random inauguration tidbits

oh dc friends, i am SO jealous that you all are partying it up for the inauguration!  and without republicans, apparently.  at least one republican stuck around and michelle obama is not impressed.

chuck schumer is psyched!  btw, who chose him to be emcee?

whenever james taylor sings at any public event, all i can think of is his cameo on the simpsons (he scolds buzz aldrin at around 1:30).  and who knew there were so many different songs about how great america is?  pretty sure all canadians have is "oh canada."

beyonce looked SO good and sounded even better.  though for a brief moment her anthem made me think of whitney houston's at the superbowl so many years ago.  RIP.

the obamas love beyonce!

RBG and her flowery shoes with...that other guy.

i see john boehner and his wife have some kind of a 2-for-1 deal at the tanning salon.

and here is the full text of richard blanco's poem.  i know next to nothing about poetry--sometimes i found his self-referential details a bit jarring, but i appreciated his evocation of the ordinary.

Baby Gosling

Here is what you get when you Google image search "baby Gosling." First of all, why are you searching for that? That's redundant. All goslings are babies, dummy. Second of all, what the fuck is up with these images? None of these fucking goslings are cute. Why are their abs so undefined? Who knows. Fuck those goslings. What you're I'm really looking for of course is this. Look at that tinysexy! His shirt is so big! Timberlake towers over him! Is that Britney at the end? She towers over him too. (Btw, I never had Disney Channel as a kid, so even though 95% of this blog is pure pop culture nostalgia, this isn't an example of that.)

I've been on hiatus from the blog for a while, I know. And after a while, I got to thinking, when I make it back, it has to be big. Some kind of magnum opus. Will I finally sit down and write that careful reflection on John Edwards -- whom I lionized in this blog? That fuck-you column about how I was right -- 100% right -- about Barack Obama, you fucking fake-ass, horse-race liberals? (I was right. Seriously. Shut the fuck up. I was right.) No, I am going to write about my questioning my sexual orientation. I think I love Ryan Gosling. Putting aside the fact that he's white and kind of blonde-ish....he's...he's....he's....Canadian. I am a mapleleafsexual. Kill me now.

an open letter to e

below is my comment to e's comment to my last post. 

e, this point, that pakistanis are the greatest victims of terrorism, is perhaps arguable, but there is a very compelling case to be made for it. first off, we have to define what "terrorism" means in this context. in my view it's composed of activities by state or non-state actors targeting civilians, or activities resulting in civilian deaths in far greater proportion to legitimate military / insurgent targets. of course, i'm declining to define what proportion is inoffensive enough to exempt said activity from my working definition, but suffice it to say that i believe the drone bombing campaigns over western pakistan, and yemen, and libya absolutely qualify as acts of state-sponsored terrorism. i know that that this statement alone will, for some people, nullify everything i say below, but i think it's important for us to divorce ourselves a bit from our creeds and flags, and think of these issues in terms of our principles and principles alone. i consider you, e, a fair mind and a very serious thinker, so you are not among the aforesaid people. you do what a friend does best -- challenge my convictions and make me think more clearly about them. i hope you do the same here.

according to wikipedia, last year alone there were 50 separate terrorist incidents in pakistan (excluding drone attacks). these were generally carried out by al-qaeda in pakistan, or a like-minded group like lashkar-e-taeba or jamaat-e-islami. these attacks were generally low-tech acts of violence (e.g., suicide bombs) carried out in public spaces. notably, in the last few years, these attacks have taken place in places like lahore, where my family is from, which is far from the badland west where the pasthun population resides and which is largely indistinguishable from afghanistan. while the sheer volume of deaths that has resulted from these acts does not compare to, say, a single act of terrorism like the september 11th attack on the world trade center, the effect of these attacks is palapable in everyday pakistan in a way that september 11th's is not  (except when it's evoked by brain-dead shitheads like giuliani and schumer -- he of the genius "no-ride" list proposal -- and other cynical exploiters of that event). that is to say, terrorism has disrupted pakistani society much more than it has any other society on the face of the planet -- unless you count iraq and afghanistan, which i don't because i think those two places are uniquely fucked up places in which terrorist activity targeting civilian populations and insurgent attacks on military targets are caught up in a whole incomprehensible morass. to put in another way, afghanistan and iraq are sites of war -- unlike pakistan, at least officially,  which is a site of non-militarily justifiable acts of terrorism.

