Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

… down to kool-aid drinkers and next of kin at the trump White House

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

What fresh hell is this?

We survived Breitbartpocalypse!

An almost top 10,000 blog!

This is how realignments happen…

‘Forty-two’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

Four legs? good! two legs? we’re not so sure…

Shelter in place is one thing. Shelter in pants is quite another.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

The house always wins.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Naturally gregarious and alpha

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Gastritis broke my calculator.

False Scribes! Falso Scribes!

We need fewer warriors in public service and more gardeners.

This blog will pay for itself.

Just a few bad apples.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Let there be snark.

Almost as fun as hiking the Appalachian Trail

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

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Formerly known as Jewish Steel, Alex Smith began writing at Balloon Juice in 2018.

Alex Smith

Well the Girls Would Turn the Color of the Avocado

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Since I am here at the sufferance of DougJ, I thought I would look in on one of his old friends. Fairly or unfairly, I’ve always felt like anyone who identifies as a libertarian past the age of fifteen occupies a space somewhere on the spectrum between sociopath and asshole. I don’t know if anyone even takes them seriously anymore. Anyway, our favorite gastroenteritis sufferer has just turned forty-five, gained wisdom, and is comin’ Moses-like down from the mountain to share it via a little something she likes to call…

After 45 Birthdays, Here Are ’12 Rules for Life’

 

1. Be kind. Mean is easy; kind is hard.

Is it? Does being mean really come so easily to you? Huh. I’ve always found that people respond quite positively to kindness and cooperation. Maybe you are some kind of asshole?

2. …If you have to choose between politics and a friendship, choose the friendship every time. 

This second one is really about you being an asshole again, isn’t it?

3. If you can’t afford to order that one extra dish, then the restaurant is too expensive for your budget and you should find a cheaper one.

I guess there is a market for this kind of patronizing “financial advice,” because I see it elsewhere. It’s super irritating.

 4. Give yourself permission to be bad.

I give you permission to be good. At anything. (A cheap shot, I know. I gave myself permission.)

5. Go to the party even when you don’t want to. Nine times in 10, you’ll be bored and go home early. But the 10th time, you will have a worthy experience or meet an interesting person. That more than redeems those other wasted hours. 

Hey, everyone who invited Megan to a party or talked to her at one? Only a 10% chance you weren’t wasting her time.

6. Save 25 percent of your income. No, don’t tell me how expensive your city is; I have spent basically my whole life in New York and Washington, DC. You can save if you want to…

So galling. It’s okay to never know poverty, never sniff economic hardship, to live out your life assured of your next meal and a roof over your head. I think everyone should get to live this way. But let me drop a little asymmetric info on you: Not everybody does. If you are so uncontaminated by curiosity you cannot imagine what kind of choices people who are bobbing along with their snouts just above water have to make, why should you have an economics column?

7. …Here’s a funny thing I have learned by being just a little bit internet famous: it doesn’t matter how many times you hear them, the words “You are amazing, and here’s why” never get old. They do not go out of style. You will be wearing them to your 80th birthday party, along with a dazzling smile.  

Am I the only one who suspects that Megan thinks 2 x 45 = 80?

8. That thing you kinda want to do someday? Do it now. I mean, literally, pause reading this column, pick up the phone, and book that skydiving session. RIGHT NOW. I’ll wait. Pixels are patient. 

Can’t, dog. My dreams cost money and I’m hanging onto that 25% of my income. Remember?

9. Somewhere around that same eighth-grade mark where we all experimented with being mean...

We did? I seem to recall experimenting with weed and getting into Pink Floyd. What is it with you and the meanness?

10. Don’t try to resolve fundamental conflicts with your spouse or roommates.

Interpersonal conflicts are something I expect you have a lot of experience with, seeing as though meanness is your default setting. Since you brought it up, I’m listening.

…You should never, ever argue with your spouse about anything that could be solved with a proper application of money or ingenuity.

 Oh, my pots of conflict-resolving money. Right.

11. Be grateful. “Gratitude is an alien concept to me. Let me explain it to you as though you don’t understand it either.” This is in there:

Many billionaires, however, squander most of their fortune on bitter recriminations about how unfair everything is. Many of them are right, and it really is unfair.

