The Alluded-to FISA Post; or, More Fun about Acronyms

So the Democrats in Congress got together with the Republicans in Congress and the Administration (do we have to call them "the Administration", really, when they can't administer their way out of a paper bag? How about-- oh pick your own suitably excremental adjective. I'm busy and sleepy and cranky.) to "reform" (and by reform we mean "gut like a carp") the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (now you know what FISA stands for, at least. Don't let anyone tell you I'm good for nothing.). I am properly outraged by this, and will be donating to the ACLU,possibly the Strange Bedfellows campaign (though those Ron Paul people are a bug, not a feature), and whoever else might make these gutless dolts uncomfortable (Meaning the "Administration", Congressional Democrats, and other gutless dolts to be named later). Yet, despite my high dudgeon, and promising a piece on this, so sure was I of its rantworthiness, I am sleepy and cranky. I am sad and dispirited. Not because I expected much different, not because I now know why it happened (can't find the link, but in some of the reviews of Jane Mayer's latest book-- basically, enough Democrats were briefed on what Bush was "administering", that when the potential for war crimes prosecutions was broached, said Dems came down with acute cover-yer-ass-itis; and a certain sympathy for those poor innocent babes at the helm of our telecommunication playground.), but because it is just so sad that there is no leadership offered in the fine art of saying "enough".

When the Bush spying plans-- like the Bush torture plans (no links here-- do you really need them at this point? The question is not whether spying and torture took place, but whether they're a good thing for the nation or not-- Mithras help us all.)--
were revealed to these leading Democrats, somebody should have squealed (I would pick Jay Rockefeller-- he's old, led a rich full life, he's got more money than Zeus so he could get great lawyers.). Somebody in the Congressional leadership should have said "we don't do this." Let the chips fall where they may, act like a coequal branch of Government, put on the brakes. Do something, anything. Don't just go "Oh, that's very interesting. Are you sure it's necessary? Oh, then, carry on." Don't let it get to where you have to shred the 4th Amendment to protect your own worthless pustule-flecked cowardly rump. This seems obvious to me, but apparently it's hard for some people to grasp. And just look at the expressions on the faces of Bush and Cheney in the photos as this farce was signed into law-- they literally can't believe they're getting away with it. Again. Those expressions tell me that things didn't have to turn out this way.

But turn out this way they did. A court challenge looms, and I am guardedly hopeful, since the "Administration" has lost every FISA related case under the old law, and hopeless, since most have been turned over on appeal. If you're interested in the differences between the old and new FISA laws, click here. I'm tired and cranky and though busy, feel a need for a good long cry in the shower, ala Elisabeth Shue in "Leaving Las Vegas". And, courtesy Congress and the President, for the same reasons.

Are you Experienced?

I meant to write this one a week or so ago, when the whole Gen. Wesley Clark kerfuffle exploded. As a liberal, a progressive, as someone who hates America's freedoms (just clipped back a little more by the recent Democratic collapse on FISA, about which more later-- doesn't that just whet your appetite, the promise of more writing about an acronym?), as a proud dirty f---ing hippie, you would think that I'd have Clark's back on this. But I do not. Because, after careful consideration and a coupla thirty-seven bottles of Rumpleminze, I realize what this country needs is the foreign affairs experience of John McCain. After eight years of mush-mouthed incompetence by an alcoholic AWOL fighter pilot with daddy issues that make Oedipus look like-- well, pick some healthy father-son relationship from myth or literature, I can't do everything for you! And call your mom, she'd get a kick out of it—anyway, like someone with less-big Daddy issues, America clamors for change. Surely John Sidney McCain III, fourth or fifth generation military, can at least free us from these crippling daddy issues. John McCain and his surrogates tell us that his experience matters. So I'm looking forward to seeing him put it into practice.

I expect McCain to, within a hundred days of being inaugurated, be shot down and tortured by North Korea, Iran, and Russia. I believe that this tour of shoot down and torture diplomacy will increase America's stature in the world, and win for us concessions on oil prices, a further infusion of cash from China, and a twin luge gold at the next Winter Olympics. Sure it will be tough on a seventysomething man, but presidentin', as we know, is hard work. Oh wait, that's not what he's going to do? Sorry, my bad. So he is going to spend 4 hours each in downtown Pyongyang, Tehran and Moscow in a flak vest, surrounded by US armed forces, and pronounce them peaceful, wonderful places to be? No? He'll go to bat for accused financial criminals in North Korea, Iran, Russia? Marry another billionaire liquor heiress while still married to the last one? No again? Okay, now I'm stumped.

