Friday, May 27, 2005
QUOTE OF THE WEEK: "Could it be that for every child with an imaginary friend, there has to be an adult with an imaginary enemy?"
Nice in and of itself, but it comes out of the Bill Maher thing and some incredibly stupid shit that a diarist at Red State wrote. Did you know that Bill Maher has the power to curtail Armed Forces recruitment? Shazam! I'm gonna ask Jon Stewart to get me a sports car.
12:17 AM by roy edroso
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Thursday, May 26, 2005
FUN IT WAS. QUALIFIED APPROVAL I GIVE. Saw that big scifi movie everyone’s talking about. I found the dialogue unspeakable and, judging by their performances, so did the actors. Though I eventually rolled with the explanation that Anakin was primed to accept the Dark Side in any case, I was for a long time surprised that even a sullen mope like him could be snowed by such an obvious B-movie villain as Palpatine.
The sets were very attractive, though I was at times uneasy at the patchwork of style influences. Though the Jetson/Piranesi exteriors make some kind of sense, it is hard to see how a techno-Classicist society would produce such sybaritic, Southern California Pre-Raphaelite interiors. Maybe citizens of the artist class were smoking some kind of space weed. I suppose the mid-air water-ballet attended by Anakin and Palpatine is the design touchstone; if you can’t figure out what kind of civilization considers that a hot ticket, you may as well stop trying.
Still, there is one thing that excuses everything else, and that’s a good story. Revenge of the Sith is such a corker of a story that, having absolutely no affection for the genre, the style, the much-beloved and -merchandised characters, or the actors, I became engrossed, cared what happened next, palpably felt the coming of the resolution, and was satisfied at the end. That, as they say, is entertainment; and though Lucas is the opposite of my ideal filmmaker, I have to admit that he has this vital aspect of making pictures down cold. When Kenobe and Anakin chase each other along a toppling oil-rig that is running down a lake of fire toward an abyss, I can easily imagine D.W. Griffith nodding in approval.
Also, though it’s no Donovan’s Reef, it has some wicked cool fight scenes. And I liked the clones and the Wookies and that big lizard Kenobe rode and… oh hell, there goes my cred.
As my regular readers know, I am the sort of dark, ratlike creature who revels in marginalia and sneers at the common herd with their bourgeois reality shows and blow-‘em-up adventure pics (and their Christmas! And their presents with their gaudy wrapping paper!), but I am really glad to have enjoyed a popular film on its first run, especially after running into the stoned kid outside the theatre (a young Ratso Rizzo played by Gino from Bay Ridge) who asked if we had just seen the movie and then bellowed, "It’s really good, right? Youse t’ought it was good? Like as good as the old Star Wars movies? I seen it four times! And I can’t wait to see it again! I got the bootleg, right? An’ it’s so clear – like sometimes you see people getting up an’ they’re shakin’ the camera, but this was just, like, the movie!" (Bootlegs have been like this for some time; obviously this was the first movie he cared to buy in that format.) "But wait’ll you see it in the IMAX! Oh, man." (Gestures indicative of blowing-away) Had he seen it? "No, that’s not coming out till like November."
How can you not feel good about a movie after that?
What it has to do with politics of any kind I can’t imagine.
10:40 PM by roy edroso
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WHATEVER WORKS FOR YOU, BUDDY. "You could spin this out further and point out that it also makes adaptive sense for women to have a certain amount of difficulty having orgasms, because then they're more likely to seek out a long-term monogamous partner who knows their body well, which in turn dovetails nicely with the general female interest in having only one partner, the better to keep that partner around when the children come along." -- Ross Douthat, The American Scene.
11:59 AM by roy edroso
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SHORTER JAMES LILEKS: The specter of terrorism, of which I am poet laureate, has been replaced by the specter of Minnesota winters, and springs, and autumns. So cold, so very cold, and not even my imaginary friends from the 1940s can warm me. Soon I will make a run for the border. You'll find the wife and child in my "media center." Mother, give me the sun!
10:26 AM by roy edroso
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SHORTER CRAZY JESUS LADY: I wish 50s TV police drama stars would smite my enemies, for they are grandstanders. They should not congratulate themselves that way. They should put little cues for others to congratulate them into speeches written by me at $25,000-$50,000 a pop.
10:05 AM by roy edroso
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Wednesday, May 25, 2005
ALRIGHT, I'LL PLAY YOUR LITTLE GAME. I got suckerpunched by Kevin at Catch.com with another of them web things. Don't they realize that I weary of human contact? Ah, well, come lads, I'll have a frisk with you:
What is the total volume of musical files on your computer?
