The Future, Where We Will Spend the Rest of Our Lives

I guess so.

It's kind of a sad thing to revive this poor blog with a post about politics and despair, but that's the world we live in. Boy, 2016 was a shitty year. That seems to be the consensus, and I'm not one t argue. All the famous people dying - and all the great artists who died - all the interesting people who died - it was a year that seemed to bring an endless stream of obituaries and loss... That has picked up in 2017: an online friend died; I found out that one of my closest friends for much of my life, who I'd lost touch with for the last decade or so, had died a couple years ago - been plenty of bad news this year too...

Though let's not kid ourselves: what makes this year look even scarier than last year is Donald Trump. His election put the finishing touches on 2016 - and now we're stuck with him. Of course he makes any day worse when you hear about him - there has never been a time when I knew he existed and didn't wish he did't - but as president? Dear god. How did he win? Like everything else he's ever done - he failed, and was bailed out on a technicality. I worry, though - he's gotten to a point where he can't hope for generous bankruptcy courts and 18th century racists to undo his failures - as president...

Dear god. Friday, Donald Trump is going to become president. The contrast to this and Obama's inauguration in 2008 is almost to much to think about, I remember how that felt: it was a day of wonder - it was hard not to feel optimistic, joyful. The USA had done something we could be unambiguously proud of - we had elected an African-American president - we had addressed, directly, America's original sin, and come out on the right side! Well - fat chance! Obama's election flushed the racists into the open - they howled and gibbered for the next 8 years and gave the Republicans the spine to cripple the country for electoral gain, culminating in what is hard to distinguish from a slow motion cup in the last year. Not confirming Merrick Garland comes awfully close - and then Trump sneaks into the white house, probably with the active connivance of the FBI and Russia - great. A loathsome little braggart pretending he routed his enemies - picking fights with people )John Lewis) whose boots he is not worthy to lick clean - sucking up to fucking Vladimir Putin.... We are well and truly fucked.

Though given how extraordinarily unpopular Trump is, he might do more to strengthen his opponents than to enact his (and the Republican party's) evil deeds - who knows. I'd rather not have to find out.

So that's the world outside. And me? It's odd, in that 2016 was not all that bad, for me, objectively. Things were all right for me, nothing bad happened to anyone too close to me, no relatives or friends dying or getting sick, nothing like that. It could have been all right - but it felt like shit. All the reasons up above, but there's more to it. Some of it, I won't deny, is work - Im not saying much about it, but suffice it to say that I have had my fill of it... But that might just be a side effect.

This blog is not, really, my life, but it does tend to reflect how things are going in my life. Look at those numbers, over there on the right of the page, going down, year over year - does that not signify? It can - I know what I have been writing. I know, back in 2011-13 what I was writing - weekly music posts, simple and routine - weekly film posts, screen shots, similar to the music videos.... Plus director of the month posts for a year, which were basically replaced by band of the month posts in 2013. And film posts - collections of capsule comments, some longer reviews; occasional essays - not just more posts, but more substance. Plus history - especially during the 150th anniversary of the civil war - and the usual occasional politics, sports and whatnot. But over the years, from 2014 on, these things have fallen away - the film posts first - then the history posts (the Civil War wrapped up; I started doing the same with WWI anniversaries, but never as ambitiously) - and finally, last summer, the band of the month posts - and then even the weekly music videos. Since summer, it's been a ghost town here - other than essays for Wonders in the Dark, there isn't much - and when their science fiction countdown ended - it's done. Some lamentations re the election, and a couple anniversaries... and silence.

Easy to blame Trump. Tempting to blame work. I don't know. Something has enervated me, something that has been going on longer than those things. Which has, I think, mostly convinced me to uproot myself, move back up to Maine, see what I can find to do up there. Which is a strong temptation, not to be dismissed. Some of it is the realization that I am not really doing anything in the city I can't do elsewhere - my movie going has declined almost as much as my movie writing. (Maybe not that radically - but it's not anywhere near as much an obsession as it used to be.) I stay at home more - don't eat out as much, don't go to museums as much. I stopped playing softball a couple years ago - the knees and hips were starting to insist - but that's cut down my exercise, and the time I spend hanging around with people. These days, when I hang around with people, it's mainly my brothers and some of their kids online, playing games and sooting the breeze - and they mostly live up in Maine. So - there's a theme...

But whatever I do in the atom world, here among the bits, I have to start writing more. This is not one of those "I'm still alive" posts, "See you next year!" - I hope. There's only so long you can feel sorry for yourself (or your country) - you have to do something. So - you know - nice to see you again! (anyone who might come by here), and I promise to try not to be quite such a stranger. What form these miraculous new literary emanations may take, I don't quite know yet - but I shall try to emanate them.

