Saturday, May 13, 2006
BUSHWICK MIX. Played a show in Bushwick tonight. A first for me: back in the day, Bushwick was for Mike Tyson, Bushwick Bill, and other criminal acts. An ensemble of our acquaintance called Demo Moe, made up of sculptors and musicians, had a forge out there then, but the rest of us stayed clear, content with Lower East Side mischief. Real estate values have since done their work in Bushwick, I'm told, and I did see white, well-appointed youngsters on bicycles and in clusters, but otherwise it was as I imagined. The envrions are still stained with graffiti, and empty lots leave the industrial buildings (some with the warm orange glow of gentrification in their windows) and residential tenements standing lonesome and forlorn in the great shadow of the Projects.
Our venue, the Wreck Room, stood near the Life Cafe -- two well-appointed embers smoldering in a dark stretch. The young folk at the Wreck Room were Friday-night giddy. They dressed well, as all young New Yorkers do, but they seemed easier and less self-conscious than the inland versions I was familiar with. The more famous semi-demimondes of New York are brightly lit stages, and those who trod them tend to notice that they have a role to play.
We did get some pressure from the short, cute singer of Hollis, which is also her stage name. She worked the crowd aggressively-friendly to get people to stay for her set. She said she had just taken a share in Queens ("In Hollis?" I asked; "No, Astoria," she said, "though that would be really cool"), having recently graduated with a double major in art history and communications, which I told her was an excellent pedigree for a rock star, her freely admitted ambition.
But I couldn't stay. Bill the drummer and I trudged up Morgan to our train, and were joined on the station bench by two young hiphopsters wearing baseball jerseys over t-shirts and white pants. They asked about the musical apparati we carried. They were more familiar with all-in-one sound producing units like the Triton Workstation, but they had a sincere interest in our old, clumsy gear. They liked music. The more voluble one, wearing a tight doo-rag and sporting a grey, metallic bottom row of front teeth, said he had a Yamaha acoustic that he played a bit. They were relaxed but polite. I asked about the neighborhood these days. "You got the white people coming in," the talkative one said, "and they got the lofts, and you got people like me. But it's cool."
Well, yes it is. They're working with a fellow called Heater. I wish them well, and Hollis well (May 27 at the Continental), and the hard-rockin Saint Bastard and all the rest of tonight's acts well. All musicians, except for those at the tippy-top, are slumdwellers in spirit or in fact. We could all use a break.
2:28 AM by roy edroso
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Friday, May 12, 2006
"GOD, YOU'VE MADE A POWERFUL ENEMY." Hugh Hewitt issues a warning to Tom Hanks:Tom: Careful now. The Saturday Night Live skit was great fun, and the ""It's only a movie," works. The pull quotes from this story do not:Hanks said objectors to The Da Vinci Code are taking the film too seriously, telling the Evening Standard: "We always knew there would be a segment of society that would not want this movie to be shown.... ...It is difficult to use the "it is only a movie" argument when mixed up with "dialogue is good" and "creepy censors want to shut us down" arguments.
The almost universally liked Hanks doesn't need to get into the theological debate that Dan browns likes to fan. Stick to the obvious --it is an absurd piece of invention that makes for a fun thriller-- and all will be well... ...and if ya don't, me and my blogger buddies will write a densely-worded essay about how theatre seats chafe our fat asses.
Many nuggets of comedy gold here. First, the overblown concern over a fucking Ron Howard (syn: stupid) movie; then, the notion that Hewitt can shake the very caliphs of Hollyweird with the force of his blog, a delusion known in the business as Sidney Applebaum Syndrome.
There is also a weird poignance about conservatives who are mesermized by Hollywood. As it is the place they hate most in the world -- more even than Paris, or the human heart -- one would think they would just avoid the subject altogether, as it is obviously irredeemable (at least until Der Tag, when Roger L. Simon is named Minister of Truth) and naught but blight on the land.
Some of them can't keep their hands off, though. Witness John Podhoretz's strange column on "American Idol." I kept waiting for the metaphor, or at least the punch line, to emerge. Finally in horror I realized that John son of Podhoretz, Decrier of Kultur Filth fils, was talking about "American Idol" because he rilly liked "American Idol"; also, that the column wasn't as bad as much of the current, politicized rightwing bunk about TV and movies, because "American Idol" is such a piece of shit that it doesn't qualify as culture, and deserves to be discussed in the debased terms of politics.
It suggests a possible solution to all the conservative culture crap currently stinking up our discourse: let the Medveds and Mathewes-Greens and all other such professional misapprehenders exclusively use sub-cultural objects such as "The Apprentice" and "Herbie: Fully Loaded" as teething rings. As they are capable of seeing, or perhaps fated to see, political portents on every moving object, the specific objects to which their attentions are directed should not matter to them or us.
