Wonkette
- OH LOOK, A BOOK REVIEW, BY YOUR EDITOR: “According to Kurt Andersen’s slim new book Reset, the economic collapse is a magical second chance for America — an opportunity for a nation of greedy vulgarians and fat slobs to find new purpose in our post-binge society.” [Las Vegas Weekly]
“…you’re also close to another three or five Lowe’ses and Home Depots in identical new stucco shopping strips.”
“Oh, how you can get stucco.” — Groucho Marx, “The Cocoanuts,” 1929, a comedy about *another* housing bust built on greed and speculation in another state of perpetual sunshine.
You make me so, so sad sometimes, Ken Layne.
For America.
There’s nobody to shop in these places, which provide the only revenue most new Southwest “cities” earn, along with the dried-up property-tax racket.
Don’t forget the usurious and useless paycheck advance business. I never thought I’d see our government go from expressly prohibiting predatory businesses to tying its own hands and letting the rich bastards fleece the poor and naive, but over the last thirty years it’s happened, and now restoring sense to the market is somehow an imposition on our freedom.
Anyway, no reset will happen just from the bottom up — it’ll require some serious socialism, with a good number of avaricious creeps getting cut off at the knees pour encourager les autres. Good luck to the government willing to do that.
Don’t expect progress. Things are what Americans want. The elites and their wanna-be imitators want to repeat the mistakes elites and wanna-bes make in every third world country. Look at Brazil or Philippines for a glimpse of the future, or even the Congo!
Expect lots of violence,too, as the “righteous” make the “wicked” suffer.
Zhu Bajie
So, you are saying that I won’t be able to get the guy that beat me up on Tuesday to join me in a club that will start a great revolution that would end in the destruction of our capitalist system? Cause that mother fucker said if I would allow him to hit me, it would. It happens at every bar I go to, damn it!
No foolin’, we get a second chance? Geez, I could drop 40 pounds and train to run a five-minute mile. Learn Spanish; play the violin.
Or else, I could just hit “snooze” till we get a third chance.
Of course, if you rearrange the letters in “reset,” you get trees. Or steer, but that would make even less sense.
gurukalehuru: “steer” into “trees”; that’s why we need “reset”.
gurukalehuru: Or ‘Sunken Retard’ for Kurt Andersen.
wut
yer mean
You know, we didn’t have so much of this “make news” when Sara was on the beat. Just saying. Ken.
““We can rediscover common sense and the better angels of our nature,” Andersen writes ….”
Nah gonna happen.
Not as hot as last week’s review of Infinite Jest
Then let’s all downsize (or get foreclosed), move to New Orleans and live in a fucking Katrina Cottage or even an old Fema trailer, only forego the ususal two pack of smokes and 12 pack o’ beer habit that dulls the pain ’cause that might ruin your health and get all expensive 20 years from now… Center-left practical politics, a bunch of standard issue American retards and a blank slate, more or less, will have the Big Easy, the post-bingiest of post-binge cities, roaring back to a sustainable post-binge society any minute because people are really, deep down inside, altruistic and inclined to make decisions resulting in long delayed gratification and benefits for others they’ve never even met, especially if you explain how the world works to them really slowly and in a condescending manner. Has Kurt Anderson ever ventured out of the shiny parts of NYC, except to attend Harvard or fly to LA to sell a screenplay to those champions of the poor, Disney? Fuck you, you elitist piece of shit…
I, too, will welcome the recession as an opportunity for spiritual regeneration as soon as Kurt Andersen relinquishes his Brooklyn brownstone and his various lucrative media gigs created by the self-indulgent excesses of our soulless boom economy. Try being self-righteous about a recession when you lose your job and your health insurance and then maybe we can have a grown-up conversation about The Way We Live Now.
Sure is bitter around here.
On what page can I find the tip sheet for the casinos with the loosest slots?
Wait, there’s a recession coming?
Cap’n Layne,
While I of course appreciate the alliterative qualities of “stucco shopping strips,” I must take issue with your choice of terms. Applying stucco is an expensive and labor-intensive process usually requiring three passes, or coats - scratch, brown and top or finish. To support this, a wire lath backing (in modern applications) must be used. The process used on most commercial mega structures is know as EIFS (Exterior Insulation Finishing System) or more often by the trade name “Dryvit,” which is quick and cheap and consists of a layer of Styrofoam, a layer of fiberglass mesh and a top coat of a proprietary plaster-like top coat. To tell which one you’ve encountered, kick it with your shoe. It it dents into a concave divot with relatively little pressure, you’ve got Dryvit. If you break your foot or it shatters into concrete shards, it’s stucco. Also Dryvit is notorious for drainage and mold-growth problems.
I know it’s not funny, but I’m just sayin’.
You can read a book only after you STAND UP AND SAY THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE.
SnarkNotFark: All the loose slots around here are on maternity leave.
A book review in a Las Vegas weekly? Oh, thats too sad. Talk about a voice shouting in the wilderness. Good review, mind you, Ken, you have a poetic quality that suprised me, you write real purty, I mean, but garsh, writing about empty consumerism and the effect of the recession, in a Las Vegas publication? Do the escort ads have photos with little stars over the nipples in that Las Vegas Weekly, Ken? Last time I was in Vegas I noticed something odd. Lots of young men with fake legs. You can go a lifetime without seeing a 22 year old with one leg. Then I walk down the strip to go to Bouchon, which a normal person can get into, unlike the French Laundry, and I see three of them in just two blocks, drunk off their asses, walking down the sidewalk surprisingly well, with their high-tech prostheses and with plastic “yard of beer” containers in their hands. And I realized, Vegas, its where people go to have their big party, the big one, the big old strip-club and hookers and puking in public blow-out of their dreams. So when the maimed Iraq vets get out of rehab, they go celebrate in Vegas, apparently. Call one of those escort services for your first time getting laid with the fake leg. Do you think the girls freak and run away, or do they do enough meth that its no problem? Yee-haw.
The bar at Bouchon is solid zinc and absolutely beautiful; as my wife and I ate our $300 meal, a gaggle of young prostitutes were hanging out there, and one, in a micro-mini, had no panties on, and I was treated to fabulous views of her hairless cooch all night. I even told the waiter about it, and he came over to look, and then he brought over the dining room manager, and they had to bend down and get their eyes in position to have the same angle I had, seated at my table, and we had a great time, and they gave my wife and me TWO free deserts, each.
Vegas, baby. On the walk home, helpful people handed me cards with the pictures and phone numbers of prostitutes, even though I was walking arm in arm with my wife, when I pointedf this out, one of the gentleman explained “in case you want a threesome.”
Prommie: I walked the length of the strip and was NOT ONCE handed one of those cards. Of course, I had my 18-month-old daughter on my back at the time.
Lascauxcaveman: Even a hooker knows the little girl is too young for a fweesome.