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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   beating Bush in Woodstock
Sunday, July 18 2004
Gretchen returned from Silver Spring today and this afternoon she and I attended a "Beat Bush" fundraiser in Woodstock. Gretchen had found out about it from a poetry group she recently joined. When we arrived on Chestnut Hill Road, we were impressed by the turnout. For whatever reason, Woodstock is something of a hub of leftist sympathies, but the sheer number of cars vying for parking in this pastoral setting took us by surprise. We joked with others on the walk in that this was like that other, more famous, Woodstock, the one that exists in time but not in space. "The Thruway is now closed," said one guy. "Don't eat the brown acid," Gretchen whispered.
At the gate I was introduced to the various poetry group people who had organized the event. Like everyone else at the event, they were mostly in their late 40s and 50s. Evidently people less than forty either lack interest in politics or can't spare the $50 admission.
The event was sheltered from intermittent rain by an enormous tent set up in a sympathetic democrat's sideyard. Chestnut Hill Road is one of Woodstock's pricier neighborhoods, with every house being something of a mansion and every yard being something one could refer to using the term "grounds."
The stage featured a large cartoonish drawing of President George W. Bush reading My Pet Goat and glancing nervously out of the corners of his beady, vacant eyes. (I thought the cartoonish hadn't quite captured thir infuriating emptiness.) As further contributions came in, a black sheet was gradually raised, concealing more and more of the cartoon in proportion to the fraction of the money goal so far attained.
The featured speaker was our local congressman, Maurice Hinchey. With his perfectly arranged stack of handsome grey hair, he looks sort of like an throwback southern politician, but he's got a New England lilt that more suggests the mayor of Springfield in the Simpsons. His politics are excellent, though I know too much about him from non-news sources to have anything other than a complicated opinion of the man. There wasn't anything particularly exciting in the speech he gave today, so Gretchen and I focused mostly on the catered food. Not much was available for either a vegetarian or an observant Jew, but there were two different kinds of shrimp that were delicious. And there was endless wine as well. I guess I enjoyed myself; Gretchen detected a certain amount of slurring in my voice before we left.
The biggest surprise came with the musical entertainment. It was none other than Peter Schickele (also known for his alter-ego, PDQ Bach) along with two vocal assistants. Peter Schickele lives near Woodstock in the small village of Shady. He's 69 and has an aging hippie appearance that both confirms and denies the warmth and humor of his voice, which I have heard often on his nationally-syndicated radio show. Despite an overall lack of interest from the crowd (as demonstrated by the din of their talking), Schickele launched into one of typically eclectic musical adventures. He easily slipped from Baroque to Blue Grass and all genres in between, introducing each song with a paragraph or so of nerdy, story-rich banter. He and his backup vocalist performed one particularly apt song about the decapitation of King Louis XVI of France. It was a serviceable metaphor for the business of today's fundraiser, although I'm sort of curious whether or not Peter Schickele will soon be visited by a humorless Secret Service agent.

HBO was full of good shows this evening. We watched Six Feet Under as usual, hoping this episode would be a little less dull than the past couple have been. Happily, they really took us for a ride tonight, starting when David Fisher picks up a pretty white boy who turns out to be a vicious crackhead psycho. Unusually, the scenes stopped shifting from one thread to the next and lingered on the ordeal for something like half the show. David is held at gunpoint and made to get money out of his bank account and then smoke crack. I was most impressed by the complicated depiction of the crackhead psycho, who veers from friendly drinking buddy to brutal sadist and back again several times.
Next we saw this little half hour show called Entourage, a sort of Los Angeles male version of Sex and the City. The characters were much richer, vapid, and more dissolute than I'd been when I lived there, but they nonetheless brought back bad memories of the place. Though the characters are completely unsympathetic, the dialogue and action is interesting enough to keep me watching.
Then there was the season premier of the ever-hilarious Ali G Show. Seeing Borat toying with those wine-drinking southern gentleman was almost too embarrassing to watch, and at one point I pulled a muscle in my neck from laughing so hard.


I've discovered a new way to procrastinate. Now I'm designing teeshirts at Zazzle.com! You too can wear the message "Why vote, the Rapture is nigh!" for $14.95. It's kind of expensive, I know, but what I appreciate is that all I have to do is design this bad boy and then it just sells itself (or doesn't). I don't know about you but I'm getting one, damn it! Note that it is promoting an as-yet-nonexistant website.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?040718

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