BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: April 2008
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Book Review: The Damnation Game
I'm doing a bit more fiction reading of late; trying to get back into the mood and mindset of that form after the many months of non-fiction and essays and articles and reviews and all that came with finishing my degree and comes with blogging, reading about news and politics, building computer game websites, etc. I know I can do fiction and non-fiction at the same time, I've done so many times in the past, but I've been away from fiction and creative writing for a while, and I need to kick start my muse a bit to get into that sort of thought process.
Writing where you can (and must) make stuff up, where your aim may not be clear and cogent prose, where you may want to be artistic, by license or not -- that's a shooting a different potted black kettle of another colored fish. Metaphorically speaking.
In addition to being out or practice at fiction, I've gone years without reading or thinking much about horror, and since I find a level of visceral frisson and intensity in that genre that's seldom found in mainstream fiction, or even in most fantasy, I'm going to get back into it by reading some classics in the genre. I'll probably review them as I go, since writing helps me think about an analyze the work, but not to the point that I'll lose the creative inspiration I'm reading it to acquire. Also, my reviews section is sadly lacking in coverage of the books and authors that have most influenced and pleased me. I've reviewed tons of crap I've read or watched over the past few years, but have never, or seldom, looped back to discourse on some of the more seminal works I consumed again and again during my formative years.
This first one isn't quite a classic, but it's a book I read several times during the late 80s and early 90s when I was a committed horror fiction fan, and today it's an interesting book to analyze in terms of what came before it, and what it led to. The author is Clive Barker, and the book is his first novel, The Damnation Game. I've mentioned Barker a few times previously, but never in much detail. I'll get to more of my thoughts on his work in this review and others to come, but first, the scores:
The Damnation Game, by Clive Barker, 1985. Plot: 6 Concept: 8 Writing Quality/Flow: 9/7 Characters: 9 Horror: 8 Humor: NA Fun Factor: 3 Page Turner: 5 Re-readability: 6 Overall: 7
These scores are my current opinion, with the full benefit of hindsight and deliberation. My overall score is in terms of the whole horror genre; not in terms of Clive Barker's novels, or else it would be more like a 4. I don't know what I would have given it in 1986 when I first read it, but it certainly would have been less than a 7. Back then, I found the plot slow and not very exciting, the characters interesting but not very involving, and the whole story far less visceral and exciting than the better stories from the Books of Blood. This novel also pales in comparison to the next half dozen novels Barker wrote, two of which are nearly direct descendants of this novel. I'll discuss those books, and how this book led to them, in a bit. But first...
I hesitate to even mention the plot, since it's not what concerns me about this book, nor where the lasting value lies, nor where the analysis should be targeted. But just to momentarily pretend like I'm a real book reviewer, here goes. I'd copy from Wikipedia, but the summary there hardly goes deeper than the blurb on the jacket, and the Amazon.com editorial review is nearly as short, and has some inaccuracies. So:
The book is set in modern day London (circa 1985, when it was written), and while there are four or five main characters, and several important supporting players, the central protagonist (perhaps unjustly) is Martin Strauss. He's in prison when the book opens, and has been for six years, though he's nearing the end of his term. He's 30 years old and wound up in prison after getting deeply into gambling debt and taking part in a failed and unsuccessful robbery to try and pay off those debts. Marty's drawn down deeply into himself in prison, no longer thinking about hope or freedom, but that shell is cracked by the intrusion of Bill Toy, the confidant and bodyguard for Joseph Whitehead, a business mogul. Whitehead is looking to hire a new bodyguard, and has Toy searching the prisons for a likely candidate, figuring a man who owes him his early release, and who will be sent back to prison if he proves unsatisfactory, will work harder and show more loyalty than mere money can buy.
Marty is chosen for the task, and spends a few pleasant months on Whitehead's private estate, getting back into shape and adjusting to his limited freedom. He only gradually comes to know Whitehead and his even more reclusive, heroin-addicted 20 y/o daughter, and also gradually begins to realize that Whitehead fears something more than physical harm, from any common human attackers.
He's got cause to, since as the reader learns through the multiple POV narration, Whitehead's old friend/enemy Mamoulian is hunting him, to repay past injustices. Whitehead and Mamoulian met in the anarchic months after WW2, when Europe was in chaos and Whitehead the thief and gambler sought out Mamoulian, the legendary, magical, and undefeatable card player, in the festering ruins of bombed out Prague. Mamoulian has powers, hypnotic and mind controlling, and can work magic a well, weaving overpowering telepathic illusions, and even raising and compelling the dead. He and Whitehead became friends and Whitehead used what he learned of Mamoulian's powers build a vast empire, an effort he largely completed after a violent break with Mamoulian, some twenty years before the novel's time.
The bulk of The Damnation Game details Whitehead's fear of his old friend, Mamoulian's efforts towards and plans for revenge, and Marty's struggle to protect his savior and Whitehead's physically frail but psychically-strong junkie daughter. There are a few twists and turns in the plot, but it's not a thriller or a straight out horror story. Barker doesn't write those, at least not very often. His novels and worlds are always far more layered and nuanced and subtle, and The Damnation Game is a good example of this, though in a very early, rough, unpolished way.
The novel really isn't about the plot; if it were I'd find no reason to reread it, or write about it. The take away value here comes from the characters and the themes and the level of intelligence and maturity conveyed by the writing. Barker's imagination is justly famed, largely in a pop culture, movie-friendly, "Pinhead the Cenobite" way, but I think his greatest strength is as a writer. His ability to work words and describe things blends perfectly with the maturity of his fictional worldview and the dynamic characters he crafts. This novel is far from his masterpiece, but it's a good start in the novel form.
Lineage
Looking retrospectively, there's a direct line between the themes, plot events, and especially the type of characters in this book, Weaveworld (1987), and Imajica (1991). Barker did not write those novels back to back, they are not set in the same "world," nor do they feature any of the same characters. Nevertheless, there's a clear progression through these books, with the same plot elements and character types, but growing larger, more complicated, and more inventive in each. I don't think Barker's done anything near the quality of Imajica since then, and I think that's the best novel I've ever read, in any genre.
Just going by dimensions, The Damnation Game is about 430 pages, Weaveworld is around 700, and Imajica is upwards of 1000, depending on the edition. It's commonly sold in two volumes these days, not something you often see for a single, stand-alone novel not featuring filthy hobbitses. The Damnation Game is a bit soggy too, in places. It could easily be cut down under 350 pages without losing anything essential, an editing option I would not advise for Weaveworld or Imajica, since it would do them grave harm.
So, Weaveworld featured much bigger ideas, bigger plots, more characters, more substance, and Imajica continued that progression, easily doubling the size of The Damnation Game, while vastly expanding upon it in scope and gravitas of subject. And in books, as in life, size does matter. What are these themes and concepts that were so expanded and improved through this non-trilogy? Familiar themes to those of you who have read a fair amount of Barker, and themes difficult to succinctly explain to those of you who have not (yet).
In these books and in most everything Barker has written, there's a sense of a magical, mystical, demon-infested world within, or beneath, our world. Most people have no inkling of it, but here amidst us are demons and humans possessed of rare magical powers. No one is ever a simple comic book character, though. Barker's characters are invariably possessed of strong personalities and drives, and usually devoted to some great goal. One reason Barker's never sold as well as King and others in the genre, despite being clearly the best writer of the bunch, is that he doesn't do easy, crowd-pleasing, black and white plots or characters. There aren't good guys or bad guys, or clear struggles where the readers is sure to root for one side. In most of Barker's books the good guys have some bad traits, but most interestingly (and influentially to me) are the bad guys, who are never just "bad." They're often evil, or destructive, but for perfectly valid reasons. And while they usually appear to be horrible demons when initially introduced, as the novels progress they are humanized, and often revealed to be flawed, vulnerable, or entirely justified in their actions.
Mamoulian certainly is in The Damnation Game, and so are his various minions. Perhaps the most memorable character in the book is Breer, the razor-eater. Breer is a corpulent, psychopathic pedophile, who swallows razors, engages in self-mutilation, and is fond of murdering young children, then posing them like living dolls in carefully-arranged scenarios. He also tends to lovingly butcher them, slicing the tender meat of their bodies into a paper-thin delicacy which he reverently offers to others like the precious gift it is. Perfectly horrible, of course, but Breer is actually a sympathetic character in the book. Filled with self-loathing, disgusted by what he does, desperate for a purpose or goal in life, and always just wanting to be loved. Whitehead's daughter earns his undying devotion upon their first meeting, when she doesn't recoil in horror at the sight of his grotesque, blood-splattered form. Ultimately, Breer becomes a sort of good guy, when he turns against Mamoulian after being betrayed and by the magician. Oh, and did I mention that Breer commits suicide shortly before Mamoulian returns for him at the start of the book, and spends the entire novel slowly rotting and being consumed by flies, while never quite realizing he's already dead? Nice touch there, eh?
As for Mamoulian, he first seems to be a monster, but as we get to know more about him, from his pathetic origin to his empty existence to his desire to simply lie down and die, he becomes one of the most interesting characters in the book. He's never quite sympathetic, but he's clearly a better man than Whitehead, and more honest too. Both work malign deeds and destroy the lives of others, but Mamoulian has the courtesy to do it one on one, face to face, in a very personal fashion. He only destroys what and who he must. Whitehead has less blood on his hands, but through his ruthless business ambitions he has ruined the lives of countless people, both personally and professionally. Mamoulian is the more honest man as well; he doesn't resort to trickery or deception to obtain his ends, at least not very often, unlike the scheming, manipulating, stoop-to-anything Whitehead.
Honestly, neither character is a tenth as interesting as the leads in Weaveworld, Imajica, or various other later works by Barker, but the basic character templates; the depth and dynamic nature of them, are repeated and reused through Barker's work. The only other author I've read (besides myself, on a thus far limited nature) who does this sort of work with characters is George R. R. Martin in his ongoing Song of Ice and Fire series. And that's one of the things I like best about Martin's work, that characters who initially seem like pure villains are eventually revealed to be very human and, (like everyone you meet in real life), the heroes of their own story. Sometimes even of the book's story. It's a clear mark of bad fiction (which is to say, most fiction) when the "bad guys" are simply that. Bad, evil, uncomplicated and one-dimensional. If the enemies in a book or film exist merely to serve as hurdles for the good guys on their victory lap, it's generally a sign of a lazy or uninspired author.
It's possible to have a compelling villain who is just bad, bad, bad, but far more often the most entertaining bad guys are multi-dimensional, even to the point of becoming anti-heroes. Hannibal Lecter, for instance. Even someone like Darth Vader, despite being a principle in the cartoonishly childish Star Wars saga, is eventually revealed to be layered and complicated, and that makes his actions, and the plot of Return of the Jedi far more interesting than it would have been if he'd simply remained a horrible murderous villain in black plastic. Barker clearly had the idea for multi-layered bad guys and complicated world mythologies in place early on, since they show up in lots of his early short stories. They are nascent in The Damnation Game, but fully emerge from their cocoon in his later works.
The good guys in Barker novels have more up their sleeves, too. Marty Strauss in The Damnation Game isn't a great example of that, since Barker hadn't really come into his inventive prime yet. Marty is just your usual everyman protagonist, swept up in a world of magic and mystery far beyond his ability to comprehend or battle against. The fact that he's only the main character by default, and that he brings very little to the tale, is one of the main reasons I don't score this book higher. The main character in Weaveworld starts out as an everyman, but soon gains a far more important role in things than merely a pawn in the buffeting winds of chaos, and the main character in Imajica is an unimportant painter making a living off of forgeries and a parade of beautiful women, who grows to hold almost god-like status as that fantastically complicated book unfolds.
Incidentally, the depth of Barker's characterization is clearly demonstrated in The Damnation Game by the fact that a good dozen disposable characters are given full 3D profiles, with strengths, weaknesses, ambiguities, and ambitions having nothing to do with those of the main storyline, even if they're only "on screen" for a few minutes. The first and most obvious example is the warden of the prison Marty's in when the book opens. He has two short scenes, but in them he's portrayed as a hard man who is rapidly falling apart after the untimely death of his wife. There's no real reason to give the warden a personality, or to have him be more than a man in a suit during Marty's interview with Whitehead's agent. But the fact that he's a memorable character, despite his irrelevance to the larger novel, adds to the realism and detail of the world. Numerous other such characters are found in The Damnation Game, from Whitehead's chauffeur, to Marty's cellmate, to a fruit merchant, to Marty's ex-wife's new lover, etc. All seem fully-formed and real, and could easily be the stars of their own stories; that much is clear even if they only appear on half a dozen pages.
For all the great things Barker does, and did even in the early effort that is The Damnation Game, his weaknesses are displayed as well. I've heard from other horror fans that Barker's work never really involves them. They enjoy his writing talent, and some elements of his work, but on the whole it doesn't engaging them. Malaya always said she found Barker's writing "too cold." Technically brilliant, but to her they were books to read almost as an intellectual exercise, rather than great stories to lose herself in.
That never occurred to me in my teens when I was first devouring his work and horror fiction in general, but reading it now I can see the point. I didn't quite feel that way about Barker's more recent novels, even ones like Galilee that I disliked, but I get enough enjoyment from the craftsmanship and writing quality and overall excellence that the fact that some of the books are entirely populated by unlikable, largely emotionless characters, engaged in struggles the outcome of which I am indifferent to, doesn't weigh too heavily on me. (This is a further point to George R. R. Martin's credit; that he can do the dynamic characters, make his villains interesting and compelling, de-villainize them as the reader learns more about them, and still keep the overall story churning along.)
In that light, The Damnation Game is a far better novel than it is a good read. I enjoyed reading it last week, but not in the same way I would have enjoyed a good early Stephen King story. I was pulled along through The Damnation Game since I was analyzing the style and form and approach Barker took, and making notes on how he structured the book. His skills as a novelist were profound, even in this early work, and the way he introduced characters, worked exposition into conversation and events, kept the story moving, relayed information to the reader through multiple POVs, occasional flashbacks, juggled multiple characters and storylines without abandoning any for so long they cooled in the reader's memory, etc, were all very well done.
If the book had a more interesting plot, had more sympathetic characters, more building conflict, was a page turner, bridged the personal struggles to larger societal themes (something Barker does very well in later works), etc, it would be a great novel. As it is it's a very well written book powered by a story that would have been unreadably dull and boring in the hands of a lesser writer. I remember Weaveworld being somewhat better, and Imajica being a masterpiece, and since I've got both books sitting out to work my way through in the weeks to come, I guess I'll find out soon enough.
I saw Street Kings the weekend it opened, but didn't get around to writing my review until two weeks later. Today I'm posting a review of a film I saw Sunday evening, but it's a movie that opened last week... thus rendering this my second review in two days that's being posted two weeks late. Not that anyone reads this site for my views/recommendations on the newest offerings at the local $7 popcorn emporium.
You might read this for my take on really bad movie trailers though, so I feel duty bound to mention a couple that we saw before the movie. That bafflingly unpleasantLakeview Heightstrailer was again featured, to a theater full of WTF silence. We also got the not-especially-growing-on-me Hellboy 2, and a couple of other forgettable efforts. The one I thought worth comment was a new Nicholas Cage film, with the LOL-able title, Bangkok Dangerous. I mean that literally; the trailer unspooled in mediocre fashion; Cage, looking Indiana Jones old, wearing a wet cat of a wig, plays a professional assassin sent to kill a popular leader in some Thailand-like country, where he discovers his conscience with the help of a scrumptious young Asian girl, and balks at his assignment. The trailer wasn't good or bad, the story looked recycled, Cage looked exhausted when the role seemed to require some of that Tom Cruise mania, but the best moment was near the end, when the title finally came up.
"Bangkok Dangerous!" shouted Mr. Voice, a declaration that was greeted with roars of laughter from at least half the patrons in the sparsely-populated theater. When the only notable thing about the trailer for your $60m movie, other than the fact that Nicholas Cage appears to have aged 20 years since National Treasure and taken a can of black paint and Tom Hanks' hair from The DaVinci Code, is the audible derision the painfully-bad title earns, it might be time to head back to that focus group and come up with something different. All publicity is not good publicity, nor are all reasons for potential customers to remember your film good ones.
As for the feature event, today's review victim is Forbidden Kingdom, a martial arts adventure starring Jet Li, Jackie Chan, and lots of disposable Chinese guys in matching suits of ineffective armor. Jet and Jackie are both supporting actors in the film, since the ostensible lead/protagonist is a side kick-esque (pun semi-intended) white teenager from Boston, who takes hold of an ancient war staff while running for his life, and finds himself tumbling through time and space, Wizard of Oz style, into ancient, mythological China. There he quickly finds that he is a figure of prophecy, destined to return the staff to the statue-ified Monkey King and end the reign of the cruel warlord.
It's not an awful premise for a film, there's plenty of martial arts action, the budget is sufficient to ensure quality production values, it's got martial arts legends Jackie Chan and Jet Li, a scowling bad guy, and even a couple of hot Chinese girl warriors. Despite all this, it basically sucks, and I'm not entirely sure why, though I'll try to get at that in the review.
It wasn't an awful film, and the bumbling Massachusetts Red Sox in King Mandrin's Court didn't ruin things, as I feared he would after I first saw the trailer for this film. My complaint then was about the white kid, since that first trailer had him making a lot of screeching Bruce Lee sound effects and clumsily knocking things over in his room, before the inevitable "down the rabbit hole" magic took him into the martial arts movie world. I envisioned him running around the countryside like some sort of Inspector Clouseau goes to China, bumbling from one wacky adventure to the next while Jackie Chan and Jet Li constantly saved him from enemy soldiers and himself.
I don't know if that was the original plan of the film, but my reaction to the first trailer was probably a common one, since the opening of the movie, before he gets sucked into mythology land, was as short and to the point as it could reasonably have been, and the scene of him knocking things over in his room is gone entirely. The kid isn't a wacky, comedic character either; he's basically playing his role like Ralph Macchio did in the Karate Kid; scared but defiant. It helped that Ralph actually looked like a teenager in those movies, unlike this guy, who looks like an undernourished grad student. He's actually twenty-one, and while his age isn't made clear in the film, it appears that he's supposed to be a high school student.
