Supreme Court nerds should give this lengthy SCOTUSblog run-down on the term a serious read. Most notable to me: “Although some cases are decided five to four, that’s no more than twenty percent of the docket this Term (we’re running the final numbers now). Roughly half the decisions are nine to zero. Only slightly more than one in ten cases involved the narrow liberal-conservative divide (fewer, if we don’t include cases in which we presume Justice Sotomayor would have voted with the left had she not been recused)… Among all the Justices, it is in fact Scalia and Thomas-frequently heralded by conservatives as ideal members of the Court-who hesitate the least in invalidating legislation or (with respect to Thomas) calling for the overruling of prior precedent…. Just as fascinating is Justice Thomas’s openness to reconsidering almost every issue in the law that he views as wrongly decided. This Term, he wrote eight separate opinions suggesting the reconsideration of existing law.”

Here is something commonly called a satire: “In the summer of 2010… an asteroid struck the East Coast. Early warning systems permitted most of the region’s population to be evacuated, so that only a few lives were lost when the meteor fragmented and exploded above lower Manhattan, leveling Wall Street…. While the cloud of dust was still clearing above the flooded crater that had once been Wall Street, in Washington, a bipartisan group of fiscal conservatives, Citizens for Understanding Taxation (CUT), held a press conference and called for immediate, drastic cuts in public spending.” Ohhhkay. Is there anyone else, besides the New America Foundation wonk who wrote this, who needs it explained to them that what happened on Wall Street these last few years was nothing like a random act of an uncaring universe? And that such an attempt, however charming, to cast the stupid political maneuvers of those fatheads in the Senate as therefore nonsensical, doesn’t really, like, add up?

“You people are stupid. I remember Pier 52 and the End Zone, Hermosa used to be a scary place. The youth hostel used to be known as the heroin hotel. Hermosa has cleaned up so much over the last few decades, let the people have their fun. I’ve grown up in Hermosa, live in Hermosa, and think it’s a great place. If you don’t want to drink on the beach, don’t. If you don’t want to get puked on, don’t go to the Ironman. Hermosa is a mellow fun-loving town, leave it that way! If you want to talk about investments, money you don’t have, or how great you are, stay in Manhattan!”
— The debate over the annual July 4 Ironman event in Hermosa Beach, Calif. — an “extreme athletic test” in which “participants must run a mile, paddle a surfboard a mile and then consume a 6-pack of their favorite beer” — is getting pretty heated! Because things get, well, kinda vomity among the participants, as well as among those spectators who just want to feel like they’re “supporting the contestants.” (I do like how the last sentence of that mini-tirade can almost be fit in to an anti-gentrification rant emanating from the opposite coast!)

“I was thinking about how before the internet, or more specifically when I was really young, if you heard a song that you really liked on the radio or MTV, owning that song involved a really complicated series of hurdles like 1) hoping your mom would bring you to Caldor or Zayre’s, and 2) hoping you somehow had $10, and 3) hoping against all odds that the record department wouldn’t suck and they’d actually have the one LP you wanted in stock, for once, just for god damned once.”

by Dan Horton

Dan Horton, a friend and former colleague of mine, works on tugboats out of the New York Harbor for a living. Two weeks ago, he flew down to Louisiana to take a job on a barge unloading crude oil from the skimmer boats that clean the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. There’s limited computer access on board; crew are only allowed to send and receive one email a day. Dan has been sending letters home to his girlfriend, Lori, who has been passing them along to friends and family, and now, with their permission, I’ll pass them along to you. -Dave Bry

Subject: Daily Dan
Sunday, June 20th

Lori,

Hey, Babe, all is well here. We were given the weekend off from chipping and 
painting and didn’t have to offload any skimmer boats until tonight. It 
went fast. I stayed out of the sun today. We’ll see about tomorrow. We may 
have to offload to another barge, so that would mean working on my tan again. 
Yes, I’m wearing sunscreen. No bugs out here to speak of, but my neck is 
really red.
 I misspelled “Sweden” in yesterday’s email. That’s haunted me all 
day… Which is to say that I haven’t had a whole lot to think about. Mostly just reading that detective novel that mom bought for me, which keeps reminding me that I misspelled “Sweden.” It’s a tough road to hoe.
 I’m glad you don’t mind being point person 
and forwarding these emails to the family. Please do forward them to 
everyone. If I get too cootchie-coo or misspell the names of European 
countries, feel free to edit. You could even just make stuff up and put my 
name on it. I trust your imagination.

