I did not post that ad to CL. I do, however, have an extra ticket to GY!BE on Saturday, with which I am willing to part for $$.
I am going to see the gang of four.
Are you fucking kidding me. The Gang of Four is playing in SF. Jesus. I'm so out of the fucking loop.
I'm so out of the fucking loop.
Tom said anti-climatically.
Why does he think he's going to pull the birds by taking them to that awful sappy 70s musical about the life of Jesus Christ?
That wasn't "Godspeed". That was "Godsmack" or something.
OT: This doesn't seem to have been covered at all in the US press, but it seems that the French foreign minister, Marie Alliot-Marie, was getting bribed by the Tunisian old regime. She first courted controversy during the Tunisian unrest by repeatedly assuring Ben Ali of France's undying support and, in his last days as protesters were being gunned down by the police, saying that what France really needed to do to help Tunisians was to provide emergency aid to the Tunisian police to help them deal with rioters. It turns out that she had spent the New Year's holidays in Tunisia with her boyfriend and parents, flown in by a private jet owned by one of Tunisia's wealthiest people, who, not coincidentally, was also a senior figure in the ruling party. They stayed at a luxury hotel owned by said businessman, all free of cost. While there her 94 yo father was given a big chunk of a valuable company at a special very discounted price. MAM says she doesn't see what the problem is, just friends doing favours for friends. The French PM incidentally benefited from free vacations and private plane travel from Mubarak.
7: The score for which can be found at Standpipe's blog.
8: What's remarkable about that story is that if the roles were reversed, it would have been so unremarkable as to be not newsworthy -- or at least not headline worthy, or worthy of a subordinate clause in a context graf at most.
BTW her first name is Michèle, not Marie.
I figured that Godspell was one of those things nobody exactly recalls. I only know of it because I was involved in a HS production, and I can't delete the awful music from my memory.
13: I was also in a HS production, but forgot the music.
This doesn't seem to have been covered at all in the US press
I heard about it, and now I'm trying to recall where. Here and Now or some other public program, I think. Definitely a minor mention, though.
My father played Jesus in some traveling production of Godspell when I was oh, kindergarten age or so. The music is likewise burned into my head, but the most vivid memory was when they were playing some dinner theater type place in eastern NC and I was sitting at a long row of folding tables by the wall right near the front corner of the stage. I had to urinate fiercely, but the only way to make my way to the restrooms was to make the entire row of several dozen people get up, or dart across the stage mid-play. Instead I peed myself and then refused to stand up during the intermission.
17: Atheism works in mysterious ways.
I had to urinate fiercely, but the only way to make my way to the restrooms was to make the entire row of several dozen people get up, or dart across the stage mid-play. Instead I peed myself and then refused to stand up during the intermission.
I think I'd have peed on the floor under the table before I did that. (Although I think I'd have made people get up before I did either.)
||
Is there a vacancy at The Atlantic that this woman is auditioning for, or what?
|>
20: What's great about that is that this is the way a woman raised in foster care who's been through three husbands chooses to tell her story. It's as though Red Riding Hood blogged about how to have a meaningful relationship with your aging relatives.
Doesn't matter if she's emotionally healthy or happy, she knows how to hook a man, and you (the presumed reader), don't. So she's better than you.
Holy crap, 20.
I could maybe get something out of point 6; I think that maybe was possibly a mildly valuable point (stated another way), but the rest! the rest!
20 is heating up my Facebook feed. Two strong approvals and one friend of the author.
20 is heating up my Facebook feed. Two strong approvals and one friend of the author.
I could maybe get something out of point 6; I think that maybe was possibly a mildly valuable point (stated another way), but the rest! the rest!
Given a 'would have been better stated another way' allowance, point 4 seems reasonable.
Lord help me, granting the 'would have been better stated another way,' and eliminating some of the gender essentializing (i.e., most of these statements would be true for men as well), this didn't seem that bad to me. Perhaps I should now set myself on fire.
I guess 5 is affirmatively bad. I can come up with charitable versions of 1-4 and 6 that make them seem like semi-reasonable responses to the "Why aren't you married" questions.
Oh yeah, I think I was thinking specifically as applies to myself, an unmarried woman. (Without the desire though, so I'm not the target audience.)
I'm just glad that I didn't have to choose between being married or being selfish.
