Somebody set up us the bomb

I was thrown out of my office in downtown Atlanta yesterday afternoon by the sounding of a fire alarm that eventually was revealed to have been prompted by a bomb of some type. Persistent rumor among those milling about on the street held that a device was discovered in the third floor men's restroom. Explosives teams were present along with about 50 different jurisdictions of law enforcement (we are less than a mile from the state capitol building) and I got to watch the little bomb disposing robot roll into the building at one point.

They were still preparing to deal with the device when I left at about 5:30, so I went home without my wallet or any work materials. Now, however, I can't find anything in the news about the incident at all. It's like the whole thing never happened. Irritating.

Never Dreamed You'd Leave in Summer

I wasn't sure what to think while reading this article in the NYT this Sunday about people's relationships with television shows. Although saying that I couldn't even imagine this kind of commitment to a television show could (and possibly should) carry an air of superiority, I genuinely didn't feel superior at the thought. I can't help wondering how nice it would be to have something in your life that you got excited about.

Today, with the season finale of American Idol safely behind us, I feel a little more satisfied that I'm not a dedicated follower of TV shows. I'm sure the American Idol phenomenon is relatively harmless, but it sure doesn't feel that way. I wonder if suicides and other, less dramatic indicators of major depression tend to hit a local peak in early summer when viewers have to say goodbye temporarily or permanently to new episodes of beloved shows.

I'm a bit surprised that the television networks are still structured around a Fall-to-late-Spring rollout schedule. Way back in the early 90s when Fox (I think) started experimenting with introducing new shows or broadcasting new episodes of shows in summer, I was pretty sure that it was only a matter of time before the fat Fall issue of TV Guide with all the new network shows was a thing of the past. It might be anyway, since I understand TV Guide isn't even a tv guide anymore, but I really don't know. I find it strange that television production still follows a model that was initially developed to coincide with the production schedule of automobiles.

A bunch of shows are ending this season, it seems, although I guess that's true every season. I'm often tempted to watch the last episode of shows, even the ones I didn't watch, just to see how they end. Since the art of the television show is so wrapped up with trying to create the illusion of perpetual motion without abandoning the things that viewers like about the show in the first place, bringing the vehicle to a halt offers an opportunity for something unusual to happen. Closing episodes often defy the general rules of television physics. I really liked the last episode of Seinfeld, for instance, despite never liking the show (this is apparently a common dichotomy; you can either like the show or the finale, but not both). I watched a few minutes of the Alias finale, but it looked like the show was closing on a note just as superficially busy and ridiculous as it had always been. In some cases, like the West Wing and Will and Grace, I suspect that the last episodes would merely amplify the things I hated about them in the first place. I considered watching the finale of Charmed just to make sure it really ended since I genuinely fear that Fall will come around and we'll all discover that, just as James Bond always manages to escape from whatever diabolic death trap his enemies cast him in, the Charmed Ones were somehow renewed for a Dick Wolf-ishly scary number of seasons.

One way in which Tivo has changed my life is that it has made me realize how little I care about most of what's on television. We've set it up so that it will record "Tivo suggestions" if there's nothing else on and if there's space, and we haven't yet filled the thing up, so every day I turn the thing on to see what it recorded for me. I end up deleting pretty much all of it. I think I've only actually watched one or two things Tivo has independently recorded on my behalf. What's more, I look at the list of things I actually asked it to record for me and often feel like they're just not worth watching. Maybe I would have watched whatever it was if it had been on when I set it to record, but now I don't feel like it anymore. I kind of expected this. I tend to see television as a serendipitous alternative to DVDs, but now that it's just a bunch of recordings that I didn't choose to buy, I don't know that I want it.

Since I haven't watched any of the major shows this season, I suppose I could just rent them and watch them all in a row now, if I wanted to. What network was it that used to have a slogan that a rerun isn't a rerun if it's "new to you"? I can't remember, but I guess it's all new to me now.

Do I have a dog in this fight?

Scanning the NYT this morning, I spotted this article from Kelefa Sanneh about the Dixie Chicks' new album and its predictable reception from the country music establishment. Now, I should say up front that (like Sanneh, I've gathered from reading him for some time now) I don't listen to a lot of country music. This is true despite the fact that I grew up with it in a lower middle class suburb of Atlanta. Therefore, I'm not sure if the current conflict between the Chicks and country's stars/industry/fans is really any of my business.