Okay, enough of that.
 Those fears of what kind of crew I’d be dealing with were baseless. 
I’m very happy with this crew. Heard good things about the next crew coming 
on this Wednesday, too. That makes a big, big difference.
 All three tankermen onboard are named “Dan.” The Dan I share a room 
with is working the captain’s watch and has been working tugs and barges for 
48 years. I’m on the mate’s watch (as usual) and the other mate’s-watch Dan 
and I are getting along fine. He’s showing me the ins-and-outs of this barge, 
which is five times bigger than the one I was used to, and is almost 40 years 
old. In other words, it’s a very large rust bucket with old, old engines. 
This is the first black-oil barge I’ve been on-the DBL 28 was in “clean 
oil”-and there are some differences in the setup. (Namely, this barge has 
boilers to keep the product heated when necessary. Doesn’t look like we 
will need to turn them on anytime soon, though sometimes they have to even 
down here in the Gulf of Mexico. Black oil products lose their viscosity 
below certain temps.)
 The chief engineer has a habit of baking something every evening watch 
after dinner. Tonight, I was laying in my bunk reading and not sleeping at 
all and the smell of what he was cooking dragged me to the galley. He’d 
burned the bottom of some cinnamon buns and was quite dejected. I ate one, 
burnt bottom and all, just to try to cheer him up. Not sure if it worked 
or not. I think he will be much more careful tomorrow.
 It’s Father’s Day and I’m thinking of all the stuff I’d like to say to 
Dad. I’m going to go ahead and say it all to Dad and assume that in some 
fashion somehow the message will be received. I’m not really too worried if 
that sounds cuckoo because it’s working for me.


One email a day really is much better than no emails per day. I have 
to climb up a very tall ladder to get to the upper wheelhouse in order to 
use the boat computer, so it’s a bit of a trek… It’s not the compulsive 
blah-blah of my normal computer use. Feels pointed and makes me focus. Not 
quite as easy as Ritalin, but it’ll have to do for now.
 Well, I am fine and hope to hear that you and everyone else is fine 
as well!
 Thank Eva for writing me!
 Thank you Lori for passing these on! And for writing me! Hope 
everyone has a wonderful Father’s Day.


Love,

Dan

Subject: Daily Dan: Post Father’s Day Wrap-Up.

Date: Monday, June 21, 2010

Dear Family,

For Father’s Day, I spent about twenty minutes casting a lure off the back 
deck of the tug. I was planning on it being my Father’s Day event anyway, 
but the way it worked out was that I was in the lower wheelhouse and 
thought I saw bait fish swimming past the boat and I got excited. (Haven’t 
seen anything alive in the water yet, though there was a flying fish on deck 
the other night.) From the angle I was looking, you couldn’t really see the 
sheen in the water either, it just looked blue like I assumed it was 
supposed to look. From the vantage of the back deck though I could see that 
what I thought was baitfish was suspended particles drifting with the 
current. I’ve been told that that stuff is what the dispersant does to the 
oil. Also from the back deck, you could again see the sheen on the surface.
 Nonetheless, I grabbed the pole and started fishing. I guess fishing 
is by nature an optimistic activity (they don’t call it “catching.”) I 
wanted to hook something just to see some life. It overrode my usual 
hypersensitive notion that it’s damn mean to trick a creature into chomping 
down on a pointed hook and dragging it out of its element into a lethal 
environment. Like I said, I was going to do it anyway because I remember how 
much Dad liked it, and it would be a good way to commune with the 
memories. But the sense that I was casting out for some good news here put a 
little pep in my arm. No bites, but I did think fondly of Pop and soaked up 
a little bit of sun. They tell me that the day before I got on, another tankerman (a 
former Massachusetts lobsterman) caught a couple of skipjacks and had a 
barracuda on the line before it jumped and spit out the hook. The second 
mate tells me that this crew is incapable of catching fish. (The lobsterman 
and I are just passing through.) So the fact that nobody else has caught 
anything isn’t really an indication of anything.
 What they have told me is that usually you can see down 200 feet deep out here, and 
you probably can’t see down 15 now. Apparently, the oil plumes deeper down 
are reflecting light back up and along with the particles floating it 
disrupts the visibility. Must change the temperature too, I’d imagine. 
There are these dead tubular jellyfish floating by all the time (they 
look a bit like Coney Island whitefish). There are large swaths of copper-colored stuff floating on the surface that makes me think of instant hot 
chocolate that hasn’t been totally stirred in. It’s depressing if you 
think about it, so for the most part I don’t. Three years of calling Newtown 
Creek home has hardened my sensitivity in this department somewhat.
 We have to pump off the barge tomorrow. Another barge is coming 
alongside us and taking the product.



