Blues for a Summer Monday: "I May Be Getting Old, But I've Got Young Fashioned Ways"

Muddy Waters: Young Fashioned Ways.

44 and the Debt-Ceiling Gambit: Death Struggle or Dance of the Wallflowers ?

Who's right and who's wrong, where do we go from here?  The Financial Times reviews the circumstances of the current Dance of the Wallflowers in Washington, as the President proffers and the GOP, at the final moment, continues to slink away, playing hard and harder to get. No deal intended, just squeeze the administration and watch them squirm.  Leadership, anyone?

"It was too little leadership, too late. To make this strategy succeed, Mr Obama needed the pressure of public opinion to force Republicans to compromise. That pressure is still too weak, and the time to fix this is running out fast. Mr Obama has infuriated much of his party – again. And he has failed to budge a pathologically intransigent Republican party – again. He has come to a moment that could settle the fate of his presidency.

"Does he press on for the big deal, fighting for public support at this absurdly late hour, risking even more? Or does he climb down from his threat to veto a smaller measure, settle on terms dictated by the GOP, and look still further diminished? Neither choice looks promising. Meanwhile, the debt-ceiling clock runs down."

More here

As one analyst opined, is Barack Obama our greaterest Republican President ever?

Washington Post's Ezra Klein: "Perhaps this is just the logical endpoint of two years spent arguing over what Barack Obama is — or isn’t. Muslim. Socialist. Marxist. Anti-colonialist. Racial healer. We’ve obsessed over every answer except the right one: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican from the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.


If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a health-care plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal coverage; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans staked out in the early ’90s — and often, well into the 2000s." More here

Apres Storm Tune: Comes a Time by Neil Young

Thursday Afternoon - It's Raining in Here - Brooklyn Heights

Issued by The National Weather Service


New York City, NY

Thu, Jul 7, 2011, 4:15 PM EDT

Local Radar Map

Updated Jul 7, 2011, 4:10pm EDT Weather in Motion®
Enlarge Map Get WeatherReadyWeatherReady Safety Tips

More Severe Weather Readiness Tips

National and Local Weather News

Watches & Warnings Explained

Storm Watch (video)

... STRONG THUNDERSTORM WILL IMPACT HUDSON... KINGS (BROOKLYN)... NEW YORK (MANHATTAN)... QUEENS AND SOUTHWESTERN NASSAU COUNTIES...

AT 410 PM EDT... NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR WAS TRACKING A STRONG THUNDERSTORM NEAR BROOKLYN HEIGHTS... OR NEAR CROWN HEIGHTS... AND MOVING EAST AT 15 MPH.

SMALL HAIL... AND WINDS UP TO 40 MPH ARE EXPECTED WITH THIS STORM. IN ADDITION... VERY HEAVY RAIN... WITH RAINFALL RATES OF UP TO AN INCH AN HOUR... IS OCCURRING WITH THIS STORM. THIS COULD CAUSE PONDING OF WATER ON ROADWAYS... AND MINOR FLOODING OF POOR DRAINAGE AREAS.

Report here

Summer 2011 Thus Far -- What's Going On

HBO’s Game of Thrones

The Addams Family with Roger Rhees, Brooke Shields and Brad Oscar

Beach Bar in Atlantic City on a Wednesday Afternoon

STARMAN – the Yuri Gagarin Story

LIFE by Keith Richards

Beginners – a film by Mike Mills

Midnight in Paris - a film by Woody Allen

Bridesmaids - a film by Paul Feig

Whitney Museum - Cory Arcangel

Jewish Museum - Maria Kalman

New York Sports Club – every other day, forever

EXAMINED LIVES by James Miller

PHYSICS OF THE FUTURE - Dr. Michio Kaku

CODA: MUST READ: NY TIMES on the Political (and Personal) Strategies That Led to Marriage Equality in the Empire State

Today, a must read front page article by Michael Barbaro that goes behind the scenes to track the efforts, under the leadership of Governor Andrew Cuomo, that resulted in passage of the Marriage Equality legislation in the largest state in the US.

Explaining Mr. Cuomo's key role: "Something else weighed on him, too: the long shadow of his father, Mario, who rose to national prominence as the conscience of the Democratic Party, passionately defending the poor and assailing the death penalty. During his first few months in office, the younger Mr. Cuomo had achieved what seemed like modern-day miracles by the standards of Albany — an austere on-time budget and a deal to cap property taxes. But, as Mr. Cuomo explained by phone to his father a few weeks ago, he did not want those accomplishments to define his first year in office.

