16 December 2007

P.J. O'Rourke is old; reviews a book about Starbucks

link to NYT book review by P.J. O'Rourke

I like O'Rourke on "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me", and I have fond memories of reading his articles in Rolling Stone back in the 1980s (especially the one about the drug dealer who came home to his house being raided and asked the cops if he could go in to get his drugs), but I think he was drunk when he wrote this book review. It makes no sense, it veers wildly from topic to topic and spends multiple paragraphs discussing P.J.'s own finances, and it ends up with P.J. congratulating himself for having taught the author to disregard fair trade rules. Or something.

I don't know what happened here, but somehow P.J. ended up feeling self-satisfied about his intellectual superiority by reading this book and not liking it very much. I get the impression that he expected it to be an anti-capitalist screed, and when it wasn't, he (P.J.) felt like he'd won an argument that no one even knew he was having. So he condescends to the "young" (his words) author for having let Papa P.J. teach him a lesson. (Here's a pic of author Taylor Clark. I don't know, he looks to me like he's out of short pants.)

At any rate, read the review because it's funny because it's bizarre. I guess once the editors asked O'Rourke to do a review, they figured they had to print whatever he sent in.

I think I love P.J.'s review most because he's the only person in America who still considers the word "hippy" to be a withering put-down. Keep fighting those dirty hippies, P.J.! Make them cut their hair! Maybe then our country will finally get back on the right track.

27 November 2007

Beowulf: The Prequel


25 November 2007

Foreskin's Lament by Shalom Auslander

I have this rule that I only want to write about things I loved, so I have to write this in the dark in order to get away with it. I did not love Foreskin's Lament.

On the other hand, this: "Hello, McFly! You realize that your blog is just a way to hear yourself talk, right?" So much for rules I made up.

I listened to this book, actually, as narrated by the author in a mostly flat, deadpan-to-the-point-of-maybe-actually-dead drone. It took me what felt like a long time to get through all 63 tracks; walking around the neighborhood, ironing, vacuuming. You name a domestic chore and Mr. Auslander and I have done it together.

I wanted to love this book, and I'm frustrated because I think I could have. It's essentially about Mr. A's Orthodox Jewish upbringing and how its strict rules and mercilessly punitive conception of God screwed him up. In his confusion and anger, he fought back with pornography and hotdogs and finally broke with his family after the birth of his son.

This is a story built on a lot of pain and emotion, and the unfortunate thing for me as a reader is that Auslander chose to bury the pain and emotion under Catskills-level jokes and a sneering disregard for everyone else (except his wife, whom he describes as being very cool and witty, and his baby, who I mean seriously, like he's going to be shitty about his newborn).

His main joke to hide behind is that he gives God the finger, quite literally, whenever he breaks one of the many laws of his religion. The extension of the joke is that God is out to get people, but particularly Mr. Auslander. There is a long section near the end of the book about the convoluted attempts of Mr. A and his wife to both honor the Sabbath and watch the Rangers vie for the Stanley Cup. The lengths that they go to are quite funny, an actual caper, even, but make no sense in the midst of Mr. A's insistence that he doesn't honor the Sabbath (so his mother is hurtful to him for reminding him of it) and that God will punish him personally by making the Rangers lose. When the Rangers win, it is still God punishing him. The tortured logic Mr. A employs to make himself God's victim regardless could've been amusing if done self-deprecatingly or with some kind of self-awareness (after all, Richard Lewis has made a career off of this idea), but it isn't, so it isn't.

God never does get the credit for the good things that happen to Mr. A -- his lovely wife, his son, his friends, who are mentioned in a tantalizing but brief bit at the very end of the book as being "foreskins" like himself. The people he admires and loves do merit mention, I suppose due to Mr. A's thesis that God will punish him and take away the things he loves.

This then is a failure on his part and a mark of the fact that he wasn't ready to tell his story. No amount of bitter attacks on his family or on practitioners of his (former?) religion will signal that he is fighting back against the damage instilled by his upbringing. It simply indicates that he's still fearful and still running away.

I think his editors did Auslander a disservice by not pushing him to tell the more meaningful story. It's as if they settled for the cheap jokes, betting that people wanted to hear a guy ridicule convoluted Orthodox Jewish traditions (though why this means he also has to ridicule and stereotype the inhabitants of his chosen home in Woodstock and the other places he's lived in Israel and New York is beyond me).

I think Mr. Auslander and his editors fell into the David Sedaris trap, whereby they think that it's easy to be as funny as Sedaris -- all you have to do is write about your crazy family. Give it the detachment of Running With Scissors, and you've got a winner on the bookshelves.

But note that Running With Scissors was followed by Dry -- there was a price to pay for that first book's insistence that you can triumph over a bizarre and neglectful upbringing without a scratch. And note that Sedaris is a write of extraordinary gifts and care for the people he writes about. He doesn't ridicule, though he does tease. He doesn't hide from pain; he puts it in context.

And context is lacking from Foreskin's Lament -- Auslander rattles off the prayers required over various types of food and the many and layered activities that are forbidden on the Sabbath, but he doesn't bother to wonder or explain why they exist and why some people are okay with them and why he's not. He's content to nudge us and say, "Isn't that ridiculous? Isn't it stupid?", so we'll say, "Yeah, it is stupid. High five!" That's fine talk for a barbecue, but you need to expose yourself more in your writing. You need to allow yourself to be vulnerable.

I'm guessing that Mr. Auslander felt all too vulnerable in going as far as he did here: in talking about his drug use and trafe indulgences and his encounters with porn and with a prostitute. And especially about his family, and about how his father used to beat his brother with his mother's passive consent.

But he stops just when the writing would've become meaningful. He resorts to arguments with his personal guardian God and the resultant tired anti-Auslander's-God jokes rather than putting his feelings and his anger and sorrow into context. He never wonders how others view God, how others deal with the same thing he's going through, how his mother and father may have seen things. He's so tied up in his own head that he can't see anything else, which ultimately makes his writing tiresome and thin.

I wish he had been pushed to tell the whole story. I wish he'd written openly about his anger and his fear instead of wrapping them up in deflective humor. He didn't admit that he's still struggling with terrible fears, all the more terrible because he knows they aren't logical. He didn't admit that he lost something by breaking with his parents, and that they must've lost something, too. He didn't talk about how therapy helped (or hurt) him; he falls back on (of course) a repated deadpan joke about how much the therapy cost.

He didn't go on a quest to address his problem, he just folded up more into himself. And that's a shame not only for him, but for his readers.

19 November 2007

My Loves (of the big and small screens)

I can't explain it. These people show up in a guest spot or a movie trailer and I sit up and go "Hey! I've got to see that! I love you, Ian McShane!"

1. SuperDave Osborne, aka Bob Einstein.
Ok, his real name is Bob Einstein, so that's cause for love right there. He played Officer Judy on the Smothers Brothers show, and though that was before my time and I've only seen clips, the very name Officer Judy makes me laugh every time. I mostly know him as SuperDave, the parody of the Evel Knievel-style stunt performer, and I've mostly only seen SuperDave on Letterman's show. So when I think about it, I've barely ever seen this guy, yet every time is a treat. Thanks to Curb Your Enthusiasm (and a few Arrested Developments), he's around more than ever before. His starkly deadpan delivery and distinctive husky voice make him instantly recognizable. His no-bullshit demeanor in the midst of playing the most bullshitting of characters is utterly delightful. He doesn't beg you to laugh because he knows you will. Love!

2. William Daniels
That's Dr. Craig to me, of my beloved St. Elsewhere. Another one with a highly distinctive voice (maybe that's the secret to my heart) -- a short guy with a powerful presence, perfectly cast as John Adams in the movie musical 1776 (he sings, too!). He's a perfectionist and an autocrat doomed by his own pride (just like me!). In real life, he's been married to his actress wife Bonnie Bartlett (Mrs. Craig, natch) for one million years. He was the voice of KITT the car. When he took the part of Mr. Feeny in Boy Meets World, I despaired that he was sinking into the sitcom mire, but he's smarter than I am and picked a good show. He's 80 now, so my longtime dream of acting with him is increasingly imperiled, but I'll always have him yelling at Erlich. Get younger, Mr. Daniels!

