The only car in Venice.
Haven’t you always wanted to see a wooden Ferrari being driven through the canals of Venice by a guy who made his house with books he’d carved from wood? —Sure you have!
Now why didn’t I think of that before?
On this long night of unexpected work at the “day” job, on a weekend which was to have been devoted to catching up on totally buggered deadlines and procrastinated household chores, I at least have this simple idea to console me:
A gin martini softened with single-malt Laphroaig rather than the more typical vermouth. A couple of olives, and—
Well. Two of ’em set me up quite nicely on the dinner break.
Happy anniversary.
We all know that George W. Bush is unelectable. After all, he lost last time; he’ll lose again. In every conceivable metric, he has failed to clear the bar set by even the most inept of presidential predecessors: whether it’s the gutshot economy, the punch-drunk war, the hamfisted cronyism, the Nixonian authoritarianism, or the ludicrous foreign policy, as conducted by a bunch of froshling poli sci majors on a Diplomacy binge, he’s presided over the most appalling collection of creeps, crooks, dolts, and faith-based dipshits ever to tap a Teapot Dome. His administration has been a miserable failure; any slob in a smelly T-shirt could beat him in a walk on that special Tuesday in November. The man is unelectable.
But he is selectable.
So here’s a clip’n’save vocabulary list of tricks and tactics we all ought to keep a weather eye out for, beyond the obvious black-box ballot-stuffing threat of Diebold and company:
Rehnquist v. tr. To purge voter rolls of blocs designated as likely to vote Democratic, whether by excluding anyone with the same last name as someone who might be a felon, or directly intimidating minority voters at the polls. Usage: “Katherine Harris really rehnquisted Florida in 2000.”
Kennedy v. tr. To gerrymander voting districts to prevent adequate representation of minorities; from the act of using specious legal reasoning to defend this practice. Usage: “The Republicans are getting more brazen about how they kennedy voting districts.” Note: overshadowed by the more virulent synonym, delay.
O’Connor n. The hypocrisy of strenuously attempting to appear principled while openly aligning oneself with unethical, amoral factions, lending them respectability in return for the tactical advantages gained by trampling the very principles one claims to uphold. Usage: “There’s an entire class of ‘good’ Republicans in this country, lost in an advanced state of o’connor.”
Thomas v. tr. To “work the ref,” manipulating rules, regulations, policies, procedures, and public relations to prevent crucial information from reaching the public, thus ensuring the vote goes your way. Usage: “The punditocracy appears if anything to be even more complicit in thomasing political coverage in favor of the Republicans than they were in 2000.” Note: thomasing differs from diebolding in that no vote tampering occurs, per se.
Scalia n. Any Supreme Court decision which is a one-time only deal, setting no precedent, engaging in transparent sophistry that makes a mockery of the articles cited, and effecting a naked power grab that shatters our much-vaunted system of checks and balances. Usage: “Bush v. Gore? Total scalia, dude.”
Over it? Feh. Move on? Ha! Happy anniversary, y’all, and remember: he’s unelectable—but selectable. The gang that can’t shoot straight is governing like there’s no tomorrow— certainly not one that belongs to anyone but them. They will not go gently into that good night.
But they will go there, by God.
The life you save could be your own.
Look, I like a Weetzie Bat book as much as the next fellow, but I’m not about to start waxing rhapsodic over the City of Quartz. There’s a place for it in the collective unconscious, I suppose—gracelessly aging screen queens of whatever gender still need shady bungalows where Nancy Drews and Walter Neffs can tumble headlong into stories they won’t suss out till the final moments of a posthumous voiceover, and the world would be a poorer place without the Dude. But (what little I’ve seen of) the there that’s there all too often leaves me wretched, retching on all fours.
In a metaphorical sense, anyway.
