Pay Tray: a blog commenter's blog

On Seeing Slick Rick, 8Ball and MJG, and Raekwon in a Columbus Parking Lot

2011-07-19T13:56:00.001-07:00

This summer I work for a federal judge in Columbus, Ohio. We do some exciting things, like passing on the constitutionality of healthcare reform or deciding whether Michigan's voters are allowed to ban affirmative action in state universities (they can't for the moment, but will be free to again when the Supreme Court reverses us), but the bulk of a federal appellate judge's work, and by extension, my own, is deciding whether murderers should go free because of irregularities in their trials, whether aliens get to stay in the country, whether an arrest was wrongful or justified, whether prisoners' rights to some modicum of medical care have been violated, and so on. Virtually no one with any kind of financial wherewithal litigates before a Court of Appeals (those people settle); people who litigate in federal appellate court do so because they have no other choice but to appeal and appeal until some court, hopefully, springs them from prison or lets them stay in the country or gives them a huge judgment without which they couldn't financially subsist. So you see a lot of bad lawyers and work through a lot of uninteresting law. Often, even if the convicted murderer in jail for the rest of his life has a strong argument, one which the poor recent Harvard/Yale Law School grad assigned the case will labor mightily to persuade the court of (the grad being one of the judge's clerks), the guy's lawyer will screw all your good work up by being an idiot. So it can be a frustrating job.

Anyway, the somewhat random grouping of Slick Rick, 8Ball and MJG, and Raekwon came to a dingy Columbus club's parking lot to perform Saturday night. The place was in a terrible neighborhood, the girls seemed to have largely wandered off the set of Apache's 'Gangsta Bitch' video, there were only about 150 people, eight of them white, etc. The fact alone that these four legends could end up together in a tiny parking lot, and that kind of a tiny parking lot, is pretty remarkable. Slick Rick and Raekwon obviously didn't have the most fully realized careers, perhaps Raekwon never really had the talent or personality that his having recorded perhaps the best rap album ever made would suggest, but these still are fairly colossal figures in the history of the genre, and yet there they were in this tiny lot. And not as some kind of back to their roots gesture - this is how they make their money. I don't think an equivalent gathering of great rock artists could occur in that kind of a setting. There's still a sense in which, as dominant as "rap" is in pop music today, rap never really made it to the mainstream or got taken seriously. Particularly the latter. Millions of college-age white kids know who Dre and Snoop and 50 and Wayne are, but have no notion that rap exists that isn't made to be played at frat parties or blasted out of their cars or laughed at because at times it's even more misogynistic than they are. It's an unfortunate and, of course, vaguely racist state of affairs.

So anyway, Slick Rick performed first, and that was rather dismal. At this stage in his career, Slick Rick is no less an oldies artist than the Beach Boys. He stands there in his eyepatch and huge jewelry and does songs he recorded 22 years ago when he was young and brilliant, but today he looks and sounds like an ordinary middle-aged guy. It's one thing to be an old-school purist and quite another to find any sort of enjoyment in seeing it performed by a 46-year-old-man. At one point he did this sad little gimmick where he wanted to "test" whether the audience preferred the old school or the "new school." So he would say, "DJ, play me the best of the new school, of the last two years of the new school." And then we were supposed to cheer, but not as enthusiastically as we were supposed to cheer when the DJ subsequently put on a Run-DMC song. So first the DJ plays 'Hustle Hard,' and I'm like, what the fuck, Slick Rick is playing us 'Hustle Hard.' Then he actually goes, "do you remember this from the BET Awards?" And he starts dancing to it! I don't even watch the BET Awards, what is the great Slick Rick doing watching the BET Awards and dancing to Ace Hood? Then the next song was 'We Fly High,' another exemplar of the "best of the last two years of the new school," though it is most assuredly not from the last two years or three years or four years. And for that, Slick Rick actually briefly did the balling dance. No one in the crowd seemed to see any irony in this. Meanwhile, the women in the crowd were finding whorish ways to dance to 'Hey Young World.' So his set was an absolute torture.

Then after a very long intermission, during which the winner of some Columbus beat battle showed us how he could set the Supremes's 'You Keep Me Hanging On' to DJ Khaled-bop, 8Ball and MJG came on. That was a lot less depressing, if only relatively speaking. For starters, both have actually done notable things after their first album, so their set was way less of an oldies act and way more, unfortunately, of an unnecessary walk through their Bad Boy/Grand Hustle discography. Now I like 'Don't Want No Drama' as much as the next guy, but how much more amazing would it have been to see them do 'Armed Robbery'? Not happening. I think the earliest song they did was 'Pimp Hard.' That aside, it was an interesting set in some respects. Maybe this is just my view, but since 8Ball got older and less facile, I've felt that MJG is by far the more technically adroit member of the group - but at the same time by far the least interesting. And that was very much the case Saturday. MJG kept doing the same stop-start, precisely enunciated flow he's been doing on everything for forever, carefully mapping out every little hitch in the air with his off-mic hand as if he were conducting himself in an orchestra, and doing so with a great deal of intensity. Yet there was something strangely inessential and hollow about it. Meanwhile, 8Ball was slurring everything, practically inaudible for half of the time, but quite riveting all the same. Between the hat and shades covering his entire face and how round the guy is, the man barely seems human; he looks like a big ball that might roll off the stage if he weren't so firmly stuck in one spot. At times when I was watching him, I wondered if he didn't just lay on a sofa all day, hibernating until it was time to roll off the couch and record something in perfect double-time. (Even though he was a bit of a mess for most of the set, this performance of 'Sho Nuff' was shockingly sharp.) At one point, he just stopped doing anything and his whole crew gathered round him in a circle as MJG looked on nervously, as if 8Ball were about to give birth. I half-expected that he might - or that he was about to pass out from the heat. Unfortunately, 8Ball started to seem a whole lot less like a magic rapping fat globule and more like a regular guy when, towards the end of the set, he repeatedly reminded us that 10 Toes Down, their latest album, is currently in stores.

Then after another huge intermission, Raekwon showed up. This was a somewhat emotional experience for me. One tends to forget that Rae isn't just his solo career, but a huge part of Enter the Wu-Tang, and particularly of songs like C.R.E.A.M. and Can It Be All So Simple, both of which were staples of my late adolescence. Raekwon still looks like Raekwon, he still raps about the same and about as well, though he's obviously much less hungry, he still does random rants about seeds and respecting your elders and the future of the youth and how he loves grandmothers. That said, I was struck by a few things. He was constantly performing other people's verses - ODB's on Da Mystery of Chessboxin, Nas's on Verbal Intercourse, Prodigy's on Eye for an Eye, probably INS's on Protect Ya Neck and a bunch of other things. So little of what he did was purely solo Rae - Incarcerated Scarfaces, a couple of the new things, and that was it. And after a while it began to serve as a reminder of how inessential Rae arguably was to the music that bears his name - indeed, how inessential and replaceable all the various Wu members may have been vis-a-vis the project's real driving force, RZA's musical vision. Second, he did do a few of his new songs, and I guess I'm not sure what the purpose of new Rae in 2011 is. He does a superb job of recreating the sound of Wu in its prime, but none of it even begins to compare to the originals or have anything new to say, musically, thematically, however, that the old stuff didn't say already. I wish that Cam could have kept going on forever in the Purple Haze vein, but Purple Haze, unlike Cuban Linx, isn't a 16-year-old album. And even in Cam's case, when he still was capable of rapping well on Killa Season, there was a point, songs like I.B.S. aside, where the whole endeavor of Cam being as crazy and far-out and 'surreal' as he could possibly be started to feel very tapped-out and redundant. All that said, seeing Raekwon perform Cuban Linx, even today, is a hugely rewarding and at times moving experience.

The Tree Of Life Is Not A Good Film

2011-06-04T23:50:00.000-07:00

Jean-Luc Godard once accurately said of Au Hasard Balthazar (the first masterful five minutes of which are above) that it was the world in an hour and a half. In The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick attempts to give us the universe in two hours and a half, only to give us over-edited fragments of a 60s Texas suburban clan's family videos. What's particularly galling is how little Malick cares about his characters; he treats them with precisely the degree of interest (and in precisely the same way) that a music video director treats his models. Large parts of the movie feel like extended anti-allergy or anti-arthritis* commercials. You know, the rapturous shots of mothers and their toddler sons playing outside - imagine a couple hours of that, edited at exactly the pace of a real anti-allergy commercial, leavened with a digression on the Big Bang and pseudophilosophical disquisitions on the "way of nature" and the "way of grace." And like a commercial, Malick's movie isn't about the people in it; it's about aggressively selling the viewer on some bullshit about loving every leaf, every ray of light (an actual quote from the film's constant voiceover). And even at that it fails completely. The only slightly interesting thing in the movie is the bit when the eldest of the Allegra Fam's three sons develops a not-very-subtextual thing for his mom, which Malick seems to be cool with, because in the film's unsubtle dichotomous world, she represents the way of grace, while Brad Pitt, her husband, represents the way of nature (apparently the bad way, which is odd given that the entire film is a series of loving shots of sunflowers and trees and flowers and more trees). It's the only sexual thing in a very sexless film, Malick being more comfortable with plant life and its less messy means of reproduction.

* The last fifteen minutes are more of a riff on anti-arthritis ads - tons of old people happily taking a stroll on the beach. The twist here being that they're all - SPOILER ALERT! - reincarnated old arthritic people. Or maybe they're just in Sean Penn's mind. Either way, who cares.

The Sun May Rise Tomorrow

2011-05-31T15:56:00.000-07:00

Yeah, it might do that.

Shawna Kingston (JR!) In Critical Condition/NY Times Totally not Culturally Stereotyping French People

2011-05-30T20:04:00.001-07:00

This is a great picture of Sean Kingston. Or "rapper Sean Kingston," as he is referred to by the Chicago Tribune, Extra TV, HipHopDX (???), and many local TV stations. I suppose he was a rapper once; JR Rotem has been quoted as saying: "Sean Kingston was a rapper when we found him and it was a development process to get him more melodic. At Beluga we essentially refine the talent so that it's more of a marketable product." Wow, super-artistic approach to making music. "Essentially refining" the talent so that it doesn't rap anymore. Anyway, Sean Kingston crashed into a bridge on a Jet Ski and is in stable, yet critical condition. I wish him the best of luck.

This, on the other hand, is a picture of French-American people. Check out the Gallic gestures! French-American people, the New York Times tells us, have mixed reactions to the once-future President of their homeland being an accused rapist. Not just that, it's "forcing them to examine their loyalties." Because that's what people do when someone of their nationality is accused of rape. Many of the American French, the Times tells us, "work for French restaurants, French banks and enterprises specializing in perfume, high fashion and luxury goods. They often prefer French newspapers..." They also have weird French views about stuff. For example, in the case of Ms. Cottavoz, who runs a health food store in the Upper West Side and was raised in the Gascony region, "her French blood boiled" when she saw DSK doing the perp walk. That's because she's French and they don't perp walk in france. Another Frenchwoman, Ms. Steckel, who runs a French culture-promoting institute, says that when DSK got arrested she got "extremely emotional" and that her "Frenchness came to the fore with more force than [she] would have thought." Ms. Steckel also adds the insight that the French are more prone to think DSK was set up because "the French adore the idea of plots," while "French Americans are more factual." Way to promote your culture. Mr. Touchard, however, who is a French American owner of a French bistro, still thinks that DSK was set up, cryptically observing that "if you want to take down your enemy, you have to know his weaknesses." And a Thomas Bishop, who isn't even French, but who is a bigtime French people expert, explains to the Times that "French-Americans... do not integrate into the American mainstream as easily as other ethnic groups, retaining stronger feelings for their homeland." These French-American peoples, he goes on to explain, may view DSK as "a man with a tragic flaw," rather than holding the normal American view of DSK as a "frisky Frenchman." Meanwhile, Ms. Cottavoz can't reconcile the views of "her American mind and her French mind" on the matter. Her American mind, apparently, tells her that raping maids is wrong, but her French mind is the one with the boiling blood over DSK's mistreatment at the hands of the police. I thought that, like, our sophisticated media elites were supposed to be all about French people and their elite sophisticated ways, not a bunch of anti-French bigots. That's what Sarah Palin told me.

Cornel West and the "Jewish Brothers"

2011-05-17T22:21:00.001-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

First, sorry for not blogging. I'm just at a point in my life where I don't care too much about rap. It isn't that rap isn't good right now; it is. But major label rap has become so moribund that the only way to stay on top of things is to follow a million tumblrs and listen to mixtapes from a million artists that don't have record deals. I lack both the time and the interest to do that. I do, however, write capsule reviews of pop, and some rap, at thesinglesjukebox.com. You can have fun guessing which of the writers I am.

So Cornel West went on MSNBC last night to be interviewed by a liberal talk radio hack, who was upset that West, in an Internet interview, had criticized Obama for lacking backbone and being the "puppet of corporate plutocrats." I sympathize with those on the left who are disappointed with Obama; from a liberal perspective, his has been a disappointing presidency. However, this is, no matter what people say, a center-right country and I doubt that Obama could have done much more than he did - besides, perhaps, making the stimulus somewhat larger. But even that, you may recall, was very difficult to get passed, even with 60 Democrats in the Senate. He does, of course, have the power to leave Afghanistan, and I do think his staying there is, in large part, attributable to a failure of political courage. But I don't really think that that's why people like West are mad at Obama, though perhaps it should be.

Anyway, when West was asked why he had accused Obama, in a previous interview, of having a "fear of free black men," West replied (about 4 1/2 minutes into the video above) that Obama has "a predilection much more towards upper middle class white brothers and Jewish brothers and has a certain distance from free black men who will tell him the truth both about himself as well as what’s going on in black communities, brown communities, red communities and poor white and working class communities." My initial reaction was that this was shockingly anti-Semitic; otherwise, why single out us "Jewish brothers" when Jewish people, after all, are white people? It all sounded very "teh Jews secretly rule the world." Moreover, this wasn't some weird slip of the tongue, because in the interview that this interview was about, West said the same exact thing, namely that "brother Barack," apparently due to his "Kansas influence [and] loving white grandparents," is frightened by "independent black folk" and "feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men."

These comments are stupid in a typical Cornel West-ian way - West, who started his career as a fairly brilliant philosopher, has spent so many years talking down to an uneducated audience that he seems to have deeducated himself as a result - but I don't think they're anti-Semitic. For, as it turns out, West has this really weird view about Jewishness as an ethnicity, on which Jewish people (or Jewish brothers, if you prefer) are no more "white" than Chinese people are white. Hence, for him, saying that Obama is most comfortable with whites and Jews is like saying that Obama is most comfortable with whites and Asians, as opposed to saying that Obama is most comfortable with whites and a religiously defined sub-set of whites whom, for suspect reasons, West felt like singling out. However, this view, as we'll see, is perhaps even more disturbing than the garden-variety anti-Semitism that it sounded like he was espousing.

Turning to this weird view, West has been rather explicit that Jewish people just aren't white. In a podcast he did for the Holocaust Museum in a series entitled, ironically, 'Voices on Antisemitism' (ironically because some of the views he espouses in the podcast seem fairly anti-Semitic), West actually says, "even if some Jews believe they're white, I think that they're duped." West doesn't claim that Jewish people are somehow genetically non-white; rather, his view is that anti-Semitism is so deeply rooted in Western civilization that Jewish people can never truly become white. Even though, he acknowledges in somewhat queasy terms, Jewish people have "move[d] from underdogs to middle dogs and upper middle dogs, and even a few top dogs at the top of American capitalist civilization," West says that he is "not going to believe the hype," as even in America, "the antisemitism lies just beneath the surface." That is why, he explains, "those like myself who are fundamentally committed to defending the humanity of Jewish brothers or sisters" are constantly reminding those brothers and sisters that they aren't really white and that Jewish brothers who lived in Nazi Germany thought they were safe too. (Yes, he says that.)

As you'll notice, this all seems awfully dissonant. For on West's terms, Jews are a race of "upper middle dogs," "top dogs at the top of American capitalist civilization," and one of the two privileged races that control "brother Barack's" policy decisions. (One might also add that we comprise a third of the Supreme Court in spite of comprising less than 2% of the U.S. population.) On the other hand, this uniquely privileged race, if you insist on calling us one, is, according to West, not white, not because that's the case biologically but because America is still such an anti-Semitic country that it regards us as racially other even though we're no less white than Russians, Italians, etc. It strikes me that, rather than being "fundamentally committed to defending the humanity of Jewish brothers and sisters," West feels a sort of vested interest in the continuation of anti-Semitism even after it's ceased to exist in American life in any important way (though I have no doubt that anti-Semitism is still huge in poor white, and black, communities where most Jewish people would never be caught dead in the first place, just as there are all sorts of powerless places in America where there's anti-white bigotry).

That this is the case is abundantly obvious in his podcast, in which he bemoans the estrangement of "Jewish brothers" from their black brothers and sisters. The way in which he does this is rather revealing. On the one hand, he says, Jewish people did play a huge role in the civil rights movement, and that's great. But then, "on the other hand," America is a place of "unbelievable upward social mobility," and this mobility has led to the "bourgeois-ossification of American Jewry," and this "bourgeois-ossification" has led to tensions between Jewish and black brothers. And it's precisely at this point at which he goes on his rant about Jewish people being duped if they think they're white or are safe in America, because Jewish people in Germany thought the same thing. The implications of all this are terribly clear. West thinks it's an unfortunate thing that Jewish people have succeeded in this country, a success he chooses to give the ugly name of bourgeois-ossification, and continues to view us as a victim of bigotry, in spite of all the evidence that that's not the case, in order to maintain some rhetorical community between Jews and blacks. This is why he insists that Jews aren't really white.

I find this rather pathological. It's understandable to be a little sad about Jewish-black relations, and it's undeniable that a - not the - cause of their declined state is Jewish economic success and black economic stagnation, or rather, a lesser degree of economic success on blacks' part than on our part, as there is a thriving black middle class that's a great deal larger than it was 40 or 50 years ago. (Of course, another cause of the declined quality of Jewish-black relations is black anti-Semitism.) But in the scheme of things, I would accept a decline in Jewish-black relations as the inevitable price of Jewish success and assimilation any day, and anyone who claims to be fundamentally committed to defending Jewish humanity should be happy for our success, rather than delusionally pretending that we didn't cross the line from other to white decades ago out of regret that we're no longer around to be partners in someone else's misery. It's a little like the fat girl who's always telling her formerly fat friend that she could put on 50 pounds at any moment, and that her warnings are just out of deep concern for her good looks. Except I don't believe that there's any fat girl out there crazy or pathetic enough to tell her ex-fat friend that, beneath the veneer of weight loss, everyone still sees her as fat. Then again, there probably is. At least that, though, isn't as egregious as not so subtly hoping for a re-injection of anti-Semitism into American life.

New York Times Does Feature On Acting, Inadvertently Demonstrates Why Modern Movie Acting Sucks

2010-12-08T22:58:00.001-08:00

Acting!

So the Times, to get us all excited for their annual Hollywood issue, gave us an exciting multimedia preview of said issue today called '14 Actors Acting.' One-minute, silent clips of pure acting from the Times's 14 favorite actors of the year. These clips, the Times says, will "show - with a few gestures and props but without dialogue or story - what acting is." Wow. More than that, "these brief clips portray not only the art, but also the joy and vigor of performance." You might think, then, that you'd see some good acting in these clips. But of course you would be wrong. Rather, you see the sort of excessively mannered, thoroughly phony, utterly self-conscious and self-aware, actorly acting that tends to win awards at the Oscars and get raves from your local newspaper of record's movie critic. Specifically, we get:

Jesse Eisenberg trying to do Mark Zuckerberg gone psycho by making a ridiculous expression in which he clenches his teeth and furrows his becurled brow
Robert Duvall doing the same old winking cutesy wise old man thing he's done in his last, what, two dozen movies
Lesley Manville playing a breakdown so broadly you'd think she was doing an opera performance for the benefit of the people in the 800th row in a megachurch
Tilda Swinton tearfully tugging her hands across her face so slowly and emphatically it looks like she's being recorded in slow-mo
Michael Douglas sitting in a chair and pretending to pretend to ponder old age and the mysteries of life, then lifting up and hopefully cocking his drooping head in a procedure that takes at least ten seconds, as if to mime thinking, "well, I'm still technically married to Catherine Zeta-Jones," and finally gazing into the camera in supposed-to-be-haunting-and-profound fashion, as if to say, "but I'm still really old and it makes me sad." All while doing stupid mannered things with his thumb and forefinger
Jennifer Lawrence doing a supremely awful job of reenacting the shower scene in Psycho
Natalie Portman, who's trying to effect a transformation from cute girl who can't act into sex symbol who can't act, doing an atrociously exaggerated take on existential weariness while stripping
Chloe Moretz trying to portray anger, I think. Judging all by the teeth-baring, she might simply be pretending to transform into a vampire
And some other stuff that isn't quite as bad.

And here's some actual acting:

WATCH BLAKE GRIFFIN/Vick/Moments From The Last Weeks of LKL

2010-11-20T22:18:00.000-08:00

Blake Griffin and teammates marveling/basking in replay of his greatness.

What I have to say about Blake Griffin will be pretty short. Blake Griffin isn't a great basketball player. Not yet, anyway. He struggles to guard pretty much anyone, is useless from beyond 10 feet, the occasional pretty jumper notwithstanding, and doesn't even have great touch around the basket. Oh and he lives at the line and can't make free throws. In large part a dunker, he only makes 48% of his shots (going into tonight's 44-point effort). His team is dramatically better with him off the court. This makes sense if you think about it. If a guy makes a little less than half of his shots (all of which are two-point shots), and just half of his foul-shots, a possession ending in that player taking a shot or going to the free-throw line will produce, on average, 1 point. In today's NBA, that is terrible. To put in perspective just how terrible that is, a team just as good, offensively, as Blake Griffin would be the 5th worst offensive team in basketball. Not coincidentally, the Clippers, Griffin's team, are the 4th worst. Griffin does not make his team appreciably better on offense, and he makes his team a whole lot worse on defense. A pretty huge guy, he can't even set a screen properly. The only respect in which his play actually makes the Clippers better is rebounding; per-minute he's one of the best twenty or so in the league at that.

That said, Blake Griffin is the most exciting player in the NBA and you better watch him now before he busts his head open flying through a backboard. This is so for two reasons; Griffin's game is sick, and the sick part of his game is the only part he has. Griffin has no real post game. I don't know if he's shot a hook shot in his NBA career. (Actually, he has, but it feels like he hasn't.) Ditto on turnaround jumpers, bank shots, drop steps/any systematized steps, and, like, post catches followed by simple footwork and a non-flashy layup. Nor can he shoot the ball. All he can do is fly, dunk, and execute a spin move faster than Twista can say 'dreidel dreidel dreidel.' Griffin is 100% highlights - even his rebounds of missed free-throws are highlights - and what spectacular highlights they are. Watching Griffin is like watching an airborne linebacker with the agility and demeanor of a puppy. Griffin's game is solely about attacking the basket, and yet, Griffin doesn't really go to the basket; of his dunks, maybe 5% are of the straight down the middle of the lane, arm raised perpendicular to the backboard variety. Griffin's M.O. is to leap up in a general area a few feet away from the basket, and then to reach over and dunk it from there; he has the oddest sense of angles I've ever seen. And when he does make contact, it's like he's tackling the basket and everyone around it. For example, this happened tonight:

Notice how his teammates' reaction is to hug each other for protection. In a dozen games, Griffin has taken the entire career of his closest physical comparison, Amare Stoudemire, formerly the last word in big-man athletic spectacle, and turned it into something hopelessly banal. One guy can dunk the basketball really hard; the other guy makes you forget you're even watching basketball. To watch Amare on the same court with Griffin is like listening to Joe Fatal's verse after Nas's on 'Live at the Barbecue.' Hopefully Griffin isn't getting career advice from Salaam Remi and the Trackmasters.

And now about Michael Vick. Michael Vick is my city's team's quarterback. I haven't seen a minute or a highlight of his play. This isn't, primarily, a reflection on my disapproval of Vick; I haven't watched football for several years now. If I did, however, I don't know if I could watch. It seems to me that two factors, and only two factors, should be relevant to whether one forgives Vick. First, one's general attitude towards forgiveness - forgiving murderers, rapists, thieves, dog-killers, significant others who cheat on you, whatever. Second, one's attitude about how wrong killing and torturing dogs is. Hence, there are a couple coherent positions you can have on why we ought to forgive Vick. You could believe that anyone who's genuinely contrite should eventually be forgiven for anything that they do, whatever that might be. That's a noble position; it's also one that very few, if any, people hold. Or, you could think that murder, rape, being Bernie Madoff, etc. is unforgivable, but killing and torturing dozens of dogs is not. What makes no sense at all is to say that Vick's playing football well should have anything to do with whether he should be forgiven, or has anything to do with whether he's a "changed man." What also makes no sense is to urge forgiveness without acknowledging that such forgiveness is predicated on an implicit discounting of the value of dogs' lives.

So for example, here the 11-time National Sportswriter of the Year complains that:

Wednesday, the L.A. Times ran yet another front-page story about how some of the 47 rescued pit bulls from the Vick kennels are doing. You know the answer because you saw the story the first 100 times: not well. Some of them still shake, cower and won't bark.

I love dogs, too, but how long does Vick have to star in "The Unforgiven"?

To me, this begs the question: what do you really think about torturing dogs? Is Reilly trying to say that 100 articles about any atrocity is too much? Of course not. If Vick had raped just one woman and left her in a state of permanent clinical depression, no one would ever write, look, this is the hundredth time we've read that this rape victim is living in a clinic and hasn't cracked a smile in years. I like women too, they make nice playmates, but, like, how long are people going to wring their hands over this shit? Of course not. So implicit in the claim that it's time to forgive Vick is the notion that electrocuting, drowning, hanging, and torturing dogs just isn't that serious a matter. Fine! Just let me know what it is about a dog that makes him soooooo much less worthy of consideration than the average person. Then maybe I too will complain that too many stories are being written about silly little dogs and their silly little shaking/cowering/not barking problems. But you need to make an argument; you can't just say, "all we've got here are some dogs still too traumatized to bark after being released from Vick's dog farm three years ago, time to get over it" like the conclusion follows from the premise.

Then Reilly continues:

Just press "pause" for a second and look at what he has done.

A man fresh from the clink is turning the NFL upside down. A man who was arguably the most reviled athlete in this country in 2007 is now the toast of American sports. Imagine that. Michael Vick ... is the favorite to win MVP this season.

Well how about that! Yes, maybe Vick has killed dogs, but he can really run and throw a ball. Well yeah. He was born fast and athletic. He has a brother who might be as talented as he is, it runs in their family. What is Reilly saying here? That Vick's genetic endowments redeem what a sicko he is, or was? So if Brad Pitt had done what Vick did, would Reilly be writing, "just press pause... a man fresh from the clink is still really good-looking! All over America, women are rediscovering Brad Pitt's cheekbones and going to see him in really bad movies!" Oh, but Vick isn't like Pitt - it's not all natural ability, he has to practice to get this good. Vick has worked hard at throwing a football this well. Many repetitions, hours of mind-numbing practice. The guy could be sitting at home reading Shakespeare, but no, he's working hard on throwing a football. The pain, the agony, the intense ennui this sensitive literary soul goes through to amuse millions of fat middle-aged men and their drunk sons. Yes, I am just so impressed that this man has found a way time and time again to throw a ball into a painted off section of a grassy field someplace that I wouldn't care if he murdered my sister.

Me, I think Vick is the most exciting athlete in American sports. Does that mean I approve of hideous cruelty to pit bulls?

As long as by 'exciting athlete' no moral judgment is being passed, then no, of course not. I think Hitler was an exciting orator - doesn't mean I approve of the gassing to death of relatives who actually appear in my family photo albums. On the other hand, I don't make a weekly habit of watching his speeches in rapture at how awesome he was at waving his hands around really super fast. Not my thing. But seriously, this is such a straw man argument. Thinking Vick's an exciting athlete doesn't mean you approve of electrocuting dogs. Therefore, it's time to forgive Vick. Huh? I'll bet he's exciting but that doesn't mean I want to cheer for the guy.

In fact, in a backward way, Vick has been the best thing to happen to pit bulls.

"It's very true," says John Goodwin of the Humane Society of the United States. "For the big picture, Michael has been a tipping point. Since his case, there have been 30 new laws enacted all over the country toughening dogfighting penalties...

Great. Maybe the pit bulls who were lucky enough to not get adopted by Vick could write Vick a thank-you note for killing a gazillion pit bulls and calling people's attention to the fact that dogfighting really sucks. Maybe Jewish people should be a little more thankful to the Nazis for killing so many of us and thereby making the world so sorry for us that we got our own country and anti-Semitism is way less cool. In a backward way, you might say that Hitler saved Judaism. Perhaps in Vick's next act he could go to North Philly and start shooting some people to call attention to inner-city violence. He could be the best thing to ever happen to inner-city neighborhoods! In a backwards way, of course.

Before prison, Vick used to be the last one into the locker room and the first one out. After prison, he's just the opposite. No Eagle prepares harder.

Before prison, he practically drove ruts in the McDonald's drive-thru lane. After prison, he's a chicken-and-broccoli guy.

Before prison, the only film room he hit much was the home theater in his Atlanta mansion. After prison, he has become a freak for studying game film of the opponent. Gollum sees more daylight.

Two things. 1, has Reilly ever heard of the term "contract year"? The guy's making a tiny fraction of what he used to make. He's probably interested in playing really well and returning to his pre-incarceration salary. 2, are we seriously contending that changes in diet and amount of game-film viewing has any possible bearing on an assessment of Vick's moral character, and even if so, are we suggesting that these sorts of things hold any substantive weight? Think about how ridiculous that sounds. Well yes, Vick did kill a ton of dogs in sick ways and torture many others. But he's stopped eating McDonald's and he watches tape of himself all the time. Even if not eating McDonald's makes you a better person in some obscure way - I guess it would speak to his being a good employee - can it possibly compare at all to what he did to all the dogs? The fact that he's simply doing what he's supposed to do, as an employee of the Eagles, has some real weight compared to hosing down and then electrocuting not just one dog, but many? Could that be? I guess it could, to an idiot who equates effective play on a football field with moral worth and whose life revolves around writing fawning tributes to fat people colliding into other fat people and concussing themselves. One might as well applaud porn stars for keeping slim figures, assiduously studying their "game film," and valiantly giving themselves STD's so socially maladjusted men can have shit to jack off to. Sheesh.

And finally Larry King, or to quote one of his interviewees, authenticity in a world of plasticity and synthesis. Larry King is retiring (forced out?), to be replaced by the judge at Britain's Got Talent who went crazy over that fat ugly woman. So now bigger-name guests are coming on his show again to say goodbye. Here are some moments, culled from transcripts, from Larry's long departure.

