drat fink

gold digging

"Republican strategists pretend that they would love to run against Howard Dean when in fact the candidate they would really like to run against is Joe Lieberman. They are trying to psych-out Democrats into fearing another George McGovern because they want an opponent who will leave no footprints which was the case with Mondale, Dukakis and Gore.

George McGovern spawned a mailing list which animated progressive public interest groups for the next decade and countless political professionals, including the young Bill Clinton, got their start in politics in a campaign based on idealism. McGovern’s loss was partially from a country that wanted to re-elect Nixon but McGovern’s biggest mistakes were not ideological but professional (losing control of his convention to the point that his acceptance speech wasn’t on until three in the morning; selecting a running mate who resigned the next week after it was revealed he’d received electro-shock treatment for depression, etc.). And, of course, McGovern’s campaign was bedeviled by illegal dirty tricks that were among the reasons Nixon was formed to resign two years later."

two to tengo

"In order to prevent collisions with Venezuelan-born shortstop Elio Chacon, New York Mets centerfielder Richie Ashburn learned to scream "I got it" in Spanish in 1962. Unfortunately, a few games later, his shouts did not stop English-speaking rightfielder Frank Thomas from crashing into him. Brooklyn-raised indie rocker Ira Kaplan loved those bumblin' Mets so much that in 1984 he named his new band "Yo La Tengo.""

la dolce vita

"Hollywood actor George Clooney reportedly is set to buy Italian Serie B soccer team Como for approximately $25 million, Britain's ITV.com reported Monday.

According to the report, the former ER and Ocean's Eleven star has told friends he is "about to buy a small soccer team" near his Italian lakeside home in Villa Oleandra."

anamatrix

"Censored SNL Animation about Corporate ownership of media."

rockist paradigm

"Then again, maybe it’s not a problem that so much pop-music scholarship sounds conspicuously uncool. For decades, jazz rhapsodists and rock poets were so intent on projecting attitude that they never got around to saying much about the music itself. The pioneering rock critics of the sixties, such as Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus, wanted to mimic the music in their prose, and they had enough style to pull it off. Bangs, whose writings have been collected in a new anthology from Anchor Books, lived the life of a rock star, or at least died the death of one. But his writings are a better guide to the mentality of smart people who went to rock shows in the sixties and seventies than they are a reliable record of music and musicians. Discussing the Rolling Stones in 1974, Bangs wrote, “If you think I’m going to review the new ‘It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll’ album right now, you are crazy. But I am going to swim in it.” Between prose poetry and academic cant there has to be a middle ground, and pop-music studies is searching it out."

hot seated

"July 14 — Bill Keller, the man who was passed over for the top editorial job at The New York Times two years ago in favor of Howell Raines, has been elevated to the executive editor’s position."

le chic, c'est geek

todays buzz, howard dean is sitting in for lawrence lessig on his blog this week. also, heres a dean profile from the squirrelly howard fineman.

balls to the walls

"In the process, James himself has become part of baseball legend. To some, he’s a philosopher-hero who brought baseball out of the Dark Ages; others consider him a calculator-punching pedant with too much time on his hands. The once proud and conservative Red Sox, by hiring James to be their Senior Baseball Operations Adviser, have joined the ranks of those teams—such as the Oakland A’s and the Toronto Blue Jays—which are now emphasizing the principles of “sabermetrics” as an alternative to the steadfast reliance on weather-beaten scouts with radar guns, hunches, and cigars. (The term, which James coined two decades ago, echoes the acronym for the Society for American Baseball Research, and denotes “the search for objective knowledge about baseball.”) The Red Sox have not merely sided with the brainiacs; they’ve enlisted the help of the founding nerd."

soul survivors

"Trippi vehemently denies the story. Yet it's clear that the Dean camp and the DLC are fighting an increasingly acrimonious civil war. Even as the Democratic Party seeks to unite against George W. Bush, many of its grass-roots activists are in mutiny. The rift is less about issues than an argument about the way politics works in America and the role of passion and anger in stirring the electorate, and its resolution will determine the Democratic strategy in 2004 and the direction of the party thereafter."

