It turns out maintaining a blog while taking on increasing responsibilities at work and trying to finish my Masters degree and trying to maintain some semblance of a personal life is a bit tricky. Plus, I think Facebook statuses suck up an alarming amount of my wit (or potential wit). But before I throw in the towel and start a Twitter, I’m going to try my hand at one of those lazy Larry King round-ups of commentary, reviews and “observations.” (Actually, I’ve never really seen a full installment of Mr. Suspenders’ program, so I’m really just aping those even lazier parodic send-ups of Larry King.) Either these are placeholders for bigger, better posts or else they are the aborted remains of very promising ideas.

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There’s a certain poignancy in that moment of steeling oneself at the front door for a charging dog who will never again slam his 90 pound body into your knees. Or how a leash, brush and bowl in a plastic supermarket bag can require the same negotiation as a chest full of heirloom jewels at the reading of a will. And when does dropping little bits of food on the ground cease being nice, and start being rude?

…

Upon third listening, the new Spoon record (a sleeper, like all others before it) sounds like a new, incredible advance. Like many of “Transference’s” reviewers, I’m attracted by the idea of Britt Daniel & Co. fully embracing the bombast that they have spent four successive records stripping to the bone. But the more that the band breaks down their songs to the most spare and elemental, the more I enjoy following them on their journey. I’m ready for their next record, comprising the sounds of Daniels’ pencil scratching paper while Jim Eno tunes his snare.

…

How hard is it to find a good coffee table?! I realize that furniture is particularly subjective to taste (and there are few people more particular than me), but sheesh. If it’s not one thing, it’s the color. Black, for the record, is not tobacco, not coffee and certainly not mahogany. It seems like everything out there alternates between the extremely baroque or the post-post-modern. Gahd forbid you want to protect the wood finish with a little bit of glass. Oh, no. If you want a glass-top coffee table, the glass will be held aloft by skinny angular metal, positive vibes and pixie dust.

…

Having as many obituaries on my site as I do, I’ve grown accustomed to estranged friends of the deceased learning the bad news by stumbling upon my blarg via Gooooooogle searches. It is somewhat dispiriting to see how long it can take before a good college buddy, former comrade or ex-girlfriend decides to investigate a bounced email or missing Christmas card. The responses to one particular comrade’s death (no names, comrades) are notable for their extreme sadness and their extreme tardiness. Did he make deep, profound connections with his friends and then retreat into his own private world? Am I doomed to do the same?

I’m reminded of the outlaw country singer / mystery writer Kinky Friedman, who writes of his shared fear of dying in his apartment and being devoured by his hungry cat before anyone notices. In his novels, Kinky writes of the “M.I.T. System.” The idea is quite simple. “M.I.T.” stands for Man In Trouble, and the point is to establish a reciprocal understanding with a friend that every few days each will call the other and say nothing more than, “M.I.T., M.I.T., M.I.T.” (Because, really, who wants to force small talk every two or three days?) If you don’t receive an “M.I.T.” call from your friend after three days, convince his Super to let you into the apartment to search for his half-eaten corpse and lay some kibble out for the ravenous cat.

I’ve made “M.I.T.” arrangements with a handful of friends over the years and, come to think of it, I have not received a “M.I.T.” call from any of them, nor they from I, in a long while. Better start Goooooogling.

When, exactly, did the celebrity-obsessed tabloid press switch over to first-name-basis reportage? Celebrities used to have full names, not that long ago in fact. Sure, there was the occasional Cher or Oprah, but they were the exceptions to prove the rule. Or perhaps they were the pioneers that got the tabloids asking “why take up space on the page with useless last names?” So, now we have Brad and Angelina, but also perfectly generic names like Jen and John and Jon and Kate like we’re not only supposed to know who the hell these people are, but we’re buddies. Someone named Nicole shares the cover of US Weekly with Britney as the “Worst Beach Bod.” I recognize neither her face nor her pot belly. Perhaps if there was a last name associated with the unflattering picture, I could place her.

What’s worse is that this cancer is spreading into politics. I guess if you can’t distinguish yourself through policy differences, you can coast on celebrity. So it was when I was in New Hampshire for the primaries that a surprising number of campaign themes emphasized a candidates’ first name – even to the point of dropping any reference to the last. It’s one thing for Hillary to do so, because, really, there could be no other. Same goes for Rudy, I suppose. But Fred? As in bumper stickers that read simply, “Fred ’08.” I thought that perhaps a wayward street team for a new solo record by the B52′s Fred Schneider had gotten mixed up with all the politicking, but, no, it was a legitimate contender for the Presidency of the United States that decided to market himself as just Fred. (Presidential Also-Rans for $500: “Who is Fred Thompson?”)

I suppose that all this first name nonsense is designed to make stars more accessible, more “just like us.” I wonder what effect being encouraged to call a celebrity by his or her first name has on the kinds of people already prone to stalker-ish behavior. I’ll tell you the effect it has on the sort of person who doesn’t watch teevee is to feel more alienated from pop culture. I used to be able to more or less follow who are the popular actors, but they emphasize last names on movie posters, so it’s a real disconnect unless you are already sucked in to the whole TMZ world of 24-hour celebrity gossip.

This informality gets to be too much. There’s only so much you can break formality down before you have to build it back up again so that some new generation can have the fun of tearing it down all over again. Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? Joe?

Someone has to take a stand. Don’t be “Janet, Miss Jackson if you’re nasty.” Be Ms. Janet Jackson to everyone except your family and closest friends.

It’s been previously noted the unnatural oddness that is leaving behind a virtual representation of oneself on the myface. As this shit gets more mainstream, the awkwardness gets more familiar and yet more surreal. In the Times, Adam Cohen writes of a friend’s Facebook profile becoming a sort of living shrine to a dead-too-soon friend. At least it served that function to those who friended him up while he was still alive, and until his surviving family chooses to pull the plug on the profile. But what of those who die unloved, unmourned, unfriended?

I recently threw in the towel and joined Facebook, the creepy, creepy improvement on Friendster and MySpace. Immediately, the computer intelligence starts recommending friends I should connect with. How does this bloody thing know the names of girls that I went on one or two dates with three or four years ago? And why does this blasted thing want me to be friends with Don Busky? Busky died late last year, and in life we were something closer to enemies than friends.

He was always an odd fellow, more noted for his reclusiveness than his actual politics or personality. As an ambitious young turk, I quickly butted heads with the guy in an attempt to recruit eager new recruits to charter a more active Philadelphia local of the Socialist Party and overthrow an innocent savant who was more interested in publishing silly little zines with a socialist bent. Shortly after I showed up for work in the party’s national office, as a teenage socialist in 1996, my buddy Clement Joseph started cracking jokes about the disembodied brain in a jar that was Donald F. Busky. My only interactions with the comrade were a fairly acrimonious e-mail exchange over his failure to properly represent the party (or, indeed, turn up to a single meeting) in the “Unity 2000″ rally planning. His last message to me (and every party member for whom he could find an email address) was addressed, simply, “Cde. Richman owes some apologies.” I met him a few months later at a YPSL convention near Rittenhouse Square in 2001. We spoke not a word, but it was the first time I had been in his physical presence. The brain in a jar was a large man, shy and soft-spoken. He was a devoted Mac user, a labor buff and adjunct professor. We might have been friends if we hadn’t started as enemies. It was a sad loss, but C’est la vie. I soon left the party, and didn’t hear about Busky again until Gabe Ross passed on the unfortunate news about his death last December.

The next time I saw Cde. Busky’s name was on an open public records access request for the list of adjunct faculty at a community college down in southern New Jersey, where I’m helping the part-timers form a union. Prof. Donald F. Busky gets to be a voter in their union election, except that he couldn’t possibly vote “Union Yes” (as he surely would have) because he is No Longer Employed. Still, it was a kick in the guts to see his name on that OPRA list, just as it is a kick in the guts to see him recommended as a friend on Facebook whenever I log in, and to see his name and home address on a mailing label for a mailing we worked on last Friday for the union campaign.

I don’t think his elderly mother (if she’s still alive), or any other surviving relative knows enough to get Cde. Busky’s Facebook profile retired. Therefore, he will continue to haunt me. Perhaps I’ll learn to be a better comrade to those who have yet to shuffle off this mortal coil.

Skylar Deleon should have waited five years. The former child actor (he was a bit player on “The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers,” not, alas, an actual Power Ranger) was sentenced to die by lethal injection for the murder of Thomas and Jackie Hawks. In November of 2004, Deleon responded to an advertisement that the Hawks had posted to sell their yacht, the Well Deserved (and, no, I’m not making this up), and joined them for a test drive (or whatever the nautical equivalent of a test drive is). When they got out into the ocean Deleon forced the Hawks to sign over the title to the yacht, tied the couple to an anchor and dropped them to the bottom of the ocean.

