A New Year, a New Bar

I just discovered the bar/restaurant Fetch not far north of me in Yorkville (the less well-known name for what lies north of the Upper East Side), and I liked it.  I ate some very tasty dish involving a bowl full of hamburger, rice, string fries, and fried egg (much needed after awaking too late for lunch yesterday, sleeping until slightly after noon due to New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day karaoke that ended up lasting until 4am, during which I had the chance to do both “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” and “Pretty in Pink” in front of a friend who looks enough like Molly Ringwald that Ringwald was once mistaken for her — perhaps a fitting high note on which to exit and find a new performance-based pastime).

The nice-seeming bartender at Fetch was able to converse with Mexican barbacks in Spanish and with elderly customers in English about Voltaire and Mark Twain.  The walls were festooned with cute dog photos and the promise to hang any framed photos brought in of customers’ dogs.  And they have a mission statement devoted not only to good food and a friendship-fostering environment but to perpetual promotion of customer happiness and to finding homes for stray animals.

Not that I need a mission statement to embrace a bar — I would be unnerved to learn Lolita (where I host monthly debates) or Merchants (where I host a monthly social gathering of political junkies) had mission statements, unless I wrote them — but in combination, all the above things made me feel the place was at least making a good effort.  See you in one or more of these establishments — or Dresner’s across from me on York Avenue — in the new year.

The Todd 10 Movies of 2009

I seem to recall Roger Ebert musing once that members of the Academy probably cast their votes without having seen half the films under consideration but won’t admit it — suggesting to him that the job should be left to film critics, who actually have seen nearly everything.

I can’t really write an authoritative “best ten films of 2009” list because I haven’t seen most of the films of 2009, but I saw roughly one new movie every other week, I now realize, which is just enough to sort them into: (a) ten I’m glad I saw, (b) ten I perhaps shouldn’t have seen, and (c) five about which I’m not sure.

Without further ado, The Ten Movies I’m Glad I Saw in 2009 (in order of release):

•Taken
•Watchmen (four times, for various reasons, despite its imperfections)
•Star Trek (though this leaves one with little to chew on days later besides “That worked”)
•Brothers Bloom
•Up (which helped nudge me to rewatch The Incredibles, which in retrospect I’d like to declare the best superhero movie of all time while I’m at it)
•Hurt Locker
•District 9
•Inglourious Basterds (even though it confirms Tarantino is a twisted man content to create long, sadistic tableaux)
•Pirate Radio (perhaps the most libertarian movie of the year and the most rockin’)
•Fantastic Mr. Fox (the last, and perhaps the best, with Dahl + Anderson + Baumbach equaling something much wittier than your average talking-animal comedy)

The Ten Movies I Perhaps Shouldn’t Have Seen in 2009:

•The Unborn (note: Area Man Uncertain Whether He Saw The Unborn or The Uninvited But Not Terribly Concerned About It)
•Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (bad enough to keep me away from any future installments from the franchise unless I hear people “lycaning” them to Citizen Kane and Casablanca)
•Wolverine
•Transformers 2 (one part of your brain thinks “Are people stupid that they flock to this?” and the other part remembers that you’re watching it, too, and that it does, after all, contain fifty-odd 200-foot-tall robots beating on each other, two hot chicks, fast cars, motorcycles, rock music, and lots of real military hardware in action, in IMAX, so where’s the mystery, really? You still feel dirty, though)
•2012 (same story, really, except with the entire city of Los Angeles unraveling in minutes immediately behind John Cusack’s car in what might be the most spectacular scene in film history but is also laughably stupid)
•Antichrist (artful but wang-mangling — the tradeoffs cannot be denied)
•Ninja Assassin (buncha kicking and fighting, only partially redeemed by a cool raid on ninja HQ at the end)
•Fourth Kind (a fraud)
•Capitalism: A Love Story (another fraud)
•Land of the Lost (as with several of the films in this blog entry, I wish to stress that I got a free pass to this one)

And the Five Movies About Which I’m Not Sure:

•Terminator Salvation (serviceable but arguably unnecessary)
•Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (the Potter movies get the job done but are assembly-line-like enough that a few months later you find yourself thinking things like “I think I liked that — but do I even remember who the half-blood prince was?”)
•Boondock Saints 2: All Saints Day (a ridiculous and cartoonish action film mostly-redeemed by its awareness that it’s ridiculous and cartoonish and its awareness that no one is in the theatre except cultish fans of the first film)
•Avatar (undeniably amazing but probably not worth ever seeing in a non-IMAX, non-3D format, where it would merely be Ferngully vs. Starship Troopers, or as South Park put it, Dances with Smurfs)
•Sherlock Holmes (for the simple reason that I haven’t seen it — and wasn’t planning to, since it appears to reduce Holmes to a mere action hero — but now I’ve heard a seemingly-intelligent person at a New Year’s Eve party praise it, so maybe…and a film buff I tend to trust reminds me that Holmes was supposed to have good boxing skills…)

To avoid crapola, I will aim to see only ten new movies per year henceforth, I think — and will let you know annually which ones make it onto that list. My Book Selections entry last week ended with a list of nine that may be nerd-mandatory in 2010, but that leaves room for at least one surprise. We’ll see.

Hippodamus the Hippie

You know, I mentioned hippie-mocking in yesterday’s entry, and in reading one of next month’s Book Selections, Aristotle’s Politics, I think I may have stumbled across a reference to the first hippie radical (at the start of Book II, Chapter 8):

“Hippodamus of Miletus: A planner of towns, who also sought to plan cities on new lines…[I, Aristotle, will present criticism] of his legal novelties, and especially of his proposal to reward the inventors of reforms.  Tradition has its claims; and the value of a law-abiding habit may be greater than that of legal reforms.  Hippodamus the son of Euryphon, a citizen of Miletus, was the first man without practical experience of politics who attempted to handle the theme of the best form of constitution…In his general life, too, he was led into some eccentricity by a desire to attract attention…He wore his hair long and expensively adorned; he had flowing robes, made from a cheap but warm material, which he wore in summer time as well as in winter; and he aspired to be learned about nature generally.”

More in January 2010…

Complete Works of Todd Seavey, Abridged

Surveying the accomplishments and failures of 2009 as New Year’s approaches, I’m reminded that a few months ago when I listed books that cite me according to Amazon, one book that didn’t come up but on which I had an influence was the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged. That’s the widely-performed comedy play that squeezes all of Shakespeare’s plays into one hour-long performance.

I was working at Applause Books when the first printed edition (or “folio,” if you will) of the play came out, so I got the chance to write some comedy footnotes for it — and at least two made it not only to the printed page but into later performances, at least ones like the performance I saw at Princeton a few years ago, in which one of the actors would pause to recite the relevant footnote to the audience.

Mine included footnotes explaining the archaic phrases “tyrannous” (adj., dinosaur-like) and “the general doom” (General Doomâ„¢ is a licensed character of Action-Time Comics). I resolve to get some more substantive writing done in 2010 — and after a pause for party recuperation, I’ll keep blogging roughly once per day.

P.S. In other theatre news, why not see my friend Jonathan Leaf’s latest play, Sexual Healing, running Jan. 6-30? I’m pretty sure it mocks hippies (as did his recent book), and mocking hippies is really all I ask for.

Beaver, Man, Monkey, Politician

Jodie Foster’s next directorial outing will be reportedly be The Beaver, featuring Mel Gibson as a troubled CEO who begins talking to his family only through a Beaver puppet, which the family finds increasingly disturbing — as you also may, after seeing the publicity photo above from it, noted on film site DarkHorizons.com. I hope the puppet’s not saying, “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world!”

(Speaking of actors who’ve played Hamlet on-screen: tomorrow a comment about Shakespeare to end the year on a cultural high note.)

This “Herman” cartoon also confuses and disturbs me (assuming that link still takes you to the Dec. 24 strip about being “dehydrated”).

On a more retro puppet note, a decade ago the two Muppets who really stood out on Muppets Tonight, I’ve always said, were thuggish Italian crooner Johnny Fiama and his sycophantic monkey sidekick Sal, and my favorite bit with them was the sad montage that went through Sal’s head (starting six minutes into this clip) when it looked as though their friendship was doomed. Sal recalls tense but treasured moments such as Johnny telling him to get off the dashboard and lambasting him for voting for Dukakis.

If Johnny and Sal are still friends in two and a half years, maybe Johnny will be lambasting Sal for voting for Huckabee in the GOP primary. After all, Dukakis’s release of the dangerous prisoner Willie Horton (brought to the public’s attention by Dukakis’s rival, Al Gore) helped sink him. And with any luck, the public won’t forgive soft-on-crime Huckabee for releasing a prisoner who recently went on to kill four cops.

