Category: Uncategorized

Mickey Kaus links to a blogger who thinks he’s figured out how “red states” get red and “blue states” get blue.

Personally, I want to find out if Bloods vote Republican and Crips vote Democrat, but I guess no one’s explored that issue.

Keith Thompson writes about his departure from the cultural left wing:

I’ll admit my politics have shifted in recent years, as have America’s political landscape and cultural horizon. Who would have guessed that the U.S. senator with today’s best voting record on human rights would be not Ted Kennedy or Barbara Boxer but Kansas Republican Sam Brownback?

And it’s in the San Francisco Chronicle, no less.

Virginia Postrel has a pretty good post about the Newsweek/Koran fiasco.

It puts me in mind of the furor over Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ, back in 1988. A lot of Christians were pissed off when this one came out. People who’d never seen the movie called for protests, not realizing the humor factor in hearing Judas-by-way-of-Brooklyn, by Harvey Keitel.

Anyway, my point is, these Christians were irate about a movie portraying Jesus Christ as a man with some human feelings. You can argue about the validity of what they were mad about, but what’s incontrovertible is that no one started a riot over it. No one threatened the lives of Scorsese, Willem Dafoe, or Paul Schraeder (although some of my friends really disliked Bringing Out the Dead).

Or, as Ms. Postrel puts it:

With its Western biases, Newsweek thought it was writing about allegations of prisoner abuse, a human rights issue. Its overseas audience had a different reading. The differences between us and them really are bigger than the differences between us and us.

Chris Hitchens writes about George Galloway in the Weekly Standard:

We are therefore invited by him to assume that, having earlier acquired a justified reputation for loose bookkeeping in respect of “charities,” he switched sides in Iraq, attached himself to a regime known for giving and receiving bribes, appointed a notorious middleman as his envoy, kept company with the corrupt inner circle of the Baath party, helped organize a vigorous campaign to retain that party in power, and was not a penny piece the better off for it. I think I believe this as readily as any other reasonable and objective person would. If you wish to pursue the matter with Galloway himself, you will have to find the unlisted number for his villa in Portugal.

Read it all.

I don’t watch a ton of TV. Outside of sporting events (I’m an NBA geek, I admit), days can go by without my turning on the TV. For the most part, I’ve missed out on the reality TV craze, except for a couple of exceptions that stretch the definition. Penn & Teller’s series on Showtime, for example, seems like it should be called a documentary series, not reality TV.

That said, I’ve found myself utterly compelled to watch a new reality/documentary series on MTV: I Want a Famous Face.

Yup. Normal-ish people go around spending tens of thousands on plastic surgery so that they can resemble their favorite stars. Usually, the celebrities/targets in question are the trashy, heavily made-up types, like Carmen Electra or Tiffany Amber-Thiessen. But watching these people handing their surgeons covers of People magazine and saying, “Make me look like her,” is ridiculously fun to watch. (Okay: accent on the “ridicul” part of “ridiculously”.)

Fat woman who decides she looks enough like Jennifer Aniston to go the rest of the way via lipo, chin restructuring, boob implants? That’s entetainment!

Cute but boyish secretary who decides she wants to look like Britney Spears so that she can leave her day job as a secretary (at a plastic surgeon’s office) and get a job as a stripper? That’s even MORE entertainment!

Pudgy Latino guy who thinks he looks like Ricky Martin? Okay, maybe that’s NOT so entertaining, but still!

(Meanwhile, fer yer edification, let’s supplement the Awful Plastic Surgery link with this one, offering realistic advice from a cosmetic surgeon)

Joe Nash, an archivist of black dance history, died last month, a victim of his own archive:

Last Thanksgiving, he stumbled over a pile of materials in his packed apartment in a West Harlem housing project. As he fell, he clutched at a stack of books, which tumbled down on him, according to Rashidah Ismaili AbuBakr, a friend who took care of him. Mr. Nash [. . .] lay on the floor for five days, until friends heard his cry for help [. . . .] “Every single room was storage–his bathroom, his bedroom,” Ms. AbuBakr said. “He just had enough space to lay down.”

Mr. Nash never recovered from the fall, friends said; he died on April 13 at 85 of cardiovascular problems. Now, because Mr. Nash had no heirs–and apparently left no will–the city has changed the locks on his apartment door and seized his property, in preparation for auctioning it off. Archivists, dance lovers and Mr. Nash’s friends are appalled by the possibility that the collection could be scattered to the winds.

Or maybe the city locked the stuff up to keep it from killing again.

Okay, it was a lame joke. But I was tired of trying to come up with a “dancing about architecture” line that would’ve pulled the story together. Sue me.

I just like the headline.

Okay, I stole that headline from the Observer or somewhere; sorry.

Anyway, VM contributor Tom Spurgeon offers up 10 reasons he may not see Star Wars III, including

2. If I had a dollar every time I heard someone on TV asserting Star Wars was important for no other reason than that they liked it a lot, I would still be about $49,973 short of the money one should be paid to hear people talk like that.

