According to Little Green Footballs, Ted Rall is still writing things every now and then. But, but, shouldn’t he have been disappeared by The Bushite Junta (TM) by now? Perhaps he’s on the lam–or broadcasting from beneath the giant gladitorial complex in which The Bushite Junta forces criminals to compete against colorfully named professional hunter-killers, just like Mick Fleetwood and Dweezil Zappa in The Running Man! Go, Ted, Go!

So, here it is: Blog About Iran Day, and I find myself with little to say. Except this:

If you run a country, and you put gigantic portraits and statues of yourself throughout that country, YOU WILL FALL.

If you run a country, and your political platform invokes the terms “hate” or “death,” YOU WILL FALL.

If you run a country, and you treat women like cattle, YOU WILL FALL.

If you run a country, and you operate under the assumption that God wants you to kill civilians, YOU WILL FALL.

If you run a country, and you believe you are in possession of The Truth, and that that Truth is so important that you are allowed to imprison, torture, and murder those who don’t share belief in that Truth, YOU WILL FALL.

If you run a country, and your main goal is to fight like hell to keep that country from having anything remotely resembling a healthy, happy, free future, YOU WILL FALL.

This I believe.

For more information on Iran, including the threatened Tiannemen Square-style massacre of studetns that the government has promised in order to quash planned demonstrations today, please visit Jeff Jarvis.

I’m starting to get a handle on fellow comics/politics blogger Franklin Harris–he’s an, I dunno, supralibertarian. I’ll admit that this is something of an… odd concept to me. I’ll plead I.L.I. (Ivy League Ignorance) on this one: At Yale, political belief systems tended towards old-money Republicanism (veering off into advocacy of a reinstated monarchy) or white-guilt liberalism (veering off into People’s Republic of Berkeley communism). Libertarians were few and far between, and though most everyone had libertarian leanings, they tended to be along the lines of “end the drug war, legalize the weed, no censorship, no Big Brother surveillance” etc. That’s certainly my viewpoint at any rate.

Point is, Franklin mildly took me to task over my ripping of Pat Buchanan’s pro-Confederacy stand. Franklin argues that putting the issue of slavery aside, the Confederate states had every right to secede from the Union, and Lincoln’s victory in the Civil War was some sort of might-makes-right blow to the Constitution.

I can see where the argument comes from, but to be honest, it just sounds like so much legalistic nonsense to me. It seems nuts to put “state’s rights,” i.e. the rights of a concept involving boundaries and official birds and flowers and whatnot called a State, before the rights of the people living in them–in this case, the slaves. I know, I know, the Civil War wasn’t started because of slavery, it was because the economy of the North would tank without the South and because advocates of a strong federal government didn’t want to set a precedent for secession, yeah yeah yeah. But in the end, if the South had succeeded in securing its “rights” from the North, you’d have ended up with some creepy militaristic apartheid state occupying the lower half of North America. Blecch. I’m simply not going to get too exercised about the unconstitutionality of an action that freed millions and millions of people and put an end to one of the most appalling practices in human history, particularly when that unconstiutionality only adversely affected the “rights” of an invisible picket fence.

This argument reminds me of Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke’s comments in Spin about the war in Iraq. Regardless of “this particular maniac,” said Thom in reference to Saddam Hussein, the laws and rules of the UN must not be thwarted by the U.S. & the U.K. Putting aside Thom’s ridiculously rose-colored view of the UN (when has it ever solved a conflict? when did it ever operate independently of the vested interests of its member states, in particular the US and the USSR?), he was apparently putting the “rights” of the imaginary entity known as “Iraq” ahead of those of the real live people living inside Iraq. This just seems like a tremendous abdication of responsibility to me–to say nothing of the fact that, from a libertarian perspective, Iraq (and for that matter the Confederacy) was one of the governments most intrusive into the lives of the human beings living therein.

What you’re left with, it seems to me, is the view that everyone else on Earth can go scratch, because my libertarian ideals prevent me from allowing my government to ever do anything to help them in any way. Again, blecch!

I myself believe that the ultimate arbiter of moral AND political rightness or wrongness is the degree to which people are allowed to choose, for themselves, how they want to live. This stems pretty directly from the occult teachings of Aleister Crowley and the pseudophilosophical prank religion of Discordianism, but I’m not as mean-spirited as the former nor as irresponsibly goofy as the latter: I believe that every man and woman was put on this Earth to achieve something, that it’s up to them to puzzle out, and that any time you do something that impedes people from figuring out what to do on their own (from lying and cheating all the way up to murder and totalitarianism) you’re doing something you morally oughtn’t. That’s where my libertarian streak comes from–it isn’t up to the government to decide what God you should worship, for instance–but it’s limited by the fact that, stemming from this belief, I try to take every issue on a case-by-case basis, so I never get hamstrung, as I believe Franklin has, by the kind of thinking that has you arguing for the Confederacy on a technicality.

It’s good to find out, every now and then, that I’m still a liberal at heart.

Hey!

