I love LOGO

I'm not gay, but I love LOGO, the gay channel. It's so refreshing to watch TV that is not completely dominated by the straight male mindset. I had no idea that there was a counterpart to "Girls Gone Wild" called "Guys Gone Wild" until I saw it on LOGO. Of course "Guys Gone Wild" commercials would reach the target demographic on other channels, but straight males would go into gay panic, so only straight male desires are catered to on "general audience" channels. Damn I hate living in a Patriarchy.

LOGO is good for other reasons - rerunning all the "Tales of the City" series, showing "In the Life," good offbeat movies - and even its commercials are refreshingly different. Now if only they would syndicate "Queer As Folk" and show it on LOGO it would be a damn-near perfect channel.

Is Gregg Easterbrook a complete moron?

With all the talent out there in the blogosphere working for free, you'd think Slate could pick and choose whom to hire, but instead they get this bozo, who, as Atrios points out, says things like:

Intelligent design is a sophisticated theory now being argued out in the nation's top universities. And though this idea assumes existence must have some higher component, it is not religious doctrine under the 1986 Supreme Court definition. Intelligent-design thinking does not propound any specific faith or even say that the higher power is divine. It simply holds that there must be an unseen intellect imbedded in the cosmos.

The intelligent design theory may or may not be correct, but it's a rich, absorbing hypothesis--the sort of thing that is fascinating to debate, and might get students excited about biology class to boot. But most kids won't know the idea unless they are taught it, and in the aftermath of the Kansas votes, pro-evolution dogma continues to suggest that any alternative to natural selection must be kept quiet.

Not suprisingly, Easterbrook doesn't believe in fact-checking, and neither does his editors at Slate.

What is wrong with these people? Have they no shame?

Read more at Media Matters

Find teh funny - repetition edition repetition edition

Helping Chris Muir, right-wing wit about town, find the funny.
See the whole thing here.

Based on the challenge at Pandagon.

Newsflash: old guy doesn't like new-fangled foolishness

One of the New Yorker's sacred Great Men of the Arts, John Updike, doesn't like the idea of an online library:

"You are in the front while writers cower in their studies," he told the audience. "I see bookstores as citadels of life. They civilize neighborhoods." His favorite local store "brightens my life and the whole street it's on."

Speaking of the May 14 New York Times Magazine article called "Scan This Book!" about the universal library of the future--where all texts would be available digitally and snippets of them mixed together the way listeners mix favorite music--Updike mocked some of the writer's predictions, including that authors will be involved in more performances and that readers will have "access to the creator." He called the article's vision a "pretty grisly scenario," a kind of "throwback to a preliterate society where only a live person adds, shall we say, value." He wondered if the culture of celebrity had made "signed books seen only as a ticket to the lecture platform." The written word, he continued, is "supposed to speak for itself and sell itself even if the author's picture is not on the back cover." Sadly, he said, the author has grown "in importance as the walking, talking advertisement for a book."

and ...

He noted, too, that "yes, there is a ton of information on the Web but much of it is unedited and inaccurate." By contrast, the book, he continued, "is still more exacting and demanding of writers and consumers."

He concluded, "Booksellers, defend your lonely forts. Keep your edges dry. Your edges are our edges. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our human identity."

I love a good bookstore, but what I like even MORE is easy access to information. If you live in a sweet upscale hi-culture neighborhood, and I feel confident in predicting that John Updike does, then yeah, you might miss those little boutique bookstores where everybody knows your name. But as you are probably aware, most of the world does not live in neighborhoods like John Updike's.

I absolutely love that I can go online anytime, almost anywhere and look stuff up. Stuff like - hey, I remember why I dislike John Updike, because I read a review he wrote about a book by a gay author about gays - but I don't remember the name of the book or exactly what he said or when he said it. Now if I had to go to a library or a bookstore to get the info, I wouldn't bother. Who has the time? But abracadabra, I enter "Updike" and "gay" and "review" into Google and Google gives me the facts:

The book is called "The Spell" the review was written in 1999, and I find that "Updike zeroes in on his real complaint about gay male relationships where "nothing is at stake but self-gratification." "Novels about heterosexual partnering," Updike explains, "however frivolous and reducible to increments of selfishness, social accident, foolish overestimations, and inflamed physical detail, do involve the perpetuation of the species and the ancient, sacralized structures of the family."

Updike also said: ""Perhaps the male homosexual, uncushioned as he is by society's circumambient encouragements to breed, feels the isolated, disquieted human condition with a special bleakness: he must take it straight."

Thank you, Gay Today

Have you ever heard such a pile of right-wing shit? And when I enter "updike", "apologizes", "The Spell", and "review" into Google I find no evidence of Updike having second thoughts on the topic.

The best part of Updike's recent comments is his bemoaning the culture of celebrity. As if his entire career hasn't benefitted from a culture of literary celebrity. And that's what it boils down to - the stripping away of privilege. Now even I can post stuff to a blog and have it read, potentially, by thousands of people. I might be as good a writer as Updike, maybe better, but unless you're annointed by the literary gatekeepers it doesn't mean anything. Updike dimly understands that the days of the literary gatekeepers are numbered, but he doesn't get why - not because of some newly-invented celebrity culture, but because celebrities won't be quite so celebrated as they once were because of all the competition.

Professional editorialists have the same reaction to Internet bloggers - they feel threatened by the competition. And so they should. You no longer have to go to cocktail parties with the editor of The Atlantic to get your license to opine, like that mental midget Caitlin Flanagan. Anybody can do it, and although the Flanagans and the Updikes of the world and their cocktail party pals can't admit it, some of those anybodies who might never have had the opportunity to be heard before everything went online might be good.

But it isn't just the chance to opine that's new. It's the chance to get at info. I doubt Updike has ever had a comparable experience, but when I was an impoverished teenage mother living in a white trash town, I went to the town's tiny library to try to take out copies of the plays of Shakespeare - I had recently been enthralled by the BBC's production of AS YOU LIKE IT and I was suddenly a Shakespeare fanatic. Well this white trash library had available about four of the plays. It took me over a year to track down, one way or another, all the rest. Now you can go to Shakespeare Online and read everything Bill S ever wrote plus essays on the plays, a glossary a quiz and additional sources. I'd say that's an improvement.

Of course Updike's not going to like it. I doubt that another annoying privileged old guy, Harold Bloom likes it. Anybody can be a Shakespearean scholar if they want, and more efficiently than if they had to go to the big city library to get at the relevant texts.

I love libraries myself. I wish libraries were open 24-7 so that you could go to them for a night out - I'd rather spend time in a well-appointed library than a noisy bar any night. But I'd be there for the pleasure of the experience, not for the efficiency of information gathering.

Of course privileged, well-paid, annointed Great Men of the Arts have time to linger over shelves and watch the women coming and going talking of Michaelangelo. The rest of us gotta get stuff done and pay the rent, suckah.

Is it a coinicidence that guys who are considered science fiction authors get what the authors of Important Novels don't?

Kurt Vonnegut, in his book Fates Worse Than Death, said:

In the children's fable The White Deer, by the late American humorist James Thurber, the Royal Astronomer in a medieval court reports that all the stars are going out. What has really happened is that the astronomer has grown old and is going blind. That was Thurber's condition too, when he wrote his tale. He was making fun of a sort of old poop who imagined that life was ending not merely for himself but for the whole universe. Inspired by Thurber, then, I choose to call any old poop who writes a popular book saying that the world, or at least his own country, is done for, a 'Royal Astronomer' and his subject matter 'Royal Astronomy.' Since I myself have become an old poop at last, perhaps I, too, should write such a book. But it is hard for me to follow the standard formula for successful Royal Astronomy, a formula going back who knows how far, maybe to the invention of printing by the Chinese a couple of thousand years ago. The formula is, of course: 'Things aren't as good as they used to be. The young people don't know anything and don't want to know anything. We have entered a steep decline!' But have we? Back when I was a kid, lynchings of black people were reported almost every week, and always went unpunished. Apartheid was as sternly enforced in my hometown, which was Indianapolis, as it is in South Africa nowadays. Many great universities, including those in the Ivy League, rejected most of the Jews who applied for admission solely because of their Jewishness, and had virtually no Jews and absolutely no blacks, God knows, on their faculties. I am going to ask a question -- and President Reagan, please don't answer: Those were the good old days? When I was a kid during the Great Depression, when it was being demonstrated most painfully that prosperity was not a natural by-product of liberty, books by Royal Astronomers were as popular as they are today. They said, as most of them do today, that the country was falling apart because the young people were no longer required to read Plato and Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius and St. Augustine and Montaigne and the like, whose collective wisdom was the foundation of any decent and just and productive society. Back in the Great Depression, the Royal Astronomers used to say that a United States deprived of that wisdom was nothing but a United States of radio quiz shows and music straight out of the jungles of Darkest Africa. They say now that the same subtraction leaves the United States of nothing but television quiz shows and rock and roll, which leads, they say, inexorably to dementia. But I find uncritical respect for most works by great thinkers of long ago unpleasant, because they almost all accepted as natural and ordinary the belief that females and minority races and the poor were on earth to be uncomplaining, hardworking, respectful, and loyal servants of white males, who did the important thinking and exercised leadership.

