Category: Personal

Posted on

[lookie here, i’m the media!]

Today I received my very first press release. Apparently someone out there things I’m a publisher of some kind. Ha! Heck, I don’t even read this blog. But anyway, here’s the press release in full:

You –> you’re a blogger.
Us –> we’re Concerts for Kerry; we create fantastic music shows that are fundraisers for John Kerry.

We want you to blog us! We have an upcoming show in Brooklyn this Friday, April 30 (details below…)

Atrios blogged us… So did Gawker… Now we want you. Please help today!

thanks in advance,
the Concerts for Kerry Team

http://www.ConcertsforKerry.org

Our next NYC show:
Concerts for Kerry Brooklyn Gallery Show!

April 30th Concert for Kerry!
http://www.ConcertsforKerry.org
Friday, April 30, 2004
at Proda Studios
25 Jay Street, Brooklyn, 11201
10pm.

Tickets: $15 online, $20 at the door.
100% of ticket sales go directly to the Kerry Campaign.
Buy tickets online: http://www.ConcertsforKerry.org

featuring…
theXpo Spring Collection
THE VITAMEN
FRANK
and
DJs Minway Mosco and ebuzZ

Buy tickets right now!
http://www.ConcertsforKerry.org

Buy tickets. Please forward to friends. Elect John Kerry in 2004!

– the Concerts for Kerry Team
questions? email: info@concertsforkerry.org

I know, it’s totally square — I love the generic rocker dude on their website, complete with wristband and Bon Jovi hair, and I’m also fond of the phrase “fantastic music shows” — but it is for a good cause, or at least the best cause we managed to nominate. Of course, you could save yourself the trouble and embarrassment and just write a check.

Posted on

[when it’s someone you know]

Topic: Culture
For those of you who’ve been regular Doonesbury readers at one time or another but haven’t been paying attention, the strip recently took an astonishing turn: BD is wounded.

The lead time on weekday strips is two weeks, so it’s a sad coincidence that as this famous fictional football player’s Iraqi tragedy was playing out, an actual NFL player, former Arizona Cardinal Pat Tillman, was killed in Afghanistan.

Posted on

[blame sweden]

Topic: Politics

According to Slate’s reading of Bob Woodward’s latest political gossip-fest, Plan of Attack:

Karl Rove, a Norwegian-American, is obsessed with the “historical duplicity” of the Swedes, who seized Norway back in 1814. This nationalism manifests itself as hatred for Swedish weapons inspector Hans Blix.

So if you were wondering why our intelligence was such a mess, now you know: blame Sweden.

And come to think of it, wasn’t Hans Blix not only entirely right but entirely successful at ridding Iraq of WMDs via the inspections regime? Because they didn’t have any, actually, so I guess all that heavily disparaged Clintonian sanctions-and-swatting-flies stuff was in fact wholly effective. Boy, I’m glad we traded in those policies for our Glorious Liberation!

Posted on

[doobieous theories]

Topic: Culture

Today is April 20, popularly known as 420. If you’ve ever wondered why the number 420 is associated with marijuana, Phish.Net FAQ has answers. Unfortunately, they have too many answers, which is not much better than none at all, at least epistemologically. Nevertheless, what better way to celebrate 420 than with piles of ludicrous, contradictory hypotheses?

And yes, I have my own theory to add. The Phish site mentions Salman Rushdie’s reference to 420 as a number of chaos and trickery. In Hindu mythology, Shiva is the god of chaos (or destruction). He is also an inveterate dopehead who whiles away the millenia getting high atop Mount Kailash and engaging in cosmic nookie with his consort Parvati. So my crackpot (emphasis on the latter syllable) theory is that 420 became associated with the ascetic followers of Shiva, who wander India in loincloths and matted dreadlocks, smoking marijuana chillams, increasing the average holiness of the population, and making respectable folk just a tad nervous.

Whatever your theory, have a happy 420.

Posted on

[palaverist is back]

Topic: Personal

After a splendid week in California, I’m back again in New York, which switched from drizzly, crappy early spring to hot and sunny early summer in my absence. The ginko leaves are peeking out, as are the occasional bare legs beneath a short skirt. Ah, summer!

In this new season, I may have to scale back a bit for work-related reasons — i.e., I need to actually do some — but I’ll try to get out a couple of good posts each week. So keep checking in!

Posted on

[living like scandinavians]

Topic: Personal
It’s that time of year again: Daylight Saving Time! Personally, though I dislike losing an hour of my weekend and getting up an hour early, I love what Daylight Saving Time actually does for us. It may be a bizarre legislative hangover from a bygone era, but it gives us long summer evenings. And I love long summer evenings. I like to get out of work when the sun is still up and go walking for an hour or three through Manhattan, exploring the city in the extended evening glow. The end of Standard Time means the end of the Dark Months, even more than those first little leaves or a daffodil peeking through the soil. Summer is on its way.

DST also makes the time difference between sunset in December and sunset in June that much more extreme, so we can all feel just a little bit more like Scandinavians. And that’s pretty cool too.

Posted on

[retracting the retraction]

Topic: Politics

As far as political crises go, a yawning kid at a Bush speech shouldn’t be a major one. CNN reported, though, that the White House was claiming the video was faked or manipulated, but then CNN backed off that claim.

I bought CNN’s line, but it has been pointed out to me that this is standard operating procedure for both the White House and CNN: the former likes to put out attacking rumors anonymously and see if they fly, then deny responsibility — revealing Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, suggesting Richard Clarke is gay or hearing voices, etc. And CNN, perhaps out of some desperation for the crumbs of access it thinks it needs to compete with Fox, folded the instant the White House told it to. Which is why we don’t watch CNN.

Paul Krugman has a bit more on the matter in the New York Times [via Talking Points Memo].

Posted on

[psychedelic drought]

Topic: Culture
Have you noticed how very unpsychedelic our current cultural moment is? As were the ’80s that we’re so tediously rehashing, this is an era of cocaine and Republicanism. Indeed, our whole society seems to be living in a cocaine cycle: blasts of grandiosity interspersed with hollow periods of baseless paranoia.

It turns out that the demand for psychedelics hasn’t dropped, but that the supply of acid has dried up. I know that as a good citizen I’m supposed to be happy about that, but I’m not. Psychedelic drugs have a way of knocking down dogmatism: how certain can you be about anything when you know your whole world view depends on the presence or absence of 30 micrograms of a particular chemical in your brain? (The moral effect of a strong psychedelic is a lot like that of traveling to a very strange country, which explains why they call it a trip.)

I like psychedelia. Whether it’s John Lennon pretending to be a walrus, Kurt Cobain standing too close to his amplifier, or Samuel Taylor Coleridge dreaming of the Khan’s pleasure dome, the exploratory, multilayered, richly hued aesthetic appeals to me. And I believe it does something positive for the culture at large.

Ah, well. It’s from played-out times like these — the late ’50s, the late ’80s, the Restoration — that something new rises. I just hope it’s noisy and weird.