to them as men do would require many women (and, for that matter, men) to choose to do many things that may be contrary to short-term self-interest. It's often easier to simply adapt oneself to actually existence injustice than to try and change it. But those who are committed to change are going to need to criticize the less-committed for their lack of commitment.

The Superfluous Men

Still, I'm haunted by the suspicion that my tale is different from those told by Edith Wharton and Candace Bushnell. The men I meet are not the rakish, workaholic, cheating cads of yore. No, I'm bearing witness to a bona fide crisis in American masculinity, one that seems especially, but not exclusively, to afflict the young, urban and privileged. And with it, I have observed the birth of a new breed of man: a man of few interests and no passions; a man whose libido is reduced and whose sense of responsibility nonexistent. These men are commitment-phobic not just about love, but about life. They drink and take drugs, but even their hedonism lacks focus or joy. They exhibit no energy for anyone, any activity, profession or ideology. While they may have mildly defined areas of interest -- in, say, "Star Wars," or the work of Ron Jeremy -- they have trouble figuring out what kind of food they might want to eat on a given night. And, in an effort to cure what ails them, they have been medicated to the gills with potions designed to dull their feelings even further.

So says Rebecca Traister in Salon by way of introducing an interview with Benjamin Kunkel (who's apparently written a book called Indecision). All this via Ross Douthat. Having read neither Edith Wharton nor Candace Bushnell but being well-versed in the Russian classics, this strikes me as a not-so-new character type. These are the superfluous men familiar to any student of that country's great 19th century novels:

A character type whose frequent recurrence in 19th-century Russian literature is sufficiently striking to make him a national archetype. He is usually an aristocrat, intelligent, well-educated, and informed by idealism and goodwill but incapable, for reasons as complex as Hamlet's, of engaging in effective action.

One possibility is that this mode of behavior is just a long-standing human universal whose salience happens to ebb and flow at various times and places. Certainly, I distrust anecdotal evidence and impressionistic generalizations about social trends. But if you want to assume that there is something to do, it seems worth pointing out that despite the huge differences between social conditions in 19th century Russia and 21st century America, there are some salient parallels between the two specific groups of people in question. Namely, the intelligent, well-educated aristocrats of 19th century Russia, "informed by idealism and goodwill" believed they were the beneficiaries of a fundamentally unjust social system dependent both on political autocracy and what amounted to chattel slavery. Something similar could be said about young, urban, educated white men in contemporary America who, unlike other brands of white men, are politically liberal. I could offer a totally speculative account of why that might lead to the brand of anomie that's bothering Traister (something like -- attainable modes of success seem valueless when you believe them to be in reach fundamentally because of unfair advantages you've received in life) but ultimately, I'd really like to see more proof that this is actually happening.

The snide reference to "Star Wars" seems to suggest that, on some level, her complaint is more that she knows a lot of dudes who have intense interest in things that don't interest her. That's obviously a real phenomenon in life -- relationships would certainly be easier, albeit less interesting, if women and men tended to be more similar in their interests and attitudes -- but this kind of "why can't a woman be more like a man?" (or, in Traister's case, the reverse) observation doesn't elucidate much of interest.

A Question

Does this mean that people who've used drugs are no longer welcome as customers at H&M? I imagine that would cut into their client base substantially. Even I was, at one time in my life, young and irresponsible just like the President.

Times Select

Boy, I'd sort of like to know what Paul Krugman's column on race and Katrina says. But that's not a fifty bucks a year kind of desire to know. If I'm lucky, Krugman will decide he'd better email the text of his articles for free to influential bloggers and the like.

The Social Construction of Straight Hair

A while back, my cousin's hair was suddenly straighter-than-usual. This, it was explained, was the "Japanese hair-straightening technique" that was all the rage. As is often the case with such things, once informed of its existence it became apparent that the technique really was all the rage. Especially with your younger Jewish women, which makes sense since Jews tend to have not-so-straight hair. At first glance, the Japanese origin of this technology passed muster, since lots of technologies originate in Asia nowadays. But then you think about it -- why would a hair-straightening technology originate in Japan, where everyone's hair is straight? Phoebe Maltz asked the question and got an answer. Apparently, Japan isn't as monolithically straight-haired as one might think, but in addition, a land of straight-haired people generates a more exacting standard of what kind of hair counts as "straight."

The general social trend toward preference for ever-straighter hair is somewhat mysterious. The superficially similar preference for lighter hair has a straightforward evolutionary explanation -- light hair suggests youth. And, indeed, in blonde-heavy Iceland it's notable that older people had a more youthful look about them. But straight hair is about . . . what?

Live It Out

I've been eagerly awaiting the release of Metric's new album Live it Out for a while now and since I respect the band and know they're not big rich rock stars I fully intended to pay actual money for it. The reality of the situation, however, is that while you can "steal" the music for free with your favorite P2P program, American consumers won't be permitted to buy it until early October. So I stole it. It's good enough that I'll probably pay for it once I'm allowed to as a gesture of good faith, though it might be more remunerative for them if I just spent an equivalent sum of money on a shirt or whatever, so who knows. Anyways, for DC area folks they'll be coming to the 9:30 Club on October 8, headlining this time -- last time they were opening for the Walkmen and did an excellent show. The new album is a bit more typically rock-n-roll, but still quite distinctive and enjoyable. They continue to produce some of the smarter political lyrics out there, as in "Monster Hospital"'s chorus -- "I fought the war / and the war won."

Alanis-Irony

So you know what would suck? If the HDTV you bought arrived Friday afternoon and then your cable went out early Saturday evening and still wasn't working on Sunday morning. It's a little too ironic, I think.

