I realize that I keep saying this, but it’s true and the best context I can offer: Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce is one of the—I think—top two political writers in America today, the other being Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, who is far better known. Everyone with even a passing interest about what happened with the Walker recall in Wisconsin needs to read Pierce’s spot-on post-mortem on the vote, “The Wisconsin Recall Aftermath: Scott Walker Steps Right Up into the Pocket of Those Who Got Him There.” Seriously, it’s a must-read if ever there was one and so is his blog, which I encourage you to bookmark.

I’ve been noticing with satisfaction in the past few days how some of Pierce’s posts at Esquire’s Politics blog have been zooming up the charts at reddit—and I’m trying to encourage more DM readers to discover Pierce’s writing, too—like this on-target statement about how big money/big corruption is destroying America. Apologies to Charles Pierce for snagging his entire post, but it’s too short—and the sentiments therein far too important—not to pass it on in full here:

The Rot of Citizens United Is Universal. Get Used to It.

It is a capital mistake to study the corrosive effect of the utterly corrupt Citizens United decision only in the context of the presidential contest, or in the context of other highly visible individual races, like the one for a U.S. Senate seat or last night’s Wisconsin recall. The rot in the system is poisonous, general, and spreading. 

(And have I mentioned really how utterly stupid it is to have an elected judiciary, especially in the current cash-soaked political atmosphere? It is the second-worst idea ever behind the Balanced Budget Amendment, aka The Stupidest Fking Idea Of All Time.)

Very soon, there is not going to be a single political campaign, no matter how small, that directly affects anything having to do with America’s corporate power, which is practically everything, that will not be swamped by anonymous cash laundered through bagmen organized under the banner of some nobly monickered political whorehouse. (While considering the names of the front groups, it is always important to remember the blog’s favorite quote from Sam Spade, of the firm of Spade And Archer: “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.”) As the NYT says:

“...Justice John Paul Stevens predicted that such spending would overwhelm state court races, which would be especially harmful since judges must not only be independent but be seen to be independent as well. North Carolina is proving him right.”

Of course, I’m sure that, sometime later this week, an earnest young scribe from Politico will tell me that everything’s okay because Democrats spend money, too, and, anyway… unions! So, coming soon to your town: the $40 million race for Register of Probate, and won’t that be fun?

You can follow Charles P. Pierce on Twitter. He’ll be an essential voice during this election cycle. If you are on Twitter, you should definately follow him, and bookmark the Esquire Politics blog.

 
The comedienne TIg Notaro is new to me, but she is a well-known figure on the American stand-up comedy circuit (and to viewers of The Sarah Silverman Program, where she played a cop SIlverman goes “les” for). While I may not live in the States, or even have a TV, I am very happy to have found this woman, ‘cos she’s hilarious. 

I discovered the wonders of Tig while innocently browsing Zach Galifianakis interviews on the web. Anyone who has seen the excellent Between Two Ferns knows that an interview with Galifianakis can be a brutal, painfully funny ordeal. Well, Tig is one of the only people who can match Galifianakis’ surly, steely cynicism beat-for-beat, and in this clip for Bright Young Things she actually gets the better of him at his own awkward-interview game. That is no mean feat.

Once my interest had been pricked by this clip, I had to go and find out more about this woman, and thankfully her hilarious dalliance with Galifianakis was no mere fluke. Notaro pulls off that west coast, drawling, “Whaaa?”-style delivery perfectly. It’s one of my favorite types of American comedy, and a style that tends to be over-looked in favor of the polemicism of Bill Hicks and George Carlin (not that it’s a competition, you understand). Maybe it’s got to do with all the sweet weed growing over there, but it’s something I think you guys do better than almost anyone else, if I’m honest. 

