Confusions of a Wasted Blog

Reasons to be proud to be an American, #213

2008-12-05T08:35:00.002-06:00

Today the Supreme Court decides whether or not to hear one of those "Obama's not an American! SUPER DOUBLE SECRET FRAUD!" cases that have been getting filed across the land as right-wingers cling desperately to every last shred of hope that the election was all a big, scary nightmare. The reason they're looking at the case? Clarence Thomas circulated it! It's my very sincere hope that Thomas also brings to the court's attention the very serious constitutional questions raised in $20 Bill v. The 9/11 Attacks, Nigerian Deposed Monarchs v. Clarence Thomas's Bank Account, and ZOMG CUTEST PUPPY EVER v. Clarence's Screensaver.

For those holding Thomas up as the brilliant libertarian/originalist justice: PLEASE feel free to incorporate today's case into your desperate defenses of his jurisprudence.

Even the Liberal New York Times

2008-04-16T23:23:00.003-05:00

My favorite phrase ever bubbles back to the surface in tonight's brain-stabbingly shallow, jaded, useless commentary blog post on the evening's debate (about which I haven't finished reading and will likely not watch, as disheartened as I am by the state of affairs in that arena). The key phrase that puts it over the top?

"We may not like it, but issues like Jeremiah Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall. Remember how George H.W. Bush toured flag factories to expose Michael Dukakis."

Emphasis added. This is either jaw-droppingly terrible copy editing (who left out the second half of that sentence?) or that liberal bastion of liberal liberalism, the New York Times, has decided that lazy, spintastic "Ehhh, those liberals were probably doing something bad anyways" coverage will do. I mean, I'm sure we all remember what Dukakis was (or was doing? or had done?) that needed to be exposed. It was like twenty years ago! Can't we just move on to talking about whether Reverend Wright hates flag pins as much as bitter gun-owners who are also, I dunno, elitists or something.

I know we can't expect anything resembling intelligent commentary from Brooks, but this is absurd.

I am lazy, and filled with lies

2008-04-14T11:59:00.007-05:00

Instead of writing a response to a months-old New Yorker article (if anyone is truly interested in what I think of Denby's Coen analysis, just corner me and we'll hunker down and thrash out the idiocy in arguing that the Coens dislike or look down on their characters, and will tease out why it is that Denby elides or omits some of their films, both canonical and non -- hello, Intolerable Cruelty! -- but it seems silly to do so here) I have decided, for THIS month's blog entry in this on-life-support blog, to list the restaurants I would visit almost immediately upon inheriting a gobsmacking sum of wealth from, I dunno, some shipping magnate I didn't know I was related to. Let's go!

Chicago
Where better to start than in my backyard? Which is coincidentally perhaps the culinary capital of America. Back off, NorCal and New York! Wooo!

1. Alinea - The new Charlie Trotter's in terms of being hot haute cuisine. Their food looks like ART! And, allegedly, is.
2. Moto - Totally not for everybody, but any restaurant that gives me a menu and says "Here, eat this. EAT THIS MENU." deserves consideration. That its chef is trying to make food levitate only adds to the intrigue factor, though I'm still not sure how I feel about meals that come with instructions on "how to eat" your courses.
3. Lula Cafe - I probably don't need a fortune to eat here, but in terms of brunch spots, it is allegedly about as good as it gets. Ina's would also qualify for this slot.
4. Topolobampo- Rick Bayless' more formal high-Mexican regional restaurant. In addition to exposing me to more traditional Mexican fare (the likes of which you don't find in most US Mexican joints), it offers the hope of balanced Mexican, which I am frightfully keen on.
5. Trotter's - The original, and still outrageously appealing. Anyone who can get the all-star cast that cooked his anniversary dinner earlier this year (at $5,000 a plate!) still has some serious game.

Not at the top of the list, but probably should be considered: Spiaggia, Tru, Blackbird. I've heard amazing things about all, but they don't leap for me in terms of priority. I'm sure they beat the pants off of Applebee's, but still. I'm also curious about Otom and Boka.

NorCal
What with Chris living out there, and what with the sickening array of fresh, beautiful, local organic EVERYTHING available to them, these joints seem vitally necesssary.
1. French Laundry - An absolute mecca of the foodie world -- Thomas Keller is acknowledged as one of, if not the, foremost chefs working at the moment, and dinner at French Laundry is said to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Pricewise as well as taste-and-ambience-wise! Remember Ratatouille? He made that dish! For them!
2. Chez Panisse - Alice Waters, that wild hedonist, preaches the glories of local, seasonal, organic ingredients prepared simply. These outrageous claims must be put to the test. Quickly! (This, while still a splurge, would probably be doable pre-boatload-of-money)
3. Ubuntu - In addition to sharing the name of a Totally Sweet Linux OS, and in addition to housing a yoga studio that accompanies the restaurant, this place is alleged to be one of the truly great restaurants out there -- completely apart from the fact that it's an all-vegetable joint. The head chef makes a point of saying it's not about avoiding meat -- it's about exploring and exploding the possibilities of the garden. Dig!

Bonus Chris-suggested joint: Manresa! I haven't read enough to begin to obsess over this place, but their menu (French-infused Catalonian? Yowza!) definitely puts them in the mix of consideration.

Nuyark City
Yes, New York, you are third! Third, you pompous, venal rat of a city! I obviate in your general direction!

1. Per Se - OK, it's maybe gratuitous (or perhaps overindulgent) to have two Keller restaurants on the menu, but hear me out! A big part of French Laundry is its environs -- between some courses the guests are encouraged to take a break and wander through their gorgeous courtyard, all of which enhances the experience, etc. Allegedly. How does Keller groove on the NYC vibe, one wonders? One will find out, after one robs a series of banks!
2. Le Bernardin - the Ubuntu of fish! (Better formulation would be that Ubuntu is the Bernardin of vegetables, but I'm ordering things all crazy-style.) Eric Rippert has the longest streak of 4-star ratings from the NY Times, and is one of a handful of 3-star Michelin restaurants in the States. This could actually also be a pre-wheelbarrows-of-gold splurge, as they offer a three-course lunch menu that's within spitting distance. Bonus: the lunch benefits a charity! Everybody wins!
3. Resto - This one's a splurgy-but-possible joint for now; it's also the restaurant most likely to cause spontaneous cardiac arrest. I've been jonesing after this place since reading its Times review, in which Brunni raves about their deviled eggs served on crisp fried pork toast, their moules frites, and what sounds like a jaw-droppingly delicious (and deadly) burger. It's on the list.
4. WD-50 - Wylie Dufresne is sort of America's frontman for the generally-maligned molecular gastronomy movement. This is his flagship - a home of "popcorn soup," savory tarts and parfaits, emulsified everythings, etc. If there's one joint (aside from Moto, which might surpass Wylie, depending on whose word you take on this) where you want to try food that's been frozen in liquid nitrogen, this is probably it.

Place I don't obsess about but Boy Would I Try: Daniel (from Bouloud)

Place I would gladly eat at time and time again (and time again again): Mundo in Astoria. Owned by a Turkish dude and an Argentinian, the joint blends and balances these national cuisines off of and against each other. I love it - great atmosphere, great people, great food.

FIN! Now let's get back to neglecting this space. (Oh, and pass on any suggestions you may have... I'm sure I'm leaving off tons of "dope" places!)

Shorter Kristol

2008-03-17T07:35:00.003-05:00

...hey, if he's good enough for the NY Times, he's good enough for me! Ahem:

Generation Obama? Perhaps Not.
"What's all this I hear about the kids and their Obama generation? Don't those whippersnappers know that 9/11 is the hip jive that all the cool kids swing to? Dig it!"

POSTSCRIPT! The blog will lurch back to something resembling life as I finish this obscene grant I've been working on (and some evaluations) with a pathetically tardy entry responding to an ancient piece by David Denby in the New Yorker on the Coens. Shortly thereafter I hope to publish a piece attacking the Lambada. That forbidden dance is a powder keg ready to blow!

POST-POSTSCRIPT! I should perhaps state that it's extremely silly to say I'm "responding" to a piece by Denby, as he writes for the New Yorker and I stumble angrily to my computer occasionally to type incoherently into the void of the blogosphere. A more accurate phrase would be "raving in unhinged response to."

Shorter New York Times Editorial

2008-02-06T06:48:00.000-06:00

I'm sorry, we thought we MADE our endorsements; all this news about the candidates continuing to campaign against each other is VERY unsettling -- can't they just accept our word as from on high and call the race right now?

Resolved!

2008-01-02T13:39:00.000-06:00

Firstly, I'd like to say that some significant developments will have to take place in order for any of my friends to have a better line this year than John does in 1776, in which he gets to yell "You heard what Washington says! It's a SHAMBLES up there!" Truly inspiring.

Now, to business: I resolved a few things, and because I feel obliged to keep up the lightning-fast once-per-calendar-month posting pace here, I intend to list them here. Any attempts to keep me on track with them will be viewed with the resentment and bitterness of a thousand termites! Here, then, are My Resolutions For 2008, circa Dec. 31-Jan. 2

1. Lose twenty pounds!
It's worth noting that this isn't a vanity project; I gained twenty pounds this last year, largely by virtue of living by Trader Joe's and eating lots of pastas, cheeses, and pizzas with their help. I'm returning to my trusty old produce boxes in the hopes of losing what I gained; more would be nice, but I'll settle for "not noticeably fat." Also, it's not all about appearances: no mannish boy of the tender age of 25 likes to hear that he has a high cholesterol count. Count me aware! Eggs: your numbers shall not increase!

2. Write! Write like the extremely literate wind!
I have been told by several people that I should try to write like a normal human being, with the aim of making my spastic, libelous captions (and occasionally lucid blog posts) work for ME! To that end, I'm resolved to write no less than five pages in any given week, either of prose or script. Ideally that number will grow if I'm inspired, but that's a rock-bottom minimum. I'm already off to a roaring great start on my Great American Novel (the one about the Rabbi who gets stuck in an airport bathroom for three days during Hanukkah). No, that isn't true. I need to write that before somebody else does, though. Copyright. COPYRIGHT!

3. Audition with the hope of full-year casting!
I can't resolve to act every week of 2008, either in rehearsal or performance, but I can resolve to audition with that aim in mind: frequently, diligently, intelligently. This'll likely involve smaller goals (overhauling my monologue book, for one) but mostly it's about taking every audition for every show that would conceivably work for my schedule -- none of this "eh, I'm so busy with rehearsals, I don't want to overload with an audition." That's LOSER talk, baby, and you want to make Mama PROUD, DON'T YOU? Mama's gonna be a star! I mean, BABY! Baby star! Gonna be!

Seriously: I've let laziness get the best of me in this regard as long as I can remember. This year, I'd like to have every opportunity I can get, and I'll be trying to make them.

Sub-Resolutions
4. Win the Visa Wonderful Life sweepstakes
January 15, baby! This $50k-a-year-for-20-years is not only the equivalent of an arts/quality of life grant, and a chance to devote myself full-time to the above goals: it's also the best and most rational plan to have to achieve said goals! Needless to say, I'm leaning heavy on this one.

5. Do not be fired!
This is key. This is MAJORLY key. Even if I get number 4, the key word is "resignation," not "fired." Wouldn't it be grand if some artistic pursuit of mine forced me to leave for greener pastures? Or is that a swamp? Let's go a little deeper in, I'm sure it turns into pasture eventually. Where did our car go?

That's all I have time for. Did you notice a resolution missing from this list? Are you tempted to say something snarky and terrible about how maybe I should resolve not to blog at work? Maybe you have some growing up to do yourself, mister! Or missus! Miss! Why don't you go back to the snack room and have some lunchables, little miss critical fussbudget! I have half a mind to... no, that's not it. Just the half a mind. Now get outta here, you little scamps.

Books of Import

2007-12-10T07:31:00.000-06:00

So, inspired by my dad's illuminating blog post on the books that have shaped his thinking and career choices, I threw down the gauntlet to my programming brother Chris to do likewise; in return, I promised to do the same. The following may be of little to no interest to anybody, but these are the books that have and continue to influence the way I think about theatre and shape the aims that I have as a practitioner. We've always been a reading family, and I suspect that these books for me, like my father and brother's books for them, not only shaped my thinking, but honed my enthusiasm and committed me to the career that I have chosen! Not accounts payable, you nerds! Theatre! Allegedly! To the books! Ahoy!

Hot Seat (Frank Rich)
In high school, happy as I was to perform in musicals -- we trended towards staples of musical theatre, so I had my moment in the sun as Bye Bye Birdie's Albert Peterson and my moment in the inky darkness as Avram the Bookseller in Fiddler on the Roof -- I spent a good deal of time hunkered down in the library, reading the plays that our high school would never perform. I also spent a good deal of time in front of a boombox, listening to the canon of Stephen Sondheim. My folks were tremendously encouraging of this, and I remember one wonderful Christmas, they ga ve me this book -- a collection of Frank Rich's reviews in the New York Times from 1980 to 1993. I had first become aware of Frank Rich during my mildly-embarrassing Andrew Lloyd Webber fanboy period in my extremely early teens; a number of fawning biographies of the British pop-musical composer had nothing but contempt for Rich, who was painted as a vile, nasty, meanspirited American who would savage good theatre (i.e. Starlight Express or Phantom of the Opera) in the name of protecting American theatre. Fortunately, I was also a gigantic Sondheim fan (even at that age), and knew Rich to have penned the review that kept Sunday in the Park with George alive for much of its Broadway run. This volume opened a historical record to the bright spots and dark periods of one of Broadway's less-fortunate decades, and pointed me towards some of the plays with which I would become hopelessly enamored. Rich is primarily known as an op-ed guy now, but his theatre writing was brave, keenly intelligent, and fun -- read his review of Carrie: The Musical, and you will know all you need to know on the subject.

True and False (David Mamet)
Another book from high school; Mamet was perhaps the most stunning out-of-reach playwright I grew to adore during these formative years (John Guare being another). I remember reading Oleanna and wanting to throw the book across the room (this can, it turns out, happen in "a good way"), and when I found that he'd written a number of books of prose, I had to check 'em out. While I find his essays tremendously illuminating, this book was a bolt from the blue. It is, simply put, Mamet's manifesto on acting, and it is widely debated within the theatre community. It presents very much the playwright's view of the art, and its message can be summarized as "Stay out of the way of the playwright; stand and deliver, and do not be afraid." It's often misrepresented as arguing against any inflection, any contribution on the part of the actor (the performances of one of Mamet's favorite actresses, his wife Rebecca Pidgeon, bring an unfortunate amount of ammo to this reading), but what it is is a bracing and refreshingly clear look at what acting can and should be: devoid of ego, drained of the awful, actor-killing neuroses of "sense memory" and the mysticism of calcified acting schools. Mamet (as becomes more clearly stated in A Practical Handbook for the Actor) argues passionately for the power of the imagination against the fascism of forced imagination. He also argues forcefully against the good of acting classes and schools, and (in a segment that almost spurred me and my roommates to form a theatre company) makes the case for self-created companies over the mechanics of getting an agent and pounding the pavement in search for approval from the Powers That Be. Electrifying and inspiring, it was probably the text I read in high school that led me to commit to pursuing theatre.

Three Uses of the Knife (Mamet again)
Mamet's manifesto (so he likes manifestos, so big deal) on, well, to quote the cover, "the nature and purpose of drama." Stupendous, and the foundation for a great majority of my analytical thinking and text analysis -- he lays the case against Message Plays brilliantly, excoriates self-indulgent playwriting (my most overused phrase in play analysis is this book's "I had a kitten who died once"), and poetically imparts the actual importance of drama, to expose the gulf between the conscious and the subconscious. Beautiful and demanding.

Impro (Keith Johnstone)
One of the first books my acting teacher Cindy gave us as a reading assignment, Impro is not, strictly speaking, an acting text, although it has a lot to say about the usefulness of maskwork (the connection she made to our curriculum). It is rather a wonderful, clear-eyed dissection of the damage done to the imagination and impulsive creation by the vast majority of educational institutions. Johnstone argues why our obsession with the "right" answers even in non-objective settings has traumatized our ability to spin out improvisations, play in the theatre, and write that which springs from our unconscious minds. He also provides several suggestions and clues as to how to combat and reverse this process, along with a number of fascinating stories about wild maskwork workshops he has led and participated in.

The Actor's Chekhov (Ed. Jean Hackett)
Nikos Psacharopoulos was a long-time artistic director of the prominent Williamstown Theatre Festival, and was renowned for his productions of Chekhov plays, which he staged and restaged repeatedly over the course of thirty-some years at the festival. This book is a collection of interviews with those who performed there, both as young unknowns and as celebrities. Some of the more recognizable names interviewed: Olympia Dukakis, Austin Pendleton, Christopher Walken, Frank Langella, Blythe Danner. A book which embraces the messiness of theatre and performance, and which cannot help but inspire a passion and curiosity about one of history's greatest playwrights, it had everything to do with the most wonderful period of acting during my university days, and was a great opening-up moment for me and my technique.

Backwards and Forwards (David Ball)
The other great text-analysis text, and a necessity for any director of intelligence and ambition, this simple tome lays out a methodology for breaking down plays into their most understandable, immediate elements, using Hamlet as illustration. One of the most notoriously complicated, sprawling texts in the Western canon, Hamlet seems to be anything but simple, but by Ball's calculus, when broken down to see (a) what event leads to what event, and (b) how that process is reverse-engineered, there's a magnificent amount of practical, usable discovery. A still-memorable eureka moment in his narrative arguing that, working backwards, you can "solve" a difficult play. In this instance: what's Hamlet's last action? He kills the king. What happens immediately before he does so? Laertes says "The King's to blame." Hamlet's wildly exaggerated period of "indecision," then, can be spun out and revealed as a painful, aggressive, active search for a definitive truth that will permit his revenge. It's not the final answer, but for anybody looking to direct, it gives the most useful tool to get a practical handle on material.

The Viewpoints Book (Anne Bogart and Tina Landau)
It's a bit of a cheat, because the process of working on Viewpoints is the greatest influence on my acting work in the past twenty-five years, but the book (particularly in an earlier, excerpted, article format given to me by Jon Berry at the start of our rehearsal process for Mud) is an illuminating explication of the technique, its aims, and its import. Adopted by the Atlantic Theatre Company's training program (which I like to think gives it the Mamet stamp of approval), the technique is all about what Mamet summarizes as "Deny[ing] nothing." Components of movement and response are tuned and developed to impart an immediate, physical awareness and response mechanism to the world around the actor. Viewpoints changed my acting, and probably changed the way I experience the world.

These are the major texts BEYOND the plays that, of course, had as much or more to do with my shaping as an actor and theatre practitioner. A brief (BRIEF!) list of the most significant of those, and then I'm out:

Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller): Heartbreaking to read as an 8th grader; it's held up as an indictment of the false American Dream, but if any man or boy can read this and not weep at the tremendous power and pain of Miller's mournful song about fathers and sons, they are likely a man or boy-robot. I cried in the car over the last ten or fifteen pages that comprise Biff's final weeping argument with his father. Is it overwrought? Perhaps, but it's searing.

Six Degrees of Separation (John Guare): The most thumbed-through book in the Wheaton North Library by yours truly; this was the play I desperately wanted to do all through high school (all the while knowing that, of course, it was wholly impossible). Everything you love about Guare is here (not perhaps in the same measurements as in Landscape of the Body, which could also easily rest here) -- poetic flights of language, dozens of detours, and a love for humanity. This turned out to be the first show I worked on at Northwestern, in a happy coincidence.

American Buffalo (David Mamet): Another Wheaton North favorite. I devoured a lot of Mamet in those high school years, and while I had the most visceral reaction to Oleana (a teacher is falsely accused of sexual harassment, and the world explodes and I throw the book into a wall, furious at the characters, not the writing), this play, with its classically Mametian rhythms and coarse language, seared his brilliance into my brain. Stupendous.

Cloud Nine (Caryl Churchill): A wild discovery from the same class that gave me Backwards and Forwards, Churchill's play is a daring, audacious, challenging piece that upends social convention and narrative expectations with electric writing, a sublime sense of the theatrical, and some of the most beautiful sprawl I have ever seen. Probably the most felt, emotional Churchill of what I've read.

That'll do it for me -- if I ever update this blog, seven or twelve years from now, I may do something similar with performances, but who needs that? Certainly not this lad.

Happy, if you will, Holidays!

I got them RTA broken-funding blues

2007-11-02T08:32:00.000-05:00

So, for the second time, on the very brink of a CTA Doomsday, Governor Rod Blagojevich comes riding in backwards on a mule, with a soup pot on his head and a hockey stick at the ready, crying "Sally ho! Forth to save the day!" and sending his mule charging into a wall filled with priceless crystal heirlooms.

Hm, perhaps I'm being unfair. Let's see here: Governor Blagojevich, long enamored of the quick-fix "can't we just sell Decatur?" method of budget management, has elected to announce today that he's TOTALLY prepared to offer the RTA another bailout to last through this year, and you know, if they won't accept it, it's probably time their management change. It's sure an interesting (read: awful, stupid, simplistic, and shortsighted -- the infant-like problem solving skills of Blagojevich at work) solution. What's particularly interesting is that he proposes it as a temporary fix while they try to hammer out this Brilliant New Approach He Just Thought Of, which is essentially to tie the RTA funding restructuring to a huge downstate roads budget.

It's worth a brief detour here to point out that the Republicans in this scenario don't come off much better than the Democrats -- it's the same craven "We're outraged! Unless, of course, you want to give us a billion dollars to dole out for road construction" brand of conservatism that makes it really tough to grok why people still have party loyalty here. That the main pitch is "We'll build an army of casinos to fund our vast spending increases!" is not particularly settling.

Anyhow, it's a huge mess -- I don't like the idea of a gigantic statewide bill that hands over what's sure to be a mountain of pork to downstaters while, by all appearances, taking a really awkward and poorly-designed path to restructuring the CTA (the GOP has proposed fare increases, which I'm obviously not crazy about, and sales tax increases -- hey, look, guys, more regressive taxation!) that looks to pull more from the bottom end of the economic ladder without properly balancing the source of taxation. (Disclaimer: I'm stitching a lot of these thoughts together from various reports I've read, none of which have simple "this is how this proposal would fix the problem" breakdowns and comparisons.)

But the King of Awfulness in this scenario is, hands-down, Blago. For one thing, this "wonderful new idea we have to try to hammer out" has been on the table for weeks; if he'd have grown up and gone to the table to work it out when it first came up instead of pursuing his delusions of political capital, we might be in a place where we'd be seeing a vote today instead of a frantic dash for money to save his political career. Instead, he stalled and postured, and now, in order to avoid the wrath of his only demographically solid constituency (Chicago), he's offering the equivalent of a Payday Loan Store loan. It's insulting and shortsighted and petty.

And to cap it off, he suggests that if the RTA doesn't accept his Wonderful Offer (they point out that they might never get a permanent solution if they keep accepting quick fixes; also worth noting that Guv hasn't said where the money would come from; also worth noting how actually incredible it is that a municipal agency would stand their ground and demand that they engage in a little fiscal responsibility, either by increased funding or cutting costs), maybe there should be a change in their leadership.

Please.

Governors whose state's major papers have started writing wildly popular editorials agitating for gubernatorial recall legislation should not (can I say that again? SHOULD NOT) attack an agency that is, for once, showing a little common sense.

Governor, you're dead to me.

In which I realize I should post about things that don't make me furious

2007-10-30T11:46:00.000-05:00

So we all know Ticketmaster is evil and gargantuan and terrible in every conceivable physical way. Here's the latest:
Convenience charges are up to $6.50. Per ticket. For the use of a service that's fully automatic and saves them having to pay somebody to answer a phone or sit in a box office. So we're already in a magical land of awfulness.

But DID YOU KNOW that Ticketmaster now offers a wonderful new service to its customers? We all know how much we hate getting tickets in the mail -- they get lost, they get bent, and worst of all, they cost Ticketmaster upwards of 50 cents per order! Well, Ticketmaster has solved these problems by creating a "print your own" option at checkout! Yes, by completely eliminating any physical element on their end in the ticket-selling process, Ticketmaster lets you and a network of computers do all the heavy lifting and eliminates its own printing and shipping costs entirely!

Best of all? It will ONLY CHARGE YOU $2.50 FOR THIS WONDERFUL SERVICE. WHICH SAVES IT MONEY.

Death to them, eh?

