needless personal note, in re: SH:

Noted - an ex-girlfriend, to whom in reaction I hopped over the emotional cliff, had her cats taken by an ex-bf on his way to California. Quite rightly, as a good progressive hippie drug-aficionado should, she called the police, and had him indicted. When he returned to NC, he had the joys of going to court to answer charges of kitten abduction, second-degree.


Goodness gracious, as Barry says. How does one account for that? I knew everyone was going nuts, but I more or less thought she already was, and so would be spared the more foolish aspects of the general decline. Not so much, not so much.

Another One?

The best thing about old Wonkette was her ability to make drunk jokes without any personal vulnerabilities or accidental revelations of world-historical self-absorption. Not so me. So want to hear some good music, that, like, isn't indy nerd self-congratulatory drivel? Music that's good, and shows how hip-hop along with Faulkner and blues is the only contribution of value America's likely to make?

Lyrics Born
Emanon
Pigeon John

(alternative post title: why moving to brooklyn and not wherever i could afford in california was a big fat fruitful mistake)

"OH, that's right, his name was Billy... Yo, this cat was all right, I saw him down at a Kiwi dj's night at this red hiphop bar, yo he was into politics for real. Yeah, for real."

Let Me Reminisce Over You...

(PM Dawn)

Howard Dean, c. June, 2004.

Hannah Arendt, for everything.

Noam Chomsky, for writing me back.

Rawkus Records, before your demise defined the word 'inexplicable."

To Andrew the Torontan of Polmo Polvo, for buttering up ole billy.

BKen, for what I might have known.

BO08, for this chance now.

Mario, for ducking before your idiot son fucked it all up.

Joe Hill, for resembling what a man might be.
("my will is simple to decide/as i have nothing to divide")

Dorothy Parker, for being the last one to see Sacco before they killed him, and for being buried in the garden of the NAACP before they could call you a wigger for wanting that.

For Billy, for crying at the thought of poor old Dorothy Parker, and poor old America.

Don't Get Me Wrong

I still think white people, generally speaking, make awful music. But this one dude had the idea to let a bunch of indy rock nerds ape their chamber music betters, and had the better idea to do it in the middle of a Korean church in midtown, and had the even better idea of soaking the whole thing in gratuitous red wine. Check it.

That's Buzzy!

Having remembered that I, in fact, keep a blog (if not the particulars of how to do anything with it), I decided its time to inaugurate a new feature to happywarrior. In loving memory of when I used to believe that shit, I'm starting a series of knock-offs of Newsweek's Conventional Wisdom watch. I have no idea how to copy and paste little arrows, but that's why they invented words anyway.


(little green up arrow) Ben Smith. I know, I know; egg on the face, unforgivable journalistic sin, etc. But, really, everyone loves the guy, and made haste to publicly cut him some superfluous slack. Plus, he was nice to Chris Owens.


(little green up arrow) HotlineTV. This political 'journalism' 'show' is to my affections as Catholicism was to Evelyn Waugh; you could stay away all you like, but with a twitch upon the thread you'll find yourself right back up in that shit. Watching yesterday's show this morning, I heard John Mercurio make mention of some 'William,' who doesn't appreciate his imperious interruptions. Not so, good sir! I'm down with good ole frat boys and their clever mispronunciations of co-host names; it's almost as hip as W's monikers. But that madcap ice skating rankings craziness? Classic.


(way down red arrow) ridonkulous - will you all shut the fuck up? 'ginormous'? what are we, (searching for appropriate opprobrium; drowning in whiskey-soaked fury).

Oh the things you'll see...

I can hardly believe this has yet to come up, but let's talk a little bit about HotlineTV. Like Hillary, by talk I mean you listen as I type, but pay that no never mind; this is assuredly the finest political web-tv cultural criticism you'll read online this afternoon.

I first came to HotlineTV in the halcyon days of late summer 2006. There were two young men, I recall, who were the stars; one gangly drunk by the Mercurio, and one apple-cheeked Orlandinian, went by the name of Chuck I believe. And Katy bar the door, what a show! Cheap graphics, sure; laughably well-intentioned Nat'l Assoc. of Mining Corporation propaganda to start out, of course; idiot sports-metaphor concluding segment, you know it baby. But above and beyond all this, the heart of the show was the camaraderie, the esprit de corps, the pure drunken intimacy of John Mercurio and Chuck Todd.

I'm pretty sure I party better than those losers in DC. Maybe not Sam Smith (fuck you DCist, I met you all at Black Cat and you wouldn't stop asking me where I went to college), he wilds out like a big 'un, but better than most of those narcotics-shy, martini-tippling, ambitious sons-o-bitches. But seeing Mercurio sniff and blink and make inappropriate jokes, my confidence was shaken. Todd is clearly a lightweight (haha, political director of NBC News), but this italian fella is onamove.

