Tuesday was primary day here in the Land of Lincoln, and it was bittersweet. Our gubernatorial favorite took our county (hooray!), but only secured one other and it wasn’t the one that Chicago is in. Dan Lipinski squeaked into the 3rd district too, as I’m sure many of you saw. Locals tell me that he won’t survive 2020, so that’s good.
Tuesday was also my wife’s debut as a campaign manager for a friend who ran for a seat on the county board. It was a surprisingly exciting campaign. Our candidate was running against the incumbentiest incumbent in all of Illinois. The longest-tenured county board politician in the state, he had served for 45 years. There were all kinds of twists and turns in this campaign, including a ratfucking fake flyer that was circulated as if it were coming from our candidate! Whaaat? Yes. This might sound absurd for what is probably the lowest rung on the ladder of elected office. But our candidate, an outspoken, tall woman who will occasionally dye her hair a bright color, is a lightning rod for the local RWNJs.
Our candidate ended up taking 71% of the vote. (Man down! Somebody call Jerry Orbach because there has been a homicide!) Don’t waste any time feeling bad for the loser. He called around to his Republican friends and pressed them for endorsements, including the Republican county sheriff and a fellow board member who said that he didn’t think “community activists” had any place on the county board. Uh-huh. So, thank you for your service and enjoy your retirement, pal.
Some of you have expressed an interest in hearing about other races in other places. I have that interest too. To that end, I have set up an email address and encourage any and all of you to send the story of your local political scene. If selected, we will front-page it and include fundraising for congressional nominees. The Chicago sports media have coined the term “out-of-town stupid.” It’s an exculpatory expression usually applied to members of the media from elsewhere who only know the surface story and none of the context. (When the Bulls had Ben Gordon playing at the shooting guard position, the national media take was that the Bulls had finally found a Jordanesque player who could fill up the basket and pour in 30 on any given night. But locals knew that he couldn’t guard a folding chair and was as much of a liability on the court as a benefit. You can’t know that from looking at a couple of box scores. It’s not your fault if you don’t know this. You’re just out-of-town stupid.)
So help the rest of us not be out-of-town-stupid about what’s going on in your neighborhood. Here’s the address: [email protected]
I was reminded that I once said to my wife, “When the money starts flowing, you’ve got to keep milking that money monkey.” She asked me never to use that expression again and once we hit 50K, I vow to you, I will. This is the fund that’s split between all eventual
Democratic nominees in House districts currently held by Republicans.
schrodingers_cat
No arcane debate about music?
Jewish Steel
@schrodingers_cat: We could have one here if you like. Herbert Von Karajan conducted Beethoven in a way that the composer himself might not recognize. And yet, for me, Herbert Von Karajan was Beethoven. His very spirit.
Ian G.
So I’m seeing Richard Ashcroft and Liam Gallagher perform in Central Park in May. As many shows as I’ve been to in NYC, I’ve never been to one in Central Park. I’ve even seen Jason Isbell in Prospect Park, and a number in McCarren Park (Sonic Youth doing all of “Daydream Nation”, for instance), but this is a first for me. Hopefully it’s not still winter then.
schrodingers_cat
@Jewish Steel: Link? I have never heard Karajan or heard of him. Our musical backgrounds are different as night and day..
And I am no musician, just an avid listener of music.
Jewish Steel
@Ian G.: I heard the new Liam Gallagher album is pretty good!
Johnny Gentle (famous crooner)
Lipinski may survive if it can continues to be a stupid open primary. Other than those Bernie supporters pandering to non-Democrats over actual Democrats, I don’t see why anyone would ever support an open primary. If you’re an R or I and want to vote for a Democrat, it’s not hard to change your party registration, or to vote however you like in the general.
Jewish Steel
@schrodingers_cat: Have a dose of the Third!
I was being intentionally provocative. Mostly what Beethoven would not recognize would be the timbral difference and the raw power of the modern orchestra.
Ian G.
@Jewish Steel:
British rockers just have a sneer to them that Americans don’t do well. Oasis, most notably, but also Arctic Monkeys, Future of the Left, and others. Hopefully Liam’s still got it.
