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Food notes:

•The band Team Robespierre, earlier this year, recalled an article on “Cooking with Fugazi.”

•Conan O’Brien (sounding oddly like my friend Chuck Blake) announces his new show and how he was bribed with a pizza pie.

•Comic books are occasionally clever, and Marvel not long ago introduced the idea that the planet-eating monster Galactus has a daughter, Galacta, who — though I’m guessing they never quite use the phrase — basically has an eating disorder. (And eating disorders mean it’s back to school time, girls!) To compensate for talk of planet-eating giants, here’s a brief remembrance of my favorite comic from my early-80s childhood, Micronauts.

•Ali Kokmen noted this Times article about freeganism — eating garbage on principle — trying to become mainstream cuisine (“In a Brooklyn neighborhood, a group of ‘friends and co-conspirators’ enjoy Grub, a communal dinner made from wasted food recovered from the trash…”). It’s spreading like the Walking Dead virus, people.

Tue., Sept. 7 (the day after Labor Day), 8pm, at Lolita Bar (266 Broome St. at Allen St., one block south and three west of the Delancey St. F, J, M, Z subway stop).

Arguing yes: Lilit Marcus, author of Save the Assistants

Arguing no: comedian and entrepreneur Jen Dziura

Moderating: Michel Evanchik

Hosting: Todd Seavey

You may well be torn on this one — perhaps you’re planning to attend the following week’s Ayn Rand Institute event in Manhattan and love captains of industry.  On the other hand, you often suspect crazy people rise to the top, using as a tool their craziness.  How to resolve this tension?  Attend the debate, that’s how.  Perhaps you’d like to vent during our Q&A segment.

A very hardworking friend of mine points out this related Time article asking the important question: Is your boss a psychopath or just mean? (This question may, of course, be applicable to people in your life other than your boss.)

Seeing the band Baghdaddios on Saturday night not only afforded me the opportunity to meet a conservative member of the band Beauty School Dropouts but led to the odd experience of me popping outside the club to retrieve Baghdaddios leader Ken Rowell so that he wouldn’t miss a song being dedicated to him by the band RewBee, only to find that the song turned out to be called “You Suck” — but I am assured he wasn’t being insulted.  (I wouldn’t want to see RewBee anger Ken’s impressive amazonian bodybuilder girlfriend, either.)  An additional good moment: the Hormones’ hardcore version of the “Science Fiction” opening song from Rocky Horror.

All this is a reminder that I should focus a bit more on actual punk in September, as we approach October’s release of my “Conservatism for Punks” essay in the volume Proud to Be Right (or PBR, as you Williamsburg-types should start calling it).  As Bono said back in the old-timey days of 2003, when obscenity on TV caused legal scandals: “Keep fooking oop the system!”

I think I may have hastily passed up a chance to toy with the system the other day, by the way, when I got a robocall (somehow defying the Do Not Call list, as non-profits can) saying merely: “This is Survey 2010!  Do you own a small dog?”  Saying no caused it to hang up, though perhaps I should have investigated further by saying yes.  Surely many people will do precisely that.  Then again, I never lie, not even to robots.

Two imperial notes before we exit this blog’s troubled and anemic “Month of Imperialism,” though:

•They’re planning a 3D movie about The Battle of Midway, arguably the largest battle of all time, and one of the most historically significant.  Take that, Japan, with all your stupid manga!

•And speaking of old-timey imperial battles, Dimitri Cavalli notes this silent-movie-ized version of the climactic battle from The Empire Strikes Back.  I can’t end on a more fitting note than that.  I’m not saying I shouldn’t, mind you, just can’t.

I’ve long said that East Asians should be the most vocal opponents of affirmative action in America, given that their numbers on college campuses have been kept artificially low relative to their test scores by lefty proportional-to-the-population regulations. But there’s no reasoning with people attached to the symbolic anti-racism of such regs, regardless of practical outcomes.