If Sanneh can express an opinion, though, I guess I can. First, I like the Dixie Chicks. My wife has several of their albums (including the new one, purchased for full retail price in a departure from our standard practice of buying music used) and plays them occasionally. It was a welcome relief to hear what I considered their genuinely country sound in contrast to the faux-country mall-pop confections of Shania Twain, Faith Hill, and Toby Keith (he recorded a song with Sting, of all people).

Still, none of that matters. What irritates me about Sanneh's article is the implicit assertion that country music fans (read Southerners) can't understand the dimensions of this argument. It starts with Sanneh's claim that "some former fans" thought Maines was insulting Texas in her statement about Bush. I saw no evidence of this when the controversy initially blew up. Everybody knew what she said and what it meant, even "country fans", whom Sanneh seems to think can't understand plain English.

Even as he accuses the Dixie Chicks of conflating "politics and culture" (typical critic-speak for something he doesn't want to describe clearly), Sanneh conflates the country music establishment and industry with its fans, and its fans with the South, who mistakenly believed they were being insulted personally. I remember the public outcry over Maines' comments just before the invasion of Iraq, and everybody knew that the conflict was over her failure to support the president. Sanneh offers no evidence to the contrary, merely assumption.

Sanneh is right that Nashville isn't politically monolithic (although it's a big difference to criticize the president for Katrina-related failings when his ratings are in the toilet than just before a disastrous and immoral, but widely popular, foreign invasion) and neither are country music fans. Those who responded angrily to the Chicks did so because they didn't like what she actually said, not because they misinterpreted Maines' statement as a slap at country fans or Southerners in general.

Now, it does appear that the Dixie Chicks are taking shots at some country fans for their reaction, but again, the ones they are dissing know who they are. To suggest otherwise is condescension. CMT and the country establishment are bound to be driven by what they consider the central tendency in country fans, who are likely to be conservative and Southern, so naturally they'll be hostile. Whether fans will desert them entirely is a different matter.

As someone raised in the South (and a genuine Cracker, having been born in the Cracker State), but with significant ties elsewhere, I get pissed off when I read and hear others from outside fail to acknowledge the heterogeneity and sophistication of Southerners. That said, there are also rednecks (meaning ignorant backward assholes, which you can find everywhere, even though "redneck" can have a positive connotation) in the South, and if the Dixie Chicks want to insult them, I'm all for it. Believe me, I knew a bunch of rednecks growing up, and I hated them.

In conclusion, I just want to stress that Southerners, and country fans in general I'm sure, are quite capable of understanding just who the Dixie Chicks are trying to defy and who they aren't. If they aren't fighting for some of their former fans, as Sanneh suggests, it's probably because they don't want or need them.

Lusty smatterings

So, I saw these reviews of Sofia Coppola's new movie, just screened at Cannes, on the NYT front page. In it, Manohla Dargis describes the film's reception as a theater filled with "lusty boos and smatterings of applause." It was a memorable phrase, so it wasn't hard to spot when I checked out J. Hoberman's Cannes dispatch filed yesterday at the Village Voice. Hoberman describes Richard Kelly's new film Southland Tales as "received with a lusty round of boos and a smattering of applause." Dargis' innovation, it seems, is to pluralize.

Someone got a bit lazy. I decided to see if the phrase was common and discovered this article from the Mercury News from Sunday regarding Barry Bonds' home run tying Babe Ruth's record: "Bonds' plate appearances drew lusty boos along with a smattering of cheers."

At least it was cheers appearing in a single unit of "smattering" in this case.

President Bush to send National Guard to Florida to Combat Alligator Menace

Following his proposal to enhance security on the border with Mexico by adding up to 6,000 National Guard troops, President Bush announced a plan today to send up to 1,500 Guard members to Florida in response to the recent string of alligator-related deaths in the state. "This is a national of laws, and we must enforce our laws," the President said in a press conference this morning. "Even alligators, who are often undocumented, must be held to the expectations placed upon all who reside in the United States. Those expectations include that they not eat people." The president's brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, recently added "alligator uprising" to his State of Emergency declaration issued last week in response to wildfires raging throughout the state.