Better Search Tools

I was listening to Pony Up!'s song "Matthew Modine" which includes the lyrics, "Oh Matthew Modine, we want to be your blowjob queens." Shortly afterwords, iTunes kicked up "Flower" in which Liz Phair sings "Everything you say is so obnoxious, funny, true and mean / I want to be your blowjob queen." That got me wondering about the origin of the phrase, whose meaning is fairly clear, but still seems like a non-obvious thing to say -- especially the deployment of the possessive your blowjob queen. Ogged argued yesterday that the world needs a song lyrics wiki, but a short-lived effort to ascertain the answer to this question suggests that the real need is for a Google function that lets you search for these kinds of things without just getting an endless quantity of porn sites. A similar problem arose when I tried to use Acquisition to find a Lesbians on Ecstasy song, though Google works fine for them.

Firefly

On the advice of various friends, I got the DVDs of Firefly, Joss Whedon's short-lived SF series about space cowboys (or bandits or rebels or something) and watched the first two episodes last night. It's excellent, and I'm not really much of a fan of Buffy or what have you. Everyone should check it out. I can't help but wonder, though, how expensive the series was to make. It has way more sets and special effects than any TV show I've seen except, possibly, HBO's Rome. Under the circumstances it seems hard to imagine how it could ever have possibly been a viable business enterprise. And, I suppose, it wasn't. But good stuff nonetheless.

The Party of Big Words

Over at Language Log I see Tony Snow busting out the linguistic big guns:

In time, virtually every Democratic panjandrum found some novel way to politicize the Atlantic typhoon. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton inveigled against the evils of Big Oil. Sen. Edward Kennedy ...

"Panjandrum" instead of "leader" is merely pretentious, but "typhoon" instead of "hurricane" is simply wrong. An "Atlantic typhoon" is a semantic impossibility, typhoons are, by definition, phenomena of the Pacific Ocean -- in the Atlantic you're supposed to call that organized-high-wind-rain weather phenomenon a "hurricane."

New Toys

Went to ye olde electronics store yesterday and bought this Bose 3-2-1 DVD Home Theater deal plus this HDTV. The Bose is now in-home and set up, but the TV won't be delivered until Tuesday, tragically. The goal is to achieve Total Sports-Watching Dominance so that now summer's done I can coerce my friends to come hang out at my house during the football-basketball era.

Paper or Concrete

Times like this, I wish I'd paid more attention in school. WaPo editorial:

Insurers estimate that their share of the cost of rebuilding after Katrina could be $25 billion, and even if you assume that uninsured losses could push the total as high as $100 billion, this isn't a catastrophe. The shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange were worth $17.8 trillion as of September 2004, so a market decline of just 0.6 percent can wipe out as much wealth as Katrina did.

I feel like that's wrong. There must be a difference in a $100 billion stock market decline, which eliminates paper wealth, and the destruction of $100 billion in real assets.

Say you have a company that makes toaster ovens in various factories around the world. Having a $100 million worth of factory destroyed has got to be worse (assuming, counterfactually, that the firm isn't insured) for the company than a $100 million decline in market capitalization due to stock market losses would be.

In part, perhaps, that's because the loss of real assets could cause a decline in the company's stock. But shouldn't something similar happen in New Orleans. Not only are homes destroyed, but even if you rebuilt a physically identical home on the site of the old one it'll wind up being less valuable than your old home was as a spillover consequence of all the destruction. Similarly, a retail chain that got 20 percent of its revenue from outlets in New Orleans isn't just going to be faced with losses of inventory and physical structures, but will also see its stock decline as a consequence. Right?

Good Vibrations?

Curiously conservative review of a book about orgasms in The Nation. Seems about right to me, but not where I would have expected to read it. On the other hand, I'm not sure an anti-sex backlash is what the country needs.

Rebuild?

We're starting to hear some discussion about what will happen to New Orleans once this disaster ends. What most of the talk I've heard misses, however, is the extent to which there isn't really a collective decision to be made about whether or not "we" will rebuild the city. Government will play a role, of course, but we're largely talking about many small decisions undertaken by businesses and individuals. One thing to consider is this. Say you're the owner of a handful of rental units in one of New Orleans' poor neighborhoods. Now say you're insurance money comes in. Are you going to use that money to rebuild your wrecked structures, or are you just going to take the money and buy some stocks? Some people will do the former, of course, but many will do the latter.

Or say you're my friend K., a 2003 Ivy League grad, working as a public school teacher in N.O., safely evacuated to her boyfriend's parents' house in Alabama before the storm hit. Are you going to sit around and wait for whenever the schools re-open, or are you going to look for some job elsewhere? The latter, I suspect. My guess would be that the overwhelming majority of childless professionals -- a transient group in any city -- at a minimum will relocate. The spillover consequences of things like this are going to be large. Poor people without savings will very quickly need to go wherever it is they can find jobs and housing. What's more, New Orleans is a very poor city and it's somewhat hard to imagine a large federal program aimed at building slums. Similarly, while the N.O. city government and the LA state government will doubtless get some kind of federal bailout to prevent bankruptcy, it's hard to imagine either being attractive candidates for bond investors in the near future and equally hard to imagine how they'll be able to get things up and running without taking on debt.

Now on the other hand, the oil and gas industry in the are will doubtless revive, and the French Quarter's appeal as a tourist destination ought to persist. But it seems very likely to me that whatever rises from the floodwaters will be rather different from the former city. In particular, New Orleans' population has been declining for decades anyway. People are naturally reluctant to uproot themselves, which slows long-term decline of urban areas. Since everyone is currently displaced anyway, though, it seems that depopulation will only speed up. So something will be rebuilt, but I'd wager it'll be something significantly smaller than the former city.