First day off work in 2 weeks so I'm taking my 2 days off as days off and choosing to not write here, too. I'll be back on Thursday...I highly recommend you read that Bill Parcells article I wrote about yesterday. It's that good.
Well, see ya later.
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Monday, October 30, 2006
Profile of a Man: Bill Parcells Revealed
Michael Lewis of the New York Times shows the world that sports journalism is still a branch of the world of journalism. This article is a profile of a week spent with Bill Parcells and the Dallas Cowboys, and it's one of the more intriguing looks inside the mind of one of the greatest minds in the history of sports. It really shows that football is not just a game for brutes to beat each other up on Sunday, and it's not as easy, nor as simple, as many people imagine it is. It is a long read, but it is well worth the time, it's one of the best things I've ever read on sport.
Excerpted:
"After the late-night flight home from Jacksonville, he went to his condo to catch a few hours’ sleep. He woke up not long after he nodded off, choking on his own bile. “It only happens to me during the football season,” he says. “It happens no other time of the year. And it wasn’t something I ate.” After that, he couldn’t sleep at all. He found that his ex-wife, Judy — they divorced in 2002, after 40 years of marriage — had left a message on his answering machine. She saw the game on TV. “Please don’t let it affect your health,” she said.
He still returns in his mind to a question his wife often asked him: why do you do what you do? Coaching football doesn’t make him obviously happy. Even in the beginning, in the late 1960’s, when he was an assistant coach at West Point, he would come home after games so evidently displeased that his eldest daughter would sit on the sofa next to him, silently, and put on a long face. She was 5 years old and had no idea what had happened; she just picked it up from his expression that postgame wasn’t happy time. “When my wife asked me that question,” he says, “I never had a good answer. There was no answer. There is no answer.”
.....
“Guys can’t take it,” he says, “that’s why they get out.” Some of the best coaches the game ever saw — Bill Walsh, John Madden — quit simply because the strain was too great. Parcells won’t quit. He now knows that about himself: he needs it more than it needs him. He just turned 65. His marriage is over, and his daughters are grown. “My whole life I’ve always had some guys,” he says. “You gotta have some guys. That’s probably one of the fears I have when I get older: that I won’t have any guys.” His younger brother Don died last year. Most of his close friends who haven’t died are back in New Jersey. His legacy is secure: he will one day have a bust in the football Hall of Fame. But then his legacy was secure in 2003, before he took the Cowboys’ head-coaching job. Before he did so, he had a surprising number of plaintive phone calls from former players. “My old players didn’t want me to take the job,” he says. “They were afraid I’d embarrass myself. They didn’t get it. It’s not about your legacy.”
Read on here...
Excerpted:
"After the late-night flight home from Jacksonville, he went to his condo to catch a few hours’ sleep. He woke up not long after he nodded off, choking on his own bile. “It only happens to me during the football season,” he says. “It happens no other time of the year. And it wasn’t something I ate.” After that, he couldn’t sleep at all. He found that his ex-wife, Judy — they divorced in 2002, after 40 years of marriage — had left a message on his answering machine. She saw the game on TV. “Please don’t let it affect your health,” she said.
He still returns in his mind to a question his wife often asked him: why do you do what you do? Coaching football doesn’t make him obviously happy. Even in the beginning, in the late 1960’s, when he was an assistant coach at West Point, he would come home after games so evidently displeased that his eldest daughter would sit on the sofa next to him, silently, and put on a long face. She was 5 years old and had no idea what had happened; she just picked it up from his expression that postgame wasn’t happy time. “When my wife asked me that question,” he says, “I never had a good answer. There was no answer. There is no answer.”
.....
“Guys can’t take it,” he says, “that’s why they get out.” Some of the best coaches the game ever saw — Bill Walsh, John Madden — quit simply because the strain was too great. Parcells won’t quit. He now knows that about himself: he needs it more than it needs him. He just turned 65. His marriage is over, and his daughters are grown. “My whole life I’ve always had some guys,” he says. “You gotta have some guys. That’s probably one of the fears I have when I get older: that I won’t have any guys.” His younger brother Don died last year. Most of his close friends who haven’t died are back in New Jersey. His legacy is secure: he will one day have a bust in the football Hall of Fame. But then his legacy was secure in 2003, before he took the Cowboys’ head-coaching job. Before he did so, he had a surprising number of plaintive phone calls from former players. “My old players didn’t want me to take the job,” he says. “They were afraid I’d embarrass myself. They didn’t get it. It’s not about your legacy.”
Read on here...
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Who needs a job, give us us marriages!
Gay marriage is back in the news again recently because of a New Jersey court ruling. This circuitous debate over the gay marriage is becoming frustrating, mostly because it's not a debate, so much as a shouting match. For just about all people, opinions on this issue are firmly entrenched and all the debate/discussion in the world is not going to change minds.
While marriage is an issue that has to be dealt with, I think there is a more important issue out there that the ACLU and gay rights advocates should be talking about: discrimination at work.
There are currently over 30 states in which an employee can be legally fired for being gay. That to me is a more important issue. I think it's an issue where the gay rights advocates can get more public support behind them than on marriage, which is clearly more divisive because of the relationship of marriage and religion and children. More people believe in a right to employment which sidesteps the moral/religious qualms of marriage. If the goal is equal rights, I don't understand why they seem to be sticking on this one issue, when there are others that could be addressed and actually affect change for people, rather than just playing politics.
While marriage is an issue that has to be dealt with, I think there is a more important issue out there that the ACLU and gay rights advocates should be talking about: discrimination at work.
There are currently over 30 states in which an employee can be legally fired for being gay. That to me is a more important issue. I think it's an issue where the gay rights advocates can get more public support behind them than on marriage, which is clearly more divisive because of the relationship of marriage and religion and children. More people believe in a right to employment which sidesteps the moral/religious qualms of marriage. If the goal is equal rights, I don't understand why they seem to be sticking on this one issue, when there are others that could be addressed and actually affect change for people, rather than just playing politics.
Saturday, October 28, 2006
Death to Hits! or: The Changing Landscape of The Business of Entertainment
Wired ran an article by Chris Anderson 2 years ago (which subsequently spawned a book) about a phenomenon dubbed "The Long Tail". The phenomenon is effectively explained with an example from Rhapsody Online Music Service:
“Not only is every one of Rhapsody's top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it's just a few people a month, somewhere in the country.“
The idea is that somewhere out there, there are people who love the “misses” as much as the “hits” and are willing to pay for them whenever they are available, but in the current economic/distribution model, there is only room for mass marketed product, “For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare…Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution”, writes Anderson.
The rise of online retailers and online versions of stores have reduced the problem of physical space to stock anything and everything. Now that the stores are massive warehouses spread throughout the country, there is no problem of lack of space. Music services like Itunes go them one better: they don’t even need warehouses, the merchandise is digital, there is no physical good to produce, ship, or stock. “Now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance…with no shelf space to pay for and, in the case of purely digital services, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees, a miss sold is just another sale, with the same margins as a hit. A hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability. If the 20th-century entertainment industry was about hits, the 21st will be equally about misses.”
Online stores do much of their business based on recommendations. “People who bought similar items also purchased….” on Amazon, recommendations on Netflix and so on. This helps pare down the endless choice available online and also allows people to discover various media that they never would have known about on their own, “a good recommendation encourages exploration and can reawaken a passion for music and film, potentially creating a far larger entertainment market overall…And the cultural benefit of all of this is much more diversity, reversing the blanding effects of a century of distribution scarcity and ending the tyranny of the hit.”
What are the implications of this model? Could the music industry go back to the days of relying on sales of singles over albums? In an article in article in Fortune back in August, Devin Leonard wrote about the death of record labels. Quoting David Kwatinetz of The Firm Management Group, "[Record labels] are in a death spiral. The record business will shortly be extinct. But the music business, the business of creating music, will not be - because people love music." Leonard writes, “Record sales became so profitable that the labels were willing to give up their revenue streams from ticket and T-shirt sales. That was great until Napster came along and CD sales plummeted.…now these same companies are so focused on making their quarterly results from album sales that they can no longer build long-term careers for their artists. The record companies are no longer so powerful, because artists have more ways to get their music to fans. In July, Thom Yorke, Radiohead's lead singer, released a solo album, "The Eraser," on an independent label. It was promoted on the homepage of iTunes Music Store and became the No. 2 record on the Billboard 200. Who needs a major label when you can do that?”
Is this democratization of media product going to be for the best? Or do we need a form of gatekeeper to separate the wheat from the chaff for us? It’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out in the coming years.
“Not only is every one of Rhapsody's top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it's just a few people a month, somewhere in the country.“
The idea is that somewhere out there, there are people who love the “misses” as much as the “hits” and are willing to pay for them whenever they are available, but in the current economic/distribution model, there is only room for mass marketed product, “For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare…Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution”, writes Anderson.
The rise of online retailers and online versions of stores have reduced the problem of physical space to stock anything and everything. Now that the stores are massive warehouses spread throughout the country, there is no problem of lack of space. Music services like Itunes go them one better: they don’t even need warehouses, the merchandise is digital, there is no physical good to produce, ship, or stock. “Now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance…with no shelf space to pay for and, in the case of purely digital services, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees, a miss sold is just another sale, with the same margins as a hit. A hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability. If the 20th-century entertainment industry was about hits, the 21st will be equally about misses.”
Online stores do much of their business based on recommendations. “People who bought similar items also purchased….” on Amazon, recommendations on Netflix and so on. This helps pare down the endless choice available online and also allows people to discover various media that they never would have known about on their own, “a good recommendation encourages exploration and can reawaken a passion for music and film, potentially creating a far larger entertainment market overall…And the cultural benefit of all of this is much more diversity, reversing the blanding effects of a century of distribution scarcity and ending the tyranny of the hit.”
What are the implications of this model? Could the music industry go back to the days of relying on sales of singles over albums? In an article in article in Fortune back in August, Devin Leonard wrote about the death of record labels. Quoting David Kwatinetz of The Firm Management Group, "[Record labels] are in a death spiral. The record business will shortly be extinct. But the music business, the business of creating music, will not be - because people love music." Leonard writes, “Record sales became so profitable that the labels were willing to give up their revenue streams from ticket and T-shirt sales. That was great until Napster came along and CD sales plummeted.…now these same companies are so focused on making their quarterly results from album sales that they can no longer build long-term careers for their artists. The record companies are no longer so powerful, because artists have more ways to get their music to fans. In July, Thom Yorke, Radiohead's lead singer, released a solo album, "The Eraser," on an independent label. It was promoted on the homepage of iTunes Music Store and became the No. 2 record on the Billboard 200. Who needs a major label when you can do that?”
Is this democratization of media product going to be for the best? Or do we need a form of gatekeeper to separate the wheat from the chaff for us? It’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out in the coming years.
Friday, October 27, 2006
Is ethanol the answer?
Out here in California, we're seeing ads with Bill Clinton, among others, extolling the virtues of freeing ourselves from foreign oil. The answer being pushed in Proposition 87 is almighty ethanol, the corn-based wonder fuel. I don't think I'm buying it. Ethanol backers, come to its defense please and lay it out for me. (Note: I haven't read the proposition summation in full in my voter's guide, I skimmed over it. I got as far as prop 85 and had to put it down before it put me to sleep)
From my perspective, taking corn (or other such grain crops) and using them for fuel (at least in part because their fuel value is higher than their food value on the open market) does not seem like the right idea. Not even taking into consideration the bleeding heart notion of starving people in the developing world to feed our SUV's, I see it like this: Not only does grain serve as a foodstuff, and an export, it also serves as a backbone for other the other food industries. If we sacrifice our grain to make fuel, we will have less to use in cattle/poultry farming, which will decrease those outputs, which would decrease outputs of dairy, eggs, and, possibly, footballs.
I think other alternative energy sources should be developed if we are talking about a sustainable shift in energy use. The world population doubled in the last 45 years, and is expected to double again in the next 40 years. At that rate, if the Western world is using even 10-15% of its grain output in fuel production, the effect on the food supply could result in even more widespread hunger than there is now. Now, if it is possible to do this without decreasing our current supply of grain products, adding the necessary acreage to grow the corn rather than using what we currently use, that could make me more inclined to approve of it.
The gas/electric hybrid seems to be the best option on the table, if only the car companies would see fit to produce them at a rate commensurate with demand. There have been millions (maybe billions) spent advertising to people to use public transportation, but I think if more money were spent improving these means and making them more convenient(especially city buses, they all seem filthy and unsafe, and never seem to stop where people live) people might make better use of them.
Wind and solar are also energy sources starting to be used, though their relation to automotive fuel have not, to my knowledge, become practically available.
I wonder if our over-reliance on foreign oil has as much to do with fuel as it does with the over-plasticizing of our country. Sooooo many things are made of plastic. I wonder if there is a way to work recycled plastic or rubber into a usable fuel source, seeing as it is made from crude oil as well.
I don't know, I just think there have to be better ideas out there than pouring our corn into our fuel tanks, no? Maybe there's a way we can glean some energy from the tens/hundreds of millions of tons of food we throw away every year. Is there?
Obviously, there is no one cure-all that will make crude oil obsolete in this country, and we'll likely need to adapt to using multiple fuel sources, but I think the legislation being proposed right now that pledges to do that is still a bit myopic. Ethanol may be AN answer, part of the solution, but it is a far cry from THE answer.
From my perspective, taking corn (or other such grain crops) and using them for fuel (at least in part because their fuel value is higher than their food value on the open market) does not seem like the right idea. Not even taking into consideration the bleeding heart notion of starving people in the developing world to feed our SUV's, I see it like this: Not only does grain serve as a foodstuff, and an export, it also serves as a backbone for other the other food industries. If we sacrifice our grain to make fuel, we will have less to use in cattle/poultry farming, which will decrease those outputs, which would decrease outputs of dairy, eggs, and, possibly, footballs.
I think other alternative energy sources should be developed if we are talking about a sustainable shift in energy use. The world population doubled in the last 45 years, and is expected to double again in the next 40 years. At that rate, if the Western world is using even 10-15% of its grain output in fuel production, the effect on the food supply could result in even more widespread hunger than there is now. Now, if it is possible to do this without decreasing our current supply of grain products, adding the necessary acreage to grow the corn rather than using what we currently use, that could make me more inclined to approve of it.
The gas/electric hybrid seems to be the best option on the table, if only the car companies would see fit to produce them at a rate commensurate with demand. There have been millions (maybe billions) spent advertising to people to use public transportation, but I think if more money were spent improving these means and making them more convenient(especially city buses, they all seem filthy and unsafe, and never seem to stop where people live) people might make better use of them.
Wind and solar are also energy sources starting to be used, though their relation to automotive fuel have not, to my knowledge, become practically available.
I wonder if our over-reliance on foreign oil has as much to do with fuel as it does with the over-plasticizing of our country. Sooooo many things are made of plastic. I wonder if there is a way to work recycled plastic or rubber into a usable fuel source, seeing as it is made from crude oil as well.
