An annual tradition

"May all my enemies go to hell.
Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel."

- Hilaire Belloc

Captain Beefheart (1941-2010)

Trout Mask Replica is the most fucked up, most avant garde, most indescribable album to ever enter the rock and roll canon. I've been listening to it for years and I still have yet to figure out what the hell it is. The track that sticks with me the most, "Orange Claw Hammer", can be heard above. It comes up so often on shuffle that I think it's haunting me.

Alternatively dissed (Christgau: "Very great played at high volume when you're feeling shitty, because you'll never feel as shitty as this record") and praised to the skies by critics, I think John Peel said it best: "If there has been anything in the history of popular music which could be described as a work of art in a way that people who are involved in other areas of art would understand, then Trout Mask Replica is probably that work." I think the dissonance and delusion and disregard for the audience are things that maybe you can only latch onto if you are an artist or have experience with that sort of postmodern frenzy. This isn't to say that you can't think it sucks. After a decade or so of listening to it, I haven't figured out whether or not it's any good myself. But it's compelling and I keep coming back to it, so that's something.

Captain Beefheart is the nom de art of Don Glen Vliet, a child prodigy at sculpture who soon turned to painting and the blues. He was a high school friend of Frank Zappa, and makes Zappa look square, so that should give you an idea of what we're dealing with here. What I've heard from earlier albums from His Magic Band was more blues-oriented and traditional compared to what they recorded in 1968. He had accomplished musicians play unfamiliar instruments in unfamiliar ways and created melodic and rhythmic patters almost randomly but assembled the parts in deliberate ways that were performed exactly. The end result was a tension between skill and naivete and formal construction and improvisation. Plenty of people dismiss this potent stew as the work of tripping hippies banging away at instruments, but then they level that sort of tired accusation at anything more complex and unfamiliar than Thomas Kincaid. Think whatever you want, as long as you think about it. Let me know when you figure it out.

Happy Birthday Wayne Thiebaud (or, The allure of tiny, tiny cakes)

I was catching up on Tyler Green's indispensable modern art blog and learned that a week ago today was the 90th birthday of painter Wayne Thiebaud. Widely celebrated in the art world as a painter and key member of the Pop Art movement, his name isn't known to the general public who may know Warhol or Lichtenstein. In the midst of a pretty bombastic art movement - Lichtenstein's exploding missiles and dramatic exclamations, Warhol's bright portraits, gigantic Rosenquist murals - Thiebaud became famous for quiet celebrations of desserts, intricate groups of cakes and pies that recalled Precisionism. He's still at it too. This week he's on the cover of the New Yorker. Compared to a similar work from 1963, he's still in command of the canvas, though with a shakier hand which reminds me of the later strips of Charles Schulz. Hopefully we will have more years of tiny cakes to come.

The boundless stupidity of S.E. Cupp (or, Sarah, I am disappoint)

I don't make it a habit of reading wingnuts. Sure, I have some thoughtful conservatives on my RSS reader, and I pay attention to the more crazy things they say when they make news, but I don't make a ritual of enraging myself by exposing myself to regular doses of crazy. So I don't often read S.E. Cupp, but whenever I do find myself following a link from some blogger or forum post, I find myself stunned at how she manages to be mindbogglingly shallow and ridiculous while simultaneously being astonishingly dull and mundane. It's a potent cocktail and I'm getting to the point where I'm dreading the sight of those ridiculous glamour shots of hers. (This one looks like a parody of Lynda Carter.)

In that spirit I stumbled across this recent column and while my expectations were not disappointed, my faith in literacy and intelligence were. It's a love letter (one of many, presumably) blatantly sucking up to the Palinista movement, so she can keep getting page clicks and invitations to Palin pep rallies like the one she describes in the opening of the piece. She attempts to describe the mood of the gathering and the movement as one of ecstatic happiness to reinforce her thesis - which we'll get to in a second - but her prose is so leaden and clumsy instead of describing the excitement of good-hearted folk, it reads like a horrific frenzied bacchanal.

