Tom Watson

The Morals That They Worship

When I first heard [via the prolific Lance and Blue Girl] that the National Review's John J. Miller had taken it upon himself to compile a list of top conservative ditties, I expected a discography of Wagner by way of Pat Boone, with the near-certain inclusion of Paper Roses by the versatile Anita Bryant. Alas, it was not to be. There, in the number one spot on the 50-song right-wing hit parade, was the classic rock anthem of classic rock anthems, Won't Get Fooled Again.

Oh yeah, they went there. Discredited and hypocritical movement. Disgraced administration. Flailing strategy. Aligned with The Who's classic rant against political revolution. And the rest of the list - Sympathy for the Devil (for its rampant anti-Leninism), Sweet Home Alabama (pro-red state values and George Wallace), I Fought the War (and the pro-law enforcement community won), Rock the Casbah (most requested anti-Islamofascist song by British Army radio), The Battle of Evermore ("The tyrant’s face is red.” Get it?), and ever onward. Play that funky music, white Buckley boy. Tongue sadly slapping loosely around the conservative lips and jaw, nowhere near the inside of writer's cheek, you realize Mr. Miller is actually serious. I guess irony really is dead in the post 9-11 world.

So, onto my own carefully-considered Top Ten list of conservative classics - skipping the many dozens of blatant attacks on the good right (your Dylan, your Neil Young, your Joni, your Bruce, your Steve Earle, your Pearl Jam - all too obvious) and focusing heavily on classics from a certain grouping on my iTunes playlist (certainly betraying my own rock vintage in the bargain).

• Anarchy in the UK - "I am an anti-christ, don't know what i want but I know how to get it." Nailed it.
• Gloria - Patti Smith - "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine." (Bush-Cheney branch of conservative politics).
• Pills - New York Dolls - Rush Limbaugh tribute.
• Dazed and Confused - Led Zeppelin - (otherwise known as Administration Breakdown).
• Search and Destroy - Iggy Pop - "I'm a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm, I'm a runaway son of the nuclear a-bomb." Tribute to Rumsfeld?
• Johnny Ryall - Beastie Boys - The GOP view of the downsized lower classes
• Big Tears - Elvis Costello - "Standing in the shadow, turning wives to widows..." Big tears mean nothing, fellas. Ask Rummy.
• Endless Night - Graham Parker - "If I could only find a switch that turns on the endless night."
• Death or Glory - The Clash - "Every cheap hood strikes a bargain with the world."
• Road to Nowhere - Talking Heads - The one we're on.

Alright, that wasn't particularly well-considered - I slapped it together in nine minutes. The aptly-named Jon Swift - the most genuine conservative now publishing a blog - did a much better job. But it was fun.  And just for your patience, a special bonus track has been appended to this conservative playlist - by far the most recent track in the list: 16 Military Wives by the Decemberists, who write this:

Sixteen military wives
Thirty-two softly focused brightly colored eyes
Staring at the natural tan
of thirty-two gently clenching wrinkled little hands
Seventeen company men
Out of which only twelve will make it back again
Sergeant sends a letter to five
Military wives, whose tears drip down through ten little eyes
Cheer them on to their rivals
Cause America can, and America can't say no
And America does, if America says it's so
It's so!

UPDATE: Pete Townshend laughs at the National Review ranking, and tells the story behind Won't Get Fooled Again. Fascinating read. Check it out, Tom K.

Technorati tags: Pete Townshend | Who | conservatism

What Kos Knows

When Markos Moulitsas accepts the 2006 Drum Major for Justice Award next month in New York City, he'll be doing so on behalf of a massive network of committed activists who are changing progressive politics day by day, post by post, link by link, comment by comment.

On June 22, the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, a progressive think tank on whose board I'm privileged to sit, will honor Markos and Anna Burger (Change to Win Labor Federation) for their commitment to American principles of government, activism, and democracy. To put it bluntly, DailyKos has long been an inspiration on the left - it's inspired legions of progressive bloggers to stop whining, pick up their keyboards, and create a movement. Indeed, DMI's own thriving policy blog - DMIBlog - is a direct response to the political activism of DailyKos.

