Week 11 Power Rankings

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Some of  you may know me from early childhood, others from middle-late childhood, still others may be Russian spam artists trying to Hax into our blog. Welcome, all. Before I wrote this weekly column on behalf of the Board, I was a meek and lowly former journalist, who had written for UW’s rag. Before that, I wrote for Ballard High School's recycled toilet paper. Before that, I wrote on walls. Somewhere, interspersed through all of these hack pay-per-pica piece of shit periodicals, I wrote for myself.  I wrote for myself, and I wrote for vexillology. State Flag Power Rankings delved into the obscure and arcane study of national symbolism and flags. With Ben “Synergy” Conway, I unpacked the nuanced layers of such powerhouse flags as Arizona, New Mexico, Israel, California and Palestine.  

I had all but forgotten these aspirations of artistry, when Conway forward me an e-mail from our rival website (allstarflags.com, no hyperlink, no need to give them a bump) asking if they could link to us or write a guest column on our blog. I am not shitting you in the slightest.

No, of course, was the answer. We don’t negotiate with terrorist or rogue bloggers. But this back and forth, combined with the jingoism of Olympics, reminded me of the love I once held for arbitrary rankings of overly aggrandized pieces of “art.”

So, I approached one of Grantland’s best and brightest*, and partnered with him to bring you this week’s Durland Power Rankings.

1: Lars**

The paragon of class, Lars Phillips is like vanilla ice cream. It seems dull, and very few would list it as a "favorite," but it has a depth of flavor and timeless aspect which ensures that every time you taste some, you'll be happy. Sometimes its best to go with a classic, someone who can stick the dismount. 
Lars was relatively present and active in the Durland going ons. During the time he spent in Durland, though, he came through big time. He performed the light accounting tasks we asked him to do, he snared a victory on the links and instituted my favorite regular feature of the Durland house:  
Lars' Racist Comment of the Day, 
brought to you by- Jeff. 
Jeff--- "Fuck You Cunts"


His time away from Durlandia was just as productive. He managed to get his testicles suckled by T.D. Ameritrade executives, and is attempting to single handedly promote Macklemore's new album. 

He even managed to turn his perceived weakness into an advantage, by needling me (pun intended) with his self deprecating humor on the golf course.

For such a strong week, he gets the strongest national anthem.

Here's what Grantland's Brian Phillips has to say about this anthem.

"Here's the thing about "La Marseillaise." Most anthems work by making themselves timeless. Queue up "The Star-Spangled Banner" on Spotify, and you're not listening to an old song or a new song; you're listening to a segment of culture that has abstracted itself from the issue of age altogether. That's why anthems can be endlessly reinterpreted by guitar gods, jazz musicians, electro-freaks, DJs, whatever. Somewhere out there, there's probably a skweee/dubstep version of "National Anthem of the Russian Federation" that would make you dance like there was no friction while crying tears of rage. That's how it is with anthems. They just … apply. "La Marseillaise," though? It's different. It comes into your world. It takes you by the arm, not ungallantly. And it guides you back into its world. Oh, hello, French Revolution. Yeah, I guess you mattered. What's new, endless, gleaming ranks of cannons? Ready for some shooting? Hang on, let me adjust the gold buttons on my dashing midnight-blue uniform. I had my saber here, somewhere. OK, all set, everybody? Let's shed some blood for an ideal!
This always, always happens. "La Marseillaise" isn't about fitting itself into your graduation or Olympic swimming ceremony or whatever. It's about taking your graduation or Olympic swimming ceremony and momentarily plunging it into the furnace of the 1790s, before suddenly bringing it back, forever changed. This is the anthem of anthems. You can imagine a better national anthem, but it would be performed by actual volcanoes and the nation it belonged to would be Mars."

France: Le Marseille


"And then there's this. Inescapably, this."

