The Summer Fascin's
A borderline weak, bi-curious, blue magazine has just -
Sorry: a curious blue-borderlined bi-weekly magazine has just, as of yesterday, released to a waiting world its issue for June 25, three days shy of the cover date of its previous issue, and is in its alacrity thus to be admired after the kid who gets his error-ridden homework done before the opening credits of Scooby-Doo and Mom's arrival in the den with the ice-cold Pepsi and the fresh oatmeal cookies.*
*You kids born after c. 1977 will have to crack open your history books to learn about single-paycheck families, mothers who actually worked inside the house from 9 to 5, and an age in which office workers were allowed to chain-smoke at their desks and pat their colleagues' diligent and impeccably-sculpted bottoms over such jobs well-done as picking up the soap you dropped in the show-, er, pant, winning the Employee of the Hour award you persuaded the boss to create for you to "administer".
I check each issue's cover, its artless art not excepted, its precision-predictable contents page and its inch-wide range of apparatchik movement-conservative regulars not so much, as you might have thought with no small justification elsewhere on this blog, from any culpable libido for the masochist, but for the twin reasons (1.) the copper-riveting of my resolve to leave these shores, if not quite yet these seven seas entire, forever, sooner rather than later with each new issue, for such among the world's more civilized capitals as København, Reykjavik, or Pyongyang, and (b.) for the same reason one eats the buttered toast he drops carelessly to the kitchen floor, the better to steel the resistance of his gastropaunch and his intestines against those "creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water", or in the restlessly-pullulating wingnut punditariat.
To be sure, the Little Fucking Fascist Prick of a "Magazine" That Couldn't, for all its expatriating and antibiotic charms, does have its inbuilt limitations: unlike Big Butt, you can't fap to it (you're just going to have to trust me here, in both cases) until just a few short weeks later it becomes a collectors' item, so hard is it then in its (tear-)smudged and dog(-team)-eared form to come by; unlike Popular Mechanics, it won't help you to smelt your own backyard steel, burn your own (whoops, there goes another) rubber-tree plant, and "Build Your First Bacon-Grease-Propelled Lamborghini From Scratch On A Budget"; and unlike The Freeman under Albert Jay Nock ninety years ago, it won't help you to understand what a magazine for grown-ups designed to counter the default liberalism of the modern age while advancing in its own content the art of English prose could possibly fucking look like.
As with all things gone horribly if predictably astray in Life In These United States in the Year of Our Hedge-Fund Overlords 2012, for which, though it's All In A Day's Work, we seek in vain an antidote in either Laughter, The Blessed Benison, or Humor Out Of Uniform And With Buck Privates Nekkid, I of course blame our Manchild-of-the-Age mediocrity of a president, to whom the offensively inoffensive editors in question devote their latest cover package (what, did the Corbis snap of Him with hand-rolled, sweet-smelling Kenyan cig dangling from lips beneath squinty eyes not clear the rights desk as of issue wrap?). Would a chief executive truly tyrannical (and thus Titanical) in his threats to the Amerkun Way of Death as She With Grit Teeth, Wincing and Cheeks Parted Is Endured inspire in reactive, functional, well-matched opposition such a gang of mewling whiners (Andrew McCarthy, post-Brat Pack if rather fatter), crybabies (Jay Nordlinger), pantywaists (Richard Lowry and his all-purpose seasoning salt), mama's boys (that all-round utility-playing whipping boy Jay Nordlinger again, batting cleanup after every self-induced spill), chiselers, half-tutored inverted-Liberal Fascists in training (Jonah Goldberg and his pepperoni-stained couch), Fox News green-room crack whores, bow-tied athenaeum popinjays (Roger Kimball), pants-wetting Nervous Nellies avant le Meccaniste déluge (Mark Steyn), squeak-voiced Dittoheads and Hannity arse-patters (Mark R. Levin, American!), and dead founder-patriarchs breathing Johnny Walker in its gaseous form ("Chairman" Bill, America's First Line of Defense against Maoist ... [you shut your mouth, child!] Cults of Personality)?
Still, I notice on the new contents page an actual poem for some reason by (sacre blue state!) ... Charles Freakin' Baudelaire (!), already**
**The more watch-checking among the back-of-the-book staff must be suffering Encounter flashbacks, aka PEST (Post-Excellence Stress Trauma)
- so perhaps such among the otherwise brethren-fascist fuckfaces as, inter alia, Messrs. Santorum, Limbaugh, Gingrich, &c., who have in the presumed sellout to liberalism revealed in the magazine's ground bass of default support for Mitt Romney claimed to discern decadent seizure-induced fleurs de grand mal they the purest of the pure on behalf of the traditional values of our plutocrat master class, and they alone, are stout enough in black heart to withstand, may have one dulled point in their poison-tipped quivers after all.
Most comic of all amid that Juvenile Jury of Jugheads, that Children's Crusade of the Cretinous that is the Magazine in Question? The fact that those said to be among the conventionally wise, the great and the good of city desk and campus pump, continue because of its founder's father's socializing, and the serial essays in elitist foppery of the founder himself, to think it an echt-lineal descendant of Albert Jay Nock, author of Memoirs of a Superfluous Man and far and away most bohemian among Les Bohèmes, a brummagem link that, if even of the most asterisked in its accuracy, makes Grandma's wedding night at Lourdes at world-without-end one with Tara Alexander's fabled-in-story-and-song eighty-six-man, six-hour, four-at-once Spermathon.
My apologies, as so often in this space, to La Alexander, for the otherwise raffish Night at the Opera stateroom throng into which I so thoughtlessly thought to smash her long-since over-worked under works.
Sorry: a curious blue-borderlined bi-weekly magazine has just, as of yesterday, released to a waiting world its issue for June 25, three days shy of the cover date of its previous issue, and is in its alacrity thus to be admired after the kid who gets his error-ridden homework done before the opening credits of Scooby-Doo and Mom's arrival in the den with the ice-cold Pepsi and the fresh oatmeal cookies.*
*You kids born after c. 1977 will have to crack open your history books to learn about single-paycheck families, mothers who actually worked inside the house from 9 to 5, and an age in which office workers were allowed to chain-smoke at their desks and pat their colleagues' diligent and impeccably-sculpted bottoms over such jobs well-done as picking up the soap you dropped in the show-, er, pant, winning the Employee of the Hour award you persuaded the boss to create for you to "administer".
I check each issue's cover, its artless art not excepted, its precision-predictable contents page and its inch-wide range of apparatchik movement-conservative regulars not so much, as you might have thought with no small justification elsewhere on this blog, from any culpable libido for the masochist, but for the twin reasons (1.) the copper-riveting of my resolve to leave these shores, if not quite yet these seven seas entire, forever, sooner rather than later with each new issue, for such among the world's more civilized capitals as København, Reykjavik, or Pyongyang, and (b.) for the same reason one eats the buttered toast he drops carelessly to the kitchen floor, the better to steel the resistance of his gastropaunch and his intestines against those "creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water", or in the restlessly-pullulating wingnut punditariat.
To be sure, the Little Fucking Fascist Prick of a "Magazine" That Couldn't, for all its expatriating and antibiotic charms, does have its inbuilt limitations: unlike Big Butt, you can't fap to it (you're just going to have to trust me here, in both cases) until just a few short weeks later it becomes a collectors' item, so hard is it then in its (tear-)smudged and dog(-team)-eared form to come by; unlike Popular Mechanics, it won't help you to smelt your own backyard steel, burn your own (whoops, there goes another) rubber-tree plant, and "Build Your First Bacon-Grease-Propelled Lamborghini From Scratch On A Budget"; and unlike The Freeman under Albert Jay Nock ninety years ago, it won't help you to understand what a magazine for grown-ups designed to counter the default liberalism of the modern age while advancing in its own content the art of English prose could possibly fucking look like.
As with all things gone horribly if predictably astray in Life In These United States in the Year of Our Hedge-Fund Overlords 2012, for which, though it's All In A Day's Work, we seek in vain an antidote in either Laughter, The Blessed Benison, or Humor Out Of Uniform And With Buck Privates Nekkid, I of course blame our Manchild-of-the-Age mediocrity of a president, to whom the offensively inoffensive editors in question devote their latest cover package (what, did the Corbis snap of Him with hand-rolled, sweet-smelling Kenyan cig dangling from lips beneath squinty eyes not clear the rights desk as of issue wrap?). Would a chief executive truly tyrannical (and thus Titanical) in his threats to the Amerkun Way of Death as She With Grit Teeth, Wincing and Cheeks Parted Is Endured inspire in reactive, functional, well-matched opposition such a gang of mewling whiners (Andrew McCarthy, post-Brat Pack if rather fatter), crybabies (Jay Nordlinger), pantywaists (Richard Lowry and his all-purpose seasoning salt), mama's boys (that all-round utility-playing whipping boy Jay Nordlinger again, batting cleanup after every self-induced spill), chiselers, half-tutored inverted-Liberal Fascists in training (Jonah Goldberg and his pepperoni-stained couch), Fox News green-room crack whores, bow-tied athenaeum popinjays (Roger Kimball), pants-wetting Nervous Nellies avant le Meccaniste déluge (Mark Steyn), squeak-voiced Dittoheads and Hannity arse-patters (Mark R. Levin, American!), and dead founder-patriarchs breathing Johnny Walker in its gaseous form ("Chairman" Bill, America's First Line of Defense against Maoist ... [you shut your mouth, child!] Cults of Personality)?
Still, I notice on the new contents page an actual poem for some reason by (sacre blue state!) ... Charles Freakin' Baudelaire (!), already**
**The more watch-checking among the back-of-the-book staff must be suffering Encounter flashbacks, aka PEST (Post-Excellence Stress Trauma)
- so perhaps such among the otherwise brethren-fascist fuckfaces as, inter alia, Messrs. Santorum, Limbaugh, Gingrich, &c., who have in the presumed sellout to liberalism revealed in the magazine's ground bass of default support for Mitt Romney claimed to discern decadent seizure-induced fleurs de grand mal they the purest of the pure on behalf of the traditional values of our plutocrat master class, and they alone, are stout enough in black heart to withstand, may have one dulled point in their poison-tipped quivers after all.
Most comic of all amid that Juvenile Jury of Jugheads, that Children's Crusade of the Cretinous that is the Magazine in Question? The fact that those said to be among the conventionally wise, the great and the good of city desk and campus pump, continue because of its founder's father's socializing, and the serial essays in elitist foppery of the founder himself, to think it an echt-lineal descendant of Albert Jay Nock, author of Memoirs of a Superfluous Man and far and away most bohemian among Les Bohèmes, a brummagem link that, if even of the most asterisked in its accuracy, makes Grandma's wedding night at Lourdes at world-without-end one with Tara Alexander's fabled-in-story-and-song eighty-six-man, six-hour, four-at-once Spermathon.
My apologies, as so often in this space, to La Alexander, for the otherwise raffish Night at the Opera stateroom throng into which I so thoughtlessly thought to smash her long-since over-worked under works.
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