Author Archive

Watch: Black Lips ‘New Direction’ [VIDEO]

July 15th, 2011 by Matthew Uhlmann

Behold the seemingly unlimited possibilities of high-def green screen!

It’s a fact: Black Lips know how to have a seriously good time.

In their newest video for “New Direction,” released earlier this week from their most recent album “Arabia Mountain,” Black Lips fly away over scenic snow-capped mountains split by winding rivers while still shredding their respective instruments despite the icy winter hair-freezing breeze. It’s Peter Pan with electric guitars and tambourines.

With the “New Direction” music video, Black Lips continue in the ridiculous, hilarious fashion of their previous videos. If you’re around in NYC at the end of the month, catch their July 29 Bowery Ballroom show, or if you’re feeling adventurous enough for the trip out to Hoboken, their July 30 show at Maxwell’s.

Black Lips “New Direction”

Scion A/V Presents: Black Lips – New Direction from Scion A/V on Vimeo.

Kawasaki Disease Incident Proves Facebook Isn’t All Evil

July 15th, 2011 by Matthew Uhlmann

The cyber baby of Zuckerberg has been used to save lives. It’s also been used as a tool for assassins. Does the good cancel out the evil?

Taking a critical stance on Facebook feels painful because most of us are part of that billion-user-plus beast. If we’re critical of the world’s largest social network, are we criticizing ourselves?

Since the birth of Mark Zuckerberg‘s fat opportunistic cyber baby, the debate over Facebook’s social and political consequences has gotten insanely overcrowded. Is Facebook sucking our souls? Or is it a boon to our humanity connecting us in newer, more intimate ways? After seeing “Social Network” Zadie Smith wrote an editorial on Facebook and Zuckerberg in which she said:

“When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.”

But good-news stories do surface every so often about Facebook. Like the story Slate ran two days ago about the 4-year-old boy whose life was probably saved after his mother posted some photos of a rash which doctors had misdiagnosed. A few of her medically knowledgeable Facebook friends recognized the rash as the extremely dangerous Kawasaki disease.

But it was only a year ago when another major story surfaced about a Facebook kill list. After a hit list was posted to Facebook in Columbia, people on the list started turning up dead, many of them teenagers.

Taken together, the two stories prove the two most extreme consequences of hyperactive social networking: With speed and efficiency, it can be used to save lives, and to take them away. But can Facebook itself be held accountable for either? Or can Facebook hide behind human behavior, as in the old NRA maxim, “Guns don’t kill people, people do.”

As Zadie Smith points out, Facebook, with its illusion of connectivity, can and does reduce us. It reduced a woman’s sick child into a face with a rash—albeit one lucky enough to get diagnosed by some knowledgeable Facebook friends. It also can reduce a group of Columbian teenagers into a public kill list.

Of course, the vast majority of us billion-plus users exist via Facebook somewhere between those two extremes. It hasn’t saved a loved one, and we haven’t been assassinated. We can exist simply as old average, digital reductions of our real selves.

And for those of us who haven’t been murdered or saved from a potentially deadly disease, it’s still as good a tool as ever to voyeuristically stalk exes and people we’re too intimidated to approach in the real world.

Stalk away, people. No one is watching. Trey Parker and Matt Stone had it right:

Israeli Parliament Loves Glenn Beck

July 11th, 2011 by Matthew Uhlmann

They can keep him.

To Fox News, Glenn Beck was more a TV personality than a political commentator, in spite of his constant attempts to validate his voice as a conservative figurehead. As a former drama student, the man’s still an entertainer.

Glenn Beck has gotten really into Israel recently, and the love is mutual—the Holy Land has reciprocated in a serious way.

It started in mid-May when Beck announced his “Restoring Courage” rally, which is set for August in Jerusalem. Most recently, this morning on his visit to Israel, Beck addressed a group of lawmakers in the Israeli Kinesset.

What did the Israeli parliament get from Beck? Love, support, and a few biblical recitations, naturally. Here’s his quote from the book of Ruth:

“Where you go, I will go. Where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people are my people. Your God is my God. Where you die, I will die. And there shall I be buried.”

He later added:

“As a man who also worships the one God, in the times that we live in, it is clear that what is going on is God’s work. If we are silent, evil will win. But if we stand up and take charge, God will do the rest.”

