Submerged

I have a thousand things to do, and a minimum of time to do it in. Don't expect regular postings. This is the post-show catch-up.

All things Ah-nold

I really don't know what's funnier: the Republicans complaining about Democrats using a candidate's sexual past against him, or Democrats actually using a candidate's sexual past against him. So far, Arnie's been accused of nothing Clinton wasn't accused of, back when the Demmie's could barely manage to catch their breath in between loud declarations that a person's private life had nothing to do with their ability to govern. Sounds like a fresh plate of hypocrisy all around (although it's interesting that no one wanted to let loose the interesting allegations of Gray Davis' temper tantrums before now. I dislike this guy more with everything new I hear about him).


Okay, so let's say Arnold's been a bad boy, and let's watch everyone aside from NOW and Tom McClintock's supporters not care. This is California. This is Hollywood. Of the things Californians worry about, restoring sexual morality to the public sphere ranks right below sending the Dodgers back to Brooklyn, with apologies. And since, per Clinton, a famous man behaving boorishly to un-famous women counts as mere sexual morality, not a criminal act, this isn't anything that Arnold needs to worry about.


In a civilized society, behavior such as what Schwarzenegger is accused of would bar a man from showing his face in public, let alone appealing to the public for public trust. But to act as though the private man and the public man were the same man is now considered frightfully un-nuanced, even medieval. Arnold is the Republican front-runner in this race because he's got a past; that means he'll never make anyone in California feel bad about their lifestyle. As long as Davis is out, debt goes down, and businesses return, Arnold can do as he pleases when the cameras go off. The people have spoken.


Incidentally, I will be taking this opportunity to admit that I was wrong. McClintock did not cost the Republicans this election. In fact, were Arnold out, McClintock might very well beat Bustamante. And were I a California resident, he'd have my vote. He's got all of Davis' "experience" and none of his slavish devotion to state bureaucracies. But alas, there are those around him who are sincerely religious, and conservatively so, and that will cost him far more votes than all the breast-fondling in the world.

All things Rush

I was going to write today about how it saddened me that Rush took the rope offered to hang himself, how dumb it was to insert politics into sports. This morning's piece on Slate by Allen Barra has made me think again. I've enjoyed Barra's column in Salon for some time; he has a plainspoken realism that the best sports writers evince. He says that every word Rush said was true, that a) Donovan McNabb is a mediocre quarterback, and b) he is being puffed up because people want to see black quarterbacks do well. And Barra is no right-wing ideologue. Which is of course why he will get to keep his job.


I still suspect that McNabb's bogus reputation has as much to do with the need to sell him to Philadelphia fans who were livid when McNabb was drafted instead of Ricky Williams as to McNabb's race, but I'm willing to put credence in what Barra says. Sounds like Rush is being mau-maued.


As to the prescription drug thing, prudence demands that we await facts. I will say that if it is true, this could be far more potentially damaging to Rush' career. His listeners may not appreciate this one. But once again, let's hear the story.

Madness

Rush is down, Arnold is up, Arnold is down, Davis is dead, Davis is undead, Plame is CIA, no she isn't, yes she is, outing her is illegal, no it's not, Karl Rove did it, no he didn't, the war is being lost, the war is being won, et cetera ad infinitum.




In a day or two, when the facts congeal, I'll sound off about all of this. Not now. Now is the time of the hyenas; always howling, always out for blood.

Words of Wisdom

When moving to make friendly with a dog that is barking at you from behind a fence, always check for that "Beware of Dog" sign.


Shut up.

I = Da Newie Rock's Slave

The Strokes are releasing "Room on Fire" on Oct. 28th. Guh....RRRR...

Oh, hell. I'm buying it.

Tybalt, you Rat-Catcher...

Skeptical Notion has added me to his blogroll. As one might guess, he was as shocked to discover his "evil twin," as I was, but added me in a show of good-sportness and a professed need for ideological balance. I salute you, good sir. I enjoy nothing so much as a chivalrous opponent. Mayhaps we can get an email debate going for the benefit of our readership.