now, it should be said that the wikipedia numbers are pure nonsense. they account only for high-profile events that have gotten press. i rely more on think tank numbers like the pakistan institute for peace studies, whose 2010 report states that there were 2113 terrorist acts in pakistan last year alone (again, not accounting for drone attacks) in which almost 3000 people were killed and almost 6000 injured. now, if drone attacks are counted, an additional 1000 people in pakistan were killed. this figure, 4000 people, is simply staggering, and i have not seen anything else anywhere in the world that compares to it -- again, with the exception of afghanistan and iraq, which are active theatres of war. more important, each year since 2001 has seen an uptick in terrorist acts in pakistan and deaths resulting therefrom. and with the killing of osama bin laden, it should be clear that any reprisal will be visited first and foremost on the pakistani people. such has been al-qaeda's (whatever that even is now, given its many diffuse forms across the world) modus operandi of late.

as for your other point, i appreciate it fully. human beings have no obligation to act in a principled manner or to put their emotions at bay. i get this. i totally do. know that, but know also i have a monumental problem with the notion that it's unobjectionable to celebrate the death of "someone who specifically targeted americans for being american." why is this relevant? seriously, why is it? if a person kills one person in a botched robbery, do we celebrate his execution? if a serial killer kills ten blonde women because he has some insane sexual fetish, do we celebrate his? if he kills ten black people because he's a white supremacist, same question. i have a huge problem with hate crimes legislation -- let me state that from the outset -- but the notion that a person's intentionality should affect my view of his bad acts is totally lost on me. this isn't about osama bin laden -- or it should not be. this is about us. our reaction to his death -- indeed, the way his killing was comissioned -- that speaks to our best or worst selves. i have a convert's zeal for this country and its bedrock principles. therefore, i cannot understand how it can be that we, collectively, have asked so few questions about the conflicting details of operation geronimo. it turns out bin laden wasn't armed. it turns out he wasn't using his wife as a human shield. it turns out that he attempted to surrender. brennan -- the deputy national security guy -- stated this was a kill operation. why was he not arrested? why was he not haled before a civilian court in the united states and given full due process rights and made to answer for the mountain of evidence compiled against him. why was he dumped in the sea? seriously, why? he was a piece of shit who couldn't give a fuck how his muslim victims were buried, and we're, well, we're denizens of a country that couldn't give a shit how the muslim victims of our drone attacks are buried. why afford this man a so-called islamic burial? what constituency does this satisfy?

i know there are still many details not known about geronimo. i know that. and it may turn out some of my questions have legitimate answers. i hope so. but putting aside protestations about america's egregious violation of pakistani sovereignty -- an irrelevant point, as far as i'm concerned given the pakistani army and intelligence services' incompetence in catching bin laden / duplicity in allowing him sanctuary -- and putting aside the basic human need, perhaps, to celebrate something, anything, after 10 years of confused, neo-imperial brutality in various parts of the muslim world, i put to you this: upon hearing news of bin laden's death, doesn't a mature population push aside its base instincts, and think about all that has been lost and can never be restored? doesn't it think about what we -- as a nation -- have lost, but also allowed ourselves to lose? when bin laden was shot dead in abbottabad and then dumped into the arabian sea, i couldn't help thinking we're now a nation that cannot stomach its own core values. we cannot put one of the world's greatest criminals on trial. as a fiercely proud, and thoroughly skeptical american, i wonder if america is now a shadow of itself. would tocqueville recognize this country? would tom paine be proud of it?

also, and i mean this question seriously, say you're a ten-year old pakistani boy whose entire family -- none of whom were involved in any kind of terrorist activity -- was killed in a drone strike. say you're face is half-charred and you lost an arm in the strike. say you did nothing -- clearly -- to deserve this. nothing at all. say "it's rather human to enjoy the elimination of one's enemy." who is your enemy in this situation? the guy in missouri manning the drone? leon panetta? barack obama? what measure of vengeance are you allowed? put aside creed and flag. put aside who-started-what, and tell me. what kind of world are we barreling towards? what have we wrought?

