Fancy Boy

A number of pieces I wrote for the Washington Fancy before their launch, went online today. There's too many to take the time to cross-post them all, so one can either go to my author directory to peruse them all, or click any of the links below:

Anthony Weiner, Tired of Crude Jokes, Changes Name to Ned

DC Under Siege by Roving Segway Gangs

Bachmann Presidential Run Shocks, Shocks Nation

Mitt Romney Literally Melts Down at Campaign Stop

California's Proposition 8 to be Tried by Golden Retriever

They Don't Want a Stimulus Package

According to Ezra Klein, bipartisanship, like sex, is a matter of consent:

But after writing this morning’s post on the Republican report that recommended the exact deficit-reduction package that the Republican leadership ultimately walked out on, I realized that even that definition of “bipartisan” doesn’t quite get it right. Rather, a “bipartisan” bill is a bill that the opposing party treats as bipartisan, while a partisan bill is a bill that the opposing party treats as partisan. That puts the agency where it belongs: on the minority party. The idea that the president can “be bipartisan” is dead wrong. He can be partisan, designing bills that the opposing party would never want to vote for, but he can’t be bipartisan unless the opposing party lets him. And knowing that any reputation he gets for bipartisanship will be used in his reelection campaign, why would they do that?

Which makes the current incarnation of the Republican party some kind of cockteasing abstinence dominatrix.

Armageddon Strikes New York With Legalization of Gay Marriage

NEW YORK—As retribution for the New York state legislature’s legalization of same-sex marriage, New York City Friday night experienced cataclysm and biblical tribulation that left almost no survivors.

A tense vote on a contested gay marriage bill resulted in a 33-29 victory for same-sex marriage proponents. Upon the bill’s passage New York City—whose destruction many have remarked would be more iconic than that of dull and unremarkable capitol Albany—descended first into a city-wide orgy of state-sanctioned hedonism, and then into an apocalyptic inferno as fire and brimstone rained from the sky.

Such an outcome was predictable, says Focus on the Family president Tony Perkins. “We have been sounding the alarm on this for years,” he explains. “Homosexuals have been trying to destroy traditional marriage by shoving this new definition of marriage down our throats like some giant, irresistible penis. Now they have to swallow the biggest, most irresistible penis of all: God’s.”

President Obama, by contrast, prefaced his remarks with condolences for the dead. “Our hearts go out to the industrious and vibrant people of New York City,” he said. Though later on in his speech he veered to a testy defense of his own qualified gay rights stance. “I hope now you see why I don’t like to deal with these issues.”

The tumult began with the casting of the final ‘ay,’ vote, during which heterosexuals throughout the city, now suddenly compelled to leave their spouses for people of the same gender, were gripped with euphoria.

“gagas not so bad after all” read the cryptic final tweet of one BroFo2099.

A sea of humanity thereafter gathered around the Stonewall Inn to celebrate the consummation of the gay agenda with racy smiles and jubilance. Though preliminary reports described the crowd as chanting “USA,” they were in fact yelling “Ooh, it’s a-aaaaaiiiieeee!” crying out as temperatures suddenly rose, a whiff of sulfur wafted through Christopher Street, and fireballs rained down from the sky.

Details beyond the beginning of the carnage remain sketchy and contradictory. Some witnesses, sending frantic tweets and text messages from their phones, described a ghoulish figure riding a pale horse across the Brooklyn Bridge as the Angel of Death, though others insist it was merely a resourceful hipster from Williamsburg. Others spoke of giant monsters and alien space ships. What is uncontested however, is the enormity of the destruction: Manhattan’s skyscrapers leveled, the outer boroughs aflame, and millions dead.

The only known survivor was Rubén Díaz Sr., a member of the New York state legislature and the only Democratic senator to cast a ‘no’ vote, for which he says he was spared. Díaz returned to New York after the vote to get his wife, Leslie Díaz, out to safety. He would have succeeded had she not looked back at the burning city to capture some video on her iPhone and turned into a pillar of salt.

Many in the disaster’s aftermath looked to God for answers. However, when asked how He could justify the leveling of a great American city, the Lord was reticent and would only answer, “Because.”