3. Gary Cole
You find me another guy who can perfectly embody murderer Jeffrey MacDonald, superfather Mr. Brady-via-Robert-Reed, and the boss man in Office Space. Oh, you can't? Of course not -- no one else is as perfect as Cole. He brings class and gravity to everything he does, while being one of the funniest guys around. Try that for your next party trick. Hint: you can't do it!

4. Robin Weigert
If I get started on the Deadwood cast, I'll never stop, so let's just mention the amazing Jane Canary. I've only ever seen her in one other thing, a bizarre bit in Angels in America where she plays a Mormon diorama thing come to life. She just has one of those faces -- kind and compelling, a face that really seems to see the people she's looking at, which brings every scene she plays to crackling life. Hey -- IMDB just told me she's on the new show Life! Now I have to watch that.

07 October 2007

"My Kid Could Paint That" (2007, dir Amir Bar-Lev)

Buy what you love, because if you buy art as an investment, you're playing a loser's game. Not a losing game, necessarily, but a loser's game, a game played by people with too much money and too little interest in natural gas futures or real estate. Art is meant to be lived with, to instruct and enlighten and enrage and love, yet much of the best of Western art (at least; how the fuck would I know about any other kind?) is locked up in temp-controlled storage units owned by the wealthy. With the wine, maybe. (Ha! Of course not -- totally different temps required. Wow, that's a filthy rich person's sidesplitter right there!)

Imagine pouring your heart and soul and possibly risking your life or risking exile to produce a work of art, and now, however many years later, it's locked in a giant closet in Sylvester Stallone's house, or Lars Ullrich's. Want to see art used as an investment? Watch the Metallica doc "Some Kind of Monster" and see Lars sell off his Basquiats and whatever. Let's hope there is no afterlife or there are bound to be some very disappointed paint-spattered souls up there.

But here's where I'll contradict myself -- art almost always has been defined by patronage, and I'm thinking that's the way it should be. Pieces produced for a specific purpose, often erotic (I think most major art museums should just be called what they are: "Museum of the Depiction of the Female Butt, Plus Some Saints and Jesus to Alleviate Resultant Guilt"). This whole bit of nonsense about one soul expressing himherself is kind of...well, the work's going to go on the auction block one way or another, isn't it? So it isn't so much expressing one's soul as it is guessing what other souls will want to see. Patronage. (Oh, and HINT: the other souls mostly want to see naked female butts, and/or war scenes and/or people being eaten by sharks.)

All I'm getting at is that I saw Amir Bar-Lev's doc, and although I was enraged for the first ten or fifteen minutes by the fact that I paid eleven dollars to sit in a theatre with six other people and some dopey woman STILL came right up to my seat in the back and asked to see my ticket because I had apparently sat in her ASSIGNED SEAT (Jesus, what is this, EUROPEAN SOCIALISM WITH THE ASSIGNED MOVIE SEATS?) -- I mean, for Christ's sake lady, there were only four other people there and you still walked down my row and said "Excuse me" to climb over my legs and you still bumped me out of my seat, I mean THIS IS AMERICA, LADY! -- so, fine, she picked the seat I should've picked, all's fair and I moved to another seat in only a 95% huff, and I was then further enraged by the fact that Amir didn't seem to have complete command of the focusing ring on his camera, so most of the interview sequences in the early part of the movie (with the journalist lady in overalls, and with Mark-the-dad) were fuzzy and, seriously, I paid 11 dollars to sit there watching a movie by a guy who couldn't manage to shine enough lights on his subjects and maybe needs new glasses.

But this movie was fantastic, really, and I think it comes down to Amir's niceness. He's so nice, it seems, that I feel I can call him by his first name. He's humble. He's not today's style of doc filmmaker, which is too often someone who wants to make narrative films with Angelina Jolie but needs to do something cheap and provocative first in order to get noticed. He's not a jerk with a camera looking for an expose or looking to make a point about society such that he'll edit his footage to fit it no matter how poorly his subject matches his theme --

(oh, I just watched "The Staircase" on DVD, CAN YOU TELL? Fascinating to watch and all, but damn there must be some kind of reverse libel statute that doesn't let you cover up so much of a real incident to fit your "American Southerners are homophobes and fools who consider justice a cotton-picking nuisance, and women are important only insofar as they are cute and doubtless golddigging and wear their hair in ways we find appealing", THAT MEANS YOU Jean-Xavier de Lestrade (writer/dir) and ESPECIALLY YOU Denis Poncet (producer), thanks for including the DVD extra of your own views on the case that explains your movie and it's creepy slant) --

...uh, where was I? Right, Amir. He's a nice guy who wanted to catch the painting prodigy in her ascendancy, and who's heart was, I think, genuinely a bit broken when he came to the inescapable conclusion that daddy was "helping" the prodigy to employ shape/form/repetition and theme in her paintings. You know, the things that a four year old couldn't employ or formulate. The things that make the paintings appealing and that make them sell.

Well, no. They sell because of the story behind them, and that's fine because lots of art is like that. "Guernica", or Motherwell without the Spanish war is...what? Mondrian without the move to New York and the influence of jazz is...not the same, I think. So the people who buy little Marla (+ big Mark's, I think) paintings are not being duped in any way that any art buyer isn't duped.

This is why people need to buy what they love. The price point is beside the point. I can give you a compare/contrast scenario to illustrate (no pun intended) what I mean: Norton Simon vs. Seymour H. Knox, Jr. Visit the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena and you will see a wonderful, passionate, cohesive collection by a man who loved art, who especially loved Degas and his little cast horses. There's a viewpoint to this museum, and an expansive generosity. Now hop on a plane to Buffalo and visit the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. This collection is shit, and I'm not just saying that because I stupidly made a special trip to the frozen center of hell (Buffalo in winter) just to see it. It's shit because it's clearly the work of a rich guy, and subsequent acquisitions directors, who decided to cherry-pick from the big names in modern art. This is a collection meant to impress with it's price tag, and the works are strung up in a stiff line like the Von Trapp children reporting to Captain Dad. Entering that gallery is like walking into a party where all the guests are big name but have no relationship with one another and simply stand around glumly with drinks in their hands. This gallery left me cold, while the Norton Simon makes my heart pound with the possibilities of humanity. I can't tell you how angry it makes me that some wonderful stuff -- a side of beef by Soutine, my beloved "Yellow Christ" by Gauguin -- is stranded in the art-prison of the Albright-Knox.

So the Marla controversy is really about money and art, about the acquisition position. It isn't about the dopey "controversy" over whether modern art is "real" art -- I mean, god, are we still worrying about that? We aren't, are we? I'm sure Morely Safer is, but the rest of us? (Go paint more hotel rooms and relax, Morely.)

(Oh, shit -- I just realized how poetically perfect the Marla/Morely naming alliteration is! I would totally do that if I were naming these characters in a novel! It's FATE!)

The movie works because it doesn't stoop to Safer-cynicism or Wallace-skepticism with the subjects. Amir lets them talk. He asks the needed questions and lets their faces tell the story. He, miraculously, gets the gallery owner who made his fortune (? Or some good amount) off of Marla to admit what we movie-goers suspected an hour earlier: that he, a frustrated photo-realist painter, was championing Marla in order to stick it the art community and their inexplicable love of the quick-'n-easy and the abstract. It's a story of revenge and ego and the desire to be special (Mark, this means you). It's MacBeth. So, of course, it's tragedy, but a small tragedy, after all. Amir sympathizes with the family, especially Mom Laura and Non-Prodigy Zane, and we sympathize with all of them, too. I'm sorry you guys got into this, that your weaknesses let it happen. Weaknesses like a need for expression, a need to be heard, love of your children, loyalty to your family, not wanting to hurt or doubt the ones you love, and money-is-good. Nice, meaty, human weaknesses.

But seriously, if you're buying Markla's paintings, you'd better do it because you love them, not because you're hoping to cash in. Don't be an ass about it. This isn't "F is for Fake" territory here, so don't pretend it is.

My mom had these little blue Chinese dragons, book ends, when I was growing up. I loved them. I saw some just like them years later in a (closed) store in Boston's Chinatown and took a photo of them. Lately, I saw them on sale at Plantation LA for $250. My mom says she bought them for something like $25. It's not that they've become valuable all of a sudden -- it's that the Plantation LA buyer went down to some Chinatown somewhere and you did not, so you pay a premium.

But no matter how much or little you pay, it doesn't matter, so long as you love your dragons.

27 August 2007

"Strangers on a Train" (1951), dir by Alfred Hitchcock

This movie exploits one of my worst fears (besides sharp corners on the edges of tables and, and this explains the first one, disembowelment): crazy people who talk to you in public settings. And then they stalk you and try to frame you for murder, and then your life is ruined.

It shouldn't feel right that a movie about a psychopathic murderer is as sprightly and fun as this one, but maybe it's the most honest way to deal with the games being played by the two men on the train. The world goes on no matter what freakiness you encounter one seat over. Hitchcock reminds us of this again and again, with our troubled heroes encountering person after person who's just going about his day or doing his job or enjoying his night at the carnival without caring about your murder plots or the man who's trying to ruin your life. I need cotton candy, and no creep stalking his prey is going to stand in my way!

Robert Walker does something very difficult in this movie: he plays a crazy person who knows he's crazy. Bruno isn't sane-crazy like Cuckoo's Nest inmates; he isn't cuckoo-crazy like a Batman villain; he isn't animal-crazy like the Cape Fear guy. He's psychotically crazy, which means that he seems rather normal. It's a Ted Bundy crazy. It's the type that convinces himself that his actions are justified with rigorous application of Crazy Logic. When explaining C-Logic to you, the psychopath does so in a calm, matter-of-fact manner and, when you react with disgust, makes you out to be the nutter.

In this case, the psychopath needs to involve someone else in his plan. He isn't explaining after-the-fact; he's laying out the plan in advance. Thus Walker has to play Bruno as a psycho who knows that he's acting for an audience. He performs for Guy Haines in order to make the proposed murders seem natural and inevitable. Walker has to act while acting, while squeezing Guy slowly tighter in Bruno's soft-from-underwork hands. He does a wonderful job, and unfortunately it seems he came by his look of haunted and resentful confusion honestly, given that he apparently suffered from depression and alcoholism and died at the age of 32 shortly after making this film.

This is a great film about how easy it is for one person to rule over another with the use of two great weapons of persuasion: Flattery and Resentment. Prey successfully on someone's ego about what they do have and on their bitterness against what they don't have and you've got yourself a willing puppet. Every demagogue and tyrant knows this, whether at the level of nation-building or spousal abuse. Guy resists Bruno's manipulation, but too late, at first. Only Hitchcock saves him at the end when order is restored.

Patricia Highsmith, author of the book of the same name on which the movie was based, did not restore order in her version of the story. I don't think she believed that the good guys always will or should win in the end. She created Tom Ripley, and Ripley's evil always carries the day. She knew that sometimes evil sticks around. Sure, it dies like everything else; every regime falls eventually, every domestic tyrant dies sooner or later. But that doesn't mean they were defeated by anything but time.

Thus this is a good time in history to revisit "Strangers on a Train". We need to remind ourselves of how easy it is to ignore the Brunos and their horrible (though horribly compelling) schemes before it's too late and they've set their plans in motion, and you're implicated. You! And you didn't do anything except do nothing!

23 July 2007

List of the Worst of Human Society (General)

I brainstormed a list of the worst of society, the lowest of the low, the degenerates, the people you would send to populate Australia. This was my list:

Mercenaries
Criminals
Murderers/Assassins
Child Abusers
Wife Beaters
Slave Traders
Sex Slavers
Terrorists
Pirates
Torturers/Inquisitors
Animal Abusers
Rapists

As we can see, the first Worst that came to mind was "mercenaries", because I in my mind apparently live in 1600s Europe. I think I was also thinking of Haliburton and other defense contractors and weapons makers, as they are the modern mercenary, available to any combatant with money. Plus it just sounds like a villainous word.

"Criminals" is too all-encompassing, as everyone on the list would fall under the criminal banner, but it was brainstorming after all.

The next thing of note is that I thought of "pirates" before "rapists". PIRATES. It seems that I am marginally more afraid of PIRATES than I am of RAPISTS or TORTURERS. Pirates arguably are rapists/torturers, but the opposite is not true, so I am still more afraid of everything that pirates embody than I am of being a victim of a sequel to the Spanish Inquisition. (At least pirates are not "animal abusers", as everyone knows they love their parrots.)

Where did I acquire my ever-loving fear of pirates? Maybe blame Robert Louis Stevenson. Maybe blame Daphne DuMaurier, whose novel Jamaica Inn I read recently -- the whole danged village feared the innkeeper for being a...well, I don't want to spoil it for you.

First fear the Terrorists, then fear the Pirates. They will swashbuckle you all over the ding dong plank.

18 July 2007

Dr. Genius and Mrs. Hunh? -- the G4 sleeps tonight

I think I might be a genius, which is a good thing because I need someone around to clean up after the boneheaded mistakes I make.

For instance (and this one gets blamed on both me and Mr. Hunh), we lived in our current house for a year using rabbit ears and watching fuzzy TV before we finally wondered, "Hey, what's that plug in the wall behind the TV for? And why's there a big antenna on the roof -- it doesn't even give us good reception!" When we finally attached a cable from the plug to the TV...hey, look! That antenna works after all!

That's the "What's That Thing?" conundrum that keeps biting us -- we'll notice something we can't explain and then shrug and fail to investigate it for a few years. We're busy, people, we can't be opening drawers in our own house unless it's absolutely necessary. So, What's That Thing that looks like a latch on the utensils basket in the dishwasher? Five years later, we push the latch and realize that it flips the basket open so you don't have to scrape your hands when you unload the utensils. Wow, that's so much easier! I'm a genius!

So my desktop MAC (a G4 -- if you care about these things, start scoffing about not having thousands of dollars to upgrade to a G5 for no reason...NOW. Done scoffing? Feel better? Ok.) had a little problem. The power was wonky, so the USB ports on the back of my monitor stopped working a year or eighteen months into my ownership of the unit, and the USB and firewire ports on the tower eventually became so unreliable that I had to buy new slots and install them, and the computer wouldn't sleep, so I had to either leave it on all the time or shut it down, and it booted kind of slowly, so it was the environment or me waiting an extra five seconds, and I already told you how precious time is to me.

So this has been going on for four years or so, with lots of web searching and macosxhints.com this and osxfaq.com that and Apple support knowledge base and google searches, all looking for answers to my problem. No one seemed to have exactly the same set of problems, specifically that putting the computer into sleep mode would cause it to reboot. I kept searching, tried all the basic troubleshooting (PRAM this, reset PMU that), tried different plugs and cords, etc etc etc. Tried a buttload of things. Considering replacing the power unit, since that was obviously the problem. Oh, and sometimes the Power button on the tower would not so much want to work without lots of pressing.

This weekend, I tackled the problem again, since a mechanical problem MUST have a mechanical solution, right? Dr. Genius put on her labcoat. Hmm, I guess I'll have to replace the power unit after all...I wonder what that'll be like? It'll probably be like the last time, when Apple sent a replacement unit and fan because the fan was too loud, and I switched out the....

Oh. Hmmm. Maybe I should retrace the steps from that long-distant operation and, uh, reseat the stuff I seated anew at the time. And reseat the power button thing, too, while I'm at it. I mean, it's the old Check That Your Cables are Fully Plugged In, step Uno of any troubleshooting, but how silly would it be if that were the prob...

Hey, look! My computer now sleeps again, the USB cables on the monitor work like a charm, the old USB and firewire ports fire up like gangbusters...I'm a genius! And it reboots fast enough even for me (which, alas, gives me less time to wonder What's That Thing around the house, like the black tubes mysteriously poking out of our balcony walls).

How did the old G4 chug along for the last three or four years with this underpowered handicap? I don't know. All credit to Apple construction, I guess.