Saying it out loud -- even in your mind -- feels
I don't care, you're already an idiot.
That was line 2, btw.
This is a virtuoso performance by a troll.
People say they want to be married, but that is just empty talk if they are not willing to change their personalities and marry someone inappropriate.
The tone is pretty annoying, but otherwise I'm surprised to say I'm with Halford in 29 and 30. Provided we grant that the target audience wants to get married and the article is answering "Why aren't you married?"
The assumptions about what marriage is/involves -- kids are apparently mandatory and inevitable, men are apparently grown-up equivalents of children -- are more annoying than the point-by-point list of obstacles to achieving this wondrous state of hitchedness.
I hated every single word of 20, starting with the title. It was just all wrong
36:The correct answer in all circumstances to "Why aren't you married?" is "Fuck off"
"The art of marriage... consists in consolidating the attention of a person against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up that attention."
It seems the author wrote this pretty good, not great episode of Mad Men. I liked Roger at the Christmas party.
I didn't like United States of Tara one bit.
39 is my favorite thing of the day.
There's a weird short segment once a week or so on the local NPR station here called "Connecting Families." It's narrated by a woman who's alternately sickly sweet and hard-eyed; she likes to talk about family traditions a fair amount.
Anyway, in this morning's segment she recounted an exchange with her husband's grandmother in which the grandmother said, not approvingly, "You love your children more than your husband." To which our narrator replied, "Of course I do." She then ruminated, on our behalf, upon the changing nature of love and commitment over the course of a marriage, observing that she's reconnecting with her husband now that the children are growing older.
It was odd. Suffice it to say that the seemingly prevalent view that husbands are instrumental to the having and raising of children is difficult for me to understand.
the seemingly prevalent view that husbands are instrumental to the having and raising of children
Yeah, this is one of those beliefs where, when expressed, I'm generally aware that all the individual words are in English and are usually arranged in a comprehensible order, yet the thought expressed is utter gibberish.
the seemingly prevalent view that husbands are instrumental to the having and raising of children
Parse it! Having? No
Raising?
Husbands? Wver Pardners, grandmas, village, creches
Necessary? No
Useful/helpful to the point of being instrumental? Possible, even probable.
Although I would like to end the legal practice of state-enforced shared or joint custody (contracts, delegation, transferral upon tragedy, but no shared rights) I would never deny that associate custodians can have a positive impact. Just always the primary's choice.
And this just a step toward minor's freedom, of course
20 just makes me really happy to be with the guy I'm with. The fact that (1) I'm a bitch, is kind of a plus. (2) He is a man of character -- but more importantly, he understands that people of character are not, in fact, a dime a dozen and growing on trees. (3) Well, okay, maybe I'll give her this one, since apparently deciding to give up sex and dating altogether does lead to finding the right person. Eventually. (4) He totally doesn't freak when I say that I kind of want to marry him and want to talk about maybe babies and he puts up with my freak outs when he talks about such things. (5) Hmm. Motherhood wasn't very successful in weeding out the lotharios until recently. But hey! I gotta guy who is totally on board with knowing that he does not come first. (6) Yeah, I'll give her this one, too.
(All low-hanging fruit provided free of charge.)
45 made me say "Awwww," and be really happy for Di.
I might shut up about him eventually. But probably not anytime soon. Stanley gets to meet him soon!
the seemingly prevalent view that husbands are instrumental to the having and raising of children
I meant it that I find it difficult to understand, though. I don't have kids: word is that things change significantly if you do have them. So I don't think that people who take that view are crazy people; they just really are living in a different world. I'd only wish that they'd have as much recognition of the world of the non-procreative, 'cause this "why aren't you married, why don't you have kids, oh I'm so sorry you didn't/couldn't have kids" thing seems to miss the fact that there's more than one way to live a life.
Stanley gets to meet him soon!
And Di, Thundersnow. It's like the "Sorry, Emerson" Meetup.
the seemingly prevalent view that husbands are instrumental to the having and raising of children
I may not be instrumental—I may even be superfluous—but I bought my daughters bikes for their birthday and let them beat me at Battleship, so points for me.
And Di, Thundersnow
Does T-snow have a horse? Because if she does, you should call it Wildfire.
Marriage is like Game Boys, only you marry the Game Boys.