Deleon planned to get away from his financial problems and sail to Mexico. Apparently, after the “Power Rangers,” Deleon had a Forest Gump-like knack for stumbling through the cultural zeitgeist and swindled a living as a mortgage broker and “entrepreneur.” Today, a lot of us have financial problems, and owning a yacht is a luxury that people seem all-too-willing to walk away from. According to the NY Times, as boat owners face difficulty making payments on loans and dock slips, many owners are simply unmooring their boats and letting them float out to sea. These abandoned boats are an environmental hazard, and localities are rushing to pass laws to outlaw the abandonment of a sea vessel.

Florida officials say they are moving more aggressively to track down owners and are also starting to unclog the local inlets, harbors, swamps and rivers. The state appropriated funds to remove 118 derelicts this summer, up from only a handful last year.

In South Carolina, four government investigators started canvassing the state’s waterways in January. They quickly identified 150 likely derelicts.

[snip]

Crab Bank, a protected bird rookery in the harbor within sight of Fort Sumter, is home to a dozen derelicts — two sunken, two beached, the other eight still afloat. They range from houseboats to a two-masted sailboat.

It’s not hard to see where this trend will end up: Piracy! I’m only half-kidding. If a two-bit punk like Skylar Deleon could resort to double homicide and theft to realize a fantasy of sailing away to Mexico to continue a career of pettier larceny and confidence schemes during a relatively decent economy, what we’ve got now is a whole lot more desperate unemployed people out there, a small flotilla of houseboats, yachts and speedboats and the compelling example of the very successful Somali pirates.

I’m almost tempted to spit on my hands and hoist the black flag, myself. Of course, as a pacifist, I need to tweak the Somali model of piracy. Perhaps I could sail alongside civilian yachts, climb aboard, look really menacing and then announce that I have Snickers bars for sale “not to raise money for my basketball team or my school, but to put money in my pocket and keep me out of trouble.”

My hometown’s getting a bit of a black eye from the NY Times this weekend. On Friday, the Grey Lady published a profile of Bellerose (a few blocks from my Floral Park and “across the street from Nassau County,” take note), where our local drive-in Frozen Cup ice cream shop is being bulldozed to make way for a new sex hotel.

This is one of many changes, notes Times scribe James Angelos:

I played in a youth league at the Bellerose Lanes, mind you. My dad worked a part-time job there. I was sorry to see it go, if only because it’s damn hard to find a decent bowling alley in New York these days. Around the same time, two bowling alleys near my old Kew Gardens home also closed down, muscled out by new developers who will likely also replace them with hotels or office supply stores. And when I moved in to Bay Ridge, it was hot on the heels of a protest over the shuttering of the local Key Food grocery store to be replaced by – wait for it – a Waldgreens drug store, while the nearest supermarket, Coney Island’s Pathmark, is swamped with shoppers from four under-served adjacent neighborhoods. It’s all just capitalist development, no? Another example of Jane Jacobs’ theory of success driving out success when it comes to real estate development, leading to numbing homogeneity and the “death of great cities?”

But the Times smells something else at play. At that something else is the faint whiff of curry:

“They’re turning the neighborhood into a third-world country,” Mr. Augugliaro said. “We don’t want it over here to look like Richmond Hill or Jackson Heights,” he added, speaking of Queens neighborhoods with sizable South Asian populations.

As he spoke, Ms. Augugliaro shook her head in disapproval at some of his remarks, and he seemed to pick up on her unspoken criticism.

“I’m not a racist,” Mr. Augugliaro quickly added. In fact, he said, he was tired of the subject of race coming up so often. “What does race have to do with it?” he asked.

Indeed. What does race have to do with it? I have a strange sort of pride that the neighborhood I grew up in is now New York’s Little India; that slumming yuppies make pilgrimages to Floral Park to sample the vindaloo (pity my bland palate can’t handle the stuff); that my parents’ home has quintupled in value, and when they cease to live there, it will be painted purple and adorned with brushed nickel metal accents.

