Some of you have probably seen PostSecret, where people create a piece of postcard art about their secrets and mail it in to be posted. In trying to figure out which parts of one image had been altered by its creator and which hadn’t, I found these disturbing ads:

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They’re actually even more disturbing when displayed smaller because the faces are blurrier. I realize schizophrenia is pretty awful, and that these ads are (probably?) meant to market to psychiatrists– the face-melting guy would be a lot scarier on the side of a bus than in a professional journal. But still.

(The ad campaign won an award for best European advertising in the “Health & Beauty” category.)

The thing I find so entrancing about Nagel’s books on philosophy is the way he will seem to say something obvious over and over again until suddenly he arrives at a strong and interesting conclusion that requires having carefully rung the changes on what supports it. But maybe philosophers are just like that.

Nagel has a lot to say about balancing the personal perspective (which is to say, the things that I not only want, but want because I am ME and not someone else who, regardless of how much concern or loathing they might have for me personally, does not taste food as the immediate consequence of my putting it in my mouth, etc.) with the impersonal perspective in which everyone has value. Pessimistically, he doesn’t think there IS an acceptable balance available to world society right now– that any attempt to balance the liberty of the well-off with the welfare of the horribly unprivileged will either place too much of a burden on the fortunate or leave too many other people destitute beyond what decency permits, or both.

(This isn’t given as an argument for complacency; he doesn’t think the status quo is even close to acceptable. It’s a reason against complacency, or at least against the kind of complacency that comes from assuming that if a conflict of interests has no perfect solution, it is basically a thumb-wrestling match and vain to claim one can apply ethical principles to.)

Anyway, I can’t recommend Nagel highly enough, even if I also can’t summarize him very well; outside of this book, I can’t think of anything I’ve read about politics, citizenship and ethics recently that wasn’t either paralyzingly depressing, or optimistic in a way that evaporated as soon as I put the book down.

One interesting point he makes is in the discussion of tolerance. The argument often comes up– and in this form it sounds stupid, but this basic idea underlies a lot of, unfortunately, very serious political discussion– that “hey, man, your quote-unquote tolerance is really just INtolerance of what you call intolerance, so what do you think of that?” Nagel’s response is that disagreements about what is good for individuals are not the same as disagreements about what conditions it is good for individuals to make their life choices in. If tolerance for sexual freedom and opposition to homosexuality are being put on the same level, then the political positions we should compare are government discrimination against same-sex couples and active government suppression of any group that discourages homosexuality– both of which those of us who favor ‘tolerance’ would probably revile, regardless of which scenario was more pleasant for us personally or even for the country as a whole. It’s telling, I think, that some social conservatives don’t seem to understand the difference between declining to suppress something and actively recruiting people for that thing; it’s the only way that it actually makes sense to paint tolerance and intolerance as just two competitors in the same horse race. Because the two aren’t parallel, the “tolerance is just INtolerance” line carries no more weight than the argument that “personal freedom” is just a code word for “bad nutrition”; yeah, okay, the lack of government-mandated diets may result in worse nutrition than the alternative, but this isn’t any response to larger claims about why personal freedom is good, and it certainly doesn’t make people with libertarian objections to mass force-feeding of Americans into hypocrites, even if you play word games so that “freedom” and “nutrition” somehow sound similar.

Native Tongue - “Blame It On Gravity” (mp3)

I was sure I had posted this, but I can’t find it. If I did, somebody remind me when it was.

I know nothing about this band, though I assume they were from Boston based on the Mission Of Burma influence and the connection to Modern Method Records (home of This Is Boston Not LA). Actually, it’s not fair to say this song sounds like Burma. What it sounds like is Clint Conley: wiry, melodic, and aghast at hidden terrors. But it sounds like the Comsat Angels playing one of Conley’s songs.

Shoestrings - “Timeline” (mp3)

I found the line in High Fidelity about whether people listen to sad songs because they have sad lives or vice versa kind of fishy because the songs that seem saddest to me in some kind of adult way– the sort of thing someone could argue I might subconsciously emulate, as opposed to songs about being rejected at the prom or whatever– keep receding into the distance as I age. I’m rapidly approaching the age at which Ben Watt and Tracy Thorn wrote Walking Wounded and yet when I hear those songs, the characters still sound a decade and a half older than me, just like they did in 1996.

Maybe I just need patience, though, because I think, for example, that I’ve finally caught up to this song. I’m so used to outgrowing music that I almost didn’t notice I’d grown IN to “Timeline”. The song is almost more sad than its lyrics can convey, as though the singers are actually looking back separately, much later, but unwilling to stop thinking of the breakup as something imminent that could be fixed with the right words.

I still don’t see what’s so special about Banhart (or rather, what’s so special about what he’s doing– I agree he’s the best Devendra Banhart there is), but I liked this much more than I expected to. The gleaming fake-retro production provides more contrast with his voice than the answering-machine style he started out in. And the

The Jen Spingla Band - “Smaller”

I heard of Jen Spingla through a friend of mine (who I think was dating her, even), which led to my seeing her band play in a ski lodge one night. As rock venues of my experience go, ski lodges rank well below basements (Mirah, The Blow), a train station (Flin Flon, True Love Always, Aden), a college gymnasium foyer (The Need), a bowling alley (too many to list) and probably several other things I’m forgetting. Even so, I enjoyed the concert. Finding this CD in a clearance bin years later still felt weird, though, like I hadn’t sufficiently thought of the band as actually existing until then.

I now wish I’d heard it while I was still in touch with our mutual friend, because some of the music is excellent. I can’t put my finger on why– interesting vocal rhythms, maybe?– but it’s rare that a straightforward rock singer/songwriter album (the kind of thing that I can never understand why people refer to as ‘folk’, but they do) has seemed so distinctive after only one listen. Reminds me of Sarah Harmer’s old band, Weeping Tile.

Rocketship - “I Love You The Way I Used To Do” (mp3)

Despite a title that’s probably a craven (and failed) attempt to be British, Rocketship are otherwise excellent mimics, pulling in many different bits of the ’sophisticated’ indiepop sound circa 1995. Cute, and too energetic to be cloying.

Red House Painters - “New Jersey” (mp3)

The thing about depressing songs is that after it’s been gray and rainy for several days, you can slip into them without even being sad. The Red House Painters have the most varied take on unremitting melancholy that I can think of; the trick, I suspect, is that if you play slow enough your music can build up a lot of energy with dynamics and still not seem anything but sad. That near-military drum that comes in for a few notes every two measures gives “New Jersey” a stern, resolute feel, even though everything about Mark Kozelek’s voice tells us that he’s much more used to giving up.

[Red House Painters have two self-titled albums, among others; this version of "New Jersey" is from the one with the bridge on the front. I feel like I should mention that not only is my affection for this song not from being depressed, it's also not related to any of the women I've dated that grew up in New Jersey, even though (now that I think about it) more than one of them dyed her hair red.]

The Loud Family - “Tearjerkin’” (mp3)

I’m not dead, just resting. This song came up in conversation the other night, reminding me that I had meant to post it…

The dB’s were always a musician’s band. Consider this: I bought my first dB’s record in high school because They Might Be Giants name-dropped them so affectionately. I didn’t ‘get’ it. Thirteen years later, one of my favorite bands (that would be the Loud Family) released a DVD featuring their performance of a dB’s song (that would be this), provoking me to check out the band a second, more successful time.