In the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where the conservative movement is confined to my Uzbek barber, political advertisements are thriving. From a bus stop billboard, Manhattan Mini Storage asks, “Is your closet scarier than Bush’s agenda?” Elsewhere, it’s an announcement: “Your closet’s so narrow it makes Dick Cheney look liberal.” A coffeeshop hosts a storefront display of “Global Warming” and “Disappearing Civil Liberties” coffee mugs. And a phone company offers some version of this: “Psst. Upper West Side latte-drinker. You’re liberal and we love you for it.” For a time I wondered why competitive companies would risk turning off whole segments of their market. But I quickly came to understand that one Uzbek barber is, sadly, not market enough. Unless, of course, it’s a market for mutton.
If Jody Rosen, Slate’s excellent music critic, is right — and he’s been right about Bob Dylan, James Brown, and Norah Jones — then R. Kelly is listening to my views on sex in song.
Rosen writes:
But above all, R. Kelly’s point is to keep things fresh. Boudoir pop was born the day that R&B singers stopped bothering with double-entendres and got explicit. That was a breakthrough, to be sure, but the act quickly became absurd: There’s only so much talk of silk sheets and whipped cream even a hyper-sexed groupie can take before rolling her eyes. Kelly has managed to breathe life into sex music by embracing sexual farce. It’s a clever move: He gets to keep his favorite subject matter and his louche backing tracks while disarming his critics. And he can let his erotic imagination run utterly rampant. Perversion goes down easy when delivered with a wink.
Read the rest here.
Which is flattering, because I don’t listen to R. Kelly. Though I do have Ruth Brown’s cover of “I Believe I Can Fly.”
The shallow south. Burke, Virginia. The last two weeks have seen me go from D.C. to the upper west side of New York to the upper east side of Dixie.
Still, my one true southern experience of the summer happened in Alexandria early July. It was at one of those painfully quiet restaurants where you’re scared to move your fork lest it touch your plate and set off alarms. Perfect place to hear, all of a sudden from the entrance in a deep drawl, “THIS LOOKS LIKE A NICE PLACE TO EAT!”
They were a couple in their 80s — not married, as it turned out, just friends with senior citizen discount benefits — the man half-deaf and the lady a lovely late Belle with a white streak in her black hair. Throughout their meal, she turned to me whispering apologies, making amused “shhhhh” motions, and sticking fingers in her ears.
To hear them conversing about Samuel Johnson was to know fifteen minutes of a perfect world.
Anyone in the business or hobby of self-expression, rhetoric, disputation — or anyone with the habit of observing those practices — must read Stephen Cox’s timeless essay, “Fruitless Controversies.” It is profound, useful, and deeply funny. Never more so to me than when I read it for the third time a few days ago, and wiggled from pleasure. As should you, if you’ve ever been in an argument before or plan to enter one again.
Thank God Liberty Magazine has it available in full on its website.
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Supersized sympathies are a crucial element of Camille Paglia’s distinct charm, and they are employed once again in her adapted lecture on “Religion and the Arts in America” for Arion, which can now be read online.
Her latest monthly riff-column for Salon is also available today. It remains the only column in which Ann Coulter, Howlin’ Wolf, and Jean Cocteau’s “Orphee” can make it under the same headline.
Fame and obscurity, songs and silence, love and death: as Alec Mouhibian shows, opposites attract, and absolute opposites attract absolutely.
To my pleasant surprise, that line from the table-of-contents of the newly released September issue of Liberty Magazine describes my short story, “Love Song,” which appears inside. The story has no action-heroes and does not include the words “freedom” or “individual,” so I doubt any of the magazine’s libertarian readers will lay a finger on it. They can forego contamination by turning the pages with a gentle blow.
The story is not available online, but the mag can be found at many Borders and BNs nationwide. It also includes a cover article about South Park and libertarianism, editor Stephen Cox’s ever-refreshing Word Watch column, a review of Christopher Hitchens, and much more.
Two pieces about H.L. Mencken’s Baltimore: the first a reflection for Liberty Magazine (scroll down to read); the second a full article for The Weekly Standard, which I’ll reproduce below.
Mencken Slept Here
Has Baltimore forgotten the Sage of Baltimore?
08/06/2007, Volume 012, Issue 44
For the first half of the 20th century, an ordinary row house in a quiet Baltimore neighborhood was the castle of American intellectual culture. From its book-lined second-story office, the man on the throne canonized F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce, paralyzed perceptions of Franklin D. Roosevelt, swayed Clarence Darrow to the defense of a young biology teacher, and clanged out more than 10 million of the juiciest words to pass through an American typewriter.
At 1524 Hollins Street, H.L. Mencken commanded the thunder and lightning of his era.
Read more…
I’ve been covering the Young America’s Foundation National Conservative Student Conference like an Afghan blanket for a magazine all week (hence my scarcity here) and today featured the first bit of controversy. Truth has been a prominent theme of the conference: We must stand up for it, we must care. The controversy thus aptly involved a talk by Robert Spencer, “The Truth About CAIR,” which got three standing ovations.
The Council for Islamic-American Relations issued a threat to YAF demanding they uninvite Spencer or else suffer lawyers. YAF’s young, hot-blooded spokesman introduced Spencer by noting that no, we have not uninvited him, and what’s more, CAIR stinks. He then ominously reminded the Council, “in America, we have something called the Bill of Rights. We advise you to review amendments one…and two.”
CAIR does stink. Their thuggish intimidation tactics and Jihadist agenda should not be taken with a grain of sand. But you already knew that. So why am I mentioning this?
Because Michelle Malkin sat down in front of me to live-blog the speech, and I heard her ring-tone. It’s “How To Save a Life” by The Fray.
