You have a busy couple of weeks of culture ahead of you,
here presented in chronological order.
TONIGHT: Michael
Malice talks
about his book Dear Reader at
Housing Works.
FRIDAY: Yours
truly, Todd Seavey, will appear onstage
as part of a big comedy/politics panel featuring the likes of the chairman
of the Free Silver Party and an
actual Marvel Comics editor (not that Marvel can be blamed for Tom Brennan’s
actions). I will strive not merely to be as funny as the other panelists but as funny as
that guy who’s replacing my childhood hero David Letterman. You can RSVP to the so-called
Electoral Dysfunction panel on Facebook -- or just risk showing up at
9:30pm on April 18 at Peoples Improv, 123 East 24th St..
•It’s hard to be funnier than the stuff the politics-media
establishment expects us to take seriously,
though, like that badly-photoshopped profile of White House propagandist Jay
Carney, dissected
here.
•Meanwhile, the commoners seem to do a good job of keeping
their senses of humor and maintaining perspective even amidst conflict.
•But hey, this article has already identified all
the funniest people on Twitter, so there’s no need to think about it any
further:
ALL THIS WEEK:
For Passover, here are a few non-funny
items on people who make life difficult for the Jews (besides this weekend's
horrible Kansas shooter, who reportedly shouted “Heil Hitler” during his
killing spree):
•HITLER himself proudly declared
himself a socialist and an inheritor of Marx (all genocide advocates had
been socialists).
•BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY might not like to hear it, but nowadays
Ayaan
Hirsi Ali sees a censorious left enabling the most oppressive form of Islam.
•THE U.S. GOVERNMENT is actually more
pro-Palestinian than the Palestinians sometimes.
THROUGH APRIL 26th:
I cannot strongly enough urge fans of absurdism and alternative rock to see the
two fuse beautifully in the form of the play Ubu
Sings Ubu at Abrons Art Center, where Verse Theater Manhattan has taken
the founding absurdist play, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu
Roi from 1896, and inserted songs by the band Pere Ubu, performed by an
impressive backing band and actors bearing more than a passing resemblance to
the Pixies and X lead singers, adding additional layers of visceral decadence
to the evening.
And it’s anti-state as all get out -- you can sense in the
prescient play (about a deranged and clown-like European conqueror) that death
was in the air for taking monarchy and
war seriously -- though not soon enough to prevent millions of people dying
as well.
AND ONLINE FOREVER:
The latest Seavey/Perry
video, in which Gerard and I discuss UFOs and the supernatural on the
occasion of the release of the documentary Mirage Men about how a man claiming to be
an agent of the government fed a UFO believer just enough hints of an alien
cover-up to drive the man insane.
Whether it’s odd readings on the radar or that trail-cam footage a few days ago of something appearing to hover and shine bright light upon a
couple deer, these sorts of phenomena always seem to happen on the fringes of
consciousness and detection -- probably a sign there’s nothing there, though we
can still learn some interesting things from such cases about perception itself
(perhaps chiefly that our brains are prone to look for other brains as the
explanation behind everything, which may explain beliefs ranging from animism
to God to Bigfoot).
Then again, there are some very detailed UFO reports from credible people like former astronaut
Gordon Cooper, who can
also (really) be heard at the end of this classic Letterman routine telling
Larry “Bud” Melman to keep up the good work. I hope Dave himself has
received plenty of such calls upon news of his own retirement. And if there is anything to the reports made by
people like Cooper, here’s hoping they stop surrendering their footage to
higher-ups from the Air Force, jostling the camera at a key moment, or larding
their stories with New Age mystical insights gleaned from their subsequent
hypnosis sessions. Until then, I suppose we have things to do down here.
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