Somebody's Life on Two Wheels

Another reason to love the Internet: stumbling upon someone's travelogue while looking for information about Eagle, Alaska.

"We must conquer the Narzis"

My amigo in New Mexico unearthed the story of Prussian Blue a couple of weeks ago. They're a musical duo, identical twin 12-year-old girls from Bakersfield, who've cooked up some acoustic versions of your favorite white-power songs.

"Is there anything cuter," wrote Vice, "than two identical twin twelve-year-old girls who have a band together? How about if they dress in matching plaid skirts—that ups the cuteness quotient, right? And what if they perform folky versions of classic racist songs by bands like Skrewdriver and Rahowa? Whoa! Now we are heading into the cute danger zone."

Anyway Steve received a record number of comments on his original post once a few European-history enthusiasts "concerned about the future of the white race" found his blog; he added further remarks awhile later. Daily Kos picked it up too.

Life Aquatic

The blog's been dark for the past couple of weeks, in part due to travel and in part because I've been covering for El Lefty Malo in my spare moments. But I'm back -- I've been enjoying a little lull between the holidays, and I made it to the cinema today.

I'm not an expert on the films of Wes Anderson -- I haven't even seen Rushmore, for chrissakes -- but I was interested enough in Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou to spend this afternoon at the Vogue Theater in Laurel Heights. What I saw was often hilarious and consistently interesting, if a little short of genuinely moving.

There are a lot of memorable laughs in the film, including a ship named the Belafonte for Zissou's faux Cousteau, an amusing Portuguese interpreter of David Bowie's songs, and an island town known as "Port-au-Patois." Bill Murray is very, very smartly cast in the lead role -- who would've guessed that the star of Meatballs would emerge as the perfect pathetic old man? -- and the long shots of people walking from room to room through the half-open, stage-like ship set are really, really cool.

Still, it was hard not to think of Ben Stiller's fire drill when an action sequence in Life Aquatic was accompanied by a drum solo. It's hard to say when a "signature" style turns into a cliche, and Anderson could be nearing that line. Also, this does makes two films in a row about failing to connect with your father because he's a pathetic old man, or something like that anyway. The action sequence in the abandoned hotel was just too ridiculous to be genuinely intense, while some other rapid-fire events occur a little too quickly to evoke the pathos they seem to be trying to evoke. I suspect I'd get more out of Life Aquatic by seeing it a second time, but on first viewing the highs and lows just weren't quite engaging enough for me to really feel for Zissou or his mates. Plus I was never that into Bowie anyway.

The new patriotism

"I'm so confused. In times of war, should I support the troops or the president?"

New Republican?

The week's most interesting reading comes from the generally liberal New Republic, in which editor Peter Beinart argues that the left needs to embrace the fight against Islamic totalitarianism in the same way it embraced the fight against Communism during the early Cold War. He eschews attacking Bush from the right, as Kerry did during the debates, but doesn't necessarily strike a centrist pose either -- he's mostly arguing that the "soft" left, as he calls them (i.e. Michael Moore, MoveOn.org) have placed the fight against Republicans ahead of the fight against Islamic anti-Westernism, and have lost sight of traditionally liberal values in the process.

It rather reminds me of Hitchens' immediate post-9/11 reaction: "[T]he bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about 'the West,' to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state."

The crux of Beinart's argument is that the American Left has simply been slow to catch onto this concept. He doesn't defend the Iraq war. Yesterday on C-SPAN, he said he thought people like Moore do more harm than good, rather than being a "useful ally," for refusing to get real about Osama, al Qaeda, etc. Beinart's stat regarding Democratic isolationism is sadly telling too.

Can it be that the Left's deepest and most important fracture isn't all about the Iraq war, but rather between those who believe that we are engaged in a war with fascist Islamic totalitarianists and those who don't? (Or, those who believe the war is being conducted to satisfy the greed of profiteers, or is some kind of propaganda, or something like that?) And is this fracture occurring at the same moment that American Republicans are starting to believe that the Iraq war is a mistake? What's the next step, if Iraq was the wrong one?

Robert S. McNamara says, memorably, in The Fog of War: "The human race really has to look at this whole business of killing people."

UPDATE: Beinart follows himself here.

It's just a TV show

A social worker on CNN just described performing grief counseling for people who did not know Laci Peterson. "Those in the community who came to know her through the media and need to process their grief can now take the first step in the healing process," said the social worker (paraphrased). Huh? Community? Healing?

As a member of the media, I've come to wonder why stories like Peterson's get so much play. I do think it's important that domestic violence is recognized in the press every once in awhile, but it's very hard to say why one case merits mass hysteria while another becomes a City Confidential and little more. It does seem like the most widely publicized murder cases usually involve good-looking white people. In this case, the victim's pregnancy made it more heartbreaking, although I find most media outlets' decision to refer to the unborn child by name vulgar and bizarre. I know that rule number one for most media outlets is, "if it bleeds, it leads," but I can't help but think that the past two years of coverage have been sadly wasted time. (This wasn't even O.J. killing his ex-wife.) Mostly I'm happy that this case will occupy significantly fewer column-inches soon. Good riddance.

