Thomas Friedman, the abysmal "Foreign Affairs" op-ed columnist for The New York Times, inadvertently made the single most intelligent point I've seen in that paper in several years...
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Friedman need look no further than his own employers to prove that statement.
In an astonishing above-the-fold [front-page article today,] reporter Erik Eckholm claimed that China "has already achieved a dramatic slowing in its emissions of carbon dioxide in the last decade..." His key sources: Zhou Dadi, "director of the Energy Research Institute of the central government's State Development Planning Commission" and Gao Feng, a "Foreign Ministry official" in Beijing. Later in the article, Eckholm cites corroborating "reports" from California's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and an American environmental group "that aids energy conservation projects in China." No names are given.
Why would anyone would believe information coming from China's propaganda machine after it has lied about U.S. political prisoners in its country and misled its own citizens about the Americans the belligerent dictatorship detained several months ago? It defies reason. It's understandable that young students, such as the Harvard hotdogs who staged a self-aggrandizing sit-in in Cambridge recently, would be taken in by the Chinese government, but adults such as those who edit the Times might be expected to be more suspicious of such information.
But why bother with facts when there's another opportunity to attack a Republican president? That's the Arthur Sulzberger/Howell Raines style of journalism, and it's getting uglier day by day.
In a [June 14 editorial,] for example, the Times gave grudging praise to the administration's efforts, through CIA Director George Tenet's intervention, to promote a lasting ceasefire in the Mideast. I happen to think that President Bush needs to demonstrate more decisive leadership on this quagmire?for surely this truce will be as temporary as every other that's preceded it?and one hopes that in the next few weeks he'll indeed defend Israel's position in a direct way. The Times has little faith in that possibility, instead praising United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan for getting involved in the process. Considering Annan's track record, which falls a bit short of say, Winston Churchill's, that's reassuring.
The day before, the [Times][ blasted Bush for his pro-death-penalty stance.] The paper is embarrassed because so many European heads of state think the U.S. is barbaric for maintaining an entirely sensible form of punishment. It was terrible timing, the June 13 editorial maintained, to execute Timothy McVeigh on the eve of Bush's trip abroad. The writer concluded: "A broad reconsideration of the death penalty is required nationwide. It is an unfairly administered punishment whose claims as a deterrent have been largely discredited. It is also, as President Bush is learning, a foreign policy liability."
Regardless of the Times' diplomatic lectures, it's safe to say that should any ally?even France or Germany?require U.S. assistance in the future, this country's current commitment to the death penalty would be quickly forgotten.
(6/15)
First there was the irritating AOL presale, which I thought was crap. (I tried to snag tickets through my colleague's AOL account and got sent to Ticketmaster. Later, I was forwarded to AOL's tech services department.) Then you had people hawking tickets to her European shows on eBay and other sites, asking upward of $1000 per ticket. Now the [Post reports this morning] that readers of the online German magazine [Thema1](http://www.thema1.de) can get tickets to Madonna's sold-out concert in Berlin next week?in exchange for having sex with one of the magazine's staffers.
Thema1 publisher Bernd Heusinger notes that "there's nothing illegal [going on]...though it may be considered reprehensible." Apparently, 22 readers are champing at the bit to see Madge, and several of the 12 enterprising male applicants sent nude photos to Thema1.
The whole scheme is not reprehensible, since no one's being forced to partake in the bidding; plus, prostitution is legal in Germany anyway. What's appalling is that only "four gay readers" sent in bids to have sex with a gay staffer. Guys, what's up with that?
(6/15)
Starting this fall, hungry Japanese consumers will finally be able to get a little taste of revenge upon the creature that destroyed Tokyo (and several surrounding suburbs) so many times since 1956, by picking up a can of Godzilla Meat.
Yes, honest-to-goodness Godzilla meat.
Packaged in small, Spam-like tins decorated with pictures of the giant, radioactive fire-breathing lizard, "Godzilla Meat" is actually just corned beef. Which is a relief, actually?when I first heard the news, I was afraid that it might mean that Godzilla had finally died. And where would we be then? Who would protect us from the likes of Biollante, Barugon or the Smog Monster? Mothra?
