Random observations on the US

Re: (a), recall that the U.S. is a vast country, and different sensibilities apply in different parts of the country. That would almost certainly be true in any major city on the East Coast. Re: (b), that’s indisputably the case in the U.S. as well, and I’m sure students in Madison do the same.

I think this actually points out something that is not regularly appreciated by most people regarding crime in the US and the UK.

Violent crime is in general far less in the UK than in the US, but the rate of property crime is actually much higher in the UK. I remember an english grad student of mine telling me had three bicycles stolen while in Oxford.

Saurabh’s point should also be recognized, of course. Both the US and the UK are diverse societies with different characteristics.

I would challenge the point that people would eat and not pay. I rarely saw that at my university in the US – maybe people have different experiences?

Leaving stuff unattended at the UW-M, particularly in the Rathskeller is a mistake. It is not the students so much as it is a plain fact of the matter that the Union and the Terrace are used by the rest of the city’s dwellers and as such are filled with the sort of riff-raff that nick things. Although gentrification killed most of the nice dives, The Pickney Street Hideaway or the Comic Strip and time has robbed State Street of some of its fun, like Paul of Paul’s club drunkenly crooning Sinatra under the leaves of his own indoor tree, beer on the Terrace, should the weather permit is still a gas.

Chris, that’s because Bob Harris likes *good* music … Now, if you get a chance to watch Austin city Limits, that’s more in line with Whistling Bob.

Violent crime, not just property crime, is probably higher in England/Scotland than the U.S. At least this is what a wide range of surveys and stats are saying now. The only exception is the murder rate, which is several times higher in the U.S. Probably because guns are more widely available. But assault, strongarm robbery, and I believe rape as well are all more common in Great Britain.

Welcome to Madison, CB! If I see your coat anywhere, I’ll be sure to make off with it so you don’t get too homesick.

Espen Andersen:

You’ve obviously never been to New Hampshire. :)

Leaving your stuff in semi-public places and getting away with it (not having it stolen) varries quite a bit from place to place in the US, too. Where I grew up and went to college people leave there stuff around all the time and no one takes it. When I was a kid I’d leave my bike unlocked in front of stores and at school all the time. In other places I’ve lived in the US this sort of thing leads only to pain and suffering. If you read the campus crime report at Penn almost all of it is from people leaving their things unattended.

Andrew’s comment about 6 pm dinners needs a response, Chris. I think he’s a mind-reader.

Hah, trust Saurabh to say first what I was going to say.

I think leaving things around is luck of the draw. I’ve had purses filled with cash returned to me by strangers off the train. I’ve also had little bits of nothing stolen if not watched for mere seconds. I’m not sure I would leave my coat hanging out of sight in Berkeley, but that might just be childhood paranoia. It’s hard to quantify these things.

When I first came to Seattle, which is a very low-crime city as far as the US, I witnessed a bare-foot man park his very new mercedes on a street corner, exit the car with the engine running and key still in, leave the door open, and walk out of the car into an atm room. That was so far removed from anything I’d ever seen growing up in Sydney that I almost drove off with the car myself. In Seattle, I’ve seen a lot of cars with the doors unlocked and I was amazed that my neighbour never locked her front door, even when she was gone for weeks.
There is huge variety accross the nation, however. Last week, two men tried to break into my apartment here in San Francisco when I was clearly home, and many of the cars on the street get their windows broken. Scary stuff.

So I am starving by 11; and again by 5.30.

That problem is traditionally solved in the UK by eating elevenses, i.e., a cup of tea and some simple carbohydrates at 11, to keep you going until a civilized lunch at one o’clock or so.

“My wife has lost her purse three times (credit cards, cash, everything inside) and all three times has had it returned (twice via police, in CA, once from the place it was lost in WA, 3 years late)”

Note to self: low on cash? follow Harry’s wife.

Seriously, it seems like it would be most useful to compare across “matched” pairs of geographic units, where the matching would be on the usual suspects — size, proximity to state capital, income, demographic composition, etc. Not to make causal claims, mind you, but just to better assess the whether there are in fact country-level differences in petty theft of the sort that are being bandied about.

I haven’t seen our house key in 6 months.

I’d agree with Andrew about Seattle- I grew up there, and the paranoia about theft down here in Atlanta (where I am now) was quite shocking, if perhaps justified. The funny thing about the Seattle area is that people are, if anything, more trusting in the ‘inner city’ than in the suburbs. You’d be hard pressed, I think, to find many unlocked doors in Bellevue or Issaquah (or shoeless Mercedes-driver). But then Seattle may be unusual in that much of the city is relatively affluent- poverty there concentrates more in certain nearby suburbs (not the ones cited above) than in the city proper.