Ricky Martin

In this episode, Larry struggles to understand how Ricky could be gay, wants to know why Ricky named his memoir 'Me' (answer: "it's about me"), speaks for 'the Latin,' hears about Ricky wandering the slums of Calcutta rescuing little girls, and learns that Ricky's being on General Hospital was a very intense and beautiful moment in Ricky's life. Also, not quoted here, Ricky explains twice that he came out because of 'transparency.' Like he's a corporation aiming for full disclosure of his corporate activities. Ah, celebrities these days.

King: Ricky Martin, as you know, is the Grammy-winning recording star. He sold more than 80 million albums worldwide and is the author of a new memoir simply titled "Me."... Why did you title it that?

Ricky Martin: Very simple. It was my life. It was my moments, my ups and downs. It's about me.

...

KING: You had a surrogate mother?
MARTIN: I had a surrogate mother. And --
KING: Your sperm?

...

KING: How did you come out?
MARTIN: Well, first to my mother. And she actually asked me, my son, are you in love? And I was in love. And she said, is it with a man? And I said yes, mom, it's with a man.

...

KING: All along -- of course the people saw your act, you know. It was a very sexual and sensual act.

...

KING: You're listening to Ricky's new single, "The Best Thing about Me is You." It's a duet with Joss Stone. And from the sound of it you'll be hearing a lot more of this one. This could be a big hit, right? Is this out?
MARTIN: Thank you. Very simple. Reggae-ish, kind of tropical vibe. A lot of people were saying, Ricky, I was not expecting this kind of music from you on your comeback. I thought you were going to do either a power ballad or a "Living La Vida Loca" kind of vibe. And I'm like, well, you know what? I guess life is more simple than that.

...

KING: To the Latin, though, this is the image. To the Latin, the thought of being gay is very difficult. It's very not macho.

...

KING: All right. You've been -- do you call yourself gay or bisexual? Are you still bisexual? I mean you -- what are you?
MARTIN: Very confusing. For everybody, but for me. I am gay.
(LAUGHTER)
KING: No interest in women at all?
MARTIN: But I am gay. G-A-Y. Gay.

...

KING: You were on "General Hospital"?
MARTIN: I was on "General Hospital." And it was a very intense moment of my life. Very beautiful moment of my life.

...

You do a lot of philanthropic work, the Ricky Martin Foundation. You're an activist against human trafficking. What got you into that?
MARTIN: Many years ago I was invited by my colleagues, someone that was building an orphanage in Calcutta, India. And he told me, come and check it out. And I hopped in a plane, I went to Calcutta to see what was going on and when I was there he told me come on, let's go out to the street and let's rescue girls. And I'm like, OK, let's rescue girls.

Oksana Grigorieva

In this episode, Larry doesn't believe the shit that Mel Gibson's battered ex is selling, questions why she would ever bother to record phone calls in which an abusive, insane boyfriend threatened to kill her, tells her that she had all the power in the relationship because Mel is famous (????), and is treated to Oksana's views on the Constitution and the history of 1600s English law.

KING: So why, Oksana, did you tape him?
KING: So, you were taping him and you thought that you would be killed and wanted the world to hear this?
KING: Is it legal to tape a phone conversation?

...

KING: How did the tapes ever get released?
OKSANA: I have no idea.
KING: They were just in your possession?
OKSANA: In the possession of my lawyers.
KING: How can they be released if you're the only one with them?
HER LAWYER: She just said her lawyers had them!

...

KING: How are they so technically good?
GRIGORIEVA: They're not that good.
KING: They're pretty good.
GRIGORIEVA: Really?
KING: Don't you think for -- you had a home machine?
GRIGORIEVA: No, it's not a machine, it's an iPhone.
KING: Just sold a lot of iPhones. That's pretty good -- no I mean, that...

...

KING: The obvious thing that people have asked about this is, why didn't you hang up?

...

KING: In this clip that came from Radar online, we hear the man [the man!] giving his feeling about Oksana's appearance.
MAN: You go out in public and it's a (bleeped) embarrassment to me. You look like a (bleeped) heat and if you get raped by a pack of (bleeped), your fault. All right? Because you provoked it. You are provocatively dressed all the time, with your fake (bleeped), you feel to have to show all.
KING: Do you provocatively dress?
GRIGORIEVA: Am I provocatively dressed right now?
KING: No, not now. But I mean, where does that come from?

...

KING: How about the story that you were out to entrap him in a way. You knew his weakness and you wanted these tapes for -- forget the public use, for use in the courtroom some day. Did you have any script?
GRIGORIEVA: Are you kidding me?
KING: No, I mean, people have said this. I'm just asking.

...

KING: I'm still a man -- I know that you were doing for hopefully protecting yourself. Why you didn't keep hanging up.

...

KING: What finally ended the calls? Why did it stop?
GRIGORIEVA: It's just I pulled the batteries out of my phones, literally, physically.

...

GRIGORIEVA: People died for First Amendment, for Constitution. Soldiers died. I know I'm not dying or anything, but I'm actually being threatened in court that I might lose my baby. I'm terrified talking to you right now because I might lose my child. I might need your help, Larry.
KING: But you know that he's a very famous person.
GRIGORIEVA: Yes, I know.
KING: And so, therefore, it's a risk to him. A power you had over him was his fame. Other people who are -- who treat people poorly and hit them, they're not well-known. Women are forced -- they're slaves to them. They have trouble running away. You didn't have that problem. You had Mel Gibson.
LAWYER: Yes. But look at the power that he had in a role like this.
KING: Except he's more vulnerable. She's vulnerable physically, but he's -- who's getting the bad press now?

...

GRIGORIEVA: The paternity system is broken. I don't know maybe it's from 400 years ago, from U.K., remnants of the system when one person, the judge, is entirely responsible for something so monumental as your child's custody.

Russell Brand, or "so, you never said to her, why did you strike me with the bottle?"

I really don't get what's going on in this interview with Russell Brand. Brand pretends to be funny and intellectual but he's neither and then Larry tries to take his bad jokes/stupid profound act literally because he takes everything literally and then he gets all homoerotically obsessive with Brand's sex life and strange stuff happens. You'll see what I mean.

KING: You feel like a thing?

BRAND: I think you -- yes, I think you're objectified by fame. They simplify you and say, oh, right, his character, he's like a womanizer, or he's a cad, or he's a troublemaker. And they just use you and they don't -- they remove nuance. Someone said to me, the brilliant filmmaker, Albert Mazors (ph), he said tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance. People simplify things. They take out away the gray areas. But it's complicated. It's not so simple as Democrat, Republican, good, evil. But like we live in a culture I think that reduces those things so that they can pack these ideas and make us passive consumers. [Russell Brand, victim of tyranny. Brilliant filmmaker told him so.]

...

KING: How many women do you estimate you have bedded?

...

KING: How did you meet?
BRAND: At the MTV awards. I was hosting the MTV awards in Radio City, New York...a bottle arched the room struck on the head from distance, I looked at the trajectory using my knowledge of geometry, I looked out, it must have come from Katy Perry's impressive right arm. I thought that's very good that she threw that bottle that accurately from that distance. And a woman with an arm that strong, I have to have in marriage.
KING: She threw a bottle at you? For what purpose?
BRAND: I think it was attention speaking. It was like a romantic riot. There was a civil rights protest between two people.
KING: What did she say? Did you ask her, why did you throw that bottle at me? You didn't?
BRAND: No, I tried to assimilate it in everyday life, Larry. [Rambles on about how it reminded him of civil rights protests.]
KING: So, you never said to her, why did you strike me with the bottle?
BRAND: I've never asked her why she did that because I think it was evident that she was using it to punctuate the slew of ordinary encounters that I was having, giggling, chuckling women, the sweet scent of them, the pinkness of their cheeks, or their rich coffee color depending on the hue of the day.

...

KING: Why did you name your book "Booky Wook"?
BRAND: Yes. Because like a language, I think it becomes like it is going to be the way that people speak with the language on TV. It becomes like a white noise, you don't really listen, whether it's an oil spill or a murder or what else, someone being given a lifetime achievement award or whatever it is -- just this white noise of language.
So, I think if you disrupt language by --
KING: "Booky Wook."
BRAND: "Booky Wook," it's silly and childish. And it sorts of like it interrupts your thinking.

...

KING: Why didn't you [propose to Katy Perry] in Britain or Hollywood?
BRAND: Why would you do that? Go to a country like India vibrant with spirituality where you can see God in people's eyes.

...

KING: So, you're both on the same elephant.
BRAND: Absolutely.
KING: Side-by-side.
BRAND: No, no. We're there, we're on one elephant, like an emblem of (INAUDIBLE).

...

KING: How did you say it? What did you say?
BRAND: We get off of the elephant (INAUDIBLE) because things are going wrong. So, like, then we walked into a clearing and suddenly all the grandiosity and all of the gestures and the magic melted away into the simplicity of a moment between the two people when you realize there's a kind of -- I got -- it was very, very emotional.

...

BRAND: -- it's like Houdini's foreskin. Look --
KING: Houdini's foreskin. That's sick.

...

KING: If you just joined us, we're wearing each others rings for some preposterous reason.
BRAND: And who dare judge us?
KING: That's right.
BRAND: If we choose to wear it, Larry.
KING: Damn by (ph).

...

KING: That's a little rough. I knew Jim Morrison. You do look like Jim Morrison.
BRAND: Thanks.
KING: I did. Jim Morrison was maybe the handsomest man ever.
BRAND: Well, hold there in a minute. Let's just run this here. This is breaking news.
KING: You're a good looking man.

...

KING: Now, how do you combine juggling careers? You, actor, comedian. She, a singer, a fame renown. Why am I talking like this?
BRAND: I like it. It's brilliant.
KING: OK.

...

KING: You're an Olympian under the sheets. You were fantastic, right? You were a good lover. BRAND: I really, really tried hard, Larry. It requires chemistry, proper good love making. Doesn't it? You can't do it really good with a table, unless it's a hell of a table. But I really was committed to it, because of this ferocious, deep love of femininity and of women and anatomy. I love the curves of their body, the aroma of a woman, the scent of a woman, to quote dear Al Pacino. I love them. I love them. I love the variety. But in the end, it got a bit much. If you were loose in a candy store for too long, eventually you get diabetes.
KING: Did you ever wake up in the morning and not know who you were with?
BRAND: Yes often, because sometimes you can't remember all their names. If you put name tags on them, that's offensive.
KING: Yeah, it is.
BRAND: Often there was not just one, Larry, of course.
KING: There were two?
BRAND: I was looking for the one. I was very thorough in my search. To save time, sometimes I would audition three or four at once. So occasionally, it was difficult to remember everybody's names.

...

KING: You were a mailman in Britain?
BRAND: Yes, Britain, delivering letters. I thought there would be more sex involved. I thought knocking on people's doors at that time in the morning, the housewives would be vulnerable, I thought.
KING: It works?
BRAND: Do you want an extra delivery. No one picked up on it. It was innuendo laden. Would you like me to stamp that? I've got a heavy sack.
KING: You're a handsome young man. I think women open the door in the morning --

...

KING: You are totally -- you are totally you.
BRAND: I appreciate this.
KING: There is nothing false about you. And yet you are in show business.
BRAND: How have I achieved this peculiar dichotomy?
KING: Yes. How?
BRAND: It's a paradox. I live in a world of plasticity and synthesis, and yet there is some authenticity.

You (DMX Voice) Can't Be Serious

2010-11-14T10:38:00.000-08:00

From this Sunday's NY Times Magazine article on white neo-neo-soul singers:

Like Hawthorne, Reed was a white middle-class Jewish kid (real name: Eli Husock). He started out listening to country and early rock ’n’ roll; most of the music played at his bar mitzvah was gangsta rap like N.W.A. and Gravediggaz.

You have to admire the writer stupid/ignorant enough to believe this guy's story. What N.W.A. songs did he play at his Bar Mitzvah? 'Something 2 Dance 2'? Maybe 'Express Yourself,' with its righteous say-no-to-drugs message? 'Days of Wayback' would work well in a DJ set with Joni Mitchell's 'Circle Game.' And what about Gravediggaz? 'Diary of a Madman,' perhaps? I bet the intro got all the Jewish grandmothers up from their seats:

[Lady] They killed my baby... oh god they killed my baby
[Judge] Order in the court
[Lady] I will make you pay for this you murderers
[Judge] I said order in the court now! Now, before this
        court passes judgment, will the four defendants
         please rise and approach the bench
[Lawyer] Trust me guys, it's all under control
             the judge is my uncle, he'll take the
             insanity plea...oh yeah, don't forget
             my retainer balance
[Judge] Okay, I understand you guys are pleading insanity
        claiming demonic spirits possessed you to do
        these hideous murders.  Can you please explain
        to the court how these so called spirits made
        you into these RAVING MADMEN?!?!

Actually that's pretty funny and light-spirited.

Today I Feel Badly For Kanye

2010-11-11T23:50:00.000-08:00

As you know, I do not get down with Kanye at all, and I have no interest in listening to/talking about his soon-to-be massively overrated album, other than that starting it off with some thoroughly mediocre rapping over a reasonable facsimile of a mid-90s RZA beat naturally raises questions in my mind as to whether Kanye is even as good a rapper as U-God. I think so, but I had to think about it for a little while. Anyway, as you've all surely heard, Bush recently announced that Kanye accusing him of not caring about black people was the worst or most disgusting moment of his presidency. To which many people have replied that Katrina itself or September 11th or bungling Iraq ought to be the worst moment of his presidency. Now that's silly; all that Bush meant was that was the most personally wounding moment of his presidency, not the worst thing, objectively speaking, that happened during it. So Bush was hurt and that's understandable, as he's not a racist, just a horrible mismanager. But who would've thought that Bush's personal pique at Kanye would lead to Kanye being arm-twisted into recanting his equally understandable views on national television? Not I. Worse yet, after eliciting this blanket apology from Kanye, who was clearly trying to say that maybe Bush wasn't personally a racist but the response to Katrina was still all about race, Lauer goes on to conflate Kanye's accusation of Bush's racism in negligently allowing however many hundreds of African-Americans to die with Kanye's alleged racism in telling Taylor Swift that she was less deserving of an MTV music video award than Beyonce. So the ridiculous upshot of the interview ends up being that Kanye needs absolution from Matt Lauer for accusing Bush of being a racist for seeming, to all the world, completely disinterested in the fate of black people in New Orleans, and Kanye is also a racist for suggesting that a white performer's video was worse than a black performer's video (when it was!), and it would be really great if Kanye could apologize for these appalling acts of bigotry. Then after Kanye has his predictable Twitter breakdown over the interview, Lauer says that there's nothing untoward about rubbing the video of the MTV incident in Kanye's face, while his white coanchor, clearly disgusted with Kanye, sniffily concurs that there was nothing the matter with Lauer's interviewing tactics at all. I mean, not only is showing the poor shitshow footage of his most embarrassing public breakdown less worthy of journalism than one of those sick postgame reunion shows they do in reality TV land, the whole concept of the interview was blatantly racist. That concept, nothing more and nothing less, is that Kanye can be welcomed back into the fold of white civilization as a good, safe black person once he (a) recants any "line-crossing" charges of white racism, and (b) admits that his being rude to a white girl and implying that she won an award because of race was, in fact, racist. That's kind of Orwellian if you stop and think about it. Next thing you know, we'll have people asking Kanye to apologize for his "racist" interest in sleeping with white women, or perhaps his "racist" appropriation of bad 80s rock and shitty French house (stealing the white man's music!). Maybe from now on Kanye's only allowed to do Motown-sampling tunes that bash black consumerism and deadbeat dads. The rest of his career can be 'All Falls Down' re-recorded umpteen times.

wakaflockawakaflockawakaflockaflockaflocka

2010-06-29T17:25:00.000-07:00

So I was sitting in court today right in front of my life-appointed judge and between falling asleep 5 times, unconsciously I randomly started mouthing the lyrics to Waka Flocka Flame's "Hard In Da Paint." Fortunately she can't read lips. Would've been awkward. Anyway, I have some brief thoughts on music. Like, really brief thoughts.

'Airplanes' is very unfortunate. We truly seem to be headed for an era of emo-rap. The hook epitomizes everything I hate about Music By White People With Guitars. I don't know if there's something objectively gross about that type of "I could really use a wish right NOWWWWWWWW" type of angst or if I just can't relate. I incline towards the former. I mean, it's not like I'm a tough guy, I drive around constantly singing along with the Supremes and shit, but there's a difference between genuine misery and feeling like you want to cut yourself with tiny blades and wear really dark eye shadow. But the rapping's even worse. I mean, the guy's possibly the hugest sellout in the recent history of the genre and he spends his last verse bemoaning label politics - the same, you know, politics that are foisting this awful song on us. He makes Ke$ha feel uncalculated and authentic. Not to mention the shit with the planes and shooting stars. Look, wishing on a shooting star is already bullshit, therefore, you can wish on anything you want to. A fart if you like. Don't act like there's this wish-code that requires you to entreaty the fucking heavens to turn planes into shooting stars so you can have something to stick your little emo wishes to. Like I really thought that we abandoned insanely trite conceits in pop lyricism like that one back in the days of Sinatra.

Forever Young is interestingly bad in theory but not in actuality. In theory because (a) you've got this man rapping/talking/murmuring like he's dying, yet he's babbling about how eternally young he is, (b) the third verse where his flow totally breaks down and he just keeps saying "hold up, hold up", (c) redundantly explaining that "if you love me this is how you let me know/don't ever let me go/that's how you let me know," which is the sort of thing that could've come off as all cool and dadaist, as the lazy critics used to say, in the mouth of the 2004 J.R. Writer, but from Jay sounds more like, "oh my god, let's get this man some help, he's coming down with Alzheimer's", and (d) when he asks if we got the picture yet, because he's painting us a portrait of himself, even though he has done no such thing at any point in the song, so his insistence that there's this picture that we're not getting just seems really delusional. But in actuality it's just a bad song, not spellbindingly awful rapping or anything.

Usher, OMG(osh??). This is a song that I would be sort of cool with, sans will.i.am. verse, if Usher weren't the one singing it. But Usher is actually a real singer, not, like, fucking La Bouche. Or The Dream. His job isn't humming a few bars of crap over an electro beat and calling it a day. So he turns out to be really bad at humming a few bars of crap over an electro beat and calling it a day. Who knew that was a skill? In any event, there's absolutely no sense of desire or sex here. And the whole thing ends up sounding like one of those awkward attempts some of the more conservative 60s bands would make to do something psychedelic post-Sergeant Pepper. All those, "here, we've got a weird spacy synthesizer, we're hippies now" songs. Can you actually imagine Usher performing this thing? What would he do during all the dead space? Everytime I hear the song I imagine Usher on some 1968 episode of the Ed Sullivan show, in some crazy multi-colored getup, awkwardly staring at will.i.am, his keyboardist, being all like, "see, I can do house-influenced pop too."

Ne-Yo, Champagne Life. Have you heard this? Hilarious. I guess he had to move past Miss Independent sooner or later. It seems that his new artistic direction is imitation-crappy-1995-r&b. At one point he promises female listeners "nice meal and a good wine, definition of a good time." Definition of a good time? I hate it when singers explain that so and so is the "definition of a dimepiece," when rappers explain that they're the definition of a g, etc., but this really takes the take. What kind of good time is it going to be? The DEFINITION of a good time. Well that's descriptive. A good time kind of a good time.

Ludacris, Sex Room. This might actually be Luda's first good single since, um.... well before #1 Spot. His party shit has just become boring as fuck, his flow as predictable as a Law and Order episode, but he can still rap about sex alright. I especially love the beat, which reminds me a lot of Master P's lost track (the sample clearance monsters ate it) 'Smokin Green' (which by the way is a top ten weed-smoking rap song of all time - I should know because I've never smoked anything in my life and generally can't stand people who do, so for a weed song to speak to me it has to be really good since I can't relate at all). And then the hook reminds me a lot of C-Murder's 'Torcher Chamber.'

I was obsessively listening to Lil B for a week but I've come to feel that he has a long way to go. The Lil B concept is great, sometimes it all comes together, but he can be shockingly reliant on Drake-like punchlines that I don't think any of his fans would be able to tolerate if they weren't coming from Lil B. And then a lot of his shit just doesn't come off. Like most of I'm Thraxx.

Rick Ross f. Styles P, that song where he goes, I think I'm Big Meech, Larry Hoover. Ricky really seems to be coming along as a rapper. And unlike Jeezy, when he does rap well, I don't think he sacrifices much entertainment value. Whereas with Jeezy there was a huge trade of charisma and ad-libs for a little technical competence. (Then again, maybe Jeezy is reaching a bit of an equilibrium. I need to listen to his new mixtape more carefully.) Anyway, Ricky and Styles P are a terrible pairing, Ricky being more from the blockbuster action movie school of rap and Styles being just the grimiest and grittiest rapper out. But it's always nice to hear Styles on the radio. Even when he says things like "the money's like a chair, I'm sitting on it," he says it in such a way, particularly the word 'chair,' that not only does it sound like a good line, it sounds really hard.

I'll comment more on music tomorrow perhaps, but I just wanted to call attention to this comment from Camille Paglia, famed scholar of nothing in particular, in the New York Times. Paglia says the white middle class has lost its sex drive, and offers this as proof:

"A class issue in sexual energy may be suggested by the apparent striking popularity of Victoria’s Secret and its racy lingerie among multiracial lower-middle-class and working-class patrons, even in suburban shopping malls, which otherwise trend toward the white middle class."

How did this make it past the editor? First of all, even the richest malls I go to have a ton of "multiracial" patrons. Once you're past the malls that are 80% Louis Vuitton stores, my mall experience is that mall customers are half multiracial. Maybe that's just Philadelphia; all our malls are stops on bus routes. But I just find it incredible that a New York Times op-ed suggests that to the extent black people come to malls, it's just for the Victoria's Secret. Second, I would next point out that (a) gazillions of white women wear Victoria's Secret, (b) gazillions of white women wear those obnoxious Victoria's Secret Pink sweatpants, sweatshirts, sweateverything, (c) basically all their models are white or Brazilian so how the fuck is Victoria's Secret this indicator of minority sexual energy? Obviously if they were this minority niche brand they'd market themselves more like it. Third and lastly, outside of a sexually repressive culture, which it's clear we don't live in outside of our insane overreactions to the misbehavior of black golfers, is it really even possible for a whole race to suffer from, to quote the piece, "sexual apathy"? I tend to think that people, like dogs, are born with about the same desires and levels of desire through the centuries and millennia and that something like, to cite one of the supposed causes of this pseudo-phenomenon, "the lack of genuine eroticism" in much of our pop music isn't going to have any effect on that.

Fresh Out The Federal, Cases I Got Several

2010-06-02T19:16:00.000-07:00

So I got a job this summer working for a judge whom shall go unnamed on a certain Court of Appeals that shall also go unnamed. For my British readers, and uninformed American readers, the thirteen Courts of Appeal, or Circuit Courts, are second in stature only to the Supreme Court. That is, only the Supreme Court can overturn our decisions, whereas we can overturn everybody else's. In the vast, vast majority of cases, the Courts of Appeal have the last say. Although I am just an unpaid intern and a first-year law school student, my work is quite serious; I am assigned a case, given the parties' briefs, the record (which is sometimes thousands of pages long), and am asked to write a memo recommending how the Judge decides. Who knows, as of yet (I've just started), how seriously these recommendations are taken, or how much of my analysis the Judge will find persuasive, but I have already seen cases where the initial bench memo, as they're called, with a few edits, is turned into the opinion of the court. Of course, I can't say anything about the cases on which I'm working, other than to note that, though one might think that the work of a Court of Appeal is quite momentous (and in fact, tomorrow we are hearing a couple of important free speech cases, so some interesting things get done here), for the most part our caseload is composed of appeals from denials of disability benefits, appeals from sentences of imprisonment, and appeals from decisions of the Immigration Board. All of which, legally at least, is quite run-of-the-mill stuff. What I thought my readers might find interesting is that, as I work on my cases, some of which, I think I'm allowed to say, involve conflicting testimony between police officers and young black felons, people getting caught with guns in dangerous housing projects, stop-and-frisks, arguments about the fairness of sentences, I find myself, a little surprisingly, tending to feel a bias towards the criminals and against the government. And not knowing what else to attribute it to - it certainly has nothing to do with my experiences, or my politics - I'm starting to think it's because of rap. I happened on an old copy of It's All On You Vol. 2 last week, and I've been listening to it every day on the way to work. It's not the greatest album, Mannie being caught somewhere between his earlier bounce sound and his cheap keyboard 400 Degreez sound, and as a result relying, rather uncharacteristically, on a lot of boring little samples, and the repetitive hooks on every song are a major detriment, and it's hard to point to a song on it that B.G. just kills (Juvie has some amazing guest spots, though, and Wayne has some amusing prepubescent ones), but overall it's quite solid. In some ways it's a lot like a Cash Money version of Lifestylez Ov da Poor & Dangerous. Anyway, being that I'm currently listening every morning to this menacing 17-year-old-kid cackle in his syrupy voice about killing fellow residents of ultra-low-income-housing with his ever-ready chopper, it's kind of hard, when I get into work, to not feel a little sympathetic for the guy who goes to jail for a few years because he got caught with a gun and had a prior conviction. In my experience there aren't a ton of lawyers, even my age, who are seriously listening to rap, and the more apolitical it gets the less it will even matter, but one does wonder what effect a generation that grew up on 50 Cent and Jay and OutKast will have on the law.

In Which I Tell You All What To Think About Elena Kagan

2010-05-12T00:04:00.001-07:00

So Obama has picked another Supreme Court Justice. Some facts on Kagan, if you haven't read the profiles. Kagan was Dean of Harvard Law and, for the past year, the nation's Solicitor General (our chief lawyer, the one who argues the government's really big cases before the Supreme Court). Reportedly she was a terrific Dean. Contrary, however, to what that post might lead you to believe, she wasn't a huge heavy hitter as a scholar. She's written only six articles (and no books); one of these is cited all the time and very well-regarded, while a couple of the others are pretty well-cited but not as big a deal in their field. None of them really speak that conclusively to what Kagan thinks about anything. They're descriptive, not normative, pieces. As Solicitor General, she's lost her one really huge case (Citizens United, the campaign finance case), but she couldn't really help that. Before the Court she's more than held her own in colloquy with the Justices and has generally confirmed her reputation as a brilliant and amiable lawyer. Basically she's (a) held two, if not the two, of the most prestigious jobs in law, while (b) not necessarily doing a whole lot to get those jobs or revealing anything about what she thinks about anything while doing those jobs, and (c), despite her thin record is undoubtedly one of the sharpest minds in the business.

So as to what I think of the appointment. Obama's idea in appointing Kagan, from what we can gather from the reporting on the pick, is as follows. Obama seems to genuinely fear that the Court may invalidate some of his policies, including healthcare reform, even though I really can't fathom Justice Kennedy (the Court's Hamletesque swing voter) or even Chief Justice Roberts going that far. Obama can fathom it though, apparently, and since he hasn't been given an opportunity to replace any of the Court's conservative members, all Obama can do about it is appoint people person types who might succeed in talking the swing voter(s) to vote his way. And since Kagan is such a charming woman, someone who managed to pacify a Harvard faculty that, at the time of her arrival, was reportedly something of a "snake pit," he picked her. That's the idea. Now in the first place, to me this seems like a preventive measure against a disaster that's never going to happen anyway. In the second, there's no evidence to suggest that surrounding Justice Kennedy with chummy liberal characters affects how he votes in the slightest. Outgoing Justice Stevens was a chummy guy, Justice Breyer is a chummy guy, Justice Ginsburg is so warm and chummy that she goes to the opera with Scalia and gives his grandchildren Chanukah gifts. (Seriously.) Nevertheless, Kennedy continues to be about the same judge he was prior to the arrival of these chummy types on the scene, about 16 years ago; if anything he's getting a little more conservative. I just find it a little absurd to think that, in a 9-member Court, in a setting where Justices are probably at least as influenced by the cadre of brilliant Harvard/Yale grads they hire to write their opinions for them as they are by their colleagues, one single person, and the Court's most junior member at that, is going to have some substantive effect on how Kennedy votes.

So what will Kagan bring to the Court besides her nugatory Svengali-like powers? I'm not sure that she brings a whole lot. Certainly, she'll replace one brilliant liberal-leaning legal mind with another brilliant liberal-leaning legal mind. Unlike Sotomayor, whose opinions were generally unremarkable and whose few articles and speeches were somewhat confused and pathetic, Kagan's clearly something of a legal genius. However, from the very little one can glean from what she's written, she doesn't appear to either be a particularly strong liberal or a visionary thinker. That, to me, is a problem, even though I am a conservative and would like to see a conservative Court. For people who are liberals, it ought to be a bigger problem. For the following reasons.

The state of the Court, as I see it, is something like this. For a little over 20 years now, Scalia and an evolving cast of conservative characters have, with a fair amount of success, attempted to impose their vision of constitutional interpretation and policy onto constitutional law. Whatever you think of this vision, it is a vision. Essentially, the Constitution is to be interpreted as it was understood at the time it was written (except when that's inconvenient or would produce terribly untoward results, at which point Scalia and Co. fall back on the policy rationales animating this whole project), which is nice for conservatives as the authors of the Constitution or its various amendments were a great deal more conservative and old-fashioned than we. When you ask Scalia, "why should we be bound by the intent of these old dead men who couldn't possibly foresee contemporary society," he and his conservative colleagues reply, "how else would you like to interpret the Constitution? Twist its vague language to mean something it wasn't supposed to mean? Interpret words like 'equality' in terms of what they mean today, where "what they mean today" will inevitably become, in the hands of a judge not bound by original meaning/intent, whatever that judge wants equality to mean today? Obviously no judge can tell what 'equality' objectively means today, as if it even meant one thing to all Americans; all he can do, once he gives up trying to tell what it meant to the authors of the text, is inject his preferred meaning. Or do you have another idea?"

