London: Day One

Yeah. It's been nearly a month since I got back from Scotland, but what am I going to do? Not post up a long, boring account of my trip on my blog? Of course not. Personal blogs DEMAND long boring accounts of vacation trips to distant lands, often with little consideration for the interest level of the readers of that blog. Who am I to be different? So I'm a going to get into it. I will try my best to keep this thing short(ish) and mostly sweet. And there will be photos.

Prior to our departure from Hartsfield on Wednesday, May 23rd, I had never really been overseas before. Yes, I was born on the northern part of the boot of Italy and grew from an enormous infant to a monstrous toddler over the course of a year or so, but I don't think this makes me a world traveler. My wife, however, has been around the world with some frequency these last 3 years, and in January of 2004, she stopped for a couple weeks in London. Because she was bunking with a friend there on business, she was mostly on her own during the daylight hours. Though she had a lot of fun zooming across the city on double-decker sightseeing buses and subways, the countryside on luxurious cross-country buses, one crucial element was missing:

Me.

Specifically, my sparkling commentary. Can one truly say they've seen, for example, Stonehenge, if they don't have a gangly, pudgy-faced smart-ass remarking, "It's really just a pile of rocks, isn't it?" in their ear while viewing it? What, you say? Far from enriching your travel experience hearing a steady stream of adolescent editorializing would actually go a long ways toward ruining it? Well, lucky for me, my wife is that peculiar, singular soul who enjoys my brand of relentless sardonic "humor". Even luckier for me, she so enjoys it that for years she's been counting the days until she could return with me to stroll the city of Shakespeare and Dickens just so she could listen to my low-register mumbling voice crack dumb along the way. So when her friends from business school decided to get married at St. Andrews, Scotland at the beginning of June, and my wife's folks agreed to give their daughter a pair of plane tickets to Great Britain, it was if the stars aligned to put my ass in London. And so it came to be.

Sad to say, the trip did not begin well. Don't get me wrong. There wasn't much to dislike about my 3 weeks in Great Britain, it was all in all a blast, but what little there to dislike all happened that first day, and a lot of it had to do with Air France. No one likes a guy belly-achin' about a bad plane ride, so I won't spend a lot of time doing it here, but I will say that my aisle seat became a middle seat plum in the middle of the plane between my wife and a big-sitting guy who looked quite a bit like the depressive novelist Russell Banks. The temperature, which on most flights runs from pleasantly cool to blanket-worthy chilly, was a zesty 80 degrees on this flight, the perfect temperature to induce not only a delightful sheen on the dryest of brows, but the spicy natural odors of one's plane-mates. Viva la France! I won't get into the surprisingly hands-off attitude of the flight crew towards the distribution of drinks and snacks, or their off-putting customer service style of overplayed but obviously pretend concern for the passengers' well-being during the 10-hour or so flight, but you get the idea. So, exhausted from lack of sleep (I can't sleep on planes), and keyed up from suppressing a claustrophobic freak-out for 10-11 hours or so, we landed at Airport de Kafka, otherwise known as Charles de Gaulle. As my wife tells it, Charles de Gaulle has been under construction for about 48 years? And from the looks of things, I'd say they're nearly halfway through.

It was bright and sunny in Paris. And also stiflingly hot. And worse than that, very very smelly. The bus the airport uses to cart off-loaded passengers from one terminal to all others was un-air conditioned, the terminal from which we boarded our connecting flight to London was un-air conditioned, and all drinks for sale in that terminal were un-air conditioned with nary an ice cube in sight. Yes, these tired observations place me squarely into the Spoiled Whiny American category of international travelers, especially given the fact I'd been informed of the silent European distaste for all things unduly cold before we left the States, but the lack of relief from the unbearable weather was still jarring. In the face of temps soaring into the nineties and blessed with the technology to chill both one's beverages and one's air, the French and the English's surrender to intolerably hot weather was baffling.

After we cleared Customs in London, we took the Heathrow Express into London's Paddington Station. The structure was beautiful and grand in an airy, practical way. Distant, soot-stained ceilings rose 50 feet into the air, old Victorian brick columns appeared here and there around the edges, (also soot-stained from the coal-burning engines that still pull in and out of the station). This station and others like it stood as backgrounds for arrivals and departures of soldiers going off to and returning from World War II. That is if they weren't bombed to smithereens during the Blitz. So, wide-eyed and loaded down with 3 bags over my inward-curving shoulders and one big suitcase rolling behind me, I walked through the cavernous station following my wife towards the street and our hotel.

While standing on the street corner just outside Paddington station waiting for the light to change to WALK, I watched the native Britons stream past us to cross the street and experienced a quiet and completely nonsensical thrill. "These people are all British," I thought to myself, awed. I listened to them talking, picking out snatches of conversation spoken in genuine British accents as opposed to the fakey mongrelized version of a British accent I do too often. We must have looked lost because a nice British woman came up to us and asked if we needed directions. As it just so happened, we did! Smiling and polite, (and in a lilting British accent mixed with something else) she directed us towards our hotel which was in the exact opposite direction of the way we'd been going. (Coincidentally, not long after we checked into our hotel and headed out, we saw the same woman again walking past and we said hello like old friends who'd been living in that part of London for years.)

If I haven't said before, let me say it now: it was hot in London. I don't know what the exact temperature was because I can't do the conversion from Celsius to Fahrenheit, but it was damn hot. I'd been sweating for going on 24 hours (and, as I hadn't yet slept, miserably aware of every salty drip) and was looking forward to the blessed kiss of some A/C and an icy shower soon after. However, there was no A/C in the lobby, no A/C in the coffin-sized elevator up to the 5th floor, and no A/C in our cramped but clean hotel room. Lack of sleep made all of this seem disastrous, but when viewed in hindsight, the heat and the dearth of ice was an entirely survivable inconvenience. I'm writing here, so obviously I survived it. In my defense, though, I didn't know then that the hot weather would end the following day, or that many if not most buildings in London do indeed have air-conditioning. But I know that in those hours post-arrival and pre-sleep, I was a sullen, unhappy bore. Eventually, I recovered.

So after an icy restorative shower, the wife and I headed back to Paddington station to get on the famous London Tube. More on the city's public transportation system later, right now I want to get right to the London Eye and some photos.


Towering there just behind my smiling face is London's newest landmark, the British Airways London Eye. Though it looks like a ferris wheel, it differs in a few important ways. Riders of the London Eye do not ride in the usual leg-dangling metal benches familiar to all state fair and carnival visitors. Riders of the London Eye go around in roomy capsules. The Eye is officially called an "observation wheel". There is no sensation of movement. Throughout the ride, you are as stationary as you would be on the observation deck of any tall building. And, unlike your typical ferris wheel, the Eye does not spin with any speed. In fact, it rotates only once every half hour. And for the price of admission, that's exactly how long you get to be in a capsule.

Even before we left Atlanta for England, I was already a little scared of the Eye. I was only made completely aware of my own fear of heights one day years ago down at the Santa Monica pier. My wife and I walked down the pier fully expecting to get on and ride the wheel all around like regular folks. We even bought tickets (which, if I remember right, were not as cheap as I'd imagined). But when I stood at the base of the ferris wheel and looked up at the dangling, peeling-paint iron swings whipping past and then shooting up heedless into the sky, I couldn't do it. More than that; I believe it would have been impossible for me to voluntarily place myself into one of those swing-benches. So with that distant day in mind, I approached the Eye worried the same base fear would reassert itself and make a little girl of me. And, to make things a little worse, tickets to ride the Eye (already pre-purchased) were quite a bit more than the Santa Monica ferris wheel. So, once again, both my masculinity and a bit of cash were on the line. But after camping at a table in an outdoor eating area at the base and drinking some coolish bottled drinks, I mustered my courage, slapped both cheeks to wake myself up, and climbed aboard.


Happily,the Eye really is an "observation wheel" and resembles a ferris wheel only from a cursory glance at its exterior. The only slightly vertiginous moments came as I stepped a little too close to the floor-to-ceiling windows and looked out over London. The photo to the left was taken during the first half of our revolution, looking up at the capsules preceding ours. The Eye moves so slowly that, even looking out at any one particular point on the cityscape, it is not immediately clear the capsule's moving at all. A couple times I was sure we'd stopped entirely. I took a bunch of digital photos while we were up on this thing. My wife watched the city sink beneath and then lift above us from the comfort of a long bench that runs through the middle of the capsule. Most of the photos I took suffer from the camera's proclivity to focus on the glass rather than the world outside the glass, but I got a number of shots that, if not particularly straight or interesting, are at least in focus and feature recognizable London landmarks.

