Death often inspires the most remarkable hyperbole. At the memorial service for Anthony Burgess in 1994, novelist William Boyd eulogized the author of A Clockwork Orange as “a genius,” “a prodigy, a daunting and awesome one,” who “would compose a string quartet in the ten minutes he allowed himself between finishing a novel and writing a monograph on James Joyce,” whose “polymorphous abilities are genuinely amazing.”
High praise indeed. Yet, Mr. Boyd wasn’t finished, Mr. Burgess, he said, was “one of our great comic novelists.” Boyd gave, by way of example, that off-used line from one of the Enderby novels. This was the line with which Burgess proved (allegedly for a bet) he could write a sentence where the word “onions” appears three times.
‘Then—instead of expensive mouthwash—he had breathed on Enderby—bafflingly—(for no banquet would serve, because of the redolence of onions, onions) onions.’
Hardly a knee-slapper, rather the kind of literary snobbishness that epitomizes Burgess, and by association Mr. Boyd.
Burgess was low comedy. He was for the cheap fart jokes, like Dudley Moore when competing against the loquacious comic invention of Peter Cook on Derek and Clive, or like the trademark raspberry (“Bronx Cheer”) used by Goon Harry Secombe when confronted with the manic genius of Spike Milligan.
Burgess’s idea of comedy was to have a dog called the n-word (The Doctor is Sick), or a “hero” poet (Enderby) writing his verse (blast) on the toilet; or where Shakespeare is cuckolded by his brother and catches the clap from his “Dark Lady” (Nothing Like the Sun)
Though I like Burgess, I would hardly call his work comic. Too often his books present an author more interested in flashing his learnedness to an audience, rather than his imagination—which is why his books lack emotional resonance, and his characters rarely have an interior life.
Burgess always wanted to be seen as smarter than everyone—when readers pointed out to the master the mistakes in his magnum opus Earthly Powers, Burgess claimed he had deliberately included these errors to see who would discover them, which is like ye olde Thelwell cartoon of the riding instructor who when thrown by his horse, asked his pupils, “Which one of you spotted my deliberate mistake?”
Perhaps aware of this lack, Burgess was usually quick to take offense—watch any interview and he types himself as the victim, the Catholic in a oppressive-Protestant society, a northerner in a London-centric world, a student from a red-brick university rather than the hallowed groves of Cambridge or Oxford. Burgess is Jimmy Porter, full of petty grievances against the world. Which all makes for an interesting character, and author, but not a great one.
Burgess’s best known novel is A Clockwork Orange, which became an international success once it had been filmed by Stanley Kubrick. Burgess came to hate it and told Playboy in 1971, of all his books it was the one he liked least. But without A Clockwork Orange would anyone have taken an interest in Burgess?
The secret code contained in Burgess’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’, after the jump…
Richard Nixon is quite clearly drunk as a skunk (unless he took ‘ludes!) in this amazing LOL-worthy recording of a telephone conversation with California governor Ronald Reagan.
“I couldn’t be better,” Nixon insisted after warmly greeting Reagan on what should have been a somber night.
“The time is so far different,” Nixon, a California native, continued. “The time is only 7 o’clock or 8 o’clock there, huh?
“Yes,” Reagan replied.
“How nice of you to call,” the president added.
“You can count on us,” Reagan said after noting how difficult it must have been to deliver the Watergate speech. “We’re still behind you out here.”
“Each of us is a different religion,” Nixon said, pivoting. “But, Goddamn it Ron, we have got to build peace in the world. And that’s what I’m working on.”
That and a massive hangover from the sound of his slurred voice!
“How’d you ever marry such a pretty girl?” Nixon asked Regan after requesting the Golden State governor send his regards to his wife.
“I’m lucky,” Reagan replied.
“Where are you now? Are you in Sacramento?” Nixon asked.
“No, Los Angeles,” Regan answered.
“Good for you,” the president replied. “Get out of that miserable city.”
It’s awkward. And all over the place. But funny. Totally worth the listen, I promise.
If Nixon and Brezhnev necked some Russian vodka during the Soviet leader’s White House visit, I can’t wait to hear that tape, too.
