NOT TO MENTION THAT FAMOUS FRENCH STENCH
5 years ago
May 23, 2003 | Steve Almond asked that Bush and Co. consider invading France.
“What the Bush regime needs to realize (and I think, deep down, it does) is that Americans are ready for a war against France. The recent squabble over Iraq is really just a symptom of a bone-deep, longstanding hatred between these two nations.

“I would remind those of you with a less-than-awesome historical grasp which side France supported in the Civil War...

“Maybe more important, France — and, more specifically, the French — are really annoying. A brief list of annoying things the French do:

1) Speak French. Spanish I could see, because Spanish is useful. The only reason to speak French is some lame effort to impress chicks.
2) Make depressing films. What is it about this whole cinéma de bummer? Are these people allergic to fun? Do they assume that doom and gloom automatically convey depth of intellect? And, if so, how does one explain the Jerry Lewis thing?
3) Sell weapons. If anyone’s going to be selling weapons to unstable despotic rulers, it’s the US of A. Got it?” Read Full Article

UNSEND MY HEART
10 years ago
May 22, 1998 | Ellen Barry discovered that technology brings nuance back into our lives.
“The world changed the first time someone wrote down a domain name on a cocktail napkin. When I realized this had begun to happen, it was at the end of a long party in a strange part of town, and I had an icy feeling that the exploratory phone call had been replaced by an exploratory e-mail. I was right. Over the past year or so, my friends and I have spent untold hours trying

“For one thing, we have been forced to develop a whole new repertoire of passionate gesture. The moment of slit-eyed fury when you delete a name from your address book! The terror of realizing it's too late to unsend! The new romantic clichés: the relationships that lived and died without face-to-face contact! The ability to document every tiny shift in dynamics! The condensed time scale! The subject line!” Read Full Article

CONFESSIONS OF A PÂTÉ GIRL
20 years ago
May 20, 1988 | According to Caroline Knapp, growing up in Cambridge could be both a privilege and a curse.
“Ah, growing up in Cambridge.

“A New Yorker subscription to go along with your birth certificate. A special set of bumper stickers for your first red wagon: BORN TO BE IN THERAPY and I BREAK FOR LIBERALS. And, along the privileged path that eases you from one higher-than average student/teacher ratio to the next (private kindergarten, private elementary school, private prep school, and thank-God-Dad-paid-for-this private college) a procession of strange contradictions. You eat tofu with your turkey at Christmas, which explains the tendency among some of your childhood friends to rebel by becoming Republicans. You are introduced to pâté and public television before you learn about Coke or cartoons…And, like people from hometowns everywhere, you end up, oh, a little screwed-up.”

SPY GAME
35 years ago
May 22, 1973 | In the wake of the Watergate scandal, Martin Lomansey Jr. talked to local campaign spy, "Thomas.”
“ ‘The trouble with those guys,’ says Thomas, ‘is that they got caught. You’d think they teach them better at the CIA, wouldn’t you?’ Thomas, who now works in state government as a reward for good and faithful service to a prominent elected official during a recent election, finds the failure of the Gemstone team the most repugnant aspect of the Watergate affair. He simply cannot believe that the men who planned and executed the break-in and related espionage could be as stupid as they were.

“ ‘I was only almost caught once,’ he recalls. ‘Back in 1971 I broke into a campaign trailer of Louise Day Hicks for ---------. Someone saw me and I almost got nailed. Even then I managed to get away with some good stuff and still make it look like a burglary not anything political.’ It was a break-in that received some coverage from the local press - a mayoral campaign sidebar at most. No one attributed anything political to it. And it is doubtful that Hicks ever suspected who did it. Thomas remained a top campaign aide to the very end.” Read Full Article

