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Tuesday, August 31, 2010

-Although I am drawn to aged audio equipment – like the pornography featured here – my frustration with it is mounting, for although it is totally beautiful, it is apparently designed to never actually work. Or, at least, to work for long periods of time.

-I have rediscovered music in recent months. That isn’t to say I hadn’t been listening but rather I’ve started trying to listen more often to a wider variety of stuff. That exploration has been thrilling, frankly, and I’ve been able to discover music that I’d either long ago abandoned or perpetually refused to listen to. Part of this process has been the use of a stereo system assembled in the way that I frequently assemble things: half-assedly. I could be one of those guys who drops hundreds on audio components bought on EBay but I’m not and never will be. I fully expect that it is possible to cheaply assemble things that will work, will do so reliably, and will last for a considerable period of time. Imagine my frustration this past weekend when my Sanyo setup’s right channel suddenly died. Despite my best attempts to fix the damned thing by hitting it really hard, nothing.

-I am nervous about patting myself on the back. It isn’t something I’m fond of. But I have to say that walking away from the utter cesspool that is journalism was a good idea. After a terrible three weeks spent interning with a group of individuals who can only be described as rabid sycophants, the idea that I would have spent a lifetime slavishly kissing asses repulses me. For example, many of the people I quickly learned to despite aspired to jobs at places like Washington Post. I’ll guarantee you that those same people, whose names I’ve long since forgotten, continue to believe that the Washington Post is an important media source, worthy of the nation’s time and attention. So good on me for realizing what was possibly ahead of me and changing course when I did.

-Seriously, I paid $10 for that thing at a nearby yardsale, and it did solid yeoman’s work for only six weeks? I even fixed the included turntable, successfully building a counterweight out of drywall screws to replace the one that had long ago been lost. For all of that effort, I get a right channel that dies overnight? If I, or more likely one of my children, had spilled something that killed the right channel, that’d be one thing, but to wake up and discover it gone? I don’t even remotely approve. One of life’s great pleasures is getting home from work and listening to music

-Breaking Bad is an obscenely good television show. I’m tempted to say it’s the best show to have ever appeared on cable television, ever. and by “tempted” I mean that’s exactly what I’m saying: it’s the best show ever on cable television. Them’s fighting words, I know, especially for those who love something like The Shield, but I have serious doubts that any show so consistently achieves such intense levels of tension as does Breaking Bad. More soon on it.

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Sneaking Up

Friday, August 27, 2010

This afternoon, I have a work gathering in which alcohol will be served. Ignoring the fact that I don’t want to go – I’d be much happier home with my family – it will inevitably be noticed that I’m not drinking anything. I say this partly because of a weird paranoia that has grabbed me ever since I quit, in which I am always certain that everybody notices the guy who isn’t drinking, but because it will be brought up, because it always is.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I went to a bar, the first time I’d been inside one in a few years. It didn’t take much time for the other people at the table to notice that somebody’s husband wasn’t drinking. That lead straight to a question about whether I drank. When I said no, I think I used my favorite, “Because I’m a Mormon…” explanation, which stops everybody short for a moment as they try to figure out the veracity of the statement. Obviously I’m not a Mormon. I am almost entirely certain that I’ll use the same joke again this afternoon. In lieu of that, I’m able to use my kids as an excuse, as in, “I’ve got to drive my kids somewhere later,” or something similarly cheap. Either is usually stop the conversation in its tracks, which is what I’m looking for. It’s an old standby in which I try to change the subject because I don’t want to explain to anybody why I don’t drink.

I did all of the dumb things anybody does when they’re drunk. I did them alot, which is why I quit. Nobody is really owed an explanation of the specifics of that decision or the reasons that I made it, and yet some people will occasionally press for just such an explanation. I don’t know why; human curiosity I suppose. There have been times I’ve wanted to start drinking again merely to avoid this unavoidable dance. To blend into the background as just another guy with a beer in his hand. That’s not good strategy though.

