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AlicuBlog What's on our minds in the short spaces of time between work and drunkenness.
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AlicuBlog: November 1. 2002-January 1, 2003
THE EDITORS
Roy
January 1, 2003
5:30 a.m.
All is Quiet on New Year's Day
I was privileged this New Year's Eve to play a show in a bar. It was work, but I have waited tables on New Year's, and playing music is a more exalted form of service--for me, anyway. The transmission of pleasure was more immediate and observable. When you give food on New Year's, you know that it's up to that couple at the table to make themselves happy--your plate-bearing is as extraneous as a pepper-shaker. When you play music on New Year's, you are the spirit of joy and misrule itself.
Tonight the evening attained escape velocity when we brought a local musician named Joe Bendik up on stage to do the Clash's "Armagideon Time" in honor of the late Mr. Strummer. I saw Joe earlier in the evening, hunched over a table. He's a wiry guy with a few years on him, and at that moment he looked beat and lost, another longtime rocker awaiting his cue to brave one more small stage for short money. But when he got in the light he went nobly apeshit: he strangled the guitar, howled and rasped, and kicked us all into overdrive. People shoved the tables back and danced, and kept it up long after Joe had slunk back into shadow. We played two hours, during the latter part of which the crowd receded to cooler venues. That was fine. We got what we wanted.
After some post-performance drink and talk, I made for the subway, burdened with my gear. The East Village streets were full and festive. Mostly young people laughed, slurred, gobbled pizza, flailed their arms at cabs. Music boomed from cars and apartment windows. In the step-down to a closed restaurant, I saw a standing couple necking passionately, the jean-jacketed boy slipping his hand under the leather-clad ass of his girl. A bum with a walkman snapped his fingers and yelled at us all, "that's the thing--I can hear it, you can't!" Two Eastern European livery drivers in front of the church on East 7th regarded their cell-phones with disgust; "Muzzerfucker!" one said. "Do you know whazz iz the name?" asked the other. A Subaru sped by, full of muffled, delirious screams.
What would they say, I thought to myself, if I told them that these streets were like this, and even more raucous, every weekend night, and some weeknights, once upon a time, except for the money? Not much, I decided; they would become confused at the "except for the money" part. A good time without money? Like, that's so not.
The First Avenue L train stop was crowded and pleasant. Instead of the usual haggard late-night vibe, we had loud conversation, and bright green and red plastic hats. A cheer went up when the train arrived.
A great number of riders disgorged at Bedford with me. "Happy New Year to you," sang several, to the tune of "Happy Birthday" ("That's copyrighted!" someone yelled.) Coming through the turnstiles I ran into Billy, another longtime local. His face was red and he carried upright a long, white cardboard box. "Cupcakes," he said. "They're pretty cool." We laughed at the huge mob of people waiting in front of the car service. Belatedly he introduced me to his girlfriend, who had been walking with us the whole time. She ignored me. Women know, I thought; they know our friends are bums and our jokes aren't funny. It's amazing we have friends and laugh at all.
Across the street from my apartment building, on a block where families live and late-night hipsters usually just punctuate the night, a small crowd was formed outside the car-park, trying to get into a lighted area where heads still bobbed and music still played. A few delis were still open, well past their usual closing. New Year's is still a big deal, despite all the trouble this city has had, or maybe because of it. And that's the beauty of New Year's. It's the one non-religious holiday overtly based on hope.
Now I am typing and, hey! Dawn is about to show its face. The shouts from the street have subsided. The holy night is running
away. Under the first gleams of January 1st, we begin to try and make everything better.
Those of us who are not Zen masters never wholly live in the proverbial moment. We carry a little of the past
with us, usually in the form of regret or self-congratulation or, if we're lucky or wise, instruction. And the future is the canvas on
which we
sketch our dreams or, if we are unlucky, our nightmares, in expectation that our crude outlines will be fleshed out to our
satisfaction--by the world if we believe in fate, by ourselves if not.
Some of us don't believe in fate, on principle or by inclination, but even those who see
their sketches as a good working blueprint,
and don't doubt their ability to
get the job done on time and under budget, must think a little of that force (or whatever it is) which eternally meddles
in even our best-laid plans. I don't know what I think about fate. I do know that things don't always work out, and that sometimes they do. And
that if there is such a thing as fate, it is not incontrovertible, and even when things seem hopeless they aren't, because hope cannot
leave us until time itself has fled.
I think that's why we watch the ball drop on New Year's Eve. Nothing really changes but the numbers on clocks and calendars,
of course. But silly as it may be, the moving hand, the spinning odometer, and the dropping ball tell us what we really have, and that's time.
Time is relative, time is fungible, time in the final analysis may be a superstition, like fate, that we developed in our ignorance and fear to
shield our eyes from the void that might be our only observable and definitive truth. And counting the final ten seconds of 2002 might be as
pointless as clapping for Tinker Bell. But we count and we clap, and when we stop counting we traditionally embrace one another, almost as if
surprised and delighted to have come through something big together. Is one more trip around the sun such a big deal? Maybe not. Maybe it's not such a big deal
that we're about to make another one, either. What is a big deal is that the earth is still moving, and taking us with it.
On New Year's Eve, the past and future are much bigger to me than usual, and at the crucial moment of Dick Clarkness
my present shrinks to a very thin object. It's like a door without a frame, and only goes one way. That which I have been is at my back,
and that which I
will become is in front of me. The former seems to give off a palpable heat, but the latter is without any temperature or color or shape; those
remain for me to provide, hopefully with a little assistance from the world, and hopefully better than I have managed thus far. But no matter
how many times it hasn't worked out before,
I always feel hopeful when the ball drops, because it does drops, for me and thee.
I can afford to feel hopeful for you, too, readers. I wish you joy and success in this new year, and every in other one that we have to good
fortune to share.
You have heard all about it by now, so I will take only a few lines to tell you what is good about Gangs of New York, and what is not so good.
What's good is most of it. I was very surprised to see how well the broad canvas of a big-budget picture suited Scorsese. The big story in the middle of it--the vengeance of "Amsterdam," son of the Priest, on Bill the Butcher--is strong enough to pull the movie through meticulous, indeed obsessive period detail and gigantic set pieces that might have overwhelmed a weaker director. DiCaprio and Day-Lewis are perfectly pitched as the combatants: the former is suitably belligerent and callow, a cipher groaning to be a man; the latter more than sufficiently--well, everything: fierce, tender, murderous, embittered, expansive, a huge man whose only real struggle is to keep true to the inhuman standards he has set for himself.
When they told me about the love-hate relationship of Amsterdam and Bill, I didn't believe it--I expected dollar-book, father-son Freudianism, but on the screen it lives and breathes as humans do, and I applaud the actors. I applaud especially DiCaprio (from whom I expected much less) for showing both sides of Amsterdam's troubled passion for Jenny the pickpocket. As always happens in Scorsese movies, the love of a man and a woman must compete with the obsession of the man with his cause, and DiCaprio gets many more grace notes out of that than I expected. (Cameron Diaz is a little actressy, but not enough to damage the effect, so let's give her some credit too.)
What's not so good is everything having to do with the Draft Riots, and Scorsese's clumsy attempts to connect the principals' passion with them. It's bad enough that the elemental fight of father-figure and abandoned-son has to be upstaged by an (admittedly spectacular) historical paroxysm--but far worse that the final battle of Amsterdam and Bill must be physically connected to it by a (so far as I can learn, non-factual) cannon bombardment of their battleground. I can see the idea behind this, and it's terrible. Scorsese should be ashamed of it. His beloved Visconti was a master at this sort of thing (e.g. The Damned) (and Bertolucci was no slouch at it either), but Scorsese's fatal impulse is to draw the zeitgeist into a private struggle through fake violence, and this has the unfortunate effect of making me wonder if the climactic bloodbath in Taxi Driver wasn't also a terrible, overreaching mistake--like the crucifixion at the end of Boxcar Bertha, acceptable in the context of a youthful job-of-work on a Roger Corman production, but embarrassing in the effort of a mature screen artist.
I should mention my favorite scene from the movie. After Amsterdam fails to kill Bill, who beats him savagely and scars his face, Amsterdam fixes a dead rabbit--the forbidden symbol of his father's gang--to a prominent fence. Bill instructs the local constable--"You, not one of your minions!"--to apprehend Amsterdam for the breach. He expands on the nature of the offense, and sinks into tears, climaxing on one particular of the crime: the death of an innocent rabbit. And his tearfulness ceases suddenly on this, and the audience I saw it with laughed. But I doubt that anyone thought that Bill's tears, however sculpted to achieve an effect upon the constable, were not fed by his sorrow at the loss of his surrogate son. This breathtakingly ambiguous moment--ridiculous, mournful, spectacular, absurd--is a high achievement of dramatic art, and shows what's best about Gangs of New York.
It is charming, in a way, that so many Right-wingers have paid tribute to the late Joe Strummer. Rod Dreher, for example, said the Clash were a great band, albeit "commies." This is within the noble tradition of Godard praising John Wayne, though understandably less eloquent.
Unfortunately, others have been more tendentious about it. For example, Mickey Kaus (say, anyone remember why he's supposed to be a liberal?) swings Strummer's corpse at the New York Times, complaining of their obit: "predictably PC...'tied punk's individual rage to mass rebellion...railed against apathy, powerlessness, police brutality, American cultural domination...drew on reggae as [a] badge of interracial solidarity...' blah, blah blah." Kaus cites "Safe European Home" and "Rock the Casbah" as countervailing evidence. Well, yes, he did those, and he also sang, "Ask the Afghan rebel whom the Moscow bullets missed/What he thinks about voting Communist." He also "railed against apathy, powerlessness,
police brutality, American cultural domination," not to mention blah, blah blah.
