BIG AL'S NOBEL. I expect conservatives will grouse and reminisce on the days when Peace Prizes were given to men who had actually put people to the sword. That just makes it more fun. I wish the current laureate were a better writer, but as long as they're giving these things for good intentions, why not Gore? It'll give him and Kissinger something to laugh about at cocktail parties.

A few people have asked me about Doris Lessing. I am embarrassingly unacquainted with her work. What do you think? Of her, I mean, not my ignorance.

LITTLE MISS CAN'T BE WRONG. John Derbyshire starts a weak National Review thread about how modern art is bullshit, and how brave he is to say so. As usual, Richard Brookhiser feebly offers resistance.

This tedious reminder of their Philistine leanings yields one blessing: acquaintance with a new culture warrior, one E.M. Zanotti, who contributes:

There seems to be a degradation of the concept of art that starts around the Enlightenment. Naturalism was a rejection of the spiritual art that came before it, then Impressionism and post-Impressionism are the beginnings of the interpretive approach to art. Modernism and post-modernism are the results of decades of hanging on to the idea that the standard of beauty is subjective and based on one's own vision of the world combined with a message about the rejection of anything eternal. Somewhere along the way, it became less about making a visionary artistic statement, and more about making a statement that was "counter-cultural" (the Dada movement, for example) and meant to shock the collective consciousness and open the minds of those who viewed it to new and wondrous avenues of thought (like contemporary art)...and what fit this qualification often garnered an artist fame in his own community and an increase in his paycheck. I suppose some might argue that that, in itself, goes toward proving that art is consciously fraudulent. Rothko and Warhol and others that recognized that art has a patently commercial aspect to it might just agree...

To condense: first came forced perspective, which was wicked, then pictures of people who were not saints, which was very wicked, then pictures of people who were not saints that didn't look like photographs, which was double-plus wicked, and then, fifty years before Theodore Roszak, a "counter-culture" of jokers and bicycle wheels, which ruined everything by increasing the artist's paycheck.

That's some tasty culture warring! You can find more at Ms. Zanotti's website. Among the choicer bits: rage at rock t-shirts with Arabic logos ("Sid Vicious might return as a zombie just to protest this"); rage at Bruce Springsteen ("What does seem funny, though, is that Springsteen has actively campaigned for people who support more government, not less"); rage at a female passenger who showed modest cleavage on an airplaine ("Nobody said we have to tolerate stupidity"), which morphs into rage at Britney Spears ("Nobody on Monday was complaining that the mother of two children was writhing around on a stage"), then into rage at the "porn culture" ("As we grew steadily more individualistic after the social revolutions of the sixites..."); and rage at some Hollywood movie ("Ironically, Italy is far closer to the Middle East than America has ever been").

Actually, having panned through three months' worth of her tripe, I can tell you unequivocally Ms. Zanotti is an idiot, which explains her inclusion on the National Review culture-cop roster. Look for her negative review of some movie with boobs or bad soldiers soon!

MIXED MESSAGES. Gateway Pundit notices Iranian dissidents declaring "Wish we were Columbia students." Haw haw, but a noble sentiment, even if the Ole Perfesser hehindeeds. But then GP asks, "Are you sure you want that, kids? It may be quite a culture shock." His link points to Free Republic, which we can assume means that whatever the Freepers want is even more freedom-loving than the Iranian protesters could get behind (at least, that is the most charitable interpretation). Let's see what the Freepers think:

Why should I care what a foreign country does to homosexuals?...

Guess that explains the low sales of Barbra Streisand CDs over there...

Why should I care what a foreign country does to homosexuals?
Nobody can be all bad, not even Amanutjob...

Didn’t say kill them but we don’t have to follow the Ancient Roman and Greek belief in accepting such sexual deviance as normal. The practices of gerbiling, fisting, rimming, and felching are not acceptable and the outcome is a lifestyle with a lifespan on par with IV drug users, which is another behavior that should not be tolerated. Sexual deviance, whether homosexual of pedophilic is not behavior to be condoned or accepted any more than theft, rape, or whatever form that is not in the interest of a stable society. The vast majority of male homosexuals seek sex with little boys. The “gay” parades used to always have Nambla representation — only recently has this part of the “gay” lifestyle become less acceptable....

yeah actually you have a point with the greeks. i had a landlord for 1 month who was this big obese married man who all of a sudden turned gay for me. worst month of my life, i almost did jailtime because of the final outcome of this pig. it also cemented (very biased) why the turks and greeks don’t get along. anyways it’s a month i don’t want to remember but he’s lucky he’s alive...

So, what I guess Gateway Pundit is saying is: Iranian dissidents should refrain from supporting American academic freedom until it is brought into line with the Gateway Pundit/Free Republic attitude toward homosexuals, i.e., disgust and homicidal hatred.

Refresh my memory: what makes us better than our enemies?

PS: For clarification as to what GP's pals at Free Republic think of gay people, try this search.

SURGE WORKING! THROW MORE INSULTS! As many of us know, and anyone with an internet connection may learn, the Empire State Building lights up in different colors for special events, ranging from religious holidays such as Christmas to celebrations of organizations such as the Poly Prep Country Day School.

