Ohio’s lawmakers and energy policymakers once thought free-market competition would drive down electric rates as independent generating companies and power brokers competed against utilities for residential and commercial customers.

So the General Assembly in 1999 rewrote state law to eliminate the regulated generation rates under which electric companies had long operated as virtual monopolies.

Told to work out the details, state regulators created a so-called “market development period” that began in 2001 and is supposed to climax in January 2006 with the birth of a robust, competitive market.

But with three years down and two to go, only a handful of outside companies have entered Ohio to sell power.

And the promised deep discounts for residential and small commercial users who signed up with alternative suppliers have not materialized for most customers. In fact, commercial customers of FirstEnergy still pay some of the highest rates in the country.

How this happened is as complicated and thorny as deregulation itself.

Experts say the failure of California’s wildly ambitious deregulation plan and the collapse of Enron Corp. helped thwart the growth of a national wholesale market as a source of electricity for power marketers.

The insolvency of nearly a half-dozen other energy trading companies further stunted the wholesale market’s growth. That, in turn, made the creation of local retail competitive markets all but impossible.

Moreover, the lack of coherent federal policies spelling out what authority regional transmission organizations should exercise over utilities has kept the movement of bulk power across the nation’s electrical grid expensive and unreliable.

Still another part of the problem, say some critics, can be traced to the design of the deregulation law itself and to the rules that state regulators wrote.

The law allowed the monopoly utilities - FirstEnergy Corp., American Electric Power Co., Dayton Power & Light Co. and Cinergy Corp. - to continue collecting for old construction costs, including nuclear power plants, until Dec. 31, 2005. The utilities successfully argued that they had undertaken the construction projects as regulated monopolies and the costs otherwise would be “stranded.”

The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio agreed to allow FirstEnergy to collect a total of $8.7 billion to compensate the company for those costs. Always part of the electric bill, the charge now appears as a separate item called a “transition charge” and represents about 30 percent of the bottom line.

And consumers who switch to another power company still must pay the transition charge.

Critics think that’s wrong.

Me too. Market solutions to public problems never work if the effort is half-assed. This is a cautionary tale for advocates of market solutions to everything under the sun (me included). Sure, the market could make the world a beautiful place, but only if it works perfectly. Kind of like they used to say about Communism.

There is something novel about music written by dying songwriters. Even if the material has little to do with death on the face of it, their condition, as long as the listener knows about it, inevitably colors the listening experience. It’s part of a larger package of “performativity” issues that pointy-headed academics (like me, sometimes) talk about, and which boil down for our purposes to the relationship between a fan and the musician they venerate, and how that relationship works in the fan’s mind.

Part of popular music’s appeal has always been in the persona the performer creates. From the on-the-spot character plays and dying-children ballads of Vaudeville and music halls to Jimmie Rodgers as “The Singing Brakeman,” Johnny Cash as “The Man in Black” to Curt Cobain as “Tortured Genius,” how an artist presents themself is tightly bound up with the music itself. Without the personas, the music would still stand up, but the songs are richer for them.

Paradoxically, in light of the importance of image, rock has always thrived on asserting its “authenticity.” Long before the first rapper kept it real, rock and roll musicians were downplaying artifice, theatricality, and forethought in favor of instinct, spontaneity, and honesty. Of course, to present yourself as honest can take a lot of planning, acting, and hard work (viz. Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan), but that’s beside the point. The point is, popular music is often assumed to be (or presented as) an unedited communique’ from the singer’s heart to you. Indeed many artists enjoy the interplay between their “real” selves and the characters they create, and this interplay only works if the perception remains intact that the artist has a “real” side visible to the fan.

And what better way to get “real” then with death, the ultimate authenticity trip?
Some artists have made careers out of audiences predicting (or celebrating) their suffering and death (Keith Richards, GG Allin, Kurt Cobain, Iggy Pop, a whole slew of rap guys). Can you imagine a world in which Keith Richards had died shortly after recording “Sister Morphine”? Can you imagine the towering legend that he would be? Can you imagine a world where Kurt Cobain had entered rehab? Can you imagine his decline from relevance? The possibility of dying suffuses our (my?) experience of Keith’s and Kurt’s work to the point that it’s shocking that Richards is alive, and not at all shocking that Cobain is dead.

The interplay of an artist’s persona and the reality of death gives power to the music created under these conditions. What we’re seeing today is a new twist. Whereas Janis, Jimi, and Jim Morrison all gained in stature after their deaths as their legends grew unhindered by the real person, that was accidental. And although a dead Elvis is a saint and a dead Sinatra is no longer a wife-beating cad, death in their cases too only uncoupled myth from reality. But now, artists from an autobiographical songwriting tradition are singing about the end of their own lives, taking the opportunity to fuse their “real” inner lives with the public personas they inhabit, and actively mold the outcome. So far, the first efforts along these lines are excellent works of art.