...Will you Walk?

Romeo and Juliet closes this weekend, I am sad/glad to say. Glad because I could use the free time; sad because the show has been an unqualified triumph, and I will miss it. I will mark the occasion with a few thoughts on the character I have played, Mercutio.


I'll start with the trendy: No, I don't think he's gay, or at least, not explicityly so. One is free to read homoerotic longings into the character's lines if one so desires, his seeming misogyny and affection for his young friend leaves such a possibility open. Since I've gotten the role, everyone else in the cast has made a point of assuming that Merc was a card-carrying GLAAD member, mostly to annoy me. I have only myself to blame, for getting annoyed about it. To my mind, playing an ambiguous character as "gay" immediately takes all the complexity away from him; it's an instant plot point. No matter what facets you add, the gayness sticks out like a pink thumb, becoming the explanation for all his motivations and actions. Blame our politicized attitudes towards sexuality, but there it is. I don't mean to suggest that gay characters (and certainly not gay people) have no complexity, but I think ambiguity should remain ambiguous.


Instead, my Merc became the Poet-Solipsist. He is the only character in the play for whom the Capulet-Montague feud is a matter of complete irrelevance; his rank as the Prince's kin puts him outside its purview, and unlike his cousin Paris, he has no intention of getting in. He regards the conflict as beneath his attention: "By my heel, I care not." If Mercutio can be said to be interested in anything, it is Freedom. He drinks when he wants to, parties when he wants to, mocks whomever crosses his path, and fights to put fighters in their place, not to be a Fighter. His concern for Romeo is that his obsession with Young Love will make a slave of him. The bulk of the Queen Mab is aimed at mocking the illogical unconcious that Romeo is so taken with. For the end of that speech, my director and I decided to make Merc come completely unglued; I decided that he speaks from experience, having shagged his share of Rosalines, perhaps leaving one pregnant, to meet a dark fate. Guilt and self-mockery thus overwhelm him; when he says "This is the hag/when maids lie on their backs/that presses them, and learns them first to bear/making them women of good carriage," the hag he means is at once the mythical Mab, the idea of Love, and himself.


But what, you say, of his duel with Tybalt? The Tybalt of our show was determined not to play him as the Black Knight of the Capulets, an inveterate bastard who loves no one and deserves his death at Romeos hands. In our reading of the script, we saw Tybalt as a Capulet-by-Marriage, who must constantly prove his loyalty to la famiglia. His dislike of Romeo is casual, but to his mind, decisive: Romeo broke the rules by crashing the Caps' banquet, he deserves punishment. In this fashion, Tybalt serves as the archetype not for the Villian, but for the Warrior.


That duel with Mercutio thus becomes a duel for Romeo's soul: will he be a Poet or a Warrior, a Laugher or a Fighter? Mercutio loses, both his life and his struggle, and Tybalt wins, though his victory devours him. The fact that Merc only dies because Romeo, eager to protect his friend's life from the Prince's death-to-duelists decree, steps in and leaves him open to a half-hearted thrust by Tybalt that Merc could easily have countered, but compounds the tragic irony. In seeking to protect his bon vivant friend, Romeo kills him, and makes himself the Death-Dealer, who takes Tybalt, Paris, and ultimately Juliet with him.


So that's our show, wounds coming from wounds leading to wounds, until the flowers die and everyone wakes up to a winter morn.

My Dear Wormwood

I have been reading The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis' twisted renderings of reverse theology. Hence, I have been laughing. At myself. Very hard. I wonder if I have a demon on my own shoulder. I will call him Suckblow. Get thee, behind me, thou infernal wanker!

God is Mocking Me...

And well do I deserve it. A friend of mine showed me this blog. I shudder at the similarities. Same idea, stared the same month, same color scheme until a few weeks ago. But he likes Howard Dean and Paul Krugman (He also manages to blog multiple posts a day on a regular basis...this stamina o'erwhelms me...)


So it appears I have a nemesis. What the hell, let's link him!

While we're in Schadenfreude Mode...

I enjoyed thoroughly the news that Tom Green's show was cancelled. I can't stand him. He's always been a annoying doofus with a one-joke schtick, but his talk show demonstrated that he basically has no sense of humor. I refer to the chainsaw incident, wherein Jesse James Dupree of Jackyl took a chainsaw to Tom's Desk.







He's a lumberjack...and he's okay....


I can't say that I would enjoy a hair-band refugee doing damage to my set, either. But then I haven't made a career of vandalism-and-other-public-disturbance as entertainment. The fact that he couldn't even maintain a professional demeanor for the rest of the program shows what a useless diva he truly was, and is. Carson, Letterman, or Leno would have laughed it off while the cameras ran and fumed afterwards. Tom has no such acting ability to fall back on. He will not be missed.

Barbara Streisand and I Agree on Something!

Her music.

Speaking Up

I tend to avoid commentary on the daily political ups and downs; most of the peckings and squabblings that make up a given day's "Political Roundup" are so frivolous as to be unworthy of any serious person's attention, and the rest are but the punditocracy rehashing old arguments. When a decision is made, a platform revealed, or a war launched, then I pay attention. Everything else is tedious.


However, today it occurred to me that the President has dropped down to a 50% approval for the first time since he's been in office. And why? Because the folks are getting jittery about the war, and the opposition is getting noisy. I cannot remain silent.


All of this comes of people with no knowledge of history, of how wars are fought, of how guerrilas are defeated. The key idea is patience. It doesn't happen overnight. The best way to beat guerrilas is to keep them occupied while you gradually improve the administration and daily lives of the majority of the citizenry. If you can cut them off from foreign sources of supply, all the better, but showing yourself to be an improvment over the guerrilas is the key thing. We have done so. Poll after poll of Iraqis has shown that they worry more about us leaving too soon than staying too long. As long as we continue to demonstrate commitment to Iraqi independence, to training and setting up police, border guards, soldiers, and bureaucrats, we aren't going to turn the people against us.


The question for now is, are the American people going to have the stomach for that? All I can say is, We'd Better. Withdrawing from Iraq before the Iraqis are capable of governing (and defending) themselves would be a disaster beyond counting. The terrorists (Baathist or Islamic) would soon undo the fledgling Iraqi republic, and declare their movement impervious to the worst the West could do. They'd declare us weaklings and cowards, unable to maintain a sustained struggle. If you think world opinion is against us now, just wait to see what would happen then.


Now is the time to recommit ourselves to a long and difficult struggle that must be won. Now is the time to stare the enemy in the eye and say You Will Not Bury Us, and mean it. Now is the time to stop flagellating ourselves for every human misery in the world; we did not cause them. Now is the time to dedicate as much of our blood and treasure as we can to mitigating those miseries, and destroying those that propagate them.


Go ahead and hate Bush if it makes you feel better; despise him for an inarticulate, cliché-spouting scion of privelege if your sense of superiority means so much to you. But recognize that he, faults and all, is our leader in a time when leadership is what is needed. And that, if the ability to make decisions and the will to see them through is of any value, we've had worse leaders. Focus on the good that can come of bringing democracy to the Middle East. Yes, it CAN work, the people there WANT DESPERATELY for it to work; so why can't we all work towards that goal, and pay the fascists and nihilists no more heed than the scope of a rifle requires?


I used to be quite taken with the writings of Ayn Rand; her clear sense of morality and sharp criticisms of the power-lust of the Left impressed me greatly. Now I am more critical of her work: the bell-ringing monotony of her fiction, her acidic disdain for spirituality or even simple kindness, her set-piece characters. Yet Rand, through the process of her writings, did uncover a useful truth: a civilization dies when it forgets why it lives, when it no longer cares to defend itself. Those of you who would criticize the current administration, who would shriek in fear at its War on Terror, need to come up with a viable alternative. Otherwise your victory will mean that we no longer care to defend ourselves. And that will mean death, to many individually, and to our dreams, collectively.

Bloody Code

I am aware that my archive pages have gone haywire. I don't know what's wrong, but I have the Blogger support team on the job. I await their advice.

Thought For the Day

I am well aware that it would be disengenuous to resolve indiscriminately the opposition of any set of men (merely because their situations might subject them to suspicion) into interested or ambitious views: Candour will oblige us to admit, that even such men may be actuated by upright intentions; and it cannot be doubted that much of the opposition that has made its appearance, or hereafter will make its appearance, will spring from sources, blameless at least, if not respectable...




-Alexander Hamilton, the Federalist No. 1

I Get Mail

My mother writes to say that she still prefers her version of rock n' roll to mine. She is entitled to her opinion, especially as she'll always be my biggest fan writing-wise. But journalistic objectivity requires me to note that she gets down on the Rolling Stones after a big dinner, and I've seen her shake her hips to the Ramones version of "Do You Wanna Dance?" In Boogie Veritas.

Ch-ch-ch-changes...

Finally did the color-change I've long been thinking on. Finally changed the music links to reflect reality. My last Allzah.com review featured me whining about not being able to buy the music I want per my RIAA-related rant. While in borders today, I resolved to assuage my hunger and buy me some Black Flag. I bet that I could get a release on their original label and thus be free of corporate stickiness, and I was right: they didn't have Damaged, but I was able to pick up a compilation of their pre-Rollins days. So far, it's glorious hardcore punk, back before "hardcore" meant "guys who are too drunk to play metal." And it came with an SST records catalog, wherein I can buy Descendents and Minutemen. They're not the bands I'm trying to support, but they'll get me through the long night ahead.

The Inspired Mind

I have been reading The Reckless Mind by Mark Lilla, an account/criticism of various 20th century thinkers who have, one way or another, found themselves supporting tyranny, be it of the Marxist, Fascist, or even Islamic varieties. His focus seems strictly to be on European thinkers, which in one way can be limiting, but for me has provided a useful primer on the kind of philosophizing and politicking that's been going on across the Atlantic of late. Of course, to be serious I'm going to have to read more, and read more I plan to do. Hence my title.


I came to realize that there was much I did not know, and much that I recognize but have not read. Thus inspired, I went to Borders and attacked the familiar: The Federalist Papers, and The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek, neither of which I've read. When that is done, I shall launch myself into the works of those I have casually dismissed on limited collegiate readings, such as Foucault, Derrida, and Chomsky. It is wise to know the ways of one's adversaries.

Thar She Blows

Isabel came and went, knocking branches about and getting the place wetter, but that's it. The only real damage this hurricane did was to Romeo & Juliet's performance schedule. As we are doing it at a local high school, the local school board ultimately had control over our use of the venue. They closed schools today, and would not reopen them for our use this evening. It's sunny out.


I hate bureaucracy.

Lies, And the Lying Liars Who Lie About Lies, While Lying that Lies aren't Lies, And Lying that Lies are Only Lies when Lying Liars Lie Them

No, I'm not going to make fun of Al Franken. He's as unworthy of my attention as Michael Moore or Ann Coulter, demonizers all. I'm going to direct you to a piece by Will Saletan of Slate, which is rapidly becoming the only left-leaning online mag worth reading (If for no other reason than they don't expect me to pay good money or watch commercials for the privelege of reading Joe Conason). Saletan does a workmanlike job of uncovering the faux-piety of Democrats shrill harping with regard to the other party, and closes with the following quotation:

Sure, some people are more guilty than others. But if that's your obsession, I commend to you the words of my colleague, Jack Shafer: If you're interested in which wing lies more, you're probably not very interested in the truth.

Amen, brother, Amen.