Monthly Archives: February 2009

I’m gonna go ahead and say that I don’t think the cartoon was deliberately racist – ie. portraying Obama as a monkey because he’s black – but I do think it’s kinda sick, and really dumb. I get it, the stimulus bill is stupid (just like a chimpanzee!) and there was a recent story about a chimpanzee that was killed after mauling its owner (topical!), if only we could kill the stimulus bill like they killed that chimp! Ummm… yeah. Look, Obama didn’t write the stimulus bill – and I seriously doubt the cartoonist somehow thought this to be the case – so it doesn’t really make any sense in a racist context. Unfortunately for the cartoonist and the Post, it barely makes sense in its intended context, so unsurprisingly people are looking for other meanings.

In these instances I’m torn between wanting to see the Post (News Corp) fucked in any way possible, and my own inner barometer of fairness. I’m also a fan of seeing pathetic attempts at humor being punished (and after wasting 2 minutes of my life watching this Half Hour News Hour comedic abortion, I’d especially like to get my News Corp-humor rage on…), but it’s hard to see Spike and Al’s backlash as anything but opportunistic. The Post’s apology was half-hearted at best:

“It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill.

“Period.

“But it has been taken as something else – as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism.

“This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize.

“However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past – and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback.

“To them, no apology is due.

“Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon – even as the opportunists seek to make it something else.”

As much as I hate to say it though, I’m gonna have to take the Post’s side on this. If anything, they should have apologized for having a tacky, violent cartoon in a magazine that is readily available to children. But the enthusiasm with which many people call for censorship disturbs me more than hundreds of cartoons of this type ever could, even if it is a call for self-censorship. There are tons of reasons to boycott the Post – hell, I have an unofficial boycott on it, haven’t bought one in God knows how long – but a tacky joke should not be one of them. The problem is, it’s easier to get people riled up on one seemingly-racist cartoon then it is getting people riled up over continuous systematic right-wing jingoism spanning years. But just because I pray for the downfall of this paper (and News Corp itself) does that mean I should jump at the chance at kicking it while it’s down? I’ll admit though, it’s mighty tempting.

I’m currently spending every free moment hard at work on my new album, so there’s not too much bloggin’ going on here for the time being, but I’ll try and post some interesting videos and such as I see ’em.

Here’s an amazingly simple and helpful explanation of the Credit and Housing crisis. I think I’m starting to get it…

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

I don’t care what people say, this was an awesome performance:

While sitting in a hotel room in Durham, North Carolina, I was just devastated by this song from the 1972 soul documentary Wattstax. I keep watching it over and over because I can’t believe how perfect it is.

That spoken intro is literally one of the best things I have ever heard. And the song and video is simply gorgeous. Damn… I gotta listen to more Stax albums.

This came up when I was trying to listen to someones music:

I think it’s kinda funny, if inevitable, that people are rushing to Christian Bale’s defense after the release of the tape of him verbally abusing another coworker (if you haven’t heard it yet, get yourself an internet). They all seem to be along the lines of this: ‘It was a very important scene, which requires an intense amount of concentration, and the director of photography stepped on the scene for the second time, actors need to be in a special emotional place for scenes, etc.’

Really? Look, I’m all about being accommodating to performing artists. People often do not understand the emotion and concentration it takes to do successfully pull off a performance. But you know what is just as important as emotion and concentration? The ability to pull it back together when something goes wrong. Maybe I’m a little more familiar with this since I’m a horn player, and the deftness with which we recover from unexpected shit is one of our primary skills. But still, can you imagine De Niro losing it like this? Hell no, because he’s a fucking professional. The most I’ve seen him lose it is when he directly defies the clown-ass director in this awesome video, and it’s still classy.

No matter how integral the scene, how egregious the DOP’s mistake was, how bad of a week Bale was having, whatever. It was an unprofessional Kinski-esque temper tantrum, and a more mature actor and person would have let it go after maybe a sharp word or two, rather than a four-minute pity party.

Or maybe I’m just bitter because Mell has a crush on him…

UPDATE:

This is unbelievably funny (and the best thing Steve Martin’s done in like a decade):

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Here is my latest toy, a birthday present. The Korg nanoKontrol:

Isn’t it just teh adorable??

Here’s how tiny it is:

As you can see, it comes in three distinct manifestations. A wittle keybawd, a wittle set of dwum padz, and the wittle set of knobs and pots I gots.

A-goochie goochie goo! I wuv oo my cute wittle nanoKontrol! You’re a naughty little MIDI controller aren’t you? You’re naughty!

Ahem. Thanks Melly. :)

I was wanting to post something about the Michael Phelps pot scandal, but Radley Balko articulates it better than I ever could, in his version of what Michael Phelps should have said, rather than apologizing:

Here’s a crazy thought: If I can smoke a little dope and go on to win 14 Olympic gold medals, maybe pot smokers aren’t doomed to lives of couch surfing and video games, as our moronic government would have us believe. In fact, the list of successful pot smokers includes not just world class athletes like me, Howard, Williams, and others, it includes Nobel Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, the last three U.S. presidents, several Supreme Court justices, and luminaries and success stories from all sectors of business and the arts, sciences, and humanities.

So go ahead. Ban me from the next Olympics. Yank my endorsement deals. Stick your collective noses in the air and get all indignant on me. While you’re at it, keep arresting cancer and AIDS patients who dare to smoke the stuff because it deadens their pain, or enables them to eat. Keep sending in goon squads to kick down doors and shoot little old ladies, maim innocent toddlers, handcuff elderly post-polio patients to their beds at gunpoint, and slaughter the family pet.

Freakin word.