But isn’t it a little weird that watching our heroes chronicle their own death holds such an appeal? I mean, George Jones sings about drinking killing him on literally every album, and every couple of years almost manages to pull it off. One of these times will be the last. Tupac Shakur sang about dying over and over, and his posthumous body of work exceeds that released during his life. Pete Townshend eventually backed off his “hope I die before I get old” schtick, because he was getting old and the sentiment was getting weird.

It seems to me that, like with most other things, rock fans use musicians as scapegoats for their own darker urges and deathwishes. It is exhilarating to see someone walk the line between junkie and corpse, and it is profoundly satisfying to honestly mourn the death of someone who has touched your life deeply yet doesn’t share your last name. I wept for Johnny Cash when June died, and I wept again for the man himself, but at least it’s not my wife, father, or mother in the grave. I mean, it’s cool and all, but I just want to call it what it is.

That being said, it is right and good that the first Rock and Roll Death Autobiographies are from Warren Zevon, Joey Ramone, and Johnny Cash, three artists whose personalities seemed always to shine through the characters they created. Death settles all questions of authenticity.

Listening to Joey give the Ramones Treatment to Louis Armstrong’s “What A Wonderful World” or sing “I want my life, it really sucks” in “I Get Knocked Down,” you understand the pain Joey is in yet understand that he approaches death the way he approached life-- with equal measures humor, introspection, and cartoonish fervor. Ditto for Warren Zevon. The last track on “The Wind,” “Keep Me In Your Heart For Awhile,” is an elegiac, touching, and humble capstone on a career that encompassed everything from archly intellectual smartassery to lacerating fury. Here the weight of his young man’s anger seems to be stripped away as Zevon accepts that he won’t be here anymore very soon. (Ironically, Zevon’s ‘meditiations on death’ album was 2001’s “My Ride’s Here,” recorded before he was diagnosed with cancer, and I suspect the irony was not lost on him.) Finally, if there is any justice in the Christian tradition, I know that Johnny Cash is sitting on a lawn in heaven next to June, and they both have guitars.

This article also appears at blogcritics.org.

Ross writes,

Early in “The Fellowship of the Ring,” the first film in Peter Jackson’s monumental “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, the wizard Gandalf finds himself alone in a room with the trinket that could end the world. It lies gleaming on the floor, and Gandalf regards it with an attitude of fascinated fear. The audience feels a chill that neither Jackson’s vertiginous camera angles nor Ian McKellen’s arching eyebrows can fully explain. The Ring of Power extends its grip through the medium of music, which is the work of the gifted film composer Howard Shore. In the preceding scenes, an overview of the habits of hobbits, Shore’s music had an English-pastoral, dance-around-the-Maypole air, but when the ring begins to do its work a Wagnerian tinge creeps in—fittingly, since “The Lord of the Rings” dwells in the shadow of Wagner’s even more monumental “Ring of the Nibelung.” J. R. R. Tolkien’s fans have long maintained a certain conspiracy of silence concerning Wagner, but there is no point in denying his influence, not when characters deliver lines like “Ride to ruin and the world’s ending!”—Brünnhilde condensed to seven words.

Shore manages the admirable feat of summoning up a Wagnerian atmosphere without copying the original. He knows the science of harmonic dread. First, he lets loose an army of minor triads, or three-note chords in the minor mode. They immediately cast a shadow over the major-key music of the happy hobbits. (A digression for those who skipped grade-school music class or never had one: Why does the minor chord make the heart hang heavy? First, you have to understand why the major triad, its fair-haired companion, sounds “bright.” It is based on the spectrum of notes that arise naturally from a vibrating string. If you pluck a C and then divide the string in half, in thirds, in fourths, and so on, you will hear one by one the clean notes that spell C major. Wagner’s “Ring” begins with a demonstration: from one deep note, wave upon wave of majestic harmony flows. The C-minor triad, however, has a more obscure connection to “natural” sound. The middle note comes from much higher in the overtone series. It sets up grim vibrations in the mind.)

The minor triad would not in itself be enough to suggest something as richly sinister as the Ring of Power. Here Wagner comes in handy. He famously abandoned the neat structures of classical harmony for brooding, meandering strings of chords. In the “Ring,” special importance attaches to the pairing of two minor triads separated by four half-steps—say, E minor and C minor. Conventional musical grammar says that these chords should keep their distance, but they make an eerie couple, having one note (G) in common. Wagner uses them to represent, among other things, the Tarnhelm, the ring’s companion device, which allows its user to assume any form. Tolkien’s ring, likewise, makes its bearer disappear, and Shore leans on those same spooky chords to suggest the shape-shifting process.