This is the support article that finally got me on the right track re: reseating plugs and jogged my memory.

And I finally solved the chronic "G4 won't remember the keyboard configuration of my Microsoft Natural Elite Keyboard, so I have to run Keyboard Prefs and Change Keyboard Type every damn time the thing reboots or comes back from sleep, which it now can do, sleep I mean, thanks to my geniusocity" problem by, um, trashing the keyboard plist. Huh. That solution only took me a year or a year and a half to find, but that time is misleading because my computer wouldn't sleep anyway, so it wasn't usually a problem. I finally noticed that the plist file wasn't modified when I changed the pref via System Preferences.

The "Mail.app Smart Folders count does not refresh" problem is ongoing and seems to come down to rebuilding the relevant mailboxes, but I don't care much about that and think it's more an Apple bug/oversight than anything I can fix.

The moral of the story is: I'm a genius. The other moral is: how am I going to put off writing if everything on my computer works now? The third moral is: when people give you the troubleshooting advice of "it's broken, buy a new one", curse at them with your worst, most insulting words and run away quick because they are almost always wrong and also lazy and perhaps also smelly.

17 July 2007

Director Ang Lee

If I could somehow steal Ang Lee's talent when he was unconscious, I would push him down the stairs to make it happen. And then I would run. I'm being honest here. It wouldn't be done with malice; it would be the push of someone who is insanely jealous, Salieri-level jealous if Salieri had just been a guy with a blog.

I love Lee's movies so much that I've had the Wedding Banquet sitting downstairs unwatched for two weeks now. I'm afraid to watch it because then it will have been watched. It's the same reason I spaced out the reading of all the Josephine Tey books -- you have to take your time with these things and think about them.

The same person directed Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger, Sense & Sensibility, and Eat, Drink, Man, Woman. That's just not fair. He excels across the genre board because all of his movies are about the only thing that matters: relationships. They are about the people in them and how they relate to other people, and how they think about themselves. They are very humane films without being sentimental or cloy.

None of the characters in his films are there as props or sounding boards for other characters. They aren't plot devices. They're people with their own needs and desires (often painfully palpable and heartbreakingly simple desires). It must be wonderful to act for Lee and receive respect and understanding for what you're trying to do. Many directors hire their alter ego as the (male) star, and a beautiful woman as the male star's accessory. Lee can work with any character of any age, nationality, sex, whatever, because he knows that we all want the same things: love, respect, and understanding.

I never would've thought I'd be on the edge of my seat about a schoolteacher getting anonymous love notes and being flirted with by an exuberant guy on a motorcycle, but there you are.

Maybe I wouldn't push him down the stairs, even in my deal-with-the-devil scenario. Lord knows he might turn and levitate and kick me in the face. It's not worth it!

p.s. We do not speak of The Hulk. We do not think of The Ice Storm. Even geniuses can sleepwalk or go insane or need to pay off their mob debts.

The Universe Told Me To Tell You To Shut Your Darn Yap

So the Universe was like, "Look, I'm being real here, I have dwarf stars and the Pluto planet controversy to deal with, I do not have time for all this I wanna iPhone, I want that hottie, this hottie, that job, money from the sky...I mean, is it me? It isn't me, is it? Dang right it isn't me! I'm not telling anybody anything because frankly, I don't give a sh...oh, girl, you know the Universe doesn't swear!"

And I'm all, "Umm hmmm."

And the Universe is all, "I am tired."

And I'm like, "I hear you."

And the Universe stood up all indignant, saying, "I need an unlisted number, I'm telling you. Like I care about anyone's career or love life that I'm gonna be telling them what to do! Do I look like Ann Landers' twin sister? I don't have time for advice! I've got cosmic concerns -- LITERALLY!"

And then I stopped listening, because, seriously, the Universe can go on.

13 July 2007

Lisa Ling Has Balls of Steel

Let's say you're visiting the inmates at animal prison, otherwise known as the zoo. The animals stare dolefully back at you: "We're innocent!" they say, but you know better. "Sure," you say, "everyone here says that. Tell it to the flamingos."

You enter the monkey house and cover your ears. The monkeys are the angriest inmates in there, and they are angry at you because they think like you do. They know that a mere branch or two of the evolutionary tree stands between your side of the glass and theirs. They are PISSED. They scream and bounce off the walls and set up a racket that strikes deep in our homo sapien souls, rattling us to our vertebrate bones with reminders of our African origins and the sounds of the jungle or opposite riverbank or savanna all around us and no walls to keep us in.

That's also the sound of the television show "The View", and the talking head news shows, and "20/20" and so much more. It's the sound of much of television these days, where everyone has both an asshole and a plethora of opinions, and it's hard to tell the difference. The loudest opinion wins. No one feels the need to back their opinions with facts or experience, because it's what they think and they aren't afraid to say it because they are honest. "Honest" is the new "Ignorant".

You can't run a nation on opinions, or it leads you to start disastrous wars and ignore people baking in the Superdome and act with impunity in regards to the Constitution. When citizens learn to value their opinions over their learned judgment, they forget how to vote with their heads. They vote, instead, with their assholes.

Lisa Ling is a young journalist who started as a teenager, reporting for Channel One. That led to her gig on "The View", a show that hoped to give women at home during the day intelligent voices to listen to. It was a show that wouldn't talk down to them. Somehow it instead became a show about screaming over each other and talking about being rich and famous, which represents none of the people watching but provides them with WWE-style entertainment.

Ling was the twentysomething champ-een back when "The View" hoped to represent different generations of women. She was, and is, smart and articulate and funny. She's comfortable in her own skin. She notices the world and its problems and thinks she can do something about them, be actively engaged. She didn't belong on that show.

She left and returned to journalism. I've set up a TIVO wishlist for her name and have thus caught her National Geographic specials on a maximum security prison and another on North Korea, and her Oxygen special on "Who Cares About Girls: Sex Slaves in India".

Watch her work. Seek it out and watch it. I don't tend to eagerly sit down to watch something called "Sex Slaves in India" because of the crushing reality of how fucked up the world is, and for girls and women in particular. But Ling's approach makes it not on bearable but edifying. She's fearless. She stop on a prison yard full of warring gangs and interviewed the gang members. She asked North Korean families about the Glorious Leader. She followed along on raids that rescue girls impressed into sex work from their brothels. She's a young Asian American women who fits in everywhere she goes and can talk to anyone about anything. It works because she's smart, unselfconscious, and genuinely curious. She listens. She probes. She challenges. And she doesn't just seek problems, she seeks solutions. Her reports show us the people who are fighting back, like the Nepalese doctor who performs cataract surgery on North Korean citizens with the permission of the Premier (thus showing the Premier's generosity, of course).

Ling had a chance to have her head turned by the easy money, easy fame, and easy work of "The View", but she wanted to talk about other people instead of herself. How terribly old-fashioned of her! How Bill Moyers! Why don't she and Anderson Cooper has a little "look at us being journalists and going to war zones and not just reporting spin" party in Baghdad or the Gaza strip! And then they could play a round of "The Mole" like the little smartypants they are!

Lisa Ling gives me hope that we aren't really a nation of people with our collective head stuck up our collective asshole, and I can't think of any higher praise in 2007.

10 July 2007

I had a great idea


It was so great, it startled me. And this is what happened to my hair.

And then I forgot the idea.

07 July 2007

"You can complain, but you can't whine." -- Lessons from Rowing Class

When I lived in Boston, for a few summers I took summer rowing classes at Boston University. These were excellent experiences for the first few years, but the last one was no fun (I had to switch to the morning class instead of the late afternoon one, and those morning people are CRANKY).

Our coaches were either varsity crew members or recent alums, but one summer we had the good fortune to also be coached by a former coach for the U.S. Women's National Team. A real coach! And B.U. has a big time team, so we community rowing joes were getting quality instruction out there on the Charles River. The best thing was that they expected us to WORK, and they yelled at us and everything. It was great!

My fellow (afternoon class) crew members were awesome, especially a couple in their forties who collected Shaker furniture. The husband and I went out in a two-man scull once and kept steering into the shore because we were so unfamiliar with having an oar in both hands. Good times.