I don't know, I just think there have to be better ideas out there than pouring our corn into our fuel tanks, no? Maybe there's a way we can glean some energy from the tens/hundreds of millions of tons of food we throw away every year. Is there?
Obviously, there is no one cure-all that will make crude oil obsolete in this country, and we'll likely need to adapt to using multiple fuel sources, but I think the legislation being proposed right now that pledges to do that is still a bit myopic. Ethanol may be AN answer, part of the solution, but it is a far cry from THE answer.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Hypotheticals
What would happen if tomorrow...
...we all woke up and all U.S troops were gone from the Middle East?
...finally, after 4 years, we came to an official agreed upon pronounciation of Iraq? (It's been 4 years or so now that we've been liberating Iraq and still it's eye-rack, eye-rock, ee-rack, ee-rock...get it together news media)
...all televisions ceased to function other than those in public places?
...the secret service stopped trying to intimidate 14-year-old girls for making anti-Bush websites?
...time had been altered in such a way that there are 48 hours in a day? Would that prompt you to work 16 hours a day, or would you take advantage of an extra 24 free hours?
...someone commissioned a "Catchphrase Hall of Fame"? What would you nominate for induction? I'm campaigning for "Let's get ready to rumblllllllllllllllllle!" and the now defunct "stay the course" from the PR firm of Rove, Mehlman, and Associates, which President Bush NEVER advocated.
...people cared about baseball teams not named the Yankees or Red Sox again?
...you won the lottery? (I can tell you right now, I'd hire 3 staff writers for this blog and never write anything myself again.)
...we all woke up and all U.S troops were gone from the Middle East?
...finally, after 4 years, we came to an official agreed upon pronounciation of Iraq? (It's been 4 years or so now that we've been liberating Iraq and still it's eye-rack, eye-rock, ee-rack, ee-rock...get it together news media)
...all televisions ceased to function other than those in public places?
...the secret service stopped trying to intimidate 14-year-old girls for making anti-Bush websites?
...time had been altered in such a way that there are 48 hours in a day? Would that prompt you to work 16 hours a day, or would you take advantage of an extra 24 free hours?
...someone commissioned a "Catchphrase Hall of Fame"? What would you nominate for induction? I'm campaigning for "Let's get ready to rumblllllllllllllllllle!" and the now defunct "stay the course" from the PR firm of Rove, Mehlman, and Associates, which President Bush NEVER advocated.
...people cared about baseball teams not named the Yankees or Red Sox again?
...you won the lottery? (I can tell you right now, I'd hire 3 staff writers for this blog and never write anything myself again.)
Monday, October 23, 2006
Athletes on trial
I don't know what's going on this year, or if it's always been this bad and I've just been not paying attention, but there seems to have been an abundance of athletes arrested this year. Below you'll find a smattering of this year's arrests, ever mindful that this list is by no means comprehensive. Someone, anyone, explain this phenomenon to me.
Former Ohio State Buckeye and Denver Bronco Maurice Clarett gets 3.5 years for a weapons charge
He was arrested driving with open alcohol bottles in his car; with a shotgun and a machete, coincidentally in neighborhood of a woman who previously testified against him in court.
Mo Clarett
A University of Northern Colorado 3rd-string punter was arrested for attempted murder for stabbing the starting punter in the leg, leaving a 3-5 inch deep laceration, or at least arranged for the stabbing, allegedly because he wanted to be the starter.
UNC Punter assault
Fresno high school baseball player Brandon Madrid gets 8 months in prison for an in-game jaw-breaking punch against a guy who slid into him, cleats-up, at 3rd base.
HS Baseballer jailed
Washington Wizards players Gilbert Arenas and Awvee Storey arrested in Miami on Memorial Day weekend. Arenas allegedly declared "You can’t arrest me. I’m a basketball player. I play for the Washington Wizards, and I’m not going to leave my teammate.” when police told him to back away while they were arresting Storey.
Wizards arrested
Green Bay Packers wide receiver Koren Robinson arrested for repeated DUI's. Sentenced to 90 days and suspended from the league for a year.
Koren Robinson DUI's
Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Chris Henry has been arrested 4 times since December for various charges.
Chris Henry's Legal Woes
Indiana Pacer Stephen Jackson charged with reckless endangerment for firing shots in the air during an altercation outside a strip club.
Stephen Jackson in trouble again
Former NBA all-star center Jayson Williams killed his chauffeur in a gun accident, then attempted to cover it up. The evidence at trial looked like he was going to be convicted, but a mistrial was declared when the jury deadlocked and he walked. Now it looks like it is going to be re-tried, though that is pending decision in the NJ State Supreme Court in the coming weeks.
Jayson Williams re-trial
In a bizarre tale from the summer, that keeps getting more bizarre, San Diego Chargers linebacker Steve Foley led an off-duty police officer in an unmarked car on a high speed chase that ended at his home. He got out and approached the officer, who now admits to never showing a badge. The officer shot him 3 times because he claims he saw Foley reach into his waistband, though it is now known he was unarmed. Foley's girlfriend was in the car too, and when she saw him get shot, she got behind the wheel and allegedly tried to run over the officer who she claims she thought was a carjacker. She is being charged with attempted assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer.
Foley was allegedly going to be charged with 2 counts of misdemeanor drunk driving (blood alcohol of .233), suspected steroid use and possibly harboring a fugitive girlfriend (a charge that has since been shown to be baseless). Now with the officers admission that he never showed a badge, and the fact that he was in his own vehicle, not a police car and he was not in uniform, and that Foley was unarmed, leaves Foley, who is still unable to walk because of the injuries, some 3 months later, open to sue for the cop shooting him for the nearly $2million he lost as a result of being unable to play this season. Like I said, bizarre.
Steve Foley 1
Steve Foley follow-up
Finally, This one didn't happen this year, but it was one of the most irresponsible, idiotic things I've seen out of an athlete.
St. Louis Ram Leonard Little was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and DUI in 1998 when he ran a red light and killed a lady while driving with a .19 blood alcohol level. He spent 90 days in jail and 4 years on probation. Then in 2004, another DUI. He deserves all the bad things that happen to him in life.
Leonard Little at it again
Former Ohio State Buckeye and Denver Bronco Maurice Clarett gets 3.5 years for a weapons charge
He was arrested driving with open alcohol bottles in his car; with a shotgun and a machete, coincidentally in neighborhood of a woman who previously testified against him in court.
Mo Clarett
A University of Northern Colorado 3rd-string punter was arrested for attempted murder for stabbing the starting punter in the leg, leaving a 3-5 inch deep laceration, or at least arranged for the stabbing, allegedly because he wanted to be the starter.
UNC Punter assault
Fresno high school baseball player Brandon Madrid gets 8 months in prison for an in-game jaw-breaking punch against a guy who slid into him, cleats-up, at 3rd base.
HS Baseballer jailed
Washington Wizards players Gilbert Arenas and Awvee Storey arrested in Miami on Memorial Day weekend. Arenas allegedly declared "You can’t arrest me. I’m a basketball player. I play for the Washington Wizards, and I’m not going to leave my teammate.” when police told him to back away while they were arresting Storey.
Wizards arrested
Green Bay Packers wide receiver Koren Robinson arrested for repeated DUI's. Sentenced to 90 days and suspended from the league for a year.
Koren Robinson DUI's
Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Chris Henry has been arrested 4 times since December for various charges.
Chris Henry's Legal Woes
Indiana Pacer Stephen Jackson charged with reckless endangerment for firing shots in the air during an altercation outside a strip club.
Stephen Jackson in trouble again
Former NBA all-star center Jayson Williams killed his chauffeur in a gun accident, then attempted to cover it up. The evidence at trial looked like he was going to be convicted, but a mistrial was declared when the jury deadlocked and he walked. Now it looks like it is going to be re-tried, though that is pending decision in the NJ State Supreme Court in the coming weeks.
Jayson Williams re-trial
In a bizarre tale from the summer, that keeps getting more bizarre, San Diego Chargers linebacker Steve Foley led an off-duty police officer in an unmarked car on a high speed chase that ended at his home. He got out and approached the officer, who now admits to never showing a badge. The officer shot him 3 times because he claims he saw Foley reach into his waistband, though it is now known he was unarmed. Foley's girlfriend was in the car too, and when she saw him get shot, she got behind the wheel and allegedly tried to run over the officer who she claims she thought was a carjacker. She is being charged with attempted assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer.
Foley was allegedly going to be charged with 2 counts of misdemeanor drunk driving (blood alcohol of .233), suspected steroid use and possibly harboring a fugitive girlfriend (a charge that has since been shown to be baseless). Now with the officers admission that he never showed a badge, and the fact that he was in his own vehicle, not a police car and he was not in uniform, and that Foley was unarmed, leaves Foley, who is still unable to walk because of the injuries, some 3 months later, open to sue for the cop shooting him for the nearly $2million he lost as a result of being unable to play this season. Like I said, bizarre.
Steve Foley 1
Steve Foley follow-up
Finally, This one didn't happen this year, but it was one of the most irresponsible, idiotic things I've seen out of an athlete.
St. Louis Ram Leonard Little was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and DUI in 1998 when he ran a red light and killed a lady while driving with a .19 blood alcohol level. He spent 90 days in jail and 4 years on probation. Then in 2004, another DUI. He deserves all the bad things that happen to him in life.
Leonard Little at it again
Saturday, October 21, 2006
Charity Consumerism
I was in the grocery store last week and at the checkout counter they were running a breast cancer research drive where they ask if you want to donate $1 to breast cancer research. The guy ahead of me said, "No, not today." which gave me a pass to say no too, precedent had been set and I was free of the compulsion that would have set in if the guy before me had said yes. It's not that I do not believe in giving, or am opposed to cancer research, but I'd feel better if there was some way I could be sure it would actually help. I always worry that the dollar I donate is not going to help anything and that it's really going to end up paying for a flyer about an upcoming "Run For A Cure"-type event that will get stuck under somebody's windshield wiper, end up as litter, then in a dump, and ultimately my dollar has been thrown away.
I think of the thousands of phony charities set up in the wake of Katrina, to take advantage of everyone's desire to give and it bugs me. The billions of dollars countries pledge to give after international disasters (recent tsunami, earthquakes, and hurricanes, etc) are rarely given in full, it's usually just for show on the international stage and since no one ever really wants to fully follow through, no one does, and all countries are willing to look the other way (except the ones who were promised the money...Pakistan, India, the Philippines), because they are doing the same thing. I am really trying to cut down on my cynical quotient, but it's difficult these days.
I don't know why, but this whole culture that seems to have popped up recently that makes people feel compelled to give, not out of genuine concern, but because it's trendy makes me uncomfortable. Who didn't have a LiveStrong bracelet two years ago? And how many people that had them actually cared about cancer research and have since given again or have volunteered to help in other cancer research drives? LiveStrong spawned several sequels for various causes and people were more than willing to drop a dollar or two to get one that matched every outfit. They could feel good about themselves, get their bracelet and apparently everybody wins. I just don't like the idea of conflating consumerism and philanthropy. The rationale is that people are going to buy, buy, buy anyway, so we might as well tie some of that to charity. It just seems disingenuous to me. The corporations rake in the money, capitalizing on people's urge to be cool, score record profits, then get to keep it all because they get tax breaks for donating just enough to charity to get the tax break and not much more. Yoplait donating 10 cents for each pink lid customers mail back to the company to breast cancer research (up to $1.5 million) sounds like a great promotion on paper. Then you do the math and realize they'd have to receive 15 million pink lids to make that contribution. And on their website they say things like "We only accept whole lids, no partial lids." What difference does it make? And they don't provide for postage, so you're going to end up losing money on this deal anyway; why not just donate the dime(s) yourself and not let Yoplait exploit you while circumventing taxation?
Here is an amusing satire on this topic from 4 years back that gets what I'm driving at.
Then again, maybe I just need to get with the times and get myself a (red) Ipod nano
I think of the thousands of phony charities set up in the wake of Katrina, to take advantage of everyone's desire to give and it bugs me. The billions of dollars countries pledge to give after international disasters (recent tsunami, earthquakes, and hurricanes, etc) are rarely given in full, it's usually just for show on the international stage and since no one ever really wants to fully follow through, no one does, and all countries are willing to look the other way (except the ones who were promised the money...Pakistan, India, the Philippines), because they are doing the same thing. I am really trying to cut down on my cynical quotient, but it's difficult these days.
I don't know why, but this whole culture that seems to have popped up recently that makes people feel compelled to give, not out of genuine concern, but because it's trendy makes me uncomfortable. Who didn't have a LiveStrong bracelet two years ago? And how many people that had them actually cared about cancer research and have since given again or have volunteered to help in other cancer research drives? LiveStrong spawned several sequels for various causes and people were more than willing to drop a dollar or two to get one that matched every outfit. They could feel good about themselves, get their bracelet and apparently everybody wins. I just don't like the idea of conflating consumerism and philanthropy. The rationale is that people are going to buy, buy, buy anyway, so we might as well tie some of that to charity. It just seems disingenuous to me. The corporations rake in the money, capitalizing on people's urge to be cool, score record profits, then get to keep it all because they get tax breaks for donating just enough to charity to get the tax break and not much more. Yoplait donating 10 cents for each pink lid customers mail back to the company to breast cancer research (up to $1.5 million) sounds like a great promotion on paper. Then you do the math and realize they'd have to receive 15 million pink lids to make that contribution. And on their website they say things like "We only accept whole lids, no partial lids." What difference does it make? And they don't provide for postage, so you're going to end up losing money on this deal anyway; why not just donate the dime(s) yourself and not let Yoplait exploit you while circumventing taxation?
Here is an amusing satire on this topic from 4 years back that gets what I'm driving at.
Then again, maybe I just need to get with the times and get myself a (red) Ipod nano
Thursday, October 19, 2006
The Departed
Preface: I apologize in advance for the length of this post, I had no intention of writing so much, but since I have, I don't see where I can pare it down and still say it all. And as usual, spoilers lie ahead, for this film and one other, so be forewarned.
So without further adieu...
The Departed
To see it, or not to see it that is the question. I know plenty of people I can recommend this for, because I know they will enjoy it, like most of the guys at work. I know that my parents would walk out 15 minutes into the movie. Both reactions are perfectly valid given the material, but it makes it difficult when people ask should I see it or not. I would not recommend it for Ma & Pa, Grandma or anyone with a weak stomach because it is incredibly vulgar and incredibly violent. So anyone turned off by those things should stay away. Far, far away. Go see Open Season.
As for the film itself, I didn't particularly care for it, though I'll start with the aspects of the film I enjoyed, so that you don't have to go in search of the niceties once I start ranting about things that bothered me, and you can get out once you've had your fill.
The Good:
I was wrong in my assumption about the length of the film. About 2 weeks back I said I thought the running time of just over 2.5 hours was going to be too long, but it was not. The story stayed interesting for almost the entire time with virtually no parts dragging, an impressive feat of screenwriting story structure by William Monahan.
