Gloss

There’s been some good-hearted ribbing this past week about Hillary Clinton’s anti-elite boilermaker of choice, Crown Royal. It came up in Thomas Frank’s debut column for the Wall Street Journal today. Last week it was part of a Daily Show segment (Stewart: “Nothing says blue collar like whiskey in a velvet pouch”).

Sure, it’s a funny drink name for her to choose, Crown Royal, seeing as she’s attempting to start a dynasty. But elitist? It might be a luxury brand, but it’s luxury like going to Atlantic City is luxury. No. It’s luxury like going to Mohegan Sun is luxury. It’s luxury like a prom limo. It’s luxury like my boob job. It’s luxury like a nightclub called Touch of Class.

I have to side with Clinton over the liberal sobergentsia on this one. It’s a pretty safe bet Obama’s shot of choice doesn’t have its own NASCAR race.

Crown Royal

I don’t care if the announcers insist on the correct pronunciation. Angel Pagan is no less than the coolest name in the history of baseball. It combines the soaring heroism of John Milton’s poetry with the percolating menace of back-country death metal fans.

Now we just have to wait for the Mets to realize the marketing potential of Pagan jerseys.

NY Post: Pagan Enjoying an Amazin’ Start

Our theories of the Internet could use some work. What we have now: ideas about virtuality, simulacra, isolation, networks and nonhierarchical distribution, the death of newspapers, copyright infringement, lawlessness and the Wild West. Theory on photography and cinema has over a century on us, but it’s a model. Images, as a group, had two meanings in the end. Superficially, they changed our understanding of time. More profoundly, they expanded our relationship with death. The Internet, I think we will find, is superficially about space, and more profoundly about the afterlife. Photography was a limitless memento mori. The Internet is one wide Nachleben.

Not sure if this work is best done by the generation that remembers the world before the Internet, or if it’s better to wait.