The national coach dude was pretty intense, and terribly frustrated when our community-level cardiovascular systems were not equal to the pace he wanted to set. But he was very nice and a good teacher and coach with a good sense of humor. I tried flirting with him, but I didn't get far. It's possible that my flirting may have seemed more like pestering or lingering or maybe a touch of psychosis. Maybe heat stroke.

On one of our first days with him, some of us were maybe exclaiming a bit -- good-naturedly, I'd bet -- about the pace he set. He put his head in his hands and said, "God, that sound! Listen, people -- you can complain, but you CAN'T WHINE. I hate the sound of whining."

Is that profound or what? I took that as my personal motto (second personal motto; first is, "Safety First!"), and have found it to be a good pep talk in moments of crisis and/or self-pity. I can complain, but I can't whine. Complaining is specific and opens the path the solutions ("It's too hot in here! Open a window!"). Whining is the sound of an engine that won't start ("I'm so freaking hot! I can't stand being hot, it makes the back of my thighs sweat, and I stick to the chair! Why are you doing this to me? You hate me, don't you? Everyone does.").

Or maybe it's just that complaining tends to take fewer words, so the duration of a complaint is less than that of a whine. Whines also take longer because the syllables are elongated to demonstrate how much the whiner is suffering. ("It's hot" vs. "I'm sooooo hoooo-ot! I'm go-ING to diiiiie!") Also, whining is close to a dog-whistle pitch, while complaining is bearable for the human ear.

Thanks, Community Rowing Coach Whose Name I've Forgotten. Hope you haven't given yourself an aneurysm or something!

08 June 2007

"Body Heat" is not "Nine 1/2 Weeks"

It's also not "The Postman Always Rings Twice" (the remake). They came out in 1981, 1986, 1981, respectively, and they all starred hot blondes and...guys. Ok, pretty hot guys, too. And they were known for being sexxy, hot nude movies!, so I've had them confused for the last twenty years or so.

Which is odd, because I think I've seen "Nine 1/2 Weeks" (which is not "8 1/2" or foreign) -- I'm not sure if I saw the good parts. I guess I didn't if I'm not sure. That movie made me uncomfortable because Kim Basinger was pretty unhappy about the whole thing, and Mickey Rourke is bizarre.

He's also in "Body Heat", so you can see how confusing this all is. I thought this was basically a sexy sex movie about sex. Nobody told me it was a noir about good old-fashioned husband-murdering!

I finally saw "Body Heat" recently, and I loved and adored it and want to go back in time and write it myself. This was Lawrence Kasdan's directing debut after also writing some movie about muppets or something? Muppets hitting back?

The casting is brilliant, the actors are perfect, Kathleen Turner is my hero, William Hurt brings his peculiar implosive disgust to this loser's tale and makes it both funny and pathetic. And Ted Danson! My god, I didn't even recognize old lean 'n lanky. He has the trickiest part in the movie and pulls it off with perfect understated grace -- he makes it look so easy that you almost forget to notice how the whole movie hangs on him.

This is a movie about love; not adultery love or I'll-murder-for-you love or narcissism, not even so much love of great movie genres, but other kinds of love. Less explosive kinds. Friendship. Love of justice (Ted Danson's character). Love of the law (J.A. Preston's character). Love of power (Richard Crenna). Love of the game (Turner). Love of hot blondes.

Dear Ted Danson -- make brilliant indie movies and show your chops again. Come on! Don't deny us! You could have Cary Grant's career in reverse!

27 May 2007

Death by Grammar

27 MAY 2007 hey, look grammar

Quiz: Who is the jerk in this scenario?

1: She made a joke at her own expense. I know she was being self-depreciating, but--
2: Actually, it's "self-deprecating". But go on.
1: What?
2: "Self-deprecating". Not "self-depreciating". That's not the right word.
1: Yes it is.
2: No it isn't.
1: People say it all the time.
2: People say Las Vegas is the capital of Nevada, but that doesn't mean it is.
1: What are you talking about?
2: If you bought yourself and went down in value over the time you owned yourself, you might be "self-depreciating". But in any other circumstance, it doesn't make any sense.
1: Oh, so instead you "deprecate" yourself. That makes tons of sense. Sorry I didn't go to your fancy college.
2: The college thing is irrelevant.
1: Irregardless, I--
2: "Regardless"! There's no such word as "irregardless", it means what "regardless" means!
1: How can it mean anything if it isn't a word? Ah ha! I caught you! It must be a word!

2 stabs 1 in the neck with a pencil.

And that is how grammar kills.

(The Answer to the quiz is: Both, because they're getting all pent up and personal about a word usage issue and should just have some sangria and relax. Standard usage now accepts "self-deprecating" when one is being excessively modest, but only because it overtook "self-depreciating" over time in the sense of "belittling oneself". One example I read said you could say "self-depreciating" if you did something that lowered your own worth to a project, like if you insulted your potential client right before turning in your bid.

And that's how I learned that "self-depreciating" is a valid term, though not in the way most people use it, though it used to be at one time.

These grammar murder mysteries are awfully confusing in terms of assigning guilt and a sentence. Ha! You get a "sentence" for a "period" of time, and so on!

I'm tired.)

26 May 2007

Robert Sean Leonard on "House"

I made the mistake of seeing "Dead Poets Society" twice; the first time you notice its earnest sincerity, the second time you notice its exasperating sentimentality. The worst part was watching Robert Sean Leonard mope around with his big cow eyes, dripping his sensitivity all over the place. I swore off the RSL right then and there.

This particular boycott was very easy to keep up because he never seemed to be in anything I wanted to watch. Since 1989, RSL has apparently been winning Tonys or some "I'm so special and New Yorkie!" crap like that, so, fine, I was happily RSL-free.

Then "House" came on the T.V. and I had many layers of prejudice against it: 1) Hugh Laurie is funny and British, not dour and American; 2) I was worn out by medical shows -- I did a long, dedicated residency with "ER" that ended when the show got too soapy, I'd had plenty of "Trapper John, MD" growing up, along with vague memories of "Quincy", and nothing could ever match the genuis of "St. Elsewhere" anyway, so why bother?; 3) the character was inspired by Sherlock Holmes, so he's called House, GET IT?; 4) he's a cranky, non-PC, man-you-love-to-hate, Becker of a guy, and I didn't watch "Becker" for good reason; and 5) RSL. Case closed. I'm not watching "House".

But it kept sticking around, and one day I was so bored I decided to increase my knowledge of current shows by watching a season three episode and getting it over with. Well, sew my buttons, this show is fantastic! I instantly became addicted.

It gives you to mystery of the diagnosis without fetishizing it like procedurals do with crime, and it gives you the character's personalities without lapsing into distracting melodrama. The best of both worlds, and perfectly cast to boot.

And wouldn't you know, my old nemesis Leonard is stellar in the part of Wilson, House's best (and only) friend. He's witty and noble, kind and depressed and sarcastic. He's got that look in his eyes, that awful vulnerability and hurt that even the best actor can't fake. It's the same look that Ed Flanders had as kind, tough but tortured Dr. Westphall on"St. Elsewhere". It's the look that brought that tremendous dark depth to Montgomery Clift's characters. (Incidentally, neither of those actors had happy personal stories, so here's hoping that RSL really is a great enough actor to fake it.)

Curses, RSL! You've defeated me by being a great actor and stealing my TV heart!

22 May 2007

"Dancing With Myself" by Billy Idol

Just thinking about this song gets your toe a-tappin' and your head a-bobbin'; it has that perfect blend of mellow reflection and defiant rockin' to suit almost any mood. It's a song about being so far into self-pity that you're past it, suddenly happy to bop around despite being a pathetic wallflower and make your own fun. Or masturbate. It might be about masturbation.

(I still remember my junior high health teacher singing and dancing around the room to "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Even I knew what that one was about, and he didn't? Maybe as our health teacher he was giving us some kind of secret message, the kind of message that got Joycelyn Elders booted from the Surgeon General's office (she wanted to "ask the world to dance", too). Hmmm, I hadn't thought of this. Stealth teaching in a Christian Right-dominated society.)