It’s only been a day or two since I wrote the review, but I’m already reconsidering my just-on-this-side-of-negative review of The Hulk. I think it’s a mistake to completely overlook the film’s weaknesses (it’s got plenty), but the strong stuff from it has really stuck with me. The film’s visuals are by far the best part of the whole, and they’re indelible–Hulk vs. the tanks, the explosion that kills the heel scientist in a freeze-frame, the ever-shifting comics panels, the close-ups of the rocks and moss and plants, the bizarre moment-in-time fight through the clouds at the end… it’s haunting.

This is pretty much the exact same thing that happened to me after seeing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I love long takes, sparse dialogue, and slow-burning plot development as much as the next guy–actually, a whole lot more than the next guy–but something about that movie just didn’t click for me. But before two weeks went by I’d undergone a critical about-face and found myself enthralled by the balletic fight scenes, the passionate desert interlude, the gorgeous music, the intense love… not triangle… pentagon?

But I’ve got more issues with The Hulk than I ever had with CTHD. Just by way of a for instance, nothing remotely resembling the incredible love scene between Ziyi Zhang and Chen Chang in the latter actor’s character’s desert hideout was present in the big guy’s movie. Though Eric Bana and Jennifer Connelly are both likeable actors who did fine work with what they had, Ang Lee never took the time to convince us of their feelings for one another the way he did in CTHD, which was an absolutely necessary thing to do given how those feelings are supposed to drive the Hulk’s actions in the entire final half of the film. Plus, unlike the crazy parent figure in CTHD, the Nurse-esque character who’s secretly the Jade Scorpion, Nick Nolte’s Daddy Banner is infuriatingly unjustified and unexplained in his madness. He goes from a loving but too-driven father in flashbacks to a cold-blooded scenery-chewing bastard in the present day. Again, given the heft his relationship to his son the Hulk is given in the film’s final act, he badly needed to be better developed.

But my mental momentum is heading towards the positive. And at any rate, I wholeheartedly agree with Franklin Harris’s assessment that a good deal of the negative hype originates from people who don’t really know what they’re talking about. Much of the hysterical opprobriation heaped upon the movie comes from fanboys who, despite proclaiming for years that superhero stories can be Art, were completely flummoxed when this film proved them right.

…umbrageumbrageumbrage…

I’ve long said that Pat Buchanan, presidential candidate and respected talk show host, is batshit insane, and this article, in which he defends the motherfucking Confederacy, proves it. (Courtesy of Andrew Sullivan: Scourge of the Taliban Wing of American Conservatism! He’s been going after Buchanan, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, Antonin Scalia, John Derbyshire, Rick Santorum, Bill Frist et al with all the manic glee of a hungry Leatherface handed a chainsaw and pointed in the direction of a three-legged race at a fat camp.)

While we’re on the subject, could there be a pair of talking heads more irrelevant to the current political climate than isolationst bigot Pat Buchanan and Phil Donawannabe Bill Press? I can’t imagine a less compelling set of viewpoints, and with any luck MSNBC will stick their show on the chopping block next.

Go, Captain, go

Go, Captain, go

Go, Captain Feathersword, Ahoy!

Please email me at sean AT alltooflat DOT COM if that made a lick of sense to you. Thank you.

How much better does Beyonce Knowles look now that she’s gained some weight? She went from “eh” to “damn!” in pretty short order. And as though in response to her sudden Amazon fabulousness, her music is better now too. (Seriously, one more Destiny’s Child song mentioning cell phones and I’d have carcjacked someone.) Uh-oh indeed!

One thing, though: I don’t seem to have gotten the memo in which we were asked to lend our approval to her dropping “Knowles” from her name. Let me see here… memo about Beyonce Knowles joining the mononym club… nope, don’t see it. Must have gotten filed with that “from her very first English-language single Shakira will be an American Superstar” fax that somehow didn’t reach my desk.

Nothing to say here, really–I just want to get onto the Google page for people searching for the phrase “How’s your Donkey Kong?” Or indeed, “How’s your Donkey Kong, baby?”

I like Don Imus, basically.

So I’m sitting down here at the computer to check my email and I see this little note with what looks like a funny quote from a commercial or infomercial written in my wife’s handwriting.

“Amy, what’s [blah blah blah] about?”

“I saw it on TV today and I’m going to write something about it for my site. It’s mine! It’s mine! And you can’t blog about it!”

What a world!

I was just using LimeWire to hunt for Jobriath songs, and I came across a “song” with the title “Nick Drake with Soft Machine (UNRELEASED 1974) – JOBRIATH.” Someone went through a lot of trouble to convince pop obscurists like yours truly to download a dummy file.

Did you know that Latina Pop Sensation (TM) Thalia (aka the latest singer who knows her bread is buttered somewhere in the vicinity of Tommy Motolla’s BVDs) is a Superstar!!!? Looks like I missed that memo too.

Amy’s been updating her blogs like mad. Go here and here.

The rest of the All Too Flat team pulled off an unbelievably impressive prank last week. It involves the Astor Place Cube and ’80s nostalgia. It’s brilliant. Check it out!

