Laura Ashley is definitely back… She’s back, and this time it’s personal. See, they mated her with the Home Depot guy, and that’s where you get Martha Stewart.
Far be it from me to defend Martha. But some recent news regarding her case is, shall we say, unsettling:
Inserting an unusual twist into their indictment of the domestic diva, prosecutors charge that she committed a crime when she stood up in public last summer and denied engaging in insider trading.
“I was a little surprised at that,” said Richard A. Serafini, a former economic crimes prosecutor in New York. “There’s kind of a natural tendency when you’re confronted with something to deny it. Now they’re charging it as market manipulation.”
On the other hand, one looks forward to what this level of prosecutorial zeal will dig up when (finally) brought to bear on Ken Lay, et al.
(Title gacked from the unaired Buffy pilot, of course.)
Let’s add a link to this in-depth piece from Steve Gilliard over at the Daily Kos.
Film at elevenses.
Medley’s noting another disquieting example of the government threatening experts who speak out against a proposed government policy. This time, it’s about the dismantling of Head Start, which, despite years of sketchy funding and grudging support, is still one of the more impressive federal success stories. Ah, well; scratch off another opportunity for your tax dollars to do some good in this world. —Elayne ties it to a venerable PBS institution in trouble because of a lack of cartoon figures ripe for exploitation on jammies and lunchboxes.
From one Sara to another: Sara Ryan links to the text of a great speech Sara Peretsky’s been delivering these days.
Ampersand is all up in Congress’s face about the “Partial-Birth” Abortion Ban: it’s patently unconstitutional, and he makes his case quite clearly here, here, and here (with a sidetrack to [shudder] the Corner here). A fourth part of his series will be coming up next week, looking at what we might expect from the Supremes, given that O’Connor will almost certainly resign before this travesty of law reaches their chambers; look for it.
I never got around to pointing out that Fantagraphics needs your help, but since everybody and her sister was on top of it, my slacking doesn’t matter so much in this hill of beans. The which said, here’s a quickie update on how they’re faring, and a reminder that now’s a great time to pick up a copy of Safe Area Goradze, a Maakies collection, or the TPB of Small Favors.
Judging from the comments section, and much to his puzzled bemusement, Kevin’s two-week old post on the Dixie Chicks and FUTK still has freakishly gawky legs. I point it out less for any insight the ongoing discussion might offer (pretty much nil) than for the entertainment value it offers as a curious singularity.
And, well, it’s mildly instructive to note the differences in headlines covering Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix’s final address to the Security Council: “US deaf to arms inspections pleas,” says the New Zealand Herald; “Blix decries coalition’s intelligence on Iraq arms,” says the International Herald Tribune; “Blix: Inspections could yet turn up banned weapons in Iraq,” MSNBC; “Blix: ‘No surprise’ if WMD found,” CNN. —Take from that what you will, which is the point, really.
Scott McCloud is right!
We do, on the whole, look less dorky in his photo than Erika’s.
Updates, faxblasts, petitions, that sort of thing—
The samizdata fuck-off.
Well sir, the Senate is mighty pissed at those irresponsible FCC commissioners. “It looks for all the world like you could not or would not stand up to corporate interests,” said Senator Byron L. Dorgan (D-ND), and no wonder. But it’s more grandstanding than anything else, given that the House seems much more amenable to the media borg, and Committee Chair John McCain (R-Ariz.) doesn’t support a bill doing anything about a situation that’s already this bogglingly bad and only getting worse. Here’s where you try to can convince him otherwise, and here’s where you can light a fire under your own representative and senators.
40 hours and a mule.
Whoa. We sorta won one. HR 1119 has been pulled from the schedule owing to the fact that the Republicans couldn’t find 218 representatives willing to sell out hourly employees—but they’re vowing to pursue passage later this year. “Only in Washington could lobbyists and politicians continue to get away with denying parents the freedom to choose to spend more time with their children.,” said Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee. “I can assure you that the fight to change this outdated requirement on behalf of America’s working moms and dads is not over.” He appears to have been noticeably less effusive on his fight to allow large businesses to take out interest-free loans from the labor of their employees. Here’s where you can send off a letter to Wage and Hour Division Administrator Tammy McCutchen (and cc it to President Bush, for a laugh).
If you read one book review this season
make it John Dolan’s review of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. (Thanks, ’hat!)
78 luftballoons.