Guess what? Jack Meoff of the Ace of Spades Beer Hall and Anime Collectors' Society is outraged that ESB will go green for the end of Ramadan.

This is a disgrace. Have you capitulated to the Caliphate already, New York?

Is the Big Apple now to be known as the Big Fig?

Pussies.

It's at moments like these that I wish the bloated self-regard of these mouth-breathers had some basis in reality. As previously covered here, hatred of New York is spreading like diaper rash among these blog booboisie, and if they had the sort of influence they think they have, they might reanimate this hatred, mostly dormant since nineeleven, among the entire flyover community. Then, perhaps, the yokels would stop sending their sons and daughters to us, and thus reverse the long upward trend in our population, our rents, our lameness, and our average body fat.

Alas, the Spades show is a niche entertainment at best. But we will make do. The units they have managed to activate -- e.g.:

I think Jack M. made a good comment in that it is pro-islam propaganda in a city that was targeted by islam at least twice already. This is why often I want to tell NY and New Yorkers to piss off. You want to allow this -- then don't come crying to the rest of the country when they blow you up again. Also, this is a judeo-christian country.

-- are sufficiently full of the poison that, should they so much as touch another outlander (unlikely for Spades readers, I know, but someday someone may, in an unguarded moment, offer them a high five), the effect should spread to the victim's entire extended famiy.

Spread the word, soldiers! New York is full of Muslims and we ain't even torturin' em! Hell, we make purty lights fur 'em! Don't it make yuh wanna rethink that Williamsburg condo you was a-hankerin' fer? Spend yer nest eggs on a fallout shelter instead! 10-4!

PINS & DICKS. At the Wall Street Journal Eugene Volokh tries to get some more mileage out of Obama's non-wearing of the flag pin, saying it means that Obama doesn't love America any more:

Wearing a flag pin is not supposed to be an explanation or an argument, just as "I love you" is not supposed to be an explanation or an argument. It's supposed to be a traditional statement of affection, powerful because it's cliché...

Yet if you used to say this and then you stopped, the symbolic message is pretty powerful. And that's true even though many people say "I love you" without meaning it (just as there are some who wear the flag pin but are just opportunists, not patriots). Even if this abuse of the phrase weakens its symbolism, an outright renunciation of the phrase retains its symbolism just fine.

The metaphor is rather weak, as one of the commenters observes:

If I were to constantly tell my wife that I love her, and meanwhile were to seek the favors of other women and hang out in taverns rather than with her and my daughter, my wife would not believe my words.

Wearing a flag pin isn't like telling your spouse that you love him or her. Unless you are a U.S. servicemember, or Captain America, or attending a naturalization ceremony, wearing a flag pin means you are a dick.

From the guy who fired Brad from All-American Burger in Fast Times at Ridgemont High to Fox anchors to the creeps who run for office to American Dad!, the flag pin has proved a reliable symbol of dickitude. Seldom have I seen an otherwise normally-dressed guy wearing a flag pin and thought, oh, isn't that sweet, he's telling America that he loves her! No, long experience has taught me that the pin-wearer wants something from me: either my vote, or an unearned advantage for whatever song-and-dance or sales pitch he's about to spool out. Or he wants the other Republicans in the room to spot him, so they can huddle privately and exchange stories about how they dicked someone over. Or he wants to pass for a dick so the other dicks won't gang up on him. Which makes him a dick.

Like most generalizations, this one is not foolproof, but coupled with common sense it is close enough to get you through most days. What Obama was trying to tell us with his gesture was simply that he is not a dick. It's not probative, but it's a step in the right direction. If he should go to work at Captain Hook's and take out a robber, he's got my vote for sure.

THE SURGE IS WORKING! Yesterday I was encouraged to learn that a street-corner slashing incident was turning people off to New York City. Today I found myself on lower Broadway, where the average age of pedestrians at 1 pm was roughly 20 -- a further sign that soon all downtown Manhattan will become part of the NYU campus, dotted here and there with communal living facilities for junior editorial assistants -- and prayed the meme was catching fire. And it may be! Walls of the City takes very badly the news that our citizens by and large do not pack heat: "New York City has made it legally impossible for your 'average', law-abiding citizen to carry [a gun] on his or her person. Welcome to 'modern' society, everyone... ain't it grand?" Somewhere a Second Amendment supporter is deciding that his young'un will attend Kansas Agricultural Land Grant College instead of Columbia. One less! One less!

Even more encouraging is the revelation that the slasher is a former model. When it gets around that even our sultry mannequins are going berserk, we won't be able to reel in the most abject suckers with a signing bonus and Friends: The Next Generation.

I envision the new Eli Roth movie: Fashion Week. Dewy innocents lured to tents in Bryant Park, there to be eviscerated or drowned in bronzer. One day a Chelsea bottle service club will close, and that will be the thin end of the wedge. Spread the word, and dream of a day when we may beat our condos into crackhouses.