And Douglas Adams said in "The Salmon of Doubt", more succinctly, if not better:

Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Shelf Awareness by way of Sivacracy.

If you want to be depressed

Check out the male:female author ratio for national "general interest" magazines. The average ratio is 1,037:355 for the past 8 months.

Get the ratios, by issue of The Atlantic, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair at WomenTK.com.

Supposedly women read more than men. And evolutionary psychologists are always going on how much more verbal females are (as opposed to male superiority in math) - so how do the gender essentialists explain this? It's always fun to watch them twist and turn to avoid explanations that come near "institutional discrimination."

by way of Ann Bartow

Cinco de Mayo is here

My first song created with GarageBand


Cinco de Mayo copyright 2005 by N. G. McClernan

Slings and Arrows

It's a shame that so many people in the NYC theatre world have not yet seen the Canadian mini-series Slings and Arrows - the second season is now playing on Sundance Channel. It's a show about the theatre artists and administrators who work for the fictitious New Burbage Theatre, and is very true-to-life. It even has an obnoxious, self-important director who threatens to sue the theatre. Is there something about directors that makes them litigious?

The first season was better than the second season, but both are great. Hopefully both seasons will be released on DVD soon.

And for Broadway people - Don McKellar, the actor who played the obnoxious director, wrote the book for the currently running The Drowsy Chaperone. Bob Martin, who played the accountant/actor ("you da money man!") on S&A, and also wrote and produced S&A, plays 'Man in Chair' in Chaperone.

Fairies, Brownies and Cronies

On April 28 Paul Krugman indentfied a creature stalking the U.S. government:"...an invisible bandit, the Crony Fairy, who visits key agencies by dead of night, snatches away qualified people and replaces them with unqualified political appointees. There's no way to catch or stop the Crony Fairy, so our only hope is to change the agencies' names. That way she might get confused, and leave our government able to function."

The Crony Fairy, it turns out is George W. Bush. And what kind of Crony did the Crony Fairy leave at FEMA? A Brownie!

Pictured above is a Palmer Cox brownie. More can be seen here. I thought this brownie's aphorism was highly appropriate.

What Stephen Colbert said right in front of Bush

Transcript here

Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in "reality." And reality has a well-known liberal bias.

Watch the video at Crooks and Liars.

Right-wingers just don't GET Stephen Colbert. It's so sad and pathetic to see them come on his show and make fools of themselves, as Harvey Mansfield and Caitlin Flanagan recently did. One of Bush's people probably thought Colbert was a real live right-winger and asked him to be on.
This almost makes up for that idiot racist Don Imus's insults of the Clintons to their faces at the Radio and TV Correspondents Dinner Dinner ten years ago.

After you read the Imus idiocy, read Al Franken's White House Correspondent's speech given a month after the Imus speech.

There's a web site where you can say 'thanks' to Stephen Colbert.

I love me some Dramatists Guild

"You've got a nice play here Colonel. It would be a shame if somebody were to set fire to it."

Hooray for the Dramatists Guild. When we told them about the Einhorn Brothers and their plan to turn a matter for small claims court into a federal case via Edward Einhorn's ill-gotten copyright, they were on it.

They recommended our lawyer Toby Butterfield of Cowan DeBaets, Abraham and Sheppard, LLP. If they were casting the role of "smart and charming British-American copyright lawyer" they would have to choose Toby. He even has the wig and when he's on a roll sounds just like Graham Chapman.

Then they wrote us an amicus brief, sent the intrepid Rebecca Frank, legal advisor to sit with us every day of the trial, and had Ralph Sevush, executive director of the Dramatists Guild, testify for us as an expert witness, to counter the other side's use of Pam Berlin, president of the SSDC (Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers) as their expert witness.

If you are a playwright, composer or lyricist, you really should belong to the Dramatists Guild.

Tam Lin is free!

The Brothers Einhorn have agreed to cancel their copyright registration and withdraw their copyright complaint!

More details as soon as I have a copy of Judge Kaplan's opinion.

A new personality equation

Dr. Laura, The Joker, Caitlin Flanagan

I know I said I wouldn't blog much, but I have to unwind somehow.

Besides, I just caught Caitlin Flanagan on the Colbert Report and whoo doggies, I thought Manly Harvey Mansfield was cuckoo for cocopuffs!

OK, now I don't want women to be judged on their appearance, and Athena knows I ain't no Miss America, but if you are advocating a world in which women trade sexual services for economic/domestic security, shouldn't you be even just the tiniest little bit HOT?

I was going to compare Flanagan to Phyllis Schlafly, who is of course Flanagan's inspiration - a mommy-stays-home harpie who has a sweet public career for herself - but to tell the truth, Schlafly is much hotter.

And how sad is The New Yorker? It already has a quota of two female contributors per issue, and this troglodyte - or as no doubt she prefers, troglodytette - is one of them. She's identified on Colbert as "a writer for the New Yorker."

The New Yorker needs a serious overhaul.

Low blogging frequency until Monday

While we prepare for the trial of the case of "The Man Who Mistook His Raging Ego for a Legal Precedent"

Also known as "An Unauthorized Derivative Copyright in Oz"

The Country Club mentality

When I was about eleven, Barbara, a girl in my class, invited me to hang out with her. I thought she was not very bright, but she seemed pleasant enough, so one Saturday I went to her neightborhood to hang out. I thought we would rollerskate or something. Instead she took me to a friend's house. There were a bunch of kids there who went to public school, so I didn't know them - Barbara and I went to Catholic school.

So we all hung out. I vaguely remember thinking that like Barbara, they were not very bright. We played on a swing set and talked. I don't remember the conversation, except the end, when Barbara informed me that her friends had decided they didn't want me to be part of their group. So I went back to Barbara's house and read her brother's comic books until my Dad came to pick me up.

Being kept out of the group wasn't a problem - I never had any desire to be part of their group, since I thought they were dullards. Plus I really enjoyed those comic books. But it was maddening that they seemed to take great pleasure in joining together to pass judgement on me.

Welcome to the Country Club mentality. I should know the anthropological term for this behavior, but Country Club mentality is a good enough description for the pleasure that most humans get in being insiders, both for the comraderie of other insiders, but also, and possibly even more significantly, scorning outsiders.

I've run up into this behavior several places on the Internet, most recently on Wikipedia. And I've noticed an interesting phenomenon. It seems to me that the Country Club mentality usually kicks when I feel like I'm starting to win a debate with an alpha insider. At this point the alpha insider will stop responding to rational arguments and simply pull rank, saying something to the effect of "I'm a member of this insider group so I know better than you, so that's the end of the discussion." Then the beta insiders will chime in to the effect of "yeah! You're not an insider. Acknowledge our superiority or we will shout you down." Sometimes they don't threaten to shout you down, they just shout you down.

Of course my perspective is not objective here. If I had time I'd look for a relevant anthropological study. And BTW - anthropologists are just as bad as any other group in displaying the country club mentality.

Darwin Awards discussions

The flame war over the Darwin Awards has cooled down, and I've gotten into some interesting discussions about the qualifications for adding information to a Wikipedia article.

I've also determined that I have to write a critique of the Darwin Awards. Thanks to a Wikipedia contributor, I now know of one other person who has publicly criticized the Darwin Awards. Unfortunately the person posted under initials. I might do some detective work to try to discover the identity of the critic, but I do think the critique, and the author's responses to critics are a little weak, and I think I might write a better critique. But it's good to know that at least somebody has thought through the Darwin Awards enough to understand the essential dehumanization inherent in the concept.

I'm currently reading Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil in preparation for writing the critique. Not that I think that the Darwin Awards are the equivalent of Nazi atrocities. Rather, I plan to make the case that Nazi atrocities are an example of the simmering banality of evil that exists in human populations brought to a boil for political expediency and that the Darwin Awards is evidence of the banality of evil in the most banal of circumstances.

The Arendt book is utterly fascinating so far. I'll post a book review later.

Darwin Awards lovers - strangely intolerant

Or perhaps not so strange - I mean, if you're the kind of person who enjoys laughing at the deaths of strangers who never did you any harm* imagine how pissed off you're going to be when you're confronted by a stranger who (oh the horror!) doesn't approve of your hobby!

I posted a criticsm of the Darwin Awards on its Wikipedia entry.