Others, like Mr. Augugliaro (whose name sounds familiar; I think he volunteers for the same community theater group as my folks), are threatened that the changes to the neighborhood look and talk different from the Irish and Italian stock that formerly constituted northeast Queens. But they are letting The Man pit us against each other. The problem is not that another generation of immigrants are pulling themselves up by the boot-straps, buying in to the community and adding a taste of curry to the proverbial melting pot. The problem is that land, and usage, and community service are for sale to the highest bidder, and that local real estate desperately needs some limits and controls placed on it, to ensure a continued diversity of use and community, and that the endless sea of Wal-Marts, Walgreens, Applebees and Home Depots are still dotted with the occasional bowling alley and ice cream shop so that our neighborhoods remain communities.

After a morning that saw me put a bid in on a spacious two bedroom apartment with a formal dining room in Bay Ridge – $10,000 down with 75% financing and a very adult activity, if ever I engaged in one – I decided to go shopping for a new hat. I’ve been wearing hats for a little over a year now: a straw hat followed by a light felt black fedora. Fashionable as it might otherwise be, a black hat clashes with the navy blazer I’ve taken to wearing lately. This is another dubious sign of maturity. As the Clash song goes, “You grow up and you calm down / You start wearing blue and brown.” A grey hat seemed in order, so I made my way to Bencraft Hatters.

Bencraft has two locations in Brooklyn. The original is located in Williamsburg, not far from where my paternal grandfather lived when he married my grandmother. It’s probably where he purchased (or, more likely, rented) the top hat he wore on their wedding day. The other, which I frequent, is in Borough Park. Inside of Bencraft, you will find the kind of intense debates, measurements and arguments over hats that made most American men heave a sigh of relief when J.F.K. attended his inauguration bare-headed. Being a Sunday, I found a dozen Jewish men (customers and salesmen) engaging in heated debates over coloring, brim size and the ever-ephemeral quality of “quality.”

A family – two older brothers and their father – fretted over the difference of a quarter of an inch of brim for the youngest of their clan. A 10-year-old girl rejected her father’s new hat as “not as good” as his last one, and chastised him for losing his yarmulke inside of a display hat and thus exposing his chrome dome to Yahweh. At the sales counter, an agitated little man complained of a barely detectable “bump” in the crown of his new hat. “I wouldn’t complain, except that this is the fourth hat I purchased from you this week,” he explained. The salesman countered, “In every hat in this store, could I find an imperfection? These are handmade hats, they will never be 100%” Finally, though, the salesman agreed to steam the hat in an attempt to work out the bump, although, he complained, Sunday was a bad day for it. He gestured to the long line of Hassidic men waiting to have their hats steamed and cleaned.

As for me, I meekly requested a grey hat in the same cheapo style as the “lite felt” fedora I was already wearing. None in my size, the salesman apologized. He did find a slightly-more-expensive Stefano. “It’s a real hat,” he explained, “as we say in the business.” Almost thirty, a real home and a real hat. How could I refuse?

Writing in the Sunday Times, Megan Hustad laments the cultural decline of “the office phone call.” People prefer to use e-mail for petty confrontations and negotiations, and valuable diplomatic skills are lost and new employees lose the informal training that comes with eavesdropping on the boss. In my new fancy-pants position with my union, I’ve noticed that my phone calls to people at headquarters frequently go to voicemail, and that the responses come back via Blackberry.

This seems to be a weekend for hand-wringing and tut-tutting over the technological devolution of our social interactions. Elsewhere in the Times, Laura Holson notices that these kids today sure do like to send text messages, creating some kind of generation gap. Apparently. Meanwhile on livejournal (itself, a weird barrier to normal social interaction) a friend of mine protests the suddenly rigid tradition of getting into and out of relationships on Myspace, complete with the formal change of relationship status from “Single” to “In a Relationship” (or vice versa), a reshuffle of one’s “top friends” and gooey comments added or deleted from each other’s profiles. Funnily enough, another friend popped back up on Myspace this weekend after deleting her account some weeks ago. Her relationship status, I took note because this is the reason that we are on the Myspace to begin with, had changed to “Single.” Is this now a way of responding to a break-up? New hairdo, new city, new Myspace profile?

I’ve been listening to old Replacements records this weekend, after reading Jim Walsh’s spotty but genuinely exuberant book about the 80′s indie icons. Paul Westerberg has always been a preternaturally grumpy old man (one of the reasons I’ve always liked him) and he’s been complaining about the distance that technology puts between us since tape-recorded answering machine messages. On a beautiful, daring and angry love song that closes out a record full of them (1984′s “Let it Be”), Westerberg, accompanied only by his electric guitar, complains “How do you say I’m lonely to an answering machine?” The song ends with the flat declaration, “I HATE your answering machine,” and a fade-out refrain of “313, 212.” Those two numbers used to signify Detroit and New York City, but soon they won’t mean much of anything as “area” codes are allowed to roam the country along with the person who totes them around in a cellphone – another kind of virtual identity.

