Randy Newman - Ambivalence and Irony

September 25, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Randy Newman has perfect pitch. Maybe not for musical tones (or maybe he does, I have no idea) but cultural and political ones. He sings most of his songs in character, and the characters are a variety of unreliable narrators who embody different strands of American culture.

“Political Science,” written at least 35 years ago, still sounds like the voice of American foreign policy based on American exceptionalism – a belief in our inherent goodness and innocence, a disregard for the decent opinions of other countries, and a readiness to use violence on those who disagree.

No one likes us-I don't know why
We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try
But all around, even our old friends put us down
Let's drop the big one and see what happens

We give them money-but are they grateful?
No, they're spiteful and they're hateful
They don't respect us-so let's surprise them
We'll drop the big one and pulverize them.

It’s a more closely reasoned version of John McCain’s “Bomb, bomb Iran.”

Most of Newman’s characters are not people like us or like him. But he makes us have some sympathy with them despite their distasteful ideas, even the anti-Semitic, anti-elitist, racist voice of “Rednecks.”* Instead of “Ebony and Ivory,” it’s Ambivalence and Irony.

The ambivalence haunts even the love songs, like “Marie,” which seems merely beautiful until you listen to the lyrics and realize that this guy is a cad.

And I'm weak and I'm lazy
And I've hurt you so
And I don't listen to a word you say
When you're in trouble I just turn away

And yet, his feeling is real.

In “The World Isn’t Fair,” the narrator drops his child off at an exclusive school and imagines a conversation with Marx

All the young mommies were there,
Karl, you never have seen such a glorious sight
as these beautiful women arrayed for the night
just like countesses, empresses, movie stars and queens
And they'd come there with men much like me –
Froggish men, unpleasant to see

It’s like Harold Brodkey’s line, “To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die.”


I just saw Newman in concert at Carnegie Hall, so I could go on. But I realize this might not be what younger, blogger-rockers are looking for. (“My demographic,” Newman told the audience, “is white males, fifty-two to fifty-five.”) You can see Newman doing most of the songs he did at Carnegie Hall by going to YouTube and searching for the concert he did in Stuttgart two years ago. But to hear his more recent political song, “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” catch him at the MacWorld expo.

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* “Rednecks” is another song from the 70s that could have been written last week (except maybe for the refrain line about “keepin’ the niggers down.” Even rednecks don’t speak that explicitly today).

Just Coincidence, Right

September 24, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Clinton surplus inherited by Bush:
$300 billion

Bush deficit:
$400 billion

Amount Henry Paulson says he needs to bail out the US economy:
$700 billion

Bear With Us

September 23, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

In my post a few weeks back about stuff kids bring to college, I had a photo of a teddy bear lying atop a pile of belongings that included pink bed linens. Obviously, it belonged to a girl. (There was a purse in the picture, but even without it. . . .)

A couple of days later, Lisa at Sociological Images had a post reminding us that pink was once the color for boys. She linked to an article by Ben Goldacre in the Guardian.

The Sunday Sentinel in 1914 told American mothers: “If you like the colour note on the little one's garments, use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention.”

Goldacre uses this bit of history to debunk the claim recently made by evolutionary psychologists that girls’ preference for pink was an outcome of evolution.

But what about the teddy bear? Isn’t there something feminine, a maternal instinct perhaps, that leads girls to keep these soft, childhood objects? It is only girls, right?

Wait, now I remember seeing NYC sanitation trucks with a teddy bear mounted on the grill like a bowsprit mermaid. And Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited who takes his bear Aloysius with him to Oxford.

Now there’s a DVD* about a Teddy bear snapshot exhibition by Canadian Ydessa Hendeles – thousands of photos from the early twentieth century of people posing with their bears. And it’s not just girls.

*The DVD is of a documentary film by Agnès Varda, who interviews the visitors to the exhibit.

Hat tip to Magda

Happy Blogday to Me

September 20, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

This blog is two years old today so I’m allowing myself one day of what Chris Uggen calls “self-indulgery.” In nearly every other post, I’ve tried to follow the rules for this blog that I started out with:

• Posts would be something our undergraduates could read and would want to read.
• Posts would have some sociological content, however tangential.

In other ways, the blog has turned out differently from what I first expected.

• I set it up as a department blog, hence the name, but it quickly became a solo effort.
• I thought that the readership would be mostly our undergraduates, but few, if any, of them read it.
• I originally thought of posts as something like op-ed pieces – 700-800 words weaving together two or three related strands of thought. Now, I try to keep posts shorter, with more graphics, and with only one idea per post.

I never imagined that I’d wind up writing 300+ posts – three a week for two years. At first, I thought I might manage one or maybe two posts a week for at the most two months. That’s why I thought it would have to be a group blog. There were times times when I felt I had absolutely nothing left to say. But then something would spark my interest, and ideas for posts would pop out of every corner. I have a file of unused ideas, most of them past their sell-by date.

The rewards of blogging, at least for me, are two: First, as a friend put it, blogging is instant gratification. The turnaround time between writing and publication is zero. You get an idea or take an interesting photo or find some data. You write it up, you click, and it’s out there. Second, blogging has allowed me to make some contact, however minimal, with other bloggers, and they are a smart, funny, lively, and friendly bunch.

My main disappointment is that the readership is small, and the comments sparse (I was encouraged by Andrewska’s kind words on his blog). I feel like a comedian in a radio studio telling a joke and having no idea if anyone out there laughed or even if anyone was listening. If I do shut down the blog – and I have often thought I might – that will probably be the reason why.

I have now gone back and read through the posts, and I was surprised to find that I liked most of them. The list below is not necessarily the ten best. They’re just ten that for different idiosyncratic reasons I’m fond of.

The Pursuit of Bada Bing, April 13, 2007
I, You, We, May 14, 2008
The Institutionalization of Hysteria, September 29, 2007
Contributions and Attributions, April 18, 2007
Mendacity, October 27, 2006
Cheating the Executioner, November 5, 2006,
A Fine and Public Place, November 8, 2007
Sweat Equity and Magical Thinking, December 3, 2007
Moral Nostalgia and the Myth of the Authoritarian Past, February 27, 2007
Closed for vacation? May 15, 2007,