That's a large part of why we loved him. Strummer's attachment to the Left was romantic, not doctrinaire. I think that's why his death touches even the reactionaries among us. Born into privilege, Strummer chose to root among the lower classes and portray himself as a guttersnipe, yet no one called him on it. Why? Because he rocked. If somebody's
making your ass shake, argument is irrelevant. His lyrics made poetic sense even to those who would certainly have rejected them on ideological grounds. Like Bob Marley said, he who feels it knows it, and the force of Strummer's passion made a lot of people feel as if they were being driven toward something good.
I first saw him in the Clash's debut New York show at the Palladium. The band was juiced and I wondered how Strummer didn't break all his strings, he pounded his guitar so furiously. (Soft pick?) He raged against "phony Beatlemania" -- didn't that turn up in a song somewhere? The next time they came round the band was loose to the point of entropy; Strummer seemed annoyed and actually stopped a new song that wasn't working ("Koka Kola"). He rolled around on the stage a lot and started the encore dancing on the drum riser with a flaming torch (!) to "Armagideon Time." Obviously they were working something out; months later we found out what, when "London Calling" was released. By the famous Bond's shows, they'd found that groove that bought them their crossover, and it was a beautiful thing, but what I felt at the same time was, well, now they're the world's, not just ours.
That wasn't entirely true, of course. We could always meet the world at "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" and "Rock the Casbah," but there was always a part of Clash that was a little too thorny for mass consumption, and that part sure wasn't Mick Jones. Joe Strummer did "Cut the Crap" -- Clash coup d'etat! -- filled in for Shane MacGowan, and carried the ragged punk flag at the front of the Mescaleros. He kept shaking our ass and being a pain in it at the same time. Had John Lennon not been the world's sweetheart for a couple of years, and been obliged to swim against the tide earlier rather than later, he might have been a lot like Joe Strummer. As it was, the two of them did pretty well. Blow Comrade Strummer a kiss goodbye then, and listen for his sound, which yet lives among us--in every ragged handclap over every dragging beat--as the man disappears and fades into the street parade.
Old Strummer was as dead as a doornail. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.
Scrooge was visited by Strummer's ghost, who told him that he must give up his materialistic ways or be lost forever. "Like you have room to talk," sneered Scrooge. "I saw that Jaguar commercial you licensed your song to; and if anything in particular hammered the last nail into the coffin-lid on my youthful dreams, it was that. Your political engagement would seem in retrospect to have been a marketing ploy, and your interest in reggae merely an access route to primo weed. Humbug! Leave me!"
"Listen, mate," said Strummer, "I haven't time to explain. Gene Vincent's standing me a round up yonder. But you shall be visited by three Spirits who'll fill in the blanks anon."
The first to visit was the Drummer, who took Scrooge round the neighborhood in what seemed to be some sort of epic search, till it turned out he was just trying to cop. The Rock Star came next, but he talked only about himself, which increased the headache Scrooge was feeling from walking about in the cold night with his head uncovered.
Finally the Bass Player arrived. He was not a talkative sort, and simply wandered, obliging Scrooge to follow. In his silent travel, having no argument to occupy his mind, Scrooge began to notice the world around him. It had its share of horrors, to be sure--poverty, greed, and appallingly bad new architecture. But Scrooge noticed also the happiness in the voices of the well-dressed people who dashed through the streets with their packages. Several times he heard delighted greetings and affectionate farewells, the results and precursors of holiday travel. He saw that it was not only the prospect of presents that made them merry, but also the spirit of the season, which had given them leave to be perhaps a little nicer and warmer to each other than they normally had time and patience to be.
And it also occurred to him that though we may be hypocrites, preaching more than we practice, we are also more than that. If we cannot be at our best all of the time, Scrooge considered, surely we must acknowledge that it is wonderful that we can be good, and do good, at all, considering how horrible modern life encourages us to be.
Scrooge and the Bass Player came now to a place where musicians gathered. Like most musicians, they were in many ways awful people, slagging and gossipping and conniving. But when they ascended their stage they were suddenly harmonious, playful, charming, and even heroic, and they brought truth and beauty and, as it were, joy to the world.
Deposited finally in his own apartment, Scrooge cheerfully scraped the Drummer's vomit from his shoes and put an old record on his record-player, and hoisted a Budweiser and sang along in full voice with the analog recording of the departed and his mates, from a time and territory a little nobler perhaps than our present day, but not forgotten nor even out of our reach if we only endeavor to remember how good it still could be:
Fascinating stuff out of Den Hague: at the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal, sentencing for Biljana Plavsic was discussed. According to the New York Times, Mrs. Plavsic, a senior official in the late Milosevic administration, had "pleaded guilty to persecuting Muslims and Croats during the Bosnian war, a crime against humanity."
CNN expanded on the bill of particulars:
I had no idea you could plea-bargain a genocide rap. What might Plavsic's eight months of negotiations have been like? (My friend Steve Baker wonders if they had a Dutch version of Law & Order's Adam Schiff, waving his hand disgustedly and saying, "Just make the deal!")
The grand nature of the tribunal and the extraordinary charges it considers may overpower our awareness that it is, after all, made up of human beings conducting trials, which perhaps inevitably involve some measure of horse-trading. They didn't hang everyone tried at Nuremberg, either; Albert Speer, who oversaw Nazi armaments and used slave labor, got 20 years. It is a humbling thing to consider that even in the adjudication of mass murder, hairs are to be split. But there it is. I often wondered how that blind lady reads those scales. The only answer I can think of is: the best she can.
In New York yesterday, a man got two years in prison for killing a dog.
Some readers have given me grief for my Grinchiness this Xmas season, but it may comfort them to learn that there are some yuletide artifacts I endorse. The 1951 British film of A Christmas Carol, for one. It is a Christmas picture after my own heart: full of darkness, pain, longing, and Alastair Sim.
Known best for his Scrooge and his drag performances in the "St. Trinian's" films, Sim was a peculiar actor of that British school of thespic contortionists that gave us Patrick Magee ("Ieem glad you appreeeciate good wine--have anotha glahsss!," A Clockwork Orange), Patrick MacGoohan ("Mnthey drownd!" Escape from Alcatraz), and Robert Newton ("Yaarrgh! YYARRRGH!" Bluebeard) that died, alas, with their generation. These players had the scale and fearlessness of the O'Tooles and Oliviers, but unlike those worthies, generally started at "too much" and went on from there. The series of epileptic seizures that is Sim's performance in The Ruling Class is perhaps the most fulsome example.
But Sim's Scrooge is a masterpiece because you can't overplay the great Dickens characters. Even the tic-ridden Ron Moody's Uriah Heep of the NBC "David Copperfield" of the 70s is enjoyable. And Sim's choleric, rolling eyes, roller-coaster voice, querulous lower lip, and tendency to shiver suits old Ebenezer right down to the ground.
The picture has the advantage of being in that murky black and white peculiar to British films of the period. Scrooge's freezing, ill-kept office, the shabby-genteel Crachit house, and the massively barren boarding school of Scrooge's miserable youth are all triumphantly bleak set-pieces. But Sim is the best special effect of all. His observation that the poor who would rather die than avail the workhouse "had better do it, then, and decrease the surplus population" makes the blood run cold, of course, but so does a beautiful insert meant to convey Scrooge's joyless parsimony. In a mean restaurant, Scrooge calls "Waiter. More bread." Informed that it's a shilling extra, Scrooge considers a moment, sinks lower over his bowl, and moans, "No more bread." The camera sticks with him a few extra moments, as if to say: behold his perfect joylessness.
Marley and the Spirits, of course, terrify, annoy, and generally displease him; but Sim's best reactions (with one extraordinary exception) are of shame and reflection. At those moments, when the childishness and waste of his lifelong grudge againt the world are brought home to him, Sim is becalmed and thoughtful. We get the sense that this gargoyle we've been watching (and enjoying) is mostly made up of sinister accretions of anger and resentment upon a simple, fundamentally good soul.
These are meaningful moments, but the scene that Dickens had to write and Scrooge had to live and we all have to see to be convinced, of course, is the vision of ultimate loss brought by the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come. George Bailey's nightmare is a fine creation, but Scrooge's is elemental; the spectre of Pottersville is disturbing, but we can't really imagine that the world would not find someone to save it if George were not around. But Scrooge's life, like all our lives, is a thing easily lost, and Sim's eerie, winding cry as he beholds his own grave cuts straight into the heart of every "shameless old sinner" who has ever been forced to confront, with or without the benefit of Spirits, the consequences of his actions, and begged of the silent Infinite to know if these are shades of what must be, or those of what might be.
There are a number of movies that can reliably set me to weeping: "Young Mr. Lincoln," "Broken Blossoms," "City Lights," and a few others. But none jerk my tears like Sim's Scrooge. The visions he endures are often terrible, but it is his own reactions, outsized and emblematic, that seize and wrench the senses. That he had missed his sister's deathbed instruction to care for her child makes for a terribly melodramatic scene, but his response of "Forgive me, Fan! Forgive me!" given three times--once as a plea, once as a cry, and once as tearful, defeated sob--is a miracle of the player's art: a spectacularly showy gesture that, for all its artifice, touches the soul.
Like any good journalist, I'm sitting at the computer tonight, ready to jump on the BREAKING STORY of the Transit Strike. So much has changed since the last one in 1980. The availability of coke, for one thing. Boy, that morning 70-block walk would be so much easier to take with a little jar of blow at hand! No wonder Starbucks didn't launch in the 80s.