I should make absolutely clear that I'm not belittling the horrific suffering McCain underwent at the hands of people he was bombing, nor diminishing his service in a war conducted under false pretenses. But did that experience make him hate war, and stop him from condoning torture? No, and only for a while. (In a true you-can't-make-this-stuff-up moment, McCain's North Vietnamese torturer supports his Presidential bid.). This experience doesn't seem to come from his Washington career, or legislation that he's passed or championed. So where and what is it, and how does it matter? Because the only Presidential experience that matters is getting more votes than the other guy (Some restrictions apply. Presidency not valid if Supreme Court justices with clear conflicts of interest and/or rigid ideologies are allowed to rule on question. Please study history for more sorry, sordid details.). So for my money, the experience question is still up for grabs. For other people's money --a near perfect rating from big business; flip-flopping on immigration, torture, and tax cuts for the rich --you'll have to ask John McCain what his experience means. Just don't be surprised if he says something bad.

Long Playing

If you think I'm the kind of guy who only enjoys translations of what Joe Cocker is laboriously squeezing out of his head while high, think again. My brow has its high side too. I remember when I was a tot, the Beatles' breakup caused me no upset, because Beethoven was my musical main man. I based this, of course, on solidly musical concerns, not (for instance) on the repeated Beethoven references in “Peanuts”, of which I was a slavish devotee; or the idea that nothing really popular could be good (although, then, what was I doing reading “Peanuts”? It must have been for the angst.); or on the fact that liking Beethoven was and remains the quick and easy route to musical snobbery. All of these things, I'm sure, brewed up in my contrarian child's soul, but the fact of the matter is I did (and do) like Beethoven. And my parents had, through luck or design, managed to acquire some first-rate performances and recordings, which I proceeded to grind into dust on their inferior playback equipment. If you asked me to name a favorite musical experience, this one would be near the top, even after all these years: me and my dad making a big bowl of popcorn, turning down the lights, and listening to Rudolf Serkin wail his European way through the Moonlight, Pathetique, and Appassionata sonatas of old Ludwig van, on a much-abused Columbia 6-eye; the radio dial of the stereo our only illumination. Truly lost in the sound, beauty and popcorn alone sustaining us, a forty-five minute step away from the world.
I was thinking about this the other day when I pulled an ancient yet well preserved copy of Walter Gieseking playing the Moonlight and Pathetique, from a cardboard box at the Goodwill. Ninety-nine cents later, it was mine, along with a few others at the same price, thick cardboard and stout vinyl, all mono. I had bested iTunes yet again.
And the sound-- I put it on while cooking dinner, and suffice it to say we had a late dinner. I kept rushing back into the living room, saying out loud “This sounds really good”. Gieseking was hitting on all ten fingers, and the recording just sang-- old enough to probably be done direct to disc, no editing or not much; a true performance, not a tape collage. I don't begrudge people their iPods stuffed with ten thousand songs-- we are busy people, hanging on by a thread, grabbing art sustenance anywhere we have the time-- but when has anyone been struck on their iPod not just by the beauty of the music, but the beauty of the sound? There is something to be said for not taking your music with you, for (at least once in a while) going to your music. The water at the oasis will always be sweeter than the water in your canteen. I had to finish grilling the fish and making a salad, but I kept coming back in at every stage, hungrily absorbing the contents of the disc. And every time I did so, I got a faint buttery taste of popcorn in my mouth.