I’ve considered trying non-alcoholic beers, but why? Why are they even made? The point of beer is to get drunk. The point of consuming it is to go until its gone or until you can’t remember how many you’ve had. It has, in my mind, no other purpose for its existence, and even if I can imagine scenarios in which I just have a few, I can’t imagine enjoying them. This actually gets worse as my sobriety drags on. I spend more time thinking about abandoning sobriety to make an attempt at casual drinking followed by more time wondering how or why anybody drinks casually.

“This beer would be delicious,” I think, followed by, “and so would having the rest of the case.”

Thinking about alcohol in this way is precisely why quitting was a necessity. Explaining it has taken me almost 500 words – that’s precisely what I want to avoid at social gatherings. Instead, I just don’t go. Today’s is mandatory which is the only reason I’m going. I suppose I should just print this out and keep copies but I doubt there are many people who would appreciate getting 500 word written explanations handed to them whenever I stand around drinking water.

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On Animals Versus Children

Thursday, August 26, 2010

A reader at Andrew Sullivan‘s responds to the fundamental injustice of England’s national freakout over a woman who threw a cat in the garbage. (Make sure to read the headline.) The reader writes:

My father is a juvenile criminal attorney, and about five years ago, he had a doozy of a case. A 13-year-old from the local Russian immigrant community soaked a cat in gasoline and lit it on fire. Tragic. A horrible thing to do. The result was that someone found the poor animal still alive and took it to a vet. The vet named the cat “Purr-Purr” and kept it alive for THREE WEEKS, performing a series of skin grafts, before the cat finally died. There was local and then national news coverage. My father defended the kid in court. He got literally hundreds of letters from all over the country, many suggesting that the kid be killed – burned to death just as he had done to the cat – or at the very least be locked up in solitary confinement for the rest of his natural life…This Russian kid? He was 13. He’d been horrifically abused at the hands of a series of relatives. His IQ was in the low eighties. He was scared shitless, pissed off at the world, and he made a terrible mistake. But did he deserve to be killed? Was what he did so much more horrible than what was done to him?

You can read the rest at the link above. This is a relatively common problem, one in which the suffering of children goes entirely unpunished by a society that cannot, collectively, believe that these things are happening. Although there are plenty of explanations for this abhorrent disbelief (the just world phenomenon springs immediately to mind), a contributing factor surely has to be the illegality of sharing the images of abused children with society. Unlike the British woman who was filmed throwing a cat into a garbage can, and unlike the Sarah McLachlan advertisements for the ASPCA (which feature imagery of abused animals), visual representations of the violence visited upon children are strictly verboten from news reports. Protecting the child is seen as paramount, as it should be, but the inability to confront society with the grim realities of child abuse prevent society from fully taking it on as a problem. Nothing is more potent than the visual image and in a world where it can’t be broadcast, even for the best of reasons, the likelihood of combating it in any sort of substantive way is practically nil.

I remember once being asked in a class, after I had discussed working with teenagers, a very casual request for any horror stories I might have. I had many as does anybody who works with children in a residential situation. The person who asked for them clearly didn’t understand what he was asking for. I’m not sure what he imagined but his engagement in the conversation turned remarkably more serious as I went on for a few minutes. Kids disciplined with golf clubs. Kids thrown off roofs. Kids raped. That (hopefully) wasn’t what he was expecting to hear about. It’s hard to know what he was, except that I’d assume it’s what most people expect to hear about, which is something akin to the strict parenting they are either intimately or distantly aware of. Many people assume that child abuse is just a spanking trumped up by out of control social workers. That’s, politely, bullshit.

But there’s no way to communicate the sheer bullshit of such an assumption. It can’t be communicated for perfectly reasonable explanations, like the privacy of the abused. So we’re left with a society that cares more deeply about the abuse of animals than it does the abuse of children. We understand the relative horror of seeing sad puppy eyes; few have ever seen or experienced the eyes of an abused child. Few know that horror. As a result, few care.