Absent real proof, I can only point to the delirious quality of this post to aver for the quality of this show. Also, for some bizarre reason every editor at Hotline is super-hot. You know who I'm talking about: who could forget Shira Toeplitz's sexy stammer, or Maura O'Brien's vampy poses. Amy Walter and Marc Anbinder can speak on camera like professionals, fer sure; but I have seen the future of my political media consumption, and it is the good-lookin' leftwing political journalists at HotlineTV.

Thank you, National Journal. If only you knew...

So, not doing so well on the whole 'posting' thing. In re: the remedy.... Item!

Here' s an Oak-town (don't stop) pic of a Bam* rally, happening in early March, the year before the election. As my increasingly main man Ben Smith says: Whoa.


* Bam, the NY Daily News' glorious new nickname for Barry, is now the nomenclature of choice for all right thinking left-wing types. Let it be duly noted.

Big White Corn Farmers for Barack

If you haven't yet, check out William Finnegan's profile of Barry, from a 2004 New Yorker. Lovely detail, just a hint of the idolatry to follow, and some juicy bicoastal-elitist characterizations of Ill. rednecks in Cairo. Your Obama-related quote of the day....

Time-Life Classics of Human Dignity





This woman, the one whose jacket is buttoned but not zippered, with the chapped face which would be that of a drunk were it not so bitterly cold in, the one who's like as old as my grandmother? This woman here made me feel like a million bucks about the human race this morning. God bless all old women, amen. And cheeky chess players and communists, too.

No time for blogging, no time at all, as the lovely neighbor is set to open her show, I (heart) Bed-Stuy, at the waist-high landlord's gallery next door. Her name being Naomi Campbell, there's little doubt as to the vast increase in attendance this show will boast in comparison to previous efforts, inevitably people solely by the artist's immediate pals, Raphael the dwarfish rentier, and us the neighbors.

In any case, could hardly pass this up. CPAC, the conservative organizational force whose hoary past reaches all the way back to the Reagan years (so I believe), chose Indiana Rep. Mike Pence as their keynote speaker for their 3/2 Ronald Reagan banquet. Pence is one of the few, bold House Republicans to have opposed Bush's march to war; another, John Hostettler, was defeated in November after running, as always, a low-funded, high-grassroots (heh) effort. With this kind of hgh-profile signalling, the conservative organizational elite - as opposed to bought-and-paid-for White House/RNC operatives - is demonstrating how fed up they are with a war that will wreak havoc on their hopes for a durable governing conservative majority.

More later on high hopes for the long-awaited schism between the economic conservatives ie plutocrats and social conservatives ie jesus freaks.

Barack quotation of the day:

Bacack, the Man in Black ("leave off that whiskey/and let that cocaine be" - even with all that book money you can't afford it)

Not-yet Mario and No-longer-the-same-old Newt have teamed up to, you know, um, elevate the motherfucking political discourse.


I usually try not to go the ultra-snarky Atrios road in my limited blogging, aiming instead to rise to the serene discursive heights of TPM or the American Prospect. But this shit is ridiculous.

No media trope is more shop-worn than the old chestnut of bipartisan cooperation to save country's from flaming extremists. Maybe it started with Gramm-Rudman, maybe when Truman went to Vandenburg and Taft to tell them what was what in re: the commies, but the sanctification of 'bipartisanship' has become clearly central to any media narrative of DC politics. No matter the self-importance of the participants, the structural significance of their policy reforms, the political value of their proposals; any initiative put forward with the janus face of bipartisanship stands a decent chance of getting some valuable MSM ink.

Yet with this Gingrich-Cuomo business, the shark has clearly been jumped (poor shark; i wonder if they got his credit cards too...). Shit, I love Mario Cuomo, and I mean love him. He was the patron saint of my liberal anti-Clinton family, his '84 convention speech one of the first things I ever searched for on youtube. But his kid is a goddamn pain in the ass. Andrew has mucked up his various efforts at electoral office in New York, despite the pull of a near-sainted three-term ex-Governor father. He's like Mark Green; he's probably pretty decent if you ever had to talk to him, but on camera, in public, and in print he comes off as an obnoxious knucklehead who you'd steer clear of quicker than the Mormon at the office party.

And as for Newt... while his faux-presidential campaign continues, and his speaking fees rise marginally, I can only imagine he'll come out with this shit on the regular. Who knows what we'll have the pleasure of seeing over the coming months... Gingrich-Coelho on campaign finance reform; Newt-Zell on the dangers Allah poses to American national security (answer: targeted assasination of all foreign deities); Newt-Joe Liebs on getting the guns out of video games, and into Iraq.... Who knows where the fun will end?