More important, though, is the fact that 2010 is a good time for conservatives, libertarians, “liberaltarians,” Tea Party animals, and moderates alike to set aside differences and unite around the less-spending message in order to nudge Congress in a slightly more Republican direction. That’s not the most audacious political goal I’ve ever expressed, but it’s the fight of the moment and should not be neglected. We already more or less lost the stimulus battle and the healthcare battle. We had better at least channel the backlash competently.

Huckabee is an unabashed welfare statist who berates the free-marketeers and libertarians in his own party and is thus not the man to lead now (nor is Romney, who can hardly capitalize on outrage at socialized medicine when he’s the man who socialized it in Massachusetts). Perfection is not an option, but we’d be better off with a Pawlenty-like spending-capper or Gingrich-like regulatory streamliner — even a Palin/Perry-like decentralizer, though I fear Palin is a punchline in the minds of half the populace and thus unlikely to win. A Huckabee, though, would squander what momentum the anti-government cause has gained over the course of 2009, reversing a very healthy trend.

30 Best Punk Songs, plus the Most Ukrainian Punk Songs

Eugene Hutz of the Ukrainian Gypsy/punk ensemble Gogol Bordello, who I saw perform last night at a densely-packed Webster Hall, is a sufficiently skinny, hyper, unashamedly tacky/goofy frontman — backed by cute sports-outfit-wearing singers in knee pads — that I’m tempted to declare him the Fee Waybill of Ukraine (not to be confused with Johnny Hallyday, the Elvis of France, recently released from the hospital and reportedly planning to sue the doctor who inadvertently put him there, if Hallyday’s irate fans don’t kill the doctor first).

Meanwhile, a list of the “30 Best Punk Songs Since 1979 Available on YouTube” has been created by a former Debates at Lolita Bar participant, Newsweek’s Seth Colter Walls (we put him up against National Review’s John Derbyshire, and he used to date yet another Lolita debater, Jen Dziura).

You’ll notice he includes a song by the band Heatmiser, as good an excuse as any for me to link to the original claymation Christmas show “Heat Miser” bit (alas, the Heat Miser and Snow Miser songs are really the only good bits from The Year Without a Santa Claus, much as one hates to pick on a claymation Christmas special).  More recently, Heat Miser appeared briefly in this amusing video montage put together by the Op-Toons blog to mock Al Gore’s eco-doomsday poetry.

On another holiday musical note, I was amused to see over Christmas in Norwich that Liberty Honda of Hartford is running TV ads using a faux-hairband jingle called “The Final Markdown,” in the style of the band Europe’s “The Final Countdown” (always filed in my brain near “Life Is Life” by the Austrian band Opus, who perhaps should be covered at some point by Gogol Bordello).

Getting back to punk for a moment, though: my own most punk contribution to the culture this month will either turn out to be that chapter-length version of “Conservatism for Punks” I’m finishing up or my drunk, somewhat maudlin — yet killer — rendition of “God Save the Queen” last week at Iggy’s karaoke bar, dedicated to a certain vexing punk-sympathizing woman I know who doesn’t even like karaoke.  It seemed to be a crowd-pleaser precisely because it lends itself to a more dangerous performance than the New Wave I’ve often done — but then, that is the nature of the punk/New Wave dichotomy.

A Connecticut Christmas Menagerie

It seems like every time I visit my parents in Norwich, CT, my once-harmless hometown has some new menacing species harassing everyone’s pet cats or even dogs.

We worried about nothing of that sort when I was a kid, then came Lyme-carrying deer ticks, coyotes, a bear or two, and the recent plague of wild turkeys, plus a couple skunks, the animal my mother fears most. Recently, my parents casually mentioned keeping the cats indoors now to keep them away from the fisher cat across the road, a species of three-foot-long predator related to the marten that I’m not even sure I ever heard of before (Nybakken blames anti-hunting laws and environmentalists, usually a wise move). Here’s a fisher cat, just so you’ll be unfazed if you see this out the living room window.

And there really has been a program to reintroduce them, leading to recent pest complaints in New England, says Wiki. — though this is not quite as annoying as flying grizzly bears into my friend Holly’s mom’s neighborhood in Montana via government helicopter, which she was understandably perturbed about several years ago.

