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Live-Blogging The 1st Presidential Debate

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campaign-2016_758_426_81_s_c1I’m live-blogging the debate tonight in the same format I have in the past – assigning values as we go.

On main questions, candidates will split 7 points.

On specific rebuttals, candidates compete for their own total of 3 points in individual rebuttals.

On crosstalk, I will award up to 5 points to either candidate I see fit.

“Achieve Prosperity”

“Two economic realities” – record job growth and income growth, but income inequality is significant.

Clinton: Pivots into an opening speech, invokes her granddaughter’s birthday. “Invest in you – invest in your future. Jobs in infrastructure, advanced manufacturing,” technology. Also wants to raise minimum wage, guarantee equal pay for women, introduce profit sharing, supporting people struggling to balance family and work. “Difficult choices you face and stresses you’re under,” hits family leave, sick days, asks the wealthy to pay their share. Says, “Donald, it’s good to be with you.” “Who can shoulder the immense, awesome responsibilities of the presidency?”

Points: 4 of 7. The typical big plan you hear from a president, but it’s credible.

Trump: “Our jobs are fleeing the country. They are going to Mexico and to many other countries. Look at what China is doing to our country – [?] our product and devaluing their currency … they’re using our country as a piggy bank to rebuild China and many other countries.” Mexico building some of the best plants, some of the “the most sophisticated plants.” “As far as childcare and so many other things, I think Hillary and I agree on that … but we have to stop our jobs from being stolen from us, our companies leaving the United States and” firing everyone. I’ll be “reducing taxes tremendously … for small and big businesses.”

Points: 3 of 7. Trump gave a terrific recap, but he seems focused on an old style of economy that’s focused on industry that we might not even have anymore.

Clinton rebuttal: “I think trade is an important issue, we’re 5% of the world’s population and we have to trade with the other 95%.” Immediately chases his tax plan, “trickle down economics all over again.” Calls it “Trumped up trickle down,” almost gets a reaction from Trump. Hits hard, “the more you help wealthy people … the better off people will be.”

Points: 3 of 3. Could not have been better or more effective to rebut Trump.

Trump, on creating 25 million jobs and “brining back the industries that have left this country.”

Trump rebuttal: “My father gave me a very small loan in 1975 and I built it into a company that is worth billions and billions of dollars” and some of the biggest? best? assets all over the world. “We have to renegotiate our trade deals.”

Points: 1 of 3. He already seems a little rattled and imbalanced. He tries to say that Clinton should have been “doing this for years” in terms of fixing bad trade deals, but it’s not connected to any kind of answer. Also, he’s got to blow his nose (or bump some cocaine, not sure.) Holt needs to interrupt him to try to get him on track. He’s rambling crazily now. [Read more…] about Live-Blogging The 1st Presidential Debate

Music Monday: “Undress You” – Mutlu

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It’s rare to spend a night out of the house unless it’s to rehearse or play a show, so I took great delight in kicking off a few weeks of birthday-adjacent celebrations on Saturday with an outing with Lindsay and her beau J. We converged on my old South Philly stomping grounds to see two songwriters and friends of ours play The Boot & Saddle – Katie Barbato and Multu.

I know Katie from being out and about on the open mic scene in what seems like a very long ago and far away life, plus splitting a memorable Arcati Crisis show with her band The Sleepwells. She’s also famous for helping me break out of one year of my February Funk (and pushing me to finish “Dumbest Thing I Could Do” – a good call on her part). Earlier this year she released an outstanding EP with her band Dirty Holiday that is amongst EV’s major favorites, and she has a new solo record out this fall.

I could write you an entire essay on Katie and her music and how Lindsay leaned into my ear at one point and remarked, “Her voicings are so much like yours, but she plays like Gina. So, obviously, you love her.” But, that will have to hold – perhaps until I hang out with her in a few weeks.

mutlu-onaralI’m actually here to talk about Mutlu.

Saturday night was the first time I’ve ever seen Multu perform without our dear friend Dante Bucci playing by his side (and, as it happens, only the second time seeing him without being behind the mixing desk, thanks to the music festivals that Lindsay, Dante, and I produced over the years).

I had second thoughts about going. Or, more accurately, about staying. It seemed impossibly hard to start celebrating my birthday there in the absence of Dante, who was synonymous with Mutlu for me, whose birthday traditionally marked the end of our various Virgo/Libra birthday shenanigans in college.

I thought it might be too hard. I thought I might slip out after Katie was done her set, or maybe stay for just a song or two, telling Lindsay and J I was exhausted after a long day.

Dante would never do that. Dante never missed a single show of mine if he could physically get to it, and he’d never leave before my set was over.  How could I use the absence of him as an excuse to miss live music when it was his favorite thing in the world?

Maybe I was supposed to simply get lost in my emotions and in the crowd and dance, like all my friends have been doing for fifteen years of seeing Mutlu perform.

So that’s what I did, undulating to the music without a care. At one point, Mutlu announced, “This is a new one from my EP Caffeine and Whiskey, you might not know it.” He began to play and I knew it within a second. It was “Undress You,” a song he had first written and performed live nearly a decade ago just now enjoying its time in the spotlight.