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Advocating Aesthetics via Big Boi’s “Shutterbugg”

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

I’m entirely willing to look past a song’s obvious faults if something substantive is happening somewhere within it. My standards are clearly low in this regard. Perhaps the most glaring example of this is the Flowerpot Men’s “Beat City” – you’ll recognize its opening as the backing music to the scene in Ferris Bueller just after Sloane has been picked up at school. The song itself is absolutely god-awful, but just try denying those opening thirty seconds. Despite the fact that it almost immediately goes off the rails, that hook is enough to pique my interest.*

I’m having the same problem with Big Boi’s “Shutterbugg” a song whose hot beat cannot be even slightly denied. And yet…the rest of the song struggles to keep up with Scott Storch’s production. Big Boi does a fine job by himself I suppose – although he sounds oddly restrained – but what in the hell is the rest of it? Cutty’s inclusion is inexplicable. So too are the sung vocals. Would anybody have really suffered had the song only been Big Boi and that beat? Anywhere?

Pleading for minimalism in hip-hop songs isn’t likely to get anybody anywhere, but there seem to be so many overproduced tracks that unnecessarily shift gears for no particular reason. Take, for example, Missy Elliot’s “Sock It 2 Me” – was there anybody anywhere desperately clamoring to get Da Brat’s part in there? Who was the idiot who said, “Missy, you’ve got something good here, but what this song absolutely needs is Da Brat’s ludicrous bullshit. It’d be ideal if it had absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the song’s flow and delivery too.” And while I’m wondering, who was the moron that agreed with the idiot? Without Da Brat’s nonsense, “Sock It 2 Me” ends up at a smooth three minutes, maybe three and a half, and it is literally perfect.

I suppose that these are the biases of a hip-hop fan only at its edges. If you ask if I’ve heard so-and-so’s mixtape, I haven’t. Nor could I rattle off the best hip-hop albums with any confidence. I only know what I like. In that regard, I’m advocating an aesthetic that I tend to believe is the strongest, one in which the things offered up aren’t extraneous. If the book would be good without those middle three chapters, they don’t need to be in there. If the movie would be good without that character, he doesn’t need to be in there. And if the song would be good without a verse, it doesn’t need to be in there either.

So what are we left with? “Shutterbugg” stands as a potentially fantastic although ultimately flawed song, taken down by an inexplicable desire to needlessly expand. To use the utterly pretentious notion of Icarus, “Shutterbugg” isn’t merely satisfied with what is good and strives for more, ultimately encouraging its frustrating endstate.

*Yes, I’m aware of how entirely obscure a song the Flowerpot Men’s “Beat City” is.

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Cee-Lo’s “F*ck You!”

Monday, August 23, 2010

Any normal person would post a link to the video that accompanies this bit of utter brilliance – it’s available here – but for technical reasons, I cannot. What I can do is extol the virtues of this transcendent song, one which manages to reminisce back to pop soul songs from the late 1960′s and early 1970′s while flowing over a modern banging beat. Some quick thoughts:

1. Language
Some people are going to be tripped up by the song’s title. “Fuck You!” is aggressive enough that I left it out of the headline. That said, the fact that there are still people who stumble over the word fuck boggles my imagination. Everybody looks for a reason to get the vapors but the word fuck isn’t reason enough, especially when it’s being used as accurately as it is in this song. Let the person who hasn’t thought exactly what Cee-Lo‘s singing cast the first stone.

2. Delivery
This song sounds different because it is by today’s standards. But over the entire course of American history, what Cee-Lo’s done is reach out to a bygone era. Think Betty Wright’s “Shoorah Shoorah“. Those are real backup singers and real backup musicians you’re hearing behind Cee-Lo’s angry lamentations. In a world of hyper produced pop, “Fuck You” is a throwback to when musically was produced differently. Cee-Lo’s proven that the old style can be just as delightfully effective.

To put that differently, if this indicates at all what Cee-Lo’s new album The Lady Killer is going to be like, I’m there and I want it on vinyl. (Why vinyl? Because it’s the most pretentious of the audio delivery mechanisms.)