A reasonable question

2007-08-28T14:16:00.000-05:00

Just what, exactly, did the studio think they had paid for when they put together Tim Burton and Sweeney Todd? I mean, have these unbearably cretinous thugs ever seen, heard, or even heard OF Sweeney Todd? Not for nothing, but when you let the whole thing be filmed and then say, "Cut it down to PG-13," you may as well just shoot yourself in the face and saved the money you spent on film stock.

What a bunch of total schmucks.

Shorter Dennis Byrne (Why do I bother...?)

2007-08-27T11:07:00.001-05:00

And these lousy corporations and their sleazy, Mexican-lovin' signs, and their... WHAT? TEACHERS speaking Spanish? Why don't they learn to talk AMERICAN?!

Shorter Dennis Byrne (Why do I keep returning?)

2007-06-04T09:22:00.000-05:00

Do "crazy dreams I had" qualify as research for a shrill, bizarre and logically incoherent column? They DO? Score!

Significant and deep-thinking political reportage!

2007-03-17T08:45:00.000-05:00

You know things are bad for your presidency when both Rosie O'Donnell AND Donald Trump think you're the worst president ever.

As my dad said when Pat Robertson announced he believed in global warming: "Well, fine. Not that he adds any particular weight to the argument."

Shorter Trib Article: Mo' Trib, Mo' Shorter

2007-02-28T23:21:00.000-06:00

You know, there's a lot of fuss being published out there about food safety -- fuss that, if you're anything like me, you'll manage to get irritated by without actually reading said books! [Cashes paycheck for unresearched ~~think~~ piece.]

Shorter Trib Endorsement

2007-02-27T19:44:00.000-06:00

"Mayor Daley's administration is, while doing good for the city, rampant with cronyism and corruption! As such, we endorse him for mayor, based on vague promises to clean up City Hall that he has not, in actuality, made."

Financial ruin!

2007-02-25T11:35:00.000-06:00

So anyways, I think everybody who still reads this blog (Hi, uh, Chris? I think that's about it) already knows this, but just for a little shout into the void, here's what I've been thinking about WAY too much for the last month or so.

When I finished up at NU, I consolidated all my student loans (or so I thought) to lock in a nice, low interest rate that has since been surpassed by my savings APR. This is a grand and healthy financial situation. However, it seems that when I asked the government, "Say, what are my student loans again?" they forgot to include one tiny little four-grand note. Anyways, after a year or so of promising to get it taken care of, I've lurched into high gear with my new job paying the way (and the tidy 7.9 APR providing ample motivation). The current goal is to throw as much money as I can muster at it every month (about $300 or so, depending on the greed and filth of ComEd and People's Energy) and have it paid off before the end of the year. With rumors floating around about raises being higher than I'd hoped for, this shouldn't be a problem.

However, being me, I just HAD to provide myself an incentive to pay this off, because losing a boatload of money to interest (and having one less bill to pay per month) just wasn't enough. So, I thought, maybe I should reward myself with a trip! A trip abroad!

I've traveled a decent amount, mostly domestic family trips, but my only trips overseas have been in groups: with the family to England, and with a youth group/missions trip to France. Both phenomenal experiences that whetted my hunger for Foreign Experience. In particular, I remember (although being surprisingly independent at times in London) coming off of the England trip just four short years ago thinking, "I would love to wander a city like this on my own." With my sister having spent her fall in Italy (insert typical gripe about how my dreams of studying abroad from NU were scuttled thanks to the setup of the acting program), a small article in the New York Times on the cuisine of rural northern Italy was more than enough for me to latch on. Northern Italy! And maybe a brief trip into a bordering state! Austria? Switzerland?

I don't remember what shifted my thinking, but in short order I was looking not at Italy, but at Central Europe. Part of this change, I think, was the realization that I could roll over this year's entire vacation time, effectively doubling my available time off for '08. This meant that, with creative timing, I could grab a three-week trip while only losing two of four weeks of vacation time (trust me, I've done the math and physics of it all). With that realization came the thought that (a) while three weeks is by no means "too much" time for Italy, or even for a specific region (or really, town!) in Italy, it's a stretch I'm unlikely to have available to me until I leave my job, which I don't plan to do particularly soon; (b) for my first trip abroad, I thought it'd be worth using that kind of time to hop around to a few diverse areas, to get a better sense for what I enjoy/find difficult; and (c) three weeks in Italy, even the less-touristed areas, would probably put me back in the hole to the same four grand I'd just paid off.

Enter the East Pass! A strange hybrid rail pass that's not in the general Eurail line (which tends to be much more expensive, and of more interest to folk on a three-month trek with a lot more travel), for less than $200, I'd get five days of travel in a one-month period. Perfect! Even better was the chunk of real estate the East Pass opened up: Poland, Austria, the Czech and Slovak Republics, and Hungary. While none of these veer to the truly difficult (as I imagine, say, travel in Russia or Turkey could be), it's a decently wide range of price, culture, and familiarity. The whole region is affordable (if you pinch pennies in the more visited areas) and not yet overrun by fat, abusive Americans taken to throwing coffee on each other and calling their daughters pigs (as witnessed in a charming trans-Atlantic flight to Paris back in the day). At least, not that you see in the brochures.

But look: the whole area is in the EU, but only Austria is officially on the Euro. This means both that the dollar retains some strength (waning though it may be) in these countries, and that they've still got their own Korunas, Zloty and Forints. That's appealing to me -- I hear mixed things about the EU's impact on individual nationalities, but am cheered somewhat by Rick Steves' analysis that the EU allows regionalism to be celebrated more so than before (i.e. Scotish parliament returning to session, Basque flag-waving, etc.). Still, homogeneity is something I distrust and fear, and currency, while possibly insignificant, seems symbolic of something.

In any case, Prague and Vienna are, of course, major destinations, which will likely take a spark of work to experience in a non-touristy way, but even there, I think it'll be pretty easy to find a more local-oriented way of bein', between being there in the off or shoulder seasons, staying in non-hotel/hostel accommodations, and my general tendency to prefer wandering side streets to spending my day within shouting distance of the largest known monument. Apart from these cities, I'm hoping to take in Krakow and Budapest, and likely a stay of some length in Bratislava, or possibly a more rural area of Slovakia. I'll have an extra travel day in addition to connecting these points, which I'm thinking would be nice to use to get out to explore a more tucked-away location, where my English won't be very useful, and there won't be a lot of fellow travelers. I will again use the word rural here.

Oh, but this is what people can't stand about me in recent days: I am preoccupied with this trip, which is at least a year away (barring my successful victory in winning the Corner Bakery sweepstakes) and have drawn up preliminary budgets and benchmarks, picking through pension and guest room listings, reading a somewhat obscene number of books about and from these various spots, etc. What's even better? How about this: I've already started thinking about the Next Trip. Because, really, as a young person with a (for the moment) secure and steady income, with paid time off, I feel like it'd be extremely silly of me not to go wander the world as much as I reasonably can! And so, after 2008 (or earlier, again pending various eateries' survey sweepstakes winnings) I'm making a bit of a decade-long goal to take at least a week abroad every year. Doing more localized, one-stop trips, planting in Bavaria or (hey!) Northern Italy, wandering around Scotland (or perhaps Wales), trekking into South America for a much-less-confident breakaway, visiting Asia once the plane tickets cost less than my entire 3-week Central Europe trip combined, etc.

So that's what I've been thinking about. Now, I have to go do work that I've been neglecting. Hey, if you have advice, suggestions, or comments, leave them me! I angrily demand thoughts!

ComEd, bane of LIFE

2007-02-10T15:51:00.000-06:00

Given that this major energy provider (still a monopoly, but now freed of price controls -- that's the free market, American-style) can basically do whatever it wants unless you operate a windmill in your back yard, it should not perhaps be surprising that their service is awful. Still, wouldn't you think that if they offer an online signup/transfer service, that they'd actually, y'know, perform whatever function you use the service to request them to perform? For example:
Let's say you are moving into a new apartment. You use the online form to request that the current bill be switched over to you for payment as of Jan 1. This seems simple, and indeed, they send you an order confirmation. However, forty-eight hours later, they send you an e-mail saying "Hey, we had a problem processing your request. One of our customer service folk will help you out."
A month passes. You foolishly imagine that they have solved the problem; otherwise, wouldn't they contact you? Then, one fateful day, your ComEd bill comes, still addressed to the old tenant. better still, it contains the second half of the former tenant's last month! Grumpy, you return to the ComEd site, where they have a specific customer service form for service transfer problems! You utilize the site to request that they change it over, and ask if they can re-issue the invoice, splitting it between the December and January dates -- they've already split the readings this way, because as of Jan. 1 they get to jack their rates way, way up. So it theoretically wouldn't be a problem. Still, no response for a week, and eventually you decide to call on the one day you have time to call: a Saturday.
Needless to say, they're not able to take a customer service call on a Saturday.

Here's a thought: Why on EARTH did we deregulate pricing if they're still a monopoly that can do, y'know, whatever they want, at all times? Death. Death to the enemies of Pat.

WHAT?

2007-02-09T14:42:00.000-06:00

Well, chalk one up to the forces of idiocy: the Cartoon Network's chief resigned today, hoping to close the chapter on the Aqua Teen Hunger Force ad campaign that threw Boston into a hissy fit. So, to recap: (1) Clever underground campaign uses Lite-Brite boxes to plug the ATHF movie that's in the works. Several major cities have these boxes set up around 'em. (2) SEVERAL WEEKS PASS. (3) Boston police wig out, inform everybody that there's a bomb threat, and generally cause a mild panic. (4) Boston police notice these are Lite-Brite boxes, and arrest the men who placed them for creating a "bomb hoax." The man who called in the police because of Lite Brite boxes is held up as a good citizen. (5) The Cartoon Network pays an obscene amount of money to Boston to "recompensate" them for their self-inflicted frenzy. (6) The chief of the network resigns.

It's not like nobody else is saying it, but man, this is the worst kind of stupid there is. Am I wrong?

2007-02-08T10:43:00.000-06:00

If you can finish watching this new Target ad and not want to stick a fork in the brain of the person who designed it (between the crappy cover, the appropriation of a good song for a retail chain, and the loathesome/morally repugnant "Goodbuy" visual), congratulations! You are not living my life.

Also, is it just me, or does that DirecTV "Back to the Future" ad run EVERY COMMERCIAL BREAK FOR EVERY SHOW? It's almost enough to make a fellow suspect that commercial television is not the greatest medium in the history of art!

Seriously: people wonder why HBO has great programming? Because you have to pay to get it. Get it for free, subsidized by corporations? You'll spend a full third (a THIRD) of your time looking at Christopher Lloyd raving about how great DirecTV is.

Update!

2006-12-28T12:13:00.000-06:00

Well, friends (and deceitful enemies who have wormed their way into my life and gotten close enough that they have found the address of this, my personal web-log), we approach the end of an era.

I'm hitting the end of my first four-month stint here in the city, and it's been a glorious and wonderful time. I've got theatre work lined up through May, I've settled into the routine at work (which has started to lay the groundwork for a hypothetical retirement investment scheme, and which has begun to pay me to do nothing but sit at home and eat Christmas dinner every so often), and I've grown to love and (sort of) understand the town. The big and/or exciting news is this: tomorrow, I pack up my Wheaton things into a cargo van, and my parents and I begin to truck all my possessions into a fantastic little apartment at Irving Park and Paulina (which is WHAT neighborhood? Sort of borders a few, by my analysis) to live with Rosie, of the fabled Trucks.

So, by New Year's Eve I'll be moved into my own place, with my own furniture, on a solid one-year lease, and I could not be more pleased. The sublet this fall worked out beautifully, and Kyle's a truly good fellow for putting up with my eccentricities and insane time-wasting apparatus, but there's a goodness in the establishment of a Pat King Emporium proper. When I'm settled, you're all free to swing by whenever -- it should be a delightful carnival of miscelaneous entertainments, interrupted periodically by outbursts of flame and sulfur.

Anyhow, hope you're all having a great set o' holidays, and have a fantastic New Year!

Shorter Robert Novak

2006-12-28T12:12:00.000-06:00

Gerald Ford made me feel stupid once, and I'm glad he's dead, the bastard!

Zombocom!

2006-11-14T22:58:00.000-06:00

The flip side of the "too stressed and busy to blog" coin is being too content and pleased with life to blog. As such, my posts have been, er, nonexistent for a while. Not even a one on the rah-rah flippage of governmental bodies! Or my recent obsessions with Scissor Sisters' latest album and The Elected and various other items! Or my continued experiment with the organic co-op, which is about to branch out to include meat and poultry!

The reason I blog now, however, is not to tell YOU about ME (for I am dullsville, seriously square) but to ask you for advice. I know a few of you (okay, none of you) live in Chicago proper, a land in which I'm seeking an apartment for the end of next month/beginning of 2007. I'll be moving in with Mike (the other half of Rosie and the Trucks), probably on the north side. Any ideas on neighborhoods to check out? Obviously I've wandered through Lakeview and Wrigleyville (I've ruled out Andersonville, as Uptown, where I currently reside, feels far enough from Where The World Is), but I'm curious about Logan Square, Ravenswood, Roscoe Village, etc. Any tips you may have would be greatly appreciated!

Oh, and also: Hi, Eileen! See you back on the blog in about 5 months!

Power to the... "people?"

2006-10-02T12:44:00.002-05:00

Blogger's fun in that when I double-click on something, it erases the whole post! Hooray!

Anyhow, a quick post-lunch note to say that for those of you reading this blog who care about the hopeful reshaping of the Democratic Party (and hey, who shouldn't care about that?), this article is a truly excellent read (free registration required). I've been a Dean fan since before it was cool (and then lame) to be a Dean fan, and this confirms much of what I admire about the dude. In any case, it's something I'd like to see happen.

Why, what do you think?

Extra credit question: Rahm Emanuel was JOSH? WHAT?

Update: Blogger is the root of all evil.

The quick brown blogger leaped over the lazy data entry system

2006-09-28T12:36:00.000-05:00

Greetings!

It has been a long, cold winter, but if this week's round of insanity at the office continues, more regular updates may or may not be forthcoming. At the moment, for the second day in a row, our data entry software has essentially crashed, leaving us inept, bumbling, and flailing. After having exhausted my daily quota of reading other blogs, newspaper websites, and even having resorted to YouTube and Apple's trailers (don't worry, that was on my lunch break, during which many coworkers watch actual movies on these mammoth monitors), I decided to return to the blog.

Well, let's recap. I have moved into Chicago, coming up on the one-month mark. It's been remarkably wonderful in endless ways. For one thing, I adore living in this city. Having a monthly CTA pass is unbelievably liberating -- the network of busses and trains is largely efficient, save my one trip to the closest Whole Foods, during which I managed to miss each of the four busses I should have caught, ultimately walking the entire route -- not bad on the way there, but not good on the way back. Still, that's very much the exception; even on the day that my bus broke down on my way home from work, it was relatively simple to hop off the rescue bus and catch another pair of busses to get me back home. Also, treks to Evanston to visit my friends there (hi Tim!) are much simpler: a five minute walk to the Metra, a ten-minute ride into Evanston, and there I am.

So, transit is beautiful. The city's also been rich with entertainment, a surprising amount of which has been free -- plays, concerts, etc. And with the Chicago Film Festival coming up, it's a very good time to be in the city.

Work has been very good to me -- I work with good and friendly coworkers who are patient with me as I gradually learn how to not undermine the financial stability of this august university, and in return I am extremely dilligent and hard-working. As a result, I'm now processing invoices from Tuesday on a Thursday. When I got here, I was working on month-old invoices. If not for this outage of our software, I would probably be completely up to date on my invoices, and assuming it's fixed at some point today (for keeps, unlike yesterday's eventual fix, apparently) I'm quite confident that I'll end the week with a clear drawer, leaving me only problem invoices to tackle. That will be a wonderful day indeed. In any event, it was extremely gratifying to have my boss and supervisor meet with me last Friday to say, essentially, that they were terribly impressed with my work, etc. So I suppose we can rely on my not being fired prior to Christmas, but let's keep knocking on wood there.

Theatre work has been busy but good. Greasy Joan opened our season with Rhinofest, at which we performed a pair of Beckett pieces and an Albee one-act that I dramaturged. I can't speak much to the Beckett (I find a subset of his canon to be too esoteric for me, and have overly specific thoughts about the staging of such works), but I was ultimately quite fond of the Albee, which was wisely directed with an eye towards emotional truth rather than Zany Abstracted Craziness, as is too often done. That show's up and running, and we're about to go into rehearsals on Woyzeck, which Neofuturist Greg Allen has adapted in what looks to be a wild production. As all this happens, I'm starting to find my footing as a literary manager, kicking around a few play-commissioning ideas, poking without much success to find existing plays that are Perfect, and so forth. It's nice to have come on board at the very end of the season planning timeframe, as it gives me a window of time in which to learn what I'm doing before having an active hand in next year's slate.

Acting-wise, things aren't bad -- my fall committments keep me somewhat limited, but I've landed a role in an upcoming production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead up in Evanston (we'll be in the Metra station... no, for real) that I'm excited about. Among other things, it's the first full production I've been cast in since graduating, which is a weight off of my shoulders. So the next half-year or so is rather well-plotted-out, as I assist Jon Berry (which is very exciting) in the winter and then spend next spring on Stoppard. (Kyle will also be in the show, which is cool and nice.) Hoping to start lining up more and more gigs, until I get my resume to a solid, happy place about which we can all be proud.

That's an awful lot of information, but hey, it's been like seven months. Social life is not bad -- could be better, but when almost all of your friends are in shows, it's limiting -- and looks to improve the more I begin to understand my routine and get proactive about seeing people I'm fond of. Other miscelaneous items: I like the TV (having four PBS stations, as I've said repeatedly, is the equivalent of having one Food Network, which knocks me out), I've set some goals for the remainder of the fall in terms of writing plays and/or film scripts, and starting next weekend I'll be signed on to a local community-supported-agriculture co-op for produce, and exploring another similar setup for meat and poultry, including eggs. Oh, heaven!

The negatives of living in the city: I miss Truman, and I miss my parents (who are ALWAYS awesome, but much more so when they don't have to deal with me living with them), and to some degree I wish Rosie was in the city so we could continue to record and polish the Dinosaur Album, which SHOULD be out by Christmas, if all goes well. Still, it's a nice place to be, and I remain pleased that I'm only a pair of train rides away from home, meaning that in any two-hour window, I can get back to see everybody I'm missing there.

Why, sup with you?

The Emmys Are Depraved And Decadent

2006-08-28T12:34:00.000-05:00

Well, big surprise: screw up the nominations, and you're sure to screw up the actual awards. Even the good awards were muscle-memory votes, the "Well, if he's won twice, he OUGHT to win another time" sort. So while I appreciate The Office getting the nod as best comedy (given that a certain cancelled Fox show wasn't in the runnings), and do not actively dislike Jeremy Piven (at least it wasn't Sean Hayes), a hearty round of boos to the Emmy voters. Particularly for screwing up Arrested Development's comedy writing. I mean, say what you will about "My Name Is Earl" -- I concede it's possible to like the show, though I do not care much for it myself -- anybody who's seen an episode of that and any single AD episode can't help but recognize AD's deserving status.

There, I guess, is the problem of the Emmys -- nobody forces any voters to watch any of the shows that are in the runnings. Much like the major Oscars (where, if you're Tony Curtis, you can vote for best picture, director, etc., all the while going out of your way to avoid seeing that gay cowboy movie), you open the floodgates to the movies or TV shows that just happened to get the most people in the door. Pretty sad, eh?

Not as sad as this: I had assumed that the much-trumpeted "new rules" for Emmy nominations were like the brilliant rules for similar nominating processes. Which is to say, you rank, say, 1-5, your top five choices. Then, rather than just tallying votes, you assign MVP-voting-style weight to each ranking. So if Arrested Development has five #1 votes and, oh, Two and a Half Men has seven #5 votes, Arrested gets the nod.

I had not seen the actual rule until the New York Times printed it this morning. Ready?

The new nominating procedures added a step to the process, using a special screening panel to choose the five nominees from the top 10 or 15 shows or actors as voted on by the broader membership. Previously, the five nominees in the top categories were simply those receiving the most votes in the first round.

O...kay. So basically if your "screening panel" really loves Charlie Sheen (or better yet -- Jon Cryer!) and they squeak in at number FIFTEEN in the voting, they can nominate them over a ninth-place Tony Hale or Michael Cera or some such.

Will somebody PLEASE explain to me how on earth this is supposed to be better in any of our currently known universes? What an absolutely thickheaded, idiotic maneuver.

TRIPLE POST?!?

2006-08-21T17:03:00.000-05:00

Well, we're in the waning few days of me having a job with no essential responsibilities, so I've been on these internets a lot. Anyways, it's been everywhere, but the question, from Zorn and Johnson (and others before them): What five shows would you want on a desert island? I'm duly impressed by entries on both of their lists. Here's mine:

1. Deadwood (Johnson said it, I said it, I repeat it)
2. Simpsons
3. Arrested Development
4. The Muppet Show
5. The Singing Detective (if you count miniseries; if not, let's swap it for The Office -- BBC)

Ask me tomorrow, it all changes. You know the drill.

Flurry of double-posting continues! Skeptics stunned!

2006-08-21T15:05:00.000-05:00

Don't worry, this isn't going to become habitual. But I had to share another snippet, again thanks to the gathering powers of the WashPost White House Briefing. This one features notable book-reading-contest-loser Karl Rove, in all his grandeur and majesty:

One protester managed to slip inside the event, which attracted more than 300 guests and raised an estimated $250,000 for the Associated Republicans of Texas.
Shouting objections, including 'men and women are dying,' the woman was escorted from the ballroom of the Renaissance Austin Hotel.
Laughter came after Rove said: 'I don't question the patriotism of our critics. Many are hard-working public servants who are doing the best they can. Some of them are people looking for a free meal.'
Rove also posed an unanswered query to Pat Robbins, the GOP group's executive director: 'Pat, did you get her check before she left?' "

Well now. I know reasonable people can disagree on the merits and virtues of the war. But it takes a real American hero to respond to war opponents' emotional charges by snarking and making petty jokes. Not much to say here beyond, "Good one, Karl! Now take this flak suit and go stand in Baghdad for a few days."

My English is very good! I learn it from a book!

2006-08-21T14:55:00.000-05:00

Straight from the indispensible linkage of the White House Briefing over at WashingtonPost, a small piece on how President Bush has entered into a bookreading contest with Whiz Kid Karl Rove.

Nothing overly remarkable about the books -- I'm reminded of that satirical piece imagining what Bush's google searches are, and am somewhat dismayed that he's spending a lot of his reading time with sports biographies and Lincoln bios (good things both, but perhaps not the best use of time) -- but what gets me is that he has allegedly read SIXTY BOOKS.

I don't know; maybe I'm slow, but I feel like I've been too busy to read sixty books, and I'm not (by most accounts) the leader of the free world. Is THIS why we're doing such a fumbling job at life?

Everybody enjoy successful blog post!

2006-08-19T11:00:00.000-05:00

Well it's been a while (as per the usual, and don't think this blogging timeline is going to change any time soon), primarily because I've been trying to get my life back on the rails harder than I think I ever have before. Essentially, the situation was this: when you agree to sublet a room in Chicago starting Sept. 1, it acts as the world's most powerful motivational tool to get a job. Inasmuch as you will die/go broke/get evicted if you do not have money.

That cheering inspiration in mind, I took the first week of August and threw myself into the job hunt, applying for some twenty-five jobs. I've applied for 5-6 jobs a week in previous job-hunting "frenzies," but this was the wildest flurry I'd ever embarked upon. Almost all these jobs (save a couple in law firms -- thanks, possible Craigslist scams!) were in the educational, non-profit sector: Columbia College, Loyola University, Northwestern, DePaul, Field Museum, Shedd Aquarium, etc. My hope had been to get some hits from that, but I was willing to repeat that week as necessary -- which gets hard, as you exhaust the jobs that look good at places you actually want to work at.

Fortunately, the following week (last week, for those of you keeping score at home), I landed five interviews at Columbia, Loyola and DePaul. Almost all clerical in nature (apart from a switchboard op position at Loyola), only two of the five were full-time: that switchboard position, and an accounts payable position at Loyola. If I was ever not going to be picky, however, this would be the time to take what I could get, so I gladly hit all five interviews with increasing confidence and skill.

