When a dearly beloved alternative band breaks up ("Moooorrrrisssey! You fuckin' bitch! Let's work it out!"), three forces collude to do something that lurks somewhere between beneficient and evil. Lawyers, labels and aging ex-members of the band put out their B-sides. In the case of Frank Black and the Pixies, the results are more on the beneficient side of the ledger, thanks largely to the efforts of Jeff Price and SpinArt records (which, I should probably confess, are both friends of the family). If you don't know the Pixies, get to know the Pixies. If you already love 'em, then you probably own this and should buy a second copy for your little brother or hip Eastern European penpal who's still only on Echo and the Bunnymen. Never-before-released tracks include "Rock A My Soul," "Here Comes Your Man" and "Oh, There's My Mind."

See other featured Amazon products.

--City Journal
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--The Villager
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--Commentary
--Dissent
--The Economist
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--Me Three
--Mother Jones
--Le Monde Diplomatique
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BOOKS:

-- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami {A Japanese detective story/war novel/Kafka rip-off. It's great.}

-- Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, by Christopher Hitchens {First drafts of history, second thoughts on received wisdom, versatile meditations on great works of literature -- all by a man who can write about anything.}

-- The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse {The Rise and Fall of the "Black Shorts," and the best of Bertie and Jeeves. You'll need Wodehouse in your life eventually. Start here; you've 89 or so more to go.}

-- The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, by Isaac Deutscher {Magnificient biography finally back in print, along with Volumes II and III. But better start before the revolution -- and Deutscher's conscience -- was betrayed.}

-- Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S., by Jeremy Leven {A sorely forgotten modern classic. Leven has since swapped the galley for the camera, directing such keepers as Don Juan Demarco and The Legend of Bagger Vance. Satan has relapsed.}

-- Colossus, by Niall Ferguson {Why the U.S. can't hack neo-imperialism, much to Niall's chagrin.}

-- Reflections on a Ravaged Century, by Robert Conquest {Don't even try to have an opinion about the twentieth century without reading him.}

-- Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh {One of the funniest books, ever. Shrinks the remainder of the "innocent abroad" genre to the vanishing point.}

-- Put Out More Flags, by Evelyn Waugh {Lapidary prose on the frisson between the wars. Basil Seal riding low before he rides again; Auden and Isherwood lampooned as "Parnsip and Pimpernell."}

-- The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh, by E.W. {Nasty, brutish and short, in short form.}

-- The Origins of Postmodernity, by Perry Anderson {Terrific writer from the London Review of Books and New Left Review, who ought to be more famous than he is, tackles lucidly the abstruse bloodhound gang -- from Habermas to Jameson -- of Theory.}

-- Saul Bellow: Novels 1944-1953: Dangling Man, The Victim, and The Adventures of Augie March, [Library of Congress Hardcover Edition] {Look: it's his world, we all just live in it.}

-- The Counterlife, by Philip Roth {How Portnoy learned to stop complaining and write a brilliant postmodern novel.}

-- Rise of the Vulcans, by James Mann {Probably the only low-blood pressure source on Bush's brain trust. Valuable for charting the progression of neo-neo-conservatism, and how Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz contravened, and then dismantled, the Kissinger realpolitik foreign policy machine.}

-- Money, by Martin Amis {Forget Bonfire and Psycho. It took the English author of The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America to effectively chew up the Reagan era -- largely by reminding us that it was also the Thatcher era. A fine lesson in history repeating, too: Di and Charles were TV's original Ben and J. Lo; the Self-on-Massi sex tape is where Paris (if she can read) might have learned her stuff; and the cavalier cash flow in this soft-boiled checkbook who-dun-it tale rivals that of any West Coast dotcom monkey a decade later.}

-- The War Against Cliché and Experience, by Martin Amis {If Amis kept on doing what he did in his award-winning collection of critical essays, James Wood would lose more hair. It's saying quite a lot that his non-fiction exceeds his fiction. Experience is by far the best memoir to appear in the last decade: a more muscular Speak, Memory, it's a midlife nostalgia trip pureed out of chronology, though somehow more cohesive than a stream-of-consciousness hodgepodge. Guaranteed to pluck at the coronary sinews for anyone dealing with the loss of a father.}

-- Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis {A comic genius on academia, Amis is the pitch-perfect representative of postwar male rage. None of that Angry Young Man, stuff, though. His apoplexy is hilarious at any age. The faces: "crazy peasant," "sex life in ancient Rome," "shot-in-the-back." Moo, by Jane Smiley, The Straight Man, by Richard Russo and everything by David Lodge seem impossible without this Platonic key ring to rule them all, and on the campus, bind them.}

-- The Letters of Kingsley Amis, edited by Zachary Leader {Pay close attention to the letters to Philip Larkin -- together with Larkin's Collected Letters (try eBay, sorry), these constitute the documentation of one of the most rewarding and hilarious literary friendships to date. Amuse yourself by guessing the exact page number where Kingsley abandons Communism.}

-- The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, by V. Nabokov {I'm way underqualified, with my mean years on the planet, to state critical opinion. Still in larval adulation, which I understand is a longterm afflication. Read Anthony Lane's review in Nobody's Perfect. And M. Amis on Nabokov in toto in the prenominate War Against Cliché. And get a dictionary.}

--The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, edited by Leon Wieseltier {The style is dated and stilted, but the insights are not. Especially worthwhile: the Orwell essay, the Mansfield Park burn, and "The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time" (i.e. "What Do They Know of America, Who Only the Upper West Side Know?"}

-- The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, by James Wood {The bling to Dale Peck's blah.}

-- A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace {Self-indulgence and the consequences of a missing-in-action editor never had it so good. The state fair, cruise ship and TV pieces are the best. But also read the Lynch essay: it'll make you want to re-watch Blue Velvet, which you can conveniently buy below.}

-- Collected Poems, by Philip Larkin (edited by Anthony Thwaite) {Poetus mirabilis and, after Auden, the occupant of a near empty Hall of Metrical Wonders in the Postwar Anglophone wing of the museum. Master ironist and curmudgeon you least want to bludgeon.}

-- Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, by Margaret Macmillan {A dryly told account of global dust-settling after what was then myopically known as "the Great War." Explores the follies of Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau, which helped bring about WWII.}

-- Doomed, Bourgeois, In Love: Essays on the Films of Whit Stillman, edited by Mark Henrie {Discreet charms of the bourgeoisie given the scholarly treatment by the kinds of New Criterion-y people who liked Grosse Pointe Blank because John Cusack's assassin refused to unionize. Don't let the pedantry taint your judgment of Stillmania, though.}

-- Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi {A beautiful paean to Western literature from an Eastern scholar living under Islamic statism; the Gatsby trial and Jane Austen dance chapters are particularly enjoyable.}

-- The Persian Mirror: The Elusive Face of Iran, by Elaine Sciolino {For those with short odds on the next war of choice.}

-- Nobody's Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker, by Anthony Lane {He needs to stop it with the creepy drooling over Natalie Portman, but Lane is still the best around for losing it at the movies.}

-- The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl {Adult stories, less like his children’s stuff than what O. Henry would have been like if his ironic plot twists had involved wife-swapping, cannibalism, or turning infants into superhuman bee-monsters. Might be fun for the kid who never reads, actually.}

-- The Chicago Manual of Style, by the University of Chicago Press Staff {and the ghost of Allan Bloom.}

-- The Brothers Karamazov, by F. Dostoevsky, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky {Incest! Murder! Theodicy!}

-- Collected Non-Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges {A prose impresario short-winded enough to keep beside the toilet -- especially if your john is in a labrynith that transcends spacetime.}

-- Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by John Shepard {Stories narrated by John Ashcroft, John Entwistle, Nazi rocket riders, the creature from the black lagoon, and others.}

-- My Life and Hard Times, by James Thurber {Think of David Sedaris, in turn of the century Columbus, Ohio. And without the gay schtick, or even a pretense at respect for his family.}

ALBUMS:

-- You Are the Quarry, by Morrissey {He's back! And almost paid off the deficit incurred by Maladjusted. A few gripes: "America Is Not the World" never fulfills the promise of its title. It's an unwieldy blunderbuss, not a rapier -- and the use of "hamburger" as synecdoche for our national obesity problem is a new hackneyed low for the Oscar Wilde of the microphone. "I Have Forgiven Jesus" ultimately works, but I can't help but feel that that one was just too easy.}

-- Weightlifting, by The Trashcan Sinatras {Remember them from your college radio daze? A brisk homecoming track, appositely named "Welcome Back" ("Everyone survived / Everyone's alive!" -- well, thank goodness) kicks off this highly accomplished return to musicmaking for an alt-pop band that shouldn't have stayed away so long.}

-- Strange Bird, by Augie March {With a name like Augie, it has to be good. It is. Analogs fail me.}

-- Evergreen, by Echo and the Bunnymen {Best 80's Band Comeback Album. No contest.}

-- Mermaid Avenue, by Billy Bragg and Wilco {A fucking classic. Ukanian bloke Billy Bragg manages to capture the rhythms of dustbowl Americana better than Dylan -- the obvious disciple/witch doctor to perform a Woody Guthrie resurrection -- ever could do. All lyrics by Guthrie, music by Bragg and Wilco.}

-- Don't Try This at Home, by Billy Bragg {Most people who hear Mermaid Avenue invariably want more of the man who brought it to them. This is Bragg's most "accessible" solo album, though not without the politics that's defined his career. "Accident Waiting to Happen" is a punk snarl against cultural fascism.}

-- Galore, by Kirsty MacColl {May this earth angel charm the knickers off the winged principalities. MacColl died a few years ago in a boating accident, but I can only imagine how well-attended her funeral must have been by the panoply of musicians guilty of "sampling" her Celtic nightingale voice. This album consists mainly of covers, but that's more than all right for someone generous enough to never ask for top billing, despite consistently stealing the show.}

-- These Are the Vistas, by the Bad Plus {"Smells Like Teen Spirit," the jazz standard. No kidding. Comes off not just better than you'd expect, but brilliantly.}

-- SMiLE, by Brian Wilson {Reviewed here. Check to the right.}

-- The Soft Bulletin, by the Flaming Lips {And the hard singing voice to take, but worth it anyway.}

-- It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, by Public Enemy {More complicated rhymes and denser loops than have been on the radio before or sense, plus the guy with the big clock.}

-- Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?, by the Unicorns {Morbid, tinny, wildly innovative and beautiful.}

-- Loaded: Fully Loaded Edition, by the Velvet Underground {Funny, Lou Reed doesn’t usually look this happy. Must be Laurie Anderson's doing.}

-- Traitor In Our Midst, by the Country Gazette {What you always thought bluegrass was supposed to sound like.}

-- The Modern Lovers, by the Modern Lovers {Speaking of Lou Reed, remember the guy with the guitar who gets shot in Something About Mary? Imagine that guy redoing "White Light/White Heat," but with lyrics about aging with dignity and eschewing drugs. That sounds like a snark, but it’s actually the SAM guy, and John Cale produced.}

-- The Queen Is Dead, by The Smiths {I can't believe you don't own this already. The summa of the Moz/Marr collaboration.}

-- The Boatman's Call, by Nick Cave {The Prince of Darkness may have been afraid to board a plane after 9/11, but this "New Testament" sound is proof of moisture's sustainability in Hell. "Into My Arms" is sweet enough to play your girlfriend on Valentine's Day, leaving the oldie-but-dreary "Deanna" to blast at her when she dumps you.}

-- No Cities Left, by The Dears {The lead singer cried when Morrissey asked the band to open on the "You Are the Quarry" tour. That kind of gone-to-pieces sentimentalism can only lead one place: straight down. Get 'em while they're new and good.}

-- The Boy With the Arab Strap, by Belle and Sebastian {Might as well order that black V-neck sweater, Rimbaud's Collected Poems, while you're at it. "Theoretical" bisexuality not a requisite, despite what angry twee detractors say.}

FILMS & TV:

-- Cannibal! The Musical. {Trey Parker's college thesis, a feature-length movie musical about the only American ever convicted of cannibalism. Not for all markets, but better than most of his later stuff.}

-- Before Sunset, directed by Richard Linklater {The sequel that doesn't feel like one. Why thirtysomethings who chat are more interesting than twentysomethings who do likewise. Some sluggish moments, but all made up for by a luminous final scene that made me fall in love with Julie Delpy once more. Bet it made Anthony Lane "spill [his] Sprite" again, too.}

-- Collateral, directed by Michael Mann {Tom Cruise has always been a hard-working, as opposed to naturally gifted, actor. This part was his pension come early. Michael Mann is the Richard Avedon of the moving Los Angeles image. And Jamie Foxx ain't too shabby, either.}

-- The Unbelievable Truth, directed by Hal Hartley {Surreal-ish debut from a master indy filmmaker and satirist. Yes, that is Edie Falco as the diner waitress.}

-- Henry Fool, directed by Hal Hartley {Hartley's masterpiece. Probably the only movie about writers that's ever worked. Barton Fink, anyone?}

-- Metropolitan, directed by Whit Stillman {Downwardly mobile 60's college jet set. Making a film about this demographic is like trying to play matchmaker to a Republican leper in Northampton, Mass. That the dialogue (and it's all dialogue) stays liquid-tongued is a monument to Stillman's talent... dare I say, genius?}

-- Barcelona, directed by Whit Stillman {Anti-Americanism when it was more funny than scary. The "subtext" speech belongs in Bartlett's. The DVD commentary is, as someone from the earlier film might say, "priceless."}

-- The Last Days of Disco, directed by Whit Stillman {An assault on 70's cliche in the best possible way -- the anti-54. Also known as Yuppies: A Defense. Chloe Sevigny gives grace to the one night stand, instead of head to Vincent Gallo.}

-- Mr. Jealousy, directed by Noah Baumbach {Who wouldn't hunt down the ex-boyfriends of Annabella Sciorra? Eric Stoltz had fewer difficulties with girls in Mask. Chris Eigeman from the Stillman flicks swaps Mayflower pedigree for facial hair (modelled on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest jacket photo), to varying degrees of success. An underrated romantic comedy, but don't say I didn't warn you: this film may engender awkward relationship conversation. It may also plant supersleuth-stalker seeds in frail men's heads. Or so I've heard.}

-- Blue Velvet, directed by David Lynch {So many epigones, so far from this mark.}

-- Father Ted: The Holy Trinity {BBC TV series about three priests on an island. No, not that kind of series, you sick fuck.}

-- The Office - The Complete Collection (First And Second Series Plus Special) {Creator, writer, director and star Rick Gervais used to manage Suede and now this. That's enough laurels for one lifetime. He can die now.}

-- Arrested Development - Season One {To think that Teen Wolf Too was just a glimpse of Jason Bateman's potential.}

07/06/05 - 09/30/05
05/05/05 - 07/05/05
03/31/05 - 05/04/05
2/24/05 - 3/30/05
1/16/05 - 2/22/05
12/3/04 - 1/15/05
9/1/04 - 12/2/04
7/14/04 - 8/31/04
6/23/04 - 7/13/04
  Wednesday, May 4, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

It's the Stupidity, Economists: Part III... I ripped on Paul Krugman Monday for deceitfully arguing against Bush's proposed reduction in the rate of Social Security benefit increases; I did the same to John Tierney yesterday for pretending he lives in Chile. Today I want to make my own points about the benefit cuts.

Bush proposed to index benefits to prices for high-end earners, fixing their benefits at a constant inflation-adjusted income. Lower income workers would continue to have their benefits indexed to wages, as they are now. Wages traditionally increase more quickly than prices. People between the extremes would see their increases indexed to some sort of average between the two rates.

The press jumped on this proposal by calling it a "benefit cut," which is kind of true, but not in the way most people understand a "cut." Decades from now, it means middle- and upper-class earners will get less than the law currently anticipates giving them, but at no point will benefits be reduced from what they were the previous year. The increases will simply be smaller.

Once people got that straight, the idea that's been bouncing around the echo chamber has been the idea that this is all a plot to undermine the popularity of Social Security in the long run. Right now Social Security is a bad deal for the middle class, but if it were an even worse deal, it would somehow cease to be popular. (e.g. This Slate essay, titled "How to Make the Middle Class Hate Social Security") But even if this were Bush's motives, wouldn't it make more sense to infuriate both poor and middle-class people (by increasing the payroll tax rate or raising the retirement age) or the wealthy and powerful (by raising the cap on the taxes)? Or is the suggestion that we keep the program as it is and run a deficit? Considering deficits are the basis for financing every other government program, especially the military, I don't see why nobody has suggested doing this. It's not like we aren't looking the other way on Medicare.

When I read these criticisms of the Bush-Pozen plan, I don't understand why nobody is worrying about the poor. It's taken as given that wages rise faster than prices, so benefits for the poor will rise faster than benefits for the wealthy. But the reason we have wage-indexed benefits now is because in the late '70s prices were rising faster than wages -- and the government switched to a wage index to slow the increase in benefits. Ironically.

So in times of prosperity, or normal or even tepid growth, the poor will see their benefits rise faster than inflation. Great! But in times of stagflation, prices rise quite a bit faster than wages. The wealthy will see their benefits stay at the same inflation-adjusted level, so that part of their retirement income will keep pace with a surging cost of living. But the pension of the poor will lag behind the cost of living, possibly by quite a bit. And because the other half of stagflation is a stagnant economy, things will have to get pretty bad before they can get better. This is what happened in the late '70s and early '80s. Advances in economic theory have made stagflation less likely -- but not impossible.

So this bifurcated indexing would give the middle-class a smaller, but more stable, Social Security benefit. The poor would get a benefit that increases more rapidly in good times, but actually contracts when they need it most. The poor would still come out ahead on average. But those who depend on Social Security and expect it to keep up with inflation could experience real hardship if the economy were to really tank the way it did during the '70s oil shocks. Instead of worrying about what Joe Suburb is going to think about a price index, we might consider what could happen if, or when, the economy tanks again to the poorest seniors.

Tomorrow I'll tie this all together (and justify this title) with some remarks on the private retirement plans the government already gives you, and why privatized Social Security might be a better deal for retirees for precisely the opposite reasons being offered by the Republican party. --Nic Duquette [link]

Al Qaeda "General" Nabbed... Abu Farraj al-Libbi, the number three guy, was caught in South Waziristan (sort of like a less "over" South Hampton of Sharia law to Kabul's once bustling Gotham).

Al-Libbi helped orchestrate one of the assassination attempts on Musharraf, as well as the execution of WSJ reporter Danny Pearl. This comes a day or two after a memo to Zarqawi was intercepted in Iraq, claiming a lowered "morale" among jihadists. It's not too much to assume there'll be an assassination attempt -- hopefully just an attempt -- on a senior Iraqi official in the coming weeks. This morale then can only drop even further as "the base" slowly and methodically chips away at itself. --Michael Weiss [link]

That's It: Dan Savage for Secretary of Health and Human Services... I'm not kidding. What the fuck did Donna Shalala ever do in comparison to this man? This week someone writes in to suggest that Bill Frist get a new use for his ever-workable last name, a la Rick Santorum. But Savage replies that this game, if kept up, would exhaust itself way too quickly.

I don't know about you, BISD, but I don't ever want to hear my boyfriend say, "Stick your dobson in my scalia, big bauer, and musgrave the gates out of me until I ratzinger." Could any man maintain an erection after hearing that?

And as for Bill Frist, yeah, he's a freakin' asswipe. But any attempt to attach his name to a sex act will only confuse people. If you tell someone you're into "fristing," they're going to think you're a fist-fucker with a speech impediment. And, really, Bill Frist doesn't need my help ruining his good name. He's doing a good job of that all by himself.

--Michael Weiss [link]

Shhh... Speaking of the Onion and, you know, neocons: "I Can't Stand It When Jews Talk During Movies."

I sure didn't pay $10 to listen to a group of twits talk back to the screen like those obnoxious Jewish robots from Mystery Science Theater 3000! And apparently, "God's chosen people" weren't selected based on their ability to follow plotlines. No wonder they wandered the desert for so many years—they can't even watch a Vin Diesel movie without getting lost. --Michael Weiss [link]

The Public Interest No More... First PR folded up a few years ago, now PI's gone too... Those who really believe neoconservatives are of a single mind on everything and rule the world oligarchically will be reminded of that Onion headline: "Starbucks To Begin Sinister 'Phase Two' Of Operation." Hell, even 'Phase Two' is outmoded, given what Kristol & co. hath already wrought. Or so plenty regularly affirm in op-ed columns, which read as if they were hatched by some uni-brained Politburo of opinion.

Yeah, well plenty ought to read these two pieces. The first is by Grand Moph Tarkin himself, the second is by the cuddlier, fuzzier-headed Nathan Glazer.

Neocons: Fellow-Traveling the Donner Party Way Since 1972. --Michael Weiss [link]

Tuesday, May 3, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

In the Company of Company Men... Glengarry Glen Ross is back on Broadway and Ben Brantley plotzes all over the Theatre page of the Times about it.

This transfixingly acted production, which opened last night at the Royale Theater, leaves you with a case of happy jitters that may keep you up hours past bedtime. But what's a little lost sleep when you've had the chance to see and hear a dream-team ensemble, including Alan Alda and Liev Schreiber, pitching fastball Mamet dialogue with such vigor, expertise and pure love for the athletics of acting?

So unwised-up and ebullient for a man whose profession afflicts more pain and human suffering than dentistry.

I once got to play Shelley "the Machine" Levine in a very independent production of it in college. I should say "re-imagining" of it: half women, half men. I hated this idea at the time because it seemed to be following a too common trend of "updating" plays that already managed enjoy that rare reward of being both timely and timeless. It wasn't until I saw MacBeth set in the Caribbean with full Carmen Miranda regalia that I realized, so long as the dialogue remains untouched, they can try all they want to add the turg to drama; perfection still abides. Anyway, our thing came off amateurish but not because of the gender split, which meshed scarily well with the metaphoric emasculation of the characters it was possible to literally emasculate. This was 1999, when Eve Ensler was using one pair of lips to rap about the other, so I guess I shouldn't have been that surprised.

Speaking of Eve, have you seen this? (I picked the worst day to write about going laissez-faire on academia.) --Michael Weiss [link]

Yeah, Cause Who'd Want to Snatch a Fugly Little Bugger?... Parents keep a better eye on their pretty kids than they do on their ugly ones. --Michael Weiss [link]
It's the Stupidity, Economists: Part II... I attacked Paul Krugman here for using deceptive arguments against Bush's benefit slowdown. Today I'm going to attack John Tierney for doing the same thing in favor of privatized accounts.