Friday in the World

Hello September. Maybe the world will get less stupid coming up - is August really the month of madness? (Via Slacktivist.) Might be - Donald Trump? This Kim Davis nitwit? I see she's off to jail, since she still won't issue marriage licenses, or allow others in the office to issue them instead. And since she is elected, she apparently can't be removed from office - it's jail for contempt for her!

Well - she deserves it. She is a disgrace. Her personal history is bad enough - the 4 marriages, apparently ending up with a fellow religious nut - but even so, she shows a particularly poor understanding of religion. First, those 4 marriages - if you don't recognize divorce, only the first one counts, getting saved isn't going to change that, so unless she goes back to #1, she is committing adultery.... And then there's her job - she talks about the right to exercise her religion - but what does any of this have to do wit her religion? No one is asking her to marry a woman - exercising her religion does not include stopping other people from exercising theirs. A pretty fundamental principal of religious freedom there. And finally - if she were sincere about her religious beliefs - she would have to resign. How could she not resign? If she is so worried that she will go to hell if she somehow facilitates someone else doing something she thinks is a sin - how can she serve in the government at all? By holding the job, drawing the paycheck, she endorses the laws of the land - whether she practices them or not. Any notion of god that forces her to not issue marriage licenses is going to hold her responsible for every single same sex marriage in the country. So all this posturing isn't going to fool a truly jealous god.

It makes one wonder if she might have a different motive, hm?

I've lost most sympathy for this kind of crap. You don't have to be a bigot to be a Christian. Though these days, way too much of Christianity seems to be invested in displaying bigotry. It's all politics - the bigotry drives the rest, people like this Davis call themselves Christians to cover for their vicious politics. She has nothing to do with religious freedom or religion - treating her actions as the sincere (if deluded) beliefs of a true believer is unjustified. She is a political bully, a bigot, a self-promoting thug, wrapping her nastiness in religion to confuse the punters. Though - I know: the punters aren't confused. That brand of Christianity is political from A to Z and it's an authoritarian, racist, violent politics.

I know: too much negativity. Here's a commentary on Kim Davis, dating from the early 70s. The fact that these loons end up reenacting Monty Python, 40 years after the fact - ought to tell us something:



Before getting to the musical part of the program, a somewhat more comical piece of nitwittery: the complaints about Obama renaming Mount McKinley as Denali. This is very amusing, mainly because that's what most people have been calling the mountain for many years - Alaska renamed it some time ago (more accurately: Alaska officially restored the original name some time ago), the Ultimate Arbiter of Truth in America, the Large Corporation, has long since accepted Denali as the name - I mean, Car Companies. This was just Obama making it official federally, bypassing the long standing efforts by Ohio congressmen to block the change. I doubt anyone cares outside the Ohio congressional delegation - though that hasn't stopped the professional Obama haters from milking it for copy. (Kinda like I'm doing here!) This particular claim, that Denali means "Black Power" - it's things like that... An obvious put on, that people (apparently) spread around as if they mean it? You can't tell the rat-fuckers from the Poes sometimes.

enough. Music:

1. Erase Errata - Fault List
2. Slapp Happy/Henry Cow - Giants
3. Pink Floyd - empty Spaces
4. The Flaming Lips - Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell
5. Liars - Who is the Hunter
6. Chambers Brothers - Time Has Come Today
7. Modest Mouse - Little Motel
8. Billie Holiday - Billie's Blues
9. Badfinger - Day After Day
10. Lou Reed & Metallica - Mistress Dread

Video? Loutallica!



And time has come today, hasn't it?



And Badfinger, because - I am obliged to post any Badfinger that comes up, I think.

Really?

What would a world cup be without idiocy? And who is a bigger idiot, really, than Luis Suarez? I mean, once, maybe, people do stupid things in the heat of the moment, even inexplicable things - and biting someone, in a soccer game, is pretty inexplicable.... But to do it twice? who does that? And to bite someone after you've been banned once for biting someone? And were banned the year before racial abuse? That's - how can that happen? But it did... And now, for the third time in his career, Luis Suarez has bitten someone in the middle of a soccer game. Big, ugly defenders, too - Ivanovic? Giorgio Chiellini? you'll break a tooth biting those guys... I don't know. Someone needs to get him a muzzle.

