September 29, 2009
Everybody has their fingers crossed, hoping Chicago can get the 2016 Olympics. President Obama himself is flying over to Denmark, home of stinky cheese and fairy tales, to press our bid. In order to clinch the games, Obama has promised to include some new events which will inject a little bit of Chicago culture into the festivities. Here is a list of the proposed new competitions:1. Pizzeria Uno Deep Dish Discus Decathlon
2. City Council Golden Gloves
3. House of Detention Pole Vault
4. St. Valentine’s Day Massacre Target Shooting
5. Oak Street Beach Topless Tanning Triathlon
6. Rush Street Beer Marathon
7. Wrigley Field Suicide Derby
8. Rod Blagojevich Legal Hurdles
9. Jesse Jackson Hot Air Balloon Regatta
10. Barack Obama Bowling Tournament
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September 28, 2009
Jay Leno is back on NBC, and not a moment too soon. Except for sports programming it has been a dreary summer for television, which right now, except for an occasional happy hour, is about the only entertainment I can afford. The news, dominated by hysterical Republican mobs screaming their guts out and cursing Democrats as commies and agents of Satan, quickly degenerated into a tedious, repetitive loop. Every night the same blah blah blah. Obama was on TV so much that he seemed to be starring in own reality show. Last weekend he appeared on no less than five public affairs interviews on Sunday and then did Letterman on Monday. He essentially has taken his cue from the Republicans, who bused the same characters from meeting to meeting, in making believe he is a crowd.Hey, I support the guy’s goals, if not his family size ego. If I were he, I would watch a tape of Shakespeare’s “Othello”, to remember what follows when a fellow’s overwhelming self-esteem gets the better of him. He better watch out about getting what he wishes for, because once the Democrats achieve their health care goal, it will remove their primary raison d’etre, clearing the way for a Republican resurgence. Sad but true. Now that the economic crisis is somewhat stabilized, people are going to return to their old voting patterns, which does not augur well for the Dems in the midterm elections.I myself might write an updated version of “Othello”, based on the comedy piece Macbird, where some joker substituted Pres. Lyndon Johnson for Macbeth, which pounded another nail into the coffin of his presidency during the 1960’s. In my version, I would cast Obama as Othello, Hillary as Desdemona and Bill Clinton as the jealous Iago, whispering into Barack’s ear that Hillary is deceiving him with the nefarious French monarch Sarkozy. Naturally, the whole farce would degenerate into nuclear war between the U.S. and France, which is where things seem to be headed anyway ha-ha! Forget Russia, it’s the French who shaping up to be our real rivals, in my humble estimation. Just as Napoleon united continental Europe against England, so are the contemporary French mobilizing the eurozone countries against the Anglo Saxon hegemony.In fact, the world of entertainment is totally moribund right now. Sorry, I’m not shelling out $15 to see “Transformers” or “Inglorious Basterds”, although the idea of watching some animalistic Jews cut the balls off Nazis rather appeals to the barbaric Hebrew trapped within me. Anyway, reality is always more fantastic than fiction. Even as we speak, Israeli Dolphin-class submarines equipped with nuclear tipped cruise missiles patrol the Arabian Sea off the coast of Iran. Not that Iranian president Ahmadinejad, a classical anti-semitic prick ever one existed, hasn’t got more immediate problems, with his own disaffected citizenry rioting in the street and hounding for his blood. Anyway, the Persian nation has historically been a soft touch militarily, dating back to the days of Ancient Greece, when Alexander the Great’s army destroyed a Persian force ten times its size and chased the Persian emperor clear up to the Caucasus. But it has been a tedious, mirthless summer since Jay Leno’s show ended in June. NBC replaced him with Conan O’Brien as part of a strategy to lock in the next generation, the same as you might use a quacking wooden duck to try to imprint baby ducklings. It might work on them but it didn’t work for me. Conan O’Brien is a Harvard man, and I don’t find the Harvard brand of comedy particularly funny. Hey, what do I know? I love The Three Stooges, who didn’t go to Harvard – they went to Jail. Show me a funny Harvard man and I’ll show you an opium dream. Look at Steven Colbert, another Harvard dude with a phony French name, which he even insists in pronouncing with a French inflection. Their brand of comedy is punishment. Same with Letterman. I never liked his brand of gentile hilarity, which I liken to Mussolini’s secret police forcing left-wingers to swallow a bottle of castor oil. Maybe it’s good for you, but it makes you puke.No, Jay’s my boy. For him, as for all true comics, it’s an act of desperation. He ain’t freakin Moses descending from the mountain with the 10 Commandments. He’s a guy who is desperate to do good so he can advance and keep working, like everybody in the world.Not to digress, but that’s why Brazil’s president, Inacio Lula da Silva, is the most successful world leader, controlling Brazil’s currency, rationalizing its economy, dynamising its industrial and agricultural bases, expanding its petroleum industry and redistributing its wealth to the needy classes. Lula didn’t attend Harvard, nor has he an MBA from Wharton. He comes from a dirt-poor family in Brazil’s blighted northeast that emigrated to Sao Paulo in search of opportunity. Starting out as a tool and die machinist, Lula advanced to union shop steward, which took balls back in the days of the right-wing military dictatorships, who repeated threw him in jail. From there he went into politics and fought his way up through a corrupt and dysfunctional system. It’s safe to say that Lula has personal experience extending from the factory floor to the boardroom and all stops in between. Brazil is advancing so fast under his leadership that it’s emerging from the group of emerging nations, developing vast new petroleum deposits and upgrading its military capability with multi-billion dollar procurement programs.Practical hands-on experience, that’s the ticket! Nobel Prize-winning agronomist Paul Borlaug, who just died at age 95, immediately moved to Mexico upon graduating from agricultural college and developed the techniques that led to the Green