After a couple paragraphs of this - which reminded me of the long windups I'd read from the mass communications majors I worked with at the college newspaper who ponderously attempted to insert local color and florid prose into their pieces - we finally get to her thesis:

And then it hit me. The reason Palin has become
such a lightening rod, a kingmaker and a punching
bag, a celebrity and a power player, is simple. It's
because she's so gosh darn happy.

My first reaction is to wonder if the New York Daily News still employs any copywriters because "lightning" is spelled wrong. My second reaction: That's it? That's what you come up with?

It's been over two years since McCain selected Palin in a temper tantrum because his advisers told him he couldn't pick Joe Lieberman. Two years of near constant media coverage, numerous books, millions of words speculating on the Palin phenomenon. While I wouldn't expect anything in the way of serious research from her, surely she has encountered some of this work, if only accidentally. And after two years, this professional commentator, who during those two years was paid to write books and columns offering her opinions, observation, and analysis, presents this flimsy epiphany and expects us to be greeted with agreement, praise, and a nice check from the Daily News.

While back in the reality-based community, we greet it with incredulity. This is the best you can do?

Let's take her thesis seriously for a moment, which is more than it deserves.

But for her detractors, nothing raises the ire of
cynical liberals more than a happy-go-lucky, totally
unburdened, freethinking and self-assured
conservative woman who has everything she wants
and then some. And without anyone's help.

Why this would raise "the ire of cynical liberals" is not explained. It never is. It is just assumed. Why would we want to keep people down? Why would we advocate "big government" and social programs if we didn't actually want to pull people up? The real cynics are those who are unable to understand empathy and selflessness and project their cynicism onto others. They assume every issue and program has some kind of conspiratorial agenda, usually some kind of scheme to purchase votes.

What really raises the ire of this cynical liberal is not that Sarah Palin is happy-go-lucky, but that she happily and cynically goes around trashing people and issues held deal by liberals. This doesn't just happen with programs and issues liberals advocate, but she trashes fundamental concepts: intelligence, literacy, expertise, language, spelling, and truth. And she does it all with a wink while she rakes in the money of those ecstatic rubes that Cupp attempts to praise in the opening of her piece.

In all this I've given Cupp's piece more credit then it deserves. Her "thesis" isn't an argument proposed and explained in the column, it is merely a reference to arguments made and assumptions held by other conservatives. It's a set of tropes and cliches: good-hearted happy people, cynical unhappy liberals, big government, etc. It's not so much a coherent argument as the lengthy equivalent of a series of slogans or a bunch of blather serving merely as a carrier perpetuating a meme. The best response to this nonsense would be, of course, another meme:

Sarah, I am disappoint.

Double rainbow all the way

So at lunch I'm reading Wallace Stenger's Angle of Repose. I'm pretty far into the book and reading a dramatic scene (minor spoilers ahead) where one character is about to give birth to a child in the remote mountains of Idaho in the 1880s. No midwife or doctor in sight, of course, so her son, who is around eight or ten or so, has to rush across a rickety bridge over a dangerous stream, then take a mule ride down the mountain. Dramatic stuff. He manages to meet up with his father after retrieving a neighbor to midwife. They all arrive back at the family's cabin when the father looks up:

In the northwest the sun had broken around the lower slope of Midsummer Mountain and was sending a last long wink across the Sawtooths, straight into the black mass of rain cloud. Clear across the stone house, bridging from mountains to river bluffs, curved two rainbows, one above the other, even the upper one as bright as colored glass, sharp-edged, perfect from horizon to horizon.

Oh God. What does this mean?

After I stopped laughing, I couldn't take the book seriously anymore so I spent the rest of the day watching Double Rainbow parodies. Enjoy.

Pee-wee Herman and the Culture Wars

When I read yesterday's New York Times article about the "redemption" of Paul Reubens, the creator and embodiment of Pee-wee Herman, I couldn't help but think that it was, in some small way, a sign that we were winning the culture wars. That seems crazy when the Teabaggers are about to gain control of the House of Representatives by reigniting a lot of those culture war conflicts that we've discovered never went away in the first place. But I think, if we can keep those idiots from dragging us back into fascism or the Pleistocene, we can keep winning.