The performances of Leonardo DiCaprio, Alec Baldwin, and Mark Wahlberg are all great, the standout performances in the film, especially Leo. He gets a bad rap, inanely, because he was in Titanic, but he is a very talented actor who's still improving, and he's riding on Scorsese now the way DeNiro did in the 70's (and we know how that turned out for him). Jack Nicholson starts out with the makings a great performance for the first 45 minutes or so...then there's the opera/cocaine scene. If you've seen it you know the one I'm talking about. From that point on, his performance just seems rather affected. (The fly: need I say more?)
Well, it seems I've exhausted my praise of the film, and have jumped into the rant, so here we go:
Continuing on about the performances, Matt Damon, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone (as Mr. French), and the female cop shrink are all given too little to work with, so try as they might, their characters never reach the level of the aforementioned characters. The female cop shrink is an interesting idea for a character, a psychologist who is subconsciously drawn to violent men with identity issues, but she is too unimportant to the plot to explore this in much depth, which is unfortunate. While I'm on the characters, can anyone, please, name me a Scorsese film where the main character isn't a paranoid, sociopathic loner and the script isn't littered with jokes that are either racist (niggers, chinks, guineas...must we, again?) or misogynistic ("period" jokes are pretty much never funny). Rehash. I know, it's supposed to be a device to infuse his film with narrative fidelity, but then again, Henry Beecher, early American abolitionist, said, "Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures."
About midway through the film I said to myself, "This film has far too much music." (And yes, I said it out loud..good thing there were only 2 other people 10 rows back, they might've shushed me). It just seemed like Scorsese was doing his best Cameron Crowe/Tarantino impression, saying "Look how wide-ranging my music tastes are; I have The Rolling Stones, Patsy Cline, and Nas on the same soundtrack!" There is nothing wrong with using that music, but it seems to be put in in a slapdash manner and feels incessant. There is never a reprieve from the cacophony of music, dialogue, and gunshots, and maybe that's a stylistic choice, designed to give the viewer the feel of being trapped in this movie, the way the characters are trapped in their world, with no room to breath. If it is done for that reason, I think it's the wrong choice. Hitchcock said the viewer needs room to breath, even if the characters don't get to, and I agree with that. The audience can't stay on edge the entire time, you get sensitized and that's when you fall into sloppy shoot-em-up endings to shock the audience, because they are too exhausted to be carried with suspense any longer. Before I leave the discussion of sound design/editing though, there were some edits where the dialogue or music of one scene bleeds into the next scene (bleeding motif perhaps?) and while this technique can work, here it just seems choppy.
Speaking of choppy, that brings me to the editing. The first 30 minutes of the film are so stylistically indulgent (2 iris wipes, zoom out from high-above angle, choppy cross-cut training montage sequences, the "title" card 10-15 minutes in, etc) that the viewer can't help but feel disjointed, and maybe that's intentional (Scorsese is the most knowledgeable filmmaker, in terms of craft, working, so I don't believe there are too many accidents in his films) but I was certainly taken out of the film experience by the style early on. He is clearly trying to emulate the style of the Hong-Kong action film on which this film was based, but he just doesn't have that in him, so the entire stylistic approach is a misfire. It never feels connected.
David Bordwell points to a technique he calls "intense continuity", wherein so much of the film, particularly dialogue exchanges between characters sitting down, is "close-upped" that the performances exist almost entirely in the facial expressions and line readings, and almost completely takes away the physical performance, use of props, gesture, relative positioning, staging, etc. These things are minimized so that the director doesn't have to account for the constant position of limbs, props, extras, etc on screen (continuity). The characters are forced to sit in relative stillness, forcing the camera and editing to add kinetic energy to the scene, rather than the actors. Scorsese is known to shoot dozens of takes and piece together the best performances of the lines, disregarding visual continuity, likely in a nod to his appreciation of Antonioni and French New Wave films. This approach is certainly one he and Thelma (his editor) have down to a science (see Cate Blanchett in The Aviator), but it doesn't always work (Jack's uneven performance in this serves as evidence of that).
The characters don't seem to have any qualms about their actions. No one seems to have any concern for human life, no one seems concerned about law, civility, or morality. It's so nihilistic. There are no such things as consequences. Events are not connected, things just happen, and if we happen to think some occurrences are unfair, it's our own fault for believing in foolish ideas like fairness, rationality, and morality. Think of the death of Anthony Anderson's character. What purpose does it serve? To show us that sometimes people die irrationally and that life is pure absurdity?
It is well within the rights of the filmmakers to make a film about a situation of such utter hopelessness, but aren't there enough films out there doing this? Where are the films pointing us toward something better, showing us what's wrong and then a way toward a better life, society, world? Or is the world so far gone that is past the point of redemption, and our artists can only reflect that to us? In his Oscar acceptance speech this past year, Paul Haggis quoted legendary playwright Bertold Brecht, saying, "Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it." The difference between a cynic and a nihilist is the ultimate belief in the possibility of goodness in man, even if it's buried somewhere deep inside, and a hope that it can (and ideally will) come out and make a difference for the better.
The ending aims to make the film a tragedy. The one comparison that came to mind when I saw it was Ran, Kurosawa's 1985 epic re-tooling of King Lear (you should see it if you haven't, it is one of the most beautiful films ever made). In both films all of the principle characters die, except one (Tango in Ran, Mark Wahlberg in this film). The difference being in Ran, the stakes are clear; now that everyone is dead, the kingdom is headed to a state of instability because the king and all of his sons are dead. It is every bit as nihilistic as this film, the never-ending cycle of violence and absurdity of life/death are on full display, but is delivered with a helping of pathos missing here. In The Departed, Costello and all of his 'sons' are dead, but this seems to have little overall impact to anyone else. They stayed mostly amongst their own underworld and the only real outside contact they had was with the police, who were also their men (and his gang was infested with cops). So you had cops as gangsters shooting at gangsters as cops, but as Leo says, ultimately, what's the difference? Essentially, that's the way I felt about the film. I saw it, but I could have just as easily not seen it, but what's the difference?
So without further adieu...
The Departed
To see it, or not to see it that is the question. I know plenty of people I can recommend this for, because I know they will enjoy it, like most of the guys at work. I know that my parents would walk out 15 minutes into the movie. Both reactions are perfectly valid given the material, but it makes it difficult when people ask should I see it or not. I would not recommend it for Ma & Pa, Grandma or anyone with a weak stomach because it is incredibly vulgar and incredibly violent. So anyone turned off by those things should stay away. Far, far away. Go see Open Season.
As for the film itself, I didn't particularly care for it, though I'll start with the aspects of the film I enjoyed, so that you don't have to go in search of the niceties once I start ranting about things that bothered me, and you can get out once you've had your fill.
The Good:
I was wrong in my assumption about the length of the film. About 2 weeks back I said I thought the running time of just over 2.5 hours was going to be too long, but it was not. The story stayed interesting for almost the entire time with virtually no parts dragging, an impressive feat of screenwriting story structure by William Monahan.
The performances of Leonardo DiCaprio, Alec Baldwin, and Mark Wahlberg are all great, the standout performances in the film, especially Leo. He gets a bad rap, inanely, because he was in Titanic, but he is a very talented actor who's still improving, and he's riding on Scorsese now the way DeNiro did in the 70's (and we know how that turned out for him). Jack Nicholson starts out with the makings a great performance for the first 45 minutes or so...then there's the opera/cocaine scene. If you've seen it you know the one I'm talking about. From that point on, his performance just seems rather affected. (The fly: need I say more?)
Well, it seems I've exhausted my praise of the film, and have jumped into the rant, so here we go:
Continuing on about the performances, Matt Damon, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone (as Mr. French), and the female cop shrink are all given too little to work with, so try as they might, their characters never reach the level of the aforementioned characters. The female cop shrink is an interesting idea for a character, a psychologist who is subconsciously drawn to violent men with identity issues, but she is too unimportant to the plot to explore this in much depth, which is unfortunate. While I'm on the characters, can anyone, please, name me a Scorsese film where the main character isn't a paranoid, sociopathic loner and the script isn't littered with jokes that are either racist (niggers, chinks, guineas...must we, again?) or misogynistic ("period" jokes are pretty much never funny). Rehash. I know, it's supposed to be a device to infuse his film with narrative fidelity, but then again, Henry Beecher, early American abolitionist, said, "Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures."
About midway through the film I said to myself, "This film has far too much music." (And yes, I said it out loud..good thing there were only 2 other people 10 rows back, they might've shushed me). It just seemed like Scorsese was doing his best Cameron Crowe/Tarantino impression, saying "Look how wide-ranging my music tastes are; I have The Rolling Stones, Patsy Cline, and Nas on the same soundtrack!" There is nothing wrong with using that music, but it seems to be put in in a slapdash manner and feels incessant. There is never a reprieve from the cacophony of music, dialogue, and gunshots, and maybe that's a stylistic choice, designed to give the viewer the feel of being trapped in this movie, the way the characters are trapped in their world, with no room to breath. If it is done for that reason, I think it's the wrong choice. Hitchcock said the viewer needs room to breath, even if the characters don't get to, and I agree with that. The audience can't stay on edge the entire time, you get sensitized and that's when you fall into sloppy shoot-em-up endings to shock the audience, because they are too exhausted to be carried with suspense any longer. Before I leave the discussion of sound design/editing though, there were some edits where the dialogue or music of one scene bleeds into the next scene (bleeding motif perhaps?) and while this technique can work, here it just seems choppy.
Speaking of choppy, that brings me to the editing. The first 30 minutes of the film are so stylistically indulgent (2 iris wipes, zoom out from high-above angle, choppy cross-cut training montage sequences, the "title" card 10-15 minutes in, etc) that the viewer can't help but feel disjointed, and maybe that's intentional (Scorsese is the most knowledgeable filmmaker, in terms of craft, working, so I don't believe there are too many accidents in his films) but I was certainly taken out of the film experience by the style early on. He is clearly trying to emulate the style of the Hong-Kong action film on which this film was based, but he just doesn't have that in him, so the entire stylistic approach is a misfire. It never feels connected.
David Bordwell points to a technique he calls "intense continuity", wherein so much of the film, particularly dialogue exchanges between characters sitting down, is "close-upped" that the performances exist almost entirely in the facial expressions and line readings, and almost completely takes away the physical performance, use of props, gesture, relative positioning, staging, etc. These things are minimized so that the director doesn't have to account for the constant position of limbs, props, extras, etc on screen (continuity). The characters are forced to sit in relative stillness, forcing the camera and editing to add kinetic energy to the scene, rather than the actors. Scorsese is known to shoot dozens of takes and piece together the best performances of the lines, disregarding visual continuity, likely in a nod to his appreciation of Antonioni and French New Wave films. This approach is certainly one he and Thelma (his editor) have down to a science (see Cate Blanchett in The Aviator), but it doesn't always work (Jack's uneven performance in this serves as evidence of that).
The characters don't seem to have any qualms about their actions. No one seems to have any concern for human life, no one seems concerned about law, civility, or morality. It's so nihilistic. There are no such things as consequences. Events are not connected, things just happen, and if we happen to think some occurrences are unfair, it's our own fault for believing in foolish ideas like fairness, rationality, and morality. Think of the death of Anthony Anderson's character. What purpose does it serve? To show us that sometimes people die irrationally and that life is pure absurdity?
It is well within the rights of the filmmakers to make a film about a situation of such utter hopelessness, but aren't there enough films out there doing this? Where are the films pointing us toward something better, showing us what's wrong and then a way toward a better life, society, world? Or is the world so far gone that is past the point of redemption, and our artists can only reflect that to us? In his Oscar acceptance speech this past year, Paul Haggis quoted legendary playwright Bertold Brecht, saying, "Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it." The difference between a cynic and a nihilist is the ultimate belief in the possibility of goodness in man, even if it's buried somewhere deep inside, and a hope that it can (and ideally will) come out and make a difference for the better.
The ending aims to make the film a tragedy. The one comparison that came to mind when I saw it was Ran, Kurosawa's 1985 epic re-tooling of King Lear (you should see it if you haven't, it is one of the most beautiful films ever made). In both films all of the principle characters die, except one (Tango in Ran, Mark Wahlberg in this film). The difference being in Ran, the stakes are clear; now that everyone is dead, the kingdom is headed to a state of instability because the king and all of his sons are dead. It is every bit as nihilistic as this film, the never-ending cycle of violence and absurdity of life/death are on full display, but is delivered with a helping of pathos missing here. In The Departed, Costello and all of his 'sons' are dead, but this seems to have little overall impact to anyone else. They stayed mostly amongst their own underworld and the only real outside contact they had was with the police, who were also their men (and his gang was infested with cops). So you had cops as gangsters shooting at gangsters as cops, but as Leo says, ultimately, what's the difference? Essentially, that's the way I felt about the film. I saw it, but I could have just as easily not seen it, but what's the difference?
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Crazy, Liberal Oprah
Last night on "The Factor", Bill O was complaining that Oprah has too many 'secular progressives' on her show and not enough conservatives or 'traditionalists', accusing her of not being balanced. If this sounds familiar, it's because it's the same argument Tucker Carlson tried to make toward Jon Stewart in regards to The Daily Show 2 years back.
Of course, they both miss the difference between news and entertainment programming, as their shows blur the lines as well (although O'Reilly did have a very civil discussion on the war with Bob Woodward prior to going off the deep end regarding Oprah), only they try to hold themselves up as newsmen, while Oprah and Stewart gladly accept their roles as entertainers, not reporters. There is no onus of balance on Oprah, it's her show and she is free to invite or not invite whomever she chooses. One of his guests suggested O'Reilly was just upset that he'd never been invited on her show.
Then he went on to say that with Rosie on The View in the morning, Oprah and Ellen Degeneres in the afternoon, and Leno, Letterman, Stewart, and Kimmel at night, people are having liberal views forced on them all day, with no conservatives on the air to inspire a point-counterpoint discussion on television. Now, this is true to a point, but overstates the case.
First, the View has Elisabeth Hasselback who is not shy about espousing her conservative views, Oprah gets 'political' maybe twice a month, Ellen never does but since she's a lesbian he lumped her in, the late night guys make fun of the days news and since the Republicans are in power, they make jokes about them; as Matthew Perry's character said on Studio 60 last week, when his character was faced with similar accusations, "I'd gladly make fun of the Democrats if one of them would actually say or do something."
There are many liberal voices on television, but I wonder if it wouldn't be different or less of an issue for Bill if we were in a national situation where the majority of people weren't upset with the direction of the country and the presidential administration. Were that the case, I doubt we'd see as much dissension among the ranks, but as it stands, I see nothing wrong with a little healthy skepticism. That's skepticism, not to be confused with pessimism. Pessimism increases apathy, which could possibly make it worse than if no one said anything and we had a state-run media.
Of course, they both miss the difference between news and entertainment programming, as their shows blur the lines as well (although O'Reilly did have a very civil discussion on the war with Bob Woodward prior to going off the deep end regarding Oprah), only they try to hold themselves up as newsmen, while Oprah and Stewart gladly accept their roles as entertainers, not reporters. There is no onus of balance on Oprah, it's her show and she is free to invite or not invite whomever she chooses. One of his guests suggested O'Reilly was just upset that he'd never been invited on her show.
Then he went on to say that with Rosie on The View in the morning, Oprah and Ellen Degeneres in the afternoon, and Leno, Letterman, Stewart, and Kimmel at night, people are having liberal views forced on them all day, with no conservatives on the air to inspire a point-counterpoint discussion on television. Now, this is true to a point, but overstates the case.
First, the View has Elisabeth Hasselback who is not shy about espousing her conservative views, Oprah gets 'political' maybe twice a month, Ellen never does but since she's a lesbian he lumped her in, the late night guys make fun of the days news and since the Republicans are in power, they make jokes about them; as Matthew Perry's character said on Studio 60 last week, when his character was faced with similar accusations, "I'd gladly make fun of the Democrats if one of them would actually say or do something."
There are many liberal voices on television, but I wonder if it wouldn't be different or less of an issue for Bill if we were in a national situation where the majority of people weren't upset with the direction of the country and the presidential administration. Were that the case, I doubt we'd see as much dissension among the ranks, but as it stands, I see nothing wrong with a little healthy skepticism. That's skepticism, not to be confused with pessimism. Pessimism increases apathy, which could possibly make it worse than if no one said anything and we had a state-run media.
Takes One to Know One?
Two weeks back, on his show, Hardball, Chris Matthews, while talking with Katherine Harris of Florida, said he felt the Democrats would be better off if they simply advocated an immediate and complete pull out of Iraq, rather than talking about timetables and re-deployments "you're either for staying there or pulling out", failing to realize that maybe their positions are not about political posturing, but about their actual beliefs as to how the situation should be handled. Just keep it to the extreme ends of the ideological spectrum and you're sure to drum up an audience, it's good theater, but that doesn't make it good policy or politics.
When asked what her opinion was, Katherine Harris answered that she supports the current course because, as she saw it, the only two alternatives are "cut-and-run" and "set a timetable so the terrorists know when we are leaving." That's it? There are no other options?
These are the same people who regularly decry "Islamo-fascists" as "extremists"....well, I guess it takes one to know one.
The day prior, Al Franken made the statement on, I believe it was his own radio show, that conservative "don't like details" in regards to persistent attacking of Democrats for lacking a strategy on Iraq. He said when he is invited on those shows and people ask him if he has a strategy, they expect him to say no or be flustered, but he claims he actually has a plan and he will "explain it slowly and in full detail, because those people hate details."
I think we all agree on the "big picture". We want to reduce and eliminate terrorism and create a stable Middle East without a nuclear North Korea, Iran, or Al-Qaida. Unfortunately, there is little discussion on how to achieve this end through "details", "small picture" victories. It's been 1270 days since Mission Accomplished was declared and yet we are currently on pace to have one of the deadliest months for our troops in this war, because all this administration has conveyed to us is that they can see the their big picture, sadly, without seeing the details.
When asked what her opinion was, Katherine Harris answered that she supports the current course because, as she saw it, the only two alternatives are "cut-and-run" and "set a timetable so the terrorists know when we are leaving." That's it? There are no other options?
These are the same people who regularly decry "Islamo-fascists" as "extremists"....well, I guess it takes one to know one.
The day prior, Al Franken made the statement on, I believe it was his own radio show, that conservative "don't like details" in regards to persistent attacking of Democrats for lacking a strategy on Iraq. He said when he is invited on those shows and people ask him if he has a strategy, they expect him to say no or be flustered, but he claims he actually has a plan and he will "explain it slowly and in full detail, because those people hate details."
I think we all agree on the "big picture". We want to reduce and eliminate terrorism and create a stable Middle East without a nuclear North Korea, Iran, or Al-Qaida. Unfortunately, there is little discussion on how to achieve this end through "details", "small picture" victories. It's been 1270 days since Mission Accomplished was declared and yet we are currently on pace to have one of the deadliest months for our troops in this war, because all this administration has conveyed to us is that they can see the their big picture, sadly, without seeing the details.
Sunday, October 15, 2006
What I've Been Reading This Weekend...
I did too much reading to do much writing, so here's what you do: look at what I read, mix it all together, output something cohesive and coherent and imagine that I wrote it.
Why I Gave Up on Hip-Hop
James Zogby on the lack of real discussion on Middle East politics
Confessions of a Defeatocrat by John Murtha
The writings of David Bordwell, America's foremost film scholar.
Reveling in 'round-trip' translation
Roger Ebert's first review since his long summer battle with cancer.
Mark Cuban on the potential rise of Euroleague basketball, and the NBA bringing it's own decline
Tommy Tuberville boo-hoo-ing about the BCS being unfair to the SEC, while forgetting that LSU was the BCS champ in the '03-'04 season.
Why I Gave Up on Hip-Hop
James Zogby on the lack of real discussion on Middle East politics
Confessions of a Defeatocrat by John Murtha
The writings of David Bordwell, America's foremost film scholar.
Reveling in 'round-trip' translation
Roger Ebert's first review since his long summer battle with cancer.
Mark Cuban on the potential rise of Euroleague basketball, and the NBA bringing it's own decline
Tommy Tuberville boo-hoo-ing about the BCS being unfair to the SEC, while forgetting that LSU was the BCS champ in the '03-'04 season.
Saturday, October 14, 2006
That's Funny, I Don't Care Who Y'are
Saw my fourth Marx Brothers movie yesterday, and I am now thoroughly convinced Groucho Marx is the most consistently funny, and really, THE funniest person I've ever seen in a movie. 90% of his jokes are funny, (and it would probably be 95% funny if I knew more about life in the 30's.)
He spouts one-liners fast and furious and his timing, delivery, and mannerisms are just perfect, every time. The other brothers are all great too, but Groucho's inspired comedic performances stand out and are still hilarious, even some 70 years later. There's something to be said for timeless comedy and this is a rare source where you can find it. I wonder what from today will still be funny into the 2070's.....certainly not me (and probably not Larry the Cable Guy, either).
Maybe it's a sign that things(or humor, or people) haven't changed so much in the decades since. Maybe not, maybe it's just funny and searching for social significance in it is all for naught.
Regardless, I recommend all of you seek out Duck Soup (widely considered the best of their movies, and in my view, rightfully so), Animal Crackers, Horse Feathers, or A Night at the Opera, and probably any of the other films they made that I haven't seen yet.
Not convinced? Check out this scene from Duck Soup (courtesy of Youtube)
In other news (because I doubt anyone will heed my advice on the Marx Brothers movies), I think I've decided (as no doubt several others have before me have as well) there are 3 kinds of people in the world: participators, observers, and recluses. I see myself as being an observer, with reclusive tendencies.
Et tu, dear reader?
(p.s. I've also decided I use parenthetical notation too frequently in posting here)
He spouts one-liners fast and furious and his timing, delivery, and mannerisms are just perfect, every time. The other brothers are all great too, but Groucho's inspired comedic performances stand out and are still hilarious, even some 70 years later. There's something to be said for timeless comedy and this is a rare source where you can find it. I wonder what from today will still be funny into the 2070's.....certainly not me (and probably not Larry the Cable Guy, either).
Maybe it's a sign that things(or humor, or people) haven't changed so much in the decades since. Maybe not, maybe it's just funny and searching for social significance in it is all for naught.
Regardless, I recommend all of you seek out Duck Soup (widely considered the best of their movies, and in my view, rightfully so), Animal Crackers, Horse Feathers, or A Night at the Opera, and probably any of the other films they made that I haven't seen yet.
Not convinced? Check out this scene from Duck Soup (courtesy of Youtube)
In other news (because I doubt anyone will heed my advice on the Marx Brothers movies), I think I've decided (as no doubt several others have before me have as well) there are 3 kinds of people in the world: participators, observers, and recluses. I see myself as being an observer, with reclusive tendencies.
Et tu, dear reader?
(p.s. I've also decided I use parenthetical notation too frequently in posting here)
Friday, October 13, 2006
The Wisdom of Albert Einstein and John Cage
This is a story I once heard about Albert Einstein, whether or not it is accurate, I know not, nor do I care...and with that preface, I commence my tale:
*************************
A prominent East Coast University invited Albert Einstein to come and speak. He accepted the invitation and they were filled with glee. They set up an Albert Einstein Day on the campus, they had a look-alike contest, passed out fake mustaches and wigs, etc.
Upon his arrival, he was whisked around campus on a guided tour by the university President himself and other prominent campus figures.
There was a glorious banquet prepared that evening and everyone feasted. Then it was time for Einstein to get up and deliver his lecture. He makes his way to podium, stands up and says something to the effect of, "Thank you all for inviting me here. Unfortunately, I have nothing to say." The crowd laughed. Then he sat down. The laughing stopped. He then walked back to the podium and announced, "When I do have something to say, I will return." Then he sat down again.
Several months later he kept his word, returning to deliver a speech.
**************************
Taking my cue from Albert Einstein, I see no need to continue to write every day. I will, however, return when I have something to say.
Or to put it a different way, in the words of avant-garde artist John Cage, "I have nothing to say and I'm saying it; and that, is poetry."
*************************
A prominent East Coast University invited Albert Einstein to come and speak. He accepted the invitation and they were filled with glee. They set up an Albert Einstein Day on the campus, they had a look-alike contest, passed out fake mustaches and wigs, etc.
Upon his arrival, he was whisked around campus on a guided tour by the university President himself and other prominent campus figures.
There was a glorious banquet prepared that evening and everyone feasted. Then it was time for Einstein to get up and deliver his lecture. He makes his way to podium, stands up and says something to the effect of, "Thank you all for inviting me here. Unfortunately, I have nothing to say." The crowd laughed. Then he sat down. The laughing stopped. He then walked back to the podium and announced, "When I do have something to say, I will return." Then he sat down again.
Several months later he kept his word, returning to deliver a speech.
**************************
Taking my cue from Albert Einstein, I see no need to continue to write every day. I will, however, return when I have something to say.
Or to put it a different way, in the words of avant-garde artist John Cage, "I have nothing to say and I'm saying it; and that, is poetry."
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Live
A few things I saw recently:
-There was a segment on World News Tonight about children with terminal cancer.
-There was recently a young man (20-something) on ESPN2's morning show Cold Pizza who was terminally ill attempting to accomplish his life's dream of going to a game at all of the Major League Baseball ballparks.
-This blog post, linked to this Washington Post article, lamenting the decline of writing by hand.
-The movie 'Human Nature' by Michel Gondry, penned by inimitable screenwriter Charlie Kauffman (the same writing-directing team behind the acclaimed 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind')
-I spent about an hour outside cleaning the pool and front porch, typically not the most enjoyable tasks, and yet I was just happy to be outdoors for a change. (I think most of us, especially me, spend far too much time in buildings, offices, cars, and houses.)
--(I also saw the debut of Mr. T's incredible new show, 'I Pity the Fool', on TV Land last night. I don't know that it's really related, but I wanted to mention it too as long as I was mentioning things.)
All of this combined to make me keenly aware of the nature of life. Life is not something we've earned, or to which we are entitled. No, it is a gift, freely and undeservedly given to us all. We are alive because of reasons beyond our control or comprehension, and so to we will all die.
I feel like most of the time we just take Life, capital L, for granted, assuming we'll live out our 3 score and 10 and then shuffle off this mortal coil, on to some after-life (or to reincarnation, or a state of non-existence) and don't realize what a gift it is to be on the aforementioned mortal coil.
Nothing is guaranteed, we could all be gone tomorrow. So I urge you, I implore you (and myself), don't be a "couch potato", don't be a "mouse potato", don't live unconsciously.
Choose to Live.
Choose Life.
-There was a segment on World News Tonight about children with terminal cancer.
-There was recently a young man (20-something) on ESPN2's morning show Cold Pizza who was terminally ill attempting to accomplish his life's dream of going to a game at all of the Major League Baseball ballparks.
-This blog post, linked to this Washington Post article, lamenting the decline of writing by hand.
-The movie 'Human Nature' by Michel Gondry, penned by inimitable screenwriter Charlie Kauffman (the same writing-directing team behind the acclaimed 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind')
-I spent about an hour outside cleaning the pool and front porch, typically not the most enjoyable tasks, and yet I was just happy to be outdoors for a change. (I think most of us, especially me, spend far too much time in buildings, offices, cars, and houses.)
--(I also saw the debut of Mr. T's incredible new show, 'I Pity the Fool', on TV Land last night. I don't know that it's really related, but I wanted to mention it too as long as I was mentioning things.)
All of this combined to make me keenly aware of the nature of life. Life is not something we've earned, or to which we are entitled. No, it is a gift, freely and undeservedly given to us all. We are alive because of reasons beyond our control or comprehension, and so to we will all die.
I feel like most of the time we just take Life, capital L, for granted, assuming we'll live out our 3 score and 10 and then shuffle off this mortal coil, on to some after-life (or to reincarnation, or a state of non-existence) and don't realize what a gift it is to be on the aforementioned mortal coil.
Nothing is guaranteed, we could all be gone tomorrow. So I urge you, I implore you (and myself), don't be a "couch potato", don't be a "mouse potato", don't live unconsciously.
Choose to Live.
Choose Life.
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
I Just Wasn't Made For These Times
There is a message board I occasionally visit that recently had a thread asking members to list their 100 favorite movies, and as I can't pass up any opportunity to talk movies, I hastily threw together my own list (then spent 2 hours revising). Anyway, what I realized is just how many on the list were released decades before my nascence: about 70 of them. And then if you add in the ones released before I hit junior high, you're left with about 6 from the last decade. Clearly, I wasn't made for these cinematic times (that or this is the cinematic dark ages).
And then when I think about my favorite music today, it's a lot 60's pop, The Zombies (progenitors of my all-time favorite album 'Odyssey and Oracle'), The Beach Boys (hence the title of the article), The Kinks (I'm currently hooked on their hit All Day and All of the Night ), Love, etc and 70's R&B, Marvin Gaye, Donny Hathaway, Earth Wind and Fire, etc. And then I bought the incredible new Ray Charles album last week and it made me sad that some people got to listen to that as their popular music while we have gibberish like Lil Jon barking "snap ya fingers, two step, you can do it all by yourself" at us. I also bought Solomon Burke's new album and his voice is so expressive still, over 40 years after he started, Johnny Cash was still popular at his death, Bob Dylan recently had a #1 record, Elton John is still working and even talking about doing a hip-hop album. How many career artists do we see in our generation of popular artists?
Last night I randomly found myself looking up all the great statesmen and orators of the American Revolution (no idea why) and wondering what it would be like if we had politicians like Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Sam Adams, and James Madison today, elected representatives who sounded intelligent when they spoke, instead of ones who give us, "I'm the decider and I decide what's best" and "It depends what the definition of "is" is...
Sure there's stuff out today that I enjoy (and I'll get to that shortly), but given my preferences, sometimes I think I'd prefer to have lived been a teen in the 1960's.
Then I started thinking, maybe it's good that I live in the present, rather than back then because, in addition to that whole Jim Crow business, I'm sure there was plenty of the suck back then too, and only the good has lasted; the wheat has separated itself from the chaff; the cream of the crop has risen, and so forth.