Like this photo, for example. Here you can see Big Ben to the left and Parliament to the right. All of this was famously blown up in both the graphic novel "V for Vendetta" and the film adaptation of the same name. Yes, as I am more a student of cheap pop culture than of history, these are the images that come to mind when taking in the great historical landmarks. Oh well. I'd have to say that taking the Eye up 400 or so feet into the air over the city is a pretty good way to get acquainted with London for first-time visitors like me. You can see all the obvious sightseeing destinations in a half-hour floating capsule ride, and get an idea from high above of which old buildings warrant a close-up viewing or perhaps even a tour.

This oblong building in the distance here is called by Londoners "the Gherkin". Its full title, given to it by its designer, is "the Erotic Gherkin". No one at all, according to our Jack the Ripper tour guide, calls it that. Whatever its goofy name, it's a striking building, and adds a bit of much-needed modernity to London's skyline, which I thought was surprisingly lacking in that regard.

Anyway, we did the half-hour revolution, and here are a few more of the photos I took on the way round.






More Big Ben.













A high view of the Thames at high tide.










This is a not-so-clear shot of the London Eye employees checking our capsule for bombs or somesuch with the use of mirrors affixed to the ends of sticks. Terrorism, or the fear of it anyway, is everywhere.














And here I am with Darth Vader. There was a Star Wars exhibit in a building adjacent to the Eye and different Englanders came out dressed as characters from both the original films and the prequels. Some goofy-looking "Padawan learners" who came out after Darth made his exit.
















In the foreground: me wife. In the background: the London Eye in full.














After we stepped off the Eye and met Darth Vader, we walked across the bridge to Big Ben. This is me on the bridge.











And here I am at a cafe just a block to two down the street from our hotel, about to dig into my first official English meal of fish and chips. The fish and chips pictured here were okay, but far from the best I had while in England and Scotland.

Anyway, that was day one in England. I don't expect each day to warrant all this verbiage, so future postings will be more brief (hopefully).

All right, this entry is long enough. Stay tuned for Day Two.

Hie Thyself to the Multiplex!

I've just seen a midnight showing of "1408". If you have time this weekend, go see this film. As with most movies I really like, I don't want to say too much about it and run the risk of lessening its impact. For example, if I say "1408" is, at times, terrifying, you may steel yourself against it, so I won't say that... because it's not. Or something. I'm feeling an urge to engage in some hyperbole here, but as it is 2:38 a.m. and I'm rarely at my most cogent at this hour, I'll spare myself any potential embarrassment. But if you've got a few extra dollars, I do recommend you check out a screening of this film before Monday. It is good, and it doesn't deserve to be beaten by the likes of "Fantastic Four 2" on its opening weekend.

In other news, still packing up the damn place. Nearly done. Swung by the liquor store on the way to the movies and grabbed up some more free boxes. They're the perfect size for the odds and ends we haven't yet packed. The movers come Sunday. Anyway, see "1408".

About Commenting

Hola guys. So we're busy packing up now. We still don't know exactly where we're headed, but we do know that we have a certain amount of money with which to move, and we get to keep whatever we don't spend. So we're packing up our apartment now.

Anyway, you may have noticed that there is no way to comment on the blog right now. This is temporary and will change likely on August 1st. By that time I will have finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, as will hopefully any other serious devotees of the series, and will thus be immune to any additional spoilers broadcast by certain (ahem) unnamed persons.

All right. Back to packing.

Oh God He's At It Again. This Time It's Books

Blogger has added a new feature that lets you post up images into the blog's header with ease. I've taken advantage of it, as you can see, in the stupidest way possible. An uncropped, unfinished drawing of what appears to be a total dullard now greets all comers to the Inanities. While I was away, my PC crapped out on me, so I haven't yet moved Photoshop CS from my busted PC to my still-working laptop (on which I'm composing this blog entry). But if I had access to Photoshop, this image would be cropped. But until I get access to it, this image will remain in its goofy, uncropped state. (Or until I get tired of it and ax it altogether). I actually think though that this drawing I did on Photoshop last month is kind of fitting. No offense to any of you, of course, but he kind of looks like he ought to be reading this blog.

Anyway, as you may have guessed, I'm back from my trip to the British Isles. Got back about a week ago and since then I've been dealing with uncooperative computers. Those issues are all resolved now, or mostly resolved (see above), and now we look ahead to the big move out of Atlanta. We have to be out of our apartment in 9 days, and we still don't know a.) what city we're going to, or b.) what or how the new employer plans to subsidize our relocation. We're hoping for a telephone call of enlightenment sometime today. I don't mean to give the impression that we are 9 days away from homelessness. The wife and I will be staying one county up with her parents until she goes away for training. But as to where we'll be at the beginning of September and the foreseeable future following, we do not know. Good times.

Enough of that. My plan was to come back, get on the 'puter, and blog about my trip right away. The 7th of this month is what I think I'd promised. A week later, I'm still not prepared to do that. The photos we took are off the camera but loaded onto my wife's calculator-sized laptop, and I won't use that because if I so much as rest my gigantor hand on it, I'll break it. So, seeing how I want to supplement my exciting travelogue with photos and those photos are not, this moment, available to me, I can provide no travelogue today. But I will do something far more boring instead. I'll tell you about the books I read while I was traveling the world! Whoo! And for those who are already clicking on other websites, take care and check back for an exhaustive description of my England trip. Here we go:

1.) The Raw Shark Texts. A Brit named Steven Hall wrote this novel which someone billed as "Memento meets Jaws". Unfortunately, this summation is accurate, and it's just as bad as that weird mish-mash of stories and genres would suggest. The story's about a twenty-something named Eric Sanderson who wakes up in his apartment one day with no memory of who he is. He finds a note nearby, addressed to him (he assumes), penned by someone calling himself "the First Eric Sanderson." In the first 20 pages, he goes to see a shrink the First Eric Sanderson tells him to visit, reads about 200 instructive notes written by the First Eric Sanderson meant to gently ease him into understanding the terrifying predicament that is his life, and he is then attacked, in his living room, by a "conceptual shark." My copy of the "Raw Shark Texts" was a library book. I've already turned it in so I can't, as I'd like, include passages from the book, but take my word for it: as difficult a time as you're no doubt having trying to imagine in your head what a "conceptual shark" looks like, the author of the novel is able to lend absolutely zero assistance. Instead of sitting down and trying as hard as he can to make the unimaginable imaginable, Hall just adds a lot of clever but bullshit modifiers to the word 'shark' to sell his story. Add in a ridiculous, shoehorned love story, a penchant for writing novels like an amateur screenwriter who's just got his hands on Robert McKee's "Story", and you've got a novel with problems. If only those were his worst sins. The end of "Raw Shark Texts" follows, in many instances beat for beat, the last 30-40 minutes of "Jaws". Seriously. So much so, that I knew what was going to happen to the characters 75 pages away from the last page because I recognized which character was Brody, which Quint, which Hooper. As I read, I held out hope for Hall. "This whole sequence is going to just be a riff on 'Jaws', he's not going to just keep ripping it off, is he?" But he does. After finishing the book, I was more than a little mystified as to mainstream publishing's well-documented excitement surrounding its release. Less mystified, though, as to why it's been termed a "disappointment" in the few months since it came out. I doubt there was very much positive word of mouth because it is not very good. That is not to say that Hall didn't have an interesting premise -- he did. I likely wouldn't have picked it up off the New Fiction shelf at the library if it didn't. He even manages to include some legitimately mind-expanding passages in his novel -- ways of thinking I'd never encountered or seen put into writing with such precision. But the goofy, screenwriter-wannabe missteps he makes the rest of the time overpower the story. I hope he has better luck next time out of the box.