At some point Beck touched on the possibility of apocalypse, saying “the world is about to go into chaos.” At another point, he describes his recent visit to the former death camp Auschwitz in Poland. He mentioned the murder in March of a family of Israeli settlers at the hands of Palestinian teens, which Beck called a “horror show.” He painted the picture of a Jewish homeland that is and has historically been cornered by hatred and violence.

Beck incited fear, demonstrated his solidarity, and naturally received a warm reception of applause from the Israeli parliament. Danny Danon, the conservative deputy speaker for the Israeli parliament, said of Beck: “If we didn’t have someone like Glenn Beck…we would have had to invent someone like him.”

A public figure like this couldn’t be invented.

In case it’s been forgotten, the man who is being praised for this recent support of the Jewish homeland was fiercely critiqued for his anti-semitic assault of George Soros just this fall. Beck even went so far as to accuse Soros of collaborating with the Nazis when Soros was only a teenage concentration camp prisoner. The Daily Beast deconstructed and analyzed Beck’s entire anti-semitic attack.

In light of his “Restoring Courage” rally approaching at the end of August, one can assume that Beck’s visit today will build up plenty of publicity for the emotionally spastic conservative entertainer’s day at the pulpit. But, especially following his departure from nationalistic Fox News, doesn’t Beck’s sudden enthusiasm for Israeli politics feel like the man is leapfrogging from one country to another?

Glenn Beck is a sensationalist. And sensationalism may burn brightly, but it also burns briefly. How much longer can the voice of a public figure like Beck still be taken seriously?

Listen to Beck addressing the Kinesset:

South California: The 51st State

July 11th, 2011 by Matthew Uhlmann

A Riverside County politician proposes that California split to form a new state with a Republican majority—’South California.’

A Republican pharmacist and county supervisor is proposing what has already been proposed more than 220 times in America’s most populous and sunny state since the 1850s: state division.

Supervisor Stone envisions a 51st state composed of 13 majority conservative counties in Southern California. The new state of ‘South California’ will be an escape from the tax burdens caused by what Stone describes as liberal welfare and immigration policies.

The county-shuffling would take some serious gerrymandering—it would conveniently exclude Santa Barbara, Ventura, and most notably, the Democratic stronghold of LA County. According to Stone:

“Los Angeles is purposely excluded because they have the same liberal policies that Sacramento does. The last thing I want to do is create a state that’s a carbon copy of what we have now…Los Angeles just enacted a ban on plastic grocery bags. That put three or four manufacturers out of business.”

Surely banning plastic grocery bags isn’t reason enough to accuse LA County of economically negligent policy-making. Just imagine how that would look in future high school history text books: “South California excluded LA County because its liberal policy-makers outrageously outlawed plastic grocery bags.”

Stone’s proposal will be debated by the Riverside County Board of Supervisors tomorrow. A spokesman for Governor Jerry Brown commented that “It’s a supremely ridiculous waste of everybody’s time…If you want to live in a Republican state with very conservative right-wing laws, then there’s a place called Arizona.”

The suggestion of seceding from the state seems an extreme response to California’s economic deficit, especially for a supervisor whose county has a $130 million revenue shortfall.

Which is probably why this ‘South California’ proposition was criticized by the governor’s spokesperson as a diversion of valuable time and energy which would more wisely be directed toward digging their county and state out of its mountain of debt. The California budget deficit is currently around $9.6 billion.

Based on the unlikelihood of secession, supervisor Stone’s incentive might just be the attention his proposal is getting. The proposal is yet another example of the unwavering rigidity of Republican policy makers that consistently seems to earn them headlines despite being unrealistic.

Last fall, following Stephen Colbert’s and Jon Stewart’s rallies in Washington, D.C., Bill Maher said that “Republicans keep staking out a position that is further and further right, and then demand Democrats meet them in the middle, which is now not the middle anymore.”

Is there really anything further right than the call for secession? And if the movement for ‘South California’ somehow gains momentum, where would a middle meeting point between Democrats and Republicans even lie?

Google Earth is Used by Terrorists

July 8th, 2011 by Matthew Uhlmann

Palestinian militants have been using Google Earth to aim rockets into Israeli border towns outside of the Gaza Strip.

Say you plugged any random US city into Google Earth. Next, you plugged in the Israeli town of Netivot, which borders the Gaza Strip to the east. You would notice that in comparison the image of Netivot is quite pixelated and blurry. It’s because of the 1997 National Defense Authorization Act that the entirety of Israel can only be viewed in low-resolution.

There’s a good reason for this.

Palestinian fighters are pretty creative. In an interview with Slate, a Gaza militant explained how they use Google Earth to aim the infamous homemade Qassam rockets and Soviet-era Grads into the Israeli border towns surrounding the blockaded Gaza Strip. It’s unclear exactly how the rudimentary artillery placement works, only that the Google program, despite its highly pixelated imaging of Israel, is used to locate targets.

Does this mean that Google Earth is evil?

The software is a fantastic tool when not used maliciously. It allows all of us to momentarily make believe that we’re spies with access to satellite technology. It can be used to explore distant neighborhoods when apartment hunting. It can be used to keep tabs on an ex-girlfriend’s front driveway, to see if some other dude’s car is parked out front (which I’ve never done).

Google Earth gives new potential to entertainment for the virtual globe trotters among us. It was the main tool used to build Arcade Fire’s “The Wilderness Downtown” project last year, which totally reoriented the music video as we knew it. (For the first time in the history of internet advertising, the online interactive music video actually made entertaining use of the online pop-up.)

No, Google Earth isn’t evil. But the best programs always seem to attract the biggest bastards who swoop in and tarnish all that’s good about the internet.

Remember when online instant messaging came out? It was the grandfather of Facebook and it was fantastic—as were those online chat rooms where lonely people with common interests could all talk amongst themselves, anonymously. But then online predators ruined it. One never knew if that person who claimed to be a 15 year-old kid was really some middle-aged man living in his parents’ basement.

Google Earth and instant messaging are entirely different beasts. But what they both can do is make the world we live in feel smaller than it really is, less alienating, and more manageable.

But while those among us like Arcade Fire will use tools like Google Earth to take viewers on a heartwarming virtual trip home, there’s always someone else waiting to use that same tool to aim rockets into the sides of school buses.

As it’s always been, I guess that’s the price we pay for new technologies.

Cy Twombly: Why Modern Art is Alienating And Fantastic

July 7th, 2011 by Matthew Uhlmann

The American artist who just died a few days ago is alternately hated and beloved as a complete genius—probably both for the same reasons.

Cy Twombly, who died in Rome on Tuesday at 83, is the reason why modern art can be so alienating. It’s why wandering through the galleries of the MoMA can feel like stepping into an alternate, elitist universe where a different language is spoken and you’re never hip or art-savvy enough to feel welcome.

That could be the reason why Twombly’s work is so hated by many. Check out the comments from The Times’ art section from two days ago for proof.

Throughout his career Twombly played around with many techniques in his paintings, but he’s probably best (and most infamously) known for his scribbling paintings, which often look like looping swirls with occasional scribbles of cursive text and look at first glance like pure abstractions. This is why he’s been attacked by many critics who claim, My six year-old child could paint like that, or simply ask, What the fuck is this?

There are lots of answers to this question. One is that this is a work from one of the most expensive artists in the world (and now, after his death, the prices will only increase). As if modern art wasn’t alienating enough, putting a multi-million dollar price tag is like glimpsing another dimension with an entirely foreign concept of value.

For anyone who’s seen the movie “Exit Through The Giftshop” the insanity of the art market might make more sense. Watching the rise of Mr. Brainwash—an artist whose Warhol knockoff silkscreens are still making a killing—I mostly just wondered: are these people seriously buying this ridiculous man’s work?

But Cy Twombly isn’t the same artistic beast as Mr. Brainwash. There’s another answer to the question what the fuck is this? that doesn’t have to do with it’s price. Twombly, unlike Mr. Brainwash, isn’t just famous for being famous.

In his paintings, Twombly invented his own language, one with a jumbling of symbols, swirling cursive, and a scattering of numbers. He completely and fearlessly did his own thing, even in the face of attacks from art critics. He really didn’t seem to give a shit.

He was the type that rarely gives interviews. In one he did give back in 1994 for Vogue, he said “I swear if I had to do this over again, I would just do the paintings and never show them. And then after I’m dead, they could talk about them all they want.”

