Here’s the above image in context on flickr.com.

The young woman pictured above is named Elizabeth, and by all reports is not running for Vice President. (Yet. McCain may change his mind when he sees this picture.)

The exhibition on R. Crumb that got so much attention last year in San Francisco is now showing in Philadelphia through December. I should have taken a day to fly up to SF last year to see it — still not quite sure how I missed it — and I don’t foresee being in Philadelphia again in time. So if you’re nearby, please go see it for me. (And bring me back an exhibition catalog.)

Thanks to Paul Crist (who is close to Philadelphia, where that catalog would be… ) for making me aware of this.

Over on the Huffington Post, a former constituent in the small town where Sarah Palin was governor writes a long letter about Palin’s decidedly poor track record. Admittedly, no mayor anywhere is loved by everyone, but these excerpts below speak directly to why she scares me:

Sarah campaigned in Wasilla as a “fiscal conservative”. During her 6
years as Mayor, she increased general government expenditures by over
33%. During those same 6 years the amount of taxes collected by the
City increased by 38%. This was during a period of low inflation
(1996-2002). She reduced progressive property taxes and increased a
regressive sales tax which taxed even food. The tax cuts that she
promoted benefited large corporate property owners way more than they
benefited residents.

While Mayor, City Hall was extensively remodeled and her office
redecorated more than once.

 In this time of record state revenues and budget surpluses, she
recommended that the state borrow/bond for road projects, even while
she proposed distribution of surplus state revenues: spend today’s
surplus, borrow for needs.

While Sarah was Mayor of Wasilla she tried to fire our highly respected
City Librarian because the Librarian refused to consider removing from
the library some books that Sarah wanted removed. City residents
rallied to the defense of the City Librarian and against Palin’s
attempt at out-and-out censorship, so Palin backed down and withdrew
her termination letter. People who fought her attempt to oust the
Librarian are on her enemies list to this day.

So what do we have here?

• Poor administration
• Bad fiscal management
• Intolerance for disagreement

And that, ladies and gentlemen, sounds precisely like the Bush administration. Whether or not McCain is “four more years of Bush,” if he’s elected and is incapacitated, his v.p. might very well fulfill that mandate.

Thinking back to when I was an 11-year-old taking my required hunter safety classes, I can’t recall anyone else out in the field looking anything like the vice-presidential candidate above. If there had been someone similarly outfitted, my seriously hormonal self would have taken note. But no, it was a cleared field filled with somewhat clueless boys in dungarees and hunter-orange vests getting tutored in the way of the gun by middle-aged men who were passing on what they had once learned at the same age.

One of the things we were taught is that a gun is not a toy, that it is not to be treated as such, and that because we should always assume it is loaded and ready to go off, we should never point it at anyone or treat it as anything less than an instrument of death. It’s because of that thinking, which has informed my life, that I look at this image with nothing but dismay. Sarah Palin is by all estimates a skilled hunter and fisher — but I don’t like her cavalier attitude with that gun.

In most political seasons at least half of one of the main tickets scares the pants off me. In 1992, it was the utterly unqualified and unmoored Dan Quayle (and, more precisely, his scarily intolerant and rigid wife, who would have wound up running the government had something happened to Bush the First); in 2000 it was Dick Cheney; and in 2004 it was a trifecta:  Bush the Lesser, Cheney, and John Edwards, a hypocritical ambulance-chaser of the first order (which made it hard to support John Kerry — except for the alternative, which we’re now enduring).

This year, it’s Sarah Palin who gives me the shivers. I don’t like what she says, and I don’t like what her choice says about John McCain.

I think Palin’s shortcomings have been widely documented already, so I’d rather discuss McCain, a man I used to esteem. McCain is running on a platform of “Country First,” which by extension indicates a criticism that someone else — perhaps his opponent? — is not putting country first. But in picking an utterly unqualified number two, has the aged and cancer-prone John McCain put country first, or has he thrown a sop to the fringe elements of his own party while nakedly attempting to attract even a sliver of the disenfranchised Hillary Clinton supporters? Every year around budget time, I have seen McCain on C-Span voting against and speaking out against budget earmarks — but he has just selected a running mate who sought (and got) dozens of them for her small town and for the state of Alaska. Is this truly the person he thinks best equipped to step when the president is incapacitated? While I’ve rarely agreed with his politics, I’ve generally admired John McCain. Now that he’s caught Potomac Fever and is willing to sacrifice good judgment for his own election, I just think he’s a hypocrite. Embracing Bush the Lesser was bad enough; positioning someone for the presidency whom you cannot believe is capable is just selfish and unpatriotic.

