Paglia on Zappa.

Camille Paglia reviews a new book about Frank Zappa in the NYT Book Review. True to Paglia form, she emphasizes Zappa's Italian background. The book, by Barry Miles, is just called "Zappa," but Paglia titles her review "Freak Out!" after Zappa's first album. I can't hear that title without guilt, because a friend of my brother's loaned me the album, an expensive double album, 35 years ago, and I've never given it back. For the last 30 years or so, I haven't remembered the person's name or had any idea how to reach her. So it's really just a permanent burden of guilt. But here's some Paglia on Zappa (and Miles, whom she doesn't seem to like very much):

Miles, who knew Zappa, often seems ambivalent about him. There is a gap between the ''juvenile and prurient'' Zappa he describes and the one we see in the book's sensational photographs, which show a man of burning magnetism and piercing intellect. Miles calls Zappa a ''cold nihilist'' who felt no real emotions for anyone. Along with ''cynicism and misanthropy,'' he detects Catholic guilt and ''deep-seated problems with women.'' Zappa was ''stuck in a 50's time warp'' -- yet the bold feminist Germaine Greer was a Zappa fan.

Whatever the meaning of the S-and-M and fetish imagery in his songs (a theme that makes Miles squirm), the picture painted here of Zappa's family life is troubling. When not touring (which he loved to do -- Miles calls him a ''road rat''), Zappa spent 10 to 18 hours a day holed up in his cavernous basement studio in his Tudor mansion in the Hollywood Hills. He was a born tinkerer and a groundbreaker in early digital production.

Addicted to black coffee and cigarettes (he was fiercely antidrugs), he slept during the day and saw little of his family. His second wife, Gail, said, ''Frank did not do love.'' When she was 13, Moon Unit slipped a note under the studio door to ''introduce'' herself and her ideas. The result was the hit song ''Valley Girl,'' a phenomenon when it was released in 1982. Because he thought formal education a waste of time, Zappa took his children out of school at 15 and refused to pay for college.

Painful. But "black coffee and cigarettes" -- that reminds me, I'm in the middle of watching "Coffee and Cigarettes," and liking it very much. I'm up to the scene with Iggy Pop and Tom Waits and I'd only meant to stop for a minute to go see if the Tom Waits fan in the house wanted to watch that scene, and I got sidetracked by my laptop and that Paglia review!

The President and the Supreme Court.

Jeffrey Rosen has a Week in Review piece in tomorrow's NYT that looks at what sort of Supreme Court President Bush may be able to produce in the next four years. "Strict constructionism" and "originalism" are discussed, and then comes this part about what the Times loves to call the "federalism revolution."

In 1995, for the first time since the New Deal, the court said there were limits on Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce. And since then, the court has struck down 33 federal laws. During its first 70 years of existence, the court invalidated only two.

33 federal statutes have been stricken down on federalism grounds? There are two cases that strike down parts of federal statutes on the ground that they are beyond the scope of the Commerce Power! There are a few more federalism cases, but 33? Does Rosen just mean 33 federal statutes have been stricken down on all sorts of grounds, including the constitutional rights grounds that were favored by judges of the Warren Court era? And why compare the current Court to the earliest days of the Supreme Court. People love to point out how few laws were stricken down in those early years, but it says very little about the level of activism of this Court. Compare this Court to another Court of the modern era, when federal statutes are plentiful and courts feel secure in the role of judicial review. Rosen raises the alarm:

[T]he federalism revolution hasn't quite delivered what conservatives hoped. Each time the court's strict constructionist justices have appeared on the brink of striking down environmental laws or health and safety laws, the moderates, Justice O'Connor and Justice Kennedy, have stepped back from the brink. They are less willing to overturn 60-year-old precedents that might strike at the core of the regulatory state. "If the 'Constitution in exile' were taken seriously, a lot of environmental regulation could be under attack, occupational safety and health regulation, even possibly some securities regulation," said David Strauss, a law professor at the University of Chicago. "Minimum wage and maximum hours laws? You never know."

The reader is urged to picture a "brink" -- a precipice up there that we would have tumbled over already if not for "the moderates" O'Connor and Kennedy. Without moderates nailing down the center -- we're left to think -- the Court would roll things back to the way they were when FDR proposed his Court-packing plan (reviving the so-called "Constitution in exile").

[F]ormer administration officials say all of the names on Mr. Bush's short list for the Supreme Court are considered strict constructionists who are closer to Justice Scalia than to Justice O'Connor. "An entire generation of lawyers have been reared and trained in Justice Scalia's philosophy," said Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School, who led the second President Bush's Office of Legal Counsel after Mr. Yoo. "So the Bush administration is likely to be more successful than its predecessors in finding reliably conservative nominees."