My wife is English and she urges me, even here in midwest cornland, to “find a seat” in a university eatery, but I tell her that we can’t bogart that table with our stuff while others are ahead of us in line.

Madison is one of my fave university towns, ah, concrete and all. My first visit there years ago, I witnessed a Dalai Lama look alike contest, in honor of his visit. And don’t miss the Mustard Museum in Mount Horub a few miles outside of Madison…

It depends on where you are. More of Europe is densely urbanised compared to the USA, which is still mostly rural or suburban. Crime rates correlates with population density, IIRC. I grew up near NYC, and leaving your stuff and expecting it to be there was considered hopelessly “out of towner” naive. I never would have done it.

It would probably be equally ill-advised in Berkeley, lets say, or Oakland. But in the more suburban areas, why not?

As for the western European boundary ending at roughly Worcester, MA (or Albany, NY), I’d agree. And I’d suggest that the eastern boundary of Asia ends at Livermore or Arcadia, and the northern boundary of Mexico somewhere around Sonoma.

I grew up in New York and then lived in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and I feel like I’ve never really lived in America, but rather in Europe and Asia. The time I spent in the midwest was quite a culture shock. Real America– the midwestern part– was a very alien environment for me, compared to the coasts.

The America I know and love as a multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-ethnic melting pot appears to be a phenomenon local to the major cities and the coasts. Beyond that, I find it a very different country.

Goatchowder, I’ve lived all over the U.S. and I disagree rather completely with your assessment of how different the various areas are. Find the right neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio and it will have some similarities to San Francisco, find the right suburb of San Jose and it will be rather similar to a suburb of Columbus. You can find most dimensions of the U.S. in most places if you know where to look. It’s a pretty homogeneous country given its size, certainly compared to Europe.

Chris,

If you want a glimpse of the real America, then rent a car and get out of the upper middle-class post-adolescent bubble that is Madison. Spend a day in Milwaukee and find a good Somali restaurant for us. There must be an excellent one or two; the city has tens of thousands of somali-americans. Perhaps there’s the kernel of a screenplay in there somewhere a la Mississippi Marsala….

Goat,

The America I know and love as a multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-ethnic melting pot appears to be a phenomenon local to the major cities and the coasts. Beyond that, I find it a very different country.

I don’t know your definition of “major cities,” but if it refers to the top 15-20 MSAs, then this assertion isn’t accurate. For ex:

Milwaukee WI, Columbus OH, and Minneapolis each have very large populations of muslim somali-Americans (30,000 in Columbus alone).

Columbus reputedly also has one of the highest densities of lesbians, probably the highest, outside San Francisco.

You’ll also find astonishing diversity in small towns and rural areas across the midwest, from amish communities to more modern strict Dutch Reformed communities to East European catholic enclaves to a very heavy German influence (including excellent classical music in many midwestern cities– the midwest has traditionally been home to America’s best symphonies, cf Cleveland Orchestra under Szell). Plus small towns dominated by scandinavians and of course large populations of mexican immigrants and also transplanted southern white and african-american baptists all over the place.

And the major cities have extraordinary diversity, of a type and extent that shocks Americans as well as foreign visitors. Detroit has more arabs (estimated 250,000, primarily Iraqi-Chaldean, Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian and Jordanian) than any city in the world outside of the middle east, including London. St Louis, another heavily German city, reportedly now has a large and thriving bosnian muslim population. Chicago is of course extraordinarily diverse and very rich in cultural offerings, not least in theatre and art.

I grew up in a rural town in Australia, population about 10,000. We never locked our cars, because, well, nobody stole cars there. However, when we drove to the next town 20 miles away, we always locked our cars because we knew that car theft was rampant there.

In high school, we got to play sport against kids from schools in the next town. Guess what? They and their parents never locked their cars in *their* town, because they knew it was safe, but they always did when they visited our town!

Certainly there’s no bike theft industry here

That seems strange, as a bicycle theft industry is such a perfect business model (steal bikes, sell them to the people who have had bikes stolen) it could probably feature in an episode of the Apprentice.

Is the lack of this industry in the US just a market failure, or is there some cultural factor?Perhaps students are unwilling to buy possibly dodgy second hand bikes?

soru

You know, in the northern part of the state (where I’m from, yah hey), Madison is viewed as some sort of decadent hippie Babylon. And still, they wouldn’t expect casual thievery in Madison of the sort you describe in the UK. Maybe in Milwaukee.

Anyway. While you’re in town, you should go out for frozen custard. I know it’s November. Trust me on this. Also, cheese curds.

Staying with college towns, I’m regularly thrown by “micro-details” when I visit my family in Champaign-Urbana, IL. The most recent discovery was little posts on every street corner in the campus part of town with a button that you press to speak to the police. According to my U of I attending cousin, if you press the button, the police have to send a car round. You would never, ever get such a thing in the UK, becaused pissed people would run down the street pressing each one, all night, every night.