I consider myself to be basically art-illiterate. I’m not an art historian or a professional artist. But I do know that as a NYC resident, I do live in the city with the greatest arsenal of museums in the world. (no European city can hang with the Met and MoMA.) I’ve seen Twombly’s work multiple times. They’re only a short subway ride away. Many times I walked right past his scribbly, massive paintings with a glance and a shrug. They confuse me, still. I’ve never seen anything like them.

Make no mistake, Cy Twombly’s work is hated. The criticism spans from way back in the ’60s when the artist and Writer Donald Judd said of his paintings, “There isn’t anything to these paintings,” to just this morning, when Evan Newmark in the Wall Street Journal wrote “Twombly’s work is awful.”

As a writer whose work also received polarizing critiques, the late David Foster Wallace felt that “What the really great artists do is they’re entirely themselves… they’ve got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it’s authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.”

Regardless of anyone’s opinion, it’s still his work. I can’t claim to have felt it “in my nerve endings” as Wallace claims is the experience of encountering truly great art. But the man who’s been called by some the greatest American artist of the last century had his own unwavering vision on reality. The man believed in his work. That had to take some serious cajones. It’s easy to be a critic, but it’s much more treacherous to keep on keeping on when you’re not so popular.

Live Review: White Denim at Bowery Ballroom

June 28th, 2011 by Matthew Uhlmann

The four-man group from Austin, Texas packed Manhattan’s greatest concert venue beyond capacity, and for good reason: these guys are insanely talented.

NYC has a fantastic music scene. The possibilities for the concert-goers among us are seemingly limitless. But when a city is absoltely crawling with so many struggling bands, lots of the music starts to sound the same. The bands even start to look alike (often, like advertisements for Urban Outfitters).

White Denim is no gimmick. That’s probably why they had Bowery Ballroom beyond capacity on Saturday, sending the audience spewing into the stairwells.

Lead singer/guitarist James Petralli and guitarist Austin Jenkins shredded like Trey Anastasio and Warren Haynes—these two killed it. Their weaving of a super eclectic mesh of riffs was like an endless reference to the Gods of the electric guitar.

I’m hesitant to take a stab at a description of their sound because it is so eclectic, all with the playfulness of a jam band. White Denim has the capacity to make some truly original music, and surely the talent to do so.

These guys are workers. They didn’t even pause between songs. They’ve only just finished their last album “D,” and they’re already at work on their fifth album.

Check here for the rest of White Denim’s summer tour dates, and check out their latest music video for “Street Joy” below.

Gay Marriage: Brought to You by American Express

June 27th, 2011 by Matthew Uhlmann

New York City has launched a tourism campaign called “NYC I Do,” which means it’s officially legal, in less than a month, to make a boat-load of money from gay weddings.

Mayor Bloomberg knows how to boost the NYC economy while still looking like a totally decent guy.

Consider the ban on smoking in public parks: It was enacted in the name of cleaner air, but with $50 tickets for violators, it surely will make bank for the city. Or the massive increase in ticketing bicyclists for miniscule violations, like this guy who got a $50 ticket for exiting the bike lane because it supposedly endangered pedestrians.

With the signing of the Marriage Equality Act by Governor Cuomo on Friday comes economic opportunity for NYC tourism. Shortly after the Act was signed, the city launched the “NYC I DO” campaign.

For all of those out-of-state same-sex couples, the official city guide NYCGo.com has all the important legal details: how to obtain a marriage license, the marriage laws for out-of-staters and the status of the New York marriage once couples leave the state.

And for those eager to get married but don’t want to deal with actually organizing a wedding ceremony, NYCGo.com has links to a variety of hotel marriage packages, all sponsored by American Express. One is called “NYC I Do: Love Has No Boundaries/Born This Way Wedding Package” and includes a one hour ceremony for 100 guests, a presidential suite and monogramed “Mr. and Mr.” or “Mrs. and Mrs.” robes, among other things, all for $25,000. There’s also the “I Do: The Right to Unite Package,” which is for those who prefer a modest City Hall wedding. There are five different hotel packages to choose from.

The Marriage Equality Act finally takes effect in 27 days, when the city hopes the “NYC I Do” campaign will hopefully start generating money for a local tourism industry already pulling in $31 billion annually.

The debate over gay marriage is almost always discussed as a social issue, and never from an economic perspective. Even those political figureheads fundamentally opposed to same-sex marriage like Newt Gingrich, who today said gay marriage “muddles” the institution, never seem to discuss the issue outside of its moral implications.

