What Cheer, Netop?

I stumbled across this thing I wrote in 2004 when lots42 commented:

Whatever you do, don't listen to Miss Manners. I seriously think that woman is insane

( my response )

I got the August issue of Harper's in the mail yesterday and read the essay by Kevin Baker titled "A Fate Worse Than Bush: Rudolph Giuliani and the politics of personality". I was interested in reading this, because my opinion of Mr. Giuliani is not very high and I was interested in reading a critique of him. This is what I got.

The article begins: "Rudolph Giuliani has, by far, the most dubious known personal history of any major presidential candidate in American history, what with his three marriages and his open affairs and his almost total estrangement from his grown children, not to mention the startling frequency with which he finds excuses to dress in women's clothing." Oh, give me a break -- I don't believe that he has the most dubious known personal history of any major candidate. More dubious than Jefferson? Also, is the fact that he has worn women's clothing as a joke seriously supposed to make me think he'd be a bad president?

But of course that's just the first sentence, so maybe the rest of the paragraph will put this into perspective. The paragraph continues: "Many of his fellow Republicans despise him for his support of gay rights and abortion rights and immigrants, for the confiscatory gun laws he enforced while mayor of New York City, and for having a personality that is irreducibly New York." Then Baker quotes Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention and James Dobson as saying they would never vote for Giuliani. But these things by and large are all things I likeabout Giuliani. So what's going on here?

The next paragraph says that he is following in the path of Bill and Hillary Clinton, then pauses to say "New York has always been where America happens first. As the nation's most populous city, as its financial and intellectual capital, and as a magnet for ambitious and creative immigrants from all points, domestic and foreigh, it has set the course for most of the nation's history." This New York boosterism continues for a couple of paragraphs, then there's a bit about how New York's problems also presage the country's problems. Then it glosses over the fact that Hillary Clinton is from Illinois -- this is unimportant because "she nonentheless fit perfectly into the city's political landscape, in large part because she was instrumental in creating it."

After that, on its third page, the article settles down for a while. It traces Giuliani's success to his success in getting liberal upper-class white folks to vote for him by exploiting fear of crime and a feeling that the city was being taken over by non-white folks. This thesis is developed for four pages. Then there are two pages that argue that Giuliani didn't do much when he was mayor and that his popularity was on the wane until September 11, after which he still didn't do much and lied about it. Then there's a page in which it is indicated that his approach to the Presidential race is similar to his approach to the mayoral race. Then there's the concluding section, which includes the following argument:

"Just as Bill Clinton was able to silence labor, the advocates of racial and gender equality, and all of the Democrats' other so-called special interests in the wake of his party's repeated presidential defeats, so Rudolph Giuliani may be able to mute the Republicans' religious wing in the wake of George W. Bush's disastrous administration. Yet what will this mean? Many of us would welcome any setback for the Christian right [. . .] Yet to expel evangelical Christians from the body politic would also be to dismiss millions of Americans who are profoundly disturbed by the amoral cynicism that now permeates this nation's elite classes; by the waves of misogynistic pornography and ultra-violence that inundate our popular culture; by the growth industries that have grown out of gambling and hedonism. To dismiss these evangelical Christians would be to dismiss millions of Americans who genuinely believe in something greater than themselves, a whole population that has been slowly but steadily won over to such causes as environtmentalism and social justice in recent years. And where would such people go? The obvious answer would be, into some sort of coalition with all those the Democratic Party has tried to banish from its ranks -- that is, the poor and the working poor, people of color, and all those dislocated by the global economy. This would mean a party of the religious and the disinherited -- exactly the combination that has given rise to the sort of extremism we so deplore in the Islamic world."

Then there's a paragraph that says that today what's important in the president is personality, and that Bush's failure is the result of his personality, and that Giuliani would probably be about the same.

I think it would be fair to say that this is not exactly the article I'd hoped for.

I've never sold anything I've written, but I wanted to do a little something special today anyway. So here's a story I wrote a while ago ... I know that I've posted various versions of this out there before, but I don't think anyone's seen this exact version yet.

I've also made a recording of it for your listening pleasure, such as it is: 523 words and just under three minutes. The title of the piece is 'Plastic Fantastic'.

( Read more... )

This morning I had an idea for what to do for the song about 'Childhood Photographs' that I have to write for this coming Sunday (January 14)'s 'Songwriters in the Round' show at AS220 (which goes from 7 pm to 9 pm). I think it's supposed to get its debut performance at the show, but here's the first verse I've got at the moment so you can see where I'm going with it.

( first verse )

I'm also thinking about what other songs to play at the show. I think I'll just bring my guitar, so that eliminates some songs immediately.

I'll do a total of four songs, one of which is the new one. I'll probably make the final decision about what I want to do while I'm onstage and listening to what the other participants (Ryan Fitzsimmons who also organizes the Songwriters in the Round shows, ilyAIMY, and Allysen Callery) play, but it will probably be three of the following:

• Editors at War
• Hybrid Car Blues
• Kitten Knitting Blues
• Lady Luck
• Pickle Postcard
• "Pumpkin, Mrs. Farnsworth"
• Watching Killer Robots Eat Your Head
• Worst Meal
• You're The Tea In My Teacup

Here's a bit of nonsense.

---

One fine day after a show I'll got in my time machine,
And I'll went back forty decades just to see what I can seen.
I was walking down the street and I found a bright penny,
So I took it to the market and invested it wisely.

And I came back to the present and I had three million bucks.
(When you've got compound interest then you don't need any luck.)
I'll invest in a research firm to invent time machines,
And in less than sixty months, they'll exceeded all my dreams.

Then I'll take one back to now, and I'll gave it back to me,
And I'll sang this little song that I once had sung to me,
And I think that brings us up to date, excuse me if I'm terse.
I think I'll take my leave and do the things in the first verse.

T for T. Rex, T for Tarbosaur.
T for T. Rex, T for Tarbosaur.
T's the time traveller my Thelma left me for.

I'd rather drink muddy water, sleep in a hollow log
Drink muddy water, sleep in a hollow log
Than to be in the Triassic and be eaten by a Theropod.

If you don't want me, mama, you sure don't have to stall.
Don't want me, mama, you sure don't have to stall.
'Cause I can get more women than an Apatosaurus can haul.

I'm gonna get me a pistol just as long as I am tall.
I'm gonna get me a pistol just as long as I am tall.
Gonna shoot that time traveller, even if he's my grandpaw.

As I mentioned to cgoldfish at lunch today, while I was dreaming (or maybe waking up) I came up with some lyrics last night. If I have time today I might record them for the podcast (although my recording setup has been acting a little weird for the past week or so, which is a little worrying).

As far as what it means to write lyrics in my sleep: I remember hearing a couple of these lines (specifically the first couple of lines from the second verse) and singing them to myself over and over. The melody I used in my dream was from the Randy Newman song 'Rider In The Rain', and the song is kind of Randy Newman-ish in other ways, I think, so I am a little worried that I subconsciously ripped the whole thing off from him, or from some other preexisting song. Anyway, I wrote some more lyrics after I got up, and I fooled around with the chord progression and the melody so it no longer sounds like 'Rider in the Rain', so hopefully it is relatively original now.

It would have been relatively easy to write a whole bunch more verses, but I decided that three verses got the idea across well enough. I'm not sure if anyone else will like the song, but I think I do. Well, we will see.

( tentatively titled 'habit' )

Addendum: The more I think about it, maybe Liz Stahler has a song with a similar conceit? Does this ring a bell with anyone?

back when I wrote things like this.

Anyway, let's see.

---

( most people learn these essay-writing tricks at some point, I think )

---

( a shaggy dog story )

One of the songs I performed tonight is a little ditty called 'Watching Killer Robots Eating Your Head'. This song title was suggested by saucypunk and the song was more or less written for cgoldfish and I played it at her birthday party. Other than that, tonight's was the first public performance of the song. People seemed to like it a lot!

Anyway, ( here are the lyrics. )

On Sunday I went to the Boston Museum of Science with Kibo, mmcirvin, samantha2074, and Joshua Cope. One of the things we did there was watch a one-man play about the life of Nikola Tesla titled Battle of the Currents. That inspired me to write the following (which was also posted to alt.religion.kibology).
( Tesla: The Life of a Genius )
I always am tempted to explain what I'm talking about in stuff I write, but it's probably a mistake to do so.