#David Roth

[haverwood]

Cannibal Corpse: Live Cannibalism David Roth USA, 2000

[thefugitivesaint]

They Are Insecure For A Reason | Defector

"One of the less-amusing ironies of the violent institutional response to the nonviolent protest movement on campuses across the country is that the goals of the people protesting are much easier to understand than those of the variously curdled elites dispatching uniformed violence workers against them. The irony is in the fact that the students, with their specific demands and comparatively disciplined approach, have been cast as somewhere between essentially unserious and actively terroristic. In contrast, the institutions pivoting and pandering and giddily giving themselves over to the incoherent and spiraling political panic surrounding the protests represent principled leadership and forebearance; the gray elites insisting that these protests are actually about their dull abstractions of choice are the voice of seriousness; the police forces, rioting and ravening as ever, are somehow in fact order.

A lot of this disjunction can be explained by the undeniable disparities in power between those two sides, the first organizing toward a legible goal and the second existing essentially to oversee the unending work of saying no. Only one side can effectively call the cops on the other; here, as elsewhere, the impunity that comes with that exclusive access to violent recourse has made those with it not only cynical and lazy and cruel, but also paradoxically insecure and perpetually terrified at the prospect of any erosion in authority. It is, on its face, difficult to make the argument that it is fundamentally unserious to object to dropping a 2,000-pound bomb on a hospital, and much more morally and politically serious to object to that objection on some point of administrative order, or simply because it is too loud." ..... "There is something terribly clarifying in how eager the people in power at these universities have been to betray the trust of everyone invested in those institutions. Institutions that otherwise exist from one exploratory committee to the next will change university policies on the fly so that their local uniformed violence workers will get their chance to thump some young skulls; administrators whose notional jobs are upholding communities of learning and care gladly consent to being upbraided by clownish golf hogs and half-fascist nullities in Congress and then do exactly what they were told to do, whatever the damage to those communities. If the students and professors in these protests, which are now nationwide, have a sort of advantage simply by being the only parties involved that actually care about anything, they are also up against an opposition that is all the more implacable because of how proudly cynical it is." .... "The order they are after is all around us—a Homeowners Association with a S.W.A.T. team at its disposal, a business that grows at a steady rate without making anything anyone could use, a world in which things simply happen and continue to happen, a pristine desolation that is safe precisely because of how empty it is. But what they are afraid of grows even as they starve it, which is why these people, with all their power, are always so insecure. It is why, despite the relentless imposition of their annihilating concept of safety, they can't ever quite feel safe. They know how bad it would be for them to be seen clearly; they are fucking terrified of being treated as they treat others. They know that people can recognize their demands as what they are, and that there are still spaces in which to reject them. And they sense, maybe, that this false and failing security can't last. "The more they try to silence us," a Columbia grad student told the Times last week, "the louder we get."

[porterdavis]

Writing this good brings a tear to my eye

I don't have to tell you that this job is a stupid, disgusting one, and one in which only someone who is facile and shameless could flourish to the extent that Carlson has. It is a demeaning thing, although it pays well; Carlson was compensated like a mid-career MLB star to play his part as a meat megaphone for the worst and oldest impulses in American politics.

That the demands of the job changed in the way they did, such that the erstwhile rich-kid heel became a howling blood-and-soil fascist, is meaningful in a number of ways, but I think most significantly in how it reflects the vacancy and drift that define our increasingly theatrical and abstracted politics.

David Roth The Defector

Photo - Rich Graessle/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

[lilyionamackenzie]

Read guest author David Roth's thoughtful & thought provoking comments on writing narrative!

David Roth’s bio: David received his undergraduate Communication degree from Stanford University. After moving to New York City to pursue a career in documentary film production, he began MA studies in Creative Writing at New York University, which included a course with his first literary hero E. L. Doctorow. He took a leave of absence after a semester to focus on supporting his growing family.…

[mywifeleftme]

154: Young Jessie // Shufflin' & Jivin'

Shufflin' & Jivin' Young Jessie 1987, Ace

Deadspin/Defector writer David Roth coined a phrase for the idle pastime of recalling also-ran baseball players: Let’s Remember Some Guys. If you’ve ever sat around with friends who share a fandom and found the conversation pleasantly degenerating into taking turns naming Guys (e.g. “Oh man, Skeet Ulrich!”) and reacting (“Oh shit, I remember him!”), you’ve had the pleasure of Remembering a Guy. (I’ve uh homaged this bit a few times in this series already.)

Roth draws a distinction here between Guys and Dudes. A Dude is someone who had a respectable degree of success at the highest levels of their practice (made an all-star team; did an album the average stepdad has worn out multiple copies of), whereas a Guy is someone who was more of a workaday stiff who has become lodged in your mind for personal, arbitrary, or outright mysterious reasons.

To whit:

Soccer player Megan Rapinoe is unequivocally a Dude. Former Arsenal player Ray Parlour is a Guy.

