The Hitch

The introduction is unintentionally hilarious--why bother eating oatmeal for your cholesterol if you knock it back with Scotch, cigarettes and prosciutto?--but the man is staggeringly intelligent and remains one of my favorite writers. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Christopher Hitchens:

http://radaronline.com/features/2007/04/christopher_hitchens_god_is_not_great_1.php

Another gem unearthed in the pre-move excavation:

Q: Does the glamour part of show business put you off?

A: No. Not at all. I love it. It's dress-up. I like all that. It would be awful to lose that. It's like the monarchy. I might not necessarily approve of what it represents, but I'd miss the hats.

--Emma Thompson, Vanity Fair, February 1996. (Interview by Kevin Sessums, photo by Annie Leibovitz.)

At the risk of sounding ethnocentric...

...I'm appalled that such practices continue in any part of the world for any reason, whether it be religious, cultural, or economic. It's just wrong:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/07/05/damon.india.widows/index.html

Everything about this makes me sad

Lauryn Hill is deeply talented and there was a time she seemed lit from within. I hope she finds her way out of the miasma:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/06/29/HILL.TMP

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/shookdown/2007/06/damn_lauryn_hills_train_wreck.php

On a blonde right-wing commentator

Humans die through one of five ways:

• Homicide
• Suicide
• Accident (falling off the roof, etc.)
• Weather (flood, hurricane, et al)
• Illness

An affluent person in the Western world is most likely to succumb to the latter.

Said commentator enjoys making jokes about death in the Edwards family, which would be out of bounds for either party at any time, but seems particularly venal given the state of Elizabeth Edwards' cancer.

And yet, where Mrs. Edwards is, said commentator will one day be, in all probability.

Remember Lee Atwater?

Enough said.

The Rainn King:

Today I encountered a real estate agent who didn't know the square footage of the condominium he was showing.

"I think it's around seven hundred," he said offhandedly.

"Do you know for certain?" I asked.

"No. I left the flyer in my car," he replied, visibly annoyed, as if I'd snatched a fry from his plate or flicked him in the balls.

Perhaps he was having an off-day or is the throes of an existential crisis, unsure if he wants to spend his finite time hawking overpriced conversion units that reek of Hungry Man Dinners and cat piss. But mostly, he seemed bad at his job, a walking refutation of social Darwinism. And also, kind of a schmo.

Which is why, tonight, I salute Rainn Wilson, a.k.a. Dwight Schrute on the U.S. version of "The Office". I have no idea what Wilson is like as a person (and for all I know, he's delightful), but that's not the point. In a world teeming with gas-siphoning scofflaws and pencil-chewing half-wits, the shruggingly disdainful and those who phone it in, Wilson embodies Schrute with the precision and vigor of a heart surgeon on Red Bull. He is, quite simply, good at his job.

And in all forms, good is worth noting.

"I have no desire to go back to Iraq, but here, it's almost like a prison. I want stability, a house, car. I want to get married, to have a life."

Today is World Refugee Day:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/06/20/damon.iraqrefugees/index.html

I just watched President Bush explain on CNN...

...why he vetoed the embryonic stem cell research bill.

I won't address the intellectual and moral incongruity of a man seemingly untroubled by tens of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths, yet protective of life in its least developed form. And I was going to be flip and joke that if it would cure CFIDS, I would support research that harvested arms and legs from my neighbors' kids.

But the underlying issue--more so than any religious underpinnings-- is that the man does not understand the exigency of circumstances for those who live with chronic illness, injury, or pain, nor how it impacts the lives of their friends, families, and lovers.

In a strange way, he's lucky.

I love the happy parts, too...

...but this might be excessive:

http://fleshbot.com/sex/sexy-science-corner/how-to-see-your-vagina--from-the-inside-270624.php

Could get interesting if they use (hardening chocolate syrup) Magic Shell, though.

Hippie kids report mass sightings of blonde yeti in aviator shades

JR covers Bonnaroo for MSNBC:

http://bonnaroo.msnbc.msn.com/

Unless you're a communist or something

Turns out listening to the Pixies' "Here Comes Your Man", Outkast's "Hey Ya", the Who's "The Kids Are Alright", Oasis' "Up in the Sky", the White Stripes' "Hotel Yorba", and Weezer's "The Good Life" sequentially and at earbleed level is akin to 50 cc's of seratonin injected through the skull and directly into the cerebral cortex.