I've been defending NYC to guys like this lately, but I have to say, our fair City gets by these days less on moxie than on the muncipal plannishness available to the average Topekan. In 1980 Ed Koch told us, they're gonna stike, screw 'em, we'll stay open anyway. Effectively, the current plan is the same, but the feeling now as I perceive it is: look, peasants, you've been beaten like curs since the planes hit; the economy's in the toilet, and we know those of you who have jobs (however temporary and insecure) will move not just your own butts, but heaven and earth to maintain them, trains or no trains. We just took away your right to smoke in bars and you didn't say shit--why would we expect repercussions from this? Just be like Mike and buy a $500 bike--on credit if you have it--and shut up.
As my bike was stolen months ago, I've been visiting the local shops, where the prices have recently been jacked up. That's capitalism, comrade! Maybe I'll buy one after the strike.
The streets of the East Village and Williamsburg were quiet tonight. People seem to be staying close to home. (The strike deadline is midnight.) The folks I overheard talking about it in the subways seemed resigned to cluelessness; it might be on, it might not; giant shrug. Great forces struggle, and we the little people wait upon the judgement.
Midnight press conference: "We have made sufficient progress to stop the clock," says TWU treasurer Ed Watt. I guess this means trains in the morning, but they're still in deliberation so who knows. At least I can with justice set my alarm back to the usual time, and see what happens then.
Sigh. The morning walk over the bridge is no big thing to me: it's the walk back. I haven't walked over a darkened Williamsburg Bridge in a long, long time (I think I was tripping the last time). At moments like this -- late at night, the situation in flux, Governor Pataki and Mayor Richie Rich virtually silent -- I really wish we didn't have a depraved billionaire clown, with absolutely no sense of the struggles of the rest of us, in charge of the City. I never much liked Ed Koch, but like a lot of aspects of Old, Despised New York, he looks pretty good in retrospect.
With all respect to the late Herb Caen, here is my own deeply disturbed version of a "dot dot dot" column:
I think I watch too much TV, but obviously I don't watch enough, or I wouldn't find the Saddam-you-didn't-know segment of tonight's Primetime on ABC so completely bonkers. The McGuffin is that some guy made an up-close-and-personal documentary about the Hitler-of-the-moment, and Primetime used scenes from it to amuse its viewership. Some downers were inserted (gassed Kurds, threatened filmmaker) but the general atmosphere was one of merriment at the goofy dictator obsessed with personal hygeine and inclined toward unflattering hats. My response to this is not political, but aesthetic--or maybe it's about the politics of infotainment. ("Confusing politics with theatre--that's romanticism!"--La Chinoise.) Whatever one thinks about the upcoming war, this kind of "journalism" is repulsive because it wouldn't even be conceivable if the networks had the least scintilla of respect for the intelligence of its audience. And please don't bring up The Great Dictator, particularly if you haven't seen it. That's a very serious film (as, indeed, all great satires are serious), made by a genuine artist. And it certainly wasn't followed by a shock cut to a Jennifer Lopez profile ("Her combination of street and sweet!") designed to further swirl the already addled brain of the hapless consumer...
George F.Will (so initialed, one supposes, for all the times he is invoked as "George Fucking Will") has oftimes said that people are conservative about the things they really know about. What about conservatives who rebuke other conservatives about what they really know? Opera queen Sasha Castel cites a poster to the apparently knowledgeable PejmanPundit (never thought I'd link him) in response to a snide Opinion Journal bit about San Francisco opera singers suing over stage fog. (Seemingly frivolous lawsuit + San Francisco = daily double for Right-wingers.) Back up, says the PP poster, trained singers have a right to protect their instruments from harsh chemicals. (I've performed with stage fog myself--it's nasty.) This is not a blow for the Right or the Left, but for informed opinion. How refreshing. Let us pause to celebrate. (Pause.) Now, back to the cudgels...
Eenie meenie minie moe, US lets NK scuds go: The United States authorizes the release of nuclear-capable scud missiles Spain had captured on its behalf from a vessel bound for Yemen from North Korea (the Holy Ghost of the tripartite Axis of Evil). And N. Korea announces it's revving up a nuclear plant. Where's the outrage? Well, at the Weekly Standard, of course, but where is it among warbloggers otherwise ardent to bomb all comers? The grandaddy of that group blames Clinton and Carter for North Korea's advanced war preparedness. Well, what's Bush doing to beat back that Crimson Tide? Shouldn't someone bring the awesome power of the blogosphere to bear upon him? Or isn't it time to stop talking about Trent Lott yet?
Dot's all, folks.
Looks like a transit strike is coming New York's way. I have to say that the reactions of ordinary New Yorkers have, as usual, made me proud. After our depraved mayor, Richie Rich, announced he would bicycle from his townhouse to City Hall, one Julio de la Renta wrote to the New York Post:
"I live in Morningside Heights and commute to Breezy Point every day. By subway, it takes me more than an hour to commute. By bike, I would have to travel over the Triborough bridge and on to the Van Wyck Expressway. I'd be dead on the side of the road before I even reached Flatbush Avenue. Earth to Mayor Bloomberg: Not everyone works in the same borough in which they live."
As one whose $70 junker was stolen this Fall, and will be obliged on some mornings to get from Williamsburg to Rockefeller Center, I raise a glass to Mr. de la Renta. And to another letter-writer who asked, "Is Hizzoner going to suggest that we all take our helicopters to work?" And to the solo car driver who, informed by a local TV news reporter that the Mayor suggests he pick up hitch-hikers on the way to work during a transit strike, replied, "Like I'm gonna pick up three guys in New York! If I did, I'd be gone! And the car'd be gone, too!"
It's a bad time for a strike, but I recall the last one, back in 1980, when I had to walk from the East Village to 59th Street and back again every day. The streets were less congested then, and the sight of all of those people heading to work in sneakers (the first time I'd seen them complementing full business suits), roller skates, and bikes was kind of inspiring.
I was much younger then, and I expect the next forced march will find me less jolly. But I also expect my fellow citizens to again make the most of things. Perhaps we can convince some bar owners to open early and provide refreshments along the way. In the event of snow, streetside sales of Totes should be brisk.
But my poor suggestions will be improved upon by the genius of a people acquainted with disaster and determined to prevail regardless.
Some recent remarks by Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party--in which Lott declared that Thurmond's explicitly racist Presidential candidacy in 1948 should have been successful--have been denounced by what at first glance would seem unlikely opponents.
Rather than run them down myself, I commend you (with misgiving, because in general he's not so commendable) to InstaPundit, who has in recent days tracked many of the cries of outrages from conservatives such as Andrew Sullivan, National Review writers, warbloggers, and even the Family Research Council (!).
This should warm my heart, but--don't let this get around--I'm a bit of a skeptic, and I see all kinds of sidelights here:
For one thing, some of the first wave of conservative web commentary on the subject chided the "liberals" (and, as ever the case with Sullivan, the New York Times) for not speaking out on it faster. (Hronkomatic caught InstaPundit saying, "Unaccountably, the (annoyingly popup-filled) Democratic Party website is silent on this subject, giving weight to the suggestion that conservatives (and libertarians!) are the most upset. Either the Democratic Party is appallingly inept, by dropping the ball on this issue, or it's appallingly cynical..." This remark seems to have been purged from IP's archive.)
This is rich. Uberconservative Jonah Goldberg (part of the anti-Lott pack now) once wrote of a liberal who associated Lott with lynching, "This is vile. Maybe it went over big with what they like to call 'the creative community' in Los Angeles, but it's vile hate speech no matter how you cut it." And at that time, Lott's praise of the overtly racist Council of Conservative Citizens was well-known.
Liberals have understood that Lott is no good for a long time. So why the accusation of untimely response? It has to do, I think, with the tendency of the blogbrethren to overstate their own power. Earlier this month, they were patting themselves on the back for Howell Raines' partial reversal in the Dave Anderson case. Perhaps, flush from this great victory, they have come to believe they can take down the Senate Majority Leader. And they don't want any of the credit to go to the hated liberals.
Fat chance all around. If Lott comes to grief (and that's a huge if), it'll happen because Karl Rove sees a persistent, national-electoral storm cloud around him, not because some web columnists made a stink.
But in closing I will be all Christmasy and wish these folks tidings of comfort and joy for speaking against Lott's repulsive sentiments. It is nice to pause in our eternal brawl for a moment of solidarity--even if, during that pause, I continue to keep my eye on the dime-rolls in their fists.
Did another catering gig this weekend. I was tired when I got there, almost as tired as when I left 10 hours later, but that worked in my favor, I think, because the fatigue blockaded my higher mind and allowed me to sink into an animal rhythm of schleppiing, serving, and smiling.
Not that I'll ever really enjoy it, but there are things about food service (a field in which I labored extensively in my youth) that I can appreciate. It's a good thing to feed and take care of people, even if the feudal relationship of waiter and diner somewhat perverts the otherwise healthful transaction. Our client, the Stern School of Business, was hosting a lavish alumni party in the rotunda of the Museum of the American Indiab, and the drunk MBAs were all observably pleased at the evidence the event offered of their success: waiters in tuxedos, high-end noshes, and a gorgeously restored Tammany building turned over to their pleasure. The men strutted and the women exuberantly swished their gowns like prom formals, and as we were part of their splendor (and playing the part well) they were cheerful and not overly demanding.
Catering is much easier on everyone than restaurant work because, like big family gatherings, catered affairs are one-offs in which all parties laser-focus their energies on having or providing a good time. Restaurants, however, sit on the street like bordellos and are obliged to take on all comers, whatever their disposition. The weather can get rather heavy. In my restaurant days, I saw howling rage, fistfights, and even, one memorable night, a full-on assault by small-time Mafiosi who busted up the joint (a struggling Soho eatery) by freely swinging their chairs, one of which caught me across the back and knocked me under a table.