Any time a NYT columnist calls himself a "control group," I hope a red flag goes up in your mind. Tierney compares his non-privatized Social Security pension with the one his friend Pablo from Chile is going to get. Chile privatized their pension plan in 1981. Tierney claims to control for income disparity between himself and Pablo, and concludes that the privatized system gives back roughly a third of American social security. The implication is that privatized plans make for three times the retirement.

But there's one problem with Tierney's "experiment." The test subject and control group are in two very different countries. Here is a chart of the S&P 500 since January 1981 and the Santiago IPSA index since 1989:

Chile has been growing at an astonishing pace in the past twenty years. It's easier for a developing nation to grow at a fast pace than a developed one -- I've heard it compared to cyclists drafting off the lead biker. As Chile's economy has boomed and its financial markets have matured, its stock market has exploded. Even giving the S&P an eight-year head start, the IPSA's growth on a percentage basis has been triple the S&P.

This comparison would be more accurate if I had data on the Chilean markets going back to '81, when the shift to private pensions happened. But I can't find it. Since financial markets have an upward bias, the gap between Chile and the USA growth is probably even bigger. But maybe not. If anybody knows where I can get better Chilean stock numbers, let me know. --Nic Duquette [link]

Signing Your Shame at Page Six... To read a thousand and one different ways of describing Lindsay Lohan's giant tits, you now need to dish on annual income, email and -- worst of all -- name. --Michael Weiss [link]
Born in the USA, Invented on the Glossy Page... A terrific up-down-and-back-up-again profile of Bruce Springsteen by a fan who, without bitterness or guilt, has let the scales fall from his eyes. The imago of The Boss may have faded (because it never deserved to exist), but Stephen Metcalf still hears America singing:

By 1978, and the release of Darkness on the Edge of Town, the endearing Jersey wharf rat in Springsteen had been refined away. In its place was a majestic American simpleton with a generic heartland twang, obsessed with cars, Mary, the Man, and the bitterness between fathers and sons. Springsteen has been augmenting and refining that persona for so long now that it's hard to recall its status, not only as an invention, but an invention whose origin wasn't even Bruce Springsteen. For all the po-faced mythic resonance that now accompanies Bruce's every move, we can thank Jon Landau, the ex-Rolling Stone critic who, after catching a typically seismic Springsteen set in 1974, famously wrote, "I saw rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen."

Metcalf goes on to quote, in concession to the sprigs of authenticity still rising up out of the acid-washed "roots," an excerpt of Bruce's speech at the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony for U2. It (the excerpt) amounts to "I'm rich and I've sold out, and by saying that I can't possibly mean it." An interesting counterpoint here would be Bono's speech at Bruce's induction ceremony a few years ago. The liquid-tongued Irishman gave an unforgettable paean to the Bard of Underdogs. The line that was probably engineered to stick in people's minds sure as hell stuck in mine: "We called him 'The Boss,' but this was wrong. He worked for us." Yeah, yeah. "With us" is closer to the mark. Nothing could have sold without people eager and willing to buy.

Still, the bathos isn't quite that asphyxiating. We needn't add another broken hero to the already pretty jammed highway because it's always been about the music. The legend's allowed to be bullshit. --Michael Weiss [link]

A Liberal Academe... I recently joked here that gay marriage was the only remaining uniquely "liberal" cause. I have been corrected. Conservatives in the academy are probably not weighing in at sociological investigations like the one below. This is a real email sent out, unfortunately, by the college I graduated from just a year ago:

Date: 02 May 2005 20:05:58 EDT
From: Women in Leadership
Subject: "WHY DO YOU ALWAYS LEAVE THE TOILET SEAT UP?"
To: (Recipient list suppressed)


*******WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP******
TOMORROW 6:00-7:00PM
Morrison Commons, Rockefeller Center

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"WHY DO YOU ALWAYS LEAVE THE TOILET SEAT UP?"
Questions Women Have for Men

A chat with Sociology Professor Michael I. Borer

Come participate in a roundtable discussion where you get to ask the questions you've always wanted to.
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--Nic Duquette [link]
Monday, May 2, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

A Rittle Ornery... The White House press secretary, characteristically a warm glob of statesmanlike phlegm, was pushed to the vituperative max today after North Korea launched a "test" missile into the Sea of Japan.

With the language used by both sides sharpening, Mr. Card denounced the North Koreans as "bullies" and called their leader, Kim Jong Il, "not a good person."

Ooh, tungsten sharp! How many peasants have to be sacrificed just so Andy Card can dispense with the euphemistic nice-nice and tell like it is, huh?

His comment came a day after North Korea called President Bush a "philistine" and a "hooligan."

Almost enough to give up the struggle right there. Soccer has hooligans, for chrissake.

The only one not pulling his punches is... Take a wild guess. --Michael Weiss [link]

It's the Stupidity, Economists: Part I... Krugman (PoKro?) has gone back to Social Security after promising to deal with health care for a month or so. This is too bad, because Krugman was making good points on health care, even if some of his statistics were misleadingly framed. His latest on Social Security is deliberately deceptive, however. Here we go:

Sure enough, a close look at President Bush's proposal for "progressive price indexing" of Social Security puts the lie to claims that it's a plan to increase benefits for the poor and cut them for the wealthy. In fact, it's a plan to slash middle-class benefits; the wealthy would barely feel a thing.

Under current law, low-wage workers receive Social Security benefits equal to 49 percent of their wages before retirement. Under the Bush scheme, that wouldn't change. So benefits for the poor would be maintained, not increased.

No, no, no. This is a common deception used for political ends, whereby one party can brag that they increased spending while the other party claims they decreased it. Nobody's benefits will be going down under this Bush plan. None. Nobody's. No spending will be cut. None.

Here's what's actually been suggested by the president. Benefits will continue to be increased every year, but the rate at which they are increased will be less for wealthier earners than the rate at which they currently increase. Right now, SS benefits are indexed to wages, which usually rise faster than prices in an expanding economy. It hasn't always been this way. During the Carter era of high inflation, prices briefly grew much faster than wages. At that time, the switch was made from price indexing to wage indexing because the government apparently thought that trend would continue for a while. But it makes more sense to tag benefits to prices, so that what your pension buys now it can keep buying in the future.

So what Bush is essentially prosposing is to keep the extra-generous wage indexing for those who depend most on Social Security, while adopting the less-generous index for those who depend on it least, and everybody in between would sort of split the difference. If you're a member of the middle class, planning to retire after 2015, and you've ever actually estimated your Social Security benefits and used them to plan your retirement out to the dollar, you have a right to be angry. But I'm not sure more than five people in this entire country have done all those things.

What Krugman would prefer is to raise the cap on wages subject to Social Security taxes, currently capped at $90,000. This would be a transfer from the wealthy to the middle class, instead of from the middle class to the poor. I'm morally comfortable with either option, but Krugman's argument that reducing the benefits to the middle class will make Social Security vulnerable in the future seems pretty far out. He may be right, but giving the very wealthy an incentive to do away with the program by making them pay for virtually all of it sounds like a better recipe for electoral evisceration than giving the middle class slightly less free money.

I'll have more to say about this over the next couple days, including what's wrong with Tierney's pro-privatization column, why Bush's plan really could screw the poor, and an argument for privatization nobody's really talked about much. --Nic Duquette [link]

There's Something About Laura... She smokes, she reads Stoppard and McEwan, and she deftly incorporates horse cum jokes into Correspondents dinners. Three words: Dowd. Bush. Jell-O. (Because otherwise the terrorists have already won.)

The only thing better than her schtick is the Washington Times' coverage of it.

"One night, after George went to bed, Lynne Cheney, [Secretary of State] Condi Rice, [Bush adviser] Karen Hughes and I went to Chippendales," she said, referring to a strip club where women tuck cash into male dancers' skimpy thongs. "I wouldn't even mention it except [Supreme Court Justices] Ruth Ginsberg and Sandra Day O'Connor saw us there. I won't tell you what happened, but Lynne's Secret Service code name is now 'Dollar Bill.'"

Oh, come on. Even the Moonies know about Chippendales. Didn't they do a "mass wedding" there once? --Michael Weiss [link]

The Apotheosis of Fan Fic... Check out this indy Star Wars movie called "Revelations." A bunch of fans made it with desktop CGI and a $20K budget. (Slate has the in-depth story.) Because of copyright laws the poor hyperdriven nerdlettes can't ever profit from their vision. A shame, too, because this is stylistically better than what Lucas has been putting out since the millennium.

Although, fanboy extraordinaire Kevin Smith has seen Episode III and thinks it's sweet, dark redemption for four hours of pop cultural life we can't have back. --Michael Weiss [link]

Least Existentially Necessary NYT Headline So Far This Week... Scientists Say Red Speck Is Indeed Huge New Planet. Put that in your cosmic significance pipe and smoke it. Someone over at "Science" has got a bad case of the Mondays. --Michael Weiss [link]
Horizontally Integrated... I've said before that Paris Hilton is going to be Lynne Cheney in twenty years. Someone, somewhere is going to get caught wondering if she wasn't that Internet porn sylph way back when, as she testifies before a Senate oversight committee about the perils of bottle service or human cloning or whatever. I mean, where does a twinkling little star without a gag reflex have to go from here? Either she chops up Bijou Phillips and then heads for the White House, or it's the smoother transition from fabulous Motorola anarchy to "sensible" Ann Klein culture. Looks like a twit, sounds like a synergist. Meet the new boss:

She said that she was pursued by dozens of talent agencies, but chose Endeavor because "they know how to do branding and they're really smart." Over an early dinner of Chilean sea bass and salad at the Cipriani in SoHo, Ms. Hilton said she intended to model her career after those of the moguls Sean Combs and Donald Trump. "Puffy is a genius," she said of Mr. Combs. "He does everything. Music. Clothing. I totally look up to him and Donald Trump because he's built this whole empire - hotels, casinos, resorts, a television show." --Michael Weiss [link]

Saturday, April 30, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Peeled Magnolias... Who is Jennifer Wilbanks? White, southern, suburban chick, tall, pretty and scheduled to be married Saturday in Duluth, Georgia. Instead, she disappeared a few days ago and was thought to have been kidnapped or worse. What in the world was going in this country? The "news" topped the headlines each day and our media wizards were sure sinister plottings were afoot.

As it turns out, she's just another runaway bride (in this case, literally, as she had gone out for a jog when last heard from). Why did she take a bus all the way to Vegas? Why did she then go on to Albuquerque? Who gives a shit? This never should have been national news in the first place and now it turns out to be a non-story entirely. Though it appears Gore Vidal was wrong when he said of Duluth: "Love or loathe it, you can never leave it or lose it." --Mark Grueter [link]

The Man of Vyra on the Man of La Mancha... Planning to celebrate the 600th anniversary of Cervantes' masterpiece by actually reading it for the first time? You could do a lot worse, says James Fenton, than to consult Nabokov's literalist but droll lectures on the Don.

Among the numerous misconceptions about Don Quixote is the idea that the knight never wins any of his contests: he always ends up with a drubbing. But that is not true at all.

In one lecture Nabokov goes through the contests one by one, and scores them, finding that the tally is even: the Don wins as many contests as he loses. "Moreover," says Nabokov, "in each of the two parts of the book the score is also even: 13 to 13 and 7 to 7, respectively. This perfect balance of victory and defeat is very amazing in what seems like such a disjointed and haphazard book. It is due to a secret sense of writing, the harmonizing intuition of the artist."

Something numerologically signficant about that scoring, too. --Michael Weiss [link]

The Clashsky... The state of post-Soviet Russian punk? Better educated, more grown up than the Anglophone original stuff. Still just as raw and angry and politically driven. Putin's got his work cut out for him with these Uncle Joe Strummers nipping at his heels:

PTVP's full name means "Last Tanks in Paris," a play on the title of a 1972 Bernardo Bertolucci film, as well as a reference to the French student uprising of 1968 and the suppressed "Prague Spring" of the same year. Formed in Vyborg in 1996, the band is now one of Russia's last remaining outposts of uncompromising, politically conscious music.

Nikonov described his most recent album, "2084," as an album about love, despite its Orwellian title. He described this as a deliberate move to distant himself from political groups, mostly left-wing in nature, who liked PTVP's stance and wanted its fan base to support them.

"They wanted to make me their flag. But I don't want to be anybody's flag, so we intentionally made an album of love songs," he said. --Michael Weiss [link]

Zakaria on Friedman's New Book... In the course of reviewing Thomas Friedman's new book on globalism, Fareed Zakaria, the conservative Indian editor of Newsweek, uses the following expressions: "schticks" and "From your mouth to God's ears." For someone without an MA in economics, I give you my best-guess vindication of Friedman's thesis right there. Still, the infelicity of ToFro's style can't be ignored even by his neoliberal boosters:

In one of Friedman's classic anecdote-as-explanation shticks, he recounts that one of his best friends is an illustrator. The friend saw his business beginning to dry up as computers made routine illustrations easy to do, and he moved on to something new. He became an illustration consultant, helping clients conceive of what they want rather than simply executing a drawing. Friedman explains this in Friedman metaphors: the friend's work began as a chocolate sauce, was turned into a vanilla commodity, through upgraded skills became a special chocolate sauce again, and then had a cherry put on top. All clear?

Crystal. Like a Waterford vase manufactured in Addis Ababa, telemarketed in Karachi and shipped... oh, never mind. --Michael Weiss [link]

Friday, April 29, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Oh, Peggy... It's a damn shame Mary McCarthy and Dorothy Parker are no longer with us (although, if nail-growth occurs after death, then the jury's still out on the viability of the retractable claw.) What I wouldn't give to have either one's feline counterstrike to this pious puppy tail-wag from Peggy Noonan:

"Those who are pursuing John Paul II's canonization, please note: his first miracle is Benedict XVI."

Had she let out a ripsnorting fart during a silent interim at Midnight Mass, that would have still been less embarassing than the above sentence.

Speaking of embarassment, the Wall Street Journal sketch artist must have been watching Three's Company re-runs on Nick-at-Nite. He make Benedict XVI look like a hornier Mr. Roper. ("Damn it, Helen, I'm giving the eucharist.")

But don't just take my word for it. Check out James Wolcott today, in Gore Vidal Overdrive Mode. The next best thing to the Unvirgin Mary appearing in your morning bailly, or Dot running vicious circles round OpinionPage. --Michael Weiss [link]

Eagleton on Wittgenstein... He went on more "Razor's Edge experiences" than even a German philosopher should be allowed in a single lifetime. The propositions in his only book, The Logico-Philosophicus Tractatus, came as a complete mind-fuck to the not-easily-discomfited Bertrand Russell. And then there was that whole fireplace rumble with Karl Popper...

Is it any wonder that a big bundle of sturm und drang like Ludwig Wittengenstein remains the 20th-century philosopher of choice for novelists, filmmakers and artists?

The Mancunian T-Bird does his thang in TLS. I wish he'd cut it out already with the summary explanations of the too-obvious. This is becoming a bad habit in his book reviews lately, probably his way of overcompensating for these breezy, perspicuous After Theory times of ours:

Two excellent pieces in this volume, by Bernard Harrison and John Gibson, show us how the apparent choice between this “textualism”, and the idea of language as mimetic or referential, is a false one. In Gibson’s appealing view, literary fictions engage with the world by providing us with a kind of archive of the standards and criteria we need in order to narrate our own way in it. Wittgenstein himself observed that nothing is more important for understanding the concepts we have than constructing fictitious ones.

Got that? You read books because they "relate" to "human experiences." Oh, and the proper study of mankind is man. --Michael Weiss [link]

Thursday, April 28, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

In Defense of Happy Slapping... The latest "craze" in the UK involves teens using cell phone cams to record their friends slapping other people in the face. Just one slap, delivered randomly, but one that creates quite a shock. These impish kids then post the footage online, for shits and giggles.

In America, the news has been met with alarm and despondency (stern voices, shaking heads, raised arms) comparable to the proliferation of missing children in Florida. Just more evidence of how far astray our debauched youth has gone. Now, I agree that it's simply wrong to hit girls, but other than that it strikes me as something that might've come out of Benny Hill or Monty Python. Boys will be boys. I wouldn't want to be hit of course, but really, is this sort of nonsense newsworthy? --Mark Grueter [link]

The Energy Policy... I wonder whether President Bush timed his announcement of a new energy policy so the formation of an Iraqi government would drown it out in the news. That's a shame, because if he pulls it off this policy would be the biggest geopolitical and environmental achievement of his presidency. He's calling for bigger tax breaks on hybrid cars, more clean coal technology, more natural gas, more nuclear power, as well as stopgap expansions of oil refinery capacity. Getting half of these through Congress with adequate funding would be great. Getting all of it would be blockbuster. Because Bush is proposing to give this technology away to developing nations as well, he could (1) single-handedly do more for global warming than Kyoto could even imagine, (2) drive down energy dependence on foreign oil, undermining dozens of despots and their terrorist cells, (3) set the stage for a largely nuclear-energy/fuel-cell economy, which has virtually no environmental or geopolitical cost as long as the reactors are kept safe and clean.

It's even more astonishing to consider he's doing this contrary to the desires of several powerful interest groups, including the oil industry, the US auto industry, and his own party. He'll get no thanks for it from the left, either. I wait eagerly to see whether he can pull this off. --Nic Duquette [link]

New Government Approved in Iraq... Chalabi gets Minister of Oil. Uh-oh. You know what that means. Maureen Dowd has about 15 fewer words to agonize over for her next column.

Twenty-seven ministers and five acting officials gained approval from 180 members of the 185 who were present in the 275-member Parliament, ending a three-month political stalemate that has appeared to be fueling violence... Six women will share the administration of seven ministries. --Michael Weiss [link]

Wednesday, April 27, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Decline of the West? Jesus, Not That Again... Joseph Bottum, the Thomas Aquinus of The Weekly Standard, weighs in on His Most Crustified Recent Eminence:

Does anyone doubt that Western Europe is tumbling downward? It cannot summon the will to reproduce itself. It has aborted and contracepted its birthrate down toward demographic disaster: perhaps 1.4 children per couple across the western end of the continent, when simple replacement requires a rate around 2.1. It can discover neither how to absorb nor how to halt the waves of Islamic immigrants swamping its cities, and it has proved supine in the face of those immigrants' anti-Semitism, anti-Christianism, and even anti-Europeanism.

Look Joseph, I'm an American, New York-born -- New York, that saturnine city -- and I'm perfectly happy to see the Continent finally exhibit a lazy Malthusian continence from below, rather than have it legislated from above. And the litany of "antis" you attribute to immigrants does not detract from the xenophobic creepiness of the phrase, "the will to reproduce itself."

Two or three days after his election, a journalist violated every rule of the Holy See's etiquette by shouting out [to John Paul II] at a papal audience, "Are you going to Poland?" Leo XIII would have had the Swiss Guard take the man down for a session in the Holy Office's penitential dungeons. Pius XII would have sat silent and stared--through those harsh, wire-rim glasses he wore--for as long as it took to make even a reporter blush. But John Paul gave instead his trademark, tilt-headed smile and said, "Wait and see, wait and see." It was said to be the first unscripted answer a pope had ever made to a journalist.

Mark the sequel to this walk down memory lane with the more irascible Leo and Pius...

In point of fact, as a few Vaticanologists have noted, Ratzinger's tenure at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was one of the most lenient ever.

See above for the history against which to compare such "leniency." The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith used to clock in under the no less euphemistic title of the "Holy Office of the Inquisition." "Hey, Torquemada, whaddya say?" "I just got back from an auto-da-fe!" "Auto-da-fe, what's an auto-da-fe?" "It's what you shouldn't do, but you do it anyway!" Sorry. Guilty as sin for coughing up the same liberal-media spiel about the Ratz.

He's a Social Democrat, after all, from Germany, where they always thought they were going to find a way to split the difference between communism and capitalism.

Not to mention another shorter-lived "ism" that springs to mind. I don't think I'm being reactionary or hyperbolic to remember the kind of "regime change" that defined the days of General Schleicher and von Papen. The Church affiliation with this shamed center-left ruling party of the 1930's is an area for historical repudiation and apology -- which, to be fair, Ratzinger was instrumental in bringing about under his predecessor's pontificate. But the secular side of things are now moot since, as Bottum admits, it's a cultural cold war against "relativism" that's being waged. In that, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are apparently the only conservative "bloc" that counts.

Now the job has fallen to Benedict XVI, who must find a way to reason, with those who no longer believe much in reason, that intellectual seriousness and moral rationality--"the postulate and the condition of Christianity"--can still guide Europe away from the new Dark Ages.

Please. --Michael Weiss [link]

The George W. Dollar Coin... That sounds like a joke, but it looks as though it's going to happen. Sorry, rabid liberals. The bill passed the house with only six nay votes. Barring something unexpected in the Senate, in 2018 there will be a George W. Bush dollar coin. In the interim, look forward to dollars featuring luminaries such as James Garfield, James K. Polk, Gerald Ford, and Herbert Hoover.

That's right -- it's time once again to give the government money in return for legal tender, patriotically etched copper-nickel alloy. The fifty state quarters cost a nickle apiece to mint, and a large share of them went right into children's display maps and hermetically sealed coin preservation envelopes. That's free money for the government. Now imagine doing the same thing with a coin worth four times as much, and you have the reasoning behind the presidential dollar coin bill.

The only problem I see with the scheme -- other than having to look at Chester Arthur's muttonchops every time I break a five in February 2009 -- is that it gives the government a way to raise money without running a deficit or raising taxes. Soon there will be collectible half-dollar vice presidents, great Civil War battle dimes, random shit Franklin did two-dollar coins, and then they'll just start stamping whatever they can think of on there. It's going to be like the freakin' post office. Elvis on every coin minted the day of his Ed Sullivan appearance. Special red bills for Valentine's Day. You'll be able to custom etch your face on the penny for twenty bucks. Sorry, Abe. --Nic Duquette [link]

Scrap Bolton for Dad?... Thomas Friedman -- who in the last few days has earned enough style-based obloquies from this site to warrant his own Dowdian nickname: ToFro -- sounds a lot like a cuddlier Jesse Helms in his latest Times column, which calls for the rescission of John Bolton's U.N. nod.

In short, I don't much care how the U.N. works as a bureaucracy; I care about how often it can be enlisted to support, endorse and amplify U.S. power. That is what serves our national interest.

Then he drops the triumphalism and channels his inner Bono:

"Reforming the U.N." is without question one of the most tired, vacuous conservative mantras ever invented. It is right up there with squeezing "waste, fraud and abuse" out of the Pentagon's budget. If the White House is concerned about waste, fraud and abuse, let's start with Tom DeLay and our own House.

But all this, after he make a rather provocative alternate choice for the ambassadorship: George Bush, Sr. No shit:

Look, John Quincy Adams went back to Congress after he served as president. Why shouldn't George H. W. Bush take another spin around the diplomatic dance floor he loved so much and where he left his biggest mark? He's already demonstrated with his parachute jumps that he has the stamina for the job, and his performance as a tsunami relief ambassador was a great success.

The irony there of course is that the man who wants to replace the burnished patina of "US legitimacy" doesn't seem to anticipate the jeers and sneers that'll come if Pops heads to New York.

Trotsky once referred to Sir Joseph Austen Chamberlain, brother of you-know-who and erstwhile British secretary of state for foreign affairs, as "that modern pocket edition Pitt." (Trotsky had his own beef with the Anglo-Soviet Communist alliance, which Stalin royally fucked and betrayed, as he would eventually do everything.) But Chamberlain's father -- just Joseph -- was a ruthless agitator for the expansion of British empire, as were both "unabridged" 18th-century Pitts (or "Pisses," as Alan Bennett had them in a memorable scence of The Madness of George III). William the Elder and William the Younger both said and did everything they could -- one as prime minister, the other as PM-understudy -- to stop the American revolution from happening.

Now Just imagine if Bush I ever became the visible pinion of the diplomatic wing of Bush II's "Doctrine." Would the Adams' family values be the sort most immediately invoked? --Michael Weiss [link]

When Pushkin Comes to Shove... Hitch stalks the Caucasus in The Atlantic this month. His quarry is Mikhail Lermontov's celebrated tribute to the candle that burns twice as bright and only half as long, A Hero of Our Time.

One is more than tempted to speculate that Lermontov made Pechorin do what Pushkin could not: discover the plot against his life and then act with ruthlessness and cold decision to ensure that it was the assassin who was assassinated. This makes it the more eerie that he was incapable of such resolution in his own life and death. Czar Nicholas I had denounced A Hero of Our Time in a clumsy letter to his wife. (As Anthony Powell, a superior contriver of literary and social coincidence, once phrased it, "In spite of Russia's great size, the number of people who actually operated things politically, socially, culturally, was very small. Thus a poetry-writing subaltern could be a real thorn in the side of the Tsar himself.") When Lermontov was brought to the field of honor, he apparently declined to fire on the fool who had provoked the duel. Slain on the spot, he never heard the czar's reported comment: "A dog's death for a dog." His unflinching indifference on the occasion, however, drew on two well-rehearsed nineteenth-century scenarios: the contemptuous aristocrat on the scaffold, and the stoic revolutionary in front of the firing squad. The Decembrists, in their way, admired and emulated both models.

That's the problem with being the founding literary father of a nation as geographically and spiritually large as Russia: the eventual court conservatism is a given. (From Virgil to Bellow, show me a laureate of letters of whom this hasn't been true.) Nabokov says in The Gift that the reader of Pushkin "has the capacity of his lungs enlarged." With an Eastern emigre's shift of longitude, we can see this respiratory exuberance being generated by a hills-and-daffodils poet like Wordsworth, but surely not by his most hilarious and unremitting critic Byron, whose own bailiwick lay in the enlargement of other organs. Indeed:

The Casanova complex -- a hectic and indiscriminate pursuit of women who are not truly desired -- is sometimes suspected of being a masking symptom of the repressed homosexual. Byron's frantic activity in this sphere (or do I mean in these spheres?) has long been a subject in its own right. Powell mentions that although the duel that extinguished Pushkin was apparently about his wife's supposed adultery, "there were also homosexual undercurrents in the circles involved."

This is from Don Juan:

I've known a dozen weddings made even thus [by female coercion],
And some of them high names: I have also known
Young men who--though they hated to discuss
Pretensions which they never dreamed to have shown--
Yet neither frighten'd by a female fuss,
Nor by mustachios moved, were let alone,
And lived, as did the brokenhearted fair,
In happier plight than if they form'd a pair.

There's also nightly, to the uninitiated,
A peril--not indeed like love or marriage,
But not the less for this to be depreciated:
It is --I meant and mean not to disparage
The show of virtue even in the vitiated--
It adds an outward grace unto their carriage--
But to denounce the amphibious sort of harlot,
Couleur de rose, who's neither white nor scarlet.

That first stanza could be the epigraph on any state bill legalizing gay marriage. That second one, with its ambiguous ("amphibious") coloring ("couleur de rose") of language leaves some doubt as to whether Byron's still talking about a woman. The ambiguity here, at least, is set in greater relief than it is in some of the more eyebrow-raising, gender-bending sonnets of Shakespeare. And whereas the Bard's off-page activities are still -- pace Stephen Greenblatt -- cloaked in mystery, the sherbert-and-pederasty and sister-fucking chapters in Byron's biography are pretty unexpurgated. You can also, if you're in a frisky Gus Van Sant kind of mood, try and "read" Peter the Great's affection for the "Blackamoor" of Pushkin's famous short story in much the same way... --Michael Weiss [link]

Our New RSS Feed... We've gone Seattle Starbucks-trashing global, baby! Just point your RSS reader to the link attached to ye old icon to your left, or here, and get daily updates from this site. Like Kirsty Alley, we only deserve to get fed once a day, so there may be some lag time between "Really Simple Syndication" and Really Real Publication. (For Your Information.) --Michael Weiss [link]
Nogger: Not-Nice Cream... Fuckin' Swedes. Can't they do anything without giving flaxen blue-eyed offense? The logo for some Stockhomey-brand ice cream product:

Which, you've got to admit, is quite an improvement on R&D's other suggestions: Manding-Rings, Klondyke Bar (what would you do for one, bitch?), Vera Drakes Cake. Check your grocer's freezer!

Slate's got the full skinny. --Michael Weiss [link]

He Makes It Too Easy Sometimes... Like Tom Lehrer's epitaph on satire when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize.

President Bush raised eyebrows on Tuesday when he asked locals in Galveston, Texas: "Do you still have Splash Day?"

"Splash Day" is the annual "adult oriented enormous beach party" celebration on the Gulf Coast.

BUSH: Do you still have Splash Day?

(LAUGHTER)

BUSH: You have to be a baby boomer to know what I'm talking about.

(LAUGHTER)

BUSH: I'm not saying whether I came or not on Splash Day. I'm just saying, Do you have Splash Day?

(LAUGHTER)

Bush was unaware "Splash Day" is now a fully gay and lesbian event on the beaches.

That this comes courtesy of Drudge ... it's like the anti-matter of satire. --Michael Weiss [link]

Monday, April 25, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

The Pain...The Merck Vioxx recall looked like it would be the corporate malfeasance story of the year when it broke. But within twenty-four hours, the media astonishingly began to tilt toward a neutral position, or even toward favoring the faceless corporate giant over the little guy who allegedly had a heart attack caused by Merck's painkiller. Reason ran an effective story defending Merck based on the evidence, while even the Times ran a little guy article -- about the plight of tortured arthritis sufferers who didn't care about the cardiac risks, buying up the shrinking supply on the stuff on the black market. (That weepy article is no longer online.)

But now that it's going to trial, the first Merck liability case looks to make the Michael Jackson case seem a black-and-white cover-slammer. Nobody involved looks to be unbiased. Consider:

- It appears Merck may have pressured its scientists to hide cardiac death data, after all.

- The widow of the alleged victim supplied some boxes of the Vioxx her husband was supposedly taking when he had a heart attack. But the lot numbers on the boxes indicates that the pills weren't manufactured until after the man died.

- The judge presiding over the case received huge reelection campaign contributions from the lawyers for the plaintiff.

- The case was brought in this district of Alabama specifically because it's among the poorest and least educated parts of the state, on the assumption that fine points of medical science might as well be presented to a team of sled dogs as any jury likely to be assembled.

That nobody appeares exculpable in this mess turns this into prime litigious farce. Let's do some justice, baby. --Nic Duquette [link]

Jon Stewart: A Sheep In Wolfe's Clothing... Every liberal I've ever talked to who claims to be an admirer of Tom Wolfe, despite the novelist's avowed conservative politics, always offers the same apologia: "Yeah, but he's an equal opportunity offender. He satirizes the left and the right." I always wonder if it isn't a pretty satiric campaign they themselves are mounting as people who claim to have actually read Wolfe's books. (Even Orwell, who famously misjudged Dickens on his Tory-ish alignment, at least misjudged him in all the right ways.) Alternatively, I've heard Republican votaries of Billy Bragg -- Billy Bragg! -- tell me that you can actually siphon out the "radical socialist agenda" from the music and appreciate tracks like "I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night" and "Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards" on a strictly musical level. (The singer-songwriter for whom the question of "mixing pop and politics" causes the languid resort to "embarassment" and "usual excuses" would have an unequivocal incitement to riot if he ever heard such nonsense.)

So now people who do concede Jon Stewart's "left-of-center" affiliation still maintain that The Daily Show is fundamentally non-partisan and merely opposed to cant and stupidity and lying. Not so, says City Journal writer Harry Stein, who, it must be said, doesn't argue the case as effectively as he might or should. Still, evidence like this hardly needs elaborating:

[Stewart] appeared to be making a far bolder move a couple of months later when, with the democratic tide rising in the Middle East, he acknowledged that maybe Bush’s policy in the region hadn’t been so loony after all. He admitted that such a thought left him full of “cognitive dissonance,” but “when you see the Lebanese in the streets, you say, ‘Oh my God, it’s working!’"

“[P]retty soon, Republicans are gonna be like, ‘Reagan was nothing compared to this guy,’ ” Stewart added, cradling his head in his hands. “Like, my kid’s gonna go to a high school named after him, I just know it.”

“Well,” comforted his guest, a die-hard former Clinton official, “there’s still Iran and North Korea, don’t forget.”

“Iran and North Korea,” echoed Stewart hopefully, as he thrust crossed fingers up in the air for luck. “That’s true, that is true.”

At least somewhat reassured, his audience roared.

Of course, this kind of laughter in the dark doesn't actually mean that there are people who harbor such antipathy toward the president that they now openly pray for his (and our) failure on explosive matters of foreign policy, much less root for Ayatollah Khamanei and Kim Jong-Il. No way! Just you try and get away with putting something like that over on the American people and you'll risk being asked the biggest wife-beating media question of them all: "Where's your sense of humor?" --Michael Weiss [link]

Pay Up, Jacko... Michael Jackson owes Bank of America $270 million. The fact does not impress me except that I must wonder if there is any connection between this and the bank's simultaneous refusal to clean it's own fucking ATM stations, or to provide them functioning pens, or to make sure the machines are working properly. --Mark Grueter [link]
Iraqi Prison Abuses... Four officers cleared, including Sanchez. I don't like the idea of appointing an "independent council" to investigate (or re-investigate) the torture of Iraqi detainees because such congeries usually resort to grandstanding and PR campaigning before they even question a single witness. The matter should be resolved internally, by the military. But not by the United States military alone. Why not create an ad hoc international tribunal to investigate the war crimes of this war (you know, like the permanent and authoritative tribunal this country still doesn't recognize for any wars)? The members could be culled from the high-ranking officer corps of the coalition. Why shouldn't British and Polish and Australian adjuticants sit in judgment of American soldiers? This would surely lower the temperature of intrigue and cover-up surrounding the Abu Ghraib scandal, and it'd keep our senators and congressmen safe from feats of Zogby-derived heroism. --Michael Weiss [link]
Not BBC Hecklers After All... An inflammatory headline on yesterday's Drudge Report reads: "BBC plants hecklers to disrupt UK Conservative Rally..." and links to the corresponding article in The Daily Telegraph.

After loyally making the case for the Tories against the BBC, the Telegraph writer, reveals the fact that the BBC insists the hecklers it filmed were NOT in any way affiliated with the BBC, much less "planted" there by them. This is a boneheaded attempt by Drudge to prove yet again how "liberal" the media is, here and abroad. --Mark Grueter [link]

Saturday, April 23, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

You're The One For Me, Fatty... I like the spirit of fuck-you regimen rebelliousness in this column, but the joke practically burns itself up in the atmosphere of the lead. (Though for a piece about winning through sinning, I suppose it's appropriate that the comedy is mainly ham.)

Voluptuous Catskills conservatism against the way we live now (as if that were a distinction with a real difference.)

"Tomorrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing; but to-day the struggle." --Michael Weiss [link]

Hast Though Slain the Filibuster?... In a move certainly directed at putting an end to fun-in-politics altogether, Dick Cheney and the Republicans are about to change the Senate rules, making filibustering a thing of the past. If all kids are like I was at age 10, the word "filibuster" is the only thing they find even remotely interesting when learning about their country's politics. The word itself is a snicker-inducer in elementary school classrooms, and the image of a 60-year-old Senator rambling on and on and on for hours just because he doesn't like some proposed idea is just plain funny, not to mention a good racket to try on your parents. Now, with the removal of this anarchist tactic, Cheney will effectively be stopping any potentially government-bound adolescents in their tracks. I bet he hasn't thought of that consequence. --Orli Sharaby [link]
Friday, April 22, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Supe's Up... Letting aside for the nonce that "Man of Steel" in Russian is "Stalin," Superman's return to cultural center stage seems perfectly well timed now that the neocons apparently control everything. Remember: Jorel was Krypton's genius stateman and pioneering intellectual who, in agitating to warn his government about the planet's impending apocalypse, became its lone Cassandra, or "Prophet Unarmed." Prior to this he earned some measure of fame for thwarting a reactionary general plotting a coup. This general was banished to a one-dimensional "Phantom Zone," which sounds an awful lot like Siberia. So a fairly hawkish papa, you might say. And the greatest dialectic is that we all eventually become a reconstructed version of our parents, right? Dad (thesis), Kid (antithesis), Grown-up Kid (synthesis). So where the franchise left off -- Superman promising the UN General Assembly to rid our world of all nuclear weapons, like some airborne Alan Alda -- it picks up with Blue Boy doing... What? Puttering around the golf course with Cheney and Scalia would be my guess. Next stop, World Bank. Jihadis beware.

Hugh Laurie, the BBC's Bertie Wooster, is cast as Perry White in Bryan Singer's new sequel. --Michael Weiss [link]

Today's Friedmanism... I love Tom Friedman's opinions, but since his writing is getting roasted today, I'd like to point out today's jarring cliche-pairing:

The other very real thing Mr. Blair has done is to get the Labor Party in Britain to firmly embrace the free market and globalization - sometimes kicking and screaming.

An odd embrace, that. Rough on the shins and the ears. --Nic Duquette [link]

Matt Taibbi: All's Forgiven For the Lame Pope Jokes... Thomas Friedman's columns are less susceptible to a close reading of stylistic whoopsy-daisies and thundering solecisms than Maureen Dowd's columns are. This is because the latter has very little to say and spends 750 words saying it the way Cathy might if she got laid more often and her comic strip was set in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. (Where would MoDo be without the verbally jazzercized sneers and "Hungry like the Wolfowitz" clunkers?) But Friedman induces a fugue state of uncritical absorption and comprehension of the "Big Picture" in geopolitics, as though a strange but wise Himalayan mystic had taken over the Times op-ed page every Wednesday and Friday. "The Muslims are angry, we must show them the path." "Freedom is nice, it has pleased the Jew in us all." "We must become the master our fear before our fear becomes our master. My son's Lebanese soccer coach told me this."

So it's a distinct pleasure to see someone go to work on Friedman over the sheer infelicity of his prose. The recently imperiled writer at the New York Press, Matt Taibbi:

"I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins."

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that's guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.

This is laugh-out-loud funny:

"As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: 'The playing field is being leveled.'

"What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened... Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!"

This is like three pages into the book, and already the premise is totally fucked. Nilekani said level, not flat. The two concepts are completely different. Level is a qualitative idea that implies equality and competitive balance; flat is a physical, geographic concept that Friedman, remember, is openly contrasting -- ironically, as it were -- with Columbus's discovery that the world is round.

Except for one thing. The significance of Columbus's discovery was that on a round earth, humanity is more interconnected than on a flat one. On a round earth, the two most distant points are closer together than they are on a flat earth. But Friedman is going to spend the next 470 pages turning the "flat world" into a metaphor for global interconnectedness. Furthermore, he is specifically going to use the word round to describe the old, geographically isolated, unconnected world... That he misattributes his thesis to Nilekani is perfect: Friedman is a person who not only speaks in malapropisms, he also hears malapropisms. Told level; heard flat. This is the intellectual version of Far Out Space Nuts, when NASA repairman Bob Denver sets a whole sitcom in motion by pressing "launch" instead of "lunch" in a space capsule. And once he hits that button, the rocket takes off.

--Michael Weiss [link]

Breaking All Rules And Not Even Learning Them First... There is something pretty shabby about the democratization of poetry. It's become an art that can be practiced as casually as it is (or isn't) appreciated, which is to say real examples of its artistry are becoming rarer and rarer. At college, I edited a sometimes not-terrible-at-all humor magazine. Our office was right next door to the well-funded headquarters of quite a number of undergraduate literary journals, and every so often, in between labored dick and fart joke, I'd peak in to peruse what gem-like flames were burning up the recycled pages of academic composition. Frankly, I couldn't tell who in the business of real comedy. Still-born mutts passed for doggerel. Iambs were unheard of, much less heeded. Meter and rhyme -- best save those for the anti-globalism placards. In short: no one knew what the hell they were doing when it came to versification.

The teaching and study of form is nowadays met with (ahem) a "wardrobe of excuses" for why such a thing is either superfluous or -- if you can believe this and you shouldn't -- sinister. Modernism killed prosody, we're told. Sonnets, villanelles, witty and necessarily orderly vers de societe -- all "constructs" of The Man trying to keep everybody down.

I usually don't defer to The New Criterion on matters of literary judgment, but this essay is a sobering eulogy on the kind of conservativism* that doesn't make for bad politics, but true beauty.

*Actually, Ezra Pound, whom the author is far too generous towards, was a fascist in the actual, non-poetic sense of the term. And he's best remembered for injecting technical chaos where it didn't belong. T.S. Eliot, with his roots that clutch and his branches growing out of Pound's stony rubbish, redeemed the chaos. --Michael Weiss [link]

Sydney Pollack: Consummate Schmauteur... Who let Slate go and get so wised-up about American cinema?

It's often suggested that Pollack has an unrivaled knack for wringing great performances out of his actors. On the set of Tootsie, his best film, he butted heads with Dustin Hoffman, and the battles lent Hoffman's performance an electricity, a great unease. (And for once Pollack juggled the embarrassment of talent, with bit parts for Terri Garr, Bill Murray, Charles Durning, and Pollack himself.) Pollack's later work rarely betrays the notion that his leading men have been given any direction at all. How else to account for Redford's All-American gauziness in Out of Africa -- he "looks as if he'd been blow-dried away," quipped Pauline Kael -— or Ford's low-decibel mumbling in Sabrina? As Pollack has retreated as a director, he seems to bring out the very worst in Redford and Ford and Cruise. They revert to their virgin states: elusive, grinning blanks.

And now who gets the treatment but Sean Penn, the elusive scowling blank of goodwill ambassadorship to the Middle East. Judging by the trailers for The Interpreter, Penn looks as if 6 months of shooting opposite Nicole Kidman was hardly a lovely distraction an impending Bolton appointment.

Pollack's best feats on film happen in front of the camera, not behind it. Husbands and Wives: The midlife crisis zhlub dragging his twit aerobics trainer girlfriend out of his friends' party. Eyes Wide Shut: The society surgeon, wondering in the semi-buff (man-rolls curling his cumberand) just how many OD-ed hookers it'll take before the American Medical Association loses its patience. --Michael Weiss [link]

Thursday, April 21, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

A Citation... Having bemoaned the state of modern sportswriting (essay at right), I've decided it's time to start issuing tickets until sports journalists -- sorry, "ink-slingers" -- learn to write. Here's the very first one:

Issued to: Jeff Horrigan, Boston Herald
Event: MLB, Red Sox-Orioles, April 20, 2005
Offense: Counterfeit Coincidence
Block Quote:

Considering that David Wells idolizes Babe Ruth, it was only fitting that Camden Yards was the setting for the left-hander's second consecutive gem for the Red Sox in an 8-0 victory over the Baltimore Orioles last night. After all, the Bambino's father once ran a saloon in what is now center field and Wells' eight shutout innings ended up having a sobering effect on the Orioles.

There's at least four degrees of separation there between last night's game and the demolished speakeasy. Not "fitting" at all.

Should you see any atrocious sportswriting, send it to me with a note detailing what offends you so. Sportswriting is generally pretty hackneyed even in the best newspapers, so only egregious offenders will be issued citations. --Nic Duquette [link]

Vaya Con Dios, The Public Interest... Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell's ideology-spliced, policy-vetting brainchild of the 60's has got this very loving tribute from one of its last editors David Skinner. This is the first time I've seen a Morrissey reference wriggled into the pages of The Weekly Standard (that it pops up in a moist farewell for a once mighty critical sheet beginning with the letter "P" is like a bite-sized Note on Camp all by itself.)

Whatever you want to think or believe about Kristol and his Jurassic hatchery of neoconservatives, try finding a fact check-immune paragraph like this on any other public intellectual with a pulse:

Before starting The Public Interest, Irving Kristol coedited Encounter magazine with the English poet and critic Stephen Spender, creating (unwittingly with the help of CIA financing) one of the great intellectual journals of modern times. Kristol's bound volumes of Encounter are still in the PI offices. Leafing through the early issues, you can see America's most important postwar political essayists cohabiting on the table of contents with England's most illustrious novelists and poets. Next to Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol sit the bylines of W.H. Auden, Robert Graves, P.G. Wodehouse, and Evelyn Waugh. Like Encounter, the early issues of The Public Interest suggest that one secret to being a great editor is remaining on friendly terms with great writers. The obviousness of this point, I hope, does not detract from its truthfulness.

Actually, I take it back. That "unwittingly" would never have gotten past a New Yorker peer review. But still. As Lord Jenkins once put it regarding the revelation of Encounter's books, "Good for the CIA." --Michael Weiss [link]

Stop Smiling Review... Mark's got a review of James Wolcott's Attack Poodles up on the website of Stop Smiling: the magazine for high-minded low lifes. Check it out. --Michael Weiss [link]
Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

South Park: Conservatives Can Have It... I'm not sure why we're supposed to be surprised conservatives enjoy South Park. (After all, since when have conservatives been opposed to vulgarity and stupidity)? Or why Brian Anderson thinks, not only that it's an important cultural statement to note the supposed popularity of the show amongst "conservatives" but that it's a testament to their cleverness. Just like Trey Parker and Matt Stone's miserable movie "Team America," the trouble with South Park is not that it's raunchy or that it "subverts" political correctness, but that it's painfully unfunny. Dull. Annoying. Lacking in wit. In college, I remember noticing how the show's appeal stemmed from the lowest common denominator on campus: dumb fraternity kids. South Park conservatives? Makes perfect sense to me. Thanks, Brian. --Mark Grueter [link]
Time To Crack Open That New Food Pyramid and Get At The Chocolate Inside... It's not the "obese" that hurts so much as the "morbidly" part. But chunkers, rejoice. The dangers of being overweight have been blown way out of proportion. --Michael Weiss [link]
Tuesday, April 19, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

In the Words of Ratzinger's Biographer... NYT:

"Having seen fascism in action, Ratzinger today believes that the best antidote to political totalitarianism is ecclesiastical totalitarianism."

Well, er, see -- I mean... you have to put "totalitarianism" in its proper 20th-century wasteland context. As the former US attorney general might have said, "No Fuhrer but Jesus." --Michael Weiss [link]

"Professor" Bainbridge on the Pope and Sully... Andrew Sullivan is an ass, according to Stephen Bainbridge, but the new Holy Father is just swell. The proof?

This from some rag called America Magazine:

"...Two U.S. bishops, Archbishop Raymond L. Burke of St. Louis and Bishop Michael J. Sheridan of Colorado Springs, recently said that Catholics who knowingly vote for pro-abortion politicians would be committing a grave sin.

[In contrast,] Cardinal Ratzinger’s note underlined the principles involved for the Catholic voter. “A Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil, and so unworthy to present himself for holy Communion, if he were to deliberately vote for a candidate precisely because of the candidate’s permissive stand on abortion and/or euthanasia,” Cardinal Ratzinger wrote. “When a Catholic does not share a candidate’s stand in favor of abortion and/or euthanasia, but votes for that candidate for other reasons, it is considered remote material cooperation, which can be permitted in the presence of proportionate reasons,” he said. In other words, if a Catholic thinks a candidate’s positions on other issues outweigh the difference on abortion, a vote for that candidate would not be considered sinful."

Cardinal Ratzinger also wrote that "Not all moral issues have the same weight as abortion and euthanasia.... There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion, even among Catholics, about waging war or applying the death penalty, but not, however, with regard to abortion and euthanasia."

And this from George Weigel:

Cardinal Ratzinger also wrote that "Not all moral issues have the same weight as abortion and euthanasia.... There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion, even among Catholics, about waging war or applying the death penalty, but not, however, with regard to abortion and euthanasia."

Well, that certainly clears things up. A Catholic voter preoccupied with leeway on abortion and/or euthanasia is complicit in "evil." Unless of course he's also fretting about social security or rebuilding Iraq or whatever. Other center stage moral issues, such as child-rape, once again get "wiggle-room."

I don't myself particularly care for Andrew's swing-low-sweet-chariot routine sometimes, especially when it avoids the logical conclusion of its thought. But we atheists must learn to forgive conflicted Catholics for not going far enough in their alienation from medieval superstition and the will to command.

Also, if this isn't a sign of "bad faith," I don't know what is:

So why is Sullivan so worked up? Here's his real gripe in his own words:

... the impermissibility of any sexual act that does not involve the depositing of semen in a fertile uterus ....

It's always about sex with Andrew, isn't it?

No, as it happens, it isn't. But the implication of this sneer is that Professor Bainbridge would grin and bear being told that his own bedroom activity was a one-way express ticket to eternal damnation. I don't fault him for hypocrisy on this; I bet he would grin and bear it and keep the Christian solider body armour well burnished still. After all, the will to command could never amount to anything without the will to obey. --Michael Weiss [link]

Our New Fat-Ass Food Pyramid... "Treadmill" has become a food group. It's just confusing enough to work. --Michael Weiss [link]
Pope Maledict... Some aspiring pontiffs hit puberty and toy with a little bohemian street theatre or poetry. Others take a more traditional route and join the Hitler Youth.

Unknown to many members of the church, however, Ratzinger’s past includes brief membership of the Hitler Youth movement and wartime service with a German army anti- aircraft unit.

Mein Gott! --Michael Weiss [link]

Dead Air... Brian C. Anderson, an editor at City Journal and the real author of South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias, writes in the LA Times that Frankendial is really a lot worse off than all the 1-year birthday cards would have you believe.

Wait a second, you say, didn't I read that Air America has expanded to more than 50 markets? That's true, but let's put things in perspective: Conservative pundit and former Reagan official William J. Bennett's morning talk show, launched at the same time as Air America, reaches nearly 124 markets, including 18 of the top 20, joining the growing ranks of successful right-of-center talk programs (Limbaugh is still the ratings leader, drawing more than 15 million listeners a week).

And look at Air America's ratings: They're pitifully weak, even in places where you would think they'd be strong. WLIB, its flagship in New York City, has sunk to 24th in the metro area Arbitron ratings — worse than the all-Caribbean format it replaced, notes the Radio Blogger. In the liberal meccas of San Francisco and Los Angeles, Air America is doing lousier still.

They've certainly increased their marketing calories. I can't leave the house without seeing a "Bushed?" poster featuring Janeanne Garofalo and... well, the other ones plastered all over bus stop terminals. --Michael Weiss [link]

Come Then To Prayers... The one area where Andrew Sullivan breaks down completely -- like a television once getting good reception suddenly becoming a cacophony of "snow" -- is religion. Here is he, in appropriate deep-shit mode, over Black Benny XVI:

And so the Catholic church accelerates its turn toward authoritarianism, hostility to modernity, assertion of papal supremacy and quashing of internal debate and dissent. We are back to the nineteenth century. Maybe this is a necessary moment. Maybe pressing this movement to its logical conclusion will clarify things. But those of us who are struggling against what our Church is becoming, and the repressive priorities it is embracing, can only contemplate a form of despair. The Grand Inquisitor, who has essentially run the Church for the last few years, is now the public face. John Paul II will soon be seen as a liberal. The hard right has now cemented its complete control of the Catholic church. And so ... to prayer. What else do we now have?

And so... to prayer. "My rational concerns over the stupidity and folly of mankind are only comforted by the stupidity and folly of mankind." (Not the kind of "South Park Conservative" t-shirt we're likely to see soon.) Did he honestly think his church was going become an afterschool special of tolerance, love and hope? Does taking a hard and consistent stand against totalism of the state excuse utter blindness when it comes to the most quotidian and pervasive form of totalism? I don't find it a healthy or "interesting" contradiction that a Catholic mourns dogma from concentrate because he prefers the watered-down variety. Nor will history bear out the existence of a latent "liberal" strain in any of the three monotheisms just because it'd be kind of nice if there were one. Drop the wafer, Sully. You're too smart for it.

Until then, wake me up when you're back on torture memos and social security... --Michael Weiss [link]

Zing!... Arch-conservative Joseph Ratzinger is the new pope, in the same sense that black is the new black. Looks like the Vatican is going to stick with its current ideological trajectory. Bully for them, I guess -- I do have respect for those who hold tenaciously to their principles and traditions in the face of overwhelming unpopularity. But damned if they'll see any tithing from me while pedophiles are taking jobs from the married-yet-holy. Maybe Ratzinger will be more liberal than anybody expects. Sure -- and maybe this photo doesn't make him look like a zombie:

--Nic Duquette [link]

Plumbing the Hows of Saul Bellow... The New Yorker runs a never-before-published Q&A between Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. The Nobel laureate's asked about his inspiration for three early books: The Adventures of Augie March, Seize The Day and Henderson The Rain King. There's a lot of redundancy in here, but I think even Dave Eggers would agree that the real "blasphemy" would be to say that same material turned over in Saul's hands feels redundant. It never does.

I laughed like at loon at this bit:

My closest friend, in early adolescence, was Syd Harris, who lived on Iowa Street, just east of Robey. An only child and a difficult one, he tyrannized his London-born mother and his Russian papa. Skinny Sydney, with his wild ways, his tics, and his rages, ran the show—he lied, he threatened, and he stormed, he played the genius and the dictator. A large dinner table occupied the little parlor and there we read our esoteric books. We wrote at opposite ends of the big table, on yellow second-sheets from the Woolworth ten-cent store. At this square borax table, its surface protected by a carpetlike cover, we wrote stories, poems, essays, dialogues, political fantasies, essays on Marxism—on subjects we didn’t really know too much about.

When well-meaning Mrs. Harris looked in on us to ask some harmless, encouraging question, Sydney would shout, “Get back to the kitchen, you old Cockney bitch. How dare you interrupt.” And, losing her temper, one eye jumping out of focus when she bristled, his mama would answer, “Yer no child of mine. They switched yer on me in the hospital.”

Bellow and Roth don't mention it, but this dynamic with "Skinny Sydney" is milked in The Dean's December. Albert Corde shared the same adolescent publishing misadventure (which is talked about in subsequent paragraphs in the interview) with the unimprovably named Dewey Spangler.

But if you've read Augie, the pitch-perfect ear for Sydney's hapless mama might also put you in mind of the French dog-groomer Guillaume, with his hypodermic needle and his recalcitrant pooches. "Thees jag-off is goin' to get it!" --Michael Weiss [link]

What Is To Be Done About Legacy?... One of the chapters in Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago which tends to overturn the moral furniture of one's mind more violently than others -- this being no small feat in such a text -- concerns the Russian peasantry's reception of the Nazis in World War II. In 1941, the invading forces of Hitlerism were viewed not just with equanimity but with enthusiasm by the most brutally suppressed victims of Stalinism, those who had been the targets of "collectivization," intimidation and a state program of mass murder tantamount to economic genocide. On a level of pure self-interest, then, calling the Nazis "liberators" was justified for such an immiserated population. On a historical level, it was more grimly predictable: What better exponent than the Third Reich for an alienated class defined by its backwardness, chauvinism, Jew-hatred, and gleeful participation in the "vanguard" of any homegrown reactionary policy of Tsarism? Yet life in the Caucasus improved "objectively" under Nazi Occupation. Famine disappeared, schools were open to freer forms scholarship, the tide of Soviet-made wretchedness had receded. How contemptible, asked Solzhenitsyn, can the kulaks have been to express relief at their thralldom to the other Miserable Mustache of 20th-century totalitarianism?

A tough question posed by one of the toughest and noblest dissidents of the USSR (and a man whose personal struggle against Hitler was rewarded with imprisonment and torture). Roy Medvedev, another Soviet dissident, is now rolling a similiar whopper down the pike of posterity: What are 21st-century Russians, who are worse off now than they were under Communism, to make of the figure of Joseph Stalin? Horrible tyrant (even for those who survived him without a scratch), or patriotic vanquisher of a worse evil? Betrayal of the Spirit of October, or complicated synecdoche for a dearly departed notion of "Mother" Russia?

The fact that Russians don't reel to even hear this question put to them indicates just how remote history, even in its pre-9/11 definition, is from any foreseeable "end." --Michael Weiss [link]

Monday, April 18, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Look to Your Right, Please... Two new essays in the Black Box. Check 'em out. --Michael Weiss [link]
When Writers Forget to Nudge and Wink Hard Enough... Poor Michael Chabon. First his wife scribbles an achy-breaky encomium to their sex life in the pages of the New York Times (here's where I'd normally link to the original or to the subsequent write-up of it on this site, but I promised myself I'd never have to re-visit that "place" again.) Now the uncannily talented author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is being accused of profiting off the Holocaust. Kafka meets Jakob the Liar:

In the lecture, titled "Golems I Have Known, or, Why My Eldest Son's Name Is Napoleon," Mr. Chabon recounts a version of his childhood, laced with some tall tales (saying, for instance, that he has encountered several golems, the clay monsters of Jewish lore), and tells the story of a counterfeit Holocaust survivor he'd once met who turns out to be an ex-Nazi in hiding.

"Tall tales" indeed. The whole Nazi-in-hiding trope is the fastest way to Barnes & Noble's bargain bin, let alone moral degeneracy. But anyone who says he's met a real-life golem is clearly yanking your crank, or spending way too much time with the junior senator from New York.

Ah, but here's the kicker: the guy accusing Chabon of Kavalier-like legerdemain with truth is none other than the former Web editor of McSweeney's. How's that for meta-irono-pomo-treacleology coming back to bite you in the ass?

"Former" because this guy Maliszewski once used the McSweeney's email account to send out gossip and rumors about the unacknowledged legislators of Williamsburg and Park Slope. The Rabbi of the River Moldavka Himself speaketh:

"Hundreds of people around New York were getting some incredibly blasphemous e-mail full of incredible fabrications," said Dave Eggers, McSweeney's editor. "His contention was that people knew it was a joke. Nobody but him thought it was a joke."

Blasphemous? Paul Auster shovels in page after page of Sue Grafton? William T. Vollmann a secret rageaholic? "Do it, you motherfuckers. Get over yourselves already. Do it, do it, finally finally." --Michael Weiss [link]

100 Years Later and Not One Fucking Royalty Check From The Elders of Zion... I'd sue, but I mean, how tribally predictable can you get?

Genius comic book illustrator Will Eisner sketched (before he died in January) an illustrated history of the most sinister example of what people mistakenly still call an anti-Semitic "forgery." The Protocols were a fabrication, not an imitation of something authentic. And I have the anemic Citibank statement to prove it. --Michael Weiss [link]

Make Room in the Canon... A fantastic new discovery (or better say, uncovering) at Oxford this past week: whole swathes of ancient Greek texts have been decoded using state-of-the-art infra red scanning technology. Chewed-up and -- to the naked eye -- unintelligible papyri found in an Egyptian "rubbish dump" in the 19th century are now being read and translated. Some say this could lead to as much as a 20% increase in the current corpus of received Greek literature... 20% -- can you imagine? Absolutely amazing.

This is one recovered bit from Sophocles' lost play Epigonoi (The Progeny):

Speaker A: . . . gobbling the whole, sharpening the flashing iron.

Speaker B: And the helmets are shaking their purple-dyed crests, and for the wearers of breast-plates the weavers are striking up the wise shuttle's songs, that wakes up those who are asleep.

Speaker A: And he is gluing together the chariot's rail.

Oedipus enters analysis, the shrink gives up the struggle after a grueling half hour, Jocasta whines about "constantly" having sex (three times a week), you know... --Michael Weiss [link]

Michael Kinsley on Neocons... Everytime I glance at Michael Kinsley's byline, I always leave out the "l" in the surname. I'm beginning to this is for reasons apart from my head being perennially in the gutter. Both Alfred and Michael have proven too easily baffled by the same force they spent their lives combating: conservatism.

The living one, with the "l":

The great neocon theme was tough-minded pragmatism in the face of liberal naivete. Liberals were sentimental. They believed that people were basically good or could easily be made so. Domestically, liberal social programs were no match for the intractable underclass or even made the situation worse. In the world, liberals were too hung up on democracy and human rights, refusing to recognize that the only important question about other countries is: Friend or foe?...

Some 80's recapping about the influence of menopausal Wookie Jeanne Kirkpatrick and her notorious (legendary?) essay in Commentary, "Dictatorship and Double Standards," and the explication of it:

Kirkpatrick thought that U.S. power should be used to shore up tottering but friendly dictators, such as Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua and the shah of Iran. Carter sat on his hands, she complained. Now we have an administration that -- wisely or foolishly, sincerely or cynically -- claims to have the aggressive pursuit of democracy everywhere as the focal point of its foreign policy. And the Bush Doctrine is said to have the fingerprints of neoconservatives all over it.

This is quite a reversal by America's most influential group of intellectuals, yet it has received surprisingly little comment or explanation. The chief theoretician of the new neoconservatism is political scientist Robert Kagan. Writing in Commentary (where else?) in 1997, Kagan noted the difference between his notions and Kirkpatrick's and had some fun at the expense of opponents who had been all for a high-minded foreign policy until the neocons started calling for one. But he had little to say about the reversal of the neocons themselves.

Kinsley strikes a pretty dull chord that no one seems to get tired of hearing, even though the evidence he offers should make us all sticklers for timbre. The foregoing paragraphs indicate at the very least that perhaps the neocon 'agenda' was never quite as monolithic as the limited chattering space for a Washington Post editorial would like it to have been. You can skim James Mann's terrific biography on the Bush war cabinet Rise of the Vulcans and learn that for all their latter-day moral and diplomatic failures, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld woke up ever day in the Ford White House wondering how they were going to make life more miserable for the morally and diplomatically bankrupt Henry Kissinger. Realpolitik was not the defining platform for all Reaganite foreign policy wonks. Paul Wolfowitz -- whose name Eric Hobsbawm tellingly (and I think accurately) deploys in the possessive next to the word "Washington" in that London Review essay I linked to a few days ago -- was always the Bizarro World Republican Cold Warrior, the "bleeding heart," as Christopher Hitchens recently called him. Wolfowitz was less impressed by Kirkpatrick or Kristol; his self-proclaimed mentors were Albert Wohlstetter, a strategic defense logician at RAND, and Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a hawkish Democratic senator from Washington. (So much for those Straussian-programmed "leo-cons" at State.) And Wolfowitz's B-Team invigilation of the USSR's weapons capabilities was anything but "pragmatic." He rightly assumed the idealist Soviet aim of military escalation, but wrongly guessed at the actuality of Soviet hardware. I could go on, but Mann does it with infinitely greater resource and persuasiveness. --Michael Weiss [link]

What Happens When You Mix Andy Rooney and The Book-of-the-Month Club... "Many compare him to Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken": The "him" being Carl Hiassen and the claim from the producers of 60 Minutes, who did a feature Sunday evening on this alleged muckraker Hiassen. Who the "many" are remains unknown.

The only difference between Twain/Mencken and Hiassen is that they were insightful, sophisticated and bitterly funny writers whereas he is a witless hack. Several months ago, at the prodding of a friend, I forced myself to read his latest novel called Skinny Dip and was later dismayed to learn that it became a bestseller. Supposedly a "comic" novel about the wild and wacky state of Florida I did not laugh, or even break a smile once while plodding through it. The story, about how a husband who trys to kill his wife by pushing her off a boat, is about as boilerplate, predictable and clichéd as they come. --Mark Grueter [link]

Jason Takes Manhattan, Leaves Manolo Blahniks... Some guys were killed by a MACHETE only about a hundred streets away:

Socialites and dog walkers alike on the Upper East Side were alarmed to hear that murders via machete were committed on the 183rd Street platform of the 4 train. "Sometimes when I can't get a taxi, I ride that train," cried Buffy Struggles. "Of course," she added, "I never go past the 86th Street stop. But still, the thought that monsters like that ride the same uptown train as I is very scary." --Mark Grueter [link]

Saturday, April 16, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Bravo, Old Sport, I Say, Even Though The Hall is... Packed... Reading Eric Hobsbawm's orthodox trip down memory lane is like exploiting a week-long EuroRail pass seated next to a grizzled old Continental whose politics you can't stand, but whose experiences you can't help but admire. A lifelong arch-Communist who never repudiated his affiliation but just sort of shrugged off its dead weight, Hobsbawm has nonetheless proven capable of writing unequaled history books, famous for their Churchillian segmentation of time periods into 'Ages.' (He says in this article that he's made the previous century his bailiwick, but that's not true: he's always been at his best when discussing the French and Industrial revolutions, and always at his worst when making excuses for the Soviet Union.) I'd say he ranks somewhere with Edmund Wilson for professional excellence immunized -- in most cases -- from personal folly.

Still, you can't help but notice how high up the gumline of your speaker is when he opens his mouth and out comes:

In a way it is the question all historians ask themselves: does mere personal association with relics of the past throw light on the past, and if so how? It plainly does, but we do not know how. Almost always it is places we have in mind, not people. Topography speaks, even without people: a dry landscape in Brazil makes it easier to understand back-country evangelists, a minor hill-fort in mid-Wales the no-man’s-land of medieval marches. At times cities used to speak louder than words, and some still do: St Petersburg, for instance, or, until its gadarene post-Communist decline, Prague. Has the Turin meeting been an experience comparable to the one I recall, once upon a time, standing on a cold winter morning before the old unreconstructed Finland Station in Leningrad? Have I learned much more from the meeting than I might have done by reading books or attending a smaller and less grandiose colloquium on the last years of the Soviet era?

Prague's gadarene decline since Communism. Would the halcyon days have been in its 'human face' incarnation or its plain old thuggish one, perhaps? And that marvellously placed "unreconstructed" before Finland Station must be another kind of slip from the past: Freudian.

One day soon Eric won't be with us any longer. I just hope Robert Conquest hangs around to write the obituary everyone will need to read. --Michael Weiss [link]

Rushdie's PEN Experiences... This deserves linking to if only because Salman avoids mentioning the difficulty with which he attended any public event in the 1980's.

In the days that followed, Cynthia Ozick circulated a petition attacking Bruno Kreisky, the Jewish ex-Chancellor of Austria and a Congress participant, because he had met with Arafat and Qaddafy. (As I recall, Kreisky's defenders pointed out that during his chancellorship, Austria had taken in more refugee Russian Jews than any other country.) During a panel discussion Ozick rose from the floor to denounce Kreisky, who handled the situation with such grace that the trouble quickly passed.

Yeah, bit of a windbag that Ozick. Her fiction's felt the strain too. I saw her give a reading a few months ago at KGB Bar on the Lower East Side. She read a story about a dim child who mistakes Christopher Robin for a real boy. Or something. I think she had her Disney fables confused. Anyway, it wasn't very memorable. "Winnie the Pooh and The Hundred Acre Wood Without a People For a People Without a Hundred Acre Wood" -- now that might have left a deeper scratch on the brain.

And I remember being dragged into the heavyweight prize fight between Saul Bellow and Günter Grass. After Bellow made a speech containing a familiar Bellovian riff about how the success of American materialism had damaged the spiritual life of Americans, Grass rose to point out that many people routinely fell through the holes in the American dream, and offered to show Bellow some real American poverty in, for example, the South Bronx. Bellow, irritated, spoke sharply in return, and when Grass returned to his seat, next to me, as it happens, he was trembling with anger. "Say something," he ordered. "Who, me?" I said. "Yes. Say something." So I got up and went to the microphone and asked Bellow why he thought it was that so many American writers had avoided -- I think I actually said, more provocatively, "abdicated" -- the task of taking on the subject of America's immense power in the world. Bellow bridled. "We don't have tasks," he said, majestically. "We have inspirations."

No comment. --Michael Weiss [link]

Let Them Eat Crumb... Fuck "cake" art, says legendary underground (and overground) cartoonist R. Crumb. What people really want is tumescent oddballs, fat-bottomed girls, bucktooth losers and polymorphous perversion on the page.

That's right, says art critic Robert Hughes, who compares Crumb to Goya and Bruegel. "I thought that nobody hated Warhol and what he stood for more than me," Mr. Hughes said at one point, "but my, oh my, you do." The author of Culture of Complaint knows whereof he speaks. --Michael Weiss [link]

Your Father Probably Doesn't Have an Oldsmobile... It's a sad time in autoland. The last two all-American auto makers are in severe trouble. Their businesses have essentially become a devilish arrangement of selling cars at or below cost and making the money on financing deals. They're turning into banks that throw in a free car when you take out a big loan. (Here's the excellent Daniel Gross on the specifics of problems at Ford and General Motors.)

The media has been spinning this as a jobs going overseas sort of thing, but nobody's building auto plants in Bangalore, and China still hasn't figured out how to build a car without infringing on patents, let alone passing safety standards. Furthermore, Toyota and other big foreign auto makers now do most of their work in the USA for cars intended for sale in America. It doesn't make sense to ship tons of steel across the ocean when Americans can just make the damn car for as much as a Japanese. And yet, GM and Ford are blaming their woes on... workers. Because the UAW gets sweet health care benefits, and health care is becoming very expensive, these industrial titans are crying poor. Is there any truth to this?

No. It's a cheap excuse. Yes, they could save a billion a year by getting their workers to accept less generous (and more mainstream) insurance packages with copayments and premiums. But in the UK, where everybody gets the same health insurance, MG Rover just went to that big scrap heap in the sky. Instead of blaming the unions, the Brits are complaining that the police force hasn't been buying Rover vehicles -- as if all the vehicular bobbies on earth could possibly explain the 75% plunge in Rover's market share in ten years.

Nobody in these large corporation, or in the media, or in the government, will come out and say what's wrong with these automotive dinosaurs, probably for fear of offending nationalist sensibilities. Well, here it is: they aren't making cars people want. GM and Ford looked at the high markup on larger luxury vehicles and bet the farm on them just as gas prices were soaring. Their vehicle designs range from forgettable to painful. And their vehicles have a (mostly undeserved) reputation for lax engineering and assembly, and high maintenance needs. They're essentially competing with Subaru, which sells equally ugly, misguided vehicles -- but cheaper. D'oh.

Meanwhile, Toyota, VW, Volvo and others have been churning out low-profit, high-volume small cars that are cheap, reliable and stylish. All it takes is one stylish hybrid coupe with a cool design and these companies could come back. But corporations being what they are, I suspect GM will be gone, split apart or relegated to the margins in five years. --Nic Duquette [link]

Friday, April 15, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

South Park Conservatives... It was bound to happen sooner or later. --Michael Weiss [link]
Todd Solondz, Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman Walk Into a Bar... Ever since I let my New Yorker subscription lapse ("Dear Michael, Frankly, we're stunned.") and haven't had easy access to Anthony Lane, Slate's David Edelstein has been pinch-hitting as my favorite film critic. Especially with something like Palindromes, which should come with a complimentary box of Gooberized Zoloft, I'm glad Lane's not around to get cutesy with the Wodehouse-Kael schtick.

Edelstein breezily whips up a cinematic gist and whipped is what it stays:

The Todd Solondz problem will always be in our faces because that's where he puts it. He doesn't have the nyah-nyah attack of such punk auteurs as Larry Clark or Harmony Korine--just the opposite: I can't think of a filmmaker who combines so much aggresion with so little affect But here's one of the few writer-directors who can earn an NC-17 rating for a movie without nudity or profanity; his films are just so conceptually grotesque that you wouldn't want to show them to anyone below the age of... I was going to write "40," but that would be too glib. I actually respect Solondz's purity of vision and thought Happiness worked beautifully as a sicko sitcom. I also respect his obstinacy: No matter how much his distributors plead for a slightly softer product, he'll always show us the world through shit-colored glasses.

Pretty much. Although, maturity is not a factor -- most people I know who are votaries of Solondz tend toward the undergraduate age level. (Must be that Gen-Y jones for pedophilia, racism, cum-tacked photographs and Belle and Sebastian lyrics. Leave grandma at home, kids!)

The real Todd Solondz problem is that he can't make a debut feature all over again, nor does he seem willing to stop cannabilizing his own reputation. His films now seem more like commentaries on whatever the critical reception was to his last film, and though the fecal-lens weltanschuuang may be free of affect, it's certainly not free of conceit. The big red block over the Selma Blair/Robert Wisdom sex scene in Storytelling was either a preemptive middle finger to the ratings board, a reaction to their demand for a re-cut, or an arrogant broadcast to the audience: "I've taken you thus far, but believe you-me, you don't want to handle this truth." Whatever the case, the selfconsciousness of form made an unsettling image of two characters on-screen nothing more than an enabler of off-screen masturbation. "Softer" Todd needn't do, but equal opportunity, squirm-inducing offense is no pardon for artlessness and sloppy editing.

Going to see Palindromes this weekend. Expect a review sometime next week. --Michael Weiss [link]

Two Mouse Buttons and a Night at Home - That's Where It's At... On Thursday morning, I received an email from the musician Beck (or rather, from the people who run Beck's website) informing me of a "secret" show he is set to play on Friday night in the Hiro Ballroom of the Maritime Hotel. Tickets, this excited email informed me, would go on sale at 5pm EST at this link.

So like thousands of other naive New Yorkers, I tried accessing the site at exactly 5pm (and just before) because I knew there'd be competition and I wanted to make sure I got a pair of the goddamn things. I have high speed cable access but couldn't get on the site. I sat there like an ape-grinning idiot hitting the Reload button over and over. Finally, I got through at about 5:10pm and the following message popped up: "NO TICKETS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE THROUGH TICKETWEB"

As of this writing (10pm the same night) the self-same message still pops up when you click on the link. And I'm still sitting here like a jackass hitting the Refresh button to see if circumstances have changed. Why do I carry on? Because the tickets have not actually sold out yet, according the site. They're just "currently unavailable" - whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean. So when will they become available?! Or is it just a hideous lie to torture us even more? The show's tomorrow guys. Do we have stay up all night to wait for the tix to go back on sale?

Thanks Beck - you prick. Thanks for making me waste a perfectly good Thursday evening sitting in front of my computer, all for nothing it would seem. --Mark Grueter [link]

Thursday, April 14, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Blair's Re-election Bid... It's fairly assured, but William Shawcross chews up the "strongest" case against sending Tony back to Downing Street.

It is fair enough to say you should not trust Blair because of failures over schools, the NHS, tax, spending, or immigration. But on Iraq he has been utterly reliable, extraordinarily brave-and absolutely right

A second-wind for leftist internationalism from the author of Sideshow: Nixon, Kissinger and the Destruction of Cambodia. --Michael Weiss [link]

Oil-for-Food Becomes Indictments-for-Three... 10,000 US fugitives weren't the only one brought under the collar of the law today. The ever-increasing scandal that should make Kofi Annan resign from the Secretary-Generalship of the UN has now engulfed David B. Chalmers, a Texas oilman; Tongsun Park, a South Korean businessman (on the lam in SoKo); and Britisher John Irving (The Petrol-Method Man) with having illegally paid off and negotiated for the wretched regime of Saddam Hussein.

Times / WaPo. --Michael Weiss [link]

Tom Wolfe's Letter to The Chroncile of Higher Ed... It's a shame he turns into Bob Dole halfway through and starts referring to himself in the third person because he really does nail the poseur behind The New New Journalism. Though we should probably view this as more of an Oedipal struggle, a lousy, confused writer trying to murder his inspirational papa, and the papa taking revenge. Whatever species of journalism we're up to now, it is first and foremost an ugly one. The orthography of the stuff is just plain awful to look at on the page -- an odd characteristic being exhibited by such a form-obsessed cabal. But open to any chapter in Wolfe and it's like Nietzschean punctuation has become literary I Ching. Anxious, amorphous black dribbles all over a cool institutional white. Fan through Bellow or James sometimes and notice how neat and rigid are their blocks of text, as if visual soundness were an indicator of the intellectual kind. Speaking of sound, the cadence in Wolfe is not much better:

Moneyball is about playing a game on the field, baseball. Specifically, it is about how one Billy Beane, office-bound general manager of a woebegone team, the Oakland Athletics, used the findings of a string of baseball-happy amateur statisticians to make a completely objective analysis of which player skills and field strategies work best in that game.

Billy Beane and his woebegone team didn't come off so mean when the J-School dean showed 'em all the New meme.

Martin Amis deftly bottled this virus in an essay on V.S. Pritchett:

[M]ost writers worry about internal rhymes and chimes in their prose to an almost comical degree. There is a marvellous joke about this in Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark, when Udo Conrad, the exiled highbrow novelist, inadvertently reveals to the pathetic Albinus that he is being savely cuckolded b y his mistress and his best friend. As Albinus reels away, Udo is left to muse on his faux pas : '"I wonder," muttered Conrad, "I wonder whether I haven't committed some blunder (... nasty rhyme, that! 'Was it, I wonder, a la, la la blunder?' Horrible!)."'

--Michael Weiss [link]

New Blogger to Watch... The smart, humorous editorial writer for the Post Robert George has a new blog, Ragged Thots. --Michael Weiss [link]
Todd Solondz Knows Right from Wrong... "I have no sympathy for someone raping children." Whew! Glad that's out of the way. Not about these fucked up films of yours...

"I'm not out to say humanity is bad. I'm just not out to tell you how great you are."

Now what if I don't rape children but make obscene phone calls to Lara Flynn Boyle? Who's got Cerebral Palsy. In Michigan. Then will you tell me? --Michael Weiss [link]

Intellectual Pictionary... A fun little test-yourself game of identifying the faces attached to the great (and not-so-great) minds of the last two hundred years.

Funny: I'd never seen what Bertrand Russell looked like before, yet somehow I "knew" which was him. Antonio Gramsci had a serious Trotsky thing going on.

FYI: When you refresh the page, the faces switch positions randomly. (Maybe Pictionary isn't the right analog. It's more like that card game, "Memory.") And clicking on someone will take you to a page about them and their works. --Michael Weiss [link]

Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Winners of the 2004 Remnick Awards Announced... Power, Gopnick and Hersh. The Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev of glossy publishing. (Greydon Carter runs the Trotskyist Opposition, especially with Hitch on the team).

Martha Stewart Living gets Honorable Mention for its three-part series on "reaccomodated domestic styles": "Baste Under Fire," "A Very Special Shanksgiving," and "Denim, Denim Everywhere and What a Stitch to Wear!" --Michael Weiss [link]

Snarksmith Thinks Globally... But still snarks locally. We have a new contributor to our site, Ms. Orli Sharaby. She's a bona fide US expat living Prague -- or as we like to think of it, the Williamsburg of Europe. Please welcome her the way you do our cascading breakers of daily content: with awe-struck silence.

Also check out her first feature, which we liked so much, we put it over yonder (-->) in the tony 'black box.' --Michael Weiss [link]

"C" Is For Cholesterol... The New Zealand Herald and USA Today report on the troubling Sesame Street decision to cut back on Cookie Monster's cookie consumption. The Muppet gourmand will instead be offering health tips and explaining that "a cookie is a sometimes food." Look at what they've done to the furry blue bastard!

Yes, fat children have become a burgeoning national health crisis, and Sesame Street has always tried to make kids educated and healthy. But the Cookie Monster's role has always been that of the prepubescent id personified. He's never been a role model. He's a lovable foil to the show's widely dispersed edutainment superego. He's comic relief. Curb his cookie habit, and the positive message of the Sesame Street's main characters loses its punch.

Jesse Walker at Hit and Run jokes that "putting Cookie Monster on a diet is like putting Oscar on Prozac." Indeed, or Elmo on Ritalin. Or the Count in treatment for Asperger's Syndrome. But at least Bert isn't touting condom use. Yet. --Nic Duquette [link]

Michael Jackson Now Hiding Victims in Britney's Uterus... Actually, that's not fair. It might be a girl.

New York responds, 6:52 AM.

Global oil prices fall as a result. --Michael Weiss [link]

Speaking of the Undead... Sonic Youth is back. All about fear of privatized social security, I tell ya. --Michael Weiss [link]
Zombie Porn For a Zombie Fetishist... Savage Undead Lover:

I'm a pretty normal guy except for one thing: I'm sexually attracted to zombies. When I was a kid, I loved to watch horror films that featured them. Then as I became a teen, I started to masturbate watching zombie flicks. I fantasize about having sex with zombies while trying not to get bitten, but eventually I end up getting devoured. I also fantasize about a woman gangbanged by a group of zombies who then rip her apart and eat her. Is this a form of necrophilia? Are there any other people out there with the same fetish? When I was about 6, my best friend and I discovered the dead body of a drug addict in an abandoned house. Do you think that has something to do with my fetish?

Meet Savage Undead Love. --Michael Weiss [link]

Or It Could Go On Forever... Morrissey is forty-fucking-five and he's forgiven Jesus. At that age, Oscar Wilde had forgiven the English penal system with just a year to go before biting the big fin de vie at the fin de siecle. Just goes to prove: you can't keep a good Pope of Mope down.

Who Put the 'M' In Manchester? is the new DVD out. (Hint: The answer's not Moy Division). --Michael Weiss [link]

The Trashcan Sinatras' Upcoming Tour... Promoting their new live album fez. If you haven't heard last year's comeback record Weightlifting, you should remedy this right away. --Michael Weiss [link]
The Croatian Cantos... The kidding on the surname will come in a bit, but for now it's important to note that the Sop in Nikola Sop is pronounced "Shop". The poetry he composed in the 1950's, as a firmament-struck versifier from the Balkans, was pronounced good enough to have its English translation fluffed up by no less a figure than W.H. Auden. A taste:

Miracle, miracle.

We are leaning over and looking
At the night overturned.

What used to be above us, high up,
A soaring vault,
Is now flying, moving, swaying,
Deep below us.

Already we have forgotten clouds and winds and rains.
Here at the summit of overturned space,
Are we not ourselves--
Our own breath?

That Melvin Lasky saw fit to publish these lines in Encounter is yet further proof of that magazine's cultural indispensability, which monthly cheques from the CIA did nothing to diminish.

Sop returning the compliment to Auden: "When 40 years ago in my poetry Jesus appeared as I saw and felt him, he was exactly such as W.H. Auden imagines him in his eminent essay on Christianity and art: Jesus a child, and Jesus crucified . . . Auden is the first to, in a way, object [to] modern technology eager to subjugate poetry, subordinate it, make it celebrate discoveries."

This is a pretty good surmise of the poet who once wrote -- half-heartedly if not disingenuously -- that "poetry makes nothing happen." Auden subjugated the form, all right, though he still knew its power of refraction and transmission of "higher" beauties (like his later Anglican beatitudes).

Oh, and here's the kidding I promised:

The very existence of these Auden-edited "space epics" would be forgotten had the Croatian Writers' Association not produced a pocket edition of them, supplemented by other poems, under the title Auden's Sop, in 1997.

"Auden's Sop" sounds like a limerick, with moderate filth potential, composed by Kingsley Amis or Philip Larkin or Robert Conquest... --Michael Weiss [link]

Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

James Wood Reviews Saturday... The New Republic could toss another Dale Peck onto the masthead and the resulting literary debt could easily be covered with the interest the magazine has earned from James Wood. He's the best there is.

I could eat up all your bandwidth quoting the compulsively re-readable bits in this marvelous review of a marvelous novel, so I'll just pluck one graph, almost at random:

The events of September 11, 2001 would appear to resemble any other great and appalling historical irruption; to offer the contemporary novelist the same capacious dualism that war and revolution offered Tolstoy or Hasek. But there are two major differences. The first is that the destruction of the Twin Towers was itself represented and re-represented, in an era uniquely marked by the obsessive over-representation of public events. Not only did we all see this calamity, but television became for most of us the grotesque verification of the calamity itself. And in a further irony, the "staging" of the conflagration seemed to have been conjured into being--to have been pre-imagined--by Hollywood disaster films. Thus into the novelist's dual representation (the world, and the characters' reading of the world) was thrown a third layer of mimesis: the version of the event as it was described for us on film and video. Any novelist wanting to narrate the occurrences of September 11 would most likely have to deal with a triple-skinned world, as if cutting through one of those mutant fruits whose membrane seems almost to have smothered its pith.

(In a vaguely McEwan-worthy irony, Slate's Blog Round-up this week mistakenly refers to the critic as "James Woods." From the jungles of Salvador to the salons of DC.) --Michael Weiss [link]

Andrea Dworkin: Strange Bedfellow Indeed... Former Bush speechwriter David Frum has some kind words for the deceased feminist.

Politically she belonged to the far, far, far left, but she had little use for an antiwar movement that made excuses for Saddam Hussein or Islamic extremism. And in one respect at least, she shared a deep and true perception with the political and cultural right: She understood that the sexual revolution had inflicted serious harm on the interests of women and children – and (ultimately) of men as well. She understood that all-pervasive pornography was not a harmless amusement, but a powerful teaching device that changed the way men thought about women. She rejected the idea that sex was just another commodity to be exchanged in a marketplace, that strippers and prostitutes should be thought of as just another form of service worker: She recognized and dared to name the reality of brutality and exploitation where many liberals insisted on perceiving personal liberation.

This shouldn't really surprise. I always thought one of the biggest missed opportunities in fiction was John Irving's refusal to portray the hard-right supporters who would have lined up behind Jenny Fields in his wonderful 70's novel The World According to Garp. How conservative can you get? Inveighing against "lust" as the root of all evil; trying to void any notion of the female body as a thing of beauty, let alone one of sensuality.

Still, in the interest of truth and intellectual fairness, it's good to see Dworkin's views re-evaluated by those who had more than a nodding acquaintance with them. I had barely even that in college: the woman was a punchline for the personally damaged good masquerading as the politically howling killjoy. What Judith Butler was to prose style, Dworkin was to weekend plans. Though I'm glad I never heard the taunts about her physical appearance. In a weaker, stupider moment I might have joined that chorus, too.

But anyone who saw the hollowness of the antiwar left and the sleaziness of the Clinton administration's most valued strategic defense initiative can't have been all bad... --Michael Weiss [link]

Sunday, April 10, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Motion's Poem... I took a pot shot a couple days ago at England's poet laureate because to be poet laureate one has to suck up to a pathetic monarchy and otherwise do things that seem like a schedule for running good verse into the ground. (My love of Philip Larkin grew at least three sizes the day I found out that "This Be the Verse" might as well have finished its titular thought with "That Ruins My Chances for the Laureateship." Never have the rewards of parents fucking us up been so manifest.) But I've since read Andrew Motion's paean to Charles and Camilla's nuptials, and I have to say: it's not half-bad. He even touches upon the vertiginous flash-bulb nature of their union, which I give him some chutzpah credit for doing. Anyway, here it is:

SPRING WEDDING

I took your news outdoors, and strolled a while
In silence on my square of garden-ground
Where I could dim the roar of arguments,
Ignore the scandal-flywheel whirring round,
And hear instead the green fuse in the flower
Ignite, the breeze stretch out a shadow-hand
To ruffle blossom on its sticking points,
The blackbirds sing, and singing take their stand.
I took your news outdoors, and found the Spring
Had honoured all its promises to start
Disclosing how the principles of earth
Can make a common purpose with the heart.
The heart which slips and sidles like a stream
Weighed down by winter-wreckage near its source -
But given time, and come the clearing rain,
Breaks loose to revel in its proper course.

--Michael Weiss [link]

The Lingua of Johnson... He was doing self-help centuries before the word 'guru' entered the lexicon (and what definition might the old buzzard have given that word?)

Samuel Johnson stands in a long line of complicated, brilliant, dead Tories (Burke, Disraeli, Kipling), so it's a genuine shame that this statement is true of him:

Samuel Johnson is the only famous writer who is better known for what he said than for what he wrote. Essays, poems, biographies, drama and fiction flowed from his pen, and they are all forgotten.

All except one indispensible title: The Dictionary. (The last laugh was on the good doctor, after all. Try making out without that book sometime).

If the Left was really serious about mounting a steroidal cultural offensive, it'd start with the language. Conservatives have always been the stone-faced gatekeepers of proper speech, which is the first Arcadia -- after religion -- someone zips to in shrieking horror from modernity. Listening to a teenager speak makes temporary Evelyn Waughs of us all. How much easier it would be for liberals to dispatch the verbal dyslexics and the homily-hockers than by treating a phrase like "the healing process" to molten showers of ironic scorn. Instead, liberals do the hocking, taking back the night but leaving the tongue in enemy heads.

If the Right's going to claim the King of Kings, the least everyone else can do is claim the King's English. You know, between "you and I."

--Michael Weiss [link]

Just Part of the Job... Apologists for Pope John Paul (the second) like to brag about the fact that he "forgave the man who shot him" - as if he had any other choice. Isn't 'forgiveness' the supposed essence of the very church he used to head up? Yes, I believe it is. The late Pope would've appeared a hypocritical fool had he refused to publicly forgive the guy. So I don't see why we should all be struck dumb with reverence by this singular act of pseudo-compassion. --Mark Grueter [link]
Saturday, April 9, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Illinoise...Sufjan Stevens was responsible for Greetings From Michigan:The Great Lakes State, one of the better albums of 2003, a folksy, melancholy tribute to his economically depressed home state. That one had titles like "The Upper Peninsula" and "Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head." Pick it up if you see a used copy.

Since then, Stevens has announced the intention to put out a theme CD for every US state. And he's announced the tracklist for his July 5th release, Illinois Unfortunately, it reads like he's beeen permitting Wayne Coyne to pen the titles. Consider track two, The Black Hawk War, or, How to Demolish an Entire Civilization and Still Feel Good About Yourself in the Morning, or, We Apologize for the Inconvenience But You're Going to Have to Leave Now, or, "I have fought the Big Knives and will continue to fight them until they are off our lands!". That's one title.There's also the McSweenian To the Workers of the Rockford River Valley Region, I have an Idea Concerning Your Predicament, and it involves shoe string, a lavender garland, and twelve strong women and They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back From the Dead!! Ahhhhh! In toto, the album has twenty-two tracks and runs over seventy minutes.

I wonder what's next. Missouri: A Rock Opera? --Nic Duquette [link]

More Here... Hitchens has the most succinct round-up of the pope's sins of omission. I still think the pope should be applauded for effective use of the world's largest international charity organization. But the comparison to Stalinism elucidates (if a little dramatically) why the church will need to change or die, fast, thanks to this pope. --Nic Duquette [link]

Friday, April 8, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

The New Drudge on the Block... With 'anarcho-capitalist' leanings. Sploid. --Michael Weiss [link]
More Here... Hitchens has the most succinct round-up of the pope's sins of omission. I still think the pope should be applauded for effective use of the world's largest international charity organization. But the comparison to Stalinism elucidates (if a little dramatically) why the church will need to change or die, fast, thanks to this pope. --Nic Duquette [link]
Thoughts on the Pope... First, check out his coffin. That is some old-school design:

Second, as a lapsed Catholic myself, I'd like to parse the pope's legacy. As a humanitarian, his record is excellent. As a pope, it's pretty poor.

No, the pope didn't end communism. But his stance against it contributed to the momentum against communism, especially in Poland, and especially after his made a big show of forgiving his attempted assassin. He also seems to have laid the groundwork for a campaign against Chinese communism; the Vatican may secure limited right to religious expression in the country in return for dropping Taiwan like a hot rock. More importantly, he took great pains to reconcile the Catholic Church with all the groups that it has been calling hell-bound for years. (They're still going to hell, of course, but no reason not to be nice to them.) And John Paul really did work to fight global poverty, focusing the Church's considerable financial resources on the problem as well as his Bono-like international stature and charisma.

As the leader of an institution, John Paul had a very mixed record. While I'm skeptical of much of Catholic dogma, I do admire the church's Sherlock Holmes approach to the minutae of faith. ("When you have removed the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth.") I might still pop in for an occasional mass if that were my only dissension. What I can't abide is John Paul's failure to deal with the pedophilia scandal before it happened. The ongoing priest shortage dictated the shameful cover-ups of Cardinal Law and others, who were bound by the Vatican to keep using aged child molestors while firing priests who went out and got married, God forbid (or does he, really?). He managed to grow the Church by a third, but largely by encouraging Catholics in the developing world not to use condoms, thereby ensuring that many of these newly saved will be dead of AIDS in a decade or so.

In other words, many of the institutional accomplishments touted by the newspapers this week really laid the groundwork for severe Church problems down the road. I do not see how the Catholic Church can continue operations without permitting, at the very least, contraception for married couples and marriages for priests. It will be much harder to allow either now than it would have been before John Paul II. --Nic Duquette [link]

Freedom Fighting Pope? Not So Fast... Marc Fisher in Slate:

No one I spoke to in Leipzig that night [in 1989] mentioned the pope. Nor did any other demonstrators, protest leaders, renegade clergy, or rebellious academics there or anywhere else I visited on my rounds during that dramatic autumn. In East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union, the talk was all about Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of openness, about how it was suddenly possible to get copies of some of the more daring Russian journals, and about how a few adventurous souls in the pulpits and on official state television and radio were making ever-more-pointed comments about a system that treated its people like incompetent children. --Michael Weiss [link]

Terry Eagleton's Surplus Value of Words... Grinding and clanking like some rusted-out Soviet dynamo, the T-Bird sticks to the After Theory afterparty script, this time in a review of someone else's universal-explainer volume on literature. Letting aside the fact that so many exponents of the so-called 'republics of letters' traffic in heady admixtures of the cosmopolitan and the international, we're now meant to believe that the ablest critics around are -- World Bank economists.

The fourth stage is when the empire writes back - when poetry, fiction and drama once again provide a means of access to the global cultural economy for those who have been excluded from it. Because these writers are liberated from the constraints of western canons and conventions, they can make themselves up as they go along, in a curious marriage of avant-garde experiment and cultural deprivation. If this was true a century ago of James Joyce and William Faulkner, it is true today of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie. The greatest revolutionaries of literature, as Casanova comments, are to be found among the ranks of those struggling to get out from under an imposed colonial language, and who are compelled to invent any number of ingenious devices to do so. It is European realism that hampers their development, as do European tariffs.

Paul Wolfowitz on Mimesis, coming to a B&N bookshelf near you... Never mind that these writers are the proud heritors of the "western canons and conventions" and -- especially in the cases of Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipal and Zadie Smith -- have lovingly enshrined the tongue of empire without ripping the thing out. This may dialectical, but it is not revolutionary. And what devices have they invented? Who told Terry and the wondrously named Casanova to confine themselves to recent European price indexes? The canon didn't begin as 'realist,' unless the wrath of a sea-god can explain bourgeois accumulation in Balzac. Magic's been around for a good long while. --Michael Weiss [link]

Well, In'it That Special?... Not only does Cardinal Law get a rent stabilized Italian apartment (at $0 a month), a plum sinecure as archpriest of the Basilica of St. Mary Major, but now he's part of a shameful neuftet of prelates presiding over John Paul's burial rites.

Not bad for the cosseter of kid-rapists. --Michael Weiss [link]

Thursday, April 7, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Andrew Motion's Rhythm Method... Who is Sarah Lyall, and how dare she be allowed to get funny and charming in the pages of the New York Times?

How do you solve a problem like "Camilla"?

If you are Andrew Motion, Britain's poet laureate and the man charged with producing a cheerful commemorative poem about Prince Charles's impending marriage to Camilla Parker Bowles, none of the obvious rhymes - vanilla, flotilla, Godzilla - seem appropriate, somehow.

If you're Andrew Motion, and you've written a piss-poor biography of Philip Larkin (who is to you as a hyperion to a satyr), you might just do the royal family a favor and plumb your old subject's archives for something to send off Charles and Camilla:

Love again: wanking at ten past three
(Surely he's taken her home by now?),
The bedroom hot as a bakery,
The drink gone dead, without showing how
To meet tomorrow, and afterwards,
And the usual pain, like dysentery.

Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt,
Someone else drowned in that lash-wide stare,
And me supported to be ignorant,
Or find it funny, or not to care,
Even... buy why put it into words?
Isolate rather this element

That spread through other lives like a tree
And sways them on in a sort of sense
And say why it never worked for me.
Something to do with violence
A long way back, and wrong rewards,
And arrogant eternity.

--Michael Weiss [link]

Yet More On Saul... Ian McEwan's lovely New York Times bit on Bellow. I agree with Lee Siegel: if there's any justice left in Stockholm, they'll tap McEwan next for the Nobel.

Now. A deep breath is being taken over a forebidding desk somewhere, and it's entering the lungs of Martin Amis... --Michael Weiss [link]

More Bellow Tributes... Jonathan Yardley, who says Bellow was a proud elitist and good for him, and that the Brits didn't "get" him as well as they thought they did; Christopher Hitchens, who says Bellow was no elitist but a humanist, and good for him, and that the Brits -- particularly Ian McEwan and Martin Amis and, ahem, your humble servant, sir -- get him just fine, thanks; Jeffrey Meyers, who pumps Sweet n' Low into the corpse that ought to be lying in state this week. --Michael Weiss [link]

Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Don't Fuck With The Drudge, The Drudge Does Not Suffer Usurpers Gladly... Nowhere in this Observer piece about a new blog of fellow-traveling Hollywood lefties will you find any mention of the fact the Wonkette and Gawker think Matt Drudge is so ardently heterosexual, it hurts.

Instead, the D-Man beams alpha hot all on his own. Can you handle it?

On the competition:

"I mean, c’mon, this is small-time. How do I take seriously ‘Sploid,’ ‘Gawker,’ ‘Wonkette’? How do you begin to take this seriously? It’s like ‘Supercalifragalisticexpialadocious: This is just in!’... Too cute by half."

They should refine that juice for menopausal women. Ugh.

On the Drudge Commitment:

Mr. Drudge has stayed on top by being essential -— a "utility," he said -- and always being there for his readers, day and night. He operates from anywhere he chooses, most recently from his new "newsroom," a brand-new 2005 Mustang GT that he outfitted with a broadband connection. (He engaged in a recent instant-messenger conversation discussing his would-be challengers while sitting in the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant in his hometown of Miami.)

Mustang GT, bitch! Like Steve McKing in Bullitt.

Mr. Drudge said he doubted the market for news links would support more players.

"I don’t think that need is there," he said. "I think I fill that need."

All dong long, baby.

Mr. Drudge observed that Ms. Huffington had "tons of charm and humor," but he questioned whether she and her powerful Hollywood friends had the stamina or wherewithal to keep up with him.

"This isn’t a dinner party, darling," he said. "This is the beast! This is the Internet beast, which is all-consuming, as anyone knows who works in this business."

It’s little wonder that Mr. Drudge accuses his adversaries of hanging out at parties. He said he once met Mr. Beatty at a book party in Los Angeles co-hosted by Susan Estrich celebrating a publication by lawyer Burt Fields.

"When he met me, he said it was the biggest thing since meeting John Wayne," recalled Mr. Drudge, who called Mr. Beatty an "extreme charmer. Extreme."

He added that Mr. Beatty’s wife, actress Annette Bening, glowered at him and asked, "‘How’s Sidney Blumenthal?’ with her Being Julia look." (She was referring to the former Clinton White house aide who once sued Mr. Drudge for defamation.)

These paragraphs are only legal in Hawaii and Massachusetts.

But to some, the rest of the press has been playing into Mr. Drudge’s hands. His former political friend David Brock, who runs the Web site Media Matters for America, compiled a 33-page dossier on Mr. Drudge, bullet-pointing his many alleged distortions and misreports.

Friend. Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments... --Michael Weiss [link]

"U.S. High School Gets Raw End of Student Exchange"... Onion:

"Didn't the Max Planck people read the AFS literature?" Seward said. "You're supposed to trade your best and brightest students. I mean, Uwe is a nice enough kid, but he looks nothing like the strapping blond, blue-eyed German boy in the brochure. I don't think he plays guitar, either." --Michael Weiss [link]

Intelligent Design: The Photoshop of Science... If the ID brigade applied even one tenth of their collective calories to real science as they do to bullshit, imagine what they'd accomplish.

The bombadier beetle, they've discovered, can't have evolved that way. It shoots fire out of its ass when two volatile chemicals, stored in separate membraneous sacs, are mixed in mutual ejection. (If you've seen Die Hard With a Vengeance, you know what kind of boom-power I'm talking about). If natural selection did its thing, the poor bombadier would have combusted right off the Darwinian assembly line millennia ago.

The power to ring up casuistry like this, for instance, must have come from... elsewhere.

Yeah, yeah. Just ask Bernard Henri-Lévy about scoping out scientific Americans:

"The problem is Darwin," Lee Strobel says, in a tone that makes him sound as if he's advertising a product rather than preaching a sermon. "That's the subject of my book: if Darwin is right, then life develops all on its own and God is out of a job. Do you want God to be out of a job?"

The faithful murmur no, they don't want God to be unemployed, "It's like the miracle of bacteria—take one atom away from bacteria, and it's no longer bacteria. Isn't that proof that God exists? Isn't that proof that the Bible tells the truth? That, too, is demonstrated in my book."

This former journalist—who in another book tells how his marriage nearly foundered when his wife became a Christian, and was then salvaged when he converted too—finds ways to quote himself eight times in one hour. So when the time for book-signing arrives, several hundred of us are waiting quietly in line in the cafeteria, between airport-security cordons, to have him scribble "Hi, Matt!" or "Hi, Doug!" for us, accompanied by a promotional smile.

"French?" he asks me, looking slightly put off, when my turn comes.

"French, yes. And atheist."

Then this reply, as if he has changed his mind: "Oh! That's okay … In that case, say the atheist's prayer—that works for the French, too..."

And now he closes his eyes, puts his left hand on his heart while continuing to scrawl an almost illegible "Hi, Bernie!" with his right, and says, "'God, if you are there, show yourself.' That's the atheist's prayer."

Billy Bragg ("English, yes. And atheist.") said it best: "This is the land of opportunity, and there's a monkey trial on TV." --Michael Weiss [link]

Jonathan Yardley thinks that for all its incandescent self-absorption, Jane Fonda's My Life So Far (so far? Oh, my dear, you mean there's more of it?) is a scenic top-down car ride through the decades with a charming and lovely twit.

I've always thought that Bridget was the real Barbarella in the family. Then again, I hear "Tom Hayden" and my immediate association is Sideways, not Port Huron.

But what makes an easy, breezy, beautiful cover girl mount an anti-aircraft gun, anyway? Two words: Daddy Issues.

Yes, her heart belongs to Daddy. "All my life I had been a father's daughter, trapped in a Greek drama, like Athena, who sprang formed from the head of her father, Zeus -- disciplined, driven. Starting in childhood, I learned that love was earned through perfection." But human perfection being impossible, love sought through the illusion of possessing it never can be real and never can last. Fonda seems finally to recognize the truth of this, but that knowledge comes too late to wipe away the frustration and disappointment that her own imperfections have inflicted on her. This is too bad, but as she says, she has had a good life, "rich with an inheritance of memories and lessons." From that life she has extracted this book, which for all its excesses -- its garrulity, its self-absorption, its preachiness -- has many good and endearing qualities. Not least of these is its smooth, highly readable prose, which, word has it, Fonda actually wrote herself.

... trapped in a Greek drama, like Athena. She was Greek, from the ancient times. She had grey eyes and she fell for emotionally unavailable men, too. Her father was Zeus, who had thunderbolts. Which the Italians call colpo di fulmine when they mean love. I learned that in Rome, where Ted was telling people that God was dead. Or that the Holocaust never happened. Or something. --Michael Weiss [link]

Notable Understatements... The BBC reports on the steady erosion of the UN's efficacy. (Or if you're a conservative, the steady exposure of its aimlessness.) I could explain it, but they do it better than I would, and really, I just want to block quote this one paragraph:

All this matters because the UN has been entrusted with trying to bring peace to central Africa. If there are disputes between UN employees about something as basic as one country invading another, that trust may be brought into question.

No kidding. This on the heels of the Darfur balk and the growing Asian tension over Japan? (The world's second largest economy, and second largest military, wants a Security Council veto, and China doesn't like that.)

I'm giving the UN a pass on the oil-for-food scandal, which seems like small change. But even the beeb seems to be running out of patience with this international farce. --Nic Duquette [link]

Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Saul Bellow.  
Saul Bellow Is Dead at 89... No words can express the loss our world has suffered today.

This is from Bellow's masterpiece, The Adventures of Augie March. It has a kind of Donne-esque condescending regard for the Grim Reaper, which I feel confident in believing its creator had at his final hour, too.

He often abandoned himself to ideas of death, and notwithstanding that he was advanced in so many ways, his Death was still the old one in the shriveled mummy longjohns; the same Death that beautiful maidens failed to see in their mirrors because the mirrors were filled with their white breasts, with the blue light of old German rivers, with cities beyond the window checkered like their own floors. This Death was a cheating old rascal with bones showing in his buckskin fringes, not a gentle Sir Cedric Hardwicke greeting young boys from the branches of an apple tree in a play I once saw. Einhorn had no kind familiar thoughts of him, but superstitions about this frightful snatcher, and he only played the Thanatopsis stoic but always maneuvered to beat this other--Death!--who had already gained so much on him.

Who maybe was the only real god he had.

Michiko Kakutani has a nice tribute.

For all the awards Mr. Bellow received in the course of his career, he saw himself as going against the mainstream of contemporary literature, skeptical of the willful aestheticism and postmodern pyrotechnics that had become increasingly fashionable, and equally dismissive of the trendy nihilism evinced by writers he called "the wastelanders," those who believe, in his words, that it is "enlightened to expose, to disenchant, to hate and to experience disgust." He believed that literature should hew to one of its original purposes - the raising of moral questions - and his own writing remained firmly indebted to the works he had studied as a boy: the Old Testament, Shakespeare's plays and the great 19th-century Russian novels.

San Francisco Chronicle; Associated Press... --Michael Weiss [link]

Natural Deselection... Here's a link to Scientific American's hilarious April Fool's Day editorial apologizing for their long-running endorsement of evolution as fact, titled "Okay, We Give Up."

We resisted [letter writers'] advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong. --Nic Duquette [link]

Bernard Henri-Lévy Discovers America... The Atlantic kicks off a Tocquevillean adventure this month, as leading French haircut Bernard Henri-Lévy (BHL to you and me, babe) travels red state, blue state, far and wide, in search of... highways jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive, little pink houses, Bush speech infelicities, Dearborn Arabs living the Jewish-American dream, baseball, prisons, and a certain nostalgie de la boue that makes us today, tomorrow, as ever, all Americans. --Michael Weiss [link]
The Day the Music Died... Robert Pinsky says rhymeless verse is historically okay, and he's got Milton, Wordsworth and Jonson on his side, while you've got petty snobbery on yours.

Still may Syllabes jarre with time,
Still may reason warre with rime,
Resting never.

April is Poetry Month. May is Screenplay Month. Enjoy the Spring. --Michael Weiss [link]

All's Wells That Ends Wells... The Red Sox bigshots have made a policy of finding excellent ballplayers underrated by their current employers and using them to good effect. That's why their entire pitching staff was unstoppable last year, even as the outfield raced to beat the all time playoff error count. But watching last night's opening game at Yankee Stadium, I couldn't help but wonder: who thought it was a good idea to hire David Wells? And it's not as though he was having an off night yesterday. He's always kinda sucked.

Even when Wells was supported by the Yankees, he struck me as ordinary and workmanlike, and permanently angry. With fifty thousand Yankee fans suddenly booing him, he was a shambles of his former mediocrity. There was a time when Wells would give up a home run and even the lip-illiterate could make out his string of cuss words on the mound camera. Last night he balked and stood there lookling like a slackjawed oaf. Who in MLB ever gives up a balk?

Then there's the issue of Wells' memoir, Perfect I'm Not: Boomer on Beer, Brawls, Backaches, and Baseball. First paragraph:

Saturday night, 7:15 p.m. My frosted pink lipstick is lavered on thick. My bleached blonde hair is moussed high and sprayed hard, like something you'd see wandering through a New Jersey shopping mall. Tight, black, patent leather pumps are squeezing my feet. Tight, black, queen-size panty hose are squeezing my groin. The cocktail dress I'm wearing feels at least two inches too short. My ass is freezing, but my big, fake boobs are smoking hot.

Unfortunately for the "World Champions," with Curt Schilling on one good ankle, Pedro Martinez and his Dominican midget friend decamped to Queens, and Derek Lowe -- I don't actually know what happened to Derek Lowe, but it probably involves a stay in a Buddhist monastery or in a straitjacket. Anyway, Wells could well be the best pitcher the Red Sox have this year. It was never likely the team would go to the World Series again. But a winning record would make life here more exciting. --Nic Duquette [link]

Monday, April 4, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Woody Allen's Crib... Sometimes jokes just write themselves.

Oh, hi. Hello, welcome to my, um, my ‘Crib.’ Of course, if you, um, if you believe all those crazy, terrible—just terrible—allegations my former girlfriend Mia Farrow said about me, you’d probably think it in poor taste for me to call my home a ‘crib.’ --Michael Weiss [link]

Sunday, April 3, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

iPod Fucking... It's a slow morning, so I bought it right up until iLube (okay, right up until slightly thereafter). --Michael Weiss [link]

Saturday, April 2, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

The Belletrist... Who wrote this?

Even if one loves to play
One's little fiddle night and day,
It's not right to broadcast it
Lest the list'ners scoff at it.
If you scratch with all your might -
Which is certainly your right -
Then bring down the windowpane
So the neighbours don't complain.

Ogden Nash? John Betjeman? W.H. Auden, in one of his lighter moments? No. Albert Einstein, in one of his breathing moments. Not just a physicist, but a regular scribbler, too. --Michael Weiss [link]

Jimmy Jazz on Franken's Folly... James Wolcott must have been watching a cuddlier living room adaptation of "Left of the Dial" performed by his cats. Here's what he has to say about the painfully hilarious HBO documentary chronicling the major falls and minor lifts of an infant Air America:

The heroine and savior of the piece is Randi Rhodes, the only host with a real track record in radio, who shlubs around the studio and broods in her apartment, neglected in the station's ads and promotions while Al Franken is treated like the l'il king. There's a wonderful little vignette when Michael Moore leaves Al's studio after appearing on the show and Randi greets him in the hallway to introduce herself. He shakes her and as he continues down the hall, she returns to her studio muttering that he had no idea who she was. But once she gets on the air, she's emerges as Randi, Warrior Princess, breaking the sound barrier and showing everyone how liberal talk radio is done by driving a wooden stake into Ralph Nader on the air.

As I.F. Stone once put it, a critic who can suck like that need never dine alone. Randi Rhodes came off like an unmedicated Times Square hebephrene, both on and off the air. That vignette was 'wonderful' all right, but only because it preceded a moment capturing Moore's sputtering deflation into the self-obsessed coward that he really is. After Rhodes galumphs off unrecognized and uncared about, Flint's favorite son is then introduced to a station executive who had recently referred to him, in the New York Times, as a left-wing Michael Savage. Moore mumbles a few defensive words -- "I thought that was, you know, kind of a shitty thing to say" -- with an angry-shy expression and downward-cast eyes, before hopping an elevator and turning to the camera to declare that Michael Moore detractors like that will be -- the downfall of Air America! Letting aside the question of why anyone would want to be acknowledged by such a person in the first place, that Moore had never heard of Randi Rhodes had nothing to do with the grubby tendentiousness of corporate marketing and everything to do with Randi Rhodes. (Mike and I have something in common: I'd never heard of her either). Such a shrill, obnoxious cow's lack of media coverage was understandable then, and is perfectly justified now given the way she reacted -- and I do mean reacted -- to her own anonymity. Nader was far too generous with her for far too long before hanging up. And unless 'broods' is bien-pensant argot for 'bitches and sniffles,' anyone with his fingers crossed for a liberal radio station should not be sinking to such Dubya-esque levels of bullshit in recounting its rather grim and unseemly hatching. --Michael Weiss [link]

On Food Fighting... Here's the video of Pat Buchanan getting the Caesar treatment. (At least it looks like Caesar dressing, which would only visit more insult to injury upon the man who wants a republic, not an empire).

Very silly, all this waste of good food on pundits. Personally, I've never understood the thinking behind splatter-terrorism. The anti-fur people chuck buckets of red paint onto the annuity-holding Huggy Bears and Chingachgooks of the Upper East Side... What's accomplished? The grand dames suddenly learn to live in fear and stop buying shawls made of Thumper? Bad luck so far. (Although, by all means, keep those PETA ads with naked supermodels coming. There's not a strip of PVC in the house thanks to Cindy and the girls).

The real winners, it seems, are the ones who videotape these stunts. Burn a few 'Best of' DVDs and suddenly you're a MacArthur Fellow and artist-in-residence at the Tate Gallery.

But the desire to scandalize or abase is unfulfilled. William Kristol wiped off his face and, with true chutzpah and dignity, went on with his lecture. No great neocon unraveling occurred, no clever act of satire was registered among the crowd -- if anything, Kristol's largesse earned him more regime change sympathy at an institution known for its 'Peace Studies Department." Meanwhile, the pie hurler gets the boot from college, possessing only a heroic jackass story he must already be finding it increasingly difficult to dine out on (always the case when the richest part of your comedy is the prop). The 15-second celebrity proprietor of Buchanan's Own gets a couple nights in the clink, where isolationism may well come in handy as a survival tool, if not a dogmatic foreign policy. Michelle Malkin squawks. Someone named Professor Bainbridge thinks guns and maybe rap music are the next objet "dart." And the beat goes on. --Michael Weiss [link]

For Love of Beck... I have two litmus tests to which I hold all potential associates: One, if you don't think P.G. Wodehouse is funny, then you have no sense of humor, period. Two, if you dislike Beck, you have no taste of music, sorry.

Beck's new album Guero is great. It is perhaps not his "masterpiece," but the most captious critic simply cannot deny the brilliance of tracks like "Girl," "Hell Yes," "Que Onda Guero," or "Rental Car." The whole thing is indeed a very nice and reckless excursion. If you have $10.67 lying around, I encourage you to pick up Beck's latest gem. --Mark Grueter [link]

Friday, April 1, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Mean Cuisine... While delivering lectures this week, two conservatives - one neo, one paleo - were assaulted with foodstuffs. William Kristol, honcho brainiac of The Weekly Standard, received a traditional pie-in-the-face from an impish student. I think it was cherry. And Pat Buchanan, the charming bastard son of General Franco, was "doused" with salad dressing by an equally mischeivous co-ed. But, salad dressing? Salad dressing?? Give the kid points for originality perhaps, but that just seems totally lacking in tact to me. It's not the right spirit.

I for one would far prefer to go, say, drinking with Buchanan over Kristol, but I suppose both men had it coming - all egomaniacs could use a pie in the face. It broadens the mind. --Mark Grueter [link]

Coal to Newcastle 2K5... Does the GAO have the authority to audit the ongoing wars? If so, why isn't it? From a newswire release about the Army-GM collaboration on hydrogen fuel cells:

The U.S. Army has the largest fleet of vehicles in the world. Improving fuel economy and reducing the logistics of the fuel supply chain could save millions of dollars. For example, it cost the U.S. Army up to $400 a gallon of gas to ship fuel to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even accounting for the logistical difficulties of being in a combat zone, that's a lot to ship fuel to troops who are operating in the places where fuel comes from. Where is that money going? For crying out loud, at $400 a gallon, blood for oil is a great deal. --Nic Duquette [link]

Where's Our Cookie?... When I ran for New York State Assembly, I learned all sorts of fun facts about the bluest banana republiquette in the Union. Among them, New York's budget hadn't been passed on time in 20 years; legislators didn't need to show up for work to vote on bills they hadn't read, or hadn't had read to them; those bills never got debated in committee or on the floor of either chamber; law was exclusively determined by the the hydra-headed Caligulan whim of Joe Bruno, Sheldon Silver and George Pataki.

Well, God bless us, every one. A budget's been done. On time this time, since the grace year 1984. That's right, boys, there's a new sheriff in town. His name is Demi-Competence. Don't go sweating that small stuff, now. Terrifying slack-jawed dysfunction doesn't just become monstrously retarded inefficiency overnight. It's a process. --Michael Weiss [link]

Leaves of Grass Unmown After All This Time... Far be it from the New York Sun to traffic in hyperbole, but

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of the single greatest book ever written by an American.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn came out in 1885, making it only 120. Gatsby publication date: 1925. Augie March became an American, Chicago-born in 1953. Hmm. Must be a glitch in that neocon math.

If the term "American poetry" clangs off your tin ear like, oh, "Great Canadian Novel," be well advised not to proceed any further than this.

(I know what you're thinking, and the answers are: Eliot became English; Auden stayed that way). --Michael Weiss [link]

Wolfowitz's Successor... I suppose it's only fitting that someone whose last name was pronounced around the BBC with a hard v fricative that'd spring Dr. Strangelove from his wheelchair should be replaced by someone whose last name is -- England. And the first name is Gordon (he must have changed it from Averell, which sounded 'too ethnic'). A former General Dynamics executive with a proven Navy Department synergy only Air America could hate. Well, you know what they say: No matter how hard you try, you just can't stop these Gentiles from percolating up into the highest reaches of power.

Returning to less eyebrow-raising appointments, the president has also tapped the much more seemly-sounding Eric Edelman to succeed Douglas Feith as Undersecretary for Policy. Thank heavens this 'democratic' outreach spirit of Mr. Bush's has not yet infested every inner sanctum. Can you imagine? --Michael Weiss [link]

Times on Schiavo... This is actually a very eloquent and moving coda to nasty national spectacle. The editorial board should be proud. --Michael Weiss [link]

Thursday, March 31, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Bad Boys, Bad Boys, What You Gonna Do?... The Economist's recent article on the failure of the Iraqi government to break out the Founding Fathers schtick has one of the most stunning digressions I've ever seen. If it's to be believed, one of the driving factors behind the insurgents' loss of public support is Fox, Iraqi style:

[T]he insurgentsí mystique is fading, thanks in part to popular television programmes such as ìTerror in the Hands of Justiceî, which shows broken rebel captives confessing to everything from contract killings to homosexual orgies. Iraqi police say this has led to a surge in the number of tips from citizens, who now take a more scornful and less fearful view of the guerrillas.

Here's more from the BBC and Washington Times. --Nic Duquette [link]

Jumping the Whale... Poor Moby. His music has always sounded like something pumped into the scuba gear during a pregnant woman's water birth. (And the Kubrickian man-fetus behind the turntables hasn't helped scour this image any.) Now Kelefa Sanneh of the New York Times has blown him the ultimate kiss of obsolescence -- and done it with a pretty plodding Fukayama reference at that.

"The end of history will be a very sad time," the political theorist Francis Fukuyama wrote in 1989, anticipating, after a fashion, Moby's world. Mr. Fukuyama imagined a future defined by "economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands." The appeal of Moby was that he would give us a way to enjoy this future; he would satisfy our "sophisticated consumer demands" through superior engineering.

The faceless choir at the American Enterprise Institute ohming along to The Bourne Identity soundtrack. --Michael Weiss [link]

A Rabbi, a Priest and a Mullah Were Walking Down the Street... Can the religious hardliners on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever be convinced that it's in their best interest to give up strife and unite around their shared religious heritage? As it turns out, sometimes the answer is yes. --Nic Duquette [link]
The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Stud... Well, now we know where Michael Chabon found his inspiration for writing about superheroes: the mirror. His wife, Ayelet Waldman, seems to have a pretty good handle on every instinct except the maternal and silent. Pity the poor rugrats who'll grow up listening to Daddy talk about Spiderman's sticky stuff, while Mommy gibbers on about Daddy's.

D.H. Lawrence would come back to life just to put himself out of his misery with this shit:

I am the only woman in Mommy and Me who seems to be, well, getting any. This could fill me with smug well-being. I could sit in the room and gloat over my wonderful marriage. I could think about how our sex life - always vital, even torrid - is more exciting and imaginative now than it was when we first met. I could check my watch to see if I have time to stop at Good Vibrations to see if they have any exciting new toys. I could even gaze pityingly at the other mothers in the group, wishing that they too could experience a love as deep as my own.

Anyone remember the noise Sideshow Bob made when he stepped on a rake in the Cape Fear episode? (Fine, no better than "Klingon politics," that reference. But if my wife ever fogs up the "Styles" section of the Times with her satisfied sexual cravings, I'll fucking kill that smug UPS guy).

It is his face that inspires in me paroxysms of infatuated devotion. If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children.

Male novelists, take note: Incorporate graphic gay sex scenes into all your books, and the girls coming running. But, wait! Ayelet, what if your children grow up to discover that you love your husband more than you do them? What if they resent having been moons rather than suns in galaxy of your affection? What will you tell them then?

I will tell them that I wish for them a love like I have for their father. I will tell them that they are my children, and they deserve both to love and be loved like that. I will tell them to settle for nothing less than what they saw when they looked at me, looking at him.

Cool. Got it. --Michael Weiss [link]

Dan Savage: Real American Hero... Some weeks you just intuitively, thin-slicingly know to skip The Onion proper and head straight, so to speak, for the "Savage Love."

"Just as George W. Bush feels we should "err on the side of life"--at least where Terri Schiavo is concerned--I've always felt it's best to err on the side of avoiding incestuous hand-jobs."

Somebody please, please put that on t-shirt... Don't worry about the length. In Texas, that size fits all.

Now read the Q that led to that A. --Michael Weiss [link]

 
ENDNOTES, REVIEWS & NOTICES
Stalin, by Robert Service  
Servicing Stalin
by Michael Weiss
(Originally published in Stop Smiling magazine) [link]

Someone at this stage should do for Joseph Stalin what Don DeLillo, in his novel White Noise, did for Adolph Hitler: Give him his own academic department. Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, assorted articles and monographs have disgorged the goods on the former Soviet Union and its miserable ruler of three decades. Most recently, Simon Sebag Montiefore's Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar examined what can only be called the methodical caprice of the modern -- and fully modernized -- authoritarian. Here, at last, was Stalin's Satyricon: decades of after-hours Politburo meetings, with food fights, adolescent pranks, and creepy man-on-man waltzes, where the head of Polish security presses his lips to the ear of a foreign minister and whispers sweet somethings about “infiltrations” -- and not the kind you'd expect under the circumstances. [Read more...]

Galloway  
Fascism With the Face It Deserves
by Michael Weiss
[link]

Tune in to Hitchens v. Galloway, Wednesday, September 14, at 7 PM, broadcast live from Baruch College in Manhattan. But first read up on the awful truth about Boy George:

-- George Galloway & Iraq's Oil For Food Program: Facts, Falsehoods, and Misconceptions

-- Galloway In His Own Words

Darwin  
If Children Don't Understand Evolution, Maybe It's Because We Don't Teach Them Science
by Nic Duquette
[link]

Neither side of the evolution debate is able to address the issue usefully in the classroom. When President Bush suggested that "intelligent design" be introduced in schools so students could understand the vital cultural debate we are having, he was denounced as a political opportunist and scientific philistine. But the president is correct on this issue: schoolchildren should be introduced to the principles of so-called intelligent design theory and encouraged to hammer out the scientific and theological issues at stake. A spirited, ugly debate on intelligent design from coast to coast is the best way to make sure Darwin's insights are introduced to students well. All participants in the evolution debate seem to believe that the school system is training children to be evolutionists, and that the introduction of intelligent design will undermine unquestioning belief in natural selection. That's absurd. The opposite is true. [more...]

Nusle Bridge  
The Prague Fall: Communism's Death Hasn't Stopped the Self-Inflicted Kind
by Orli Sharaby
[link]

Even in the warmest of months, life can seem cold and dreary. So it was, presumably, for some anonymous fellow on a bright and sunny Tuesday morning a few weeks ago. As I made my way unsuspectingly to the tram at 8:10 that day, incidentally, without yet having had any coffee, I suddenly came face to face with self-inflicted death, splattered unsympathetically across the tram tracks directly underneath the Nusle Bridge. A shocking sight, to be sure, and one which made me rather unfashionably late to work, not to mention the fact that it's haunted me ever since. The crude outline of the victim has long since faded from the pavement, but it remains forever etched in my memory, from time to time bringing to the surface ruminations on suicide and what would cause a person to end his own life. I mean, it's a harsh world out there. Leaving aside the uncertainty of living in a major city in the age of "sacred terror," millions of horsepower zoom past us everyday as we cross the street; diseases threaten to gobble our t-cells; earthquakes rend holes in the very ground beneath our feet...Isn't it enough to leave death to chance?

Apparently not for the hundreds of thousands of people who kill themselves every year, citing -- presumably in suicide notes -- marital problems, depression, mental or physical disease, or fear of police (yes, really) as reasons for their "take no prisoners" attitude toward their own lives. In the Czech Republic in 2003, the last year for which records are available, approximately 1700 people committed suicide, thankfully not all from the bridge above my house. When one researches global trends in suicide, which I discovered is a much less repulsive task than one might imagine, certain interesting facts emerge. One is that women are anywhere from 2 to 6 times less likely to die at their own hands then men are (except in China, where women are more inclined), but that they're at least two times more likely than men to try.

The statistics on suicide also point to the high numbers in European countries versus Latin American and Middle Eastern nations. This would seem to lend truth to the popular opinion that a religious commitment all but inoculates a person from committing the act. Church and other religious leaders claim that integration in that kind of social network provides worshipers the necessary support system and sense of belonging to choose life. More likely, fear of burning eternally in hell is the predominant deterrent for conscientious churchgoers. Whatever the case, the claim that atheists and agnostics are more likely to kill themselves out of desperation falls apart when one takes into consideration Poland, a country that boasts a population wherein 97% of citizens are strictly Catholic. Poland has a comparable suicide rate to that of the Czech Republic, a country, as we all know, that is one of the most atheistic in the world.

Moreover, neighbors Czech Republic and Poland share their status as high-suicide-rate nations with the entire region of Eastern Europe, including Lithuania, which lays claim to the highest global rate of suicide. So maybe it's not about religion, and it's not about girls and boys; maybe suicide is just another social phenomenon to be put neatly in the "it's because of Communism" box. And true enough, Prague's Suicide Bridge, giving fatalism an inconvenient potential energy just above my apartment, was built from 1968-1973 by Communist authorities not only to alleviate traffic congestion but also as a grandiose display of military and cultural authority. But as the thousands who jump, hang, shoot, suffocate, and overdose to their deaths in the former Eastern Bloc can attest, Big Brother left his legacy in the region in far less showy, but just as pervasive, ways.

The Aristocrats  
Peer Review: The Aristocrats, In Theory and Practice
by Michael Weiss
[link]

Within the vernacular of modern show biz there exists a system of taxonomy that sounds as if it were dreamt up by a Variety editor with an annoying speech impediment: "director's director," "actor's actor," "comedian's comedian." Whatever the species under consideration, the genus is instantly recognizable as much by its implied shortcomings as by its signaled attributes. The limelight has probably been elusive for the comedian's comedian despite a white-hot talent which only the pros can appreciate and, to coin another commonplace of the industrial lingo, "hope to work with someday." Not for him is the blockbuster weekend or household celebrity. The best he can hope for is his name whispered in hushed tones, in moist magazine profiles of his box office betters; a moment of amplified applause during an embarassing cameo in some award show montage; or, now that the success of independent film is largely brokered on the success of the semi-anonymous underdog, a documentary all about his little old self...

The Aristocrats is not about a comedian's comedian, but it is about something slightly more elect and revealing: a comedian's comedy. As with any mercantile guild or philosophers circle, the closed circuit of the entertainer is worth investigating on social merits alone. Who are these people and what do they do when they're not working? Even if the answer is, Still working, what's different when the cameras aren't on? This is why old Friar's Club and Dean Martin roasts are now available on DVD and why books like Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live top the bestsellers lists. It's not the ham schtick, bad haircuts, or parade of bold-faced (and mostly dead) names that fascinate us; it's the access to a rare-glimpsed culture of comity or commiseration, how those bold-faced names intimately know one another, or pretend to do, anyway. It's the cant-free chaos of shoptalk, the personnel abuse -- whether ironic and well-meaning, or sincere and irate -- that makes these spectacles no different than those of a vaguely functional family that drinks together. From scripted intentionality to failure-friendly improvisation. All certificates of inauthenticity have been voided as a little something extra for the fans. Actually, failure-friendly doesn't quite cut it: failure, and a temporary immunity to it, is the whole point. David Letterman's monologue would have been consigned to the dust-bin of Nick-at-Nite reruns a long time ago were this not true.

And this is pretty much the conceit behind a legendary inside joke of vaudeville that's been passed down through the ages and told mostly offstage as a form of self-entertainment. It's built upon the thinnest and most shiftable armatures of form, a Zen-like rock garden of humor. Ready? Here goes: A family visits a talent agent. The father tells the agent they've got this amazing, must-see act. "What is it you do?," asks the agent. Now insert the vilest, most elaborate thought-images of carnality, incest, bestiality and scatology you can dream up on the spot and sustain indefinitely. (Grandmas and newborn infants aren't just fair game, they're de rigueur.) Finish with one justifiably horrified agent who has a single follow-up question, the name of the act, and you've got the whole shebang of The Aristocrats, which is also the punchline. The same hoary set-up is told and retold and with alternating levels of gusto and flourish by everyone who's still alive and ever made you laugh. Or never made you laugh, but will do so here. George Carlin, Gilbert Gottfried, Bob Saget, Drew Carey and Cartman from South Park all spray their own brand of liquid filth to enormously hilarious effect. (That Gottfried, the Patron Saint of the Onstage Reincarnation, and Saget, who charitably donates his Frankenstein rendering of the joke to the "kids from Full House," are two of the funniest in this capacity is another testament to the you-only-thought-you-knew world of professional stand-up.)

You might say that such a documentary, which is the badly molested brainchild of Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza, depends on a one-trick pony, but given what ponies are rhetorically put through for two hours, you'd only court banality with that description. Instead, what's been produced here is a very smart and engrossing work of history, deconstruction and reconstruction of a near-Iliadic text by academics you wouldn't mind reading even when they do get a touch pedantic. I suppose it was inevitable that the gender and race distinctions of "blue" comedy would get its exegesis, but even this is handled skillfully by Chris Rock, Whoopi Goldberg and Phyllis Diller, charmingly buttoned-up about the obscene, all the while wearing a muu-muu. "I fainted the first time I heard it" -- which leads you to wonder what poor Phyllis must have made of Sarah Silverman's exquisitely tasteless interpretation of the bit, ending in the slow-dawn realization of her own rape.

A few years back Jerry Seinfeld made a documentary called Comedian. The problem with that compulsive peak behind the curtain was that it attempted to take a wildly inordinate success story -- about the richest and most high-profile master of observation, ever -- and boil it back down to its humble, on-the-road essences. The duds remained duds because of a complete lack of self-consciousness about them, not to mention a too-literal presentation of the agonies of invention by a mediocre supporting cast. Whereas with The Aristocrats no one hogs the mic, if only because of the deliberately thankless material everyone has to work with. That's the fun. Small and formulaic imperceptibly building to outsize and unpredictable climax is also one definition of artistry. Indeed, it says more about the true nature of comedy that a shit-soaked, uncle-fucking mongoloid girl of seven somehow represents the more attractive side of an industry filled with bank-breaking personality disorders like Jerry, and self-obsessed primadonnas like Orny Adams.

Before Sunset  
Freaky Deaky: A Rogue Economist Has Fun, and So Do We... Up to a Point
by Max Gross
Buy it from Amazon
[link]

Probably the best thing that can be said about Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's new book, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything is that it makes for excellent cocktail party nibbles.

Who wouldn't like to regale one's friends with some of the weird avenues Levitt and Dubner explore? The book tells why public school teachers might encourage their students to cheat on a standardized test; why a real estate broker would gladly sell a house for less than its market worth; why sumo wrestlers are willing to fix matches; why a swimming pool is more dangerous than a handgun. And so on.

Freakonomics is essentially an expansion of a fawning article that Dubner wrote for The New York Times Magazine a few years back about Levitt, a young economist at the University of Chicago, who specializes in economies that have little to do with money. (The article is quoted -- embarrassingly -- throughout the book.) The research is all Levitt's, and the book is a pop-rewrite of Levitt's academic papers.

Since it has come out, Freakonomics has been collecting nothing but lavish praise from a lot of highbrow reviewers. "If Indiana Jones were an economist, he'd be Steven Levitt," wrote Steven Landsburg, in the Wall Street Journal. The New Yorker's science writer, Malcolm Gladwell, lent the book a blurb for its cover: "Prepare to be dazzled." There were many others.

But I would advise against preparing oneself to be dazzled; on the contrary, I would say that one should prepare to be slightly disappointed. It would be ridiculous to say that there is nothing worthwhile in this book, but I found the book to be scattershot and unconvincing, in which serious topics (such as abortion, crime and drugs) were looked at in a somewhat sophomoric way.

In what should have been the most engaging chapter, "Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?" Levitt and Dubner look at the economy of the crack-cocaine world:

A few years back one of Levitt's colleagues befriended a Chicago crack gang and, in the process, managed to obtain one of the gang's ledgers. (Yes, apparently crack gangs keep accounts.)

It turns out that crack gangs are run very similarly to Fortune 500 companies; the gang had an enforcer, a treasurer, a CEO (who was a college educated business major) and dozens of junior-level dealers, who earned pitiful wages working a highly dangerous job (less than minimum wage; many dealers had to supplement their incomes working at places like McDonald's).

The economy of crack dealing is, of course, fascinating, and the chapter smells of what could have been first-rate journalism, but Levitt and Dubner choose to ask the wrong questions; the chapter asks why, if crack dealing is so profitable, most dealers live in the slums? (With their mothers, no less.) It is as if Levitt and Dubner watched movies like "The Godfather" and "Goodfellas", and took them for literal truth.

It's no surprise to anyone who has ever walked through a slum (or even picked up a newspaper) that most crack dealers lead Hobbseian, squalid lives. It almost goes without saying that crime would obey a certain pecking order -- that the Pablo Escobars and John Gottis of crime do very well, and the foot soldiers would not do nearly as well.

Most of us would respond, "Duh."

This chapter only serves to emphasize the overall slightness of the book as a whole.

More troubling is the chapter entitled, "Where Have All the Criminals Gone?" which explains why the legalization of abortion might have led to reduced crime rates.

This chapter begins by asking why crime went down during the 1990s when all experts were predicting it would go up. Some attribute the dip to the booming economy; others say it has to do with stricter gun laws; a few said that it was because more police were put on the force.

But Levitt posits that the dip came almost exactly 16 years after Roe v. Wade took effect -- exactly the same years that most thugs enter their criminal prime. Maybe there was less crime because fewer criminals were being born...

For both liberals and conservatives, the implications of this argument are horrific; for conservatives -- who have always prided themselves on believing in law-and-order -- Levitt's argument would validate abortion. For liberals the argument smacks of a soft form of eugenics; that poor people -- and all the minorities that live in poverty -- are criminals, and that they are being weeded out.

The book has facts to back itself up; in the states where abortion was legal prior to Roe, crime rates went down sooner. And in 1966, after Ceausescu made abortion illegal in Romania, the reverse happened: crime started to go up about 16 years later. (These facts seem a little wispy when making such a startling claim. I would have liked to have seen much more evidence.)

Levitt and Dubner have remained proudly noncommittal, politically speaking, about this chapter -- which, no matter what side of the political aisle you come from, is a major cop-out. At a time when a new Supreme Court Justice might well decide the fate of abortion (as well as the legislation that has been chipping away at a woman's right to an abortion) it seems too important an argument to treat as neutrally as Levitt and Dubner.

But, then, that seems to be the general gestalt of the book. Freakonomics might flirt with serious topics, and maybe that's the only way to write a best seller these days, but it will ultimately be relegated into a quaint anecdote.

