Slouching Towards Euphoria: Radio Bar

After bidding adieu to my corporate job that has sustained me through writing my thesis and acquiring teaching experience, I walked into a local bar to toast my former career and my future one. I had walked by Radio many times to get a morning espresso and wondered what the bar was like. No time like the final time.

Radio is a hipster dive bar. It’s not truly a dive, although it’s made up to look like one. Like hipsters themselves, hipster bars have an ironic self-knowledge. The font of the Radio sign is pseudo-Chinese character. The bar has red hanging lanterns and trays with floral designs hanging of the wall. Radio is close to Oakland’s Chinatown, so the motif works well. It’s also painted black and it’s so dark in there that Dick Cheney could get laid.

The bar is a shotgun shack layout with a loft at the end of the bar. The loft has a chain-link fence, which is a nod to Goths or to piggy sex clubs. A mannequin lies on her side on a walkway above the bar. She wears a long slip and looks to the ceiling, perhaps trying to see how the stars are aligned tonight. The seats at the bar are attached to the ground and swivel around. The seats remind me of the bars from the sixties and seventies, the kind of bar you see in Goodfellas, the kind of bar where Joe Pesci kills a made man. In the middle of the bar is a huge column. Either it’s a load-bearing column or it’s a vent. The bottom part of it is covered in square bits of mirror, like a disco ball.

The have a generous supply of Jack Daniels, Makers Mark, and more vodka than you can shake a piroshki at. The bartender made me an excellent Manhattan. A lone, turned-off TV sat on the walkway. I imagine that when they turn it on, it plays cult movies. The bathroom was truly hideous. The smell curled the paint off in strips. The graffiti must have been there for years, including references to the corporation, whose doors I traveled through for the last time a half hour before.

They have DJs here, but there is nowhere to dance. But at hipster places, dancing is not on the menu. DJs come in many forms. The club DJ is pumping a crowded room full of e-bombed dancers. He or she has a headphone in one ear, while staring intently at the turntables. The wannabe club DJ plays bars, where they blast beats and no one is dancing. They just annoy the drinkers, while the bar tries desperately to be hip. The hipster bar DJ spins indie and old rock songs. No one dances. They just say ahh, this guy knows his old rock and indie stuff. I’m guessing Radio Bar DJs are this way.

I like Radio. It’s an unpretentious place with decent drink prices. Oakland, for some bizarre reason, has expensive drinks, but Radio seems like an exception to the rule. The bartender was cool, and the jukebox was well-stacked with great music. The swivel chairs are comfortable. Just be prepared to be blinded when you walk out in the sunshine. The blinding orb will remind you, that you’ve left the cocoon for the cold, bright world.

Something Wicked This Way Retires

The animated show, American Dad, had a good take on Karl Rove. He is shown as a dark lord, dressed in scarlet robes, his face partially covered, and with a bat on his shoulder. In real life, he looks like an accountant who spends too much time at the bakery. But he definitely has inspired fear and loathing. Winning the first election wasn’t too difficult since the Supreme Court gave the presidency to Bush, but winning the second election was pretty amazing, even with the voting irregularities in Ohio.

His work in the Whitehouse has been one of embarrassing mistakes, all of them politically motivated. The Plame affair and the attorney fiasco most certainly came from his egg-shaped head. The only decent thing he came up with was the immigration reform, and he couldn't pull together his Republican lackeys to pass that one.

Like the administration that he helped spawn, Rove is full of illusions. He told Paul Gigot that he believes everything will turn out all right, as if he controls fate:

"He will move back up in the polls," says Mr. Rove, who interrupts my reference to Mr. Bush's 30% approval rating by saying it's heading close to "40%," and "higher than Congress."

Looking ahead, he adds, "Iraq will be in a better place" as the surge continues. Come the autumn, too, "we'll see in the battle over FISA" -- the wiretapping of foreign terrorists -- "a fissure in the Democratic Party." Also in the fall, "the budget fight will have been fought to our advantage," helping the GOP restore, through a series of presidential vetoes, its brand name on spending restraint and taxes.

As for the Democrats, "They are likely to nominate a tough, tenacious, fatally flawed candidate" by the name of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Holding the White House for a third term is always difficult given the pent-up desire for change, he says, but "I think we've got a very good chance to do so."

Actually I agree with him that Clinton will be nominated. I think it will be her against Romney. And Rove might be right about her being flawed. She comes across as a little cold on camera, but she is getting better. If she even gets a smidgen of the empathy that her husband emanates, she’ll be our first woman president. But trying to guess the election is a fool’s game.

And as for the rest of Rove’s predictions, my God, man, let me know when the space shuttle lands. Rove may have an encyclopedic knowledge of American politics, but he doesn’t know anything about Iraq. That country will end up with us leaving and a bloody civil war happening, and all our troops will have died in vain. Bush will go down as one of our worst presidents, and Rove will be a footnote in the book of shame. And the GOP brand name is all over spending, mostly with Haliburton contracts and Ted Steven’s bridge to nowhere.

Rove’s biggest mark is the one-issue wedge. Gay marriage, abortion, terrorism, and let’s not forget racism (Anybody remember the accusation that McCain had an illegitimate black child?). This served Rove well, but now, not so much:

If some of Mr. Rove’s signature achievements have been eagerly imitated, others — including an emphasis on turning out Republican base voters by focusing on polarizing issues like same-sex marriage — have been discredited by polls suggesting that the base is shrinking in Mr. Bush’s second term.

I hope this is true. If literature teaches us anything, it’s that the world does not revolve around single issues. I am astounded people will vote for inept politicians because they spout platitudes about religion. A lamb may symbolize Jesus, but you don’t have to be a sheep, placidly following your preacher. The people in the bible belt have more children serving in Iraq and are hit harder by tax cuts for the rich, but will still drop their vote so a gay guy can’t have the same rights as them. It boggles the mind.

But I guess it’ll come down to the next presidential elections. If the Republican’s win, it will show the American people have a high tolerance for mediocrity and corruption. But there’s an optimist inside of me that says the Karl Roves of the world will soon be in the dustbin.

Somebody Save Jackie Chan!

In the mid-nineties, I was dragged to an art-house movie theater by a friend to see some Hong Kong Kung Fu films. We sat through Drunken Master II and Super Cop 2. I was blown away. The movies were funny, touching, and had kick-ass (literally) fight scenes. I came out of that theater with a new hero—Jackie Chan.

Oh Jackie, what hath Hollywood done to you? Rush Hour 3 is released today, but I won’t be in line for that stinker. Chan brought a great comic sense to martial arts films. Bruce Lee was the master, and Jet Li does that leg split thing, but only Jackie Chan brought a intentional sense of humor that martial arts films need so badly.

When I saw him all those years ago, I thought, what is Hollywood waiting for? What I forgot was the complete lack of cojones Hollywood has. Let’s look at Chan’s American films: the Rush Hour series, Shanghai Noon, The Tuxedo, and other embarrassments. What is the problem here? The studios are too timid to let Chan man his own film. They pair him up with Chris Tucker, Owen Wilson and Jennifer Love Hewitt?!? Oh the humanity.

He still makes Hong Kong films, and I’m sure they use his talents much more then the American films do. I just wish to God they would write a film that is tailored to his talents. Let’s look at the reviewers say about Rush Hour 3. Here’s the New York Times review:

Given how much pleasure both have provided over the years, especially Mr. Chan, here’s hoping they were paid by the truckload. Mind you, it would be nice if they could find mainstream projects that didn’t insist that the only way an Asian man and an African-American man can hold the screen together is if they engage in mutual abasement and self-humiliation. It would be nicer still if Mr. Chan didn’t have to play the sexual neuter and Mr. Tucker stopped popping his eyeballs.

And here is Salon.com’s review:

But it's frustrating that no Hollywood…has been able to showcase his subtler qualities as a comic performer. Tucker and Chan are a strange mix to begin with, and not just for the dumb, obvious reason: Tucker is an overbearing actor, the kind who'll run off with every big line without even really intending to. Chan is a charming and wonderful comic actor, but he needs room to breathe, and that's the last thing Tucker is capable of giving. So while Tucker grabs laughs with the silliest, most obvious gags -- he woos Genevieve, stroking her skin and murmuring "Jay tam!" and "Voolay voo!" -- Chan is most often left looking as if he doesn't know what movie he has stumbled into. No one has bothered to write a real scene for him, and that's a drag.