I know what that feels like. I’ve been sitting in my living room rehearsing decade-old songs for weeks, checking to see if it’s their time.

How was it not this song’s time in the spotlight a decade ago when it is so instantly memorable? I’m not sure. I don’t remember it being this relaxed, the jazzy guitar quite so articulated. Maybe it was a little too eager to undress a decade ago? Maybe it needed the years to give heft to “Why we wasting time when we could be together?” Maybe the old falsetto hook of “Can I undress you?” was played for laughs instead of being a soulful call-and-response with the following “probably the last thing I should do”?

Maybe there was a through line from this song of Mutlu’s I had forgotten to my own “Dumbest Thing I Could Do,” who Katie helped to coax into the spotlight with its own response of “is be along with you.”

While I was wondering those things in my songwriter’s brain I was dancing, singing along, and remembering. The song brought back flashes of friends lost to time and circumstance, and of Dante’s lawn and a song that was suddenly and improbably my new favorite thing, pulling me out from the mixing desk to dance and sing along.

It was an indelible moment that I had completely forgotten, but it all came rushing back as I sang along to words I didn’t even realize I knew with Lindsay smiling at my side in her own instant recognition.

It is my new favorite thing all over again.

accumulate

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Last week on one of our trips to the library EV had to hold on to my belt loops rather than my hands to cross the parking lot because I was juggling a massive box of books to donate.

In it were books that E and I have been carrying around since college – over a decade now! Textbooks, college literature, and pleasure reading that has been forgotten or fallen out of favor. They travelled from our separate apartments to our combined one, then to our house on Greenwich Street, and now here to the suburbs, never once cracked open in all that time.

It never felt like we had a lot of stuff before we moved to this house. I’m not sure if it was because we didn’t have the space for it or because we were better at hiding it all.Or, perhaps it’s that we’ve given up a third of our physical space and much more of our time to the tiny third human now rooming with us. Likely some combination of the three..

I used to scoff at the idea of someone who needed to clean out their attic or garage or basement – how could you have so much stuff in there that you needed to dedicate time to throwing it all away? Yet, earlier tonight I waded into our box-strewn attic to try to reclaim my recording space for upcoming projects.

There was barely room to take a step. When we first moved here six years ago the attic felt cavernous – so large you could hold a concert or install a bowling alley. Now it is cramped, a scene from hoarders, packed to the eaves on each side with boxes of comic books, CDs, instruments, sheet music, board games, and random knick knacks I have accumulated and not yet purged.

I managed to eliminate six entire boxes from the hoard, consolidating three boxes of print samples from my old Creative Services job down to one (do I need five copies of a 2010 individual health care plans booklet?), mercilessly eliminating items from boxes marked “computer errata” (a spare copy of my original 1999 demo encoded at the wrong speed – was I hoping it would become a collectors item?), and combining several boxes of books (perhaps communications history books and grammar guides can share a space?).

Now there is room to breath in the attic – though still not enough to record. Eventually I’ll run out of obvious trash to dispose of and get down to the harder choices… books that I’ve read and still love, board games we play but not often, and stacks of handwritten revisions to lyrics.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about accumulation in this digital age. I have some friends who are notoriously sparse in what they allow into their homes, constantly pruning possessions back to a few favorites. I have further friends who eschew any physical item if they can have the digital version.

I don’t know how to get there. I’ve wanted so many things for so long that just now my urge to possess is starting to feel sated. Now the constraint is not budget but space and, terrifyingly, time.

I’ve been working on a song about this feeling before EV was born. It’s never quite finished – just one more possession I’m hauling around, although this time it’s my mind that’s being weighed down. Now that I’m nearing a half year of spending time at home as a parent, I think it’s high time to start putting these things to use or discarding them.

Are we all that we accumulate
Because I don’t want to be defined
By melted liquor bottle chocolates
That fell behind my dresser
The night we thought we ought to eat them all at once
To see if we would get drunk

Am I a thousand paper backs with creases on the spine
And every Beatles record I have bought since I was nine

I don’t want to live alone
I don’t want to be a hermit crab
Carrying my possessions inside a shell
Winched onto my back
Moving to a larger home when I’ve outgrown the last

the twin challenges of reading and other children

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EV had a 36-hour runny-nosed cold yesterday and I’d really like to blame it on other children, but I refuse to let them take credit for all of the books we read together.

On Monday I finally went to the gym at the local YMCA, five months into this stay-at-home experiment that was supposed to be at least fractionally about getting back into the shape I was in five years ago. Going to the gym by day meant depositing EV into a kid’s playroom for the better part of an hour – something that has always given me pause.

I’ve met the director at the Y and would trust her chosen child-minders implicitly, plus the environment is a room filled with toys and books without a screen in sight. The pause comes from the children they are minding. I don’t know them or their manners or what vapid TV shows they watch or what their parents have been teaching them.

It’s tempting to assign this fear of other children to a yuppy millennial helicopter parenting, and I’m sure some portion of it has to do with that, but my fear of other children influencing EV comes from my own distaste for other kids growing up. I wanted no part of them and their messy, silly, rough ways. Even though I watched all the TV they did and played with a lot of the same toys, I never wanted to be associated with other kids. I didn’t even want to be one myself, which was an easy illusion to maintain as I hung out in bars with my father and went out to dinner with my mother.