Store clerk attacked, hospitalized over David Hasselhoff cardboard cut-out - Death and Taxes
Quebec’s Muslims, Jews, Sikhs and other religious minorities are on alert after reports that the Parti Québécois government intends to introduce legislation that would ban veils, kippas, turbans and other symbols from government offices, hospitals, schools and any other place that receives public funding - The Star
Ron Paul to be keynote speaker at anti-Semitic conference - Salon
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak slams Ashton Kutcher’s Jobs - ABC News
There’s a fascinating “long read” article on the Moscow News website looking back on the trip through Russia that David Bowie made forty years ago with Geoff MacCormack, his childhood friend and back-up singer/conga player for six major rock tours.
MacCormack was one of The Astronettes along with Bowie’s mistress Ava Cherry and Jason Guess and he appears on Aladdin Sane, Pin-ups, Diamond Dog, David Live and Station to Station (he’s also in the Ziggy concert film). He put it nicely when he described the three decadent, action-packed years he spent touring with Bowie to Goldmine magazine: “Say you’re my friend and I invite you to a party, and the party goes on for three years, and you change costumes, and maybe we go home and say hello to mother — which is important, obviously — and we check with our families and, and we do all that, and we come back to the party and we carry on the theme, or the next theme, or the other theme, or whatever the theme is going to be and that’s kind of what it’s like.”
The travelers were given communist propaganda on their arrival: the book “Marx, Engels and Lenin on Scientific Communism” and various leaflets explaining what they could and couldn’t photograph, as well as a sermon on the evils of Tom and Jerry which said the cartoon was sick, degrading and a threat to children’s development. To back up this argument, the leaflet noted that then British-Prime Minister Edward Heath had staged a private showing of the cartoon at his country home of Chequers.
It was only once they got to Khabarovsk that they realized that they weren’t actually on the Trans-Siberian Express. This fabled train was a bit of a disappointment after the grand old Nakhodka-Khabarovsk train – more Formica than wood paneling, even if they were travelling in first class.
In the rather sweet columns that Bowie wrote for teen magazine Mirabelle, he paints a pleasant, varnished picture of the trip, as if writing to reassure his worried aunts at home.
“I could never have imagined such expanses of unspoilt, natural country without actually seeing it myself, it was like a glimpse into another age, another world, and it made a very strong impression on me. It was strange to be sitting in a train, which is the product of technology – the invention of mankind, and travelling through land so untouched and unspoilt by man and his inventions.”
More realistically, MacCormack told of how he had to run and jump onto the train after it began moving out of the station while he was buying food on a platform. “The very thought of being stuck with no ID in the wastelands of Siberia still fills me with panic, even after all these years.”
The two train attendants in his carriage, Danya and Nadya, were unsmiling and stern (as would you, if you were on a seven-day shift), but they melted once Bowie presented them with a soft toy he had been given in Japan. They also were given the full Bowie charm.
“I used to sing songs to them, often late at night, when they had finished work. They couldn’t understand a word of English, and so that meant they couldn’t understand a word of my songs!” wrote Bowie in Mirabelle, whose readers almost certainly took an instant dislike to these women who had what they had dreamed of and didn’t even know the language, let alone all the words by heart.
“But that didn’t seem to worry them at all. They sat with big smiles on their faces, sometimes for hours on end, listening to my music, and at the end of each song they would applaud and cheer!”
Joining the two in Khabarovsk was Robert Muesel, a veteran reporter with UPI with hangdog looks, and photographer Lee Childers, whose spiked platinum-blond hair and snakeskin platform boots drew plenty of looks, too.
Muzel described what happened when Bowie boarded the train.
“A passenger made an entrance that stopped onlookers in their tracks, as he was destined to do at most of the 91 stops to Moscow. He was tall, slender, young, hawkishly handsome with bright red (dyed) hair and dead white skin. He wore platform-soled boots and a shirt glittering with metallic thread under his blue raincoat. He carried a guitar, but two Canadian girls did not need this identifying symbol of the pop artist.
“‘David Bowie” they screeched ecstatically, “on our train.” Bowie turned their spines to jelly with a smile.”