The Pokemon Pidgeotto is a Guy. Bulbasaur is clearly a Dude.

Ex-porn star Carter Cruise is a Dude. Scarlit Scandal is currently a Guy with Dude potential.

Guy. The wrestler Duke “The Dumpster” Droese is a Guy. AEW’s Britt Baker is a Dude.

Basketball player Detlef Schrempf is a Dude. Christian Wood is a Guy and it’s no one’s fault but his.

Dude.

The talking doorknockers from Labyrinth are Guys. Ludo is an absolute Dude.

Border collies are a Dude breed of dog. Drevers are Guys.

I trust these carefully chosen exemplars have helped you calibrate your Remembering devices. So, based on what you know about the rules of Guy Remembering, would you say Young Jessie was a Guy or a Dude based on the stats below?

Active between 1953 and 2020, but best known for a short run of rock ‘n’ roll singles in the first decade of his career, some of them featuring guitarist Mickey Baker (among sidemen a definite Dude, otherwise technically a Guy?) and saxophonist Sam “The Man” Taylor (same)

Briefly a member of The Flairs (Guys) and The Coasters (Dudes)

Writer of the song “Mary Lou,” later covered by Bob Seger (Dude), Steve Miller (Dude), Frank Zappa (Dude), and The Oblivians (Dudes, within their specific niche)

Performed and recorded sporadically (mostly jazz) over the ensuing decades

Pencils down. What do you say?

Yeah, Young Jessie is obviously a Guy, but he’s a great example of the worthiness of humble Guydom, and the joys of Remembering Guys. There was a huge glut of talent working during rock ‘n’ roll’s first decade, and despite the public’s insatiable appetite for the new sound there wasn’t enough limelight, enough studio time, enough capital for most singers to get even a single whack at the pinata. To his credit, Young Jessie had enough onstage electricity, and enough craft in his pen, to cut thirteen singles between 1954 and 1963, including some work with the legendary songwriting duo Lieber & Stoller (Dudes).

The concept of an independent (or alternative) class of recording artists didn’t really exist in Jessie’s prime—studio time meant somebody somewhere was willing to risk money on you in the hopes you might have the decency to reward them with a hit. There simply wasn’t as much willingness to invest in a longshot at stardom back then, and you needed, luck, fortitude, and ideally something special vocally to stand out.

Relatively few of Jessie’s peers had the juice to fill out a retrospective compilation, let alone one with the spring of Shufflin’ & Jivin’, which collects most of his work for the Modern Records label (’54 to ’57), plus a few previously unreleased tracks and a token entry from his time with vocal quartet The Flairs (the latter with Ike Turner [Dude] sitting in on guitar). These are pretty hot recordings in general, not far off the jump blues-derived sounds of Big Joe Thornton and Chubby Checker (both Dudes), and Jessie makes a good host. He’s believable when he asks a woman if she’d like seven or eight kids, and he has the strut needed to sell a hustler’s anthem like “Hit, Git & Split.” But he never managed to land a real hit, and he was ultimately the type of unflashy pro that had a more limited ceiling in his stardom-driven era.

But, for anyone who is a true fan of early rock ‘n’ roll and can’t get enough of this sound, this compilation (like Young Jessie himself) is an excellent find, and if you say his name among the right crowd, you’re sure to get an appreciative, “Hey, I remember that guy!” We should all be so lucky to leave such a fond legacy.

154/365

[toshootforthestars]

[Chris] Christie correctly adduced that the Republican electorate was very eager to line up behind a Big Loud Asshole, and Christie wasn't wrong that his best political skills—talking grandly about leadership; carrying and prosecuting dumb grudges against rivals; standing behind a phalanx of State Police officers and yelling "oh yeah wow what a tough guy" at a schoolteacher—were well suited for the moment.

In a sense, it's hard to fault Christie for not being the biggest, loudest asshole in the 2016 GOP candidate field; in almost any other field, he would have been just that. Already something of a joke when his campaign started, Christie stuck around long enough to land some tepid burns on Marco Rubio, but had been reduced to getting stunted on by the New York Times editorial page by the time he finally, inevitably endorsed Donald Trump and dropped out.

In a Republican presidential primary, Christie's most unappealing personal attributes were his strongest selling point; it's not really his fault that he wasn't quite unpleasant enough, and he absolutely was trying his hardest in that particular area.

An attribute of Christie's that might have played well had he made it to a general election, in which he would have had to reach voters outside of the "slavering orc" demographic that votes in GOP primaries, is that he can seem convincingly human when discussing some of the things that he actually cares about. Very few of these have anything to do with governance, good or bad, although a tragic family experience with drug addiction led him to be notably more humane in that area than in any other. This is a classic Republican thing: They govern as if everyone else on earth is a repellent moocher wretch who deserves every misery they endure, but they are sometimes willing to reconsider that, narrowly and tentatively, when some similar misery is visited upon themselves, the heroic protagonist of reality.

