The Middle Ground

That appears to be James' roommate.

Fly the chopper back to Brooklyn

Counterpoint to Skinny's post, only I substitute hyperbole with arguments

Perhaps the most salient problem with "anarchists" is the way that the bad behavior of certain segments tends to distract from and become the message. I don't agree with the political philosophy of "anarchism" (although I know it's not monolithic) but I largely agree with their idea that the increasing rigidity and entrenchment of bureaucratic structures tends to concentrate the flow of ideas and the processes of democracy at the top.

I don't believe that it is necessary to work through existing or conventional means towards change in order to address problems, nor do I believe that these are the only outlets for dissent or opinion. I also have no problem with people dressing like buffoons, eating cheese from dumpsters or any of the rest of the hallmarks of the stereotypical anarcho-crusty lifestyle whose identity is superimposed externally over the entirety of any broad lefty protest movement.

To digress to the topic at hand - it is nearsighted to conflate street begging trustafarian Steel-Reserve-swigging crusties with a broad gathering of individuals with a wide range of protest issues, just because they are in the same place at the same time. Furthermore, knee jerk reaction of this kind by liberals is at cross-purposes with their own aims.

Let's not forget that the Seattle protests of 1999 were a pivotal moment in the mainstreaming of discussion about all issues related to globalization. The grievances voiced in 1999 were not the unique province of the protesters - many on the left were concerned about issues ranging from climate change to farm subsidies to Third World resource privatization. But the existence of a visible and vibrant protest element on the left has always served to create a middle ground for moderate left individuals like Skinny to actually gain bargaining power with the moderate right.

The logic here is that the moderate left agrees with the radical left on many issues, but has a strong difference of opinion about the means towards an end and the value of compromise which keeps them working at 501(c)3's and not riding freight trains from protest to punk show to protest. The visibility of a leftist protest element provides an opening for the moderate left to say to the rest of the political world, "Well obviously these issues are important if people are getting so irate about them, but you don't want to deal with those guys. Talk to us."

The viability of this model is longstanding. The American government's two party system (and separation of powers) preserves overall systematic stability at the expense of immediate change and thus mainstream politicians and political organizations are slow to action - wary of being wildcards in a slow moving system. But on issues ranging from civil rights to the environment - once characterized by protest movements subject to intense FBI scrutiny, public skepticism and political marginalization - they've come around in time.

The element breaking store windows and bathing in the bathroom at a hardcore show is beyond counterproductive, but let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Without these guys - YOU are the crazy ones.

P.S. FEDS- LEAVE ED UM ALONE.

P.P.S - G20 music post up on philadelphyinz.com

you don't know what we do

To the dudes smashing bank windows as a protest against the G20 this week in Pittburgh: what exactly is your goal here? Yes, you don't like capitalism. And what then? Anarchy? Are you 13 years old?

I can't remember the context for this quote at all, but someone on NPR made the very good point that while Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden etc had a massive following they don't really have an endgame. Oh you want to establish a Caliphate? How exactly do you plan on doing that? I guess it would be something like a military dictatorship except with more random stonings for women who think out of turn. But law and order is a small fraction of actually running a government.

My least favorite type of people are those who complain without proposing a solution. Saying something is wrong is easy, fixing a problem is hard. I understand the problems with the G20 and why people want to protest it. I have no beef with Free Tibet protesters because that's a movement with a goal. The Chinese government are a bunch of assholes and need to fall the fuck back and let the country of Tibet live. That's pretty straightforward.

I don't think I'm really breaking new ground with this rant, but I think it's important to restate this in the era of Obama. I protesting Bush. I protested the war in Iraq. I cut my teeth campaigning for John Kerry, Jeff Smith and really just anyone who was on the left and progressive and forward thinking. Honestly, were it not for Bush being such an easy target, I may have never joined Billy Wimsatt's League of Pissed Off Voters, gone to Columbus, OH for the national conference in 2003 and really gotten a taste of how shit works.

I don't think I'm the only one for whom Bush was a catalyst for political action and, to make a very easy analogy, a legion of politically active and motivated leftists could have been the crop that sprung from the fertile soil left behind in the wake of a destructive volcanic eruption. So here we are, with the most progressive president in American history. This should be an insanely productive period! There's stimulus money out there! We're in the middle of a green revolution! Put down your damn black flag and go write a grant! Or start a bike exchange! Or a local garden!

But those things take effort and organization and responsibility and hard work, significantly less so than squatting under a bridge for a week, putting on a bandana and screaming until you get shot with a rubber bullet.