Yeah, it’s running up the blogdex like a thing that climbs up something else really fast, but it’s worth it: the ’80s Tarot. There are some truly inspired choices in there, and if your memory is long enough to have looked past the rather blandly mediocre nature of That ’80s Show to appreciate just how frighteningly, subtly spot-on the production designers and set dressers were in capturing That ’80s Look—not so much the bar or the record shop, those were gimmies; I’m thinking of the condo they lived in, the generic hotel-lobby furniture, that weird mix of wall and decor colors, neutral cools and mellow pastels that manage to be prickly and uncomfortable despite their best efforts: slick salespeople too studied, too mannered in their insouciance, smiling too much, their hands behind their backs holding other shoes about to drop. —Where was I? If you caught more than one episode for some variation on this queasily fascinated nostalgia kick, then the Tarot will make you laugh in delight, and you’ll think of Howard Jones for the first time in ages.
Luftballoon bonus: the 99 Luftballoons installation at Project Blinkenlights.
40 hours and a mule.
If you haven’t fax-blasted your Representative yet regarding HR 1119, do so. The vote’s tomorrow; the overtime pay you save might be your own. Don’t let them turn your work week into a no-interest loan for businesses. Don’t let them utterly stall the economy by taking money out of the hands of people who need to spend it on basic necessities and putting it in the hands of people who are sitting on the idea of new investments because the economy is in a slump right now on account of all the people who aren’t spending money on basic necessities. Don’t let them render meaningless such formerly useful words as “compassionate” and “flexible.” Don’t let them squeeze anymore blood from this stone. From us.
Did you know—
—that over and above $2 million dollars in taxpayer-funded trips, FCC staffers have taken an additional 2,500 trips costing nearly $2.8 million, most of which came from the telecom and broadcast industries that the agency is supposed to regulate? The top destination was Las Vegas, with 330 trips to such plush accommodations as the Bellagio; then New Orleans, at 173; then New York, at 102. Also listed: Paris, Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro, London, Buenos Aires, and Beijing.
Nor does the FCC compile its own data or crunch its own numbers when assembling support for its proposed revisions to our media regulations. Instead, it relies on third-party information providers and self-reporting from—again—the telecom and broadcast industries it’s supposed to regulate. (Presumably, this helps explain why commissioners had to meet 71 times with industry reps leading up to Monday’s historic vote, but only five times with the two major consumer groups working for public interest.)
Wow. You’d think this would have made the news or something, to let us all know what was up with the vote: the Center for Public Integrity released these findings back on 22 May and 29 May, respectively. —Funny, that.
(Well, it did make Molly’s column, at least. I should remember to check in with her on a more regular basis.)
À la recherche du temps perdu.
There’s this smell—
Okay. So you’ve just eaten a bowl of Wheaties. And you’re in a hurry, you’ve got to get out the door and catch a bus to go to work. So you dump the bowl in the sink and make some half-assed promise to yourself to wash it when you get home. But you go out after work and there’s some beer or maybe you go to that place just up the street which has the Tom Waits which is basically a Manhattan made with Knob Creek and it’s blasphemous on a number of levels and pricey to boot, but who cares while you’re sipping it and admiring the shrine to the Unknown Gentleman Caller up there above the restrooms, but the point is there’s drinking and conviviality and you roll in late and wake up bleary and dash down some coffee because, you know, you have to catch the bus to go to work, and you’ve just barely got time to maybe catch a bagel on the way in, and then that night, let’s say it’s Friday night, you’re going out with some friends, maybe a video festival at somebody else’s place, and whether there’s booze or not doesn’t really matter but there is more conviviality, and you end up rolling in late again, so it’s Saturday morning after a cup of coffee before you’re ready to deal with the sink where you find that bowl you ate the Wheaties out of a couple of days before, and did I mention it’s summer and you don’t have air conditioning?
So you blow off the bowl and the rest of the dishes and head back into town, maybe go to Powell’s, there at the edge of Portland’s Pearl District, and this is back in 1998, by the way, or early 1999, when Anodyne was still hitting the streets and the Blitz-Weinhard brewery was cooking up a batch of Henry’s every couple of days—late nights or even some early afternoons you could wander through the streets of the Pearl accompanied by the musical clink of empty bottles shuttling at a mad pace along the conveyor belt that stretched over 11th (I think it was 11th) from one building to the next, and when the batch being brewed had hit just the right point in its zymurgic maturation, well, that whole little pocket of refabbed light-industrial and warehouses-becoming-lofts and hole-in-the-wall diners and nautical supply shops and the biggest used bookstore in the world would all pretty much smell like that dried-out faintly fermenting bowl you’d eaten the Wheaties from a couple of days before. (Cf. a half-eaten bag of Fritos; also, gym socks under certain difficult-to-reproduce conditions.)
