How the Electoral College Is Shaping Up

I am a polling nerd, and nearly every day for four or five months have been tracking first the primary and then the general election polls in every state, state-by-state. Looking at so many polls for every single state I've gotten a real sense of polls that are misleading outliers, and leads that remain remarkably consistent, if small, over time. My prediction, with a couple months still to go, and obviously lots of possibility for the race to swing unexpectedly in one direction or another, is that this race could damn well end in a 269-269 electoral tie and (!) go to the House of Representatives. Which is fine by me, because they'll elect Obama. Just an interesting possibility. Here's how the states break in my scenario:

McCain: Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, Arizona, Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Alaska

Obama: Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware, Rhode Island, DC, Maryland, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Hawaii

As you can see, I'm giving almost all the famous swing states from previous elections to McCain, just because over time the polls have generally leant in his direction in most of them. The most likely two swing states to defect from my McCain column to Obama on election night, and pretty much clinch it for him, are Colorado and Virginia, where his leads are very weak. I think Florida and Ohio are pretty solidly in McCain's camp, though, so don't look for any big Obama jackpot in either spot.

Obama's "269" strategy relies on winning all the states he's generally expected to win in the Midwest and Northeast and West Coast, and just adding two "swing" states: New Mexico and Nevada, where, with the exception of a very few polls, he has shown and still shows slim, consistent leads. I think these two increasingly diverse, growing, and complex Western states are ready to go progressive this year (or in New Mexico's case, go back after a bit of slippage). Nevada is much closer than New Mexico. It's amazing that after being so conservative for so long, this little ignored state might have the chance to decide a President.

What do you think?

Track-Flayer, Episode I, Part II: The Dismemberment Plan's "Ellen and Ben."

Okay, finally, I'm ready to try to do justice to the un-justice-doable end of this song. To wit:

Just before the end of the song, the music slows to a near-halt; we're sensing that the pressure built up throughout the song, between the story and the narrator's own feelings, has come to a head (not to mention that the story itself is peaking). That halt is resolved with what is one of the most beautiful shifts in music that I've heard:

"I'm doing fine..."

The musical and vocal irony suddenly ceases, and the music becomes downright earnest, open, releasing itself, like a tired sprinter, into a relaxed trot. Simultaneously, there's a dizzying narrative shift to an I-and-you relationship that has only been slightly hinted at earlier in the song. "I'm doing fine" responds to a silent, implied interruption, from a newly-present-and-insistent "you," a person who is ostensibly listening to the narrator's story (and is, perhaps, tired of him not getting to the real point). The "you" might be us as listeners (who are wondering much the same thing), or might be someone separate from us; Morrison lets that distinction hang in the air, a pleasing ambiguity. The shift from Ellen-and-Ben to you-and-I, the collapse of any seemingly disinterested narrative structure, and the replacement of that by a frank, friendly conversation, is so winsome, and carried off both naturally and surprisingly.

Anyway, the implied question is something like "But how are you doing?", and instantly moves the whole focus of the song away from the story, which is interesting, but not world-shaking, to the narrator himself. It goes further than that, though: we realize that even the story itself has been about the narrator. Our minds are instantly forced to re-envision the whole narrative in terms of the speaker. Ellen and Ben, though he obviously cares for them, are just a subject that is on his mind because of his current emotional state. Which is all to say that this shift is FUCKING BRILLIANT.

Musically, too, we now finally see the import of the whining synthesizers, which didn't seem appropriate to such a simple, tossed-off story--they were the representation of the narrator's emotional pangs, that were hiding behind the story all the time.

So what exactly is the narrator's state? I don't think it's "fine," though I don't think it's awful, either. The trite everydayness of "I'm doing fine" seems to mask a bit of uncomfortableness, which comes out further in the next lines, "I'm staying busy hanging with my nephew / and trying to keep my eyes on the prize." Not exactly a resoundingly happy summary of the narrator's life; he's just "staying busy," which implies that the narrator is simply doing something to occupy himself, rather than enjoying any kind of fulfillment. And trying to keep one's eyes on the prize contains the suggestion of one's straying away from "the prize," whatever life goal one has. (How much more effective these understated lines are than standard rock lyrics, where singers complain directly and plaintively about their problems.) But these last lines are so sunny we can't help but think things aren't really so bad, after all, for the narrator and for us, slogging along in a relatively pleasant stage of history.

In the final lines:

You know how it goes
And so do I so call me when you can now
You know I would love a surprise

the narrator formalizes the already implicit shift to a personal I-you conversation, though still the "you," when it appears vocally for the first time, is quite a surprise. This is no omniscient narrator; it's someone deeply involved with both the story he's telling and with "you," either his listener or a specific person whom the song is addressed to.

Then "Call me when you can" pushes it, subtly, even further: we learn that this is not the generic "you" of "you know how it goes," but a specific person he's talking to. He's now a guy sending someone an e-mail or leaving a rambling message on an answering machine. Which is even better than him talking to us as listeners: any singer-listener closeness would be strained or false, but a closeness with a "you" who isn't us, a separate person who actually knows Morrison, feels earned and natural. We're just eavesdroppers.

These final, gradual, masterful shifts to a) ambiguous I-you intimacy and b) specific I-you intimacy are really fetching, and put the song firmly into the "classic" category for me.

It also gives us the best summary we get in this song of what's going on with the speaker, though one of the best parts about the song is that he never gets too specific about what exactly is eating at him. He's lonely (as evidenced by his asking his friend to call him), and thinking about people who mean something to each other--and, one can assume, him--but drift apart over the years. He's resigned but hopeful. The tentative conclusion to the silent plot of the song is in the operatic fullness in the way Morrison sings "surprise"; he holds on to the word so voraciously that we have to think it's important. Life is full of trying and failing, staying busy, doing fine, the song suggests, but we're still aching for the surprises that it used to hold, and almost never does, and might not again, as our torrid pasts fade, and we fall into humdrum, separate lives.

All of that could be said in the prosaic way I just said it, but it comes off so much more effectively in the modulated, nuanced answering-machine message of those final lines.

Anyway, enough. Does that sum it up? Now that I'm done with this beast of a two-part post, I'd be happy to hear what those of you who have heard the song think.

The Buffalo Wild Wings Food Pyramid

As many of you know, I am deeply interested in the chain restaurant known as Buffalo Wild Wings, both gastronomically and intellectually. In an attempt to combine these two interests, I've created a graphic pyramid that you should print out and take to your local Wild Wings. Like the FDA food pyramid, it guides your eating choices, based on my extensive research into what makes for the most fun at B Dub Dub. Judicious use of the pyramid strategy will lead to the blessed state known as the "food coma," which in turns leads to deep existential communion with all the sliders, poppers, and slammers that are the springs and hinges, the very atoms, of God's universe. I believe Coleridge wrote his poem "Xanadu" after such an outing at his local Ye Olde Bufalloe Wilde Winges.

Still working on the end of the Dismemberment Plan post

and more sonnets, but things have been busy. In the meantime, check out this interesting political race in my home county:

http://www.politickerca.com/benvandermeer/1284/brown-mcclintock-aiming-each-other-californias-4th-district

If Placer County goes Democratic, it will be nothing short of a miracle. But it's great to see some rays of hope, however unlikely, in that den of conservative pricks.

Sonnets for Mike While He's Gone, III

And sing, oh Muse, of the son of Frederick's wrath;
without a car, he scrabbled up the hill
dividing Colfax High School and his Troy,
the old Victorian where he would sulk
Achilles-like, and play computer games.
And stutter out, oh Muse, the modem beeps
connecting him to blessed Sacramento,
that holy, learned city, nearest portal
to a few raw bulletin board services,
and e-mail, and the nascent Internet.

It sucked, oh Muse, but things should suck, sometimes,
and the stars were pretty jerks, who promised milky
things about the future, that I'd have to wait for,
a gorgeous insult splashed across the sky.

Sonnets for Mike While He's Gone, II

Please sing to me, Muse of Division IV
(her name is Crystal; dirty-haired, she holds
a half-drunk can of Keystone) Golden Empire
League basketball in 1995,
Paul Wickwire making threes, left-handed arcs
I tracked, like Galileo, for seven months.
The gyms were little coals in mountain dark.

What lasts is only the fidelity
of every game, each player like a needle
on time's slow vinyl, making mystic marks,
the dusty averages that told our youth.
In trying out our bodies in the gently
heated air of Golden Sierra's gym,
our motions made a decimal testament.

Sonnets for Mike While He's Gone, I

To Mike: Though You're in Florida

The polyurethane that tops our bar
awaits; it scatters and reforms all light
committed to its surface, light that I fancy
is confined in here as punishment, for lying
one time, perhaps, about a girl, for getting
caught in an earring at 9:15 (Toledo
in Tuesday quiet while the lake drives blankly
against the shore) and fueling reveries.

Light shouldn't be a dream. Light should just be.
A causeway for our eyes, commuting them
like sensible Hondas to their object.
It isn't so. But sometimes, a dry sun
attends to Wednesday meekly, makes all of us
keen, lovable, and free of criminal quanta.

