Wild in the Streets Thursday, November 04, 2004

Driving to work this morning, at the usual unspeakable hour, it finally happened. I had been waiting for it, going on three years now, and it happened just before dawn on a back road outside of Princeton. Good thing I was at a red light, or I might've driven off into the cornfields.

It was the absolute worst song I have ever heard in my life. I can't give you the precise lyrics--I was too stunned to get the artist's name--but the narrative included a boy who went to school but couldn't find no job; and a girl "from the good part of town" who ended up on a street corner because her "daddy did things to her [you can't talk about]."

This easily trumped the second-most astonishing music-industry extrusion I had seen in recent weeks: a video for a John Cougar Mellencamp song that involved--I swear on the seeping wounds of Christ--a woman in a wheelchair whose trailer is firebombed by a gang of rednecks. For loving a sensitive dwarf! I'm sure the songwriter above is kicking himself for not thinking of that one first, provided he's not confined to a wheelchair.

I hesitate to draw political points from all this. But I can't help seeing connections between the Little Nell-ism and the Vote Kerry tour conducted by Bruce Springsteen, REM and the Dixie Chicks--a kind of Blind Faith of clapped-out bien-pensants. Likewise the sneering of B-list Bolshies like Steve Earle, whose voice seems to be squeezed from a sphincter where his nose meets his brain.

It's not that rock has become politicized; politics has become rock-and-roll. Emotion, attitude and posing trump common sense. How different is the girl on the corner and the sensitive dwarf from Edwards's "Two Americas"? Both are based on the same idiot assumptions and absolute lack of context. And both think magically about the solutions--see also Kerry's plan for making the world safe for Nongovernmental Organizations.

In this light, Kerry's campaign was nothing more than a failed comeback tour for a Woodstock-era dinosaur. He might have taken a lesson from John Fogerty, who recently dusted off his old playbook for a new record, but crossed out Vietnam and Nixon and pencilled in you-know-where and you-know-who. Kerry managed to do the latter, but forgot to fix the former.

@ 9:17:00 AM, ,

Let George Do It Wednesday, November 03, 2004

I hesitate to say too much, since the Overclass Wehrmacht is still picking over the results. But after a long afternoon of nail-biting and a sleepless evening, things look good. Yesterday morning, when I told a friend that I was going into a cocoon and ignoring the updates, she wrote back: "How can you sit this out? The future of civilization is being decided in the next nine hours!" Truer words. I conked out just after Ohio.

At any rate, more when it's official. (Also a quick hello to the newest Blog Baby in the e-vicinity, a girl of eight pounds born to one of the link fraternity at left! Which one? I'll wait for the official announcement to spread the word...)

@ 7:28:00 AM, ,

A Crazy Little Place Called Be There Now Tuesday, November 02, 2004

As you can tell from the posts below, I've been preoccupied. Imagine driving cross-country in a car that can only hold one gallon of gas at a time, and a spoonful of lube. But then imagine that the car is a spotless Phantom roadster, and you had never wandered farther than your corner in your life. Unthinkable vistas and a thundering ride. (And faeces--lotsa faeces.)

I'm going to elide Wrong Turn Jr.'s history and name--it's his life, not the Web's. But I will observe that he is a lemon pound cake, a bread-crumbed meatball and an overripe Bartlett pear; he has eyes that watch and a mouth that bubbles. His hands appear to be made of marshmallows. His stomach is a water balloon. He speaks dolphinese and goatois.

I would've blogged sooner, but what else is there to talk about? You all know you have to vote, and you know which button I'd urge you to push. Music? I haven't been able to take much of it seriously since WTJr. came along. Most of what I used to dig sounds superfluous now; for one thing, I just don't have the time or the brainpower, and for another, the sentiments seem ridiculous now. It's tough to identify with songs about bad breakups anymore, or with, say, Tom Waits's hobo posing. (Oy, his new record is a toughie. But that's another post, from a different world.)

Then again, there's religion, on which WTJr. has given me a whole new perspective. I need to rush off to other things, but here's the thumbnail: I never really understood what "do unto others" meant, or why God turned himself into a servant, until somebody else was completely dependent on me.

Groove on that. We'll talk later.

@ 8:02:00 AM, ,