There’s the heat and the sun and the fact that you’re driving for hours to get anywhere and the sheer number of movie billboards makes getting around the city feel like those obnoxious DVDs where you can’t fast-forward past the coming attractions. There’s the prefab megaburbs, fœtal Neal Stephenson atopias that spring forth fully paved from the knotted foreheads of urban planning committees, settling the Mandlebrot fronds of their culs-de-sac around big-box nuclei of Home Depots and Bed Bath & Beyonds, and if you think it’s tacky to blame Venice for the sins of Thousand Oaks, well, tough. There’s more than enough to go around. And sure there’s wonder there, and beauty—you can’t put that many people in one place without some deliriously amazing things being done and said and built—but it takes too much money and gas to enjoy them properly. I am a callow, petty, cruel man, and for these sins: heat; sun; annoyance; urban blight; profligacy; bad planning; and one of the worst cups of coffee I’ve ever had in my life, I could easily write the whole festering mess off without a backward glance—Bats and bungalows, screen queens, Dudes and all. Except—
We were in this minivan, Scott and Ivy and Winter and Sky and Jenn and me, and we were somewhere between Thousand Oaks and Culver City and having a hard time getting any closer to either of them, and it was hot, and the sun was flinging daggers off the chrome and glass all around us, and even though there’s something to be said about improvising Pythonesque skits with a couple of disarmingly precocious kids in the back seat of an elderly minivan on the 101, you’re still stuck in the back of an elderly minivan on the 101, and even disarmingly precocious kids can get squallingly cranky. (Hence the Pythonesque skits.) Are we there yet?
Eventually whatever was blocking the traffic popped free and it began sluggishly to move, down out of the dry, scrubby hills through cool green suburbs toward the apocalyptic orange haze at the bottom. Somewhere off thataway, that grey mass that wasn’t quite sky and yet wasn’t quite anything else? That has something to do with an ocean, apparently. And for all the skyscraping high-rises jutting up at alarmingly random intervals, none of them quite stick in the mind’s eye, you know? (Quick! Draw LA’s skyline!) —We didn’t go quite that far; we found instead a nondescript corner with only a couple of movie billboards looming over it and parked. (Climbing out, I discovered I had suffered a Sartorial Indignity; I do not want it to be said that I blame anyone, as any fool knows one shouldn’t wear white pants in an elderly minivan frequented by disarmingly precocious children. But: nonetheless: I had, and it was.) One door down from that corner was a nondescript storefront. Scott leaned on the nondescript buzzer. The door opened. And, ladies and gentlemen, as God is my witness: all of Los Angeles was redeemed.
We were in the Museum of Jurassic Technology.
For one thing, it was cool and dim. But! I don’t know that I have ever spent any two hours more totally immersed in awe, stumbling about through such a lovely, druggy haze of presque vu. I— I—
Trailer parks! Rotting luck! Athanasius Kircher! Mice on toast! —Aw, fuck. Words fail me.
(There was a book. Words kinda failed him, too.)
Which makes this part of the post mildly moot: it has come to my attention that, like so many other enterprises which depend upon the kindness of strangers, the Museum of Jurassic Technology could use a little more help than usual, these days. Memberships start at $35 per year ($25 for seniors and students), and you get stuff and discounts and free admission and so on. And if you know about the Museum then you know, but if you don’t—my inability to articulate the hows and the whys and wherefores does none of us any good, now, does it.
Think of it this way: one day, you, too, will be in Los Angeles. And you, too, will be hot and sun-stricken and stuck in traffic. When you finally pull off the 101 into the City of Culver City, well—you’re gonna want a there to still be there. Know what I mean?
No one may ever have the same knowledge again.
Unelectable.
I’m gonna quote Atrios on this one:
...and another thing. Stop ceding the goddamn debate. Who here thinks Howard Dean can beat Bush? Why Ted, you ignorant slut, Fred Flintstone could take Bush with Barney Rubble as his campaign manager. Wesley Clark should stop saying that he needs to be the nominee because someone needs to be able to match Bush at foreign policy. What Clark should say is that Joey Tribiani could match Bush at foreign policy, though he, Clark, has the most experience. Stop acknowledging that Bush is strong on anything. He’s a big loser. He’s a miserable failure. He’s lost 3 million jobs. He got us into a screwed up war. Our soldiers are being killed by terrorists. The Middle East is a mess. Afghanistan is a mess. OBL is alive. Hussein is alive.
Say it with me, everybody: George W. Bush is unelectable.
Angels.
So yeah: I’ve got this thing about Ayn Rand and objectivism—I’ve got no use for her, and I’ve got no use for it. (There’s a subset of Trek fandom who like to insist that Surak’s Vulcan logic is best expressed as Randian objectivism; it would seem they utterly glossed over the moral of the third-best Trek movie ever made.) —And one of my most cherished prejudices is that libertarians are coddled, pampered, naïve fools, who believe what they believe only because they have no clue what nastiness awaits when their cherished ideals are fully implemented. “A farmer in Idaho who’s contemplating taking up sodomy,” was R. Fiore’s definition; “Repeal all laws except the ones that benefit me,” was mine.
