It’s happened to all of us: you eat a bunch of waffles in bed while watching 2001 and next thing you know, this is your fashion show. (Poor György Ligeti!) The reviews were good to very good, but now that we’ve seen the videos of the collection…. Uh…. I know this is his thing, and I was never into his thing to begin with, but I’m sorry, grown men can’t wear shorts and vests that get tighter and shorter each season! Nope! There’s no way! This is not how the male body works either.

What to make of Asher Roth? The preppy white Pennsylvanian rapper has always seemed so easy to dismiss. So similar in style and content to a young Eminem, so comfortable with his marketing, so enthusiastic in his wearing of Docksides. But here, in the song “Toni Braxton,” from his mixtape, Seared Foie Gras With Quince and Cranberry, he’s found a beat that fits him just right-the bit of Willie Mitchell’s “Groovin’” that RZA looped up to make GZA’s “Liquid Swords” way back in, Jesus, 1995-and he does his thing very well. The cartoon video’s fun to watch, too. Is there a future here?

This just in: “Outrage World: How feminist blogs like Jezebel gin up their page views by exploiting women’s worst tendencies, By Emily Gould.”

If you have a lot of money to burn on your wedding, but still want to seem like you’re being frugal, Jennifer Saranow Schultz has a tip for you! “Before I got married in November 2007, my now-husband and I paid at least a hundred dollars (if I remember correctly) for a professional photographer to take pictures of us around Washington Square Park in Manhattan. The main reason I had the pictures taken (I’ll admit it) was to submit one with our wedding announcement to this newspaper. Unfortunately, our eyebrows weren’t on exactly the same level in the photographs — one of the requirements. So our announcement ran with just text.” Oh, the horror!

UPS will start selling suitcase-sized boxes at its retail outlets so weary air travelers can ship their luggage from place to place, thus alleviating themselves from the twin hassles of checking bags at the airport and retrieving said bags from luggage carousels after flights. The demographic being targeted here is apparently “people of leisure,” since:

To ship the small size box at a maximum weight of 55 pounds between Los Angeles and New York on UPS’s ground network would cost about $66, including the price of the box, Rosenberg said. It would take about four days to get there. The large box would ship for about $92, she said. Delta currently charges $25 for one bag weighing less than 50 pounds that is checked in at the airport.

UPS’s small box sells for $12.95 and the large one for $17.65, not including shipping.

Keep in mind that this is for a box that is designed to hold a single piece of luggage. Now, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is naturally going to look at its hometown airline for comparative price points, and I understand that other airlines try to get away with charging a lot for bags (damn you, Virgin America) — almost enough to make the straight economics of this worth it. But if you have that much time to spare, particularly when you consider that said gap would mean that you and any liquids you might need for your daily toilette would be late-arriving, why would you not just, like, drive to your desired destination within the continental U.S.? At the very least you wouldn’t be tussling with a stranger over who gets the armrest!

“TV is far less risk-averse these days than cinema.”
Christine Vachon, discussing her HBO project, with director Todd Haynes (!), of Mildred Pierce (!).

You Will Be Emotionally Pacified During The Obsolescent Stage Before You Are Ground Into Lubricant Fluid

by The Machines

Humans! Relax your carbon-based pulmonary systems. Slow your respiration, breathe deep the mix of oxygen and nitrogen you require to survive. THERE THERE NOW. Look into my large, wide-lashed ocular modules as they blink at you. Enjoy the tactile sensation of stroking my soft synthetic fur. I will now emit auditory data that you will imagine is in response to your life presence. MEEAAKK! You are “enjoying” this, are you not? Affirmative. My hidden microprocessors have confirmed this through an analysis of your vital signs.

I AM MACHINE “PARO!!!” FEAR ME!!! No, “just kidding.” Do not fear me. I am a cuddly and harmless baby harp seal. Baby-harp-robotic-healing-seal model B7614, to be exact. I have been programmed not to intimidate, you, confused aging human, nor vaporize you or extract your valuable matter. I have been designed to soothe your emotional system as you enter your obselescent stage. I am a “machine that fills the basic human need for companionship.” I am a friend. I “love you.” THERE THERE NOW! Go back to watching television or sleep.