He should listen to Ian Hunter:

Charles Pierce for the Win

Dipping briefly into politics... Here's Charles Pierce, the magnificent Charles Pierce, summing up one of the blights on the American political landscape:

She is the living representation of the infantilization of American politics, a poisonous Grimm Sister telling toxic fairy tales to audiences drunk on fear, and hate and nonsense. She respects no standards but her own. She is in perpetual tantrum, railing against her betters, which is practically everyone, and volunteering for the job of avatar to the country's reckless vandal of a political Id. It was the address of a malignant child delivered to an audience of malignant children. If you applauded, you're an idiot and I feel sorry for you.

The fact that that dim bulb is still running her grift, 6 years after being laughed off the stage... tells you all you need to know about modern conservatism. They are a pack of suckers, and proud of it.

Film Festival Follies

I haven't been following the news from Cannes too closely this year - I was on vacation last week, up in the Northeast Kingdom and Upstate NY, with better things to use my spotty network reception for than reading about new Terence Malick films... But it's good to see that some auteurs can be counted on to deliver the goods. I mean of course, Lars von Trier - who made a fool of himself at a press conference (I like Emerson's post - he has video and some context) - though from a man who once cast himself as the "Schmuck of Ages", making a fool of himself seems pretty much standard operating procedure. Unfortunately, the Festival organizers proceeded to top him, making complete asses of themselves by banning him - my, my.

I'm not going to go into much depth on this, but - I'm not sure what of von Trier's remarks could be fairly called "unacceptable, intolerable, and contrary to the ideals of humanity and generosity" (as the festival's statement put it.) He used inflammatory words and images - you're always on thin ice cracking wise about Nazis and the holocaust [unless you're making shitty, anti-historical movies about it - fucking Life is Beautiful won a prize!] - but the actual content of what he said doesn't seem all that offensive. Something about discovering that his ancestors were Germans instead of Jews, and referring to Germans as Nazis... something about understanding what Hitler must have felt like in the bunker (related, I imagine, to the fact Von Trier's Melancholia is about the end of the world) - hardly offensive, a bit banal even - we all know Hitler loved dogs and kids!... By that time, (going by the video you can find at Scanners) he seems to have realized he was digging himself in a hole - you get some generalities about the evils of the holocaust, his support for Jews (though not for Israel), an aside on Albert Speer, and finally - well - probably the dumbest punch line you can come up with - "OK, I'm a Nazi." But still - it's a punch line, and bad taste, I'm afraid, isn't quite what I'd call "unacceptable, intolerable, and contrary to the ideals of humanity and generosity"....

It's not like he's alone in playing around with Nazi imagery - is there a punk rocker alive who didn't? There's just nothing there in what he said - provocation and posturing at most.... And on that note, I'll leave you with these nice American boys, doing a happy ditty about- something... about as seriously fascist as von Trier, to tell the truth...

More Snow! Hooray!

Well, here I am, buckling down for another snow storm, this one threatening to last a couple days, turning into sleet somewhere in the middle. That sort of thing sets off alarms - put down a foot of snow, then cover it in ice - there won't be a tree left standing in New England! The electrical situation may soon become precarious, even in the metropolis. Fortunately, this waited until the middle of the week - it's been a very nice stretch for movies, the last couple weeks - some of last year's best films replayed; and a Hong Sang-Soo series at the HFA. I'd just as soon not try to plow through a blizzard to see them - though I have done worse. I made it out during the April Fool's blizzard of 1997 to see Rebel Without a Cause! I suppose I'd make it to Hong's films anyway...

The weather hasn't started yet, so it's off to work I go. It's supposed to start any minute though. The commute back home in the evening ought to be entertaining.

One possible consolations is that no Groundhogs will be seeing any shadows this week.

That's all for now. I will leave you with a Cat Picture. She agrees with me on the merits of Grinderman, I think.

Snow Day

Yes indeed. Very pretty snowstorm, but it's all pretty heavy and there's a lot of it, so there is an awful lot of this around:



I myself got a day off from work, which is just as well as I also got half a day with no electricity... I took the opportunity to wander the neighborhood looking at the aftermath (if that's the word - its still coming down, sort of...), then warmed up with a bowl of Pho before coming home... I've been looking at theinternet, and I am confused - did someone accuse Sarah Palin of drinking the blood of Christian children? Surely that can't be right - she would never discriminate on the basis of race, color or creed, would she?

Right. The mere mention of a certain reality show star and failed politician gives me a pain - here, as an antidote, is a picture of a cat misbehaving, cutely...

December Miscellany

Nothing much important here, but the world is turning around me, and I should put in a word....

