NO MORE TIME FOR SPECTATING

This opens a new chapter in our relations with all nations of this hemisphere.
The Lucksmiths: Great Lengths
(live; please bear with the slight distortion!)


Not so much antic despair as desperate antics.
The Lucksmiths: T-Shirt Weather (live)

I participated in an American tradition this weekend. I spent hours stuck in traffic getting the heck out of the city. Like many Americans, the other people in the car and I whiled away our time listening to music. I don't have a road trip playlist or anything, and anyway I wasn't so fortunate as to be driving. However, I did listen to Blur's Parklife for the first time in years. Still sounds good, even if the Syd Barretty stuff has worn a bit, and "Trouble in the Message Center" always felt a bit tossed-off. Nothing was better, though, than listening to Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville on a screened-in porch with friends, reading and overlooking a mountain lake.

Today education blog The Quick and the Ed basically did what offnotes does in reverse. Instead of starting off talking about some random thing or other and ending up talking about some random music thing (or other), blogger Kevin Carey gets music out of the way first, then talks about some edumacation thing. But not before dropping this pearl o' nugget:

"The challenge of the information age isn't in gaining access to information, it's making sense of it. It's not figuring out how to buy CDs, it's figuring out which CDs to buy--and which not to. Those are issue of judgement and taste, which only people can provide."

Exactly! That's why, ultimately, just racing to promote every old thing without stepping back to assess what really works is a doomed proposition. Yes, the MP3 era has probably changed listening habits in some ways permanently, but particularly if people's music collections continue to grow at such an exponential rate, listeners will still probably be interested in some help finding music that appeals to them. Given how irrational and subjective music fandom can be, I'm less confident than perhaps my colleague Chris Dahlen in the extent of technology's ability to meet the challenge.

I leave my pajamas to Billy Budapest.
MP3s: King Khan & the Shrines: "Welfare Bread" and "No Regrets"
[from the forthcoming What Is]

Jonathan Chait notes (free reg req'd, or bugmenot) that some right-wing thinkers are moving from "the conservatism of Paul Wolfowitz" to "the conservatism of Montgomery Burns." In other words, conservative thinkers are leaving behind the small-"d" democratic values the Iraq war was supposedly fought to promote, instead seeing the virtue of authoritarianism now that our own democracy isn't swinging their way. An economist from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Kevin Hassett, rather enviously compares dictatorships to our democracy, noting that the former are "are not hamstrung by the preferences of voters for, say, a pervasive welfare state." Yeah, democracy really blows that way, don't it chief?

Lastly, I'd be remiss if I forgot to point out the great work Bob Somerby has done in the past week or so at the Daily Howler. (I know, I probably link to him every time, don't I?) In short: "Al Gore said our discourse is broken. And his critics rushed to prove that he's right." Somerby looks at the way reporters for the Washington Post and the New York Times have responded, as Gore wrote they would in his new book, not to the substance of his arguments, but with Maureen Dowd-esque irrelevancies. Chris Matthews is getting paid millions of dollars to speculate about Gore's possible plastic surgery (there, now even I have spread this rumor... this is how coverage of prominent Democrats works-- remember Gennifer Flowers? Kathleen Willey? "Clinton's New Girl Friend" that the Google Ads promise to tell me about? ...Botox?). Somerby has also written about the way Matthews, the Washington Post and others have rushed out to hype the possibility of negative info about Hillary Clinton in a pair of new books. In doing so, these high-paid pundits have treated former Timesman Jeff Gerth as a reputable source-- despite the fact the man not only concocted much of the Whitewater fable, but was eventually fired from the Times for his shoddy reporting in the Wen Ho Lee story. Look it up.


Waiting for you is like waiting for the man in the moon.
R. Kelly: The World's Greatest

EVERYTHING'S COMING UP PIZNARSKI

Famous-sounding words make your head feel light.
Pixies: Gigantic (live, 1988)

Clicks are currency here in the ad-sponsored online media Interzone, and that simple fact changes not just how we interact with content, but also what content we see in the first place. In 2007, is the concept of a Googleable name so newsworthy it belongs on the front page of The Wall Street Journal? Just a couple of years ago, was the notion of college kids eating cereal really so novel it merited an entire trend story in The New York Times? Magazines like Time have pandered hard with sex and religion covers for decades, but the online medium has only intensified the media's emphasis on easy sells over timely news pegs. The difference: It doesn't even matter anymore if people actually read the story, let alone find it worth money. The click is all that counts.

News websites have a few different ways to generate clicks. The most valuable to readers is breaking a fresh story, but while this may be the best strategy for maintaining long-term credibility, it requires resources (talented reporters with time to develop sources) and flexibility (you can't schedule scoops). Another way to generate clicks is to write a story with broad inherent appeal: No matter what you write about universal topics like sex, religion, or health, if you write an intriguing headline, people are going to click. Keep your common denominator low enough, and AOL or MSN might even throw links your way (= more advertising revenue). Finally, sites can run cultish stories targeting readers who make up in passion what they lack in numbers. Not everybody cares about Sirius stock (ticker: SIRI), but everybody who does seems to click on every Sirius-related news story.

From a news perspective, the effect of the latter two options is to trivialize and segment the dialogue even further than cable TV shoutfests have already done. Websites run stories that are the journalistic equivalent of Cosmopolitan coverlines: A Slate article on "Hillary's red-state accent" probably doesn't have any policy relevance, but that headline is like American Apparel near-nudity for grabbing clicks-- whether or not anybody actually finishes reading the durn thing. Further, Sirius might not be particularly important, but click-conscious editors will probably assign additional resources to them to keep up their numbers, and end up missing out on smarter, tougher, more important stories. At some point, forget investigative reporting.


Not only is a man in the cabinet, but the man is a midget.
Los Campesinos!: We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives (cross-posted from Pitchfork)

I'm beginning to believe that Web music discussion is affected by these same trends, though probably not as consciously (none of my editors have ever, ever broached the topic). Here, too, news portals and click-conscious bloggers must know they can get the most bang from their buck writing about topics with extremely broad appeal. Or topics with tiny but devout (often aka bored) followings. And this is where I get back to one of the things that's bold and awesome about Matt LeMay's band, Get Him Eat Him (although in response to Nick's post, I like the album but have no idea how I'd go about rating it-- knowing somebody involved with a band tends to make me worry both about being unfairly positive and about overcompensating for perhaps being unfairly positive): This is an environment where the Top 40, MTV, and American Idol acts still have cross-niche appeal to writers and readers; everybody likes and writes about the tiny amount of stuff that gets a national push from non-Internet media. It's also an environment where we, overloaded with information, devote an inordinate amount of time to albums nobody seems willing to admit they don't get (in fairness sometimes I probably just don't get 'em). The faltering mass culture and the above-reproach avant garde. [though: Why accept Clive Davis's story as credible? Doesn't it enhance a pop star's image to portray her as a rebel rather than a product?]

"ANYWAY" (hyuck hyuck) what Get Him Eat Him do is put together influences from unjustly undermentioned '90s indie-rock heroes like Chavez and Shudder to Think and write catchy songs and actually sing well. This is neither low-brow nor incomprehensibly outre. In fact it's so barely a few years ago ("Oh, I'm listening to an indie-rock band") it seems like the type of thing that could get overlooked in the New Promotional Order. A one-line post about a buzzed-about record you've never listened to in its entirety (but OMG it just hit oink) would be an easier, flashier lure for buzzers/ees. WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO GET PEOPLE TO LISTEN TO STUFF NOWADAYS??? Are we making music "work" or did the technology just get that way.


