Photo of today

Big news day so far

The Washington Post breaks two mind-blowing stories on its front page:

Inflation Hits the Poor Hardest
No Income Group Is Untouched, but Staples Are Rising Fastest

Inflation is walloping Americans with low and moderate incomes as the prices of staples have soared far faster than those of luxuries.

Who would have thunk it? I thought only bad things happen to the rich, economically anyway.

And stranger still:

Small Dog Attacks Boy
"Pinkie-Poo" really very nice, claims owner

An out-of-control Pomeranian nipped the heels of you Billy Smith today, drawing no blood, but forcing him to hop around until the dog's owner, Mrs. Jones, could intervene.

And I always thought they were such nice dogs.

Meanwhile, in a small paragraph buried at the end of an article on page 24D we learn that the banks are failing, war is imminent, Charles Krautenhammer continues to resist treatment for the sharp stick up his ass, and a prominent Republican called for the deportation of just about everyone.

Difference in latitude

I couldn't help notice the three major newspaper's play on the content of Hillary Clinton's schedule during her years as first lady. The different approach you see between an independent foreign newspaper and its dysfunctional U.S. counterparts is illustrative of just how fucked up American journalism has become. Following are the headlines, deks, and first graphs.

The Guardian gets to the heart of the matter:

Hillary Clinton missed key presidential moments

· Papers cast doubt on claim of first-hand experience
· First lady was often far from scene of negotiations

On the day that dozens of US cruise missiles rained down on Serbia in an attempt to punish Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic for the country's onslaught against ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo, first lady Hillary Clinton was far from the White House war room: she was touring ancient Egyptian ruins.

In other words, she is full of shit and now she's exposed.

The Times opts for the sleep-inducing lede:

11,000 Long-Awaited Pages of Clinton’s Schedules as First Lady Are Released

WASHINGTON — The National Archives and the William J. Clinton Presidential Library on Wednesday released more than 11,000 pages of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s public schedules for her eight years as first lady.

I'm surprised they didn't mention he was wearing a grey suit when he released the 11,000 pages of information.

In other words, nothing to see here, move along.

The Post tries to find it in its heart to say something substantive, but rambles:

In Hillary Clinton's Datebook, A Shift
Events Less Lofty After Health-Care Debacle

Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived in the White House with a schedule befitting a president, packed with policy sessions, meetings with senators and trips to promote an ambitious political agenda. But after the collapse of her health-care plan in 1994, she largely retreated to a more traditional first lady's calendar of school visits, hospital tours, photo ops and speeches on a narrower set of issues.

In other words, we want her to beat Obama, but if she runs against McCain, we'll get her.

If you read beyond the first paragaraph, you can glean some useful information from each of the newspapers, but most people don't even read beyond the headline. Editors know this. By their criteria it's clear that the Guardian wants you to read the story, the Times doesn't, and the Post doesn't know what the hell it's doing.

Chuckling has a dream

I watched Obama’s speech on race relations today. It was a great speech; an unprecedented piece of artistry by a modern day American politician in a presidential race. If Hillary Clinton had an ounce of concern for the future of this country she would immediately quit the race, turn all her money over to Obama and work her ass off to get him elected president. Yea, well, I know what they say about wishes, beggars, and horses. But still, I can dream. And I do.

For many years I’ve been having a dream in which I am lost, either on my way to the airport, or in the airport, and am in a combination state of intense anxiety and crushing depression because every minute that passes, every wrong turn I make, increases the likelihood that I will miss my flight to France.

Even long after the flight is scheduled to leave, I’m still running -- or driving like a wild man in that version of the dream -- in case the flight is delayed and there's still a possibility I could board.

I feel no real hope that I can make the plane, that I can get to France. I feel gut-wrenchingly bad that I can't. Still I keep trying. No other choice occurs to me.

Do I make it? Well, the dream is never resolved, but based on the sick empty feeling I have won awakenint, I suspect not.