WE GIVE THEM MONEY, BUT ARE THEY GRATEFUL?/NO, THEY'RE SPITEFUL AND THEY'RE HATEFUL. Since they're supposed to like Germany and France now that Merkel and Sarkozy are in, conservatives have of late been short of allies to yell at. Luckily Scott Kirwin's wife ran into a New Zealand girl who clued her to the astonishing news that a lot of foreigners don't like the United States. This gives Mr. Kirwin, a contributor to the Dean Esmay site, a new spot on the map at which to throw his verbal darts.

First he calls the girl a "trollop" and threatens, "Perhaps a little American Isolationism - our default state - is called for." He may have reflected that his threat would bear more weight if he cited his diplomatic credentials, because he updates to brag on his mad inferior-people skillz:

I am currently exposed to people from all over the world at my job. I work with two people from Beijing China. Even though I am fuming about what's happening in Burma and Darfur, and haven't forgotten the fear that Chinese students at my university felt after the Tiananmen Square massacre, I don't bring up these topics with them - nor do I mention the continuing oppression of Falun Gong. This is partly because of working together, but I also don't hold them responsible for any particular action of their government.

Maybe it's just that he's had more practice suppressing his rage at the Chinese, because shortly thereafter Kirwin denounces New Zealand, saying that its people hate the United States because they are a tiny and jealous country that "has spent most of its time since independence under European-style socialist governments." In one poetic flight, he muses on the vulnerability of the kiwi to predators:

For millions of years the kiwi thrived in its isolation. However today it is endangered by introduced predators including stoats, dogs, cats, weasels - and just about anything else that is fast enough to catch it. Only human intervention has saved the flightless bird from extinction.

He compares this to New Zealand's vulnerability to Muslim terrorists, announcing in bold type that "The weasel is a greater threat to the kiwi than to the eagle."

I'm guessing the dog would be government-run health care, the cat gangsta rap, and the stoat a player to be named later.

As for the weasel, it has, at least in its metaphoric form. been very little seen in New Zealand. No matter: the threat of terrorist attack against a disagreeable ally is not meant to sway the ally, but to provide a comforting revenge fantasy to enraged wingnuts. At least Randy Newman was honest enough to cut out the middleman.

WELL, I'VE DONE MY PART. Rachel Lucas, reacting to a local crime story:

So, yeah. I’m gonna go ahead and continue to be pissed off and judgmental for a while.

And will remember never to go to NYC without packing heat, even if it’s illegal (because New Yorkers are so fucking enlightened and evolved that they realized long ago that handguns are nothing but compensatory substitute penises for poorly-endowed redneck morons, and not necessary for civilized people in a civilized city like New York).

I hope she is as good as her word; we have too many idiots as it is. Whether she just stays away or gets locked up for playing Charles Bronson with a panhandler, it's all the same to me.

And if she can encourage other idiots to stay out of New York (her comments suggest she has), so much the better. For too long I have worried that our relatively modest crime rate was drawing too many such like into our overcrowded, expensive polity, but perhaps -- the right-wing blogosphere being, as we are constantly reminded, the true voice of the people -- this marks a turning point. Maybe all the teeth-gnashing, fist-shaking white people will stay away -- indeed, maybe such as have moved here will be spurred to flee, and the rest of us can finally get back to crack, heroin, squatting, cold lampin', turnstile-hoppin', and other pre-Giuliani pleasures we enjoyed before their invasion.

More encouraging signs -- Thrown for a Loop writes about my earlier Mets post:

But to claim the Mets have a claim to suffering in some special way (this year aside) displays the sort of self-centeredness and entitlement that makes people hate New York.

I hear ya, buddy -- please spread the word! New York's a terrible place! Abandon your condos and deflate our rents! Eschew Radio City Music Hall and depress our credit rating! Stay in the suburbs and let Gotham be Gotham! God take Miss Lucas to His mercy, and leave New York for us to hustle in!

UPDATE. Ace of Spades takes up the cause! From the comments: "Why I left NYC last week for good. The city is filled with psychos and moral cowards. This behavior isn't suprising in a city where everything is someone else's problem. Disgusting." It's a juggernaut! Time to dust off my squeegee.

THIS TIME FOR SURE. Victor Davis Hanson:

One thought in this context. It is of course true that the surge is working and our soldiers are far more sophisticated than in 2003. But in all the places one visits, there are reminders everywhere — pockmarked walls, rubble, memorial photos in bases — of all those killed during the worst ordeal between 2003-6. When one walks through these former battlefields, there is an eerie melancholy, a ghostly archaeology, a sense that now unnamed and largely anonymous Americans paid the ultimate price in those years to allow the opportunities we witness today. And that’s why we must continue and finish the job they started.

Charlie Brown no longer needs Lucy to pull away the football. He will drop back to punt and fall on his ass unassisted.

DUH DUH. DUH DUH, DUH DUH. DUH DUH, DUH DUH, DUH DUH, DUH DUH... Y'all know me, how I earn a livin'. Well, not a living, chump change really, but my fingernails on the blackboard should have convinced you of my seriousness anyway. I be a roving hunter of media buffoons. Mine's a small craft, but I am hella mediagenic in this grizzled guise of a crusty fisherman. Once I performed the works of the immortal Bard and couldn't buy a bag of farts, but we'll not speak of that.

