Election Liveblogging

So tonight is, as both Rod Stewart and Neil Young would have it, the night. In 2008, I was yet a youngling, unversed in the ways of the Interweb; not yet having discovered RealClearPolitics, FiveThirtyEight or even my dearest friend The Dish. Now, however, I'm much more versed in the ways of these things, and as such I shall attempt to provide some tea-fuelled commentary, insofar as possible. I'll no doubt also be expounding some rather shorter opinions on Twitter, so do join me there too.

Note on bias: I support Obama. I make no secret of this fact, as I believe the four-year-old video at the top of this post makes reasonably clear. That said, I try to keep an open mind about data, so if the night seems to be swinging Romney's way, I won't try to spin that. I will, however, swear an awful lot more.

Note on resources: I'll probably be sticking with BBC 1 all night, but with constant reference to various blogs and online newspapers, linked as relevant. Bear this in mind for when I inevitably start making jokes about David Dimbleby.

I'm not big on predictions, and I do genuinely think this one could go either way. But what the hell: Obama, with circa 280 EV.

11.20 p.m.: Nothing whatsoever is happening. All the news networks are doing their utmost to cover this up. That said, The Daily Show appears to be on Comedy Central. The fact that I have Comedy Central on my telly is news to me; the surprises start early tonight.

11.35 p.m.: Just put on the kettle for the first time tonight, and gathered together a plate of liveblogging biscuits for the next couple of hours.
I'm pleasantly surprised by how refreshed I feel. I've been a bit out of it all day, but I seem rather awake now. I do seem to be making more spelling mistakes than usual, though, so expect incomprehensibility later on.

11.40 p.m.: I see RTÉ's coverage has started. As ever, I'll be missing Garret Fitzgerald by the end of the night. Also, BRUCE!

11.45 p.m.: All this time-filling highlights nonsense is rather pointless. It means nothing to anyone who hasn't been following the election closely, and anyone who has probably doesn't need reminding of it. Still, at least I got to see Clint arguing with an empty chair again.

11.50 p.m. (I'm rounding off, btw): I believe the BBC coverage has started in the UK proper, but I'm sitting here watching a documentary about Ian Rankin. Feckin' BBC NI.

11.55 p.m.: Well, hello, live feed! Oh, Dimbleby; how I've longed for your sonorous tones.
That said, bugger all is happening, obviously.

12.05 a.m.: First projected results give a 19:3 result to Romney. No real surprises there. Also, a BBC reporter just said "math", which annoyed me more than it really should.

12.10 a.m.: Good guide here from Nate Cohn (via The Dish) recommending caution when looking at early indications from swing states; for some time, Obama will probably appear to lead in Ohio, Romney in Virginia. Doesn't really mean much, but news outlets must fill space and time. As, indeed, must I.

12.20 a.m.: To be perfectly honest, I've only half been paying attention to the coverage so far. This is partly because nothing whatsoever has really happened yet, but largely because Soundgarden are on Later.

[Between these two entries, my aged laptop (which saw me through 2008) overheated, for the first, but almost certainly not the last, time tonight.]

12.25 a.m.: Interesting how gracious and bipartisan people from both sides seem to suddenly be tonight. One wonders how long it'll last. I'm rather enjoying the Big British Castle's habit of putting "REPUBLICAN" or "DEMOCRAT" in huge letters above the names of correspondents.

12.40 a.m.: Now the Castle is looking at campaign attack ads. Turns out they're very partisan. Who'd have guessed?

12.50 a.m.: Update: Nothing is still happening. Luckily, we've got lots of polls closing at the top of the hour, so we should get some results in soon. Projected count currently stands at 33:3, by the by.

12.53 a.m.: Ah, a BBC reporter standing amid a ludicrous Minority Report-style moving graphic. How I've missed this.

12.55 a.m.: Andrew Sullivan rounds up the predictions of various pundits. Worth referring to as we move through the night.