I read an interview with Billy Idol in his heyday, and he said that he has no problem with people who laugh at his punk posturing -- that he welcomes it, in fact, as long as they're open to his music. I can believe that a man with that perspective could write a song as matter-of-factly great as this one.

My friend Killian has a theory that songs with "la la la" sections automatically might be great. This song's excellent "oh oh oh-oh" bits bear that out, along with its perfectly-measured tempo changes and Idol's brilliant performance. He tells the story of the song from smooth to snarl to "scat" (what one set of lyrics I found on the internet hilariously called his oh oh oh-ohs) to scream with perfect ease.

Dude put toothpaste in his hair, but he could sing.

21 May 2007

F, Marry, Kill: Tom Ripley, Holden Caufield, and Henry James

F, Marry or Kill? You'd have to kill Tom Ripley, obviously, in preemptive self-defense. Marry Holden because he's so sensitive, which leaves Henry, who you wouldn't so much F as spend an awkward evening with unsatisfying results, then never speak to him again and look away when you see him in public.

These guys are three sides of the same three-sided coin, despite the fact that only one was a "real" person, for those of you who are literalists and fictionphobes. (It's so typical of you to hold someone's fiction-ness against them, as if they are second class citizens!) They cannot get into someone else's mind or walk a mile in someone else's shoes because they think other people's shoes smell and will doubtless give them athlete's foot. Other people are inexplicable and annoying and rather gross to these guys. They either hate them or idealize them. They try and fail to make other people better than they are.

Holden believes there are two types of people in the world: idiots and Phoebe. But he knows that he's doomed to be misunderstood or abused by the idiots, and that he's bound to fuck things up with the Phoebies. His saving grace is that Phoebe will forgive him.

Tom believes there are two types of people in the world: Tom Ripley and all the people he despises and/or kills. Thank goodness he has those forgery/murder/identity theft hobbies to keep his spirits up.

Henry believes there are two types of people: Henry alter egos and naive women full of crippling self-doubt or crippling self-confidence. Women are just waiting to be victimized, and all Henry Alter Ego can do is watch and wring his hands and hate them a little for being so dumb.

Thus the core problem for these men is, of course, women, those boorish or beautiful or clingy or coquettish puzzles who insist on being both alluring and repulsive. Women never act right, and they can be terribly pathetic and/or treacherous. Men make no sense to these guys, either, but the great folly of men is when they abuse women or lose their heads over them or both. It's all about the ladies.

So if the game were reversed, Tom would kill you and convince himself it was your fault; Holden would F you and then get way too attached until you had to change your cell phone number just to get away from him; and Henry would marry you just to make you miserable.

17 May 2007

How to get a cat out of a tree


This is my good friend Duchess. Isn't she cute? She likes head scratches.




This is a clump of red cedar trees. They aren't that cute. I don't know how they feel about branch scratches.

One day, Duchess decided to climb one of these trees. They are very dense, with lots of dead leaves near the trunk that fall down if you shake the tree. There are a great deal of small branches shooting off from the trunk in all directions. With these five trees in a row, there's a lot going on in there.

So Duchess got to the top, looked down, and said, "Uh oh." She went as high as the telephone wire, which cuts through the trees and is thick enough so she could walk on it and have a path from the tree on one end all the way to the tree on the other. So she could go sideways but not down. And she was 30 feet up.

She was not happy about this. When she didn't show up for dinner, I knew something was up. Then I heard the pathetic meowing coming from our trees.

We couldn't see her in the thickness of the trees unless she found a hole and stuck her little face out. We stood on our second floor balcony and called to her. She meowed at us. Her mother cat stood on the wall at the base of the trees and meowed at her. She meowed back. So we were having lots of conversations, but no movement.

The days and nights went on. We rigged up all sorts of contraptions to get food over to her and to try to provide her with a bridge to walk over to our balcony. No dice. We worried about her starving up there and leaving a white corpse. We couldn't sleep for worry; she meowed most pathetically at 3am.

Q: Have you ever seen a cat corpse in a tree? A: No, because the corpse falls out of the tree. Or something like that -- look, I searched my old friend the internet for help, and mostly found either lame jokes about dead cats or lame advice like "wait for her to come down" or "put food at the bottom of the tree" or "get another cat".

On the third day of the kitten tree-sitting adventure, we tried calling our friendly city officials. The fire department sent a guy who looked around and said it'd be too dangerous for their truck and basket to maneuver up there. Pardon my vernacular, but HELLO? Too dangerous for the fire department? I thought their middle name was dangerous. Not when it comes to kitty cats, I guess. At least he came to visit.

Animal control said they didn't have ladders high enough. They said to get a ladder, somehow assuming we had access to higher ladders than they do. They didn't even send someone to look.

City tree trimmers were working nearby, but we couldn't get ahold of them in time.

We called private tree trimmers who either refused or didn't answer the phone or didn't call back.

Our building has a 20 foot ladder, so we tried that but couldn't coax Duchess down far enough. Alas, 20 feet is not the same as 30 feet.

We called a cat rescue lady from our neighborhood who is a true cat crusader and will do anything to help a cat. She is a god-send. She helped us trap, tame and adopt out a family of very gentle feral cats. She was alarmed about Duchess and pissed off at the city for not helping.

She contacted a cat-friendly friend of hers who had some tree trimmers at her house with a long ladder. On the fourth night, she asked (forced?) them to come over to our place. A super-nice father and son came with their ladder after a long day of work and tried to help.

We had rigged up a bucket-and-pulley system to get food up to Duchess, with the hope that she would somehow jump in the bucket and we could lower her down. Duchess ran away from the tree man, but he did secure the bucket for us so she could reach it.

He then promised to come back the next day. I couldn't believe he was being so nice when everyone else had shrugged their shoulders.

He came back the next afternoon. I asked our neighbor if we could put the ladder in his yard (the yard you can see in the picture). Our side of the trees has a driveway sloping underground, and a small side yard with little room to maneuver. Duchess was by this time near the phone lines on the left-most tree in the picture. We've lived here almost six years and had never spoken to this neighbor. He was very nice and said go ahead. He was also maybe high.

We were all a little pissed at Duchess for not just jumping on the neighbor's roof, but we figured it was too far for her.

The following happened within fifteen minutes of the tree man arriving: he set up his ladder, climbed up and reached for Duchess, she cowered away from him and screamed a bit, he came back down for his tree tools to be able to get closer, I gave him a pillowcase to put her in to get her down.

(I forgot to say: my web search did bring up one useful story, of some young men who rigged up a basket system to rescue their cat, and as they put it up, the cat panicked and simply jumped out of the tree. That gave me the idea for the basket-and-pulley, and also some hope that Duchess really would get down when she had to.)

So the tree man went back up, pushed aside some branches with his tool, and climbed closer to Duchess. She panicked, pushed her way out the side of the tree on the left, and LEAPT the 30 feet down to the sidewalk.

My neighbor, two bystanders and I GASPED.

She wobbled to her side when she landed, then straightened up and took off running away from us down the sidewalk and around the corner. She ran full tilt without limping.

I rejoiced. I ran after her but couldn't find her, but I was convinced she was fine because of the way she ran. The tree man was very worried, but I thanked him and assured him she'd be fine and would come home. He wasn't so sure.




(dramatic reenactment)

I thanked him again. He had already refused any kind of payment the night before. He packed up his ladder and left.

I searched the area for Duchess for the next few hours. I went out back by her food bowl. Maybe three or four hours after her big leap, I turned around and she was chomping at her food.

She said hello nonchalantly. She was none the worse for wear and not even particularly hungry. You couldn't even tell anything had happened. I petted her and felt around for broken bones or pain, but she was a-ok.

We thanked our two cat lady friends and got the tree man's address and sent him a Home Depot gift card and and a note assuring him that the cat was fine.

So the moral of the story is: cat rescue people are amazing and no-nonsense cat advocates who will help you in this situation. Give their organizations money if they work with one! Also, some individuals are extremely nice. Also, cats are mysterious and also cute.

