This article first appeared in The eXile on June 1, 2007

For months now, our overseas readers have been asking us, “What’s a gopnik?” They have a vague idea of what a gopnik looks like, thanks to our Face Control page: tough Russian dudes with bad skin and blank fuck-if-I-care expressions. They’re the guys who look more comfortable squatting than standing. But more than anything else, they’re the last males on planet earth who can get away with wearing those 20s-style leather gangster caps without looking like drama school fags rehearsing for a musical. (more…)

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As an antidote to the current World Cup soccer idiocy, we suggest taking 1 full dose of The eXile’s classic soccer takedown, published during the 1998 World Cup.

Here’s a little something to consider for all you folks who’ve been trying to watch the World’s Greatest Sporting Event–otherwise known as the World Cup–over the course of the last week. The following is a short list of some of the official mascots of the World Cup in the latter half of this century. 1990: Ciao, an abstract object (Italy). 1986: Pique, a chili pepper (Mexico). 1982: Naranjito, an orange (Spain). 1978: Gauchito, a boy (Argentina). 1974: Tip and Tap, two boys (West Germany). 1970: Juanito, a boy (Mexico). 1966: World Cup Willie, a lion (England).

An abstract object, a chili pepper, an orange, a boy, two boys, a boy, and a lion named “World Cup Willie”…Is this sports or a NAMBLA convention? (more…)

I’ve hated Tom Cruise for twenty-five years now. It’s been one of my favorite traditions, hating Tom Cruise. It involved refusing to go to his biggest blockbusters like Top Gun, then occasionally, foolishly succumbing to the temptation to see just how awful he really was in one of his many, many hit films. Say, War of the Worlds, when he completely bolloxed up his role as a blue-collar dad. (Don’t tell me about blue-collar dads, Tom “Rich Putz” Cruise. I know blue-collar dads, and you, sir, are no blue-collar dad, and have no clue how to play one. Blue-collar dads don’t swank around with spa-fresh skins and gym-toned bods, wearing hoodies under down jackets just to prove they work for a living.)
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Seriously, it beats me how people managed to develop such an appetite for sloppy sentimentality. With each successive hit feature, Pixar tests the limit of that appetite, and finds that there is no limit. Audiences drink up vats of Pixar’s patented corn syrup in animated film form, smack their sticky lips, and beg for more. Please, Pixar, could you make the characters even rounder and smoother and cuter, like a vast array of babies’ butts? Could everyone find out that everyone loves everyone else, and then all rescue each other ten or twelve times, with lots and lots of preaching along the way? Our tears, could they be jerked harder, to the point of actual pain and bruising this time?

Sure, says Pixar, and the ticket-money washes in like the tide.
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This article was first published in the New York Press.

Wall Street bankers and retired hedge fund billionaires have been talking about fiscal responsibility and deficit reduction, preparing the masses for austerity measures and cuts in social services—which we are told are regrettable, of course, but necessary nonetheless. Well, here is the perfect welfare program for the bailout queens to show off their fiscally conservative chops: Let’s see them cut federal farm subsidies, which funnel billions of dollars to the richest Americans, including notables like Ted Turner, David Letterman, Scottie Pippen, Paris Hilton’s grandpa, Charles Schwab, Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen and just about every single one of Sam Walton’s degenerate heirs. (more…)

It’s pretty simple, really. If you don’t like action films, don’t go see The A-Team. That is, if you complain when a film has explosions, and a lot of shooting and punching and special effects crashes and whatnot, and no in-depth character studies, and a plot structure that goes blah-blah-blah-whatever-fight-scene, then you don’t like action films, and you shouldn’t go see a film like The A-Team. There, I hope I’ve finally cleared up this issue for all the professional film critics and non-professional everybody’s-a-critic critics who continue to go see genre films so they can say how much they hate all the traits associated with genre films.

But for those of us who like action, we can talk sensibly. Is The A-Team a dumb film? Yes. How dumb is it? It’s incredibly dumb—nay, exuberantly dumb. And who was it who said, “Exuberance is beauty?” William Blake, maybe. Or somebody just as good.

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For months people had been asking me if I’m still living in Victorville and if so, why I stopped writing about it. Some dumbshit even accused me of running back to live the big city life, as if I was too embarrassed to tell people “da trufe.” Well, I’m still here, still proud, still shooting and perfecting my aim. And I figure it’s about time for me to crack my knuckles and see if I still got what it takes to do a proper Victorville update. (more…)

Feck, as the Irish say. Feckin’ independent film, it’s not worth shite.