Long bending busses are common in many cities in the US, and also in Russia. In the US you have to pay in the front, usually. In Russia there is a conductor who comes and takes your money which is quite a pain since they are mostly rather heavy-set women and the busses are often packed. People in Russia will often claim that the bus was free in the Soviet Union and so get annoyed when they have to pay now. In fact it’s not true that the bus was free in the Soviet Union- but, paying (or punching your ticket, rather) was done on a sort of honor system. Signs on the bus said “your conscience is the best conductor”. As it turns out this just isn’t so. (Not in England either, I guess.)

I got myself a free train ride when I was in London recently. At the platforms at Liverpool Street station, all the ticket-reader/gate things were open. I got on the train, assuming that either a conductor would come through or there would be an exit gate at the destination, like on the Tube. Neither was the case.

Who leaves the house at 6:55 to get to school? My children’s schools both start at 9, and my children leave the house between 8:45 (to dawdle) and 8:55 (running).
This is in Cambridge, UK. Also a bicycle town. There’s a fair amount of bike theft, but in 19 years here I’ve never had my bike stolen (well, once it was taken from the back yard but the thief abandoned it after a few metres when he realised it was properly locked). These days I mostly don’t even bother locking it *to* anything.

For the most part what is on CMT is crap. But there are exceptions: Try to catch Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman” , Alison Krause’s “Restless Tonight” Alan Jackson’s “5’O Clock Somewhere” or “Talking Repairman Blues”, or Trisha Yearwood’s “Georgia Rain”. Except for the last two, they are mostly out of rotation, but still come on occassionly.

BTW, Madison is a mecca for Lao food. Don’t miss it.

Lets start with this:
(On the very downside, I tuned into Country Music TV in my hotel room and found no overlap whatsoever with the stuff that gets played by Bob Harris : Emmylou, Steve Earle, Gillian Welch—forget it—it is all wall-to-wall pap by people wearing cowboy hats. Appalling.)

Chris turns up in the US, and the first thing he does it characterize a complete musical genre whose shape he appears to only know through the work of DJ’s whose whole raison-d’etre is to promote the obscure artists of a genre as the most ‘representative’, as ‘pap and ‘horrible’. This is simply musical snobbery. Then he turns on the way they dress: “English Literature Professors wearing Tweed Jackets? – Inexcusable” without the fact clicking that this is what people who make and listen to C&W actually wear, from the lowliest musician to the biggest superstar.

Now to respond to your point:
Disclaimer: I do not own a C&W record, nor do I deliberately listen to C&W music on the radio, or watch C&W videos, but theres no escaping it here. In addition, I always felt Andy Kershaw was a twat “That was psychobilly-bluegrass trio The Blue Road Boys, who play their music on home-made zithers, and it was, I think you’ll agree, tremendous”

Music for the masses is what is says it is. Just because its not obscure doesn’t make it bad. This holds true for any genre of music. Just because I still listen to Can’s ‘Soon over Babaluma’, it doesn’t stop me thinking that the Durannys ‘Rio’ is a way better album.

To talk specifically about C&W, I do think that the production values, writing, singing and musicianship are way higher than most other genres, even at a utilitarian musician level, because this is expected by the target audience. Does Kevin Chesney write more relevant songs than Morissey? quite possibly. Is Dolly Parton a great artist? definitely. Are the artists who play at the Grizzly Rose better musicians than those who play here? absolutely, but just because its not your taste doesn’t make it crap.

But really this discussion is about something else: It’s not about whether certain C&W artists are worthier than others, it’s that fact that Chris’s musical perspective is shaped by his culture and social position. Years of listening to late-night radio 1 DJs produces a musical taste that’s hard to crack, and when placed in the Mid-West where all the points of reference are gone, the refuge is musical superiority.

Ah… Siouxies ‘Cities In Dust’ has just come on on my internet radio. That really is musically superior…

Cheers

Mark

“Just because I still listen to Can’s ‘Soon over Babaluma’, it doesn’t stop me thinking that the Durannys ‘Rio’ is a way better album.”

This is the kind of comment that may force me to permanently abandon the blogosphere.

I live in a small surfing town in New Zealand called Raglan. Here, all the people who steal stuff are wily. Because of this, I can leave most anything unattended, since everybody who would steal it knows that nobody would be stupid enough to just leave it unattended. Somebody must be watching it.

Huh? You said
I did not “characterize” an entire musical genre, I said the stuff broadcast on CMTW is crap.

You also just said (paraphrase)
I haven’t actually watched a lot of CMTV

So…

Now lets assume that You’ve seen 10 hours of CMTV, and listened to 4 or 5 hours of off-center C&W artists. You feel confident enough to use the words Pap and Appalling based on that, I suggest politely that you dont understand the demographic and for that I’m a troll?. Jeez, talk about sensitive.

