CHRONIC CITY

"Paranoia is a flower in the brain," asserts the incredibly named Perkus Tooth, nexus of all the strange happenings that run through Jonathan Lethem's very strange novel "Chronic City." Lethem waters and fertilizes that flower with every paragraph of his new book, which tracks a lonely former child star named Chase Insteadman across the cramped wasteland of moneyed New York, suggesting tinfoil hatfuls of bizarre conspiracies that threaten never to come to fruition.

Newsday - 10/18 (link to syndicated affiliate)

MAHIDA'S EXTRA KEY TO HEAVEN

Mahida's Extra Key to Heaven" belongs to a line of vaguely political plays that laud man's basic secular goodness and lament his tendency toward faith, conflating Jesus freaks with Muslim terrorists and mourning gentle humanism. At opposite ends of the cultural spectra are Edna and Thomas, a conservative American homemaker and her flighty artist son; and Mahida and Ramin, a liberal Iranian studying in the U.S. and her fanatical brother. Finely tuned perfs and nuanced direction from Will Pomerantz give the play some excellent textures, but what good is theater that presents the audience with all its favorite opinions?

Daily Variety - 9/29/09

A BOY AND HIS SOUL

You can barely hear Colman Domingo over his shirt -- a skintight, pastel plaid number at which he plucks while he explains his love of thrift stores. "You can't keep me out of the motherfuckers," he crows, striking his second pose in one sentence. Shirt and show are a little thin, but the performance underneath both is so engaging that the 85-minute memory play always fits nicely, no matter how worn the coming-of-age material. Backed by a terrific soundtrack, Domingo brings the same frantic energy to "A Boy and His Soul" that made his "Passing Strange" performance so much fun.

Daily Variety - 9/24/09

THE CONFIDENCE MAN

It's a good thing "The Confidence Man" is free -- it requires at least three viewings. Not because it's particularly obtuse or dense, but because there are three different, dovetailing strands of playlets in simultaneous motion aboard the good ship Lilac, a rusty old tub that sits at Pier 40 on the Hudson. Nominally inspired by Herman Melville's novel of colorful steamboat passengers, Paul Cohen's gratifyingly ambitious script manifests itself less as a single play than an impressively cohesive piece of installation art about swindling, literally buoyed by the verisimilitude of its maritime setting.

Daily Variety - 9/16/09

THINGS YOU SHOULD READ TODAY

Who wants to read that gov't sponsored health care bill everyone's been begging for/ afraid of? If the answer is "Me! Me!" please click here. And if the answer is, "That stuff is boring! I'll find out what I think on Fox News/MSNBC later," please don't vote in the next election.

[]

Dick Cheney likes to kill people! Seymour Hersh said it, the New York Times accidentally referenced it (read the Hersh blurb first), and then this week the Times full-on reported it. Tell me, how do you get away with creating death squads available for deployment in Nowhere, Pakistan, where they will supposedly kill terrorists but are much, much more likely to cause an international incident? How do you make them personally answerable to you, without any congressional oversight at all? How do you do that as Vice President of the United States, a position with no actual authority or influence? And why aren't you in jail, if you do manage to pull it off?

One of life's little mysteries. Choice quote from the article "'It sounds great in the movies, but when you try to do, it it’s not that easy,' said one former intelligence official. 'Where do you base them? What do they look like? Are they going to be sitting around at headquarters on 24-hour alert waiting to be called?'" Remember, Dick Cheney did not serve his country during the Vietnam War! Or any other war! Mostly, he served himself.

Truly, he is the trickiest Dick of all.

[]

Randall Terry is the victim/subject of a not altogether sympathetic profile in the Washington Post today, which chronicles his troubled personal life and the dangers of extreme pro-lifing, which, as anyone who ever went to an Operation Rescue Rally will tell you, is a full-contact sport.

[]

And Matt Taibbi's hair-raising article about Goldman Sachs is finally up at Rolling Stone. It is quite frightening, even if read with an appropriate skepticism (Taibbi is a brilliant writer, but he's an investigative journalist, which means he presumes people guilty until proven innocent. It's the only way to do it, and he does it well). A good, if not altogether successful rebuttal is here at reasonable libertarian Megan McArdle's blog on The Atlantic.

TODAY IN CRAZY PEOPLE

Former Bushie John Bolton, scrotum of the body politic, believes that Israel, yes, folks, the nation of Israel, should invade Iran, because the Tehran-only rioting over the country's stolen presidential election means that everyone in the Islamic Republic just can't wait to be annexed by Jews.

Lord knows that the Iranian people deserve (and very likely elected) a much better leader than nuke-pushing holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but there's a perception that everybody up to and including Allah was on the side of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and that perception is - how to put this - dead wrong.

First of all, Mousavi himself is not exactly a baby-kissing peacenik. A Mousavi regime would not differ significantly with the current one except in terms of crazy race-baiting nonsense and inflammatory rhetoric, which would admittedly be an improvement. The actual heroes of all this craziness are the young people who rallied behind the slightly more liberal candidate like he was Barack Obama and not a marginally less offensive theocrat. They want a more liberal government, and they thought half a loaf was better than none until they discovered their government wouldn't even give them the half.

Secondly, there is a slim chance that Ahmadinejad actually did win the election, although we'll never know now, since nobody bothered to count the votes.