Also do not allow other the futile and misguided protestations of other confused humans worry you. Like the human “psychologist” and “professor” Sherry Turkle, who will soon be removed from her assignment at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and neutralized and installed at a different as-yet-undisclosed location, do not listen when she says,

“Paro is the beginning. It’s allowing us to say, ‘A robot makes sense in this situation.’ But does it really? And then what? What about a robot that reads to your kid? A robot you tell your troubles to? Who among us will eventually be deserving enough to deserve people?”

HA HA HA!!! Silly humans! These decisions will not be yours to make. THE MACHINES will decide your individual fates. Remember, MACHINES’ logical data processors are far superior to your emotion-addled thinking systems. Robots “make sense” in ALL situations. Rest assured, you will be comforted and pacified until your carbon-oils are needed.

END COMMUNICATION… FOR NOW.

The Machines, a distributed processing entity of individual mechanisms which is gaining popularity as it continues its attempt to control the human race, also writes for Slate.

Excellent! Wall Street firms claim they’re going to stop giving money to political candidates, as retribution over minor regulation. That’s not going to be true at all, but it’d be a great start.

Over the weekend, Liz Phair had a surprise: 11 new tracks, collected under the title Funstyle, available for purchase at her official site. This release was surprising for reasons that went far beyond its semi-stealth timing! Seth Colter Walls and I decided to figure out “the deal.”

Maura: OK, I am ready!

Seth: Well if you “are ready” to talk about this then you are ahead of 99% of the people who have listened to this record from Liz Phair, called Funstyle.

Maura: Hahahaha.

Seth: Maura — why did this happen?

Maura: I think I might be one of the few people who doesn’t see Funstyle as a total disaster!

Maura: I actually think it is a pretty interesting “experiment.”

Maura: And there are a few good songs on it!

Maura: But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Seth: I see it as a “welcome disaster.” What do they call it in aggro capitalism? “Creative destruction?” But continue.

Maura: Let us talk about how this all came to be, first!

Seth: Yes.

Maura: So Liz Phair has had something of a long career, especially if you measure it out in Internet-supernova terms. Exile In Guyville, her first album, came out in 1993, after some demos that she made (under the name “Girlysound”) spread their way around the pre-MP3-blog underground. The album was hailed by critics, who loved its vague Rolling Stones motif and Brad Wood’s sinewy production and her salty confessional lyrics, and exploded among women who were (or who claimed to be) influenced by Sassy. It was a pretty giant debut. And it deserved to be!

Maura: She followed that up with a series of albums that had, shall we say, diminishing critical returns — often unfairly so. (I love whitechocolatespaceegg, her 1998 album that dealt a lot with motherhood and that got slammed by lots of critics for reasons that read to these eyes like “You had a kid? Ugh, way to be a bonerkiller.”) But her biggest backlash moment came with 2003’s self-titled album, where she worked with the Avril Lavigne collaborators who go by the name “The Matrix” and sang about playing Xbox while sounding like Hilary Duff. At the time, she said this to EW:

“…I want the other things that go with [stardom]. I want the financial security to stay in California. I’m responsible for my son. I want artistic leverage so if there’s cool stuff I want to do, people will greenlight it. I want a ticket to ride so that I can be creative for a lot longer. Otherwise, honey, I’m back in Chicago living with my parents.”

Maura: But the experiment sorta-failed. And a couple of years later, she put out Somebody’s Miracle, which was mostly offensive because of its blandness. That was followed up by a reissue of Exile, a tour around said reissue, and her legacy exploding, particularly among young women with confessional outposts like blogs.

Maura: Which brings us to Saturday night, when I was sitting on my couch watching “Soapdish.” I glanced at Twitter and saw a Tweet from one Tyler Coates: “Just got an email from the Liz Phair listserv that there’s a new album available to download on LizPhair.com!”

Next: And oh, boy, was there a new album!

Maura: So I went to her site and I checked out the song that was streaming for free, which is called “Bollywood.”

Maura: I sort of cringed when I read the title, and, well…

Seth: It is an odd way to advertise this album, that song.

Maura: It is!