Revolution. By enabling farmers to triple their crop yield through the use of genetically engineered strains and scientifically enhanced fertilizer, Borlaug increased crop yields by a multiple of 3, enabling India and Pakistan to achieve agricultural self-sufficiency and save billions of persons from famine and starvation. Paul Borlaug, with his own hands and his scientific imagination, did more for humanity than Einstein, Mother Theresa and Batman put together, even as Harvard genius Paul Erlich was raking in millions of bucks for writing “The Population Bomb”, wherein he predicted famine, mass-starvation and destruction (sounds like my house on a Saturday night) – based on the statistics. Blah blah blah. The reason nobody knows who Paul Borlaug is, is because writers and journalists generally tend to avoid writing about anybody who knows more than they do, preferring to concentrate on other useless writers and journalists.Naturally, with Jay Leno gone from late night, New York Magazine, which can always be counted upon to get everything exactly backwards, proclaimed Letterman, with his entitled WASP act, to be the undisputed champ and new King of Comedy. They actually liked the fact that he now resembles somebody’s crotchety grandfather. The problem today is that people seem to feel the need for an avuncular figure of authority. Basically, I can’t think of anything more tedious than adult persons seeking a paternal figure, and it speaks to a lot of contradictions that exist in today’s world. Anybody seeking that kind of forbearance from me is playing in a field of dreams, that’s for sure!I was relieved that the 10:00 Leno show is following essentially the same format as his 11:35 slot. My habit has always been to tune in for the first five minutes to check out his monologue and then forget the guest portion of the show. Celebrity interviews, I can live without. Who cares if Ellen Degeneres has tennis elbow? Now, with the new time, I wouldn’t have to stay up late. I could check out his latest gags and then go back to watching the Yanks.For his opening night, Jay’s monologue was a little bit flat, but what do you expect coming off a three-month hiatus and NBC execs breathing down his neck, everybody frantically nervous? My girlfriend, Magpie, who’s a little bit on the WASP side of things herself, seemed to derive a kind of perverse satisfaction from watching him deflate. But I have been a steady viewer for 15 years. I have seen him kill night after night, going after O.J. Simpson and Bill Clinton like a shark attacking the scent of blood. I was confident that once he gets his hooks into a victim and finds his rhythm, ol’ Jay will start to kill again.He followed up with a mock interview with Barack Obama, where he asked stupid questions which were interspersed with recorded answers from old Obama interviews. Not too funny. About the funniest thing was when asked Obama “Will you be my Facebook friend?” Unfortunately, Facebook is already about as shopworn a subject as exists, and Barack Obama is not exactly a barrel of laffs either. One look at Obama and you know why I miss Bill Clinton. Life was fun with Clinton. He accompanied Chuck Berry with his saxophone. There were endless years of laughs over Monica Lewinski, He continually made monkeys of the Republicans, where Obama seems to be bending over backwards to placate them (see where it gets him!). Even Bush was funny, though he drove the country off a cliff. Unfortunately, for all his virtues and good intentions, Obama is not terribly entertaining, with his endless moralizing and entreaties advocating responsible behavior. Am I asking too much of the man?Leno next brought out this LA comic and they showed a clip of the guy singing to a girl in a carwash to a boom box accompaniment while a couple of guys in business suits danced in the background, reminiscent of the Blues Brothers. Bomb-o City!My girlfriend seemed to be enjoying the spectacle of Jay Leno taking a header in his primetime debut, the same as some people get their kicks from rubbernecking a car crash. She fancies herself a comedy critic, though her idea of hilarity is watching a You Tube video of a kitty trying to drink from a faucet. Her idea of hilarity is watching old black-and-white reruns of Victor Borge telling anecdotes about Baltic herrings while playing a grand piano in a white tux on the educational network.It’s absurd to believe that Leno himself would have allowed this mess to represent his primetime debut. He definitely would have preferred to bring on Gilbert Gottfried dressed as Octomom, or Bob Golthwaite, if he hadn’t turned himself to creamed corn in a car crash. After 30-plus years of doing stand-up, including 15 on late night, Jay Leno knows what works.Unfortunately, corporate comedy is a collaborative effort that includes a lot of executives who understand only ratings, and the NBC investment in this show is too significant to be left up to a comedian. That’s why he got stuck with this dog of a premiere. The next guest was none other than that tired old standby, Jerry Seinfeld, the king of reruns. Seinfeld is NOT FUNNY, OK? His fabulously successful sitcom show, recounting a comedy of manners involving a group of ineffectual Upper West Side nitwits, used to make me cringe. You want to write a show about a strike at H&H Bagels? I’ll write you the damn show. I was a manager at that freakin Porto-San for a couple of years, and I’ll write you a show that will make your hair stand straight up!Then there was the time when a Seinfeld segment contrived to have him burn a Puerto Rican flag during the Puerto Rican Day parade. What the hell was that all about? OK, I know. He’ll tell you the joke is on him for playing the fool. Really? Seinfeld represents what I call the Wooden Stool School of Comedy, where the comic comes out and philosophizes to the audience from his rich knowledge of contemporary culture while perched on a stool, like Socrates. Give him some hemlock! The whole concept is strictly from hunger. One of the pioneers of this school, Bill Cosby, who was funny about 40 years ago but not now, has now started to bill himself as Dr. Bill Cosby, because some school awarded him an honorary degree. Ugh! What’s next, Professor Seinfeld? How about Dr. Curley Stooge or Dr. Keith Richards, Doctor of Pharmacology? I go by Groucho Marx, who declared, “I refuse to belong to any club that would accept me”.So Seinfeld comes out in this very expensive tuxedo, except it didn’t fit. It was cut too tight. A monkey in