Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle: "As surreal as the movie gets, though, it never quite reaches the pungent contact high of Dude, Where's My Car?, a virtuoso demonstration of the pothead paradox that what isn't funny the first or second time absolutely kills the 11th or 12th time. Still, while H&K's larger point may be that its protagonists' ethnicity is incidental, it's indicative of the film's basic decency that the pesky racial stuff is allowed to interfere with its buzz--the repeated run-ins with bigoted white cops and extreme-sports rednecks have less comic value than social import. The titular destination would simply be noxious product placement if it didn't also serve a symbolic purpose. 'This night is about the American dream,' Kumar declares only semi-facetiously, and indeed, by the time our heroes finally approach their holy grail--having battled the usual impediments that go with being half baked as well as a lifetime of cultural expectations and heaps of dumbass racist bullshit--it's not just about a soggy case of greasy sliders anymore. " 

My Demographic

"Ma and Pa Kettle Back on the Farm- The Kettles become grandparents and decide it's time to get back to basics on the farm after meeting their blue-blooded in-laws, who have some very different ideas about rearing children. To get away from the complexities of modern life, Ma and Pa move back to their farm shack. Meanwhile, Pa gets into trouble again--he strikes uranium, but promptly gets caught up in two crooks' swindle!" 

more on the election of 1912: "Had Theodore Roosevelt been nominated by the Republican Party -- and he would have been had he not been cheated out of the votes he had gained in the primaries -- he would have been president in 1912 and Woodrow Wilson would have lost. This would have meant that Roosevelt would have continued to make the Republican Party a party of reform, which is what he stood for at the time, indeed, almost radical reform. In terms of foreign policy he might very well have brought the United States into the First World War after the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, in which case the war might have ended far sooner and certainly with a less drastic peace than the one imposed on Germany. This might well have changed the course of the 20th century. "

DNC 2004 Weblogs: News Aggregator

(Teddy Roosevelt, mounting a third party challenge in 1912, trying to baptise the Republicans (his protege Taft is the tug-of-war anchor, left)in the progressive waters of "Teddyism")

Harper's Weekly Elections 1860-1912--a trove of info, cartoons, etc... 

Some favorite US presidential campaign books--1988

Richard Ben Cramer What It Takes : The Way to the White House

Besides the Hunter Thompson, this book would be the most fun for non-wonk readers. W appears as the hot-headed son of a ruthless dad. You end up liking Dole & Dukakis.

1976

Marathon: the Pursuit of the Presidency 1972-6

Hardly gonzo, but Witcover is a sharp guy. Every thrift store in Canada has a copy of this book.

1972

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail

Hunter Thompson

I read this in installments in Rolling Stone when I was 14, with the Ralph Steadman drawings spread across those huge newsprint pages. A pretty sound education & Thompson's best book.

1968

An American Melodrama Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson, Bruce Page

"In its essence 1968 was like the great European revolution year of 1848 during which even the bourgeoisie perforce chose the streets as the only available forum to assert their unacknowledged power. Like 1848, its aftermath resulted in a flood of spiritual exiles who colonized the world in their diaspora. And as with 1848, the official structures of political and economic repression were reassembled afterward in slightly more disguised, but nonetheless excruciatingly durable form.

The four political tragedies for America were tied together by more than chronology. In a Shakespeare play, not just the hero is tragic, but all the characters as well. Both our leaders and ourselves failed to rise to the occasion. And the best book about the year remains the work of three journalists from the London Sunday Times, called with typical British approximation, An American Melodrama. (Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson, Bruce Page: Viking Press, 1969) "

"An American Melodrama" is a superb book and widely available. Reading it, you get the sense of the gravity and momentousness of events constantly challenging the writers professional reserve.

looks like CPAC is carrying a feed of the gavel-to-gavel C-Span coverage of the Democratic convention--Miss Teen New Mexico just did the anthem... 

