"In October 1956, Mr. Feiffer strolled into the office of The Village Voice, which had been founded the previous year, and offered to draw a regular strip for nothing."

"First titled 'Sick, Sick, Sick,' it eventually became 'Feiffer.' (He was not paid, he later wrote, until 1964.) With his signature sketchy, scribbly lines, Mr. Feiffer sought to bring to a six- or nine-panel format a level of visual simplicity and intellectual sophistication akin to what William Steig and Saul Steinberg had done with their cartoons in The New Yorker. Often devoid of backgrounds and panel borders, Mr. Feiffer’s strip focused almost exclusively on dialogue, gestures and facial expressions.... He would present a couple bickering with each other in profile, or someone in therapy, often with the speaker facing the reader.... Complacent, self-satisfied white liberals were a frequent target, and he upbraided them mercilessly.... The leotard-clad Dancer, who first appeared in 1957, was inspired by a girlfriend. She was... Mr. Feiffer wrote, 'abused and exploited by men.... but where [her male counterpart, based on himself] grew defensive and angry over the years, the Dancer retained her faith. She danced, fell, got to her feet, tripped, sailed aloft, came crashing to earth, rose stubbornly and kept dancing.'"

From "Jules Feiffer, Acerbic Cartoonist, Writer and Much Else, Dies at 95/In his long-running Village Voice comic strip and in his many plays and screenplays, he took delight in skewering politics, relationships and human nature" (NYT).

Feiffer also wrote the screenplay for "Carnal Knowledge" and the Robert Altman version of "Popeye," and his play "Little Murders" became one of my favorite movies from 1971:

"I said #@!%@**# the kids in '67, let's do something for us."

I love this ad for the Village Voice that appeared in the NYT on June 11, 1967, "Now that you're tried Psychiatry, Self-Improvement Books, and Ceramics, try The Village Voice. It's cheaper." In choosing the form to fill out to subscribe, you're given 6 choices and encouraged to use the one that's the real you""

Why am I reading that this morning? I was thinking about yesterday's elections and the effect they may have on the Democrats' ambitious spending programs, and it got me thinking about the controversy — which I remember well from half a century ago — about the insanely high cost of building the Superdome. 

I went to the Wikipedia article on the Superdome just to find the price — $135 million — and got distracted by "[Sports visionary David] Dixon imagined the possibilities of staging simultaneous high school football games side by side and suggested that the synthetic surface be white." 

I had to check the source, and it was in that 1967 issue of the NYT: "How would you feel about white?... A white playing field and an orange football with luminous paint. When a quarterback throws a pass, we turn the lights out while the ball's in the air. Wild?"

Things were so much wilder then. Let's talk about Youngkin now.

"Recently I heard a woman say her department is full of freaks, they don’t like her, and she doesn’t have a life, but that sounded more like a whine than an epiphany."

"I’m no sociologist so I don’t know if this era is less interesting. You’d think people would be as tormented by sex, self-fulfillment, and relationships (and babies) as ever, but I’m not hearing it on any movie lines I’ve been on lately. Maybe I should ask the NSA."

Said Stan Mack in a 2013 interview on the blog Jeremiah's Vanishing New York. Stan Mack drew the fantastic cartoon "Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies" that ran in The Village Voice from 1974 to 1995. The words in the cartoons were all things Mack claims to have heard people say around New York City. I, myself, had long loved the absurdity of the partial conversations you'd overhear as you walked around or half-minded your own business in a restaurant or shop. Here's an example showing part of one week's Stan Mack cartoon:



If you like that, you can order a collection of the funnies — remember when we called the comics "the funnies"? — here (at Amazon).

In the quote that begins in the post title, Mack is comparing the words he used to overhear with the words he overhears today, which, unlike then, include a lot of talking into cell phones. In fact, the reason I was looking up Stan Mack this morning is because I read (on Facebook) this post by Annie Gottlieb:

Really, the things you hear on the street. People on their cellphones seem to assume they’re in a soundproof phone booth, and people just conversing seem to have been made unselfconscious or oblivious by phone culture to being either intrusively loud, or private and overheard. You hear some funny things.

(a woman on her cellphone, crossing the street, indignantly: ) “I don’t want ANY bacteria.” (Apparently no one has yet broken the news about the microbiome.)

(Young man to his girlfriend, walking along holding hands, conversationally) “You know how some people jerk off just to jerk off?” (as opposed to?)

(today) “Hydroglyphics”

ADDED: Did people become less self-conscious because of cellphones? It's very hard to compare what you're hearing now with what you heard back then. Stan Mack is kind of an authority on the subject, and the difference he cites is in the interestingness. If what people are saying these days is less interesting, it could be that people are more private, less prone to revealing themselves when they can be overheard. But it could be that the eavesdropper has changed, and not just because we've all gotten older. We're different because we're listening to phone talkers, not to people who are with other people and talking in the flesh. People talking into a phone irritate us a lot more, so we're more judgmental. We think they're intruding on us. When we listen to people who are together in real life — as in "Real Life Funnies" — we feel that we are intruding on them. Our transgression makes things inherently more interesting.

"Martin Shkreli... hahahahaha, just kidding, that guy’s going to Hell."

From the Village Voice article "Here are 25 New Yorkers Who Really Need Pope Francis to Forgive Them."