I used to discuss that dream, among others, with my psychoanalyst. Or more accurately, I used to discuss it with a psychoanalyst. I wasn’t paying her anything. In fact, she was paying me for some other work, but we talked a lot and I think she just liked to practice.

Anyway, according to her, the dream was my unconscious's way of telling me I was stuck and that all my efforts to move on to a better place were in vain. Frustratingly so. She said that the airport and the flight to France were metaphors for a healthy sexual relationship. Yea, well duh. I didn't need Sigmund Freud to tell me that. She knew that I wasn't getting along with my second wife any better than I did the first.

But what to do? The dream doesn’t give any clue.

When I heard Obama speak these words, I realized that we suffered from that same dream, even if his didn't take place in an airport:

I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

And nothing will change. Exactly. I’ll be running for that plane for the rest of my fucking life and he'll be running for president for the rest of his. I'll never make the plane. He'll never be president. He might as well re-name himself Williams Jenning Bryant. No, he has more sense than that. Maybe Eugene V. Debs II would be more appropriate. Our elections will always be about distractions. They will ever make a lick of sense. No one with any significant combination of brains and morals will ever be allowed to win.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

The promise of our ideals and the reality of their time? Therein, I think, likes the clue. Obama and I. We have the same dream.

What if the airport, the presidency, is not just another metaphor for sex? What if it's really telling us, in plain dreamspeak, to get out of this fucked-up country and move to France? What if that is the solution? Not just for me and mine, but for Obama as well?

The answer is, my friends, that the world would probably be a better place if he made that choice. Let's face it. Obama has already lost the election. Hillary has him branded.

But although he has lost this election, with that speech, he has set himself up to win the century.

Unfortunately, this country is fucked and we are doomed to live our lifetimes being ruled by the only kind of sociopathic morons that can navigate the media horror show in such a twisted way as to be elected president. Obama, clearly, is not cut out for the job. He is a good man with a good brain. He is too good for this country.

So chuckling's advice to Obama is to get on that plane to France. Just wash your hands of this mess. Go into exile. Speak for posterity. The long run is our only chance to win. If the best of this generation were to abandon this poor shade of democracy and spend his life speaking, writing, and acting to bring about the real thing, that would be a powerful act. Much more powerful than sliming it up with John, Hillary, and the boys on radio and teevee.

The weekend in photos

Y'all like pretty boy. Check out the rest of the show.

Oh, and by the way, if you're in the New York area and would like this kind of portrait done for yourself or someone you know, get in touch. We can probably work something out.

An oft-told tale

I saw Macbeth a few nights back in Brooklyn. I am not a Shakespeare scholar so, unlike the play, this review will be short.

Sorry, I couldn’t help the little joke. Although it came in at just under 3 hours, the production moved right along and I was never bored, at least not for long. Had I been able to understand half of what they were saying, I probably wouldn’t have been bored at all.

As long-time readers are aware, I am a shallow critic. Hell, even if you just came here and read the above paragraphs you probably figured that out. I don’t have any grand theories about the stage or screen. I’m not a member of the genius director’s school, nor the great actor’s. Mainly I am interested in story. I can appreciate good cinematography or stagecraft as well. But it usually comes down to I liked it or not.

Why or why not? The answer is almost always found in the writing. Great acting, directing and stagecraft certainly enhance a well-written work, but can rarely, if ever, save a poorly written one.

Macbeth? I thought the stagecraft great and the acting fine. As a writer, it’s difficult for me to do justice to the staging, you really have to be there and see it for yourself. I’ll just say that I liked it. A lot.

The acting? It was marvelous. Frankly, I’m impressed that anyone can memorize so many strange words, much less pronounce them coherently. The actors did both. Well done, I say.

But the writing? I’m sorry Mr. Shakespeare but that play sucked. As poetry, I grant you, it had its moments, But a play is not a poem. The plot is a tired retread of the writer’s better work. The characters are whiny and unsympathetic. Their motivations are a complete mystery. Oh, sure, plenty of people want to be king and you might say that’s an obvious motivation, but you would never get that from the words of Macbeth. More likely he was just motivated to find something else to whine about. The question that drives the plot is “when will someone shut these people up?” The answer? Not soon enough. I tell you.

