Review: The Communist Manifesto

[printed in the entertainment section of today's Stanford Daily]

["The Record Bin" encourages readers to try oldies but goodies by reviewing art that's moved from the new releases shelf to the classics rack.]

Reading it now, "The Communist Manifesto", by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, seems prescient. It predicted the rise of consumerism, federalism, and intellectualism: aside from also forecasting a quick and permanent revolt of the working class, Marx and Engels were right on the money.

These authors actually created the now-cliché genre of "boy meets girl, boy is downtrodden by bourgeoisie, boy overthrows yoke of oppression, boy engages in dialectic." And the plot grips you from page 1 and never lets go. They trace the roots of communism from ancient Rome to the discovery of American (in a blatant attempt to spice up the visual appeal of the movie adaptation).

But their work is not without flaws. The opening sentence introduces and names their main character: "A specter is haunting Europe--the specter of communism." But what next? We are not given any description of the specter. Even rudimentary details like eye color, height, or visible scars/tattoos would turn this sweeping philosophical movement into a believable person.

And at a few points, the authors allow their other interests to peek through. Marx and Engels pulled the 18th-century equivalent of printing a paper in 14-point courier when they start the second chapter with 11 consecutive one-sentence paragraphs (at the time, political tract publishers paid the author not by the line or sentence but per paragraph) And though they do offer a concise version of the entire work in the sentence "the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single phrase:", they do so deep in the middle of prose where skimmers will repeatedly miss it, consequently earning them further royalties from sales of the Cliffs Notes.

Of course these are all criticisms born out of a deep love for the work. M&E were the first to do what they did, and arguably the best. Who can forget the haunting refrain of "They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder." or the melodic, poppy jingle "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." So when I complain that the final sentence "WORKINGMEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!" is just one gtg and two lol's away from being the product not of two enormous economic minds but a 13 year-old girl on a cellphone, remember that it is done as a longtime fan.

After writing the Manifesto, Marx and Engels broke up. The reasons? A mixture of skyrocketing production costs, their deaths, and the tiresome meddling of Yoko. So don't wait to catch them on tour and pick up this book. [A cautionary note: most bookstores will try to "upsell" you to a premium edition of the work, perhaps leather-bound, that includes B-sides, demo tapes, or live versions. Avoid these like the plague, or you'll end up as ashamed as the time you walked into Tower looking to buy "The Sign" single and walked out with an Ace of Base box set.] This collaboration marked the peak of each of their careers: Marx's sophomore effort, Das Kapital, is admittedly genius, but also an FDA-approved treatment for insomnia. And Engels never managed to regain his footing after the emotional toll of the faction, instead spending years in and out of rehab hoping against hope for a reunion tour and writing no fewer than twelve distinct prefaces over the next forty years.

Which isn't a bad thing, per se: if some other fallen legends had taken a similar route, our world might have been spared both Wings and "Ringo and the All-Starrs".

Friends Don't Let Friends Whine Punk

How well do you know your punk-teen?

I know, its a scary question. Time was when you wouldn't even have to think about it. When you asked your punk-teen just where she thought she was going at this hour, you could be sure that her response of "Away from your Fascism, Helen!" meant the Social Distortion show at CBGB (OMFUG), where she'd spend her hours in a 120 decibel catharsis before emotionally enslaving the Bassist from Jones Crusher and brutally stopping his advance from Second to Third.

But in these trying times, can you be sure even of this? Every day--in the paper, on the evening news, at your dinner parties--there are new stories about punk teens trading in their mohawks for faux-hawks, piercings for clip ons, filthy for "vintage". Why, I'd be as wealthy as Good Charlotte if I had a nickel for every time I heard about a parent accidentally walking in on an embarrassed punk-teen scrambling to cover up his iPod or to change the channel from MTV2.

It wasn't long ago that you'd see cheap, basement-made EP cassettes and vinyl lining your punk-teen's bedroom floor, those days when your intrusions would meet with screaming and door slamming and even the occasional wish for your death. But sadly, this is no more.

