Yeah, there's still poetry.

6 days to go...

You can vote however you like.



But you ought to vote for Obama-Biden.

Feinstein says No on Prop 8.

Finally, a bigshot politician makes an ad.

A Tale of Three Ashleys.

A great post by Sean Quinn over at 538 -- that is, FiveThirtyEight.com, which you should all check out.

Money quote, actually from Obama's speech on race in America:

"I'm here because of Ashley." By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.

And the video of that speech, "A More Perfect Union," which is definitely worth watching again:

The liberal media?

Watch Joe Biden handle himself well (I think) during a local Florida TV reporter's ridiculous interview.



Oh, and to answer Biden's question about who wrote the questions: I'm fairly certain it was Stephen Colbert.

Dylan the Evangelical.

This Washington Times article is about a new movie coming out (straight to DVD, it seems) that explores Bob Dylan's "evangelical" years -- 1979-1981. Basically asking: Really? Why?

Money quote:

"Jesus Years" surmises that the inspiration factor was crucial but the conversion was real. Mr. Gilbert unearths broadcast TV footage of Mr. Dylan answering critics befuddled by what appeared, for a time, to be a wholesale abandonment of secular music. "The old songs won't save you," Mr. Dylan said.

Now, I haven't seen the film yet. These are just thoughts off the top of my head. But I rather doubt Dylan meant to imply that his new songs (the evangelical ones) could save people. I expect he was more reacting to other people's confused reactions -- responding, dismissively, to their pleas to keep writing the old songs that had saved and inspired them. But maybe not. Obviously, we need to hear the whole exchange -- though I'll say from the start that even a clear, face-value implication wouldn't convince me of Dylan's sincerity on the point.

Which, I expect, exposes my biases. But I'm inclined to think Dylan was just reinventing himself as completely as he could -- not exactly a concept that has been foreign to his nature during his 4+ decades in the public eye. The Washington Times writer, and presumably the movie-maker, suggests that there is something nefarious in Dylan fans' tendency to puzzle over or ignore or disdain those years and their music. I think he/they might have it backwards -- not that there's something incongruous with paying little attention to those years, but that there's something incongruous about paying special attention to that particular transformation. Why not the transformation from Minnesota fraternity boy to the hillbilly who wrote lines like "That light I never knowed" and "They'll be drownded in the tide"? Knowed? Drownded? Or his recent transformation into a lingerie ad-man and entirely conventional disc jockey on satellite radio?

It seems to me that Dylan's singular magic over almost 50 years now has been his uncanny ability to keep an audience, generally by ignoring what they assume to be their own desires. He was never the voice of a generation. That implies that he spoke the words they wanted to speak. No. When he seemed their voice, it was only by coincidence. He was out in front of them all along, moving on to something new. Not leading them, so much as out-running them. Not a pied piper. Just a song-and-dance man. Puzzlement, ignorance, and disdain are part of the show. To focus on whether Dylan was actually born-again for the 3 years straddling 1980 misses the point. The point was then--as it has always been--reinvention.

(Image: BobDylan.com)

11 more days...

Yes we can.



Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan.

[UPDATED] Either terrorists are dumb, or they aren't very committed to their causes.

I've been saying this, somewhat jokingly, for years.

But apparently the TSA actually thinks it's the former. Or, at least, they've set up security procedures on the assumption of terrorists' inferior intellects.

Not entirely certain that's the right tack, guys.

UPDATE: By the way, Jeffrey Goldberg's Atlantic article about TSA "security theater" is hilarious and-- I almost wrote "frightening," but actually it's really not. And that's sorta the point.

[UPDATED] I know this is old, but...

...how much do you want little kids in the White House? Adorable.



Apologies for the annoying Maria Menounos (especially the veiled Spiderman reference).

Oh, and the video is making the rounds again because of the news about Sarah Palin's rather expensive campaign wardrobe. If you missed Jon Stewart's take on the story tonight--including his brief rendition of "Small Town"--you should find the video. I'll post it when it's up.

UPDATE: Daily Show clip below.

Abandon your kids while you can...

Nebraska's ridiculous safe-haven law--which allows parents to abandon children up to age 18 at hospitals without fear of prosecution--will soon be changed. Gotta keep your teenagers now, folks. No more seventeen-year-olds. In fact, no more seventeen-day-olds. Looks like the new age limit is going to be 3 days.

Talk about switching extremes. I say give 'em a month or so, like most states. Someone should remind those Nebraskans not to throw out the month-old babies with the seventeen-year-old bathwater.

McCain accidentally calls Western Pennsylvania racist...in Western Pennsylvania.

This clip can be summed up as follows: Booo...Oops...Oh god...Huh?



Oh. And how much do I love Cindy McCain's smiling nod as McCain drums up the boos about Obama? Soooooo much.

Poetry from a California September.

Poetry. Making a comeback.

This is what I like to call a 'moody moment poem.' Enjoy.

(Oh. And. I played with the format a bit. Thoughts?)

Written five minutes ago.

Not sure yet if this is really one poem in three parts, or three poems that need their own titles. Thoughts?

Striking a little close to home.

This is basically a short essay I've been meaning to write for some time now. Complete with Gilmore Girls references. Just never got around to it.

Still might write mine though. There's one point in Stevenson's piece that I think I disagree with: that procrastination precludes certain forms of success. I'd like to probe that a bit deeper yet. We'll see. For now, I've got other things not to do.

Philly vs. Filly

Ok. So please understand: I'm not literally equating the fates of these two beings.

But. Hillary Clinton recently drew a line of comparison between herself and Eight Belles, the lone filly in the Kentucky Derby this year.

Today. (Tragically.) Eight Belles finished second place in the Derby. That's not the tragedy. The tragedy is she ran all the way through to the finish line, finished second, then collapsed with two broken ankles, and had to be euthanized right then and there.

So a little quip comes back to bite Hillary in the ass. Someone should point this out to her, though I'd be at least a little surprised if anyone in the MSM did (because of the "literally equating" problem mentioned above). But that's what the blogosphere is for.

(I'm not even gonna mention the name of the stallion that won the race.)

Mentos fountains. Too cool.

I expect this works with Diet Coke, too. And not just Coca-Cola Light.

(Thanks to Andrew Sullivan.)

Get your electric kool-aid while you can.

Salvia needs a Ken Kesey.

Or. You know. Not. Doesn't sound like much fun to me.

Flirting your way to sex offender registration.

Ok. So I admit: Sending naked pictures of yourself to someone you like (like, like-like; not just like) goes a bit beyond an extended hug after class or sitting on someone's lap during study hall.

But it's not felonious. And it's definitely not worthy of sex offender status.

With all the talk in the last decade of pushing various technological boundaries (web 2.0, nanotechnology, genomics, and yes, cell phones) we still rarely get to talking about the secondary boundaries affected by such technological innovation. Unless, of course, a hot-button social issue (read: political wedge issue) is involved, in which case let the ill-informed adventures in spin begin. As in: "Genomics sounds like cloning!" (No. It doesn't. You don't know what you're talking about.) Or, the less common refrain: "Nanotechnology is the birth of Big Brother!" (Well. Yeah. Ok. Mayyyyybe.)

Along these lines, I've recently come across several articles and stories referencing the notion that today's young people are less concerned with privacy than previous generations (privacy is trying so hard to become hot-button, it's cute -- like a puppy trying desperately to climb a staircase), and placing the blame for such lowered fences on Facebook, MySpace, and other such sites. To me, this seems either just plain wrong, or misleadingly incomplete. Facebook, for example, faced an uproar from its "millennial generation" users when it opened the site first to non-college-affiliated users, and then again when it opened the site to anyone. In response, it instituted significant user-directed privacy controls over who can see which elements of your profile. I suppose it's an unanswered (to my knowledge) empirical question to what extent these controls are put to use. But in my anecdotal experience, almost everyone uses them to some extent.

So the younger generation, it seems to me, is not less concerned with privacy than previous generations -- today's youth just have more opportunity to be more open to more people. This doesn't mean they don't value their privacy. Had their parents (who, let's face it, were pretty damn open with their opinions, feelings, and sexuality) been able to share an hour-by-hour "status" accounting with hundreds of friends, I expect they would have. They just couldn't.

But now the constraints of technology have retreated: Hundreds of people now know my favorite books. Boy, do I feel invaded. No. Wait. I don't. But not because I'm not concerned with my privacy. I never cared who knew my favorite books. I'd have gladly told anyone who asked. (People rarely did, for the record -- in fact, I can count on one hand (maybe one finger) the number of people who have commented on my Facebook favorite-books list, which suggests that the level of narcissism involved in maintaining, say, a Facebook profile is disturbingly staggering. But that's another post for another day).

And I fully believe my parents would have too. The difference is not in the level of personal willingness to be open with various aspects of oneself. The difference is in the technological ability to be open. There's no new conception of something-like-the-thing-called-privacy-we-once-cared-so-much-about being cultivated by Facebook. It's the same old conception (the same old ethical bounds) being construed via newly-relaxed technological boundaries.

Which brings me to my point, finally: It's wrong to label naked-picture cell-phone swapping among consenting teenagers as "criminal behavior." It's no more criminal than that "trust me?" game where one person in a group slowly moves a hand up another's thigh while asking the two-word query until the second person responds, if ever, with a "no." (No one else played that? Really? Oh.) You might not want your kids doing either of those things. I get that. All I'm saying is, the cell-phone thing isn't a behavior of a radically different sort than anything we've seen before. It's on the same spectrum. If Polaroids weren't so clumsy and expensive, this would have been happening long ago. (And, really, claiming it's child porn is just silly. I understand why society doesn't want 50-year-olds looking at naked 15-year-olds. But it's not clear to me why other 15-year-olds shouldn't be.)

Whether you, as a parent or school administrator or Congressperson, likes that it's happening, it's just flirtation. Maybe teens shouldn't sit on each other in study hall. Maybe they shouldn't play spin the bottle. And maybe they shouldn't exchange naked pictures of themselves. But criminalizing the first two seems nuts right off the bat. And criminalizing the third is just as insane. It's wrong. And it won't work anyway (see: abstinence-only sex education).

Prose again. Or, Giving the parents equal time.

Pizza, with my mother.

It is a Saturday night, I think, or a Friday, around 6 (which is well toward the night in Chicago’s cold November). I walk downstairs, wondering at the quiet, finding only my mother, in the kitchen. I open the refrigerator, looking for a quick dinner before I have to leave to pick up my friends – who, at 17, were not all lucky enough to have their own cars at their disposal. Finding nothing fresh appealing, I turn to the freezer. I take out a microwave pizza, and my mother—whose apparent sadness had been peripheral until now—says, “Jordan, I have to tell you something.” I say, “Ok,” wondering at her “have to,” and start to open the pizza box as she begins to ramble something or other about not intending to tell me this way, and she’s not really supposed to tell me, and he’ll be angry, but he’s going to do it tomorrow and that’s not right. At this point, though I wasn’t sure at first, I know she’s talking about my father, who had earlier asked me to go to breakfast with him the following morning so we could discuss something he refused to specify to me but apparently had to her. I remove the plastic shrink-wrap and place the pizza on its box, atop its silver paper heating disc, and then reapply the frozen cheese that fell off in the plastic, careful to fill any obvious distribution holes. I set the microwave to 3 minutes and 45 seconds. She’s still talking, and as I hit START, she gets to: “He says he’s not going to, but he won’t say what, and I know he’s going to.” So, I think, apparently he didn’t specify the future conversation with her either. I open the cabinet over the microwave and take out a dinner plate – solid black, except for white painted swirls in a ring around the edge, a choice of my mother’s that I didn’t realize was unusual until college. I search the utensil drawer for the pizza cutter, and say, my profile to her, “Mom, what’s going on?”

She starts to cry as she lets out what, she tells me, has been eating at her for weeks, months, years even. It’s been so hard, she tells me, and—because of the microwave’s timer, and my memory of burning my mouth on the pizza’s first slice—I know it takes her a bit over 3 minutes to tell me, in really no detail at all, just how hard it’s been. I stand, leaning on the counter, my elbows on either side of the pizza cutter resting on the plate, facing her, as she sits at one end of the rounded-corner rectangular table, askew a bit, her left side against the table’s edge, facing me, her left arm resting on the table’s corner and her right forearm resting on her thigh. This position allows only sharp movements as she speaks, jaggedly matching the stops and starts of her words: the motion of her right arm limited, as though by a puppeteer’s rod, to the upturning of her palm by a twist of her wrist as her forearm remains on her thigh, and her left arm, constantly moving, as by the strings of a marionette, in a sort of pulling forth motion as her elbow brings her hand forward toward me and then returns it to her chest or her mouth. The combined effect of her tears and the hum of the microwave forces her voice to a higher register than normal, and that, along with what she is saying and the fact of her crying, somehow makes it hard for me to look at her for more than brief intervals. I intersperse my glances at her with long gazes at the pizza in the microwave, spinning and warming and cooking. She is telling me—in multiple and synonymous and repetitious sets of phrases—that “things” haven’t been right for a long time, that “we” still love “you” and “your sister” very much of course, that “that” will never change, that none of “this” is “your” fault at all. The pizza is making noise in the microwave, drops of sauce spurting from beneath the covering of now melted cheese. Looking at the microwave, I think, I tell her, “It’s ok, Mom,” and, turning to look at her—and lying, really—“I guess I knew something was up.”

The microwave beeps the pizza’s completion, startling us both: I turn too quickly to it and knock the pizza cutter to the ground; my mother lets out a gasp that frees a loud sob. I interrupt the microwave before its third beep and remove the pizza as my mother tries to calm her lungs. She wipes tears, careful not of preserving her makeup but of getting it in her eyes, and says, raising her voice above the sound of the sink as I rinse invisible dirt from the floored cutter, “It’s just gotten too hard, and we all need something to change.” I start to cut the pizza into slices—it’s only an 8-inch circle, but I have a habit of cutting it into 16 bite-size slices, quartering it, and then quartering the quarters—and she gets to the point. It’s difficult (in the way small things are sometimes difficult) to cut a soft-crusted, microwave pizza into so many small pieces—the slices stick to the cutter as it runs back and forth, they curl up and want to somersault over each other, and you need your other hand to keep them in place—and so I’m concentrating mostly on the cutting as my mother says, “Your father’s going to move out soon, I think, as soon as possible.” It must appear as though I don’t react at all—though this is, somehow, amidst what seems now obvious family turmoil, an enormous surprise—because I simply continue to make my cuts, looking down. Then, finished slicing, I bring my fingers to my lips and raise my eyes, as my mother stands and walks toward me, crying still, or again, as she reaches for a hug. Still holding the cutter, with pizza entrails still on its blade, I hug her, careful not to stain the back of her shirt. It’s a brief embrace—though longer than the hellos and goodbyes that would become common in my college years to come—and as we pull away, her wiping her face, and me licking the blade of the cutter before I put it in the sink, I tell her, “It’s going to be ok.” “Yeah,” she says under her breath, still trying to sigh away sobs, and I pick up the plate, grab a paper napkin, and walk to the family room to eat.