My entry was originally deleted because it didn't follow Wikipedia's rules of attribution. So I reposted it in Wiki-friendly format, and almost every day somebody
has to post a criticism of my criticism - in a way that is not acceptable to Wikipedia. We call that vandalism.

Here's the latest vandalism, posted anonymously, of course:

Most people, however, seem to understand that the Darwin Awards are all about being funny, and hardly rise to the standards of being dehumanizing or unethical. Laugh, it's good for you!

I think Al Franken had the best take on people who think that cruel creepy shit is funny. People like Ann Coulter. Here is Al Franken's remarks about Ann Coulter's concept of humor, delivered in his opening remarks for their recent debate:

Ann recently told an audience:

“We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens’ creme brulee,” Coulter said. “That’s just a joke, for you in the media.”

Here’s my question. What’s the joke? Maybe it’s a prejudice from my days as a comedy writer, but I always thought the joke had to have an operative funny idea. I’ll give you an example of a joke.

Like they do every Saturday night, two elderly Jewish couples are going out to dinner. The guys are in front, the girls riding in back. Irv says to Sid, “Where should we go tonight?”

Sid says, “How about that place we went about a month ago. The Italian place with the great lasagna.”

Irv says, “I don’t remember it.”

Sid says, “The place with the great lasagna.”

Irv says, “I don’t remember. What’s the name of the place?”

Sid thinks. But can’t remember. “A flower. Gimme a flower.”

“Tulip?” Irv says.

“No, no. A different flower.”

“Magnolia?”

“No, no. A basic flower.”

“Orchid?”

“No! Basic.”

“Rose?”

That’s it! Sid turns to the back seat. “Rose. What was the name of that restaurant…?”

That’s a joke. What exactly is the joke in “We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens’ creme brulee?” Is it the crème brulee? Is that it? Because Stevens is some kind of Francophile or elitist? Is it the rat poison? See, I would have gone with Drano. I’m really trying here, Ann. Please, when you come up, explain the joke about murdering an associate justice of the Supreme Court. One who by the way, was appointed to the Supreme Court by Gerald Ford, and who, also, by the way, won a Bronze Star serving in the Navy in World War II. What is the joke? ‘Cause I don’t get it.

You can read my ongoing flame war with the DA lovers here.

More on the DA lover spleenage as it develops.




*but it's OK, because unlike you they're stupid and genetically inferior

What is this Harvard mystique?

Why does Havard have this lofty reputation? The most prominent Harvard people I know are Laurence Summers, Steven Pinker and Harvey Mansfield. None of them are at all impressive.

The focus here is on Harvey Mansfield. If he has always been this confused and incosistent, it's incredible that he was paid to teach at Harvard. If he's only recently become a crazy they should fire his ass.

Tom Ashbrook was all over Mansfield's inconsistencies in the interview on WBUR. He questioned Mansfield's premise that educated women should endorse "irrational manliness" by reason. He also said that manliness was 50% good and 50% bad, but when Ashbrook pressed him on it, he changed it to "more than 50%."

Then Ashbrook brought analyst Jack Beatty on, and he observed that the "democratic revolution" has begun to erode male privilege.

Then Katha Pollitt delivered the coup de grace. She began by trashing John Wayne - one of Mansfield's heroes. She pointed out that Wayne was an actor, not a manly men. She pointed out the complete insanity of Mansfield's pretzel logic - in his book, Mansfield claims that women should do the housework because men have contempt for housework because that's something that women do.

Mansfield is an addle-brained old coot, and the ONLY reason that anybody takes him seriously is because he is surrounded by the Harvard mystique. I say to hell with it.

Dept of bad career promotion

So Katha Pollitt debated Manly Harvey Mansfield on March 21 at WBUR this year. So why didn't I find out about it until today?

You can hear it from this page.

It isn't mentioned in the Nation's archives of Pollitt's columns, which I check regularly for updates. What I don't check regularly is the Nation's home page, which is where I finally did find out about the debate. I love Pollitt but I don't love the Nation - I'm still annoyed with the Nation over its coddling of that ratfink Christopher Hitchens.

And apparently I'm not alone - I haven't heard a peep about this debate from any of the liberal blogs I read - blogs which mentioned Mansfield's Manliness book and which usually report on Pollitt's columns.

Anyway... I'm too busy to listen to the debate right now, but I predict Pollitt wipes the floor with His Manliness. I caught Mansfield on The Colbert Report last week and the guy is out to lunch. I mean, he's a rightwinger so his beliefs are surreal, but I also think he's got some, shall we say age-related problems with his mind. I almost felt bad for him, he was so befuddled by Colbert.

More on the debate after I've listened...

But I really think Katha Pollitt could be doing more to promote herself as an intellectual and pundit. It annoys me that mental midgets like David Brooks and shallow Smurfettes like Maureen Dowd get more attention than the clearly superior Pollitt.
Pollit has a blog http://kathapollitt.blogspot.com/ which she occasionally posts to, so occasionally that I rarely check it out. But I've been remiss in not putting it in my liberal links, which I will do today. But there isn't even a link to this blog from anywhere in The Nation that I can see, certainly not from the Pollitt column archives page. What's up with that???

The Iran Plans

Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article about the plans to nuke Iran

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”

Of course we know that Bush is partial to booze and cocaine, not marijuana.

Theatre critic's dichotomy

Standard theatre critic's dichotomy - if you don't like the pointless bloodshed of The Lieutenant of Inishmore then you must therefore be a philistine who only enjoys unchallenging, "old-fashioned" fare.

Charles Isherwood demonstrates:

Theatergoers with a taste for things traditional - imposing, naturalistic sets; pretty period costumes; tidy narratives with a surprise twist or two - can take comfort in "Tryst," a suspense drama of a distinctly old-fashioned stamp that opened last night at the Promenade Theater. No bloody bodies are dismembered and no cats are harmed in the course of this new play by Karoline Leach, making it a safe option for the "Inishmore"-skittish crowds.

The Catholic Church: always doing whatever it can to make women's lives a hell on earth.

This is what happens when the Catholic Church is given free reign.

During the first round of investigations, police officers interview the woman's family and friends. "The collecting of evidence usually takes place where the events transpired — by visiting the home or by speaking with the doctor at the hospital," Tópez said. In some cases, the police also interrogate people who work with the woman. Tópez added that that didn't happen very often because, she said, "these are women who don't work outside the home." (Indeed, the evidence suggests that the ban in El Salvador disproportionately affects poor women. The researchers who conducted the Journal of Public Health study found that common occupations listed for women charged with abortion-related crimes were homemaker, student, housekeeper and market vendor. The earlier study by the Center for Reproductive Rights found that the majority were domestic servants, followed by factory workers, ticket takers on buses, housewives, saleswomen and messengers.)

As they do in any investigation, the police collect evidence by interviewing everyone who knows the accused and by seizing her medical records. But they must also visit the scene of the crime, which, following the logic of the law, often means the woman's vagina.

No sane women supports the Catholic Church. It is an evil misogynist organization - and getting more evil by the day as the crazy rightwing Opus Dei increases its control.

All the President's Men

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

I is for Impeachment

In Court Filings, Cheney Aide Says Bush Approved Leak

But the disclosure in documents filed Wednesday means that the president and the vice president put Libby in play as a secret provider of information to reporters about prewar intelligence on Iraq.

......

Libby's testimony also puts the president and the vice president in the awkward position of authorizing leaks -- a practice both men have long said they abhor, so much so that the administration has put in motion criminal investigations to hunt down leakers.

Treasonous traitors. Impeachment's too good for them - they should get jail time too.

Darwin Awards: profiting from the celebration of human tragedy.

Few people express disgust with the unethical nature of Wendy Northcutt's Darwin Awards, a profit-driven celebration of human tragedy, because the Darwin Awards employs the technique of dehumanization - through declaring that its award winners are less evolved than "us." The popularity of the Darwin Awards reinforces the contention that the mass of humanity, while capable of self-preservation, is easily manipulated into cruelty and callousness.

Ann Bartow tells me that Wendy Northcutt, the main beneficiary of the profits earned through laughing at other people's death or mutilation, will be in the "YearlyKos" conference. Kos and company should be ashamed, but people who champion the Darwin Awards by definition have no sense of shame.

I contributed to the Darwin Awards wiki. The original text was verging on an advertisement for Wendy Northcutt.

Messing with Texas - Tom Delay edition

Buh-bye, Tom Delay!

I used to work for Donald Rumsfeld

Back in April 2000, when the Bush presidency was still just a twinkle in the Devil's eye, Donald Rumsfeld was on the board of advisors for a company I was working for. I only had a vague idea of who he was at the time. Wish I still did.