In “The Return of the King,” which opens this week, Shore’s music keeps pace with the burgeoning grandeur of the filmmaking. When the hobbits escape Mt. Doom, Renée Fleming sings, in Elvish. As the evil lord Sauron comes to grief, the dusky harmonies of the ring give way to their mirror image in the major key. There is an abrupt harmonic shift that has the effect of sun breaking through clouds. You would have thought that sometime between the birth of Stravinsky and the publication of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” such echt-Wagnerian material would have gone out of fashion, but there is life in the fat lady yet.

OK. First of all, although Ross’ assertions are correct on a harmonic level, he is dead wrong about why Howard Shore’s score to LoTR is a descendant of Wagner’s operas.

On this point, Ross is right: the major third is lower down in the harmonic series of a vibrating string than is the minor third. Hence, it may be described as more “natural” sounding if you’d like. But to argue from that base that “natural” equals “happy” and “unnatural” leads to “grim vibrations in the mind” is so much handwaving. Music theory is as much a cultural construction as it is a matter of science. That’s the problem that the Greeks ran into, as well as the problem that Bach papered over with his “Well-Tempered Clavier.”

What that means is, although acoutistics and the properties of vibrating bodies are a matter of physics, how the ear interprets them is a matter of conditioning, context, and prior preparation more than anything else. Don’t believe me? Then you tell ME how “Boot Scootin’ Boogie” is as much a party song as Balinese gamelan music. What music-theoretical parallels can be drawn between the two to isolate the “happy sound”?

Within the boundaries I’ve just established, it’s perfectly OK to say that major is a happy sound. In European society, it surely is. And it’s even possible to theorize that it’s so because major keys resolve so neatly.

Why is this? Because the half-steps in the major scale come between the 3rd and 4th degrees and the 7th and 8th (or 1st) degrees of the scale. In the key of C, that would be between E and F, and between B and C. Because of other aspects of theory which I won’t bore you with, this means that these half-steps fall in harmonically crucial places. 

In conventional music theory, a “V-7” chord, or “dominant 7th” in the key of C is spelled G-B-D-F (a G major chord plus an F on top). Theory dictactes that, in the key of C, a G chord likes to resolve back to a C chord (C-E-G). With the addition of the F on top, that tendency becomes far more pronounced.

Why? Two reasons. First, the minor third (D-F) placed on top of the nice-sounding G triad pollutes the harmony. A string vibrating G will generally contain prominent overtones of B and D. Any guitarist can tell you this. So this triad is part of what occurs naturally (and audibly) in any vibrating body. But adding the F on top sets up a series of conflicts that add dissonance to the mix. Dissonance, to Western ears, likes to resolve to consonance.

Second, the chord G-B-D-F contains a “tritone,” or two notes separated by four whole steps. In music theory, the tritone is a black sheep, neither consonant nor particularly dissonant, and it is the only interval that does not naturally occur in the interaction of the root of a given major scale with the other elements of that scale. (That is, all the possible intervals between two notes, except the tritone, occur in the following two-note combinations: C-D C-E C-F C-G C-A C-B.)

Look at those notes F and B. Earlier I mentioned that the pairs E-F and B-C were special. Guess where this tritone of F and B contained in the G-B-D-F chord likes to resolve to? That’s right-- E and C. E and C are two notes in a C chord (C-E-G). Thus, adding F to the triad G-B-D sets up a harmonic situation that tends very strongly to resolve to C-E-G, a nice, square, clean C major chord.

Since our ears are trained from birth with fundamentally simple songs that rely on this very harmonic device, such a tension-release series is very satisfying to us. Hence major keys produce harmonically balanced sounds that could be considered ‘happy.’ I’m not claiming that these theoretical reasons are the only reasons why major keys sound so happy, but it’s a major part.

Minor keys, on the other hand, are a different story. The minor second intervals fall between the 2nd and 3rd degrees of the scale, and the 5th and 6th. In C minor, that would be between D and E-flat and G and A-flat. That means that the tritone in the scale exists not between F and B, which tends to resolve strongly to the home chord of the key, but between D and A-flat. The tendency is thus for the key to resolve to E-flat major (why? just bear with me). Therefore, minor keys are constantly fighting their own tendency to go elsewhere, and only frank harmonic trickery and exception-making causes minor-chord pieces to work out harmonically.

Since our ears, as I’ve asserted, are trained to hear the square, mathematically neat resolutions of major keys as deeply satisfying, minor keys sound by comparison unsettled and dissonant. The same goes to a certain degree with modal harmonies which are beyond the boundaries of this particular bit of wonkery.

