The Quincy Adams Observer

Seriously guys, $10 show at Vino’s Sept 29th. TEN DOLLARS HOW CAN YOU SAY NO? I JUST BOUGHT THREE!

Hey, even our liberal mothership The New York Times is hip to them now. Don’t you want to be able to tell your kids you saw these guys when they were still playing small clubs? Hmm?

Excerpted from the NYT:

So the Gaslight Anthem won’t be sharing the stage with Mr. Springsteen, at least not anytime soon. But its vigorous Saturday show at the Knitting Factory demonstrated why such a pairing wouldn’t seem so far-fetched. The band’s lead singer, Brian Fallon, has a controlled bark, all fuzzy edges around a clear, crisp center; it mirrors the band’s sound, which masks highly assured pop instincts underneath a ragged exterior.

With precision and bravado, the group — Mr. Fallon, the guitarist Alex Rosamilia, the bassist Alex Levine and the drummer Benny Horowitz — churned through most of the songs from “The ’59 Sound” (SideOneDummy), its excellent new album, which is to be released on Tuesday, and “Sink or Swim” (XOXO), one of last year’s most promising rock debuts.

But the most telling moment almost slipped by unnoticed, just a minute or two before the end of the show. During “Say I Won’t (Recognize),” Mr. Fallon shook free of the melody to inject a bit of Arthur Conley’s “Sweet Soul Music.” He delivered these lines with an impressive howl, making it possible to forget — for just a moment — that one of that song’s most famous interpreters is Bruce Springsteen.

You don’t want this guy to have all the fun, do you?

Their ode to Joe Strummer…

*

Ok, Ok. So nobody thought the Loved One’s change was particularly interesting or otherwise not shitty. Well, it’s a FREE COUNTRY, am I right!? In celebration of that sweet fact, I just drove around town all afternoon, their new album rattling the trunk and rocking/raking the southern cityscape. Take that, haters.

Also, maybe I can get some taste-points back from you guys if you like the Gaslight Anthem and want to come see their super-fun show on Sept 29th at Vino’s. Gaslight Anthem! Beer! Pizza! 10$!

*Toad Suck Park pictures, courtesy page 2 of a Google Image Search for “loved ones suck”

You know when a band falls off your radar for while, and then when you meet them again they make you go “what the fuck, how did they ever arrive here, this not something that band I liked 3 years ago would do. Boo this band.” Happens every once in a while.

Usually it’s kind of sad.

Call it “selling-out” or call it trying to get together a down payment for a house, usually when a band starts making music with a wider appeal that music is worse. (right?) At least it always sounds worse to the smaller fanbase that fell for the band’s early work.

Well, an old 8/10 star standby in my album bin called The Loved Ones just released a new single that moves them from this:

to this…

The Bridge

… in a period of one year.

It’s one big hook. The whole song is one big hook. And really good set lighting in a jokey video. Thing is, I can’t get enough of song right now.

Can an old fan be a sellout for liking the bands radically different new music better?

The game was naming cities.  That’s it.

I don’t know. I just don’t like this thing about rejection of public funds, and I find it very difficult to rationalize Obama’s decision on the matter. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like it basically boils down to this: Obama turned his back on a cause that he’d openly advocated for years, campaign finance reform, by choosing to reject federal funding for his general election campaign in favor of using the incredibly effective fundraising system he’d built during the primary. On Slate, John Dickerson juxtaposed Obama’s decision with a recent rhetorical reversal by McCain, who says that he is now in favor of lifting the federal ban on offshore oil drilling (McCain has repeatedly gone on the record as against the practice until last week). I can’t help but agree with Slate:

Obama’s change of heart was more closely tied to his self-interest than McCain’s. If he entered the public financing system, he would have denied himself hundreds of millions of dollars. Money is the mother’s milk of politics. More of it allows Obama to better get out his message, organize, and send himself across the country. (He can even cook up a jazzy presidential seal for himself. Next: cuff links.) The self-interest that may motivate McCain’s drilling proposal, by contrast, is more indirect. For McCain to benefit from his flop, voters have to believe in his drilling idea and then vote for him at least partly because of it.

Obama’s is also exposed because he initially pledged to work against his self-interest on this very point. His promise to take taxpayer funds was always conditional—he’d do it if McCain did, too—but he and his aides said he would “aggressively pursue” negotiations with McCain to work something out. He even said he’d sit down with McCain to find a way. When it came down to it, though, the negotiations that took place don’t qualify as aggressive. Obama’s lawyer met with McCain’s lawyer for a single 40-minute session. That was it. The Obama camp says they quit because it was clear McCain wasn’t interested in a deal. But the evidence for this seems to rely in large part on interpreting McCain’s position rather than probing and testing it through serious negotiations. Giving up after one meeting seems a little weak, particularly for a candidate who, in the foreign-policy context, says that he will never fear to negotiate.

I mean, what the fuck? Sure, it feels good to know that Obama’s capable of being ruthless when necessary and is willing to do what it takes to beat the GOP, but rejecting public funding in favor of private campaign donations? It makes me feel oily. And then I read this NYT article just now about Obama’s support for ethanol subsidies, a topic I was always sort of aware of but that my mind held at arms length in its ever-present quest to rationalize away upsetting problems.

It’s funny how recently ethanol was generally considered Good by the liberal, socially-conscious semi-consciousness that we (most of us, me included) collectively comprise. Hell, I used to go out of my way to visit “Go Green Biofuels”, a Little Rock gas station that sells biodiesel and E10 to citizens ridden with environmental guilt in exchange for terrible service and the worst conceivable location that I have ever seen for a service station short of being underwater.

