I enjoy reading Paul “the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine” Krugman’s opinions on things. I learn so much from his large and abundantly folded brain. For example, here he argues that conservatives are mostly incapable of modeling the thought processes of liberals.

[…] if you ask a liberal or a saltwater economist, “What would somebody on the other side of this divide say here? What would their version of it be?” A liberal can do that. A liberal can talk coherently about what the conservative view is because people like me actually do listen. We don’t think it’s right, but we pay enough attention to see what the other person is trying to get at. The reverse is not true.

You try to get someone who is fiercely anti-Keynesian to even explain what a Keynesian economic argument is, they can’t do it. They can’t get it remotely right. Or if you ask a conservative, “What do liberals want?” You get this bizarre stuff – for example, that liberals want everybody to ride trains, because it makes people more susceptible to collectivism. You just have to look at the realities of the way each side talks and what they know. One side of the picture is open-minded and sceptical. We have views that are different, but we arrive at them through paying attention. The other side has dogmatic views.

What do you think? Yes, it’s smug and a bit self-congratulatory. Paul Krugman has identified as one side of the political divide as wise and open-minded, and by complete coincidence it’s the side he belongs to.

But maybe there’s something to what he says. I’ve long felt that conservatives often do a poor job of understanding the liberal view of things, and that liberals typically do a better job of understanding their opposition.

The repeal of Roe v. Wade in the United States has proven that I was wrong. American liberals, on this issue, have no idea why conservatives believe the things they do, attributing to them instead cartoon villain motives and implausible conspiracy theories that make George F Will’s “trains = collectivism” theory seem the rarified heights of sanity.

On the day the news was announced, perhaps 10-20% of Twitter changed their avatar to either a coathanger or a Handmaiden outfit. This was the start of an attack on civil rights that is solely motivated by oppressing women. Reddit had some kind of psychotic break. Many of the posts below had hundreds or thousands of upvotes.

How to turn women into “breeding cows”?

It’s a forced-breeding program. Women are chattel to these people.

And

In a 6-3 decision, women are now brood mares for the state.

I wonder if there’s any correlation between RvW being overturned and the U.S have consistently declining birth rates for years. If people stop having children, there’s no more generations of workers to exploit and propagandize through the school system.

No. Call it what it ultimately is.

Slavery.

In general pumping the birthrate will be good for the economy in the long run, if traditional economics stays true, but it’s hard to imagine that the GOP is thinking more than 2 elections ahead.

And

And

It’s slavery with extra steps. Lots of these kids will eventually end up in jail and using Prisoners as free slaves has been a thing for a long time in the US.

Basically, how do you know what’s on a person’s mind? You really can’t. The fastest way to get an idea is to ask them why they believe what they believe: sometimes they lie, but you can’t assume that as a default explanation. Anti-abortion activists claim to be motivated by the idea that a fetus’s life has some kind of moral value. Absent other evidence, they should be believed.

George Carlin may have been patient zero for this kind of “Christians oppose abortion because they want more soldiers” stuff (though here’s an earlier version by Marge Piercey). He was a cynic. A small amount of cynicism can be healthy, just like a small amount of wine can be healthy. George Carlin was a falling-down drunk on the verge of liver failure.

Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. Pro-life… pro-life… These people aren’t pro-life, they’re killing doctors! What kind of pro-life is that? What, they’ll do anything they can to save a fetus but if it grows up to be a doctor they just might have to kill it? They’re not pro-life. You know what they are? They’re anti-woman. Simple as it gets, anti-woman. They don’t like them. They don’t like women. They believe a woman’s primary role is to function as a brood mare for the state.^[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDzs0gY1cTA

How does he know that this is what they believe? He doesn’t, and also probably doesn’t care. There might be seven words you can’t say on TV, but the market for lazy caricatures of one’s political opponents is as wide and as deep as the ocean.

Speaking of lazy caricatures, this is another one. But at least it’s funny.

Garfield only has value as a deconstruction of itself. Jazz/R&B label GRP Records accidentally discovered this fundamental fact about the universe in 1991, when they released Am I Cool Or What?, the first ever Garfield concept album.

“Garfield concept album” sounds like a 4chan musical shitpost like MoonMan. Incredibly it’s a real product that was released on both cassette and CD, for a double dose of Garfield madness.

A cynical mind might suspect that the Garfield mythos cannot support a full-blown concept album. The character isn’t exactly Ziggy Stardust: Garfield is to comics what “Jim Davis” is to names, a desolate TS Eliot wasteland of unfettered blandness. I was a Garfield fan for ten seconds in 1997 because it replaced a comic I hated (Cathy) in the Sunday funnies. Then I actually read it and realized I’d cured a toenail disease with an amputation. It was the least funny thing I had ever seen. You can’t even use it as lavatory paper, because any paper containing Garfield has shit on it by definition.

