Author: denialism_bv2x6a

What is this business about the Broadway opening of Green Day’s American Idiot? Both the Journal and the Times have reported on it, and in the process, defamed an entire genre by describing Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong as a “punk” rocker.

This musical, which opened at the Berkeley Rep a few months ago (to an audience that will ovate any performance), was pretty disappointing. The musical is essentially a “buddy movie,” but typically in buddy movies, some great thing is accomplished. It might be some caper or venal activity, but at least one can care about its execution. Not so with this thing. These buddies hardly do anything. They wallow, and while the women in the play are more interesting, the playwright stripped them of identity such that they were mere appendages to the men (one of the women was named “Whatsername;” I don’t think this was ironic). In a momentary respite from appendagehood, one of the women ends her relationship with her manchild, perhaps because he was attached to a couch. I’m really not sure why the relationship ended, because I was adjusting my earplugs in response to the howls of joy emitted from the Berkeley Rep’s audience; they seemed impressed by this action in light of the general atmosphere of torpidity and self-pity.

I think Patrick Healy of the Times is trying to tell us something by closing his article with this description:

In a “ballet of rubber tubing,” as members of Green Day have called the choreography, the lovers tie themselves together with the kind of band that heroin addicts use to tie off body parts when finding a vein to inject. The lyrics declare, “My beating heart belongs to you.”

“To take this scene of Johnny and Whatsername doing heroin and turn it into some of the most beautiful and evocative shapes I’ve ever seen — it was an incredible moment,” said Mr. Dirnt, the Green Day bassist. “Real theater.”

Cross posted at teh Berkeley Blog.

Shamelessly stolen from Gawker: Brick Fatwa Libertarian Also Gets Fat Government Checks. For what? A preventable disease! Oh, what ever happened to personal responsibility?

Illustration: A typical American male libertarian in its natural habitat

Dear Readers, we’ve been completely derelict in maintaining Denialism Blog. Please accept our apologies. Mark is training to be a surgeon, and Chris recently had an enormous baby! We hope to get back blogging soon. Please excuse our absence until life is back in order.

Check out this week’s New Yorker for a well-put insight into the Rand-infected mind. Nick Paumgarten writes about John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods and his attitudes towards unions:

…His [Mackey’s] disdain for contemporary unionism is ideological, as well as self-serving. Like many who have come before, he says that it was only when he started a business–when he had to meet payroll and deal with government red tape–that his political and economic views, fed on readings of Friedman, Rand, and the Austrians, veered to the right. But there is also a psychological dimension. It derives in large part from a tendency, common among smart people, to presume that everyone in the world either does or should think as he does–to take for granted that people can (or want to) strike his patented balance of enlightenment and self-interest. It sometimes sounds as if he believed that, if every company had him at the helm, there would be no need for unions or health-care reform, and that therefore every company should have someone like him, and that therefore there should be no unions or health-care reform. In other words, because he runs a business a certain way, others will, can, and should, and so the safeguards that have evolved over the generations to protect against human venality–against, say, greedy, bullying bosses–are no longer necessary. The logic is as sound as the presumption is preposterous.

Take Pristiq. Warning: side effects include becoming a fat wind up doll.

Exhibit 1001, on our great college and university campuses, this wretch can complain of coyote ugly. The nerve. Nice hat, BTW. Do you have a matching jersey? Ladies, imagine waking up with this puffy misogynist! Via Gawker.

Exhibit 1002, Southern Football’s Dating Game in Today’s WSJ.