Firehose #108: Stop Crying Your Heart Out

Also: Olivia Nuzzi’s brave bullshit-calling

We were somewhere around Toledo on the edge of Lake Erie when the Oasis began to take hold. I remember saying something like “You realize this is going to make me drive a hundred miles an hour….” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the countryside was full of what looked like, well, corn….

Thus endeth parody. But! It really was the first time I’d cranked up their rip-yer-face-off debut Definitely Maybe in a year or four, and it really did just happen to be two days before the ever-feuding Gallagher bros tweeted out a tease that became reality two days hence, as revealed from the secret wypipo chat on Episode #442. I’m not much of a reunion-tour enthusiast, and Lord knows there are few things more insufferable than Gen Xers going on about their ‘90s musics, but you don’t have to care for either to enjoy, as distraction from the shitty news if nothing else, Liam Gallagher fielding questions from a bunch of kindergarteners:

* Speaking of music, huge ups to Nick Gillespie (Special Dispatch #72, #379), for landing an interview with Nick Cave, just prior to the release of the latter Nick’s new record with the Bad Seeds, Wild God. Among other things, they also talk about Roger Waters, and Israel…..

* Moar music before the horror? Yes, let’s. Experiencers and consumers of our two recent live shows in Chicago will recall cameos of (and deserved hosannahs to) Constellation club owner and all around good dude Mike Reed. Well, thanks to the indefatigable spelunkings of Busty Wimsatt, here’s a great Chicago Sun-Times profile of our Mike, who (NBD!) co-founded the Pitchfork festival, helps with the Chicago Jazz Festival, and is a prominent free-jazz drummer/bandleader on his own. Excerpt:

For Reed, his endeavors in producing shows and creating music are all connected, allowing him multiple opportunities to create concrete expressions of what he’s thinking and feeling.

“You make things because those things that live outside of yourself can be even bigger than you,” Reed explains during a recent interview, his elbows on an empty bar at the Hungry Brain, hours before the venue was set to open. “It’s best when you get on stage and you play with people and you essentially have this experience that kind of comes out of you — then it’s gone.” […]

[B]usiness acumen helped Reed steer both venues through the pandemic. He says that since he already set Constellation up as a not-for-profit in 2018, he was able to focus on applying for grants and pivot to livestreaming performances there.

Reed says he did have to let some employees go and get rid of office and storage space to slim down costs as much as he could. Those staff members would go on to volunteer to help put on the scaled-down performances the venue was able to host, Reed says.

Through those collective efforts, Constellation and Hungry Brain have survived and become part of a shrinking list of small venues in the city where you can find alternative programming for a relatively affordable cost.

* Our friend (and musician!) Noam Dworman got a more recent profile treatment in the Wall Street Journal. Excerpt, featuring a past Fif’ guest (#30 & #32):

Largely because of this hair-trigger sensitivity, few stand-up artists have found a comedic way to address the war in Gaza. “They’re mostly staying away from it,” Mr. Dworman says. “The few who have tried are not really succeeding.”

An exception is Andrew Schulz, a New York-born comedian and podcaster. “I saw him in Madison Square Garden do some material about Gaza, and he was destroying,” Mr. Dworman says. “He was fantastic. But of course, that was his crowd.” Mr. Schulz has cultivated an audience, “very diverse, who enjoy politically incorrect humor, and so they were not offended.” (An example, from a recent show in Sydney: “I saw people protesting the Israel-Palestine war. It was wild. All these white Australians out there, shouting ‘Give them back their land!’ ”)

“Schulz does it with good vibes and friendliness and a light touch,” Mr. Dworman says. 

* Noam, characteristically, posted an anguished yet nuanced reaction Sunday to the Hamas execution of U.S. citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin and five other Israelis, just a bewilderingly awful crime that we will likely be talking about within a matter of hours. Also processing are Ask a Jew gals Yael Bar tur and Chaya Leah Sufrin.

* In other rotten news, as referenced in passing at the end of #442, the former alt-weekly magnate and Backpage co-founder Mike Lacey, at age 76, was sentenced to five years in prison on a single bullshit count of international concealment of money laundering. The decade-plus, serially tried, moral panic-fueled persecution and scapegoating of Backpage for creating an online classified ads space used by sex workers, already contributed to the suicide last year of Lacey’s partner Jim Larkin; a fact that Dept. of Justice obscenity task force prosecutor Austin Berry had the DGAF gall to use as an argument for keeping defendants under lock and key from now until the end of their long terms: No “flight by suicide.” Here again is my cranky video about this case from last year, which also gets into the crucial role by a certain attorney general-turned U.S. senator.