robotniks

"Eyebeam will host ROBOT, a four-day festival featuring a robotic talent show, exhibition, workshops, presentations, party and massage parlor. ROBOT will take place from July 12 – 15, 12-6pm daily at Eyebeam's Chelsea facility located at 540 West 21st Street between 10th and 11th Avenues. The four-day event will examine current applications of robotic technologies on creative practices, activism, consumerism and physical intimacy. Eyebeam will conclude the event July 15 with a party from 6-10pm featuring music by DJ-I ROBOT, the first random-access, fully analog robotic DJ."

lounge fax

mercury lounge

* Radar Bros, 7/20
* Starlight Mints/April March, 7/24
* Pernice Brothers/The Tyde, 7/25
* Fruit Bats, 8/11

river phoenix

Live music at the Hudson River Park. Thursday, July 10: Pretty Girls Make
Graves, Broken Social Scene, the Natural History. Hudson River Park, Pier
54, just south of 15th Street and West Side Highway, Manhattan. 6p; $free.

ringing in my years

Siren Music Festival, 7/19, Coney Island, free

straight down the line

other upcoming events i will find a way to miss --

River to River

*Patti Smith @ World Financial Center, tuesday 7/8, 7pm, free
*Guy Clark & Ramblin' Jack Elliott @ Rockefeller Park, wednesday 7/9, 7pm, free
*Calla, The Boggs @ South Street Seaport, 7/10, 6pm, free
*Cat Power @ Castle Clinton, 7/17, 7pm, free
*Spoon @ Castle Clinton, 7/24, 7pm, free
*Essex Green @ Castle Clinton, 7/25, 6pm, free

Prospect Park

*Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks, 7/18, 730pm, $3

Central Park Summerstage

*Tindersticks w/strings, 7/31, 7pm, free
*Sonny Rollins, 8/9, 7pm, $10
*Jimmy Cliff, 8/10, 3pm, free
*Polyphonic Spree, 8/16, 3pm, free


Bowery Ballroom

*Neko Case, 7/26, 9pm, $15
*Rilo Kiley, 7/28, 9pm, $13
*New Pornographers, 8/25, 10pm, $15
*The Shins, 9/4, 11pm, $15

New York Mag Summer Freebie Calendar

(more to come)

mark my words

to-do list

*Orchestra Baobab @ Central Park Summerstage, Sunday 3pm, free
* The Fall @ The Knitting Factory on Sunday
*La Rčgle du jeu (The Rules of the Game)1939 @ Moma Grammercy Theatre, Monday 6pm

wedge would

"'Cunt' refers literally to the female genital organs (the vagina and vulva), though it is also a highly offensive insult. Such is the word's vehemence that even in its literal sense it is very rarely used. Its Middle English variants 'cunte', 'count', and 'counte' are clearly close relatives of the modern spelling, though a definitive earlier provenance remains elusive. Etymologists have suggested that its origin is the Latin term 'cuneus', meaning 'wedge', from which 'cunnus' ('vulva') is derived. 'Wedge' and 'cunt', however, seem, initially, to be unlikely associates, as Jane Mills explains: "I know what a cunt looks like, and the word 'wedge' doesn't sort of spring to mind!" [Richardson, 1994]. She suggests the Greek Macedonian term 'guda' as an alternative source for 'cunt', and other possibilities are the Anglo-Saxon 'cynd' and, returning to Latin, 'cutis' ('skin')."

via caterina

hey, little dudelers

"Little did I know that I was witnessing a phenomenon that was, in fact, a hot topic among lexicographers and linguists, according to my friend Jesse Sheidlower, the astute North American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary: the sexual transmigration of "dude." Where once "dude" had applied mainly—only—to men, "there’s a lot of discussion now," Jesse said, among his colleagues in the word-study business, over this issue: whether "dude" (in a descriptive rather than prescriptive sense) could now generally be said to apply to both men and women. (The way "babe" has crossed over from the other direction, you might say.)"

resist errs

"In an audio tape sent to the Pakistan daily The News, which is accepted as authentic, the leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, urges Muslims to step up their jihad against the US and other coalition occupation forces in Afghanistan. Omar issued the tape from his hiding place in Afghanistan, the daily reported, quoting Taliban spokesman Mohammad Mukhtar Mujahid. Omar has named a 10-member leadership council to organize the resistance against the US-led foreign troops in Afghanistan."

quotable notables

a little light in the blogging loafers of late. i blame my lack of a desk. a reclining chair and a 36 inch counter do not compliment each other well. but heres a couple of noteworthy blogs you can read whatever your seating habits.

donkey rising
christopher lydon