Last Days of a Great City

Believing Passionately in the Palpably Not True

       P   O   S   T   E   D       B   Y       F   E   L   I   X

This item from the March 31st Washington Post:

Greeted by anti-war protesters at almost every stop in a tour of working-class England, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday that the Bush administration has probably made thousands of “tactical errors” in its handling of the Iraq war.*

_____

* “Rice Admits Thousands of ‘Tactical Errors’ in Iraq” by Glenn Kessler, Washington Post Staff Writer, Friday, March 31.

Picture the Rhine as an American River

       P   O   S   T   E   D       B   Y       T   O   N   Y

I recently heard Francesca Zambello described as “a superstar among opera directors,” and I wondered what that meant.  For me the experience of opera is like wearing a thick woolen coat inside my grandmother’s overheated apartment, minus the pictures of the pope.  But I was curious enough to accept an invitation to see Zambello’s staging of Wagner’s Das Rheingold at the Kennedy Center.  Would a superstar among opera directors finally convince me that opera does not suck?

Here’s what’s going on: Wotan, king of the gods, commissions a big palace (Valhalla) from two giants who demand his sister-in-law Freia as payment.  He agrees to the terms but later reneges on the deal because he likes Freia’s golden apples.  Meanwhile, some troll king has forged a magic ring with gold he stole from some half-naked river nymphs.  He’s using the ring to take over the world, and I don’t know how it goes from there because by this time I’m hunched over in my seat, dead asleep, drooling into my pants.

The story sounds promising, right?  Problem is that soon after the opera begins, they start singing.  And they don’t stop until three-and-half hours later.

I don’t know what it is—I think my brain works too fast for opera.  At one point Wotan asks, “How shall we go to Valhalla?”  It takes him sixteen bars to formulate this simple question, and that’s excluding the annoying little cadence the orchestra always tacks on at the end.  By the time his wife answers, “Lo! A bridge,” my mind has already wandered to Valhalla, hired a gay decorator, and printed the invitations to the housewarming.

Then there’s all the attitude.  The furs and the wallets, the half-dead old ladies thankful they didn’t have to put up with the stimulation of an Italian opera.  When my mother was young, they would gather around the hi-fi every Sunday to listen to the great Caruso.  It was about family.  In this country, opera’s the kind of music that looks at you sideways then suggests you put on a nicer pair of shoes.

Madonna and Other Scattered Objects

We invited Enrique the Gay Philosopher to guest blog on White Courtesy Telephone.  In this installment, he uses the latest issue of OUT Magazine to explore the BIG QUESTIONS that exercise the minds of people in the gay community …

There’s a cover photo of Madonna, then this photograph, six short pages into the magazine: a beautiful man, strong-jawed, bearded and most noticeably dirty.  But why?  The most compelling explanation I’ve heard is that it’s a visual pun: Acknowledging that we have succeeded in sweeping aside many barbarous stereotypes, the editors of the magazine now ironically encourage sex with a miner.

The interview with Madonna raises new questions.  No one will stop calling it the Eiffel Tower if I replace one of its beams.  But what if I replace ten? or a hundred? or all of them?  At what point does it strain our sense to identify it with the structure built by Gaustave Eiffel?  Philosophers call this the problem of identity conditions for scattered objects, and it arises with other historic structures like Cher.  We might remove a rib here, enhance a breast there, replace her nose entirely, so that over time we’re left with only a few ratty bits of the original Cher.  Would the creature then really be Cher?  I should mention that Madonna claims her supernaturally youthful appearance was achieved without plastic surgery.  Yeah, right, and I’m the Eiffel Tower!

Downtime for the Veep

       P   O   S   T   E   D       B   Y       D   O   C   T   O  R      D   R   E   A   D

They set up Cheney's room,  but they forgot the small child.  And the chalk for drawing a pentagram on the carpet.

The Other Bell Curve

       P   O   S   T   E   D       B   Y       S   A   L   L   Y

My nephew, who recently dropped out of college in California, submitted this as his final paper for Psychology 101 …

Many psychometric studies have explored the psychological structures associated with conservative thought and behavior.  The Authoritarian Personality (1950) by Theodor W. Adorno, et al., correlated fascist and anti-democratic attitudes with a personality structure characterized by an aggressive attitude toward groups that threaten traditional values, a tendency to accept and obey social conventions, and other related qualities.  Correlations like these are supported by Robert Altemeyer in his seminal work, Enemies of Freedom: Understanding Right Wing Authoritarianism.  In a study conducted in Israel, Fibert and Ressler (1998) found that measures of intolerance of ambiguity were significantly higher among right-wing students than among their moderate and extreme left-wing peers.  Whiny babies grow up to be conservatives, and scientific study after study shows that conservatives are generally a bunch of stodgy, selfish, unempathic shitheads .

Evidence for a high heritability (H) for conservatism comes from the fact that these fuckers tend to cluster in families and breed with one another.

This author recommends that we send all these fuckers to Kansas.

How to Play The Game®

       P   O   S   T   E   D       B   Y       F   E   L   I   X

Hey kids, don’t miss out on the hottest electronic reality game on the market!  You might have heard it described elsewhere, but here’s how The Game® is really played.

On “Level One: Money,” grab that steering wheel and navigate Senator Lucre down K Street at breakneck speeds as he collects bribe after bribe from Well-Heeled Washington Lobbyists!  But don’t get too greedy: You need to hurry back to Congress in time to water down proposed Lobbying Legislation!  In the Big Bonus Round, help the senator sink as many putts as possible during his Golf Junket in Scotland!  Loads of fun!