A reminder of just how dangerous it is to let government wade into these matters at all was noted on Drudge, in the form of an ABC piece that paints blatantly racist Mississippi middle school rules about which students can hold which school positions as a legacy of Jim Crow — when in fact the rules in question were put in place in 1969 as an ostensibly-progressive quota system to ensure black participation. Just stay out of the whole area, politicians. And abolish public schools while you’re at it — but more about that this coming weekend.

In more-elite school news, Emma Watson’s short haircut has left people saying that she’s left her youthful Hermione days behind, but what they really ought to be saying is that she finally looks like a Brown student. Might the haircut indicate that the time for an experimental lesbian phase has arisen? Has Brown taken steps to ensure that a resulting sex tape does not leak out? I’m only asking questions.

Watson will, of course, appear on film in one of the year’s three big remaining nerd films (after this week’s Machete, the year’s most perfect date movie). November brings the first half of the final Harry Potter film, and December brings both The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Tron: Legacy, which is arguably the major-movie sequel longest separated from its original, at twenty-eight years. Let us hope we are not in for another Phantom Menace experience.

•Normally, when you think of hive minds being invaded by brain-controlling, zombie-making parasites — and I know you do — you are thinking about a dark potential future (or at least Washington, DC — speaking of which, if you haven’t already watched this weekend’s Freedom Watch, airing again tonight at 7 and 11, note that it features Mort Zuckerman explaining his concerns about Obama fiscal excess and the effect on Democrats).  Nature has been fighting creepy struggles involving mind-controlling parasites for millions of years, apparently.

This revelation leaves me wondering, as E.O. Wilson might put it, why everyone isn’t studying zombie ants.  Then again, militaristic and imperialist ambitions could take on whole new, more terrifying forms if militaries around the world really figured out the mechanics of mind-controlling spores, so maybe the zombie ant phenomenon would benefit from a period of benign neglect.

•Speaking of turning people into arthropods, I have only recently learned (from Byrne Hobart) of the most disturbing horror movie premise of all time, as notoriously explored in the film The Human Centipede, about a German scientist whose goal is to do something which is far worse than whatever you’re imagining, and which I will not describe on this blog but which is explained on Wikipedia, for the not-easily-sickened.

•Real-life Germans may not be much saner, given not only their history of producing dark or violence-admiring thinkers such as Marx, Nietzsche, Hitler, Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt — not to mention, apparently, plans for a cannibalism-themed restaurant.  What is wrong with German people?

•In other movie news, Paul Verhoeven — whose films, he admits, have been influenced by his youthful fascination with the Nazi conquest of his native Holland — plans to look at Dutch colonialism in Indonesia in his next film, which sounds interesting to me.

•Less promising, I fear, is the plan to let the director of Underworld remake the 1990 Verhoeven movie Total Recall, which, as Scott Nybakken likes to point out, is an already-perfect film.  There is no way Read the rest of this entry »

In 1632 (144 years before the Declaration of Independence and one year after William Seavey arrived in the New World and built Plymouth’s first church), the Tuttle family began farming on the New Hampshire/Maine border, a region whence hail several of my favorite people.  Now, 378 years later, the Tuttle family is considering selling the family farm.  Think of the dusty knickknacks they must have in the back room.

Then again, what Americans consider “old” is laughable to inhabitants of the Old World.  Plymouth, England, for instance, traces its founding not to 1620 (or 1607 like Jamestown, lest we neglect it) but to the Bronze Age.  America just got here yesterday, really, and we’re still getting our footing.  I still recall pointing out Manhattan’s oldest church to my British friend Sangeeta Sahi and getting a “So what?  Oxford has been around for over a thousand years, Cambridge for two thousand” as a compassionate response.  Of course, Sangeeta is also the sort of softy who once declared a teddy bear’s facial expression that of “a gormless idiot.”

But enough about the English — tomorrow a look at those thuggish, brooding latecomers to the New World, the Germans (who, like the English, have been known to display imperialist tendencies).