Age issues aside, the white kid was not the problem with the movie, much to my surprise. In fact, I'm not sure what the problem was. Nothing in the film was laugh out loud awful, or sigh in pain dreadful. The acting wasn't good, but it was serviceable. The martial arts weren't exciting or vital, but they weren't terrible. The plot was archetypal and somewhat video game-esque, but I've sat through worse. On the whole, nothing stood out like a sore thumb, but at the same time, nothing could be singled out for excellence either, and I think that's what really sunk it. Plenty of good, or at least enjoyable, movies have some bad parts, or even some awful parts, but they make it up with great, exciting sections that your brain remembers while ignoring the bad stuff. This one didn't. It's just a long film full of mediocrity, in writing, acting, fighting, scenery, plot, etc.
It's got elements of Jackie Chan style comedy, but only a few. It's got elements of the scrappy underdog training to take on the bad guy, but they're fleeting. It's got pretensions of grand, mythic, LotR-style saga, but they fall flat. And it's got some martial arts scenes that are realistic and interesting, and a few that are flying wuxia style magic, but most of them are a hodgepodge of actual fighting with wire-fu leaps and flips, and all seem relentlessly choreographed.
At this point in their careers, Jackie Chan and Jet Li can't do what they did when they were younger. Jackie can still move pretty well and he's a good comedic actor, but he doesn't have the amazing body and tumbling grace to turn simple fight scenes into masterpieces of body language. Jet Li can still be a hardass, but he doesn't have the speed and precision he once did. Propeller Li? They could both still be effective in martial arts scenes, but they need to modify how they do them.
Jackie's old style worked since he was so flexible and bouncy that he could hit people fifty times, get hit twenty times himself, and keep bouncing up for more. It was funny, and you rooted for him, and wanted the scene to go on and on. Now he's old and not so fast, and you wince when you see him get pounded and hope he wins before he breaks something. His scenes now need to be more madcap and choreographed and processed with camera angles, since he's not good enough anymore for the director to simply point the camera at him from a distance and marvel at his grace.
Jet Li can still pull off the kickass stuff pretty well; he was awesome at that in Unleashed, and that was only four years ago, but his character in this film didn't have that sort of animalistic rage, so he had to fight in a more non-lethal style, and it didn't suit him, since he looks tired after a minute or two of sparring. They should have had him use a more lethal, crushing style, where he floated back from attackers, fending off their ineffectual jabs, until he had an opening and killed with one punch.
Unfortunately for the styles these two would be best at these days, this movie was written with the combat inspired by a Saturday morning cartoon. Endless bad guys storm in, yelling and swinging their swords/spears/polearms, and Jackie and Jet beat them down with their bare hands and fists. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. There are endless bad guys, but they're anonymous and ineffectual, so the action scenes are video game like, but not satisfying since the movie is PG and therefore lacks blood, pain, emotion, and breaking of arms or legs. Instead there are hundreds of scenes of, "guy gets punched/kicked and falls down." If anyone is hurt by these hits, or killed, it's impossible to tell. They don’t seem to be dead, but they all vanish like bodies in an RTS, and after five minutes of battle in a royal court there's not one body to be seen on the floor, much less any dazed victims staggering off, or soldiers writhing in pain.
That would all be fine, if the whole movie had that non-serious, non-realistic tone. What makes it so jarring is that other scenes are full of deep gravity and sincere importance, all of it unearned. We don't care that much about anyone in the movie, or their quest to kill the warlord, or if the white kid gets back to Boston, etc. But at times it appears that we are supposed to, while at other times it's just a lighthearted romp. With lame fight scenes.
Let's be honest; no one is going to this movie expecting good acting, an involving story, interesting characters, etc. People are buying a ticket for good martial arts, and hoping the rest of the film won't be so bad that it ruins the fight sequences. The rest of the film didn't, but the fight sequences weren't very good of themselves, and most of them went on way too long. The movie felt like a rough draft for a much better film that would be 30 minutes shorter. That improved version would have to be an outright comedy, Jackie Chan style, or a more serious, darker, action movie. As it is the movie has a lighthearted vibe, but wants to be serious and epic at the same time, and as a result... it's neither.
Street Kings is a LAPD thriller starring Keanu Reeves as a morally-conflicted detective with as many violent tendencies as hero complexes. It's not one of the old style hero cop movies, not by any measure. Keanu's not working to solve a huge crime, or bring down a powerful drug dealer. He's not breaking in a new partner, or trying to do his job while a by-the-book captain rides his ass. He doesn't even have a bunch of wacky buddies at the station, or a wife who nags him about risking it all "For what? Those people don't care about you!"
The film is kind of a character study, where details gradually emerge from the minutia of day to day operations, rather than from major dramatic events. Who's character are we studying? It's not clear. Not Keanu's, or any of the other cops, since they're mostly one or two-dimensional types. Even the ones with complexity and layers are immediately shown to be layered and complex, so all along you know their surface appearance is not going to fully define them.
In my judgment, the character being examined is the character of society and law enforcement, and how cops have to act to do their jobs. The ends almost always justify the means in this film, and everyone is morally ambiguous and compromised. What kind of corruption is bad? How much is too much? What if corruption serves a good purpose; stopping criminals, saving kidnapped girls, providing assistance for cops when they're down on their luck?
All valid questions, but the film is much more interested in violence and action, and exploiting the violence and action for entertainment purposes than it is in seriously grappling with any of the big issues it brings up, then skirts around. It's very unclear, even at the end, who the good guys and bad guys are, and that's quite intentional. I didn't get so deeply involved in the film that I cared; it was more about entertainment than thought provocation, but it was more interesting than just another traditional, formulaic cop buddy thriller. Scores:
Street Kings, 2008 Script/Story: 6 Acting/Casting: 6 Action: 7 Eye Candy: 3 Fun Factor: 5 Replayability: 6 Overall: 6
I don't know if I liked this movie or not. I didn't dislike it, but it didn't really do much for me. It's got pretensions of grandiosity and of being thought provoking, but it doesn’t quite do it. It's not quite noir, and it's not a morality play. I wouldn't even say it deals in shades of gray, since the characters and events in the film aren't morally gray. They're usually black or white, often bleeding into each other from one moment to the next. On the whole the film is a rather dark gray, but I couldn't say what the movie's moral is, or if it's even has one. If it does, it's something like, "Corruption is an illusion, since cops have to do what they have to do to get their jobs done, until eventually there's some corruption so large and evil that it must be destroyed. And if countless laws must be broken in the process, the ends always justify the means."
To ground this theory in a bit of practicality, I'll give a quick plot summary, which is somewhat spoilery, but only of events in the first half hour of the film. I won't get into the bigger plot twists.
Keanu is the hero, or at least the protagonist. He's very cowboy and crazy, but his methods are functional. The movie opens with him faking a weapon sale to some Asian gangsters, simply to get them to steal his car. He uses his car's GPS to track them to their hideout, busts in solo and blows them all away without making any effort to identify himself as a cop or to take any prisoners, and then plants evidence to exculpate himself; firing shots from their guns, finding weapons and throwing them near the bodies, etc. But it's all good, since he knew they were drug dealers, and it turns out that they had kidnapped two girls and locked in a rape room.
It's soon revealed that this is Keanu's style. He essentially uses his police authority and resources as a piggy bank to carry out private raids of "justice," and gets away with it because he's effective and because his captain, played by Forest Whitaker, always has his back. There are many dramatic speeches throughout the film with Whitaker, other high ranking cops, and by Keanu in his own defense, all rhapsodizing about how he does what has to be done, and how he's the "tip of the spear," and how they might not like it, but they know they need him.
As events unfold in the film we learn that Keanu's former partner grew embittered by the corruption and that he is now talking to internal affairs. Keanu thinks the guy is diming him out, and when he goes to beat him up, he's interrupted by two gang bangers who execute the other cop and make their getaway. This would appear to solve Keanu's problems, but since the other guy was his estranged buddy, he's got a tie of honor and must hunt track the killers to get revenge. He is, of course, quick to use innumerable extralegal means to hunt them down, including torturing suspects, bribing informants, trading stolen drugs, etc.
Things are not as they appear with the two suspects though, and (of course) the corruption goes much higher than it initially appears. The way this information is presented is unusual, in that Keanu's character is utterly lacking in introspection. He just does what he does, and he's very bulldog and determined in it. By the time it begins to dawn on him that his friends might not be who he thinks they are, the audience has long since realized this.
Most films would pause the action at that point, to give the protagonist some time to think things over. Does he reflect on his own constant law breaking, and realize the people he's hunting are just like him? That they're working for their own greater good and that the sins they must commit are necessary evils?