Maybe that's the case, but it seems to me that much of this entertainment was popular in it's day and has lasted because it was good, while today it seems like for most of the good stuff "you have to know where to look." I don't want to have to plumb the depth of cyberspace, searching to and fro for quality entertainment; it should be, in the immortal words of Van Morrison, "ever present everywhere."
However, since we do live in the present, I must deal with it, so here are some current music releases I enjoy and can recommend for just about everyone.
John Mayer - Continuum. I referenced this a few times when I first started this place up and I still think it's good. It's a maturing John Mayer, dealing with growing into adulthood and his place in the world, and of course, the requisite relationship angst.
Robert Randolph and the Family Band - Colorblind. My goodness these guys are awesome. If you've never heard them, you have to immediately. They're sound is like Blues crossed with Funk crossed with Gospel crossed with Rock...it doesn't fit into any genre really. This is the 2nd studio album and it's got more of a rock feel than the first and it's higher energy and features more of Robert's amazing pedal steel guitar solos. If you've got extra money lying around, get their first album, Unclassified as well.
Robin Thicke - The Evolution of Robin Thicke. This one comes as a more modest recommendation because about half of the album is really good. The rest is good, but nothing too special. It's probably better to just buy the best songs, 2 The Sky, Angels, Lonely World, Ask Myself, Complicated, Cocaine, Can U Believe, and Shooter w/ Lil Wayne on Itunes, (or download them for free if you're, you know, a criminal) and leave the rest. His first album, A Beautiful World, is a better whole, in my opinion, but this has some great moments on those songs I listed. His biggest problem is that all of the songs this time around seem just a little too long; there is only 1 song under 3.5 minutes.
Amos Lee - Supply and Demand. Amos' sophomore effort is mostly a continuation of his first album stylistically and lyrically, which is a good thing. At times he does try to stretch himself a little bit musically, but not too far, sticking to a winning formula from that solid eponymous debut. It's good music from start to finish, the title track being the standout the couple times I've listened.
Sufjan Stevens - The Avalanche. I understand this is an album of outtakes and leftovers from his album "Come on, Feel the Illanoise"...while I haven't heard that one, if these are the outtakes, either he has no idea what he's doing by leaving off some of these tracks, or he is a musical wizard and that album is pure magic.
Corinne Bailey Rae. This debut is a great summertime, feel-good album, so you kinda missed the boat on it if you missed it. The two times I was Malibu over the summer I just turned it on, turned it up, drove around and smiled for 11 songs. That isn't to say it only works in summer, good music is good all the time (except Christmas Music...it's only acceptable from about Thanksgiving til Dec. 25th, then that's it, shelve "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer" and its ilk til next year.) I can't think of an acceptable comparison....musically, I'd say her style is somewhere between Craig David and Kelly Clarkson.
Anthony David also has a new album out, but I haven't heard it, although the single "Words" with India.Arie is pretty good.
Weird Al's "White and Nerdy" may be the funniest song I've heard since MaddWest put out "Ugly Friend" about 4 years back.
Van Hunt is my favorite modern artist, and his two albums and Live EP are fantastic. I am anxiously awaiting the upcoming(Oct. 24th) release of the new John Legend CD, his single "Save Room" is, as Ben might say, tasty.
In movies, I'm not sure if they're all still in theaters but The Last Kiss, The Illusionist, and Little Miss Sunshine are all fine films, and The Lake House and Thank You For Smoking hit DVD recently, and both of those come highly recommended. Oh, and the recent Platinum Edition DVD release of The Little Mermaid is worth every penny, it's an even better film than I remembered it being. Finally, if Spike Lee's Hurricane Katrina documentary "When The Levees Broke" is playing on HBO, you should give it a shot, even though the 4 hour running time is daunting.
And there is a TV show called Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip it comes on NBC, Monday nights at 10. I suggest you watch it. It is very good television. And watch the Project Runway finale coming up tomorrow and next Wednesday. And of course, catch Entourage, The Boondocks, and The Daily Show whenever possible.
OK, I just finished listening to the Robert Randolph CD all the way through....you must get it.
So there you have it, maybe these times aren't so bad after all.
And then when I think about my favorite music today, it's a lot 60's pop, The Zombies (progenitors of my all-time favorite album 'Odyssey and Oracle'), The Beach Boys (hence the title of the article), The Kinks (I'm currently hooked on their hit All Day and All of the Night ), Love, etc and 70's R&B, Marvin Gaye, Donny Hathaway, Earth Wind and Fire, etc. And then I bought the incredible new Ray Charles album last week and it made me sad that some people got to listen to that as their popular music while we have gibberish like Lil Jon barking "snap ya fingers, two step, you can do it all by yourself" at us. I also bought Solomon Burke's new album and his voice is so expressive still, over 40 years after he started, Johnny Cash was still popular at his death, Bob Dylan recently had a #1 record, Elton John is still working and even talking about doing a hip-hop album. How many career artists do we see in our generation of popular artists?
Last night I randomly found myself looking up all the great statesmen and orators of the American Revolution (no idea why) and wondering what it would be like if we had politicians like Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Sam Adams, and James Madison today, elected representatives who sounded intelligent when they spoke, instead of ones who give us, "I'm the decider and I decide what's best" and "It depends what the definition of "is" is...
Sure there's stuff out today that I enjoy (and I'll get to that shortly), but given my preferences, sometimes I think I'd prefer to have lived been a teen in the 1960's.
Then I started thinking, maybe it's good that I live in the present, rather than back then because, in addition to that whole Jim Crow business, I'm sure there was plenty of the suck back then too, and only the good has lasted; the wheat has separated itself from the chaff; the cream of the crop has risen, and so forth.
Maybe that's the case, but it seems to me that much of this entertainment was popular in it's day and has lasted because it was good, while today it seems like for most of the good stuff "you have to know where to look." I don't want to have to plumb the depth of cyberspace, searching to and fro for quality entertainment; it should be, in the immortal words of Van Morrison, "ever present everywhere."
However, since we do live in the present, I must deal with it, so here are some current music releases I enjoy and can recommend for just about everyone.
John Mayer - Continuum. I referenced this a few times when I first started this place up and I still think it's good. It's a maturing John Mayer, dealing with growing into adulthood and his place in the world, and of course, the requisite relationship angst.
Robert Randolph and the Family Band - Colorblind. My goodness these guys are awesome. If you've never heard them, you have to immediately. They're sound is like Blues crossed with Funk crossed with Gospel crossed with Rock...it doesn't fit into any genre really. This is the 2nd studio album and it's got more of a rock feel than the first and it's higher energy and features more of Robert's amazing pedal steel guitar solos. If you've got extra money lying around, get their first album, Unclassified as well.
Robin Thicke - The Evolution of Robin Thicke. This one comes as a more modest recommendation because about half of the album is really good. The rest is good, but nothing too special. It's probably better to just buy the best songs, 2 The Sky, Angels, Lonely World, Ask Myself, Complicated, Cocaine, Can U Believe, and Shooter w/ Lil Wayne on Itunes, (or download them for free if you're, you know, a criminal) and leave the rest. His first album, A Beautiful World, is a better whole, in my opinion, but this has some great moments on those songs I listed. His biggest problem is that all of the songs this time around seem just a little too long; there is only 1 song under 3.5 minutes.
Amos Lee - Supply and Demand. Amos' sophomore effort is mostly a continuation of his first album stylistically and lyrically, which is a good thing. At times he does try to stretch himself a little bit musically, but not too far, sticking to a winning formula from that solid eponymous debut. It's good music from start to finish, the title track being the standout the couple times I've listened.
Sufjan Stevens - The Avalanche. I understand this is an album of outtakes and leftovers from his album "Come on, Feel the Illanoise"...while I haven't heard that one, if these are the outtakes, either he has no idea what he's doing by leaving off some of these tracks, or he is a musical wizard and that album is pure magic.
Corinne Bailey Rae. This debut is a great summertime, feel-good album, so you kinda missed the boat on it if you missed it. The two times I was Malibu over the summer I just turned it on, turned it up, drove around and smiled for 11 songs. That isn't to say it only works in summer, good music is good all the time (except Christmas Music...it's only acceptable from about Thanksgiving til Dec. 25th, then that's it, shelve "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer" and its ilk til next year.) I can't think of an acceptable comparison....musically, I'd say her style is somewhere between Craig David and Kelly Clarkson.
Anthony David also has a new album out, but I haven't heard it, although the single "Words" with India.Arie is pretty good.
Weird Al's "White and Nerdy" may be the funniest song I've heard since MaddWest put out "Ugly Friend" about 4 years back.
Van Hunt is my favorite modern artist, and his two albums and Live EP are fantastic. I am anxiously awaiting the upcoming(Oct. 24th) release of the new John Legend CD, his single "Save Room" is, as Ben might say, tasty.
In movies, I'm not sure if they're all still in theaters but The Last Kiss, The Illusionist, and Little Miss Sunshine are all fine films, and The Lake House and Thank You For Smoking hit DVD recently, and both of those come highly recommended. Oh, and the recent Platinum Edition DVD release of The Little Mermaid is worth every penny, it's an even better film than I remembered it being. Finally, if Spike Lee's Hurricane Katrina documentary "When The Levees Broke" is playing on HBO, you should give it a shot, even though the 4 hour running time is daunting.
And there is a TV show called Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip it comes on NBC, Monday nights at 10. I suggest you watch it. It is very good television. And watch the Project Runway finale coming up tomorrow and next Wednesday. And of course, catch Entourage, The Boondocks, and The Daily Show whenever possible.
OK, I just finished listening to the Robert Randolph CD all the way through....you must get it.
So there you have it, maybe these times aren't so bad after all.
Monday, October 09, 2006
Where do pulled teeth go? and other such questions
I'll be back to sports next Monday, I promise; I started writing something but I didn't feel like writing on that topic at length this afternoon. Ideally, I'll work on it all week and have it done by next Monday, but in all likelihood it'll be this time next week and I'll be in the same predicament. Oh well. Instead, tonight, I present you with a few questions that have boggled my mind the last week and so I turn to you, noble reader, in search of answers.
Question the first:
What do dentists do with teeth after they pull them out?
Why is Bugs Bunny's incessant cross-dressing never questioned?
Honestly, why do we have Civil War re-enactments?
Why do we assume that aliens, if they exist, look anything like humans and are "higher life forms"?
Why don't doctors just schedule appointments farther apart and later into the day, rather than insisting on being behind schedule all day?
Are there any geniuses alive today on par with Leonardo, Mozart, or Shakespeare?
Seriously, what happened to WTC 7 on 9/11?
Do people actually like reggaeton or do they realize it's dreadful and they just listen for the irony factor?
Calculus....why?
Am I the only one who saw the North Korean army marching and thought of the 'Be Prepared' number from The Lion King?
Question the first:
What do dentists do with teeth after they pull them out?
Why is Bugs Bunny's incessant cross-dressing never questioned?
Honestly, why do we have Civil War re-enactments?
Why do we assume that aliens, if they exist, look anything like humans and are "higher life forms"?
Why don't doctors just schedule appointments farther apart and later into the day, rather than insisting on being behind schedule all day?
Are there any geniuses alive today on par with Leonardo, Mozart, or Shakespeare?
Seriously, what happened to WTC 7 on 9/11?
Do people actually like reggaeton or do they realize it's dreadful and they just listen for the irony factor?
Calculus....why?
Am I the only one who saw the North Korean army marching and thought of the 'Be Prepared' number from The Lion King?
Sunday, October 08, 2006
Jon Stewart & Stephen Colbert vs. The News Media
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have the rare position of being able to poke fun at the ever-present absurdity and inconsistencies in the administration and world politics and events at large, because they are on a comedy show. Everyone else in the news media is forced to play it straight; they are the ones who can hold it up the light a little differently and let us all see just how irreverent even the most "serious" of events in life can be sometimes. Many times they don't even have to deliver punch lines. The facts of an event are funny enough when presented on a comedy show rather than on nightly network news with [insert generic news anchor here].
A University of Indiana study due for publication next summer was recently announced with it's summarized findings released, the buzz being that it shows the substance of news on The Daily Show and that of the average nightly network news program are roughly the same.
I don't know if this says more about The Daily Show or network news. It certainly gives Jon Stewart's show some legitimacy against the inane critics like Geraldo who said Stewart and Colbert make a living by "putting on video of old ladies slipping on ice and people laughing.” Of course, anyone who's seen the show knows how ridiculous this sounds, but say it on Fox News and you're bound to get 89% of viewers buying it.
I wrote a couple weeks back about the overall softening of network news, and the eroding of the concept of investigative reportage (outside of John Stossel's hard-hitting, "Fat in America"-type pieces every week on 20/20). It's unfortunate that our news media has to bow to the entertainment divisions of their various media conglomerates. I honestly think people who watch the news will continue to watch if they were to add more substance and less fluff, and people who don't watch the news aren't going to tune in now just because Brian Williams or Katie Couric will occasionally talk about Jennifer Anniston or whoever happens to be celeb du jour. Just report the news, let Mary Hart and Nancy O'Dell worry about who is breaking up with whom in Hollywood and all that drivel with which we've decided to concern ourselves. If we need our news wrapped in a shiny info-tainment package...woe to us all and our declining civilization.
If Jon Stewart, a comedian doing a comedy show on a comedy network, is doing the news as substantively as people who consider themselves newspeople and serious journalists, what does that say about them? It's not like these people are unintelligent, just look at the credentials on some of these correspondents for ABC News, it's rather impressive on paper: Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Stanford, law degrees, Ph.Ds in Political Science, etc.... and yet collectively they muster the same depth and breadth of what's going on in the world as a self-professed comedian on Comedy Central.
I won't even touch on cable news...where news and comment have become indistinguishably intertwined, almost to the point of absurdity, which Stephen Colbert does a great-send up of every night on The Colbert Report, and which Jon Stewart astutely pointed out about 2 years ago as a guest on CNN's Crossfire, an interview which led, directly or indirectly, to the canceling of the show Crossfire and the firing of Tucker Carlson (who unfortunately got a new show on MSNBC, and it's just as bad, although I don't think anything is as bad as Hardball with Chris Matthews. Someone should fill him in on the difference between a question and a statement. I'm sorry, Chris, but "What do you think the president should do? Do you think we should just abandon Iraq and stop fighitng terrorism, because let me tell you that is a terrible idea" is just not a question).
A University of Indiana study due for publication next summer was recently announced with it's summarized findings released, the buzz being that it shows the substance of news on The Daily Show and that of the average nightly network news program are roughly the same.
I don't know if this says more about The Daily Show or network news. It certainly gives Jon Stewart's show some legitimacy against the inane critics like Geraldo who said Stewart and Colbert make a living by "putting on video of old ladies slipping on ice and people laughing.” Of course, anyone who's seen the show knows how ridiculous this sounds, but say it on Fox News and you're bound to get 89% of viewers buying it.
