So the Piss has turned, has it? Both my commentators have agreed, leaving only the moderator to reap vengeance? Fine.
Point Number 1: Under Capitalism, man screws man. Under communism, it's the other way around.
Agenda Item Letter B: I love America. Because I live in it. But if you're on the outside looking in, this "outpouring of aid" is more like a giant's pumpkin pie crashing down on you because his feast was so bountiful that he pushed it off the table. What the woodchuck are you going to do with a giant pumpkin pie? It's not that healthy, and fuck if you don't even have any whip cream, of either brobdingnagian or lilliputian proportions to eat it with.
Argument Animal Fish: Yeah, maybe the public did right in this one instance. But you know why? Cause it was photogenic in that awful, makes you face your own mortality kinda way. (When my roommate saw this, his first response was a shocked "oh my god". His second a "that reminds me of sim city") But Americans woudl donate so much more if we saw a picture of a puppy about to be ground up and fed to orphans, all of whom have lisps, stutters, or some other sort of speech impediment. Speaking of which, another of my friends recently referred to a Parkinson's as "speaking sign language with a stutter." He's going to hell. And so are you for laughing at it. Are these the kind of people you want making choices of aid distribution? No, of course not. Admit it, you're pulling for the bureaucratic, faceless, compassionless arm of the law to come through.
-D"Though I don't know what kind of arm does have a face"an
Editor's Note: For a scholarly (that is to say, unfunny) exchange about the aesthetics and psychology of tragedy, see Bentley's seminal Theory of History, and Foster's 7 Theses in response.
Friday, January 07, 2005
...and the Southern Shaved Bush refutes the going botanical orthodoxies
Kudos to the Leviathan on his brilliant repost-riposte below. I hate to draw attention from it, but I was glancing over the Oxford homepage which I so often ignore, and I stumbled upon what may just be the greatest and best thing in the world.
Great Tits Challenge Evolutionary Theory
Now, I'm led to one of two conclusions, each of which is sufficient to convince me that, in Hemingway's words, the world is a fine place and worth fighting for. Either Oxford--the oldest, most prestigious and best educational institution in the world--has still got the sense of humor and set of balls so utterly lacking at the likes of Fenlands Polytechnic and the place my Bulldog-associate so lovingly calls Epcot Oxford, or the old Oxonian dons are so sublimely oblivious to all things peripheral to their ivory towers that this Pulchritudinous Pun simply swam over their heads with all the grace of a swan on the River Isis.
-H.R. Chortleton IV
Great Tits Challenge Evolutionary Theory
Now, I'm led to one of two conclusions, each of which is sufficient to convince me that, in Hemingway's words, the world is a fine place and worth fighting for. Either Oxford--the oldest, most prestigious and best educational institution in the world--has still got the sense of humor and set of balls so utterly lacking at the likes of Fenlands Polytechnic and the place my Bulldog-associate so lovingly calls Epcot Oxford, or the old Oxonian dons are so sublimely oblivious to all things peripheral to their ivory towers that this Pulchritudinous Pun simply swam over their heads with all the grace of a swan on the River Isis.
-H.R. Chortleton IV
Pissing in the Wind: Round IV, or, Why Dan Hates Freedom
I wholeheartedly agree with what Baron von Foster wrote, and honestly, have little to add. So to diverge from our usual weekly format, I will now direct my ire to Castro de Bentley.
In the original posting, Daningrad wrote:
President Bush has made it clear, though, that any more aid is going to come not from the government but form the public. Right. Cause Americans have such great hearts.
Why, comrade, do you hate America? Is it the freedom you hate? In an obscure post from several years back, he wrote:
Yes, I hate freedom.
(note: the author is paraphrasing)
So there you have it. He hates freedom.