Blitz-Weinhard is gone now. Henry’s is brewed in California somewhere, by Miller, and the old brewery buildings they didn’t tear down are being refitted as lofts and offices and upscale retail. They’re doing a better job of it than not—certainly, it’s a better world there than the one where Paul Allen replaces Memorial Coliseum with a fucking big-box retail park Jantzen Beach clone. There’s a grocery store downtown, now—pricey, and with a nasty labor-relations history, but they stock Bert Grant’s IPA and green wine, so color me conflicted—and if some of the new builds are ugly as sin, some of the refits are temptingly neo-urban hipster cozy—railroad lofts with reading lights shining cheerfully through hazy glass-brick walls opening onto loading docks, that sort of thing.
And the smell is gone. But.
Yes, it’s a story as old as real estate: as a city grows and its infrastructure improves, the transportation hubs and industrial nuclei can be shunted from points downtown to outlying campuses (in this case, various industrial parks heading up the Willamette River from Swan Island to Rivergate, at the confluence with the Columbia); the old warehouses and factories left behind close and decay, rent out dirt-cheap to artists and other disreputable bohemian types, and funky restaurants spring up and shut down and spring up again, galleries open, people start taking to its funky recycled industrial charm, the exposed brick and rusting I-beams and roads laid with railroad tracks so boxcars full of grain and bone meal can trundle through the streets at midnight making deliveries to the factories still manufacturing and the massive amounts of open square footage at low low monthly rates; somebody organizes a regular open gallery night, First Thursday of every month, the galleries get giddy, there’s cheap red wine and Ritz crackers a go-go, buskers start showing up, and there’s upscale galleries showing aggressively minimalist stuff in white white rooms cheek-by-jowl with scrappy low-rent award-winning photo studios and the just plain weird shit, like the art cars and that old warehouse that had the row of ratty theater seats sitting on the loading dock and the perpetual indie-rock band practicing in a loft somewhere upstairs (drums and bass echoing in the duct work, unseen guitars crunching to life and stuttering to a stop as the song stumbles and falls over and gets back up again) and the stuff, the stuff on the floors and the walls, light bulb sculptures and weird Da Vinci wing-things and giant canvasses like what Cy Twombly might have painted if Cy Twombly had been that stoner at the back of your junior high homeroom with the spiral-bound notebooks and that pen that clicks through four or five colors of ink. —You don’t want to know how much it costs to buy a condo in that warehouse now. Success raises rents, artists are replaced by boutiques, development money comes pouring in and if there’s a dot com boom that leads Wieden + Kennedy to relocate their offices smack in the middle of the whole shebang, it just exacerbates the process. And not to draw too deeply from the well of stereotype and cliché, but now there’s cell phones and sunglasses and lattés and valet parking for your SUV outside bars which still open on loading docks, and some of those old freight rail lines have been paved over because they were wrecking the suspensions of those SUVs. First Thursday is still a great walk, yes, and there’s loads of stuff yet to see and laugh at and be surprised by, and they still get the buskers and the sidewalk hustlers and the art cars. Heck, there’s even still a smell: William Pope.L has a branch of eRacism up at PICA, which involves paintings with peanut butter and mayonnaise, onions and pop tarts, a map made out of hotdogs, and a room full of liquor and stuffed animals. It’s been pretty rank walking past the ground floor of W+K these past few early summer weeks.
But it isn’t the same smell. —And there’s more missing: most of the local artists, for instance, who’ve chased cheap rents across the river to Northeast Alberta Street, where Last Thursday has something of the anarchic anything-goes vitality of First Thursdays gone by. Though not without doing some displacing themselves. —As old as real estate, then, and as cyclical as the seasons: though the first wave of boutiques in the Pearl District is starting to close now that the tide of dot com money has receded into memory, the second wave (more with the Thai restaurants and bank branches and less with the avant garde lighting solutions) is rolling in. And so (he said) it goes.
