Hating on someone else's President for once.

Via Feministing, I thought this was a good article on Sarkozy's desire to ban the burqa in France.

Excerpt:

So now we have a bigger picture: Muslims as a "misbehaving" minority group, an ongoing war on terror and related distaste for all things Muslim, wide-spread discrimination against Muslims (1 in 3 Muslims in Europe have reported discrimination), desire to maintain a culturally homogeneous society, and, finally, a fascination with another man's progress. Put together, the something else is revealed: by highlighting the oppression of Muslim women Sarkozy is giving people in France more reasons to do what France is already doing pretty well - marginalizing its large Muslim minority.

Anyway, I should admit that I find the burqa a bit unsettling by sight, but I also find this sort of religious censorship suspect, and wrong-headed.

Two other quick notes: If the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in modern history is tied in part to forced secularization in the Middle East and forced secularization mixed with underclass status in European Muslim immigrant communities, then this sort of move seems counterintuitive even if you can get around it being racist. (Obviously it goes without saying that the greatest contributing factor to the rise in Islamic fundamentalism is a hatred of our freedoms that God made for the United States of America on the Sixth Day of Creation, but I guess there are also other factors.)

Second, check out those staggering numbers on Muslim incarceration in France. They looked at our numbers on African American men and started feeling competitive. Truly appalling.

Also, the "sartorial hijab" page on Wikipedia is interesting to look at if you're interested in being able to distinguish between, say the burqa and the niqab.

.

this is a non sequitir.

Works great as motor oil!

Tastes sort of like bread-paste, if memory serves.

Indeed, angry urinating man.

Ever just be in the port-a-potty at the Louisiana State Penitentiary Angola Prison Farm and just need to get something off your chest so bad that you write it in #2 pencil?



.

This is what Louisiana is like.

Of course it's a watering bucket for the tree.

That makes perfect sense. A garbage bag-lined watering bucket for a tree.



Props to brother-in-law Matt for clueing me in to this one.

.

I remember Halloween.

I guess a lot of Halloween costumes have to do with wearing boxes.

Joe Pulido: Gangster of Love

Anonymous Cayman Photo

Anybody else come across this on the Internet and download it back in 2005?

Leonard has seen better days.

And so has Fresno in some ways. In some ways not, I guess.

.

Thinking of ways to appear really cool.

My ten year high school reunion is next weekend. While I don't typically get excited about expensive nostalgia trips handed down by the ages as compulsory, I gotta say this one brings out the joiner in me. High school was of course miserable at times, but after Catholic school for nine years it felt liberating every day to be around 2,000 people who weren't keeping track of how many times I wore the same shirt on free dress day. I miss a lot of those people, and why not say hi to who I can after ten years, right? After all, the event promises "heavy hors d'oeuvres," which sounds excessive and weird.

I've spent weeks lobbying for Joe Pulido to come with me and he has finally agreed to do so. And it occurred to me for the first time: maybe I should dress up like King Diamond just to mess with people who haven't seen me in forever. What happened to the thirteen year old kid who only listened to Eazy-E and Green Day and Nirvana? Oh, Melissa.

Too many words devoted to Robert Smith.

Been listening to Pandora Radio at work. I never really got into Pandora Radio before: you say you like the Misfits, you're stuck listening to the post-Danzig schlock that Jerry Only put together; you say you like Bob Dylan, eventually you're listening to way too much Mason Jennings; you say you like Eric B. and Rakim and suddenly every third song is from The 18th Letter album, which could technically be quite good, but are you prepared to make that assessment when all you want is to be passively entertained while typing a memo? But anyway, it's there on the Internet, it works for the temporary-ness of a job where I'm not going to load CDs onto my computer.

The other day it came up with "Mint Car" from the Cure's 1996 album Wild Mood Swings. I imagine this is the record that most once-fans associate with the end of their career, but there was a time when you couldn't escape "Mint Car," a short eight weeks after which radio play petered out, the song disappearing altogether after a year or so, never to be a part of the culture again. I really liked this song, I even remember where I was the last time I heard it: Coelee's old house, in the little space between the living room and kitchen, must've been about 1998. I've thought about the song off and on since then, and I have to say hearing it after all this time made me really happy.

So happy, in fact, that on my way out of town to Phoenix, I swung by Amoeba and picked up the album for five bucks. Trudged west to Hollywood in rush hour traffic, trudged back east through the hour-and-a-half of idling that you must do to get out of the LA area in the early evening. It felt triumphant, the sort of inconvenient and not-worth-it detour that still reminds me that I am an adult, I can waste two hours if I want to thank you very much.