Love,


Dan

Previously: Letters from the Gulf, Parts 1 And 2: “Four Miles off ‘Ground Zero’”

People keep sending in the link to that Camille Paglia Times op-ed. I personally could not make it beyond paragraph five, when I came across this sentence: “Only the diffuse New Age movement, inspired by nature-keyed Asian practices, has preserved the radical vision of the modern sexual revolution.” My brain went like this: ?…? And that is when I, as they say, closed the tab, but not without a sense of wonder-a sense that I had no idea which glassy wall I had silently shattered and now was forced to examine: into which level of the multiverse might I have stumbled? Good news though: The Machines have this one covered.

Elena Kagan is back this morning, testifying as an expert witness in the trial of America’s very recent history! One thing some senators are hoping for is a conviction, on the grounds that he is evil, of former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. He may have died in 1993 but we can still get him on something! Even though Kagan is defending his abhorrent record!

They’re trying really hard: “Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the ranking Republican on the panel, branded Marshall a ‘well-known activist.’ Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said Marshall’s legal view ‘does not comport with the proper role of a judge or judicial method.’ Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) pronounced Marshall ‘a judicial activist’ with a ‘judicial philosophy that concerns me.’”

I’m sure his son, who was sitting in the room right there yesterday (and who is, quite unfortunately, on the board of the Corrections Corporation of America, a massive private prison contractor that actively lobbies for stricter sentencing in criminal cases), really enjoyed all this. We can only hope today that Kagan renounces “results-oriented judging,” as Sen. Jon Kyl (Crazy-Arizona) keeps putting it.

Lest we forget: “Thurgood Marshall’s legal philosophy was so far outside the mainstream that before he was named to the Supreme Court, he had won only 29 of the 32 cases he argued before it as an attorney. In his 24 years on the court, he continued to pursue the radical doctrine that the courts needed to protect the rights of people who were otherwise unprotected.”

I hope we go after JOHN MARSHALL today, while we’re digging up corpses and putting them on trial. That power-mad Marshall elevated the Supreme Court above all the other branches of government. Then he went on to subject the states to the laws of the federal government! And then he undermined states rights further, by subjecting interstate trade to the whims of those nitwits in Congress! Why did he hate states rights? This sort of judicial activism is intolerable.

A woman went into the Arche store in the East Village and tried to muscle the fancy shoe shop out of some cash the other day, only there was a catch — the woman, according to the New York Post, donned a cat mask before passing a note that she wanted money and had a gun to the poor shop clerk who got called into work that day. “She got her paws on $86 in cash and scampered off,” the Post noted, which ha ha ha. Her “Wanted” poster is after the jump!

How this has not become 10,000 LOLcrime images, I do not know.

(Apparently she has also donned a burqa and robbed a Body Shop in Jackson Heights? Although I am not sure how the connection between the lady above and the burqa’d burglar has been solidified, to be honest. Is the Post’s “source” actually the woman herself, who’s hoping to drum up some publicity? Because honestly, in this age, if you’re using a cat mask as a disguise for your criminality, you probably want someone on the Internet to notice.)