Now (at least among my current circles, which I admit may not be the most accurate gauge), the consensus is that ethanol is solidly, solidly Bad. It’s bad because US ethanol is derived from corn, which is an absolutely stupid crop to use for ethanol production since it requires almost as much energy to grow corn and process it into biofuel as that finished ethanol itself will contain. We give billions of federal dollars in subsidies each year to companies and farms that produce ethanol, and we also tariff the shit out of foreign biofuels (such as sugarcane-derived ethanol, which IS genuinely energy efficient) — all so corporate farms in the Midwest, in Obama’s territory, can turn higher profits. From the BBC:

Corn for ethanol remains a central plank of US agricultural and energy policy. The 2007 Energy Bill quintuples the country’s biofuels target to 35 billion gallons by 2022.

The US continues to heavily sustain its corn-for-ethanol industry, paying out 50 cents a gallon for each of its 27 billion litres of ethanol produced.

Combined with farming subsidies, the ethanol sector receives a total of some $6bn in support each year.

Meanwhile, there’s a global food shortage. Food prices are rising here and around the world and corn is trading at record highs. Our response to the lack of food is to pump more public money into a sector that turns corn into gas.

Obama is going to break our hearts. Please convince me it’s not so.

  I guess this post is basically just for Jake, but it’s open to anyone who’s interested.  I’m heading down the dangerous road of trying to get an online diplomacy game together again, and this is my official statement of that.  Assuming that Jake and this other kid I know want to play, we need four more people.  Now, find them, Jake, find them! And have them send me an e-mail.

You win, Facebook!  Much like Radiohead (if Radiohead wasn’t very popular or important) joining itunes, I just got a facebook account.  I fully expect my life to improve by leaps and bounds within hours.

Now, be my friend!

Does anyone have any idea what “Stardoll” is? I received this in my inbox a couple of days ago, and I have yet to visit any of the links out of a mixture of wariness and the desire to preserve the mystery itself. My first assumption was that “Stardoll” must be something adult-oriented — but then note that the email says “when you are at Stardoll you should not swear or use sexually graphic terms or be racist.” Hmm?

You are also urged to not “bully other Stardoll members”, and references are made to “Stardollars” (sounds ok), my “Stardoll Suite” (sounds sleazy but possibly interesting), and my “MeDoll” (ok, please put on the brakes).

The email is as follows. However, I guess I’m now feeling a little wary of posting this without investigating further into what it is, so I’m going to look it up on Google now.

EDIT: It’s upsetting.

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Click here to confirm your email: (By doing this, you will receive your 25
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Here is your account information:

Nickname: Benjjj
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Please remember: Don’t give this to anyone! This is your own private
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Every time you want to log on to your personal page at Stardoll.com you’ll
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As a member you will get 25 Stardollars as a kick-start gift to shop
clothes for your MeDoll and furniture and decorations for your Stardoll
Suiteas soon as you have confirmed your email address.

If you want to shop more, you can buy more Stardollars at My Account with
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When you are at Stardoll you should not:
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Rambo

Who’s the Boss?

Luna Lovegood

Terminator (and predator)

Thank you, Internet!

OBAMA! OBAMA! OBAMA!

As I’m sure you’ve heard, he’s secured the delegates he needs. A wave of super delegates came out in support of him after he had clinched the remaining delegates he needed in Montana and South Dakota. The first black presidential nominee (of a major party)! YES! A president I will happily vote for– something I’ve never been able to do before! YES! A president I really feel will change America for the better! YES! I am so pumped!

Probably the worst thing about this drawn out race between him and Hillary is my complete loss of respect for anything Clinton. The race started out with it being a toss up between who I preferred — Hillary, Edwards or Obama. But as it dragged on and on, and Clinton stooped lower and lower with her divisive, often racist, republican-sounding, fear mongering comments (”who do YOU want answering the phone to save your babies lives?”, “To the best of MY KNOWLEDGE, Obama isn’t a muslim…”, etc.) I grew to absolutely loathe her. Even though she lost the nomination months ago, she dragged this whole process out and refused a graceful exit every step of the way.

In the end it just got pitiful for her… in fact, she (as of right now) STILL hasn’t bowed out the race, even though she’s absolutely, 100% lost! This bullshit about “popular vote” is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. First of all, the relevance of a popular vote is nil. We don’t use a popular vote in any of the races. It just doesn’t matter. Second of all, she didn’t even win the popular vote! Her calculations of “popular vote” (that doesn’t even exist) didn’t even include the 15 states that use caucuses for their primaries (that’s almost 1/3 of all the states, remember). Daily Kos “corrected” Hillary’s math and included these states in the popular vote, and– well, surprise surprise! Look who wins– Our man Obama! By a margin of about 190,000. However, as Daily Kos points out, the only numbers that matter at all no matter WHAT math you’re using is the delegate count.

Despite all this, though, Hillary said tonight after Obama clinched the nomination that she “just can’t make any decisions tonight” about her staying in the race! Are you fucking kidding me?! The decision’s been made for her! She doesn’t HAVE a choice anymore! And no matter how much Oprah’s legions want to kick and scream and agree that she must be somehow entitled to the nomination– she’s not! Our boy Obama’s going all the way!

Now I get to go have a great fucking mood for the rest of the day and dream of the upcoming day when I might actually be proud of America’s system of government!