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.

I Taste Sour Apple, Tobbaco, and Hypocrisy

England has been a bit more tolerant of the human need to be inebriated. Consider this quotation from a book review on the Waugh literary legacy:

Alexander’s and Auberon’s books also give us a taste of London journalism, which in Auberon’s time was very gloves-off. Stabs in the back, vendettas, letter-writing campaigns, lawsuits: what drama! Writers called people piss pots, poltroons, dog sodomists—almost everything but drunks. (Drunkenness was not considered a vice.) English journalism is much the same today.

Drunkenness was not considered a vice. Today, England talks of the trouble of overdrinking, but they talk about it sensibly by changing their too-short pub hours of operation. America used to be very tolerant, too. Obviously some things should not be tolerated, such as drunk driving.

But drinking in America today has a whispering secret-society feeling about it today. I once had a teacher who told me if you drink to get drunk you are an alcoholic. This is illogical by any standard; the whole point of booze is to change your consciousness. Non-alcoholic beer and decaffeinated coffee are exercises in futility. As David Letterman referred to decaffeinated coffee, it’s what their drinking in hell.

I bring all this up because of an article in the New York Times about the battle between the slobs and the snobs in the wine country of New York. Evidently, people are getting drunk at wine tastings:

There also are reports of tastings gone wild involving intoxicated visitors who have tossed back full glasses of wine without regard to nose or body until they grabbed the brass spittoon for baser purposes…The latest additions to local lore include a story about members of an inebriated group at the Palmer Vineyards here who hopped off a hayride and began gallivanting naked through the vines. Then there were the drunken customers at the Pugliese Vineyards in Cutchogue who jumped into the shimmering lake next to the elegant outdoor tasting area. And the bachelorette parties that often culminate in tabletop dances, to the horror of nearby oenophiles sniffing or sipping the local chardonnays.

Okay, I have sympathy for the people trying to get into the whole wine experience and being annoyed by the drunken louts. But this lays bare the hypocrisy that has grown around wine. Just because there is great craft gone into winemaking and the prices are high and there is a whole oenophile (wine connoisseur) language, does not mean that you are free from the baser instincts that wine brings forth. In vino veritas indeed.

But what will the vineyards do to fight the deadly drunken mobs?

In response to the raucous behavior, more associated with that South Fork bastion known as the Hamptons, almost all of the wineries have ended free tastings and now generally charge $5 for a flight of carefully measured samples. (Palmer is one of the few still pouring without charge, if only for selected wines.) Many tasting rooms have banned bachelorette parties and tightened cutoff policies on serving the inebriated.

I have a feeling the charging is more about greed than dealing with drunks. And banning bachelorette parties? Don’t these people know you don’t fuck with the bacchanal? Don’t they remember what happened to Pentheus when he tried to end the Dionysian celebrations? He was pulled apart by the ecstatic women (including his own mother!) You can’t ban the bachelorette parties.

As the movie Sideways demonstrates, you can be an oenophile and still be a drunk. But even regulars at bar know there are certain rules. Number one rule: you should be polite. It’s not rocket science. Unfortunately, amateur drunks are not very good at that rule, so they have to be reminded. The article ends with quotations from a local wine mag:

The Long Island Wine Press, a local magazine, has begun printing wine tasting etiquette guidelines and rules of proper behavior, including the need to refrain from putting tips in the wine spittoon…Do not “shout that something’s disgusting because you don’t happen to like it,” the list says, and “don’t take the three-ounce pours of wine as if they were shots.”

Yeah, save that for the tequila.

We Need Quality! Send In the Nuge!

Rupert Murdoch, media mogul, evil genius, right-wing propagandist, is the highest bidder for Dow Jones and its flagship newspaper, The Wall Street Journal. The WSJ is upset over this because of Murdoch’s meddling and obsequiousness towards China. They fear Murdoch will ruin one of the best newspapers in the world. And they are right. Murdoch has a history of turning his news outlets into propaganda machines. They spew faux-populist crap and call it fair and balanced. Murdoch also bends over backwards not to insult totalitarian China, killing book deals that criticize China’s repressive government all in the name of China’s currency: yuan.

Now the reporting of the WSJ is excellent. Their news section is one of the finest in the world. The opinion section is shite. Ayn Randian belief in unregulated markets and knee-jerk conservative values rule the opinion pages. While the supposedly liberal bastion New York Times has conservative pundits such as David Brooks, the WSJ opinion section has no such balance. And apparently they don’t care much about facts or logic. As long as you bleat their ideology, they will print your ravings.

Case in point: the Nuge. Ted Nugent, has-been rocker, famous for being drug free and his love of hunting, wrote an editorial slamming the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Why would the stuffy staff of the WSJ call upon the Nuge to write an editorial is beyond me. Perhaps they love all those paeans to pussy that Nugent wrote, such as “Cat Scratch Fever” and “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang.” And the Nuge delivers on the hysterical prose:

Forty years ago hordes of stoned, dirty, stinky hippies converged on San Francisco to "turn on, tune in, and drop out," which was the calling card of LSD proponent Timothy Leary. Turned off by the work ethic and productive American Dream values of their parents, hippies instead opted for a cowardly, irresponsible lifestyle of random sex, life-destroying drugs and mostly soulless rock music that flourished in San Francisco.

Actually I think they were turned off by the Vietnam war, the repression and unhappiness of their parents and what a complete lie the American Dream is, unless your Scooter Libby. He then bemoans the death of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin due to drugs. I can’t argue with that. And then he casually drops a lie:

Other musical geniuses such as Jim Morrison and Mama Cass would also be dead due to drugs within a few short years. The bodies of chemical-infested, brain-dead liberal deniers continue to stack up like cordwood.

Morrison’s death remains a bit of a mystery because no autopsy was done on it. He certainly was no stranger to drugs, but more than likely, Morrison died due to his enormous drinking habit, and although alcohol is a drug, hippies for the most part rejected alcohol. Mama Cass died from a heart attack brought on by obesity, a true American, Midwest, American-Values problem. (No, she didn’t choke on a ham sandwich.) Also, the term liberal deniers make it sound like someone denying liberals, but clear grammar and logic is not the Nuge’s forte.

Then he gives a powerful description of what he went through in those turbulent times:

I literally had to step over stoned, drooling fans, band mates, concert promoters and staff to pursue my musical American Dream throughout the 1960s and 1970s. I flushed more dope and cocaine down backstage toilets than I care to remember. In utter frustration I was even forced to punch my way through violent dopers on occasion.

I love this image: Terrible Ted punching his way through a zombie force of drooling drugged out hippies. Say Ted, didn’t you sing “The stakes are high and so am I” in your song, “Free For All”? Oh I see, you can exploit drug use in your songs but you didn’t use them.

And it seems being stone cold sober means you get to print lies with the imprinteur of the WSJ:

The 1960s, a generation that wanted to hold hands, give peace a chance, smoke dope and change the world, changed it all right: for the worse. America is still suffering the horrible consequences of hippies who thought utopia could be found in joints and intentional disconnect.

A quick study of social statistics before and after the 1960s is quite telling. The rising rates of divorce, high school drop outs, drug use, abortion, sexual diseases and crime, not to mention the exponential expansion of government and taxes, is dramatic. The "if it feels good, do it" lifestyle born of the 1960s has proved to be destructive and deadly.

Did you get that, folks? Hippies smoking rag weed cause divorce, kids leaving school, drug use, abortion, STDs, crime, more government and taxes. Where are these statistics, Ted? I’m guessing he pulled them out of his ass. All these things have risen along with our population. Not to mention these things existed well before the 1960s. Why do conservatives look to the past with rose-colored glasses? I’d also like to point out we’ve had more conservative leadership since the 1960s then liberal, and I think the government has more power then the hippies of Haight Street.

He goes on:

So now, 40 years later, there are actually people who want to celebrate the anniversary of the Summer of Drugs. Hippies are once again descending on ultra-liberal San Francisco--a city that once wanted to give shopping carts to the homeless--to celebrate and try to remember their dopey days of youth when so many of their musical heroes and friends long ago assumed room temperature by "partying" themselves to death. Nice.

Shopping carts to the homeless? Those crazy, Godless San Franciscans! Room temperature? You would think a hunter could come up with a better metaphor than that for death. God knows, he has caused a whole lot of death. Then Nugent ends his piece:

There is a saying that if you can remember the 1960s, you were not there. I was there and remember the decade in vivid, ugly detail. I remember its toxic underbelly excess because I was caught in the vortex of the music revolution that was sweeping the country, and because my radar was fine-tuned thanks to a clean and sober lifestyle.

If your clean and sober lifestyle lead to the formation of your shit-sucking band, Damn Yankees then pass the joint, Ted. And WSJ, don’t worry about Murdoch buying your paper. If the Nuge is your idea of high journalistic standards, Rupert can only make things better.

Apocalypse Pretty Soon

I have to admit there have been certain days when I prayed for the end of days. Most likely, it was because my head was throbbing or I was broken hearted or I was filled with corporate-work ennui. But I never really wanted the world to end, and certainly didn’t put an exact date on it. But through the centuries, religious groups have predicted the end of the world. In an article about the newest version of the apocalypse comes this paragraph:

Light and darkness—heavenly forces and a corrupted earth—are the twin engines of apocalyptic movements. For Christians awaiting rapture or Shiites counting the days until the Twelfth Imam appears, the trials and injustices of the known world are a prelude for the paradise that we can imagine but can’t yet achieve. Judging by the sheer number of predicted end dates that have come and gone without the trumpets blowing and angels rushing in, we are a people impatient to see our world redeemed through catastrophe—and we are always wrong.