The liberals on the Court, and arguably the liberals in the law schools, don't have great answers to these questions. They have no overarching vision of constitutional interpretation. Justice Breyer wrote a book about his theory, and pretty much everyone who reviewed it deemed it a huge failure. Essentially, he's a confused pragmatist; half the time when reading Breyer one doesn't know if one's reading law or a cost-benefit analysis. The general idea seems to be that Justice Breyer will read the Constitution in accord with what is good for us, where "what is good for us" is determined by lots of selectively deployed statistics and math. The others, brilliant though they are, have even less of a theory; they generally respond to whatever the latest crazy conservative innovation on the Court is with, "this is crazy and new and inconsistent with the precedents of previous, more liberal Courts, and it just sucks." And it may well suck in every case for narrow specific reasons, but without a deeper theoretical reason for why it sucks and why they're right about campaign finance or abortion or affirmative action, they're doomed, in the long run, to lose the argument. At some point, Justice Stevens essentially surrendered in the fight over interpretive methodology and attempted to out-originalist the originalists, as his dissents turned into counter-histories of what the framers really meant, .i.e. corporate speech isn't protected by the First Amendment because Thomas Jefferson hated big business (I imagine he also would've hated Nazis had they been around at the time, but this wouldn't create a Nazi exception to the First Amendment), the Second Amendment doesn't protect the right of people in D.C. to pack because it was really all about militias. This may have won him brownie points from... well I don't know who, but in the long run agreeing that analyzing Thomas Jefferson's feelings about crap is the way to read the Constitution is liberal suicide. Unfortunately, the liberal members of the Court have no other method to offer. Every time a really big case comes along and the conservatives reach some new shocking result, the liberals say that either (a) "Thomas Jefferson, despite what you say, is NOT on your side," or (b) "come on guys, this is totally contrary to all these decisions that came down in the... 60s, back when the Court was the total opposite of what it is today, but hey, those are still Supreme Court cases and you can't overturn them without damn good reason, and naturally, we being liberals don't think that your conservative reasons are good reasons. Of course, if the old cases in question were contrary to our own beliefs, we'd overturn them, but that, that there would be different. Somehow. We're not sure why."

Thanks to this sort of dithering, we have reached a point where, for example, your constitutional right to confront witnesses against you is today interpreted by reference to what the law in England was in 1787, which is to say, how the law was reported in Shakespearean English in cases we have poor records of from the 1600s. Then when some guy murders his wife and the prosecution tries to bring in her statement that he was a wife-beater into court (Giles v. California), the Court hits the 17th century law books and argues over the appropriate way to interpret the famous case from 1666 where Lord Morley got witnesses kidnapped while he was still in jail, both sides at least pretending that this is a normal way to go about interpreting the Sixth Amendment. This is an absurd state of affairs (both that this is the method and that no one contests it), and nominating a cautious moderate like Kagan isn't going to change things a bit. What you need is someone like Pamela Karlan, a Stanford professor who reportedly made his shortlist and actually has written umpteen articles and books about how to interpret the Constitution in a progressive way. I violently disagree with everything she's ever written, but she'd immediately become one of the three or four most important voices on the Court; she's that good. Unfortunately, Obama will never expend the political capital it would take to nominate someone who's on record as having some kind of coherent nonoriginalist approach to interpreting the Constitution, so we get nominees like Kagan and Sotomayor, carefully chosen for their lack of controversiality. The trouble is that, the Republican Party being the band of obnoxious, ignorant, willfully dishonest boors we are, any nominee who would actually have an impact would be controversial. As in so many other areas of his administration, Obama's too afraid of a little Republican opposition to get anything real done.

Hoes On My Dick Cuz I Look Like Jesus

2010-04-23T19:36:00.000-07:00

A lot of yall have probably been wondering where Lil B is going with this whole "I look like Jesus" thing. (Yeah, I don't see the resemblance either.) Before I explain, let me just say that:

Man, I'm God, I look like Jesus, and I'm coming with that fucking heater. Bitch, suck my dick

has to be the greatest ad-lib intro into a rap song in years. Anyway, when I saw this song I thought to myself, "oh my God, Lil B is clearly, like, me if I were a black teen rapper." You see, I occasionally suffer from delusions of grandeur, mostly because I'm kind of ridiculously brilliant (though you sure as fuck wouldn't know it from this blog), and have a habit of referring to myself as God or Jesus. Only around a few people, of course, as it's not really the sort of thing you want to do in public unless you're a recording artist or some other sort of professional attention whore. Of course it's basically a self-parodying joke as I don't actually believe in/care for God or Jesus, but still. Occasionally it even becomes this obsessive sort of fixation, especially after I've done something especially brilliant, and all I can think about for days is how clever and Christ-like I am. Oddly, obsessive grandiosity, physiologically speaking, feels just like a headache. Like when I get this way my head actually aches. Kind of like when John Travolta would think his autistic thoughts in Phenomenon. (Except those were the product of a magic genius-producing brain tumor. I don't believe tumors actually work that way.) Anyway, I kind of figure that Lil B is sort of on the same tip.

What's funny about Lil B, though, is that he has this deep spiritual Killa Priest side, as seen in 'I'm God' or this. That's one thing about Lil B I never see talked about amongst his blogger fans, yeah he's crazy and weird and whatever, freaky, freaky, freaky freaky flow, but he's also bringing back a kind of merger of spiritual and street shit that the Wu, among others, excelled at with their Five Percenter mumbo jumbo. One of my favorite moments in rap ever is on the largely dismal Wu-Tang Forever, 'The Projects' to be exact, where that little kid tells Rae, 'call me back at the God Hour.' There are a lot of things that you could do in 1997 that you could never do on a huge commercial release today, but one is that skit. I can sit here as an educated well-off white guy and be like, Five Percenterism is some retarded self-serving ghetto shit, but there is a wonderful empowering quality to a religion where all its adherents, mostly underprivileged people, even little kids, are all Gods. You look at rap today and back at Guru's catalogue and one thing that's missing that rap had then, besides the metaphysical concerns that album titles like The Realness or The True Meaning suggest, is religiosity. I imagine some of that is still in the underground but on the street or aboveground level, no one's really doing that anymore. Except for Lil B.

As Seen On Youtube

2010-04-23T00:13:00.000-07:00

I was listening to Juelz's 'Murda Murda' and I saw this comment:

Dis da shit!What happened to music??
Everyone talkin how GREAT drake and wayne r....
They WACK there used to be bttr songs out there!In 2001-2006 nd then music just CRASHED!rap music iz GONE and i HATE that!RIP rap music

Those good old days in 2001-2006 when there were bttr songs out there. What really got me though was reading the Source's review of Hard To Earn, where the critic writes that the album (just four mics!) "is definitely a welcome breath of fresh air during this otherwise stale period of rap." The stale period/year that brought you Illmatic, Resurrection, Ready To Die, Outkast's first album, Tical, Do You Want More?, The Main Ingredient, Dare Iz A Darkside, On The Outside Looking In, Keith Murray's debut, Bone Thugs' debut EP, and the quite respectable Blowout Comb. And best of all, this classic.

Tray's Personal Reflections on Guru

2010-04-20T11:16:00.000-07:00

I wish I could make this piece more poignant than it's going to be, but oh well. So, the summer I failed out of Duke, I decided that I was going to work at a family friend's beachfront arcade down the shore, as we say in Philly when we're talking about the Jersey beach. Specifically, in the Victorian town of Cape May, the southernmost point on the Jersey coastline. This is one of the funnier streets in Cape May:

Victorian cookie-cutter low income housing.

And this is a pretty awesome picture of the arcade (h/t CozyBeach.com):

The idea was that I would live in a tiny room adjoining the garage of the arcade-owner's elderly mother, show up to work every day at 9, and give people prizes in return for the tickets they'd racked up playing skeeball. I guess I was supposed to spend my nights on the boardwalk romancing slutty freshmen at the local community college. To be honest I was actually pretty excited about this job, it seemed like the archetypical shitty job/summer at the shore experience I'd been missing out in this life. Honestly, still to this day I wish I was spending my summer picking fruit instead of working for a Court of Appeals judge. (Sorry, Joey, I'm the sharpest legal mind in the rap blogosphere. Even though I probably did just get my first A- ever in law school. I'm such an embarrassment to my race/mother.) Anyway, though apprehensively excited about the job, I was obviously fairly miserable at the time, having been depressed enough to fail out of college in spite of being, like, the brightest little Jewish boy on the planet. And in fact, as it turned out I didn't get to keep the job, because I was a slow prize-giver-outer and they needed to give the room to some mad genius at fixing arcade games. That guy was one of the strangest people I've ever met or ever will. All that by way of context.

Now back then I didn't have a car, so the plan was for me to take a train from Philly to some point in Jersey, and then, novelty of novelties for this pseudo-privileged, insanely suburban kid, take a bus from that point to Cape May. Many warnings were issued to me about the sorts of people I might sit with on this bus. I'd brought my CD player with me, and back in 2004, as those of you from Philly just may remember, 30th Street Station had an fye. Those were really the golden days of music sales, when rappers used to beef over how many platinum plaques they had and even train stations had CD stores. Stores that routinely made you pay 18.99 for an old album at that. So I picked The Ownerz and went on my merry way. It's hard for me to articulate the comfort that album was to me on the bus ride down to Cape May and later that night when I sat alone in my little room in this arcade-magnate grandma's garage, but at the time it meant quite a lot. The Ownerz is not a perfect album, the second half is largely rather bad and I hate 'Skillz,' but the first seven or so songs (which was all I could hear anyway with my broken CD player) compare favorably, if not to the heights of their own catalogue, to most any album of that decade. The whole thing is steeped in a sincerity, a warmth, a righteousness that's genuinely righteous and not overbearing on some Lupe shit, that the slacking on occasion in Premo's production is well beyond forgivable. A song like 'Rite Where U Stand' that's ostensibly a battle rap/about killing people is really about - as the sample in the beginning of the song goes, how do I explain this to you? - those moments in life of moral clarity where, like Hav says in 'Get Dealt With,' one sees who's who, who's real and who's not, but not in the cartoonish sense of 'Who's Real,' in a really real sense. Later that summer I started listening to Cam and would never again be the same as a rap listener, and I still believe that the Cams and Guccis of the world serve a purpose, but the moral sustenance that Guru and Premo brought to the table is definitely something on short supply in rappers of that ilk and in today's hip-hop. Though shit, it was on short supply even in Guru's heyday. At any rate, I'll always have a soft spot for The Ownerz and for Gang Starr because of what they meant to me that day in that long awful summer.

Blogging WorldStar/Onsmash

2010-04-16T21:27:00.000-07:00

My interest being piqued by the appearance of videos from JR Writer and J Hood, at one time two of my favorite up and coming rappers, on the same day, I decided I would take a break from studying Property and listen, though I know better, and see if they have anything left in the tank. I also am making the questionable decision to listen to a new Sauce Money song. We will see how that goes.

As you may recall, JR Writer, AKA the Writer of Writers, was the young tyke who memorably rapped Cam to a draw on the first track of Diplomatic Immunity 2. He also made some pretty great mixtapes, took nonsensical internal rhymes and multis to a whole new level, and reached some kind of apotheosis of the Dipset aesthetic when he rapped in baby talk on 'If Only You Believe' to describe the experience of fatherhood:

It's a miracle from seein' the birth next
To seein' the burp (yes!), first words, even the first steps
Goo-goo ga-ga, hoo-hoo ha-ha
peek-a-boo, I see you, you-who papa...

Subsequently, however, the Writer of Writers' writing got kind of sloppy and he put out a number of albums on Koch, all of which sucked. Or at least I think so having only heard the first. Anyway, now JR is 'Back At It'... and the results are very discouraging. His trademark squeaky voice seems to have disappeared with puberty, his flow is no longer so eccentric, I didn't hear a single funny punchline, and ironically and rather sadly he boasts that "I can do hooks/while your whole tape sounds like a Dr. Seuss book." Still more sadly, he rhymes

I've been a great, how can yall pricks relate
What yall know about Hot 9, 9 minutes straight?
Been a while, but there's a time and a place
My timing is great, I define what it takes

Ah, the tragedy of the has-been NY mixtape rapper. Speaking of has-been NY mixtape rappers...

J Hood also once had quite a bit of promise, what with his quirkily grimey inflection and way with a punchline. He also had a tiny little head and a face like a mosquito. This added to his gulliness. Then J/Jae got himself in trouble with his big D-Block brothers and they decided to end his career and not let him out of his deal. Only a short while after Jada had that shit fit on the radio about how he might toss a stainless steel refrigerator off a skyscraper and kill Diddy with it because Diddy wasn't giving him his publishing. Oh well. Anyway, poverty seems to be bad for J's rapping. I guess this is what six years ago we used to call a "club song." Back when Joe Budden was so confused about how to make one that he actually called a song "Club Song." Six models in this video and only one is borderline doable. The same is probably true of the women at any club that would play this song. That's about all I can say about it.

Talk about unfulfilled promise. The Sauce Money of 'Bring It On' could've made a pretty terrific album. [Excerpt from a puff piece on his debut from the time: "Fiercely determined, Sauce never gave up on his dream and the result is the multi-layered Middle Finger U. on Priority Records, which will undoubtedly take its place alongside other monumental debuts like Jay-Z's Reasonable Doubt, Nas' Illmatic and DMX's It's Dark and Hell is Hot."] As we know, that didn't occur. Instead he made a bad album and wrote 'I'll Be Missing You,' which isn't really an achievement to his credit but did, I imagine, allow him to live a comfortable lifestyle. Today, Sauce Money is simply very fat, so much so that he sounds an awful lot like Fat Joe. I guess when you blow up your voice goes through changes. Appropriately he's accompanied in this video by a plus-size model. She licks his sideburns at one point. That's sort of gross. The production would've been okay in 1998. The rapping would've been a little more than okay around the same time. You can still tell he has talent though. At one point he says, "if I want it, kings I unseat 'em and rains/reigns become a slight drizzle." Which isn't that good or anything, but hey, his mind is still working. The track is also happily free of pathetic references to the days when he was quasi-important.

Apparently Styles has an album coming out May 18th? I like how all Styles songs begin with conversations between himself and his engineer, Poobs. I also like how Styles never evolves as a rapper at all, technically, thematically, whatever. He's still the same guy with the same eight ad-libs ("uh-uh!"), same elementary yet unorthodox flow, same concerns, etc. Unfortunately Styles has a weakness for shitty piano beats and lachrymose hooks sung by bad singers, and the verses are very by the numbers Styles. Why don't I leave the hood, why don't I leave the corner, rusty blades, D-BLOCK, uh-uh, etc. etc. And this is the first single. Oh well, it'll have 6 good songs and he'll keep making great mixtapes.

I decided to listen to this song from Soulja Boy and Arab just so I could have the unique experience of sitting through Arab's verse thinking, "oh shit, it's coming, a halfway-okay rapper is about to go in, he's going in, he's coming... Soulja!" You know, the way you might listen to a Juelz song in 2003 waiting for Cam to come in and just destroy everything. Well, Soulja certainly does not disappoint... in entertainment value, anyway. I hear a Gucci Mane imitation in here, a weird Master P/Silkk imitation, a Lil B imitation of course, an attempt to rap like he's from Africa, and a claim that he's more "froze than a frozer, I missed the fucking freezer." And that's all in one verse. Arab then says he goes hard like a boulder and gives a shout-out to a guy who's "his dog, just like Milo." And Otis! I believe that movie came out before he was even born.

Tray Loves The New Gucci Tape, Rap's Future

2010-04-13T20:28:00.000-07:00

Actually how I eat every day in law school (minus the strawberries).

You know, I used to have all these declinist fears about rap. "Rap is declining! There will never be another Cuban Linx again! There will never be another Infamous/Critical Beatdown/Niggaz4life again!" And no, there won't be. It's possible there may never even be a rap album as good as any of those were again but in a completely different way. I certainly can't think of one in the last ten years. But there's still a shit ton of really good rapping out there, which is more than you can say, by analogy, for movies, American ones anyway. At least one can coherently mention Andre 3000 and Pill in the same paragraph; it's not entirely a, back then there were gods, today there are midgets situation. So my hopes for the future are brightened considerably by the new Gucci Mane tape.

Irony of alphabetical ironies, by the way, and one that I think is slightly telling; in my iTunes, Burrrprint 2 picks up where Group Home - 'Up Against The Wall (Getaway Car Mix)' to be exact - leaves off. Can't get much more different than that. There are a lot of stupid points one could make about this totally arbitrary comparison, including the obvious point that Gucci is 50 times the rapper that Malachi the Nutcracker, who is only tolerable over Premo beats (although I imagine that Gucci would be pretty lost on most Premo tracks, though I can imagine an interesting Gucci freestyle over 'Take It Personal'), was, yet real hip-hop heads will give Malachi and Dap a pass while still bizarrely at most giving Gucci props for making "fun shit to listen to while you're drunk," but on a less reactive and silly note, I think what the absurdity of just how damn different Gucci's Drumma Boy phone call from jail is from maybe Premo's best track ever points up is that rap is a big variegated genre and just as you wouldn't compare Beethoven to Dre's comparably paltry musical innovations and arrive at some grand conclusion about the unimportance of rap, we shouldn't compare rap across eras and ought to just let today's shit stand for whatever it is.

So about the actual tape. This is not, by my sadly limited knowledge of Gucci mixtapes, the best or one of the best things he ever did, though I would say it's a more fun listen than his album. There's way too much 'Gucci Speaks' and 'Shawty Lo Speaks' and 'Lil Kim Speaks' for that, a couple of these songs are less than inspired, there's a song where he sings that's utterly pointless. He occasionally fails to rap circles around people (Wacka, Rick Ross) whom he should be rapping circles around and at one point is distinctly outshined by Yo Gotti. No matter. Gucci is in one of those rapper zones where he could read from the phonebook, or even, horrors, Drake's rhymebook, and the shit would come off. Just hearing this guy say "Mi casa su casa patna" is worth the price of admission, and worth wading your way through Shawty Lo and Nikki's verses to hear him do the hook containing that phrase again. (In fact I'd pay a lot to hear him do an all-Spanish mixtape.) Same with the jailhouse pay phone intro which is largely indecipherable but still hypnotic anyway, to the point where I was kind of disappointed when the whole mixtape wasn't phone raps. The disdain conveyed when he says (something like) "if you think this shit gon' flop, go and jump in the OCEAN" in his slow flow is just tremendous. Of course, Gucci actually says tons of funny shit too, such as

I've got Caucasian neighbors, that's just how I rock

Multiply, divide me, then add on the remainder
I push more weight than a personal trainer

Preposterous for you to fathom how you could block this [what other non nerdy white rapper could toss off a line like this?]

Professor, but Gucci didn't graduate from college
Your girlfriend says my earrings are erotic

I pull up in that Spyder, strapped up like McGyver
Should've brought my Phantom out but I'm mad at my driver
He's so fucking [?, turned up?]
Riding on autopilot
Smoking kush, he smilin
He drinkin while he drivin

AC blowin, feel like it's snowin (brrrr!)
Now where I'm goin even I'm not knowin

I only fuck with bad bitches because I'm very picky

I am bossin, proceed with caution, 'cause I be flossin
I didn't do that feature with you because you're not important

You're funny, just like a dummy, without no eyelids

Gucci is a lot of things, but fo sho I'm not scared of you!

Yo yo, yo nose gon' grow, just like Pinocchio
You lyin that you hot as me but that is not the troath

So yeah, actually by Gucci's standards this tape is kind of lyrically weak (perhaps because it's basically composed of throwaways). But it's still a blast. Great beats too.

I Tweet Now, and Larry King Is Still A Rider

2010-04-10T16:10:00.000-07:00

In a sensible drunken decision I have decided to tweet now. Sensibly I have named my twitter "ughnanana." I have no idea how twitter works and what all the @ and # shit means but if you want to explain that would be cool.

I stopped recording Larry but I sometimes take a look at the transcripts of his shows. They're pretty awesome. Here we have Larry on Tiger's "comeback." Read through this post carefully and thoroughly because this might have been the most amazing Larry episode ever. Here we go. It starts fairly slowly and innocuously like so (but ends up insane and wild as shit):

All right, Jim, frankly, were you surprised at his performance today?

JIM GRAY, CORRESPONDENT, THE GOLF CHANNEL: ... Yes, it's -- it's very surprising. But it's also surprising that we have a 50-year-old man in Freddie Couples leading the tournament, shooting six under par, and we have a 60-year-old man, Larry, Tom Watson, one stroke behind.
So it's all been a very surprising and uplifting day here at Augusta National.

Killing me with the profundities here. Then Gray makes some more idiotic trite observations in which Larry clearly has no interest.

KING: How do you explain, despite the fact that he did things which got him terrible publicity, that he was so cheered today?

GRAY: Well, you know, he hasn't committed any crimes. He simply disappointed a lot of people with his behavior....I think that this is a respectful place where people appreciate the golf. I mean we all want to see Picasso paint. We all want to see Michelangelo sculpt. We all wanted to see Ali box. If we get a chance to see Tiger Woods play golf -- and that's what this is. And he played golf today.

So I wouldn't misinterpret the reception. But, you know, he's been torn down. It's been a tremendous fall from grace, Larry. And I think that, you know, once that happens, you build him up to tear him down and now they're building him up again.

KING: Uh-huh.

GRAY: And his play was outstanding today, so he should have been cheered.

KING: He is a Buddhist. [To be fair that wasn't actually some insane non sequitur, just a really awkward topic change to the guy who flew the banner attached to a plane that asked if Tiger really practiced bootyism.]

Then Larry gets a little pushy when some panelists won't give straight simple answers to his retarded banal questions:

KING: Jim, is there any doubt that he's the greatest of them all?

GRAY: Well, he needs to win the titles. He has 14 major championships. He is four behind Jack Nicklaus....If he were to somehow quit and play golf -- quit playing golf for the rest of his life today, there would be some in some quarters who would say he was the greatest golfer ever. But he would not have the records.

KING: All right. I'll put it this way, is he the best...

FERGUSON: He's an amazing, amazing athlete, Larry.

KING: Is he -- is he the best you ever saw?

GRAY: Well, no. I saw Jack Nicklaus. And as long as Tiger Woods is going to say that Jack Nicklaus is the best -- and I saw Jack Nicklaus -- I'm going to say Jack Nicklaus is the best. In terms of what he could do...

KING: OK, Doug, is he the best...

GRAY: -- in this day and age, I think that Tiger Woods will be the best. I'll agree with you.

KING: All right. Doug, is he the best player you ever saw?

FERGUSON: A little more unfair for me, Larry, because I only saw Jack when he was 46 and -- and won his sixth green jacket. I think Tiger's the best of his generation. I think that's the only way you can look at this. Jack was the best of his. Hogan was the best of his...

KING: All right...

FERGUSON: Jones, you can go all the way back. You just have to look at what you've got today.

KING: Thank you both very much.

Then we have some Stephen A. awesomeness:

And, you know, regardless of being in the sex addiction clinic or whatever where -- wherever he wants to call himself being -- he had plenty of time to work on his game, to practice just a little bit. I'm quite sure that he got on that golf course a little bit and -- and worked on his game....And this is his sanctuary. If he doesn't win here, then that brings more fuel to the flames. And I think he recognizes that and he stepped up and performed.

Fuel to the flames. Dude. Then Larry gets to the Nike ad and introduces one of his panelists like so:

And David Cornwell, sports attorney, known as "the cleaner." He's represented a number of athletes. Among his current clients, Pittsburgh Steeler quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. He's accused, by the way, of sexual assault.

By the way. I love this man. By the way, his first question to David on the ad was, "David, you're a cleaner. Was this a clean bit of work?" Thank God for senile people. Or prematurely senile people like Donny Deutsch, who has this to say about the ad:

Stunningly brilliant. Genius. One of the single best pieces of advertising I've seen in a decade.They took the voice of God, the voice of his conscience, his father, in a very stoic way, to say you know what, this man is carrying this with him now. Yes, what he did was terribly wrong, but don't think because you see him playing golf now that there's not a new level of consciousness, there's not a new level, hopefully, of morality. And I think it was brilliant. It was artfully, boldly, stunningly done. Kudos to Nike.

Kudos to Nike. And as Stephon Marbury would say, kudos to Isaiah Thomas. (Do you remember the video when Marbury was ecstatic because Isaiah traded for Zach Randolph? And he was like, he's a lefty fucking southpaw, together Eddy Curry and Zach will demolish the league with their righty/lefty southpaw combination of devastating post moves. KUDOS TO ISAIAH THOMAS.) But really, Donny, the voice of God? The guy is dead and they took his voice from an interview where he was contrasting his parenting style with that of his wife and they make it into this "Tiger did you learn anything from fucking 50 bimbos" shit. Come on. Then the lawyer makes some hilarious image control arguments as to why this ad was such a good thing:

I thought the ad was brilliant, as well. Another thing is, it was consistent or it is consistent with Tiger's statement, when he said that he needed to go back to his roots. What -- what better way than connecting him back to his father?

Oh my God. This is a man (and a dead man), and you're making it sound like he's a bar of soap that Nike's associating with some pretty-ass flowers. Even Larry, in his usual dense cover all the bases way, sees some issues here:

KING: Isn't that a little weird, though, the voice of a dead person?

JOHN SALLEY: Well, yes, that's like, you know, but I've watched movies of some people who have passed, also. And I've seen some things on, you know, when you show it. Yes. [Yes, John Salley has seen some things on you know when you show it. I love how that statement could be about anything. Most obviously porn.]

KING: OK. Let's see if Stephen makes this a complete agreement. Stephen? [Let's see!]

SMITH: Well, I -- I do completely agree. I think it was absolutely brilliant. But I think that what a lot of people have failed to recognize, you've got some people that -- what -- that they sit around and they talk about how, well, you know what, it's kind of creepy or what have you.

And I said wait a minute. All of us have loved ones, some alive, some who have -- who have passed away -- that we hear them talking to us at key pivotal moments and junctures in our lives. And the fact is, is that that was the situation with Tiger Woods.

Yo but Stephen, we may hear dead people talking to us at these key pivotal moments and junctures, but this is an AD for fucking golf balls in which they are blaring a dead man's voice at US. It's a little different. I mean, "buy our golf balls, our big sponsor feels bad about cheating on his wife, he hears his dad's voice in his head, do not feel ashamed to wear the clothes of our serial cheater sponsor" is kind of crass. Later Stephen speculates that Nike made the ad to show their other athletes that they'll stand by them. To which Larry goes, "Stephen sees motive in all things." To which Stephen replies, "No question!" I love it when the two dumbest sports pundits in the world collide. Actually make that the second and third dumbest pundits in the world, because you've also got John Salley:

But Kobe's gotten past it. Kobe, people are backing, not even talking about it. They're just going to say now that we know that Tiger used to like, you know, like sex.

Yeah, he used to like sex, but not anymore. He went to a clinic and treated that shit away. Now he and his wife sit at home and make cupcakes. Then Donny gets mad about the head of Augusta talking shit about Tiger and wants to know if Augusta has any Jewish members or if it just discriminates against blacks and women (because that would be okay):

But before I get off that, also, Larry, can your research people check and see if there are any Jews in Augusta? Because I'm nauseous about -- about this Payne guy, also. I was so violated and disgusted by his speech, the way he was spanking Tiger. So I knew we've got one African-American there, no women. Can we check and see if there's a Jew in Augusta, by the way?

Dusted and disgusted, Donny was. I'm telling you, when people go on Larry King, they do coke in the green room before the show. It's the only explanation. Then we get an absolutely insane discussion of whether men don't give a shit about Tiger's evil ways and whether women's views matter. Seriously. Donny and Stephen say the men were never mad at him. Salley says even the women were never mad at him because "the women love a gangster. They love the bad boy." To which an UNIDENTIFIED MALE replies, "a lot of them do." I so hope that was Larry. Then Donny announces that "the women don't matter. The products he sells - razor blades, video games, golf clubs - it's all men. It doesn't matter." What happens next is simply indescribable:

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is fun, guys.

SALLEY: We've got a whole new thing. This should be a Viagra show.

KING: That's right.

(CROSSTALK)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Larry...

SALLEY: Oh, I can't say that. We've...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Larry, that's called...

(CROSSTALK)

SALLEY: -- help you better. [??????]

KING: Well, I'm -- I'm losing control here.

(CROSSTALK)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's my father (INAUDIBLE).

KING: OK.

I wish I knew what happened there. Then Larry starts introducing some metaphysical doubt into the proceedings:

can he win this tournament, John?

SALLEY: Yes. He's going to win this tournament.

KING: Going to win?

SALLEY: This would have been the greatest week...

KING: How do you predict a golf tournament?

Salley then explains that Tiger's going to win because people are excited that he's playing and because Salley's watching the tournament on TV on a Thursday even though, and I quote, "no one ever watches TV." You would think Larry couldn't top that. But he does. By asking a LAWYER if Tiger might have a tough time on Friday because the rains will make the greens... faster! Faster! Have you ever tried to putt on a soggy green? The ball barely moves. Yet Larry goes in:

With the rains there occurring tonight, those greens will be faster tomorrow, David, he might have a rough time tomorrow?

Again, that's a lawyer he posed that question to. A sports lawyer, but still. And being that he knows nothing about the game, he says that Larry is right. Just so amazing. Then Donny makes a plea for adultery:

Larry, once and for all, can we stop being shocked when men of power are adulterers, like multiple women? It goes with the territory... I want to see the guy win the Masters. I don't care what he does with his other putter frankly is probably not my concern.

Then Salley bizarrely replies:

Well, like you said, his putter tomorrow, if he gets more control of his putter, and, you know, he'd shoot better.

I don't think he even knows where that double entendre is going. Then Stephen A. predicts that Tiger will go back to fucking bitches:

I've said it on your show weeks ago, months ago. I'll repeat it again, Larry, just in case you didn't remember. Whether the number 7, 11, 13, 15, 16, 19 or whatever number amount of women, or whatever amount of women he had, you don't go from that to zero. I don't care what anybody says.

Just in case you didn't remember Larry. This is just orgasmic. After the break, we learn that Salley was, according to Larry, "nodding his head viciously no" while Stephen made his remarks. I'm not sure how one does that. Salley being the dumbest man on the planet replies, "well l didn't say viciously." No, Salley, you didn't SAY viciously because you didn't SAY how you were nodding your head. You just did it. Larry said that. Then Larry says in his opinion Salley was viciously nodding. Then Salley admits it:

I was viciously because Stephen's obviously speaking from experience, what he's talking, but you can't really say what somebody else is doing. You can't really go and put that on somebody. That's not -- it's not fair that you're going to go and just put a stamp on somebody, like, you're this and that's your way, people can change.

Could we itemize all the ways in which that comment was one of the greatest things said on TV?

1. I WAS viciously!
2. Stephen's obviously speaking from experience, i.e. Stephen obviously has fucked a lot of bitches and struggled to reduce his bitch-fuck count.
3. You can't say what somebody else is doing. You can't really. It's not fair.
4. Don't put stamps on people. They change. Young Bleed however would like to disagree with you:

The only thing that could top this is if Larry interviewed DJ Khaled. Actually the only thing that could top it is what happened next. Donny announces that we should stop caring whether Tiger does or does not fuck mad bitches because "Tiger Woods doesn't exist in my consciousness because of what he does or doesn't do with women. The only reason he exists in my consciousness is to watch him play golf." What can one even say about such brilliant logic? Stephen A. decides to have a shit fit about it.

