DJ Talks Straight

As if he's not given the world enough through the music of dem Squids, Dan Jones analogizes the shit out of both produce and the Greens:

Last night I went out on somewhat of a culinary limb and grilled small heads of cauliflower for a pasta dish. That was damn good. Cauliflower is sort of the Ralph Nader of vegetables--needs a little something to actually make it to the table.

Syndicated PrisonShip Rerun, #1 of...?

(because I am convinced you people will have something to say on this matter. - Lex)

Welcome to our new film roundtable, entitled amazing/never again. Recently, my good friend and courtroom videographer kyle dropped an amazing film on me:
This movie meets all of my criteria (crime, 1970s, method acting, verite pretensions, implicit class critique) but almost jumped the shark of seventies thriller-style grit and gestalt all the way into overtruthfulness and, ergo, un-watchability. Which brings me to the topic of our conversation, one I hope will carry on for all of our sakes’ for as long as possible:

Which films have you seen that made you think, simultaneously, this was wonderful and i never wish to see it ever again?

In literature the works of Conrad best exemplify this weird kind of anti-transcendence for me, in which once-heroic victims of their own successful quests for truth wreck their own lives and the lives of others trying to outrun the horrors they were brave enough to confront and idiotic enough to mistake for being somehow nourishing. Some, if not all, of life’s big lessons seem to me to be dark. And some films are so good at pointing those out that I don’t need to see them more than once, artistry notwithstanding. Here’s my first submission:

Bad Timing is a film by Nicholas Roeg, the director of Performance, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Eureka, Don’t Look Now, Insignificance and a bunch of other art-damaged features that nonetheless somehow won studio funding and influenced the whole wide subsequent world of indie rockers and auteurs.

Art Garfunkel plays a petulant, Freudian psychoanalyst prancing around Vienna, who falls in lust, love, lust, hate, lust, love with, and loses himself in pursuit of Theresa Russel. Russel herself gives a very three-dimensional performance that gestures way beyond Madonna-Whore-Femme Fatale - Film Noire Gal, and somehow positions herself in my memory, at least, as less a victim or object of Garfunkel’s narcissism than the subject, the animating presence, the magnet of desire, that moves the film. Harvey Keitel is woefully miscast as - you guessed it - an Austrian homicide detective who prevails upon the stop-start, flashback/flash-forward structure of the film’s narration, and tries in a Hitchcockian way to apply deductive reasoning in the corridors of unreason.

Is this film a critique of Freudian narcissism or a Freudian parable of the collusion of sex and violence? Is this film anti-intellectual or the masochistic face-scrubbing of an irrevocable braniac? Is it about the poison enlivening the maddening, luxurious desiring that certain sexual subjects favor, or is it about the death drive that universally haunts all of our procreative functioning? I don’t know, and I won’t soon figure it out, because this deeply flawed film is also the most probing, brilliant and unwatchable slab of film I’ve ever had to deal with. I shan’t be dealing with it again, nossir.

Now what about you? How about a title, brief synopsis, and reflection upon whatever films’ you loved enough to know better than to mess with ‘em again.

(Honorable Mentions: The Deer Hunter, A Woman Under the Influence, Compulsion....)

McCain Endorsed by Haiphong

Looks like McCain has been endorsed by the communists.

HAIPHONG, Vietnam (AP) — John McCain has an unusual endorsement — from the Vietnamese jailer who says he held him captive for about five years as a POW and now considers him a friend.

"If I were an American voter, I would vote for Mr. John McCain," Tran Trong Duyet said Friday, sitting in his living room in the northern city of Haiphong, surrounded by black-and-white photos of a much younger version of himself and former Vietnam War prisoners.

At the same time, he denies prisoners of war were tortured. Despite detailed POW accounts and physical wounds, Duyet claims the presumed Republican presidential nominee made up beatings and solitary confinement in an attempt to win votes.

I guess we already knew he had the torture-denier vote locked up.

Don't mess with Texas

What PZ sez:

You are free to believe whatever wacky nonsense you want — you can believe moody teenagers are possessed by demons, and you can believe that cutting out the hearts of virgins will guarantee that the sun will rise tomorrow, and you can even believe that barbecued babies are especially delicious — but you are not free to act on those beliefs in a way that infringes the rights of other people. The Texas court, in its zeal to protect religious beliefs, has gone too far and has endorsed the right of a church to do harm in the name of their god.