2: Flies      Like the festering bunghole of Europe that is Spain, this week saw the resurgence of flies. We pridefully believe them vanquished. They were waiting, seething, with hatred and bile. They have returned. This time we are ready. We have the arsenal of chemical weapons and snares. We have the swatters. most importantly, we know how depraved we truly are. We can live with flies, writhing masses of flies, crawling all over our body. Let's eradicate them now, where they lie accumulating power in the darkness of their lair, before they are strong enough to breach our elven walls. We must be Madrid to the flithy Catalanian peninsula. We must be Madrid to the flithy Catalanian peninsula.  ... and yet their anthem. Their anthem. Bellicose and doleful, belying their persecuted past and their ever defiant present. Not daring to gesture at a future of happiness, or even freedom. But simply by virtue of being, they exert some degree of freedom. Every Barcelona win, every misstep by Madrid. Isn't it possible that the compost bin has developed some sort of Hive Queen intelligence, and is now capable of creating true art like this anthem? Some sort of artifact of an alternate node of being. I don't know whether I've argued for or against the destruction of the flies. I just know we must choose correctly, or else God will condemn us, with huge tuba hits and antiphonal swells. 3: JP          It was a cold night in Durland and John Preston lay dreaming. Despite the balmy August weather, the basement kept his bedding cool, and he roiled in and out of sleep. The great investor was tangled in his sheets thrashing from side to side under the influence of some terrible nightmare. What did he dream of? He saw Lake City, vivid and angular against the bleak Seattle sky. He saw boys on motorcycles, leather jackets, cigarettes dangling, tattoos. He saw girls with pink hair. He saw tourists with their cameras, wild dogs fighting for scraps in the alleys, barges on the Sammamish, restaurants with their gaudy signs. He saw a bank of televisions in a shop window showing footage of an old Sonics champinship parade, the players in their short shorts and yellow sweaters, floats in the streets, old men cheering wildly from a balcony. He saw the old Smith Building, once the headquarters of the Seattle real estate boom, after that the site of a failed condo proposal. "The tallest building in Seattle," the people used to joke. "You can see a rebounded commercial real estate sector from the lobby." A man with pale eyes and an empty expression was coming out the front door, tucking a file into his coat. What was in the file? The man vanished into the crowd of Pioneer square. Terrible ironies, terrible juxtapositions. JP groaned in his sleep. It was too much, he would never be able to understand it all, never be able to predict it. Seattle was a montage of madness, a chaos nothing could hold together. He woke up. For a moment he thought he was still in the world of the dream. Then he realized that Hanna had forgotten to turn off his I-tunes . A pulsating techno remix of the Russian anthem was beating edges of his temples. JP rubbed his eyes and rolled over to his pile of pre-made sandwiches. Salami and pepperoni. Shredded lettuce and tomato. He pressed the wrinkles from  aluminum foil wrapper. He was already 17 seconds behind his schedule. 4: Poor Allocation of Resources             There are pools, in a mostly dried Mexican river bed, which no longer connect to each other. The deep wells have become independent ecosystems, and the small fish who populate them are independent populations. They are slowly specializing, and becoming distinct. The genetic diversity in these ponds is bottle necking, and the fish are slowly dying due to inbreeding. Zack has been spending most of his time at work developing intricate systems to waste more time playing fantasy football. Jeff, an IT guru, is unemployed and trolling. Michael, a philosopher king, flips burgers. Keyan, the greatest people-person since Jesus.  Even our house, with its beautiful natural resources, could be used to better ends. By those more willing or able to sip coffee every morning on its many porches, and pick up strangers every night with its refined and understated elegance. Like wise, the Montenegrin national anthem is wasted on a country of literally dozens, Read what my boy Brian Phillips has to say about this.