2.) For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. This collection of short stories was written by Nathan Englander. He did the Iowa Writer's Workshop, his stories have appeared in Story magazine and The New Yorker, and his new novel, "The Ministry of Special Cases", has been getting rapturous reviews from everyone who reads it. Since I didn't want to plunk down $25 for an un-discounted hardcover of the new book, I picked up his first book instead. In one a wealthy, WASPy gentile decides, while sitting in the back of a cab, that he is Jewish. His transformation from Polo shirt and penny loafer wearing prep into an Orthodox Jew (right down to the little black box some penitents wear at the Wailing Wall) is meant to be hilarious, and though it is funny at times, mostly it is just sad, as are most of these stories. Englander's reputation as a masterful short story writer is well-deserved. His tone is pitch perfect for each story, the epiphanies subtle and well-managed, the themes clearly drawn and if creative writing teachers held this book up to their students to say "this is how you write short stories", I would have no problem with that. Though, as with most serious, so-called "literary" fiction, I feel I'm only half-getting the stories. And by that I mean I understand them on one, maybe two of several levels the authors were writing on. I think in the case of this particular book, some of my ignorance might be corrected if I'd either a.) retained what little Sunday School instruction I got, or b.) pick up the Bible and just suck it up and read the damn thing. In all of these stories Englander is much concerned with Jews and Jewishness, and the Old Testament Biblical allusions were a flyin'. Anyway, good reviews are much more boring than bad, so I'll just end with that.

3.) Arthur & George. Another book written by a Brit. Written by Julian Barnes, this novel was shortlisted for the Booker prize in England a couple years back. Set primarily at the beginning of the 20th century, "Arthur & George" tells the story of George Edalji, a half-Scottish, half-Indian man living in the English countryside who becomes the object of an unjustified criminal prosecution. To the rescue comes the rich and wealthy Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. Spurred to action by a letter from George's father, a Vicar, Doyle uses his position and wealth to clear Edalji's name. Though Arthur and George don't meet until page 293 (the book is 501 pages long), the meeting still manages to feel perfectly timed. Barnes is so deft at not only conjuring the imagined personalities of these real-life men with clear attention to the true details of their actual lives, but also to recreating the world they inhabited. The effect of this careful work is that their first meeting in the lobby of the Grand Hotel is actually thrilling and, in the end, not at all predictable. Because the characters in this novel, even the non-famous ones, behave like people and not as characters in a novel, unexpected moments do sometimes arise in the story that intentionally move the reader away from easy judgments and moralistic pronouncements. For instance, after Doyle has begun his investigation into the crimes George is alleged to have committed, he interviews the bigoted chief of police (or the British equivalent) that managed the original investigation. Far from depicting the systematic and satisfying destruction of the Chief's (Anson's) irrational and dangerous beliefs on race at the hands of a Holmes-like Doyle, Barnes instead casts Anson in the Sherlock Holmes role and Arthur Conan Doyle in the exasperated and befuddled Watson role as Anson calmly and condescendingly instructs Doyle on both the particulars of the case and the sad truths about the nature of truth. After that conversation, I figured that none of my assumptions were safe, and even began to doubt the innocence of George. I have to say that my reading of the story was in no way helped by this suspense, so, if you do plan to read this book, let me tell you this: George didn't do it. Knowing this may help you later on. Anyway, an engrossing, beautifully-written, fast-moving read. I highly recommend it.

4.) The Interpretation of Murder. So we go from brilliant to terrible. This is the book I read while flying back to the States. This means that, along with "Raw Shark Texts" I sandwiched my UK trip by reading two bad books while flying over the Atlantic. This is by far the worst of the two and a particularly egregious instance of an author completely failing to deliver on a fantastic premise. This, from a single page preceding the novel.

"In 1909, Sigmund Freud... made his one and only visit to the United States. Despite the great success of this visit, Freud always spoke, in later years, as if some trauma had befallen him in the United States. He called Americans 'savages' and blamed his sojourn there for physical ailments that afflicted him well before 1909. Freud's biographers have long puzzled over the mystery, speculating whether some unknown event in America could have led to his otherwise inexplicable reaction."

To me, this is a great premise. What terrible thing happened to Sigmund Freud when he visited New York at the height of its Gilded Age? Just as with "Raw Shark Texts", the author got a big advance for a first novel, and the publishers put a lot of their selling power to bear to get this into bookstores in a big way. I opened the book expecting something on the order of Caleb Carr's "The Alienist", which was also about psychology, serial killers, New York and true life historical figures. Instead I got 529 pages of true dreck. Though Rubenfeld may have mastered many a discipline in his life (his author bio, located on the inside cover, lists his many accomplishments in both drama and law), he can not count "Writing a Good Book" as one of them. This is one of the worst books I've ever read, and I've read a few. Here is a brief list of his transgressions: He starts his novel in the first person voice of one character and then, in the next section when describing things the other character cannot have witnessed, blithely switches to third person voice. The "great trauma" Freud was supposed to have suffered, the one Rubenfeld alludes to in his one-paragraph preface, turns out to be neither great nor particularly traumatic. He uses movie-like catchphrases. For instance, after the main character is nearly drowned in the Hudson river, he emerges alive, and reunites with a fellow psychiatrist. When the main character is asked what he's been up to, he says, "Just trying to keep my head above water, really." If that's not enough, the novel was boring, the characters all lifeless puppets, and the solution to the murders was, if not completely implausible, than at least intolerably dull. The only vaguely interesting thing about this book was the interplay between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, who traveled with him and whom Freud considered the heir to his methodology. But even that Rubenfeld manages to caricature so cartoonishly that Freud comes off as the all-knowing, all-seeing mind reader, and Jung the hedonistic, deluded, mentally ill ass-hole whom Freud insensibly coddles. The only thing more opaque than the plot or the inner workings of the minds of the characters is how much praise this book received! My copy is riddled with adulation. "Spectacular ... fiendishly clever", says the Spectator. "Unusually intelligent", so says the Times. The Sunday Telegraph weighs in with, "Rubenfeld writes beautifully." The Independent: "A dazzling novel." Entertainment Weekly calls "Interpretation", "an expertly crafted novel." I don't know if they read a different book or didn't read it at all, because none of this has any bearing on the contents of "Interpretation of Murder".

All right. I'm through. More soon.

Declaration of Intent to Hiatus

Hola, readers.

I wanted to post up briefly to let you know that, owing to a stint of traveling I'll be doing (to PA and then England -- weddings), the Inanities will go dark for 3 weeks. I'll resume posting on this blog on or shortly after the 7th of June. I'll let you know how everything went.

Until June.

The Wife Has Gradumagated!

And, just like that, two years of business school is over and my wife has graduated with honors.

The graduation ceremonies happened this morning and she is now officially done.

Last week she accepted her first post-M.B.A. job and it has been determined that we will be moving, though to where we don't yet know. Her training starts in July, which will take her to Sunnyvale, California and then to Dehli, India, and the job itself begins in August, which is when we'll probably be moving. So pretty exciting. Having listened to a bunch of speeches aimed at "looking back" over the last couple days, I don't feel at all inclined towards retrospection, so you don't have to worry on that score. Maybe as the move-out date draws closer. Anyway, I wanted to let you folks know -- I'll keep you posted.

But hey! In movie news, I saw "28 Weeks Later" over the weekend. Excellent stuff. It's not as good as the original, but it's a strong bit of work. The scares aren't cheap, the suspense is expertly done, and the premise is designed to put the screws to the characters in the cruelest (read: most entertaining) way possible. Good times.

Some other very brief reviews.

1.) "Happy Feet": Wtf?

2.) "The Holiday": Sheer embarrassment all the way through. "Bewitched"-level embarrassment.

And I've got "Little Children" and "A Good Year" on tap. I'm hoping they do better than the last pair of DVDs.

"Spider Man 3" and "Eragon". Both Sink Beneath the "Average" Mark, but One Buries the Needle

6:20 a.m. is too early to be blogging.

My allergies, which I'm thinking are related to grass, are the worst of my life and they've woken me out of a sound sleep. I've never really had them before, and the fact that they've developed at a time when I'd always thought I'd go through my life immune to pollen in all its forms is pretty depressing. It's just another bit of evidence that, sometime in the unknowable future, even more unpleasant afflictions and maladies are likely to develop. In other words, my prolific nostrils and red, irritated eyes are additional proof I am not invincible. Whether you want to know or not, I'll tell you that the roof of my mouth feels like the thinnest of membranes. Up till this past week, I always thought that just above the roof of my mouth were layers and layers of impenetrable skull meat. But now I realize that a series of strenuous tongue-pokes could puncture that membrane and allow me to probe the interior of my skull, whether with my tongue or a finger, in no time flat. Yeah, it's gross, but it's my blog, so I'll bore you with whatever I want.