“They are operational,” he told his father. Passing same-sex marriage, by contrast, “is at the heart of leadership and progressive government.”
“I have to do this.”
The players, the advocates, the opponents, the Roman Catholic Church, were all brilliantly orchestrated in what may in fact be considered the turning point in this latest step in the long history of the progressive and civil rights movements in New York State.More here

Also in today's NY TIMES, the new Sunday Review section, which seems largely a design twist on the Week in Review, although, even after a quick scan.\, I miss the wit of Conan O'Brien, Jay Leno, et al, and the selection of editorial cartoons from across the nation, which was apparently replaced by the Times first color comic.strip. More here

CODA: Tarantino's DJANGO UNCHAINED to Star Foxx, DiCaprio, Jackson, and Walz to Star

Variety, via the UK Guardian, reports on casting for Quentin Tarantino's slavery-era epic, Django Unchained.

Jamie Foxx will take the lead in Quentin Tarantino's latest film, the western-influenced Django Unchained, according to Variety. The Oscar-winning actor was selected over stars such as Idris Elba, Terrence Howard and Chris Tucker for the role of a freed slave who learns to become a contract killer and eventually returns to his old plantation to retrieve his wife. Kerry Washington, who starred opposite Foxx in Ray, is in line to take the latter role. Leonardo DiCaprio has already been cast as the plantation's sadistic owner, Calvin Candie, with Tarantino regular Samuel L Jackson as a sinister slave named Stephen who does his bidding.

Will Smith evidently was the first actor to be named in connection with the role of Django, but he appears to have turned it down. Reviews of Tarantino's leaked screenplay suggest it is peppered liberally with the n-word, which some critics speculate may have made Smith uncomfortable with the role.

More details here


DITHOB previously reproted on the leaked script for Django Unchained here

Flatbush Solstice

 After sunrise, June 21, 2011

 Anticipating the Summer Solstice

Guinevere, contemplating the summer solstice

photos by Tony Napoli

The summer solstice is the longest day of the year, respectively, in the sense that the length of time elapsed between sunrise and sunset on this day is a maximum for the year.

The summer solstice occurs exactly when the Earth's and the moon's axial tilt is most inclined towards the sun, at its maximum of 23° 26'. Though the summer solstice is an instant in time, the term is also colloquially used like Midsummer to refer to the day on which it occurs. Except in the polar regions (where daylight is continuous for many months), the day on which the summer solstice occurs is the day of the year with the longest period of daylight. The summer solstice occurs in June in the Northern Hemisphere north of the Tropic of Cancer (23°26'N) and in December in the Southern Hemisphere south of the Tropic of Capricorn (23°26'S. The Sun reaches its highest position in the sky on the day of the summer solstice. More here 

Summer solstice on June 21, 2011 is 17:16 UTC (coordinated universal time) which is four hours ahead of daylight savings. So the summer solstice will occur in New York City (including Flatbush) at 3:16 PM (13:16).

2011	June 21, 17:16

Society of the Spectacle: Et, Tu, Zizek? But Maybe Not

According to the New York Post, Lady Gaga and another recent fave of DITHOB, Slovenian cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek, are buds. Since it is the The NY Post, one can easily interpret it as a zing or a knock or just a tittilating namecheck on either Zizek or Ms. Germanotta, but evidently they were in touch during Lady G's spring tour, talking "feminism and collective human creativity." (Also: As he's written, he sees the meat dress as a nod to "the consistent linking in the oppressive imaginary of the patriarchy of the female body and meat, of animality and the feminine.")

While Zizek, Man of the Mind, is no doubt a babe magnet, The Post implies a little amour feu. But Dr. Z says, "I am terribly sorry to disappoint you, but this is all a fake! The only thing I share with her is the support for the strike [Gaga showed up at a lecturer's union strike in London earlier this year]." 

The Interpersonal Circumplex and the Papers of Dr. Timothy Leary

Before he became synonomous with the psychedelic drug culture of the 1960s, Dr. Timothy Leary was a former West Point cadet and a trained psychologist who developed the interpersonal circumplex, a model for conceptualizing, organizing, and assessing interpersonal behavior, traits, and motives. The interpersonal circumplex is defined by two orthogonal axes: a vertical axis (of status, dominance, power, or control) and a horizontal axis (of solidarity, friendliness, warmth, or love)

During the twentieth century, there were a number of efforts by personality psychologists to create comprehensive taxonomies to describe the most important and fundamental traits of human nature. Developed in 1957 by Timothy Leary,  the circumplex is a circular continuum of personality formed from the intersection of two base axes: Power and Love. The opposing sides of the power axis are dominance and submission, while the opposing sides of the love axis are love and hate. 

Leary argued that all other dimensions of personality can be viewed as a blending of these two axes. For example, a person who is stubborn and inflexible in their personal relationships might graph her personality somewhere on the arc between dominance and love. However, a person who exhibits passive–aggressive tendencies might find herself best described on the arc between submission and hate. The main idea of the Leary Circumplex is that each and every human trait can be mapped as a vector coordinate within this circle.

Furthermore, the Leary Circumplex also represents a kind of bull's eye of healthy psychological adjustment. Theoretically speaking, the most well-adjusted person of the planet could have their personality mapped at the exact center of the circumplex, right at the intersection of the two axes, while individuals exhibiting extremes in personality would be located on the circumference of the circle.

The Leary Circumplex offers three major benefits as a taxonomy. It offers a map of interpersonal traits within a geometric circle. It allows for comparison of different traits within the system. It provides a scale of healthy and unhealthy expressions of each trait.

Later, of course, Dr. Leary would later become famous for his controversial LSD experiments at Harvard.  Dr. Leary's papers were recently purchased by the New York City Public Library. They contain historical and cultural nuggets, such as Allen Ginsberg's early experience with psychedelics: “The first time I took psilocybin — 10 pills — was in the fireside social setting in Cambridge,” Ginsberg wrote in a blow-by-blow description of his experience taking synthesized hallucinogenic mushrooms at Leary’s stately home. At one point Ginsberg, naked and nauseated, began to feel scared, but then “Professor Leary came into my room, looked in my eyes and said I was a great man.”

The NY Times reports that "The material documents the evolution of the tweedy middle-aged academic into a drug guru, international outlaw, gubernatorial candidate, computer software designer and progenitor of the Me Decade’s self-absorbed interest in self-help.
The archive will not be available to the public or scholars for 18 to 24 months, as the library organizes the papers. A preview of the collection, however, reveals a rich record not only of Leary’s tumultuous life but also of the lives of many significant cultural figures in the ’60, ’70s and ’80s."

Leary, who died in 1996, coined the phrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out” and was labeled by Richard M. Nixon as “the most dangerous man in America.” He was present in Zelig-like fashion at some of the era’s epochal events. Thousands of letters and papers from Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Charles Mingus, Maynard Ferguson, Arthur Koestler, G. Gordon Liddy and even Cary Grant — an enthusiastic LSD user — are in the boxes.


“How about contributing to my next prose masterpiece by sending me (as you sent Burroughs) a bottle of SM pills,” Kerouac wrote Leary, referring to psilocybin. “Allen said I could knock off a daily chapter with 2 SMs and be done with a whole novel in a month.”

More details here

DITHOB met Dr. Leary in passing in the late 1970s, when a nexus of Brooklyn and former NYU pals and I attended a show at the Bottom Line in the Village. I don't remember the performer. But I do recall that we were for reasons totally unknown to us seated at a fairly large and prominent table by Alan Pepper, one of the owners, who then seated Dr. Leary at an unoccupied adjoining table. Dr. Leary, who was released from prison in 1978, sat with a female friend, appearing mellow and healthy. We said hello to the good Doctor and proceeded to enjoy the show. Someone nudged me at one point and we saw someone furtively smoking a hand-rolled cigarette before the management could tell them to put it out.  It was proferred to Dr. Leary, but he smiled and waved it off politely. By that time, no doubt, he had had enough problems.

More on Dr. Leary here 

By the Way --Happy Bloomsday

Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature it has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement".
Ulysses chronicles the passage of Leopold Bloom through Dublin during an ordinary day, 16 June 1904 (the day of Joyce's first date with his future wife, Nora Barnacle). The title alludes to Odysseus (Latinised into Ulysses), the hero of Homer's Odyssey, and establishes a series of parallels between characters and events in Homer's poem and Joyce's novel (e.g., the correspondence of Leopold Bloom to Odysseus, Molly Bloom to Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus to Telemachus). Joyce fans worldwide now celebrate 16 June as Bloomsday.

