Glebe Cow Drooled

Moscow Or Bust

2011-07-26T15:33:00.001-07:00

"Thanks, International Monetary Fund!"

Reviewed: Metro 2033. Published by THQ for X-Box 360 (2010)

This is one moody dystopia in the Moscow subway, that's for sure. The depths are crawling with refugees, soldiers, fascists, ghosts and mutants, all vying for supremacy in these hopeless tunnels.

If you've read the novel (its vision of post-apocalyptic humanity forced underground isn't a work of genius, but it's striking), you'll be in for an even more immersive treat. The game has liberally adapted its source material, even down to reutilizing dialogue. This is science fiction of the Russian-bleak-as-all-'ell variety; it owes more than a passing debt to the Strugatsky Brothers' unforgettable novel Roadside Picnic as well as to the spiritual dolor of Tarkovsky's film adaptation Stalker.

As a pure FPS, it's frantic and exhilarating. Weapons have a rusty, scavenged quality, lethal junk that has outlasted the finer works of man. Enemies range from monsters to monstrous people -- the game leaves it to you to decide which is worse. I liked the flow of battles and the way they're woven into the environments, which are important to the way certain creatures attack. The above-ground levels in frozen Moscow make a nice departure from the

underground in the way air management is essential and by introducing a welcome stealth element.

But it is always the sense, best captured by the Strugatskys and in recent times by Cormac McCarthy, of social relations in grim corners that sets Metro 2033 above the dull bang-bang gaming genre and at least glances at richer realms of storytelling. As games (the Elder Scrolls series is one good example) even crudely engage the idea of society, they move well ahead of today's Hollywood movies whose boring, nihilistic visions treat the social landscape as nothing but many-limbed decor.

Frankly I loved the game -- that's far more than I can say for most I play, each more forgettable than the last. Here is a stunning blend of backstory and action. A great deal of sweat has gone into getting its details right, the feeling right. It's nearly perfect up until its final dark moment.

Ketchaoua, Here I Come

2010-11-07T01:11:00.000-07:00

"...This is some very free music and, save for a handful of scored passages, almost wholly improvised. A number of the scene's top players make appearances here in different groups. On the large ensemble pieces Thornton is joined by Grachan Moncur III, Archie Shepp (on soprano sax), Arthur Jones, Dave Burrell, Beb Guerin, Earl Freeman, and Sunny Murray. Otherwise, "Brotherhood," a piece for quintet, is performed by Thornton, Jones, Guerin, Freeman, and this time, drummer Claude Delcloo, while on "Speak With Your Echo" only the two bassists (Guerin and Freeman) accompany Thornton's cornet. This piece in particular is especially enjoyable and reminiscent perhaps of Arthur Jones' fantastic ballad, "Brother B," from his own Actuel LP, Scorpio. At times the ensemble pieces sound like a Pan-African Morton Feldman..."

Oh my god. Sign me the fuck up!

Morton Feldman, Where You Been All My Life?

2010-03-12T00:12:00.001-08:00

The two great discoveries of my middle years are jazz and indeterminate music, such as Feldman's, with its slow, evolving complexities built on simple gestural parts.

Every time I encounter Feldman's music, I wonder what took me so long getting here. Then I think, Ehhh... only everything that makes it more interesting now.

How Gordon Brown Won The War

2010-03-11T22:43:00.000-08:00

"Dulce et decorum est, eh wot? Carry on!"

British PM Gordon Brown was just off to the Khyber Pass to promise more war goodies for the lads. What a comfort to the homesick squaddie to see his nettled eminence, trussed up in a flak vest, arrive on the scene looking like a misdelivered panda. This way to the mating cage, sir.

Brown was traveling because he is under fire from the UK military brass for not spending enough on equipment. Sound familiar? The same charge was leveled by US liberals many times against Bush. It became a point of pride for the Kerry campaign, later turned to horror when his Swift Boating showed Democrats they can not play at right wing militarism convincingly. However much it is in their mind, they lack that ineffable thing located somewhat lower in the dark, clammier places where guile conjoins with bowel: the motherfucker instinct. It can't be faked. I don't see much motherfucker in that picture of Gordon, do you?* Kerry lacked it in spades, too, even if once he'd shot a few peasants from the safety of his widdle boatie.

"Supporting the troops" is what politicians say over here when campaigning to satisfy the armchair Genghis Khans at home watching FOX for the least sign of disloyalty. But it is only a guarantee against death threats, not one of votes nor of influence. The pro-war liberal politician, for all his murderous good intent, is chiefly an accessory to empire. Empire is the only concern of our system; its maintenance, its expansion; he is a ceremonial functionary, siphoning off grease splatter for the constituents and helping to pile high the plate of lard for the mil-industrial complex. Mostly he is scared by it; witness the number of Democrats voting against Kucinich's recent motion to withdraw immediately from Afghanistan. According to an eyewitness account I heard, a few were spluttering mad over the mere suggestion.

All of which, funnily enough, brings us back to the great irony of asymmetrical warfare in our and Britain's ongoing imperial adventures: the local resistance appears to do well on far less than the invaders. As in Southeast Asia forty years ago so too now in South-Central Asia and beyond. For the amount spent on fuel, grooming and security for crating Gordon Brown off for a day to Afghanistan, you could probably feed a thousand local resistance fighters for a month.

*However, according to Andrew Rawnsley's new book, Brown is such a motherfucker to his own staff that he had one terrified aide covering up in the back of the limo as he threatened to bash him. Points for style, but not really relevant.

"We Have Such Sights To Show You!"

2010-02-24T10:42:00.000-08:00

London is howling, and no wonder. The new U.S. embassy design unveiled this week is a cilice belt to be wrapped around the city's balls.

It can not help the architect has referenced medieval keeps. His spiky glass turd comes with a moat. And battlement, emerging out of its weird thorny hide:

That's the price you pay for being in a special relationship. A bit of love. A bit of pain:

David Pogue at Macworld

2010-02-13T23:08:00.001-08:00

Wheeee: Like an animatronic at the Prozac booth

The plot was lost when print journalists morphed into craaaaaazeee "personalities," long the fluffy identity of shills on morning TV. Now that he's delivering the big pep talk at the annual Apple trade fair, what credibility can the New York Times technology columnist have as a rentable brand-muppet?

Feelin' All Hopey-Changey

2010-02-11T00:18:00.000-08:00

I make a point of never listening to political speeches, lacking either the required taste in sadomasochism or instep for falling in behind Glorious Leaders. I like my politicians as I do my dogs: heeling, desperate to please and squatting in the park rather than on the rug.

But their soundbites I can abide, provided these run to ten words or less, and as the form goes Palin's tempest-in-a-Tea-Party crack the other day was hard not to appreciate. Whoever was hired to write her shtick is loads better than the last Melvin. Her latest taunt, taking a rightful place in the annals of palaver, is pure gold:

How's that hopey-changey thing workin' out for ya?

Badum-CHING! I repeated it to Michael Blaine who, not surprisingly, swiftly topped it:

How's that waterboardy-Jesusy thing workin' out for ya?

The Gorgon Cometh: Every snake in her bonnet hisses for peace

2009-11-18T02:59:00.000-08:00

"She's a global celebrity, but can Secretary Clinton make a more peaceful world?"

Obama was just lecturing the Chinese about freedom of speech.

Free speech. It's our secret ingredient--our MSG. We sprinkle it in the inanities and lies to give them flavor.

The global celebrity pictured above, for instance, once was wont to say she would "totally obliterate" Iran if it attacked Israel. She loudly advocated invading Iraq and Afghanistan. She consistently demands increased war spending. She has never met a war she didn't like. In photo-ops from war zones, she can be seen looking like a giddy 60-something cheerleader with her frightening eyes a-twinkle, a war tourist jazzing her career with a little glamorous dust.

Can she make a more peaceful world? Depends. Is she willing to resign, admit her every foreign policy stance has been farcically destructive to U.S. interests not to mention to innocent lives abroad, and confine herself to a future of shrieking on political chat shows? How about a plea bargain--she walks, but we let her keep the snakes.

McCarthy's "The Road" Out In October

2009-07-14T18:45:00.000-07:00

Word that the film version of "The Road" is in post-production is good to hear, especially as it's directed by John Hillcoat. Hillcoat's "The Proposition" (2005) is artful in its terror and melancholy, two terms that can be applied to Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece.

Personally I won't see the film -- I would prefer to live with the book as I have experienced it. But we aren't a country of readers and the value of the film may lie just in its ability to plant a seed of horror of abysses -- nuclear and cultural -- in the triumphalist American skull. Something must scare us off our savage trajectory. I don't know if art can do that today or ever could; I would like to think maybe, sometimes, yes.

The Many Deaths of Arturo Gatti

2009-07-13T18:34:00.001-07:00

June 25, 2005: doomsday

I was saddened to read about Arturo Gatti. Brutally murdered this past weekend, a mere two years after retiring, at 35, from boxing. Strangled in a Brazilian vacation rental. A bloody purse strap. His young wife suspected. The early press reports spoke of a "second honeymoon" ending in the macabre. She -- plump, 23, her face covered by a hoodie in custody -- claiming to have slept soundly as his corpse grew cold in the next room. He just weeks shy of testifying in a suit against a boxing commission concerning brain damage he dealt to another boxer. Does this sound like pulp fiction yet?

It was a squalid end for the much-loved former champ. Boxing is often about dark ends, in the ring and out, but there was extra pathos given Gatti's legend. He was a sunnily optimistic journeyman. He bled like nobody's business and he hoisted his matinee idol's mug, however dented or red, every round for more. In interviews he was soft-spoken, humble, no braggart, no trash talker. He sounded like the archetypal kid brother in a 1950s TV sitcom. Like, say, the Beav after a Charles Atlas course. Well, I'm gonna go out and do what I can against that Eddie Haskel, I know he's bigger 'n me but I'm gonna try. He could handle most guys but never the best. Oscar de la Hoya whipped him.

And of course he went to war when equally matched, as in his famous trilogy in 2002-2003 with "Irish" Mickey Ward. These are thought to be among the best classic fights in the recent era. They are rebroadcast endlessly. They are exhilarating, they are ferocious. They are almost medieval in their seesawed bloodiness. They have little to do with good boxing actually. Raised on Ali, I like boxing for technical prowess mainly, for its grace and art. Neither Ward nor Gatti possessed much art nor defense nor any idea other than go forward, swing, get hit, swing, sit down, get stitched up, hear the bell, rise and gedbackoutdere. Yes they had heart, mad gonzo courage and nerve beyond all sizing as if they knew the lessons of the world are told in a catechism of pain from one man to the next. So they stood face to face and tortured each other. Always the dumbfounded look as they swung on. Bones breaking. Gatti's shattered hand hanging limply at his side as, one-fisted, he laid into the mutilated Irishman. "Fight of the year," according to Ring Magazine.

In later years, beloved on the eastern seaboard for such heart, Gatti made many people rich. Promoters, HBO, trainers, bookies, gamblers, mooks of all vintage and origin: all got a taste. This led to him being grotesquely overmatched--elevated, foolishly, as the Great White Hope. His dismantling by Floyd Mayweather, Jr. in 2005 is a terrible thing to see. This spectacle, and not Gatti-Ward I, II or III, is among the classic fights of recent years because it is in fact representative. Its raw materials: so-so slugger vs. supernaturally gifted boxer, brute versus technical genius, plodding versus blinding speed, and most tellingly, plucky B-list endearing Everyman versus top-of-the-food-chain nihilist. Hope vs. Truth. Darwinism in three-minute bursts. In its cruel inevitability, as it ends with Gatti somehow able to cry out of eyes bulging like chemically-enlarged turnips, it epitomizes how money and horseshit fantasy rather than quality or qualifications drive this sport. I've never watched a sadder six rounds in my life. As criminal as it was to stage this event, it revealed in microcosm the business of boxing as it is usually conducted: bait for sharks.

I don't doubt Gatti died in some measure that night when his egregious hopes were mercilessly judged. It wasn't the beating, it was the meaning of the beating. Boxing careers are short fuses in a long life and his had burnt out. Two more knockouts would stretch him out before the end. According to news stories, grief followed in retirement: arrested for assaulting a former girlfriend, jailed for skipping a court date, restraining orders, hauled from a strip club, drugs and booze. And now this purse strap, this unseemly and pathetic death. Don't get up, champ. RIP, hopefully, at long last.

You Take The Ankles, and I'll Take The Stairs

2009-06-24T16:29:00.000-07:00

My pal Rick Griffith has a new CD out. Take the Stairs is a fusion of every mad idea the Saint Paul-based lutenist/guitarist/mandolinist/bassist has had in the year since his last CD, the pop-subverso Tool Factory Project. Rick writes like he's channeling all the stuff your mother told you would rot your brain (and oh was she right), or as he puts it:

influences include everything from Edgard Varese to The Jam to TV cop shows to Neil Innes to the Ventures to 50's B sci-fi movies to Japanese power pop to 70's UFO abduction paranoia literature to Frank Zappa, Jay Ungar, Tom Waits, They Might Be Giants, The Archies (the cartoon, comic books AND bubble gum pop group), Monty Python, Ed Wood, Charles Fort, Marcel DuChamp, the Hair Bear Bunch, Jonny Quest, the Marx Brothers (but NOT the Stooges--unless you're talking about Iggy Pop), the Ritz Brothers, the Chambers Brothers, the Buscema brothers, Steve Ditko, Steve Gerber, the Fuzztones, Bart Hopkin, Harry Partch, lutenist Nigel North, those wild Japanese robot toys from the 1980's, and every single dog in the whole wide world, plus a whole bunch of other stuff for which there just isn't room to list here...

So we are in a place where pastiche and homage are spoken, often with bite and always with verve. (Fond memory: I once saw Rick lecture to a packed house in the rotunda at the Highland Park Library on the roots of the medieval anti-witch crusades, while he played bewitching lute and performed magic tricks.) Favorites this time around are his Morriconesque "Love Theme From An Imaginary Foreign Film" and the gorgeous instrumental, "Under the Northern Stars," which gives a hint of the renaissance musician he is in another, leotarded life.

Silence! Mr. Bale Is "Thinking"!

2009-06-15T15:57:00.000-07:00

Thank you all for coming to the associate producers meeting.

If you've only heard Christian Bale's leaked on-set emoting, where he goes off on a poor crew member who had the nerve to walk around during his oh-so-heavy creative labors ("...kick your fucking ass! I want you off the set, you prick!"), skip Terminator Salvation. All the fireworks are on that mp3. Bale is much more wheezily dramatic when he feels his golden line to his muse has been cut by insufficiently reverent peons than in this flat, boring dud. Ironically, this is the same Bale who once casually told an interviewer that acting is so simple it can be learned in a day. His variety, maybe.

Worse than a bad day at work, the movie feels like it has possibly the highest budget-to-boredom ratio of all time. Much blame must fall on the filmmaker, the vowel-deprived McG, who directs like a T-800 robot. So incapable is he of doing anything new or interesting, as he raids every previous Terminator movie and Tom Clancy jackass fest he's ever seen, that nothing feels fresh even when he is launching gobs of molten CGI into the frame. It's no fun. The script is supremely godawful, as is to be expected from half the creative genius behind Halle Berry's Catwoman bomb. (You might think participating in that fiasco would be a slight impediment to writing future blockbusters. But no. Hollywood's like American finance: you can fail all the way to the moon, baby.)

By the second reel, I was rooting for the poor robots to hose the entire insufferable human cast. Yes the lot, from Lord High Bale on down to the cute mute ragamuffin, the wise Boomer earth mother vegan, the butt-kicking Asian sexbomb chick, the unwilling half-man half-robot and certainly the young striving 20-something hero out to prove he's fit to join this man's anti-terminator army. We are a long way from the James Cameron movies which originally made this silliness watchable. Could it be that twenty years of life in an increasingly robotic, soulless society has drained this vision of its incipient dread? Is there anything left to the myth that we will be ruled by machines when we live in the age of the real, live governator? I've seen 21st century real estate agents who look scarier than anything McG can dream up.

From the crappy to the not-so-crappy: over the weekend, I caught the Scottish supernatural Nazis-back-from-the-grave flick Outpost (2008). At a budget of roughly 1/200th of Terminator Salvation's $200m cost, it delivers many more spills and chills, while managing to rework its own well-used cliches into something at least mildly entertaining. That the filmmakers mortgaged their house to get it made only adds to the charm. McG could learn lots watching it.

Just Say Infer-NO

2009-06-04T13:59:00.000-07:00

Lesser-known 10th circle of hell glimpsed

Outside the LA convention center where the E3 gaming expo is being held, redneck Christians are protesting the Dante's Inferno video game. They don't want hell taken lightly. "My high score," says one sign, "is in heaven." Proselytizing gold, that one.

You can understand their fear, which is somewhat different to the usual proprietary hands-off-our-symbolism of Catholics, say, offended by The Last Temptation of Christ or Godard's Hail Mary. This goes deeper, past denominational wrinkles to the mythological core: take away the boogeyman, make him easy to whup, and supernaturalism is a much harder sell. The brimstone crowd needs an indomitable evil. If you can beat their all-time baddie with a lightsabre, what use have you for their long-haired superhero sky god?

