I spend more time than I used to perusing blogs. I just got an email from Brasscheck pointing me to an old friend, Susie Bright, and her blog, with its most excellent dissection of how we might best understand the Jeff Guckert/Gannon story. Susie has been thinking and writing about sex and its commodification, as well as the endless permutations of desire and identity, for a loooong time now. She’s a crisp writer and a clear thinker. If you want to go beyond the first blush obsessive coverage of the scandal, and now go deeper into how a blatant gay male escort can have penetrated the White House press corps so thoroughly, you can do no better than to check her brief essay out.
Meanwhile, in blogland, I’m delighted to see that Billmon is back. My friend Danny and I had to toast it the other night, hoisting one to billmon’s eloquent account of coming face-to-face with his own irrelevance (last September when the Swift Boat story proved to him–as though he needed such proof!–that propaganda was mightier than the truth…. WAY mightier!) and having to stop posting for months. But he seems to be back, and with the passion that comes from speaking from his own heart and mind, thoughts of changing the world or affecting others no longer cluttering the scenery. And he’s a very good writer, not really a radical by my reckoning, but an angry and eloquent liberal lefty… which leaves me wanting often enough, but that’s ok. He’s still a better read than any columnist in any daily newspaper in the U.S.
Also, my good pal Jon Christensen is keeping up a torrid pace at The Uneasy Chair where he covers conservation, ecology, science, and so much more, all from his sharp and brilliantly skeptical point of view. I guess he must be getting up mighty early in the morning to keep up with so many other blogs, news sites, etc., and to digest so many things so cogently. Or maybe that just goes with the territory of being a middle-aged graduate student who has the ability to follow his interests fulltime. Good for the rest of us who can use him to explore dozens of great links he’s developed and are a click away from his site. Also, he wrote an interesting review in the SF Chronicle recently about our water supply, The Battle Over Hetch Hetchy. Well worth checking out.
Still keeping up with Narco News, Informed Comment, and Baghdad Burning (Riverbend has a new post today, April 3, on the dismal state of American media–it’s even obvious to someone in Iraq with hardly any electricity) too, plus a daily persual of Common Dreams even though I rarely find anything that impresses me. It’s a way of keeping track of what passes for left-liberal opinion in (mostly) North American papers. fwiw…
In my non-computer life, I spent the day yesterday at a CounterPULSE board meeting, followed by many hours of cleaning and working on our new space. We’re behind schedule, but it’s going to be AWESOME and very exciting. Don’t miss our May 1 opening!
heh heh — he said penetrated. heh heh.
In anti-economy news: Rebecca Mead’s New Yorker piece is on-line. It demonstrates how people don’t need to be told prices once they’ve replicated the entire market pricing structure of a $10 trillion economy in their own little heads. Pretty remarkable!