That week of hustling in and out of Chicago left me exhausted, and dismayed at the prospect of this week being a return to the 25-apps-a-week routine after having drained myself of energy and hope through the previous two weeks. Mercifully, however, as I started up my job agents Tuesday morning, I got a call from Loyola's human resources department, offering me the oportunity to join them as the newest (and shiniest) Accounts Payable Representative! Needless to say, I accepted immediately, and sixteen tons lifted from my back as life began to fall into place.

The job will be a challenge, but a very good one. It'll set me up with skills that are marketable in the long-term, and its 9-to-5 nature leaves me free to audition, act, direct, etc., in Chicago's massive off-Loop, non-Equity theatre scene. I'm hoping to spend the next several years doing that and writing plays, while being the best accountant I can be; the prospect is terribly exciting.

Anyhow, what all this means is that Sept. 1 I move into Edgewater with Kyle. The following Tuesday I start up at Loyola. By the third week in September, I'll be back to receiving a regular paycheck, keeping a regular schedule, and keeping busy working for Jon Berry (whom I'm assisting on "The Piano Tuner" at Lifeline Theatre) and Greasy Joan (at the moment, focusing on dramaturging their Rhinofest shows; as I get caught up on that, I can start to get back to new play huntin'). Prior to that, I've got a few scattered days working at Steppenwolf, which is a blessing and a joy, and a lot of scriptreading to do while popping in and out of the city.

Also? The onset of packing. It's silly how giddy I'm getting over all of this.

Also also? The further completion of The Dinosaur Musical, which I'm hoping to have finished by the time I hit Chicago. There's some very exciting stuff going on here...

OK, that's it for this update. Hope you are both well (you both know this anyways, this is just for people googling "George Clooney Dafur stupid") and I'll be catching you on the flip side. Do not imagine that my having a job will increase the rate of my blogging. Nothing, nothing in the world, can get me to post more frequently.

When you're right, you're right

2006-08-19T10:31:00.000-05:00

Regular readers of this blog (Hi Chris! Hi, Tim! Hi, Vladimir and Estragon!) will recall that I occasionally reflect on the writings of Dennis Byrne, a regular columnist for the Chicago Tribune with whom I usually irritably disagree. I meant to put this post up the day he wrote this particular column, but due to crazed life-related circumstances (detailed in a post to come later this morning), I didn't get around to it til now.

In any case, the point is this: if I'm going to poke at him when I think he's being ridiculous, I oughtta give the man credit where credit is due. And this column, on oil prices, is spot-on correct. Some of you know that I respect politicians who are ideologically consistent (Feingold, Brownback, what have you) far more than pols who may align more closely to my personal politics but cave in to public opinion as much as possible (insert yet another Lieberman joke here). Along those same lines, I have immense respect for people who write or say things which are immensely unpopular but correct.

I don't have much to add to the column. If we could keep oil prices way high (I believe it's oxymoronically on Reason's blog that I've seen the idea of taxes to keep gas at $4 or $5 a gallon, to force market pressures to shift to alternative energy sources), alt-energy would start actually getting some traction. I also think that Tom Friedman got it right in The World is Flat when he argued that Bush should announce a plan to get America energy independent in ten years, and in doing so, accomplish both a Kennedy-to-the-moon and a Nixon-goes-to-China in one fell swoop. Still, high gas prices are good, as long as politicians don't use it as an excuse to open up strategic reserves (meant to be used in the event of actual catastrophe, not cringing inconvenience) or try to open up ANWAR to drilling yet again, pushing back any serious discussion of long-term energy independence. But how likely is THAT to happen in an election year?

In any case, as I said earlier: hooray for Byrne!

We'll return to our usual mix of irritation and bemusement shortly.

Trouble, trouble

2006-08-07T12:12:00.000-05:00

(I can't stop listening to Whiskeytown's "Mirror, Mirror." Wasn't it great when Ryan Adams' drinking was interfering with his band, and not with his solo career?)

Well, a brief update on life-o-Pat. Specifically: I'm hoping for a karmic backlash to the rough 'n' tumble nonsense of this weekend, which featured a small house fire (no structural damage, and far from where I dwell, but not cool for the family) and me bashing my foot into the stairs. Fun fact: without insurance, I'm not getting this looked at! Not even after last night, when I was unable to put any weight on it. Is it broken? Who cares? Bones heal, probably just fine on their own. Maybe after I get insured somewhere I'll have it looked at.

Anyways, those of you who speak to me regularly (which is basically my entire blogreading crowd, making this a bit redundant) know that I'm moving into Chicago on Sept. 1. Nick Lake, my old roomie, is on tour in Boston Sept-Dec, and I'm subletting his room at Leland and Dover, in the thriving heart of Edgewater, the armpit of the north side. It's actually a great spot -- walking distance of Green Mill, Zephyr, two 24-hour burrito joints on the block, as well as Carol's pub. Not where I'll live come January, but not a bad place to kick things off.

Anyhow, given that my return to the city brings with it the need for a regular paycheck (rent, food, un-breaking my foot), I launched a thousand applications last week (OK, maybe only 25) and am now headed into a week of in-person and over-the-phone interviews. Everybody I've heard back from is a college of some sort (Columbia, Loyola, DePaul); Loyola is the only one considering me for full-time spots (two, at last count) and therefore the place I most want to work, much as I love DePaul. Anyhow, this week may be a make-or-break week, as the interviews from this week will likely determine whether I'm working at the start of September, or am still applying for jobs. Which, again, would not be financially great. In fact, the word "disaster" leaps to mind.

In any case, that's where I'm at. This is the last hurtle over which I must get to close this suburban chapter of my life, which will be ever-so-good to have behind me. By the end of September, I'll either be thriving in the city, or in debtor's gaol. Avenge my death.

A total non-sequitor

2006-08-06T18:34:00.000-05:00

I ranted in person and e-mail and IM about it when the nominations came out, but having just watched three episodes of Arrested Development's third season, I'd like to again point out that the Emmys are the worst award in which I invest any interest (which takes care of the Grammys, about which I find it very difficult to have any opinion). I've already beaten the "House but not Hugh Laurie?" complaint to death, but I'd like to reiterate that AD's entire ensemble deserved nominations, and it's mind-numbing that they lost out to, say, two of the titular Two and a Half Men. While Will Arnett deserves everything he has coming to him, I once again make the case that Michael Cera, even if he were not so young as he is, deserves a nomination for having the most brilliant comic timing I have ever seen. The whole cast is as worthy: Tony Hale, David Cross, Jeffrey Tambor, Jessica Walter (JESSICA WALTER), and so on. And as brilliant as Patrick Stewart was on Extras (and of the group nominated, he MUST win), a good number of the guests on AD could easily have landed on the comedy guest list (I'm thinking of the surrogate in particular, but I'm sure there are others... Charlize Theron, anybody?). Anyhow.

And it's never too early to get angry that it's going to lose Best Comedy to Will & Grace, because an unfunny but long-running sitcom obviously deserves more acclaim than an abbreviated, brilliant example of television at its greatest.

Tell your god to ready for CANDY!

2006-07-31T13:15:00.000-05:00

So, for those of you not watching Deadwood, you're missing a crazy season, filled with all the excellence I've detailed in previous posts. Two delightful additions (George Hearst and an actor played by Brian Cox) are just upping the amazing crowd-control character creation that Milch has gotten good at.

In any case, for those of you who ARE watching, I was inspired today to hatch a new crackpot theory as to where the plot is heading. Given my success in predicting the outcome of Lost, I think we can rely on this information as accurate. To wit:

In next week's episode, Wyatt Earp kills Hearst for Swearingen, in return for the right to leave a pile of whores piled up inside the Gem while he and his partner go check out their timber claim. This infuriates the hoodlums Hearst brought in, most notably their leaders, Butch Cassidy and Sundance, who burn the town to the ground. This incites the wrath of President Abraham Lincoln (I know, but stay with me here), who comes to the camp and announces the emancipation proclamation. This arouses the wrath of Zombie Steve, who attacks Zombie Hosstedler (if he wasn't already dead, I'd doublecheck that spelling) in the episode entitled “How old is this porridge, anyways?” This of course sets up the two-part post-series finale, in which H.G. Wells comes to town and uses his time machine to let Swearingen and Bullock go back in time to prevent the rise of the zombies, though they inadvertently rescue President Lincoln from his assassination along the way, allowing him to serve six consecutive terms, before declaring himself Emperor of the Americas and invading Africa. Which, curiously, sets the story at precisely where John from Cincinnati (Milch's surfer noir) picks up!

Now, please, I desperately need a job.

A side note

2006-07-26T17:24:00.000-05:00

I'm sure many have commented on it before me, but as I rarely spell-check these posts (can you tell? I'm otherwise ever-so-professional) I only today realized that Blogger doesn't really buy into "blog" as a word. In the future, I shall try to refer to this properly, as a web-log. Kindly do likewise.

Sis boom rah!

2006-07-26T17:16:00.000-05:00

Three cheers to Chicago's alderman, who in what'll either be seen years from now as a compassionate, noble and stunningly bold legislative maneuver or a cynical, anti-globalization defensive backlash, approved the big-box retailer motion today! Obviously my own stance on this is clear (it has, after all, revived this blog, limited though this new focus may be in re: entertainment value): opponents have to lash out against the ordinance by arguing that it will kill jobs and make Target, Wal-Mart, et al, move further away from the city, further spreading poverty and unemployment. Well, okay. As below, Zorn takes a good whack at that theory. Absent specific numerical proof, opponents have led the charge by (hey, let's have a party!) accusing Big Union of tricksy moves. Which makes, again, zero sense.

Anyways. Let's check back in five years (if blogs even EXIST in five years! Think of the possibilities!) to see who's right. If it's Dennis Byrne and his ilk, I will be sad, and I will eat Werner Herzog's shoe.

UPDATE: In the interest of fairness, rather than singling out Byrne (who, obviously, I'm not overly wild about) I should note that Mayor Daley (about whom my feelings are much more schizophrenic) is also opposed to the measure. It passed by a veto-proof margin, so that doesn't mean anything tangible with regards to policy, but it's worth noting.

In other, more specific words

2006-07-26T01:02:00.000-05:00

Eric Zorn has a great takedown of the "Communist union bosses hate the poor!" take on the big-box retailer minimum wage proposed by Chicago alderman. Everything I wanted to say, plus facts!

Apparently, it ran the same day the Trib officially opposed the measure, because, well, uh, doesn't everybody KNOW that making corporations behave responsibly kills jobs and hurts everybody? The free hand of the market helps everybody unless somebody tries to nudge it in one direction, at which time it stomps the guts out of everything in its path! Fear the invisible hand! Pay homage to the invisible hand!

Won't somebody think of the multinational conglomerates?!?

2006-07-17T10:58:00.000-05:00

Well, as usual, I blog when I'm irritated enough to burn five minutes of my day rambling about whatever strikes me the wrong way, and once again, this blog comes flyin' at ya courtesy of the latest idiocy of Dennis Byrne.

In essence, his argument is: how DARE Chicago aldermen require "big box" retailers to pay their employees a wage on which one can live in Chicago! As per the usual, market forces will sort everything out for the Glory of God, and besides, the government runs the risk of scaring off Wal-Mart (the generally-acknowledged target of the proposed legislation) altogether. It's hilarious work, as he drops in a "remember when the aldermen turned Wal-Mart away altogether a few years back?" to set up his logical conclusion that Wal-Mart would rather get out of town altogether than, say, as he suggests earlier, slashing their workforce twenty-five percent. He also delivers this whopper, shortly after scoffing at a "non-partisan" think tank for supporting liberal causes (really, only conservative-leaning tanks are non-partisan, as that's the direction in which the political winds are blowing):

Why are aldermen acting so stupidly? To placate organized labor, which wants government to do the union's work for it by enforcing wage and work rules that it can't bargain into place by itself.

Read that again, slowly and out loud. Then, repeat after me: "Of course! Organized labor wants nothing quite so badly as they want to be made obsolete by governmental regulation! Those greed-filled mafioso thugs HUNGER for enforcable standards to which Wal-Mart must comply, because the thought of unionizing (and earning dues from) Wal-Mart employees fills them with disgust and revulsion! They heave a sigh of relief as their work is done, without having to collect one cent from these workers!" It's a reversion to the neolithic "UNION BAD! REGULATION BAD! UNION AM WANT REGULATION!" zombiedom that surfaces whenever there's a hint of government supporting employees rather than handing out subsidies for conglomerates. Illogical, knee-jerk, and typically void of usefulness.

Really, though, the best part of this article is the manner in which it follows general conservative reaction to the proposed legislation, by screaming murder and claiming that you can't punish successful (read: large, national-chain) retailers. It's a spectacular abandonment of the age-old canard that, gosh-darn-it, the minimum wage's absurdly low level ($6.50 in Illinois at present) helps small businesses! THAT'S who minimum wage hike opponents fight for: the little guy starting his own mom and pop store!

Well, that's bunk. You can't live in Chicago on $6.50 an hour (sans benefits, as most Wal-Mart employees are) unless you have about four full-time earners in your household, live in a decaying neighborhood, and/or start stacking multiple residents into single bedrooms. If a small business can't afford to pay an employee enough to be able to make ends meet in 2006, well, I'm not happy about it, but I can understand those who say we have to make allowances for that business. But it makes a world of sense to require the companies who can afford to give their employees a living wage to do so, and the fact that the right-wingers are up in arms over this belies their honorable small-business-boosterism. It also exposes, to my mind, many of the current brand of "conservatives," who argue for states' rights (and generally argue that the more localized government is, the more effective it is) but cry bloody murder when a locality whose cost of living is significantly elevated tries to work to protect its residents.

Anyhow. As a final note: for those of you keeping a deathwatch over this and Beckley's blog, I'd like to take a moment to celebrate my victory in this race-to-posting. One full month, June 17 to July 17, and here I am, updated. The next move is yours, Mr. Beckley: what will it be?

Bronze the flag!

2006-06-27T11:53:00.000-05:00

So, the Trib provided (once again) that invaluable dose of morning irritation, with this story about the apparently very-possible passage of a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning. (The online frontpage of the paper has a more amusingly written, though similarly vexing headline, stating: "Bush ignores laws; congress vexed.")

The most startling piece of this article is its announcements that the vote will likely come within a one-vote margin either way, either to pass or to be defeated. This is sad, sad, disgusting news. To begin with, it's just pathetic that politicians are willing to have the constitution amended for what's 100% election year grandstanding -- unless you, gentle reader, have specific memories of all the times this issue surfaced when we weren't in an even-numbered year. It's even more pathetic that the charge is led consistently by Republicans, particularly their members numbered among the Religious Right. It seems to me that if anybody's going to make an idol of the American flag (thou shalt not burn, desecrate, etc.), it ought to be godless pagans like, I dunno, Russ Feingold, but no, it's the same Rick Santorums and Sam Brownbacks who lead the charge for Constitution By Ten Comandments. It's sad on that level.

What's more frustrating is the way in which this again hits at the sorry state of the Democrats, with allegedly liberal politicians falling over themselves to jump to the extreme right on an issue that has no part being seriously considered. Which brings me to my favorite politician, Senator Joe Lieberman.

Senator Lieberman (CT - D/R) is officially opposed to the flag burning amendment (a shocker to me), although he's in favor of a bill that would be ruled meaningless by SCOTUS (as state laws have been) that bans the desecration of the flag. But the dude's been such a hawk on Iraq, and such an advocate of sweeping presidential powers, he's being painted as Bush's right hand man in the Senate. Frankly, he invites comparison. Others (Chris?) can speak more eloquently than I on his troubling record on free speech issues. Connecticut Democrats, of course, have grown weary of the man, and his primary challenger, Ned Lamont, is getting closer and closer in the polls, and could overtake the man come election time. Lieberman, predictably, has screamed foul, and is threatening to run as an independent, and while some (Russ Feingold! Hooray!) have pointedly said they'll support the Dem's nominee, others (the Dem's national committee on Senate elections) have hinted that they might support Lieberman as an independent.

Again. As an INDEPENDENT. Not, you know, the nominee the people of Connecticut choose.

Well, it's sad, and it's foolish, but the great gesture this whole situation won from Lieberman is too good to pass up: a shrill speech in which he irritably complained that he had no idea why Ned Lamont has a problem with him, or why the voters are supporting this man (those fools!), and went on to make my favorite argument ever, in the continuing history of politics: I, Joe Lieberman, have been in the Senate 18 years. I have seniority. I can "get things done" for Connecticut as a freshman could not.

Essentially, this is the real-world equivalent of "Have a cupcake! Vote for me for student council president!" I cannot believe that a U.S. Senator is playing the same game, but it (for the first time ever) really makes me dream about term limits...

It's not TV, it's HBO!

2006-06-24T22:23:00.000-05:00

I think Deadwood ruined The Sopranos for me.

As in almost all areas of pop culture (if not modern art forms), I was way behind on the whole "Greatest TV Show(s) Of All Time." Much of this came from growing up in a home centered around PBS - a network whose praises I will ever sing, even if the local affiliates continue to drop Charlie Rose like the fools they are - although I never had too much of a yen for shows in the mainstream, after a brief love affair with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in elementary school. As such, I started watching Seinfeld in its final season (already, I recall, it was in syndication, which is how I caught it), and my first episode of Friends was their final episode.

So it's not overly shocking that, despite a huge interest when Sopranos first aired (fueled largely by the ubiquitous subway signs I saw on a college visit to NYC, particularly the grim visage of Uncle Junior) I didn't watch it for some time, catching my first episode during sophomore year of NU, and never getting further than the pilot until... Well, about a month ago.

Well, while the show's good, as I say, I think Deadwood spoiled it for me. This is sort of a roundabout way for me to stake out my "Deadwood is television's greatest show" argument, so I'll get on with that, and then we'll double back and point out how it's shaping my Sopranos experience.

I became mildly interested in Deadwood after reading a typically brilliant New Yorker article on David Milch, it's creator/writer/runner. As I continued to babble about my interest in the show, my roommates at the time decided to shut me up by getting me the first season for my birthday, and that summer, in the early, sweltering days of June, I spent a solid week on the couch, sweating hazily through twelve episodes detailing Swearingen and Bullock's adventures.

The show is phenomenally precise. The period detail is remarkable (it's shot on a massive soundstage, and the level of dirt and grime that bathe everything is remarkable), with the speech of the characters standing out as its most remarkable aspect. An overly-discussed iambic pentameter hybrid of Elizabethan English and U.S. profanity, the words are poetic and gut-punched, simultaneously violent and classy. It's certainly stylized, but handled so consistently, it becomes the foundational fabric from which the world springs. You never doubt these words, even when they're at their wildest (a recent episode takes its title from a brilliant Swearingen pronouncement, "Tell your god to ready for blood"). At the same time, it's the richest, fullest language I've ever heard on television -- and as a sucker for great dialogue, this is one of the areas in which I feel it surpasses Sopranos.

In general, the world depicted here shoots for a bold theatricality, a heightening of its world that stays rooted in the detail and grit of Real Life. Despite Milch's eloquent musings on the nature of the Western Hero (silent because studio codes forbade the language authentic cowboys spoke), this show thrives on inflating and exploding the reality of Deadwood. On a broad scale, this leads to the constant barrage of murders (though unlike John Tierney, I don't think you can argue that "recorded murders" prove anything of Deadwood's actual fatality rate), but it's best observed in its specifics. A preacher, ministering to his best in this perverse camp, is overtaken with epilepsy, a condition that drives him away from God's word. Wu, given permission to take vengeance on a Chinese rival, has his men don traditional masks as they ritually slay the man and his minions. Sheriff Bullock's wife and son are welcomed to Deadwood by his plummet from the second story of the Gem and his near-throat-slitting by Swearingen. And on and on.

It's all violent and wild and larger than life as we know it, but at the same time, Milch is quietly (well, maybe a better word would be indirectly) punching out an inquiry into some very serious issues, tracing how societies are formed, how governments come into being, and what brutal things the desire for amalgamation of capital will inspire humans to do. The trick of commenting on current problems by removing the story from the present is an ancient one, particularly for television, but Deadwood, like Battlestar Galactica, vastly enhances these resonant commentaries by weaving them into a story that's primarily about its characters and what they need.

Along the way, Milch achieves a density of content that's Altmanesque, unmatched (I would argue) in television's lexicon. This can be linguistic density (some of the more convoluted speeches take multiple hearings to unravel), narrative density (as in the two-parter opening Season Two, where you have to be paying attention to notice that after Slippery Dan plays a prank that ends with Bummer Dan being shot in part one, he's gored almost as an afterthought in part two), but its largest success in the thick mass of humanity that populates this world. Much has been made of Lost's broad cast, spanning as it does various ethnicities and physical types, but (especially as it rolls through its second season) Lindelof and Cuse let their characters slip into background action for stretches of multiple episodes, content to remind us that Sun and Jin are around by showing them... fishing, cuddling, what have you, in a brief shot before getting on with the rest of the plot.

Not for Milch, these mini-vacations for his characters. Instead, episode after episode, when we see a character, they are working, whether through a mini-arc, or a more broad, long-term arc, and fighting for what they want. The bartender (and cutthroat) Dan grows slowly desperate to stay in Al's good graces while E.B. Farnham, a minor and comical character, is allowed to work a slow burn over almost a full season before he has a Shakespearean soliloquy and a mental breakdown over the prospect of leaving his post as a hotel manager. This is blessing and curse: blessing because the series so richly rewards repeated viewing (more so than any other dramatic show) and because, well, it's staggeringly good dramatic craftwork; curse because it takes a real committment to dig into the show. It took me about four episodes before I understood why everybody was doing what they were doing, but it's all there on screen. This stems, no doubt, from Milch's incredibly present hand in the production of the show -- he's said he'll pick up an actor's choice and spin an episode's plot out of it. Truly impressive stuff.

Anyhow. How's all this relate to Tony Soprano? Part of this is a timing issue. When Sopranos first went on the air, there was much press (part of what got me interested, in fact) about Tony and his mob being real, ugly mobsters, and not the cleaned-up "good guys" of The Godfather films. To some extent this is true (no speeches about how we don't deal with dope, etc.), but the show still is fundamentally about a man who -- at whatever miniscule a level -- is plagued with a growing awareness of what he does, and a need to get out.

Oh, and since I can feel the flames coming on, a disclaimer: yes, I'm only in six episodes, through College. I know it'll change a lot. These are early sketches of impressions. Feel free to remind me what I have to look forward to.

Contrast Tony, whose series kicks off with him needing to see a therapist (albeit reluctantly) with Swearingen, and the expectation (probably unfair) of a brilliant portrait of villainy never gets satisfied. Gandolfini is remarkable, and he's very well written, but not the ogre the press made him out to be. Frankly, Swearingen's the greatest villain on television, and what's amazing is that despite taking 24 hourlong episodes to do something even remotely altruistic (as opposed to kind, but for agenda-driven reasons), you root for him almost from hour one. To me, that's a more impressive accomplishment.

Sopranos also strikes me (again, in these early six episodes) to lack something of the density of Deadwood. Yes, there is a huge stack of characters, and indeed, they're really well drawn (Christopher being my surprise favorite -- hey, so sue me, I had no way of knowing), but there's that Losty sense that This Episode Is About Christopher, whereas This Episode Is About Meadow, etc. The miniature miracle that Milch routinely accomplishes with Deadwood of nudging all the arcs in the same episode doesn't strike me as happening as regularly on Sopranos.

Finally, while I know Tim will refute this in the comments (having disputed it via that more-reliable format of e-mail), Sopranos doesn't resonate for me the same way Deadwood does by being about much beyond itself. Apart from its nuanced, knowing look at The Human Condition (and a sense of how we treat those who are closest to us), I just don't see it connected to the world in which I live. Again, I'm limited in terms of where I am in the show (and, quite possibly, in terms of my understanding of what I've seen), and on a broader scale, I'm not sure that I think art has to be about anything outside of itself. Still, Deadwood's probing some bigger-picture sociological and political questions while dealing with its personal demons, to a larger and more effective extent, I would argue. Fuller, bolder, more dangerous and more stylish (I am, after all, a sucker for style, theatricality, and gorgeousness, my refusing-to-see-it loathing for, say, Memoirs of a Geisha aside), it strikes me as having made strides beyond Chase's show.

