The long and the short of it.
While we’re at it, Joey Messina posted an interesting question at the end of an old, old entry:
just have one comment what does long story, short pier mean?
looked it up but cannot find anything
And I was going to say something, but then it occurred to me: before I open my big mouth, why not open-mike it? See if anyone out there on the other side of the screen has an answer that might be different than mine. Or theirs. Or yours.
So: what does “long story; short pier” mean? Anyone?
Those who forget are doomed.
Holy Christ. I’d forgotten. It’s been bugging me all this time and I’d clean forgotten until something, some quirk, some happenstance jolt sparking between here and here maybe lit up the memory and I squatted, in the muck, hauled it up, felt a chill…
You’ve seen this, I’m sure.
And we’ve read all the foofooraw and snarked it up about as far as it will go, but there was still, somewhere, deep inside, a chill. You felt it. Didn’t you? I did. And I don’t know where it came from for you, and like I said, I had no idea where it was coming from for me, until I remembered “In Pictopia.” —Buzz Bunny opening that black gash of a sneer and spitting “What’s up, doc?” like it was “This time, it’s personal,” that’s pretty much the moment when Nocturno taps Flexible Flynn on the shoulder and Flynn turns around and he’s, he’s different, and forget for a moment the fact that the changes in the funnybook industry that Moore and Simpson were allegorizing so terribly well in “Pictopia” are no longer a pressing concern; the long Dark Knight of the superhero soul has come and gone and commented ironically on itself and we’ve had nostalgia explosions since then, and joycore, we’ve eaten it all up and gotten used to the idea that the occasional paradigm twitch is part of the paradigm, now, and if Sue Dibny is dead, well, the Teen Titans are tearing up the cartoon ratings. It’s a wash. —Oh! You’re gonna jump when Buzz snarls, all trace of the transvestite trickster god ruthlessly rubbed from his face and voice. It’ll give your innards that twist of wrongness that only Echthroi and the finest committee-dump entertainment product can manage—it’s a pure shot of the visceral punch that Moore and Simpson so lovingly, heartsickly conjure up with the blank flat sneer on Flynn’s steroided face. But the snarl, the sneer, those are just the signs: what’s signified is what you see when you stumble out of Captain Billy’s on the desperate, despairing heels of Nocturno, through the black-and-white streets past windblown scraps of blank paper to the very edge of town where you cling to the chain-link fence. Out there, past all that, is nothing. It’s empty and flat. Far as the eye can see.
Is it getting bigger? Blanker? Coming closer?
Sure, laugh at the Loonatics. It’s gut-bucket funny how bad it is, how naked the opportunism, how shoddy the assembly, how quickly it will fold and be forgotten. But it was here, in the first place. This isn’t bad art; please. That we will always have with us. This is something else, and we may always have that with us, too. Now.
Mind the chill. Remember the run to the fence. We’ve been here before. We’ll be here again.
Your spasm of activism.
By way of the Hellcat, here’s Patridiot Watch on the Democratic Party’s usurious credit card:
Just a week after handing the Republicans and credit card companies a big win by restricting people’s rights to enter into bankruptcy, the Democrats’ web site continues to offer a credit card with rates that rise to 29.99 percent.
Annual percentage rate (APR) for purchases: 0% for the first 3 monthly billing periods that your account is open (“Introductory Period”). After that, 9.99% to 23.99% [snip]
Default APR: Up to the Prime Rate** plus 24.74% or up to 29.99%, whichever is greater, and may vary (see explanation below***)
The Hellcat has an excellent rant on just how soul-destroying the bankruptcy bill is. Read that and then try to keep your temper in check as you go give the Party whatfor. Everybody inside the Beltway thinks nobody outside the Beltway is paying any attention at all to something so dry as bankruptcy deformation, so it’s safe for them to whore it up for some extra cash, but they’ve gone far too far with this one: if it passes the House (which it probably will) and Bush signs it (which he will, he will), then Capital One will be coming after your kneecaps as well as your wallet. Remind the Democrats that the outrage they’re hearing right now over a pissant-stupid offer is nothing compared to what they’re gonna be hearing in a couple of years; remind them that Senator Joe Biden (D-MBNA) will never be president, now; let them know that we are paying attention, and more of us every day.
And then: the Decembrist has the graduate-level coursework. Let him lay out what PAYGO is, and why it’s so important, and why once again those inside think us outside don’t care, and then pick up the phone and call your Senators and tell them that you do. Bonus round: you can score a point against Bolton, too, if you like. Again, Mark Schmitt explains.
Koan.
Kyogen Osho said, it is like a man up in a tree hanging from a branch by his mouth. His hands grasp no bough. His feet rest on no limb. Someone appears under the tree and asks him, what is the meaning of Bodhidharma’s coming from the west? If he does not answer, he fails to respond to the question. If he does answer he will lose his life. What would you do in such a situation?
It’s not that an oleaginously pompous third-rater has from a wrought-iron throne on a cedar deck proclaimed me and mine and half the country about him as traitors. That shit—that particular shit—that’s fuckin’ hilarious. What it is is that a couple of oriflammes of our perniciously liberal media have nevertheless in spite of or rather because have chosen this overcompensating twerp and his cohorts as the best our nascent medium had to offer, this past year.
Go crawl back into your hole, you stupid left-wing shithead. And don’t bother us anymore. You have to have an IQ over 50 to correspond with us. You don’t qualify, you stupid shit.