A bureaucratic eunuch from the UN, financially supported no doubt from Dan's anti-freedom PAC, claimed America was being "stingy" with their aid. To which America grabbed our collective crotch and replied, "Stingy deez nuts!" Private donations have been pouring in so heavily that agencies have more than they can possibly use. Doctors Without Borders even told people to stop donating money to tsunami relief (people are more than encouraged to give money without earmarking it to the Asian crisis, but that's a whole different story).
But back to why Dan prefers to sleep with a cool, all-encompassing iron quilt rather than a nice, warm capitalist blanket. Digging further into Dan's shady network of writings, we find another window into his drab, beige-colored mind:
You know what I hate even more than freedom? Private property. Know what I really get off on, though? The rationing out of resources.
(note: this quote is from an actual article that was never written)
So Dan likes to give away his things to super-happy-fun-benevolent government, and then stand in line for hours on end to get his weekly allowance of slurry. Well, what's keeping you, Dan?! Is it freedom that's keeping you from doing this?! Why do you insist on hating freedom!
"Communism was a good idea," he says, "it just had some bad leaders." Know what else was a "good idea" with bad leaders? Gigli, and that movie fucking sucked. "What about socialism? Sweden and other Scandinavian countries are basically socialist, and they're doing fine." Oh, they're doing fine, alright. But when Lars and Hans aren't too busy building clogs, ice-skating around in chocolate leotards and combing each other's white-blonde hair they're hurling themselves off buildings. Not to mention their governments aren't socialist, but actually run by free-masons with idyllic visions of an uber-Aryan state.
I don't know about you, my sickle and hammer bearing friend, but I'm going to go buy some deep-fried fast food from a multinational corporation, make numerous unnecessary purchases of goods produced cheaply in third-world countries, and go write inflammatory things about my government.
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
"Knock Knock","Who's There?", "Tsunami", "Tsunami Who?" "Tsunami gonna come up with a punchline for this joke"
Let me just start, as all startlingly unoriginal polemicists do, with some statistics. Some agents of the United States of America, which UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland called "stingy" last week, have ponied up the following:
-Pfizer: $35 million
-Coca Cola: $10 million
-Exxon Mobil Corp: $5 million
-Citigroup Inc.: $3 million
-Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: $3 million
-Merck & Co. Inc: $3 million in cash, plus drugs and health supplies
-Johnson & Johnson: $2 million, plus drugs and health supplies
-Abbott Laboratories Inc.: $2 million, plus drugs and other supplies.
-Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.: $1 million in cash, $4 million in antibiotics and antifungal drugs.
-Nike Inc.: $1 million
-American Express Co.: $1 million
-General Electric Co.: $1 million
-First Data Corp.: $1 million
-Amazon.com: collected about 87,000 donations totaling more than $6.2 million for the American Red Cross
-Wal-Mart Inc.: $2 million, plus donations.
-Catholic Relief Services: $25 million
That's more than $125 million and counting. This list is non-exhaustive. Also, it's a week old. Oh, and it doesn't include personal donations. Um, or the $1 billion in aid set to be paid out by the Feds themselves.
Just for grins, one could add that the US was responsible for 40 percent of all disaster relief aid paid out this past year. And if we were feeling particularly saucy, we might even let slip that Uncle Sam (or is it Uncle Scrooge?) donated $826 million to the UN World Food Programme, $100 million more than all the EU countries combined, despite the EU's larger population and GDP.
Stingy? If the US is stingy, then I'm unpretentious and satisfied with the size of my penis.
But boy, am I just all broken up about the fact the UN, the EU, the pot and the kettle all think we Yanks are a bit tight with the pursestrings. Its just that, by the time Marshall and Eisenhower and the boys got around to unclusterfucking Western Civilization and getting the electricity and running water turned back on in Brittain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the whole of Scandanavia, Germany, Austria, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, the Balkans, the British and French Near East, Northern Africa, Turkey, Greece, Japan, China, Indochina, the Phillipines, Australia, Micronesia, and Luxembourg, we were a little light on walking-around money and a bit wary of real estate scams. But, if the free world is done borrowing the Modernity we loaned it, it could give it back and we could totally hawk it at the pawn shop for like, at least a hundred bucks.
