Career Opportunities

Aaron Cohen was Perry Farrell’s “best friend and spiritual collaborator” during the heyday of Jane’s Addiction. Now he’s fighting human trafficking and child prostitution in Asia. A lengthy but engrossing read.

Meet the New Boss(es)

Emily Bazelon in Slate on the chagrin some people must be feeling over their support for the supposedly “even-handed” and “moderate” Chief Justice Roberts.

To be fair, it took a few decades for Eisenhower and Nixon appointees to undergo their mellowing and legal red-shifts to the center from the far right. But this court feels a lot different.  Just ask Justice Stevens himself.

“Angler”

WaPo’s expose of Cheney’s Vice-Presidency.

Meanwhile, Cheney’s office claims he’s actually part of the legislative branch (as Volokh Conspiracy reminds us, this is the NYT reporting, not The Onion).

The other day I was thinking about the 2004 elections and specifically a former co-worker, a really smart guy with three kids who tended to vote Republican, but wasn’t what you’d call a hardcore ideologue by any means. To him, it was still all about Clinton and the office-sex, even after the shock of 9/11. I found this odd, as I still do, but then again, he was doing his best to raise his kids to be decent and respectable young adults. Voting Bush over Kerry, despite some of his reservations (at a time when the occupation was still merely an invasion), made him feel more assured in his parenting, if that makes any sense. (In addition, he was respectful and not at all condescending when offering his condolences on that morning after, which I considered a pretty stand-up thing to do.)

Sublime

Pavement does Space Ghost (yt), introducing them as “The Beatles,” from 1997. Here’s the full clip (featuring Goldie Hawn and Canadia’s own bucolic funny-man Red Green!).

Malkmus finding himself unable to even face the camera at this point before the break-up isn’t that surprising. What’s truly amazing is that someone wasn’t so completely freaking high that they managed to get a tape into the VCR and push “Record.”

Thank you, high but not too high person.

Bonus Clip: The more dulcet and poignant “Space Ghost End Jam.”

What Me Worry?

Who knows if Sicko will actually make a difference in America’s dysfunctional health-care system, or if it will simply get lots of people angry over the fact that we live in a country where bureaucrats make their life or death medical decisions for them, not their actual doctors.

That said, it’s been interesting to follow Andrew Sullivan’s take on the film, of which he now grudgingly admits “Dammit. I’ll have to see the bloody thing.” It’s a bit of a shift from his previous tune.

Sicko

Via mefi, clips from Michael Moore’s new film Sicko.

Most of Michael Moore’s politics suit me just fine, but the man himself has always rubbed me the wrong way. Bowling for Columbine raised some important questions about guns and American culture, but was marred by Moore’s need to constantly shift the message (and the camera) back to himself.

I’ve seen about 3o minutes, and it’s powerful to say the least. Overdone at moments, but at least not egregiously self-aggrandizing like his previous work.

And it’s worth reminding people — much of this film is about the plight of Americans who do have health insurance.

Bosh

RIP Richard Rorty, American philosopher.

I had the opportunity to meet him in college, and took a course with him in graduate school on Western aesthetics (which was almost entirely composed of English majors like myself). I loved his class, but I’d be lying if said there was some sort of Dead Poets’ Society vibe to anything he did. One of his favorite jokes was to describe the sex act, in a gruff monotone, as “The somatic release of bodily tension” (we were doing a few weeks on Gothic versus Romantic traditions, so the subject came up a few times). I take a little pride and a little shame in the fact that I laughed out loud every time he dropped that one.

Here are some good Rorty links, and the the wiki entry isn’t a bad place to start either.

In the late-theoretical age of everything-as-performance, from gender to race, I took some comfort in the inherent wet-blanket attitude, the essential anti-jouissance, of Rorty. One of the major points of his thought is that, by definition, we are limited language-squawking machines that hopelessly make noises at one another, with no recourse to a transcendent or invisible set of “true” discursive laws (hence his famous split with Habermas). From here, from our position as a collection of jabber-spouting islands, we’re left to come up with all those things we do very much need to get on — ethics of some sort, a sense of purpose, a sense of collective identity.

“A Jesus Horse”

Ars Technica takes a field trip to a Creationist museum.

Crimes of Paris

She’s no Frances Farmer.

Nirvana’s take on the situation (yt).

“Pretend We’re Alala”

Oh dear god, I’m going to link to a myspace page — CSS’ to be exact. Check out “Pretend We’re Alala,” a mash-up of L7’s 1992 hit “Pretend We’re Dead” and Cansei de Ser Sexy’s “Alala.” S’fun. (Done by L7’s own Donita Sparks, who happens to blog music and politics over at Firedoglake.)

Update: Actually, a group called The Illuminoids did the mix, and they were kind enough to let me know.