This blog is stuck and can no longer continue in its current mode (even as it remains inactive). Originally conceived to pioneer what my friend calls "decadent conservatism," I tried to show that the young fogey can have the most fun. Also, I was filling the hours of the day at an internship. The blog introduced me to a wide circle of people, the new Dandies, the fashinistas, and many other incredible bloggers - some have become good friends. I had a persona and soon after that, a profession.

And that last bit is the problem with the blog. I now spend most of my political observations in my articles and (blog posts!) at the magazine. And "Decadent conservatism"  became irrelevant once its only two spokesmen (my friend and I) got engaged (Not to each other!). The diversity of subjects I was interested in has also made the blog difficult. I tried to write as if everyone just sort of knew what I was talking about - whether it was "paleoconservatism," baseball, liturgy, or dandyism. It didn't work. In trying to build and then serve an audience, I made the blog unpleasant to write. I had readers but nothing to write to them.

Also, my interests as a writer have evolved. Instead of little polemical notes about bookbags or free-traders, I've been writing short fiction, more "mainstream" projects, and pieces of writing that explore ideas through the events in my own life.

And so the blog is going to be revamped, and (possibly) redesigned. It's no longer going to be a blog for conservatives (of any prefix), or dandies, or traditionalists or sportsfans - though it may interest any of those people from time to time. It's just going to be my blog. I'll link to the things I write elsewhere - other than that, it should be as weird and idiosyncratic as I am.

What is happening to my Mets? After last season's tailspin finish which inspired me for the first time to use the word "flabbergasted" I was pleased to see the Mets shed one headache (Paul LoDuca) and added the best left-handed pitcher in baseball, Johan Santana. This would be the year the Mets couldn't coast (like 2006) or expect a World Series appearance to be handed to them (2007). I bought MLB.tv so I could furtively watch and listen to games in the office while writing about NAFTA or how McCain is so annoyingly McCainish. I've got plans to spend a weekend in Philly with the boys in April to catch the Mets first road trip to a legitimate I-95 Rival. I've even got some of the more imaginative Alyssa Milano-branded Mets gear in mind for my fiancée.

But Minaya's plan to surround Wright and Reyes with veterans is starting to unravel. My spring-training mellow is seriously being harshed. Yesterday, David Lennon reports on his blog that of the 12 of the 15 projected opening day position players are currently injured. Just look at that graphic from the Daily News above. Bunion! Seriously?

At least the injury report is entertaining. Brian Schneider isn't suffering from a concussion but rather had his "Bell rung in collision " Also, Endy Chavez is "allegedly close" to returning.

Please read my friend and colleague Dan McCarthy on The PoMo Russell Kirk in the latest Reason.

One of McCarthy's observations strikes me as extremely important:

There is indeed common ground here between Kirkian traditionalists and postmodernists. Both camps try to conscript the uncertainty principle, mathematician Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, and Einstein’s relativity into attacks on objectivity in other fields. The Kirkians and postmodernists share a fallacy, and ironically it is a species of scientism: They wrongly apply the ideas of advanced physics and mathematics to history. It turns out that when “science” casts doubt on objectivity, the otherwise science-skeptical Kirkians and postmodernists are all for it.

This is the one photo that could shock me out of my non-blogging state. Thank you Kyle Korver!

Yeah, so after promising to blog more, I write yet another overly personal and disquieting entry and stopped entirely for a few months. Sorry--sorta. I'm not sure how to please my audience of D.C. professionals, professional D.C. haters, stalkers, fashionistas, Mets fans, paleo-cons and traditional Catholics.

I've been writing some fiction in my spare time, and writing little pieces on sports for The American Spectator. My latest is on the murder of professional basketball in Seattle. Also, you'll be glad to know I'm still on my regular beat: the low I.Q. coteries found in hotel ballrooms. This time: CPAC 2008. I feel like Russell Crowe in Gladiator: Are you not entertained?!

You probably heard that my  friend, Bill Buckley died last week. My small contribution to the tributes is also at the Spectator. An old high school friend recently contacted me through Facebook. He was once a waiter at a restaurant Bill frequented. He writes

He was just about the most polite and well-spoken individual I have ever met and I was kind of in awe of him (although politically I can't say that I agree with him...) He would eat lunch with a bevy of ancient women and regal them for hours over several rum punches while his stretch limo waited outside for him. One time his wife dropped something, and I went to help him find it with a flashlight (the restaurant was very dimly lit) and he proceeded to take the flashlight from me and get down on his hands and knees and look for it himself. He also called me "Captain" all the time... and I liked that.