Since this is Bloomberg, they are editorially bound to say that the rich are right about something somewhere in every column. It’s just policy, folks.

12. …

is just some cutesy-poo foodie shit.

So what can be done about people who both lack basic empathy for others and a set of principles that guide them toward decency and mercy? I’m not sure. In the public sphere, though, it means electing folks from the party that makes an effort to help. And so I bring to you fund that’s split between all eventual
Democratic nominees in House districts currently held by Republicans.

Goal Thermometer

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I Saw Her Standing There

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Last year, the fruit of many long labors was borne for my wife, and she was awarded a Princeton fellowship to further her scholarly work. By pure coincidence, or so she claims, Paul McCartney was playing in New Jersey the same September week that she had arranged to be there. She’d seen two shows from McCartney’s 2016–17 tour with her father over the past year, and both were almost identical in content. Nonetheless, a week or two before her departure to Princeton, she confessed in an offhanded way that she had gotten tickets to see Macca a third time at one of his two Prudential Center shows in Newark.

“Oh?” I said.

Yes, she’d purchased a twenty-third row ticket, then paid a nominal $5 fee to upgrade to an eighth-row, center-stage ticket which would really put her in the thick of things.

We don’t have one of those marriages where we must obtain permission to spend our discretionary funds, so I was like, hey, if you want to blow your money on the same Paul McCartney concert all over the US, knock yourself out. That’s a level of fandom to which I can only bear witness, despite being a huge Beatles fan and general Paul partisan. She might deny it, but in addition to being a scholar of early modern women’s reading, my wife comes close to having a doctorate in Beatleology too, so encyclopedic is her store of Fab Four knowledge. She’s my go-to for Beatles info—and I’m supposedly the musician in the family. I want to say she, in her early thirties, is The Last Beatlemaniac, though time will tell.

Anyway, the day of the concert arrives, and Sarah hops on a train to Newark after toiling mightily at the Firestone Library all day. I’m at work that night receiving a steady commentary on her journey upstate and then the concert itself. She sends pictures and short videos. She’s super close! She could almost reach out and poke Paul.

During the encore, a truly amazing thing happens: he seems to make eye contact with her and does a little waltz step, referencing the sign she’s been holding up. Sign? Yes, she’s made a different sign for each of the concerts she’s attended. This one says: BALLROOM DANCE WITH A VEGETARIAN LIBRARIAN?

Wow! Acknowledged by a Beatle. Pretty good. Worth the effort.  I don’t hear from her for awhile then I get some garbled, semaphoric texts that I can’t make heads or tails of.

Then at 10 p.m. Eastern time, she texts me. “You’re never going to believe it.”

And then …

Here I thought that Sarah was going to see the same concert and over when really she was working on her sign game. Third time’s the charm!

But you say you want a revolution? Well, you know, that’s a bit of a tall order. But you could contribute to the fund that’s split between all eventual Democratic nominees in House districts currently held by Republicans.

Goal Thermometer

 

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I Know Politics Bore You

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I consume baseball in the most Americana way imaginable. I listen to it on the radio in the summer Midwestern night surrounded by cornfields. In the orange streetlight, moth fluttering nights that refuse to drop below 80. I own a cleaning company and while you are at home winding down your day I am vacuuming and dusting and taking out trash and cleaning toilets and listening to the Chicago White Sox not make the playoffs since 2008. It’s easy to picture me. If I was a character in a Stephen King novel I would surely be the first to get knocked off by a vampire or a clown.

For this reason, most of the visuals of the game are lost to me except when I can tune in on weekends. This is one visual I will certainly not miss.

The New York Times is reporting that the Cleveland Indians, in cooperation with Major League Baseball, are abandoning the Chief Wahoo logo after the 2018 season. 