That is a drag. Tucker is lucky that Chan is around. Who would pay to see him screech like he does? Chan is getting older. I don’t see how he can do his stunts much longer. If Hollywood is smart, they would scan the world looking for the next Jackie Chan. But in the meantime, let this man star in his own vehicle for the love of sweet and sour Jesus.

Part of the Job

Regardless of the media coverage of young actor’s D.U.I.s, we are fighting a war in Iraq. The main outcome of war is, of course, death mostly. Not that you would know that unless you have a deceased family member or friend. President Bush has yet to attend a military funeral, although he loves to give his speeches in front of military personnel. He has had about 3,680 chances to do so as I type this. The military also refuses to let the media shoot footage of the body bags or the flag-draped coffins coming home to United States burial grounds.

The news media has given some attention to our soldiers. The News Hour on PBS ends each broadcast with pictures of the deceased soldiers with no music. The silence is deafening as the pictures of young men and women never to resume their civilian lives come to the screen. Nightline had a special called “The Fallen” where they read the names and showed photos of the 900 dead at that point in the war. A conservative owner decided not to show that Nightline because he thought it would “focus attention solely on people who have died in the war in order to push public opinion toward the United States getting out of Iraq.” I think if you are going to have a war, you have to see the effects. And you have to honor those people who died in it. Nightline would need about four hours of advertising-free airtime to honor the dead at this juncture.

I bring all this up because of an article on the funeral of Brenton Thomas Gray, a military contractor who died in Iraq from a car bomb. If the soldier’s deaths are being ignored, what about military contractor’s deaths? There are 125,000 contractors in Iraq right now and 1,001 have died. The New York Times article on Gray is the only contractor funeral coverage I’ve seen.

Gray seems like a lot a military guys that I know: a warrior in blood and bone.

“Yeah, you can make a buck,” said Wayne Colombo, a white-haired warrant officer who, well before he worked with Mr. Gray, served with a Special Forces A-team in Vietnam. “But you’re also back with guys you know, doing what you can — and doing what you know.”

Putting aside the problems of a private and unregulated army financed by our government, I have nothing but understanding for contractors. The army doesn’t pay that well and as Walter Reed has shown us, doesn’t take care of them medically. Why not get paid well for the dangerous labor that you do? Contractors can make up to $18,000 a month. That kind of money makes the danger worth it, and you get to do what you love to do.

The downside of course is the loss of life. Dying is hard but the death of a friend or family member is where the real pain is. The funeral’s eulogies were spoken at the cemetery and at a pub:

No one goes dry on the anniversary of a contractor’s death. The party moved from the graveyard to a tavern near the railroad tracks. Your money wasn’t good there. Mr. Gray’s favorite drink, a gin and tonic, was placed beside his portrait on the bar.

While the ritual of burial was honored at the cemetery, the real eulogizing, the shared memories could only be done at the pub. The detail of the railroad tracks also shows who is bearing the cost of the war: the lower and middle class. The reporter has a deft touch and shows the insular world of the military and the stoic grief of the families:

The room seemed physically to stiffen as Mr. Gray’s teammates from Iraq walked in, a tight-knit group that installed itself at the bar. One of them set out the portrait of Mr. Gray with the smoky circle of an ammunition detonation rising in a halo at his head.

“How long did you know my son?” Mr. Gray’s mother asked.

The team leader said about two years.

Mrs. Gray touched another picture of her son, in a photo album lying on the bar.

“That’s my fair-haired boy,” she said. And both of them walked away.

At the end of the article, two Special Forces soldiers walk to their Harleys and sheath the American flag. All the political posturing in the world cannot match this simple act. I’d like to drink a toast to Mr. Gray. I’d like to drink a toast to all who have died, but that would put me in a coma. All I can do is give my sympathies to all those families and hope for something better, anything better that what we have now.

The Dark Tower Bummeth

San Francisco is a living entity, constantly in flux, and being made over by the little worker ants that swarm her body. She is like an actor with hairdressers and makeup artists and cosmetic surgeons fluttering about her, turning her into a vision. But sometimes that vision isn’t so good. Have you seen the older actors with the tight faces, faces that resemble plastic masks more than flesh?

By the Bay Bridge, a looming tower, called One Rincon, greets you as you drive in to the city. I get a dark feeling, much like Browning’s Childe Roland as he approaches the dark tower. San Francisco’s manhattanization began in the seventies and is really taking off lately. On Monday, three proposals were made for a train terminal. None of them are really distinctive. Tall glass buildings are rarely interesting. These buildings will be the tallest buildings on the West coast if built:

The three proposals range in height from 1,200 feet to 1,375 feet - each extending well past the 853-foot Transamerica Pyramid, the tallest tower in San Francisco.

These buildings will be as tall as the Empire State Building. Why do we need such tall buildings here? Their answer:

In the early planning for the new terminal, it was assumed that any tower alongside it would climb no higher than 550 feet. Now, though, public officials say the extra height is merited - not just to boost the land sales, but to show that San Francisco continues to measure itself against other cities of global status that are seeing super tall towers proposed or built.

Yuck. I don’t care to have my city look like Kuala Lumpur or Dallas. But at least there will be a park built along with it. The new buildings show a shrinking of neighborhoods and a growing of condominium canyons. One Rincon, the dark tower, will be very expensive to live in:

One Rincon is not affordable housing -- the minimum price is estimated at $500,000 for a "junior one-bedroom" place, an apartment of only 613 square feet. Top of the line, top of the building will be a dozen three-bedroom deluxe condos, 1,967 square feet with drop-dead views. The estimated price: $2 million.

So you can pay half a million dollars for a view of frustrated commuters trying to get into the city. Of course, the higher paying deluxe condos will have stunning views, while they block out the sun for a whole lot of other people. Not to mention blocking the view of the Bay Bridge. There will be no affordable housing in the behemoth, but they did grease some palms:

"Who is going to live at One Rincon Hill? People who can afford it," Kriozere said. His firm -- Urban West Associates of San Diego -- was required to make a $20 million contribution to the mayor's affordable housing fund and $18 million into a Rincon Hill community improvement fund as a condition for building the project. The cost, of course, is passed on down the line. "Basically it is a tax," Kriozere said. "A tax on the people who buy the condos."

How about a pox on the people who buy the condos? Such bullshit. No doubt the city is giving them tax breaks to build the eyesore. We have a housing crisis, but the very rich have no problem securing housing, so this does not help.

The old San Francisco of middle-class and working-class families is vanishing, replaced in part by a city of more wealthy residents. Some of the new residents are only part-time San Franciscans, who reside elsewhere and have second homes in the city.

So Rincon Hill is going to be the second home to some asshole jetsetter? Great. San Francisco will be the play land for the super wealthy, a place where the elite meet and sleep with each other. We already have bars that have guest lists and velvet ropes. We have Tommy Lee opening a L.A. style lounge so he can spin records. We have spatially-challenged Hummers trying to find parking spaces. We have jerkoff supervisors who barely pretend to live in the neighborhood they represent. We have it all and only at a small cost to you.

Amo Inglés

Sometimes two articles can comment on each other even though they are about two separate things. In the New York Times Magazine, there is an article about small town immigration issues and a mea culpa about the Iraq War.

In the immigration story, a small town in Illinois called Carpentersville has elected two officials on an anti-immigration ticket. The two officials, Judy Sigwalt and Paul Humpfer give some strange reasons for being anti-immigration:

A restaurant owner and his family, who were Hispanic, [Ed.—Were Hispanic? Did they stop being Hispanic?] had been abducted from their nearby village to a home in Carpentersville. The six kidnappers, all members of a street gang, believed the restaurateur had a stash of drugs or cash, which they wanted. Everyone was eventually freed safely, but in the aftermath the newspapers reported that one of the kidnappers was here illegally. “It scares you,” Humpfer told me. “It’s just a matter of time before it ends up in my neighborhood.” Around this time, Humpfer also learned that the village was having little success in collecting $372,000 in ambulance fees. The collection agencies hired by the village were unable to locate many of the individuals with outstanding bills. A number of them had Spanish surnames, Humpfer said, and he concluded that many gave false addresses because they were without documents and so feared deportation.