The most recent attack was just last Sunday, when a visiting college student was killed by a gator while snorkeling in Marion County. Another woman was found dead Sunday in Pinellas County of bite marks consistent with an alligator attack. Last week, yet another woman was killed while jogging in Sunrise, FL by a ten-foot alligator who was later caught.

"We are ready to meet the alligator menace," Major General Douglas Burnett of the Florida Army National Guard resolved on Monday. "We have three UH-60 helicopters on call in the event of further alligator incursions."

Bush's plan has met with mixed responses so far, however. Florida Senator Bill Nelson (D) criticized the plan, citing concerns that it would overtax the already burdened Army National Guard and distract them from other important duties "preparing for natural disasters, fighting the war on terror, and keeping oil companies off the coast of Florida." Senator Mel Martinez (R) also criticized the proposal as "too little, too late." He characterized the gesture as "an unsatisfactory sop to his conservative base, a knee-jerk response that will do nothing to stem the rising tide of alligator offensives," although he was not willing to say that Florida was engaged in an interspecies civil war. Senator Martinez questioned the president's commitment to using executive authority in pursuit of law and order, given his failure to call out National Guard troops to prevent the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube last year, although he offered praise for their use in the 2004 election to prevent illegal voters from reaching the polls.

The proposal drew opposition from other circles as well. Democrats roundly criticized it as a political stunt to bolster support for the president's brother and to appear active in response to a crisis. On the other side of the aisle, Representative Marsha Blackburn (R, TN) also took the president to task for favoritism, noting that the administration has still done nothing about the fatal black bear attack in the Cherokee National Forest that left a 6-year-old girl dead last month. "Certainly the danger of bear attacks nationwide is of much more significance than that of alligators," she said, "yet the President has sat idly by while bears run rampant over our recreation areas, stealing picnic baskets, harassing forest rangers, and killing little girls."

So far, the public appears to be divided on the question of sending National Guard troops to do alligator duty. However, the Bush administration appears to believe that citizens can be swayed to approve of the measure and to the belief that robust use of military personnel can solve many policy problems. It remains to be seen whether this application will meet with more public regard than the president's previous calls to use National Guard forces to register Medicare beneficiaries for the new drug benefit plan, retrieve telephone records from Qwest, serve on the jury for the retrial of accused Jordanian perjurer Osama Awadallah, get Chris back on American Idol, and make the Da Vinci Code come out sooner.

Update to the last post

Howard Kurtz apparently agrees with me. Kurtz also has a lot more details from the Dallas Business Journal story and responses from several outlets.

"Americans... need to watch what they say" - Ari Fleischer

Speaking of questionable things said in public, another strange controversy is hitting the Bush administration. HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson apparently told attendees at a real estate forum in Dallas that he didn't give a contract to a deserving bidder because the bidder said he didn't like President Bush. His attributed quote: "Why should I reward someone who doesn't like the president, so they can use funds to try to campaign against the president? Logic says they don't get the contract. That's the way I believe."

Jackson is now trying to say that the story wasn't true, that he made it up to illustrate how some people "will unfairly characterize the president and then turn around and ask you for money." Moreover, Jackson isn't even involved in approving contracts for the Department, so the explanation goes, so this couldn't have actually happened.

I don't know if it happened or not, but even if the "anecdote" told by Secretary Jackson was just what he says it is, it's still puzzling and problematic. Why tell a story in which a contractor says "I don't like President Bush" in order to illustrate how some people "mischaracterize" the president? That's not mischaracterization, that's just stating an opinion. Moreover, the "logic" Jackson used the story to support is nothing short of saying that a patronage system is policy at HUD. The message conveyed by the story isn't "man, can you see how frustrating it is at HUD that we have to give out money sometimes to people who hold wrongheaded notions of the president?", it's "man, I'm not going to give people money here at HUD if you're not on our team." Note that Jackson has not (yet) denied that his comments were reported accurately.

Now, his explanation of the affair is that he made the story up. Normally, officials are loathe to say that they tell made up stories (known in some circles as "lies") in public appearances, but in this case that seems like the most politic thing to do.