So Kos deserves the honor, and he and the NetRoots movement he's helped to breathe life into deserve the support of progressive bloggers. To that end, we've started putting together a committee of bloggers to honor Markos. I'm pleased to say that the co-chairs of this blogging committee are a quartet of incredibly prominent, scarily committed, and genetically prolific bloggers: Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake, Steve Gilliard of The News Blog, Lance Mannion, and Ezra Klein. That's an all-star group representing thousands of daily words and many thousands of daily readers.

Want to join 'em?

We're looking for bloggers to spread the word, to join the committee to honor Kos, and to raise a little money for a vital progressive think tank - a small but ferocious and smart organization that is really outthinking the right (you know, those well-funded conservative institutes). Please add you blog to our committee. What's required? Just a post urging people to support the benefit - no contribution is required - that's entirely up to you. Every blogger who joins will be recognized with a link. There are a few ways to get involved.

- Create a post and include the Techorati tag HonoringKos.
- Go to Word of Blog and pick up this tile, and put it on your blog.
- Trackback this post
- Drop me a line.
- Send a note to Elana Levin, who runs the DMIBlog, and she'll get you hooked up with banners, text, whatever you need.

Finally, we'd love to see as many bloggers as possible at the benefit - there will be lots of interesting special guests and presenters. The reception (with light food but no boring sit-down rubber chicken) will be held at Lotus / 409 West 14th Street, New York City. All the details are here. So please join us!

Blogger Host Committee
[in near-constant formation]

Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake
Steve Gilliard of The News Blog
Lance Mannion
Ezra Klein
Emboldened
The Astounding Trickster
The Sawpit
Blue Wren
Brouhaha
Jessica Valenti of Feministing.com
Nathan Newman
Liza Sabater, publisher of culturekitchen and The Daily Gotham
Sean-Paul Kelley of The Agonist
Democracy in Action
jspot
Flaming Grasshopper
WFP Blog
Michael Berube
Blue Girl in a Red State
Michael Stickings' The Reaction
By Neddie Jingo
JD Lasica
Digby's Hullabaloo
The American Street
Jude Nagurney Camwell
Peter Daou
Arianna Huffington
Black Sky Theory
Brendan Tween
Phronesisaical

Technorati Tags: HonoringKos | Drum Major | Drum Major Institute | DMI | Kos | DailyKos

Der Fling des Nibelungen

To see William "Billy" Wagner break into small, ineffective pieces this afternoon was a painful baseball tragic opera - and one scary as shit sign for this so-far, so-good Mets season. Is Wagner going the way of other talents who, exposed to New York's pressure, fail to grasp the ring? Are we destined to see a baseball God destroyed? And why oh why is Willie Randolph always falling into safe choices that betray the very evidence of his quite experienced Brooklyn eyes. Duaner Sanchez was well-rested and rolling. But no, Willie goes all Enter Sandman, playing it like October. And Wagner can't find the plate. Extra innings, blown win for the amazing Pedro, gift win for the hated Yankees. Makes you think of a Ring cycle alright - maybe Royce Ring, a lefty with good stuff. Meantime, pass das Rheingold - hops, barley, corn and water clear. UPDATE: Mets won the rubber match, and Wagner got the save - but Mannion is still worried.

A DaVinci Load

Dan Brown's spectacularly successful The DaVinci Code isn't anti-Catholic. It's anti-English. As in the language. While the Church can easily survive a silly pop thriller, I'm not sure the millions who've read the Code can stomach the assault on their literary minds. A.O. Scott nailed it today in his brilliant Times review of the new Tom Hanks vehicle, which is out to universal non-acclaim:

To their credit the director and his screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman (who collaborated with Mr. Howard on "Cinderella Man" and "A Beautiful Mind"), have streamlined Mr. Brown's story and refrained from trying to capture his, um, prose style. "Almost inconceivably, the gun into which she was now staring was clutched in the pale hand of an enormous albino with long white hair." Such language — note the exquisite "almost" and the fastidious tucking of the "which" after the preposition — can live only on the page.