If you have a cat in a tree, I'd say try the bucket thing. I know it's hard to wait, especially after the third and fourth days. Get a tree trimmer. Maybe put something on the ground to lessen the cat's jump? Don't give up on them. Keep talking to them. Contact cat rescue people (who rule).

And call the fire department, if it isn't too dangerous.

13 May 2007

Do not write these things down

Why would you tell me this is what you've written and expect me to read it?

1. Musings -- Best exemplified by the inexplicable Larry King and his bizarro, ellipsis-happy, stream of nonsensical consciousness newspaper column, full of Angie Dickinson shout-outs and endorsements of things like "rain" and "holidays". Musings are what kill first dates. Your musings are as fascinating to other people as your dreams are, which is to say, tell it to the mirror.

2. Random Thoughts -- Can't be bothered with a specific thought, I see. Let me help you. From now on, you can only write about death.

3. Rants -- Have you ever known a schizophrenic, or an elderly person who has slipped into dementia, or a weird boyfriend who lied about being employed? These are people who rant. Their rants are loud and make no sense and are best listened to from the other side of a locked door. Same goes for Dennis Miller, the unfunny, pseudo-intellectual, former joke-teller who's about as funny as Tiny Tim at the Council of Trent -- next up, my good friend and fellow cutup, George W Bush! When you feel the urge to rant, push your face into your pillow and rant away. Pull your head away from the pillow before you suffocate (I know how ranters lose track of time when they're really steamed about lady drivers who can't see over the steering wheel, or brussel sprouts).

4. Ruminations -- Musings that have been to college.

I hope we've all looked deep inside ourselves and realized that we should put the keyboard away before we embarrass ourselves.

And that reminds me -- brussel sprouts are disgusting! They smell like a wet towel that's been crumpled in the corner for three days, and they taste kind of like nothing, and it's like watching Lance Armstrong pedal a cotton gin for Scarlett O'Hara as Tara burns...Bats fly, but they don't have feathers. I wonder what would happen if we measured time in stones?

11 May 2007

Vons Light Brown Sugar and Bacterial Cultures


Mmmmm! Don't the graphics on the Vons Light Brown Sugar package want you to start baking right away? Let's see -- you could:

1. put a bacterial culture on a cracker, or
2. make just the plain cracker, suffering from a rash, or
3. put peaks and valleys of glue all over a slice of pizza, or
4. put a diseased raspberry clot on top of an iced cookie.

I'm hungry already!

07 May 2007

Mike Judge, the funniest man in America

"Beavis and Butthead" was so smart, it was dumb. So dumb it was smart? Both? Had they been Mike Judge's only contributions to American culture, he would still deserve a nod as an important contributor to smart comedy in a country that insists on acting increasingly dumb. Ever since Beavis told Morrissey to "get up off the ground and stop whining" in one of his videos, I've been in love.

Judge hasn't stopped working since, and the miracle is that he didn't pander to his presumed audience in order to increase his popularity and ride the gravy train of crude to the end of the line. He's gotten better and sharper and more subversively satirical as he's gone along. He's also gotten kinder, an almost unheard-of evolution for a highly successful television writer. His comedy despairs for the willful stupidity of mankind, but it does not condescend. He has hope. He doesn't think he's superior to his audience because he has made a lot of money, and that is a rare quality in popular culture indeed. (And if he does feel superior, he hides it very well.)

"King of the Hill" is a marvel of character-based comedy that respects both its characters and its audience. Hank and Peggy and the rest have their laughable flaws and exaggerated self-regard, but they also have their admirable qualities, most notably a core of decency that Judge celebrates in his work as the only thing that can save us from our own stupidity. It's no coincidence that the younger generation (Bobby, Connie, even poor Joseph) are the calmest, nicest, most tolerant and most curious characters in the show. They point to a future that has a chance, just maybe, of being better than the past.

We all know that OFFICE SPACE is a cult classic for the cubicle crowd (which is really everyone, whether you've worked in an office or avoided it because you suspect it's just like this movie presents it), but it's time now to make IDIOCRACY the classic it deserves to be. Forget its bizarre release (or non-release) history -- studio machinations are none of the audience's business, since they never make for a better film and we can't do anything about them anyway. This movie is hilarious in many ways, but mostly in its willingness to be stupid to be smart (that again). Presenting a future overwhelmed with advertising, sexual innuendo, and violence is not exactly groundbreaking, but linking it to our own embrace of things we know are dumbing us down and calling out the capable people who prefer to do nothing rather than lift a finger to stop it (as represented by the Luke Wilson character) is. Groundbreaking, that is. Showing the sheer scrot-level to which we allow ourselves to sink is not only funny but very very...funny. Oh, and a bit sad, if you have any hope for humanity and/or America at all. (Hmmm, "or" I guess would be America without humanity. Are we there yet?)

I feel like a scrot myself for analyzing a comedy, especially one that relies on yelling, slogans, phallic monster trucks, and the transmutation of Fuddruckers into ButtFuckers to tell its story. But that shit's funny, and it's accurate as well. I guess people haven't seen the movie due to its theatrical disappearing act, mixed reviews, and the fact that it hits too close to home. We can watch JACKASS, but we can't stand some prissy smartypants making fun of JACKASS. It's no coincidence that the people of the future ridicule Luke Wilson's perfectly logical comments by repeating them in a high-pitched voice.

Other great things about Judge are: that he's a Texan, that he shot his movie in Austin, and that he works with a regular group of hilarious actors (e.g. Stephen Root, the marvelous David Herman). His casting is impeccable. He is one of the few people in the state of mind and money that is "Hollywood" who goes his own way. He has something to say and he says it with a minimum of fuss or self-promotion.

And he's very, very funny.

30 April 2007

Pop-Tarts: The Mostest of Toaster Pastries

Pop-Tarts, how I love you.

You hit the spot. You are cute and easy to heat and eat. You are certifiably flammable when left in a toaster too long -- trust you to have that hint of danger about you, you old scamp (44 years old this year, you cougar). You solve many a hunger pang problem with a minimum of fuss. You are the James Bond of toaster pastries.

Some defile you with butter -- I had never heard of this until I read it on the internet, which proves that the internet spreads filth for the mind. Butter on Pop-Tarts is nothing but food porn, and I think more of you than that, Pop-Tarts. I would never subject you to that.

Some eat you raw. The uncooked food movement has reached even to you, has it? Will they stop at nothing? Yet only heat releases that sweet lava center. And don't they know that Pop-Tarts is Latin for "put it in the toaster"?

I forgot about you for years, Pop-Tarts, but our estrangement wasn't you, it was me. I was foolish. I thought I'd outgrown you. Now I know you don't outgrow perfection.

Hikers and bicyclists knew about your all along, didn't they, you little adventure-seeker? They remembered that you are high-carb and low fat, a perfect burst of energy for a dreary trek around the cubicle. I mean trail. I mean couch.

I love you, Pop-Tarts Toaster Pastries.

(But only the strawberry frosted ones; the others are crap on a cracker.)

29 April 2007

I hate people, don't you?

Don't you? Them and their faces, and the noises they're always making. They even make noise when they walk, fabric on fabric or skin on skin, like they're applauding themselves with every step, and they don't have that much to be proud of if you ask me.

They leave their appendages flapping around all over the place; they don't even look where they're going, and that's how we end up with accidents and disease, all over the world.

No matter where you look, there they are. Even when you close your eyes and dream, they're bound to show up sooner or later, with a hand growing out of their fused heads or giving you a math test when you're naked. That's just how they operate. They confuse and humiliate you. Don't you find that to be true? I do.

And they never shut up! Complain and die, that's all they do, complain and die. If they're aren't doing one, they do the other.

And now they want to run away to space, leaving a big mess behind just to create another mess, or so I think. I do think that, because they've proven they can't be trusted. In space they'll be more meaningless matter twirling aimlessly around, just like on the highway on the way to work.

There couldn't possibly be an afterlife. People are too stupid to put together something like that, don't you think? It sounds complicated, what with the dimensional shift and the rearrangement of matter. Lots of paperwork.

But if there is an afterlife, I bet you dollars to donuts it'll be just like here, but forever. And in reverse -- die and complain, that's all they'll do, forever and ever.