A big part of what makes me such a shallow critic is that I refuse to do research or consider any kind of historical connotations around a work. I would say “it is what it is,” but then I’d have to bash my brains against a wall for using the cliché of the day, so I’ll just say that I believe that the best criticism comes from total ignorance. I don’t give a fuck who wrote the goddamned play. I don’t care what history has to say about it. If it doesn’t work from a perspective of total ignorance, it just doesn’t work. Well, maybe sometimes, but for now that’s my story.

Yea, yea, yea. I get up on my box and say all that so righteously, right, but in this case I actually did some research.

The thing that struck me most about Macbeth was that it told the exact same story as Richard III except from the perspective of a pathetic whiner rather than an unrepentant schemer. That and Macbeth wallowed in special effects and violence. My thesis was that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth when he was young and then grew as a writer and produced his masterpiece -- Richard III.

So I looked it up and, as is not unusual, got it entirely backwards. Richard III was one of his first plays, Macbeth one of his last. That makes sense as well. Apparently in his dotage, Shakespeare cribbed from his earlier, truly great work.

Like many washed up writers, he added violence and special effects to try to cover the lame-assed writing. Where Richard III was fiendishly twisted and direct, Macbeth is loaded up with witches, ghosts, silly prophesies, and sword fights. I’ll be a dollar to your dime that the next remake ends with a mushroom cloud over Dunsinane.

Anyway, although I thoroughly enjoyed the theatre-going experience, I genuinely detested the play. Unlike normal people, however, that made me want to see it again and as fate would have it, TMC had a Shakespeare night and I caught the end of Orson Welles’s Macbeth and the entirety of Olivier’s Hamlet. This was an interesting juxtaposition because just days before I had read an article in an old New Yorker (abstract here), which discussed Olivier and Welles’s claims to greatest Shakespearean actor ever and discussed those very movies.

So for good measure, I actually bought Welles’s Macbeth and watched the Richard III that features Ian McKellen for like the hundredth time. All that to get a little more context.

You must understand. Although poor chuckling is a clown as well as a shallow critic, I am aware in some deep dark corner of what passes for my mind that all serious people consider Shakespeare to be one of the greatest writers ever and Macbeth to be one of the great masterpieces ever produced by humankind. Ninety-nine out of one hundred and five historians included Macbeth as an example of what they would give superior beings from outer space to demonstrate our worthiness to life in this galaxy. So I ask, who am I, poor chuckling, to belittle the master’s masterwork and piss urine most foul on five hundred years of learned critics? And it’s not just Shakespeare upon whom I pee, but the great Lawrence Olivier as well. His Hamlet blew chunks. And Welles’s Macbeth? Let’s not even go there. The headgear was interesting. Beyond that, I shall not speak.

So to sum it all up, if you haven’t seen Richard III with Ian McKellen, go out and rent it immediately. As I said above, I am a story guy and rarely moved by great acting. Well, Richard III is one of humanity’s great stories and McKellen’s acting is possibly the best I’ve ever seen. The staging is quite good as well.

I’m sure if Macbeth were alive he’d whine about it. Richard, however, would dispatch him with a smirk and some pointed snark. Hamlet would also do well to steer clear of good Richard.

Photo of today

The subject of Barak Obama's race comes up so frequently already that if some unforeseeable miracle occurs and he is allowed to run for President as a Democrat, then questions of his "blackness" will dominate the airwaves thirty seven hours a day, eight days a week until early November.

So answer me this: What is the child in the photo above?

Click on it to see a larger image. Then take a moment. Take a breath. Give it a little thought. Try to empathize. We are not talking about a national figure. This is not a blog fight. This is a child.