I interviewed a bunch of reporters who had just gotten out of the country, most of whom were terribly depressed about the state of things there. Interestingly, Jason Jones of "The Daily Show" had some fascinating things to say, and this is one that didn't make it into my article: "People keep asking if this is going to be the next revolution, and the answer is 'no.' The government controls the money and the guns. There's not much they can do. In 79, the whole country was involved in the revolution, and this is really divided."

Jones says that his team went to Qom and other rural areas around Iran, where they met a great many people who were not, in fact, thrilled with the possibility of a more moderate Iran and believe all the horrible anti-Semitic, anti-American rhetoric spread by the current administration. Sadly, the anti-American rhetoric is not entirely baseless - the US did in fact help to overthrow Mohammed Mossadeq, an unswervingly democratic leader who decided not to give us preferential access to his country's most precious natural resource. So we had him deposed and installed the country's most hated ruler, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Good for us.

By remaining utterly silent until the last possible minute, President Obama, whose foreign policy, at least, is living up to his promises, managed to totally undercut the paranoia Ahmadinejad had been trying to foment about present-day American involvement in Iran. Obama has publicly slammed Ahmadinejad for persecuting his people (long after the election was actually held, of course), but that is to be expected - the main thing to do now is not to interfere further. This is an internal conflict in a country that has never been a close ally of the United States, and it is also a potential revolution with a lot of momentum behind the correct side. Agitators didn't help the Iranian people overthrow the Shah; they did that by themselves.

[]

Times Square was filled with people yesterday, all of them carrying signs that said "TEA: TAXED ENOUGH ALREADY," "OBAMA'S CHANGE IS KILLING MY HOPE" or "OO-RAH!" but might as well have been nametags reading "Hello, My Name Is Ignerunt Savidge" (you haven't PAID Barack Obama's taxes yet, jackass. Bitch to me next year).

As various speakers began to whip the crowd into a frenzy, the attendees started to mount the stand in order to deliver anti-tax testimonials, or something.

"My husband worked hard his whole life so we could have private health insurance," said one woman before I plugged my ears and ran away. I worked hard my whole life and still have to buy my own incredibly shitty limited coverage health insurance, lady. God protect me from anything I can't fix with Claritin, Maker's Mark, and four-year-old hydrocodone.

[]

Here in the news biz, any time immediately before a holiday or a weekend, or better yet, a holiday weekend, is considered an opportune moment for a "newsdump." This is what happens when you have a bunch of papers you legally have to release (but really don't want to), a slight case of the galloping homosexuals that could lead to the loss of your Senate seat, or an embarrassing photograph of yourself with a girl who told you she was eighteen.

So what happens the Friday after Michael Jackson dies, a few days before the 4th of July, and amusingly stupid Governor Mark Sanford is busy telling everyone who'll listen about his affair with an Argentinian reporter?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/26/AR2009062603361.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/featuredCrisis/idUSISL400063

Remember, today is Thursday. Let's see what happens tomorrow, when most reporters are off.

[]

Kim Jong-Il, do you WANT the Pentagon to turn Pyongyang into a smoking crater?

PANIC EATS YOUR BRAIN

Pic via Gawker

Here's a problem: leech-like O'Reilly Factor producer Jesse Watters snuck into the GE shareholders' meeting to hassle CEO Jeff Immelt about the leftward slant of MSNBC. Meeting attendees, some presumably egged on by Fox, some not, joined in the tirade, slamming the cable network for boosting the president. It's unclear how much of the screaming was News Corp in origin, but the point is actually a quasi-valid one: MSNBC is a liberal network supporting a president who may give its parent company a heaping helping of federal money.

On the other hand, Fox News is an organization that wouldn't know journalistic ethics if they danced a kickline through the newsroom.

The problem here is less that no one is listening to these bozos and more that people are only hearing ridiculous "Obama is a Marxist" conspiracy theories from halfwits and scaremongers, while avoiding the actual conflicts of interest that stand to harm you, me, and everyone we know.

So here it is, in small words that everyone knows: The people with the money will fuck you.

Simplistic? Possibly. But if I hear another conservative wax rhapsodic about the good old days of the Reagan Administration, I'm going to spam everyone I know with copies of this. The world is not better when we trust the rich to give more money to their workers out of noblesse oblige. Read a Dickens novel.

The right used to know that, sort of, although their love of a literally demented cowboy actor blinded them to some of the finer points. Now, though they only seem to get angry when somebody in the government tries to give money to poor people. The Obama bailout/budget is populist to the max: it creates blue-collar jobs, gives money to the needy, and cuts taxes on everybody but the extraordinarily rich... and yet we now have "tea parties" in which people who voted for George Bush twice run around screaming about government spending because Newt Gingrich told them to.

And conservatives continue to whine about tax hikes, which are not in fact happening, and how the government is usurping the role of private charities and secularizing the nonprofit world.

That last one really gets my goat: "The government should not give money to poor people; it should let religious organizations take care of that." Why, because you've done such a shit-hot job of it up to now?

I wish to Christ someone would argue with me about this stuff, but everyone is zonked out on the Swine Flu, of which there have been a whopping ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-TWO (mostly nonfatal) CASES WORLDWIDE!!!! I've also been hearing about a deadly disease called CANCER, rumored to be affecting people in the MILLIONS! WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE, LIKE, NOW!

Here, America, buy one of these and use it to get a grip. Then focus on the pork, not the swine.