I wrote a couple weeks back about the overall softening of network news, and the eroding of the concept of investigative reportage (outside of John Stossel's hard-hitting, "Fat in America"-type pieces every week on 20/20). It's unfortunate that our news media has to bow to the entertainment divisions of their various media conglomerates. I honestly think people who watch the news will continue to watch if they were to add more substance and less fluff, and people who don't watch the news aren't going to tune in now just because Brian Williams or Katie Couric will occasionally talk about Jennifer Anniston or whoever happens to be celeb du jour. Just report the news, let Mary Hart and Nancy O'Dell worry about who is breaking up with whom in Hollywood and all that drivel with which we've decided to concern ourselves. If we need our news wrapped in a shiny info-tainment package...woe to us all and our declining civilization.
If Jon Stewart, a comedian doing a comedy show on a comedy network, is doing the news as substantively as people who consider themselves newspeople and serious journalists, what does that say about them? It's not like these people are unintelligent, just look at the credentials on some of these correspondents for ABC News, it's rather impressive on paper: Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Stanford, law degrees, Ph.Ds in Political Science, etc.... and yet collectively they muster the same depth and breadth of what's going on in the world as a self-professed comedian on Comedy Central.
I won't even touch on cable news...where news and comment have become indistinguishably intertwined, almost to the point of absurdity, which Stephen Colbert does a great-send up of every night on The Colbert Report, and which Jon Stewart astutely pointed out about 2 years ago as a guest on CNN's Crossfire, an interview which led, directly or indirectly, to the canceling of the show Crossfire and the firing of Tucker Carlson (who unfortunately got a new show on MSNBC, and it's just as bad, although I don't think anything is as bad as Hardball with Chris Matthews. Someone should fill him in on the difference between a question and a statement. I'm sorry, Chris, but "What do you think the president should do? Do you think we should just abandon Iraq and stop fighitng terrorism, because let me tell you that is a terrible idea" is just not a question).
Saturday, October 07, 2006
Why I Didn't See The Departed
I respect Martin Scorsese immensely as a filmmaker. He is very talented and has created some of the best movies ever made. His new movie The Departed opened yesterday and I was interested and excited to see it until I looked in the newspaper and saw......'Running Time: 2 hours 38 minutes.'
Ugh.
There are certain movies that can run over 2.5 hours and I'll stick with them, North By Northwest, 2001:A Space Odyssey, heck I enjoyed every minute of 'Seven Samurai's 3.5 hours, but I can't help but wonder if this movie needs to be so long. I need only look back to his last film, 2004's The Aviator. That was a great movie, but after 2 hours 48 minutes, I thought it couldn't have benefited from losing 20-30 minutes. Action/Adventure movies can run long because they have big, long action sequences that make the time go by quickly and things like that, but a cop/mob movie like this, I don't know, it just seems a smidge too long. Goodfellas was 2 hours 20 minutes and that is about as long as it should be. The Godfather is a 3 hour mob movie, but Coppola's original cut was around 2 hours, and the studio told him they wanted an sweeping, operatic epic, not an above average mob movie (talk about getting what you ask for). Anyway, point is, that movie is 3 hours, but it is so good you (or at least I) would stick with it for 4 hours (and 2 sequels). The Departed, however, does not strike me as an epic.
In his old age Marty seems to have gotten a wee bit over-indulgent in his craft. Then again, I could be wrong, this movie could be like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and fly right on by, but I doubt it.
I'll go see, in spite of that seemingly incessant length, because it has Jack Nicholson (as a bad guy), Leo, Marty Sheen, and Scorsese is a great director and then I'll come back and give report.
Ugh.
There are certain movies that can run over 2.5 hours and I'll stick with them, North By Northwest, 2001:A Space Odyssey, heck I enjoyed every minute of 'Seven Samurai's 3.5 hours, but I can't help but wonder if this movie needs to be so long. I need only look back to his last film, 2004's The Aviator. That was a great movie, but after 2 hours 48 minutes, I thought it couldn't have benefited from losing 20-30 minutes. Action/Adventure movies can run long because they have big, long action sequences that make the time go by quickly and things like that, but a cop/mob movie like this, I don't know, it just seems a smidge too long. Goodfellas was 2 hours 20 minutes and that is about as long as it should be. The Godfather is a 3 hour mob movie, but Coppola's original cut was around 2 hours, and the studio told him they wanted an sweeping, operatic epic, not an above average mob movie (talk about getting what you ask for). Anyway, point is, that movie is 3 hours, but it is so good you (or at least I) would stick with it for 4 hours (and 2 sequels). The Departed, however, does not strike me as an epic.
In his old age Marty seems to have gotten a wee bit over-indulgent in his craft. Then again, I could be wrong, this movie could be like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and fly right on by, but I doubt it.
I'll go see, in spite of that seemingly incessant length, because it has Jack Nicholson (as a bad guy), Leo, Marty Sheen, and Scorsese is a great director and then I'll come back and give report.
Friday, October 06, 2006
Spanning the Globe
Word out of Iraq is that it is, surprise surprise, getting worse. It is being reported that American troops are taking Iraqi police/armed forces off the streets because the Iraqi people don't trust them; believing they are in collusion with Shiite militia in attacking Sunni civilians in a form of ethnic cleansing.
The people don't trust the police and believe their is an ethnic cleansing taking place: how much has changed since Saddam was deposed? I know, I know, stay the course, the people will buy into democracy and liberty eventually.
Also in connection to this, Keith Olbermann mentioned yesterday on his show 'Countdown', that Congress has set aside $20m for a celebration when/if there is final victory in Iraq/Afghanistan, while halving funding for research for brain trauma injuries (from $14m to $7m), the leading cause of mortality for American soldiers in Iraq due to IED's.
The Sudanese government continues to reject receiving UN armed peacekeepers. They continue to maintain that the problem isn't as bad as it's being reported. Also, they say they would prefer if China (who is a trade partner) and other Arab and African countries took a bigger role in resolving the conflict, though they say they would welcome UN assistance in training and development of African Union troops, but they do not want US and UK troops coming in, making Sudan the next front in the war on terror.
Brazil's election last Sunday failed to turn up a winner, as no candidate gained a majority, so Alckmin and Lula will have a run off at the end of the month. Lula, the incumbent, is increasingly being accused of scandal and corruption and Alckmin is gaining support, and the 8-10% of voters who voted for the neither of them will have to vote for one or the other. Current polls show Lula ahead by about 8 points, but he dropped his campaign manager and that angered some, and with the stench of scandal hanging around it could become closer in the coming weeks. As this is the largest nation in Latin America, it could be regionally significant if they stick with the "leftist" president, as opposed to returning to the more "conservative" candidate.
George H.W. Bush and Pervez Musharraf say the pledges to reconstruct Pakistan after the massive earthqauke are not coming through, with Bush fearing the growing number of humanitarian causes around the world is creating 'donor fatigue', after the Banda Aceh tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the Pakistan earthquake, and various other recent campaigns.
The conspiracy theorist in me thinks the Republicans leaked this Foley story last weekend. Last week the big story was just how bad things are going in Iraq, through both the NIE and Bob Woodward's new book; this was an easy shifting of 'the story' as they know we can't resist a juicy Washington sex scandal (even if, as in this case, there was no sex involved). This gives them the opportunity to demonize the "liberal media", blame the Democrats for leaking the story and politicizing the event with no consideration for the children, and most importantly, it kills all momentum that was building in criticism of the handling of Iraq.
(Bear in mind, this is the same conspiracy theorist in me that is not sold on the official story of 9/11...seriously, what happened to Tower 7?)
The people don't trust the police and believe their is an ethnic cleansing taking place: how much has changed since Saddam was deposed? I know, I know, stay the course, the people will buy into democracy and liberty eventually.
Also in connection to this, Keith Olbermann mentioned yesterday on his show 'Countdown', that Congress has set aside $20m for a celebration when/if there is final victory in Iraq/Afghanistan, while halving funding for research for brain trauma injuries (from $14m to $7m), the leading cause of mortality for American soldiers in Iraq due to IED's.
The Sudanese government continues to reject receiving UN armed peacekeepers. They continue to maintain that the problem isn't as bad as it's being reported. Also, they say they would prefer if China (who is a trade partner) and other Arab and African countries took a bigger role in resolving the conflict, though they say they would welcome UN assistance in training and development of African Union troops, but they do not want US and UK troops coming in, making Sudan the next front in the war on terror.
Brazil's election last Sunday failed to turn up a winner, as no candidate gained a majority, so Alckmin and Lula will have a run off at the end of the month. Lula, the incumbent, is increasingly being accused of scandal and corruption and Alckmin is gaining support, and the 8-10% of voters who voted for the neither of them will have to vote for one or the other. Current polls show Lula ahead by about 8 points, but he dropped his campaign manager and that angered some, and with the stench of scandal hanging around it could become closer in the coming weeks. As this is the largest nation in Latin America, it could be regionally significant if they stick with the "leftist" president, as opposed to returning to the more "conservative" candidate.
George H.W. Bush and Pervez Musharraf say the pledges to reconstruct Pakistan after the massive earthqauke are not coming through, with Bush fearing the growing number of humanitarian causes around the world is creating 'donor fatigue', after the Banda Aceh tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the Pakistan earthquake, and various other recent campaigns.
The conspiracy theorist in me thinks the Republicans leaked this Foley story last weekend. Last week the big story was just how bad things are going in Iraq, through both the NIE and Bob Woodward's new book; this was an easy shifting of 'the story' as they know we can't resist a juicy Washington sex scandal (even if, as in this case, there was no sex involved). This gives them the opportunity to demonize the "liberal media", blame the Democrats for leaking the story and politicizing the event with no consideration for the children, and most importantly, it kills all momentum that was building in criticism of the handling of Iraq.
(Bear in mind, this is the same conspiracy theorist in me that is not sold on the official story of 9/11...seriously, what happened to Tower 7?)
Thursday, October 05, 2006
Mic check one, two
I was in a particularly cynical mood the latter part of last month and this was the musical by-product:
A Misguided Notion
Last week, religion jumped into the political discourse once again, after everyone had gotten their fill of the Bill Clinton-Chris Wallace thing, with the noise that the All Saints Church in Pasadena is being investigated by the IRS for possible violations of rules for tax-exempt entities, citing a sermon from 2004.
The left immediately attacked it, calling it a partisan move, because there was no investigation of any of "many" conservative clergymen who blatantly pushed GW Bush, such as Ted Haggard who became something a celebrity during the 2004 election season for his bombastic support of W. (This is not the case, there are apparently dozens of active investigations by the IRS on this issue, this one just got publicized.)
The sermon was presented as a scenario in which Jesus would debate Bush and Kerry, but really it's just the preacher putting his words in Jesus' mouth, and it's not so much a debate as it is a string of diatribes. It is very blatantly anti-War, anti-"pro-life"ism, anti-Bush, anti-conservative rhetoric (read the transcript linked above to see for yourself..."Conservative politicians
...have strongly advocated the dismantling of social programs that provide a decent life for children...") but it is not an endorsement of any candidate, because as I recall there were several candidates who fit the anti-Bush, anti-war, anti-conservative agenda in 2004, notably, Kerry, Nader, Bednarik (ok, I know Bednarik was a football player, but that Libertarian's name was something like that too). But the tax-exempt provision prohibits direct political endorsements or oppositions, and this was clearly an argument to not vote for Bush, and thus in violation of the tax-exempt statute and deserving of being investigated. You can't say "well, they got away with it" as a reason for you to get away with violating rules. There are plenty of other speeders on the road, but that doesn't get you out of a ticket if you get caught. (Defenders of Mark Foley, this applies to you too. Stop saying "Clinton did it too." That doesn't make it Foley's case any less shameful.)
Then there was the zeal surrounding a soon-to-be-released documentary, "Jesus Camp", in which children as young as 4 or 5 are seen speaking and praying in tongues, begging for forgiveness in tears, and counselors teach children to "prepare for battle for Christ" and all sorts of other things that shocked and appalled people unfamiliar with the Bible and who'd never seen Christian camp before. Fear rose that we (or rather, the group(s) broadly defined as "The religious right") are training radical Christian extremists the same way Muslims train "Islamo-fascists".
The filmmakers clearly sought out an over-the-top experience for their docu, expectedly, because the spicier it is the more provactive. However, in doing so, they attempt to pass off as mainstream a fringe denomination, and it does not reflect the typical Christian camp, based on what I saw of it on television.
On September 27, Lou Dobbs, of CNN fame, wrote an op-ed entitled Keep Religion Out of Politics"
Excerpting the crux (since I assume no one follows all the links I put in): "The intrusion of religion into our political lives, in my opinion, should be rejected in the same fashion that we constitutionally guarantee government will not interfere with religion."
Politics can avoid interfering in religion because it is an external concept and we choose when and where it can go. If we want politics out of religion, we simply don't legislate it.
Religion, on the other hand, cannot be kept out of politics because religion is internal to all who participate; it becomes part of the person who practices it and since you can't have politics without people, you can't have politics without religion, if religion is practiced freely. That is not to say that politics should be beholden to religious views. Rather, religious views should not be dismissed simply because they are religious views, they should be treated the same as any other views in politics: evaluated for the utilitiarian effectiveness and compatibility with the Constitution and then applied or dismissed accordingly.
To think that religion will sunder our nation more so than extremist pundits ranting ad nauseum with minimal objectivity and our widespread social apathy is a misguided notion.
Speaking of misguided notions...last week it was reported that Tariq Ramadan, a professor from Oxford and one of Time Magazine's 100 next great innovators, was denied entry to the US to accept a professorship in the states because he had, at one point in time, given money to a French organization that DHS says is linked in some way to Hamas. Ramadan says, "I gave money...between December ’98 and July 2002, meaning one year before this organization was blacklisted in the States. And I received today a letter telling me, ‘You should reasonably have known that this organization was connected to Hamas,’ so meaning..I should have known it before the United States administration itself knew it, which is nonsense...It’s not a reason."
I don't understand, one of the supposed great minds of our time wants to come here and enlighten our college students and we say 'no, thank you' because he gave to a charity that may be connected to Hamas in some "6-degrees of Mahmoud Zahar" kind of way?
Oh wait, he's critical of the war in Iraq? Now I get it. Can't have him training dissenters at a college in Ohio. We would be remiss if we forget how that turned out last time.
The left immediately attacked it, calling it a partisan move, because there was no investigation of any of "many" conservative clergymen who blatantly pushed GW Bush, such as Ted Haggard who became something a celebrity during the 2004 election season for his bombastic support of W. (This is not the case, there are apparently dozens of active investigations by the IRS on this issue, this one just got publicized.)
The sermon was presented as a scenario in which Jesus would debate Bush and Kerry, but really it's just the preacher putting his words in Jesus' mouth, and it's not so much a debate as it is a string of diatribes. It is very blatantly anti-War, anti-"pro-life"ism, anti-Bush, anti-conservative rhetoric (read the transcript linked above to see for yourself..."Conservative politicians
...have strongly advocated the dismantling of social programs that provide a decent life for children...") but it is not an endorsement of any candidate, because as I recall there were several candidates who fit the anti-Bush, anti-war, anti-conservative agenda in 2004, notably, Kerry, Nader, Bednarik (ok, I know Bednarik was a football player, but that Libertarian's name was something like that too). But the tax-exempt provision prohibits direct political endorsements or oppositions, and this was clearly an argument to not vote for Bush, and thus in violation of the tax-exempt statute and deserving of being investigated. You can't say "well, they got away with it" as a reason for you to get away with violating rules. There are plenty of other speeders on the road, but that doesn't get you out of a ticket if you get caught. (Defenders of Mark Foley, this applies to you too. Stop saying "Clinton did it too." That doesn't make it Foley's case any less shameful.)
