I haven't seen Fahrenheit 9/11, nor do I have plans to do so, since the only thing it would really accomplish would be to make me hate the Bush administration more. But, although I'm personally not much for Moore's polemical style, I'm glad the movie's out there and having an enormous amount of box office success. Although it seems to be largely preaching to the converted, if it converts even a very small handful of swing voters or convinces wavering anti-Bush voters that they must vote for Kerry, it will have done a world of good.

Generally speaking, the Moore-styled brand of criticism is the type of thing that liberals have to do to counteract the rise of the self-styled badass conservatism of talk radio and Fox News that has helped shift American discourse irretrievably rightward. It's clear that as distasteful as this style of communication may be to most left-type folks, it works a hell of a lot better than the liberal strategy does. The current brand of mass media discourse is but one of the many reasons why the left has been on the run in this country for the past 25 years or so: allowing conservatism define the debate, affix labels and generally steamroll over a genial, hapless left that still believes in creating political change with devices like protest marches and public radio panel discussions.

Political debates aren't won by the careful, logical consideration of the facts before the audience, especially with this electorate. They're won by appealing to and manipulating others' emotions and creating some sort of personal stake for the voter. Most people make political choices based on emotional reasons and then use intellectual reasons to justify them. Moore, for all his sins, realizes this, and stacks his documentaries accordingly, creating something that's far more likely to resonate with people than a dry but thorough recitation of the facts. (This leads to the much-documented factual distortions of his prior works, although the fact that Fahrenheit 9/11 hasn't been slammed for this is a rather damning indictment of just how dubious the Bush administration's case in Iraq was in the first place.) Fahrenheit 9/11 probably won't win the election for John Kerry, and it should be regarded as the first blow in a liberal assault on the media rather than the final and decisive shot. But even if it won't shift the national debate, at least it's crammed a phonebook under one of the legs of the crooked coffee table, and that's an important first start.

In honor of Bloomsday, here's a link to a Ulysses parody of sorts featured on this blog many moons ago. In 2004, of course, the use of hax0r lingo is a hackneyed and trite comedic device, so please pretend that you haven't read a million other dopes do the same stupid joke. And as for the other installments in the Culture for Internet Subcultures series, please watch this space in the years and decades to come for the furry version of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and the slash fiction version of Sinclair Lewis' Main Street.

This is my obligatory weekly post to make sure that this blog doesn't go completely dormant. There should be new content here this week, assuming I decide to finish the pieces I've started instead of watching the new, totally kick-ass SCTV DVD set. In the meantime, muffins!



Delicious, oven-fresh muffins! Who doesn't enjoy them? Why not have one today?

Yeah, so. I haven't been updating ye old blog recently, partly because a. I may be involved in an exciting new blog project soon that will change the focus of this page somewhat and b. I have a tendency to gradually ignore any commitments I make to myself. That said, I promise to make a commitment to effort to try to write for this thing on a regular basis. In the meantime, here are a couple of random music thoughts that will fill some space on this page.

- I heard "Summertime, Summertime" by the Jamies on an oldies station over Memorial Day. Has anyone else noticed just how creepy and unsettling that song really is? Despite the surface catchiness, everything about it seems off in a weird way - the just-slightly-of-tune harmonies, the oddly joyless sounding singer (who sounds like she's desperately trying to convince herself just how fun summer is really going to be and failing), the sparse and distantly recorded backing instrumentation and an overall hollow and airless feel from a song that's supposed to be an anthem for the kids who catch junebugs and wrassle down by the old swimmin' hole. I can't believe that David Lynch never used it in one of his 80s era weirdness-in-suburbia flicks - it has that same aura of barely contained turmoil underneath a shiny, happy veneer.

- The hot rumor on the interweb music nerd circuit is that the original lineup of the Gang of Four will reunite soon. As much as I love the Go4's first two albums, and as impressive as all of the post-punk reunions from Wire to Mission of Burma have turned out thus far, I'm kind of nervous about this one. Of all the great post-punk bands, the Gang of Four's music always struck me as the most identifiable to a specific age - i.e., it's one thing to be quoting Marxist philosophy against sputtering noise-funk while in your twenties, but if you're still doing it in your forties and fifties, it's probably time to stop hanging out at the coffee shop and get out of grad school. Most of the great Gang of Four songs were spitballs fired by young men against a social order gone awry; by middle age, these observations don't seem so novel, and you've either chosen resigned acceptance or unrelenting bitterness. I can't see them working again outside of their original context. Besides, the Gang of Four's output post-Solid Gold was widely uneven and suggests that they're less likely to put together a great comeback effort like onOFFon or Read and Burn. That said, of course I'll shell out the money to see them live if they're actually reuniting, because (choose one) a. I'm probably completely wrong b. they're still responsible for some of the best albums ever c. I am extremely gullible.