Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 906

A Decade Later, Elliott Smith's Death Still Hurts

Paying meaningful tribute to Elliott Smith is a tricky thing: his music is so quietly devastating, so pure in its sadness, that expressing the weight of his loss in words feels almost superfluous. If you want to know who the Portland songwriter really was, you can skim the handful of books and dozens of magazine profiles that have been published about him — or you can listen to "2:45" over and over until everything else sounds impossibly insincere. Who's to say which is the better glimpse?

That, at any rate, is the challenge facing the music world today. Ten years ago to the day, Smith collapsed in his Los Angeles home with two stab wounds to the chest — possibly self-inflicted, but let's not get into that debate here — and the world lost one of the most treasured songwriters to have emerged in the nineties. In an era where faceless grunge imitators and chest-beating nü-metal ruled the radio, Smith's songs emphasized vulnerability and heartbreak. But posthumously, he has become the closest thing the indie generation has to a Kurt Cobain: a tremendous talent whose tragic, untimely end will likely always threaten to overshadow the songs themselves. 

Here's a quick glimpse at how the Internet — and Smith's contemporaries — are paying tribute. 

Stories from the people who knew him best

For breadth and authority alone, it's touch to top Jayson Greene's oral history of Smith's career for Pitchfork. Greene spoke to 18 of Smith's closest friends and collaborators, including the Flaming Lips' Steven Drozd and Sebadoh's Lou Barlow, to piece together the story of the artist's short career. (Many others refuse to talk publicly, having been burned before.) It becomes clear that the trauma of his death is still raw: one friend, Dorien Garry, admits that it's painful when Smith's songs play in coffee shops, while Flaming Lips manager Scott Booker says that Either/Or is one of his top 10 favorite records, but he "can’t listen to it anymore, it’s too hard."

Given the brevity of Smith's career, there's also the speculation about what he could have accomplished had he lived: "He would be on his own right now," says producer Rob Schnapf. "He’d be like Wilco, he’d be able to do whatever he wants. He wouldn’t need the business."

Tributes from fellow artists

Stereogum has managed to cobble together tributes from a handful of Smith's contemporaries. It's a reminder of what should be obvious: you don't have to have known Smith personally to have been intensely affected by his music, or devastated by his demise. Sharing a vivid memory of listening to Either/Or with an ex-boyfriend, Speedy Ortiz's Sadie Dupuis reveals that the artist's death "was the first and only time I cried over the loss of someone I didn’t know personally." Here We Go Magic's Luke Temple, meanwhile, discusses how Smith's incorporation of jazz harmonies inspired him, while pianist Christopher O'Riley discusses performing Smith's songs and introducing him as "the most important American songwriter since Gershwin."

Spin's look back

Just over a year after Smith's death, Spin published a closely detailed glimpse at the last several years of his life. That piece, by Liam Gowing, has been made available online for the first time today. Unsurprisingly, it's not always an easy read: it contains details of the artist's battles with heroin and troubled onstage episodes at the start of the millennium, addresses the flashbacks Smith had to memories of being sexually molested by his stepfather, and touches on widely shared allegations that Smith's death was, in fact, a murder and not a suicide.

But it also incorporates sweet glimpses of Smith's personality, including this recollection from a fellow heroin addict and musician:

"Elliott told me: 'The people who try to intervene, they're good people who genuinely care about you. But they don't know what you're going through. Do what you need to do.' We talked for a long time that night about songwriting and art and, finally, depression. I told him that I had it pretty bad and was thinking about killing myself. He looked me in the eye and just said one word: 'Don't.'"

The tribute concert

If you're in Brooklyn tonight and don't mind navigating last-minute Craigslist ticket-finding drama, you can see Smith's songs performed live by such talents as Cat Power, DIIV's Zachary Cole Smith, Why?'s Yoni Wolf, and Speedy Ortiz's Sadie Dupuis, some of whom penned memorials for the Stereogum round-up.

Surely it'll be a cathartic affair, but the many who won't be able to make it can still pay respects by listening to XO or Either/Or the way they've always sounded best: alone on a pair of headphones in a bedroom at night.