I’m not getting my point across here really, and harry b seems to be getting close to ad hominem attacks Have you spent hours watching CMTV? Or listening to corporate country radio (or any other radio for that matter)?. To lay that to rest, uh yeah actually. I’ve lived in Denver for 10 years, and C&W and its associated culture is inescapable, the local joke is that KYGO plays both types of music, Country and Western and thats why its the number one corporate radio station in the state . My cable station has 3 C&W video channels, but my interweb thingy gives me a lifeline back to BBC radio. Personally speaking, I can’t stand the stuff, but in the same way that I despised the songs of Supertramp, but can sing along to ‘take a look at my girlfriend’, I know the words to ‘Redneck Woman’, because it was on everywhere. The people who live here who wear cowboy hats, check shirts and drive pickup trucks don’t think that what they listen to is pap, and who are we from another to continent to say so.
I’ve heard no quantitive argument to suggest that what Bob Harris plays is better than Garth Brooks, the only thing I see in this thread is the constant mantra ‘Obscure=Better’. So give me some pointers here:

1. Does what Bob Harris plays in the UK, but nobody listens to here, better reflect the lives and values of the people who live here, but listen to mainstream?

a. If you answer yes, explain why society does not embrace the music that reflects itself, and rationalize this in terms of the punk movement.

b. If you answer no, explain how popular music reflects society, how an outsider might not recognize the cultural touchstones, and rationalize this in terms of the punk movement.

2. Somebody , objectively quantify ‘Musical Pap’. Any reference to ‘Whistle Test’, ‘John Peel Sessions’ and pre-electric Dylan instantly disqualifies.

Hoping to enrich my musical education

Mark

Actually, Mark, you have it pretty much backwards `obscure = better’ is laughable. Of course `well known music = good music’ is also laughable. I also suspect that you are abusing the term `obscure’, but will leave that.

Most of the music produced isn’t well known because it isn’t very good at all. Some very well known music isn’t very good either, but on the whole it tends to be ok, somewhat in a lowest common denominator way. There is a lot of stuff out there in the populuar music sphere (whether in C&W, hip-hop, rock, reggae, whatever) that boils down to medium talented [1] people doing it by the numbers.

Now the *interesting* thing is that while some of the best music being produced (in any of these genres) is well known, a *lot* of it isn’t.

[1] here I mean, of course, medium talent for professional touring (popular) musicians, which is a lot better than your average kitchen musicians and random weekend bands, but not compared to, say, your average symphony player….

sorry about the strikethrough on the text above, didn’t realize the markup would do that…

I can’t believe we’re all swimming in the spew of Nickleback and Creed (58).

I’m going to be grossed out all day long now.

The people who live here who wear cowboy hats, check shirts and drive pickup trucks don’t think that what they listen to is pap, and who are we from another to continent to say so?

People with taste in music, perhaps?

I can’t objectively define Garths crapiness, and I don’t believe anyone else on this thread can either, which makes me think he’s not actually crap or dull.

Mark – Can you “objectively define” why horse shit stinks? I can’t, but I’m sure as hell not going to eat it. Which I’d sooner do than listen to Garth Brooks.

Engels,
Can I ‘objectively define’ why horse shit stinks? Holy Crap of course. But can you tell me why your taste in music is better than that of the 60 million+ people who have bought Garth albums, of course you can’t.

Mark, the idea that popularity is equivalent to quality is an old one, but not a particularly good one. Of course as in all art, there is an aspect of subjective preference, but to suggest that is all there is too it is naive. It is also wrong to suggest that two peoples subjective judgements are equally valid, regardless of a difference in experience.

I really enjoy many types of music when they are done well, and can at least appreciate any style of music done well (but might not choose to listen to it). I have vastly more experience than the average top-40/hip-hop/C&W/whatever radio station target, am a musician of sorts, and spend a lot more time than average listening, *especially* listening for its own sake, rather than background. Support for this statment? This year, for example, I bought more music and went to more concerts than many (most?) people do in a decade, if not a lifetime. Hence my conclusions about music both subjectively and objectively are not the same as the average (however meaningful we can make that). I certainly don’t reject music because it is popular (see previous comments) but mere popularity won’t convince me it is any good, either: and I have a lot of material to contrast it with to make sense of this.

A lot of popular music is intentionally derivitive and formulaic, and it is marketed in very particular ways. In this there is a (ok, probably weak) analogy with fast food: the product is cheap, easily available, and you wont have to expend any effort or intelligence on it. However, it is objectively inferior to many other available meals (some of which will require effort on your part).

Come to think of it, there must be reasons why the intersection between major literary prizes and bestsellers lists is small, too, no?