3. Sentiment
There’s catharsis in telling somebody “Fuck You!” I can only assume that there’s even more in singing it to them with an entire backing band. Giving any thought to the song makes it a bit perplexing – Cee-Lo’s obviously not an Atari now – but the message’s importance and, as the song progresses, impotence remains.

I once dated a girl who told me she would melt into a puddle of tears if somebody seriously said “fuck you” to her. It was boggling. Announcing it made it all the stranger. The word has no power if the listener doesn’t let it, something Cee-Lo’s protagonist appears to learn a little more than midway through the song. Upon the realization setting in, he’s reduced to going to his disinterested mother for life advice. The act seems so strong right up until the moment the words come out of your mouth – then they’re just words and they fall harmlessly to the floor.

4. Great Songs Just Are
Ultimately, you can think as much about this song as you want to, but the fact of the matter is that I haven’t spread this song to a single person yet who wasn’t in love with it immediately. That’s the mark of transcendence. While I’m sure that there are those people who will complain about this song, they’re wrong. It’s everything that’s right with music.

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Music Gone By

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

The other day whilst getting a burrito downtown, I heard a few familiar notes buried deep within some drawn out jam. “Oh, it’s Phish,” I thought. Then I wondered how I could possibly remember that. It has been a legitimate 12 years since I seriously listened to that band, and seriously is a term I use delicately, what with my genuine Phish fan friends, the sort of people happily willing to drive around the country listening to them play. Or drone. Drone is a word that more accurately describes my impression of its work, because that’s what Phish does, drone on and on, endlessly.

At the time I didn’t think so just like I didn’t think Pink Floyd was anything short of one of the great bands in the history of music. To hear it now is to wonder what exactly I was hearing back then. All the necessary love and respect to The Dark Side of the Moon, one of the great albums, but the rest of the band’s love and admiration is lost on me, a person who used to genuinely love and admire the band. I listed to Dark Side the other day on vinyl, a delightfully pretentious thing to do. It was just as fantastic as I remembered. It pushed my to add a bunch of Pink Floyd to my iPod’s regular rotation, a decision I’ve regretted ever since. Between the utterly insignificant lyrics and the sloooooowly developing songs, it’s hard for me to figure out what the attraction originally was.

This was especially vexing to a person I used to know who’d continually observe that both Phish and Pink Floyd are bands best enjoyed when high, something I’ve never been. On the few occasions I did see Phish live, I recall getting drunk, but that doesn’t explain the rest of my fandom and it does nothing to justify the love I had for Pink Floyd.

It isn’t only those two bands though. Much of the music that I used to love deeply now seems to have disappeared into the ether. Hearing it now is like grabbing the emergency break at 30 miles an hour. My brain squeals trying to figure out what it was exactly that I found so pleasurable. Here’s a short list: Primus, Suzanne Vega, Paul Simon, Pharcyde, They Might Be Giants. Frankly, it’s that last one that’s so jarring.

With each passing album, it gets harder for me to revisit They Might Be Giants earlier work. I have always been a proud devotee of that band’s first six albums, but since John Henry, liking the band has been more a chore than it has been a pleasure. Does a band’s later work color its earlier work is a question better asked on another day in another post. But it isn’t absurd to observe that if a band’s library isn’t being occasionally replenished, it gets too easy to rely on the old stuff to the point of it losing its potency.

Perhaps this too explains what happened with Phish and Pink Floyd. Long after the pleasure of hearing new music passed, the grim realities of inexplicably long songs that blend together for a dispassionate listener settle in. Both stopped popping in the way that they once did and once that’s gone, there’s nothing left. So while I can identify some Phish songs after only a few notes worth of jamming, it’s not something I want to spend my time doing. Just as I can hear Pink Floyd on a classic rock radio station and it only inspires me to flip to the next station.