No. Keanu doesn't seem to think at all, and the script doesn't require or even allow him to, since events always transpire to keep him moving forward without time or need for introspection. This keeps the movie, and to a large extent the audience, from doing so either. Not during the film, anyway. Afterwards, maybe. I found it an interesting approach by the film, since it actively avoids considering the moral dilemma that the viewer expects to be at the heart of the movie. The murderous, criminal behavior of almost every cop in the film isn't analyzed or evaluated at all. They just do what they do, and then something else happens and they're off to react to that.
There's morality in the film, but it's deeply tweaked and skewed. Keanu's character is a bad guy in almost any other cop movie. He's only the good guy in comparison to the other bad guys in this movie, and when the head bad guy is revealed, it's arguable if he's bad at all, for the same reason that Keanu's the hero; both get results, and are working for what they think is a greater good.
In retrospect, the movie lacks any kind of moral center or even a moral compass. It lacks those things by design, not by accident, and if there's a moral discussion to engage in about this film, it's got to be about that meta point. How could this movie have been made differently? What did the clashing styles and resumes of the writer and director grind together to create? Whose vision is ultimately presented by the movie? What is a viewer meant to take away from this presentation? Street Kings isn't quite intelligent enough to function as a Rorschach test for the viewer, but even that might be intentional; it's not a film with a message, and its un-message is a sort of message in of itself.
I can't recommend this movie on an intellectual level. I can recommend it on a stupid level; if you just want to see a cop movie with a bunch of action and entertaining violence and don't want to think, you could enjoy it for that purpose. Lots of bad guys get blown away real good. On the other hand, there will always be better choices than this one to satisfy your action film jones, so perhaps even that level of endorsement has to be leavened?
I blogged a couple of months ago when Wesley Snipes' tax evasion trial began, and noted the curious defense he was attempting, and might actually succeed at. Essentially a "not guilty by reason of insanity" defense, since a curiosity of US tax law requires prosecutors to prove a person evaded paying taxes with bad intent. If you can convince the jury you sincerely believed you didn't have to pay, you can avoid prison. You'll still owe the money, but you won't go to jail.
Apparently Snipes' acting in court was as good as his acting in films, since the jury didn't buy it, and he was sentenced to the maximum term; 36 months in federal prison. (Which means he'll be out in 12-16, on good behavior.)
The prosecutors and judge made it fairly obvious that they were making an example of him, and hoping to use him as an object lesson and a deterrent to other people who might hope to use the same wacky arguments against paying taxes. For good measure, they really threw the book at the guys who were promulgating those arguments to Snipes and others:
Co-defendant Eddie Ray Kahn, a longtime tax protester who coached clients of his American Rights Litigators on how to beat the tax system, was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Co-Defendant Douglas Rosile, whom prosecutors called a "defrocked certified public accountant," was sentenced to 4-1/2 years for his part in the scheme. Both were convicted of conspiracy and tax fraud.
Prosecutors said Kahn and Rosile were "incorrigible tax offenders" whose anti-tax schemes caused "enormous damage to the administration of our tax system." They said at least nine other Kahn customers had been convicted of criminal tax violations and two had been indicted.
Silly wabbits; all they had to do was find a way to incorporate their tax evasion into a massive corporate structure and do it under a Republican administration.
I don't imagine this is news to anyone who every considered the issue from a scientific perspective, rather than from wishful thinking of the "wouldn't that be cool?" type, but a major study has shown that no, of course there's no relation between your talents, traits, proclivities, and the time of the day/month/year you were born.
For several decades, researchers tracked more than 2,000 people - most of them born within minutes of each other. According to astrology, the subject should have had very similar traits.
The babies were originally recruited as part of a medical study begun in London in 1958 into how the circumstances of birth can affect future health. More than 2,000 babies born in early March that year were registered and their development monitored at regular intervals.
Researchers looked at more than 100 different characteristics, including occupation, anxiety levels, marital status, aggressiveness, sociability, IQ levels and ability in art, sport, mathematics and reading - all of which astrologers claim can be gauged from birth charts.
The scientists failed to find any evidence of similarities between the "time twins", however. They reported in the current issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies: "The test conditions could hardly have been more conducive to success... but the results are uniformly negative."
...Dr Dean said the results undermined the claims of astrologers, who typically work with birth data far less precise than that used in the study. "They sometimes argue that times of birth just a minute apart can make all the difference by altering what they call the 'house cusps'," he said. "But in their work, they are happy to take whatever time they can get from a client."
The findings caused alarm and anger in astrological circles yesterday. Roy Gillett, the president of the Astrological Association of Great Britain, said the study's findings should be treated "with extreme caution" and accused Dr Dean of seeking to "discredit astrology".
I don't think "seeking" is quite the right word there, Starmaster Gilbert.
This will have zero effect on people who put value on a horoscope, after all. Humans invent and utilize patterns and systems of organization to superimpose on our random, chaotic world. Religion is the biggest one, but things like astrology, political ideologies, racial and gender stereotypes, and others are all popular as well, and probably always will be. After all, if someone can believe that a case of alleged parthenogenesis = divinity in the flesh, which led to a human sacrifice that redeemed all the sins of the world, it's comparably much easier to believe that position of Saturn when you were born might have some effect on your personality or destiny.
In more reality-based news, it turns out that porn is good for men, providing they find a variety that turns them on, and take that visual excitement to its logical conclusion.
Masturbation 'cuts cancer risk'
Men could reduce their risk of developing prostate cancer through regular masturbation, researchers suggest. They say cancer-causing chemicals could build up in the prostate if men do not ejaculate regularly.
Australian researchers questioned over 1,000 men who had developed prostate cancer and 1,250 who had not about their sexual habits. They found those who had ejaculated the most between the ages of 20 and 50 were the least likely to develop the cancer. The protective effect was greatest while the men were in their 20s. Men who ejaculated more than five times a week were a third less likely to develop prostate cancer later in life.
...
Dr Giles said fewer ejaculations may mean the carcinogens build up. "It's a prostatic stagnation hypothesis. The more you flush the ducts out, the less there is to hang around and damage the cells that line them."
A similar connection has been found between breast cancer and breastfeeding, where lactating appeared to "flush out" carcinogens, reduce a woman's risk of the disease, New Scientist reports. Another theory put forward by the researchers is that ejaculation may induce prostate glands to mature fully, making them less susceptible to carcinogens.
Dr Chris Hiley, head of policy and research at the UK's Prostate Cancer Charity, told BBC News Online: "This is a plausible theory."
This news hit a week ago, and I read it, chuckled, imagined the conservative hysteria it would create, and forgot about it until a friend sent me the link yesterday. I'm not curious enough to go fishing in the fever swamps, but some of the religious, self-appointed moralists have to be apoplectic over this by now, right? These people fight to stop cancer vaccines because they'd rather women die of cervical cancer than possibly have more sex. They must be bursting blood vessels over medical evidence that frequent ejaculation, whether from auto, homo, or heterosexual activity, has health benefits.
On the other hand, that's about male sex and male needs and male health, so perhaps not. There's a reason far more health insurance plans pay for Viagra and Cialis than birth control pills, and it's not a reason that's going to be real comprehensible until you view society through the lens of the sexist men and self-loathing women who hold most of the political and cultural power in America.
Months ago I said that I thought Clinton could win big as president, since she'd get huge support from women who might have grown slightly tired of picking between rich white man A and rich white man B in every election during their adult lives. I was less sure Obama could win, even with his formidable speech-making skills, since so many white Americans remain fundamentally racist.
Now that Obama has an essentially insurmountable lead in delegates, (seemingly to everyone but the Clintons, who seem determined to fight on) the right wing attacks that were focused on the Clintons have shifted to him, and as a result we've had months of white panic and stupid debate questions about Obama being a stealth Muslim, things his pastor said, and tons of general nonsense in which anything any black person has ever done in America is viewed through a lens that requires Obama to repudiate it. And we're still months and months from the real start of the presidential election -- it's going to get much, much worse. I assure you, the open lies and slurs that made up the Swift Boating of John Kerry will be a fond memory by November.
For today's example, it's now incumbent upon Obama to repudiate rap music. Not just something one particular rapper said, or a rapper he's been personally associated with, but rap music in general.
Although the media has finally exposed Barack Obama’s ties to the unhinged pastor his support from rappers who propagate equally pernicious nonsense has gone almost entirely unnoticed.
...The rappers have good reason to praise Obama. He has at times been an apologist for their "music."
...Obama thus far has equivocated on rappers. He has criticized their language, but adamantly refused to denounce the whole sordid genre as the unique cultural problem that it is.
Because after all, rappers are often black people, and Obama is half-black. The fact that rap music happens to be the best selling, most influential style of music in the US, and on earth, over the last decade plus is apparently beside the point. It's scary to reactionary right ring white Republicans, so it's therefore Obama's fault. Look for this talking point to infiltrate the mainstream media in the weeks to come, when everything every black male more intimidating than Will Smith has ever said, in rhyme, will come to symbolize Obama's outlook on society.
Actually, it gets worse, since come to think of it, Obama's not just half-black, he's also half-white. Will his deceptions never end! So now Eminem, Limp Bizkit, and Vanilla Ice are his fault, too! Also, those creepy Aryan Olsen twins. I demand he prove that he's not secretly aligned with the white power movement to pass stealth laws that would force Black Americans back to African, White Americans to back to Europe, and leave this country to the Indians!