Indoors at the Seavey home, things remain fairly tranquil, though my parents’ dog Jaycie seems to be neurologically degenerating in some way that causes her to wander around until she reaches a corner and then stand staring into it.

The game-theoretical situation with the three cats is at its usual stand-off: Elder cat Meow avoids dark and lanky Pepper, but she enjoys giving objects to Pepper’s brother Salty and then watching him go berserk with them. Indeed, Salty particularly enjoys putting things in shoes, whereas Pepper enjoys dropping them into water. It is therefore crucial on any visit home to be careful when putting one’s shoes on or when raising the toilet lid.

Book Selections of the Month: Cabell, Mirrlees, and Williams

ToddSeavey.com Book Selections of the Month (December 2009):

Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice by James Cabell

Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees

Descent into Hell by Charles Williams

If proudly amoral people, lesbians in academia, and Christians with a theatrical bent are your idea of a good time — and aren’t they everyone’s? — you’ve come to the right Christmas Eve blog entry, since the three books listed above (in order of their publication) appear to have been produced by just such authors.

This entry also marks the glorious fulfillment of my year-long plan to make 2009 one last fun-filled wallow in fantasy books, sci-fi books, comics, and TV before leaving consumption of all of those things behind (and even this seemingly frivolous plan naturally expanded into some digressions such as utopian texts throughout October and other arguably highbrow fare because that’s how I roll). Saving some of the best for last, though, I here recommend three strange early-twentieth-century fantasy novels clearly aimed at mature readers — these are no mere war between elf tribes. At least the first two turn out to have been praised by Neil Gaiman, but I swear that’s not how I discovered them.

•Jurgen (1919) was written by an American, James Cabell (rhymes with “rabble”), who had been suspected of murder at one time eighteen years before this book — not hard to believe given the strange fact that his main character here, Jurgen, commits a murder and soon resolves, in a fatalistic fashion, that what’s done is done and that he won’t even bother reflecting back on the crime during later episodes of soul-searching and (slight) moral growth, brought on by slipping ghost-like between different fantastical and mythological worlds in search of his wife and numerous extramarital affairs (in a picaresque fashion bordering on sloppy and superficial at times). Very weird. Somewhat Satanic, by design.

But then, a lot of Satanism is really just playful philosophical mischief, you’ll find — even when allied to other, truly execrable causes. Take for example the dedication to the book Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky, an influence on Obama associate Bill Ayers, which apparently reads in part: “Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins — or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”

One amusing aspect of Cabell’s amoral, faux-medieval novel: Jurgen eventually visits Hell and learns that it is actually filled with self-absorbed moralists who have intense and guilt-wracked consciences, who spend eternity demanding punishment for sins that no one else — including God or Satan — actually cares about.

People without consciences (arguably including the philandering and lying Jurgen himself) go directly to Heaven, whereas the occupants of Hell, the ultimate “controlling bottoms,” narcissistically demand elaborate punishments from the wearied demons of Hell. The demons are the only ones who are truly suffering in all this, since they have to keep poking penitents with pitchforks and relighting bonfires and so forth, causing the demons to start complaining about the fact that Hell hasn’t had a democratic change of administration in a very long time and could perhaps do with some alterations.

•Lud-in-the-Mist (1926) was written by Hope Mirrlees, a British woman who fell in love with one of her female professors and lived with her until the latter’s death. This hyper-quaint, rural tale — almost like a ghost story set in a combination of New England and Hobbiton — revolves around the question of just how much weirdness a community can repress before having to embrace the strange. The closest analogy from our world is not forbidden sexuality, though. Rather, Mirrlees’ tale suggests she had at least some passing familiarity with drug culture. In the town of Lud-in-the-Mist, the drug in question is not heroin or cocaine, though — it’s fairy fruit, a reminder that the entire town once had frequent interaction with beings about whom it is now taboo to speak at all.

As a corrupt teacher, a semi-human doctor, and other local menaces begin luring children into ancient, repressed rituals, a pair of aging fathers attempt to unravel the mystery, leading to a hallucinatory trip to fairy land itself and encounters with the walking dead. In the end, though, the only solution to the artificial dichotomy between the rational, commercial world of Lud-in-the-Mist and the irrational but spiritually-invigorating world of the fairies may be to let in the forbidden armies of the supernatural.