There was reaction from the Russian side too, as one passenger looked at Bowie askance and said that such a thing could only happen in the decadent West.
Muesel hints that Bowie had a fun time on the train, but without providing any details. Mentioning talk of Bowie’s bisexuality, he wrote, “There was nothing ambiguous about his relationships with some of the prettier girls on board, either. “My wife Angela understands,” he laughed one day.”
Geoffrey MacCormack’s book From Station to Station, is a memoir and photo book about his life on tour with Bowie from 1973 to 76. The book, which has a foreword by Bowie, is available from Genesis Publications.
Below, you can see MacCormack (and the very lovely Ava Cherry) backing up the thin white coke-fiend on ‘The Dick Cavett Show’ in 1974. He’s the guy in the jumpsuit to Bowie’s right:
When two beautiful worlds collide, you get… Nugtella!
I’ve yet to encounter this fantastical hazelnut chocolatey goodness—apparently infused with 320 milligrams of THC from hash oil—at my local dispensary, but I’m willing to give it try when I do! (You really had to twist my arm with that one, btw!)
So far it’s only available in the great state of California. And as BuzzFeed points out, “...all your Nutella recipes just got way more interesting.”
A recent poll taken of Republican voters in Louisiana revealed something… well… something kind of stupid: A significant portion of them think that Obama deserves the blame for Hurricane Katrina, which occurred in 2005! In fact, more Louisiana Republicans blame Obama than… George Bush!
The latest survey from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling, provided exclusively to TPM, showed an eye-popping divide among Republicans in the Bayou State when it comes to accountability for the government’s post-Katrina blunders.
Twenty-eight percent said they think former President George W. Bush, who was in office at the time, was more responsible for the poor federal response while 29 percent said Obama, who was still a freshman U.S. Senator when the storm battered the Gulf Coast in 2005, was more responsible. Nearly half of Louisiana Republicans — 44 percent — said they aren’t sure who to blame.
Bush was criticized heavily when he did not immediately return to Washington from his vacation in Texas after the storm had reached landfall. The government was also slow to provide relief aid and Michael Brown, then-director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), admitted in a televised interview that he learned that many of the storm’s victims at the New Orleans Convention Center were without food and water well after the situation had been reported in the press.
Former FEMA director Brown’s handling of the federal agency’s incompetent emergency response to Katrina ultimately led to his resignation.
The polls’ results, and the indication that a sizable portion of Louisiana Republicans must be as dumb as cud-chewing cows, is not exactly a jaw-dropping revelation—after all it was the state’s goofy-ass, deeply unpopular Republican governor Bobby Jindal who coined that “stupid party” moniker to describe his own political brethren (and he should know, he appealed to these ignoramuses for their votes!)—but still.
Talk about a short—not to mention, faulty—memory these Republicans must have. Better than a goldfish, but by how much?
After a couple decades of being primed by the geniuses at Wieden+Kennedy (Nike’s advertising agency of choice for years and years), it was quite a shock to stumble upon these shitty L.A. Gear commercials from the late 1980s and early 1990s and tumble back, back, back into a world in which your parents might have been every bit as into these ads as you were. You can almost hear mom saying, “Now, those sneakers would be nice, don’t you think? They’re so fashionable....”
More vintage L.A. Gear commercials than you can shake a stick at after the jump…
Politicians, many of whom have probably never met anyone on food stamps in real life, played a fun game over the summer.
The SNAP Challenge!
As of May more than 47 million Americans are on SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, what we used to call “food stamps”). The program was not originally designed to provide an individual’s or family’s entire food budget. It is supposed to provide supplemental money for food, in addition to other income from work, pensions, child support, or government benefits (unemployment, disability, Social Security, SSI). However, 20% of people on SNAP (almost 10 million people) rely on it alone to buy groceries.
Democrats started the #snapchallenge over the summer to show how difficult it is already for this 20% of our nation to get by and make a real-life point about why SNAP cuts are a bad idea. They ate on $4.50 a day, using the average SNAP payment for one person of $133.44 per month. Journalists from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette joined them but were allowed to budget $6 a day.