At home I have a dial-up connection (tracking links for my posts sometimes makes me feel like the guy who takes 4,000 years to say one word in I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream) and no iPod, except for the one IN MY MIND! So I have only the 20 or so files that came with this generously gifted computer (Butthole Surfers, T Rex, etc.) and 40 or so that I created myself, with which I will not afflict you good people.
What song are you listening to right now?
The iPod IN MY MIND! is playing Lou Reed's Caroline Says.
Last CD I bought?
A Jackie Mason live comedy CD. I had to learn an Israeli accent in five days for a reading and all I could find was Jackie Mason doing Peres and Sharon impersonations. I think I got away with it though.
Five songs you listen to a lot and which mean something to you:
Shopping Bag, The Penetrators. This Syracuse punk band from the 70s was about as raggedy-ass as they come (some of their members are still at it and I hope to write at length about them someday). Their Kings of Basement Rock reissue is pretty great. Shopping Bag starts off as a complaint about a bag-boy job ("When I was a bag boy, I got pushed around/Tryin' to earn some money to bring you all this sound") and then just becomes a rant about The Gong Show ("I seen all them judges and that Unknown Comic/If I ever see him live I'll grab his bag and vomit -- init"). The bellowed chorus -- "Shopping bag! Shopping bag! Spend your life in a shopping bag!" -- is pure moron glee. They sound like they're singing from the bottom of a lake into a Walkman. They are obviously drunk, marginally talented scuzzballs and they are having the time of their life. Which means that I can, too.
Mass Production, Iggy Pop. There is no grandiloquence like Iggy's especially when Iggy is in the grip of David Bowie, Berlin, bad love, bad metaphors, and a speed rush grinding painfully down into dawn.
The Broad Majestic Shannon, The Pogues. It's one thing to be a beautiful loser and another thing to be a beautiful loser who doesn't believe he has quite lost it all, and who offers his proof in glorious, gargle-voiced song.
Perfect Love, The Residents. Ree dee dee ree dee dee, ree dee dee dee dee. Ree dee dee ree dee dee, ree dee dee dee dee. "There's something I must tell you/there's something I must say/The only really perfect love/is one that gets away." Ree dee dee ree dee dee, ree dee dee dee dee. Ree dee dee ree dee dee, ree dee dee dee dee.
I'm Free From The Chain Gang Now, Jimmie Rodgers. The essence of American song is a story, preferably a sad one, preferably simple as water. It makes you feel, despite all contrary evidence, that people are worth listening to.
UPDATE. Oh, I'm supposed to invite people into this, aren't I? OK, the unfortunates are the Mighty Mighty Reason Man (har de har har), Majikthise, and Sisyphus nee Jules.
10:44 PM by roy edroso
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ASSHOLES AND ORANGES. OpinionJournal on steroid abuse:Steroids have cooked baseball's results much the same way sleazy accounting practices have cooked stock prices in recent years. In both arenas, fortunes are made on immoral conduct. But beyond the obvious matter of money, what difference does it make when athletes cheat? This difference: when Mark McGuire juiced himself into the Michelin Man, thousands of employees didn't lose their life savings.
The rest of the piece is a paen to the free market, natch.
3:19 PM by roy edroso
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Tuesday, May 24, 2005
NERDENDUM. I guess political analysis of Revenge of the Sith could not be finished till Orson Scott Card -- sci-fi legend, Mormon visionary, anti-homosexualist and fake Democrat -- had weighed in. Lance Mannion handles him well -- with insulated tongs, one hopes. I will say that, having no strong feelings about Jedi or Wookies or Ferengi or whatever they've got going on, this is all just comedy to me. But I must note one of Card's digs at George Lucas:It’s a terrible thing, I suppose, for a writer to invent a religion and then discover that he and all his friends are on the wrong side of it. Well, I guess now Card knows how Jesus feels.
11:15 PM by roy edroso
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JUST EXPERIMENTING. This latest in a long line of self-proclaimed liberal apostates inspired me. I decided to take the plunge and, at approximately 12:10 pm today, became a conservative.
I didn't tell anyone I was a conservative, of course. I preferred "centrist," or "true liberal," etc. Not that I identified myself this way either. Liberals are famously intolerant, and I had enough trouble keeping friends and jobs as it is. Look how such brave dissenters as Michael Totten and Roger Simon had been silenced, deprived of a public forum by the Red Hand! And then of course you had to explain yourself endlessly -- who had time for that?
So I kept it under wraps. When drawn into a political discussion, I used the Jonah Goldberg Variation: "Anyway it's late and I have to go to the grocery store and I don't have time right now, it'll be in the book I'm writing." I did start dropping "heh" and "indeed" into ordinary conversation, but I think I got away with it.
