Michael Andersen

Giants at play

2011-11-28T17:52:00.000-08:00

My latest thought about Wikipedia and the cognitive surplus is that the most useful object ever constructed by human beings was just a flick of the wrist -- a seven-year whim -- of the world's unimaginably powerful labor force of understimulated, implausibly motivated men.

It was a very lucky whim, and I'm grateful. But we'll never slip a yoke over this beast.

Dirty hands

2011-05-24T19:12:00.000-07:00

Working late tonight on the bazillionth self-inflicted writing project of my life, I'm grateful to believe in the mechanics of my job.

Some of my friends complain about working long hours for companies whose objectives they share but whose strategies they don't believe in.

I keep signing up to do this stuff because I'm certain that words work.

Where I'll end up

2011-04-26T14:13:00.000-07:00

If I do well in this life, hopefully I'll come back as the "n" sound in the line all he asks from me is the food to give him strength from Cat Stevens's breakout 1966 single "I Love My Dog."

As long as the waters flow

2011-03-29T00:10:00.000-07:00

Do we know anything about Maria Strehinsky, the only woman who seems to be doing much of anything on the Atlantic's masthead? Because this trick of constantly hiring female writers to tell hard, politically incorrect truths about gender roles has been feeling a little -- how to say? -- Cowboys and Indians.

White wedding

2010-07-12T02:06:00.000-07:00

Update! See this list assailed mercifully, with my defense thereof!

The way I see it, wedding playlist songs for white people fall into 10 categories.

1) The bride-and-groom (bride-and-bride, etc.) song. Obviously this is specifically chosen for the first dance and whatever it is is fine. Warning: see section (9) below.

2) The undisputed must-have classics.
I Will Survive, Gloria Gaynor
Respect, Aretha Franklin
Walking on Broken Glass, Annie Lennox (IMO this has graduated from category 3)
You Never Can Tell, Chuck Berry (note special inclusion for weddings)
Like a Prayer, Madonna
Brown-Eyed Girl, Van Morrison
Don't Stop Believing, Journey

3) The judiciously chosen FM standbys. As when selecting a wedding gift, selecting a wedding playlist is not the time to be a hero. All you can do here is carefully select the best among several plausible options per artist.
All Day and All of the Night, The Kinks
Wouldn't It Be Nice, The Beach Boys
Help!, The Beatles
Rocks Off, The Rolling Stones
Only the Good Die Young, Billy Joel
Modern Love, David Bowie
I'm Gonna Love You Too, Blondie
Teach Your Children, CSNY
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Cyndi Lauper
Bad, Michael Jackson
Raspberry Beret, Prince
Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes, Paul Simon
Every Little Thing She Does is Magic, The Police
And She Was, Talking Heads

4) The expired radio hit. Like their target audience, these tracks have lately emerged out of awkward adolescence into what now appear to be long, prosperous adulthoods, almost without anyone really noticing. Ushering these songs closer to the canon, one reception at a time, is perhaps the most precious duty of the wedding DJ.
Breakfast at Tiffany's, Deep Blue Something
The Sign, Ace of Base
Baby One More Time, Britney Spears
The Impression that I Get, Mighty Mighty Bosstones
Stacy's Mom, Fountains of Wayne
She's a Rebel, Green Day
Semi-Charmed Life, Third Eye Blind
Oi to the World, No Doubt
Mambo No. 5 (A Little Bit Of...), Lou Bega
Livin' La Vida Loca, Ricky Martin
If I Had $1000000, Barenaked Ladies
Angel, Shaggy
Hey Ya, Outkast
Buddy Holly, Weezer
What's Up, 4 Non Blondes

5) The slow songs. Approximately one-fifth of the total. Mandatory. I cannot help you much on this one.

6) The R&B/hip-hop/last few years songs. Mandatory. Ditto.