Some bigtime operators are incensed that the White Whale Limbaugh is under attack by David Brock and a flotilla of Congressmen. Let me scratch my fake beard and speak plain: I don't like to see no creature ganged up on, and like it still less when the power of the state is invoked. I don't truck with no Fairness Doctrine. I am a simple man, as shown by the jaunty angle of my cap and my guttural dialect.

But when such powerful media voices rise to defend the mighty Leviathan even as their own junior death squads continue their merciless siege of one lowly soldier who spoke ill of their beloved Iraq occupation -- well, I have to spit evocatively over the side of my boat. They have no call to be cryin' foul. Their Mighty Wurlitzer has already made the seas run red with blood. I'll not put on a lifejacket again.

Farewell and ado to ya, fair Spanish ladies. Farewell and ado to ya, ladies of Spain. [writhes, spits blood] Yeeeargh! Yeeeargh!

UNTERMENTION. James Lileks mourns the demise by legislation of old motel signs on the highway. I am not unsympathetic. But:

...we give these people a smooth serene road, carefully designed to bring them from one planned community to the next with a minimum of visual friction, and the spoilers put up loud contentious honking signs that reeked of the Almighty Dollar. You know, ugly godless totems like this:

[visual of old matchbook motel sign from the author's collection]

Well, we showed them.

Our signs our primitive; the lawmakers must act. Jeebus. This is what annoys me to no end about the 60s, to cram it all into a tidy convenient decade; the overculture and the underculture ganged up on the great Middle, for different reasons but with equal gusto. The Middle was Crass, in the eyes of the overculture; Phony, in the eyes of the underculture. Now here we are a half-century later, and people will build websites detailing the few remaining examples of postwar roadside architecture, documenting the survivors, eulogizing their demise.

No one organizes a petition to save a building the underculture built, because they didn’t build anything. Ah well. Onward Garden Soldiers.

One thing sticks out: underculture? What's he mean? There's no referent in the preceding text. In the context of a thousand Lileks Bleats, this may mean hippies and beatniks -- you know, they hate phonies, it was in The Catcher in the Rye. And they never built anything but yurts and the Burning Man; they were all about tearing things down, smashing the state etc. Presumably these hipniks, fronted by a crying Indian, collaborated with Lady Bird Johnson to remove neon from the highways, leaving Lileks to shake his fist at the countryside.

Maybe it refers to the earlier part of the essay, in which Lileks talks about how great it would be if we could put more people in prison.

The middle class always gets it in the neck in Lileksland. You'd think they'd organize into a voting bloc or something.

THE WOUND AND THE BOW. In the new Vanity Fair Tom Stoppard writes about his perception of rock music:

I have no understanding of music, none at all. Much as I love the noise it makes, I can stare for hours at a guitar band and never work out which guitar is making which bit of noise. Also, my brain seems incapable of forming a template even for sounds I've heard a hundred times. You know how it is at rock concerts when half the crowd starts to applaud the first few notes of what's coming? My brain is like a two-year-old playing with wooden shapes: sometimes I'm still looking for the right-shaped hole when the lyrics finally kick in, and it turns out to be "Brown Sugar." Me and music.

This corresponds to a suspicion I had about Stoppard when I saw his play Rock 'n' Roll in London last year (review here). The allusions to rock felt a bit academic and sterile to me, and now I learn that the author suffers from a kind of rock dyslexia.

I sympathize; though the rock is strong with me, I have almost no feeling for poetry and, as regular readers will know, cannot render a simple human figure convincingly. Nor am I skilled in the domestic arts: both my apartment and my finances are an unholy mess. Now that I think of it, I can't do much of anything, despite my education and experience. A more efficient society would have left me on a hillside to die. Oh well.

Luckily Stoppard has a sense of humor about his affliction:

With another play, Arcadia, the drug was the Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want," and since that play ends with a couple waltzing to music from an offstage party, I wrote the song into the ending and stayed high on that idea till I'd finished. It was inspiring. When, in rehearsals, it was pointed out to me that "You Can't Always Get What You Want" isn't a waltz and that, therefore, my couple would have to waltz to something else, I was astonished, uncomprehending, and resentful.

He might have substituted "I Got The Blues." But none of this should keep you from seeing Rock 'n' Roll on Broadway if you get the chance. It opens next month and Brian Cox, Sinead Cusack, and Rufus Sewell, all brilliant, are coming with it. In some cases, raw talent and professionalism can lift a man above his disabilities.

