At Last Is All - I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness - Fear is on Our Side - 2006

Well, I've already told this story to basically everyone I know, so that's pretty much the readership of this blog but...I want to write it down, just so I'll have it for posterity.

On Wednesday April 15th, a few events took place. One of them was that Arsenal Football Club played the second leg of their Champions League Quarter Final against Villarreal, the second was that it was Tax Day, the third was that a bunch of short sited morons decided to have a protest of paying taxes to a liberal administration and dubbed their protest with the unfortunate name of "Teabagging" allegedly in honor of the Boston Tea Party.

So, as the game was live at 245 and I had to be at work, I had set my Tivo and divorced myself from the Internet at approximately 244 (I had been screwed by the Internet too many times in attempting to watch non-live games...including one rather unfortunate event with a friend's facebook status post). But before I signed off I remember seeing the coverage of the Teabagging parties on CNN and thinking "My God, CNN has been hacked"...but no, this shit was for real.

Anand and I had planned to meet at a local watering hole called The Patriot. The Patriot is one of those faux country dive bars that exist in NYC, clearly created by people who have never been to a country dive bar but have seen a lot of movies that had them in it. A lot of Toby Keith is played in this bar, the beer is all flat, the place reeks of vomit and the waitresses are uniformly skanky.

So I walk in to meet Anand, and on a Wednesday night the place is absolutely packed. Like I can't even make it to the bar or the bathroom. It's then that I notice that all of the other attendees are wearing the same T-shirt (Except one guy who, I shit you not, was wearing a revolutionary war town crier outfit). The T-shirt says on the front "Obama-Reid-Pelosi" above the presidential seal and "Wrong for America" below it. On the back it says "Liberals are Freaking Faggots".

I quickly realize that this is not a bar I wish to be in and beat a hasty retreat. Running into Anand on the way, we popped into a second bar only to see that that bar is showing a replay of the Arsneal match that is already 15 minutes into the game. I see us scoring our first goal, though I managed to get Anand out of there before he saw it...so at least one of us would be going into the game fresh.

The thing is...I won't go too much into covering the ludicrousness of the Teabaggers agenda (or their name)...it's been covered by funnier people than me. But seriously, it's amazing how quickly they lose their prudery when the shoe is on the other foot. They gladly trash a president they don't like when they accused us of being traitors for questioning the one that my side didn't like. They call us "Faggots" (yet still down grade the F-word to "freaking"???) all to protest what? Not the loss of human life, not the allowing of robber barons to run roughshod over our economy, nor a government that simply sat back and watched our country fall apart...they are pissed that the government is actually trying to DO SOMETHING. They want inaction at a time when our country is falling apart and it is simply staggering to me.

You lost, wing nuts. Suck it.

Anyway, it seems appropriate to end this with a song by I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness. Fear has always been on their side, and that hasn't changed much. Wouldn't it be nice if we ran our country on hope rather than fear?

Armchairs - Andrew Bird - Armchair Apocrypha - 2007

So last night I went to see Will Ferrel's show on Broadway where he plays former President GW Bush giving a farewell to the nation. My buddy Shani bought me a ticket as an early birthday present since she'll be in LA for my actual b-day. As is typical, I got stuck in the bar a little too long and had to haul my ass to the theater district to make the gate. We barely had time to throw down a quick glass of champaigne before the lights started blinking and the show started.

Now Ferrel has certainly lost a little of his luster in the last year or two, but there is no denying he has been one of the comedic superstars of the last decade, and his Bush impression has certainly made the last 8 years slightly more bearable...but what struck me most about the show was how much of it might have been too painful to laugh at.

There was certainly very funny stuff, but by and large it was the bits of absurdism(Bigfoot, Monkeys with spear guns, western style handjobs) that packed the biggest punches. The topical stuff (My Pet Goat, "Nice Job Brownie" and of course "Mission Accomplished") mostly served as reminders of what a total clusterfuck that administration was. It's not that Ferrel wasn't funny, or that the time wasn't appreciated so much as...it was the first chance I'd had to look back since President Obama's innauguration. And to see the scope of exactly how badly the W administration really and truly bent this country over a table was staggering. There was still funny stuff in this (Dick Cheney and the Goat Demon, Condie Rice as the office hussey) but mostly it was a bit like being punched in the gut.

Anyway, this Andrew Bird song is a good antidote for that. Bird has always had a strong knack for writing a melody, and his instrumentation has generally been one of his strong points (a rock musician who clings so strongly to the violin as his core instrument certainly has to be inventive). In recent years, Bird has added a level of maturity to his songs that shines through on this track, a fine song for a sad evening.