Bryan Joiner

My iTunes has a long and storied history of being erased through breakage, human error and theft.* There aren’t many albums on there right now. There are few enough that I can count them: 79. More than I thought, but fewer than there would be if not for the crises listed above. We’d be in the 200-300 range, and I’m not even a big “music guy.” I’m an aspiring one, however, because I’ve realized how much I really like music in the month I’ve gone without cable. Sort of like having a normal sense of smell (mine is pretty shitty, which isn’t all that bad in the city, most or the time) might change how I feel toward nearly everything in my life, I just play the hand I’m dealt. Without garbage television cards to play, I’m leaning heavily on my iTunes account, especially after I got that message from Time Warner for illegally downloading torrents that said they were after me, basically. Jerks! Get a life.

* There was no theft

Any top five albums list of any time is an excuse to talk about things that you like in a context that doesn’t seem self-serving but really is, and this one is no different. In no particular order:

1) Beck, Sea Change

I lied. There is an order. I’m listening to this album now and it inspired me to write this post. I have a long-ish history with this album that’s about half as long as the album’s actual history. An ex-girlfriend is involved, but this album has survived the emotional fallout. Recently another player on my basketball team put this on during our maddening drive home (they close a bunch of shit on the Brooklyn Bridge toward Manhattan after 11 now, leading to gridlock’d chaos, more or less) and nothing seemed weird about it, because it’s self-evidently awesome.

2) Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain

The last computer explosion spared Sketches but ate Kind of Blue, so that decision was made for me.

3) Radiohead, In Rainbows

Ask me tomorrow and it could be OK Computer. Ask me the next day and it could be Kid A. Ask me the day after that and it could be Hail to the Thief.

But more likely if you asked me tomorrow I’d just say, “In Rainbows, but ask me tomorrow and it could be OK Computer. Ask me the next day and it could be Kid A. Ask me the day after that and it could be Hail to the Thief.”

4) Stereolab, Emperor Tomato Ketchup

I don’t think I was a small-town rube who only listened to pop music when I got to college in Chicago—I still think I’m a small-town rube who only listens to pop music, even if it’s not true. It was sure true back in 1996, though. This album was and remains the album that showed me there was Something More out there, and it has not stopped being awesome.

5) Nas, Illmatic

I tried to come up with some explanation as to why I was picking Kanye (My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy) above this that involved “All the Lights” and desert-island sunsets, but it was horseshit. This is probably the album I’ve listened to more times than any other in my life, which I’m just realizing now.

But Bryan there are no Beatles albums on your list

That’s true, but they’re all in my brain. I realized this week that I hadn’t listened to Sgt. Pepper in probably five years, and that’s a conservative estimate. There were two summers growing up where I listened to nothing but the Beatles. And when I say nothing, I mean nothing. My best friend, brother and I all worked at the same place and no matter who drove there, we played Beatles tapes. I went from not knowing a Beatles song from a piece of bark to knowing everything about them in two summers. I loved Sgt. Pepper then, but it wouldn’t be my favorite now. Abbey Road is probably my favorite, which is unfortunate only because it believes I think they were still getting better when it all fell apart, and yeah, the tension reached a breaking point, but still.

There had to be some tough cuts

Well as this list is entirely hypothetical, I wouldn’t call them “tough.” To that end, no one has really ever explained how we’re going to play these albums on this island. It was tough to cut Siamese Dream, but I have a habit of not listening to it after the first six songs anyway.

You are entitled to burn an EP of 5 songs from the other ones

Really?

Yes. Go.

Okay:

1. Let Down, Radiohead

2. Rebellion (Lies), Arcade Fire

3. 3030, Deltron

4. Television Rules the Nation/Crescendolls, Daft Punk

5. My Favorite Things, John Coltrane

Is this more or less capricious than the albums list?

Far more.

How are you feeling about the albums list?

Uh…

Spit it out

I might swap out Beck for the Avalanches’s Since I Left You.

That album is awesome

Yes it is.

What keeps planes in the air? Yeah, yeah, hydraulics, geometry, combustion and speed. That’s not what I mean.

What I mean is: Why do we fly?

That question has long had two answers: Business or pleasure. Apparently they used to ask which it was at ticket counters, and they still ask it at Customs. The question is really: “What in God’s name is so important that you need to leave God’s Green Earth for a few hours to get there?”

Airlines don’t really make money, and when they do it’s on the backs of wealthy corporations that pay egregious sums for last-minute and first-class seats that effectively subsidize the entire enterprise. Often it’s not the corporations themselves that do this subsidizing, but the people who work there who are otherwise egregiously compensated and think flying coach class is for rodents, and they buy overpriced seats, thereby subsidizing the whole enterprise.

The intersection of all of these factors comes in last-minute travel and it’s nowhere more stark than it is when traveling for the death of a loved one, where airlines offer a “bereavement fare” to those who show up with a death certificate.

THINK about this for a second. I think it tells us everything we need to know about airlines.

An airline will cut your fare by hundreds of dollars if you can prove that one of your loved ones died. They will do this because air travel has become as much a part of our culture as grieving. If you have decided to move away from your loved ones, you are allowed to go see them one final time. We have decided that this is fair for everyone. This is the bargain we have struck.

I will not get into the wisdom of mourning, except to say that it is such a regular occurrence in human affairs that there must be a value to it that goes beyond money. Except, in the cases where a bereavement fare is applied for and accepted, we have an exact number for how much, to one company and industry, the mourning of a death was worth.