•Descent into Hell (1937), arguably the best — and most conventionally moralistic — of the three books, was written by Charles Williams, part of the circle of British, Christian fantasy writers called the Inklings, which also included J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. The plot revolves around a group of mostly-young twentieth-century British intellectuals and theatre people unwittingly living in a neighborhood where the veil between our world and the afterlife has grown very thin, affording each of several characters the opportunity to perceive the divine or, through easy but vicious psychological decisions, sink into Hell, both metaphorically (by succumbing to hate and aggression in this world) and literally (by consorting with demons). Central to the plot — and aesthetically vindicating the book as a whole — is a harrowing portrait of an older man obsessed with a theatrical young woman — and, ultimately, with a demonic version of her.

We haven’t quite heard the last from British fantasists on this blog, by the way, since G.K. Chesterton will make an amazing second appearance in my Book Selections in January (though not for a fantasy novel), as will Aristotle and an In Character issue about Wisdom — plus, perhaps less obviously, books from economist David Friedman and eroticist Rachel Kramer Bussel (and speaking of sex-obsessed writers, I see anthropologist Helen Fisher is speaking at the New York Academy of Sciences on Jan. 5, so maybe I should check her out).

MOVIE NOTE:

Also coming next year, lest I appear to be giving up on fantasy in all forms: a decent batch of likely-good nerd movies (to note on your new 2010 calendar):

•Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (3/19)
•a remake of Clash of the Titans from the director of the second Hulk movie (3/26)
•Iron Man 2 (5/7)
•Jonah Hex, based on the disfigured DC Comics cowboy character who wears a Confederate uniform — with Megan Fox portraying a scantily-clad whore (6/18)
•Inception, the Matrix-like thriller from Chris Nolan (7/16)
•The Expendables, featuring Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and virtually every other action star ever, fighting a Latin American dictator (8/20)
•Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I (11/19)
•Tron Legacy (12/17)
•Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (roughly one year from today)

The two-part final Potter film (don’t tell me what happens!) will reportedly feature a brief glimpse of main-character ass, by the way. Alas, it will be a Harry ass, not a Her.-ass. (Aslan will also be nude in any and all remaining Narnia films, if you swing that way.)

But I’m de-emphasizing the fantasy next year in favor of some real-world history (which is, of course, often even weirder), while admitting I’m sort of doing it for fantasy-enhancing purposes, having another comic book idea percolating in my brain.

Tomorrow, though, I’m off to my own little slice of ancestral forestland, Norwich, CT — and thus will be offline until Sunday morning. Enjoy the holiday and be good — your small corner of the universe depends on it, after all.

A Conservative Punk Moves to Wyoming

Libertarian Republican Eric Dondero posts an essay by Michael W. Dean, singer of the punk band Right Arm of Wyoming, who got sick of criminals, liberals, and anti-gun forces in California and then bought guns and pulled up stakes — a heartwarming tale for the holidays (and in the same week, as it happens, that I spoke to a woman who once had the Dead Kennedys crash at her house).

I don’t claim punk conservatism is common — or even that it’s a trend — only that it’s correct.

P.S. Sam Goldman, who I mentioned Monday, occasionally repeats the punkish anarchist slogan “No gods, no masters,” though usually not in his posts on the First Things blog — and I have only recently learned it was the slogan of Margaret Sanger’s birth control and eugenics newsletter circa World War I. Interesting cross-fertilization, so to speak.

ADDENDUM: I have a ticket to give away to a Gogol Bordello concert (they being a Ukrainian, Gypsy-inflected punk band), if anyone wants to claim it and join me, this Sunday 7pm at Webster Hall. Just e-mail my Earthlink address, discernible from my right margin — and be warned I’ll be offline from Christmas morning until the evening of the next day (Saturday), but at that time I’ll then promptly respond to the lucky first claimant (assuming it’s a non-hostile person I know) and will note here that the ticket’s been claimed — if it doesn’t get claimed before then [UPDATE: Ticket claimed!].