More (sarcasm) directed at this absurdity can be found here.
Elsewhere, Roy Edroso makes a point I was going to, but abandoned when I realized it would require me to spend several seconds thinking about country music.
Book Review: G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire
I saw this book referenced while doing some research on sexual issues last semester, and while I didn't have time to read it then, I kept it in mind and eventually tracked it down earlier this year. It's by a female anthropologist who danced in strip clubs to work her way through grad school, and then turned her dancing experience, and the interviews she did with some regular strip club customers, into her doctoral thesis. As the title indicates, the book is chiefly about the men who regularly patronize strip clubs. Why do they visit, what do they get out of it, what makes it worth the expense, what types of clubs do they frequent, what do they think of the dancers, and so on.
The book is not a page turner, and it's not written for a mass audience. It's pretty clearly a modified thesis, with tons of anthropological and sociological theory, hundreds of references, plentiful endnotes, and all discussion couched in very scientific, scholarly terms. Despite that, it's got a lot of useful info and I benefited from reading it. I would have received the same benefit from reading a good forty page synopsis of it, or simply discussing it with a knowledgeable reader. But since there was no such synopsis to read or reader to synapse, I had to plow through the 344 pages myself.
To the scores!
G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire, by Katherine Frank, 2002 Concept: 8 Presentation: 5 Writing Quality: 5 Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 8 Entertainment Value: 3 Rereadability: 4 Overall: 5.5
As you can see, my scores are very bifurcated. I loved the topic and the concept, but wasn't a big fan of the presentation. It's overlong and feels padded in a lot of places by redundant anecdotes and interview quotes, and most of the higher level sociological theory is shoehorned in and extraneous. If Frank had gotten a good editor with an eye to pop culture success, she could have whittled this book down to about 180 pages, pumped up the titillation factor, added more juicy anecdotes from behind the scenes, added more quotes from the Johns she interviewed, and turned this into a really fun book, without sacrificing any of the information. She'd have had to jettison almost all of the cultural anthropology and scholarly material though, and I think she would have refused. Despite landingsome interviews (that one gives a good overview of the book's findings), Frank didn't want to be a celebrity sexologist specializing in strippers. Her goal was a career in academia, not as a sex writer angling for a shot on Oprah (or at least Ellen), and since she's now teaching at a private university in Maine, and has recently published a second book on sexual cultural issues, she's probably pleased with her career path.
What I found most interesting about the book was the insight into the mind of the strip club customer. I've never been to a strip club, not even once, and I've never wanted to. I'm a bit more curious now, having read this book, since it overturned a few of my assumptions about such places, but if I went it would be curiosity/research, not prurient desire. (Which is not why the regulars she interviewed went either.) According to Frank's book, strip clubs aren't as seedy as I thought, and they're definitely not all clandestine whorehouses. They're more like video arcades where the machines are flesh and blood females, and you watch more than play. They're not all about sex, and the girls sell personality and conversation as much, or more, than T&A.
According to the book, the main priority for most of the strippers are table dances. The clubs have a main stage or two, and the girls are scheduled so they all have to take a turn dancing up front, but they make their real money doing private dances. Tables dances in the clubs Frank worked in, lap dances at some other clubs (local regulations vary enormously from city to city and within cities, in terms of how much nudity, contact, alcohol, etc, is allowed), and girls make better profits per song with individuals than they do up on stage in front of everyone; movie scenes of guys throwing wads of cash at the feature dancers notwithstanding.
At the time this book was written, the going rate in Atlanta was $10 a dance, with songs lasting about 3 minutes. Men who liked a dancer could pay her to dance, or simply sit and talk, for the same price as a dance. Most of the guys would buy the dancers a drink, or even take them to dinner in the upscale clubs with restaurants, and the dancers obviously did their best to encourage the guys, since they'd prefer to get paid for sitting and talking than stripping. Plus the girls got a cut of the customer's food/drinks tab.
It's not just the dancers who enjoy the private time, since that sort of personal interaction was what all the men interviewed in the book cited as their main interest in strip clubs. They all wanted to talk to the girls, to get to know them, and not just because they hope to fuck them, as I would have expected. Most of the men are married, and few of them hit on the girls or try to arrange hook ups, at least as far as Frank describes it.
Many of the men I interviewed who considered themselves to be regular customers of particular clubs referred to their relationships with the dancers they visited as primarily that of "friends." These men pointed out that they knew significant details about the dancers' lives: where the women lived, whether they had a boyfriend or partner, the names of their children, their history, and so on. These men also claimed that these relationships were symbiotic and pleasurable, highlighting their platonic aspects and stressing that they returned for the conversation, the friendship, and the atmosphere of the club rather than out of an prurient interest in the dancers. (Pg. 180.)
Frank asked good questions and got good quotes from the men, but she did very little analysis of what they didn't say, and provided no insight into whether or not they were being honest. I was skeptical about a lot of it. Just because they told the smart college student stripper that they thought of the girls as "friends" doesn't mean they weren't quite willing to screw her/them, if given the opportunity. Men constantly tell women they're happy just being friends... when friendship is the only option. Meanwhile, that "friend" guy is just hanging around, waiting for her to break up with her boyfriend, or need a shoulder to cry on, etc.
All the men Frank interviews talk about wanting to get to know the girls, and wanting to be friendly and social, but none of them seem to object when the dresses and bras and panties start to come off.
Even with that allowed for, keep in mind that all the interview subjects are regular customers, so they're not the whole demographic of strip club visitors. Plenty of guys come in occasionally just to look at the goods, bachelor parties aren't there for conversation and dinner, and men who weren't interested in talking to the strippers certainly weren't going to agree to meet Frank outside of the club for an interview. Frank gives no demographic info on how representative the men she interviewed were of the total club visitors, so there's no telling if 75% of 5% of the men there are "regulars" who like to chat with the girls.
The thing that the customers all realize, to some limited degree, is that the girls know what they want, and are working to give it to them. If a guy's paying you $10 a song to sit and chat, of course you're going to let him talk about whatever he wants to talk about, and you're going to tell him what he wants to hear. The girls are there to make money, and it's not easy work. They've got long shifts, they're on their feet in high heels the whole time (except when some guy pays them to sit and chat and drink), and out of their take they've got to pay a % to the club, tip the bouncers and bartenders and DJ, etc.
If they don't sell a lot of dances they might as well be waiting tables at some neighborhood pub. Of course they're going to do what they can to sell dances, or better yet, sell their personality. They're basically in-person phone sex operators, except that the conversations are seldom about sex. The goal is the same though; to keep the other person talking for as long as they can afford to talk. The stripper has a bit of an easier job, since she can show off the goods to keep the guy interested, and she's getting paid right then and there. (Slightly OT, but phone sex or psychics or counselors have a trickier task with that; and they have guidelines for how long to keep their calls. If they're too short there's not enough $ coming in, but if they go too long, people often refuse to pay when they get a $500 phone bill.)
Given that financial reality, the strippers become very skilled at reading the interest of the men, and will do whatever it takes to keep the conversation going. Tease and titillate if that seems desired, laugh at his jokes and feign interest in his stories, make fake revelations when the guy asks for greater intimacy, and show your tits or pussy if he's losing interest in words. Whatever it takes.
Unsurprisingly, it turns out that the basic truths of human psychology hold true in strip club customers too. Everyone wants to be special and everyone is the hero of their own story. Every guy wants to think his questions and comments and interests are unique and unlike the other guys'. Frank runs through a whole long list of things men say, or ask, or request, and makes clear that the best way to please virtually any guy in conversation is to act like you've never heard that particular comment before.
The tricky part is that that customers want intimacy, but they want authenticity as well. If the guy knows the girl is just telling him what he wants to hear, the illusion is shattered. So the trick is to be flattering and interested and make him feel special, without overdoing it. Since the customers aren't so naive as to forget that they're paying by the minute, the clever stripper plays it cool. This can require honesty, or lies. Frank says that she usually danced under her real name, going by Kate in most clubs (if the name wasn't already taken by another girl), and that she often had to make up a fake name when a guy asked to hear her real name, since they never believed she was using her real name as a stage name. She also wore her wedding ring while working, and was honest about her profession when she told guys she was a grad student researching strip club customers. Some guys believed these revelations, and other guys thought they were just trappings of her trade, and that she was playing on fantasies for hot librarians, or married women, etc. Hence the appearance of authenticity was more important than the actuality.
Another good way to get men interested was to play innocent. Strippers with years of experience would sometimes wear unprofessional clothing they couldn't easily remove, or act like they were frightened to take off their bras or panties, or freeze up during the music. This usually brought them a line of eager customers, since the men were eager to see someone new and fresh and unsure of herself, instead of the polished product the other women presented. Lots of the interview subjects talked about how they liked to go to low end clubs to talk to the poorer, less attractive strippers and hear their hard luck stories. The men felt special if they could help a woman who (appeared to) need it.