WORKING AUTHOR. A bum lady came into my subway car on the L today. Her clothes were dirty and her hair looked as if it had been cut with a steak knife, but she was very energetic and her eyes had a mad gleam. She offered us the Story of her Life. She handed out photocopied sheets of lined paper with the Story scrawled in a loopy hand. It read:

Story called My Life by marilyn pierce When I was 5 Years old, My father had tied me to the bed in he rape me, And gota gallon of gasoline in pure it all over my body and set me on fire that left me with 1st degree burns on my body When I was 6 Years old, my mother had thrown me out of a third floor window to my death. When I was 9 Yrs old, she had thrown me in front of a car in try to kill me. When I was 23 Years old, I was rape in got Pregnant. When I was 25 Years old, I was rape in got Pregnant. When I was 28 Years old, I was rape in got Pregnant. When I was 31 Years old, I was rape in got Pregnant. That why I thank God for all he has done for me in my babies, that why I am a survival through it all, may God bless you in your family

I gave her a dollar, as did four or five other people. At the next stop she went to the next car, where I presume she did the same thing.

Success in the literary game takes an awful lot of hustle.

IF YOU HATE US, YOU JUST DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE SAYIN'. The mishegas over Obama's non-wearing of a flag pin seems to have made "patriotism" the word of the day for conservatives. Their contributions are mostly simple jingo howls on the order of Dean Esmay's, "Yes, Virginia, there really are deeply unpatriotic people. Deal with it." The Armed Liberal goes for the long form, regrettably to the same effect. After an extended metaphor in which, it appears, people who criticize the Bush Administration are abusive parents and America their whimpering child-victim, Armed Liberal declares that liberal intellectuals like Matthew Yglesias who go for a less table-ponding style of patriotism

are fundamentally missing what it is that Middle Americans see in America. And in doing so, they do two things - as the 'shapers' of our culture, they mis-shape it in fundamentally damaging ways (thank God for hysterisis), and they isolate themselves increasingly from the mass of American people who are grateful for the patrimony America has given them, and who are willing to contribute to the future.

Perhaps that's why children are so out of fashion in certain circles...

The fit is so strong upon AL that he doesn't stop to explain how, if Middle Americans see patriotism clearly as he does, liberals "mis-shape" American culture "in fundamentally damaging ways." If no one's listening to them, what's the big deal?

This latest round of patriotic talk does not relate to anything tangible upon which patriotism is based. In another post AL quotes at length from one John Schaar, who talks about principles and commitments (and, of course, the unpatriotism of others), none of which suggests what might cause the lump in one's throat at the sight of the flag or the sound of the anthem. He who feels it knows it, as they say, and I think anyone randomly hauled in off the street might better express it.

That expression might not include a detailed citation of historical events and documents -- though his grade-school social studies teacher would be pleased if it did -- just things observed and participated in: a small-town Memorial Day parade, a picnic out by the barn, a blues club where they served 40 ounce beers and a cup if you wanted it, a waitress telling about her recently deceased dog in Nashville, a couple of chubby, giggling ladies in pantsuits hustling one another into a male strip club on the old Tenderloin in San Francisco ("C'mon, gal, we're goin' in!"), sand-surfing the Great Dunes in Colorado, hundreds of firefighters standing in dress uniform outside a comrade's funeral service in Greenpoint... every encountered person and event unique as a snowflake, all part of America, not identified with a foreign land or even a world community so much as with a place large enough to contain such variety and still be called home. Even if the subject were not a Constitutional scholar nor a professor of history, he might instinctively connect that richness of experience to the freedoms that made it possible and the struggles endured to keep it so. That may be what the flag and the anthem stir in him.

At a time when a dispiritingly large majority of Americans think the country is going in the wrong direction, you'd think our conservative friends would try to promote the blessings of patriotism, and cheerfully invite all of us to share in them. Yet they're focused on making people afraid not to display patriotism -- as if patriotism were something one could be hectored and bullied into. They seem to have a depressingly low opinion of America.

BARKING. Hur-ray, hur-ray, hur-ray! Step right up and see scenes from the Folsom Street Fair! Not for the squeamish or the faint of heart! Parents, take heed of the content warning! Butt-whippings, cock-sucking, dildo-shoving, and Dem-o-crrrratic advocacy! Just a pitcher from life's other side! You say you saw our Trans March ex-hi-bi-tion. You say you thought you'd seen it all. But you ain't seen nnnnothin' yet, folks! To see all the grrrrrisly details, follow the instructions for unblurring the ex-pli-cit photos. We brrreakin' taboos here, folks! The pictures they don't want you to see! Provided for ed-u-ca-tion-al purposes only! Stay as long as you want, bookmark it for a later date, and remember, if you're outrrrrraged it's not voyeurrrrism!

Ace of Spades is roused to action:

Oh: Reminder, this was largely sponsored by Miller Beer. And Miller Beer representatives did in fact wear leatherboy outfits in their booths.

So, there you go. I drank the beer, but I think I might switch to Coors Light. I'm not big on boycotting but I'm sick of this disgusting double-standard where corporations are allowed to pump money into shit like this but won't pony up a dime for anything tainted with conservatism, because that would be "controversial."

I'm sure if Mr. Spades ran some pictures of him and his butchly-pseudonymed buddies beating each other off, Old Milwaukee would throw them a few bucks.

HAIRCUT BY RING LARDNER JAMES LILEKS. March, 1997:

My regular barberette, B., was out today, and in her stead, to my astonishment, was last year's stylist, M. - a cheerful young woman...