He speaks truth to power, with a smile.

Case in point:

We’re all hearing that Obama has the youth vote nailed down. Evidently, the McCain camp agrees; their student support is in the single digit. (If you are that student and want to order, click here.)

Thanks to Chris Wojcieszyn for making me aware of this.

You may recall that a couple of weeks ago I promised a free iTune song to the person who suggested the best song I should be have but don’t. (And if you don’t remember, click here.) Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner. But first, a little about the process.

Someone named “Niv” wrote “I love ‘Bring Me To Life’ by Evanescence. It is a very powerful song. If you have not heard it you should.” Niv, I thank you for the recommendation, and I did check that out. I can see why this song speaks to some people, but for me I have to say the goth/Christian collision skews a little younger than my demographic. (We’ll see if the Christian part becomes more interesting to me some day on my death bed, but I doubt it.)

My good friend Barry Rowell recommended “Lazy” by David Byrne. I am indeed a David Byrne fan, but here’s the problem with “Lazy” on iTunes — the full “preview window” of the song is orchestral instrumentation. Meaning that I would have to actually BUY the song to see if I wanted it for the reasons Barry gave. I decided not to, but I do have to say this piqued my interest in an album I wasn’t aware of and may go back and buy some day. (Without being able to listen to it first.)

Another good friend, Paul Crist, took to quibbling over rules like a Republican precinct captain working to suppress the rural black vote. First, he asked, “How are are we to know if you already have the song we are suggesting?” To which I responded, “You are to post — and then find out.” Then he proposed this: “I am going to try a different angle, instead of suggesting a song to get I am going to suggest a song to stay away from.” And he proposed that we not listen to bad remixes of “Werewolves of London.” Job done, Paul, I won’t — but that doesn’t tell me what I should listen to with my download voucher. So you’re disqualified.
Chris Wojcieszyn recommended This Mortal Coil’s cover of the Talking Heads song “Drugs.” Hm. That was interesting; thanks for alerting me to it. The original benefits from Brian Eno’s production and the queasy paranoia lurking beneath the entire album. The remake (and, again, I get to hear only 30 seconds) has a great slap and tickle in the bass, but overall it sounds overproduced. Still, Wojcieszyn being a man of taste, he has captured my attention with this. I wonder if he would lend me the album?

My mentor Rich Roesberg blew the deadline, but wrote: “But in case you win ANOTHER couple of songs, how about the theme from BLADERUNNER by Vangelis? I love themes from movies I love. You might also check the one from Robert Altman’s version of THE LONG GOODBYE.” Note to Rich: If you win some songs, redeem them on the soundtrack to “Grizzly Man” by Richard Thompson and compadres (with a DVD bonus feature of “Grizzly Man” showing Werner Herzog inserting himself into the proceedings). But even better, if you ever want some music so bleak and depressing that Angelo Badalamenti would have to turn it off, check out the soundtrack of “The Farmer’s Wife” by premiere David Bowie guitarist (and former bandmate of Soupy Sales’ sons) Reeves Gabrels. The documentary is concerned with a farm family struggling to make ends meet; I heard this precisely once, and about 10 years ago, and the music is still etched into my brain, like the scratches left by a drowning man. Truly depressive. And the parents in the film got divorced.

Finally, we come to Werner Trieschmann’s suggestions. Plural. Werner emailed no fewer than six (6!) suggestions, and gave as his rationale, “they’re great.” I know what you’re thinking, because it’s what I was thinking at first: Hey, he cheated. But in fact, a quick check of the contest rules reveals that I never limited entrants to one submission. Nor did I say that the rationale had to be compelling, clever, or even well-written. So what Werner has done here, in the time-honored American tradition, is show initiative. I know, we kinda hate it but we kinda love it, like having so much hubris that you say you’re not going to slum around with just one gold medal, no, you’ve got to be the Man from Atlantis and seize eight of them, helping to ensure that, say, Canada, comes away with absolutely nothing. And then doing that.

In addition to taking advantage of the slack rules so that he can carve through the water this way, Werner has assembled a compelling list of oddities. Look at this list and ask yourself about at least half of them: “Who?”