yours,
c4ts

Canada Just Killing It, Like Always

Look, people (person?), I think it's weird that you're so consumed by your national bloodlust that you haven't thought twice about the conflicting details of the Bin Laden kill operation and whether it comports with our national values. Or that your response to the admittedly strange, frankly unbelievable circumstances in which he was found is to proclaim that we stop all aid to Pakistan and regard it as a terrorist state -- despite the fact that the United States has thousands of troops and tons of military equipment and other supplies in Afghanistan, which got there through Pakistani ports and would have to get out the same way; despite the fact that the greatest victim of terrorism in the world today is Pakistan, its people, its police force, its soldiers; despite the fact that an incompetent Pakistani army or duplicitous Pakistani intelligence agency is not interchangeable with its people; despite the fact that we continue to drone-bomb the Pakistani countryside, which, understandably, might cloud its people's feelings about American wonderfulness. I think it's weird that you, strawman, disregard obvious geopolitical complexities for easy "USA!" sloganeering. But that's just me.

Still, while we can disagree about politics and policy, here and abroad, it's nice to know there remains some common ground between us: We can still agree, for instance, that Canadians are just killing it--straight murdering shit--with their amazing awesomeness at life. Really, just a paragon of democratic values that country is.

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!

is obama secretly a fan of wings?

how else to explain the presence of both tim daly and steven weber at the white house correspondents' dinner?

where was tony shalhoub?!

ps. creepiest photo.

pps. photo begging for a caption.

American Politics, the Last 48 Hours

Today, John McCain pitched reviving the Glass-Steagall Act, which would separate commercial and investment banking and lead to the break up of the megabanks, and which Obama and his economic advisers oppose; and today the White House admonished Howard Dean for saying the Senate Health Care Bill should be scrapped and reconciliation should be explored so that we might get a semblance of a public option/Medicare Buy-in; and yesterday, the White House refused to say one word about Joe Lieberman's unprincipled murder of Medicare Buy-in; also, yesterday, Obama's DOJ reiterated its Bush-era position re an expansive and unprecedented States Secret Privilege in asking the 9th Circuit to overturn its ruling in the Jeppesen rendition case.

I know I am supposed to talk about politicians only in terms of how they depress or inspire me, or how imbued with evil or goodness they are, but cold, hard facts are confusing me. Quick, somebody please send me pictures of how cute the Obama kids are or yell at me for questioning our fearless leader, whom we should all love without condition and with complete disregard to the things he actually apparently stands for.

When the only thing that we ask of our President is that he not be as much of an asshole as the last guy -- or at least draw on pretty words, not his Jesusy whims, when he decides to be exactly as much of an asshole as the last guy (on national security issues)-- then we ask nothing of him. And nothing, apparently, shall we receive.

Ted Kennedy, 1932 - 2009

I know there will be idle talk in the morning about the continuing brutality of Death's Grip this, the summer of 2009. I believe E. has made mention of it in these pages as well. But seriously, if we make it to the September Equinox with Rue McLanahan and Betty White walking among us in God's Dominion, then Death, I will know, has a soul, and we should all breathe a sigh of relief that He has claimed only Michael Jackson et al.

That said, the death of Ted Kennedy is notable and need be marked, not in the least because his death marks the death of mainstream, national Liberalism. I haven't really followed Sherrod Brown's record close enough to term him a liberal. Paul Wellstone has been dead for many years. Al Franken had hawkish tendencies during the buildup to and waging of the War on Iraq (and has declined taking on a serious and objective look at Middle East policy). And Russ Feingold, for all his anti-war tendencies and civil liberties street cred, was a whorish apologist for Israel's crimes against sanity in southern Lebanon in 2006.

Liberalism is a third-rail word in our electoral politics, As we know, despite occasional virtues, there is no real Liberal spirit among our elected officials. Watching our pragmatist, impotent President and the scatterbrained Democratic Congress he lets run wild, fail even to begin a dialogue on meaningful, universal health care coverage, without succumbing to the shrill masses, without stripping from their proposals health-care reform's central tenet, a public option, in some sort of pre-emptive compromise with the sullen and lame minority party -- watching this, we should know that the Liberal philosophy of equality, welfare, and social justice has no place in our Government. Ted Kennedy -- ever the parliamentarian, make no mistake -- did at least this: He wore Liberalism like a crest on his blazer. For that -- and not just that, of course -- he should be honored. And so I honor him.