We had a good talk - that's one of the main reasons I go to her. I can't stand awkward conversation while I'm getting my hair cut... given how animated I get on certain subjects, it's good we don't talk politics, or I'd get a scissor-point in the eyeball...

Hollywood, after all, convinced us all that the mentally ill are just rebels, difficult people, no more or less sane than the rest of us, sanity being a socially constructed invention. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" - a great movie - probably did more damage to the mentally ill than all the lobotomies and shock treatments combined...

April 1, 2004:

...today I got a Madge. A fifty-plus haircutter who still had a hint of Winstons in her voice. You don’t want a wash? We don’t have to do a wash. I’d say more, but I just realized there’s a column in that, and I have to write a column tomorrow. Enough to say that it was a great cut, and I left feeling that wonderful I’m too sexy for my head feeling you get after a good haircut...

I know this paints me as a buffoon of the tenth magnitude, but I don’t care what France thinks, and I wonder why some are so eager to seek their approval...

June 3, 2004:

Never get the same stylist twice. Never. The last one was a classic Madge in the old wisecracking Lark-smoker beautician mode. This time I got someone who had learned some odd things at the Stylists Academy. There were moments when I wondered just what, exactly, she was doing. The shampoo, for example: at some point it just veered into some odd thumb-based scalp massage. I don’t like to get my hair washed by other people anyway. I generally prefer that strangers keep their hands out of my hair. Particularly if they’ve spent the day with their hands in other people’s hair...

Lenny Bruce was celebrated for offending the right people, and this enshrined the act of offending as some sort of brave stance against The Man, The Grey-Flannel Suited Establishment, the whole Ike-Nixon Axis of Medieval, the straights. Gotta offend the straights or you’re not doing your job...

June 13, 2006:

Then it was my turn. I almost asked the stylist if she remembered when the hallway was a dead end, but thought better of it. Yes or no, there’s really nowhere you can go after that...

Drove home. Two squad cars outside an apartment building. The conclusion to the afternoon’s story, perhaps. Fixed myself leftover pizza...

June 26, 2006:

The haircut was quick and cheap, and this time I had a well put-together stylist who did not seem to give off waves of regrettable but largely unexamined backstory. I read an article in the Weekly Standard about the Ahmadinejad letter. The stylist wanted to talk, but for once I didn’t. Because I have a bad feeling about this, as George Lucas wrote...

December 22, 2006:

My stylist was unpleasant. Usually I get a cheerful lass with a balloony bosom (displayed for all to see, so we can marvel at the tattoos) but this time I got a sullen minx who radiated indifference and self-regard... I made the first tentative offering of small talk, which was backhanded away with a grunt. Fine; I’ll just sit here, then, recalculating the tip.

Do you use scissors? she asked.

I had no idea what she meant. I mean, I did, inasmuch as she had scissors in her hand like every other person who’s ever cut my head, and I had entered into the transaction with the assumption, however unvoiced, that scissors would be involved anew, but I didn’t quite understand, and asked her what she meant.

Do you use scissors? On your hair?

No, I don’t, I said, carefully, but the people who cut my hair do?

That satisfied her. Pissed her off, too, but it satisfied her. (Later my wife explained that she was asking if I would rather have a razor cut, because now they’re offering to cut your hair with a razor....)

Spare me the emails about how I shouldn’t have tipped her at all! It was a decent enough cut, and she has to make a living. I just won’t use her again. I’m North Dakotan that way. I’ll show the little snit what I think, and tip her exactly what the custom demands...

July 19, 2007:

I failed to undertip Little Miss Sullen, the hair stylist I keep getting at the chop-shop where I get shorn every third fortnight; usually she’s a miserable little scowling pill, but this time we didn’t talk at all, and things went well...

...at least I didn't forget Bleat Radio Theater. This is an odd one from the 50s, from CBS Radio Workshop. It’s a “humorous” Cold War “parable” set on a planet populated by vegetables...

October 4, 2007:

Went to the Mall Wednesday night to get hairs cut; had a daffy stylist with a bosom tat and a fractured patter that made me wonder what she was doing to my head. Without my glasses, I can’t tell. She did a great job, but she also dumped half the snipped hair down my collar, and I walked around the mall itching and twitching...

Outside the sun was low, the weather warm; it felt like a summer day. I remembered what my stylist had said about the weather: it’s too cold, I want it to be cold. And I twitched and itched some more and headed to the car. Soon enough, dear...

OH YEAH, THE METS. I only watched the first inning of the last game, a rare case of self-restraint. I'd been thinking of going to Shea. Maybe I should have, though I don't know how I could have stood it. The Daily News reports:

Deafening chants of "Let's Go Mets" rocked the big house in Queens an hour before the opening pitch.

The carnival mood - fueled by the Mets' dramatic win a day earlier - quickly turned to deathly silence as the Marlins pounded ace Tom Glavine like they were the ones battling for a playoff spot.