Ulysses is approximately 265,000 words in length and uses a lexicon of 30,030 words (including proper names, plurals and various verb tenses), divided into eighteen episodes. Since publication, the book attracted controversy and scrutiny, ranging from early obscenity trials to protracted textual "Joyce Wars." Ulysses' stream-of-consciousness technique, careful structuring, and experimental prose—full of puns, parodies, and allusions, as well as its rich characterisations and broad humour, made the book a highly regarded novel in the Modernist pantheon. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses first on its list of the 100

CODA:NY Assembly Passes Gay Marriage Bill 80-63; Legislation Moves to GOP-controlled State Senate

NY Times reports that the GOP conference in State Senate stalled on NYS Gay Marriage Bill, although Dean Skelos, Senate Majority Leader, reports that discussions are continuing. More here

The Assembly Wednesday passed a bill to legalize gay marriage while Senate Republicans battled over whether to let the measure come to a floor vote. The measure passed 80 to 63, the lowest margin in the four times it has been approved by the Assembly since 2007.

The NY Daily Nes reports: "It feels different this time because I'm very hopeful it will pass the Senate and become law this year," said Assembly bill sponsor Daniel O'Donnell (D-Manhattan), one of a handful of gay state lawmakers.

Gov. Cuomo, who has made gay marriage a priority, crowed, "We are on the verge of a pinnacle moment for this state."

The fate of the bill is still up in the air in the GOP-controlled Senate, where 31 senators are on record as supporting it - one shy of the 32 needed for passage.

More here

Passage of Marriage Equality in New York State: At the Tipping Point

Governor Andrew Cuomo isn't walking on water, yet, but his strong mandate, coupled with his administration's exercise of remarkable political skill, and willingness to spend political capital as quickly as it is earned, maybe shaping up to make the Empire State the next state to make Marriage Equality/aka Gay Marriage/aka Same-Sex Marriage legal.

It was DITHOB's belief that, since Conservative Party boss Mike Long had promised to take names of any politicians who required his party's line and deny them that access in the upcoming, many politicos were playing their cards very close to the vest, awaiting what appeared a groundswell of support for this legislation.

It is appearing more and more that a turning point in Albany has been reached.

NY Times - One vote away as a GOP elected official agrees to support legislation here

NY1- reports the bill is now getting a lot of GOP support. Details here

Politico reported earlier this week that "In a development with national implications, New York is looking more and more like it will become the next state to legalize gay marriage as a bill gains momentum in the legislature ahead of a landmark vote that could come by midweek.
“I believe that votes will be there for marriage equality if the vote happens,” Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Monday afternoon. “I’ve had enough conversations with enough Republicans” to think the bill can succeed.

More from Politico here

Quentin Tarantino's "Django Unchained" -- The Dark(er) Side of the Old, Weird America

Destroy the Brain offers an exciting and very very interesting script review by Michael Haffner of Quentin Tarantino's DJANGO UNCHAINED, anticipated as the filmmaker's unique take on the spaghetti western -- and slavery -- in 19th century America.

However, Haffner observes: "while it is said by many to be Tarantino’s take on the “spaghetti-western” films that served as an inspiration for him.  Though it includes nods to the genre made famous by Sergio Leone, it doesn’t exactly fit into this category.  In a lot of ways, it feels more like a  period-piece, character drama than anything else.  Sure, it takes place in the west and includes a few well staged gun-fights, but based on the structure of this script, never did I feel it would fit in that genre.  Like most of Tarantino’s scripts, it relies way too much on a larger cast of “colorful” characters to ever feel the gritty loneliness of “The Man With No Name” films.  This, I feel, is completely intentional.  Tarantino has set out to make his own film that incorporates elements of this gritty west, while also wanting to make a film that captures the times of the slavery movement in the south.  This script is much more concerned with recreating this landscape of hate, racism, and greed, than recreating iconic large-scale gun battles. .. It details this disgusting world so vividly that it will without a doubt offend people.  There is no doubt about it. "

Mr. Haffner's excellent full review appears here

DITHOB's Two Cents:  This script and concept seems to fit snugly with the entire Tarantino oeuvre, as well as the director's rumored "John Brown" film. Like roots music, Bob Dylan, and outsider/folk art, Tarantino seems to be peering under the wagon tarp to get a good look at American culture today by givings its antecedents a good going over. You've got to be in it to win it.

Weinerville: Why DC Colleagues Want Anthony to Hit the Road

Interesting article by Steve Kornacki in Salon.com on why Congressional Dems are not supporting Congressman Weiner when his misstep -- while personally humiliating -- is arguably less malfeasant than those ethical and other lapses committed by colleagues in his own party. Hint: Get thee to a bookstore, Congressman, and get a copy of "How to Win Friends and Influence People." Hot-dogging (ahem), alone, just won't do it.

Full story here