Catch the sacred and the profane on this weekend’s Freedom Watch, first shown at 10am Eastern tomorrow on FBN, as the guests include prostitute turned novelist/activist Tracy Quan, defending the profession, and a polite debate between two libertarians with decidedly different philosophical foundations: Skeptic editor Michael Shermer and the Acton Institute’s Father Robert Sirico.  They might make you believe that atheists and Catholics can get along.  Maybe.  Possibly.  Well, watch it anyway.

Coincidentally, I am scheduled to have dinner the next night with an Italian, Catholic, libertarian economist of my acquaintance, whereupon I should begin my recruitment drive for our second Debate at Lolita Bar for September because, yes, we’re doing two, the first asking “Are Bosses Usually Jerks?” (Sept. 7) and the second, the one for which I still need a “no” debater, asking “Is Macroeconomics a Fiction?” (Sept. 23).  Decide for yourselves which is more illusory, God or “trade deficits.”  Don’t feel obligated to pick just one, though.

Some people get accused of wanting to rule the world, and I was recently accused of subconsciously wanting to destroy it for liking things like this Road Warrior-esque Pink video for “Funhouse.” Did a male comics nerd have a hand in writing the chorus about “evil clowns,” I can’t help wondering? Dave Whitney notes that Pink in that video, always a tad 80s-ish, looks a bit like Wendy O. Williams. She also looks a bit like a striking punker recently moved into my neighborhood — and like Storm from the X-Men in the 80s plotline in which she lost her weather-manipulating powers and so could cut loose emotionally for the first time in her life. So much simpler, and thus more aesthetically coherent, than Lady Gaga, recently condemned by Camille Paglia for “overkill.”

Speaking of wild costumes and tough dames, it occurs to me that Wonder Woman, whose costume change I mentioned yesterday, looks better as subtly redesigned by this Halloween costume company than she does as normally depicted by DC Comics (with star-spangled panties, no cape, and mere knee-high boots), and a Halloween costume being an improvement over the real thing is rare, perhaps even unique, so kudos to someone. I’m pretty confident the Darth Vader costume I wore for Halloween as a kid was not as impressive as the filmic original, though I’m sure I was terrifying.

And two more comics notes for the month: Matt O’Brien e-mails to note this list of forty comics arguably good enough for classroom discussion, topped by one about Iran, while both Paul Taylor and the Raspberry Brothers have, in the past few days, found themselves discussing the comedic wonder that is the “Italian Spiderman” trailer.

I’m not sure how much of the comedy value here was intentional, but my former employers at the American Council on Science and Health have created probably the funniest thing the organization has done, by plugging a dialogue about the (harmless but nonetheless feared) chemical BPA into this personalizable cartoon of talking bears.

In other cartoonish news, my drawing of the superbeing Fondue-head (a monster who skewers his enemies and dips them into the vat of bubbling cheese in his skull) got me first prize in the Raspberry Brothers’ create-your-own-suphero contest last night. Victory is mine, and this makes up for Evan Dorkin’s response to Fondue-head when I presented the character to him years ago as a suggested foe for his characters Milk and Cheese, which was to send me back a letter simply showing Fondue-head skewered with his own fondue forks (for which I’m quite grateful, in all seriousness).

The most exciting thing going on involving comics this summer is arguably something that has nothing to do with new or changing characters, though: It’s the family whose home was saved from foreclosure because they found a copy of Action Comics #1 as they were cleaning out their stuff to move. Now they’re loaded.

J. Michael Straczynski, much as I love him for creating Babylon 5, sounds like he may not be bringing the same level of excitement to the Superman and Wonder Woman comics he’s now writing for DC. After fighting a vast, complex war in space, JMS is now depicting Superman deciding, I kid you not, to go for a very long walk. Meanwhile, Wonder Woman’s entire reality has been altered by time travel-type shenanigans, with the primary headline-getting result being that in the new reality, she wears pants. I guess if JMS combines the walking and the pants-wearing plotlines at some point, we’ll really have something. (A more beautiful walkabout idea, it seems to me, is Steve McCurry’s quest to make fitting use of the very last roll of Kodachrome film, with which he was entrusted.)

