T.G.I. HIGHDAY: OBAMA INTERVIEW EXCLUSIVE

Unless you've been living under A ROCK for the past few weeks, you've probably been seeing Barack Obama's face everywhere you look and turn. Though his name isn't a household name, "Space Martin Luther King" seems to be the most popular kid in school! These days. I recently visited him in his space house to find out who this asshole really is.

The Obama house


Nick: I was really "hoping" you wouldn't "change" your mind about this interview, Senator Obama.
Obama: (laughter)
N:(laughter)
O: (laughter)
N: (laughter)
O: (laughter)
N: this eye contact is intense
O: (laughing) I am so drunk


Barack, Michelle, Rudy, and Vanessa happy at home

conclusion after the jump

what I love most about Lil Wayne

1. That he's clearly going to be alive for a long time to come.
2. Relationship with Robin Thicke.
3. Artistic.
4. That he's dead.

Fairies

I love that Wolfgang Schivelbusch. Here’s part of an essay he wrote about electricity:

…at the beginning of the century, electricity and modernity were equated -- electric current was viewed as nothing less than the medium and energy source of modernity, and the industry it produced and nourished to life was still perceived as something that had little in common with the capitalist industrialism typical of the preceding period. In contrast, electricity was widely associated with the miraculous. Indeed, the fin de siècle imagined this new form of energy as the "electric fairy" that would free the industrial world from its gloomy accompaniments, creating an effortless, agreeable, and, above all, work- and exploitation-free society of pleasure. It promised redemption.

Why did people used to think that everything new was a type of fairy? Like how in the nineteenth century they called photographs “fairy pictures.” They probably also called cars “fairy wagons” and movies “fairy movies.”

Speaking of fairy movies, anybody want to go see a play?

S-N-A-P

“What is this marvelous fairy book before me?”


It’s just a newspaper. Calm down, olden times.

“What is this thrilling yet dangerous fairyland of foreign wonders?”
What are you a newborn infant? It’s just a newspaper. Take a pill. Jeez.



"Holy fucking shit! A newspaper!"

China: Playing it cool

I'm sure most of you read this in Business Week

"Because of government restrictions on the channel, most Chinese never see [CNN]. Yet it has become such a popular target that an amateur song has become a hit on the Internet entitled, "Don't Be Too CNN." As the song's refrain puts it:

"Don't believe that lies will become mottos if they are repeated a thousand times,/
What's the purpose of racking your brains to turn fraud into truth/
Don't be too CNN/
I would rather believe you were silly and innocent."

Did you know that song is actually about Dave Coullier?

Have I Got a Screenplay for You

How Bill Clinton Got His Groove Back

This was the headline when I opened the NYT website today. Can you imagine what a good sequel that would make?

In case you can’t, I wrote out the plot summary for you:

"Bill Clinton (Bill Clinton) is a very successful forty-something African-American stock broker living in San Francisco, who is persuaded by his colorful New York girlfriend Delilah (Whoopi Goldberg) to take a well deserved, first-class vacation to Kingston, Jamaica. As he soaks in the beauty of the island, he encounters a strapping young islander, Winston Shakespeare (Taye Diggs). His pursuit of Winston turns into a hot and steamy romance that forces Bill Clinton to take personal inventory of his life and try to find a balance between his desire for love and companionship, and the responsibilities of mother and corporate executive.”

I blockquoted these for you

Here is a new MC feature called Letting Things Speak for Themselves (it is the blogging equivalent of pointing at something, or photography, or blogging). This one, a poem from the latest New Yorker, was inspired by National Poetry Month, and by this funny post on Videogum, and by Nick’s very own poetry submission to the New Yorker.

Here Name Your
by Dora Malech

My friend spends all summer
mending fence for the elk to blunder

back down and the cows to drag
the wires and the snow to sit and sag

on, so all the twist and hammer and tauten
and prop amounts at last to nought, knot, tangle.

The next year he picks
up his pliers and fixes

the odds all over again. There are no
grownups, and I think that all of us children know

and play some variation on this theme, the game of all join
hands so that someone can run them open.

Then war whoops, shrieks, and laughter
and regather together

as if any arms might ever really hold.
I’m trying to finger the source—pleasure of or need

for—these enactments of resistance, if Resistance
is indeed their name. I’m trying to walk the parallels to terminus—

call them lickety-split over rickety bridge,
tightrope, railroad tie, or plank as you see fit—

trying to admit to seeing double,
innumerable,

to finding myself beset by myself
on all sides, my heart forced by itself,

for itself, to learn not only mine
but all the lines—

crow’s flight, crow’s-feet, enemy, party, picket,
throwaway, high tide, and horizon—to wait

in the shadows of scrim each night
and whisper the scene. Always, some part

of the heart must root for the pliers, some
part for the snow’s steep slope.

LOVE. IT. I’m so glad that took up space in a magazine that I pay money to receive. My favorite part was either the enjambment in the fourth stanza or the part about fingering.

Anyway, two cheers for contemporary poetry. And two cheers for blogging!

That brings me to a debate Nick and I have had many times: Which number is the funniest?

a) 2
b) -1
c) 5 or so
d) 100
e) millions

I uploaded these for you

So good.


FRIGGIN MERLOT!