To be fair, though, Mr. Goldsman conjures up some pretty ripe dialogue all on his own. "Your God does not forgive murderers," Audrey Tautou hisses to Paul Bettany (who play a less than enormous, short-haired albino). "He burns them!"

The hilarious "controversy" over the Code's alleged attack on the Church just sells tickets, to a movie that almost by definition has to be better than a dreadful book (I mean, can Hanks and Ron Howard fail to create a not unpleasant two hours)? As the Sawpit says: no one has a monopoly on Jesus. And as Gandalf, er, Ian McKellen told The Today Show this morning: how come there's no disclaimer in the front of the Bible? Different stories, different people, different truths. Or to quote Variety: Catholic League Ballistic. Ticket Sales Soar.

Book, meanwhile, remains a poorly-written, fact-challenged bit of fluffery.

So tonight there's Chris Matthews doing HardBall live from the Lexington Avenue headquarters of Opus Dei, doing his best Larry King imitation - "So Father, the Pope, great man, dead yesterday, already on his way to heaven? Or already there?"

Technorati Tags: davinci code | dan brown | Da Vinci Code

The YouTube Senator

Since many of the posts on this little missiva digitalis are political in nature, it seems natural to assume that its creator is political in nature. Sort of. I like to spout a lot about politics (as is evident). I occasionally like to rant (ditto). This happens a lot. My involvement in electoral politics, however, is more sporadic - I don't always put my money or time where my fat yap is.

This year, I'm attempting to be a little less hypocritical. I'm making a few contributions - small, as a blogger's gift must always be - to a few candidates I happen to like. And because y'all have shared so many of your political ideas (however insane) with me over the run of this blog, I've decided to share. So slap away in the comments, but here goes.

All of my giving so far is aimed at U.S. Senate races, and every penny goes to Democrats (yes, that's a shocker). What might be surprising are the varied political fillings inside those big Democratic donuts: some are centrists, even by other's standards (I'm 100% certain they would all describe themselves as in the middle). In no particular order, here's who's getting those hard-earned Watson bucks:

- Bob Casey, PA
- Claire McCaskill, MO
- Sherrod Brown, OH
- James Webb, VA
- Ned Lamont, CT

Ah yes, you say - the last two are interesting: primary choices, Dem vs. Dem. Well, Webb is an outspoken anti-war candidate with a strong miliary background and he's no chickenhawk. His kid is in Iraq. I want him on Capitol Hill when the votes come down on the sons and daughters of other Americans, period.

Lamont...well, it's just a great story all the way around. First, of course, he's running against Joe Lieberman in a pretty safe Democratic state. But Lieberman, since he ran for Vice-President, has become a flaming Republican in Democratic clothing all around. A strng primary challenge therefore can accomplish eithe rof two things: snap his head around like a fender-bender on the Merritt and get his vote back in the Democratic column, or replace him with a more progressive candidate.

Secondly, Lamont is the first YouTube candidate. His campaign has - quite amazingly - used social video networking and distribution to get their candidate's ideas across. Lamont videos find their way all over the web, and the campaign employs tagging and feeds to keep supporters and the politically curious informed. Check out Lamont's YouTube page, and you'll see "NetRoots" in action. (Lamont knows media: he's a cable TV entrepreneur). It also happens to be working: Lamont is going to make the ballot and received endorsements as diverse as NOW and former Senator Lowell Weicker.

