Jim Newell

The Top Ten Albums By The Guy Who Made the Top Album of 2011

It is my duty as a pathetic creature of the Internet to spend a December Saturday afternoon typing a meaningless top ten list. Since Destroyer’s Kaputt, like every Destroyer album, was the best album of the year — although I no longer listen to 100 new albums a year like I did as an even more pathetic person in college, so maybe I missed some things, but probably not — this is the meaningless top ten list I’m running with. And yes, I copped out with a tie for second, but this is just a tumblr post so who cares?

Top Ten Destroyer Albums:

1) Streethawk: A Seduction (2001)

2t) Thief (2000)

2t) City of Daughters (1998)

4) This Night (2002)

5) Kaputt (2011)

6) Collection of Dan Bejar’s 10-12 best songs for the New Pornographers (2000-)

7) Rubies (2006)

8) Your Blues (2004)

9) We’ll Build Them a Golden Bridge (1996)

10) Trouble in Dreams (2008)

What? Stop making fun! Just be happy I went with this instead of the Top 50 Destroyer Songs.

George Meyer

BLVR: So what happened exactly? Did you just open a map and throw your finger down?

GM: Almost. I knew very little about Boulder, other than that it had a college and a few good record stores and bookstores. It was also close to Mile High Kennel Club, and I was really into dog racing at the time. Beyond that, I just wanted to get as far from the New York environment as I could. It was very healing, and a good place to eliminate cynicism from my work. Or what do you guys call it again? Snark?

BLVR: [Laughs] Yeah, snark.

GM: I felt like snark, or cheap cynicism, was beginning to play out as a comic sensibility. I thought that sincerity and individuality were going to be the next wave of comedy. Obviously, I underestimated cynicism’s appeal.

BLVR: I’m actually a little surprised by that. Not that I think your writing has a mean streak, but The Simpsons isn’t exactly known for lighthearted, sanguine comedy. It may not be outwardly cynical, but it certainly has a more cynical edge than the average TV comedy.

GM: To an extent, sure. But the comedy I was reacting to was just reflexively snide. It’d pull some stooge apart and leave him writhing in agony. On The Simpsons, we try not to attack something just for the thrill of watching it die. I’ve always felt that the nihilistic approach to comedy is inherently limiting. It’s not particularly clever, and it’s so openly hostile that it even puts the audience on the defensive. Other than death and speaking in public, one of the big fears that everybody shares is that the joke will have been on them. It’s a primal thing. When [Simpsons writer] Dana Gould was starting out in stand-up, he didn’t connect with the audience very well. Another comic told him, “The audience wants to like you. But before they will, they want to know that you like them.” And it’s really true.

BLVR: So it’s not so much the message as the messenger?

GM: Exactly. If people think you’re coming from a place of smugness or viciousness, it won’t be as funny to them. Take somebody like Lenny Bruce. If he were only an angry, spiteful comic, I don’t think he would’ve had the same influence. George Carlin gets away with murder in his stand-up, because people sense that he’s honestly hurt that the world isn’t a saner place.

BLVR: Well, how about Bill Hicks? He was almost entirely fueled by anger and resentment.

GM: Yes, but he was never smug about it. There wasn’t a smirk behind his anger. He railed against the government because he felt let down by it, not because it was an easy target. He was so much more sincere than a lot of political comics, who strike me as very calculated.

BLVR: Without getting all snarky on you, I don’t care for most political comics. At what point does satire become propaganda? It seems to me that a lot of them are just pushing a political agenda with jokes.

GM: Personally, I like to keep an audience guessing. Just before the ’96 election, we did a Halloween special where Bob Dole and Clinton were kidnapped by aliens. We killed off both of the presidential candidates in the middle of that segment. They were asphyxiated and floating in space. At that point, I defy anyone to tell us what our politics were.

BLVR: You know, I never realized just how horrific that actually was. You literally killed the standing president.

GM: For a giggle, yeah.

I hope that people can tell I care, is all. (link)

A comment from Frank Rich’s column, about Joe Stack:

If we are going to fight the corporate predators we have to do it together.