SMITH: I can't -- I can't take this anymore. First of all, we're on THE LARRY KING LIVE show to answer the questions that he asked. The man asked me a question, I gave him an answer. He didn't ask us to come on and express how we don't care. He asked us --

(CROSSTALK)

DEUTSCHE: What I'm saying is we don't care.

SMITH: What I'm saying is the man asked me a question, and I don't believe that you go from that many women to zero. Simple.

DEUTSCHE: And my answer is whether he does or doesn't, who the hell cares. That's an answer.

SMITH: I agree with that. Will you care about stuff that you're sitting on air? You're here. You obviously care enough to answer.

These guys just have to be high. A, Stephen can't take this anymore? What? B, panelists have a moral/professional obligation to care about stuff that you're sitting on air? It's like the culture of insanely stupid analysis of inanely stupid topics is evolving and growing as these guys speak. Centuries from now people will watch this episode and see it the seeds of the decline and fall of America. Like where in the fuck is this world headed?

But it gets better! Salley then suggests that Tiger will "pick them better" in the future. Smith gets pissed and goes, "oh, so he's going to pick them better now?" Salley starts talking about a girl he saw on Maury Povich. He then says that he aspires to be like Larry and asks, "who's your TV daddy? Who do you really want to get money from?" Smith gets more pissed. Salley says he's just mad that Larry is styling on him. In purple duds. In HD. Larry closes and says he'll have this panel back "because I am basically a masochist." Anderson Cooper comes on to say that he'll be talking to Sean Penn about the situation in Haiti. He also claims that teachers may be going to jail in Wisconsin for teaching sex ed. "How did this happen?," he asks. "Well, we're keeping them honest." That's a responsive answer to your own question there.

Then Dr. Laura shows up to talk about bullying and that is a bit of a letdown. This did happen though:

KING: You were bullied, am I correct? You were bullied as a kid?

SCHLESSINGER: I -- yes, pretty severely when we moved into this neighborhood on Long Island. It was mostly one religious persuasion there and my mother was a nice Italian Catholic, a drop dead gorgeous woman from Italy, a shiksa. And she was married to a Jewish man and that's a shiksa, and that's a bad thing.

And I really took the grief for that because they would say horrendous things about my mother and I would try to defend her and then I got picked up in fistfights and thrown down a flight of stairs. And I had my fun.

Sounds fun! Laura's acting retarded on TV like whoa. Laura then compares what happened to this bullied girl to Christians being thrown to the lions. Larry points out that not all teenagers are bad people:

As we know, not all teens behave badly. Case in point is our "CNN Hero of the Week," a big-hearted bookworm who helps abused and homeless children. Mackenzie Bearup lives with an agonizing and incurable disease but spends her time easing the pain of others by sharing her secret for relief, reading. And she's only 16. Watch.

Oh ho ho it's magic, you knowwww, never believe it's not so.... Larry, Larry. What a magician. Never believe he can't sink to new levels of insanity. It's time for a JR Writer break:

Laura concludes by talking about her new book that's coming out. Apparently it's about revenge. Laura sagely observes that "revenge is mostly sweet in your mind. It's not that sweet when you execute it." Larry bids her goodbye:

Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the internationally-syndicated radio host, best-selling author and a good conversation. But a terrible topic, bullying.

Terrible, terrible topic.

I'll Be Your Black Panther All In Your Dreams, or, Blogging About Premo While Drunk From The Night Before

2010-04-10T11:13:00.000-07:00

Remember how good Famlay's 'Skrung Owt' was? Where is Fam-Lay now? I just thought of that as the phrase "come on, space cadet" drifted through my mind. He also had this one other really great song the beat of which Noz once likened to the sound of a shipyard. I wish I remember what that was called. There's this amazing write-up on The Smoking Section comparing a song by A-Rab to a song by Lil B, flawed only slightly by its authors' apparent view that Lil B is some kind of bad rapper, that you should really read. Perhaps it's because I'm drunk but I actually laughed out loud when I read that in the Arab song, Arab actually says "you hard nigga? Faggot on the low/my money, my time." If I were not white and not surrounded by little gay law students (literally, little gay law students) I would so go around just saying that to everyone. Constantly. It's like, what in the world was he thinking linking these two concepts together.

Anyway, I saw this Premo mix from Sach on Passion of the Weiss and the whole shit was post-98 Premo except for two songs. All stuff from the era when getting a beat from Premo was like the capstone of a rapper's career and he'd scratch the rapper saying something into a hook and the rapper would ruminate on his long and illustrious career. Sorry I repeated a word there. Like 'Invincible.' (Seriously, you have to love rappers and their outsized sense of importance and self-worth. I mean, the invincible untouchable CNN? They made one album.... it was good.... kind of sounded just like certain other albums made by way more talented artists that were much better... and then that was that. And then they come back and they're the invincible, untouchable CNN? That's why I love rap.) So over there I wrote, fairly coherently (it's weird, I get more drunk as the day progresses):

The symphonic, sheeny, ‘Nas Is Like,’ ‘Sixth Sense,’ Moment of Truth Premo to me is just an infinitely less interesting producer than the Premo who made ‘Who’s Gonna Take The Weight,’ ‘Rappaz R N Danja,’ ‘Brownsville,’ ‘Black Cowboys,’ ‘ALONGWAYTOGO,’ ‘Supa Star,’ etc. Somewhere between Hard To Earn and Moment of Truth, his beats get a lot more predictable and to me basically become the aural equivalent of really good comfort food. Whereas listening to Hard To Earn or Livin Proof is a pretty challenging experience.

Which I think is very true. (I should think so, I said it.) And raises the always fun "what are Premo's Greatest Hits" question. In that regard, I'll tell you an absurd story about myself. When I failed out of Duke, I really wasn't that badly off, just depressed as shit (and not even that depressed by the end of the semester but enough damage had been done). Naturally, however, I wasn't too happy about being kicked out, and told no one I knew from high school, though people did eventually find out in a rather traumatic and upsetting way, but that's a different story. Anyway, on top of lying about still being at Duke, I started lying to people at Duke about what a great time I was having back home, and eventually lost touch with reality to a great extent, although I don't really think I was ever full-on delusional. One of the odd stories I made up, no idea why, is that I met a gorgeous girl who said she'd fuck me if I made her what she considered to be a perfect Premo mixtape. This never happened, but for some strange reason I actually started making the tape, and at this point it's hard for me to entirely remember that the girl never existed. Mental illness sucks. Fortunately no longer a problem (much). Anyway, to come up with a serious list I'd have to actually go back and listen to the Gang Starr/Jeru albums, but here is a very preliminary sketch of what I think are Premo's best tracks.

Too Short - In The Trunk (Premo Remix)
Jeru - Come Clean, Me Or The Papes
Nas - N.Y. State of Mind, 2nd Childhood
Bone Thugs - 1st Of The Month (Premo Remix)
Fat Joe - Shit Is Real (Premo Remix)
Group Home - Supa Star, Up Against The Wall (Getaway Car Mix)
KRS One - Rappaz R N Dainja
Crooklyn Dodgers - Return Of The Crooklyn Dodgers
Jay-Z - Bring It On, Intro/Hand It Down
M.O.P. - Brownsville, Follow Instructions
Craig David - 7 Days (Premo Remix)
Jaz O & The Immobilarie - Love Is Gone
Teriyaki Boys - You Know What Time Is It
Gang Starr - Manifest (Remix), Who's Gonna Take The Weight, The Place Where We Dwell, ALONGWAYTOGO, Mass Appeal, The ? Remains, Words From The Ghetto Child, Rite Where U Stand.

The Tiger Ad

2010-04-07T21:10:00.000-07:00

What is the Tiger sex scandal about? I think it's always been pretty obvious that the only reason Tiger's affairs are a scandal is that he's a black man playing a white man's sport, and married to a white woman. Emphasis on white man's sport and white woman. Nobody cares that Michael Jordan cheated on his wife; most people don't remember he had a wife. No one cares that Kobe cheated on his, that Shaq cheated on his, no one cared when Superhead talked about fucking a married Allen Iverson in her book. No one even cares that there are people in the NFL who killed people. That's just what basketball and football players do. And fine, it is, and I'd be okay if the reason white people didn't care was because they just didn't care about athletes' infidelity (why should we? These guys aren't preachers or even politicians), but I'm afraid the real reason is something way more along the lines of, "those guys are animals married to other animals, who cares if Animal A is unfaithful to Animal B, I still enjoy watching him jump with his freakish animal skills." How else do you explain Tiger? It isn't even that golf's this more genteel sport and that we expect more of golfers or tennis players, no one gives a fuck if Phil Mickelson cheats on his model wife, if Andy Roddick cheats on his long-time model girlfriend. It's not that Tiger's such a big star that he plays by different rules, no one cared about Muhammad Ali's infidelities. It's that he's a black guy playing a very white game and married to a seemingly nice, non-bimbo Swedish woman and therefore he's got to be extra well-behaved. I mean, when else in the history of the fucking world has a man given a press conference to talk about cheating on his wife? I can think of Bill Clinton and 80s televangelist Jimmy Swaggart. If you actually think about it for a second it's utterly absurd. People act like 20 cocktail waitresses is a lot of cocktail waitresses. How many times have you heard some idiot on TV say that "the women keep coming and coming"? We're talking about 20 women over a six year period, that's about a new waitress every three months. And that's a sex addiction he needs to be in a clinic for, when maybe 50 such women throw themselves at him a day? It's pretty absurd.

So Nike stands by Tiger, and why the fuck not, who can better sell sports gear and golf balls, and now that they have a hold over him, being his biggest and only huge sponsor deal left, they actually get the guy to stand for 30 seconds and sniffle into a camera while audio of his dead father plays asking him what he's learned. If you were going to lose respect for Tiger, now is the time. Imagine if someone came to you and said they'd found some audio of your deceased father and they'd like it if you'd stand there while dead Pops gave you a little talking-to about cheating on your wife on national television. If you do that for them and consent to your father's voice being used in this way, they'll give you a ton of money. Who accepts that? And the worst part of it is, you know damn well that Tiger didn't put up a fight, probably didn't even mind the idea, but rather is thinking, "aw shit, what a clever idea, this can build up my brand back because now I'll seem HUMAN. As I have not in my insanely robotic and overcoached statements on this matter." A lot of commentary on this ad tomorrow will say that Nike is pimping Tiger, that this is all about the (white) corporation doing really sick shit so they can salvage the value of their black pitchman, but Tiger acquiesced and probably for the same reasons that Nike thinks this is a good idea. Which of course it is, the ad is brilliant. Through this ad, Nike becomes not only the brand of Just Doing It, but of life as the school of hard knocks, of learning your lesson and facing up to shit like a man (which is another flavor of Just Doing It), of painful defeat and the big comeback. It's probably the best sports ad in years. And easily the most reprehensible. Then again, maybe not. Consider Tiger's agency in this regard. Let's suppose that Tiger is sincerely sorry about what he did, and wishes he knew how to say so more articulately. Maybe he likes this ad, not just for the sake of the money it will save him, but because it's his way of saying he's sorry, the only way he knows how, through the voice of an ad agency. If so I think you have to respect his choice, though I don't see why he need apologize to us, and I'm not crazy about the use of his father.

....

2010-04-05T23:06:00.000-07:00

A Boring Tray Weekend Story

2010-04-04T13:45:00.000-07:00

I was going home from the gym to change into something to wear at our one bar when I was stopped by a familiar voice that asked, "is 23 your favorite number?" And I was like, what, why, and she was like, because your screenname is traydeuce on toplawschools. It only occurred to me, like, 20 minutes later that she should've been asking me whether my favorite number was 32. But anyway I explained that my name was Asher which became Ashtray which became Tray and one day when I was listening to Cam's 'Family Ties,' by no means one of my favorite Purple Haze songs but a song with its moments to be sure I heard Cam say something about a trey-deuce and I was like, THAT'S my new AOL screenname! (Plus some numbers I'm not giving out here.) And she said, I think I know that song, and I was like, ohmygodareyouaCamfan? And she said sort of, and then compared him to Drake... which was a relief because I don't really want to become infatuated with anyone in the weeks before I leave so any huge flaws in this quite charming girl, like liking Drake, were quite welcome news to me. After changing into my douchey preppy outfit and loafers, I walked over to the bar and on my way what do I hear but a nice Drake song. Dear readers, I was just appalled at what a bad rapper Drake was. Drake, not, like, really being a rapper, but rather more of some kind of robot who seems to have applied the lessons he learned in acting class about enunciation and clear diction to his recording career, says everything so clearly that if a car is speeding by you you can hear everything he says exactly and go home and google the lyrics and find the song. This is actually pretty rare if you think of all the times you've turned on the radio and heard some cool song by Gucci or OJ you wanted to download when you got home and you listen and listen hoping to hear some clear understandable phrase you can type in to Google, and it's just like, ssdfjsdwgesdgfBRICKSsdfwewettesyeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Which is cool, that sort of thing has grown on me. Now some rappers have clear diction, like Nas or Jay, but none sound like they're on a stage heeding the lesson of their high school theater teacher to say everything twice as slowly as they think they should so the granny in the back can hear. Drake however does, and this really underscores how much his lyrics suck. He also has this habit of EMPHASIZING every word at the end of every line, sometimes because these words are supposedly clever punchlines, but sometimes just because that's just what he does. So when the car passed by blaring these lines my jaw just dropped at the suckiness on display:

We just took our first trip to the AMALFI COAST,
couple days on the beach then it's ADIOS,
killer, just look what i DONE ALONE,
you would swear we planted trees the way the MONEY GROWN,
we been busy like some bees no HONEYCOMB,
and you could probably feel the breeze when the MONEY'S BLOW'N

We been busy like some bees no HONEYCOMB?? You can't be serious. On that note, see this hilarious list of top ten fake Drake lyrics. Favorites include "you only move grams - wheelchair," "I run this paper business - Michael Scott," "Just do it. Nike," and really best of all, "[corporate slogan] [corporate name]." Can't you really hear him doing the last one? Corporate SLOGAN, corporate NAME... jump around, you are in the house of PAIN....

Those Are Not For Suzi, Those Are For The Gentleman

2010-04-03T10:07:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to do a full-scale piece on Saboteur, probably Hitchcock's most underrated film (nobody, not even the French critics who liked Topaz, has ever to my knowledge mounted a defense of it) and sort of an intriguingly off-key minor masterpiece, but as exams come, and then the week after that I'll be working for a judge on the Third Circuit, I don't know if I'll have the time. So in the meantime I wanted to leave you with these frames. Saboteur is one of Hitchcock's many wrong man thrillers (a crime is charged to the wrong man), though it's not very thrilling and we never feel much sympathy for the wrong man. In this scene, the wrong man is arrested at the home of the right man, the titular saboteur. As the right man, the bad man, exchanges smarmy pleasantries with the police, his baby granddaughter reaches to the handcuffs on the wrong man's wrists, as if to remove them, and begins to cry. To which the bad man creepily says, "no Suzi, those are not for Suzi. Those are for the gentleman," as he gives an evil look at the wrong man. It strikes me these images are among Hitchcock's most powerful and haunting of evil, injustice, but most interestingly, and this is a theme that comes up throughout the film, a kind of intuitive, innate sense (here on the baby's part) of right and wrong. Which raises really interesting questions as to how this Rousseauvian belief in man's innate decency fits into a filmography that's generally been seen as putting forth a pretty pessimstic and dark view of humanity.

I Still Have A Few Thoughts On Music (And Healthcare!)

2010-03-12T14:28:00.000-08:00

So I [was] home for spring break and [was] listening to new music for the first time in two months (I don't drive down here; if I did I'd constantly be tempted to drive away). The most striking thing about pop radio at the moment, from a rap-centric perspective, is how little rap there is on it. Aside from 'Bedrock,' 'How Low,' 'Say Something,' and 'Nothin On You,' and I don't even know if I would categorize those as rap songs so much as pop songs with something that sounds like rapping on them, there's really no rap out there. And even on rap stations, there's incredibly little rapping. I've heard 'Women Lie Men Lie,' 'Lemonade,' and 'O Let's Do It' a total of three times, the above-mentioned pseudo-rap songs about a hundred times, and then the rest is Rihanna and all these Chris Brown imitators. Perhaps surprisingly, I don't see this as a bad thing at all. Instead of looking this in the old stupid terms of, "the only rappers who sell these days are the ones who sing into autotune, and that's why all my favorite rappers either have no career anymore or are being forced to make these terrible pop concessions," I think this is an opportunity for rap. With the genre as unpopular as it is, trend-chasing becomes futile for all but a mostly undeserving few that still manages to move large amounts of product, freeing rappers up to make their own artistic choices in an attempt to at least hold on to their core fans. You see this with projects like Cuban Linx 2 and The Stimulus Project, not that I liked The Stimulus Project much. Of course, the risk is that rap will become a little too traditionalist and everybody will start to sound like a bad imitation of themselves (see The Stimulus Project). But that's better than the old superproducer potpourri approach to making an album. So for the first time in a while I'm kind of optimstic about rap's future, although I don't really hear any actual music bearing that optimism out and it is a little scary when you can spend a week in Philadelphia and the only verses you hear on the rado from a rapper born above the Mason-Dixon line (and below the U.S./Canada border) are Jae Millz's on 'Bedrock' and Nicki Minaj's countless crappy guest spots. (Oh, and one kind of solid Cassidy comeback attempt, and that awful song with Lloyd Banks and Juelz.)

So on to some actual songs. I really do enjoy 'Bedrock,' Drake's verse notwithstanding. My Drake-hatred currently centers around the line, "I love your sushi roll, hotter than wasaaaaaaabi," but truthfully that line, while dumb, wouldn't bother me at all if put in the mouth of Gudda Gudda. The issue is more that Drake just exudes "this guy has no business being a rapper"-ness every time he speaks. Does he sound too suburban, too privileged, too Canadian? All of the above, I guess. What it comes down to is that I believe that rap is really about the poor to lower-middle-class American black experience and people who sound like Will Smith's nerdy brother from Fresh Prince should not be rappers. Unless you want to honestly rap about your background and how that makes you different from other rappers. But you can't just sneak in to the genre and pretend that no one notices you don't belong. It'd be like if one of Obama's daughters joined the 2020 equivalent of Crime Mob ten years from now. I would also append my comment on somanyshrimp's excellent post on Drake's sucky rapping:

I think you could find some equally embarrassing punchlines from some much-beloved 90s rappers, to say nothing of people like Jeezy or Wayne before, not after, your opinion of him soured. So I wouldn’t say the real problem with Drake is how lyrically deficient he is, as someone else could pull that crap off. (Though maybe no one can pull off two thumbs up, ebert and roeper.) I think it’s actually more the laser-guided delivery that Dombal praises that, like you say, hangs them out there for the picking in this really self-impressed, self-congratulatory way. I only heard the song we’re talking about once, but I’m sure he pauses between two thumbs up and Ebert and Roeper for half a beat in a “wait for it, it’s really good, here the punchline comes… Ebert and ROEPER, wow, I killed that!!!” way. While Wayne can say he’s in the building like the audience (bad example, but he did much worse even in his prime) and it’s okay because it’s just a part of his train of thought, not this pseudo-aha moment.

But back to 'Bedrock,' a few things. Lloyd is head and shoulders above all the other r&b singing young men and I wish he would put out more music. When he first came out, I was like, who is this clown who sounds like the black sixth member of the Beegees, but then he made 'Get It Shawty' and 'Girls All Around The World' and now I'm a huge fan. The rapping... I mean, the rapping isn't really rapping. They're all basically singing along with the melody of the beat. You hear a lot of this day in pop-rap, these super gimmicky only for one song flows. But that said, it works here and if you think of this as a pop ditty rather than worrying about whether any of these people can rap the song works much better. Nicki's the only one who tries to get outside the box a bit and that fails. I don't get why she randomly changes her voice 3 times a verse. Like what's with the "me on my LOW STARCH" part? She's really just becoming the same collection of the same three gimmicks on everything she does. Gudda Gudda, on the other hand, gets more fun to listen to the worse he raps. And I enjoy Jae Millz's almost Bob Dylan-esque emphasis on everything ("Miss Indepennnnnnndent, and yeah she got her ownnnnnnn").

'Nothin On You' is kind of indistinguishable from a Drake song; the only thing that gives it any personality is B.O.B.'s accent and the fact that he raps a lot like one of the guys in Field Mob, I forget which. There's a sincerity there. But lyrically it's extremely autopilot. A few details about this girl whom all the beautiful girls all over the world have nothing on would be appreciated. Otherwise why is one supposed to listen? For the awful hook from the guy who sounds like Matthew Santos?

'Women Lie Men Lie' is a fantastic song. There's a reason Yo Gotti is one of the last five or so rappers standing who can actually get his shit on the radio; he's a really good rapper.

'Tik Tok,' 'Blah Blah,' etc. If you took one of the girls off Jersey Shore and locked her in a room with some okay house producers, do you really suppose the results would be any worse than this? I can't be down with someone this talentless and dumb.

'Do You Remember' is a solid 'Forever' remake. Good to hear Lil Jon on the airwaves.

I'm a huge fan of the last two Rihanna singles. As I've said in the past, I used to feel that Rihanna was a video model/softcore stripper who sang, and up until and including 'Run This Town' that was still very much my assessment. What the fuck is she talking about on 'Run This Town,' she sounds like one of those girls you sit next to in class whose life consists of looking at facebook pictures of herself taken the night before. Like oh my god, I was sooooo the 823rd hottest girl in that club. I really ran the town last night. Such vapidity is just objectively uninteresting to hear about when put into song. But with 'Hard' and 'Rude Boy' I feel she's taken a huge step forward towards having a personality and a non-detestable one at that, sort of a Terminatrix of pop look. To the point where her singing about sex has become this "I'm bored, can't you get it up already" shit, as opposed to the skankiness of Rihannas past.

Timbaland has obviously run out of gas for the moment, but you already know this.

I'm starting to become reconciled to the dribs and drabs of Blueprint 3 I hear as this sort of rap starter kit for rich white children who know nothing about rap to get into rap. I just see too many Facebook photo albums from friends at Columbia Law or wherever who know absolutely nothing about music but are really really pumped to go to a Jay-Z concert and caption all their photos with lines from 'Young Forever.' Yeah, it's really terrible rapping, but maybe we can forgive him that because (a) he's not trying anymore and is basically creating some kind of new pseudo-rap over Coldplay-esque beats genre, (b) because he is actually saying something in his dim, bloated exec, 50,000 feet above Earth way.

Finally, on healthcare, I have no idea if that crap will actually work or not, there are bajillions of ways the whole thing could blow up, but I do think it's really admirable that the Democrats went ahead and did it, many of them risking their jobs. It's reassuring to see that it's still possible to pass major legislation, and frankly I felt almost a little patriotic for a couple days after it got passed. Of course the whole thing is a grand bargain between insurers and drug companies and doctors so it's a little hard to see it as a shining idealistic moment for American democracy, but in a way it is, and I was actually pretty thrilled to see the House Democrats prove me wrong and pretty dismayed to see how hopelessly retarded the critique of this thing from most conservative quarters has been. Though to be sure if you look around there are some really bright conservative economists who can tell you why the bill may be a disaster, but their arguments aren't what you're hearing, whereas "it's socialist" or "the founding fathers [the fucking founding fathers!] would have disapproved" are. Pathetic. The worst to me, as a philosophy major, is when I hear that there's no right to healthcare, ergo we shouldn't be doing this, or at least, ergo there's no moral argument for this. Yeah, no shit people don't have some kind of natural right to live till they're 80 instead of 60, much less get procedures paid for which may or may not effectuate that outcome. But since fucking when are things only good things to do if they guarantee people some right that they have? I don't know that dogs have a right to be treated kindly, but I sure think that it's wrong to beat a dog and good to treat a dog well. Not all theories of ethics are rights-based. Somehow people seem to not realize this.

The NBA Can Still Surprise Us

2010-02-20T20:48:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I claimed that we are approaching the end of history in the NBA as the league progresses towards an era of family-friendly, fully realized superstars whose talents are so beyond question that they leave no room for debate or surprise. But the NBA still can surprise us, if only because the previous generation of stars has not quite left the building yet. Tonight Tracy McGrady made a stunning and indescribably poignant debut for the Knicks. Of all the teams in the league, no teams' games are as inconsequential as the Knicks. Of the current Knicks, only one, Gallinari, seriously figures in their future plans. (Chandler figures, I suppose, but not very seriously, and Lee may not be back.) They're simply playing out the string until free agency comes. It doesn't even help them if they lose; their draft pick is Utah's. I have no idea why Knicks fans watch the games. It's into this malestrom of meaninglessness that McGrady got traded, his contract the mechanism by which the Knicks could lure a second max player and thereby lure LeBron (since otherwise he'd be coming to play with absolutely nothing). In return for his cap-clearing services, McGrady gets to showcase his skills for the one NBA franchise that can afford to let an ex-star put on a purely self-seeking showcase. Some teams couldn't afford a successful showcase because they're trying to tank; other teams couldn't afford a McGrady showcase because he might shoot them out of games in efforts to impress future employers. New York's the only team that could give McGrady this opportunity. It's quite a convenient confluence of circumstances.

The same factors that make New York such an ideal destination for McGrady make McGrady's new home an ideal one for NBA fans. Because McGrady plays on the most meaningless stage of all, we're free to focus our attentions solely on his play, without any nagging concerns about the outcome of the game or the actual efficacy of what he's doing. It's star-watching without the guilt that usually attends star-watching, or at least attends star-watching for those of us who think that winning, rather than the soap opera-like clash of personalities and styles, is the most important thing in sport.

So it was with great pleasure that I watched McGrady's improbably successful comeback. T-Mac is not back; athletically he's deteriorated to the point where he can't split a double team, blow by anyone, or even dunk for all we know. But he got to the rim somehow or another, finished with great accuracy, shot the ball well, passed beautifully, took only one bad shot, and managed to put up 19 by halftime. Not only did he look miles better than the shaky, diffident player we saw in spot action earlier this season in Houston, he played better than he did at any point last season, maybe even the season before that. Gone was the McGrady who spent most of his last years in Houston lazily launching arcless jumpers from the top of the key. Time and time again he went to the basket, in spite of looking even more hobbled than he did a year ago. I know it's only been a year since McGrady got real playing time, but I was almost reminded of Tom Watson's nearly winning the British Open two months shy of his 60th birthday, turning back the clock to his 30 year-old self in spite of very visibly being trapped in a 60 year-old body. Shades also of 'Mama Said Knock You Out.' At one point McGrady even shook his head at a defender who let him can a 17-footer in a gesture of "I'm still Tracy McGrady" pride.

Perhaps the most touching part of the night, though, was when Jonathan Bender and T-Mac were on the court together. Bender's a veteran of the high school era; picked fifth in the 1999 draft straight out of Picayune, Mississippi (McGrady went ninth two years prior), he was touted as the next Garnett. He was a 7 footer with guard skills and immense leaping ability, shot the three well, and could block shots, a rare combination. But he never did figure the pro game out, became an injury problem, and retired four years ago, leaving only legends of what he did in practice, where teammates said he looked like the most talented player they ever saw. Then this season the Knicks unexpectedly signed him. In his comeback, he's shown flashes, but ultimately has looked even spottier than he did in Indiana. D'Antoni's using him primarily as an outsider shooter hasn't helped, and he didn't look particularly good last night. But there was a certain synergy between him and T-Mac, as seen on the play below where he gets the ball from McGrady, fakes the three and delivers a perfect pass back to McGrady under the basket that McGrady converts for his flashiest score of the night. Nothing could have been more fitting than the sight of these two players, both young men (30 and 28) who seem much older, trying to hang on to their careers in a league that's passed them by.

Some Thoughts On Melo/Bron and The End of History In The NBA

2010-02-19T11:49:00.000-08:00

What are we to do with these spring days that are now fast coming on? Early this morning the sky was gray, but if you go to the window now you are surprised and lean your cheek against the latch of the casement. - Franz Kafka.

I'm not sure what that has to do with the NBA but I've always liked it. I guess it means the snow is melting and the playoffs are coming. Anyway, did you see Denver-Cleveland Thursday night? Carmelo had 40, 6 and 7, while LeBron had 43, 13 and 15. Making him the first player to score 40 with 15 assists and 10 or more rebounds in 36 years. He now averages a 30, 7 and 8.4 on the season. Simply put, if you are one of those people who persists in thinking that Kobe is the best player in the league, you're either insane or not very bright. There are a great many things that Kobe can do better than LeBron offensively, but concluding that Kobe's a better player because of all the things he can do that LeBron can't is like concluding that Vladimir Guerrero, in his prime, was a better hitter than Barry Bonds because Guerrero could hit the ball at his feet and Bonds couldn't. That said, LeBron, like Shaq, is this weird contradiction in terms, someone who's undeniably the best player in the game while being pretty raw in many phases of the game. But unlike Shaq, who never tried to do anything he couldn't do (except for trying to hit free-throws, which wasn't by choice), LeBron does try to do quite a bit that he's not very good at. For instance, last night LeBron shot 12-16 from within 10 feet, and 3-17 outside of ten feet. 1-9 from three. Now obviously on an average night LeBron's shot falls with greater frequency than it did Thursday, but even on a good night he's just an average shooter. Whereas Daniel Gibson is making 47% of his threes this year and Delonte West 41%. So why does LeBron take nine and Daniel and Delonte take 4 combined? I'd be crazy to call LeBron selfish, he's the best and most willing passer the game has outside of the point guard position, but he seems to be of the view, understandably, that as the best player in the world, he should be taking the shots that a Kobe Bryant does, and that's mistaken. If he weren't so content to inaccurately fire away from the outside, Cleveland would've won that game. I worry that LeBron is forcing himself into a Jordan/Kobe mold and thereby depriving his team, but more importantly us, of the chance to see what a fully realized power wing would look like. The game has never seen a face-up player of his power, speed and athleticism, and right now we're only seeing the half of it because he's trapped in antiquated notions of what a superstar perimeter player is supposed to do on a basketball court.