Thirdly, the guy has an interesting background. A lifelong liberal Democrat, Lamont comes from one of the most prominent banking families in the US. The grandfather was Thomas W. Lamont, basically JP Morgan’s right hand man. Ned’s Uncle was Corliss Lamont, a leading humanist philosopher in the 1930S through the 1980s or so. He is perhaps best known as a civil libertarian. During the McCarthy period, when the ACLU refused to stand up to the McCarthyites, Corliss Lamont, at the time their Chairman, resigned and formed the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. This group defended many of the working class and middle class people (many of them Jewish) who were getting victimized in that period. In the current conservative climate, the very real injustices of that period (and their lessons for today) have been forgotten. Ironically, one of Carliss Lamont's supporters was Senator Prescott Bush, a liberal Republican from Greenwich. Yeah, that Bush family.

Finally, he's a Democrat with a rare pursuasion - he just speaks up and lets people judge. Here's a snippet from a Wall Street Journal profile:

Mr. Lamont criticizes Democrats--and not just Joe Lieberman--for timidity. "I think we should have been a lot bolder as a party during [the 2004] campaign, and probably the previous campaigns. Come out and say what you believe. . . . The Republicans are really good at talking about the principles that they believe in. And be bold. If you think preschool should be a right for all 4-year-olds . . . go out there and say it, and give people something to believe in."

It's not enough, he says, to be anti-Bush, although he certainly is that. "This administration may be leading the country in the wrong direction . . . but there's also a sense that the Democrats aren't standing tall and being constructive and offering real alternatives, and [voters] want the Democrats to stand up and offer real alternatives."

I'm on a committee for a Lamont fundraiser here in Manhattan next week, hosted by Richard Edelman (who is, by the way, a great blogger) - if you're interested in attending or giving, let me know.

This may well be a Democratic year, possibly in both Houses. New Gingrich may be right: the best slogan the Dems can trot out could be "Had Enough?" But in turning Congress, I'd also like to see it improve. And for that, we need some meat with our potatoes.

UPDATE: Amazingly, Lamont has already forced a primary, taking 243 votes to Lieberman's 513 at the state convention. That was a huge surprise. Natch, Jane has the details. More from FDL: " Lieberman 1014, Lamont 497.  That puts Ned at roughly 33%, WILDLY in excess of what they anticipated."

UDPATE II: And from MyDD: "Ned Lamont is CRUSHING Joe Lieberman.  Lieberman's expensive tent and lavish support and paid armies of staffers weren't enough.  His side is incredibly dejected - their crowd of thunderstick cheerers, who cheered whenever a town went lopsided for Joe, have disbanded and are chatting.  The Lieberman supporters aren't even dejected, they are bored."

UPDATE III: As Bruce notes in comments, attendees to the Lamont fundraiser  in NYC are most  welcome!

Date: May 23rd, 6 PM -- 8 PM

Place: Edelman PR Headquarters, 1500 Broadway (between 43rd and 44th Street), 26th floor

To rsvp, call Paige Savage or Anne Blossom at Edelman PR, (212) 704-8121. or email paige.savage@edelman.com 

Bring your checkbooks!

Technorati Tags: Senate | Democrats | sherrod brown | oh-sen | 2006 | bob casey | Rick Santorum | claire mccaskill | ned lamont | james webb | YouTube | Edelman

The Georgia Colossus

As President Bush's approval ratings continue to slide, the chattering conventions adopt resolutions comparing his slipping numbers with the lowest of the low: the ultimate Mendoza-line President, Richard Nixon. But right-leaning observers - those who are disgusted by Bush's failure but loyal to their politics - raise another colossal Oval Office flop time and again, when publicly wringing their hands about the slow destruction of their beloved party.

George W. Bush, they'll tell you, is getting perilously close to Jimmy Carter territory.

He should be so lucky.

For all the easy list comparisons of failure and malaise, Jimmy Carter is acres of fertile territory past George W. Bush as President of the U.S. It's not close, just on the basis of Carter's permanent introduction of human rights as an important factor in American foreign policy. Sure, there was the sweater, Iran hostages, oil prices, the stupid Olympic boycott - a litany of disasters, no doubt, and not easily balanced by Camp David, the Carter Doctrine of an open Persian Gulf, and his dual stance of Salt II with a human rights stick for the USSR.