Often the illusions are mutual; the men tell stories about their lives that match those the dancers tell, or both sides collaborate on a tale; talking about the Hawaiian vacations they'll go on (together) or the trips to Europe or whatever. When the customer is married and could never get away and wouldn't dare if he could, and the dancer has no inclination to go with him anyway. And both parties realize this, on some level, but the fun is in the verbal dance.
The book didn't draw any major conclusions, and it wasn't very reader friendly, but there was some interesting info in it, and I liked it since it fell into my area of research/interest/expertise. I doubt many other laypeople would care enough to wade through the academic presentation, though, so I'm not really recommending it.
A 39-year-old man who had been cited 32 times for driving without a seat belt (and who finally rigged a fake belt in his car to create the illusion that he was belted in) was killed in a low-impact car crash that would not have been fatal to a belted driver (Okata, New Zealand; coroner's inquest, February). [Fairfax News (Stuff.co.nz), 2-23-08]
News of the Weird cited a police report last May that an unidentified man in Guelph, Ontario, had committed at least three incidents of approaching women and asking to be kicked in the groin. After seven such incidents, Jarrett Loft, 28, pleaded guilty in March 2008 to one count and was sentenced to 60 days in jail. Loft offered no explanation for his behavior, other than that he was "curious." One victim, saying that she feared what Loft might do if she refused, repeatedly kicked him between the legs, after which he thanked her and rode off on his bicycle. [Guelph Mercury, 3-29-08]
Mr. Seat Belt Darwin Award aside, what's up with the second guy? It's not an unheard of fetish, at least not to News of the Weird readers, but jail time for that? Talk about adding insult to injury. How can it be illegal to ask someone to kick you in the nuts? Some kind of public nuisance or disturbing the peace law there, I guess.
Seriously though, someone point this man to the classified ads. How hard would it be for him to find women to volunteer for that? Just run a Craig's List ad and you'll have no shortage of feet looking for your groin. "Angry after your boyfriend cheated on you? Dumped you? Want revenge for being assaulted? Have I got an offer for you..."
Amusing story about a Houston TV station that did some actual reporting, busting the head of a local degree mill in the act of trying to trade sex for a high school diploma.
The woman getting in Jordan's passenger seat is a parent who's been trying to get her 18 year daughter enrolled in Jordan's school.
"She hadn't passed the TAKS test and she hasn't got all her credits, that's the reason we are going to that school," the mother told us.
A fee to the school and some course work can get students a diploma without passing the required state test at Parkway Christian School, where the Web site boasts, "a program based on Christian character, morals, values and integrity."
...
Jordan: "For the uh, enrollment fee and stuff like that, maybe you and I can do something, you think?"
Mother: "Yeah, what, I mean what, what, you gonna wipe out all the fees?"
Jordan: "All the enrollment fees."
Mother: "All the enrollment fees?"
Jordan: "Three hundred dollars."
Mother: "So you gonna wipe everything if me and you get together?"
Jordan: "The enrollment fee, yeah."
Mother: "Ok."
Jordan: "If you and I get together."
Mother: "What you mean? I mean, what?
Jordan: "Excuse me and I don't mean to be so blunt but I am talking about f------ you."
Mother: "You talking about what?"
Jordan: "F------ you."
...
Jordan: "For the $300 I would expect maybe we could get together several times, you think?"
Mother: "Several times, whatcha mean several times?"
Jordan: "Well I don't know, you might like whatcha getting."
I think the helicopter parents are getting out of hand. It used to be they'd just yell at teachers for not giving little Bobby or Suzie an A, or swoop in to do their little dear's laundry or solve their other problems. I can see helping your kid with their homework or giving them moral support, but honestly, if there's sex required, I think the kid should have to take care of that themselves.
I also enjoyed the awkwardness of the guy's segue from innuendo to honestly saying what he wanted. That's always a tricky moment in a M/F relationship; one partner (usually the man) knows what he wants and wants to be sure the woman knows too, but how to slip it into the conversation? You don't want to be too crude or blunt, but you don't want to just hint at things and never get to the point. I don't think Principal Jordan's technique here is exactly one to emulate, but he's not the only man to stumble over this kind of interpersonal subtlety.
Obama and Clinton held a debate (video or transcript) a few days ago, and there's been more or less universal condemnation of the frivolous, gossipy nature of the questions ever since. I've read dozens of bloggers and media critics who were disgusted by it, but I'm only going to link to a couple. Glennzilla did his usual sober, calm, and devastating deconstruction of the media follies, and then today for laughs, there's this ahistorical parody on Obsidian Wings, depicting the 1858 Lincoln vs. Douglas debate as moderated by Gibson and Stephanopoulos.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you love America this much (extending fingers), this much (extending hands slightly), or thiiiiiis much (extending hands broadly)?
LINCOLN: I think we covered this…
GIBSON: If I may interrupt…
LINCOLN: Please.
GIBSON: I noticed, Mr. Lincoln, that your American flag pin was upside down…
LINCOLN: Yes, the wind caught it. Now, as I was saying...
GIBSON: We get questions about this all the time over at Powerline and on Hannity’s talk show. Mr. Douglas has said this is a major vulnerability for you in the fall. So I’ll ask again – do you love America?
LINCOLN: (scowling with a forced smile). Yes.
GIBSON: If your love for America were ice cream, what flavor would it be?
I don't usually read comments on blog posts, but some of the readers got nicely into the spirit of things and added value of teh funny kind:
Are you bitter about American politics this much (extending fingers), this much (extending hands slightly), or thiiiiiis much (extending hands broadly)?
If your bitterness about American politics were a leafy green vegetable, which one would it be? Brussel sprouts? Spinach?
I like to think of my love for america as a giant beaver, gnawing on the tree of liberty to damn up the river of freedom.
My bitterness would be a fruit: to wit, Chinese bitter melon, which is nearly bitter enough to make you contemplate suicide when you eat it.
I haven't watched TV in many months, but one of the TVs at the gym is usually on CNN when I'm doing the elliptical machine at night, and from what I see, the constant criticism of the pettiness and self-inflicted irrelevance of the mainstream news seems to be entirely accurate. I didn't see any post debate coverage, but last week all they showed non-stop was pontificating about the preacher at Obama's church who made some controversial remarks several years ago. A couple of weeks before that every single minute of CNN for a solid week was about hookers. The one the NY Governor allegedly hired in particular, what hookers are like in general, interviews with self-proclaimed pimps, etc. Some weeks before that Larry King and their regular news coverage was all about a UFO that apparently buzz bombed some hick town in Texas.
The real news channels have been watering down their coverage for years, and now they're hemorrhaging viewers while Colbert and John Stewart swell in ratings, so they think a further retreat from actual news is the solution. Hence we get endless inconsequential stories about celebrity-style foolishness. Gotcha comments, personality based bullshit, and reporting that grows ever shallower with each news cycle. This puddle-deep reporting is exactly the sort of media coverage that gave us 2 terms of George Bush -- if the candidates are never forced to answer real questions or show real solutions, but can skim through with smiles and glad handling and a few sound bites, you get an idiot who looks good on camera but has no real ability to govern.
Now we've got McCain skimming through unencumbered by media scrutiny; if anything he's even more beloved of the media than Dubya was. McCain is clearly a more capable man than the current president, and McCain is occasionally (though largely symbolically) willing to go against the default grain of his party on social issues, but he's "four more years" in every way when it comes to foreign policy. Naturally, the media coverage of this is nonexistent. Why shouldn't it be? After all, Clinton almost teared up at one point, and Obama doesn't bowl very well, so clearly those stories must lead the evening news for the foreseeable future.
I've been drinking on occasion over the past year+ since I split with Malaya, or since she split with me, to be more accurate, and since I'm slightly lubricated at the moment, it seems like a good idea to blog about it. And since all ideas hatched while drunk are good ones, you're in for a treat.
Actually, I'm not drunk. I can tell fairly easily, since I've gotten into the semi-habit of sending the IG emails when I drink, and by now I can accurately calibrate my blood alcohol content by my writing, or at least by my typing, since when I'm buzzed I stop caring enough to fix typos, to capitalize properly, to worry about sentence structure, etc. I don't know how I type when I'm really drunk since I don't type then; I stumble around and annoy people, or have non-orgasmic sex, or (and then) lie down and fall asleep.
Well, I have to add a caveat to that one too. I've only been really drunk 3 or 4x in my life, and on those occasions I was hardly able to remain upright, much less type. The drunkest I've been in the past year was when I had a couple of shots in short order, and that was enough to send me reeling into bed, a strategic location from which I engaged in semi-coherent conversation with Malaya (there was no drunk dialing; she called me) and several less-coherent day dreams involving the IG, nudity, and exotic produce. I bring this up only to point out that I was quite wrecked, while still far below the legal limit, at least when calculating (2 drinks) x (my body weight). I'm a lightweight since I don't didn't used to do it often enough to build up any resistance. I still lack that, but I'm a bit less featherweight than I was 18 months ago, when a single bottle of Heineken, with food, was enough to make me slightly loopy.