Anyway, onto movie reviews. [Beware: Below Thar Be Spoilers.]

1.) Spider Man 3. There's a point late in "Spider Man 3" when it becomes clear that Sam Raimi has made a less-than-great film and that there's no hope of saving it. The moment happens in an alleyway in which Sandman (Thomas Haden Church, or Lowell from "Wings") is fighting Venom (Topher Grace, or Eric Foreman from "That 70's Show"). Who knows why they're fighting, they just are. It's what people in costumes do. They quit fighting for a minute at which point the black Venom-suit skin tendrilizes away from Topher's face and Topher suggests that, as neither of them alone can kill "the spider" alone, that they should team up and do it. Lowell thinks about it a second, and then, reluctantly, sadly, agrees. The scene was lazy, expository, implausible, wildly coincidental (among many many wild coincidences that punctuate the movie), and served solely to move the plot forward. The scene implied that this unwieldy monster-budgeted behemoth called "Spider Man 3" had really and truly gotten away from Sam Raimi. If this shitty, throwaway scene was the best way Raimi and his screenwriters could think of to set up the ridiculous, overlong finale, then all hope was lost.

I didn't hate "Spider Man 3", and I don't think it's a terrible movie, but considering the two fantastic films that came before, this second sequel is a big disappointment. The thing we were all worried about going in to the movie, namely that Raimi had crammed too many villains and subplots into this thing a la "Batman Forever", turned out to be exactly right. With hindsight being what it is, I think had the screenwriters taken out the entire Sandman sub-plot and focused on the Eddie Brock/Venom storyline, "SP3" might have been in a league with the brilliant "Spider Man 2". But even then I'm not so sure success would have been assured. Raimi's masterly understanding of the subject and tone of these films faltered a few times in this movie, but never so egregiously as during the jazz club scene, an adjunct of the Venom plot-line. As I watched Peter Parker express the depths of his dark side through jaunty "mean" dancing, I remember thinking, "This is pretty weird." But since it was Raimi, I figured he had everything well in hand; he'd pull it out. But just a few seconds later I understood. Raimi or no, the scene was just bad. And so was quite a bit of what came after.

Though there were a lot of fun sequences in the movie (OK, a few), overall "SP3" just felt muddled and rudderless. A disappointment.

2.) Eragon. The true badness of this movie is not at all apparent in the trailers cut for this movie. From a viewing of "Eragon"'s trailers, the film looks like a fairly low-rent dragon movie for the 12-13-year old male set, but not any kind of cinematic travesty. There are warning signs, sure. The appearance of not just Jeremy Irons, but also John Malkovich, adherents to the I'll Be In Anything school of acting, made me suspect true and depthless badness, but the fantastic dragon effects threw me off the scent. (They are good.) The movie is a testament to the trailer cutters' skills. "Eragon" is abysmal. It is a no-rent dragon movie for kids. The novel on which "Eragon" was based was written by then-16-year old Christoper Paolini, and that's exactly how it plays -- like a 16-year old wrote it. It was as if Paolini had only ever seen "Star Wars", had only ever read a novelization of Lucas's screenplay for "Star Wars", and then decided to write a new version of "Star Wars", except his version would have the same characters but with different names, dragons, and he'd stretch out the story over 3 or more books. The film ends with little to no resolution of the larger plot: for example, Malkovich plays the evil king in "Eragon", and the film ends without our Skywalkerian hero having anything to do with him. I don't want to write any more on this, so I'll just put it simply: the movie's crap.

Wow. I spent about 2 hours writing this post. Crazy.

Anyway. Enjoy your Wednesday.

Glorious "Golden Compass" One-Sheet For Your Thursday Night Enjoyment

After seeing the first bit of footage New Line released, I was feeling that maybe Chris Weitz (the screenwriter and director) was taking the film in a different direction than I'd envisioned while reading the book. This one-sheet, released today, which features the polar bear Iorek Byrnison in all his beary greatness, makes me think Weitz really does get these books. Could be a great movie.

NBCC Stages a Rally in Atlanta, "Night at the Museum" was Worse Than I Anticipated, and Another Drawing From the Archives

Tomorrow at 10 a.m. in front of the Atlanta Journal & Constitution building in downtown Atlanta, the National Book Critics Circle is holding a "read-in". The AJC's book editor, Teresa Weaver, was recently fired because the paper was essentially eliminating original book reporting, deciding to rely instead on wire reports and the reporting of larger newspapers. I agree with the NBCC. This is no good. The few times I pick up that awful newspaper and found something worthwhile, it was usually some bit of original AJC book reporting edited by Weaver. So for a few minutes there, I was thinking, "I should just go down there. Show my support. What the hell else have I got to do tomorrow morning?"

On the other hand, I don't read the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. I don't think it's a very good newspaper. Even if they reinstall Weaver and renew their commitment to book reviews and author profiles and whatever else, I have no intention of buying a subscription. So, with all that said, wouldn't it be less than forthright on my part to go down there and quietly demand (via "read-in") the AJC reallocate their resources to a robust book section when I don't do any business with the AJC and have no plans to do so in the future? It just feels hypocritical.

The point is moot anyhow. The wife reminds me we have someone who saw our ad on Craig's List coming by to look at some stuff tomorrow at 11 a.m.

Anyway. I rented "Night at the Museum" the other night, mostly to see what the hubbub was all about. This movie's about 99.8% for kids. I know most of you already knew that, but I was expecting a slightly more favorable ratio. Goofy, pointless, not fun, and the kid who plays Ben Stiller's son reminded me less of an actual kid than the creepy "children" in "The Polar Express". "Night at the Museum"'s $250 million domestic gross is even more staggering now that I've seen exactly what everyone went to see during the 2006 holiday season.

And finally, I was looking through my "artwork" folder, and realized a drawing I'm proud of hadn't ever made it up onto the blog. A quick search of this blog for the word "Wright" confirmed my suspicion. So here it is:


















I drew this as a gift for my father Christmas before last. Thought it came out pretty well.

That's all I got for today.

A Woman Named Kristin Calls and Insists I Asked Her Out at The Grocery Store

So, something weird happened to me last night. The phone rang at 7:43 p.m.. Privacy director listed "Private Name, Private Number". Usually, I ignore calls like this, but against my better judgment, I answered.

Me: "Hello?"

Woman: "Hello, may I speak to Brian?"

Me: "This is he."

Woman: (pause)

Me: "Who's this?"

Woman: (laughingly, as if we know each other well) "This is Kristin." (A trashy southern accent.)

Me: (pause, as I wrack my brain for Kristins I've known. I come up with nothing.) "Kristin who?"

Woman: (as though I'm being dense) "Kristin!"

Me: "Are you sure you have the right number?"

Woman: "This is Brian, right?"

Me: "Yes, but..."

Woman: "We met the other day. You gave me your number, said we should go out some time."

Me: "Uh..."

Woman: "Honey, is this a bad time?" (in the background, a small child is saying, "Mommy.")

Me: "What's my last name?"

Woman: "Hon, do you want me to call another time?"

Me: "No, no. I have no idea who you are, and you're not saying."

Woman: "We met the other day."

Me: "Where at?"

Woman: "At the grocery store."

Me: "Which one?"

Woman: "Kroger."

Me: "Which Kroger?"

Woman: "Oh, I don't remember, the one down in Decatur. Sweetie, if I called at a bad time, I can call back..." (again, the child in the background says, "Mommy.")

Me: "Oh no, don't call here again."

Woman: "Honey, I'll just call back."

Me: (yelling) "No! Do not call back here again!"

I hang up.

Now, that's just a rough transcript from memory. Reading over it, it comes across as shorter than it actually was.