When the club first hired Glavine in 2003, I fretted that it was just another bizarre Met donation to the knacker's yard of expired talents. But after a bad start he played gutball reliably. He was the natural choice to bring it home Sunday. The pathetic response of the rest of the team was, alas, expected -- if you can't get more than one run in the first with Dotrell pitching that badly, what good are you? -- but Glavine hadn't started that badly since 1989. His face in the dugout afterward showed the exquisitely private agony of the big-game pitcher, jaw tight, eyes ablaze: how could I fuck up that bad? But he got no balm from the Shea faithful but a shower, nay, a hailstorm of boos.

Which was exactly as it should have been.

The reverse mojo enjoyed and suffered by Cubs and (til recently) Red and White Sox fans is historic. But Mets fans never needed a history of suffering. We were inoculated and immunized against the usual side-effects of futility by their awful first season -- hence their ironic early cognomen, the Amazin' Mets. Like potholes and crime, suffering is part of the Mets' DNA.

This made their "Miracle Mets" World Series win in 1969 enduringly singular -- not like any Yankee Series win, but a battered fist punched upward through despair. I still remember a WOR-TV promo of the time that played "The Impossible Dream" and showed the grizzled visage of Casey Stengel on the line, "That one man, scorned and covered with scars." It was about redemption for the underdog, as was "Ya Gotta Believe!" a few years later. Even in defeat, the Mets had become a belief system. The Yankee ascendancy that followed was fine for those who worshipped at that cathedral, but Mets fans remained lower-church Believers, praying for the return of the Miracle.

The 1986 team was allegedly it -- a harbringer of a butched-up National League dynasty in New York. But then came Strawberry's pre-season fistfight with Keith Hernandez (the only recorded case, a local sportwriter observed, of Strawberry hitting the cut-off man), then Straw swinging through an Orel Hershiser fastball in the NLCS, and then a deep miasma of Isringhausen, Jeff Kent, Saberhagen, Bobby Bonilla, Bobby V in a fake mustache, Kenny Rogers walking in the winning run in the 1999 NLCS, Timo Perez overrunning his base and Derek Bell pulling up lame at the wall in Game 1 of the 2000 series, Art Howe, Mo Vaughn's fat ass, etc.

We supp'd full with horrors then, and came to Shea ready to jeer. I saw "Captain" John Franco, the last World Series-winning pitcher on the team, greeted with cries of "OH NO!" when he came in from the bullpen. I saw grown men draped in vintage Mets paraphenalia dramatically jerking the thumbs-down from the upper deck. With no Miracle on the horizon, we still attended our lower church, but mocked the ceremony and splattered the celebrant. Yankee Stadium was never like this. Though we were acquainted with glory, we were used to ignominy, and when that was all we had we reveled in it. We knew how to lose.

In this same period, New York itself eschewed loserdom. It was Giulianified -- safe, and rich, and beloved of the nation. Even the Yankees (spit) gained fans in most major markets; during the regular season you could hear their bellowing in stadia from Seattle to Baltimore. No one loved the Mets except us. Our stadium was a toilet and our team was shit. We didn't give a damn. Shea was for locals. Families spread out on the cheap seats. When the season-ticket jerks fled for the suburbs in the fifth inning, we took their seats. Shea in its way preserved a piece of New York from before Giuliani time, where victory was not expected and you could express a negative opinion of management without getting thrown out.

The New Mets were our next great chance. Even last year's NLCS had a silver lining: fate had been cruel but the team was tough and local hero Willie Randolph had brought them a long way. Next year would be worth waiting 'til. Well, we saw how that worked out: a big-town beginning followed by a big-time collapse. "Jose Jose Jose" followed by Shinjo-level booing. Glavine out after one-third. Willie standing dull-eyed in the dugout. We began to see that our Mets were not what our mythology demanded -- neither a Miracle nor scorned nor covered with scars. They were overpaid journeymen shamefully bereft of the fuel we fans had thought they shared with us: hope.

The other day I saw some newspaper columnist giving us grief for not giving Glavine a gentler sendoff. Fuck him and fuck you. We are not like other fans, however long or short their period of suffering. We are the children of '62: born to lose, contemptuous of quit. We are impervious to dynastic bullshit and will cheer lustily for the Tribe to extend the Bronx goons' endlessly edifying ringless streak. And come April, from every section we'll let you hear how we feel, long and hard. We are not impressed by the new Shittyfield you offer us. We want blood. We want a manager who will bestir himself to get thrown out every once in a while. We want players who will dive for a grounder. We want a team worthy of our exquisite suffering. We want a Miracle.

ADVICE FOR CULTURE WARRIORS. Here's one of the reasons I have Daniel Larison on my blogroll:

Conservatives definitely should make more documentaries, but they should do so because they actually want to be filmmakers and want to tell stories. They should do this because they have a talent for doing it, which ensures that they will be doing the work that best expresses their particular gifts. Conservatives should not make documentaries just because that’s what leftists do and we need to counter their propaganda arm with one of our own. As much as it may stun certain folks to read this, left-wing politics prevails among actors and artists for the same reason that it prevails among most journalists: it is a kind of politics that initially fits very well with the kind of work that these people do, and these professions attract people who already tend to share these beliefs.