Top photo by llaurens via Wikimedia Commons.

       

Netflix's Original Content Strategy Is Paying Off

What a difference a year — and original programming — makes. Netflix's stock rose 10 percent following its better-than-expected third quarter earnings report, which saw the service adding about 1.3 million domestic subscribers. But what really impressed investors was its bottom line: Netflix brought in $1.1 billion of revenue and earnings per share of $0.52. That is way up from then $0.13 per share Netflix reported for the third quarter of 2012, sending its stock down nearly 17 percent. 

As The Hollywood Reporter's Paul Bond pointed out, Netflix's stock has climbed 445 percent in a year, the same year that saw the launch of original programming like House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black. In his letter to shareholders, CEO Reed Hastings touted the success of Orange, which he said, along with the network's Emmy nominations, helped lift domestic additions. "Orange Is the New Black has been a tremendous success for us," Hastings wrote. "It will end the year as our most watched original series ever and, as with each of our other previously launched originals, enjoys an audience comparable with successful shows on cable and broadcast TV." Hastings announced that the company will double their investment in original content next year, which still represents "less than 10% of [their] overall global content expense."

Netflix's shares closed Monday at $354.99, up more than 6 percent, and then after the earnings report was released, rose nearly another 10 percent in after hours trading to nearly $390. How well they're doing even had Time's James Poniewozik declaring "Orange Is the New Green."

       

Americans Spent $36 Million on Negative 2014 Campaign Ads Last Month

Congratulations to the Democratic Party's House elections PAC, which was able to raise $8.4 million in the month of September, far more than the $5.3 million its Republican equivalent raised. But the real winners are the American people, who again invested heavily in the TV ads they'll complain about next fall.

Of the Democrats' take, $2 million came in the days after Sen. Ted Cruz's filibuster, according to The Hill. People were mad; people handed over credit card numbers. (That sentiment worked both ways.) Unsurprisingly, the Democrats' Senate campaign committee also bested the Republican total, pulling in $4.6 million to the Republicans' $3.4 million. And as The Washington Post notes, the Democratic National Committee at large raised $7.4 million to the Republicans' $7.1 million.

The total: $20.4 million for Democrats, $15.8 million for Republicans.

So what good are these numbers? Not a lot, really. Monthly fundraising is a relatively unimportant benchmark, used more as a sort of barometer of public opinion than anything, as it was last month. Yes, if one party had raised zero dollars and then had to sell everything it owns, there might be some long-standing effects, but incremental differentiation between party committees — much less three different party committees — doesn't do much at all. The distinction in fundraising totals between candidates is more significant, but even that isn't a great guide this far out from the election.

You know what the Democratic Party raised in October 2010? Sixteen million bucks — a total that overshadowed any previous month's after campaign finance reform. And then a month later the party got completely demolished as the Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives. And the Republicans did so even as they tried to hide massive debts. This is an unimportant metric!

What's really baffling is why Americans would spend $36.2 million on congressional elections at a time when the body has never been less popular. Obviously, a lot of that money, particularly on the Democratic side, was meant to help elect Democrats to replace the Republicans — but Ted Cruz isn't up for reelection until 2018. And the Republicans took in $5.3 million for races in a body it already controls. America, this is a bad investment. It is a bad investment because it rewards bad behavior. It is a bad investment because it turns the power of determining where to invest in races over to party committees. It is a bad investment because it is largely dissociated from victory.

Americans get the significance. Contributions to political parties are like party-line votes that you can take any time you want. "I was so mad at Ted Cruz," some guy in Los Gatos, California, probably said, "that I gave $100 to the DNC." It's a mark of displeasure for everyone that didn't get a call from Gallup.

But it is also sowing seeds that you'll see again next fall. Or, rather, that the guy in Los Gatos won't see. Some person in Colorado's Sixth Congressional District will see one more round of anti-Mike Coffman ads, thanks to the well-meaning but misguided efforts of Democrats around the rest of the country. It's not an elegant system, this democracy of ours, but at least it's quantifiable in dollar amounts.

