Musik Indonesia

On the stereo: “Late-Century Dream,” Superchunk

The level of meta-meta-meta-post-everythingness around this event has me a little rattled. There are 15,000 journalists here. Is there reason for every last one of them to be here? No. Probably not even a third of them.

The Pepsi Center itself is a labyrinth of caves and passageways, wired with miles upon miles of CAT-5 cable to accommodate all these bloggers, TV and radio types, thousands of cameras and laptops and passenger pigeons and every other media transmission type you can imagine. No one really knows where they’re going yet, and no one has enough time to get anything done quite the way they’d like; we did an interview (which went really well, thankfully) with Melissa Long for CNN, but the lighting director didn’t get the three minutes he was promised to do his thing, and he spent the minutes after the interview apologizing profusely for how we were gonna look on national TV. But, you know, we’re a rock band. No one cares how we look, least of all us. Ha! Not really. But kind of.

Last night was pretty incredible. Much has been written already about how moving the Lion’s speech was; how cute the Obamas’ kids are; how Michelle absolutely owned it. It was amazing to be here, and it’s why I was so frustrated with some of the commentary I saw afterwards. As in, what convention was James Carville at, anyway? I think he must have been in some other building. The thing I saw last night was far from a squandered opportunity. I doubt it’ll go down as a transformative moment in American political history, but I do think it caught the zeitgeist. It felt right. I hope he got some good sleep.

Bill O’Reilly walked into the lobby of the Grand Hyatt as Ben, Nick and I were standing there this afternoon. He’s very tall, maybe 6′3″, which surprised me, because he’s such a small man. I’ve never felt the urge to throw the first punch like I did at that moment, but I didn’t, because then I’d be “that guy.” But then again, I’d be “that guy”!! And wouldn’t that make me a kind of wingnut lefty superhero? Like, where Al Franken would make me lunch?

One other note: I caught up with Senator Leahy again this morning. I had him all wrong: He’s a huge Dead Head (in fact, GD drummer Mickey Hart was at the reception) and actually has a cameo in The Dark Night. We hung out for a bit. I might have to move to Vermont.