Oh, hi. I’ve neglected to update the internet on my thoughts recently, and for that I apologize. But it’s just that I’ve been busy writing words about things elsewhere. If you are interested in those words, please read them over here and over here too. Oh, wait, here also. Also, check out my new widgetbox.
Via the Daily News.
Eons ago, I worked for Carl as a scheduler and community liaison. I learned a lot on the job, about people, about Brooklyn, about race, and about being in the workforce; but since I had that job I’ve learned that people are certainly not always as ridiculous in Daily News headlines as my former employer.
The Albany Times Union adds a great detail: “His departure comes amid an Inspector General’s Office investigation of his alleged improper contact with the chairman of the State Liquor Authority Dan Boyle, who has publicly complained that Andrews attempted to intimidate him in connection with a regulatory matter.”
This email from Newsmax is a travesty.
Yes we did!
This is a great flashback from the 1960s Batman TV series - quite apropos to our current president campaigns. The Penguin debates Batman for a shot at being mayor. Penguin alleges that Batman consorts with criminals, while he, of course, is always on the right side of the law. Sounds vaguely familiar.
My latest musical obsession, set to a weird animation.
It’s television like this that makes me really happy. Colbert goes after one thing that really got me last week: Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s denial that anyone responsible for Justice Department wrongdoing in the improper hiring practices scandal deserves actual punishment.
Mr. Mukasey told the American Bar Association that he did not see any crimes to prosecute. “Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime,” he said. In any case, the wrongdoers have been punished, he claimed, by “substantial negative publicity.”
This didn’t get much play outside the echo chamber, but Colbert tackles it in “The Word,” which is my favorite of his satirical musings. He then goes after oil speculating and an industry that is demanding more than the 68 million acres of off shore drilling leases they already have rather than invest in alternative energy via a three card monty game he plays with himself.
This is award winning lady porn if I ever saw it. Thanks to Weeds for pushing the boundaries. Also, for letting the ladies (and gents) all over the world contemplate this beautiful image… a couple times a day.
I’m about two years too late, but I just watched American Hardcore. Coming on the heels of my recent obsession with Century of the Self and anti-consumerism, it sort of got me riled up. Yet, at the same time of course, I’m writing a luxury shopping guide. Sigh.
Anyway, it got me thinking about how cultural and political movements happen, and how the left always seems to get their best achievements wrested from their control, swallowed, chewed up and sold back to them at a premium.
The left of the 60’s brought us a sense of sexual freedom and individual choice that now pervades every car and detergent commercial thrown at us (18-20 minutes of them per hour, actually).
With hardcore, a solid underground movement built from the ground up, only to leave us with hair metal and scantily clad groupies on the other end. I suppose that’s a pesimistic viewpoint, and I don’t mean to denigrate the influence that hardcore has had on music. I still love it and listen to it frequently, I’m just a bit nosalgic for the idealism I once had about social and political progress.
It’s raining really hard today and I started thinking about Travis Bickle. You know, from Taxi Driver. (By the way, if you live in New York and haven’t seen that movie, please go jump in the river.) Bickle’s oft quoted line is prescient in a way.
All the animals come out at night - whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.
Did I miss it? It might have happened while I was in college, or at least it’s final push. It wasn’t rain, it was money, and it turned New York from a middle and lower class cesspool of violence and art to this shimmery new city and now there’s all these nice people who live here. It’s easy to have a faux nostalgia about old New York, because we’ve spent the last 15 years glamorizing it. I sometimes wish that we could turn back the clocks, if only to return to a time that was far more honest and lacked the doublespeak we are currently spoonfed. I also think the real estate market will do that for us. But I also like walking home by myself at night, for which I sometimes dress inappropriately.