But mostly they feel unease because they didn’t like hearing Spanish spoken at grocery stores and other public venues. So they put up some English only referendums and some other laws. They called themselves the All American Team, and they handed out this flyer:

Are you tired of waiting to pay for your groceries while Illegal Aliens pay with food stamps and then go outside and get in a $40,000 car?
Are you tired of paying taxes when Illegal Aliens pay NONE!
Are you tired of reading that another Illegal Alien was arrested for drug dealing?
Are you tired of having to punch 1 for English?
Are you tired of seeing multiple families in our homes?
Are you tired of not being able to use Carpenter Park on the weekend, because it is over run by Illegal Aliens?
Are you tired of seeing the Mexican Flag flown above our Flag?
If you are as tired as me then let’s get out and Vote for the: All American Team ... Finally a team that will help us take back our town!

Yeah, punching 1 for English is exhausting. I usually have to take a nap after punching a single button. And the part of the park being overrun by Mexicans, I mean Illegal Aliens, is truly hostile racism. And as far as the multiple families, what are about this news story of a white Bible Belt family that has 17 kids? Who wants to live next to them?

Although they couldn’t get the English-only law to pass, the All American Team did win a majority on the Board of Supervisors. A lot of politicians get a lot of mileage out of this racism. Lou Dobbs has built a second career out of it. To paint a group as the other that will do you harm always wins points.

Which brings me to the other article. Political professor, Canadian politician and pundit, Michael Ignatieff says how a politician has to walk the line between being bold and being pragmatic, the gist being the Iraq debacle suffers from too much boldness and not enough pragmatism. Ignatieff makes an interesting point of bad policy that is popular with the people:

In my political-science classes, I used to teach that exercising good judgment meant making good public policy. In the real world, bad public policy can often turn out to be very popular politics indeed. Resisting the popular isn’t easy, because resisting the popular isn’t always wise. Good judgment in politics is messy. It means balancing policy and politics in imperfect compromises that always leave someone unhappy — often yourself.

The English-only laws are popular but pointless in the end. To get anywhere in America you need to be fluent in English. Even in the world, English is the lingua franca of both science and business. First generation immigrants can get along without learning the language but their children do assimilate and learn English fluently. Third generation children are American as apple pie, and probably vote for English-only laws.

We need to overhaul our immigration policy, but it seems to me that much of the anti-immigration is racism that hardly helps our country. The Latino immigrants that I have met work hard, and I think getting them amnesty and making them contribute to the country is better then sending them back home. And to be a humanist about it, should we try and help Mexico anyway? Wouldn’t it be better to have a stable and prosperous neighbor to the south instead of instable one? Is it better to help thy neighbor instead of building a wall?

But that’s not popular politics.

Bloody Battles in the Comment's Section

The New York Times Dining & Wine section had a humorous article on people getting drunk at expensive high-class restaurants. There were examples of stripping, throwing up, passing out and singing. The article was light and funny and made the top ten emailed story list with ease. Not much of a gloss can be put on the article, but what was really interesting was the comment’s section.

With newspapers being on the internet, people can comment on a story right after reading it. This makes news reporting immediate and interactive. No more waiting for the letters to the editor. Now you can read the reactions in their raw, unspellchecked glory.

The reactions fell into distinct categories. The most popular response was people’s own stories of dealing with drunks at restaurants or their own confessions of drinking a bit too much before dinner arrived. They’re actually pretty boring so I won’t reprint any of those.

Besides the stories, most comments were arguments. The ex-drunks and nags got up on their soap box:

Why is it acceptable to poison oneself with alchol [sic] for any reason?

And this:

Wasn’t the same kind of thing happening in Rome just before it fell?

Yeah, that’s right America is on the decline because people get soused in restaurants. Here’s a guy who was driven from civilization due to these brutes:

I recall similarly creepy scenes at a number of 4-star restaurants, and … This was one reason I lost my taste for those restaurants and hotels — and for that matter gave in to my natural reclusiveness and retired to a hut in the woods!

Perhaps that is for the best for all of us. Hopefully you won’t be making bombs. And then there is the pothead who is far superior by his choice of inebriation:

Alcohol is a legal but deadly drug. As this excellent article clearly shows, judgement [sic] goes right out the window when some people get drunk…At the same time, the far less dangerous drug pot should be legal and therefore provide a safer alternative.

This guy points out alternatives:

If you drink to reduce stress, their are other ways to achieve, including meditation, marshal arts, [sic] sex, sports, nature walks, or RX medications and psychotherapy.

Marshall arts? Sounds like paintings of sheriffs. Of course, there are the smart asses who love to rile people:

Any fool can drive home sober, but it takes real genius to get there safely while drunk.

And this:

I have dined at the finest five-star restaurants the world over. Boorish and drunken behavior are not unique to the corner tavern. After all, alcohol still is the best way to wash down all the pills.

And then there are the deluded, ugly-American arguments:

Public drunkenness among the young, usually a result of binge drinking, is newly epidemic in university towns in France, but drunkenness in good restaurants is in my experience almost unheard of. Middle class French people drink and eat judiciously…More than that, French people think (and I think they are right in this), and you might as well be dining at McDonald’s; [sic] after the third glass the wine drinks the man or woman. Moreover, it is not thought polite to be drunk in public in France. That, they think, is for Brits and Americans.

I’ve encountered many publicly drunk French in France. The French might think being drunk in public impolite, but that doesn’t stop them anymore than it stops us.

Thankfully, most of the comments were for having fun in restaurants. I’ll leave you with this gentleman’s thoughts:

With apologies to all of you who are apalled [sic] at the sight of several inebriates in “your” fine restaurant, I have to say that intoxication is an essential part of the fine dining experience. Vomiting, acting out, and some of the other behavior described here has no place in a fine restaurant, but getting drunk and slightly boisterous does. Simply put, fine meals are a celebration of the ideal of hedonism- if you’re shovelling foie gras [sic] down your gob and chasing it with a rack of lamb, you don’t have the moral high ground from which to condemn those who also like to imbibe fine wines and maybe break out into a song or two.

Slouching Towards Euphoria: Daft Punk

Daft Punk tries to answer that age old question: what do you do with a drunken sailor? No, wait, that’s not it. No, they try to answer that conundrum, how do you make two guys playing with synthesizers interesting? The answer: with lots of lights and videos.

Let’s rewind a bit. Daft Punk, a French synthesizer band, played the Berkeley Greek Theater last Friday. I went with a small contingent of friends. First, I stopped off at Henry’s Publick House and Grille. Notice the old tyme spelling. Henry’s was packed with Cal students getting their gills greased. The Guinness pint I ordered came in an American pint glass instead of an English pint glass. The difference is about three ounces. The waitress sheepishly apologized. Publick house of lies is more like it.

The opening band was The Rapture. They were energetic and multi-instrumentalist. They would flit between bass, guitars, keyboards, turntables, and drums. I didn’t pay much attention to them, but they were a great band. They deserved a dark club instead of the fading sunset.

When The Rapture finished their set, the curtains stayed closed for a half hour. Someone (or thing) was spinning records. I assumed Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo (this guy has two hyphens in his name!) and Thomas Bangalter were backstage having their pâté and Château neuf de Pape, waiting for darkness to fall.

Daft Punk’s music is abrasive. They especially like a hard shriek of a synthesizer. They also favor repetitive vocal lines, which is commonplace in dance music. Their theme is the love affair/battle between technology and humanity. They’ve had a huge following in Europe for more than a decade. They sold out the Greek, so they are building a following here.

I danced on the cement steps to the right of the band for a while, but went to the top of the amphitheater to get direct view. Daft Punk has an advanced light show, probably the most intricate and expensive since Pink Floyd’s heyday. They stand and toggle switches in a pyramid that has light patterns and videos that play off of it. A grid stands on both sides of the pyramid that lights up in different colors. And behind them is a giant screen. Their robot suits also are lined with lights. Taken as whole, the show is breathtaking. I’m happy I am not asthmatic.

At first I was standoff-ish. Where the warmth, I thought? Where’s the interaction? A friend pointed out, they could be paying their bills online for all we knew. I mean they were bent over looking at electronic stuff while the light show raged. Who knew if they were playing music or just hamming it up to a recording?

But this is just another show and the show was fantastique. They played their hits. The crowd loved them and danced their ass off. Even if the most cynical guess was correct, it didn’t matter because in a word they were fun. Robotic fun but fun nonetheless.