Bedamned if Arthur Silber doesn’t manage to challenge all of that on all-too-regular a basis.
Bastard.
Anyway: read what he has to say about Angels in America, and take it to heart, and watch the damn thing, already. —I saw it on Broadway, too, and, oh, heck. Just see it. (Amp’s recording it; we’re all going to get together with some popcorn one of these days and shut away the rest of you for a while.)
And not that this has much to do with anything that’s gone before aside from the obvious, but make sure you pick up a copy of Wig in a Box. Hedwig, Rufus Wainwright, Robyn Hitchcock, the Breeders, the Polyphonic Spree, Sleater-Kinney (with Fred Scheider!), and Cyndi Lauper her own damn self, and the proceeds go to support the Harvey Milk School. How can you beat that?
What happened, you mooks.
Oh, there were circumstances. (There are always circumstances.) There was that holiday. (I made my usual goyishe challah and a black bean and chocolate chili.) I’ve been so distracted from other writing tasks that I can’t work up the gumption to procrastinate those by tossing off something here. (They ought to come first, which means this usually does, unless I’m over some other rainbow entirely.) I’m going through another one of those periods where my normally fecund outrage lies fallow; overwhelmed by the effort to keep my head above this river of shit, for some perspective, I’ve instead curled up in a little ball and sunk to the bottom, where at least it’s cool and dim and quiet—pleasant, really, as long as you don’t try to breathe. (It’s a heartsickness. I read the news and I sigh and shrug and turn away to burrow deep within the flannel sheets we just bought and I turn out the light.) We lost a cat we never really got to know all that well. (She reached out for something as the shot went home, the most she’d moved in hours, and then she stopped breathing. We got a paw print and a clip of fur in the mail from the clinic and I suddenly found it hard to speak. Chris ’shopped a silly composite image from these silly snaps that Jenn took, and now I have a mental image of Kitty Heaven that’s going to be hard to shake. But at least it makes me laugh.) And of course, there’s the day job—
I don’t talk much about the day job, do I?
I work in litigation support, basically, a field I never even knew existed until Aaron, the Demented Lawyer, snagged me a part-time job here. When the freelance writing and graphic design market started drying up, I stepped up to full time; now, I’m a Project Manager, with a corner office and everything. —Basically, when two companies hate each other very much, they come together in a lawsuit. And the lawyers for each side want to see all the pieces of paper the other side has in its filing cabinets and desk drawers and bankers’ boxes stashed away in the unused office space on the sixth floor, memos and financials and correspondence and telephone messages and test results and printouts of every half-baked Excel spreadsheet and ill-conceived Power Point presentation stuffed onto the harddrive of that laptop Bob hasn’t used since the ill-fated trip to Nova Scotia. And they argue back and forth about what’s pertinent and what’s privileged, but in the end all this paperwork is boxed up and dropped off at our offices, where we scan it all in, number every page in sequence, print (“blow back,” in the parlance) a fresh, numbered set, break that up into discrete documents, code the particulars of each document into a database, and then hand the whole shebang back, neatly boxed up and easily and quickly searchable in any of a number of ways. —We sort haystacks, in other words, so that needles—howsomever defined—might more easily be found. And on the one hand, this is cool: if a lawyer is getting ready to depose Bob about that trip to Nova Scotia, and she wants to see every memo he wrote before he went, she doesn’t have to send her paralegal scurrying down to the sixth floor office to search all those bankers’ boxes for any memo that he might have written before the date of the trip; instead, the harried paralegal can scurry over to the computer, run a simple database search, and print out all the corresponding documents. Time and money are saved! The invisible hand of commerce lubricates the exceeding fine if slowly grinding mills of justice! Huzzah!
On the other hand, you also have clients who get a mite peevish when you try to tell them it’s a wee bit difficult to print 60,000 pages in chronological order in 12 hours.
I think I’m figuring out why I don’t talk about the day job much. —Oh, there’s something new to learn with every project, and there’s scads of fun terminology (blowbacks, Bates numbers, redwelds, bankers’ boxes [which, thanks to my days in comics retail, I can assemble with alacrity], etc. etc.), and I get to see all sorts of juicy behind-the-scenes stuff, going through other companies’ dirty laundry every day, but since I sign a non-disclosure agreement with most of the projects I take on, well.
So: day job. We work for lawyers; there’s the concomitant stress level that that entails. —November was a month, in other words; still, peevish clients and appalling actions taken in my name and good food with friends I haven’t seen in years notwithstanding, I’m most rattled here on the other side by the death of a cat I knew, what, two months? Less?