Religious myths depend on tradition for power, but in our visual age they are at a disadvantage. Walking on water wowed 'em, as a story, two millennia ago. Today that sounds slightly less banal than one of David Blaine's dumb feats. Advances in the fantastic, or adjustments to what an age considers fantastic as well as how it consumes such imagery, chip away at classic omnipotence style. Video games are the first experiential form outside of drugs to give their users god-like powers. That's what the humbugs should worry about. How are you going to keep them down on the farm when they've shot lasers out of their eyes?

Games, of course, now outsell movie tickets, DVDs and CDs. It's wrong to think of them as mere entertainment. They're the predominant expression of American culture, or more accurately, of international digital culture, which has fused with ours. Their mythic underpinnings vie with their mission to coax floods of endorphins into coach potato brains. I would argue that in their enactments of rage, salvation and endless slaughter they say more about American dreams and desires in 2009 than do baseball, The NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams or the two-party political system. Their gravitational pull on the 21st century mind may be enormous.

I doubt they're either as baleful as their foes say or as benign as their addicts hope. Undeniably they are what we are now: visual, post-literate, sensation-bound, honking mad and able to jack in to our id with the push of a button. Speaking of id, let it be known I like my video baddies steeped in old-school Lovecraft style as is to be expected when your dog is named after John Carmack (as much in admiration of his coding artistry as of his humanity). I will give Dante's Inferno a go, without a care for heaven or hell.

Making The World Safe For Facebook

2009-05-13T22:27:00.000-07:00

Twenty years of schoolin' and they put you on the tit shift

Is there anything drearier than a young prude?

Yes, a professional young prude:

The 26-year-old Stanford grad is one of some 150 people the young company employs to keep the site clean—out of a total head count of 850. Facebook describes these staffers as an internal police force, charged with regulating users' decorum, hunting spammers and working with actual law-enforcement agencies to help solve crimes. Part hall monitors, part vice cops, these employees are key weapons in Facebook's efforts to maintain its image as a place that's safe for corporate advertisers—more so than predecessor social networks like Friendster and MySpace.

That's Newsweek in "Walking The Cyberbeat" lauding Facebook's "porn cops," the crew seen above, as they go about their work days with lips pursed and mouse hand poised, making the deletions that will keep the social networking site safe for corporate advertising. For performing this Winston Smith-meets-Ruth Buzzi work, these recent grads do OK:

Behind all these actions is a team of employees who set guidelines and make judgment calls, each earning in the neighborhood of $50,000 a year—making "porn cop" one of the quirkier entry-level jobs to emerge in the Silicon Valley economy.

"Quirkier"-- when did that come to mean more pathetic? Sure, it's a lousy economy, you take what you can get. What a waste of minds, let alone seats in colleges, though, if we're sending people to school only in order to train tomorrow's areola hunters. The only more depressing example I've heard recently is a friend's friend's kid getting a job through the Obama gravy train. Idealistic campaign worker, change you can believe in, making history, etc. He's now riveting together Homeland Security press releases. Given the choice between Facebook and the vee-haf-ways people, I'd probably rather click the OBSCENE button all day long.

Maybe these folks hate their jobs, maybe they love them, who knows? Newsweek's too busy making it sound like derring-do to ask anyone; not that the answer is likely to be, "Yes, when I removed the shot of that guy in the chaps with an ass like the lid of the Popemobile, I knew this was why I studied history." Clicking through naughty Facebook pages admittedly beats what I did at their age. When the economy sucked in the 80s and I had yet to cobble up enough credits to graduate, I sold shoes. Millionaire TV news bimbos, banker-slavers, pampered athletes and Saint Paul's coked-up scandahoovian elite stuck out their dogs for the cool embrace of a Cole Haun, which I obligingly squirmed onto their toesy woesies in the usual sad bid for commission. Tennessee Williams, who also sold shoes for a spell and decided those years didn't count, would later subtract the time when giving his age.

How can this tit-nitpicking be economical? Facebook has yet to earn a cent. Not that I'm trying to downsize anyone, but really, people do this kind of thing for free. Ask any librarian. $50K to censor seems like dear pay for work that has been done down the ages, from Milton's era to ours, by simpletons, busybodies, bitter pensioners, seething mobs, vituperative churchmen and so on, with remuneration only the flames in their eyes and a happy clenching in the bowels. It's a vast dishonorable tradition. Facebook's clueless. Out there, beyond the darkness on the edge of town, is a congress of sere and vengeful fogies who'd gladly devote their every free minute as canaries in the coal mines of exposed flesh.

Yes, I know it's called Facebook and not Arsebook. So? Why glamorize a grubby gig? Half the trouble here is Newsweek being so approving, so panting, in its usual conceit of having located the cutting edge. (News magazine trend-hopping can be a millstone of embarrassment. Back in those heady post-9-11 days, Newsweek's resident fuckwit Jonathan Alter got excited about torture, declaring himself all manned-up and ready at last to think the unthinkable.* That sure worked out well.) But today in newsmagazine land, the edge only gets blunter as the readers thin out along with the ad pages. There's desperation for anything that can bring the audience back. Maybe that's why the article has the anti-porn posse posing like a TV crime-show cast, unless they've all watched so much CSI that the pack-of-uptight-dicks look just comes naturally.

* His pro-torture piece ran the very same week FOX's 24 debuted; Alter, you might say, cut Jack Bauer's umbilical cord.

Oscar Wilde For Beginners

2009-05-01T16:03:00.001-07:00

My Sony PRS-505 is a real treat, easily my favorite all-time gizmo.

No more dead-tree books for me if I can get them digitally. I realize this won't be universally true, ever, especially as my tastes are eclectic and often far from the commercial norm; but it's going to be more possible as time goes by. No, I'm not expecting Thomas Bernhard in digital form any time soon. But I should point out it wasn't cheap or easy getting him in paper, either. So there.

Generally, shopping at the Sony eBook Store is pretty painless. I do it by booting into Windoze on the Mac. Are prices fair? Not fair enough, as reflects a top-heavy corporate publishing world heaving under its profit demands. (Something like the mp3 revolution will soon set it straight.) But as weighed against waiting on a book I want to read now and as against buying a smelly used copy, it's a value proposition I accept. I've bought a couple books from Sony in the month I've had my Reader -- Gary Shteyngart's delicious satirical novel The Russian Debutante's Handbook and Andrzej Sapkowski's droll arcane fantasy "witcher" stories, The Last Wish.) As the image above from the Sony store shows, though, there are still a few small kinks to work out.

Choosing the Sony Reader wasn't hard. The community at Mobileread.com was helpful for model comparisons and answering questions. The Sony technology I've owned has performed well (indeed more reliably than Apple hardware), and its marginally more open platform for ebook formats was a critical advantage. I didn't see myself being tethered to Amazon.com, figuratively or literally by way of its Whispernet. The Kindle has lock-in written all over it.

The Sony experience? Invisible, as it should be. The e-ink is gorgeous in a just-minted way, and the page turning swift. Holding a leather cover (detachable from the slender Reader) is at least as pleasant as holding a paperback and much lighter than a hardcover. I find the page-turning buttons a small weak point: ergonomically positioned, some click louder than I'd like. This matters when you are trying not to wake up your dear, light-sleeping wife. But as I say the device is lovable, in the way an Eames chair is lovable: beauty and practicality merge in it like fond hands entwined.

Of course to read ebooks is fairly controversial in some quarters. Denunciations abound. Many of these are gurgles from a vanishing world, a few nostalgic to the point of preciousness or crabby in their demand for the old order.

"Decimation of context," as electronic culture foe Sven Birkerts thunders in The Atlantic Monthly online, is a fair complaint. Some context vanishes when physicality elides into the digital. My pal Nik, for instance, showing me his own handicraft, a book bound by hand; that's a context no ebook device will ever broach. The ancient texts my philologist friend Evelyn has been translating and annotating for decades; again, context. Even my old childhood paperback copy of The Fellowship of the Ring (the first place I encountered the name W.H. Auden), handed down from one reader to the next, provides qualities that will go missing from ebooks: linkages, associations, book sharing, even the sour passport of must. But grousing about context is also more -- it's sneakily an appeal for authority to be kept in someone very much like, oh, say, Birkerts, a critic, scholar and administrator. The context most feared to be in danger may be his own.

Much in the same spirit was lit-crit giant Harold Bloom's earlier denunciation of the Internet as a place where there are no "intellectual and aesthetic standards of judgment." (So? Even offline, Bloom finds this to be true. Visiting at Stanford in the late 90s, he perceived opposition to his ideas at a debate as so "abusive" that he ordered opposing scholars off the stage.) Bloom has since gone on to deplore ebooks. It's wildly hard for these old men to accept the world changing.

Hard for all of us, in truth, sometimes. Stick to paper if you must. That's a country for old men.

Swine Flu . . . And You!

2009-04-27T17:50:00.000-07:00

Worried?

I can think of worse ways to go, but I'm rather fond of staying.

Hell, only this week did I discover Morton Feldman's music. The Viola In My Life. I've heard it just twice so far. No fair!

Morbidly Fascinating World of the Michael Jackson Auction

2009-04-13T15:09:00.000-07:00

In the flush, billion-selling days as he was being whittled into his signature man-elf morphology, he socked away goodies in his home/funpark/stately pleasure-dome/molestation factory, Neverland. He laid up acres of gilt, Louis XIV thrones, adult-child glass figurines, Midway's "Dark Stalker" arcade video game, custom Disney-created Pinocchio dioramas, many many tricycles and peddle cars, and endless self likenesses and statuary.

Now you can bid on this shit.

Main auction page

Impressive arcade lot, 9 pages

And The Reviews Are In!

2009-04-09T20:51:00.000-07:00

Sorry, T.S. Eliot.

From the only customer review in the online Sony eBook Store of The Wasteland:

** out of *****
What?!
Posted October 23, 2008 by Jade, Wyoming US

The imagery was somewhat pretty and very grand. The notes at the back were helpful but this wasn't something I'd read again-at least I don't plan to. It was nothing but chaos. Just a scattering of lines of thought and other works.

So there you have it. Pretty much just a heap of broken images. You've been warned.

Update

2009-01-27T13:03:00.001-08:00

It has been a season of grief. The sudden loss of Peter Firchow, my friend of twenty-five years, in October was shattering. Closer to home, there is my mother's cancer. There have been things to say but no desire to write here. "The busy griefs," as Auden calls them, want time.

Downtown Portland isn't a bad place to be if you are mourning: weathered, uncheery, crowded by forest to the north, with its rusting bridges and glum faces, this is seldom a city to twist you by the arm into feeling like you should be happier. Except for recent development, it feels human, dialed to what is necessary and useful. I expect this is due in large part to my walking life, far from freeways. Nor has it all been torn down and rebuilt into a frictionless facsimile of every other recent glib American place; there is a memory here with the weight of the past, and it reminds me of Waukegan, Ill., in my 1960s childhood, where what was old had a claim on the present (largely because prosperity was a rumor, work hard, capital fickle, industrial decline afoot, the loot extracted and the action elsewhere).

Livability is helped by there not being billboards on every corner, so I rarely see insipid ads outdoors. This is in contrast to Saint Paul where my days were oppressed by my view of the sleek, blinding teeth on the twenty-five foot high faces of KSTP-5's TV news team. Yes, all four in a row, like sinister diecasts, sugary same-jawed fuckers perched above the corner on Snelling Avenue. I thought of them as smiling suppository salesmen pushing the new revolutionary Jumbo iPlug: you shove it up in the crevices of your ignorance and -- give it time! give it time to work! -- within minutes you're aware of every shooting, car pileup, NFL trade and massing stormfront for miles.

I don't even know the names of the newscasters here. And I will never know.

It's a start.

McMansion Trash Outs: What The Foreclosed Leave Behind In Gutted America

2008-10-01T15:35:00.000-07:00

"Foreclosure Alley" (Part 1) (Part 2) is an astonishing look inside the new dire social reality in Southern California. We're with a public TV crew following a so-called McMansion "trash out" -- the rubbishing of property and personal effects left behind in one of 700 SoCal foreclosures per day. People fleeing the bust will have had months to do this themselves, but in despair and rage they often leave it all in the house. The megahomes feel suddenly evacuated as in a zombie film. Furniture, appliances, clothes. It all goes, we are told, to the landfill.

"Why would somebody leave a big TV like that?" asks the reporter pointing to a huge flatscreen. There are full closets, made beds, computers and a big pile of family photos -- memories that didn't make the final cut. That's nothing. The trash out boss explains he has lately discovered a funeral urn containing "somebody's remains."

I like the reporter, Lisa Ling. She seems alert to the psychological dimensions in this rout and she gets lucid responses from the wrecking crew. We see disaster capitalism fraught with unwanted feelings yet flush with business, the boss fumbling with his complicity and his crew quipping wryly about price tags left on box store junk they crush and throw in a dumpster. He says his staff has gone from three to 73 almost overnight. Then we learn some of his merry workers are losing their own homes, too. Meaning, in a crazy sort of self-vampirism courtesy of the fanged, er, free market, they can earn a paycheck clearing out their own stuff! And wait until you see the spraypainted grass.

Both on Wall Street and on McStreet, this collapse feels like the long-awaited massive stroke of Reaganism -- the fried neural wreckage of a dream that has left everyone betrayed, nobody knowing what to do, no hope in sight, no faith in our corrupt politicians, no restraint for the banksters, and everywhere lopsided scars: houses and bank accounts as empty as the promises that have left debt and waste piled to the sky. This seizure has come only after a long ideological binge. The culture was told it knew everything worth knowing, could buy everything worth having. The free market had set it utterly free to spend, swill, zombify, without end.

Now the urn's left on the mantle and the shattered tribes have lit out for points unknown without grandma's ashes or the monster TV.

Favorite RNC Image

2008-09-06T16:20:00.001-07:00

Irony-free zone: Lobbyists For McCain ply their satire among the groundlings. Kudos for the "Don't Change Horsemen Mid-Apocalypse" and "Waterboarding Is Not A Crime" signs.

See their very amusing "No, You Can't" video, too.

Is this Minnesota or Zimbabwe?

2008-09-02T16:36:00.000-07:00

17-year old Kevin Smith, "practicing Buddhist," moments before.

I'm proud of Minnesotans for resisting today. In recent years I demonstrated against the Iraq war with fine people there, from neighbors and friends to (quite by chance) Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak and local Vietnam Vets Against The War. Always, in my experience, these public events were peaceful if passionate for the normally modest, Keilloresque midwest. They did no good, obviously. The war went on, goes on. Yet in finding a public voice that is seldom obliged either by our oligarchs or the news media, they spoke to that abiding hope evoked by Edward Said:

If only more Americans and others can grasp that the main long-range hope for the world is this community of conscience and understanding, that whether in the protection of constitutional rights, or in reaching out to the innocent victims of American power (as in Iraq), or in relying on understanding and rational analysis "we" can do a great deal better than we have so far done. Of course this won't lead directly to changed policies on Palestine, or a less skewed defence budget, or more enlightened environmental and energy attitudes: but where else but in this sort of decent back-tracking is there room for hope?

Today, as crises of its own making gnaw away at its grip, the state is in no mood for hopes that run counter to its plans. The mass arrests, beatings and illegal detention of journalists occurring in the Twin Cities aren't unique in our history. Their latest reappearance is a measure of elite fears, rising once again to the pitch of the Nixon era. And it is emblematic of how far and grotesquely Minnesota has traveled from its progressive roots. I'm not a Democrat -- I voted for Nader. But one political party has brought this nightmare to my old state. In its behest has young Kevin Smith, pictured above and below, been brutalized, forced to wear a "Remember 9/11" t-shirt, and then denied medical care or a phone call. Upon his release, the hospital treating his wounds characterized them as those typically seen in criminal assault, a bootprint sunk in his back.

There is a community of conscience and understanding, and there is its opposite. Love to the good folk in Minnesota, presently under occupation.

Paleo Palin

2008-08-29T17:30:00.000-07:00

Masterstroke?

She's a) anti-abortion, b) anti-gay unions, c) pro-drilling, d) pro-war, Heartland-safe-since-George-Bush-invaded-Iraq-etc-etc; e) opposed to Endangered Species protection for polar bears because they the oil industry has to be able to shoot them; f) a global warming denier; and g) and has her Dept. of Fish and Game wrench wolf cubs from their dens and kill them.

So she's kind of Lady Rambo of the North, jetting around the tundra with her new infant, nursing it, who knows, with a nipple dusted in gunpowder. Teach the kid it's a bad, fallen world with each dribble. She has sons named Track and Trig, one stationed in Iraq, and a daughter named Piper after the Piper PA-28 Cherokee aircraft. Christian fundamentalist. Pentecostal -- which means all that End Times woo-woo.

The Dems are all credentialed-up and crying progress, making eastern meritocrats ecstatic. Contrast Palin, called in today's WaPo "a straight-talking soccer mom." Not exactly. She and her Inuit husband fished for a living. That's somewhat more hands-on than your average Soccer Mom pushing paper for an HMO. In what she projects she's the opposite of Biden and Obama, with their intellectual polish. She's earthy, fecund, and whereas Obama is MTV-hot, she's hot in a way that you can sell to the depressed heartland. It's another kind of heat which may trump sex appeal. Soft-spoken, motherly, pragmatic, nurturing heat -- and figuratively speaking, by virtue of her Alaskan digs, situated far from the taint of modernity in her miracle-fed igloo.

Already photos are appearing of her playing Nightengale to wounded troops: primal maiden-honoring-the-warrior stuff. This is potent imagery -- it negates the vicious neglect shown the troops during the years when Bush wouldn't let them be seen, undercutting that shamefulness and repositioning government as healer. Yes, it's manipulative, it's empire tarted up as compassion, but it will sell. Another narrative in picking her is the mortality clause, with its assumption that the oft-ill McCain can't last forever. When he finally goes to that Hanoi Hilton in the sky, momma's going to be there to lay fish on your plate.

The Dems are going to say, We'll eat her alive in the debates, Biden is so much more "experienced." So what? They said the same thing about Reagan. She reminds me of him in powerful ways. Unpleasant ways. We're in the mess we're in today -- deregulated financial sector gone haywire, housing in collapse, up to our ears in war and debt -- because of Reaganism. The Reaganism of both parties. It's a curse.

I wonder if she'll carry her new baby to the veep debates. Wouldn't that be brilliant? Squeeze it a bit so it squawks the moment Biden starts gassing. Change its nappies during his peroration, ask him to hold the used one. Winking, Come on, Joe. You're used to getting your hands dirty.

Democracy Is Coming To The USA

2008-08-28T04:54:00.000-07:00

I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can't stand the scene.
And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags
that Time cannot decay,
I'm junk but I'm still holding up
this little wild bouquet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

--Leonard Cohen

Details at Colorado Legal Eagles and ABCNews.com.

What To Call Detroit's New Tiny Cars?

2008-08-04T12:58:00.000-07:00

The way things are going, the big car is dead.

My dream of a microcar future may be coming sooner than I expected. My dream? This is where the remaining cars on the road are shrunk to a size made for Jacques Tati. You know, like the 1957 Messerschmitt KR-201, everybody's fave three-wheeler:

Picture courtesy of the fab Bruce Weiner Microcar Museum

Now, this will be a difficult cultural transition in America. Cue evil laughter.

As gas porkers transition out of their SUVs and pick ups, they'll want cars with names that continue to massage their egos even as the vehicles themselves shrink.

The ideal names for our new tiny cars will have to slosh around in that same cocktail of sex, power, nationalism, wealth, macho and corn-fed pioneer nostalgia that today's dying car lines are poured from. The nomenclature which has given us the 'Vette, the Mustang, the Regal, the Crossfire, the Shadow, the Bronco. Etc. etc.

But you can't call a widdle two-door micro-compact, oh, The GM Piledriver. Although doing so would please a large market segment that likes to regard the world as a giant ring where grimacing steroid users grapple in tights, commuters will fear the Piledriver won't get good gas mileage. But you can't call it The GM Premie, either. Or even The GM Wart, fun as that'd be. No, car names must sell fantasy.

And so I present: Big-Ass Names For Tomorrow's Dinkmobiles

The Ford 4x4closure ("The truck so tough, no one can take it away from you")
The Chevy Paul Bunyon ("Its supercharged 0.3 litre Tecumseh engine sounds like a thousand mighty ripsaws, but it sips -- not guzzles")
The Chrysler USS (Unconditional Surrender Subcompact)
The Dodge Pridelet ("Small as a beach ball. . .proud as a mountain!")
The Reliant Temp ("Finally, a car that's like you -- it's all about the flexibility")
The GM Vasectomy ("Never think about gas prices again")
The Lincoln Sans Moi Le Deluge ("In times of challenge, only the finest can set an example")
The Mercury Push-'N-Tush (concept car: runs on a combination of nitrogen, CO2 and methane collected by seat-based receptors -- the highly theoretical Flatulengine -- as well as a variable drivetrain powered by the up-and-down motion of the occupant's derrière)

Minnesota Sucks

2008-07-14T22:17:00.000-07:00

That's what you have to conclude after a year in which your old home state has or will have

a) allowed a main bridge to fall

b) allowed one of the nation's most significant theatres to fail

c) hosted the Republican convention

d) allowed elite swine to foist a new half-billion dollar baseball stadium on the public who consistently opposed one

e) designed said stadium so that it looks like a giant toilet seat offering its white, crescent roof to cosmic haunches.

Minnesota, stop this sucking at once. What happened to you, old dear?

So when's the next war?

2008-07-02T14:22:00.001-07:00

Housing shitcanned. Markets down. Jobs drying up. Gas prices crazy. Food costs outta sight. Current wars being lost.

As the late, great Carlin might have observed, what a good time for a new war!

Sy Hersh, who chronicles the inner workings of empire like no other journalist, writes in The New Yorker that the attack on Iran is around the corner. Similar guesses have been out for weeks in the international press, from the Independent to Der Spiegel, on the heels of events like the Israeli air force training over Greece. Hersh pays credit where it's due; he nods to Andrew Cockburn for releasing details of Bush's 2007 Presidential Finding, authorizing some very expensive covert ops against Iran, in Counterpunch. In one sense, hostilities have already begun.

Speaking of Israel, I happen to agree with the renowned Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld. There's no need to attack Iran. Nuclear proliferation hasn't led to more war -- just the opposite, in fact. Attacking a weaker enemy, moreover, is self-defeating. It invokes a harrowing paradox:

"(H)e who fights against the weak . . .and loses, loses. He who fights against the weak and wins also loses. To kill an opponent who is much weaker than yourself is unnecessary and therefore cruel; to let that opponent kill you is unnecessary and therefore foolish. As Vietnam and countless other cases prove, no armed force however rich, however powerful, however advanced, and however well motivated is immune to this dilemma. The end result is always disintegration and defeat."

Should this moral and strategic disaster come to pass, we can thank Democrats, too. They are the Bushies' great enablers. They saw the Finding. They signed off. And they've campaigned tirelessly for the war position, Hillary infamously threatening to be Lady Nuke and Obama recently sounding much like her, his new crass positions causing anxiety in those progressives who still labor under the belief that the two political parties aren't conjoined like ugly and uglier siamese twins.

October Surprise, then? No, not if the loyal opposition has essentially already rubber-stamped it. The run-up to this attack has been traditional. First came the media reports about the latest great peril, then the expressions of solidarity from the opposition party, then the fleet steaming across the ocean. There have been other signs (resignations, surprising avowals) that Hersh discusses. You can be sure the computer graphics have already been designed at FOX and CNN.

Now we're just waiting on the final phase, where our crawling press starts chanting: "If an attack on [LATEST GREAT PERIL] becomes inevitable. . ." We last heard the mantra every few minutes in the lead up to the Iraq invasion; "if" means "when."

This bullshit grows old over a lifetime. It's always the same. One minute you're a citizen in a nation beset with troubles for which it has nobody else to blame, but for which it seeks everyone else to blame. Next, there's some living corpse in a uniform sitting across from the perky anchor on CNN praising the cuddly glory of our cruise missiles and explaining how they only land on those as deserve it.

Just When We Needed You Most

2008-06-22T23:41:00.000-07:00

The wit who was too much for Wisconsin: in custody, July 21, 1972

When he was booked in July 1972 for saying shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits, in that order, to a delighted Wisconsin audience, America had ways of dealing with folks like George Carlin. Troublemakers found out, often the hard way, where smarting off to power led. Not even a decade had passed since Lenny Bruce's crucifixion on obscenity charges in New York; even gentle wits like the Smothers Brothers were taken off the air. It was the era of Nixon, Kent State, COINTELPRO. The state, then as now finding itself hugely at odds with popular culture, saw itself as a humorless warden of our thoughts and fancies. Much to its displeasure (and our good luck), Carlin's dirty bits would wind up before the Supreme Court in a big win for broadcasting freedoms.

This was all possible because Carlin was both brilliant and fearless. He would spend five decades at his unapologetically merciless art. Never did he let up mocking our stupid politicians for their greed, cruelty and ignorance, flaying the corporations that sold us mindless crap, or goading us for our weakness -- especially our gullibility, our herd mentality. Yes, pretty high standards for a foul-mouthed guy! And that was the point, as it always is in the Swiftian mode. In my pantheon of American heroes, you can seat Carlin next to Mark Twain, Terry Southern, Michael O'Donoghue, Groucho Marx, Joseph Heller, Richard Pryor, Hunter S. Thompson, and Kurt Vonnegut. Rebel wits all. And all about a necessary business, God love 'em.

Who do you think keeps the people from falling entirely under the spell of the rich assholes?

Goodbye, George.

Tim Russert Is In Heaven Now

2008-06-17T12:57:00.000-07:00

He wasn't just any man, you know. He was a bona fide godling:

"There wasn't a better interviewer in TV, not a more thoughtful analyst of our politics and he was also one of the finest men I knew."

That's Barack Obama, ear tuned to the zeitgeist, lavishing praise on the late NBC talking head. Does Obama really mean it? Is Russert, he of the whisper-soft massaging of Dick Cheney on the eve of the Iraq invasion, actually his nominee for the most "thoughtful analyst of our politics"? Or is it just the sort of sweet thing you say when everybody's feeling sad -- when, with the White House in your grasp, you're in full-time don't-screw-it-up mode, and decorum calls for niceties. I'd prefer to think that Obama saw through Russert, but maybe he didn't.

Russert's stock-in-trade was the surface, the seeming nature of things, and so too will his popularity have had a lot to do with how he looked. He wasn't a Brokaw, statuesque in that overbearing way. He gave off a cozy, doughy aura. Like the old giggling Pillsbury icon, you could imagine him smelling like fresh biscuits. This essential harmlessness -- who was Russert going to bite? -- endeared him to high and low alike. Elites saw in him a reverent ear for their lies. You could tell

Tim Russert anything, his moist eyes gleamed back at you sincerely.

For an age that has come to think more of iPods than of citizenship, this was a new ideal. Russert advanced the post-democratic spirit of allowing power its prerogatives, using his interviews and "analyses" to model the proper lumpen response to our betters: Total Surrender! Russert's journalism said: these are our living gods. Don't mess with them, or the iPods might stop working. Feed them sweet meats, pet their sleek coats, indulge their wars as you would their windy stories about the trip to Venice or the favorite child's violin recital, challenge them (if you dare!) to rise to a higher eloquence before the commercial break. But never, ever bug them.

In his defense, it's also true that Russert put outsiders like Ralph Nader and Russ Feingold on Meet the Press. That was a strength. For every fifty flattering interviews with insiders, you got a cameo by dissenters. Russert saved his rare prosecutorial fits (temperate as these were) for them. Like his peers, he shifted easily between these two antipodal approaches to interviewing. It all depended on the power quotient, on the amount of juice seated across from him. Thus a simple dictum that might be called Russert's Rule: press the quarrelsome rabble, so they will know their place, and curtsy before the lords and ladies, so they may improve theirs.

Obama: Don't Get Me To My Old Politically Unpopular Church On Time

2008-06-03T14:19:00.000-07:00

My late, dearly missed grandfather Carl put it best:

Don't give a damn about a man's religion. The only thing I care about, Speedy, is if he can hold his beer.

His beer was Schlitz: working man's beer. If there was a God in his cosmos, he certainly never bothered us with any talk about it. His irony, his wryness left no room for the metaphysical. He kidded me -- the shrimp in his lot of strapping grandchildren -- that I would become a wrestler. Today I don't go for Schlitz or wrestling, thank you, although I admit both sound better than a Sunday in church. And I think warmly about that self-educated man and his uncommon sense.

Nobody believes Obama has quit Trinity Church because he disagrees with the Rev. Wright or Father Pfleger. He quit for political advantage. Or actually, to cut his losses. As Michael Blaine said to me the other day, it was the only politically smart choice for the candidate. I think that's true -- it's the price to be paid for courting white middle-of-the-road voters who'd rather see him in a McDonald's uniform or prison duds than in the White House.

I also think it's a despotic price. This conformity casts a harsh, revealing light on the usual hogwash about America's grand religious tolerance. You can believe what you like here, of course, within fairly broad boundaries.* But your political viability is always a measure of how much your faith bucks up the status quo. The minute your creed challenges the eternal verities -- you know, white privilege, corporate governance, America uber alles -- then all the fine talk about freedom ends. That's when you start to look mighty suspicious there, feller.

Carl would be proud: I didn't give a damn about Obama's church until expedience made him quit it. If anything I found his membership in the cerebral left-wing Trinity Church refreshing. Not for him the soporifics of the suburban sermon with its NFL metaphors, its tidy readymade salvations, its earthly self-aggrandizement. (Nearer my net worth to thee, O Lord of Tax-Deferred Hosts.) And now, Shazam!, he's out, thrice-denying his old circle like Peter in the Good Book. While others may be pressuring him, Obama's wielding the knife in his own ideological gelding. If he can sacrifice so dear a part, just wait. He'll be shearing off much more of his identity as this sad repackaging continues.

*Unless you're a Wiccan in, say, Kansas.

Liberation Theology: Mocking Hillary's Tears

2008-05-30T15:28:00.000-07:00

It's been ages since I liked a religious figure as much as the sardonic Father Pfleger, a born troublemaker. That's God's work, padre, keep it up.

The pastor policing now going at full tilt (as of today, it is the leftwing Chicago priest who Obama now must be "deeply disappointed" by and "renounce") is pretty transparent. It's meant to drag the candidate fully into the center-right, into pearly Hillaryland, where he can be ideologically tumbled and bleached. The intention is to make him more like Dr. Cliff Huxtable: safer than jello itself, and half as likely to change anything.

I'm not worried about Obama, whose persona I like but whose politics aren't much different from those of Hillary or McCain. No, the ugly subtext in this game is the insistence (by the corporate news media, by the pols themselves) on reverence due our leaders. This priest's japery used to be a point of pride for us in America, from Twain up through Nast, Lewis, Buchwald, Heller, Southern, Gelbart, etc., when it was popularly understood that mockery keeps the ruling swine in line. These days, even a peep about our plutocrats is "shocking."

When Frank Zappa Destroyed The Monkees

2008-05-26T04:10:00.000-07:00

Post-modernism invades 60s teeny TV. And the result is only the best three minutes in the entire Monkees history -- the moment when creator Bob Rafelson, tired of his silly confection, whisks away the tablecloth hilariously and cruelly. NBC called it quits after one more episode. Not quite finished, Rafelson and Jack Nicholson still had in store the stoned mischief of the movie Head. Zappa shows up there, too, to witheringly taunt poor Davy.

If only we could resurrect him, Zombie Zappa could be sent on every crummy TV show to end it this way. I like to imagine him gnawing on the latest American Idol winner. Lumpy gravy!

Florida: Pride of the Nation

2008-05-07T01:39:00.000-07:00

Toothpick? Nay! Devilpick!

Orlando TV station Local 6 on a sordid, swampland witch hunt:

Teacher Jim Piculas does a magic trick where a toothpick disappears and then reappears.

Piculas recently did the 30-second trick in front of a classroom at Rushe Middle School in Land 'O Lakes.

Piculas said he then got a call from the supervisor of teachers, saying he'd been accused of wizardry.

"I get a call the middle of the day from head of supervisor of substitute teachers. He says, 'Jim, we have a huge issue, you can't take any more assignments you need to come in right away,'" he said. (...)

The teacher said he is concerned that the incident may prevent him from getting future jobs.

O for a trick to make Florida disappear!

Good luck to Piculas, who is lucky they left it at firing and didn't go on to the stoning part. He might wish to leave the south and join us in the 21st century, now in progress.

Get Your Murder Downloads On!

2008-05-05T02:56:00.000-07:00

"The sound of your spine cracking has totally got me wanting to buy some compressed digital music."

Excited about players buying songs from within video games, music biz bible Billboard gasses about fan "loyalty" to the Grand Theft Auto franchise:

It is this resolve to create the best entertainment experience for its fans -- postponing the game's release by almost six months because of quality concerns, weathering persistent criticism from politicians over the game's violent content and fighting a hostile takeover bid for parent company Take-Two Interactive from Electronic Arts -- that has earned Rockstar and the "GTA" franchise a rabidly loyal following within the gaming community.

Yeah? Huh. I think people actually just really like stealing cars, shooting cops and messing up hookers, and getting away, and then doing it again in a new part of town.

Seriously, is there one kid in America who waddled into Wal-Mart this week thinking, I loves me some GTA IV because Rockstar had the nads to stand up to Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman, famous playa haters?

Sure, Billboard's going to drool. When you're the cheerleader for an industry facing dying revenues, it's big news when everybody's favorite sociopathy simulator debuts technology for in-game song sales.

And that is a fascinating synergy of desires -- a turning point in the business of entertainment, a blood-drenched game mutating into a sort of nightmare-world iTunes where you first act out and then use a credit card to assemble the soundtrack to your darkest urges. Everything's a marketing vector under hypercapitalism. You liked the song playing when you dragged that bitch out of her car and backed over her? Thug brotha, let's do business.

Which Celebrity Do You Think Is Taller?

2008-05-05T01:59:00.000-07:00

The American MSM yesterday, hard at work:

Don't worry, be happy.

Because You Enjoyed...

2008-04-17T15:09:00.000-07:00

Yes, because I enjoy biting social satire, I'm sure to want to watch goslings hatch on snowy mountaintops.

Mamet Shocker: He's No Longer A Liberal!

2008-03-12T16:49:00.001-07:00

This ain't no party. This ain't no disco.

David Mamet takes to The Village Voice today to reveal "Why I Am No Longer A 'Brain-Dead Liberal'." He runs down the usual litany of reasons known to surface in Boomers who have outgrown their souls: things ain't so bad in Mametland, war ain't so bad, right wing folks at the water cooler ain't so bad, and so forth. But liberalism! It's so damn negative. He turns on NPR -- "National Palestinian Radio," he calls it -- and it makes him berserk:

I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up.

And in that rictus is born a conservative. The Voice not being quite what it was back in the day, the comments section is full of guys welcoming Mamet to their side.

I don't know why this should require a 2,500 word essay from the great man. Anyone who's watched his TV show, The Unit, already knows he's right wing. The Unit? You know, the exciting War on Terror drama. The one where every week, some goddamn terrorist is about to blow up something in America and the only hope is for our gallant heroes to go kill piles of foreigners in time. In one episode, this requires incinerating a full busload of Arab men. They're diseased, you see. And heading our way! Probably got the radio tuned to NPR.

The Bush White House could hardly ask for better propaganda than that provided eagerly for the past three seasons by Mamet, the Leni Riefenstahl of prime time TV. But in his Voice piece, he really does protest too much. The free market, make-war-not-love litany with which he thinks to separate himself from long-dead "liberalism" sounds oddly like the same one used for decades now by Democrats like Bill and Hillary Clinton. Not being a liberal, in short, is already the default liberal position. Mamet's a bit late to the renunciation party.

Flashback: TIME and Marcuse, 1966

2008-03-07T03:32:00.000-08:00

When war supporters demand "good news" out of Iraq, they mean a cheerleading role for the press. Not for them the buzzkill of, say, an Andrew Cockburn or Robert Fisk. That's no way to enjoy a war! It's the Tammy Wynette school of combat coverage they want: upbeat, proud, with each gutsy verb, every loyal adjective fit for duty. The recent model might be Michael Kelly, the late Atlantic Monthly writer whose jingoistic pieces savaged war critics and helped drum up support for invasion, and who then went off to Iraq to cheer on Shock & Awe (becoming, for his pains, the first U.S. press casualty and a patron saint to war party buffoons). Kelly's fatal blindness belonged to the revival in our time of an old tradition that in the late 1960s had fallen out of favor. For decades, reporters reflexively shook their pom poms as the bullets flew -- no matter whom they hit or why. This was the default mode for U.S. reporting up through the early years in Vietnam.

Here for instance is Time magazine on its megaphone for Operation Rolling Thunder one year into the U.S. bombing campaign. Dropping nearly one million tons of bombs on North Vietnam from 1965 to 1968, Rolling Thunder did little apart from shredding 70,000 civilians (the CIA's estimate) and creating over a quarter million refugees. In America it is remembered today, if at all, for another legacy: sowing the political future of Sen. John McCain, its most famous pilot. But in April 1966, bombing hopes ran high in the pages of Henry Luce's weekly good news factory. At home the war was losing favor. Gallup polls had public support standing at a mere 41%, with 37% against and rising. Elites wished for more war and planned to get it. Time, then a major tool for conveying their wishes to middle America, snapped its salute.

For perspective, I've paired Time's rah-rah reporting with comments made that same spring by Herbert Marcuse, the left wing German social philosopher. Marcuse (1898-1979) is fascinating. Having fled the Nazis in the early 30s, he would ultimately settle and teach in the United States after serving the allied war effort. He first worked in Washington on anti-Nazi propaganda, then as an analyst in the OSS identifying Nazi groups and planning post-war de-Nazification, and for six years after the war headed the Central European section in the State Department. He understood fascism: how it is made, how it is sustained and how it must be stopped. American Vietnam war reporting uniquely appalled him.

TIME

Marcuse

"Rolling Thunder," as U.S. fighter-bomber strikes over North Viet Nam are code-named, last week boomed to a new pitch of devastating intensity. In one day alone, the Air Force launched 120 sorties north of the 17th parallel, the Navy 141--the largest number of strikes in a day since regular bombing of Ho Chi Minh's domain began more than a year ago. For the first time since November, Air Force flyers penetrated north of Hanoi and Haiphong, blasting with 750-to 3,000-lb. bombs the road and rail lines carrying supplies from Red China. Concentrating on lines of communication since then, the U.S. raiders have increased their destruction of materiel headed south from an estimated 15% to 25%. One certain sign that Hanoi is hurting: an increase in trucking by day when the targets are easier to hit--just what the allies want.

In the ground war, U.S. Marines, cleaning out the mangrove swamps near Saigon in Operation Jackstay, rooted out a major Viet Cong headquarters. Its 25 buildings included a hospital, classrooms, dispensaries, a large ammunition dump and a factory for the manufacture of water mines used to harass shipping into Saigon. The Reds had fled so quickly that the food on the tables was still hot.

Elsewhere, the Air Cavalry closed out three-week Operation Lincoln along the Cambodian border. The Flying Horsemen's tally: 480 enemy killed, ten captured, 98 weapons seized. Cross-country, near Tuy Hoa along the South China Sea, the 101st Airborne routed a Viet Cong company, killing 15 in a fierce fire fight. Guam-based B-52 bombers, newly modified to haul 60,000 Ibs. of bombs each, jackhammered a Viet Cong radio and communications center 35 miles northeast of Saigon. The big jets came in single file, each unloading its 750-lb. bombs on the same, deeply bunkered site of the radio. It has not been heard from since.

I personally did not find such open brutality during the Second World War, even in the Nazi press, as that which is spread daily in American newspapers – in the headlines announcing triumphantly the number of (alleged or actual) deaths and corpses recovered. And from warfare and its language, brutalization invades the sphere of entertainment and amusement.

Here we have an effective acclimatization and dehumanization, and this in turn leads to a kind of mass hysteria. The image of the enemy is blown completely out of proportion, and the insensitivity, the inability to distinguish between propaganda, advertising, and truth is becoming ever clearer. The organs for this discernment seem to be atrophying. You cannot even say that everyone believes what is placed in front of him; the mood instead is: I cannot judge that, the government knows better than I do, and you can’t do anything about it anyway.

(...)

In history there is something like guilt, and there is no necessity—neither strategic nor technological nor national—that could justify what is going on in Vietnam: the slaughter of the civilian population, of women and children, the systematic destruction of foodstuffs, carpet bombing of one of the poorest and most defenseless countries in the world—that is guilt and we must protest against it even if we believe that it is hopeless, simply in order to survive as human beings and perhaps to make a dignified existence possible for others, perhaps only because it could possibly shorten the terror and the horror, and today that is already a great deal.

A Tale of Two Campaign Images

2008-02-27T23:52:00.000-08:00

Above: quality time. Below: quality fund-raising.

Valentines Day, 2007. Two screen captures from, respectively, barackobama.com and hillaryclinton.com.

Night and day, no? One feels sort of syrupy, almost like a greeting card. The other is like a creepy corporate motivational poster that your boss inflicts on the office. Looking at their contrasts in message and tone, I can hardly resist the gravitational pull of soundbite hackery. Surely there is a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party and the choice has never been starker between hope and cynicism, yesterday and tomorrow, and yarf yarf yarf! I don't really believe it, though. I wonder if even my old flower-power Minnesota friend who sends me "Obama fever" chain emails believes that in her heart of hearts. She'd like to believe it. Who wouldn't? After all the hopelessness under Bush, there is a feeling across the land in well-meaning hearts that maybe, just maybe, redemption is at hand. And that it will come only through Obama.

Whatever the truth in that hope, both sites are pitches for money. They just go after their quarry differently. One is soft-sell, all confidence and glimmer. The other is sweaty and fervid like the mood of the poor bastards in Glengarry Glen Ross. Money is a brutal fixation these days for Clinton. By mid-February she had nearly run out, prompting charges of lavishness and mismanagement in the New York Times. (This spree includes "more than $11,000 on pizza and $1,200 on Dunkin’ Donuts runs" in January, with an unspecified quantity consumed by Bill. Not mentioned in the Times is how she swooped around Iowa in what her campaign goofily called the "Hillocopter.") Struggling to stop Obama's momentum, homegirl's homepage now works the giving angle nonstop. Her site had a 3D PowerPoint chart on it today crying "Close the gap!" You could almost hear Her Entitledness herself screeching that from her Total Ambition Bunker.

Clinton's moolah salute is meant to suggest a rebound. She seems to gaze directly and gratefully into the floating figure of $14 MILLION, as if it had just materialized above her, like a beacon, say, or some monetarized Star of Bethlehem. This day was born a savior, and its name is $14 MILLION. She's shot here in an unflattering low-angle, the mighty hunk of maternal chin emphasized. She must hate that photo. In a tightly scripted campaign, it's no accident. It's been used so as to humanize her. The campaign has heard time and again, She's cold, nobody can stand her. So up goes this shot to make her seem like you and me -- just plain folks. Just plain folks with our big double chins. And $14 MILLION, honey. $14 MILLION GODDAMN DOLLARS, in case you didn't notice. Wanna give some?

What a contrast is the Obama image. All family-luv and wholesomeness, it could scarcely be more antithetical to Clinton's rhapsodic money shot. She bathes alone in the radiance of greenbacks (money can buy her love) while his are earthly, human joys; he is hugged by one daughter, tenderly cradles another, leans cozily next to his beautiful wife. True, he has the security of having already raised his war chest and won over most hearts and minds, but he doesn't parade the fact. Like a rich man out for a stroll in any old duds, he doesn't need to impress. He's the frontrunner. Now he just needs to appear normal, which in American politics equates to posing with a photogenic mate and kids and looking like it's the thing you most want to do in the world, even as you vie for the job that will give you the least time for them.

You have to click into the site before you hit the fundraising pitch. Unlike Hillary's which rather grubbily implores you to "help her make history," his implies that by giving you become an "owner" of his campaign. "Over one million people own this campaign." Cute. It's meant, obviously enough, to give him populist cred. But it's paradoxical and disingenuous. Aren't elected officials already the people's servants? Why should we need to pay for a piece of the action? And if Obama regards contributions as a form of campaign ownership, what does that say about the Wall Street money behind him? My little donation, for instance, would hardly buy me the same level of influence as Goldman Sachs or Lehman Brothers, two of his biggest contributors.

Why does it matter? As the public interest writer Pam Martens points out in the latest Counterpunch newsletter,

Seven of the Obama campaign’s top 14 donors consist of officers and employees of the same Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages. These latest frauds have left thousands of children in some of our largest minority communities coming home from school to see eviction notices and foreclosure signs nailed to their front doors.

To be backed by these donors at this moment in history is, at least, to be indebted to the wrong guys. Wall Street wants to avoid having much-needed reforms imposed on it for its role in the catastrophic housing and securities scandals, so it will be buying all the forgiveness it can up front.

For now, though, forget money. There is warmth in this image and so often our politics has none but the manufactured variety. That's what Obama's site asks you to do at first glance: feel human. His page wants to say, Look at us, we're warm, lovely human beings. You're not afraid of us, white America, are you? (No, not I. I like Obama, though he isn't nearly leftist enough for me.) The black-and-white photography has a vintage quality which will have been chosen to convey timelessness, thus metaphorically linking Obama with deep and abiding values even as he sounds the scarier, uncertain theme of change. One odd characteristic: the soft, muted background. It's almost abstract, like the whitespace in which Apple iPod ads are set. You can see some details: a hazy treeline, maybe some backyard structure. The transparency level has been raised in Photoshop to foreground the Obama clan, but it makes them seem to be floating in a netherworld. There's a kind of unconscious evocation of horror movie posters. It's weird. In the brutishly obvious world of our politics, campaign photos don't usually come tinged with an air of mystery.

The Pimp Style In American Politics

2008-02-10T12:02:00.001-08:00

Shuster eats crow. Bonus points for quivering chin.

Half the American public long ago saw that our democracy is less than advertised, a bedtime story we tell ourselves to dress up our ceremonial service to elite power while holding at bay our fears about the ogres who truly run our land. This realistic half no longer gets twice-a-decade nobleness thrills from pretending to be in charge, especially as the gulf between subject and master widens. And so they don't vote. One of our greatest wits, George Carlin, puts it in his inimitable, vulgar and brilliant way in the video below. Please note (especially my friend Louis J. Concierge, down there at the nerve center): the video is NSFW. It will cause upstanding citizens to gasp, complaints to be filed, employers to fulminate, the Gipper to turn in his grave, angels to lose feathers. Watch it in the privacy of your home, where only you, your loved ones and the government will know.

I bring up Carlin by way of antidote to the silly, toxic mess about Hillary and "pimping out" Chelsea. You've heard about this flap: MSNBC reporter Mark Shuster used the term to describe the shameless way Clinton has set loose her daughter on the superdelegates -- the party hacks who will tip the balance at the convention if it's still a close race. It was a major mistake, likely a career-wrecker, and Shuster has paid. First he was made to crawl before the camera and fake up some contrition, which left him looking spiritually waterboarded; then he was "suspended," like any misbehaving schoolboy. Locked in a frightful race against Barack Obama, Hillary is milking the event for all it's worth. By the weekend, she wasn't sure the insult could be rescinded fully enough for her ever to appear on another MSNBC presidential debate. "Nothing justifies the kind of debasing language that David Shuster used and no temporary suspension or half-hearted apology is sufficient," Clinton wrote to NBC President Steve Capus, clearly angling for Shuster's head. Maybe if he were really waterboarded, she'd relent.

Why all the fuss? Surely not because what Shuster said was false. By any rational measure, his point was unassailable. Rude? Oh, yes. Untrue? No. Everyone knows that campaigning requires the worst kinds of sentimental strong-arming. Family members get pressganged into service like the unlucky drunks who used to fall through trap doors in 19th century Portland bars and wake up as new deckhands at sea: spouses known to hate one another must temporarily bury the hatchet, offspring must comb their hair and smile through their paroxysms of Oedipal fever and gratification-delay, every sourness, malignancy of the spirit and brain-killing boredom must be treated as an epiphany, and so on, for the camera. All for the mighty camera: the final arbiter of American reality.

One amusing example of how this can go wrong occurred in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in the late 90s, when then-mayor and now U.S. senator Norm Coleman was required to dig up his model/actress wife (not for this Hollywood girl the Keilloresque pleasures of sleepy Saint Paul!) and bring her back for photo-ops in his gubernatorial campaign. Some joker sent me a campaign tape: it featured the dwarfish Coleman doing his little Napoleonic strut on a riverboat for the assembled big donor-dignitary-creeps, while off to the side, bored out of her pretty skull and doing nothing to hide it, the captive missus stared into the murky Mississippi like a convict on death row and dreamt of, lord knows what, a love scene with Johnny Depp? Her husband being keelhauled under the paddles? Though he lost the election to a pro-wrestler, her disenchantment seemingly hurt Coleman not one bit; Minnesota's famous liberalism was already dead long before Paul Wellstone, and eventually he became one of its smirking pallbearers.

The story has a coda. In time, Laurie Coleman learned to stop worrying and love the Republican bomb. By 2004, she'd appeared in her lingerie -- yi yi yi! -- in an exclusive baring for the Washington Post. Each half of Coleman, Inc., will have gained something from this calculated striptease: the senator his peers' envy and some peacock street cred, and the senator's wife broader exposure of her thighs to casting directors. The event could be said to raise the Pimping Paradox: when both parties to a pimping engage in pimping out one another, pimping can collapse upon itself like a black hole, swallowing motive and sucking it down the wormhole of hypocrisy to be extruded in an alternate universe as mutual benefit.

In our season the Clintons have been busy in different ways. First there was Bill sent out to the hustings to besmirch Obama's Iraq war opposition, and to invent his own. Now comes Chelsea lobbying the superdelegates. Trying to game primaries afterwards isn't unusual or unexpected: it's why the superdelegates exist. They are plutocracy's safety valve, the party establishment's crepuscular insurance policy against accidents of the popular will. Arguably a most American of solutions -- both in how it recalls the founders' famous distaste for democracy and anticipates fungible balloting in the age of Diebold -- you want it on your side if you are a candidate but you don't want cynical emphasis put on its uses while both you and the media are busy singing old-time voting hymns. It's embarrassing to be seen trying to pull the superdelegates' super levers before all the little people's votes have been cast and ignored. Hence Clinton's rage.

Shuster made two mistakes. One, obviously, was tone; he used a crude sexual metaphor which opened him to charges of sexism. Two, Shuster's faux pas gravely offended the real interest held by MSNBC in the election. As is well understood by everyone from the janitor to the CEO at MSNBC's parent, General Electric, the reason for election season hoopla isn't the principle of the thing, not the City on the Hill and Thomas Jefferson or any of that wax museum stuff.

It's moolah. Elections pour a Hurricane Katrina's worth of ad dollars into the media, and if truth and honesty must be left stranded on rooftops or gurgling on the lower floors while the greenback tide rises, then the people's tribunes in the press will just have to grit their teeth and bear their salaries. One of the dwindling number of journalists left in the nation, Shuster was among this flood's six-figure income beneficiaries but still contrived to misunderstand the rules, which could be no plainer: if you're going to wear the corporate monkeysuit on TV, then you must talk like a monkey and pick your ass like one. So his downfall can be read as a kind of Darwin Awards reel highlight--a grim, hand-stuck-in-the-garbage-disposal moment where natural selection has the last bitter laugh. The commentator, who until last week styled himself intrepid and fearless, made a point in his nervous on-air confession to vouchsafe that "all Americans should be proud of Chelsea Clinton."

And Hillary says that isn't punishment enough.

Here's the glorious Carlin.

The Joys of Calculated Risk

2008-01-16T15:44:00.000-08:00

For my nerdy econ fix, Calculated Risk is my daily destination. The blog is like a backstage pass to the economic forces now reshaping America. It isn't written by elites but by two people who professionally served them -- and emerged from their tenure with heterodox viewpoints.

Since the mid-00s, CR's been injecting reality into our era's funny-money fantasies -- this epoch of suburban luxe and Wall Street shell games. If you were reading it and other skeptical economists (such as Nouriel Roubini or Robert J. Shiller), you saw the fault lines under the popular illusions. House prices weren't always going to climb; the Home ATM wasn't going to go on spraying equity in the path of Lexuses and Anthropologie. The planet could not go on underwriting McMansions and trips to Olive Garden. What's happening now -- and what's whispered by frightened elites -- was under discussion there long before it creased the servile brow of Brian Williams or sprouted full color diagrams in The New York Times.

These days, the mainstream media are all over the collapse of housing and finance. If they're late to the party, it's for dubious reasons (they had money to make from speculation, and so didn't see it in their interest to spoil the fun). One exception was warnings in the UK's Economist magazine, pointed out to me back in 2005 by the perspicacious Michael Blaine, about the unsustainable worldwide housing bubble. But mostly our press contentedly cheered on "growth" and cut its own slice of the equity pie. No shockeroo, really. Credulity drives the biz so that elite agendas are served: even as the Times was manufacturing consent for Shock & Awe, it was also busy blowing party horns for real estate. Meanwhile the straight shit was online, months and even years earlier, on blogs.

While CR is very nuts-and-bolts in a way that can be intimidating to econ novices (that's me), I love its substance and style. It's hard to imagine a livelier, more intellectually agile discussion than that led by the host, a retired corporate economist, and his blogging partner Tanta, a former bank officer who happens to be the Dorothy Parker of financial writing. There's fire in the comments section -- as there should be. The meltdown in housing and finance is among the most pressing narratives in American life right now, central (like the war, another fever dream) to who we thought we were and who we finally are.

On "Violating" Chez Keillor

2008-01-14T23:09:00.000-08:00

The Strib's photo of Fort Keillor, next to the disputed addition

God knows what the truth is in the dispute between the Minnesota legend and his next-door neighbors over their plan to build a two-story addition that Garrison Keillor's lawsuit says "violates" his home and "the beauty of Ramsey Hill." It's a he-said, they-said spat, as usual in property wars. And it's a battle between swells (ironically enough, Keillor's soon-to-be-eclipsed manse was the subject of the usual worship in the New York Times Home & Garden section a couple years back, where it was revealed he also keeps a $3.5 million Central Park West apartment; no wonder he pines for Main Street Republicans). A cynic might even point out that Keillor's St. Paul house already towers over the competition, depriving it of the very air and light he deems his right.

Whatever the case, even we commoners get to experience this sort of thing.

In recent flush, triumphalist times in the Bush era, Americans have liked to build out to the edge of their property line. This dwarfing and crowding is absurd, as I saw in our old St. Paul neighborhood before moving last year. We lived near Macalester College in a place much more modest than the digs (5,168-sq ft.!) occupied by Lord Keillor. You could find lots of bungalows, craftsmans and Sears Modern Homes there. And one block over there'd been a fire or something, so the owners rebuilt, this time stuffing their smallish lot to the brim with McHouse.

I used to walk my dog the other way rather than have to pass that fat clapboard blight, which elbowed the adjacent houses like the dude who should really be buying two airplane tickets, you know? It was both ugly and aggressive, much like SUVs. Shorn of sunlight, air and view, the neighbors on either side soon put theirs up for sale. Building to ridiculous scale with such arrogance and obliviousness is a kind of moral tone-deafness, the mark of an era when money was cheap and virtue cheaper.

It's A Mac, Mac, Mac, Macworld

2008-01-12T21:14:00.000-08:00

My Gadget, My Self: Apple retail staff cheering the consumer-as-hero in Macworld

Thanks to a pal's generosity, I get a complimentary copy of Macworld. I'm ambivalent about the magazine. While making the switch to Macs a few years ago was easily for the best, I don't feel comfortable with broader Apple culture, with the self-love, the cultishness. Walking into an Apple store to discuss an upgrade for my machine, I can barely describe the reason I'm there before being congratulated for owning an Apple. If you bought an iPhone at launch in Manhattan, they hugged and applauded for you. It's too much, this squishy Zen consumerism.

Nuts-and-boltsy with less fetishistic preening than its competition (for that only glance at MacAddict, since rebranded as the even more Stepfordish MacLife), the magazine can still be creepy. Take, for instance, the ad for MacMania, an ocean cruise built around the idea that Apple users would like to be on a cruise ship together for days enjoying guest lectures by Macworld editors. Five minutes of this and I'd be jumping overboard. Obviously the event is for a different type of person, one like the participant whose testimonial raves about having "the unbelievable opportunity to spend time with my Mac heroes!" I understand: I slapped Choctaw-Chickasaw wrestling sensation Wahoo McDaniel on the back when I was thirteen, and it was unbelievable, too.

Or consider a pivotal conceit. This is the idea that the magazine can "review" Apple products, when its fortunes entirely hang on the Apple eco-system (including costly multi-page ads from the mother ship itself). Inevitably, every review is a foregone conclusion. What, they're going to pan the iPhone? They want to mate with the iPhone. The recent cover story on Leopard is titled "Leopard!" And so on. Macworld is as compromised on its pet subject as FOX News is on the Bush administration. That's fair enough, or would be so, if both just admitted they're glossy fanzines -- fluff powered by a worship bias. But as with FOX News, there always has to be the pretense to objectivity, to expertise. It's not enough for them to love: totalitarians, whether political or consumerist, demand that you take their love as truth.

Mind, I do like my Mac. What's so good about OS X is how it stays out of the way while you're working. It's subtle, almost invisible. This is unlike Windows which always seems to be clattering (and shuddering and bleeping and steaming) like some mad Rube Goldberg contraption. So it's just fine. But in the larger Apple universe, I sometimes feel like the last person who doesn't want to take his Soma.

A Wish For 2008: Don't Go Killing All the Bees

2008-01-03T03:04:00.000-08:00

We think there is a soul

We don't know

That soul is hard to find

He Wondered How He Would Feel About It

2007-12-09T00:15:00.000-08:00

"Three days," writes the AP about the resilience of the Nebraska heart,

after a gunman killed eight people and himself inside, a Nebraska mall reopened Saturday morning with extra security on hand and holiday shoppers waiting at the doors.

I'm willing to bet many weren't there to shop as much as to gawk and gossip, which is naturally the culture of malls, anyway. This time it was heightened. You wanted to go to see the black tarps, Halloweenish over the entrance to the murder store. You retraced his steps, looked for any shell casings the cops missed. You ate pizza and ran unspeakable film in your imagination, and then took comfort in how dully back to normal it had all been returned. And there was ritual to perform. Someone had set up a memorial for the dead where you fastened paper snowflakes to a wire shrine. Austere -- and seasonal, too.

The Westroads Mall in Omaha, which already looked like a mausoleum before 19-year old Robert Hawkins went into the Von Maur department store there earlier this month with his automatic rifle, reopened the following Saturday. The murder store was still closed, but everything else was ready. So keen were the mall's keepers to get on with it after the killings that as soon as the detectives had left and the vacuuming was done and it was judged in executive hearts that a decent interval had passed, Omaha's mayor was given his cue and posted at the door. A special one-day engagement: post-massacre greeter.

If the AP story is any guide the good mayor rose to the occasion. As a politician who can be expected to have honed a ceremonial sense equal at least to the needs of his tribe, he understood his dual duty as jack-in-the-box and spiritual ferryman. Cheer in the prospect of spending money, yes, how fine -- yet, alas, grief in such fresh and unwarranted doom. These were his antipodal themes. A novel challenge for the true leader! So it happened that in resolving them, he comforted the stricken by example:

"I came in here and I was wondering how I would feel about it, but I feel fine," Fahey said. "I did not necessarily look at Von Maur ... but I feel fine."

Don't look -- you'll feel fine, too. When in gloomy times past American fast food restaurants have played host to mass slayings (by coincidence, Hawkins' rampage followed his firing from a McDonalds), these despoiled buildings were later razed. There had always been something mildly civilizing about these razings -- a recognition that even junk culture has a moral sewer it shuns. By erasing a murder site the owners said, "We will not ask you to suffer even one bite in so black a place as this drive-up abattoir, gentle diner, much though our willingness to poison you signifies our belief in your unmovable appetites. Call it our gift to impart high blood pressure, obesity and diabetes to you on roughly less haunted land."

Today, in a dire Xmas shopping season with the economy faltering and the national bloodstream awash in antidepressants, post-massacre retail arrangements may be made with less finality. Nobody seriously expects an anchor store in a mall to be subtracted from the premises; what a gaping absence would be left where once it mightily anchored! No, there is scarcely time for the mall to replace the carpet, spritz the air, plant the mayor outside and carry on.

You hurriedly reopen the mall because doing so is in confluence with America as it is now, in 2007, given over to the frictionless velocities of consumption culture. Society is a shattered ideal. We're atomized now into consumer-competitors, as our masters long wished and assiduously saw to our becoming. What are you to me in this vision? You are the person who might buy what I want if you get to it first, get my table at Sizzler, gobble my Signature Steak, nix my hanging chad, deflate my McHouse price, short my long position in gold. Maybe your store opposite mine did suffer a mass killing. Condolences, but I've got XBox 360s to move for Xmas 2007, capische?

Such a society mourns at warp speed. It forgets. The forgetting is intentional. Maybe it won't be led in public mourning at all, if to do so would impede other goals. The dead are shipped back from Iraq in shadows and without cameras permitted because it is felt mourning would hurt the project in Washington by giving rise to a shared, communal response whose main material -- sympathy for strangers, that Fool's Gold! -- could be cast in the forge of war resistance. Better the masses just shop. Shopping is constructive. After 9-11 it became this way: shopping as patriotism.

Some years ago I was in Lincoln, NE, when a pall came over the city as the Huskers underwent what I was told was a rare loss. It dealt the Nebraskans an incomprehensible blow. The neighborhoods went quiet, everything was still. Thick communal gloom. Nobody was outside and the city I had seen earlier in its half-hearted bustle (surely already contemplating the terrors of losing) remained in this widely shared funk through the night. My sister-in-law said the domestic violence rate would see an uptick. The next day everyone was back at it and keen for an auto-de-fe of the coach, but carrying on, with heave ho -- just like that statue atop the mad capitol tower.

Omaha is sensible. It knows that it is meant to go back to the death mall, shop in the death aisles, eat in the death court, ride the death escalators, be recorded in the hidden death cameras and honor the dead in their temporary memorial on a wire frame with clip-on paper snowflakes. We're all like little snowflakes, every one of us different. You will wonder how you will feel about it, and you won't look and you will feel fine. That's how it works now.

No Peace, Please, We're Democrats

2007-12-08T01:08:00.001-08:00

And now the Democrats, with their all-bukkake version of Lysistrata.

From the WaPo, Hill Close To Deal On War Funds:

House Democratic leaders could complete work as soon as Monday on a half-trillion-dollar spending package that will include billions of dollars for the war effort in Iraq without the timelines for the withdrawal of combat forces that President Bush has refused to accept, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said yesterday.

But, you may ask, what about all the tough talk recently about no longer funding "Bush's war"? Demanding dates for withdrawal? Yes, well, but...must everything be yes or no? As Hillary likes to say, maybe there's a third way!

So now it appears a deal can be cut to wheedle some domestic spending out of the Republicans, if only the Democrats will stop playing hard to get on Iraq. You know how it goes. Scratch my war ass, I'll scratch yours.

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Xmas!

2007-11-29T15:47:00.000-08:00

Yuletide greetings from NPR:

Bush Urges Congress to Fund Wars Before Holiday

All Things Considered, November 29, 2007

President Bush has raised the ante with Congress over funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Speaking at the Pentagon on Thursday, the president called on lawmakers to approve nearly $200 billion for the Pentagon before leaving for the Christmas holidays.

How can the Congress go home for quality family time and presents if it hasn't first seen to the care and feeding of the extermination budget? Come on, don't be Scrooges. Lord knows, war is the gift that keeps on giving.

Meanwhile, Bush's partners-in-generosity the Democrats -- who've rubberstamped every single red cent for the war -- suddenly are balking. (While the public hates the war, the Democrats don't. But poll data have them scared.) After all their concupiscence now they say they'll only give Bush a stocking stuffer, a cool $50 billion or so. All they ask for in return is the usual unhurried "withdrawal timetable."

Say, another year or so. Ho ho ho!

The Very Special Olympics

2007-11-24T17:32:00.002-08:00

At a Wal-Mart in Nashville, Tenn., the doors opened at 5 a.m., with customers surrounding a wooden palette piled high with $50 digital picture frames at the front of the store.

Worried the frames would sell out, Cindy Chavez, 36, braced herself, yelped and tossed her body on top of the pile, much to her fellow shoppers’ horror. She emerged from the scrum with six frames.

-- "Retail Desperation on Display in Early Hours," NY Times, 11/23/07

Did you yelp and belly flop for frames on Black Friday? We didn't. A great family walk under wintry skies, cooking with my wife, reading Mailer's final novel and later watching an elegantly creepy Kiyoshi Kurosawa film together left no time. But I was curious about the people in the news photos. You saw them: shabby from sleeplessness, surging across darkened parking lots, pale under the fluorescents, carts topped off, bags lugged like trophies. The lines around the stores looked like chain gangs.

The meaning in the day's big shopping narrative for me was the kind oracles lift from bird guts. Stringy portents. Undigested fates. Here the corporate news was very helpful. In its taxonomy, Black Friday shoppers were existential heroes: they "braved crowds," they "defied economic blues." It's a tired symbolism, lately on steroids. The Houston Chronicle interviewed "professional-league shoppers." ABC News strapped on its porn-thang-best for the headline, "Bargain Hunters Gone Wild!"

You can tell how shaky things are getting in the economy from the hyperbole. Smiling and pointing madly and insisting that the motley lines around box stores at 4 a.m. are healthy signs, the media sound like the old Soviet press lavishing praise on some collective that miraculously made its grain quota. See, comrades -- the Five Year Plan is working! We're not at the point where opening a new Macy's card and maxing it out on the spot makes you a Defender of the Homeland, but give it time. When that happens FOX News can just recycle the casualty graphic it began using in Shock and Awe, the logo which comes spinning out of the distance like titles on a retro TV game show: Ultimate Sacrifice. "Tell us why you went deeper into debt today, sir?" "Oh, I just love America, Bill."

The press has a big role to play in keeping Americans naive, in debt and accumulating junk. It's its first function. So in a state like Michigan, already in a brutal funk (and in lost Detroit far worse), will the papers take a break from foreclosure and bankruptcy stories to tell people to take it easy, maybe? To demand just housing costs, wage increases, solutions from leaders? Get real: instead, The Jackson Citizen Patriot unleashes its in-house "Black Friday rookie" who meets a 3 a.m. wake-up call "in honor of" cut-rate coats and kitchen gadgets. Three quarters of our economy is based on consumerism. You have to keep the proles spending, even if they can't afford to. No reporter is going to ask: Show of hands, folks--how many of you have a mortgage resetting in the new year?

Another portent is the downshifting in American lifestyles. The data aren't in yet, but it doesn't look like the big expensive chain stores did very well. The action is at the low end, the downscale boxes -- Wal-Mart, Target, Big Lots. No wonder. Home equity's running out, house values are plunging, credit's tapped, Wall Street's convulsing, the war's a bust, oil's soaring, dollar's dying, jobs aren't secure. Abruptly, people are having to live within their means after a long hallucinatory period in which they pretended to greater means. Nobody likes it. They want the ethers, but here comes gravity. The Times found a social worker slumming at Big Lots who bemoaned having to shop beneath her station. There'll be a lot more of this ahead, and much worse, too.

Black Friday splurging in this economy is brave, sort of. There is even something crazy-brave in letting the kids bed down on a greasy Best Buy parking lot in the cold Cincinnati dawn so you can buy discounted electronics. It is at least to tempt whatever angry gods dwell under the asphalt. Pneumonia, toxic poisoning, do your worst, but that flat screen shall be mine! And if you don't think it's brave to hurl one's middle-aged body onto a Wal-Mart palette in Tennessee so you can human-shield your share of the takings, then you aren't fit to be a judge in the Very Special Olympics of American Professional-League Shopping. I see impressive scores of 8.8, 8.9 and 9.1 for that swan dive. The judges praise Ms. Chavez for her technique, but as she came away with only six digital frames, they doubt her commitment.

His Thought Dreams Have Been Seen

2007-11-19T16:39:00.000-08:00

Dylan Then:

Well, I seen a Cadillac window uptown
And there was nobody aroun',
I got into the driver's seat
And I drove 42nd Street
In my Cadillac.
Good car to drive after a war.

-- Talkin World War III Blues (1963)

Dylan Now:

"You That Build The Death Planes"

2007-10-12T01:25:00.000-07:00

Masterful work from Indianapolis video artist Ottawa2006.

Such A Client Is A Great Meal Ticket Joy And Inspiration, Let Me Tell You

2007-10-09T18:11:00.000-07:00

"One of the best things about Lil' Wayne is he takes his business very seriously. He's never missed a concert or a hearing," his Bronx-based attorney, Stacey Richman, tells E! Online.

--Attorney Stacey Richman yesterday on her rapper client's bust for failing to make a court date.

Bill Ostrem vs. Doughnut Holes

2007-08-23T23:19:00.001-07:00

Fig. 1: Fundamental to the Montesorri Method.

My pal Bill at Northern Letter is waging a polite public campaign to rid his daughter's pre-school lunch menu of junk food. It's a responsible parental deed: spare the kids the processed crapola, a prime link in childhood obesity. To this end he has met with the school's director and wisely suggested a menu rethink. Then he's blogged about it.

I happen to think Bill is a model of the engaged citizen (check out his blog's efforts to make his town a saner place for bikes) and my wife and I think highly of little Ava, who kept us amused during a fun visit with her parents this summer. So I've been keeping tabs on his reform efforts.

Sorry to say, five months later there has been only scant progress. As Bill suggests in his latest update ("Doughnut holes and Pop-Tarts gone, cheese puffs remain") it takes time to dislodge the mighty doughnut hole. And good frigging luck moving the cheese puffs.

Against bureaucratic feet-dragging, I had earlier advised him to wage a campaign of surrealism and hijinks by staging an anti-junk food demo at the school: march the kids around holding giant self-portraits in which they're transmogrified into the quivering jellied ovoids that are apt to rise from a diet of Pop-Tarts and doughnuts. Bill may have found this a bit much for Northfield, Minnesota.

Now comes news that shouldn't be too surprising. Earlier this month, a new Florida State University study found Americans see being fat as normal. So maybe the pre-school has been onto something all along. Cheese puffs: gateway to cultural literacy!

St. Paul to Portland, the long way (pt. 1)

2007-07-13T09:46:00.000-07:00

For four days last week we drove in a rental car with our bags piled to the roof and our dog in the back seat, budging across prairies and steppes, between mountains, along rivers and through land that is alternately hard-bitten and beautiful. If I thought it was a fairly grand though often tiring time, all 1700 miles worth, Google Maps is there to remind me that all journeys are just a series of turns, some precipitous:

1. Head west on St Clair Ave toward S Wheeler St 0.7 mi
2. Turn right at Cleveland Ave S 0.5 mi
3. Turn left at Summit Ave 0.2 mi
4. Turn right at Cretin Ave N 1.0 mi
5. Turn left to merge onto I-94 W/US-12 W
Continue to follow I-94 W
Passing through North Dakota
Entering Montana
838 mi
Etc. etc.

I'd traveled long distances by land in Europe and Egypt but I hadn't taken a really long road trip in the U.S. since childhood when my parents, suddenly possessed of a spirit of get-up-and-go, drove us from Waukegan, Ill., to the Smoky Mountains and then on to New York (a trip that shaped me irrevocably; I barely recall the mighty Smokies, but by God I remember the offices of Mad Magazine).

Katherine was excited to be on the road. I wasn't. Car trips unnerve me. In the midwest the road is repetitious, the land flat and unvaried, the cars ugly and monstrous, the drivers asleep or insane, and the radio dial owned by kooks. I prefer trains which allow movement, rest, contemplation and gazing, their clatter and sway relaxing and their routes shy of corporate commerce, and my fellow passengers generally unable to decide my fate should their kids crank up the in-car DVD system or their raving talk radio host make their eyeballs roll back in milky rage.

And it wasn't as if we were on a joyride on Route 66 in a Bel Air, anyway. Our rented Ford Escape was a chilled silent antiseptic dreadnought hurtling us expensively between lonely filling stations. But if we were to get the game Mr. C. to Portland, then it had to be by car and on a deadline. He had few complaints as long as we plied him with biscuits and stopped frequently for him to pee a veritable AAA TripTik up and down the great plains.

Driving west we recalled that the interstate highway system was a testament not to American get-up-and-go-ness, which learned to use it, but to the rigid grip of Cold War paranoia: Eisenhower's dream of moving armies to stop a Soviet invasion (his plan got a boost from not-disinterested Detroit). It was hard to imagine fears about invasion in the vast open expanses dotted by farms and factories, in the humble beaten-down towns we occasionally detoured to see, or in the chiseled Idaho rock faces where there are monuments to miners. Who could dwell out here and not already feel conquered by immensity? But we Americans depend on myths spun for us by our masters, drummed into us by their institutions, and neither they nor we are much wiser a half century on. Here we are in 2007, once more captive to the baleful war drive of our ruling class, though nothing as useful as the highway system will come out of it this time.

I-94 as we struck out for North Dakota seemed lightly traveled, surely due to the wallop of gas prices and the fact the state more often sees exodus, not influx, these days. Fewer cars made driving much easier and also strangely isolating after the last few years in congested, car-sick Minnesota. It was a sour sight, a last glimpse of the outlying Twin Cities area that sealed, for me, anyway, the sense we were leaving a place that had changed in the last 20 years for the worse. An hour or so due north, the highway passed over another of the exurban rashes left by white flight and the moronism of unregulated sprawl.

This was a vast strip mall-and-box shopping district, maybe a quarter square mile in size, certainly among the largest I've seen. There it sat, gouged out of the middle of nowhere, with its McMansion subdivisions just over the ridge. Composed like all the rest in mostly windowless Big Boxes set on a lick of asphalt, all its black acreage was laid out crazily as if in mute homage to its formal disregard for space (sprawl is always in a hurry and land always in its way). Yet as I could see from this rare perspective, the topography also had a cruel, maze-like logic. Once inside it, you were not to leave easily. You would be passed through its integuments like bubbles in a twisting drip-feed. Scattered throughout were the fast food troughs, these mutant grease nipples. Burger nipple here and chicken nipple there. I wondered what the possibilities were like in these die-cut warrens for joy and community, let alone earning a living or simply surviving your meal.

Minnesota's fate is being decided by these places. Packed with latter day Babbits nursing as much on McDonalds and imported chemical-laced food as on the cosmic gruel of their mega-steepled Elmer Gantrys, these are the population centers that have welcomed and powered the state's ghastly descent into right wing culture.

Call them Fox News Hamlets. One of many, this single long-range commuter outpost spoke to nothing so much as the anti-populist theory of Bushism in practice: unsustainable, damn-the-torpedoes self-indulgence for which the many are meant to bear the costs for a few. In a shallow kind of grid-like presentableness, it recalled one of the model cities the North Koreans built near the DMZ to hallucinate prosperity, and perhaps the comparison goes deeper. For if you peel back the brand name surface, now even the somnambulastic mainstream news carries grim tidings of foreclosures, staggeringly bad debt, tapped-out equity and falling house prices. It isn't hard to hear the wheezing of overconsumption, the rattle of the I-Got-Mine-Screw-You ethos as it turns rheumatic. What is the future of Minnesota sprawl and these Fox News Hamlets? It can't be bright.

As the miles fell away I also thought about the other Minnesota, that of our friends in the cities still fighting the good fight and whom I admire and will miss. If progressive politics is no longer a majority belief in what was once the land of Dylan, Prince, Sinclair Lewis and H.H. Humphrey, you couldn't stop Emily, Ann or Linda, who made us a wonderful farewell feast, from striving in environmental politics and nursing to bring back the light. Or Nik and Sarah, champions of reading and culture, who saved us from last-minute moving meltdown with their kindness and camaraderie. Or our great neighbors, Jean and Phyllis and Mary. Or Bill and Urmilla, Peter and Evelyn, Fred and Theresa, Kris and Jenneane, Peter and Scherrie. Or my parents, Dan and Carol, and my brother Patrick and his wife Cristine. Or Col. Dave, Rick, Dave "Tea" and Barry at dear old Uncle Sven's, comic shop and salon extraordinaire. Ironic points of light: my Minnesota.

Next time, the open road--astonishing beauty carpet-bombed by Wal-Marts.

Michael Blaine On The War Fetish

2007-06-08T15:03:00.000-07:00

Michael Blaine at Rudely Stamped has a terrific post on jingoism. Sample:

An ill-defined and distant enemy who apparently has no ability to harm you on your home turf can't possibly focus the mind and stir the passions the way the shiny steel of a new sports car can. A year or two ago these cars would often feature a yellow "Support Our Troops" magnet as well, but now these emblems of convenience-store strength have all but disappeared. On one hand, if a war isn't finished before the bumper stickers fade or go out of style, it probably never will be; but on the other, if you're a driver who impulsively jumped on the jingoist bandwagon by slapping a magnet on your trunk, you should probably be forced to maintain it in full view for the duration. Once you've shown yourself to be a reckless hothead, the label should stick so the rest of us know who we're dealing with. "Stay the Course" ought to apply to wartime fashion statements, too.

I wasn't aware of the Virginia plates he so aptly skewers as "macabre." They're cheesily authoritarian, too. From magnets to Franklin Mint Humvees to the very redesign of the World Trade Center as a kind of permanent open sore where the gangrene of revenge fantasies may fester, the license plates are of a piece with other ghoulish, neuron-killing war kitsch. For years, I've walked the dog past a giant "Remember 9-11" slogan that some parent in St. Paul has slapped up over his kid's basketball backboard. Yes, I've often thought, that will build character. Nice shot, son. Now let's take a moment to dedicate it those who perished in a fiery cataclysm on that fateful September day whose exact date has been piloted into all our hearts. In fact, let's remember every time you shoot. And when you miss, well, that's one for Team Osama.

Eloquently and bitingly, Michael goes on to score the jingoism imposed on our pro sports. He attends a San Diego Padres game where everything stops for one of those thundering adorations now used to enforce consent for war. We've all witnessed some form of this over the past few years. Stadiums, loudspeakers, jets crossing the sky, cannons firing, leaders glowering, a Riefenstahl-like panorama of pomp and noise and the fan in the stands clapping, for what choice has he? Applause for these martial exhibits is the new loyalty oath. As Norman Mailer warned in a widely-discussed speech before the invasion of Iraq,

The dire prospect that opens, therefore, is that America is going to become a mega-banana republic where the army will have more and more importance in our lives. It will be an ever greater and greater overlay on the American system. And, before it is all over, democracy, noble and delicate as it is, may give way . . . Indeed, democracy is the special condition -- a condition we will be called upon to defend in the coming years. That will be enormously difficult because the combination of the corporation, the military and the complete investiture of the flag with mass spectator sports has set up a pre-fascist atmosphere in America already.

Selling war, especially the fictional virtues of an unpopular, lunatic war, is an all-encompassing task. You never know when the public is going to tire of the adventure and demand a return to lazy virtues like peace and plenty. So you "educate," as the spinmasters say. Driving has to celebrate war; play has to celebrate war; entertainment has to celebrate war; generals go out on TV to chat up the project like stars plugging a new movie and war celebrates war. No context is the wrong one because the war is the organizing principle, the Straussian rallying point. No means is too tacky (the glorious message redeems the medium). In this culture of death kitsch, even mass-murder underwear has its place.

The Old Fund-And-Jive

2007-06-04T14:09:00.001-07:00

Baghdad, November 8, 2003: Room for cream?

In this weekend's Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton once more washed her hands of responsibility for Iraq:

Well, and I think it's important particularly to point out this is George Bush's war. He is responsible for this war. He started the war. He mismanaged the war. He escalated the war. And he refuses to end the war.

That's rich stuff coming from someone who has handed the White House one blank check after another. It's smug, too, after her ongoing trips to Iraq for photo ops, as part of her presidential campaign's long-term strategy detailed by The New York Times to win hearts and minds in the Pentagon. Clinton's culpability for Iraq began when she was one of 29 Senate Democrats to join Republicans in voting to authorize the war. (Twenty-three had more conscience or sense.) Earlier there was her husband presiding over eight years of bombing and starving Iraqis, policies that killed one million and which she has never renounced. Need one mention all her thundering about WMDs, too?

The standard defense for Clinton on Iraq is that she was lied to. Yes, there were lies. But how morally and intellectually feeble must one be to predicate a vote for war on evidence out of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz sewer? The rest of the planet rejected their manufactured excuses. Half her party in the Senate did, too. But Clinton didn't. Tricked so badly by George W. Bush that you went to war sounds like the set-up for a Rodney Dangerfield joke. But get this...then I paid for it for the next four years! Hillary: she can't get no respect.

You can get a measure of the public anger over this complicity from an extraordinary outpouring on MSNBC, hardly a hotbed of radicalism. On Sunday, NBC's political director Chuck Todd used his blog to rush to the defense of the liberal warriors. Todd wrote, "Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel aren't doing the Democratic Party any favors by BOTH trying to put the Iraq War at the feet of the Democrats as well as Pres. Bush." The response in the comments has been overwhelmingly against the fund-and-jive Democrats while praising Kucinich and Gravel for their truth-telling.

Yellow Dog

2007-06-02T00:37:00.000-07:00

"But you, you. The actor gets you to the life. The sheen of youth. The sheen of power. What's it like, power? Is it heady?"
Yes, he said, but you're steadied by the responsibility.

The Long Kiss Goodbye: Martin Amis on Tony Blair's Farewell, The Guardian, June 2, 2007

Earlier this year in a scintillating appearance on the BBC's HARDtalk, the leftwing politician George Galloway was asked if he would shake Tony Blair's hand.

"Only as a prelude to shaking him by the throat," replied the British MP, sensibly choosing appendages. "He's a mass murderer. He's responsible for far more deaths than the obscurantist savage Bin Laden, for far more deaths than Saddam Hussein, responsible with Mr. Bush for everything that happened in Abu Ghraib, for everything that happened on the killing fields of Iraq!"

Not as keen to bite or even nip is Martin Amis. Once, writing scathingly about politicians in the 80s and 90s (see his portrait of a Reagan-era GOP convention or his review of Hillary Clinton's It Takes A Village), Amis could be counted on to expose leaders and their gullible followers. No more. Late-career blues, 9/11 moralizing, political slippage to the right and what he calls a new "tenderer" sensibility have all taken their toll. Defanged thusly, there are still scoldings, call them gummings, but now he mainly snaps at war protesters ("bawling"), multi-culturalism ("woozy") and bloggers ("semi-literate"). In a Q&A with readers in The Independent, he tells a clever mocker of his clash-of-civs hystericism to "fuck off." Like many a rebellious young wit who later learns to harrumph, he is tenderer towards power, authority.

Embedded by The Guardian in Tony Blair's farewell tour, heroically saddled in combat armor, reassured by bombproofed limo doors and nannying the PM over an unfastened seatbelt, the former satirist does his best to be of decaffeinated use. The tone is beyond respectful. It's fanboy. Blair is his generation's Beatle Prime Minister, and Sgt. Pepper taught the bombs to play. Amis is now pro-war and while gloomy about its chances, he is as apt to valorize the west in its warmaking as once he was to ridicule its social, sexual and political manners. And there is the White Man's Burden. In a multimedia segment for the article, he is heard to say that flying over the Middle East with Blair reminds him there are "millions" down below who want to "murder" and "behead" him. Perhaps he was thinking of literary Britain.

There's one worthwhile moment. Amis records how at a base in Basra, Blair loses his nerve in what is supposed to be a spot of stage-managed mingling. Unexpectedly (did no one prep them?) the soldiers begin to unburden themselves of the ghastly bits, the hell into which maniacal idealism has cast them. And Blair, at a loss, with no podium or spinmaster to steady him, turns stammeringly Bushlike. Then Amis hurries on; what the novelist's nose detects, the political sentimentalist is in no mood to breathe. Besides, there's an incoming mortar round to set up some belle lettres.

But however fleetingly, the truth has Blair by the neck. In his momentary discomfort (would that it could deepen, but a plane awaits to whisk him back to Pepperland) we glimpse something long overdue, and it brings to mind an English writer less willing than Amis to play the pet, Siegfried Sassoon, whose WWI poem "They" is about such strange meetings where high sentence is made to face its low deeds:

The Bishop tells us: 'When the boys come back
They will not be the same; for they'll have fought
In a just cause: they lead the last attack
On Anti-Christ; their comrades' blood has bought
New right to breed an honourable race.
They have challenged Death and dared him face to face.'
' We're none of us the same! ' the boys reply.
For George lost both his legs; and Bill's stone blind;
Poor Jim's shot through the lungs and like to die;
And Bert's gone syphilitic; you'll not find
A chap who's served that hasn't found some change. '
And the Bishop said: ' The ways of God are strange!

Jarmusch's America

2007-05-15T13:39:00.000-07:00

I watched Ghost Dog again the other night. What does that make? Four? Five times? I don't think it's Jarmusch's best by a long shot (and I'm not sure which one that is, either) nor is it especially deep or profound, being in one way just a fun parody of Italian American gangster clichés and in another an outsider idealizing samurai tradition. For me it has beauty and resonance. I could talk about the neat riffs on communication between Forrest Whitaker's character and the French ice cream man, or the send-up of ethnic stereotypes, or the absurdist humor, or the suggestion that loyalty is a set of handcuffs and maybe that's all right, or just the rooftop vigil with its echoes of Kazan kept by the pigeon-loving assassin. But there is at least one more subtle aspect to it that is solemn, mysterious and necessary.

Holeee, do I love those tracking shots in the city at night! Nobody shoots American cities like Jarmusch. He loves to film the grit, disorder and shadows of downtown life. It isn't just as texture, either, but as testament. Many American cities are in grave physical decline but our happy-go-lucky cinema is as blind as our politicians to this fact. Jarmusch's camera never looks at our wrecktropolises without recording what they really look like, their falling-down pasts and boarded-up futures, and it dwells on this entombment like a realtor of the spirit asking what has been foreclosed and what is still viable. What kinds of lives can still go on here. If you have seen his work you know that in his unforgettable study of people he's always finding the broken flowers that contend between such pavement cracks--he loves beauty in the margins, its solitary, lonely grace. So do I. I could wish he would make a hundred movies.