• “I Need Some Fine Wine and You need to be Nicer” by the Cardigans
• “Enough Rope” by Chris Knight (depressive but great)
• “The Sound of German Hip Hop” by Clem Snide
• “Cath…” by Death Cab for Cutie
• “Not Ready to Make Nice” by Dixie Chicks
• “Don’t Know Why” by Fleet Foxes

If I want depressive, I’ll go get that Reeves Gabrels soundtrack (see above), so that leaves out Chris Knight. “Don’t Know Why” isn’t available on iTunes. Dixie Chicks is just not me. “Cath…” is pretty good, but the Cardigans song and the Clem Snide song both really grab me. (I’m thinking Werner and I should do one of those music compatibility tests on Facebook.) It was almost impossible to choose, but here’s the thing — I’d already heard the Cardigans (anyone near a radio since the 1990’s has heard “Lovesong”), but Clem Snide was a discovery! I love the twang in the guitar, I love the offbeat lyrics, and the overall sound. I even love the name of their other songs, like “Joan Jett of Arc.” I found myself listening to more of their songs, going to the website, checking out tour dates — and learning that I had just discovered a band that had just broken up! How poignant. How like a Paul Auster novel — falling in love with some offbeat art and then almost getting to know the artist except he’s just died. (This recurring theme of something almost attained is the subject of Book of Illusions in particular.)

So I have redeemed my download on “The Sound of German Hip Hop” by Clem Snide, and awarded Werner Trieschmann the free download, I thank thank him and everyone else who entered.

Now only one question remains: What should Werner download?

Tonight I attended a convention party to listen to Barack Obama accept the Democratic party’s nomination for president. Twenty or 30 people were expected; instead, about 60 showed up and crowded the condo at which this was held. (There could have been more, but the hosts shut off the online invite at 60.) The mood of the crowd left little doubt that this was an early indicator of the level of excitement, at least in these circles, for the candidate.

I thought Obama’s speech was superb.

On the one hand, I was impressed by the way he stole all the ground from the Republicans: To listen to Obama, all problems can be settled somewhere in the middle between left and right, and to the satisfaction of all parties (except, well, al Qaeda). I doubt this is true. Every day in every way, the world forces hard choices on us. But the notion of compromise is spot-on, and the concept that right-wingers aren’t unpatriotic, but simply wrong, threatens to dampen the fire under the opposition, as does the notion that their ideas will at least get a hearing. The only skilled way McCain can go after this is to cut the knot by saying that you can’t have it all, and that in a time of hard choices we need someone capable of making them. In what almost all of us hope will be a post-Decider age, I don’t think this will carry him far.

On the other hand, what truly impressed me with Obama’s speech was the deft way he wove his positions that are unpopular with his base  into the overall tapestry of his speech. To wit:  Obama endorsed nuclear energy. I know, you probably didn’t hear it, especially if you sneezed or blinked or thought about something else for a nanosecond. But he did. How did he do it? As part of (I’m paraphrasing) “releasing us from dependence on foreign oil within 10  years.” (And by the way, if he can do that, he can probably also cross his arms, nod his head quickly, and reappear inside a magic lantern.) So nuclear energy under Obama isn’t an anti-environmental position, as it has always been, but is now a national-security issue, and a pro-environmental issue because it relieves us from global warming. That’s smart. Even moreso because he buttressed it with a call for “clean coal energy,” which last time I checked doesn’t exist. While I’m skeptical about “clean coal energy” and an early parole from oil dependency, I don’t doubt his sincerity in working toward these things. He is indeed a man with hope you can count on — or, at least, a man you can count on to hope.

That’s what I’m going to start saying to the supporters of Hillary Clinton who keep telling the press they can’t bring themselves to vote for Barack Obama this fall.

“Then don’t.”

Just think how much whining and complaining would mystically go away if more often we adopted this response to the many free-floating objections we hear from people on a daily basis, whether it’s about significant others, traffic, politics, or your crummy hairdresser.

“I don’t think I can take much more of this.” “Then don’t.”

It really has a put-up-or-shut-up quality to it.

Now that I’m reading and hearing about the ongoing outrage by the Hillaryites, who for some inexplicable reason think their candidate was robbed of an honor to which she was entitled, and who therefore say they won’t vote for Obama, I’m ready to deploy it. So here it is: “Then don’t.”

Don’t come out and vote for the Democratic candidate, who by the way, fairly and squarely beat your candidate within the rules (never requesting that discounted or uncounted delegations suddenly regain their votes, for example).

But then, if you wind up with another White House Administration you don’t like — one that thinks the Iraq War should go on for another 100 years, one that thinks Antonin Scalia is a model Supreme Court Justice, one that thinks $5 million in annual income is the upper register of the middle class — don’t complain about it.

Just move to Canada. And start your complaining there.

We know Joe Biden uses Amtrak to commute home. Let’s just hope he doesn’t rely on it to meet with voters this fall. We don’t want his campaign running out of gas.