See, what's sad is that a handful of minor powers have seen fit to make a point of outspending the US in Tsunami relief. The goal is to get into a pissing contest. If for nothing else, we can credit Bush with not biting. No press conference or forced contrition, just an envelope under the table and another subtle fuck you to the UN. Bush himself donated a measly 10K out of his own pocket. Why so little? Two reasons: 1) Sitting Presidents' assets are placed in a blind trust, and word is Bush's portfolio took a dive on account of some bad advice about Enron, and 2) Bush is setting a realistic example for every American. Nobody has to break the bank to help out. If you've got a hundred decent regular people, you don't need one Hollywood hero.
And you don't need your government proxying for you either. The American people are perfectly capable of recognizing a noble cause when they see one, and the needy are far better off when that recognition comes at the business end of a debit card than when it comes at the business end of a 155mm Howitzer.
There's a little spark of something left on this side of the pond that some other parts of the world look at as peculiarly as if it were a BetaMax(R) cassette player, and it's called Civil Society. You see, Civil Society is where people get together and do things without inviting George Bush and Nancy Pelosi. Sometimes they do silly things like sell each other tupperware, or collectively ape Oprah's literary tastes, or bowl for the league championship; and sometimes they do naughty things like dress up in latex and spank each other, or burn crosses, or vote; but every now and again they do something downright strange, like put a couple cans of soup or a few dollars or a little brawn and elbow grease on a plane and send it to people they'll never meet so their lives can be a little less miserable. Odd, I know. But then again we've always been a little fucked up like that.
I close, as all startlingly unoriginal polemicists do, with a quote--nay, a Gospel--from a petty Minnesota bourgeoisie by the name of Scott Fitzgerald. He said, "France was a land, England a people. But America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter. It was the graves at Shiloh, or the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, or the country boys who died in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart."
Now, despite my wont to make the occasional lighthearted quip, there is absolutely nothing capricious or funny about Mr. Fitzgerald's words. Except that "heart" rhymes with "fart".
-The Ugly American
-Pfizer: $35 million
-Coca Cola: $10 million
-Exxon Mobil Corp: $5 million
-Citigroup Inc.: $3 million
-Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: $3 million
-Merck & Co. Inc: $3 million in cash, plus drugs and health supplies
-Johnson & Johnson: $2 million, plus drugs and health supplies
-Abbott Laboratories Inc.: $2 million, plus drugs and other supplies.
-Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.: $1 million in cash, $4 million in antibiotics and antifungal drugs.
-Nike Inc.: $1 million
-American Express Co.: $1 million
-General Electric Co.: $1 million
-First Data Corp.: $1 million
-Amazon.com: collected about 87,000 donations totaling more than $6.2 million for the American Red Cross
-Wal-Mart Inc.: $2 million, plus donations.
-Catholic Relief Services: $25 million
That's more than $125 million and counting. This list is non-exhaustive. Also, it's a week old. Oh, and it doesn't include personal donations. Um, or the $1 billion in aid set to be paid out by the Feds themselves.
Just for grins, one could add that the US was responsible for 40 percent of all disaster relief aid paid out this past year. And if we were feeling particularly saucy, we might even let slip that Uncle Sam (or is it Uncle Scrooge?) donated $826 million to the UN World Food Programme, $100 million more than all the EU countries combined, despite the EU's larger population and GDP.
Stingy? If the US is stingy, then I'm unpretentious and satisfied with the size of my penis.
But boy, am I just all broken up about the fact the UN, the EU, the pot and the kettle all think we Yanks are a bit tight with the pursestrings. Its just that, by the time Marshall and Eisenhower and the boys got around to unclusterfucking Western Civilization and getting the electricity and running water turned back on in Brittain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the whole of Scandanavia, Germany, Austria, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, the Balkans, the British and French Near East, Northern Africa, Turkey, Greece, Japan, China, Indochina, the Phillipines, Australia, Micronesia, and Luxembourg, we were a little light on walking-around money and a bit wary of real estate scams. But, if the free world is done borrowing the Modernity we loaned it, it could give it back and we could totally hawk it at the pawn shop for like, at least a hundred bucks.
