3:0 and we're going strong!!!

Heres the thing......

Dear Rein and Ken,

Well I watched all of that Holland - Portugal match and I gotta say it was shit. I like boxing just as much as the next guy, but what the fuck was that?

Anyway, miss you guys and hope you drowned your sorrows, and then pissed on every Portuguese citizen you could find.

I'm certain Italian ex-pats in Australia will be lynched tonight, but I don't care. We're in the 8, and that's great. Pray for my brothers!!!

Best,
Dr. Chialvo - Farnessi (late of Lucca and Piedmont)

Last Call- anybody need anything from Amsterdam?

Goodmorning, Beautiful Girl!

Hang the Uruguayan!

Don't read Philip Roth's American Pastoral if you hold any illusions about controlling your own destiny, entertain secret, willowy notions of living out the American Dream, or have kids. Phil will pierce your private ambitions with a deft stroke through the scrotum and keep jamming until he comes out your rectum. It's a circuitous route, but it's a desperately painful one. If Tuna wants books that capture the spirit of the times, well how about the spirit of changing times, most notably, the shift from Eisenhower's America of golden opportunities to LBJ's USA of subversion at any cost. What happens if the perfect illustration of America's special place in God's heart has a daughter who wants to tear down everything about the worldview that created his place and time and standing? It's heart-wrenching and horrifying and hilarious, and it shatters any illusion you might quietly be clinging to about shaping your children's lives. I haven't slept right for days, and I've developed an ugly twitch in my left shoulder that suggests incipient heart trouble. Yes, Phil says, no matter how decent you are or how honestly you play by the rules or how fairly you treat your fellow man, life can shit all over you with such great force that you'll swear the man upstairs has projectile diarrhea. Is the book any good, given that it has landed itself a Pulitzer and a spot in the top 5 of that recent NY Times poll of the best American novels of the last 25 years? Like Sabbath's Theater, it has sections of sustained virtuosity, and sections of repetitious tedium. I'd have cut 100 pages. That said, does anybody have more to say about the second half of the American 20th century? No, says the dude on the couch on Lawton.

Fuck Soccer, Let's Rumble

Today is the first day of my holiday, and I don't know what to do with myself. I've already done the yard work, cleaned the barbecue, gone to the gym, picked up more flonase, caught part of all three World Cup games, talked Brazilian women with the cashier at the burrito joint, changed three diapers, read 70 pages in American Pastoral, listened to the Rise of Hitler in the car, and cleaned my ears. It's now 2:47 PST and I'm plum out of ideas. Two kids will be up in an hour. Suggestions?

Place Your World Cup Bets...

Hup Holland!

If you look over the list of Nobel Prize winners for literature, it’s amazing how many vowels you’ll find, and how few of those unpronounceable names you’ll recognize. I haven’t seen so many umlauts since the Huskers were passing out promos at the hardcore show at Fender’s in Long Beach, and I came back from that with a broken nose and a strange sense of euphoria. But I digress. Every now and again, I get a momentary inspiration to check out some of those foreign “greats,” and usually find myself waking up on the couch with the book splayed across my chest and dark spittle crusting at both sides of my mouth. Mojo usually sounds like a pretty good alternative at that point.

Not so, however, with this week’s try, Par (umlaut city!) Lagerkvist’s Barabbas, the story of the man who, allegedly, when Pilate asked the crowd of screaming Jews whom they would free, they chose instead of Christ. For some, Christian anti-Semitism is born here, as the blame for crucifixion shifts from the Romans to the Jews. It’s Mel Gibson’s favorite Christmas story. His kids get a big kick out of it. Anyway, Lagerkvist, who won the Nobel in 1951 after publishing this short novel/parable in 1950, evidently struggled with faith throughout his life and delivers this brief, imaginative post-exoneration life for the man Christians believed should have died instead of JC. Barabbas, who secretly witnesses Christ’s crucifixion at Golgotha and sees the skies turn black when he finally dies on the cross, tries and fails his whole life to truly believe. We follow him back from that scene to the bed of his fat lover, who wallows in his body and takes pleasure in his emotional apathy. We see his return to the cave of his fellow bandits, who find him so changed and so strange that they secretly plot to kill him before he disappears to their great relief. We see him enslaved and then chained to a true believer, whose childlike innocence and purity of belief torment the faithless Barabbas. And finally we see him exuberantly join in the burning of Rome, which he mistakenly believes is Christ bringing an end to the world and delivering the kingdom. In prison awaiting execution, he's offered one last chance at salvation, and the next day's crucifixion will determine his final choice.

You can read this on a number of levels, and I’m guessing that both devout Christians and godless existentialists could swing a thesis out of it. I’m also guessing that’s Lagerkvist's intent. It’s a haunting work that’s effecting in indefinable ways, so if you want something you can read in an afternoon that allows you to ponder some of the big questions without shoving them didactically down your throat, head for this dark, cobblestoned Swedish street.

My Great Grandparents;

14 when they came over from Lucca, 22 when married (wedding pic)

An Idiot to Not Appreciate Your Time

http://silkwormtributerecord.com/

All hail George Saunders' early stories, but the man's magic may have gone bye-bye. I just finished his novella from last year (takes an hour to read), The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, a not-so-thinly veiled Animal Farmesque satirical attack on the Bushies, and I was underwhelmed, to say the least. His targets are easy, the humor is smirk-producing at best, and there are few surprises. You will not see the Administration in any new ways, and most importantly for a Saunders story, I did not laugh once. Yea, comedy is very hard to do well, and maybe Georgie's well is all dried up. If so, too bad. The man was a breath of fresh air for two collections, and while I'll still check out the third (even though I haven't really enjoyed the stories in the collection that have already appeared elsewhere), my hope quotient is diminished. Funny- it's a bitch, ain't it?

