In Which The Devolutionist Hears The Sound of Saint Bartlett

Damien Jurado has always been about simple.  Strumming his guitar and accompanied by a hushed violin, some tinkling piano keys, or brushes caressing a tom, he spins tales of heartbreak set in sparse landscapes, conjuring images of flat Texas plains and old trucks zooming along dirt roads, trailing clouds of dust.  But Saint Bartlett, his ninth album, calls to mind a different geography: the lush greens of the Seattle native’s Pacific Northwest (the album was recorded in Oregon): rain dribbling on tree leaves, a melancholy soul with a picture window, a cup of tea, and time.  It is a record of ramshackle beauty.

Jurado has continued the work he began in isolated spots on 2008’s Caught In The Trees: orchestral arrangements, overdubs, and his usual melancholia replaced by a sense of wistful – dare we say it – playfulness.  He has left behind the hard-bitten working-class lives of 2003’s Where Shall You Take Me and the heartbroken suburban adulterers of 2006’s And Now That I’m In Your Shadow.  Still, the melancholy bard retains a tinge of darkness as he spins tales of growing up and accepting.

Saint Bartlett was recorded in a week, with Jurado and producer Richard Swift playing all the instruments.  There was little in the way of rehearsal or polishing.  The album opens with “Cloudy Shoes,” a song Jurado reportedly wrote in six minutes while producer Swift was taking a phone call, and for which he recorded guitar and vocals in one unrehearsed take (other instrumentation was looped in later.)  The song is a stunner, a story of a man trying to live up to an ideal self he pictures in his head.  When he tells this image “You have a way about you/I wish that I had” one can hear the longing in his voice, the knowledge he has work to do, shaded with the hope of someone who believes he can achieve this longed-for state of grace.

This sense of hope and longing permeates the entire album.  “Rachel and Cali,” a throwback to the simpler arrangements of his past work, is a sort of call-and-response about an unrequited love between two young people that ends on the melancholy note of one telling the other “Sometimes I wish you knew/How I keep living for you/A friend is just a lover/You’re not committed to,” punctuated by lonely taps on a xylophone.  “Kansas City,” a sparse throwback to Jurado’s past work, is underscored by the sounds of a car braking and voices on a radio fading in and out of the static as the singer tells himself over and over “I know someday I will return.”  On “Kalama” Jurado sings of regrets over a son’s efforts to retain his distant mother’s affections, and his gradual coming to grips with the impossibility of achieving this goal, and in “Beacon Hill” he learns to accept the loss of someone who may not have loved him after all.

Saint Bartlett may not sound like your typical Damian Jurado record, but it is a natural evolution: the sounds of an adult learning to let go and not spending time moping over past youth (the twelve songs clock in at a brisk thirty-six minutes.)  It’s a new direction for Jurado, and one with territory he has the talent and maturity to mine.

In Which The Devolutionist Gives Props to a Personal Favorite

It is well known to Shearwater fans that frontman Jonathan Meiburg was once a graduate student in ornithology who named his band after a type of bird that flies just above the surface of the water.  As part of his academic studies Meiburg has done field research on remote islands all over the world.  Such studies demand a discipline and attention to detail one does not usually associate with indie rock bands.  The Golden Archipelago, inspired by Meiburg’s time tramping through delicate island ecosystems that are changing and disappearing as a result of environmental catastrophe, has been billed as the third in a triptych of records that began with 2006’s Palo Santo and continued with 2008’s Rook, and the band has saved the biggest for last.

Meiburg’s background informs every second of the band’s sixth full-length album.  The songs are as delicate as the hollow bones of a small bird, as formal and structured as a PhD dissertation.  There is undeniable passion in Meiburg’s voice when he sings of “summoning the holy light/on their citadels/the blackening light/the collapsing sun” on “Castaways,” encourages the listener to “look down on the rolling waves/that strike the crumbling reef now” on “Black Eyes,” or even just repeats the lyric “oh my my my my my” over and over on the stunning “Corridors.”  The record clocks in at a brisk 38 minutes, which feels like the perfect length.  Any longer and the listener might be exhausted.

But while Meiburg is undeniably the driving force behind this band, it is the percussion work of Thor Harris that holds these songs together.  Whether he is beating a standard drum kit, tapping on a glockenspiel, or working over one of the several homemade instruments he utilizes, Harris underscores Meiburg’s singing while also keeping his voice from overpowering the work being done by the rest of the band (Kim Harris plays bass, and in concert Shearwater is joined by multi-instrumentalists Jordan Geiger and Kevin Schneider.)

When I saw Shearwater play the club Spaceland in Los Angeles recently, Meiburg told a story about participating in a charity event at the Forum a couple of years ago, when the band got its biggest cheer ever for their first thirty seconds on stage before the crowd realized they were not Coldplay.  The Golden Archipelago is a startling maturation from the rambling and wonderful weirdness of Palo Santo and the rock-band ambitions of Rook.  If there is any justice in the music world, this album will be the one that finally earns Shearwater the recognition the band’s musicianship deserves.