The vaguely directed rage has turned to Meloncholy (sans, even, The Infinite Sadness); the mood-swings of emotional breadth have turned to brood-swings of emotional depth. I'm afraid to say that our children have lost the Parental Advisories on their music, and with it, their innocence. There is a growing underbelly of archy out there; of well-organized, well-funded music shows at big venues, complete with sound engineers and lighting technicians, tickets to which are available only from Ticketmaster (R). Indeed it seems that the only constants in this age of uncertainty are the amorphous angst and the black eyeliner. That's right, friends:

Your children are so fucking Emo that it literally hurts.

But its not too late. Talk to your kids, tell them that its ok to be effectual again. Tell them its ok to want to get laid for its own sake, and not just for the post-coital longing. Tell them that its ok to turn up the volume and the gain on their Marshall Stacks; or, if your youngsters have already unplugged, that its ok to play major progressions again. Tell your son that the number of tattoos he has should be proportional to his chances of winning a fight, not inversely proportional to it. Tell your daughter that there will be plenty of time for unexplained emotional distance once she's married, and that its possible not to fall in love with every sickly sixteen year old who sort of looks like Chris from Dashboard Confessional. And most of all tell them that sometimes, just sometimes, the sigh and the thousand-mile-gaze are inappropriate responses to external stimuli.

All this and more in my forthcoming educational video: Blood on the Frets.

An Open Letter to Pop-Punk Emo

Dear Pop-Punk Emo,

Why must you be so good? You don't help me feel better about myself, my life, or my future. In fact, you make me feel bad. And not naughty-but-exciting-bad or evil-archnemesis-but-worthy-foe-bad. I mean curling-up-in-a-corner- and-then-being-sad- that-i-can't-do-anything- even-just-crying-right bad. Why must your lyrics be so creative and compelling when they are, objectively, about situations and circumstances quite awful. Why must Saves the Day's chords be so angsty but also bubblegummy? Your ironical sense of the world, finding the cloud around every silver lining, is reminiscent of Hemingway or Fitzgerald, but instead of having short sentences or fluid prose, you pile misery upon bad luck.

And yet, I come running. I heart your titles with their poignant combination of literary allusions, pop cultural references, and more words than can fit on one line of my iPod/iTunes/iClaudius interface. I have come to you many a night when the last thing I needed was to dwell on matters now ancient. And you, you with your backing vocals and well-timed-regression-to-acoustic informed me that I still had open wounds by rubbing the salt of your melancholic melodies into them.

But it is time to take a stand. No more will I listen to any album whose subtitle could very well be "50 ways to kill your significant other". Or that tries to sound triumphant through 40 minutes of complaint. Please release from your grasp and take me off your mailing list.

Unless you have new releases forthcoming because, if nothing else, I need new songs to get stuck in my head.

I remain your humble servant, &c.,
Dan Bentley

Pissing In The Wind: Short, unfunny, and not wrong

So many words, so many links this week. What more can I say/point to?

Instead, I offer a suggestion: what if girls are innately worse at math and science? But not math and science in general, the math and science that predominately men have spent centuries creating? A math and science that, created by male minds, fits itself to male minds?

Great Minds Think Alike, for the appropriate definition of great,
Dan (probably speaking for the other Dan and the Lev)

Pissing in the Wind, Round ?: Orgasmic Chemistry

Before I get into this week's topic of gender roles/differences, as articulated by Harvard President/bull-in-a-china-shop Larry Summers, I should make a quick disclaimer. Like JFK, Natalie Portman, and the Unabomber, I'm a product of The Kremlin on the Charles, and have seen my share of Harvard debates turned national debates. Mostly, the only reason they get press is because of where they take place. Were this to happen at, say, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, I doubt any newspaper besides the Star Ledger would waste any ink on its behalf. So I tend to not take these things very seriously. So keep that in mind, as well as the distinct possibility that I've been brainwashed by the elitist, intelligentsia of fair-at-all-costs Harvard. But anyway, let me begin...

America is a nation of whiners. Always have been, always will be. We were founded by a bunch of whiners. "We want to practice our crazy religion and churn butter all day long," the Puritans whined. Thus, Massachusetts was born. "We don't want to pay our debts," and thus, Georgia was born. "We don't want to take showers," and thus, New Jersey was born. Then we whined about taxes and sequestering soldiers and having to chop down cherry trees and being forced to lie about it. And thus, America was born. The South whined about taxes, we whined back about slavery, and we had the civil war. Then a bunch of stuff happened which we naturally whined about...

