Positive Liberty

In keeping with the lightheartedness of recent posts.

First, and just right for a Friday evening: Robot cocktail mixers say “Move over, Jagermeister machine.” (Confession: We have a Roomba, but I still mix the martinis by hand.)

More on the perfect albums: I continue to be fascinated by the idea of the “perfect” album — the rare compilation where every track is outstanding, and where all of them fit well together, such that you never want to skip a single song. Do any of Positive Liberty’s blog neighbors have nominations? The ITA guys? Jim Henley? Obsidian Wings? Consider yourselves tagged, and answer the question, if you dare: What five albums are, to your taste, absolutely perfect?

(Incidentally, you can now purchase all of the PL bloggers’ recommendations in the eminently handy sidebar to your left.)

Thinking about our own picks, it struck me this morning that I’m definitely the outlier: My “perfect” albums are less guitar-oriented, less jazz- and blues-influenced, and relatively more underground. (I’m sure that, say, Julian Sanchez could easily outdo me here. But it’s not about one-upsmanship, is it?)

Curiously, I also picked two of the three albums with female lead vocalists — Fox Confessor and Blueberry Boat. In particular I urge Neko Case on my colleagues and readers, both because she is really, really good, and because she’s accessible to people who don’t go for the weirder stuff I tend to like. If there is one album I could make everyone listen to, it would be Fox Confessor Brings the Flood.

Another facet: The idea of the “perfect” album has gotten me thinking, too, since there are so many albums that are almost perfect, but that have one or two tracks that don’t quite cut it. I tend to think, contra Brayton’s commenters, that the truly perfect album is exceedingly rare.

Pink Floyd made many great albums in my opinion, but no perfect ones: Dark Side of the Moon is nearly perfect, but I usually just want to skip “Any Colour You Like” and get on with the finale. There’s a lull, a noticeable decline in the interest, and this makes it (ever so slightly) imperfect. Animals just drags in places, and Wish You Were Here has “Have a Cigar,” which is almost unlistenable. (You’re a rock star. Yes, so I’m sure your life is very, very hard. You’re breakin’ my heart… Boo-freakin-hoo. Skip!)

And Zeppelin? Again, there’s all kinds of extraordinary music, but not a perfect album in the bunch. Led Zeppelin IV just misses perfection, in my opinion, thanks to “Four Sticks.” It’s a great song, and it would be a credit to most other albums, but as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t live up to the rest of Zeppelin IV. (Swap it with “Tea for One,” or “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” and you might just have a perfect album. But I’d have to give it a listen to see if it flows properly. It’s tough to stand in the shadow of “Stairway to Heaven.”)

Oh, and Sergeant Pepper’s? I can’t stand “She’s Leaving Home.” It’s a downer on an album otherwise composed of total brilliant fun.

A lot of readers will balk if I go from the Beatles and Led Zeppelin to this, so I’ve started a new paragraph for Architecture and Morality by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark: This is a spectacular album in my opinion, vastly ahead of its time and full of this amazing sonic creativity. It would be a perfect album, but the first track — “The New Stone Age” — is just so different from everything else, so very, very different, that it breaks the flow. It may well be the best track on the album, but it also stomps all over the album’s continuity. “The New Stone Age” sounds like someone invented a totally new kind of music, recorded just one track in that style, and then abandoned it. (Actually, it sounds a bit like Underworld, just way ahead of its time. But it still doesn’t fit here.)

One more thought on the search for the perfect album: A number of writers, including Cass Sunstein, have fretted lately about the cultural disintegration that may occur thanks to the vast array of choices faced by modern consumers. While I don’t believe that he shares this worry, Sandefur could only identify one of my five “perfect album” picks, and his comment to that effect started me thinking.

The argument runs like this: Won’t the “long tail” effect in books, music, and other entertainment make it impossible for us to share any meaningful culture in common? And isn’t this a serious problem? My first impulse on hearing this argument is to say — Well, so what? You have yours, and I have mine, and what, after all, is the big deal here? If we are all happier that way, then, being the sophisticated hedonist that I am, I have a very hard time complaining.

But a more demanding critic would answer: Sure, you’re happier — for now — with your eccentric music and almost-unknown literature. But what will happen twenty years from now, when you no longer share the same values with your neighbors? Won’t there be, um, rioting in the streets or something?

