Get Your Kicks

Something that has been a source of grim amusement for me during my period of unemployed repose is the vitriolic glee I keep encountering regarding the vast sea of us jobless Information Technology/Computer Science folks.

I won't point fingers (via links) at the various blogs who've tee-hee'd over it; because, so what. I laughed, bitterly, at some of the things said, visions of the snotty computer tech guy from the Saturday Night Live skits dancing in my head.

I even chuckled, darkly, at my wife's boss taking a swipe at us (he owns an independent window coverings shop which competes directly with the big box, home decor stores), when he said: "And another reason why you wouldn't want to buy your blinds from [a big box store] is because the people wearing the red (or blue) vests are nothing but laid off IT workers." Heh heh. Ouch. Yet, true.

BUT, when a headhunter / placement service feels cocky enough to include this in their "too bad, so sad" blowoff letter: "Our clients' demand for these skills is low right now", a disenfranchised IT worker has to wonder if he/she should pretend he's/she's been selling colostomy bags and trusses for a living.

Rock and Roll, Part 3
or
Ubiquity Alert

You know that great tub-thumping song by Gary Glitter, glam rocker and pedophile, called "Rock and Roll, Part 2"? Sure you do. (Just listen.)

Well, a new song has arrived that will be as ubiquitous and as long-lived as it is. It will be used at sports games, probably at least three commercials, and it will play mercilessly for the next year. You will hear this song for the rest of your life.

I'm only telling you this so you can pace yourself and not come to hate it since it will be played to death in the coming year before it takes up permanent residence in our cultural soundscape.

Luckily, it's a great song.

"Hey Ya" by Outkast.

Shake it like a Polaroid picture, indeed.

Nightmares

My daughter asked me why she couldn't watch the movie I had just rented: The Matrix Reloaded.

I said, "because it's very violent and it would give you nightmares."

"Will it give you nightmares?" she asked.

At the time I chuckled and told her it wouldn't. Since then I've reconsidered.

My lovely wife and I went to see the final movie, The Matrix Revolutions. Hmmmm. It's not a bad movie, but it isn't necessarily a good one either. Though my opinion might be a function of my age - I dunno. (These days, I'm often wondering if my impressions regarding some music and movies are based on their actual artistic merit, or my possibly shifting tastes.)

We emerged from the theatre with dual headaches, kinda shrugged at each other, then went and got some McDonald's fries to get rid of the sour taste leftover in our mouths. (Dollar menus, good idea!)

Just to say something positive, the women definitely have the best lines in the flick. Jada Pinkett (Will) Smith has two of the best. It must have been a blast to have the best catch-phrases all to herself, especially as a minor character.

But the rest is dark, noisy, and sad. The original one had some fun gee-whiz, freshman dorm stoner philosophy and that great, mid-show smack upside the head. The last two have been rather grim marches through swat-fu and chase sequences. They're spectacular in each, but even really top-notch beer is still just beer after all (to make a really clumsy comparison). The story has been rote since the first one gave all the goodies away, so even blowing past the road signs of plot points is just like enduring one of those grueling family vacations that center around a long car trip, where dad eventually freaks out and screams at everyone that we're not there yet so stop freakin asking already (you've all been there, I know you have).

The primary thing that did finally get to me was how fantastically dark the story is. Since life has thrown a few curves at my family and me this year, we don't have much tolerance for dark these days, so that part of it was an endurance test. The first one had some nice light moments and some humor. This one has some humor, but it's about four laugh-out-loud lines in the midst of the big swirl down the drain to the sewage treatment plants. I imagine teens and young adults who still have nothing but a future so bright they gotta ... continue the cliche on their own ... they will like it.

Me, I might have nightmares.

Oh, and every single preview was for an upcoming war movie. We have Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Russell Crowe, Dennis Quaid, Billy Bob Thorton and on and on in war movies on the sea, in Japan, in Texas, in ancient Greece, blah-de-blah. Hasn't even one of these movie executives who green-light films ever studied the history of how well war films do during an actual war when real soldiers are dying?


Dreams

I'm becoming increasingly convinced, even though I've held some form of this opinion since my late teens, that well-done children/family films are really some of the best entertainment there is. Yeah yeah, I love some great adult movies and wouldn't want to have missed them, such as the "Godfathers", Apocalypse Now, Body Heat, Alien, Fight Club and such. But a glance at my DVD rack reveals a lot more all-audience classics than not. The best "National Lampoon's Family Vacation" is the sole one in which Beverly D'Angelo does not do a topless scene (hint: "Christmas Vacation"). I say this because the movies I've enjoyed the most lately are family films.


Elf has been the family favorite so far this season. It's just sweet and innocent, which is such a relief anymore. After all the crippled fish of Finding Nemo and the "lifetime partners" couple (though I like the phrase one of my friends uses: "the friends of Dorothy") in Good Boy (which was terrible in many other ways as well), a clean and light-hearted kids film with no agenda and no politics was like an ice-cold Coca-Cola with ice and a bag of chips on the hottest day of summer. We laughed and laughed and had nothing icky to try and explain away after the movie on the way home. ("Honey, some fish and people are just born with small limbs and stuff." "Yes, it probably did hurt to land on those dental instruments." "'Two daddies' just means they both owned that dog, honey." Etc.)

We liked Disney's Brother Bear, too, but it did not evoke the "can we buy the DVD when it comes out" sure sign of a good film from the MPC. The best thing about the whole flick was Bob and Doug McKenzie from the old SCTV skits reincarnated as moose, which is kinda sad and funny all at once. I chortled to myself about the way imaginary Eskimo life was portrayed. Most children's films anymore make "native" life seem like some sort of utopia where everyone lives a comfortable, happy middle class American life where everyone is cherished and all the children are above average, doo dah doo dah. The grandma of the tribe assigns everyone's "spirit animal" in a ceremony similar in tone to the huggy, warm ritual they had for my daughter's kindergarten graduation. It's no wonder bored suburban kids become suffused with bullshit weltschmerz about such things when they aren't shown what a truly hardscrabble life a hunter-gatherer's is. Yet, this is a Disney film after all; we wouldn't want the quasi-verisimilitude of Quest for Fire, would we? That would be harder to explain than gay doggy owners. Oh, and supposedly this is the last Disney film that will be "hand drawn" as all the new ones will be animated by computer via Pixar; it's too bad that the film wasn't any better since it's supposedly the last of its kind.

And, finally, we saw Holes on DVD today. It was a pretty rough film for anyone under 10. It is essentially a prison film for the Capn' Crunch demographic. Even though critics and friends said it rocked, we only kinda liked it and have decided to stick with Elf as our fave so far.

And there you have it.

Loophole!

Does it count if I'm not the actual composer of a political post? I think not.

In a great interview on Salon.com today with Bobby Kennedy Jr., there's this, which says in a nutshell my biggest concern with the way our country is being run at the moment:

Salon: In Rolling Stone, you use the term "corporate fascism" to describe what's happening under Bush. Do you think that's excessive rhetoric?

Kennedy: No, I don't. When I was growing up, I was taught that communism leads to dictatorship and capitalism leads inevitably to democracy. And I think that's the assumption of most Americans. Certainly if you listen to people like Sean Hannity or any other voices of the right, there's an assumption that capitalism in any form is beneficial for democracy. But that's not always true. Free market capitalism certainly democratizes a nation and a people. But corporate capitalism has the opposite effect. The control of the capitalist system by large corporations leads to the elimination of markets and ultimately to the elimination of democracy. And we desperately need to understand that point in our country -- that the domination of our country by large corporations is absolutely catastrophic for our democratic process.

Corporations don't want free markets, they want profits. And the best way to guarantee profits is to eliminate the competition; in other words, eliminate the marketplace, through the control of government. And that's what we're seeing today in our country. There is no free market left in agriculture. The free market has almost been eliminated in the energy sector. These are two of our most critical sectors, and the marketplace has disappeared. We're seeing the same process underway in the media industry now. So there's very little consumer choice and Americans aren't getting the benefits and efficiencies that the free market promises us.

Under Bush we're seeing the complete corporate domination of the various departments of government. The Agriculture Department, which was created to benefit small farmers, is now a wholly owned subsidiary of big agribusiness and the principal instrument of their destruction. The Forest Service is being run by a timber industry lobbyist, Public Lands by a mining industry lobbyist. Virtually all Bush's Cabinet secretaries, department deputies and agency heads come from the very industries that those agencies are supposed to be regulating.

The same thing happened in Germany, Italy and Spain during the fascist takeover in the 1920s and '30s -- you had industrialists flooding the ministries and running the ministries, and running them in many ways for their own profit. If you read the American Heritage Dictionary definition of fascism, it says "the domination of a government by corporations of the political right, combined with bellicose nationalism." Well, we're seeing that today.

Of course the first people who start talking about this connection are going to be derided for it. Even though Rush Limbaugh calls feminists "Nazis." The right wing for years has tried to discredit anyone who believes in the idea of community as a "communist" or a "pinko." But it's time that people started telling the truth about what's going on in this country. And start realizing that democracy is fragile, that corporate cronyism is as antithetical to democracy in America as it is in Nigeria.

