Rude Pundit Live, August 21, 2005: The Rude Pundit doesn't fuck around. If you like your political commentaries with imagery of sodomy, necrophilia, and rape, he's your man.
His blog rarely makes me squeamish. Its graphic language and imagery don't feel gratuitous. First, his writing is calculated and polished. Second, he offers a lot of original research and analysis. In between phrases that make The Aristocrats look like The Aristocats, he connects dots that other people don't.
It's tempting to think that he appeals just to the Id, or to the fourth-grade titillation of nasty phraseology. I don't think that's the case. There's a purpose and a method to his rudeness. With the Iraq War as a backdrop, there's no easy way to articulate all of the pain and frustration that comes with citizenship right now. By pushing language and sexual imagery to their extremes, Rude Pundit mediates horrors and outrages without becoming self-righteous. He finds new, better ways to articulate rage.
He's one of my favorite political commentators, and my favorite daily read. Unfortunately, what works on a blog didn't succeed in person.
The Rude Pundit was performing a one-hour show called "The Year of Living Rudely" as part of the Fringe Festival. I'd been looking forward to it for weeks. Maybe expectations were unreasonable.
There was a problem with seeing this kind of rhetoric live. Instead of focusing on the words (which were rehashed in large part from prior blog posts) I focused on performance. When the words work so well on paper, there's not much that an in-person performance contributes -- maybe especially when it comes to such extreme material. It all got a little bit loud, a little icky, a little over-the-top.
If you're an Air America listener, you can get a better jeremiad from Mike Malloy on most nights. I thought about Mike Malloy a lot during the show. He does a nightly three-hour radio show out of Atlanta. It starts at 10 p.m., and in New York, WLIB cuts him off at midnight in favor of local programmingg. Mike Malloy is wild -- he is to the left what Michael Savage is to the right. Malloy condemns the Democrats for being the patsies in every Republican brainstorm. He's angry every night, and every night, he bashes Bush, Rumsfeld, racists, and Christians, essentially equating them all. His sense of humor died sometime before I was born. But he's overpowering. He makes things feel better. I look forward to Malloy's nightly bombast about as much as I look forward to Rude Pundit's daily screeds.
Even with a full head of steam, Rude Pundit's live show wasn't as persuasive as Mike Malloy on an off night. Malloy probably couldn't write a paragraph as elegantly as the Rude Pundit; Rude Pundit didn't put on a show as good as Malloy's. Everybody's got their medium. I'd buy a Rude Pundit paperback in a heartbeat. I would not see him live again.
Sufjan Stevens, August 20, 2005, Bowery Ballroom: Who's the opposite of Rude Pundit? Squeaky-clean, ultra-earnest Sufjan Stevens.
His music isn't naturally to my taste. Mostly, I listen to him because his highly literary lyrics synthesize approximately 2,000 themes simultaneously. They're smart as hell. Also, he grew up a short drive away from where I grew up. Being from such an isolated corner of the Lower 48, that counts for a little.
I did not expect to like Stevens in person; I expected that I'd be bored to tears. So I was surprised again. His music strikes me as painfully earnest, a little self-important, too cute by half. I was glad that his performance was not reverential. The show for his Illinois album was structured like a pep rally. There were cheers and University of Illinois cheerleading outfits. Stevens was witty and likeable. He didn't take himself or his music too seriously. I left liking him a lot more.
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