At this point, Reubens' comeback has been longer than the time he was at the pinnacle of his creative and popular success. Following Tim Burton's Pee-wee's Big Adventure, the movie that gave me the lifelong goal to visit San Antonio and find the basement of the Alamo, was the Saturday morning television show Pee-wee's Playhouse. Unfortunately, I scorned the show (and most other children's programming) because, at the time, kids abandoned cartoons and comics and other things that seemed too childlike for budding adults. Today, with prime time cartoons and superhero movies, kids carry those things into adulthood and the diving line has been erased. For those kids younger than me or not foolish enough to rush into some facade of adulthood, they were blessed with a wonderfully surreal television show that had a huge budget, little creative interference, an amazing cast, and, of course, the imagination of Paul Reubens.

For five seasons, anyway. The show had wrapped up (Reubens was weary of the character and the grind) but reruns were still airing on CBS. But in July 1991, Reubens was arrested for masturbating in a porno theater in Sarasota, Florida. In a stunning waste of time and police and legal resources, cops would prowl porn theaters looking to enforce morality and rack up easy arrests. Of course, public wanking should be illegal, but it also shouldn't be a police priority. How much money and manhours were wasted on this case? One article puts a cost of $2000 just on police protection for Reubens' courtroom appearance.

There was another cost as well, a cultural cost. Reubens went into seclusion and his evidence of his work immediately started disappearing. CBS stopped rerunning his show and toy stores around the country stripped Playhouse merchandise from their shelves. I remember reading about this in my local newspaper and went back to a newspaper database today to verify my memory of this: a local toystore, like stores in most in the country, removed all their Pee-wee merchandise, but accidentally overlooked two lunch boxes, probably because lunch boxes would have been in a different aisle. An "indignant" customer found them the next day complained about their presence, saying they "shouldn't be displayed for children because he was sick and perverted.'' It's helpful to look at the timeline of this. Reubens was arrested on a Friday night and a reporter noticed his arrest record the next day. The beginning of the next week that particular toy store chain ordered their stores to remove Pee-wee merchandise, and that store did so on Tuesday night. The outraged customer was at the store on Wednesday.

I remembered this incident for 19 years because to me it became emblematic of the culture wars. I exaggerated it slightly in my mind, but not by much. I imagined a permanently-clenched evangelical rooting behind boxes the next morning trying to find the last, misplaced Pee-wee Herman doll so he could harangue the poor manager, spit flecking from his open mouth while he screamed about "sick perverts" because all trace of Paul Reubens hadn't disappeared fast enough for his liking. This happened a thousand different ways over a thousand different things during the 80s and 90s.

It was tempting to think that in the 21st century this had gone away, but it hasn't. Things like the George Tiller killing and the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction proved that the culture wars hadn't left us even before the Teabaggers went full retard. Even Paul Reubens had another culture war incident in 2002 when he was arrested over a handful of objectionable items in his 70,000 piece pornography collection. (The charges were dropped in 2004.) Cops may have stopped raiding adult theaters - which largely died out anyway due to home video and the internet - but they are still busting people for owning porn despite its ubiquity on the internet. But this served to be merely a speedbump on his long comeback trail, nothing like the consequences of his 1991 arrest. Sure, moralizing culture warriors are still with us and people see pedophiles under every rock thanks to Dateline, but in the age of Lindsey Lohan and Britney Spears, masturbating to porn seems decidedly tame. The culture warriors would say we've degraded as a society, but are Lindsey Lohan's antics so much worse than Clara Bow's or Tallulah Bankhead's?

The difference is that I think we've become a lot freer and more open about things than we were in 1991. Technology has helped. The same internet that I used to find that old newspaper article preserves the memory of Pee-wee Herman through video clips, Wikipedia articles, fawning blog and message board posts, and a thousand other ways. We can't stuff Paul Reubens down the memory hole for masturbating because the internet will remember him, and we're all wanking to things we find on the internet anyway so we're not going to ostracize someone else for it. We can't be outraged about Janet Jackson's nipple when we've seen 2 Girls 1 Cup. We can keep the memory of George Tiller alive through internet activism. More and more homosexuals are stepping out of the closet at younger and younger ages, and the internet (most recently with Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" project) is helping them. Popular support for DADT and prohibiting gay marriage is collapsing. The pace might be slow, but we are winning the culture war.