After the show, I ended up driving a behemoth Suburban with a raucous crowd in the back. If you want to test your Zen, try driving an enormous SUV with a bunch of drunken sailors. We turned the apartment into a dance party. At one point I languidly laid on the couch while watching young things dance. I might as well been wearing a toga and eating grapes while watching slaves dance.

I didn’t get much sleep that night. It was good but it was wrong. But the memory will be of the fun and not of the wreck I was the next day.

I'm Praying in Here, That's All! Go Away!

I’ve been reading Mormon websites, researching Mitt Romney’s religion. It’s a rich vein and deserves more time. But in the meantime I found this little tidbit given out to Mormon youth during the seventies to keep them away from masturbating. If anything this proves that you should never let your spiritual guidance be in the hands of the repressed.

The entire list can be found here.

I’ve culled the more laughable parts:

A Guide to Self-Control:

1. Never touch the intimate parts of your body except during normal toilet processes.

3. If you are associated with other persons having this same problem, YOU MUST BREAK OFF THEIR FRIENDSHIP. Never associate with other people having the same weakness. Don't suppose that two of you will quit together, you never will. You must get away from people of that kind. Just to be in their presence will keep your problem foremost in your mind. The problem must be taken OUT OF YOUR MIND for that is where it really exists. Your mind must be on other and more wholesome things.

Sounds like someone had a bad experience doing a circle jerk.

4. When you bathe, do not admire yourself in a mirror. Never stay in the bath more than five or six minutes -- just long enough to bathe and dry and dress AND THEN GET OUT OF THE BATHROOM into a room where you will have some member of your family present.

Sounds like a horror movie. Get out of the bathroom! The call is coming from inside the bathroom! The steam will make you horny and then will kill you!!!! Doesn’t the toothbrush look like a dick? Doesn’t the folds of a towel look like a pussy? Get out! Get ooouuutttt!!!!

5. When in bed, if that is where you have your problem for the most part, dress yourself for the night so securely that you cannot easily touch your vital parts, and so that it would be difficult and time consuming for you to remove those clothes. By the time you started to remove protective clothing you would have sufficiently controlled your thinking that the temptation would leave you.

I have a friend who works at a store called "Chaps" that might have some secure clothes you can wear. You can also pick up a cock ring.

6. If the temptation seems overpowering while you are in bed, GET OUT OF BED AND GO INTO THE KITCHEN AND FIX YOURSELF A SNACK, even if it is in the middle of the night, and even if you are not hungry, and despite your fears of gaining weight. The purpose behind this suggestion is that you GET YOUR MIND ON SOMETHING ELSE.

Enough with the shouting. I’m repressed not deaf. Say did you hear about the rising obesity rates in Utah? I wonder why that is.

7. Never read pornographic material. Never read about your problem. Keep it out of mind. Remember -- "First a thought, then an act."

Does looking at pictures involve reading? It does? Are you sure?

9. Pray. But when you pray, don't pray about this problem, for that will tend to keep [it] in your mind more than ever. Pray for faith, pray for understanding of the Scriptures, pray for the Missionaries, the General Authorities, your friends, your families, BUT KEEP THE PROBLEM OUT OF YOUR MIND BY NOT MENTIONING IT EVER -- NOT IN CONVERSATION WITH OTHERS, NOT IN YOUR PRAYERS. KEEP IT _OUT_ of your mind!

Again with the shouting. Have you heard of the theory about the white elephant, in which you are told not to think of a white elephant and then it’s all you can think about?

Suggestions:

3. When the temptation to masturbate is strong, yell STOP to those thoughts as loudly as you can in your mind and then recite a prechosen Scripture or sing an inspirational hymn. It is important to turn your thoughts away from the selfish need to indulge.

It’s been a long day. You finally hit the sheets after saying goodnight to the kids. Then you’re jolted awake by a shout from your son’s bedroom. First he screamed “Stop!” and then started singing hymns. Do you:
A) Call the mental ward and book him a room
B) Throw a Penthouse and a towel in his room and tell him to shut the fuck up.
C) Remind yourself to send the Elder a basket of muffins for his guidance in making your son a repressed wreck.

11. In the field of psychotherapy there is a very effective technique called aversion therapy. When we associate or think of something very distasteful with something which has been pleasurable, but undesirable, the distasteful thought and feeling will begin to cancel out that which was pleasurable. If you associate something very distasteful with your loss of self-control it will help you to stop the act. For example, if you are tempted to masturbate, think of having to bathe in a tub of worms, and eat several of them as you do the act.

That’s not aversion therapy, that’s the start of a fetish. “Honey, I’m feeling randy tonight. I’ll be in the garden digging up worms.”

12. During your toileting and shower activities leave the bathroom door or shower curtain partly open, to discourage being alone in total privacy. Take cool brief showers.

Discourage being alone or encouraging voyeurism? The Mormons are so kinky.

17. Avoid people, situations, pictures or reading materials that might create sexual excitement.

Walk around with a bag over your head.

18. It is sometimes helpful to have a physical object to use in overcoming this problem. A Book of Mormon, firmly held in hand, even in bed at night has proven helpful in extreme cases.

Sure it might look like a pocket pussy or a dildo, but I call it my Book of Mormon.

19. In very severe cases it may be necessary to tie a hand to the bed frame with a tie in order that the habit of masturbating in a semi-sleep condition can be broken. This can also be accomplished by wearing several layers of clothing which would be difficult to remove while half asleep.

I’ve tied a few hands to bed frames in my day.

21. Do not let yourself return to any past habit or attitude patterns which were part of your problem. Satan Never Gives Up. Be calmly and confidently on guard. Keep a positive mental attitude. You can win this fight! The joy and strength you will feel when you do will give your whole life a radiant and spiritual glow of satisfaction and fulfillment.

Now I know why Mormons play so much basketball. I have to remember to bring really dark sunglasses when I go to Utah; all that spiritual glow is hard on the eyes. Have a good weekend and lock the bathroom door, kids.

Oh Yes It's Ladies' Night and the Litigation is Right

Have you ever see that news guy on ABC named John Stossel? He’s got a mustache, and he’s a libertarian (read: Republican who likes drugs and sex) and he does these condescending news reports in which he exposes some falsehood. Yeah, that guy.

He’s a tool.

Anyway, ABC News has this report of people suing bars over ladies’ night. The lawyer (and it’s always the lone lawyer bringing these suits) is claiming ladies’ nights at bars discriminate based on gender and are illegal.

Roy Den Hollander is a New York lawyer who says Ladies' Night drinks and admission specials are unconstitutional, and he says he's suffered personally. Hollander is also a graduate of Columbia Business School and seems like a guy who should be able to get into a decent bar and afford the drinks. So what irks him?

"I'm tired of having my rights violated and being treated as a second-class citizen," said Hollander, who is seeking class-action status for his suit in federal court.

Sigh. Okay, let’s continue with the article:

Tim Gleason, general manager of the China Club in New York, calls Hollander's complaint "pathetic" and echoes other club owners who argue that the discounts actually help both sexes by balancing out the ratio between men and women. Nevermind that some men are more than happy to pay for inequality in the ratio department.

Yes, that’s true. What will Hollander counter with?

In court papers, he cites a 1970 case against a bar called McSorley's Old Ale House. The ruling in the case struck down a policy excluding women, claiming it violated the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection.

I’ve been to McSorely’s. It’s a great bar, but not a good comparison. Today’s bars aren’t excluding men, only giving discounts to women:

Club owners maintain that Ladies' Night is not a policy of exclusion, but rather an economic enticement to increase business and satisfy their customers. They say the marketplace dictates whether the promotions are abandoned, not the courts.

And Hollander shoots back with fratboy logic:

But, Hollander said these perks do not justify discriminatory prices because the same beneficial end could be achieved by charging men less or equal to the amount women are charged.

"Each guy that walks into that club will have more money to buy her a drink, and the more she drinks, the more fun she and the guys will have," he said.

Okay, so Hollander is wasting tax money and court resources. Normally I would bag on this guy for being so lame and then Stossel does a commentary on it, and I hate John Stossel. ABC News apparently will hire anybody. Here is Stossel on how ladies's night is actually against the law:

…It IS against the law — which ought to make us think about how many laws we have. Ladies' night is a long and useful tradition, but activists have actually succeeded in getting them banned in more than a dozen states and the District of Columbia.