A little background: both of his parents are college educated professionals. One was born American with a heavy dose of Dutch ancestry. The other is from a somewhat illustrious family in Africa that includes lawyers, professors, high government officials, even an economist. He goes to one of the better schools in the world, not primarily because of affirmative action, but by merit. His friends are a diverse group, their parents have similar bios -- educated, well-traveled professionals, often one parent from a different part of the world. His closest friends are some combination of Chinese, African, Jewish, Italian and other European mixes. In those respects, he is much like Obama. Kinda looks like him too.

So what is he? I have a little experience with this question. On more than one occasion, a small child, much like the one above only younger, has asked me "what am I?"

So what do you say? A child asks you "what am I?" After you've thought about it and decide, or more realistically, speculate, realize that your answer should apply equally to Obama.

I'll tell you how I answer.

Q: What am I?
A: American.

Q: I mean, am I black?
A: No, you are mixed.

That, followed by a little demonstration that everybody's skin is a different shade of earth tone, and that's the end of it. At least through high school. It's really not that difficult.

Or it shouldn't be. But I know it is. At least it used to be.

And that question: what am I? has played a vitally important role in Obama's life. In a fascinating article about his mother in yesterday's NYT, he is quoted as saying:

[I was] “engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America.”

I find it so odd that he has that attitude. As far as I can tell he has absolutely nothing "African-American" in his background. Yet he consciously chose to become one. I always read that many kids who are labeled black but are not from an African-American background suffer identity issues and often feel pressure to "be black." What does "be black," or "be black enough" even mean? In that context those phrases seem like code for "poorly educated criminal," or "nigger."

Although reading a politician's self-serving campaign autobiography goes against my deepest moral beliefs, I guess I'm going to have to read Obama's book and find out more.

Was he a black man wannabe or a black man havetobe as he made his way through one of the better prep schools and became a superstar at Harvard? As many point out, the cop who pulls you over for driving while black doesn't know where you went to school. Society decides who we are and an individual with dark skin is black. Would people do well, as Obama has done, to embrace it rather than fight it? (In general I'd say no, but people will obviously decide for themselves)

The larger question, for the kid in the photo at least, is whether things have changed since Obama's character was formed by whatever experiences he had being labeled black by society.

What is he? Yes, he is American. Yes, he is mixed.

And yes, society categorizes him as black. At some point, will he, like Obama, feel great pressure to become so?

The question will never change but it's meanign will. For a child it's what am I (physically)? Later on it becomes what am I (culturally)?

I'd like to find a better way to put it. I am open to suggestions. Middle class educated? Maybe, but the best way I can think of to phrase it so that everyone understands is to say that culturally he is white. So is his 100 percent African parent. And so is Obama.

For the child's sake. For the world's sake, I hope times have changed and those stupid questions are moot. They haven't of course, but I am actually optimistic that they are changing and that ultimately they will change. Although there is still pre-judgement and prejudice against people perceived as black, I believe that it has become much more of a cultural thing these days. I also have quite a bit of experience being pulled over for driving while black. Although the cop doesn't know anything about the victim's education, my experience has been that once they figure it out they treat you well, even perhaps a little better to make up for their initial suspicions. I know there are still Klan types and Nazis out there, but their numbers are small. The great majority of society judges a person more by how they speak than how they look.

That's what Obama's got going for him. I'm not the first to note that he speaks very well. And I think he would actually have a chance if more people heard him speak, but as the campaign goes along, I think that will happen less and less. It's already happening less and less. Instead of hearing the guy talk, we get people talking about the black guy. Is he black enough? Is he too black? Does it help him? Does it hurt? What are the demographics? Is American ready for a black president?

I think when we phrase it like that, when it's all about blackness, we'll find that no, America is not ready. I think we are ready for an extremely talented, well-traveled and well-educated president with a strong moral center, but unfortunately we'll be stuck with one of the Republicans, Hillary or John.

The kid in the picture? Well, here's hoping things are different when his generation runs for president*.