       

'The Walking Dead' Does the 'Monster Mash'

We realize there's only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cellphone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why, every day, The Atlantic Wire highlights the videos that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention. Today:

The Walking Dead is back, and Halloween is coming. What better way to celebrate these wonderful things than to make the cast "sing" arguably the best Halloween song there is this side of "This Is Halloween": 

And there are apparently people who put up lights for Halloween. Bless these people. 

And these people too:

And, no, we're not sure how we feel about people who put eyebrows on their dog. We don't condone it, but if you are going to do it ... we may or may not watch a video of it: 

       

Prisoners Who Were Mistakenly Released Return to Jail

Joseph Jenkins and Charles Walker, two convicts who were mistakenly released from a Florida prison after submitting forged papers, were taken back to prison on Sunday after being caught the day previously. Both men were serving life sentences and authorities are assuming they had substantial help in their escape.

It is not yet clear exactly how the pair managed to prepare the document for their release, but they drew the attention of an assistant prosecutor after he discovered that they had been signed off on by employees who do not normally handle sentence reductions. Gerald Bailey, commissioner for the state's Department of Law Enforcement, speculated that someone was paid around $8000 to forge the papers, although he emphasized that it was merely a theory. Regardless, he stated that, "They had to have had help — and a lot of help — to get to where they were last night"—a motel in the Florida panhandle.

The judge whose signature was on the release authorization, Belvin Perry, believes that his John Hancock was found online. Judge Perry had nothing to do with either Jenkins's or Walker's case but did preside over the trial of Casey Anthony, which likely explains why his signature was readily available.

Bailey said that the papers for the pair of convicts "looked official." Since the mistake, court clerk must now verify sentence reductions with judges. 

       

Same-Sex Marriages Begin in New Jersey

As of midnight on October 21, same-sex marriage became legal in New Jersey, following a judge's ruling that not granting licenses to gay couples violated the state's equal protection laws. City halls across the state began officiating marriage ceremony's as of 12:01. This makes New Jersey the 14th state to allow same-sex couples to marry, despite Governor Chris Christie's objections.

Newark mayor, and Senator-elect, Corey Booker was on hand to perform ceremonies.

Poppin' champaign with @CoryBooker. Gay marriage in New Jersey. Tell it! pic.twitter.com/enp3TL2d7I

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) October 21, 2013

in one of his last acts before heading to the Senate, @CoryBooker conducts NJ's first same-sex marriage at 12:01am! pic.twitter.com/c8t10hDlc5

— James Allen (@JallenJ) October 21, 2013

The first wedding in Lambertville, NJ.

Jersey City

       

The U.S. Is Ready to Start Providing Military Aid to Pakistan Again

In advance of Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif's meeting with President Obama, State Department officials stated that they intend to give the country a $1.6 billion aid package. The aid package is to reinstate programs that have been stopped ever since relations between the two country's turned icy following multiple events including but not limited to the CIA's drone program and the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden's compound.

According to the Associated Press, the cutoff of aid to Pakistan was not precipitated by a single event, but officials point to increased cooperation from the country over the past couple of years. Those relations are supposed to be cultivated further on Wednesday, although the decision to provide aid was arrived upon before Sharif's visit was even on the schedule. 

From The New York Times:

Marie Harf, a State Department spokeswoman, said the renewed aid was “part of a long process of restarting security assistance cooperation after implementation was slowed during the bilateral challenges of 2011 and 2012.”

The relationship with Pakistan struck a low point in 2011, when a C.I.A. contractor shot and killed two Pakistanis in Lahore, the Navy SEAL team killed Bin Laden in Abbottabad and an errant American airstrike killed 24 Pakistani soldiers near the Afghan border.

"Bilateral challenges" indeed. Pakistan had at one point blocked all American and NATO supplies from entering the country, causing them to accumulate at the border. The stoppage of aid was restricted to military and security assistance, and civilian aid was not interrupted during that time. For the new fiscal year, Obama has requested an aid package of almost $1.2 billion, about a quarter of which is for security purposes.

Sharif met with Secretary of State John Kerry briefly on Sunday, but did not provide any statement on the matter.