I don't understand why this story isn't bigger.

Star crosses the line, again

Troi Torain, Star of the Star & Buc Wild Morning Show on 105.1 in New York, was fired yesterday for some stupid shit. The story at the link has the details.

I used to listen to Star and Buc Wild on Hot 97 sometimes when I lived in NY, despite the fact that Star said some offensive things and some really stupid things (there was a great deal of overlap). Sometimes, he was really funny, but sometimes he was tiresome or idiotic and I'd have to turn the show off. Unfortunately, I got the impression that some of the things that I found tiresome and idiotic were the things other people tuned in to hear.

I guess the most interesting thing about the show was that it was often very unpredictable. Despite the fact that Hot 97 was a hip hop station, Star never let that interfere with indulging whatever musical whims might strike him at any particular time. He's around my age and we shared a lot of tastes, and he would regularly lambaste fans of the station as musically ignorant for not knowing anything outside of rap music from the last few years. His on-air contests, for instance, would often involve naming who performed songs like "Fooled Around and Fell in Love" or "Love is Alive" (Elvin Bishop and Gary Wright, for those who don't know). He dedicated entire shows to interviews with people most Hot 97 fans wouldn't know they should care about like Nile Rodgers (which wasn't that surprising) or Geddy Lee (which was). Star was a huge Rush fan, and while I lost interest in Rush about 15 years ago (which was about 10 years after almost everyone else) it was interesting to hear hip-hop station DJ interview him.

All that aside, Star was always an inch away from making himself more trouble than he was worth, and it looks like he's taken a step forward, again.

The Onion crosses the line

Among this week's news briefs on The Onion, I find this story:

Senator Fucks Own Wife Out Of Political Necessity

WASHINGTON, DC—Seeking reelection in 2008, Senator Gordon Smith (R-OR) will limit himself to sexual activity with his wife, Sharon. "I love my wife and would never do anything that would weaken our sacred bond of marriage, or reduce my constituent's faith in me," said Smith, who faces fierce competition in the next election due to recent redistricting. "Sharon's been right at my side, and instrumental in my political career, through all our years of marriage." Seeing no possible negative ramifications, Smith allows himself to jerk off while thinking about Naomi Watts.

Pretty funny, right? Well, it was up until the claim that Smith "faces fierce competition in the next election due to recent redistricting" appears. "Nonsense," I thought to myself, "Senators run in statewide races. They'd have to change the shape of Oregon for Smith to face some kind of 'districting' change."

Then I realized that being a political scientist has severely damaged my ability to appreciate political humor.

Bruce Willis as a "rebellious raccoon"?

As the Summer movie season sorta begins, Sunday's NYT had a Summer movie release schedule section. More coverage of the season can be found at IMDb. Theater attendance has been declining, so it's said, and formerly secure strategies for producing hit movies appear to have become less secure. This weekend's lackluster performance for Mission: Impossible: III (for the sake of accuracy, I note that the poster has colons separating the "M" "i" and "III", while the full title appears to have undergone a colectomy) demonstrates that even for Tom Cruise, moviemaking appears to have become a risky business.

Still, it looks like the movie industry hasn't abandoned the stuff that's been so profitable in the past. What does the summer bring us?

Sequels?

Check - M:i:III, X-Men: The Last Stand, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Garfield's A Tale of Two Kitties, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Clerks II, Invincible (oh wait, that's not actually a sequel to Rock Star)

Remakes?

Check - Poseidon, The Omen, Pulse, Romeo and Juliet: Sealed with a Kiss, Lassie

TV show adaptations?

Check - Strangers with Candy, Miami Vice, Crazy Like a Fox (oh wait, that's not actually a version of Crazy Like a Fox)

Video game and comic adaptations?

Check - Art School Confidential, Over the Hedge, X-Men: The Last Stand, The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green, Superman Returns, Azumi, DOA: Dead or Alive

Book adaptations?

Check - The Da Vinci Code, The Devil Wears Prada, A Scanner Darkly, How to Eat Fried Worms, Factotum

Animated kids movies?

Check - Over the Hedge, Cars, Garfield..., Romeo and Juliet..., The Ant Bully, Barnyard, Monster House, Captain Sabertooth

Horror?