There are some excellent Tig performance clips floating around online (particularly sketches recorded at the Purple Onion) and last year Notaro released her first album of comedy material, Good One. Here’s one of the longer sketches from the album, called “Taylor Dayne”, which recounts Tig’s run-ins with the eponymous 80s songstrel/actress. The way this sketch keeps looping back to the same punchline reminds me of Stewart Lee in a way, but stripped of all that “comedy-about-comedy” pretence that can become tiresome:

Tig Notaro “Taylor Dayne”
 

 
You can buy Good One here, and find out more info on Tig at her website.

In the meantime, you can download the sketch “Can You Believe It” by putting your email address into this little widget, then clicking “Download” when it directs you to her site:
 

 
Earlier today, in a scene straight out of Veep (which is terrifically funny television, btw), the hapless underlings of the National Republican Congressional Committee oh-so-naively invited the entire Internet to sign a petition to repeal Obamacare, which would be webcast on LiveStream as a printer printed out each “signee.” (Who would give a shit about something as bloody boring as watching a PRINTER over the Internet, anyway? Oh, right, Republicans… I get it, I get it. Sorry, it was a brainfart).

The “Watch Your Petition Print” video feed lasted just minutes before frantic GOP staffers pulled the plug on signatories like “Grumpo Prembus,” “Barnacle Jim Long Face,” “Connie Lingus” and “Turd Sniffer.”

Despite their best efforts, the trolling lives on, on a Tumblr blog called The Angry Hand.
 

 

 
Via Wonkette

 
I can still recall watching The Ascent of Man when it was first broadcast on TV. It was a startling experience, like taking a dive into the cold waters of a loch in November. Its presenter the scientist and mathematician, Dr. Jacob Bronowski may have been “4’ 11” in height” but he was “10’ 5” in presence.” He was astonishing on screen. Likable, super intelligent and filled with a life-loving humanity that inspired. He seemed, as a Monty Python sketch later claimed, to know “everything”.

The series had been intended as a counterpoint to Kenneth Clark‘s landmark series Civilisation, which had appeared on the BBC at the end of the 1960s. There was then still the idea that science and art were 2 different cultures, an idea which had been promoted by scientist turned novelist C. P. Snow in 1959, when he claimed in a lecture, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, that the intellectual life of “the whole of western society was split into two cultures” of Science and the Humanities.

Snow said the British educational system had put an emphasis on the Humanities (in particular the Classics) at the expense of Science. His lecture inspired a notorious rebuttal from F. R. Leavis, Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow, in which the famed academic dismissed Snow as a “public relations man for science” and destroyed his reputation as a novelist:

“Snow is, of course, a—no, I can’t say that; he isn’t: Snow thinks of himself as a novelist….his incapacity as a novelist is … total….as a novelist he doesn’t exist; he doesn’t begin to exist. He can’t be said to know what a novel is…..[Snow] is utterly without a glimmer of what creative literature is, or why it matters…..not only is he not a genius, he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be.”

Today this type of vitriol one might expect from Simon Cowell, but back then, in the dusty quadrangles of academe, it was unacceptable, and led to mailbox filled with letters from Outraged of Oxford, Cambridge and Mayfair. More damagingly, it led to an entrenchment of views between science and the arts.

In essence, the avuncular Snow believed science, or the culture of science, contained “a great deal of argument, usually much more rigorous, and almost always at a higher conceptual level, than the literary persons’ arguments.” He went on to say:

“If the scientists have the future in their bones, then the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist.”

By “traditional culture” Snow meant writers, artists, those students of Humanities, and incredibly cited George Orwell’s novel 1984 as an example of someone who did not want the future to exist. 

Snow claimed that science offered optimism, while let’s call them the Arts were just plain old pessimistic. he also thought writers were suspect (obviously excluding himself here), and science was the only means through which society and the quality of existence would become better. Admirable stuff. But as Leavis was to point out, while science had indeed made the quality of life better, but it only told us how to do something once the decision had been made to do it. Science could not offer the process through which humans came to the moral / philosophical decision to do something.