April 26, 2000 (12:16 p.m. EST)
TechWeb News

Former White House Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld is joining the board of advisors for e-business consultant TIS Worldwide. Rumsfeld has held several high-profile public service positions. He was President Reagan's special envoy for the Middle East, chief of staff of the White House, the youngest secretary of defense, and a four-term U.S Congressman.

How Texas dictates what may be taught in high school

via Ann Bartow at Sivacracy

The Muddle Machine - Confessions of a Textbook Editor

The big three adoption states are not equal, however. In that elite trio, Texas rules. California has more students (more than 6 million versus just over 4 million in Texas), but Texas spends just as much money (approximately $42 billion) on its public schools. More important, Texas allocates a dedicated chunk of funds specifically for textbooks. That money can't be used for anything else, and all of it must be spent in the adoption year. Furthermore, Texas has particular power when it comes to high school textbooks, since California adopts statewide only for textbooks from kindergarten though 8th grade, while the Lone Star State's adoption process applies to textbooks from kindergarten through 12th grade.

If you're creating a new textbook, therefore, you start by scrutinizing Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS). This document is drawn up by a group of curriculum experts, teachers, and political insiders appointed by the 15 members of the Texas Board of Education, currently 5 Democrats and 10 Republicans, about half of whom have a background in education. TEKS describes what Texas wants and what the entire nation will therefore get.

Texas is truly the tail that wags the dog. There is, however, a tail that wags this mighty tail. Every adoption state allows private citizens to review textbooks and raise objections. Publishers must respond to these objections at open hearings.

In the late '60s a Texas couple, Mel and Norma Gabler, figured out how to use their state's adoption hearings to put pressure on textbook publishers. The Gablers had no academic credentials or teaching background, but they knew what they wanted taught--phonics, sexual abstinence, free enterprise, creationism, and the primacy of Judeo-Christian values--and considered themselves in a battle against a "politically correct degradation of academics." Expert organizers, the Gablers possessed a flair for constructing arguments out of the language of official curriculum guidelines. The Longview, Texas-based nonprofit corporation they founded 43 years ago, Educational Research Analysts, continues to review textbooks and lobby against liberal content in textbooks.

The Gablers no longer appear in person at adoption hearings, but through workshops, books, and how-to manuals, they trained a whole generation of conservative Christian activists to carry on their work.

It's time to start messing with Texas.

Find the funny - xenophobe edition

Helping Pandagon helping Chris Muir find teh funny...


See the whole parody here.

Ghastly original here.

I gotta go see that Hatshepsut exhibit

Hatshepsut was the female pharoh of Egypt. There's a big exhibit about her at the Met.
Good review in the New Yorker

Lennon-McCartney

Given how often the Beatles were photographed, it's suprising how few photos there are of just John and Paul together. The original of this cropped image
by Harry Benson has George and Ringo in it too.
If I had the money I'd buy all kinds of original Beatle art photos prints - what's not to like? Not only are they an investment, they're historical, the subjects are very attractive young men, they're works of art, and come on, it's the Beatles.
I did treat myself to a couple of prints signed and numbered by Beatles "exi" pal Astrid Kirchherr (Stu Sutcliffe's girlfriend) a few years ago.

Sight Unseen, Lunch Revisited

I went to a mass actor audition thing yesterday and to my great dismay was treated to two versions of the same ghastly monologue, one of the most nauseating examples of self-loving male puppetry ever forced down the throats of female actors:

PATRICIA: I can't describe the pleasure I had being your muse. The days and nights I sat for you. It thrilled me, watching you paint me. The connection. The connection was electric. I could see the sparks. I never felt so alive as when I sat naked for you, do you know that?

Now I did some nude modelling when I was a desperately poor single mother and I don't care if the painter is young Elvis in a thong, it's not a pleasurable experience. I bet a hundred bucks Donald Margulies never did even 2 minutes of sitting naked for a painting.

I can't believe any female actor with an ounce of self-respect would choose that monologue, with its pre-1969 levels of female passivity and self-abasement. I'd have a hard time casting someone who picked it - I'd just automatically assume she's an idiot.

The monologue is not only obnoxious in itself, it is obnoxious because it encapsulates the mind-blowing irritation level of Sight Unseen, a play about the playwright's desire to be worshipped, especially by females, for his artistic importance and power. Donald Margulies admits in the latest issue of the Dramatists Guild magazine that Sight Unseen is a thinly disguised self-portrait. I'd lock that shit away, Dorian Gray.

The Patricia character isn't the only female who appreciates Jonathan the Important Painter. The other female in the play is an attractive German woman who is interviewing him about his art, and the importance of his art, to give the playwright a chance to wax philosophical on the importance of art. Not that he REALLY needs your goddam worship, thank you very much.

JONATHAN: What I am today? What am I today? I just got here. People like you suddenly care what I have to say.
GRETE: I do care.
JONATHAN: I know you do. It cracks me up that you do; it amuses me.

Women care so much about him and his art, and yet he doesn't care about their adulation. No, not really. He can live without it. Protest much, bitch?

The Patricia character doesn't merely worship Jonathan and his art though. By rejecting her, Jonathan has ruined her life. Thanks to Jonathan, Patricia had to marry an English guy she doesn't really desire. The only time they have hot sex is when Jonathan comes to visit, because his proximity turns Patricia into an animal.

Male critics, and most critics are male, adore this play, which is a big reason why it's considered an Important Play That We Can All Learn Something From. To get a sense of the gender divide, consider this item from a recent production. A rare female critic notes:

The final scene (the second flashback of the play), surely intended to be a poignant last look at love lost, feels unfinished in this production, leaving the audience confused, saying (as the woman sitting behind me did) "is that it?" at the end of the show.

The critic blames the director, but the problem is the script. I think the woman who said "is that it?" assumed incorrectly, because Patricia does get a few lines not explicitely about Jonathan's importance, that this is a play about their relationship. Oh no no no, woman in the audience. This play is the story of the godlike power and sexual attractiveness of the Great Man of the Arts, who can ruin women's lives forever with his indifference. The little men of the arts never tire of that story. And since we are trapped in a Patriarchy you can expect to see this play revived again and again.

Cheney's downtime demands

As featured on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and available at The Smoking Gun.

Am I the only one who's ever noticed this?

If you crossed Frank Burns from MASH with Senator Joseph McCarthy you get... Bill O'Reilly!

comic book about copyrights

Via Ann Bartow at Sivacracy

What the NYTimes can't say: "nasty ass military area"

In today's NYTimes article about Camp Nama yet another horrendous American torture site and another blot on this country's reputation, it says:

Some former task force members said the Nama in the camp's name stood for a coarse phrase that soldiers used to describe the compound. One Defense Department specialist recalled seeing pink blotches on detainees' clothing as well as red welts on their bodies, marks he learned later were inflicted by soldiers who used detainees as targets and called themselves the High Five Paintball Club.

It took me a few moments of Googling but according to a military person, a friend of members of a web site devoted to quilting of all things :

Due to security concerns, I don't go downtown too much, although I do make pretty frequent trips to neighboring compounds. I spent the night of my birthday at Camp NAMA (which stands for Nasty A$$ Military Area--named by a General). Like the name says, it is lacking in accomodations--all tents and portajohns and "Navy" showers.

If a quilting circle can handle "nasty a$$ military area" why can't the urban sophisticate readers of the NYTimes? Especially when the accounts of torture and abuse mentioned in the article are far more "coarse" than that phrase.

Manly Man Mansfield

Walter Kirn in the NYTimes has an awesome review of the book "Manliness" by Harvey C. "Manly" Mansfield

After a section on the history of "the great explosion of manliness that took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries"(an image that gives even me, a straight man, erotic chills), it's time for Mansfield to stop preheating the oven and cook up the geese he's already got trussed and cleaned: the feminists. Remember the feminists? These would be the late Betty Friedan and the even later Simone de Beauvoir, along with the somewhat more recent, but not very recent, Kate Millet, Germaine Greer and so on.

These thinkers are all somewhat different from one another, Mansfield carefully shows, but they also have something profound in common: they stole their best ideas, by and large, from two great men. From Marx they pilfered their economic theories. From Nietzsche they swiped their "nihilism." For Mansfield, nihilism is the idea that in a godless universe people are free to invent their own identities. At least I think that's what he means. Next to "manly," "nihilism" is Mansfield's favorite word, and it shows up in such a variety of contexts, attached to so many names and objects, that he might as well have rendered it as "X," as in: Simone de Beauvoir + all those other gals + the fact that they're female + the notion that "becoming manlike is a strange way of proving you are independent of men (ladylike would seem to be a better way)" = X.

You got served

The guys that do South Park are libertarian jerks, but I have to admit every now and then they do something great. "You Got F*cked in the Ass" from 2004 isn't an all-around great episode, like the immortal Underpants Gnomes episode or the anti-Scientology episode "Trapped in the Closet" but it has great moments, especially with the goths.