But, like Christmas, weddings are a big industry. There’s money to be made from broadening the marriage opportunities—plenty of it.

The Pride Parade in NYC yesterday featured many floats with corporate sponsors—Delta and American Express, to name a couple. Similarly, the launch of “NYC I Do,” for this reason, seems highly opportunistic. Is it insensitive to squeeze profits from such a significant event in the history of American human rights?

In a capitalistic society ever more pervaded with marketing messages, this is just how it goes, I guess. Even our social lives are penetrated by economic incentives. It doesn’t minimize the significance of the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York—not in the least. But it’s a sobering realization that even the greatest of victories for human rights can be leveraged as prime marketing opportunities.

Lab-Grown Meat Could Soon Replace Real Meat

June 20th, 2011 by Matthew Uhlmann

The pseudo meat will marginalize the harmful environmental impact of the real animal farming industry, but the entire concept forgets that domesticated farm animals are dependent on their consumption for their survival.

The global demand for lab-grown meat has less to do with any ethical or moral concern than it does environmental concerns. The factory farming of animals is ravaging the global ecosystem. According to a researcher at Oxford University and as reported in The Guardian, lab-grown meat could be commercially available in as soon as five years.

The prospect of synthetically engineered animal protein isn’t a new one. Just last week we ran an article about a Japanese lab that has found a way to make a pseudo beef-like protein from human feces. A.K.A. a “turd burger.”

Compared to a turd burger, lab grown meat sounds much more appealing. Considered alone, however, the idea of lab-grown flesh is deeply chilling. The ecological ravaging of factory farming is real, that can’t be denied. But the potential hazards of feeding the growing, meat-dependent global population synthetic animal meat should be considered before the real-deal animal flesh is ditched for good.

Let’s enter the dreamworld of PETA for a moment and imagine that the world stopped eating animals. If we must eat meat, we all eat lab-grown meat. The environment takes less Co2 emissions because factory farming has been eliminated, not to mention all the rest of the other ecological ravaging inflicted by factory farming on the environment.

What would be the fate of those species that we as meat eaters used to consume?

What is often overlooked when the case against meat eating is made is this: all the animals we’ve become dependent upon through our evolution from hunter-gatherers to domestic farmers have also become dependent upon us. As Michael Pollen points out in his book “The Omnivores Dilemma,” the animals we need for food, also need us for survival:

“Domestication took place when a handful of especially opportunistic species discovered…that they were more likely to survive and prosper in alliance with humans than on their own. Humans provided the animals with food and protection in exchange for which the animals provided the humans their milk, eggs, and—yes—their flesh. Both parties were transformed by the new relationship: The animals grew tame and lost their ability to fend for themselves in the wild…And the humans traded their hunter-gatherer ways for the settled lives of agriculturalists.”

It seems bizarre to even suggest it, because nothing could seem more contradictory: that the survival of a species is dependent on being slaughtered for food. But there is a case to be made that the animals we domesticate basically want to be eaten.

If lab meat were to replace natural meat after it becomes commercially available, the repercussions could be anyone’s guess. They could be insignificant—who knows. But repercussions aside, there’s an undeniable sense of alienation in all this. Take the turd burger, for instance: Are we really about to start eating our own shit in order to save the environment?

Writer Scott Korb brings this point into question, and suggests we don’t necessarily need to feel guilt for eating meat:

“Plants and animals need us as much as we need plants and animals. Indeed, in this world dominated by industrial agriculture, the lives and needs of animals could not be more desperate. Ethical vegetarianism requires that we allow ourselves to believe we still eat of Eden, that we belong to Eden, and that Eden did once and still can exist. Indeed, this is, perhaps, what the ethical vegetarian shares with those of us who eat industrial meat without giving it much thought. For the vegetarian and your average meat eater alike—for all my students who both come and go convinced that vegetarianism offers deliverance from a world of sin and death—there’s some magic involved, and not a little sentimentality, complete with the escapism that magicians and myth-makers have always provided.”

Korb would argue that we do, in fact, live in a world of pain and suffering. I would agree. I would go so far as to say that renouncing meat altogether is naive. In the world of factory farming, it’s an ethically sound decision to make. But facing the prospect of eating lab-grown meat and turd burgers, I wonder if being human on some fundamental level means I’d really rather a cow—any cow—than my own shit.