1.05 a.m.: More safe states coming in, mostly blue, bringing us to 56:40 to Obama. Dimbleby's sedateness rather suits this part of the night, I'm finding.

1.10 a.m.: If you want an alternative to me, Andrew's liveblogging (live on the Colbert Report, no less) too. In fairness, I stole the idea from him.
Incidentally, it seems Obama has both a victory and a concession speech; Romney
 only has a victory speech. Potential for hilarity there.

1.20 a.m.: Early indications from Ohio, Florida and, surprisingly, Virginia seem to favour Obama, but it doesn't necessarily mean much. My feeling, though, is that Obama has more momentum right now than anyone, including perhaps the Dems, realised.

1.40 a.m.: Every time Dimbleby says "But, Jeremy..." or "If we can go to you, Jeremy...", my head dips and I tune out the telly for a bit. Those insane BBC graphics are never worth as much as they must certainly cost.

1.45 a.m.: Curious discrepancy between RTÉ and BBC. Both have Obama on 78, but the former have Romney on 88, while the latter have him on 76. Really underlines the preliminary nature of everything we have at this point.

1.53 a.m.: Twitter is certainly ready to give this to Obama already. That said, there's a big bias in the people I follow. The few Romney supporters (*cough* Louise Mensch *cough*) seem oddly silent.

1.58 a.m.: One Pastor Steve Holt just showed up being interviewed on the Castle. As a big Arrested Development fan, I was inordinately amused.

2.07 a.m.: Both candidates into triple figures: 153:123 to Romney. Still no real surprises, but things are stepping up a bit; we're getting better ideas of some of the swing states, and it's increasingly looking good for Obama.

2.12 a.m.: My guess right now is that, if Romney can snatch a victory, it'll be so close that it'll be massively contested, and therefore not much of a victory. A dead heat isn't good for anyone.

2.20 a.m.: Looks like Obama has Pennsylvania, though the Beeb hasn't called it yet, for some reason. Oh, they called it literally as I finished typing that sentence. Vindicated.

2.28 a.m.: I'm going to go wild and revise my earlier prediction upwards. I'm thinking circa 290 for Obama now.

2.33 a.m.: CNN reporting that there are only 636 votes between the candidates in Florida, with 81% of boxes opened. All I can say is: FOR FECK'S SAKE, FLORIDA.

2.38 a.m.: Crucially at this point, as Marc Ambinder has pointed out on Twitter, Romney MUST win the incredibly close Florida, Virginia and Ohio. To all intents and purposes, he's lost the race if he fails to win one of those three.

2.46 a.m.: Romney advisor Nile Gardiner on the Castle describing himself as "cautiously optimistic"; visibly sweating. Hmmm...

2.54 a.m.: Expanding on my view of 40ish minutes ago, Romney's potential road to victory is now looking so tentative that such a victory would be fatally undermined; his authority would be challenged perhaps even more than Bush's was in 2000. The momentum is very clearly Obama's.

3.09 a.m.: I haven't mentioned anything beyond the presidential election, mainly because of the lack of surprises - House going Republican, Senate going Democrat. The likes of Akin and Mourdock getting thrown out on their backsides. Marriage equality seems to be doing well, which is encouraging.

3.30 a.m.: One of the big narratives of this election is the changing demographics of America - whites are now a minority of births. Black and Latino votes are, it seems, the big impetus behind Obama. Bad news for the GOP; it's more clear than ever that they need to undergo drastic change in order to maintain any relevance.

3.37 a.m.: From the Beeb's live-blog: 'Wall Street Journal columnist and leading conservative Peggy Noonan on Fox News: "It's going to take some real thinking about what's happened here - if indeed what's seems to be happening turns out to be true."'
A shiny prize to the person who can make sense of that syntax. Doublespeak at its finest (and, indeed, most literal).

[A second overheating of the laptop occurs.]

4.02 a.m.: Obama hits 244 having unsurprisingly taken the west coast. We're still waiting on the cusp of several states. I'm rather wishing Florida would hurry up while I still have fingernails left.