7) The generational twofers. Wedding DJs who pride themselves on cultural literacy look for songs that were once granted second life by being featured in a movie more than a decade after their release.
Son of a Preacher Man, Dusty Springfield
Mona Lisa and Mad Hatters, Elton John
I Love to Boogie, T.Rex
It's Raining Men, The Weather Girls
Video Killed the Radio Star, The Buggles
I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles), The Proclaimers
Mickey, Toni Basil
Blister in the Sun, Violent Femmes
Get Rhythm, Johnny Cash

8) The long-tail tidbits. This is exactly as edgy as weddings are allowed to get. Appropriate only when at least a dozen people present meet a particular, relatively narrow demographic. Easy to mishandle. Optional. To illustrate, I'll name a few that might work in my own demographics but could be disastrous in the wrong room.
American Pie, Don McLean
Cheeseburger in Paradise, Jimmy Buffett
Barrel of a Gun, Guster
Closer to Fine, the Indigo Girls
Magic Dance, David Bowie (OK, this will never be disastrous)
Polyester Bride, Liz Phair
Turning Japanese, The Vapors

9) The custom selection. Other than the song in section (1), at most three songs may be played as in-jokes among friends or family of the bride and groom. Definitely optional. Smash them together and make it quick.

10) The closer. Not the final crowd-pleaser (you'll need one of those, too) but the final slow song that signals that people really have to wrap it up before the lights come on.
The Wind, Cat Stevens
Let it Be, The Beatles
Still Crazy After All These Years, Paul Simon
You've Got a Friend, Carole King
Stand By Me, Ben E. King
I Will Always Love You, Whitney Houston

Covalence

2010-06-22T19:46:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I took a great big breath of friendship and submerged. Now I'm underwater, wondering which way is up and savoring the tiny precious explosions of new energy in my capillaries every time a bond snaps.

Andersen's general theory of free ridership

2010-02-27T14:14:00.000-08:00

The bills for all this shit (read: the service industries, the private sector, the West) are not paid by the people who play by the rules. They're paid by the fuckups.

Therefore almost everything you buy consists of a bet by the person you're paying that, at some point, you're going to become one of the fuckups.

Trajectory

2010-01-08T09:33:00.000-08:00

My brain has declined with me; my thoughts are wetter, warmer, softer, weaker. But I can still remember that brief arc above the clouds when I was 20, breaking into clean crisp air and seeing every system laid out by the light of the stars.

Keep your lamps

2009-08-28T12:31:00.000-07:00

I still keep time by my 2005 earthquake, like the seventh city of Troy. But the candles I lit then to stay alive, which I've kept, are burning out one by one.

Professional calculus

2009-08-01T00:15:00.000-07:00

If I don't update this blog very often, it might be because my topical blog is, like, its day job.

This summer, my topical blog also has a day job. Even my topical blog's day job has a day job. But I like to think this one, down at the bottom, is the most integral of them all.

The point is, this blog has a new name for its day job. If you're curious about what I'm doing, stop on over.

Memo

2009-06-24T20:44:00.000-07:00

Well, pantry moths, it's been a long winter and spring for us.

Since Christmas, you've been appearing in my kitchen almost every afternoon, rubbing your tiny feet together, distressing friends and lady friends alike, pasting your hideous young along the edges of my ceiling, scumming the walls with your smeared guts.

I've come to understand that this is how things have always been for you.

We like the same foods, you and I. We both enjoy croutons, walnuts, unbleached flour, powdered sugar and the spices of India. And though I have, during our acquaintance, regularly supplied our household with all these things -- at the value, in my world, of many hours of labor -- I observe that you have not.

This is why I'm writing, pantry moths.

Effective immediately, I'm changing the terms of our partnership. You haven't yet interfered with my enjoyment of the cupboard we share, and I see no reason why you will in the time that we have remaining. But I will no longer restock our mutual supply of dry goods. And though your nutritional requirements are minimal, they are real. Starting today, every meal either one of us consumes brings us closer to a final reckoning.

And I will survive, pantry moths. For I am larger than you, and far crueler.

I don't relish the weeks and months to come. But nor, in truth, have I enjoyed our time together. And so I will not mourn the departure, one by one, of each of your skinny, black little asses.

How to make money in America

2009-04-23T18:54:00.000-07:00

Step 1: Coil the odds as short as you can.
Step 2: Roll the dice.

The masses

2009-01-24T09:58:00.000-08:00

It's natural to assume that a crowd of people will behave like water or an amoeba or a nest of ants, creeping and probing until it discovers a path. But a human crowd isn't focused on discovery; it's focused on desire. It's goal-oriented, like a lightning bolt or a cobra. When an event occurs -- a spreading rumor, an opened gate, a shouted order -- each individual calculates what effect it will have on his or her immediate personal objectives and the crowd reacts suddenly and unpredictably.

The best way to control a crowd of humans is therefore to never present it with new information.

Immortal beloved

2009-01-17T13:03:00.000-08:00

I just can't get over this slightly autistic Photoshop experiment and its promise of a new, strange universe beyond our own. (With more lens flare.)

The laws of motion

2009-01-07T20:59:00.000-08:00

These days I'm a machine, obediently crunching through deductions while I spin off into space in the last direction I was pushed. A closed system.

Gimme fiction

2008-11-13T01:47:00.000-08:00

For a while tonight, I watched home videos from the early to mid 1990s that my parents got somebody to burn onto a DVD.

Unlike my sister, who was all ham, I carefully avoided acknowledging the camera, ever. I think this has been my Personal Moral Code of the Camera: it is your duty to ignore them. They are documentary devices.

But here's the thing, Aiken: 15 years later, watching all these disembodied memories, I enjoyed watching my sister lope around for the lens. And it didn't take long for me to become utterly bored by my somber, quiet self. Fifteen years out, it's not actually accuracy that's revealing. It's performance.

Our first WBEZ-listening president

2008-11-02T21:29:00.000-08:00

"But here's the thing, Aiken."

All my heroes

2008-09-14T00:10:00.000-07:00

It's from the book that was six inches from my foot when I heard the news: Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace's wonderful 2005 collection of autobiographical, moral question marks.

I don't mean to impugn or co-opt. It just seems timely.

But if you, like poor old Rolling Stone, have come to a point on the Trail where you've started fearing your own cynicism almost as much as you fear your own credulity and the salesmen who feed on it, you may find your thoughts returning again and again to a certain dark and box-sized cell in a certain Hilton half a world and three careers away, to the torture and fear and offer of release and a certain Young Voter named McCain's refusal to violate a Code. There were no techs' cameras in that box, no aides or consultants, no paradoxes or gray areas; nothing to sell. There was just one guy and whatever in his character sustained him. This is a huge deal. In your mind, that Hoa Lo box becomes sort of a special dressing room with a star on the door, the private place behind the stage where one imagines "the real John McCain" still lives. And but now the paradox here is that this box that makes McCain "real" is, by definition, locked. Impenetrable. Nobody gets in or out. This is huge, too: you should keep it in mind. It is why, however many behind-the-scenes pencils get put on the case, a "profile" of John McCain is going to be just that: one side, exterior, split and diffracted by so many lenses there's way more than one man to see. Salesman or leader or neither or both, the final paradox -- the really tiny central one, way down deep inside all the other campaign puzzles' spinning boxes and squares that layer McCain -- is that whether he's truly "for real" now depends less on what is in his heart than on what might be in yours. Try to stay awake.

Self-serve politics

2008-08-19T12:32:00.000-07:00

I make a lot of snap political judgments the same way investment bankers make stock picks.

The Andersen Principle: If a proposed political action -- rent control, offshore drilling -- has an obvious, powerful rationale, then it's a bad, overvalued idea and not worth investing in. If, on the other hand, a policy is complicated and hard to explain the benefits of -- cap-and-trade, the EITC -- it's undervalued and you should give it the benefit of the doubt.

First Corollary to the Andersen Principle (Also known as the Greater Wonk Theory): Policies that are hard to explain are also easy, once enacted, for highly motivated rich people to fuck with.

Darwinian socialism

2008-07-30T20:26:00.000-07:00

The guy who sits next to me at work just stopped in for the first time after his son's birth, and looking at his familiar face I felt this sudden rush of warmth -- a desire to do favors for this friend and his family.

It's a gift from my ancestors, sowed in my heart: one, two, ten thousand moments of reciprocal kindness in a long, long line.

The blockbuster we deserve

2008-07-21T00:05:00.001-07:00

Halfway through Dark Knight I actually thought: "I hope the war on terror ends soon, so every time I go to the movie show I don't have to do so much work." And then, right about the time Michelle Obama blew out her brains all over an early conference committee draft of FISA, the movie show reminded me -- for the first time in years -- that it's not going to end. Ever. It was a horrific realization, and I shook.

Leaving Flatland

2008-03-16T22:23:00.000-07:00

I spend almost all my social life thinking fast, spinning, smashing into one face after another. Like a billiard ball. Clonk! Clack! Thud!

