It’s come to our attention that the readership is experiencing a great yawning gap in their psyches since the cartoons went on hiatus. Both of them have said that they suffer from a crying need. I was so moved by their pleas that I could help but think, if you want something to cry about I’ll give you something to cry about.
Rather than go out and find a few cartoons we’ve decided to undertake a summer project. In the next couple of months Dr. Random will prepare a series of short films about biodiversity. His first undertaking appears below and as a matter of introduction he writes -
For years, the endangered manatee has struggled to survive through it’s dense urban jungles composed of the suburbs. Some have resorted to drastic measures, such as joining organizations such as the Masonics for funding. Here, we see one that has been instructed by it’s secret Illuminati managers to conduct the dance to bring fortune upon itself in it’s wildlife habitat.
From our Make Hay While the Sun Shines/Do Your Best Business on Main Street Dept -
Today we honor America by honoring the entrepreneurial spirit that made our country great. While selling fireworks is not allowed in the city of Seattle it is legal to sell them in unincorporated King County. Unincorporated King County is just a few blocks away and that’s where Dr. Random shot some video of this “op n all nite” (sic) fireworks stand.
Tomorrow is the 4th of July. Thankfully there’s been enough good weather as of late which meant that I could finally get our Montgomery-Ward above-ground pool in good working order. There’s nothing Mom (Above 7/4/07) likes more than spending Independence Day pool side, the smell of chlorine wafting up between her toes.
While she lounges about I’ll be firing up the grill and boring the family with the tale of how Uncle Gus got even with Helsinki Helen at the 1938 Telluride 4th of July town picnic.
Enjoy your holiday and we’ll be here all weekend if you need us.
“If the pilot’s good, see, I mean if he’s reeeally sharp, he can barrel that baby in so low… oh you oughta see it sometime. It’s a sight. A big plane like a ‘52… varrrooom! Its jet exhaust… frying chickens in the barnyard! ” - General Buck Turgidson
One of the ongoing concerns for those of us who try to keep our hispter credentials in order as we sail through middle years revolves around how and when to make obscure references WRT current events. One of those challenges presented itself yesterday when Seattle’s mayor went on tv to say that after 41 years the city’s pro basketball franchise was leaving town. Hot on the heels of the announcement panic gripped the local media and just about no one else. Well, almost no one else since the people who take the time to phone the sports talk shows on the radio were so spooked they were ready to gnaw their own legs off. One caller just kept repeating, “Not with a bang but a whimper, not with a bang but a whimper.”
Hey T.S. Eliot - not bad, and no, I’m not disappointed. Given the medium and the audience that’s a pretty good obscure reference. Luckily for me two thing came together which were right in my wheelhouse. First several local media outlets were asking the question, “Will the fans forgive the Sonics ownership for moving out of town?” Having seen that I got in the car and caught up with the June 22nd episode of Philosophy Bites which was all about Jacque Derridas’s concept of forgiveness. Host Nigel Warburton and guest Robert Rowland Smith decided to forego the usual discussion of deconstruction in favor of one J-D’s lesser known ideas.
Long story short - Derrida was thought that forgiveness was more than just a little overused. He thought that the small acts were forgive were probably not big enough to be worthy of forgiveness in the first place. Therefore if your dog, Scruffy eats the unfinished portion of your sandwich you might forgive him, but for what? Shouldn’t forgiveness be reserved for acts so massive that we can barely get our mind wrapped around. Instead of wondering whether or not we should forgive Scruffy, should we wonder if we could have forgiven say … Pol Pot?
And given that can we then truly forgive the Sonics ownership for moving the team to the modern city-state of Athens that is Oklahoma City?
Feel free to figure that one out for yourself.
I’m only here to keep my hipster credentials in order.
It really doesn’t make any difference to me. While I watch a ridiculous amount of baseball and football, I have never been able to watch a basketball game for long than 20 seconds. Also - at other times and on various other incarnations of this page I’ve gone on and on and on and on about how Seattle is the ideal post-modernist sports city so I won’t bother you with that again. But I will take a second to say that when the sports leagues and their owners cry poverty I am always reminded of how some interviewers will get them to start talking revenues and once you get the owners and commissioners talking that’s when the fun starts. Once they get all caught up talking about how the broadcast and merchandise revenues allow them to roll around naked and sweaty in great piles of cash the suddenly stop and cath themselves. Then like General Turgidson they realize they’ve said too much.