A Revalued Yuan Means a Cheaper Dollar. Will China Buy General Motors?
by Nic Duquette
[link]

The very idea that one of the iconic corporations of American manufacturing could be bought up by Asians may strike most Americans as impossible. However, it is not only feasible, but the recent revaluation of the Chinese currency suggests that this may be exactly what China is planning. Like the auto worker in the Johnny Cash song, China's government and manufacturers may be assembling all they need one piece at a time. [more]

Before Sunset  
In the Gloaming: Before Sunset on DVD
Buy it from Amazon [link]

Of the many virtues of seeing Julie Delpy do anything for roughly ninety minutes, her strutting Nina Simone impersonation in the very last frame of Before Sunset was easily the sexiest thing committed to celluloid in the last year. "Baby... You are gonna miss. That. Plane." I know. Planes, trains, automobiles, Vienna, Paris. Who wouldn't write a bestselling novel, thinly disguised as an all-points enchantress bulletin, and tour the Continent with it just to find her again? There's absolutely no reason why a sequel to a self-contained story of circadian rhythms should have turned out better than the original. But then, your thirties are supposed to be more interesting than your twenties. And it makes sense that not having seen each other for a decade (oh, come on, if they had met six months later, would there be a sequel?) has almost estranged them back into first encounter mode. So we get another day, another peripatetic chatfest with some tingly, but also prickly, catching up to do. Are they both presently with other people? Yes. Does one of them now have a child? Uh-huh. Does any of this matter remotely? Maybe. Kudos to Linklater for resorting again to the flickering neon question mark of a denouement, which for these two characters obviously works. Though plenty of that older-and-wiser badinage can drift back into post-college Eurorail banality ("How can you possibly think that the world is not going straight to hell?" belongs to a different French Celine, in a different decade), this generally occupies the realm of how real, flawed human beings talk to and seduce each other. I can't believe I'd live to say this, but a director's instinct to let his actors write their own dialogue has finally paid off. Hawke and Delpy have a frightening natural chemistry (I even hear one of them is single these days) and you get the sense -- and ain't it always the reaffirmingest kind -- that they derived as much pleasure making the film as we do watching it. Until 2014 in the land of the midnight sun. And make it fucking work this time. --MW

Revenge of the Sith  
Evil Will Always Win Because Good Is Dumb: Episode III
by Michael Weiss

A lot of the trouble George Lucas has faced since going down the long slide into bathos and shattered expectation stems from the very phenomenon he helped create: the Movie Event. I'm probably wrong about this (it's my lede, bite me), but before Star Wars I don't think American cinema had quite attained the degree of cultural inescapability it has now -- what Don DeLillo in another context calls the 'world-hum.' (Where were you standing when Alec Guinness phoned it in?) Radio peaked with Orson Wells' Martian invasion hoax; television inaugurated the age of historical simultaneity via the live broadcast; but Star Wars alerted everyone to the news that from now on, going to the movies was no longer just a mode of "passive entertainment." No. It was democratic mythmaking in progress.

So it's ironic that Lucas's long-awaited return to the franchise that invented the modern consensus fable was met, in 1998, with almost unanimous hostility. Let's see, the first installment: a disposable children's cartoon best remembered for a talking upright fish for whom the seemingly inevitable line, "No woman no cry," was just an anti-defamation lawsuit away. Round two: a saccharine love story sprinkled liberally over a bland admixture of human cloning and "separatist" rebellion. Let simmer until plot thickens.

The good news is Revenge of the Sith -- or Episode III, or Bush in Space, or whatever the fuck it's called -- does pay down some of the deficit amassed by Lucas's latter-day gambles. No, it's not better than the original Star Wars, but it is well-paced, well-acted -- especially given the moody, brooding circumstances of the western/samurai trope -- and far more attentive to the unities of dramatic storytelling; it actually draws you in this time. Like the last scene in the final episode of Seinfeld, a giddy nostalgia is generated by the distinct impression of having "been here before," except that in this case we know exactly where we're going: back to the future of 1977. Oh, and a Promethean fall from grace, a prophecy betrayed, and something about the struggle for the fate of the universe -- all that shuffles things along, too.

To bring us up to speed, then: Anakin Skywalker is now secretly married to Padme, much to the contravention of an austere (and vaguely homoerotic) honor code for Jedi journeymen. Yet domestic life in an Ikea-furnished apartment seems to have only heightened his abilities as a fighter pilot and lightsaber swashbuckler. As a result, Anakin is now the Page Six apprentice of the galaxy, best known for saving the lives of other heroes and plenipotentiaries, not least of which belongs to Obi-Wan Kenobi, his (ahem) "master." The film opens with dizzying space battle that is shot and edited by someone who's been begging us to hear him out on the glories of CGI and has finally provided the key evidence for his case. Skywalker and Kenobi are on a mission to rescue Chancellor Palpatine, believed to have been kidnapped by the nasty Count Dooku, played by Christopher Lee who looks like an advertisement for the undead he once was. But of course the droll, froggy-voiced chancellor -- imagine Gore Vidal, only funnier and with better politics -- moonlights as the "Dark Lord of the Sith," prime mover of cosmic misfortune and chief villain of all six films. He's orchestrated a phony civil war, with nary a Jabba the Moore having hipped to him, the better to facilitate the transformation of the republic into his very own totalitarian empire. This is a project in which Anakin will, unwittingly at first, serve as helpmeet.

Now the Sith is either a schismatic sect of the Jedi order founded on a kind of alchemical interpretation of The Force, or else it's Douglas Feith's old department at the Pentagon. I'm really not so sure since the macedoine of ancient and contemporary histories and contradictory philosophies makes for a befuddled morality play indeed. Leaving aside the idea of a chancellor winding up a genocidal baddie dressed in black (forget ham, that's just spam-fisted), at one point a Dark Side-lured Anakin remarks to Obi-Wan: "Either you're with me, or you're my enemy." To this comes the sententious reply that "only a Sith thinks in absolutes." Yet Obi-Wan will soon thereafter invoke the giveaway Manichean term "evil," against which Anakin submits a claim to relative "points of view"! "Fanatical obscurantism" is something that even the arcane Leo Strauss deplored. I've got to wonder what the hell the "noble Wookie lie" must sound like.

I'd also like to take a moment and give credit to the wrongfully defamed Hayden Christensen. He learned from Shattered Glass that overwrought post-adolescence needn't package itself as a cardboard cutout set to bleat every five minutes, and he's proven under more demanding conditions that this is a knowledge he intends to keep. Good for him. His pissiness has matured into a respectable angry young man's grumble (that bulge in the forehead is genetic -- have you no heart, A.O. Scott?) which leaves you half sorry for the chap as he suppurates and smolders on the volcanic shore where Darth Vader is satanically born.

Despite what you've read, the dialogue in this installment isn't nearly as face-coveringly embarrassing as it was in the other go-rounds. Some of Yoda's Yiddish left-dislocational syntax would trip up Noam Chomsky on a good day, but otherwise the signs are all there of Tom Stoppard's cautious, and no doubt gleefully self-contained, script-doctoring. (C-3PO and R2-D2 Are Dead might have made for an interesting failure in its own right.) When Natalie Portman says, "Hold me like you did by the lake on Naboo," I winced more out of memory of her having opened her mouth at all in Closer. And the other critically celebrated clunker, "She's lost the will to live," is delivered by a medical droid who couldn't order 300 cc's of Penzoil Plus without sounding ridiculous. So no harm there, either.

But would it have killed Lucas to give Samuel L. Jackson the adieu his being zapped out the window of a multi-storied government building requires? "You God damn right I sense a disturbance in the Force!"

FDR Stamp  
It's the Stupidity, Economists: The Debate Over Social Security
by Nic Duquette
[link] [Click New Dealer to read.]

The whole four-part series has been compiled and edited together. You can now view it here as The Tractatus Fiscalo-Deepshiticus.

Nouvelle Vague  
Nouvelle Vague: Putting the High-Concept Into "Concept Album"
by Nic Duquette
[link] [Click album cover to buy.]

Lately I've been listening to Internet streams of Santa Monica's iconic public radio station KCRW, which might as well drop the syndicated news programs for an "all covers and remixes, all the time" format. I don't think I've heard an original version yet, except for one song from Guero that sounded like it was a rimix of a different Beck song. But one day, rising from the seamless sea of trip-hop was a thoroughly unironic lounge jazz cover of "Love Will Tear Us Apart."

If you're anything like me, you double-took that sentence the way I did the song itself. It's the leadoff track from the self-titled debut Nouvelle Vague, a French band that recorded an album of British post-punk in a Brazilian bossanova style with a half-dozen guest chanteuses. ("Nouvelle Vague" translates to "new wave" in English and bossa nova in Portuguese.)

Had I never heard the album, I would have stayed away from it. After all, these sort of experiments usually have the Cakey toxicity of those "ironic" punk covers of TV theme songs that circulate through freshman dorms, or at least the one-shot novelty of that Flaming Lips cover of the Kylie Minogue song. (You know, the version with the tympani.)

But this is one such idea that actually works more often than not. If anything, the arrangements generally strip the songs of hipster smugness and lay bare the emotional core in a way synthesizers and depressed British dudes often didn't. It doesn't always work. But what works is as surprising as what doesn't.

Songs that should be unkillable come off mediocre. Teenage Kicks doesn't even sound especially different. Guns of Brixton sounds stiff. (What kind of time signature do you put on a French band's bossanova cover of an English reggae tune?) Friday Night Saturday Morning and Sorry for Laughing give up on the bossa nova thing for the most part and are unexciting. Killing Joke's Psyche stands out on the only song on the album that is worth getting up and crossing the room to skip over.

But there's a lot of gems, too. Depeche Mode's "I Just Can't Get Enough" is positively giddy. The Cure's "A Forest" is very good, with jungle sound effects deployed well on top of the mix. "Making Plans For Nigel" is better than the original. "I Melt For You": who would have thought Modern English could ever sound cool again? Weirdest of all, "Too Drunk To Fuck" actually turns the Dead Kennedys into a maddening cocktease.

It's a pretty good album with excellent moments. If nothing else, hop over to iTunes and drop a buck for "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and "Just Can't Get Enough." Throw them onto an iPod shuffle and wait for these songs to come from nowhere on some subway ride.

Affirmative Conservatives II: David Horowitz and "Academic Freedom"
by Michael Weiss
[link]

Before I matriculated at college, I was out at a bar with my sister's friends from medical school, one of whom had brought a date. I don't remember much about this woman except that she seemed very interested in the post-adolescent limbo I was in, having just graduated from high school and occupying the threshold of a supposedly "formative" experience in life. Which cask would I be maturing in? Brideshead Revisited or Animal House? Or someplace in between? One of the worries I brought up to her was that I didn't much see myself as a frat guy, yet I was going to a school where Saturday nights (not to mention Monday through Friday nights) were measured in kegs of cheap beer and gallons of more costly vomit. How was I going to avoid this scene? "Oh well, if you're against all that, that's good," she said. "It'll be four years of learning how to deal with people and conditions you'll be dealing with your whole life." Fucking twit, I thought as I smiled and mumbled false appreciation for this unglimpsed bright side. [more]

Affirmative Conservatives
by Nic Duquette
[link]

Russel Jacoby's new article in the Nation ponders the growing pressure on universities to hire more conservative professors to balance the longstanding leftism of campuses. The argument is usually phrased in terms of "intellectual diversity." The piece is typical Nation rinse-and-recycle, with sentences that begin, "Conservatives claim that..." The ironic knife-twist promised in the title barely appears, and then not until the end of the third page. In the interim, Jacoby drools remarks like, "Angst besets the triumphant conservatives. Those who purge Darwin from America's schools must yell in order to drown out their own misgivings, the inchoate realization that they are barking at the moon." I thought this was sarcastic until I reread it a couple times. [more]

Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Goedel, by Rebecca Goldstein  
A Beautiful Mind: Rebecca Goldstein's Goedel
by Michael Weiss
[link]

It surely says something about the slanted, flickering halos we place atop the figures of twentieth-century "genius" that Rebecca Goldstein's wonderful new study of the life and mind of Kurt Goedel doesn't get around to the math that made him famous until around page 150. This is no fault of Ms. Goldstein, who artfully and engagingly carpenters a stage of historical and philosophical preconditions that led to the eventual discovery of "incompleteness."

Goedel, Escher, Bach. Einstein, Goedel, Heisenberg. The umlaut hovers over that "o" like the twin theorems over the head of the agape initiate. What's an obscure Austrian name doing in troikas of such forbidding company, anyway? Goedel is the third tenor, the "other guy." There never was a Philip Glass opera called Goedel on the Beach. No taut, world-traveled Michael Frayn duologue ever clocked in as Vienna. A poster of the ferrety logician's hand imperceptibly tracing itself will not become a staple of the computer desktop background. And when tortured prodigies of number theory do gain some measure of popular recognition, they get Ben Affleck as their confidant in the suburbs, not the nimbus-domed author of the most famous equation in history.

The man in the street may have heard of Kurt Goedel, but that man is on wobblier footing than when terms like "relativity" or "uncertainty" or "fugue" are invoked. Like each of these schema-altering concepts, Goedel's theorems have been misunderstood and misappropriated by all the usual suspects in cerebral larceny: postmodernists, creationists, people who think "It all depends on what you mean by genocide" is a moral argument. "Incompleteness," then, also seems to be referring to Goedel's legacy, which is... what, exactly?

In 1930, at the age of twenty-four, a University of Vienna graduate student quietly, and to yawning initial reception, established the following: 1. There are provably unprovable but true propositions in any formal system that is consistent and contains arithmetic; 2. The consistency of such a system cannot be proven.

These discoveries may look bite-sized enough to fit comfortably inside a nutshell, but they shook modern epistemology, in all its kingdoms of infinite space, to the core and blew the living daylights out of regnant Continental notions about objective reality. Not bad for a pre-doc.

Goedel's proofs scuppered the positivism of the famed Vienna Circle, which was embodied most charismatically by Ludwig Wittgenstein, actually more of a tangential member. Founded on the Protagorean, or Sophist, idea that "man is the measure of all things," the Circle held that nothing beyond sensory experience was truly "meaningful." Touch, taste, smell, etc. -- that's all we should ever bother to work with as everything else is metaphysical bunkum. In Goedel's opinion, which was fundamentally Platonic, man was not the measure of all things. There was indeed a pure absolute reality, albeit one which could only be apprehended through the tenebrous lenses of probability and presupposition. Nothing wrong with them, however, since they formed the bases of a priori reasoning and hence all mathematics. (When Einstein later formed his peripatetic friendship with Goedel at the Institute for Advanced Research at Princeton, the physicist confessed to sharing this belief in a "higher," semi-translucent realm. Einstein dubbed it the "out yonder.")

The positivists' favorite mathematician, the one they believed they could trust not to futz with their worldview, was the formalist David Hilbert. This was because his bete noire, like theirs, was intuition, that unreliable gatekeeper of the "out yonder." Hilbert's desire was to create what he called "consistent formal systems" which would drain mathematics of any descriptive relation to external phenomena: numbers, sets of objects, etc. Like the recent ads for Las Vegas, "What happens here, stays here," formalism decreed that mathematical systems should only consist of stipulated rules governing symbols that were internally "meaningful" (having semantic value within the system, but no mundane representation to upset the positivists.) Simple enough, except that no math is an island; even in formalism, to get from one system to the next requires a point of origin, a hub system from which all others can be then be accessed. Axioms and the rule of inference, which logically allows any pre-proven theorem to act as "given" in the proof of a new one, traditionally served as the bridges for convenient systems-hopping. But what happens when an axiom is divested of its real-world significance? Where one used to rely on a fingers-crossed "best guess" assumption, now the spadework had to be done using the "provability" of symbols worth nothing outside their own domains.

The hub was arithmetic. The first challenge was proving its consistency, i.e. showing that no logical contradictions could be found in the stuff everyone learns in grade school. A contradiction proves anything; it's the anarchist monkey wrench tossed into a well-oiled machine. The second challenge was proving arithmetic complete, that its logic was tautologous. Accomplish these two things, and formalist revolution could begin.

Goedel stopped the revolution in its tracks. Through metamathematical legerdemain, he was able to use the very syntax (the rules) of a uniquely designed, number-based formal system to both compute and comment upon the meaning (semantic value) contained therein. The numbers he used symbolized starting-point logical propositions that, although not actually paradoxical, were weird and entendre-loaded enough to be saying something about themselves. E.g., "This very statement is not provable in this system." When this self-cannibalizing logic worked itself out, Goedel had produced contradictions of Russian doll-complexity, one integument of meaning masking another.

Goldstein elegantly compares Goedel's winning style of being able to have his cake and pop out of it too to the dramatic conceit of the "play within a play." Specifically, the kind where the characters of the one become "actors" within the other and then use that medium say relevant things about their character selves. She cites Leoncavallo's opera I Pagliacci as she might have done the season of Seinfeld where George and Jerry work on a television series a lot like the one Jason Alexander and the real Jerry Seinfeld had been appearing in. And while I suppose Hamlet technically doesn't qualify because the "players" in Shakespeare's tragedy were all out-sourced allegorizers, Tom Stoppard's paradox-loving comedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead most certainly does. The syntactic-semantic barbershop pole around which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern coil their celebrated "question game?" Very Goedelian. Indeed, the filiations between mathematics and literature were never more finely exampled, especially at the self-referential and meta levels. Goedel's theorems are said to consist of a logical "double speak." Letting aside the coincidence of another "Goldstein" who factors significantly in 1984, is Orwell's novel of thwarted political revolution itself not brokered upon a clever plot involution? Winston Smith is handed a book encoded within a book: a fabricated essay theorizing the motives of a factitious society, stuck between the pages of that society's updated "formal system" of grammar. Elsewhere we hear of the "Alice-in-Wonderland" model Goedel braided around Einstein's field equations for relativity; or the "rigorous rule-bound logic" he admired in Kafka's writing.

Actually, Kafka affords an easy segue into the kind of psychic distress that would come to define Goedel's life following his annus mirabilis. Goldstein uses a good chunk of her book exploring the logician's chronic bouts of paranoia and delusion. His fear of being poisoned by refrigerator fumes and food ultimately led to his demise: the medical record indicated "malnutrition and inanition" as the causes of death. A no less acute, if slightly more justified, sensitivity lay in Goedel's hearing his unorthodox ideas -- which only grew more unorthodox and less remunerative as he got older -- ridiculed in public. This led to reclusiveness and the mournful, too-familiar symptoms of a heavyweight intellectual losing his shit. Some of these read like plagiarism of Bellow's Herzog: the tranches of go-where notes; the unpublished papers and unposted letters; the mounting agoraphobia and anthrophobia.

We know from Douglas Hofstatder that an overactive imagination can produce "swirly, twisty, vortex-like" patterns of rational and creativity marvels. But we also know from the historian Richard Hofstatder that there's a much darker side to this synaptic industry. In his classic essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," this second Hofstatder made an observation by no means exclusive to styles American or political: "The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms; he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds" [Italics added].

The cartel ran out for Kurt Goedel at a rather unripe age.

So we get Noam Chomsky once running into the "greatest logician since Aristotle" and asking him what he was working on. The MIT linguist "received an answer that probably nobody since the seventeenth-century's Leibnitz had given: 'I am trying to prove that the laws of nature are a priori.'" Yeah, any day now.

A less melancholy anecdote involves Goedel's precarious navigation of the a posteriori laws of naturalization. Having obsessed over his US citizenship exam, he uncovered a "logical contradiction" in one of the clauses of the Constitution, a loophole he believed could eventually be exploited for the purpose of transforming democracy into dictatorship. The incompleteness of "It can't happen here" would have to wait, however, if the ÈmigrÈ wished to remain here. Einstein and the economist Oskar Morgenstern agreed to calmly distract their friend from bringing up this alarming matter before the New Jersey justice, who, having presided over Einstein's own case, turned out to be a lot more sympathetic than Goedel was distracted:

"'Up to now you have held German citizenship.'
Immediately, Goedel corrected the judicial error: 'Austrian citizenship.'
Duly corrected, the judge continued.
'In any case, it was under an evil dictatorship. Fortunately, this is not possible in America.'"

The look on the Bavarian sage's face at this moment should have been photographed and sold as the pop art complement to the shots of him on the bicycle or sticking out his tongue.

Ernest Gabor Straus once wrote that "Goedel had an interesting axiom by which he looked at the world; namely, that nothing that happens in it is due to accident or stupidity. If you really take that axiom seriously all the strange theories that Goedel believed in become absolutely necessary." And Goedel's silly-to-sinister regard for the status quo becomes explainable, if not quite excusable. Try to avoid wincing through the chapter in which he travels back to Nazified Vienna preoccupied only with his "rights" as a certified academic. Possessing a Wodehouse-like obliviousness to current events -- even after being roughed up by a gang of brownshirts for his ostensible resemblance to a reviled race -- Goedel had to take an enormously detoured return trip to the lush and secure quandrangles of Princeton. What news of home did he bring with him for his info-starved fellow exiles? "The coffee was wretched."

In that same letter, Straus indicates that the normally indulgent and avuncular Einstein was given -- just once -- to write his daily walking partner off as "completely crazy." "Well, what worse could he have done?" inquired Straus. "He voted for Eisenhower."

From Plato's disciple to Plato's Republican.

I began by alluding to the fetish our culture seems to have for slowly morphing eccentric geniuses into genius eccentrics. If there is a "strange axiom," or telos, which guides these fantastic anomalies of the species, "legend" occurs somewhere between awe and condescension, between the whispered campus rumor and the Time magazine cover story. It's a real credit to Goldstein that her book does not contain a passage of greater endeavor than the one in which, drawing on all her skills of characterization as a novelist, she hazards this cant-free, and un-Hollywood portrait of the logician as a young man:

"When the random permutations of genetic blending produce an offspring whose intelligence far outstrips that of his parents that child faces a special sort of predicament: he both recognizes his utter dependence, being after all only a child; and he also clearly perceives the sever limits of his own parents' understanding. Most people come to the latter recognition only during adolescence, when the normal reaction is an explosive mixture of hubris, contempt, and outrage (how can they be so dumb?). But the reaction of a young child is more likely to be blind terror (how can they be trusted to take care of me?) It would be comforting, in the presence of such a shattering conclusion, especially when it's reinforced by a serious illness a few years later, to derive the following additional conclusion: There are always logical explanation and I am exactly the sort of person who can discover such explanations. The grownups around me may be a sorry lot, but luckily I don't need to depend on them. I can figure out everything for myself. The world is thoroughly logical and so I is my mind -- a perfect fit."