Want to know why Garfield is bad? It’s often asserted^[1]once, by a guy on Quora that this is the all-time funniest Garfield strip…

Yes, I agree it’s funny. But it has nothing to do with Garfield. He is pointless. Not only could you cut him out with scissors without affecting the gag, he actually makes it worse by being there. (Why is he reacting in disappointment? Was he hoping to hear a long sponsored message?) It’s peabrained nonsense, even within its own universe.

The true load-bearing wall of Garfield is Jon Arbuckle, whose character trait (neurotic insecurity) at least enables things to happen. Garfield, by contrast, is a blob. Take Jon out of Garfield and the comic collapses into a black hole: take Garfield out of Garfield and it stays the same or becomes funnier.

What can you do with a character so bland? What can’t you do? GRP’s pitch meeting must have gone like this:

“Our market research team has identified four traits with the core Garfield brand: he’s lazy, he’s fat, he eats lasagne, and he hates Mondays. If we took each of those traits and wrote a song about it we’d have almost 50% of 1/2 of a real, honest to God album! Ka-ching! This is an even better idea than our Samuel ‘Screech’ Powers prog-rock suite!”

Obviously they had to pad it out some. Neither “I Love It When I’m Naughty” and “Next to You I’m Even Better” have anything to do with Garfield. I think they were included because they were written by a person called Catte Adams, by which standard Cat Stevens, Jon Bon Jovi, and One Direction should be on here. (Get it? OD? Odie? If Jim Davis could write KWALITY JOKES like that, the comic would be cooking with gas.)

I would call the music an afterthought but that would incorrectly imply that any sort of thinking was involved. It’s very cheesy and cheap, with sampled lifeless drums that sound like they’re coming off a midi keyboard. It doesn’t sound close to jazz, it’s more like New Kids On The Block or Billie Ocean or something. “Shake Your Paw” has a stuttered horn sample (think “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Yes) but that’s the only musical point of interest I can recall.

What’s amazing is that they recruited a stable of R&B/soul greats to make this turd. BB King. The Temptations. Natalie Cole. Just how broke were those guys by 1991? That leads to a fascinating possibility: with the demise of the music industry, there has never been a better time to recruit legendary musicians for cheap. Who’s with me? The world must hear Am I Cool Or What? II.

The Pixies are alt-rock’s dark matter: invisible, but they bend the universe around them. The 90s are inconceivable without their music. They laid the founding stones for Seattle grunge, 3rd wave punk, 90s glam revival, and indie rock, but they couldn’t lay the founding stones for their own careers. Other bands broke big. The Pixies just broke up.

“Why didn’t the Pixies become more famous?” was once a popular column brief in the alternative press. Too early? Too weird? Not enough MTV videos? Wrong place? Singer too fat? Bassist too lady? Whatever the truth, their gold and platinum certifications were awarded long after they broke up, after an unpaid PR campaign on their behalf by the likes of Kurt Cobain and David Bowie. The Pixies are to Gen X what the Velvet Underground were to baby boomers: more famous as musical corpses than they ever were as a living, active band.

On their records they merged into a wall of sound with a single performer sometimes punching through, perhaps one of Joey Santiago’s fierce, singing leads, or Black Francis squalling bloodily, like a thundercloud made of dripping meat. Their lyrics were minimalistic and filmic, owing more to visual language more than prose. Other bands wrote songs about being sad: the Pixies wrote about having a broken face. They approached subject matter obliquely and orthagonally: if they were a chess piece, it would be the knight. Some Pixies songs make you feel alienated. Others conferred a sense of cosmic understanding. Their best songs made you feel both at the same time.

In 2003, rumors started crackling that the Pixies would soon reunite. The next year, a string of sold-out shows were announced. loudQUIETloud is Matthew Galkin’s 2006 documentary of their performances and some of the circumstances leading up to it.

Documentaries need storylines, and “legendary band reforming” has one that writes itself. Are the Pixies too old? Can lightning strike twice? Do they still have “it”? Are they still relevant in a world that’s changed beyond recognition (in 2003, “alt rock” now meant Evanescence, Linkin Park, and Nickelback)? Also, why do it at all, when there’s ample evidence that they don’t particularly want to?

It’s clear in the film’s first few minutes that the Pixies reunited because of money.