New York’s Pride March went on the Sunday after as planned despite the destruction, and was described by patrons and planners as “even more flaming than usual.”

[Cross-posted from The Washington Fancy]

Obama Abandons Principals, at School Picnic

ANNAPOLIS, MD— President Barack Obama abruptly left a Department of Education picnic on Saturday, and in the process deserted some of the country’s most cherished principals.

The event, held at Annapolis High School, was organized as a means of celebrating American learning and wisdom and the people who help to cultivate it. After meeting with the nation’s standout students, parents, and teachers, Obama was in the middle of talking with a group of principals when his Blackberry alarm sounded.

“Oh damn,” he muttered, and then turned to the people assembled around him. “You know, I’ve got a lot to do—running the country, dealing with Republicans, you know—and I’ve got a singing lesson in twenty minutes.” He then began to quickly walk back to the presidential limousine while warming up with The Sound of Music’s “Do Re Mi,” to the bewilderment of those he had just left behind.

“I don’t understand,” said Lawson Goode, of New York City’s St. Francis Elementary School. “During his campaign he talked constantly about building up this country’s principals, but then ditches us when we become an inconvenience.”

The walk-off was not the first such incident. Obama began his term with a vow to restore the principals held in detention by rogue students of the school district established on Guantanamo Bay, yet the district itself remains under the jurisdiction of vice administrators. Tensions heightened earlier this month when he suspended one principal, Prudence Libby of Denver’s Rocky Mountain High, over inclusion of the War Powers Act in her school’s civics curriculum.

The reaction to Friday’s incident split along party lines, with Democrats largely applauding the President for his pragmatism. Said Vice President Joe Biden, “It’s unfortunate the way it played out, but being President comes with the responsibility of making tough decisions, and I think siding with song and dance over principals was the right call.” He went on to add, “Barack does an extraordinary rendition of “America, the Beautiful.” Members of the President’s liberal base voiced their displeasure, but were told to raise their hands if they wanted to be called on to speak.

Republicans meanwhile castigated the President for not doing away with principals altogether. “These are people who have no problems restricting Americans’ freedoms with arbitrary rules, such as ‘no running in the hallway,’ and ‘4th graders eat at 11:10, 5th graders at 11:15,’ for completely inexplicable reasons,” said former Bush advisor Karl Rove. “I really want to know, can we trust the judgment of someone so deferential to abstract principals?”

The President later apologized to the offended parties by way of an autographed “Yes We Can” poster.

[Cross-posted from The Washington Fancy]

Programming Note

It strikes me that there's no reason for me not to cross-post the material I write for my other gigs, so I'll be doing so with my Washington Fancy pieces as they're published. My contributions can be found in one convenient place here.

The Writer's Notebook

So it's going on nearly three weeks since I last posted here, and all I have to offer is naval gazing.

From inception this space has been prone to inconstant atrophy, which has almost always been contingent on my having a job. When I had just graduated and was unemployed, I spent a month writing limericks about headline news. When my theatre world was crashing down around me (or at least I thought it was) last August, I decided to spend more time here. Over several months, again abetted by unemploymnet, I put out what I would say is some good work, and also got something of an audience. Then I got a job--two, really--and so my output went down. It had been making a comeback of late, and I even managed to be tweeted by Josh Green.

But real life is intruding once more, in the best possible way. I've been for the past couple months volunteering for a major theater's lit department, reading script submissions and writing supplementary materials for their website. And for three weeks--basically since my last post here--I've been at work producing material for a political news parody website that will be launching next week, The Washington Fancy. (My pseudonym will be Doug Limey). Writing scenarios for often absurd public figures is a great deal of fun, but doing so at least three times a week on top of two jobs and a volunteer gig requires a great deal of time and energy (right now I ought to be figuring out how to salvage a Jon Huntsman piece that isn't working that's due tomorrow).

"A writer’s notebooks grow thicker in inverse proportion to his other work.” This blog has been a notebook of sorts, albeit one much more coherent and articulate than the one I scribble in before I go to bed. And so it is that my other work is taking me from it once more. I may have the time and inclination to say something here, I may not. This isn't the first time I've made excuses for falling through. But something has to give, and unfortunately this blog, haphazardly maintained as it has been already, is it.

'til next time.

Mindjob

William Saletan explores whether Anthony Weiner's dick pics qualify as cheating:

In the annals of lust and sin, Weiner is just another straying husband. But in the unfolding story of information technology, he's a milestone worth thinking about. The trajectory of political sex scandals—Clinton, Mark Foley, Kwame Kilpatrick, Mark Sanford, and now Weiner—has taken us from phone sex to chat rooms to sexting to email to Facebook and Twitter. We're finding new realms in which to wander, meet people, and flirt. You can call these adventures whatever you want to. But we all know what they are. They're relationships.

X-Men reached this conclusion nearly a decade ago. During Grant Morrison's New X-Men run, Cyclops, Scott Summers, found himself attracted to telepathic Emma Frost, and they began a tryst, but telepathically; no physical contact was ever involved. This would pass Weiner's test, not that that made much of a difference to Jean Grey:

See For Yourself

Andrew Sullivan posted an excellent and moving poem, "Reverse: A Lynching," accompanied by a photo of the Duluth Lynchings. I hadn't heard of this event and so followed the Wikipedia link, and there came across this photo, of the lynching of Henry Smith, used in the Lynching portal:



The imagery is stunning: a sea of Paris Texans come to elevate the dejected only to debase and destroy him. Behind them an indefinite swirl of color, with a particularly bright burst behind the victim, bound and head-down, giving him an especial visual gravity. Written on the platform on which he stands, "Justice," a mockery of the concept.

I always have to stop and absorb such pictures, with their horrid juxtaposition of the dead or dying victims and their killers' ghoulish indifference or glee. Scenes like these grab me because they are so alien to my experience and because they are even now terribly novel. We all supposedly know what a lynching is, but to see it is something else entirely. (A long time ago I wrote something similar regarding public executions.)

Part of what makes such a scene so foreign is a failure of education, but another part is, to be frank, race. A white American simply has no collective memory of mob violence and slavery like a black American does, and so beyond the shock of lynching imagery there is a narrow blindness that settles over considerations of and assumptions about other issues. The ex-slaves were as much of the South as their white former owners, but they are scarce referred to when discussing "Southerners." The Civil War killed 600,000 Americans, but it freed four million.

This makes it easy for otherwise well-meaning people to be taken in by Confederate apologia that whitewashes blacks out of all consideration of the war and its aftermath. Consider this link, posted to Facebook by a friend of mine (my emphasis):

Even after Lincoln’s death, and for twelve years after the war had ended, Reconstruction further proved that the fighting had little to do with slavery. If the North cared primarily about freeing slaves, soldiers would have vacated the South shortly after Lee’s surrender. Instead, there was nation-building in Dixie. Anyone connected to the previous regime or military (essentially all Southern males) could no longer vote, run for office, or exercise any of their constitutional rights without pledging support for the Union. A Southerner was forced to surrender his dignity and vow allegiance to the conquerors who had ravaged his people and his land. Southerners had their right to a representative government suspended indefinitely, their dignity trampled, and over a quarter million of their citizens killed by foreign invaders from the North, then were forced to suck it all up and like it. Not surprisingly, the vanquished South held onto its anger for generations after Appomattox. Even now, in the modern, post-industrial South, being called a Yankee is no compliment. And it has little to do with the Emancipation Proclamation.

It's easy to complain about federal interference in the South when one airbrushes away the evils that flourished in its absence--Jim Crow laws, lynchings, the Ku Klux Klan, Mississippi Appendectomies. Nothing beats education on these matters, but a haunting and revolting image, like the ones the lynchers themselves captured for posterity, are an important start to shaking one out of complacence.

