Something Incredible Happened To Me Last Week

Like BIG big: I saw Elvis Costello and Bob Dylan in concert. It was P-H-A-T phat! Actually, Elvis Costello was awesome and Dylan was great, but ultimately a little disappointing. Costello was really personal and soulful. It was just him and a guitar and he played plenty of older hits that he knows everyone wants to hear. Angels Want to Wear My Red Shoes and Allison were A-fuckin-Plus.

I checked with a cross section of people who saw the show (a dog-catcher) and many of us agree that Dylan, while good, was not really what we were hoping for. One of my favorite Dylan pieces is Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues, with Robbie Robertson’s punchy guitar as a counterpoint to Dylan’s almost-late vocals. The live version is bourbon to my ears.

But that was a long time ago. Now Dylan is with a backing band that is solid, but unremarkable R’n’B all the way, and they do songs that I have never heard. It is still Bob Dylan, especially when he blows harp, but it is not the Bob Dylan that I want to see. I know the man is probably tired of playing “Like a Rolling Stone” on acoustic guitar for the upteen-millionth time and wants to move on as a performer, but frankly, that is what the kids paid for. I guess Bob Dylan has reached a point where he doesn’t need to try to please an audience. Just showing up as himself is enough.

So that concert was a really amazing thing that happened to me last week. Those of you who know me probably get the joke at this point because…SHAZZAM!!!! I also had a kid last week! Yes, 9 and a half months of waiting are over and now a real person belongs to me, and me alone…plus Sarah. Baby Jacob is the latest and shortest addition to the Schmiechen-DeStefano-Cohen-Burke-Beckett clan. His prodigious predigree includes filmmakers, reverends, newspapermen, Bautistas, Jersey gangsters, Louisville shopkeepers, Samuel Beckett and Capt. John Smith. Big shoes to fill with tiny little feet. Everyone feels this way about their baby, but many people have told me (not just dog catchers) that he is really beautiful. He is like the most fascinating toy ever. All he ever does is sleep and crap his pants yet people have literally traveled across the country just to see him. Having a baby is the most amazing thing ever. Despite his unassuming state, he is always the center of attention and he fills a room with joy just by being him. A little like Bob Dylan.

P.S. A gold star to whoever knows Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello's real names

Chicago's Blue Bags

Let me lay this out for those that do not know. Since 1995 Chicago's recycling for residential units of four or less has been done via blue bags. This process involves putting all your trash in one container, but the recyclables are placed in specific blue bags that can be bought at participating stores.

The odd thing is all the garbage and blue bags are taken by the same municipal truck. This sounds ridiculous and has lead to major mistrust of the system. It just intrinsically rubs people the wrong way. Besides people's apprehension that they arrived with on their own, there have been articles slamming the system. People quote these articles often but the majority are just spouting second third or fourth hand information. I was made a disbeliever of the system almost as soon as I moved here. I heard it from so many sources (different people) that I figured the system had to be bunk.

I kept hearing the figure "ten to fifteen percent" of the blue bags made it to their destination. Chicago already has a bad reputation because of the horrible corruption and cronyism throughout its civic history. This is left over from the "Great Machine", as it was known. A Daley has been Mayor for as long as any one can remember. Due to the mistrust of the people, the city decided to test a different system in a few Wards.

It took me fourteen months of living in Chicago but eventually I went on a tour of these "awful" facilities. Turns out what happens there is different then I expected. Allied Wate, the people who receive our garbage are a subcontracted company, separate from the city workers who pick it up. Allied Waste employees manually pick through every piece of trash to separate out the recyclables.

Friendly readers, I have to go to South America so I will save the rest for later. I know you all are very interested.

Disaster Capitalism

Why do we refer to Richard Perle merely as an ideologue -- rather than an arms dealer with an impressive vocabulary?
-Naomi Klein

The HuffPost has a great video and transcript of John Cusack interviewing Naomi Klein about her new book The Shock Doctrine.

Klein explains to Lloyd how people with more connections than scruples use the chaos of disasters as a way to push for government policies that, under normal conditions, would be anathema to the American people. The two examples she gives are privatization in New-New Orleans and, of course, the half trillion dollars that has been lifted out of our pockets to blowup and rebuild Iraq.




In the transcript of their further discussion she details how companies that have made windfall profits from war contracts directly or indirectly paid public figures to push for the invasion of Iraq after 9/11. She mentions Henry Kissinger, George Shultz and others, but my favorite is her above description of how the media mischaracterizes Richard Perle. In fairness, he is very articulate for someone so totally shameless.

I’ll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush.

-Perle, 2003


Klein and Cusack's brief discussion drives home the point that the Iraq War is not the disaster for which most Americans see it, but actually a huge success - for certain people. Defense contractors and oil companies have made an unprecedented killing.

Facebook

A brief posting here. GCNOF just joined facebook. He checked out the site and was reminded of why he was hesitant to join, but also impressed with what it could do. I dislike that I interact with people over the computer. it's not satisfying, almost comparable to the difference between looking at porn versus going to a strip club and getting a lap dance... or for those lucky blogs, actually having sex.