I very much doubt that many law students are being "reared and trained" to think like Justice Scalia! My sense is that the Warren Court vision of constitutional law still prevails among law professors. In fact, it's probably safe to guess that Justice Scalia's positions are routinely derided in most law school classrooms! It is true at least that students have read the conservative Supreme Court opinions (though I bet they were informed by their lawprofs about how wrong and bad these decisions are) and they have been able to participate in the Federalist Society if they wanted to pursue the conservative viewpoint. But the liberal position continues to dominate. That said, I'm sure President Bush will be looking for conservative Justices -- not moderates like O'Connor and Kennedy -- and that he will be able to find them. But it is alarmist to suggest that these people would radically dismantle federal law, tossing out statutes like those that protect the environment and guarantee minimum wages at a shocking new rate. UPDATE: Law students or recent law students are welcome to send me their observations. For example, I just received this from one law student:

[A]s for law students being reared and trained in Justice Scalia's philosophy, I'd be shocked out of my socks if there were a professor in my law school who doesn't think Scalia is a wacko and curmudgeon who is blind to the "realities of the situation." Every SCOTUS case we've ever discussed (now halfway through my second year), the professor criticizes the Scalia opinion, sometimes to the exclusion of discussion of the majority opinion! So, you are EXACTLY right. And keep in mind that [state name deleted] is probably the reddest of the Red States. If he's that despised here, I can't imagine it's any better anywhere else.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More email:

Well, I graduated from law school in 1996, so maybe that's not "recent" but it's a good deal more recent than anyone who's likely to be considered for a Supreme Court appointment in the next four years. I can certainly tell you that professors at Harvard Law School were very much interested in presenting Scalia's views but equally interested in deriding them, to the point that my first-year criminal law class actually sent a petition to Justice Scalia to come and give us the other side of the story. This being Harvard, he did just that and had a toe-to-toe debate with our professor, Alan Dershowitz. Suffice to say that they did not agree on much. On the other hand, the existence of the Federalist Society certainly does give young lawyers a sufficient exposure to a comprehensive Scalia-like judicial philosophy that you can expect to see more and more people who can be depended upon by Republican presidents to be genuine Scalia-like conservatives. So Rosen's essential point isn't all that off the mark.

I agree with that second-to-the-last sentence, as my original post shows. But Rosen is overeager to make a point and in the process drags in much dubious information. My post doesn't even begin to deal with the blather about "strict constructionism," which Scalia himself makes a big point of disavowing. 

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Another email:

I can affirmatively assert that at my school, the University of Chicago (I'm the class of '00), the professors took Scalia very seriously. Some seemed to disapprove of originalism, others rather liked it. But everyone ... approached Scalia and originalism as a vital form of constitutional jurisprudence.... [at Chicago], Scalia's writings and teachings -- along with law and economics and formalism and feminist jurisprudence and other theories -- are certainly taught and treated with respect. And why wouldn't they be? Scalia, like many other originalists, are federal court judges after all. It would be pretty silly to train lawyers to exercise contempt toward a judicial philosophy that moves so many of the arbiters of the lawyers' future clients' cases.

The emailer is quite right (and lucky to have gone to Chicago). One of the reasons I became a law professor was to find for myself the experience I felt I was denied as a law student: exploring the full scope of the debate about law. STILL MORE: No Oil For Pacifists writes about his experience in law school in the early 80s:

I was one of the few conservatives in law school. My views were tolerated at best, derided at worst. I remember a First Amendment course taught by an old-time socialist. He was smart and funny, but increasingly frustrated with my interjections. So, after calling on me about halfway through the semester, he paused for a few seconds, put hands on hips, and said "Carl--you're a wrong thinker and should be liquidated." He never solicited my views again.

He probably thought he was being hilarious--and perhaps that conservatives have no feelings so why not torment them and have fun at their expense?

Politics and fear.

I just ran across the September 6th copy of The New Yorker, which has a painting on the cover of fearful elephants crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. The reference is to the Republican Party's convention in New York City, and the notion is that Republicans are anxious about a visit to the unfamiliar territory that is New York (a popular pre-convention topic). It's funny to see this image now, after reading endless post-election expressions of fear about the territory of the red states -- Jesusland! -- coming from Democrats.

Four hours later.