a monkey suit, behaving for all the world like Mr. Showbiz. See, he’s not a comedian any more, he’s a cultural icon, like Letterman. These guys don’t even feel compelled to try to be funny. It’s like they’re gods descended from Comedy Olympus to show us what’s hot. The other genius, Howie Mandel, is also infected with the same virus. At least Mandel knows he’s sick, insisting on wearing latex gloves all the time and refusing to touch anybody. Basically, these comics feel that they have achieved such an exalted status that it is enough for them to come out and regale the public with little details about what is happening in their lives.Lenny Bruce was obsessed with the idea of class, like a lot of schmucks. He had a routine where he constantly badgers his manager to book him into a “class room”. Finally, the manager manages to get him an engagement at a dinner club in London which meets all his criteria for a “class room”. When he starts to do his act there, the audience responds by throwing cutlery at him.But the most notable offender has got to be Jerry Lewis who, sick of being treated like an illiterate clown from New Jersey in spite of all the money he had made, decided to show the world that he had class like Peter Lawford or Kennedy. Of course, it was a New Jersey concept of class, with big French cuffs and ersatz Bing Crosby, Perry Como smoothness, as though he had emerged fully grown from the head of Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry character as portrayed by Burt Lancaster, but it was enough to inspire a whole generation of buffoons going forward.If it wasn’t enough to have Seinfeld’s tedious little anecdotes about himself, his wife and his upcoming HBO special, they managed to contrive a brief videoconference with the Queen of Daytime TV, Oprah, which didn’t exactly enchant this viewer either. Ha-ha, very funny.Mercifully, this segment finally ended only to be followed by an interview with rap performer Kanye West, who the night before had jumped onstage during the MTV video awards show presentation for best music video to “country” singer Taylor Swift, for her video that had been entirely shot on the New York subway. What happened to the usual country themes of mountains and pick-up trucks, I don’t know. It just goes to demonstrate the standardization of commercial culture when the subway suddenly becomes a theme for country music. Hank Williams and Hank Snow have got to be looking down from Grand Ol Opry Heaven and shaking their heads in astonishment.Hey, who am I to complain? Given the current depression, anything that makes money is good. It’s a sure bet that the subway was not Taylor Swift’s concept, but that of her record label’s marketing department, based on input data supplied by innumerable polling data and focus groups. That’s probably where she got her name as well.In any case, there she is receiving an award for a video she never conceived, based on a song she probably never wrote (maybe she never sang it either), and Kanye West jumps onto the stage, grabs the mike and declares that the award should have gone to Beyoncé. Very charming. But these award shows are a bunch of garbage anyway. Remember when Sasha Baron Cohen descended from the ceiling dressed as Tinker Bell the Fairy complete with magic wand, and plastered his bare butt directly in the face of P-Diddy (or whatever he calls himself now)? The whole grotesque event was revealed to have been staged. Anyway, who cares? Cohen’s movie disappeared almost instantly, a victim of the Twitter rage, as spectators emerged from the theaters and immediately texted, “Don’t go it stinks”. Next year Twitter will be gone too.Personally, I believe Sasha Baron Cohen has got a lot of comedic talent and nerve. He just shouldn’t be allowed to write his own movies. After years of hearing about how great “Borat” was, I finally got a chance to see it on TV and it totally stank, except for the scene where the naked fat guy sits on his face and screams “Eat me!” That I liked.Kanye West appeared appropriately chastened on Jay Leno about ruining Taylor Swift’s star turn on the MTV award show, but he also betrayed an unbelievably spoiled and indulged personality bereft of any capacity for reflection or even self-expression. “I know, as a celebrity I should have behaved better”, was about all he could get out.What did Jay Leno care? This dork has got a big name and his appearance and abbreviated mea culpa were guaranteed to draw big ratings, which meant that Leno would live to fight another day. Leno did not give West the bum’s rush he so richly deserved, like he did a couple of days later with Mel Gibson. His producers are turning over any rock they need to in order to ensure ratings, and they even gave some air time to Gibson, who is a virtual pariah in Hollywood since he revealed himself to be an unreconstituted falangist anti-semite. Everybody is charming when he is young, and Mel Gibson was exciting and vital 30 years ago. Unfortunately, he never figured out how to remain current in middle age, revealing himself to be a xenophobic, drunken half-wit. Leno shut him down halfway through the segment.With Kanye West, even though he was no more coherent than Gibson, Leno was obliged to finish the interview because West was scheduled to “sing” with Jay-Z and Rihanna, whom I must say are no less diminished in talent than he. I am not going to go out on a limb and state that hip-hop is not music. I own an LP from the sound track of 1980’s movie “New Jack City”, and it is very entertaining. At this stage of the game, though, I have to say that it is much depleted as a musical genre over the last 30 years, and the current group of artists, if I may grace them with such an elevated term, are strictly the dregs. Jay-Z, Kanye West and Rihanna somnambulated through their performance with a lack of passion that seemed calculated to stimulate the audience to wish it was in Philadelphia, as W.C. Fields once put it.Despite its rather flat beginning, I predict the Jay Leno Show will do very well so long as his opening monologue is sharp enough to keep the audience tuned in. That is the hook that will keep me tuning in, and I have no doubt that he will pull it off, based upon his previous years of success. Jay’s monologues, rather than being one-off affairs, are based upon a culture of cumulative themes. He may not have OJ or Bill Clinton to kick around currently, but once he gets his hooks onto some good running themes, he should take off in primetime and stay on top for a while.