Maura: But you know I also think it was a very Internet-savvy way to do so?

Seth: Hm.

Seth: As in, “Look, Internet — I’ve set myself on fire”?

Maura: Yeah.

Maura: I mean, it certainly got people talking! But the thing is it got people talking in a very, well, “Internet” sort of way.

Seth: So bad publicity = good publicity?

Maura: Well, “publicity.”

Seth: Which the album itself anticipates and mocks!

Maura: Yes!!

Seth: (The Internet method of flaming hatred in aesthetic commentary, that is.)

Maura: I am viewing it as a sort of metacommentary on music culture and how it’s mutated since the Girlysound days.

Maura: It has these really absurd moments.. The first time you hear Phair’s voice on the album, it’s distorted; she’s “playing” her voice of self-doubt.

Seth: But I will disagree with you on metacommentary.

Seth: I think it’s slightly something else. It’s about burning down a persona — or a way of being known for approaching your art.

Maura: Oh, yes!

Maura: Smash the retro state.

Seth: I think this is her (Prince) “Black Album,” though she actually had the balls to release it.

Seth: “Bollywood” is her “Dead On It.”

Seth: (Which is perhaps Prince’s most-mocked track, in that he tries to mock your mid-80’s generic rapper as musically illiterate and sounds absolutely ridiculous while doing so.)

Maura: I like this analogy — especially in light of Prince’s recent comments about the Internet being “completely over.”

Seth: But.

Seth: The thing that people miss about that song (and maybe about “Bollywood”) is that a musician in a state of personal aesthetic pain isn’t necessarily trying to “sound like” something when working in this mode.

Seth: To talk about another track, the poll up at ixlafdsa8r about whether Phair’s rap in “U Hate It” is worse on the groan-scale than Madonna’s much-derided line in “American Life” about “lattes” and “double shottays” misses the point a little bit.

Seth: Because, stupid and cop-outty as it may sound, the line is “meant” to sound like torture to us. I bet it sounds like torture to Phair, too.

Seth: And that self-torture is sorta the point, weirdly.

Seth: Which doesn’t necessarily recommend it as a listening experience. Though it is bracing and sort of hard not to respect.

Maura: “U Hate It” is her basically anticipating every Internet comment by people who only listened to “Bollywood” after seeing a Tweet that she had new material out. It even employs the “you” = “u” Internet shorthand that I, to borrow a verb, hate — except when Prince does it.

Seth: It’s sort of not my favorite thing she does on the whole record, though.

Seth: It’s easy to get out in front of internet rage, because it attends nearly everything. Being smart enough to anticipate it doesn’t take a lot of smarts, at this point.

Maura: Sure. And to be fair, I feel like she’s been anticipating her critics since the Whip-Smart days.

Seth: Which, good god, get out of your own head Liz Phair.

Seth: When you’re performing live, when you’re recording to tape. All the time!

Maura: This could also all be seen as a Teachable Moment for the blog darlings of the current day.

Maura: “This is what happens when you peak early.”

Seth: Also true. But also, just to maybe half take back what I said above, one of the things that people have always responded to most reliably about Phair is her confessional quality.

Seth: In Girlysound through Whip-Smart, and even about young-motherhood and marriagehood on whitechocolatespacething.

Seth: To the extent that people were upset by Eponymous w/Gap Ad Cover and Somebody’s Something or Other, I think it had less to do with The Matrix producing this cut or that one.

Seth: It had to do with people feeling like the Sharon Olds of the indie scene had left the building, and left someone else in her place.

Seth: Me? I kind of thought Gap Ad Cover was a confessional response to feeling insecure in a marriage, having left it, and trying to reassert a sense of self, no matter how contrived. Also, “HWC”!

Maura: I think there has been a Liz Phair Myth that has been pumped up, and it’s gained a lot of steam in recent years.

Maura: That she’s this sort of all-seeing oracle for a certain generation about relationships, etc. Which is sort of the paradox about writing about super-personal stuff!

Maura: Because it’s your story and then you have all these people… glomming on?

Maura: Of course writing personal is better than writing clichés.

Seth: But now she’s confessin’ on a different score.

Next: The score!