Intellectual Perversity in Chicago

Again with David Mamet, who's doing more publicity to promote his book on why liberals are stoopid. He pulls off quite a feat here, attacking stupidity while at the same time defending it:

Years ago, you described “American Buffalo” as being about “how we excuse all sorts of great and small betrayals and ethical compromises called business.” In this book, you defend enormous payouts to C.E.O.’s working for failing corporations. You seem to have changed radically.
I have. Here’s the question: Is it absurd for a company to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to a C.E.O. if the company is failing? The answer is that it may or may not be absurd, but it’s none of our goddamned business. Because as Milton Friedman said, the question is not what are the decisions but who makes the decisions. Because when the government starts deciding what’s absurd, you’re on the road to serfdom.

File this one under 'oh for fuck's sake.'

Contrarianism is all well and good, and goodness knows there are plenty of dippy hippies in the theatre world, but this is just making a virtue of idiocy. Put aside the issue of responsibility that comes with being tied into a precarious world economy. Mamet is reflexively arguing that any private business decision, no matter how reckless and collaterally damaging, is inherently better than government, just because, and he's relying on tired bumper sticker sloganeering--"on the road to serfdom"--to "prove" it to boot.

The modern conservative movement takes a nearly erotic pleasure in infuriating liberals (or at least thinking it's doing so), but saying something like this fills one with more pity than anger. David Mamet is a man of tremendous intelligence and talent, and so more than anything it's simply sad to see him now cutting off his brain to spite his face.

Scaring the Dickens Into Me

George Orwell was onto something in his description of how Dickens reads as comedy or terror based on the reader's age:

I must have been about nine years old when I first read David Copperfield. The mental atmosphere of the opening chapters was so immediately intelligible to me that I vaguely imagined they had been written by a child. And yet when one re-reads the book as an adult and sees the Murdstones, for instance, dwindle from gigantic figures of doom into semi-comic monsters, these passages lose nothing. Dickens has been able to stand both inside and outside the child’s mind, in such a way that the same scene can be wild burlesque or sinister reality, according to the age at which one reads it.

Here is one of the Murdstones in question:

It was Miss Murdstone who was arrived, and a gloomy-looking lady she was; dark, like her brother, whom she greatly resembled in face and voice; and with very heavy eyebrows, nearly meeting over her large nose, as if, being disabled by the wrongs of her sex from wearing whiskers, she had carried them to that account. She brought with her two uncompromising hard black boxes, with her initials on the lids in hard brass nails. When she paid the coachman she took her money out of a hard steel purse, and she kept the purse in a very jail of a bag which hung upon her arm by a heavy chain, and shut up like a bite. I had never, at that time, seen such a metallic lady altogether as Miss Murdstone was.

She was brought into the parlour with many tokens of welcome, and there formally recognized my mother as a new and near relation. Then she looked at me, and said:

'Is that your boy, sister-in-law?'

My mother acknowledged me.

'Generally speaking,' said Miss Murdstone, 'I don't like boys. How d'ye do, boy?'

Under these encouraging circumstances, I replied that I was very well, and that I hoped she was the same; with such an indifferent grace, that Miss Murdstone disposed of me in two words:

'Wants manner!'

My favorite instance of comic horror comes as David is running away to his aunt--who later gives the Murdstones a most exquisite tongue-lashing--and is looking for a shop at which to pawn his jacket:

Into this shop, which was low and small, and which was darkened rather than lighted by a little window, overhung with clothes, and was descended into by some steps, I went with a palpitating heart; which was not relieved when an ugly old man, with the lower part of his face all covered with a stubbly grey beard, rushed out of a dirty den behind it, and seized me by the hair of my head. He was a dreadful old man to look at, in a filthy flannel waistcoat, and smelling terribly of rum. His bedstead, covered with a tumbled and ragged piece of patchwork, was in the den he had come from, where another little window showed a prospect of more stinging-nettles, and a lame donkey.

'Oh, what do you want?' grinned this old man, in a fierce, monotonous whine. 'Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you want? Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh, goroo, goroo!'

I was so much dismayed by these words, and particularly by the repetition of the last unknown one, which was a kind of rattle in his throat, that I could make no answer; hereupon the old man, still holding me by the hair, repeated:

'Oh, what do you want? Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you want? Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh, goroo!'—which he screwed out of himself, with an energy that made his eyes start in his head.