With TIME, I suppose, they could be telling themselves it’s “Blogger of the Year,” you know, like “Person of the Year,” it’s not a mark of respect or who was the best or anything like that, just who had the most impact, like how we picked Hitler and Khomeini. Yeah. That’s the ticket. —But what the fuck is The Week’s excuse?
(Hey, did you read that nutty stuff over at Powerline today? And every day? Here’s my advice. When you find yourself reading something by Hindrocket, some rant about how irrational and traitorous the left is, or the MSM; just sort of pretend you are reading a Spider-Man comic, and Hindrocket is J. Jonah Jameson yelling at Betty Brant, or Robbie. Or Peter. About Spider-Man. Because why does he hate on Spidey so? Spidey is so obviously not a menace. He’s good. It’s too bad we all know who Atrios is now. Otherwise we could imagine: what if Atrios is really, like, Hindrocket’s secretary? I realize it is really a quite serious matter than the right-wingers have gone around the bend and apparently aren’t coming back. Still, you’ve got to find a way to read their stuff with a sunny heart.)
“Am I saying we can all just get along if we all just cut the nonsense and admit we are a nation of pragmatic liberals and Hartz was right?” says John Holbo. “No, but I pretty much agree with what Timothy Burke says in this post. Count me in as a liberal sack of garbage.” —Which confuses me: John’s style, after all—while sometimes perhaps a tad too comfortable for the afflicted—is nonetheless an arrow fit for the quiver the Happy Tutor seeks to fill. I would not call it faux naïveté, but there’s a wicked glee hiding under his sunny heart, one that takes no small delight in walking you through the follies of others. Far too generous and charitable to ever be called Fisking, but it’s precisely that charity and generosity that enable it to do what it does.
But that’s actually why the Happy Tutor wouldn’t tell Holbo to ankle it off the ramparts, and what’s actually puzzling me is why Holbo—whose reaction to David Horowitz’ “Frozen Limit of Silly” is to head out on the ice and land a very creditable hit—why he would align himself nominally with Burke’s earnest liberal tribunes; nominally against the Tutor’s wetworking hockey hitters. —Then again, I’m puzzled by the fact that I, too, agree with Burke: I also want to grab the Tutor’s essay by the lapels and yell, “What’s your great idea, motherfucker?” (“Creating a dialectical set of traps for the unwary reader,” yes, I know. But who’s the unwary reader, dammit? Who?) —Of course, Burke says “I write [as a liberal sack of garbage] because the only way to win a rigged game is to play fair and hope that the onlookers will eventually notice who cheats and who does not,” and I want to grab him by the lapels and yell, “Onlookers? For the love of God, man, what onlookers?” and the whole mess dissolves into another kabuki war of cod-liberal and cod-leftist, which I don’t think was ever anyone’s intent.
I think sometimes the reason we’re so good at circular firing squads is that the only readers we’ve got are ourselves, and you always end up playing to your audience. (Is it pomo cul-de-saccery to note that Gomer Pyle’s as much a rôle as Happy Tutor? Probably, but it’s no less true.) —Meanwhile, the oleaginous pontificies yell at nothing but the voices in their own heads, taking potshots at their puppetuses of the left that somehow still get scored against us. But how? By whom? Who’s onlooking? Who’s reading? —How do we knock the scales from someone else’s eyes?
Even if your eloquence flows like a river, it is of no avail. Though you can expound the whole of Buddhist literature, it is of no use. If you solve this problem, you will give life to the way that has been dead until this moment and destroy the way that has been alive up to now. Otherwise you must wait for Maitreya Buddha and ask him.
It’s just a war of Whig on Whig, says John. A family squabble. Not so fast, says Bob McManus, spitting out some numbers from the latest naked attempt to shift the tax burden off the rich onto the rest of us. Yes, yes, I know, says John. (“I realize it is really a quite serious matter than the right-wingers have gone around the bend and apparently aren’t coming back,” he says. “Am I saying we can all just get along if we all just cut the nonsense and admit we are a nation of pragmatic liberals and Hartz was right?”) But without a sense of historical perspective, of moral perspective, you can’t leap into battle with a sunny heart. —But how can you laugh at a secret note in your permanent record? asks Roz, and maybe she’s grinning as she asks, but it’s a grim little grin (and the Happy Tutor, after all, is looking over a cold chain of law already forged that could easily lead from Horowitz’ frozen limit of silly to a long, long stint in jail). And maybe we can all laugh grimly at the fact that Roz actually is dealing with Tory against Socialist, not Whig against Whig, ha ha! But why, asks Lance Mannion, why did Ring Lardner have to spend a year in jail for a wisecrack?
First, they win. Then we attack them. Then we laugh at them. Then we ignore them…
Kyogen is truly a fool
Spreading that ego-killing poison
That closes his pupils’ mouths
And lets their tears stream from their dead eyes.
And there I go myself. See? We can’t go forward if we’re always fighting the war of us and them—but we can’t fight at all if there is no them. And we are in a fight, by God. They’re curtailing basic personal liberties, they’re destroying opportunities, they’re wrecking the commonwealth, they’re deliberately making life worse for the rest of us and we’ve got to stop them, goddammit, before they drive us all to a crisis point and betray everything America stands for—
( And Adam Kotsko says, “There has to be some way to react to people wanting the wrong thing other than to just say, ‘Well, I guess we’d better give them what they want.’” And I say, Jesus Christ that’s a dangerous fucking statement. And I say, hell yes. There must. Bring it on.)
