Cars,
Cars, cars, cars
Cars, cars, cars, cars
Cars, cars, cars, cars, cars
Cars, cars, cars, cars, cars, cars.
Cars.
–*Kanye and Kim’s new mansion. How does it compare with a hole in your skull?
–*The Elusive Nipples of Miley Cyrus.
–*Acid or industrial press: Which is the most effective way for the government to do away with Edward Snowden?
–*Jennifer Aniston emerges from home without hat and sunglasses.
–*How the government can kill you where you are standing right now.
–*How to burn fat while eating an ice cream sundae and watching reruns of “Friends.”
–*This deflated balloon looks remarkably like Josh Hartnett’s shrunken scrotum after a swim.
–*Is this a picture of Lady Gaga? (We can’t ever be too sure these days!)
–*Breaking: This idiot doesn’t know how to spell “cereal.”
–*Will Cameron Diaz ever get any younger?
–*Parent capturing child’s tantrum over candy goes viral.
–*Child gets even with fake molestation charges.
–*We approached Justin Theroux with a billy club, just to see what he would do.
–*Brides on fire: A pictorial.
–*The most delicious yogurt in the world happens to be 40 feet from this writer’s apartment.
–*Viral video: See why this dog is doomed.
Posted in The Web, Uncategorized | Tagged Jennifer Aniston, Justin Theroux, Miley Cyrus | Leave a Comment »
… I feel like I’m looking at a guy who’s gone blind from too much sex.
Posted in Politics | Tagged Anthony Weiner, Eliot Spitzer, New York magazine | Leave a Comment »
As many of you know, Liz Phair’s debut album Exile in Guyville, is turning 20. That one of my favorite albums ever has turned this corner is supposed to make me feel old. And it makes one ask the question: “When will the genius who made this album ever make a second one?”
Sorry for the snark, but one must occasionally torment his heroes, and after listening to subsequent outings by Phair, I feel like I’ve earned the right to be sarcastic. Oh sure, she’s shown flashes of brilliance here and there, but she was never again as focused as she was on this album, whose cohesive themes of relationships as politics, of female sexuality as a form of forced role play, remain so strongly observed that I still believe they are misunderstood to this day. When I read reviews of Guyville, even in this decade, I bristle when I hear such things as “This is the album where she was really being herself and playing from the heart.” It was obvious to me then and now that Phair was speaking through different female characters on the album, some showing extreme vulnerability, some showing brazen manipulative streaks, some showing the virtues of female sexual aggressiveness. It seemed as powerfully observed as experienced. Take the “Divorce Song,” a take on a doomed romance that tries to capture the pride of two lovers who don’t want to give up even though they should. Or the line from “Strange Loop,” “I always wanted you. I only wanted more than I knew,” which is probably the cruelest, saddest, most brutally honest observation one can make about the reasons many people part, even good ones, even people who really love each other. Despite her first-person treatments, Phair is always standing both inside and outside these observations. If you thought of her only as the girl who sang the dirty blow job lyrics, seems to me the prurience was all yours, not hers.
But she wasn’t without empathy. She let her insecurities hang out more than her boobs, and that’s why people fell in love with her. Furthermore, she couched this in the kind of guitar playing that I would call almost willfully naive, aggressively unknowing. She played chords no professional musician would play because they might have been called discordant at best or just plain wrong. Some of them are ingenious–a plagal cadence starts the album off on “6’1″” and is slyly completed in the album’s last song, “Strange Loop,” neatly allowing the musical and emotional promises of the album to come to fruition at the same time. There are also riffs I still can’t figure out after years of trying to deconstruct them on a guitar. “Dance of the Seven Veils,” one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard–ever–is a piece I’ve given up trying to figure out. It turns me into an infant, sends me back into my fetal dream state whenever it comes on.