Shatner, Randi, Raimi, Pop

I strongly urge you to read the manic interview with William Shatner in the January GQ (on sale now) by Andrew Corsello — and not just because he asked a question about “Rocket Man” at my urging. No, Andrew covers the waterfront and captures the self-referentially larger-than-life quality of Shatner — or “SHATNER!” as he renders it throughout the article — better than any other profile of the man I’ve seen. This paragraph is an example, inspired by Shatner’s recollection of moving his hand at an auction and accidentally buying a horse (and I am reminded that Andrew and I had a class years ago with readings from Nietzsche):

“I believe that when things happen, they happen with a PURPOSE,” Shatner declares. “You can’t change them. I have been accused of never saying no. I am INDISCREET, it is said, is it not? With my roles. With my endorsements. With my books. With all that I am involved in. But I am not a big believer in No. What if I had tried to renege on that horse? I’d only have embarrassed myself. A flaky actor pretending at being a cowboy. No, I ACCEPTED it. I moved with it. I believe in MOTION. I believe in CHAOS. I believe in taking what happens as inevitable. Lightning STRIKES. It RAINS. You get ILL. You get NOMINATED. The photon SHATTERS the molecule, the electrons SHOOT OFF in all directions, and I BEHOLD the mineral around me!”

•••

Speaking of things resembling science, Chuck Blake notes that another nerd hero, debunker-of-false-claims James Randi, has (to my delight, really) run afoul of the global warming alarmists. This has to be a strange time for them, with their sinister regulatory triumph at hand in Copenhagen and their credibility rapidly crumbling in East Anglia at the very same time. Predictably, instead of becoming more cautious, they’ve become more dogmatic — slapping down anyone, such as Randi, who expresses doubt about the doomsday narratives, declaring him — James Randi! — anti-science.

They know they’re in a weakening position intellectually and can’t afford to let the momentum get away from them. And it’s not just that one or two East Anglia e-mails suggest the scrubbing or skewing of data, it’s that the e-mails confirm the widely-held suspicion that the tiny, well-funded club of climate researchers is not engaged in dispassionate research but rather in circling the wagons and preventing anyone straying from the approved storyline. If, as they so often claim, they thought the science alone would bear out their story, they wouldn’t be as desperate as they visibly are to get one more of their guys onto each science journal editorial staff that has an opening. It’s like watching a lit department faculty hiring committee torn between humanists and deconstructionists (neither able to win converts by pointing to evidence alone), vying for control.

Pathetic. This is not how lasting scientific wisdom is created, and it shouldn’t be how regulation is created. But then, given problems like this, the human race probably shouldn’t create regulation.

•••

What should the human race create? Better Spider-Man movies for one thing, as alluded to in a previous entry. Toward that end, it appears that no less a figure than director Sam Raimi himself has been arguing with the studio that the Vulture is the best villain for the next movie. Of course, it’s worth reminding myself that I didn’t like Spider-Man 2 (critically-acclaimed Michael Chabon’s writing efforts notwithstanding) or 3, so I suppose I shouldn’t care too much.

In more auspicious news, though, it sounds like the young-Magneto and young-X-Men movie ideas have merged into an X-Men: First Class prequel (emphasizing the initial Magneto/Xavier split), directed by Bryan Singer, who did X-Men and the stellar X-Men 2. That all sounds like the best of three worlds coming together, which is nice.

•••

On a broader note, it has crossed my mind over the past couple days that pop culture, despite its growing plenitude, hasn’t really changed that much in its overall tone in the past twenty years — not when you compare, say, the 40s to the 60s, or the 60s to the 80s. People in their teens or twenties at any time over the period 1989-2009 got a similar combo plate in some ways. Like strange attractors in chaos theory, certain recurring tropes such as the Internet, gaming, reality TV, genre-mixing alternative/indie music, retro crazes, and personal electronics seem to be scattered almost evenly across the epoch.

And five things (some huge, some admittedly very dinky) that in my mind sort of demarcated the current pop culture epoch, each happening in or about 1989, were:

•(politics) collapse of European Communism

•(everyday living) the Internet

•(TV) the Simpsons

•(music) the Deee-Lite video for “Groove Is in the Heart” (and all the retro-things and gender-bending clubbiness it portended)

•(film) Do the Right Thing (in retrospect, it “looks like the 90s to come” as surely as, say, Miami Vice looked like the 80s)

And when I recently listed a few absurdist humor items that preceded the Simpsons era of omnipresent absurdism, I should have given props, so to speak, to Airplane (and Police Squad from the same crew) as well as to early Steve Martin. He got tame quickly and did all those family comedies, so it’s easy to forget how ludicrous The Jerk was, not to mention his fantastic first two ABC specials, which dared to ask questions like (paraphrasing): Has this ever happened at your home? You throw a party, and a friend leaves drunk…then gets into his steamroller and begins to drive?

