TDS/TCR (This is Bat Country!)

Truly Bizzare

Eminiar VII

The real news, 3 (count ’em) 3 web exclusive Spoon performances and this week’s guests below.

Spoon

Inside Out

Do You

Rent I Pay

This week’s guests-

The Daily Show

• Monday 11/3: Jake Gyllenhaal
• Tuesday 11/4: Reince Priebus
• Wednesday 11/5: John Cleese
• Thursday 11/6: James Risen

The Colbert Report

• Monday 11/3: Chuck Todd
• Tuesday 11/4: Andrew Sullivan
• Wednesday 11/5: Kirsten Gillibrand
• Thursday 11/6: Steven Johnson

16 Fascinating Tidbits We Just Learned from Jon Stewart, By Sarah Gray, Salon

In Conversation Jon Stewart, by Chris Smith, New York

You’re coming to the end of your term in office. Your Daily Show contract finishes in September 2015. How much are you thinking about “Okay, what’s next?”

I’m thinking about it a lot.

…

Could covering the 2016 election motivate you to stay at The Daily Show?

Yeah. But part of the thing to remember is this is not the only process by which you can work material, and sometimes it’s more important to step back and reconfigure a conversation than continue the same conversation because you know how to do it.

What happens then?  Hard to say, but I’ve never been tempted to leave my post in this lonely lighthouse and as long as I amuse myself, who cares what you think anyway?

It would be difficult to give up the structure, it already is.  I’ve been blogging as long as Colbert has been on the air and I don’t have any real desire to change or plan to do so.  It’s not like I’m going to write a novel or a screenplay except to prove that I can if I want to.

As a fan it makes me sad.  As a poet I’ll come up with some other way to seem vaguely repellent, anti-social, and suffering for art in a hostile world.

The Poet’s Pledge

To be peculiar in the most unusual way I can cook up

To write excellently, or more especially to be known to write excellently

To master bards of old and bards anew, or at least never give on that I haven’t

To advance in gestures of my own and not in the stirrings of a majority, except where money is at stake

To be perceived as morally suspect, no matter what the truth

To sniff at adulation and pooh-pooh honors no matter how much I crave them

To obey whim and eschew duty, or at least appear to

To rove ruffian-like across continents of poems with ease, or at least make them think so

To engage in ridiculous arguments, all hot and sweaty for my own position

To be judicious only in the judging of my own merits and mean about the others

To die young, or if I linger, to be ignored and abused well

To write tons of crap for every good poem I do write, and obfuscate the difference with rhetoric

To suck up to important editors with honeyed words, and cuff the assistant editors often

To bemoan the sorry state of poetry in my country and do not one damn thing about it

To speak so incoherently that everyone thinks I am a genius

Jake Gyllenhaal will be on to talk about his new film Nightcrawler.

Chuck Todd is everything that’s wrong about Versailles Villager access “journalism”.

Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits — a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism – which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

There are a lot of ways to practice the art of journalism, and one of them is to use your art like a hammer to destroy the right people – who are almost always your enemies, for one reason or another, and who usually deserve to be crippled, because they are wrong. This is a dangerous notion, and very few professional journalists will endorse it – calling it “vengeful” and “primitive” and “perverse” regardless of how often they might do the same thing themselves. “That kind of stuff is opinion,” they say, “and the reader is cheated if it’s not labelled as opinion.” Well, maybe so. Maybe Tom Paine cheated his readers and Mark Twain was a devious fraud with no morals at all who used journalism for his own foul ends. And maybe H. L. Mencken should have been locked up for trying to pass off his opinions on gullible readers and normal “objective journalism.” Mencken understood that politics – as used in journalism – was the art of controlling his environment, and he made no apologies for it. In my case, using what politely might be called “advocacy journalism,” I’ve used reporting as a weapon to affect political situations that bear down on my environment.