For those reasons I haven’t been too concerned with Phair’s long and sometimes embarrassing post-Guyville decline. It seems the more she learned about the guitar, the worse she’s become. The critics who always disliked her (there were a few vocal ones 20 years ago) called her stuff self-indulgent and preconceived, and if they had heard anything other than Guyville, they were damn near right on the money. Her searching guitar chords became as aimless as her strange imagery: “six dick pimps” and “polyester brides” and lots of other confusing crap. It didn’t help that she was already walking a wobbly rail, trying to make rock music for adults, which people like Lou Reed might tell you is a treacherous way to make a living. Occasionally she hit a gold streak–the way she observes her son’s chance run-in with her new lover on the album Liz Phair (in the song “Little Digger.”) But her guileless approach seemed to work against her more than for her as the years went on and the suits came in and tried to save her career (making her work with the Matrix, known for working with acts like Avril Lavigne and Britney Spears–not the kind of people who are going to gently unravel the emotional nuances of sexually ravenous single moms). Phair’s own ambitions for “big sounds” also made it feel like she was being pulled in different directions artistically, and you can’t blame that on a record company.
Why do I not care? Because with one album, she had already done her share. Exile in Guyville isn’t an album. It’s a gift. A gift to the world. And I don’t feel old hearing it now, don’t feel any kind of cheap nostalgia–which is unfortunately the main reason a lot of people listen to music–because, like the brush marks on a gestural painting, the music and lyrics on Guyville still feel alive to the world, still address contemporary issues and will keep giving to the here and now. Compare anything on Alanis Morrisette’s first album, which ranges from ranting to coyness to cuteness and whose most famous song increasingly grates for its loud and repeated inaccurate use of the word “ironic.”
So yes, Liz, I’m waiting for you to make a (real) second album. But if you don’t, I promise I’ll never ask what have you done for me lately. Happy birthday, Guyville!
Posted in Music | Tagged Exile in Guyville, Liz Phair, Spin | 4 Comments »
Ted Nugent.
(API) The Ted Nugent Celebrity Roast kicked off at the Friars Club in New York on Thursday night, a raucous fun-filled laugh fest that featured a constellation of some of the best comedy stars around, all who’d come to rib their fellow entertainer a bit.
“We gather here to toast a man who thinks a loincloth is proper dinner attire,” said veteran jokesmith Mort Sahl. “Maybe tonight he’ll wear a tie.”
Nugent, seated in the audience, laughed heartily at the steady stream of one-liners made all in good fun at his expense.
“Ted Nugent doesn’t know the meaning of the word compromise,” said Don Rickles. “Also, he doesn’t know the meaning of the words ‘matriculate,’ ‘gustatory,’ or ‘erstwhile.’”
Nugent continued to laugh heartily, slapping his knee at Rickles’ shtick.
The gala, which started at 8, went well into the night as dozens of legendary comics took turns to jab at “The Motor City Mad Man.” Even rock ‘n’ roller Dave Grohl took a turn.
“Ted’s music is great,” said Grohl, “although not traditionally my taste. I kind of like rock music.”
“What else can you say about Ted,” said comedian and director Richard Lewis, “He didn’t know that one of his most famous songs, ‘Journey to the Center of the Mind,’ was about drugs. I’d say that not understanding the content of your own speech sums up Ted pretty well.
“But I kid, Ted knows personally that a journey to the center of the mind is best done through the eye socket with an orbitoclast and a mallet.”
“Everybody knows that ‘Cat Scratch Fever’ is Ted’s signature song,” said Norm Crosby. “But ‘We’ll Meet Again’ is the official song of Ted’s corpus callosum.”
Nugent continued to laugh, making the “I’ve got my eyes on you” sign at Crosby.
“Ted Nugent wields a big gun, a big guitar and a big crossbow,” said Shecky Greene. “So how many small penises is he trying to make up for exactly?”
Nugent doubled over with laughter until he was practically peeing himself on the floor.
“A couple of us tried once to explain the word ‘irony’ to Ted to see if he’d have a stroke,” said venerable yuk meister Jackie Mason. “Every day it seems our efforts have paid off anew.”
“Ted is a fulminous critic of black on black violence,” said Woody Allen. “He especially seems ready to bring focus on it right after an instance of white on black violence.”
“You can’t question Ted’s compassion,” said Robert Klein. “He prays for the soul of every person whose head he threatens to blow off. Ted thinks it’s OK to kill an endangered species, of course, if it’s for food, survival or because it’s wearing a hoodie in the wrong neighborhood.”
“People don’t understand when Ted tells everybody, including the president, that they can suck on his gun, it’s a double entendre. I can imagine that Ted explaining double entendre to the Secret Service was a pretty heady discussion.”
“But let’s be fair,” said comic legend Jerry Seinfeld, “Ted mostly doesn’t have the time for meaningless stuff like double entendre, metaphor, rhetoric, simile, dramatic irony, subject-verb agreement, ‘and’ or ‘the,’ or the participial phrases.”
Comedian Gilbert Gottfried said, “Most rock stars have had their minds addled by drugs. Since Ted doesn’t do drugs, we have to ask him, ‘What’s your excuse?'”
Nugent was rolling on the floor laughing by the time he had his own chance to get back at his tormentors.
“Thanks for toasting me,” said Nugent. “I got a joke. Stevie Wonder is brain dead. Eighty million gun owners didn’t kill anyone last night. Trayvon Martin was a dope smoker. Everybody can suck on my gun. California, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts have lost their souls. Fabulous rockin’ NRA orgy last night. God bless you St. Louis. Godspeed REO and Styx. Piers Morgan is bullshit. The truth hurts you subhuman racists. Go to hell. Win a ThermaCell killer bug zapper!”
See this clarification about the preceding story.
Posted in Satire | Tagged Don Rickles, Florida, Mort Sahl, NRA, Stevie Wonder, Ted Nugent, Trayvon Martin | 1 Comment »
So we’ve finally come to the end of the debate over marriage equality and our gay friends 
have won an unquestionable legal right to marry. Right?
Well, no.
Wednesday’s historic Supreme Court decision invalidating the key part of the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as being between a man and a woman, has likely set the stage for a series of arguments in the state houses over the issue. The majority opinion in the United States v. Windsor, written by Anthony Kennedy, essentially says that the Defense of Marriage Act for no good reason allowed the federal government to stick its nose into a state issue, the affairs of family, to single out one group and injure a class of people that one of those states, New York in this case, sought to protect. As he put it:
“DOMA’s avowed purpose and practical effect are to impose a disadvantage, a separate status, and so a stigma upon all who enter into same-sex marriages made lawful by the unquestioned authority of the States.”
What the decision doesn’t do, however, is make gay marriage the new law of the land. By making this a state issue, the court left open the unhappy idea that it might not strike down gay marriage bans in less liberal states.
Look at the decision on California’s gay marriage ban handed down the same day. In that ruling the court decided not to take up an appeal on California’s law, but this was an issue of standing, not the constitutionality of criminalizing gay nuptials. The state of California had refused to defend the law any longer, and the gay marriage opponents who appealed had no direct stake in that appeal, so legally the Supreme Court didn’t have to argue the substance before it simply passed the hot potato right into the garbage. (The majority opinion in that vote offered an interesting Red Rover game in which Roberts stood alongside justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan against Sam Alito and Sonia Sotomayor, crews as motley as one could imagine.) The decision in Windsor also found an executive branch–Barack Obama’s–unwilling to fight for the DOMA, so a party directed by Congress had to get involved.
Of course, the standing issue is important to this argument for myriad reasons. Standing means that a plaintiff must have been directly harmed or have some connection to the harm caused by a law. In the case of gay marriage opponents, that applies … um … never. As I’ve joked here before, gay marriage does no harm whatsoever to straight people other than directly offend what must be their smutty imaginations. That fallacy was again voiced relentlessly today as religious conservatives again said that allowing gays to freely marry somehow deprived them of freedom. I guess because the act contradicts what they believe, it is a form of mind control. I’m stretching there, but it’s hard to make sense out of such a brutally senseless argument.
But as glib as I’d like to be that questionable legal representation produced a happy effect, Emily Bazelon at Slate, among others, asks a fair question: Is it right that the will of California voters was subverted in this case because their state government refused to fight for a law they passed? Would our joy at seeing gay haters’ asses handed to them on an issue of standing be so funny if this were, say, a water pollution issue that our state refused to fight?
But I don’t wish to be ambiguous. I’m happy for the decision today, that five of the Supreme Court justices called the Defense of Marriage Act what it was–malice against a group of people. A law that disapproved of a class of people one state, New York, was trying to invest with some status and integrity.
You can, of course, read Justice Antonin Scalia’s whining dissent, filigreed with such thumb-sucking lines inveighing against the “black-robed supremacy” of a court gone out of control. It is more tired rhetoric about judicial activism, something Scalia, whose willingness to become activist in defense of conservative causes, ought to be too embarrassed to keep saying out loud by now. Then there are predictable screeds by National Review editors who try to subvert the logic of tolerance by saying gay marriage proponents are somehow full of contempt. See what pretzel logic man Rich Lowry did there? I’m not the one hating the people I hate. It must be something they are doing. The people I hate must be causing it somehow.
That attitude was institutionalized by the DOMA. That attitude spawned a law of the land. That attitude was why the law came crashing down under its own weight.
Posted in Family, Politics, Relationships | Tagged Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Barack Obama, Defense of Marriage Act, DOMA, gay marriage, John Roberts, Proposition 8, Supreme Court | 1 Comment »
Here’s an awful article by the Mail Online, which, as you know, trades in awful articles the same way numismatists trade in cob coins. The paper disingenuously promotes a theory Elizabeth I was a man, mainly to promote what looks like an awful book.
The proof seemingly is that there have been other conspiracy theorists on the subject, namely Bram Stoker, not that any historians were actually consulted. Supposedly, Elizabeth died 470 years ago of plague while still in her teens. Her handlers were so afraid that her father would punish them with slow, painful death that they found a boy to take her place, and they taught him to live life as a princess, then later a queen, all to hide the original lie. She grew into “the Virgin Queen” and was cloistered from society, all to hide her manhood.
Of course, in truth, Elizabeth I had plenty of boyfriends and did want to marry one of them but couldn’t for political reasons. If that’s not enough to persuade you she was a woman, maybe it would be the fact that she lived rather transparently in front of a full court, plenty of whom could have exposed her masculinity but instead focused on the fact that she was kind of slutty, vain and had a filthy mouth. Still not enough? How about you consider that by the date of her supposed “death” in 1543, she wasn’t even really a contender for the throne. She came in last for succession behind her younger brother, her older sister, and any other children they might have had, not to mention any new male children her stepmother might have had with the king. In other words, she wasn’t remotely important enough at that point for a “Weekend At Bernie’s” type fraud.
I’m trying to decide what I find so distasteful about what is obviously a tongue-in-cheek article by a saucy tabloid that only wants to excite my basal ganglia with fun gossip. Is it a feminist reaction to the Mail’s suggestion that no woman could have possibly defeated the Spanish Armada and turned England into a world power? Nah. Is it the fact that conspiracy theorists are so able to supply filigreed detail to their suppositions without creating a plausible basic narrative? Nah. Is it that spreading this shit is a quick way to make friends, and that it has likely been that way for 500 years? Yeah. That’s the one.
Lies are more rugged as memes. They propagate faster than truth because they somehow forge local bonding, a trend that behooves us as primates, to close ranks against interlopers. Truth, meanwhile, is unhelpful. It is complicated. While we sit contemplating truth, we are often paralyzed by the analysis it requires. That makes us helpless to act, and as we are stuck in reflection, introspection and narcissism, meanwhile our group is easily preyed upon by hyenas and tigers and honey badgers.
Still, if I can recommend a highly paralyzing read, I’d point you to Carolly Erickson’s books on this subject, “The Great Harry,” “The First Elizabeth” and “Bloody Mary.” As for the Daily Mail, I recommend that you limit yourself to its Kate Upton pictures. That is, if you can trust that she’s female.
Posted in history | Leave a Comment »
–*The death toll is either in the hundreds or in the low tens.
–*At least two bombs went off, though we can’t discount that one of the building echoes might have been a third or a fourth bombing.
–*Several Saudi nationals were taken into custody.
–*These Saudi nationals were then booked, tried, convicted and hanged after a speedy jury trial by day’s end.
–*The chief suspect is Mohamed Atta.
–*Marathons were invented by the Egyptians.
–*Boston is located in the great state of New Hampshire.
–*Every foreigner who fled the scene of the blast is a suspect. Only foreigners who ran toward the blast are in the clear.
–*Abe Vigoda is dead.
–*It wasn’t a bombing, it was just a fallen scaffolding.
–*It wasn’t really tax day, since you can always file an extension.
–*The Boston police cannot determine at this time if they have arrested a suspect.
–*The Boston police have been holding a mysterious man in an iron mask for 34 years who is thought to be President Obama’s twin brother, the man who can prove Obama was born in Kenya.
–*A conflagration later reported at the JFK Library was reported, but it was uncertain whether the event was a mechanical fire, an explosion, or just readers’ passion for books.
–*The New York Post‘s source is a woman named Lennay Kekua and The New York Post deeply loves her and believes she is The New York Post‘s soul mate.
–*Mahmoud Ahmadinejad likely factors into this story somewhere; The New York Post is just trying to find the right paragraph to stick him in.
–*Test X180 with fenugreek extract and ginseng will improve your performance on and off the field.
–*According to Boston police, Ronald Reagan’s sunny optimism allowed America to feel good about itself again.
Posted in News, Politics | Tagged Boston Marathon bombing, Iran, New York Post, Saudi Arabia | Leave a Comment »
I spent a lot of this week troubled by the bombing of the Boston Marathon. The only relief for me was that this, like the Newton massacre, was something I didn’t have to explain to my very young son yet.
But eventually I’ll have to. I’ll have to explain to him how people hate and use violence to achieve political ends, that they are capable of extreme thinking they can’t give voice to and must demonstrate with force what they can’t do at the ballot box. Writers and artists sometimes don’t give themselves enough credit for their existential advantages–the fact that they have a means to express themselves. A voice to shape their environment, even if it is to an infinitesimal degree. Even if it’s through a painting in a garage that nobody sees, or a piece of music unpublished or a poorly traveled blog. But the crippled, politically disenfranchised soul who can bomb a peaceful sporting event using pressure cookers filled with nails is the sort who makes violence an expression of what he’s otherwise impotent to say.
We all have extreme beliefs. But we have to absorb other people’s realities. We have to embrace freedom. We also have to recognize when freedom becomes tyrannous in and of itself–an infinitely regressing obsession with perceiving barriers. No matter who this person was, he or she has a perception problem and perceives that he is in some way not free. Some people walk down the street with endless freedoms and still see nothing but a jail.
I can’t yet tell my son that it’s statistically very unlikely that he’ll ever be hurt in a tragedy like this. Or that terrorists are rarely that successful and that people tend to react disproportionately to rare events because of fear and make irrational future decisions prompted by statistical outliers. (The Atlantic has a good article on this.) I remember after 9/11–there was a lot of argument that New York, having been attacked, would immediately be attacked again. Specifically, by nukes. That fear even roused the sage Warren Buffett to decry imminent nuclear strikes on D.C. and the Big Apple, which made people take notice of course, even though he’s a investor, not Nostradamus, and, if you know anything about his investing philosophy, it has nothing to do with predicting trends. In fact, his prediction was an anomaly for his philosophical and financial temperament. I told a friend frightened by Buffett’s prediction that the 9/11 attacks actually proved just how desperate our enemies were. It showed, demonstratively, that they had no nukes. Nor bombs. Nor guns. They had to come up with an almost impossible plot, one that could have been frustrated at several points (and partly was over the skies of Pennsylvania). If the entire plot had been foiled ahead of time, let’s be honest, many of us would have derided it as hopelessly cartoonish.
Of course it wasn’t foiled. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t rare. According to some psychologists, my child is only going to be as anxious as I am about this and the horrible other news that has come down this week in Congress and West, Texas; these days, every attack, explosion and school shooting makes me anxious. I can’t yet impart to my son the wisdom of statistics. Instead I have to absorb the wisdom of forbearance and tolerance and critical thinking and feel confident enough about my world that I can make my confidence his.
Posted in Politics | Tagged Boston, Boston Marathon bombing | Leave a Comment »
Beauty is Imperfection 