As you can probably tell, I was very freaked out by this conversation. By the end, my heart was racing and I was shaking a little. I think what was most strange about the conversation was how goddamn certain she was that she knew me. Even though I hadn't been inside a Kroger since early last week (which would have been a stretch to include in her vague "the other day" time frame), and even though I was pretty sure I would have remembered something like giving a woman named Kristin my number (or any woman for that matter), her casual certitude made me question my own hold on reality. "Did I hit on some redneck woman at the grocery store and give her my number?" I wondered. It didn't sound like me (to which the wife agreed when I told her about it), but her certainty was, at least during our brief chat, compelling evidence that I was in fact a cheating bastard. Clearly, it doesn't take much to make me doubt my sanity.

After I settled down and remembered I haven't ever tried to start up an affair, much less one in the fruits and vegetables section of my local grocery store, the question became what had Kristin been after? How had she gotten my name and address? The phone book was the simple answer to this question, as my name, number and address are listed there for all the world to see. So what was she doing? Running her finger down the Yellow Pages and calling random Metro Atlanta men by alphabetical order? And all just so she could try and convince them she'd caught their eye at the grocery store in whichever city they lived?

So what if the conversation had gone a different way? What if I'd been the kind of guy looking to score some "alone time" with a random trailer park single mother? What would have happened to me when Kristin and I finally went "out"? Would it have been her and two hillbilly thugs waiting behind trailer #14 ready to drive me and my bank card around to a bunch of ATMs? Would they figure I might not say anything given the circumstances surrounding my kidnapping, thus leaving their crime unreported and them free to run the same scam again? I'm not sure. Though it's possible that Kristin's out-of-the-blue evening call was just a weird prank or maybe the wishful delusions of a mentally ill woman, I think it was likely some kind of scam. Any of you have any theories?

Anyway, you heard it here first. The weirdest, most ineffectual telephone scam you can imagine may be coming to a city near you! Watch for it! But don't hang up like I did! See where it leads!

Also: for more fun telephone hijinx from the Inanities Archives, click here and here.

Back at You on the Last Day of April

So I get home yesterday from my weekend-long house and dog and cat-sitting stint up in Oxford to find my bathroom and part of my bedroom flooded.

Sometime since I left the house on Friday, the toilet overflowed. As our bedroom was unlivable, we went up to the in-laws and spent last night there. Today, our apartment management called up their carpet cleaning people to clean the affected carpets, which has now been done. As of this moment, we await a big fan to help dry the bewetted area. Since we put in our 60-day notice of our "intent to vacate" a week ago, I think the management at J.S. is less inclined to be prompt in their dealings with us.

Anyway, saw a few movies over the weekend.

1.) "The Good Shepherd". Very good. Eric Roth wrote a complex and brilliantly-written script and De Niro, who directed it, turns it into some serious, must-see filmmaking.

2.) "Rocky Balboa". As cries for sympathy for a once-beloved character long past his prime go, this one's surprisingly easy to take. Stallone wrote and directed this unambitious final installment of the Rocky "saga", and it mostly succeeds in its modest, aw-shucks kind of way.

3.) "Deja Vu". From the scathing reviews of this film that accompanied its release last year, I was expecting a flashy but thoroughly awful movie. It's flashy all right (it is directed by Tony Scott), but it's not awful. Actually, I thought it was pretty good, at least as far as crazy Bruckheimer-produced action movies go. Maybe it just goes to show most movies live or die based on expectations. Had I been expecting greatness, I would have been disappointed. But since I was on the look-out for total crap, this movie came out very well. Once you accept the more fantastical elements of its sci-fi premise, which I did without too much difficulty, the plot flows forward logically and Denzel manages to hold the whole thing together. Time travel's hard, and screenwriters Rossio and Marsilii manage its complexities just fine. Good, goofy times.

Isn't "Spider Man 3" this weekend? I'm stoked in theory, but really I'm just glad there's something fun and almost assuredly good (did I just jinx it?) to see at the movies.

Hot Fuzz Makes One's Aces Smokin'

Is it Monday again? I feel like every other day it's "24" night. Well, I hope everyone had a good weekend. Mine was good. Saw "Hot Fuzz" on Friday, went up to Oxford to celebrate my grandmother's 80th birthday, watched "The Bourne Identity" in my folks' new, totally-awesome but still-in-progress home theater, then on Sunday I watched "Smokin' Aces" on DVD.

"Hot Fuzz" wasn't bad, but it wasn't nearly as fun as "Shaun of the Dead". "Hot Fuzz" is intended as a parody of over-the-top eighties action movies, specifically, the buddy cop movie, and it succeeds well enough at that, but setting such a parody in the English countryside sounds funnier on paper than it is in practice. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg (who played Shaun in "Shaun of the Dead" and plays the hero, Nicholas Angel, in this one) wrote a smart screenplay that sends up the excesses of action directors like Bay and Scott (of the Tony variety), sometimes brilliantly. One instance, early on in the film, occurs when Angel hauls an assortment of small-town troublemaking kids into the police station. The mugshot montage that follows is a dead-on parody of Tony Scott's overblown, degraded, hyper-frenetic montages from "Man on Fire", right down to the ominous guitar strums. Very funny. There are a couple other really great moments in the movie, but "Hot Fuzz"'s high notes are usually drowned out by a kind of cheery ploddingness courtesy of a script that too often defers to formula. I'm sure some less-than-good elements of the film were intended as high-concept satire of the movies Wright and Co. clearly love, but come off simply as a tired retread of what's come before. By the end, I was so weary of all the frenetic cutting and satirical montages, all I wanted was an actual scene without a scrim of irony placed over it. All in all, though, "Fuzz" gets by on its good intentions and charm and a few good jokes, but works only as a forgettable diversion.

"Smokin' Aces", on the other hand, has got way bigger problems. "Smokin' Aces", director Joe Carnahan's long-awaited sophomore effort to "Narc", hardly proclaims the arrival of a new film visionary that "Narc" portended. It's a big misfire and it would deserve total dismissal if there weren't something there, beneath all the flash and meaningless style, that hints at how very close to worthwhile this movie could have been. I don't know if the "Aces" script needed a second or third draft to make it work, or if Carnahan needs another film or two to hit his stride and figure out what he's trying to say, but throughout the movie his potential as a filmmaker is there, clearly visible, and part of the reason "Aces" is such a disappointment is that his material never rises to the level of his talent.

The A-plot's simple enough. A federal witness, Buddy "Aces" Israel, has been targeted by the mob for assassination because of all the baddies he'll implicate. The mob puts out a one million dollar contract on Israel, which then attracts a motley assortment of hit men to kill Israel in his penthouse suite in Lake Tahoe. A.O. Scott said about Robert Rodriguez recently in his review of "Grindhouse", that Rodriguez's "energy . . . often outstrips his taste." I think the same can be said for Carnahan, much to the film's detriment. Here's a good example.

[Spoiler ahead.]

Ben Affleck, Peter Berg and Martin Henderson are bail bondsmen who want to bring Israel in. We meet them in a bar while Affleck rattles off some exposition. They are interesting characters. Their rich histories are briefly alluded to and I wanted to learn more about them. Another trio of characters, a group of inarticulate berserkers who get off on killing indiscriminately, are hired to kill Israel. After the 20 minutes of exposition has been dispensed with, we find Affleck, Berg and Henderson standing in a parking lot beside their car preparing to start their Israel-getting operation. The berserker characters drive past and out of frame, their percussive music booming. After a moment, they reverse back into frame and mow down the three bail bondsmen. It is audacious and, admittedly, counts as one of the best laughs in the movie. (There are few.) The berserkers linger for a while, and then move on. The fact that the flashy but ultimately uninteresting berserker characters survive, while the comparatively complex bail bondsmen characters are unceremoniously slaughtered, says a lot about Carnahan's aims with this film. He would rather see these three grunting thugs (who, owing to their implausibility as characters, have no stories to tell), emerge screaming from an elevator with chainsaws and shotguns, than he would like to follow three actual characters (and real actors) interact with the world he's created, speaks volumes about Carnahan's judgment as a screenwriter. After the cheap laughs derived from the senselessness of the bondsmens' demise fade away, a disappointed boredom sets in, and never really goes away.

[Spoilers finito.]