The mad pawnbroker is, near as I can tell, a throwaway character, appearing for all of two or three pages. But what an appearance! With but a word--Goroo!--his impression is instant and memorable, being weird and funny and frightening all at once. It makes me think a David Copperfield adaptation directed by, say, Sam Raimi, would be pretty awesome.

Late Expectations

As part of another project I've been reading through Dickens's David Copperfield; Blood Meridian will have to wait. Thing is, I'm actually enjoying it. My only previous Dickens exposure, Great Expectations in high school and Bleak House a couple years back in college, left me bewildered by the man's long-winded prose and wide-net plotting. Such was Bleak House that my college classmates and I were convinced its ungainly prose was motivated by the incentive of getting paid by the word in serial fiction.

David Copperfield is also long in its story and in the telling thereof, but it goes down easier. No doubt this is due to the improved circumstances of reading it in relative leisure. Yet important people like Virginia Woolf and Tolstoy have declared it to be Dickens's masterpiece, so there must be somethings else going on.

There is for one thing the singular focus on Copperfield, literally from birth, as described in Copperfield's own voice:

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.

Right from the start it shows it content to let go of some of its storytelling authority: "...or whether that station will be held by anybody else..." "(as I have been informed and believe)," "It was remarked..." No omniscient narrator, this. It's endearingly conversational.

It helps a great deal that Copperfield has so many strange and wonderful characters and happenings to describe to us. I took for instance the near-end of the first chapter as an encouraging sign of quality to come:

'How is she?' said my aunt, folding her arms with her bonnet still tied on one of them.

'Well, ma'am, she will soon be quite comfortable, I hope,' returned Mr. Chillip. 'Quite as comfortable as we can expect a young mother to be, under these melancholy domestic circumstances. There cannot be any objection to your seeing her presently, ma'am. It may do her good.'

'And SHE. How is SHE?' said my aunt, sharply.

Mr. Chillip laid his head a little more on one side, and looked at my aunt like an amiable bird.

'The baby,' said my aunt. 'How is she?'

'Ma'am,' returned Mr. Chillip, 'I apprehended you had known. It's a boy.'

My aunt said never a word, but took her bonnet by the strings, in the manner of a sling, aimed a blow at Mr. Chillip's head with it, put it on bent, walked out, and never came back. She vanished like a discontented fairy; or like one of those supernatural beings, whom it was popularly supposed I was entitled to see; and never came back any more.

Finally there is Dickens's/Copperfield's (being semi-autobiographical, the two are hardly interchangeable) keen power of observation. Consider this episode describing Copperfield's nasty stepfather and aunt's methods of education, the way in which they manipulate an ostensibly positive relationship into something abusive, manipulative and power-driven:

I hand the first book to my mother. Perhaps it is a grammar, perhaps a history, or geography. I take a last drowning look at the page as I give it into her hand, and start off aloud at a racing pace while I have got it fresh. I trip over a word. Mr. Murdstone looks up. I trip over another word. Miss Murdstone looks up. I redden, tumble over half-a-dozen words, and stop. I think my mother would show me the book if she dared, but she does not dare, and she says softly:

'Oh, Davy, Davy!'

'Now, Clara,' says Mr. Murdstone, 'be firm with the boy. Don't say, "Oh, Davy, Davy!" That's childish. He knows his lesson, or he does not know it.'

'He does NOT know it,' Miss Murdstone interposes awfully.

'I am really afraid he does not,' says my mother.

'Then, you see, Clara,' returns Miss Murdstone, 'you should just give him the book back, and make him know it.'

'Yes, certainly,' says my mother; 'that is what I intend to do, my dear Jane. Now, Davy, try once more, and don't be stupid.'

I obey the first clause of the injunction by trying once more, but am not so successful with the second, for I am very stupid. I tumble down before I get to the old place, at a point where I was all right before, and stop to think. But I can't think about the lesson. I think of the number of yards of net in Miss Murdstone's cap, or of the price of Mr. Murdstone's dressing-gown, or any such ridiculous problem that I have no business with, and don't want to have anything at all to do with. Mr. Murdstone makes a movement of impatience which I have been expecting for a long time. Miss Murdstone does the same. My mother glances submissively at them, shuts the book, and lays it by as an arrear to be worked out when my other tasks are done.