The better question to ask in all of this is, what must it be like to be Howard Schultz this week?
Q: Is it now over? Are the Sonics now certain to make the move to Oklahoma City?
A: No. It is far from over. Howard Schultz, the Starbucks CEO who sold the Sonics to the Oklahoma City group in July 2006, is still trying to stop the move in a lawsuit he filed against Clay Bennett and his Professional Basketball Club LLC. Schultz and his attorney, Richard Yarmuth, charge that Bennett “fraudulently induced” the sale with dishonest promises to try to keep the team in Seattle. They want a court order that would undo the sale and allow a sale to an “honest buyer” who would keep the team in Seattle.
It’s an unusual legal action, but it may work. Even though Schultz and Yarmuth deliberately stayed out of the settlement discussions, the possibility of their success is important enough that it is described on the first page of the five-page settlement agreement between the city and Bennett.
The agreement makes specific provisions for what would happen if Schultz succeeds. It provides that if Schultz forces a sale that would return the team to Seattle, Bennett would be entitled to a refund of $22.5 million for each season should his investment group lose the pending lawsuit. Under such a scenario, the city must pay Bennett, the agreement provides, within five days of the “first home game played in Key Arena.”
Schultz’s lawsuit and the settlement offer the possible scenario of the Sonics playing a season in Oklahoma City and then, as the result of a court action, returning to Seattle for the 2009-10 season.
Earlier in the week Mr. Schultz announced that he was closing 600 of his underperforming coffee shops. Given the total number of Starbuck in the US closing that many is like saying, “Oh Scruffy this cheap flea collar we got you ain’t working is it? No it’s not!”
Which is why I’d tell the mayor that before he asks the legislature for taxing authority to build improve Key Arena he should put his ear to the ground and hear what the voters are saying. Because if he did he’d hear them ask the burning question - will there be a Starbucks closure in my neighborhood?
God knows here in the ‘hood the one in Jefferson Square by the Safeway is considered dead man walking.
So should we get basketball back?
On that I’ll yield to the wisdom of our local philosopher who said, oh well whatever…
“Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.” - Marshall McLuhan
From our Pet Theories Dept. -
Excessive, or at least constantly repetitive, parody of a given subject is very cargo cult. By constantly conjuring up your demons you try to create a homeopathic dose of those things that vex you. In modernist terms - parody is the sublimation through creative form of those things or people who dominate your life in an endless amount of small ways.
Sorry - didn’t mean to go all Hegel on your ass this early on a Sunday morning.
Last night Lorne Michael’s aired the first-ever installment of Saturday Night Live as a tribute to that program’s first host, George Carlin. Sitting down to watch this now 33 year-old episode you can’t help but notice how much of it is taken up with parodies of tv commercials. Years ago Prof. Astrolabe and I were of the opinion that commercial parodies were just lazy writing. Rather than put your back into a sketch or the creation of a character you could just go for a quick and dirty cheap laugh in 30 seconds.
Some people think that our theorizing broke up what Prof. A called our “garage band equivalent of a real comedy troupe.” But we believe it broke up because we got sick and tired of being the only ones who did the actual writing, editing, production, promotion, hectoring, folding, spindling. and mutilating.
Oh callow youth.
Examined via the McLuhan quote - those commercial parodies show a fundamental shift in perception. The parents of the Baby Boomers parodied the powerful and the famous. Now their children parodied the ads that ran during the presentation of the previous generation’s creative output. More importantly it showed the Boomers were vexed by the interiors of what they’d been shown. Which is why the 70s were the golden age of all things self-reverential.
And yeah, the drugs probably helped.
Which is why it’s a little embarrassing to think back to how many times you laughed at SNL during its first incarnation given that marijuana’s potency is so much higher today.
But enough of all that.