4.12 a.m.: I thought FiveThirtyEight's 313:225 prediction was utterly insane before we started on this evening. Now there's a real possibility that Obama could surpass 313. I never imagined this in my wildest dreams.

4.16 a.m.: The American networks (all of them but CNN, it seems) are calling Ohio for Obama. Remarkable. I didn't think we'd know so quickly. Even more remarkably, it seems increasingly possible that Obama mightn't even need Florida or Virginia.

4.24 a.m.: The Big British Castle has now sent up its own Ohio flare. It's over.

4.25 a.m.: All year, I've been saying that Obama would likely win, but by a significantly smaller margin than in 2008. Now it looks like it could well be larger, EV-wise at least. I've rarely been so pleased to be wrong.

4.30 a.m.: Four years ago, people were saying to me: "I don't think America will elect a black president. I don't think they're ready for it. etc. etc." I countered by pointing to polls which showed Obama clearly ahead, which led to more dissembling (remember the mythical Bradley Effect?). One should never underestimate the importance of instinct in such matters, of course; but once more this year, we have a triumph of maths over feeling, as it were. People are calling Nate Silver the big winner of the evening; political science may be inexact, but it should never be underestimated, and certainly not ignored.

4.39 a.m.: I'm too tired to properly reflect on this (for instance, I seem to have just written a long paragraph about how maths won this election), but certainly I'll remember this for a long time. Normally I tend towards pessimism, or at least pragmatism; this election, just like the last one, is freeing the hopeful, idealistic child locked in my cage of cynicism.

4.42 a.m.: "[T]he hopeful child locked in my cage of cynicism" - good God, I'm delirious.

4.52 a.m.: I understand Karl Rove is having a reality-denying meltdown on Fox right now; and Donald Trump is essentially advocating a revolution on Twitter. Nice to know I'm not the only one being driven into insanity by this long night (though I could hope for better company, I must say).

5.03 a.m.: Lest we forget, historic victories, seemingly across the board, for marriage equality. Marijuana legalisation also seems to be doing very well.

5.05 a.m.: I think I'll leave things here (beating Romney to it). I never expected such a head of steam so early; I imagined gridlock, and a slow push in Obama's favour. This is more than I ever expected; a clear victory, which is exactly what was needed, for everyone's sake.

The Hero Facebook Deserves... But Maybe Not the One it Needs Right Now

[Or ‘Internet Scammers are a Cowardly and Superstitious Lot’.]

Over the weekend, my Facebook account was subject to a hacking scam; a message covered the screen when I tried to log in, purporting to be from Facebook themselves, informing me that my account had been sending out spam and asking for my personal details (including credit card details) for some poorly-justified reason which I can’t remember. Before I changed my password in a rather circuitous manner to get rid of this scam, I decided to have a little fun with it. So I filled out the details as follows:

First Name: Bruce

Surname: Wayne

Address: Wayne Manor

Gotham Outskirts

City: Gotham

State: NY (Almost tripped me up here, but then Gotham was based on New York, so I decided that was the easiest)

ZIP Code: 228

Phone Number: 2286261

[I made up some credit card details too, but they escape me now.]

Remarkably, the system seemed to accept all of this; its only problem was that my arbitrary mashing of number keys clearly didn’t resemble a credit card number. I decided not to keep trying, just in case I ended up accidentally putting an actual person’s credit card details in. Especially in case it really was Bruce Wayne.

As a footnote, I’ll switch gears to the Riddler for a moment. The ZIP code and phone number were not chosen at random. What’s their significance?

Unhappy is the Land...

[This is not a review of The Avengers, largely because any attempt at such a thing would quickly descend into babbling, but let me simply say that any Marvel fan, of any degree, absolutely must see it, and to anyone else, I can highly recommend it. Better than Iron Man, at least on a par with Serenity – I would even, potentially sacrilegiously, compare it favourably with The Dark Knight, incredibly different films though they are.]