There is a pile of these arrears very soon, and it swells like a rolling snowball. The bigger it gets, the more stupid I get. The case is so hopeless, and I feel that I am wallowing in such a bog of nonsense, that I give up all idea of getting out, and abandon myself to my fate. The despairing way in which my mother and I look at each other, as I blunder on, is truly melancholy. But the greatest effect in these miserable lessons is when my mother (thinking nobody is observing her) tries to give me the cue by the motion of her lips. At that instant, Miss Murdstone, who has been lying in wait for nothing else all along, says in a deep warning voice:

'Clara!'

My mother starts, colours, and smiles faintly. Mr. Murdstone comes out of his chair, takes the book, throws it at me or boxes my ears with it, and turns me out of the room by the shoulders.

Life and age are a constant rebuke of youthful fancy, as evidenced by my reappraisals of Cormac McCarthy, The Great Gatsby, and now Dickens. With that in mind, I am rather looking forward to being proven wrong in the future.

Face Off

Today I saw a poster for the upcoming Mr. Popper’s Penguins film starring Jim Carrey.


The poster didn’t make me think much on the film itself, but rather a different film, Me, Myself, and Irene, and its attendant publicity material.



This led me to consider other similarly framed posters in Carrey's ouvre.





I know a star close-up isn't at all unusual for movie posters, but it's still a little odd to see it so often with Carrey. Is his face really so compelling?

Then again, no one ever accused Hollywood of originality:

The Miseducation of David Mamet

This Weekly Standard piece on David Mamet's conversion to conservatism is an interesting read, in that it unwittingly reveals Mamet has learned the wrong lessons:

Mamet mentioned a screenplay that he hopes will soon be produced involving a young rich girl who applies to Harvard. When she’s rejected she suddenly declares herself an Aztec to qualify for affirmative action. Presumably high jinks ensue. A new two-character play opening in London this fall, The Anarchist, is a “verbal sword-fight” between two women of a certain age, one a veteran of 1960s radicalism, jailed for life on a bombing charge, and the other a reactionary prison governor from whom the aging radical hopes to receive parole. Regardless of the play’s true merits, we can expect the word didactic to get a workout from critics.

Also, regardless of its didacticism, we can also expect the words 'true merits' to get a workout from conservatives.

Terry Teachout noted the problem with this sledgehammer approach to political theatre a couple years back, incidentally amid a discussion on why there are hardly any conservative playwrights:

Mr. Hytner, in other words, wants to produce issue-driven conservative plays that are just like today's liberal plays, only in reverse, whereas the problem with today's political theater is that its practitioners see their plays not as works of art but as means to an end. In such tedious exercises in left-wing agitprop as Sam Shepard's "The God of Hell," Caryl Churchill's "Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?" and Tim Robbins's "Embedded," we are presented with a black-and-white universe of victims and villains, a place where every deck is stacked and never is heard a surprising word. Why would anybody with half a brain in his head -- even a fire-breathing McCainiac, if such a creature exists -- want to suffer through their right-wing equivalent?

Mamet may have once worshipped Bertolt Brecht, but his strength as a playwright has always been his refreshing refusal to sermonize or caricature. Instead his characters interrupt each other constantly, lose trains of thought, and generally speak in short, often vulgar bursts. Even a politically charged play like Oleanna was laden with ambiguous intentions and misunderstanding, showing the strengths and weaknesses of both its characters and the "sides" they represent. In breaking away from his liberal peers and from the characteristics of his writing that often set him apart from them, Mamet is in fact indulging their worst habits.

Newtly Wed

Joshua Green called for a David Brooks photoshopping meme earlier this week and today tied it into the Newt Gingrich implosion. I propose an alternative.



A little obvious, but, yeah.

Life From Inside

One of James Fallows's readers provides an Orwell quote that dovetails nicely with Follies's downtrodden spirit (emphasis mine):

An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.