Interview: White Denim

June 17th, 2011 by Matthew Uhlmann

White Denim just released their latest album “D” last month and the group is currently touring like crazy. Leading up to their show at Bowery Ballroom on June 25th, White Denim frontman James Petralli discusses everything from his philosophy on the music video to his desire to collaborate with Weird Al.

Coming from Austin, Texas to New York City—arguably the two cities with the biggest music scenes in the country—do you guys notice any dramatic difference between performing in either city?
Ha! I would love to hear that argument. Austin is a great city to live in, but in my humble opinion the “music capital” thing is a bit of a stretch. The local music culture in Austin is good and getting better all the time, but I personally think it has some catching up to do with larger and more established cities like Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Boston, New York, and Los Angeles. Your phrasing of this question is a testament to effective marketing (or SXSW & ACL syndrome) though! The biggest difference that I have noticed between our Austin gigs and gigs that we do in other major cities is the level of respect and professionalism that we see from the staff in the clubs. I am by no means saying that it is all bad here, but for the most part the behind the scenes work that makes a show great just isn’t taken as seriously in Austin as it is in other places. The audiences in Austin are generally great though, especially if your current single sounds neat.

I realize that you’ve just recently released your latest album “D” but have you started in on any new material for another studio album?
Yes, we are always working. The next few records are coming along very nicely!

Do you guys ever try to catch any shows when you’re on a busy touring schedule?
I enjoy going to concerts when I can, unfortunately I do not get out often enough these days. If we have any time at all in NYC, we will be out enjoying the city. I love visiting New York. Steve saw the Green Day musical last time we were there. He came back to the hotel with a rave review. If time permits, we’ll try to watch some people play jazz somewhere or maybe check out Here We Go Magic if they are in town. I heard that there is a wayward Texan in that group.

Do you find it difficult balancing your touring schedule with the amount of time dedicated to writing and recording new music in the studio?
Yes, I would like to live in a studio someday. I feel very comfortable in that space. It is very forgiving and there is always somewhere to go so to speak. I learn how to really stretch my guitar playing on the road though. We have learned the hard way that you can’t really have one without the other. I just get so bored in the van, and generally all that I can ever think about is making records.

What were your favorite bands growing up that you still listen to?
I still listen to The Mothers, The Isley’s, Hendrix, etc. Classic Rock you know. Basically, I still listen to all of the good stuff that I discovered when I was a kid.

Are there any musicians or bands that you’d like to collaborate with either live or on a future album that you haven’t had the opportunity to collaborate with before?
We are down to collaborate with almost anyone who asks us. There are many great musicians and artists working today that we would be thrilled to work with. Basically everybody that has ever put a record out on Thrill Jockey, Stevie Wonder, Sly Stone, Weird Al… we are up for it.

You’ve made some very strange music videos in the past. Like the music video for “I Start to Run.” Do you really put much stock in music videos, or are they less valuable than the recorded track itself, and just an opportunity to sort of make something that’s mostly funny and playful?
People seem to enjoy music videos and sometimes I think they can really compliment or even elevate the music. We have had some fun kicking around concepts and making videos in the past. We have also been fortunate to work with some brilliant artists on video projects. I could take them or leave them 9 times out of 10 though, especially if we have to be in them. They take forever to make, and being a subject in a work is not all that exciting to me personally.

Say you could open for any band, either current or from the past, and at any venue of your choosing. Who would you open for and where at?
The Soft Machine and The Jimi Hendrix Experience at the Acropolis.

Louis C.K. Defends Tracy Morgan, Citing Comedic License

June 17th, 2011 by Matthew Uhlmann

Louis C.K. is standing in solidarity with Tracy Morgan, defending his fellow comedian as misunderstood. Is he onto something?

Of every media outlet and public figure that’ve voiced or published their opinions on the Tracy Morgan scandal in the last few weeks, whether they called for his firing from “30 Rock” or for his public apology, almost all of them shared this: none of them were actually there to hear Morgan’s diatribe live.

This may seem irrelevant. After all, I don’t actually sit in on all Congressional hearings but I can still have opinions about new laws. What does it matter if most people didn’t actually hear Tracy Morgan make his allegedly homophobic comments live?

A few days ago Louis C.K. began a Twitter campaign to defend Tracy Morgan. Just this morning Slate published an interview with C.K. in which he continues to stand in solidarity with his fellow stand-up, and to defend himself for doing so.