It’s almost a cliché at this point to say that superhero films are in the ascendancy. The two big comics publishers, and Marvel in particular, have been doing extremely well from their film divisions in the last decade or so. The Dark Knight, to name the most obvious example, is one of the highest-grossing films of all time and The Avengers (not Avengers Assemble. Never Avengers Assemble) already looks set to do extraordinarily well too, despite arguably not having anything close to the name (or brand) recognition of Batman. Yet the term “superhero” itself deserves some examination.

The most popular superhero, cinematically speaking, across six (soon to be seven) films (not to mention video games, animated films and series and so forth), is clearly Batman. Yet Batman is simply a man –a genius and billionaire, true, but ultimately he relies on his wits, his self-assembled gadgets and his bare fists. As for his obvious counterpart, Iron Man (who also does extremely well at the box office), he’s also a genius and billionaire, but the suit which makes him so powerful is, to a large extent a function of necessity; the reactor which powers it is also keeping him alive. As for Captain America, his chemically-enhanced martial prowess is emphasised significantly less than his patriotism, his sense of honour and duty and his simple straightforwardness. Meanwhile, who assembles (so to speak) the Marvel superheroes and gives them a sense of purpose? A grizzled, one-eyed agent, somewhere between a military commander and a bureaucrat, whose only superpower is being Samuel L. Jackson (admittedly, not an inconsiderable power).

By contrast, films featuring heroes with actual superpowers have been notably unsuccessful. Green Lantern was largely panned by critics, and failed to set the box office on fire. Superman has been missing in action since the decent and moderately successful Superman Returns back in 2006. Even the power of Joss Whedon failed to get a Wonder Woman film out of development hell (although, admittedly, a post-Avengers Whedon might be a little more successful). Films based on the X-Men and Spider-Man have been successful, certainly, but the focus has always been on the humanity of these characters – the prejudice faced by the X-Men, and Spidey’s adolescent headaches and deadpan wit. It seems that audiences, and producers, want humanity from their heroes, not all-powerful supermen.

Whedon’s Avengers provide a prime example. Of the entire team, only Thor is truly superhuman, and even he displays more human characteristics than the truly godlike character of the original comics. The Hulk is superhuman, true, but Bruce Banner is a victim of his power more than anything, and it’s constantly made clear that he’d be far happier without it. Iron Man and Captain America are enhanced humans, but still recognisably human, while Hawkeye and Black Widow are highly trained SHIELD operatives; their onscreen feats may seem superhuman, but no more so than those of Bruce Willis or Jason Statham in a thousand action films.

Interestingly, the focus of the film is in many ways on group cohesiveness (I’m attempting to avoid spoilers, but some minor points may slip through; be warned). Tony Stark is constantly told that his focus is too much on himself; Cap accuses him of not knowing the concept of sacrifice, but by the end credits, Tony has risked himself for his teammates several times over. Thor and the Hulk are hardly team players, but both of them end up fighting as part of a cohesive unit. Whedon has said that getting the group to work together was the greatest narrative challenge; yet it also forms, in screenwriting terms, a strong narrative engine. This isn’t a situation where one remarkable individual can save the world – it calls for a team.

Having seen the film, one thing that struck me was that, amidst the skilled juggling of characters, more of an impact was quite possibly made by the more human characters. In particular, Black Widow, a character to whom I was shamefully underexposed (I know; I’m a terrible Marvel fan) ended up being probably my favourite Avenger, followed closely by Hawkeye (though I was already a fan of his from the comics. And thank Christ they got rid of that stupid headpiece of his). Both characters were skilfully constructed, and the relationship between them was one of the more nuanced I’ve seen in a blockbuster film, but beyond that I think it was the fact that both managed to fit in in a film about extraordinary individuals while also being ultimately, recognisably human.

Hawkeye's eyeline here proves just how human he is.