Francis’s solo act (can we admit that The Catholics was his solo act?) was stuck in a rut. Release an album on some indie label, get a 6/10 from a Pitchfork nerd who raves about how cool the Pixies were, make a pittance touring bowling alleys and phone booths, repeat. Santiago and Lowery never even had a rut to get stuck in: their faces hold the sullen desperation of Oliver Twist asking for more gruel. Kim Deal had arguably weathered the post-Pixies years the best (“Cannonball” was the crossover MTV smash her former band had never had), but she was fresh out of rehab, and also had the commercial failure of the third Breeders’ album hanging over her head. Santiago comes up with a funny name for the tour: The Pixies Sell Out. Or it would be funny if it was ironic.

Lowery is blunt about the situation. He states that although royalties from the Pixies had more or less supported him through the nineties, by 2004 this was no longer true. Four years previously the domain Napster.com was registered by a NEU student^[1]At Boston, the Pixies’ hometown called Sean Parker, and suddenly the cool thing to do with music was not pay for it. The industry began collapsing. This is the reason why every venerable rock act was (and still is) touring like devils into their 60s and 70s. Live music became the backbone of the industry: you still can’t download a band into your living room on Napster. I regard Sean Parker, who can’t play a note, as one of the defining figures of 21st century music, scarcely less significant than Guglielmo Marconi.

Continuing the legacy of the Pixies is a daunting task on the face of things. We see Black Francis looking terrified, like a man nerving himself up for a 10,000 ft skydive. He repeats affirmations on a couch. “I can do it! People like me! I’m cute!” (Two out of three isn’t bad.) We also see Kim anxiously fretting (in multiple senses), worried that she’ll biff notes and look like an aging fraud on stage.

“Why are they back?” is one question. “Why did they split?” is another, and the film never addresses it, except at slant angles.

The breakup of the Pixies is another big mysteries. “Francis and Kim were fighting” is the usual non-explanation proffered…but why did Santiago and Lowery leave? Part of a good documentary is establishing the leads as characters. Is Black Francis a chill, laid-back teddy bear? Or a slightly sinister, controlling figure? The film never comes down on side or the other, allowing the viewer to make up their own mind. But as Francis himself said, where is my mind?

We sense the rifts between Francis and Kim, which don’t seem to have closed with time. Kim rides on a separate bus to the others, apparently working on material for a new Breeders album. There could be ample reasons for this (ranging from “her desire to stay sober” to “her commitments to her sister” to “she would rather give herself a cervical exam with a trench shovel than ride on a bus with Black Francis”) but the film doesn’t settle the issue. Will there be new Pixies music? Francis seems hostile to the idea. He’d rather talk about his next solo album. When Kim is asked the same question, she responds with “you’re demanding answers to questions that have no answers.” (Sadly, an answer finally came in 2014, when the Kimless Indie Cindy hit a remainder bin near you. It got a 2.5/10 from Pitchfork, which doesn’t even seem possible.)

The documentary’s title is a reference to the infamous loud/quiet songwriting mode of alt-rock, where a soft verse is contrasted with an explosive chorus (“Smells Like Teen Spirit” being a canonical example). But the style here is more quietQUIETquiet. It’s cleanly shot and well-directed, but you still need to listen hard to gain any insight on the Pixies…same as ever, in other words.

Mid-tour, we see Lowery going on a bizarre rant in Kim’s dressing room. Soon after, the band falls apart during “Something Against You”, with Lowery apparently having no idea what song he’s playing. He claims that he couldn’t hear the stage monitors, but Santiago believes he was on drugs. Kim and her sister are visibly having trouble themselves, with terse conversations about whether they can stay dry during a nine-day stopover in NYC.

There are very few scenes of the Pixies interacting with each other, and it always has a weird vibe. Their chemistry is awkward and full of fake laughter. They’re trying to be friends, but there was a reason this band stopped working out in 1993, and probably most of those reasons still exist. We wonder if they’d even want to be in the same room if the checks stopped clearing.

There are also happy times. Moments when the band clicks on stage. Scenes of Santiago and Francis hanging out with their families. The reactions of fans is incredible to behold – however cynical the Pixies reunion might seem – the elation it produced was real. The documentary ends with a Kim Deal superfan being inspired to pick up the bass guitar herself. The Pixies are dark matter, but there’s light matter in the universe, too.

But the stakes in this reunion seem so low. The Pixies are selling out shows…but they’re playing clubs and theaters, not arenas. Fans swarm them for autographs…but it’s ten or twenty people, max. The Pixies weren’t that big in the 80s and they’re no bigger now, even after their innovations have percolated throughout all of mainstream rock. These guys are scrapping hard, not to regain a seat on rock’s throne, but to obtain a nine-to-five income. But is there anything more quintessentially alt-rock?