Our president’s latest energy initiative was to go to Saudi Arabia and beg King Abdullah to give us a little relief on gasoline prices. I guess there was some justice in that. When you, the president, after 9/11, tell the country to go shopping instead of buckling down to break our addiction to oil, it ends with you, the president, shopping the world for discount gasoline.
— Thomas Friedman, New York Times.
OK, Diddy just showed up.
HOVA. With Memphis Bleek. I came back for a second night
Lighting (feat. JayZ & Mary J Blige) at MSG
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
The Replacements, “I Will Dare” (1984)
…not sure what brought this about, but I’ve been listening to The Replacements for weeks, non-stop. If they didn’t invent jangly indie slacker attitude they definitely refined it to an irresistible malaise. Walking through Carroll Gardens last night, I overheard this track billowing out of a half-empty bar. I think a Replacements revival is ripe for summertime, much like the Hall & Oates
revival, summer of 2006.
I spent the weekend catching up on Boulevard’s past few issues. It’s one of the few literary journals that can both fascinate and enrage me in a handful of pages. Someone’s stylistic departures leave me reeling; a page later I’m bolted upright and shaking my fist. From Boulevard #68/69’s Symposium: Writers and Readers Under 35:
“This is the most passive, confused, disoriented, malingering, abstract, ignorant, brainwashed, unified, coddled, meaningless American generation ever, and it shows in its reading and writing. It is also the most tolerant, self-sufficient, understanding, empathetic, multicultural, uplifted, vocal, articulate, knowing, ironic, sensible, pragmatic, disciplined, ambidextrous, wholesome generation on record. The two tendencies exactly cancel each otherout. Its strengths are the mirror image of its failings…” -Anis Shivani.
Shivani goes on like this for five pages. Just thought you’d like to know…
Some recruits, though not on any network payroll, were influential in other ways — either because they were sought out by radio hosts, or because they often published op-ed articles or were quoted in magazines, Web sites and newspapers. At least nine of them have written op-ed articles for The Times.
— The NYT admits it too was a sucker of the Defense Dept’s campaign… but not until page 4.
Even analysts with no defense industry ties, and no fondness for the administration, were reluctant to be critical of military leaders, many of whom were friends. “It is very hard for me to criticize the United States Army,” said William L. Nash, a retired Army general and ABC analyst. “It is my life.
— From the NYT article on Pentagon Propaganda. Please replace the last quoted word, “life,” with “fucking tomb.”