Now, I don't dislike Sopranos. I can still marvel at it, there have been episodes that I thought were going to hook me in, and it can be just as nuanced and detailed and wonderful as it wants to be. In particular (because I just finished it the other day), "College" deals with the Father Phil arc beautifully. On a textual level, in performance, and (my favorite) just the quiet excellence of the gradual erasure of his priestly garb, as his collar comes off, then eventually his shirt, and so forth. The show's got a really phenomenal cast (if anything, my frustration is that I don't see all of the mob in every episode), and the best opening song I know of. I'll finish this season, and may yet go further, because it ain't bad.

But you know, I feel like Deadwood's gone beyond this.

Flame me up! What am I, some kind of idiot?

Super "MAN?!?!?"

2006-06-11T18:36:00.000-05:00

Well, the Tribune has bested itself with a new story (actually from sister paper L.A. Times) penned by John Horn. After a brief opening segment detailing the interest in the new Superman in the gay community (given director Bryan Singer's previous exploration of similar themes in the X-Men movies), the article goes on to posit the profound question: How much will Superman's box office be hurt if Teh Gays like it?

No, really.

The key quote comes here:

But four ... movie marketing executives, all of whom declined to speak on the record, said gay "Superman Returns" interest presented two potential box office problems. First, teenage moviegoers, especially those in conservative states, might be put off by a movie carrying a gay vibe; among some teens, these executives agreed, saying something "is gay" is still the ultimate put-down. Second, the attention threatens to undermine the film's status as a hard-edged action movie, making it feel softer, more romantic, and thus less interesting to young ticket buyers who crave pyrotechnics.

Okay. So. There are a few levels on which this is ridiculous. I suppose the most obvious is the author treating as expertise the opinions of folk he earlier designates as executives at "rival studios." What's really impressive is that two execs said Superman stood to gain from this attention. But generally, asking movie execs questions about rival releases is like asking Karl Rove to go off the record about how successful he thinks Howard Dean's strategy is going to be.

But let's look at the arguments they lay out. First, they try to give this absurd logic a sense of order to it by clarifying that they're talking about teens in "conservative states" being repulsed by the gay community's interest in said film. Which, I guess, presumes that teens in Nebraska are reading gay publications, or somehow getting wind of the community's enthusiasm, while still recoiling at everything gay. Seems to me you can have one or the other, not both. But the best bit is their agreement that teens use "gay" as the ultimate insult.

I mean, who on earth is shocked by this? Movie executives gravely pontificate on the fact that fourteen year olds call nerds "gay," and use VERY SCIENTIFIC METHODS to extrapolate the idea that said teenagers will, again, having somehow gotten wind of the fact that actual, real-life homosexuals, like a given movie, and will rebel in fury. These people are fools and idiots, and I would suggest that if you asked them about "X-Men" and "X2" they would designate them both anomalies, as they do any rival's success they don't wish and can't explain. Movie execs rank slightly above frogs on the distinguishment-o-meter.

And that's really the huge laugh here, is these adult, wealthy, allegedly competent men will spin theory on the spot that disdains the gay community, teenagers, and filmmakers all in one pithy analysis.

It would be easy (and oh so enjoyable) to just pile on the execs and pretend they're the only fools here, but let's spare an inch or two to mock Mr. Horn's paragraph in which he proves -- beyond shadow of a doubt -- that gay themes sank Batman & Robin:

Warners knows from its own history that too many gay associations can play a role in derailing a big summer movie, particularly one involving an established superhero.
In addition to drawing poor reviews and generating weak word-of-mouth, the studio's 1997 summer release "Batman & Robin" was criticized for having too much homoerotic appeal, including nipples on Batman's suit. George Clooney, the film's star, has joked, "I could have played him straight but I didn't. I made him gay."

Horn goes on to point out that B&R tanked. Again, his own writing gives some good clues here: "In addition to drawing poor reviews and generating weak word-of-mouth..." pretty much does it for me. But, you know, homosexual overtones probably were the main cause. After all, George Clooney's jokes were ABOUT homosexual overtones! And it's a truly applicable film comparison to begin with, because (as we all know) Joel Schumacher is the exact cinematic equal to Bryan Singer.

I mean, why not argue that if Fierce Creatures has a lot of British elements to it, and tanked at the box office, there's no reason to believe that The Fully Monty would succeed? If you're going to just arbitrarily apply a comparison factor, you may as well say that since Billy Zane was in Titanic, Johnny Kakota is going to be the largest box-office hit of this decade.

How is it that people in L.A. and the film business consistently display the least knowledge (or even, at minimum, a passing curiosity) in how box office success works? No wonder 99% of what this industry churns out is pure crap.

Blogger functional! Users dumbfounded!

2006-06-08T09:04:00.000-05:00

Amazing, after a week of totally worthless non-service from blogger, to come in and see it running smooth as can be. So, to catch up, a few things from yesterday and today:

1. Tim and Dave have far more intelligent analysis than I could on the results of the CA race to replace Randy Cunningham. In short, I doubt it's terribly significant one way or the other; it's a heavy GOP district, so a closer race is a victory of sorts, the Dem candidate made some gaffes at the last minute that tanked a few voters, or at least galvanized the right, etc. Still, it's a long way to November, and anything could happen.

2. Zarqawi's death is a definitive good, regardless of where people fall in the Iraq debate. Hopefully it won't turn into a martyrdom (which is always my fear, being the nancy-pants lefty that I be), but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it will at least dampen some of the violence over there and start paving the way for a pullout. Again, I'm not nearly wise enough to comment with a lot of intelligence in this area.

3. The best story of the universe is this one. Essentially, a UN senior official suggested that it's possible that the United States has an antagonistic relationship with the UN -- who knows where that idea came from... certainly not the "UN agents kill Matt Drudge" graphic of Liberality for All. The key quote:

Calling the matter "very, very grave," Mr. Bolton said he had made the demand in a morning phone call in which he had told the secretary general, "I've known you since 1989, and I'm telling you this is the worst mistake by a senior U.N. official that I have seen in that entire time."

Ah, Bolton, you poor man. For the record, a trio of quotes of Bolton's from back in the day:

"There is no such thing as the United Nations. There is only the international community, which can only be led by the only remaining superpower, which is the United States."

"The Secretariat building in New York has 38 stories. If it lost ten stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference."

"The United Nations can be a useful instrument in the conduct of American foreign policy"

Seriously, what WAS that UN official thinking? Although, to be fair to Bolton (a thoroughly unpleasant man, and another great example of the administration's "screw the rest of the world, treaties only mean things insofar as we decide to let them mean things" ethos), he was not a senior UN official at the time that he made any of those remarks.

Two things

2006-06-05T11:29:00.001-05:00

Because Blogger is being evil today, I'm gonna try to squeeze these both into one post. First, the as-expected fury over the latest Pentagon follies. As the Trib has it, essentially the Pentagon has decided they want to eliminate from the training manual a portion that deals with the Geneva conventions prohibiting humiliating treatment of prisoners. Smart move, right? Between the PR and general policy? It gets better:

Military lawyers and other defense officials wanted the redrawn version of the document known as DoD Directive 2310, to again embrace Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention.

That provision — known as a "common" article because it is part of each of the four Geneva pacts approved in 1949 — bans torture and cruel treatment. Unlike other Geneva provisions, Article 3 covers all detainees — whether they are held as unlawful combatants or traditional prisoners of war. The protections for detainees in Article 3 go beyond the McCain amendment by specifically prohibiting humiliation, treatment that falls short of cruelty or torture.

The move to restore U.S. adherence to Article 3 was opposed by officials from Vice President Dick Cheney's office and by the Pentagon's intelligence arm, government sources said. David S. Addington, Cheney's chief of staff, and Stephen A. Cambone, Defense undersecretary for intelligence, said it would restrict the United States' ability to question detainees.

A refresher: that's MILITARY LAWYERS and DEFENSE OFFICIALS. Presumably not inclusive of Don "I stand all the time!" Rumsfeld. Generally, this is a nice refutation of any hint that the political arm of this presidency has any interest in tangibly supporting our troops, or paying attention to what career professionals think. And so, in short, the vile, repugnant elements of the administration once again bewilderingly decide that we're bound only by treaties that we feel like being bound by. Geneva? Not helpful. Cut it. This, of course, should have no bearing on the Iraq debate, because (after all) Iraq was violating a UN dictate! Lawsy! Oh, hypocricy. Again, I think people who pay attention to current events can rationally rally behind the Prez and his crew... This kind of arrogance and deliberate ignorance is what really does outrage me.

State, however, as usual, deserves kudos for being the one element of government intelligently opposed to this latest round of nonsense.

BUT! In happier pastures: Colbert gave a commencement speech. The ending is posted below. Happiness ensues.

So, say “yes.” In fact, say “yes” as often as you can. When I was starting out in Chicago, doing improvisational theatre with Second City and other places, there was really only one rule I was taught about improv. That was, “yes-and.” In this case, “yes-and” is a verb. To “yes-and.” I yes-and, you yes-and, he, she or it yes-ands. And yes-anding means that when you go onstage to improvise a scene with no script, you have no idea what’s going to happen, maybe with someone you’ve never met before. To build a scene, you have to accept. To build anything onstage, you have to accept what the other improviser initiates on stage. They say you’re doctors—you’re doctors. And then, you add to that: We’re doctors and we’re trapped in an ice cave. That’s the “-and.” And then hopefully they “yes-and” you back. You have to keep your eyes open when you do this. You have to be aware of what the other performer is offering you, so that you can agree and add to it. And through these agreements, you can improvise a scene or a one-act play. And because, by following each other’s lead, neither of you are really in control. It’s more of a mutual discovery than a solo adventure. What happens in a scene is often as much a surprise to you as it is to the audience.

Well, you are about to start the greatest improvisation of all. With no script. No idea what’s going to happen, often with people and places you have never seen before. And you are not in control. So say “yes.” And if you’re lucky, you’ll find people who will say “yes” back.

Now will saying “yes” get you in trouble at times? Will saying “yes” lead you to doing some foolish things? Yes it will. But don’t be afraid to be a fool. Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying “yes” begins things. Saying “yes” is how things grow. Saying “yes” leads to knowledge. “Yes” is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say “yes.”

And that’s The Word.

I have two last pieces of advice. First, being pre-approved for a credit card does not mean you have to apply for it. And lastly, the best career advice I can give you is to get your own TV show. It pays well, the hours are good, and you are famous. And eventually some very nice people will give you a doctorate in fine arts for doing jack squat.

Query

2006-06-01T11:55:00.000-05:00

If you buy the argument that you have to make exceptions to _______ (Civil liberties, separation of powers, judicial oversight, fill in the blank) in a time of war, as Lincoln suspended habeus corpus, etc. -- how do you reconcile that distinction with our present way of waging war? I'm not talking exclusively about the whole issue of how the "War on Terror" is so vaguely defined as to defy an ending point, though that's a valid question. What I'm curious about is the fact that Presidents have, since the end of WWII, enacted "police action," usually confirmed with a statement of authorization from congress, which the executive branch has almost always said it doesn't really need. Would it not be possible for an executive who was frustrated with shortcomings in intelligence operations to just send troops into whatever country posed a threat, and then to use the wartime circumstances as a reason to increase the executive's power? Or am I missing something?

Reflection after reading Tim's blog and the linked story therein

2006-05-30T11:10:00.000-05:00

Sans Dick Cheney, the Bush administration's evil would have been reduced by a minimum of 75%. The remaining 25% is Karl Rove and his minions of darkness.

Officials obtain court order! AMERICA IN JEOPARDY!

2006-05-25T19:36:00.000-05:00

Okay, this is absolutely absurd. I don't mean absurd in the sense of "horribly warped," but rather in the sense of "makes no sense on any level whatsoever."

As you've probably read, Representative Jefferson's offices were recently searched (and a great many records siezed) as part of an ongoing bribery investigation by the Department of Justice. The reaction of congressmen was immediate, and shockingly bipartisan. Few if any rumbles of payback for the Abramoff brouhaha from GOP members (initially, didn't it seem like that's where the story was gonna go? Dems-are-crooked-too?), but rather a unified front screaming about separation of powers. Led, of all people, by Denny Hastert.

Obviously I'm a left-leaning dude, and I dig separation of powers, and so I guess I'm supposed to feel like, "Yay, our guy is coming out on top," but man, that's not how I feel. First off, it seems massively obvious that Jefferson made some stupid, illegal decisions, and he's paying for them. Second, and I think this is rather crucial: the DOJ got a COURT ORDER for the search.

A court order. Isn't that how such things usually work? I thought that's what we wanted to secure for, like, all that NSA stuff.

Which brings me to the truly absurd portion of this scandal, which is where Bush landed: predictably, on the more popular side of the issue. Quoth he, ordering the documents sealed for whatever reason: "Our government has not faced such a dilemma in more than two centuries."

That's a mindboggling quote. First off, it presumes that this is a larger constitutional question than, say, the Nixon subpoenas (read Final Days for a good explanation of how that hung the separation in the balance) and, I don't know, the secession of the Confederacy, things like that. But no biggie. Why look at ancient history when you have, y'know, a few weeks ago to look at? Somehow Bush has determined that this court-approved search and seizure is a larger threat than, you know, apparently blowing off a law enacted by Congress (FISA), and completely bypassing the courts (warrantless wiretaps). How is two branches working together as structured more of a threat than one branch deliberately bypassing the other two? You can't read and accept Bush's statement with a serious mind and not have your brain explode.

Anyhow, in the interest of clarity, I do want two things explained to me, if you understand them (I mean this seriously) :

1. Is there really a constitutional separation-of-powers breach here? What's the scandal?
2. What's the ostensible merit of sealing the documents for 45 days? To keep personal material from entering the public record, to hide what documents were actually seized? What?

Which is to say, if the issue is "they took politically sensitive documents not contained within the scope of the warrant/investigation," isn't that just going to be ruled on by the court? And if not that... Well, I don't know, I have yet to read an account that really clarifies the situation. Help meee!

Pat Attempts to Grow Up

2006-05-21T15:45:00.000-05:00

In the wake of a conversation I had with Tim yesterday (HI TIM!!!), I am embarking on an enormous project. Namely, to see all the movies that I need to have seen in order to assemble a top 100 list and maintain some degree of legitimacy. Along the way I'm hoping to correct some horribly embarrassing gaps in my cinema history (Psycho? 400 Blows? There are humiliating gaps here... Tim can probably remember more of them) while enjoying movies by folks I already enjoy (still gotta see Shoot the Piano Player and Playtime, although I'm catching Grand Illusion today) and suffering through the Bergman films Tim insists are neccessary. Just kidding, Tim! I love Bergman. Just so much fun...

Anyways, it's going to take me forever, or at least til the end of the summer -- the movies that Tim owns that I am required to see number somewhere in the eighties, I think we figured out, and that figure doesn't include films from the last ten years, which we agreed we should leave out. You know, for the integrity of the list. But I wanted to let you all know that apparently this is how I'm going to be spending way too much of my allegedly free time, in lieu of, y'know, getting a long-term job, moving into the city, or participating in the art form for which I spent four years in training. Woo hoo!

In the words of Tobias Fünke, "LET THE GREAT EXPERIMENT BEGIN!!!"

Sprechen Sie Englisch?

2006-05-19T09:05:00.000-05:00

Well, so it came to this. I don't know that I particularly care about the big-picture idea of an English as the National Language bill. Yes, it's a huge waste of time -- who honestly believes that immigrants/non-English speakers don't know that it's important to learn the language? -- and there are more important matters at stake, but it's not like the Senate's going to require more bulk shipping inspections if they weren't working so hard on this bill, so it's just a different waste of time.

The key language of the bill is the particularly creepy part. Here 'tis, from the Trib article:

Specifically, the bill says that "unless otherwise authorized or provided by law, no person has a right, entitlement or claim to have the government of the U.S. or any of its officials or representatives act, communicate, perform or provide services, or provide materials in any language other than English."

The amendment continues, "If any forms are issued by the federal government in a language other than English . . . the English language version of the form is the sole authority for all legal purposes."

Now, as expected, Senate debate on this was pretty low-level in terms of brain activity... Durbin's point (bilingual signage dramatically reduced deaths in the Potomac), although well-taken, doesn't really apply in this case, since the signage was voluntary. It does seem to rule out the possibility of, say, activist groups suing for similar signage in the hopes of similar progress, but that's another battle.

Where I think the language gets extremely scary is where nobody has the right for any US officials or representatives to act or communicate in any language other than English. While there are some laws on the books (acknowledged here by the "Unless where provided by law," etc.) dictating that, for instance, in Federal court, non-English speakers are required to have translation made available to them, it seems that if a state didn't have a similar law, this provides a theoretical loophole under which a non-English speaker could be arrested, read his rights in English, and never have them explained to him in language he could understand. The dual-language item is just mind-boggling, cruel for the sake of being cruel -- if there are two translations of the same document, there's no reason to say one is the only legal authority unless the translation reads differently, in which case this bill suddenly throws the onus for mistranslation on the reader of such documentation. The potential for abuse of the system is massive, it seems to me.

I'm not, however, a legal authority. Anybody who knows more than I (or has a different read on this), sound off -- I'm curious if this seems as awful as I'm making it out to be.

In any case, I think the bill is unlikely to stand a legal challenge -- sure to give fodder to more idiotic "activist judge" nonsense -- and so, perhaps, it will ultimately be as useless as a "Im'grunts should speak English" statement. Even so. Huge props to my hometown senators (Durbin and Obama) for votin' nae, as well as to Senator Domenici (from New Mexico, and you'd think if this bill was actually necessary and not just an idiotic waste of time at best, New Mexico might be a state that would benefit from it... just a thought) for bucking the party line to be the lone Republican to vote common-sense. A wag of the finger to the Dems who jumped fence for whatever reason, but a surprise kudos to Lieberman for, somehow, not joining his conservative brethren!

This is all I have to say at the moment.

Aaron Sorkin, They Hardly Knew Ye

2006-05-14T20:21:00.000-05:00

Well, I watched a bit of the live West Wing (enough to be irritated by the "YOU'RE A LIAR!" guy in the crowd -- super realistic, guys -- and to realize that Jimmy Smits is as expressive and articulate as a waxen dummy) but this week's finale was my first full episode since Sorkin left the show. I'd been warned off of the fifth season on, but figured, hey, it's a farewell episode, it's gotta be worth something.

Well, let me say this: who knew that people standing around watching TV was so... compelling? Such poignant drama was the linchpin of this historic episode, which cried in its every scene, "These people feel useless and directionless! Watch them dangle and run the clock out! This is what drama was made for!" Apart from the few magical exchanges of dialogue ("How's Sam?" "Engaged." "Good for him!" "You wanna say hi?" [COMICALLY SKEPTICAL LOOK! HA, HA! THE LIGHT TOUCH OF AARON SORKIN LIVES!]), much of this episode lived in the world of a guy who once heard what a Beckett play was like, and then marched off with a bag of Neil Simon plays in order to create his Beckett homage.

We repeatedly see Josh and Donna together. "Yay. They are together." intone the skillful authors and director. We hear a subplot about whether or not Toby (the godlike Richard Schiff, who - God bless him - has been vocal about disliking the post-Sorkin years, and who was subsequently written into SCANDAL AND SHAME) will be pardoned. This particular bit of "tension" involves a Hitchcockian series of scenes in which CJ asks, "Are you going to sign it?" and the President says, "Oh, I don't know, I want to think about it, give me a minute," and then TWENTY MINUTES before the episode ends, he hands it to CJ. Phenomenal structuring, really lets me focus on everybody standing around like you're waiting for detention to end. Rob Lowe shows up to deliver about five lines, to which Jimmy Smits responds, "Fuh fuh fuh fuh fuh fuh fuh," with a performance built to match it.

Another choice scene: CJ leaves the White House for the last time, and a man and his 6-year-old daughter stop her and say, "Do you work there? We saw you coming out of the building, do you work there?" And CJ says, "No... No I don't." "It must be something to work there, huh?" "Must be."

OK, first, nobody has that conversation unless you're TRYING to have that kind of awful, Meaningful-But-Gimpy conversation, and if you're trying, I hate you for it. Second, are you KIDDING me? After four years of Sorkin establishing what kind of character CJ is, she declines to say anything to a six year old girl about the fact that she just spent eight years serving her country? What a bunch of losers.

The episode closes with Bartlet getting a framed copy of the napkin that Leo gave him. It was the one cool thing about the episode, and it made me furious, because they were ripping off both Sorkin and (it felt like it, anyways) John Spencer, a titan of a man. They also had the class to follow this up immediately with this series-ending exchange, which maybe says it all about where the series got to:

Mrs. Bartlet: What are you thinking about?
President Bartlet: Tomorrow.

AN AIRPLANE FLIES ACROSS THE... OCEAN? SKY? WHATEVER. WEST WING THEME SOARS! THE PLANE EXPLODES! RICHARD SCHIFF FLIES THROUGH THE FRAME SOARING ON A PARACHUTE, RED BARON CAP AND GOGGLES ON, A MACHINE GUN BLASTING AWAY AT THE AIRPLANE! THE THEME FROM MISSION IMPOSSIBLE BEGINS TO PLAY! THREE HUNDRED TAP-DANCING GOATS EMERGE FROM THE CLOUDS AND PERFORM "WITH CATLIKE TREAD" FROM "THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE." TEH END!!!

KHAAAAANNNN!!!!

2006-05-12T19:14:00.000-05:00

It seems to me that nothing's quite as disorienting as picking up your box that's meant to contain two 25 pound weights and finding that you can hold it on one finger. Then you look at the UPS label, which clearly reads 3 pounds, and you start to realize that you got screwed hard.

I know I'm stupid to ever assume things on the internet, but come on : if they sell through Amazon, show a picture of a 25 pound weight, and charge just a few bucks less than another 25 pound weight, isn't it fair to assume that that's the weight you're getting? If these punks try to stick me with their shipping costs, I will raise hell.

A quibble

2006-05-11T21:47:00.000-05:00

Do you think Microsoft could possibly improve on a situation wherein if I open a disc up in Explorer, Explorer crashes, and when it reloads anything sitting in the system tray that isn't specifically Microsoft (I'm looking at you, iTunes) vanishes? How about that it NEVER PUTS THEM BACK THERE, even if I close the programs out and restart/minimize them? No? We all think I should just have to restart my computer every time Windows gets confused? Stay classy, Mr. Gates.

As soon as I don't have to be wireless, I'm running the hell back to Linux, I tell you...

In which I continue to canibalize away messages

2006-05-11T21:46:00.000-05:00

I think all of the shows I watch resonate because of where I'm at right now. Lost, obviously, because I spend most of my time in an underground structure pushing buttons in the hopes that something important will happen. Prison Break because, despite insanely numerous setbacks, I'm still plotting to escape this place. And House because I have a rare, hard-to-diagnose pancreatic cancer (somehow located in my BRAIN) causing me to bleed out of my toes.

On the nature of truth

2006-05-11T12:55:00.000-05:00

Bein' as how I'm all switched over to organic meat (Thanks to that rock-solid scaremonger, Eric Schlosser!) and have been thoroughly terrified by the aforelinked book, I was intrigued to find this story in the Chicago Tribune.

If you've read Fast Food Nation, there's nothing new here; just an account of him taking his new, juvenile-oriented book to the schools. Which I dig, given how much of FFN focused on fast food targeting juvenile customers and juvenile employees. But the real meat of the story is the reaction of the industries he attacks in the books. Because, frankly, going after their target demographic is cutting too close to the bone. That they're defending themselves isn't noteworthy, but it's part of a trend that I love to loathe, which is a zesty, proud relativism.

Schlosser talks about the initial reactions to his book in the epilogue of the paperback edition, noting that as much as they decried him as an exaggerator and a boy who cried wolf, nobody challenged the anecdotes, facts, or figures he lays out in the book. By and large, the arguments have been structured as "How could you SAY something like that about us? When we're so cuddly!" Couple that with the rather extensive fundage thrown into lobbying against any real kind of regulation (on the combines who somehow don't show up to bid on cattle at the same time, on increased OSHA oversight, on prohibiting cattle feed from containing, y'know, brains and such), and you get a clear picture of the kind of defense mechanisms in place.

But what's truly astonishing here is that, absent any facts, here we have an industry demanding that their side be covered as well. So you have fliers being handed out, letters to the editor, etc. -- all demanding that the media (and the public) pay attention to their Very Important Side of the Issue. Which, again, has no factual basis, just a gut feeling of "Beef producers good! Independent beef producers bad!" It fits a really disturbing pattern that the media has bought into in varying degrees in the political arena... From issues like Intelligent Design to NSA data mining, we're told again and again that the media just isn't doing an impartial reporting job, being as they are (in Colbert's words) the "fact-based community. And as we all know, facts have a known liberal bias."

It's weird to me that this comes from the bastion of conservativism (or, in the current example, monolithic overly wealthy... well, okay, but they're cut from the same cloth, posing as "Good Heartland Americans" whose Midwestern values stop short of workman's comp) that you would hope would argue that there is demonstrable truth, that there are things which are, and are not. Since when was moral relativism repugnant, but factual relativism okay? Isn't that insane?

Well in any case. This gets me off the hook for posting today. Lap it up, you jackals!

Shorter Alphonso Jackson

2006-05-10T09:45:00.000-05:00

"I hate critics so much I kept one from getting a HUD contract!"
...
"JUST KIDDING! I was trying to demonstrate how partisan people are in Washington."

The Best Picture Ever

2006-05-07T12:32:00.000-05:00

I just can't get over this. Too incredible.

In which I come late to yet another party

2006-05-06T22:20:00.000-05:00

Everybody oughtta read Fast Food Nation, or at least everybody I know. I've meant to read it for quite some time, but I was always under the impression that it was essentially the same material as Super-Size me, albeit perhaps a bit more research-oriented and with a smidge less navel-gazing.

It was an incorrect impression.

The book is a sprawling examination of the fast food industry, but apart from a few tidbits early on dealing with the expected content (Food am make Americans fat! We am disgusting!) it begins to examine how What We Eat gets where it gets. A great deal of focus here lies with employees and employee safety -- some of which resonates far more in the wake of the current conversation on illegal immigration, and shines an gargantuan spotlight on a ten-ton reason why employer responsibility is being shuffled out of the deck for this debate. It offers a searing account of how much the meat-packing and fast-food industries are willing to throw their weight around to protect even the slimmest addition of profit, and given the great number of illegals that work throughout this industry (though Schlosser quotes their employers as shocked, SHOCKED that there are illegals working in the company), it's not hard to see how they benefit by this debate being about the immigrants, not those who (as one meat giant does) set up huge advertisements in MEXICO CITY about how amazing it is to work at, say, Colorado slaughterhouses.

Anyhow. All that said, the book makes the most spectacular case for government regulation that I have ever seen -- though, honestly, it's a topic I haven't exactly sought out -- and the best smackdown of the Magical Invisible Invincible Floating Ghost Hand of the Free Market. It solidified my belief that the greatest evil of the Reagan years was the rebirth of monopolies and a large-scale downsizing of government oversight even where regulations are in place.

As for the food factor, let's just say, there's a very specific set of meat that I will be purchasing in the future, and if the cost increase means I eat less of it, that's probably just as healthy for me.

Seriously, check the book out if you haven't yet. You may disagree with his agenda, but it's incredibly hard to argue with the details and the stories within this book.

Bonus scare factor: Since the meat industry is desperately resisting widespread Mad Cow testing, and since we still don't know what the incubation period is (could be as much as twenty years), we could all have mad cow! Hooray!

Though it's a good excuse as to why I've been so tired lately... And why my brains have been sliding out of my ears...

On a future episode of Lost

2006-05-04T12:00:00.000-05:00

Jack's father gives Hurley a lift to the faith healer's, where he finds Locke and Rose, neither of whom is aware the other is there, because Locke is wearing a duck costume. Picking them up, he's en route back to Sydney when he runs over Shannon's boyfriend, inspiring a confrontation when Boone runs into him back at his hotel. Later, Sayid runs into Jack's father's corpse in an airport bar, where he attempts to blow him up, but Jack's father is saved at the last minute when Jin throws a drink at Sun, who ducks. Jack's father's corpse is drenched, shorting out the explosive device.

Oh, and Claire finds out she's Jack's sister, too, or at least that's how I read the scene in which Jack's father shows up at her artist boyfriend's hoedown gallery opening, at which Michael is calling the square dance while Walt summons "sponge demons," all of whom mysteriously look like Charlie. Who is secretly getting married to Libby by Mr. Eko, shortly before Jack's father drops ten-ton weights on them all, erasing their memories of the event.

The episode's finish? Jack finds a Powerpoint presentation about the Hanso Foundation, revealing his father to be Dr. Hanso himself. Just at that moment, his father (clad in a penguin costume) runs out of the forest, which explodes into flames behind him.

More on that "proof" front

2006-05-04T00:01:00.000-05:00

I have a few pictures of Wex I'm pulling out. This one, for instance, features him plotting his escape from a group of slovenly gentlemen en route to a performance of "Baba O'Riley."

All you bastards are listening now, aren't you?

2006-05-03T23:40:00.000-05:00

Dave Wecsler news, or at least rumors. Claire Wilmouth (an old theatre hand) was in town, so naturally she and I and our acting teacher Cindy Gold went to Steak n Shake to hang out with Nick and Kyle, and somehow we got to talking about the CIA or Homeland Security or some such thing, and I brought up the Long and Twisted Tale of "Sexy Wexy." (If you don't know it, I'll tell the harrowing tale to you some day)

Claire sort of got really alert and leaned in, and asked if I'd said something about him not being in the annual fund database, which of course I had. Was he her year? Yes, he would have been (she being a fifth-year senior in my senior year)... Well, apparently our mutual friend Hannah Schwartz (with whom I haven't spoken in forever) was talking about -- IT APPEARS -- the same person when she met Claire in New York for something or another. Claire said she believed Hannah had said something about him being in Iraq. I'm not entirely convinced this isn't just another theory, or if somebody actually knows something, but at least we have further outside confirmation of Wex's existence.

Kate, if you tell me Hannah worked phone-a-thon, I will cry. I WANT this to be a breaking lead...

Also

2006-05-02T14:53:00.000-05:00

Worth mentioning that I show up prominently for the phrase "Now oportunity wasted."

My favorite thing? I am the first hit for "George Clooney - re Dafur," which I'm sure is going to be an explosively popular Google search as time goes by... But the real gem is that I land as number three for people looking for information on "GEORGE CLOONEY DAFUR stupid."

That's really all I want to say today. Huzzah!

Now I can die a happy man

2006-05-02T14:49:00.000-05:00

This humble blog is officially the #3 hit on Google for "Honky Town." Perfect, no?

Immigration stuff

2006-05-01T19:06:00.000-05:00

Didn't get downtown for the march today (as an artist, my responsibility is to abandon social responsibility and political activism in the aim of furthering my career... You know, like in Russia), but it's prompting a lot of debate around the house today, so a quick thought here, while I can hold one in my brain.

Specifically, it puzzles me that almost all of the get-tough crowd yelling about this one seems to not only focus on the immigrants, but to go out of its way not to address those that employ them. Perhaps this is just overcompensation for the excesses of the House immigration bill (humanitarian aid as a prosecutable offense, etc.), but it's a bizarre blind spot that doesn't speak well to their cause.

The argument for employer-centric reform is pretty simple: if owners weren't willing to provide (and in some cases, advertise that they provide) jobs to illegal immigrants, they'd have no reason to come here, etc. It's a funny turnaround from "They hate our freedoms" to "They only want to come here for money; absent that, they have no cause," but whatever, there's some truth to it. This is certainly a reasonable area to look for some reforms; the majority of these jobs are in the service industry, where more stringent restrictions on labor usage, while not terribly owner-friendly, isn't the kind of problem that's likely to force business overseas. Unless you want to mail your house to India for a lawn trim. So while you might see some local fluctuation in the pricing on catering, things like that, putting harsh pressure on management and owners to hire only documented, legal immigrants (or, y'know, just plain old citizens) shouldn't spell catastrophe.

Even so, the most acerbic anti-illegal-immigrant writings lately seem to brush aside the idea of penalizing AMERICANS for exploiting immigrants. The best (or at least most fun) example I can think of is in a Krauthammer article in which he posited that a huuuuge concrete wall on the border would solve, like, everything, and about three paragraphs in magically evaporates this issue with a simple "Forget employer sanctions. Build a barrier." He, however, at least addresses the issue, arguing that border control is government's job, employers shouldn't have to sort this out -- a bewildering position, to say the least, and besides, shouldn't the invisible floating hand of the free market be able to solve our border troubles?

Does this mean we should slam enormous fines on a small businessman who gets fed falsified paperwork for his employees, sets aside their federal and state withholdings, and only discovers their illegal status when the INS comes a-knockin'? Of course not, that's not at all what we're talking about. The people we should be targeting in this debate (and in this legislation) are those who hire illegal immigrants because they're cheaper, they can pay them off the books, without worrying about minimum wage, etc. To ignore this enormous part of the equation is to pretty much ensure we'll be having this debate again down the road.

Shorter Dennis Byrne (Is it necessary? Probably not)

2006-05-01T19:04:00.000-05:00

High school football games sucked at Soldier Field, ergo its existence dishonors World War II veterans.

This has happened before, and it will happen again

2006-04-27T19:40:00.000-05:00

The next time I'm abandoned on an island, I'm gonna have all the stranded people who landed with me sing "I Believe (When I Fall In Love)" while we gather vegitation, before catapaulting one of us into St. Paul's Cathedral. This dream was an omen.

In defense of celebrity

2006-04-27T16:21:00.000-05:00

Man, I hope I never get famous. It's so bizarre that in our cultish celebrity-worshiping society, the greatest sin a star (rock, film, basically anything but literary, and even there it's suspect) can do is give an interview where they express an opinion about Life, Politics, Etc.

Case in point, and the reason for this rant (Chris points out that most of my posts here are rants... true! But I remain a happy person, who doesn't feel that "I really like pie" is much of a reason to blog), from the Chicago Tribune's blog The Swamp:

“I think Sen. Obama should be president!” Clooney declared. “I'm a huge fan of the guy's.”
...
"But I wish he would run in 2008. I really wish he would,” Clooney said. “I haven't talked to him about it – this is just me, it's my wish list! – but Kennedy was his age. He only had been a one-term senator, why not?"

First off, let me just say that I like George Clooney. He seems like a good guy, and the reason he was even talking today is that he and his father had returned from Dafur and were trying to raise profile of the massive trauma that region has been crippled by. Anybody who tries to get that story through to these kids (with their hippin' and their hoppin') on their MTV is right on in my book.

Ah, but the gaffe drew fire. Naturally, Illinois' citizenry was furious that their hometown boy would be championed by a Hollywood Lib'rul:

Please keep me informed when George Clooney, Alec Baldwin, Barbra Streisand, et al decide who the next Vice President, governor of Illinois, and dog catcher. I'm REALLY interested in their opinions, because they're just SO important.

Another favorite:

Abama for President? Clooney must know, after all, he's on TV and everyone likes him. I agree, make Obama president of AlecBaldwinian where Alec, George, Rosie, and Barbara can go create their perfect world.

Well anyways. The most thoughtful comments here basically said, "Isn't the point here Dafur, why can't we focus on what he ostensibly went there to discuss?" And I think those folks are right on the money (as opposed to those who really really really didn't understand why these anti-Iraq people are all about saving the Africans now). But this is a point that's bothered me for some time (I think since Victor Davis Hanson did a surprisingly smarmy, condescending column on it -- shocking, I know), which is that I think it's profoundly unfair to pretend celebrities have any less right to talk about their views than anybody else. I don't care if we're talking about Ron Silver and (prior to his entry into public life) Arnold Schwarzenegger or Barbara Streisand and George Clooney.

The issue is one of balance, it seems to me. First off, I think it's a bit silly that none of these furious voices arise when, say, a small businessman or farmer is quoted in the primaries as saying why they support Senator Whomever... It seems off-kilter to me to gripe that when celebrities are asked similar questions, they actually respond. It's not clear to me how Silver or Clooney are any less qualified to react to the politics of the moment than I or my brother are... We're told they're "aloof" and "wealthy elites," as if that somehow distinguishes them from the bigwigs throwing soft money around every two years come the fall.

But that wouldn't bother me quite so much if it wasn't just their specifically political viewpoints that came under attack, but their actual efforts to do good. I'm as cynical as the next fellow, but when Victor Davis Hanson responds to Sean Penn's trips to Iraq and New Orleans by snorting about a "high school dropout" with an enormous ego, that sets me off somewhat. If a high school dropout had, say, left his small business for a week to go to New Orleans and help rescue efforts, he'd be crowned a hero -- we saw stories like this about dozens of ordinary folk who pulled out and Did What They Thought They Could For Others.

But a rich movie star? Obviously an attention hog. I mean, the guy goes in front of cameras for a LIVING, he probably just wanted to get all over the news. Because, y'know, recent Oscar winners really have a need for good PR.

Look, the bottom-line thing here is a systemic problem with America's celebrity culture. David Milch talks about it in context of Deadwood's handling of Wild Bill Hickock, arguing that our adoration of celebrities is paired by a deep-seated pathological need to see them fall from glory. The gossip mags LOVE Tom Cruise -- so they love it all the more when he has a meltdown. They love Nicole Kidman, but just imagine how much they'd love her if she got drunk in public and attacked Wallace Shawn! I think what bothers a lot of people about celebrities who are active in the political sphere (or even in spheres that shouldn't be political, but somehow have become political -- see Dafur, see New Orleans) is that they're failing to let us truly loathe them and hunger for their demise.

After all, wouldn't the world be a better place if Sean Penn had just stayed at home, bathing in diamonds?

A more full knowledge of my dreams

2006-04-24T15:31:00.000-05:00

Again, just a random dream. One of the more complete renditions I have been able to recall in recent months.

I'm in a competitive improv musical, in which Nick starts cheating by singing material that he obviously wrote ahead of time. I strike back with selections from the Dinosaur Musical. The next morning, back at NU, I complain to Mary Poole that SHE was cheating against me in a competitive improv battle, and she reassures me that it's okay, because she knows that all the incoming freshmen will be coming to us about safety tips, thanks to the competitive improv show. Jon Berry is wandering around the offices, taping newspaper over all the windows. I go to my dorm room (located now in the designers' area) and find Kevin Smith there with a group of 20 Indian children who he's trying to introduce to the music of Sufjan Stevens. As I joke about him starting with Enjoy Your Rabbit, one of the kids is informed that his white blood count is way down, and shows us all a set of syringes that Dr. House let him use, all of which are filled with an organic halucinogen. I wake up at this point.

So, about three generations of Pat's life, and a pair of art forms thrown in as well! This is the second night in a row I've had a dream involving a TV show (the other being a dream in which I was in Lost and Locke was cloning copies of himself... tres creepy), so take that for what it's worth.

Nothing. It is worth nothing.

Two things, one bad

2006-04-17T21:07:00.000-05:00

Thing one: Ryan's guilty on all counts. It's kind of refreshing to see a rich old white guy face consequences for his actions, but let's not kid ourselves. Sentencing has yet to be done, and anyone who doesn't see the appeal on this one lasting until Ryan expires hasn't been paying attention. My call: Ryan gets a moderate sentence (not the max 20 for racketeering, as it seems like the prosecution didn't ram the licenses-for-bribes scandal down juror's throats in an attempt to link his involvement with the deaths caused by illegal truckers), but it's sent back for a retrial within the year when an appellate court rules that the dismissal of two jurors after a lengthy start to the deliberations should have constituted a mistrial.

Then again, maybe not. Hopefully I'm wrong on that count.

Thing two: It's not a new story, but the Times piece puts a little more out there on what the Trib reported a few weeks back. Essentially, the psychotic Reverend of Westbro Baptist Church (home of God Hates Fags - check out their web page, it's a real charmfest, especially the broken link that's supposed to lay out their reasons for using "fag") has rallied his troops to start -- you guessed it -- shoving their hate down the throats of Iraq casualties' families!

Yes, courtesy of yet another fringey insane Christeo-fascist (this blog is inventing all kinds of words for this post) group, we're treated to the nuanced theological position that not only does God really really really hate fags, he's also very interested in killing anybody who serves in the US Military, as (after all) this is such a fag-loving nation. Even YOU (you liberal elitist latte-snorting blue staters) cannot deny the depths of America's love for the gay communities, eloquently expressed in the words and actions of its leaders, particularly Rick Santorum. Apparently God's wrath is only falling on our servicemen in Iraq, not the policymakers or bureaucrats running, you know, the domestic end of things.

This group's position (touted on their website as "a profound theological statement, which the world needs to hear more than it needs oxygen, water and bread") is anti-Christian, to say the least. Even if Biblical teachings on homosexuality are granted to be straightforward, clear and damning, the group's teachings demonstrate a fundamental, mind-bogglingly stupid understanding of Christianity. The central thesis of Christianity (as generally as I think it is understood) has to do with grace in the face of unattainable expectations. Christ's revisions to historical Judaic theology made it significantly more difficult to obey even the most out-there commandments (one interesting example: if you look with contempt on another person, you'll be judged. Interesting, no?) by way of driving home the idea that all of humanity is sinful, and only through grace can we be saved from ultimate judgment.

How exactly this tenet translates into Jesus picking off U.S. soldiers one by one is beyond me. What's even better is that this group has made their hateful mission the ultimate message (more necessary than oxygen, etc.), because apparently by their thinking, earthly condemnation and spewing vile rhetoric is far more important than, y'know, saving souls. But that's cool, I guess, it's not like Christianity was ever about saving sinners, more about screaming at them and generally discrediting your faith.

Well, anyways. I know nobody takes these people seriously, but it's thoroughly depressing that "God hates troops" is going to join the ranks of the rest of the loony fanatics who get air time by wrapping their psychosis in the garb of the church. What a wretched, myopic, vengeful, hypocritical batch of thugs.

Sometimes all you can do is sit in your room and swear and kick things.

Honky Town

2006-04-15T11:03:00.000-05:00

Anybody else think that Dairy Queen's new Caramel MooLatte smoothie is possibly the worst branding ever? If you don't know what I'm talking about, sound it out.

Lists released! Nerds in uproar!

2006-04-13T17:05:00.000-05:00

Side note: I am experimenting with hyperlinks. It was too much for this posting, so I only did it where it seemed necessary, or excessive. What are you gonna do about it?

I don't know why this didn't seem inevitable, but the WGA has their own top 100... and one... Greatest Screenplays List.

My initial reaction was mixed, but it's getting better the more I think about it and re-read the list. First off, to tackle the obvious: subjectivity, blah blah blah, and that number one spot is always going to be contentious. When I first read the list, I thought, "Give me a break... Casablanca?" And hustled over to imdb.com to pull some quotes to back up my assertion, ready to say that aside from "Here's looking at you, Kid," "Play it again, Sam," and "Round up the usual suspects," (all of which -- I still contend -- are more iconic than they are phenomenal lines) the dialogue ain't that great.

Well, of course I forgot that there are a good number of great exchanges therein (my personal favorite being Rick's "I came to Casablanca for the waters," "The waters? What waters? We're in the desert?" "I was misinformed."). Even so, I don't know about number one.

But that's kind of what I dig about this list. More than general movie lists, or genre lists (coming soon: AFI's top 100 Sci-Fi-Western hybrid films), something this specific forces you to really look at the movies on the list, breaking them down a bit. It's an inverse-Blink exercise, forcing at least a minor amount of examination of your preferences and breaking them down into their core components. This is actually one of the reasons I still don't know about Casablanca; I think without Bogart, given the film's period, most of those lines don't become the perfectly-delivered clips we know and love today. But enough about that movie! Let's look at the list as a whole.

First, obviously, this is a list of English-language films. Er, American films. Wait, it's got and 8 1/2 and La Grande Illusion in it? Well, shut my mouth! I guess it is a comprehensive list incorporating world cinema. Too bad no other foreign films are brilliantly written.

But snobbery aside, there's some cool stuff going on in this list. The sheer number of Woody Allen nods would be wearying if they weren't all so right, and the recent additions include a few pleasant surprises, most notably Eternal Sunshine. It's a high position (as opposed to Sideways' squeaker) that will probably fall as years pass, but I think a solid pick. A few of these picks read as obvious concessions to popularity (remember the sheer wit and bite of that Wizard of Oz screenplay?) and some are downright... weird... but on the whole, it's a fun list. Which we will all pick apart in our own various ways. (Example: Where's sex, lies and videotape? And why is Do The Right Thing below Forest Gump?)

My personal gripe? This is not a list that likes directors. The action-film romp-fests aside, there aren't a lot of films on here that are identified by their directors. I'm thinking specifically of the Anderson Not-Brothers, Linklater and Altman here. With the Andersons, obviously we're just overlooking full-fledged writer-directors, but I think the exclusion of all the major (and minor) Altman/Linklater points to an avoidance of director-heavy movies. You can't tell me that of Before Sunset/Sunrise, Dazed and Confused, MASH, Nashville, The Player, and Short Cuts (to say nothing of lesser-known movies), none of those screenplays deserved a nod. Ahead of, say, Shakespeare in Love. Like the Chris Guest films, I think the knowledge of improvisation as a tool in creation of these films probably hurt their chances at making the list, though there's more insightful dialogue in some of their films than most films on this list.

Anyways, that's a totally self-absorbed point. The real question is, what's the next interesting list you'd like to see? Best 100 shot films? 1,001 best directed films? 10 films that should lead to the public execution of Christopher Columbus? 10 films that will someday lead to the public execution of Rob Marshall? Let's pretend this is worth talking about. Also, what YOU want to complain about regarding this list.

UPDATE: For those of you following the "Stone Columbus" links, I am aware that Bicentennial Man shows up twice. At first it was a mistake, but now it's making a point. If you don't buy that, remember that I could have pulled out Home Alone 2, Harry Potter 2 (Featuring the most massive disdain for the audience possible, in one lengthy sequence of shots that convey the same information, like, twelve times), or "Reckless" -- I'm just guessing on the last one. I exempted Mrs. Doubtfire because without her, we wouldn't have Mrs. Featherbottom and her glorious plummet into the coffee table.

LOST: SECRETS REVEALED!

2006-04-13T16:47:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm sure you've all seen Chris's post on the poisoned-pineapple season finale by now. If you haven't, feel free to check out his link. I have only a few things to add, having reviewed his source work.

First off, I think the strong points are obvious. Yes, a second crashed plane is hands-down the exciting development of the impending episode. I find it more shocking that this plane is filled with snakes, all of whom have koala bears living in their stomachs. What's the story there? Surely it's meant to connect to the backstory about Mr. Eko starting that koala zoo in Nigeria (be on alert for bittersweet irony alert for season 3, now that he's got the koalas he couldn't get in Australia), but how is this going to build in seasons to come? Maybe eventually this will be the source of the Season Seven Zombies that the writers have been "joking" about.

Anyhow, I can't disagree more with Chris about the crucifixion of Charlie. After making a lot of noise about how Monaghan has a home on Lost for as long as he wants, he's the perfect surprise death, and personally, I think any time a character slathers on the insanity sauce, Lost gets better.

Third appendages is very cool. Now it seems pretty obvious why they've been dropping in all those shots of Sawyer stashing away hand lotion from the plane... Sounds like somebody's gonna clean up! Though I hope the rumors about Jack saying "Could you use a hand" being foreshadowing are wrong. That's just painfully obvious.

Not an awful lot else to say here... I am surprised Chris didn't blog a lot about Hurley starting the hand-made jam business, but I guess that's sort of the last couple episodes, not just the last one. Why on earth Libby had to hypnotize him in order to start the venture is beyond me... Probably has something to do with the jungle gym she found by that "Cerebrus" marking on Locke's map, or maybe (this is a long shot) it connects to that whispered conversation she had with Jin about the trampolines buried by the Black Rock where Hanso is supposed to be.

Anyways. I know knowing the twists kind of ruins the show, but I can't wait to see how the writers carry us through this plot with their trademark wit and verbal sparring! Woo hoo!

Dreamer in my Dreams

2006-03-09T00:19:00.000-06:00

Heya hey. Big update coming sooner or later here, but at the moment way too much is up in the air to really be able to post about anything. So, instead, here is a dream I had. Again, from the away message.

I just dreamt I was in my third production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, still playing Reuben (I've played him twice before, "Those Canaan Days" being the operative song). Of course, this version was absolutely unstaged and unchoreographed. Kevin Smith was doing sound, and the cast was comprised of NU and WN folk. Also, we were performing it in the Middle East, and its production immediately followed me uncovering some satanic plot or another (side note: this is literally satanic, not like devilish and/or cunning). It was weird.

More dreams, and also a question

2006-02-28T12:40:00.000-06:00

Continuing my blogging technique of porting over away messages that I'd like to hang on to, but am too lazy to write down, here is a highlights reel of my dream of last night.

Odd parts of last night's dream:
1. Acting with Terry Kinney
2. Punching Amy Morton in the face
3. Injecting myself with some amber-liquid-filled syringe just because Robert Sean Leonard wouldn't tell me what was in it.

There was also a riot caused by these activities during which my military companions kept yelling "Black Hawk Down!"

The riot was, as I recall, reminiscent of the "IM-HO-TEP" mobs in The Mummy.

I have no idea. (I also remember now that John Dixon did some variety of interpretive dance to make fun of the show we were rehearsing. I don't know where that fit into the narrative.)

So there's that. Also, this: How much is too much to pay for framing my The Time Of Your Life poster? Remember: it and the faux-Kandinsky are my two most sentimental things I stick on walls!

Scuzz-tastic!

2006-02-22T16:35:00.000-06:00

From today's Tribune, in a tiny corner article:

"President Bush's new energy program banks on new technologies with a long-term payoff in improving the nation's energy picture, such as expanded ethanol production, hydrogen cars, more powerful batteries, nuclear power and renewable fuels.

Yet Bush's budget shows that programs to increase the energy efficiency of buildings, appliances and vehicles--which their advocates say represent the only way to reduce energy demand in the short run--are being cut back sharply.

In addition, these advocates say, the president could reduce the nation's gasoline demand more swiftly by dramatically strengthening fuel-economy standards for gas-guzzling vehicles, but the administration is unlikely to make more than modest changes in the mileage standards this year."

Well then. Surprised?

More like, FATtlestar GaLAMEtica!

2006-02-19T00:57:00.000-06:00

Well I was curious about the show, having read about it in the New Yorker and the Chicago Tribune. Enough people from different publications/backgrounds/styles had been saying it's a veddy veddy good show to make me think something had to be up, so I thought I'd download an episode or two (or, as it turned out, the first season) to see how I liked it.

VERY MUCH.

This stuff is so smart in so many ways -- yes, it has the requisite cheesy Adventure Movie standards (sassy lovers, clash between military/politicians, etc.) but along the way it digs into some serious issues about human nature, religion, civil liberties, the value of life... And what's fantastic is that, unlike Star Trek (which I dig, but it's totally different), it explores those themes only laterally. That is to say, no part of the pilot becomes, "Are humans destructive? Are the Cylons just?" to an overt level. No, everybody's pretty good about focusing on getting their survival (or annihilation) on, and along the way we whip past some very fascinating stuff. It also has the good sense to mess with you, as with the Crucible-esque stranding of the journalist "Cylon."

It's also just really stylish. I'm sure eventually all of today's sci-fi stuff will feel as campy as old 60s Treks do now, but musically, visually, and in literary terms, it's pretty forward-looking and action-driven. Performances are, by and large, quite solid (with a few standouts in the bunch, of course... I like the fellow who got exiled in the pilot, Edward James Olmos, the dude who plays his son, and a few others) and it's just riveting good story. Mankind has to run for its life? There's no negotiation, it's run forever or hide forever? Way cool.

Anyways. This is, to my mind, a good argument for this bittorrenting thing I do. Now, once in a while, I just take a leap of faith and buy something I've heard amazing things about -- or, in the case of Deadwood, my friends take that leap of faith for my birthday present -- and it sometimes works out phenomenally (Deadwood) and sometimes sort of meh (at least a dozen of my DVDs). The end result is, I'm less likely to pop out and buy a $40 TV show series on DVD if I haven't seen it at all. Now, having seen the pilot of Battlestar Galactica, I'm going into work tomorrow and buying the entire first season, sight (partially) unseen. It's like Lost was last year, and the way Arrested Development and The Office were the year before that.

Essentially, by sampling these things online in a legally dubious manner (I still hold that after they air, before they're commercially available, it's legally grey... especially since I live in a household that picks up literally two channels, PBS and ABC, it's not like Fox loses ad impact because I don't see what they air on AD) I end up boosting their end-product DVD sales. Not just me, either: after we got into AD and Office, both myself and Kyle (and Adam, at least for the Office) bought the DVD sets. Without the internet? We're gone, we don't see the show, we don't bother to tape a show we've heard of but haven't seen... Well, it goes on, this justification.

Even so. That's why I'm a huge fan of all the iPod video store/Google video store, because it makes that stuff available... Sure, there's a nominal fee, but I'm way more likely to pay $1-2 to sample a show I'm interested in than I am to go out and pay $40 right off the bat. Woo hoo for the internet!

And as a total sidebar (to the sidebar that these last few paragraphs have been), a double woo-hoo for Google putting the current Charlie Rose videos on for free. That's so cool it makes my brain explode.

Quote

2006-02-15T13:35:00.000-06:00

Two long, rambling posts in a row! Three, if you count the old one. Or four. This blog is drowning in its own filth! Anyways, responding further to Tim's posting, here's an excellent Charles Mee quote, part of which is on my Facebook profile, so I'm sorry, but that doesn't immediately mean it's awful, so lay off already! It comes from a Brecht-like figure, the director of a state theatre company in East Germany after the wall came down, who's basically sitting in a chair confessing his sins/crimes/what have you. It's the best 20-minute monologue ever, and here is a slice:

I mean one could say
what is an artist anyhow
in essence
if not a supporter of the status quo
since it would be hard to argue that a work of art can change history
and therefore, ipso facto
a work of art is an exercise in accepting things as they are
which is, in and of itself
a way of supporting the status quo.

You have all these artists who like to say of themselves
well, I am changing the world
and if they like to say it
there is no harm in it
except that it's not true
and it gets an artist in the habit of lying
and expecting his lies to be accepted
so that, when his lies are not accepted
he is in a snit

Or not, or not
it may be that a work of art contributes
to the common discourse of the culture
and so, in some modest way,
supports or undermines the status quo
but really so what?
I mean if you really care
whether this fellow on the street has no food or clothes
the most useful thing to do is not to put on a play
but give him food.

I know the arguments for art
I've made them all myself.

Tim causes me to blog all over myself

2006-02-15T12:49:00.000-06:00

So I'm enjoying my day off, checkin' my blogs, and all of a sudden Tim's got this TREMENDOUSLY provocative post up about Art, Politics, and Context. Well, not context specifically, but that's what my brain jumped to. I started to post a comment on his blog, but then I thought, two birds with one stone, I'll just get it on my blog, keep his comments section nice and clean and keep Chris from yelling at me about Teh Blog.

Let's start with a good Timquote.

To start off, I have some questions that I think bear asking, some to clarify terms and semantics, some to direct discussion
-What precisely is meant by the words "art" and "politics"?
-Can a work of art be a political act? Is a work of art necessarily a political act? Is satire a political act, or "mere" commentary?
-Is it best to treat a work of art in terms of how it speaks to the society of its creation, in terms of the critic's society, or in terms of some "universal" timelessness?
-If we view polemical art not in terms of its political ramifications (whether through ignorance or chronological/geographical separation), do we do it a disservice, missing its authorial intent; or do we do it a service, transcending it beyond a limited application?

That's a gigantic hunk of rhetorical meat, and I'm just going to metaphorically pick at the last literary "rib tip," if you will. Because by god, I have a college degree, and if it didn't prepare me for the job market, it sho' nuff prepared me to engage in haughty discussions on just this type of topic.

In short: We do not, I feel, do it a service. Now, I don't think we do it a disservice either (per se), but my reasoning here comes almost entirely from my personal experience as a practitioner. A good place to start? My experience as a Director, which is miserable and also pretty fantastic/cool.

In most theatre, research is the stronghold, the base on which to build a production. Now, obviously if Neil Simon writes a new play (Yuppies in love! In, uh, Mongolia! And they're snowbound!) this isn't as fertile a field to harvest, but almost any production I've been involved in at any level has been rooted in research. You can set Hamlet on Mars, but it helps before you make that decision to know what was going on when it was written, why it was written, who was involved, if there were earlier drafts that hinted at overtly political/sociological themes, etc.

This is not entirely a self-absorbed bloat-and-think fest. The amount of details to be selected, the sheer number of choices to be made during a several-weeks rehearsal, demands an almost obsessive knowledge of the work itself, and if any scrap of detail exists that might give you a hint as to why there's a comma in the middle of that line, or why this character keeps talking about potatoes, you want to have access to it. Without knowing why and how a piece was written, you deprive yourself of essential tools to decode why things happen within that piece's world. As I'm speaking about Hamlet, let's use a famous example: Fortinbras' meeting with Hamlet. This is a scene that is cut from an unbelievably enormous number of Hamlet productions, and yet when Brecht wrote one of his most famous fables (the most useful tool I know of to distill a dramatic work to its essence) on the piece, the encounter is the most important moment in the play:

"Overcome by this warrior-like example, he [Hamlet] turns back and in a piece of barbaric butchery brings about the death of his uncle, his mother, and himself, leaving Denmark to the Norwegian."

Now there's a change. This kind of interpretation can only be accessible to an artist/director through study of the manuscript in detail (A causes B causes C, etc.) but also, crucially, through an understanding of the piece's place in history, and of the social forces in existence when it was created.

A non-dramatic way of looking at this need is apparent in what was actually one of my favorite artistic experiences ever: working on Shostakovich's 5th Symphony while playing horn for the Chicago Youth Symphony. It is a monstrously complicated, demanding, and brilliantly acerbic piece... Pretty compelling stuff, dynamite to listen to right out of the gate. Musically, just spectacular. Now, when we worked on this piece, we were under the baton of Rossen Milanov, a Bulgarian conductor who grew up with a very real, personal history with the Soviet Bloc. I don't know that any music-oriented approach to the piece would have been more effective than his, which was to carve out, in detail, the forces Shostakovich was reacting to, and commenting on, in his work. Suddenly, the discordant military march of the second movement meant something terribly specific; the crashing finale, with fortissimo major chords going ON and ON underneath a shattering, steady timpani beat, was no longer a triumph ("of man," Shostakovich wrote at the time, appealing to the censors and selling the piece as about birth and life, nothing political at all!) but the fascist powers-that-be pounding Shostakovich into a happy ending (his previous works had been shredded by Pravda), and the piece just bled with history and vitality.

So.

As an artist? Not deliberately and aggressively seeking out the context of a piece of art is, I would argue, a great disservice. As an audience member, I don't think it's quite as true; the greatest works of art do indeed seem to escape the orbit of their time and context and become "universal," but as has been argued on Tim's blog and elsewhere, frequently this universiality is achieved only through painstaking detail and specificity. Aguirre, the Wrath of God says an awful lot more about mankind's instincts and the evil we do to those around us by showing a man going (staying?) insane in the jungle (on a raft, surrounded by monkeys) than that one movie about the cop who has to get that killer who's killing all those people in mildly novel ways. You know what I'm talking about, right?

Well in any case. I don't expect an audience (or filmgoer, or visitor to a gallery) to contextualize art. Great art can exist in a vacuum. But adding the specifics of history can in no way, to my certain knowledge, detract one iota from that art's power, and almost always enhances its effectiveness to move and impact us. When I hear Shostakovich, I hear him differently than I heard him before learning about his work's birthplace; when I read Chekhov, the faint stirrings of revolution are more palpable, and the work becomes work about isolation and fear, not inertia. And when I see Confusions of a Wasted Youth, I am moved to laughter and tears, knowing how fat and skinny the lead actor was over the approximately 5 years of shooting.

Anyways. There were more points up top, and I'll probably post on them eventually, but at this point this post is looking pretty insufferable and awful, so I'm gonna cap it off here for now. Comments are welcomed! For example: how do you create that jump page? These posts are crazy-long, and suck. I'll save the snazzy quote for the next post.

A shorter, more typically irritable post

2006-02-09T14:40:00.000-06:00

UPDATE: As Chris pointed out to me, this post is no longer shorter. It is, however, perfectly in line with the whining irritability I refer to in the post's title. I regret the error.

Huge kudos to the Evangelical group that is taking out ads and mounting a campaign to fight greenhouse emissions and, y'know, save Planet Earth. I am proud (for these few minutes) to hail from Wheaton, from which college President Litfin joined others in stating their belief that since God appointed man to run earth, they'd do well not to trash the place.

And yet, halfway through the Trib article, I managed to get mad. Here's what sent me a-growlin':

"But environmental issues have proved divisive within the body of believers who identify themselves as evangelicals. Some who believe the world is in the "end times," with a return of Jesus imminent, have not seen the necessity of protecting the environment for the long term."

Yes, it's the lunatic "values" coalition, which we find later in the article includes James Dobson and Chuck Colson, who apparently pressured the National Association of Evangelicals not to come out with a similar statement. (Side note: Colson baffles me. I dig the dude's prison ministry, and he's the one notably political Christian to have said, in the wake of '04, "Let's not be total jerks, and let's not be arrogant and demand an agenda." Plus he's a Nixon man, and if you know me, you know I adore them.)

What absolute braindead claptrap. This is the kind of reasoning you expect from the reamining brain cell of a 16 year old after an all-night drinking binge, not from men who purport to honor and respect a powerful God whose mercies they sometimes skip over in favor of focusing on his wrath. You really have to set aside a plethora of biblical parables (y'know, stories Jesus said an' whatnot) that repeatedly say, "HEY! BE GOOD STEWARDS!" in order to come to this bizarre, irresponsible, and fundamentally self-centered egomaniacal position. There's even a parable about people waiting for the bridegroom's return that fall asleep in the eleventh hour!

But then, perhaps I'm forgetting about the "Parable of the Master who wanted his servants to care for his sheep, but then since he was going to be home in an hour, they ate all the sheep and threw the wool in the incinerator and he came back and was like, "Dudes, you made it til like the last minute, that ROCKS!" and then they all had a big party."

This is my beef with the public face of the Religious Right, is that they've taken these bizarre, power-mongering positions that are totally at odds with a good healthy percentage of Christ's teachings on the poor (help 'em) and the proud (not so great). For all the ruminating done on Paul's writings on homosexuality, it strikes me that you never hear Dobson, Roberts, and the rest of the loons out there, talk much about the pharisees, who were not so much Christ's cup of tea. Something about being interested only in their own glorification and status and, uh, something about displeasing God, I forget what.

In any case. It would be great if these alleged leaders did right by themselves, stopped presenting a bigoted and self-centric warping of Christianity to the world at large, and occasionally referenced the entirety of the Book whose truths they claim to profess. Because when that gets going, you can get some cool schwag out of it, and a little less Eeevil.

In any case. Halelujah for them righteous brothers coming down on the right side of science and faith, a shout-out to Prez Litfin, and here's hoping that this particular values-laden movement will gain some traction and make a difference!

Dreaming for Posterity

2006-02-09T14:37:00.000-06:00

Again, I post here a dream I had last night, not because it's worth reading, but because I'm too lazy to write it down on paper, and I had to change my away message. Here it is. I take great joy in the fact that nobody reading this blog can share all points of reference needed in order to understand fully this dream's emotional weirdness. Huzzah!

An actual dream about getting a new job (it was at NU, and involved me calling extremely important celebrities in the middle of the night, dealing with them yelling at me, and writing down their reports - were they covert operatives? they acted like it, when they weren't mad about me waking them up - and hiking through the midnight snow to deliver them to dorm rooms) transitioned not just through college, but into Nicollet Jr High, where I had to race from one end of the building to the other in order to make it to the first day of Show Choir, where Mr. Woodward was ringing a bell to summon all the previous year's members in to judge us in our first performance.

I did make a stop through NU at some point, but that part of the dream has faded, and is no longer memorable.

What's this all mean? Probably nothing, although I will say that I woke up from the "this is your life" experience feeling as well rested as I've felt in weeks. How do you like those apples in particular?

Prickly City: Hatred Abounds!

2006-01-26T13:16:00.000-06:00

Just a quick post on my way into work: Not that anybody has been keeping tabs on this, but Prickly City is officially my least favorite comic strip, ever, ever, ever. This little snarky, smarmy, meanspirited strip has been running in the Trib for about a year now, and after today's actually libelous strip ("Not one Democratic Senator/Congressman took Abramoff's money!" "But eighty did!" "Well that's not one, is it?" "And you call Bush a liar?") I am incredibly angry.

Beside the obvious problem (Democrats took money from the tribes Abramoff represented, but, uh, of his many campaign donations -- including his Bush Pioneer donations -- absolutely none went to the Dems. "And we call Bush a liar?" Well, maybe. You, though, sure), the strip exemplifies the whole comic's style, which is similar to the columnist style I just wrote about: wildly misrepresent the opposition's position (or, failing that, just change the facts) and then act like they're CRAZY to believe what they believe! My favorite such example was after Katrina, when while even Republicans were saying, "say, oughtn't the federal government have taken a more active interest in this?" Scott "Dickhead" Stantis had a really top-notch comic in which he basically griped, "Why are people saying President Bush willed the hurricaine into existence? Oh, those absurd Democrats!"

In other enjoyable columns (er, cartoons! cos they have "jokes!"), Stantis has defended the right of conservatives to admire Rosa Parks (a TOTALLY REBELLIOUS position which liberals apparently don't let them hold) and has chastised women's rights groups for calling for the firing of some college coach for sexual harrassment when they TOTALLY ENDORSED (in his words) "a sexual predator and suspected rapist" when he ran for President! Ha, ha!

Well, long story short, the man's an enormous ass who really needs to shut the f*ck up and invest in some non-bowtie neckwear, and get the hell off the comics page. If he has to stick around and join the political fray with Boondocks and Doonesbury -- because I'm seriously not at all opposed to a conservative counterpoint to those strips, just something, uh, intelligent and a little less slap-fighty -- it would be nice to see him (a) develop actual humor, and (b) get his facts straight. But then, I'm a wigged-out PC liberal lunatic, as exemplified by my suspicion that this administration has occasionally had reliability and trust issues. And therefore, who gives a damn what I think?

UPDATE: This site gives you a good thumbnail description of the fellow. I think you'll find the start of the second paragraph enlightening.

Blagojevich: Let Us Make Stew of their BONES!

2006-01-18T22:45:00.000-06:00

So obviously I'm a left-leaning dude (I don't think I'm far-left, just that the reigning GOP leadership has slipped off the rails altogether), but I enjoy a good buffoon on the Left as much as I do on the right, which is why I took so much pleasure from today's news that Rod Blagojevich's brainlike object had cooked up a new scheme: Keno! Like they do in Michigan! To fund... whatever!

My gut reaction to state-sanctioned gambling is pretty much always the same -- slap forehead, groan -- because it just reeks of oportunism. Anybody who's spent ten minutes in an off-track betting parlor (or a day watching lottery tickets being sold) can tell you that the gambling customer, apart from returning addicts and the occasional "What the hell, it's fun" wealthy dude, is the impoverished. I've gone into an OTB in the Loop, spent a good 20-30 minutes wandering around with my friend Ross, and pretty much everybody in the place was thoroughly lower-class, none of the white, middle-class yuppies we'd been walking with on State Street moments earlier. Generally, apart from actual Destination Casinos (Vegas, basically), that's the target. Which is why, whenever somebody says, "Let's fund education with a State Lottery!" or words to that effect, I want to scream, because basically, at best, you're balancing your society's budget on the backs of those at its bottom, and at worst (and really, on average) you're costing society more than you're helping it out.

Not to mention there's the whole moral issue; why is it okay for the government to do something that's A Very Bad Thing when done by the Mob or generic jerks like that dude in Ocean's 11? There's nothing that suggests to me that government involvement in an activity has any impact on that activity's moral value. Not to mention, how is running a numbers game the Work of the People?

Anyways, much as I like the guy for not being George Ryan, this is pretty much just the latest flop from the Man Who Would Be President (which is why he's doing so well in all those polls that... wait, nobody's writing about that? He's got no name recognition? He might not win a second term? Oh, cool, then.) -- and I should make it clear that I'm not saying flip-flop, just straight-up floppery. 100% dumb move. Basically Rod does nothing from the gut, from what I can see, but pretty much acts according to how cool he thinks he'll be perceived. No M-rated games to minors? Score! Keno? Score! Health insurance? Score!

What really burns me is not his specific programs, which are at worst inept and at best well-intentioned, but the fact that his approach on the whole does so much to undermine the causes he champions, and the party he represents. It'd be great if he took a stance once in a while that required real courage, not just Play-Acting Courage, where he had to engage in a debate and show us how he got from Point A to Point B, but he has no interest in doing that, because doing so would require him to get an ideology. And he'll have none of that, thank you very much.

While I'm thinking of it

2006-01-16T20:35:00.000-06:00

If you've read the new Charles Krauthammer column, congratulations! You've just seen a prime example of the Right's favorite style of argument: argue with a position that doesn't exist.

Yes, Charlie K reviews Munich, and Does Not Like What He Sees! Specifically, he takes issue with Spielberg's argument that Israel should not exist! Presumably he also takes issue with Spielberg's claim that Satan is the Prime Minister of Japan; both positions are given equal screen time in Munich. I may have posted about this before (I'm not going to check; if you think you don't enjoy reading my blog, you should try being me) but this is the winning game that has been played for oh-such-a-long-time. It's brilliant in its way, because by misrepresenting its opponents (he pulls, as does fellow crony/jackass Bret Stephens for the WSJ, a quote about Israel's founding being a ‘a historical, moral, political calamity’ for the Jewish people, ignoring that Kushner's quote is preceded by his staunch belief that the state should exist, and a poetic desire for its ideals) he can state the obvious and true and therefore villainize and smear his vict...uh, subject.

By totally disregarding what Spielberg himself has to say about his film (because what bearing would THAT have on reality? Surely much less than what Mel Gibson had to say on The Passion and how that was not meant to attack the Jews... But then, Gibson's a conservative, not a deceitful liberal) Krauthammer can wail away on his own invented demons: Israel was forged in response to tragedy! They lived in the land until the Romans displaced them! These things are true, and yet, who's he arguing with? Spielberg? Does he honestly believe Spielberg's reaction to the Israeli athletes' deaths is glib (Spielberg's list, he dubs their screen time, proving himself able to denigrate Spielberg, the athletes, and the Shoah project in one quip -- nice work, Charlie) and that Spielberg's movie is an argument against the existence of Israel?

Of course not. Krauthammer is not stupid; nor, to what knowledge I have, is Victor Davis Hanson, whose masterpiece of a misunderstanding-op-ed "If France has such great health care, why are they rioting" stands as one of my primary examples of this art form. These men are of a group with others (Dennis Byrne is one of the local boys) who don't care to sidestep the facts, as John "The Wild West Was Great Til Gummint Came In" Tierney enjoys doing. Why sidestep facts when you just have to invent your own opposition? Instead of arguing against people who say it should be very hard to get ahold of a gun, why not argue against people who think the Government should prohibit anybody from defending themselves? Instead of arguing for the death penalty, why not argue against putting serial killers out on parole within ten years?

And while you're at it, why argue anything that would suggest progressive policymaking or decisive action? This is an echo of the blog entry below, but while Democrats are demonized for criticizing without suggesting improvements to the Republican agenda, the right-wing columnists feel free to argue against, say, mandatory abortions, so they don't have to argue for a new specific policy that might either alienate their readership or reveal their intellects or agendas to be less than sound, but simply have to smack down Ted Kennedy for some stupid idea they thought of while puttering around their homes late at night.

I dislike them profoundly. And doing so from my blog has about the same weight, policymakingwise, as their nationally syndicated columns do. Difference being? Nobody's paying me to do this. With a paycheck, maybe I'd start thinking about how to actually, y'know, change or improve something once ina while.

Those insane, lunatic dissenters!

2006-01-16T20:00:00.000-06:00

Here's the Trib quote that got me mad today... Interesting to see how just following the news for 6 years gets you attuned to this kind of wretchedness:

But Gore, whose active career in the political career arena really appears to be over (that premature "Howard Dean for president" endorsement probably put the last nail in the coffin) didn't pull any punches, blasting the president in saying "What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the president of the U.S. has been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently."