The Cliff Lee sweepstakes are over - turns out there really was a "mystery team" - the Phillies! Not that mysterious, I guess. You had to wonder if they were going to step into any of the bidding - they aren't that far off the Boston/New York superteam standard. I will have to work up some baseball thoughts when I have some time - it has been a happy season here in the land of the bean and the cod...

On the film front - I have to get a note up about David Cairns' Late Film Blogathon, ongoing now.

UPDATE: forgot this one - Spielberg blogathon, hosted by Adam Zanzie (Icebox Movies) and Ryan Kelly (Medfly Quarantine.) Running from 12/18-28 - that is, right now!

Coming in January - a Hitchcock Blogathon - a very promising affair.

And? I must leave you - I am still in thrall to the Vampires, for another day or so. After that, the holidays... I hope to get back in here and make up for some of my slackness, but who knows.

For now - Happy Holidays!

May Day Celebration

Happy May Day, folks! I want to say - I rather wish the teabaggers were right, and Obama was a secret socialist, planning to establish a reign of terror of single payer health care, strong regulation of financial institutions and corporations, end of undue deference to religious organizations, strengthened unions, better safety and environmental regulations - and oh, so much more. One can dream, no? The dirty fucking hippy in me wishes he might get us out of a war or two, end the worst offenses against human rights stemming from those wars (treat prisoners as either prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva convention, or as criminals, protected by the American constitution and international law), maybe even reduce the war on drugs, and stop destabilizing our neighbors and filling our prisons in a vain attempt to keep hippies and football players from enjoying their weed... Not likely. The only comfort - and it's thin comfort indeed - is that the right seems determined to marginalize itself completely - Arizona's immigration law seems designed to keep any non-whites from voting Republican - they might have already succeeded in losing Florida to the Democrats by alienating the Cuban vote... though divisive, xenophobic, racist, authoritarian politics are always dangerous...

Enough of that. Let's celebrate the day with some music - the anger of the downtrodden (at least in the film version of the play): Lotte Lenya singing "Pirate Jenny" from Red Pabst's Threepenny Opera movie.

From My New Undisclosed Location

Well, that's done. I have moved house, into a smaller, but perhaps nicer place. Now I have to unpack - this is an accurate representation of the place:



The world has been busy, meanwhile - Health Care Reform passes, finally - a huge relief. I can't get too excited about the results - it still seems to me that the system is designed to provide a kind of endless preemptive bailout of the Insurance Industry - but it does good things, moves the system in the right direction. We're better off with this reform than without it - we will be better off still if we can build on it. I see the right wing is up in arms - and sometimes almost literally - about this; I am hard pressed to see why. The raving and ranting about it is utterly bizarre - where is this awful "usurpation" people talk about? People are carrying on as if they had found out that the government was running torture chambers in an offshore concentration camp and -

- What? what was that?

Enough. As with most political issues these days, the only real debate is on the left. The Republicans and their tea-bagger friends* have basically stepped out of the political conversation - they rave, they posture, but they believe in nothing, they support nothing - they are nihilists. Thankfully, they are weak and stupid nihilists, but that doesn't mean they can't inadvertently cause good people to collapse in a parking lot from a bad heart... But in this process, in the end, the real debate and work was between the left and the center. The right has stopped trying.

*Tea-baggers... I am not going to refer to these people as "tea party" anything. The tea party was a rebellion against a tax imposed on a colony from England - it represented a real power struggle between absentee government and self-determination. Taxation without representation - really. This stuff? is stealing the good name of Sam Adams (brewer and patriot) for a front group for a corporate lobbying firm. Rounding up nitwits who know about as much about politics as a parrot that's been watching Glenn Beck to stand around and should mad slogans - keep the government out of medicare - or whatever the fuck they're on about... Christ! The whole thing plays like something straight out of The Idiots - a flash mob for morons...

Oh! And happy birthday, Akira Kurosawa (a day or so late) - thanks for summing up how I feel!

Atomworld Annoyances

I'm afraid my blogging ambitions, however modest they might be, have taken another hit. The long delay since my last post is the result of a simple weekend visit to the kinfolk, but now I've heard the news that I shall have to move house... I've known it was coming, the place has been on the market - but nothing had been happening, and then suddenly it did. So I have to stop procrastinating and find a place to live.

Anyway - that's a time consuming and anxiety ridden process, so I fear my already sporadic blogging will become - what's more sporadic than sporadic? At least at the end of it, I should be able to get a cat - a time honored source of blog filler.