It’s a safe bet that Westerberg, if he’s paying attention, finds flirting on a Facebook wall or announcing a divorce via text message to be even more ridiculous than “I’m not here right now…” Still, it’s hard to imagine any songwriter finding pathos in being dropped from someone’s “top friends,” or sending a come-on that can’t help but read like a booty call via text message. I h8 ur txt msg? No thanks.

All in all, absinthe’s a bit of a disappointment. In case it escaped your attention, the green fairy, which has been illegal in the United States for most of the 20th century for its supposed hallucinogenic and psychopathic effects, is now legal. It turns out, in fact, that it’s been legal since Prohibition’s repeal but nobody noticed. Since that time, absinthe has been banned from the U.S. for containing a chemical compound that determined European importers have recently proven never existed in the wormwood-derived liqueur. So what of absinthe’s reputation for murder, mayhem and gothic artistic inspiration? Guilt by association, it turns out. It’s kinda like blaming bourbon for country music or Colt 45 for drive-by shootings.

That sober analysis takes much of the fun out of drinking absinthe, which can now be found in select liquor stores and bars in one of three brands, with more (supposedly) on the way. I’ve been sampling a bottle of the French Lucid today, which tastes like a mix of sambuca and liquid Tylenol. Forget Victorian romance, or Vincent Van Gogh’s missing ear, my favorite absinthe story can be found in Dave Van Ronk’s posthumous memoir, “The Mayor of MacDougal Street.” In the collection of anecdotes from NYC’s late-fifties folk scene, Van Ronk tells of some sailor friends who smuggled several dozen cases of absinthe out of Japan on the even of its prohibition there, hoping to make an underground score back home. When the mob wouldn’t touch it, the sailors were reduced to bartering their illicit booze for places to sleep. I’ll let comrade Van Ronk pick up the story:

As a general rule, I tried to avoid getting mixed up in this kind of convoluted skullduggery, but ever since I was a teenager, I had been reading about Lautrec and absinthe, Modigliani and absinthe, Swinburne and absinthe – naturally I was dying to find out about Van Ronk and absinthe. Also, there was the sheer joy of conspiracy for its own sake. What can I say? I have always been a hopeless romantic…

The next day my two smugglers dropped by Judy’s place, and over glasses of guess what, I got the discouraging word: my guy had bought a few cases for himself and his friends, but basically his position was, “Look – you know what it is and I know what it is, but nobody else ever heard of the stuff. Who are we going to sell it to?”

“Gee,” I said, “the Mafia sure is hard on honest crooks.”

By way of consolation, I took five more bottles off their hands. Hell, they were selling it cheaper than Irish Whiskey. For the next few weeks, the nabe was awash in absinthe. Everybody I knew must have picked up a few jugs. Then it was gone…

It must have been about ten years down the line that I happened to be doing a gig in Provincetown, and a publican in Wellfleet invited Paul Geremia (the world’s best blues guitarist and singer) and me to a high-class bash at his Victorian Gothic “cottage.” Paul and I were sitting there jamming, when our host approached us with two glasses of a familiar-looking opalescent fluid…

“I’ll bet you guys’ll never guess what this is,” our host said, as he handed me a glass.

I took a sip, ostentatiously rolled it around my tongue and replied, “It tastes very much like Japanese absinthe.”

“Jesus, how could you tell?”

I arched my eyebrows in my very best William F. Buckley imitation. “To the truly sophisticated palate,” I intoned, “there are no mysteries.”

Now, that is exactly the kind of absinthe experience I was hoping for! Not necessarily a hallucination, but at least some good old-fashioned conspiracy. But now that everything is twice as legal and half as fun, I can only hope that the humorless American commissars, who are supposedly seething at this subversion of their authority, will find a way to make absinthe illegal once again. Then my bottle of French absinthe would take on some illicit quality, and comrades could gather around my liquor cabinet for some rarified naughtiness. In the meantime, if you’re curious what all the fuss is about, but don’t want to shell out the big bucks for your own bottle, you’re welcome over to the Kew, comrade, to sample some of mine.