Anybody who guessed that I'm mad about Gore's quote, sorry to disappoint you. Shocking, I know, but somehow I find the allegation that the Bush team might have overinterpreted their authority somewhat plausible (!!), and my reading of Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72 and my re-reading of All The President's Men brings back pleasant thoughts of Nixon, with whom (boringly) Bush resonates, echoing the same arrogant "If the President wants to do it, it's legal" logic that eventually shocked the American Public. Seems like that kind of shock is old hat (and why not? Some doubt that Tom Delay's involvement with Jack "stupid people get broke" Abramoff won't end up keeping him from reelection) but here's what ticks me off...

Why the Dean endorsement as the last straw? I'm sure I'm in the minority here, and I'm biased, as I was a Dean man all the way through, from before he took off to after he was declared dead (but kept campaigning)... So sue me, I thought the guy was solid. But here's the real puzzler: it's accepted as Holy Writ that Dean was a catastrophe, and THANK GOD we got out of there before he turned into the screaming nutcase he turned into. If you supported Dean, you shot yourself in the face, politically.

Why?

I mean, for god's sake, all we heard from Kerry's nomination through November of '04 was flip-flop, waffle, coward, etc. -- none of which would have been an issue with Dean as the candidate. Dean was solidly anti-Iraq, which during the Dem's primaries (Hussein captured! Mission accomplished!) hurt him, but by November could have been a fantastic issue to debate as "A vs. B," as opposed to "A vs. A, but with certain qualifications and understandings that were entirely ignored, not to mention it was poorly executed." We could have had a real talk about Iraq that didn't have to be couched and guarded to minimize the fact that Kerry voted for prez authority. I have no doubt the Bushies would have smeared Dean a new one anyways (Vietnam oughtn't be an issue, as Dean's back-injury-then-skiing doesn't quite match Bush's air-guard-but-maybe-not-showing-up-and-oh-yeah-drinking-all-the-time, but they'd have gone after the hothead angle, the "he hates security" and failing that, probably another "he's got a black baby" whisper campaign) and possibly it would have turned into another McGovern, but it would have been a contest worth watching, and one worth winning -- something that could be won, too, I think.

Side note: The big Hunter S. Thompson resonation from F&L:CT72 is not actually Bush related, but Kerry related, as he guns after Muskie in the early chapters. Muskie, by Thompson's account, had no ambition or ideas other than "I should be President." Difference in '04 was that Kerry held onto the machine (and pulled off Iowa in an amazing "Gimme your votes if you ain't gonna win" deal with Edwards... which is... interesting... and... [becomes physically ill]) to get as close as he's ever going to get. Thanks a lot.

Anyhow. What's interesting is that after the MSM praised the hell out of Dean for his striking message and definitive stances (and the general hipness factor), once he was on his way down, he got incessantly slammed for two things, by the media and (in his DNC chairmanship now) by the GOP. The first is his hotheadedness, about which there appears to be one solid piece of evidence ("yeeeeahhh," and I'd rather not go into another diatribe on what a non-story that was, and how pathetic it is that it had the impact it did) and a lot of complaints about his statements, like when he said he didn't believe that the capture of Sadaam Hussein made Americans safer. Boy, was that a crackpot statement! Not only that, but he didn't even dispute that it made our troops safer, just the American populace in general. But who cares? It's ancient history; we've always got to shriek about his latest wild allegations and claims before they turn into reality too.

Anyways, this sort of leads me to the second thing he gets hammered for, which is this whole nonsense about "Dean has no solutions and no new ideas," which really isn't a slam on Dean as much as it is a slam on whomever the GOP has to slam that day. Their response today to Hillary Clinton was virtually identical to their response to Gore, namely: "They only criticize, no new ideas, we're expanding King's legacy [by spying on thousands of Americans just like him!]" It's an interesting theory, though if you're driving a bus off a cliff, it's better to stop it first before explaining what might be a better place to drive. Still, even if it is true, it points me to my main gripe about that paragraph, and about the general populace's read on Howard Dean and the Left in general, which is this:

Why is it so crazy to attack your opponents? Or, more precisely put, why is it so crazy to align yourself with a cause on the Left that takes extreme exception to the actions of the far-right wingnuts currently in charge? I have absolutely no idea why Republicans, leading into Alito, could grumble and moan about Sen. Kennedy 24/7, and that's hunky-dory, but when Hillary Clinton attacks Bush, the Democrats have no ideas and no principles and are interested only in furthering their own agenda. How in God's name has it become common sense that dissenting liberals are psychotic, while the GOP's threats to strip the filibuster from the Senate's hands in order to keep a handful of justices on their way to the bench are seen as cold, sharp gamesmanship? Since when has criticism become a vice? This "no new ideas, only criticism" thing drives me nuts: if a house is on fire, howzabout calling 911 before you draw up architectural designs for a new house, or before installing a new sprinkler system? And where were these "no new ideas" Republicans when pretty much the entire 1990s was spent demonizing the Clinton White House -- a movement that, incidentally, got Bush elected on little more than a wink and an "honor and dignity," two words that have been rendered fairly meaningless?

Here's where I get off: When Howard Dean says "That's not true, not one Democrat received campaign contributions from Jack Abramoff," the knee-jerk reaction to it is, "Ohh, why are you doing the Evil RNC - Holy DNC routine again?" When you sit down and look at the facts, he's entirely right. Just as he was entirely right about Hussein, and about Iraq from the beginning. And to paint him as the albatross of the Democratic Party, and to suggest that the best and only way the Dems can win is to avoid talking about how they're different than Republicans, is to set your brain in a vat of pickle brine (sometimes known as Fox News) and escape reality.

I hope to God some miracle occurs to bring the Dems back to power in '06 (and... '08 too?) if only so I don't have to read one more goddamn story about wiretapping that doesn't include an RNC spokesperson fingerpainting a halo over Bush while getting in a huff that somebody would dare to question that he has anything but absolute power. Dissent is righteous, and if the GOP can't handle people talking about the idea that Bush overstepped his legal authority, that's a pathetic, arrogant, petty, small-minded, and vindictive... Well, that's the Republican Party for you.

The incredible shrinking Alito

2006-01-11T23:31:00.000-06:00

So I'm a big NPR driver, which usually means my reaction to my shifts at Best Buy tend to simplify to "Aw, I have to listen to Worldview on my way into work? Why couldn't it just wait til Fresh Air?" This week, however, was different. This week... it's Alitoland.

Sort of.

The best thing about uninterrupted Senate coverage is you get to hear the longwinded Parlimenterian bits the senators like to do... You get a whiff of it whenever Daily Show covers a Senate story (and let's all doff our caps to the best Ted Stevens coverage you could ever hope for) but it really comes out when you drive a good 20 minutes and hear Alito say nothing more substantial than, "I believe that's correct, Senator." Don't get me wrong, I love the Senate (but I love Ted Stevens more) but you get to giggling when they can't find the off switch. Especially when you're conducting hearings about another SCOTUS nominee, you figure it might be okay to keep your remarks, short, pointed, and bothersome, rather than extended, irritating, and utterly devoid of surprise.

Anyways, yesterday I was caught by a drawly twang asking a series of ludicrous
questions that were VAGUELY pointed in the direction of Gitmo, asking things like "Do you know of any case where an enemy prisoner of war brought a habeas petition in World War II objecting to be their confinement to our federal judiciary?" Because it's important to understand that, back then, we were dealing with a CLASSY enemy. Nazis didn't bring frivolous lawsuits; when they lost, they lost! And they would stay in time out until we said it was time to go. Anyways, it all led up to this senator drawling on about how ALL these cases were tried where these German prisoners were executed for sabotage, etc., etc., and THEY didn't need due process! Or some such nonsense.

Anyways, this created the fascinating scenario in which Alito was backing away very cautiously from agreeing with anything Senator Squeaky was talking about, carefully walking around the obvious problem, that the cases being referenced regarded non-US citizens, that the circumstances were remarkably different, etc. Which led to this excellent exchange:

Sen. Squeaks: For those who are watching who are not lawyers, generally speaking, in all of the wars that we've been involved in we don't let the people trying to kill us sue us. Right? And we're not going to let them go at an arbitrary time period if we think they're still dangerous because we don't want to go have to shoot at them again or let them shoot at us again.
Is that a good summary of the law of armed conflict?

ALITO: I don't know whether I'd put it quite that broadly, Senator.

Anyways. I got home, went to find a transcript, and lo and behold, I was hearing Senator Lindsey Graham (R - S.C.). I'd always thought Graham was one of the more maverick fellows (indeed, he later told Alito "You don't have to listen, I'm talking to other people" while bashing the Bush wiretaps) but hearing him construct an argument at length was a little bit disappointing. Anyways, I returned to my car today, and lo and behold, Graham's easy drawl floated from my car's speakers to soothe my troubled mind with today's mellow message: abortion.

Here, the focus was Alito's prior comments and positions on the issue, which have become politically troublesome, if a minimum of 55% of the vote is really that troublesome. Graham drew repeated parallells to Justice Ginsburg, complaining that if she had gone on the record saying she favored abortion rights, what was the big deal on the Big Bad Left even if Alito did oppose abortion rights? It's not like the Right smacked down Ginsburg. Far from it! She got ninety-six votes! Sup with that, dawg? "If she were here today and a Democratic president had nominated her and we take on the role that our colleagues are playing against you, not only would she not have gotten 96 votes, I think she would have been in for a very rough experience," as Graham somewhat more eloquently put it.

Well, here's the problem with that. It doesn't really cut both ways, y'see. If Roe v. Wade is the law o' the land -- which Roberts and Alito have scurried around like crazy to convince us it is, it is! -- well then, where's the controversy or impropriety in saying you support it? This is like saying, "Well Justice Souter testified that he believed freedom of speech implies a right to criticize the executive branch, so why can't Justice Alito testify that he believes we can summarily execute critics of the White House?" The issue is, one position appears to support what has by now become a standard and an established right, while the other position essentially says, "Screw that, I never signed that part of the constitution."

Basically, if the argument is "Roe v. Wade = Dredd Scott," I think that's the argument you have to make. Not, "all opinions are valid," but "It's law incorrectly decided, and our nominee believes that, and that's why we think he's an appropriate choice to the bench, and if you believe the same, you'll vote that way." But instead we get into this gummy, hypocritical, self-serving and patently fake nonsense about GOSH, we Republicans were so nice to your nominees, why are you so MEAN about ours? I mean, if this is a culture war they want to be in, I'd love the GOP to just come out and fight it head-on. Lay the arguments out and hope that you win. Pretending that both sides of the debate are inherently equal defies logic, cheapens the debate, lowers the IQ of the room, and totally blows the monopoly the Far Right had on bitching about moral relativism.

Anyways, that's my rambling and unfocused take on the Alito stuff so far. Surprising but true: these hearings make me think better of him, if only because seeing a normal human being surrounded by these shining Men of the Senate makes him look like Christ on Capitol Hill.

"You don't have to listen to this, I'm talking to other people now." Thanks a lot, Senator Graham. I'm paying for that microphone.

No James Spader? You bastards!

2006-01-09T12:42:00.000-06:00

So Josh Hime sent his headshot in to Myheritage, a genealogy/crazy face-relating technology site, to see what celebrities he was matched with. Well, of course I had to do the same. And write an entirely trivial post about it. Here's what it told me:

The closest matches (65%, of what I have no idea) were Demi Moore and Dudi Balsar (the hell? apprently he's some sort of Israeli model), followed EXTREMELY closely by Keanau Reeves. This was not boding well. I figured Spader was likely to show up, as I keep getting told I look like and/or remind people of him, which is really great insamuch as I'm hoping to do lots of creepy sexually deviant roles in the future. Still, the list went on with Jason Biggs (b'oh!), Michael Douglas, Andriy Shevchenko (Ukranian soccer... they really take this "most famous in the whole world" thing seriously), Gillian Anderson, John Malkovich (woo hoo!), Luis Figo, and finally at 57%, Johnny Depp. That's some relief.

Anyways, I decided to give it a second shot, see if maybe my smiley, non-slackjawed "serious" photo got us different results. I refuse to believe that James Spader isn't in the world's top 2,400 celebrities... Well, it's believable, but c'mon. And oh, holy hell. In first place, with 72% of the vote, Chelsea Clinton.

Screw this, I figured, paging through the scads of women they were matching me with, I'm a BOY. And I turned on the gender device (after confirming that yes, Depp showed up again). What'd that do for me? Well, nothing. Apparently I look like Rajiv Ghandi.

Anyways. I started this blog entry before I actually submitted the pictures, and I am greatly saddened by this result. Guess I might as well go back to job applications. Sigh.

I'm still gonna play Spader's son someday. You wait and see.

The Lion, The Witch, and the Flourishing Democracy

2005-12-31T19:58:00.000-06:00

A brief post to end 2005! Brief but chock-full o' furiously analytical commentary of the highest order. Specifically, let's take a look at this new Narnia moving picture show. What did I think of the new Narnia moving picture show?

Well, I wasn't a huge fan. Obviously we're looking at a different level of source material than we did with, uh, say, LOTR, to name a completely unrelated film, but even so... I guess the principal issue I have with the flick is a certain lack of unity of vision. While I know plenty of people who find fault with Jackson's flicks, and in particular his shaping (mangling, some younger brothers of mine might argue) of Tolkein's novels on their way to the screen, BUT: the dude had a serious vision. A vision that, yes, often manifested itself in those "What's that down there? Oh, let's swoop in for a closer look at THE COOLEST SHOT YOU HAVE EVER SEEN IN YOUR LIFE!!!!!!! OMG!!!!" as Brayton didn't quite put it, but I'm not going to open his blog to get the exact description down. Anyways, a pretty clear, pretty ambitious little set of films. That kinda chopped out some of the books to make way for Jackson's meat and potatoes: swoopy, heroey, and the ever-increasing insanity of Klaus Kinski.

With TLTW&TW, you have the opposite issue. Here, everything is left in from the books (as I remember them, tho I'm not exactly a devotee of the originals) but it all feels pretty... commercial. I'm reminded of the factoid I learned from Goose Island, namely that the truly brilliant brewers in the world work for Miller Lite and Bud, because making a tasteless beer is the hardest thing to do in the industry. Well, here, as in lousy beer icons, a bland generic heroism is the order of the day. Look, there's a cute little girl getting SO HAPPY about something! (I am reminded of Elizabethtown; this film reinforced my opinion that reaction shots are the flatulence of cinema) But over there: a boy-hero, reluctantly accepting the mantle of King -- just like Aragorn! And say, there's a terrifying actress doin' a mighty fine job whipping her suddenly-comical gnome sidekick! Yes, it's everything America wants -- the feel-good hit of the holiday season! With animated beavers! Making FAT JOKES in the middle of chase scenes! Ah, the light touch of Disney... Is there nothing you don't turn to gold?

In any case. There is one regard in which I think the movie execlls, and that's in its inherent, subtextual political narrative. I noticed it because, at least as I remember it, the book didn't contain this particular moment during the augh-run-from-the-wolves sequence: they rush across the river, but are surrounded by wolves on the ice! And hey, aren't those the same wolves from the Bush/Cheney '04 terrorism ad spot? My god, they ARE! And now they can talk!

Maugrim: It's not your war.

Sweet Jebus! What will noble Brit[tish AMERICAN!] Peter do? Well let's hope he doesn't listen to his sister, Susan (who looks uncannily like Harry Reid)... SHE thinks he should cut and run! Unfortunately, before Peter can kill the beavers and solve this whole issue outright, the river breaks and they're all swept off to Asland. And what happens next? JUST when the girls are all happy and doing laundry, BAM: the wolves are back! And this time Peter slices 'em good, teaching us yet again that the path to manhood leads through killin' dogs (or [gratuitous Frist-slam] kittens), and demonstrating that he's SO capable of leading an army.

Anyways, I thought it was pretty clear that this film learned the lessons of 9/11.

It's not as bad as I make it sound (I just like being obnoxious, if that isn't obvious enough as-is) but hey, I'd rather be catching Syriana.

Anyhow. Time to go upstairs and ring in the New Year. I have about 10 apps out to NU jobs, and hopefully between that and next week's Temp Agency mailings, I'll lock something down and get out of this place! That's what you might call a resolution.

Happy New Year, y'all.

Harumph!

2005-12-23T22:24:00.000-06:00

There'll likely be some sort of Christmas blog post (look for a long sidenote about how much I hated the last few days of Holiday Shopping Season in that one -- it's a real barnburner) but for now, it's just worth saying that it's incredibly sad how little traction I think the NSA wiretapping-sans-warrant story is going to receive, even with more recent revelations that the operation involved data mining far beyond what the Administration has acknowledged thus far. It's fascinating, because this is precisely the sort of story that usually does take hold (Our government spies on us! Our Army is inhumane! Bill Clinton is less than a morally upstanding individual!) but because of the lack of a good photo, a good clip of Bill saying he's totally innocent, and the technical nature of the program, it's a safe bet that this one will be another quiet death in the ongoing shell game of Bush Administration scandals. See, I'm rereading The Final Days, which of course deals with Dick Nixon's incredibly bungled fall from grace, and thinking, really, a lot of what's actually done there isn't really that far removed from some of what we've heard from this administration. But of course, in the early 70s, we had an awkward, ungainly President, a staff that played as mafia dons (sans Golden Boy Johnny Dean), and apart from the horrible PR on the coverup, you had a goddamn breaking and entering expedition. That's home-run vilification material.

There's a great Doonesbury with two senators discussing Watergate, one of whom says, "If he'd only knock over a bank or something." "By God, then we'd have him!" That's more or less where we're at here, I think. The problem is, most of these abuses tend to be technical or, y'know, less sexy than a smash and grab job... They paid some tool to praise the No Child Left Behind act? Well, there's a sexy video feed. They set wiretaps without warrants? Well, now, that's a huge story, and gets big reaction, but you can't do a thing about it on TV -- what do you show, file footage of a Naval officer listening to an old-timey telephone?

Here's (I suppose) where this post is gradually and halteringly staggering towards. The two lessons the Bush Administration has learned from the past are these: if you do fail to restore honor and dignity to the White House (we're still laughing about that one, in between severe bouts of depression), keep it dry and technical and legal, so the biggest video failure is the entire GOP leadership being hauled away, indicted, etc.

The other huge lesson? Information dumps. People have said Watergate wouldn't have crushed Nixon if he hadn't dragged his heels 100% of the way; I don't know if that's true, but the best thinking in all of Final Days comes from Pat Buchanan, who argued thusly: release all the stuff that weakens John Dean on day one; release all the stuff that incriminates the President on day two; release all the stuff that shows the Prez trying to do the right thing and proving his innocence. Nixon flopped on this count: he unloaded the whole messy affair late one night, hoping to dodge the evening news (like nobody was going to go straight to the much-storied March 21 meeting) and got drawn and quartered. What Buchanan suggested, however, is basically how the Administration tends to deal with these crises: dump as much info off as possible, let the cable news rage about it for a good 24 hours, and then it's immediately over. Remember when the entire cabinet kinda quit when the second term started? Commentators were saying, "Wow, they're really falling apart," but they only said it for a day or two, and then the next story came out, rather than having a string of stories about the cabinet disolving.

That's, I think, the hope for this story; with the Times reporting that the program is deeper and more legally dubious than ever, there's an outside chance that a few revelations like this, over a matter of days and weeks, can start to seriously shake up business and get something going.

And I'm not talking about "Let's just bring Bush down," because that's far from the best outcome here... But it's a phenomenal place to begin a discussion of the Executive branch's overstepping their boundaries and to look at a different way of leading, possibly by not being enormous pricks.

Anyways. Just about 18 hours until my weeklong vacation from Best Buy begins, and with it, the Joy of Christmas, as opposed to the bitchiness of the oh-so-merry folk who decided to buy a computer the day before Christmas and are SHOCKED to discover that we do not, in fact, have many left, and that they cost more than $100.

Until then.

Huh

2005-12-18T14:12:00.000-06:00

Anybody else weirded out by Confetti? Martin Freeman in a wedding movie that decides to ape The Office (or, perhaps as accurately, Chris Guest's movies)... Yeahhh... that's gonna work...

A Uniter, Not A Divider

2005-12-17T13:54:00.000-06:00

So it's time for another high-pitched whine of a post about politics, and once again, I'm ticked off at... the GOP! Let's go to the videotape:

Yesterday's White House position: President Bush will not sign a three-month extension of the Patriot Act. These krazy Democrats [and six Republicans] will pass our version, privacy concerns be damned, or they will let the act expire altogether!

Today's cozy Bush radio address: Democrats [and six Republicans] are screwing up big-time! If this act expires for one day, it could be DISASTROUS! And not just politically, neither! Uh, we could get blowed up real good.

Talking to my folks about this today, I re-centered on why all this Patriot Act nonsense gets me so angry, apart from all the civil liberties awfulness and whatnot. I think what gets me so angry is that here's this prick telling us both that our lives are at stake, and that he's not going to do a damned thing about it unless he gets things exactly his way. It's the height of arrogant, partisan (everybody's favorite word, but disprove me here) bullshit -- that political victories outweigh personal safety. Same deal as the whole 9/11 commission report card thing: we're still not taking a ton of simple, low-profile, uncontroversial measures like screening more cargo, but we're fighting like HELL to be able to search library records. Because we'd be RESPONSIBLE about it, dammit! Not to mention it lets us paint Democrats as anti-American, pro-terrorists.

Anyways. Many people are more well-versed in the foibles of this law, and of the various executive orders and pieces of legislation that have puffed up the executive branch while doing relatively little to actually, y'know, deal with Our Great Nation's Safety. As Mamet says, we're a nation that deals with success by seeking out failure... And we're doin' not so bad there.

Still, kudos to the Senate, and here's hoping things get turned around before '08 rolls around!

Moving on

2005-12-14T19:46:00.000-06:00

Well, this is the first week of transition, in that I'm starting to scope out the job market. For those of you just joining my brain in this journey, basically the plan is (a) find job, (b) find apartment situation, (c) move in, (d) die cold and alone. That said, the job market looks daunting to a liberal arts degree in theatre (legal secretary - experience required; data entry clerk - degree and experience required; most other jobs for which I'm qualified - almost no money), and as such, I will be needing you (yes, you!) to offer me a job. Nothing huge, just a decent benefits package, and a decent living wage. I type 90 words per minute at 100% accuracy, if that helps.

Alternatively, if anybody wants to leave a few suitcases filled with twenties on my doorstep, that'll do just as well. Better, even.

A Myopic Analysis of Cameron Crowe

2005-12-14T00:25:00.000-06:00

So anyways. I been thinking about Cameron Crowe, as one does almost constantly when one takes an active interest in Art, Cinema, and the Future of Mankind. In this particular instance, I done just finished watching Almost Famous, which I still loved, albeit with a more mixed reaction than the last time I'd seen it a few years back... Probably colored somewhat by my good 'n' plenty distaste for Elizabethtown.

What, I have wondered since watching AF, makes that so good and Elizabethtown so... grating? Technically, Crowe makes the same [mis]steps in AF that he does in E-town... Takes that allow PLENTY of time for reaction shots (watch the scene where Penny Lane meets Russell), likes to establish his pathetic heroes as whomping-over-the-head sympathetic (Orlando Bloom's half-hour "I'm fine" scene pairs in this case with the "Look, no pubes!" scene) and, as I noticed for the first time, has literally no idea how to write a heroine's role. Now, it seems like people are of two minds on Kirsten Dunst's performance in E-town: either she works like hell and bravely makes Art of Fluff, or she is the scariest screen presence since Hopkins chewed that dude's face off to wear it as a mask. Still, both sides tend to acknowledge that she's fighting a losing cause. Really, it's the same battle Kate Hudson faces in AF: how do you personalize and make specific the character who's meant to be the mysterious ideal of feminine perfection, the virgin whore? These characters are meant to be entirely adorable. Even their faults are meant to be sweet. For actors, that's kind of kiss-of-deathish.

Anyways. I guess this brings me to my central point, which is: Crowe lives and dies on the strength of his actors. I don't even really mean shitty actors ruin his movie and great actors sink it, though I'm not here to argue Orlando Bloom as the second coming of Brando either. Really, I think it comes down to two types of acting, one of which suits Crowe's style, and one of which does not. To his detriment, I don't think Crowe differentiates between them. Basically, you have the Inhabitor and the Utilitarian. That's a very awkward and bad way to put it. Here's a lengthy elaboration.

Basically: the inhabitor is an actor who sinks his teeth into character preparation. These actors make millions of decisions, some conscious, some not, about their character: how they sound, how they walk, how they reach for a doorknob, how they verbally tic (uh, okay, huh), where their physical tension lives, etc. These are dudes like Philip Seymour Hoffman (witness Capote -- for God's sake, PLEASE witness Capote, it's one of my favorite films of the year), and obviously when the cameras role, they have all this baggage with them, to which they add The Action, which is basically What Do I Want In This Scene.

The utilitarian buys a little more into the Mametian (if I may) dictum that Character Is Action, and SCREW the physical and behavioral realities! For some, this arises from laziness and is enabled by the whole Celebrity thing (Keanau Reeves, who, to my knowledge, has never learned that there's more than one way to talk, aside from sometimes clippin' the n's off words) and for some it's a matter of real personal choice... People like the Mamet disciples, where you're looking at Joe Mantegna, and the entire cast of any Mamet-directed film. Rebecca Pidgeon doesn't count. The best of this class of actor does still fall into the former category (Macy swears by Mamet, and in fact co-founded the whole school of thought, but my God, the man's a truth machine physically and vocally in Fargo and Magnolia) but their emphasis falls here.

ANYHOW. Basically, Crowe's major stylistic tic (I don't see it as a choice, because I don't think he uses it consciously or with any particular intent) is to DWEELLLL on EVERRRY SHOOOOT. On a macro level, of course, this leads to E-town and V-Sky problems, where he doesn't trust the audience to understand basic mechanics like "The boy likes the girl," or "There are obstacles to their relationship," and on a micro level, Kirsten Dunst spends about five minutes per shot wrinkling her nose at Orlando Bloom. This is where the actor split becomes so crucial. In AF, one of the earlier scenes involves Philip Seymour Hoffman, ranting as Lester Bangs, and wandering with Patrick Fugit. Hoffman is NEVER caught forcing a moment, because he's wearing the character so well. He's done the homework, he knows how Bangs is going to sit and stare off camera, and now he's just letting his mind work on what he wants at that moment, whether it's active (singing the praises of American Woman) or pointless (looking around at a diner for.. food? something). Frances McDormand also nails this, and it's one of the reasons she was Oscar-nominated and, dammit, coulda won.

The point is, when Crowe works with inhabitors, his lingering camera and repetitious storytelling pays off, in that we find characters revealing themselves in their minutae, because nobody's worried about conveying ANYTHING. When he works with utilitarians (this is still a bad word to use for it) the lingering camera becomes a problem, because (I know this from having been one of these people) without a total understanding of the character at rest, actors PUSH and PUSH and INVENT, and so you have Crowe's bang-over-the-head pairing with the actors' bang-over-the-head, and the feedback just makes you want to go into the projector room and have at the reel with a pair of scissors.

I guess this is where I should sum up, but I'm not sure where this all heads, aside from saying that when Mamet writes that anybody with the discipline to break a script down into a million tactics and objectives can act exceedingly well if they can remember the lines, he's entirely right... when you're performing a work that's designed to work that way, as Mamet's are. When you're faced with a sprawling and meandering piece of writing (Eugene O'Neil, to match theatricalities) you HAVE to add the layer of the character at rest, and their physical universe, or there's no way to survive the various monologues and dramatic flourishes that get laid on a little bit thick.

And I suppose if you hire Susan Sarandon to have her do kooky insane things in the background, you need somebody to take your keys away from you.

Morkinson!

2005-12-12T19:18:00.000-06:00

I had also forgotten that the blog frequently becomes the place I put my better away messages when it's just time for them to go. And so, the dream I've been posting throughout the day, from last night, when we learned that a few glasses of wine with pizza RIGHT before bed gives you something like this:

I dreamt I was hanging out with The Guys (Rosie, Doug, etc.) and found out that they'd all gone in to buy a house we'd all live in til we had gotten our feet on the ground and had to move out of town. At which point the property value would have skyrocketed, giving us a little financial boon when we all took off. Anyways, that's what Doug said. And it was a pretty sweet idea!

This came after the dream about being chased in a musical by a singing corpse (a mixed bag -- turned into a few people I knew playing the part, and at least the second time through turned into a musical comedy) but before the flashback dream about BUILDING the house we were all gonna live in, during which it changed from The Gang to The NU Gang, where M-Dep, Jack and I came up with the idea and were swiftly joined by the young members of Monty Python and the cast of Lost. With B.D. Wong guest starring as Jin. I'm not entirely sure it was B.D. Wong, but it definitely wasn't Daniel Dae Kim, and he kept making "in-character" jokes about how he didn't understand English.

Anyways. I need to do this all the time, it's kind of incredible.

But for real, perhap

2005-12-10T22:00:00.000-06:00

Thanks, Timmy and Chris, for your words of encouragement. I still stand by the "this blog is officially closed," but we all know I'll probably blog just as frequently now that it's done as I did when it was actually up and running. Hopefully not, but we'll see. Anyways, my resolve would have held firmer if I didn't think it worth mentioning that it struck me this evening that, having finished reading a little Doonesbury, I headed down to my parents' basement to eat some Chinese food and watch some Monty Python before crashing so I could go into work at Best Buy tomorrow. And I thought, man, if that's not a theatre major, I don't know what one is.

Death!

2005-12-07T21:11:00.000-06:00

Well, anyways.

This blog, as those of you who checked it with any kind of regularity, has been an incredibly inconsistent and (to me) increasingly annoyingly written little experiement, and in honor of this Christmas season of joy and giving, I'm putting a cap on it. Oh, I may return to blog any major events (I got a leg amputated, one of my eyes actually stopped working, I've accepted a role in the new Mel Gibson Holocaust miniseries) but by and large, it's over.

I've never really been settled in this whole bloggy thing -- every time I wrote an emphatic opinionated post about Something Of Import ("Frist's college actions are applicable to his current station!") I felt massively unqualified, and when I wrote less Topical, more Personal posts ("Here is a list of three hundred TVs. Tell me which one I should buy with all my sweet sweet money!") I felt pretty pompous and silly. I don't get that vibe from many others' blogs -- most people are witty, sarcastic, or thoughtful enough to carry the whole thing off -- but it's just not my bag. And you know you're in a bad way when you really only hear about the blog in terms of "Hey, you never update that thing."

So anyways, this is sort of a farewell to those still reading (hi, Chris! Maybe!)... In honor of the preceding sentiments regarding the worthiness of this blog, two items:

1. I will be starting a job hunt on Monday, hoping to nail down a new job to start sometime in early to mid January. Once that's down, I'll be hunting down a place in Chicago to live, and hope to move in by February. Technically that would move me past my January "deadline," but as long as the process is in motion, there's no harm in saving the extra notable amount of money I'd save by not moving til everything's settled. Hopefully I can pay off some of that unconsolidated four grand I owe Sally Mae. Whoops! Anyways, hopefully this will all go smoothly, and with any degree of luck the massive feelings I'm having right now (Everybody I know has an agent/show/movie/TV show or at least is auditioning! I'm a slacker! A loser! I'll never catch up!) will be gone by later in the year.

2. The New York Times had a great Op-Ed about how retarded this whole "War on Christmas" story is, given the actual problems missionaries (and Christian populations) face abroad, not to mention the Actual War still going on out there somewhere. That anybody still cares even remotely whether City Hall puts up a Christmas display, or whether Best Buy says Merry Christmas, is beyond comprehension. Fun fact of the story: Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, leader of the "Kill the Christmas-killers!" campaign, was featured on a Bill O'Reilly holiday ornament, sold on the Fox News Store's website to go with their Holiday Tree. Ah, disingenuous posturing... where would our current political climate be without you?

In conclusion, I can think of no better parting words than these: I'm sorry I kept on about Bill Frist's cats last post. That's not a dignified way to be. And also, I think my pants are on fire.

Good night.

SHUT IT UP YOU

2005-11-15T10:13:00.000-06:00

Well, since my dog decided to bark like crazy at a package just sitting on our doorstep (I swear, he's the dumbest dog I know)... It's time for Pat to blog with his extra time this morning!

Today's subject, on the subject of the stupidest fill-in-the-blank, is the distinguished Senator from Tennessee, Mr. Bill "Dipshit" Frist. Hey now, I know, I shouldn't jump on the shrill wagon right off the bat, and there are many more amusingly sarcastic/irritated blogs than this one to go to for such amusement, but how can you not go straight to "dipshit" with this talented dude? Let's go to the history machine!

First, as you're no doubt aware after hearing about his noble attempts to keep Democrats from killing yet another woman in a coma (only the latest in their spree of pre-infanticides and patricides and so on and so forth), Bill Frist is a MEDICAL DOCTOR. Not only that, this Man of the Land hails from Harvard, land of intellectual rigor and demanding academics. It was here that Bill Frist first got his taste for the kind of person he wanted to grow into: a man who killed kittens. His excuse? Medical school was haaaard! But hey, enough of the personal attacks: let's look at how Bill Frist plays politics!

Coincidentally, Bill Frist plays politics... wait, this can't be right... it looks here like he plays politics the same way he played doctor! Yes, boys and girls, the good Dr. Frist turned his eyes to politics in that great Year of Our Victory, 1994, resigning his membership in the segregated Belle Meade Country Club in preparation to oust the demonic incumbent Jim Sasser. During that glorious campaign, Frist informed Tenneseans (and again, I turn to Wikipedia): "While I've been transplanting lungs and hearts to heal Tennesseans, Jim Sasser has been transplanting Tennesseans' wallets to Washington, home of Marion Barry." Frist further attacked Sasser for (horrors!) making a run at being Senate leader, where he would no doubt "be spending more time taking care of Senate business than Tennessee business." These claims, along with claims emphasizing that Jim Sasser REALLY LIKED Marion Barry -- a Negro! -- swept Frist into office, and in 2000 he was overwhelmingly re-elected by the largest margin since... Al Gore ten years earlier? Well, that's something, I suppose.

Flash forward! It is the year 2002, and Senator Frist has been having the time of his life, helping to ensure a 2002 Republican gain in the local Tennessee government -- oh wait, no, sorry, I guess he was working on raising US Senate soft money to the tune of $66 million dollars. At least that money wasn't going to those scary D.C. black mayors! Anyhow, Frist was rolling right along when suddenly everybody threw Strom Thurmond a party, Trent Lott said something, er, fairly unpopular, and suddenly, it was time for Little Billy Frist to set his sights on the Senate Majority Leader spot! You see, from the Majority Leader's seat, Billy could wield more power and bring better things to his constituents! We have NO idea where this idea that the Senate's business isn't the people's business came from... but it's probably just the slander of those America-hating liberals. Who, by the way, want Sadaam to have nukes.

Anyways, Billy wanted the leader's spot (Again, Wikipedia: In his 2005 book, "Herding Cats, A Lifetime in Politics", Lott accuses William Frist of being "one of the main manipulators" in the debate that ended Senator Lott's leadership in the Republican Senate. Lott wrote that Senator Frist's actions amounted to a "personal betrayal." Frist "...didn't even have the courtesy to call and tell me personally that he was going to run." Lott wrote.) and damned if he didn't win the sucker! He immediately went to work for the people of his home state, and has spent the last few years informing everybody that blinking equals consciousness (though the autopsy proving otherwise prompted him to say "I never said she responded." Videotape: "Based on the footage provided to me... she does respond." Interesting), declaring that the U.S. Senate is no place for minority rights, and sending out the word that Republicans are not allowed to disagree with Bush's court nominees. Oh, and selling off HMO stock two weeks before the stock took a nosedive. American hero, this man.

Anyhow, this whole little profile is a roundabouts way to come to Mr. Frist's latest escapades. In particular, I was mighty proud of our boy when the Democrats called a closed session of the Senate in order to clear the air about, y'know, why we're in Iraq and who knew what when. It's the same procedure used during the Clinton scandals, when Republicans and Democrats tried to broker a deal in a closed session to avoid the whole impeachment muddle. The idea here is, kick the media and cameras out, nobody's on record, we're gonna get work done. Senator Frist, American Hero, chose this moment to storm out of the chamber and announce to the media that these damned Democrats were ruining the Senate by having a publicity stunt! So said the Senator who, after the media left the closed session, chased after them to give them soundbites about Evil Democrats. Ah, Frist, you always were a consistent and totally unhypocritical man.

The spark that led to this active posting, however, relates specifically to BF's latest sound bite, in which he responded to the Washington Post's article detailing our secret East European interrogation centers operated by the CIA. Frist and Hastert immediately started up investigations (GOP-led investigations have always gone well in such matters, don't you think?) but Frist made sure that it was generally known that he was more concerned about the leak to the Post than about the centers themselves.

Anyhow, folks, there you have it. It's an open secret that Fristy wants to be President someday, and I for one hope he does run so I can vote against Bill Frist once in my life. And if he wins, hey, I'll finally get to burn somebody in effigy! Hooray!

Local Idiot Goes Broke

2005-11-05T23:33:00.000-06:00

There is MUCH I could blog about today (including a fantastic get-rich-quick scheme I was offered an oportunity to take advantage of -- and I've been burned by get rich quick schemes before, but this scheme could make me RICH! And QUICK!) but as I have to get up at the butthole of dawn tomorrow, I will content myself with this:

I bought an HDTV. It is a Sharp Aquos 32" LCD (it wasn't on my list, but what can you do) and it is fantastic. I watched the first 45 minutes of Mouline Rouge before going into work today, and between the surround sound (thanks, digital coaxial cable!) and the image quality, it got me very excited and/or happy indeed! The only downside to this one in particular is that it's an HDTV monitor, meaning if I want to pick up HD signal, I need either a cable box, a satelite receiver, or an over-the-air receiver. I'm likely to pick up the latter at my discount, which looks to be a fairly reasonable pickup, particularly compared to the HD-integrated sets comparable to the fellow I ended up with. Well, that's the one downside, and I suppose the other one would be: no live Who DVD by mail with this one. And yes, screw you all, that actually feels like a tangible downside. Oh, well... I'm experiencing stunningly little buyer's remorse with this, so y'know, it is what it is.

Anyways, all this is a long way of saying: come visit me. I have toys, and I'm not afraid to exploint them in a desperate attempt for your affection.

Huh

2005-10-29T20:29:00.000-05:00

Am I the only person who relies entirely on computers for daylight savings time? If I'm up late enough, when my machine jumps back tends to be when I find out... And if I'm not, I usually find out by somebody else's away message. Isn't that weird?

Okay, maybe 5 straight 8+ hour days at Best Buy are getting to me. Only 3 to go...

SWEET SWEET ROSES!

2005-10-29T10:21:00.000-05:00

There is little to say about my life at the moment... it's okay, aside from the fact that I've worked four days straight and have another four to go before I get a day off... Also, it looks like I have a bit more loanage out there than I had been aware of (whee)... BUT! The glorious thing is, somebody has finally started bittorrenting Charlie Rose shows.

I am a gigantic nerd for caring about this, but I'm an enormous fan of Rose -- he's the smartest host on television, absolutely refuses to dumb down discussions, and steers conversations towards matters of weight and importance (even when interviewing ENTERTAINERS!) and generally is just a mighty cool dude. Not for nothing is he the only television interviewer some authors (Mamet, for one) will abide.

Well, in any case, this week somebody started putting his shows somewhere where I can reach them, as I can't pick up channel 20, and channel 11 has prioritized retarded shows about animated pink dragons and about 3-hour blocks of Antiques Roadshow aboveRose. Hooray for piracy of the public airwaves!

Triplets of SWEET!

2005-10-27T08:26:00.000-05:00

Wow, so within 24 hours, the White Sox win the World Series (WOO HOO!) and Harriet Miers withdraws her nomination to the Supreme Court... Pretty sweet, eh? But then, I'm a raging sexist...

Here's hoping we can tack on a little grand jury action to this list, but I'm not feeling overly vindictive, so for now I'll just say, it's a mighty fine week for Justice and The American Way.

Now, off to a day of jury duty and computer sales! With any degree of luck, I will find a shoebox filled with twenties at the courthouse, completing this week's total excellence! Think how many exclamation points I'd use for something like that!

Unspun funny political quote o' the night

2005-10-25T21:44:00.000-05:00

Senator Hutchison (R - Texas) said she hoped "that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars."

Two films, by god!

2005-10-25T19:34:00.000-05:00

So this was a phenomenal weekend, all told. I visited lovely San Jose to visit my cooler-than-thine Brother Chris, and apart from my fatigued recovery from a prior 8 days straight at work (now that I'm back, it's gonna be another 8 in a row... whee!) it was just splendid times. We caught the tech museum's history of video gaming -- I'm not a huge gamer, but it was very cool nevertheless -- and had us some In-N-Out burger, some San Francisco party times, and a TON of excellent food. I am enough of a food whore that I would have been happy if the entire weekend had consisted entirely of sampling local eateries, so that plus the whole seeing-friends-fr0m-school (hi, Anne, Cameron, David!) plus the general excellence of the area added up to a spectacular time.

Anyways, while out there I caught Good Night & Good Luck. Weigel has written insightfully about this in his blog, but to briefly recap: Clooney and company reexamine journalist Edward "Flippy" Murrow's head-on confrontation with Senator Joe "Hambone" McCarthy, with Very Potent (though far from underscored) Application to Today's Times. As Weigel points out, a great deal of the film focuses on material of public record. Much footage of McCarthy is used (which is exceedingly fascinating and creepy) and massive portions of screen time are spent on Murrow's addresses. I have no idea what the actual percentage is, but as I left the theater with Chris, I guessed around 75% of the film's dialogue could have been dug up in documentary footage somewhere.

For me, this is very cool stuff. First off, it's rock-solid on the facts (Ann Coulter's "controversial" views of Murrow -- and that bastion of Communist America-bashing, Walter Cronkite -- aside) both on and off camera. This is very nice. Every time a good, progressive, left-leaning voice comes out with a book/movie/diatribe, I always wince in anticipation of the backlash when one or more of their arguments turn out to be extremely flimsy. Beyond damaging their specific arguments, this almost always gives opponents an oportunity to slam the entire drift of a movie/book/speech as lunatic nonsense. So it's nice in a case like this, where not only is the factual evidence overwhelming, but the "then and now" comparison isn't hinted at once. It's all there if you're looking for it, but Clooney never has a character stepping up and saying "Fifty years from now, I hope people don't get their characters all assassinated and whatnot!"

Anyways. I guess the short version is I liked it, in particular its attention to the detail of what ruthless, blithering assholery (Bill O'Reilly-style) did to Murrow's colleague Don Hollenbeck. Obviously it's not the main story, but Clooney quietly lets us see how Murrow's refusal to take on more than he thought he could handle left Hollenbeck at the mercy of the rabid right-wing press. Very sharp.

Anyways, I'm not particularly eloquent about movies I like (as we found out when I tried to champion Dazed and Confused in an earlier post), but man do I ever know why I hate the movies I hate. And right now, I reeeeally hate Elizabethtown.

Oh, I know, I knew it was gonna be bad, and Tim and Ross and others have covered very well its many faults (Ross: I would have rather watched footage of Cameron Crowe shoveling a hundred million dollar bills into an industrial furnace while Def Leppard played, because that's essentially what was happening anyways), including a very creepy (as opposed to quirky) Kirsten Dunst, who I really do like outside of this film, and a really bizarre and disjointed story that doesn't really seem to have much of a drift to it. Indeed, Susan Sarandon's "I was grieving and then a man poked me with a boner!" monologue is among the more embarassing-in-a-bad-way patches of movie I've seen in a while, Crowe actually manages to screw up a montage (in which Bloom is seen in conversation with a kid, and a minute later is introduced to the kid) and Orlando Bloom needs to get slapped around a little more so he stops going doe-eyed every time he senses an emotion. The movie did have its good points (Crowe always has a kickin' soundtrack, and the dude can cut together a montage with pretty decent skill) but they were few and far in between, and they pale next to the gargantuan quality of the film's major flaw, which is that Cameron Crowe thinks I am legally retarded.

I caught a little of this in Vanilla Sky. Unlike all you bastards out there, I really liked VS; it was well-crafted, fun, good in a what-next kinda way, and fairly stylish, I thought. Then came the scene in the elevator, where out of NOWHERE Crowe decided that I hadn't been paying attention, and that the best way to get me up to speed in case I'd been in the can for about the last hour was to have a man explain the plot of the movie. I'm not a huge "I figured it out" guy, but I hate, hate, hate it when writers put explanations into their scripts and mask them as dialogue. I'd much prefer something like Mulholland Drive, where it's basically incoherent but makes you work at figuring it out, than have somebody sit down and slowly yell, "SEE? HE WAS IN A DREAM MACHINE. ISN'T THAT FASCINATING?!?"

Well, Elizabethtown was like the elevator scene, only the full-length feature version. Orlando Bloom fakes being okay! For 2 hours! Kirsten Dunst lies about stuff and masks a deep neediness by being cute to the point of psychosis! Until you want to shoot everybody! Susan Sarandon goes crazy! Every frame of the picture! By the time these characters start telling each other that "We're the backup people," we're already way ahead of them, just waiting for them to make out for the third time, at which point the movie has ended. In stark contrast to the second time they made out, when... uh... they still needed another 45 minutes of Orlando Bloom wandering around doing basically nothing.

Which is the other fun thing, that the whole movie is about a guy who not only doesn't do anything, he doesn't want to do anything. This is less than interesting, particularly if he drives a nice car, looks dreamy, and had a lot of nice things before he decided to throw them all into the street and invent an electric stabbing machine. A master of time management, Cameron Crowe is not. Also, his editing is inept.

Well, I've said all I came to say, and hopefully this will get all you jackals off my back for another few days. I'm gonna go have me some nachos.

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Love Them

2005-10-20T00:28:00.000-05:00

You know, I get a really evil pleasure out of lying to people. Not deceiving them per se (it actually really bothers me when people fudge the truth when doing a sales pitch at work, and I don't like tricking people), but constructing elaborate, outrageous lies that somehow, no matter how hard I try, fail to set off the truth meters in my audience.

Tonight was a good example. I was IMming Jen Sharber (it's always easier with girls who are your friends, and infinitely easier over IM, but I find it holds true in life as well, plus then you get to see them get confused) and all of a sudden decided to type, "So apparently I'm dating this girl from work now." Jen flips out a bit, so I come up with some appropriately unlikely (I thought) details. "She's almost 18, which is pretty cool..." and when that failed to set off the lie detectors, decided she was Ukranian. Jen wanted more details, so I explained how we'd gotten together (her Polish boyfriend was having a fight with her and never showed up to bring her home one night, so I gave her a ride and Elling was on, and so we started talking jazz, and ended up necking in her driveway) with just a whiff -- or more -- of absurdity to it. Here the reality of my situation sunk in: she caught the lie about her tattoo (a random detail I threw in), but assumed it was an absurd elaboration on an essentially true story. I then tried the back-off revelation of truth, wherein a ridiculous statement is backed off of in favor of an equally nonsensical one, in this case that we'd gone to a tattoo parlor for piercings. Again, while clearly a lie, the story was still getting the ring of truth. So I just started having fun with it, inventing a family (she's second-generation, so while she's just Miss America with a hot accent, I can't really talk to her parents except in a very limited vocabulary and gesture) and her appearance (a nose stud, those arched Ukranian eyebrows -- this is true, they pluck 'em into a mountain) and a general history of sorts.

Of course, when I know I'm being foolishly believed, I always make a point of admitting to the lies before the conversation ends. I've had some cases wherein I think I've tipped the scales and laugh it off, only to realize later that the bulk of my story was bought as genuine, at which point I usually feel very stupid and have to retroactively explain that my entire story was made up, etc., but if I know I still have 'em on the hook, I let 'em go. With Jen, this is fun, because she gets very irritable and mad when I do this, so of course tonight she flipped out and told me she was never talking to me again. I floated the idea of her passing this around NU a bit to see how it plays, and she seems game.

Anyways, my point is: am I an awful person for enjoying this so much? It's kind of a passive-aggressive way to force the play-acting I enjoy so much (childlike in its innocence and charm) into the world in which I live. I may not be allowed, in today's society, to play House with Tim and M-Dep and Sip, but by god, I can wrestle others right into my overwrought and laughable excesses of imagination. Does anybody else feel this way, or ever do something like this in this sort of long-form way? Or am I genuinely a sneaky, bad person?

I should hit the hay; I'm meeting the store managers tomorrow morning for breakfast. Apparently we're staging a mock-heist, and they've asked me to run the internal-theft ring. We're testing the system, but I will be trying to steal at least $3,000 of merchandise for myself.

Eh? Eh?