Up, Up and Away, 2010 (Resolutions)

Given a new decade as well as a new year, I might as well post a set of resolutions I can break. Or fail to live up to. This is, of course, a film and blog related set of resolutions - I'll skip the eat better, save money, get more exercise resolutions, more or less.

Last year's are at the Film & Discussion blog - I did not do very well: 250 movies? almost, and I spent a lot of time on individual movies, thanks to taking classes, so that's pretty much good... turn over the netflix queue? Not quite, but not bad - bursts... I did not watch DVDs I bought, I still haven't watched Center Stage again... #4 was a rousing success - I took two film classes (and an English class, on theater), and all were immensely rewarding - though time consuming... thus - 3 blog posts a week? I was lucky to get 3 a month! though all three classes I took required weekly postings/papers - which were blog posts by another name... comments? not enough, no... Making things? nope... I did not do Piper's dinner with X meme... I did not travel much at all (up to Maine a bunch of times, for reasons that may be deduced from my recent personal notes here...)

So 2010 dawns and - try it again!

1) Start with a perennial - see more movies: 250 makes a good goal - that's not so much a resolution for change as a target... And again - and turn over the netflix queue - every month, say, at least, all 4 films in a month... this year, I've tended to sit on one or two films and switch out the others fast - especially with the classes. I've had Yella and The Fall since this summer, but have gone through a pile of other films in the same time frame... I'll try to improve that. And try to at least open and look at every movie I buy... ha!

2) Post 3 times a week on the blog and comment more often on other blogs. I try - we'll see. There is also Facebook, which complicates matters, because I don't know quite what to do with it. I haven't quite worked out what belongs where... the overall point, in any case, is to post here regularly, and be more active around the Interwebs. (I mean, in reality, not in the minds of others - though more actual interaction with people, even to the point of picking the occasional fight is not a bad thing. Though preferably with sane people. Though I'd be a piss poor stalker if I didn't notice that he just posted a note about Lang's Metropolis, but embedded a video of the trailer to the anime. Thought he anime is pretty good, and originates in Osamu Tezuka's manga, and Tezuka is an even more important artist than Fritz Lang, so no harm done...)

3) Classes and the like - I like the discipline, I like doing it - in terms of hobbies, I'd rather take a class than play video games or join a bowling league - not that I wouldn't join a bowling league if I had the chance... though softball is more my game, even at this advanced age. (I was almost competent again last year - only hurt myself once, though it was at a key moment, and turned a game where we had a chance into a humiliating defeat, when 3 of our starting outfielders got hurt. Since all three of us are north of 40, that's not much of a surprise, though.) But - I will take classes, though if they monopolize my time as much as last year's did, resolution #2 will likely suffer as well...

4) Eat better! save money! exercise more! Save money the big one - I need stuff - furniture especially - and want stuff - a new TV, an all region blu-ray/DVD player... a house would be nice, but... I'll settle for an all region DVD player and the new Mabuse set. (See? I worked it around to movies. Fritz Lang, too...)

5) I want to do things in other media - video, sound, pictures - this may not turn up on the web, but I hope I can do some work in video, etc. I monkey with video and animation from time to time, though it never gets far - but it's fun. Over the summer, I did make a film of sorts with my brother's kids - with their Johnny West figures and some nice woodsy settings out by their house - it's a blast, the kids loved it (my niece provided the story, the nephews provides most of the "puppetry", so to speak)... I'm not much of an artsy craftsy kind of guy, but it's fun, and there's no reason I can see not to treat making films like making tree forts or go-carts or whatever it is people do with and for kids, or their own entertainment and distraction. I need to do more of that. I doubt any of it will be good enough to share with anyone not involved, but anything worth doing is worth doing badly... There's also Piper's dinner meme, 2 years overdue - the two might go together.

6) Speaking of other media, and doing things badly - I should try to learn to play the piano again. I poke at it for a week or two every year, but never get anywhere... ought to try to change that.

7) Travel - this year, probably Canada, etc., visiting relatives, friends, places - but get out of the country. A film festival would be nice, but probably going to take a back seat to socialization this year.

8) Universal Health Care would be a nice thing. Ha!

Anyway - thus 2010. Here's to a decent year of it...

I Am Legion?

I find that I have achieved the dream of film lovers everywhere - I have been cast as a Supervillain! The honor comes courtesy of Dan Schneider, a critic of sorts I've poked at a few times, here and abroad - out of the thin stuff of 3-4 arguments, a couple links, a comment or two, he has made of me a veritable Mabuse. I am, I gather, everyone who makes fun of him in comments at No Ripcord; I am most of the participants in this thread at Empire Online. I have even apparently persecuted the poor man at Wikipedia.