If his only sin were style over substance, that would be one thing, but Carnahan can't find a way to make "Smokin' Aces" make a lick of sense. Besides being wildly implausible, much of the story is incomprehensible, not to mention stupid. If "Aces" had been a big flashy dumbshit movie about a bunch of hitmen going after one guy in Lake Tahoe, cool. That was the movie I wanted to see. But then Carnahan adds in his own bullshit FBI/Mob subplot "twist, ostensibly to give the film some weight, and this subplot, along with his own countless missteps, help sink the movie. Particularly terrible, the end of the film purports to be a quiet counterpoint to all the bombast that's preceded it, but because of this ridiculous subplot, the operatics of the film's last moments are completely phony, the emotion Carnahan wants us to feel (the swelling score rising helpfully) entirely unearned. "Boondock Saints" is a good film to compare "Aces" to. Both films deal in cheap nihilism, are stylistically violent, are overblown, make no sense, eschew substance for the "cool shot", and both are terrible. What's different is that Carnhan's skills as a director are exponentially better than "Boondock" director Troy Duffy's. He's just poorly served by his skills as a screenwriter. Time to tell that agent to start looking for new material, Joe.

(Also, Andy Garcia's southern accent in this film is so mind-bogglingly awful, that it made me think back and reevaluate his entire career as a film actor, looking for a reason he's worked for so long. Not sure I get it. It is soooo bad. Keanu Reeves in "Dracula" or "Devil's Advocate" bad.)

In other Crane-related news, my brother had some automotive misfortune last week. His truck engine burned up. Click here for a couple photos he took with his cell phone camera.

Links O' Plenty

Just a bunch of links today, so I'll get right into it.

1.) The Funny. Will Ferrell made a short video with his pal Adam McKay that's been blowing up on the internet. Five millions views since it debuted on FunnyorDie.com. In it, a down on his luck Will Ferrell is visited by the landlord who is none too happy with Ferrell's failure to pay his rent. The landlord is played by McKay's 2-year old daughter, Pearl, and though her baby dialogue is subtitled, she isn't just blabbing nonsense. she's actually saying words like, "Pay me now, bitch!" and "I work too hard" and "I'm going to smack you". Anyway, it's funny. Take a look here. And click here for McKay talking about how the clip came to be. And here for some "Pearl the Landlord" attention from People Magazine.

2.) The Illuminating. For you fans of The Colbert Report, TalkingPointsMemo has some very cool backstage footage of Colbert explaining his schtick to Sen. John Kerry before they do the interview. As far as I know, this is the only video that exists of Stephen Colbert explaining his character, the premise of his show, and how guests should handle his character. Very cool. Most of it is a limo interview with Josh Marshall talking to Kerry about his new book on the environment, but if you want to go right to the Colbert part, click here, let the video load, and then adjust the cursor-thingie until the clock reads.0 2:05 or so.

3.) The Impressive. Dave Chappelle performed for about six hours at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood on Sunday night, breaking the record for longest performance at that establishment, breaking Dane Cook's recent nearly four hour performance. If that's the same place I went to see Eddie Griffin ramble through his set, then I'm not sure it's Dane Cook's record Chappelle broke but Griffin's. That performance felt like it had to have been 5 hours. At least.

4.) The Shameful. You remember that so-called Voter I.D. bill Georgia passed a couple years agi? I wrote about it here way back in September of 2005. Intended by racist whites in the Georgia legislature to suppress minority voting in the name of tamping down on voter fraud, the bill passed, but has since been rejected by court after court as unconstitutional. Jurists recognized the law for what it was: a modern day poll tax straight out of the Jim Crow era. Well, one of the revelations coming out of the US Attorney scandal is the degree to which the Bush administration has purged the Justice department of competent professionals and replaced them with Bible-thumping "loyal Bushies", including a lot of folks who graduated from Regent University, Pat Robertson's bottom-tiered Jesus Freak Factory. Monica Goodling, the #3 person at the Justice Department was one of these Regent grads. She also just resigned after pleading the Fifth to avoid testifying before Congress. (According to Regent's website, upwards of 150 Regent graduates work in the Justice Department.) Anyway, the purging of the Bush Justice Department hasn't been relegated to just US Attorneys, but also the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ. Bush and Karl Rove, as obsessed with suppressing minority voting as the Georgia legislature, signed off on Georgia's Voter I.D. bill even though all but one of the career lawyers in the "voting section" of the Civil Rights division of Justice called it what it was and rejected it. Those people were pressured out and replaced.

But the choice quote from the TPM story is this:

"Here's one thing that the Bush political appointees insisted didn't raise any red flags. The sponsor of the bill, Georgia state Rep. Sue Burmeister, told voting section staff that "if there are fewer black voters because of this bill, it will only be because there is less opportunity for fraud," and that "when black voters in her black precincts are not paid to vote, they do not go to the polls.""

Once again I'm reminded of how difficult it can be to be a proud Georgian while we're all saddled with labels like ignorant, redneck and racist. People like Sue Burmeister and all the folks who voted for and supported that bill, are doing their part to make sure Georgians have no chance of escaping those labels in my lifetime. Anyway, there's more background on this facet of the story here. TPM is really doing some fantastic journalism. We need more guys like Josh Marshall to more fully document this poisoning of our Federal government.

4.) The Very Cool. The Pulitzers were announced on Monday, and my man Cormac McCarthy's novel "The Road" won the Pulitzer for Best Fiction. Did you know that the trade paperback is only about $9 at your local chain bookstore? Now that it's won a major award, won't you buy it and read it? It's very good and reads very fast. Then we can talk about it. And then you can watch Oprah's interview with McCarthy on a day to be announced.

5.) The Head-Scratching. Edward Norton has been tapped to play Bruce Banner in the latest Hulk movie. This sounds like it could be a really good idea, but then again, I thought Ang Lee was going to make a great Hulk movie.

Okay. Enough links. Enjoy your day.

Virginia Tech and the Debate on Gun Control

There's a lot to talk about in regards to the Virginia Tech shooting that happened early yesterday, but I want to get into just one aspect of it, namely the political back and forth on gun control.

I caught a few minutes of Rosie O'Donnell on "The View" this morning. She was talking about the shooting, reiterating her support of a near-total ban on guns (though she did say she wasn't for taking guns away from hunters, but I'm not sure where she draws the line exactly). Tonight on Charlie Rose, I listened to Brian Williams reporting via satellite from Virginia Tech, relating a question he asked the President today about where we are on the gun control debate. In essence, he asked if the rights of gun-owners should supercede those of students to a safe and secure learning environment during what, as Williams kept saying, "should be the best years of their lives." Shortly thereafter a Washington Post reporter talked about a lawsuit the gun lobby brought against the Virginia University system not long ago targeting the University's prohibition of all weapons from campus, saying it violated the 2nd amendment rights of teachers and students. An unnamed gun lobbyist went on to say, in light of what happened yesterday, that the incident proved that their lawsuit was right. Had the teachers and students in those classrooms been armed, it never would have gone as far as it did. It seems both Rosie and the unnamed gun lobbyist are living in their own fantasy worlds.

When Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold picked their way through the halls of Columbine High School with assault rifles, I thought that was a fairly clear-cut case for the banning of public ownership of automatic machine guns. The siege in North Hollywood not long after made the case more succinctly. What possible reason, after all, would a person need a street sweeper-style machine gun for? Or armor-piercing bullets? For the impending declaration of Martial Law and all of the so-called "jackbooted thugs" marching down Main Street demanding subservience to a New World Order? It seems that many of the most virulent gun-advocates on the right are possessed of a deep-seated paranoia that leads them to advocate really bad policy.

But yesterday's violence was done with two handguns, not assault rifles. Where then is the law-making impulse of government to direct itself? Should we then ban all public ownership of handguns? Maybe we'd do that as well as we've managed to ban all sale of heroin and coke, or alcohol during Prohibition. How long after that would some maniac kill another 33 people with a hunting rifle (didn't that happen once in Texas?). What would our governments decide to do then? Ban all rifles? Maybe I'm being simplistic here, and the only real advocates for wholesale banning of all guns are folks like Rosie O'Donnell and some others on the left, but I'm not quite sure where gun control arguments logically enter into the debate after this most recent violence. The killer bought both of his guns legally, waiting out the 30-day waiting period meant to weed out crime of passion shooters. He was of age and he had no flags on his background. These were clean buys. He was not a citizen, per se, but he was a legal resident, which, as far as I know, confers many of the same rights. Maybe the guv'mint could make a law making it illegal to sell to a non-citizen, but what would that do? Make it more difficult for a non-citizen to buy a gun and go on a rampage? That would do really great at making sure something EXACTLY like this never happened again.