Occasionally, it is that simple.

Armistead Maupin Lives:

Salon's Laura Miller wrote of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City books, "As with the Beatles, everyone seems to like Maupin's Tales--and, really, why would you want to find someone who didn't?"

Maupin's work is smart and engaging and tastier than picnic table cobler on a warm June night. The Night Listener and the TotC series were the best part of some otherwise hideous couchbound weeks in '02 and '03 and I'm delighted that his newest, Michael Tolliver Lives, is on stands now.

While I might never forgive the editor who declined to let me interview him and assigned a Q & A with a video-installation artist instead (yeah, I know), I did enjoy Maupin's recent tete a tete with EW:

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20041807,00.html

And mad props to my parents, who not only read "The Cousinfucker" (see yesterday's entry)...

...but who just called to tell me how much they enjoyed it.

That cinches it: no old age home for you guys.

"The Cousinfucker"

My short story, "The Cousinfucker", is in the June issue of the lit journal, Hobart:

http://hobartpulp.com/website/june/dremousis.html

"The sun struggles up another beautiful day/ And I felt glad in my own suspicious way...

...Despite the contradiction and confusion
Felt tragic without reason
There's malice and there's magic in every season..."

Goddamnit, Seattle. Again with the Tevas.

My third piece for Esquire is here:

The Soul Singer in the Shadows

She was Miles Davis' second wife with a killer set of pipes and attitude to spare. For the first time in decades, Betty Davis talks about walking away from the business.

By Litsa Dremousis

5/31/2007, 10:01 AM

If you listen for it, it's there. The faint hint of a growl, like a Bengal tiger rising from a nap. "It doesn't matter," she says when asked if she prefers to be called "Betty" or "Ms. Davis" and the voice is unmistakably that of the legendary funk songstress, the woman who roared "I said if I'm in luck/ I just might get picked up" at the start of her self-titled debut, Betty Davis, thirty-four years ago.

Light in the Attic Records has just re-issued Davis' first two discs, Betty Davis and 1974's They Say I'm Different, Molotov cocktails of sticky sex and unchained rhythmic propulsion. To support the re-releases, she agrees to what is only her seventh interview in the past three decades, conducted by phone from her home in Pittsburgh. She is engaged but reticent, politely and frequently answering questions with the fewest words possible. When asked if her epoch-defining years sometimes feel as if they happened to someone else, her reply is a single snare drum kick with zero elaboration: "Yes."

More:

http://www.esquire.com/the-side/music/betty-davis-053107

This makes me want to move to England...

...right this second:

http://www.winterbournerabbits.co.uk/index.htm

Too fucking tired to concoct a witty headline using the word "filter":

My review of the Betty Davis reissues, Betty Davis and They Say I'm Different, is in the current print issue of Filter and online now:


http://www.filter-mag.com/index.php?id=14465&c=3

I interviewed Annie Stela in the fall and it ran in Filter's Winter '07 print issue. It went online earlier this week:


http://www.filter-mag.com/index.php?id=14508&c=2

Best Sitemeter discovery ever:

Someone in Hsinying, Taiwan landed here tonight after Googling "pull your shit together".

Intelligence and stupidity crop up everywhere, so you can't assume the Justice Department is...

...idiot-free, any more than you can assume the guy who rang up my organic tomato soup yesterday doesn't have Proust tucked in his messenger bag. (The latter is entirely possible: it's one of the things I like most about Seattle.)

That said, isn't there some sort of bar you have to clear, some nominal I.Q. requirement, that precludes the Justice Department hiring someone whose legal reasoning skills amount to:

"I know I crossed the line. But I didn't mean to."

Perhaps Monica Goodling's next job should involve a doodle pad and colored pens.

From Reuters:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070523/pl_nm/usa_prosecutors_dc

[Sidenote: Yes, editor friends, I know there should be question mark outside the above quotation marks. It's ineffective in this context.]