Monday Medley

What we read while reconnecting with our Buddhist roots…

• The Tea Party has been a hot topic of late, and not just at NPI. David Barstow of The New York Times wrote an in-depth piece on the group, as did Ben McGrath at The New Yorker. George Will is dubious of populism’s advantages to the Republican Party, and Kurt Andersen of New York thinks our democracy is too democratic. But populism and the Tea Party seem to be energizing the conservative movement, and motivating Sarah Palin to keep saying stupid things, and exploiting her retarded son for publicity.

• Speaking of fucking idiots who some people inexplicably trust as some kind of authority, Donald Trump doesn’t think global warming is real. Since, you know, it snowed a lot recently. Because that kind of logic is airtight. Political cartoonists have also harvested this hilariously ironic gold mine. A lot.

• Tim swears he wrote his ode to curling long before Dan Wetzel and Rick Reilly did their own. And that he hasn’t spent his entire weekend honing his strategy and touch curling online. (By the way, Reilly’s piece is notable for his characteristically condescending portrait of the typical American sports fan via an italicized interlocutor. Nobody disrespects the device of interlocutor as frequently and as frustratingly as Richard Reilly.)

• If you want serious Winter Olympic reporting, you have to turn to Deadspin, where Tommy Craggs rightfully took the International Luge Federation, Canadian Luge Association, and IOC to task for not doing what was necessary to prevent the death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili. But don’t worry, it’s not like even the experienced, former-medal-winning lugers think the track is still dangerous or anything.

• One grassroots movement to be happy about, though, was the apparently successful movement to prevent EMI from selling Abbey Road Studios.

• Chris Jones’s profile of Roger Ebert has rightfully been getting a lot of positive coverage. Here is Roger Ebert himself on the piece. If Jones’s name sounds familiar, it’s probably because either A. it’s a really common name or B. you remember hearing how he won the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing last year with his epic piece, “The Things That Carried Him.”

• NPI favorite Joe Posnanski writes a very compelling piece on why Frank Thomas is a no-questions-asked first ballot Hall of Famer. His reaction to Tiger Woods’ apology, meanwhile, was only compelling–not very.

Meet (and Rank) the Beatles’ Albums, Part 2: The Top Five

5) Rubber Soul, 1965

John S (3): Rubber Soul is the band’s first truly great album; it features the beginning of the band’s more sophisticated songwriting (“You Won’t See Me,” for example, was the longest song the band had recorded to that point, coming it at a whopping 3:22), both in terms of lyrical depth and musical arrangements, and them finally finding the right equilibrium of their wide-ranging sensibilities. The first four songs (“Drive My Car,” “Norwegian Wood,” “You Won’t See Me,” and “Nowhere Man”) may constitute the best balance of Lennon and McCartney’s different styles in The Beatles’ entire oeuvre—at least until the “Penny Lane”/“Strawberry Fields Forever” double A-side. Both of Harrison’s songs, “Think For Yourself” and “If I Needed Someone” are great, and even the token Ringo song (“What Goes On”) is an exciting stylistic change of pace (though Josh disagrees). The album’s finale, “Run For Your Life,” is maybe the most underrated song in the Beatles’ canon. Also, the vocals at the end of “In My Life” are beautiful.

Josh (7): This is my most controversial rank and—frankly—I feel a bit badly about it. I have a bias towards later albums largely because I love the Beatles’ more psychedelic work: that’s why I ranked Magical Mystery Tour higher in my own rankings. There is no doubt that this was a huge leap for the Beatles, shifting from a more lighthearted pop style in Help! to a more sophisticated style in Rubber Soul. But I think Side Two is a bit weak. With the exceptions of “In My Life” and “I’m Looking Through You,” all of the side two songs are mediocre (once again, by Beatles’ standards) at best, bad at worst (“What Goes On” comes to mind). Side One is very good though: “Think For Yourself” is the most underrated George Harrison song and the harmonies in “Nowhere Man” are beautiful. But, the fact that it’s fairly brief and contains a number of subpar songs gives Rubber Soul its relatively low rank.