The other day I got something in the mail from a farmer -- small farmers in this country understand better than anyone how markets are being stolen and democracy is being eroded. He sent me a quote from Mussolini that said fascism should really be called "corporatism" -- because it's the control of government by large corporations.

Another farmer sent me my favorite quote. This one was by Lincoln, in 1863, during the height of the Civil War, when he says, "I have the South in front of me and the bankers behind me -- and for my country, I fear the bankers most." Lincoln, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Eisenhower and all of our great leaders have warned our nation that the greatest threat to our democracy is from large corporate interests.

Rimshot

"How many politically correct assholes does it take to screw in a lightbulb?"

"Zero. They are perpetually in the fucking dark."

- Dennis Miller

The eclectic joys of Ween

Ween is a couple guys pretending to be brothers but doing anything but as musicians. To the truly musically trained, these guys must be like the smartass idiot savant of the class who can ace every spelling test or math quiz, but gets F's regularly because he would rather clown around and make unappreciated fart jokes. "Talent" doesn't even begin to cover it, and then they play songs so full of juvenile prurience and glee, it would make a South Park character blush.

Folks who are Ween fans can't just review the albums, they have to give a Harry Knowles-like review where they describe the weather that day, what they ate, what their nightmares were, the position of the planets, the placement of the lint in their navel and so on. THEN they tell you about the first time they discovered Ween.

My experience was during the time I lived in Minneapolis, and I had made the long voyage on foot (I had no car at the time because a license and insurance in the Miniapple was more than my rent) to one of those great old-time music stores with the skank of a thousand incense sticks burned over time and sun-bleached posters of bands who didn't last beyond one solar-induced shift in the Pantone (R) spectrum of the same. I'd had a gyro for lunch, having only recently discovered Greek food to my utter delight, and was avoiding breathing directly on anyone should they react like a cartoon character encountering Pepe LePew with bad intentions. It was a cold, sunny day. I think it was the month of Aquarius with Venus descending. Over on the new rack was a primary red and blue line drawing of a face with a storm sewer mouth and shocked hair, entitled "God Ween Satan - The oneness". Cartoon satanism in rock has always annoyed me, so I picked it up to see how bad it really was. Well, it had songs like "You F*ucked Up", "I Got a Weasel", "Never Squeal on the Pusher" and, geez, "Papa Zit". Nothing about the devil, though. It was way cheap, about half the price of the other CDs, so I took a chance. Later, as my roommate and I were gasping with laughter only half way through, he wheezed, "Stop! Turn it off! My side hurts! I'm gonna hurf up my beer!"

I've been a big fan ever since.

I wish I could find the review I once read where the reviewer related his Ween discovery story about an entire group of partiers who had to gang up on a guy who had recently purchased "The Mollusk" and played it over and over until a spontaneous intervention erupted and someone chucked the CD out the window. This threw the guy into such a black mood, had tossed everyone out and wouldn't forgive his girlfriend until she bought him another copy. That's dedication.

And, how could you not love an album cover like this?

(This contains the hit "Voodoo Lady".)

With each subsequent album, they have gotten better, wierder, and much more diverse. They even did a country album . Their last studio release, "White Pepper", is so all over the road, if you didn't have the label to tell you differently, you would assume it was a sampler CD of different bands.

Frinstance, check out:
- "Even if You Don't" - where they sound just like the Beatles.
- "Bananas and Blow" - with steel drums and a Caribbean beat.
- "Stroker Ace" - a hard rocker with a title taken from a very bad Burt Reynolds movie.
- "Ice Castles" - which sounds like they discovered mom's Optigan in the garage, fired it up, and got this one last song out of it before the plastic sound disc shattered from age.

And they're all on this one CD.

Maybe your Ween experience is out there waiting for you. I hope it is.

In the meantime, pop open this short little spurt of a number: Papa Zit.
(I added the movie quote on the end, btw.)

Recent viewings

Being an official geek (though I may lose my membership if I can't get another job in IT. and since the industry currently thinks (stupidly) that India is the solution to everything, it looks grim), I have to watch each Star Wars film more than once. With the original three, that was no problem as they were great in each and every Ewok-free frame.

The new ones, of course, blow hot and cold, but since they're so patchy, they may as well just suck out loud completely. The whole first one is kind of a trial with only Ewan McGregor's dead-on impersonation of Obi-wan Kenobi being enjoyable. (Ok ok, Natalie Portman is very easy on the eyes, but that's like saying sunshine is bright.)

Over the course of three nights the family tried to wade through eppy 2 - "Attack of the Clones". The child bailed sometime during one of the many committee meetings that festoon the film like leaf rot. The wife remarked that it was a particularly bad soap opera, and she was right.

However, the last half-hour of the movie is nearly perfect, kinda gets the old skank back. From the time Natalie and future Darth arrive at the droid factory, the movie rocks. (The one scene where Obi-wan is escaping debris from the god-like flatulence bombs that turn asteroids into a deadly projectile sandboxes is kinda cool, too, but it's just a little too much like what we've seen before, so only that wild sound rescues the scene.)

If they were to edit together the first two movies, cutting out all the dross, leaving the last half hour or so alone, they would have one bitchin' movie.

Saw the newly restored Superman DVD on the library shelf, and snagged it for the MPC (Most Precious Child), as it is almost the perfect movie for her age. And since Superman is such an icon in American mythology (alongside "Star Trek", "Star Wars", "The Wizard of Oz", and "Gilligan's Island"), I wanted her to see it. She really liked it. I had forgotten how charming it was. And, for once, the footage they added actually improved the film.

It had some pretty good "making of" documentaries, too, better than the usual HBO/Showtime marketing campaign castoffs. The screen tests for Lois Lane were fun, especially the one with the ultra-hot Anne Archer. The discussion over the size of Superman's, uh, codpiece should make its way into every film school's texts. Oh and Cliff Claven has a bit part. He's the guy who can't turn the missle from nuking California. That alone made the revisit good enough for me.

Please, baby...

Don't be doing porn, k?

According to this Salon.com article (and if ya don't want to go through the ad to read it yourself, I excerpt most of the skankiest parts here), we have begun to cross that barrier that John Waters predicted we would: Mainstream actors and actresses are crossing the line into graphic sexual scenes for mainstream movies. I'm talking obvious genital contact and total everythang hanging out nekkedness.

Full frontal ain't such big news, because many have bared all before. A short list of major stars who have: Kathleen Turner, Richard ("gerbil boy") Gere, Sissy Spacek, Ewan McGregor (Obi-Wan, the younger), Kathleen Quinlan, Elizabeth McGovern, Harvey Keitel, Karen Allen, Kathy Bates, blah-de-blah. We've seen a lot of thespian skin. Onward.

No, kids and kittens, I'm taking full frontal technicolor contact with the uglies outside of porno. I for one don't like it. I guess it blows (ahem) my suspension of disbelief, because one moment I'm in the middle of a story, but once the porn starts, suddenly I'm looking at Meg Ryan doing porn, and the story is kaput.

Frinstance, there ya are, handful of popcorn, engrossed, then:

In [Jane Campion's choppy, erotic thriller, In the Cut], a mustachioed and criminally attractive Mark Ruffalo takes recovering-moppet Ryan to bed, plants her on her stomach, spreads her legs, and performs oral sex on her from behind in a scene that lasts a breathtaking two minutes. A steady master shot with no quick cuts and no "Is that what I think it is?" moments, the scene depicts exactly what you think it does, and even the most jaded filmgoers will feel their pulses quicken.

Kinda makes you wonder if they left an "n" out of the title of the film, doesn't it? [Rimshot!]

Or, another frinstance is this:

After a rushed and awkward first encounter, [William H.] Macy's character [in The Cooler] makes amends by paying [Maria] Bello lip service. The cut of the film that screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January shows Bello's face grimacing in a quiet, almost pained orgasm. The camera then moves lower, where Bello's own hand and Macy's face rest in the actress's thatch of brunet pubic hair, earning the film a dreaded NC-17 rating.

You remember William H. Macy, right? He played the schlepp who tried to have his wife fake kidnapped in Fargo, but everything goes wrong and it ends with him being dragged by police from a hotel, screaming, in his undies.

I don't think I can make a believable assertion that I am not a prude, but I will state that I have found some scenes of sex in past movies wonderful, tasteful, and appropriate for the story, thus my suspension of disbelief expanded into other happy suspensions, if you will. But Kathleen Turner and William Hurt going at it in Body Heat, or Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lang in The Postman Always Rings Twice putting a cutting board to good use, were exciting and titillating, and most precisely because we don't see any genitalia during an erotic scene. Seeing someone's privates does something to our wetware (ultra-geek term for our brains, you perv), and suddenly we are slammed into another mode (whether we like it or not). I guess because that is something related to one of our most intimate acts that we can't feel anything but the emotions related to the same. It breaks the fourth wall in a way nothing else does, even a creepy 3-D Michael Jackson reaching out of the screen for your kids at Disney World.

For the record, I don't think seeing someone's nude crotch outside of a sex scene is the same, because - even though it still sends a spark to that lizard part of our brain - if we are just seeing someone nude outside of a sexual situation, we just register that they're nude and don't necessarily lunge into that part of our brain that is involved with intimacy and such. I think we register, "oh, nekkid body" and go on, essentially -- perhaps, at most, making a mental note about proportions or aesthetics.