But I am also a bastard. So, let me tell you my one Ted Kennedy story:

My childhood friend Paul, the eldest brother of three much younger boys, grew up in a stately manse near Embassy Row. One Halloween many years ago, he took his kid brothers out trick or treating. They got to Ted Kennedy's place, and rang the doorbell. The liberal lion answered the door, absolutely smashed, and with some fine Irish sloshing about in a tumbler in his hand. Bleary eyed, he sized up Paul's brothers, their arms outstretched for caloric bounty. In one graceless move Teddy reached for the bowl of Nestle Crunches, but in so doing knocked a lit candle into the dustbin. The contents of the dustbin immediately caught fire. Irish in hand, Irish in blood, Teddy let out a torrent of expletives and ran off for the fire extinguisher (or another drink, who really knows). Paul and the kids slowly retreated from his doorstep, sans Nestle Crunches. I'm not sure if they went back to casa Kennedy the next year.

Confused

Now, I'm just stumped. I give up. The man has no problems continuing Bush's state secrets and preventitive detention policies, especially as applied to Muslims arrested on the Afghani-Pakistani border, and he has shown real enthusiasm for Predator drone strikes in the same region, but he can cook keema and daal, and reads Ghalib, which is more than I can say about myself. Go figure.

Must Desi TV

Hey, everybody. There is a hot new blog on the scene. Thoughtful vivisection of television done by brianiac grad students, Tubatv is the half brainchild of devoted reader Thumbu Sammy, who this past week makes the rather astute observation that all four of the shows comprising NBC's comedy lineup last Thursday, The Office, Parks and Recreation, The Office, and 30 Rock featured South Asian people. Yay for pop cultural presence! Boo for the fact that the South Asian people in question (pictured above)-- Aziz Ansari, Maulik Pancholy, and Mindy Kaling -- played characters named Tom, Jonathan, and Kelly respectively, just like that lady from Texas wants.

Aziz Ansari, who has been a personal favorite of mine since occasional reader Sweet Daddy Purns introduced me to him in the summer of 2005 at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater (right before his killer "Aziz Ansari Punched a Wall" show), has always eschewed the rather limiting ethno-centric style of lesser comedians, but Tom Haverford? Desi, please...Still, I hesitate to condemn after one episode; he struck gold with his "I'm what you call a redneck" line in the otherwise mediocre pilot of Parks and Rec, but gets several demerits for the following statement, which while funny and self-undermining, does nothing to explain really why the fuck he can't be of Muslim heritage on TV: The cold hard fact is that dark-skinned people with funny-sounding Muslim names just don’t make it very far in politics...Yes, OK, fine, Barack Obama, Why does everyone always bring up Barack Obama?

what is on my mind grapes?

you know, alec baldwin sounds so thoughtful in interviews that you sometimes forget that this man is permanently on the brink.

the interview was supposed to be about his new movie called "lymelife," co-starring two of the many culkin brothers (not macaulay, sorry), but of course, most of the questions centered on 30 rock. nothing too new to report, except this unexpected tidbit:

I went to an event the other day for NRDC [the Natural Resources Defense Council] and Jack Welch was there. When he told me he watched the show, I was like, "You do?" We've got to get him on the show.

hope he's better than salma hayek.

tangent: was i the only person who found most of the g20 related photos/videos totally hilarious?

the queen reprimands berlusconi:


then this kerfuffle:

hillary's reaction reminds me of angela merkel:

gordon brown can't contain his bromance:

the rock obama

john thain owes me (and you) $1.2M

last week i turned into some sort of crazy obsessive maniac who couldn't stop looking at photos of malia and sasha (pronounced rick warren style, of course). i thought i was being a touch more creepy than what would be considered normal, then i read the comments on the slideshow, mostly from people who wanted to take the girls home and buy them ice cream, misery-style. now that's creepy.

anyway, where did you watch the inauguration? was it you arriving in DC in your private jet? my office set up giant tvs in the cafeteria, which was pretty thoughtful of them since cnn.com just wasn't cutting it. and yes, i can confirm that a room chock full of corporate lawyers found the sight of dick cheney in his wheelchair completely, utterly hilarious.