Fast-forward to the 1960s. It was then that whining reached it's zenith in America history. Whining became a way of life. In fact, whining became its own movement, captivating the disillusioned youth and inspiring them to stage numerous sit-ins, teach-ins, LSD-ins, and other acts of symbolic protest which required little to no effort. They whined and they whined and they whined. And eventually, they won a few battles. We withdrew from Vietnam, and Nixon was forced to resign.

But then the generation of whiners grew up. Their whining was turned elsewhere. Rather than taking on The Man, they took on The Corporate Ladder. Instead of protesting the government's role in world affairs, they protested the government's role in their lives. Supply-side economics was Hot, and bellbottoms was Not.

What does this all have to do with Summers saying women suck at science for a reason? Well, if there's one thing the ex-whiners turned Reagan Democrats love to whine about, it's whining about how much the current generation whines about political correctness. Summers response was met by the religiously-PC camp with accusations that Summers thinks women (or rather, wimmyn, womin, or whatever it is you're supposed to say) are genetically stupid, and on the other side, by the religiously anti-PC faction that Summers' deriders were freedom hating lesbian-communists whose aim is to hyphenate every word in the English language. Allow me to take a side somewhere in between what I have misrepresented these two sides as saying.

I once read of an experiment where a group of Asian schoolgirls (easy there, perv) was given a math test. When they took it the first time, they filled out their name and gender on the answer sheet. The second time, their name and race/ethnicity. The two tests were relatively the same degree of difficulty. Surprisingly--or perhaps not--when they wrote "female" they did worse than when they wrote "Asian." And when they wrote "Asian" AND "female" the research team became incredibly turned-on. (Sorry, couldn't resist).

Obviously social roles, expectations, et. al. have something to do with performance. Granted not everything. I seem to remember reading once that males and females have their brains wired differently--one is more left-brained or right-brained than the other. But I'm sure that doesn't explain why the vast majority of people teaching or majoring in one of the hard sciences will be male, and the humanities female.

To be honest, I think the more interesting question is the relation between good-lookingness and intelligence. Go to any Ivy League campus and look around for a while and tell me what you see. I guarantee you'll see a student body composed of wildebeests, hunchbacks, and the disfigured. Do the genes that control for facial symmetry also control one's preference for shiny objects and loud noises? Is IQ lessened by 10 points for each cup size after A? Sure there are exceptions--myself and my co-bloggers obviously included--but by and large this holds true.

Just think about when you meet a person who is both good-looking and intelligent. You don't trust them. You just know there's something wrong with them. They're either: 1) an alien, 2) a free-mason, 3) a robot, 4) psychotic, or 5) gay/taken. Either that, or: 1) you're actually quite slow yourself and the person isn't all that smart, 2) you have painfully low standards, or 3) you're drunk, and it's a combination of 1 and 2.

Like Foster, I'd also like to close with a joke of my own:
A man walks into a bar. Ouch.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

(Same post, different blog)

A Monologue of silence

In honor of the passing of Johnny Carson, a man funnier than Foster or The Leviathan can ever hope to be, I offer these snippets from his final monologue:

"The greatest accolade I think I received: G.E. named me 'Employee of the Month.'" [Editor's note: his show was the greatest moneymaker in NBC history, and at one point was 19% of the network's profits.]

"Farewells are a little awkward, and I really thought about this -- no joke -- wouldn't it be funny, instead of showing up tonight, putting on a rerun? NBC did not find that funny at all."

"During the run on the show there have been seven United States Presidents, and thankfully for comedy there have been eight Vice Presidents of the United States."

"And I said, well, I would prefer to end like we started -- rather quietly, in our same time slot, in front of our same shabby little set. It is rather shabby. We offered it to a homeless shelter and they said 'No, thank you.' I am taking the applause sign home -- putting it in the bedroom. And maybe once a week just turning it on."

And, finally, the way I hope I feel, said better than Nietzsche or Thoreau could, of a highlight reel: "If I could magically, somehow, that tape you just saw, make it run backwards. I would like to do the whole thing over again."