Anyway, my point was that when I'm buzzed, my typing goes to hell. I know I'm making typos, and even if I didn't, Thunderbird helpfully underlines the words in red, a visual tip hard to mistake even with the assistance of Absolut. I just do not care enough to backspace and fix them. I've noticed a similar thing in physical behavior, since in that condition I get very rough with things. I'll kick a chair turn it around or a door to open it, and I have to restrain myself from just dropping dishes into the sink, or throwing down glasses, etc. It's not that I want to break things, I just get impatient and careless and it seems like too much trouble to exercise the motor skills and caution required to not break them. Fortunately, I'm almost always home alone when I'm in this state, so I don't find out how I'd behave in public or while interacting with others. Especially other drunks, who I tend to hate even when sober. I'd probably find out just how well all these martial arts I've been studying work, and then I'd find out what it's like to spend the night in jail on a drunk and disorderly and/or assault charge, and while that might provide some nice blog material, assuming I could type with broken knuckles, it wouldn't do a lot of good for me in other respects.
Amusingly, the IG enjoys my drunken emails. She says I'm more honest in them, which I want to dispute. Not that I don't believe her report, but I don't think I'm more honest since I'm honest in all of my emails to her. I'm not sure what adjectives would fit best, but I think something along the lines of "unrestrained" or "unguarded" or "pathetically-sentimental and slobberingly-horny" would sum it up fairly well. Flux's id runneth free when unleashed by fermented beverages.
Another trait of my drunken emails, and perhaps of my drunken mind in general, is that I go very non sequitur. I jump from subject to subject fairly quickly, without trying to tie the whole body of the email/essay together. And to demonstrate that point... Why do people get drunk on beer? How do people get drunk on beer? I've come to enjoy the taste of the stuff, more or less, but it's goddamned expensive, and it's high in calories, and it's so inefficient. You can get a huge bottle of good liquor at CostCo for like, $20. I've got a 1.75liter bottle of Absolut in my pantry right now to prove that point. One shot of that is way more incapacitating than a beer, and it doesn't have 170 calories or take ten minutes to drink or cause constant bathroom breaks. I get bored sitting around drinking beverages, and I get bored drinking the same beverage. I enjoy Dr. Pepper, beer, OJ, sparkling cider, and various other liquids, but a glass or two of each, in a given day, is more than enough. The only liquid I drink more of than that is water, which I down by the gallon, even on the rare day when I don't engage in 90+ minutes of fairly vigorous physical exertion. And since water doesn't have any taste and is calorie neutral, it hardly counts.
Besides, if you're going to drink to get drunk, man-up and fucking drink. Don't nibble around the issue, like one of those bottle blonde tanorexics who works at Hooters but throws a lingering look of longing at the strip club when she'd driving to work in the stupid orange jogging shorts she's wearing over nude pantyhose. Hit a shot, or a mixed drink at least, and be done with it.
Another thing I don't understand is how writers drink and produce good stuff. It's a cliche, writers drinking, and it's common in other fields; how many songs did Eminem and others gifted with wider noses and more melanin, write about needing pot and pills and booze to free up their muses? I can see that working for rap, since there's no requirement that one use proper sentence structure, or spelling, or thematic consistency. In fact, most of those features would be positive drawbacks to the genre. For writing though, I don't know how Hemingway or Hitchens or others turn out good work while buzzed. I can imagine doing some brain storming, since as I admitted several paragraphs ago, my liquored mind is freed to jump from topic to topic. This is to the detriment of coherent emails or blog posts, and ruinous to fiction writing, but it could potentially be useful for coming up with novel (both meanings) ideas.
Problems with that. 1) Ideas initiated while drunk seem brilliant at the time, and seldom make any sense when reviewed afterwards, in the cold light of day. 2) Even if there are better, or at least different, the other side effects of being buzzed make it unlikely that those ideas will be recorded in any sort of coherent fashion. 3) Even if you do come up with some decent ideas and they still make sense the next day, the writing used to present them will be so dodgy that you'll take longer to fix it up than you would have to write it sober in the first place. 4) You might get too used to it, or come to need it, and then you're a fucking alcoholic and doomed.
Furthermore, and mostly related to point 2 -- even if the drunken mind is capable of slowing down long enough to include some context and explanation, that will only help the sober mind understand where the idea came from; it won't make the idea any more useful or viable to non-drunks, which is, I suppose, point 1. It's like those wacky memories of dream fragments you have when you wake up. They often seem brilliant and visionary right then, while you're still half asleep. If you remember then later in the day, they're hallucinogenic bullshit and you wonder WTF you were thinking while dreaming, and especially what you were thinking when you woke up and imagined that bit about the pirates having sex in the museum on the giant oragami crane was a meaningful metaphor about the state of political discourse in eighteenth century Great Britain.
In conclusion, I'd like to add that a double shot of vodka stirred into a Peach Pleasure Jamba Juice is one of the great rewards you can give yourself for surviving a hot, pre-summer day, and that if such gustatory pleasures are the price you pay for not having a girlfriend or advancing your career one iota in the last 6 months, it was probably worth it anyway.
Also, I'd like to point out that my drunken writing almost always grows maudlin and self pitying at some point, and I'm happy to say that I avoided that malady in this installment... at least until right near the end.
I saw Street Kings with Malaya last weekend, and we enjoyed it. Not a great movie, but a serviceable cop thriller, in the morally ambiguous, post-modern mode of films like Training Day. I'll post a review later this week, but what I wanted to mention today is a trailer we saw before the film. It wasn't a good trailer -- in fact, I'll go out of my way to avoid seeing the movie it promoted -- but it did put some ideas into my head, and they're still resonating three days later. So I'm hoping that by blogging about it I can stop thinking about it, and start never thinking about it again.
The trailer is for the ignominious and forgettably-named Lakeview Terrace. The title was so boring that I hadn't paid it a second of attention before seeing this trailer, and despite the trailer making an impression on me, the name didn't. I had to go to The Movie Box's trailer page and search on "Samuel" to find the film. The trailer is here, though I don't recommend you watch it. Personally, I wish I could unsee it, but as we all know... that's not quite possible.
It's not a gross or ugly trailer, it's the film it's promoting that struck me so poorly. The scenario and plot, which the trailer completely gives away, is simple. A married couple moves into a new home in a nice suburban neighborhood, and they immediately begin feuding with their insane next door neighbor, played by Samuel L. Jackson. The twist, if you can call it that, is that he's a cop. So they're in their dream home, but they've got a neighbor who's got blinding search lights on the side of his house, who breaks into their garage and slashes the tires on their car, who uses a chainsaw to cut down the trees they plant for privacy, etc. All while they're helpless to fight back since he's a cop and his cop buddies will back him up.
It doesn't sound that bad from the text description, but if you watch the trailer, try to figure who they're hoping will buy a ticket to this. Sam Jackson's got fans, but as Snakes on a Plane demonstrated, not enough to "open" a major motion picture. I like him as an actor, but he has to be in a certain type of Bad Ass Motherfucker role, not a pot-bellied suburban dad with anger issues. Since none of the other actors are notable, that leaves the plot, and that's what really sinks the film. It's sort of a thriller, but is anyone really going to drop their $9 to watch neighbors feud in a non-comedy? Jackson's not a murdering maniac, he's just an asshole, and the inequality in power between the feuding parties makes it seem very unfun to me.
These sort of "affluent couple terrorized in their own home" films can work, but they need to include sex and weird characters, and go over the top with life or death stakes; Fatal Attraction, Hand that Rocks the Cradle, etc. If Jackson were seducing the neighbor's wife, or befriending their kid in order to murder him and make it look like an accident, or hiding some horrible secret, it might be enticing. But no, he's just an average guy who is a nightmare neighbor, but since he's a cop he can get away with everything.
I don't think suburban husbands feuding over their property line is quite the draw the film's financiers seem to imagine it will be, and especially not when the couple seems to be the ones the audience is led to identify with, and they're basically helpless and have their lives ruined by a corrupt cop. Plus Jackson's character has a wife and kids in the film, so you can't even root for the aggrieved couple to blow him away or just get him fired, since then you're putting his family and children out on the street because their dad's a nut.
The movie's basically the preamble to a case on Judge Judy. It's a dramatized documentary about a petty struggle that everyone loses. Everyone including the audience, who are left depressed as they drive home and pray their next new neighbor isn't a psycho cop who could destroy their home lives with impunity. And wish they could unsee the last 2 hours of their lives.
While looking for a link to place in the previous post, I saw this graphic and remembered that I'd wanted to post about it weeks ago, but hadn't gotten around to doing so.
I saw it posted here, and the original is here. Reading the comments on the Washington Monthly page, I found some insightful analysis into the trends this map illustrates.
First, some liabilities.
The map isn't calibrated by %, but by whole numbers, which means that only large populations can qualify, and that slight differences in very large populations will be magnified. NYC, for instance.
The age range is too wide; 20-64, which extends far beyond what most people think of as "singles," and runs into the problem of widowers (who are predominantly female, especially under the age of 65).
There's no racial breakdown, and since prisoners (disproportionately male) were evidently not counted, and most prisons aren't located in metropolitan areas anyway, this skews the numbers female in areas with large black populations, given the high rate of incarceration among young black males.