I'm embarrassed by how much I like the somewhat maligned "Mint Car." I don't understand what a mid-period Cure fan can find missing in this track. It's a great example of the manically happy Cure songs ("The sun is up! I'm so happy I could scream!") where you think Robert Smith should feel guilty about writing songs that remind people how they never ever feel this way. It's got the rest too: the guitar sounds bright, the music during the chorus picks itself right up, his voice disappears into a wheeze when he hit the vowels mid-word. He makes the kind of sounds those Sesame Street nose-honker muppets made. It's close-to-perfect if you like this version of Robert Smith, and if you can accommodate the occasional lyric about vanilla smiles and strawberry kisses.

The video is something else too. An old-West high stakes poker game, and Robert Smith wearing a sheet underneath Magic Johnson's getup from the Michael Jackson "Remember the Time" video.

As for the rest of the album, well, it's a lesser version of Wish. There's the longwinded and dirge-y opening track. There's half of a lyric in "Round & Round & Round" that seems taken directly from "Doing the Unstuck," and "Mint Car" itself ends in a rush during the last two seconds of the song, this being lifted straight out of "Friday I'm in Love." There are a bunch of songs with one-word titles. He even does that from-the-throat "I'm absolutely mad" thing where he sounds like a bootleg Louis Armstrong and/or a bootleg Moz.

There are also more singles. "The 13th" falls a little flat and sounds too deliberately Latin. I think that was the follow-up to "Mint Car," and I like it too despite its flaws. "Strange Attraction" was yet another single, but I don't remember this one as well. It's growing on me, but it sounds like a mid-tempo Paula Abdul song. Something in the drums does it. "Gone!" was a single too, but the best thing about that song is that it has an exclamation point in the title.

This post sounds really album review-ish, and I don't like that. I think I just have a lot to say about the Cure, and when is there ever occasion to talk about the Cure in 2009? Sorry Lauren.

This blog is turning into an apologies-to-Lauren blog. Because Lauren is a the faithful reader.

So, for your trouble, here are photos of Robert Smith looking like a fat and confused Alice Cooper. The last one is priceless - he looks more like a Bob than a Robert. I think he's starting to disintegrate. Get it?

How are you? Fine thank you. See you later.

So I saw Le Tigre perform once and oddly, this is exactly how it felt at the time.



A few thoughts:

1. Does she really say "More crackers please?" "Linoleum floor?"

2. My sister Lisa liked Jem. I remember those earrings. The bad guys (girls) were called the Misfits if I recall. Is it a problem that my favorite Misfits songs are the misogynist ones? How appropriate is it that those were the ones that sounded extra-Phil Spector-y?

3. I love the parasol at 1:29 and 1:52.

4. That song from this album, "Les and Ray." I love that song.

5. Also, if I knew how to play any musical instruments, I would play them like these ladies.

6. If you play the video in two separate tabs, and start them 1/2 second apart, the drums sound all death metal.

7. Altogether this is the best thing I have seen in recent memory. This is like the best thing since Election Night.

Via Feministing.

.

Joe Lieberman still sucks.

I liked Prez. B's comment on hijab in Cairo, but this article is worth reading anyway. Why? Because it points out things that Obama glaringly left out of his speech regarding women's rights, and because it pokes at Joe Lieberman, and we must not forget that he sucks.

This is also relevant to the Abu Ghraib photos question.

What kind of a country passes a law that has no purpose other than to empower its leader to suppress evidence of the torture it inflicted on people? Read the language of the bill; it doesn't even hide the fact that its only objective is to empower the President to conceal evidence of war crimes.

.

"credible based on supporting evidence provided by other witnesses"

I initially was down on Obama about not releasing the Abu Ghraib photos - it's easy for me to be down on Obama after all: he's the president of a shitty shitty government during a time when our moral failings as a nation are painfully obvious pretty much across the board, and so his hands are tied I guess, in terms of exercising his much lauded shiny shiny goodness. For example, not prosecuting criminals in a nation of laws simply because to do so would be a huge pain in the ass and might, um, spend too much "political capital" or whatever.

Or maybe I'm an asshole, and I digress either way.

So here is a relevant article in the NYT. It's by Philip Gourevitch, who wrote We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, which is a book about the Rwandan genocide, as necessary as reading gets. He's a smart and thoughtful guy. If Obama's position will inevitably require him to compromise his decency (and let us keep killing innocent Afghani people with drones, and lie about his position on gay marriage, and so on) then Gourevitch is a person whose decency is not compromised, and he agrees with Obama on this one. And he's seen the pictures in question, and he doesn't think they need to be released.

Via Cogitamus, here's an article that talks about the "potential street consequences," that "Baghdad will burn" if the photos are released. That means more dead Iraqis, which is a bad thing, so this is the most convincing argument I've heard in favor of Obama's reversal on the issue.

I'm still not sure I actually agree with Obama. I'm not in favor of painting all American soldiers as criminals - it's not productive, it's overly simplistic, and it's not true. However, I do bet that there are a ton of My Lai Massacres hiding behind our little disaster over there, things that would cause some needed soul-searching if we found out about them. Maybe it's a good time to be reminded of how badly we should hate ourselves for what we've visited on that country.

Case in point: the photos in question apparently show evidence of "every indecency," including rape committed by American soldiers against female and male prisoners:

"Allegations of rape and abuse were included in [Maj. Gen. Taguba's] 2004 report but the fact there were photographs was never revealed. He has now confirmed their existence in an interview with the Daily Telegraph."

So I have to say: if the pictures have to be released to teach us - if nothing else - that rape is an inseparable part of war and so we shouldn't allow ourselves to be deceived into war, then I still disagree with Obama on this decision.

Sorry for the downer post, Teresa and Lauren and whatever third person visits this blog. Not in love with the world today. I should add that I basically still like Obama, just that now that he's Prez we occasionally need to take more of an adversarial position, just to be consistent and, well, correct.

.

got my mind made up

I'm applying for a job tonight, I've applied for so many jobs that I realize this is in itself my basic vocation in life these days. It's hard to figure out an artful but not redundant way to say that you shower every day and people like you and you know how to type several dozen words a minute, especially when this is all I would want to know about myself: "I like David Bowie and half a dozen Bad Brains songs, and pictures of 2Pac wearing awkward leather outfits. The older I get the more I hate the zoo. I am fanatical about maintaining proper grammar when confronted by obscure plurals such as 'data' and 'criteria'."

Based on those things, I would hire me. But no one else would. So this is why I will never be in charge of hiring anyone for anything, and more importantly for the present, why no one will hire me.


.

In which a rock band makes fun of Bakersfield.

Just got back from the LA Propagandhi show, which surprised me because it was actually a better show than the Pomona show. Usually big-city rock crowds are all self-aware scowling, but people seemed really excited to be at this show. I internalized the first wave of Propagandhi records without really sharing my enthusiasm with anybody, so it was cool to be around a bunch of people who were listening to the same things I was in 1996.

Highlight of the evening: "So, this isn't as daring to say here as it was in 1993 in Bakersfield, California, but we're a gay-positive band." I still love it when people talk bad about Bakersfield. I don't care if Danny is from there, it still makes me laugh.

Lowlight of the evening: the inevitable segue from Bakersfield-bashing into Proposition 8 - somehow it never occurred to me that people from other countries know about this and are thinking about it, and it made me more ashamed to be from post-Prop 8 California. The whole thing seemed like such a flip of the coin, I'm hopeful it will be overturned next year. Cross your fingers, I guess.

Other highlights: "Back to the Motor League," "Dear Coach's Corner," "Rio de San Atlanta, Manitoba," "A Speculative Fiction," and a rad version of "Fuck the Border" sung by a member of the opening band, the unfortunately named Bridge and Tunnel. (Despite the name, they are also pretty good. They play Hot Water Music-era hardcore-ish stuff, and the lead guitar player is cool because she plays like Eddie Van Halen.)

As a teenager this band was so intimidating, a mountain of radical politics I would never live up to. But what struck me seeing them Friday and tonight was that they are really just hicks with no pretensions. There's dignity to what they do because they do it as well as you'll ever seen it done, but they don't seem to think very much of themselves. They obviously love it - Todd Kowalksi in particular is a giddy, fist-pumping teenager up there - and you can tell they grew up doing it together. It left me feeling sort of sad that I've never really found something that I love doing like that.

Check them out when they come back in four years. They are still getting better after more than fifteen years, almost unheard of among the 90's punk bands that are still around.

Related: despite being from Bakersfield, Danny is also pro-gay. He sent out the following video today, which makes fun of Prop 8 and Pat Robertson, and looks oddly like a fake rap video if you watch it without the sound on.



One-half of this duo played at the same show as Jessica's new band, Old Lumps, yesterday. That show was also great, and I like Jessica's new band even though the name makes me uncomfortable, and this duck-video lady is obviously also talented and funny.

Three-rock show weekend gets a thumbs up.

.