"The fact is," writes Thomas de Zengotita in an abstract piece about ordinary people and celebrities in the December Harper's, "that a lot of people who have not had some problematic condition thrust upon them by fate feel as if they have. They feel alone and misunderstood... unacknowledged, unappreciated. So they identify with a saga of redemption through recognition, which transforms the anonymous victim into the heroic survivor. They respond projectively with something that borders on envy."

Man about town

I'm happy to report that my slow week of blogging has been due largely to a busy week of evenings out. During nights when I wasn't preoccupied with venture capital and the Giants, I was at the Great American Music Hall watching Jesse DeNatale, Jonathan Richman and Iron & Wine.

DeNatale, who just finished a couple of tours with Richman, has added a handful of new songs and a Wurlitzer piano to his shows since I saw him last. His imagistic lyrics remain fairly lean, in that there's no wasted effort and no wasted words, though he's not afraid to spend six minutes on a thought if that's what it takes. He appears to have slowed down "Rosie" a touch too, allowing him to dwell a little longer on one of my favorites in his catalog.

Richman, who seems to prefer singing in Italian or French to English these days, was as loose a cannon as ever. I think if you see him more than once every six months he might get tiresome, but it's really hard to tell whether he's being spontaneous or whether his act is totally premeditated. Either way he's not afraid to let the drummer have some while he retunes his guitar away from the mic, mid-song. I kind of feel like he's beyond criticism in some ways -- if you're not having a good time, it's your fault, because he sure is.

Sam Beam performed alone, to uproarious applause from the first song to the last. The 450 or so people in the sold-out Music Hall were dead-silent during his performance (though they weren't for Jesse or Jonathan), which actually lent even more seriousness to the performance. Beam seems to sing about losing a parent quite a bit, and uses words like "God" and "came" and "gone" a lot. He's a great guitar picker. When I met him briefly, I heard just how much South Carolina he has in his speaking voice. My friend thought "Upward Over The Mountain" was corny, particularly the bit about the dog, but I think it's one of his best.

I've long felt that Beam has been wrongly pegged as some sort of Appalachian balladeer by lazy rock writers who can't think of anything better to say when they hear a banjo. (I admit that "The Rooster Moans" does remind me of 'Mountain Music of Kentucky.') It's become almost meaningless to compare someone to Nick Drake, but his guitar playing has a lot in common with Beam's. My other friend didn't go to the Iron & Wine show because she thought it'd be a "downer," but I actually find Beam's songs hopeful rather than distressing. They're like things you could say to yourself to make you feel better. Oh, and he covers "Mr. Soul" and "Love Vigilantes," too.

How would it have felt?

Check out Shaun Considine's piece about how Columbia Records almost blew it on "Like A Rolling Stone."

I remember hearing it (for real) for the first time in Mitch Getz's car sometime in the late 1980s. John Hiatt says he heard it in a car too -- his mother's, parked outside a grocery store or something. Said he was worried she wouldn't recognize him when she got back.

Next week: Cooking with Leonid Brezhnev

If you've read any Lester Bangs, this recipe ought to be a treat.

Giambi juice

He always looked shiny and zitty, like a pubescent 15-year-old whose voice flutters embarrassingly between high and low registers. His greatest mentor in the big leagues was Mark McGwire, the Oakland Athletics' other first baseman-DH from Southern California, who we now know at least skirted the line between growing his muscles naturally and unnaturally. Injuries threatened his well-being, and seemed to precipitate an early decline in productivity. They said he had a pituitary tumor too, hidden from the press by the team that protected him and his nine-figure contract. Now Jason Giambi appears to have admitted steroid use for at least the period 2001-2003, confirming (in some nauseating detail) what a lot of us suspected all along.

It's not clear what Major League Baseball will do with him, but the time has come for the New York Yankees to stop protecting Giambi and go after him where it hurts: his massive contract, which has turned into a huge albatross in the last two years. If pickup basketball was enough to dump Aaron Boone, using life-threatening and career-ruining drugs ought to be enough to void Giambi's deal.

This is not simply a vice. Lots of ballplayers have gotten messed up on recreational drugs or booze; they deserve a chance to clean themselves up. But Giambi's surge in productivity in the early years of this decade is the very basis for the contract he signed, and for that reason you could make a very strong case that the contract was negotiated under false pretenses. If you cheated your way through college and didn't really earn your degree, you could be fired. If you're a journalist who made up quotes in prize-winning stories, you can be fired. Giambi's credentials, i.e. his accomplishments with the A's, were obtained through cheating.

Everyone involved with baseball knows the sport has a steroid problem. If the Players' Union is to be taken seriously in the future, it must address the Giambis of the world not as victims of addiction who must be protected, but rather as frauds and cheaters who should be punished. The Union's members who play clean know this too.

And while ESPN's Jayson Stark suggests the Yanks have a shot at voiding the Giambi contract, SI's Tom Verducci says it's unlikely to happen. (Tim Kurkjian is on ESPN right now saying he doesn't think it's going to happen either.)

Blue Christmas

Although I can't comment yet on his political stances, I did find this blogger's The 10 Least Successful Holiday Specials Of All Time rather hilarious, especially the Rand entry and the Rage Against The Machine reference. (Warning: several humorless commenters nearly ruin the fun.)