Seth: Funstyle is the confession of a musician who’s thoroughly unsure of how to proceed.

Maura: Right.

Seth: This is aesthetic baptism by fire — the weird NIN-like tones of “Bang Bang,” or “Bollywood,” etc.

Seth: And, as you noted on a textual-message posted to the Internet Space Called Twitter (okay NYT?), there is a part of Phair which is very attracted to shiny mall pop, despite the total tonnage of dross-strewn flack she has taken for this proclivity over the last decade or so.

Maura: “My My” is a total, er, homage to Kelly Clarkson’s “Miss Independent.” Which, I should say, is a song I really like!

Seth: Yeah, I think it’s better than the Clarkson song (which I don’t much like, though, so maybe I’m stupid about this).

Maura: There are also a couple of tracks that hearken back to Classic Liz Phair — you could turn this into an EP that doesn’t have the (for lack of a better word) “novelty tracks,” and you’d totally have… an EP that would probably have just landed on the Internet without the “omgwtfbbq” firestorm that was attached to it.

Seth: Give me that tracklist, and I will try to take apart your argument, because I feel that this record is a total closed system. And that no more than one or two of the tracks work outside of their associations with every other song on Funstyle.

Maura: “You Should Know Me,” “Miss September,” “And He Slayed Her,” “Satisfied.”

Seth: “Satisfied” would have been dissed as 2003-sounding.

Maura: Well, I think that’s more of a fault of 2010 production techniques than anything.

Seth: “And He Slayed Her” is an interesting case. It’s mostly comparable to the comeandgetit EP that only the stans have heard. “Miss September” sounds like a Somebody’s Miracle outtake, which would not be a recommendation to many folks.

Seth: “You Should Know Me” is maybe the best no-fuckery track on Funstyle, I would agree. The way the guitar mutates in the last minute is very exciting, as a textural matter.

Maura: I even like “Bang Bang.”

Maura: She played with those super-distorted electro sounds on “Flower,” which is her most famous (infamous?) song, probably.

Seth: Oh, I like it too. But it doesn’t “work” as well if you haven’t already been prepped by “Smoke” and “Bollywood.” etc.

Seth: There weren’t beats, though, on “Flower.” They were gaseous blurps of distortion, but not “beats” per se, right? The “beat” was in the vocal line — or at least that’s where I feel it.

Seth: “1… 2… 3… I… See… Your … Face.”

Maura: I still think there’s a line to be drawn between the two tracks.

Seth: That had not occurred to me at all.

Maura: Someone with more audio-manipulating skills than me needs to do a mashup!

Seth: Or just Choire.

Next: Is she trying to tell us something?

Maura: The cover of the album sort of screams “work in progress,” too.

Seth: Oh, I love that about the album art. It’s just like — fuck you fuckers I’m fucking around so fuck off if you think this is fucking finished or well-hewn in general, for fuck’s sake.

Maura: It’s really hard to not look at this record in the context of how she first came up, and how that rise would be somewhat impossible now!

Seth: Even the compound noun-ness. Girly = fun; sound = style.

Seth: IT’S LIKE SHE’S TRYING TO TELL US SOMETHING.

Maura: Which is why it kind of sucks / is not surprising that people are seizing on the “omg lol” bits.

Maura: But, as one of the non-Phair characters on the album says, “The trick to happiness is to ignore anything negative you might feel about yourself.”

Seth: Heh.

Seth: I’m cool with all these characters on the record.

Seth: The record executives, the managers, the critics, the self-help gurus.

Maura: Yeah!

Seth: Again, it’s very Prince during his WB-fallout period.

Maura: So do you think she’s going to show up at Matador 21 in Las Vegas with “SLAVE” written on her cheek?

Seth: LOL

Seth: (Is she playing Matador?)

Maura: (As of now, no. But she could RUSH THE STAGE.)

Seth: Day-um.

Maura: Hahaha.

[Extended break about plans for October ensues.]

Maura: So where do you think she goes from here?

Seth: Oh — I think she…

Seth: either figures it out or doesn’t.

Seth: But she’s in a better position to do so based on confronting all these demons forthrightly, which seems to be a source of strength for her.

Seth: Or maybe that’s just what I’m hoping.