I don’t want to dwell on this, but George Carlin died this week which is why Mr. Michaels picked the pilot episode to air last night. It was deeply disappointing to see how many people paid tribute to Mr. Carlin by simply smearing a bunch of bad wurds around a blog post. It misses the larger picture that Carlin’s career trajectory as a comedian was only matched by Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut. All three went from being silly and fun to being very dark and despairing of the human condition at the end of their lives. Last night you could see the one of the earlier versions of Carlin’s baseball vs. football bit which was very different from the video clips that went around this week where Mr. C says we’re all the victims of the rich and powerful. The latter is not delivered as a mean to chase away the demons who vex, it is delivered as Old Testament style prophecy spoken by a very weary man.
As a side note - last night was the first time I’d ever seen this episode of SNL. When it originally aired I was very busy doing my undergraduate work testing the effects of America’s Fine Light Beer on coeds. Over the years I’d only seen bits and pieces of this one. Despite having missed the show when it first ran I consider myself fortunate that this moment of pure genius has been aired time and time again.
“Literary works are peculiarly portable. They can be lifted from one interpretative situation to another, and may change their meaning in the course of this migration. Waiting for Godot as performed in San Quentin prison is not quite the same play as Peter Hall’s first London production. We cannot simply put Auschwitz out of our minds while watching The Merchant of Venice. Writerly meaning does not always trump readerly meaning. Walter Benjamin believed that works of literature secreted certain meanings which might be released only in their afterlife, as they came to be read in as yet unforeseeable situations. He thought much the same about history in general. The past itself is alterable, since the future casts it in a new light.” - Terry Eagleton
“Even if you never met him, you know this guy. He’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.” - Karl Rove
“Don’t worry, boys, we’ll weather this storm of approval and come out as hated as ever.” - Saul Alinsky
The tent pole holding up the legend of James Jesus Angleton clearly states that every afternoon after lunch J-J would lock himself in his office, make himself a pitcher of martinis and chain smoke while he snatched small pieces of info out of the air in order to see if America’s intelligence network had been compromised. Except for the spy part it sure sounds like a fun job and one that - in a very roundabout way - I do for all of you.
Or did.
As some of you noticed I took last week off Which lead to no odd fact been grasped here or snatched there for Angletonian analysis. In fact things got more than a little lax in the snatch department which can lead things to get pretty tense. Or at least that’s what my Uncle Gus used to say and Prof. Astrolabe assures me is still true.
So let’s see what we can do about that shall we?
The collective consciousness of the Movement Conservatives (MooCons) is expressed through the more popular radio talk shows. Setting aside the medium for a second we know that these talk shows will never be mistaken for literature as Mr. Eagleton defines it in the above quote. Until very recently talk show topicality was so consistent, repetitive,and unchanging that it bordered on being an archetype that could even be represented visually.
But lately some of you have had reason to doubt the unswerving nature of the MoCon consciousness and with good reason. First Rachel Ray goes out in public wearing an old dish towel around her neck and suddenly she’s an A-rab threat. There’s fear that terrorists are bumping their fists together in order to send coded messages. Unfounded conjecture spreads like wild fire under the heading, “What would John Kerry look like with a tan?”All of it leaving one to wonder if the sophistry of such a question would make even a grown Republican gnaw his own leg off out of fright. And - if taken from a distance - makes some wonder if the entire MooCon nation is suffering from Obama Derangement Syndrome. (ODS)
Sure would be nice if it were true but it’s not.
Look no further than Mr. Rove’s clandestine signaling of the troops as witnessed in the above quote. In this moment of MooCon existential crisis he is saying that - yes, hell is other people. It’s time to go back and be at one with your roots. Start by fearing the gods of your ancestors. Pay heed to the crazed demiurge who takes the human form of Woolworth Van Husen. Take care to make sure the shoes match the belt and take even more care to make sure the white Florsheims stay under the bed until Memorial Day. Until the lost amend their ways and try to live so as not to seek the wrath of one who posses a great deal of disposable incoming and what used to be known as a drinking problem - then anxiety and chaos will reign.
But OBS?
Hardly.
See wasn’t that simple.
Wanna know what’s hard?