Stupid death. It’s a really dumb way to run things, you know? —Oh, sure, “They will come back—come back again, as long as the red Earth rolls. He never wasted a leaf or a tree. Why should He squander souls?” If it floats your boat, I guess. But rake my yard, first. Then talk to me about squandering.
Reflexive decency.
Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a faggot there from Boston—not a blue-blood Brahmin, neither, most as upright as a straight man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane—the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the state. And what do you think? They said he was a lawyer in a big firm out that way, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could get married when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? Now, I’m sweet on Dolores, as you know, and I was just about to go and ask for her hand if I warn’t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a state in that country where they’d let that faggot marry a man, or let some bulldagger swoop in on sweet Dolores, I drawed out. I says I’ll never get married ag’in. Them’s the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me—I’ll never get married ag’in as long as I live.
With thanks to Teresa Nielsen Hayden, for reminding me; apologies to Messr. Twain; and a great big dollop of neener dumped all over Jonah Goldberg and all his icky, phobic ilk.
The Devil, quoting Scripture.
Matthew, Chapter 7, that ol’ Sermon on the Mount:
Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.
Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.
Some of the trees in question: Allen Brill introduces the Right Christians to the latest batch of the Christian Right, who’ll doubtless be spearheading the upcoming Last Stand for Bigotry against gay marriage. David Neiwert does some digging into recent efforts by Richard Mellon Scaife & co. to do to America’s churches what they’ve done to America’s conservative movement. One of Neiwert’s links leads us back to Brill and thence to a connection between black box voting and a particularly nasty brand of Christianist. And y’all did remember to make a copy of this Harper’s article from a while back, didn’t you?
Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?
And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.
(Which, you know, is fine and dandy for Him. But what about the rest of us, huh? Stuck down here with these corrupt and evil-fruited trees.)
The incredibly strange referrers who stopped living and became mixed-up zombie-blogs.
So I’ve been getting these weird pings over at City of Roses. A blog of nothing but airplane news. A blog of LA news. Technical something-or-other blogging. —They’re each of them nothing but simple links with a brief summary scraped off a newsfeed, each laid out differently, each with a not-entirely-random, vaguely evocative name. Each of them linking, under “Referrers” or “Incoming links,” www.thecityofroses.com, along with a bunch of other sites, with almost nothing in common except—like City of Roses—they don’t actually have a link to the blog in question.
And each of them has, at the bottom of the page, the following code:
“Zombieblog.com,” of course, being the URL of the blog in question.
Sebbo did the detective work. —Me, I’m puzzled, too. I’m not seeing how this is driving traffic to “adult-webcam”; certainly not enough to justify the effort that went into setting up these templates and newsfeeds.
Anyone?
I have no response to that.
What’s Happening on Sunday, November 16, 2003?
First Lady Laura Bush is in Dallas, TX where she will tour the Nasher Sculpture Center. Following the tour, Mrs. Bush will participate in a media availability at the museum.
A media availability?
A media availability?
She will participate in a media availability?
...I got nothin.’ Let’s just note it without comment and move on, shall we?
The word of the day.
We never had to stand in line or bribe a bouncer to get in; we just went for drinks one night after somebody quit a job somewhere, and I had a birthday dinner there once—good enough food, good infused vodkas (I won’t back down on the whole ice-cold gin and a whisper of vermouth thing, but I will allow that cucumber-infused vodka-based martini-like drinks leave this world a better place than the one they come into), good music, great people-watching, for those into the vanity-thy-name-is-unintentional-comedy school of human nature. —And I love the logo: the melting ice cube. Genius. But I never knew that “saucebox” was a slang term meaning “one who is obnoxiously self-assertive and arrogant.”
My night is made. Early morning? Whatever.
It keeps getting vaster every time I see it—
Via The Minor Fall, the Major Lift: Hal Boedekker offers up 25 helpful hints to get you through those four hours a day (on average). —Oh, go on. You might learn something.
Dennis Miller: Tax and spend liberal!
In a surprise move guaranteed to confound those who’d counted on Dennis Miller’s acerbic wit to lend a certain cultural legitimacy to the Bush administration and its lack of a popular mandate, the former SNL anchorman recently spoke in favor of not just rolling back the Bush tax cuts, but raising taxes—across the board.
In the course of a broader discussion of his politics, Miller said “he’d like to keep a dollar out of every two he makes.”