For myself, I hope that Hollywood gets through this phase quickly, that it does not catch on, and that it's remembered only as something to avoid, much like "smell-o-vision".

Douglas Coupland booster club, meeting three

Just finished a raft of Douglas Coupland's fiction. Hey Nostradamus! made my jaw swing low in awe so many times, I just had to see what came before.

Thus far I've read:

- Shampoo Planet - Twentysomething deals with the initial steps out into the real world, hippie parents and cheating on girlfriend
- Life After God - Short story collection
- Girlfriend in a Coma - High school friends' stories that revolve around one of their group awaking from a coma after 16 years, and the world ending (no shit!)
- Generation X - His first novel, about three twentysomethings of the post babyboom generation out in the real world for the first time, which coins several memes and terms now taken for granted in journalism, fiction, and film. This was the mother ship.

I'm thrilled to gush that only the short story collection made me eye the TV remote a couple times. Everything else was fun, touching, and most of all written so well that sometimes it makes you (gentle reader) ache.

Every author has his or her constant themes. John Irving: the sweet comedy of life and the constant proximity of violence and tragedy. Stephen King: the horror and humor pulsing under the surface (like a straining boil) of modern American life. Patricia Cornwell: forensic medical examiner who hates men, loves guns, and solves nasty crimes. Dean Koontz: something evil is created in a government lab; everybody pays.


Douglas Coupland's common themes are:

- Fear of obliteration by nuclear war, especially seeing the flash that indicates detonation, thus having time to think about the coming wave of fire, and the world ending in general.

TLD: I think this is common for people my age. I once had a dream where, after the nuke hit, I walked around and saw the shadow left on the walls where my friends had been standing when it hit. I later discovered all of my friends have had that dream. A month or so ago, during a wicked thunderstorm, two lighting strikes detonated like explosions in the sky. Since we are more likely to get hit by a terrorist bomb now than we were in danger of being nuked by the Russians during the cold war, this scared the hell out of me. The whole room went completely white, with only a few stark shadows standing out in relief behind say, a chair, and the shock wave made the windows bulge.

- Fear of humanity wasting our opportunity for making the world a better place.

- Having a wasted life.

- Fear that God isn't there; wanting badly for God to be there.

_ Fear of love and the heartbreak it can bring.

- Inappropriate hair care.


The primary problem with Coupland's fiction (that I've read so far) is that there is never a single happy, uplifting, unalloyed moment. Yes, characters report hitting little pools of contentment, but as a reader, we are never allowed to see one of those moments live, with perhaps the exception of the ending of Generation X where the main character is essentially dog-piled on by jubilant retarded children, which the character reports is the happiest thing to have happened to him. (That isn't really a spoiler, btw.) Thus, there is never a let-up of the wonderful sad tone that Coupland is a master of. Another writer who's tone is primarily comic blue, John Irving, does provide a few laugh-out-loud moments in most of his best work, probably to provide relief. Coupland doesn't do that, to his detriment.

Still, he's a wonderful stylist, a master of tone, wonderful with dialogue, and tells compelling stories. Bet you'll like him if you're not already a fan.

---

Here are some quotes I liked:

"History does not record my response." [As a response to another character's question] - From Generation X

"Me-ism: A search by an individual, in the absence of training in traditional religious tenets, to formulate a personally tailored religion by himself. Most frequently a mishmash of reincarnation, personal dialogue with a nebulously defined god figure, naturalism, and karmic eye-for-eye attitudes." - From Generation X

"I think there was a trade-off somewhere along the line. I think the price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully believe in love; instead we gained an irony that scorched everything it touched. And I wonder if this irony is the price we paid for the loss of God." - From Life After God

Quits

Three books I have tried and tried to read and enjoy, but will now forever avoid as though they were homework from an Accounting 101 class:

- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
- A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
- Ulysses by James Joyce

I'm officially giving up for good on all of them.

Sorry guys.

Cluelessness

<Rant>

I've been a member of the Columbia Music Club since I was a kid. Their "buy 1, get three more free" deals cannot be beat.

But, recently, I got a nastygram from them to the effect of "you've not ordered in a year, so we're ending your membership unless you order something". So, I go on-line to see if there is anything I want, the odds of which are slim because the music industry pretty much as a whole has lost its mind and spews yer basic dreck anymore. Well, anything that I did want wasn't available in any offer, so I woulda paid the full $22.98 or whatever for each freakin' one, in these days where I can go anywhere and get it up to $10 cheaper. So I wrote them an email and asked them not to dump me.

But, assuming they will dump me because so far they've shown they don't really understand what customer service is, I call to redeem these "bonus points" I've earned (because of course you can't do it on the web), which is supposed to get me free music, but I'm like 5 short and they won't discount it or prorate it - you gotta have a full number for a CD, even if the CD is cheaper than full price (and thus should be fewer points). McFeh.

Here's where it gets stupid(er).

The person on the phone starts in with "but what I CAN do for you sir is offer you various selections, like 'Linkin Park', for $4.99, or..." I stopped her right there. This was the impression I got from the web site, too, that these people act as though they are selling towels or brands of soup and not music, as though one with a close enough color, or one that tastes like other stuff I like, is equivalent in regards to music. Worse, they are trying to sell what they want to sell, and are not allowing me to buy what I want to buy in perhaps one of the few retail situations where only the very thing you like will do.

It was kinda like this:

Moi: "Y'know, I'd like that Elvis CD over there."

Idjit music club: "Oooo! That'll cost ya! But, tell ya what, sport! I've got an Elton John CD right here today that'll cost a lot less, and Hey!, his name starts with an "E" too!"

Moi: "The fuck?"

I'm having a hard time getting past the sheer dunderheadedness of this.

I read a few years ago that all the actual music lovers were being run out of the music business, and they were all being replaced by suits who heard nothing but the bottom line and could care less about the product. The final death knell was A&M records being acquired and closed. Judging from today's shopping experience (and the radio - AND CD releases anymore) the conversion is now complete.

<Rant>

How sad for us.

The School of Rock

The whole family went to see The School of Rock today. Roger Ebert went out of his way to point out that that PG-13 rating was silly, and that this was a good family film, so off went. Our daughter, who turns 7 this week, got to open her presents beforehand as we will be on a group outing on the actual day of her birthday. Since she'd peaked, as we all do, shortly after the presents were opened, and still wanted to play, she was not all that happy to be taken to a movie with "real people" (as opposed to animated people, her favorite (she's so my daughter that way)). Well, she giggled and danced the whole way through; gave it a big thumbs up at the end. My wife laughed out loud many times, which is an accomplishment, as she doesn't often laugh at scripted material. The majority of the audience was pre-teenagers, and they LOVED the movie. (In the men's room afterward, as we queued up, they all chattered excitedly about the fact that all the kids really played and sang as you see it in the film (which is true), and talked about forming their own bands. Dear Lord, yes!!!! Rock and roll staggers from the grave yet again!) Several adults belly-laughed throughout, as well. Jack Black is a joy.

Yes, this is a good movie. And so is literally everything else Richard Linklater has made. (Well, Waking Life is for fans and stoners only, but the rest of his oeuvre is excellent.) It's worth your time and money. Warm up ahead of time and see Dazed and Confused, his best so far. Rock on and all that.

TLD:The championing of rock and roll, and the fact that the kids in the audience responded so well to it, reminded me of a tiny episode when my wife and I were first dating. I was dragged to one of those family dinners, ostensibly for a possible future spouse test-drive with the family I would guess, and during the meal, her younger brother started extolling the virtues of rap. This would not do. The very next day me and the future missus went to the CD store and got AC/DC, Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Steve Miller, and a few other rock gods and goddesses and drove them right over. We knocked, he answered, and we just handed the stack to him and said, and I quote, "Here." Maybe he mistook our utterance for its near-homonym, but either way, it worked. He was saved.

Hallelujah.

Apologies

I tried, and I mean I really tried, to not make political posts. My dismay at the way things have gone since the botched election have overcome my better judgement to not grouse about things. The pendulum will most likely swing back, even if this is the most ruinous administration ever to have power in my lifetime. We can and will recover. Clinton proved that.

Waxing political when that is not the main thrust of your blog almost never has good effect, I've noticed when I read other blogs. What finally tipped the scales for me is this post by my favorite blogger (even though it's not technically a blog as he will point out), James Lileks. I nearly always unconditionally love every word that Lileks bothers to tap out for us on his site (though his articles for his various professional gigs, though uniformly good, aren't as much fun as his writing for the hell of it, probably for that very reason). But this one post made me wonder if James is really taking into account that the FBI person he thrashes is making some really valid points about the dangers to our constitutional rights, even if he does not agree with the way she made them. He seems to trust that the government will be right, good, and fair in dealing with those they target as enemies, which astounds me, given recent history. I think some administrations would be fair, but clearly not all will be. So they shouldn't have the kind of power that this FBI person is concerned about. They don't need it. And only those who would use it would naturally abuse it.

So, I kinda wandered away from that post thinking a little less of one of my heroes.