Don't get me wrong, the fear-mongering jackasses on the right telling tales out of school about piss balloons and "Children Of Men"-style attacks using burning cars can eat a big bag of dicks too. And cops are cops, some are real cool, some are genuinely enjoying tossing tear gas canisters at the commies. But if you are destroying private property and you can't tell me succinctly what your long-term agenda is (and I don't mean "the end of capitalism"), you are on some Benedict Arnold shit.

Hood Pass Intact

There are only two categories of people it is 100% ok to hate in America anymore: pedophiles and nazis.

When I say "ok to hate," I mean nobody will stand up and defend the idea of pedophilia or the idea of nazi Germany. There are a lot of people worth hating in America -- republican senators, pyramid schemers, Tom Brady -- but you will have no problem finding assholes to defend anyone in those categories (including myself, sorry Olympia Snow and Susan Collins, etc). Most pedophiles, taken case by case, are sympathetic figures struggling tragically against mental illness. Even most white supremacists are sociable enough to give interviews in Vice and see their accumulation of guns and their belief in the superiority of the white man as more political than revolutionary. I highly recommend everyone check out the article on their music scene in Heeb a few months back, it was pretty good.

Anyways, I digress. Nobody likes Nazis. Even the German army didn't like Nazis and they tried to kill Hitler a few times. And there is no other group of people so unsympathetic that you could showcase so many of them dying, often graphically, in a movie without causing an uproar. Which is exactly what happens in Inglorious Basterds -- a lot of Nazis die graphically, and you chalk it up mostly to Tarantino's signature gore.

But as Jew, good lord did I love seeing Nazis die.

Here's a mega understatement: there have been a lot of movies telling the sad tale of Jews in World War II, either in camps or escaping from them, or hiding silently to avoid capture. It's heavy shit. Very few of the stories have happy endings and the ones that do still leave a lot of trauma in their wake. There haven't been very many movies which consist of a revisionist history where World War II ends with the US sending in a bunch of Jewish killers to terrorize the German infantry and hack the third reich to pieces.

So while as Americans, we still unconditionally hate Nazis, I don't think you can really appreciate Basterds as anything but an entertainingly ridiculous B+ of a Tarantino flick. But as a Jew, this was pure catharsis.

See, in the short hand of public school history books, Jews got caught out there by a bunch of Euros who were more or less indifferent to them, if not outwardly hostile (as they had been since, like, the beginning of time), and when Hitler came through, we were all sitting ducks. So GI Joe stepped in and blew up Auschwitz with blue lasers, victory gardens and Rosie the Riveter, and us Jews got freed. There's something emasculating about that.

There's no shame in being saved by the American military, but still, we needed saving. Several decades later, we get this guy. You know what's much better for my self-esteem? Seeing a lot of Nazis get their really nasty come-uppance. A movie in which we get to see a sweaty, anxious Fuhrer wondering what the hell he's going to do about "The Bear Jew," whose love of bashing in the faces of German soldiers with a goddamn baseball bat is crippling the once-great Nazi army.

(An aside: Donny's entrance was my favorite scene in the movie. Starts ominous, with the sound of him clanking the bat against the tunnel wall, seen but not heard while Aldo interrogates a soldier. But when he finally enters, it's entirely blase. In most movies, the guy with the rep for being especially violent in a crew of dudes running around taking fucking scalps would have some mystique, if only from juxtaposition. Nah, he's just a dude from Brooklyn (?) who likes baseball. The only reason he's even scary is because Eli Roth looks like Sylar from Heroes, who is both psychotic and terrifying.)

On the whole? Pretty good. Thoroughly entertaining, lots of crazy dialogue and a heroine who looks like a younger, sexier version of Juliet from Lost. Also, Ryan from The Office killing people (though more or less playing Ryan from The Office before his plot arc really took off). Brad Pitt's character was great, even with the terrible accent. But it could have lost a half hour or more and still been intact.

But if you are a Jewish kid who spent the better part of his youth constantly being reminded about The Holocaust, you really need to see this.

Live Coda from Twitter, re: the joys of killing Nazis
Balagan: play Wolfenstein.

Touche, Sam.

The All-Fat Team

OK it's been a while but I have nowhere else to put this musing.

Today, I interviewed ESPN's Jayson Stark for a piece I'm working on. We were joking about how the Manny suspension story is kind of ruining his week and I said that if Pujols gets implicated, there will be almost no great, untainted natural hitters from this generation. I said that Griffey might be the last guy under the bar. Jayson said he's rooting for Ryan Howard to be the slugger everybody remembers.