In the months after September 11, I had a conversation with a friend who was angry at people who were angry at new flying regulations. “No one needs to fly,” he said, correctly. Of course, no one needs an iPad or Gatorade or even to brush their teeth, either. The difference is that people will subject themselves to specific searches and delays and the incredibly slight chance of certain, immediate death to fly, which I imagine they would not do to obtain Gatorade, unless they were thirsty to a degree few have experienced.

The hollering about these delays is nonsense. Air travel is the most efficient way to get from, say, New York to Charlotte, but that does not mean air travel is an efficient system. It is, in fact, such a grossly inefficient system that it relies heavily on subsidies and union labor and price gouging of AmEx black holders that the cognitive dissonance between the reality on the ground (so to speak) and the average person’s idea that flying should be simpler and easier is so vast as to be almost indescribable.

I have a good number of friends and one brother who are obsessed with air travel—its inherent romanticism and Byzantine framework are, for them, the stuff that studying makes life worth living. One will holler out the carrier name for each airline that sends a plane over the Mets’ home ballpark, usually before the rest of us have even noticed the plane; another wrote a full New York Times column on how to abuse the airlines’ nonsensical fee structure; another has kept every ticket stub from flight he has taken, a pile that was larger than the size of a fist when I last saw it seven full years ago (note: I used to do this with sports tickets, but eventually stopped; my friend laughs at me); my brother has merely devoted his life to trying to get a job at an airline, going to engineering school and wading his way through various supply-chain management jobs until an opportunity arises at an airline and he boards, ultimate destination unknown.

It’s here I wonder if the purpose of flying hasn’t been misunderstood from the very beginning, and whether airlines should be set up like movie theaters, where the attraction (being the air) is the draw, and not as a utility to get us from one place to another. (As a movie does with time and emotions.) But—no. Hooters Air can attest to this. For 99.9 percent of the people who do it, flying is a void into which we shove Stieg Larssen books and airplane food. It is the absence of an experience, because the only experience we imagine we can really have on an airplane is crashing.

Which gets to another point: When flying, you cede all control to the airline system both on a macro (getting to the airport, having your goods X-rayed, being delayed by a storm system thousands of miles away) and micro (pilots and flight crew, storms hundreds of miles away, people sitting next to you) level. But in every case, you’ve almost always ceded control to something larger than air travel, be it business, emotion or wanderlust. The last being a lack of control that looks like a freedom right until you realize that the truly open mind could be enlightened by the next town over.

But that truly enlightened mind is as much an ideal fiction as the fiction that airlines are run efficiently. Sometimes we really feel like we need to go far, far away as fast as possible—a view that is encouraged by enlightened travel writers, who encourage us to move without guidebooks in foreign places because travel is the best way to broaden the human soul. What would these writers do without air travel? What would any of us do? If airplanes suddenly vanished from the world tomorrow (on the ground, empty), would it change our concept of what it means to be human? And another thought experiment: What if this was just temporary, and we decided to start “airlines” as we knew them from scratch, as a business and system that made sense? What would we end up with?

It’s my thought that we might end up with something slightly more efficient in the short-term, but we’d end up with the same problems in the long-term. The airplane is an anachronism, kept afloat by nothing more than our feelings, which, more predictably than anything in history, twist logic to their own ends. The entire air travel system is a testament to our inability to balance our needs and our wants with any sort of economy. Any person’s lack of economy is one thing, but add up the change from hundreds of millions of people and it can support a perpetually failing business in the sky that always manages to stay airborne. If you look at a photograph of a plane, you have to know how it works to understand why it doesn’t fall toward the ground. It stays in the air not by hydraulics, geometry, combustion and speed but by love, heartbreak, dreams and fears.

I had come home from work and missed my stop because of the adrenaline rush of getting an obscenely high score in Fruit Ninja, turned around, got my computer and went straight to the Banh Mi place, which raised its prices and was playing salsa music.

•••

I remember what it was like to spend 10 hours in a retail store trying to push the hands around the clock with your mind.

•••

I have not been working in any sort of customer service, where I am required to be nice and polite to people for their ends and those of my bosses. You learn about people pretty efficiently this way. Now I’m nice and polite to serve my own ends because unlike at a store where people are trying to find what they want, I’m trying to coax things out of them that they often don’t want to say. Sometimes they want to, sure, but not as often as I’d like. In the end I get my information, but in the exchange they end up learning something about me.

•••

Most journalists aren’t really trying to save the world, but are trying to live in it.

•••

The world is a nice place where people give you club soda for free if you just show up to ask for it.

This is largely the fault of sabermetrics. Although the tool was designed to deal with the independent interactions of pitchers and batters, it’s now being widely applied to team sports, such as football and basketball. The goal of these new equations is to parse the complexity of people playing together, finding ways to measure quarterbacks while disregarding the quality of their offensive line, or assessing a point guard while discounting the poor shooting of his teammates. The underlying assumption is that a team is just the sum of its players, and that the real world works a lot like a fantasy league.

No, Jonah Lehrer. That is not the underlying assumption behind sabermetrics. The underlying assumption behind sabermetrics is that things can always be done better, and finding a way to measure things is a good way to help us do things better. But there’s a reason teams are not run by computers, and it’s that general managers are still valuable for the reasons you cite. A team without statistics would do just as poorly as a team that used them exclusively, and your comparison to a stock market study (where people without analyzed the stock market better than those with too much data) doesn’t hold water. The stock market is a confidence game. Sports are results-based.

The problem is with not the numbers. The problem, as always, is about the people using them. There is no “math problem” in sports, the same way there is no problem with sports coverage on Grantland. Just people who know what they’re doing, and those who don’t.

Here.

Is an essay at the Tumblr site.

I wrote an essay about the Eiffel Tower stuff and memories of 9/11 at my Tumblr site.