A family of four could receive up to a maximum benefit of $668 in SNAP per month for food. According to the USDA’s Food Plans, updated in June, for a family of four (a couple with two children between 6-8 and 9-11 years old) SNAP benefits are slightly more than the USDA “Thrifty Plan” of $632 per month. The “Liberal Plan” is $1250 a month for the same family.
The USDA does have somewhat decent resources, including a list of cheap recipes to enable recipients to plan meals around the food one can afford, searchable by dollar amount, and ponderous, somniferously dull Dietary Guidelines. This is useful for SNAP users with access to computers and internet access, probably at their nearest library branch, which is hopefully within walking distance or on the same bus line as a grocery or dollar store.
For a family of four including teen-agers, I suspect that surviving on $632 would be possible only if they also raised chickens, had a large vegetable garden, and at least one actively extreme-dieting family member subsisting on protein shakes and cotton balls dipped in orange juice.
Massachusetts’ Department of Transitional Assistance Commissioner Stacey Monahan did the challenge for a week. She told WCVB:
Yesterday I had my last apple. And I was really anxious about that. If this were my way of life for more than just a week, I can see how that would be really difficult. A lot of people that utilize SNAP run out of their benefits by the third week in the month.
Unfortunately a lot of Democrats – however good their intentions were with this challenge – are clearly not used to grocery shopping for themselves. They made themselves look foolishly out of touch with people living in poverty. Instead of buying in bulk, shopping at a farmer’s market, making a lot of food and freezing it in portions for future meals, they pulled idiot moves like buying expensive Boca Burgers (Rep. Mark Pocan), grated cheese, non-seasonal fruit, one (!) presumably free-range egg dipped in gold for $1.08 (Donald M. Payne, Jr.), and—preposterously—setting foot in Whole Foods (children’s health advocate Matthew J. Wright).
Fitness and nutrition blogger Lisa Johnson used the USDA “Thrifty Plan” in 2012 ($491.10 for 30 days in her case, which is 30% higher than SNAP), and shopped only at Whole Foods in an attempt to prove that if you really, really try, you can feed your family healthy organic food near the poverty line. When she succeeded, Whole Foods agreed to reimburse her for the month’s expenses. She asked the company to donate the amount to a local food bank instead.
Throughout the 30 days I kept thinking of families who were living at or below the poverty level trying to feed everyone. It was such a struggle for us even though we had done our homework and only had to do it for one month. I can’t imagine what the grind feels like after months or years of living like this.
If you’re on food stamps it can be really challenging to feed your family healthfully. Starches are cheaper than produce and it’s easy to reach for those. I can see how the poverty/obesity trap happens and why it’s so difficult to get out of.
Over the 30 days, I gained a lot of knowledge about how to feed a family well even on a tight budget. When I started our meals were starch heavy but as I got savvier about living on a frugal budget, I figured out how to add more produce into our diets. It’s definitely possible, but it takes a lot of patience and tenacity.
A former Wild Oats (bought out by Whole Foods) employee told me that the Thrifty Challenge is do-able if you buy almost everything in their bulk food aisle and carefully shop their sales. Hope you like quinoa and dried figs!
To prove that living in poverty and getting enough to eat on a daily basis is no biggie, lawmakers like Texas congressman Steve Stockman declared the SNAP Challenge to be a left-wing publicity stunt and set out to disprove it. In fact, one of his staffers, Donny Ferguson, claimed that all the SNAP Challenge accomplished was prove that poor people are already getting too much food assistance and the program should be decimated. It also had the unintended consequence of proving that Donny Ferguson is a morally-repugnant douchebag of low character who possesses zero empathy for his fellow man. No doubt this Texas Republican toady considers himself a good Christian…
Donny Ferguson, who serves as Stockman’s communications director and agriculture policy adviser, was able to buy enough food to eat well for a week on just $27.58, almost four dollars less than the $31.50 “SNAP Challenge” figure.
“I wanted to personally experience the effects of the proposed cuts to food stamps. I didn’t plan ahead or buy strategically, I just saw the publicity stunt and made a snap decision to drive down the street and try it myself. I put my money where my mouth is, and the proposed food stamp cuts are still quite filling,” said Ferguson.
