"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.

"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!

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.

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.

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.

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.