Sussing out the Personal Democracy Forum.
With that let’s take a minute and note that this is The Poorly Thought Out Sunday Think Piece for yet another week even if TPTOSTP doesn’t want to shut up about handing out The Shack at John Tesh concerts.
The first and most obvious problem is - what the hell is personal democracy? Taking half an hour to figure out what you want at Baskin-Robbins? Having people stare at you as you wander up and down that cold case and whispering, “Lookit that poor bastard - he must run from one shit-or-go-blind minute to the next?”
All of us can be of two minds. No one is immune from from being conflicted. But there are no ties once you’ve forced yourself into a straight up-or-down vote. Which, even if you can wrap your mind around all that, still leaves you wondering why a conference would insist on the acronym PDF and why in a room full of techies some one didn’t say something?
Grasping for something to hang my hat on in all the verbage that came out of the PDF I was lead to this speech given by Mark Pesce in which he said -
Conserved across nearly four thousand generations, the social fabric will warp and convulse as various polities actualize their hyperempowerment in the cultural equivalent of nuclear exchanges. Eventually (one hopes, with hypermimesis, rather quickly) we will learn to contain these most explosive forces. We will learn that even though we can push the button, we’re far better off refraining. At that point, as in the era of superpower Realpolitik, the action will shift to a few tens of thousands of ‘little’ conflicts, the hyperconnected equivalents of the endless civil wars which plagued Asia, Africa and Latin America during the Cold War. Naturally, governments will seek to control and mediate these emerging conflicts. This will only result in the guns being trained upon them. The power redistributions of the 21st century have dealt representative democracies out. Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and ‘rebooting’ them is not enough. The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him.
Which begs the question, “Gee mister, when you come out on DVD will you have subtitles?”
Now I’m not stupid. I know for a fact that Fred and Wally are the only people who’ve ever click on any link seen on this page. Had you actually followed the link you would have seen that Mr. P’s speech came in three parts. The first part contains the inarguable premise - the earth cooled, fish, dinosaurs, cavemen, Greeks, Romans, Jeebus, stuff stuff stuff stuff stuff, the Bomb, stuff, The Beatles, stuff, cable tv. The second part seems to be filler - and I’m just punting here - it comes off like there was time to kill because Gallagher and Lyle couldn’t get a cab to the theater.Which leaves only the third segment available for the Angeltonian treatment.
And that’s where we find the money quote -
We are asked to believe that hyperconnectivity can be embraced by political campaigns, and by politicians in power. We are asked to believe that everything we already know to be true about the accelerating disintegration of hierarchies of all kinds – economic, academic, cultural – will somehow magically suspend itself for the political process. That, somehow, politics will be different. Bullshit. Ladies and gentlemen, don’t believe a word of it. It’s whistling past the graveyard. It’s clapping for Tinkerbelle. Obama may be the best thing since sliced bread, but this isn’t a crisis of leadership. This is not an emergency. And my amateur photography did not bring down the curtain on the Republic. For the first time, we have a political campaign embracing hyperconnectivity. As is always the case with political campaigns, it is a means to an end. The Obama campaign has built a nationwide social network (using lovely, old-fashioned, human techniques), then activated it to compete in the primaries, dominate in the caucuses, and secure the Democratic nomination. That network is being activated again to win the general election.
Shoe leather? Arm twisting? Using the United State Postal Service? Techniques even my grandmother the early to mid- 20th Century machine pol would understand?
Who knew?
Overall we’re going through one of those moments where we are constantly being told that nothing is ever going to be the same again. Sadly I’ve lived through enough of these “revolutionary” moment to know that they are worthy of an archetype as well. Like all archetypes this one shifts its form and moves about like stink on the wind. In my life it has taken the human form of those famous snake oil-ists Ruben and Hoffman, manifested itself in pop culture as Martha Quinn and JJ Jackson, or taken the shape of any number of pop psychologists. It likes to light on those with youthful enthusiasm or those who suffer from no small amount of narcissism.
In the case of the PDF it’s a case of some people needing to get out of the house more often.