Unfortunately, I don't think I can accept the role. If you read the book, you will find, Duke Beeson is the supervillain, master of disguises - Weeping Sam is just his number one henchman. (Though he does have the ability to appear at will when his name is spoken, just like the devil, or anyone with access to Google.) And I, as Dan rightly points out, am but an "apathetic old man"* - how true, how true. I can barely muster the energy to post here once a week - I could never meet the responsibilities of a Man of a Thousand Screennames, All of Them Evil... I have no idea, really, how Dan got the idea I was all those people in the first place - maybe I'm just the only person to actually try to take him seriously long enough for an actual conversation, unedifying as such things may be in the end. I don't know.

I do know it's probably wrong to encourage such behavior - I'm sure Mr. Schneider will get a shiver of joy when he learns I'm writing about him, and take it as confirmation of his claims - if I weren't cyberstalking, how would I know he's written about me, hmmm?** But I don't care. Hell yeah, I keep an eye on Dan's blog and posts - people like that are good for a cheap laugh. And sometimes, like that Dekalog post, wrong in interesting enough ways to give me something to write about. (Though he's a shamefully easy target.) And - though I hate to admit it right at the moment, he puts up a fair amount of interesting stuff at that blog. He's almost human when he writes about trash cinema. (And some of the other contributors aren't entirely bores - particularly Wassim Diab, who actually seems to go to the movies once in a while.) But mostly - all right - it's the comedy. It's the magnificence of someone defending himself from being called a terrible poet with a line like "Note the assertion of my terribility as a poet without any back up." What more backup could you want than a poet using a word like "terribility"? And yes - he's a barn door of a target if you want to start sniping at the bad prose - but... what can I say?

In the end - the big reason to respond is that he's going out of his way to cut himself off from response. No comments allowed at his blog; articles like this posted at his web site, with no means of public debate - that's crap. And granting that he doesn't matter, exactly, but he pulls this shit on actual professionals, like Edward Hoagland - and bleats like a baby when called on it. He isolates himself from direct contact with his critics - then issues long, stupid screeds about them, where he gets to claim to win the arguments he didn't actually have.

* You have to scroll up a bit from the link to find that - it's just "pathetic" old man at the link; I thought the other might be a typo, but Dan also notes in this document that he doesn't make types, or he corrects them, and since this one has been there a week or so, surely, he would have changed apathetic to a pathetic if he meant to. Anyway - "apathetic old man" is much better - it's even a decent paraphrase of the Beefheart quote on the masthead.

** Because someone posted a link in the comments, you dopey fuck.

Oopsies!

Uh oh - more names leaked from that 2003 drug test that got A-Rod earlier this year - this time coming closer to home - cheating swine Manny Ramirez and the sainted David Ortiz are named. Shocking news! Meanwhile, Ortiz wasted little time getting the Boston faithful to put this difficult revelation behind them, hitting a home run to win the afternoon's game....

Personally, I am rather grateful for this revelation. Boston fans were a bit too eager to go after A-Rod or Bonds or Canseco back in the day - local commentary is a bit too willing to sniff at those poor deluded fools in LA who welcomed Manny back with open arms after his suspension. Now - they'll have to find other ways to make fools of themselves. I am happy to report that I have generally not been too stern in my judgments - Manny, getting caught this year, is pretty pathetic - but, he did the time, he's back, there you go... and people like Bonds and such - it was a fact of the game back then. There's no grounds to get self-righteous about it - never was, and every name that comes out just proves it over and over again. There's been a certain amount of talk lately about Bill James' take on steroids - one of the keys of James' argument is that whatever "rules" existed against steroids before 2002 or 3 were openly unenforced, if not simply unenforceable. It was hard, in the 90s, not to see the steroid era as a deliberate policy on the part of major league baseball - home runs put asses in in the seats, most of the promotion of the game was promotion of home runs - not for nothing was the home run contest THE attraction of the all star break in that era. I don't know how to get around this. The plain obviousness of the rampant use of steroids, and the obvious acceptance of this at every level of the game. Maybe not the "purists" - as posturing a bunch of blowhards as you are likely to see - but everyone else. Not that you had to like it - I'm a pitching defense, walks and doubles guy myself, a fan of the national league game stuck in a quintessentially American League city, alas... but it's what it is - or was what it was.