How does a nation of 632,000 people — roughly a quarter the size of the borough of Queens — produce an anthem that … I mean, if a mountain range woke up one day, unfolded itself into a race of giant stone men, and marched off to war, each step crushing houses and splintering the Earth's crust, this is what they would sing while they marched. Are you planning to kill Superman? THIS IS YOUR LAIR MUSIC. Quick intuitive translation of the lyrics: The seething hot magma at the core of the world — Bring us our tankards, we want to drink some for breakfast! We wean our babies on lava, and they can't get enough. By the time they're 6, they could beat an oak tree at wrestling. Everyone! Do you understand that we are ferocious? We have ventured down among the bones of the mountains, Where we killed like 50 or 60 dragons, We didn't even keep track, that's how easy it was. My beard is the moss that binds the stone of God's fury. Drink with us! Drink with all of us! Be welcome! We will wipe the floor with you and leave you for dead. I'm in a good mood! I may dismember a bear. Again: Montenegro, pop. 632,000.

5:  Keyan The king of the kitsch, his every move and gesture exudes a sweetness that would seem affected on anyone else. Gracious on the gold course, and generous. He provided an oloo blade for Durland, for Christ's sake. An oloo blade! His eternal kindness is the stuff of legends. Similarly, Nepal. Take it away, B.W.

You want to find it corny. You want to say, "This anthem contains too much about biodiversity and not enough about blood-soaked mountainsides." You want to say, "This anthem is too easy." You want to say, "Plus, this anthem sounds like the 8-bit soundtrack for the dwarven kingdom in a 1988 computer RPG called Thanequest." But it gets you. The more you pull away, the tighter it wraps its silken threads around your shoulders. Hush, it whispers to you. Just be. Listening to it, you feel sure that Nepal is a nice place, a place you'd like to go, full of warmth, friendliness, stunning landscapes, and people dancing at night in traditional, possibly quasi-religious costumes. Sensual dancing, but not sexual dancing. Not corrupt dancing. Just good, watchable dancing. Maybe the air is dry and pure. Maybe you're talking about the air with Angelina Jolie. You want to order a dish you've never eaten before? Do it. This is Nepal, and Angelina will only appreciate your adventurousness.

6: Jingoism With the Olympics raging, America's economy bucking to grow despite European instability, huge swaths of ignorant racists loathing anyone not "white" and nationalism sweeping across the Eurozone, jingoism is all the rage. And what better anthem to honor it with than our own.

America has suffered over the centuries, largely from wounds she has inflicted on herself. Slavery. A long, bloody Civil War. Generations of racial discord. A political system that frequently betrays its deepest ideals. A wounded, wounding insistence on its special destiny in the world. In light of this troubled past, we can only admire the wisdom of the American people for selecting as their anthem a song that directly confronts the single most painful moment from their history: The time when Francis Scott Key didn't know who had won the battle for Fort McHenry during the War of 1812. The chord progression might be stodgy, the melody might be hard to sing, but the words — words about not being able to see very well when peering over the side of an 18th-century sailing ship — remain as true today as they were the day they were written.

7: Zack There is some power, here. Some organic push, which is both enticing and revolting. Yet this week, Zack's fleshy human underside was on full display. He left Durland for 4 days to traipse around in LA with a bunch of octogenarians. I managed to get this self-referential post out on time, and made a few dinners, but I was hardly clean about it and, lets be frank, half of this post is plagiarized. I was late for work twice this week, and spent most of my time there devising fantasy football constitutions. Yet, you are reading this. There is still some power. Much like the Israeli national anthem.

I know. Believe me, I know. It's not that you "feel chills" when listening to this anthem. It's that the rest of the time, you feel nothing, you're a shell, the gray world races around you like some sort of time-lapse effect in a city-themed coffee commercial ("Before your first cup of Maxwell House, life moves a little fast!"), and then you hear "Hatikvah" and feel whole again. That shivering? That's just your nervous system coming back. And then you read through all 1,519 YouTube comments and it occurs to you that you should maybe just drive out to Big Cat Jungle Adventure on Highway 85 and park the Impreza in the leopard section and get out.-BP

8: Tradition These little eddies and whorls of regular time. Jeff curses. Mikey drinks. Patternicity, perhaps, but maybe there is a predictable rhythm that the house has finally found. Maybe we have just laid down the ground work, in the first 11 weeks, from which our improvisations can arise. If you trust I'll be on the back beat, that Lars will be masturbating nightly, that JP will be thumping out the Galic calendar on his chest.

