Rolling back the years.
The chickenhawks of the kulturkampf continue their war on truth, health, life, science, trust; the very fabric of the commonweal. —I’m running out of curses. Japanese is a geat language for getting up a righteously angry dudgeon. Maybe I should learn some Japanese.
Happier thoughts: Ampersand’s blog, which I don’t link to nearly so often as I ought, because a) I assume most of you reading this read him already, and b) I’m a lazy, disreputable bastard, is about to go group: housemates Charles and Bean (who guest-hosted while Barry I mean Amp was off telling his relatives once again why this night is different than other nights) will be joining as regular co-bloggers, fingers flying over keyboards to fight the power and whatnot. A round of applause, please, ladies and gentlemen.
And: the Polyphonic Spree is one small way I’ve just discovered for dealing somewhat with the current surfeit of Weltschmerz: “When you’re dealing with 25 Texans in white robes, it’s pretty impossible not to mention you’re dealing with 25 Texans in white robes.” —After which, you’ll be needing a bracing tonic; management humbly suggests rather than spinning Godspeed You! Black Emperor once more, you instead pluck up this poem by George Faludy, nicked from a Making Light comments thread:
Learn by Heart This Poem of Mine
Learn by heart this poem of mine;
books only last a little time
and this one will be borrowed, scarred,
burned by Hungarian border guards,
lost by the library, broken-backed,
its paper dried up, crisped and cracked,
worm-eaten, crumbling into dust,
or slowly brown and self-combust
when climbing Fahrenheit has got
to 451, for that’s how hot
your town will be when it burns down.
Learn by heart this poem of mine.
Learn by heart this poem of mine.
Soon books will vanish and you’ll find
there won’t be any poets or verse
or gas for car or bus—or hearse—
no beer to cheer you till you’re crocked,
the liquor stores torn down or locked,
cash only fit to throw away,
as you come closer to that day
when TV steadily transmits
death-rays instead of movie hits
and not a soul to lend a hand
and everything is at an end
but what you hold within your mind,
so find a space there for these lines
and learn by heart this poem of mine.
Learn by heart this poem of mine;
recite it when the putrid tides
that stink of lye break from their beds,
when industry’s rank vomit spreads
and covers every patch of ground,
when they’ve killed every lake and pond,
Destruction humped upon its crutch,
black rotting leaves on every branch;
when gargling plague chokes Springtime’s throat
and twilight’s breeze is poison, put
your rubber gasmask on and line
by line declaim this poem of mine.
Learn by heart this poem of mine
so, dead, I still will share the time
when you cannot endure a house
deprived of water, light, or gas,
and, stumbling out to find a cave,
roots, berries, nuts to stay alive,
get you a cudgel, find a well,
a bit of land, and, if it’s held,
kill the owner, eat the corpse.
I’ll trudge beside your faltering steps
between the ruins’ broken stones,
whispering “You are dead; you’re done!
Where would you go? That soul you own
froze solid when you left your town.”
Learn by heart this poem of mine.
Maybe above you, on the earth,
there’s nothing left and you, beneath,
deep in your bunker, ask how soon
before the poisoned air leaks down
through layers of lead and concrete. Can
there have been any point to Man
if this is how the thing must end?
What words of comfort can I send?
Shall I admit you’ve filled my mind
for countless years, through the blind
oppressive dark, the bitter light,
and, though long dead and gone, my hurt
and ancient eyes observe you still?
What else is there for me to tell
to you, who, facing time’s design,
will find no use for life or time?
You must forget this poem of mine.
Chin-chin.
The thing of it is, we could have been spending it on books all along.
Watched the most recent episode of Angel (which is fun these days in a way that Buffy, sadly, isn’t) through a haze of static.
We watched Angel through a haze of static because a couple of weeks ago I asked Jenn if we’d gotten a cable bill recently. —We’ve just swapped bill-paying duties from her to me, so a couple of things still needed sorting out, and while it was possible that a cable bill had slipped through the cracks, it seemed odd that two whole months’ worth would not turn up. So I called AT&T Broadband and discovered via the chirpy answering recording that it had been bought out by Comcast or somesuch.
So sue me. I don’t read my junk mail.
I asked for a new statement and got it, last week. For four months’ worth. $134 and change. Wrote them a check back. Mailed it off. Came home today, checked email, checked voice mail, twiddled with a couple of things. Got dinner ready. Turned on the television for some background yammer. Got the blue screen of death.
So I called and was on hold while the pasta water boiled and when the nice person came on the phone I asked why we didn’t have cable. And was told it was because I hadn’t paid my bill. There was no record, apparently, of my previous call, when I’d asked for a new statement, and told them I hadn’t been getting one. “We’ve sent them out every month on the 14th,” she said. I tried to explain the bit again about how we hadn’t been getting bills and I understood that maybe it was because of the changeover from AT&T to Comcast which I hadn’t even been aware of until I’d called to ask for a new statement. “We’ve had TV commercials and everything,” she said.
She never got around to explaining why I’d never gotten a notice of cancellation mailed to me, or a phone call from them wondering where my money was.
We haven’t been watching cable all that much, lately. That ’70s Show in reruns while I cook, maybe, because Jenn likes it so much; Buffy reruns on FX. First-run Buffy and Angel. Gilmore Girls now and again; if the damn thing doesn’t get turned off on a Thursday night, an episode of Scrubs. I tried that new Lucky the other night, which, eh. But Firefly is dead and Farscape is dead and anyway coming out of college when we never had money for cable; we watched videotapes every now and then and otherwise, the box was cold. TVs, we discovered, are big dead presences in rooms when they aren’t on. If you put them up high—on top of those rickety pressboard entertainment towers you buy at Circuit City, say—it’s paradoxically less noticeable; or you can cover them with a tapestry or something when not watching them. Just flip up the cloth when you want to put in Duck Soup or Metropolitan for the umpteenth time. Video wallpaper. Comfort food. —We went to Sara and Steve’s one night to watch Tom Waits on Letterman. They hauled out a tiny television from some back room and hooked it to the cable jack coming out of the wall in an unused corner. I cocked an eyebrow at the relatively large color set sitting dark on top of their VCR and under their DVD player. “Doesn’t hook up to cable,” said Steve. He pointed at the little set, where Letterman was sweeping a dud joke off-camera. “We’ve hauled that thing out twice, for New Year’s,” he said. “And September 11th,” said Sara.
“So why do you have the cable jack?” asked Jenn.
They shrugged. “Comes with the condo,” said Steve. “We couldn’t get them to turn it off.”
And the thing of it is, we haven’t been watching television all that much. —It was Buffy that got us back into the habit, dammit. Jenn and Barry way back in 1997 caught the first showing of episode two on a whim and said hey! This doesn’t suck! And cajoled the rest of us one at a time into watching it. By the time of the first season finale, we were group-watching, a microcosmic echo of those massive geek outings back at Oberlin, where we’d sign out the massive projection TV in the Mudd Library AV Room for showings of Star Trek: The Next Generation. (Only much more satisfying.) (And you should probably note the rather sloppy use of the first person plural throughout; at times it means me and Jenn, at times it means me and Jenn and Barry and Sarah and Charles and Matt and Brad in various subsets, and just then it meant a whole helluva lot of people I knew in college who all teased me mercilessly for looking like Wesley Crusher. Verb. sap. and all that.) —By the midpoint of second season Buffy, we were hooked, and hooked good. Tuesday nights were sacrosanct. You didn’t call any of us at 8 pm because we just wouldn’t answer the phone. It is not at all an exaggeration to state that Jenn and I first got cable ourselves so that we could watch Buffy without the static and occasional unwatchable nights we’d had with a simple antenna.
But the thing about having cable is once you’ve got it, you might as well use it. We got caught up on DS9, say, which is the best of the various Treks, yes, but I don’t think has aged all that well. We watched a lot of Friends in reruns, and Seinfelds, and Roseannes; we got hooked on Xena for a while. Tried Farscape on a whim and found it was better than not, and then somewhere in its second season we got that ohmygod rush again: this show rocked. Friday nights, out on the town? I think not. At least, not without setting up the VCR to record while we were away. Angel we started watching because, well, it’s a Joss Whedon show, and ended up enjoying it in its own right, but Tuesday nights were an utter wash when both it and Buffy were on the WB: that’s two hours of television right there, not counting the hour or so of syndicated sitcoms in the 7 – 8 cook-and-eat bloc. G vs. E we both liked a lot, but it got cancelled. Jules Verne was fun until it got weirdly obsessed with Dumas and shunted to one o’clock in the morning and then cancelled. Cupid—remember Cupid? I don’t remember why we started watching it, a whim again, I guess, maybe because we’d liked Jeremy Piven in Ellen which, you know, we’d been watching, but it was a great little show, and it got cancelled, too. We loved Sports Night, until it got cancelled, and Sports Night led us to West Wing which we loved even more. We never clicked with Smallville, despite the cheeky amusement value of a show that knows it’s nothing but an engine for slash; we checked out that Iron Chef show, which we did click with. Wow. AbFab reruns on Oxygen? Okay. Commercial break—skip up to AMC, there’s an old spaghetti Western on. Surf back down to the mid 50s, where TNT and FX and the Superstation hang out—what the fuck? Wesley Snipes, with a sword, slicing Stephen Dorff in half with lots of bad computerized blood effects? Jesus, this is so bad you have to watch. There’s a Law and Order on every hour tonight. Or we could skip back down to the Cartoon Network—Dexter’s Laboratory, Powerpuff Girls, Samurai Jack…
We got really excited about Firefly. The idea of Whedon and co., stretching their wings a little, the background and backstory we’d seen bits and pieces of, what we knew about a couple of the actors (Gina Torres, Ron Glass, Adam Baldwin) going into it—it had us buzzed. The first couple of episodes were a bit rocky, and then it started hitting its stride, and it got better and better. We were getting that ohmygod rush again. Friday nights were going to be shot once more. —And then it got cancelled.
Which wasn’t the straw here, no, but as I said, we hadn’t been watching television all that much. We’d been leaving it on, looking at something out of curiosity, surfing up or down to the next interesting thing. The times you actually watch television—when you sit down and know you’re not getting up for a half hour, or a full hour, or until the tape ends, when you’re committed to ride whatever story’s unfolding in front of you—we hadn’t been doing that through cable all that much. Buffy still, yes, but out of grim loyalty these days more than anything else, and anyway it’s about to go gently into that good night. Angel, but it isn’t a big deal to miss a week or two. West Wing—what happened to that one? Right, we just sort of stopped watching. Farscape? Gone. Firefly? Gone. And what else was up there on the television screen?
Right. Law and Order and Wesley Snipes sneering under some badass sunglasses. Morimoto rolling some deft sushi with asparagus in it or something. Bubbles and Buttercup and Blossom riffing on old Beatles songs. Axminster hunting MacGuyver, and Christopher Lloyd channelling Reverend Jim under inches of Klingon makeup for the umpteenth time.
For this we were paying nearly $40 a month.
So I told the nice woman on the other end of the line, who insisted they’d been sending us bills we hadn’t gotten, who seemed to think it weird that I hadn’t seen the TV commercials telling us Comcast had bought AT&T, who couldn’t explain why we’d gotten no mailed notice about cutting off our service, or a phone call ditto, I told her to cancel our account.
We can get The Sopranos on videotape from the library, you know.
Laughing at Mister Phelps.
Go on. You know you want to.
Which way will the stone age vote swing?
Ever since the principles of our own social order have become a matter of sustained debate, there has been a persistent tendency to invoke the First Man to settle our disputes for us… It is not entirely clear why Early Man should possess such authority over our choices. Suppose that archaeologists digging up a very early site, found a well-preserved copy of the original Social Contract: should we feel bound by it terms, and proceed to declare all current statue law which was incompatible with it to be null and void?
—A great quote from Ernest Gellner’s Plough, Sword, and Book, which I will now keep close in my quote file thanks to a cheeky rant from John railing against utter and complete crap. (Though I think he’d agree with me that the study of psychoceramics itself, properly undertaken, can prove if not entirely edifying then at least entertaining.)
Your First Amendment in action.
Via the Daze Reader, a neat little essay from Lawrence Walters answering that question that’s been nagging the back of your brain lately, I’m sure: why on Earth are all those porn flicks made in Reseda and Studio City, anyway?
Operation Zipless Cakewalk.
TBogg points us to this interview with Tony Kushner, which (among many other things it’s good to hear being said) has added “his zipless little war” to my lexicon. —Also, he’s working on a musical.
The show abides.
INT. STUDEBAKER. DAY.
KERMIT
Why are you jumping up and down?
GONZO
I’m hoping mad!
KERMIT
Guy’s got a sense of humour.
FOZZIE
Hey, why don’t you join us?
GONZO
Where are you going?
FOZZIE
We’re going to follow our dream!
GONZO
Really? I have a dream too… but you’ll think it’s stupid.
ALL
No, no! Tell us!
GONZO
Well, I wanna go to Bombay, India and become a movie star.
FOZZIE
You don’t go to Bombay to become a movie star! You go where we’re going, Hollywood!
GONZO
Sure, if you wanna do it the easy way.
The next time it’s getting to be a bit, well. Remember the International Channel. Especially at 9 o’clock on a Sunday night when Showbiz India is on. Not just for the impossibly cheerful and preposterously joyous clips of song-and-dance numbers from mass-produced Bollywood musicals (where Michael Jackson’s old choreographers must be lauded like those old Beijing Opera fighting masters on the sets of Hollywood action movies), though that’s what lifts the heart and crooks the grin in the first place. —It’s also because you get to hear a long rambling interview with Gurinder Chadha, who was born in Kenya and grew up in England, and whose new film, Bend it Like Beckham, is sparking girls’ soccer leagues like wildfires across India. You get to hear her talk about casting her aunt in a background role and having relatives call from Australia to crow about seeing Auntie on the telly in a movie and you remember once again how big and wide and unexpected the world is and yet people somehow manage to crisscross it with something approaching grace (Jane puts down in New York a newspaper picked up in Australia; she can replace it with another copy from the kiosk on the corner)—and somehow it manages not to unravel in total chaos except.
Except.
—But at least these days it’s easy enough; we can all be superstars of Bollywood. (Each in one’s own unique idiom, of course.) Lots of bhangra and Najma and Vijaya Anand to be played at work this week. Talvin Singh, too. —Especially the stuff he did with the Master Musicians of Jajouka, except we’re getting rather far afield from Bollywood. But why not? Bring along some Muslimgauze, too, and Sif Safaa—except. Except.
Sometimes, though, you just can’t resist that pellet.
Keeping in mind that skewing an online poll is mockery for ever taking the damn things quasi-seriously in the first place, Atrios is right: Wolf Blitzer deserves as much grief as you can possibly give him for phrasing a weasel-assed question like today’s. Go. Vote early and often.
What are you protesting?
Whaddaya got?
Meant to note this one earlier: Kevin points us to a fun little piece by Geoffrey Nunberg on the semantic drift of the word “protest”—since you now hear “pro-war protest” referred to every now and again:
But it sounds a little weird to talk about a protest in support of a war that’s about to be initiated by the Administration in power. Maybe that’s just semantic sloppiness, as if “protesting” nowadays were just a question of getting together to yell slogans—why should the other side have all the fun? Or maybe it’s a strategic blurring of historical memory. It’s hard to keep this stuff straight in an age when the oldies stations are apt to play Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” back-to-back with Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets,” which was a number one hit a few months later.
Worth a chuckle.
And you thought “freedom kissing” was a joke.
One of Daze Reader’s readers sent in this photo of a Nevada brothel menu.
Bush! Klaatu barada nikto—
It is no concern of ours how you run your own planet. But if you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned-out cinder. Your choice is simple. Join us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration. We will be waiting for your answer.
Which, to be fair, risks being misread, or rather read as a mirror image of my own reading; after all, in some imaginations, it’s Bush standing at the head of the flying saucer’s ramp, having been shot in the back by paranoid, squabbling (former) allies, delivering his cinder speech to Saddam Hussein—whose present course they fancy threatens to extend his violence. (The persistent lack of any option to join us and live in peace in Bush’s various ultimata rather militates against this reading—but the risk, nonetheless, is there.) Still! The first thing I thought when I read this—
Berkeley – After more than a million years of computation by more than 4 million computers worldwide, the SETI@home screensaver that crunches data in search of intelligent signals from space has produced a list of candidate radio sources that deserve a second look.
Three members of the SETI@home team will head to Puerto Rico this month to point the Arecibo radio telescope at up to 150 spots identified as the source of possible signals from intelligent civilizations.
—the first thing I could think to do was run outside and find a really tall hill and start yelling as loud as I could: “Help! Help! You frickin’ Galactic-Federation-formin’ Ashtar-Command-runnin’ Fermi’s-Paradox-duckin’ motherfuckers, get your butts down here and do something!”
All di tings wey dem talk about di rights, wey human beings suppose to get, na im de for this small book.
[...] Article 7
Everi one na im be, di same for law, no mata wetin di person be or di kind person e be. Di law of our kontri must to make sure say notin happen to am. Di law must to make sure say dem treat everibodi di same, so tay all dis tings we de talk about human right, nobodi go against am, or gada people to go against am.
—via Open Brackets: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Nigerian Pidgin English.
Pardon my French.
It was kind of pathetically funny when Neal Rowland did it. But actually slapping the moniker “freedom fries” on the US House of Representatives cafeteria menus is—well, it’s upholding a long-standing tradition of moronic House grandstanding, but it’s still pathetic. Disappointing, even. —But no longer funny.
Don’t take the weasel’s way out: don’t try to argue that they’re really Belgian fries, and the only reason we call them “french fries” is because of the technique of frenching, or slicing in long, thin strips (more properly referred to as “julienne”), thereby proving the protest is not only moronic, but misguided; Snopes makes it pretty clear that we call it frenching because that’s what you do to make French fried potatoes, and not vicey-versey. —Just go out, have some lunch, and order french fries, loud and clear, by golly.
Speaking of lunch—
Happy Easter.
I think I’m just going to take a pass on this one.
Retailers went on the defensive. “There was no intention on our part to offer up a violent Easter basket. We’re very conscious of what will and what will not offend our customers. It was meant to be a lighthearted and fun gift,” says Kmart spokesperson Abigail Jacobs. “It’s in my opinion a harmless toy included in an Easter basket.”
The reaction to a Voice query at Walgreens contrasted sharply, with company representatives retreating instead of digging in. “Going forward next year, we don’t plan to have Easter baskets with toy soldiers or a military theme. The thinking on these Easter baskets was more toy-related and we didn’t really think about it otherwise,” says Walgreens spokesperson Carol Hively. “We apologize to anybody who is offended or felt that this was inappropriate.”
Anyone else want a crack at it?
However could I have forgotten the Generating Stabilizing Electro Carbon Condensating Atmospheric Pro-Cyclonic Compact Dynamic Magnet Box?
There’s been some recent traffic at an old post, one I wrote back in December on kid detectives (and inventors, and magicians) and magic and slandering Encyclopedia Brown (and just as a side note: sitting across the table from Kristen Brennan at Bucca di Beppo’s is a delightful exercise in fragmentary multichannel signal-as-noise watch-me-for-the-changes-and-try-to-keep-up brinksmanship): Mike Tatreau came through, finding the book long since forgotten but rather tenuously described as having “this haunting nighttime flight home over moonlit countryside on a bicycle, and a midnight picnic of sandwiches in a field in the middle of nowhere.” Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Jan Wahl’s The Furious Flycycle! —Except, of course, for the fact that the flight is away from home during (mostly) the daylight, and it’s a noontime picnic (with iceberg watermelon pickles), and there is some haunting moonlight, but it comes later, and anyway, Wahl slanders wolves. But. There it is.
—Now we just need to find that Dutch? German? French? book in English translation with the Purloined Waldo cartoons for each bite-sized chapter-mystery. Anyone? Anyone?
Word to the breakaround, y’all.
Or something like that. —If there’s any blogger I’d ever want to be (aside from myself, that is), it’s the languagehat. The man’s polylingual like a fittstim, snarky like an illywhacker, he’s all-too comfortable brachiating happily through the madly glorious exfoliations of the liberal arts, and every time I think of him as the Rosetta stoner, I break out in a fit of Flight Lieutenant Biggles; if nothing else, he raises the bar for links to cool stuff you might otherwise never have heard of but now can’t imagine living without, you know? Which, for me (cue standard MeFi lament), is what the web is all about.
His write-up of the New York Times obituary of Robert K. Merton, for instance, which, in the course of firmly cementing another book into my teetering must-read-soonest stack, reminded me of the all-too-terribly cool word “anafractuous,” in the course of seeking a quickie etymology of which I stumbled over this lovingly detailed exegesis of John Bellairs’ “The True History of St. Fidgeta, Virgin and Martyr.”
In other words, today I had a good coffee break. —So. Thanks, ’hat. Look on this perhaps as sincere flattery, inspired if nonetheless inept; I just wanted to give a little something back. Yo.
t.A.T.u. en passant—
Elena posts some interesting insights from Russia into that phenomenon known as Tatu—who, I am given to understand, are 50 cents shy of the number one spot on TRL. (There’s a moral or something in that, or maybe it’s an ironic O. Henry twist, but I don’t give too much of a damn. I’m enjoying h too much for that.) —I’d just note that in the version I’ve seen of “Prostye dvizheniya,” it’s not at all clear Yulia’s, well, jilling off; she was assembling a time bomb to blow up her school (metaphorically, maybe; these music videos are irresponsibly slippery when it comes to the Truth) because Lena was making out with some guy in the middle of a slo-mo carousel. But that video was I’d thought for “30 Minut,” so what do I know? —I’d also note that mentioning t.A.T.u., Taty, or Tatu prominently on your website is a great way to score traffic from web searches.