In Which Your Devolutionist Makes the Mistake of Seeing What's Up on Open Salon. Again.

Like a bug to a porch light, a child to an abandoned refrigerator, or women to Charlie Sheen, Yr. Hypertensive Devolutionist finds himself drawn into blog flame wars every now and again.  Usually this happens when he visits Open Salon, reads an interesting post, and then idiotically checks out the idiotic comments from the contrarian and ill-informed conservative/libertarian/wingnutty morons who think they have the most clever and well-thought-out arguments to make to educate us liberals about our lunatic naivety.  All without getting personal, of course!  Because only left-wingers are nasty, thuggish name-callers!  Because right-wingers are really nice people reluctantly drawn into the fight to hold the line of freedom agaisnt the encroaching government-run politically-correct socialist communism the liberals would love to ram down the freedom-loving throats of great patriotic Americans everywhere!

Sorry, the Devolutionist almost went off-track into an angry rant there.  But yes, this happened over at Open Salon again this morning, as it does every three or four months.  Your humble editor should know better by now: people are assholes and you can't change minds with logic or truth.  It's unfortunate, but if people want to be misinformed who am I to stop them?

In Which The Devolutionist Looks Ahead to the 2012 Election

This morning your Devolutionist followed his usual morning routine: roll out of bed around 8:30, get the coffee maker going, turn on the laptop, and giggle at the public discourse of our political class. Because it really is funny, I swear!

The 2010 elections are still eight months away, so you know what that means: time to check on what the frontrunners for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination are doing:

Mitt Romney has released a book, and Spencer Ackerman has his review.  There is little your editor can add to Mr. Ackerman's takedown, other than that the MormonBot 2012 really will need a processing power upgrade before the primaries in two years.  Too bad the computer guy who may have had a hand in swiping the 2004 Ohio elections for W is dead!

Meantime Sarah Palin continues her canny bid to lock up the nomination by courting an audience made up of people so old that many of them could be dead by 2012.  I'm speaking, of course, of the audience for "The Tonight Show," hosted by that unfunny dude with the chin whose name shall not ever be spoken by the Devolutionist. Not that the Devolutionist was a Conan fan, or owns a TV, or ever bothered to watch the show online...in this house it's "The Daily Show" or GTFO.

So, Sarah Palin, who is only unintentionally funny, apparently did a stand-up routine (!!!!) and submitted to an interview with The Chin. Your editor only read the excerpts, suspecting as he does that watching the video will give him heartburn, anal leakage, chlamydia, and the irresistible urge to kill puppies.  For those with stronger constitutions, video is here.

Thankfully Mike Huckabee does not appear to have done anything insane to appear in the news this week.  But it is only Wednesday.

In Which Yr. Devolutionist Packs a Bindle

Rep. Dean Heller is worried about hobos on the march (H/T to Wonkette):

Heller said the current economic downturn and policies may bring back the hobos of the Great Depression, people who wandered the country taking odd jobs. He said a study found that people who are out of work longer than two years have only a 50 percent chance of getting back into the workforce. “I believe there should be a federal safety net,” Heller said, but he questioned the wisdom of extending unemployment benefits yet again to a total of 24 months, which Congress is doing. “Is the government now creating hobos?” he asked.

The Devolutionist has been pondering this statement while playing the blues on his harmonica and waiting for his campfire to heat up a can of beans: Heller thinks there should be a federal safety net but questions whether the government should be extending unemployment insurance? Um, if the government extends UI, doesn’t that at least delay the creation of hobos? 


Or perhaps this safety net is an actual net to sweep up all newly created hobos and take them to the nearest Soylent Green processing facility, where they will be ground into a protein-rich paste that can be fed to poor people who at least still have homes?

Oh who am I kidding, the paste will be used by our moneyed class to re-grout the solid-gold tiles in their bathrooms.

Ha ha, hobos are funny, with their adorable little beards and their feet wrapped in newspaper.

In Which the Devolutionist Stifles the Urge to Hate-Fuck the Rotting Corpse of Time Magazine

Anytime a right-winger whines about the mainstream media and its propagandistic pushing of evil liberalism on the unsuspecting mass of idiot sheeple that populates America (said right-winger is not one of these sheeple, having awakened just in time to the "truth" of the world as spouted by Limbaugh, Beck, et al.), you can always point this person to Time.


Yr. Hungry Devolutionist was in line at the grocery store buying the ingredients for a large pot of chicken chili on this cloudy and cool Southern California Wednesday when he saw that the cover of the current issue of Time touts an essay by Newt Gingrich entitled "A Blueprint for Bipartisanship."  Newt Gingrich.  The guy who shut down the federal government in 1995 in a snit because his seat on an Air Force One flight was too far back and that was apparently The Last Straw.  Newt Gingrich rides in the front of the plane, dammit!  And he gets all the little bags of peanuts he wants!  


Newt Gingrich.  A Blueprint for Bipartisanship.  