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Achieving Greatness: Fugees

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

It is hard for me to rationally consider the Fugees’s The Score. Is it one of the greatest albums of all time, genre notwithstanding? Is it a perfect game from a pitcher with a lifetime ERA of 5.14? Does it honor the idea that maybe artists are better off trying not to top themselves? Although I lack the credentials necessary to definitively answer any of these questions, my immediate answers are: yes, yes, yes. Perhaps further explanation of those answers would help.

Is It One of the Greatest Albums of All Time?
I’ll happily argue that there’s no such thing as a great front-to-back album. Artists, even if their best work, tend to go astray somewhere, and the Fugees’s were no exception. The skits on this album are inexplicable. For the sake of backtracking slightly, my own whiteness might be tainting my interpretation of these skits, but I honestly can’t imagine a band sitting down and thinking that including the chicken wing sequence added anything to their album. Also strange is the inclusion, at the end, of remixes. “Hey, if you didn’t like our first attempt eight tracks ago, here’s another version. Any better?” I want the best, not several attempts at it.

Those two objections aren’t nearly enough to derail the album. The Fugees go an astounding 11/11; there simply isn’t a weak song amongst the 11 included. I’d write more about this performance except I’m not sure what I can say. On Paul Simon’s Graceland, “Under African Skies,” just isn’t particularly interesting. On Radiohead’s OK Computer, “Electioneering” stylistically sticks out like a sore thumb even though it’s an excellent song. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing is incredible, but goes briefly off the rails on “The Number Song.”

Those three examples represent musical missteps. To put that another way, had the Fugees simply put out an album with eleven tracks, they’d lay a genuine claim on actual, bonafide perfection.

Is It a Perfect Game From a Pitcher With a Lifetime ERA of 5.14?
This album represents more than the sum of its parts. With the exception of Lauryn Hill – whose Miseducation of Lauryn Hill remains, in its own right, a stunner – the Fugees both before and after haven’t done much to hang a hat on. Hill seemed to fall off the face of the planet after Miseducation. Wyclef Jean has produced a seeming neverending parade of pop hits but never anything of particular substance. Pras continues to scheme about ways to kidnap Hill and Jean and force them back into the studio for a followup.

There’s little in the rest of their careers to point to what happened on The Score, no hint that such an intense greatness would be achieved. The entire scenario is hard to believe or understand. The band crumbled, which isn’t so complicated, but the fact that they couldn’t manage to force themselves back into the studio for even an inferior followup? My musical knowledge is limited at best, but there can’t be many other examples of groups that internally combusted after the overwhelming success of a single album to the point that they weren’t capable of recording a followup.

In this case, describing The Score as a perfect game from a pitcher with a career era of 5.14 might not be extreme enough. It’s probably more accurate to describe it as a perfect game from a minor leaguer called up to the big leagues, one whom immediately retires without ever pitching again.

Does It Honor the Idea That Maybe Artists Are Better Off Trying Not to Top Themselves?
What if they had managed another album though? The odds that its anywhere near as good as The Score are overwhelmingly small. The fact is that the Fugees solidified themselves in music history, perhaps, because they never collectively produced another album capable of tainting their legacy. In some ways the band is a bizarre offshoot of the old claim that death is a good career move. For a wonderful singular moment, the Fugees achieved at an unbelievable level of greatness. That they never even attempted the same feat is sad but the batting average the band achieved as a result is shocking. Nobody can ever say, “Sure, The Score was good, but all of that other work tarnished the legacy.”

In that vein, The Score exists as one of the great albums, hobbled slightly by its inexplicable skits and unnecessary remixes, but otherwise triumphant, an almost unfathomable musical accomplishment.

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Listening to Modest Mouse

Thursday, August 12, 2010

The following true statement won’t make any sense:

Some people that I don’t like themselves enthusiastically like Modest Mouse, thus, I don’t like Modest Mouse’s music.