Also, this weekend at a party, I spouted about how Fox News is calling Plame a CIA "worker" and not an agent, in their typical wingnut spin. It cleared the table. People suddenly needed another beer, to hit the facilities, go find something else. There I sat, blowhard asshole, immediately knowing it wasn't worth the bad feelings to blabber about such things in the middle of polite company. Mother's warning about religion and politics proves to be true.

As my blog is still new, and my intent is to entertain and not anger or alienate, I think I'm going to put the kibosh on political posts. That doesn't mean they won't come up as topics, but hopefully it will stay light. I will try.

Most humble apologies.

Music Corner - Totally Terrible and Really Wrong

People ask me, since my music taste is as eclectic as it is and I tend to like about everything (except that foulness know as rap), what do I think is a BAD song?

Well, like the rest of the western world, "Feelings" is about as bad as it gets. Even "Billy, Don't Be a Hero" and "Run, Joey, Run" are opuses (opai?) unto themselves compared to "Feelings". Still, "Feelings" is a gimme.

Therefore, I present to you, the second suckiest song ever composed and recorded:

"A Cowboy's Work is Never Done", performed by Sonny and Cher. Penned and produced by Sonny for a 1972 album (which I believe my mom won at a Jaycees raffle or something).

(Note to RIAA: this example is at a low sample rate, and is taken from the original vinyl so it crackles more than a yoga session at the old folks home, so it sounds like crap. No one will burn this onto a CD, nor will any artist lose money over this - it may even spur someone to go buy it for all its terrible glory. Yet, if this is infringement of copyright and not "fair use" please don't sue me, just tell me to remove it.)

I was all set to tell you how obscure this song was, buried on side 2 of a minor album, and then I was going to defend Sonny who did write some great tunes and was a protege of Phil Spector (inventor of "the wall of sound"), but I discovered through a little research it was one of their hits! Dear Lord! To think they played this on the radio on purpose and that people actually thought, "Hey! Let's go buy that one! It rocks!" just astounds me. Evidently I don't need to defend Sonny.

But, heck, my mom would play the thing so we could all roll around laughing at lines like, "Ride! I usta jump my horse and ride!" (I was old enough to get the sad image of a poor horse being buggered by Sonny in a cheap variety show cowboy costume) and, "And I got shot, but I never died". Maybe everyone listened to it in that spirit. I dunno.

And there you have it.

Egregious political post #8 (or so), but it's my blog and I'll bitch if I want to.

So the Texas gerrymandering worked.

The California recall worked. They now have a popular actor as their new Governor puppet. (Grand total of neocon puppets in charge, if you're counting, is now 4: Texas, California, Florida, and the USA herself!) Said puppet has clearly done more womanizing than ole Billy, but did we hear a peep from the moral brigade? Of course not! This one's their puppet. (Though Bill was anything but someone's puppet, which I think was one of the things that pissed off the neocons. "What!? He doesn't have controllers out in the shadows? He's running it himself?! That's just wrong!)

Our president has achieved, in a scant couple years, a new depression, a (potential) Vietnam, and a scandal worse than Watergate (*cough* Plame *cough*).

Welcome to the third world my friends. Brought to you by Tom DeLay, Karl Rove, and Georgy "the puppet" W!

Calpundit spells out what their agenda is, just in case you were wondering. With an addition here.

Nietzsche was an asshole

Stephen King is writing a bi-monthly article for "Entertainment Weekly" and he recommended some authors recently, one being Peter Abrahams. Just finished Crying Wolf and enjoyed it immensely, though the ending was a little anticlimactic.

The best thing about the novel is the continual riffing and rippage on the evil bastard philosopher Nietzsche. Dying insane and riddled with syphilis was too good for that son of a bitch, if you ask me.

Abrahams creates an interesting dynamic by presenting a Nietzscheian superman (the evil character of the book, natch) who's contrasted by a college professor who's enamored of Nietzsche. This misguided, prissy prof. foists his crap on clean, young minds using the standard lies that Nietzsche was a "free thinker" who was unencumbered with our stale notions of morality while the bad buy lives the nightmare. (My theory about Nietzsche is that he was so putrid that he was driven by the sole need to improve his impoverished sex life; thus, he sought to expand his potential mating pool by convincing others that screwing anyone was fair game. In short, he was the Pauly "the weasel" Shore of his day.)

However, all the characters with a little savvy expose him for the gumball machine diamond ring he was:

"Nietzsche didn't mind a little rudeness, did he, Leo?" said Mr. Zorn.

"He was rather correct in his personal dealing, in fact," said Professor [Leo] Uzig. "Excluding the period of his madness, of course."

"Let's exclude Lizzie Borden's one bad day while we're at it," said Mr. Zorn.

It's nice seeing Nietzsche upended like the bucket of turds he was.

Halloween

Ah, the season of Halloween has arrived! Halloween is a holiday where no one expects presents, cards, a meal, an invitation, or a big freakin TV sports game of some sort. Nope, everyone just wants to put on a costume, get a piece of candy, and perhaps attend a great party. Now THAT'S a holiday. The only way it could be improved upon is by adding in some Mardi Gras-like gratuitous nudity.

Because Halloween is my family's favorite holiday, we start planning our costumes in August, and put up the decorations October 1st. (I sit amongst pumpkins and skulls and bats - oh my! - as I type this.) This year, my wife and I are going as an electrical socket and a plug, respectively. Our daughter is going as a princess.

One year, my (then future) wife and I went as the 7-up dots. Remember them? They would detach from the red dot on the can, with little wayfarers and white gloves, and run around squeaking whilst making mischief, and were probably abandoned as product mascots because they are so similar to the M&M guys.


Before the party (shown here), we stopped at a bar nearby for a beer, which happened to be a sports bar. Because I am missing the competitive sports gene entirely, we had no idea that there was a game on with our most bitter rival (assuming you give a flying star-spangle fuck about such things), Nebraska. Nebraska's team color is red. People acted as though we had walked in and insulted everyone's mother, peed on the floor, beat their dog, stole their Bible, and then shouted "vote Democrat!" The bartender ignored me until I finally yelled over for a beer. She looked at me with a scowl and hesitated as though she wasn't going to serve me. When she did, she gave me a stunning variety of dirty looks, didn't say a word, and didn't even touch the money I put on the bar until I walked away. When we got to the party and told them about our trip to the twilight zone, they clued us in about the game and such. Still, though, what a weird subculture sports nuts are, getting all pissy about the colors on someone's costume on Halloween, for crying out loud.


Back in college, I went as a werewolf once.


I did it just like they did for the old movies; I glued it on layer by layer. However, I did not follow the instructions to put cold cream on my face first (as I hadn't read that until it was too late), and when I came home later from the bar, blasted off my canine gourd, I had the joy of ripping the hair off my face and literally sanding the glue off. Thank God I was so wasted or it would've hurt like hell. It was wild, though; No one recognized me. It's thrilling and chilling to walk up to someone you know well, and be able to tell that they have no glimmer of recognition in their eyes. You'd think that simple recognition wouldn't be such a blatant facial expression. The best costume at the bar that night was this bunch of guys who had attached eight ski boots to one set of skis, and all four of them trooped around all night together as the "Norwegian Ski Team." Going to the bathroom must've been interesting for them.

The best costume I ever wore, though, was a cake donut.

Simulation Only

I hadn't expected to get off work in time from the movie theater to go to the party, so I didn't have a costume. There was a bakery on the way to the party, so I got a cake donut, hung it around my neck, and went as an asshole. It was a total success. Everyone had a built-in joke. Also, it was the anthro dept.'s party, so everyone else there was dressed as Jesus (there were four, one carrying a life-sized cross), Moses (three, one with a tablet with profane commandments), or a nun (five, if I recall). I got away with calling everyone a bunch of assholes, getting a big laugh rather than a belt in the face.

I love Halloween.

New Genre Alert. Category: Music

Flying so low under the radar that only the most obsessive music sluts (like myownself) have detected it, is a new music genre known as "chillout" music. It's essentially jazz, classical, and other low-key instrumental music purposely intended to be background music - sorta like muzak with some cachet - or the old chestnut PBS radio show "Hearts of Space" with a rhythm track. Classical and jazz purists might spray blood from their eyeballs in apoplexy upon their first encounter with chillout mixes because this is an offshoot of modern sampled, looped and spliced drums, with licks and phrases mixed and hashed all together - for sheer ambiance or effect more so than musical purity.

Yet, it does make an excellent background soundscape for working or a mellow party.

A search on CDuniverse.com or Amazon.com for the terms "chillout" or "after hours" will pull up a bunch.

I can personally recommend these two:

-- classical chillout

-- the very best of AfterHours

Check it out, mang.

Enron, the sequel

Here in Colorado, we are getting gamed by an energy utility the same way that California got gamed by Enron.

In a nutshell, Xcel Energy has completed the construction of a new pipeline that allows them to divert natural gas from Colorado to California. Since they can make more money from the gas in California, they are sending a lot there. This creates a shortage and a competitor for the gas here in Colorado, so they are increasing the price of our natural gas 73% (and that's just for residential, with commercial getting an 84% gouge), making our prices roughly equivalent to what they charge Californians. That means, in dollars, that someone in Colorado who paid $64 a month last year will pay around $110 a month this year. So, we get the onus of California's rates without the benefit of their economy. Rapture.

