http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo7HiQRM7BA

     There are two kinds of satire in this world, Horatian and Juvenalian.

     This ain’t Horatian.

     Carly Fiorino’s web-ad lacerating rival Senate primary candidate Tom Campbell wants you to get out the pitchforks.  Better yet, a shotgun.  You need to put that wolf down.

     The video is anchored by the grandeur of its inspired opening and departing flourishes in the sheepfield, but the rest is nothing shabby, despite the complaints of those ADD-led commentators who can’t seem to stay alert for three thrilling minutes and a few seconds in change.

     The civic upside with negative campaigning is that it helps (yes, there are political scientists who admit this!) to “inform” the voters.  Of course that information is on a one-way street!  Still, facts can be facts, and the fact of the matter in California is that, as everyone will concede, the state finances are in a state of disaster.

     If Carly Fiorino is hoping to slash entitlements, or has a brilliant plan to destroy the deathgrip of the CA public employees’ pension funds on the budget, she isn’t telling us here (though I would imagine she’s at least given some thought to the latter).

     And surely this Tom Campbell isn’t the sole responsible villain.  And yet– even Keynseans who swear on the moon and stars that deficits are no big deal (there’s some famous ‘conservative’ or other who famously seconded that emotion) could hardly watch this spot without feeling a twinge over the–villainy?–of running them up.

     And I have to admit:  Krugman and company are becoming increasingly unpersuasive to my ears on this.  Does it look like more ’stimulus’ would miraculously lower unemployment to 5%?  Isn’t lower unemployment something that’s just going to have to take some time?  And do you trust your Congress to craft a ’stimulus’ that actually stimulates?

     I’m reminded of the feeble attempt at a political moment in Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” where a painting of the sainted royal has been graffitied with– what was it?– “Queen Deficit” or somesuch?

     Tom Campbell:  fiscal genius?  Ha, he’s fooled you!  He’s a wolf, and might as well be in a powdered wig too.

     You know where they drag wolves loose in the public fold like that?  The guillotine. 

     The only metaphor that is, so to speak, dangling is the other sheep.  Are they impressionable fiscal conservatives who let Tom into their ranks, fooled by his clothing?  But the female narrator drips with sarcasm about their fearless manhood.  Obviously there is some right-wing Up With Women appeal going on (something Gov. Palin might appropriate later down the road?).  A real Fiscal Conservative would in fact be (so everything in the ad points to) someone to admire, a person worthy of that pedestal.  Presumably, Carly has some beef (lamb?) with the rank-and-file Republican officeholders.

     Well, what of it.  There’s a Miltonic grandeur in that “leaving but one way to fall” line.  For a political spot it seems highly irregular; political ads aren’t supposed to force people to actually think, after all!  The ad is operating on a Biblical plane:  it presumes to judge Tom Campbell, in the full divine and damning sense of that word.  Hence that rhythmically hammering Requiem of a soundtrack.  Oh, and we get to judge him too!  “Who would remember . . . ?  We would!”

     What a splendid indictment!  I don’t know Tom Campbell from applebutter, but God knows his name will be a byword from now on.  If someone could make a video this damning against my own mother, I’d make keep her name as a byword too.

     Hmm, actualy I might make that video someday . . . .

<div><iframe height=”339″ width=”425″ src=”http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/34108611#34108611“

      While trying to cut a path through the mounds of magazines filling some of my cardboard boxes, I rediscovered the not-very-long-ago delights of a Feb. 2008 Elle spread with the luminous Kate Winslet-y majesty of “Bobbi.”  And yes, I shamefully admit that this seems to be the first occasion on which I bothered to squint through the make-up and hair credits at the end of the spread to learn her name.  And yes, I shamefully admit I am not otherwise familiar with her body of work.  But O Bobbi, you are a bombshell, oui!

Chanel jeans, suede jacket See by Chloe

     Now, I don’t count myself an acolyte of the “disco pant”, not least because I fail to see what’s inherently “disco” about the disco pant, aside of course from the slavishly temporal-minded attitude that it existed in the disco era, and was worn in disco-oriented venues.  Rubbish.  “High-waisted” does not scream debauchery to me.  But Bobbi does (oh, but I do mean ‘debauchery’ in the most chastely luminous sense!  or at least–).  Stella McCartney provides the denim, Lanvin those leather pumps.

photography by Mattias Vriens

     I dreamt I was at this dinner party in Manhattan, it was being held in some swank hotel and it occurred to me that there was supposed to be a privately-owned Ingres on display there.  I start craning my neck looking at a couple of paintings hanging beyond the heads of the diners seated opposite me, but these are abstracts, almost monochrome pink canvases really.  Partly I’m disappointed, but somehow relieved that the Ingres is not here.

