Entries from March 2005 ↓

There’s some very excellent music out there on the internets. Yesterday, I stumbled onto a song called Hana, which is very much unlike anything I’ve ever heard. It starts out annoying, two monotonous voices disharmonizing over a string section, but it’s just intriguing enough to keep you listening. And then, after it ends, about six minutes later, you come out of your daze, shellshocked and slightly unsettled and not sure what the fuck just happened, but fairly sure you want it to happen again. Check it out here.

And then there’s a Sri Lankan woman named MIA, who’s Galang is a sort of beat-heavy pop thing that fuses so many different styles that it’s hard to pick any of them out; which is, I think, the point of fusion, piecing old stuff together to make something new. Unfortunately, the song is accompanied by a video, in which MIA dances in various outfits on a shifting background of military ordnance. Her dancing skills are … well, worse than nonexistent, they’re Elaine-ish in their abject horribility. Still, you can close your eyes and listen.

And, best of all … someone came up with the bright idea of mashing Galang up with the theme from Super Mario Brothers! Cool does not begin to describe the coolness of the result. Check it out.

When I was around thirteen, and just waking to the tragedy of male pattern baldness, I decided to make a pact with my hair. “Hair,” I said. “here’s the deal: if you promise to not fall out, I promise I’ll leave you alone, forever.” My hair gave its silent assent, and I’ve been true to my word ever since. I have resisted any urge to comb, treat, mouse, shape, or otherwise molest my hair; I cut it rarely, and when I do the barber has strict instructions to refrain from any impulse to style, or sculpt, or in any way impose order on the chaos occurring on top of my head. “Shorter,” I say. “Make it not so long. That’s all.”

This policy has had the expected repercussions: the tumbled haystack of my hair gets many amused glances from peers, friends, professional associates, passersby. Clowns mock me. Mimes burst out laughing. But that’s fine. It was a bargain worth making.

Nevertheless … I’ve recently decided to break my oath. This morning found me standing in the bathroom, brush in hand, staring at myself in the mirror. “Ok,” I said. “Time to be a star.” I placed the brush on top of my head, and pulled it to the side. My hair let out an outraged protest, and held. I tried again, tugging hard, until, finally, a great shelf of hair rose up, trembled for a moment, and then fell.

I had a achieved a part.

I stared at myself, uncertainly, and tried: “Damn you’re good looking.”

Silence. The dog, loitering at my feet, snickered, then, when I rounded on him, dropped his head and snuffled at the floor.

I turned back. The hair was still there, sitting on my head like an ungainly ferret. An ungainly parted ferret.

So, holding the brush with the wary care of a pacifist wielding a bazooka, I dragged the hair back to the way it was, and then forward. It collapsed over my forehead like an untidy awning, like a circa-1980’s faux-punk do in mid-primp.

Grumbling, I tried parting it the other way. It tumbled rightward, settling into something that resembled the twisted aftermath of a forest fire.

I combed it straight back. It reared up and stuck, the profile of an ancient mountain range caught in mid-avalanche.

“So,” I said, in a low, dangerous voice. “It is to be war between us.” Glaring balefully, I reached down for the magazine on the sink, held it up to the mirror, and turned to the picture: a handsome outdoorsy thirty-something-looking fellow with a tousled thatch of artfully disheveled hair, previously authorized by my wife. “Tomorrow, you bastard,” I said, pointing, “this will be you.”

Because the truth is that all of this mucking around with my hair is, more or less, a direct result of persistent complaints from my wife; who after a decade of forbearance, has finally had enough. Whenever she ventures a look at my head these days, she cringes, points, and screams: “Oh my god! There’s a squirrel attacking your head!”

“Ha ha,” I say. “You like it. You know you do.”

“Your hair looks like a 75 cent halloween wig.”

“Ha ha,” I say.

“No really. It looks like a blackened cairn that’s just finished consuming some ancient Saxon king.”

“Ha ha,” I say, a little uncertain now.

“It looks like the tall fuzzy hats those English guard people who can’t move when you poke them wear.”

“You know, you’re about this close to hurting my feelings.”

She looks at me. “Cut it.”

“But I just cut it. A month ago.” I sigh. “Fine. I don’t think the Hair Slaughtery’s open now, but …”

She shakes her head, silently, and gives me a look that says “real haircut.” It says “expensive salon.” It says “divorce.”

“No!” I wail. “Not again! I can do it better than they can! For free!”

And that’s what led to the bathroom, and the mirror, and the brush, and the abject failure.

I still haven’t cut my hair, but I don’t think I can hold out for much longer. I have nightmares about great slavering shears with pointy yellow fangs and bulbous eyes bearing down on me. I wake screaming, pointedly, in the direction of my wife, but she just rolls over and goes back to sleep, muttering something about deadlines and prenuptial agreements.

This weekend, I go under the knife.

Goodbye, head squirrel. I hardly knew ye.

The Loony Room is buried deep in the catacombs that lie beneath the White House. It sits to the right of Cheney’s Hidey Bunker, where he goes for snarl augments whenever he feels his nastiness waning, and to the left of the special guest suite where the party hides Republican luminaries who need to lie low until some media firestorm blows over. Newt Gingrich stayed there until the newspapers forgot about his fall from grace; Trent Lott recently moved out, and Tom Delay’s about to move in, bringing with him enough ethics violations to fill an Ethics-Violations-A-Day calendar.

But the Loony Room is something else entirely. It’s where Bush goes to make all of his major policy decisions.

It’s staffed by two men who go by the names Lefty Bobblehead and Ignatius Beef Stew. Lefty is a former South African mercenary who wakes up to twenty thousand volts of shock therapy every morning. It makes more of a man out of him, he says, and also drives away the demons who hover around his head like a cloud of gnats. Ignatius is the former Jester to King Henry VIII, recently revivified by Karl Rove, who, in addition to his duties as deputy chief of staff, is also an Arch Necromancer. Doodleplex was able to infiltrate the Loony Room at the beginning of Bush’s second term, posing as a Democratic Pinata. More on that later.

On this particular day, nothing much was going on. Lefty Bobblehead was carving dozens of little puckered mouthes onto the forehead of a marble bust of Beethoven, while Ignateous Beef Stew was campering around the room, making strange noises and screaming at all the lampshades that displeased him.

Bush walked in. He seemed nervous. “I need appointments,” he said.

Ignateous was in the act of accusing a lightbulb of being a Papist spy. He paused, turned around, and said: “The parasols galavant like jackhammers!”

“Powel’s gone, Ashcroft’s leaving, the UN Ambassadordiship is open,” said Bush, who was clearly agitated. “I need bodies.”

“Stiffen the bowels! The bowels are destiny!” Beef Stew bounded over to Bush, executed a deft somersault and then stood on his hands, so that his feet, clad in large clown shoes with mouthes painted on the toes, were level with Bush’s face. He waggled them, and the mouthes seemed to move. “Have you seen my volcano?”

“I need suggestions now,” said Bush, unphased.

Lefty put Beethhoven down, and let out a long, incoherent scream. “AAAAAAA!!!!!!”

Beef Stew joined in: “AAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!”

Lefty: “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalllllllllbbbbbertooooooooooooo!!!!”

Beef Stew: “I am pure magma! Roil beneath my igneous wrath!”

But Bush was nodding. “Alberto Gonzales. I like it. What do you think, Attorney General?”

Lefty nodded. “Yes, his torture credentials will come in handy.”

“Good. How about State?”

“Well, you’ll need someone with no experience at all.”

“And,” said Beef Stew, tearing off his clothes and smearing pecan pies on his chest, “she needs to have failed utterly in whatever she’d doing now.”

Bush thought. “Condi?”

“Yes. Good.”

“Great. How about UN Ambassador?”

Beef Stew grimaced. “Haven’t we blown that up yet?”

Bush: “Not yet, no. We need them for elections and stuff.”

Left said: “Well, how about Madeline Albright? She has experience, she’s well-liked, and it would be a sort of a peace offering to the Democrats, perhaps helping to break the state of gridlock that’s gripped the Congress ever since you took office.”

Bush stared. “What?”

Lefty nodded, then picked up a lead pipe and whacked the nearest Democrat Pinada, a likeness of Ted Kennedy. It ruptured, and a cascade of bleeding hearts spilled out.

“I guess that make sense,” said Bush, after a moment. “I mean …”

“Gotcha!” screamed Lefty, and dove into the pool of hearts, splashing around like a man writhing in lava. “Pick Bolton! He hates the UN, and everybody hates him. Plus he wants to blow the place up. Also he has a beard!”

“Fuck you, rest of the world!” said Beef Stew. “And stop standing on my earmuffs!”

“Good. Ok, one more. World Bank.”

Beef Stew found a large spool of yellow Caution tape, unrolled it, assumed an oratorical stance, and began to read. “Wanted: World Bank President. Qualifications: Must have engineered a disastrous and unnecessary war that led to thousands of deaths, and then followed up with an occupation strategy that plunged the region into a state of total anarchy. Must enjoy making decisions in an echo chamber surrounded by lackeys and yes men. Must deny responsibility for any and all wrongdoing. Zero financial experience preferred.”

“Rummy?” said Bush. “But I need him to insult the Europeans and annoy the press.”

“You’ve got McClellan for that.”

“True. But still.”

Paul Wolfowitz walked into the room, and said: “Has anyone seen my Gauntlets of Infinite Denial? I’ve got a hearing in an hour.”

“Wolfy,” said Bush, smiling. “Just the World Bank President I wanted to see.”

I’ve always been kind of ambivalent about Hillary Clinton. I respect her and everything she’s done, I admire her intellect and her accomplishments, and I’m frankly mystified by the paroxysms of visceral, murderous hatred she seems to inspire in others. But there’s something about her that’s always turned me off.

But that was yesterday. As of five minutes ago, she’s one of my favorite senators, and it’s all because of this tasty exchange with Allan Greenspan, Fallen Financial Oracle cum Republican Shill:

Alan Greenspan and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton clashed briefly Tuesday over rosy surplus forecasts the Federal Reserve chairman relied on to support President Bush’s 2001 tax cuts, estimates that turned out to be considerably off the mark.

“It turns out that we were all wrong,” Greenspan conceded at a Senate hearing.

“Just for the record, we were not all wrong, but many people were wrong,” Clinton, D-N.Y., quickly shot back.

I still find the prospect of her running for president terrifying, because half the country will instantly vote for whatever guy/slime creature/ficus plant/wad of pocket lint runs against her, and we’ll have to endure another four years of Republican vileness and corruption. But I’m maybe just a little less terrified that I was before.

Juan Cole throws cold water on yesterday’s bubbly enthusiasm about the recent happenings in Lebanon:

The country appears deeply divided over how much presence Syria should have in Lebanon, and on where to place the blame for the death of former PM Hariri. a recent scientific poll by Zogby International, half of Maronites and Druze blame Syria for Hariri’s death. Only 14% of Shiites do, while 70% of Shiites blame the US and Israel. Shiites are probably over 40 percent of the Lebanese population, while Maronites are probably only about 20 percent (Lebanon may now be as much as 70 percent Muslim if Druze are counted in that group).

The spectacle of over half a million protesters coming out in Beirut while 200,000 to 300,000 came out on the other side in Nabatiya in the South the day before is worrisome, given Lebanon’s recent history of sectarian violence.

He’s right, of course. Dueling rallies are not a good sign. In fact, this could be very bad, indeed. And Bush isn’t helping things by “demanding” Syrian withdrawal … despite the posing, he has nothing to do with what’s happening in Lebanon right now. It’s a popular uprising, a match struck to a powderkeg of frustration, decades in the making, and his administration’s attempts to take credit for it just lends credence to the idea that Harriri’s death was the result of some sort of shadowy US/Israeli cabal. The Bush people will do anything — anything — to advance their political agenda, but I hope they have the good sense, and the basic humanity, to leave Lebanon alone.

An amazing picture of today’s opposition protests in Lebanon, which easily dwarfed last week’s Hezbullah demonstration:

Check out the symbolism: Harriri off to the side and in the back, behind a sign that says 100% Lebanese: he’s a goad to the demonstration, its origin, but no longer its main purpose. A crane in the background, rising above the city, symbol of progress and reconstruction, but also a sort of a cross beside the minaret of the nearby mosque, two antagonistic faiths finally standing together. Sunshine, sparkling blue ocean, nature’s gifts to Lebanon in full display. And, in the middle of it all, the Lebanese people, gathering together to say that thirty years is long enough, thank you very much, we’d like our fucking country back now.

You can’t discount Hezbullah, or Israel, or Syria, or any of that. Nothing’s over, this has just barely begun. But, all the same: the energy in that crowd must have been electric, captivating, uplifting, all-consuming. It could have powered cities, I’d imagine. Planets. Galaxies. I would have loved to have been there.