Another Scott
Donated (again). Does Doug! need to modify the distribution? (Like someone else, I got an e-mail from ActBlue saying I was getting a refund because of something about the redistricting in PA.)
@Jewish Steel: So where do you come down on Beethoven’s Metronome – Was it broken or not? (8 page .pdf).
I love Solti’s version of the 9th. There was some program on NPR a while ago arguing that Beethoven want it played much, much faster, but it just sounds wrong that way. It seems to me that something must have been broken about the metronome (or about Beethoven’s perception of time intervals by that time as a result of his deafness).
Cheers,
Scott.
Jewish Steel
@Johnny Gentle (famous crooner): Amen.
Booger
@schrodingers_cat: He revolutionized airline travel with his invention of Karajan luggage.
Jewish Steel
@Jewish Steel: And here is a contrasting 3rd.
Mnemosyne
If we’re doing classical, my novel research recently led me to the Chevalier de St-Georges, aka “the Black Mozart.” Recordings of his work are available on Amazon. He had a really amazing life in addition to his music.
ETA: He was the actual leader of the first Black battalion, though in the French Revolution.
Jewish Steel
@Booger: Banned for life. Collect your things and leave quietly.
Corner Stone
@Booger:
I thought he was the uncle of the Boston Bombing brothers?
patroclus
@Johnny Gentle (famous crooner): Anyone actually living in Illinois would never ever ever ever accept an idiotic closed machine primary, which has zero arguments in favor of it and would surely have resulted in Lipinski winning by an even greater margin than he did. Closed machine primaries are exactly what the machine would want and would exclude voters who have commonly voted for Solidarity (Adlai Stevenson), Harold Washington Independent (Tim Evans), Chicago First (Tim Hynes), Reform (Perot) and other parties and candidates. We want those voters in the primaries; we do not wish to exclude them. Illinoisians should decide what kind of primaries we have; not those from out-of state. Thanks for proving the Ben Gordon story.
Gin & Tonic
@Jewish Steel:
IOW he conducted the orchestra as if he were deaf?
Corner Stone
@Ian G.:
Who are the other two in their Barbershop Quartet?
trollhattan
The Moscow Times (not those RT guys) had this to say about the Putin coronation for life.
Kay
Every single day we find out about more self-dealing, nepotism and corruption in these horrible families.
Corner Stone
Not too bad…for a rook.
Jewish Steel
@Another Scott: Very interesting!
This still happens constantly.
Ian G.
@Corner Stone:
Good question. How about Damon Albarn and Ian Brown?
Jewish Steel
@Mnemosyne: Oh yeah! I remember his life being touched upon when I was an undergrad.
Did you say you were writing romance novels? One of our best pals in town is this lady. Another romance fiction writer. She’s retired now. I’ve read some of her stuff. It’s really good.
geg6
@Jewish Steel:
I used to love Oasis back in the day. Now which one of the asshole brothers is Liam? I can never keep them straight.
Jewish Steel
@patroclus: Poor Ben has seen his share of troubles post NBA.
Ian G.
@geg6:
Liam was the singer. Noel the guitarist and songwriter.
Roger Moore
@Jewish Steel:
That just shows you’ve been indoctrinated. IMO, the problem comes from an ahistoric way of thinking about Beethoven. Because he is considered the first of the Romantic composers, people tend to conceive of him and his music in terms of the late Romantic composers, treating him as a sort of prefiguration of Wagner or Bruckner. It makes a lot more sense to see him as the last of the Classical composers, making him Mozart’s successor rather than Wagner’s predecessor. That’s certainly a more reliable way of understanding the way he thought about his own music.
He can’t possibly have known what kind of music people would be writing decades after his death, but he knew a lot about what music was like shortly before he started writing, and it was inevitably what he would think about when composing. Even to the extent he was rebelling against the Classical style, he was deeply influenced by it. He was also composing for orchestras that were much more similar to Mozart’s than Wagner’s, and those orchestras were much better suited to playing lively, dynamic music than majestic, powerful music.
