Sir Duke: Circle of Life Congressional Remix Version

It must be hard for someone used to power and privilege not only to go to prison but then face a loss of rights upon their release. Such is the case with former Congressman and current inmate Randy “Duke” Cunningham. Next year, Cunningham will finish the 100 month sentence he’s serving for bribery, fraud and other misdeeds committed while he served as part of California’s delegation to the House of Representatives.

Cunningham, who had to forfeit a lavish home as part of his plea agreement, plans to live in a cabin in the Ozark Mountains after his release on June 4, 2013. Reflecting that choice of domicile, Mr. Cunningham would like to make generous use of Second Amendment rights in order to provide both food and protection for himself. As described in a letter he sent to the judge who sentenced him, Larry Alan Burns, “[Cunningham] will live in a very remote part of Arkansas and not much threat from people but they do have a lot of black bears, cougars, and history of rabies.” The problem, however, is that convicted felons like Cunningham are generally prohibited from possessing firearms. 

Cunningham, who despite the fact that he plead guilty to the various offenses apparently sees his situation as a shameful example of how the country treats veterans rather than the result of any misconduct on his own part, wrote to Judge Burns to request permission to own and use guns after his release. In a very thoughtful response, Judge Burns explained that he had no authority to grant this request and went on to explain the avenues available to inmate 94405198 and the obstacles he’s likely to face in a way that the former congressman should appreciate more than most.

“You should be aware, however, that every year since 1992, Congress has refused to provide funding to the ATF to review applications from the federal firearm ban. And the United States Supreme Court has ruled that inaction by the ATF does not amount to “denial” of the application within the meaning of section 925(c) United States v. Bean 537 US 71, 75 (2002). So unless Congress changes course and decides to fund ATF’s review of applications for relief, it appears you are stuck.”

Douglas Adams: A Man Who Really Knows Where His Towel Is

Since 2001, today has been known in some circles as Towel Day, a tribute to the work of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams who died in May of that year at the much too young age of 49. The many adaptations of his work that have appeared in film, TV and radio since his death are a clear tribute to how beloved Adams and his work was by so many. Towel Day, which is inspired by a particularly amusing passage from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is another particularly unique sign of that love.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to- hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Mostly Harmless, Adams’ final book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide… series, came out in 1992, the same year as the blockbuster romance The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller and probably only sold a small fraction of what Waller’s book did. However, it’s a safe bet that years from now new readers will be embracing Adams’ work while Waller and his ephemeral blockbuster will be answers to a trivia question or if they’re lucky remembered as the inferior inspiration for a pretty good movie from Clint Eastwood. Whether those new fans will be reading Adams’ work in printed form or on an electronic device like the one the writer envisioned back in the late 1970s remains to be seen, but I’m hopeful they’ll all know where their towels are.

In Praise of Disco (As Long as We're the Ones Playing the Machines)

I come to praise disco not to bury it. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that the recent deaths of both Donna Summer and the Bee Gees’ Robin Gibb suggest that the latter is proceeding on its own unfortunately literal trajectory. The other is that it ultimately doesn’t deserve all the derision heaped on it (except possibly for some of the fashion choices it inspired). Whether people like to admit it or not, disco (and related forms of dance music) was the victor of the dueling late-70s musical revolutions between itself and punk and it won for good reasons.

On a social level, disco and dance music tend to be more inclusive in terms of race and gender than a lot of punk, notable exceptions like Bad Brains and Pansy Division notwithstanding. On an artistic level, disco is more adept at crafting expressions of desire that appeal more directly to the heart than the head. The examples are plentiful as anyone who’s heard both "If I Can't Have You" and "Anarchy in the UK" can attest. There are certainly notable exceptions such as the Buzzcocks, though some of Pete Shelley’s solo work suggests that they may be the exception that proves the rule.

It obviously bears mentioning that there’s a lot of crap dance music, just as there's a lot of crap punk music. At its best, though, when you know it’s the humans playing the machines and not the other way around, there’s an undeniable gut-level impact to songs like Chic’s “I Want Your Love” (or even New Order’s "Bizarre Love Triangle").

