More Random Poop (w/ Bullets)

But no lectures aboot Susan Sontag.

• The Guess Who has got to be one of the worst groups in the history of humans.  Look, I understand the studio/hit version of American Woman.  I have never particularly have liked the song but I understand why it was such a big hit.  It sounds like a hit, the lyrics are kinda punkish, they've got attitude (even if it is stupid) & it does have a good beat, if you know what I mean, but their other (modest) hits, especially No Time Left For You, or whate'er the fuck it is called are so painfully bad that it is not e'en worth discussing.  (But, of course, I will.)  Listening to No Time today at work it was plain that the singer was just stretching rhymes together.  "Watch and chain"? Really? And the singer's 'plea' for peace is so lethargic, stale, and insipid that it shows in great big bright lights just what the singer is really singing aboot:  Another Hit Single.  Ugh! Where is Bill Hicks when you need him? Oh, here he is.  Play from your heart.  And I am not even going to get in to the whole Lester Bangs Live Guess Who review.  It is in this book.  Buy this fucking book.  If you do nothing else with your paycheck this Friday, lay down fifteen measly dollars and buy Carburetor Dung this weekend.  It will change your life.
• Man, the Dems are starting to win some news cycles, right after Labor Day.  Shocker! What is it aboot us cynical, Question Eevvvvvvvvvrything! Liberals, so afraid to stand up to the Fucking Naked Reagan Emperors? Where are the guts for our Dem Public Servants? Where did it all go wrong? It started to go wrong in November 1984.  Reagan had backtracked on most of his biggest aims (he actually did raise some taxes) and he 'cut and run' when the Libyan bombing happened.  (Plus, there is that whole 1980 October Surprise, dealing for hostages with Iran.)  Still, the 'Image' of tough Cowboy Reagan reigned supreme.  (Poor Mondale, he prob would have been the last true Liberal Prez.  Instead, it is the truly awesome, yet crushingly vilified Jimmy Carter who fills that role.)  And then 9-1-1 happened.  And the Dems have been running scared ever since.  The O'Donnell victory is the icing on the National Cake that the Dems need.   That, and the Obama Tax Cuts Measure (which should be voted on RIGHT NOW!, both bills.) Let the GOP run on the Bush Tax Cuts and vote on it.  And let the Dems run on the Obama Tax Cuts and vote on it.  It is a frickin' no-brainer, here, really.  Yet, despite the news cycles going our way for once, the USS Teabagger taking on water, I have serious doubts our CongressCritters are going to do the Right Thing.  
• You know what? I want you to watch a couple of videos.  Watch all of them, do not cheat.  I used to spend aboot a month of my young Summers w/ my Grandparents, two weeks each.  One Summer, my program was interrupted for this amazing, prescient speech by our President, Jimmy Carter.  Natch, I moaned and bitched, as a child, "I want to watch baseball, yada yada yada, ... "  My Gramps, Charles Lewis, sed, (not a Liberal, a Union Democrat, eschewing Big Time Religion in Evangelical Oklahoma, and a thorn in the Love of His Life's Rightist wife) "No, Michael.  That is the President of the United States.  He has taken the time to say something to us, it is important we listen to him."  Please watch the speech in full.  Carter was right.  He has been right over and over again.  I cannot link to Hunter S Thompson's Come To Jesus Moment re Carter, but it is magical.  Watch Gonzo.  It is all in there.
