More flotsam from my life-on-Mars phase:
I didn’t know this video existed, until now. I wish I had a clip of Ochs’ performance at the first Winter Soldier (two years later than this TV appearance) but this is good enough for now. Knowing that the vets in Detroit heard Ochs’ anthem, just before four days of hearings on war crimes, makes me feel more certain than ever that I chose the right title for the book.
My bankruptcy lawyer, among others, is quite aware of my financial illiteracy (something I’m not proud of). Which has likely made it amusing, for the five to ten regular readers of this blog, as I worried about having to get an MBA in order to understand NYC’s then-peaking real estate market. I wanted to simultaneously get a Ph.D. in philosophy, so that I could find a way to articulate that whatever allowed these guys to get away with what they were doing, it was wrong.
Now, thanks to the invaluable Sullivan, I learn that the degree I was really missing? I could have written their kind of lucrative fictions – but I needed to use advanced mathematics.
I can’t wait for the episode of the show above entitled The Gaussian Copula.
You know you’ve spent too much time doing nothing but write when you show up at a party of sorts – the Philadelphia Drinking Liberally, featuring cool folk like Duncan and Jeremy and Roxanne – and end up fading into the background. You know you’re hanging out with bloggers when you realize its been way too long since you posted, so you might as well liveblog a presidential speech.
I wake up to find that my publisher was just like those purple lines of joy we saw dancing at the bottom of the speech. I just posted her love letter here: go click on it, if only for the Jimmy Stewart film clip. Then read below, for my somewhat-snarky-almost-grateful musings.
The group that was clustered at the bar is now all crowding into this conference/semi-banquet room, which was also cold until filled with bodies.
Frankly, it’s been a relief to hear someone reasonable at each press conference- but as I write this I hear that Obama is going to announce *here* that he’s not going to withdraw troops from Iraq as he’d promised. Ouch.
Keith and Rachel trying to figure things out as they go. We’ll see what we think by what’s actually said.
Lots of brass in the house. Young men in dress uniforms and Purple Hearts, shyly greeting Jane Harman et al.
Jill Biden (god, she *is beautiful) shaking one of their hands. Someone serving with Beau?
Kirsten Gillibeand looking incredibly short. Rache calling her “Senator from the Lollipop Guild.”
The Cabinet files through: Hilda Solis – confirmed today! – grinning in the crowd. She and Susan Rice also in the short crowd 😉
This room erupts in applause when Ginzburg shows up – looking pretty healthy, surprisingly.
I personally love the Baltimore-born Italian San Francisco girl at the head of the room, gently clapping as her Prez shakes hands along the way.
To have the Supreme Court clapping for you: I can’t imagine how that must feel.
Ohhhhh FUCK those lines, like in the debate. NOOOOOOOOOOES!
Peanut gallery (the bloggers): “si se puede!” when he says “We will rebuild.”
Professor Obama: “It is only by understanding how we got to this moment..”
For too many years we ignored crises in:
energy, healthcare
global economy
more debt than ever before
short-term over long-term
‘surplus became an oppty to transfer wealth to the wealthy,” thank you.
Pelosi looking tired/worried now
“begins with jobs,” gets applause. applauds stimpak, are Reeps applauding?
Kerry grins a little much, as if he’d been drinking. McCain absolutely has.
“A proven and effective Inspector General.” That guy, who looks like he’s just been told his wife is pregnant again?
9:20 update: Lecture re “if we don’t get lending restarted”
new lending fund – auto loans, student loans, etc
Won’t help speculators, will help others struggling w/declining home values……
When we learn a major bank has serious problems,we hold accountable, fix them. Is he talking receivership w.o talking recerivership?
Joe Lieberman sucks on a sour lemon.
“..private jet. Those days are over.” easy applaue line.
McCain voters happier than Obama voters? (from the lines….)
My job is to solve the problem. Thats what this is about. Not helping banks but helping people. Trickle-down theory of bank fixes.
What exactly i this reform u speak of? I know, I know, this is a night for big concepts…..
Eric Cantor’s forced smile: what he been smoking?
Civil war railroads, public high schools, GI Bill – big government you can believe in?
Govt catalyzed private enterprise. Three areas: energy, healthcare, education.
Energy: Van Jones approach? Camera goes to Steven Chu when Obama mentions how much further along China is on this stuff.
Double supply of renewable energy, research, power lines. – clean energy! market-based cap on pollution..
re-tooled auto industry. “the nation that invented the auto cannot walk away from it.” how???
healthcare: The real issue here. Can’t afford to put healthcare reform on hold. Applauds S-CHIP. Now on to electronic health records, etc. Curing cancer. Where’s the word universal health care?