Instead of trying to please you all. I'll please myself on this blog. It will be as obcene as it sounds.

And yes, my Buckley tribute contains some news about my personal life. More on that soon.

I meant to write a long, reflective post about my fellow libertarians and paleo-conservatives and their (often disappointing) reaction to the Ron Paul newsletters. But that horrow show hasn't played itself out long enough to form valuable thoughts on it. Instead, I thought I’d mention a phone call I got a few hours ago - one that will haunt me for a week. But first, a little theological background

Evangelicals have an incredible confidence in their ability to understand Scripture. One of the central (and most radical) doctrines of the Protestant Reformation was that man could understand Holy Writ without any mediators (i.e. The Church, Tradition -etc…). Less then a decade ago, this confidence led me to take charge of my public high school’s Bible Club. We sought no official recognition from the school, and in turn the school was delighted not to recognize us. The people that came would have been horrified to know that I was on my way back into the Catholic Church but no one else would take care of it. I often prepared the week’s lessons while in my AP English class - taking occasional five-minute breaks to stare at my friend Andrea’s mini-skirts and the long pink legs that ran out of them.* That may not be what Luther imagined the consequence of Sola Scriptura.

Click to read more ...

 

Here it is, your exclusive look inside the office of The American Conservative - or at least a part of my desk during lunch. What's interesting here? Well There is the fact that I don't keep my books separated into any categories. There is some David Foster Wallace right near a huge biography of Jefferson Davis. Apparently I can't even keep my volumes of the Encyclopedia of Tariffs and Trade in U.S. History in their proper order and they oddly sit next to a collection of Truman Capote's fiction.

 

In the foreground there is my daily calendar which features pinup drawings from the late 50s and early 60s and a short story collection I'm working through - "Cheating at Canasta" by William Trevor - an amazing collection of well crafted stories by a sure-handed Irish author. Also, you can see my instruction manual for the camera itself. I might get flack for the Huckabee bumper sticker. All I can say is that as a reporter you tend to collect this stuff. On another part of my desk I have both the American and Isreali flags I took from a conference of Christian Zionists.

Looking over the picture it seems that the oddest concentration of books happens on the lefthand side. I have those encyclopedias next to a collection of Antonio Gramci's work, then Dave Egger's "How We Are Hungry" and then Hilaire Belloc's "The Servile State" and a biography of Mikhail Bakunin (which I loved).

Lots of people gave my employers hell for our last issue's cover art.

Some of these same people want to support a campaign that makes this its closing pitch:

 

Fitting that on the day of the Iowa Caucuses, Reason magazine discovers that there is a libertarian in the race. Sure, sure, you say: Dave Weigel has been covering this Ron Paul thing from the start.

Absolutely. Wonderfully, in fact.

And Jesse Walker wrote a few pieces online too.

Yep.

But, according to this month's cover story,by Brian Doherty,

These Paulistas are what hopeful libertarians have fantasized about for decades: a disaffected but engageable mass of Americans, many of them hidden among the 45 percent or so who tend not to vote. They support an argument advanced by David Boaz of the Cato Institute and David Kirby of the America’s Future Foundation, who estimate, based on detailed polling data, that 9 to 14 percent of Americans hew to a roughly libertarian political ideology—and that this group has been shifting away from the GOP during the current Bush administration.

(Somehow I doubt David Boaz has been fantasizing about Ron Paul. Don't tell Ron Paul either, or else we might have another reason to call him Dr. No) So, if these Paulistas are a libertarian dream, why is it making the cover of the leading libertarian magazine six months after Paul made his big splash?

Normally I'm against the whole anti-cocktail-party critique of D.C. I want to be at the cocktail parties myself. They are nice. I want people who go to fancy cocktail parties to adopt my politics. I think that is one of the definitions of success. But indulge me for a moment:: it doesn't seem like D.C. libertarians were all that against the war in Iraq - at least when it counted. Ron Paul privileges fidelity to the Constitution more than, say, abortion rights. And that tamps down the enthusiasm of the Beltway set too.

