Friday, December 29, 2006
SHORTER STEPHEN BAINBRIDGE: See, the difference between us Catholics and bloodthirsty maniacs is, we humanely lull you to sleep with endless speeches of self-justification before we kill you.
UPDATE. Michael Rubin at NRO says, "Of course, the Iraqis do favor capital punishment and that’s what matters..." When did we go back to pretending to give a shit what they think?
2:52 PM by roy edroso
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THE CONTINUING WAR AGAINST VICTORY. Seen Rich Lowry's column today? Today's moment of oh-no-he-DIH-hint:In a major speech on poverty last year, he referred to the social ills besetting young mothers who “aren’t married.” But his prescription for this problem is to excoriate teen parenthood and say that people should be expected “to hold off having kids until they’re ready.” He refuses to offer as the obvious solution the M-word that rhymes with carriage.
This is because the word “marriage” is something of a taboo in the Democratic party unless it is prefaced by “gay.” Is it true? Are these guys really going back to the Democrats-hate-marriage argument? Hello President Kucinich! Because by the time me and my Demonrat Congresscritter friends finish gayifying America, even fancy restaurants will be serving condiments in packets 'cause the waiters won't even marry the ketchups! The Mother of Christ will charge her name to Commitment Ceremony! Bride magazine will be full of drag queens! etc.
Or maybe they expect to turn the electorate back on with Bridget Johnson and her comedy "resolutions":Grab other conservative pundits for a weekend of headline-grabbing partying in the manner of Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, and Paris Hilton. I shall be Lohan, pre-gothic hair dye, because unlike Britney, I remember to put on unmentionables. The New York Daily News will catch up with the squad of conservavixens and christen the GOP the “Republican Par-TAY!” Well, there go my next three erections. ("Unmentionables" is, like, 19th-Century for panties, right? 'Round my way they're called ankle-warmers.)
1:03 PM by roy edroso
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YEAR-END DUMBASS CLEARANCE! As an English tutor of yout's, I teach a module on Fact and Opinion, in which I explain that assertions that cannot be proven are opinions. If you say "This potato weighs a half a pound," you are stating a fact, because you can weigh the potato to prove your assertion; but if you say "Potatoes suck," you are expressing an opinion, for there is no suckometer with which you could measure the suckage of potatoes.
Sometimes, though -- and don't tell the kids -- I feel as if I, perhaps alone among humanity, possess an internal suckometer, one that has been sensitized by prolonged exposure to the fatheads and dipshits that are alicublog's primary subject matter. And I must tell you that, by its measure, Crunchy Rod Dreher is reading absolutely off the charts.
First he bitches on and on about how they's a Wal-Mart a-comin' to his l'il ol' childhood home. In Crunchy Rod's former (and my current) jurisdiction, of course, we use activism and politics to prevent such noxious results; but, to each jerkwater burg its own.
Then he drops this turd:Here's something interesting: there are Mexican laborers in town now. More and more of them. A local businessman said to me, "If you want to get anything done nowadays, you have to hire Mexicans." He explained that the black day laborers that people around here used to hire for agricultural or small-scale construction work aren't available anymore. He speculated that this must have something to do with the way the drug culture -- especially crack -- has made serious inroads into the black community here. Frankly, I'm so shocked by this that I can't even think about being sad. Crack for sale in this sleepy Southern town. I guess I'm too Romantic, too naive. Because if blacks aren't doing the grunt work, it must surely be due to their crack addiction. "Romantic," indeed.
A commenter calls Rod on this, and Rod gits mad:Harvey, you may valorize yourself your condescension, but you know nothing about the way life is and people are around here. You know how you wish they were. You know exactly nothing about how the black community, as a general matter, lives in this specific place, or the white community. Neither do I, though I know more than you do...
...It is also the case that the black unemployment rate is much higher than the white unemployment rate, which informs the "won't work" judgment -- you have a significant number of employable black men here who are able to work, but who do not work. Some of these men sell drugs instead. If someone needs unskilled labor on a temporary basis, when I was a boy it was possible to hire a crew of black men who didn't have regular employment to come perform the labor. I am told now that those kinds of jobs, which used to be performed by black men a generation ago, are now performed by Mexican laborers, who are available and willing to do the work that local black men, for whatever reason, are not... ...willing to do for a buck-three-eighty, like in my pappy's day.
