“Lost You in the Canyon”
Burning the Daze

Marc Cohn’s third studio album seems, more or less, to be universally seen as his weakest, and I guess I mostly share that opinion.  But even so there are a number of quite good songs on it, and “Lost You in the Canyon” is one of them.

Got your call from California
But I could hardly hear your voice
Through the hissing of the highway
And all that other noise

I really like the extended metaphor, analogizing the erratic cell phone signal we all loath with the gradual decay and loss of a deep emotional connection:

Now all these things we leave unspoken
Seem to haunt me like a ghost

This is our first hint that this song is about more than a dropped call.  It’s more than static that’s getting in the way; the call is failing to transmit the things they can’t say.

There were times I thought I knew you
Before these changes came to pass
But you don’t think about it do you?
From up there in your house of glass

The loss becomes palpable here.  The regret seems resigned, sad rather than angry to discover that the other is not whom the singer thought he was.  ”House of glass” works on many levels.  It denotes a certain ultramodern detachment and impracticality, a retreat into aesthetic that walls off the singer from his conversant.  A glass house looks pretty but doesn’t make much sense.  It’s also intrinsically fragile and even a bit reckless, even if it’s the singer throwing stones.

The Earth is shifting underneath you
The land is sliding all around
Do you ever stop to wonder
About that paradise you’ve found?

Ostensibly about the California from the first line, this is really an anguished cry that things are changing and the conversant apparently doesn’t even notice.  A loss cuts twice as deep when only one feels it.  This might also render the first line’s California metaphorical — it’s more the California of the mind than of the Pacific coast.  While it’s probably reading too much into it, this really works for the times during which Marc Cohn grew up — late 1960s through early 1980s.  This was exactly the time that California was shifting in the American psyche, from technicolor fantasy world to a grittier, harder-edged reality — when the paint had begun to dull at Disneyland — when the state, and the nation, woke up to the hangover truths of the times.  A dimming and distant California, lost in static not music, fading from paradise into parody, speaks to everyone coming of age at that time.

I hear you moving through the mountains
Through the fires and the floods
But I can’t fix this bad connection
In the wires or the blood

This is the crux of the song for me.  It works on a literal level, of course — fires and floods in California are nothing new.  But it’s also about the wanton way in which we reinvent ourselves, obliterating what we were to become what we hope to be — and the losses we suffer, the things and people we leave behind, to whom we might speak but with whom we will no longer connect.  There’s also just something gripping about the “connection in the wires and the blood”.  (That might make a great title for a novel of the Internet age.)

Hint: It’s not the Democrats.

According to a piece in Politico, significant numbers of Republican representatives are willing to trash the full faith and credit of the United States — and incidentally dynamite the entire international economic order — so that they can “send Pres. Obama a message”.  Some of them are more reasonable, according to the bizarre new definition of “reasonable” that pervades today’s GOP: They only want to force a government shutdown, not a full-on default.

This is insanity.  It’s time for everyone who’s not, you know, crazy to start calling it out for what it is. And that begins with the numerous sane moderate Republicans we are always assured are lurking in the background in the Party, rolling their eyes at their wayward brethren.  It’s time for those so-called leaders to step up and call out this craziness.  Someone calling for a platinum terabuck is a lark; someone calling for the US to default — to score points! — is a loon.

By the by, it’s not even sound fiscal policy motivating these guys.  Apparently, it’s all in the testosterone.

• “They think this is the only way to get Obama’s attention.”
  

• “This is where they could choose to shut down the government to dramatize their contention that for four years Obama has promised in words to cut spending but in action only piled up debt. Many Republicans believe this is precisely what they will do.”

We’ll leave aside the fact that spending has been cut, to the tune of two trillion dollars.  After all, the official GOP position is, if the numbers don’t support you, ignore the math.
The best part of the Politico piece is this:

Obama assumes Republicans would never be so foolish as to put the economy at risk to win a spending fight. Conservatives say he’s definitely wrong on that score.

He is wrong.  Even the conservatives admit, they are exactly so foolish.
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Following Noah Smith’s lead, I am simply copying John Derbyshire’s ludicrous racist screed to do my bit to prevent it from vanishing down the memory hole once he and his sponsors realize how damning it is.  Distributed democracy for the win.

Racist nonsense below the fold. UPDATE: Smith has published some thoughts on the screed, which capture some of what I’d been thinking, so I figured I’d link to that too.

Continue reading →

Still trying to get WordBooker to move my Mongrel Dogs posts to Facebook.

I’ve had my iPad for just under two months now and thought it’s a good time to reflect on it.

I’ll admit to hesitating before buying one.  I’m not really a fan of Apple — they do good hardware but (in my opinion) only so-so user interface work, and I cannot abide the zealots who are legion who believe that every decision by the Cupertino company is sublime, inspired, and unassailably correct.  (The single button mouse?  For twenty years? Really?)  But my school is currently investigating providing an iPad to every student, and purchased 20 for faculty to use to get acclimated, and then offered a decent deal on purchasing them.  So I thought, What the heck?

My impressions are below the fold. Continue reading →

So I wonder why my iPhone can run the WordPress app and see Mongrel Dogs but the iPad (running the same app) cannot see the posts (but it -can- see the comments). Odd.