Miss Teen South Carolina, Lauren Caitlin Upton, seems to be the internet joke of the week for her rambling, incoherent response to the token political question lobbed at contestants in this weekend’s beauty pageant. The blond beauty queen was asked to account for why, according to “recent polls,” one-fifth of Americans can’t locate their country on a world map.

For the sake of posterity, here is the transcript of her response, which I had already read on two websites and the video of which was forwarded to me by five different people before I finished my morning cup of Irish Breakfast tea:

“I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some… people out there in our nation don’t have maps and, uh, I believe that our, ah, education like such as in South Africa, and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, uh, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., or should help South Africa, it should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future, for our children.”

Now, if the statistic is correct (and I would like that verified, comrades) then the odds are that at least nine of the other contestants would have fared just as poorly as Miss Teen South Carolina in naming a bunch of countries other than the U.S., which is to say nothing of the audience. Call me elitist, but I wager the kind of people who would spend their Friday night watching a sexless teenage beauty contest aren’t exactly our best and brightest. Could they find the U.S.A., or Iraq, South Africa or even one Asian country on a world map? And yet a question meant to highlight the collective stupidity of our nation was twisted into an easy “dumb blond joke.”

In Miss Teen South Carolina’s defense, what the hell would have been an appropriate response to this question? I mean, what would have been an appropriate response in the “I would wish for world peace, I believe the children are our future” world of beauty contests? Was she supposed to decry a property tax system of funding local school districts that produces woeful inequality between cities and suburbs? Denounce the high cost of tuition that leaves college out of reach for too many? Or was she supposed to crinkle up her nose, look slightly distressed and coo something about inspirational teachers?

I like to imagine an alternative scenario in which Ms. Upton really took the issue head-on:

I personally believe that Americans (or, I should say, U.S. Americans because our fellow North Americans in Canada are a bit more globally savvy) are unable to find our nation on a world map because of a conspiracy between our media and our government to keep us blissfully unaware of the world outside of our big screen high definition TVs, sport utility vehicles and McMansions, except when there’s a country that’s a “problem” that we have to “fix” or “help,” like such as Iraq or some of the Asian countries. If we knew, for example, that half the world’s population–three billion people!–live on less than two dollars a day while the 20% of us in the developed nations consume 86% of the world’s goods, well, we might not be so silent or complicit in the imperialist agenda of our government which supports our unsustainable lifestyle.

Something tells me if the blond beauty queen gave a response like that it would still be fodder for morning chat and gossip, albeit with a far different spin.

Not to belabor the point, but Barbara Ehrenreich doesn’t get it. Writing in the Nation (online edition), she declares, “Of course it’s the ho, not the hair, part of Imus’s comment that hurts.” Actually, it is the hair that hurts.

Once again, Barbara can’t see past her white, middle class nose to define an issue for what it is. In this case, it’s a blatant case of racism as Imus was contrasting the looks of the Rutgers players with the cute, blonde Lady Volunteers. You don’t have to be black to know how culturally sensitive hair is. Just look at the beauty products that are advertised to black women – the hair relaxers, the weaves, the weird blonde dye – all designed to satisfy white standards of beauty. Look at the handful of books and poems by black artists that we are assigned in high school (out of some token notion of diversity, so that we can look past our white noses). There’s Langston Hughes’ “high yaller” girl. There’s Lorraine Hansberry’s Beneatha Younger, whose brother scorns the afro that she grows. There’s Toni Morrison’s Soaphead Church, who prizes his mixed blood and “good hair” and takes pity on an “ugly” (and delusional) black girl who wants to look more white.

Hell, just take that term “good hair.” Google it and you will see the tortured relationship that black women have with their natural kinky hair. You’ll find salons and hair products to get rid of the nappiness. You’ll find African-American chick-lit about “moving on up.” You’ll find websites dedicated to empowering black women. Somewhere along the way, you’ll find a far more articulate essay on this subject by Malena Amusa on hair weaves and black women’s self image.

The fact that Imus could be so casually derogatory about something so sensitive to black people is what makes his remarks so offensive. It’s the racism that gave this controversy legs.

There was an enormous protest today on the traditional women’s college campus of Rutgers University over Don Imus. Imus, of course, disparaged the University’s second place NCAA women’s basketball team in crudely racist and demeaning terms about two weeks ago. The controversy, which has raged across the country and which threatens Imus’ career, started out with very little notice here: a “dart” to Imus in the Daily Targum newspaper’s traditional “Darts and Laurels” Friday editorial. Today’s rally, however, seemed to attract the majority of the student body of Cook and Douglas Colleges, and cleared out the staff from most of the offices.

The women’s basketball team’s success in the Final Four tournament united the women and the bleeding hearts of Rutgers University in a way that the comparable success of the school’s football team – which came at the expense of budget cuts to academic programs and less popular sports – never could. Such feminist support was underscored by the signs that protesters carried, which read “Rutgers Women R Strong Women” (Imus described the team as “rough-looking” tattooed women and “nappy-headed hoes” and expressed a preference for the “cute” Lady Volunteers of Tennessee). But Imus’ racism – no matter how much he insists he is a “good person” – is clear and unmistakable. Kinky hair and eurocentric standards of beauty are enormously sensitive topics and the rooting for “white” over “black” is the very definition of racism. And yet, this racism bubbled up and spilled forth so effortlessly, coming from the same dark pit (more like a shallow ditch) as Michael “Kramer” Richards’ “joke” about lynching niggers who dare to talk through his set, or as your crazy uncle’s “jokes” about black moms and velcro.

I’m inclined to agree with the protesters (most famously Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson) who complain that Imus’ apology rings hollow, and call for his termination. Our media and politics have coarsened to such a point that a great number of shock jocks and pundits profit by saying outrageously insulting and offensive things, and if any of them result in a controversy that proves dangerous to their careers, they quickly apologize and claim it was a joke. But what was the joke here? That Don Imus doesn’t really think the Lady Volunteers were cute? That the Rutgers Scarlet Knights are actually blonde, light-skinned and unmarked by tattoos?

There was no joke. Just mean-spirited taunting, the kind that is casually tossed around in talk media. Examples should be made. Don Imus made the poor choice to elect himself to serve as that example.

The Guardian of London has a heart-warming seasonal story about a small town called North Pole in Alaska, where it’s Christmas 365 days a year and all the town’s residents (including the school children) answer “letters to Santa” that come in from around the world. Last spring, a group of about a dozen of North Pole’s sixth graders were caught “making a list and checking it twice.” Their Columbine-style massacre plot was narrowly thwarted. Perhaps the incessant holiday “cheer” drove them to it, writer Jon Ronson wonders?

I was thinking about North Pole while doing some grocery shopping this morning in Kew Gardens, the Land Where It’s Never Christmas. All the shops are open as normal. Perhaps they’ll close an hour early for the big day in deference to the rest of society. There are no Santas around, the streetlights are plain and unadorned and almost no houses are decorated. It’s bliss. This is a less-advertised perk of living in a majority Jewish neighborhood (and, being Queens, those who aren’t Jewish are Hindu, Sikh, Taoist, Buddhist and Stewardess). Sure, it’s hell to find parking on a Friday night, but you won’t be driven bonkers by the whole “X-Mas Atmos.”

Serving on my co-op’s board, it has come to my attention that my apartment has probably doubled in value in the last three years. If we promote this whole “No Christmas” thing the way that North Pole promotes its “Year-round Christmas” thing, we could probably redouble our home values with all the Scrooges beating a path to our doors. But if I ever do sell, someone please remind me of this post. Just start singing “Jingle Bells,” and my Pavlovian response will kick in: “Never leave Kew Gardens.”

Your honor, it was the beer talking. Not me. It’s a lame excuse coming from Mel Gibson when he’s caught being himself (a sexist, anti-Semite yob), but even lamer when coming from drunken frat boys being drunken frat boys, on camera no less! The unnamed frat boys in question were the ignominious stars of “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.”

I don’t need to tell you that Borat is the brainchild of comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, a fake TV journalist from a former Soviet republic who baits Americans to say outrageous things (that they likely believe) with his seeming innocence. On his TV show, he famously got a bar room full of country-western fans to sing along with a song called “Throw the Jew Down the Well.”

The movie is savagely funny. It has a fair amount of poop jokes and Jackass-style gross-out humor, but it also has a keen eye for mocking the elite and the powerful, and the racism and sexism of ordinary Americans. While everyone is baited, some of our fellow citizens pass their tests with flying colors, such as the driving instructor who responds to Borat’s “traditional” two kisses on the cheek with a grumbly, “Well, I’m not used to that, but that’s fine.” But most take Borat’s bait and reveal the ugliest tendencies of Americans. A crowd of rodeo fans applaud Borat’s speech, in which he wishes that Bush drink the blood of every Iraqi man, woman and child; a gun store clerk responds to Borart’s query of the best way to protect against Jews with the instant recommendation of a very large handgun.