* This wouldn't be chuckling on-line magazine if I didn't add "if we still have any kind of even barely functioning democracy at that time. More likely by that time President George Bush VII will have succeeded President George Bush VI and we'll all be living in cardboard boxes, if not concrete cells.

No news is good news (for Republicans)

The national press, as well as the rest of the chattering classes, seems to have missed the fact that Obama just won two more primaries by landslide proportions. He won Saturday's Montana caucuses by 17 points and Tuesday's Mississippi primary by 24 points.

Doesn't that strike you as a bit odd? Such a well-publicized, closely fought election, few remaining primaries, one candidate gets wiped out in two of them? If Obama had lost by those margins, if he had lost at all, do you think it might have been reported differently? Hmmmmm.

Nonsense about the liberal media aside, I suspect this fits the pattern of the corporate media pretty much openly supporting Republican candidates. I realize I don't get a lot of love for commenting on the obvious fact that Hillary is a Republican. I am open to argument that she is not a Republican, but so far no one has made a convincing one.

And the facts supporting the contention that she is a Republican continue to mount. From the Guardian UK:

According to anecdotal reports in the Mississippi press, the end of the Republican presidential contest saw GOP voters crossing over, and it appears that a substantial number of them voted for Hillary Clinton. The exit polls show that 12% of voters overall were identified as Republicans, and three out of four them backed Clinton - a strong contrast to most previous primaries. Call it the "Limbaugh effect" - after the radio shock jock who urged Republicans to vote for Clinton prior to the Ohio and Texas primaries last week. For further evidence, around one in five of Hillary Clinton's supporters told the exit pollsters in Mississippi that they had a "strongly favourable" opinion of John McCain, while district maps show Clinton's best results in strongly Republican counties. If we assumed that Republicans had voted in similar numbers as in Louisiana and Alabama (only 5% of voters in both states), then without them Clinton's loss in Mississippi would have savage, tipping her toward 30% and an even wider loss in delegates.

Even if you ignore all the rest of the mountain range of evidence, doesn't the fact that Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter actively support her tell you something?

Photos of yesterday

Promised slideshow here.

Photo of today

I had an interesting, though ultimately unsuccessful photo day today. I'll try to put together a little slideshow tomorrow, but for now, this provides a clue.

Photo of today

Remember what it's like, being 9 years old and staring out the window on a rainy day?

Chuckling predicts

Although I've known for some time who each party's nominee would be, I've held off making a public prediction because I was unsure who they would choose as their running mates. Well, I've figured it out, so here ya go:

Democratic Presidential Candidate: Hillary Clinton.
Republican Presidential Candidate: John McCain.
Democratic running mate: Joe Lieberman.
Republican running mate: Joe Lieberman.

Yes, chuckling confidently predicts that both candidates will choose Joe Leiberman as their running mate. He will, of course, accept, though he will decline to give up his senate seat, just in case.

Who will ultimately win? I'll tell you that when you tell me why it matters.

Lord's day (brooklyn edition)

Slideshow here.

Breaking News: Hell just froze over

The New York Times Magazine has a long article about one of my literary heroes, Eduard Limonov. Everyone who appreciates Knut Hamsun or Dostoevsky's underground man should read Limonov's masterpiece "It's me Eddie," in which, coincidentally, he regularly savages the Times. And although many of his articles, particularly the ones detailing the nitty gritty politics of political organizing, are hard to get through, check out the Exile archives. A lot of it is precious.

I don't have time go go into this thoroughly now. Maybe later I'll pick through the archives and point out some good stuff. A lot of it is outrageous and Eddie is easily the least politically correct writer on the planet, but his stuff is worthwhile and his life is one of his better literary works. Very much like Mishima.

Pictures of yesterday

Another Saturday hanging out with the kid in the teeming concrete borough of Brooklyn. That's John Bob doing his meditation exercises in the foreground. Will winter never end?



You can't walk ten feet around here without tripping over an agave of some sort. I took this photo in a particularly bad moment of self-loathing. What next? Pretty flowers?



