The Sound of Young America

A few songs into the dance portion of my wedding reception, my Aunt Margaret, a proper woman of leisure, told me, "Play some Motown." We did immediately. The music Barry Gordy's little-record-company-that-could made in the '60s is already timeless. I remember hearing Motown music growing up from my sisters and brother, and it sounded like it came out the day before. Like their chart peers the Beatles, the Motown artists never age. The Temptations always sounds as fresh as they look in the picture above.

On a broader level, Motown paved the way for Barack Obama. The popular black artists who preceded Motown were not young. Motown brought young, black America into whites' car radios and The Ed Sullivan Show. They were the non-threatening vanguard of the civil rights movement. I truly love and admire the artistry of the Motown musicians. This year is the 50th anniversary of the label, and I'm sure you will see much publicity about that fact. Vanity Fair provides an oral history on the label that made it all happen.

Christopher Hitchens Visits Room 101

Overweight, out-of-shape, alchoholic Christopher Hitchens chose to be waterboarded on video for Vanity Fair. Hitchens has been a defender of torture for terrorism suspects, and his primary assumption is that the intelligence agencies do everything not to kill their detainees. Therefore, how tortuous can it be?

Watch the video. That's torture, baby. Hitchens 'fesses to this here:

Also, in case it’s of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the
bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find
myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and
claustrophobia. No doubt this will pass. As if detecting my misery and shame,
one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re
breathing water.” I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit
with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the
relationship between the torturer and the tortured. I apply the Abraham Lincoln
test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well,
then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing
as torture.

Hitchens will next be dressing up in drag and performing at comedy clubs to prove his theory that women aren't funny.

A Cult of Carefree Irresponsibility

If you ask me, every Christopher Hitchens essay is an event. Alcoholic? Yes. Frustrating? Sure. Genius? You betcha. In this week's Vanity Fair, he writes an emboldened plea to save the little patches of Bohemia disappearing in an urban landscape so desperate for another bespoke boutique.

It isn’t possible to quantify the extent to which society and culture are
indebted to Bohemia. In every age in every successful country, it has been
important that at least a small part of the cityscape is not dominated by
bankers, developers, chain stores, generic restaurants, and railway terminals.
This little quarter should instead be the preserve of—in no special
order—insomniacs and restaurants and bars that never close; bibliophiles and the
little stores and stalls that cater to them; alcoholics and addicts and deviants
and the proprietors who understand them; aspirant painters and musicians and the
modest studios that can accommodate them; ladies of easy virtue and the men who
require them; misfits and poets from foreign shores and exiles from remote and
cruel dictatorships. Though it should be no disadvantage to be young in such a
quartier, the atmosphere should not by any means discourage the veteran.

I know the West Village in Chicago is no Greenwhich, but I will always be profoundly influenced by the raw individuality of that urban frontier I called home. Status had not fully arrived yet, and the streets stunk of immigrants and artists. It was a blast. Hitchens is right- urban life without real artists is a mall.