This would, of course, translate to a tax rate of 50%. The highest federal tax rate at the moment is 35%. American families near the median of income distribution currently pay one dollar in taxes for every four dollars they make.
Though it would mean an increase in taxes for almost every single American, the Miller Tax of 50% could easily raise enough money to eradicate budget deficits currently plaguing state governments, as well as address the structural deficits built into future federal budgets. It would also go a long way towards fully funding such underperforming Bush administration programs as No Child Left Behind, Americorps, the Department of Homeland Security, and the War on Terror, as well as help assuage fears of looming crises in Social Security and Medicare—yet it would be a far cry from the 1950s top tax rate of 94%.
But a tax increase of this magnitude would work against the avowed goals of many of Miller’s newfound allies on the right, such as Grover “Drown it in a Bathtub” Norquist, who has compared progressive taxation to the Holocaust. Still, the Miller Tax is a flat tax, and so would presumably avoid that particular criticism.
As of this writing, Mallard Fillmore could not be reached for comment.
So we finally got around to seeing Gladiator.
Pretty much only because Bill Mudron dummied up a fun little soundtrack for his forthcoming Pan, stringing together orchestral cues from a couple of big-budget extravaganzæ and apropos pop songs as a way of sketching out the structure of the thing, and Jenn and I were pretty sure the lion’s share came from Pirates of the Caribbean, only it turns out most of them came from Gladiator, and thereby might hang a fun little essay comparing the rigid adherence to genre conventions of big-budget soundtracks with that of, say, superhero comic books, but instead I’ll just remind you of the ad campaign for the movie—that tag line, remember? Floating in oh-so-Roman Trajan allcaps with dignified slow dissolves over shots of Russell Crowe almost getting mauled by a matted tiger? That got parodied for a few weeks by everybody and his brother for a couple of weeks there at the end of 2000? “The general… who became a slave… the slave… who became a gladiator… the gladiator… who defied an emperor…” —That tag line, right?
I had no idea the lazy ad-copy hacks were quoting the frickin’ script.
Oh, wait: one more comment, and then I’m outta here: it’s a profound mark of something-or-other that snarky comparisons of our 43rd president to Joaquin Phoenix’s truculent Caliguloid, Commodus, did not become common satirical currency. —What happened, you mooks?
Stable’s gettin’ kinda full, ain’t it?
As Horsemen go, it’s a small one, but a tinny echo of the Last Trump blatted through my bus this morning. —I’m sitting there puzzling out a bit of dialogue when some strap-hanger clinging behind me gets into it with an underling on his cell phone. I missed the particulars, but then he got agitated: “Yeah, well,” he says, “hurry it up! You’re late as it is.” And then he’s listening to whatever the underling is saying about how my car won’t start or the bus blew me off or the idiot at Kinko’s used the wrong foam-core or what am I supposed to do about how IT misunderstood the email and rebuilt the database for Lotus and I can’t get anybody to tell me where the backup tapes are or maybe my cat that’s been the family companion for fourteen happy years is walking funny and leaking something and I can’t put off taking her to the vet it would kill my kids, I’ve just got to fix this one little thing, that’s all, and then I can, and in the middle of it all this guy snaps with no hint whatsoever of self-consciousness: “There is no I in team.” And then he slaps his phone shut and shoves it in a pocket.
Ah, well. At least I got to snicker to myself at how his utter lack of irony made the whole thing rather ironic.
(Confidential to, oh, just about everyone: yes, there’s been a dearth of posts and less back-and-forth than usual and missed emails and I’m really sorry I didn’t get around to installing MT-Blacklist until last night, Barry, but I’m glad it’s going gangbusters for you now. —There’s been stuff. In the interests of reducing my workload, then, I’ll mention that I want to do something with the stuff dredged up by Jeremy’s meanderings, prompted by the infamous Messr. du Toit: the short answer, Mr. Pinkham, is you’re wrong, but. The problem being I’m finding it really hard to pontificate breezily on pop culture without access to what passes for it on the cable channels, and I’m not about to let that beast back into my house for nothing more than a blog entry, and yeah, world’s smallest violin, cry me a fuckin’ river, suck it up, close your eyes and think of the children, what would your mother say, and anyway, you see an I in this team, shithead?
(In the meanwhile, a non sequitur: Mark Lakeman!)
Our new interviewing technique is unstoppable.
Ever wanted to ask David Rees a question? You know, the guy who does Get Your War On? (Among other things.) Comixpedia’s giving you the chance. Get in there and make it a good’un.
