Two unrelated reasons to cheer

Yay!

Woohoo!

Now this is just funny.

Today's New York Times Magazine gives us a birds-eye of an interesting project. Turns out Metallica has been filming their group therapy sessions. [I know, the link requires a login, suck it up]

Not only that, but the reviewer gleefully indulges in the exact thing you or I would in the theater: mockery. Just listen:

Virtually everyone in the theater snickered like condescending hyenas, just as they did during every other visceral, meaningful moment in the documentary. And so did I.

Yeah, that sounds about right. I actually saw Metallica about a year ago, and it was the first time [God knows how it took me this long] to utter in public, "I just don't get white people." There were great heaving women who yanked up their tops and licked each other to audience hootings. The venue [some big roofed thing in Houston] stopped selling beer a full hour before Metallica even came on, suggesting to me that this was their only attempt at crowd control. And then the band came out.

My friend Ray was a bouncer in the Bay Area throughout the 80s, and he got a weirdly intimate look at that world. Humpty from the Digital Underground was a regular, and Ray observed lots of madness and busted heads. His name for Metallica is "The Glitter Midgets", which, having seen them in concert, is completely accurate.

How to tell? The stage is covered in stagehands and cameramen and light dudes scurrying this way and that. A cameraman goes up to James Hetfield or Lars and shoots for awhile, and you can't help but think, "Shit, that's a big cameraman." He's got at least a head on James, maybe a head an a half. "Fuck, that one over there by Lars is huge too! Fuck, they're all gi-normous!"

This is in fact actually not true. All the cameramen at a Metallica show look like giants because the band itself is probably 5'5". We're talkin James Madison small. Many celebrities are, turns out. I've met Lenny Kravitz, who can't be any more than 5'7", probably less. In "Zoolander", you can see clearly that Ben Stiller is even shorter than that. Tom Cruise, Van Damme, Stallone .. quite a pattern. I am shocked, shocked that persons who might have felt inferior in some way have sought out careers that commanded the adulation of millions. It's astonishing!

The final nail in the coffin of public protest as a method to effect policy change. That, and some nudity

So this morning, after a misadventure in the mundane details of life [automotive, if you must know], I went to this. Embarrassingly, Puddinhead has a long history of public nudity, albeit usually more in the sense of gleeful shenanigans than actual protest events, and so he felt obliged to have one last go-around. Living in a city that still has a comparatively thick hippie population, I get treated to the occasional protest in the street against Bush or Iraq or Ashcroft or oil or whatever. I'm no great fan of Dubya, and I can understand the cultural momentum that underlies the genuine protest sentiment. Time was, one could get the people together and actually accomplish something. At one point or another, some folks decided that protests weren't actually going to get the job done. These days, in the United States, it seems pretty clear to me that protests don't do a damn bit of good, and, in particular, why this one with the naked people and the bikes was woefully flaccid. [If you skipped the first link, it was a "naked bike protest" to increase awareness of alternate forms of transportation.] There are several reasons for this protest impotency:

1) In terms of trying to influence the current President, you can't even get close enough for any policymakers to actually hear you. [Of course, it's not like they even bother watching the news anyway.]

2) Do protesters actually vote? I'm looking for numbers and am not really coming up with anything definitive. For the time being, I'm going to speculate "no", mostly because ...

3) Protests are no longer political events but social ones. Probably the greatest example of this is a lengthy New York Times article on the enormous grassroots to-do of the Howard Dean presidential campaign, yet somehow couldn't get past the notion that people who did this made social bonds and fell in love. Much was made of their social awkwardness and the seeming acceptance they found by volunteering in the organization, indeed, the article didn't really touch on Dean's politics at all. Is this what the movement amounted to? A cure for loneliness, as compared to a genuine thrust for social and political change? You bet.

4) Anybody who has any real power these days is a lobbyist anyway. Ever wonder why all the laws are slanted to benefit the rich? It's because they're better at bending ears! If the sorts of protests you see nowadays changed things, we'd have marijuana at the grocery store and free patchouli in your mailbox. Okay, we might have universal health coverage too. But the people who are pushing for these things are either a)not rich or b) really shitty at disseminating their message to the right people.

As you might well imagine, the naked protest ride flopped as a protest. Why? It was a social event. It invited lots of gawkers [a bunch of newspeople, the usual cadre of Girls Gone Wild-type photographers, several TV news trucks], got the front page of the local paper, and, let's face it, there's no way it would get that sort of participation without a gimmick. The "protest" element was restricted to yelling at streetbound pedestrians, either walking or waiting at bus stops, that driving sucks and one should seek alternate forms of transport. Er, like they were doing.

To add a tinge of nastiness to the proceedings, Austin both prides itself on being liberal but has gentle racial tensions unheard of in other, more "conservative" cities, like Houston. Which is to say, Austin is full of privileged white folks who are fine with the idea of recreational drug use and homosexual experimentation but are not quite so sure about making friends in the "bad" part of town. Despite having say, a 12% black population in the city, wandering anywhere west of the interstate that divides the town will net you zero sightings. While Austin's racial divide is a topic for another post, it was palpable to be in a phalanx of well-heeled hippie whiteys riding bikes, telling the poor folk and pedestrians that they should be bicycling when they're too poor for cars or almost anything else. There may have been some uneasy solidarity between the hippified Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panthers, but it sure don't seem that way now. Somewhere the hippies either got rich, or turned into crystal-bearing earth mothers, or both. In the meantime, brown and black folks got screwed. Again.

So, well-off naked people tending a social event and gentle exercise are not really going to get the US out of Iraq, no matter how loud they yell. They'll tick off the folks who might actually benefit from some of the policy changes they're proposing. And the female ones will get their images masturbated to later on that evening.