That points to what may be another underlying cause of disco’s victory. Dance music thrives in that middle-ground between craftsmanship and inspiration, where the technology and humanity collide. As it should, punk offers plenty of collisions, but its reticent attitude toward craftsmanship often makes it as limited in scope as many of its leading practitioners are filled with musical ambition. It’s not surprising then that artists like the The Jam’s Paul Weller have spent most of the past three decades making music that for all its passion is well outside the scope of what we commonly think of as punk.

I certainly wouldn’t want a world with only one or the other, but it’s all too easy in the age of micro-trends to dismiss what you don’t personally like as meaningless. Personally, I’m happy to know that the work of Robin Gibb and Joe Strummer will outlive both of them.

Imitation of Art: Why NBC's Smash Was a Well-Produced Bore

Being married to someone who not only worked in theater when she lived in New York but also has forgotten more about musicals than I'll ever know, watching the show Smash was as inevitable as its pre-debut commercials were unpromising. The key warning sign was seeing how many times the ads showed someone declaring that one of the female leads was a star. If you're putting that much effort into telling people something, it's a safe bet you haven't done a good job showing it. I regret not placing any such bets, because it would have provided at least something worthwhile related to the show, whose season finale aired last night.

There’s no question Smash is a classy production. They’ve got highly talented people on both sides of the camera, ranging from the team that wrote the (very good) score for Hairspray to Coupling star Jack Davenport with experienced Broadway performers like Megan Hilty and guest star Bernadette Peters also in the mix. Unfortunately, their talents are wasted in a show that’s neither dramatically engaging nor outlandish enough to be campy fun.

It’s a tight race to say which performer most exemplifies what’s wrong with the show, but Davenport as the libido-driven dictatorial-yet-visionary director narrowly edges out Anjelica Huston as the producer. A defining moment could be found in last night’s finale during a confrontation between the director and producer, when Davenport declared his character to be an artist and a storyteller while refusing to follow Huston’s directive. In a world where even acclaimed directors with track records are fired (e.g. Lion King director Julie Taymor’s departure from the Spider-Man musical), this scene defied any presumption of plausibility, while the deadly serious delivery robbed it of any entertainment value. 

I’ve declined to mention character names, not just because I’ve forgotten them but also because no one is really playing a character so much as a character sketch. Actually, it’s worse than that, because a character sketch could still be engaging if played with verve. For whatever reason, though, the writers have either by inability or design placed all of them in a limbo world of being too clichéd to be genuinely believable but not sufficiently out there to be entertaining. 

That feeling permeates nearly every aspect of the show. There isn’t dialogue so much as pronouncements about theater and art and what great things people might achieve either for themselves or with others. Meanwhile, every melodramatic complication is a mockery of true dramatic conflict, driven not by characters but by a production team’s desire to push actors who are capable of much better around on a chess board because that’s what they think their audience expects.

Here again, Davenport as the director typifies the approach. It isn’t just that he’s presented as a writer’s idea of what a tyrannical director is like. He’s written to be the writer’s idea of what they think audiences expect this kind of character type to be like. Had those writers been willing to commit to making Smash a lighthearted romp set in a fantasy-land version of Broadway, broadly sketched character types would be not just forgivable but even preferable. Instead, they committed the deadly sin of wanting to make both art and entertainment, failing to realize that succeeding at both requires you to invest yourself in one and let the other take care of itself.

Where the Wild Bytes Are

Other people have said far more eloquent things about the literary work of the late Maurice Sendak than I can manage. However, as someone who's enjoyed reading his books and reading slightly dog-eared copies of them to the kids in my family, his death is a call to think about the priceless nature of books themselves.

I enjoy my Kindle for many reasons, but even if every book I own was available digitally and I could replace them all with digital copies for free, I wouldn't do it. My century old copies of stories by Poe or Shakespeare plays aren't just collections of text but rather something unique in their own right, an amazing intersection of the human and the technological. I think this is what Sendak was getting with a comment he made about ebooks in an interview he did last year with the UK newspaper The Guardian.

 “I hate them. It’s like making believe there’s another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of book! A book is a book is a book."

The Declaration of Hypocrisy: Mitt Romney vs. The Constitution

You'll never hear me call Mitt Romney a hypocrite when it comes to political issues. To be a hypocrite, you have to believe in something. Aside from his faith, which I have no doubt is quite sincere, the former governor's only conviction seems to be saying whatever it takes to get himself elected.