See, what's sad is that a handful of minor powers have seen fit to make a point of outspending the US in Tsunami relief. The goal is to get into a pissing contest. If for nothing else, we can credit Bush with not biting. No press conference or forced contrition, just an envelope under the table and another subtle fuck you to the UN. Bush himself donated a measly 10K out of his own pocket. Why so little? Two reasons: 1) Sitting Presidents' assets are placed in a blind trust, and word is Bush's portfolio took a dive on account of some bad advice about Enron, and 2) Bush is setting a realistic example for every American. Nobody has to break the bank to help out. If you've got a hundred decent regular people, you don't need one Hollywood hero.
And you don't need your government proxying for you either. The American people are perfectly capable of recognizing a noble cause when they see one, and the needy are far better off when that recognition comes at the business end of a debit card than when it comes at the business end of a 155mm Howitzer.
There's a little spark of something left on this side of the pond that some other parts of the world look at as peculiarly as if it were a BetaMax(R) cassette player, and it's called Civil Society. You see, Civil Society is where people get together and do things without inviting George Bush and Nancy Pelosi. Sometimes they do silly things like sell each other tupperware, or collectively ape Oprah's literary tastes, or bowl for the league championship; and sometimes they do naughty things like dress up in latex and spank each other, or burn crosses, or vote; but every now and again they do something downright strange, like put a couple cans of soup or a few dollars or a little brawn and elbow grease on a plane and send it to people they'll never meet so their lives can be a little less miserable. Odd, I know. But then again we've always been a little fucked up like that.
I close, as all startlingly unoriginal polemicists do, with a quote--nay, a Gospel--from a petty Minnesota bourgeoisie by the name of Scott Fitzgerald. He said, "France was a land, England a people. But America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter. It was the graves at Shiloh, or the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, or the country boys who died in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart."
Now, despite my wont to make the occasional lighthearted quip, there is absolutely nothing capricious or funny about Mr. Fitzgerald's words. Except that "heart" rhymes with "fart".
-The Ugly American
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
Pissing Into The Wind
Are we stingy? We've been guilted by the liberal and Jewish-(mother-)dominated press into pledging $350 Million towards Tsunami relief. As near as I can figure, this is approximately the same amount it costs us to be in Iraq for 74 seconds. (twice in a row)
President Bush has made it clear, though, that any more aid is going to come not from the government but form the public. Right. Cause Americans have such great hearts. We being the nationality most able to avoid eye contact with people in squalid living conditions who are yelling at us directly. And we're going to open our hears and our pursestrings for victims that had the beachfront property we all secretly wish we could have instead of this stupid-ass-Ranch-split-level-condo-in-a-gated-community-ohmygod-i-hate-the-burbs.
So, commentators, have at it. Illuminate us. What should we do to help our brethren? Would the response be the same if the wave had hit Western Europe instead of Asia?
President Bush has made it clear, though, that any more aid is going to come not from the government but form the public. Right. Cause Americans have such great hearts. We being the nationality most able to avoid eye contact with people in squalid living conditions who are yelling at us directly. And we're going to open our hears and our pursestrings for victims that had the beachfront property we all secretly wish we could have instead of this stupid-ass-Ranch-split-level-condo-in-a-gated-community-ohmygod-i-hate-the-burbs.
So, commentators, have at it. Illuminate us. What should we do to help our brethren? Would the response be the same if the wave had hit Western Europe instead of Asia?