Suffice it to say that the seemingly prevalent view that husbands are instrumental to the having and raising of children is difficult for me to understand.
Try raising a kid by yourself for a bit and it'll become clearer. Kids are expensive and time consuming and having another adult in the house sharing that responsibility helps you not want to drives yourself and your offspring into the river.
I'm not sure that the link in 20 isn't supposed to be satire. The last paragraph is about how marriage is practicing loving someone who doesn't deserve it.
I'm finding 42.3 hard to interpret. Literally having a husband isn't instrumental, but being a single parent has got to motherfucking suck.
With the (huge) caveat that I don't have kids, and, you know, I'm gay, so to be charitable I'll replace "husband" with "spouse": I just knew a lot of single parent households growing up. It doesn't seem outside the norm to me. Being a single parent in the extreme sense -- no real support network of family etc -- must truly suck, but just being married does not guarantee the substantive involvement of your spouse. It seems like there's a middle ground large enough to accommodate myriad family structures.
Try raising a kid by yourself for a bit and it'll become clearer. Kids are expensive and time consuming and having another adult in the house sharing that responsibility helps you not want to drives yourself and your offspring into the river.
"[A]dult" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. As is "sharing that responsibility." And, IME, if you strike "in the house" from the sentence, it's a more firmly true proposition.
As much as I just adore Rory's dad, oh so very much, the idea of not starting out with a (rebuttable) presumption that he would be instrumental in the having and raising of his kids seems very odd to me, and makes me wonder if I am misunderstanding Parsi's point.
I think what Parsimon meant was not that it was odd that husbands/fathers were seen as instrumental to parenting in the sense that they are in a limited sense necessary, and in a broad sense useful, for parenting, but that it was odd that husbands/fathers were instrumental to parenting in the sense that women would seek to marry to facilitate parenting rather that to pursue the relationship with the man in question for its own/his own sake. I don't think women actually do that all that often, but I'd agree that it would be an odd thing to do.
Thanks. That makes more sense. Or rather, finding that odd makes more sense.
42: I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to the way the writer's putting things. In the early months when Mara was home and I was spending all my waking and some non-waking moments with her, I felt so attuned to her that there was almost no room for Lee in my heart or life. When I turned over at night, it was to hear whether Mara was rustling, etc.
I do think that mindset is probably normal and basically healthy and certainly contributed to how well Mara has found a space in our home and lives, but it also would have destroyed the relationship if we'd stayed that way. The balance is still (all of three-and-a-half months in) tilted more toward Mara than perhaps it should be in both of our perspectives, but we're working on it. It's just so much easier to be annoyed with an adult than a three-year-old that it's easy to take even the child-related annoyance out on the other adult. Or maybe that's just me/us.
58: Huh. It always seemed obviously right and good to me that I loved Rory "more than" UNG. I mean, aside from the part where "love" is (at least theoretically) non-quantifiable and not really amenable to comparative measurement. But yeah, she unquestionably had (and has) dibs on my attention.
in the sense that women would seek to marry to facilitate parenting rather that to pursue the relationship with the man in question for its own/his own sake. I don't think women actually do that all that often, but I'd agree that it would be an odd thing to do.
I was certainly assessing Jammies on how I thought he'd be as a parent. It's kind of a tangled question, right? If I had wanted a different sort of life, (travelling, childless, etc), I would have ruled him out as incompatible.
Yeah, I think quite a few people I know have looked at their partners partly in that light. Male and female. Their suitability as prospective parents played a part in their choice.
And I'm pretty sure I know more than a few people where the facilitating parenting was indeed precisely the point.
It's all a sliding scale -- I don't mean that there's anything odd about considering someone's merits as a prospective parent when thinking about marrying them, but it does seem odd (not unheard of, certainly, but odd and probably a bad idea) to think of them as a means to the end of having kids rather than as an end in their own right.
You should always spend time contemplating the end of a potential partner.
Only if they're really been pissing you off.
I like it that 'end' has as many meanings that work in that sentence as it does letters.
You should always spend time contemplating the ends of a potential partner.
You should always spend time contemplating the endo of a potential partner.