Stan: Hey guys. Uh. You guys know how to dance, right?

Tall Goth: [with cigarette] Of course we know how to dance.

Stan: Cool, because, there's this competition on Saturday, and I have to find the very best dancers in South Park to be on my crew. My friends can't do it because they suck ass, so, will you be in my dance troupe?

Red Goth: Dance troupe? Please. [leans to one side and whips his hair back into place] We don't dance like those Britney and Justin wannabes at school. [whips his hair back into place] Goth kids dance to express pain and suffering.

Tall Goth: Yeah. [stands up] The only cool way to dance is to keep your hands at your sides and your eyes looking at the ground. Then every three seconds you take a drag from your cigarette. [leans his head to the right for two beats, leans it to the left for two beats, leans it to the right for two beats while taking a drag, leans it to the left for two beats, repeats. The red Goth follows suit, then all four Goths dance the same way]

Stan: Okay, that'll work fine. Listen, there's a dance competition this Saturday and I need good dancers so I don't get served.

Red Goth: [flips his hair back] No way. Dancing is something you do alone in your room at three in the morning.

Stan: [walks up to the red Goth] Please, you guys, our whole town's reputation is at stake! Will any of you do it?

Red Goth: I'm not doin' it. Being in a dance group is totally conformist.

Henrietta: Yeah. I'm not conforming to some dance-off regulations.

Little Goth: I'm not doin' it either. I'm the biggest nonconformist of all.

Tall Goth: I'm such a nonconformist that I'm not going to conform with the rest of you. Okay, I'll do it. [rises and walks over to Stan]

Stan: Great! [they leave together]

Henrietta: Whoa. I think we just got put in our place.

Red Goth: Yeah. We just got Goth-served.

And now... it's on!

Book report: Adapting Minds

Just got Adapting Minds, Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature by David J. Buller, and so far so good.

Unfortunately, but not suprisingly, it hasn't captured the public's imagination the way many of the works of the Evolutionary Psychologists (Buller capitalizes the term) have but then that's always the advantage EP had - telling the public, in simplified "scientific" terms what it already believes about the true natures of men and women.

But what Buller lacks in user-friendly presentation he makes up for in his solid examination of the claims of evolutionary psychologists. I've only read a few chapters and already found refutations of EP that I hadn't considered, like the fact that much of the results of the celebrated female desire for males with status actually boils down to "status homogamy" - the tendency of people to mate with those in their own status group. He points out that it's very likely that studies have shown that women prefer high status men because the women studied, invariably white upper-class women in college, have high status themselves.

He criticizes the methodology of David Buss and confirms what I suspected but hadn't yet researched - that David Buss ignores cultural restrictions on female choice of mates. As Buller says:

...in a well-documented study, the anthropologist William Irons found that, among the Turkmen of Persia, males in the wealthier half of the population left 75 percent more offspring than males in the poorer half of the population. Buss cites several studies like this as indicating that "high status in men leads directly to increased sexual access to a larger number of women," and he implies that this is due to the greater desirability of high-status men (David Buss 1999 "Evolutionary Psychology the New Science of the Mind").

But, among the Turkmen, women were sold by their families into marriage. The reason that higher-status males enjoyed greater reproductive success among the Turkmen is that they were able to buy wives earlier and more often than lower-status males. Other studies that clearly demonstrate a reproductive advantage for high-status males are also studies of societies or circumstances in which males "traded" in women. This isn't evidence that high-status males enjoy greater reproductive success because women find them more desirable. Indeed, it isn't evidence of female preference at all, just as the fact that many harem-holding despots produced remarkable numbers of offspring is no evidence of their desirability to women. It is only evidence that when men have power they will use it to promote their reproductive success, among other things (and that women, under such circumstances, will prefer entering a harem to suffering the dire consequences of refusal).

The fact that Buss can't be bothered to account for virtual female slavery when proclaiming female choice is typical of the Evolutionary Psychologist approach. Their belief in the power of biology to control human behavior is so reflexive that they can't be bothered to consider even the most glaringly obvious cultural factors impacting their claims.

And those who claimed that all Lawrence Summers was doing was expressing an interesting theory on human nature are so incredibly short-sighted. Because Summers suggested "to provoke you" that women are mentally inferior to men in math and science, and that's the primary reason why women have lesser math/science careers than men.

This isn't just interesting scientific speculation. He was the president of Harvard and had some say in its hiring policies. That made it political, and feminists would be fools to refrain from fighting tooth and nail to prevent the flimsily-backed claims of Evolutionary Psychology from being allowed to excuse gender-based discrimination.

Permalink

...and the president you rode in on.

By way of Evil Li-brul Overlord >:D , Shakespeare's Sister has a great post on conservatives who are now trying to distance themselves from Bush.

And now that the hideous underbelly of conservatism is exposed in a grotesque mosaic of avarice, antipathy, and corruption, the movement conservatives, who happily regarded Bush as the water-carrier for their movement during this hog wild run toward heaven on earth, now want to distance themselves from him as if the revolting montage of carnage is the singular result of his dogmatic incompetence, instead of the culmination of a mob-directed feeding frenzy that it actually is. Well, fuck you and the president you rode in on.

Bush was your Golden Boy—a corporate shill with the demeanor of a country bumpkin, who could hold together the unholy alliance between Big Money and Big Religion, standing at the altar and giving the blessing to the crackpot marriage between the business interests who sought to get rich off the stupid sods who marched in lockstep if only someone would protect the children from radical feminists and kissing boys. He didn’t just give good speech on Neocon dreams and working class nightmares; he believed that shit. And with a GOP-led Congress and a neverending stream of media mouthpieces willing to demonize anyone who dared to dissent, he tumbled headfirst into fulfilling every last one of your wishes, like a demented genie pulled out of a bottle in oil-soaked Texas.

He wrapped himself in the flag and told America to follow him down the Yellow Brick Road. He went to war, and he made you rich. And you cheered him all the way, over every last golden cobblestone. Then America got to Oz, and started getting itchy—and now you want to pretend you never knew what was there. Why, we had no idea there was just some shriveled old man behind the curtain! Please.

This excerpt also gets bonus points for using a Wizard of Oz metaphor, which I intend to use myself when I create a web site devoted to the lawsuit involving my fight to protect my copyright, and my right to authorize derivative work - or to refuse to authorize derivative work - in the spirit of the savinsucks.com web site.

Fun Copyright Fact

This is from the US Copyright Office's Circular 14 Copyright Registration for Derivative Works

WHO MAY PREPARE A DERIVATIVE WORK?
Only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to prepare, or to authorize someone else to create, a new version of that work. The owner is generally the author or someone who has obtained rights from the author.

I have never authorized a derivative work for my play TAM LIN, so anybody who claims to have a copyright on such a derivative work has obtained it unlawfully.

anti-slavery.org

Find out which products you buy are produced by slave labor.

Unauthorized Copyright in Oz

Coming soon to this blog - my parody of the court case my partner Jonathan and I are embroiled in.
(After the case is over, of course.)

(image of Ozma of Oz c. 2006 by N.G. McClernan)

The New Republic has never heard of Tom Tomorrow

According to Noam Schreiber in the New Republic

The shrewdest observers of human nature in newsprint, such as Tierney's Times colleague David Brooks...

Reading this - thanks to great goddess Echidne for blogging about this first - caused me to burst into laughter because I remembered the classic Tom Tomorrow cartoon Mr. McBobo, the Intellectually Near-sighted pundit. The whole point of that cartoon was exactly how bad an observer of human nature Brooks actually is by comparing him to the literally near-sighted cartoon character Mr. Magoo.

Tom Tomorrow (aka Dan Perkins) should win the Pulitzer for that cartoon alone.

The fact that Noam Schreiber can make such a claim about David Brooks without a hint of irony proves he (and possibly the New Republic) are unfamiliar with This Modern World.

Oh Magoo, you've done it again!

---

Ooh! Blog-parasite bonus - Tom Tomorrow's blog has a video of right-winger John Derbyshire getting his ass kicked by Bruce Lee - for real.

Videos of anti-abortion protestors

Can be seen at atCenterNewtwork. No surprise here - the anti-abortion protestors haven't thought through the ramifications of making abortion illegal - like whether women who get illegal abortions should be prosecuted.

I have a whole bunch of videos of anti-abortion protestors of my own from the Cherry Hill Women's Center from the early 1990s. I'll have to start posting excerpts here soon.

I found this link via Pandagon.

Slavery denial

One thing that really bugs me is when the importance of slavery to the American Civil War is minimized or denied.

A good example of how that works is on an episode of "The Simpsons" when Apu is getting his citizenship.