Still and all it's a much shorter list, with fewer dead bodies, than Bush's - and human rights trumps all, in my book. (As does a post-Presidency career of a truly great man- and a burr in the saddle of every President after him). Even Reagan continued that human rights doctrine (on a very selective basis - along with every President after him - but it became part of the national debate permanently).

So yeah, don't lift Bush by comparing him with Jimmy - he wilts in the side-by-side.

Technorati Tags: jimmy carter | Politics | George W. Bush

Prosumers on March II

We had about 100 people out last night in the rain for NYSIA's panel on DIY Media Technology, and overall, it was a terrific, wide-ranging discussion. After my opening remarks (more in a second), we started out with a demo by Pat Cummings, CEO of iGuitar, which is developing USB-wired guitars for plug-and-play recordings. Fred blogged about this a while ago, asking whether his many guitar-playing buddies might adapt to the USB guitar - answer, hell yeah. The demo had the crowd at JPMorgan Chase buzzing, as Pat played a bunch of licks and chords directly into Apple's terrific Garage Band program - and using internal controllers on the guitar and the software - also performed on "piano, harp, organ, and bass" - yeah, software instrument models for the keyboard-challenged.

Clearly, the ultimate prosumer tool and a great lead-off for the panel - led by Chervokas, and featuring Don Loeb, veep for biz dev at FeedBurner, Charlie Matheson, media and entertainment software specialist for IBM, and Chris O'Brien, founder of the pre-beta video network company MotionBox, which operates out of NYSIA's (totally full) incubator space at 55 Broad. Jason, who runs one of the best podcasts extant and is what I'd call an "uber-prosumer," had the topic nailed and led the panelists through a discussion that included every-fragmenting audiences, advertising models, youth culture, and distribution models.

Here are some of the notes I used for the introduction, which was aimed at setting the stage for a wide-ranging discussion (audience questions were great, as well) - see if you agree:

More than a decade ago, I helped put a panel discussion together for the Columbia School of Journalism that examined the future role of the “gatekeeper” – in journalism specifically, in media more generally. The panel included some of the bigger lights in media: all of whom have, shall we say, moved on to other careers. Except one – Barry Diller. At that time, Diller was a movie studio guy who greenlighted mega projects and billion-dollar entertainment deals - but he had a different vision of the future (this after he’d stepped from his chauffer-driven, cream-colored Bentley outside the school). Diller thought gatekeepers were done – that in the future, users would create and distribute content over ever-faster networks using better software tools.

He was right – the rare mogul to see that clearly.

Alvin Toffler had been there 15 years earlier of course – when he identified a coming shift in consumer consumption – from pure, lemming-like buying of packaged goods to the actual creation of things – including media – he called these future consumers “prosumers” – the people who produced and consumed. I listened to Toffler speak two weeks ago in L.A. and he’s not resting on his FutureShock laurels. Hardly. Now Toffler has a new vision for his “prosumer” vision – now a quarter century down the road, and brought to palpable fruition by the Internet. That vision is of a vast, partially hidden economy – one that doesn’t included currency, or accounting – but one that he believes rivals the trillions of the world’s monied economy.

Another 25 years may or may not prove Toffler right, but Barry Diller and those like him aren’t waiting around. That unmonied economy – people who Do It Themselves – is moving to the fore, on the back of ever-more-open software standards.

At the same conference in LA, there was Edgar Bronfman, head of Warner Records, talking about easing up on digital rights management and attacking his own industry for being short-sighted, for slighting prosumers. And of course, Bronfman is a prosumer himself, a songwriter with a home studio (though of course, it’s pretty damned high-end), a mogul who just might use some of the gear we’re going to see demonstrated in a minute.