Big Sunny D is really good.

I’m not the only one who’s uncomfortable with certain commercials.

I’m pretty much back to full-speed posting.

I really, really miss Barry White.

He was much more than a roly-poly punchline, you know. As anyone who’s really listened to his music can tell you, he truly earned the honorific of The Maestro, just as much as he deserved to be called The Walrus of Love. (God, what a great nickname. I wish I was The Walrus of Love, goo goo gajoob, baby.)

Of course, there’s that voice. It’s not just that it’s low, or sexy–he sings with such conviction and control that you could almost swear (as in “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Baby”) that he’s singing harmony with himself like some sort of sexed-up Tibetan monk. And those spoken-word sections–when he says “Now that I’m a man I’ve put away childish things,” you believe him.

His amazing ear for orchestral ambience helped bring gorgeous, complicated string sections out of the opera house and into the on-the-one funk arena. He had a compatriot in this regard with funk’s other great low-register loverman, Isaac Hayes, but where Ike conveyed turmoil and torment, Barry exuded confidence, warmth, and world-in-your-eyes (or thighs) passion. Funk’s later users of sexy strings, like P-Funk and Rick James, owe Barry a huge debt, as do every DJ and producer who’ve based hip-hop tracks around violins.

Barry also made the most persuasive case for disco I’ve ever heard. I vividly remember reading the liner notes to a friend’s copy of Barry’s greatest hits my sophomore year in college, in which Barry offered an eloquent apologia for the much-maligned dance genre. Disco, he argued, was not about the trendy fashion atrocities we’ve come to associate with it, but about people looking beautiful, feeling beautiful, listening to music that made them feel beautiful. After reading White’s words I felt instantly able to appreciate the genre for the fun-loving (and fun, and loving) music it’s bequeathed us, from K.C. and the Sunshine Band to Giorgio Moroder’s collaborations with Donna Summer to Chic to (I couldn’t believe it myself) the BeeGee’s disco stuff to, of course, Barry’s tunes themselves.

And what tunes they were! The titles alone speak volumes: “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More, Babe” (with the unforgettable “feels so good” opening), “Love’s Theme” (we used it as the entrance music for the wedding party at our reception), “It’s Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next To Me” (featured in a seriously sexy scene in Spike Lee’s compelling, underrated Summer of Sam, it may be my favorite Barry jam). But beyond the greatest hits, there’s the proto-trip-hop epic “Your Love (So Good I Can Taste It)” the 12-minute bedroom-funk equivalent of “Stairway to Heaven” from Barry’s awesome record Is This Whatcha Wont? (Yes, that’s how he spells it–how cool is that?) Folks, words simply cannot describe how good this song is, as it transitions from an anticipatory string-laden opening to a downbeat foreplay-in-music-form spacey relentless groove to a full-throated climax (in every sense of the word). It’s a full-fledged journey deep into the cosmic groove. Please, please go buy this album at Amazon, and discover the joys of White’s art beyond the best-of comps and radio staples.

Man, he was good. In the Missus’s words, the world is a much less sexy place with him gone.

In the “I Love It When Assholes Are Hoist By Their Own Petard” Department, professional bigot Michael Savage has been fired from MSNBC (courtesy of Instapundit–the link, not the firing). The best part of it is that the meltdown for which he was fired was the result of internecine shock-jock warfare: He began shouting viciously homophobic obscenities at a fan of the sub-Opie-and-Anthony “Don & Mike Show.” Now if only we can get a caller to start repeating the word “Bababooey” the next time Ann Coulter is on Hannity & Colmes.

Did you know that Prescott Bush sold stuff to Hitler? So obviously his grandson can never, ever be right about anything.

In addition, the war was all about helping the oil industry, which explains why the government of Saudi Arabia, oil magnates one and all, virulently opposed it. Or maybe it doesn’t, I’m not sure. At any rate, the oil companies wanted us to invade the country rather than simply lift the sanctions and begin making sweetheart deals, because a full-scale invasion against a man who’s lit oil fields on fire by the hundreds and dumped crude into the sea willy-nilly is the less risky option. I think.

Also, any attack on a Muslim country sends thousands more rage-filled jihadists over to the terrorists, who otherwise are suffering from a shortage of volunteers and an insufficient level of free-floating anger at the West. If we were to stop fighting they’d leave us alone. Isn’t that obvious to everyone? I mean, just prior to 9/11 we invaded Syria, didn’t we? And after we pulled out of Somalia they said “whoops, sorry, thanks for crying uncle, we won’t pick on you anymore,” didn’t they? Cause and effect, people!

RIPPING UP THE CONSTITUTION! OIL!! 1984!!! COWBOY!!!! HITLER!!!!!

Phew, I feel much better.

Did I mention that oil’s not really worth fighting for? A crazy guy sitting on 9% of the world’s supplies with a full 25% within striking distance? No big whoop. After all, it’s only rich SUV-driving top-hatted Monopoly Men like Ken Lay who use oil. The economy of poor people in the third world runs on Segways and magic beans.