I think this ad for one of the Superman comics in question sums up how much the stories may resemble bad heartbreaking-dilemma-of-the-week “traveling loner” TV shows. One good thing to come of the Wonder Woman pants is that DC executive Dan DiDio, called upon at a comics convention to sum up what he thought of the change, uttered the funniest (intentional) thing I think I’ve ever heard him say, Read the rest of this entry »

All right, I’m back from visiting my ancestral homeland of New England, which I have to admit is perilously close (geographically and culturally) to Canada, with which I have a love-hate relationship.  On the downside: the socialistic tendencies that the U.S. now threatens to imitate.

On the plus side, it’s the land that educated the Williamsburg-dwelling rock writer with an interest in conservatism who just e-mailed me to say she wants my opinions on rock and the right — and on a similar note, it’s where my libertarian friend, McGill polisci prof Jacob Levy (at my suggestion) recently saw Montreal-dwelling, formerly Williamsburg-dwelling band Metric.  I offered to give him his money back if he didn’t enjoy them, and he reports that no refund was necessary.  Here’s a reminder why we are both correct.  I almost tear up when she hits those really high notes, which helps aesthetically even if it’s just a nails-on-chalkboard auditory nerve response thing having nothing to do with the emotions conveyed (I find myself having a similar reaction at times to the slightly more nasal Aimee Mann, though I have multiple reasons to cry when I think of Mann).

On a nerdier entertainment note, my one-week vacation may justify taking the time to see my acquaintance Jerm and his Raspberry Brothers mock superhero film clips tonight at Knitting Factory (361 Metropolitan Avenue, again with the Williamsburg) at 8pm, all MST3K-style.  I’ll just say: Batman and Robin.  Another option tonight: 6-8pm artsy storytelling at Cornelia Street Cafe (29 Cornelia St.) featuring my friend Michele Carlo among others.  The brave and bold man might be tempted to catch both events.

By now, everybody and his uncle have probably used this JibJab animation to put their faces into a short version of The Empire Strikes Back, but I dare say I make a natural Luke Skywalker in this version, with photos entered by co-worker Austin Petersen. Of course, I’m not saying it’s as funny as Chewbacca singing “Silent Night” (nor as slickly produced as the frenetic and funny Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, about which the lukewarm critics and uninterested masses are all wrong, by the way — go see it even if, say, you only have one evil ex instead of seven).

The Empire is a fitting topic for this blog’s “Month of Imperialism,” and I’m reminded that about seven years ago, the fictional empire and the real one blended for me briefly when The Weekly Standard posted an article, around the time it was one of the chief proponents of attacking Iraq, half-jokingly arguing that the Empire was superior to the Rebels in the Star Wars series. I good-naturedly e-mailed to say that if the Standard built a Death Star, they might find there are Rebels willing to assault it. Little did I realize the jittery Standard had received some death threats over their pro-war position, and a flurry of carefully-worded e-mails was exchanged in which it was clarified that I was not planning to kill anyone. (I think I likened myself to Andrew Sullivan jokingly challenging someone to a lightsaber battle at one point, which sounds kind of gay in retrospect but was reassuring.)

But despite some reservations about U.S. military policy, I won’t claim we have an empire in the sense that the British had one — and it was a bad thing in some ways, but it’s hard, as someone for whom all that is now history, to regret that the strange blend of West and East in India has helped bring about things like this strange video of a breakdancing dwarf (pointed out to me by Gena Binkley — and speaking of psychedelic experiences and John Stossel staffers, note that this weekend’s Freedom Watch features a Stossel cameo, with him sparring against conservative biped S.E. Cupp over pot legalization, airing four times on FBN).