Blogs are all around us – open sharing of information by DIY publishers. David Sifry says his search engine now tracks 37.3 million blogs. People creating content for other people, with little or no money changing hands in most cases. Prosumers are building wikis the size of vast encyclopedia. They are creating virtual stores and video games inside a virtual landscape on Second Life. Google Earth is run by and for DIY types, who create their own geographic overlays. Video mashups are all the rage, despite what some would see as their quasi-legality. Flickr users build tricked-up photo maps. Even the big consumer companies are experimenting with allowing users to create advertisements.

In New York, especially over the past decade since the advent of the commercial Internet, we talk a lot about media technology without ever really defining it. The problem is, I think, one of separation. We approach the question with the notion that media and technology are separate things—separate disciplines, separate industries. But in fact, media — movies, television, video games, books, magazines, recorded music — can't exist without technology. Media is nothing more than the commercial exploitation of the creative arts. And the process of turning a creative work into a commercial media product is entirely dependent on technology. As Jason said to me last week, A Grateful Dead concert isn't necessarily media. But a CD  recording of that concert IS.

Prosumerism is a big movement, and a change that goes beyond blogs and RSS - which are terrific, generally lightweight software that rely on tecnhique and strategy as much as millions of lines of code in a tightly-controlled working group in a software lab. This goes past the PC - Tehnologies not talked about as prosumer – yet I believe will be at heart of DIY in future – voice recognition and gps.

Investment follows innovation and acceptance (and sometimes, profits). So why are two Web 1.0 old guys here tonight? Because it’s happening again – what happened in New York in 1994 and 1995 and 1996 . Innovation (and I hope, not an overvaluation bubble).

Technorati Tags: prosumer | toffler | web 2.0 | feedburner | NYSIA

Prosumers on March

The Astounding Trickster and I will be panel-bound on Monday evening here in New York, hosting a discussion on DIY media technology up at JPMorgan Chase from 6 to 8 pm. Full details are here. Guests will include smart people from iGuitar, FeedBurner, MotionBox, and a little outfit known in the technology trade as IBM. Thanks to NYSIA for hosting. Should be a lot of fun, and there may - I stress, may - be some live guitar-playing.

That 70s Show

Back in season two of The Sopranos, in an episode in which nothing much happens - no ventricle-charged bloodshed, no real turning points, the kind of week that drives the obsessive plot-sitters wild with frustration - Tony Soprano is forced to report for duty every day as an executive at the waste management company he owns. With the Feds closing in, his lawyer advises the boss to stay out of the strip club and away from the streets. As with every week in this brilliantly-written series, the episode was its own discreet chapter and it ran along a crooked road to this soundtrack:

Disco Inferno - The Trammps
Gotta Serve Somebody - Bob Dylan
More Than a Feeling - Boston
Space Invader - The Pretenders
You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory - Johnny Thunders

The songs were perfect; against an almost casual lack of action, they portrayed much of the underlying tension in the life of a mobster. And man, they took me back.

Music propels The Sopranos, and so much of it was either recorded in - or inspired by - the 1970s, and a certain style of life here in the low-down middle atlantic states of that wonderful, dogshit time. Although the backdrop is the real estate-charged world of turn-of-the-millenium north Jersey, the hoods who make up the revolving central cast are leather-clad, picaresque hot-rod jockeys riding the Turnpike of 1977 or so, flipping 8-tracks into the console, sucking on the embers of an old joint,  and downshifting battered Camaros past the exit signs.

Line up Tony's crew in black and white in the parking lot of the Bada Bing, and they look much like an aging band of northeast classic rockers, with paunches, thinning hair, and leather coats - the E Street Band in their 40s and 50s. Oh yeah, one of them is the E Street Band in hs 50s - Steve Van Zandt, a musician of singularly good historical taste, who no doubt inhabits the soundtrack of The Sopranos just as well as he fills the greasy pompadour of Silvio. Van Zandt's wardrobe for the show is amazingly like his threads for the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour - no accident there, I think.