Stossel is saying that discrimination law is one too many. Then he says ladies’ night is long and useful. Long and useful? Ladies’ night? Starting in the 1970s is not long and it’s useful only to greedy bar owners. Here’s a thought, don’t charge to get into your lame meat market. Unless you have live music, you shouldn’t charge to get into your bar. And really, in meat market bars, women rarely buy their own drinks anyway, No need for discounts.

Some people go to bars to relax and see friends. Pubs are social centers. Some go to bars to see sports. Have you ever been to a bar with six television screens? Some people go to bars to get hammered. That’s what they are there for. Some go to dance and see live music.

And yes, some go to bars to get laid. Some people go specifically to get laid. These are the lamest bars of all. Why? Because there is a palpable sadness in the air at meat markets. Desperation and booze don’t walk so well together. And if a place has to bribe women to get them to come down that makes it all the more seedy and sad.

So, why I think it’s a wasteful use of the court, I won’t miss ladies’ night. It’s dated anyway. Women don’t need encouragement to hit the bars. Sorry, Kool and the Gang. Back to you, Stossel, ya tool.

Spy In the House of Duh!

Do you remember how the black and white spies in Mad Magazine’s "Spy vs. Spy" were both incompetent? Sometimes the black spy would win and sometimes the white spy would win, but they both seemed a little dim…and mostly dead.

According to a new book out right now, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner, the CIA was/is as incompetent as…well…the Whitehouse these days. Check out this excerpt from the NY Times book review:

The C.I.A. never did have much luck operating inside Communist China, and it failed to predict the Iranian revolution of 1979. “We were just plain asleep,” said the former C.I.A. director Adm. Stansfield Turner. The agency also did not foresee the explosion of an atom bomb by the Soviet Union in 1949, the invasion of South Korea in 1950, the popular uprisings in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the explosion of an atom bomb by India in 1998 — the list goes on and on, culminating in the agency’s wrong call on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in 2002-3.

Okay, so the C.I.A. pretty much missed the boat on every major global political event since its inception. I imagine being a spy is not easy, but you would think at least with how rich our country is that we could have bribed our way into some knowledge. The Soviets bribed that good Catholic, C.I.A. case officer Aldrich Ames into giving up ten agents who were then executed; you would think that we could have done the same.

But perhaps we should look no further than the leadership. Our country certainly has been lead downwards by G.W. and Cheney. The C.I.A. is not any different:

In Weiner’s telling, a president trying to use the C.I.A. resembles Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. The role of Lucy is played by scheming or inept directors. Dulles is particularly egregious, a lazy, vain con artist who watches baseball games on television while half-listening to top-secret briefings (he assesses written briefings by their weight). Casey mumbles and lies and may have been almost mad from a brain tumor by the end. Even the more honorable directors, like Richard Helms, can’t resist telling presidents what they want to hear. To fit the policy needs of the Nixon White House in 1969, Helms doctored a C.I.A. estimate of Soviet nuclear forces. In a draft of the report, analysts had doubted the Soviet will or capacity to launch a nuclear strike. Helms erased this crucial passage — and for years thereafter, until the end of the cold war, the C.I.A. overstated the rate at which the Soviets were modernizing their arsenal. The C.I.A.’s bogus intelligence on Iraq in 2002-3, based on the deceits of dubious sources like the one known as Curveball, was hardly unprecedented. To justify the Johnson administration’s desire for a pro-war Congressional resolution on Vietnam in 1964, the intelligence community manufactured evidence of a Communist attack on American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.

This would be amusing if so many people hadn’t died because of their lies and incompetence. I think America does need information. What hinders us is our xenophobia. Our education rarely bothers to teach us about other cultures, and we’re lucky if learn Spanish, much less Russian, Arabic, or Farsi. Our own President barely knows anything outside of Washington and Texas. Arrogance and firepower can only take you so far. Even our own army kicks out translators for being gay. How inept can we be? Apparently a lot:

A few years later, in 1979, Iranian revolutionaries seized the American embassy in Tehran. They captured a C.I.A. case officer named William Daugherty and accused him of running the agency’s entire Middle Eastern spy network while plotting to assassinate Ayatollah Khomeini. Daugherty, who had been in the C.I.A. for only nine months, tried to explain that he didn’t even speak the native tongue, Persian. The Iranians seemed offended that the Americans would send such an inexperienced spy. It was “beyond insult,” Daugherty later recalled, “for that officer not to speak the language or know the customs, culture and history of their country.”

It’s moving beyond insult right into stupidity.

Slipping Off the Tightrope

If I was forced at gun point to choose a religious order, it would probably be either Judaism or the Jesuits. Only because they honor learning as opposed to the evangelicals who claim only to take the Bible literally (which is a lie, for they cherry pick what they like and ignore the rest. If they followed the Bible literally most of the money they make would go into helping the poor and not into big houses for its rich preachers.)

But this learning entails questioning everything and questioning leads to leaving the leap of faith behind. James Joyce left the Jesuits. His commitment to truth and art (and sex) lead him to literature instead of the Eucharist. Noah Feldman writes of his slight excommunication from modern Jewish Orthodoxy in a superb article in the New York Times magazine.

Feldman married someone outside of the fold and for that he was taken out of the school reunion picture and his accomplishments are never recorded in the alumni newsletter. Small matters indeed, but Feldman questions it, analyzes it and ends up with more questions than answers, which is in accordance with his religious teachings.

What he ends up with is the dichotomy that haunts every religious person: how can I resolve my belief in outdated religious writing and live in a modern world? We see this battle with varying levels of failure. The radical Muslims, who want to institute Sharia law and repress women, retard science and technology and destroy non-believers, will lose this battle. You cannot return to a medieval state in a modern world. All you will do is increase suffering. The evangelicals, as Feldman points out, oppose stem cell research and push for creationism.

Feldman brings several interesting examples of trying to straddle Orthodox Judaism and contemporary life. They seem like failures of living in the modern world to me. For instance in the kosher diet:

The dietary laws of kashrut are designed to differentiate and distance the observant person from the rest of the world… The category of the unkosher comes unconsciously to apply not only to foods that fall outside the rules but also to the people who eat that food — which is to say, almost everyone in the world, whether Jewish or not. You cannot easily break bread with them, but that is not all. You cannot, in a deeper sense, participate with them in the common human activity of restoring the body through food.

Another example is when a doctor, who was visiting Feldman’s school, stated that he would save a non-Jewish person on the Sabbath not because of keeping the peace with the gentiles but because he was a human being deserving medical attention:

This appealing sentiment did not go unchallenged. One of my teachers rose to suggest that the doctor’s attitude was putting him in danger of violating the Torah…if…you intended to save the patient out of universal morality, then you were in fact guilty of violating the Sabbath, because the motive for acting was not the motive on the basis of which the rabbis allowed the Sabbath violation to occur.

Later, in class, the teacher apologized to us students for what he said to the doctor. His comments, he said, were inappropriate — not because they were wrongheaded, but because non-Jews were present in the audience when he made them. The double standard of Jews and non-Jews, in other words, was for him truly irreducible: it was not just about noting that only Jewish lives merited violation of the Sabbath, but also about keeping the secret of why non-Jewish lives might be saved. To accept this version of the tradition would be to accept that the modern Orthodox project of engagement with the world could not proceed in good faith.

Which leads me to wonder, when one does engage with the world, does one have to cast off certain religious principles? The answer is yes, if the principle is one of exclusion. Exclusion is more than just not treating the goyim or eating kosher, it’s also viewing unbelievers as beneath you, such as when a Catholic believes the apostate will go to hell, or a Muslim thinks exposing a woman’s face as sinful. The price for modernity is to let people be.

Of course the reason people are religious is comfort. To belong is a treasured feeling. Feldman talks of the joy when reading the Book of Esther with is children. But in belonging, you need to set rules and exclude those who don’t conform, just as Feldman and his children are excluded from the newsletter. And that leads to sorrow. Feldman married out of love, I assume. To leave the Orthodox religion when he could have easily married a nice Jewish girl certainly points to romantic choice. But he obviously feels conflicted. And what about homosexuals who are excluded from the start? Do these people have to suffer for an outdated religious belief?

Feldman acknowledges, correctly I believe, that we live in contradictory lives. We are paradoxical men and women. And religion is not going to go away. Some of us must straddle that line between ancient beliefs and modern living. Just don’t think you’re outdated beliefs will rule over me.

Blood 'n Strippers

Jim Mitchell’s funeral was held today. He died of a heart attack, and he was buried next to his brother, Art, whom he shot 16 years ago. Even though San Francisco has a relatively short history compared to London or even New York City, its history is as colorful as a rainbow flag.

The Mitchell Brothers built a pornography empire, including making the famous porno Behind the Green Door. Even though I’ve never been inside their strip club (I’m way too cheap to pay for blue balls), I’ve always found the mural of the whales on the side wall to be pretty funny. I also liked how they battled our ex-mayor Senator Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein is highly respected, although I find her petty and more Republican than Ronald Reagan. But as Noah Cross says in Chinatown, “Course I'm respectable. I'm old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” She became mayor when Mayor Moscone was shot by Dan White, a fact she exploited in her Senate campaign.

Anyhoo, Feinstein tried to close the Mitchell Brother Theater for two decades and lost every time. The brothers knew the nasty art of San Francisco politics:

The battle resulted in the brothers obtaining Feinstein's unlisted phone number and placing it on the theater marquee with the words, "For a Good Time, Call ..."

The brothers entered the rarified air of SF history when Jim shot Art:

It was February 27, 1991. Jim went to see Artie and they got into a bad argument. Even as Artie's girlfriend was screaming to a 911 operator, gunshots could be heard. Officers came and found Jim walking around in a daze and carrying a .22 rifle and a .38 Smith and Wesson Special. Inside Artie's house, they found Artie in the bedroom. He had been shot through the eye, abdomen and right arm by a .22, and he was dead. Eight spent cartridges were picked up in the room.

Jim was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter, which is a strange term innit? Does anyone want to volunteer to slaughter this man? He was sentenced to six years. I’m not sure why a man who brings a rifle to a “intervention” and then proceeds to shoot his victim three times (and apparently is a bad shot since he fired eight shots) is not in jail longer than that, but in America if you have money you can kill with impunity.

With Jim’s passing is the passing of a certain San Francisco time period. The seventies in SF were violent, sexual, and insane. Jim Jones was preaching and booking a flight to Guyana. Dan White climbed in a basement window on the capitol building. The Zodiac Killer was taking lethal cab rides. It must have been a hellova time. At least rent was cheaper back then.

So goodbye, Mr. Mitchell. I assume you’re going to hell, where your brother is waiting for you. And, ooh boy, is he going to give you such a pinch!

Next Spokesperson: Virgina Crossleggs

Will you look at this girl from the photo from a recent New York Times article? She stands near a field; salt of the earth, she is. And even though she has cutesy heart jewelry, she wears a jaded, world-weary look. Actually, she looks pissed off. Her name is Jami Waite, and she is the public face of Virginity Rules, an abstinence propaganda machine.

Teen pregnancy is down, although abstinence programs are not the reason for the decline. I’m guessing pregnancy is down due to better information being available. Studies have shown no difference between those who have abstinence indoctrination and those who don’t. Because of the lack of success, funding for these religious programs is being threatened, thank God.

I have no problem with people abstaining from sex, especially teenagers. Sexuality is a complicated beast (with two backs) and pregnancy and diseases can happen. What bothers me is the message that sex in a monogamous marriage is worth waiting for and completely satisfying. These kids are being sold a flesh pipe dream and that fur pie in the sky turns out to be not so tasty. Instead of giving these kids all the information and letting then make rational decisions, they give them bizarre metaphors. Here’s a quotation by Eric Love who runs Virginity Rules: (Eric Love? Jami Waite? Who named these people? Charles Dickens or perhaps Thomas Pynchon?)

…Mr. Love grabbed a tape dispenser and snapped off two fresh pieces. He slapped them to his filing cabinet and the floor; they trapped dirt, lint, a small metal bolt. “Now when it comes time for them to get married, the marriage pulls apart so easily,” he said, trying to unite the grimy strips. “Why? Because they gave the stickiness away.”

Besides the risible dorkiness of the symbolisim, the message is premarital sex amounts to a piece of tape on a dirty floor. Why don’t they just force sexually-active girls to wear a red S on their shirts to announce their sluttiness. And this is mostly aimed at women. Why have the girl up above be the spokesperson? A double standard exists, and since these programs are faith-based the onus is on the woman to hold off and her reward is a relationship in which she is subservient to her husband.

Another sad fact is people change over time and not necessarily in sync with their spouses. According to statistics, 43% of new marriages end in divorce. And that’s not including all the people who stay in miserable marriages for the sake of religion or kids. I hope the best for Ms. Waite as she waits, but I advise her to have pre-martial safer sex. She should get to know her body, her likes, dislikes and her level of kink (or her complete lack of kink. I assume she has a low libido.). Knowledge of yourself will help a marriage far more than the religious platitudes about sex.

I'll Have a Large Popcorn and a Dry Martini

Every Sunday, my whole family would go to the movies. While the good Mormon families of Utah would do whatever good Mormon families do on Sundays—perhaps playing basketball or patching up their Mormon underwear—we would be munching popcorn and taking in everything from Star Wars to Barry Lyndon.

Now days, I rarely go to the movies. I love the experience, but somehow I rarely make it past the front doors of the multiplex. There are a variety of reasons: my friends aren’t into the same movies I am into; the movies suck; it’s easier to watch DVDs at home; tickets are pretty expensive; and there are so many other things that attract my attention.

The movie offerings are pretty sad indeed. Sequels, especially third and fourth installments are pretty dreadful, but studios love ‘em. This summer we have sequels to Spiderman, Pirates of the Caribbean, Bruce Almighty, Shrek, Harry Potter, and The Bourne Indentity. Of which I have seen none. We’ve also been treated to another Michael Bay schlockfest, Transformers. I’d rather bathe in hot coals than see a Michael Bay film. Anyone who has seen action done so beautifully in a Hong Kong action films cannot sit through the close-ups and quick cuts of a Bay brain ache.

Apparently few summer movies have legs and they drop in sales considerably after the first week. A lot of this is due to the huge amount of blockbuster films released every week. How many blocks can you bust when you’re gone from the theater in a week? Of course this is business and the money supposedly lies in catching the attention of teens and twenty-year olds.

Thankfully there is another way of thinking. There is a theater in Los Angeles that might be on to something:

The lobby contains a restaurant, a bar, and a book-and-gift shop. Before the movie, people hang out and have a drink or leaf through a hot new novel or a movie-star biography. The rest rooms are spotless, and the concession stand serves delicious coffee. All the seats are reserved, and they are plush, with plenty of legroom. The steeply raked auditorium is dark, and insulated from the sound of the other theatres in the same multiplex. Is this some sort of upper-bourgeois dream of the great good place? A padded cell for wealthy movie nuts? No, it’s an actual multiplex, the ArcLight, on Sunset Boulevard near Vine.

The idea of user-friendly theatres may be catching on. Sumner Redstone’s daughter Shari, the president of National Amusements, the family-owned theatre business, has vowed to convert half the lobbies of the chain’s hundred and nineteen theatres to social spaces with comfortable lounges, and to build more. Martinis will be served; newspapers and magazines will be offered. If theatres go in this Starbucks-plus-cocktails direction, the older audience might come back, with a positive effect on filmmaking, and the value of the movies as an art form and an experience could be preserved. After you are seated at the ArcLight, an usher standing at the front of the auditorium tells you who wrote and directed the movie and how long it is. He promises that he and another usher will stay for a while to make sure that the projection and the sound are up to snuff. There are no advertisements following his speech, and only four coming attractions. The movie begins, and you are utterly lost in it.

This is the way to go. I would go to movies a lot more often if they served martinis with Hendrick’s gin. It becomes an experience. I think people are hungry for social spaces, especially in suburban areas where isolation comes too easily. This is why Starbuck’s coffeshops are so successful; people crave that social area. And if movies theaters have good coffee (unlike Starbucks), good food, good drinks, good books and good movies, Hollywood would find their movies sprouting legs and running marathons.

Send Lawyers, Guns and Money, Dad; The Shit has Hit the Fan

Happy birthday, Kalashnikov! And many happy returns! Have some cake. You’ll love it; it’s filled with blood of millions! You look great at sixty. Seriously, you look like in are in your thirties. You still catch the eye of revolutionaries, religious extremists, drug war lords, and other filth. And of course, your biggest suitor is right over there, the United States.

I hear mother Russia threw a party for you. Nice. I hope you kept your bliny down. Those Ruskies pour on the vodka shots, eh? Like at any good party, people complained. I heard that Russia is not getting all the money owed to her through your sales. It seems the gun factories that the Kremlin built in satellite nations (since freed from her iron grip) are popping out cheap knockoffs of you at half the price. You should talk to Versace; they feel your pain.

If only the United States would buy directly from Russia. Then the Iraq army would have most glorious machine gun instead of a Hungarian knockoff. But I’m sure the Iraqi families can hardly tell which is the better gun—the guns that destroyed their family all look the same. Maybe Russia should keep her guns. When the oil money runs out, not much is going to keep her afloat.

Ahh, why be gloomy? Happy birthday! Tommy, Uzi, Sten, M16, and Maschinengewehr all wish you the best.

Slouching Towards Euphoria: Forbidden Island

I wonder if those first people who walked into Hinky Dink’s (soon to morph into Trader Vic’s) understood the kitschy drive behind Tiki bars. Probably not; they probably thought it was exotic, which Tiki bars are, but now they mix kitsch along with exotic.

I have a friend who moved to the island of Alameda, and I finally got the chance to visit him. We checked out a Tiki lounge near his house called Forbidden Island. This place is the best Tiki bar I’ve ever been in. Trader Vic’s is bland. The Tonga Room is way too expensive and touristy. Trad’r Sam’s is great but a little ramshackle.

The outside has wood paneling with painted Tiki gods and palm trees. As you enter, a long wood bar with a low ceiling covered in palm fronds is to your right. There are booths with bamboo walls and couches and the kind of chair that Mr. Roarke of Fantasy Island would lounge on. A fountain gives off its soothing sound and emits a green color. They have an outside area for smoking with tables and couches and another fountain. A corpse of a pirate lies near the fountain.

The jukebox is stocked with Hawaiian music, surf guitar, rat pack classics, and a whole lotta soul. Black velvet paintings of busty nude women hang on the wall. They played beach movies on the one television. The place has a curious smell of stale, sickly sweet drinks and the fried bar food they serve. The bathrooms have old advertisements for Tiki cups and rum. The bartenders were two really cute brunettes that had more than a passing resemblance to Betty Page.

The drink selection was superb. They carried classics like the Mai Tai and the Fog Cutter. And they also had their own tasty concoctions, such as Neptune’s Garden, a bluish umbrella drink and the eponymous Forbidden Island that comes with its own mug. They had a wide range of rums, and I’m sure they could make you any drink in the world, so large was their bottle collection. And the food was decent: friend prawns in a coconut batter and sweet potato fries served for an impromptu dinner.

My friend and I met a dialysis technician (which might come in handy some day) and drank outside by the fountain. Tiki drinks are sort of like boozing and eating a whole lot of desserts at the same time. Plus, you get to say things like, “I’ll have a Banana Mamacow, please.” And I love the kitsch. It’s joyful and goofy. It’s a celebration of beach vacations. Next to us, were some bartenders on their day off. They told us stories of comeuppance for snotty customers. Always be nice to bartenders.

We drank a bit too much for a Sunday night, but logical thought was not present. Meh, the ancient gods of the Pacific Islands approve, so I can’t complain.

Let Them Eat Cake

The New York Times has an article about the new gilded age we live in, complete with robber barons. These guys try and justify their outrageous salaries with weird logic. The contradictions in their philosophy are pretty clear. Kenneth Griffin, who took home a billion dollars last year in the creaky hedge fund business, says that it’s the work and not the money that drives him:

Mr. Griffin, 38, argued that those who focus on the money — and there is always a get-rich crowd — “soon discover that wealth is not a particularly satisfying outcome.” His own team at Citadel, he said, “loves the problems they work on and the challenges inherent to their business.”

But in another quotation regarding raising the taxes on the super rich to the old standard of the Clinton years, he says:

“The income distribution has to stand,” Mr. Griffin said, adding that by trying to alter it with a more progressive income tax, “you end up in problematic circumstances. In the current world, there will be people who will move from one tax area to another. I am proud to be an American. But if the tax became too high, as a matter of principle I would not be working this hard.”

So what is it Griffin? Inherit challenges or your low-taxed income? You may be proud to be an American, but you’re not doing much for this country. Asshole.

Although I hate shopping at Costco, I think that the C.E.O. of Costco, James Sinegal speaks the truth:

In contrast to many of his peers in corporate America, Mr. Sinegal, 70, the Costco chief executive, argues that the nation’s business leaders would exercise their “unique skills” just as vigorously for “$10 million instead of $200 million, if that were the standard.”

As a co-founder of Costco, which now has 132,000 employees, Mr. Sinegal still holds $150 million in company stock. He is certainly wealthy. But he distinguishes between a founder’s wealth and the current practice of paying a chief executive’s salary in stock options that balloon into enormous amounts. His own salary as chief executive was $349,000 last year, incredibly modest by current standards.

“I think that most of the people running companies today are motivated and pay is a small portion of the motivation,” Mr. Sinegal said. So why so much pressure for ever higher pay?

“Because everyone else is getting it,” he said. “It is as simple as that. If somehow a proclamation were made that C.E.O.’s could only make a maximum of $300,000 a year, you would not have any shortage of very qualified men and women seeking the jobs.”

The super wealthy need to pay their share. Raise their taxes. Maybe they can skimp on the cocaine and hookers this year.

When You're a Lez, You're a Lez All the Way

A murky little gob of hate and horniness drives right-wing religious nuts, especially when it comes to lesbians. You would think here in the United States, we would let people be who they are, let them breathe free if they’re not hurting anyone, but that little prickly white-hot spasm cooks the religious kook’s hypothalamuses into telling pathetic lies and starting frivolous court cases.

I don’t watch Bill O’Reilly. Who needs to when Stephen Colbert does such a better job of O’Reilly-ing? But he had Rod Wheeler, a supposed security expert, tell a tale of lesbian gangs. It’s been quoted in all sorts of newspapers and blogs but the allegations bear repeating in nifty bullet points:

* The gays are recruiting kids as young as 10 years old to join their gay gangs and perform—you guessed it—gay sex acts

* There are 150 lesbian gangs in the Washington DC area alone.

* It’s all over America

* The girl gangs carry pink nine-millimeter Glocks

Of course, these allegations are false—complete and utter lies on the no spin zone. The Southern Poverty Law Center debunks the damned lies here.

In other gay panic news, a dickhead in the Bay Area tried to get the courts to block Dykes on Bikes to use that moniker. He stated that the word dykes is “disparaging to men and is scandalous and immoral.” Scandalous? Who made you the arbiter of words?

The court told him that being a man, it’s none of his business:

Someone opposing a trademark has to show "a reasonable basis for a belief that he would be damaged," the court said in a 3-0 decision. McDermott, being a man, couldn't be harmed by a group's decision to call itself "dykes," the panel wrote.

I wonder how much eye rolling went on in the courtroom. Here are some of the wingnut’s arguments from the pleading:

In the arguments he filed with the patent office and in court, he stated his opposition to any trademark for a group associated with the annual Dyke March, which he called “the Annual Illegal San Francisco Dyke Hate Riot.”…He said he and all men are subject to criminal attacks and civil right violations during the march, and that the word dyke is associated with a “deep obsessive hatred of men and the male gender.”

Actually a Dyke Hate Riot sounds like a rockin’ dance party, don’t it? Obviously, this guy has never been to the pride parade. Men are not subject to criminal attacks, maybe catty remarks, maybe suggestive leers, and perhaps a goosing, but not a criminal attack, and certainly not from the dykes on bikes. They’re doing all they can to keep those bikes upright while traveling 10 miles per hour.

So there’s an obvious searing hatred that drives these sub humans, but there also salaciousness too. Either it’s impotent rage because they feel left out or they secretly want to watch the dykes and their bikes and their Glocks. They may claim they do it for the common good, for the morals, but in the end it’s that little Johnson urging them to do God’s work. If only they would just wank it away.

And Cialis is a Personal Erectoral Assistant

I hear a ringing in my left ear all the time. We all do, but my ringing is pretty loud. My affliction is called tinnitus. Sometimes it’s so loud, I get vertigo attacks. Luckily, it rarely happens these days. Only in times of extreme stress do I get dizzy. But I don’t hear very well. In a crowded place, I have a hard time hearing conversation. Thank God, I hang out with loud people.

Going to so many rock and roll shows didn’t help, even though I was wearing ear plugs since high school. I was in rock bands for a long time. Usually the guitarists had what I called guitar wars, whose weapons were the volume knobs of the amplifiers. Needless to say, my poor ears didn’t have a chance.

