January Update

First of all, Happy New Year.

Second, this is what I've been feeling like lately:



I plan to be more active soon, thanks for your patience.

Samurai Cop

This now rockets to the upper echelons of my must-see list.
Also, I hope to go on a blogging spree soon and write up my thoughts on a bunch of movies, including Whatever Works (6/10), The Hurt Locker (8/10), Orphan (7/10), Thirst (8/10), Taxidermia (8/10) and Inglourious Basterds (9/10). Fingers crossed!

Happy Holidays

And apologies for not posting more stuff, or more interesting stuff. One of my New Year's resolutions will be to try and get more stuff up on this damn thing more regularly - I mean, I am unemployed for the foreseeable future, so I should be able to, right?

In honor of the season, here's a tidbit of delightful sleaziness:


And here's a talking cat:


I hope everyone out there, whoever you are, is having a fun and productive holiday season.

McCain, Viagra, and Birth Control

This is old news by now, but I still think it's a pretty remarkable bit of video, especially because it shows John McCain squirming (check out what he does at 0:52, it's hilarious and tragic) in a way that none of the other major political figures out there would do - Obama and Hillary Clinton have been preternaturally composed in the last few months, tears aside, while Mitt Romney and Bush typically maintain a stubborn lunkheadedness in the face of conflicting ideas in their minds. Really, what this does is make me feel sorry for John McCain - I think he's a genuinely good guy who just happens to be on the wrong side of most of the issues out there, but he's also not a traditional politician, which is both how he got his 'maverick' reputation and his popularity and why he's probably going to fizzle out in the next few months.

Anything else?

The New Yorker Cover

I hope to have at least something movie-related up here before too long again, but first I wanted to point out this tidbit.

I'll make the modest proposal that this controversial New Yorker cover is obviously a piece of satire, in the grand tradition of satire that works through subtle exagerration, in this case, taking every element of innuendo and rumor-mongering build up in the media over the last few months and mashing them together into a single cluster-f*&@ of an image. So on that level it's kind of brilliant, because it shows how stupid the 'terrorist fist jab' and everything else is.

At the same time, the mistake the New Yorker made was over-subtlety (the problem with 54.3% of all satire) in that most people, including the traditional 'humorless liberals', didn't get it. If the art had been a little less droll and whimsical, perhaps the intention would have been easier to make out, but that's the way the NYer rolls.

What's most interesting to me, though, is that this helps to illustrate that, sadly enough, a huge amount of the population of White America, even after all these years, still doesn't really believe, deep down, that non-White people are really Americans. It's not really an overt thing, but the buildup of each of these things - the 'flag pin' debate, the continued perception that Obama is a secret Muslim, etc. are the symptoms of the psychological resistance that people still have to the idea that a black guy whose middle name is Hussein is a leading contender to become President of the United States, and why the GOP is keeping these very subtle memes alive, to exacerbate the idea that he's not one of us. Which is why I salute the New Yorker for getting it all out into the open, in a way that hopefully will stimulate a little more national debate.

Wisdom from David Lynch

I love this man. First, on the subject of the iPhone:

The amazing thing is, in the comments section there are people who think he's wrong - 'today's consumer wants choices' blah blah blah. They're all idiots.

Next, a tidbit on product placement:

What I like here is the "What? I said it all" look at the end.

Random tidbit

It probably goes without saying, but Beethoven's Fifth Symphony really is one of the greatest things anybody has ever created. Few pieces of art deserve the term 'perfect' but this is one of them.

Anybody else?

Two political tidbits

First and more immediately, I'm encouraged by the reports of Jimmy Carter's meetings in Damascus with Khaled Meshal, a leader of Hamas, which has had the result of an unofficial Hamas recognition of Israel's right to exist, which counts as a minor, yet important, diplomatic breakthrough. Conservatives everywhere are lambasting Carter for meeting with leaders of a terrorist organization and giving the impression that the U.S. government is shifting its official policies, but they're forgetting some important things, like the fact that Yasser Arafat and the P.L.O. were also considered to be terrorists (and indeed, rightly so) for years, not recognizing Israel's right to exist until 1988. But that shift led, eventually, to the Oslo accords of 1993 and the current roadmap to peace.

The fact of the matter is that Hamas, like it or not, represents a majority of the Palestinian population (or at least a very sizable portion), and they govern the Gaza Strip; regardless of their tactics, it is currently impossible to make any progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue without including them. So a backdoor movement via Carter is really the only way progress can be made, officially, further down the road. I expect the next Secretary of State, Democratic or Republican, to make good progress in this area (an official recognition by Hamas of the State of Israel and repudiation of terrorism) once the idiots currently in charge (Bush, Cheney) are gone.

In other news, in last week's Democratic debate in Pennsylvania, I was most struck by this analysis, (sorry, it's a few days old) saying that the mainstream media has by now been thoroughly trained by the right-wing pundits to do their job for them - every time they asked Clinton or Obama a question about 'electability' and "how will you respond to these charges in November?" it's just a convenient shortcut for the GOP. It's the equivalent of having a news outfit asking a candidate, "these stories about your confusion over whether or not you have stopped beating your wife, how do you address them?" I'm sure that if McCain was still debating somebody we'd be getting dumb questions about his age and other such nonissues, too, which just indicates the death of actual political journalism in this country.

Speed Racer promo

I found this on David Poland's The Hog Blog, where he's been a relentless promoter of all things Wachowski for years now, even though he won't admit it.


My favorite element, which hopefully is for real, is the line "He cannot tolerate the shame of defeat". Sooooo Japanese.

Italian Spider-Man

A true Italian Spider-Man from the period 1972-1984 would have shown naked breasts at some point, but this is still pretty good.

Celebrity Sighting of the Day

Weird Al Yankovic, waiting to cross at the intersection of Franklin and Hillhurst in my neighborhood. In L.A. you mostly see celebrities in fancy public places like movie theaters or bars so to just see Mr. Dare to be Stupid tooling around on foot was especially odd.

Who else wishes he would bring back the moustache, by the way?

Rox vs. Sox

Well that's kind of a surprise after a season in which the Rockies managed to just squeak into the Wild Card spot and the Mets collapsed after seeming like a pretty sure thing. I'm kind of a sports dilettante but I've always liked the Red Sox as underdogs against the evil Yankees, but too bad for them - they already won a damn World Series.

Any other topics of interest?

NL Champs Colorado Rockies

I'm from Denver, and I remember the days when they were at the bottom of the NL West, so this is a very pleasant turnaround. Would have been nicer if I was still living there, but that's what this new invention called Tele-Vision is for.

Anyone else got a topic to talk about?