Why, it’s almost as if they would have preferred Ronald Reagan’s method. . . .
Via.
Circus Maximus MMXVI: Big time
18 01 2016Former Virginia Attorney General and current Ted Cruz supporter Ken Cuccinelli, on New York values:
There’s lots of other things that go with that like cheesecake and big sandwiches.
Mm-hmmm.
Comments : 4 Comments »
Tags: Ken Cuccinelli, New York City, presidential campaign, Ted Cruz
Categories : Politics, Quick hits
This is ourselves
12 01 2016I was never a huge fan of David Bowie’s.
I mean, I liked his music, had a few records, and generally enjoyed his work, but I was never a super-fan, and never had a full-on Bowie fever.
So why am I so sad today? And why can’t I stop reading about him?
~~~
David Bowie is actually associated with one of my worst memories from high school.
I wanted to be the yearbook editor my senior year. I’d started working on the yearbook staff when I was a freshman (which frosh usually didn’t do), was generally acknowledged to be ‘the writer’ in my class (not that hard, really, in a class of 150), and fully expected that the adviser, Ms. G., would appoint me.
She did not.*
L. and T. were appointed instead, and I’d be pissed about it to this today had they not a) put together a kick-ass yearbook; and b) treated me really, really well, allowing me to contribute in all kinds of way. They were champs.
Anyway, my idea was to create a yearbook around the lyrics to “Changes”—which is how Bowie gets dragged into this bad memory.
I have no idea whether or not this would have worked: it could have been amazing, it could have sucked, it could have been Eh.
Woulda liked the chance to have found out.
(*She had her reasons, which were legit. Still. . . .)
~~~
I’ve said “Under Pressure” is one of my favorite guilty pleasures, but today I’ve read all kinds of pieces holding that song out as some kind of genius.
I don’t think it’s genius, but yeah, it is a good pop song, undeserving of the guilty-pleasure label.
~~~
One good thing that’s come from all this reading today is that I found, courtesy of the Huffington Post, a couple of videos of Bowie playing with Arcade Fire.
First I saw this one, one of Bowie’s songs:
Then one of Arcade Fire’s:
I like Arcade Fire’s cds just fine, but watching them live, man, I realllly want to see them live.
What it would have been like to see them live with Bowie.
~~~
I think the main reason I considered “Under Pressure” a guilty pleasure is that every time I hear it I tear up.
I cannot handle my own tears, cannot handle that I am moved to tears.
~~~
It’s kind of astonishing how amazing a singer Bowie was, given that he didn’t have much of a voice.
He’s not like Leonard Cohen, who can’t sing at all, but if I were asked for the best straight-up voices in pop, I wouldn’t name Bowie.
But oh, could he sing, so many different types of songs, with so many different types of singers. Some of these collaborations (Arcade Fire) work better than others (Mick Jagger), it wasn’t down to him.
Something about that thin reed, stretched across the universe.
~~~
“Space Oddity” reminds me of John Lennon. I don’t know why. Maybe I heard it while thinking about Lennon’s death.
Or maybe it just reminds me of high school.
It’s not every time I hear the song I’m reeled back, but sometimes, sometimes I’m in the parking lot at Sheboygan Falls High School, Bowie on the car radio, singing And I’m sitting in my tin can. . . .
~~~
“Under Pressure” is about love, after all.
And love, I don’t know what to do with love.
Thus my chagrin over my tears, my chagrin over love.
~~~
And all of the work he’s done, all of the chances he took, all he gave and all he withheld, all he hid and all he revealed.
David Bowie, 1947-2016, was a Starman, a man who fell to earth, an alien, an artist, but most of all, most of all, David Bowie was a human being.
Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: David Bowie, high school, life, love, Music, Under Pressure
Categories : Musing, Obituary
Cheese, glorious cheese
9 01 2016How could this not be wonderful?
Coffee, chocolate, and cheese: the three Cs that make life worth living
~~~
Sorry I haven’t been posting much. I’ve had ideas, just not the oomph.
I’d say I made a New Year’s resolution to be more disciplined, but y’all know I’m too lazy for that. . . .
Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: cheese, laziness, life
Categories : Musing
Achtung, baby
28 12 2015Finally made it to the Neue Gallerie for the Berlin Metropolis exhibit.
Verdict: Ehhhhhh glad I went, slightly disappointed not more Otto Dix (tho’ this work is great), but taken with the work of John Heartfield (about whom I knew nothing prior to this exhibit) and pleased to see some of George Grosz’s work up close (although I didn’t know that there was more than ‘Metropolis’ painting: I was thinking of this one, but the Gallerie hung this one).
There were a fair number of movie stills and drawings for movie sets, which didn’t rock my world, but I’m sure would be of interest to film aficionados. There were a few fashion items (shoes, dresses, hats), and some architectural renderings. Oh, and Walter Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis played on continuous loop; I watched about a third of it, but will catch the rest on YouTube.
I also checked out the (small) permanent collection, and, oh my, they have a number of Klimt’s—including the famous portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, which is, as expected, completely astonishing.