Plus, it’s in my genes. My grandmother is stone deaf. She has a hearing aid, but it mostly gives off a ghastly whine due to feedback issues. My mother is hard of hearing, too, although she’ll deny it. But watching television with her is aural attack on the senses.

According to a statistic from this article, “just 149.6 of every 1,000 adults who have diminished hearing, whether from aging, disease or injury, use a hearing aid.” That’s a great many “what?” going on. And who is this .6 person? The lack of hearing aids points to vanity and denial. If I don’t have a hearing aid people won’t know I’m aging. New hearing aids adjust to this vanity by making themselves look like Bluetooths or iPods with stylish colors like Shy Violet, Pure Passion and Crème Brûlée. And they’re not called hearing aids but Personal Communication Assistants.

I think another reason people don’t use hearing aids is the comfort of being deaf. Whenever a noise is keeping me awake at night, I just turn over and let my deaf ear block out all the sounds. People cut themselves off from the world all the time. Look at all the iPod users. People love music, but they love cutting off the world more. Why do you think iPod users have that glazed look of a catatonic? It’s the bliss of being separate.

The article also blames noisy restaurants as a source of frustration for the deafened. In the nineties, there was a popular deconstructed look in restaurants. Everything was exposed: vents, steel girders, bricks. Old factories were made into restaurants and artist’s lofts that real artists could never afford, so that fueled the look. Since nothing soaked in the sound, noise bopped all over the place, making them extremely noisy. Thankfully, that look has passed out of fashion, but it’s almost impossible for me to carry on a conversation in a noisy restaurant and bar.

Of course being deaf has its amusing moments. You can never be jilted or fired from a job.

“You’re fired.”

“Wired? Well that last cup of coffee was a bit strong.”

“No, you’re fired.”

“Tired? No, the coffee is keeping me awake.”

“You’re…oh forget it.”

“Heh, heh, heh.”

Starring Zack Braff as King Lear

I felt confusion and then pique when Scatman Crothers received an axe to his stomach. As a preteen in the theater watching The Shining, I thought I knew the story. I read a whole lotta Stephen King as a kid and when Scatman gets offed by Jack Nicholson, I was offended that Stanley Kubrick decided to kill off one of the heroes of the book. What I didn’t understand then was this was a Kubrick film and not a King book.

Richard Schickel writes about Hollywood adapting movies from books in an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times. You can read it here, but let me summarize: Hollywood improves low culture books, ruins high culture books and tries to capture middle brow books like Harry Potter and Gone with the Wind. He also thinks movies are closest to Victorian literature, in that they are narrative-driven.

Although he doesn’t say it, I assume he meant standard-fare movies, movies for unwashed masses at the multiplex. There are lots of movies out there that are not narrative-driven. Besides famous foreign art films like Breathless and La Doche Vita, there are American films like Waking Life, Magnolia, and perhaps the entire oeuvre of Robert Altman.

Unlike in my pre-teen years, I now believe novels and movies to be apples and oranges. Charlie Kaufman certainly proved that with his film, Adaptation, which has zip to do about orchid thieves. I prefer to movies to change the book, otherwise I might as well stay home. Silence of the Lambs was so thoroughly like the book that I was bored. They should carry the spirit of the book. The movie Troy was a complete stranger to Homer’s Iliad, but it certainly nailed the hubris and pointlessness of the battle. I could have done without the prerequisite “NOooooooo” scene, in which the hero cries out when he sees a friend about to be hurt, but petulant Pitt seemed as narcissistic as Achilles ever could be.

Of course it would take a director with balls as big as church bells to do something drastically different to the Harry Potter franchise. The Potter books and movies are fine entertainment, but I giggle like a little girl thinking of what a maverick director like Kubrick or a visual artist like Mathew Barney, or a whackjob like Alejandro Jodorowsky could do to a Potter film.

But people are comforted by predictability. Even French movies are easy to predict—a main character will die. Our lives governed by enough chaos as is, a little celluloid familiarity is a good thing I suppose. So Harry Potter will do exactly as the book has plotted him to do. But I recommend only reading books that can’t possibly be turned into movies. Gertrude Stein, anyone?

Deaf Dumb and Blind and They Suck at Pinball

Let’s get the obvious out of the way—the Bush administration has been one of the top worst administrations our young country has lived through. Nixon, at least, improved relations with China. The Bush administration has put its religious right-wing ideology before truth, before logic, and before the needs of the American public. Every day, the news tells us another story of how these imbeciles have made our country worse off.

The latest is another attack on science by these chunderheads. Let’s let the lede tell the story:

WASHINGTON, July 10 — Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona told a Congressional panel Tuesday that top Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to weaken or suppress important public health reports because of political considerations.

I didn’t blink when I read this. No surprise really. They have their own version of reality and have no qualms on forcing it on the rest of us, facts be damned. The usual topics were verboten by the cursed Bushies: stem cells, contraception, sex education, second-hand smoke, global warming. And, as usual, there are moments of mirth at the audacity of the dimwits:

Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches.

I hope Carmona added Bush’s name as a non sequitur at the end of every page to show how retarded the order is: “So, in conclusion, Americans need to have less trans-fat in their diet…oh yes and Bush Bush Bush.”

Here is another jaw dropper:

And administration officials even discouraged him from attending the Special Olympics because, he said, of that charitable organization’s longtime ties to a “prominent family” that he refused to name…“I was specifically told by a senior person, ‘Why would you want to help those people?’ ” Dr. Carmona said.

The prominent family is the Kennedy family. You couldn’t make the Bush administration look worse if you tried. Don’t help the handicapped; the Kennedys help them, and we hate the Kennedys. So much for Christian values. So much for compassionate conservatism. But those titles were all oxymorons anyway.

The Whitehouse hack has to say something, so they do their usual doublespeak:

Emily Lawrimore, a White House spokeswoman, said…“It’s disappointing to us,” Ms. Lawrimore said, “if he failed to use this position to the fullest extent in advocating for policies he thought were in the best interests of the nation.”

He failed? He failed to stand up to you I guess. How do these hacks sleep at night? I don’t know which is worse, that they have to lie publicly or they believe in the disinformation they try so desperately to spin.

The Surgeon General is a tough job. Former SGs testified that both Democratic and Republican administrations tried to influence them. I soured on Clinton when he fired Joycelyn Elders for stating that masturbation could be useful way to prevent risky sexual behaviors. Elders was simply agreeing with a statement and she was correct anyway; it is a good way. But right-wingers and religious fanatics screamed bloody murder. Clinton wussed out and asked for her resignation.

What’s most disturbing is the Bushies have no understanding of science at all:

[Carmona] described attending a meeting of top officials in which the subject of global warming was discussed. The officials concluded that global warming was a liberal cause and dismissed it, he said…“And I said to myself, ‘I realize why I’ve been invited. They want me to discuss the science because they obviously don’t understand the science,’ ” he said. “I was never invited back.”

Once the science was explained to them and it didn’t back up their narrow beliefs, they just ignored their top doctor. And the litany of bone-headed manipulations goes on and on. Here’s their stupidity on tobacco:

Dr. Carmona described being invited to testify at the government’s nine-month racketeering trial of the tobacco industry that ended in 2005. He said top administration officials discouraged him from testifying while simultaneously telling the lead government lawyer in the case that he was not competent to testify. Dr. Carmona testified anyway.

On stem cells:

“I was told to stand down and not speak about it,” he said. “It was removed from my speeches.”

On contraceptives:

“However there was already a policy in place that did not want to hear the science but wanted to preach abstinence only, but I felt that was scientifically incorrect,” he said.

On prison health care:

Because the administration does not want to spend more money on prisoners’ health care, the report has been delayed, Dr. Carmona said…“For us, the science was pretty easy,” he said. “These people go back into the community and take diseases with them.” He added, “This is not about the crime. It’s about protecting the public.”

But the Busies don’t care about the public. They are like Freud’s Id; they only see what will gratify their ideological needs. So very pathetic. The man the Bushies want to replace Carmona with is Dr. James W. Holsinger Jr., a religious right-winger, who will tow the line on any issue the administration wants. God save us.

I’m usually wrong about America’s voting habits, but I’ll be very surprised if the Republicans are not kicked out en masse in the next elections. If not, then all the surgeon generals in the world couldn’t help us.