On the game in general, I think everyone's starting to realize that the league is at a crossroads in about 82 ways, the most obvious of which are the potential lockout and 2010 free agency. LeBron's decision this summer is probably going to be the biggest factor affecting the narrative of professional basketball in the next decade. But what's been less acknowledged is that the old generation of superstars is dying out - even Kobe only has a couple years left before age catches up with him - and is being replaced with a group that may be a lot less underachieving but is frankly a whole lot more milquetoast. When I began watching the NBA, at the beginning of the decade, these were the guys who made All-NBA teams:

Allen Iverson
Kobe Bryant
Tracy McGrady
Kevin Garnett
Shaquille O'Neal
Tim Duncan
Chris Webber (once)
Jason Kidd

And on the second teams you had Vince Carter and Webber and Iverson in years they didn't make the first team. Lesser stars included Steve Francis, Stephon Marbury, Paul Pierce, Antoine Walker, Baron Davis, Jermaine O'Neal, Rasheed Wallace. That was the constellation of superstars. In the new decade, the constellation of superstars going forward should look something like this:

LeBron James
Dwight Howard
Kevin Durant
Dwayne Wade
Carmelo Anthony
Chris Bosh
Chris Paul
John Wall
possibly Brandon Roy
and maybe Tyreke Evans several years down the road.

We can quibble about the composition of the second group, but I think it's safe to say that, of the first group, only Tim Duncan can match the sheer uncontroversiality of pretty much everyone in Group 2. Even Shaq had all his psychodrama with Kobe going on, the sense that he was just a big goofball who didn't maximize his talent or take care of his body, the passive-aggressive way he took shots at all his former teammates, coaches, competitors, the feeling one occasionally got that his warmth was something of a manipulative put-on, etc. Garnett, we forget, spent his career getting criticized for being too skilled, too intense, and too unselfish. Vince Carter only ceased to be controversial once everyone agreed to hate him. Sleepy-eyed McGrady, for many, epitomized what was wrong about the post-Jordan NBA. And then there were Iverson and Kobe and Webber. The NBA of the next decade, on the other hand, will be comprised of superstars who, everyone agrees, "get it" in the way that Iverson and Webber and perhaps McGrady and for years Kobe never "got it." It's not like the future is a league of Tim Duncans, these are players who by and large have a lot of personality (though see Kevin Durant), but it's all of the affable, jovial, extroverted sort, like Shaq if Shaq were genuine and not really just a public approval whore. The most controversial thing any of these guys ever did is appear in a Stop Snitching tape, and that was followed by boatloads of apologies. Besides, no one really thinks that that episode tells us anything about Carmelo, other than that he did come from Baltimore and that he's a go along get along sort of guy who will appear in your tape if you ask him to. It's more a sign of his chumminess than anything else.

And on the court, none of these players are a fabulous waste of potential the way Webber or Rasheed or 'Toine or Steve Francis or Carter or Iverson or McGrady arguably were. Some of them will win championships and some never will, but when Chris Paul or Melo retire ring-less many years from now, no one will blame that on them, they'll be graced with the John Stockton "they were one of the best ever (and nice guys too!), they just ran into superior teams" narrative. Maybe someone will complain that Dwight Howard could've done more with his ability, but Dwight Howard is no Webber or Rasheed. He just doesn't have a lot of post moves and probably never will. Some players are more agile in the post than others. That's rather different than being able to do anything and everything a power forward ought to be able to do but choking in the fourth quarter, shirking the spotlight or spending your career chucking up threes. It seems to me that we live in an era where players who don't get it are becoming marginalized, most spectacularly in the cases of Arenas and Marbury. Years ago, guys like Tyrus Thomas, Michael Beasley, Charlie Villanueva, J.R. Smith, Chris Wilcox, Rashad McCants would have been given franchises of their own to destroy, fan bases to tantalize with their talent only to crush, or at least in the case of Rashad some actual playing time. Sean Williams would be somebody's enigmatic starting center. So would Eddy Curry. Do you remember how many years Robert "Tractor" Traylor hung on in a haze of obesity and weed? The guy got drafted over Paul Pierce and Dirk Nowitzki! Got indicted for laundering $4 million of his cousin's drug money. That doesn't happen in today's NBA. In today's NBA, columnists are running out of players they can call enigmatic. Even once enigmatic players are letting go of their enigmatic ways (Josh Smith, Zach Randolph, Jamal Crawford, Ron Artest to a great extent).

How many guys are there left in the NBA who look like someone you wouldn't want to meet on a dark street corner, even when they're signing a kid's jersey?

None of today's rising stars inspire debate; they only inspire consensus. Just as there is no serious debate as to how good Duncan was or any lingering questions about unrealized potential, there can be no debate about how good LeBron, Wade, Howard, Paul, Durant, Melo, etc. are. They're all unambiguously great players to a greater or lesser extent. People will debate which one deserves the MVP in a given year, but people will never question whether they make their teams better or worse the way we did with almost all of the last generation of superstars, whether they're good enough to build a team around, whether they get it or don't. Even Brandon Jennings, who since the 55-point game is shooting 35% from the field and is still pulling the trigger 16 times a game, reaching levels of inefficiency that Iverson could never have dreamed of, somehow doesn't project the same "I'm going for mines" attitude that Marbury and Francis did every night of their careers. He just seems like a confused kid. Moreover, there are no villains in today's generation of superstars, no one who elicits hatred the way Kobe or Reggie or, for some portion of the public, Iverson could. And at the same time there's no one nearly as lovable as Iverson was. Even the stars themselves all seem to like each other; rivalries become dimmed by a glow of mutual admiration. Garnett's the only star left in the league who hates his opponents, and even he's become a parody of himself, more an exaggerated simulacrum of competitiveness and universal emnity than the real thing.

As a result, a kind of "it's just a game" indifference creeps into the game. The stars' reputations are already set in stone - even if LeBron never wins a title we'll blame it on his bad supporting casts - so in a very real sense, one ceases to feel, when one watches the NBA, that history is being made. The season takes on a feel of one long celebration of young talent (all good friends from their halcyon days on the Olympic team), with some suspenseful moments interspersed, rather than the feel of a narrative. In the past, the season began with unanswered questions - is McGrady for real or a fraud, is Kobe good enough to win on his own, who is Kevin Garnett really, etc. - that the playoffs ostensibly answered. In the past, the playoffs took on an air of a battle between good and evil, depending on one's idea of who the good and bad guys were. In today's game, they're all good guys and history has already been made before the fact. LeBron will inevitably win his rings, Durant and Melo and Paul may or may not but if they don't it won't detract from their reputations that they'll ultimately make as two of the great scorers and one of the great point guards the game's ever seen, Wade's title is on the books already. One begins to sense that the players themselves are aware of the ultimate irrelevance of how the games actually play out. This was especially apparent at the All-Star Game, when Deron fouled with seconds left not realizing the score was tied and laughed it off, when Melo clanked a game-winning three-pointer that he shouldn't have taken and laughed it off, when we had a dunk contest that none of the participants seemed to care about because we all know already that Shannon Brown and DeRozan and Gerald Wallace are great dunkers, won by a guy the sole point of whose being in the league is to win dunk contests. There was something very symbolic about Nate's bringing the cheerleaders onto the court and then not using them; their presence on the court was entirely meaningless, like the weekend itself.

Thoughts On We Are The World 25

2010-02-15T15:04:00.000-08:00

I don't actually find this a whole lot more objectionable or stupid than the first We Are The World, which had some great zombie Michael action but otherwise, total garbage. This is also total garbage, but not of a higher/lower order in any way that I can discern. In fact, in a way I find it a little less rankling. The original version featured a shit ton of retarded sanctimonious Hollywood singer liberals vaguely ranting about making a brighter day, whereas this one is a lot less sanctimonious, just really stupid, and it's actually motivated by a specific cause, not some vague "let's save the whole world" nonsense. However, there are some definite lowlights and surprises.

Jamie Foxx should never try to talk about anything serious. Here he sounds like some idiot Oscar presenter talking about how actors are the people who bring movies to life. (You know how before they give out the award they'll give these awful speeches from teleprompters about the importance of actors/screenwriters/directors to movies. Like, "tonight we honor the director. They're the ones who put everything together. They're the dreamers - but also the doers! From Navi aliens to people dying in I-raq, we saw a lot of great movies made by great directors this year." Same level of self-congratulatory stupidity going on here.)
The kid who starts this thing off is only 15 and he already sounds like he's full of shit. There must be some 8 year old pop star I don't know of who could've lent a little sincerity to these proceedings.
Nicole Scherzinger is here. I don't really think that a woman famous for terrible songs about what an unapologetic slut she is should be part of the cast. I guess they wanted somebody good-looking involved.
Jennifer Hudson always sounds like she believes in whatever she's singing, good choice.
This next woman has a frighteningly husky voice. Apparently she's a big country star. She makes a weird face when she sings like she's taking a shit.
Josh Groban is the first huge douchebag on the track. You might classify him as operatic closeted metro douche.
I was prepared to like Tony Bennett's part in a cute old senile man way but he's doing this weird self-conscious fist-pumping thing and doesn't really seem senile.
Mary J. Blige just creeps me out. What huge shades. She's like the megalomaniac Darth Vader of hip-hop soul.
Dead Zombie Michael sings along in split screen with Living Diana Ross. Somehow less creepy than in the original. Partly because, thanks to Diana's aging, they no longer look like twin sisters.
Barbara Streisand comes in to restore a bit of the sanctimonious flavor of the original. If Nancy Pelosi ever got Hollywood to make a movie of her life, Barbara would be the perfect one for the part. Watch the disgustingly gooey way she shakes her head to confirm that it really is true that you and me will one day make a better day.
Miley Cyrus kills. This doesn't surprise me. Aside from her lyricists making her shout out a 'Jay-Z song' about 7 years after Jay-Z's last good song, what has Miley ever done wrong? I'm serious.
Enrique Iglesias sounds like a gay vampire. Really freaky ex-Latino heartthrob vibrato on the 'cries,' as in "so their cries will not be in vain." (My God this song has great lyrics.)
Somehow Celine Dion doesn't turn in one of the top 5 worst performances. It's kind of disappointing, actually; she would seem to be the ideal candidate to do something awful on a song like this.
Jamie Foxx's first go-around is not a disaster. (But don't worry, he gets another shot.)
Wyclef wins the Bruce Springsteen Memorial I Will Frighten You With My Douchey Intensity Douche Award. It's hard to get a good still because his face is in such Tourettic motion, but compare:

It's uncanny.

It's like he's one of those greenbean plants in kids' books that have minds and faces, reaching his head to the sun for nourishment. "Ah, the sun! Photosynthesis!" And you know he had to break out the braying goat melisma tricks. We are the childre-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-en indeed.
Adam Levine and Pink both don't embarrass themselves. Weird.
Bebe Winans starts moving his hands around like he's trying to conjure up a "better day" with his fingers. I think I've seen wackjob gospel preachers do this on TV when I'm flipping channels.
Zombie Michael returns. He then passes the baton to...
Usher. The producer of this thing must have wanted to embarrass Usher because he really does pale in comparison. Between this, his annoying All-Star ditty, and his All-Star performance, he could end his career right now.
Then the producer starts pointing at Celine to start in a sort of "unleash the Canadian mammoth-voiced hounds" manner. Celine goes "well well well well" before getting fully revved up and into obnoxious diva mode. But again, not one of the top five worst performances. I think when she's all screaming and shrill like this it kind of negates her Celineness and makes her seem a little human.
Then comes Fergie who looks really fat, is wearing a strange bondage-y outfit, and cannot sing. I mean, it's like she just talks. She's had much grosser moments though.
Cut to the full ensemble, and then Nicole Scherzinger, who has stripped down to a clingy white tanktop. Seriously, she's taking articles of clothing off as the save the dying Haitian children video progresses.
One of the Jonas Brothers sounds eerily like Michael, if Mike had been a white teen-pop hack.
More close-ups of Nicole! And this time she looks like she has bad gas issues. Just strange directorial choices here. Of course, this was directed by the director of the worst movie ever (Crash) so that's kind of to be expected.
I can get behind Toni Braxton's guest spot.
Lil Wayne sings into Autotune. Neither as heartfelt or as going-through-the-motions awful as it could've been. More on the plus side of the ledger.
Akon turns in one of the more awful insincere bullshit performances of the night.
I don't question T-Pain's sincerity but the way he phrases his lines you'd really think he was singing about a cute ass-shaking bartender.
Jamie Foxx starts jokily imitating Ray Charles and clowning around like he's at the All-Star Game. This is no time for bad douchey humor. Gross Lowlight Of The Song Award.
LL starts rapping. Along with Swizz, Will.i.am, Snoop and Busta Rhymes. LL's rapping at this point is kind of on the level of the little rapped interludes in 'Black and White.' Swizz doesn't even move his mouth. He knows this sucks.
Wyclef emits some sort of Haitian tribal war cry. This is devolving into The Lion King soundtrack.
More Jennifer Hudson singing, fewer tight closeups of her fat face, please.
Damn, Celine has a lot of Botox.
Uh oh, Kanye has arrived.
More Wyclef tribal war cries. I know it's French but he really sounds like a cartoon African lion right now.
Kanye seems sort of chastened by the Taylor thing; not a ton of energy. (I wonder if he's why she's not here.) But he does sort of serve as the social conscience of the whole affair, actually talking in his sung-rap bits about the actual dying people in Haiti. I like Kanye when it comes down to it, I just think he's made three straight shit albums and is deeply confused about his abilities and limitations. He means well.
Will.i.am is the embodiment of retarded consciousness in black pop music. Here is no exception as he improvises, "like Katrina, Africa and Indonesia, and now Haiti needs us, they need us, they need us." Nicole stands next to him looking confused, like she entered the wrong set and is thinking, "where's the stripper pole?"
Wyclef starts making noises. The song ends.

The New York Times Breaks Down Gender Disparities In College Dating

2010-02-07T14:47:00.000-08:00

Tool.

Every so often a newspaper will do an hilarious piece purporting to inform grown folk on how the kids live. They tend to read as if the author was a Victorian Englishman who just got plunked down into North Philly and thought he'd write a letter about what he saw to his Victorian friends back home. These things have become such an obligatory subject of mockery that I even saw them being made fun of on Law and Order the other day. My favorite used to be the Rolling Stone piece about Duke post lax-scandal, when some wiseass told the writer that we had a thing called the Duke Fifteen, the elite fifteen percent of lax players, frat stars and sorority girls, and the writer actually believed him and structured her whole article around the non-existent Fifteen. But today the Times came out with a doozy. 'The New Math On Campus: On College Campuses, a Shortage of Men.' If the editors have any sense, they'll fire the author.

The piece begins with a tale of a girls' night out. The girls are at a "gritty basement bar." They sing along to Taylor Swift, drink beer, and "trade jokes." But wait, there's something missing! No guys.

“This is so typical, like all nights, 10 out of 10,” said Kate Andrew, a senior from Albemarle, N.C. The experience has grown tiresome: they slip on tight-fitting tops, hair sculpted, makeup just so, all for the benefit of one another, Ms. Andrew said, “because there are no guys.”

No GUYS?? Where'd they go? Are they, like, dead? Well not quite. See, "North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly 60 percent female, is just one of many large universities that at times feel eerily like women’s colleges." Wow, eerie. But how did 41% of the population just up and vanish? By this logic it would seem that there are also no non-whites at UNC because white people make up 67% of the population. (And in fact, in the 8-photo slideshow accompanying the article, there are no non-whites in the whole thing.) Well, it turns out there are some guys at UNC. Just not any desirable ones:

Jayne Dallas, a senior studying advertising who was seated across the table, grumbled that the population of male undergraduates was even smaller when you looked at it as a dating pool. “Out of that 40 percent, there are maybe 20 percent that we would consider, and out of those 20, 10 have girlfriends, so all the girls are fighting over that other 10 percent,” she said.

Of course, it's also true that out of that 60% female population, there are maybe 15 percent that I would consider, and out of them many have boyfriends. It's not like the scarcity of genuinely attractive people is a one-way street. However, the author's about as dumb as Miss Dallas, and genuinely seems to think that you've got 6 girls chasing for each desirable/available guy. This massive demographic imbalance leads to some seriously unladylike behavior (I really can't go a post without alluding to No Limit):

Thanks to simple laws of supply and demand, it is often the women who must assert themselves romantically or be left alone on Valentine’s Day, staring down a George Clooney movie over a half-empty pizza box.

“I was talking to a friend at a bar, and this girl just came up out of nowhere, grabbed him by the wrist, spun him around and took him out to the dance floor and started grinding,” said Kelly Lynch, a junior at North Carolina, recalling a recent experience.

Oh my God, she just came up out of nowhere! I can't decide whether this piece is really anti-feminist or whether it's trying to say that "simple laws of supply and demand" have created the slut. Perhaps the latter:

“If a guy is not getting what he wants, he can quickly and abruptly go to the next one, because there are so many of us,” said Katie Deray, a senior at the University of Georgia, who said that it is common to see six provocatively clad women hovering around one or two guys at a party or a bar.

Since that is not her style, Ms. Deray said, she has still not had a long-term relationship in college.

That's right, because the only way to form a long-term relationship is to hover around a guy with five other provocatively clad women at a party or a bar. Actually, quite the opposite. Sluttiness is also a product of geography:

At colleges in big cities, women have more options... But in a classic college town, the social life is usually limited to fraternity parties, local bars or coffeehouses.

You don't say. Of course, just because there's a massive 41:59 gender gap doesn't mean that just any guy can get play:

“Even though there’s this huge imbalance between the sexes, it still doesn’t change the fact of guys sitting around, bemoaning their single status,” said Patrick Hooper, a Georgia senior. “It’s the same as high school, but the women are even more enchanting and beautiful.”

The women are even more enchanting and beautiful. Someone sounds like they just stepped out of an unholy hybrid of Gone With The Wind and Superbad. In pieces like this you really have to wonder whether the kids being interviewed are putting on the writer. You also have to wonder how someone who writes for the Times could be such a dope. My guess is that they put their dimmest bulbs on pieces like this and that that explains why they're always so ridiculous. But maybe the generational disconnect is just that great.

I Have Lost All Respect For Alicia Keys/A Mildly Funny Story

2010-02-04T10:14:00.000-08:00

Too disturbing.

Well first the mildly funny story. I was sitting here doing some work for the family business when a very large, openly poorish African-American classmate started talking to me, hoping to learn what the reading for today's class said. I, being reasonably polite, did not run in fear of the obese girl and at some point asked her where she was from. To which she replied Huntsville, Alabama. I said that I listened to some rappers from Huntsville. She said there were no rappers from Huntsville. I said they were called the Paper Route Gangstaz, G-Side, and several other things. She said I was making them up. I said that I'd been told that they had a few regional hits in Alabama. She said this was not so. I said I guessed they were probably just a hipster thing. Then when I googled them to prove their existence, I noticed that all the hits were New York Magazine, The Fader, Pitchfork, and other similar outlets. So the next time you feel like making some argument about how the industry and the radio won't give the authentic people's music a chance, consider that, judging by this purely anecdotal evidence, the authentic people from Huntsville itself have never even heard of these authentic folk.

As for Alicia, I read that she is thinking of marrying Swizz Beatz. Obviously her music has taken a huge turn for the worse in recent years, but I never saw her marrying one of the lamest people in the industry. I could certainly see Beyonce marrying Swizz if he were a bigger deal, I could see Christina Milian doing it because dating powerful producers is what washed-up singers do, I could see Keri Hilson doing it because she strikes me as a careerist robot. But Alicia? It really devalues songs like 'You Don't Know My Name' to learn that Swizzy is Alicia's idea of a suitable lifelong love interest. Even musically, how can she stand to be in a relationship with this guy? It'd be like the director of The Hurt Locker being married to the director of Avatar. Oh wait, that actually happened. Of course, Swizz was not always a terrible producer. In fact he was once a very good, if limited one. Maybe the best thing Jada ever did is 'All For The Love,' which Swizz sold to Bad Boy at the tender age of 20. It's an unusually reflective track for a guy of his age.

Rap! Styles!

2010-02-03T22:16:00.000-08:00

I listened to some new rap for the first time since The State vs. Radric Davis dropped. Naturally the only rapper who could bring me back to rap is Styles P. Styles may never write a particularly clever line or come up with an interesting flow from now till the end of his career. But the guy just raps with a degree of integrity, sincerity, honesty, warmth, and heart that never fails to bring a smile to my face. No homo. I feel the same way about Styles some people feel about G-Side.* I can't think of any song from last decade that I enjoy more than 'Switch My Style,' 'Kill Dat Faggot,' 'Please Listen To My Mixtape,' this 'Where's My Homies' freestyle, or the infinitely quotable 'What Up.' Youtube commenters are the biggest idiots on the planet, but one surprisingly accurate index of a good song is when its youtube commenters just quote every amazing line of the song in their comments. Such is the case with 'What Up.' Nothing Styles says on 'What Up' is actually that special but he says it all with so much passion that it sounds like it is. I can't tell you how many cumulative hours of my life the last six or so years that 'Everybody wants Jesus to come/Well I can send you there, and all I need's my weed and my gun' or, 'And I might need a sedative/they said I'm cool and I, drop a lot of jewels but I'm too fucking negative' or 'And how foul could his karma be/Still smoke a lot, still in the hood, still move coke in large quantites', or 'Yeah, I'm respected and feared/Slice your neck and your ear/Then torture you the rest of the year/I'm from the school of hard knocks so the lessons is here' have run through my head. There's just a matter-of-factness to his presentation, like he's not bragging about his negativity and foul karma the way the rappers people compare him to would, like a Hell Rell or Uncle Murda or Sheek, but like he's just stating that he's an incredibly foul individual. There's also a kind of quasi-religiosity to Styles at his best; not only is he the hardest out, it's his mission, it's his credo. Sort of like Forest Whittaker in Ghost Dog.

Anyway, Styles and Green Lantern came out with a mixtape/album. It's called The Green Ghost Project and it's very good. Personally I prefer Styles over super-cheap beats and old 90s beats, he struggles with the album format - maybe even with the song format period, but since it's not really an album this is the closest thing we'll get to a great Styles album. (Maybe it's a tie with The Phantom Sessions. And Gangster and a Gentleman isn't bad.) No stupid Akon features, no Swizz Beats, no Ray J, no songs about the opposite sex. Some mistakes are made, such as the ridiculously lachrymose hook sung by one Dwayne Collins on 'Send A Kite' about how you should send Dwayne a kite when he's locked up, don't come to see him or send him money or expect collect calls to get placed by Dwayne, none of that. Just the kite. Styles being Styles triumphs over even Dwayne's crappy hook and turns the thing into a pretty successful song. (Prison raps, of course, are a Styles specialty.) There are a couple other mistakes, like failing to recognize that just because this is a hard no-compromises mixtape doesn't mean that we must hop in our time machine and try to bring crappy scratched hooks back. And I don't know if anything here is out and out classic, the way the cuts linked to above are. But there's plenty of fantastic stuff on the album. 'Pablo Doe,' a non-catatonic-Noreaga feature, sounds appropriately like a way more sinister version of 'Superthug.' 'Double Trouble' is the requisite neo-Bomb Squad banger, and it features Sheek, who does well with old-schoolish shit. More innovatively, 'Real Ghostly' is probably the closest we'll ever get to Styles rapping over Goblin (the famed late-70s Italian synthmeisters who did the soundtracks for Italian horror director Dario Argento's best movies). The rest doesn't quite lend itself to description, but Green Lantern, Alchemist, Scram Jones, Buckwild, and Dame Grease and co. do a solid job with the beats and Styles is Styles, consistently great.

* Except Styles is actually a great rapper and the guys in G-Side need to go to rapping school/stop talking about the exciting time they were actually in a hotel in, like, a European country and rented a Hummer. And met a girl. Who was European. I understand coming from a certain background that stuff can be really exciting. Shit, I'm excited about being first in my class. Others here are excited about just being in the top half. But I/we are not writing songs about it. Maybe if they were actually great rappers, they could make that stuff sound exciting, the way Kool Keith could make a Saab with fog lights in the front sound really fucking special. Otherwise, however, it's just like listening to two dudes talk about their grocery list, and how hard they worked at their boring-ass job to afford the items on said grocery list. Actually, that would be way more interesting than actual G-Side. I grind hard for this butter! In all seriousness I liked their last album to an extent but they do have an excessively blue-collar problem.

A Shot So Great It Deserved Its Own Post

2010-02-01T17:51:00.000-08:00

Though I do think Topaz is a minor masterpiece and that the film's rigorous suppression of audience sympathies is a big (maybe the) reason why, there's no question that it could have benefited from somewhat less incompetent actors and that the scenes between the lead and his wife are some of the flattest things Hitchcock ever did. But even in this arid wasteland of abysmal acting, writing and not especially expressive or inspired directing, Hitchcock occasionally does something that just floors you.

When Andre, the French spy, is sent off to Cuba to find out what the Russians are up to (the Americans have no intelligence operation there so they're forced to rely on the services of other nations' intelligence agents), his wife is none too happy and some dreadful acting ensues. Then she pronounces the name of Andre's Cuban contact and mistress, Juanita de Cordoba, and we cut to Andre's reaction. But Andre isn't there:

And for several sections the camera sits, immobile, trained on this empty doorway into a bathroom, until Andre sulks out and demands that his wife tell him where she heard his mistress's name. In a film that rarely surprises or shocks, the cut away to the empty doorway when the viewer expects a reaction shot packs quite a lot of punch. In that one shot, Hitchcock says more about the emptiness of Andre's marriage, and the emptiness of all lives subsumed to international power politics, than his actors ever could. Partly it's my German DVD of the film, which offers a fuller frame than the American version at the expense of blanching Hitchcock's Technicolor, but what a haunting study in muted whites. Look at the way the lampshade in the left foreground ceases to be a lampshade and functions as an abstract part of the composition. One's almost reminded of Malevich's White On White:

Films I've Watched: Topaz (Alfred Hitchcock, 1969)

2010-01-31T20:42:00.000-08:00

Hitch - down with the Tank.

Being an auteurist - a film critic whose criticism centers around the mythos of the great director and his personal vision - is a lot like believing in God. Or in particular, believing that God wrote the Bible. Just as the devout will always attempt to resolve away contradictory biblical text, the auteurist, no matter how flat his chosen auteur falls on his face, will always attempt to show that the auteur's failings are really some sort of brilliant realization of the auteur's vision, one that has escaped the stupid critics. For example, Hitchcock's, shall we say, interesting decision to represent Baltimore Harbor by way of transparently painted backdrop in Marnie is often defended on all sorts of grounds as one of his more brilliant touches. For example, Hitchcock couldn't get a real ship to protrude/penetrate into the street in such overtly phallic fashion, so he had a painting made. Or it expresses the "heroine's subjective unreality," or represents "the fake emotional history which has been forced on Marnie to repress her primal memory." Never mind that the art directors themselves later claimed in interviews that the boat wasn't actually supposed to look fake. (In my own view, though blatantly fake backdrops can have their uses - Hitchcock does wonders with them in Under Capricorn, another movie I plan on posting about - the ship in Marnie doesn't work.)

So auteurism has its dangers, and I think it's important to recognize when a bad movie is a bad movie, just like it's important to admit when your favorite rapper can no longer rap. Which brings me to Topaz, which pretty much everyone, aside from a couple critics, seems to believe is Hitchcock's worst American movie, and not even in the "Hitchcock's worst is still better than most anything else" sense - more in the "a disaster in any terms" sense, to quote the editor of Hitchcock's notebooks. And there are certainly moments in Topaz so stupefyingly misperformed, miswritten, and misfilmed as to support that judgment. My favorite might be when the film's French master spy, played by a comically wooden veteran of sub-Bond thrillers, Frederick Stafford, meets up with his family for a New York vacation. His daughter, played by a very pretty and perfectly good French actress whose English-speaking skills are unfortunately rather limited, inanely cries in her French accent, "there is so much to see and do, New York is marvelous!" To which Papa, channeling the dad from Leave It To Beaver, says in his phony French accent, "and we will do it all!"

A less convincing or more vacuous representation of familial harmony simply isn't imaginable. The acting and writing are so poor, one could almost imagine it's the beginning of a twisted father-daughter porno. (Which actually isn't entirely off the mark; to the extent that the daughter plays any role in the movie, she does so as yet another, admittedly subtextual, rival to her mother for her father's affections. There's also something a little porn-esque about the way Daughter's vacation hopes are rather summarily dashed seconds later when the family arrives at their hotel room and finds an American secret agent waiting to meet Father there.) But in the first place this is nothing new for Hitchcock; one could make a very strong argument that there aren't any happy or normal nuclear families in any of his 53 films, and that whatever superficial familial happiness there is in Hitchcock almost always belies severe internal strains. More than that, though, this is where the auteurist in me says that this sequence couldn't be the result of simple laziness or artistic decline, that Hitchcock must have intentionally made it this bad in order to say something about the emptiness of the life of the professional Cold Warrior.

But to back up. Topaz is ostensibly a film about espionage and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the movie, other than Hitchcock's decision to cast an abjectly unsympathetic statue of an actor in the main role, is that it's a suspenseless film - about the Cuban Missile Crisis. The most suspenseful week in the history of the world! The week where we all came within inches of annihilating each other! And yet the film is almost entirely devoid of suspense. Of course, we all know, after the fact, how the Cuban Missile Crisis turns out, but the movie acts like it knows too, and like it doesn't particularly care. When Topaz came out, this was one of the biggest knocks on the movie - that it managed to turn that suspenseful week into a nullity whose big exciting ending consists of a man being asked to leave a room. And that's true. But of course that's precisely the point. Topaz is a film with the daring to suggest that the outcome of something even as potentially catastrophic as the Cuban Missile Crisis is a triviality when weighed against the human cost in betrayal, deception, dehumanization, and death of keeping the peace. Hitchcock all but comes out and says so in the film's last shot, a shot of a man tossing a newspaper proclaiming the successful conclusion of the Crisis on a park bench, a shot which in one of three endings to the film Hitchcock interposed with a montage of the film's numerous deaths. There is neither suspense nor release in Topaz, neither crisis nor happy (or unhappy) ending, because for Hitchcock the logic of cold war is one of stasis, inevitability, of a mutually assured destruction that prevents either side from making a move and thereby keeps the entire world and everyone in it frozen in a deathly standstill, or moving along deterministic lines not of their own choosing. Whatever horror there is in Topaz isn't the horror of a possible nuclear war, but the horror of there possibly never being one, of an eternal Cold War. Put in another way, the militarization of the whole globe (the film takes place in Copenhagen, Moscow, Paris, New York, Washington, Havana) paradoxically drains the world of Hitchcockian suspense, or more precisely, Hitchcockian terror, because the trademark of Hitchcockian terror - the moment where a character suddenly realizes that things aren't what they should be, whether it's the windmill turning the wrong way in Foreign Correspondent or the piece of jewelry that Kim Novak shouldn't be wearing in Vertigo - can no longer work in a world with spies on every corner, where every corner of the earth is uniformly charged with paranoia. There's no longer, in Topaz, a normal facade in the world behind which terror can lie.