According to a Takara spokesperson, sounding just like a character from almost any of the Toho films, "People can eat Godzilla and become energetic and powerful. It's got dreams mixed in with fun."
Also, with the more vengeful consumer in mind, Takara plans a whole series of Toho-related, Tokyo-crushing canned meat products, including "King Ghidora Meat" (more corned beef) and the barbecued chicken of "Rodan Meat"?misidentified in the AP story as "Radon Meat," which would be something else entirely, more akin to "H-Man Meat."
Unfortunately, Takara officials said that they have no plans to export the products to the United States. Which gives me an idea. Perhaps this should be the impetus for some bright entrepreneur to finally start marketing Soylent Green.
(6/15)
[James Ridgeway's "Mondo Washington" column] starts out innocuously enough on page 28; it's an interesting story on Laili Helms, an American woman who's become the "unofficial ambassador" for the Taliban leaders in Afghanistan. The Taliban, as you know, have been on feminist shit lists from NOW to the Muslim Women's League ever since they took over Afghanistan several years ago. Afghan women who once enjoyed relative autonomy are now more or less under house arrest, forced to cover themselves with full-body burqas under threat of death, and are sexually abused by husbands and other family members. The story continues through half of page 29, at the top of which there's an accompanying photograph of three Afghan women swimming in fabric and mesh, the kind of uniforms you see in heavy-duty pest control.
So what's the ad that takes up the other half of the page? Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation. There's a woman in truck-flap profile?arched back, string bikini, satin sheets?staring up at the third Afghan woman. Underneath the satin sheets you read that a board-certified gynecologist, in LA no less, will "completely re-sculpt and rejuvenate the vagina with a one-hour laser procedure." And back at the top of the ad there's a tagline positioned directly across from the photo of the three women, with their tilted and bowed and Munch-like heads, that reads, "You won't believe how good sex can be!"
I don't know if this was deliberate or not, but either way, it's an interesting bit of social commentary.
(6/15)
This isn't so unusual when you consider that fans in full makeup have gotten married at Kiss conventions, or that plenty of the band's adult fans (some, frighteningly in terms of taste, with children) have turned their homes into Kiss shrines. Why not go the distance, and six feet under, with a Kiss casket, maybe to the strains of "Beth"? I can already hear the whispered conversations: "Dude, you know, like, Beth is God in this song, only this time him and the boys can come home right now, they finally found the sound. This is so heavy, man, hand me some tissues."
Frankly, it's great news for the rest of the world that the band anticipates its fans' imminent departures, although maybe a Kiss retirement village in Hollywood, FL, might've been a more logical first step for all those spigotheads who didn't die before they turned 30. To judge by the burgeoning 70s package tours that hit America every summer, plenty of people over 30 want to go on believing that that decade was the zenith of great pop music. More likely is that, like most music "fans" before and since, those people simply stopped buying records when they hit their early 20s, turning their musical tastes into nostalgia-laden time capsules instead of making any effort to let them grow.
(This is assuming they ever exerted any initiative at all with their musical tastes. The 70s bands now revered by so many morons were force-fed to listeners by record companies, albeit in ways that seem subtle by today's bludgeoning standards.)
True, something like this is one more zit on the ass of America's decaying culture, but what the hell? Take a look around: Kiss is like Mozart compared to what passes for a lot of pop music today. I flashback to the most rabid Kiss fan I knew in my teen years, this pudgy, troubled kid named Billy who always smelled vaguely of feces and owned every Kiss product: dolls, lunchboxes, Halloween costumes, even the special plastic bag one attained only by buying all four Kiss solo albums simultaneously at the local mall. My most vivid memory of Billy finds him in our junior high lavatory, urinating on a clanking radiator in his Love Gun t-shirt, watching the steam rise and muttering, "Man, I love that smell," just before being roughly collared and then suspended by our vice principal.
By today's standards, Billy would be a relatively happy, well-adjusted kid.
So bring on the caskets, I say, and let's not stop there. Rather than use a staid old crematorium, a recently departed fan (for a nominal four-figure sum) could stipulate in his will that Ted Nugent could use his gas-soaked corpse to shoot a flaming arrow into at one of his shows. The aging delinquents at the county fair would go wild seeing something like that. Or doomsday cults could book Styx to reenact their astoundingly awful Kilroy Was Here stage show in local theaters, which would make even an "Up with People" rally consider a Jonestown-style mass suicide.
Alice Cooper, what hath thou wrought? I like to think you're laughing about all this, but considering your time's now spent on the golf course or at your new theme restaurant in Arizona, something tells me you've been taking copious notes from your students.
(6/15)
More: "'We're not looking to be an underground art mag or be like ArtForum with only 12,000 copies,' Yellin says. 'We're looking to go from the street up, not the museum down. It's going to be a mass market publication; whether that happens on the first run or the third remains to be seen.' He predicts that circulation will eventually hit 'millions.'
"Lindvall's fellow mannequin Karen Elson is also involved with the mag..."
Meanwhile, [the front page of The New York Times' "Weekend" section] bears today an article with the headline "Watching Movies with Julianne Moore," in which a reporter sits through Rosemary's Baby with the actress and records her apercus. And so: "'This used to terrify me, just terrify me,' said Julianne Moore, popping a Milk Dud into her mouth and staring at the television screen with happy, fearful anticipation. 'It's like a mother's lullaby, only really creepy. Look at the Dakota, how terrifying it looks, and yet normal at the same time. I used to live a block from there on 71st Street. Wow, I love the beginning of this movie.'"
And again: "'The camera work is extraordinary; the acting is superb,' she said. 'It's a movie movie. And it's just one of these movies that, I don't know, bring you to another place cinematically. Those are the kind of movies I like.'"
(6/15)
It seems that there would remain one small area of Manhattan in which porn shops and titty bars would be able to operate under at least a modicum of freedom?a short stretch of the waterfront along the Hudson River. Already, it seems, some proprietors are looking to move their shops into the area, rather than scrambling (once again) to meet the new regulations. And you know what that means? Unintentionally or not, the City Planning Commission has, in effect, paved the way for an honest-to-goodness red light district!
Time was, even when Times Square was alive, you still had to claw your way through the tourists and theatergoers, past "legitimate" theaters and souvenir stands, before you finally reached what you went there to find. Now, however, should this ordinance be passed, those citizens who care to patronize adult establishments will know right where to go. They'll all be packed in there together?a mile of glittering, glorious sordidness! It'll be like a shopping mall of smut! And what's more, those who used to be ashamed to sneak into Show World during their lunch breaks, fearing a coworker might catch them, would now have nothing to worry about. Because again, should this happen, everyone who goes there will be going there for the same reason. Everyone will know, and everyone will understand. There will be no more shame in browsing the "Amateur" section, or taking in a little show all by yourself.
So, surprised as I am to hear myself say this, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the Planning Commission does the right thing, and returns to New York a taste of the seaminess that helped make this city great.
(6/15)
Irony abounds. Wouldn't a better song have been "Death of a Clown" by the Kinks? "Laugh at Me" by Sonny Bono? "Tears of a Clown" by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles? "Forever Young"? The kids in the studio must have been strapped to their seats, because I would have bolted in terror. The only greater, more horrible irony would have been singing it to Dylan himself.
In the film clips, it looked like Corgan has reeled in his image a bit, ditching the emaciated Uncle Fester look for a more conventional "self-conscious nerd with a shaved head" style. Since he is bald, the question arises why he didn't dab on some pancake makeup and simply wear the rock star duds he has in many of his videos, thus exactly emulating the look of a circus clown. Thankfully, Michael Stipe and Marilyn Manson were nowhere to be found.