Don'cha love big energy business and deregulation, especially when the energy boys run the country?

Here are a couple articles about it (if you care). (I love the spin on the title of the second one, "cost of coziness". Shit, as if we need heat to be merely cozy as opposed to NOT DYING.)

- Xcel's 73% heat-bill hike approved
- Cost of coziness could be worse

Layoffs have hit Colorado pretty hard, too. For instance, on my block alone, 9 people have been laid off in the past year, most of them in the past 4 months. Of a total of 30 people available to work (and this includes the stay-at-home moms), 9 have lost their jobs, making it roughly 1 out of every 3 people on my block alone have lost their jobs just this year. That's obscene.

And, so, we are being gamed by an energy company in the midst of the depression. Fuckers.

For many years, when I've had enough scotch at a party, I howled into the wind about how the neocon's most basic goal is to convert the USA into Mexico. I didn't think they'd get this far this fast.

At least we finally have proof (and it was just a matter of time with this bunch) of a political scandal that may help to bring this administration down. I direct you, as a starting point, to Andrew's (the Poor Man) hilarious post (it's precious!), from which you can surf around for other blogs and news about what will probably get monikered "spygate" at some point. (And I couldn't be happier that it's our own private Machiavelli, Karl Rove, who is probably the perpetrator of the crime. And a felony no less! (Funny how perpetrator almost includes the word "traitor".))
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Update: Folks, check out the comments for corrections to some of my suppositions here. (Thanks everyone!)

A long time ago, on an amp far, far away...

Bopping around town the other day, one of my favorite guitar solos came on, and for a moment I'm sure I was more dangerous to my fellow drivers than an inebriated executive on a cell phone in the midst of changing a CD in a school zone. Good solos tend to distract me. That gave me the idea to mine my collection for ya.

I've collected a herd (get it? "heard" - *ahem*, anyway...) of some great ones. [Click the titles for the solos. Or if things don't work, in MS Windows right click and select "save as..."; on a Mac, hold button down and save it; on Linux, I won't insult you with instructions.]

"When I look at the World" - solo by The Edge (aka Dave Evans) of U2. Doesn't it sound like fireworks riding into the sky and detonating? The Edge is underrated as a guitarist because what he does is so simple. Guitar mavericks often say "anyone can do what he does," yet I've yet to hear someone who makes good on that boast.

"Sentimental Hygiene" - Neil Young straps one on for Warren Zevon's chunky hit. This is just one of the two great solos Neil hammers out for the excitable boy, may he rest in peace.

"Breakdown Dead Ahead" - This is where I get into trouble with the true believers of rock and roll. "Boz Scaggs!?!?" they'd say in mock horror, "What have you been smoking and why aren't you passing it around? Isn't Scaggs that guy who sounds like Kermit the Frog on 'We're All Alone'? How lame!" Well, yeah, Boz did channel Kermit for the first couple bars, but man, Steve Lukather (renowned studio musician) just snorts off a nasty one here, don't he?

"Sausalito Summernight" - from Danish one hit wonder Diesel. This was one of those impossible to find singles until a couple years ago. Don't you wish you could play guitar like that?

"Things Change" - Dwight Yoakam's silent partner, in only a figurative sense, is Pete Anderson. Pete has produced all of Dwight's albums, is often the co-writer of his songs, and is his main guitarist on top of it all. Take the pressure off, Pete.

"Peach" - Prince gets all Jimi here. The tune is essentially a frame for guitar solos (three!) and breast metaphors. In other words, bouncy perfection.

"Up in Arms" - Foo Fighters. That's Dave Grohl, former drummer of Nirvana, smokin' the frets (all too briefly) there (AND doing the vocals). To think one guy is this talented just makes my fillings ache. (In case you were wondering, he simply is the best freakin' drummer still working today, only threatened by the drummer he hired for the Foo Fighters, Taylor Hawkins.)

"Nada" - The Refreshments (specifically guitarist Brian David Blush) from their album "Fizzy Fuzzy Big & Buzzy", which to me is one of the great unsung rock albums of all time. The whole thing is a raft of great tunes, with phenomenal guitar work - as you can tell from this clip. The band broke up after their second album, which was a dark day in the Yahmdallah household. The wife let me sit out on the deck and gaze into the distance as the sun set, contemplating that "sun-cracked, coal-black soul of mine" (a refrain from "Nada") and the sadness of losing one of my favoritist bands.

Hey kids, rock and roll, rock on.

Reason number 57,387 why I love that woman:

Came back from running errands the other day, and my wife was introducing our daughter to that classic of felonious parenthood Raising Arizona as part of our ongoing effort to fan the flames of one of the most important components for having a happy life - a good sense of humor. There are so many things to love about that movie, but this is one of the better ones: It shows how very much we love our babies.

Reason number 666.2 why some Christian fundies shouldn't even be allowed to drive:

Crap like this. (Via Mark Shea.)

Their basic premise is this: These musicians aren't really Christians, even though the musicians themselves claim they are, because they aren't as perfect as Jesus and don't even try to be, therefore they are not good enough, neener neener.

You really can't get the message of Christ any more backwards than that.

(For those of you in the cheap seats: None of us are good enough because we all sin, therefore we are made good enough, that is forgiven of those sins, through belief in Christ and what he did for us. It's not a goal; it's a gift.)

Movie killers

Ever noticed how some actors and actresses always bring up the level of a movie by merely being in them? The short list includes Al Pacino, Denzel Washington, Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Frances McDormand, and M. Emmet Walsh. (Yes, M. Emmet Walsh. Check it out. If he's in a movie, it's good.) I could spend a lot of keyboard mileage debating with myself whether their skills as a performer create this magical aura or if they just tend to know which scripts are for them, have something they can work with, but I won't. Partially because I haven't really thought that hard about it yet, but mostly because I can't muster much of a damn over the fact. It's just a fact, let's move on.

I say this only to point out that I've discovered the antimatter, the dark side, version of this phenomenon. By name, he's Dennis Quaid. What's odd about this is that he's actually a decent actor. He was great in both The Right Stuff and The Big Easy. Yet, nearly every other movie he's been in has either been a turkey in its own right, or he has made it somewhat less than the sum of its parts. Boring. Arid. I dunno. Odd, ain't it?

You got any antimatter/black hole actors/actresses that just suck the life out of a film?

A rare event

For the first time in over half a year I heard a song on the radio that I liked, and would buy if I had the money. There was a time where I had this experience at least twice a week. I read an interview in this week's "EW" with Dave Matthews, Pink, and Outkast, (which was great btw) and they all carped about the same thing. We turn on the radio, surf for about a half hour for something, anything, that will make us want to stay, then we pop in our newest mix CD. If major label artists are bitching about the same thing I am, let's call it A CLUE. And the record labels wonder why no one's buying.

I went out to iTunes to get the song because I can afford 99 cents, actually, but they don't really have a good run-down of actually how things are charged before you download their application and sign up - or at least I couldn't find it. Web designers: if a customer cannot find exactly how much something will cost in under five pages, then you've lost half of your potential customers. Fix it, please.

Oh, and online CD sales guys, like Amazon and CDUniverse, please put up samples of the songs of new releases when they're actually released and for sale. That's kinda the whole point, just in case you were wondering.

Big nasty fuckin' spider

My computer is in the basement, and the other day on the way to a potty break from reading blogs, as I bopped past the sunken window well, I registered a bug clasping the screen on the window. My early alarm systems posted "Spider!" on my fight-or-flight nerve web, but the higher brain overruled with calm reason, offering that it was probably a grasshopper because the creature was simply too large to be a spider, so I didn't even break stride. However, the reptilian brain spoke up and said, "you'd better believe that's A BIG FUCKING SPIDER! MY GOD!! LOOK AT THAT MONSTER!!!" So I did.

I don't know about you guys, but when I encounter something truly spectacular in a negative sense, my brain attempts to recoil, thereby prolonging the agony as I have to re-grasp the terribleness over and over again a few times until it sinks in that it really is as horrid as it appears, such as when I encounter a truly ugly person (so ugly they fit Moms Mabley's description of, "so ugly, it hurt my feelings"), a large, complex puddle of vomit, or a REALLY BIG FUCKING SPIDER. So, I froze there, waves of goosebumps echoing around the surface of my skin as if it were a proof of concept demonstration that the epidermis is the largest organ of the body.

I thought briefly of taking a photo of it and posting it here, but that would've meant that I would've had to tape something to the window to give you an idea of the scale of this monster, which most likely would have resulted in my wife discovering my cooling corpse in the basement, a look of horror molded onto my face ala The Ring, scotch tape in one hand, a quarter clutched in the other (the coin I would have used for scale comparison), spider gone as the thump of my body hitting the floor would have startled it away, so she would have to wonder for the rest of her days what I had been doing, why it killed me, and why I needed tape and twenty-five cents.