I'm reading The Village Voice this morning — orthography buffs will know why I capitalized the "t" in "the" in this sentence and not the previous sentence — because I'd arrived at "R.I.P. St. Vincent's Hospital" in connection with the story of the white man who settled Brooklyn.

It was where the lowly, the mighty, and the garden-variety zany denizens of downtown were born, cared for, and died. Edna St. Vincent Millay, the Village poet who first proclaimed the lovely light of a candle burned at both ends, was given the hospital's name after it saved her uncle's life. It was where Gregory Corso—the beat poet who "sang Italian songs as sweet as Caruso and Sinatra," as Jack Kerouac said—was born in 1930.

St. Vincent's Hospital is the St. Vincent in Edna St. Vincent Millay:

My candle burns at both ends;
   It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
   It gives a lovely light!

The white man who settled Brooklyn is the subject of the post that's sat at the top of this blog overnight and was the subject of conversation between Meade and me as we assembled breakfast this morning. Meade thought it was funny that the article about the man had the correction: "This article initially quoted B.A. as saying he was born in 'Mt. Sinai.' He actually says he was born in St. Vincent's. We regret the error." As if such a trivial error, amidst everything else that happened, could be a subject of serious regret.

I took the position that, in New York City, the difference between Mt. Sinai and St. Vincent is huge. For a man who is adamant about his urban territorial credentials, the difference is intense. Born in St. Vincent's? He may think he's a natural-born hipster. He's 46, so he was born in 1969. That was the year of the Stonewall riots in the Village, and he was saying "I grew up with Stonewall, I grew up on the laps of drag queens." He also says: "So what I have in this city is ownership. When I look at the concrete I think, oh my blood mixes with the concrete." Blood and concrete ≈ St. Vincent's.

As for St. Vincent himself — St. Vincent De Paul — he was captured by Barbary pirates in 1605 and sold into slavery. His second master was a spagyrical physician, and Vincent learned medicine from the Muslims, converted to Islam, and had 3 wives. There's more to that story. He gets back to France and to Christianity, and, obviously, sainthood. [ADDED: The linked Wikipedia article is incredibly confusing, as discussed in the comments, but, to be brief, the "converted to Islam, and had 3 wives" part isn't about Vincent.]

And Martin Shkreli, the man whose name festers in the post title? Don't you know who he is? His fame, too, lies in the field of medicine: "Thanks to Martin Shkreli, life-saving drug Daraprim will now cost $750 per pill—up from $13.50. And no one, not even the FDA, can stop him."

Lady Gaga self-censors her rape-y video.

"Riffing on Gaga’s hip surgery last year, the video opens with her on an operating table being felt up by [R.] Kelly, who then sedates her and messes around with her unconscious body with help from a team of scantily clad nurses."

Why film it in the first place? It must have seemed like a good idea at the time, last October, but then, in December, an article came out in the Village Voice, collecting the new stories into one spot thus displaying a vivid portrait of Kelly's history as a sexual predator.

We're told that "Gaga distanced herself from Kelly immediately following the Village Voice piece, and has kept away in the months since." It's not as though those stories weren't already out there, and Gaga chose to make this video giving up her naked body — consciously — for the acting out of a sexual assault on a naked unconscious female character. (Clip viewable here.)

She knew exactly what she was doing, and all that had changed— to which she reacted "immediately" — was a conspicuous Village Voice article. The video was intended to stimulate a certain amount of outrage. It's the old game of succès de scandale, and her move was calibrated on the presumption of the public's vague memories of many old stories about Kelly. The Village Voice threw the calculation off.

Apparently, there's not no such thing as bad publicity

Why did Lady Gaga make but then pull the video?
	Something other than that Village Voice article.
	The VV article roused her conscience and made her see the video was wrong.
	The VV article changed the way some viewers would see the video and she chose to protect them.
	The Village Voice article changed the prediction about what the PR would be like.
pollcode.com free polls

"Women wanted to remove their support from men, the ‘enemy’ in a movement for reform, power and self-determination."

"Once I understood the feminist doctrines, a lesbian separatist position seemed the commonsensical position, especially since, conveniently, I was an L-person.”

Jill Johnston, the staunchly radical feminist, has died. She was 81. In the 1970s, she was the radical feminist, and we read her every week in The Village Voice.

The sexual power of Carrie Prejean.

I've been checking my Site Meter quite a few times in the last day. I've been pleased and then a little ashamed of myself as I see the phenomenal power of one particular post title to attract search engine traffic. This post was originally titled "Things the Site Meter dragged in." I've tweaked it a little to make my point. I'm not traffic-greedy — not too much. Just trying to make my point.

While I was hanging out on Site Meter, a couple other things got my attention. It's my general policy not to respond to bloggers who attack me — otherwise it would be a traffic-building strategy to attack me — but I do make exceptions as the whim strikes me. So, let's look at what Roy Edroso — of Alicublog and the Village Voice is saying about me.

He takes my Carrie Prejean post and intersperses it with comments in fisking fashion, and I'm going to fisk it back at him. Ready?

THE OLD DARK HOUSE. Hadn't been over to see the Ann Althouse site for a long, long while, but I retain a soft spot for her, so when tipped today by the Perfesser (with the irresistible tease, "Teenager? Is TMZ threatening to post child pornography?") I took a chance. Professor Althouse was talking about the Carrie Prejean sex tape:

But TMZ — I don't read it much, but, again, I'll guess — does not itself parade as Christian. Prejean does, and so she will be held to the high standards of Christianity, while TMZ can say and do whatever it wants. ("When we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it; when we are slandered, we answer kindly. ")

TMZ is following Rule 4 of Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals":

Scripture and Saul Alinsky? This explains so much: Althouse is The Anchoress!

Despite his inclusion of that St. Paul quote, Edroso cuts my quote of Alinsky's Rule 4, which happens to use Christianity as the example of the effectiveness of demanding that your enemies live up to their own rules. Alinsky wrote: "You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian Church can live up to Christianity." It's hardly some odd quirk of mine to combine scripture and Alinsky. Edroso, in his usual fashion, looks for ways to make me look flaky — along with the other bloggers he's made it his business to mock. (The link to The Anchoress hints at Edroso's approach. Check out his latest Village Voice column for a more comprehensive example of how he works.)

Back to Edroso:

This argument that hypocrisy doesn't exist for the Elect...

What argument? Where did I argue that Christians aren't responsible for hypocrisy? I simply don't.

.... is by now an old rightwing favorite....

So just pull it out of you frumpy bag of liberal complaints about right-wingers. I thought you were trying to fisk my post, Roy. But, no, I'm either this distinct writer that you love to make fun of or I'm indistinguishable in the blurry mass of rightish bloggers that you've looked at before and have grown weary of squinting at.

... and the quality of Althouse's reasoning hasn't changed much from the old days.

Well, you haven't come close to nailing anything I've said in this post, so why bother to be specific about anything I've said in the past? You can't even read the post currently in front of your face, yet you think everyone already knows what it is I've said in "the old days." Maybe Roy is tired and on autopilot. But maybe, as he worked his way through what I'd written, confident in his ability to spew snark, he saw that my post actually cohered and that it was pretty damned sharp and funny, and he consciously decided to blur his observations so he could still get his post up. The poor wilted man. The option of actually liking what I'd written is inconceivable within the little framework he's built for himself. What would happen to that Village Voice gig?

But the Jesus stuff was a shock. I went down into her comments...

He couldn't figure out anything to say about what I wrote — "the Jesus stuff" — and, desperate, he dove into the comments looking for something repulsive. What he came up was from Florida, a specific, familiar commenter here:

... a quick scan suggests that the old let's-pretend liberals (what were their names, again? Rainbow? Sunshine?) seem to have fled or outed themselves, and the remnant are leaving stuff like this:

What's difficult as hell to do is to live up to the standards that would be set up for Christians by the butt-buggering sodomites. The rapists of 13-year-old children.

Christians could never live up to the sodomites' expectations.

Thankfully, though, Jesus doesn't require that. And we know they'll spend eternity burning in hell.

So at least there's that comfort.

"Jesus stuff"... "stuff like this"... Roy is not editing and dealing with sloppy word repetitions, and, worse, he's not bothering to figure anything out. It's just stuff. He found the most unsightly quote and then — without reason — counted on his readers to believe that it exemplifies what is generally in the comments at my blog. How utterly flabby and lame.

Now, as for the comment he cherry-picked, Edroso has no idea what it means and makes no attempt to figure it out. He has not, like the regular comment readers here, been exposed to the way Florida writes and the things he writes about. He doesn't know about Florida's longstanding Roman Polanski theme — which began here and which involves a fair amount of antagonism toward me. It's likely that Edroso thinks he's come across some rabid homophobia, but, in context, I know that "butt-buggering sodomites... rapists of 13-year-old children" refers to Polanski and the Hollywood-type liberals who've defended him. Florida's comment is not part of a mass of "stuff like this" in the comments. It's something particular, incisive, and satirical, and, if you are going to focus on it, you'd better take some time to figure out what it means. But Edroso is happy to see something that looked like shit and to splatter it onto his post and then, childishly, to demand that onlookers see how ugly things are over at Althouse.

Amazingly, Althouse is still removing comments...

Huh? Where did that come from? What comments does he think I've removed? He's trying to pin that one comment on me by asserting that I moderate the comments, so that anything that is left, I've approved of. That is either a lazy mistake or a nasty lie. My approach to the comments is well known: I have a strong free speech policy, and I leave vile things in. To imply that whatever is left has my stamp of approval is cheap and unethical.

... perhaps because they don't come up to the standards of this gem, or because they're actually messages from her employers trying to reach her because her phone has gone dead and her windows are boarded up.

He ends with a comic image, intended as a play on my name, the "old house" that he's used in his post title. Unfortunately, he hasn't built the foundation for what could have been a well-written joke. The material he thought he had just wasn't there.

Den Beste isn't still blogging, is he?

Roy makes a second attempt at humor, and, while I'm familiar with Den Beste, I have no idea why this is supposed to be funny. Althouse is The Anchoress... Althouse is Den Beste? Everything is melting in the mind of Roy Edroso.

"The Official Village Voice Election-Season Guide to the Right-Wing Blogosphere."

Roy Edroso puts a lot of work into this thing, and it would have hurt my feelings if he'd left me out. So don't cry for me. And, check it out, they got Tom Tomorrow to draw a cartoon of Glenn Reynolds.