Medium and Message

You know I love the internets as much as the next person. Why else would I be here now? But there is such a thing as appropriate use. (And no, I'm not talking about Dave's Harold and Kumar video.) You know what's not appropriate use? Telling someone that their father has prostate cancer via fucking e-mail. Kudos for being oh-so-web 2.0 by including a link to a video of a prostatectomy on YouTube, but still. 

Damn, yo. That shit ain't right.

TGIF!

My Morals Should Be Your Morals

Rev. Jim Wallis who is an friend/adviser/defender of Obama's has apparently been recommending that the Dems reach out to the young evangelicals by dialing back the support for abortion and making "reducing abortion" a central plank in the party platform. He's been taken to task at TAPPED for missing the fact that this is already pretty much the mainstream Dem position on abortion, and Scott at LGM wonders what might happen to the support from women who have had abortions if the Dems were to start publicly questioning their morals.

I take issue with Wallis from a slightly different angle. Here's his quote:

“Taking abortion seriously as a moral issue would help Democrats a great deal with a constituency that is already leaning in their direction on poverty and the environment,” said Wallis. “There are literally millions of votes at stake.”

He seems to presuppose that Dems, because they support abortion rights, aren't taking it "seriously" (alarm! alarm!) as a moral issue. Yes, because the only "moral" position to take is in line with a conservative Christian definition of morality. There is no morality in the argument that the state has no business telling a woman what she can do with her body. There's no morality in keeping the state out of medical decisions. There's no morality in trying to keep a legal medical procedure viable for poor women. There's no morality in protecting young pregnant women who don't feel safe discussing the issue with their parents. Nope, this is all just wacky liberal anti-morality for the sake of being shocking and anti-Christian.

Thanks Rev. Wallis, but I think we'd do best to keep our slopes as non-slippery as possible on this one.

Great Moments In Product Reviewing

From amazon.com's page for Samba shoes:

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars So good I might get another pair., May 20, 2007

By Jerry Napier "Constant Evolution" (Chicago, IL) -

You know how sometimes you worry that the picture may look better then the real thing?

Well, this is the exception.

I saw these Samba's online and was a bit skeptical... but I know my shoe size in adidas because I have other pairs so I thought 'what the heck' and bought em'.

When they arrived I was more then pleased, they fit perfectly and look great.

John Cornyn Ad

Someone thought this was a good idea. That's all I can say. I'm blown away.

Difficult iPod transitions

"Mrs. Hayes" - Alice Donut
"The Girl is Mine" - Michael Jackson (w/Paul McCartney)

It was difficult to move from an angry and raw tale of drunken murder fantasies driven by domestic alienation to a saccharine MJ and cheesy Sir Mac woo-off. But the lyrical shift from "Christ, you're an idiot!" to "I'm a lover, not a fighter!" was nauseatingly awkward.

Did I Mention What I Dissertate About?

See below quotation from Kim Moody, US Labor in Trouble and Transition (Verso, 2007: 166). Discuss.

• [Labor's] alliance with the Democratic Party is the logical extension of business unionism to the political realm. The lack of ultimate or even long-range goals, the embrace of the system with some modifications, the business-like relation to limited goals (lobbying for legislation), the top-down nature of political decisions and tactical choices, the self-importance that comes from associating with those in power, the notion of measured advances through a semi-institutional partnership with those who administer the system; all of these features f business unionism fit well the alliance with the capitalist party most open to compromise.
• The problem is that these very same attributes fit poorly with the notion of labor as a social movement based on class and class conflict. How to inspire African Americans or Latinos to vote in larger numbers for candidates that shrink from addressing their issues? How to turn immigrants into citizens and working class voters? How to attract working-class white, particularly low-income ones, to vote for their real interests? Clearly, the Democratic Party cannot do these things. But can a business union leadership that shares many of the same ideas, cautions, and fears of class conflict and mass mobilization?

The Passion of Gummi Jesus

I thought this was too awesome not to post.

Go ahead and disagree with me in the comments.

h/t: Tbogg

AFL-CIO Endorses.......BHO?!?!?!?!?!?