Some days I hate myself.

Picture of today

A brief introduction to chuckling

In what passes for an exciting development for poor chuckling, a new reader emailed me with some questions about chuckling on-line magazine.

...just looking through your blog: here are things I'd love to hear from you...)

First, you must understand that chuckling on-line magazine is not a blog. It is an on-line magazine. And a fictional one at that. Chuckling is a fictional character and anything he writes is, like, totally deniable.

What is the difference? Well, chuckling on-line magazine pays for content. I can’t pay much, but good writers like yourself deserve money for your work and I’ll pay what I can afford, which, alas, is nothing but a token at this point. As part of the fictional premise of the magazine, everyone who has written for chuckling on-line magazine so far has written under the “chuckling” byline. It is a good premise, I think, but ultimately unworkable. If you want to write for chuckling, either as chuckling or under your own name, please feel encouraged to contact me.

Anyway, I kind of assume everyone that drops by knows me from Alicublog. Roy is the patron saint of chuckling on-line magazine, though he is not a patron in the financial sense of the word and probably not a saint in any sense. So it surprises me when someone asks about my political beliefs. I’ve written extensively in Alicublog comments and regular readers no doubt roll their eyes when I start to explain, again, my take on the current situation. I guess that’s why I don’t write so much about politics here. I just assume everyone knows what I think.

Nevertheless, for the uninitiated (regular readers can roll their eyes now and go look at the pretty pictures), here’s an introduction:

McCain: What do you think?

McCain is a fascinating individual. I have a lot of respect for the complexity of his faults. He is so profoundly damaged that I can’t help liking him.

He’s like a dog that’s been severely beaten over and over again for years, yet continues to wag its tail when the master approaches. I guess the Vietnamese softened him up. Then Bush, Rove, and Cheney fist-fucked him until he liked it. The American people would be insane to elect or allow him to be appointed chief executive. But with Hillary on the ropes, we might as well get used to calling him Mr. President.

Where do you fall on the Dem<---->Rep continuum?

I don’t believe in the two party system. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I don’t think it would be a good thing to have multiple parties. I don’t believe in the American two party system in the same way I don’t believe in Santa Claus or Jesus. Because it’s at least 99 percent mythical. The Republican party is the only party. In basketball terms, the Democrats are the Washington Generals to the Republicans’ Harlem Globetrotters. They’ll appear to put up a fight but they always fold in the end. That’s what they’re paid for.

Is Hilary the Devil or just misunderstood?

She’s a Republican. I don't believe in the devil any more than I believe in Jesus or the chupacabra.

Is Hilary the most powerful thing to ever happen?

No.

Would you vote for her?

No, but I rarely vote for anybody. It’s a waste of time and effort and gives the whole "American democracy" charade a patina of legitimacy. That, plus where I live people are sometimes jailed for voting and I can't take that chance. All that, plus she is a Republican and even if I voted, I would never vote for a Republican.

Hope that helps. Tune in next week for the fascinating story of chuckling's birth in an old-fashioned newsgroup and adolescence smacking around proto-winguts before smacking around wingnuts was cool.

Morning, noon and night

Slideshow here.

Photo of today

Housa bout a little change of pace? What? I can do portraits.

Photos of (brooklyn) today

Yesterday's theme was urban, but today we're just doing normal Saturday stuff around Brooklyn. It may surprise you to learn that we have a few hills and trees here in the big city and that kids go sledding.

It may really surprise you to see that they still deliver seltzer in those old fashioned bottles. I've seen them in antique stores for $40 apiece. In my neighborhood, I see cases of empties on front porches waiting to be swapped for full ones.



In many ways, I've found, Brooklyn today has more in common with small midwestern towns in the 60's than small midwestern towns of today do. In addition to sledding and home delivery, we've got mom and pop groceries all over the place, know most of our neighbors, and can't go anywhere without bumping into acquaintances or meeting people who know people we know.



Doesn't gel with Conservative narrative, I know, but such is life.