I don’t want to yell at the voices in my head. I don’t want to fill a barrel with puppetuses of the right and take potshots. What I want—what we all want, with our earnest tribunals and dialectical traps and sunny hearts—is to knock some scales from eyes. And it’s not that they have to agree with us—if we did not see things differently, we would not be different people, after all. And anyway sometimes it’s our own eyes we’re trying to clear. But on this one point here, or that one, there, if they could just see that they are wrong—
How do we knock the scales from someone else’s eyes?
The upper part [of the kanji for koan] means “to place” or “to be peaceful.” The lower part means wood or tree. The original meaning of this kanji is a desk. A desk is a place where we think, read, and write. This “an” also means a paper or document on the desk.
There is another kanji used in koan. In the case of this kanji, the left side part means “hand.” The literal meaning of this kanji is to press, or to push with a hand or a finger. For example, in Japanese, massage is “an-ma.” So this “an” is to press to give massage for healing. This kanji also means “to make investigation” to put things in order when things are out of order.
“And the student was enlightened.” —But you have to have a student first, see? It’s rare, it’s vanishingly rare for a koan to reach out and strike some random bystander or passerby, someone who isn’t already looking for enlightenment. Sen no Rikyu foils an assassination with a point of etiquette, and while enlightenment doesn’t really pierce a veil in this one, there’s still maybe a lesson we could learn. Gudo, the emperor’s teacher, enlightened a gambler and a drunkard by being decent to him, and speaking plainly, and there’s definitely a lesson there, too, though I wonder about what happened to the drunkard’s wife and mother-in-law and kids. —But still: for the most part it’s students and monks, monks and students, people already engaged in the dialectic, shall we say, who realize there are eyes, and scales to be knocked from them, who are actively seeking the best way to do just that.
—To get back for a moment to those numbers Bob McManus cited, and what they mean, for us, and them: I know why we end up with aggressively regressive tax policies like this, and the politicians who push them; I know what we have to do to stop it from ever happening again. I’ve known for a couple of years, now. All it takes is a piece of paper and a pen. You ready? Write this down:
- A majority of us think that only somewhere between 1 and 5 million Americans live in poverty in the US.
- The actual number of Americans living at or below the poverty level is 33 million.
- 47% of us think the poverty level is $35,000 a year for a family of four.
- The actual poverty level for a family of four is $18,104 a year.
And it doesn’t matter if you do it earnestly, or with a sunny heart in the face of obstinate opposition. It doesn’t matter if you lard your dialectical koans with honeypots for the unwary puppetuses of the left or the right. What matters is that you go out and you find one of that majority, one of that 47%, and you sit down with them, and any way you have to, you show them that they have crucially misapprehended the situation. You show them the facts of the matter. Use whatever frame you can find. Whatever works. And then up and on to the next.
That’s it. That’s all there is to it. And if their ignorance is less blind than willful? If they have different remedies in mind than maybe what I think is best, or you? That doesn’t so much matter. (There are always more scales to fall from eyes. Even yours; especially mine.) We can’t begin to hash out those differences until we’ve reached some basic agreement as to where we all are and what we’re all facing, but once we do—
I have every reason to believe that all our other battles can just as easily be won.
Pupil: Why did the Bodhidharma come from India to China?
Master: I have no idea. Why do people always ask me that?
Up is down; black is white; y’all is fucked.
Two grandpas and their granddaughters joined President Bush on Thursday in making his case that Social Security was on wobbly footing and private investment accounts would help provide a safety net for future retirees.
From the AP by way of Joshua Micah Marshall. —I’d say something about how easy it is for the emperor to hide his flop sweat when he isn’t wearing clothes in the first place, but what does it matter? Win or lose, we’ll all be paying it out to MBNA anyway.
Like a seed dropped by a seabird.
Despite what some might tell you, it’s not that often I get memewhomped by a tune, playing it over and over and over again until coworkers and Spouses alike threaten bodily harm.
But when I do get so memewhomped? —Thank God for iPod and earbuds, is all the people around me have to say.
And this one’s particularly, shall we say, embarrassing. Revealing? —Wicked, see, is one of my all-time evermost favoritest books: Gregory Maguire’s Elphaba is one of those characters who kicked her way inside and made herself at home, and I can only imagine the fantastic damage she’d’ve wrought had the book been around in 1986 or so. When I heard they were doing it up for Broadway, I shivered: on the one hand, there’s almost nothing that can knock head and heart for the same loop at the same time like a musical done right; but on the other—how many, really, are done right? —Lately?
So now I’ve heard the soundtrack for Broadway’s attempt at Wicked. And it’s, well.
Competently played?
Except for this one song. —Well, no, not “except”: “Defying Gravity” is a king-hell slice of Disney cheese, a competently played first-act closer that bulldozes its way through what ought to be the most delicately charged moment between Elphaba and Glinda, leaping past questionable rhymes and awkward scansion straight to those triumphantly lung-punching diva belts your bones will thrum to all through intermission, and the less said about the climax, the better. And it doesn’t matter; it doesn’t matter. I can see the auctorial intent blundering up to me like a sloppy puppy dog, like a kid behind the wheel for the very first time, and it doesn’t matter one bit: my buttons still get pushed. Just about all of them. Hard. “And if you care to find me,” Idina Menzel whoops over the accelerating horns and synths and drums, “look to the western skies!” and it’s all I can do not to hit replay over and over and over again like some endorphin-besotted rat.
Something about doomed characters and triumphal moments anyway, in spite of. Because of, even.
(Also: the way Idina’s voice catches when she says, “Glinda, come with me. Think of what we could do, together!” —Did I mention how they’re playing up the subtext hardcore? Apparently, that’s what the reviews all mean when they say something like “adding a dose of camp,” and the collapse, right there, the tectonic shift and dizzying inversion of that word in this context, that’s maybe the wickedest aspect of the whole dam’ enterprise: femslash drag-queen divas in mutually unrequited love. —When the price drops sufficiently, high school productions of this thing will do a magnificent job of breaking hearts.)