Proctor: All right, here's your last question. What was the cause of the Civil War?
Apu: Actually, there were numerous causes. Aside from the obvious schism between the abolitionists and the anti-abolitionists, there were economic factors, both domestic and inter--
Proctor: Wait, wait... just say slavery.
Apu: Slavery it is, sir.

Cute, ain't it? But in fact, slavery it IS.

When Abraham Lincoln was elected president, South Carolina seceded, followed within two months by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas. They seceded because they feared Lincoln would free their slaves.

The Confederacy was formed Feb 9, 1861.

Then on April 12, 1861 the Confederacy attacked the United States of America at Fort Sumter, South Carolina.

If the Confederacy had won the civil war there is no doubt they would have preserved slavery - possibly even forcing slavery on formerly free states.

How interesting that the clear cause of Civil War - the desire of the South to preserve slavery - is constantly downplayed.

Could it have something to do with the fact that the state of Texas, a member of the Confederacy and to this day a deep Red state and a bastion of racism has so much control over textbooks?

According to the NYTimes, March 17, 1994:

Textbooks sales in Texas represent about 8 percent of the $2.2 billion national market for textbooks. The state is second only to California which represents about 12 percent. Texas is also one of 22 states in which government committees must approve all texts sold in the state. Because Texas controls such a large market share, publishers often develop texts to meet the standards set by its 15-member Board of Education and then market them nationwide.

I think there's very likely a connection there.

Growing up in the mid-Atlantic states, I never thought much about North-South differences. The Civil War was a hundred years before I was born - ancient history. I think many Northerners feel that way. Only recently have I come to realize just how much anti-Northern resentment there is in the South. (BTW, mute your computer's sound before you visit these links or be blasted with a hideous MIDI version of "Dixie.")

They're still bitter they lost the Civil War, and I think some Northerners try to make them feel better by downplaying the obvious - the South was the pro-slavery BAD GUYS in the Civil War and it's a great thing that the North won!

The Southerners can get over the Civil War by stop thinking of themselves as Southerners and start thinking of themselves as Americans.

Interesting article on slavery denial at blackprof.com which I found by way of Ann at Sivacracy.

Link changes

Delinking Majikthese - too many annoying guest bloggers, too worshipful of Daniel Dennett, anti-doggie steps and now two Oscar fashion posts. I'm out of there.

Linking - Americablog - brought us the Jeff Gannon/Guckart scandal.

On the ability to bring new life into the world

The problem with the discussion of abortion is that it has been entirely framed by the patriarchy. In the patriarchy's view, pregnancy is something that happens to female bodies, part of "nature" and once a female happens to become pregnant, her body belongs to the patriarchy.

And this is the enlightened view. In extreme patriarchy, even non-pregnant females are owned by the patriarchy - females are not permitted to decide when to have sex, much less when to become pregnant. In cultures that exist right now girls are sold into marriage and women cannot refuse to have sex with their husbands.

It is time for a new, holistic understanding of the female body - not a collection of organs in service of the patriarchy but a single entity with self-determination.

The fact that the actual process of growing a fetus is not a conscious action of will in no way invalidates the conscious will of the woman growing the fetus in her body.

Girls should be taught that the future of the human race is up to them. If they decide to get pregnant, and decide to grow a fetus to term, they are doing humanity a favor.

It is the woman's decision to grow life or deny life. If society wants another generation, we, as women, may decide to provide one if we can expect the proper amount of gratitude for undertaking such a body-sapping, time-consuming, sometimes even life-threatening project.

And as soon as enough women have wrested control of their lives from the patriarchy, that's how it will be. Which is why the patriarchy is terrified of both abortion and birth control.

Bush is Bad - the Musical

I saw Bush is Bad the Musical last night at the Triad Theatre (located on the upper West Side, aka Blue State Central) in New York and had a great time.

It's more a cabaret act than a musical in the traditional sense. The cast, Kate Baldwin, Neal Mayer and Michael McCoy perform a variety of tunes concering the evils of the Bush Administration. They also do impersonations - Michael McCoy does a good Bush and Baldwin was spot on as God - and the role gave her a chance to show off her impressive voice.

Highlights of the show include "Crazy Ann Coulter", "Culture of Life" and "Das Busch ist Schlect" (Schlect was done in the art song style of Robert Schumann.)

It was definitely a heartening experience to be in a room of people who get it - who understand just how crazy and radical the rightwing have become. And can laugh hysterically about it, in between moments of utter bafflement and outrage.

We're going back and taking a bunch of people from work with us.

How can 59 million people be so dumb? Of course these days even my mother, a conservative anti-abortion Catholic says she doesn't like Bush. If only the election could be held today (assuming the voting machines aren't tampered with.)

The Donald's latest solo

Not Trump, Donald Fagen of Steely Dan

He has a new album Morph the Cat coming out March 14. I pre-ordered at Amazon.

I wasn't a huge fan of the latest Dan record Everything Must Go, but the one before, Two Against Nature had, for my money, two songs that stand up to the best of old tyme Steely Dan: the title track and Jack of Speed.

Fagen/Becker (Walter Becker) are one of my favorite songwriting duos, along with Lennon/McCartney and Flansburgh/Linnell (They Might Be Giants).

I definitely prefer Donald to Walter though. Mainly because none of Becker's solo work has ever grabbed me, and the man's voice is nothing to rave about either. But if Fagen had never done anything else musically, he should be revered for the sci-fi ironic-patriotic electro-pop subversive supermarket masterpiece that is IGY (International Geophysical Year) from Fagen's first solo album way back when in '82, The Nightfly. Hearing the opening synthesizer of IGY, especially in the supermarket, always makes me perk up in anticipation. The very fact that you can experience such smooth and knowing irony in a supermarket makes the world seem like a fun and funky place, if only for a moment.

Also, Walter Becker has a sort of leering old sleezy uncle persona, whereas Donald Fagen has a far more appealing resigned-to-life's disappointments uncle persona.

I had to laugh at Fagen's reply in this week's Time Out New York interview when asked if any of his songs were optimistic:

I think they're all optimistic in the sense that I wrote a song. In other words, if I didn't write any songs, that would really be pessimistic. The fact that I wrote the song and took time to do the arrangement, got the musicians to show up on time, arranged to pay them somehow, went out on tour, played for people, charged money and stuff like that - that's really optimistic.

And I am optimistic that I'm going to like Morph the Cat.

But it would be hard for anybody to match the excellence of songs like Time Out of Mind, Sign in Stranger, Boddhisatva, My Old School or IGY.

If you haven't heard IGY, go listen to it at your earliest convenience. Amazon has a snippet that doesn't do it justice. The lyrics alone don't do it justice either, but they're still fun to type.

Standing tough under stars and stripes
We can tell
This dream's in sight
You've got to admit it
At this point in time that it's clear
The future looks bright
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
Well by seventy-six we'll be A.O.K.

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

Get your ticket to that wheel in space
While there's time
The fix is in
You'll be a witness to that game of chance in the sky
You know we've got to win
Here at home we'll play in the city
Powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world
There'll be spandex jackets one for everyone

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
(More leisure time for artists everywhere)
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We'll be clean when their work is done
We'll be eternally free yes and eternally young

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

Banyantrees.net for the hard-core Dan fan

Watch Donald and Walter do Taxicab Confessions.

People who feel are just not cool

Many people with at least some education are familiar with Horace Walpole's saying

Life is a tragedy for those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.

And they all take a single meaning out of it - people who feel do not think.

That's why it's so terribly chic to laugh at violence and cruelty.

Ben Brantley swoons for the manliest man playwright

Ben Brantley:

Theatergoers familiar with Mr. McDonagh's work (which includes the Tony-nominated "Pillowman" and "Beauty Queen of Leenane") are by now used to the acts of torture, humiliation and interfamilial skull bashing that figure in his work. But with "Lieutenant," directed with a steady gaze and acute theatrical instinct by Wilson Milam, Mr. McDonagh raises the carnage factor to a level that rivals Quentin Tarantino's.

Unlike Mr. Tarantino, Mr. McDonagh isn't trying to elicit the poetry in surreally stylized violence or the aesthetic content in shades of red. There's nothing pretty about the gruesome mess in which these gun- and razor-toting characters, members of splintered splinter groups of the Irish Republican Army, find themselves. And they seem to regard as merely mundane the abominations they commit in the name of causes they can't always remember. But they might as well face it, they're addicted to blood. So, this play suggests with devilish obliqueness, are we.

Well there you have it. McDonagh writes stuff with torture and humiliation, but he doesn't do it in the service of something greater like that wimp Tarantino. He does it for the sheer fun because "we" are addicted to blood.

Damn I hate it when critics presume to speak for me.