I want no part of it, no, sir. My plan is to never end.

27 April 2007

OxiClean. No need to yell.

Look, I swear I just read a novella by D.H. Lawrence, and another by Henry James, and a third by Leo Tolstoy (I found a book of masterpiece novellas; can you tell?), and I might write very intelligent stuff about that stuff they were talking about -- humanity and love and stuff. And snow.

But the real story of my real life right now is OxiClean. I don't understand this. This is a product that flat out works, I mean like miracle rejuvenation of yellowed t-shirts, curtains, stained couch cushions, and what is euphemistically referred to as "pet stains" on the carpet. This motherf'ing stuff works! I am obsessed with it like Henry James was obsessed with insecure and naive women! I am as proud of it as a Russian aristocrat is of his horses and serfs! D.H. Lawrence should've written "Sons, Lovers, and OxiClean"!

It is sold in stores. I did not realize this until I looked for it in Target and Ralphs. It's a real product, not just a late night TV virtualclean thing, like a NoFuzz Duster (I made that up; good idea, no?). It is a legitimate, though MAGICAL, cleaning bubbler thing that agitates the material and lifts the dirt away (as I understand it). I bought a 16 gallon bucket just for OxiCleaning, and I am so happy! Everything is clean now!

I must grow a beard and yell at people about this product. Seriously, why the annoying pitchman? Is he Mr.Oxi? Why is he yelling? He makes the product seem like a rip-off when it is most certainly a rip-on. I can't figure out the advertising, but I am insisting you start cleaning all your stains and spills with the O.X.I. or I can not visit your house.

23 April 2007

This Year's IFC Independent Spirit Awards nominees

Yeah, whatever -- the awards were weeks ago (months? Who can keep track?), way to be on top of all the new stuff out there. And I watched these before the awards so that I could vote, so these are opinions that have been allowed to sit and ripen, like dates, or pickles. That makes them sweeter and tangy-er.

Disclaimer: I hate independent films, just on principle. Don't we all? They're grainy, and slow, and stuck in a Hal Ashby world when the rest of us are in a McG world, right? Am I right, people? And they're so concerned about everyone's feelings, ewww. Crash some cars; then everyone will feel better.

Never mind that most of my favorite, most cherished movies of the last five or fifty years have been tiny little indies. That is not my point. I want to love Hollywood movies, but they make it so damned hard.

So I popped these films into the old player with my usual sense of dread, but look what happened: something wonderful!

(These are in no particular order)

1. LAND OF PLENTY -- look, I've heard of Wim Wenders, I don't think it's fair that he's on this list. But I guess if you make a movie for three cents, then you earn your props. This movie starred Michelle Williams, who I will watch in anything, anywhere, at any time. I have loved her since DICK, and I loved that she showed up in the great THE STATION AGENT, and she is luminous and expressive and great. It also starred some dude named John Diehl, never heard of him, but he too was great. This movie was kind of annoying and precious and 9/11-ny at first, and I was worried, but the more it went on, the more I liked it. It is buoyed up by two things: its own sense of humor (as in the scenes with the guy who works for the Diehl character), and the incredible letter that the dead mother wrote to her brother Diehl, which Williams delivers. The letter is one of the finest pieces of writing I've ever heard (Diehl reads it to us in voiceover). There is a depth of emotional understanding and compassion in it that took my breath away.

2. QUINCEANERA -- Ok, I'm dumb, I kept confusing this with REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES because all those Latino movies look alike, right? Am I right, people? They couldn't be more different. I loved this movie because it was very matter-of-fact in what happens to the characters and in how they deal with life. Stuff happens, they deal with it. Period. There are no neon signs saying GAY! OLD! KICKED OUT! PREGNANT! REALLY GAY! POOR! The characters are people, and stuff happens to it, and some of the stuff is mean, and some is nice, and they are themselves sometimes mean and sometimes nice. That's why I loved it -- because I believed it, and I really wanted many nice things to happen to the people in it.

3. MAN PUSH CART -- I have a lot of reservations with this one. I mean, holy shit, did that man ever push that cart. He sure did. I know because I watched him do so for many long minutes. It's worth seeing because the cast is great and the triangle between the cart-man, the lady, and the creepy businessman is really great and subtle and inescapable.

4. SORRY, HATERS -- Robin Wright Penn fucking RULES. She is fantastic, and Abdel Kechiche and Sandra Oh are really impressive as well. This is a fun and surprising movie that Wright Penn totally owns.

5. ROAD TO GUANTANAMO -- Every time I watch the news these days I think of this documentary and the appalling information within it.

6. BUBBLE -- Steven Soderbergh goes back to his roots, or even underneath his roots, for this one. Watch it, then definitely watch the making of extras for lots of excellent information about how it came together. The first twenty minutes or so are so boring you will wonder why you're sitting there watching it when you could be staring into space in peace, but then it winds tighter and tighter until you can't stand it. I was so worried for the characters as the movie progressed that I think I got hypertension just by watching it. They asked for so little out of life! And they couldn't even have that without problems problems problems! A wonderful story and a film that is truly inspiring for those who still believe in truly indie movies.

7. HALF NELSON and PAN'S LABYRINTH -- You don't need me to tell you how great these are and that you should watch them.

The end.

11 April 2007

Answers to Questions Asked in a Job Interview

Q: Where do you see yourself in five years?

A: In five years, I see myself working here and working hard. That's my personal motto, and I live it every day of my life. If I combine working hard, which I always do, with working here, which is a dream of mine, I will finally be living to my highest potential. I plan to work so hard, yet so efficiently, that I will quickly rise in the ranks of this fine corporation, of which it is a dream of mine at which to work and for which to make money. In five years, I see myself taking my boss's job, then my boss's boss's job. In ten years, I see myself running this excellent company with an iron fist covered by a velvet glove. That's what a hard worker wears. In fifty years, I see myself dead.

Q: What are your best and worst qualities?

A: Let's start with my worst qualities, because I believe in self-criticism as the path to increased productivity. I sometimes work too hard, and I'm too much of a perfectionist. I'm also too modest. I don't like to toot my own horn, which I understand can hold back even an outstanding worker like myself. Also, I am a Communist, which causes conflicts with my quest for salary increases and an 3500 square foot home, but that is my personal issue, and I have been successfully struggling with it since that one summer I backpacked in Europe with an Armenian guy.

My best qualities are my generous nature and my attention to spelling, despite a slight dyslexia that makes me occasionally type fuc instead of cuff. You'd be surprised how often the word "cuff" comes up in interoffice disputes. Also, I love to work and work to love.

Q: Here's an example of a situation that you may encounter on the job here. Would you tell me how you would handle that situation?

A: Of course I will. I want to provide as much free work for you as I can and disseminate my ideas before being paid for them. I love you.

Q: What kind of salary range are you considering?

A: What kind of salary range are you considering?

Q: No, seriously.

A: I am always serious. Except when I play table tennis. Then I am fun-loving and competitive without being creepy about it.

Q: Yes, we have a ping-pong table in the--

A: Table tennis.

(pause)

Q: I see you have a gap in your resume. What were you doing between 2004 and now?

A: Consulting.

Q: What kind of consulting?

A: Value added.

Q: Point of sale?

A: Return on investment. Also, Just In Time deliverables.

Q: Multi-tiered, or VPN?

A: Vertically integrated, mostly. I maximize profits, minimize pain. Hard stop.

Q: You sound perfect.

A: I am.



Did I get the job? Yes. Yes I did. Did I accept the job? (!Cliffhanger!)

03 February 2007

New stage name possiblities

Princess Awesome

Dannie Dan Danforth

Marvelous Marvin Hagsworth

The Great and Mighty Court

Chunk O'Lamb

CZA

Jorg Friendly Neighbor

Jane Doh!

04 January 2007

Get Offa My Farm


If I recorded an album* (or a "phonograph", as the kids call it), and I needed a record cover, this would be it.

Also, if I owned a business and needed a laminated cover for our annual prospectus, this would be it.

Also, if I had a farm.


*spoken word, of course.