Unfortunately I found this March 2007 nugget via a deep link from a less canny Larison post, in which he focuses more intently on the problems faced by conservatives who want to do more than just shake their fists at Commie Hollywood and the news media, and less on their opportunities. Are there no Limbaughs? Are there no Liberty Film Festivals? More to the point, are there no Scaifes and Murdochs to finance them?

In both posts, Larison hits the point that a life in the arts is not conducive to raising a family, which object conservatives exalt. Just so. You're not usually going to find your eiron among family men -- except in sitcoms. In fact, I would say that the ironic role of the paterfamilias in your average sitcom from The Life of Riley onwards comes from the tendency in late American life to integrate all the necessary aspects of a community into a consumer experience. Theatre being a niche experience anymore, we have had to replant our truth-telling outsiders, however clumsily, in the middle of our suburban fantasies. In fact, you might say that the whole "anti-American" tendency of American popular art in the past several decades has been a reaction to that uneasy fit...

But that's what comes of reading too much of The American Scene: that way lies madness and Reihan Salam. (Warning to posterity: link evanescent.) So forget it and we'll make it this: trying to write or film or act or sing anything is a hard job, and making it pay is much harder. You have to make sacrifices, including doing jobs you don't want to do and living like you don't want to live. If you have the stomach for that, you might get somewhere, but it will probably take longer than your childish hopes and dreams have led you to expect. The payoff may take years -- indeed, it may never happen. Internalize that, and then let me know how badly you want to drag your ideology with you into glory.

This post is written at the finish of another damn class I've taken to try and realize my own dreams. I've been at this game a long time and the brass ring doesn't look much closer. I don't know as I've acquired much of anything in its pursuit except guts. But maybe guts, as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman once said, is enough.

A POOR EFFORT. There are tropes that come up in every schoolyard political discussion. Like "You liberals say you're against tyranny, so how come you didn't like when we took out Saddam?" You can ignore them, or muster the patience to answer them briefly. Or you can do like Jonah Goldberg who, offered a T-ball shot at an ancient libertarian comeback, swings his wiffle bat wildly, trips on his shoelaces, falls on his ass and smacks himself in the crotch:

I have zero desire to launch another Corner-exhausting debate on drug legalization. I will note — since many readers still seem unaware — that I am in the minority here at NR and the magazine has officially favored an end to the drug war for a very long time. For the record, it's my view that drug legalization (note: I'm for the gradual decriminalization of pot) will create more, not fewer, moms like the one discussed below. It's also my view that the constant leap to "What about alcohol!?" is not as boffo an argument as many readers believe it to be. Saying alcohol is really bad for people and ruins lives has obvious validity, but it doesn't advance the ball very far down the field by saying that therefore other substances that ruin lives should be made legal too. I think there are very strong arguments for drug legalization. The argument that we should be consistent and ban alcohol too is not one of them in my book.

I think he must be paid by the word because this is a very long way of saying, "Aw c'mon." Also, if someone among his colleagues or family really cared about him, he would tell Goldberg that phrases like "doesn't advance the ball very far down the field," "into the weeds," "it's late" and "I have to walk Cosmo" etc. don't embellish his arguments as well as he thinks they do. He should switch to "I'm drunk" or "fuck you," which have worked very well for me.

MORE ARTISTIC ADVICE FROM PEOPLE WHO CAN'T WRITE ENGLISH PROPERLY. It's Jules Crittenden's turn to yell about treasonous Hollywood. The central thesis, as we have shown at stultifying length in regard to its previous applications, is a non-sequitur, so we will devote ourselves here to the more obvious secondary signs of Crittenden's incompetence when addressing any subject more subtle than a car alarm:

The point has been underscored this week by “The War,” a documentary that for all its shortcomings has performed a great service, bringing to light previously unseen combat footage. That footage demonstrates what combat veterans and combat photographers know, but many filmmakers and ordinary Americans, innocent of that variety of carnal knowledge, do not appear to fully grasp. The most extraordinary things can be quite ordinary, the most unbelievable events playing out in matter-of-fact fashion. Without drama. Without irony.

They're really cute, if incomprehensible, when they get all aesthetic. Artists all over America will be interested to know that "the most extraordinary things can be quite ordinary." It's a pity Hemingway, Celine, James Jones, et alia, aren't around to hear this lesson: they might have then endeavored to raise their feeble efforts to the exalted level of TV documentaries.

It may also be impossible for actors to feign the subtle expression of faces of men in combat, intent on their business, or in the extreme, utterly expressionless, evocative of the void. You can’t fake those eyes.

Yeah, and what was with that Daniel Day-Lewis pretending to be a cripple in that movie? He's not crippled! I saw him walking around at a gala once.

And of course, that old culture-warrior favorite:

Disclosure: I haven’t seen this movie, and don’t intend to spend my money on it.

But he will tell you his opinion of this film he hasn't seen. What a racket! Let's us liberals start a website where we analyze things we haven't seen. I'll start with the Complete Works of Balzac. It's great!

Summation: Artists can't get war because war is real, man. That's why we Citizen Journalists avoid all art. Yet we still have plenty of advice for you art fags. Bloggers -- is there any problem they can't solve?