Waiters, many of them employed from the show biz community, bring their own baggage, and the psychological grind of rushing from auditions and scene study rehearsals to serve slop to boors, who are unacquainted with aesthetics and unmindful of their talents and struggles, can press heavy on their nerves. I recall running into one waiter who had vanished from the place where we had both worked, and asking him what had happened. "I just had to stop for a while," he told me. "One day I was walking up Fifth Avenue after work, and I looked at the Empire State Building and it was on fire."
Sometime I'll share with you more of my stories from that period, particularly of the declining East Side bistro where rats ran across the floor, the phone was answered by an ancient Chinese who spoke only incomprehensible pidgin English, the night manager drunkenly bawled Irish balads at the bar, and one of our busboys, an erstwhile male prostitute, ended up slashing his lover's throat. It was all quite an experience, but I'm glad I don't have to do the work more than occasionally now.
Thanks to all who responded to my December 4 roundup of black-hearted alt-Xmas songs. It's nice to know I'm not the only Grinch around who finds the usual Jesus 'n' Santa crap irritating and unlistenable.
Grady Olivier writes in to suggest "Santa's Coming (and You're on His List)", Crucial Youth. I'm not familiar with it, nor with CY's "Xmastime for the Skins," but they sound like the right stuff.
Crystal Noir sends a list worth checking twice, including "Another Lonely Christmas," Prince; "Christmas In Hollis," Run DMC; "Merry Christmas (I Don't Want to Fight Tonight)," The Ramones; and "This Christmas," Donny Hathaway.
Tanya Strano reminds me (and I'm ashamed that someone had to) of "Christmas with the Devil," Spinal Tap: "The sugar plums are rancid/And the stockings are in flames..." Remember, Santa spelled inside-out is Satan.
Worthy additions, all, but still a bit too cheery to truly countervail the noxiously twee Christmas Spirit. So I offer a new suggestion: "Silent Night/7 o'clock News," Simon & Garfunkel. This amusingly earnest sound collage has the boys warbling the old Christmas chestnut while a Walter Cronkite impersonator (or is it Walt himself?) intones grim newsbriefs ("The nurses were found stabbed and strangled in their Chicago apartment. In Washington today the atmosphere was tense..."). This serves as a pertinent reminder that, thirty-five later, no one (least of all any big-time recording artist) is sufficiently idealistic and naive to try anything remotely like it. To blasphemously paraphrase John Lennon, "Merry War (Xmas is Over)."
For the ultimate alt-Xmas record guide, click here.
Earlier, exhausted from work, I'd watched a bit of Good Morning Miami (or, as I'm sure it was working-titled, Sitcom: Generic). The lead guy has a crush on this girl at the station he runs, but she's going with this vain, stuck-up guy. That's supposed to be the conflict, and we're supposed to root for the lead guy, except he's about as big a drip as the stuck-up guy. In fact, the girl's a drip, too. Suzanne Pleshette's on the show and she's not even funny. They also have a girl who wears black plastic framed glasses and does a pretty weak Janeane Garofalo impersonation. (By the way, if you want to bag this and go see some Republicans talking about "Janeane Garafolo," click here.)
Then I called my friend JT and we talked about how everything sucked. Movies, music, politics--all of it. And we were trying to figure out why.
I flipped through this free magazine I'd picked up called While You Were Sleeping. At first glance it looked like it wanted so bad to be Vice that it was painful to read. I'm still not sure that isn't true. But they had an interview with a guy named Eugene Hutz, who pilots a band called Gogol Bordello, and he really said something:
Hutz was pictured sitting shirtless, declaiming with lidded eyes and a PBR in his hand and what looked like a snake in his lap.
And suddenly it hit me. What the man said about Beck--Yeah, I'm into it but not really. I'm just kind of checking it out--that's it. That's why, even though I kind of admire some of his songs and videos, I can't bring myself to listen to Beck at all.
It's also why so many bands suck. Not incompetence--that's excusable, that's even sort of sweet. But because they're pretending to do something and not really doing it. I was talking to JT about this one bandleader we know who takes guitar lessons and voice lessons and wears hip clothes onstage and has kind of gotten her band to play some semblance of rock. But when I see her play, I can only think: Why? Why are you doing this? Why am I watching it? Because nothing really seems at stake, except maybe someone's career.
I wouldn't call it irony, because what we often call irony, in our lazy way, has nothing to do with the Greek eiron tradition (and like just about everything else the Greeks did, there was nothing "ironic" about it). I think there's a better word for the problem. The word is "bullshit."
Bands that play "funk" but aren't funky. Bands that are "rock" but don't rock. Anything that's "transgressive" but doesn't give you chills. Anything that's "subversive" but doesn't get you in trouble. Anything that's "patriotic" but runs completely contrary to the traditions and principles of the country. Anything that's "politically incorrect" but draws a big round of applause and approval.
The problem is that we all feel the need for something, but lazily accept the palest substitute. Like that mopey office boy in the Volkswagen commercial. He's shown doing his office thing, day after day, growing more and more anomic and pitiful. Then something opens his eyes, brings him out of himself.
It's a new car.
Bullshit.
I'm going to see this Gogol Bordello thing first chance I get. And I will reserve a part of my brain for unravelling the mystery that has been revealed to me--a Unified Field Theory of Bullshit. More later!
Goddamnit, it's happening again. Every public space is lousy with holiday songs. Drippy muzak instrumentals, swinging pop reworkings, Bing Crosby, Whitney Houston, Patti Page: thousands of yule-themed aural atrocities have been resurrected from whatever treacle-pits house them the rest of the year, and released like merry vampire bats to fly and nest in my offended ears.
As a child I had some use for Christmas songs. They were easy to learn, and associated in my unformed mind with the receipt of presents. But I am long past childhood, and for me now the season is more closely associated with avarice and hypocracy: an orgy of "gifting" that serves mainly to quiet squalling brats, fulfill social obligations, and prop up credit card companies and a bankrupt economy. The horrible songs just rub it in.
I went to Barnes & Noble on my lunch break today for literary solace, and as I huddled over my Jacques Barzun I was buffeted and elbowed by nervous crowds of bag-laden gift-grabbers, while some studio hack chirped, "Santa Claus knows we're God's children, that makes everything right." Then, on the streets of Rockefeller Center, I was assailed by dirgelike blasts of "The First Noel" and "Away in a Manger." Everywhere I went I was whipsawed by forced cheeriness on the one hand, grinding sentimentality on the other.
Had I a say in the public programming of seasonal tunes, I should introduce these alternatives as a corrective:
"Father Christmas," The Kinks. A British social realist Xmas, in which a department store Santa gets mugged: "Father Christmas, give us some money/Don't mess around with those silly toys/We'll beat you up if you don't hand it over/We want your bread so don't make us annoyed."
"Santa Claus is Coming to Town," Rats of Unusual Size. Flint-based rockers do this song the only sensible way: as a horror-movie Black Sabbath shriek-fest: "SAAAAANTA Claus is comin'! SAAAAAANTA Claus is comin'!"
"Merry Muthafuckin Xmas," Eazy-E. "On the third day of Chrismas my homeboys gave to me/three pounds of indo/two birds of cocaine/and a A muthafuckin' K bitch." Word.
"Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy," Portsmouth Sinfonia. This famous experiment, in which musicians played instruments with which they were only vaguely familiar, yielded a hilarious version of the Tchaikovsky warhorse. The percussion is especially "good."
"Christmas in Prison," John Prine and "Christmas in February," Lou Reed. If we must have bleakly sentimental Christmas songs, let's go all the way, with hard-timers and homeless Vietnam vets.
"Santa Claus von Bulow," The Reverb Motherfuckers. Alright, so I wrote it. A bum dying of hypothermia on the Houston Street traffic divider while dreaming of Lotto says "Christmas" to me.
"I Hate Christmas," Oscar the Grouch. "I can't think of anything that's dumber/To a grouch, Christmas is a bummer!" This one's for the kids.
Write to me if I've missed any.
The burger world is at war. For a limited time, Burger King will offer its Whopper for 99 cents--a price-off aimed directly, it would appear, at consumers of McDonald's dollar menu items, specifically of the Big 'n' Tasty, a suspiciously BK-style hunk of beef 'n' soy product slathered with quasi-mayo.
Neither chain is doing so well lately, but McDonald's global contractions are particularly fascinating to one who remembers that company's worldwide march to fast-food dominance over the past few decades. When Mickey D hit Beijing, it seemed the crowning moment in the most successful global marketing effort in human history. The Golden Arches, hoisted in the capital of Red China! No wonder McDonald's became the bete-noir of the anti-globalization people: it incurred in them the ageless dread of a thing unstoppable.
But McDonald's has been scaling back overseas. Franchises are closing in Durban, Taiwan, Bolivia, and Denmark. McDonald's says this is part of a "restructuring" that will allow them to open more restaurants in more promising markets next year, but the sight of a great empire in retreat is piquant no matter what the rationalization.
"They added too many stores in questionable locations," an analyst recently told the Greenwich Time. He added that "Many multinational companies got infatuated with globalization." But it's hard to see the aggressive incursions into world markets as anything so adolescent as an "infatuation." It always looked more like manifest destiny. I don't mean that as a sneer; I'm a fan, or perhaps more properly speaking an addict, of the classic McDonald's burger. My scruples about globalization to one side, I never questioned that McDonald's would someday be "your kind of place" for people in every corner of the globe. And I doubt McDonald's questioned it, either.