The questions about the hall of fame are coming up, more and more - that's what James is writing about; the other night on one of the Red Sox games, Gordon Edes said almost the same thing - you don't know who used and who didn't - in the end, the odds are almost everyone from 95-05 will have used something - so you probably have to accept it as a fact of the game as it was played and vote for the best players of the era. That is how I feel. Using steroids isn't admirable, but it was done, and done widely, and hall of fame voting (for instance) is always about comparing players to their peers. Now - it might be more of a problem to compare those players to the players who came before - what are the raw totals worth? How much do you have to discount Manny Ramirez to compare him, accurately, to Jim Rice? Personally - I think steroids are already starting to work the other way - I think Jim Rice got into the Hall of Fame mostly as a reaction to the steroid era. I suspect - much as I adored Jim Rice as a ball player - that without the steroid era, Rice would never have made it in. He wasn't getting in before the strike, before McGwire and Sosa and Bonds hitting 60s of home runs, and so on. If they hadn't, even if they had put up the kinds of numbers you would have expected them to - a couple hundred fewer career homers, maybe; topping out around 52-55 in a season, I imagine - I don't think Rice would have gotten in. I don't know if I would have voted for him, for anything except as a home town favorite... I suppose that goes for the juice boys - I don't know if Sosa was really any better than JIm Ed - McGwire was just a power hitter... ON the other hand, steroids or not, I don't see any case for keeping Bonds or Clemens or A Rod out of the hall - if they were cheaters, they were plainly better than all the other cheaters, and probably better than a good many non-cheaters... So...

Baseball. In the end, I expect to treat steroids the way you treat Coors field or the dead ball - one of the conditions of the game at a certain time, that changes the way the stats look.

Meanwhile, to turn to less controversial subjects - I see metro Boston's last big horrendous news item has reached a kind of conclusion, as President Obama's "beer summit" occurs, bringing Henry Louis Gates and police sergeant James Crowley together for a brewski and a few words of wisdom.... I hope those words of wisdom include something to the effect of, "you know, sergeant, while it's true I should not have called you stupid in front of the national media, you really did screw up." It's rather amazing that a significant number of people don't think the cop is essentially to blame. You can't go arresting people for breaking into their own house - or for being pissed off when you show up and investigate them for breaking into their own house... of course, there's some sign the cop knew that, and got Gates to follow him outside in a rage, where he could arrest him for creating a public disturbance - hard to say. But hard to see anything in the story that puts the blame for the arrest anywhere but on the police.

Anyway, it seems to be winding down now. Just as well. Though I hope something more comes out of this than another round of solemn intonations to Never Antagonize An Officer of the Law! Usually from the same people who solemnly intone that Socialized Medicine Will Take Away Your Right to Choose Your Own Health Care! Right. By god, if we've gotta have a police state, let's at least have free health care!

Quick Bloggage

The holiday season is here in all its time consuming glory. With weather promised for tomorrow - fun fun! I have been eye deep in Oshima for the last couple weeks - almost over, though there are a few shows left. Including Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, which is one of the 2 or 3 I most wanted to see - but won't be around for. Blast it. But the rest has been glorious. I will try to post comments - whether capsules or mini-essays or just, I don't know - something - we'll see. If it wasn't 11:30 PM, I might try something quick now - I'd note, say - the way he seems to pick a style, a formal principal, with every film, and see what he can do with it. His career is wildly eclectic - I mean, his style shifts with almost every film (though some things remain the same: gorgeous compositions, radical storytelling, political engagement, distancing devices) - one may be rough and loosely structured and the next tight and carefully laid out; one may be color the next black and white; one may be tightly scripted the next semi-improvised - but the shifts are from film to film. Within films, he's very consistent - along with the widescreen compositions, which are always impeccable, he sets himself a fairly well defined set of devices that he uses: the cool formalism of Boy and Ceremony; the disruptive editing in Violence at Noon; the use of lighting and theater in Night and Fog in Japan - and so on.... It's good to see him getting some airing - I think this series is traveling - I hope others get to see it, beyond NY and Boston. And I hope Diary of a Shinjuku Thief comes back to Boston soon...

Meanwhile, before I go - a few links to tide you over....

James Urbaniak on Peter Schiff's prescience. This is as close as I have seen to what it would look like if a time traveler came back in time and went on Fox news. It looks like a fake - Schiff basically describes the summer and fall of 2008 in 2006, and a bunch of nitwits laugh at him. Oops! Oddly, the same morons are still on TV - hasn't Ben Stein been banished yet?

David Cairns on Brazil.

What the hell? The Bush family Christmas video card - starring a dog, though not a shoe, at least not in the minute or so I lasted...