After the song, Corgan sat next to his father in the audience. Is this refreshingly down-to-earth or just plain weird? That sort of uncertainty has always been my problem with clowns and rock stars in general. What are rock stars, really, but extensions of the kind of over-the-top weirdoes a child sees at the circus in his formative years? The only problem, obviously, is clowns don't take themselves seriously and are not turned into cultural icons by the fawning media. They do try to exploit a child's emotions, but, one hopes, those of happiness and delight, as opposed to self-pity and general loathing. And they don't become jaded millionaires in the process.
So a clown with a guitar paid homage to a real clown, in a world that apparently wants neither of them anymore. Corgan can go back to his fading rock-star life, and Bozo... Well, Bozo, for all I know, is going back to a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 in the senior citizens' highrise of some small Midwestern town. In the end a better song might have been "Take This Job and Shove It" by Johnny Paycheck.
(6/14)
He said: "[My wife] and I spent the weekend together, and took one last look at it, and looking into my children's eyes, I thought, I don't want to make the commitment to be away from them, not just for the period of the four months of the campaign, but for what it would take to be an effective congressman over the period of the next 10 or 20 or 30 years."
Heartwarming, but you'd think Max would've thought of the kids before he spent half a million on a house so he'd be eligible to run in the 9th. After all, a Kennedy dollar isn't worth what it once was.
The New York Times, uncharacteristically, [took a swipe at Kennedy in a June 12 article]. Reporter Carey Goldberg writes: "Today, Mr. Kennedy left the door open for a future run. ÔAs my father often quoted from The Song of Solomon, "To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven,"' he said in his statement. (The line is actually from Ecclesiastes.)"
In [yesterday's Boston Globe,] Scot Lehigh spelled out the obvious, that it just wouldn't do for a Kennedy to lose a race in Massachusetts. He said: "The Kennedys, up to [Sen. Teddy Kennedy] himself, are said to have been intensely worried about a political domino effect. If Max lost, what might that mean for Patrick, on the defensive in Rhode Island after several years of boorish behavior, or for Mark Shriver, running against a long-time GOP incumbent next year [in Maryland], or Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the third generation's female hopeful?
"ÔThere were three separate careers to consider,' says one knowledgeable Democratic operative. ÔIf Max went down, I can guarantee you Patrick would have bought himself an opponent and Mark Shriver gets hurt as well. That's what happens with a royal family on the ballot.'"
Lehigh might've noted that Townsend, contrary to the Beltway buzz, doesn't exactly have a lock on Maryland's Democratic gubernatorial nomination next year, despite holding the office of lieutenant governor there. Baltimore's popular Mayor Martin O'Malley, should he decide to challenge Townsend, is young and charismatic, a startling contrast to the frumpy scion, and might be the beneficiary of an anti-Kennedy backlash.
I did get a kick out of Howard Fineman's [MSNBC online article ] yesterday in which he wrote that Townsend "is likely to be elected [Maryland's] governor" and didn't even mention O'Malley. I wonder if Fineman's ever heard of the Baltimorean?
The Newsweek political pundit, and one of Hardball host Chris Matthews' 100 closest friends, started off his piece with a nice bit of unintentional self-parody. He wrote: "The White House Correspondents' Dinner is an oppressive event: a ballroom full of insufferably self-important Washington insiders stuffed into tuxedos and gowns for a long evening of forced fellowship, bad food and worse jokes."
Uh, Howard, then why do you attend such occasions?
(6/14)
[The New York Post reported yesterday] that the instant Timothy McVeigh died, "crime-buff bottom-feeders" began packing eBay and other auction sites with items connected, in even the most obscure way, with the execution.
Though eBay, having recently instituted a "no crime memorabilia" policy, yanked the items as soon as they appeared, they did report that users had tried to post everything from McVeigh's letters to a clearly fraudulent "handwritten last statement" to a baseball cap owned by a prison guard who watched McVeigh.
While this was happening, some enterprising soul began sending e-mails around the country that promised a video of the execution. Those who took the bait, however, [found themselves saddled with a particularly nasty virus,] which would give hackers remote access to their victims' computers. Apparently they knew what to offer.