     But then the host announces that he’d like to show us a recently acquired letter of Ingres’ that he has.  I’m horrified to realize that this letter is being passed around the table (there are some thirty or more dinner guests).  I am galled and fearful, yet somehow I am slowly calmed as the letter makes its way through so many strange, possibly filthy and almost certainly damaging hands.  The letter is in fact written on a loose sheet of contemporary 3-hole notebook paper, in pencil.  I am becoming filled with excitement to hold it in my hands.

     Finally it comes to me.  I have wiped my hands furiously on my linen napkin, still filled with an anxious reluctance at the thought that this cannot be right, holding an unprotected autograph letter like this.  But everyone else has, so I take it up.  The letter is in pencil, and in French of course, and is from early in his career, the Napoleonic period.  At certain points in the letter Ingres has made florid designs of his letters, particularly in one passage on the front-side of the sheet, where the word “BRILLIANTE” has been sketched in the manner of the titles in Gone With the Wind that come moving across the screen.  I turn it backwards and forwards, delicately, trying to make out some shards of meaning in his French, and I hold the paper up to the light and find an improbable water-mark.  Somehow this mystery fills me with a kind of satisfaction.  I am aware that I have held onto the letter much longer than the other diners have, but I am enraptured with it, thinking of how Ingres has held this paper, poured out his solitary thoughts upon it, and I am radiant with gratitude for the fact of his genius, and to be able to have this kind of intimacy with the long-dead great man.

     Admiringly I point this out to the dinner-guest seated to my right, the next one in line to hold the letter.  I am gushing with enthusiasm.  “See how he has done this” I say, thinking of Ingres’ swelling confidence in his own early genius.  The guy takes the letter and stares at it closely.  Then he starts absent-mindedly following Ingres’ script with a little nub of a pencil he holds in his right hand.  I am filled with fright.  Then he starts penciling in over Ingres’ handwriting.  I cry out ‘What are you doing?!!?’  Then he starts to erase, and then fill in, in his own undistinguished script, the letters he has removed, though it’s intuitively clear to me that, not knowing French either, he’s guessing at the text he has eradicated.

     I am mad, appalled with horror.  I am filled too with a swelling, consuming guilt– guilt at having let this madness of passing round Ingres’ letter happen, guilt at having joined in, guilt at having pointed out something for this madman at my right to take an interest in.  My eyes are flooded with tears and I stand and rail madly against this folly.  “For two-hundred years his words have lived on in safety,” I cry, “and in as many seconds you have ruined them forever.  What right– what right had you, Madman, to take up your damned penci; to this letter from a great genius, this ancient precious thing from his own hands, his own thoughts– . . .”  And so forth.  In the midst of this outpouring I haul off and slap this man, with a satisfying hardness that astonishes me, a Scarlett O’Hara slap, my hand is stinging so hard I feel it has swollen to the size of a baseball glove but I know, I know that I have physically hurt him and this fills me with moral satisfaction even as I reel in the knowledge of the horror that we have destroyed Ingres’ letter.

Ingres "Study for 'Venus a Paphos'"

  Alyssa Rosenberg is a hottie. . . .

http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/22921?in=01:19&out=09:31

  But why, I ask you, does a girl who re-reads Possession every single year even know who Bloodshy & Avant are?!  Oh dear god, why do I know who they are?

  This clip, and the entire diavlog from which it comes, confronts me with the cold horror of what Pop has made of us all.  It also really, really turns me on somehow, almost in a BDSM sort of way.  Matt Yglesias gets asked if he’s had a chance to listen to the new Robyn album yet.  I repeat, the new Robyn album!!!!  Our leading public intellectuals are talking about Robyn . . .  would I have dreamed of this in 1997?

  Rosenberg’s description of Robyn, by the way, is priceless.  Yes, Robyn is a little scary these days, now that I think about it.  –Oh, Alyssa, do you know who else has a microlabel?  Melanie C, that’s who!  Do you follow Melanie C?  Do you love the Spice Girls, Alyssa?

  I wonder if Alyssa has the hots for Matt Yglesias?  I wonder if she’s gay . . .  Maybe that would play into my hands.  Has she read Muriel Spark, I wonder?  And dear god, does she know any Classical music?  Can I turn her on to Brahms?