How many times have you heard crap like that? I know it's not a Southern thing, because I've been hearing it since I was a boy in Bridgeport, Connecticut. And I've heard it in every region of the country: Oh, you don't know those people like I do. They just don't want to work! All they want to do is get likkered up and play dice! Or get coked up and play Young Jeezy, whatever.
Well, I'm here to tell you that I've been walking this earth quite a long time now, and the monstrous stupidity of that POV just gets clearer, and the traditional defense offered by Crunchy Rod -- that outside agitators don't know his little slice of Valhalla, where human nature is totally different than it is everywhere else you've ever been in your life -- increases past simple lameness and into immobility.
9:44 AM by roy edroso
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Thursday, December 28, 2006
TODAY'S ZEITGEIST SNAPSHOT: BILL BENNETT YELLING AT THE CORPSE OF GERALD FORD. I have to admit, when old Number 38 went down I was tempted to post a parody version of this headline. But we the living should not press our advantage over the newly dead. There is hilarity enough to be gleaned from right-wing jackasses now professing to admire him.
We all know what these people truly feel about the proto-RINO who took Nelson Rockefeller as his VP. Still, for the sake of their Party, they have made a pretense of mourning, and reminisce fondly about the Mayaguez incident -- 40 Americans killed to rescue sailors who had already been released. That's standin' tall, by God!
Rare as these japes are, the punchline is even better. Ford left his Republican brothers a time-delayed stink-bomb: a posthumous bullshit-call on the Iraq War. Apparently Ford wanted history to record that, whatever his other defects, he was no GWB.
Who would be the first of the mourners to rip the lid off the coffin and start pummelling the corpse? Why, Dollar Bill Bennett:This is not courage, this is not decent. The manly or more decent options are these: 1. Say it to Bush's or Cheney's face and allow them and us to engage the point while you're around, or 2. Far more decently, say nothing critical of Bush will be on the record until his presidency is over. There's a 3. Don't say anything critical of George Bush to Bob Woodward at all. Or 4., tell Ken Mehlman you want a cool million to keep your mouth shut, then take the money to Caesar's Palace. Best slots in the West! Tell 'em Bill B sent you.
UPDATE. Crunchy Conman Rod Dreher on Ford:Sorry, I wish I had stronger opinions about Ford. I also wish I had stronger opinions about mashed potatoes. R.I.P. What, I wonder, is the Crunchy Con policy on drugs? Because it sounds like RD has got him some of that good hydroponic weed.
9:52 AM by roy edroso
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PLEASE, PEOPLE, don't any of you tell Ben Stein about The Producers, or he'll kidnap Mel Brooks and take him to Israel for trial.
9:33 AM by roy edroso
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Wednesday, December 27, 2006
SHORTER THE ANCHORESS: I really hate my sister.
2:52 PM by roy edroso
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ADDED VALUE. I haven't been paying enough attention to Ann Althouse lately. Fortunately Whiskey Fire is on the job:Althouse feels things, and these things are terribly important:
I am struck -- you may think it is absurd for me to be suddenly struck by this -- but I am struck by how deeply and seriously libertarians and conservatives believe in their ideas...
...One of the reasons 9/11 had such a big impact on me is that it was such a profound demonstration of the fact that these people are serious. They really believe. The problem with this is that it is self-aggrandizing pap, complete with a silly observation about 9/11. It's a strategy. It's a move in a game, the claim to be above playing it. Also, it's annoying. And beyond that, it's a confession that she's labored under conditions of appalling ignorance for years... This is good shooting, soldier, and it also helps explain Jonah Goldberg's earlier-noted confusion: he thinks Ann Althouse is a liberal.
Adding to the merriment: someone at The Corner has linked to the post. Matter meets doesn't-matter!
12:26 PM by roy edroso
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A NEW LOW. It is traditional at alicublog, when we treat a piece of writing by Jonah Goldberg, to close with the phrase, "This is the stupidest thing ever written, and will remain so until Goldberg writes something else." But his latest essay will be hard even for Goldberg to top.