Of course it's great to be in touch with everyone I've ever known. But I'm also well aware now of exactly how many of my old acquaintances still consider me a friend. I like imagining that everyone I still consider a friend, but haven't heard from in awhile is just busy and lost touch, but still considers me a friend. Before joining facebook, I could lie to myself. With facebook you find out who just doesn't want you in your life anymore, when they post pictures about the party or event which they went to without you.

On the bright side, someone did invite me to join facebook, and I have, I think, five friends on the site. Maybe I just need to invite more people to be friends and face my fear of rejection. Does that happen? You ask someone to be your Facebook friend and then they decline? I guess I'll have to find out the hard way. Because I keep my facebook life and my blog life separate, there will be no link to my facebook page on this site.

Who knows...after I face my fear of rejection over the internet, perhaps I can muster enough courage to ask out that hottie at the swimming pool.

Amanda Peet or Jessica Biel? I always get them confused...

I just got back from Bloomington, IN. Visiting family always treats me well, whether it is in Bloomington, New Haven or Philly. Family always gives me the extra spark, that battery recharge to add spice to my otherwise somewhat-stale-but-getting-better living-at-home existence in Cali.

Something else that Indiana has going for it. It always seems easier to talk to people in bars in Indiana; not only that but IU attracts some hotties, including one I talked to named Amanda. "Amandas" are always hot. What (or should I say why) do only hot moms name their daughters “Amanda”? It’s gotten to the point that even when an Amanda is not that hot, which is very rare, I look to find the hotness that must be hidden somewhere in her that I’m just missing. Usually it’s not very hard to find.

Every visit, every experience always provides some unexpected surprise, and now that the Captain has relocated here, my visit began with high expectations. And no, the surprise wasn't that I enjoyed watching "The Princess Diaries" (I had already watched "Alfie", the only other DVD at my aunt’s house and didn't feel like reading. It was that or watching PBS). I guess I'm not much of an intellectual; more of a romantic, kinda of pathetic sentimentalist apparently. Anne Hathaway looks really hot (after the whole princess makeover). I know in the movie her character is 15, but I checked her IMDB page and she was 18 when the film was released.

The unexpected surprise was.... No, no, I'm waiting till Evil Spock blogs about the "surprise" first. It did involve crashing parties, getting free drinks and even (better) getting freaked by hot college girls, but it was much more than that. There is a link to his evil, evil blog on our blog roll. I’m getting impatient, but it's his thing to blog about, at least, first. Check his blog daily. You won't be disappointed.

From the Ranted Files of Dr. G, brought to you at great cost...

ENCINO - Many times, in ostensibly enlightened company, I have been berated for suggesting that it is somehow unnatural for women to get boob jobs. This kind of neo-philistinism is rampant in our socio-culture, but nowhere is it more apparent than in the systematic marginalization of the films of Jenna Jameson.

Just recently, in the pages of a purportedly progressive blog, when yours truly mentioned her body of work in an artistic context, her films were dismissed as the butt of a crass wanking joke. Is this all we have for the artist who gave us “Where the Boys Aren’t 7”, a radical meditation on modern psycho-sexual identity politics that is almost completely overlooked by the feminist-academic community. Or “Up and Cummers”, in which, judging by the first 7 minutes, she seems to be some sort of naughty librarian. In the tradition of Joyce and Goddard, these texts turn ideas of conventional cause-and-effect narrative and character development on their heads.

In fact, according to her inaptly titled autobiography that my book club read last year, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, Jameson is now the producer and a distributor of the movies in which her naughty bits star. In taking a lead role in her own degradation she has turned the tables: The peddled becomes the peddler, the exploited becomes the enriched. Of course the obvious question, the “800 pound gorilla in the room”, so to speak, is what exactly happens on the casting couch now? Before she decides to give herself the lead in her studio's next film, does she just give herself a good going over? Sadly, her otherwise very thorough, and often highly-autobiographical, memoir remains silent on this subject. However, such minor philosophical inconsistencies must be forgiven in light of the vital and necessary critique that is spewed forth in her cinematic works like a string of pearls. For clarification I turn to the writings of the deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida:

...the entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of centre for centre, as a linked chain of determinations of the centre…The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. -"Structuralism Destructured Structurally"

Clearly, viewed under the unapologetic light that French literary criticism allows into the darkened theater of bourgeoise aesthetics, we can no longer sit back and conveniently view Jameson’s films exclusively as young-adult fiction. In fact, her proto-neo-feminist protagonists are sympathetic actors, not mere objectified, non-agent receptors of the male gaze.

Stated simply, in the post-media-globo-corporato-neo-fasco-meta-iCulture, it is inevitable that all of us are going to get f&#%ed, but if we act with courage and ironic self-awareness then maybe, like Jenna, we can at least choose which hole.

That is all this American has to say on the subject. Good night...and good luck.