The new domestic struggle with Burger King adds insult to injury. That McDonald's should retrench in Denmark is one thing, but to be simultaneously pulled into a downmarket squabble with BK back home must be mortifying to the erstwhile world-beaters--like a mighty nation forced to deploy troops into the streets of its own capital to quell an uprising.
My own elegaic tone surprises me here, but as I would like to believe that not every last inch of the personal should be political, I can admit that the drainage of McDonald's watershed stirs in me feelings other than schadenfreude. McDonald's is my kind of place, but less and less other people's. If it should become a small, specialty brand for fogies, like Fox's U-Bet, wouldn't the world would be better off? Only if human history is reversed, and it should fail to be replaced by something worse.
Andrew Ian Dodge (in real life a splendid fellow) links enthusiastically to the Claremont Institute which, he avers, has the goods on "left-wing bias against black gun crime." I was not at sure first what Andrew meant by the phrase--why would anyone be biased in favor of black gun crime?--but I followed the link and found that the source of the confusion was Claremont itself.
In a piece interestingly titled "The Silence of the Liberals," the Institute posits a crime wave in Minneapolis (evidence presented: two murders), and is certain that the reason the city fathers have allowed it to flourish is that "The gangsters themselves are largely black, and Minneapolis's political culture is absorbed in a crusade against the reality that blacks are arrested and incarcerated in numbers that substantially exceed their proportion in the general population."
The reason for the title, and the continuing menace, says Claremont, is that none of the liberals in authority are willing to admit that these dark hordes are to blame: "That the numerical racial disparities rather obviously arise from underlying racial disparities in criminal behavior is taboo--a fact (or hypothesis) that is simply banished from public discussion."
I was prepared to concede, at this point in my reading, that no leftists, to my knowledge, had blamed crime, in Minneapolis or anywhere else, on a disproportionate number of black criminals, and I was anxious to see what remedies the Claremont posse would bravely propose to their breathless public.
Alas, in the home stretch Claremont loses the courage of its overtly racial convictions: "As Rudy Giuliani proved within months of taking the helm in New York City, dedicated and skilled executive leadership combined with appropriate law enforcement can take back the streets and restore the city's neighborhoods to their rightful owners. The techniques used by Mayor Giuliani and his police chiefs are well known; they need only be implemented and pursued with vigor."
Wait a minute. What happened to the black people? Having been called the problem, why are they absent from the solution?
The community policing efforts that, Giuliani and his people have always insisted, led to a steep drop in our crime rate were supposed to be about arresting "quality of life" offenders, not citizens of color. Not even James Q. "Broken Windows" Wilson referred in his writings to any such Black Peril as Claremont sees. Nor do I recall Giuliani ever forthrightly stating that he was targeting black citizens.
Could it be that they were dissembling, and Claremont knows better?
Here is an opportunity for Claremont or any of its ideological soulmates to break this "Silence of the Conservatives," if they will. Let them say, loudly and proudly, that New York was pacified by a sweep targeting black people specifically on the grounds that they cause all the trouble. Go ahead, fellas. Take that final, bravely "politically incorrect" step.
Or admit that the race flag is just a ruse conservatives use to portray their political opponents to a certain class of voter as--well, in the hinterlands they use a baser name; since we liberals are all about euphemisms, let us just say, "lovers of people of color."
In the tradition of lazy columnists everywhere, I present here some random paragraphs that, like the turkey I had yesterday, have not yet been digested into anything coherent.
This is the first year I noticed the term "Black Friday" being used by TV newsreaders. Am I not watching enough television, or is this new? It's called that, I understand, because massive sales on the day after Thanksgiving push (or are hoped to push) retail businesses into the black. For salespeople I can understand the resonance, but what an odd thing for others to call it. We don't celebrate "The End of the First Quarter" on March 31, nor call January 31 "Fiscal Year's Eve." And it seems rather morbid to follow a day of national Thanksgiving with a name that recalls the great market crash of 1929. (Perhaps it's a foreboding). Me, the only Black Friday I want to see is one made by Ice Cube.
I notice that the Detroit Lions lost their game yesterday. Poor guys. Every Thanksgiving they're on TV (though we watched the Redskins vs. Cowboys game this year--another paradigm shift?) but they're seldom in the playoff race. The Lions Thanksgiving tradition began, says the Pro Football Hall of Fame, as a promotional stunt in the first year the Lions were relocated from Portsmouth, Ohio, 1934. Thanksgiving football had gone out of fashion with even college teams, and the Lions' owner smelled an opportunity. So did NBC Radio, which relayed the game to 94 markets, and began the Lions' big holiday broadcast tradition. Detroit won the NFL Championship the following year, and won it again in 1952, 1953, and 1957; since then they've played exactly one NFC Conference Championship game, and lost. The Lions have played over 60 Thanksgiving games, and broken about even. They're not a glamorous team, but should be celebrated for giving us something to do on Thanksgiving besides talk to our families.
I mourn the passing of Dino Yankov, age 19, who was human-catapulted to death last Sunday. No, this was not another Islamic fundamentalist legal outrage. Apparently some blokes had set up a catapult in a water-park in Somerset, U.K., and people were paying 20 pounds to be shot from it into a net 30 feet above the ground. They were doing alright with it till they undershot Yankov. I did some foolish things in my youth, too, and if I need a reason to be thankful I guess my survival of these would have to be it.
Finally, in future when I worry that I am putting too much time and ephemera into these pages, I will recall this National Review Online piece by "a graduate student in political science at the University of Notre Dame" who complains that the new Muppet movie has too many sexual references, and is bothered by the sight of "Animal chugging eggnog till he passes out." The grad student, it would appear, has not met many drummers.
I found myself writing about the East Village and, trawling for sources, came upon a blog called Urban Depressive Signals, written apparently by a freelance editor living there.
Being a blog, MDS is crammed with quotidian minutiae, and I read a long story about how UDS's neighbors have been giving her the cold shoulder and the hairy eyeball. Their charges have mainly to do with the smells coming from her apartment--described variously as cat box, onion, coffee, cigarettes, and food being cooked late at night.
Food being cooked late at night! In my years of EV residency, I was involved in some such standoffs, usually having to do with noise. The most spectacular came many years ago, when I had invited a drummer and bass player to my tiny apartment and jammed with them at maximum volume until the drummer stopped and pointed at the door, which was bulging in at rhythmic intervals.
Turned out it was being beaten upon by a couple of cops responding to a neighbor's complaint. I got up and opened the door. The cops were goggle-eyed, perhaps from exhaustion. (Then, as now, I lived on the top floor.) "THAT YOU PLAYING?" said the lead cop. Yes, I said. "NICE!" he rejoined. "PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO SLEEP!" And with my assurance that the din would cease, they went away.
A few weeks later I did it again.
Alright, I was an asshole, and like William Munny I ain't like that no more. But, dammit, if you can't be an asshole in the East Village, where can you be one?
In the Age of Giuliani there was a great hoohah over "quality of life" offenses. To some extent the point was well taken. Even in the rawest spaces people are entitled to push back against assaults to their peace of mind. And many of us need at times to be told to mind our manners.
But look around New York today. We are as well-behaved as we've ever been. Why, most of us wouldn't blast our stereo if The Strokes were actually as good as they're supposed to be. And yet the energy is all flowing toward more, not less, regulation of the public space. The old Giuliani animus against nightlife--the "no dancing" thing--is back. (Not to mention the "Silent Night" noise-ordinance sweeps.) And Mayor Richie Rich is succeeding in a proposed ban on smoking in bars. In bars! Match me, Sidney--but only to light this scented candle.
At the same time, our economy is in the shitter (as, boy, don't I know) and taxes are going up. Rents are absurd, money is scarce, social services are a joke; one would have a right to expect a civic Walpurgisnacht, not only a little laxity in manners. Yet the screws are still being tightened. We're expected to starve in silence.
The author of Urban Depressive Signals has "gone through a few cycles of obsession and distraughtness" trying to figure out if she's right or if she's wrong. To her I say: honey, you should fill a censer with dogcrap, set it on fire, and hang it from a hallway smoke detector.
Because on Thanksgiving 2002, when we are supposed to celebrate our freedoms, we resemble a free society much less than we did a year ago. Homeland Security is swaggering into our private lives to an unprecendented degree, and we still wonder if maybe our stereo or our cigarettes or our midnight Mulligan Stew is offending our smoke-free, sound-averse, shithead neighbors.
The ball has gone too far down the wrong of the field, and it's dangerously close to our end zone. I am no fan of chaos, just as I am no fan of tyranny, but I think it's time we stopped worrying about the distant former and starting worrying about the neighborly latter.
Among the "Top Stories" listed at CNN.com today was the "news" that Nicolas Cage and Lisa Marie Presley are getting divorced after four months of marriage. In other breaking news, it's supposed to snow tonight. Also: Dog Bites Man.
I trawled the six o'clock news shows and found the Cage-Presley disnuptials prominently placed--if "prominently" is an appropriate word for placement anywhere within the dog's breakfast of human interest drivel, features about toy safety and job stress designed to worry viewers into sticking past the commercial break, and occasional genuine news reports that now comprise these programs.
There were also many "special" weather updates on the coming snowfall. Even now, several years into the fashion, I can't get over how every little storm is covered on local TV news as if it were an invasion by Cossacks, with warnings about health and safety and solemn assurances that the newsreaders will keep us updated as events progress. A village idiot standing on the street howling, "It's shore a-comin' down now!" would serve equally well. (Maybe there's one of those on local cable.)
I'm beginning to think that what's really wrong with us as a people is what James Thurber used to call "a case of the jumps." When fake crises are treated as near equivalents to very real dangers of life and limb, over time we lose our sense of proportion. Thus the massive socialization of the insurance industry, for example, is treated as a less important event than incipient precipitation and the presence of small, detachable parts on toys for toddlers.