* Some of us actually produced content this past week, by which I mostly mean Moynihan. So, literally moments before we hit the record button on #442, there Hollywood was doing a Free Press Kamala-Harris-interview reaction thingie with Michael Shellenberger, Olly Wiseman, and neoliberalism-hater Batya Ungar-Sargon (#451):

* Moar Moynihan: Here he is one-on-one with Whole Foods founder and “conscious capitalist” John Mackey:

* Our fast-talker also moderated a Free Press debate on how to fix American education, with the Progressive Policy Institute’s Richard Kahlenberg, Parents Defending Education’s Erika Sanzi, and NYC bomb-thrower Maud Maron.

* Here’s a good little article about a dumb big-media thing that happened to former guest Olivia Nuzzi (#190). The nubbin:

Bloomberg quietly killed a splashy PR rollout of Olivia Nuzzi’s new show, Working Capital, in response to a small Twitter campaign against the journalist by Democrats.

The interview show, announced with great fanfare in July, wound up being unceremoniously released on Bloomberg’s television network and is available online. But Max reports (and Nuzzi confirms) that plans for a higher-profile rollout of the Bloomberg Originals bet were abruptly scotched after a Nuzzi article about the “conspiracy of silence” around President Joe Biden’s age.

Her article prompted a group of Democrats on Twitter to call her a racist and tweet at Bloomberg demanding she be fired.

Wicked retahded, right? Well, what makes this tawdry little episode rise to the level of more lasting interesting is Nuzzi’s be-brave-call-bullshit response. Which closes like this:

[M]ainstream media organizations tend to ignore bad-faith campaigns against reporters led by the right. I have no illusions about massive corporate media entities and their tolerance for even the faintest murmurs of a PR crisis, so I can’t say I was surprised, but I was disappointed.

I know a lot of reporters who long ago made the shrewd decision to delete all of their old posts to protect themselves. I would never judge anyone for doing that. But a large part of my project as a journalist is to meet people where they live in gray areas and to run toward complication and nuance, and to understand context as it is or as it was, and I see an effort to conceal jokes I made in the context of the internet of five or 10 or 15 years ago as a kind of dishonesty that I am not comfortable engaging in.

I really believe that if you want to live in a world that is forgiving and where people hold even those they disagree with to the same standards they wish to be held, you can’t cave to mob pressure as a means to protect yourself even when it would be a lot easier to do so. That’s how this type of culture is formed and maintained and as individuals we get to decide if we think it’s worth enduring a little pain to fight against it.

* Past guest Aaron Sibarium (#456) last week dropped the plagiarism hammer on White Fragility/Nice White Racism huckster Robin DiAngelo, in a report that has been picked up by such publications as The New York Times and The Root. We talked about DiAngelo on #195, #322, and Members Only #151; I wrote about her for Reason in 2021.

* Comment of the Week comes from Kev:

I'm a disabled Iraq vet. Veterans issues are of significant importance in my life. Neither candidate has attended any of the major veteran-lobby events for the first time since 1940. Trump committed, then backed out. Neither of their campaign websites mentions veterans once. It feels weird to have no one trying to court my vote. Trump and his entourage lacking the capacity to behave in Arlington doesn't make me angry, but their undisciplined conduct draws a sharp contrast with that of the fallen servicemembers who are buried there. I don't care about the Walz stolen valor incident either. If I got pissed every time I encountered a National Guardsman embellishing his record, I'd have died from a stroke already. I care about my benefits and the absolutely pathetic state of the VA in both the shit-quality medical care they provide and the frozen-molasses-like speed at which they process benefits claims. Want my vote? Offer me something in exchange. Increase my disability payment and/or privatize the pathetic, bureaucratic disaster that is the VA.

* Events! On Sept. 10 in D.C., Fifth Column-namer Katherine Mangu-Ward (#75, #395) is gonna team up with Tyler Cowen for a Free Press debate on the American Dream vs. David Leonhardt and Bhaskar Sunkara; moderation from Bari Weiss (#89, #115, #159, #180 & #187). The day after, Nick Gillespie is gonna nine-eleven our friend Kat Timpf (#33, #97) at the Reason Speakeasy in NYC over her new book I Used to Like You Until…. (How Binary Thinking Divides Us.

Walkoff music I will admit to not ever hearing (or at least remembering) until this morning; as in many things, I tapped out on the band after the ‘90s. But: