cheese it, the cops!

if you needed a good argument for a government shutdown, it would be watching these eedjits blame each other. the incredible repetitive mechanical merely-partisan pinheadedness of it all makes you realize that our lives are being run by mindless fuckheads. so maybe a shutdown is a permanent solution. after awhile eric cantor or harry reid won't be on television anymore. no price is too high.

here's a thought i'd like to develop systematically: people take 'art' - literary fiction or gallery installations, for example - far far too seriously. there's a constant drumbeat about how you've been redeemed by someone's novel, or how shakespeare invented the human, or how the symphonies of mahler have launched your ass into the stars or whatever it may be. it has to turn out that there is nothing more important; it has to have cosmic significance. really, you know, some of this stuff is pretty good, pretty deep, pretty absorbing etc. but you do not have to take your pleasures and blow them up like blimps. fiction is fictional; paintings are representational; post-modern art is funny; opera hurts; and so on. that you want to spend chunks of your life experiencing such things does not require that you pretend that the novelist is a god or that cezanne entirely changes the human capacity for vision or something. actually, the constant hyperbole about the arts and the next book called why literature matters should arouse your suspicion: it's way too shrill, way too defensive with regard to other aspects of culture - science or reality television - and when you get down to it massively implausible and sort of sad. i really think we need to get art into perspective. it's like, picasso: creator and destroyer: let's try: picasso: occasionally interesting painter. art audiences are constantly reassuring each other about the importance of what they're experiencing, and how great and sensitive they are for experiencing it. that itself should show you that it isn't actually as great as all that.

in blowing art up like this, we lose our connection to it as something human beings do for the reasons human beings do things and as well as humans do things. we lose the connection to craft. we lose the connection of art to work: to what each of us does to make a living. we invent a fantastic context and fantastic beings that inhabit it, beings who crystallize and yet transcend whole historical eras, people who live in the future, people whose misery or insanity is a symptom of how much better they are than everyone else, and so on. we need to keep art with us, here, in our own human lives and in the lives of the actual regular human beings who make it.

man the women's championship, won by the magnificent aggies, was as great as as the men's championship last night was lame.

sydney colson:

speaking of women's college hoops: the game that just finished between texas a&m and stanford - an major upset by a&m accomplished with a furious comeback and a series of clutch shots in the last minute - was about as good a college basketball game as you'll ever see. 

About six insurgents, including at least two disguised in burqas, the full-body covering common among Afghan women, attacked Camp Phoenix at about 6:30 a.m. using Kalashnikovs and explosives, according to Afghan and NATO officials.

it's likely that we've misconstrued the threat as islamism, and that what we really have is a world jihad carried forward by drag queens. jane russells and marilyn monroes - glittering with plastique sequins, full-figured bras stuffed with suicide explosives - are no doubt tottering in spike heels toward targets all over our major metropolitan areas. a tragically misunderstood diva - a judy garland, say - is even more tragic when, instead of declining slowly into miserable addiction, she explodes right in front of your face and takes a public facility and some random civilians along with her. the tears are streaming down my face as i write this. the opera ain't over til the fat lady goes KA-BOOM.

would it make y'all happy if an american philosophy professor burned a bible? because i'm here for you.

on the npr hourly newscast just now, they described the attack on the un compound in mazar-e-sharif, apparently in response to a koran burning by a florida minister. then they dutifully reported the condemnations of the attack by ban-ki moon and obama, and in fact there have been whole news stories on the condemnations. the attack is news. but the condemnations are not. they are incredibly formulaic series of words ('we unequivocally condemn this cowardly act' etc). you know without being told what these people said; you have literally heard it a hundred times. they have to say it. but you don't have to report it. in a four-minute newscast, you could actually use those seconds to say something with some content about the actual event. it's not the case that what the authorities say is ipso facto news or that you need to have the comment of authorities to report a story to which it is irrelevant. if they respond in any substantive or surprising way, then by all means. otherwise, not at all.