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September 27, 2009
Irving Krystol
Conservative Blowhard
1920-2009 Neo-conservative Irving Krystol passed away last week, and not nearly soon enough to please this writer. If anyone exemplified an era of vacuous poseurs who have achieved notable status by blowing off a load of rubbishy old bollocks, it is Krystol, who never held a job in his life and based all his shopworn, middle-brow conclusions on a couple of unpleasant years he spent as an army inductee, where he came face-to-face with a reality of illiterate hillbilly conscripts whom he could not stand.It takes a big man to develop an affection for the peasant classes. Count Leo Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Victor Hugo were all able to overlook their all-too-obvious defects and plumb the realities of their underlying nobility. It takes all kinds of people to build a world, not least those for whom tilling the soil, descending into a coal mine or manning our industrial complexes are ennobling acts. Because of their labor we enjoy an abundant cornucopia of exquisite comestibles on our tables and the power to generate our useless gadgets.Closer to home, in America, we have had writers who were able to portray our working classes with the affection they so obviously merit. New York writer Mac Hyman was also drafted into the army, but he was able to transcend class and racial differences and write a hilarious novel based on his experiences called “No Time For Sergeants”, which became a hit Broadway play and one of the most hysterical movies ever made, starring Andy Griffith. This movie, which my mother dragged me to repeatedly as a kid, had both of us crying with laughter at every screening.Mac Hyman, Victor Hugo and John Steinbeck will all live forever as long as humanity exists because they embraced the laboring classes with affection. Unlike the above, the only books Krystol ever produced were four collections of his homegrown neo-bloviations that should go down in history as notable doorstoppers or bathroom tissue surrogates.My personal experiences with rural Southerners and Appalachians, for which I am grateful, stem from my adolescence, part of which I spent in Chicago. Forsaking the usual summer employment choices of working at McDonald’s or in retail stores, I sought industrial work in the factories located in the suburban industrial parks. The work was unpleasant and the conditions distressful, but it paid 2-3 times what I could make if I had stayed closer to home. Plus which, it was sort of daring.One summer I obtained a job in a plastics factory that made celanoid alternators, which reverse the electrical current and perform functions like making windshield wipers go back-and-forth. The work was hot and repetitive, but at the end of the week I emerged rich, compared to other teenagers. The companionship was not exactly scintillating. The workers were migrants from rural Kentucky and Tennessee, and the conversation revolved strictly around stock car racing (this was when NASCAR was still an apple in Junior Johnson’s eye). When the other workers found out I was Jewish, they did not exactly embrace me like a long-lost relation. In a lot of cases they addressed me as “Hey, Jew!” So what! This is Chicago we are discussing. I don’t know what it is now, but back then there was no concept of political correctness. How do you think my father made his money, by sending out floral bouquets?Anyway, now that these yahoos had a real Yankee Jew for an interlocutor, they exploited the occasion to air long-held grievances. “We hate your longhair music!” they informed me. I first thought they were talking about freakin Arturo Rubenstein and the Philharmonic, but they meant the Beatles, whose hair I considered not even long enough to discuss. What of it?These guys had some peculiar dietary habits. One of them, Red, would eat a whole jar of jalapeño peppers for lunch and then, just to show he could take it, would chase them down with the scathingly hot pickle juice straight from the jar. He must have had an industrial-strength sphincter to go with his ventilator shaft of an esophagus. Sometimes we were allowed a five-minute bathroom break, during which the foreman, Blackie, would take our turn at the baking ovens. A lot of these guys used the break to buy cold hamburgers and hot dogs from the canteen vending machines and then eat them without first heating them in the microwave because time would not allow.In order to economize, instead of using Brylcreem to slick back their elaborate pompadours or duck’s ass hairstyles, these guys would just grab a handful of the hot machine grease that lubricated the pneumatic heat presses and comb it into their locks.And don’t bend over! A lot of them, even though they all had nasty wives and a whole passel of kids to support, were not immune to the charms of each other’s backsides. There were a couple of flagrantly gay men in the place, but not the stereotypical guys that you meet on Saturday night in the Jackhammer Bar in Chelsea. These guys were hugely muscular and tough, and their brute force and strength commanded respect even in the homophobic environment of the factory floor, hypocritically so, as I pointed out, where guys would gladly cornhole each other for lack of any alternative romantic interest.Their attitude toward military service was just as basic and hard-bitten. To a man, they expressed a preference for serving in the infantry. “My daddy was in the infantry and his daddy before him, all the way back to the War Between the States”, was the unanimous mantra. This was a big eye-opener for me because the guys in my neighborhood all wanted to become big shots in the Navy or Air Force jet pilots. This willingness to gladly absorb all the hard work and punishment of a ground campaign, I considered their most noble characteristic.Not too charming, OK? These experiences, combined with a couple of unfortunate military schools I was forced to attend as a kid from a dysfunctional family background, alerted me to the hazards of military service, not so much from a fear of combat but from what I could expect from my own side! This was an era when there was too much fun to be had in the world, wild women and abundant drugs, and I wasn’t inclined to consign myself to military service, so I didn’t.Unlike Irving Krystol, however, I didn’t allow these brushes with the sub proletariat to color my lifelong attitudes toward the laboring classes. Far from it. I developed a love of country music and car racing which later on, when I went to university, informed my love of folk music, blues and gospel. Even today, after seeing a fair part of the world, if I meet people from the red states, politics aside, I am able to touch on common points of conversation and humor. Unfortunately, my wrath is reserved for the arriviste, social climbing attitudes of the urban middle class, which I find ghastly.And Irving Krystol’s relentlessly petty bourgeois disdain for the working class, which he developed from being pushed around in the army, spread to middle class elements that were sympathetic to them. He basically hated any kind of social reformers. He teamed up with the unfortunately named Gertrude Himmelfarb (it sound like Dr. Ruth, only without the sex), who wanted to drag society back into the abject misery of the Victorian era, and together they formed a kind of Marvel Comics team of reactionary superheros whose goal was to stymie any kind of social evolutionary progress in America. And they succeeded not only in that, but between the two of them they seduced enough wealthy suckers that nobody in their family has ever had to lift a hand to produce a single day’s productive labor.Opinions he never lacked. While his wife was studying at Cambridge on (what else?) a grant, Krystol teamed up with the CIA to produce the reactionary journals Commentary and Encounter. When later confronted about his CIA financing his response was, “So what?”Look, if the CIA were to offer me funding for one of my pet projects, like a journal on bestiality practices in the French Republic, don’t you think I would accept the money? Of course I would! But it’s doubtful they would advance me such a proposition. Fortunately for Krystol, his agenda and that of the CIA coincided perfectly.Later on Krystal established other such useless organs with names like The Public Interest and The National Interest, and he became an editorial opinion writer for The Wall Street Journal. A bunch of crap if you ask me.The abysmal aspect of the whole thing is that Krystol claimed to be a reformed Marxist based on the fact that he called himself a Trotskyite when he was a juvenile student in college. Purges or a civil war he never experienced. He turned on the left because some hillbilly probably knocked him on his ass in a fistfight behind an army barracks.Anyway, now he’s gone and good riddance, only he’s left behind a plague in the form of a son, William Krystol, who has taken over the family business of expounding useless, unintelligible neo-conservative positions that don’t have any grounding in real experience, and whose only realistic result would seem to be to keep the funding rolling in.
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September 26, 2009
The beaches of Brighton are resounding with the cries of women’s titties and backsides yearning to be free. “Enough”, they are screaming. “After thousands of years of freezing on the desolate wastes of Kazakhstan and the Crimean steppes, we are demanding our right to be exposed to the clear sunshine!”Who can argue with such a plaintive plea? Certainly not this writer. Women of Brooklyn, I will fight to the death for your right to expose your breasts and backsides on Brighton Beach until they turn crimson with sunstroke!This backended behavior is not the only manifestation of the Russian invasion of Brooklyn. Even as the U.S. Coast Guard maintains a vigilant surveillance of New York Harbor to deter illicit infiltration of our national territory by undocumented extranationals the denizens of the former Soviet republics are streaming in by the front door, waving authentic visas procured by means of Byzantine processes the mechanics of which are only comprehensible to a few initiated operators.No matter. They are here and it is a good thing for Brooklyn. That borough, which for years suffered a serious hemorrhage of entrepreneurial talent with the exodus of its Italian and Jewish inhabitants for points east, is undergoing a transformation which is changing not only its ethnic composition but also its patterns of living. Brighton Beach, which only a couple of decades previously was a blighted and moribund appendage of Coney Island, with grandmotherly bubbies and zadies pushing walkers down Brighton Beach Avenue on their way to the Cheap Jack’s 99¢ Store, is being transformed into a fashionable version of South Beach, replete with Italian designer boutiques and elegant outdoor cafés terraces on the boardwalk facing out over New York Harbor.Where the capital which is financing this Cinderella makeover is coming from is of indeterminate provenance, but maybe the city fathers/mothers of other blighted cities like Detroit or Cleveland do well to initiate a research as to how their fair cities might learn from the Brighton Beach renaissance. Certainly, some of the investment revitalizing the quarter is the result of the classic capitalist formula involving the conservation of accumulated earnings derived from honest labor. There are probably a few suckers around who still adhere to that shopworn philosophy. But as the old saw goes, “Nobody ever got rich from working”.No, the Russians are too worldly wise and cynical to adhere to such a quaint formula. They didn’t survive centuries and millennia of serfdom and decades of communism by following the rules. One is reminded of the first classic Brooklyn Russian scam of the 1980’s and 1990’s, wherein some Soviet-era genius realized the perfectly obvious fact that there is no fundamental difference between heating oil and diesel fuel, except for the fact that the U.S. government didn’t collect excise taxes on sales of the former. Very simple. They bought heating oil and sold it in gas stations for diesel fuel, collecting the taxes and not passing them along to the G.This racket, totally elegant in its simplicity, lasted for many years, generating hundreds of millions for the Russian mob until somebody who was being investigated for something else entirely happened to blurt it out to investigators, believing