How the right is wrong on Rachel Maddow's Steve Stockman comments

This Monday, Rachel Maddow began her show with a powerful segment about the extremism of the current crop of GOP candidates and made connections to the extremists last GOP "revolution" in 1994. She discussed the ties to the racists and extremists in the militia movement of two '94 legislators in particular:

Yes, this has happened to a smaller degree before. In 1994, in the first midterm election after the last Democrat president was elected, we got a slate of candidates that included Helen Chenoweth of Idaho, Steve Stockman of Texas. These two were so close to the militia movement in this country that Mr. Stockman actually received advance notice that the Oklahoma City bombing was going to happen.

It's hard to forget the crazy that was the late Helen Chenoweth, who was, with help from The X-Files, responsible for mainstreaming the black helicopter paranoia of the militia movement. Steve Stockman was not as flamboyant, but just as nuts. This Texas Monthly story (free registration required) contains many of the lowlights of Stockman's short congressional career. Stockman was the author of a manifesto published in Guns and Ammo declaring Bill Clinton and Janet Reno murderers and that the Waco siege was staged to push an assault weapons ban. (This kind of conspiracy theory is echoed in the current right-wing claim that the BP oil spill was staged by environmentalists.) He claimed a secret operation at Fort Bliss spied on the militia movement. He got into a public tussle with the mother of a murder victim when he wanted to use his name for an anti-gun control bill. He called for a government investigation of the Kinsey Report, 47 years after its publication. The Texas Monthly estimated he generated an ethics investigation once every two months. When asked about his interest in ceramics, he replied "don't say that or they'll think I'm a fag for sure. '' Thankfully, Stockman was sent home after a single term.

It was for the honor of this distinguished legislator that the right-wing blogosphere sprung into action after Maddow's report. Stockman is most notorious for receiving a fax notification the day of the Oklahoma City bombing. Unfortunately, Maddow was either the victim of a misstatement or sloppy research as Stockman didn't receive the fax until after the bombing. To her credit, Maddow issued a prominent correction during her show on Wednesday.

On Monday, I said that Mr. Stockman's notice from the militia movement about the Oklahoma City bombing was advance notice. It wasn't in advance, it was right after the bombing. I apologize for the misstatement. It was an editing error and it was mine alone.

Still, the right-wingers were unforgiving. The trolls at Newsbusters claimed that Maddow implied "Stockman consigned 168 innocent people to death". Reason accused her of "mistakenly accusing someone of being an accessory to the worst act of domestic terrorism in this country's history". And most over the top, according to Outside the Beltway, she knew she was making a false claim on Monday because she gave the correct information about the Stockman fax in an earlier broadcast in March, the same broadcast she cited in on Wednesday in the above clip.

I don't get it. I know that as a liberal, I'm inclined to give Maddow the benefit of the doubt, but I can't come up with a reasonable interpretation of her comments that would make any of the above statements accurate. There seems to me a clear difference between, to take a recent turn of phrase, palling around with domestic terrorists and being directly involved in an act of domestic terrorism. Even Maddow's most thick-headed critics know this, but only the wildest extrapolation of her remarks would place Stockman in the latter camp. And if Maddow was doing this - purposely according to OTB - why was she so subtle about it? Wouldn't it drive home her thesis even more to play up Stockman's supposed involvement? Why make such a dramatic accusation in passing and then immediately drop it?

The conspiracy theory is too tempting to pass on, but to reasonable people who have no axe to grind and don't have a need to cram Maddow into the paradigm of a partisan crank, it seems much more plausible that this was simply an error, that they were correct in March but sometime in the last ten months the busy staff and host of a daily commentary show forgot the details of a 15 year old incident involving an obscure one-term congressman.

This (feigned?) outrage about Stockman's lack of responsibility for the Oklahoma City bombing allows Maddow's critics to ignore what Stockman was actually responsible for: peddling conspiracy theories and contributing to an atmosphere of paranoia and hate. If anyone in Congress got a fax from Bill Ayers at any time in the last half-century, those same critics of Maddow would be absolutely outraged. But the terrorists who killed 168 people felt that Stockman was such a kindred spirit that they singled him out for notification, and Maddow's critics think that's just Stockman standing up for the heartland.