So feel free to discount whatever you see here. Those of us who lived through the 1970s saw NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME AGAIN turned into a cottage industry and not a very good one at that. But they did have a catchy theme song.
Alex: No. No! NO! Stop it! Stop it, please! I beg you! This is sin! This is sin! This is sin! It’s a sin, it’s a sin, it’s a sin!
Dr. Brodsky: Sin? What’s all this about sin?
Alex: That! Using Ludwig van like that! He did no harm to anyone. Beethoven just wrote music!
Dr. Branom: Are you referring to the background score?
Alex: Yes.
Dr. Branom: You’ve heard Beethoven before?
Alex: Yes!
Dr. Brodsky: So, you’re keen on music?
Alex: YES!
Dr. Brodsky: Can’t be helped. Here’s the punishment element perhaps.
Years ago you could drive up 1st Ave S. on the way to the King Dome and see no end of persian rug dealers who all had one thing in common - they were all going out of business. Window after window shouted warnings of last days and final sales. What we didn’t know when we first moved here was that all of these stores had been going out of business since they’d opened. A few were celebrating 10 years of going out of business. Finally various citizens and consumer groups got together and had a law passed which said that if you were having a going-out-of-business sale you really had to be going out of business. Within a few months of the enactment of that law all the rug merchants were gone and, as far as anybody knows, the law is still on the books and has evolved into one of those unused statutes.
Will it ever see the light of day again?
If anybody’s gonna test that proposition again it will be the Mariners. Sure, they’ll be around next year, but between now and Labor Day EVERYTHING MUST GO! Yes, friends and neighbors it’s one of those every-so-often Stalinists purges only the Sporting News could love. The M’s are havin’ a fire sale and the deals are hot hot HOT.
So hot even the bats might warm up!
Except for Sexson’s.
Which leaves me with a heavy heart. If the rumor mill is to be believed then our alleged first baseman, Richard Sexon, will be cut loose this weekend while the team’s in Atlanta. Richard will be unceremoniously dumped, left on some Georgia back road dazed and stunned, and like many others in that area who find themselves in similar locations, having to suddenly account for his “missing time.”
You know, we were there that one Sunday afternoon when the M’s played the Rangers and Mr. Sexon lifted his batting average up from .091 to .119 over the course of two innings. But that moment of glory is not why we will miss him. We will miss him because he was always there to give us a reason to get up in the respective faces of family and friends who do not share our passion for sports. You know the ones I’m talking about - the ones, who when you say something that can be construed as critical, atuomatically snap back with a hearty, “You’re just saying that because you’re jealous! You can make fun of that man and pick on him all you want but you couldn’t go out there and do that!”
Right there and then I would make them look at an old tape I have in the book case. First Sexson swings at a pitch that goes into the dirt, then he swings at one down around his shoelaces. Eventually he swings at everything but a pitch intended to hold the runner on first. (Not that he didn’t want to!) And after we watched that through one time I would always say, ‘Don’t dare ever, ever say to me again I couldn’t go out there and do that!”
Then I’d rewind the tape and make everybody watch it again in slow motion.
With a few augmentations.
For those of you just tuning in - Bavasi’s gone, McLaren’s gone and ownership says everybody’s on the trading block. Which taken at face value would mean that Felix and Ichiro could be gone. But this creates a dilemma in that if you take away the only two guys worth watching then why bother with the M’s?
People fault ownership’s enabling of of the casual fan’s reasons for going to the game, but we have to remember something. Seattle is not New York or St. Louis where even the bag boy at the grocery store knows the batting averages of the last three guys in the lineup. This is not LA where people started lining up at 7am in the morning to get Dodgers tickets because Fernando Valenzuela had the start that night. Given the M’s checkered past and ugly present you really do need those goddam gimme-hat and fucking beach-towel nights to get people to show up. For most of the 30 years the team’s been around they’ve never given the casual fans - who are the bulk of their base - any incentive to actually follow the game or learn the strategies.
Again- take away the only two name-brand players you got and then what?
And having said that -
However I will pull up short of saying, “Oh Richie we hardly knew ye.” Instead I will leave Mr. Sexson and the others who will soon depart with this thought.