(I also note with interest the very last line on CNN's story, well below the figurative fold, on the signing of the Homeland Security Act: "Creation of the new department is the biggest reorganization in the federal government since the Department of Defense was created in 1947.")
I'll try and remember this the next time I see a warblogger sounding the tocsin against man-hating feminists or some equally ludicrous perceived threat. Great or small, the jumps blight us all.
I was thinking of Libby Titus this morning. Titus had a career as a singer and actress, had a baby with Levon Helm, married Donald Fagen (!), and is now a producer, I believe. Anyway she was pretty hot back in the day, and I recall some critic getting slapped in Rolling Stone for devoting too much ink to her womanly attributes. I don't recall the critic's name, but his baleful response has stayed with me lo these many years: "I have no more interest in fucking Libby Titus than I'm sure she has in fucking me."
I was reminded of this by a pull-quote acquired by tootsie-of-the-moment Shakira from none other than Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who enthused in some unnamed forum (Maxim?), "Shakira's music has a personal stamp that doesn't look like anyone else's and no one can sing or dance like her, at whatever age, with such an innocent sensuality, one that seems to be of her own invention."
We ink-stained wretches labor in solitude and get a little squirrely sometimes. Nonetheless this old wordsmith has a piece advice to writers young and old: when you get a crush on some fabled piece of pop trim, keep it to yourself.
(Great authors don't fare much better with boy bands. Years ago the Legs McNeil band Shrapnel played Norman Mailer's daughter's birthday party. Among Mr. Mailer's observations to the boys on that occasion: "Well, when you get older, you get fucked, you see. Then, you go eat some cheesecake, and you can fuck some more." And don't even get me started on Thomas Pynchon.)
On its front page, the Media Research Center professes to "bring political balance and responsibility to the media." Targets struck in the current edition: Tom Daschle, Walter Mondale, Bryant Gumble, Al Gore. Champions defended: Rush Limbaugh and President Bush.
If my deli counter offered this kind of "balance" on its scale, head cheese would cost $76 a pound. Yet elsewhere on the site, the organization insists that "the MRC's goal is not conservatively biased news...but balanced and fair coverage," just before beating the hell out of columnist Jack White for saying bad things about Clarence Thomas and white people.
This struck me as remarkably similarly to something reported recently in the Chicago Reader. Chicago Media Watch held a symposium at which a noted pro-Palestinian speaker, Sut Jhally, would appear. At the last minute, CMW's president stuck a pro-Israel speaker onto the bill. Okay by me if there's no pro-Israel speaker; okay by me if there is. It's their party. But Jhally complained: "This is how the propaganda works. You can change the debate. You can change the discourse within a supposedly progressive organization." A heckler got up and screamed at the CMW president, "When you try to censor [Jhally]--how dare you!"
This is the sort of thing that sends MRC and its sister organizations like Campus Watch into paroxysms. (CW also claims that it "fully respects the freedom of speech of those it debates," though its leader, Daniel Pipes, recently proposed a flying squad of regulators to enforce his idea of diversity on campuses--see below, November 14).
But in my view it's the same thing as what MRC's up to. The heckler thinks the presence of a popular, countervailing opinion equals censorship; the right-wing guys think that liberals hold such vast powers (evidenced by their sweeping victories in the recent election) that any blow struck against them is a blow, not for any specific agenda, but for simple justice.
This thinking leads to many monstrous outgrowths of the sleep of reason, such as Instapundit's frequent insistence that white males get a bum deal in our society, and the neologism "anti-idiotarianism," by which conservatives redefine their creed as that which is not stupid and liberalism as that which is.
As an antidote to this kind of hooey I commend you to Spinsanity. They declare themselves to be bipartisan, and seem to mean it. In the current edition you'll see swipes at Limbaugh, Hannity et alia, but also thoughtful considerations of factual shortcuts taken by Michael Moore and Tom Tomorrow. Some analyst might parse their aggregate data and show that they devote more tonnage to one side than another, but it's hard to mistake the sincerity of their effort.
Even-handedness only goes so far, and I certainly don't practice it myself. (I'm partisan and proud--so sue me.) But it's instructive to observe someone who does, particularly alongside some folks who are just pretending.
I made a trip to James Lileks' site and observed, in equal scale weighing delight and dole, that he is less inclined toward madness than previously, and is at present just his usual pain-in-the-ass self.
First, the eminent warblogger carps on about the Wellstone memorial (though he notes that "everyone is sick of" it--nice of him to acknowledge our alternative reality, however briefly, before stoking the unquenchable Republican fires of outrage). Now he's upset to hear there was a beachball being passed around there. Lileks' concern for the decorum of his avowed enemies' obsequies is little less than touching, and more than tedious. I bet he's still mad that Clinton got to speak at Nixon's going-away party.
But, worse, he piles on the Michael Jackson case. Jesus Wept! Every penny-ante pop cultist has lashed out at Wacko Jacko more times than Leeza Gibbons can count. The latest McGuffin is Jackson's dangling of his infant son out a window as fans roared outside his hotel window. I happened to get home early from work tonight, and caught this act on the TV: a fleeting, playful bit of rockstar bear-baiting that should do no lasting damage to the tyke, and compares favorably to the drowned guy in Tommy Lee's pool. But it gets Lileks where he lives: "holding your kid over a balcony with one hand--well, that's the thing parents have nightmares about doing. For God's sake! I duct-taped Gnat to my chest just to climb the stairs." (And Bin Laden wasn't even coming after her then.)
I grow weary of the perpetual outrage over Michael Jackson. That the guy's an easy laugh for Leno is reason enough for higher minds to lay off. So he's a freak. Big deal. I haul out my original Blind Faith album cover and wonder why Jackson has to shoulder all the world's outrage at twisty singers--till I recall, oh, right, he's not selling so well these days, whereas Eric Clapton did that nice "Tears in Heaven" weepy that clangs the cash-register on every Lite-FM station in Christendom.
Michael Jackson produced at least a dozen great pop songs, and scores of acceptable ones. I'm happy and grateful when they come on the radio. If he wants to bungee his baby from a balcony, I couldn't give a rat's ass. That's for Child Protective Services to worry about. I expect pop stars to turn out good pop. Every seven days I read in Entertainment Weekly about up-and-comers who lead blameless lives (or Betty Ford-redeemed ones) and suck dog dick artistically. And hear about "legacies" and "divas" till I want to vomit from my ears. I really don't see where the blowhards who buy into all this swill get room to rag on a guy who may have a creepy facial structure but rocks Justin Timberlake off the face of the earth.
Oh, yeah: Lileks does a bit on Hans Blix, too. Some folks just can't get their blitzkrieg fast enough.
I found this A.P. story from Yankton, S.D. about one Sharon Hayward, who's retiring from the profession of nursing after 36 years. The article contains praise from her colleagues and a little biographical data, but this hook got to me: "Hayward, who has worked on the medical floor for the past 36 years, is the last nurse in the hospital to wear the traditional nurse's uniform of a white dress, stockings and shoes..."
Now, the passing of the old nurse's uniform is something I surely should have noticed, as my acquaintance with hospitals began during their heyday. At 12 I had a tumor removed from my adrenal gland, and I clearly recall two specific Florence Nightengales at New England Baptist Hospital who always wore the starched whites: one crusty, middle-aged woman who would greet me every morning with a gruff command to "get up" and force me to walk upright, so that the incision that nearly bisected my torso would not heal too tightly to one side (it was explained to me that the exercise would prevent a permanent deformity, but it's a cinch that I would not have performed it without the nurse's encouragement), and one absurdly beautiful Irish girl who would gently lift my gown every night and administer a shot of morphine to one of my buttocks.
So much has changed over the years, I guess, that only a serious crank would notice every small shift in dress. I'm surprised, though, not to have noticed when nurses stopped dressing like clip art. I recall there used to be a brand of white shoe-polish that featured a nurse on the label. I wonder if they still even make the stuff.
I think it's fine that medical dress became a bit more egalitarian, and even Nurse Hayward seemed accepting of the shift: "A lot of the older people say they like to see me in my white uniform," she told A.P. 'But I always say, 'That's because you and I both have gray hair, so we look at things differently.'"
Still, I wonder about her reasons for sticking with the old ways. She scaled back her hours when she and her farmer husband had kids--"I'm a career mom," she said. "Nursing was on the side. My energies were going into my kids at home." Besides, nursing was getting more "technical," she allowed; "There are a lot more machines and paperwork...I didn't need to have a lot of new challenges at work."
Nurse Hayward, it seemed, availed an opportunity now lost to the rest of us. If we decided that office work, for example, had become too technical for us, with all those computers and copying machines, we would not be allowed to revert to typewriters and mimeographs. Even if we were so allowed, I doubt if most of us could resist modernity for long. Some of us may pick and choose, to a certain extent, from the modernist menu. I have thus far avoided cell phones and PDAs, for example, but even the temporary loss of my Internet connection unnerves me a bit. To slow even slightly our rate of speed leaves a feeling that something is lacking. It's not unnatural; we are social creatures, and to cut the wires (or wireless connection) would leave us a little more alone.
This doesn't go for Nurse Hayward, though. She expects to travel a bit to visit family, and spend time her husband on the farm. "I'll help him when I can," she said. "We like to make fence together."
Speaking of modern life, I had a pleasant time in the company of some bloggers last Saturday at Cafe Taci, an Italian restaurant at Broadway and 110th Street where opera performers hit the stage every twenty minutes or so to belt out arias and whatnot -- sort of like open-mike night at La Scala. The guests were mostly of the Rightist persuasion, but no one turned me in to Homeland Security, so I guess the spirit of Rodney King prevails on the Upper West Side. My thanks to our hostess, Patricia Neal in The Fountainhead.