Yr. Devolutionist should know better, but he was having trouble focusing on a badly needed rewrite of his novel today and sometimes anger provides the fuel he needs to work, so he took a peek at the article.  The first sentence of the second paragraph jumped right out: "Obama should not be afraid to drop the 4500 pages of Democratic health legislation."  That Newt!  What a card.  Of course Obama should be afraid.  The Congress has spent an entire year putting those pages together and getting them through votes in both chambers.  If they dropped the whole thing now and started over, there would be about two Dems left on the Hill after November.


But let's assume that Newt was not higher than Charlie Sheen when he wrote that sentence.  After all, if anyone in the history of American politics has been prone to intellectual honesty, it's the Newtster.


Ahem: "The summit is an opportunity for Obama to reunite with the American people by dropping the Big Government bill and opening up to a genuine bipartisan solution."


Newt must have been in a tequila coma for the last nine months or so.  Otherwise he would know that the liberals in the Democratic Party have been tearing their hair out that a) Congress has never considered any type of single-payer system and b) the Senate dropped the "public option" in about two seconds when it became obvious that conservatives, particularly sock monkey lookalike Joe Lieberman, would welcome Osama bin Laden into the Republican caucus before they would vote for a provision that might give the insurance companies a hint of competition.  He would also know that the Dems have already compromised and put quite a few Republican ideas into the current Senate bill. 


Yr. Nonplussed Devolutionist is not even going to get into the competing polls on this matter, both the ones Gingrich mentions in his piece and the ones that completely repudiate him.


This is all just mental masturbation, of course.  Newt either knows these things but he is being disingenuous, or he does not know these things and is blind to any evidence that contradicts his personal ideology.  Believe it or not, the Devolutionist is betting on the former.


In any case, never let it be said that the mainstream media does not give conservatives a forum to air their opinions.  On health care, as on more than a few issues over at least the last ten years, the right has been given more than enough chances.  The fact that they have so often turned out to be wrong does not seem to be slowing them down.

In Which The Devolutionist Ponders President Obama, Teddy Roosevelt, and the Amoral Selfishness of Certain Wealthy Angelenos

President Obama speaking to BusinessWeek in early February regarding enormous bonuses paid to Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein:

“They’re very savvy businessmen.  And I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth.  That’s part of the free market system.”

Teddy Roosevelt in a 1910 speech (via Jonah “My Mommy Says I’m The Smartest Kid in School!” Goldberg):

“We grudge no man a fortune which represents his own power and sagacity, when exercised with entire regard to the welfare of his fellows…We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used. It is not even enough that it should have been gained without doing damage to the community. We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community.”

It goes without saying T.R.’s was the more inspirational quote and the old Rough Rider obviously went farther in making a connection between the gathering of wealth and the communal good.  The Devolutionist chalks that up to a) the difference between giving a major policy speech and an interview in BusinessWeek and b) T.R. was naturally more of a fighter then the pragmatic Obama.  Still, interesting similarities.

And then there is this article from today’s Los Angeles Times following the trials and tribulations of Frank and Jamie McCourt as their divorce plays out (emphasis mine):

“The McCourts…jointly pocketed income totaling $108 million from 2004 through 2009…(o)n that sum, they paid zero federal and state income tax… the McCourts deliberately structured their business at least partially to allow them to live tax-free.” 

Frank and Jamie McCourt own the Los Angeles Dodgers, the fourth-most valuable franchise ($722 million) in Major League Baseball as of 2009, according to Forbes.

Like presidents past and current, Your Curmudgeonly Devolutionist does not begrudge business people their success, even those who inherited family real estate empires and used that fortune to buy a baseball team.  He also does not like writing a check to the federal government every year any more than the next taxpayer, though he’s not going to fly a plane into an I.R.S. office over it.

No, the objection here is that, in case the McCourts have been too busy redecorating one of their eight houses to notice, the economies of California and America recently crashed down around our fucking ears.  The city of Los Angeles alone faces a budget deficit of $300 million or so and rumor has it the cops and parking enforcement have been given a green light to go stone cold nuts writing tickets to try and squeeze out a little more revenue from the people.  

This is your community we’re talking about.  The citizens are your customers.  They come to your stadium 81 times a year to overpay for Dodger Dogs and cheesy souvenirs and cups of warm Bud Light and even just to enter the friggin’ parking lot.  Yet your refusal to pay taxes means even more of the burden of paying for city and state and federal services falls on us.  Which actually hurts you, because the more we get squeezed on taxes, the less we have to spend on Manny Ramirez wigs. 

I’ll give Frank McCourt credit for starting the ThinkCure charity, which funds research on cancer cures.  Personally, I think a guy who is worth several hundred million dollars could be even more involved in philanthropy, but I’ll let that pass for the moment.  I’ll be satisfied if he and his soon-to-be-ex-wife just start paying their fair share of taxes.  Think of it as an investment in your customers so you can continue to rip them off at the stadium.  Because we’re all in this together.

You fucking dolts.