that since everybody else in the world already knew it, the cops must have known about it too.There are so many of these scams going on that there is not enough bandwidth in cyberspace to consider them all in this article. My physician, who is a Russian woman, recounted to me the story of her girlfriend, who is a home healthcare aide in Brighton Beach. This lady qualified for a subprime mortgage and got title to a luxury condo, which she promptly took a second mortgage out on to finance a Mercedes Benz. So, you got a healthcare aide making $8 an hour living in a beachfront condo and driving a Mercedes.A strategy like that is evidently not meant to endure over the long run (she is probably moonlighting as a massage therapist to bring in a little extra pin money), but it is probably calculated to get her a more desirable mate, and anyway, this is what she came to America to achieve. It’s definitely preferable to a life of quiet desperation in some dreary industrial city in the Ural Mountains. Meanwhile, as untold millions of Americans subsist in shabby little one-horse towns and trailer parks in flyover country, these sophisticated foreigners are flooding in and enjoying their lunch. A promenade on the boardwalk, filled with beautifully coiffed, elegant Russian women and their burly boyfriends wearing expensive track suits and sporting kilos of gold chains, will indicate to the casual observer that this is not a convention of the Better Business Bureau. But as the great American writer Louis L’Amour once opined in one of his western stories, America was not exclusively constructed on the sweat of honest labor.Russians are not Europeans. They are Slavs, and bound to their feudal terrains since time immemorial. Peter the Great, after achieving his grand tour of Europe early in his reign, enforced western dress and customs upon his subjects, though it was just a superficial graft of culture upon the ruling classes and the urban bourgeoisie. The peasants, or muzhiks, were totally untouched and remained that way until the revolution. Part of the resentment toward the communists was due to the fact that they confronted the common people with the realities of modern life, which they resisted.So the Russians, though they look and appear European, are locked in a psychological world dating from the Mongols and the Tartars. They are superficially modern in that they are conversant in all aspects of popular culture, like Michael Jackson and Gianni Versace, but they have more in common with the Turkman and the Uighurs of Central Asia than they have with any Frenchman or Italian. For many years the Russian mind confounded Western military and diplomatic strategists, who couldn’t get a handle on their thinking because even though the Russians look white, they don’t think white. Now that they have invaded Brooklyn, it’s up to New Yorkers to make sense of their Rubik’s Cube of a psychology in order to learn how to deal with them.And deal with them we must. They are very canny business people, and they strive to stay 3 or 4 moves ahead of their interlocutors in matters of culture, like a chess game. Russian business people have heavily invested in Brooklyn real estate and are rebuilding the borough in their image from one end to the other. The transformation of Brighton Beach has been stunning, with new condos springing up where previously existed shabby, antiquated residences. A few years ago I wrote a fiction story about Brighton being reborn as another South Beach, and now I am living to see my opium dream transformed into reality, complete with shady rezoning deals, just like I pictured it.Another advantage the Russians bring with them is their linguistic and cultural connection with robust and vital elements of the Russian economic elite, which has expressed a lively interest in Brooklyn. How much of the money currently involved in revitalizing Brooklyn has its origin in the Motherland may yet be a subject of speculation, but one of the problems endemic in the accumulation of vast amounts of ill-gotten wealth is the placement of it, and Brooklyn is about as safe an investment as any emerging markets. America is right now starved for capital, our capitalist class having completely run out of steam in the generation of new wealth. Previously we have tapped the Europeans, Arabs, Japanese and Chinese for new sources of liquidity, and now the time has seemingly come for the Russians to step up to the box.Our latest savior is 6’7” kickboxer Mikhail Prokhorov, 44, a self-made (which must mean that he stole it all himself) billionaire in the Russian mineral extraction industry. He is reputed to currently be the richest man in Russia, or at least until the wind shifts and he ends up in jail with all the previous richest guys. In the meantime, more power to him. Prokhorov is investing $200 million to buy an 80% shere of the Nets basketball team and a 45% share in Bruce Ratner’s planned new stadium in the Atlantic Fields development in downtown Brooklyn. This will basically extend Russian control of Brooklyn from one geographical pole to the other. Such an ownership, if it is approved by the NBA, would imprint Russian culture on one of the most important elements of American sports culture and imprint a Russian sensibility on the whole way we look at athletics, particularly if Prokhorov decides to import some big, brawling Russian players to enhance the team’s popularity among Russian Brooklynites and the sports viewing public back in the immense Russian market.It could also induce resentment among Brooklyn’s Black population, who have come to regard the NBA as their own and have been hungering for a Brooklyn team for a long time. As it is Black people have expressed resentment against the Russians coming in to the borough, usurping one of its loveliest neighborhoods (though it wasn’t lovely when they arrived. As with the heating oil, they saw an opportunity that wasn’t evident to native-born Americans and they took it) and making such a success of it in so short a time.Where this Nets thing is going, I can’t say. But Russian ownership of Brooklyn basketball, combined with the Russian people’s rather arbitrary way of looking after their own interests, could lead to some interesting points of divergence down the road.