Then it occured to me - baseball has come full circle. It went from fat guys hitting the ball forever to musclemen, now it's fat guys.

So here it is - the All-Time-All-Fat team. This is a list of the best baseball players who fall under the "fat" category. You don't get points just for being comically fat or having a fat "phase" a la "Fat Elvis" or "Fat Miggy Cabrera."

C: Ernie Lombardi

I've never looked at Pudge Rodriguez and thought "fat," in all honesty. Plus Lombardi scores big points for being known in baseball folklore as the slowest guy ever to play the game.

1B: Ryan Howard

Fat guy, hits the ball very far, very often. Off to a good enough career start to beat out Boog Powell, Cecil Fielder and Prince Fielder for this slot.

2B: Ronnie Belliard

Only fat guy I can think of at second.

SS: n/a

Fat guys don't play shortstop.

3B: Terry Pendleton

Third is kinda "thin" on fat guys too.

LF: Kevin Mitchell

Fat guy, hit the ball far.

CF: Hack Wilson

Kirby Puckett wasn't "fat" until he had health problems and you know it. Hack Wilson was 5' 6", 195 and allegedly had a neck the size of a telephone pole.

RF: Tony Gwynn

Not a slugger, but one of the greatest hitters of all time. I used to get cheap seats to Padres-Pirates games at Three Rivers Stadium in right field just so I could sit near Tony.

P: Babe Ruth

You save an outfield spot this way. In my world, the DH was never invented.

Manager: Tommy Lasorda

Duh.

Honorable mention: Boog Powell, Cecil Fielder, Prince Fielder, Kirby Puckett, Bartolo Colon, CC Sabathia, Fernando Valenzuela, Andres Galarraga, David Ortiz, LaMarr Hoyt

New PW article

I wrote this a while ago but it's been on the shelf at the PW. Fortunately, some current events made it timely again, so it got published.

Philadelphia Weekly: List Mania

Take me out to the crowd

Peep game: A new story I wrote about the life and death of the old North Philadelphia ballparks:

Philadelphia Weekly: Take Me Out To The Crowd

Look for it in print tomorrow.

There's Noone to Stop You

The Thermals - Ballad Of Big Nothing (Elliot Smith cover)

I'm going to spend tomorrow afternoon and evening drinking bloody mary's and eating rice and beans, watching a monstrous and uncontrollable weather system stomp all over the city of New Orleans with some of my friends who grew up there.

People from New Orleans have a sense of inevitability about hurricanes. About ruin in general, actually. The city's legendary party culture is different from Vegas's corporate hedonism. In New Orleans, you party because you need to maximize the pleasure when times are good to balance out the absolutely assured ass-kicking which is coming to you as the sad son of a bitch you are. Juvenile gets gold teeth, the city's oil barons build the Superdome and ex-pats watch yet another meteorological disaster befall their fair city while getting retarded drunk.

I spent a summer in the city back when it was an amusing, aging drunk of a city and, though the summer of 2003 (?) was among the worst I've ever had (RIP Money Mike), I spent enough nights drinking away the humid tedium at Butler's (also, RIP) and saw enough shows at The Maple Leaf to tear up when Randy Newman opened one of the myriad fundraisers for Katrina victims with "Louisiana, 1927" out of both nostalgia and grief. I was working at LSU medical center and I'm quite sure any progress I made in my research of protein motifs was destroyed when most of the power to downtown New Orleans went out and all the windows in the towering building I had worked in blew out during Katrina.

Katrina almost wasn't "the big one." It actually fell short of the worst predictions and things weren't apocalyptic until the levees broke and dumped up to twenty feet of water on almost 80% of the city (according to some e-mails I wrote at the time). The tragedy of Katrina was that it was avoidable. Not so sure about Gustav, although at least evacuation plans are going smoother this time around. I will let GW9K give the geological knowledge on the dangers of the bol Gustav.

Three years ago, I was dealing with the end of a very intense three-year relationship with a girl from New Orleans. I had been in Brooklyn for about a month and her on-again-off-again situation with a new man played a big role in getting me to leave St. Louis in the first place. As it would happen, the stability that said man provided to her while her family tore itself apart during the aftermath of Katrina led to them settling down. They recently got engaged.

(I'm working through another break-up right now, less complicated but still painful, and here comes another hurricane. This, of course, means I control the weather.)

I don't really have a point, I'm just thinking about it a lot right now. I hope everyone who has people living in harm's way knows their people are out of harm's way and I'm hoping for the best. With a refreshing beveredge.

History of the DNC

This is pretty fascinating

NYT: A History of the Democratic National Convention