There is a cultural divide in libertarianism. Reason stands for the future in which, presumably, we'll freely and capitalistically upload our brains and genitals onto a Vivendi-Murdoch server to our great pleasure and profit. Ron Paul talks about things in the past, like the Founder's vision for our country and the Constitution they wrote. How quaint!

Is the Ron Paul candidacy perfect? No. Should libertarians be falling over themselves to support him? Absolutely. In fact, his campaign has, in many respects been so poorly managed that I'm surprised it hasn't ruined his candidacy. Noteworthy also is the fact that this piece as many others did, profiled not the man, but the movement - which is more colorful than Paul himself.

Read the piece. It's better late than never. Welcome aboard Reason magazine, the beer is getting warm here. But most of us are friendly.

You all know how much we like Michael Cera here. But you don't need to see Juno, Helen Rittelmeyer saw it for us. Bookmark her blog now and say you were into Cigarette Smoking back when...

In the meantime, I found something to look forward to in '08.

 

 

 

So, one of the New Year's resolutions of this blog is to blog more. So, to that end, I got a digital camera thinking that the photographs I take would occasion a thought. Here goes. This underexposed beauty was taken at Brother Jimmy's near MSG - literally around the corner from the store I got the camera in.

I ask: What has happened to Pabst Blue Ribbon? Less than a decade ago Pabst had to close its Milwaukee operations and move to Texas. Then in 2001, at the lowest of the low, one bar in Portland, Oregon switches from a local brew to Pabst, and one barbershop in that same city starts to carry it.

Suddenly, I discovered a world in New York where bearded hipsters played Kings of Leon records at bars that offered "Blue Collar Tuesday" specials to those  (usually unbearded middle-aged souls) who showed their union cards. These bars invariably smell like urine. Now two years later, here it is being sold in a top flight sports-bar chain in NYC right next to Madison Square Garden.

I can't precisely explain how a product goes from iconicly boring brand, to being hip overnight, except to say that precisely because it was so iconicly boring - and cheap - PBR was a prime target for a cohort that has tried to rehabilitate mutton-chop facial hair and Southern Rock. Now that PBR is in places like Brother Jimmy's - an establishment whose only hipster cache is that until a year ago it occasionally played Ben Folds Five records while the patrons scarfed down buffalo wings and NBA playoff upsets -- I think it is safe to say that PBR will decline in status-value to hipsters. One beer brand that is particularly well suited to the next hipster renovation is Schaefer - just get a load of that perfectly down-market authentic can design. It just so happens, Schaefer was purchased by Pabst in 1999.

And it even has a perfect YouTube video.  

 

 

But if I had to guess, my bet is that young people begin rejecting the ironic embrace of long-defunct brands, and begin once again to ironicly embrace the almost-defunct projects of major corporate brands. Expect to see lots of Bud Ice at the hipest bars near you.  I close my eyes and hear the faint strains of a Feist CD and an idiot 24 yr. old in a mustache explaining that, "The ad guys at A.B. [that's Anheuser Busch] have wanted to dump the Ice for years man. They don't even know what they've got!"

Some of my friends and acquaintances in this business of content production put out end of year lists of albums (Peter Suderman, and Matt Yglesias occur to me.) At my advanced age of twenty-five, I find this task impossible. Maybe four years ago I would have had some idea. Now, I find I don't have time to listen to that much new music. If I think about the albums I've listened to this year- I find that only a few were released this year: Easy Tiger (an e.p. technically) by Ryan Adams and the Cardinals was okay. Old Crow Medicine Show's album, Big Iron World was a constant companion on my long car trips and I find it came out last summer.

I only bought the Kanye West album, Graduation (which tops Peter's list), in the last week of the year and I like it. I was always delighted when "Stronger" came on the radio. I like "Flashing Lights" too. But the pleasures of this album are slightly diminished by a thought which was embryonic earlier in the decade when OutKast was at the top of the hip-hop charts, that this is "safe-for-whites" hip-hop.  (More thoughts on that later)

 Only a few years ago I was the first person I knew to buy The Shins first album, Oh Inverted World. Now, I can't say that I've listened to Arcade Fire, or St. Vincent. I've let my music magazine subscriptions expire, so I can barely even tell you what they are supposed to sound like. The two last things I remember as being "cool" (to me) when they came out were The Yeah Yeah Yeahs first album (haven't heard their others), and The White Stripes.

