Monthly Archives: July 2007

Damning with Faint Praise

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Joanna Newsom

Just received an announcement of an upcoming performance by Joanna Newsom in my humble town. It included this quote from a Pitchfork Media review of her album (“her 2006 masterwork”) “Ys”:

She swoops into the sky and races across the ground, names every plant and every desire, and never feels less than real. The people who hear this record will split into two crowds: The ones who think it’s silly and precious, and the ones who, once they hear it, won’t be able to live without it. (9.4)
Pitchfork Media

Wow. Who else has a sneaking suspicion, sound unheard, that they’ll land in that first cohort?

Seems Newsom just inspires such insipid writing. Try this one on for size:

Though it’s unfair to reduce an artist to a few superficial descriptors, Joanna Newsom has undeniably emerged as a candidate for such caricature. A classically trained harpist with long red hair and a little girl’s voice, dressed like a character from a medieval-themed restaurant, Newsom is all but asking you with her otherworldly performances and allegorical songwriting to label her a pixie prodigy.
Paste Magazine | Joanna Newsom Tugs at the Harp Strings

Not even a good pun to wrap that one up.

In Praise of the Also-Ran Redux

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Making an incredibly sane point for a man mostly known for his inchoate rants against immigration, Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO) had this to say:

Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo says the U.S. isn’t waging a “war on terror.” We’re involved in a clash of civilizations, according to Tancredo. “Terrorism is a tactic. It is not the thing with which we are at war,” Tancredo told an audience in Grinnell today. “Characterizing it or mischaracterizing it that way is something that we should not do. We should understand exactly who it is that we are fighting.”
Radio Iowa: Tancredo disputes label “war on terror”

Sounds an awful lot like the point that actual sane people were making a few years ago, reported here:
Some Food for Thought | Fortune’s Pawn

Love Monkeys for Keyes

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Maya Keyes “snogging” Bria Grace (2004)

This week brought even more major league defections from the Presidential primary campaigns of Republican candidates, this time its John McCain (again) and (unannounced) Fred Thompson, although Rudy has lost his share to the law of late. Leaves one wondering just who will be left when it actually comes time for right-wingers to vote?

Pawn finds this all vaguely reminiscent of the Summer of 2004, when one Barack Obama was running for US Senate from Illinois, the seat vacated by Republican Peter Fitzgerald, and his opponent Jack Ryan had spent a small fortune to wrap up the Republican primary against well qualified opponents. Ryan’s campaign flamed out amid allegations by his ex-wife, actress and Star Trek bombshell Jeri Ryan, that he had forced her to go to sex clubs. After Ryan finally heeded the calls of his party, and dropped out of the race, the Republicans had a mad time finding a replacement, even briefly flirting with the idea of a Mike Ditka candidacy. Finally they settled on Alan Keyes, who during a laughable campaign came out against his own daughter coming out and claimed that Jesus wouldn’t vote for Obama, and ended with 27% of the vote to Obama’s 70%.

So, “What’s your point?” you may well ask. It is this: At the rate things are going it is almost as though the Republican party must be hoping that at least one obscure candidate can hang on long enough and not self immolate, so that they have someone to prop up in November 2008 to face off against a strong Democratic candidate.

One wonders how long Ron Paul can keep up that respectable bank balance of his?

A rant about the July 17th Executive Order

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There is a great threat to America, one right here on our soil. It threatens the very fabric of the Constitution which defines this nation and its people. It is a runaway administration which has circumvented the courts, ignored the elected body of Congress and redefined the laws to serve its on ends.

 

On July 17th with a stroke of the pen, President Bush annulled parts of the fifth, sixth and fourteenth amendments of our Constitution [Ed. Note: See Below]. He signed an executive order which essentially erased the implicit idea of presumption of innocence and the due process of the law protecting property. This infamous piece of paper is known as: Executive Order: Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq. It is the duty of all Americans regardless political affiliations to demand it to be scrapped. To lose constitutional rights, rights which are self evident and our heritage, we lose what it means to be Americans.

