The Mountain Goats last night at The Queen in Wilmington.
Great energy, great show, great setlist, including the first time I’ve ever seen an act come out for another encore after the house lights went up.
An Opinionated History of Modern Rock
Hypothesis: while it is usually impossible to pick a precise genesis of any cultural movement, for the purposes of this exercise, R.E.M.’s “Radio Free Europe” gave birth to “modern rock,” and Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” killed it. I slid in some obvious precursors to R.E.M. and covered the dénouement and fallout from OK Computer as well.
This one has been kicking around my head for a while, inspired by tapes teenage me made off of Philly’s own WDRE (RIP), late nights staying up for 120 Minutes (their 1993 year end best of episode was a foundational text), countless mixtapes, mix CDs and playlists made and received over the years, and Matthew Perpetua’s exhaustive work cataloging and curating the last 40+ years of music (here’s a thread of his playlists I referred to heavily while creating this playlist.)
Listen on Apple Music, Spotify or Last.fm.
Delaware earns a C- on Common Cause’s Community Redistricting Report Card
Perhaps the perfect encapsulation of Delaware Way politics: Delaware Democrats, who held the Governorship and both houses of the General Assembly, ran an “inadequately transparent” process in which “incumbent protection appeared to trump protecting communities of interest or consideration of public testimony” and still managed to gift Republicans a district (the new RD 4, which moved from Wilmington to Sussex County).
How can we take pride in and venerate the supposedly good things Americans in history did but ignore and dismiss the bad things? How can we pick and choose our moral inheritance at will? How does the need for us to downplay slavery, colonization, and Jim Crow continue to be such a strong political force? And whose interests does this down-playing serve in 2023?
Beaver Hall, Junior Year
Inspired by the announcement of REM’s “Up” reissue, I took a trip back to Fall ‘98, my first semester away at Penn State. Here’s the contemporaneous music that was spinning in my dorm room on the 4th floor of Beaver Hall.
Listen on Apple Music, Spotify or Last.fm.
Folks, it seems like there’s a pending announcement of new music from Charles Bissell of The Wrens coming next week. This is not a drill. Prepare accordingly.
Lucky enough to have seen Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service last night at the Mann. My son’s first concert (he’s a huge Postal Service fan). I think we both made a bunch of core memories; I know I did.
Sunny Day Real Estate last night in Baltimore.
Still can’t believe how tight these guys sound and how well Jeremy’s voice holds up.
Three candidates have announced their 2024 candidacy for Delaware’s lone U.S. House seat. How did they use branding to differentiate themselves in an already crowded field?
In the next installment of “The Politics of Design,” I critiqued all three for the Delaware Call.
Strong Enough?
Pulling the thread that connects Sheryl Crow’s “Strong Enough” and boygenius’s “Not Strong Enough” in both directions.
Listen on Apple Music, Spotify or Last.fm.
Made the Roy Choi salsa verde tonight and, folks? It’s good.
Admittedly fudged the recipe a bit based on what was on hand but it’s a hell of a starting place.
Allstate is still using “security questions I can probably find the answers to if you’ve filled out your Facebook profile even a little bit” in 2023. Woof.
I’m in the Delaware Call today!
The Politics of Design will be a lighthearted series of critiques focusing on the branding of state and local politicians.
First up: the logo for Delaware gubernatorial hopeful Matt Meyer.
Finished reading: Tomorrow Will Be Different by Sarah McBride 📚
I absolutely tore through this book. Partially out of personal interest in McBride’s story, as she is my state senator and has a really good change to be the first out transgender member of the US House of Representatives, but mostly because she’s an engaging storyteller with an incredible story to tell.
This is pretty clearly a political memoir, one written to give background as the candidate ascends in the public sphere. McBride is pretty transparent about her ambitions, but manages to be ambitious in a way that never feels transactional to me. She deftly is able to zoom out from a personal story to illustrate a policy point or value statement in a way that makes the connections obvious, and offers some insight into how she will govern that have since been demonstrated in her tenure in the state senate.
Her “why” is incredibly clear, and I am hopeful she will be able to bring an undiluted version of it back to Washington.