Somehow in all this time, I've only managed to read seven admissions files and put up one of the blinds. Some cursing was involved. Not at the admissions files however. And at least now I understand how the new brackets work and why they can't be put in the same spots as the old brackets. I spent way too much time looking for the chuck for the drill before finding it clipped to the drill's cord and trying to figure out how to run the drill in reverse to remove the screws on the old brackets before giving up and using a screwdriver. Now it's nearly 4 on this Saturday of mine, it's getting dark, and I have yet to touch the rake -- or even leave the house!

UPDATE: An emailer writes that I should call that drill thingy the chuck key and not the chuck, but I think I remember my father calling it the chuck and this diagram calls it the chuck. Anyway, have you ever noticed what an elaborate website the writer Chuck Palahniuk has? The things one finds while Googling for answers to one thing may be more interesting than what you were looking for. I'm much better at blogging than hanging blinds or fiddling with drills because I enjoy all sorts of distractions and digressions. I prefer them. I believe that John Lennon lyric: "Life is what happens to you/While you’re busy making other plans."

More interesting to me than whether that thingy is actually called a chuck or a chuck key -- and no, I'll resist writing anything about the new Chucky movie -- is that since Chuck is a classic macho guy's name -- Palahniuk seems pretty macho -- and since the key device is more masculine than the clamping jaw mechanism of the drill, that it would be more linguistically elegant for the thing I was looking for to be called the chuck.

Also, here's Chuck Berry's official website. Another good Chuck is Chuck Jones. And you know that Chuck E. Cheese slogan, "Where a kid can be a kid?" How many times a day do you think somebody sees that and cracks a joke that begins "and an adult can..."?

So I have four more blinds to hang, 32 more admissions files to read, and a yard full of leaves that cannot be raked today because it is already dark out. Which means the bright day I described earlier is a thing of the past. And I still have not left the house!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Note that I do concede that damn thing must be called the chuck KEY.

A Saturday plan.

It's nice to have a Saturday. The carpenters who have been yanking out and replacing pieces of the exterior wall to my house are off, and I can sit at my dining room table this long morning, idly reading the New York Times, intermittently blogging or reading email, and inking in the crossword puzzle, without feeling the cold air pouring through gaping window frames and without having to hear the carpenters' radio. They keep it tuned to a Wisconsin Public Radio station, even during the fund drive parts, but most of the time it's classical music that I hear along with their hammering and sawing.

It's a clear, bright day today. I haven't left the house yet. I'm just getting to the end of my NYT-and-blogging session, which has stretched out as it always does on Saturday. I do have two pressing household tasks to accomplish today.

First, I've got to rake the leaves in my front yard out into a pile by the street. I only rake the front yard. I've been relying on a self-serving theory of mulching for the backyard for the last decade or so. My backyard is ruled by a 200 year-old oak tree named Agatha, and in her domain, lawn is banished. There is only ground cover and whatever else she deigns to preserve. But the front yard leaves must make it to the street before the first snow falls, and today, with the temperature at 30, has chosen itself as the day when the task must be done.

Second, I need to put the new blinds up on the five six-foot windows in my bedroom that look out on Agatha's domain. These blinds have been lying on my bedroom floor for several weeks. The paint-splattered step ladder is right there by the first window, and the power drill is in the spot on the desk where I put it shortly after the blinds arrived. I keep thinking I'm about to put the blinds up, and all these things in my room are there night after night, mocking me. It's a wonder I can sleep at all.

And I've also got a non-household task to accomplish. I have forty law school admissions files to read. I'm thinking if I just start one thing, then, when I need a break, switch to one of the other things, I can generate energy and endurance out of the three distinctly different things that need to be done. I'm also hoping that blogging about this plan will create some crisp commitment to the three-task plan. I'm envisioning an update here later saying that it has all been done and an excellent night's sleep, after a hard day of mental and physical labor, in a newly darkened room with a clear floor.

UPDATE: No, this isn't the update I was envisioning. Scroll up for the description of my level of progress on the three tasks. This is an update to include an email:

I had no idea that carpenters in Madison were so educated. I would have thought they would be listening to classic rock, or sports radio. How very frou frou of them. Your life sounds so... so... I don't know. Like a wine commerical sort of. A leisurely Saturday reading the NY Times, sipping Celestial Seasonings or riesling, and trying to decide whether to get the Corvette or the Range Rover while the carpenters (who have all graduated Harvard and are slumming) carefully add a new wall and deck and wine cellar. In only a matter of moments, the educated and single man next door will look out his window and see you looking out yours watching him make Berilla pasta. I'm only too sure he will next ring your doorbell and you, carpenters and hunky neighbor will sit down to pasta with shaved truffle sauce, and discuss methods to reduce your massive 10,000 property bill (which must mean you live in a $7 million dollar home....though, math is not my strong point either).

I don't think it's math so much as Madison politics that this guy lacks knowledge of. Let's just say the property tax rate is about 14 times what he thinks it is and see if you can calculate the assessed value of my house. And if I am really so rich, why am I driving a five year old New Beetle, hanging my own blinds, and raking my own leaves. But as for the tea, it was Twinings Lady Grey!

The news from Ann Arbor.

One of my email correspondents sends this, from Ann Arbor:

Since about 8:45AM today morning, a 2 to 3 block area around Ann Arbor City Hall has been closed down, and cordoned off, because, it seems someone had called in a bomb threat. The police have Division, 4th Ave, 5th Ave, Huron, Washington and Liberty Streets closed off for the time being, while they investigate. And it is totally disrupting traffic, especially since today, there is a football game at Michigan Stadium - the season's last game!!!. I walked downtown to check it out, and talked to some folks who were gathered there also watching the happenings. The rumor was that it was a threat called in by a Bush-hater, who was angry about Pres Bush being reelected.

From what I've seen here in Madison, the peace movement folks lack much regard for the way ordinary citizens feel about traffic and football. (Let's hope it is just a lame threat in Ann Arbor.)

UPDATE: The emailer sends this:

As of 12pm, Ann Arbor time, the bomb threat situation has been resolved, and the police has opened up all the streets. While I haven't heard any sort of an official statement, I would assume that it was a hoax, and that they checked everything out and found nothing.

Good to hear. And note that I don't intend for my comment up there to suggest that I think the peace movement folks use bomb threats as a technique. I just think their protest rallies and marches are obtusely insensitive to the driving and football interests of people they (presumably) want to persuade.

So what about that car?

You may remember my "Should I buy a new car?" post, and you may have even voted in the poll, perhaps as one of the 805 who produced the winning choice: buy the Corvette! I hope you didn't imagine that I agreed to be bound by the poll. I notice Chevrolet has thus far failed to pursue the fabulous PR opportunity of giving me a Corvette. The fools! Don't they realize I would blog about it?! I would drive all over the U.S.A., taking digital pictures of the mythic landscapes, many of which would include the Corvette, and I would post these pictures prominently on my popular blog?!

I see that theCarblog, discussing my little blogpoll, simply assumes I have the money on hand to buy a Corvette. Didn't I just tell you about the carpenters I've hired to rebuild the exterior wall of my house? I may be a tenured law professor, but I'm also a tuition-paying parent, and I live in the city of Madison, Wisconsin, which is about to mail me its annual property tax bill for well over $10,000. Yeah, yeah, I know that inspires absolutely zero pity. Nor should it. But buying a Corvette is quite irrational. If everyone who voted for me to buy a Corvette would click on that Amazon Honor System button over there and make a $75 contribution, I'd buy the Corvette!

About moving to New Zealand.

Americans contemplating moving to New Zealand after the election are following an Australian tradition:

After Australian voters re-elected Howard last month, giving him an expanded mandate and control of both houses of parliament, commentators in that country also raised the idea of unhappy Australian liberals fleeing to New Zealand.

In a satirical column in The Bulletin magazine, Tim Blair wrote: "The malaise among this bunch is so profound, many are threatening in various online forums to leave Australia for New Zealand, which is as close as you can get to committing suicide while still registering a pulse."

Strong words, especially considering that the contrast is with Australia, which already seems unusually calm and remote to us Americans. I had thought that blue-state types generally looked down on the red states for being boring -- too remote, too rural, too monotonous, too bland. I cannot understand the idea of leaving the country -- where presumably you are already living in blue-state, urban pluralism -- to go someplace that seems more bland and remote.

A radiant ferret.

Arafat interred. (Anagram.)

"It's a little sexist. It's not creating an image of a woman as an elegant creature. It's a little bit down and dirty, a little crass."

The "voluptuous" new mannequins have 38" hips and actually wear a size 8. Should we be offended at the loss of "elegance," like the executive quoted above, whose company manufactures the "Twiggy mannequin," which is tall and wears a size 2 or 4? The voluptuous mannequin -- called the Goddess! -- ends up selling a lot of clothes, because the clothes (especially jeans) look good on the mannequin and then look good on the customer. Who hasn't wasted time trying on something that looked great on the mannequin (or the hanger) and then been horrified at how it looked on? If you go to all the trouble to try something on and it looks the same on you as it looked on display, you're extremely likely to buy it.

And then there are the men: "Men like it. Some guys come in and buy the mannequins."

Moving out.

Here's another article about people wanting to move out of the country because Bush got reelected. Choice quotes:

"Life is too short to spend with people whose values you don't like or agree with."

"Why would I want to fight to change things here when I can just move there?"

[re New Zealand, a preferred haven] "Yeah, they have a big ozone hole, but I'm nocturnal. They have great coffee, great food and a great music scene."

I suppose these people mean to register a protest, but they sound so watery-blooded that it's hard to imagine anyone cares about their threatened departure.

[Here's what I wrote yesterday about threatening to leave the country.]

Secret Service responds to high school kids' rendition of Dylan's "Masters of War."

Some teenage kids played Dylan's "Masters of War" at a Boulder, Colorado high school talent show and the Secret Service later came to town.

"It's just Bob Dylan's song. We were just singing Bob Dylan's song … If you think it has to do with Bush that's because you're drawing your own conclusions. We never conveyed that Bush was the person we were talking about," said Allysse Wojtanek-Watson, a singer for the band.

The lyrics are devastatingly harsh:

And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand o'er your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead

But the song is about "masters of war" -- "masters" with an "s" -- and it could be about a lot of people, I write as I sit here watching the news which conspicuously features a casket today.

The latest in Duke Ellington CDs.

My wonderful colleague Stewart Macaulay sends out advice about buying Duke Ellington records to the faculty email list here at the University of Wisconsin Law School. I keep telling him he should start a blog for this sort of thing. But since he hasn't, I asked if I could reprint his email here. He said yes. So here's the latest missive from Prof. Macaulay:

Several people have asked that I keep you up to date on Duke Ellington CDs. If you couldn't care less, stop reading now.

There is a brand new never before issued release on the Danish Storyville label called "The Jaywalker." These are recordings from 1966-67 and part of the collection of stuff that Mercer Ellington gave to Danish radio. Some of the cuts are things that appeared on other CDs such as "Rue Bleu,"" Chromatic Love Affair" and Billy Strayhorn's "Blood Count." It also includes music for the play "The Jaywalker," a religious allegory "about the boy Mac (Mac meaning Son of) trying to have the traffic on the highway stopped so that people living on either side of the road could cross freely." I think the music is better than the concept for the play.

At the other extreme, there is the Bluebird release called "The Centennial Collection: Duke Ellington," which goes back to the original "Black and Tan Fantasy" and "East St. Louis Toodle-O." But it also has such classics as "Ko Ko" and "Concerto for Cootie" (which later became "Do Nothing 'Till You Hear It From Me."). It includes 7 previously unissued tracks from 1940s radio broadcasts. Also included in a DVD with films of the Ellington orchestra playing.

Finally, there is one that many of you might like. It is "Duke Ellington's Jazz Violin Session." It is on Wounded Bird Records WOU 1688. (It originally was released in 1976 on Atlantic). It feaures Svend Asmussen on viola and Stephane Grappelli and Ray Nance on violins. The tunes are classic Ellington, such as "In a Sentimental Mood," "Don't Get Around Much Any More," "Day Dream" and "Cotton Tail." This music was recorded in 1963 for Reprise, the then new label formed by Frank Sinatra when he decided to eliminate all the middle men and make off with more of the money from recording. He engaged Ellington as his jazz A & R man. Warner Brothers bought Reprise and didn't release much of what Ellington had recorded. Of course, the mid-1960s was a time when people weren't listening to much jazz. I have found myself putting this one on over and over. The strings playing this music are different and nice.

I got all of these from Tower records on line. (www.towerrecords.com) I assume that they are available elsewhere as well. The nice thing about Tower is that you can switch to recent releases in order without having to go through everything as you do on Amazon.com.

I don't watch "The Apprentice" anymore.

But I do still glance at some of the recaps. This, from Entertainment Weekly, amused me:

[H]aving a task that is the exact job of one of the contestants in real life seems a little bit disingenuous to me, like casting, I don't know, a survivalist on Survivor or, like, a hooker on The Bachelor.

A "long, white, wordless banner" of peace.

Here's a report of a 60-person peace march that took place in Madison yesterday. Maybe someone ought to tell these people than snarling rush-hour traffic for over an hour is not a good way to influence public opinion. The group carried a "200-foot piece of white fabric ... a sculpture by a veteran that symbolized peace." One group member said: "There were some elements of teamwork that were kind of interesting." The drivers whose trip home was blocked were not terribly intrigued by the symbolism of what the Capital Times calls the "long, white, wordless banner." On my way home, I saw the protesters clustered in front of the ROTC building with their banner crisscrossing itself in the space above them. It didn't look like "peace" to me. It looked like someone had TP-ed the trees in front of the ROTC building.

"You can't have an arsenal on school property."

School fundraiser goes awry.