       

Virginia Paper Endorses 'None of the Above' for Governor

The Virginia gubernatorial race has been, well, a bit awful this year. So awful, in fact that the Richmond Times-Dispatch went ahead and endorsed nobody for governor, for "the first time in modern Virginia." That snub will probably hit Republican candidate Ken Cuccinelli the hardest: The Times-Dispatch's editorial board leans Republican with its endorsements. But it's not exactly a victory for Democrat Terry McAuliffe or Libertarian Robert Sarvis, either. 

Virginia's attorney genera Cuccinelli, a conservative who is basically campaigning on a Religious Right, anti-gay platform, gets the harshest criticism from the paper: 

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli rigged the process for the Republican nomination when his minions changed the system from a primary to a convention, which they considered more likely to produce their desired outcome. The switch mocked Cuccinelli’s advertised fealty to first principles. The expression of raw power would have delighted sachems of Tammany Hall. Virginia does not welcome an in-your-face governor.

The editorial board goes on to refer to his stances on abortion and homosexuality as "objectionable."  Even though the board has previously supported bans on late-term abortions (they characterize their stance as against abortion "for any reason at any time"), the paper writes, "we remain troubled by Cuccinelli’s approach to personhood and to regulations on clinics." So, Cuccinelli, who is campaigning on a platform designed to attract social conservatives, can't even win the endorsement of a paper who is on his side of the line in the sand. The paper also dismisses his anti-gay views tersely: "Cuccinelli’s hostility to marriage equality offends. The rights applying to human beings by definition apply to homosexuals." 

The Republican is currently behind in the polls, and only falling further back thanks in part to the fall-out from the government shutdown, he admitted earlier this month. Cuccinelli's campaign was hampered early on by his connections to a donor mired in a scandal plaguing the current Virginia Governor, Bob McDonnell. The Dispatch, white writing that it "considerable merit in the libertarian ethos," dismisses Sarvis, the other conservative-leaning candidate for governor, as way too inexperienced for the job. 

Moving on to McAuliffe, the paper believes the Democratic candidate isn't a compelling choice either: he's the "default" nomination for the party. The Times-Dispatch blames his ascension to the nomination in part on "Republican gerrymandering" after the 2010 census, which cost Ward Armstrong, the Democrats' floor leader in the Virginia House, his seat: 

If Armstrong had not lost his seat, he would have rated as a formidable candidate for governor. The Times-Dispatch would have endorsed him over Cuccinelli; we would have endorsed Republican Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling over McAuliffe.

McAuliffe, it should be noted, isn't hurting for endorsements: Hillary Clinton threw her weight behind the candidate this week. He also has the endorsement of the Washington Post. But the Post's endorsement wasn't exactly a rousing one: "staying home on Election Day is irresponsible," the editorial board argues, adding that Cuccinelli governorship would cause the commonwealth to "veer off into an ideological adventure."  Which is a gentle way of reminding readers that Cuccinelli has spent considerable time on the trail defending the state's anti-sodomy laws, while McAuliffe, at least, hasn't.

       

Dick Cheney Wrote a 'Pending' Resignation Letter in 2001

Dick Cheney's heart condition was so bad at the beginning of the Bush administration's time in office that the former Vice President drafted up his own resignation letter just under 70 days after taking office. That letter, Cheney explained in an interview to "60 Minutes" on Sunday, was something of a failsafe in case he was incapacitated — but not killed — by his disease. 

Dick Cheney: Basically, what I did was I resigned the vice presidency effective March 28, 2001.

Sanjay Gupta: So nearly, for your entire time as vice president, there was a letter of resignation sitting there.

Dick Cheney: Pending.

Sanjay Gupta: Pending.

Dick Cheney: It says, "In accordance with Section 20 of Title Three of the United States code, I, Richard B. Cheney, hereby resign the office of Vice President of the United States...

Sanjay Gupta: How did President Bush react when you told him about this?

Dick Cheney: A little surprised. But he thought it was a good idea.