5/22/2008 4:31:32 PM by Ian Sands | Comments [0] |  

BAD TIMES
5 years ago
May 16, 2003 | Dan Kennedy called for “tougher standards” in journalism in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal.
“Yet by purging Blair, it would be wrong to think that all is now well at the Times, or in journalism. Tougher standards are needed. We all deserve better. I was struck by a comment that Alex Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center...at Harvard’s Kennedy School, made to USA Today. Jones noted that in the Times’ self-examination, the family of former POW Jessica Lynch and others said they were well aware that Blair had falsely claimed to interview them...But they didn’t complain to the Times because they didn’t expect any better of the media. ‘They didn’t say, ‘Holy cow,’ this is somebody who is clearly unscrupulous.’ Instead, their response was to shrug their shoulders and say, ‘Hey, what did you expect?’ ’ Jones was quoted as saying.” Read Full Article

GOOD RIDDANCE
10 years ago
May 15, 1998 | Matt Ashare presented the 1998 BMP award for Best National Act to Radiohead.
“For a band whose career in the US was launched in 1993 with the kind of perilously catchy...single that can easily kill a band's career by marking them as a one-hit wonder, England's Radiohead have truly come a long way. Sure, ‘Creep’ was great the first dozen times you heard it, but you can't blame Thom Yorke for not wanting to sing it anymore...Johnny Greenwood hated the song so much from the get-go that he tried to muck it up with those cacophonous false starts on his guitar...But Yorke, Greenwood, and the rest of the band refused to be defeated by success, returning in '95 with The Bends (Capitol), a disc...with absolutely no ‘Creep,’ a disc as complex as ‘Creep’ was simple...

“The Bends in all its convoluted glory was really just a twisted prelude to OK Computer (Capitol), which arrived last summer with nothing resembling a workable single and very little in the way of a coherent lyric. Majestic probably doesn't begin to describe the operatic scope of the album, but it's not a bad place to start...So now some of the same critics who wrote the band off after ‘Creep’ hit the charts are holding Radiohead up as modern-rock saviors, which they probably are.” Read Full Article

SELECTIVE LISTENING
30 years ago
May 16, 1978 | After having had bad experiences with living arrangements due to his musical pursuits, pianist Paul Raeburn seemed to have found the perfect situation.
“Not too long ago, I thought I had solved all my problems. I had an apartment to myself (no roommates to worry about). It was on the second floor (not too difficult to get the piano in and out). And the downstairs neighbors never complained. I could never quite understand why they never complained, but I was happy to let the matter rest.

“In fact, so tolerant were the neighbors that they allowed several people to enter the apartment one weekend when I was away and help themselves. When I returned, I found that the burglars had chopped a large hole in the door, upended the dresser, pried into a locked metal file cabinet, strewn clothes and books everywhere, and the neighbors, bless their hearts, had never said a word. Stereo, television, tape recorder, typewriter, piano amplifier...had been removed. Miraculously, the piano stood in the center of the living room. (I don’t blame the thieves for not taking it—I know how difficult it is to get it down the stairs.)” Read Full Article

THE HAVES AND THE HAVE-SHOTS
35 years ago
May 15, 1973 | George Kimball pointed out the differences between those folks sitting in the grandstand and the clubhouse and those in the infield at the Kentucky Derby.

“If you are a Governor or a Mayor or a Newspaper Editor or a Kentucky Colonel or if you just happen to have a lot of money or happen to be on intimate terms with somebody who has a lot of money or even somebody whose family once had a lot of money then you will wind up in the grandstand, the clubhouse, or in one of those boxes near the finish line which run about $50,000 for Churchill Downs’ 50 yearly racing days but which are rarely used save on Derby Day...

“If, on the other hand, you (a) have developed a tolerance for claustrophobia, (b) loved Woodstock, (c) have an aberrant penchant for attending spectacles you are unable to see, (d) drink a lot, and (e) don’t have the money or the connections for a seat, you will end up in the infield.”

