eye of the storm

here is an excellent piece from reason on the bizarre way we've come to think of our presidents.

hey brian put up the first bit of the soul list on seeqpod. that is cool. gotta figure out how to use it.

speaking of political aesthetics: behold the pc colossus and despair!

how you know you're in love, by jane sartwell (7)
first you look at their eyes without them knowing, and figure out whether they're cute.
then you talk to them a little to see if they're nice.
then you ask them a really hard math question, and you take the problem to your teacher, and if the answers match, you know they're smart.
this is if you like them cute, nice, and smart.
then you hang out and you start getting a funny feeling in your heart!

jane's working on her new book frenemies, about her amazing love/hate relationship with eric, who is "kind of" cute, nice, and smart, until he turns ugly, nasty, and stupid!

demographics is a lot less interesting in politics than, say, cable news makes it. i just saw someone assert that the election will turn on the vote of blue collar white men. but let's try to get this straight. let's say you're trying to explain an election in which candidate a beats candidate b at 54 to 46% (just for simplicity).
any demographic segment that constitutes , say, 10% of the elecorate that votes largely for one of the candidates can, with exactly equal propriety, be represented as having been decisive. this could be black folks, but it could be people between 35 and 45 years old, or people with graduate degrees, soccer moms, left-handers, blondes, what you like for your little account. now probably left-handers are split. but that of course just makes them even more decisive: a potential battleground. the fact that they, or white blue collor men, are split, is no less decisive and significant than that they go one way or another. had they not been split, they would have decided the election. therefore the split decided the election. none of these can be "the" explanation because they are all to a precisely equal degree an explanation. if barack could have split off the left-handers, or people with violet eyes, he would have won. in other words, this variety of analysis flows to any taxonomy you like, and then the idea that we're detecting the categories of race, religion, age, income, education shows much more about how we split people up - about our prejudices, say - than about anything substantive about an election.
here's a paradigm case: blame nader's 1.5% of the vote in florida for gore's loss of the state in 2000. well, any 1.5 percent segment of the population that didn't go to gore is exactly equally responsible: those who voted for buchanan, for instance, or practitioners of voodoo. the idea is that had these people not voted for nader, they would have voted for gore. then again, had the voodoo practitioners not voted for buchanan, they would have voted for bush. in other words, we also make a series of presumptions on which only a vote for one of the major candidates is sensible, in which counterfactuals are cast in terms of a two-party system etc.
all of these ideas are not things we detect: they are a priori categorizations that shape narratives. the methodology, in other words, is fundamentally non-empirical, though it all comes in the quasi-scientific numbers of the polling industry.

watcha listenin to, mistercrispy?
i'm soaked in, permeated by, classic soul. putting together a definitive 2-cd set (playlist below). my main rediscovery in this sojourn is o.v. wright, an amazing and amazingly underappreciated deep soul singer. "blind, crippled and crazy" is my latest theme song. later in his career, he recorded for hi records, which made the classic soul of al green and ann peebles (who is one my favorite artists ever; you can't seem to get the right stuff on itunes; you want early: "I can't stand the rain," "tear your playhouse down," "feel like breakin up somebody's home.") i finally went back and got early solomon burke. beautiful. my kids vince and sam are skeptical; i think they think it sounds like country music. it's amazing what happens to popular music retroactively! but they're musicians and i at least can say: try to understand the horn arrangements! or just fucking soak up those vocals: the best singers in pop music history, approximately. there's little aretha below, not because i don't love aretha, but because i've heard "respect" and "think" perhaps too many times.

(1) ann peebles, "i can't stand the rain"
(2) bobby bland, "ain't no love in the heart of the city"
(3) purify bros, "i'm your puppet"
(4) solomon burke, "everybody needs somebody to love"
(5) otis redding and carla thomas, "knock on wood"
(6) al green, "look what you done for me"
(7) o.v. wright, "i'd rather be blind, crippled, and crazy"
(8) clarence carter, "back door santa"
(9) wilson pickett, "634-5789"
(10) o.v wright, "drowning on dry land"
(11) sam and dave, "i thank you"
(12) otis redding, "fa-fa-fa-fa-fa (sad song)"
(12) solomon burke, "cry to me" ("don't you feel like crying?")
(13) patti labelle, "1-2-3-4-5-6-7 (count the days)"
(14) booker t and the mg's, "green onions"
(15) don covay, "mercy, mercy"
(16) ann peebles, "tear your playhouse down"
(17) rufus thomas, "push pull"
(18) o.v. wright, "a nickel and a nail"
(19) sam cooke, "cupid"
(20) solomon burke, "can't nobody love you (like i can)"
(21) bettye swann, "chained and bound"
(22) the staple singers, "i'll take you there"
(23) ike and tina turner, "i idolize you"
(24) al green, "call me"
(25) aretha franklin, "chain of fools"
(26) o.v. wright, "i've been searching"
(27) sam and dave, "soothe me"
(28) solomon burke, "none of us are free"
(29) otis redding, "i've been loving you too long"
(30) janis joplin, "piece of my heart"
(31) the isley brothers, "shout"
(32) bobby bland "i wouldn't treat a dog (the way you treated me)"
(33) ann peebles, "feel like breakin up somebody's home"
(34) o.v. wright, "eight men, four women (jury of love)"
(35) betty wright "clean up woman"
(36) wilson pickett, "land of 1000 dances"
(37) o.v. wright, "everybody knows (the river song)"
(38) don covay, "everything gonna be everything"
(39) al green, "let's stay together"
(40) donna summer, "love to love you"
(41) the bar-kays, "soul finger"
(42) sam and dave, "hold on, i'm comin'"
(43) otis redding, "(sittin' on) the dock of the bay"
(44) o.v. wright, "born all over"
(45) sam cooke, "(ain't that) good news"
(46) ike and tina turner, "river deep, mountain high"

me working out with a japanese fanning deck. no tricks: a real deck of cards, only colorful.

moving acid back above the fold.

white guys get ever hilariouser .