everyone celebrated differently. this guy decided to bake the most, uh, offputting cookies ever (you've got to watch the video, seriously), some wept, and one person decided to let her hat do the talking. we've heard a lot about how michelle obama chose immigrant designers, like taiwan-born jason wu or cuban-american isabel toledo, but dudes, foreal, a korean-american milliner from detroit--hockeytown!!--made aretha's hat!

despite this incredible moment in history, the deprecession continues. and the princes of wall street again prove to us that they are complete failures in PR and they could care less about winning over the american people since they already have all of our money anyway. john thain attempted to break the bonehead mold by apologizing for his inappropriate decorating expenses:

The final topic is the expenses related to my office. The $1.2 million reported in the press was for the renovation of my office, two conference rooms and a reception area. The expenses were incurred over a year ago in a very different environment. Nonetheless, they were a mistake in the light of the world we live in today. I will therefore reimburse the company for all of the costs incurred.

finally! taxpayers, $1.2 million. thain, at least $3.2 million...and counting...

i chu-chu-[steven] chuse you

yeah i know, it's a terrible joke. (for those of you who don't get it...how are we friends? kidding. here it is.)

i've been watching the cabinet appointment process with some interest. so far, he's vindicated eric shinseki and, in my mind, wen ho lee. we've distanced ourselves somewhat from automatically associating asian men in science with espionage (yeah, i know, bill richardson, who led the charge against lee, will be commerce secretary in the new administration. it's not a complete victory. let's just hope that he doesn't make all asians rebuild america's crumbling infrastructure). i also admit that steven chu sort of looks like a more handsome (?) version of your prototypical asian male nerd. one stereotype at a time, i suppose.

what's even better than having two asians safeguarding some of america's icons (military, energy/national security)? 3 asians? no, government officials from cities. yes, those un-real, un-american bastions of elitism. so far, eric holder, obama himself, timothy geithner, hillC, this dude arne duncan, shaun donovan, and rahmbo all hail from NYC and chicago. you can let me know if i've missed any.

my unshakable bias in favor of urban areas (loosely defined in my head as places with a certain level of population density, viable public transportation system, and a government with a at least some understanding of the need for public services and infrastructure) started when i moved from vancouver to atlanta and realized that sidewalks--sidewalks--were not a given. whether driven by race or some other misguided NIMBY-ism, atlantans generally eschewed investment in public property; certain counties refused to permit MARTA within their boundaries. i don't have any sophisticated thoughts on this. it's just mean to not give people who either cannot afford or do not want to drive a car an alternate mode of access.

with 2008 drawing to a close and possibly the best bush comedy skit behind us (this one? that one? too many to count), i really hope that this new administration, with their exposure to and faith in cities, will rebuild public infrastructure and give cities their due.

oh yes, for those who may think city folk are a bunch of snobs, people who live in single-family dwellings with fenced-in yards at the exclusion of all others shouldn't cast stones.

Day at a Time, I Suppose (It's a Wire Reference)

I have now been unemployed for one month and one day.

I wish I could say that this time has been one of deep reflection, a time to pursue grace and samadhi, a time of quiet productivity, but it hasn't. I'm dumbstruck that the days have passed as quickly as they have , but in truth I've always been overwhelmed by the tyranny of free time. Having been exiled to house-husbandry, my mind has become a mudroom of domestic ambition: I think a lot about reorganizing the contents of the freezer, getting that picture framed, sweeping the leaves off the deck, but somehow at the end of each day none of these things seems to get accomplished -- or half of one does. One week of this kind of personal mismanagement I suppose is excusable; a month not so much. I am clearly unqualified for Martha Stewart's mantle, but perhaps I can return to Michigan and help run the auto industry into the ground.

Anyway, I have little to report in this post. I always thought that my job was going to turn me into an irredeemable bore, but without it, I don't seem to be any more fascinating. Still, for the sake of completeness, here's the backsell: my job leads have all soured; it turns out our house was burgled much more successfully that we'd initially realized (and let me just leave it at that); and 'Pockets lost her wallet today (en route to the airport).

I firmly believe that we are all makers of our own luck, so I am trying to figure out how we can remake ourselves out of this tangled string. Though I haven't quite yet figured it out, I will. But this all prologue to what I want to say. I want to end this cheerless post with an uplifting declaration of self-awareness: Some might turn to faith or embrace humility in trying times, but not me. I turn to schadenfreude. To wit: Elizabeth Wurtzel, who turned self-indulgence into a best-seller, who took a 160 LSAT to Yale Law School, who convinced David Boies to give her a flex-time job, failed the Bar Exam -- which is only funny when it happens to terrible people and/or celebrities -- and then has the gall to suggest that Yale improperly prepared her for the Exam when everyone knows she, like the rest of us, took a prep course to, you know, prep for the Bar. Alternatively, she suggests that she partied too hard when she should have been studying, which leads me to wonder, ftw, I thought you needed a flex-time job so that you could do all this writing, you fancy-pants writer? Also, what? I thought Yale didn't prepare you for the Exam? Which is it? Anyway, she is an epic fail -- again not because she failed the Bar, which good and decent and intelligent people often do, but because she is a lame, undeserving, ungracious celebrity -- and her failure makes me happy. That is to say, I'm still a terrible person. Because I have not done a lot of Prozac and gotten published and because I have not bedded David Foster Wallace, I'm jealous and mean, but that means I'm still me; so we can all rejoice. Yay for my petty, petty soul!

Also--and, yes, I'm going full-rant on this one--what's up with this? We, as a society, are kind of irked, yes, by Ayman al-Zawahiri's blood commitment to the destruction of America, but when he calls our Best Friendsident "a house negro" that's when we all start paying attention again?? It's like Qaeda HQ saw that it was heading towards the outer reaches of our cultural memory and decided to throw up a game changer to win the news cycle. This kind of makes me wish McCain was President. No one throws up a game changer like that decrepit motherfucker.

Vote. Rocked. Yet again.

unintended consequences--part 2

is the obama presidency already bumming me out?

before you unnecessarily rush to obama's defense, let me give you a list of all that either already has or probably will fall prey to obama's historic presidency:

1) pride in my citizenship - now that you all have a president who no longer embarrasses you, there go all the breathless "wow, you're so lucky to be canadian" comments directed at me. i no longer feel privileged to have the possibility of escaping the united states. let's face it: who wants to live in a country with a milquetoast leader who, in fact, is not actually the leader?

2) apathy - during the time i entered and left law school, it didn't seem to matter much what i did with my degree. the DOJ was overrun with underqualifed and overpartisan hacks, so why bother?

3) laziness - during dubya's two terms, i could care less about keeping up with the prominent bushies, like karl rove or monica goodling. who cares if john yoo is korean? look at his fat head, not to mention his abhorrent and tortured (ha!) interpretations of what constitutes torture. compared to those disappointments, having a job and being able to speak in complete sentences seemed like pretty significant accomplishments.

but now that there are intelligent, accomplished, young and motivated liberals who will make actual differences and potentially improve people's lives, man, i feel like a loser. nobody told me that i was supposed to remain optimistic during the bush years. wait til my parents discover just how many korean progressives there are.

4) voyeurism - who doesn't enjoy a good issue of us weekly or, if desperate, the new york post? but now everyone is obsessed with the obamas! as much as i think the obama girls are impossibly cute or that michelle obama dresses well, i feel kind of creepy watching the kids being dropped off at school...or their every move, really. well, it appears at least dlisted.com has remained obama-free.

and the worst of all...

5) hating on hipsters - obama's win got the billyburgers to collectively drop their knitting needles and crowd the streets with glee. fuck, who knew these people even knew how to smile?

anyway, i'm gonna resume watching those puppies now. it's the only thing keeping my spirits up nowadays. feel free to add to this list. i'm fairly certain we won't see an episode like "cooter" with the new administration.

unintended consequences

Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are

Some Kind of Special Mustache

And, yes, this is how we Muslims do.

We Was Robbed...

Campaign for the President: A Tribute @ Yahoo! Video

...Well, more like burgled. But more on that in a second. For now, let me just say...

ZOMG to the MAX, everybody! We did it!