Newest Year Ever (or: The Metaphysics of Then)
Faced with the choice that befalls every man at some point in his life--spend New Year's Eve with the ones you love, or with the ones you love and a hundred assholes--I opted, as a change of pace, for the latter. I was invited to a party at popular high school acquaintance x's house, and there promised to be a cadre of TNA and a contingent of Ubercrombie there to help vomit forth the new year in suburban style. Now, I know you, dear Reader, would never guess it, but old Foster kid wasn't often invited to the cool-kid parties back in high school. But I married up, and the girlfriend managed to secure spots for me and a crew of friends so motley we make Vince Neil and Tommy Lee look about as well-ordered as the set of positive integers.
So what was it like to hobknob with the beautiful people, the quarterback, the homecoming queen, the social directors, the winners of yearbook superlatives? Well, this isn't fucking page six. If you want a tit-for-tat account, go read Live Journal. We here at the Enfranchised deal in Big Pictures. Often of naked ladies. But I digress...
Suffice it to say that watching the ball drop while taking a trip down memory lane that goes all the way back to when your balls dropped, was a bit surreal. I've been quoted by some sources as saying that youth is a funny thing in that you're supposed to be young when it happens, but I was old at sixteen, too fucking old to go around being reckless and carefree.
When high school ended I remember realizing with a gasp and a blink that I only had four years left to do the things I was going to regret for the rest of my life, and that if I didn't I'd regret it for the rest of my life. But I didn’t have the stomach or the semen for that.
Besides, freshman year at university is neither what’s expected by hopeful intellectuals nor what’s portrayed in B+ movies. I rarely did find the bunchings of sensitive sophists, eagerly powwowing around the vast depth of smart things and/or painstakingly harvesting their collective minds for one kernel of Universal Truth. Therewere no academic orgies, nor orgies of any kind. The frat houses were shotgun and brick affairs that led one into the other along the mediocrity of H Street. Their pulp-fabled glory was non-existent. The parties were—for lack of a better word—lame. And then I asked myself, What did you expect? Corridors of alternating pulpits and soapboxes manned by the future giants of art and politics situated under a cherry tree and flanked on either side by Coors’ Light Gardens and hook-up chateaus, fueled by a never-ending string of full frontal shots and gross out jokes? Is that what you expected? Yes. Yes it is.
But, alas, people were either typical or typically atypical of the most common common denominator. They’re Thin-Candy-Shelled-Men wandering in the RecycledLand, whose deviancies and rebellions fall neatly into accepted norms. The last new idea was that we should be open to new ideas, and now all that's left are second-rate, third-generation Subterraneans who wear their old costumes with all the oblivious absurdity of a British Magistrate in his powdered wig...
Maybe that's why the suburban shindig at x's house was so oddly satisfying. Call it the-devil-you-know, but these people whose adolescences waltzed with mine all those years ago, they were somehow softer now, realer and less anonymous than the herds of WASPs and JAPs and BoBos in training who graze on stale beer and resin at America's institutions of higher learning. Now they're my small town heroes: The prankster who joined the Corps and ships off to Iraq next month, but not before you buy him dinner; that popped-collar who kicked his low-grade coke habit and worked his ass from County Junior College to Big State University, and dropped some of his superiority along the way; the dandy who's finally out and happy and minus one chip on his shoulder; and, of course, all the girls you thought you could have saved, the best of them with something like a self now to go along with the flesh.
If I've rambled its because the point is slippery here. Essays that hit a vein ought, if 9th grade biology serves me, get eventually to the heart. But essays that hit an artery...well, there the end of the road is a thousand other roads. But I suppose if there's something to be gleaned from this dwelling qua prose, it's the lessons of that temporal nexus we call midnight--when the bleary-eyed, sentimental longings of the past and the bright-eyed, zealous pronouncements for the future hurdle toward one another for about ten seconds, and collide for the briefest of instants at the orgastic Nowly Nowness of Now. Its just about the only time the artist, hedonist, and scientist versions of You are ever seen in the same room together.
-The '05 Baby.