It's impossible to read Daniel Ellsberg's Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, through any other modern lens but Iraq. And it has plenty to teach, or to remind, about how and why administrations that lock themselves away from contradictory positions fail to see the reality on the ground. But it also delivers an insider's account of how a devoted Cold Warrior could evolve into an anti-war activist in just a few years. It also provides plenty of specific evidence to back up your arguments for why the attacks in the Gulf of Tonkin never happened, why Richard Nixon is fucking insane, and how the Pentagon Papers came out. The last one was what I was most interested in, as I had the basics but never the detailed-laden story, and it's that story that really brings the book to life. Too much of the first part is building a case for Ellsberg's move from Cold War true believer, and while a necessary component, it goes on too long, especially the chapters on his time in Vietnam, which are too self-serving in an attempt to illustrate his manly courage in the field. OK, you raced around the most dangerous roads where no white man dared venture and instructed inept commanders while Charlie fired rounds above your head and stood guard while drunken South Vietnamese hefes spewed anti-American trash and hailed machine gun fire over your hut. We got it. You're a bad ass.

That said, the second half is both riveting and very, very disheartening for its depiction of the corruption of power and the sick recognition that it happened all over again and for many of the same reasons. One line from Kissinger that struck me and probably has as much explanatory power as anything else I've read about why we kept going in Vietnam when so many folks on the ground kept saying that the war could not be won: "Yea, things have been going badly, but that's because the previous administration did not know what it was doing. We do." I'm paraphrasing slightly, but it's the arrogance that rings so clearly. It's not only the contempt for the public, but the disdain for just about anybody else outside the inner circle. We know better, trust us, but just to be sure your puny brains don't misconstrue what we're trying to do, we'll lie over and over again to that guppy press and they'll turn our lies into the truth of public perception and then we can do whatever we damn well please. Near the very end of the book, when Ellsberg is finally exonerated for releasing the Pentagon Papers and Nixon's plumbers are being busted and cutting deals with the Feds and Tricky Dick is isolated and cursing the world and still increasing the secret bombing, somebody asks Ellsberg what good he believes the release of the Pentagon Papers and the entire anti-war movement has done: "None," he replies, adding that all the protests did nothing to stop Nixon and Kissinger from raining down bombs on innocent civilians, and while the implosion from Watergate and the psychiatrist office break-ins might have shortened the war slightly, the number of deaths during Nixon's time after he vowed publicly in '68 to withdraw with honor is staggering.

It's an old lesson but we just keep forgetting to tap ourselves on the shoulder and remind our lazy asses: if Congress and the press do not check Executive power, administrations will do what they want and lie about it. The nature of power being what it is, human beings and human institutions need strong restraints, and Congress has to show more wisdom and less machismo in the future when real, imagined or constructed threats appear. Instead of racing to give future Admins the blank check of expedient war powers, let's all take a deep breath, put the flags down and measure the threat honestly and prudently. Twice now Congress has laid down and told an Administration that hey, guys, we trust you, and look at the results. We're always gonna get nutjob execs drunk on theory and power looking to etch their names in the history books through foreign wars. Bush is just Nixon without the brain or the self-consciousness and inferiority issues. Will the press, the Congress and the people ever remember that to give too few, too much power is to ask for corruption and lies and aggressively bad decisions? Doubt it. See ya in 2032, when we smoke out the atheistic biotechers looking to push the post-human future in the Droid's Republic of Korea. Ought to be a hell of a ride.

Black Black Love of our Lord
I celebrated our Dark Lord's holiday by heading down to Rooster's Roadhouse in Alameda to check out Black Stigma, a five-piece Acalanes band opening a metal fest to honor Satan. I chatted nicely with the boys for a few minutes before the show but quickly made my exit so they could get their evil on away from teaching influences and headed for the bar to order an Arrogant Bastard draft from what looked like an escapee from the Philipino leper society. She called me hun and the night was on. After our boys' first song, the audience filled with tattooed metal boys with weedwhacker hair slabs began chanting at the sixteen year olds and then finally after a moment's silence, one dreadlocked cretan screamed, "Are you dudes in high school?" The lead singer from my sophomore English class quickly responded, "Yes, we are all in high school, and this week is Finals." The blazingly hot metalettes standing next to me at the bar swooned, and continued to make rude gestures and to utter suggestive coos about things they'd like to do to said 16 year old boy that had me outraged, proud, and jealous. He continued to ramble about the band's incompetence, their ignorance of any one in the decidedly white trash establishment, and the number of cds they had for sale. My breast swelled. They finished their four song set to "fuck yeas" and "you guys are sick" and I made my way for the exit. I paid my deserved compliments to the band and heard this from the swirling haired bassist: "Dude, you made my night. Thanks for coming, dude." I've never felt more like a dad in my life. If this is the apocalypse, pour me a milkshake. All the right people, obviously and as always, celebrate the juju. Long live the mark of OUR beautiful beast!

There is a god...

New Bob Forrest songs

I know that dude...

Say Hello To Miss World Cup, from Togo