Mr. Irresponsible's Bad Advice

Swingin'

I've always had a theory that whenever guys and gals start swinging, they begin to lose interest in conquering the world. They just want a comfortable pad and stereo and wheels, and their thoughts turn to the good things of life -- not to war. They loosen up, they live and they're more apt to let live. Dig?
-- Frank Sinatra (The Playboy Interview, February 1962)

Dug, baby. Anybody longing for some moral clarity, or just for a time when people could reasonably be said to "start swinging," should study the text of Sinatra's Playboy interview, helpfully posted by a site called This Is Sinatra! (The exclamation point is theirs, not mine, which seems entirely appropriate.) Sinatra weighs in on the peculiar demands of performing, of course: "...an audience is like a broad -- if you're indifferent, endsville." But he also holds forth on racism (against it), disarmament (for it, with one swingin' catch), fatherly responsibility ("I didn't tell my daughter whom to marry, but I'd have broken her back if she had had big eyes for a bigot") and the chances for a Communist takeover of the US: "Khrushchev has as much chance of succeeding as he has of making 100 straight passes at the crap table." The fact that this turned out to be correct is much less interesting to me than the picture of the diminutive Soviet premier hunched over a crap table, signaling feverishly for more comped vodka and shouting "Seven come eleven, comrades! Niki needs a new pair of shoes!"

The interview is especially fascinating for the glimpse it provides into that long-gone postwar moment when liberalism had certitude and swagger, and its own boy prince on the throne. It was surely the last time in recent memory that the Left was sexy. (The college girls may have loved Gene McCarthy, but that was ideological, not vascular.) Looking back two years to the presidential candidacy of John Kerry and two years ahead to a probable run by Hillary Clinton, one has to wonder where the zazz went.  In the meantime, there's always nostalgia. "When GUM department store in Moscow starts selling bikinis, we've got a fighting chance, because that means the girls are interested in being girls and the boys are going to stop thinking about communes and begin thinking connubially," Sinatra told Playboy, showing a gift for nuanced geopolitical thinking that's sorely lacking in today's celebrities.

Endsville.

It's The Thursday Morning Grab Bag!

Mr. Irresponsible has just returned from a fact-finding tour of central Texas, where the principal fact to be found is that damn, margaritas are tasty. And what do I discover on my return, besides a desk chair which has been subtly but unmistakably canted out of position?* A whole raft of bad behavior from which to draw inspiring life lessons! Let's mangia!

-- The US Congress has banded together in an unprecedentedly bipartisan show of moral dudgeon over the Dubai ports deal. It's nice to see that our legislators still remember how to stand shoulder to shoulder in front of the cameras when there are sound bites of outrage to be expressed. Just one teensy problem: They're all wet. Life lesson: When the universe offers you a chance to get your name in the papers, don't let niggling things like facts get in the way.

-- One of the multicellular life forms in charge of distributing free goods to rich, famous celebrities tells the AP that $50,000 goody bags are actually a sort of compensatory mechanism for the inconveniences A-listers have to suffer. "They can't just go to the mall like a regular person," says the extravagantly-named Lash Fary. "Or," he adds, showing the gift for nuance that is so typical of bottom-feeders in the Hollywood ecosystem, "they can, but it won't be very much fun."  Life lesson: Celebrities are just like you and me, only less fortunate and pampered. Their lives should inspire not envy, but empathy.

-- Film nerds apparently have even more free time than previously suspected. A cabal describing itself as "an international group of lifelong James Bond fans" (or AIGLJBF, pronounced "Aig-la-jibbif," which is almost as memorable as SMERSH) is calling for a boycott of the upcoming "Casino Royale," a Bond film which, if memory serves, has been made about eleven times before. Their main beef appears to be the selection of actor Daniel Craig as the sixth screen 007, after Sean Connery, George Lazenby,  Roger Moore, Skitch Henderson and some guy named Al. (My notes may be a little sketchy on those last two.) How ridiculous a contretemps is this? Just this ridiculous: Among Craig's defenders is actor Toby Stephens, who (again from my notes) played super-criminal Jean-Jacques "Fromage" DuPlessy, The Man With The Golden Gums, in "I Loved You Tuesday." That's right, it's come to this: Bond villains are now defending Bonds against the depredations of Bond fans. Life lesson: Take your friends where you can get them, and then for Pete's sake get some sleep. That tequila hangover is killing me... um, you.

*Note to Debbie: Check the security tapes. If the intern's been using my desk, you know what to do.

On The Road (Again?)

Mr. Irresponsible's been feeling sort of logy lately. What's an advice columnist to do when the big story in the news is one old white guy shooting another old white guy in the face and (we subsequently find out) the heart? How am I supposed to mill advice-giving gold from that? What am I supposed to say: "Hey, don't do that"? Advice columnists live in a shadowy world of nuance and interpretation, and there's no room here for either. So I'm off on a therapeutic fact-finding tour to America's heartland, and will be back next week with fresh ambiguities for your delectation. Tune in then, won't you?  And remember to  keep your shotgun pointed at the ground, for God's sake.