5/16/2008 2:53:25 PM by Ian Sands | Comments [0] |  

THE ICK FACTOR
5 years ago
March 21, 2003| While listening to R. Kelly’s new album, Chocolate Factory, critic Jon Caramanica couldn’t get the singer’s recent transgression out of his mind.
“On ‘Ignition Remix,’ for example, there’s some awkward business about spewing ‘venom’ into a lady’s ‘trunk.’ And on ‘You Made Me Love You,’...he leers, ‘You must be one of them top models/Body curved like a pop bottle/Got me sweating like a boxer, baby.’ Kelly has always had a gift for injecting the sacred with the profane, and his predilection for young women has been rumored for years. But his arrest makes listening to a track like the operatic ‘Showdown,’ the latest installment of his mano-a-mano song cycle with Ronald Isley, uncomfortable. The saddest part is that nobody else in contemporary pop has his talent when it comes to recording smooth, sensual slowdances and steamy R&B workouts. Chocolate Factory isn’t a bad album, it’s just a difficult one to listen to.” Read full article

ASSHOLE ALERT
18 years ago
March 24, 1989| Mark Jurkowitz gave a picture of Roger Clemens before he’s accused of anything worse than egocentrism and stiffing little kids.
“About an hour after the Texas Rangers beat the Red Sox...in an exhibition game...young autograph hounds are waiting anxiously near the clubhouse. The big news is that Roger Clemens — he of the Cy Young Awards...—has promised he will sign their baseballs on his way out of the ballpark.

“As Clemens’s car comes into view, the youngsters stream into its path...The problem is that Clemens doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Nope; in fact, he’s cruising right by the pack...like a fullback blasting through a narrow opening in the offensive line...[I]t’s obvious that Clemens has as much intention of stopping as he has of grooving a fastball to Jose Canseco in the bottom of the ninth of a 1-1 game.
...
“Roger Clemens. If there’s one ballplayer who seems to epitomize...what many people perceive as the egocentric and selfish new breed of ballplayer, it is the Rocket in ’89 — a somber, hulking presence around the clubhouse, a guy who would stiff a group of kids who have waited for him after the ballgame, and in this exhibition season, a ballplayer who has enveloped himself in the cone of silence by refusing to talk to the press.

“And to Clemens’s way of thinking, the media are the culprits.”

POETRY IN MOTION
25 years ago
March 22, 1983| Robert Polito rhapsodized on the merits of poet Elizabeth Bishop’s body of work.
“Robert Lowell told an interviewer that ‘he enjoyed her poems more than anybody else’s.’ John Ashbery termed her ‘the writer’s writer’s writer.’ To James Merrill she was ‘our greatest national treasure’...

“The Complete Poems 1927-1979...gathers in one volume the life work of Elizabeth Bishop, the poet most admired and celebrated by our other most admired and celebrated poets. ...

“That Bishop is less well known than some of her admirers is a paradox that floats on a short string above the qualities that make her work so distinctive. Her poems resist even the most supple efforts to categorize them. Despite its slenderness — The Complete Poems 1927-1979 comprises 115 original performances — the identifying mark of this book is its variety...Bishop’s writings ‘dramatize the mind in action rather than in repose,’ as she approvingly described the procedures of some 17th-century sermons. And like her ‘Gentleman of Shalott’ she ‘loves/that sense of constant re-adjustment.’ As a result, Bishop has been difficult to pin down in anthologies. Instead of a handful of agreed-upon, representative, important pieces, what we discover here is almost unequaled range and diversity. In the writing of no other American poet...is there greater amplitude of feeling, tone and attitude, and less repetition.”

SEE NO EVIL
35 years ago
March 20, 1973| Staying for some time overseas in Vienna, Austria, writer Sylvia Rothchild said that the city “suffers from amnesia.”
“Strange to come from a post-affluent society to a pre-affluent one, from post-Freud to pre-Freud as well as pre-youth culture, counter culture, women’s liberation, all the rebellions of the sixties and seventies! Especially bizarre since I always felt that the counter culture...was a response to what went on in Austria and Germany. To be sick of the Vietnam war was not only to be horrified at killing innocent people, but also to be terrified that we were not really different from Nazis. Being at the scene of the old crimes, however only added to the confusion. Vienna suffers from amnesia. It’s a city full of statues and memorials, obsessed with history as architecture and operetta, opposed to dwelling on any ‘unpleasantness.’ No demonstrations, no strikes, no controversies in the newspapers...”