Letter by Thomas Nashe to William Cotton 1596

"[Address, at back] To my worshipfull good freinde Mr. William Cotton geue these

Sir this tedious dead vacation is to mee as vnfortunate as a
terme at Hertford or St Albons to poore cuntry clients or Iack
Cades rebellion to the lawyers, wherein they hanged up the L cheife
iustice / In towne I stayd (being earnestly inuited elsewhere) vpon
had I wist hopes, & an after harvest I expected by writing
for the stage & for the presse, when now the players as if they
had writt another Christs tears, ar piteously psecuted by the
L. Maior & the aldermen, & however in there old Lords tyme
they thought there state setled, it is now so vncertayne they cannot
build vpon it; & for the printers there is sutch gaping amongst
them for the coppy of my L. of essex voyage and the ballet of
the threscore and four knights that though my lord Marquesse
write a second parte of his feuer lurden or idlenesse..........
..................................................... or Churchyarde
[e]nlarge his Chips, saying they were the very same wch christ in
[Car]penters hall is paynted gathering vp as Ioseph his father
[sta]nds hewing a peice of timber, & Mary his mother sitts
[sp]inning by, yet wold not they giue for them the price of a
[pr]oclamation out of date, or which is the contemptiblest summe
[tha]t may bee, (worse than a scute or a dandiprat) the price of
[ ] Harveys works bound up together. Only mr harrington
{of} late hath sett up sutch filthy stinking iakes in pouls
churchyard, that the stationers wold giue any mony for a couer
[fo]r it. what shold moue him to it I know not, except he
[m]eant to bid a turd in all gentle readers teeth, or whereas
[D]onDiego & Brokkenbury beshitt pouls, to prevent the like incon-
[u]enience, he hath reuiued an old innes a court tricke of turning
[ ]out in a paper, & framed close stools for them t[o] carry
[in] there pockets as gentlewomen do there spuges th[ ]
[ ] O it is detestable and abhominable, farre worse then
[Mu]nday[s] ballet of vntruesse, or Gillian a Braynfords
[Wi]ll in which she bequeathed a score of farts amongst her frends
[&] able to make any man haue a stinking breath that lookes
[b]ut on the outstide of it. Sure had I beene of his
cousayle he shold haue sett for ye mott or word before it
Fah, & dedicated it to the house of the shakerlies that
giue for there armes thre doggs turds reaking, For my
paarte I pitty him & pray for him that he may haue
many good stooles to his last ending, & so I wold wish
all his frends to pray, for otherwise it is to be feared
yt according as Seneca reports the last words Claudi-
ius Ces was hard to speake were Hei mihi vereor
concacaui me so he will die with a turd in his mouth at
his last gaspe & bee coffind vp in a iakes farmer tunne
no other nosewise christian, for his horrible pfume being
able to come nere him. well some men for sorrow singe as
it is in the ballet of Iohn Carelesse in the booke of
martirs & I am merry whe[n] I haue nere a penny in my
purse. God may moue you though I say nothing, in wch
hope that that wch wilbee shalbe I take my leaue. yours in acknowledgement
of the deepest [bond] " 

essays & effluvia: 100 MP3 blogs

this Monet & others at the Portland Art Museum until Aug 22 

(Limestone Seacaves, Tobermory,Ontario)

Christopher Dewdney

"Transubstantiation

Devoid of perception the
blind form of the fossil
exists post-factum.
Its movement planetary, tectonic.
The flesh of these words
(as the words must be placed together
in light of theiyr skeletons)
Or rather the motion ascribed to
becomes a vehicle (for Paraclete).

What rises.
From the visible altar
to the altar sublime. Is
Is what we wish to inhabit
just the bread, just the wine.

Erosion unites with process to reveal
form.
Complies with laws
independent of vision.
In formation.
Mirrors.
(a photograph of the author photographing themselves)
At any given moment
moment is solid.

'Generation' of the Son.
'Procession' of the Holy Spirit.
A unicorn
white from existence in the underworld.
Gold is sprinkled on a fossil or
administered intravenously.
(in the late 4th century
the Arians released the unicorn in a cavern
to the thin leathern applause of bats)

'Generation' of Logos.
'Procession' of the Holy Spirit.")  

(Jimmie Rogers, Maybelle, A.P. and Sara Carter) the lyrics of all the Original Carter Family songs--

"Don't Forget This Song

My home's in old Virginia among the lovely hills,
The memory of my birthplace lies in my bosom still.