To give you an idea of its size though, if you were to place a computer floppy on the thing, all of its legs would've extended a solid inch or two, depending on the leg, beyond the perimeter. The fangs would've been just visible on one side, and the two weird stubs that hang off the back of the abdomen's web excretor would've been visible on the other side. It was one of those sinister sporty spiders, all sleek with the legs held to the front and back for optimum leaping and dashing ability, as opposed to the economy spiders who hold their legs in a circular configuration, best for gripping a web. The quarter I would've taped to the window were I a braver man would've looked like an M&M next to a Hotwheel Camaro.

I stepped into the other room and had a total cluster attack of the fantods. I went and sat again at the computer, planning my course of action. I simply wanted to read some more, have another cup of coffee, and so I decided to relax and do just that. However, my lizard brain kept whispering things like, "what if it's not there later when you go to get it?", "what if it's outside the window well and it jumps on your leg?", "what if it crawls up the side of the house and falls on you while you're looking down in the window well?", and finally, "what if it gets inside?" Well, fuck.

I go into the garage for a really big, really long stick. Then I remember I have a can of spider killer spray up on the ledge out there; I won't have to even get close! I have another moment of anxiety as I imagine another spider perversely clinging to the other side of the can way up there where I can't see it. I spastically grab the can in order to dislodge any nasties, real or imagined, and head over to the window well, which is at the top of a steep incline covered in landscaping rock, surrounded by long wild grass we've neglected to pull. I imagine the look on my face as I climbed the sliding rock was quite comical.

It was still there on the screen, so I blasted it. I totally coated the thing, turning it from gray to completely Christmas tree frocking white. It slowly turned and began climbing up the screen, the thick layer of poison not even making it falter or slip. (That fact that anything which weighs as much as a mouse can casually stroll up a sheer vertical of glass is just wrong.)

I ran to get a big stick! Images of its yellow fangs gave me another fit of the fantods as I scooted down the rocks. The thing was a dull, moldy gray, but its freaking HUGE fangs were poisonously yellow! Dear God!

Back with my stick, I whacked it a good one. It dropped to the bottom of the window well, and I leaned over and went after it.

Here, boys and girls, is the reason I have told you this whole horrid story: I reached down with the point, placing it on its stomach segment to crush the dreadful bastard, and it started grasping wildly at the stick for purchase. The thing was so huge, the thrumming of its legs traveled up the stick; I could feel it!! I can't really be sure, because at that moment the tape head that records my memories was completely out of contact with the tape so my brain wouldn't have to go to the effort of repressing the memory later, but I bet at that moment I let loose a strangled, multi-octave, "GAAHHHH!" and impaled the beast. It stopped struggling, but I hammered the thing flat, pushed it between the rocks, covered it with one, and pushed hard on the entombing rock for good measure.

I hope it's dead.

Where the Boys Are - and the Girls, too!
or
Artfest!

My town had the annual artfest recently (an event which I heartily recommend for every single town in the nation), and it is one of the highlights of the year for my family. Artists and artisans set up their tents, local eateries put out booths and double their prices, and the town rents the a cappella group du jour for the weekend. There's a guy on stilts who takes care to dress as a cowboy and not a clown (our current age's scariest archetype), since freaked-out frightened little kids tend to automatically strike out at scary things within reach, a real hazard to stilt-wearers. Someone makes balloon animals. Once, they had a roving magician, but I think he made the jewelry artists nervous since he could clearly palm anything; I've not seen him since. The local Birds of Prey rescue mission shows up and displays the eagles and hawks they're nursing back to health after prying them off someone's fender or grill. The police show up and do their K-9 unit demonstration (which makes the artists who indulge in chemically enhanced inspiration a little edgy). They sell nice T-shirts. And, of course, there's beer for $5 a glass.

It occurred to me as I was perpetuating my endorphin rush by wandering from tent to tent, that artisans are the real artists anymore. Official, academically-sanctioned art is so pretentious, formless, and generally awful that no one outside of that particular circle of artists likes it, takes it seriously, or really pays any attention to the latest "found art" refuse sculpture or abstract smear of pigments intended to wake us up from our bourgeois trance. (Most twenty-year-olds who indulge in this illusion haven't even lost their mental baby fat, and yet they are supposed to shake the rest of us from our supposed daze. Like, puh-leeze, dude.)

Michael Blowhard once asked me via email about what I do out in the wasteland of Colorado to experience art since I moved from the art mecca of Minneapolis/St. Paul (though these are not his phrasings or implications, he's too polite for that, but is the basic gist). Well, for me, artisan fairs are the answer.

My two favorite artists whom I encountered this year are Bill Amundson and Padgett McFeely.

This is an example of Bill Amundson's drawings, and his site is here.


Amundson told me a great story when I chuckled at this particular drawing. And I paraphrase: "Yeah, that happens to be my most popular commission subject. Everyone wants me to put logos and stuff on tits. I say 'tits' by the way, even though it embarrasses me, because my girlfriend said that 'breasts' really belong to women - its such a serious grown-up word - but 'tits' belong to the world. So, she says I need to call them 'tits'. This one lady had me make one with tractors on the tits for her dad, because he likes tractors, and well, tits, of course. I think I've put every logo there is on tits..."

Naturally, he's a hoot.

Here is one of Padgett McFeely's hand-tinted photographs, and her site is here.


"Mountain Melody"

I wish I could retell her stories about where and how she found some subjects, and how she re-envisioned them, but those were mostly great in the telling, and I just can't do them justice.

However, both of these artists post their scheduled shows on their sites, so go find them yourself and hear their stories first hand.
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As an added bonus, check out this great essay by the Blowhards regarding art and stuff.

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Afterthought: Now I know that slamming mainstream/academic art and then posting a drawing of boobs (sorry Bill, I like "boobs" better) and a tinted photo is kinda cutting myself off at the knees, as they aren't "high art". I don't think the artists who produced those works would call them high art either - but they are art, regardless of their relative stature in the larger wash of things. It's just that art should contain the high and the low and everything in between. Here's the inbetween. And they pass my test: I would hang them on the wall with pride if I could afford them. So there.

Why Star Trek SUCKS when Capt. Kirk isn't at the helm.

Was pleased to run across the DVD set of the complete fifth season of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" at the library. Snag-a-roo!

Spent the rest of the week remembering why I eventually abandoned the series with extreme ambivalence. Gad what a frustrating experience STTNG is. It's Star Trek, dammit. But it's boring and grindingly politically correct, dammit anyway.

The main culprit is mediocre writing (you can often reverse engineer the story conference for an episode* [see below]), but the blah writing is always exacerbated by clunky direction and pacing. As I had suspected when riding out another vast swath of commercials during the original broadcasts, each episode clocks in at 45 minutes, including the title and credit sequences. Taking 3 to 4 minutes off for that, we have only 40 minutes of show. Then, each and every cursed (pronounce that with a long "ed") episode has a good 5 to 10 minutes of bullshit character development - that serves nada towards said character development.

I don't know how many times a scene starts with someone cutting flowers in their quarters, playing the trombone/clarinet, reading a book, masturbating, etc., and we have to wade through their cute moment before something to do with the actual plot happens. Y'know, when Spock was playing his hippie dulcimer-harp in the rec room, it was interesting because we didn't think an emotionless person would like music. But when we see Riker tooting on a trombone, no one gives a flying warp speed fuck. It's not surprising or informative that he plays the trombone, it's dull.

Even the way trivial dialogue is delivered (meaning they're not on the bridge dealing with aliens with bad facial prosthesis) and edited fills me with entropy. It typically goes like this:
- One character speaks, then mugs for the camera
- Cut to the other character looking at them; pause; we see them absorb the other's dialogue, formulate their own
- They then speak their dialogue, mug
- Cut to other character looking at them; repeat
(This is what typically happens when you let actors direct, btw.)

Since the running time of most episodes is only 40 minutes, this crap pads each by about another 5 to 7 minutes, so we are officially down to about a basic half hour of action and plot spread over a life-wasting hour. It's kinda like that joke Woody Allen uses in Annie Hall to explain his view of life: two women are at a cheap resort in the Catskills having a meal when one says to the other, "the food here is terrible," to which the other adds, "I know, and such small portions."

*- "The Perfect Mate" - story conference idea: Q: what would be the perfect woman? A: someone who liked what I liked and thought I was totally cool. (Another possible sci: "You brought her, you fuck her.") ((Though, Famke Janssen in the role goes a long way towards achieving the perfect woman groove. Good Lord, that woman's a mondo-uber-hottie! (Alien estrus spots notwithstanding.) She joins my "Friends" inspired list of Celebrities My Spouse Would Let Me Do, alongside Kimberly Williams and Kate Hudson.))
- "I, Borg" - sci: what if a borg, used to a collective, was all alone?
- "Ensign Ro" - sci: if the Klingons represent(ed) the Russians, what kind of character would represent Arabs?
- "Darmok" - sci: y'know how we pitch stories, "it's kinda like "Altered States" meets "Lethal Weapon" (), what if a race really talked like that all the time?
- "The Game" - sci: you guys really need to quit playing "Doom" and work on those scripts.
And so on.