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Posted 56 days ago
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September 14, 2009
People are getting stoopider and stoopider. As we progress on our inexorable ascent back up that ancestral family tree from whence descended our illustrious antecedents, we are assisted in that endeavor by the newest innovation in digital technology that our little, ape-like hands have been able to fashion – text messaging.Let there be no mistake. The public has spoken. Disheartened and frustrated by the evolution of human communication into complex constructions of thought and language that have left it feeling increasing marginalized and inadequate, society is striking back with a literary counter-revolution that elevates even the dullest dimwit to the level of a Shakespeare or a Nietzsche – tweeting, which reduces all of human wisdom and experience to the level of a retarded two year-old.But alack and alas! There is nothing new under the sun. The compression of human endeavor into a few stunted characters is not a recent phenomenon. It has always been going on, aided by the primitive forms of technology available to our progenitors – jungle drums, carrier pigeon, the telegraph. What is revolutionary is that the Twitter technology has delivered illiteracy into the service of those who have the least to say, the average garden variety twits who populate and fashion our Brave New World.Just to demonstrate how tweeting has always existed, and as a standard against which our contemporary vulgarized culture may be measured, 200motels has plumbed the archives of history for useful relics of abbreviated collective wisdom. As the child is father to the man, so may these ancient tweets prepare us for a new golden age of diminished intellectual capacity.“Ate a nice nurse for lunch” – Hannibal Lecter“Had sex with the whole palace guard, including the horses” – Catherine the Great of Russia“Getting ready for my big speech to the Roman senate” – Julius Caesar“Looking forward to a pleasant evening at the theater” – Abraham Lincoln“Can’t decide between the pink dress and the blue dress” – Rudolph Giuliani“Wonder what I can get for Madonna as part of the ‘Cash for Clunkers’ program” – A-Rod“Have developed a design for a new safety razor” – Dr. Guillotine“At last I have succeeded in creating the perfect hockey player” – Dr. Frankenstein“Another perfect morning at Pearl Harbor” – Admiral Nimitz“All I need is one more whale and I can sail for home port” – Capt. Ahab“I feel lucky” – Gen. Custer
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September 10, 2009
President Barack Obama did a fine job in his healthcare reform speech before a joint session of Congress, wherein he seized the initiative and presented a coherent argument for his legislative agenda. The speech was succinct and powerful, and he even threw in that little element of moral didacticism that the public seems to crave like its little dose of emotional castor oil as necessary to its spiritual growth (yuck!).Of course, the Republican opposition did its part as well, sitting there with long faces and appearing for all the world as though they would rather be in Philadelphia, longing for the bygone days of yore, when George W. Bush would rhetorically tie his own shoelaces together and then trip and fall on his face. One Republican congressman, Joe Wilson, was even inspired to add his own two cents, screaming out to Obama that he was a liar.If that was a momentary distraction, it no way equaled Hillary Clinton’s bright red pants suit, which was so blatant an attempt at scene stealing that it made me cringe in shame at having voted for her during the primary. What could I have been thinking? Instead of reading foreign policy briefs, which have availed this nation’s external affairs absolutely no results whatsoever, she should be issued a huge pile of fashion magazines and forced to peruse them page-by-page until she absorbs some basic wardrobe principles. Essentially, the only thing she was lacking was a sleigh pulled by reindeer and a bottle of Coke. And, oh yeah, a stenciled sign across her butt reading “Wide Load”.My girlfriend, Magpie, immediately attacked me for ridiculing Hillary’s sartorial attire, accusing me of being blind to the subtle message Hillary was trying to diffuse. The message? “Hey, look at me, I’m a big shot!” Very subtle. What do I know, just being a man! OK, I’m an idiot, but if I was driving down the expressway and I came face-to-face with an enormous, bright red bulldozer, I would cede it the right-of-way.No wonder Hillary came under sniper fire in Bosnia! Who could resist a target like that, an enormous backside covered by yards and yards of glowing, iridescent rayon. The sniper who missed her should be sent back for additional target practice, shooting at the broad side of a barn.But if Obama has taken the lead in pushing through health insurance reform, he can’t pull the whole train himself. He needs a legion of compelling speakers to fan out throughout the nation and push his agenda in all the media markets, great and small, and here he has a problem. He’s the only decent speaker in his administration except for Hillary, and he has scheduled her for state visits to Tierra del Fuego, New Caledonia and all those other hot spots that are essential to furthering American interests throughout the globe.Of course, there’s always Bill Clinton, but if he succeeds he’ll end up getting credit for everything, which is not exactly the way Obama has got it planned. So who is available for Obama to enlist in his health insurance campaign? Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, Joe Biden? Forget about it! Obama wanted to be the whole ball of wax, and now he has gotten his wish. There’s nobody else.The only thing working in his favor is that there are no Republican speed bumps to stand in his way, as was aptly demonstrated by the hapless sucker they deputized to deliver their rebuttal to Obama’s address, Louisiana Rep. Charles Boustanny Jr. This guy couldn’t even read his lines right off the teleprompter. He would do well to visit some karaoke bars and learn how to pick up his cues from a screen. Between him and the heckler, the Republicans have demonstrated themselves to be such hapless rubes that they can’t even be trusted to run the “Shoot The Freak” attraction on the Coney Island boardwalk.