Check - An American Haunting, See No Evil, The Omen, Pulse (maybe, remains to be seen), The Reaping, The Return, The Descent

There are some things I'm kind of interested in here. On the "quality movie" front there's Art School Confidential, Mouth to Mouth, Coastlines, 13 Tzameti, The Science of Sleep, and The Illusionist. Land of the Blind looks really interesting (and it has Gareth!). I might be tempted to see some of the horror releases, although I can't muster much enthusiasm for The Omen, another remake of another 70s "classic" that I'm not fond of. The continuing wave of comic book adaptations doesn't interest me much. I'm a fan of the original Poseidon Adventure, but not sure the remake is compelling enough to lure me into the theater. Distributors keep looking for another documentary to hit big and there are a few here that might be worth seeing (Guiliani Time, aka Tommy Chong, This Film is Not Yet Rated). Beerfest looks, oddly enough, kind of intriguing.

There's plenty here that looks appalling, though, or at least categorically unnecessary. One Last Thing, for instance, is almost unbelievable at first blush, but Cynthia Nixon and Gina Gershon are in it. The same could be said for My First Wedding, except nobody's in it of note. I understand that Lindsay Lohan movies make money, but Just My Luck looks like she's pushing it. She's obviously trying to stretch a bit by joining an Altman ensemble in A Prairie Home Companion, but I don't care for the source material so she'll have to do it without me.

Nacho Libre combines the director of Napoleon Dynamite with Jack Black and that bodes ill for us all. Also on the "comedies that look annoying" front we have Click, Little Man, Another Gay Movie, Zoom, The Puffy Chair (which sounds like it'll be one of those too-self-satisfied-indie comedies), and of course, Clerks II. I can only hope that the latter will finally demonstrate to America that Kevin Smith's entire career has been an abominable mistake that we can put past us. The Will Ferrell/Wilson Bros./Vince Vaughn/et al. comedy mafia have a number of movies on the horizon that could, like all the others, turn out good or really bad.

The less said about Snakes on a Plane the better. Hasn't the internet already done enough damage?

Not much to get excited about, but I can't remember the last time I was really excited about seeing a movie. No reason summer should be any different.

Weekend - Busy not grading

I was supposed to finish grading students' exams this weekend in preparation for giving my other exam today, but I found I was far too busy. I did get some grading done, but my time was full with engagements, like a Kentucky Derby party hosted by Andrew and Mary (whose book is coming out later this year!) My wife continued her uncanny winning streak, co-winning the pool (with Scott Strader, who passed along this hilarious analysis of Dan Brown) while I successfully picked the 19th place horse in the field.

Sunday, I attended an art exhibit opening at Grow Salon and dropped by Inman Perk for some coffee and a bit of chocolate mousse cake. In between these vital appointments, I saw a few horror flicks on Tivo or video. Sure, I did a bit of grading while on the couch watching Hand of Death and The Ghost Galleon, but there's only so much marking one can do without missing an important development in the plot.

Fortunately, I'm almost done grading this first batch of exams now and felt like everyone needed to know. Meanwhile, check out this recent post about alleged allegations against current Bush judicial nominees on the ACSBlog.

Entering the Fray

Headlines in the mainstream media address vital questions and important issues raised by current events to be sure, but sometimes they neglect stories that fail to conform to their preconceived notions of what is news. Fortunately, the blogosphere is here to draw our attention to the inconvenient truths conventional journalists are afraid to touch. Last week we saw another instance in which a critical issue fell through the cracks in the MSM until bloggers gave it much-deserved attention. I refer, of course, to Stephen Colbert's speech at the annual White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. It's time the CR wrote out on this.

As this article relates, blogs have debated the merit of Colbert's performance at the correspondents' dinner, with liberal observers in general finding Colbert funny, or at least memorable, and the conservative audience mostly unimpressed. I expressed my opinion to friends last week after seeing the speech, which wasn't really that funny.

Like MSM commentator Richard Cohen, columnist for the Washington Post, I can be a funny guy. If you need proof, I can show you student evaluations to that effect. The comments I highlight in my annual teaching reports would lead you to believe that my performance is evaluated largely on how funny I am. Also like Cohen, I was also often called upon in school to be spontaneously funny. In eighth grade I made fun of another student during a presentation he was giving so effectively that he started to cry. I was so proud.

Unlike Cohen, I don't fault Colbert's performance for rudeness. I thought Colbert was about as funny as he usually is on his Comedy Central show, if you subtract the visual crutches and supporters he leans on during the show. There were some darts, but a lot of bricks as well. I think Colbert was trying to use the close proximity with his target as another crutch, the way he does (sometimes effectively) on his show, to make the material funnier.

Cohen's accusation of rudeness against Colbert ultimately doesn't hold together. Sure, most of Colbert's jokes were at the expense of the President and many of them were lame, but if the latter weren't true, Cohen's critique should still hold. To rephrase, Cohen's claim that Colbert was guilty of rudeness shouldn't depend on whether or not the jokes were funny, just that they were at the expense of the "guest of honor" and he was constrained by decorum from reacting as he might like to. However, from the way he relates it, Cohen's allegation depends on Colbert's jokes being weak. Telling good jokes at the expense of a function's guest of honor is a well-established tradition known colloquially as a "roast." Making unfunny statements at the expense of a politician, even in his presence, is called "political commentary," a tradition nearly as well established as roasting. It's only making unfunny statements that are supposed to be good jokes at the expense of a guest of honor who's a politician that's not such standard practice.

My problem with Colbert's speech was that he chose the wrong target. The best parts of the speech were those directed at the feeble efforts of the press to cover the White House over the last five years. Colbert's act on the Colbert Report has the same problem. Sure, it's great to see some parody of the tortured facts and twisted logic that conservative TV personalities like Bill O'Reilly marshal to defend the President, but the real object of Colbert's act should be the state of TV "journalism," not the president they shill for. Cohen is right that Colbert was playing to the audience at home, the friendly audience who tune in for the Daily Show and his own almost as if they were a shadow universe, an alternative reality kind of like the West Wing in which no one really takes conservative positions seriously. Colbert did have a chance to say something to the audience in front of him, but he would have succeeded not by getting laughs from that audience, but by really making them dislike him.

I'd like to see Colbert parody figures like the new Press Secretary Tony Snow, recent Fox News commentator and former guest host for Rush Limbaugh's show. Snow, as has been remarked upon to no end recently, is no reflexive apologist for the Bush administration. Snow is sometimes critical of Bush, from the Right.

I want to see Colbert take his belligerent TV character into the Red Zone. He should be to the right of Bush on every issue, excoriating the administration for not following through on True Conservative Principles, offering only reluctant praise for how far Bush is willing to go (phrased in language that makes the President sound as extreme as possible), occasionally suggesting with satisfaction that the President is really more conservative than even his supporters believe. I imagine that doing so would perhaps allow fewer opportunities to make jokes directly at the President's expense, but so be it. A lot of those jokes are bad anyway and they undermine the act. Colbert subtly breaks character far too often for the sake of a (often lame) dig at President Bush. I wouldn't mind if the Colbert Report wasn't even that funny in the conventional sense.

Rather than pandering to his enthusiastic Blue voter audience, Colbert should risk appealing to red meat Red voters, the better to parody their own positions. He should cause committed liberals and Democrats to wonder occasionally whether he's really serious. He should risk being disliked by everybody. I want to see Stephen Colbert turn into the new Andy Kaufman. Unfortunately, that's never going to happen.

Here's an example of what I'd like to see. During the first Gulf War (as I continually hear it referred to, although we aren't calling the current Iraq campaign Gulf War II), I was in college on a pretty political campus that had protests in favor of or against the buildup and war on a regular basis throughout late '90 and early '91. Seeing an opportunity, I made up a bunch of flyers and posted them around campus advertising a meeting of a group called "Patriots for Domestic Exploitation." I read a bunch of Pat Buchanan speeches and wrote a jeremiad about Desert Shield, arguing that instead of liberating Middle Eastern plutocrats, we should be using this instability in the oil-producing region to recolonize Prince William Sound and other American sites that had been declared off-limits to oil exploration due to illegal, immoral and nonsensical environmental concerns. I maintained that the military campaign in the Gulf was driven by a conspiracy of Zionist homosexual drug dealing British royalty (Lyndon LaRouche was big at the time) and that we should conscript illegal immigrants at the border with Mexico and send them to Alaska to retake and work oil fields in federal preserves. I listed a schedule of meetings in various coffee shops around campus, but never had the guts to actually show up at the appointed times to see if anyone responded. I'd like to think no one took it seriously, but fear otherwise.