C.K. finds the entire scandal to be ridiculous. Stand-up is meant to be appreciated live he asserts, and places the true blame for the entire scandal on whomever initially reported Morgan’s comments to news sources. As he told Slate:

“And people heard this Tracy shit mostly third-hand. He didn’t stand on a public stage and say this stuff. He didn’t make these announcements: “Here, America, are my views.” Where you say something makes a huge difference about what you say and what it means and what you let yourself say.”

Especially In the wake of the Anthony Weiner scandal this point seems especially timely. It’s true that Tracy Morgan didn’t exactly Tweet his notorious remarks. And unlike the Weiner scandal, Morgan didn’t try to cover up what he’d said. It was live, to an audience. He wrote the entire routine out beforehand. He knew what he was saying—it wasn’t some slip from a deeply homophobic subconsciousness.

If any one comedian can understand what it means to not give a shit about political correctness while entertaining an audience, it’s Louis C.K. His over-the-top brashness is part of the key to his humor.

And that’s the beauty of being an entertainer instead of, say, a politician. Comedians can say things they don’t actually mean. They can be sarcastic monsters. That’s what makes great comedy great: when the border between the genuine and the conceit blurs. A comedian can make cancer jokes. Like Chris Rock’s comments at the Tonys last week, a comedian can joke about hookers. And like Louis C.K. once did, they can even joke about rape. As he told Slate:

“I’ve said to many audiences that I think you shouldn’t rape someone unless you have a good reason, like you want to fuck them and they won’t let you. That’s worse than what he said! And I didn’t wink and say, just kidding. I just said it.”

What makes most so uncomfortable about scandalous comedy is the exact same thing why it is fantastic to begin with: it’s not always clear if the comedian is for kidding. Of course C.K. doesn’t actually condone rape, and of course Tracy Morgan wouldn’t ever stab his kid if he were a homosexual. We all know that. But the fear is: what are the dangers of being constantly disingenuous to the audience, regardless if that audience is a live one or say, the entire online community via Twitter?

The political and social battles facing the American LGBT community are real. The last thing a homosexual needs to hear, even as a joke, is that they deserve to be murdered for their sexual preference. This is exactly why Vince Vaughn took a similar media assault for his comment “Electric cars are gay” in the trailer for “The Dilemma” that was released last fall. The comment came soon after the gay Rutgers student committed suicide, and it was a moment of particular national sensitivity. In a statement to E! News, Vaughn echoed Louis C.K. on the role of entertainment:

“Comedy and joking about our differences breaks tension and brings us together. Drawing divided lines over what we can and cannot joke about does exactly that; it divides us. Most importantly, where does it stop?”

Tracy Morgan, as an entertainer, has the right to say whatever he damn well feels, as does Vaughn. But it’s important to remember that we as consumers of that entertainment can respond however we damn well feel, too. That includes telling Tracy Morgan exactly where he can shove his opinions.

Homophobic Guys Are Probably Slightly Gay, Says Science

June 13th, 2011 by Matthew Uhlmann

A University of Georgia study involving both men and porn proves yet again the incredibly old, ominous saying that “we are what we hate.”

The magazine Psychology Today reminded us of a 1996 University of Georgia study in which researchers took two groups of heterosexual men, one group identifying with homophobic claims and the other with more inclusive proclivities, attached their penises to devices that measure arousal, and then watched three types of porn: man-on-man, woman-on-woman, and then some old-fashioned hetero man-on-woman.

Not surprisingly, the study revealed that both groups were aroused while watching hetero and lesbian porn, but only admittedly homophobic participants were turned on by the gay porn.

I feel like this should be called the “No Shit” study. Or maybe the Bishop Eddie Long study. And if homophobia is an indication of deeper homosexual urges, then what does that say about Christian fundamentalists who so aggressively fight same-sex marriage? Are they the true face of gay America?

University of Georgia should now aim their penis meters at Newt Gingrich and Tracy Morgan and see how they react to man-on-man action.

But what I want to know, is if these participants in the study were self-proclaimed homophobes, then why would they agree to take a study that involved someone else fastening a device to their penis, and possibility a male scientist? I mean that sort of gives away the study right there, and before they even got down to the actual porn. A truly dedicated homophobe would never agree to a male scientist fiddling with their junk.

Just saying…

[via psychologytoday.com]