BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: December 2008
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Twitter
I created a Twitter account last week and have been posting to it fairly often. Since that's likely to continue over the next week+, while I'm off in San Diego visiting relatives, doing Xmasy stuff, snowboarding at Big Bear mountain, etc. You can check that page for updates or subscribe to my feed, which I think means you get my tweets sent right to your cell phone, like any other txt msg.
Why? I'm not quite sure. I've heard of Twitter forever, but never really bothered with it. I like words, and long blog posts make me happier than 140 character blats, at least when I'm reading them on the internet, rather than from people I know in RL. However, since I send a lot of text messages, mostly to the IG, but also Malaya, other RL friends, and my parents, I figured I might as well set up Twitter and have a way to put selected texts online. I've been CCing various texts to twitter since I signed up; mostly (so far) about the new cat and how she and Jinx are getting (or not) along, but there's other utterly mundane stuff as well; after Xmas sales, car maintenance, random jokes and comments, and other even less interesting stuff. Why you must be just about breaking your mouse in your hurry to click through, by now.
Don't expect much more than that; the posts have a 140 character limit, and while they can be entered through a web browser, when I'm on my computer with time/interest in blogging, I'm more likely to write something like this. So most of mine have gone up via text message from my cell, and most of those are sent when I've got a minute or two to kill while in line at the store, while walking through a mall, or sometimes even at a traffic light. (I text pretty fast.)
If you're wondering what good Twitter is on a larger scale, I don't really know. I just signed up and I don't subscribe to anyone else's feed. I think the end game is when you and multiple online friends are using it at once, and are all subscribing to each other's feeds. Then any message you post to twitter is automatically forwarded to all of your subscribers, and you guys can have a sort of group chat via Twitter. 140 characters at a time.
Fortuitously, the former CalPundit posted a question about Twitter on his new blog a week ago, and the comments thread is quite informative. Lots of Twitter fans posting what it's best for and why they use it. I recommend looking it over if you're new to the concept and curious, or just want to learn more.
My main complaint about Twitter so far? Horrible tech support. Very unclear set up menus, awful FAQ, very poor info on the installation and instruction pages. Took me a day of trial and error to get my phone set up to send messages, and I've found much better info about other technical issues on various blogs and tech sites, rather than by using the official Twitter help pages.
This Twitter Fan Blog has tons of how to info, though I've only glanced over it thus far. This blog post has detailed instructions on how to embed your Twitter feed into your own blog, which is what I want to do here. I've not done it yet, obviously, and don't know when I will. The instructions are fairly complicated, and I'm not sure where I'd put it on this site anyway. My layout now doesn't really allow for a tall rectangle of twitter posts to show anywhere, other than at the top or way down at the bottom of the nav bar, and that's kinda too narrow for them to display properly. So it'll probably just be something I want to add when I do the long overdue site remodeling. A remodel that'll likely grow much longer overdue before it ever occurs. I will at least put a link into the nav bar for it, and tidy up some of the other outdated stuff over there. For example... HGL? Really? Sheesh.
I was fascinated by this blog entry on the NYT site. I didn't even know they had a drinking blog, but there it is, and it made me thirsty. The author talks about his own awakening to proper mixed drinks, after years of swilling beverages no more advanced than beer or whiskey, and then talks about which cities in the US are better for getting proper mixed drinks at. It's never made clear what defines a good drink, what's a bad one, and what all those other bartenders are mixing that makes their output so unlike the classic, refined drinks the author lauds. But I find myself wanting to know more.
My New York drinking years revolved largely around beer, with the occasional scotch thrown in for good measure. It wasn’t until I’d been in Seattle for five years that I finally learned how to mix a proper Manhattan, and the effect was that of a whiskey-fueled satori: the skies cleared, the universe slipped into balance, and for the first time in my life I understood the concept of bibulous beauty. Overblown? Perhaps — but liquor has a tendency to do that.
After that, the pursuit of cocktail wisdom began to consume virtually all my free time. I’d spend hours prowling eBay in pursuit of bartending manuals from the cocktail’s heyday, and began allocating a part of each paycheck to building my liquor collection from a meager couple of bottles of vodka and crème de cassis into a mighty mixological machine replete with dozens of kinds of rum, bottles of obscure liqueurs and every type of bitters I could lay my hands on.
As is often the case online, the real laughs come in the comments. In this case we've got moralistic teetotalers insisting that no one should ever write anything glorifying liquor consumption... on a blog about drinking. Others compare the post to an article extolling the benefits of really good quality heroin, except that heroin only kills a few hundred people a year, while alcohol kills thousands. Subtle!
I've not had that many mixed drinks in my life, but I had three (well, a one of my own and then half of two others I shared with the lady) on a recent date, and they were definitely the best thing about the evening. I've also been concocting my own drinks for the past couple of years, and though I claim no expertise at it, I do occasionally make one that's really good. My favorite is tanqueray with OJ and some peach/mango juice. On the rocks. The thing is that I don't measure it, and tend to vary the Tanqueray depending on how close it is to my bedtime (more = sleepy sooner), so only about every 3rd or 4th time does it turn out just right, when the tang of the gin is mixed just right with the OJ and slightly sweetened by the peach/mango. The rest of the time it tastes like a mediocre screwdriver with some peach juice. I am very curious about trying other mixed drinks, though. It's just a pity they cost so much and that you have to go to a bar to get them. Sure, you can mix them yourself, but as the author bemoans, you fuck it up most of the time. And you can only appreciate the first one or two. I think a wise man would do it like wine tasting; sip enough to enjoy, savor it, and then spit it out so you can have more, rather than getting blotto so everything tastes the same.
And the drive home on the wrong side of the freeway, straight into a school bus, just like a heroin addict. At least that's what the NYT commenters told me.
I don't mean to make a habit of tearing into bad movie trailers, but here we go again. This one I don't actually hate, unlike the last two, but I do find it equally perplexing. The trailer(s) are for The Spirit, and I'm only remarking in it now since it's opening soon, and the reviews are eye catchingly scathing.