Commies, Punks, Academics

Partying my way across the political spectrum over the past few days (because life is so full of reasons to celebrate, don’t you know) brought me into contact with libertarians, then liberals, and tonight communists. I was on the massive invite list for the Communist Party USA’s annual holiday (??) party tonight at their Unity Hall headquarters on West 23rd St., so I may as well at least check it out.

The renting out of parts of that building is apparently their main source of income these days (landlords!), as the New York Post noted a couple years ago. The article mentioned one CPUSA official named Libero Della Piana, a Brown alum from my time who once played a game of Monopoly with an ex-girlfriend of mine, a prophetic ritual in retrospect.

Somewhat closer to me on the political spectrum, my self-described socialist friend Richard Ryan e-mailed a link to this New Republic rave for economist Amartya Sen’s new book, which ostensibly contains profound insights about why fundamental elements of economics ought to be questioned, such as the assumption that we should gauge the goodness of consequences by whether individuals’ preferences are being fulfilled. Weirdly, though, Sen does think that we should gauge people’s wellbeing by their capacity to enhance others’ preferences. Why the hypothetical second group of people’s preferences matter so much if the preferences of the first don’t is unclear — at least in the review, and I fear it wouldn’t be much better in the (much longer) book.

Sen is apparently building on Rawls’ intuition — hardly novel at this point and hardly something that takes hundreds of pages to explain — that helping the worst-off is the morally crucial thing, and should be seen as such even by developmental economists, requiring us to take the worst-off (even in distant places) into our democratic deliberations about how the rules of the world ought to be structured without clinging fast in advance to any particular set of intuited rules (such as purely libertarian or purely egalitarian ones). Sam Goldman responded to Richard Ryan by noting that several thinkers just at Harvard alone had already expanded on Rawls’ ideas in this way, such as Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer, and Judith Shklar.

(Sam, who jokes that he is the token atheist blogger at First Things, is the young scholar who, when I first encountered him a decade ago, was a straightedge punk, so he may well crop up in the chapter-length “Conservatism for Punks” essay I’m writing over the two-week vacation I’m starting today, assuming the Communists don’t alter my whole philosophy tonight.)

I find myself a lot less interested as I age in whether yet another philosopher or economist has intuited that we ought to do something about the desperately poor — we know, we know! — and more interested in what specific policies would work to get the job done (and of course, I’m guessing: markets, though one word may not quite do the topic Justice) and, perhaps more intriguingly, which specific policies do the most unwitting damage (foreign aid? licensure? protectionism?).

Here’s a practical consequence, if Sen wants to be a consequentialist: India, long suffering under de facto democratic socialism, partially deregulates…and poverty rates there decrease more rapidly than ever before in history (while philosophers come up with ever more rationalizations for why fully free markets aren’t the source of good outcomes).

I’ll grant Sen this, though: his ex-girlfriend (my former Brown prof Martha Nussbaum) is still kind of hot, though equally wrong about some things, despite the influence of her reportedly libertarian daughter.

Speaking of academics and communists, by the way, I was seated behind members of NYU’s Young Communist League in the studio audience of Stossel last week, and it was another reminder that I don’t think the liberal/academic mainstream can be trusted to ward off socialism (much as some market fans might wish there were a viable, more respectable alternative to pushing libertarianism). The YCL kids were the only ones in the audience shouting out comments about Kenneth Arrow and other esteemed liberal-mainstream thinkers as support for their pro-Obamacare position (and the Communist party invitation also noted the passage of Obamacare as reason to celebrate, by the way). By academic standards, they might have been A+ polisci students for all I know — and the very last people in the audience by whom I’d want to be governed.

I didn’t ask if they’d be at the party tonight, but I’m sure there’ll be plenty of people who are smart but wrong, and the “wrong” is the important part, from a consequentialist perspective. Those near-starving millions matter more than a handful of academics, no matter how impressive their credentials.

I Have Touched William Shatner's Life

Well, the fourth audio clip down here — the one about “Rocket Man” — is GQ’s Andrew Corsello asking the legendary William Shatner himself a question I suggested: how that song, as inimitably performed by Shatner, compares to Leonard Nimoy’s shocking “Ballad of Bilbo Baggins” song (with the video’s self-parodically 60s-ish plug for the United Nations).

Like the main characters in Free Enterprise, I am pleased just to know that in some small way the level plane of my starship’s course, as it were, has intersected with his.