“quality healthcare for every American” = universal? Mandate, as Ezra says Obama finally accepts?
“Will not wait another week.” Better mean it.
Education: more charter schools. at least one yr of higher ed for every American. (Now? On top of what we have, or?)
by 2020 America will once again have highest proportion of college graduates in the world
If you’re volunteering or serving your country, we’ll make sure u get thry college
Hatch-Kennedy National Service Act?
“No substitute for a parent.” Lindsey Graham playing with his hair obviously needed one.
“The deficit e inherited” gets applause, but what now?
$2 trillion in savings over the next decade. Payments to large agribusiness, no-bid contracts in Iraq, cold war weapons systems we don’t use. Ending tax breaks for corps that ship jobs overseas.
McConnell and Hoyer lean in as if they’re buds.
When he talks abt including both wars in the budget, both line go up and up.
The men in uniform, many with gray hair and tons of medeals, lean forward as people applaud. Then they applaud, too.
Obama does a coin pose.
expanded health care for vets.
Closing of Gitmo, “swift and certain justice.” But what of Bagram? Still, no-torture pledge is worth something.
Closing phrases. diplomacy, envoys, forge alliances, incl G-20 on trade etc.
Now the poster children: Leonard Abess, bank prez who gave his bonus to employees, Greensberg, KS (new green town post-tornado), and Ty’Sheoma Bethea, girl from SC school who wrote to Congress. She smiles when he quotes her saying “We are not quitters.” This feels like that pre-election movie from October. Camera on Sully Sullenberger.
“We must show them we are equal to the task before us. ” Knows everyone loves this country and wants it to succeed. (really?)
“This was the time.” Reminiscent of South Carolina speech. Totally jazzed and relaxed at the same time.
now time to make the long, wearying trek back to Nofeast Philly…..
Before it gets too old: Paul Schindler at Gay City News (one of the hardest-working and most brilliant journos I know) sends this report from the weekend’s Human Rights Campaign dinner, where Keith Olbermann (above) schooled the lawmakers in the room:
In an evening when the governor of New Jersey made his most forceful statement to date in support of marriage equality, the new Senate majority leader in New York State pledged to make gay marriage a reality here, and New York City’s mayor once again promised to lobby the Legislature in Albany to help get that done, the crowd’s heart at the February 7 Human Rights Campaign gala in Manhattan’s Hilton Hotel, it seemed, belonged to a cable television political commentator.
In honoring Keith Olbermann, host of MSNBC’s nightly “Countdown,” with its Ally for Equality Award, HRC took particular note of a “Special Comment” he made about California’s Proposition 8 six days after the election. As Olbermann was poised to take the stage Saturday evening, a clip from that “Special Comment” was replayed to a hearty standing ovation.
The rest of the piece is a must-read: Schindler explains the complexities of gay and progressive politics with his usual elegance. He also includes video of Majority Leader Malcolm Smith wading into those complexities.
Still CRAZY deadlined. Spent much of the weekend in 1968, when — as Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan put it in their 1984 Who Spoke Up?: American Protest Against the War in Vietnam — “events happened so quickly, hammer blow after hammer blow, that in retrospect it seems astonishing that the national psyche survived intact. Perhaps it did not. ” I didn’t even make it to the NYC re-release of the film above, though I’m being told about it by enough others who were there when it was first filmed. I’ll write more about them later, but in the meantime, here’s a glimpse of why I started my journey into this book in the first place. (Hanoi Hannah is a Pandora radio station that I didn’t start, but is giving me a soundtrack right now).
When I was a teenager, in the course of a few years I gobbled books by all the masters of science fiction — Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, Harlan Ellison — paying more attention to plot than prose. That was mostly appropriate, both as a 13-year-old and because for most, what made the books special was their exquisite and inventive plots. I know I read Fahrenheit 451: what I remembered most vividly was the ending scenes of old men whispering excerpts to one another, which is where its stellar plot takes you. After I left the boys behind for a more varied literary canon, I lumped Bradbury in with the others and never looked back.
This week, the book came into my hands almost accidentally. “OK, how come no one told me he’s a poet?” I asked Rachel, astonished by its first pages.
It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. … Montag grinned the fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by flame. He knew that when he returned to the firehouse, he might wink at himself, a minstrel man, burnt-corked, in the mirror. Later, going to sleep, he would feel the fiery smile still gripped by his face muscles, in the dark. It never went away, that smile, it never ever went away, as long as he remembered.
What a fool I was at 13, I thought. Just as I was then sneering at Kerouac. in the Bradbury I sped past something that would have mattered to me a scant two years later, the year I discovered James Joyce. I looked at the copyright date, 1950, and first saw the obvious: Miller, HUAC Berryman. But I was also taken by its only-slightly-off-base prefiguring of our televisual age, which I now know Bradbury later identified as the book’s core message. In Montag’s house,the walls are alive: three of them, at least. Those walls are filled with a story half-acted by people his wife calls “the family”, just as my students at CUNY saw J-Lo and Kobe Bryant as members of theirs. I think Bradbury also did pretty well for 1950 in predicting reality TV:
The homemaker, that’s me, is the missing part. When it comes time for the missing lines, they all look at me out of the three walls and I say the lines. Isn’t that fun, Guy?
“How long you figure before we save up and get the fourth wall torn out and a fourth wall-TV put in?” the protagonist’s wife asks him. “It’s only two thousand dollars.” That’s about the price of the bigger plasma TVs out there now, that are all the rage (a sale of which prompted those awful Walmart tramplings on Black Friday). And while the books are burned to keep control over the ideas within them, Bradbury knows by then that we’re not actually in Orwell’s world, we’re in Aldous Huxley’s. I wonder if the director of the inevitable new movie based on the book (superseding the visual poetry of the Truffaut film above) will know to riff on those themes, or if he’s planning to turn Montag into some Neo. I hear Tom Hanks has dropped out, which is just as well: this is obviously a job for Ironman.
I can’t decide whether Twitter is an exercise in mass haiku, an ADD enabler, a time sink or all of the above. I’m therefore not doing a widget with this. But if you tweet, consider following Chris411 and I’ll reciprocate. (Though if I know you, you’re too busy following Brent Spiner or Rachel Maddow.)
Update: Apparently, via this site you can also follow Lincoln’s and other tweets-throughout-history. I’m sort of terrified to look there for James Joyce or Joan of Arc.
That there’s “consensus” about the wars we’re mired in:
p.s. Part of me is still holding onto yesterday’s glow, at least a little – and bemused by what ended up in the liveblog I was running all day: earnest joy, snark, sly memories, and thanks to Julia, an endorsement from a bobcat.
For many, probably most, people today’s observance is also a cry of joy about the possibilities represented by (say it!) President Barack Obama. But I personally hope our new president listens to *this* MLK speech tonight somewhere, and maybe puts a podcast of it on his iPod or something. The words still hold, until big changes are made. (Video via SF channel kensonofkevin.)
Not to be all late-boomer about it, but I’ve had the line “Iraq=Korea/ Afghanistan=Vietnam” flash through my mind a lot lately. The first war prosecuted by an amiable fool, the second by the “best and brightest.” Put it on my list of Bumper Stickers I Don’t Want to See.
My journalistic ouevre is not as deep as most. But for ha-has, I did an ego search on Google Books, and found myself cited in more books than I expected (and quoted,too). I irrationally went, “Woot!” I’m also deeply curious what piece of mine falls under “restricted’ content.
Now I have to go back to getting my *own* book to join them there.
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Military Justice in Vietnam: The Rule of Law in an American War – Page 209by William Thomas Allison See also Chris Lombardi,”The Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of
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Sexual Rhetoric: Media Perspectives on Sexuality, Gender, and Identity – Page 45by Meta G. Carstarphen, Susan C. Zavoina – Social Science – 1999 – 304 pages Chris Lombardi, spokeswoman for a group of former servicewomen who say they … top training official as saying possible remedies for the military’s sex …
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Masters of War: Militarism and Blowback in the Era of American Empire – Page 308by Carl Boggs, Ted (FRW) Rall – Political Science – 2003 – 371 pages Military…Chris Lombardi, Women’s Enews …
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Child Maltreatment Risk Assessments: An Evaluation Guide – Page 217by Sue Righthand, Bruce Kerr, Kerry Drach – Social Science – 2003 – 216 pages …that only decisive action by military leadership at all levels can break the
cycle …Chris Lombardi, Correspondent. Women ‘s E-News, New York City THE … |
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Psychological Trauma and the Developing Brain: Neurologically Based …by Phyllis T. Stien, Joshua C. Kendall – Psychology – 2003 – 270 pages [ Sorry, this page’s content is restricted ]
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Simple and Complex Post-traumatic Stress Disorder: Strategies for …by Mary Beth Williams, John F. Sommer – Medical – 2002 – 408 pages [ Sorry, this page’s content is restricted ]
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Social Welfare: Politics and Public Policy with Research Navigatorby Diana M. DiNitto, Linda K. Cummins – Political Science – 2006 – 562 pages [ Sorry, this page’s content is restricted ]
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Child Trauma Handbook: A Guide for Helping Trauma-exposed Children and …by Ricky Greenwald – Psychology – 2005 – 341 pages |
Incredible Panic Rules 