REVIEW: "Sex and the City": Give me Celibacy or give me Death…

…either of which would be preferable to watching this movie. Seriously. I'm not kidding. If this is sex then I'm a monk. If that's the city, then I'm letting my hick flag fly. I don't want what they've got. Do you need more? Cause I got more, baby…
Now would be the point where I might be expected to say “Sex and the City” tells the story of-- but there is no story per se. More accurate would be to say that “Sex and the City” is a series of product placements and manufactured conflicts that drags its thoroughly unpleasant protagonistas through a series of expensive would-be hells, only to deposit them at more or less the same place they were at the beginning. It's a fun house ride without the fun; and shots of many expensive houses do not make up for that lack.
Let's be clear-- and I say this as a non-New Yorker (thought I do have a subscription-- that counts for something, doesn't it?)-- this is a movie that equates closet space with love. In fact, human beings and expensive accessories are pretty much interchangeable in the movie's cosmology, the chief difference being that the accessories are accorded more respect. Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie, our plucky heroine (and by plucky I do mean eyebrows), for instance, refers to her would be husband (Chris Noth, doing his best Leonid Brezhnev imitation.) repeatedly as “Big” (not even time for the honorific Mister that she has saddled him with, let alone his actual given name); but be assured that the various emanations of Louis Vuitton, Vivienne Westwood, and Manolo Blahnik are always fully and respectfully identified. The movie encourages us to salivate along with its characters over these high end goods, each one photographed more carefully than any of the leads (that Chris Noth dyes his eyebrows is information I wish to G_d they'd managed to keep from me.). Yet, when an actual fetishist does show up-- a perfectly correct Asian gentleman in a suit and pink pumps-- he is treated as though he is a radioactive freak. Apparently, having a true organic connection to this stuff is too much for these people-- it is to be appreciated for its socioeconomic connotations alone. God forbid it give you a boner; it's that whiff of integrity that they can't stand.
Even more annoying, if that's possible, is the movie's use of serious themes of love, parenthood, relationships , work, being of a certain age; and the difficulties of juggling all of them to find happiness and balance. As someone who is awash in these things right now, I feel protective and particular about this struggle and the depiction of it. Watching this movie feebly gumming them engendered the same feelings I'd get from watching someone hand a toddler a Ming vase, the Rosetta stone, a Guttenberg Bible, a hammer and a box of color Sharpies, and tell them to go play. The emotional jolts that occur fitfully within the film have nothing to do with the movie itself, its point of view or gestalt; and everything to do with the raw subject and a certain modicum of skill on the performer's parts (stage training helps. So does utter shamelessness.). An artless movie made about a compelling subject can be Important while not being good. But if you go to “Sex and the City” expecting an Important Film, about The Way We Live Today, then you're even more pathetic than I am, wanly hoping for a competently made diversion.
Speaking of competently made, it isn't. Everything is stretched past the breaking point; at two hours and twenty-five minutes, it feels longer and more pointless than Andy Warhol's “Empire State Building”. Fashion montages that should be disposed of in seconds spread before us like buffets full of slowly spoiling food. The editing is ad hoc, pointless, and offensive, in addition to there not being enough of it. Do we really need insert shots of untrimmed, unwaxed crotch hair to show bed death in a relationship? But we get one, and the other characters' reaction to it is akin to finding a rat in the soup. So then, later, when we see the miraculous revival of these characters' sex lives, shouldn't we then get an insert of the carefully shaven landing strip or something, since clearly that's what was holding them back? Well we didn't, and thank God, but I certainly was led to expect it.
The same harsh rules apply when Kim Cattrall shows up at a party bearing a microscopically protruding stomach that Brad Pitt would be happy to call his own, and her friends say how miserable she must be to let herself go like that (I let myself go like that every day, it's a little thing I call “lunch”.). I could go on and on, but I'm not the creative team behind the “Sex and the City” movie. In summary, this movie hates most women, despises love and forgiveness, confuses leaden wit and poo jokes for comedy, and contains precious little sex and not even much City (some nice shots of the New York Public Library to the contrary). Of course, it has gotten a few decent pull quotes from many reviewers, and is a huge hit. So what do I know? Well, I may not be a Communist (though I have been accused), but this movie made me long for a nice low-key production of “Red Detachment of Women” (it's a Communist Chinese opera, not a slasher flick. Geez Louise, stop it, or I'll turn this car around.). I'm not holding my breath for one, though.

There it is, take it

It is discouraging, if you are a member of the Nation of the Undiscovered, to find ANYTHING AT ALL resembling your work under somebody else's name. The name of this blog, for instance, a slogan of mine since 2003 or so, was very nearly independently stumbled upon by Tom Tomorrow on his (vastly more read) blog earlier this month. I like Tom Tomorrow very much. It would have pained me no end to wish that he meet his end at the hands and teeth of a pack of rabid, chainsaw wielding raccoons (don't let the washing thing fool you-- they fight dirty because they are dirty)-- but wish it I would, because , dammit, Faster than the Sped of satire is MINE, and you can have it when you can pry it from my cold dead career. Wait a minute, no, you can't have it, not then, not ever.
One of the things that keeps me pumping out all of this black gold, this Texas tea, is not swimming pools and movie stars, but a kind of wanna-be starlet's belief that success is just around the corner. Someday, I will walk into some lousy coffee house, and the performers will be all abuzz. What's happening, I will ask. Flo Ziegfeld is in the audience, they'll say, looking for a star for his new revue, here to find the leggiest comic mind with the pearliest smile, and I will open my notebook confidently, and drape myself in its sexy-makingest little number, and blow Flo away with my wit and crack timing and something that may even be called wisdom, and ride off to fame and fortune in his Pierce-Arrow touring car while my contemporaries rend their garments in that mixture of joy and despair so particular to the aspirants of show bidness.
Notice first, how this fantasy unfolds in some out of the way Mustache Pete, and not in any well-known venue (no triumph at the Palladium for me, that's too easy. Any man-Jack can get discovered at the Palladium). Note second how I go with Florenz Ziegfeld instead of, say, Simon Cowell, which by itself probably explains why I am not headlining the Palladium. Which by the way is closed for two years worth of renovations. But i'm getting ahead of myself again.
What I'm saying is, it is difficult to keep up an empire when these latecomers keep planting their flags in territory I've already claimed for myself. Their fame indemnifies them against any charge of plagiarism, and while I could mount a defense, complete with documentation, I would come over like Lenny Bruce reading his court transcripts, without ever coming over (as far as the general public is concerned) like Lenny Bruce not reading his court transcripts. The thought of being the Elisha Gray of the satiric American community has very little attraction.
But wait, why settle for being like unto the man who almost patented the telephone? Dammit, maybe I'm the Leonardo daVinci of this here age. Maybe hundreds of years from now, people will be decoding the impenetrable scrawl in MY notebooks, realizing that here was a meditation on race done with paint swatches that was YEARS ahead of The Daily Show's, and that somehow I, Nosmo King, had drawn skeletal diagrams of jokes uniting quantum hydrodynamics, Britney Spears (some things will never go out of style) and the male glans (ditto) IN WAYS THAT WERE STUPEFYINGLY AHEAD OF THEIR TIME EXCLAMATION POINT TIMES THREE. I mean, if you're going to dream of failure, then dream big. And if you're going to fail, fail big. It's probably time to start mailing stuff out to agents and publishers, instead of in self-addressed stamped envelopes. What happens to me is probably not so much plagiarism as eminent domain. Even if I get a stack of rejection letters as long as my sad-sackiest face, my notebooks could still be like those of daVinci. Who, it should be pointed out, never finished most of his projects either. The comparison holds, or will once I've finished this portrait of my friend Mona. Lady, I don't know what that ***t-eating grin means, but I like it.

SERIOUS non-writing

So, I spent part of the day breaking the sidewalk in front of our house into chunks, armed with my trusty sledgehammer “Bess” (named after Harry Truman's wife, for reasons I cannot divulge, or remember) and a gardening tool called a Mutt. Then I ate a delicious sandwich for lunch, took care of a couple of personal items, paid my cell phone bill, read the entire blogosphere, checked out a couple of things my girlfriend sent me in emails, almost took a shower, but instead ended up doing the dishes in the nude-- an idea I so DID NOT get from Cosmo, OK, so just stop even thinking that. And now, finally, I find myself writing this, the all-important second blog post, the one that has to keep you people engaged to the same level if not higher as the previous efflorescence of my creative genius did, and asking myself the question, what will I do in order to not write. The answer, I believe , is anything and everything.
The list above is a pretty good guide to how serious I am about not writing. In fact, there are very few things I work harder at. But still, some literary output manages to dribble its way out. You'll just have to trust me that soon that will be gone for good, and that this place will stand like an abandoned gas station in the desert, a stylish ruin from a more hopeful time. Vintage candy racks will line the dusty counter, a premise sitting there just waiting to be used, as though the “writer” had just stepped away for a cup of coffee and a swallow of laudanum, and had been waylaid in his return, perhaps by angry coyotes (hmm, coyote wrestling, must remember to try that one the next time inspiration is striking.) Yet somehow, I keep crawling back to the word processor, (parenthetically again, is there any worse term for a writing program than “word processor”? Last I looked, which was just milliseconds ago, I'm the one doing all the word processing here. All the program does is meekly ask permission to complete an odd word here and there incorrectly, and then save the file to somewhere it can't be found. Which makes the program just like a subpar temp, but not quite as cheap.) like Charlie Brown to the football, drunkenly braying for my lady Literature to take me back, that things will be different now, I'm ready to dance with her and only her, no more coyote wrestling, nude kitchen chores, whatever. And she takes me back, the foolish good-hearted woman, because she's a concept, not a person, and the only heart I've been breaking is my own.
Because I have more words than Webster, more words than Oxford Unabridged, a great near -Joycean harvest of syllables, piled on the syllabus, careening its way to market, a steaming slab of fatback Funk and Wagnalls just waiting to be got on the goodfoot, if you know what I'm talking about, and I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I am talking and that's the point. I have always loved words and language-- too much even when I was a kid. I couldn't do baby talk, I waited till I could make my own sentences . I am meant to string words together, and send them up like multicolored box kites dancing in the firmament of ideas. When I found words I felt like Paganini with his Amati, Mondrian with his grid, Rodney Dangerfield with his self-deprecation. I was in my element. So where the hell have I been, and why haven't you heard of me, and I'm from Missouri and you're gonna have to show me.
I know, I know, I get this a lot. Mostly from myself. And I have no answer, still, for why I became the most serious non-writer I know. Perfectionism, depression, erectile dysfunction, seasonal affective disorder, the dog ate it-- you name it. Maybe I just can't resist a sidewalk that needs to be smashed. There is more to life than writing-- in fact, the more life one lives, the more one has to work with, in theory. All I have to go on is theory. And I have wrestled, and pulled, and dragged, and spat, and indeed hacked my way through some very difficult lies in and near the stream of consciousness, to get to this point. Which is a start. And, thankfully, nobody cares where one starts, it's all about where one ends up. Afterwards, if anything comes of this, they can scour my notebooks, dinner napkins, and credit card envelopes for the swamp that gave rise to this howling banshee. And for the first time in along time, I will shut up. Because there is no answer to the question “Where did this come from?”. There is writing and there is not writing. One can do a lot of the latter and still find time for the former.

Down these Mean Streets

Hi. This is my first piece for the new blog-- New Blog, meet First Piece, Piece, Blog-- good. No fighting, OK. There's plenty of everything for everyone(which, if you think about it, is the promise and the tragedy and the threat of modern-- nay, postmodern existence. But I'm getting ahead of myself. It's not a bug, it's a feature. Anyway--). You're probably wondering why I've gathered us here today. I'll tell you why, or at least which of several shifting and contradictory rationales I'll be using to justify this invasion of your internets. It is not a search for weapons of mass instruction; nor because of the fabulous oil wealth this humble web address hides. It is because down these mean streets a man must go who--

Well, who likes to use titles and phrases that others have used already, for one thing. (One of my stories that I'm happiest with is called “John Carter, Warlord of Mars”. It's not the one you're thinking of, and it may well appear here. At some point. Not this one.) This is not Piri Thomas' searing account of growing poor in Spanish Harlem (if there's one word everybody agrees on here, it's “searing”.). Nor is it that part of Raymond Chandler's celebrated essay “The Simple Art of Murder”, toward the end of which he discusses the moral imperative of creating a detective very like Philip Marlowe. This after he had already written four novels featuring a detective who actually was Philip Marlowe.

That's the problem with foundational manifestos-- they describe reality much better when written after the fact. Even better if you can create a moral imperative for your fictional creation. Just ask Raymond Chandler. Or George W. Bush.

Bush and his henchmen, by the way, have indirectly provided the name for this little corner of the world wide web. I can go on and on about this, and probably will at some other point (not this one), but (for a brief, true example): when Dick Cheney is given the “Architect of Peace” award… at the Nixon Library… presented by Henry Kissinger-- that's when you know that the explosion you heard last night was not a backfiring ice cream truck or a gangland hit, but the sound of the planet crashing, Chuck Yeager-like, through the satire barrier. We are now moving-- wait for it-- “Faster than the Speed of Satire”. I can't tell you how many times I've written the most scathing funhouse mirror distortions of the events of the day, gone to sleep thinking that I would finally be recogniz'd as the Jonathan Swift of our day (hence 17th century spelling there, a few wyrds back), only to wake up and hear my jape on the news, as an actual fact on the ground. Maybe, like George W, or Kim Jong-Il, I should give myself credit for creating reality through the power of my ideas. But I don't. Nor should you.

So what does a satirist do when the very notion of satire becomes obsolete? Simple, Watson-- he blogs. About the shape of the world (still round, though not on the set of “The View”, apparently.). About the Haves vs. the Have-nots (Have-nots not even covering the spread.). About the fall light in the evenings in Los Hollyangeleswood, this most minor yet most elusive of the United States' Outlying Islands (we have more grinding poverty AND more millionaires than you. If you don't live here now, you will soon.). The hawks that circle the air here above my hill. Music, art, fruit desserts. You know, stuff.

When I can come up with a moral imperative that justifies these invented truths and repurposed lies, you'll be the first to know. Until then, why is today different from all other days? Because, today, I am a blog.