I live fifty miles northwest of Champaign-Urbana and its resident University of Illinois, so I had a mezzanine seat to the Retire the Chief / Save the Chief hullabaloo, which is still going on to this day. The Chief is a sort of local MAGA hat that we’ve had for decades. If I walk into a business or an office that’s festooned Chief stuff, I know the kind of person I’m dealing with upfront. A friend who witnessed the mascot’s formal retirement in 2007–he worked for the local paper and the university–once let me look through his personal letters-to-the-editor Chief file. They ranged from sedate and prosecutorial to spittle-flecked. I liked this:

Unfortunately, all that pageantry was built around a product of the rather odd obsession white people had with their view of Native American culture nearly 100 years ago. Too bad we are still saddled with the decisions of an assistant band director who was just trying to put on a good halftime show. If he had simply chosen some other kind of symbol to be the focus of all that audience participation stuff, we wouldn’t be dealing with this mess today. Can you imagine!

 

Great pic with a weirdly equivocating tweet. Don’t go read the replies. Trust me.

But forsaking the revolting Chief Wahoo logo is more complicated than it appears on the surface. Let’s Go Tribe goes on to say:

 It’s interesting, but not surprising, that the Chief Wahoo merchandise will still be sold in local markets. According to Jordan Bastian, this is in part because the Indians still maintain a trademark for the logo and are required to keep it in retail spaces to do so.

 “The Indians will maintain control of the Chief Wahoo trademark. In order to do so, it will still have a limited retail presence. No retail presence would open door for another party to seize control of the mark and profit from it.”

Not only will they keep the trademark, but the flood of people who support a logo over their favorite baseball team will likely flock to buy up whatever they can. Make no mistake about it, the Indians are going to keep profiting off the logo for a long, long time.

So either the team profits on its heritage of racism or some third-party does. Short of the team donating those profits to a reservation, there are no good choices here.

The University of Illinois is a case study in the trouble with trying to get rid of a racist mascot. Eleven years later, it is still plagued by the the specter of the ostensibly retired Chief. This is due in part to a failure to replace the mascot: with no new official mascot to compete with, the Chief lives on. The mascot makes several appearances a year at sports games, and the Chief logo is still worn by students and used by local companies in advertising. (For years now, the logo for Unofficial St. Patrick’s Day merchandise has been a silhouette of the Chief wearing a headdress that spells out the words UNOFFICIAL.) The university’s longstanding inaction is no doubt political in nature. Alumni donations are its lifeblood, and the fond school-day memories of predominantly white alumni are invariably bound up with that ubiquitous figure in a headdress. You can see the outcry in micro-scale on the comment thread of this recent story from the university paper. White alumni–some of whom matriculated from the university long after the Chief’s retirement–threaten to withhold donations and support for their alma mater if Chief symbols are removed from university property. Parents and grandparents who attended the university pass on their love for the Chief to children and grandchildren who currently attend it, and the Chief continues to flourish.

While we wait for all of this to wind down (someday it will, people forget) let’s elect the folks from the big tent. Here is the fund that is split between all eventual nominees in House districts currently held by Republicans.

Goal Thermometer

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I’ll Be In My Basement Room

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I’m sure I’m not the first one to make this observation, but the supposed accelerated news cycle is having a stroboscopic effect on the passage of this presidency for me. At first everything was moving at such a breathless pace that I felt an almost physical sense of movement. Now, everything has been moving so fast for so long that it’s as though things are standing perfectly still. One scandal feels much like the next. We are in a land that has no signposts: a featureless plane of stupidity, a weird stasis.

And so, in spite of the oft repeated cliche that any X amount of time is an eternity in politics I will defy the scolds and gaze into deep time, like I did in 2010 when Republicans had their Tea Party wave. Back then, I’d looked forward to 2020, the next redistricting year, and concluded that Hillary would be the best set-up to take us back to the promised land. I made a few key phone calls and said only, “Clear the field.” You know the rest. Looks like I may have been right in my assessment. But not in the way I expected.

Looking beyond 2020, one thing that concerns me about a post-Trump world is the sort of anti-First Law of Motion of the media. Once a body is set in motion in the vacuity of media space, no countervailing force will stop it from doing the thing that gets eyeballs, clicks–turns a profit, in other words. And so I look forward and wonder, will Jake Tapper be able to prevent himself from scolding President Gillibrand for some totally anodyne shit? Will the media be so high on its own supply of rageahol that it won’t be able to wind itself down and cover a “normal” presidency? What possible incentive will it have to do that in what will likely be an even more fragmented media landscape?