So why is this? Why do we seem more drawn to heroes the more human they are? Certainly, it’s been a trend in comics since Watchmen in the mid-80s, and arguably even since Stan Lee in the 60s – heroes have to be relatable, and flawed. Thus, Batman became an uncompromising agent of absolute justice under Frank Miller, Tony Stark became an alcoholic, and the authority of all the leaders of teams was challenged (see Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men for an excellent latter-day example of this). Ultimately, I think it’s that we like to see ourselves mirrored in our heroes. It’s not a new thing; Achilles gets his best friend killed by going off in a huff in The Iliad, the ancient myths of the gods are consumed with jealousy and lust – even the Old Testament God is forever getting angry and smiting people.

There’s more to it than that, though. Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne may be remarkable individuals, but their power is hard-won – one is potentially dying at all times, while the other saw his parents gunned down, and in both cases, this forms the impetus for their heroism. Cap got the easy route to power with his super-soldier serum (incidentally, not an easy phrase to say quickly), but he also ended up frozen, and fundamentally separated by time from everyone he loved. Hawkeye and Black Widow  both trained their entire lives for their power. Here, there are no fortunately-acquired power rings, no alien birth – this is a kind of power that is relatable and, in the case of the latter examples, even potentially attainable.

That we need (or, at least, want) heroes as examples seems unmistakeable – throughout history, leaders have always been elevated to extraordinary standards by imagination, from the pharaohs to Obama (yes, really, I just made that comparison). Yet we don’t like them too perfect – we don’t want them to be Nietzschean supermen, a class above, but recognisable, fallible individuals. This way, their heroism can lie as much in dealing with the demands of their position as in actually filling it. If the audience response to superhero films tells us anything, it’s that the latter part of the compound noun “superhero” matters far more than the former.

Who doesn't relate to that face?

Cross Comparisons

(I know it’s been a while; I apologise. If it helps, I’ve been neglecting YouTube as well. It probably doesn’t.)

One of my pet subjects, as you may be aware, is the study of song lyrics. Recently, following a comparison in an English seminar (more on which later), I started to consider the drawing of such cross comparisons between luminaries of the art of songwriting, and those in other spheres of literature; in terms of content, influence or otherwise. Having given the matter some thought, I present some examples. I’d rather like to expand on these at some point, but let this be a start.

Leonard Cohen and W.B. Yeats

This is a rather easy one, since the resemblance is unmistakeable. Both gained a reputation early on as poets of the heart, fascinated by capricious love and by elements of the supernatural (though Cohen has never been as, to use the technical term, batshit crazy as Yeats on that front). Both are extremely self-aware; Cohen’s new album begins “I love to speak with Leonard”, while Yeats gave plans for his own burial place in one of his final poems: “Under bare Ben Bulben’s head/In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid”. Both gained a new lease of life in their late fifties, acquiring a new direction, and their later work has been acclaimed as their finest in both cases (spearheaded by, in a curious coincidence, Yeats’s poem ‘The Tower’ and Cohen’s song ‘Tower of Song’, both of which are like manifestoes, or at the least examinations of the poet’s position). Indeed, Cohen himself has acknowledged Yeats’s influence on him; in a recent interview he quoted Yeats’s late poem ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’, while in 2010 he gave a special concert at Lissadell House in Sligo, where Yeats spent a great deal of time (I was there; it was remarkable). Both are often seen as late Romantics, adjusting to address the times, but never changing radically in form in the manner of their respective contemporaries Ezra Pound or Bob Dylan. Finally, both are giants in their fields, viewed with a reverence (and, sometimes, a reactionary scorn) afforded to few others.

(It’s worth mentioning that Cohen has published numerous volumes of poetry, and a couple of novels, though I’m mainly considering his musical output.)