Was it funny? Not especially, but I was very amused (hey, I was still a teenager). In my fantasy scenario for how that joke played out, I show up to a packed meeting, whip up the attendees with a rousing and completely insincere speech along the same lines as the pamphlet with plenty of references to King Juan Carlos of Spain (a popular candidate at the time for being the Antichrist), and then lead them out into the street to disappear into a crowd and never see those freaks again.

I abandoned my dream of becoming a comedian when I realized things like this that tickled me were not funny to most people.

So, Stephen Colbert's routine at the White House Correspondents' Dinner wasn't funny; there, I said it. Like Richard Cohen, I'd like to see him really enter the fray, but my idea of doing that isn't likely to keep the Colbert Report on the air for very long.

Schedule to Clear Your Schedule

If you'd like a trip to Orlando in mid-July, you might want to attend this conference on conferences. Allegedly, "participation in conferences is one of the means of knowledge communication" and you can learn all about it at the International Symposium on Knowledge Communication and Conferences. One cause for skepticism, perhaps, is the following sentence, found on the above site:

An increasing number of research, studies and reflections have been published with regards to knowledge communications by means of journals publications, but very few publications can actually be found with respect to knowledge communications via conference presentations.

Via the Improbable Research blog.

Shoulda been major, Part 2

When I was in 3rd grade, I caused something of a scandal in music class when I chose Hall & Oates' "Kiss on My List" as my favorite song. The music teacher asked, so I told her. As I recall, the modal answer that year (I think it was 1980) was "The Devil Went Down to Georgia". Apparently, a song about the devil was nothing to raise an eyebrow about in my suburban Atlanta elementary school (as I recall, Terri Gibb's "Somebody's Knockin'" was huge not too long afterward) but a song about kissing was a shock.

My little blue-eyed soul self was already listening religiously to Motown and Stax by that time and taping Stylistics and Gap Band songs off the radio. I can't tell you for the life of me where all that came from, since neither of my parents were at all fans of R&B or soul music. Nevertheless, it paved the way for future development of my musical tastes, as I turned to hip hop music heavy with samples from those songs I recognized by the mid-80s. In high school, though, the crowd I hung with most of the time were heavy metal and/or prog rock fans and I took to that as well. I was listening to AC/DC, Metallica, Yes, and Pink Floyd in no time. My favorite, though, was King Crimson. I always wanted Robert Fripp and the Bomb Squad to work together. I still listened to R&B and soul music a fair amount, catching up with older stuff I hadn't happened upon when I was younger and keeping up with whatever New Jack Swing was worth listening to.

Want to know where this is going?

It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that I'm a big fan of Daryl Hall's first solo album, Sacred Songs. The first time I heard of this album, I thought it was just an urban legend. There was no way, I reasoned, that Daryl Hall had cut an album in the late 70s with Robert Fripp on board as producer and guitar player. Nevertheless, the evidence was right there on Fripp's 1979 solo work Exposure. Hall is credited on vocals and as co-writer of several songs. Obtaining Sacred Songs became something of an obsession with me, and I eventually found it on LP.

Of course, it finally appeared on CD a few years ago and my wife picked it up for me (since I didn't even know it had come out). The album isn't really as weird as I was expecting before I heard it, and that's a good thing. Sure, I'd have been really intrigued by some kind of bizarre chimera of Hall's Philly soul pastiche and Fripp's experimental electronics and sharp, nimble guitar work, but Sacred Songs sounds like it makes all the sense in the world. Hall isn't nearly as smooth here as he was on most of Hall & Oates' material, hitting notes with imprecision or not at all sometimes, but the effect is a loose, passionate series of performances that balance well with the sometimes ascetic setting of Fripp's production. The songs written for the album aren't nearly as forbidding as one would expect, although there are moments of Frippertronic intercession in the middle of what would otherwise sound like perfectly serviceable, radio-friendly rock or R&B. "Babs and Babs" is an absolute triumph, a nearly 8-minute pop song complete with guitar solo and propulsive beat until an ambient soundscape invades the track like a culture jammer. NYCNY is apparently the first take on a song that reappears on Exposure as NY3.