Track-Flayer, Episode I, Part I: The Dismemberment Plan's "Ellen and Ben"

I think the most overlooked part of any song is the completely agnostic silence before the song happens. That full silence, those few moments after the laser or needle hits substance, but before a single sound is made, forces us to sit with our highly developed expectations as listeners (since even the most provincial of us (i.e. me) have heard countless hours of music spanning centuries of history). Like fighters at the beginning of a match, we nervously wonder what kind of (in this case aural) punch is about to hit our ears. That silence can be broken in many ways, of course, from a gentle musical build-up, instrument by instrument, to an immediate blast of sound, and the way it's broken can be awful (surprising in a bad way), completely average (which is to say, expected), or amazing, if it's, like all good art, both appropriate and surprising.

Which is all to say that I don't think "Ellen and Ben" could begin better than it does, in our tired age of history, than with a rather sheepish synthesized trill that bursts into a too-shrill attempt at joyful transcendence. It creates a humbleness and irony that is extraordinarily attractive as a song beginning. The irony, which is at first purely musical, gets even more tasty when you hear the first lyrics and find out that this is a straightforward narrative song; the friction between the technological, grandiose posturing of the synthesizer and the simplicity and off-handedness of the lyrics is fucking fun, and essentially drives the song. (If the lyrics were paired with, say, a standard guitar strum, the song would be completely limp, and lack the extra level of meaning that this one has.) We find out it's a narrative in the very first lines, when Travis Morrison introduces his characters about as simply as possible:

"Ellen and Ben
They met at someone's housewarming party
They didn't like each other at first."

It sounds like a typical short story opening. But songs (at least contemporary ones) don't often start this way; they're more given to declarations or abstractions, or, even if they're trying to tell a story, in-media-res-ish stuff. The frank simplicity of the opening lyrics is arresting and, well, cute. What's additionally arresting is that the song dives into first-person narration with the next line, "I was still there"; rather than an omniscient narrator (as we have in, say, Stephen Malkmus' eerily similar narrative song "Jenny and the Ess-Dog"), we have a personally involved narrator, a Nick Carraway from The Great Gatsby. Which brings the song even more down to earth; this is not an artist with invented characters, the song convinces us, but a friend shooting the shit with us. (In the middle of the song, by saying "They'd show up at shows," and thereby suggesting the narrator is in a band, Morrison goes further and blurs the line between his narrator and himself, making you think it's actually Travis talking to you about his personal life. Which it may actually be, I guess, but that's not the point.)

The story itself is lovely in its specificity, and its inconsequence. It's a kind of satire of epic love stories like Romeo and Juliet; at the same time, in its unromantic sloppiness, it resonates more with everyone's messy, real-life experiences than a classic love story could. Two people don't really like each other, then suddenly can't take their hands off each other (in a way that seems "rude" to the narrator), and fall into love so deeply that they completely disappear from the social scene (in a way that seems "cheap" to the narrator), then summarily break up. That arc has a humor and poignancy to it, even without the musical accompaniment. Some highlights include "A sunny Sunday watching John McLaughlin" and "I had stopped by / cause Ellen had my copy of Nebraska" (glorious in their specificity). And

When Ellen got home she made a snack
and went up on her rooftop
and didn't think about Ben at all
She stayed up for hours just watching all the drunk folks find their taxis
cause all in all it was a good night

is a great picture of someone standing unknowing (as we all do) before an event that will remake her entire life (and interestingly complicates our initial perception that this is not an omniscient narrator--how does he know what Ellen is doing when he's not there?). The way the double pulse of the synthesizer and Morrison's voice crescendos at "good night" suggests that despite the tranquility and faint sense of happiness in the scene, there's something more to this story that hasn't yet been articulated. During each verse, much the same drama between the music and the lyrics unfolds, as the singer, synthesizer, and drums fluctuate in urgency from mellow to earth-shaking, while all the while the actual lyrics (and the plodding bass) are relatively flat and conversational. This is a fucking odd song, we're thinking. What's the big deal about this story?

We get our first inkling in the bridge:

"When I was ten I had this book of modern fighter planes with F15s and MiGs
And headed for a brighter future with...(I can't quite understand these lyrics)...the Ocean City girls on the boardwalk"

Whatever the exact lyrics, this complete, mumbly, and somewhat shocking digression tells us that something is on the narrator's mind other than Ellen and Ben; he is by no means a disinterested storyteller. We don't know exactly what, but given the reminiscent tone, it might have something to do with the narrator (with and through Ellen and Ben) sensing the difference between the bright magicality of beginning something (whether it's life or a relationship) and how things turn out, when the humdrum everydayness of life kicks in.

In fact, the story is more about Ellen and Ben before and after their relationship than anything else. What's interesting to the narrator in this song is people either on the cusp of a life-changing experience or floating off emptily after that experience is over, not the experience itself. And that's interesting to me too, so I suppose that's one of the reasons I love "Ellen and Ben".

When I return, I'll deal with the brilliant ending of this song, which deserves, and will get, its own post.

Sorry for the delay

I was working a ridiculous amount at the bar. The Dismemberment Plan post is coming soon.