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September 07, 2009
Disgraced former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, who was forced to resign when he paid for sex with an electronic fund transfer even though he knew that the whole banking establishment was looking for an excuse to screw him, has expressed an interest in running for public office. He thinks he’d make a good U.S. senator. Go for it, baby! Whaddaya gonna do for an encore, expose yourself on the subway?Coincidentally, his erstwhile paramour, who goes by the nom de cul Asslee DuPree, has issued the New Jersey version of Zola’s "J’accuse" letter, excoriating the respectable society women of Metropolitan New York who are hypocritically condemning her for accepting to have sex for money. Why, Ms. DuPree complains, should she be condemned to wear a scarlet tattoo on her butt for doing what every woman does as a matter of course, transact female affection as a commodity! She points to the legions of unhappy women involved with men whom they can’t even stand at all because it’s easier than working.Her argument basically boils down to the method of payment. She prefers to be paid in advance where respectable women are willing to first service the guy and then present the bill later. It’s these easy payment terms that constitute the distinction between a respectable enterprise and unethical freelancers.I’m glad that the Pink Wall of Silence is finally being breached in the interest of sexual transparency. Everybody already knows the deal, but nobody wants to talk about it. It doesn’t bother people to engage in unsightly behavior, but they don’t like to have it openly discussed. Go into any church or synagogue and the pews are filled with thieves, right up to the Vatican. That’s why religious leaders so rarely address the topic of stealing in their sermons.The acceptance of women giving sex in return for a petit cadeau, as it’s delicately referred to in the French language, extends right back to the primates in the jungle, where the apes in the trees enjoy a similar understanding. Anthropologists with binoculars have noted a tendency among female apes to accord sexual favors to those males who deliver to them a nice, delicious piece of meat. The male apes, realizing the chance for an advantage in propagating their bloodline, quickly established brokerages and trading desks to speculate in nice, beautiful, gamy, maggot-infested joints of stinking, putrid, diseased monkey carrion.The problem, as it specifically relates to New York women is not the method of payment but the quality of service. Getting laid in modern New York is rather like effectuating a purchase in a Soviet-era Moscow department store. When you finally do find somebody to serve you, you are encouraged to hurry up and finish. Like many of the restaurants in town, the product is overpriced, substandard and unsatisfying, only you can’t call 311 to complain. In addition, instead of gratefully accepting payment, the vendor complains ceaselessly about being driven out of business because of the low rates, despite the fact that she is still in possession of the merchandise.Women frequently berate their men for being boorish and unintelligent, but they intentionally seek out these dullards so that they can appear more intelligent by comparison and dominate the situation. As one female confided to me in a moment of candor, the ideal man should be “just intelligent enough to bring back the bacon” (again coming back to the meat).This writer learned early in life that there was no percentage in appearing too intelligent, so I perfected the role of an idiotic knucklehead and, finding it to be rather agreeable, stuck with it. It got me a lot of sex, though in retrospect, considering the women I came to know, I could have achieved comparable results and saved a fortune of money by establishing a liaison with an inflatable latex female substitute.As it turned out, whatever the contemporary woman lacks in erudition, she makes up for it in instinct, and as soon as they figured out that they were dealing with an unpredictable and potentially disruptive element, they dropped me. That’s why I never had any kids. The women correctly judged me to be an unreliable sucker.Neither are men seeking overly-intelligent mates. The male predilection for stupid females is historical. Everybody is seeking to find somebody dumber than he/she is so that they can be boss. Any offspring resulting from such a diminutive coupling is bound to be not-too-bright either, leading to a kind of reverse evolutionary spiral that is bound to land humanity (if I may use such an exalted term when discussing New Yorkers) back in the loftier branches of the ancestral family trees from whence descended our distinguished antecedants.Assley DuPree would do better taking her act to LA or Vegas, where you really can get a second chance, rather than wait around here, pleading for forgiveness from the Mad Housewives of New Jersey who all have plenty to hide themselves, believe-you-me, but are caught up in a frenzied vortex of vindictiveness, flailing around incontinently in the throws of their hysterical compulsion to become Roman gods.
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