You can see links to the teaser and both versions of the theatrical trailer here. The teaser is vague and puzzling, while the theatrical trailer adds to it, but only just. It's still got zero hint of a plot; just lots of trying-to-be-artistic profile shots of the actors, with very quick snippets of semi-action scenes. Everything is obviously done with special effects and green screen, and it's all very clear and crisp and cold; there are no textures or depth or rounded edges or organic shapes; just hard, straight angles and primary colors; almost all black and white with a few accents of red. I got tired of the monochromatic nature of it in a 2.5-minute trailer; I can't imagine that much visual monotony for 102.
As for the critics, they are not happy. The film's average score is in the low 30s on MetaCritic, and it has a 17% approval level on Rotten Tomatoes. Even Ebert gave it 1 star, which is about 2.5 below the average he's posted since they removed his ability to dislike things along with some rather tenacious cancer.
The funny thing about the critical consensus is that it meshes almost perfectly with my reaction to the trailer. I saw the teaser months ago, online and in the theaters, and both times I had the same *shrug* of a reaction. It's not even clear that the trailer is for a movie. It looks like an artsy student film, or a demo reel for some kind of iMac movie editing program. All of the images are silhouettes, showing a young man in a black suit and a skinny red tie, wearing children's sneakers, running (none-too-gracefully) over archetypal big city rooftops, while a voiceover whispers non-sequiturs about how he loves the city and she's his breath, or something like that. Frankly, it's baffling.
Intentionally baffling, I guess, since the promotional goal seemed to be to create suspense and wonder. That's a reasonable approach; the movie had a huge hill to climb since it was based on an obscure comic strip from the 1940s. Virtually no one but hard core comic book geeks (or maybe their grandfathers) had any idea who or what "The Spirit" was, so the movie's ad dept. had two options. 1) to explain the movie and introduce the characters and convince viewers the old ideas were still cool (a dubious proposition). 2) be vague and intriguing and reveal nothing, while hoping to entice with mystery. That's also a dubious proposition, but I think it had a better chance of succeeding than the first choice. We'll see how well it worked when the box office returns come in this weekend.
It definitely didn't work on me, since I saw the teaser and was more annoyed than enticed. It seemed like it was trying too hard to be cool, and like it was an empty pose, one born of desperation rather than strength. I (think) I can tell when a movie's promotion is cool and vague as a marketing stance, rather than because it's a crappy movie without any content. And The Spirit immediately triggered my BS detector on that front. It looked like warmed over, less-filling Sin City, which I thought was a pretty crappy movie in the first place, since it substituted (allegedly) cool imagery for actual story or character far too often. That Sin City was said to be very true to the comic it was inspired by made perfect sense to me; I've never been able to get into comics as an adult (though I enjoyed them as a pre-teen) since they seem to put 90% of their emphasis on imagery and 10% on story. And I'm not enough of a fan of gritty illustrations of muscular guys in torn tights and capes for that to hold my interest.
I did get a good laugh from one of the reviews, at least. It's one of the lower scores, (D-) and it appeared on Oregon Live. The review wasn't funny, but then I got to the comments and couldn't help but chuckle. Here's the first one:
Posted by sergal on 12/24/08 at 11:33PM
I'd like inform you that Scarlett Johansson (actress)actually is a clone from original person,who has nothing with acting career.Clone was created illegally using stolen biomaterial.Original Scarlett Galabekian last name is nice, CHRISTIAN young lady.I'll tell more,those clones(it's not only 1)made in GERMANY-world leader manufacturer of humans clones,it's in Ludwigshafen am Rhein,Rhineland-Palatinate,Mr.Helmut Kohl home town.You can't even imaging the scale of the cloning activity.But warning,H.Kohl staff strictly controlling their clones spreading around the world,they're NAZI type disciplined and mind controlled,be careful get close with clones you will be controlled too.Original family didn't authorize any activity with stolen biomaterials,no matter what form it was created in,it's all need to be back to original family control in Cedars-Sinai MedicalCenter in LA.Controlling clones is US military operation.Original Scarlett never was engaged,by the way
The weirdness of that was perfectly enhanced by the second comment:
Posted by shawnlevy on 12/25/08 at 2:22PM
Best. Comment. Ever.
I think we can all agree on that, even if opinions on The Spirit differ.
Here's a link and a quote from a 3 year old book review. Not entirely relevant, but it made me laugh and it's always funny to read a scathing literary take down. At least it is when I am or agree with the taker, and am not the takee. The quote is by the prescient Matt Taibbi, taking the piss out of Tom "suck on this" Friedman's unjustly overpraised The World is Flat.
I think it was about five months ago that Press editor Alex Zaitchik whispered to me in the office hallway that Thomas Friedman had a new book coming out. All he knew about it was the title, but that was enough; he approached me with the chilled demeanor of a British spy who has just discovered that Hitler was secretly buying up the world's manganese supply. Who knew what it meant, but one had to assume the worst.
"It's going to be called The Flattening," he whispered. Then he stood there, eyebrows raised, staring at me, waiting to see the effect of the news when it landed.
Manganese? I assume that's just a comically fictional example, but I almost want to look that up to see if it was true. Hitler did a lot of crazy things, after all. And yes, I anticipate using "who knew what it meant, but one had to assume the worst." as a general purpose phrase for the immediate future.
Malaya sent me this and I eloeled so I'm putting it up here. It's a fan-made trailer for a non-existent Thundercats movie, comprised of dozens of clips and bits of dialogue from various action movies over which the movie maker has painted Thundercats faces and added Thundercats sound clips. Lion-O is Brad Pitt, mostly from Troy, but I thought the Vin Diesel/Chronicles of Riddick/Pantera was the best (looking). And, as Malaya said, Snarf finally provides a reason for Garfield the Movie to exist.