This debate continued during my school years, where a lack of interest in Maths or Science, or a preference for English and Art, was considered a failing. It was therefore inspiring to watch Bronowski’s Ascent of Man, who showed this separation to not only be false but irrelevant.

“For me science is an expression of the human mind, which seeks for unity under the chaos of nature as the writer seeks for it in the variety of human nature.

Or, as he explained in this interview with James Day for his series Day at Night, recorded in April 9, 1974, just 4 months before Bronowski’s death.

Where does fact end and where does imagination begin? Well, in a sense fact is what the world faces us with, and it is chaotic. We are surrounded in nature by a multitude of phenomena, in which, if order exists it certainly does not display itself.

It is when human beings enter into that, that they ask themselves where is the trail of this chaos?

The trail is called science, if we are talking about inanimate nature.

But, if we are talking about animate nature, about living things and their personal relationships, that trail is called literature or drama or cinema.

In each case, what I the scientist , you the reader, get out of the film or the book, is a series of landmarks which say ‘Follow these steps and you’ll see that there is a hidden unity’, what I call a trail, in the variety of nature. Now, finding that requires imagination, that’s not displayed for you in the open book of nature or in the hidden book of human mood.

In 1945, Bronowski visited Japan and saw at first hand the devastation caused by the detonation of an atomic bomb over the city. It affected Bronowski deeply, and he quit his involvement with mathematics to focus on writing a book on the life and poetry of William Blake. As he wrote the book and contemplated his experiences of the war, it was became clear to Bronowski, long before Snow or Leavis fired their broadsides, that the human imagination is not passive - it is what unites Science and Art - and the pursuits of which were “characteristic of the identity of the human species.”
 

 
John Boswell, the musician and producer behind the Symphony of Science, a musical project devoted to educating people about science through music, has put a psychedelic spin on Mr. Rodgers in this trippy little video.

Rogers’ cosmic perspective finds the magic in the ordinary.
 

 
Made to order by Etsy seller percylau, these pieces of shrunken body-part jewelry are excellent. There’s something very David Cronenberg about them…
 

 

 
Thanks to Kim Thompson.
 

 
Something tells me this particular quip is going to get him into a lot of trouble…

“I’m in favor of continuing the accelerated Darwinian process of early death and weeding out most of the population through sugary drinks.”

—Misanthropic comedian Jerry Seinfeld, discussing the proposed health plan with Grub Street, boiled down his philosophy to, “Fatten them up, kill them off, and move them out.”

Ouch.

Via New York

 
 
Has Banksy struck again, in honor of the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations?

Sure looks like he might have been the author of this piece depicting Her Majesty as Aladdin Sane—and the painting appeared on Upper Maudlin Street, in Banksy’s hometown of Bristol—but it might actually be by an artist named Incwell.

No one seems to know just yet. Doesn’t matter, it’s amusing whoever painted it.

In case you didn’t get the joke:
 

 
Via Lost at E Minor

 
That Wayne Coyne is quite the trickster. Last week he released a Flaming Lips video collaboration with Erykah Badu, “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face,” apparently without getting Badu’s approval of the final cut, which she now finds quite distasteful. One wonders where Ms. Badu was while the video was being made…though it is her sister, Nayrok who appears in the more explicit scenes. Still…

Anyway, Badu has been quite vocal in her feelings of being betrayed by Coyne. Yesterday she Tweeted the following:

@waynecoyne then… perhaps, next time u get an occasion to work with an artist who respects your mind/art, you should send at least a ROUGh version of the video u PLAN to release b4 u manipulate or compromise the artist’s brand by desperately releasing a poor excuse for shock and nudity that sends a convoluted message that passes as art( to some).
Even with Window Seat there was a method and thought process involved. I have not one need for publicity . I just love artistic dialogue . And just because an image is shocking does not make it art.
You obviously have a misconception of who I am artistically. I don’t mind that but…
By the way you are an ass.
Yu did everything wrong from the on set .
First:
You showed me a concept of beautiful tasteful imagery( by way of vid text messages) .
I trusted that. I was mistaken.
Then u release an unedited, unapproved version within the next few days.
That all spells 1 thing ,
Self Serving .
When asked what the concept
meant after u explained it , u replied ,“it doesn’t mean anything , I just want to make a great video that everyone is going to watch. “
I understood , because as an artist we all desire that. But we don’t all do it at another artist’s expense .
I attempted to resolve this respectfully by having conversations with u after the release but that too proved to be a poor excuse for art.
From jump,
You begged me to sit in a tub of that other shit and I said naw. I refused to sit in any liquid that was not water. But Out of RESPECT for you and the artist you ‘appear’ to be, I Didn’t wanna kill your concept , wanted u to at least get it out of your head . After all, u spent your dough on studio , trip to Dallas etc.. Sooo, I invited Nayrok , my lil sis and artist, who is much more liberal ,to be subject of those other disturbing (to me ) scenes . I told u from jump that I believed your concept to be disturbing. But would give your edit a chance.
You then said u would take my shots ( in clear water/ fully covered parts -seemed harmless enough) and Nayrok’s part ( which I was not present for but saw the photos and a sample scene of cornstarch dripping ) and edit them together along with cosmic, green screen images ( which no one saw) then would show me the edit. .
Instead, U disrespected me by releasing pics and rough vid on the internet without my approval. (Contract breech )
That is equivalent to putting out a security camera’s images of me changing in the fitting room.
I never would have approved that tasteless, meaningless, shock motivated video .
Our art is a reflection of who we are . I have no connection to those images shot in their raw version. I was interested in seeing an amazing edit that would perhaps change or alter my thoughts . Never happened .
You also did the same thing with the song itself which displays crappy “rough “vocals by me . I let it go , perhaps iiiii was missing something, I thought.
I Should have followed my first mind back in studio when recording the vocals “your way”.
( Red flag.) It was uncomfortable.
For that I am at fault .
Consequently, brother, As a human I am disgusted with your what appears to be desperation and poor execution. And disregard for others . As a director I am unimpressed . As a sociologist I understand your type. As your fellow artist I am uninspired. As a woman I feel violated and underestimated.
Hope it works out for ya ,Wayne.
Really i could give a shit less.
Still love your live show tho.
And , you’re welcomed.
Lesson learned .
By the way I have guested in very few videos. But I have always been given the opportunity to see the edit and contribute to it when my roll is substantial. Not this time .
I guess u feel it better to apologize than ask for permission and be refused . Hey, Love u man, but your ways are not very nice .
O, And on behalf of all the artists u have manipulated or plan to manipulate, find another way .
These things have been said out of necessity.
And if you don’t like it
you can KiSS MY Glittery ASS .
O and Nayrok told me to tell u to kiss her ass too .
Almost forgot.
Peace

Ms. Badu

In response, Coyne Tweeted back a photo with his lips covered in glitter accompanied by the short and sweet “Hey @fatbellybella I kissed it!!!! Thanks!!!!!!”

The whole thing has created tremendous publicity for all involved and that will ultimately be key in burying hatchets. After all, it is only rock and roll.

Here’s the offending video. It keeps being pulled from the web so enjoy it while you can. I like it. The song production is haunting.
 

Rare 70s pic of Prince, uploaded by ChrisEagle08
 
The purple funk pixie turns 54 today. Happy birthday, Prince!

You are the reason I have dedicated my life to music, and also the reason for my occassional feelings of inadequecy. I mean, seriously, how can anyone ever compete with that?

Oh well, we do our best.

Here’s some footage of the master at his post-Purple Rain peak in 1985, tearing it up live at the Grammys, with The Revolution still in tow. He truly is the greatest performer rock or pop has ever seen, let’s just hope he doesn’t yank this cracking clip:

Prince & The Revolution “Baby I’m A Star” (live at the Grammys, 1985)