The theme is religious certainty. Here is the intellectual highlight:The rot, not surprisingly, has reached Hollywood. For example, in Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith, George Lucas caved to the fashionable anti-absolutism that comes with Bush hatred by having a young Obi-Wan Kenobi proclaim, “Only a Sith lord deals in absolutes!” Translation: Only evil people see the world as black-and-white. This signaled that Lucas’s descent into hackery was complete, since it was Lucas himself who originally explained that the entire universe is divided into light and dark sides. I don't even know what to say to this. I tried out three jokes here, and they were pretty good jokes (two involved bongs and poop), but they just seemed so... puny compared to the breathtaking scale of this idiocy. That the editor of a major magazine would present such dorm-room sci-fi drivel without a blink of embarrassment! Somewhere the shades of Addison and Steele are tearing one another's hair out and screaming God-a-mercy.
And how about this:Whenever I hear people say such things, I like to ask them, “Are you sure about that?” When they say yes, which they always do, I follow up by asking, “No, no: Are you really, really certain that certainty is bad?” At some point even the irony-deficient get the joke. Next week, Goldberg discourses on the use of "why are you hitting yourself?" as a rhetorical tool.
Goldberg would not roll so often into such ripe patches of intellectual manure if he were not so addicted to willful misunderstandings. Liberals worry about the influence on our governance of religious dogmatists, and Goldberg absurdly interprets this as an anathema on "certainty." Then he makes a great show of revealing that "they aren’t offended by conviction per se, but by convictions they do not hold." In other words, if you like Rosa Parks but don't like Osama Bin Laden, you're a liberal hypocrite for whom "'Closed-minded' has come to mean 'people who disagree with me.'" Plus Hitler was a vegetarian. Psych!
I do advise you follow the link and find your own favorite bits. But I call dibs on "As Chesterton teaches, a dogmatic conviction can also be morally praiseworthy and socially valuable." And, as Shakespeare said, white wine goes with fish, and an open box of baking soda will help keep your fridge smelling sweet. Sweet Christ, the Argument from Authority itself must feel unclean after such a use.
10:00 AM by roy edroso
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Tuesday, December 26, 2006
STAY ON THE SCENE. On my local TV news, tears rolled down Rev. Al Sharpton's face as he paid tribute to the late James Brown. That figures. Like Reverend Al -- my love for whom you all know -- JB was a shuck-and-jivester who sometimes left a bad smell after himself, but whose glories far surpassed his trespasses.
I used to work with a guy who played first trumpet with JB and kept coming back on tour, partly for the music and partly because JB always paid players for the last tour rather than the present one -- "Holly," he told my friend, "you're a smart man -- you know I can't pay ya!" I'm sure if it were only the latter reason that compelled, Holly would have just gone to the union, but he loved playing for the man, and it showed when he was on a gig.
I'm sure JB could be hard for players to love. He famously fined them for missing cues. He was just as famously tight with a buck, so we may suspect his ear was well-tuned to such malfeasances, and maybe even hypersensitive to them. But here too there was more than one reason: JB started out as a drummer.
All jokes aside, it has been my experience that the drummers who conform to stereotype are the ones who just can't do anything else (just as it's always the monomaniacal cooks who are the crazy ones) -- but if they have anything besides paradiddles rattling around in their noggins, they are usually quite brilliant, and typically exacting when put in charge of group endeavors. The great drummers I've worked with -- Andy Malm, Ray Sage, Sally Barry, Billy Ficca -- all have wide-ranging interests and very short tempers. They love a groove, but they despise a mess.
JB's music is full of hairpin turns and dead-stops -- you better be on top of things if you're playing it. But those tight boundaries just make the grooves groovier. The funk has got to be loose, but the turnarounds have got to be snare-head tight. It's only when those rivets are snug that the pocket can get deep.
No one talks about JB as a songwriter. In a way, that's unfair. Some of his songs are excellent on their own terms. Check out Eartha Kitt's strangely compelling cover of "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" to get a taste of how far that supposedly macho lyric can be stretched. Or just look at it plain, especially at the end: "He's lost, lost in the wilderness ... he's lost, lost in the loneliness..." That ain't triumph. That ain't even soul-man baby-please-don't-go pleading with a promise in its pocket. That's despair. She ain't coming back. Ain't no one coming back. That's the end, the sad, stinking, canned-heat end of a ladies' man who's run out of game. It gives cold-water-flat chills.
But for the most part, JB was less a songwriter than a funkmeister. His joints are designed to wake joy and shake ass. He used modern songwriting techniques -- verbal and musical riffs -- to make that happen, but once he achieved launch velocity, he didn't feel the need to elaborate. Stay on the scene, like a sex machine. I feel nice, like-a sugar and spice. I got soul, I'm super bad. Well, damn, what else do you need?
But let's not just talk about his legacy on recorded media. I saw him once, at the old Lone Star Cafe in New York. My sloppy who-was-I-sleeping-with metric puts the show at 1978, give or take a shake. (Also, I'd just missed Iggy at the Palladium on the grounds that he was washed up, and I had decided, after the glowing reports, that I wasn't going to make that mistake again.) The Lone Star had a very shallow stage, so JB hadn't a lot of room to work with. And he wasn't the wild man I hoped to see. But he was eminently theatrical, and his spins and lunges, though constrained, were sharp -- his will observably extended beyond his marks. He was in fine voice, too. His band was shit-tight, and you could feel his pleasure whenever he vocally or physically smacked into a hard beat they supplied for him. It wasn't the 60's Apollo, but it was a full measure of what he had to give, And yes, he did sweat. JB came to work. On black coffee, and a hard roll. Huhh.
And long after that, long after any of us thought or cared about seeing him again, there were those JB hits on Public Enemy records. HOO! Yeah! HOO! Yeah! Cut tight to the groove, appropriately.
No flowers. Just stop playing Justin Timberlake for a few minutes. Or at least think about what it meant to spin ten or twelve players on a dime, and try and get some of that centifugal force onto a record. Because Pro Tools, from what I've heard, can't give you that heave, that sense of great mass suddenly shifting at the sharp stoke of a bandleader's hand. Or maybe it can and you haven't found it yet. Till you do, you ain't bringing sexy back.
10:22 PM by roy edroso
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Monday, December 25, 2006
MERRY CHRISTMAS. I was making rather merry myself last night, and am a little sluggish on the uptake today, but I expect you all know that I wish you the best even when I am silent. Christmas puts a lot of people in a good mood, and those it puts in a bad mood have my sympathies -- I have suffered many festive seasons that way myself. But the way I currently see it, the winter festival has something for any of us, happy or sad, who can focus briefly on the fact that seasons change, and the cold earth will be warmed. The popular metaphors extended from that are a bit of a stretch, but I have believed in sillier things that were far less cheering. Whatever wets your wassail, I hope it gives you joy.
3:56 PM by roy edroso
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Sunday, December 24, 2006
THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN. My holiday has been so busy that I almost missed Daniel Henninger writing about the Atheist Menace.
Henninger's new stock in trade seems to be the announcement of some non-existent threat to society, followed by assurances that we'll all get through this dark time somehow. Just last week he was saying that a new wave of "clean" comedy was going to save us from filthy-mouthed Hollywood. (He also admitted to enjoying old Eddie Murphy routines, which suggests a wonderful picture: Henninger, whose manner on "The Journal Editorial Report" is that of a funeral director with constipation, relaxing in a Barcolounger and, when Ralph Kramden tells Ed Norton to fuck him in the ass, clanging open his mailslot mouth to emit the old Mr. Machine shriek of pleasure.) Now he suggests, on the strength of one provocative book, that atheist scientists are coming to burn down our churches. Exhibit A: The Treason of the Bookstore Clerks!When I asked a young clerk at Borders on lower Broadway if they had Richard Dawkins's best-selling atheist manifesto, "The God Delusion," he replied, "Oh, we'd better: It's a fantastic book!" He swept the quarter-mile across the store to make sure I got it. "Enjoy!" he said sounding, well, triumphal. "Swept," eh? Must be a fag, too. Yet through the godless science of IVF, he will unite with Lileks' bete noir, the small-breasted, unsubmissive hair stylist, and spawn a race of monsters!
The trope is risible, but what's a culture cop to do? The post-Foley era has taken some of the zest out of his racket. "Conservatism: The Anti-Sex" can only sustain so many columns, and even some right-wingers are tiring of the drug war. So it's down to the stems and seeds of psychodrama for Henninger till a new Pat Buchanan emerges to re-energize the scam.
I look forward to forthcoming columns in which he accuses "American Idol" of leading an assault on the Second Commandment.
1:36 PM by roy edroso
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