Go buy yourself a case of Zima while you can. You deserve it. Personally, I'm just overwhelmed with feelings of peace on earth and good will to man. Yes, you hopey-dopey kids, all your joy has managed to infiltrate my cold, steel forcefield of cynicism and mix with my inner reserves of fatalism. Needless to say, I've been all awash with funny feelings these last couple of days, and I don't like it. That's why I can't wait till Obama's promised violent and ill-informed Afghani surge and his capitulations on energy. All will be right in the world when I can go back to hating the President. Meanwhile, I will continue to marvel at the fact that as of today, every state I have ever lived in -- California, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Virginia -- is a blue state.

Oh, and as for the burglary, that's in part why this post is late in coming. On Tuesday I was waging a losing battle with Washoe County poll workers as they refused to properly explain the difference between a provisional ballot and an official one to voters who found themselves at the wrong precinct. Meanwhile, back in the Bay, a resourceful, smallish person was shimmying his(/her) way through our back bathroom window, which had been left slightly ajar. This person then rifled his way through Pockets' dresser, emptied my gym bag (apparently for my swimming goggles), jacked one of my watches, and high-tailed it out of there on Pockets' bike with, I shit you not, a massive jar of pocket change that we've been talking about taking to Coinstar for like two years. Fortunately, he did not take my Mariokart. That would have been going over the line. (Strangely, he found the box for the Wii, and rummaged through it, but didn't go to the living room and take the Wii itself). 'Pockets came home to the mess, called the police, and only about 25 hours later an officer showed up at our door to take a statement.

Vote. Rocked. Again.

Can We Kick It?

Yes we can.

After a needlessly long ordeal, Pockets and I and a couple of friends scored tickets to yesterday's Friendly Fires/Lykke Li show. The ordeal, fyi, resulted from the fact that the tickets I had ordered were delivered to my former place of work, which I have been banished from, which fired its mail staff weeks ago, and which, apparently, also, fired the receptionist who's supposed to answer phones during business hours. This, people, is how you conduct an orderly dissolution. Anyway, after some haggling with Ticketweb, an organization that makes up for its lack of Ticketmaster-like clout with Ticketmaster-like intransigence, we secured our tickets and headed to the show.

Friendly Fires, a dancey, post-shoegazey rock act from St. Albans, a London suburban outlet made up primarily of pubs and abbeys, barrelled onto stage with massive hip-shaking energy. There were many highlights, but the guitarist playing his instrument with a Dustbuster was perhaps the most memorable. Go out and see them, if you have a chance. Such unself-conscious silly sweaty dancing surely makes the world a better place.

Next came Lykke Li, whose rise to fame has been documented in these pages. Her performance was largely disappointing -- while 'Pockets found her breast-heaving "hip-hop" dance moves amusing, her dancing proved a little much for me, as did her thin vocals and odd tendency to slam a cymbal occasionally. Scandinavian pop, I am now realizing, is best when paired with the polish of studio production. Anyway, here's what's interesting. During the encore to her set she introduced a song thusly: You all are hipsters. You'll know this one. Then she a capellad straight into the intro of an iconic song that indeed all should know and love, but a weird confusion set over the audience. I noticed it immediately, as immediately as I registered the foundational beats for Tribe's "Can I Kick It" (above) emanating through the speakers: the crowd of 20-something San Franciscans, raised on irony and little else, had no idea what hipster staple they were being exposed to. The annoying midget dance brigade that had saddled up next to us were left motionless. Finally, the discordant opening notes gave way to some totally haphazard rapping on Lykke's part, then a failed call-and-response with the essential question from 90's hip hop left dangling in the air:

Can I kick it? She asked.
Yes you can, only some responded.

There is much to love about the West Coast, but there is also much to loathe. This would never, ever, ever happen in New York City. And in that moment I missed the Boroughs like I haven't in a long time.

As the spectacle devolved, it occurred to me that there was a good deal of pro-Obama-message-mongering that could have been had from this moment as well. I mean, why not, can we kick it, or can he kick it? Sure, it would take some serious rhetorical skill to replace Mr Dinkins, will you please be my mayor? with the syllabically gratuitous Mr. Obama, will you please be my president? but the moment called for this, no? Sadder still than these missed opportunites was the revelation that the thought had in fact occurred to Lykke herself. The chorus she lamely attempted was soon aborted and what followed was this cheerleading closing:

Give me an O....O!
Give me a B....B!
Give me an O....O?
Give me an M....M!
Give me an A....A!

Vote. Rocked.