I'll admit it, I had to gulp-back some throw-up when I heard the AFL-CIO was going to be endorsing for President today. But, thank goodness, it would appear that the Federation has decided to endorse Barry Obama.

Everybody but Uncle should check out the strong, interactive Net presence the House of Labor (1.0) has already rolled out. Boom!

That said, a simple image search on "obama unions" will take you to this Double-Boom! delite.

Books I "read" on the I-5

The Vatican's Exorcists: Driving Out the Devil in the 21st Century, by Tracy Wilkinson.
Kudos and jabs to Wilkinson for neither succumbing to a Faces of Death-style exploitation piece, nor extrapolating her way into philosophical or anthropological explanations for the persistence of exorcisms and exorcists in the life of the Church.

An LA Times bureau chief, Wilkinson gains access to several 'live' exorcisms, and does the worthy work framing the Enlightenment and Counter-Reformation contexts in which "modern" exorcism and its supporting theology emerged. Most interesting are Wilkinson's profiles of four exorcists, career priests who've found themselves on the wrong end of the Church for varyingly flagrant attempts to foreground demonic possession, Satan, and 'evil' as such in the lives of their parishoners. The various exorcists are smart, sallow, sardonic, steadfast, opportunistic, etc., just like other real people you know.

While not as even-handed as Blatty's telling of The Exorcist, Wilkinson respectfully sits psychologists and exorcists at the table and allows them to say their pieces. It's only in off-handed moments that Wilkinson betrays what seems like a kind of moral functionalism, if not a politicized "moral economy" approach. In bits of narration we are jostled into juxtaposing modernity, industry, etc., with a deficit of spirit and ecstasy. It's kind of rote, kind of trite, and completely ubiquitous in any and every exposition on religious culture of this day and age, be it from PhDs or shock-jocks.

Mourners: A Nameless Detective Novel, by Bill Pronzini

Pronzini is a seasoned elder statesman of the pulp-worshipping, locked-room-murder-puzzle, lone-existentialist-gumshoe-in-hippie-California genre. If you're me, this last is another way of saying "Pronzini is essentially workmanlike at churning out that which helps pattyjoe breathe."

I've read six or seven installments from this series that began in the 70s, and features the aforementioned "Nameless" protagonist adrift like some Ulysses, solving mods' murders in alternately white ethnic, hippified and multicultural San Francisco. This time I jumped out of sequence, ahead into the 2000s, to find Our Man having undergone important but non-radical personal life changes. Meanwhile, Nameless stays entertainingly busy as people keep dying in weird, intellectually-sexualized ways in CA (thank god for that!)

You are familiar with those two iconic American filmic achievements, Polanski's Chinatown and Altman's Long Goodbye?

Well, if you know these films you will recognize Nameless' alienation before 2005 SF, CA. However, knowing these films, you will also wonder if Nameless' alienation stems from something inward, and if his external sociopolitical surroundings aren't just a useful scapegoat.

There's a weird "I guess I just wasn't made for these times" thread that runs through Chandler, Ross MacDonald et. al., that typifies a sort of "California PI" vibe that's now truly a global, multimedia phenomenon... Is it a sort of pop existentialism, like the kind Fredric Jameson locates in the work of Philip Roth and Dog Day Afternoon? I dunno. I just know that Pronzini is a worthy vessel for another instantiation, another reiteration of this timeless-yet-oddly-timely format. Praise to him!

Wherein a drunken wobs posts a lolcats image in lieu of something substantive

Oh, I've got things to say. I'd just regret saying them in the morning.

Dear Ralph, It's Over

Frack me. I have defended Ralph Nader and supported his quixotic and increasingly narcissistic campaigns for more years than I care to admit. I gave the man my vote for President three times -- which is, depending on where you fall on the "a vote for Nader was a vote for Bush" unpleasantness from 2000, at least one time too many. (To put matters in perspective, I'm only old enough to have voted in four presidential elections, ya'll.)

I hear he's running again this year, which is...unfortunate. I've tried to just look the other way and pretend not to notice, like when a good friend gets shitfaced and pisses themselves in a corner at a party. Then he has to go and do this. (Zombie) Jeebus, Ralph. WTF am I supposed to think about this shit?