That’s a true statement about me. I’m not sure what Modest Mouse did to deserve this fate. There are, of course, plenty of bands that could be associated with the annoying hipsters that worship at Modest Mouse’s altar. In fact, it seems as though I ought to acknowledge that I don’t even know if hipsters still do worship at that particular altar. I just assume they do based on nothing more than my own biases against hipsters. This policy has finally struck me as being stupid. Maybe Modest Mouse is awful and maybe they’re not, but that evaluation probably ought to be made based upon what I’m hearing within the music and not what I think of some their skinny-leg jeans wearing fans. (Again, assuming that the people who wear skinny-leg jeans are, in fact, Modest Mouse fans.)

So I threw Good News For People Who Like Bad News on my music machine, both because it was the only album of Modest Mouse’s that I own and because I figured that since it had the only two songs I recognized, it’d be a good place to start. Since first hearing them, I’ve had a soft spot in my heart for “Float On”, “Ocean Breaths Salty”, and “Bukowski”. Sadly, the rest of the album is pretty good too. I won’t bother getting into the specifics of an album released quite awhile ago that everybody’s already heard, except to say that “Dance Hall” and “The Devil’s Wedding” and “Satin in a Coffin” are fantastic. Hell, The Dirty Dozen Brass Band makes two separate appearances. There’s so much more to this album than I ever expected to find. This brings us to a larger issue: I am an idiot.

As with Radiohead (the post below), I struggle mightily to disconnect music from my context for that music. The fact that a lot of people I genuinely don’t like seem to genuinely enjoy the band was all I ever needed to cast the band into damnation. That defense of my behavior only goes so far though; at the end of the day I walked away from perfectly listenable music for no better reason than its fans annoyed the bejesus out of me or worse. This is remarkably shortsighted, and although I’m extremely likely to repeat the same behavior as I get older, recognizing its inherent silliness hopefully functions as a stopgap against it.

Unfortunately, this means I have to put genuine effort into finding a hipster band whose music that I don’t like, all in an attempt to have a new band to associate with a culture whose existence bugs the holy hell out of me.

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Conquering Radiohead

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

It’s tough – double tough – to disconnect life from the soundtracks accompanying it. I can tell you with absolute certainty that the first time I ever danced with a girl, it was to the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s “Soul To Squeeze” at a 7th grade dance. It doesn’t contextually matter where I hear the song, all I can remember is dancing on a sawdust covered floor. I greatly enjoyed reminiscing with friends recently about a night spent driving around in a car and listening to Bob Marley, not because I particularly like Bob Marley, but because that night stands out as one of the time’s when I was truly, unabashedly happy. The first time I ever rode around in a car with another teenager, free from the oversight of adults, Skankin Pickle was on, a ska band who I can’t imagine voluntarily listening to now.

It boggles me to know that there are people who don’t arrange their memories in this fashion. Still, I occasionally come across people for whom music is nothing more than background noise. How is that possible? It’s music for goodness sake; it’s literally the most important thing after family, food, water, and shelter.

Associating music with memories has its downsides. Musical memories make no distinction between the good and the bad. As easily as I can tell you that I was listening, oddly, to Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians on a night that I was manically happy in high school (an odd night, looking back on it), I can tell you that Radiohead has stayed tainted in my mind for quite a while. I associate that band’s music with people I’d rather forget, particularly its albums after the sublime OK Computer. Which brings me to a brief, recent project: having spent year’s avoiding the band, as part of a bigger project to build a giant wall between myself and those people and their associated memory, I kept being drawn to this outrageously good cover of “Reckoner” by Gnarls Barkley. (The man sings his ass off.)

I couldn’t deny myself wanting to hear the original. It isn’t as good as the cover (*dodges lightning bolt hurled by the gods of Pitchfork Media*) but it’s undeniably good. So were the other songs I kept clicking on, songs like “(Street Spirit) Fade Out” and “There There” and “Like Spinning Plates”. This was frustrating. What can you do though? If the music is good, it’s good, bad memories or not. So I start listening to Radiohead again, as much as possible while doing my best to risk avoid the burnout I generally experience with music. (Listening to songs a billion times on repeat isn’t a good long term strategy.) I also absorbed both Amnesiac and Kid A, the two albums which are generally the toughest for me to disassociate.