But hey, it was pretty cool to cruise through the Capitol in a speedo with a police escort.

Ding dong

So Reagan died over the weekend. Not to be morbid, but he's been at the top of my dead pool for some years now [sharing the throne with the Pope]. And, as I wasn't savvy enough to write his obituary a long time ago and slacked off this weekend, pretty much everyone beat me to the punch. And all of those responses are only on one lousy site! We've already descended into sufficient meta-analysis that commentators are already bitching about the coverage.

It was bad enough when Reagan was actually in office in terms of the country's divisiveness, let alone now. And considering that his love of deficits and contempt, or at the very least indifference, to inconvenient facts are but a mere antecedent of today's regime. I hated Reagan from the beginning, despite being only six years old at the start of his first term. Time and time again, folks from different venues strenuously disputed the facts upon which Reagan's policies were based, and at various points asserted that he was unable to tell movies from reality. Perhaps the day will come when public servants set policy on empiricism, which is to say, facts. But that day has been postponed by Reagan, and even more so by Bush. We'll see how ugly things will get before they start to get better. I try not to listen to this guy too much, but I'm a little worried that he's right.

The descent into darkness slows just a wee bit

Puddinhead normally doesn't traffic in these circles, but this is a bloody godsend.

Eau du smack and bisexual implications in the beltway

One of the more odious words to come out of this business is "blogosphere". It seems to be on the lips of pundits everywhere, especially ones that traffic in would-be political analysis. I guess the idea is that this wing of the internet is an echo chamber, and, while a fairly closed one [a news.google search for "blog" gives us a paltry 1600 stories, as compared to, say, 19,000 for "horse"], every once in awhile things bust out.

I had pretty much considered the punditry migration to the internet to be the ultimate in self-insulation. Last year, I was teaching a science class to a bunch of business majors, when the most idiotic of the bunch confided to me that he was a "budding pundit". Really, I mused. What exactly does a pundit do? I might be wrong, but it sounds like such a person gives advice to people who are unable to affect public policy. Which is to say, entertainment. Which is to say, such people shouldn't take themselves too seriously. Especially since it seems that the blogosphere is a place where each political blogger reads the other one, quotes it, and links back, resembling nothing so much as an internicine, google-linked sewing circle. Which, really, seems entirely appropriate, given the pundit's role as an entertainer and impotent architect of public policy.

Indeed, the most recent [and only, so far as I can recall] explosion from that land of nod to the actual news is, predictably, a sex scandal. A low-level staffer, Jessica Cutler, dubbed herself "Washingtonienne" and had written a naughty blog wherein she details sleeping with a variety of men, some politically-connected, some, not so much. If there's any mistaking her for a serious political analyst, here's a taste: "A man who tries to fuck you in the ass when you are sober does not love you. He should at least take you out for a few drinks to spare you the pain. Now I know that W does not care about me, only my asshole."

Profound, yes, but Jim Lehrer it ain't.

Anyway, this tripe [she coos approvingly about marthastewart.com at one point] gets picked up by a variously celebrated and denounced blog, Wonkette. Eventually the story breaks, because everyone wants to know about Bush-appointees and assfucking, and it becomes a big to-do. Wonkette herself, not a bad-looking woman, scores an evening of drinks with Washingtonienne, and produces these rather unfortunate pictures. Of course, this was after the actual fallout from her writings, so a juicier part of the scandal, that of a potential lesbian romp between a well-known Washington blogger and the roundheeled staffer she outed, had missed the Post entirely and was restricted to the reverberations of the echo chamber. [Bear in mind that this post would be chock-full of Washingtonienne links if I bothered to rigorously sift through the literature, but there's only so much shit I can give about this topic.] And, predictably, it has fallen from, and I quote, "Damn. After seeing that picture, I wanna be the white meat in a Wonkette-Washingtonienne sandwich," to something a bit more insidious than your typical male fantasy: the niggling idea that these two women had orchestrated the whole thing to get attention. The nerve! Anyway, that's what Wonkette told me:

puddinhead: props for the hasty Washingtonienne exit.
tipwonk: i am happy to be rid of the story
puddinhead: Yeah. One needs to know the proper time to leave.
tipwonk: no regrets (except maybe the pix) but i hated those last few days
puddinhead: Figured you got porn requests from across the country. Feh
tipwonk: exactly
tipwonk: mr. wonkette was exceptionally supportive and good humored about it
puddinhead: Cheers to him. I mean, it's not as if you planned this one
tipwonk: that is not what some people think.
puddinhead: Hm. Interesting conspiracy theory, if you were after publicity as a beltway sex goddess
puddinhead: Somehow I kinda think you weren't, though
tipwonk: no. i wasn't.
tipwonk: i don't complain about any press, but that's not what i was aiming for.
puddinhead: So it's progressed from adulation to snippy accusations of scenestealing? That was quick.
tipwonk: well, it's the internet.

[Before I take any credit for actually knowing this person, you too, can bug her: "tipwonk" on AOL IM. Go for it.]

Yeah, it's messy. I was about to tell her, the gossipy blogger, "Hey, honey, live by the sword, die by the sword," but it struck me that, as a public [?] figure who's an attractive woman, it might be more apt to say, "Live by the sword, die by the howitzer." There are plenty of reasons women don't get props for fulfilling public roles, and I fully expect this one to cartwheel into nastiness in the future. For those of you into this sort of thing, be on the lookout in the upcoming days for outraged ugly male bloggers impugning her wantonness or accidental wiles.

Then, there's the rest of us, who could give a shit. Is the outrage coming? Yes, it is. Is there a moral here? Yeah. Don't read blogs.

The predictable outcome of an afternoon spent sputtering about my financial status

I forgot to the pay the rent today.

Oops.