So I put on “Now / Later / Soon,” because it’s just about the opposite in every conceivable way, except how I stop in my tracks when the three waltzes interlock at the end to build some brand new thing that soars into unexpected heights; I put on “Flying North,” because it moves with the same sweet grace of doomed exhiliration. If I have to, I’ll crack open the J-pop. “Yakusoku Wa Iranai” on heavy rotation ought to do the trick.
—But just one more listen first, okay? I can always stop later.
And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day—
Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s right about that threat to poliblogging that might not even really be a threat: Nathan Newman has the best take:
The FEC is making noises to limit the speech of blogs in the name of campaign finance reform. Josh worries that this “would mean the end of what this site and so many others on the right and left do.”
Only if we follow the rules. I won’t. Free speech is worth fighting for and the best way to do it is to refuse to be silent. There are a lot of bloggers out there and that’s a lot of people to throw in jail if they all pledge to defy the rules.
I think most campaign finance rules restricting contributions are worthless and lead to idiotic proposals like this one. This is a good place for the insanity to stop. The more bloggers who pledge to defy the FEC, the less likely they are to move forward.
I’m down with that. If we take this sort of naked moonshit lying down, then the Medium Lobster will have won:
Certainly the excesses of the blogosphere will now be held in place, but how can there be true campaign reform when the spoken word goes unchecked? Every day, millions of Americans make unchecked and unregulated political contributions by making political endorsements on sophisticated verbal logs—or “verblogs,” if you will—comprised of billions of currently untracked sound waves transmitted through the atmosphere. Until these words are properly tracked, counted, and restricted by the FEC according to the arbitrary limits of McCain-Feingold, American democracy will forever remain a prisoner of Big Speech.
“My fellow Americans. I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Iran forever. We begin bombing in three months.”
Scott Ritter, appearing with journalist Dahr Jamail yesterday in Washington State, dropped two shocking bombshells in a talk delivered to a packed house in Olympia’s Capitol Theater. The ex-Marine turned UNSCOM weapons inspector said that George W. Bush has “signed off” on plans to bomb Iran in June 2005, and claimed the US manipulated the results of the recent Jan. 30 elections in Iraq.
—Mark Jensen , “Scott Ritter Says US Plans June Attack on Iran,
‘Cooked’ Jan. 30 Iraqi Election Results”
Off. Off. Off!
Off. Off. Off. Off. Off.
I wish to God we lived in another world, where Jeanne d’Orleans could take my breath away by saying something, anything other than this:
Italian politicians are furious that their government may have been involved with torture, and a prosecutor, Armando Spataro, has opened an investigation into the charges.
That’s what is supposed to happen. Decent people get angry when they find out their country is consorting with thugs. They demand answers. I’d almost forgotten that.
We almost all of us have, haven’t we? —We are all bad apples, now.
In November 2002, a newly minted CIA case officer in charge of a secret prison just north of Kabul allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young Afghan detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets, according to four U.S. government officials aware of the case. The Afghan guards—paid by the CIA and working under CIA supervision in an abandoned warehouse code-named the Salt Pit—dragged their captive around on the concrete floor, bruising and scraping his skin, before putting him in his cell, two of the officials said. As night fell, so, predictably, did the temperature. By morning, the Afghan man had frozen to death. After a quick autopsy by a CIA medic—“hypothermia” was listed as the cause of death—the guards buried the Afghan, who was in his twenties, in an unmarked, unacknowledged cemetery used by Afghan forces, officials said. The captive’s family has never been notified; his remains have never been returned for burial. He is on no one’s registry of captives, not even as a “ghost detainee,” the term for CIA captives held in military prisons but not registered on the books, they said. “He just disappeared from the face of the earth,” said one U.S. government official with knowledge of the case.
The CIA case officer, meanwhile, has been promoted, two of the officials said, who like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to talk about the matter. The case is under investigation by the CIA inspector general.
How many more names await the chance to become a ghost? How many more causes of death are yet to be ginned up? How many more families will never be notified?
New Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, under pressure while he awaited his confirmation hearings late last year, repudiated a controversial August 2002 memo that CIA officials carefully solicited from the Justice Department for legal authorization on renditions and the agency’s treatment of Qaeda prisoners. Today the CIA has dozens of detainees it doesn’t know how to dispose of without legal procedures. “Where’s the off button?” says one retired CIA official. “They asked the White House for direction on how to dispose of these detainees back when they asked for [interrogation] guidance. The answer was, ‘We’ll worry about that later.’ Now we don’t know what to do with these guys. People keep saying, ‘We’re not going to shoot them’.”
Professor John Yoo, one of the banal engineers of this monstrous machine of split-haired technicalities and unnumbered flights and false-flag kidnappings, thinks we all had our chance to press that off button, and chose not to:
He went on to suggest that President Bush’s victory in the 2004 election, along with the relatively mild challenge to Gonzales mounted by the Democrats in Congress, was “proof that the debate is over.” He said, “The issue is dying out. The public has had its referendum.”
If I believed for a moment that were true, Professor Yoo—that we had had last year a full and frank exchange of views, seen clearly what had been set in motion, and had soberly decided our safety could only be secured at such an appalling price—then I would write this whole damned country off off off. But the arc of the universe is long, and your name will be broken on it; your legacy will be that of a moral footnote: what not to do. What not to be.
Of course, moral outrage is nothing more than a laughable beginning:
Amnesty International, the international human rights organization, noted that the Bush administration has turned over prisoners arrested in the battle against terrorism to the same countries it cites in the report for torturing prisoners.
We must turn it off. All of it. And then start down the long hard road of making what amends we can.
(My goodness, were there that many bad apples? Is it possible there were that many bad apples in the whole country?)
Homonemia; riverbeds; going up—
The inimitable ginmar saw Alexander and the second Bridget Jones movie in a theater that was apparently deep in the heart of the Unheimlichsenke, and what she has to say about the power dynamics of desire and being an object of desire end up cutting a lot closer to the heart of what Jed was getting at back in the summer of ’03 than, you know, the really quite terribly simple idea of tokening up your futurefic with a (fully realized) gay character (or two), no matter how happily ensconced in a fulfilling relationship well-validated by those about them. —This isn’t about tolerance, people; it’s about building new worlds. Even if only on paper.
Right now, I’m trying to figure out why my brain’s insisting on holding Victor/Victoria up against “The Riverbed of the World.” My next move apparently lies in limning how each does what it does and yet doesn’t what it wants done; when I get that figured out, I’ll make it. (Maybe I’ll stick ’em in a room for a bit and let ’em interrogate each other.) —If nothing else, it’s been instructive to reflect on how a contained, mythologized setting such as the theatrical demimonde can, like the aggressively (didactically) otherworldly settings of (some) SF, serve as a source of that paradoxical ostranenie the audience expects: the unheimlich that isn’t. Just, you know, not as much. —But that leaves me feeling like I’m on the verge of telling everyone something they already know, so maybe instead I’ll point out how much fun it is to read The Intuitionist as an SF novel? (Though it was odd, running into Ben Urich like that.)
My song is love unknown.
Here’s an unexpected tragedy of the commons:
The biggest single contributor to last fall’s Measure 36 campaign was an obscure east Portland company previously unknown in political circles.
That company, Christian Copyright Licensing International, contributed $410,000 ($200,000 of it in loans), nearly 20 percent of the $2.2 million raised by the Defense of Marriage Coalition. (The next-biggest backer was the national Christian group Focus on the Family.)
It’s part of Willamette Week’s rather dispiriting look at the infighting and fallout of same-sex marriage in Multnomah County, one year later. We do learn that anti–same-sex–marriage activist Tim Nashif, “a longtime Republican organizer” and CEO of Gateway Communications, “which makes its income by printing materials for political campaigns,” wants “reciprocal partnerships” in Oregon that would be “open to any two people not allowed to marry”:
“If it’s a question of people not being able to get benefits, let’s open benefits to anyone barred from marriage,” Nashif says.
And on the one hand, sure: I mean, it’s up to him if he wants to destroy marriage as he thinks he knows it within a generation, but so long as the benefits appertaining thereunto are available to all and sundry, regardless of race, creed, color, or sexual orientation, I’m down with that. What’s he gonna do, smack Chloe and Olivia on the wrist whenever they slip and talk about their marriage with their friends and family? I’m sorry, Bob and Ted—that’s a fifty-dollar fine for not using the sanctioned terminology for your relationship. —On the other hand, I smell a bait-and-switch: after all, Vermont anti-marriage activists want to replace that state’s civil unions with “reciprocal partnerships.” Some scrutiny of the fine print is called for.
Still, there’s something about a Christian ASCAP being such a big mover and shaker in the THOU SHALT NOT movement that tickles the husk of my funnybone. I mean, I don’t know that they’ve moved into the full-on protection racket aspect of the biz yet, calling up random churches and leaning on them for licensing fees, are you sure you’re covered? You’d better buy one, just to be sure, you know?
- Photocopying. The Church Copyright License does not convey the right to photocopy or duplicate any choral sheet music (octavos), cantatas, musicals, keyboard arrangements, vocal solos, or instrumental works.
- Copy Report. As a license holder, you will be selected to report your song copying activity once every 2-½ years. At that time you will receive a letter of notification along with a Copy Report booklet. The Copy Report will provide information about the length of the report period, and instructions on how to complete it. Your completed Copy Report is a vital element of the Church Copyright License, as it allows us to accurately process and distribute royalties to songwriters and copyright owners.
- Congregational Single Songsheet (CSS). A CSS is a single song, which is found in a compilation of songs intended for congregational use (i.e., a hymnal or chorus book). These songs can be copied into bulletins, congregational songbooks, congregational songsheets, or placed on a slide or transparency. However, the above activity only applies if the song is covered under the Authorized List, and only if the purpose is to assist the congregation in singing. This is the only photocopying allowed under the Church Copyright License.
- Copyright Notice. The Copyright Information you will find for each song needs to be placed on each copy you make, along with your CCLI License Number. If you are unable to display the copyright notice on a slide or transparency, because of lack of space, you may place the information on the frame.
- Recording Services. One of the rights granted to you with the Church Copyright License is the right to record your worship service. This right includes recording your meditations, preludes, postludes, interludes, fanfares, handbell, vocal and instrumental specials. Please be sure to report these when it is your time to report on the Copy Report.
- Rehearsal Tapes. If you would like to make rehearsal tapes for the purpose of having your choir or orchestra learn the music, you must contact the Copyright Administrator directly for this activity. There are no exceptions regarding this issue.
Seems to me it might be better to make a joyful noise in the public domain. More fitting, somehow, too.
My song is love unknown,
my Savior’s love to me,
love to the loveless shown
that they might lovely be.
Why (those currently in charge of the) Republicans are evil.
This is related to what I believe is the Republican strategy to break any positive connection between citizens and government. The appointment of “Constitution in Exile” judges and the stripping of government of all revenues is part of the strategy. Even the horrendous Medicare prescription drug bill fits this strategy, in my theory, because in its arbitrariness, its cost, its “donut hole” where coverage is needed most, it will, when fully phased in, create only anger and frustration, not the positive associations that people have with a reliable, sensible insurance program like Medicare or Social Security. It is an “anti-entitlement,” the opposite of the guaranteed protections that entitlements can offer.
The positive theory that accounts will make people excited, entrepreneurial, wealth-accumulating owners, and thus Republicans, expresses one idea about human nature. The negative, anti-government theory embodies another: that people, unless desperate, will not rise up to demand what they don’t have and have never known. Here it’s useful to remember that Karl Rove’s historical parallel is the 36 years of Republican dominance from the McKinley election in 1996 to Hoover’s defeat. That was a brutal period in American economic life. Government offered nothing in the way of benefits for workers, minimal widows’ pensions, no aid for children, monetary policies that were cruel to farmers and regulatory laissez-faire that was cruel to workers. And yet, year in and year out, people took it, without question. It was the natural order of things. Only the greatest economic collapse in our history forced change. People generally don’t demand what they don’t have. When Social Security is gone, it will not come back, no matter how badly the accounts do. And people will not respond to its absence by becoming Democrats and demanding the restoration of an economic safety net for seniors. Rather, they will forget it ever existed and vote Republican, confirmed in their belief that government doesn’t do a damn thing for anyone.
—Mark Schmitt, the Decembrist
It is one thing to be mindful of the power of government; to use it carefully, perhaps sparingly, but to use it, realizing there are certain things that enrich us all that only collective action can accomplish.
It’s another to reject the power of government as water from a poisoned well—to say that nothing or almost nothing we do collectively is ever worth the price we all must ultimately pay. (Whether one says so adamantly or ruefully is really a matter of personal style.)
But to take the levers of that power yourself and do what you can to twist them, distort them, to cheapen and coarsen the lives of the people around you, to deliberately make us all worse off so that more and more will abandon the idea of collective agency and the common good? To poison the well yourself, merely so we’ll someday say that you were right?
(And so you might cadge a greasy buck or two. Or two trillion.)
Unheimlichsenke.
Jed Hartman, who wrote that “Future of Sex” essay back in the summer of ’03, picks up some threads from recent discussions hereabouts and just hauls off and runs with ’em, handing me a real d’oh! moment in the process:
Though I would add that to some extent these days (thirty years after the Sanders novel was published), the presence of homosexuality in science fiction set in the future is more alienating than in contemporary-setting fiction, for a reason much like what I was talking about in my editorial: because there’s so much more homosexuality in the real world (and in contemporary fiction) than in SF set in the future.
Which, yes, of course, and I wish I’d said something to that effect. I started off on a very personal note with a TIME cover from back in a day when it was still possible without trying too terribly hard to grow mostly up in this country and not encounter the idea of same-sex love and desire and didn’t really look back up from it. —Things are different now: studies and anecdotal evidence both demonstrate that among the Youth of Today in America, there’s a marked jump in acknowledgement and acceptance of, and experimentation and experience with—humanity towards—alternate sexualities. At least insofar as gender preference goes. (I don’t know that we’ll be hitting gender-as-fetish anytime soon, but every little bit helps. —Will it hold, this humane attitude? After all, the Boomers were all about peace love and understanding, and look where they’re getting us now; we Gen-Xers, of course, were apathetic and disaffected underachievers, and look what we’ve got to fix. Backlash bites.) (Why, yes. That was a whole slew of unfair generalizations. Goodness.)
Where was I? —Oh. Right. So with this marked jump in humanity, why then does the future in our current fiction appear to be so darned straight? (And vanilla?) —To properly begin to frame an answer would take us all night and far afield; I’d suggest you start with Interlogue Four in “The Rhetoric of Sex/The Discourse of Desire,” when the pissed-off ventriloquized puppet takes over and rants for a bit—but I don’t want to tackle the big amorphous things Down There, crawling about the foundations to the tuneless tootling of shrill pipes; I want, for a bit, to pretend that history progresses; that there is a Big Picture; that with Metaphors I can construct Conceits and with Conceits I can grasp Concepts and shove them about to make pleasing Patterns that line up neat as you please, oh, I get it. So: first, I’d note that the fiction we’re finding wanting in this particular is outlined and written and produced by the Boomers and Xers and not so much the aforementioned Youth of Today. And second, I’d note that, much as none of us is as dumb as all of us, none of us is as normal; and third, I’d note that maybe the uncanny valley applies to more than just robots and rotoscoped CGI.
Ah, but here we’re playing with conceptual dynamite. Any time you start labelling this normal and that ab-, this human and that in-, you set somebody whether you like it or not up to play the ventriloquized puppet—sorry; chances are you haven’t read the essay. The Other, then: the One Who Isn’t. (Normal. Human. “Would you actually argue that I am, whether with my breasts thrust into black leather or basket heavy in a studded jock, the One Always There, who, when everyone else is redeemed, can be thrown to the dogs, at the eye of the patriarchal cyclone you’ve already located as the straight white [need I add?] vanilla male?” —To quote the aforementioned puppet. Did I mention it was pissed off?) —So let me repeat myself: none of us is as normal as all of us. And when we pitch our ideas for consumption beyond our immediate circle, we tune them to our idea of all of us, or as many as we can stomach: that matrix we all keep in our heads of what will fly and what won’t, what’s acceptable and what’s not, what’s titillating and what’s beyond the pale, what plays in Peoria and what doesn’t, what’ll run up the flagpole and who’ll salute it. What’s heimlich, and what’s un-.
(Yes, I know: there’s more than one: there’s a myriad alls for all the myriad audiences we could dream up; there’s Peoria and there’s Hollywood and there’s the Great White Way; there’s the MIT SF Club, and the one at Hampshire College; there’s even ways to pitch the same piece to more than one all at once, and never they’d know the difference. I know. Let’s brutally simplify it and peg one hypothetical all to the right of that graph up there, the axis labelled “fully [careful! dynamite!] human.” —The mechanism such as it is would be the same for whichever all you’d care to pick.)
As, then, an idea, a behavior, a way of being Other, approaches in familiarity that matrix of behaviors and attitudes we’re assuming comprises this asymptotic all, it climbs the red line marking the favorability of the all’s assumed emotional response: it’s a curiosity, it’s something new, something exciting, ostranenie; whatever New Wave is current can leap out and play with it and build strange weird glorious frightening (dull, turgid, inexplicable) shapes with it. —But as it gets even closer, goes from something conceivable to something that could conceivably affect us (transform us, replace us), it hits the cold dark heart of the Unheimlichsenke. (“Oh God I am the American dream…”) We push it away. With the most benign of reasons, sure: why should we bother; they have their own stories; it’s not our your their place; and anyway, if we foreground protagonize celebrate it, it will all prove too distracting, and we can’t sell it to boys aged 16 – 24. Best just to let it happen when it happens of its own accord. —Which is never, if we don’t push it.
Did you notice how the assumed matrix that made up that mythical, asymptotic all became we, and us? —Yeah. You’ve got to be careful about that.
Of course, this fable has a happy ending. History progresses, you see. Things get better. Having enthroned that all, having become aware that we’ve so enthroned it, it becomes our duty to broaden flatten spread it all as far and wide as we can. To open it up to as much as possible. (The ultimate futility of this task is no excuse.) —And our graph foretells a happy ending, doesn’t it? Things do get better.
Don’t they?
(Look at all the Assmissile jokes and ask yourself: what is so goddamn funny—what is so insulting, really—about enjoying anal sex? What is so belittling about being penetrated? —Don’t laugh. The ventriloquized puppet is still furious, and there’s a lot more to it than maybe you first thought.)
Um. Okay. That got a little stranger than maybe I’d first thought when I set out. Certainly longer. —What else was I up to? Right. More from Jed:
(Aside: It occurred to me recently, while reading a Human Future In Space story in Asimov’s in which there are actual homosexuals, that I neglected something in my editorial: it’s traditionally okay to have queer and/or kinky people in HFIS stories as long as they’re decadent and jaded and world-weary. This realization led me to decide that I want to write an Absolute Magnitude-style Starship Pilot Adventure Story in which the dashing starship pilot jock hero is gay but not at all decadent.)
Well, yes, but: there’s more than one dichotomy here. It’s not just straight/gay (straight/queer; vanilla/every other flavor in the universe); it’s active/passive, dominant/submissive, masculine/effeminate (not, note, feminine), penetrative/penetrated. There’s a lot of borders to shall we say interrogate here, and some are easier than others. A female character taking on masculine attributes—those ass-kicking chicks, in other words—they’ve made it past the Unheimlichsenke and are rapidly climbing the final asymptotic all. (For some values of all, yes yes.) A tomboy dyke with sufficiently feminine touches and an unrequited crush on the ingénue? What harm could she possibly do? (And we could bring up the male gaze, but let’s not; it’s late.) —A male character taking on effeminate attributes, though? As some would have it gay men must do: penetrated, submissive, passive, decadent, jaded, world-weary, distant, push away, push away, into the cold dark heart of the Unheimlichsenke, and that’s why Assmissile jokes are so funny. To some.
Our great hope here? Aside from the old reliable engine of slash, and all it’s been able to do? (Have you watched an episode of Smallville? It ain’t great, but damn.) —It’s yaoi. Go, baby, go!
What else? —I’ve got one more move to make in the “long explore,” as Lance put it; it was maybe going to have been two, or one-and-a-half, but I think I took care of that with this unlooked-for aside. I want to peer more at Jed’s original essay, and the why and wherefore of it, and some of the things that are going on outside the circle he’s drawn and examined, that maybe can be sources of pop-culture juice for engineering the epiphanies he’s looking for (but also, making it harder for those epiphanies to be engineered: “They have their own stories,” after all). And I want to look at what happens when you misuse that space, that grace I outlined; what happens when you try to engineer an epiphany and fail. (It’s not that they can only be epiphenomena, these epiphanies. I don’t think. I hope not. But it has to look like they are. I think. Maybe.) —And I’m gonna do it in 1500 – 2000 words. Oh, yeah.
Before we leave the grace of this in-between, backstage space we’re in here and now, though, let me point you in another direction, away from the straight/queer border and towards one that’s more between male and female, and how SF allows (again) a pushmepullyou of ostranenie and the unheimlich. —It involves Dicebox, which is the Spouse’s comic, which is maybe why I’ve been reluctant to bring it up, and maybe I’m a dolt; anyway, here’s cartoonist Erika Moen playing with some of the same ideas:
While a sci-fi story, it is impossible to lump it into any of the common stereotypical categories. It is not an adventure, it is not a hero’s story, and while futuristic gadgetry is present, it is hardly relevent. With most sci-fi stories the location and time are just as integral characters as the protagonists; the audience is there to be swept up in the exotic future. Manley Lee places the chronicle of Dicebox in a science-fiction environment not because that setting is pertinent to the development of the story but because it gives her the freedom to break her characters out of modern day gender stereotypes and rules without having to justify her decision to her audience.