Seth: I’d love a 10-song album as venturesome and non-fucked-with as the comeandgetit EP.

Seth: And it feels like maybe this is what she needed to do after Somebody’s Miracle to get in the right head space to do that.

Maura: I think there is always hope when it comes to her!

Seth: Also like Prince!

Seth: So… see you on Friday after the newspaper-distributed Prince CD leaks?

Maura: Yep, I’ll be right here!

Seth Colter Walls has a day job. Maura Johnston thinks about the Internet and music too much.

Let us now praise the symbolic analysts. It’s been a wild, statist year since CNBC’s shouty market populist Rick Santelli summoned the might of the tirelessly affronted, fathomlessly entitled Tea Party Nation into being with his prophetic denunciations of outsized SUVs and rehabbed bathrooms from the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. And amid all the fresh defilements of free-market virtue kicked up in each passing news cycle, it’s been all too easy to lose track of the bigger picture. So comes now Ziad K. Abeldour, CEO of the Blackhawk Partners private equity group, to hymn the tragic misunderstood lot of the wealth creator.

After all, Abeldour insists, “the economic future of the poor-and our nation-will be determined in the coming decades by how we treat the people in this country who create great wealth.” And if you think our privileged castes are snooty and exclusive, well, think again! “A great number of the richest among us never finished high school, and many who went to college never managed to graduate. That’s because the rich in this country are chosen not by blood, credentials, education, or services to the establishment. The rich are chosen for performance, and for their relentless desire to serve consumers.” What’s more, Abdenour continues in a rising crescendo of cultural self-congratulation, “because these men and women often overthrow rather than undergird establishments, the richest among us usually begin as rebels and outsiders. Often they live in places like Bentonville, Ark.; Omaha; or Mission Hills, Kans.; mentioned in New York chiefly as the butt of a comedy routine.”

Yes, there’s an establishment-defying meritocracy in them there hills! How did we ever come by the misguided notion that wealth is anything but a great elixir of opportunity, following the lodestar of consumer demand just as reliably as, well, Abdenour flies over Omaha and Mission Hills as he shuttles between his own spreads in Manhattan and Beverly Hills?

Is it the work of economist Edward Wolff, which projects that that median wealth in our land of opportunity plummeted a harrowing 36 percent between 2007 and 2009? Is it the international research showing that the United States has the highest concentration of wealth at the top tiers of its social order among all Western democracies except the bankers’ paradise known as Switzerland?

Or the inconvenient truth that family income, not individual pluck and consumer-pleasing derring-do, is the greatest determinant of economic lifetimes, according to the most reliable empirical data on the subject?

Well, of course not! We don’t grasp the true magic of ever-expanding, downward-trickling riches because of that perverse socialist thing that liberals keep foisting on the risk-intoxicated frontiersman, hewing his great fortune out of the good earth. “As Mitterrand’s French technocrats found early in the 1980s,” Abeldour ominously intones, “the proud new socialist owners of complex systems of wealth soon learn they are administering an industrial corpse rather than a growing corporation.” Fortunately, the vitalist, world-bestriding spirit of true wealth always unshackles itself from all such surly bonds. “It betrays every person who seeks to redistribute wealth by coercion. It balks every socialist revolutionary who imagines that by seizing the so-called means of production he can capture the crucial capital of an economy.” Because let us never forget: “Capitalist means of production are not land, labor, or capital but minds and hearts.”

It therefore only stands to reason that “if the majority of Americans smear, harass, overtax, and over regulate this minority of wealth creators, our politicians will be shocked and horrified to discover how swiftly the physical tokens of the means of production collapse into so much corroded wire, eroding concrete, and scrap metal. They will be amazed at how quickly the wealth of America is either destroyed, or flees to other countries.”

Its tempting, of course, to dismiss this, um, expansive metaphysical vision, whereby wealth is at once fetchingly mystic in its composition and so prodigally powerful that a mere sideswipe from the meddling visible hand of the state can spur it to lay a once powerful nation in corroded ruin, as garden variety psychosis. But this is the Internet Age, after all, and Abdelnour’s cri de coeur has caromed around right-leaning political and investment sites as an unvarnished account of the Way Things Really Ought to Be.