Here’s Representative Eric Morrison on his controversial vote on HS 1 for HB 121 (the Seaford LLC voting bill):
Governing is not easy, and things are not always as they appear on the surface. As happens time and again, we as Democrats had to do the responsible and right thing for Delawareans. We do not have the luxury, for example, of throwing temper tantrums like petulant children and walking out in the middle of session like every member of the Republican House Caucus did Wednesday evening, while Democrats stayed on the floor and performed the jobs we were elected to do. In this entire situation, we as Democrats took the high ground and did the right things for Delaware, and I am proud of it.
(More background here.)
My position remains that many of the surprising “yes” votes have previously earned our trust and should not be vilified on principle. Especially given that it was clear all parties knew the bill had not immediately future in the Senate.
As much as I would love to live in a world where all my favs could always vote on principle and tell the GOP to eat shit, we’re not there yet. We don’t have the numbers. If we can flip 2 more house seats, we theoretically have a supermajority that presents us from this kind of nonsense every late June.
Which is why I’m working with at least one candidate to flip a clearly dem-friendly district. And I’m willing to work with you, if you are running against a Republican in a flippable house district, I will do your logo & branding design pro bono.
Let’s stop complaining about governing process and Delaware Way bullshit. Let’s work together to make these goons officially irrelevant.
John Carney has not moved on
When Delaware Governor John Carney announced that he would allow House Bill 1 and House Bill 2 to become law without his signature, he declared that it was “time to move on” from the debate around recreational marijuana. However, by appointing former Delaware State Trooper Robert Coupe to oversee the rollout of the recreational marijuana industry, Carney has proven that he has done anything but “move on.”
House Bill 2, enacted this past April, establishes and regulates the recreational marijuana industry in Delaware. Portions of the bill were specifically crafted to redress the racist war on drugs that has ravaged countless communities in Delaware. The bill gives those who reside in areas disproportionately impacted by the war on drugs preferential access to the legal marijuana market. The bill also earmarks tax revenue for the Justice Reinvestment Fund, “where it will be used for projects to improve quality of life for communities most impacted by the prohibition of marijuana and ‘war on drugs’ era policies.”
So what does that have to do with Robert Coupe?
Coupe spent nearly 28 years in the Delaware State Police, and has filled a number of administrative roles in the criminal justice system since retiring from the force. Governor Carney believed this professional experience makes Coupe an ideal candidate: “There are few people across our state who are more well-respected, and more committed to serving the people of Delaware, than Rob Coupe,” the governor said in a press release. “He’s exactly the right person to take on this new challenge.”
Unfortunately, the same experience that excites Governor Carney should have disqualified Coupe from consideration for the role of the Marijuana Commissioner. This is not an indictment of Coupe as an individual, but an acknowledgement that Coupe comes from the same criminal justice system whose harms he is tasked with remediating.
If the bill’s intent is to undo some of the harms caused by decades of racist war on drugs-era overpolicing, why is Governor Carney appointing someone with such a criminal justice-heavy background to oversee the bill’s implementation?
The answer: Governor Carney has not, in fact, “moved on.” Carney’s own draconian views on cannabis are well documented. Despite these views, he opted not to veto the bills, realizing that both chambers of the Legislature had the votes to override his veto and politically embarrass him. But, by choosing a commissioner with a decades-long background in law enforcement, Carney gets to save face while giving a slap in the face to everyone who advocated for the bill’s passage, who has been unfairly impacted by the war on drugs, who believes in restorative justice, and who just wants to get high. Carney could have opted for a commissioner who knows the industry, or someone who has been impacted by the War on Drugs to ensure the commission would work to remediate its harms.
Instead, he chose to appoint a cop. That’s not “moving on.”
Before calling for a vote, Cooke spent ~10 mins doing what I can only describe as scolding everyone in the room who had the temerity to suggest the bill wasn’t good enough. Wish we could give specifics but his scolding blew out the mic; all we know for sure is that he was Big Mad.
The 80% off all ebooks sale at Verso Books ends this Wednesday. (Looks like most of their paper books are also 20-30% off, too.)
You know your boy copped:
- Revolutionary Mathematics – Justin Joque
- Hegemony Now – Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams
- Prisoners of the American Dream – Mike Davis
- If They Come in the Morning – Angela Y. Davis
- Radical Technologies – Adam Greenfield
- Keystroke Capitalism – Aaron Sahr