The only anthem with such a rich and deserving tradition isHandel's Zadok the Priest: The Coronation Anthem. If only Enguland had adopted this as its national anthem, and not the deflated lung filled with diarrhea that they currently wipe their oracular orifices with.

 

 9: Mikey  
The yard is out of control. Granted, he's been working for 11 straight days... but he sleeps until noon. He hasn't posted to the blog in god knows how long, and he wasn't even present for our spur-of-the-moment drunken homoerotic festival. He hasn't slept with any librarians, and he isn't even close.Yet he is, in a way, beyond reproachable. Mikey is Mikey, and kvetching will get you no where. Of course he gets the classic, and seriously overrated, Kimigayo.

 The poem that "Kimigayo" is based on is hundreds of years old. "Kimigayo" is now sung by pop divas at soccer games. You don't critique "Kimigayo," in the same way that you don't go to Sequoia National Park and complain that the trees "seem a little off." You don't even talk about "Kimigayo." You just take in its aura of mystery, give it the bronze medal, and get the hell out of its way.

 10: Pink Elephants     
Jack London coined the phrase, when he described a particular type of a drunk as, "the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants. He is the type that gives rise to the jokes in the funny papers."
Despite any positive associations you might have with Pink Elephants and clean cars, it's a very negatively charged lexical ion.
During JP, Jeff, Lars and my foray into the sixties swinging subculture (Pass Out) we concocted a growler of Pink Elephants.I know root for ivory hunters. The grenadine congealed, the vodka settled, our stomachs were unsettled and we all got drunk. Despite, or perhaps in part because of this, we all had fun, as well.

The only anthem which could encapsulate this pathos of detestment and, beneath the obrobrium, some degree of whimsical enjoyment is Canada's. Fun fact: my father, an ardent NHL fan, believe that the eponymous evocation comprises the entirety of the anthem's lyrics, and will sing "Oh CANada, oh CaaANada! Oh Canada, Oooh caaanaaadaaa. Oh CANada, ooh Caaaaaaa-naaaaa-daaaa!"

Bottom Billion: Jeff

Jeff, you hve been docked. For scurriously refusing to uphold the duties of your position as the Docktator, for not even proffering an excuse, instead going the route of the scrivener, for not golfing, but walking next to our threesome... you are the bottom billion for the week. In honor of your constant trolling, I offer you North Korea's anthem. Here's the story of its origin, according to Brian Phillips.

"Oh, Muhn?"
"Yes, Dear Leader?"
"Muhn, bring me my quill pen and a sheaf of our finest Pyongyang-milled staff paper. I have a mind to compose a new song."
"Yes, Dear Leader."
"It shall be a song for all the people of this land. A song expressing their spirit, their fortitude, their courage. A kind of anthem — by heaven, I think I've coined a new concept, Muhn!"
"Another one, sir?"
"Yes, Muhn, another one. Muhn, it is 2004. I believe every nation should have a unique song expressing its ideals and its character. A … a patriotic song, Muhn, if you will."
"A kind of anthem, then, sir?"
"Precisely. Now bring me that quill pen and staff paper. I have a hard hour's work ahead."
"Writing our anthem, sir?"
"Not just our anthem, Muhn. All the anthems."
"All the anthems, sir?"
"Well, I have only just invented the concept, Muhn. Every country will need one. My goodness, my brain is humming. I shall also have to enter the Time Caverns and retroactively insert these anthems into each nation's history and cultural memory. Muhn, bring me the original reels of Casablanca."
"Yes, Your Dear-Leaderliness."
"And some Combos, Muhn. Some Pepperoni Pizza Combos. Many Pepperoni Pizza Combos."
"Yes, Your Dear-Leaderliness."

"I have an appetite, Muhn, and it is the people's work we do this night."