The Mail
MUSIC CRITIC ON THE RUN
I wish the Fame luck, and I hope they are judged because of their music rather than the t-shirts they have on.
Lucas Papaelias, Manhattan
Intrigued by J.R. Taylor's interview (6/1) and the band's non-ironic, don't-give-a-shit come-on, I sought out singles from the band's EP. I've got nothing bad to say about these guys, but they hardly merit the second-coming-esque praise (which says something about the sad state of accessible rock music). They're distinctive, have a good sense of melody and play tight with some verve. But they're working in awfully tired forms that weren't that great from the start. By itself, straight-ahead power-pop-rock from the 70s is hardly something to get excited about. They don't have the chops, humor or bite of Cheap Trick, or the eccentricity of Big Star (plus, it's a bit easier to make this stuff after the recipe's been on vinyl for 30 years). You're right about one thing-the Fame oughtta sell millions, given all the lame bands covering similar ground, but it's no artistic tragedy if they don't.
Mike Strassman, Brooklyn
Maple Leaf Letdown
Your review of Ron Howard's Cinderella Man ("Rocky Rides Seabiscuit," 6/1) failed to mention one very important fact: It was filmed entirely in Toronto, Canada. In a time when 85 percent of Screen Actors Guild actors make less than $5000 a year, and most don't qualify for their own union's healthcare, Canada "stood in" for a Depression-era America.
Erik-Anders Nilsson, Manhattan
Watch This
Re: "Ministry of 'Truth Ten Years Too Late'" (6/1): Thank you for mentioning the existence of our surveillance camera walking tours in The News Hole, despite the fact that you failed to indicate our current schedule.
Unlike you, we are not sanguine about the prospect of the NYPD adding 400 more surveillance cameras (a 500 percent increase), nor do we believe that privacy was lost "a long time ago." We are alarmed that the NYPD would add more cameras when they have failed time and time again to prevent or even record evidence of criminal activity (the recent and still-unsolved bombing of the British Consulate, for example), and we are committed to reclaiming whatever privacy rights we have lost.
The Surveillance Camera Players, Manhattan
Christ Almighty
Re: "Monkey Business" (6/1): Matt Taibbi continues his scurrilous attacks on Christians with this latest diatribe. He calls those who sided with the Shiavo family over the life of their daughter "snake handlers." He maintains that we conservative Christians "live the intellectual lives of farm animals." While Taibbi was reading Esquire, I was reading Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities. I recently reread Joyce's Ulysses. I'm now reading The Brothers Karamazov. And I'm against abortion, gay marriage and having the desires of a de facto bigamist win out over the wishes of a loving family. What Taibbi needs to come to grips with is that there are many conservative Christians who live intellectual lives that put to shame the mediocreÊrants of secularists who can't analyze a situation beyond their own self-centered needs.
Frank Gibbons, Seekonk, MA
All past sins of Matt Taibbi need to be forgiven. "Monkey Business" (6/1) is the best work he's yet done for New York Press. Heck, it's the best work anybody other than the movie columnists has done for you in a long while.
Too many people still want to insist that politics is cyclical, but I'm no longer sure it is. There is a large, too large and growing, segment of the population to whom reason, logic and science, and even verifiable indisputable fact, mean nothing anymore. We can hope some of the miscreants who prosper because of this will overreach and stumble, but they will merely be replaced. The sequel to the Age of Enlightenment is not upon us, and may not be for a decade or more. I'm not getting my hopes up.
Brendan Foster, ManhattanRe: "Monkey Business" (6/1): "Progressives in this country have always maintained a kind of fuzzy belief that fundamentalists will eventually just disappear, as if by magic, that the phenomenon of grown men and women believing in devils and witches and angels will inevitably be outgrown, the way children outgrow Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and Marx."
Uh, I would not put Marx in the same category with devils, witches, angels, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. He really did exist, you know, in the real world, and had some interesting things to say about that real world.
Tom Keel, Chicago
Re: "Monkey Business" (6/1): Matt Taibbi is right. America does have an unrelenting zeal for Christianity. We are a Christian nation. Why this is offensive to some leaves the rest of us in head-shaking disbelief. It's like crying out against air, water and food. It is certainly a howl against love itself. He telegraphs his pain with every word he writes, as if sprinkled with holy water.