Like previous subliterary gimmicks, the newly-published The Hipster Handbook exploits the behavioral and linguistic attributes of a modern, youth-based phenomenon, toward the end of light humor and a fast holiday sale. As shown at its website, the Handbook's time-dishonored method includes lists, anecdotes, and buzzwords. You might be a hipster if "You graduated from a liberal arts school whose football team hasn't won a game since the Reagan administration." You are certainly not one if "You are a big fan of the suburbs and vinyl siding."
Well, some of them are better than that. Still, the examples on offer seem curiously familiar. The hip-versus-square Manichaeism dates back to the fifties at least; if we want to be intellectually generous about it, in a Greil Marcus kind of way, it goes back to Classicism versus Romanticism, wet versus dry, the joiner versus the abstainer, the eternal Oscar and Felix.
What does distinguish The Hipster Handbook is its glossary. According to the online excerpt, a bronson is a beer, to bust a moby is to dance, deck is cool and fin is its opposite. 18 examples are given, and I had never previously heard of any of them. I can easily imagine they have been made up for the book. (The definition of "kidsmen" hints at this.) If so, they are well-crafted: they have the lazy aptness of hipster lingo from time immemorial, in which simple descriptors are slathered with attitude, rendering usage by fin fradoes such as myself risible. (See what I mean?)
What does it tell us if its language is, as it looks to be, The Hipster Handbook's sole innovation on prior Preppy, Yuppie, and Nerd equivalents? Maybe that language is vital enough to make old ideas interesting. The relationship between words and things was the subject of ancient debate, but, contra Plato, tinkering with terms may actually enhance our understanding -- not of the things they describe, but of the people who use them. Maybe I liked the glossary because it told more about the Handbook's hipsters than did its tired Foxworthyisms.
This is a bad time for words. Kids can't read or write, our poetry stinks, even our pop song lyrics have devolved to an unNVable state. Anybody who busts a moby with the language gets an extra star from me. May it gain them a bit of scrilla, and inspiration to move on to the next step: interesting sentences.
Columnist Daniel Pipes is unfailingly hard on Arabs, but he's murder on American professors of the antiwar persuasion. In this New York Post throwdown, he says our typical university is "a topsy-turvy world in which professors consider the United States (not Iraq) the problem and oil (not nukes) the issue." He also says the cloth-eared crowd "despise their own country," and describes them as "inept," "cranky and mistaken," and "the major American institution most alienated from the rest of the country."
After he's got that off his chest, Pipes gets down to prescriptions: "The time has come," he says, "for adult supervision of the faculty and administrators at many American campuses. Especially as we are at war, the goal must be for universities to resume their civic responsibilities."
One might wonder when unthinking compliance with Administration policy became an educational responsibility, but Pipes has no time to explain--he's got a plan: "This can be achieved if outsiders (alumni, state legislators, non-university specialists, parents of students and others) take steps to create a politically balanced atmosphere, critique failed scholarship, establish standards for media statements by faculty and broaden the range of campus discourse."
In other words, some unnamed authority should send somebody to all our colleges and enforce some diversity. I thought conservatives disliked that sort of thing. (Oh, wait; it's ethnic diversity they don't like.)
I've never understood the right-wing beef with leftist faculties. If you think Harvard's too pink, why not send your kid to Bob Jones University or Liberty College? That's the marketplace in action! Good schools driving out bad!
I especially like that "Especially as we are at war..." Mark it well: you're going to hear that prelude, or something like it, in front of a lot of crazy ideas in the days to come.
I hadn't seen such a turnout for an art exhibit since the opening day of the Monet show at the Art Institute of Chicago. Having read about it in the Carroll Gardens/Cobble Hill Courrier, I thought I'd drop down Sunday afternoon to see the Ars Subterranea show in the old Atlantic Avenue train tunnel. I admit I was more interested in the tunnel than I was in the art. But, arriving at 2:30, the line stretched from Court Street to Clinton. One of the Ars Subterranea (Society for Creative Preservation) staff, wearing an orange safety vest, said there was little chance that anyone joining the queue at that time would get in. Do so many people read the Carroll Gardens/Cobble Hill Courrier, or was it publicized elsewhere? Alas, all I have to share are these pictures of the line, and the manhole in the middle of Atlantic Ave. where those who were able see the show went underground.
As previously shown, W's journalistic shock troops have propped up his presidential image by comparing his wit and wisdom to that of Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Ernest Hemingway, Harry Truman, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Frodo Baggins.
After Tuesday's Republican victories--vastly aided by a campaign war chest over a hundred million dollars richer than the Democrats', and an incipient war which they gleefully used to tar the opposition, including a veteran who lost three limbs in battle, as traitors--still more bouquets have been tossed Bushward, celebrating his political acumen in allowing Karl Rove to fly him all over the country for last-minute political appearances, often at taxpayer expense.
The low point, so far, is found in the latest New York Post column by John Podhoretz, in which he compares W to--I shit you not--Groucho Marx. His evidence consists of this: Bush responding to a New York Times reporter by "saying, 'Yeah, yeah,' and rolling his eyes," and the following incident:
"And at the end, he called on a reporter and before she could get her question in, asked whether she had named her newborn baby 'Georgia W.' The reporter was stony-faced and aghast in response."
Imagine any event at which a powerful man asks a woman with whom he is not on good terms if she's going to name her baby after him. This passes for wit only in proximity to the death-chambers of Texas prisons, where the Commander-in-Chief honed his style, but to Podhoretz, the injured reporter "seemed like nothing so much as the perpetually offended Margaret Dumont, who served as the humorless foil for Groucho Marx."
Let us pause to remember the real Groucho, whose wit crackles through many films and kinescopes, and who even in his dotage could muster real zingers. I recall him on one of Bill Cosby's variety shows in the early 1970s. Noting Cosby's flamboyant suit and Afro, Groucho said, "You oughta get yourself a banjo and come out for Nixon."
Much ink has been spilled decribing the anguish of Democrats after this election. But I pity the presidential PR men, who must lie that their lummox client has the qualities of great men. Perhaps they even lie to themselves. Or perhaps they don't need to: the consolation of revisionism--beyond the cash offered, of course--may be the larcenous thrill of claiming one man's achievements for another, far less worthy client, and getting away with it.
But Podhoretz, a sometime film critic, surely knows the difference between Groucho and Dubya. When he next catches Animal Crackers on cable, will he suffer a pang of guilt?
"Not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game." Everything about modern life seems to spit on this ancient wisdom, yet do you know, in times of disappointment it really seems to be true. At day's end, ain't nothing like the real thing, and we who have nothing invested in pretending a putz is a prince--or that churlishness is wit--have the privilege of drinking from that deeper well. It is not so heady a drink as power, but it is sweet and healthful, and something power cannot taste.
Is it me? I just looked at the calendar (well, the numbers on the upper right hand corner of the Mac) and noticed it's the 7th. Two weeks to Thanksgiving!
How'd I miss that? It's not like they haven't been marketing Thanksgiving--or, rather, the holiday for which Thankgiving is a mere stalking horse, Xmas. Tim Allen is all over the place in Santa drag, and, come to think of it, I have detected an uptick in the use of the word "gift" in television commercials. On Saturday I even noted with some surprise (but no holiday linkage) a poster at Popeye's advising diners to order in advance for a truly grisly-looking "Cajun Turkey." And you know what I said to myself then? Why would people order a turkey? That's something you do at Thanksgiving.
Two explanations present themselves:
1.) As an longtime abstainer from most forms of society, including holidays (Monday is Veterans' Day! Gasp!), my consciousness has so completely detached from the orbit of normal human activity that it has floated into some black expanse where Pilgrims never trod nor bells jingled.
2.) Consumerism is so regnant that red-letter days are perceived no longer as occasions of remembrance, but as cycles of a sales calendar, and the turkey and tinsel have as little meaning as that animated dot that slashes prices on the Wal-Mart commercial.
I'm trying to think positive these days, so I'll say it's the former.
They're still talking about the election at midnight, and it looks like the Republicans will have a slight lean in the Senate. They're also holding the House, a stark anomaly in mid-term elections.
In other words, we're screwed. One could argue that Democratic pickups in either house would, given their basic gutlessness, divert but little the nation's headlong dive into the proverbial shit, but in the present case we know what to expect: unfettered Bushism. This nightmare vision would include an Alaskan wilderness drenched in oil, unchecked adventurism in the Middle East, a ruinous economic program, and, of course, a wave of right-wing judges taking care of whatever depradations their legislative brethren can't achieve.
Gloomy news, but nothing we can't handle, kids. Barring a total collapse of the constitutional order (not out of the question, but not probable either), the termite-like work of local politics will recommence right after this election. Given the inevitable inequities of the new order, in some districts new candidates will emerge who might figure a better way to make the case for sanity. Whether they're Democrats, or Greens, or whatever, will depend on the intelligence of the local political chiefs, but if these worthies don't follow the shifts in the wind while they're small breezes, sooner or later they'll find themselves chiefs no longer. I saw this in the early 70s, when the Democratic Party was, mildly and briefly, radicalized by the McGovern movement, and the Republican Party began its apparently unending journey into the fever swamps of the Far Right. History, an even older observer than I, has seen even bigger shifts that began to percolate after even more smashing electoral victories by one party or another.