So: one more move, and then I’ll see where I’ve ended up.
When standards are outlawed, only outlaws will have standards.
Kelli Davis, 18, had her senior class photo taken in a tuxedo top and bow-tie outfit provided for boys rather than the gown-like drape and pearls provided for girls. The school’s principal decided it could not appear in the yearbook because she didn’t follow the dress code.
Kelli, a straight-A student with no discipline problems, is a lesbian. She said she was uncomfortable to have her chest exposed in the photo.
“Because that’s me, you know. That represents me. The drape does not,” Davis said. “They’re not accepting me. That’s the whole reason we’re here.”
Here’s the photo of Kelli Davis that so mightily offended:
Clay School Superintendent David Owens denies it’s about her sexual orientation, just about a student not following the rules.
“There’s a dress code to follow—a dress code expected for senior pictures in the yearbook, and she chose not to follow them. It’s just that simple,” Owens said.
Here’s a prom dress “made by a Texas company that has advertised it successfully in teen magazines like YM and Seventeen.” While not an accurate depiction of the senior girls’ drape, it’s presumably closer to the æsthetic that Owens finds simply acceptable and Davis finds unacceptably uncomfortable:
Others applauded [Principal Sam] Ward’s decision, including Karen Gordon, who said, “When uniformity is compromised, then authority no longer holds.”
All I have to say to that is damn. If your authority is compromised by a girl in a tux, you’re in a bad, bad way.
(Mad props to yearbook editor Keri Sewell, by the way, who was fired for refusing to remove the photo.)
Tooting my own horn.
Just for a moment, honest, and then I’ll put it away. —See, Atrios links to a report over at There is No Crisis which shows our favorite propagandistas, USA Next, were until recently nothing more than a spam farm that harvested the mailing addresses of guillible donors and plowed any funds raised thereby back into the charitable endeavor of raising funds. “Is the privatization scheme just a junk mail operation?” asks the headline.
Why, yes. Yes, it is. I’d like it noted, for the record, that this humble blog, not usually known for its policy prognostications, nailed this particular pelt to the wall back in December.
No, the ultimate argument against mandatory private retirement accounts is this: do you have any idea how much more junk mail you’ll be getting? From multinational financial corporations and fly-by-night penny-stock–pimping quasi-firms? Lurid brochures and badly written come-ons, envelopes tricked up to look like overnight deliveries with that stupid handwriting font misspelling your name in the corner, Kipp, I thought you would appreciate a look at this, Mr. J.K. Manly, you could be making thirteen percent, Ms. Beezel Lee, have you thought about your retirement account? Dire red-inked envelopes with bold block letters RE: YOUR RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS IMPORTANT OPEN IMMEDIATELY, anonymous cheap white envelopes hoping to sneak past your first brute-force Bayesian filter, your own goddamn bank shoving ten-page slick-papered prospectuses financed by your ATM fees through your mail slot every week or so, just because they can.
Spread the word, if you’re so inclined.
Next year, in Glocca Morra.
(I’ve really got to work on the posting slump that seems to hit me every January or so, right about when folks start sniffing around for places to put their Koufax votes, you know?) —Oh, hey! The winners have been announced. Go, look, see. Me, I’m just gonna highlight Mouse Words, who handily trounced James Wolcott and Michael Bérubé to walk off with the Best New Blog award. No mean feat, that.
Pitchforking.
I don’t read enough to know whether we really ought to stop reading it to save all of music journalism, but what I have read bugs me just enough to make me not all that eager to read more. I mean, the comparison that opens the thing I’m going to talk about in a minute, with the “food bands” and “not since Cibo Matto,” sure, it makes a quirky-cute sort of sense, I suppose, since Cibo Matto had a lot of songs about food on Viva! La Woman, okay, but still, I mean, you end up juxtaposing Cibo Matto and the Books as if the logic of your lede hadn’t just leaped the bounds of common sense and run amok through your CD collection, grabbing referents willy-nill. You can almost smell the flopsweat: the writer, staring at the screen, cudgelling their forebrain for a taste of something quirky-cute to get you to read on, spinning aimlessly in an Æron chair picked up cheap at a dot-bomb clearance sale—okay, maybe that’s a bit much, but when they reach down to pick up the pencil that fell from the ceiling tile where they’d stuck it with a perfect wrist-flip toss maybe fifteen minutes before, they happen upon sitting back up, pencil in hand, to glance down at the bog-standard press pack and note that when asked to describe themselves the Books came up with “blipworld / fakegrass / speedblues / chamberclick / eccentrock / country&eastern / glitch post-anything music with samples,” and then followed that up with “food band.” And the writer sighs and says food band, Cibo Matto, whatever, let’s run with it, I’ve got to get this fucking blurb finished for God’s sake.
Maybe it didn’t happen that way. Whatever. For once I don’t care so much about form, not when there’s content that makes me sit up and cheer like this:
Late in the ’04, The Books finished their latest full-length, Lost and Safe, which has been set for an April 5 release on Tomlab.
And look! Right underneath it! The Decemberists’ new album, Picaresque! Out on the 22nd of March! And they’re touring, too! And Petra Haden’s with them! In Portland on the 17th!
So, yeah, you say stuff like that enough of the time, it doesn’t matter so much how you go about saying it. I guess. Maybe.