Then there was the zeal surrounding a soon-to-be-released documentary, "Jesus Camp", in which children as young as 4 or 5 are seen speaking and praying in tongues, begging for forgiveness in tears, and counselors teach children to "prepare for battle for Christ" and all sorts of other things that shocked and appalled people unfamiliar with the Bible and who'd never seen Christian camp before. Fear rose that we (or rather, the group(s) broadly defined as "The religious right") are training radical Christian extremists the same way Muslims train "Islamo-fascists".
The filmmakers clearly sought out an over-the-top experience for their docu, expectedly, because the spicier it is the more provactive. However, in doing so, they attempt to pass off as mainstream a fringe denomination, and it does not reflect the typical Christian camp, based on what I saw of it on television.
On September 27, Lou Dobbs, of CNN fame, wrote an op-ed entitled Keep Religion Out of Politics"
Excerpting the crux (since I assume no one follows all the links I put in): "The intrusion of religion into our political lives, in my opinion, should be rejected in the same fashion that we constitutionally guarantee government will not interfere with religion."
Politics can avoid interfering in religion because it is an external concept and we choose when and where it can go. If we want politics out of religion, we simply don't legislate it.
Religion, on the other hand, cannot be kept out of politics because religion is internal to all who participate; it becomes part of the person who practices it and since you can't have politics without people, you can't have politics without religion, if religion is practiced freely. That is not to say that politics should be beholden to religious views. Rather, religious views should not be dismissed simply because they are religious views, they should be treated the same as any other views in politics: evaluated for the utilitiarian effectiveness and compatibility with the Constitution and then applied or dismissed accordingly.
To think that religion will sunder our nation more so than extremist pundits ranting ad nauseum with minimal objectivity and our widespread social apathy is a misguided notion.
Speaking of misguided notions...last week it was reported that Tariq Ramadan, a professor from Oxford and one of Time Magazine's 100 next great innovators, was denied entry to the US to accept a professorship in the states because he had, at one point in time, given money to a French organization that DHS says is linked in some way to Hamas. Ramadan says, "I gave money...between December ’98 and July 2002, meaning one year before this organization was blacklisted in the States. And I received today a letter telling me, ‘You should reasonably have known that this organization was connected to Hamas,’ so meaning..I should have known it before the United States administration itself knew it, which is nonsense...It’s not a reason."
I don't understand, one of the supposed great minds of our time wants to come here and enlighten our college students and we say 'no, thank you' because he gave to a charity that may be connected to Hamas in some "6-degrees of Mahmoud Zahar" kind of way?
Oh wait, he's critical of the war in Iraq? Now I get it. Can't have him training dissenters at a college in Ohio. We would be remiss if we forget how that turned out last time.
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Intoducing....pt 2
For those who missed yesterday, this is part 2 of an inaugural offering from guest columnist Jimmy Blanks. I recommend checking back to yesterday's before jumping into this one, because it was written in one piece, but I split it into 2 for sake of length.
I think that young people view love as this sort of grand event that has to somehow be new and exciting and passionate all the time. I don't blame movies for this, but I think that a lot of times young people think love is something that happens in the romantic movies. In most cases, the movie ends with the guy coming around, just catching the girl as she is about to leave or give up on him forever. He apologizes for what he's done, or if he hasn't done anything, he makes this big speech about always loving her (despite the oversight of him not knowing her that well or for very long). And then he says he wants to be with her forever, she says yes, they kiss, the credits roll and an indie rock song plays.
What people don't understand is that in real life, your world and your relationship continue long after those actors finish and get to go home. What happens after you kiss the girl? In real life you can't freeze the scene and then cut to another scene in which you're at home, reminiscing. You kiss, then you stand there, and there is no soundtrack, then you have to decide what to do next.
Additionally, those fiery feelings for your “sweetie” ALWAYS fade. I'm not saying that because I'm cynical or don't believe in love, but it's true. It's also true that they are replaced by deeper, more meaningful feelings.
When I first met Janelle and we first got involved, I couldn't do a single productive thing. I was caught up in that heady, dizzy feeling that is not love but just giddiness. I thought about her all the time, I wanted to doodle her name in notebooks; I wrote about her, I wanted to call her a thousand times a day. It was a wonderful time, but I'm so glad it's over. I would have exploded if that lasts forever. If that is love, we would all die, or at the least the country would grind to a halt. Nobody would be able to think clearly. Nobody would go to work. We'd all want to be outside flying kites and eating ice cream and thinking about cute names for our non-existent children.
I'm more impressed where I am now. It's love, real love. We trust each other. We don't have to call each other a million times a day just to prove ourselves. I don't get worried that she "doesn't like me anymore" just because she doesn't return my text message within 25 seconds. I still think about her all the time, but in a different way. Whenever I see her I still lose my breath, but it's for a different reason. It's because I love her mind, her soul. I love all kinds of things about her that go way beyond the first three weeks of lunacy in relationships. And you know what? It's ordinary.
Before I left, we did regular things, but that is what makes it so extraordinary. We don't need fireworks everyday. We are happy just being with each other. We enjoy each other, not the situation.
That doesn't mean that there aren't bad days. There are plenty of them. We fight. We argue. But this type of happiness exists beneath all those surface anxieties; we understand that we have to work together to reach conclusions instead of trying to find ways to prove that our point is the right one.
We compromise. We sacrifice. We are patient.
Young people sometimes forget all this. They think that love has to be dramatic. They think that if their significant other isn't "on" all the time that there is something wrong with the relationship. Those first few weeks are lovely, but they made me so anxious. You don't know if it's going to work out, you don't know if you want to invest everything into this new person, you don't know anything really. And yet, people tend to return to these times when searching for "love."
I wish that more people would realize that love is not glamorous, and it's not a big public display, and it's not a thousand roses and exotic vacations and fancy restaurants. Love, most of the time, is quiet. It is intimate. It is between two people and nobody else ever has to know or understand the particulars. It just exists, and it persists. It is this wonderful bond between two people.
There you have it...I'll be back behind the keyboard on Thursday. Until then, good night, and good luck.
I think that young people view love as this sort of grand event that has to somehow be new and exciting and passionate all the time. I don't blame movies for this, but I think that a lot of times young people think love is something that happens in the romantic movies. In most cases, the movie ends with the guy coming around, just catching the girl as she is about to leave or give up on him forever. He apologizes for what he's done, or if he hasn't done anything, he makes this big speech about always loving her (despite the oversight of him not knowing her that well or for very long). And then he says he wants to be with her forever, she says yes, they kiss, the credits roll and an indie rock song plays.
What people don't understand is that in real life, your world and your relationship continue long after those actors finish and get to go home. What happens after you kiss the girl? In real life you can't freeze the scene and then cut to another scene in which you're at home, reminiscing. You kiss, then you stand there, and there is no soundtrack, then you have to decide what to do next.
Additionally, those fiery feelings for your “sweetie” ALWAYS fade. I'm not saying that because I'm cynical or don't believe in love, but it's true. It's also true that they are replaced by deeper, more meaningful feelings.
When I first met Janelle and we first got involved, I couldn't do a single productive thing. I was caught up in that heady, dizzy feeling that is not love but just giddiness. I thought about her all the time, I wanted to doodle her name in notebooks; I wrote about her, I wanted to call her a thousand times a day. It was a wonderful time, but I'm so glad it's over. I would have exploded if that lasts forever. If that is love, we would all die, or at the least the country would grind to a halt. Nobody would be able to think clearly. Nobody would go to work. We'd all want to be outside flying kites and eating ice cream and thinking about cute names for our non-existent children.
I'm more impressed where I am now. It's love, real love. We trust each other. We don't have to call each other a million times a day just to prove ourselves. I don't get worried that she "doesn't like me anymore" just because she doesn't return my text message within 25 seconds. I still think about her all the time, but in a different way. Whenever I see her I still lose my breath, but it's for a different reason. It's because I love her mind, her soul. I love all kinds of things about her that go way beyond the first three weeks of lunacy in relationships. And you know what? It's ordinary.
Before I left, we did regular things, but that is what makes it so extraordinary. We don't need fireworks everyday. We are happy just being with each other. We enjoy each other, not the situation.
That doesn't mean that there aren't bad days. There are plenty of them. We fight. We argue. But this type of happiness exists beneath all those surface anxieties; we understand that we have to work together to reach conclusions instead of trying to find ways to prove that our point is the right one.
We compromise. We sacrifice. We are patient.
Young people sometimes forget all this. They think that love has to be dramatic. They think that if their significant other isn't "on" all the time that there is something wrong with the relationship. Those first few weeks are lovely, but they made me so anxious. You don't know if it's going to work out, you don't know if you want to invest everything into this new person, you don't know anything really. And yet, people tend to return to these times when searching for "love."
I wish that more people would realize that love is not glamorous, and it's not a big public display, and it's not a thousand roses and exotic vacations and fancy restaurants. Love, most of the time, is quiet. It is intimate. It is between two people and nobody else ever has to know or understand the particulars. It just exists, and it persists. It is this wonderful bond between two people.
There you have it...I'll be back behind the keyboard on Thursday. Until then, good night, and good luck.
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
Introducing....
Coming up later this week: I'll finally finish writing 2 posts I was trying to finish for this week: one on religion in politics sparked by a Lou Dobbs op-ed piece, the other a sequel to the Dea(r)th of Comedy which I wrote a little while back, and of course movie Saturday (could be The Departed, could be something throwback...could be both). Now on to today.
Today I introduce a guest contributor, who could become a regular, weekly contributor, Mr. Jimmy Blanks.
For those unfamiliar, Jimmy is a fellow Fresno native and is currently an MFA student at the University of Montana in Fiction Writing. I've known him since we were in 2nd grade and consider him more of a brother than a friend at this point.
Rather than gushing over his abilities, I'll allow his writing to speak for itself. So without further adieu, here's part one of his first offering, the second part will be up on Wednesday. I should preface it by saying this was initially written as an e-mail and has been edited for length and content.
I'm tired of dreaming. I'm tired of resting on my own talents, and not risking failure. I'm beginning to see that these other MFA students are satisfied to sit passively in these workshops and think abstractly about that "great book" they want to write. I don't want to do this. I want to write something and get it out there; that is why I left Fresno in the first place. It would have been much easier to stay in Fresno and postpone my professional life for another 2-3 years. I can't do that anymore. I want more. I want to start taking those chances and making serious decisions instead of saying, "someday, I'd like to publish something." There are too many vague terms in that dream. There is too much wiggle room.
People seem to put too much pressure on themselves because they believe that "one decision will ruin them forever." What they don't realize is that there are no bad decisions. Let me clarify that slightly. There are no bad decisions within reason. We are going to assume for this argument that the decisions aren't criminal or suicidal.
An example: I decided to go to Montana instead of staying in Fresno. Now, I could have agonized over that, and I can still spend my life agonizing over what a horrible decision I've made. But the truth is, I didn't make a bad decision at all. I made A decision. You don't make a decision and then finish. You make one, then you make another, and so on until you've filled this big broad timeline you call a life. (I find myself using the "you" pronoun a lot, so I apologize if this sounds like I'm addressing you personally. In my mind I imagine I'm addressing a group of directionless youth.)
I can make this work. I could have made Fresno work. I could have moved to Europe and made that work too. There are going to be problems here, and in Europe (namely, missing Fresno and my friends and family). But, there would be problems with Fresno (never knowing what's "outside" [a ‘Pleasantville’ complex], feeling trapped and limited in my hometown, possible feelings of guilt about not making a big leap and testing myself.).
There are problems everywhere, and there are possibilities everywhere, and if you cut yourself off (if you just say, "Well, I've just ruined my life, I can't possibly come out of this") then you'll never give yourself a chance to grow, a chance to find happiness and success and love and all that great stuff that is promised to us as children.
And another thing. George Eliot said, "It is never too late to be what you might have been." It is never too late to change course, and it is never too late to try for something on which you've previously given up. I want to be a writer. But a couple years ago, I really wanted to be a chef. I still do, in some ways. I still hold onto that small dream, and I've never ruled out the possibility of doing both.
People, young people I think, feel confined to one path or another. I don't think there is any real path. People feel their lives slipping, and they say something like, "I've strayed from the path," or "Somewhere I moved off the path and now I don't know what to do." What they don't see is that THERE IS NO PATH. Assuming a path assumes that everything is pre-determined, that there is nothing you can do and that you're simply on autopilot. Even assuming something like God deciding our lives for us doesn't allow for this lack of choice. Even people who say our lives are decided will be quick to point out that God doesn't show people how their lives will turn out. So, let's say you feel yourself slipping. Couldn't THIS just be a part of the path?
I'm always amazed when people lament that their lives have somehow veered horribly off course and now they're worried about finding the right way again.
Why worry? There is always time to do what you want, and to find what you're seeking. Don't let yourself become paralyzed by anxiety or fear that you've made a wrong turn somewhere. Every turn is just a turn.
Also, I have an idea about love that sort of fits with this rant, but I should probably save that... Ah, heck. Here it is...
You'll have to come back tomorrow for that one.
Today I introduce a guest contributor, who could become a regular, weekly contributor, Mr. Jimmy Blanks.
For those unfamiliar, Jimmy is a fellow Fresno native and is currently an MFA student at the University of Montana in Fiction Writing. I've known him since we were in 2nd grade and consider him more of a brother than a friend at this point.
Rather than gushing over his abilities, I'll allow his writing to speak for itself. So without further adieu, here's part one of his first offering, the second part will be up on Wednesday. I should preface it by saying this was initially written as an e-mail and has been edited for length and content.
I'm tired of dreaming. I'm tired of resting on my own talents, and not risking failure. I'm beginning to see that these other MFA students are satisfied to sit passively in these workshops and think abstractly about that "great book" they want to write. I don't want to do this. I want to write something and get it out there; that is why I left Fresno in the first place. It would have been much easier to stay in Fresno and postpone my professional life for another 2-3 years. I can't do that anymore. I want more. I want to start taking those chances and making serious decisions instead of saying, "someday, I'd like to publish something." There are too many vague terms in that dream. There is too much wiggle room.
People seem to put too much pressure on themselves because they believe that "one decision will ruin them forever." What they don't realize is that there are no bad decisions. Let me clarify that slightly. There are no bad decisions within reason. We are going to assume for this argument that the decisions aren't criminal or suicidal.