I was moved to sling these streams of consciousness about by the report in today’s Portland Tribune that the last freight rail car made its last delivery to pretty much the last working factory in the Pearl in the wee hours of Sunday morning: a cargo of pig, cow, and chicken carcasses for a bone and blood meal pet food factory. Cities change, and that’s good and that’s bad, and I’ve been living here for almost eight years—longer that I’ve ever lived in any one place before; perhaps that makes it all the more keen. There was something special about a downtown with an active industrial core intermixed with shops and offices and lofts. But that particular temp is now perdu; doff your hat as the rail car trundles by.
Just don’t wrinkle your nose too much. And watch out for the puddle of pig’s blood—that’ll be hosed down by tomorrow, never fear.
So small and flat.
How can I trust you if you write to me, but do not include an URL to your photoblog? How can I tell, first, what your face looks like? Isn’t that enormously important? Secondly, without a photoblog I cannot know if your perception of the world is stale or fresh. I cannot know if you look around you, and, if you do, what you’re looking at, and how. I cannot know how you dress, and whether it would be appealing to undress you. I cannot know to what canon of beauty you subscribe unless I can subject you to rigorous style analysis.
You may be a brilliant writer, like Ian Penman, and you may have a blog stuffed with lively wordplay and interesting opinions. But the world is already full of opinions, of commentaries on commentaries, glosses on glosses, and spins on spins. Photos, in a world where the word-snake dines on its own tail, give me hope. Maybe photos can break the ever-narrowing vicious circles of language. Break them with textures, colours, forms; the peculiarly irreducible specificities of the visual world.
I want to know what you look like, and what the world around you looks like. It’s tremendously important to me, because in the end I don’t care a fig about whether you pronounce in favour of this or that book, film or record, or what life has taught you. Don’t tell me, show me! I want to look at the new shapes you’re seeing, viddy the texture of your lips and the colour and condition of your teeth. I want to see your face and use your eyes, damn it, because mine are always stalling and failing.
You have no choice but to start a photoblog. It’s a course requirement in the art school of life.
—That’s pop star Momus on photoblogging. Lots of icy cool links, too. —And if what little work I’ve done in graphic design convinces me that reproductions of the teal blue of his shirt are just as untrustworthy as the words, “teal blue,” well. He nonetheless has his point. (Several, in fact.)
The samizdata fuck-off.
The FCC, defying the will of 98% of the thousands upon thousands of Americans who wrote and faxed and emailed and overloaded their phone systems, has voted to ease the rules restricting media ownership. “Our actions will advance our goals of diversity and localism,” is the money quote from FCC Chairman Michael Powell. Yeah. And bank mergers have ever and always been about better service and cutting costs.
Orwell fatigue’s setting in.
If I haven’t been writing about this or calling to arms with the fervor of days-gone-by, it’s because a) I’m tired and b) this more than anything else has been a foregone conclusion. We could have wired those three Republican FCC wonks to a Ryder® truck packed in with fertilizer and fuel oil and a suicidal Mickey Mouse,® haggard after 70-some-odd years on the plantation and more to come, ready to push the button if they dared vote yes—and, well, it still would have come down along party lines, 3-2 in favor of keeping in place the restrictive rules that lock thee and me out of the broadcast media playground, while relaxing to the point of meaninglessness the rules on those who’ve already greased their way over the insurmountable licensing hurdles.
Boom.
Time for the samizdata fuck-off: it is assumed you already don’t listen to the radio much. (Not many of us do, and fewer every day.) Shut it off. Cancel your cable; get a jump on the decline in television viewership to come, and be ready to miss the coming age of shock-block programming. (You can get your Sopranos fix from DVD if you really, really need it.) Get your news from civilized countries and scrappy under-the-radar sources, using your favorite blogs as filters and pointers. Add your own voice to the mix—pick up the slack on local coverage by covering it yourself, keeping in mind that “local” is as much the doings of the school of small press poets whose work you follow from Kokomo and Kathmandu as it is the politics of the school board race run just last week. —And while you’re waiting in your online bunker for the inevitable borgification of the net, pick up a typewriter. Buy a copier before you have to have a Kinko’s license to own one and keep it in toner. Learn to run a mimeograph machine. Let’s see a renaissance of ’zines and minicomics, chapbooks and ashcans. Home-tape your own talk shows and soap operas, existential dramas and surreal collagerie, and pass ’em around as mpegs on CD-ROMs. Solder together a micropower transmitter if you’re feeling daring and take back the airwaves with your band’s live concerts.