I did not like my fireside, I did not like my home,
I have a mind for rambling so far away from home.

It was on one moonlight evening the stars were shining bright,
And with an ugly dagger I made the spirit fly.

To friends I'll bid adieu to parents I'll bid farewell,
I landed in Chicago in the very midst of hell.

Twas then the sober struck me as plain as you can see--
I'm doomed I'm ruined forever throughout eternity.

I courted a fair young lady her name I will not tell,
Oh why should I disgrace her when I am doomed for hell?

But now upon my scaffold my time's not very long,
You may forget the singer but don't forget this song." 

The Outcrops of Prehistory
"Ahead of his own time in weighing the balance between nature, commerce, and art, Smithson was also prescient about conflicts over a park's social function. He included the general ideal 'Central Park is a ground work of necessity and chance, a range of contrasting view points that are forever fluctuating, yet solidly based in the earth.' But he deleted the more polemical 'All parks or 'recreation' sites should be able to absolve modifications, but not to the point where Disney-type kiddy villages subvert the organic dialectic, and cover the outcrops of prehistory. The new subway excavations in Central Park are probably more interesting to kids than big plastic Dumbos.'" 

(Seattle's Denny Park, 1903)

Happy Birthday Frederick Law Olmsted! 

Resisting Left Melancholy

"In short, the Left has come to represent a politics that seeks to protect a set of freedoms and entitlements that confronts neither the dominations contained in both nor the limited value of those freedoms and entitlements in contemporary configurations of capitalism. And when this traditionalism is conjoined with a loss of faith in the egalitarian vision so fundamental to the socialist challenge to the capitalist mode of distribution, and a loss of faith in the emancipatory vision fundamental to the socialist challenge to the capitalist mode of production, the problem of left traditionalism becomes very serious indeed. What emerges is a Left that operates without either a deep and radical critique of the status quo or a compelling alternative to the existing order of things. But perhaps even more troubling, it is a Left that has become more attached to its impossibility than to its potential fruitfulness, a Left that is most at home dwelling not in hopefulness but in its own marginality and failure, a Left that is thus caught in a structure of melancholic attachment to a certain strain of its own dead past, whose spirit is ghostly, whose structure of desire is backward looking and punishing. "

(thanks to wood s lot) 

Illinois Jacquet 1928-2004 

Delacroix's Faust 

lots of updates--new work, reviews--at Portland artist Bruce Conkle's site... 

Third two and a half buck movie--"The Hit List"
"Considering that Scott and I did not receive credit, everything we put in the script stayed there and is in the finished film. When we meet Jan Michael Vincent he is doing carpentry on his house and he's a Vietnam vet. Scott and I also added the main gag of the picture -- Lance Henrickson being dragged by a car toward the Severe Tire Damage spikes in a parking lot -- which became both the film's poster and video box. And, of course, the classic 6 swinging around and becoming a 9. "

The great Michael Rooker (here as William Quantrell) of Brown's Requiem, from James Ellroy's first novel, which I also purchased for two and a half bucks. We may be entering the golden age of VHS--like that period when 8-tracks were being phased out & they were giving them away. The flotsam of technology, the jetsam of content.  

William Smith in Run, Angel, Run purchased for $2.49 at the video store 

overegged and overlong but welcome tribute to Chris Penn, which makes up for a lot by correctly identifying his finest performance, in Abel Ferrara's "The Funeral", the only movie about the Mafia that avoids any trace of exculpatory romanticism. The similarly underused Annabella Sciorra was also very fine in it. (salon) 

Jerry Goldsmith, composer of the scores for "Chinatown". "Planet of the Apes" and many others, died. 

Jim Kalb's Palindrome Connection: "A Dan, a clan, a canal - Canada!"

took this sub-sophomoric Expatriate Manifesto as either the working notes of 9th grade debate champion or a knowing parody of the hysterical NYPress house style, but I really think he might be serious...

"(American decline) stalks the parapets of our crumbling democracy, howling at our low voter turn-out and groaning at a republic of television-entranced morons with little knowledge of or interest in the world outside their cycles of compulsive consumption."

Another reason for Canadians to fear a Bush victory--an invasion of smug backpackers. At least in the 60's they might have read a little Marcuse.

Running scared
"To live in America now - at least to live in a port city like Seattle - is to be surrounded by the machinery and rhetoric of covert war, in which everyone must be treated as a potential enemy until they can prove themselves a friend. Surveillance and security devices are everywhere: the spreading epidemic of razor wire, the warnings in public libraries that the FBI can demand to know what books you're borrowing, the Humvee laden with troops in combat fatigues, the Coast Guard gunboats patrolling the bay, the pat-down searches and x-ray machines, the nondescript grey boxes, equipped with radio antennae, that are meant to sniff out pathogens in the air. It's difficult to leave the house now without encountering at least one of these reminders that we are being watched and that we live in deadly peril - though in peril of quite what is hard to say. "

George Romero " Zombies ain't supposed to move fast. They're supposed to be dead, man. " 

It's Delightful, It's Delicious--It's Wrong
"But the worst thing "De-Lovely" does to Porter's music isn't musical, precisely; it's interpretive. After a few bars of 'In the Still of the Night,' the angel Gabe says, 'You wrote that for her, of course.' Porter responds, reasonably, 'A song doesn't have to be about someone.' The rest of the movie ignores this caution, and makes Porter out to be a kind of proto-James Taylor. It shows Porter jotting down a love song upon waking beside Linda, and generally suggests that his lyrics closely tracked his personal life. This is to impose a rock 'n' roll--or perhaps singer-songwriter--aesthetic on a prerock mode of production. Notions of sincerity and self-expression have little direct application to songsmiths of Porter's era, who produced romantic, rueful, or raucous material according to the needs of a given form, be it stage show, film, or the individually marketed song. " 

Germaine Greer--this goes for Canada too of course.
"'Australia doesn't owe whitefellas (including me) a living. They should stop ripping its guts out for a pittance, and sit on the ground. Sit on the ground, damn you, and think, think about salination, desertification, dieback, deforestation, species extinction, erosion, suburbanisation, complacency, greed and stupidity. As if.'" 

Robert Wyatt's "Cuckooland" nominated for Mercury prize: "'I think it would be a disgrace if anything came of it,' the 59-year-old told The Daily Telegraph. " 

LBJ's scar and the King's two bodies: "Trying to allay suspicions that Johnson was seriously ill, press secretary Bill Moyers 'snowed [the White House press corps] with details,' including full-color anatomical slides, and the news media duly carried daily reports of Johnson's convalescence, including such minutiae as how well the president slept on particular nights, Lady Bird planting a tree outside the hospital room window, and his viewing of 'Hello, Dolly!' on television. Unfortunately, Moyers had no idea how far the president was willing to take the full disclosure policy. On October 20, Johnson was holding forth to the press as he sunned himself on the Bethesda Naval Hospital grounds. 'Apparently feeling words to be inadequate' in describing how he felt, the Baltimore Sun's Muriel Dobbin reported, 'the President whipped up his blue knit sport shirt,' and, as Time put it, 'let the whole world inspect the ugly twelve-inch seam under his right rib cage' where the surgeons had done their work. Many newspapers and both major newsmagazines carried a photo that week of a squatting, squinting LBJ exposing his flesh for the press." 

Interesting looking doc on PBS tonight: "But 'Last Man Standing' meticulously delves beneath the surface--the filmmakers shot 200 hours of footage over five months--and stereotypes of Texas politics fall by the wayside. For one thing, Texas itself is on the cusp of a sweeping demographic change that threatens to unsettle the state and nation's political landscape."

(Later: this was rather good. Seeing the young (24!) Democrat
Patrick Rose--bucking a statewide trend--narrowly defeat his predictably sociopathic rival made for gripping TV. And early on, there were great colour shots of a white-suited LBJ doing some fancy walking horse dressage...) 

The Drunken Silenus, 1628
Jusepe de Ribera (Jativa, Spain 1591-1652 Naples)

from The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Special Exhibitions: Poets, Lovers, and Heroes in Italian Mythological Prints
(thanks again Plep)