So. All this crap is to say that Alex Ross is engaging in a lot of post-Romantic handwaving when he talks about “dark vibrations in the mind” (he is a Wagner fan, after all!) Tibetan throat singing sets up dark vibrations in my wife’s mind, and that’s neither major nor minor. The real feat is that, using the simplest of musical tools available in the Western tradition,Howard Shore’s score advances the state of the art of “Mickey Mousing” (that is, keying musical cues to onscreen action) for almost the first time since John Williams did “Jaws” and “Star Wars: A New Hope,” and comes close to the heft, grandeur, and complexity of Wagner’s most demanding moments. Theme is heaped upon theme, harmonic relations are handled with a loose and masterful hand, and the tension-release cycle is closely keyed to the action we are seeing on the screen. In this regard more than anything else, Howard Shore has come very close to the spirit of Wagner’s writing, as a thousand shitty books will tell you at great length.  Regardless of whether Tolkien disavowed his Wagnerian inspiration or not, Howard Shore has brought the spirit of Wagner’s operatic scoring to the big screen in high style. 

Politics

Person of the Year: Howard Dean

Asshole of the Year: Ralph Nader, but only if he decides to actually run for President. Barring that, I’m going to have to go with Karl Rove.

Scandal: That nobody STILL has been shitcanned for the intelligence failures leading up to September 2001, yet members of Bush’s team who didn’t toe the line have been jettisoned repeatedly.

Sports

Best Athlete: Lebron James, especially if he can develop into a team player.

Best Sports Team: The Red Sox.

Most Memorable Sports Moment: approximately 11:18 PM, October 16, as my baptism into the Red Sox Nation began. I’ve had my Buckner moment, and it feels… ouchy.

Film/Television

Best Film: The Hours was good, as was Master and Commander, but I’m going to bet that the Return of the King is going to be a near-spiritual experience.

Best Documentary: Martin Scorsese’s “The Blues,” with special attention to Bobby Rush and the ass on hinges.

Best Adaptation of Literature to Film: Return of the King.

Best TV show (comedy/drama/fiction): Scrubs, and Gilmore Girls.

Best TV show (information/reality/non-fiction): Queer Eye for the Straight Guy

Most Memorable TV Moment: Saddam Hussein’s examination for head lice.

Music

Best Album: Outkast: Speakerboxxx/The Love Below

Best Song/Single: Seven Nations Army: The White Stripes

Favorite Live Show: Robert Randolph & the Family Band, free afternoon show at Copley Square.

Notable “Re-discovery” in Music: The Beatles. I no longer think they suck completely. Only partly.

Literature

Best Fiction Book (Since January 2002): Screw dates of publication. Dan Simmons’ “Hyperion” and sequels.

Best Non-fiction Book (Trade) (Since January 2002): Edmund Morgan’s “Benjamin Franklin” was pretty hot shit.

Best Academic Book (Since January 2003): Screw dates, again. David Hackett Fisher’s “Albion’s Seed” was pretty hot shit.

Best Short Story: I don’t read these. I also don’t run sprints.

Notable “Re-discovery” in Literature: Haruki Murukame “The Wind-up Bird Chronicles”

Guilty Pleasures

Album that I refuse to admit that I like: I am perfectly willing to admit I listen to Christina Aguilera and I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that Garth Brooks released some great songs.

TV show I watch in secret: Nothin’. I’m proud of my viewing choices. Although I’m only allowed to watch “Adult Swim” on the Cartoon Network alone because it gives my wife headaches, except for “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.”

Culture

Best Restaurant Meal: The steak tips at McSwiggin’s Irish Pub in Salem, Massachusetts have twice brought me, in a literal and entirely unmetaphorical sense, to tears. They may be the best meat I have ever tasted. For the non-New Englanders: steak tips are pieces of sirloin. Don’t know why they’re called tips. They’re just pieces of sirlon. A regional delicacy on the level of fried whole-belly clams, Moxie, Sky Bars, and Kelly’s Roast Beef.

Favorite Personal Moment: For Christmas I got my wife an appointment at a hair salon on Newbury Street, the high-fashion nexus of the Boston area. I sat and read my book patiently while the stylist did her magic. After a while, I looked up to find a vision walking toward me. It took a minute to register in my stunned mind, but when it did it was like a sweet punch to the head: “Oh my God, that gorgeous, hot, breathtaking woman, is my wife. MY wife!.

Favorite Website: why, perfidy.org, of course.

Gracious Celebrity: Erm… Jessica Lynch, for having the grace to slide back into obscurity.

Undeserved Celebrity: Ann Coulter.

Will be found guilty/innocent

Michael Jackson: Innocent.

Kobe Bryant: Guilty!

Scott Peterson: Guilty, guilty, guilty! Who goes boating on Christmas eve?