I thought it was a commonplace of marriage self-help books that a first child was one of the greatest stresses on a relationship because of the transference of the mother's attention/affection from the partner to the child. Not that that's an endorsement of self-help book advice, but the idea seems pretty widespread. The common theme between this and the article in 20 may be that society dictates men be ridiculously flattered. And I must be right, because McMillan says every man has an uncanny inexplicable wisdom about marriage and stuff.
OT, but sort of on the OP theme, Yglesias seems to have effectively agreed with heebie on the question of Stanley's wine-making cob-logger and his desire to keep prices down. Does this really hold up for people? I get an uneasy whiff of trickle-down logic in the idea that just donating to charity solves everything.
LB's disambiguation in 56 of my point is correct. Thanks. I understand that a spouse is a partner/helper in a joint child-raising project, but in so many popular writings on the matter of finding a husband (like the piece in 20), you seem to hear some version of the view that one doesn't seek a mate for his own sake, exactly, but as a father for one's children.
In saying that that's "odd" I don't mean that I think it's crazy and horrible, but that I have never looked at relationships that way, and it's really somewhat of a foreign language.
On preview, pwned by 62.
OT, but sort of on the OP theme, Yglesias seems to have effectively agreed with heebie on the question of Stanley's wine-making cob-logger and his desire to keep prices down
Yglesias' opinions on ticket pricing are, basically, dumb.
I think the optimal-ticket-allocation question is more complicated with concerts than with wine, because the Concert Experience is a function of the audience in a way that isn't relevant to the Wine Drinking Experience (since you'll usually drink with with small self-selected groups). A LCD Soundsystem concert filled with people who can afford even $100 tickets would be lame. This is in addition to the issue of reciprocity, which (rather than general do-gooderism) I take to be part of bands' rejection of 'efficient' pricing: indie bands recognize that they've only achieved success through the evangelizing on the part of a dedicated fanbase that would be priced out of such concerts.
So Yggles is being silly about this, even if Heebie's right about the wine.
A LCD Soundsystem concert filled with people who can afford even $100 tickets would be lame.
Had a very weird experience as a summer associate -- a number of law firms hired Arlo Guthrie to put on a concert for their summer associates at Town Hall. It was disturbing: "Look, kids, we hired a hippie to dance for you. Dance, hippie, dance!" But I think the money went to a good cause.
Wow. That really is disturbing. Especially since I can't imagine biglaw summer associates would be the Arlo Guthrie demographic.
I heard of one firm that took its summer associates to a falconry thing. Now that sounds cool.
Sadly, I don't remember heebie's opinion on the question of Stanley's wine-making cob-logger and his desire to keep prices down. Did she think he was being silly?
I heard of one firm that took its summer associates to a falconry thing.
Later they despoiled the peasantry.
Where do you think dsquared gets his ideas?
73: The wine-related post in question.
Apologies; I've just read the Yglesias post:
Someone (Bono?) needs to set up a trust fund to which bands will allocate the excess revenues that accumulate when the market price of concert tickets exceeds the "fair" price as determined by the bands' moral intuitions
This has got to be tongue-in-cheek. No?
And heebie's comment that I think is being discussed. It's like there's no Google for some people. Sheesh.
70- Doesn't indie music involve small self-selected groups just as much as wine-drinking? Wine-drinking groups are assumed to be UMC/rich and indie music fans ostensibly poor bohemians, sure. But I don't see how you can dismiss them as completely separate issues just on that alone.
Sorry for forgetting the link; thanks for that, Stanley.
I can pretty much guarantee that LCD Soundsystem's fans are not poor bohemians, by and large.
If we're going to have a cheap wine talk, this box 'o wine is what I've been drinking lately.
To be fair to this post's title, it is not a suble wine.
I've been finding Redhook's Mudslinger Spring Ale to be suddenly abundant and on-sale locally. Like Moby's wine, it also comes in a box (of twelve).
One somewhat clunky way to address both the ticket-problem would be to play alternate free-market shows with shows that have low prices and require a student ID.
I don't know much about that beer or what you're paying for it, Stanley, but I guarantee you that this is way better and also a better value.
86: Good news for b-school students, bad news for bookstore employees!
81: The question regarding pricing remains an open and valid one, nonetheless.
I can't say what's happening to Yglesias in the last however long, but the considerations he brings to bear on a given case are increasingly blinkered awkward. He might have come out and said in that ticket-pricing post: soak the rich, give to the poor! The (free-ish) market is able to do this, while the government is not! And if that's the state of affairs, okay, we should go ahead and embrace the privatization of redistributive efforts! It's a waste of time to expect this to occur in any other way but privately!