That's just one of a handful of kind of bonkers details in the interview — the other big one was Cheney going all Homeland and getting a defibrillator disabled because he was worried terrorists would hack it and kill him. Cheney's heart troubles are so sustained that the former VP wrote the new book he's promoting, called Heart, with his cardiologist Dr. Jonathan Reiner. Cheney had his first heart attack at 37, and has had five total. Last year, he had a heart transplant at age 71.

Cheney also got a bit prickly during the "60 Minutes" interview when Sanjay Gupta asked him about a 2000 medical opinion by a famous heart doctor, who told the Bush campaign that Cheney had "normal cardiac function:" 

Sanjay Gupta: How were they able to say that you were able to do the job?

Dick Cheney: The way I look at it Sanjay is that first of all, I didn't seek the job. The president came to me and asked me to be his vice president. The party nominated me. The doctors that consulted on it reached a common conclusion and the people elected me. Now what basis do I override the decision making process? Do you want to have an offshoot where we come check with Sanjay Gupta and say, "Gee, is he up to the task?" That's not the way it works.

       

The White House Hopes a 'Tech Surge' Will Cure its Obamacare Exchange Site

The GOP isn't the only group finally giving some post-shutdown attention to the White House's troubled healthcare.gov exchange site. Tomorrow, President Obama will give a Rose Garden speech "directly address[ing] the technical problems" of the Affordable Care Act exchange site. According to White House officials, the President will characterize those issues as " "unacceptable." But we already know how the administration has promised to fix the site, as the president's political opponents roll out their post-shutdown efforts on the flawed roll-out of a key piece of Obamacare reform: with a "tech surge." 

The Department of Health and Human Services released a statement on Sunday outlining the issues and the first round of fixes to the site, which includes hiring "some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government" to jump in "surge" the agency's capacity to fix ongoing bugs. They'll have their work cut out for them. Healthcare.gov's issues are wide-ranging: there's capacity problem for starters, something the administration has squeezed into lemonade: the half a million submitted health insurance applications submitted to date, they say, "confirms that the American people are looking for quality, affordable health coverage, and want to find it online." The site had 19 million unique views since launching at the beginning of October. There are also deeper, back-end problems: for instance, the site was apparently sending the wrong information to some health insurance providers. By the numbers, the administration has just under a month to get the site back on track, or else it risks missing its enrollment target for this year.

So, why is President Obama giving a speech about a glitchy website in the Rose Garden? Because this isn't just any website, and this isn't just any botched launch. This is an Obamacare website. This is the president's signature reform, the very same one that many Republicans want to obliterate. House Republicans have already called for the resignation of Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, and planned a hearing for this week on the site straight out of the Benghazi playbook: "Implementation Failures: Didn't Know or Didn't Disclose?" will focus its investigation on whether there was an "internal cover-up" over the glitchy site, and how far up the chain of command that perceived cover-up goes. 

Although the GOP was kind of busy during the first weeks of the Healthcare.gov launch with its own problems, Obamacare opponents are hoping that the nation will establish a metonymic connection between the troubled site and the entire health care reform law. That, it turns out has been more of a mixed bag, as many efforts to make the law seem like the end of America haven't held up to scrutiny. Salon made a splash last week by fact checking six Hannity guests who claimed a variety of ills from the health care law, including drastically raised premiums and stalled business ventures. In reality, it turns out that Obamacare ills were not caused by the law at all: the guests could get lower premiums than their original plans on the exchanges (which they hadn't visited). The business owner claiming his company had stalled because of Obamacare requirements had far too few employees for any part of the reform law to apply. This isn't the first time an Obamacare horror story has turned out to be less than it seems. 

There have been some not-made-up issues beyond the website, however: despite a comment by President Obama indicating otherwise, thousands of Americans have been told this year that they can't keep their current individual health insurance plans. Many of those individuals will be able to buy comparable or cheaper plans from their providers or on the exchange, but the seeming contradiction has proved frustrating. Speaking of confusion, in 17 states, conservative lawmakers have dropped as many roadblocks in possible in the path of the administration's initiative to hire "navigators" to help Americans sign up for health insurance. And in states where (mostly) Republican governors have refused to expand Medicaid, millions of impoverished Americans who make to little to qualify for a subsidy have been completely left out of the health care reform law's plan to provide affordable coverage.