Film, likewise. I saw "The Lives of Others" this year - which makes Peter's list also - and I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. Technically it came out in 2006.

As we passed into 2008, it became time to print our predictions. I did this once before, and was only correct that in two predictions - that my writing would appear in a magazine, and that I would terribly wound and offend about 20% of the people I met.

As for political predictions, I have very few. I can make a case that Romney will win Iowa tomorrow and the nomination. I can make a case that Huckabee will win the nomination.  Same with Clinton and Obama. But in January of '06 I predicted the Republicans would hold onto the Senate.

I will predict that the salutory effects of "the surge" will begin to end. The surge will have only made it possible for conservatives to blame our next Democrat president for losing Iraq, the way some people still blame Democrats for "losing" Vietnam. It will also have made the narrative of the war sufficiently unclear and prevent the political elites of our nation from drawing any meaningful lessons from Iraq.

Other than that I expect death will continue to end every human life and the Mets will make the playoffs this year.

It seems like everyone in D.C. is trying to leave town early to get in some Christmas vacation before the Iowa Caucus. And so it's time to comment on the candidates and their holiday ads. I'd like to Grade them.

Candidate:Huckabee
Grade:A+
Alternate Title: What Would Be So Wrong if I Was Celebrating Christmas?

Analysis: Huckabee has no money to run this ad. So they light it just right to get the floating cross/bookcase effect, and Drudge goes nuts. Adding in the bit about "celebrating" the birth of Christ makes it just specific enough to have a "War on Christmas" topspin. Then when he's called on playing the Christian card, he makes himself even more likable. Well played.

Candidate:Giuliani
Grade: B
Alternate Title: Sweat my Sweater

Analysis: Reagan could pull off brown suits. I'm not sure Giuliani can pull of a red sweater. Other than that - just fine. Michael Crowley of TNR has noted Giuliani's strange "jokey" campaign - and this fits right into it. Think Giuliani will let Santa into American airspace after Jolly Saint Nick delivers presents to the Christians in Iran?

More Below the Fold 

Candidate:Clinton
Grade: C-
Alternate Title: Stocking Stuffer Social Justice

Analysis: Do Democrats really want to portray their social programs as gifts they are handing out? What's the weird font for "Happy Holidays?" I hate the reflexive hatred of Hillary Clinton. Yet, I still can't warm up to her - at all.

 
Candidate: Edwards
Grade:B
Alternate Title: Christmas is About Giving a Shit

Analysis: Edwards lacks the sartorial daring of Giuliani. But he talks about "miracles" in this season and promised not to forget the poor. At least Clinton is offering "Universal Pre-K". I bet the poor can count on her for that more than they can on Edwards' signs and wonders. He really knows how to telegraph "sincerity" with those brow gestures.

Candidate: Obama
Grade: A-
Alternate Title: My Wife is More Vibrant than I Am

Analysis: Cute kids really help any ad this time of year. Allowing the "C" word in the ad makes him seem less threatening. He'll meet with the enemies in the War on Christmas with no preconditions in his first year in office.

Candidate:Paul
Grade:A-
Alternate Title: More Fecund than The Mormons

Analysis: Red Shirt! Paul has a big-ass family and a really cute granddaughter (Polka dots). But why are you taking time off when your supporters just gave you over 6 million dollars in a day? I like how the music is "people-powered."

 Technically the following isn't a Romney commercial. But he's in it with his family and a lot of snow. So I'll link to it.

 

Tell me. Does that small scared child say "No!" just before Mitt launches him down the hill? (Right around :54 seconds into the video?)  

National Review endorsed Romney and their cover featured an ol' timey heroic painting of him. In keeping with the spirit of the season and the magazine, at The American Conservative, we've also put a painting of a candidate posing heroically on our cover.

Check out the three articles. Michael Desch on Giuliani's foreign policy team, Tom Piatak on the disaster of nominating a pro-choicer to lead a pro-life party, and Glenn Greenwald on Hizzoner's record of straining at the limits on his power.

L.A. Weekly has an absolutely incredible article on the resurgence of gang violence in L.A. and around the nation, with a particular focus on Watts. One of my favorite pieces of journalism this year.