On “Level Two: Drugs,” use your joystick to direct Nancy, the anorexic wife of a Prominent U.S. Politician, through a Pac Man-like maze.  Nancy gobbles Painkillers as she goes (prescription, of course!), pursued all the while by four members of the Liberal Media!  Because Nancy leads the national “Take a Pass on Grass” campaign, you win big Hypocrisy Points for each painkiller she ingests!  At the end of the round, a Mario-like character with a southern twang hops across the screen shouting, “But I didn’t inhale! I didn’t inhale!”  Oh boy! …

Cheney as Text

       P   O   S   T   E   D       B   Y       F   E   L   I   X

The only thing missing is the white Persian cat.

All Hail the Fuckers at LiveJournal

       P   O   S   T   E   D       B   Y       R   A   C   H   E  L

I visited livejournal.com and printed a list of Live Journal interest areas.  These are tabulated automatically when these bitches write profiles that tell the world what they’re into.  If one of them lists “pizza” in her profile, pizza gets one vote in Live Journal’s list of what’s hot.

Pizza was #116 on the list, by the way.  Take a minute to think about all the things in the world that are interesting.  Now try to absorb the fact that these losers can’t find 115 things more interesting than pizza.

The fuckers like cheese (#34 on the list) better than Nirvana (#41).  In fact they like cheese more than beer, baseball, sushi, and God (#140).  Sure, people get all Rosemary’s Baby about God, and cheese is a mysterious substance.  I mean, is it a plastic, or what?  But what kind of fuckhead finds cheese more interesting than Bjork (#234), or dreams (#103), or New York City (#351)?

Sleeping is more popular than laughing, boys are more popular than girls, reading more popular than writing, and eyeliner (#160) tops Moulin Rouge (#296).  OK, the bitches got something right.  Ewan McGregor’s hot bod couldn’t rescue hour after insufferable hour of Nicole Kidman pretending she could act and sing.  I can’t stand watching her smug mug on TV talk shows.  She looks like an overcooked piece of white asparagus with lipstick.

Most puzzling to moi is the fact that drugs, #313 on the list, rated far lower than Harry Fucking Potter, Starbucks, and shoes.  Dear one, if you mainline a shoe, will you see a thousand tiny red faces floating a foot above your head, smiling and saying that everything will be OK?  Will your body shrink to a tenth its size while you stand in front of an open closet door, pushing aside enormous shirts on enormous coat hangers?  Will the subway car rattle you like a coin in a glass jar as you strain to understand how heads go completely bald?  Will it?  Well then, go fuck yourself if you think shoes are more interesting than drugs.

I mean it, go fuck yourself.

Contributors to Last Days of a Great City

       P   O   S   T   E   D       B   Y       S   A   L   L   Y

It was Felix who brought us together.  We had little in common before that.  One thing that united us—Black, White, young, old—was an abiding skepticism about received wisdom.  Felix saw this and invited us to blog together, to inflict our clashing perspectives on one another and the world.

Each of the contributors to Last Days of a Great City has blogged on issues relating to the Culture Wars, sometimes openly and often under an assumed name.  Each continues a dialogue that began with Dionysus and Apollo—a dialogue that has little resonance in the waking dream induced by contemporary market forces.  Last Days owes allegiance to no school of thought, no political party, no religious creed.  Individually and collectively we aspire to Truth, Beauty, and Justice, although Rachel Tension still thinks that's a big load of bullshit.

We talked amongst ourselves to find a cultural product that we could all endorse.  This took more than a month of e-mailing back and forth—long e-mails filled with didactic nonsense.  We finally lighted on this speech from Nagg in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame:

Let me tell it again.
(Raconteur's voice.)
An Englishman, needing a pair of striped trousers in a hurry for the New Year festivities, goes to his tailor who takes his measurements.
(Tailor's voice.)
"That's the lot, come back in four days, I'll have it ready." Good. Four days later.
(Tailor's voice.)
"So sorry, come back in a week, I've made a mess of the seat." Good, that's all right, a neat seat can be very ticklish. A week later.
(Tailor's voice.)
"Frightfully sorry, come back in ten days, I've made a hash of the crotch." Good, can't be helped, a snug crotch is always a teaser. Ten days later.
(Tailor's voice.)
"Dreadfully sorry, come back in a fortnight, I've made a balls of the fly." Good, at a pinch, a smart fly is a stiff proposition.
(Pause. Normal voice.)
I never told it worse.
(Pause. Gloomy.)
I tell this story worse and worse.
(Pause. Raconteur's voice.)
Well, to make it short, the bluebells are blowing and he ballockses the buttonholes.
(Customer's voice.)
"God damn you to hell, Sir, no, it's indecent, there are limits! In six days, do you hear me, six days, God made the world. Yes Sir, no less Sir, the WORLD! And you are not bloody well capable of making me a pair of trousers in three months!"
(Tailor's voice, scandalized.)
"But my dear Sir, my dear Sir, look—
(disdainful gesture, disgustedly)
—at the world—
(Pause.)
and look—
(loving gesture, proudly)
—at my TROUSERS!"

We invite you not only to look at our trousers but to comment freely and otherwise keep in touch.  Click here for profiles of the contributors to Last Days of a Great City.

Under Construction

Egregious pabulum coming soon!