As the old saying goes, politics is show business for ugly people, and my new corollary is: blogging is politics and show business for the mentally retarded.
12:50 PM by roy edroso
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Thursday, May 11, 2006
MORE CIVILITY DEBATES, PLEASE! I am even more short of time these days than usual, so I have to thank Kathryn J. Lopez for saving me some. I was actually thinking of taking a look at Ramesh Ponnuru's The Party of Death. But this excerpt, quoted by the NRO den mother, made clear to me the folly of that course:The party of death should not be confused with a conventional political party: It has members (and opponents) within both of America's major political parties, although it is much stronger today among Democrats than Republicans. The party of death has unwitting allies, too, just as it always has. Someone who reluctantly supports euthanasia to spare the dying from further suffering surely does not intend to advance a comprehensive agenda to undermine the protection of human life. Yet that is the effect, however modest, of her support.
We are sometimes told that polite conversation avoids the topics of sex, religion, and poltics. Some would say that a book with this subject matter breaks all three rules. They might go on to worry that calling one side of the debate a "party of death" will raise the temperature still further.
We all have close friends and beloved relatives—I certainly do—who support legal abortion, or euthanasia, or both. Maybe we supported these things ourselves, once. I did. Maybe some readers still do. I hope that this book speaks to them with an honesty that does not seek to wound, but with a love that dares not refuse the truth. If the thought of belonging to a party of death disturbs them, perhaps they can be moved to leave it. Lopez seems to think that this answers any Sullivanian charges of intolerance against Ponnuru. To her and to Ponnuru I say:Not all stupid cunts belong to one political party. There are Republican stupid cunts and Democratic stupid cunts, though most stupid cunts, my objective investigation has shown, happen to be Republicans. Indeed, you might be a stupid cunt without thinking yourself one, merely by saying stupid, cuntlike things.
We are sometimes told that polite conversation avoids the term "stupid cunt." Such stupid cunts as think this will naturally charge me with raising the temperature of this debate, the cunts.
We all of us know personally several stupid cunts. Some of us are married to them. Some of us (including myself, I confess) have been a bit stupid and a bit of a cunt on occasion. I got over it, of course, but others persist in being stupid cunts for some reason.
I hope this blog reaches those persistently stupid cunts, and that they understand that I have no desire to wound in calling them stupid cunts, and feel nothing but deep Christian love for every stupid, cuntish one of them. And if they feel badly about me calling them stupid cunts, then they should just stop being such stupid fucking cunts. UPDATE. This post is dedicated to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.
10:09 AM by roy edroso
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Wednesday, May 10, 2006
I KNOW YOU ARE, BUT WHAT AM I? I see that in the blogger playground, a bully got a wedgie and his friends cried no fair.
And that's pretty much it.
12:25 PM by roy edroso
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Tuesday, May 09, 2006
SLOW TIMES AT PRATT INSTITUTE. Terry Zwigoff did very well with Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World, but has a rockier time of it with Clowes' Art School Confidential. The new movie devotes a lot of time to fleshing out a thinly-disguised Pratt Institute. The makers have a strong feel for, and opinions about, the setting, and must have found it great fun to delineate some of the types such places attract. I was encouraged by the arrival scene – there’s the barefoot neo-hippie chick! There’s the beatnik! There’s our hero, Jerome the suburban Picasso manque! – and I would have been satisfied if they just set these stereotypes bouncing off one another with some verve.
Alas, immediately the campus slacker is enlisted to describe more stereotypes, and for the most part the ‘types never get a more vivid reading. That still might have worked. There are worse cinematic failings than glibness. When ASC is fast, it’s fun. Jerome’s failed romantic encounters, and some of the desperate follies of the would-be art stars, give some easy laughs. But there’s not enough energy here to keep the balloon aloft for long.
It may be that Zwigoff and Clowes are too in love with their material. People familiar with this scene – and I have some small knowledge of it -- can sit around in a bar swapping funny horror stories about it for hours, but it’s not enough to hang a movie on unless you can convey some of the insane momentum of dream-maddened people completely devoted to their ego trips and illusions.
Zwigoff moves too slowly for that. He’s not the most high-octane sort of director anyway, but he might also have been weighted down by the grander theme of the film, which has to do with the toxic residue of failed ambition. A few scenes are fully devoted to this, and though they’re even slower than the rest of the movie, they’re much more interesting. Jerome’s visit to Professor Sandiford’s home, with a clenched wife, a scotched deal, and a pathetic monologue ending with a sexual advance, has a nice dank smell of failure about it. Better still are the scenes with Jim Broadbent as the appallingly maudit Baconian lush who becomes Jerome’s confidant, and who sets in motion Jerome’s downfall, or triumph, depending on how you look at it.
They’re good scenes, and another, better movie might have been built out of them. Or the filmmakers could have gone the other way and made American Pie: Art Camp. As it is, we have a failed campus comedy with a few stretches of splendid desolation.
UPDATE. Some morons, of course, think the movie is about politics. But I guess that type never thumps a melon without observing that conservatism made it ripe, or liberalism made it green.
12:10 AM by roy edroso
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Monday, May 08, 2006
WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE WHITE PEOPLE? If I only read conservative publications, I would imagine myself a very privileged honky indeed, for I would be convinced that all the rest of my people lived in white ghettos and spent their days running gauntlets of racial abuse by the Dark Ones.
But then, these are the same people who go on and on about how homosexuals may one day break bigots' fists with their noses (just the same trick the miscegnators used on Bob Jones, adds historian Stanley Kurtz).
Can't these people just enjoy the many economic, social, and governmental advantages whiteness unfairly confers? I know I do!
11:20 AM by roy edroso
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AND IF SHE WAS INTO FAT GUYS, THEN I COULD TOTALLY DO THAT THING WHERE I DRAW A MOUTH ON MY STOMACH; AND IF SHE WAS A SIMPSONS FAN, SHE WOULD TOTALLY GET IT AND LAUGH. AND THEN I WOULD MAKE MY MOVE. As usual, this is the stupidest thing ever written, and will remain so until Goldberg writes something else.
10:11 AM by roy edroso
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Sunday, May 07, 2006
"KILLIN' PIGS AIN'T KOSHER, SARGE!" "CAN THE WISE LIP, SLIBBERBERG!" Andrew Klavan wants Hollywood (conservative for "somebody else") to make movies that praise our War Against Whatchamacallit:We need films like those that were made during World War II, films such as 1943's "Sahara" and "Action in the North Atlantic," or "The Fighting Seabees" and "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," which were released in 1944...
...Though many of these pictures now seem almost hilariously free with racist tirades against "sauerkrauts," and "eyeties" and "Tojo and his bug-eyed monkeys," they were also carefully constructed to display American life at its open-minded and inclusive best.
Every roll call of Hollywood's U.S. troops seems to include a Ragazzi and a Donovan, a Hellenopolis, a Novasky, and a wisecracking Roth. "Sahara" even throws in the black "Mohammedan" Tabul, a Sudanese ally. This may have been corny, but it was also more or less realistic, and it depicted the war as a conflict between our lovably mongrel melting pot and the despicable Axis ideal of racial purity. I really don't see what the problem is. The Fightin' Keyboarders have a film unit -- put them on the job.
I'll help! I've seen All Through the Night a few times, and have always wanted to work in that genre -- not on some silly modern version, but one in the old-fashioned style.
Okay, you mugs, here's the scenario:
Bugs Johnson, noted intenet wise guy, is taking a stroll around his subdivision with his colorful sidekick, Pixels. Bugs is no better than he should be -- he sells unlicensed assault weapons to local sporting enthusiasts -- but he's a good egg and won't do business with illegal immigrants. "I love this dirty township," he tells Pixels as they head over to the Park and Ride to make a drop.
But out of the 7-11 lurches one of Bugs' customers, "Protein" Goldstein, a curly-bladed dagger sticking out of his back. "Who done this to ya, Protein!" cries Johnson, cradling the man in his arms. Protein holds up five fingers, then expires. "Shalom, Protein," says a visibly moved Bugs. "When ya see Jesus, try not to act too surprised."
Pixels wants to get away fast -- the local security force has Bugs' number and would love to pin the caper on him. But Bugs knows what Protein's gesture was about: "Fifth columnists -- liberals!" He and Pixels dash into the 7-11 to grill the proprietor. "Listen, Gunga Din," cracks Bugs, "either you make with some names or I turn your sacred cow into ground chuck!" In a comical interlude, they spin the man by his turban till he exposes the perpetrator: Makos Mamamakoulis, whose souvlaki stand is actually a front for high internet treason.
Unable to go to the security force, Bugs and Pixels try to convince other local yeggs to help them nail Mamamakoulis.
"Listen, you yeggs," says Bugs, "This feta-munchin' Greek geek and his fellow-travellers are gonna blow this beautiful scam we call America sky-high!"
"Aw, that's baloney, Bugs," says "Crazy Dave" Horowitz, the local school's custodian. "As long as these liberals let me alone -- "
"Ah, but that's just it, Crazy Dave," says Bugs. "They won't let ya alone! They'll tell ya you're crazy, intolerant, and wrong! They'll use statistics, logic, even sarcasm!"
"Sarcasm!" says "Ole Perfesser" Reynolds. "Indeed?"
"Now you're gettin' it, ya hot-blooded Italian!" cries Bugs. "Alright, ya melting pot of mugs! I'm gonna kick me some liberal keyster! Who's with me?"
The crowd swings Bugs' way. "Sure and I'm with ya, me Bucko!" cries Peggy McNoonan, a clog dancer with a heart of gold. "If it's a donnybrook these doorty liberals want, they we'll be givin' it to 'em, yerra!"
"Pour some coffee down McNoonan's throat and let's shake a leg!" cries Bugs, and the gang rushes off to their computer desks...
(Alright, Klavan, ya wiley whatever-you-are -- over to you!)
8:42 PM by roy edroso
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I MISS RUSSIA. At Tech Central Station, Lee Harris asks "Why Isn't Socialism Dead?" His short answer is that stupid people are stupid and Lee Harris and his buddies are smart. In long form, there is much elaboration on the point that "capitalism is mankind's only rational alternative," and a lengthy analysis of some ancient socialists' theories, though the relevance or popularity of these dead letters among the rabble of Venezuela and Bolivia -- whose support for quasi-socialist states seems to have stimulated Harris' essay -- is not proven here.
Harris concludes that socialism is beyond the reach of capitalist rationalism because socialism is a sort of religion:...even a hundred proofs of failure are insufficient to wean us from those primordial illusions that we so badly wish to be true. Who doesn't want to see the wicked and the arrogant put in their place? Who among the downtrodden and the dispossessed can fail to be stirred by the promise of a world in which all men are equal, and each has what he needs? The myth, thus described, does sound familiar and indeed religious, though Marx and Sorel were well behind Jesus Christ in promoting it.
Harris postulates a "myth gap" between socialism and capitalism, and proposes that capitalism produce a "transformative myth of its own." He does not say who would be best suited to this task of myth-production. Maybe he expects the Parallax Corporation to farm the job out to analysts in Bangalore.
He certainly seems unaware that one sort of capitalist myth has been promulgated for over a century by our own entertainment media, via movies, music, glossy magazines, videos, etc., which have offered the world countless enticements to the splendors of a market economy, with resounding success wherever it has been encountered -- or rather, wherever their promise has been even slightly realized by a substantial number of the population; it tends to be less successful in places where the people despair of gaining these blessings by ordinary means, e.g., Venezuela and Bolivia.
Harris' ignorance of this observable reality is perhaps understandable, as modern conservatives are bound by blood-oath to consider the Western media treasonously unhelpful. Besides, it better serves the professional purposes of right-wing pundits to portray themselves as messengers of the capitalist Good News to Modern Man.
They don't seem especially qualified, though. In the same edition of TCS, Harris' colleague Pejman Yousefzadeh talks down the notion that CEOs are criminally overpaid. Shareholders alone should make that decision, he argues, and accuses those who disagree of "scoring... political points by tapping into people's frustration and envy."
Yousefzadeh argues well on capitalist terms, but I doubt his argument will make deep inroads among those whose "frustration and envy" are excited by the ever-escalating profits of global capitalism's top dogs -- especially in a time of rising gas prices. (I don't believe many of the disaffected in this case are students of Marx or Georges Sorel.)
I am in some sympathy with Yousefzadeh. I am no socialist, and I understand his logic, dreary as it is. But in his capitalist calculus he has included no place for the human factor. Yousefzadeh is as convinced as Harris that his way is the only rational one, and expects invocation of the iron law of his philosophy -- to each according to what he can get, from each according to what we can get out of him -- to sate the punters, or at least shoo them away.
For years this has worked fine for them, and may do so for years to come. Here is one reason why I sort of miss the old Soviet Union. They were wrong, of course, but the threat of their existence offered a screen and bank against the predations of capitalism within our own side of the Iron Curtain: so long as the global dominance of capitalism was not a settled matter, even in the Age of Reagan its avatars were compelled to throw the working people of this country a bone every now and then, lest we lose our Cold War resolve. The welfare state was accepted as a necessary evil, and even in hard times we got our government cheese and food stamps and extended unemployment benefits.
Once Russia was reduced to another rapacious capitalist state, though, all bets were off: the Welfare Queen was dethroned, America became a happy hunting ground for consumer loan sharks, and downsizing evolved from a cyclical to a constant threat. Security vanished, productivity rose. The U.S. became what it had been in the Gilded Age: a sandwich of striving pressed between the desperate poor and the arrogant rich.
Between the socialists, whose faith in the people is unshakable, and the capitalists, who faith in themselves is ditto, stand I, equipped only with cynicism. Spiritually it seems by far the best bet.
2:07 AM by roy edroso
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