“We can cut the proposed benefits by an additional 12.4 percent and still be able to eat for a week,” said Ferguson. “Not only am I feeding myself for less than the SNAP Challenge, I will probably have food left over.”...
“Not only did I buy a week’s worth of food on what Democrats claim is too little, I have money left over. Based on my personal experience with SNAP benefit limits we have room to cut about 12 percent more.”
Here’s what he bought to feed himself for a week:
Two boxes of Honeycomb cereal
Three cans of red beans and rice
Jar of peanut butter
Bottle of grape jelly
Loaf of whole wheat bread
Two cans of refried beans
Box of spaghetti
Large can of pasta sauce
Two liters of root beer
Large box of popsicles
24 servings of Wyler’s fruit drink mix
Eight cups of applesauce
Bag of pinto beans
Bag of rice
Bag of cookies
Gallon of milk
Box of maple and brown sugar oatmeal
Paraphrasing Marie Antoinette, “Let them eat empty calories and carbs!”
What is objectionable about this challenge is that it is a political version of The Simple Life. After smugly making their case for or against SNAP cuts, like Paris Hilton and Nichole Richie going back to Beverly Hills after taping an episode among the peasants in Bumfuck, USA, these politicians, journalists, bloggers, and public policy researchers can go back to a normal, much higher food budget, whereas the people for whom this struggle is daily reality…. can’t.
Democracy Now’s report on food insecurity in the U.S., below:
Art punk progenitor, David Thomas, American citizen abroad and longtime front man of influential avant-rockers, Pere Ubu, has been fighting since May with the US Customs & Immigration Service (USCIS) and the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) in a drawn-out attempt at receiving visa approval for a few of his fellow band mates. Thomas and Ubu would like to do a small U.S. tour, their first in several years.
Two British citizens have been in the group for the last four years. To tour in America with those British citizens, Pere Ubu must prove that the band itself, or the individual musicians, are of ʻworld classʼ caliber and have a respected international reputation. Pere Ubu provided the USCIS with voluminous documentation spanning its thirty-eight year history that attested to the groupʼs considerable reputation and nearly universal critical acclaim. The application states that the band must also seek a consultation from an appropriate labor organization.
The idea that the band would still have to pay the AFM a $300 fee in order to have the union conduct a consultation thereby “validating” the international credo of the group and its members rubs Thomas the wrong way. He refuses to pay the fee, stating that he has already supplied ample information to prove that the Pere Ubu is “legitimate” and that the fluidity of its members is key to the largely improvisational creative process that Pere Ubu relies upon so heavily.
Again, from the press release:
“I do not recognize the musician unionʼs authority in this matter,” said Thomas, a US citizen resident in the United Kingdom. “If Steven Tyler wants some guy from Greater Lower Slobovia to be the guitarist in Aerosmith, then what right does the Government have, through its deputies in the AFM, to comment on the validity of Mr. Tylerʼs choice? More to the point, musicians in a band like Pere Ubu are not interchangeable - when someone new comes in we have to re-compose the entire repertoire.
At this late date (the tour starts on September 6th), Thomas has decided to drop back and punt on general principal. Despite being down two members, Pere Ubu will embark upon their U.S. Tour as scheduled (albeit operating under Plan B) with Cleveland visual artist and guitarist David Cintron filling in for British guitarist, Keith Moliné, who can’t come into the U.S. because of the visa issue. And despite what might prove to be a tricky endeavor in some of the smaller clubs that Ubu will be playing, Thomas plans to “beam in” live performances from one of the group’s keyboard players stuck in Europe.
“The remote performance will only be for one song but it’s a victory nonetheless,” Thomas said. “For a month I’ve been in my studio working on this project. Everyone says it can’t be done… Oh well.”
For more on the issue, check out the radio interview below with Thomas on the Defend Cleveland Show, a local sports and culture broadcast from Thomas’ hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. Ubu’s point man discusses the visa issue, his “Chinese Whisper” creative process and some of his favorite Cleveland bands.
Below, Pere Ubu’s memorable appearance in ‘Urgh! A Music War’:
