Category: Politics (explicit)

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Vote with soul

I haven’t finished loading up my new iPod yet, so I wasn’t able to play James Brown’s Living in America during the drive down to the polling station this morning. I fell back on Prince’s Sign o’ the Times (should’ve gone with America from Around the World in a Day). To make up for it, I offer up some JB:

To provide some more Obamatude, I’ll only play funk, soul and R&B in my office stereo today. Up first, Sly & the Family Stone – Anthology!

Now go vote! And then dance like there’s ass in your pants!

Update! Next up: the soundtrack to Brown Sugar.

Vote Lando!

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That’s certainly transformational

I try to cut the Drudge Report a bit of slack; I figure everyone has an agenda, and so I do my best to weigh their biases and suss out the signal from all the noise. Still, I was a little sad when I checked out the site this afternoon and saw this link in the top of the right column:

Disappointed because I saw the interview earlier in the day, and I knew that’s not what Colin Powell said. In fact, the very story that Drudge quote links to includes the correct version of the quote:

I think the last decade’s proven pretty adequately that “Republican” is not the same as “conservative.” If you’re going to quote somebody, I think you have a duty to actually include the correct quote.

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Not long enough

Here’s a quote from this morning’s reading:

“We live in what is called a democracy, rule by the majority of the people. A fine ideal if it could be made to work. The people elect, but the party machines nominate, and the party machines to be effective must spend a great deal of money. Somebody has to give it to them, and that somebody, whether it be an individual, a financial group, a trade union or what have you, expects some consideration in return.”

— Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953)

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Under the Sun

Barring a major investor jumping in during a time of financial panic, it looks like the Official Newspaper of Gil Roth will be shutting down in a week. How’s today’s Arts+ section looking?

  1. Victor Davis Hanson reviews Martin Creveld’s The Culture of War: “he presents himself as a Thucydidean”!
  2. Steven Nadler reviews Joel Kramer’s biography on the Great RaMBaM: “From Moses to Moses, there was no one like Moses”!
  3. Eric Ormsby reviews Fernandoz Baez’ history of the destruction of books: “Unlike Borges, who delighted in inventing titles which don’t exist (but should), Mr. Báez describes books and whole libraries that fell prey not only to fire and flood but to sheer human malevolence”. . .
  4. And speaking of Borges, Alberto Manguel reviews William Goldbloom Bloch’s The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel: “Mr. Bloch notes in his preface that the ideal reader of his book is Umberto Eco”!?
  5. Paula Deitz writes up the Venice Biennale of Architecture: “Two different exhibitions featured walls of refrigerators as stand-ins for enclosed spaces”?!
  6. In a rare disappointment for me, it turned out that Valerie Gladstone’s Bacon and Rothko in London does not actually involve pork products: “‘What I find amazing,’ Mr. Gale said, ‘is that even after all the preparation for this exhibition, looking at Bacon’s paintings still makes my spine tingle. I never stop being overwhelmed.'”

And a bonus! This weekend, the New York Times wrote about the Sun’s plight! While it can’t be bothered to mention the Sun’s top-notch arts coverage until a passing ref. 6 paragraphs from the end — presumably because it puts the Times’ coverage to shame — it does manage to include a quote from a writer at The Nation who called the Sun “a paper that functions as a journalistic SWAT team against individuals and institutions seen as hostile to Israel and Jews”! Awesome! Now I can miss it even more. . .

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New Orleans, Beijing: Same Difference

Nicolai Ouroussoff: still here, still batshit-crazy. He asks why, if China could make a major architectural statement out of Beijing, the U.S. won’t do the same in . . . New Orleans. No, really.

Somehow, he misses the points that

  1. Beijing is the capital of a burgeoning world power, while New Orleans’ economy is driven almost entirely by drunken tourists,
  2. New Orleans, we now understand, faces destruction by flood every hurricane season, thanks to its georgraphy, a series of incredibly short-sighted development decisions, and the admitted incompetence of the Army Corps of Engineers,
  3. “New Orleans” and “coherent vision” don’t belong in the same article.

Maybe he’ll propose Frank Gehry to design new curved levees.

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Me and Client 9

It turns out Cardinal Egan, Eliot Spitzer & I have something in common, besides virtually nothing! We all read the Official Newspaper of Gil Roth! In an article about how past governors, pols and other NYC figures want the NYSun to stay in business, they somehow managed to snag the former governor’s first public statement since his resignation:

“The Sun has been a spectacular addition to the city’s political discourse and is one of the finest papers in terms of editing, writing, and analysis that one can find anywhere.”

I’m gratified to know that other people were actually reading this paper.

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Fables of the Reconstruction

I’m no knee-jerk fan of either major party, so the ugliness of this election season has triggered one of my depressions. For me, these are characterized by what I call “wheels within wheels” phases, in which the world seems to reduce to the meshing of an impossibly complicated set of gears. I get stuck probing away at the mechanisms, trying to make sense of a planetary gearset that leaves no room for randomness, irrationality, or serendipity. It’s paranoia both grand and personal, but I’ve gotten better about getting it under control.

More importantly my wife helps ground me and elevate me, and that’s why I love her so.

This morning, I considered what I want to share with you about 9/11 this time around, and that’s when I reached the conclusion that the reconstruction of Ground Zero should remain perpetually in progress. After all, anything that actually gets finished will only be a letdown after all this buildup. Plus, it’ll boost employment among construction workers, city-state-federal lobbyists, starchitects, and Sheldon Silver.

And most importantly, it’ll be a fitting symbol of our state of endless war.

In the words of James Brolin, “Happy 9/11!”

In the words of my wife, “I hope Josh got his mom’s brains. Whoever she is.”