It seems like the kind of question media boffin Jay Rosen might have some thoughts about. Or the enlightened jackal salon of the Balloon Juice commentariat?

Not that there’s much we can do about it. (And lamenting the deteriorating level public discourse is as old as the agora.) But what we can do is elect some Democrats. And here’s how: This is the fund that’s split between all eventual Democratic nominees in House districts currently held by Republicans.

Goal Thermometer

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Can’t Get There From Here

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Thanking Illinois for safeguarding my biometrics is not something I ever expected to do, and yet…

The state is one of two in the country where the Google Arts and Culture app’s selfie feature — which matches users’ uploaded selfies with portraits or faces in works of art — is not available. Google won’t say why, but it’s likely because Illinois has one of the nation’s strictest laws on the use of biometrics, which include facial, fingerprint, and iris scans.

 

 Good on ya, Lincolnland!

So in lieu of an art selfie, I will post a face-match I noticed myself a few years ago. I swear, I didn’t used to look like Michael Stipe, and he didn’t look like me. Somehow, in the intervening years, we converged. Maybe white guys lose all distinguishing facial characteristics as they age? (I’ll let you know.)

That’s me in the corner.
And you, you are not me.
Fables of the Reconstruction, R.E.M.’s third
album, got a lot of airplay in Chicago when I was living there in the 1980s, and my relationship with the band thereafter ran this way:
  • This song is okay, but a little limp. Not much here.
  • Why is this song still in my head after a couple of days?
  • Wait, this is a really good song!
  • Buy album

This cycle took me up through Document, their fifth album, after which I lost interest. You hardly needed to buy a record to hear R.E.M. anyway; they were all over the radio. I remember Stipe’s impenetrable lyrics angered me as a young songwriter. Now I like them. It’s funny how one’s tastes migrate over time. Young people get peevish over stupid shit. R.E.M. officially broke up in 2011. Reflecting on them now, I have to say I really miss their autumnal, Byrdsian guitars and madrigal-like vocal interplay.  Nothing stays the same, though. Including not resembling Michael Stipe.

It’s hard to pick a favorite out of so many good songs. My band Constant Velocity, in an early incarnation that included a fiddle player, covered “Fall on Me” on the radio valiantly but badly live on the radio in Champaign back in the ’90s. Cuyahoga and Don’t Go Back to Rockville are hard to argue with. R.E.M.’s cover of Wire’s Strange is a very interesting departure from the chord jangling folk-rock for which they were celebrated. A nice, straight ahead riff-rocker which brings something different (Fats Domino? Jerry Lee Lewis?) to the original. It’s great when a band bridles against its own type-casting and pulls it off.

I have a Chicago cousin who now lives in Georgia. A real Italian Beef in the land of grits and hominy. It seems very middle class where he lives. Indistinguishable from the endless suburbs of Chicago. I don’t know what the situation is really like down there locally but I have read that Georgia is a candidate to turn blue eventually. I’m sure the very knowledgeable commenters who live down there (looking at you raven) know the local angle. But let’s work to help that process along.
Here is the fund that’s split between all eventual
Democratic nominees in House districts currently held by Republicans.Goal Thermometer

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Strangers Passing in the Street By Chance Two Separate Glances Meet

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Guys, I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. I’m Aware of All Internet Traditions and know I must present my pets for inspection. Meet Echo the basenji.

!olleH
We have been rescuing basenjis since 1998. They are a peculiar and somewhat un-doglike breed. People buy them for their barklessness and hypoallergenic coat, expecting maybe a terrier temperament. Instead, they end up with a half-dog, half-cat, half-person in their house. (To wit: One of the other basenjis up for adoption at the same time as our first rescue basenji came with her own lock for the refrigerator since she’d mastered the art of opening it.) Even “good” basenjis are a handful, and we rescue the less-than-good kind.

Whatcha readin? A book? Looks like some kinda book!