At the other end of the "Morbid Voyeur Scale," or MVS, [a judge in Daytona Beach sided with stock car legend Dale Earnhardt's widow] by barring the release of his post-autopsy photos to a website and a local college paper.
While the judge and Mrs. Earnhardt argued (and rightly so, I think) that posting these photos on the Internet would constitute a grotesque breach of privacy and would be incredibly painful for the family, lawyers for the college paper argued that releasing the photos would not only help determine whether the coroner did a good job, but also go a long way toward making stock car racing safer.
"We want a safer future where a great good has been served... We want more information because we want to stop these deaths from happening," the lawyer said.
Nobody really took him very seriously after that.
I think he would have done a lot better for himself, and everyone, if he'd just been honest. They wanted these pictures, not for any "greater good," but because people wanted to see then. Post-mortem photography has a long and rich history. In today's celebrity-obsessed culture, post-mortem celebrity photographs are big business. Hell, I still have my Weekly World News with the Ted Bundy cover.
While I can certainly understand and appreciate Mrs. Earnhardt's position--would any of us want pictures of loved ones laid out on a slab posted on the Internet with funny captions beneath them?--I also think there's a service provided by seeing pictures of our heroes dead as doornails. Whatever we try to make of them, it's important to remember that they were only human. Most Americans are still terrified of dying. It's the Last Big Mystery--and one we rarely want to face (except, perhaps, in the case of Tim McVeigh). But by being able to either own something once used by a man who took a lot of lives and is now dead himself, or by seeing evidence that someone we considered to be beyond the merely mortal has to die, too, maybe we can get just that much closer to accepting it.
(6/14)
For example, in [the latest New York Observer,] "Off the Record" columnist Gabriel Snyder, in recounting the recent firing of six people at the New York Post--that's six, not 600 or 6000, like at some nonmedia companies that aren't as newsworthy--was compelled to disassociate his "class" of people from the rest of us who spend a quarter for the Post and don't think twice about it.
In criticizing the tabloid's Timothy McVeigh front page ("HE'S DEAD"), which was pointed out to demonstrate the paper's new direction under editor Col Allan, Snyder wrote: "Subtle stuff, to be sure. And particularly for a paper that had, until recently, been positioning itself as a harmless guilty pleasure for high-income urbanites, with regular, humorous dishings of political, media and entertainment gossip. Suddenly it's ÔHEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR' all over again. ÔThe Post seems to be becoming, in my mind, the retro-Post of the 1980's,' said one staffer."
That's quite a feat, Master Snyder: using the cliche "guilty pleasure" (which ought to be an actionable offense), lazily resorting to an invocation of the Post's most famous headline and generally sounding like an overeducated twit all in one short paragraph.
(6/14)
I believe that's [a point I made last month] when they announced that they were going to be firing some missiles into a comet, just for the hell of it. It's a point I need to make again, if a [recent report in the London Observer](http://www.observer.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4201561,00.html) turns out to be true.
According to the Observer, in order to prevent this global warming business from getting way out of hand and overheating the planet, NASA scientists have developed a scheme to use comets to simply nudge the Earth into a cooler orbit, farther away from the sun.
The plan put forward by Dr. [Greg] Laughlin, and his colleagues Don Korycansky and Fred Adams, involves carefully directing a comet or asteroid so that it sweeps close past our planet and transfers some of its gravitational energy to Earth... Engineers would then direct their comet so that it passed close to Jupiter or Saturn, where the reverse process would occur. It would pick up energy from one of these giant planets. Later its orbit would bring it back to Earth, and the process would be repeated.
Is it just me, or does this sound like a really, really bad idea?
ïAll you have to do is strap a chemical rocket to an asteroid or comet and fire it at just the right time,' added Laughlin.