Lo, the music is just as fantastic as I remember it being then. It was a foolish albeit necessary thing to willingly deprive myself of that music for now going on four years even if it will forever be impossible for me to disconnect those particular people in my memories from Radiohead’s music. By taking a break though, I was able to blunt the effect. That’s good enough. It means I can put Radiohead back into some sort of regular rotation of my life. Adding new music to the rotation is always, always, always a good thing. It feels as though I have been able to reclaim the band’s entire catalog. (Whether or not I really want access to much of the band’s most recent work is another discussion for another day.)

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Record Players and Vegans, In Reverse Order

Friday, July 16, 2010

Over at Andrew Sullivan‘s website, they’re having a back and forth about picky eaters, a topic that I know loads about because I’m a parent, and as a parent, I have the unique experience of having children apparently desperate to starve themselves half to death. I’ve read the back and forth with passing interest. So when I came across the following comment, I was surprised to find my otherwise barely engaged self thinking seriously about throwing a computer monitor across my office. The comment comes from this post:

I think there is a large missing piece to the argument that veganism is just an extension of the neurosis of picky-eating. When I went vegan (nearly 2 years ago), I was afraid that my options would be limited and I would be eating the same things over and over again. But my fear was really just an extension of the “vegans only eat salad” argument that some ignorant omnivores use. Since I cut out all animal products, I have discovered a number of delicious plant-based foods that I never would have otherwise. I had never tried beets before I went vegan, and now I love them. Same with eggplant. And rainbow chard. And wild greens like sorrel or stinging nettles. Not to mention the myriad uses of tofu! The point is – once you embrace your veganism, you realize that it can be a vessel to try all kinds of new things. In my experience, it is the hard-line meat-eaters who have a limited palate – not the vegans. How creative can you get with a steak anyway?

Briefly, in response:

If you’ve taken a significant portion of the entire spectrum of food off of your plate, don’t go lecturing other people that they’re the ones with limited palates. It’s rude and stupid, in equal portions. You might as well be the Americans Lewis Black is discussing in this. This person has seriously gone to the lengths of commenting publicly about the fact that she chose to limit her food intake to particular products – in this case, ones that didn’t hurt animals – and then turned around and made that claim.

For the sake of mathematics: if commenter’s palate is X, my palate is X+Y, with Y equaling everything that includes animal products. Ergo, the omnivore’s palate is necessarily larger.

Really though that isn’t even the issue. The real issue is this self-absorbed assumption that whatever an individual is doing is necessarily best. It is deeply ingrained throughout society. I’m sure an evolutionary psychologist somewhere could explain the reason why humans are so certain that their own actions and beliefs represent the pinnacle of human achievement, but even a cursory examination of the facts will reveal that such claims, even if only held internally, are completely ridiculous.

For example, I’ve recently rekindled my love of listening to records. They are, I am convinced, the best way to listen to music but the reason I believe that claim has more to do with my affection for the technology they necessitate – I love old stereo equipment, like the stuff pornographically photographed here – than anything more substantive. In fact, there is no better, more substantive explanation. I just like records. That I like them though doesn’t reflect at all on the superiority (or, I suppose, inferiority) of records and record players.

I could walk around screaming at everybody how vastly superior records are but I’d be talking out of my ass. I’d only be attempting to assert my own biases as facts, a dumb thing to do in any situation. Just as dumb, I’d wager, as asserting that vegans are truly they with the most adventurous palates, especially given the mathematical situation discussed above. That commenter wants her own position to be the superior one so she makes the outlandish claim, when anybody can plainly see how wrong it is, if only because I’m just as capable of eating beats and chard and (for god’s sake, why?) stinging nettles as I am a steak. Is the commenter?

This isn’t about vegans. That commenter merely provided an excellent example of the sort of self-asserting bias that, as I get older, I have a harder and harder time understanding. What we like as individuals is personal to each of us, a fine thing. The assertion of our personal pleasures as plain facts, however? Surely that’s where the decent high ground is lost.

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