Needless to say, this looks far better than 90% of the comic book movies that have actually been made, thus far. It's certainly more realistic than that slow motion, man-on-a-wire, physics are optional, leaping in a perfectly straight line towards the helicopter scene from the end of the Wolverine trailer.
The Boston Globe is hosting a one, two, three page, 120-photo selection of the year's best news images. Most of them show wars, natural disasters, corpses (human and other) and generally depressing (but realistic) imagery, but they are all very high quality images and well worth a browse. I thought page one was the most interesting (and varied) and I liked the very first shot best. Here's a detail of it; the full images are a cinematic 990x624; too wide to post here without breaking my page layout for anyone running lower than 1280 resolution (and viewing their browser window full width).
Lightning bolts appear above and around the Chaiten volcano as seen from Chana, some 30 kms (19 miles) north of the volcano, as it began its first eruption in thousands of years, in southern Chile May 2, 2008. Cases of electrical storms breaking out directly above erupting volcanoes are well documented, although scientists differ on what causes them. Picture taken May 2, 2008. (REUTERS/Carlos Gutierrez)
This one is also quite awesome; I want to Photoshop out those rectangular windows in the back and pretend it's 1200BCE and my ancestors are about to sail down to Scotland, split and spit some monks, and pillage a cathedral or two of their ill-gotten gain.
The Guizer Jarl is silhouetted as members of his Viking Squad walk around a long boat with burning torches during the annual Up Helly Aa Festival, in Lerwick, Shetland Islands on January 29th, 2008. Up Helly Aa celebrates the influence of the Scandinavian vikings in the Shetland Islands. (Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty Images)
Perhaps better than the photos are the comments. Maybe 50% of them are by dueling anti-Palestinian or anti-Israeli fanatics, who spend their time shrieking about 1) the unprovoked massacres by the fascistic Israeli army, or 2) the world media's culpability in creating sympathy for the evil Palestinian terrorists by reporting (and photographing) the damage when Israel blows up a hospital or an apartment complex and kills Palestinian children. Leave those people have their endless and pointless Crips vs. Bloods online feud; the real fun comes from reading the (almost) ALL CAPS mental patient rants.
#539. THESE PICTURES SHOWS US THAT WE ARE NOT FROM THIS PLANET, WE ARE NOT CONSTRUCTED TO LIVE HERE WITHOUT DAMADGE THE PLANET.OUR LIVE IS 100 YEAR PROJECT EXPERIMENT OF "THE THING"( i don't know how to name it but its no God) WE ARE HERE TO GAIN EXPIRIENCE FOR THE MACHINES WHO CONTROL THE WHOLE SYSTEM, OUR MINDS ARE THAT WHAT WE ARE, OUR BODIES ARE THE MACHINES WICH WE CONTROL WITH THE MIND, WHY ANIMALS NOT DO THIS FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS LIVING HERE IN THE EARTH WE THEY LIVE IN THE NATURE WHY?!?! WHY WE NOT UNDERSTAND ANIMALS, BECOUSE WE ARE NOT FROM HERE
Posted by Alexander December 21, 08 12:57 PM
Well okay then. It would be easy to say this guy is just a crazy troll, but he seems fairly sincere in his lunacy. I like his honesty; he only says what he knows and admits when there are facts yet to be compiled. Notice how he doesn't claim to know everything about this grand conspiracy theory? He knows we were put here by something, but he can't name them/it. And he knows about the Matrix-esque machines that are controlling our minds, but he doesn't yet have all the details. Just some suspicious tidbits, like how we we've only been here for a few hundred years. Or did he mean just one hundred? That might be a bit limited in scope; after all, there are plenty of living humans who are more than 100 years old, and they certainly remember living on earth in their earliest days. Or perhaps all the old people are in on the conspiracy, colluding with our robot overlords? I never trusted you, Grandma!
There's no hint given of why or how this scheme has been perpetrated, but those are minor details when you're working single-handedly to uncover a time cube style conspiracy and a deception as large as this. And then along came these images, and reinforced the illusion. Or do they dispute it? I'm not quite sure. We can only hope Alex has time to clarify things in a follow up comment before the Lithium kicks in.
I follow about a dozen comic strips online. Most of them are web-only strips, but I read a few newspaper comics online, since I never see an actual printed newspaper other than in the recycling box at the gym. Well, I also see the paper when visiting my dad in San Diego, since he's old school (as well as old) and subscribes to the print edition.
I have to admit that came in quite handy this week, since he knew I was looking to get a cheap laptop, and when he saw huge sales going on at Staples, he alerted me. Check out the back page specials; I got the HP on page 3; was $850, now $500. Dual core processor, 3gig RAM, 250g HD, newest wifi, etc. It's an upgrade on my current desktop at everything but screen size and OS (Vista! :( and was a great deal.
Ironically, dad not only notified me about it, he went to pick it up at a Staples in San Diego, since when I went to find it locally, I discovered that that model was not available at any Bay Area Staples. All of the laptops on big sale are on sale since they're discontinued models, and the stores are limited to stock on hand. Two stores in the SF area had just their display model left, but since that one has, by definition, been pawed at by the sort of greasy-fingered reprobates who shop at Staples, I wanted a new one. So I played around with the few remaining display models at my local Staples for a bit, and then called Dad, who called a Staples in San Diego, and found that at the 19th closest store to him, down in National City, they still had one new one in stock. He reserved it and went out into the cold and rainy night to pick it up. Merry Xmas to me!
Ordinarily a new laptop in San Diego wouldn't do me much good, since I'm like, 500 miles north. But since I'm going to be down there next week, it's not a problem.
So yeah, the printed newspaper can be useful, if only for the ads. Which I probably wouldn't bother looking through if actually had a newspaper, since I don't look through the ones I get in the mail. I'm less sure of the utility of the comics in the paper. It's nice since there are a whole bunch of them every day, but on the downside... there are a whole bunch of them every day. When I last checked, the San Diego paper had about 50 or 60 comics. They covered two full pages on weekdays. I never actually ranked them all, but if I did I think Garfield would be in the top 10. And since that strip hasn't been worth reading since oh... 1987? I think you get my point. Most of the rest aren't even good (or bad) enough to be worth reading on the Comics Curmudgeon.
Another benefit of reading them online (other than not having to read all the shitty ones) is that you can go through several weeks at a time. This is irrelevant for daily gag type strips, but it's nice for strips that carry on storylines. One I usually remember to check every 3 or 4 weeks is Doonesbury, and while going through the past few weeks of it yesterday, I was reminded of a topic upon which I'd meant to blog... a few weeks ago.
Guns n' Roses new album, Chinese Democracy. One of the ongoing storylines in Doonsebury features BD, a long-time character who lost a leg in Iraq and has suffered with a lot of post-combat psychological issues. Part of what got him through it was helping out a metal-obsessed private from his unit who took severe injuries from shrapnel in a separate incident in Iraq. The kid got head injuries and lost an eye, and he's been struggling with aphasia ever since. However, as related in a recent week of strips, he's hugely excited about the new Guns and Roses album. Ignoring the fact that his description of the music (shredding, hard, face-melting, etc) bears no connection to the actual album... how is the actual album? First, what is the actual album?
Fourteen years (or whatever) in the making, Chinese Democracy it finally appeared last month, and was most noteworthy for earning everyone in the US a free Dr. Pepper (if you were quick/persistent enough to sign up for it on their Blizzcon-ticket-rush-like website during the 24 hours they allowed). I wasn't anticipating it.
I was a huge GnR fan back in the day, and I still occasionally populate my play list with the best songs from Appetite and Illusion. But the current GnR has nothing to do with the original other than Axl's screechy vocals, nothing any of the other ex-GnR members had done since then was better than okay, and none of the various "new" GnR singles or leaks had caught my ear. As far as I knew, Axl's in-name-only vanity project Chinese Democracy was going to be more of the in sub-NIN quality electronic/industrial stuff that he'd pushed to incorporate into their work back in the glory days.
The first single off of the final version of Chinese Democracy was released a few weeks earlier than the album, but when it failed to grab my ears I returned GnR to the low priority shelf of my memory where they'd been since 2002, when I blogged about them a few times thanks to 1) the daily blogging schedule I kept then, and 2) the fact that GnR was trying to tour and kept canceling shows for increasingly comical reasons (all related to Axl's habitual fuckup-ery, a trait that destroyed the band in the first place).
There they might have stayed, until media coverage of the Dr. Pepper promotional debacle reminded me that the album was actually out. And that, like all things musical, I could surely find a link to download it from one or another of the various and unsavory forums I occasionally frequent where such things are exchanged. So I did (find a link), and so I did (download it) and after forgetting to unzip the file and extract the songs for a few days, I eventually got back to it, added them all to my WinAmp playlist... and put off listening to it for a few more days, since I wanted the time to be right. I had no real expectations, but I wanted to listen when I could listen, instead of the music just playing in the background while I blogged or worked on the D3 site or surfed. The right occasional finally dawned; one day while I had to do a bunch of housework that didn't involve creating enough noise (vacuuming) to drown out the music.
That was my first mistake. I got the first song cued up, turned up the volume, and listened while I was rearranging furniture, sweeping the kitchen, scooping the cat box, repotting some plants, etc. It was fortunate that such activities had me AFK, or AF Mouse at least, since I would not have been able to listen to a single song in its entirety. They weren't awful, they were just boring, and if I had been near the computer that listening session would have lasted about 5 minutes, since there's no way any song would have gotten more than 30 seconds. As it was I was in the other room, or on the back patio with my hands covered in potting soil, and so I soldiered through most of the tracks, only detouring to my desk on a couple of occasions, driven by a song that was egregiously lame.
I tried again the next day, listening while playing an old school gaming session of Diablo (I, not II), but even that wouldn't do. I had to alt+tab out several times to skip songs that were so bad I was almost unable to spam Chain Lightning, and after that second "listen" I deleted all of the songs from my playlist, and haven't had any desire to go back. I didn't hate it, since that would have required me to have some interest going in. I was mostly curious, wondering if there was any way it wouldn't suck, and I found out fairly quickly. I didn't even care enough to hate blog about it.
I'm not going to offer a review, since as I've ranted in the past (damn, 6.5 years ago?), music reviews are useless. Well, general purpose ones are useless. The only useful ones compare like to like, and rate within a genre. There's no way to say if an album by Lil Wayne is better or worse than an album by Green Day, since they are entirely different types of music, appealing to different people, or at least satisfying different needs in the same person. However, since in this case I'm comparing GnR to GnR (well, sort of) I guess it's possible to do so somewhat fruitfully.
The new album doesn't sound like GnR. I'd have no idea it was the same band, if not for the distinctive vocals. Well, I suppose it's not the same band; no one now playing an instrument was playing one in the glory days. That's not necessarily a bad thing; Slash is famous and he wrote some great riffs, but it's not as if 5000 random guys webcaming themselves in their dorm rooms on You Tube can't play the opening to Sweet Child 'o Mine as well as the original top hatted snake lover. There are plenty of competent musicians out there; what makes the difference for rock (and other types of music) is if they can write good music. And Slash contributed a lot of the sound of GnR. Much of the rest came from Izzy, and he's also long gone. That leaves Axl, who wrote some good lyrics and collaborated on most of their classic compositions, but was always his own worst enemy in terms of giving in to excess and wanting to change the band into something it wasn't meant to be. That tendency, and his egomaniac asshole personality, is what broke the band up in the first place. I don't think it's what ruined Chinese Democracy, though it's clearly what made it take 14 years to record.
So no, the album isn't any good and none of the songs are memorable. But I don't think that's due to the quality of the musicians. It's due to the songs just not being very good. Plenty of songs off of Illusion, and even a couple on Appetite, were clunkers, and those are two (well, three, if you count the double album) of the best hard rock albums ever recorded. I will single out Axl for some criticism, since his vocals are just absurd on this new album. Way, way, way too screechy. To the point of distraction. That crazy scream that opens Welcome to the Jungle is one of the more memorable bits of vocalizing in all of rock and roll, but in the glory days Axl used the scream and screeches for emphasis and impact. His usual singing voice was more often raspy, and he was almost doing spoken word quite a bit of the time, with many of the lyrics rap-like in the pace of delivery and tone of voice. On Chinese Democracy he sounds (and looks) inflated, and is almost a falsetto in a number of songs. That tendency, unameliorated by the uncatchy nature of the tracks, is what defeated my efforts to enjoy, or tolerate, the album.
In a month or two I'll hear some other news about GnR and that will cause me to remember that I have the new album, and by then I'll have forgotten most of what and why I didn't enjoy it, and I'll throw it back onto my play list... and will almost certainly remove it as or more quickly than I did the first time, when I was determined to give the songs a fair chance. It's a bit tragic, really, but at least we've had plenty of time to adjust to the fact that GnR is no more. It's not like they put out this album in 1995, when we'd all have been hoping for a return to greatness.
It's a shame though, since old bands who were great in the 80s don't have to suck. Case in point, Metallica. I really should talk about Death Magnetic in its own post, but I'm not going to say much. Just that as most of the critics and fans have said, it's an awesome album. Maybe the best Metallica album ever; definitely the best since 1988's Justice for All, which is my personal favorite. Mixing quality issues aside.
The Black Album's songs were too simplified and generic and only a couple stuck with me, Load and Reload were a mess, and while St. Anger tried to return to their long-form, crunching-yet-melodic hardness, it was so poorly produced I can hardly listen to it. I literally get a headache from the flat, empty-can sounding drums and the vocals are harsh to the point of grating. I have Some Kind of Monster on my gym playlist of Metallica songs, and it's the only song off that album I can take, though even it's only really good for the first two minutes. (The YouTube quality doesn't help the flat, hollow, breaking-rocks-in-an-aircraft-hanger sound of all the percussion on that album, but it's something to link to.)
I don't love every song on Death Magnetic, and it took me a few listens to get into, but I've been really enjoying it for weeks. I have all the tracks but the slower instrumental on my gym playlist, and they rock for that. Cyanide was my first favorite song from the album, I can cardio (or play a destructive video game) like a madman to Broken, Beat and Scarred, and the way James sings howls the album title in My Apocalypse has been popping into my head at random for weeks. (It's at 1:24 and again at on that linked version. As is always the case, sound quality via YouTube is shit; so don't judge the album by the tiny, tinny, clanking, YouTube version.)
I don't know the last time I recommended an album, but I'm recommending this one. To, sticking with my own "cross-genre music reviews suck" guideline, anyone who likes metal, old Metallica, or hard rock.
Incidentally, I do not prefer the "Shorter" version that got in the news when a Swedish reviewer, who must have been astonishingly, blissfully ignorant of copyright laws and Metallica's past history with online file sharing, discussed the fan-made, shorter version, recommended it over the actual album, and told readers just how to get it via Pirate Bay. I gave it a listen out of curiosity, and it's better... if you think The Black Album (or perhaps the punk covers on Garage Days Revisted) was the best Metallica album. "Shorter" Death Magnetic isn't a hack job; it retains the essential nature of the songs, but removes all the musical flourishes, tempo changes, and symphonic compositional qualities that make people like me so cherish everything on Justice, and other classic Metallica songs like (off the top of my head) Master of Puppets, Breadfan, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Orion, The Prince, The Four Horsemen, Sanitarium, and others.
Flux = do not recommend. Shorter guts everything that makes this album so special.
By now I think everyone's seen the footage of the outraged Iraqi journalist hurling his shoes (with more accuracy than effect) at Bush last week. If not, watch this video; it shows Bush's surprisingly nimble ducking (he'd gotten very good at avoiding things over the past few years of refusing to take responsibility for any of his actions) after a hilarious parody of the legendary event. It's from the TNT, NBA pregame show, when Chris Webber surprised Sir Chuckles by hurling his shoes at him on live TV. I enjoy watching almost anything with Barkley, and this one had me elemayeoh, mostly as his shocked facial expressions.
The actual shoes that Iraqi journalist threw at Bush have apparently been destroyed (they should have auctioned them and used the money to cover about 2 seconds of the cost of the ongoing US occupation), but the company that manufactures them has been deluged with orders since the shoes were literally propelled into the worldwide spotlight.
The brown, thick-soled "Model 271" may soon be renamed "The Bush Shoe" or "Bye-Bye Bush," Ramazan Baydan, who owns the Istanbul-based producer Baydan Ayakkabicilik San. & Tic., said in a telephone interview today.
"We've been selling these shoes for years but, thanks to Bush, orders are flying in like crazy," he said. "We’ve even hired an agency to look at television advertising."
...Baydan has received orders for 300,000 pairs of the shoes since the attack, more than four times the number his company sold each year since the model was introduced in 1999. The company plans to employ 100 more staff to meet demand, he said.
"Model 271" is exported to markets including Iraq, Iran, Syria and Egypt. Customers in Iraq ordered 120,000 pairs this week and some Iraqis offered to set up distribution companies for the shoe, Baydan said.
Baydan has received a request for 4,000 pairs from a company called Davidson, based in Maryland. He declined to provide further details.
I've never worn brown dress shoes, or felt any urge to throw my shoes at anyone, but I can see the attraction of these items. It would be a conversation piece, and for the vast majority of the people on earth who hate George Bush, a fun reminder of the fact that at least once in his pampered life he got his bubble punctured and received an actual, if brief and harmless, look at how most people feel about him.
I'm still sporadically pursuing female attention via online dating, and while I'm not blogging about it, that doesn't mean I'm not encountering blog material. I think I'll have to write a book about this someday, or at least work a bunch of semi-fictionalized tales into a novel, since there's just too much weird and amusing and drama-rich material.
I've had no luck (in terms of getting replies) when I send short, generic emails to women whose profiles I fancy. Besides, for me it's harder to send a short email than a long one. So what I do lately is send the intriguing women an email (which goes anonymously through the service) with an boilerplate opening paragraph, and then 2 or 3 paragraphs about things I liked in their profile. This lets them know it's actually a mail to them, not just one I cut and paste to every woman I see, and it keeps my interest writing it. Thus far, I've gotten 3 types or replies. Complete silence, a very short "no thanks", or enthusiastic acceptance. The majority are the first type, of course. From what I've read, the hit rate is like 5% for men seeking women via online dating services. Most of the ones with pictures to browse (that does not include eharmony.com, which is picture free and all about computer algorithm matching like an arranged marriage) have far more men than women. And since I'm not lying about my profession or grossly inflating my income, I've got a bit of an uphill struggle to start with.
Initially I did a bunch of searches and favorited a bunch of women, and then spent hours one weekend sorting through them all, ranking them on various criteria, giving them overall grades, prioritizing which ones I wanted to mail first, etc. That didn't work very well since I'd spend hours at it one day and mail a dozen women, then get exhausted or discouraged with the whole thing and not return to it for a week. Or three. So now I'm being much less selective/obsessive, and devoting an hour a day to it, during which time I mail 2 or 3 women, as I steadily work through my favorites list.
Thus far the favorites are winning, since it's easy to add a dozen more women in 5 minutes of searching, and while I don't search that much, my backlog of favorites increases much more quickly than I can send out emails. I don't mail them all; I favorite every woman who looks and sounds somewhat interesting, and then a week or a month later when I return to her profile I read it much more carefully and decide if I really want to try to contact her. I delete at least half of them without trying to make contact, even though I'm trying to be less picky. From the women I've met thus far, I've concluded that you really can't tell that much about a person just from a few paragraphs, a list of their favorite things, and some photos. You gotta at least talk to them on the phone, if not meet them, to determine if you'll have any chemistry or attraction in real life.
I've not gone there yet, but I am occasionally tempted to lie about my income and/or career, like 75% of the other guys do. I had no idea there were so many single lawyers and professionals making $100,000-$150,000 a year who were looking for love online! Amazing they can't meet a nice girl in person, what with their good looks, muscular physiques, high incomes, and honest, forthright character. *cough* (Sure, that approach would just delay the rejection from the initial email to the second date, but hey... dates!)
But I digress, since I had a quick, funny story to tell. So:
One of the two women I mailed on Thursday replied to me on Saturday morning. Here's her reply to my instigating email:
Thanks for the thoughtful and well-written email, Greg! Unfortunately I'm already dating someone.
Best, Connie
Nice of her to at least bother to reply; the vast majority of people do not (including me; I've ignored most of the women who have emailed or winked at me, since most of them weren't attractive or interesting to me) and your message in a bottle floats out into endless silence. Except that you can look to see who has viewed your profile, and that lets me know that the women I mailed checked me out, in almost every case. They just weren't interested enough to reply. Lawyer. $100,000+. I'm telling you...
Ordinarily I'd have said nothing to Connie here, since as I said, just by sending a quick "no thanks" she put herself well above most, in manners and consideration. Unfortunately (for her?) I received her reply just as I was going to bed, after staying up an hour later than I should have, after a long night of work, in order to fulfill my two-a-day email quota. I wouldn't have replied with anything if she'd just said no, but her saying that she was dating someone annoyed me. Her profile said nothing about that, and gave every impression that she was single and available. I mailed her though a fricking singles dating site, for Xmas' sake!
Plus, she called me "Greg." I don't have anything against that name, but I signed my email with my actual first name, and she forgot it in the time it took to click reply and type those dozen words? True, "Eric" has an "E" and an "R", as does "Greg," albeit in a different order, but come on...
So I was a little annoyed, and that made me a little snarky.
Thanks for the reply and good luck with your relationship and your short term name memory issues. You might consider removing or amending your profile now that you're off the market, so future potential suitors don't waste their time as I did? Unless you're just keeping open the possibility of an upgrade...
Eric
Was that wrong? Mean? Probably, but it made me laugh when I wrote it, and sent me off to bed in a better mood. (Which didn't last long, since Jinx was all hyperactive and attacking Kyo and making noise to the point that I had to toss her (Jinx) out of the bedroom so I could go to sleep. Yes, I have a new/second cat. Much overdue post on that to come...)
Connie replied to my snark, but I didn't read it. Not even a peek. I deleted it unopened, since I didn't want her wounded complaint or angry rebuttal to bring me down or complicate things. I got in the last word, it was a funny word, and we all lived happily ever after. (Except for the part about me not having a girlfriend, and staying up too late getting bitchy as I email women through an online dating site.)
Did you know the Miss World pageant was held last weekend? Me either. I found out one night when I checked the Yahoo News and saw nothing but beauty contestants in the most popular news photos. They didn't look that great, but I was curious enough to click through a few of the images since it was free (except for the time) -- pretty well sums up the appeal of the entire Internet there, eh?
Rather looking through a news article, I just clicked an image and then went through the slide show to get the gist of things. Purely by chance my exploration began with the 3rd place winner, who hailed from Trinidad-Tobago and must have gotten a terrible cramp tucking through the entire swimsuit event. The next image revealed of #2, a beautiful woman from India. Her attractiveness threw me off, since you so seldom see a gorgeous woman in a beauty pageant. Dazzled by that surprise my defenses were lowered, and thus the horror of the Blonde Queen shook me to my marrow. I literally gasped.
Well, gasped and added three words whose initials are W, T, and F. I'm looking at her picture right now, and while I'm no longer gasping, I'm still very W. Here's a typical shot of the royal court, or whatever they call the top finalists.