[Via]

by Mike Barthel

Around the time the last Scissor Sisters album, Ta-Dah, came out, I was in Maryland for a funeral. Some funerals feel sad like like a drizzle increasing to a steady rain, and some funerals feel sad like a punch in the face; this was the latter kind. A friend’s younger sister had died from a drug overdose near the end of her freshman year at college, and here we all were, in Maryland, to mourn her. The funeral had been full of absurdly fresh-faced teenagers in inappropriate sundresses and ill-fitting lacrosse-team-dinner suits, people wearing their expressions too lightly for the occasion, like they didn’t really know that death is done and final, standing around talking about how they were going to divide up the dead girl’s things-these people being, of course, the same ones, her friends, who hadn’t thought to call an ambulance when the girl passed out, just let her sleep until she didn’t wake up.

As me and the two people I’d driven down with, all of us old college friends, were making our way from the funeral home to the house for the reception, speechless at the whole incomprehensible awfulness of it all, we put on Ta-Dah to cheer us up. It had, after all, been described, not inaccurately, as sounding a lot like Emmett Otter’s jug band, and what’s more cheerful than that? But something about the brutal mood in the car made us pay more attention to the lyrics for “Intermission,” a seemingly light orchestral track done up with flutes and strings.

That is when you see the sign
Luminous and high:
Tomorrow’s not what it used to be
We were born to die
Happy yesterday to all
We were born to die

And good lord, it just killed us. Setting bleak lyrics against cheerful music is a too–easy trick for pop music to pull when it’s trying to seem artistic, of course, and it usually comes off like the Serious Artist wanted to write happy music without being thought shallow. But the dark turn of “Intermission” was such a genuine surprise (the phrases “Jake Shears” and “assless chaps” being very nearly synonymous, after all) that it was the perfect song for the moment. Maybe one of the most lingering questions of the human condition is how an awareness of horror and a feeling of happiness can peacefully coexist, and even if the lyrics didn’t give us much help, as a piece of music, “Intermission” felt like it had something useful to say. We are born to die, but hey, flutes are pretty!

That’s the thing about Scissor Sisters albums now: they’re about something very specific (Ta-Dah was written in response to the awful times their good friends went through even as the band was becoming successful and traveling the world) but feel like they can be applied more broadly. Which is sort of a problem for me and their new one, called Night Work. Because it’s about… well, let’s just let Jake Shears describe it:

I was at a sex party in Mannheim, I was on the dancefloor. It was six o’clock in the morning. I was wearing a little rubber wrestling singlet. I was having a great time. There was a cloud in the room, this cloud of man sweat, cigarettes, spilled booze, shit because people were getting fisted, and poppers. And piss! It was disgusting… The most vile place I’ve ever been. And I was dancing, and the DJs put on ‘Walk The Night’ by the Skatt Brothers. It’s one of my favourites. It was one of those revelatory moments for me when I realised what I wanted the album to sound like and how I wanted it to make me feel.

As a pop listener, this is fantastic! Who wouldn’t want their music to sound like that, right? (Answer: lameazoids!) But as a person trying to connect with a work of art, it makes it maybe more problematic, maybe. I mean, it’s not like you can play in bands in New York for half a decade and not come in contact with a scene or two sorta like this (especially if you played Siberia at any point), but I am, nevertheless, a grad student engaged to someone I’ve dated faithfully for ten years.

So what’s my way in to an album about polyamorous nightclub-based sexual deviancy?

Shears wasn’t mischaracterizing his plans: the album is very much about the darkly sleazy experience of a good night out. It’s most explicitly expressed in the penultimate track, “Night Life,” which is kind of like the Velvet Underground’s “Rock and Roll” for club kids. While most songs about going out tend to be dismissive of the experience (think Blur’s “Popscene”), Shears paints clubbing as a space of liberation: “Beneath the surface, some say it’s worthless,” he sings, but “you can find your life in the nightlife.”