But what stood me still was this smaller piece by Klimt, Girl in the Foliage:
As noted, it’s small—less than 13×10—but man, there’s something about that face, her eyes, that I couldn’t stop looking at. I stood back, I went in close, I stood back. I left, I came back, left again, came back again.
It’s just. . . I . . . I lack the words for this image, for how it affects me, not mesmerizing, maybe mesmerizing. . . I don’t know. I can only repeat: it stood me still.
I can ask for nothing else.
Comments : 4 Comments »
Tags: Berlin Metropolis, George Grosz, Girl in the Foliage, Gustav Klimt, John Heartfield, Neue Gallerie
Categories : Musing, Review
I hate you
24 12 2015Oh my fucking Zeus do I hate Twitter right now. NOT WORKING!
That’s under 140 characters isn’t it?
Fuck. I have to finish grading, but I sure as I hell don’t want to look at papers when I am this fucking aggravated.
I can’t believe that after all my to-ing and fro-ing regarding this stupid platform that I’m still trying to work with its sorry fucking ass.
Fuck fuck fuuuuuuuck.
Oh, fuck.
Comments : 4 Comments »
Tags: trouble, Twitter
Categories : Rant
Circus Maximus MMXVI: Dance this mess around
23 12 2015I am old—I’ll hit a half century in 2016—so I have run out of patience for this kind of shit:
And, fucking hell, he had to make this a generational thing, as opposed to a self-satisfied-schmuck thing.
I’m not going to bother fisking Bragman’s “argument”, such as it is—Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns & Money has been handling Bragman and others of his ilk quite nicely—but I do want to emphasize that when the 2nd-wave feminists argued the personal is political, this is not what they had in mind.
I get it: You don’t like Clinton. Fine. You don’t have to like Clinton. And the primary is the perfect place in which to register your preference for the senator from Vermont.
Hell, I plan to vote for Sanders (even if self-satisfied schmucks “feeling the Bern!” make me want to defenestrate my computer). And then I’ll go volunteer for the Clinton campaign.
You see, I know this election is not about ME ME M-FUCKIN’-E ME!
It’s about a chance to make things marginally better versus a chance to make things much worse, not just for me, but for folks in this country whose well-being ought to matter to any decent leftist.
Which the Bernie-or-bust bros, with their heads comfortably snuggled up their respective asses, are manifestly not.
~~~
Okay, so here’s where I also admit that I’m a hippy-hippy-forward-hippy-hippy-hippy-hippy-hippy-shake! hypocrite:
I voted for Nader in 2000. When I was old enough to know better.
Now, in my defense, I was living in Minnesota, which Gore had locked down, and I’m pretty (not, alas, absolutely) sure I would have sucked it up and voted for the vip had I lived someplace swing.
(And as an aside, if these Bern-burners live in states which are clearly in the tank for one party or the other, then, whatever, register your protest. But Bragman et. al. aren’t content simply with registering a protest: they loudly announce their preference any Republican to Clinton.)
But, yeah, I was pissed at Gore and even years into the Bush regime I liked to toss around the whole “he couldn’t even win his home state” bluster in response to (entirely appropriate) criticism of my vote.
I was an idiot. Not only would Gore have been a better president than Bush, he fuckin’ certainly would have been a better president than Nader. Who I voted for. For president.
Fuuuuck younger-me.
So maybe I’m particularly sensitive to these types “we’ll-show-’em!” of arguments because I am a convert away from them, and y’all know the converts are the most hard-core.
But it’s also worth pointing out how well that whole Gore Sucks movement worked out, how well that worked for the country, for the world—which is to say, calmly, quietly,
NOT FUCKING WELL AT ALL.
Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: Bernie Sanders, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Politics, presidential primary
Categories : Politics
Keep it down now
20 12 2015So much concern about black people and brown people and gay and lesbian people and transpeople and women people insisting that they’re people and you know who’s really got it bad?
But seriously, you know who can’t take a joke? White guys. Not if it implicates them and their universe, and when you see the rage, the pettiness, the meltdowns and fountains of male tears of fury, you’re seeing people who really expected to get their own way and be told they’re wonderful all through the days. And here, just for the record, let me clarify that I’m not saying that all of them can’t take it. Many white men—among whom I count many friends (and, naturally, family members nearly as pale as I)—have a sense of humor, that talent for seeing the gap between what things are supposed to be and what they are and for seeing beyond the limits of their own position. Some have deep empathy and insight and write as well as the rest of us. Some are champions of human rights.
But there are also those other ones, and they do pop up and demand coddling. A group of black college students doesn’t like something and they ask for something different in a fairly civil way and they’re accused of needing coddling as though it’s needing nuclear arms. A group of white male gamers doesn’t like what a woman cultural critic says about misogyny in gaming and they spend a year or so persecuting her with an unending torrent of rape threats, death threats, bomb threats, doxxing, and eventually a threat of a massacre that cites Marc LePine, the Montreal misogynist who murdered 14 women in 1989, as a role model. I’m speaking, of course, about the case of Anita Sarkeesian and Gamergate. You could call those guys coddled. We should. And seriously, did they feel they were owed a world in which everyone thought everything they did and liked and made was awesome or just remained silent? Maybe, because they had it for a long time.
Rebecca Solnit can think and she can write and if I were the jealous type I’d be jealous that she gets paid to do the work I can’t be arsed to do but I’m not particularly jealous so instead I’ll just read her and sigh Ahhhhh.
~~~
h/t PZ Myers; update: fixt hed
Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: humor, racism, Rebecca Solnit, sexism, writing
Categories : Blog theft
Who knows, tonight, we may lose the battle!
16 12 2015How about some numbers?
I’m a theorist, yes, but when it comes to elections, you gotta talk numbers.
So how about some numbers for Reichstag elections 1919-1932?
- January 1919 (percentage of seats; bold are Weimar Coalition 1919-20; after 1920, parties in minority)
- Social Democrats (SPD) 39%
- [Catholic] Center (Z) 22%
- German Workers Party (DDP) 18%
- Nationalists (DNVP) 10%
- Independent Social Democrats (USPD) 5%
- German People’s Party (DVP) 4%
- Others 2%
- June 6, 1920
- SPD 22%
- USPD 18%
- DNVP 15%
- DVP 14%
- Z 14%
- DDP 8%
- Bavarian People’s Party (BVP) 5%
- Communists (KPD) 1%
- Others 2%
- November 30, 1923 (seats)
- DDP +DVP + Z 168
- SPD 103
- USPD 83
- DNVP 71
- BVP 21
- KPD 4
- Others 10
- May 4, 1924 (percentage)
- SPD 21%
- DNVP 20%
- Z 14%
- KPD 13%
- DVP 10%
- German People’s Freedom Party (DFVP) + Nazis (NSDAP) 7%
- DDP 6%
- BVP 3%
- Others 6%
- December 7, 1924
- SPD 27%
- DNVP 21%
- Z 14%
- DVP 10%
- KPD 9%
- DDP 6%
- BVP 4%
- NSDAP 3%
- Others 6%
- May 20, 1928
- SPD 31%
- DNVP 15%
- Z 13%
- KPD 11%
- DVP 9%
- DDP 5%
- BVP 3%
- NSDAP 2%
- Others 10%
- September 14, 1930
- SPD 25%
- NSDAP 19%
- KPD 13%
- Z 12%
- DNVP 7%
- German State Party (DStP, former DDP) 3%
- BVP 3%
- Others 12%
- July 31, 1932
- NSDAP 38%
- SPD 22%
- KPD 15%
- Z 12%
- DNVP 6%
- BVP 4%
- DVP 1%
- DStP 1%
- Others 2%
- November 6, 1932
- NSDAP 34%
- SDP 21%
- KPD 17%
- Z 12%
- DNVP 9%
- BVP 3%
- DVP 2%
- DStP 0% (tho’ still held 2 seats)
- Others 2%
The November 1932 were the last free parliamentary elections; after Hitler became chancellor in 1933, the fix was in, so while elections were held that year, they were in no way free. Even then, however, the Nazis couldn’t manage a majority: they received only 43.9% of the vote in the March 5 elections.
A coupla’ things to note about these numbers (helpfully provided by Fuad Aleskerov, Manfred J. Holler, and Rita Kamalova in their paper, Power Distribution in the Weimar Reichstag 1919-1933; note that they go on to analyze those electoral results and various governing coalitions):
- These are parliamentary election results, which may or may not have been reflected in who was chosen as chancellor—and there were alotttttta chancellors in this period.
- As noted in a previous post (as well as in bold, above), the Weimar coalition didn’t rule past 1920.
- A number of parties in parliament were, in fact, anti-parliamentarian: the rightist Nationalists (DNVP) most notably early on, and the Communist KPD and fascist NSDAP later.
- The two Catholic parties kind of straddled the republican line: The Center party (Z) was decidedly anti-left, but also valued their ability to participate fully in government; they moved to the right by the end of the 1920s. The Bavarian People’s party (BVP) was more conservative (and, obviously, found its power base in Bavaria) throughout this period.
- Finally, and rather importantly, look at those figures for NSDAP: After the failed beer-hall putsch in 1923, Hitler vowed he would take power via ‘legal’ means. Yet in elections from 1924-28, they were a marginal force in politics—the Nationalists were the main representative of the right in parliament. It was only after the onset of the Depression did the Nazis’ electoral fortunes improve.
That last bit is rather important: absent economic crisis, it is not clear that the republic would have fallen, nor that the Nazis would rise to destroy it all.
It’s an incredibly complex matter, complexities which I’ve barely touched on here nor in previous (and likely, future) posts, and which I’m still sorting out myself, but whatever other elements contributed to the end of Weimar, it’s nonsense to conclude that the republic fell of its own accord.
~~~
In addition to the Aleskerov, Holler, and Kamalova piece, I also relied upon Richard Evans’s The Coming of the Third Reich and Detlev Peukert’s The Weimar Republic for various electoral and party information.
Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: elections, Great Depression, Reichstag, Weimar
Categories : Politics
AbsurdBeats 