Indeed, outside of Tony's thoroughly modern children and their plot lines, every character in The Sopranos has that 70s grime on them - before unleaded gas, before environmental controls on the refineries of Elizabeth, before new graffiti-free subway cars, before a sterile Times Square. And yeah, before the unrelenting Federal prosecution of the 80s made the Soprano crew into pure fantasy. Although he's the youngest member of the gang, Christopher Moltisanti is the clearest 70s throwback in the cast, played to spectacular precision by Michael Imperioli - those of us who grew up in Yonkers in the 70s knew this guy, and I suspect this goes for Belmont, for Queens, for Brooklyn, for Newark, for Philly, and onward down the seaboard. The character is pitch perfect, although at the extreme range of violence - his sensibilities toward life, his priorities, are closer to The Seven-ups (that underrrated 70s car-chase opera), than to the old-time gangsters of The Godfather.

At the center, of course, is James Gandolfini, whose habitation of Tony Soprano has certainly ruined him for future lead roles. As Chris is the young Tony, living his 70s now, Tony just looks back. He only looks back. There are few clues to what he thinks about the future, what he wants to do, or really, how he wants to live. Everything is about the past - an elegaic but unsympathetic view of the past. Tony talks about his younger days on the therapist's couch, but when he walks into the kitchen singing Aqualung, you're back there.

Sunday's episode indulged that 70s symbolism to the max, with its noirish, filthy carnival scenes, the short leather jackets, the focus on cars and drugs, the big hair, and the music. Over the course of its run, repeat musical quotations have framed the action, with pulll quotes from Jefferson Airplane, Booker T and the MGs, Cream and Eric Clapton, Paul Simon, The Eagles, Boston, Led Zeppelin, Steve Miller Band, Stones, Tom Petty, Elvis Costello, and Steely Dan. No accident that Silvio tried to lure the outed gay gang member back with backstage passes to the big Blood, Sweat, and Tears show.

This week, as Christopher fell back into heroin and self-hatred, the score returned to Johnny Thunders - the ultimate destructive 70s era New York rocker. The carnival faded to near black and white: deep, horrific colors like a faded print of the French Connection. And Thunders and the Heartbreakers lurched into a live, raucous version of Pipeline - no doubt played in some dive club in Brooklyn circa '78, filled with half-drunk, leather-clad guys like Christopher Moltisanti.

Bubble Boy

[from flickr: David Blaine, originally uploaded by your pal Matt.]

Over on the West Side, a 32-year-old man from Brooklyn floats in a bubble. His clear plastic womb is heated to the perfect body temperature. He takes nutrition and oxygen from tubes, and expels waste through other tubes. He can see a glassy, gauzy, watery version of life as it walks by him at Lincoln Center, but he is alone, cut off.

David Blaine is a media hound, using his "street" stunt/illusions to sell items embroidered with his name and likeness. My friend Andrea messaged me yesterday and said "you should write about this guy and what a waste of time it is for the media to cover this while people are dying in Iraq." So I looked into the matter. And I was immediately struck that Blaine might be after bigger game wtih his week-in-a-bubble trick.

I think he's portraying George Bush.

And quite cleverly as well. In today's Times, Maureen Dowd's column kicker has President Bush playing hooky from his intractable, self-created Iraq disaster - oblvious to the damage. She quotes an upcoming Vanity Fair article by Todd Purdum in which Vice-President Cheney admits to a zero tolerance for any healthy human self-doubt at all. These guys are floating free in viscous, semi-cear, warm and cozy liquid, attached by tubes to the rest of the world - a thin, pure oxygen version of reality.

Still and all, Blaine's planned stunt at the end of his week in the bubble is an even scarier portrayal. Next Monday on ABC, he will be throw in stranglin chains into deep water with no breathing apparatus, and will be expected to escape while holding his breath.

A brilliant portryal, in my book - of the American soldier in Iraq.