Topaz's style bears this reading out. When people think of 60s Hitchcock, they think of montage - the 50 cuts/cuts in Psycho's shower scene, the birds picking at Tippi Hedren in The Birds from a thousand angles. Topaz puts forth a different sort of montage. At key moments in the film, individual motions are broken down into their constituent still parts. So a Cuban leader grabbing the arm of his traitor mistress so she can't run away becomes this:

And then this:

And then this:

And his killing her moments later to save her from being tortured becomes this:

And this:

And this:

Followed by this shot of him dropping his gun, unusually sexualized for Hitchcock, to his side:

And finally this famous shot from above:

Movement in Topaz is frequently mechanized, roboticized, broken down into so many still pieces that it ceases to look like movement at all. And with this mechanization comes a sense of inevitability and a concomitant lack of suspense. From the moment the leader grabs his mistress's hand and the soundtrack starts ominously duh-DUHing like someone just walked down the wrong trap door in a bad 50s horror movie, we know how this will go. The woman pictured above, in an exchange with her captor before she gets shot, explains that she worked for the Americans because "you made my country a prison." It would be more accurate to say that, in Topaz, the Cold War has made the whole globe a prison.

For though Hitchcock is careful to not get too morally relative - all the killings, for example, are committed by Soviets, even the Russian defector is somehow made to seem disgusting for selling his beliefs out for a plush safe-house in Washington and a diligent maid - the free world, in Topaz, is not really so free. In one of the film's worse-acted and written scenes, the French spy's wife prattles, "you are French. You are not supposed to be mixed up in this cold war between the Americans and the Russians. You are neutral!" To which her husband replies, "no one is neutral." Or rather, no one is free to be neutral. Constantly this ostensibly neutral party's freedom to be neutral is denied - for example, when as mentioned above, he and his family arrive at their hotel room to find his American spy-counterpart waiting for him there, half-menacingly, half-ridiculously standing before an enormous bouquet of flowers he's had delivered as a sort of consolation gift to the French spy's wife for ruining her vacation:

"I hope you don't mind my dropping in like this."

Of course, he has a job his French underling must do.* Sometimes the intrusions on our nominal hero's freedom are more symbolic, as in this strangely ominous, almost Kafkaesque shot of his coming home from Cuba to a heap of mail that Hitchcock somehow films like an unexpected corpse in his doorway:

"The amount of junk mail that accumulates in just a few days!"

Among the pieces of mail is a paper promising a "Soviet Showdown." Even though he is in danger of losing his wife to his work for the Americans (her return to Paris is the reason no one's picked up the mail), world events require him to plug ahead. In the ensuing collapse of the domestic order, the spies are left to rather pathetically clutch to ice trays:**

After which he is persuaded by a Russian defector whose American protectors afford him fantastic in-home coffee service to betray the French government and do still more work for the Americans:

"Mrs. Fawcett makes wonderful coffee!" [And what else?]

The withholding and granting of domestic, and implicitly, sexual privileges being one of the ways in which the Americans obtain loyalty from those whom they must control. And of course, our hero, Andre, in doing America's bidding, will reclaim his wife - her lover being the very man whom Andre has been sent to ferret out. (The fact that the Soviet spy whose identity Andre is sent to discover happens to be seeing Andre's wife doesn't come as an unbelievable coincidence, but rather as a turn of events which is almost to be expected, given the logic of the movie.) But even this, for Hitchcock, is not an entirely happy outcome; in fact, there is no sadder moment in the movie than when the Soviet mole realizes that his time in the French foreign service is over.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't say something about the march that opens and closes the film and encapsulates everything Hitchcock's trying to say. In the beginning, it plays over newsreel footage of Soviet tanks; in the end, it plays over the shot of the man tossing aside the newspaper that announces the end of the Missile Crisis. Neither a menacing warning of Soviet military ambitions, nor a rousing call to action, it elicits a sort of ironic detachment. What the march does is embody, as one writer has so aptly put it, "the parade of national interests," both American and Soviet, that go on in spite of the "successful" conclusion of the Missile Crisis, rendering all free peoples subservient to its implacable momentum.

* Conversely, in Cuba, spying on missile deliveries is whimsically disguised as a picnic (the cameras are packed in the sandwiches), and ironically, it's that very disguise that gives away the fact that they are spying where they shouldn't be (via a gull, whose movements, unlike those of people in the film, are presented in one shot, not as a series of stops and starts):

** In one of the great small touches in the film, we learn that Cubans, during their appearances at the U.N., have mastered the art of American takeout:

Obama Miseducates Us Like Lauryn Hill

2010-01-27T22:56:00.000-08:00

Was Jada's latest album any good? Now that I barely listen to music I don't know these things. Anyway, Obama gave a very good speech tonight and wisely appears to be rapidly deprioritizing healthcare reform in favor of an (as yet undefined) jobs bill, mentioning it somewhere in between community colleges and foreign aid to Zimbabwe. Whether his jobs bill, or the natural recovery of the economy, will actually create enough jobs for Democrats to maintain anything above the narrowest majorities in Congress remains to be seen, but the strategy, at least, is sound.

However, Obama did make one small but glaring mistake - attacking the Supreme Court as they sat several yards in front of them, and doing so in a fashion that can only be described as (a) deliberately dishonest or (b) negligently ignorant. First, Obama said that the Supreme Court "reversed a century of law"; as discussed two posts below, they left untouched the century-old law in this area, and have never signaled any interest whatsoever in invalidating bans on corporate contributions, which date back to the times of Teddy Roosevelt. What they reversed was a single clause in a seven year-old law that they had already neutered a few years ago. To confuse the two is like mixing up a single affirmative action program and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Then he said that the decision would open up the floodgates for special interests, which is probably wrong as a predictive matter, but at least it isn't a baldfaced lie. Then he claimed that the decision allowed foreign corporations to run campaign ads - which again is either a lie or really bad misinformation on the part of his speechwriters. A different provision of campaign-finance law, left untouched by the decision, bans foreign corporations from running any electioneering ads at any time whatsoever, or making any donation to any candidate or party. The decision only dealt with the rights of American corporations. Naturally, one of the Justices, Justice Alito, couldn't help but shake his head in disagreement and mouth "that's wrong" - and now remarkably some are accusing him of lacking decorum. Obviously the lack of decorum here is on the part of the President who presumes to publicly tell to their faces the members of the highest court in the land how they ought to construe the First Amendment, and in doing so lies to the public about what they just decided. As if the media wasn't already doing a bad enough job explaining this stuff. Just as the Justices traditionally never applaud during States of the Union, lest they appear to be partisan, a President shouldn't use a State of the Union to bully the Supreme Court about how it ought to be deciding cases. I was also baffled by his suggestion to Congress to pass a bill that "addresses some of these issues." The Constitution's the Constitution, and the Court has the last say as to what it says; Congress can't change it unless it wants to amend it. As for My Son John, it wasn't at all the camp classic I was expecting, but rather a pretty devastating portrait of a 50s nuclear family in crisis, and in particular the fraying relationship between a mother and her grown-up son, that just so happens to be a rabidly anti-Communist movie

Even Now The Eyes Of Soviet Agents Are On Some Of You

2010-01-27T10:50:00.000-08:00

My Son John, an hysterical 50s anti-Commie film about an effete intellectual boy whose upstanding parents suspect him of being a Communist spy, is on TCM tonight at 8. Apparently this is the first time it's been seen on TV since 1970, and no video or DVD of the movie exists. Obviously I've never seen it myself, but it sounds like a cockeyed masterpiece. Dave Kehr of the New York Times writes:

An appalling masterpiece. Resist the temptation to laugh at the film's violent anticommunism and try to see it as the audiences of 1952 did, and you'll experience the most wrenching right-wing film ever made. The film's propaganda is all the more powerful because director Leo McCarey refuses to acknowledge any intellectual, ideological intent: his argument is wholly emotional, and it is a powerful one. Robert Walker, fresh from Strangers on a Train, is a government worker who signs with the reds in oedipal revolt against his domineering, patriotic father (Dean Jagger); Helen Hayes is the mother who must choose between son and country.

Adding to the fun, the star died midway through shooting, forcing the director to make some interesting decisions, like playing his confession as a tape recording at his college graduation:

In an amazing scene, his speech is played from the tape recorder after his death at an empty podium that is lit with a shaft of light as if from God above, as the graduating college students listen...

John speaks of education as an evil worthy of equating with Satan. That this takes place during a commencement is beyond irony; it is an indictment and screed against the bright-eyed graduating class as much as it is an indictment of the viewer. Education is called a “stimulant”. But, John intones, “stimulants lead to narcotics. As the seller of habit-forming dope gives the innocent their first inoculation, with a cunning worthy of a serpent, there are other snakes lying in wait to satisfy the desire of the young […] Even now the eyes of Soviet agents are on some of you.”

Oh boy. After I see this thing I'll have some comments.

Demystifying Citizens United (AKA, That Supreme Court Decision From Last Week You Probably Hate Without Knowing Anything About It)

2010-01-26T21:35:00.000-08:00

I'm half-asleep so I apologize if I'm even a little more incoherent than usual, but I thought I should intervene now and rescue my readers from their ignorance on this (as I hope to show, pretty unimportant) issue. And luckily for you law is something I actually know something about, and I don't have any strong views one way or the other on corporate money in elections, so unlike some expert commentary out there, what I have to say will not be disingenuous drivel. I plan to cover what the Court did, and didn't do, why I think their decision makes a fair amount of sense, and what actual impact this will all have. Some parts of the post are a little lengthy, so if you want to skip to my views on the real-world impact of the decision (last two paragraphs), feel free to do so.

What exactly did the Court decide last week?

If you take nothing else away, take this. Last week, the Court invalidated - found unconstitutional - a provision of McCain-Feingold that banned corporations or unions from spending money from their general treasuries on TV ads, broadcast within 60 days of a general election or 30 days of a primary, that told the viewer whom the corporation or union thought he should vote for. It did not say anything about corporations' rights to give candidates money. Just had to get that out there. Anyway, the provision the Court overturned, as it was meant in 2002, was supposed to ban ads that pretended to be mere issue advocacy, but were really designed to get viewers to vote for or against someone - ads that said, for example, "your Senator supports/is opposed to gay marriage, go write him a letter telling him how wrong that is," and said so days before the election, with the obvious purpose of getting supporters/opponents of gay marriage to vote against the Senator. However, several years ago the Court found it was unconstitutional to ban these sorts of ads, so all corporations couldn't do as of last Monday was run ads explicitly telling you whom to vote for. Now they can do that too. Things corporations still can't do and haven't been able to do since 1907 - give their own money directly to candidates. That's right - corporations can't give money directly to candidates. They can form political action committees with separate funds that can do it in limited amounts, they can give money to the parties. But they can't directly give to the candidates. So all that has happened is that now corporations can run, in the weeks before elections, ads explicitly saying whom to vote for. Nothing more and nothing less.

What does the First Amendment have to do with spending money? Money isn't speech.

No, money is not speech. Neither, however, are microphones, but if we were to say that certain politicians couldn't use microphones at their rallies, forcing them to rely only on the sound of their natural voice, they would obviously have a First Amendment case. And it's the same with money. How is the corporation supposed to make its views known without spending some money? A ban on spending corporate money on TV campaign ads is essentially a ban on corporations running campaign ads, period, or for that matter making its views widely known. Ads aren't free, and the ordinary voter isn't checking Exxon's website to see whom it endorses. Moreover, the Court has allowed Congress to regulate campaign contributions, which do have some expressive qualities (expressive here means that a campaign contribution is, among other things, a way of expressing one's views), but do look a lot less like speech than buying an ad stating one's view. So the whole money's-not-speech thing isn't really an argument against this decision or against the Court's campaign finance jurisprudence in general.

But corporations aren't people. Since when have they had constitutional rights?

To answer the question, since the late 1800s. But to be fair, the important question is whether that's right. And I would argue that the more one seriously thinks about it the more one has to say that it is. (By the way, the four Justices in the minority don't actually disagree; they just think there are compelling reasons to regulate corporate expenditures that supersede corporations' rights to make those expenditures.) No, corporations are not people. But they are made up of people. Suppose you ran a business that was in danger of being put out of business by a Walmart moving into town, and you wanted to run an ad in the paper pointing out that Walmarts and the like drain money from the community and encouraging people to write to the zoning committee and tell them to not let Walmart in. For that matter, suppose you run an ad telling voters to vote against Commissioner Brown because he wants to let the Walmart in and destroy local businesses. I think it would surprise you if you were told that your company had no constitutional right to run that ad because it's not human, that the only person with a constitutional right to run that ad is you yourself, and that in fact you could be put in jail if you used corporate money to tell people to vote against Mr. Brown. Of course you could use your own money, but I think it seems odd to say that if you want to use your company's money to save your company from extinction, you have no right to do so because once you dip into corporate money you're no longer human in some sense. Your opinions are still your opinions when you use corporate money to air them - and Exxon's CEO's opinions are still his opinions when he uses corporate money to air them.

If you didn't find that too convincing, consider these hypotheticals. If you believe that corporations really have no speech rights, you believe that ACLU and Planned Parenthood, both corporations, have no rights to advocate about anything. If you think that non-profit corporations have constitutional rights and for-profit ones don't, at which point you lose the benefit of being able to make the "you're not human, then you don't have rights" argument, you still are of the opinion that Congress, if it wanted, could ban any corporation from running ads for or against healthcare reform. To me, the notion that insurers and pharmaceutical companies have no right to try to sway our opinions on legislation that will fundamentally alter their industry is pretty absurd, but that's what you think if you think corporations don't have a right to speak. Finally, let me just note that there's no textual support in the First Amendment itself for the only-people-can-talk argument. Nowhere in the Free Speech Clause can the word 'person' be found. The Free Speech Clause, read literally, bans all regulations of speech without regard to who or what is doing the speaking. So it's not at all obvious that we need to even pretend that corporations are people for the purposes of the First Amendment to find that they have a right to speak.

Still, though, this was really activist. They overturned precedent, and I vaguely understand that they could've avoided reaching the broader constitutional issue in this case. I thought Chief Justice Roberts promised to be like an umpire in his confirmation hearings, just calling balls and strikes. [Sorry if that made the person making this point sound a little retarded, but I can't tell you how many pieces of commentary I've seen complaining that this decision was not very umpire-like.]

Briefly, activism is one of these charges that people throw out when they don't like a result. Yes, they overturned a precedent, a 20 year-old case that was pretty inconsistent with what the Court had said before and since about campaign finance, to the point where every election law professor in the country had been predicting that that case would get thrown out one day for years. Some precedents are wrong. You're supposed to give them some deference, but the Court does make mistakes. Like arguably this decision, for example. I doubt many people on the left would be too upset if Obama appointed some Justices who reversed this decision a few years from now.

A better "this was activist" argument is that there were lots of ways the Court could have said that the Hillary-bashing on-demand movie actually at issue just wasn't covered by the statute. And I can definitely see the argument, for instance, that on-demand movies aren't quite like ads. If you read the statute, though, they would seem to be covered (all you need is a broadcast, cable or satellite communication that CAN - not is, can - be received by 50,000 or more persons), but a Court that didn't want to reach the constitutional question could easily have said that on-demand movies don't count. However, a majority of the Court believed that the law was deeply problematic, and therefore didn't want to take the easy way out, especially when the easy way is probably a misreading of the statute. And I think that's fine. Suppose in the 50s you had a law segregating schools, and the parents who are suing say, look, if you can't find that segregation's unconstitutional, we'd be happy with a decision that said our kid isn't really black. He's only one quarter black and if you look at the statute we think it doesn't cover our son. And the state says, we'd like to keep this kid out of our white school, but if we're going to lose, we'd much rather lose on the grounds that the kid isn't black. They might be right about the technical meaning of the law. But if you're the Supreme Court, you're going to bend over backwards to find that the kid is black by the terms of the law, so that the only way he wins is if you get to the constitutional question, because you want to shoot down that law. You certainly don't want to write a decision that says that Johnny - and only Johnny - can attend the white school. And that's alright. It's alright to say, "we don't want to wait until a 100% black kid sues to kill the law, we'll take the first chance we get to kill this terrible law, even if technically we probably shouldn't even be getting to the step in the analysis where we decide whether to kill the law or not." Courts do this sort of thing all the time and unless you believe that it's wrong across the board, you have no business complaining that this Court did some mildly questionable things to get a crack at killing a law that they thought was blatantly unconstitutional.

But this is just a terrible result. Even if corporations do have rights to talk, their being able to buy our elections is such a bad thing that Congress should be allowed to regulate anyway.

Put that way (and not just put as "I hate this result, so the decision's wrong"), opponents of the decision have a point. In constitutional law land, constitutional rights can be superseded by compelling government interests. And preventing our elections from being bought, or preventing corporations from buying our representatives' votes, certainly sounds compelling. But are corporations going to start buying our elections? No. In fact, I don't think you're going to see many corporate ads at all. And here's why.

A few years ago when, as I mentioned above, the Court said corporations could run ads saying that your Senator is a really bad guy because he did some bad thing and you should write him a note telling him not to do that bad thing, but the ad was run a week before the election and the whole point was really to get voters to vote against the Senator, people were very upset and said that now corporations would buy elections. But what's the last time you ever saw an ad of that sort paid for by a corporation - unless it was a non-profit like Planned Parenthood? Fact is, it barely ever happens. Because who's going to listen to a corporation? If Goldman Sachs comes on your TV telling you to tell your Senator to stop killing baby seals, aren't you going to have a pretty good idea that Goldman Sachs really wants that Senator to lose his election so he can stop fucking with their money? Well of course. When it comes down to it, how many corporations do Americans like enough for their endorsement to not hurt a candidate? Not many. No one in the world is going to listen to what Exxon has to say; everyone's going to assume that whomever Exxon endorses in its ads (that it will never, ever run) must want to help them raise gas prices or destroy the environment. And even a popular corporation, like Apple, couldn't get away with running ads for anyone. Just think of the consequences of Apple running an ad telling people to vote for Obama. I'm not sure that many Republicans would stop using Apple products, but associating your brand with any one candidate is branding suicide. It's like coming out and saying that your corporation's official religion is Southern Baptism. Not to mention that if the guy you didn't endorse wins, he's not going to do you many favors. Which is why most big corporations have political action committees that give to both parties, not just their favorite. The bottom line is that if you didn't see corporations running many campaign ads when they had to make them slightly veiled and discreet ("tell your Senator that he sucks at life"), you're not going to see them running ads that really put themselves on the line. Of course, there are corporations that don't need to cultivate their image with the public much because they mostly do business with other businesses, and they might be a little more willing to advertise. And there are corporations run by people who just really want to see a candidate win or lose. But again, corporations have been able to run pseudo-issue ads for several years, and they just haven't. And not because pseudo-issue ads don't work; studies find they're more effective than the "vote for Smith" types of ads. The big difference this will make is that now the unions, and non-profits like Planned Parenthood, will run some ads telling you whom to vote for. And if Planned Parenthood wants to run an ad telling us to vote for Obama because he'll put people on the Court who love abortion rights, I think we're all fine with that. I certainly don't see what great harm it can do.

LeBron Lip-Syncing Eminem

2010-01-22T01:09:00.000-08:00

Maybe Bethlehem Shoals will do a one tenth brilliant, nine tenths dopey post tomorrow on the social meaning of this here lip-syncing. I was just taken aback by the sheer aggressiveness of LeBron's lip-syncing, although kind of disappointed by the lame choice of material. Also disappointed by the reminder of Drake's continued relevance. Perhaps the 2010s will bring us a revival of the posse track. Maybe in the future no one will buy CDs, not even small children, and being a star of a high school soap opera will no longer be a stepping stone towards rap superstardom. Maybe Tru will do another reunion album and only sell 8200 copies. Maybe I'd buy one.

About the game, LeBron is quite a force, but as a loyal member of the Play The Right Way coalition (I'm a Republican who delights in the death of uninsured peoples, I like conservative basketball, it all coalesces), it's kind of jarring to see a guy shoot 12-16 from inside the arc... and 1-9 from outside it. Like you look at the 37 points on 13-25 shooting line and you think, nice efficient night for a perimeter guy, but it could have been a ridiculously dominant night if he just skipped the threes. And you know the defense didn't make him take any of those nine shots. He can get anything he wants. Interestingly enough, if you go to hoopdata.com, where they have all kinds of exciting advanced stats and shit, you find that LBJ was 6-6 at the rim, 6-10 on long twos, which is very good, and 1-9 on threes... and he took nothing in the 5 to 15 foot range. No, LeBron has no midrange game to speak of, and he's still this good. (Perhaps when the Wizards finally trade Jamison over, they could send assistant coach Sam Cassell along with. That way he could do in-game interviews during the playoffs.) Meanwhile Kobe took 29 shots to score 31 points, the announcers enthused over how tough the shots he made were, and his team just scored 87, because when you take 29 shots to score just 31 points, you're not actually helping your team. Unless your teammates are Smush Parker and co., which they aren't anymore. (Although to be fair, Artest and Gasol had crappy nights too. Of course Artest often has those, offensively he's like you just threw a linebacker out on a basketball court and asked him to make plays just by dint of his athleticism. And then the linebacker starts trying his hand at shooting from long range, knowing that his teammates are too afraid that he'll Terry Tate them to say anything about it.) I might do a post sometime soon about how the simultaneous troubles of Arenas, McGrady, Iverson, and Marbury headed to China signal the death of the post-Jordan maniacal perimeter gunner. Brandon Jennings is trying to bring the prototype back, trying real hard, but I feel like there's already a Jennings backlash or a Jennings skepticism that just wouldn't have been there if he came into the league 5 years ago. People are actually cognizant of, and openly mention the fact that since the 55 game everything's been 5 for 21, 6 for 19. There was a time when no one seemed to care about that shit.

Finally, on a nice personal note, I aced every damn thing last semester, am at the top of my class and might as well have Harvard Here I Come stamped on my forehead. Well not quite, but at least a Columbia or something of that ilk. We'll see about Harvard. Anyway, Lexington is an odd place. I moved into an old Victorian house in the leafy part of town and there's an old print of Stonewall Jackson, great Confederate general, Lexington native, just sitting on the floor. The woman who owns the place was the one person in town with a Creigh Deeds sign on her lawn (that was the Democratic candidate for Governor who lost by a million points in another election that had no bearing on what voters thought of Obama, just local issues at stake, bad candidate, nothing to see here), but she can't seem to bring herself to dispose of her ancestral Stonewall print. So it's sitting on the floor. I would've liked to talk to more natives about their strange feelings about the Civil War and whatnot, but I'm not a documentarian, and everytime I do chat with locals they say strange things like, "I knew a Jewish person once," or strange crap about how much they love their fishin and huntin. This one locksmith one time used the phrase, "word, booty!" to describe how much ass there was to be had at some bar that's no longer here, but the way he used it it almost sounded like he was talking about spoils of piracy. It makes you wonder, as a future legal eagle of the Republican Party, which party's leadership would be more uncomfortable on a desert island with its base. That is, would Dick Cheney rather spend a year here in Lexington, or would Al Gore rather spend a year hanging out in Anacostia? I would say that Cheney would rather spend a year in Lexington... but it's close. He actually likes fishin and huntin though so maybe he'd fit in.

And Lastly

2010-01-20T13:46:00.000-08:00

Surveys confirm that this is how (yes, completely misinformed) voters feel about health reform.

A remarkable poll confirms that yesterday's result was all about healthcare reform. When asked what the most important issue in determining their vote was, 48% of MA voters named healthcare. The second most important issue, the economy, polled just 5%. I would bet anyone reading this that never in the history of exit polls and post-election polls has there ever before been such a massive split between the first and second most important issue in an election. Usually you see a lot of numbers clustered in the tens and twenties. Not so yesterday. Moving on, just 3% of the electorate said the most important issue in deciding their vote was disliking Coakley or liking Brown, and only 5% described their vote as a vote against Coakley. This in spite of the fact that many pundits have tried to blame last night's result on Coakley not knowing who Curt Schilling was. Nor was this about the sucky jobs situation. When asked if there was a second most important issue to their vote, a full only11% said the economy was their first or second most important issue. 62% said healthcare was. When asked whether their vote was cast to stop Obama's healthcare plan, help it get passed, or whether they didn't vote on that basis at all, 42% of respondents said they voted to stop Obama's plan. Brown won with 52% of the vote. Therefore, about 80% of his voters voted for him, in part, to stop Obama's plan. Insane. 51% of independents, and even 17% of Democrats said they voted to stop Obama's plan. On the other hand, only 53% of Democrats said they voted to help it get passed. 27% of them said they didn't vote on that basis at all. Contrast this to the Republican breakdown, where 77% said they voted to stop the plan, just TWO percent said they voted to get it passed, and 17% voted for other reasons. One party's voters are united in opposition to the plan, the other party's voters are split and apathetic about the plan.

On the other hand, if you look at Obama's policies in general in this poll, they're not nearly as unpopular as healthcare - even though healthcare is included among those policies. Only 38% said they voted in opposition to his policies. 27% said that Obama's policies weren't a factor in their vote. 44% of independents said they voted against them, as opposed to the 51% that said they voted against healthcare. While only 41% say they like the healthcare plan, 55% approve of the job Obama's doing. 59% say they have a favorable image of Obama. 55%, of course, is substantially higher than Obama's numbers nationwide, which speaks to what a Democratic state MA is. And Obama the person is quite a bit more popular than Obama's policies. Nevertheless, there's a road to electoral respectability here if the Democrats jettison healthcare and are judged on November on the basis of their other policy goals, which are unpopular but not as unpopular as healthcare. Once you get out of MA, where Democrats have an enormous majority, the margins are going to get even worse if the Democrats insist on pushing this through. Consider these numbers from the poll. Republicans oppose reform 92 to 2. Democrats support it 69 to 21. Independents oppose it 63 to 32. Now consider that only 13% of respondents identified themselves as Republicans. In a state with an actual functioning Republican party, that 92 to 2 bloc will be huge and health reform - currently by far the single biggest issue in American politics - will be opposed by substantially larger margins than the one that brought down Coakley. Meaning that, with the passage of health reform, very few Democrats would be safe.

"No No!"

2010-01-20T10:42:00.000-08:00

So surely enough, Mr. Brown became MA's first Republican Senator in over 30 years and its first Republican member of Congress in over a decade, and surely enough, liberal commentators attempted to spin this as a signal that Democrats... really need to pass healthcare. Because, you see, the reason that Martha Coakley lost, besides that she dissed the Red Sox (come on now, how many voters do you really think would otherwise like Senate Democrats to maintain a 60 seat majority but just couldn't bring themselves to vote for someone who doesn't know that Curt Schilling pitched for the Red Sox?), is that Democrats have taken too long to get healthcare done, can't govern. So they sensibly elected someone who doesn't want to get healthcare done. So don't misinterpret the results of this election, nervous House Democrats - if healthcare dies, Democrats die. So say Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Ezra Klein, the folks at The New Republic, etc. Well Maddow and Olbermann are sub-literate, in spite of Maddow's being a Rhodes Scholar in a past life, so we can forget them. But some pretty smart people take this view, including, it would seem, the folks at the White House, who aren't backing down, and more usefully for my purposes, a couple of professors of political science from Yale and Georgetown who put forth this argument in the Washington Post this afternoon. According to Professors Hacker and Hopkins:

[Congressional Democrats] should ask themselves: Would they rather defend a successful law or an unsuccessful year-long legislative imbroglio? As was true after the Clinton health plan went down in flames in 1994, failing to pass health-care reform would cripple public perceptions of the Democrats' ability to govern. And as was true in 1994, the Democrats most endangered would be moderates, not liberals. The Blue Dogs may be hearing the loudest calls to turn tail. But they stand to lose the most if the governing reputation of their party goes down with reform.

Would they rather defend a successful law or an unsuccessful year-long legislative imbroglio? Hmm. Either way, of course, they're going have to defend the year-long imbroglio and the fact that they spent a year on healthcare reform that won't go into effect for years while unemployment was rising to 10%. So the question is really would they rather defend a successful law + imbroglio or just defend the imbroglio and their choice to quit. That said, the force of this argument is that "successful" laws are more popular than failures to make laws. And in a vacuum, I'd agree that voters would probably rather see Congress doing stuff than failing to do stuff, although even there I'm not so sure, because what was the last time you've seen Congress get anything done that anyone was particularly happy about? Voters are perhaps most content when Congress simply doesn't do anything. But yes, failure never looks good.

However, a "successful" law only trumps a failure to get a bill through if voters actually believe the content of the law is worthy of the name success. Right now you have an electorate which in large part believes, probably delusionally, that the healthcare reform being proposed is the equivalent of going around harpooning dolphins. Or, if they don't believe that, they think it's a great mystery (a thousand pages long, so complex and impenetrable!) that will probably make their lives worse. Or they're cranky liberals who think it should be more ambitious, that the current package is a big corporatist giveaway to insurance companies. Why a politician would want to go around bragging of his success in spending a year of Congress's valuable time passing a measure that many of his voters believe is the equivalent of going around harpooning dolphins, and many of his supporters think isn't nearly good enough, I do not know. It would strike me that a better message would be to say, "for some strange reason I thought it would be best for this nation if we started slaughtering dolphins, but then I got a lot of mail from my constituents to the contrary, and I notice that members of my party - the one that's into killing dolphins - have started losing elections in states where they shouldn't, so obviously my party isn't very popular at the moment and it probably has something to do with the dolphin-killing legislation that we've been spending the past 8 months doing nothing but talking about and attempting to get through. I now realize that at the very least, we were wrong to focus on dolphin-killing at a time when people are losing their jobs, and that we probably failed to explain how awesome and great for our economy dolphin-killing really is, and that in fact the legislation we were proposing did not actually, in any way, propose to actually kill dolphins. Your loyal Congressman would never, ever support killing dolphins. But it's too late now to convince you of that, so sorry for spending all this time on the dolphin issue; I now plan to focus my efforts on things more pressing/things you actually want." Or if he's insane he could hope that, once the legislation that has falsely been labeled as dolphin-killing legislation gets passed, people will suddenly take a new view of the whole thing, instead of getting much angrier than they are now once what they imagine to be a dolphin-killing measure actually becomes law.

Hacker and Hopkins then point out that Democrats failed to pass healthcare reform in 1994, and look, they got killed because people thought they couldn't govern. I'd really expect better from a couple of presumably pretty bright professors in the subject. Not to repeat myself, but this is like saying that it was sunny on Election Day in 1994, so Obama better go and secretly seed the clouds if he wants to retain his congressional majorities. This is also like saying that the reason Republicans lost in 2006 is because they failed to reform/destroy Social Security. If only they had succeeded, then the voters would have loved them so. No no. In that scenario, the Republican Party wouldn't have thrived, it would have practically ceased to exist. The reality is that a lot of things happened from 1993 to 1994; in fact, a lot of things happened from 1993 to 1994 that proved Congressional Democrats could govern. They passed a successful tax hike, they passed a successful trade agreement that tons of people in their own party hated, they passed successful gun control laws, they passed a successful crime bill. They actually got an enormous amount of stuff done. (Unfortunately for them most of it was stuff the median voter didn't like.) The one thing they didn't get done was massively unpopular. And the reason voters kicked Democrats out was because they failed to pass the massively unpopular item on their agenda? I don't think so.

Finally, Hacker and Hopkins argue, partly towards the claim that the failure of health reform killed the Democrats in 1994, partly to warn moderate Democrats that the effects of killing health reform would be disproportionately visited on them, that moderate Democrats went down the hardest in 1994. Which just goes to show, I suppose, that voters in 1994 really were punishing the Democrats who caused health reform to fail, not the ones who were pushing for it in the first place. But that's backwards. If you're a liberal Democrat, you usually come from a safely Democratic district. Otherwise you couldn't get away with being a liberal Democrat. If you're a moderate Democrat, you're more likely to come from a non-safe district. So yes, anytime a party does something drastically unpopular, the ones who get punished are, paradoxically enough, the moderates who weren't necessarily that in favor of it. That's why all the extremely conservative Republicans haven't gone anywhere and why the moderate Republican members of Congress are currently a virtually extinct species. They got blamed by their moderate constituents for what their extremist colleagues pushed through, because when it comes down to it, votes don't know jack shit about what their individual representative is for. They just know his party affiliation and a little about what his party has been up to. So of course the moderate Democrats have the most to fear from the passage of unpopular legislation, which is exactly why they should work to ensure that health reform never gets passed and why they should make a big public fuss of apologizing for having fucked up.

Finally, as for Obama and the leadership, they currently find themselves in the worst of all political worlds. The second Brown won, Democratic members of Congress (wisely) started panicking and saying maybe they should try reforming healthcare some other time, and the White House and the leadership, which hasn't seemed to have given this situation a great deal of thought, said they still plan to somehow get reform through. So a mere 24 hours after election night, it's already too late for the White House to get out in front of this and quit. If they did now, it would just look like face-saving and flip-flopping. So the rank and file members get to claim the "I listened to the people" high ground, while the White House and leaders, at best, get to claim the "we're getting bullied by our members and plan to quit" low ground, and at worst, are going to get publicly beaten by members of their own party. At that point, Democrats do begin to look like a party that doesn't have its shit together. Unilaterally quitting, however, would not have that effect. But that may be off the table - though perhaps Obama could pull a dramatic quit in next week's State of the Union.

Of course, this all ignores the question of whether healthcare reform is actually a good thing. Maybe it is and maybe Congressional Democrats have a moral obligation to give us the gift of healthcare reform, even though we don't seem to want it, and go down to defeat for having done so. Years later we'll thank them. Perhaps. The uninsured, at least, would certainly be grateful. My only issue is that the obvious desire of so many left-leaning analysts to get health reform done has led them to construct this bullshit political analysis that claims that voters reward politicians for doing really unpopular things, and punish them for failing to do unpopular things. And this strain of analysis of 1994 and the costs and benefits of failing to pass unpopular legislation in general could ultimately take us to a place where voters have no check on unpopular legislation pushed by the White House - because these cheerleaders will always be there to assure Congress that things will be even worse politically if they don't get something done. The whole point of representative democracy is voided if the representatives come to believe that passage of any bill is always better for them politically than failure of any bill.

What Democrats Should Do (If They Care To Win Elections)

2010-01-18T13:56:00.000-08:00

I don't know who reads what I say about politics, but I just had to make a couple points. The polls all say that tomorrow Massachusetts will elect its first Republican Senator since 1972. The last time Massachusetts went for a Republican in any national election, it did so for Reagan in 1984, in a year in which Reagan only failed to carry his opponent's home state and the District of Columbia. It's true that Massachusetts has had a lot of Republican governors in recent years, but when it comes to national politics, no one can deny that MA's a very liberal state. Of course, liberal commentators will try to palm off this remarkable defeat on the crappiness of their party's candidate, her patrician affect and the fact that she barely tried. But, while she may have ran a terrible race, that doesn't explain away her losing a state that Obama carried by 26 points just 14 months ago. A bad campaign, or an uncharismatic candidate, can only have so much effect on an electorate's underlying partisan breakdown. Otherwise, John Kerry (who has a hell of a patrician affect himself) wouldn't be Massachusetts's other Senator. The fact that voters in MA understand that by electing Brown, they're depriving the Dems of their crucial 60th vote, only underscores that this election is largely about a rejection of Democratic policies and not just a matter of purely personal discontent with Martha Coakley. (Also the fact that Brown's whole campaign has been about promising to go to Washington and defeat health reform.)

Given, then, that one of our nation's most liberal states is poised to show at the polls that even it doesn't like the Obama health package, what should Democrats do? They could ram the bill through even with only 59 votes in the Senate, simply by getting the House to adopt the Senate bill that's already been passed unchanged. A lot of House Democrats aren't crazy about the Senate bill, but suppose that they're willing to take the Senate's version of health reform over none. Should they do so as a matter of politics? Of course not. Why would a House Democrat from a toss-up seat vote for a bill that even Massachusetts doesn't like? The logic seems straightforward enough.

However, the reasoning behind voting against a bill that consistently polls awfully would also seem simple enough, and yet Democrats have been willing to vote for health reform so far. How come? The answer is that they're relying on a tragically inaccurate misreading of recent political history. The reason, the argument for voting for health reform goes, the Democrats lost the House in 1994 for the first time in 40 years is because they failed to get healthcare passed. Because Hillarycare went down in flames, the voters rejected the Democrats for failing... by bringing in the minority party that helped kill Hillarycare.

(Why exactly was a First Lady that had never held elective office put in charge of healthcare anyway?)

As should be obvious, this analysis of 1994 makes no sense; if voters were mad at the Democrats for failing to get health reform done, why would they punish them by electing reform's opponents? Does anyone really believe that had Hillarycare been passed, the Democrats would have held on to Congress? Isn't a much more credible analysis that Hillarycare failed to pass because it was so unpopular and that voters then punished Democrats, in part, for attempting the thing in the first place? Yes, but it's even simpler than that. A lot of the reasons the Democrats lost in 1994 were non health-related. In 1993, the Democrats raised taxes before we had gotten out of the recession. The hikes were so unpopular that Gore had to break a tie in the Senate and the bill passed by just one vote in the House. Clinton and the congressional Democrats also did other unpopular things, like passing gun control and NAFTA, the free trade agreement with Canada and Mexico that was supposedly going to suck millions of American jobs away. And yes, they also failed to pass a very unpopular health reform bill. Had they succeeded, they could have lost worse.

Because, however, the Democratic Party's been taken over by ideologues, or at least, people who actually believe in things (unlike Clinton, who arguably became - see welfare reform - our most conservative President since Hoover once he saw that voters didn't want him to govern as a liberal), the party, conned by health reform wonks masquerading as political analysts, has bought into this purely imaginary reading of history, one which says that they're better off passing a really unpopular bill than not passing one, because if they didn't pass anything 1994 would happen all over again. (Never mind that it's not even as if the poor ignorant masses will quickly see the benefits of reform once it's through; for the most part they come several years down the road.) And so they intend to go and commit political suicide. Or at least most of them do; surely a few House Democrats will understand the significance of the results in MA and peel off, citing irreconcilable differences between the House bill and Senate bill, at which point the bill in its present form will die. But instead of allowing reform to die in a chaotic process where a handful of no-name Texan Democrats come to their senses and kill healthcare, which would make Obama and the Democratic leadership look like losers, why not manage the fallout? How brilliant would it be for Obama to come out and acknowledge that he was wrong, that he wasn't elected to reshape the health insurance market? The speech practically writes itself. I listened to you, the American people, he'd say, and you don't want this. Partly it's my fault; I did a horrible job of explaining what reform entails. I also failed to take into account how happy a lot of you are with the system as it exists currently, I made too many backroom deals with drug and insurance companies to get this all done, and I took my eye off the all-important jobs ball. I'm asking Harry Reid and Pelosi to withdraw this bill and look to passing a second stimulus. Then in November they run on the economy; it still sucks, they'd say, but the GOP got us here, we arrested the decline, and now we're starting to see recovery. Fortunately for Obama, he hasn't actually really done much, and very little that people don't like - nothing equivalent to NAFTA or raising taxes. He can still do okay in 2010 so long as he kills his most unpopular policy proposal.

Up In The Air Is An Awful Movie

2009-12-24T21:13:00.000-08:00

As longtime readers of this space know, I happen to think Armond White's a first-class contrarian idiot. For example, recently he claimed that "all [Sandra] Bullock’s films promote an edifying sense of human experience—she has an instinct for what people like to see," a claim which (a) is utter bullshit and (b) a claim which Armond himself doesn't even believe in - see his review of The Proposal mere months ago , or his for-once on-target evisceration of Crash - and is just making to befuddle the idiots who read his shit into thinking he's some sort of genius intellectual who sees things beyond the ken of the 99.999999% of the world that thinks Bullock's a hack. That said, the nice thing about Armond White is that he's the one critic in America, aside from the good people at Slant and Reverse Shot, who I can always count on to see through the Oscar bait de jour - though of course he usually does so for the wrong reasons. Nevertheless, I was happy to come home from the Tray Family's Christmas Eve Movie Viewing and see that Armond had trashed Up In The Air.

That pointless prelude out of the way, Up In The Air might be the worst Best Picture favorite in quite some time. Unfortunately, most of the critics who have bashed UITA have done so for purely political reasons - "the movie doesn't care enough about fired people." J.R. Jones of the Chicago Reader went so far as to accuse the movie of being a modern day Cary Grant film - and mean that as a bad thing! Frankly, if this thing were remotely comparable to a modern day Cary Grant film, I wouldn't care if it glorified cannibalism or the slave trade. (Depending, of course, on which Cary Grant film this thing would supposedly be a modern day version of - he made a lot of bad pictures.) No, the trouble with the movie is that there's just simply nothing aesthetically, dramatically, comedically, intellectually, whatever adverb you like, good about it.

Aesthetically, the movie's composed of several types of shots. First, you've got your pointless quick-cut montages of Clooney packing his luggage, or negotiating an airport, or going to a wedding. Second, there are a lot of aerial shots of cities and slightly tilted establishing shots of cheap hotels that look like something I might've shot in high school photo class. (For some strange reason, the director saw fit to actually shoot in each of the many cities where Clooney's character fires people, although he never actually shows you these cities, so that, with the exception of differences in weather, every location looks absolutely the same as every other.) Third, you have your conversations. Each and every one is all shot-reverse shot, and each of these shots is an over the shoulder shot, with the listener's shoulder or ear completely out of focus. Over the course of the film, you get very familiar with what George Clooney's blurry shoulder looks like. Everytime Clooney speaks to Vera Farmiga or whomever, you see his face and her shoulder; then, when she has her line, you see her face and his shoulder. There are no reaction shots, no off-camera speakers, no close-ups, and very rarely any shots with more than one interlocutor in a frame; it's just this cutting rhythm ad nauseam. Fourth, in moments of high emotional impact, you just might get a long shot of 10 seconds or less, with the camera banally zooming back to indicate so and so's loneliness.

With the director bringing absolutely nothing cinematically to the table, to the point where, by dint of his inability to ever hold a shot for more than 5 seconds, he manages to kill each and every scene where the audience might be actually moved to something resembling an emotional response to what's going on on screen, the movie's forced to rely completely on its actors and its script. Unfortunately, Clooney's a void. I know he's supposed to be something of a void - that's the point! - but he's such a bland, charmless (if handsome) void that the movie becomes quite a bore, as he's in every scene. He's slick enough, but doesn't have a personality to speak of. Exchange Clooney for Aaron Eckhart, who starred in the director's first film, Thank You For Smoking, and you might begin to have something watchable.

As for the script, it's a joke; the whole thing reads and even sounds like its own high school English paper explication of itself. Every event in the movie is freighted with symbolism or cheap irony, every fifth line is a little thesis statement. The Cornell grad who comes in to Clooney's termination firm and convinces his boss to switch to firing by webcam is shocked that her boyfriend broke up with her by text. The irony never seems to dawn on Miss Cornell, presumably to make us feel smarter for "catching on" to these hidden depths. Clooney gets his 10 million air-miles card at, of course, the very moment in the story where he's finally begun to yearn for a solid home. When the pilot comes to his seat to congratulate him and asks him where he lives, Clooney replies, "I live up here." Deep! There's even a pathetic third act where he comes back to his native Wisconsin to attend his sister's marriage and discovers how real middle-class people with real relationships live. At which point he takes his fuckbuddy/partner in frequent flyer derring-do back to his high school and gets back in touch with his childhood. At this point in the film, a happy little indie-folk song starts playing, and the movie is so badly directed that when he's sitting in his old high school gym with fuckbuddy and his sister calls to tell him that his future brother-in-law suddenly has cold feet and Clooney needs to come to the church fast to change future bro-in-law's mind, the song keeps playing. Either suggesting that the editing was done by a robot, or worse, that the potentially dashed marriage only matters to the director, and is supposed to matter to us, on the level of Clooney returning to his family and doing cutesy little family business shit, in which case the jaunty indie-folk playing over the "your sister is getting dumped by her fiance on the day of her wedding" call would make sense... in a perverse way. This sort of trivialization of other people's real lives as some kind of vehicle to Clooney's process of self-discovery goes on throughout the film, if you can even call this teledrama a film. Critics of more liberal sensibilities have jumped on the similar way the armies of terminated workers (including one cavalierly glossed-over suicide) are treated by the movie, but the problem isn't really political; it's a blithe indifference to anything in the film but Clooney's trite personal drama. The thing is though that the movie could get away with this sort of solipsism if it knew how to make Clooney's character matter to us, but it fails even at that, ultimately ceasing to care about the character as a person at all and treating him as a pat parable of our collective selfishness and alienation. Which hardly seems to be an accurate diagnosis of That Which Ails America; as the movie somehow forgets there are a whole lot more faceless fired people in America than there are George Clooneys. But really, who even cares about the muddled message of this piece of junk on stilts when there are ever so many things wrong with it besides whatever it's feebly trying to say?

Yeah, I'm SILKK THE SHOCKER!!! - and Yeah, That's Me

2009-12-20T19:13:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to briefly call your attention to this No Limit classic, which I enjoyed playing repeatedly during my contracts exam this Friday. I've always found the whole "if you're not a soldier, then what's your purpose in life" concept that runs through the No Limit Soldiers tracks strangely attractive. Obviously there are lots of meaningful non-No Limit Soldier lives, but I guess I'm attracted to the view that there's some single type of valuable life to be led out there (like being a genius attorney), and that all others are pointless at best. I could ramble for a while about the similar types of essentialism at work in Westerns and 90s gangsta rap (although the best Westerns deconstruct/interrogate the masculine ideal, see for example The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, but then, perhaps you could argue that the best gangsta rap - Mobb Deep for example with their preoccupation with the 'foul'-ness of their deeds - deconstructed its ideologies?), but anyway, I love No Limit, it's dumb but it's good dumb. Silkk, for once, has the best verse on his own song. Actually, you could make a case for Mystikal, but Mystikal on No Limit posse tracks always annoys me, he detracts from the so amateurish it's genius vibe. Not sure why I like Silkk's "I'm a psycho" put-on so much, but I do and it always cracks me up when he goes:

So don't flip me, cuz you'll end up empty
and then I'll reload
and reloadandreloadand reloadandreload
whole barrel explode!!!!

Also when he explains that 'yeah, I'm Silkk The Shocker, and yeah, that's me.' Most of all when he says, "mention meeeeee to my enemieeeeees, they thinking of PAIN" and sounds like an adorable hyperactive five-year-old doing a Tupac imitation on Youtube. In fact, describing TRU as a band of three little kids, each doing his own very different and usually very bad Tupac imitation, would not be too far off the mark. Though such a description does grave injustice to C-Murder.

I See A House, A House Of Stone

2009-12-12T11:50:00.001-08:00

The Four Tops - Seven Rooms of Gloom.

This Wasn't Actually Funny,,,

2009-12-09T21:21:00.000-08:00

but every night poor Anderson Cooper, in the little sneak preview of his show he does during Larry King, says how he's going to keep some officeholder or would-be officeholder or corporate exec honest. For instance, "was Sarah Palin totally full of shit in her new book? We're keeping them honest." Well that's nice, I guess, if a little sloganeering and dense, trying to position your cable news channel as the one that actually reports on stuff and holds politicians' feet to the proverbial fire. So last night in the middle of Larry's horribly disappointing interview with the Jackson 5 ("the only one who isn't here is Michael" - he's, don't you know, dead) Anderson shows his face and says:

A woman commits suicide at a James Arthur Ray spiritual retreat. Remember the guy who killed three people in a sweat lodge? Did Ray try to cover up this death? We're keeping 'em honest.

Yeah! We're keeping guys who killed people in sweat lodges honest. Holding them accountable to the American people. Oh Anderson.

Larry King Does Plato

2009-12-03T12:56:00.000-08:00

Larry King is like Greeks in Egypt learning something deep from their teachers.

Last night Larry did an episode on Tiger's infidelities and what he should do to repair his public image. I don't get the assumption that it's necessary for Tiger to worry about his public image. The man is a great golfer and makes plenty of money from golf itself. And as far as endorsements go, he's obviously not losing them. But even if he were in danger of losing the endorsements, why should he care? Why is there this assumed, oddly quasi-moral imperative for the guy to maintain his brand at all costs? He has other sources of income and even if he didn't he could live on what he's made. Who's to say that Tiger even likes being a huge brand? I have no idea, but the way Larry's guests talked about Tiger you'd think that the real thing he'd done wrong wasn't cheating on his wife, but harming his brand and violating some sort of trust we had in him, a trust he has an ethical duty to repair via carefully coached and phonily sincere interviews. (One even said that he shouldn't come out with his wife because that's such a cliche and would detract from the appearance of sincerity. Well what if he sincerely wants to make a statement with his wife, and she with him?) Anyway, Larry had a surprisingly Platonic moment with his panel of damage control doctors last night. They're all saying what Tiger should do and suddenly Larry asks:

Do you teach remorse? You're either remorseful or you're not. Or do you guys teach it?

BRAGMAN: You teach him how to show it, I mean, you know... (LAUGHTER)

KING: Would the old George Burns thing, the secret of sincerity -- if you can fake it, you've got it made?

Compare this to this exchange from Plato's dialogue, Gorgias:

Soc. Let me tell you then, Gorgias, what surprises me in your words; though I dare say that you may be right, and I may have understood your meaning. You say that you can make any man, who will learn of you, a rhetorician?
Gor. Yes.
Soc. Do you mean that you will teach him to gain the ears of the multitude on any subject, and this not by instruction [by which Socrates means the teaching of actual knowledge] but by persuasion?
Gor. Quite so.
Soc. You were saying, in fact, that the rhetorician will have, greater powers of persuasion than the physician even in a matter of health?
Gor. Yes, with the multitude-that is.
Soc. You mean to say, with the ignorant; for with those who know he cannot be supposed to have greater powers of persuasion.
Gor. Very true.
Soc. But if he is to have more power of persuasion than the physician, he will have greater power than he who knows?
Gor. Certainly.
Soc. Although he is not a physician:-is he?
Gor. No.
Soc. And he who is not a physician must, obviously, be ignorant of what the physician knows. Gor. Clearly.
Soc. Then, when the rhetorician is more persuasive than the physician, the ignorant is more persuasive with the ignorant than he who has knowledge?-is not that the inference?
Gor. In the case supposed:-Yes.
Soc. And the same holds of the relation of rhetoric to all the other arts; the rhetorician need not know the truth about things; he has only to discover some way of persuading the ignorant that he has more knowledge than those who know?
Gor. Yes, Socrates, and is not this a great comfort?-not to have learned the other arts, but the art of rhetoric only, and yet to be in no way inferior to the professors of them?

Video Hoes, Beware (And A Couple Good Songs):

2009-12-02T22:29:00.000-08:00

"A 38-year-old former Miss Argentina has died from complications after undergoing cosmetic surgery on her buttocks.

Solange Magnano, a mother of twins who won the crown in 1994, died of a pulmonary embolism Sunday after three days in critical condition following a gluteoplasty in Buenos Aires.

Close friend Roberto Piazza said the procedure involved injections and the liquid "went to her lungs and brain."

"A woman who had everything lost her life to have a slightly firmer behind," he said."

Normally I wouldn't really sympathize but a mother of twins, shit.

On another note, two good songs. In one corner, B.G. f. Soulja Slim, Boosie and C-Murder - 'Nigga Owe Me Some Money.' You can't go wrong with B.G. and Soulja Slim - 'Fired Up,' which I believe I've written about here, was one of the great songs this decade - and you can't go wrong with B.G. and C-Murder. And I don't really like to acknowledge Boosie for stupid reasons but he's good too. Unfortunately, Soulja Slim just does, or rather, did the hook (R.I.P., Soulja), and C-Murder sounds like he's getting a little old - still raps just as well, but his voice has become a slightly blunter instrument. As if he ate Juvenile circa today for lunch. But a great song nonetheless. B.G., like Kurrupt, is the sort of minor talent that just doesn't decline with age. I actually happened to pick up his first album, True Story, that he made with a 12-year-old Wayne when he was 14, and he was just about the same rapper then that he is today. I'll say something about it sometime. In the other corner, Gucci makes up for the deficiencies of previous album leaks (see previous post below) with some virtuosic technical fireworks on 'Gingerbread Man,' over a Mannie Fresh track that sounds nothing like vintage Mannie Fresh but thankfully sounds nothing like his recent crappy work either. More of a solid approximation of a Zaytoven beat, which is good enough given how great the rapping is, and OJ has a surprisingly good verse, although perhaps I like Bad Goofy OJ more than Surprisingly Decent OJ. At this point I'm fine with the fact that Gucci's weedcarriers can't rap, and when they do rap well it's a bit like if ODB were to have suddenly busted out a really solid 16 on some Wu-Tang song - defeats the whole purpose of his being a member instead of, like, Killah Priest, or that guy in Killarmy. Actually though, it would be okay if Waka Flocka learned how to rap, as he doesn't have the personality to make up for it. Guy doesn't have an accent. It's like, who invited the fifth-rate N.Y. mixtape rapper to the party? But anyway.

Brief And Reasonably Clever Larry King Remarks (White House Party Crashers' Friends)

2009-12-02T21:26:00.000-08:00

More articulate people have said it less tritely before, but you've got this weird phenomenon in today's media where, out of a concern to appear unbiased, reporters will actively avoid coming down on one side or another of a question of fact. Which is understandable, because the line between questions of fact and questions of opinion can be a hard one to draw (for instance, whether Obama's healthcare bill will improve or hurt the quality of our healthcare is both, in a sense, a factual matter, but also such a heavily disputed and somewhat unknowable factual matter that it's really just as much a matter of opinion), and because questions of fact can become politicized and therefore picking a side can look like partisan bias. But some things are just hardcore questions of fact and should be treated as such, not as issues where reasonable minds can disagree or state their views. And one such question is whether the Salahis were invited to Obama's big soiree last week. They weren't, and they didn't get confused and think they were either. They just crashed. But in a journalistic world where objectivity has come to mean that it's forbidden to actually report that someone is lying about something, that can become hard to say. And it's particularly hard for Larry King, who seems to inhabit a world where the sky could be blue - or it could be green. We just don't know.

So Larry has on three friends of the Salahis the other night, two of which are just stupid people and one of whom was wildly insane. And how does this go down? The first question Larry asks the friends is how the poor Salahis are doing. Gee, Larry, how do you think they're doing? They've just become famous for being colossal buffoons. But Larry's into seeing both sides of a story, so that's what he asks, and they say that the Salahis aren't doing so well because people are running around taking pictures of them now. OH NO. Then Larry asks why they went if they weren't invited. The one woman says "as far as I know, they were invited." Which only means - as she admits that she has no evidence of that fact - that her friends lied to her and said they were. Really, what is the point of this exercise? This is like having Jeb Bush on and asking him why his brother invaded Iraq, and Jeb saying, "Larry, as far as I know George didn't invade Iraq. That was his evil twin. George TOLD ME so." Larry, however, doesn't ask why we should give any credence to the lies Miss Salahi Friend has been told by these two nuts; he just moves on to the next guest, who is the insane one.

Since Larry has no bullshit filter, you can basically walk out of a mental clinic and say whatever you want on Larry King Live. Unless you're a beauty pageant contestant, in which case Larry must hold you to the highest standards of journalistic scrutiny, because hedging about the confidential contents of your settlement with Miss USA Inc. is really important stuff. Otherwise, though, you're good. Well, Mr. Matthew Christian Davis, author of The Best of D.C., is here to defend his friends proudly. For Mr. Davis featured them in three, count 'em, three different areas of his book, the purpose of which is to chronicle the defining change in America's leadership. The first area is design and couture; Ms. Salahi rocked the runway fashion show. She's leading the way in America in couture. #2 is D.C. for Divas in Charge, an event where Ms. Salahi, a D.C. Diva in Charge, wore a green number. And the third was the book launch at the National Press Club, where she emceed with three other ex-Miss D.C.'s. So you can see that Ms. Salahi is really the best of D.C., and part of that defining change in our nation's leadership. This is all direct quotation, more or less.

Then Larry asks whether this eminently honorable woman was actually invited. Mr. Davis has an answer for that. He comes from three generations of law enforcement and proudly served his country in "such places as Rwanda during the genocide in 1994." Being a patriot and a proud servant of this country, he is "a strong believer that our nation has a front line, a first line of defense that will protect our leader, our commander in chief by all means necessary." What are you saying, Larry asks? That they must have been invited because otherwise they couldn't have gotten past the first line of defense? Yes, Mr. Davis replies. But quick, we've got to take a commercial break.

When we return, the one friend continues to say that the Salahis were invited to the best of her knowledge. This is turning into the Watergate hearings. She admits, however, that she never saw the invitation. Larry asks Mr. Davis what would happen if he went to the White House without an invitation. Mr. Davis says that Larry has a blanket invitation wherever he goes, because he's such a hell of a guy, and that "I do not want to make any comments in terms of seeing that you're not being considered welcome to a party." Mr. Davis won't even consider the hypothetical because it's too offensive. Larry follows up; aren't the Salahis well-known too, like Larry? Why yes, Mr. Davis says, "they are D.C.'s dynamic couple, another acronym for them in the book. However, in this particular case, D.C. also represents diligence and courts. I feel they are innocent until proven guilty." Pay attention to what Mr. Davis just did. He's spelling out D.C. acronyms about the Salahis. They're the Dynamic Couple. But they also should receive the benefits of our justice system's Dilligence and Courts. All this is just flying over Larry's head. If Larry realizes he's talking to a madman, he doesn't show it.

After the break, Larry probes some more about that invitation, and this time the Salahi Friends admit they had the feeling that the Salahis were not invited to the dinner, but only the reception. But they're really sure that they were invited to the reception. Because the Salahis told them so. Why Larry hasn't finally started booking serial killers' best friends and beloved pets to testify to their innocence, I don't know. It would make no less sense than this. Finally, Larry says that he can imagine how heartbroken the Salahis must be and that he looks forward talking to them. For as he says, "we don't have an agenda on this program. I would like to learn what this was all about." No agenda! No bias! Just lively debate about the color of the sky.

Another Annoying Tray Complaint About Rap (See 3rd Paragraph)

2009-12-02T13:29:00.001-08:00

I'm (obviously) abandoning my Larry King wrapups, as I don't find them too entertaining, and I really don't care too much about rap right now, and I don't really have anything interesting to say about the weird Pill/Gibbs flare-up on the blogs a couple weeks back, other than that, yes, Pill and Gibbs, pretty great rappers, but admittedly, it is a little weird that these somewhat limited talents are the most ballyhooed rappers in the rap blog world right now, and there is something a little - I don't want to say retro about their work, because I don't particularly hear any kind of blatant Outkast imitation going on the way you did with the Knux or Da Backwudz - but a little "cinema of quality" to their output. Cinema of quality being a term of derision a group of young French film critics (who ultimately became great young French directors) in the late 50s used to throw up at the very competent and finely crafted, but a touch lifeless and certainly not at all innovative, movies made by their elders. And that's kind of how I feel about Pill, though he's not one bit lifeless, but I do feel that we've perhaps progressed beyond finely polished rapping of the sort he has to offer being the gold standard anymore, and that it's just a bit of an artistic dead end in the very large scheme of things. In the not so large scheme of things, it's just a relief to hear some very good rapping these days, and it's not like it's thematically barren stuff either.

Anyway, I've become a partial Gucci Mane convert, and listened to about half of his new mixtapes (skipping Brrussia and Great Brrrrtain) with a fair amount of approval, though all the songs do seem to blend into one big ad-lib, aside from interesting changes in flow (I love the Jeezy imitation on 'Dope Boys,' since Jeezy is no longer very interested in being himself, and the slurry mumbly mess that isn't actually a mess at all that's 'Trap Goin Crazy') and some stupid-funny jokes that help to distinguish tracks from each other. But the album cuts, so far, have not been so wonderful. For a mixture of reasons. With 'Heavy,' Gucci's reaching the point of diminishing returns in his fun "my whole life can be reduced to one word that expresses its awesomeness" subgenre. Why he can't just put 'Wonderful' or 'Awesome' or 'Gorgeous,' or maybe my favorite, 'Disaster' on the album, I don't understand; in the great old material vs. the exciting new material that's not nearly as good as the old, I always come down on the great old material side. That way, you might actually have an album worthy of reissue ten years from now, at which point no one will remember how new the material was. Then there are songs like 'Bad Bad Bad,' where the guest appearance (Keyshia Cole) actively detracts from the quality of the song. Gucci Mane's the kind of artist who needs his own Blue Raspberry to fit into his insular world of mealy-mouthed vocals and Brrrr's, not some top-of-the-line chanteuse. But it's an album and record labels seem to think that big names help move records, in addition to which rappers seem to genuinely like working with big names. So okay, excusable pitfall of the medium.