  And hey, it’s Max Martin she’s hyping here, not fucking Timbaland, thank Jesus Prophet of the Jews!  Girl has sensibility  (though learning Martin wrote “Hot and Cold” is not exactly a plus, mind you . . . )

Polanski's The Tenant

  Mickey Kaus is America’s leading public intellectual.  Bob Wright is Mickey’s friend.  Here they discuss l’affaire Polanski, with Mickey’s Mom as arbitrating authority and moral compass, with the help of posthumous inside dope from Mickey’s late Dad, the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court.  Let’s libel   watch!

http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/22791?in=18:02&out=24:34

     President Barack Obama has come very far based upon the appeal of mere presence.  That, of course, is one of my prime objections to him.  The peripatetic ramblings of his childhood, as much as his dual ethnic heritage, were seized upon during the campaign as a sort of proof that the man could “contain multitudes” (in Whitman’s phrase), that by having touched base with so many different places, faiths, “colors”, he could somehow understand and embody the All, not only in post-millennial America but in the whole world.  And Democrats, who oftentimes misplaced their criticism of Pres. George W. Bush’s reckless, unreal foreign policies with concern over how foreign nations “feel” about us, were sold on Obama’s campaign in part by the persuasion that Obama, an African-American with Muslim relations, could, by the very appeal of his “identity”, heal America’s “image” in the world.

     Well, flash-forward to the Olympics bid.  Obama was persuaded to pitch in Copenhagen in person, a gesture which I thought unbecoming.  For a developing nation such as Brazil, going all-out is perfectly understandable.  The Chinese surely regarded their Beijing Olympics  in 2008 as an object of statecraft:  they wanted the games as a “showcase.”  But what does America need to showcase?  One could make an argument, perhaps, that it would be more becoming for the US to stay out of the frakus at all, considering Atlanta and Salt Lake City.  In any event,  cities that host are generally lucky to break-even, so hosting an Olympics would be a debateable privilege for Chicago itself– and unlikely to be of any real good to the USA as a whole.

     I thought before that Obama was making a mistake to go in person.  And now, he’s lost– and I’m overjoyed!  It’s not going to ruin his Presidency, it’s not going to get Americans killed or flatten the economy.  But it’s a relatively painless, but very public, way for Obama and his supporters to take a lesson.  –His presence is not magic.  The world does not, and never did, love him so much as to do his bidding out of affection.  His will does not translate magically into action.  He can’t just sell anything– and certainly not by mere dint of “eloquence.”

     Obama’s World Without Nukes seminar at the UN was only saved from dismal embarassment by the fact that few people were paying attention; the Iranian kerfluffle has absorbed attention and made it look like Obama was there to do something serious.  Without the revelations of the Qom facility Obama would only have looked fatuous– daydreaming about the abolition of nuclear weapons (surely the global priority that’s uppermost in everyone’s mind?) when everyone knows Iran is pursuing them.  Iran’s admission to the IAEA gave Obama the chance to look like he was doing something gritty, after all.  It was that which preserved his “image of success”, to borrow the leaked phrase which the Obama Administration supposedly used to persuade Sarkozy not to rattle the No Nukes seminar with explicit warnings about Iran’s secret enrichment facility.

     No “image of success” can be salvaged from the Olympics conference in Copenhagen.  Good.  The IOC’s kangaroo court of the Nations of the World did not vote to give Obama what he asked for simply because he showed up to ask for it!  Nor does he come back with the image of a “dealmaker” that he supposedly sought.  So we’ve still never seen him close a deal . . .  hmm.  Unless you count his election victory, of course!  –But it’s time for the President to focus.  Time to do some serious work, and to finish it.

I’m so happy to see Ralph Lauren leather for the fall!! –Mind you, I haven’t always paid attention, so perhaps I’ve missed many glorious years of leathery Lauren confectionery. But there’s one from way back that’s prized in my memory, so I’m exceptionally keen for these new gifts.

Perhaps there’s something a little improbable about working the aristocratic angle with leather (how many aristocrats, after all, do we see sporting it?), but the haute honey above gives the look as fine as a pedigree as she can, considering her anxiously reclining position. However, my better fervor is reserved for the bursting autumnal fruitfulness of the dryad below . . .

If Keats could see this, Fanny Brawne would be toast!! –And praise must also be reserved for this:

It’s a preppie motorcross BDSM wet dream!!