• Anyone else do Silent Sundays on TCM last Sunday? They showed The Student Prince by Lubitsch.  You know, you can take your Passion of Joan of Arc, and your DeMille, and your plainly, unforgivably racist, reactionary asshole, "History written with lightning" D.W. Griffith and flush 'em down the toilet.  Eisenstein, Murnau, & Lubitsch were the true masters of the silent cinema (& any lucky-ass soul that was directing Garbo.)  I've always preferred Lubitsch but am now leaning towards Murnau.  (My fave Murnau, who Hollywood certainly understood was gay, quote is:  "I hire my drivers based on their looks."  Tragically, young, he died in a car accident.)  Student Prince is a comedy, really, a musical comedy (without sound) as only Lubitsch could do.  It is smart, hilarious, and already (1927) shows the famous PR slogan:  The Lubitsch Touch.  (Like the Beatles, Lubitsch actually lived up to his ludicrous Headline Slogans.)  The Student Prince, an extremely nominal picture on the face of it, a romcom for the silent era, absolutely shimmers with wit and invention and attitude.  The 'Touch', as it were, is visible in the first reel, with all the citizens simply lowering their hats in deference to the King.  It is a joke repeated over and over that through his artless style does not grow stale but, yet, gets funnier and funnier, and richer, and richer, and more touching until we are in a new set-up.  (It is a shame Lubitsch chucked drama in the late 20s, because his Revolutionary War drama, Passion [made before he blessed us here in the US] is an absolute popcorn-muncher, on the edge of your seat nine-reel Dickens book set to life, and SILENT. The crucial 'Marie Antoinette' beheading scene is some of the most riveting cinema I have ever seen.  I saw it at the Castro, a German Film Fest Thingy, and my 'date', as it were, made a sound unlike I have never heard when the head was shown to the mob.  It was an equal blend of delight for the rabble and horror for the blade and skull revealed.  Hell, we ALL cheered when the head was shown.  What does that say about us?)  Lubitsch, more than any other master, and he is one of my beloved masters:  (Hawks, Bunuel, Welles, Frears, Lubitsch, Linklater, Powell/Pressburger, Hamer, Murnau, Huston, Polanski, Hitchcock, Curtiz, Busby Berkeley, etc, ... ) knew how to make life fun through films.  And unlike Warner Brothers in the 30s, he did it with no overt political message.  Sure, he is making fun of the Bolshevik bitching aboot the handbag in (The greatest film e'er made:  ) Trouble in Paradise but that is all it is, sweet bitching.  Lubitsch was like Busby Berkeley in that way.  He both subverted and rose above the common, topical poiltical message of the times, by saying:  There is glitz, glamor, high-life avaiable to all those that truly want it.  And it has nothing to do with money.  It has to do with TASTE, an appreciation for the those things that might be considered beyond your reach.  He asked his audiences to reach for the stars, in a glossy, flimsy, lacy, gauzy, sexy, ironic, winking sort of way that could ne'er (sadly) play well today.  It astounds me how irony and satire have died in the cinema (and Rock.)  Nuance is dead, a wink means naught as another Apatow Blockbuster careens thru the Mid-west.  Sex, money, cynicism were the true Themes of our pre-War Puritanical Heartland, yet those audiences were amongst the most savvy & smart audiences e'er, resembling, perhaps, but smarter, prob than a Piedmont Art-House crowd today.    And no one expressed that better thru art, cinema, than an-expat Jew/German, comedic star/auteur legend than Ernst Lubitsch. 
• The Rangers will likely clinch on Oakland soil.  I mean no disrespect.  Jules knows what I am talking aboot (& Meghan, too.)  
• Jesus, some one returned a bottle of The Prisoner (Ugh, an over-extracted, high-alcohol, super-ripe FRUIT MONSTER that I hate) b/c they said it was 'corked'.  They had not even opened the Fucker.  The top of the cork was halfway red and smelled like cooking wine.  I gave it to nick, he LURVES them big Napa wines.  Yuck.  
• For the novices oot there:  If the top of the cork is blonde/tan (White) or ruby/rust (Red) and smells like cooking sherry or even displays the slightest, tiniest whiff of vinegar, you have got a WINNER! It is a wine well-stored.  Decant that mofo and share it w/ your hated in-laws.  You'll earn super-mega-family points. 

Gosh, I just do not know when to shut up.  I am going to savor a Winston, Ranger Manager, Ron Washington's brand, and say Good Night.