I was treated civilly, yet I seethed, knowing that all my friends would turn into extras from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Donald Sutherland version) if I let slip that freedom was on the march!
Part of me wanted to reach out to them -- after all, what real difference is there between Rush Limbaugh and, say, Bobby Kennedy? But there was obviously no hope of reconciliation. What a bunch of jerks, with their impertinent graphics! My walls were covered, or would be once I took my new conservatism home, with simple, tastefully portraits of Whittaker Chambers and Zell Miller! What was the point in even arguing with them if they were never going to admit that I'm right? Didn't they realize that Jesse Jackson is no better than al-Sadr? And I meant that in a totally centrist, classically-liberal way. No, I didn't leave them, they left me.
So I brooded in my cubicle. On the bright side, I was offered three book contracts and a nationally-syndicated radio show. But I soon tired of that life, and so at approximately 3:35 pm I became a Royalist.
Isn't it true that all our national goals would be better realized with a strong leader at the helm? If we decry the political intrigues, deal-brokering, and pork-barrelling of our time, wouldn't it be better to eliminate all incentive to corruption by placing all power in the hands of a single, infallible Royal Family? If disunity is a plague on America, wouldn't a venerated Head of State, of noble blood, unite us all? And if new mothers named their sons after this monarch -- particularly if he had a suitably exalted, old-fashioned name, like, for example, Roy -- would that not strongly affirm the traditional values which made Western Civilization great?
But I can hear your arguments -- or would, if I were actually arguing with you. The same tired catalogue of complaints. Your time is over -- your tedious town halls, your shopworn electioneering, your whining about "civil liberties" and "trial by jury." Quit hanging onto the past, you stupid hippies!
UPDATE. I have just decided to become a Lipstick Libertarian. You know, porn, pot, endless foreign wars I'm too old to fight. I'm convinced this one will take.
UPDATE. It was just like being a conservative, and the publishers tell me that Brian Anderson has it covered for this season. Nevermind. I'm going back to believing whatever it was I believed.
8:10 PM by roy edroso
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Sunday, May 22, 2005
PERMANENT REVOLUTION. Finally finished Carlyle's History of the French Revolution. At the start I thought myself in for a 750-page Burkean peroration on the folly of Godless democracy. From the beginning Carlyle is Jeremiacally disdainful of the Revolutionary dream:... Of a truth, the long-demonstrated will now be done: 'the Age of Revolutions approaches' (as Jean Jacques wrote), but then of happy blessed ones. Man awakens from his long somnambulism; chases the Phantasms that beleagured and bewitched him. Behold the new morning glittering down the eastern steeps; fly, false Phantasms, from its shafts of light… For what imaginable purpose was man made, if not to be 'happy'? By victorious Analysis, and Progress of the Species, happiness enough now awaits him… Nay, who knows but, by sufficiently victorious Analysis, 'human life may be indefinitely lengthened,' and men get rid of Death, as they have already done of the Devil? We shall then be happy in spite of Death and the Devil.--So preaches magniloquent Philosophism her Redeunt Saturnia regna. Sounds like John Derbyshire with poetry, eh? Carlyle doesn’t think much of "Evangel Jean-Jacques" Rosseau ("Theories of Government! Such have been, and will be; in ages of decadence"), nor of Figaro ("thin wiredrawn intrigues, thin wiredrawn sentiments and sarcasms; a thing lean, barren…"), and at times, many times, a reader may think that he considers this Revolution nothing more than a "mad Gaelic effervescence" of "eleutheromania." He mentions America hardly at all, and Pitt only as a Sansculottic bogey-man (L'ennemi du genre humain) or as one who deals with "his own Friends of the People" by "getting them bespied, beheaded, their habeas-corpuses suspended, and his own Social Order and strong-boxes kept tight" -- in the face of the French madness, an apparently wiser course. Lafayette is a sap, and Voltaire a carbuncle-eyed false prophet.