Ack. This post suffers from a marked lack of cynicism, and a ridiculous surfeit of wishful thinking. It’s just a picture, after all.

But what a picture. What a beautiful picture.

I’m supposed to be doing my taxes now, but it’s after 8:30, and after 8:30 I become officially useless. Nevertheless, every night, as that witching hours approaches, I steel myself and resolve that this time it’ll be different; this time, I will lower my head and barrel through my limitations. No: I will gore my limitations with my mighty horns of industry!

And, every night, I wind up parked in front of my computer, flipping listlessly through the internet and tending to my burgeoning gut with massive infusions of cornsyrup-laced pastasicles.

So, tonight, I’m going to try a different approach: I will engage in “introspection.” Introspection is the act of self-examination, a sort of private inner status check. But I will be doing so out loud, in print. Thus: extrospection.

The subject of tonight’s extrospection is a mistake I made today. I sent a story to SciFiction, an online fantasy/sci-fi mag. This was a mistake for several reasons, but most of them boil down to this: the story is not very good.

Why would I submit a story I know to be bad? Well, a couple of reasons; but, again, they all boil down to one: I couldn’t stand having it in the house anymore. I’ve been working on this thing for a couple of months now, revising and editing, cutting and adding, eliding and expanding, moving sections around in an endless game of musical paragraphs. Every time I looked at it, I found something that needed fixing, and every time I fixed it, it got either not better, or just plain worse.

The story was flawed from the start, I think. It never had a chance. Sometimes it happens: an idea that looks promising comes out stillborn, and you have no choice but to bury it, spend a couple of days mourning what it could have been, and then moving on. This was that kind of an idea, but I couldn’t put it aside. I just kept hacking at it. Over time, it did get better, but I don’t think it ever got good. I don’t think I had the power to make it good.

I couldn’t finish it, and I couldn’t abandon it, so I did the next best thing: I sent it away, where it will almost certainly be reviled by an editor who will quickly enter my name in her “auto-reject” database. Or maybe not. I don’t know. Because, after having toiled at it for so long, I find that the objective distance between me and the story has narrowed to a hairline crack. All of my efforts may have transformed it into a masterpiece, or — far more likely — twisted it into a broken monster, a drooling halfwit troll that roams the gaps between the circles of hell, looking for spent bottles to redeem for a nickel a pop.

But there’s just one more wrinkle. I find that, nestled underneath all of this self-conscious gloom & doom, there’s an irrational, unreasonable hope that it really is good, and it’s been fooling me all along. Hunter S Thompson got his big break when he gave up on the linear story he was writing for a newspaper and just sent in a mad set of scribbled notes; he was convinced he’d get fired, but the story was a hit, and Gonzo Journalism was born. Stephen King’s wife had to fish his first novel, Carrie, out of the trash, where King had thrown it in a fit of pique, convinced it was shit. That novel became a huge bestseller, and launched what is arguably one of the most successful careers in the history of literature. Khafka, who never sold a thing in his lifetime, instructed his friend to burn all his stuff after he died. His friend published it, instead.

I’m not equating myself with these geniuses, of course: I’m just saying that you to need to give yourself a chance, even when you know you don’t deserve it. Because maybe … just maybe … you do.

Winter blew back into town yesterday, screaming southward on gusty gale-force winds, dropping a swirling maelstrom of snow on the morning rush hour and then freezing it solid with a sudden, 20-degree plunge into frigid.

It made for some interesting views when I came out of work; patchwork skeins of ice plastered to the cars, stalactites hanging off of bumpers like ragged teeth, hard rivulets of freeze ribboning the sidewalks; and, here and there, scattered piles of crushed ice, as if some angry winter god had frozen the sky and then smashed it to bits with a big-ass godhammer.

Well, it looks like the Senate is going to pass their vile personal bankruptcy bill. Declaring bankruptcy is about to get a lot harder for the rabble; predictably, however, the aristocracy and the corporations remain untouched. I can’t think of a more perfect symbol of the current state of the Republican party: a pack of amoral, heartless thieves.

[Frothing Ends]

Update: Turns out 12 Democrats voted for this thing too. So we need to swing the Swine Umbrella over to the other side of the aisle, in order to cover everyone involved. My apologies to the contingent of Republican Swine, for unfairly singling them out.

Saw this sign taped to a window at work, over a broad, and bare, windowsill:

Please bring back my plant. I was just trying to give it a little sun.

How sad.