The net (by which I mean so much more than the internet) treats censorship (by which I mean so much more than bowdlerization) as damage and routes around it, yeah. But we are the net. We do the routing. So declare defeat. Turn off, tune out, walk away. Let them have it, tell them to fuck off, and do it your own damn self.
Let’s you and him fight.
It is at this point of anti-hierarchical anarchist debate that the correspondent from another football magazine chooses to ask Richard Essex if he is in charge. This really is the wrong question. Essex, kindly, lets it go and continues. “This is not just a case of scoring goals and it’s not just about footballing skills, other skills are required, too.”
Mainly, it seems, the skill to trick people from another team into thinking you are going to form an alliance with them. This is illustrated early on in proceedings when Jason Skeet of the AAA, calling for the ball, takes delivery of the pass and promptly scores in the goal of the side the pass came from. Embarassingly, this is the end that Goal is defending. More embarassingly, it is one of our representatives who has been so obviously and completely duped. Worse still, it’s me. It has taken a very short time to realise that with three sides playing one is going to be picked on. It is us.
That’s from a piece called “The Anarchist’s Ball,” an only slightly condescending description of the delightfully dotty game of three-sided soccer—rather, football. (Found while browsing Chris Bertram’s miraculously unbloggered blog.) Which puts me in mind of moopsball, for no particularly good reason—those adhering to the rules of moopsball as written by Gary Cohn (and, it must be admitted, as remembered by fallible me) would rather sniffily didain Richard Essex’s intrepidly interplanetary footballers; the sentiment, I imagine, would be rather heartily reciprocated. —Granted, the moopsballers would with their bicycles and Scadian armor and squeaky hammers probably eat the more gently anarchistic dissolvers of the homoerotic/homophobic bipolarity of two-sided games for lunch, but so what? Strength is for the weak, and easy travel to other planets always scores beaucoup style points in my book.
Oh—the comic book that mentioned moopsball was one or another incarnation of that venerable fan favorite, The Legion of Superheroes. Which, for some reason, ties it all up neatly for me in one strange and inarticulable pop-culture ball of thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
Well, I don’t think it’ll all fit on one page
and I’m sure some might find an item or two “unfair.” But you know what? I hear that charge levelled from certain quarters these days, and the only conceivable response is to dredge up bitterly black and bilious laughter. Anyway: George W. Bush’s resume. —Via David Chess.
The final Buffy.
As opposed, I guess, to the Buffy finale? Anyway. I didn’t end up watching it, what with one thing and another, and the fact that the show never really recovered from its sixth-season slump, a couple of decent shows this past year notwithstanding, and, well, there was the one thing and another I was up to. Washing my hair, I think, or something. But it seems I made the wrong call: the finale actually sounds like it was a hoot and a half.
Ah, well. I’ll end up catching it on DVD sooner or later.
Dicebox.
Being the science fiction comics novel the Spouse is working her way through page by page over at Girlamatic (the first chapter and a half available for free, starting here). —Anyway, Jen Contino (Heidi MacDonald’s better half over at the Pulse) has been working her way through interviewing the various Girlamatic cartoonists; yesterday was Jenn’s turn.
We’re back.
Oy and gevalt, but. One week ago successfulhosting.com updated various software packages, including its basic database program. Unfortunately, in so doing it rendered the database upon which Long story; short pier, Alas, and Jennworks depend unreadable. (Also, every other non-MySQL Movable Type database on a successfulhosting.com server.) Now, there’s a terribly simple fix—but you have to have command-line access to do it yourself.
And, uh, we don’t.
So. —It’s been a week of testy phone calls and sudden epiphanies and nail-biting tension and glowering looks and links missed and memes unblogged and a lot of Sports Night episodes more on which in a bit, maybe.
Anyway. We’re back now. Miss us?
Quirks.
On the one hand, I don’t imagine it’s all that common to hear people talking about slipstreaming their stories and think you’re going to stumble over the poor piece of fiction with fifteen other naked men at the back of Wilson’s bakery. —Oh, that poor Danny Slepstrini…
On the other, I can’t be the only person in the world with a mad mad crush on Miranda Richardson’s imperiously petulant Queen from the Elizabethan Blackadder. Can I?