It's unclear how illegal immigrants are counted. If they are, that would probably account for many of the blue dots in California, with its heavy population of largely male migrant workers.
Sexual orientation isn't adjusted for, which really skews things in areas like the one I'm in. It's a cliche how much women in San Francisco bemoan the "Every guy is gay or taken." issue. (Guess I should move to the city?)
All that said, there's still plenty to explain and learn from. Many commenters pointed out that tech heavy industries are clustered in California, especially around LA and Silicon Valley, and those are heavily male. Others said that many industries in NYC skew female; fashion, publishing, media, etc. It's also likely that some of the blue dots would be surrounded by dart boards of tiny pink dots, thanks to young men moving to work in cities in greater numbers than do the women.
I'll buy most of those explanations, but as is usually the case in American society, they're largely devoted to explaining things from a male POV. What about the big pink dots, though? Why are there so many more women in almost every major city in the South, Midwest, and Northeast? It's not enough to say that men are moving to follow jobs in higher numbers than women, unless you're going to say that all those guys from New York and Alabama and Georgia moved to Phoenix and Dallas. Either the men all moved west of the Mississippi, or all the women from California moved to the East, and why this might be the case was not addressed by any explanations I've yet seen. This isn't 1849; men from New York aren't selling all they own to book passage on a clipper sailing around Cape Horn on the way to San Francisco and their fortune in the gold mines.
Candidate Barack Obama made a remark at a fund raiser last week in San Francisco that's become somewhat controversial, thanks to the rebroadcasting, amplifying, and condemning it's received from his various political and racial enemies on the right and in Hilary Clinton's campaign offices. Here's the remark:
You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them....And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
When I first read that last week I thought it was fairly insightful. I knew it would be cited by Obama's political enemies as elitist and insulting and untrue and anything else they could smear on it, since 1) they're his enemies, and 2) since any honest discourse about race or class in America is strongly condemned by the powers that be, especially those on the right side of the political aisle. Much of the conservative voting bloc in the US is motivated precisely by what Obama pointed his finger at in these remarks, and the politicians and commenters who remain in power thanks to the proletariat's inchoate anger at Hollywood liberals, or gun control, or immigrants, or the ACLU, etc. If those people are pointed, or led, to the actual economic and political sources of their troubles, in a What's the Matter with Kansas fashion, they might rethink their knee-jerk reactions to cultural provocations, and that might stop them from automatically, and self-defeatingly, voting Republican. So, much as was the case with the controversy whipped up after Obama's brilliant speech on race, the aim of the whippers is to manufacture outrage and perpetuate stereotypes, precisely because those are what keep people from reading or listening to the words and possibly rethinking some of their inbred assumptions.
That was my initial reaction to Obama's words and the extremely predictable reaction to them. I'm slightly rethinking this today, since as Kevin Drum points out, Obama's comments are rather crude and arguably inaccurate generalizations of larger and more complex issues.
...what really strikes me as odd about Obama's statement is that, on its merits, it's largely untrue, isn't it? Economic distress probably is responsible for growing anti-trade sentiment (though the Midwest has never exactly been a bastion of free trade support), and maybe for a bit of the increase in anti-immigrant sentiment too... But does anyone really think that stagnant wages and globalization are responsible for rural gun culture? Or the rise of the Christian right? Or an increase in bigotry? ...Gun culture, for example, has been around forever. It's just that it was largely unnoticed until liberals started trying to take guns away in the 60s and 70s. The rise of the Christian right has lots of causes, but it's part of a long American religious tradition that has very little to do with the ups and downs of the economy. And bigotry hasn't increased in the past 25 years, so that part doesn't even make sense on its own terms.
I think he's right on most of the particulars, but is ignoring the larger issue. It doesn't matter if exact, demographically-provable economic charts show that the Midwest is victimized by globalization and immigration; it matters if the white rural voter thinks that's the case, and fostering that belief, along with the attendant conservative cultural values, is what keeps the Republican party viable in national elections, despite the fact that their actual economic policies are of benefit almost exclusively to the rich. Obama might not have been exactly correct on the details, but the overall theme of his remarks was a perfect strike against the demagoguery of his opponents. Even aside from that, it was a remark made to his supporters at a fundraiser in a very liberal city, and was exactly the sort of faux-insightful political analysis those type of people like to hear. (As this San Francisco-area inhabitant is proving with this blog post?)
Besides, it's not as if politicians don't focus their remarks to appeal to the audience listening, especially when that audience is paying to attend a fund raiser. Parsing out every word of a speech made to a highly supportive, partisan audience is absurd, since obviously any politician is going to give such people more or less what they want to hear.
Suddenly, it's hot. And I'm reminded of why I so prefer the winter, spring, and fall. Well, winter and spring, anyway. It's been unseasonably mild here in the North Bay and the whole Bay Area for months; I recall it raining steadily all through Feb/March/April/May and into June last year, my first (and I thought then, my last) in San Rafael. This year I've hardly seen a cloud since Valentine's Day (literally, not figuratively), but it's been quite temperate. I don't mind the sun when it's 62, but over 70 I start getting unhappy, and above 80 my mood deteriorates appreciably.
Predictably, I've felt peevish and antisocial yesterday and today, although the heat did at least motivate one benefit. It drove me to get my first Jamba Juice of the year. Peach Pleasure, sub rasp for banana, w/ energy boost, kplzthx. I'm also experiencing another one of my "hot weather only" desires. Tuna salad. I haven't had a Jamba since last fall, but I think about them from time to time, since I love fruit smoothies. I haven't had tuna salad since last fall, but the thought of making/eating some hasn't entered my mind even once. Until just now, as I looked in the fridge and tried to think of something I might be able to stand eating when it's still hot/bright outside, and unbidden, the idea of tuna salad on Ritz crackers leaped into my thoughts.
I'm now trying to think what else I like to eat only when it's hot out, and wishing I could somehow sleep (in a cold room) until Monday, since the forecast says hot all weekend, before a return to the 60s that we average this time of year. The countdown to November and cold weather begins... now.
It's not the funniest South Park ever, or even in the top 10, but it might have the funniest 5 minute stretch. I definitely laughed as hard as I have in my life for a few minutes of this one, anyway. You can watch the whole episode on the official South Park site, and the can't miss section starts at 12:00, when the boys head off to collect their profits for the highly-popular video they made of Butters singing and dancing. To find it funny you'll have to be familiar with most of the absurd YouTube celebrities of recent years, but given that you're reading this site, I figure the odds of that are pretty good.
The main plot of the episode is that Canada goes on strike... for more money. Sadly, I didn't realize it was satire of the recent Hollywood Writer's Strike until about halfway through. In my defense, I haven't watched TV since October, and haven't regularly watched any scripted TV shows since 2006, when I used to semi-regularly sit through CSI since Malaya enjoyed it. I'm sure there are Americans who are/were less affected by the writers strike than I was, but most of them probably live in caves.
Great article from The Guardian's film critic about the worst movie ever, what makes a movie bad, and the pleasures of reviewing awful films. Here's a quote that gives you a taste of his writing and thinking:
Several years ago, I read that a movie about a blind dental technician and a paraplegic athlete who enter a white-water rafting competition was playing at a cinema near me. I immediately bought a ticket for Good Luck, enthralled at the idea of seeing what figured to be one of the worst movies ever made. To be honest, that is the reason I became a critic in the first place; criticism seemed to be a way to channel my unwholesome fascination with train wrecks and fires into a socially acceptable framework. The truth is, every time I go to the pictures, I get goose bumps all over, anticipating that this, after all these years, could be the worst movie ever made.
Sadly, it never is. Yes, Good Luck was bad. It was an inane premise, poorly executed, and the results were not pretty. But it was not so bad that I spent the rest of my life thinking about it. I didn't even spend the rest of the afternoon thinking about it. What's more, because there was no one else in the cinema at the time, and because I have never met anyone else who has seen the film, its imbecilic charms were not something I could share with others.
I'm not going to spoil his pick for the top spot, but here's a bit of the lofty requirements he sets forth, ones that a film must meet in order to compete for the title:
To qualify as one of the worst films of all time, several strict requirements must be met. For starters, a truly awful movie must have started out with some expectation of not being awful... Two, an authentically bad movie has to be famous; it can't simply be an obscure student film about a boy who eats live rodents to impress dead girls. Three, the film cannot be a deliberate attempt to make the worst movie ever, as this is cheating. Four, the film must feature real movie stars, not jocks, bozos, has-beens or fleetingly famous media fabrications like Hilton. Five, the film must generate a negative buzz long before it reaches cinemas; like the Black Plague or the Mongol invasions, it must be an impending disaster of which there has been abundant advance warning; it cannot simply appear out of nowhere. And it must, upon release, answer the question: could it possibly be as bad as everyone says it is?
...Six, to qualify as one of the worst movies ever made, a motion picture must induce a sense of dread in those who have seen it, a fear that they may one day be forced to watch the film again - and again - and again.
If you're like me and you enjoy reading bad reviews more than good ones, this is an article you will surely enjoy.
