So what's wrong with being Marxist?

Too many bands cite Gang of Four as an influence these days. I take these dour post-punkers down in Stylus. Franz Ferdinand may yet go down in history as 2004's Elastica (and I enjoyed Elastica's debut far more), but they sound like they're getting laid and have the sense to layer their sextalk over Go4-inspired beats. Which may yet prove world-historic.

My favorite records of 2005, thus far

M.I.A. - Arular. A lot of ink spilled about this one, and I've delivered enough half-drunken encomiums; still a damn fine party record.

Go-Betweens: Oceans Apart. God bless these guys. David Byrne writes Keatsian sonnets, demands Haydn-esque strings, and tells Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth to shut the fuck up about Tom Tom Club and play.

The Mountain Goats - The Sunset Tree. Confessional singer-songwriter music doesn't get better than this, without drip, clean: the truth shall set you free. "This Year" is the song of the year.

New Order - Waiting For The Sirens' Call. Just cuz they got paunches don't mean the music isn't punchy. Very much New Order-by-numbers, but every NO album, even the great ones, feels both absolutely necessary and perfunctory.

I am mighty disappointed in Sleater Kinney's The Woods. Self-consciousness leads them to bloat, un-rousing invective, and retreads.

Joan Didion and Theresa Schiavo

Joan Didion shames both the left and right in this long, scrupulously researched account of what really happened during the Terri Schiavo debates; I'm surprised this has gotten so little attention. After reading it, I now think most of us should have kept our opinions to ourselves.

Reviewing the new, confirmed allegations that Gitmo guards did "mishandle" the Koran, E.J. Dionne argues that conservative dismissals of "relativism" in the so-called liberal media are unfounded. It's conservative academics who understand how the hermaneutics of relativism can work in the political realm:

Today's conservative activists have become the new postmodernists. They shift attention away from the truth or falsity of specific facts and allegations -- and move the discussion to the motives of the journalists and media organizations putting them forward. Just a modest number of failures can be used to discredit an entire enterprise

Wonder what Pat Buchanan, Phyllis Schlafy, Charles Krauthammer, and the rest will rebut this.

Michael Chabon: Starting Out

Michael Chabon, one of my favorite contemporary writers, published a rather earnest piece in this week's New York Review of Books recounting the writing of his first (and still most striking) novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. I don't like the flossy insights of this excerpt:

I wanted to tell stories, the kind with set pieces and long descriptive passages, and "round" characters, and beginnings and middles and ends. And I wanted to instill—or rather I didn't want to lose—that quality, inherent in the best science fiction, which was sometimes called "the sense of wonder."

In an essay which adduces Proust, Calvino, Philip Roth, and Donald Barthelme, he's worried about producing a sense of wonder? I wonder.

He's better when he confesses his debt to The Great Gatsby; he wanted to write a novel "about friendship and its impossibility, about self-inventors and dreamers of giant dreams, about complicated women and the men who make them that way." Pittsburgh doesn't succeed at all these levels, but it's a testament to Chabon's ear for gossamer prose that, at least stylistically, his novel is a worthy heir.

I'm most struck by Chabon's confessions of homosexual activity. Of course, any casual reader of his books knows Chabon is at least interested in the complications of same-sex love, but then:

I had drunk a lot, and smoked a lot, and listened to a ton of great music, and talked way too much about all of those activities, and about talking about those activities. I had slept with one man whom I loved, and learned to love another man so much that it would never have occurred to me to want to sleep with him.

Coming from a married man with four children, his honesty is remarkable.

I'm taking an awful risk, Lucas. This had better work.

In a review as merciless as Anakin Skywalker wielding a lightsaber, Anthony Lane chops the head off George Lucas and the shallow mythmaking of which Episode III: Revenge of the Sithforms the last third. Lucas, Lane writes, has produced "an art of flawless and irredeemable vulgarity." Further:

All movies bear a tint of it, in varying degrees, but it takes a vulgarian genius such as Lucas to create a landscape in which actions can carry vast importance but no discernible meaning, in which style is strangled at birth by design, and in which the intimate and the ironic, not the Sith, are the principal foes to be suppressed. It is a vision at once gargantuan and murderously limited, and the profits that await it are unfit for contemplation.

The Force with this one is not?

The always hilarious Stephanie Zancharek reviews Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Siths in Salon. After laying waste to Ian McDiarmid's performance as Emperor Palpatine ("slapping sleaziness all over his performance with a trowel"), she moves on to Natalie Portman's Padme; when she tells Anakin about her pregnancy, "the doughnuts clamped to either side of her head quiver with hormonal joy."

I will post a more thorough review when I see the damn thing tomorrow.

Now this is pop music

Me on the Go-Betweens' latest, Oceans Apart.

We not only talk funny, we smell funny too!

See? Gay men really are different from you and me. The latest findings by Swedish researches suggest that homosexual and heterosexual men respond differently to pherenomes.

No laughing matter

Frank Rich dissects what exactly made the mass media's sycophantic coverage of Laura Bush's comedy routine at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner last week:

Watching the Washington press not only swoon en masse for Mrs. Bush's show but also sponsor and promote it inevitably recalls its unwitting collaboration in other, far more consequential Bush pageants.

Like the Jeff Gannon flapdoodle. Like Bush's eerie Tom Cruise mimickry on that aircraft carrier. Like telling Ron Suskind that "We create our own reality" in the White House.

My thoughts precisely.

Well put.

Because it is 2005, ladies and gentlemen. That's pretty much the future. I feel like throwing up every time my co-workers try to explain to me how Adam made the friendly vegetarian dinosaurs die by introducing death into the world.

This website was actually recommended by someone who thought I was just being misled by atheist anthropologists.

On Being Conservative

I thank Andrew Sullivan for this Michael Oakeshott, a riposte to my friend Andy, who over sushi and vodka tonics implied that conservatism had nothing worthwhile to say as a philosophy (if I'm misquoting him, well, blame the sushi and vodka tonics):

G]overning is recognized as a specific and limited activity; not the management of an enterprise, but the rule of those engaged in a great diversity of self-chosen enterprises. It is not concerned with concrete persons, but with activities; and with activities only in respect of their propensity to collide with one another. It is not concerned with moral right and wrong, it is not designed to make men good or even better; it is not indispensable on account of the "natural depravity of mankind" but merely because of their current disposition to be extravagant; its business is to keep its subjects at peace with one another in the activities in which they have chosen to seek their happiness.

Revenge of Alec Guinness

In the second volume of his droll memoir A Positively Final Appearance, Sir Alec Guinness has more than a few darts to throw at fans who presume to impress the former Obi-Wan Kenobi with their knowledge of all things Star Wars. For one, he's not having it ("I shrivel inside each time it is mentioned"). Note this hilarious exchange between him, a boy of twelve so besotted with Star Wars that he's seen it a hundred times, and his indulgent mother:

"I would love you to do something for me," I said.
"Anything! Anything!" the boy said rapturously.
"You won't like what I'mm going to ask you to do," I said.
"anything, sir, anything!"
"Well," I said, "do you think you could promise never to see Star Wars again?"
He burst into tears. His mother drew himself up to an immense height. "What a dreadful thing to say to a child!" she barked, and dragged the poor kid away. Maybe she was right but I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities.