Ain’t like that

Just in case anyone was wondering, I haven’t stopped posting on this shit because I got a tumblr blog or nothin’.  Back soon.  

The Race and Politics speech

An utter triumph for the campaign and for American political discourse — finally, a credible public persona gets it right.  Brother gets up there and says, w/r/t racism and its devastating legacy of persisting injustice, that that shit is real.  But. . . the story can’t end there, and we’ll never move forward, whether as individuals or or families or congregations or as a society, without acknowledging not only that shit is real but that shit comes in different stripes, and afflicts all of us, and so can only be comprehensively overcome in efforts of unity and transformation.  Or, well, maybe you should just watch it yourself. Oh, and try to ignore the appallingly dull-witted CNN summary points at the bottom of the screen.  Full text here.  

The Logic of Hillary ‘08

I like these videos:  

Pros, in different area codes

Something about this Eliot Spitzer thing is just off.  Spitzer was governor of the whole state of New York, but never moved out of Manhattan.  Yet the only place he could get his rocks off was a hotel room in D.C., in a painstakingly negotiated transaction? In Nick Paumgarten’s profile piece on Spitzer in the New Yorker late last year, he wrote that Spitzer bristled at the suggestion of drinks at the Carlyle Hotel, because it was “not his scene.”  Perhaps some of his discomfort with the lack of sexual ardor in the Upper East Side world he inhabited peaked through there.  It was an absence he could never transcend.  His whole life lacked for human curves; all he knew were sharp edges–the suspenders, the predawn wakeup to jog in the Park–all the rigors of merit and moral asceticism (he told Paumgarten that his first thought every morning was to wish for two hours more of sleep).  No wonder his lapse into venality seems so amateurish, so boneheaded, so boring and small of him.    The sex at issue is utterly flat and joyless–no dashing around downtown with a mistress, like even Giuliani did, for god’s sake; just a few appointments here and there, tucked in between wide swaths of effort on behalf of the Empire State.  It’s a scandal more befitting the part-time mayor of some unthrilling place like Three Bridges, New Jersey. One of the most powerful men in the city, yet how very un-New York of him indeed to throw it all away for such an ultimately dull show.  Is he really one of us?                 

h/t

This is fuckin’ great.  Here’s just hoping that the California sunshine won’t make Jack Roy quit smoking, lose his righteous indignation and go all soft after he picks up and moves there this summer, for a girl. (What a fag.)  

Well, THESE are nice

Last night, I went to the legendary Herald Square Macy’s to use up some Christmas gift cards on much-needed work clothes.  How about these for a pair of pants, huh?

 

While pants-shopping was tolerable enough, I became disheartened when I shifted gears and tried to pick out some work socks.  In fact, I would submit that it is impossible to shop for socks at a place like Macy’s and not swell with sadness.  You’re looking at all those socks, and they’re so bright, clean and taut, and their novel designs and crisp folds make them all seem so fresh and creative and fun. You think that if you would just buy these socks — only $21 for three pairs! — suddenly sock-wearing itself would become an interesting thing about you.  The new socks whisper a promise that they will give you a source of personal pride; that they will add color to your personality; that they will be Exhibit A in the Case of the New You; that those those silver and navy argyles would be a quirky affectation that you could make your own, like a cane or cigarette case.  

But then you catch yourself, and you realize that you know these socks are just going to let you down.  Like anything else in life, there’s no trick, no shortcut — these socks are just like the socks you have at home, that have been through the laundry a thousand times, that become threadbare and faded with time.  And the abruptness of that realization, how it rushes in so forcefully and knocks you from your absurd and dizzy visions of what new socks could mean, hardens you against what is in front of you.

Then all you see is the “Made in China” label, half-elegantly framed by a perimeter of gold-colored thread.  A claim of dubious merit; sweatshop provenance.   You cannot understand why the packaging so proudly announces the socks’ ingredients — Cotton Merino Blend; Cotton with Lycra.  As if that were the answer we’ve too long been looking for.  

All you feel is emptiness, and so, to claw yourself out of it, you probe deeper into the significance of these objects, which beguiled you just moments ago.  You begin to think of them not as fresh-born matter, all potential and ideal, but rather as things with history, a story to tell.  You imagine where they have been before: the dry, tired, wage slave hands they passed through briefly six weeks ago before being sealed up in a cardboard box and shipped all the way to a stuffy inventory room, invisible but just a few yards away.  Or you consider that perhaps no human hands ever graced them at all: that maybe the closest they ever came was when the gloved hand of a factory worker (in some city I’ve never heard of with more people in it than Brooklyn but which doesn’t even have its own airport) pressed the button on a machine that spat them out into existence.  A tired hand, pressing a jelly-refracted button — its three or four pockmarks from some long-forgotten dinging being smoothed away and erased, impression after impression, day after month after year — encased in a thin aluminum cylinder all the way around, so no errant bumps, but only a human depression, could cause the machine to groan, grudgingly, and shudder with anger as it cycles through its creative process once more.

You start to hate the socks, for what they are, for the meaninglessness of what they’ve accepted for themselves.  With disgust you just grab the cheapest ones you can find that don’t look utterly god-awful.  And, after defending to the cashier your choice not to take advantage of the nearly-irrational savings the store is offering and buy just a little bit more, you walk out onto 34th Street and try to grasp back at reality, passing Burger King and K-Mart and the World’s Most Famous Arena on your way to the C train at the corner of 8th Avenue.               

Tips

• Even if your wife is gracious enough to accompany you to your second (and her first) viewing of There Will Be Blood, and even if you have a wonderfully engaging discussion with her afterward on the walk back home from BAM, during which she raises several points about the movie that you had not considered before, she will eventually grow tired of you doing your Daniel Plainview voice while saying mundane things like “I would be happy to unload the dishwasher.”  If you persist, and trot out the Daniel Plainview voice unexpectedly while in flagrante delicto, you are truly pushing it.  
• Trying to learn about new music through clicking on the iTunes “Listeners Also Bought” link will prove frustrating and take at least 2 hours before you come away with five good new songs.  Just because you like “Superstar” by Lupe Fiasco does not suddenly make you an expert hip-hop aficionado.
• If you’re going to enlist Jack Nicholson’s help to salvage your quickly downward-spiraling presidential campaign, make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into first.
• If you want to have a viral music video just as cool as that of your rival in order to try to breathe new life into your quickly downward-spiraling presidential campaign, make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into first.  (Reminds me of the theme music for “America’s Funniest Home Videos”, or every terrible evangelical praise chorus ever.)