My Crystal Gayle shirt is ruined.
Jonathan Richman: Springtime in New York

Elsewhere:

Here's more on what I was getting at in the non-musical portion of the post that prompted this discussion with Dave Moore. If no journalism at least strives for objectivity (while inevitably failing), then we're further from a well-informed democracy:

"You can always dismiss a blogger, or a partisan paper like the New York Post, as biased. But The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal have long batted down this complaint. That's because it rings so empty. The MSM makes an earnest (albeit occasionally flawed) effort to achieve a neutral understanding of events, and that's the source of an authority and prestige that even its harshest critics in the political and corporate elite still must respect."

If you haven't gotten to Tom Ewing's latest Poptimist column yet, you should. Key point:

"[C]riticism isn't at the brass-rubbing stage quite yet. To fully avoid it, it seems to me as a reader that music critics will have to stop relying on their superior taste and expertise, and start trading on their ideas and the conversations they help spark."

One crazy addition: I read some of my favorite music writers also for the pleasure of their prose, savoring the vitality of their language as much as what the words convey (the way people can listen to an album that sounds good whether or not the lyrics match up) (cf. especially Meltzer, Bangs, and Xgau, yes he of the "Consumer Guide"). Good writing can function without necessarily being only overtly functional, right? (Not saying I can even achieve this, but ideally it's one more way we could make ourselves useful.)


Look at that, a bear mining for coal.
Yoko Ono and Cat Power: Revelations

I TRIED TO WAKE YOU WITH A REALLY LOUD COUGH

If I had the money to go to a record store, I would.
The Tough Alliance: First Class Riot (cross-posted from Pitchfork)

"STOP TREATING MUSIC LIKE IT’S YOUR STICKER COLLECTION."
- Chris Ott, guest-posted in Nick Sylvester's RiffMarket

In the early '80s, my cousin Kent gave me a 1981 Topps Joe Montana rookie card. Kent lived in Iowa, so he was more of a Green Bay Packers fan, and he knew that his younger cousin-- not yet old enough to appreciate the gift-- was a drooling San Francisco 49ers worshipper. Also, Kent is awesome. My mom, witnessing the destruction I had wreaked upon my collection of more contemporary cards from 1983 and 1984, wisely stashed the card away in a drawer, where it was never seen again until I was old enough to take care of it. I once sent it to Joe Montana himself to autograph; he demurred, saying that signing a rookie card can actually diminish its value. The card now sits beside the 1990 Pro Set card he signed instead, in a frame at my parents' house (until I'm old enough to take care of it).

At its early-'90s peak, as I recall, that beautiful slab of cardboard was worth more than $200, at least according to Beckett. Of course, considering I would never sell it, the card is both worthless and "priceless," like that 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card Bob Costas lugs around in his wallet. The value of the card lies in what it represents to me about my most beloved football team of all time, the Montana-era Niners, and the many happy hours I spent watching and obsessing over them. Is it a little pathetic to fetishize a piece of paper depicting a dude who named his first three kids Alexandra, Elizabeth, and Nathaniel so their full names would all have 16 letters, matching the number he famously wore as quarterback? Probably.

In conversation, I've complained as much as anybody about the current blog-o-matic tendency to treat bands like collectibles. Many writers seem to pack in as many posts per day with as many up-and-coming artists as possible, but their words usually show little love, appreciation, or understanding for the performers they so tirelessly promote. What are the Cold War Kids about? My Pitchfork review revealed one interpretation, but I'd never seen any of their supposed online fans ever give the idea much thought, something that to me seems irreconcilable with normal fandom. How do they sing along? Further, the obsession with collecting seems not just shallow but also narrow, excluding, as Ott notes and Nick observed recently in a piece on Matt LeMay's Get Him Eat Him, a broad swathe of great bands (more on this in a future rant).

All those criticisms still stand. But reading Ott's post, I'm beginning to wonder if the "sticker collector" gripe might not be, probably subconsciously, a proxy for bigger worries. After all, the phrase "record collection" is common parlance, and even if it implies something different than music appreciation or fandom, broad knowledge/ownership of records hardly seems like a negative (except perhaps in the case of "record-collector rock"). Aside from the superficial, no-commitments way many people approach this stuff, I'm not sure what's wrong with a record collection per se. Don't we WANT kids to listen to more music?

Now, I'm sure Ott is being sincere, but it's particularly convenient for a guy like him-- whose "collection" might be said to include the likes of Joy Division, the Clash, Pink Floyd, Arab Strap, Stephen Malkmus, the Constantines, and uh Carlos D.-- to tell today's fervent young music acquirers to cease and desist. Imagine the parallel: A geezer with a yellowing hoard of '60,'70s, '80s and '90s baseball cards starts insisting that people shouldn't bother collecting anything he doesn't already own. If people follow this dude's advice, his collection will become more valuable, and theirs will become worthless. It's common knowledge that more music is put out today than ever; so, too, will the old guy avoid having to learn and obtain the endless varieties of premium and superpremium baseball cards and inserts released in recent years. Lucky that guy!

But bands aren't baseball cards, obviously-- or pogs, or stickers. I've never claimed to have always known as much about music as the modicum I know even now, and Ott certainly wasn't born clutching a 1952 Mickey Mantle. Someone had to give it to him. Instead of wishing technology would slow down or telling young music fans how they suck (and sometimes they do!), it would be more productive to help explain to them why we value certain older records, to help them appreciate new and old music rather than merely compete to own it. This is the function of a good music critic. It's in all of our collective best interest to foster a new generation of people who care about music as passionately as we do, just as it's in-- pardon me for again comparing art and commerce-- the best interest of the National Football League to inspire the kind of passion I had for Joe Montana's 49ers.

Of course, it's always in the best interest of an individual critic to be a dick. Otherwise, how would you get other bloggers to whine about you?


We got our own jihad if you know what I mean.
Bill Richardson: Job Interview and Tell Me

Elsewhere:

Via Bob Somerby, Jack Welch's well-paid Nantucket boys make a joke of your Democratic and Republican presidential debates. Brian Williams, the guy who made you rich is a billionaire douchebag-- do you still let him kiss you good night?:

BRIAN WILLIAMS, OPENING QUESTION (4/26/07): Senator Clinton, your party's leader in the United States Senate, Harry Reid, recently said the war in Iraq is lost. A letter to today's USA Today calls his comments "treasonous" and says if General Patton were alive today, Patton would wipe his boots with Senator Reid. Do you agree with the position of your leader in the Senate?

CHRIS MATTHEWS, OPENING QUESTION (5/3/07): In the NBC-Wall Street Journal poll, just 22 percent believe this country is on the right track. Mayor Giuliani, how do we get back to Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America"?

Williams tells us Patton would "wipe his boots" with a top Democrat, then asks Clinton if she supports such a treasonous wimp. Matthews implies the country was last on the right track under a Republican, using the Gipper's own marketing slogan. How do we get such utterly bizarre behavior from a so-called liberal media? Make your own inferences from a recent Poynter item: "Journalists shouldn't be part of a royal class in America."

A recent article in The New Republic by Joseph D. Becker raises important points about the growing divide between the nobles and the peasants in our glorious democracy:

BECKER: Last year, the president of the United States--the CEO of the country--was paid $400,000, with a $50,000 allowance for expenses and up to $100,000 for travel. The amounts are fixed by statute and do not vary with the success or failure of his administration. With responsibilities hardly comparable to the president's, the CEO of Citigroup made nearly $26,000,000 in 2006 (counting all benefits). He may have done better in his job than the luckless president did in his, but surely not 47 times better. Further, if the average annual wage of non-executive employees of Citigroup was, say, $50,000, the CEO made 520 times their salary. There are dozens of such astonishing cases. As a member of Congress recently said, "The average CEO makes more money before lunch than the average worker earns all year."

Becker goes on to call for a study group (how bold!) to look into ways to restrain surging public-sector compensation. However, his critics will point out that this will only cause executives to jump to the private sector, where their pay ISN'T restrained, or even public. And they'd be right. This problem goes way beyond Wall Street.

In a startling development, noted policy wonk Jonathan Cohn calls for more policy wonkery. I'm a big fan of Cohn's policy prescriptions, but I'm skeptical of the politics of this post. Earnestly or not, Cohn is basically the latest guy to carry the Edwards campaign's memetic water, insisting that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton need to give "details" on how they will implement their health care policies, when any honest answer at this early stage would have to be "it depends." Presidents don't enact health care legislation; legislators do. Matthew Yglesias gives an historical view of the subject.

Meanwhile, Colbert isn't just parody, folks. Wall Street Journal columnist Stephen Rademaker recently published a column attacking the "Blame America First" crowd. Subscription required, because people pay for this shit. Murdoch knows what's up.

Finally, there is no God: MC Rove might be an atheist. [UPDATE: He's also toast.]

FOUR IS A MAGIC NUMBER, BUT SO IS FIVE

"...forget racism, what strikes me about our media elite [is] how profoundly stupid they are."
- Atrios, 4/13/07


Meant to weigh in on the Don Imus dust-up. Y'all hear this shit? Rich, powerful, unexceptional white guy-- crony of other rich, powerful, unexceptional white guys-- gets booted out of a job for talking like a cracker. And he's not even politically conservative? Bro got famous with booze and coke streaming out his nose!

Jesus, the way Frank Rich tells it, it's almost worth telling. Free speech under fire! In a slow post-holiday week, too. Rich Boy, learning from David Brooks, makes a show of admitting his own hypocrisy in order to distract from his other hypocrisies. But c'mon now, scribes and Pharisees: First off, I don't care whether Imus stays on the air or not, but what he said was uniquely fucked. Second, Imus has been airing significantly more hateful thoughts about people of (sorry!) much greater importance for years now, getting his rocks off with the fraternity and poisoning your discourse. Third, Imus's firing shouldn't have a chilling effect on free speech because Don Imus is uniquely, profoundly stupid.

Oh I know we're all actually sitting around in our parlors calling various women "nappy headed hoes." Wait, no, we're NOT. It isn't as if this phrase is something "everybody thinks" but most ppl are too politically correct to say. It's not even the kind of language a traditional bigot like South Park "n----- guys" Mark Furman or Michael Richards might find accidentally running out of their mouths. It's totally weird. About anyone. How did these words even get in a man like Imus's brain? The Rutgers basketball team's blamelessness helped them win over the media, but that isn't why the insult was so disturbing. Guy even looked all smirky and proud of himself as he was warming up to deliver his new phrase (vid).


Only reason I come around is for the double-dutch.
Lil Mama: Lip Gloss

Back in the reality-based community, this is how the "Gang of 500" who run our national political discourse like to talk about everyone all the time. Especially women, but especially Democrats. Over at The Daily Howler, Bob Somerby remembers Imus "always" calling Hillary Clinton-- i.e., the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination-- "Satan" ("Satan"!) and dubbing Al Gore-- i.e., the man who was right all along about the two biggest issues of our time, Iraq and global warming-- simply "the most evil man on the planet." A more dysfunctional press corps could hardly be imagined. If a major political commentator were to use either phrase to describe John McCain or Rudy Giuliani-- or, more revealingly, Jack Welch-- do you think frequent Imus guests like Tim Russert, Jeff Greenfield, and Chris Matthews would still show up on that honky's show? Yet they kept hanging with Mr. Imus, at least until all us meddling non-millionaires had to go and get our race/gender panties in bunches.

Fact is, these and other figures of the Washington Establishment share the same hateful views, which aren't far removed from batshit Ann Coulterism. Our pundits would rather be Howard Stern than Walter Cronkite; "liberal bias" is an outmoded and rarely applicable term these days not because of FOX, but because of a deep-seated animus among the likes of the Washington Post, New York Times, and NBC toward all signs of intelligent life-- particularly from anybody linked to icky slicky Blowjob Bill. Bummer everyone who actually wants a career writing about this stuff is too desperate to work for those pubs to expose their prospective employers' journalistic malfeasance, huh?


"My daddy mentions me in his New York Times columns."
Rich Boy: Boy Looka Here

So you may not know that prominent Iraq war critic and former Democratic aide Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's Hardball, has called Hillary Clinton "witchy," a "stripteaser", and, to him perhaps worst of all, "ambitious", even falsely claiming hubby Bill has called her an "uppity woman." You may not know Matthews' long history of unprofessional petulance toward Gore: calling the former veep Bill Clinton's "bath tub ring", or a man who "doesn't look like one of us... he doesn't seem very American, even", or someone who would "lick the bathroom floor" to be President and wears troubling, troubling suits ("My joke is, “I'm Albert, I'll—I'll be your waiter tonight'").

You also may not know that, beginning in 1997, ostensibly liberal New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd for years wrote columns from the point of view of Gore's "bald spot"-- including a pre-election column on Nov. 5, 2000 called "I Feel Pretty." Now she complains a lot about Bush and interviews billionaires who accuse Hillary Clinton of being "ambitious." Aww.

Further, you may not know that Dowd wrote about seriously substantial issues like health care and Al Qaeda during the all-important summer of 1999, when the stage was getting set for the 2000 election. Wait:

July 28: Dowd described her recent lazer eye surgery.
August 1: Dowd reviewed the movie "Runaway Bride."
August 4: Dowd discussed a Talk magazine piece about the Clintons' marriage.
August 8: She interviewed Bob Dole on the prospect of being "first gentleman."
August 11: She compared the Talk magazine piece about the Clintons with an auction of Marilyn Monroe memorabilia.
August 15: Will Warren Beatty run for president?
August 18: Bush and the question of youthful drug use
August 22: Bush and the question of youthful drug use
August 25: Dowd reviewed a Showtime movie about Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas.
August 29: She ruminated on the life story of John McCain. "Never have so many men wanted to run," she mused, "to prove they are worthy to larger-than-life dads."
September 1: "I ran into Kato Kaelin the other night," she wrote—at the start of a piece about Monica Lewinsky's fashion business.
September 5: Dowd penned a review of the Paris, the new Las Vegas casino-hotel.


Airplane food was on the plane, airplane coffee too.
Karin Strom: Klaustrofobi
(plus great remixes over at Discobelle)

You may not even know that Frank Rich himself, the former theater critic who so skillfully bobbed and weaved on the Imus issue this weekend-- the devilish wag who makes you so happy in his Bush-bashing Sunday missives-- is the same dude who in 2000 called Gore "about as different from [Bush] as J. Crew and Banana Republic" under the headline "Survival of the Fakest", who mocked Gore's focus on actual policy ("Dingell-Norwood, anyone?") and pronounced the then-veep "the truly stupid one"; Rich is the shameless schmuck who even recently, in a column admitting An Inconvenient Truth is right, found it far more notable (troubling!) (phony!) that the film includes multicultural audiences, people who laugh at Al Gore's jokes, and the fact Al Gore once owned a gun. Did you know Rich helped make up the falsehood that Gore falsely claimed he and Tipper were an inspiration for the film Love Story, even though the story's author said the Gores really *were* an inspiration? Rich probably still thinks Al Gore said he invented the Internet. "Frankly, that's Rich."

Always focused on the big issues, today Rich Boy is miiighty concerned over Imus's canning. "If we really want to have this conversation" about the ugliness of the disgraced jock's words, Rich muses, "it also means we have to have a nonposturing talk about hip-hop lyrics, Borat, South Park and maybe Larry David." The fuck? I'm all in favor of Rich, Imus, Coulter, or any other moron having freedom of speech-- in the privacy of their homes, or on sidewalks and subway platforms (wild-eyed and spittle-flecked, haranguing passers-by)-- but the biggest difference between Imus's brand of humor and the stuff Rich mentions, aside from the fairly huge distinction between first-person speech and character-driven art, is that Imus's joke wasn't funny. At all. Who could defend it? As Different Kitchen notes, conservatives too are blaming the Imus brouhaha on rap. Do you think this man listens to rap? Does Michelle Malkin?