An example: I decided to go to Montana instead of staying in Fresno. Now, I could have agonized over that, and I can still spend my life agonizing over what a horrible decision I've made. But the truth is, I didn't make a bad decision at all. I made A decision. You don't make a decision and then finish. You make one, then you make another, and so on until you've filled this big broad timeline you call a life. (I find myself using the "you" pronoun a lot, so I apologize if this sounds like I'm addressing you personally. In my mind I imagine I'm addressing a group of directionless youth.)
I can make this work. I could have made Fresno work. I could have moved to Europe and made that work too. There are going to be problems here, and in Europe (namely, missing Fresno and my friends and family). But, there would be problems with Fresno (never knowing what's "outside" [a ‘Pleasantville’ complex], feeling trapped and limited in my hometown, possible feelings of guilt about not making a big leap and testing myself.).
There are problems everywhere, and there are possibilities everywhere, and if you cut yourself off (if you just say, "Well, I've just ruined my life, I can't possibly come out of this") then you'll never give yourself a chance to grow, a chance to find happiness and success and love and all that great stuff that is promised to us as children.
And another thing. George Eliot said, "It is never too late to be what you might have been." It is never too late to change course, and it is never too late to try for something on which you've previously given up. I want to be a writer. But a couple years ago, I really wanted to be a chef. I still do, in some ways. I still hold onto that small dream, and I've never ruled out the possibility of doing both.
People, young people I think, feel confined to one path or another. I don't think there is any real path. People feel their lives slipping, and they say something like, "I've strayed from the path," or "Somewhere I moved off the path and now I don't know what to do." What they don't see is that THERE IS NO PATH. Assuming a path assumes that everything is pre-determined, that there is nothing you can do and that you're simply on autopilot. Even assuming something like God deciding our lives for us doesn't allow for this lack of choice. Even people who say our lives are decided will be quick to point out that God doesn't show people how their lives will turn out. So, let's say you feel yourself slipping. Couldn't THIS just be a part of the path?
I'm always amazed when people lament that their lives have somehow veered horribly off course and now they're worried about finding the right way again.
Why worry? There is always time to do what you want, and to find what you're seeking. Don't let yourself become paralyzed by anxiety or fear that you've made a wrong turn somewhere. Every turn is just a turn.
Also, I have an idea about love that sort of fits with this rant, but I should probably save that... Ah, heck. Here it is...
You'll have to come back tomorrow for that one.
Monday, October 02, 2006
Requisite Mark Foley discussion
No sports today, there’s nothing too exciting to write about. Nobody can beat Tiger, the Raiders can’t beat anybody, and the baseball playoffs are starting, but no team other than the Yankees seems like a championship-caliber team. So, we turn to the headlines.
The big question over the last few days has been how the Mark Foley scandal will affect the Republicans in the upcoming mid-term elections. Several Republicans have left Congress in the last year over ethics issues (Tom DeLay, Bob Ney, now Foley) and it has pundits asking if this will cause Republican voters to think twice about their candidates or if it will cause “undecideds” to vote for Dems because of these apparent character problems.
Of course not.
99% of people vote along party lines no matter what. According to what I remember of Intro to Psychology, people seek to reduce Cognitive Dissonance by rationalization rather than adjusting their own views, and in this case that’s exactly what Repub voters will do, dismissing this as the liberal media trying to exaggerate a story close to the election to smear the right (as Limbaugh claimed today: read more here or here).
The “undecideds” are such a small percentage of voters that they are not likely to make much of a difference in most, if any races. They tend to be issue voters, making their decisions based on the stances of the candidates in relation to their own views, not based on party-wide generalizations, so one depraved congressman isn’t likely to affect their vote.
The fact is, a congressman was making numerous, lecherous advances on teenage boys working for the Congress. This is absolutely unacceptable, regardless of party or ideological affiliation. To politicize this unfortunate set of events (which will undoubtedly happen), rather than looking at the causes and how it was allowed to continue for allegedly up to 5 years, in hopes of preventing it from happening again, is lamentable. Then again, this is the government we're talking about here. There will be an "investigation" on the taxpayer dime that will render no results of consequence, we'll all forget in 2-3 weeks anyway, and this unfortunate episode will be under rug swept.
Catholic priest scandals, teachers who can’t resist the charms of their 13-year old students (and another rash of shootings and scares in schools), now Congressmen preying on pages…if Congress, the Church and schools are not safe places for children, we seriously need to take a look at ourselves and examine how we got to this point and think about how we can get going in a better direction.
Ultimately, Foley alone does not represent all Republicans, and to try to make it seem that, because of this event, the entire Republican Party lacks character, is ridiculous. (Misleading the public into a seemingly un-winnable war in Iraq, without any semblance of a real plan, though, does not speak highly of them).
The big question over the last few days has been how the Mark Foley scandal will affect the Republicans in the upcoming mid-term elections. Several Republicans have left Congress in the last year over ethics issues (Tom DeLay, Bob Ney, now Foley) and it has pundits asking if this will cause Republican voters to think twice about their candidates or if it will cause “undecideds” to vote for Dems because of these apparent character problems.
Of course not.
99% of people vote along party lines no matter what. According to what I remember of Intro to Psychology, people seek to reduce Cognitive Dissonance by rationalization rather than adjusting their own views, and in this case that’s exactly what Repub voters will do, dismissing this as the liberal media trying to exaggerate a story close to the election to smear the right (as Limbaugh claimed today: read more here or here).
The “undecideds” are such a small percentage of voters that they are not likely to make much of a difference in most, if any races. They tend to be issue voters, making their decisions based on the stances of the candidates in relation to their own views, not based on party-wide generalizations, so one depraved congressman isn’t likely to affect their vote.
The fact is, a congressman was making numerous, lecherous advances on teenage boys working for the Congress. This is absolutely unacceptable, regardless of party or ideological affiliation. To politicize this unfortunate set of events (which will undoubtedly happen), rather than looking at the causes and how it was allowed to continue for allegedly up to 5 years, in hopes of preventing it from happening again, is lamentable. Then again, this is the government we're talking about here. There will be an "investigation" on the taxpayer dime that will render no results of consequence, we'll all forget in 2-3 weeks anyway, and this unfortunate episode will be under rug swept.
Catholic priest scandals, teachers who can’t resist the charms of their 13-year old students (and another rash of shootings and scares in schools), now Congressmen preying on pages…if Congress, the Church and schools are not safe places for children, we seriously need to take a look at ourselves and examine how we got to this point and think about how we can get going in a better direction.
Ultimately, Foley alone does not represent all Republicans, and to try to make it seem that, because of this event, the entire Republican Party lacks character, is ridiculous. (Misleading the public into a seemingly un-winnable war in Iraq, without any semblance of a real plan, though, does not speak highly of them).
Sunday, October 01, 2006
A dream I had last night...
There's this myth out there that if you die in your dreams, you die in reality. Well, I can officially attest to the fact that this is untrue...I think. Whether or not I died in my dream is technically up for debate, and you'll see why once I've recanted my tale....
I was sitting in the ABC-30 newsroom [this is where I work, for those who don't know] with the usual weekend crew, just hanging out. Randomly, in walks Miss P, the leadership/student council teacher from when I was in high school, complaining, "I left Edison High School so I could get away from a-holes like these idiots." I said, "Miss P, what are you talking about?" She replied, "Shut the f--- up, loser" and stamped away angrily. I was confused. I was even more confused when Miss Carey, who I had for freshman biology back in high school entered the room, talking about the Pope to our weather guy, Angelo. I didn't know what was going on, so I left.
When I walked out of the room I was somehow in some nondescript department store, in search of a gray sweatshirt. I located the area where they should have been and walked over there. En route, I passed a group of 3 loitering teenage boys. One of them turned to me as I walked by and said in aggressive tone, "If you wanna do something, make a move son." I paid him no mind and continued my search for the desired article of clothing.
This clown followed me and said "Hey, I said something to you." I foolishly remark, snidely, "I know, I chose to ignore you." He says "Naw, f--- that, I don't play that sh--." He advanced toward me with a knife. I kept looking for sweatshirts, hardly taking notice of this kid. He finally ends up standing right next to me and says "Ignore this motherf------" and he proceeds to stab me in the stomach and chest. I hit him and run away, but both of the guys he was with pull out guns and shoot me in the chest. I fall to floor, blood and water pouring out of my wounds (I believe this makes me a heretic). I was dying. I was dead. But I was watching myself die, I wasn't actually lying on the floor. Well, I was, but I was also watching me. As if I were participating and watching at the same time.
Then, as if it had been a dream within a dream, I woke up in a laboratory, with myself as the doctor presiding over myself the patient with various apparatuses (apparatti?) attached to me, and I (as doctor) asked myself (as patient), "Did you die?" I reply to myself, "Yes."
I, as the doctor, exclaim, "Eureka! It Worked!" and run gleefully out the room, and a large crowd of people who are sitting in bleachers in the laboratory erupt into applause.
Then I woke up for real....so I died, but I didn't die, because I died in a dream in a dream, and not in the dream itself, if that makes sense.
Go ahead and wager and explanation of that one.
The other day while I was in the shower I posed to myself the question of whether my dreams were in the 1st person or the 3rd person POV (don't ask why, my mind is at times a strange place to be).
Anyhow, I'm pretty sure all of my dreams are in the 1st person POV, but then again in this dream I recited above, I moved to the 3rd person when I died, and then I was both 1st and 3rd person when I was myself as the 'patient' and 'doctor'.
Perhaps I transitioned to avoid dying in the dream because subconsciously I believed that I would die if I died in my dream, and I somehow removed myself to avoid such, and then concocted the laboratory situation as extra safety precaution.
Controlling your dreams in a state of dreaming while knowing your dreaming, is I believe called lucid dreaming, a process discussed cursorily in Cameron Crowe's movie, Vanilla Sky (2001).
Does it matter if we dream in 1st or 3rd POV? Does 1st person mean you can't see your true self and exist in a construct you've created for yourself, while 3rd person means you can see yourself as you are and objectively understand yourself better? Or could be the other way around...1st person meaning you understand exactly who you are and embody your true self, while 3rd person means you don't know who you are and are trying to get an understanding of who you are. Does it have to do with ability to control your dream? I definitely felt more in 'control' of what happened in the 3rd person, while in the 1st person I was more in the moment and it was more 'real'. Does it even matter? Where does the content come from and how do we interpret that, particularly in the context of POV?
(^complete stream-of-consciousness-ness)
I don't have any of the answers, obviously, but I think it's worth thinking about. Dreaming is something we all do, and no one has ever convincingly proven what it all means, and honestly I hope no one ever does. The mystery of the dream is part of what makes it an interesting and integral part of life. It serves as a constant reminder that we don't have all the answers and never will when it comes to ourselves and our world.
For more movies suffused with dreaming and/or ideas about dreaming check out:
Waking Life (2001), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), 8 1/2 (1963, and probably most of Fellini's oeuvre), Lost Highway (1997, and probably more of Lynch's films), and Wild Strawberries (1957) to name a few.
Well, that was definitely an infomercial-ish/Reading Rainbow-esque kinda ending.....meh.
Oh yeah, welcome to October :)
I was sitting in the ABC-30 newsroom [this is where I work, for those who don't know] with the usual weekend crew, just hanging out. Randomly, in walks Miss P, the leadership/student council teacher from when I was in high school, complaining, "I left Edison High School so I could get away from a-holes like these idiots." I said, "Miss P, what are you talking about?" She replied, "Shut the f--- up, loser" and stamped away angrily. I was confused. I was even more confused when Miss Carey, who I had for freshman biology back in high school entered the room, talking about the Pope to our weather guy, Angelo. I didn't know what was going on, so I left.
When I walked out of the room I was somehow in some nondescript department store, in search of a gray sweatshirt. I located the area where they should have been and walked over there. En route, I passed a group of 3 loitering teenage boys. One of them turned to me as I walked by and said in aggressive tone, "If you wanna do something, make a move son." I paid him no mind and continued my search for the desired article of clothing.
This clown followed me and said "Hey, I said something to you." I foolishly remark, snidely, "I know, I chose to ignore you." He says "Naw, f--- that, I don't play that sh--." He advanced toward me with a knife. I kept looking for sweatshirts, hardly taking notice of this kid. He finally ends up standing right next to me and says "Ignore this motherf------" and he proceeds to stab me in the stomach and chest. I hit him and run away, but both of the guys he was with pull out guns and shoot me in the chest. I fall to floor, blood and water pouring out of my wounds (I believe this makes me a heretic). I was dying. I was dead. But I was watching myself die, I wasn't actually lying on the floor. Well, I was, but I was also watching me. As if I were participating and watching at the same time.
Then, as if it had been a dream within a dream, I woke up in a laboratory, with myself as the doctor presiding over myself the patient with various apparatuses (apparatti?) attached to me, and I (as doctor) asked myself (as patient), "Did you die?" I reply to myself, "Yes."
I, as the doctor, exclaim, "Eureka! It Worked!" and run gleefully out the room, and a large crowd of people who are sitting in bleachers in the laboratory erupt into applause.
Then I woke up for real....so I died, but I didn't die, because I died in a dream in a dream, and not in the dream itself, if that makes sense.
Go ahead and wager and explanation of that one.
The other day while I was in the shower I posed to myself the question of whether my dreams were in the 1st person or the 3rd person POV (don't ask why, my mind is at times a strange place to be).
Anyhow, I'm pretty sure all of my dreams are in the 1st person POV, but then again in this dream I recited above, I moved to the 3rd person when I died, and then I was both 1st and 3rd person when I was myself as the 'patient' and 'doctor'.
Perhaps I transitioned to avoid dying in the dream because subconsciously I believed that I would die if I died in my dream, and I somehow removed myself to avoid such, and then concocted the laboratory situation as extra safety precaution.
Controlling your dreams in a state of dreaming while knowing your dreaming, is I believe called lucid dreaming, a process discussed cursorily in Cameron Crowe's movie, Vanilla Sky (2001).
Does it matter if we dream in 1st or 3rd POV? Does 1st person mean you can't see your true self and exist in a construct you've created for yourself, while 3rd person means you can see yourself as you are and objectively understand yourself better? Or could be the other way around...1st person meaning you understand exactly who you are and embody your true self, while 3rd person means you don't know who you are and are trying to get an understanding of who you are. Does it have to do with ability to control your dream? I definitely felt more in 'control' of what happened in the 3rd person, while in the 1st person I was more in the moment and it was more 'real'. Does it even matter? Where does the content come from and how do we interpret that, particularly in the context of POV?
(^complete stream-of-consciousness-ness)
I don't have any of the answers, obviously, but I think it's worth thinking about. Dreaming is something we all do, and no one has ever convincingly proven what it all means, and honestly I hope no one ever does. The mystery of the dream is part of what makes it an interesting and integral part of life. It serves as a constant reminder that we don't have all the answers and never will when it comes to ourselves and our world.
For more movies suffused with dreaming and/or ideas about dreaming check out:
Waking Life (2001), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), 8 1/2 (1963, and probably most of Fellini's oeuvre), Lost Highway (1997, and probably more of Lynch's films), and Wild Strawberries (1957) to name a few.
Well, that was definitely an infomercial-ish/Reading Rainbow-esque kinda ending.....meh.
Oh yeah, welcome to October :)
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