I joke here, but it is a serious objection. And I do have a serious answer: No, there will not be rioting in the streets, and the reason is that all of us, whatever our interior tastes, have a strong incentive to maintain and even to enhance the organizational and distributional systems that produced the long tail in the first place. Our very coolness depends on it, and nothing motivates quite like coolness. Our egos are invested in the system, and I suspect that that will be good enough.

We form a common class, then, with common interests. This is because we share the same relationship, not to the means of production, but to the means of consumption. To the degree that we like getting our obscure books and music from Amazon.com, we will also like Amazon.com, or, to speak more precisely, we will like the organizational idea behind it, and we will favor either Amazon.com or whatever other retailer best embodies this method of distribution. Now that we have discovered the long tail, we will seek to preserve it.

To this same degree, we will therefore like, support, and finance a decentralized artistic and intellectual culture that values diversity and nurtures talent in many different forms of art. We will likewise support the right to a free press and other aspects of free expression — knowing, for example, that our individual tastes are eccentric, and that a threat to one eccentricity can easily become a threat to any other, the optimum solution will be for us to band together and support a normative cacophony.

I know I’d be very upset, these days, if Amazon.com didn’t e-mail me whenever a new Neko Case album appears. And I suspect that many others feel the same way about other, similarly non-mainstream products. Yet even ten years ago, was anyone thinking this way? The long tail has brought us together — and given us a lot to share in our conversations — rather than splitting us apart.

Ez dut ulertzen. Speaking of being unable to communicate: “A Basque noun is inflected in 17 different ways for case, multiplied by 4 ways for its definiteness and number. These first 68 forms are further modified based on other parts of the sentence, which in turn are inflected for the noun again. It’s been estimated that at two levels of recursion, a Basque noun may have 458,683 inflected forms.”

An Entertainment Bleg: I’ve noticed that my reading lately (more Tocqueville, Mises, probably even more Mises when I’m done) is running toward the heavy and theoretical side. Can anyone recommend some good fiction? I give priority to thought-provoking “hard” sci-fi, as in… I’m thinking of a return to Gene Wolfe. I welcome your suggestions.

On the Proliferation of Calendars: I got an e-mail the other day inviting me to a social event with some real-world friends. The catch? It offered, through GMail I believe, to set up an appointment for the event, automatically, in an electronic calendar that I didn’t even know I had. Nothing against my friends, but this is beyond useless.

Set the value of having a calendar at 1. I submit that the marginal value of each additional calendar is not only negative, but that it decreases in roughly inverse proportion to the number of calendars you own, until such time as you own as many calendars as you have business and social engagements. At this point, the value of your collected calendars approximates zero, because the human mind can only concentrate on one appointment at a time without a calendar. (Or perhaps the value is less than zero, because if you always have a calendar in front of you, those around you will think that you deliberately snubbed them if you miss their appointments).

Token Political Entry: Via Brayton’s Dispatches from the Culture Wars: 2004 World Series of Poker champion Greg Raymer is considering the vice presidential spot on the 2008 Libertarian Party ticket:

In an interview with our favorite Lithuanian-based poker news site, PokerNews.com, 2004 WSOP champ Greg Raymer claimed he’s considering a run for the VP spot in the 2008 election, saying, “I am currently talking to some people who run the Libertarian Party about the possibility of running to be the party’s official candidate for Vice President of the United States.”

No one who can count, let alone play poker, imagines that the Libertarian Party will win in 2008. But Raymer would be an excellent choice all the same: When you know in advance that you aren’t going to win, the campaign becomes a teaching exercise, in which libertarians can tell the world what they’re all about, inspire the faithful, and challenge the rest. Anyone with name recognition outside the libertarian movement is therefore at the top of my list.

Recent campaigns did an atrocious job of this. From the nutty Michael Badnarik, to Harry Browne, who suffered painfully through not one but two presidential campaigns under the delusion that he might actually become the president, the LP has consistently sent the message that it has no reliable connection to reality whatsoever.

Set aside the eternal question of whether this or that candidate is enough of a true-blue libertarian: If they also happen to be a fruitcake, then they’re failing in the real purpose of an LP presidential run, which should, at this stage, always be educational. A charismatic, real-world celebrity will do more to encourage libertarian ideas than any other type of figure. So Raymer has my encouragement.

My choice for the top of the ticket? Penn Jillette. Everyone knows him. He’s got great stage presence. And in interviews, he’s remarkably sharp. I can think of few people who would do a better job of getting the libertarian message across in the info-tainment world of presidential politics.

Besides, how awesome would it be to have a first daughter named Moxie CrimeFighter Jillette? The only thing more awesome would be if she were Attorney General.

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