A Stitch in Haste

I went to Carnegie Hall last night to see Lewis Black, the funniest man in America and the most important comic since George Carlin. He was, as always, awesome.

There were two opening acts for Black: a very good older comic named John Bowman, and an atrocious new-age techno-"music" poser composer named Jane Ira Bloom, who screeched meaningless strings of almost-notes on a soprano sax while tapping out cacophonous counter-noise on a footpad synthesizer reminiscent of the F.A.O. Schwartz scene in "Big." I simply cannot adequately describe how utterly awful she was.

So why am I blogging about it? Because of this line in her Playbill biography:

She was the first musician ever commissioned by the NASA Art Program...

NASA Art Program?!? We need a "space art" program? This is somehow part of NASA's mission — not to contribute to scientific knowledge, advance new technologies or aid in national defense, but to make "space noise"?

Remind me again how there's "no fat left in the federal budget"?

And does this mean that the National Endowment for the Arts will be launching its own satellites?

So if you're at all tempted to think that the ludicrous NASA proposal to spend $104 billion on a "Been There, Done That" warm fuzzy feeling Moondoggle, think about how NASA has been spending its your money recently.

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Meanwhile, here are the various government bodies that took tax money from people who did not see Lewis Black in order to make tickets cheaper for those who did see Lewis Black. Because Carnegie Hall generally and Lewis Black specifically are apparently "public goods" and some "smarter than you" bureaucrats decided that subsidizing a well-off Manhattan investment banker seeing a potty-mouth comic was a worthy use of your tax dollars.

--City of New York
--State of New York
--NYC Department of Cultural Affairs
--New York State Council on the Arts
--New York City Council
--National Endowment for the Arts
--U.S. Department of Education
--U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
--U.S. Department of State

I love that last one — I guess U.N. ambassadors wanted to see Lewis Black too.