*      *      *      *      *      *

For one thing, the Big Loud Asshole who bigfooted Christie's life's ambition back in 2016 inspired ever greasier and more grandiose weirdos and sociopathic grifters to chase their dreams of political power.

Across the country, in races big and small, communities are faced with the decision of whether to elevate obviously daffy and otherwise unemployable goons to high political office. That these people lack the sort of rudimentary political skills that a Christie-grade talent displays—the ability to appear human for a few minutes at a time, or just present as "a type of person who exists in the world"—has not held them back. It certainly has not kept them from reaching high office.

And this is how you wind up with the Mayor of New York City joining the Yankees broadcast on Opening Day and answering very easy are-you-happy-to-be-here questions by telling kids to "put down the Gameboy" and repeatedly bringing up crime and September 11.

The bits to which Adams repeatedly returns are not quite partisan; his catchphrases and obsessions and bewildering personal vibe, which he has imposed on the city with an effectiveness that he hasn't been able to match in any policy aspect, are their own thing. It is not a politician making a canned speech, which is what Christie dinged Rubio for back in 2016; it is not a monstrously vain and venal politician type more or less passing as a normal human being for a few minutes, which is what Christie did during his more effective moments. It's someone who appears to be operating from an entirely different vocabulary of expectations and perceptions, and who transparently believes that he is just killing it.

This is just how Adams is. It is tough to say that he represents anything in particular beyond an embodiment of the ongoing trend of communities electing the weirdest and most confident person in that community to increasingly demeaning and impossible governmental roles.

This is how Adams does his job, and if no one has ever thought to do it quite this way before—staying up for 22 hours a day, eating exclusively at Midtown restaurants owned and operated by people who have gone to prison for Medicare fraud, talking about undoing bail reform during a Yankees game—it is hard to say that he is doing it wrong by his own standards.

That is, admittedly, a lot easier to assess by other standards. But if Adams's election reflects a bleak new understanding of governance as pure reactive spectacle, the election of relentlessly weird serial fabulist George Santos to a House seat on Long Island almost looks like defensive driving.

The trends and broader forces that made his ascent possible are very bad, but Santos is almost certainly doing less damage on a day-to-day basis in the House of Representatives than he would if he had been permitted to keep wandering outer Queens fleecing people out of money intended to pay for veterinary emergencies. It is not "good" that Santos is in Congress, but it could be argued that packing him off to D.C. to do the sort of corny stuff that Members of Congress do is better for the people of his district than leaving him there to do the sort of mid-major felony fraud things that he would otherwise get up to.

Is George Santos good at the congressman stuff?

Before you answer, remember what he was sent there to do. It is unlikely that voters understood, at the time that they voted for him, that they were doing the equivalent of shooing a very hungry possum out of their kitchen. The incentives that create and elevate a George Santos don't operate at that conscious a level, really.

It is important that his politics are cruel, and it is also important that he himself is so relentlessly odd, but this sort of politician exists because people have come to see politics as cynically as politicians do.

None of these people—the posh bullies with some latent retail talent; the crystal-vision narcissists; the howlingly overt criminals—will give you anything like what you want. It's not in them to do it; they think that doing so would mean less for them. Watch them bluster and mince in their ridiculous official capacities and their elections can almost start to feel like vengeance. They got what they wanted, and in lieu of any other benefit, the rest of us get to watch them abase themselves doing it.

David Roth:  Local Politicians Enthused By Return Of Base Ball 

Defector  /  31 Mar 2023

[dailydccomics]

Titans' holiday postcard by David Talaski

[soranatus]

Titans (2023) #4 variant cover by David Talaski

[conandaily2022]

2022 Idaho senate election results: Mike Crapo, David Roth, Idaho Sierra Law, Ray Writz, Scott Cleveland

2022 Idaho senate election results: Mike Crapo, David Roth, Idaho Sierra Law, Ray Writz, Scott Cleveland

election date: November 8, 2022 country: United States state: Idaho position: member of the U.S. Senate incumbent senator (party): Mike Crapo (Republican) term: January 3, 2023 – January 3, 2029 ELECTION RESULTS (Idaho senator) PARTYCANDIDATE VOTESRepublicanMike CrapoDemocratic David RothLibertarian Idaho Sierra LawConstitution Ray WritzIndependent Scott Cleveland

[eroticlamb]

David Lee Roth posing with a Harley Davidson Motorcycle, 1978 ⋆ ౨ৎ ˚ ˖ ࣪ Photographed by Michael Ochs

[wtftaylr]

look little timmy, it's Mr. and Mrs. New Vegas. Isn't that suit butt fugly

[justarocknrollclownxd]

rockstar pics that are my mental support

[jamisonrivv]

the mighty ⭐️

[skinomyteethh]

need these men biblically, not even a guillotine could prevent the head id give them, im biting through an iron jail cell rn

[vancruejovi]

David Lee Roth 🎶

[atomic-chronoscaph]

TGIF