Jewish Steel
@Gin & Tonic: Conductors of Beethoven’s era, when an orchestra bothered to have one at all, would pound the podium with a big stick to keep time. I’d like to see a return to pounding.
Jewish Steel
@Corner Stone: Logically, it would be Damon Albarn and Jarvis Cocker.
geg6
@Ian G.:
One of them was just on CBS Sunday Morning with Jane Pauley. Again, because I can never keep them straight, I’m just going to guess it was Liam only because they discussed a new album and tour. But it could have been Noel. :-)
What was clear is that some things never change. They still despise each other.
Jewish Steel
@geg6: The singing one. Noel is the songwriting asshole.
germy
@Jewish Steel: What was the first record with a fadeout at the end? Who came up with that? I’m curious.
It’s such an odd thing.
Like, “we didn’t arrange an ending for this song, we’ll just keep repeating and lower the volume into silence”
Why live versions of rock songs end so awkwardly sometimes; they can’t “fade out” onstage, so they create a chord pounding finale.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
How disgustingly insular. They have a place if they’re elected jackass.
Roger Moore
@Another Scott:
Not. I think people who dispute Beethoven’s metronome markings have just been indoctrinated to a particular view of what his music should sound like and can’t handle the difference. Once you get used to it, music played to his written metronome markings, especially with a smaller, more nimble orchestra, has a fantastic life and dynamism that the slower, more majestic take simply lacks. The 7th Symphony is a great example of this. The later movements just die if you try to play them slowly and powerfully, but they spring to life when you play them quickly and nimbly.
Jewish Steel
@Roger Moore:
Exactly. I cannot shake it either.
No, but I’ll bet he had some guesses.
germy
@Roger Moore: And weren’t orchestras tuned lower in Beethoven’s day?
Another Scott
@germy: Rush and The The (and I’m sure others) had last songs on an album side that would be timed to the last groove so that it would play some perfectly repeating stanza (or whatever). It was clever and nice.
That went away when CDs took over. Dunno if MP3s can somehow handle that (“GOTO 20”).
It would have been a challenge to do live too, also too.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ninedragonspot
In my view, Beethoven’s metronome marks are interesting, but not dispositive. Beethoven is dead and can have no further say on the matter. How musicians feel the music, how audiences want to hear them, those are the essential factors. Beethoven’s music can support a variety of interpretations.
Jewish Steel
@germy: Dude! I looked into this once. The fadeout. Who had the best fadeout. Whose fadeout was too bloody long. The false fadeout. Definitely an artifact of recording technology. Some classical pieces call for the fading ending too.
Roger Moore
@germy:
I always assumed it was a response to radio play. At some point, DJs started crossfading from one song to the next rather than playing them to the end, and bands copied the effect on their singles by fading out rather than ending cleanly.
Jewish Steel
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?: We discovered some people in his district had never heard of him. I’ll bet he preferred it that way.
germy
@Jewish Steel: Can someone point to a specific record and say “this is the first ever fadeout” ?
Such a strange invention. What is the equivalent in live performance? That the band is slowly walking away from you?
As far as Beethoven, Mozart and those boys go, I always suspected their original performances were raucous like rock concerts. As the centuries passed, the interpretations got smoother and smoother.
Pity recording technology didn’t exist in Beethoven’s day. I read somewhere he’d begin a piano performance with a loud bang on the keys. An attention getter.
Mnemosyne
@Jewish Steel:
Nice! I was out of the romance world for a long while when I was pursuing screenwriting, but now I’m back and getting up to speed. I haven’t heard of her, but I’ll put her on my list!
The contest where I was a little sad about not finaling was sponsored by the Chicago North RWA chapter and will be in Oakbrook at the end of April. It would have been a nice excuse for a long weekend in Chicagoland to visit family and attend the conference. Le sigh. ?
oatler.
@Jewish Steel: I liked Zappa’s “conducting”. Looked suspiciously like Ernie Kovacs leading the Nairobi trio.
trollhattan
@Another Scott:
I had an album (forget whose) that said “turn me over” in the runout groove, but did not know about it for years until the first listen on a non-auto turntable. Yeah, I jumped.
Mnemosyne
@trollhattan:
I borrowed my older brother’s vinyl copy of “Matching Tie and Handkerchief” and FREAKED OUT the first time I landed on the second groove. I had no idea it was there.
Yutsano
@Jewish Steel:
Probably not, but he would have loved it.
trollhattan
@Mnemosyne:
Too funny! When I bought my copy the record counter dudes looked at each other “Should we tell hm?” “Yeah.” And despite them informing me “It has three sides” it took awhile to figure out what the heck they were talking about.
ETA cueing up tracks on that side for radio was a…challenge.
Cleese+”Holy Grail” next week! I’m chuffed.
Mike J
@trollhattan:My vinyl story: I got a like on Twitter from Peter Holsapple when I commented about playing Amplifier and Spy in the House of Love back to back on college radio. Greta, the girl on before me, called the batphone demanding to know how I segued the last song on side A into the first song on side B. Amplifier had also been on Repercussion.
rikyrah
@Kay:
yEP.
Dumbspear O'Sparrow
I thought the post title was a reference to Whitesnake’s Here I Go Again. That just goes to show my age and trashy musical tastes.
Spanky
Oops! It did it again. DJI down another 426. Guess the market doesn’t like a cobbled together Federal budget. Or maybe it’s the dick waving trade wars. Or maybe it’s Bolton’s threat of actual wars.
Speaking of which, Hugh Hewitt’s headline at the WaPo once again proves Einstein’s apochryphal adage, “The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits”.
Spanky
@Spanky: Actually, I would approve of Bolton as an addition to the White House if it was as a gargoyle.
Johnny Gentle (famous crooner)
@patroclus;
Ha ha, yeah, tell me all about how the open primary system is designed to prevent machine politicians. Linpinski’s the scion of a quintessential machine politician, who inherited the seat when his daddy retired at the last minute and got his son’s name swapped onto the ballot.
If you want to pull the parochial “stay out of our local elections” bit, then vote for dogcatcher. This is a race for Congress. Every Democrat around the country has a stake in every single House seat and in winning back the majority.
Besides, Betty Cracker had the definitive post on the bullshit open-primary.
https://balloon-juice.com/2018/03/21/exhibit-a-for-closed-primaries/
Almost 20% of the people who voted in the Lipinski primary approved of Trump and–unsurprisingly–Lipinski won their vote 85-10. On the other hand, actual Democrats supported Newman 51-32. You didn’t attract any “new” voters, you attracted republicans who were mobilized by the Susan B. Anthony List. (“But..but oligarchs!”)
Take your love of open primaries somewhere else, because your Bernie butt-hurt is clouding your vision.
Yutsano
@Spanky:
To be honest, there are many ways in which this budget could have been so much worse. I’ll take a funding increase for the IRS every day and twice on Sundays. Maybe some attrition can finally be reversed. After all we need bodies for the new tax law to help implementation.
germy
Sen. James Risch’s decades-old grudge briefly derailed the big spending bill
Such petty assholes they are.
trollhattan
@Spanky:
How about we turn Bolon loose in the West Wing with a sack of meth, some LSD and an AR-15? Winning!
Another Scott
@trollhattan: rofl. Nice.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@Mike J: Oooh. Sneaky.
:-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Uncle Cosmo
@Spanky: Yeah, weld him to a cornice & shoot dirty rainwater out his mouth by way of his arse. Be more productive than he ever will be.
Fair Economist
@Roger Moore: This Beethoven’s 9th, first movement manipulated to his written tempo blows me away.
Fair Economist
@Yutsano:
The comic “Leonard and Larry” had a recurring dream sequence in which an insecure musician dreamed about Mozart showing up to teach him how to play. The fictional dream Mozart had a fitting response to encountering the modern piano:
“What a magnificent instrument for the playing of MY music!”
which IMO fits both Mozart’s personality and the differences between fortepianos and modern pianos.