You combine this sensitive gaze with the haunting minimalist beats by RZA and it's magic: a dirge for lost dreams played at their ground zero. I don't want to downplay the script or Whitaker, both memorable, but I come back to this one as much for them as for a certain feeling about the whole piece, sad and beautiful in equal measure as the tired city rolls by.

Giant and Midget

2007-05-02T00:31:00.000-07:00

The great modern empires have never been held together only by military power. Britain ruled the vast territories of India with only a few thousand colonial officers and a few more thousand troops, many of them Indian. France did the same in North Africa and Indochina, the Dutch in Indonesia, the Portuguese and Belgians in Africa. The key element was imperial perspective, that way of looking at a distant foreign reality by subordinating it in one's gaze, constructing its history from one's own point of view, seeing its people as subjects whose fate can be decided by what distant administrators think is best for them. From such willful perspectives ideas develop, including the theory that imperialism is a benign and necessary thing.

-- Edward Said, "Blind Imperial Arrogance," July 20, 2003

We have given the Iraqi people the chance to have freedom, to have their own country. It is up to them to decide whether or not they're going to take that chance and it is past time for them to demonstrate that they are willing to make the sacrifice.

-- Hillary Clinton, Democratic presidential debates, April 26, 2007

R.I.P. Joan E. Lee

2007-04-14T21:39:00.000-07:00

In those bad days after 9/11, many of us went online in search of insight, moral support and community. One place I turned was a now-defunct message board called Abuzz owned by the New York Times. There my political postings came to the attention of someone named Joan Lee, who invited me to join a group of progressives who met to commiserate in its threads. In time, she and I began an email correspondence.

More should be made of how meekly and blindly went most Americans into the long night of Bushism but this was not as true for the older generation of women, as I often witnessed both online and here in weekly vigils in St. Paul. Joan was some thirty years older, yet as I saw many times in her and her peers, their vigor to oppose fascism put to shame any in my own wan, high-def, iPod generation. Perhaps technology hadn't bought them off as it has us. Or perhaps they remembered, as we are too young to do, the spirit of a better society. I only know this: America would not be so screwed up if it were run by grandmothers, by people such as her.

I liked and admired Joan, even if I did not quite understand why she sought me out, as we only agreed on the malady and hardly at all on the cure. I shared little of her philosophical optimism and none of her specific faith that the solution to renewal lies within our duopoly system, and I made this plain, and sometimes overbearingly so, in my Abuzz posts and in our emails. With a forbearance that I seldom find in life, she gently demurred. It may be the unconscious job of the optimist and the pessimist to find their opposites in times of need, if only to know what they are by comparison to what they are not. We wanted to understand and appreciate more than convert, so there was respect without agreement, and we could keep our little conversation going fruitfully for years.

Eventually Abuzz shut down and Joan and the others went elsewhere to continue their passionate--and for me, too strictly partisan--conversations about America's future. Our email exchanges became less frequent, although none passed without a friendly word. One of the last brought news of ill health at home, along with a letter she had written to her local newspaper in opposition to the war. The text was everything that summed up her worldview and her public activism: lively, courageous and decent, concerned for the common rather than merely the personal good, in the best sense of the liberal tradition to which she belonged.

Tonight I have received the email that her children sent in accordance with her last wishes to her wide company of correspondents. It is one last occasion to marvel over her.

DO NOT send flowers, gifts, food etc. Mom would prefer you spend that time and effort on your own loved ones doing something fun.

I also marvel at our age, which is not merely one of horrors but also a time when the lives of those who resist may be woven together unexpectedly by as little as a mouse click, as it was my fortune to see in knowing Joan. As W.H. Auden reminds us, even under great darkness the simple rites of caring and trying bind us together, and give us hope:

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut

2007-04-12T11:49:00.000-07:00

Kurt Vonnegut was a writer you came to in youth who baked delicious comic cakes with a file hidden inside. He knew the world was locked up by the Organization Men, the system lunatics, ham-fisted Masters of the Universe with their plans for everyone who ransomed American life and brutalized mankind and whose heirs do so even now with equal talent for ruin. If Vonnegut's wry laughter got to you at an early age, you stood a chance of not being ritualized into their service. He helped you break out.

His ghost is in those pages now forever plotting for our survival and happiness against madmen. Thank you, Mr. Vonnegut, and farewell.

Charade 2008: Night of the Hunter

2007-04-10T00:06:00.000-07:00

I taught I taw a votah!

It isn't hard to see what should be done in the next national election. The nation is losing a pivotal war it never should have begun. Simultaneously, the fuse of recent domestic economic growth--the disastrous housing bubble--is sputtering out. Beyond the Wal-Mart campfire, staring us down wolfishly are a range of social, health, energy and environmental needs that can never be met through our ethos of Machiavellian self-interest, but in fact are only pushed by it into deepening crisis. Fun as it's been fucking up so grandly, the reality of our situation, which has begun to penetrate even the McMansion ramparts, is clear. We can't go on like this, even though we plan to do.

And so, in rough order, a shortlist of What We Should Do, Like, Yesterday: 1) End the failed, immoral war in Iraq as well as the absurd "war on terror" while massively cutting military waste; 2) Institute living wage laws; 3) Provide national health insurance while sweeping away the entire corrupt HMO edifice; 4) Replace the discriminatory property tax funding mechanism for public schools with a socially-just alternative; 5) Swiftly transition to sustainable energy by using policy, the carrot of investment and lots of stick; 6) Take development decisions out of the hands of the exurban sprawl barons.

Did I mention the free beer, too? Why not; it's as likely as any of the other reforms. As the 2008 race gets underway, what we will see instead is the best charade money can buy--the What's The Matter With Kansas? masquerading, posturing and emotional button-pushing that nobody does better than us. The affair will be cheered on by a corporate media anxious to squeeze every penny it can out of the process and therefore energetically devoted to portraying it as a most august duty/honor/privilege/etc., while partisans tell us it's the most important election of our lifetime, at least since the last once-in-a-lifetime election.

Often this process is misunderstood as base hoodwinking. (Thomas Frank's Kansas thesis is much more subtle, but still amounts to people not being clever enough to identify self-interest). I grant you it is that, in large measure. But give us Americans some credit, too: we were founded in darkest mistrust of the state, and since then and with recent brutal example we've witnessed democracy fail us enough to know that election promises are ephemeral, and that our broken, hijacked system is finally as resistant to our wishes as it is responsive to its truest master, Money. Seen in this light, choosing leaders on symbolic cultural merit isn't only a default condition for Falwell-gulled hayseeds. It can also be a kind of (admittedly meager) transcendence for voters who are long-practiced in disappointment: if I can't change anything through voting, at least I'll back someone I can stand--or use my vote to run interference in behalf of one dud against an even greater dud.

Since both parties today wildly promote greed however antisocial or irresponsible (Clinton through the Dot Bomb bubble, Bush through the housing bubble and both through the unchecked and usurious personal borrowing that has made us a colossal debtor nation), voting is now more or less a style choice. The basic compact is that one goes to the polls to choose a political-cultural style one can live with, or at least not lose your cookies endorsing, safe in the knowledge the winner or thief of the election will grant us the customary commercial freedom to live the American Dream as recklessly, unsustainably and destructively as we can afford to do. All the elected ask in return is we butt out of their business, admire the fungibility of their every utterance, pay when and what they demand, and unquestioningly march off to their wars. (Yes, there exist exceptions; in my basement is a lawn sign for a certain unforgotten Minnesota senator who was, at one time, a beacon, even if his own party was content to dull his light by marginalizing him and preparing no successor, and paid him more heed in death than in life.)

While facing pretty stiff competition, no entrant in the 2008 race has yet proven to be as adept a panderer or as shameless a toady as ex-Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. Known for his Bible Belt conservatism as much as for his grouchily-titled weight loss book, Quit Digging Your Grave with a Knife and Fork (2005), Huckabee cuts a fairly, well, elfin profile. Yet in the fashion of a General Buck Turgidson, the holy-rollering Slim Jim has identified a hunting gap:

WASHINGTON (AP) - GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney was wrong to suggest he was a lifelong hunter even though he never took out a license, campaign rival Mike Huckabee said Sunday.
``I think it was a major mistake,'' said Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor. ``It would be like me saying I've been a lifelong golfer because I played putt-putt when I was 9 years old and I rode in a golf cart a couple of times.''
``I think American people are looking for authenticity,'' Huckabee added. ``Match their record with their rhetoric.''

Take that, city slicker! With this little hickier-than-thou jab, Huckabee effectively paints himself as a contemporary Daniel Boone while emasculating his opponent, the equally banal Massachusetts technocrat Mitt Romney. Of course, authenticity in such earthy matters is as elusive as the famous jackalope. We can never know if Huckabee hunts for the manly thrill of the hunt or simply for political expediency. Is he a real ghostface killah in the woods or just a keen aim with a soundbite? What about the mediated self is ever truly authentic? While image consultants may call it "telling one's story," the minute a candidate feels compelled to advise us he's a real hunter--and has the beef jerky wrappers to prove it--we understand that we're being played, being sold. Hilariously, the truth that today's candidates hunt less for sport than for this manipulative image grooming was illustrated in the 2004 campaign by John Kerry's clumsy attempt to replace his robo-billionaire's techno soundtrack with a jus' us folks shootin' jug band number. I voted for Lurch, and I still laugh to see him in a hunting cap.

Yet Huckabee's hunting pitch does have an authentic echo, albeit a creepy one: its name is raw, manful killing. It's perfectly understood that to be fit to run empire presidential candidates must arrive in Washington having shed helpless blood, a qualification that augurs future success in the black arts of "national security." Military service is the usual proof, but the shadow of Vietnam has complicated that marker; hence convenient resort to the old Rooseveltian frontier symbolism, that of the fearless hunter.

(Hillary Clinton's answer to this problem--she doesn't hunt, and has never flown a bombing mission over a village--has been twofold. One, as explored in a recent New York Times piece, she's ingratiated herself with the Pentagon by becoming a kind of honorary military brat, flying off to photo ops in Iraq and diligently cozying up to the brass. Two, she's keenly endorsed bloodletting on a grand scale, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Israel's 2006 bombing of civilian Lebanon. If she's elected, may we expect an early display of wanton imperial might to assure skeptics that the new prez, no matter the missing Y chromosome, likes her steak served rare?)

Huntsman Huckabee may think he has an early lead in the killing sweepstakes, but as Alexander Cockburn recently pointed out, first place is reserved for ex-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's wife, the former live dog executioner. Years ago, as a medical sales rep, the good lady would drive these staples into drugged dogs in order to sell the product to Doubting Thomases, and the animals would then expire from blood loss or be killed. Cockburn thinks this revelation is curtains for Giuliani, who insists the Rover Riveter will be his co-president, but we'll see. Even in indecency, timing is everything. The nearer we draw to bailing from Iraq, the greater will be the need for the martial violence that we find so vivifying and essential to our national identity to relocate to new quarters, like a ghost evicted by wrecking ball from its familiar squeaky halls. Against the tang of another imperial failure, the martially bereft among us will wail in doubt for all that is sacred and true. Having a First Lady of her experience could, I guess, be reassuring--a firm stapling hand at the wheel. Imagine the Franklin Mint plate.

Get a job, ya @#*$ clean-cut, baseball-loving middle class hippie!

2007-03-21T11:25:00.000-07:00

Writer, wit and sometime scourge of Star Tribune milquetoast Eric Black, my friend Michael Blaine has debuted his new D.C.-based blog, Rudely Stamped, with a thoughtful post about attending the Pentagon march last week. On hand to run interference against Michael and other antiwar marchers were right wing belligerents, in one case a surly mob of vets seemingly stuck in an Archie Bunker time warp. "Get A Job" may be the only blog entry you'll read this month in which a former Reagan voter with a self-described "corporate haircut" gets hippie-baited by reactionaries who haven't updated their insults since the days when Peter Boyle played the hardhat Joe; great stuff, don't miss it.

David Usborne's March 19th piece in The Independent confirms this account of pro-war nasties haranguing peaceful marchers (while paranoically dreaming they were somehow defending the Vietnam memorial; wow, fellas...you got the monument's back!). How different they sound to the enlightened VVAW members whom I've been proud to meet and march with in Minnesota in opposition to this for-shit war.

On the subject of what to do next, or better what not to do, Usborne quotes an activist with whom I strongly agree:

But a labour activist from New York, Michael Letwin, warned demonstrators in Washington not to invest too much hope in the Democrats. "This is a bipartisan war," he said. "The Democratic party cannot be trusted to end it."

So we have seen. Only relentless public pressure will end the war.

Cheney and Clot

2007-03-05T19:40:00.000-08:00

In such ongoing revolt against his grim and bloated person is Dick Cheney's heart that since 1978 he has had four heart attacks, these spells plotted faithfully to flash points in the political calendar. The other bad years were 1984, 1988 and 2000.

These dates show rises in party fortunes taxing his ticker most (he first succumbed when poor Carter was in mid-doldrums). Naturally so, as this is when he has been busiest at his mischief, or anticipating a new round. The Reagan peak and exit were brutal, and the return of a Bush to Washington in this decade reawakened his heart's dismay. High times bring him low.

Cheney's medical history is absurd, a triumph of American machine medicine wantonly leveraged against baleful living. From Wikipedia we see how, virtually from head to toe, he's held together by the scarecrow patchwork of bio-tech, squadrons of surgeons, a fortune in treatment, and the dogged hope to see him last until his next calamitous operation:

. . .moderate contractile dysfunction of his left ventricle. . . underwent four-vessel coronary artery bypass grafting in 1988. . . coronary artery stenting in November 2000. . . urgent coronary balloon angioplasty in March 2001. . . In 2001 a Holter monitor disclosed brief episodes of (asymptomatic) ectopy. . . On September 24, 2500. . . an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD). . . in his left upper anterior chest. . .catheter treatment technique used in the artery behind each knee. . . On January 9, 2006. . . shortness of breath. . .

Now comes the clot and once more the cry will go up, "He is not fit, he should step down," but what tosh. He's as fit as a gorgon: his leer has turned his own heart to stone. Even a nine-day stretch of 65 hours circling the earth ~~on a broom~~ on a plane, inactivity during which the clot might well have crept up his leg and swum into his lung, a frightful salmon spawning, has barely inconvenienced him.

Best wishes for recovery, etc., but fret not for Dick Cheney! Odds still favor him, in some deep Strangelovian fallout-proofed mineshaft, outliving us all.

Wolcott On Gopnik (Ouch)

2007-02-19T20:34:00.000-08:00

Adam Gopnik, New Yorker writer and proud former yuppie ("We were called that, derisively, before the world was ours"), has a new book out. Reflections on how adorable his children are, how nice Disneyfied New York is without riffraff, and etc. Don't laugh: this sort of thing gets you a 150,000-copy first printing. James Wolcott's review opens:

I sometimes wonder if Adam Gopnik was put on this earth to annoy. If so, mission accomplished.

And so the fun begins. The first 100 or so words read like self-parody, as the famously easy-to-displease reviewer seems determined to show he'll take an inch off everybody who dares publish. After Wolcott powers down his chainsaw and turns to the scalpel, it's a very nice course in frog dissection.

This, btw, courtesy of Powell's Books Review-A-Day site, which has a good archive, too. I was glad to find several fine pieces there by the film critic David Thomson. His essay on the Black Dahlia murder is daring and arresting, as good a read as Brian De Palma's recent movie is a trite and overblown mess.

De mortuis nil nisi bosom

2007-02-08T19:29:00.000-08:00

Here's Yahoo tonight, from its top story "Remembering Anna Nicole":

From small-town girl to pop-culture icon, Anna Nicole's life was filled with great highs and terrible lows.

Huh. As epitaphs go, it's no show stopper, is it? That's in a way fitting, as Anna Nicole Smith was pretty much WYSIWYG, but it's also short shrift. You wouldn't know that this remarkable woman, like a human Macy's Day parade blimp, zephyred into our imaginations on wings of cartoonish desire and breathtaking blandness. If at times she would come untethered, as free, loopy spirits will, you could enjoy the comedy of handlers racing after her or lawyers gathering in their dark numbers. So, a runaway float: see her overhead, blonding out the sun.

She was born Vickie Lynn Marshall, worked in a Wal-Mart, married a boy at 17, ate by stripping in clubs. A long Texas dullness stretched before her. Then in 1992 (pre-Viagra years, let us remember) she aroused the graying interest of Hugh Hefner. Suddenly, new horizons, and the 1993 Playmate of the Year.

Playmate Smith was to be the "next Monroe," an unfortunate idea, really, and one impossible outside the feverish realms of geezer lust that molded and marketed her. Anachronistic, nostalgic, wheezy and kitsch, repackaging Smith in Monroe drag was an attempt by the Hefner pack to resuscitate Marilyn for a last roll in the mind's hay. She had less wit than her famous predecessor, but more importantly, the Bombshell Age was long over. No one could again occupy the pent-up moment in pre-sexual revolution American consciousness that Monroe did for Greatest Generation gonads. So this clueless positioning (all the press chatter, the hairstyle, the white dresses) was always going to be a pratfall. In fact, the zenith of this ambition is Smith's walk-on parody role as "Za-Za" in the Coen Brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy, where at a press conference she's so sleek with animal heat, she growls. "Ho-leeee!" cries a newspaperman.

I never found Smith very attractive, just sort of preposterously beautiful, all impossible curve and jut wound to keeping by some hidden mechanism. It was as if there should be zany sound effects when she moved. (She also reminded me of D.H. Lawrence's fabulous poem, Gloire de Dijon.) Yet I had to give her credit for guile and nerve. Faux naive in a way that suggested a female Andy Warhol, she knew how to play the old boys. By the 90s Playboy was in serious decline, but the less Anna Nicole hid the more she returned to it a certain late-life cachet (her Wikipedia entry says she even "began a trend for a more voluptuous look"). The mag's over-the-hill readers weren't complaining about kitsch or cliché.

Then came the marriage to the 89-year old oil tycoon, which you might call the perfection of her art. I love the idea of the bombshell fresh from strip club and centerfold dividing the billionaire's fortune from his grasping heirs, it's pure Preston Sturges. Think of her cuddling, say, a drooling William Demarest, his reptilian skin glistening from her kisses, palsied fingers signing the will as he smirks and gurgles and clucks. Hur hur hur...time of my life, baby... And a doubly delicious irony: all that oil loot ending up in the purse of this former Wal-Marteer. Pity she never was able to cash the check.

When I happened upon her ho-hum reality TV show, though, watching even a few minutes made me squirm. She was fat, vulnerable. Her voice was squeaky and affectless. Maybe it would have worked if they'd found another billionaire for her. Pure bathos, the show was made, like much reality TV, for voyeurs and cannibals. The has-been celeb TV vehicle is itself a kind of cultural bitchslap, a measure of Puritan society's revenge on the public lives that fuel its fantasies, and there was a whiff of that in The Anna Nicole Show. Yet what's striking is how in these two incarnations she traveled light years from unattainable fantasy to attainable mope, snaring wildly different audiences in each orbit. Is there any other such journey in cheesecake history? I imagine neither crowd liked the "other" Anna, particularly not the sweaty strict constructionists who'd rebel at the idea of their fantasy amazon going post-modern schlub.

Later, apparently in between scattered film work, PETA ads and a new marriage, Smith slowly and steadfastly carved herself into a stark, angular wisp for a diet company. That was the "new Anna," and the last. She vanished, inch by inch. Talk about the long goodbye.

Now the next Monroe story has ended as the last one did: badly. If you trace the contours--the "great highs" and "terrible lows"--in these iconic lives that are built on breast and ass, seldom does it end any better. Ripeness is all, you know. RIP.

Ex-video game dealer: 'video games are crap'

2007-02-02T23:39:00.000-08:00

Blaming big box merchants and publishers alike, DVD Empire exits the online video game business with bitter words for the industry:

We all know how fast games devalue in prices; this is due to the fact that 80% of the games created are crap.

That's being generous, I'd say. Mind you, this sordidness about games sucking seems not to have prevented DVD Empire from trying to sell them when its hopes were higher. But if you can't turn a buck, then scruples eventually will rear their ugly head.

Games weren't always mostly bad. When independent developers (id Software, once upon a time, or the text-stirrers at Infocom) could still compete through the 90s, games had more variety, more idiosyncratic personality. Oh, what strange wondrous things were made.

They also had the advantage of being simpler graphically, which meant anyone could make them, which meant anyone did, and the monkeys-typing-Shakespeare trick seemed to work fairly often.

Now that you need deep pockets to produce games (seven-figure development costs not being uncommon), the Impressionist Age is done for. It's a lot of per-pixel-lit, normal-mapped Hollywoodism now, with all that implies about cookie cutter ambitions, shrink-wrapped imagination and sequel-itis.

And the effect isn't only to open the medium to loads of garbage. It has also clearly looted the spirit of its stars. Once plucky id Software now turns out glossier yet soulless rehashes of its decade-old properties. The even pluckier 3D Realms has been stuck on a kind of existential treadmill since 1997, wasting ten years on its still-unreleased sequel to its cheesy ode to steroid-driven sci-fi, Duke Nukem.

Ironically, even as the recent feverish hype for the new Playstation 3 saw shoppers trampling one another, shooting at people in line and committing armed robbery with the inevitable cops-burst-in-firing motif, the buzz is now muted to a weary, strangled burble. Seems the games aren't all that, next to all the fun had getting the thing. There's a lesson for DVD Empire: if you want to compete, find a way to hold online riots.

Things To Be Thankful For: A Short List

2006-11-23T22:00:00.000-08:00

1. Health
2. Family, friends and neighbors
3. Nobody's invaded my country, destroying its civil society and creating the conditions for this:

Baghdad's day of sectarian death: five car bombs, 160 killed

Jonathan Steele in Irbil
Friday November 24, 2006
The Guardian

An indefinite curfew was imposed on Baghdad last night and its international airport closed after the city was convulsed by the deadliest sectarian violence since the US led war began in March 2003.

Out, Damned Spot!

2006-11-11T14:02:00.000-08:00

So, out they go.

There is, maybe, a sense that after the bloodshed and lawlessness, something has been sated in America. I read the election as a kind of bulimic scene: the nation binged on Bush, swagger, bombing, torture, brutishness. Now, rising and blotting its chin, it tells itself, "I'll never do that again."

Obviously there are many millions who want more--more war, more repression in the name of "security" and "faith." They will growl and regroup. Many in the new majority, moreover, are anything but liberal or progressive (and you can find the right wing taking early comfort in that fact). So it seems too early to speak about the end of a conservative era. It's too soon to speak about the end of destructive post-9-11 nationalism, too; give that another decade, alas.

But there are signs, however tentative and small. My friend Peter observes that with the scouring of Congress, there is less fear in his heart of fascism, and inside the beltway, my pal Chris writes:

The imperialist blowhards who favor war and torture and crushing the poor will perhaps be a little more sedate, while the potential for a little more debate and truth-telling has probably risen.

Optimistically, Alexander Cockburn points out that the few antiwar Democrats did well, even if they had to buck their own party.

Double Mortgages Leave No Cash For Car Brakes

2006-11-03T18:30:00.000-08:00

From the indispensable Housing Bubble Blog comes this anecdote in Money Magazine about a pair of strapped borrowers:

When Chicagoans John and Judy Peeler decided to move to Philadelphia last spring, they blithely assumed they'd get more space for their money. Indeed, the couple quickly found a 2,500-square-foot, four-bedroom colonial for $440,000, just about what they figured their 2,000-square-foot Windy City condo would fetch.

Since then the seemingly ideal move has devastated their finances. The Peelers' Chicago condo has generated little interest, even after they dropped the price, twice, to its current $389,000. And it has been four months since they relocated, which means they've been carrying two mortgages and a home-equity line of credit at a cost of $4,000 a month.

Having depleted their savings to pay for this, they've had to seriously cut back on spending. They went without air conditioning this past summer. They've also put off fixing the brakes of their second car. "We don't spend money on anything that isn't critical," says Judy. "Everything goes toward the mortgages."

Priorities, priorities. I nominate this as the best symbol yet for the bubble.

Borat: Subversive Genius

2006-11-03T15:46:00.000-08:00

Can minstrelsy be subverted for good? Spike Lee's answer in Bamboozled (2000) was a qualified yes, but beware the effects of make-up that won't come off.

Sacha Cohen's brilliant Borat--the British Jewish comedian mustachioed and pidgin-Englished into a gangly Kazakhstani naïf--uses a cruel stereotype. (So did his Ali G.) But invariably Cohen's out to skewer something crueler. When he invades an Arizona honky tonk bar in a cowboy hat to play a c&w song seemingly about his country's backward transportation, the patrons glare or wince condescendingly. A goddamned ferriner on the stage? Then in a sleight of hand so deft no one notices, he swiftly draws out their inner Nazi, and the desert rings with an ugly, gleeful sound of culture-spanning prejudice. Mission accomplished.

Not everybody's cheering on these ruses. In his review of the Borat film this week, a cautious Anthony Lane seems mildly affronted:

...it is as if he were outraged by the business of our being human--as if, in laying bare our follies, he were just quickening the process by which we already make fools of ourselves.

But while also goofing and riffing on comedy of manners stuff, Cohen's after bigger game than folly. Watch him dog politicians, right wing nationalists and would-be experts, all gulled because they think he's a backward foreigner. At his best, he's a doctor drawing venom.

Satire's hard to make popular, but it's more necessary than ever in an age of conformity beholden to kooky spirituality and vicious ideologies. Disarming rubes and rulers alike, Cohen's a stealth Swift. He's showing us how one strategy for satire in an overconfident society is the confidence trick.

Russ Meyer (!) on TCM

2006-10-22T13:41:00.000-07:00

Does Rob Zombie know what spoilers are? His introductions to TCM Underground, the new cult classics show on Turner, are to flicks what Octoberfest is to beer: spoilerfests. Ease up on the plot detail, already. It'd be more interesting to hear what Zombie, who locates his own film work in the tropes and splatters of a bygone era, thinks about these pieces than to have him run through half the plot.

That said, it was cool seeing the staid TCM play against type by screening two Russ Meyers this weekend. It's common to think of Meyer as a mere boob director, but before his Dolls days he was one of the most interesting American indy filmmakers working, pushing the (then fairly tame) boundaries of popular taste while also exploring the reasons and forces that make for such boundaries. His Faster, Pussycat Kill! Kill! welds French New Wave style to the drive-in thrill flick, in the process giving us the template for chicks-kicking-ass pop culture (there's no Thelma & Louise without it). Mudhoney, even if looser and messier, is the more ambitious film. Shot the same year as Pussycat (1965), it goes even further to part Puritan society's hypocritical smokescreens.

Ironically, little indy film today can match Meyer's mad vision of American extremes, which still pulses with relevance. The will to push isn't there in the age of Prozac and Homeland Security. Meyer pushed gleefully. Try out his image of a small-town preacher goading on a lynch mob to tie the rope to the church eaves (whereupon a leering redneck crawls down it, spider-like), or a mad, ape-like farmhand doing an obscene jig in a tarpaper brothel with the toothless madam and her two daughters. Overheated, yeah. But both the title and the tagline to Mudhoney--"...leaves a taste of evil!"--are pieces of his transgressive poetry, hinting at the mingling of human juices and the soil in this Depression-era potboiler, a Grapes of Wrath gone wrong.

When Talk Was Cavett

2006-10-06T18:49:00.000-07:00

TCM's re-running 70's-era Dick Cavett interviews. I was a tyke watching cartoons when these first aired, but occasionally they'd be on in our home--as a kind of half-appreciated exotica that now strikes me as my first brush with intellectualism. So far I've caught the self-deprecating Robert Mitchum and the sardonic Alfred Hitchcock. How good was Cavett, and how bad is TV chat today?

What you notice first about the man, in his part-grad student, part-Beatle persona, is how little he speaks. I don't mean interrupts. The elfin wit was the host, but not the star. Self-effacing, for minutes at a time literally invisible (not many two-shots on that set!), he's content to let his guests speak while here and there edging his drollery into the mix or almost shyly suggesting a new topic. It feels unscripted, unforced. To anyone watching TV interviews today, the effect is startlingly fresh.

Elastic and evolving, Cavett-chat can offer up unexpected pleasures and surprises. Take Mitchum, eyes wary, face deadpan, scotch in hand. After describing paranoia in Hollywood, he's asked if the movie business is the worst he's seen of human nature. No, he replies: little has been as cold as what he's witnessed of corporations making decisions without regard for the impact on people. For a moment, a lucid, edgy silence hangs in the air. Try finding an exchange like that on Leno or even Jon Stewart.

Although the hour-long format is a smorgasbord when Cavett and subject click, it can drag when the conversation is halting or the chemistry off. That's the risk to this daring free-form style. Seemingly at a loss for anything more serious to ask, Cavett couldn't stop pestering Hitchcock with process questions; how did you do this effect, get that shot, etc. I wanted to hear a discussion about Hitch's vision, his view of cinema as art, and what the films said about human nature, but it wasn't to be. When Cavett asked what Hitchcock liked in current film, the master intriguingly mentioned Buñuel, though Cavett let it drop.

But even on an off night Cavett is leagues better than anyone doing TV interviews today. It's ages since I could stand Leno or Letterman; I just don't care about most celebrities, and even less for watching them be petted and fed. Stewart's interviews are generally unwatchable, too. He's going to do his usual shtick no matter who's on, a too-clever-by-half routine that treats the interview itself as a post-modern prop--an occasion for Jon to do Jon. Then there's the buzzkill of watching a brilliant Ed Helms piece only to have it followed by Jon asking you to please welcome some GOP flunky or anti-terrorism expert. Daily Show interviews are the penance you have to do for enjoying the comedy.

I'll rarely catch Charlie Rose if someone interesting is on (say, Norman Mailer or Gore Vidal), but it's hard to take much of Rose's wheedling or his need to push to new topics. Even on the show most directly Cavett's descendant, the jittery contemporary urge to keep it moving darts nervously past the possibility of amazement.

All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Zunergarten

2006-10-06T15:30:00.000-07:00

From a tech shill at Computerworld.com, rhapsodizing about Microsoft's iPod competitor:

(Kids) have acquired the habit of feverishly sharing videos and songs. Today, they mostly have to wait until they get home and use their PCs to do so. With the Zune, students will be free to share music, videos and photos right there in class. They'll be able to pass notes to one another. The Zune isn't just a solitary music player. Think of it as a portable, wireless, hardware version of MySpace.

1) Or think of it as another way to screw up schools.

2) Then again, Zuning in class sounds like ideal grounding for a future slogging away at Wal-Mart in the outsourced economy.

KOSus Interruptus

2006-10-05T02:17:00.000-07:00

Can Dem blogging grow hair on your palms? Newly designated as "mature" content by SmartFilter internet censor software, KOS and his polymorphously centrist flock are claiming they're being unfairly lumped in with porn merchants. Fears of a "Kos Blackout" at companies utilizing these filters have the party hearties bewailing being able to access Limbaugh and Drudge from their work machines but not the truly sweaty stuff they've come to depend on as a substitute for real intimacy. "I don't know what I would do," writes one KOSser in withdrawal, "if I couldn't access during the day." Your job, maybe?

Ironically, one of Bill Clinton's last deeds before leaving office was signing the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which lifted the fortunes of censorware makers like SmartFilter by forcing their products on schools and libraries receiving federal funds. CIPA was wisely opposed by the American Library Association and major publishers but upheld by the Supreme Court in 2003. Today, no one is entirely safe from this capricious (and profitable) blocking--including fans of the man who helped mainstream it.

Soup's On

2006-09-14T17:19:00.000-07:00

I'm in the Fall issue of Edible Twin Cities, out now where healthy local foods are sold.

Why Your Kid Is Nuts

2006-09-12T18:37:00.000-07:00

Worried that children in Western society are cracking up, some 100 British leaders in academia, child education and developmental psychology have signed an open letter run this week in the right wing London Telegraph. Troubled as much by escalating cases of childhood depression as by "behavioural and developmental conditions" that produce violence, drug abuse and self-harm, the experts say, in short, that the "fast-moving hyper-competitive culture" is to blame.

What an old idea, and how interesting it's rising again in the present triumphalist atmosphere. (You've heard, of course: our culture is the greatest. Ever.) Conservatives often fret that change unmoors us from a golden past, but seldom do they go as far as writers like Erich Fromm, whose compelling diagnosis in "The Sane Society" is that the rot isn't a symptom of heedless transience from one epoch to the next. Fromm says it's deeper, much older--starting in our disunion from nature. The Brits are pressing a sensitive button, partly couching their complaint in euphemism ("fast-moving") but also implying that dearly-held fundamental assumptions ("hyper-competitive culture," "market forces") are to blame:

We believe this is largely due to a lack of understanding, on the part of both politicians and the general public, of the realities and subtleties of child development...

...Today's children are expected to cope with an ever-earlier start to formal schoolwork and an overly academic test-driven primary curriculum. They are pushed by market forces to act and dress like mini-adults and exposed via the electronic media to material which would have been considered unsuitable for children even in the very recent past.

Surely none of this is accidental. If kids have been transformed into prototypical uber-consumers primed to enter the rat race with feral zeal, isn't that what our masters want? But is it what we, as citizens, and those of you who are parents, want? Maybe so. The divide yawning between our hopes and aspirations and those of a materialistic culture won't be bridged easily, or neatly, if at all, and surely not without resistance from those it is most malforming: grotesquely enough, just a few days before the Telegraph letter, came reports that American parents are asking doctors to fake ADHD diagnoses so that their kids can be put on performance-enhancing speed, too. Can't have their little geniuses being at a disadvantage, see, from the jumpy, distracted ones.

A Sad Day for Lavender Clouds (and Circus Peanut-Colored Church Steeples)

2006-08-30T13:43:00.000-07:00

As BoingBoing reports, the FBI is probing Thomas "Painter of Light" Kinkade. My dear father-in-law is a fan. Once on a drive from the train depot, he subjected me to a long lecture on Kinkade's "amazing" light. Later, at the family manse, I was encouraged to eyeball a litho--some horrorshow of dappled mill brook, tree and cloud, all irradiated. Yes, I see why they set hearts aflutter; I can also imagine them setting off epileptic seizures.

Anyway, Free Thom! and all that. Locking him up won't solve much. Not with an army of Master Highlighters still at large.