pavement/lcd soundsystem

so i went to a free outdoor festival over the weekend. pretty good lineup: matt & kim, joan jett, omg pavement and lcd soundsystem. at a different stage, luda and M.I.A. performed. i'm probably missing some others, but anyway.

i'd say the vast majority of attendees were in the early-to-mid 20s range. most were unfailingly polite, managing to not step on your blanket or other personal items when ambling drunkenly across the grass field where we were all seated.

the new york times was totally right, btw. the elaine benes look is back, full force. a sizable portion of the young girls there were wearing tiny floral prints and/or rompers. some looked adorable, while anyone weighing over 100 lbs looked a little...compromised.

here is the setlist for pavement. and lcd's setlist. i can't believe there's an entire wiki site devoted to just setlists. man, you don't have to remember anything anymore.

anyway, pavement were pretty solid, although they still couldn't help but bicker. scott kannberg, aka spiral stairs, looked old and kind of beer-bloated. they played several favorites, including summer babe, trigger cut and starlings of the slipstream. it was like riding a bike, y'all. only if remembering anything about the law were as easy.

but you know, LCD were just awesome. their music was meant to be heard in a huge outdoor pavillion. your fancy stereo and/or headphones just do not do justice to the sound.

why didn't anyone tell me about this?

law & order: UK! now available in america! sam waterson gets wiggy!

wait, so does this mean he's not a secret muslim?

oh dinesh d'souza. who the hell are you? for my own sanity's sake, i usually ignore these pinhead pundits, but his article was actually published in a major and non-crazy-conservative magazine (which i understand is a dying medium and, yeah, i probably shouldn't be reading them anyway).

he penned an article to be published in this month's forbes, entitled "how obama thinks." the proposterousness of the title aside, the basic gist is that barry o is his father's son and his father was an "anticolonialist," which, d'souza helpfully explains, means "the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America. As one of Obama's acknowledged intellectual influences, Frantz Fanon, wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, 'The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races.'"

why does d'souza know anticolonialism so well? "because I am a native of Mumbai, India. I am part of the first Indian generation to be born after my country's independence from the British. Anticolonialism was the rallying cry of Third World politics for much of the second half of the 20th century."

eyeroll. it drives me insane when non-whites pander to whites by claiming to stand for an entire nation, ethnicity, race, etc. this is no better than a conversation i had last night, when a well-meaning liberal friend of mine admonished her equally white friend for challenging my authority on some throwaway fact about korea, "how can you contradict a korean?" um, i dunno, bc i haven't lived there since 1987 and i can be pretty ignorant sometimes?

btw, jonathan franzen hilariously skewers this well-meaning-liberal phenomenon in freedom. jessica, one of the berglund kids, who already hates her dad's too pretty and too young indian-american female protege named lalitha for obvious reasons, cites as yet another one of lalitha's shortcomings her inability to teach jessica anything about bengali cooking--and indeed, doesn't even know how to cook!--even though jessica was culturally aware and sensitive enough to be inquisitive about it. ha ha ha. thanks for understanding my pain, white man.

anyway, d'souza's description of o sr. i guess is meant to denigrate barry o as well: "He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard. He was a polygamist who had, over the course of his lifetime, four wives and eight children. One of his sons, Mark Obama, has accused him of abuse and wife-beating. He was also a regular drunk driver who got into numerous accidents, killing a man in one and causing his own legs to be amputated due to injury in another. In 1982 he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself."

oh god, if we were to judge presidents based on their family, no matter how removed, i'm not sure if any would escape unscathed.

the more amusing part about this rather disturbing article (disturbing bc it's already caught on with gingrich and will certainly be repeated ad nauseum on fox and their friends, only fueling the othering of barry o) is that many non-sons-of-drunken-polygamist-kenyan-fathers actually kind of accept a lot of the following ideas this more or less as fact: "From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet."

c'mon, i don't think all those economists who believe in the existence of negative externalities are anticolonialist, polygamist, alchoholic, capitolism-undermining secret muslims. just sayin'.

then, d'souza boldly proclaims, "Colonialism today is a dead issue. No one cares about it except the man in the White House. He is the last anticolonial. Emerging market economies such as China, India, Chile and Indonesia have solved the problem of backwardness; they are exploiting their labor advantage and growing much faster than the U.S. If America is going to remain on top, we have to compete in an increasingly tough environment.

But instead of readying us for the challenge, our President is trapped in his father's time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father's dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost."

wow. maybe this is some kind of conservative payback for all those times liberals tried to claim that W invaded iraq out of some desire to avenge his father. at least libs didn't lump W and HW's ideological beliefs together.

oh well, shrugs. go djokovic!

R.I.P. This Blog (2007-2010)

Kidding. This blog, like vampires and Betty White, can never die. But if my extended absence really were just a prelude to retirement, thereby killing 50% of the blog, I would post the above video as my final farewell. E-mancrush Gabe over at Videogum suggests this video "taken in the dining hall of a cruise ship during rough seas...is a VISUAL METAPHOR FOR LIFE!" But it's also a metaphor for blogging in the age of parenthood and a wicked content blocker at work. Rough motherfucking seas, people.

art vs. commerce, etc.

i found out that pavement will be appearing on jimmy fallon. and they're holding a contest to see who can jam with pavement. you can enter here, guitar hero.

so how do you feel? yeah yeah, if you care for pavement, i know, c4ts.

1. yay, pavement on a mainstream tv program!

2. jesus, pavement on jimmy fallon?

this, combined with the fact that i corresponded with a 2L today who was born in 1987, i need to up my fibre intake. or something.