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The Church of Latter-Day States

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handcuffed.jpg

Remind me again why we granted statehood to Alaska and Hawaii (just kidding)…

US senators today made a bipartisan call for the universal implementation of filtering and monitoring technologies on the Internet in order to protect children at the end of a Senate hearing for which civil liberties groups were not invited.Commerce Committee Chairman Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii) and Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee Vice Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) both argued that Internet was a dangerous place where parents alone will not be able to protect their children.
US Senators call for universal Internet filtering | Press Esc

Sears Tower Elevator Chicken

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Judith Martin James Carville

A new feature here in Fortune Land, Sears Tower Elevator Chicken is a mental exercise wherein you try to imagine two (or more) people sharing an elevator ride down the Sears Tower, and guess who would bail out first. Today’s contestants: Judith Martin (aka Miss Manners) and James Carville (aka The Ragin’ Cajun)

A brief profile in the latest (July 30, 2007) New Yorker magazine brings us up to date on Ms Martin’s fascination with Venice. This little aside is precious:

As for modern-day Venice, yes, it’s sinking, expensive, and mobbed with rude tourists who are despised by the ever-shrinking local population. (Tiresome observations all, in Miss Manners’s view.) Recently, the local legislature proposed a scheme to charge visitors more than residents for the use of public toilets. “One would think,” Miss Manners writes, “that a city with liquid streets would not want to tempt people it had already branded as being uncultured and crude.”
Decorum Dept.: When in Venice: The Talk of the Town: The New Yorker

But more pertinent to today’s game is this critique:

“I brought back the word ‘etiquette,’ ” she said, explaining her resentment of the idea that “civil comportment is some sort of quaint form of behavior that we’ve grown beyond. Certainly not!” People don’t realize, Miss Manners said, that to the Greeks morals and manners were topics as worthy of inquiry as the principles of democratic society. “ ‘Just be yourself.’ Now, what does that mean?” Carving her carpaccio with X-Acto precision, she lamented the popular sentiment that knowing which fork to use is a trifling matter lorded about only by mean-hearted snobs. “If you were going to go live in Japan, would you learn how to use chopsticks?”

How would Mr. Carville respond to that, one wonders? Well, let’s look at how he responded to a bit of well reasoned criticism from his own wife, Mary Matalin:

“It stretches any credulity to believe that the White House could not stop this rabid dog. He’s not my husband when I speak of him as a frothing, rabid dog. He’s clearly a front for the president … If anyone is close to obstruction of justice, it’s the president of these United States whose pit bull is out front.”
— Radio talk show host and former Republican strategist Mary Matalin on “Fox News Sunday,” describing her spouse, Democratic consultant James Carville, who has attacked the integrity of Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr (The Washington Post, December 9, 1996).
James Carville’s reaction to hearing of Mary Matalin’s comment: “I went home and bit her” (The Washington Post, December 11, 1996).
James Carville – George Loper – Rogue’s Gallery

Hmm. This one is close.
Pawn thinks it has to go to Carville, by a nose. He isn’t used to backing down, and we think he would most surely chase Miss Manners screaming from the car.

In Dreams

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City Reliquary - Williamsburg

I awoke just now from a dream.  I was idling on the streets of Williamsburg and watching John Waters as he slowly strolled, hands clasped behind his back, long deliberate strides to some internal rhythm, like the Russian immigrants down the block do on their long plodding walks.  He peered into first one then the next boutique, intently, like some grave-robber window shopping a reliquary.

Rage Against Irrelevance

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Irrelevancy is all the vogue of late, and getting more so. But wait, there is hope upon the hype-rizon. As reported here, previously, anchors are starting to push back against the omnipresence of celebrity “news” and its creeping into actual “newscasts.” Here is further evidence (via New York Times):

There seems to be a new wave in the contrarian crossfire of television news on the subject of celebrity misdeeds. Jack Cafferty, the vinegary commentator on CNN and alumni of a legendary “Live at Five” team, was the latest example in a protest against the Lindsay Lohan news, right.
Rage Against the Teleprompter – The Lede – Breaking News – New York Times Blog

Let’s hope this is a trend which catches fire across the land!