But what life, and what night life? I read “life” as “being creative and/or intellectual,” and “night life” as “hanging around with smart, cynical, and funny people who like to drink and eat and dance.” It’s the kind of thing you take for granted when you’re in New York, maybe, but once you spend a lot of time off the hipster highway, you start to realize how unusual it is to find a group of people like that. (Because they’ve all moved to New York, duh.) And you start to realize how hard it is to maintain the conviction that culture is important, and that intellectual/creative ambition is important. Lord knows that cool people have their problems, but having an environment where peculiarity and caring too much is accepted and even valued makes a huge difference to an endeavor like writing that can take years to develop properly. It’s easy to see these oddball qualities as problems when you’re the only one who feels that way, but having a good night life, a good place to feel at home in the dark, lets you, as Shears puts it, “crawl up all your hangups to the underground.”

But here’s the problem: the album’s not about that, at least on the surface. It’s about fucking! That’s pretty clear: fisting and poppers and piss, etc. “Harder You Get,” for instance, is essentially a power top anthem, and that’s not exactly uncharacteristic of the album’s general theme. So am I appropriating someone else’s culture by reading rubber wrestling singlets into my simple desire to make Holocaust jokes in mixed company? I tend to feel that the very fact that I’m concerned about it means that I’m being reasonably respectful, and certainly while Shears’ particular version of night life seems fun, I am happy to leave him to it. But of course I would!

Nevertheless, I think I can make a good case for why the manifest meaning of the album is treated in a way that deserves to cross over to more vanilla climes, and that case revolves around a comparison with another work celebrating sexual licentiousness: John Cameron Mitchell’s movie Shortbus. Though it was based on a real thing which was maybe different for those who were there at the time, for people like me just watching the movie, Shortbus seemed to be about a very 90s sex-positive sex club where people of all races and sexual orientations could come together to explore their desires in a safe and nurturing blah blah blah etc. One character experiences her first orgasm in the course of the film!

It was that kind of movie, and it was just awful. It made sex look boring, like therapy, clean and respectful and in the same sort of category as working in a co-op or rescuing shelter animals. The female orgasm was like an abandoned puppy: it just needed love and attention and it would finally feel safe enough to emerge into the sun-dappled light.

In contrast, Night Work has essentially the same message of “hooray fucking!” but without giving up the transgressive pleasures that animate sex and art-the pleasures that make pleasure special. Instead of portraying sex and art as socially redeeming activities that should be done publicly as a way of finding your true self, the Scissor Sisters endorse the idea of closed spaces as stages, as enclosed domains of play where you can perform a more pleasing role than you’re allowed to in everyday life. The self you display in the club is a different one than you display at brunch, and there’s no contradiction there. By placing this affirmation of freedom within the artificial context of dance music, it sends the message that there’s no reason for glamour to negate meaning. Glamour or night life here becomes like agar, a disgusting reagent that helps something new grow, or that helps existing things coalesce. But Shears makes clear that this magic can’t just happen in any club: “If there’s no spirit,” he advises us, “then don’t go near it.” Merely being disgusting is not enough. There must also be a certain energy.

My favorite song from Night Work is probably “Skin Tight,” musically a great example of the kind of ecstatic synth hymns the Scissor Sisters have written for Kylie Minogue in recent years.

But thematically, the song it reminds me of is Jonathan Richman’s “Closer,” which is about how he snuggles up to his wife in bed so enthusiastically that she runs out of room. Shears’ depiction is dirtier, of course-”nothing will slide in between you and me”-but with sentiments like “wrap me in your love,” it’s essentially the same idea. The rubber and latex of fetish gear are dirty, sure, but also intimate, a way of bringing two people physically and emotionally closer, and it’s a wonderfully tender ballad for an album that is mostly about wangs.

Night Work is a great album for the way it decouples passion from any sort of objective judgment about whether the object of that passion deserves it. Your fetish is your fetish, your camp is your camp, and so your choice is how to pursue it, not what it’s attached to. Because at the end of the day, when it comes to art and love and sex, it’s the passion that matters, not the justification; the energy itself is what gives the impulse power, especially in the face of irrational wrongs: fight fire with fire. The desire can be dirty or silly or inconsequential, as long as it’s strong.