All abstraction; no time for anything more accurate.

Yesterday, on a hike, I lingered on the top of a hill while my friends walked away from me. They shrank to the size of my arm, then my hand, then my thumb, and then they were just a part of the forest that I happened to know very well -- bouncing hair, black coats, cocked elbows. They became concrete. I'd never felt so protective of them, or so proud.

Songs for getting laid off

2008-02-25T13:29:00.001-08:00

Not me, but a friend, a colleague and a better reporter than I'm likely to become.

1. Shove This Jay-Oh-Bee, Canibus
2. Cotton, The Mountain Goats
3. Spanish Pipedream, John Prine
4. I Love My Boss, Moxy Fruvous
5. One-Trick Pony, Paul Simon
6. Love Love Love, The Mountain Goats
7. Barney's Epic Homer, Leon Rosselson and Roy Bailey
8. It's Not My Place (In the 9 to 5 World), The Ramones
9. Alienation's for the Rich, They Might Be Giants
10. To Beat the Devil, Kris Kristofferson
11. Everything is Free, Gillian Welch
12. The Mary Ellen Carter, Stan Rogers

Elrond, Toffler and the breakdown of the family

2007-10-20T01:27:00.000-07:00

I saw Fellowship of the Ring tonight for the first time in four or five years.

I think one of the more touching things about Lord of the Rings, and maybe sword-and-scepter epics in general, is the presence of powerful parents. Literally. The books are scattered with the fantasy of vigorous, independent adult children whose parents are still at the top of their game.

Maybe this circumstance is actually a lost treasure of the entire pre-industrial past, the days before everything we learned was constantly being torn apart by discovery.

Frodo is wounded, lying on the ground in a forest. "We have to take him," Arwen says, "to my father."

On the job

2007-10-04T21:54:00.000-07:00

Even these days, being part of a newspaper's big voltron body requires a close acquaintance with caprice. We tear through the day on a few dozen slapdash decisions whose outcomes are probably worth tens of thousands of dollars to the beneficiaries or the victims.

Three short stories about Bumbershoot

2007-09-09T10:58:00.000-07:00

Bumbershoot is Seattle.

The music side of the festival is a huge arching wood structure. It went up with a vision, and it's been rotting in the rain ever since. It's the weird kid after 35 years of socialization. Isn't socialization just another word for rot?

Then there's the art side. The artists have been there the whole time, nibbling. They're the termites beneath the structure. Not part of the rot; they don't care about what's happening up in the sky. They're just building a home in the dirt. This is how they do it, and someday the whole thing is going to fall and whoever's still there afterward will get to put up a new one. Maybe it'll be them.

But termites are social insects.

*

When I tell people outside the Northwest that I live in Portland, they say, "Oh, that must be an interesting place. It's so close to Seattle." For people squinting over from the East, we're a twin star system, one blurry dot in the telescope and 20 light-years away.

Seattle people feel British. You can see it in the limp faces beneath their knit hoods. They refer constantly to "the Pacific Northwest." They're just patronizing enough about Portland to hide their fascination. It's an old empire.

Portlanders do not talk about Seattle.

I think the Easterners have it right. One blue, one red. Both in orbit, and a plume of hydrogen pouring across the gap. The blue one doesn't notice, or need to.

*

When people talk about "experimental" art, it seems like they usually mean that it doesn't have a narrative. Most modern experimental art is lyric art. Concrete art. You understand a Jackson Pollack painting because your eyes are moving.

I love lyric art. But one of the things about narrative is that you remember it. You can abstract it. You can keep it. Lyric art doesn't keep well -- it's great, and a few weeks later you can't remember anything else about it. That's why commercial art is almost always narrative art. And great narratives are great, too.

Experimental art is like the sex. Narrative art is like the relationship.

Hollywood isn't selling sex after all -- it just wants to move in.

Prince's guitar

2007-02-05T09:45:00.000-08:00

Prince's halftime show: "send help," folded into a fortune cookie?

Antony at the funeral?

Also 2007

2007-01-02T20:18:00.000-08:00

My other resolution is to not use so many labels.

2007

2007-01-01T11:23:00.000-08:00

My resolution is to use fewer parentheses. Apology defeats the purpose of the offbeat.