At the NYTimes, Virginia Heffernan’s been blogging from the “upfronts” presentations, where TV networks pitch next season’s new shows to advertisers. It’s a hoot:

In the big, comic presentations, “Hawaii,” “LAX,” and “Father of the Pride” were satirized as bad ideas. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler said that the people who created them are now in rehab. (In fact, they were probably in the audience, smarting at the slaps; just last year, of course, Mr. Zucker was hyping those same shows, doting on them, and hearing him tear them down like this year was like watching a parent smack a child.)

One of my coworkers asked me how I could possibly read Proust, as he’d fallen asleep in the first 30 pages every time he tried. When I first talk about it, I invariably sound like I’m pursuing it “because it’s there”, as if reading these books is the same as climbing a mountain.

And maybe it is. Because what I’m reading for, besides the totality of the experience and the wit, are the intensely beautiful passages, not the vistas I’ve seen from a mile elevation in New Zealand, but the views of the human soul. It’s the feeling not of understanding another person, but of being understood, as Orwell once wrote about Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.

That said, here’s that Proust passage I mentioned earlier. Its specifics don’t pertain to my own relationship, since it’s about the narrator’s potential union to a bisexual social climber in fin de siecle Paris, but hey:

“But you yourself, what do you think of her?” I asked my mother.

“Well, I’m not the one who’s going to marry her. You could certainly do a great deal better in terms of marriage. But I feel that your grandmother would not have liked me to influence you. As a matter of fact, I can’t say what I think of Albertine; I don’t think of her. All I can say to you is, like Madame de Sevigne: ‘She has good qualities, or so I believe. But at this first stage I can praise her only by negatives. She is not this: she has not the Rennes accent. In time, I shall perhaps say: she is that.’ And I shall always think well of her if she can make you happy.”

But by these very words which left it to me to decide my own happiness, my mother had plunged me into that state of doubt in which I had been plunged long ago when, my father having allowed me to go to Phédré and, what was more, to take up writing as a career, I had suddenly felt myself burdened with too great a responsibility, the fear of distressing him, and that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.

Those of you who’ve known me for a while are familiar with That Damned Hegel Quote. I first read it more than 10 years ago, during a semester-long study on Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right. (I’ve led an exciting life, as you can tell.)

The essence of the passage is that we must make decisions to become real. But Hegel says it better (or at least more completely) than I do:

A will which resolves on nothing is not an actual will; the characterless man can never resolve on anything. The reason for such indecision may also lie in an over-refined sensibility which knows that, in determining something, it enters the realm of finitude, imposing a limit on itself and relinquishing infinity; yet it does not wish to renounce the totality to which it intends. Such a disposition is dead, even if its aspiration is to be beautiful. “Whoever aspires to great things,” says Goethe, “must be able to limit himself.” Only by making resolutions can the human being enter actuality, however painful the process may be; for inertia would rather not emerge from that inward brooding in which it reserves a universal possibility for itself. But possibility is not yet actuality. The will which is sure of itself does not therefore lose itself in what it determines.

Those of you who’ve known me for a while are also familiar with my intense, paralyzing neuroses. My tendencies to hem and haw, to hedge every statement (“Well, almost every statement . . .”), to never quite reveal where I am, had to be as infuriating to my friends and loved ones as it was to me. I’m a lot better about it than I used to be. I was pretty much a cipher, back in the proverbial day.

But “such a disposition is dead, even if its aspiration is to be beautiful,” we read. I know too many people who live that way, avoiding life-decisions as a means of retaining their “freedom.” Most of them are artists. They’re getting old now. We all are, but they seem lonelier than my other friends.

When I first read that passage by Hegel, I felt like an insect, pinned to a collector’s display (or like a patient etherised upon a table, to recall that old influence). Intellectually, I knew that I couldn’t keep living like this, that it isn’t living. But there’s a difference between knowing something and living something. I feel like I’ve bridged that gap in the past two years. You long-time readers have been along for the ride, and that must’ve been entertaining.

Funny thing: all along, I was saving the Hegel passage for “just the right” entry, the unaccomplishable piece of writing that would make it the centerpiece, in which it would be fastened like a jewel. I’ll likely never get around to the great essay on identity and reification. Rather, I’ll likely get around to living it, but not writing it.

So instead you get this. I can’t do justice to that passage, but as William Gaddis once put it, “In the next world you get justice. Here you have the law.”

And that’s the rambling erudition I was talking about, bringing Proust, Hegel, Eliot, Orwell, Miller, Gaddis, et al. into the conversation. In the old days it was as if, by being everywhere, I could keep from being in one place. It’s still a nervous habit, quoting so much, but those writers and thinkers have informed a good part of how I see the world. They keep opening my eyes, making sure I can see life as it contines to unfold.

All of which is to say, we’re in love, and I finally get it:

“[W]e have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.”

Now I’m gonna get back to my 15 pages.