What happened at Virginia Tech yesterday was senseless and isolated. It doesn't seem to be indicative of some larger trend, nor does it illuminate some fixable flaw in the system that can be addressed by our elected officials. Bad as it is, this incident seems like a horrific act of gun violence that defies fresh debate on the pros and cons of gun control. I think there's much more debate to be had about guns -- regulating gun shows, requiring child-proof trigger locks on handguns, etc. -- but yesterday's violence moves the debate forward only minimally.

Anyway. Blah blah blah. More tomorrow.

"Heckler"

Happy Friday, ya'll.

As I procrastinate from writing a short summary of my novel, I stumbled over a trailer for Jamie Kennedy's new documentary called "Heckler". Click here for the trailer.

At first the documentary seems like a relatively enjoyable compilation of comedians taking down hecklers; you know, those assholes who shout things at people on-stage in an attempt to co-opt some of the attention the performer's getting. They're a fairly indefensible group. In one clip, Jamie Kennedy comes back at one heckler who's just told him he ought to die, with, "You see, the difference between me and you, is that I came here in a limousine. You came here behind twelve huskies." Not really that funny as I type it on the screen, but the crowd seemed to like it. Anyway.

Eventually the trailer for the documentary moves from hecklers, to critics of all stripes. Anyone who's got something not nice to say. Kennedy calls in bloggers and critics into his home for on-camera interviews and reads them back the things they've written and they have discussions, apparently. True, during these discussions he endures even more insults from these critics, this time live and in-person, but he also gets a chance to insult them back, and usually with more cutting precision. He asks one blogger to restate the name of his website. Kennedy responds, "Shouldn't that be frustrated filmmaker dot com?" To another: "Do you have any friends? And your computer doesn't count." Rob Zombie bitterly describes what must be his impression of most bloggers as people who "live at home with mom, never had a girlfriend, all writing in to say that Spielberg sucks."

I guess my question is: who is this movie supposed to appeal to? People who'll see anything and then like everything they see? "Heckler" looks like something Jamie Kennedy put together because he was angry, in part, over people who've heckled him during his stand-up shows, but mostly over how bad the critics, legit and amateur both, raked him over the coals for movies like "Malibu's Most Wanted" and "The Mask II". I know it must sucks to be in the public eye and have to deal with meanness from anonymous people writing on-line, but to ask the great unwashed to pay to see a withering indictment of themselves is just a little confusing. I know this is just the trailer. Perhaps the film is less a criticism of critics and more a denunciation of the incivility with which many on-line self-publishing folks use to criticize those in the spotlight, the folks putting out movies and TV shows and books and music and what have you. If so, then yeah. I still won't see it, but I won't condemn it.

But the trailer doesn't give that impression. It seems more like a screed from comedians and filmmakers telling us if we don't have anything nice to say about what they do, we shouldn't say anything at all. To some extent, isn't unfair criticism part of being an artist/performer in the public eye? It's a great job, but even great jobs are bound to have a downside or two, right? I can sympathize that famous folks don't like dealing with all those hustling paparazzi in their faces, or maybe even that they don't like people calling into Gawker with star-sightings, but now we can't weigh in with critical opinions of their creative products, the very products they expect us to consume?

I don't know. On the face of it, it seems like a vanity project where Kennedy and other maligned rich creatives get a rare chance to vent about the audiences who don't have the smarts to love them or their work. I think Jamie Kennedy's a funny, talented guy. His next movie, "Kickin' It Old School" looks like it could be pretty funny. But I think he'd be better served concentrating on the next thing rather than looking back in anger at all the vitriol that, if one Googles themselves enough (I'm talking to you, Charles McClennahan), is pretty easy to find on the internet.

Then again, maybe I got the wrong impression from this trailer. Take a look and see what you think Kennedy's trying to do here.

Have a good weekend.

Comments Post! Imus: Redux

Mmm, controversy.

I did this once before that I can remember, back on the global warming post, but I'm a gonna do it again for Tuesday's Imus post. I'm going to post up some of those excellent, well-reasoned comments and then respond to them and thus, possibly, keep the discussion alive.

(Just as a news update, Imus lost his TV show today, though he's still on the radio, broadcasting away. Drudge had a transcript of today's Imus show that was pretty funny because throughout Imus whines about losing his MSNBC show but keeps saying he isn't whining and that he deserves all this. You sort of feel sorry for the guy, but then you read this Slate article, and then you actually listen to his radio program for a minute or two, and then it's much harder to feel sorry for him.)

Anyway, onto the comments:

Shawn posted:

Either way, here's my big beef with this thing: it's more sexist than racist. The statement is demeaning to women regardless of race, but that's not to say Imus isn't making the association that black woman = ho. I think he probably is and I think the notoriety attached to the idea of the pimp in our culture over the past decade or so has sort of made this the acceptable norm in a way. Pimps and hos is a black thing right? Well, it shouldn't matter - it's a gender and power thing first and foremost.

I think Shawn's right here -- the sexism in Imus's oft-repeated comment has definitely been overlooked during all this. I wonder if the less-discussed sexism may be what's adding fuel to the fire -- it's like a double whammy of offensiveness, racist and sexist, and that much harder to brush off. And historically Imus has enjoyed using the pimps and hos imagery to spice his descriptions of black people. He called the New York Knicks "chest-thumping pimps" (And just to keep on with the Knicks, he once called Patrick Ewing once a "knuckle-dragging moron". )

Heath wrote:

I don't even care to argue whether he should or shouldn't get fired (or resign) over this, because at the end of the day it has to do with how the communications conglomerate that owns his station views this incident in terms of profit gain and loss. It's business, really, that decides these issues, and most of the time to a huge fault.

This I agree with. It is up to GE-owned NBC-Universal (which did opt to boot him), as well as the Viacom-owned CBS (which so far has opted to keep him). And I also agree that, oftentimes, it is "to a huge fault" that corporate America has so much leverage over what can and cannot be broadcast over the airwaves. Back during the run-up to the Iraq war, Phil Donahue had a show on MSNBC. It was a decent show, its rating weren't stellar but during his critical and skeptical coverage of the seemingly inevitable rush to war, which at the time was fairly unique on TV, his ratings went much higher. In fact, according to one of his producers, it became the most-watched show on the channel. But his show got canceled anyway. A leaked internal NBC memo came out calling Donahue and his show, "a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war ... He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives." So he got canned for expressing the entirely legitimate views shared by about half of the country. So even though his ratings were good, NBC decided, out of a sense of patriotism and for the good of their viewers, that he shouldn't be allowed to have a venue. Somewhat similarly (emphasis on the somewhat), Imus's ratings are way up, and still MSNBC has decided to fire him. But like Peggy wrote in her comment,

The fact is Imus is deteriorating the value of the brands he works for, not only for each station he airs on, but also MSNBC and CBS Radio, which is why they should let him go.

Though perhaps the facts that separate these two situations are more numerous than those that unite them. Imus said something ignorant and racist for a joke and lost his MSNBC job, and Donahue was airing legitimate political opinions unpopular with the NBC brass and lost his job on MSNBC. Pretty different.

Heath wrote:

Crane, your take on this is staggeringly myopic and dangerous. You need to stop watching the news for a couple months, so you'll stop with the left-leaning absolutism. Jesus. Gross. Gross Jesus. You say you're of two minds about this controversy, but are you? Really? I think not. You have a singular vision for a utopian society that's a bit naive, I think. Racism is a delicate subject, but to single out that it's exceptionally delicate for white people, is at it's core racism, too. But, it's the okay kind, right? You know the kind, the anti-white kind? That kind of racism is socially acceptable to you New York Times white apologists, and I can't side with that.