The Simpsons at 20

Lacking TV reception, I have no idea when the official anniversary show airs — and, of course, they started out as shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show — but today marks the actual twentieth anniversary of the first real, half-hour (Christmas-themed) episode of The Simpsons, explaining how they got Santa’s Little Helper from the racetrack.

Little did we know then that we’d come to value the Halloween episodes far more than the Christmas ones, but it was all revolutionary and hilarious — even though I almost stopped watching around episode 3 because I hated the “Dancing Homer” baseball episode so much (I still recall my friend Paul Taylor saying the same thing at the time, but we both stuck with it for at least several more seasons, thank goodness).

By contrast, I think my favorites have been “Homer in Space,” the Conan O’Brien-penned “Monorail” episode, and perhaps “Kamp Krusty.” Speaking of Krusty, I think the show marked an important break between the decades of American comedy dominated by a Vaudeville feel and — though Vaudeville’s influence will long resonate — an era more dominated by postmodernism and “college” humor. Alan King and Seth MacFarlane seem to belong to somewhat different worlds.

And nerds should be grateful simply for the sci-fi-like level of strangeness and randomness that The Simpsons has helped make acceptable on mainstream television — chaos of a kind that only the Marx Brothers, Monty Python, and moments of early Woody Allen had previously achieved but which now seemingly permeates not just several sitcoms but virtually every animated kids’ show, albeit in a more frenetic, more snarky, and far less creative form. By contrast with today’s toons, I recall when I could hardly believe my eyes when I stumbled across rare hip animated shows like The Tick, Ren and Stimpy, and the earlier, tragically overlooked New Adventures of Mighty Mouse (featuring such fitting yet absurd characters as Bat Bat, who drove a fleshtone “Manmobile” with gangly human feet instead of wheels).

What more can I say? Perhaps only: “Excellent.” And “D’oh!” And “I don’t believe in nothin’ no more — I’m going ta law school!” And “Batman’s a scientist.” And “I’m the one with stigmata.” And of course “Well, judging by his outlandish attire, he’s some sort of free-thinking anarchist.” And…

P.S. On a perhaps less historic TV note, you should be able to glimpse me silently sitting in the audience on tonight’s 8pm Eastern Stossel episode (on healthcare) on Fox Business Network (alas, without former NY lieutenant governor Betsy McCaughey as my companion, since she had to cancel).  And at some point, you’ll see the episode about Rand in which I actually ask a (skeptical) question, then with luck future episodes in which I answer questions, and then I conquer the world.

Black Metal in the Times

More culture: A Norwegian-decay vs. American-hybridization clash and Catholic-pagan tensions are apparently just two of the profound topics raised by the Williamsburg academic conference on black metal’s place in rock, according to this New York Times article.

Is Spider-Man Being Produced by Idiots?

John Malkovich is reportedly being considered for the role of the villain the Vulture in the next Spider-Man movie — but what’s more important is that the same report says that the villain the Lizard, who has appeared more than once as an as-yet-untransformed character in the films, will not soon make his full, scaly debut because the producers think he’s too weird-looking.

I’m fine with the Malkovulture but can in no way understand why a reptile-man wouldn’t work at least as well visually (indeed, I’m skeptical of the report). Hasn’t Hollywood done countless reptile-person villains? Have we so soon forgotten the Gorn? Have we already forgotten V?!? The Lizard would be awesome. (And there’s already bare-bones computer animation they could use as a model for making him more gecko-ish and creepily wall-crawling, if desired, since he appeared in the computer-animated late-90s Spider-Man TV series in that mode.)

Truth be told, I wrote a letter to Sam Raimi and company suggesting how they could work the Lizard into Spider-Man 2 back when they were reportedly toying with the idea, a letter noting my TV and comic book-writing experience and carefully waiving any and all legal claim to the idea, so eager was I to assist. No matter how clear you make such legal disclaimers, though, Hollywood apparently still sends back a letter saying they can’t read any outside suggestions for legal reasons. Fine. At least I tried (and now I have the ostensible signature of one of the other producers).

My suggestion was that they avoid the recurring problem of the multiple villains in these movies seeming thrown together at random by depicting Doctor Octopus and the Lizard as rival scientists, one enamored of cybernetics and the other enamored of biotech, each seeking to replace damaged limbs. Then, scientific rivalry becomes a (timely! relevant!) physical battle to the death — with their student Peter Parker caught in the middle.

But on to more culturally-significant matters in two days: the twentieth anniversary of The Simpsons.