PS: How obscure was this post? Your opinion is valuable to us, and will help us continue to bring you only the most obscure insight here at The Enfranchised. Please vote using the Modern Language Association's Obscurity scale: 1 being Charlie's Angels and 10 being Finnegan's Wake.
So what was it like to hobknob with the beautiful people, the quarterback, the homecoming queen, the social directors, the winners of yearbook superlatives? Well, this isn't fucking page six. If you want a tit-for-tat account, go read Live Journal. We here at the Enfranchised deal in Big Pictures. Often of naked ladies. But I digress...
Suffice it to say that watching the ball drop while taking a trip down memory lane that goes all the way back to when your balls dropped, was a bit surreal. I've been quoted by some sources as saying that youth is a funny thing in that you're supposed to be young when it happens, but I was old at sixteen, too fucking old to go around being reckless and carefree.
When high school ended I remember realizing with a gasp and a blink that I only had four years left to do the things I was going to regret for the rest of my life, and that if I didn't I'd regret it for the rest of my life. But I didn’t have the stomach or the semen for that.
Besides, freshman year at university is neither what’s expected by hopeful intellectuals nor what’s portrayed in B+ movies. I rarely did find the bunchings of sensitive sophists, eagerly powwowing around the vast depth of smart things and/or painstakingly harvesting their collective minds for one kernel of Universal Truth. Therewere no academic orgies, nor orgies of any kind. The frat houses were shotgun and brick affairs that led one into the other along the mediocrity of H Street. Their pulp-fabled glory was non-existent. The parties were—for lack of a better word—lame. And then I asked myself, What did you expect? Corridors of alternating pulpits and soapboxes manned by the future giants of art and politics situated under a cherry tree and flanked on either side by Coors’ Light Gardens and hook-up chateaus, fueled by a never-ending string of full frontal shots and gross out jokes? Is that what you expected? Yes. Yes it is.
But, alas, people were either typical or typically atypical of the most common common denominator. They’re Thin-Candy-Shelled-Men wandering in the RecycledLand, whose deviancies and rebellions fall neatly into accepted norms. The last new idea was that we should be open to new ideas, and now all that's left are second-rate, third-generation Subterraneans who wear their old costumes with all the oblivious absurdity of a British Magistrate in his powdered wig...
Maybe that's why the suburban shindig at x's house was so oddly satisfying. Call it the-devil-you-know, but these people whose adolescences waltzed with mine all those years ago, they were somehow softer now, realer and less anonymous than the herds of WASPs and JAPs and BoBos in training who graze on stale beer and resin at America's institutions of higher learning. Now they're my small town heroes: The prankster who joined the Corps and ships off to Iraq next month, but not before you buy him dinner; that popped-collar who kicked his low-grade coke habit and worked his ass from County Junior College to Big State University, and dropped some of his superiority along the way; the dandy who's finally out and happy and minus one chip on his shoulder; and, of course, all the girls you thought you could have saved, the best of them with something like a self now to go along with the flesh.
If I've rambled its because the point is slippery here. Essays that hit a vein ought, if 9th grade biology serves me, get eventually to the heart. But essays that hit an artery...well, there the end of the road is a thousand other roads. But I suppose if there's something to be gleaned from this dwelling qua prose, it's the lessons of that temporal nexus we call midnight--when the bleary-eyed, sentimental longings of the past and the bright-eyed, zealous pronouncements for the future hurdle toward one another for about ten seconds, and collide for the briefest of instants at the orgastic Nowly Nowness of Now. Its just about the only time the artist, hedonist, and scientist versions of You are ever seen in the same room together.
-The '05 Baby.
PS: How obscure was this post? Your opinion is valuable to us, and will help us continue to bring you only the most obscure insight here at The Enfranchised. Please vote using the Modern Language Association's Obscurity scale: 1 being Charlie's Angels and 10 being Finnegan's Wake.