One of the startling things about the album is how much space Hall gives to Fripp's instrumental interests. He adds only a touch (although it's an effective one) to "The Farther Away I Am" and nothing to "Urban Landscape" (also from Exposure). The ballads are excellent as well; "Why Was It So Easy" and "Without Tears" are among Hall's best work in any setting. I almost hate to single out any tracks, since there's no filler on the album at all.

The CD reissue includes two tracks from Exposure that feature Hall: "You Burn Me Up I'm a Cigarette" and the gorgeous "North Star", which served as the template for "Matte Kudasai" on King Crimson's 1981 return album Discipline.

This won't always be the case, but the title of this series of posts is meant seriously this time. RCA didn't release Sacred Songs until 1980 despite being recorded in '77, fearing it had no commercial potential. I can see several of these tracks making their way to radio, though, in the context of late 70s AOR. There's no telling what would have happened if it had been given a proper, timely release, but I don't think it's ridiculous to suggest that one or two of these songs might have been hits.

When I Click Post, I Feel Guilty

I keep thinking of things to post about, then fail to do so or start something and never finish. It's not that I'm lazy (or just that I'm lazy), I also feel genuinely guilty when I'm writing on the blog. I always feel like there's something else I should be doing instead. That's basically true, but after too long without a post I feel guilty about having a blog and never providing any content. That's a truly strange phenomenon that, nonetheless, seems to be quite common.

There's an awful lot of court related stuff going on now that I could be putting down thoughts about; maybe I'll do that soon. Those posts are at least tangentially related to what I'm supposed to be doing (reading, thinking, writing).

In the meantime, I've almost gotten through my first week with Tivo. So far, I can't say it's changed my life, just made me watch a lot more What Not to Wear. That's not wholly accurate. I've been a much more regular viewer of the Daily Show and Colbert Report than I was before, since I can watch it whenever I like now without the trouble of setting my VCR to record it for me. I also asked it to record (I've discovered that I use the word "tape" as a verb to mean "record" and it's starting to bug me now that I have a DVR; it's also starting to bug me that things like that bug me) a couple of horror showings on those great commercial-free basic cable movie channels that are always showing stuff in the middle of the night I want to watch. I caught up with Eye of the Devil, which I've wanted to see for some time, and Diary of a Madman, a curiosity that escaped my attention for some time.

I genuinely liked EotD, even though it was considerably overlong and most of the performances were underwhelming despite a name cast. Oddly enough, the most striking performance comes from Sharon Tate, who is spooky and intense. Damn fine looking woman, too. The movie itself is not bad, but uneven and far too drawn out. The usually-reliable J. Lee Thompson pulls off some effective scenes to create a mood of estranged fatalism in which Deborah Kerr wallows. Overall, the enterprise makes you appreciate how well-down The Wicker Man is, since it delivers much more with a similar basic story. Diary is, as I put it above, something of a curiosity. I never say no to a Vincent Price feature, but this one offers little to distinguish it. Price's character (Simon Cordier) is possessed by a murderous entity called the Horla, with which he converses at some length. In fact, the Horla is so loquacious that its chats with Price start to resemble the telepathic antics of the Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. There's an interesting sophistication in the movie's morality. Despite being a calculating murderer, Cordier is still a sympathetic character who takes steps to prevent himself from succumbing to the influence of the evil Horla. They're ineffectual steps, but he does retain some sympathy. Meanwhile, his victim is a beautiful artist's model who leaves her husband for Cordier, primarily for his money. Nevertheless, she's not unsympathetic either. The girl's husband, a poor artist, ends up being falsely convicted of her killing, but in contrast to the typically faultless wrongly convicted man, he's depicted as pretty bitter about his wife dumping him and is kind of a jerk to her. Not unrealistic or unwarranted, but it is kind of interesting.

Now I've gone and done it. I've been writing for about half an hour when I really should've started grading the exams I just gave.