ADDED: Should I take care what I put up now, as the new readers from the Village Voice click over? How many? You might wonder. Based on the Site Meter, 29. Ouch.

AND: I see that Tom Tomorrow has illustrated all of us, including me. I feel really weird about that... mainly out of vanity.

MORE: Armed Liberal says:

[A]side from being a juvenile jackass, [the author Roy Edroso is] a tool. Why? Because while nonsense like this is great for making the 15% of True Believers feel Really Really Good about themselves, ... it makes the other 36% that we on the left need to do things like - you know, win elections - pretty pissed off at the smug arrogance that's so proudly on display....

We're in an election cycle where the GOP candidate should be staked out like a sacrificial goat waiting for the knife. Instead, we get Democratic thinkers worrying - appropriately - that the Democratic candidate is going to actually lose in November. And one of the big reasons is that the public voice of the Party is cranky, smug yuppies.

I agree. It's counterproductive. Why do people like Roy want to demonize me? Roy even designates me as a "moderate 'Democrat'" and notes that I voted for Obama in the primary. If that's enough to make you a stupid, evil right winger, how do the Democrats hope to get enough votes to win?

AND: A comment over at the Voice by David on Wed Apr 16, 2008, 09:26:

I think this tripe is what David Mamet was referring to in his "Why I am No Longer a Brain Dead Liberal" article a few weeks ago. Heck of a job, guys.

Exactly.

Charles Johnson — another target of the Voice piece — like me, notes that there's hardly any traffic clicking over from there: "Since this article was published, we’ve received a grand total of ... count ’em ... 32 hits..."

Protein Wisdom says: "It’s wry, amusing, and demonstrates perfectly the left’s contention that if you disagree with them, you’re either stupid or evil, or some combination of both."

Megan McArdle rants (her verb) about the term Roy applied to her: "lipstick libertarian."

I do wear lipstick (well, usually gloss), and more than occasionally eyeliner and mascara and a little shadow. And what the hell does that have to do with my political ideas?

... I'm annoyed that a typically female narrative style, which touches on personal experience, is derided as fundamentally unserious--particularly when it is so derided by people who admire it in feminist bloggers.

Yes, the lefties think sexism is quite okay when it's used to attack their opponents. I'm too thick-skinned — despite the routine application of moisturizer — to let things like that annoy me anymore. But I don't mind saving the evidence to use against people like Roy when my wily feminine emotions tell me to attack.

And I'm perilously close to despair at finding that so many of my correspondents not only believe that pointing out that I am 35 and unmarried is a devastating insult, but apparently expect me to share that opinion.

Despair!? I recommend pity aimed at those who flaunt their incomprehension of the benefits of singlehood.

"A rejuvenated tax specialist, a boarding school pixie, a literature major from Virginia and a clog-wearing nutritionist."

The NYT makes the 4 individuals that ran a prostitution ring sound like characters in a new, bad sit-com.

What, exactly, makes a human being a "pixie"? Apparently, Cecil Suwal was "petite" and "bubbly."

And how did the "tax specialist" get "rejuvenated" — by going into the prostitution business?

[The] boss was Mark Brener, 62. He dealt with a stack of medical bills for his late wife by starting the escort service, an idea that dawned on him several years ago as he surveyed sex-related advertisements in the weekly newspaper The Village Voice....

The venture reinvigorated Mr. Brener. He dyed his hair black, donned a leather jacket and recruited three women to help him. The four seemingly had little in common beyond a desire for extra money and a willingness to earn it in alternative ways.

So there's your "rejuvenated." He dyed his hair and got a leather jacket — and entered the prostitution business.

Then there's "Temeka Rachelle Lewis, 32, whom friends describe as a reserved and bookish graduate of the University of Virginia, scheduled meetings between willing young women and wealthy men." So you graduate from a fine college and you become a secretary... for a prostitution business?

The "clog-wearing nutritionist" — get it? Each member of the unlikely foursome in our new sit-com has a different kind of unlikeliness. This one, Tanya Hollander, has kitchen shelves that "brim with spices and herbs" and a table "strewn with grapefruit and books of holistic and organic recipes."

"I’d like to help people heal through food, to use food as medicine and to take the time to choose the right meals."

The comic dialogue will practically write itself. She can be like Saffy on "AbFab."

Now why do these 4 mismatched characters come together in their ridiculous enterprise? The Times delves into the mystery:

For decades, studies have tracked the forces that drive people into prostitution. Few, though, have reviewed what, beyond money, propels someone toward a life as a pimp or a madam.

What, beyond money.... I love that.

“We don’t know much about people who run brothels, massage parlors or escort agencies,” said Ronald Weitzer, a sociology professor at George Washington University who has written about the sex industry.

Call up the expert and learn... we don't know much.

"Something weird and cultish in the sycophantish cathexis onto Hillary of the many nerds, geeks and vengeful viragos who run her campaign..."