That would at least have had some meat to it. Couching it in pseudo-econ terms is just freakish: "optimal allocation", "demand-responsive". If he has a larger position to take on these matters, I'd rather he'd set it out.
81: The question regarding pricing remains an open and valid one, nonetheless.
Meh. They should just find a bigger venue or keep playing shows.
Doesn't indie music involve small self-selected groups just as much as wine-drinking?
Wait, that didn't work.
Doesn't indie music involve small self-selected groups just as much as wine-drinking?
Yglesias, as I've said somewhere else, lost me about 6 months ago, and I now view him as someone who has suffered terminal and incurable Slate disease.
In any event, this is basically just another example of his current penchant for half-assed libertarianish policy schemes put together at 30,000 feet. He knows nothing about the actual business of music or why tickets are priced the way they are. There are any number of answers, including: (a) as Trapnel says, there are significant benefits to fan experience from a sold-out show full of hipsters, combined with a strong norm that a non-crowded show means a less successful show; (b) much (in many cases, most, though this varies enormously based on what kind of band we're talking about) of the revenue generated by concerts does not come from ticket sales, but from merchandising and other sales, and there are reasons to bring tastemaking people other than zillionaires to your concerts for merchandising reasons, unless you're the Rolling Stones and are already licensed to the hilt; (c) at the not-very-profitable level of indie rock shows, you are dealing with not very wealthy promoters and not very wealthy band managers, and the notion of implementing a massive variable pricing scheme is just way too much work; (d) the last thing anyone in an industry based on incredibly complex negotiated contracts between tons of different entities wants is an additional level of complexity about revenue generation (c.f. the movie business, where box office revenue is about the only transparent metric there is); (e) it is absolutely the least fucking surprising thing in the world that a band is complaining about scalpers, since scalping hurts with factor (a) and the band sees none of the profit. Etc. etc. etc.
88: "Bad news for bookstore employees" is of course fair but "good news for b-school students" is less so. The students I knew were not, on the whole, poor, but students, on the whole, are. A small, single concert open to "all students in the New York metropolitan area" might end up being an exclusive event, but the instrument could be tuned finer than that.
Doesn't indie music involve small self-selected groups just as much as wine-drinking?
I drink wines from the far-flung provinces of Canada. They're not very good, but at least *you've* never heard of them.
Put another way, the entire premise of Yglesisas's post -- that bands are leaving substantial amounts of money on the table for no reason by artificially underpricing tickets -- is wrong. In the specific case of LCD Soundsystem, think about it: Are they better off having a farewell concert that creates an "awesome" (I'm putting this in quotes because I don't know if their live show is any good or not) fan experience and provides the coda for a career, further album sales, further licensing, etc., which is where the real money gets made, or making a tiny bit of extra profit on a single show that is now 2/3 full of rich people, in order to earn an extra $10,000? If I'm their manager, I'm going to argue strongly for the former rather than the latter.
95: I'm already tired of those wines.
From what I hear you can omit the quotes. They're supposed to be insanely good live. On the other hand, I know a lot of people -- big fans! -- who are willing to fly across the country to go to this show. So I don't think jacking the ticket prices by 50 or 100% would dissuade them, except for the fact that it would make them feel like the band had sold out or was gouging people or whatever.
Another factor to consider is insurance/indemnification. Contracts for major concerts will fairly often require, e.g., the guy who delivers the stage to indemnify in the event that the stage doesn't work and the concert doesn't go on. If you boost the total revenue from the concert by jacking up ticket prices you've now also increased the cost of indemnification, and you now have to pay more for your equipment and insurance, which can quickly eat up much of the additional profit from increasing the ticket price. If the potential indemnification cost is too high, you may lose the vendor completely. And of course many of the contracts with vendors are negotiated on a tour-by-tour or year-by-year basis, not for any individual show.
I'm interested in the details-- I love LCD Soundsystem, but am a middle-aged dad so late night shows are a production and it's basically impossible to get my friends out for a loud night. I'm probably not demographically appealing to bands, but I would like to understand who is appealing.
So I guess I'm asking how licensing works-- selling the music for background to airlines and liquor peddlers for ads? Snowboard logos? TV shows?
I really don't think Yglesias's point is limited to discussion of LCD Soundsystem, whatever their particulars may be. He's arguing for jacking up prices no matter the product, as long as people can be convinced to pay.
Look, I don't care about LCD Soundsystem. It doesn't matter whether people are willing to pay. The topic seems to be hype, enthusiasm, advertising, and people willing to bleed money out their fingertips, and whether that's a commercial format we should be interested in encouraging, because we can give the excess to charity.
So I guess I'm asking how licensing works-- selling the music for background to airlines and liquor peddlers for ads? Snowboard logos? TV shows?
Yes, among many other things.
Yglesias' posts are frequently an object lesson how Econ 101 destroys your ability to think. I can't figure out why he thinks these kinds of posts are adding anything to the discourse -- anyone who's read David Friedman's "Price Theory" get write those kinds of posts as well as Yglesias. (In fact, Friedman literally makes the argument that Mother Theresa should maximize profits and then donate to charity.)
To be fair to Yggles, the problem he's approaching is that the price gets jacked up anyway by scalpers. It's not as if the status quo is that by the band leaving money on the table, lots of their fans can affordably see the show.
Halford, are you saying that because of insurance requirements, it's better for a band to let scalpers figure out the market price?
Requiring people to swipe a credit card in order to claim their ticket is not a bad solution.
104.1 gets it right. If you have way more people that want to see a show than can get tickets, something's going to give somewhere. It's not an easy problem to solve. I guess they could have done a wristband lottery or something.
104.2 -- yes, sometimes that can happen. But it's more that the "market price" as reflected in the original, pre-scalping, ticket price is not some weird anomaly of irrationally low pricing* designed to either be a charitable contribution to fans or scalpers; ticket price is the combination of a lot of factors in an industry that's very much focused on profitability.
It's not like no one has ever had the "hey, we can eliminate scalpers by massively raising the list price of the ticket!" idea before Matthew Yglesias invented it on his blog.
*Indeed, there are very good antitrust reasons to think that original ticket pricing is too high, though this has been less true in the last 5 years or so.
people can be convinced to pay
There are many people for whom paying is recreation, aspiration, and fulfillment all in one. This is the shape of liberty, and I had thought that these people were the most interesting for businesses. RH suggests otherwise, though.
Aside from asking here, is there any way to see how earnings break down for actual entertainment businesses? Is say Mad Men a business, and what does that business make from renting its cachet? How about Modest Mouse or Cake who are presumably also largely trading on past glory now, and both sold music for background in ads, is there a way to identify licensing:sales:performance ratios?
Aside from asking here, is there any way to see how earnings break down for actual entertainment businesses?
Yes, but you can't see it.
109: We must destroy Matthew Yglesias's argument-from-econo-speak, which is just a version of the argument from authority. If we can get him to speak along the lines of an argument from conscience, there may be progress.
Seriously, though: I noticed that Obama recently spoke against the Republican cost-cutting plan which involves cutting funding for a program supporting infant's formula for low-income families by saying: "Is this the kind of country we are? [long pause] This is a conversation we're going to have to have."
That would be an argument from conscience and morality.
That would be an argument from conscience and morality.
That would be heartening, wouldn't it?
Tangentially related ("Democrats showing some spine")...go Wisconsin, go.
111,112:"Is this the kind of country we are? [long pause] This is a conversation we're going to have to have."
That would be an argument from conscience and morality.
Looks more like a question than an argument to me. Obama doesn't actually say we aren't "that kind of country", nor does he say we shouldn't be, nor does he say what it would mean either way. The distance from the above and FDR's Second Bill of Rights is kinda astonishing, as is the distance between the sets of audiences and supporters of each.
Obama:"...Hope!"
(Crowd goes wild)
It's not like no one has ever had the "hey, we can eliminate scalpers by massively raising the list price of the ticket!" idea before Matthew Yglesias invented it on his blog.
No, but I believe he's unique in his perspective of presuming that the only thing motivating LCD Soundsystem's anti-scalper efforts is LCD Soundsystem's goal of minimizing its/his profits. "It would be so much easier to do blah blah. That way, not only are the richest people the people at the show, thus satisfying the market, but you end up with no profits, AND the scalpers end up with no profits. Everyone wins."
