Way to go, Newt.

Not to be outdone by the new radical fringe of the GOP, Newt Gingrich decided to suggest that the HCR bill will lead to the same kind of political fallout for the Democrats that Civil Rights legislation had in the 1960's:

But former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich said Obama and the Democrats will regret their decision to push for comprehensive reform. Calling the bill "the most radical social experiment . . . in modern times," Gingrich said: "They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years" with the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

Am I reading this right? He's basically gloating about the fact that Democrats suffer for taking on unpopular, but morally righteous, legislative tasks, right?

I like to imagine he was skinning a possum as he said this.

[via Washington Post]

NYT: Jet Plot Shows Growing Ability of Qaeda Affiliates

When I think about what the Birther movement and the Teabaggers would do with news of a successful terror attack committed on the U.S. by a skinny, African, Al Qaeda operative from Yemen, I get the sads real bad. [Link]

Happy New Year!!
2010!!

Unicorn chaser: The plane was bound for Detroit, so let's all enjoy some very political proto-punk from Death via the Evan "Funk" Davies Show [song | whole playlist ]

Great Moments In Manufactured Youth Culture

Also: I strongly consider looking at my friend's piece on the last Polaroid film in existence being sold at Urban Outfitters.

Someone Had To Say It.

But because this is a Washington Post editorial by a "reasonable" Republican no criticism of the conservative movement may be proffered without a "pox on both houses" attack on Democrats for doing the exact same thing, all the time, but worse.

Because Nancy Pelosi (D-Boogeyman) accused town hall disrupters of "carrying swastikas" (they were). And because unnamed "liberal antiwar protests" were chock-full of Hitler mustaches. Because Michael Moore said something dumb about the Patriot Act. And because Representative Brian Baird decried "Brownshirt tactics."

Here's the thing about that last one: the people intentionally disrupting town hall events and trying to turn them into anarchic carnivals of rage and possible violence are literally, actually guilty of "Brownshirt tactics."

Both the Nazis and Mussolini had Brownshirts and Blackshirts, their violent followers (many of whom were angry, disenfranchised-feeling war vets resentful of elites), attack socialists and union leaders, often on behalf of capitalists unhappy with leftist governments. Brownshirts marched through socialist strongholds in order to provoke attacks, and then they ginned up more support by holding up those who were attacked as martyrs. Does that sound familiar?

Thanks for this, Pareene. [via Gawker]

Horror Stories From SNL in 1995

There are a lot of great bleak vignettes in this article—from Chris Farley's sycophantic display at a memorial for deceased SNL-writer Michael O’Donoghue, to Julia Sweeney's personal annoyance with Lorne Michaels' phalanx of high-strung young blonde assistants (widely mocked as "the Lornettes").

I left the article with a sense of the heroic awesomeness that is Jim Downey; pitty for the "too hip for the room" new hires like Laura Kightlinger, Chris Elliot and Janeane Garofalo; a reaffirmation of my love for Bill Murray; and a potentially productive chunk of my day gone.

[Link via a 1995 New York magazine]

Bruce Sterling's "Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature"

SUMMARY: Easily, not the dumbest thing Bruce Sterling has ever written.

Naturally, everything he says applies just as urgently to cartooning and ought to have been on the agenda for MOCCA's Making Good Comics in a New Era panel.

Below are a few of the challenges* that I have comments about:

2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.

Also true for printed text paired sequentially with images. It's also conceptually indistinguishable from Sterling's #14, which is more a corollary than its own independent "challenge." (Who is editing this blog? Was s/he laid off?)

Something to keep in mind with this point is that: until you become a famous graphic novelist (whose very name is a Brand unto itself), film, TV and animation are your mortal enemies in the attention economy marketplace. Like the other losers (e.g. literature, nonfiction writing and the static visual arts) your twin hopes used to be that your production cost was still relatively lower and that the flexible pacing of your medium's consumption afforded audiences the breathing room to digest smarter, and thus more significant and lasting, idears.

Needless to say, the (relative) democratization of the means of video production, as well as the cheapness of digital distribution, have undercut those hopes significantly. Film, TV and animation will always be more expensive, but by much less than they used to be. And further, the public's ability to parse, edit, repost and generally scrutinize moving images has radically improved thanks to these technologies. The "Cool Guys Don't Look At Explosions" musical sketch from the 2009 MTV Movie Awards, should tell us something about the ascendancy of cinema studies in academia and its convergence with homemade YouTube montages. Namely: the shelf life of every genre convention in the moving picture medium has been dramatically reduced. If that's not a recipe for exponential sophistication, than I don't know what is. (However, I would be willing to debate the amount of drag force that a glut of "lowest common denominator" Reality TV, YouTube response videos and the like are effecting on this exponential up tic.)

8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.

This is probably the only leg up we have on our rivals in moving images, whose work can "follow the vernacular" as it hightails it (heh) into the universe of cellphones and streaming video. Comics will always be cheaper and can pour themselves into all kinds of niches faster and deeper. Provided, of course, that they can stop trying to appeal to their own limited niche audiences. You know what they are!

18. The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast.

Okay. So, clearly, this is not a challenge, but an artfully elucidated statement of fact. Can I attribute this to laziness on Sterling's part? A bit of creative license that forces the critical reader to re-evaluate his entire blog post as capital "P" Poetry? And, if the latter, why not use the cooler British spelling, "spectre"?

There's more (#'s 3-7 obviously), but I'm reticent to spend more time on it.

[Link via Wired]

* ("Challenges" sounds like self-help to me—but I realize that it can also sound like some "NASA-grade inspiring," Camelot-era bullshit.)

I Did An Interview With Peep Show Co-creator Jesse Armstrong

It's up at the website for the PRI-syndicated radio show, The Sound Of Young America. Here's the opening blurb:

Jesse Armstrong is one of the co-creators and writers of the BAFTA-winning BBC sitcom Peep Show. (A BAFTA is like a British Emmy.) Now entering its sixth series, with a US version in development at Spike TV, Peep Show is a funny, but cringe-inducing, depiction of the lives of two twenty-something flat mates, played by past "The Sound of Young America" guest David Mitchell and comedy partner Robert Webb. No less an authority on UK comedy than Ricky Gervais called it "The only British thing that I was really blown away by in the last few years."

Armstrong has also written for other acclaimed television series, including the sketch series That Mitchell & Web Look and the political satire The Thick of It.

[Hey, TSOYA visitors: Wh's'happening?]

"The Road" Trailer [Do Not Want]

Nothing about this filled me with more dread than the "Dimension Films" logo. Did I really want to think of this adaptation in the same line-up with Scream 3, Halloween H20, Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return and Hellraisers 3-8?

Pollution In My Neighborhood Explained By WNYC

The Irony Of This "McCafe" Hulu Ad Is Sad

What is Adbusters Magazine going to do now that companies are "sponsoring" ad-free (virtual) environments?

On The Boston Globe's Big Picture Blog

[Via the Awl]

Each year, the New York Times presents in-house awards, called the Punch Awards, to recognize great contributions from the staff. This year they quite rightly recognize the inventor of The Big Picture, the genius Boston Globe-hosted photography weblog. Unfortunately, the owners of the Times are forced to note that staffer Alan Taylor (a software engineer) “developed and promoted the blog largely on his own time.” Perhaps in the future the newspaper company will encourage the development of their most successful products on, say, staff time.

On The Plastic Jesus Scene From Cool Hand Luke

There was a period when the two middle brothers in my family would sing this around the house a lot. Then my dad would sing it to himself while doing dishes. The Newman performance that inspired this fad in my immediate family is pretty cathartic and suitably ambiguous.

I, for one, can't tell if Newman's weepy banjo playing is actually meant to transform the Jesus statue's glow-in-the-dark plasticity and the Madonna's rhinestones from the mild parody songwriters Ed Rush and George Cromarty had intended into a poignant contemporary analog for the cheap poverty and humility Christianity is notorious for.

Ultimately, I know I'll have to rewatch the whole movie (which I haven't done maybe since high school) to know for sure. However, what I want to think is that this is just a perfect encapsulation of how useful even empty rituals and religious trinkets can be when you are down in the dumps.

You Know, Begrudgingly ...

I am impressed by how much this stupid "If You Seek Amy" Video operates simultaneously as a vicious celebration of, and a mea culpa for, Britney Spear's career of acting innocent while selling sex to minors. Congratulations America for the schizophrenic culture that could produce these three juvenile minutes of David Lynch by way of Madonna and Robert Mapplethorpe.

[This week's South Park about the Jonas Brothers couldn't have happened at a better time.]

Well, That Jim Cramer / Jon Stewart Thing Happened

For anyone looking for the take-away message from the Jon Stewart / Jim Cramer interview this is it:

It was uncomfortable and somewhat breathtaking to watch. What I hope people get from this interview, though, is not just that CNBC is a really shitty journalistic institution. This is how ALL cable news works (and most websites, and some newspapers). Access is so difficult to find that journalists end up being mouthpieces for different points of view rather than arriving at some kind of truth. I have no idea how this problem gets solved, but until it does it seems to me that cable news does more harm than good.

[Via Some Gawker Commenter]

Out For Blood (or at least anwsers)

A new Gallup Poll claims that the majority of American want—at the very least—some kind of investigation into potential criminal activities by the Bush Administration.

While I agree with them, I also understand that navigating this current economic crisis means all hands on deck and that alienating the whiny babies in the GOP is a luxury we can't afford yet. [via TPM DC]

"I work to support my wife's Christian Louboutin addiction."

Best Abramoff Crony Quote Ever!

I Do Not Want The Mexican Walking Fish To Go Extinct

Thing is like a Pokémon. [More Info Via AP/Yahoo News]

"The Disease Was Life Itself"

Fiction author and Rolling Stone contributing editor David Lipsky chronicles David Foster Wallace's life-long battle with depression in this harrowing feature for the aforementioned publication.

Jerk Behavior, Explosion-Related, Oil Companies

With the past few years of record profits, you'd expect oil firms to be able to responsibly deal with massive explosions that ruin people's homes. The fact that your instincts are so totally, flagrantly wrong is why no one pays you the big bucks:

[Via Josh Spear. Found on BeepBoop.] Nearly three years ago, Ian Silverstein, one of my dear friends and guest contributors to this site was simply minding his own business, asleep, when his home and everything in it was destroyed by Britain’s largest peacetime explosion.

His life would never be the same.

It’s now known as the Buncefield Depot explosion, and little has been done to remedy the situation for the people affected by this massive incident. Ian lost everything, his beautiful home, all of his belongings, and years later he suffers from symptoms caused by the blast. Frankly, he’s lucky to be alive– and he knows it, but deserves closure and help from the companies that caused it.

Literally, nothing has been done to help him with his situation — or anybody for that matter. The local authorities have failed him, the governments have failed him, insurance has failed him, and the companies that operated the facilities — Total and Chevron — have ducked blame entirely. The massive companies made more than £18 billion in cash last year, but can’t help a few people out when a leak in their tanks caused massive and catastrophic damage to dozens of people’s lives.

The Most Important Question About Full House

Full House was a show that was done for ten-year-olds. The critics hated it. They said terrible, terrible things about it. But it should have been reviewed by ten-year-olds. That’s who it was made for. They loved it. And if they loved it, great. Why the hell does a fifty-year-old guy working at a big newspaper have to tell me I’m a piece of crap?—Bob Saget via Shut Up Internet, which provides literally zero support on when, where or in what context Saget said this. Thanks for nothing, guys.

[Update: It's from this article in Esquire. Rahul figured it out, because "He genius."]