It's Camille Paglia (who admits she's "leaning" toward Obama). She's got her sights set on Hillary Clinton, and it's going to get ugly, with the hurling of dangerous words like viragos and cathexis and — my personal favorite — "sycophantish":

Aside from the stylish Huma [Abedin], there's definitely something weird and cultish in the sycophantish cathexis onto Hillary of the many nerds, geeks and vengeful viragos who run her campaign -- sometimes to her detriment, as with the recent ham-handed playing of the clichéd gender card. I suspect the latter dumb move, which has backfired badly, came from Ann Lewis (Barney Frank's sister), a fanatical Hillary true believer who has been spouting beatific feminist bromides about her for the past 15 years.... Hillary seems to have acolytes rather than friends...

Paglia goes on to lavish compliments on Dianne Feinstein — she's "shrewd" and "steady" — why can't she be the first woman President? Feinstein speaks with "silky ease" and has "true gravitas." Paglia also strokes Nancy Pelosi, who has a "relaxed, resonant realism" and speaks in a "low purr." Pelosi purrs but Hillary's got that "tight-wound, self-righteous attack voice" and that "flat, practical, real-life voice."

But there are no big conclusions here about Hillary. Just an expression of that vague irritation we all feel. (Don't we?) But I wonder if this is the reaction we would have to any woman who got realistically close to the presidency. And I'll bet that's the sort of thing Ann Lewis says behind the scenes, but that doesn't make it wrong.

Paglia lights into Ellen DeGeneres for her "cringe-making on-air meltdown over a dog":

Following Rosie O'Donnell's professional collapse amid lunatic rants and operatic kvetching, this has been a terrible year for Hollywood lesbians' public image. It's as if when the butch mask drops, there's nothing inside but a boiling candy kettle of infantile rage and self-pity.

Butch up, girls, says Camille. But don't forget to keep that voice at a low purr.

She's got this on global warming:

This facile attribution of climate change to human agency is an act of hubris. Good stewardship of the environment is an ethical imperative for every nation. But breast-beating hysteria merely betrays impious tunnel vision. Thousands of factors, minute and grand, are at work in cyclic climate change, whose long-term outcomes we cannot possibly predict. Nature should inspire us with awe, not pity.

That's a nice twist. Our arrogance lies not in thinking we can indulge ourselves in our carbon-spewing ways — as we're commonly told — but in thinking we move Nature. It's impious to think of ourselves that way.

On Norman Mailer:

I didn't care about his novels -- I don't care about any novels published after World War II (Tennessee Williams is my main man) -- but I was impressed by Mailer's visionary and sometimes hallucinatory first-person journalism. And I was directly inspired by his eclectic "Advertisements for Myself" (1959), which I took as a blueprint after my first books were attacked by the feminist establishment in the 1990s.

I will immediately go read "Advertisements for Myself"!

Mailer's "The Prisoner of Sex" (the original 1971 Harper's essay, not the book) was an important statement about men's sexual fears and desires. His jousting with Germaine Greer at the notorious Town Hall debate in New York that same year was a pivotal moment in the sex wars. I loved Greer and still do. And I also thought Jill Johnston (who disrupted the debate with lesbo stunts) was a cutting-edge thinker: I was devouring her Village Voice columns, which had evolved from dance reportage into provocative cultural commentary.

Ah, yes, I remember. How we hated Norman Mailer in those days. From this distance, I rather admire him for making himself as a vortex for feminist hate. He got into the center of things the only way he could.

[O]ne of the lousiest things Mailer ever wrote was his flimsy cover-story screed on her for Esquire in 1994. It was obvious Mailer knew absolutely nothing about Madonna and was just blowing smoke.

Because he neglected to read Paglia's musings on the subject, no doubt.

Guess what -- Esquire's original proposal was for me to interview Madonna. Mailer was the sub!

Ha ha. What a transcendent brag! I especially like the use of the word "sub," with its insinuation of phallic gigantism. Paglia has the bigger... writing talent.

Next, Paglia has a reference to my favorite movie:

Penthouse magazine had similarly tried to bring Madonna and me together, as had HBO, which proposed filming a "My Dinner with André" scenario of the two of us chatting in a restaurant.

Camille is the André, of course. Madonna would have to be the Wally.

But Madonna, no conversationalist, always refused.

Damn! Madonna just needed instruction on how to play the listener, like Wallace Shawn. "My Dinner with André" begins Wally's voiced-over anxiety about he is about sitting through a whole dinner with André Gregory. He resolves to get through the experience by, essentially, interviewing him. But Madonna's problem was not — I suspect — that she wasn't good enough at talking, but that she didn't fancy herself enduring a long outpouring of Paglia's thoughts about everything. To be a good Wally in a "My Dinner With André"-format movie, you have to wait while the other person has most of the lines, then finally, when the audience can't take it anymore, say "You want to know what I think of all this." And then charm us to the core with a few lines that we will remember for decades.

Hey, remember the time Camille Paglia refused to have dinner with me? I wrote a post about it called — of all things! — "My Dinner With Camille."

Find the ladder in the back of Jammyland to go to Hospital Productions.

Ah, here it is. At 60 East 3rd Street.





It's run by our old friend Dominick Fernow. You remember this Village Voice article about him.

You saw pictures of him here, remember? (With the tongue?) I told him that the pictures made some of you readers angry... for reasons we couldn't understand. And he's the guy painted fuchsia in this blogged-about performance.

And he painted this, remember, from the old "Mysteries of the Althouse house" post?



Anyway, Hospital Productions is about noise music, but the music Dom was playing in the shop when we were there wasn't very noisy. It was actually the sort of atmospheric music that I like. It was Muslimgauze, and I bought the CD "Syrinjia." Here's the Muslimgauze website.

Dom's mother is Jean Feraca, who does that radio show — "Here on Earth" — on Wisconsin Public Radio. (I was on the show that time.) She's a writer with a new book, a memoir, called "I Hear Voices."

ADDED: Here's the NYT obituary for Muslimgauze — Bryn Jones, who died of "pneumonia derived from a rare fungal infection in his bloodstream" when he was 38.

Muslimgauze occupied a strange place in the musical world. He was a powerful, prolific innovator, releasing albums that were alternately beautiful and visceral, full of ambient electronics, polyrhythmic drumming and all kinds of voices and sound effects. The recordings earned him a devoted following in underground, experimental and industrial music circles worldwide.

But the albums' liner notes and titles were dogmatically pro-Palestinian, a rarity among Western musicians in general but especially unusual in one from Manchester who was not Muslim and had never visited the Middle East. Some said Mr. Jones was aiming for shock value, but those who knew him described him as a shy, mysterious man who was serious in his political beliefs and never wavered from his commitment to music....

Mr. Jones recorded 92 albums with titles like ''Hamas Arc'' and ''Vote Hezbollah,'' references to militant Islamic groups....

Note that I'm not buying the politics, nor did I inquire into his politics before buying the music. Do you think I should have? With all musicians or just ones with "Muslim" in their names? I heard the music and bought the music.

Cool people can't go out on Saturday anymore.

Because the uncool people are out.

“In the old days, Saturday was the destination night for chic New Yorkers headed to Studio 54 at its most resplendent,” [said Michael Musto, the longtime Village Voice night-life columnist.] “But things changed as more and more tri-staters were willing to use the bridges and tunnels for here-we-come Gotham weekends, so the locals started staying home and triple-bolting their doors as if in a George Romero film.”...

Last Saturday, four Manhattanites in their early 30s were huddling over a low table downstairs at Buddakan, the cavernous pan-Asian restaurant in the meatpacking district. “During the weekends, you get a lot of clutter, if you will,” said Brian Kirimdar, 30, an investment banker. He and his wife, Ashley, tend to hide out in restaurants on Saturdays, avoiding all but a few of the Chelsea clubs. “You don’t find too many bridge-and-tunnel people at Cielo or Marquee,” he said. “You really have to pick and choose.”

Zombies! Clutter! The aversion to other people permeates human life. The wonder is that anyone ever ventures out at all. What riffraff is out there!

And yet they do go out. They go out and still imagine that they are hiding out in restaurants and only a few clubs.

"Noise is the real punk."

Oh, I see that Dominick Fernow got written up in the Village Voice:

[Y]ou'll find a stuffy basement hotbox packed to the ceiling with the most elusive items in the noise underground: cassettes affixed to shards of vinyl or slipped into fuzzy pouches, CD-Rs packaged in seven-inch sleeves, seven-inches packaged in tin foil, a record where the grooves are lathe-cut onto a coke mirror . . . everything from mutant monoliths like Merzbow and John Wiese to obscurants like Cream Corn Barf Extravaganza. There's plenty of black metal too, but no death metal, hardcore, or punk. "In many ways I would say it's a real punk store in that it's more about celebrating the individual instead of the genre," Fernow says. "Noise is the real punk. It's not about the haircut, it's not about politics, it's not about an agenda. It's personal. That's the key for me. And that's an intimacy."...

Back in Madison, Wisconsin, when Fernow was in the eighth grade, some new friends invited him to hang out while their death/grind band practiced. The emotional intensity he witnessed was unlike anything he got from Aerosmith or the Chili Peppers. There were no gateway bands, no Metallica, no Slayer, not even Cannibal Corpse—Fernow just dove straight into tape-trading bands like Fleshgrind and Anal Blast. Around 1997, an appropriate distance from the time when computers and CD-Rs would become ubiquitous, 16-year-old Fernow started Hospital Records to release his home-recorded, organically made noise cassettes.

Dom is the person who painted this...



... which -- you may remember -- is something I couldn't get out of the garage, back when I cleared out the whole garage. It's an artifact of one of the concerts that were played in that garage. Embalm was a death metal band, and there were at least two other bands, Toy Gun and Four O'Clock Tragedy, that played here back then.

Anyway, John visited Dom in NYC this summer -- in that "stuffy basement hotbox" -- and got some great photos, like this one:

"Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World."

I enjoyed this NPR interview with Albert Brooks about his new movie, in which a character, played by him and named Albert Brooks, is sent to India and Pakistan to try to learn what makes Muslims laugh and write a 500 page report about it, which, Fred Thompson tells him, would be doing his country a great service. Well, that's the concept. Yes, of course, it doesn't make any sense. He's just one comedian, and the Muslims in question are millions of people, many of whom don't speak English. I wouldn't even expect Albert Brooks to be able to figure out what Americans find funny. But none of that matters much, I assume. The question isn't what makes Muslims laugh, but whether Brooks can make us laugh with this material. That sounds like a rather difficult task.

How is he doing? Rotten Tomatoes is showing seriously mixed reviews. Here's J. Hoberman in the Village Voice:

[T]he movie is complicated by two paradoxes—one annoyingly obvious, the other fascinatingly implicit. The first is the use of India, which, although home to 150 million Muslims, has six times as many Hindus; the second is that Brooks's comic sensibility travels so badly. Woody Allen may bestride the world like a colossus, but—the brilliance of Real Life, Modern Romance, and Lost in America notwithstanding—not even the French have shown any interest in Albert Brooks. I'd hazard that this has something to do with the untranslatable subtlety of his one-liners (dependent as they are on situation and delivery) and the uningratiating nature of his persona (complete with refusal to acknowledge blatant neuroses).

"Not even the French have shown any interest in Albert Brooks" -- I love that.

The Village People cowboy has his say about "Brokeback Mountain."

Well, of course, "Brokeback Mountain" means it's time for Randy Jones, the cowboy from The Village People to resurface and do some press. Who better to inform us about whether or not gay cowboys are just a Hollywood concoction?

“There they were, a couple of men, alone together in isolated frontier country, for weeks or sometimes months at a time...

“The thought must have passed through their minds, even if they didn’t act on it, because men are sexy animals. If that wasn’t the case, there wouldn’t be so much homosexual sex in prison.”...

Mr Jones ... said that Brokeback Mountain was encouraging “red [Republican] state” gays to come out of the closet. He added that the advice he gave to the actors Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, when they questioned him about the love scenes, was to “keep their hats and boots on in bed. The boots are for traction.”

It sounds as though he knows a tad more what he's talking about than Annie Proulx, the author of the New Yorker short story the movie is based on. (Note to Althouse critics: I read the short story!)

I see the NYT "boldface" reporter talked to Jones a few days ago (TimesSelect link):

This film is described as trail-blazing and pioneering in its depiction of gay cowboys. Does that make you feel underappreciated? we asked.

''I'm a little ----.'' Whoa there, partner. Let's just say miffed.

''They're not even cowboys,'' Mr. Jones said. ''They're sheep herders. If you can't tell the difference between sheep and cows, how can you tell the difference between men and women?''

A good question. But in fairness, we asked him about his own qualifications. For one, he is happily married to WILL GREGA, a recording artist. For another, he said he grew up working in the tobacco fields of North Carolina. Thus, our next question. They wear chaps in the tobacco fields?

''Jeans,'' he said. ''The chaps I left to THE BIKER DUDE.''

Ah. What historical figures do you consider your major influences?

''I was raised on all those 50's Warner Brothers cowboy shows. 'Sugarfoot.' 'Maverick.' 'Cheyenne' with CLINT WALKER. It seems like every week they had his shirt ripped off, and he was either tied to something or another cowboy.''

So who, of HEATH LEDGER or JAKE GYLLENHAAL, best personifies the gay cowboy? Mr. Jones admitted he had not in fact seen the movie yet. But.

''I've got some pictures I've pulled off line of Heath Ledger.''

Yeah, we've heard about those.

Mr. Jones has just finished his role as GOD in ''Sodom: The Musical'' and is moving on to ''I Wanna Be Rosie,'' at La MaMa E.T.C.

''I play all of the men in ROSEMARY CLOONEY's life. Her father, her uncle, her nephew GEORGE CLOONEY, her psychiatrist, JOSÉ FERRER, BING CROSBY, NELSON RIDDLE.''

Mr. Jones also has a film coming out next spring about a country club that is built over the graves of Civil War soldiers, whose spirits are angered when the grounds crew uses extra-strength fertilizer. It is called ''Lawn of the Dead.''

Okay, I never really paid any attention to him before, but I've got to say, I love Randy Jones. He sounds really smart and funny and has an excellent attitude!

"Sodom: The Musical"? Here's a review (from the Village Voice):

Randy Jones ... plays God as a beleaguered office manager, Brian Munn's Abraham, his sycophantic subordinate—or, as he dubs himself in one interminable tune, "God's Li'l Bitch." The white-tracksuit-clad God doesn't want his Sodomites being such sodomites—even though they're cast quite clearly in his own image—and he will smite the land unless Abraham comes up with one good man there.

What follows are songs about sins: The writing team of Kevin Laub and Adam Cohen follows a formula of defining each of the Ten Commandments Greek chorus–style, then demonstrating with a peppy tune how it's violated. Lyricist Laub has his moments, celebrating a sexual paradise where penicillin is doled out "like government cheese," but Cohen's score, trying too hard to satisfy the Broadway musical idiom, is uninspired. Sodom fails the karaoke test: You will never hear these tunes at Pieces or the Duplex.

And here's an interview with Annie Proulx, in which she evades questions about how she got the idea for the shepherds-in-love story.

QUESTION THAT OCCURS TO ME ON REREADING: But what's the hat for?

"What is going on in the United States?

James Ridgeway writes in the Village Voice:

Why won’t Bush take decisive action in the Hurricane Katrina disaster and send in the military? He has control of the world’s mightiest military machine—thousands of planes, trucks, boats, expertly trained men and women. Where are these people? How can the National Guard be so close to providing help, as the public is told, yet still there are people dying on the sidewalks of a major city?

No excuses. Just do it. I'm tired of the talk. It's all very nice that people are raising money, but the military should be there, saving lives. What is going on?