Pop’s incessant paeans to passion wrap a superficial art in a cloak of Important Themes, but most pop songs are actually about fucking, which is why we love them, and most desire is dirty and selfish and depraved. It’s not clean and neat and classy, like the mastering on a hit single; it’s sleazy and tacky and nonsensical, like the lyrics of a hit single. But that lowness does not prevent passion-for culture, for art, for entertainment, for human contact, for orgasms-from being fundamentally good, and maybe even better when it comes from a dirty place. In a culture that thrives on self-righteousness and protestations of purity, such moral vulnerability is rare, and all the more valuable for its rarity.

And it’s the same energy that found us in the car in Maryland in 2006. When everything real around you is awful, there’s always the fake and the artificial, which is to say art. In the harsh light of day, we’re face to face with the banality of teenage evil, trying to reconcile our need to continue to trust human beings on a day-to-day basis with the apparent fact that, just as we suspected, college freshmen are such irredeemable creatures that they can be casually responsible for another person’s death. There’s nothing good you can say about that which is also true. So you have to make something up. It doesn’t have to be a lie, necessarily; “Intermission” isn’t a lie, it just sets the truth to music that softens the blow.

“Night Life” isn’t a lie either, even though it doesn’t talk about all the possible problems that can result from getting fisted by strangers in a nightclub while snorting poppers. Like all art, it just lets you see things from a particular perspective, effective because of its focus and convincing because of its passion. It inflects the world in such a way that it becomes tolerable, even enjoyable. And if you can make the world enjoyable just by singing a song about it-well, then it can’t be all bad.

Mike Barthel has written about pop music for a bunch of places, mostly Idolator and Flagpole, and is currently doing so for the Portland Mercury and Color magazine. He continues to have a Tumblr and be a grad student in Seattle.

Photo by craigyboi, from Flickr.

by Joe Berkowitz

There was a free corporate-sponsored event this weekend! Billed as a multimedia arts venture, the event took place in the meat packing district of some city. It was one of a handful of events that will be held internationally this summer, offering up exciting artistic experiences across several technological platforms. It was a music festival featuring a bunch of hot acts. It was also an art show with interactive exhibitions. There were film screenings, including one from a highly acclaimed director. Some companies provided food, and still other companies kept bars stocked with beverages, both alcoholic and otherwise. All for free. It was an embarrassment of riches!

The selection of musicians was really impressive and spanned many genres. There were new bands, just starting to break out on the strength of blog-buzz, and other bands who were popular last decade and have new albums on the way. There was also a surprise special guest-a controversial performer who’s been talked about lately because of a profile that a magazine did on her. The surprise guest also has a new album out soon.

All the bands did a really great job! Also the artwork was a fun and interesting diversion between sets, and while the films were reportedly totally worth checking out, lots of people missed them to secure good spots near the stage for the next musical performance.

The refreshments were also just terrific. All your basic barbecue favorites were on hand, and remained available for most of the afternoon (the event lasted from 2 p.m. to 2 a.m.) Twin gelato stands dispensed icy treats in many tasty flavors. The bars were handing out unlimited alcohol from various brands, and there was juice, tea and bottled water from some other brands. Drinks were available continuously all day and into the night. You could get totally hammered, and then keep on dancing, if you were so inclined!

Did I mention this was all for free?

The companies who made the experience possible were being very generous. It was the kind of experience an attendee would usually pay a lot of money for. Getting to go was like receiving a substantial reward, even though nobody had to do anything beyond RSVP and volunteer an email address in order to gain admission. Surely some response must be expected in exchange for such a gift?

For my part, I will certainly look favorably upon the corporations sponsoring the event, even if I can’t remember their names. When I am next in the market for a new computer, or for some entertainment-related goods and services, the association will live on. Hopefully that will be enough to fulfill my end of the bargain, and express my gratitude to somebody. Because I would like to, but I’m not exactly sure what I’m supposed to do.

Joe Berkowitz had a really, really good time!