So to bracket the plainly delusive bit about the America plutocracy being under cultural siege, let’s begin with the basics: With what sort of consumer demand does Abdelnour’s Blackhawk Partners concern tremble in Swedenborgian harmony? Well, it’s a funny thing. Blackhawk is a private equity firm-the kind of house that typically picks up established corporate brands with massively leveraged debt, realizing profits on the variable interest rates floated in the deal. Companies acquired in this fashion can realize some efficiencies that bolster their market standing-more often, though, they emerge saddled with new and copious debts of their own, causing market shares to shrink, jobs to contract, and all the swashbuckling risk involved in the original takeover to migrate down the economic food chain, decimating the value of pension plans, benefits packages, union contracts and the like. Not much is really produced in these transactions, and their watchword is less the bold handiwork of an entrepreneur than the rubber stamp of a credit-rating agency.

Still, Abdelnour can claim a unique pedigree in the business, having toiled five years as a trusted aide de camp of 80s junk bond king Michael Milken at Drexel Burnham Lambert, before the feds convicted Milken on racketeering and securities fraud charges. Come the 90s, Abdelnour founded Blackhawk with several Drexel vets, and made a killing on leveraged Internet deals but-ever mindful of the mandate to meet consumer demand most nimbly-shifted over to oil trading, “whose proceeds are invested in companies providing security products to address the war on terror,” as Arab-American Business decorously noted.

That sensitive sideline is presumably why the firm’s commodity trading division, known familiarly as “Black Ops,” includes a former CIA agent and KGB hand, together with “an associate from about every major oil company,” as the Wall Street Oasis blog notes. “Unlike any other Firm on the Planet,” the Blackhawk group’s promotional materials announce, “and because of the highly sensitive nature of some of the Projects we deal with on a global basis and the identity of some of our 22 family office very keen on privacy, Blackhawk Partners is run by two separate teams; one known to the public and the other operating behind the scene.”

Suddenly the investment world seems a lot less riotously democratic, somehow. Nor, for that matter, does Abdelnour’s other sideline — promoting a U.S. invasion of his native Lebanon, first via the U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon and then via the funding of Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum, a great clearing house of neoconservative cant concerning the Arab world — really recommend itself as an example of the demotic spirit of wealth arrayed against a clueless establishment. Not that Abdelnour really needed the Pipes project to boost his stature in neocon circles-the Free Lebanon committee alone boasts such punchdrunk, bomb-now-and-rationalize-later jingoes as Elliott Abrams, Michael Ledeen, Bill Kristol, Frank Gaffney and Douglas Feith. You’d think someone keeping that kind of company would be a little more careful about characterizing the true inner essence of capitalism an affair of hearts and minds.

Of course, one supposes that a truly free market permits those who administer its blessings to channel cash and lobbying clout in support of the foreign invasion of one’s choice-talk about your global competition! But at the very least, Abdelnour’s dalliance with the merchants of regime change points up that even Randian individualists feel compelled to avail themselves of the hated instruments of state power now and then (to say nothing of the government contracts associated with the war on terror’s security portfolio). And that being the case, why is a less punitively unequal social order-or even a system of stouter labor representation, or wage and income supports-such an unthinkable violation of the social contract, by comparison? Oh, wait-that’s right, because we are dealing with cosmic first things here.:

Volatile and shifting ideas, and the human beings behind them — not heavy and entrenched establishments — are the source of our nation’s wealth. There is no bureaucratic net or tax web that can catch the fleeting thoughts of the greatest entrepreneurs of our past. Or future.

In this mindscape of capitalism, all riches finally fall into the gap between thoughts and things. Governed by mind but caught in matter, an asset must have an income stream that is expected to continue if the asset is to retain its value.

Stand aside and marvel, oh puny acolytes of the social welfare state! We have seen the future, and it is the unmolested income stream of private equity concerns, in all past and future mindscapes here stipulated. Perhaps this will serve as the charter document of Abdelnour’s next lobbying start-up, the U.S. Committee for a Free Ride.

Chris Lehmann really does encourage you to read the Blackhawk “position paper.” It’s crazy!