Fights and trash fires broke out at the hot and stinking Superdome and anger and unrest mounted across New Orleans on Thursday, as National Guardsmen in armored vehicles poured in to help restore order across the increasingly lawless and desperate city.

An additional 10,000 National Guard troops from across the country were ordered into the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast to shore up security, rescue and relief operations in Katrina's wake as looting, shootings, gunfire, carjackings and other lawlessness spread.

That brought the number of troops dedicated to the effort to more than 28,000, in what may be the biggest military response to a natural disaster in U.S. history.

Where are they? People are dying!

"Academic work ... is so bloodless most of the time."

That's from a nice piece in the Village Voice about academic blogs.

Now you know why we academics blog: we blog for blood.

Some of the buzz about Condoleezza Rice running for President.

Jonathan Karl of ABCNews queries Condoleezza Rice about running for President:

MR. KARL: You've seen some of the buzz about you running for President in 2008 and there's even a website, there's even a Condoleezza Rice for President song, a theme song.

(Laughter.)

SECRETARY RICE: Oh, really?

MR. KARL: Yes. Would you consider it?

SECRETARY RICE: No. I'm really respectful of those who do run for office. I know what I do well and I know what I like to do and I'm really going to try to concentrate on being a good Secretary of State.

MR. KARL: So you would categorically rule out running for President in 2008?

SECRETARY RICE: Jonathan, I'm going to try to be a good Secretary of State, and then, as I've said many, many times, there's always NFL Commissioner.

MR. KARL: Right. So it sounds like there’s a door open now.

SECRETARY RICE: Jonathan, I'm going to try to be a good Secretary of State and see if I can do this job well, and then we'll see if the NFL is open.

MR. KARL: The NFL and maybe something else. We'll see.

Thank you very much, Secretary Rice.

Despite the "no" after "Would you consider it?" -- I'm reading a "yes," because when asked it she "would categorically rule out running for President in 2008," she makes the classic move of saying I'm happy with my current job. That's exactly how a serious candidate would talk at this stage, right?

UPDATE: Here's a Village Voice piece about the Condi for President push. And here's that "Americans for Rice" website (which has an atrocious web-retro design!).

What are the chances that John Edwards will end up as the Democratic nominee? Interesting speculation in The Village Voice (via Drudge).

Listening. You can listen to 9 Beet Stretch on line here. (See yesterday's posts if you don't know what I'm talking about.) It takes a while to make any audible sound at all, so don't give up. The ordinary speed first movement has a mysteriously slow intro, so when you slow that way the hell down, it might make you think the MP3 isn't working. I think it's nearly silent until the second minute! Well, if you're the impatient sort maybe this isn't your thing, but you might want to speed ahead to minute 2. The first audible note is very Ninth Symphony. If you get easily bored, you could simultaneously play, in slow motion, with the sound off, your DVD of Clockwork Orange. Or just read--read Philip K. Dick, like this guy, who made 9 Beet Stretch his Philip K. Dick reading soundtrack, noting that that it "is somewhat reminiscent of Blade Runner's soundtrack. It's got just the right mixture of desolation and transcendence, and is my favorite online audio find since SpamRadio."

I found the 9 Beet Stretch website through this nice review in The Village Voice. Here's an excerpt from that:

Electronic-sound jockeys must have fantasized about this idea ages ago, and it's a wonder that it waited for [9 Beet Stretch composer Lief] Inge to get around to it. Early composers who worked with audiotape agonized over their inability to change the speed of a sound without raising or lowering the pitch as well. In the '60s (according to genius sound engineer Robert Bielecki, my source for such data), there was some success in doing this with vocal samples, but music-quality time compression and expansion waited for the digital age. Today, many audio programs like ProTools contain pitch-shifting algorithms, because that's what you need: Changing the pitch without changing the speed is the same problem. Slowing down a sound is especially difficult, since the computer needs to interpolate identical wave forms in between the ones already there, but without causing glitches....

The second and third movements are remarkably lovely, eight hours of ethereal ambient music between them. The isolated violin notes of the scherzo's fugue turn into gossamer lines, while the slow movement's dissonances and suspensions take forever to melt, holding the ear rapt like the slowest Furtwängler recording of a Mahler adagio, only much slower. I find this 330-minute version of the Adagio a considerable improvement over the original. Who would have thought that Beethoven could have been a great ambient composer, if he had only divided his metronome markings by a couple dozen?

Looking back over my photos from yesterday, I realize that a glaring question is: Where is everybody? It looks completely empty! I was avoiding including people, in part because I wanted to be able to put the pictures up here and in part because I thought most people didn't add to the somber glory of the abandoned factory (visitors to my office know that when my iMac is unused for a couple minutes it starts to play pictures of abandoned buildings, which I got from a website I've now forgotten and would love to be able to find again (Inge used an iMac, by the way)). There was one woman I wanted to photograph--I would have asked her first, though. She was dressed like the people in this book. Oh, how I would love for this style of dressing to take hold in Madison!

I wonder if the audience grew as the 8pm end time approached. Perhaps it seemed to be an evening thing to do, or people just assumed the Ode to Joy part of the symphony would be best, the way I thought I'd prefer to hear something other than the Third Movement, which seems least interesting in normal time.