My dad models SN3 not HO scale but pretty close.
Tokyo Police Club: Cheer It On
(Ryan Dombal's take at Blender)

Borat looks at the world from the perspective of a casually offensive outsider in order to highlight our own casually offensive ridiculousness (part of the joke is the fact we even have to write all these big serious words about it, let alone the fact that kneejerk, joke-missing tuttutters like Frank Rich and David Brooks despise it)-- though, as Nick Sylvester notes, sometimes a blowjob joke is just a blowjob joke. South Park ventures into taboo territory on the premise that "either everything's OK, or nothing is"-- the freedom to transgress is what separates us from the Taliban (cancel Family Guy and the terrorists have won!). Larry David is pretty OK, I guess.

The rap question gets a whole lot more complicated. I've already touched on it in dealing with Devin the Dude's sometimes hateful new album, but I do get uncomfortable about the misogynistic/homophobic language and attitudes of yr fave rap clips. When Lil' Wayne is treating his objects like women, man, on the "It's Me Bitches" remix or on the really exciting so far Da Drought 3 mixtape, I squirm even as I can't help but be dazzled by his verbal acuity and charismatic delivery. In rap, you can kinda write stuff off as being spoken in character, but maybe it's just a music that-- like South Park, or more like the way rock used to be-- requires transgression to thrive. It's hard for rap to be good without being "bad"; that's why M.C. Hammer became instant kitsch (surely it wasn't the pants). Rap's moral ambivalence probably isn't going away anytime soon, but it doesn't have the least thing to do with the rich white guys at the top of the Washington, D.C. political journanimalism establishment being fuckwits.

Something else you probably didn't know: Dick Cheney was a major-league Imus fan. Yeah, big time. Cheney's spokeswoman once explained, "He has the same sense of humor that Imus has. He thinks Imus is funny. He gets good guests on. And he asks good questions. It's not really strategic or complicated. Not everything we do has to work on 50 different levels." (She totally loses me with that last part.)


You dudes gotta stand in the mirror backwards cuz you can't face yourself.
My boy John Mayer, circa 1999

Look, the only reason this matters is because if we don't understand the forces that have driven our discourse for the past 10-plus years, we can't begin to push back against them. The same hateful millionaire world view will be inflicted upon Obama, Edwards, or Richardson should they defeat Clinton, just as it was upon "phony," "French-looking," "wind-surfing," "effete" John Kerry-- another recent Imus victim (vid). In any other profession, such malpractice would've put these pundits out of a job long ago.

When Chris Matthews made the following statement last month, which fearless speaker of controversial thoughts might he have imagined nodding in cowboy-hatted agreement?

"You know, somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean, I think there might be a giant, green, ugly, horny monster. A gigantic, gigantic monster of anti-Hillary, and anti-woman Hillary, anti-liberal woman Hillary, some real ferocious beast out there that says no matter what happens between now and Election Day, they're not going to let her win. Men, some women, are just not going to let this woman, this woman win the presidency. I don't know whether that monster's out there. All men I meet are afraid to talk like that. You only hear criticism of Hillary from smart, college-educated women. They're the ones that always have a problem with her now."

HEY PUNDIT CLASS, RAPPERS AREN'T THE ISSUE HERE.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO TOUCH MY GIGANTIC MONSTER?


...As for Wonkette, she doesn't deserve to live.
Husker Du: New Day Rising and It's Not Funny

Elsewhere: Kelefa Sanneh compares Nine Inch Nails' noisy new Year Zero to '90s cyberparanoia.

Eric Harvey ponders Grindhouse, "art-enjoyment-context," and the Washington Post's novel panhandling experiment involving acclaimed classical violinist Josh Bell.

My Love of Diagrams review over at Playboy; my Mice Parade review at Pitchfork.