Simple as pie. Now, the scientists involved in this tomfoolery do admit to a couple of niggling little problems with the plan. First of all, if their calculations are off by just a smidgen (I noticed no one brought up some of their recent escapades on Mars), there's a good chance they could send a comet hurtling directly into Earth, effectively eliminating all life on the planet, down to "the level of bacteria."
There's also another minor concern that involves, well, losing the moon. You change Earth's orbit, you might effectively strip away the moon--which would have an even more devastating impact, not only on the climate, but on songs and poems as well! What, are people going to have to start singing, "By the light...of the silvery...mm...mmmmm-mmmm..."?
(And of course, if these scientists have been watching Damnation Alley, there's also the problem of giant, armor-plated flesh-eating roaches.)
These criticisms are accepted by the scientists. 'Our investigation has shown just how delicately Earth is poised within the solar system,' Laughlin admitted. 'Nevertheless, our work has practical implications. Our calculations show that to get Earth to a safer, distant orbit, it would have to pass through unstable zones and would need careful nurturing and nudging. Any alien astronomers observing our solar system would know that something odd had occurred, and would realize an intelligent lifeform was responsible.'
Or at least "a lifeform." Or, come to think of it, maybe not even that.
(6/13)
(6/13)
The angle? Horyn thinks walking up Madison Ave. is exciting. After squealing like a teenager for a few paragraphs about her first commercial haircut in the 1970s, which she showed off by walking up Madison with all the swells ogling her, Horyn sets her word processor to "precious" and comes up with this:
Well, I must have walked for 20 blocks that evening, turning my head this way and that, just stretching out the whole experience, until it got dark and I caught the No. 4 bus for Morningside Heights, French Lit and the rest of my hinkty college life.
Isn't "hinkty" a great word? It describes perfectly a style, or style of life, that's embarrassingly unfashionable. Tom Wolfe used it once to refer to men's shirts that don't have that little button on the back of the collar--do they anymore?--and if you listen carefully, you can hear one of the policemen in the movie "The Fugitive" saying it. Hinkty--a total killer...
Jesus Christ. Don't blame Tom Wolfe: it's the Times trying to be "with it" and getting it wrong. The word--usually spelled "hincty"--has two more-common meanings and neither means unfashionable. Originally, hincty was jazz slang for snobby, according to any number of online dictionaries of jazz. There's a 1924 song by Rosa Henderson in which she sings, "Well, I am hincty, and I am lowdown too." Hincty was a putdown to describe rich people who put on airs.
Later, the Beats picked up on it and gave the word a new twist. They used hincty to mean paranoid or suspicious. In Junky, William Burroughs uses it to describe a nervous dope dealer who won't do business. No serious writer since then has been much interested in the word. Until now.
Does "hincty" describe a style of life that is embarrassingly unfashionable? We'll go with the old jazzbos on this one: Horyn is hincty all right, but not in the way she thinks.
(6/13)
The legendary New York City columnist, who now, in his twilight years, toils at the obscure Long Island tabloid Newsday, [lobbed a spitball] on June 10 at Rupert Murdoch, owner of the New York Post. Breslin was upset that the Post's new editor, Col Allan, fired six people last Friday, including Lisa Baird, a deputy metro editor who was mistakenly referred to "the only person of color who worked on the newspaper." What "color" is that, Jimmy? Yellow? Brown? Black? Rocky Mountain Fudge?
Breslin writes with a Pat Buchanan-like xenophobia: "Until Friday, Lisa Baird was an editor on the New York Post newspaper, which is owned by aliens who bring their quaint Adelaide habits to the city of the world... [The Post] is not a true newspaper. Its editorial pages are an ugly right-wing pamphlet. During election times, the paper turns into a campaign leaflet for their candidate."
As opposed to The New York Times?
Breslin, a crabby old man whose glory days are decades behind him, also called Murdoch's Fox News "the Gong Show of television news." Brit Hume, that station's superb anchor, must be reeling.
Also let go was Jack Newfield, the longtime Village Voice /Robert F. Kennedy/Brooklyn Dodgers hagiographer who'd for the last 10 years written a column for the Post.