The trait shows through most clearly when Candidate Romney talks about the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (i.e. Obamacare to its detractors), which puts him in the uncomfortable position of explaining the health-care law that Governor Romney enacted in Massachusetts. It’s not so much his attempts to split hairs about why the law was appropriate on a state level but not on a federal level but rather his claims about how he'd deal with the law if elected president.

Romney has promised that one of his first acts as president will be to issue waivers for all 50 states that he pretends will put the law's effects on hold while he and (the presumably GOP controlled) congress repeal it. To his credit, and I’m sure many peoples’ surprise, Romney has been consistent on this point throughout the campaign. What is not a surprise is that the promise is as meaningless as it is contemptuous of the values he professes to hold.

Where the promise is meaningless is the fact that these so-called “state innovation waivers” require the states to meet very specific requirements which (with the possible exception of Massachusetts) they may or may not be ready for when January 2013 rolls around. That’s without factoring in that in the law’s current form the waivers don’t apply until 2017. Even if a bipartisan amendment supported by President Obama (i.e. the man who’s willing to get his hands dirty and work with people to get something good done) takes effect, the waivers would still be deferred until 2014. In short, whether the election has a good outcome or Romney gets elected, the next presidential term starts some months before the much feted waivers could take effect.

That bit of mendacity aside, the way Romney talks about the process is even more telling about his lack of credibility. With one breath, he boasts about how he “would respect the different branches of government if [he was] fortunate enough to become president." He then “[reserves] the right as president to put in place executive orders”, specifically pointing to his stated intention of using that power to put the health-care reform law on hold.

Whether the Affordable Care Act was passed with bipartisan support or strictly along party lines is irrelevant. For all its flaws, it was a legitimately enacted law, passed by both houses of Congress. A president who truly respects “the different branches of government” should think twice before undercutting their authority. Voters who want a president who truly respects the US Constitution and the separation of powers inherent in that document should think twice about voting for Mitt Romney.

Beavis, Butthead and MCA

I was never a huge fan of the Beastie Boys, and I respected them too much to pretend to be one. My appreciation was always awed more on admiration for their creativity than a particular love of the results. Still, the death of Adam Yauch (aka MCA) is sad for many reasons, one of them being the reminder that the medium that brought him and his spiritual brothers fame is nothing like what it once was. Though it's been three decades since the debut of MTV, the decline actually started well before the midpoint of its life. Looking back, the peak moment was quite obvious, and, though he probably didn't see it at the time either, Yauch was a key contributor to that peak.

One of the best things about Beavis & Butthead was that when they made fun of music videos between the "real" cartoons, they were as willing to make fun of the great ones as they were the terrible. In the mid-90s, there were few videos greater than the the Beastie Boys/Spike Jonze video for "Sabotage".

We didn't know it at the time, but the high-water mark for MTV had arrived. Watching Beavis & Butthead's slightly bemused reaction to "Sabotage" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YsiTUxe4MI&feature=youtube_gdata_player) was the moment where MTV's original mission to play music and the network's desire to expand into other forms of programming were in perfectly balance. It was all downhill from there.

Big Time: 36 vs. XXXVI

A couple of months ago, I was measured for a suit, which turned out to be a great learning experience. In particular, I learned that, while I can pretend that bacon is my friend, the numbers leave no doubt that the tape measure isn't. Even though we the people are getting bigger en masse, it's hard not to feel self-conscious about my own increased mass when shopping for clothes.

I suspect I'm not alone in this feeling and the attendant belief that something must be done. Eating less is undoubtedly the smart option, but if others' will-power is as inconsistent as mine, it's simply not a realistic one. If you're not willing to make the changes needed to reach a lower size, then clearly the sizes themselves need to be changed. But how?

As with so many vexing questions, answers can often be found on the past, in this case ancient Rome. The simple path to feeling less self-conscious about buying larger clothing sizes is to label those sizes using Roman numerals. I don't have the chromosomes ( or predilection for drag) to assess the virtues of IX versus 9, but personal experience tells me that a pair of jeans sized XXXVI would be far less troubling than one marked 36. After all, perception is reality, at least until the heart disease takes you down.