Last night PBS ran a Ken Burns doc on Thomas Jefferson. It reminded me of the nearly savage contest between the Federalists and Jefferson's Republicans, and the long Virginian Presidential tenure that followed: Jefferson, Madison, Monroe. Are we now living in Jefferson's America, or John Adams'? One might argue that, given the depravity of our politics (New York State Senate candidate Liz Krueger put up posters this morning, telling voters that now that it was Election Day, they no longer had to endure her opponent's negative ads; she won handily), we are not living anything like the Founders' vision. But the more important point is, neither Adams nor Jefferson really won that argument, and we continue it--admittedly, in less elevated language--in our current struggles.
So if you don't like the results of this election, wait a bit: there'll be another one along soon enough. If you don't like W's world, you don't have to live in it. I don't mean you should ignore reality; I mean that you have your own, and it is shared by a great many people. (This hasn't been a sweep by any means, and there are deep cultural currents that the political situation doesn't touch: if you follow issues of gun control, freedom of speech, and abortion, among others, you know that already.) Whether the coming reality requires you to take action, or sit back and watch, will be revealed in time. Meantime shelve your gloom, reaffirm your principles, and keep your eyes open.
I had the TV on today and the newscasters said Tom Golisano, the latest rich guy to finance his own campaign for high office, would soon go "on the air live" with an important announcement about his candidacy.
I went and did something else, and when I turned the TV back on there was Golisano, talking about what a great Governor he would make, with the chiron saying LIVE in the upper left hand corner.
The odd thing was, Golisano kept dissolving--that is, every once in a while there'd be one of those smooth edits where his head was a fraction of an inch off-register from where it was in the previous nanosecond.
And I thought, if he can actually do this while he's live on the air, he must be some sort of superhero or alien, and we'd better do what he says or he'll blast us with some sort of space gun or something.
The LIVE appearance turned out to be a commercial. (Are there laws about this sort of thing?) But damn, it couldn't have been more than an hour or so after his actual LIVE announcement. That means he had a team of professional editors standing ready to immediately cobble his highlight film into a campaign spot. Can you imagine what that must have cost, never mind the airtime? Golisano has something more deadly than superpowers: he has serious money, and no worries whatsoever about how he spends it.
Or about where he gets it. Golisano runs Paychex, a company that handles payroll disbursement for small companies. Paychex stock went up over 40 percent a year throughout the 90s, and its revenue went up about 20 percent, making Golisano a very rich man. Yet in September he asked New York State for $600,000 in "incentive" money for a business project. So he already has some experience in deciding what should be done with taxpayer money.
Clearly we're dealing with a force of nature here, without scruple or shame. This is Golisano's third run for Governor, and if he does not win this time, I doubt very much it will discourage him from however many attempts it takes to gain the office. Resistance is clearly futile. Corzine and Bloomberg were the thin end of the wedge; Golisano's campaign shows that the day is upon us of the Runner-Baron--new feudal lords who take up electioneering as their forebears took up fox-hunting and the construction of monuments. Perhaps we should elect Golisano now, before the Paychex IT department discovers a way to tap into the voting machines and do it for us.
Circumstances have of late pushed me more frequently into the streets, and All Hallow's Eve on the streets of New York was a bit of a shock to me. Many young adults were in costume and headed to parties. It probably helped that this year Halloween fell on a Thursday, the beginning of the New Weekend for corporate youngsters who can pass Who-Gives-a-Fuck Fridays in deep blear without giving off that pathetic, incriminating morning-after drunk-stink peculiar to oldsters.
I bestirred myself to attend a client's party near what in recent years was called Silicon Alley, and in some precincts still is. Heading out of my apartment I was struck by the number of costumed children being led around by parents. Most of them did not have candy-bags; trick-or-treating has been long abandoned, or nearly so, in Williamsburg. But the kids were delighted by their own disguises and the spirit of license that go with them, and squealed with appreciation at each other and at the grown-ups who, they must have thought, were aping them.
In my transit I saw Princes of the Church, male and female, a big-headed Jack from The Nightmare Before Christmas, cowboys, a Ninja, Goths so overblown they could only have unlivened themselves for this night, hooded and beaked Bosch visions, adult fairy princesses, and a spectacular Gainsborough Lady in Blue, replete with upswept hair and beribboned lace hat, running against the light across lower Broadway.
The party started slowly for me, as I was not well acquainted with most of the guests, but a trick I have learned from long solitude--watching, taking note, and letting the world come to me--eventually paid off: I had several brief conversations which, like the hors d'oeuvres, were not in themselves filling but, taken together, got me through. The party was designed spectacularly on an Austin Powers theme: giant daisy faces, psychedelic bunting, 60s music. Ninety minutes in, I heard the mordant old Chad & Jeremy song:
And with that I made my quiet exit. The streets were even more raucous by then with spillage from the annual Halloween Parade. Costumed and uncostumed alike were full of high spirits. An Elizabethan couple passed Spider-Man and Mary Jane, and each guffawed appreciatively at the other.
Back in my neighborhood the young children were all inside, but teens still traveled in clumps, wearing only their usual dark, ungainly costumes. From a stoop one, unquietly nursing some grudge, harangued his comrades. "Fuck y'all, ain't none y'all got anything good," he howled, "'cept'n the BITCH that steal from me!" I can see why young men like that word: the ripe consonant, the thin sound hissing after. His friends laughed at him, and I wondered how long Halloween would be spoiled for him hereafter. Not long, probably; the signal virtue of youth is forgetfulness. Even in that awkward place between squealing childhood and the privileges that a job and a place in the world brings, you can still count of the onrush of life to wash most of your resentments away. It's only later that they start to stick in your craw. Craws, it would seem, develop in adulthood. And when the onrush of life slows to a trickle, you have to find a way to wash them out yourself.
Midnight has passed, and it is the Day of All Saints, known in Mexico as the Day of the Dead. "These are the days by which the communion of the living and dead are made manifest," says an unnamed Prince of the Church at ABS-CBS News, a "global Filipino" service. "This is also the moment when we are called to examine the role of death in our lives... as Christians, we should also feel at the same time a firm hope that what are confronting is a separation that may be long or short but that it is not a total loss of contract forever. Our lives are too precious to end without a trace. We believe that death is not an end. It is a transition...It is a transformation. We believe that when the hour of our death arrives, when our existence on this earth reaches its end we do not find ourselves facing nothingness."
And there it ends abruptly, leaving white space.
Roy
December 31, 2002
12:10 a.m.
Ask Not For Whom The Ball Drops
Roy
December 30, 2002
12:20 a.m.
Gangs of New York
Roy
December 27, 2002
12:20 a.m.
Strummerabilia
Roy
December 24, 2002
12:10 a.m.
A Clashmas Carol
And then there's Keith, waiting for trial
Twenty-five thousand bail
If he goes down
You won't hear his sound
But his friends carry on anyway
Fuck 'em!
Clang clang, go the jail guitar doors
Bang bang, go the boots on the floor
Cry cry, for your lonely mother's son
Clang clang, go the jail guitar doors...
Roy
December 20, 2002
12:09 a.m.
Copping a Plea
Plavsic initially pleaded innocent to eight counts of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes after surrendering to The Hague tribunal in January 2001. But in October she changed her plea to guilty of one count of persecution on racial, religious and political grounds--a crime against humanity--saying she was filled with remorse. Other counts were dropped and Plavsic avoided trial.
Roy
December 17, 2002
12:09 a.m.
Sim's Scrooge
Roy
December 16, 2002
12:09 a.m.
Strike Watch
Roy
December 13, 2002
12:09 a.m.
Weekend Roundup
Roy
December 12, 2002
12:09 a.m.
Walking to Work
Roy
December 11, 2002
1:49 a.m.
Lottsa Luck
Roy
December 10, 2002
12:30 a.m.
Food Service and its Discontents
Roy
December 9, 2002
12:30 a.m.
Christmas Cavil Update
Roy
December 6, 2002
2:30 a.m.
Unified Field Theory
Irony poisoned almost the whole world, and it's only going to keep spreading... because you can't really experience life, you can't really live in an ironic way. I mean, what the fuck is that guy Beck doing? I can't even watch him on stage. It's ridiculous. I don't understand. What is this kind of, Yeah, I'm into it but not really. I'm just kind of checking it out. I'm kind of break dancing, but not really because I'm too cool to really break dance. What the fuck are these people breeding?
Roy
December 4, 2002
12:33 a.m.
A Christmas Cavil
Roy
December 3, 2002
12:03 a.m.
My Kind of Place
Roy
November 30, 2002
5:31 p.m.
Throwing Back Some Race Bait
Roy
November 29, 2002
12:21 p.m.
Afterbirds
Roy
November 28, 2002
12:01 a.m.
No Thanks Giving
Roy
November 27, 2002
12:01 a.m.
A Case of the Jumps
Roy
November 26, 2002
6:40 a.m.
Ask Professor Unrath
Roy
November 22, 2002
11:40 a.m.
We Report, You Decide
Roy
November 20, 2002
2:40 a.m.
Jimbo and Jacko
Roy
November 19, 2002
12:01 a.m.
Old Ways
Roy
November 15, 2002
12:02 a.m.
Words and Things
Roy
November 14, 2002
1:00 a.m.
Cuffing the Cloth-Ears
Martin
November 11, 2002
5:10 p.m.
Ars Subterranea Draws Hundreds
Roy
November 8, 2002
1:50 p.m.
The Consolation of Revisionism
Roy
November 7, 2002
12:01 a.m.
When Did This Happen?
Roy
November 6, 2002
12:05 a.m.
Election Wrap-Up
Roy
November 4, 2002
12:05 a.m.
The Runner-Baron
Roy
November 1, 2002
12:05 a.m.
All Saints
And don't allow the day
Here inside where I hide
With my loneliness
I don't care what they say,
I won't stay in a world without love
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