I agree with the second sentence. I do need to stop watching the news for a while -- it's been a real bore of late. But to the point, I don't think I am for a utopian society. In my post I didn't ask that offensive racial language be stricken from the public dialogue by force of law, I'm merely expressing my opinion that Imus ought to be fired for uttering it in this case. In fact, all the people calling for Imus to be fired are merely expressing their opinions about it. And though you may think these opinions wrong or "dangerous" even in the free-est society they'd be allowed and celebrated. And I'm not sure that pointing out that discussions on race are exceptionally delicate for whites is also racist, though it may be. Maybe it presupposes that inside the heart of every white person there's a hate-spitting racist trying to be heard, or maybe it presupposes that there's a tissue-skinned minority waiting to be offended at the slightest provocation, whether intentional or not. On any given day of the week, I believe neither, one or the other, or both. Also, I wonder what, specifically, you're referring to as "the anti-white kind [of racism that's] socially acceptable to you New York Times white apologists"?

Heath:

Were Imus' comments offensive? Sure. To me? No. To someone or a group of people? Apparently. You think there should be consequences, and I wonder what consequences you feel would be appropriate. To me, this falls under free speech, but, because he was speaking as an employee of the station, it's up to the station to determine if this will affect their profits negatively. If decidedly yes, then they should have the right to let him go. And if the voice of the people say they don't like what he says, then they have the right to not listen to him. Those are the consequences I find fair. The law has no place in this matter. Not even a little bit.

I totally agree that the law has no place in this. I hope I didn't give the impression in my post that I did. He has a right to free speech, and so do all of us who condemn it. And yes, it's true as you imply, that one solution would be for those who didn't like his comments to simply not tune in (which would likely effect his ratings not in the slightest as the people most enraged by his comment are not Imus listeners). But as Peggy alluded to, it's more than just that, it's a "branding" issue. Imus falls under the "brand" of NBC-MSNBC, and if he's been deemed a racist by leading and respected opinion makers in the country and that label has now stuck, then NBC cannot reasonably keep an outed racist under the NBC brand.

I think it's a mistake to look at this Imus imbroglio through the prism of this one comment. If it had been that and only that, his shot at holding onto his job would be much better. But it isn't. He's got a history. Journalist and politician guests are Imus's bread and butter. I think it's telling that not a single black journalist, of which there are many, have ever gone on his show. Even before he insulted PBS's Gwen Ifill by calling her "the cleaning lady", she knew enough not to go on his show, which may have been why he singled her out for the racial insult. The exception, (so I've read though I can't find the article at the moment), was Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune. He went on, told Imus to cut it out with all the racial stuff, and was never asked back. Yes, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson want him gone, but so does Barack Obama. Even Al Roker, hardly a reactionary firebrand, thinks Imus ought to go. I think the unspoken boycott by respected African-Americans of Imus's show is very telling, and gives the subtext to this outrage that, to some, seems overblown. I think a lot of people have been waiting a long time for Imus to slip up like this. It was bound to happen.

But racism, systemic and government supported racism, is alive and well in 2007. Today on Josh Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo.com, he lays out clearly what may be underlying the entire US Attorney scandal, namely suppressing the minority vote, specifically African-Americans. Click here for the full post. Therein he lists a few cases featuring voters making innocent mistakes and being prosecuted harshly by the federal government. The gist of his piece is this: some of the fired attorneys were supposedly fired for not pursuing so-called "voter fraud" cases aggressively enough. But, as Marshall says, the overwhelming evidence points to the fact that voter fraud cases are, across the board, trumped up and phony attempts to keep black people out of the voting booths, or to throw out their votes after they've been cast. It's been a Republican strategy for decades, but never moreso than it has been under Karl Rove. Remember Florida in 2000? They stole the election by throwing out huge chunks of the black vote. Hell, not long after I started this blog, I wrote about this great state of Georgia passing a law, sponsored and passed by Republicans, requiring all voters to have a $20 ID in order to cast a ballot. This would disproportionately effect poor minority voters, which was, of course, the idea. But to hear a Georgia Republican tell it, the Voter ID bill was designed to protect against the anti-democratic (and non-existent as it turns out) scourge of voter fraud. Like so much of what Republican's hold near and dear, it's bullshit.

And finally, speaking of Republican bullshit, they're trotting out a shiny red wheelbarrow full of it for our discriminating palettes today. You know those White House emails Congressional Democrats requested in regards to the US Attorney purge? The ones White House officials wrote on the Republican National Committee's email system so as to circumvent the Hatch Law requiring all White House emails be saved for posterity? The ones that no doubt featured tons of damaging evidence of deliberate, widespread Rovian malfeasance? Yeah, well, they lost them.

Another day in the reign of George W. Bush.

Imus

In other news, anyone have any thoughts on this whole Don Imus debacle?

For a brief refresher, Don Imus, nemesis of Howard Stern, cranky old skull-faced radio bastard in the 10-gallon hat, one of the first to be called a "shock jock", said on air Wednesday of last week that the Rutgers women's basketball team were "nappy-headed hos". An uproar ensued, and justifiably. Yesterday, Imus went on Al Sharpton's radio show, "Keeping it Real with Al Sharpton", to apologize and explain himself. While he was on that show, he referred to Al Sharpton and another guest as "you people". This may have been innocent, but may also have been that old semi-subtle racist expression that says more about how a particular person views people of another race than about the race that person is attempting to refer to.

I'm of two minds about this controversy. I do very much like the idea of a broadcaster having freedom to say what they want on the air, and I recognize that radio people have to talk extemporaneously, and for hours everyday, about whatever the topics of the day are. Race is a delicate subject, particularly for white people to discuss, and aspects of this controversy might lead one to believe that for people in the public eye, one poorly-phrased statement can change your life in a very negative, very public way. On the other hand, this is Don Imus. Imus is a dick. Even when he's not putting his foot in his mouth over racially offensive statements, he's trying to be funny by being an ass-hole. And this wasn't a poorly-phrased statement, this was calling the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos". There's not a good euphemism for that. It's just racist. And he's made racially insensitive comments in the past, like calling PBS political analyst Gwen Ifill a "cleaning lady" for example. Rush Limbaugh got fired from ESPN (or officially he resigned) for saying the media wanted to see Eagles QB Donovan McNabb do well because they wanted a black quarterback to succeed. Getting him off TV then was good and it sent a good message: racist statements are not acceptable in the mainstream of today's society.

Should Imus be fired for his comments? I don't know. The statements he made were clearly offensive and, in my humble layman's opinion, there should be consequences. If the women's basketball team, which today agreed to meet with Imus, decides to forgive Imus for what he said, maybe Imus's seemingly heartfelt apologies and the 2-week suspension NBC's already handed down might suffice. If they don't, then ultimately NBC will decide what they're willing to live with in the name of profit. I do like that Imus is getting called out for this; he's being forced to defend his statements. That doesn't always happen. Nationally-known Atlanta-based radio "personality" Neal Boortz called Cynthia McKinny a "welfare drag queen" and a "ghetto slut" shortly after her run-in with a Capitol policeman, and for his racist remarks he received not even a fraction of the condemnation Imus is getting. Though the difference here might be the targets of these racist comments: on one hand you've got the commendable Rutgers basketball players who'd recently lost the championship game, and on the other you've got Cynthia McKinny, whose missteps and impolitic behavior had made her a lot of enemies in her home state. Both Imus's and Boortz's statements are racist, clearly, but when men like Sharpton and Jackson are trying to fight their impossible war, namely to cleanse speech of racist content, they must recognize the need to pick their battles. If it's possible to be more in the wrong than Boortz was last year, then Imus has done it. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

In completely unrelated news, Jimmy Kimmel subbed for Larry King the other night. On his show he had Emily Gould, a editor from Gawker.com to defend a feature on their website called "Gawker Stalker" which allows people to call in to Gawker with celebrity sightings, at which time Gawker posts them after a short delay. Celebs hate this, in particular Jimmy Kimmel. Someone called to report that Kimmel looked "intoxicated" in public. Gawker ran with the piece without bothering to check first with Kimmel's publicist, and so now poor Jimmy's mad and decides to take it out on Ms. Gould on King's show. This is the clip. I never liked Jimmy Kimmel, and this clip only goes to reinforce my poor opinion of him. "I want you to think about your life," he tells her. He implies she's on her way to hell, all because she had the temerity to make Jimmy feel bad. How Bill O'Reilly-esque he is in this clip. How small. His continued success is astonishing to me.

And I know two posts in one day is unusual, so just in case you may have missed it, check out my "Grindhouse" post, located just below this one. And I'm out.