I have also complained in the past (if you're paying attention and bless you if you are) about the dearth of sex in most post-classic Star Treks. Well, in season five, Troi boffs the leader of the Eugenics society they save from a neutron. Riker boffs Troi, Ro, an androgynous character who supposedly doesn't even possess genitalia, and a few nameless wrinkly faced alien chicks. Picard most likely boffs the "Perfect Mate", the "Metamorph" empath babe who's literally born solely to please men. So, seems there is a lot of woogy woogy taking place, but everyone seems to regret it except Riker. I still prefer Capt. Kirk - and even Bones (and Spock if only he didn't go into heat just every seven years) - indulging in a little space nooky, then unashamedly showering off and moving on to blow more shit up.

Now, the Borg were a great creation, and Data was a wonderful character, but that's about where it begins and ends for STTNG. Oh, and what red-blooded guy didn't want to do Troi at one point or another?

One final thought ... the compression used on the DVDs had this odd artifact/effect where if any of the characters were sitting with their head very still, their features would float on their head, because the compression would keep the surrounding frame of the sides and back of their head still, but let all of their features move as a unit, particularly with Capt. Picard. It's totally freaky. I surprised they let this pricey collection out of the gate with such a blatant flaw.

In the Bedroom
partial review

<Channeling Sam Kinison> OOOOOOH! OH! OOOOOOOOOOOOOHH!
IT SUUUUUUUUUUUUCKED! I WOULD RATHER DIE SOBER IN A HAIL OF BEER CANS ON AN ABANDONED HIGHWAY ESCAPING MEMORIES OF MAKING A VIDEO WITH JESSICA HAHN THAN WATCH ANOTHER ARTHOUSE TURKEY LIKE THAT! OOOOOOOOOOOH! </Channeling Sam Kinison>

Yet another pretentious, glacially paced, overly long art film with inexplicable Oscar nominations up the butt. This is some folks idea of the perfect "serious film". Bullshit. It's the perfect bad film.

Let me give you an example. The plot (all 5 minutes of screen time that it gets out of the total 140) is this college boy home from school is boffing an older woman who has kids and eventually her estranged husband puts a bullet through his eye. The remainder of the film is his parents dealing with this. Here is one of those scenes:

- 10 seconds of black screen and silence.
- We fade up slowly on the mom (Sissy Spacek) sitting watching some talk show. We watch her watch the TV for approximately 90 seconds of screen time (I watched the time readout on the DVD player for these timings).
- The dad (Tom Wilkinson) walks in with a teapot and offers to pour her a cup, which she accepts, so he does, taking 60 seconds of screen time.
- The dad sits down to watch the TV, too. We watch the both of them watch TV for approximately 100 seconds of screen time.
- We fade out slowly, for about 15 seconds, to sit through another 10 seconds of black screen and silence.

Total wasted time: 4 Minutes, 55 seconds, and let's just round it up to 5 minutes to be that way.

That is just one vignette out of 7 in a row like that. The movie is wall to wall with scenes like that. The movie even ends with a series of scenes like that. Why in the hell does anyone make a movie like that?

Just in case anyone needs reminding:

George Bush did not win the popular vote, and perhaps wouldn't have even won enough votes in the Electoral College had the vote been allowed to continue to legitimate resolution, but the Supreme Court, stacked with cronies, halted the election and installed Georgy..

After we were attacked by Middle Eastern terrorists, George rightly attacked the country that gave refuge to the group, but we don't know if we got the leader. It's even come out that our intelligence agencies knew of the possibility of the attack, but it was ignored at higher levels.

Using this terrorist attack, George Bush then attempted to justify a war against Iraq and Saddam Hussein by saying they had weapons of mass destruction and had aided the terrorists. So far, neither seems to be true. It's good to be rid of Saddam, but the means perhaps weren't justifiable. It is more likely that Saudi Arabians were behind the financing and planning of the terrorist attacks, but the Bush family and most of the oil families are tight with the Saudis, so aggression against them, whether it's justified or not, is unlikely.

Americans have lost more civil rights though this administration through John Ashcroft's PATRIOT Act than we have in all of our nation's previous history. This is the single largest attack on our civil rights since Ronald and Nancy Reagan's drug war, with its introduction of civil asset forfeiture - taking the accused's money and belongings before guilt has been established. Essentially, the PATRIOT Act completes the nullification of our Constitution begun by the drug war. In case you missed the fine print, Feds can now come into your house when you're not home, go through everything there, not tell you they did this, and they get permission to do this from a closed court that has no public accountability. The same goes for phone taps, internet access taps, and complete access to all of your financial accounts.

Tom DeLay has been the mastermind behind the possibly illegal, and certainly unrepresentational, gerrymandering in Colorado and Texas to guarantee Republican seats in the Capitol. He was also behind the California recall fiasco which will most likely result in the installation of another actor/puppet and neocon rubber stamp into the Governor's office.

George Bush has led our country into the worst depression ever since the Great Depression of the '20s and '30s - a verifiable fact. Jimmy Carter's recession was nothing compared to the economic trouble our nation faces today. There's even cause for suspicion that the Bush administration and the puppeteers behind it actually want our nation to be in a depression as some sort of "wage adjustment" with the added benefits of union busting. ("Look! We're losing our jobs overseas to cheaper workers! Make it cheap here and the jobs will stay!")

On top of all this, some of our news operations now blatantly and unapologetically lie to us, and then try to sue citizens who point this out, as Fox news did recently to Al Franken - just search google on his name. News organizations are supposed to be upholding free speech, not suppressing it. Reuters is often caught lying, as in this mind-stabbing example (on yourish.com via Andrea Harris).

Total full-goose bozo wingnut Ann Coulter's latest effort has been to "save the legacy and reputation" of Joe McCarthy - of the infamous McCarthyism period (so infamous your spell-checker knows the term). When she froths about it on the Rushclone talk shows, they just smile and ask, "Really Ann? Joe McCarthy? Isn't that even far out for you?" And when she says, "No, he was a great man," they just smile, say "OK," and go to commercial.

Even my father-in-law, a lifelong Republican, has finally realized the above and how bad things are. He began a "did you know about this?" diatribe yesterday, and my wife and I felt vindicated that someone who should be firmly and warmly ensconced in the excrement of delusion offered by the administration and the far right's spin doctors is suddenly alarmed by the facts. He even went so far as to explain the original, real meaning of fascism and how fascism rises only from a nation that was democratic, but had been whipped into a nationalistic frenzy and then allowed the many small changes which add up to the creation of a fascist state. A lifelong Republican said this.

We are in some deep shit folks. No doubt about it. It can happen here.

The Game of Love
or
Cat's in the Cradle

Went out to celebrate the birth of one of our friends on the block, her 40th I'm told (but didn't ask), so it was bittersweet and fun. As we walked from the restaurant to the club for some dancing, a whole horse carriage of drunken twentysomething girls clopped past, and they, for some reason, were celebrating Mardi Gras, in September, in the middle of downtown Denver no less. Some people actually had beads, and these girls would flash their boobs to get a string, as the tradition goes. A comedian I saw called this phenomenon "breasts in the wild", in that these aren't your wife's boobs which, though still wonderful and enticing, aren't the same as getting a glimpse of a stranger's boobs. (Yes, yes, men are freaks.) The comedian said this was like God saying, "Have a Nice Day!" My wife, to this day, will point out a breast in the wild if she notices I haven't noticed, bless her heart.

Yet, even with unexpected gratuitous live nudity, the highlight of the evening for me was when our daughter got to ride in the limo they rented for the night, before all us adults blasted off to an urban evening. We had to go pick up some friends in another cul-de-sac, so all the kids piled in and we went. The look on her face, that wondrous shy and slightly-stunned-with-the-novelty demeanor, and being there for another first experience were like soul candy.

That's what being a parent does to you.

This morning, she got up and got herself ready for school all by herself, and she's going to be seven in just over a month. Recently, she's begun to keep a diary. A freakin' diary! At six! Can you imagine reading a diary you kept at six? She's made my wife and me solemnly promise we won't read it. We got her one with a little lock on it, and she's thrilled. I can't believe how fast this time is going. Joni Mitchell says eventually you "drag your heels to slow the circles down". Hell, I would toss out an anchor if I could.

I wish that I had kept a blog from the time before my daughter was born so I'd have it all recorded, and some written memories to go back to and reminisce. Yes, we have the videos and the pictures, but the words would be nice to have, too.

James Lileks does have that, and it's wild to read and see the changes a child brings. Even as a vicarious experience, it's compelling. I've read Lileks pretty much since he put up his site (I think I found it when it was three months old, back when he could reasonably respond to his email), and from the time he announced he was going to be a dad, it was one of the more enjoyable reading experiences I've had. Here is the post where his daughter is born: http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/00/0800/080200.html
Read through some of the posts before and after. You'll probably not encounter a better depiction of the dawning of a new life anywhere else.

And, hey, it gets even better. Dooce, aka Heather Armstrong, is pregnant right now with her first child. If you want to have the experience "live" as I did reading Lilek's wonderful posts, add Dooce to your bookmarks. On top of it all, she's probably one of the most hilarious bloggers out there. It's always fun reading a new parent trying to describe one of the most moving and life changing events we can experience as humans (outside of seeing Star Wars for the first time, of course), and Heather's even treating us to weekly tummy pics. (Note to self: make sure you read her husband Jon's blog for the new daddy perspective.)

Here's to life on this momentous day!