But since critics long for manly men playwrights to rescue theatre from the dangers of kindliness, aestetics and other feminine foolishness it's only a matter of time before McDonagh gets a Tony or a Pulitzer.

The New Yorker, predictably has already written a Great Man of the Arts profile of McDonagh.

You go, Sarah Vowell

I haven't paid attention much to Sarah Vowell, although everything I've heard about her sounded good, and I enjoyed her commentary on the documentary about They Might Be Giants, A Tale of Two Johns.

Well now I know why she makes a living as a writer. I've been reading her guest op-eds in the NYTimes and she is very good. And look, MoDo! Another woman who can opine on a regular basis! This goes against your and Gail Collins's belief that, as Gail said: "There are probably fewer women, in the great cosmic scheme of things, who feel comfortable writing very straight opinion stuff, and they're less comfortable hearing something on the news and batting something out."

If this keeps up, Collins might have to give up her evolutionary psychology-informed understanding of female nature.

Vowell is not only good, she's distinctive, if her Times pieces are any indication. For the past two weeks she's finished up her guest op-ed columns, both hearty and satisfying indictments of the Bush Administration with paragraphs that clang and resonate with the force of a big mofo Chinese gong.

Last week's column is The Pessimism Deficit and its final paragraph reads:

Alas, I see my initial worries about the current administration as the greatest betrayal in my whole life by my old pal pessimism. I attended the president's inauguration in 2001. When he took the presidential oath, I cried. What was I so afraid of? I was weeping because I was terrified that the new president would wreck the economy and muck up my drinking water. Isn't that adorable? I lacked the pessimistic imagination to dread that tens of thousands of human beings would be spied on or maimed or tortured or killed or stranded or drowned, thanks to his incompetence.

This week's column, When Bush Falls In Love has an even stronger finish:

Bonhomie, as our ex-cronies the French call it, should have its limits. Seems as if American voters picked the current president because they thought he'd be a fun hang at a cookout — a jokey neighbor who charred a mean burger and is good at playing Frisbee with his dog. What we should be doing is electing a president with the nitpicky paranoia you'd use to choose a cardiologist — a stunted conversationalist with dark-circled eyes and paper-cut fingertips who will stay up until 3 tearing into medical journals in five languages trying to figure out how to save your life.

Watch Sarah Vowell on the Daily Show here. She discusses her op-eds.

Stupid or Lying? John Tierney edition

Tierney:

(Lawrence Summers) great gaffe on campus was suggesting that bias by patriarchal white men might not be the only reason for the shortage of women professors in science and math. After making the ritual genuflections to discrimination, he dared to note that there are many more men who score at the upper extreme (and the lower extreme) on math tests.

This will come as no surprise to the high school students who have taken the math part of the SAT, a test in which there are three boys in the top percentile for every girl. Perhaps a few of these students will now wonder how much intellectual stimulation they'll get at a university where inconvenient facts are taboo. But most of them will probably be happy to go there just because it's Harvard.

As so often happens with right-wingers, the response to these statements is "is he stupid or lying?"

Anybody who has paid 5 minutes of attention knows that Summers's gaffe wasn't saying that "bias by patriarchal white men might not be the only reason for the shortage of women professors in science and math" and noting that men as a group scored better than women in math.

The gaffe was that Summers said that biologically-based mental inferiority was the most important factor in the lesser math/science careers of women.

Perhaps it's a reading comprehension problem that so few commentators understand what Summers said. Siva sets Eric Alterman straight over at Sivacracy.

Here's the exact quote from 'Remarks at NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce':

So my best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.

What Summers says is that socialization and discrimination are LESSER FACTORS than evolutionarily-endowed female inability to do math and science.

Imagine for a moment that Summers said that biological differences were the cause of fewer black men in math and science. How many liberals - and even conservatives - would have a problem with that, I wonder?

The difference between evolutionary psychology, of which Lawrence Summers, Steven Pinker, John Tierney, David Brooks, Maureen Dowd are populizers, and modern racism is not basic proof, it's focus.

Both the proud racists of American Renaissance and evolutionary psychologists agree that a group's vocational achievement and test scores are clear indications of innate, biologically-endowed abilities of the members of that group.

The only difference is that American Renaissance uses these indicators to claim both gender AND racial inferiority, but the evolutionary psychologists only apply them to gender.

As a conservative John Tierney gives the game away. Neither Summers nor his critics said anything about white men. There was nothing about race involved in this particular controversy. But since Tierney is not an evolutionary psychology insider, he hasn't gotten the message that while it's politically correct to say that women have a biologically-based mental inferiority to men, it is not EP PC to say that blacks are mentally inferior to whites.

In a review of Steven Pinker's Blank Slate, AmRen complains that Pinker won't apply his theories to race:

Prof. Pinker is firm and clear about the “inherent” or “innate” characteristics and behavior of human beings—human nature — that exist before anyone has a chance to scribble on the blank slate. Not only aggression and sexual differences but also intelligence he acknowledges to be in large part genetically grounded, but on the Big Taboo—race—he is vague and even contradictory.

He endorses the environmentalist theories of the origins of civilization of Jared Diamond and Thomas Sowell as opposed to racial ones, and tells us that “My own view … is that in the case of the most discussed racial difference—the black-white IQ gap in the United States—the current evidence does not call for a genetic explanation.” Yet, six pages later, he tells us that “… there is now ample evidence that intelligence is a stable property of an individual, that it can be linked to features of the brain (including overall size, amount of gray matter in the frontal lobes, speed of neural conduction, and metabolism of cerebral glucose), that it is partly heritable among individuals, and that it predicts some of the variations in life outcomes such as income and social status.” Combined with the different scores of blacks and whites on IQ tests, of course, this implies that the “most discussed racial difference” has a significantly genetic and not an environmentalist explanation.

I think AmRen may have a point. Why can't the innate mental properties that both they and Pinker believe are indicated by test scores be applied to race as well as gender?

Pinker, Summers and the rest hope that if they ignore the racist uses of evolutionary psychology it will go away. But it won't - and the evolutionary psychologists may ultimately find their greatest political champions, possibly even the source of most of their research funding, from racists.

Screw ethics, this is theatre

I have to go see my friend Bruce Barton perform tonight in a play by David Foley. I always enjoy Bruce's performances, but I'm pissed that I have to see a play by the author of The Last Days of Madalyn Murray O'Hair, In Exile. The play presents O'Hair as a crook. The summary on Theatremania says

a comic fantasy that imagines a different fate for the notorious atheist activist who, in real life, disappeared several years ago under a shroud of mystery and speculation. In this version, after having embezzled millions of dollars from her own organization American Atheists, Madalyn has fled America and is holed up on a South Seas island with her son and granddaughter. As she waits for the embezzled funds to come through, she is visited by ghosts from her past and feted by the island natives. Old scores are settled, romance blooms, and transformations are undergone as the play moves toward an unexpected finale.

What actually happened was that O'Hair, her son and granddaughter were kidnapped and brutally murdered.

But if you think that horrific reality is going to stop a jolly smearing of a person's character, well, you don't know the theatre world very well.

Lest you scoff at my concerns that this play be taken as the truth about O'Hair, consider this web page at rotten.com which uses one of the publicity shots for the play to represent O'Hair. (The first picture.) Nowhere in the article is it revealed that the photo is NOT O'Hair.

What we have here is a case of Foley using O'Hair's name recognition, and the scandal of her disappearance to garner interest in his play.

This situation is somewhat like what Doug Wright did in his play Quills, but in reverse. Whereas Wright portrayed the rapist Marquis de Sade as a hero of free expression, Foley is helping to smear the reputation of a woman, who, as one of the most famous American atheists in a religion-loving country, is already well-hated. Her own son, the born-again one, says of her "My mother was not just Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the atheist leader. She was an evil person who led many to hell."

As Foley admitted in an email to me in 2003:

I wrote the play before anyone knew what had happened to the O'Hairs, but even then I never intended a historically accurate account of Madalyn Murray O'Hair. That's not a playwright's job. I wanted instead to address seriously - though perhaps in "zany" theatrical terms - the discussion that O'Hair helped spark in this country and which is still going on.

Foley admits to using O'Hair's notariety for his own purposes. Which may have been OK, except that the actual horrendous details of her last days became known before the 2003 production of the play. But inconvenient facts can't stand in the way of publicity. He could have changed the names of the characters and still addressed "the discussion that O'Hair helped spark in this country and is still going in." But of course he would not, because getting people to come out and see The Last Days of Jane Doe, In Exile would be much more difficult.

And anyway, playwrights needn't be concerned about facts, Foley self-servingly proclaims.

Portraying O'Hair's mythological absconding to a tropical island, however zany its theatrical terms, comes nowhere near addressing the true "discussion" that O'Hair sparked. But maybe it's a good sign that Foley wants to believe such things. Maybe it's proof that he does have a sense of ethics, which needs to be buried under a truckload of theatre marketing copy bullshit.