Poor Echo was a hard-luck case. When her original parents had a new baby, she was tossed out of the house to live in the backyard. You can’t do that with a basenji, especially not one like Echo, who needs a steady infusion of cuddles throughout the day. She became an expert escape artist and roamed her New Orleans neighborhood, a lovable vagrant searching for food scraps, unwary squirrels, and human affection. Her owners decided to do the responsible thing and relinquish her to a breed rescue. She arrived at our house coming down off of a bunch of mood-altering medications she didn’t need, which her previous owners put her on in a last-ditch effort to make things work. She’s snappish and unpredictable at times, but getting better all the time. 

I would grow my beard down to my knees if left to my own devices, but for some reason my wife does not want to be married to Gabby Hayes. She is a dab hand with the old trimmer and neatens up my beard every two to three weeks. What does this have to do with Echo? From the time we got her, the beard trim has always stirred great pity and concern in her little heart.  I know she is concerned on my behalf and not her own, because she doesn’t flee the trimmer like she does the Dread Vacuum. She insists on sticking close to my side while I undergo this cruel ordeal, nuzzling her head under my hand and making sure I know she’s there to stabilize me and help me through my difficult time.

Hang in there, man.
Can we get this guy some help or something?
Have mercy on your soul.

Update:How did WP eat this in the first place? Anyway, here is the fund that’s split between all eventual
Democratic nominees in House districts currently held by Republicans so maybe Echo does not have to suffer under the idiot tyranny of Darin LaHood come 2019.

Goal Thermometer

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Let’s Make The Best of the Situation

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It’s been so long since I wrote a whole album of songs about Eric Clapton that I hardly remember why I did it in the first place. I guess the idea germinated when I was living in Seattle and teaching guitar there. I had a whole spate of middle-aged dudes, successful white-collar types, coming in and confessing their love for Old Slowhand. I started wondering what my students saw in him. I think they liked his boring music and bought into the Clapton-is-God hype. But I think they also saw a kindred spirit–a schlubby white guy with a guitar, neatly put-together with nice clothes and a tidy haircut–and they dreamed.They related. So, I wrote a song about it, and the original thrust of my song was that you, desk-jockey, actually have far less in common with Slow Oldhand (who, after all, was a ’60s icon) than you think. “It’s not very likely that he shares your point of view,” I sing in the refrain.

I’m not immune to Clapton’s good points. I like “Bellbottom Blues” and “Lay Down Sally.” “Presence of the Lord” is just the kind of thing you’d come up with if you didn’t write “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” but wish you had. His version of “I Shot the Sheriff” is unjustly maligned; it’s pretty good! Bob Marley was courting a wider audience with his cleaner, warmer original. If anything, Clapton’s grittier version sounds more like a Studio One classic.

But I have always found Clapton’s guitar playing dull, dull, dull. As the ’70s wore on–and, no doubt, heroin began hollow him out–he took on the style of B.B. King in Las Vegas: by-the-numbers, pentatonic-scale wankery. (I have a friend who can play Clapton-style licks at me until I am clutching my sides with laughter.)

Shortly after that, I began having thoughts about the music of the ’60s and ’70s. I hit upon the idea of using stations of Clapton’s life as a way to write about that period, the creche of the sort of art-rock I had been writing and performing since the ’90s. When I researched him and discovered he was kind of an asshole and probably a racist, I had a volte-face and thought, “You know, those desk-jockeys might have been onto something.” They may indeed share a point of view with Clapton.

On 7 Songs about Eric Clapton, I include songs about Robert Johnson and one about guitar teachers and one about Pattie Boyd, stirred in with others about heroin addiction and the mad zeal of irrational fandom. Does that about cover it? Well, it was enough for me. So, my band Constant Velocity toured the Midwest playing it and then recorded it.

7 songs about eric clapton by Constant Velocity

Have I piqued your interest? Well, now my offer to you. I will donate all of the proceeds of the sale of this album over the next week to the Act Blue thermometer that splits the funds between all of the eventual candidates. But if you’d prefer not to have Great Art in your life then you could just contribute directly. I suppose.

Goal Thermometer

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