I’m not trying to raise EV to be a mini-me or to have the same mistrust of her peers that I had – to this day it remains as an unhealthy habit of keeping my peers at arm’s length. Yet, when I see kids EV’s age who act up, always have their hands in their mouth, spout nonsense words, are picky with food, yell and screech, or play rough and imitate guns, I can’t help but sneer at them just as I did when I was a little kid. I don’t want EV to miss out on important peer interaction, but I don’t want her to think that behavior is the acceptable norm, either. You can be more of a kid than I was without being a terrible little snot-nosed monster.

So, I gritted my teeth and left her eagerly exploring the play room while I huffed and puffed and lifted weights for an hour. She was perfectly cheerful when I picked her up.

Four hours later every part of my body was sore from class and EV had a definite case of the sniffles. “It was those damned runny nosed play-room kids,” I raged over internet chat to E and Lindsay. To their eternal credit as my life-parter and BFF, respectively, they replied separately but in verbatim unison: colds don’t incubate in four hours.

In other words: cool your jets, helicopter pilot.

The sniffles continued into yesterday, which put a whammy on some of our plans – I didn’t want to be the asshole parent who brought a contagious kid to the playground. (This led to me trying to explain the concept of “contagious” to EV – I love that we’re in the explaining things phase of parenting). Instead, we made a return trip the library to pick up a new batch of books to read at home. There, the librarian talked us into joining their “1,000 Books Before Kindergarten Challenge.”

“We’re starting this a bit late,” I said, trying to dissuade her from signing us up.

“It’s plenty of time!” she responded cheerily as she began to copy EV’s information down onto a registration card. “Plus, you can always count re-reading the same book multiple times.

It was as if she said the magic words. I could feel OCD Godzilla revving up in the interior of my gut, sharpening his nails within my bile duct as he contemplated that most kids were doing a SELECT ALL instead of a COUNT DISTINCT when querying their book reading – the obvious tactics of a book challenge cheater.

Godzilla and I quickly did the math. We had 24 months until Kindergarten, which meant maintaining a solid clip of 42 new books a month to hit the mark. But that was barely a book a day! We easily did 5-6 even on a slow day, but those were repeats from our own collection. Surely we could do better with 26 branches of the Delaware County Library System at our disposal and me as a stay-at-home-parent.

“Let me ask you something,” I said, giving the librarian a sly sidewise smile, “what’s the fastest anyone has ever completed the challenge.”

We’ve read 30 books in the last 24hrs and have another 20 ready to pick up at the library tomorrow. Today we cleared off our entire bookshelf to begin plotting our path through re-reading them and logging them for the challenge – which, to EV, is like letting her loose in a candy store. I quickly tired of hand-entry on the challenge sheet and switched over to a database format that would also track durations and duplicate reads.

I think we can nail this thing down in less than 100 days.

Clinton’s Cough and Trump’s Kryptonian Children

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Today the leading story on the political internet is that Hillary Clinton coughed yesterday, closed followed by Trump’s children being a cadre of evil Kryptonians escaped from the Phantom Zone.

Hold on, I am just going to fashion my framed Journalism diploma into a deadly throwing star that I can use as a weapon during the impending end times. I’ll be right back.

Let’s start with Hillary. It’s not that she coughed once. She coughed several times. It was a coughing fit, actually, enough so that she excused herself from the presence of reporters.

On one hand, it’s a lightweight story that humanizes a candidate. We’ve all had that moment of coughing, sneezing, or eye-itching in the middle of a meeting. Hey, it happens to Clinton, too! She’s not a robot. On the other hand, it’s part of a continuing narrative about Clinton’s declining health and unfitness for the presidency.

trump-millenial-outreach-outsider-01None of that is the actual story. We’ll get back to that in a moment.

The big politic meme of the week has been a Trump outreach campaign targeted at millennials. In the outreach, three of Trump’s children pose stonefaced in a either a terrible photo or a terrible photoshop job above the caption “This is not a Republican vs Democrat election. This is about an insider versus an outsider.”

There is so much to unpack about that photo and caption, and why this outreach is warranted in the first place. However, do you know what people were mostly tweeting about? How much the junior Trumps resembled a host of cinematic villains – from Children of the Corn to Slytherins to the Kryptonians who escaped the Phantom Zone in Superman 2.

The reality is that Donald Trump is barely beating the collective third party candidates among likely voters of the millennial generation. An August Quinnipiac University poll had him at 24% to Clinton’s 48% in a four-way race against Johnson and Stein (here’s the raw poll results). Yes, that’s right, Clinton is beating him by a 100%.

I have not seen that fact tweeted or commented a single time on all the villainous memes. I also haven’t seen discussion of the fact that the youth vote is purely a turnout game, since this huge swath of voters rarely hits the 50% mark in participation. What other Get Out The Vote efforts is Trump’s campaign undertaking with this population? Should he even engage, given his low percentage of support? [Read more…] about Clinton’s Cough and Trump’s Kryptonian Children