3/20/2008 10:56:26 AM by Ian Sands | Comments [0] |  

The Weekly World News may be dead -- long live the Weekly World News -- but who needs it when we've got Boston Herald covers like this one? We were reminded today that the WWN -- bless its putrid, beautiful soul -- perished not because its niche shrank, but precisely because the opposite happened: its practice of fabulism, shameless hyperbole, and proud, profound disdain of anything so mundane as "the facts" metastasized into general practice for the mainstream media. The Weekly World News ceased to exist because it was no longer necessary: daily newspapers and weekly glossies out-sensationalized the insatiably sensational.

The first rule of tabloids is, if you can get the words "Vampire," "Killer," and "Blood" above the fold, increase your point size by 20. (Why? So that the rest of the headline -- in this case, the final two words of "Vampire Killer's Blood Money Bid" -- doesn't get in the way.) The Herald dutifully followed this advice to the letter, but that was just the beginning. The real beauty was how they managed to cram not one but three grade-Z bloodsucker puns into its front-page hype. There was the merely awful "Parole Play May Be in 'Vein' " kicker sitting there at the top, decapitating the upper eighth of the page. Then came the treacly, cringe-inducing "Critics say jailhouse art sale bites" in the subhed. And, for good measure, they finished off with a photo caption of the killer that began "LOTS AT STAKE." (Cue crickets chirping.) At this, however, the staff's pun-muscles apparently failed: the page-five inside hed leeched off the front caption's pun, settling for the weak, community-newspaperish " 'Vampire' stakes future on art." Still, only a truly inspired layout staff -- or a deathly bored one -- would follow up by letting the vampire theme bleed across into the top story of the facing page, a wire import headlined "Technology bytes: New controller puts power to run iPods in your mouth."

Nice to see what the moribund Herald staff is capable of when they find something to sink their teeth into.

Inside there was the faintest tidbit of political red meat from Duval Patrick's office -- hedging support in favor of an anti-"murderbilia" bill -- buried under a page's worth of hyperventilation about a 50-year-old diagnosed schizophrenic named James Riva who, as Massachusetts law shamefully permits, has been hawking his jailhouse artwork on a web site. Riva is also hoping, as only paranoid schizos can, that some parole board will actually let him loose after serving 27 years of a life-sentence-plus, which he incurred for shooting his grandmother and, unfortunately for the both of them but fortunately for the ghouls at One Herald Square, drinking her blood.

Here's our favorite excerpt: "A relative [of Riva's] who refused to identify himself wouldn't comment, except to say the media was only out to 'sensationalize'
Riva's story." Gee, wonder where he got that fucking idea? Perhaps the Herald should run a second-day story on the unidentified relative's clairvoyance, since clearly he was able to magically forsee a) the quarter-page reproduction of one of Riva's drawings that ran adjacent to the story; and b) the sentence that immediately preceded his quote, which took the low-road step of giving out the URL at which one can purchase Riva's art. (We're not stupid: we know you're googling it right now, but some news outlets still have a vestigal lizard remnant of something that used to be called "class.")

It's a trick the Herald learned from the WWN: a feigned, winking moral outrage at the shocking -- shocking! -- acts of a debased, fallen society, delivered with a straight face even as it fucks the corpse for all it's worth on Page One. We bet Riva makes less in a year from his art (even with the added publicity boost) than the mailroom boys will make selling today's Herald cover on eBay. Hey guys: we hear "murderbilia" is auctioning big these days! (At least the Weekly World News was honest about it.) We don't begrudge the Herald its hypocrisies: hell, we encourage them -- with the same root-for-the-retards glee we used to reserve for Bat Boy and Ed Anger. Go, Herald! 

8/22/2007 7:57:18 PM by Carly Carioli | Comments [1] |  

Dance in the streets!! Toast your neighbor!! Use exclamation marks with reckless abandon!! Seven years of ire and whining directed at Karl Rove finally paid off today as Bush's top political aide--the man credited as the brain behind every Republican victory in the past seven years (and blamed for the notable rout in the 2006 mid-term election)--announced his resignation at the end of the month. A favorite target of bloggers and liberal media outlets, "The Phoenix" contributed its share of anti-Rove sentiments over the years with dozens of articles paying tribute to the ruthless mind of the "Boy Genius" and "The Architect" as Bush has ordained him. In March, "The Phoenix" indicted Rove for choreographing the firing of eight U.S. attorneys for seemingly partisan reasons in "Rove's Footprints." And "Phoenix" political writer Adam Reilly expressed grudging admiration (the sort only expressed toward evil nemesis) of Rove here.

As for the impetus behind Rove's resignation, he told The Wall Street Journal that he wanted to spend more time with his family: "As much as I'd like to be here [the White House], I've got to do this for the sake of my family." He claimed that he has contemplated leaving for over a year and this decision is completely unrelated to the attorney firing scandal currently embroiling him. "I'm not going to stay or leave based on whether it pleases the mob," he added.

Rove's denial of the scandal's impact in his decision is more than a little questionable. As the pressure continues to mount against the previously invincible Wormtongue character, he likely opted to step down under his own terms rather than risk a less dignified removal. I expect the investigation will continue, but only half-heartedly, since Rove ousted himself and will still enjoy a degree of executive privilege protection from Bush and the White House.

Rove's optimism and ability to deny the elephant in the room even while it was standing on his feet was remarkable over the past seven years. In "The Wall Street Journal" interview, he declared that conditions in Iraq would improve, predicted Bush's approval ratings would recover and remained confident that Republicans will retain the White House in 2008. He also launched a parting shot at Hillary Clinton, whom he expects to win the Democratic primary, describing her as "a tough, tenacious, fatally flawed candidate."

For wielding influential clout as an advisor, Rove stands unmatched in American history, and his departure leaves a gaping hole unlikely to be filled in the next 15 months. Where will political bloggers aim our smarmy comments now? He will be missed, if only because of the tiresomeness of Cheney jokes and the difficulty in excerpting material from Bush that elicits more than a shake of the head and an imploring look at the calendar.

But before waxing sentimental about the "Rove Years," watch this video of Karl dancing and rapping as "MC Rove" at the Radio-Television Correspondents' Association Dinner. Then remember why we we're thrilled that he's back in Texas where his damage will be limited to the shrewd strategy guide he bequeathes to the GOP and to the book he plans to write about his years in the White House with "the Boss."
--David Mashburn

8/13/2007 12:37:34 PM by Nina MacLaughlin | Comments [0] |  

Dear douchebag or bags who robbed my apartment early Tuesday morning,

I'm not going to say I'm not mad—because I am. I'm furious but not just because of the material possessions you stole. What riles me almost as much as the DVDs and CDs you swiped is your sheer incompetence. Even the cops said this is one of the sloppiest robbery cases they’ve ever investigated, so I want to pass on some advice for future reference. First, you stole a 1998 X-Box worth all of $25 but left the PS2, a $1,000 sound system and forgot the adapter and cords for the X-Box; good luck hawking it. And what’s your excuse for leaving the watch lying on the kitchen table? Don’t thieves go straight for the jewelry? I'm a little offended. Granted, it was just painted gold and wasn’t crafted in Switzerland but it was worth more than the dozen or so empty DVD cases you took. Second, I want you to take the time to watch the DVDs that were in their cases before you pawn them for $5 a piece. I know “Teen Wolf Too” didn’t have Michael J. Fox in it but I still feel that it’s an underrated classic of 80’s cinema, and I think you might agree given a fair viewing. Also, I’m having difficulty accepting that you lifted the DVD case with disc two of “Once Upon a Time in America” (but not disc one because it was in the DVD player which you neglected to take) and now I’m going to have to rent the movie to see how it ends. But what’s really unforgivable is that you scampered off with five bottles of Labatt Blue and left the empty packaging on the kitchen counter—with the lights on.

Now, I’m a pretty laidback guy and not prone to overreacting but I have to warn you that you made a mistake when you jacked my roommate’s racing bike. He competes in—and wins—triathlons and if he ever sees you on that bike, he’s going to run you down and beat you until you bleed blue—Labatt Blue.

--David Mashburn

 

7/18/2007 4:13:04 PM by Nina MacLaughlin | Comments [1] |