 

 

Bruce Springsteen and William Carlos Williams

This is the one that started it all off; it struck me suddenly as I sat peacefully in a seminar on Williams, simultaneously amusing and impressing the seminar leader. Biographically, of course, the two seem worlds apart; Springsteen has been a bona fide rock star for almost four decades, while Williams laboured in relative obscurity for much of his life. Yet in terms of content, there’s a great deal of similarity to be glimpsed. What really gave me this idea was the sense of movement for both. Many of Williams’s poems involve cars, or highways or some such; the concept of the poet as transient witness. For Springsteen, the road represents escape; not necessarily escape to anywhere in particular, but the sense of running for the sake of running, as it were (hence the title of his most famous album). On a deeper level, I was struck by Williams’s poem ‘To Elsie’; its empathy with “devil-may-care men” and “young slatterns”, who lack “peasant traditions” to give them character. I daresay this is what Springsteen is trying to do as well; to provide a voice for this voiceless caste, the lower class of a classless society, lacking even the prospect of prospects. While Springsteen’s political activism shines through on this front (his new album looks to be very much in this vein), it’s a feature of a great deal of his work, and, I believe, of Williams’s too.

Nick Cave and T.S. Eliot

I admit, I struggled a little with this one. Eliot always made me think immediately of Bob Dylan; ‘The Waste Land’ always reminded me of ‘Desolation Row’, in its appropriation of characters from western mythology into a simultaneously mundane and apocalyptic landscape. What escaped my notice was that Cave does something rather similar. Consider his tongue-in-cheek version of the myth of Orpheus, for example. In fact, Cave, like Eliot, draws on a great deal of poetic and mythic tradition throughout his work; a casual reference to the Sword of Damocles, a re-envisioning of a Biblical parable or various irreverent references to literary luminaries (including, notably, Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls). Not to mention, of course, that Cave has created enough apocalyptic landscapes himself; a song like Straight to You is full of such Waste Land-esque imagery. Religion is another shared obsession; although, as with Cohen and Yeats, the older poet is by far the more esoteric. In fact, the similarities deepen with examination; to take a rather superficial one, Eliot’s “I am Lazarus, come from the dead” (from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’) is expanded into Cave’s ‘Dig, Lazarus, Dig’ (you’ll note from that video that Cave probably has the edge when it comes to dancing). Admittedly, Eliot probably wouldn’t have written anything like ‘Stagger Lee’, but that’s probably something about which literature classes around the world can be relieved.

Richey Edwards & Nicky Wire and Sarah Kane

Oddly enough, this is one in which the influence goes the other way. I understand, via Nicky (and anything Nicky says needs to be taken with a massive grain of salt), that Kane was a Manic Street Preachers fan, and particularly a fan of Richey. In fact, the premiere of her debut, Blasted, corresponds quite nicely with both the release of the band’s seminal album The Holy Bible in 1994 and Richey’s disappearance (and presumed suicide) in February 1995. Even putting aside the obvious biographical echoes, I’ve always felt there were remarkable similarities. In particular, Kane’s final (posthumously premiered) play 4.48 Psychosis, with its concentration of despair into a kind of eloquent incoherence, has always reminded me of the first three Manics albums. It has the misanthropy of ‘From Despair to Where’, the personal entropy of ‘Life Becoming a Landslide’ and the general loathing (self- and otherwise) of ‘Yes’ (whose deliberately messy, crowded lyrical structure it also resembles). Even a look at the relative layouts of the Manics’ lyrics, especially for The Holy Bible, and 4.48 or Crave will reveal a marked similarity; the words are laid down with the most arbitrary of regards for punctuation or line breaks, lying bare on the page. Uniquely on this list, Kane was a contemporary of Wire and Edwards; indeed, they were similar ages, and thus they were dealing with the same issues – the Manics have always been outspoken on political and social (a rather good example being the delightfully-titled ‘ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayitsworldwouldfallapart’ or ‘Little Baby Nothing’, about the objectification of women by both sexes), while Blasted (almost literally) brought the horrors of faraway wars to Britain.

I have a number of other examples, but these are the main ones; also, I appear to have inadvertently spent almost two hours at this, so I should probably stop and have a lie-down. Some notable songwriters, such as Ian Curtis and Tom Waits, completely elude comparison, while others, most notably Bob Dylan, are too chameleonic to be tied down to a single personality. Thus, my work at this will continue. Please do enjoy.