Yup, always wrong. Such hubris, to think that one can know when the earth will flutter out. We might not make it, but the earth will be around. But insecurity is so strong that folks have to believe in it

…according to Paul S. Boyer, an authority on prophecy belief in American culture and an emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the apocalypse is an appealing idea because it promises salvation to a select group—all of whom share secret knowledge—and a world redeemed and delivered from evil. “The Utopian dream is a big part of the Western tradition,” Boyer told me, “both the religious and secular forms. But the wicked have to be destroyed and evil has to be overcome for the era of righteousness to dawn.”

This reminds me of clubs that little kids make in which they exclude a gender just to feel special. And of course it’s not just the religious. New Agers have their own religion, but their myths and icons are all too similar:

“The post-2012 world will be a world of universal telepathy,” Arguelles wrote me recently from New Zealand, where he has gone to prepare for the transition. Since 1993, when he claims to have received a new prophecy in Hawaii, he has been calling himself Valum Votan, Closer of the Cycle. “We’ll be literally living in a new time,” Arguelles said, “by a 13-month, 28-day synchronometer that will facilitate our telepathy by keeping us in harmony with everything all the time. There will be a lot fewer of us, with simple lifestyles, solar technology, garden culture and lots of telepathic communication.” As for the many who “have not evolved spiritually enough to know that there are other dimensions of reality,” Arguelles predicts they will be taken away in “silver ships.”

Not interested in telepathic gardening? Oh well, get on the silver ship—destination unknown. Hard to believe that people buy into this, but then again, people buy into Jesus rising from the dead and Moses parting the Red Sea. According to the Mayaist (They believe the Mayans predicted the end of days), the end is either 2011 or 2012. Being that the idea of heaven bores me, and the New Ager idea of telepathic gardeners is even duller, I’ll go to hell on the silver ship.

What amazes me is the amount of work people put into this. They study ancient cultures and write books and even change their names, all in a quest that will end in disappointment once the end date passes to the next day. The sun will set and the sun will rise. I’ve seen this elsewhere. At a hippy reggae festival I had a pleasant woman at a booth try and convince me that the World Trade Center destruction was caused by controlled demolition. There were books and videos and here she was manning this booth, spending her free time and energy on this pointless mission. I tried to be polite, but I had to ask, isn’t more important to work against the right-wing demagoguery in this country rather then silly, paranoid conspiracy theories. But I misunderstood the powerful human emotion to fantasize rather than deal with cold, dull truth. Oh well, while you are on the mountain top waiting for the rapture, I’ll be in the bar, telling jokes.

Slouching Towards Euphoria: The Attic

On Saturday night, I saw a friend perform in a Hip Hop dance show. Hip Hop dance is fluid movements, punctuated with sharp stops symbolizing major attitude. You definitely do not want to get into these people’s grills. My friend is an excellent dancer, and his time on stage was woefully short. After the show, we retired to a bar a couple of storefronts away from the theater. I’ve never heard of The Attic, but San Francisco never ceases to surprise me.

The Attic resembles many hipster bars in the Mission. The interior is painted in black, and the paint job looks sloppy, as if the painters were hitting the hooch as they worked. The entrance is like a long narrow hallway with the bar on one side. In the back is a bigger room with booths and tables. Horror movie posters sporadically line the walls. A few peculiar paintings hang on the wall. One has a giant head of a conquistador floating above a harbor, very strange. We sat in a booth, whose seats seemed entirely covered in duct tape.

We sat and drank and made fun of the hipsters. As the title implies, hipsters try to stay hip by wearing unusual clothes. I knew one guy that wore women’s pants and clown shoes?!? I kept making fun of two guys wearing bright-red tuques, a knitted hat they wear in Canada because it’s so freaking cold there. I am way too lazy to dress hip. I look like a preppy that has gone to seed. A D.J. started spinning records of hard rock bands from the seventies and eighties. I complimented him on a Pat Travers choice; I haven’t heard Travers in a long time. He also played Saga, another band I haven’t heard in some time.

On going to the bathroom, I noticed a flyer for a drink special: Canada night, all Canadian whisky and beer discounted. Hmm, I thought, they have a Canadian night, how hipster-ish. When I returned to the booth, they handed out the words to “Oh Canada” in English and in Québécois French. Ah, the light bulb appeared over my head. Sunday must be Canada’s Independence Day or whatever they celebrate since they are still under England’s queen. That’s why people are wearing the tuques. That’s why the D.J. is playing Pat Travers, Saga, Rush, April Wine, and Triumph. Canada did put out some fine hard rock bands.

At midnight, we sang “Oh Canada” along with a recorded version by Céline Dion. I pounded my chest, just like the screecher from up North. With the exception of a friend who went to camp up north and knew the melody, we butchered the melody. Of course, this is a perfect example of hipster-ness, a mix of fascination, adulation and a huge dose of irony. They are making fun of Canada while worshipping it. While annoying as that is, it is also fun. It sure beats a normal night of drinking. And it is surely more fun then drinking in a Marina bar, watching the aging frat boys and sorority girls do the sad mating dance they do.