Monday, January 03, 2005
Luxury's Lap
Mich Napolitano always was a funny bird. One of those guys who would be eccentric if he had money, but as things stood he was just plain crazy. I remember him explaining his Wiccan beliefs to seventh-grade me (he was an illustrious eighth-grader), when my knowledge of witchcraft was almost entirely culled from Nick-at-Nite reruns of Bewitched. And he and John Atkinson did a great scene from The Importance of Being Earnest at some high school drama festival (I can't remember who was Algernon and who was Jack, but, neither can the characters, so it evens out). So maybe it's because he's carved himself a niche in my mind's pantheon, but Mich Napolitano is the only person whose choice of Dunhill cigarettes I can respect.
You know Dunhills. Reds, Blues, Menthol Greens. They're the "top shelf" pack on the 7-11, holding their noses higher than the Camels and Marlboros to the left. They cost more, sure, but remember: you're not paying for a premium blend, you're paying for status. These have not one but two of those tin foil wrappers on the inside, presumably because a "Dunhill Man" needs to savor his cigarettes with a bit more freshness.
But if you really care about the quality of your tobacco, are you really shopping at the 7-11? No, you are not. You are shopping at Nat Sherman's or Mac's Smoke Shop or some store which caters to your taste. You are buying a brand no one has heard of because you think it will suit your palate better. If you are buying Dunhills, it is because you have an extra $1.80 burning a hole in your pocket and you want to treat yourself to "the best". The same reason that people buy Grey Goose or Glenlivet or Tanqueray Ten. These are not the best, these are just the best popular members of their classes.
So, enjoy your faux luxury. Drink it down. But I hope a small part of you remembers: there's no such thing as the best rum. So either invest as much time as disposable income and sample a wide range of sorts to develop your taste... or drop a packet of sweet and low in ethanol and call it a life.
Sunday, January 02, 2005
How the Reviews Were Won [UPDATED]
In Today's Times, Margo Jefferon calls out performance artists. Great, the kind of sneering disdain for those cream puffs of the art world. Normally, I live for this kind of stuff.
"Do what you're good at," she yells (paraphrased, cause she's, well, let me put it this way: she hates talking in straight lines when circumlocution will do). Her call for collaboration is appreciated. But only as a critic. Any artist would be a fool to listen to her, unless they actually cared about the art.
Americans don't want to believe in collaboration. They believe in the monoartist: for a film, he writes, directs, lights, dresses, dollies grip, and controls each of the actors with an elaborate mannequizing machine he designed himself. Oh, also, he *was* the sick kid that inspired the whole damn thing. If a singer took Jefferson's advice not to write their own songs, every middle-class critic (the kind who actually create middle-class snobs, who are the ones spending middle-class dollars to create media-class empires) would deride them as just another pop-tart, propped up on the backs of hacks so untalented they can't even get their names known.
If you want to make it as an artist, you have to be Woody Allen. I mean, except for the, well, you know. But this is something so devious you have to be as neurotic as Woody to get it: every time somebody criticizes his jack-of-all-trades-approach by saying, "he may be a great director, but he limits himself with his acting", well, he just got you to compliment his directing.
And that's one more compliment for directing a major motion picture than you've ever gotten.
[Of course, the thing Jefferson would hate most is a world in which instead of using another's points, we responded directly. Shakespeare and his cronies^Wpeers were the men who took a tale they liked, and redid it. Now such productions are the province of Jerry Bruckheimerettes, looking for a cheap way to generate power by harnessing the rotational energy of Jimmy Stewart's Grave. How ironic to shape something out of the ashes of a movie called Flight of the Phoenix, eh? (if this blog were a Batman-era comic, there would be a sound effect balloon with the words, stylized, "Unintended Irony!") Of course, this is what English is like nowadays: armchair readers who only write about emotions at several syllables' distance. And historians have long since stopped talking about events, and only now discuss analyses of second-hand retellings.
Or, maybe in her darkest nightmares, she envisions a land in which some awful blogger, finding himself with nothing else to say, decides to tear apart nonsensically her earnest warning, instead of just taking to heart what substance he could find in it.]
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