Al Franken's friend is a right-wing idiot

I've loved Al Franken ever since he wrote "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, and other observations." He wrote it at a time when most liberals were still oblivious to just how evil and pervasive the right-wing media had become.

Al Franken is a sentimental guy, though. He cries virtually any time he talks about his father. Old ties are important to him. Which is why he remains friends with the thoroughly repugnant Mark Luther.

I listen to Al Franken's radio show every day. I always turn off the radio while Mark Luther is on, because listening to him always causes me to go into a rage over his stupidity and obnoxiousness. I made the mistake of leaving the radio on today when he was on, so I was treated to hearing him accuse people who object to the Dubai port deal of racism. He believes this because Rush Limbaugh said so.

To have Rush Limbaugh accuse anybody of racism is the most spectacular absurdity. Rush Limbaugh is a famous racist. He claimed that Arabs shit themselves. He was fired as a sports commentator for his racism. I personally witnessed his racism when I watched his TV show back in the early 90s. It was about homelessness, and they interviewed only black people to ask them if they would move to a city that was offering free housing to homeless people. Mind you, none of the black people were identified as homeless, and one of the interviewees was a well-spoken guy in a business suit. The assumption was that homelessness = stubborn black people who won't take free housing in a new city. I was astounded at this mendacious technique - to promote racist attitudes without actually saying anything racist aloud.

Limbaugh also used this non-verbal technique when he said "there's a White House Dog" and showed a picture of then-12-year-old Chelsea Clinton.

Even a right-winger should be utterly repelled by Rush Limbaugh after such an incident. To still admire Rush Limbaugh after such a stunt is to admit that you have no values whatsoever.

Rush Limbaugh is a documented racist, a liar, a bully, a smear-meister and a world-class hypocrite. To worship him is to worship evil incarnate. And that is what Mark Luther, Al Franken's friend, does. Mark Luther worships evil.

Why? Because Mark Luther is stupid and doesn't understand the complex world we live in. Stupid people rarely realize they're stupid, and so Luther feels that the real problem is that there's something tricksy going on behind his back. He doesn't understand it, and he fears it, so he looks to a thug like Limbaugh to protect him from the incomprehensible tricksiness. You can hear Luther's fears in the whiny undertone of his voice. He has decided that the world is unfairly tricksy, and needs somebody to blame. Rush will be happy to supply candidates for blame, regardless of logical considerations.

Al Franken has compassion for stupid people, and besides, he and Luther go way back.

But Al - Mark Luther isn't your friend. If you and he and Rush Limbaugh were in a sinking lifeboat together and he could only save one person he would save Rush Limbaugh.

He was once your friend, Al, because you had common cause. You were both against the war in Vietnam. You were against it because it was morally wrong, Luther was against it because he was worried about being sent there and getting killed.

It's time to face reality Al - he's a whiny, stupid, self-centered creep who worships evil. To give him a forum for his stupidity is to aid evil. He pretends to be your friend because you're a celebrity, and his association with you can only help him, especially with female ditto-heads. He's using you, and he isn't worthy of your consideration.

Cut him loose Al!

New York Songlines

A super cool web site If you love New York you'll love this site.

I love me some Alec Baldwin

Here he is in the Huffington Post:

"Cheney is a terrorist. He terrorizes our enemies abroad and innocent citizens here at home indiscriminately. Who ever thought Harry Whittington would be the answer to America's prayers. Finally, someone who might get that lying, thieving Cheney into a courtroom to answer some direct questions."

I tried to get to see him in Roundabout Theatre's Entertaining Mr. Sloan but there are no tickets to be had for this show. At all.

Buh-bye Larry

Harvard says Summers resigns as president

Summers, whose brusque management style has won both praise and contempt, sparked controversy last year when he said innate differences between men and women may help explain why so few women work in the academic sciences.

He has since apologized repeatedly for his remarks.

But the abrupt resignation of the arts and sciences dean William Kirby, on January 27 deepened opposition against him. Several faculty have accused Summers of pushing Kirby out and called for his resignation at a faculty meeting this month.

"The university has been in a state of paralysis. I've never seen anything like this before," Farish A. Jenkins Jr., a Harvard zoology professor, told Reuters.

"Harvard can't be run by one man. It is a collaborative enterprise with many fine people," said Jenkins, one of a dozen professors who confronted Summers at a faculty meeting this month and suggested that he step down or be fired.

Following an expected yearlong sabbatical, Summers will return to Harvard as a professor in economics, public policy, and international affairs, the university said.

What, he isn't going to be a professor of evolutionary biology? But he claims to know so much about women's biological natures!

einhornsucks.com

The web site savinsucks.com is a great tribute to the First Amendment.

It also happens to be a demonstration of the way David Einhorn, of Anderson, Kill & Olick, P.C., embarrassed himself in his attempt to use the Lanham Act to punish free speech.

And now he's trying to do it again. David Einhorn is representing his brother, Edward Einhorn, in his claim that by the mere fact that Edward was involved in my play, TAM LIN, I therefore owe him credit and licensing rights over the play for eternity.

Although the Einhorns think that they're going to get big bucks out of us for "violating" Edward's "copyright" they nevertheless are not happy about being publicly connected to this case (Edward refused to be interviewed for the NYTimes article) and for good reason - they risk ending up as pariahs in the theatre world. For if they succeeded in their case it would have a chilling effect on American theatre.

But any "metastuffing" that anybody could do is nothing compared to Edward Einhorn's connecting himself to the case publicly by writing a letter to the Wall Street Journal about the case.

My partner, Jonathan Flagg, has a response to Edward Einhorn's fantastical claims:

Since filing suit in October 2005, Edward Einhorn has done his best to spread an incorrect version of his case – resorting to all manner of misinformation, presumably in an attempt to garner sympathy. Neither the facts nor the law support his viewpoint; he therefore hopes to apply pressure by influencing public opinion. While Einhorn’s misstatements are too numerous to list, we will address some of the most grievous. Einhorn’s quotes are taken from his blog entry on the Wall Street Journal (http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2006/01/30/off-off-broadway-and-into-federal-court) and his letter to the editor in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/arts/12alsmail.html).

Einhorn Claims:

“A fee was agreed to, in writing….” And “I was never paid the promised fee” (He claims $1000.)

But Actually:

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan wrote in his February 7, 2006 order dismissing Einhorn’s promissory estoppel claim, “that aspect of the complaint clearly is without merit. There was no clear and unambiguous promise to pay Einhorn $1,000, regardless of what happened….”

Einhorn Claims:

“I do not wish or expect $3 million, which is a number derived from the maximum potentially allowed. I merely ask that I get a reasonable amount for my work as a director….”

But Actually:

Einhorn seeks damages that are many times more than the maximum the law allows, even if he were eligible for statutory damages, which he is not. As William Patry points out in his copyright blog (http://williampatry.blogspot.com/2006/01/copyright-in-stage-directions.html), “statutory damages are awarded per work, not infringement.” Edward Einhorn’s brother/attorney/business partner, David Einhorn, should know this well, as the chairman of the intellectual property group for Anderson, Kill & Olick, P.C.

Einhorn Claims:

“I felt I had no choice but to sue Ms. McClernan and Mr. Flagg, partly based on their theft of my intellectual property.”

But Actually:

A theft has occurred, but Einhorn is the thief. There is a similarity between the blocking script (which Einhorn registered two months after the show closed) and video of the 2004 production, and with good reason. Einhorn wrote his blocking script after he left the production, based on these video tapes. His script was reverse engineered from our work, not his. This will be proven during trial with video tape taken during rehearsals that Einhorn directed. These videos show very different blocking.

Einhorn compounded this fraud by stating that he had Nancy McClernan’s permission to create the blocking script on his application to the United States Copyright Office. (The original author’s permission is required to register a derivative work.) No such permission was ever granted. But most grievously, Einhorn seeks to block Nancy McClernan from having her play produced ever again without his permission.

This case is nothing more than an extreme abuse of the legal system. It shows how someone with an attorney-brother, can file copyright registrations and complaints with no evidence and no basis in law. Most individuals and small companies simply cannot afford the high cost of legal fees. They are forced by financial circumstance to quickly settle, surrendering their rights and money to these thieves. Fortunately, the vast majority of attorneys would never file such a frivolous and fraudulent case; doing so is prohibited by the rules of civil procedure. We will be moving to seek a ruling from Judge Kaplan that Anderson, Kill & Olick, P.C. violated these rules. Our attorney, Toby M.J. Butterfield of Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard LLP is currently preparing a Rule 11 Motion to that effect. We are fully committed to defending this case in trial until our rights are fully vindicated.