The Book of Light by Michelle Blake
"Hated it."

Michelle Blake's The Book of Light is a grueling read, in my opinion. It belongs to that odd genre of fiction brought to us by "gender feminism" (Christina Hoff Sommer's term), that vaguely man-hating, quasi-poisonous narrative, where the main character is a snarky, bitter woman who can barely stand her boyfriend, and would probably rather be a lesbian, but "just likes a stiff one once in a while" as a real-life woman friend of mine once put it. Their general view of life is soured; everything is ugly and it smells badly; everyone's damaged, particularly men, but it's all made a little better by eccentric women that the rest of us typically cross the street to avoid conversing with. Other writers in the genre are Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin, Terry McMillan, and Anne Tyler.

As with all fiction, there is some reality woven into the fabric of this story, and since I've read more than one author who writes about the world in this way, there must really be women out there who wander around with this sour point of view all the time. (And a few men, come to think of it. Jonathan Franzen of The Corrections - official killer of the Oprah Book Club fame - also fits into this "malaise genre".) I feel pity for those who are cursed with such a curdled view of the world. Everyday must just be another variant of misery. Some days you wake up as a giant cockroach in Prague, some days you don't, but everything still sucks. Bleh.

In The Book of Light, Lily Connor is an Episcopalian priest who gets involved in mysterious circumstances. There is no actual mystery, even though the genre label on the cover says it's one. The whole "mystery" is centered around a document that's supposed to be an unedited, earlier version of the "Q" document. It's clear through the whole novel that it's authentic (in the story), so there's no freakin' mystery. And we never find out what happens to the few people who end up missing at the conclusion. (So, OK, that part's a mystery.)

TLD: The thumbnail story behind the "Q" document is that some "scholars" have proposed there was a document that a couple of the Gospel writers cribbed from, because the two Gospels have so many sayings of Christ that are similar. Thus, the typically unstated premise behind the "Q" document is that the Gospels are just myth, meaning pure bullshit, so the only way they could have so much in common is if they used a common source document - plagiarism essentially. That source document is labeled "Q", for reasons I've forgotten. Of course, this whistles through the graveyard of the idea that the Gospels have a lot in common because the authors were reporting ACTUAL EVENTS. Here's a fact: when eyewitnesses describe an event, their stories have a lot in common with each other. Thus, when someone buys into the concept of their being a "Q" document as it's offered by the scholars who invented the concept, they are also buying into the idea that the Gospels are fiction. It goes without saying there may have been little bullet list collections of the sayings of Christ, but the "Q" document folks insist that such a list invalidates the Gospels as independent accounts of the events.

Besides the fact that there's no mystery in the mystery, the narrative is tedious, partially because of the sour viewpoint as descried above, but mainly because every time we encounter a female character, we are given a detailed list of what she's wearing. Every time anyone eats, we are given the complete menu, sometimes even the order in which they ate it! It's like a really skewed result of Hemingway's bad writing advice, like "always describe the weather." Look, only Hemingway could write like Hemingway, so his writing advice is useless to everyone else. If an editor were to cut out all the descriptions of food, clothing, and the dialogues that have no relation to the plot from The Book of Light, it would be a short story. And a boring one at that.

Here're a couple excerpts as examples of what I mean:

"He wears a white dress shirt with the sleeves buttoned at both wrists. The detail makes Lily feel sorry for him, so she tries not only to listen but also to empathize, but she's having a hard time doing either."

"Recently, Lily has been growing tired of the monastery chants and voices -- so precise and precious and a little feeble. So male, she thinks, although not bass male, tenor male. Today the whole service feels especially closed down, and she wonders why she bothered to come."

So, the book sucks. I was even going to post a review on Amazon saying pretty much that, but of the three books she's written, there are only about a dozen customer reviews between them. I know most authors check out Amazon regularly, so I just didn't have the heart to go poop on her parade. And I doubt she'll ever find this blog. And if she does, I'll prolly hear from her.

(P.S. Why is it easier to write a bad review rather than a good one? And why is it more fun?)
__________________

That said, besides being the epitome of a bad read, there was this bombshell in amongst the tedium and thread counts of fabric:

[Lily says,] "Let's just say...Let's just say I'm beginning to see the gospels in a new light"
"What light would that be?" he asks.
"I don't know," she says. "Maybe I'm beginning to believe they're true."

So, our main character, Lily (eye-rolling symbolism, that), is an Episcopalian priest who doesn't believe that the Gospels are true. Y'know, it's one thing to have a detective who's not really a detective, or a gal that isn't really even a gal (The Crying Game), but a priest who doesn't believe? What the Spong is up with that shit?

Note to pastors, preachers, priests (nuns), and clerics everywhere: If you think the Gospels aren't true, find yourself another fucking job, you leach! Read any part of the oeuvre of Job Bob Briggs where he waxes rhapsodic on having to explain things that are obvious! If yer gonna be a carpenter, you gotta have a hammer! If yer gonna be a flight attendant, you gotta be able to say "buh-bye!" If you're going to be a leader in the faith of Christianity, YOU'VE GOT TO BELIEVE, BABY!

Aren't editors supposed to point this kind of shit out?

Save the Children

A neighbor lent us a teen magazine that had an article about how casual (some) teens of the current generation are about oral sex. It does seem as though this is some sort of fad, in addition to kids - mostly girls - being encouraged to try same gender sex even if they have no firm personal opinion on their being actually gay or not. (The girl whose mag we borrowed had gone through and added the female pronouns to a test meant to tell you if that hot guy you're checking out is right for you.) ((Nother example: "This year’s big MTV Video Music Awards tongue-wagger? Madonna open-mouth-kissing Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera after the two younger singers paid tribute to her 1984 VMA rendition of 'Like a Virgin.'" - from Salon.com's "The Fix" from Aug. 29, 2003.))

Both my wife and I paged through the whole teen mag. It is amazing what the soulless cretins who put this magazine together are trying to stuff into kid's heads. I recommend anyone who's reading this should pick up any teen magazine they encounter and go through it. Some issues of "Playboy" aren't as risque and sex-focused as this one issue of "Seventeen" is.

After me and the missus had talked about all the crap in there, including ads where underage kids were getting real tattoos, we had a riff session on what the world's gonna look like in about 10 years with practically one entire generation covered with faded tattoos. It's gonna be a like a bad art gallery installation by Ed Gein. Ick-o-rama.

I hope (and suspect) as with all past generations, there's gonna be a small percentage who do all this shit these magazines put forth, but the rest of the kids will have a brain and some independence of thought and won't end up a tattooed loon with a string of icky love affairs with both genders, scarred by some sort of oral venereal disease, and a litany of regrets that take them regularly from the darkest hour of the night all the way into noon the next day.

More Elsewhere

I've got my own stuff in the hopper, but I seem to have constipation of the keyboard these days, the words just won't drop out, as it were.

So...

Go check on the history of Dooce's (Heather Armstrong's) hair in the past year year (at the bottom, click "Launch A Year in the Life of Heather’s Hair"). I wonder if that woman is that funny all the time just wandering around the house. If so, her husband is going to have to have plastic surgery by the time he's 40 to correct the damage done by laugh lines, or he's gonna have a passing resemblance to Keith Richards (and they can each form part of the scary smile/frown drama faces, with Keith being the frown, natch).

Yesterday, I pointed at Mark Shea as a good "current affairs in Christianity" guy, but the Mark of "Minute Particulars" kinda has cornered the market on thoughtful pieces on Christianity as it intersects daily with the world. I love his style, and I would envy it if it weren't unChristian to do so.

Elsewhere

The Poor Man has served up his greatest hits whilst he takes a break. Try not to die laughing.

Salon.com has a fun rumination on being a pariah of taste in the midst of a truly hip and informed circle of friends that tries not to cast too many pitying glances in your general direction when you broach the topic of your beloveds. I am familiar with this problem, and I love music, all music (refrain: 'cept gansta rap of course), unabashedly, and am likely to put, into my 5 CD player, Nirvana, Barry Manilow Live, Live's "Throwing Copper", The Best of Dionne Warwick, and Dwight Yoakam's "Gone" and hit random. Every roomate I've ever had has complained bitterly about my eclectic tastes. True music snobs don't even try to be polite; they unload their most bitter, vintage bile all over my love of great tunes, naturally tossing in a rhetorical question regarding my questionable lineage. I take it as the ultimate compliment.

If I haven't sent you in Andrea's direction lately, let me correct that mistake right now. I've noticed my blog reading habits have changed since I'm sitting out employment thanks to ... well, Georgy Porgy undt da boys ... but it's not time to rant, it's time to go read Andrea because I keep coming back to her charmingly snarky view of the planet in these days where I have cut way back on blogsurfing. It's consistently fun, on occasion eye-opening, and always worth a few swings of the eyeballs.

For a right-wing Catholic, Mark Shea is surprisingly breezy, and a good source for the topics on the Christian side of the aisle these days. The Rush-like bombast makes me shake my head sometimes, but unlike Rush, Mark has some legit points. Warning to those who care: he does not take the current party line on gay rights, so consider yourself warned. (I may or may not have an entry coming up on that - if I can find the right way to articulate some things in this day of unallowed dissenting opinions.)

Have fun!