But as Carlyle proceeds more deeply into the (to use one of his favorite words) Cimmerian opera buffa of the Revolution -- the risings, the factions, "sea-green" Robespierre, "People’s-Friend" and "Dogleech" Marat, the Terror, the legislative spasms, the Feast of Reason, the rise of Gilded Youth, all finally "blown into space" by Napoleon -- it seemed as I read that the author had grown more forgiving; certainly not toward the rough treatment of innocents, or even of the guilty, or toward farewells "too sad for tears"; the worst outrages he delineates in the simplest language, for maximum heart-rending effect. Yet even in the worst atrocities Carlyle finds understanding, if only because 750 pages (written twice over*) is an awfully tall mountain from which not to discern a context. The pathetic end of the Dauphin he describes, in an odd premonition of Dickens, "as none but poor Factory Children and the like are wont to perish, unlamented." Even the Terror has its reasons -- the plotting of exiled aristocrats, invasion, starvation, the need for unity -- and, from Carlyle, an unexpectedly gentle epitaph:It is a horrible sum of human lives, M. l'Abbe: -- some ten times as many shot rightly on a field of battle, and one might have had his Glorious-Victory with Te-Deum. It is not far from the two-hundredth part of what perished in the entire Seven Years War…
But what if History, somewhere on this Planet, were to hear of a Nation, the third soul of whom had not for thirty weeks each year as many third-rate potatoes as would sustain him?… History ventures to assert that the French Sansculotte of Ninety-three, who, roused from long death-sleep, could rush at once to the frontiers, and die fighting for an immortal Hope and Faith of Deliverance for him and his, was but the second-miserablest of men! The Irish Sans-potato, had he not senses then, nay a soul? In his frozen darkness, it was bitter for him to die famishing; bitter to see his children famish. It was bitter for him to be a beggar, a liar and a knave. Nay, if that dreary Greenland-wind of benighted Want, perennial from sire to son, had frozen him into a kind of torpor and numb callosity, so that he saw not, felt not, was this, for a creature with a soul in it, some assuagement; or the cruellest wretchedness of all?
Such things were, such things are; and they go on in silence peaceably… Oh, have I mentioned that this is among the most gorgeous English prose ever written? And that it defies comparison to anything, literary or political, in our own poor, benighted age -- though, People’s-Friend that I am, I will draw your attention to some Carlyle musings on Revolutionary Journalism:One Sansculottic bough that cannot fail to flourish is Journalism. The voice of the People being the voice of God, shall not such divine voice make itself heard? To the ends of France; and in as many dialects as when the first great Babel was to be built! Some loud as the lion; some small as the sucking dove...
Folded and hawked Newspapers exist in all countries; but, in such a Journalistic element as this of France, other and stranger sorts are to be anticipated. What says the English reader to a Journal-Affiche, Placard Journal; legible to him that has no halfpenny; in bright prismatic colours, calling the eye from afar? Such, in the coming months, as Patriot Associations, public and private, advance, and can subscribe funds, shall plenteously hang themselves out: leaves, limed leaves, to catch what they can! The very Government shall have its Pasted Journal… Is not every Able Editor a Ruler of the World, being a persuader of it; though self-elected, yet sanctioned, by the sale of his Numbers?…
Placard Journals, Placard Lampoons, Municipal Ordinances, Royal Proclamations; the whole other or vulgar Placard-department super-added -- or omitted from contempt! What unutterable things the stone-walls spoke, during these five years! But it is all gone; To-day swallowing Yesterday, and then being in its turn swallowed of To-morrow, even as Speech ever is. Sounds familiar, blog-readers, n’cest pas?
(* The burning of Carlyle’s original manuscript is one of the great literary stories. Carlyle said that writing the History over again was like "swimming without water." (The sole web account of that quote describes its circumstances differently than I recall it, but I think most writers will support my version.) Speaking of things only writers would appreciate, this is my favorite part of the story linked up above: "Carlyle was terribly upset about the loss of his work. He was, in fact, on the verge of giving the project up entirely. That night, however, he had a dream, in which his father and brother rose from the grave and begged him to give up writing. He awoke with a new determination.")
11:43 PM by roy edroso
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SHORTER OLE PERFESSER: NASCAR=White People. Hip-Hop=Black People. Black People get all the breaks.
ADDENDUM. Reynolds' piece refers to a quote from "The New York Times," but the piece he quotes is from the Times Sunday edition's Book Review, which, as any literate person knows (excuse my elitism, Hoss!), is a free-opinion zone. Moreover, the Times Book Review is edited by Sam Tanenhaus, whose biography of paleo-con hero Whittaker Chambers was very favorably reviewed by the right-wing Brothers Judd, and who has written in favor of the Bush Administration in the Wall Street Journal. ("I'm not a conservative," Tanenhaus once told an interviewer, "I'm a man of the Right.")
Of course, if you seek examples of wingnut publications -- from the Wall Street Journal to the National Review to the Washington Times to, yes, the Ole Perfesser hisself -- having fun with "blue state" people, to paraphrase Christopher Wren, look about you.
Is there anyone on the face of the earth who doesn't know that the "not a conservative" Perfesser is nothing more than a right-wing bagman? Christ, what a lot I have to tell him or her.
UPDATED SHORTER OLE PERFESSER: Just 'cause I cook doesn't make me gay, even in Tennessee, so don't call me gay, because I'm not gay, no matter how I hold my fork.
11:40 PM by roy edroso
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