I just watched Ondine, this Neil Jordon thing set in contemporary Ireland about a soulful fisherman played by Colin Farrell, who catches a young woman in his fishing net and wonders if she might be a water nymph or some damn thing. It’s a crusher, a masterpiece of patience-testing boredom. It’s one of those films that keeps almost ending, but just as your flattened spirits perk up a bit in anticipation, you realize there’s a whole other wearisome sequence to go through before the characters emote their way to the obvious finale. By the time the real ending arrives, you’ve lost your capacity to rejoice in freedom regained, and you plod out sighing, “Well, the cinematography was beautiful.”

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This article first appeared in Alternet.

Ray Dalio is a billionaire hedge fund manager who makes more money in a single day than most Americans will earn in their entire lifetimes. That’s because hedge funds are the top of the Wall Street food chain — and Dalio runs the largest hedge fund of all, Bridgewater Associates. Life’s good at the top of this food chain: in 2008, a bad year for most Americans, Dalio took home $780 million. That same $780 million could have paid the salaries of about 20,000 teachers — and those 20,000 teachers could have taught about 400,000 American students (using author Les Leopold’s calculations). A lot of people might find this offensive and unjust, but not Dalio—he thinks this is all part of Nature’s Plan, and it just so happens that Nature favors the hedge fund managers:

“I believe that self-interest and society’s interests are generally symbiotic [bold--Dalio’s]…That is why how much money people have earned is a rough measure of how much they gave society what it wanted.”

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First published on Alternet

Welcome to Gilded Age 2.0, a time when government has become an appendage to the super-rich, used by industrialists, financiers and corporate robber barons to monopolize the economy and strip regular citizens of power and money. One example of just how much corporate cash and oligarchical interests have corrupted America’ democratic institutions comes out of California, where a giant corporation is spending tens of millions of dollars to push through a law that would snuff out competition and enshrine its corporate monopoly in California’s State Constitution.

It sounds outrageous, but it is perfectly legal here in the Golden State, where a form of “direct democracy” introduced 100 years ago allows voters to write laws straight into the state constitution. All that is required is a ballot initiative and a two-thirds majority vote by the people. Ironically, direct democracy was introduced to the state by the Progressive Party as a direct response to the runaway corruption of the Gilded Age, a way to shift power away from corporate and moneyed interests that dominated the legislature and to give it back to the people. Hiram Johnson, California’s progressive governor from 1911 to 1917, said that it would “restore absolute sovereignty to the people” by allowing voters to trump elected politicians. (more…)

The following is an adapted excerpt from Alexander Zaitchik’s book, Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance, just released by Wiley & Sons.

Every July 4, Glenn Beck emcees the Stadium of Fire celebration in Provo, Utah. The patriotic extravaganza is the most elaborate Independence Day celebration in the country, drawing more than fifty thousand people annually to Brigham Young University’s LaVell Edwards Stadium for a program of family music, star-spangled speeches, military displays, and a magnificent array of fireworks. Sponsored by the conservative Mormon group Freedom Festival, the Stadium of Fire is the closest thing in the country to an institutionalized Rally for America, Beck’s controversial 2003 traveling pro-war roadshow. It is not surprising, then, that this is among the high points of Beck’s calendar year. “There’s nothing like Utah on the Fourth of July,” he likes to say.

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As we explained in our last issue, the eXile has created this new feature, the Schopenhauer Award, to serve the spiritual needs of our readers. Concerned that some of you might be backsliding from pure Nihilism, we’ve come up with a dramatic way to remind you what the world is really like. Each week we’ll introduce you to one of your fellow denizens of Slaveship Earth — the kind of critters you might try not to think about, left to your own devices. We feel sure that after meeting the hideous chunks of venomous, parasitic protoplasm sharing this world with you, you’ll be ready to agree with our Patron Saint, Arthur Schopenhauer, that, “unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, then our existence must have no object whatever.” Here to remind you of that bedrock truth is our second Schopenhauer Award nominee… (more…)

I came across this practical nugget of wisdom from Teamster’s Union mafia don Jimmy Hoffa, as recounted from the death bed confessions of the legendary Mafia hitman Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran:

Jimmy said, “You always run away from a man with a knife and toward a man with a gun.”

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Story first published on AlterNet

Anyone interested in taking the pulse of the GOP base in 2010 has a few options. They can watch Fox News at any hour of any day. They can trot down to their local Tea Party, where the overwhelming majority of participants vote, and have always voted, Republican. They can visit the various official party Web sites, where the leadership has crafted a message to resonate with the angry anti-government mood that defines today’s conservative grassroots. (more…)