•••

The dwarf video in turn reminds me of perhaps my favorite mistranscribed interview quote of all time. Avant-garde comics writer Grant Morrison (whose Final Crisis I now have in hardcover thanks to a generous Scott Nybakken, raising the possibility that it will cohere if read as a single work) was asked what things on the Web interested him lately, and he was quoted as saying he loved “the site American Dwarf,” but it turned out that excellent as that title is, there was no such site, and what he really said was “the South American dwarf,” referring to a mysterious and creepy dwarf with a sack over his head who had been appearing to startled people and gamboling about before disappearing into the woods. It’s a Read the rest of this entry »

My fellow Film Bulletin alum Jenny Foreit notes that an Ayn Rand fan drove across North America tracing out the giant message “Read Ayn Rand,” and thanks to Google Earth and the guy’s GPS system, you can view the results.  This is a reminder of a phenomenon that gets sarcastically commented upon with some regularity: libertarians doing things that obviously are not profitable in the conventional monetary sense (perhaps the GPS guy has a bright future in advertising, but let’s assume for the sake of argument he’s just in it for the sake of getting the message out and helping to save the world). 

In a similar vein, I recall a column a year or so ago that mocked young libertarians for lamenting how little money they were making at their thinktank and magazine jobs, as if this showed something was horribly awry with the profit-driven system they espouse.

In truth, of course, money is just one of many ways — arguably the most efficient one in many situations but not the only one — of (1) keeping track of who owes what to whom and (2) of gauging how much benefit you’re reaping from your investment in an activity.  There are countless situations in which a widely-recognized, stackable, countable medium of exchange is not necessary, though: if you can gauge the quality of your jokes by the size of your best friend’s resultant smiles, if your family repays your kindness with love and entertaining anecdotes, if your work as a volunteer webmaster gives you the deep satisfaction of knowing you are part of a noble project (one that helps put your name in the public mind in a positive light), and so forth.

Free-market ideology (to my mind, though I’ve lately encountered dissent, of course) merely suggests that property rights adherence is more efficient (and thus more happiness-enhancing and thus more humane and thus more moral) than property rights violations.  Free-market ideology alone does not dictate what you should prefer to do once your property rights are secure.  Ayn Rand has a specific, narrower vision of the good life that does seem to imply one should be seeking profit, creating businesses, etc., but a free-marketeer or libertarian in the broader sense is behaving in accord with his philosophy so long as he does not violate property rights and thus could, with perfect consistency, devote his life to tilling one small (owned) plot of vegetables in the woods and playing ultimate frisbee all day while trying to expunge egotism through meditation. 

It’s a very flexible philosophy, and I should perhaps have made it clearer in my Reason pieces about left-libertarians over the past couple years that I’m Read the rest of this entry »

When I was younger, I tended not to take concerns about imperialism seriously and, in conservative fashion, just wanted to be sure that whoever was being shot at was a bad guy.  But history is a mess, only rarely presenting clear-cut heroes and villains, and one country dominating others is highly likely to present at least some major negatives even if there are some underappreciated positives.

It’s often the case that, rightly or wrongly, one is made sympathetic to a novel position in part by discovering that someone who thinks like you or whose mind you like holds that position.  In my case, after decades of hearing New Left types and Brown University Marxists bash imperialism, I was almost ready to call it a good thing, but finding out that anti-imperialism actually has a long history in the U.S. — and in particular, I must admit, that Mark Twain was active in the early anti-imperialist movement — made me a bit more willing to listen to the argument that U.S. military influence in other countries is a project at odds with our older republican principles. 

On the other hand, one need look no farther than my April and August Book Selection entries, about Genghis Khan and the British Empire, respectively, to see that imperial projects often mingle the good and the bad in ways difficult to extricate, certainly in ways that don’t make clear-cut ideological judgments easy (except for extremists)  Even the dreaded and brutal Genghis Khan helped to create stable trade routes, foster freedom of religion, and make law predictable within his realm.

Similarly, to make the world’s most complex and important topic obscenely brief, local autonomy is swell and all, but there are certain extremely beneficial, broad — even universal — rules that we’d like to see people participate in, especially if we are to have a peaceful global commercial order, an order that people everywhere ought to join somehow (preferably in a smooth, organic, non-violent fashion — but somehow). 

Legal orders and even moral notions themselves get reshaped to suit Read the rest of this entry »

Imperialism is not the only way to rule the world, comrade!  Fidel Castro recently used his column in an official Communist publication to paraphrase with approval a Lithuanian book alleging that the annual Bilderberg conference of global leaders secretly controls the world.  The conspiracy Fidel has publicly embraced goes even farther than that, though, reaching a psychedelic crescendo of conspiratorialness worthy of a Robert Anton Wilson novel (and causing embarrassment, one hopes, among the handful of elderly leftists who still respect Fidel).  Writes AP’s Will Weissert:

The excerpt published by Castro suggested that the esoteric Frankfurt School of socialist academics worked with members of the Rockefeller family in the 1950s to pave the way for rock music to “control the masses” by diverting attention from civil rights and social injustice.

“The man charged with ensuring that the Americans liked the Beatles was Walter Lippmann himself,” the excerpt asserted, referring to a political philosopher and by-then-staid newspaper columnist who died in 1974.

“In the United States and Europe, great open-air rock concerts were used to halt the growing discontent of the population,” the excerpt said.

P.S. One of my young co-workers, unfamiliar with conspiracy theories about the Bilderbergers, overheard someone talking about them and thought someone was alleging the world is run by Build-A-Bear, which would be far more entertaining.

Ah, life is good so long as a man can, unharried, enjoy a wholesome pleasure like licking an ice cream cone in public (yesterday in Midtown, as seen at left in photo by Austin Petersen).  And even age and death seem trifles when we hear of a fifty-seven year-old Eddie Munster finding true love with a fan from decades prior, or a seventy-eight year-old riding a rollercoaster ninety times in one day.

But to hear true strife turned into beauty, listen to the war poems of Gregg Glory, who was kind enough to recite them last week before our big Debate at Lolita Bar about imperialism — in which imperialism won, by the way (but more on imperialism’s pros and cons tomorrow, if I’m not hung over from drunkenly riding hotel elevators).

Dim NIMN

By Gregg Glory

Saddam’s boys, fed lion’s hearts
And bad philosophy, were sent into the rape room
Under P.S. 106, Baghdad,
Same ground that saw a Ninevah arise
Same wide-eyed folks that made
A few of civilization’s unending things,
Set golden bird upon a ruby bough to sing.

“Not in my name”
shall we set, we
The people of Hamilton and Adams
Not for such names, nor for our own,
Forgotten since our civics’ texts
Have gone to rot as assuredly as Rome’s poems
Burned by Visigoths to watch
“Vandal Idols” on a commandeered TV
in the fumbled coliseum.

“Not in my name”
shall these be set free.
Not by us, the people of Lincoln and Paine,
Not with our bullets of inalienable rights,
Nor our hatred of tyrants,
Not by our strength, our success,
Not by our sure hand in a selfish world,
Not by our open palm
shall these be set free.

These same who crouched in a shit pit
Or were shot for sheer sport.
Power plus a few roaring lies
And arabist France is your firm friend,
Scoring oil off of marsh arabs’ misery,
Breathing grievance and flattering tyrants
alone in their ego-lovely
palaces of misapplied plaster,
walls caulked with exquisite fear,
real memories of friends, father
or sister suddenly dragged out at 1 AM
and shoved into the State’s Mercedes
and returned in ribbons,
eyeless, legless, earless, hymenless,
or not at all….
The fear of faces too used to fear,
Same faces Stalin made in Russian clay Read the rest of this entry »