I used to be a member of a professional association for computer scientists, and they still send me an email newsletter once a week. It is revealing what they think of as “news”. It’s not the decimation of my profession, the decline of wages, any issues related to outsourcing or H1-B, the decline of computer science as a major. I have gotten this newsletter every week for years and those issues have not been mentioned once. On the other hand, every single week there is an item on efforts to expand the presence of women in the field.

Now I am a woman, and I appreciate these attempts. But what has happened with the rise of ‘identity politics’ is the total suppression of any issues related to preserving our middle class, and what that means for jobs: benefits, job security, outsourcing, stagnant wages, etc etc. It’s like we gained identity politics but lost the middle class.

I hate to use these words, I know they are loaded, but the truth is, we need class conscious politics to make a come back in this country.

It’s not a flawless comment, but it’s definitely better than Frank Rich’s column. He writes early on, “Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a ‘Tea Party terrorist.’” So then why does Frank Rich write such a glib and inaccurate remainder of the column?

As someone who is guilty of shitting on teabaggers (did it just there!) at most every opportunity over the past year, I’m irritated when certain producers of the glib and inaccurate left lose control of their own language and feel content simply to play their roles in the unproductive surface-level dialogue that’s paralyzed the political mainstream. HE HATED TAXES — MUST BE A CRAZY GLENN BECK FAN!, for example. The left does realize that it, too, is allowed to complain about the IRS and tax code? Complain furiously over its breaks for the ruling classes? And the left does realize that there is such a thing as “left-wing violence,” too, and there’s 10x more justification for it right now than there is right-wing violence, but that’s a different story?

We still have no idea how to deal with insane violence in our own country. We love labels. You can create many labels and label things you don’t like with labels you don’t like.

Joe Stack was pissed off at the power structure and went nuts. Such is the case of every terrorist attack in the last 10 years. Stop giving them stupid other labels from stupid words in our stupid political lexicon.

At some point, shouldn’t we address the causes of bad things, even remotely?

I’m Such A Shitty Senator

No, don’t try to talk me out of it. I’m definitely quitting this time. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with myself once I leave the Senate, though. I can’t go back to Montana, that’s for sure. Facing all those constituents I failed so badly day after day, year after year? I don’t think so. Maybe I’ll go to Maine instead. No one knows me there. Set up a small law practice, hang my shingle, buy a quaint little saltbox on the outskirts of Bangor. Of course, I’m sure I’d somehow manage to fuck up everything there, too. What the hell was I thinking? God, I’m such a bonehead. I should go live in a cave somewhere, someplace far away from all humanity where I can’t poison everything I touch.

This is one of the three or four funny articles I read monthly. The other two or three, I don’t know what they are. Oh, well this, of course. So it actually must be four or five funny articles that I read monthly.

The Medium Lobster And FFNR Should Write More Often

But when you start writing more often, there are more words, and a growing marginal ratio of anger words to good satire words.

Hello, five readers from May!

Here are many good satire words from a blog that does not force itself to shit new product words every 37-54 minutes.

Q: Is Iran a threat?
A: Oh yes. Even as we speak Iran is potentially starting the beginnings of a very possibly quite almost-real hypothetically nuclear weapons program!
Q: Oh no! How many nuclear weapons does Iran already have?
A: Counting warheads, ICBMs, mid- and long-range missiles, ABMs, tactical nukes, bunker-busters and submarine-based weaponry, the full nuclear arsenal of Iran at this moment is very rapidly just beginning to quite possibly approach a number just short of one!
Q: That makes them almost as deadly as the rogue nation of Whoville or the Islamic Republic of Candyland!
A: And they could be just months away from an actual bomb!
Q: But they’ve been just months away from a bomb for years now.
A: I know! Which means in terror years, Iran already has a bomb… in your child’s precious brain!
Q: But that’s where she keeps her sugarplum dreams!
A: That’s why it’s up to us to already have being stopped them!
Q: What will Iran do with nuclear weapons?
A: Terrible things. For a start, it will have them.
Q: Oh no!
A: And once it has them, it can threaten to use them, if anyone else tries to use them on them.
Q: There would be no defense against their self-defense.
A: They pose an existential threat to our ability to existentially threaten them.

Iran will then deliver Iraq and Al Qaeda 20 million nuclear weapons via Muslim Rainbow Road. They will nuclear attack small businesses in Missouri and Louisville and other places that have such traditions as pie and football and women, and grandchildren.