Unlike these other victims of the fake foreign journalist, the frat boys in question – who are so embarrassed by the spectacle they made that they are suing the filmmakers to have their appearance removed from the film – needed no prodding at all. As soon as Borat hitchhiked his way onto their RV, they were extolling the virtues of slavery, the innate inferiority of women and how tough it is to be a white man these days where no one gives you any breaks.

I saw the new Borat movie on opening night with a raucous Times Square crowd, and the scene with the frat boys was the only part of the movie that hushed the crowd. It wasn’t funny. It was scary and depressing. These morons are the future of America. They’re probably future Congressmen.

Writing in the Nation, Richard Goldstein accuses Borat of double standards, of couching bigotry in humor in order to get away with the bigotry that Borat himself employs. Goldstein either did not see the movie, or did not get it. It is significant that the only black people (other than Alan Keyes, who deserves mockery) who appear in the movie are in on the joke, and help satirize genteel white racism. Everyone is not fair game, just the rich, the powerful and the intolerant.

Like a brontosaurus trudging into a tar pit, the New York Times just blundered into a debate that up to now has been best left to feminist journals and Queer discussion groups, in the Fashion & Style section, no less. With the nuance of a brickbat and the keen understanding of someone who has watched “The L Word,” writer Paul Vitello takes a look at lesbian response to transmen and finds (surprise!) some unease.

Unhip and straight as I am, I still know that not every woman who identifies as a man pauses to identify as a lesbian in between and that any woman who successfully passes as a man never quite gains the male privilege that the rest of us are born into.

I’ll leave further criticism of the Times for being out of its league to more qualified blargers, but did want to highlight this illuminating quote from Natasha, a lesbian whose partner became a man, putting an end to their relationship:

“You’re in love with a person, but there is something about gender that is so central to identity it can be overwhelming if the person changes,” she said.

What I had never quite gotten about transgender identity is that if gender is supposed to be just a social construct, like “race,” something that we made up and that has nothing to do with biology, then why change the physical form? Why go through a series of expensive and less-than-satisfying surgeries and hormone treatments just so that you can be who you always felt you are? Why not just be?

As I thought more about what Natasha said, I realize that I can accept my trans friend who identifies as a man, because to accept him as a man means to drink beers together and talk about what’s the best strategy for grooming facial hair. But if it was a man asking me to accept him as a woman, I could do so, or tell myself I could. But I wouldn’t countenance dating her. I would view her as a sexless being, like nuns or my grandma.

Yes, yes, nuns and grandmas are women, and femininity and womanhood comes in all varieties. I could certainly be saying this more eloquently, but I am writing this in the first flush of realization that saying that gender is a social construct (much like saying the same about “race”) does not make it a contemporary fact. Saying it is merely the first step towards making it true. In the meantime, we live in our culture and society today, where gender is so central to our identities, and sometimes extreme physical changes through medical science are important for acceptance.

I was at the H Mart buying creatures of the deep for a Fathers Day meal when I was startled by the sudden roar of cheers and a polite, but enthusiastic, burst of applause. The Japanese and Korean checkers and baggers were gathered around a teevee that had a terrible reception of Telemundo. Korea had just scored against France to tie the match. Oh, that’s right. The rest of the world is intensely focused on the World Cup these days. The native lawnguylanders scowled at all the fuss and went back to their shopping routines.

I’m jealous of all the fuss and wish I could really get into soccer – er, futbol – the way hundreds of millions do. Aside from the occasional rioting and hooliganism, it does seem a wonderful bit of global togetherness. Back at the university – itself, a model United Nations – the student activities center has been a ghost town while all the international students hunker down in the basement to catch broadcasts from across the pond. Meanwhile, I was out in the cold at the happy hour in one of the labs as my friend, the Ukrainian scientist who’s an unapologetic union supporter, chatted with the skittish Chilean tech who’s got Visa worries about…some team or match or other. They really were in their own world when having that conversation, so I wandered down a little further to try to chat with the Argentinean scientist who refuses to talk to me. A friendly, casual, non-union ice breaker chat is just what the PhD ordered. A grad student mentioned Argentina’s team and she beamed with pride, “Aren’t they wonderful?” If only I caught a match, or had a clue.

At least America is apparently losing. The last thing we need, really, is to win at the sport that the entire world is bonkers about, but that we could give two shits about if we even bother to call it by its proper name.