But then you have something like 'Stupid Wild,' of which I can only conclude that no one involved gave a shit. 'Stupid Wild,' you know, if done right, could actually have been a pretty important song for this generation, the way 'Black Republicans' was supposed to be for people old enough to care about Jay or Nas, the way 'Mr. Carter' kind of maybe actually was, the way, I don't know, the Flava In Your Ear remix was. Think about it - the three critical darlings of the decade, each one of whom was or is a pretty huge cult figure outside of critical circles, all on one track. Produced by Bangladesh! What could go wrong? Well apparently everything. First, Bangladesh decided to refurbish 'You Don't Want Drama.' What is that about? Maybe it's not on him and Gucci particularly wanted to rap over that track? Well if so, that was a mistake, because he sounds suffocated by it (note how he just gets off one muffled 'Brrr' and one 'Well damn!'). Wayne reuses the same forgettable verse he had on previous Gucci/Wayne collabo, 'Bitches Wanna' - although perhaps that was a leaked incomplete version of this track, but given that no one liked 'Bitches Wanna' much, shouldn't this have been a signal to go back and actually record a good verse, instead of this collection of throwaway lines like "Mr. Coach Carter, or Mr. Go Harder" and "and if you wanna fight, come on, you can fight my guns"? And then there's Cam, who just can't much rap anymore. "Started getting on my nerves so I hit her with a BRRRRR" is about as embarrasing as any of Jay's recent exercises on overemphasis and punched-in adlibs. (It's also very typical of rap these days that no one thought to partially redeem this lame idea by having Gucci complete Cam's line, which would at least create an illusion of chemistry and shared studio time that your average 90s rap posse track thrived on.) Who to put Cam's verse on is hard to say; it's between Cam, who is capable of working around his deficits for a 30-second spurt or so (see 'Popeye's'), and Gucci, who didn't have the gumption to say the verse wasn't good enough to make the record. You know, the way rappers used to do when a guest appearance sucked.

If this were just one disappointing song, it wouldn't be worth taking a break from studying contracts to write about, but the thing is, virtually every big collaboration or remix is like this these days. One generally gets the sense that today a rapper decides to do a song with someone, sends him the instrumental, gets a recording of his verse back, and puts the verse on the song regardless of whether it's any good. If it's good, we get lucky and get a good song, and if it's bad we're unlucky and don't. What was the last time you heard of a verse being shot down? You do hear about it occasionally, but usually in the context of replacing one rapper with another with a bigger name - more for the sake of marketing than quality. Compare this to some of the old XXL write-ups about the making of Cuban Linx or what have you, where you read about artists rejecting bad verses, listening to different verses - in the case of 'Verbal Intercourse,' for example, telling Nas that the legendary verse that made the record was the one he should use, when he apparently wanted to go with another - and you can see one major reason for why today's album rap is rarely better than mediocre. A reason, I might add, that really isn't on the label so much as it is on artists not giving a shit. It goes beyond that though - one doesn't get the sense, with today's big collabos, that the featured artists get up for them the way they undeniably did in the past. Wayne's verse on this song, or Gucci's or Cam's, definitely can't be their idea of a great verse. They're just passable at best, and they have to know that. Maybe this is the fault of mixtapes - anything but your lead single, a torch-passing collaboration with Jay, or the intro to your album is just another song out of millions, so why bother trying to make something unusually good - but even if that is the cause, it's no excuse.

Larry and Mariah Go Back Like Babies and Pacifiers (Blogging LKL Pt. 2)

2009-11-09T14:00:00.000-08:00

The thing about Larry and really big-name female celebrities is that he's friends with all of them. It's weird but true. So anytime he has some really famous woman on above the age of 30, it's not going to be a very funny episode because he just cuddles up to them for an hour and whispers sweet nothngs in their ears. Basically. So aside from

a) Larry reciting the lyrics of 'Hero' like it was the fucking Rime of the Ancient Mariner
b) the hilarity of an old white man like Larry saying "and then along came Nick Cannon!"
c) Larry's creepy fascination with how Mariah, who he seems to think is a gorgeous woman, managed to look so ugly (as he puts it, "how about the question of playing down the looks") in her new awful overrated abuse-porn film Precious
d) Larry telling Mariah that 'Obsessed' is "pretty great... a great song"
e) the "abuse bombshell she drops exclusively to us" turning out to be a vague claim that once upon a time she was mentally and emotionally abused by a certain unnamed someone

nothing on this episode was too good. The one great part was when Larry asked Mariah to define 'diva' for him. I half-expected Mariah to calmly explain that a diva is a female version of a hustler, but she instead said that a diva is (a) a great opera singer, and (b) a difficult woman, but that today the diva concept has become diluted:

but now it's like everybody's a diva. The Cupcake Lady -- oh, the Diva of Cupcakes. You're the diva of, you know, whatever it is. It's sand, you make great sand castles. It doesn't have the same connotation.

Really, Mariah, the diva of sand? Anyway, Larry, who's honestly trying to understand what a 'diva' is, says, with a straight face:

So it lost its meaning.

Tonight, though, should be way better, because we're getting "the "DC Sniper's" ex-wives and one of his sons! One night before his scheduled execution, his first ex-wife will be there to hear his last words before he is put to death. The dark side of John Allen Muhammad revealed." I would've thought that he already revealed that dark side when he shot a ton of people.

Blogging Larry King, Pt. 1 (Fort Hood, Domestic Abuse, Obama's Brother)

2009-11-08T16:18:00.000-08:00

No words.

Everyone's always known that Larry King was the squishiest of big-name interviewers. But he used to be something more than a complete joke. Remember when he had Ross Perot and Al Gore on to debate NAFTA? (I do and I was 8 at the time.) These days, though, Larry is quasi-senile, his producers are insane, and the result is the most dependably hilarious 60 minutes of television since, I don't know, fucking I Love Lucy. Larry's probably been this nuts for years but I started watching him religiously after this summer's double whammy of the Jermaine Jackson interview and the Ashton/Diddy/Seacrest/Fallon Twitter episode. A few traits define Late Larry:

A penchant for having on crazy and/or retarded guests.
A complete suspension of disbelief or critical thinking as these crazy and/or retarded guests say crazy and/or retarded things.
Blind celebrity-love.
Great trust in highly dubious "experts."
Bizarre levels of inanity - inane questions, inane subjects, inane musings.
Inadvertent surrealism.

Anyway, my obsession with latter-day Larry is such that I've decided, now that I have a handy DVR, to start blogging the best bits from each Larry episode. I start with his second episode on Fort Hood.

Fort Hood

The Fort Hood episode was fairly subdued by Larry's standards, but we did get a few great moments of unwitting self-parody. The episode kicked off with an interview of a neighbor of the officer who shot the assailant; the subtitle under her head read "SHE KNOWS FORT HOOD HERO COP." (One of the best parts of Larry's show is the crazy subtitles.) Larry, naturally, asks what she thought when she heard her neighbor was the hero cop. The neighbor, being a well-intentioned but clearly dim young Texan woman, says that she wasn't surprised at all because her hero cop neighbor had previously deterred some juveniles from breaking into a house, and then gone to the heroic extent of warning residents in the neighborhood to be careful of marauding juveniles. Midstream into this story, Larry inexplicably goes, 'Wow!" And when it's all over, instead of being like, "um, what does that have to do with anything," he goes:

So she was the heroic type.

Next up, Larry had a man whose "SON LOOKED SHOOTER IN THE EYE" (and who also was wounded). Larry sensitively asks whether he immediately thought of his son when he heard about the shootings; the man, for the first time in the history of post-mass-murder interviews, says no because it was a base of 50,000 and what was the chance his son was one of the victims? Then, in typical "something just isn't right up there" LK fashion, he asks:

We understand he was scheduled to come home for Thanksgiving and then go to Afghanistan. Can we imagine that's all changed - well, he'll still get home, won't he, for Thanksgiving?

Dad says he's sure his son will. Next, after some reporters whom Larry effusively congratulates on their great reporting, we get "MEDIC WHO TREATED HERO COP". Much to Larry's disappointment, the medic didn't get a chance to talk to hero cop because she was unconscious, but the medic does tell an involved tale of putting a torniquet on the woman's leg. To which Larry quoth:

That's what great medics do. Thank you, Francisco.

Then we have the sister of one of the victims. Why she's chosen to put herself through the gauntlet of an emotionally insensitive Larry King interview, who knows. Larry opens with "when did you find out that Jason had been killed?" Which he follows with "he was just 22, right?" And to really rub it in:

Do you know, Leila, you can expect someone who goes in the Army, goes to Iraq, OK, you're hardened for the worst. But you certainly never expect him to die at his base, right? Never.

Amazingly, Leila does not sue Larry for intentional infliction of emotional distress. Finally, Larry caps things off with the duo of General McCaffery and Wesley Clark, who know absolutely nothing about what happened or base security in general, but proceed to argue over whether we should all be afraid of Muslims now. Typically, Larry, who never questions his interviewees' veracity or judgment, acts oblivious to his guests' raging debate because acknowledging it might force him to pick a side. Wesley, once a Democratic Presidential hopeful, actually muses on "what it would take for you to feel comfortable now" serving with Muslims and darkly hints that we're "just scratching the surface of the enormous conflict that must be so present in so many people around this country and around the world." McCaffery says that this is a completely isolated incident that we can learn nothing from whatsoever. Larry just thanks these two "outstanding servants" for showing up.

Domestic Violence

This episode starts with a great premise - let's get four mildly famous battered women (or sisters of famous dead battered women), including Robin Givens, together to watch clips of Rihanna's interview with Diane Sawyer and offer their expert commentary. But it never really picks up the absurdist steam you'd expect. Though at times Larry's attempt to subject Rihanna's interview to some sort of Perez Hilton-meets-deconstructionism analysis yields up some gems, as when he actually asked Mary Murphy, reality TV judge on "So You Think You Can Dance," and a oneitme battered spouse, this question:

Do you think [it was] worse for her than you, or apples and oranges?

Mary thinks it's maybe apples and oranges. Robin manages to be the least sympathetic domestic violence victim ever, constantly reminding us that Mike went on to eat Evander's ear, and at one point clapping for something Nicole Brown Simpson's sister said - who, by the way, reveals her myopic class biases when she says that most women used to think that abuse couldn't happen to them, but when they found out that Nicole got battered, they realized it could happen to affluent people too. As if most women are affluent or something, or maybe just the ones who matter. Larry attempts to sympathize with all these whiny abuse victims, but eventually shows his true colors and asks:

A famous psychiatrist once said to me - and I wonder how you would all react to this - he said, "If you come home at night -- you are a man -- and your wife hits you with a lamp, and you come home the second night and she hits you with a lamp, and you come home the third night, and she hits you with a lamp, on the fourth night, if you come home, who is nuts?" So that we relate to. If you are hit all the time, granted, the hitter is wrong - again, why do you come back to get punched?

The women are so shocked that they don't know what to say. Then Larry adds in a doctor to the mix and asks her "have we had a definitive study of the violent person?" What? The doctor says there are lots of different kinds of violent people. Larry says he just meant domestic violent people. Like that makes his question any less retarded.

Obama's Brother

Mark Obama Ndesandjo is one of those people whose remarks, as nutty and incoherent as they read in print, sound a million times more demented on TV. The guy just seems like he's done a ton of drugs. He sounds a lot like the SNL guy who does Obama, if that guy swapped brains with Jermaine Jackson. It's not even like he's going up there with some rational plan to cake off Obama and sell tons of copies of his book, because the first thing he emphasizes is how that book is a work of fiction with no insights into his brother or the Obama family. Even Larry seems to half-realize that the guy is nuts. Mr. Ndesandjo explains that his book is of no interest to the Obama-curious reader at all, but rather is a novel with three important messages, namely

1. Domestic violence.
2. Starting from scratch.
3. The power and the spirit of service.

These messages, Ndesandjo says, are not just about the Obama family. Rather, "they run across all countries, all regions.... all religions." Again, you really need to see the video because in between each word he takes huge pauses in a futile attempt to gather his thoughts, pauses that can only be the product of a lifetime of heavy drug use.

After that, Larry asks him what effect being beaten as a child had on him. Typically inane Larry question made to seem almost brilliantly rational by Nde's colossally off-point answer. Ndesandjo starts his answer like so:

Let me -- I guess one thing I would like to share, Larry, is that, just to recap a little bit, my life has always been about self-expression, whether it is through music, calligraphy, writing, and so forth.

Calligraphy. Then, for the next two minutes, Ndesandjo muses on how "there are things that are sometimes extraordinary situations that can occur in a man's life," among which "could be, it could be, it could be" the loss of a job or falling in love. When these things that are sometimes extraordinary situations occur, Ndesandjo seems to be groping towards, the abuse victim begins to reflect on his sucky childhood. To which Larry can only blurt out in exasperation:

And the effect on you was WHAT??

This shouting seems to trigger some coherence in Nde, who, on cue, promptly regurgitates memories of seeing his mother being beaten in Kenya. Very vivid memories:

you -- you see the light. There's like a golden -- the light of the lamp in the living room, and you hear thuds -- and I have mentioned this before in the interviews -- and YOU CAN'T PROTECT YOUR MOTHER!

'Wow,' Larry says. Nde begins to cry. After a commercial break, Larry says that they have limited time on the satellite (??), so he just wants Nde to give some quick comments on whether he and Barack have discussed their father. Nde will have none of it and instead goes on one of the great lunatic rants you'll ever see on cable television:

I want to just get back to one issue, and that is that my brother talked about having a difficulty in terms of relating to people, and I think this is very true, because what happens is that when you are in such situations, your skin -- you become hardened to emotional attachments to people. And in the book, while the book is an autobiography -- excuse me, is a novel that is semi-autobiographical -- it has strong parallels with my father, with my mother, with me, and also my grandmother. Now, I just wanted to say that what happens is that sometimes -- because you're not able to connect with other people, you do things which are very strange -- for example, when you fall in love. In the story there is a character called David, and he falls in love with Spring. And what happens is that they butt against each other; they seem to break apart. And it's because of dumb emotion and dumb emotion. And then what happens is that David discovers his father's diary. Now, I have not discussed my father with -- with Barack, but I do know that we have had similar thoughts, and we have had similar -- I think similar reflections on certain things, but I -- Barack and I never had the benefit of a diary which could explain the fullness of, for example, my father. I thought my father was just a bad man for a long, long time, and I shut a lot of things out of my life. And then what happened is that I felt that there had to be good in him. There had to be good in him - and so I wrote this diary in my book because that would fill out the good parts.

Larry, constitutionally incapable of uttering a "what the fuck are you talking about" or the broadcastable equivalent, can only say that he's very anxious to read Nde's book.

Iverson, Iverson

2009-11-07T19:03:00.000-08:00

Anyone could have told you that Iverson in Memphis would be a disaster. But who would've thought things would blow up so quickly? I was expecting more of a gradual disaster, where A.I. would completely stymie Mayo/Conley's development, see his playing time slashed, complain a whole lot, and ultimately be sent home by about March. Instead, he's already complaining about coming off the bench, and today things got a lot worse. But first, the bench complaining. First off, he's just come off an injury so he has no reason whatsoever to complain - this is what NBA teams do with veteran players coming off injuries, but besides that, what makes A.I. so special that he can't come off an NBA bench? Rasheed Wallace comes off the bench. Manu Ginobili comes off the bench. Jason Terry comes off the bench. Jamal Crawford comes off the bench. Al Harrington is coming off the bench and averaging 22 per. Does A.I. really think he's that much better, today, than Ginobili? That because he accomplished a lot of stuff in his career a long time ago, he's an essential part of any team's starting rotation? Where does he propose to start anyway? Over Conley, the team's point guard of the future? Over Mayo, the team's shooting stud? What purpose would that serve - making the team, maybe, the 13th best team in the West instead of the 15th?

But it gets better. Tonight, Iverson's left the team, just 3 games into his Grizzlies career, for personal reasons - reportedly, his upset over playing time - and it's unknown when he's coming back. Says Marc Spears:

A frustrated Allen Iverson has departed the Memphis Grizzlies and is not expected to return any time soon, if at all, a source close to Yahoo! Sports said today. The source said Iverson is going back to Atlanta to clear his head and is extremely unhappy about the lack of communication with coach Lionel Hollins over his playing time and reserve role in three games since returning from an injury.

You can't be serious! Even if the guy was actually promised that he would start over the team's future point guard, which would be insane, this would still border on the psychotic. Who, in the history of the NBA, has left a team three games into his season because he was unhappy over only playing 22 minutes a game?

Soulja Boy vs. The Shirelles Finally Happened

2009-11-02T17:29:00.000-08:00

I think my second post ever was about how Soulja Boy should sample the Shirelles 'Soldier Boy.' He finally came through, in typically mediocre but substantially entertaining fashion. Track 7 of the mixtape below.

Download Mixtape | Provided by DatPiff.com

Dubya

2009-09-15T19:39:00.000-07:00

Lazy writers' crutch alert, but when people look at American democracy, they often express amazement that someone as incompetent and supposedly dumb as George W. Bush could be elected President. When people look at democracy in general, they express surprise that the two most venerable democracies in the world could elect leaders who both thought it was a good idea to invade Iraq. And sometimes this gets blamed on the media, or various elites, or stolen elections and family dynasties in the case of Bush. But the reality is, our system, or the British system, just isn't set up to elect people who are good at governing the nation or developing wise policies. It's set up to elect talented politicians. And we really do a stellar job at it. If you conceive of presidential politics as a sort of NCAA tournament of gifted bullshit artists, where the guy who's better at pushing his bullshit advances, you begin to get a handle on what American democracy really is. Of course, the state of the economy plays a huge role in elections, probably determines most. But even so, this plays out on the bullshit level. It's a lot easier to bullshit about the other party's economy than to, as President, bullshit about why the bad economy's not your fault. So though the economy (and popular/unpopular wars) may be the real causal factor behind electoral outcome, the best bullshitter at any given moment will still almost always win.

To give some examples before I turn to Bush, Jimmy Carter, though we forget it today, was an unbelievably talented politician. A basically unheard of and unpopular one-term Governor of Georgia, he defeated a slew of better-known candidates in the primaries on an incredibly vague platform of change, hope, character, American heartland values, and Washington outsiderism, and then proceeded to knock off the sitting President. Once in office, he proved to be fairly incompetent, but still fended off a primary challenge from Ted Kennedy, who knew vastly more about getting shit done in Washington but much, much less about winning an election. Then, unfortunately, he ran into the most gifted bullshitter of the post-war era in the general election. And that was the end of Carter.

Another example - John McCain, a man who knew absolutely nothing about domestic policy and whose foreign policy instincts were like something out of Dr. Strangelove, was such a fine bullshitter in his day, with his promises of straight talk and sappy ghostwritten memoirs about his admiral father and grandfather, that he nearly up-ended Bush's infinitely better-funded and better-ran campaign in the 2000 primaries. After that, he was, for eight years, probably America's most popular politician. Even David Foster Wallace loved the guy. In 2008, after internal struggles within his operation threatened to torpedo his campaign, he knocked off Rudy Giuliani - 9/11 folk hero, America's Mayor - and Mitt Romney with ease - Mitt Romney, who in his own right is such a talented politician that he managed to get elected Governor in Massachusetts. But then he met Obama, and, like a Federer-Roddick match, the guy with mere one-in-a-million gifts went down to the finest talent of his generation.

The abilities of either man to govern, of course, weren't tested in this match at all; note that, prior to Obama's becoming President, neither had ran anything in their lifetime, and that neither ever passed much significant legislation. Our elections aren't about ability to govern because actual administrative competence is something that would actually take work and research on the part of the voter to assess. Even if voters have the time - many of us watch tons of political news coverage - looking at candidates' actual track records is too boring for many voters to do or for many media outlets to do. Therefore, even politicians who have competence don't campaign on the basis of it. The illusion of competence, on the other hand - an appearance of strength, of decisiveness, of a superficial knowledge of the issues - is something that a politician either succeeds or fails at projecting in a matter of mere seconds, and is terribly crucial.

Getting to Bush, then, Bush got elected because he was a phenomenally gifted politician, one who was able to, for however brief a time, re-brand conservatism in much more appealing terms than those in which the middle of the electorate had perceived it for a decade. At the same time he was also able, and don't underestimate the difficulty of this, unify the conservative base like nobody had been able to do since Reagan. A hard task by itself, but even harder when you're simultaneously winning moderates' votes. He managed to stay in office even though he already had been revealed, by 2004, to be an incompetent President. Some excerpts from a Bush speechwriter's memoir came out today, and it's startling to be reminded in the same piece of how the same man managed to be such a political genius and such an administrative fool.

On the one hand, we learn that our President signed onto the initial bailout even though he had no idea how it worked. That he was excited about the bailout because he thought it would "go [down] in [history] as a big decision." (To which, we're told, some pathetic hanger-on replied, "Definitely, Mr. President. This is a large decision.") That he imagined that we'd be buying up cheap assets and selling them for great profits. And that when he was told that wasn't how the bailout worked,

the president was momentarily speechless. He threw up his hands in frustration.

“Why did I sign on to this proposal if I don’t understand what it does?” he asked.

Then, after finding out how it did work, he went ahead and gave the same speech he was planning to give in the first place.

On the other hand, we learn that while most of the media and certainly the entire Republican Party was celebrating Palin's choice as a game-changer, Bush had the acuity, several days after her choice, to correctly and quite articulately prophesy that she would be a huge bust:

“I’m trying to remember if I’ve met her before. I’m sure I must have.” His eyes twinkled, then he asked, “What is she, the governor of Guam?”

Everyone in the room seemed to look at him in horror, their mouths agape. When Ed told him that conservatives were greeting the choice enthusiastically, he replied, “Look, I’m a team player, I’m on board.” He thought about it for a minute. “She’s interesting,” he said again. “You know, just wait a few days until the bloom is off the rose.” Then he made a very smart assessment.

“This woman is being put into a position she is not even remotely prepared for,” he said. “She hasn’t spent one day on the national level. Neither has her family. Let’s wait and see how she looks five days out.” It was a rare dose of reality in a White House that liked to believe every decision was great, every Republican was a genius, and McCain was the hope of the world because, well, because he chose to be a member of our party.

There's also a rather poignant bit (if you're capable of feeling sorry for George W. Bush) where Bush is supposed to do a rally with McCain in Arizona to show that they don't hate each other, and then the thing gets closed to the press, prompting Bush to ask why it's closed to the press if the point is to show people that they don't hate each other. It turns out that the event is closed because McCain's staff is a bunch of fuck-ups, causing Bush, who probably presided over the best-ran presidential campaigns in our nation's history, to despair:

Eventually, someone informed the president that the reason the event was closed was that McCain was having trouble getting a crowd. Bush was incredulous—and to the point. “He can’t get 500 people to show up for an event in his hometown?” he asked. No one said anything, and we went on to another topic. But the president couldn’t let the matter drop. “He couldn’t get 500 people? I could get that many people to turn out in Crawford.” He shook his head. “This is a five-spiral crash, boys.”

We tried to move on to something else. But the president wouldn’t let go. He was stuck on the Phoenix event. At one point, he looked off into space and said to no one in particular, “What is this—a cruel hoax?”

Sad in a few ways, not least of which is the fact that too often Bush's presidency felt like a cruel hoax. Unfortunately, it's one of the tragedies of our political system that it not only allows for, but encourages the election of men with such huge disparities between their political skills and their abilities to govern.

Why Do People Love Jay-Z?

2009-09-14T00:18:00.000-07:00

What do people see in Jay-Z? More to the point, what did I ever see in Jay-Z? I listen to songs I used to think were great, like 'Hovi Baby' or 'Watcher 2,' and the parts that wowed me at the time - "know the shit I don't write be the illest shit that's ever been recited in the game, word to the hyphen in my name!" - now seem to fall totally flat. At one time I bought into the myth that Jay never got outshined on a track (except maybe on the 'Ha' remix); now if I hear a song with him and another rapper, or three other rappers, his verse is almost always my least favorite. Take 'Poppin Tags'; it seems pretty clear to me now that even a young Killer Mike gets him on that. But back in 2004, Jay's verse was the only one I knew the words to, and I loved it, particularly "there he goes, talking about hoes and dough again/I'm surprised I got so much dough to spend." What was I hearing? For so many people, Jay seems to be this lovable household god, the rapping equivalent of Oprah. 6 years later, I would've thought the days of my being held captive on road trip Black Album sing-alongs would be over by now. After all the post-retirement pratfalls, you'd think the days of people calling Jay the G.O.A.T., as if Nas, Big, Ghostface, Rakim, Kane, KRS, Scarface, Andre 3000, Ice Cube, Chuck D, and Prodigy had never lived, would be over. But no. A guy with two very good albums and many collections of filler continues to be talked up as the greatest. I can only conclude that the very things I can't stand about Jay, the reasons I'm so fed up with him that if I had to go to a desert island and had to choose between Jay's catalogue and Yo Gotti's to take with me, I'd take the Yo Gotti - his 6-o'clock-news-anchor-like blandness, his lack of personality, of idiosyncracy, of humor or emotion, his inability to be anything more or less than this vague universal all things to all people Hova-man - are what make him so beloved. In that respect he's a lot like Jordan. Except that Jordan, notwithstanding his carefuly cultivated persona, was a transcendent basketball player and Jay rarely sounds like much more to me than an insecure guy trapped in an only occasionally convincing ice grill.

A Thought On Race

2009-09-13T19:29:00.000-07:00

In the days to come, some enterprising someone will point out that whites' anger at Kanye (which is really reaching a ridiculous fever pitch on my Facebook news feed) over this Swift nonsense is partly racial. That it reeks of racist animus against uppity negroes. And they'll be damn right. I know I have some white readers out there who probably fancy themselves super-enlightened and will think this doesn't apply to them, but speaking for the great mass of white Americans, white people don't like angry black men. Really don't like them. Most of the upset about Jeremiah Wright had nothing to do with the stuff he said and everything to do with his enraged delivery and the mob-like "that's right, mmm-hmm" chorus from his black audience. Wright also said some stupid shit, and has since turned out, surprise surprise, to be a flaming anti-Semite (the Jews, he said on the day that the Holocaust Museum got shot up, are the ones keeping him away from Obama), but it was really mostly how he said what he said, and that he was black. Similarly, Kanye is going to get pilloried for this to a far greater extent than he would be if he were a white guy who talked like a white guy (and was rude to some black performer).

That being said, I suppose this is where I'm supposed to atone on behalf of my race for the racially motivated beating-up in the press Kanye is about to get. But I won't. In the first place, though Kanye will be bashed more than he would have if he were white, a whole lot more, he surely deserves some bashing (and surely could use some therapy). As I noted with Vick, the fact that some people don't like Thing X that you do for, in part, racial reasons does not mean that they are wrong to not like the fact that you do Thing X, whether Thing X is electrocuting dogs, killing your white wife, being Michael Steele, offering healthcare proposals that won't work (I thought we were getting some kind of cost controls?), or acting like a colossal jerk on live television. Racism is always regrettable but doesn't end the conversation.

More interestingly though, I think whites' discomfort with angry black guys is just one of those almost instinctual things that will never go away, like black distrust of white elites. I mean, what makes me, for example, cringe when I see a Kanye or Jeremiah Wright on TV? Was I somehow acculturated by my liberal family and insanely left-wing Quaker school to dislike angry black men? Or is a Jeremiah Wright simply something so foreign to my experience that seeing him on TV makes me feel threatened, repulsed, disgusted - just as the last black, Baptist funeral that I attended was so novel to me that I was reduced to uncontrollable laughter? I really don't think that anything more insidious here is at work than a simple lack of exposure. That, and different norms of etiquette.

I'm Starting To Feel Bad Ragging On Kanye Because It's Clear That The Man Is Autistic

2009-09-13T18:53:00.000-07:00

I see the Aspergian Queen of Pop stood up for one of his living legends tonight. What can you even say about a man with the comportment of a 2-year-old? This is what happens when shitted-on losers become famous, I guess; they continue to act out their anger towards the kids who punked them at recess. I just want my pop radio to be freed of his noxious whiny voice already. Or at least if he can't retire he could go back to making some good beats.

The Best Movie Ever Is On TCM Tonight (Sunday) at 2

2009-09-12T23:10:00.000-07:00

Watch the thing.

50 Top Rap Songs Of The Decade

2009-09-11T18:09:00.000-07:00

Saw Jordan do this over on Suckapunk, thought I'd try it. This is being done really quickly and is probably going to be retarded and not at all reflective of my true tastes. I mean, not at all. Here goes. In no particular order.

Lil Wayne, 'Go DJ.'
The Diplomats, 'I Really Mean It.'
Styles P, 'Kill That Faggot.'
Jay-Z, 'Ignorant Shit.'
Three 6 Mafia, 'Stay Fly.'
Three 6 Mafia, 'Poppin My Collar.'
Young Jeezy, 'I Got What It Takes.'
Young Jeezy, 'Air Forces.'
Madvillain, 'All Caps.'
Ghostface Killah, 'The Sun.'
Ghostface Killah, The Watch.'
Cam'ron, 'Killa Cam.'
Cam'ron f. Kanye West, 'Down And Out.'
Cam'ron, 'Get Em Girls.'
Cam'ron, 'Glitter.'
Crime Mob, 'Knuck If You Buck.'
Dem Franchize Boys f. Lots of People, 'I Think They Like Me (Remix).'
Nas, 'Purple.'
Nas f. Jadakiss and Ludacris, 'Made You Look (Remix).'
Nas, 'Stillmatic (The Intro).'
Jay-Z, 'Hovi Baby.'
Jay-Z, 'La La La.'
Z-Ro, '2 Many Niggaz (Screwed and Chopped).'
50 Cent f. Notorious B.I.G., 'Realest Niggas.'
Jadakiss, '40 Bars of Terror.'
Jadakiss, 'The Champ Is Here.'
Outkast, 'Bombs over Baghdad.'
Mike Jones f. Paul Wall & Slim Thug, 'Still Tippin.'
Yung Wun f. David Banner & Lil Flip, 'Tear It Up.'
The Clipse f. People, 'Cot Damn (Remix).'
Pharell, 'When Skateboard Came.' (Yes, love that mixtape.)
50 Cent, 'In Da Club.'
Sheek Louch f. Jadakiss, Styles P, J-Hood, '2 Guns Up.'
Styles P, 'Whattup Whattup.'
Gang Starr f. Jadakiss, 'Rite Where You Stand.'
Raekwon f. Method Man, Ghostface, 'New Wu.'
Masta Killa f. U-God, Method Man, RZA, 'Iron God Chamber.'
Ghostface Killah f. Solomon Childs, 'Gorilla Hood.'
Soulja Boy f. Gucci Mane and Yo Gotti, 'Shopping Spree.'
Trae f. Three 6 Mafia, Paul Wall, 'Cadillac.'
Outkast, 'The Whole World.'
Fabolous, 'Can't Let You Go (Remix).' (Trust me, look it up.)
Soulja Slim, Fiend, B.G., 'Fired Up.'
Hood Headlinaz, 'Wood Grain.'
Freeway f. Beanie Sigel, Jay-Z, 'What We Do (Is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, Wrong...)
Lil Jon f. Lil Scrappy, 'What U Gon' Do.'
Ludacris, 'Rollout.'
Nelly, 'Must Be The Money.'
Nelly, 'Air Force Ones.'
Big Tymers, 'Still Fly.'