This unrelenting insistence that America is not a Christian nation, and that smart Americans are not Christians flies in the face of sanity, history and observable fact. It's like standing in the spray of Niagara Falls insisting that you're standing in a desert.
It's also contra to our national purpose to imply that Christians must be put down as a political voice, for it is Christian temperance and tolerance that paved the way for Taibbi to cry out against the very virtues and people who made possible his place in the world. I hear in his message tolerance for me, but damn those Christians, there's no tolerating them. We'll tolerate any political voice except the voices of those who founded this nation! That makes Matt Taibbi quite a hypocrite.
NAME WITHHELD, Boulder, CO
Fiction, With an "F"
Re: "Locked Horns" (6/1): I was with Aaron Naparstek on this one right up to the physical assault. I'm just hoping it's some kind of fantasy or metaphor and not a true story.
Frustration and anger at horn-blowers is totally understandable, but rage and violence are probably the worst ways to make someone see your perspective. I would expect at least a hint of remorse from someone who assaulted a low-paid service worker (even if that service worker was being a dick).
Helen Smith, Pittsburgh
Slack-Not Sacked
I love Jim Knipfel. I bought his book. I was intrigued with his life story. I anticipated his column.
You won't answer any mail querying his status. But his name is still on the masthead. Re-instate the column, you motherfuckers. Now.
Mark Prindle, via email
Salt Lake City or Bust
Re: "Rage Against The Mormon" (6/1): I appreciated your article, a "heads up" on the Jehovah's Witnesses.
Jehovah's Witnesses are predatory psychopaths who succeed by intimidation through litigation. They are bullies, plain and simple. The Watchtower is big money, being one of the top 40 New York City corporations making nearly one billion dollars a year. (That's just from one of their many corporations.)
Unlike in the case of Christians who are persecuted in other lands for talking about Jesus Christ, Jehovah's Witnesses are largely persecuted for following the teachings begun during the second presidency of the Watchtower, when Joseph F. Rutherford took over in a corporate flap and began changing doctrines quickly in the Watchtower belief system. He claimed that angels directly conveyed "truth" to some of those in leadership. He coined the name "Jehovah's Witnesses" to make them stand out from being witnesses of Jesus, a typical evangelical expression (and a Biblical one).
Rutherford dumped holidays, birthdays and the 1874 date for the invisible return on Christ, and invented an "earthly class" of Witnesses, since only 144,000 can go to heaven in their teaching. The rest, meaning all 99.9 percent of Witnesses still alive, will live forever on a cleansed earth, under the rule of the Watchtower leaders in heaven, who will keep them in line by local elders known as "Princes."
If you have been "witnessed to" by Jehovah's Witnesses and you reject their message, you will likely die "shortly" at Armageddon with all the other non-Witnesses, since theirs is the only true religion, and (if they can live up to all the rules) they are the only ones to inhabit this "new earth." If you believe Witnesses seem rigid now, any non-conformist during the future "cleansed earth" will be directly destroyed by Jehovah. Even now a Witness will be dis-fellowshipped for any one of many gaffs, such as smoking, taking a blood transfusion or even voting.
To even vocally question the teachings of the Watchtower will result in complete cutting off, with family and friends usually being forbidden to talk to them. The Watchtower is a truly Orwellian world, in a time when Orwellian societies are nearly obsolete.
By their own yearbook accounts, Witnesses are shrinking in number in many Western countries as of the last three years, as the internet facilitates the spread of information (much of it critical of the Witnesses). Witnesses are cautioned against creating JW-related websites, largely to prevent their members from discovering the history and dirty laundry of this organization on other websites. (There are literally hundreds of former members pages in many languages.)
The Watchtower strives hard to control the flow of information to the individual Witness, and prefers that all instruction come through the magazines they carry door-to-door. Without this form of control, even as they themselves admit, they would believe just the same as other bible believers.
My hope is that there will be a day in each of their lives when the Watchtower magazine is no longer needed, and they can go to college, vote for office and contribute money and time to other, more vital causes in their community. More than likely they will then cease to be persecuted, except in a few societies more authoritarian than their own. Theologically, Jehovah's WitnessesÊare a cult of Christianity. The oppressive organization does not represent historical, biblical Christianity in any way. Sociologically, it is a destructive cult whose false teachings frequently result in spiritual and psychological abuse, as well as needless deaths.
Danny Haszard, via email