There’s only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He’s half African-American. Whether that will make any difference, I don’t know. I haven’t heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What’s keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn’t want to appear like Jesse Jackson?

The true believer in me want to insist that he must have been misquoted or his remarks taken out of context -- something, anything. There must be a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, right? Sadly, no.

I guess what other folks have been saying for years is true. The man apparently has no shame. It's over between us, Ralph. Before I just wanted to see other candidates. But now I just want to be done with you for good.

obama's ipod

oh jesus. and here i was thinking it was all milton friedman and father pfleger lectures.

Thanks, Walnuts!

With the controversy over FISA, questionable decisions about his economic team, and backing away from his campaign finance pledge, Obama has given the left-wing of the Democratic party much to lament.

Fortunately, John McCain has stepped up to remind us why we are supporting the guy in the first place.

Teal Encore, DNC edition

Thanks to the libertarians over at Reason for making plain that the DNC's "responsible consumer" committee blows the GTFF's to bits. Apparently we'll be able to choose between "union" or "organic" caps, par example.

I hope this means that conventon-goers (conventioneers?) can rock some dank falafel while watching Sen. Menendez or whomever's Keynote on that sure to be "Hot" August Night in Denver.

(btw friends, if we know anybody that's attending the DNC and who is not my father, you must please clue me in. i'm going to need a cohort. it's gonna take a village to live through that zesty Infomercial. i'm still scarred from 2000, even notwithstanding the Pat Morita appearance.)

The Current $$$ Conundrum re: Rates

It's a big day for the money people today. So imagine yr a capitalist.

Yr sitting in an antique chair in Elvis' Jungle Room, and some rook hands you the latest financial data with a pair of silver tongs.

You've got a housing slump, with aging Baby Boomers everywhere facing negative savings. They are about to have their only earthly assets, their homes, foreclosed upon - poor Boomers. You've got half-assed Senate Bills compelling Banks not to foreclose upon the bankrupt Boomers, because, shit, it's not like there's anybody out there to buy these foreclosed-upon mortgages anywho.

You're convinced that if people don't own homes, they won't have the personal ATM necessary for them to continue purchasing at the hospitals, restaurants and bars that make our economy grow. You need for their to be "easy money" available to do business, but you are patently opposed to higher wages, progressive income and capital gains taxes, decreased military spending or various Keynesian-y public investments.

So what do you do, lower interest rates? Sure you do. Make it easier for banks to lend each other money to lend to other people? That seems like the most logical solution in the world. Why reproduce labor power through wages or social services when you can financialize the process? That way, wages, benefits and standards of living once thought of as "rights" can now be reckoned as "debts:" somebody else's cross to bear.

Two problems, though. First, nobody's positive that the credit crunch has finally, fully unfolded, and for all you know all that is solid (insert financial institution here) may very soon melt into air, unleashing a concomitant burst of market terror; bankrupting the occasional municipality; and threatening to bring about a more concerted, more ubiquitous "run on the bank" vibe at home and abroad. Lowering interest rates increases lending and may defer our getting to the bottom of the credit fuck-up and allowing you to cut out the cancer - remember yr a capitalist, so this is about "a few bad apples," and not a structural problem."

Second, everybody everywhere else is making moves against impending inflation, and that means raising interest rates, not lowering 'em.

So what is to be done? I have no idea whether the Fed will raise or cut rates today, but I think it will be a while longer before you see an active "war on inflation" a la Volcker that's filled with rate hikes.

Too many people are hurting too much, still, and it's an election year. And this is that unlikely bout of inflation that many attribute to commodity price increases rather than blaming on overpaid workers.

Weird times. A new chapter of neoliberalism. This is the political economy we're navigating or not navigating, labor movement. Don't expect President Obama to be able to tell us how to find a good restaurant here.

Max Fraad Wolff takes us as close as we're going to get to a punchline with his newest expose on an almost pomo indecisiveness around inflation:

A newly enhanced interest in blaming foreign actors smoothes political and media discussion. The confluence of today's high prices with declining home prices, stagnant wages and dimming job market prospects helps explain radically different perception of the new inflations. In the end, none of this explains it all. We seem to have decided some hyper-inflations are good and some are bad. Ultimately, we like hyper inflation in what we already own and hate it in what we have to buy.