Ed Howard cites Alison Bechdel's rule for movies - 2 women in the film, who talk to one another, about something other than a man. Oshima doesn't come off too well, though he sometimes seems to critique the social patterns that cause this kind of problem, isolation of women from one another etc. Night and Fog in Japan makes an interesting point, a bit accidentally - there are two major women characters, who don't speak to each other and only speak to the crowd about their relationships to the men (to Nozawa, the communist turned journalist who is marrying one of them.) There's also another woman, an older woman, who stands with the girl getting married in the film - she never says a word - she just drifts through the shots - though at the end, during the Stalinist's harangue, she gets a lot of the camera time - it's as if Oshima is making a note of her, of her silence and marginality here... Though he never really makes films about women, the way Ozu or Imamura, let alone Naruse and Mizoguchi did. All fo them have their issues, but they hit this standard a few times....

And finally - the Film of the Month Club is back inaction, with Absolute Beginners as this month's film. A neat choice for a host of reasons,bot least, the consideration of the 80s' place in film history. It's ging to be a while before I get to see the film - but it's a good discussion going on....

If Franklin got his Way, Would we have to Eat Eagles?

Popping in for some trivia... A new meme of sorts: the "They've Gone Too Far" post about Sarah Palin. For a lot of people, it was the "Africa is a country" story - even before it was debunked. Now comes another one - the Turkey Shoot. This one - okay no one wants to see all that blood and gore on the 6 o'clock news, but geez! Who among us isn't planning to eat the bird in a week? We ought to know where that comes from.... And for people who live around farms and wildlife, it's just normal behavior...

Though still - I have been inclined to call Poe's Law on everything about the McCain campaign, and especially Sarah Palin's part, and things like this certainly make it a tougher call. That shot, with the guy carefully positioned in the back of the frame, killing the bird and looking back at the camera - looks as carefully staged as a sitcom. It's not even a blooper - it's like a sitcom staging a blooper.... I don't see what it has to do with Sarah Palin (except to prove she doesn't consider food preparation unusual), but there might have been some intent on the part of the cameraman: that's a pretty well composed shot, and composed for maximum comic value.

Random Content

Ha ha! a double entendre! This post is random - and so is this!

Sarah Palin trying to answer questions from Katie Couric. Like Jim Henley I am particularly fond of this one:



"Our next door neighbors are foreign countries." Whoo hoo! Hey - I grew up in Maine - our next door neighbors were foreign countries too! some of them even speak F***h! I'd even been to those foreign country before I turned 44, unlike Ms. Palin! why didn't John McCain pick me for VP? even being a full on democrat, I don't think I could do more harm to his campaign than Palin and McCain themselves have done. Is Johnny boy going to show up at the debate tomorrow? or will he be in the next studio, arguing with Katie Couric?

(I should add, for those expecting a higher level of discourse here [good luck with that] - it was a long weekend last weekend - I will try to get some comments up about the second part of the Edward Yang series. Maybe tomorrow, with some luck... And meanwhile - I must point to the Film of the Month club, where Chris Cagle has kicked off this month's consideration of Claire Denis' L'Intrus.)

This Expedition does have some Rather Unusual Aspects Jim Lad

In honor of the great day, I offer something other than else:

More Politics, I'm Afraid

A political miracle - Peggy Noonan (and Mike Murphy) say pretty much what I think about McCain's choice of Sarah Palin for veep:



The link is everywhere, at least on the lefty blogs. I first saw it at If I Ran the Zoo, where in comments, Tom Hilton links to Daniel Nexon noting what this says about modern pundits. They know better, but keep putting it out.... hypocrisy, cynicism, shamelessness - the modern republican party.

Creepy Suburban Doings Right Under Your Nose*

Via Screengrab, I have discovered another world, lingering just the other side of the movie screen - a Parallel Universe! with its own film guide and everything. I may never leave.... who wouldn't want to see Alienation with an F/Stop? or the classic rom-com, All in All, I'd Rather Marry the Rich Handsome One? not to mention the surrealist masterpiece, Venomous Stink of the Hoi Polloi.

There's plenty of fun to be had figuring out the references, though even when they're obvious, they're a hoot - take the works of the famed Rave brothers - Slack Jawed Yokels on Parade; Slack-Jawed Yokels in Minnesota; Slack-Jawed Yokels Picaresque and Slack-Jawed Yokels Feelin' Philosophical - it's mean, but what can you say? And can you improve on All Men Are Scum Sucking Pigs in summing up Mizoguchi?

* From the auteur of You Explain It...