Yes, that skanky, heroin-junkie looking blonde won. I know tastes differ (as this contest proves) but she's clearly the least attractive woman in this photo. She might out-point Jennifer Garner's bastard sister in the red, but only just. Let's proceed from left to right. Miss India is spectacular, the next two are very pretty, the brunette in the middle is okay, the one in the red orange is okay, the black girl is gorgeous but hard to see in the shadow, and Trinidad-Tobago looks like the hottest tranny this side of Beyonce. And the queen, in the middle? Um.... yeah.
Here's a collage of the top three finishers, though I suppose I should have dug up #4 also, since she'll be #3 when they get around to the physical and DQ "Miss" Trinidad-Tobago.
I realize that some people find the Olsen Twins attractive, (the real ones, not the idealized fake version) so there's clearly some market for starving, bony, raccoon-eyed, rat-haired, junkie blondes... but it's not one I'm shopping in. Can that many of the Miss World judges be Full House fans?
My theory is that the contest ended up with half a dozen olive-skinned "exotic" women amongst the finalists, with that one wet cat in the mix. The judges felt bad for Miss Siberia after the sabotage the makeup artist and his can of spray paint tried to inflict upon her, so they gave her some pity votes, and with all the exotic beauties splitting the vote, the blonde won. A development that must have been as surprising to the judges as it was to her.
One of her prizes was a year's supply of Revlon products, which she'd gone through before she got to the airport.
The last movie trailer I spent any time thinking about was for Lakeview Terrace, and I only thought about it since the trailer was actively unpleasant and made the movie look even worse. That movie came and (mercifully) went without much of a ripple, and now I've seen a new trailer that might have been even worse. But it's for a much higher profile film that will probably not vanish so swiftly into the night.
Well, let me amend that. The trailer isn't so bad; it's the movie that it makes look awful. Boring, suffocating, monothematic, depressing, and just generally unpleasant and fairly bereft of redeeming qualities. Though it did spur one good joke when I was forced to endure it while waiting to see Milk earlier this week.
The trailer is for the new Leo and Kate movie, the ironically-named Revolutionary Road. I'd heard of the film since it's the first to reunite the Titanic leads, (who I'm calling by their first names since I can't be bothered looking up how to spell "DeCaprio") but knew nothing about it other than that it was one of those small, artsy, intense, character-driven films that exist primarily to keep hit films from ever winning any Academy Award nominations. I still don't know much about it; there was a feature on it in a recent Entertainment Weakly, but I only glanced through it since the recycling bin needed topping off. What I can tell from the trailer is that it's set in the 50s. Kate and Leo get married, and he's been traveling a lot. Maybe in WWII; hard to tell. He has one scene where he raves about Paris and how much he wants to go back there since "people there are alive!"
European vacations go to the back burner though, since he and Kate get married and settle down in some Middle America type place with white picket fences and sunny kitchens and neatly-trimmed yards. Leo enters the rat race, signified by numerous scenes of him riding a train to some big city, in his Ward Cleaver type hat/coat/tie/suit costume. Kate does domestic stuff, baking pies, washing clothing, vacuuming, etc. And over these scenes of domestic ordinariness, there's depressing music constant dialogue about how they're not going to fall into a rut like everyone else, and how they want to be different, and how their lives are going to mean something. And Leo whines about how he works 10 hours a day at a job he hates, and Kate whines about how bored she is at home, etc.
And that's the whole trailer. You get 2.5 minutes of that. It's unrelieved, except by the increasingly-anguished voice over dialogue of the despairing characters, and by the depressing background music rising to new heights of clashing discordance. I spent the whole trailer waiting for something to happen. So do they break out of their joyless, soul-sucking existence? Transgress societal norms in some major way? Move to Paris? Kill each other? Apparently not, or at least the trailer never hints at that. Just how bored and unhappy they are, trapped in lives not unlike those of most of the potential audience.
As I wondered about Lakeview Terrace... who is this movie targeted to? Do bored, trapped suburbanites really want to see a movie about people just like them, who are unable to sublimate their misery beneath new flat screen TVs and golden retrievers? There's nothing in the movie to interest action movie fans, or teens (Leo was a heartthrob an eternity ago in Internet time; people under 16 have no idea who he or Kate Winslet are), there's no love story or adventure, there's no witty dialogue or excitement... I honestly have no idea who would want to see this movie based on the trailer, other than film nuts who like every movie, or people who really enjoy acting-heavy dramas. Who make up about .001% of the film going public, these days.
I don't make movies. I write. And I know, from research and experience, that there's a very fine line between writing about characters who are bored and imparting/impacting the reader with that, and boring the reader with a bored character in a boring scene. This trailer crosses way, way over that line, and then never even bothers pretending that it's going to come back to the fun side. Even if the whole movie is like that, it's crazy to make the trailer emphasize it so much. Who wants to subject themselves to 2 hours of that? Not me, clearly.
Oh, I almost forgot. The one redeeming aspect of the trailer was that after 2 minutes of yawning and fidgeting through it, my date mumbled something about it looking depressing, to which I replied, "Yeah, they look really unhappy. They should take a nice cruise. That would cheer them up." I was amused by that, at least. She didn't laugh though, which is just a symptom of various underlying reasons I think that was our last date.
Continuing my annual tradition of forgetting to mention this early enough to potentially do me any good, here's where I point to the "buy crap" icon atop the navigation bar on the left and note that if you are going to purchase items from Amazon.com this holiday season, you can give me about 4% of the price by doing so in a browser session begun through that link. Any why wouldn't you? I do so much for you, what with sometimes updating as often as twice a week. kthx mryxmas!
In more substantial but less greedy news, what the fuck is so hard about pouring clothes detergent into the fucking hole on top of the washing machine? I never understand why all the machines in laundromats are just covered with spots of liquid and clumps of granulated soap; you assholes paid money for that stuff, and you're paying money to get your clothing clean, and the two work better in conjunction. But the practice of slobbery has become an art at the machines in my apt complex's laundry room.
In a way it's reassuring; I know if I ever run out of detergent I can do at least two loads for free just by scraping off the coral reef accumulations of old soap that crusts the opening, like white and blue canker sores on Paris Hilton's diseased vagina. But at the same time... what the fuck? Are people handing the brimming full soap cup to their 4 y/o's and picking them up and leaning them over, so they'll get early practice at the task that will be their primary occupation in adult life? I can't see how any adult with the competence to operate a washing machine could be so fucking clumsy.
My favorite part is that people just leave the mess there. Forever. If only they had some sort of cloth items near at hand when they spilled? Like say, articles of clothing that could be used to wipe up the mess, and that were destined to very soon be covered in soap and water? Oh well, can't really blame anyone for the mess when there's nothing at hand to clean it up with.
One aspect of Milk that caught my attention was the depiction of Harvey's love life. Throughout the movie, which covered about 9 years of his life, Harvey had sex with two guys, both of them relatively long term relationships. (The personal details as presented in the film don't mesh with Harvey's biography on wikipedia, but that's another issue.) Harvey met Scott, a younger white guy in NYC, and they moved to SF together and stayed together (without any signs of cheating or serious discord) for 6 or 7 years. They eventually broke up when Scott couldn't take Harvey's endless political campaigning and the fact that he was putting the gay movement first. Harvey was then alone for about a year (hard to precisely judge the time flow in the film) until he met Jack, a somewhat nutty but seductive and free spirited Latino guy. Harvey and Jack were together for a year of drama (from Jack) while Harvey's career finally took off, until Jack eventually killed himself because he was unbalanced and very needy. Harvey got over that in like, a day, and devoted himself to his work.
Leaving aside the issue of how true to life this is (not very), it's a remarkably non-sexual life for any single, powerful, prominent man to lead, especially an openly gay man living the pre-AIDS era in San Francisco.
Scott, the first boyfriend, remained a character in the movie, and he and Harvey stayed friends and looked to be heading towards a possible reconciliation at the end, just before Harvey's death. One thing Scott said during a meeting while Harvey's crazy second BF was still alive spurred this post. They'd brought their dates to the same party; Harvey with the crazy Latino guy, Scott with his new BF, and during a moment of private conversation Harvey said to Scott, "You can do better." Scott shrugged and said, "He keeps me away from the bars."
I noticed that at the time, and thinking it over later, it's an interesting way to view a relationship. Almost as a necessary evil; a way to stave off the cravings or opportunity to do worse things.
A slight digression: while researching video games and addiction and other issues for my senior project last year, I read a number of scholarly papers in which mental health practitioners and patients praised World of Warcraft and other such games for the good they did for people with addictive personalities. Yes, WoW will suck your life away, but better a computer game than truly dangerous, expensive, life-destroying addictions like booze or drugs. It's bizarre to think about, but a non-negligible number of those crazy people with multiple level 80 alts are actually using their 8+ hours a day of WoW as a form of self-medication.
Back on the topic at hand, I found myself thinking about Milk last night while procrastinating other projects and working up to writing my irrelevant review of the film. Specifically, the gay lifestyles as shown in the movie. They were largely desexualized; probably to give the film more appeal to straight mainstream audiences. Harvey has 2 long term boyfriends, only 2 other guys in the movie are ever shown engaging in sex (during a victory celebration), and there isn't any public nudity or sexual deviancy (other than some campy drag queens), no orgies, or anonymous hook ups, or cottaging, etc.
I'm not complaining about this; the film focused on Harvey's political efforts, with his personal life important only as it related to larger public events. The movie wasn't about life in the Castro, or the gay bathhouse scene, etc. It made me think about how so many gay men actually do behave though, and how wildly different it was from what we saw in the film, and from the lives of most heterosexual men. It's quite possible for your average (or below average) gay men to go out to a bar or a park or some other cruise spot, and get laid (well, at least a blow job) just about any night they wish. Consensually! I'm not talking about hiring a whore, though that's sometimes necessary. (Heterosexual guys can do that too.) Most of the time no money need change hands, and true, you might not get the hottest guy in the bar, but you'll likely meet interested in quick sex, happy to reciprocate whatever you do to them, and not interested in giving a thought to dating or even trading phone numbers or names. If you're a straight guy, try to imagine that? Three or four or six nights a week you could go to a bar, hang out for an hour or two, and be almost guaranteed to get laid, without needing to be all dressed up, to have a great convincing rap, having to lie, to make promises of love and commitment, etc. I think that, for most straight guys, is inconceivable. Pun intended.
Sure, there are straight men in that situation, but they're exceptional. Rock stars, tycoons, pro athletes, etc. Some .001% of the male population with enough "eligible" in their "bachelor" (or not; lots of them are married) to create a situation where attractive women will relax all of their usual rules and requirements and will indulge in sex without a relationship or any long term promises or agreements. The key difference is not that only that tiny 0.001% of straight men want easy, eager, anonymous sex. It's that they are the only type of straight men who can get it! Women just aren't interested in that, except in rare instances (some women like it, lots more women like it at one time in their lives with very special men).
Also, let's be clear that not all gay men are into cruising and anonymous sex of that type, and even those who are at some point aren't into it forever. That's what Scott's comment in Milk reminded me of. He liked his post-Harvey boyfriend since it kept him out of bars. As Chef said, "Meaningless sex is fun for 20 or 30 years, but after that it starts to get old."
I'm not going to debate the pros or cons of this practice; I'm more interested in contemplating it as a reality. I can't imagine it, personally. I've never had sex with a woman I didn't know fairly well, either as friends for at least weeks, or from dating a number of times. I have had (usually realizing it in retrospect) that I've had a few opportunities for hook ups with female strangers, but they weren't interesting to me at the time, for various reasons. Admittedly, I never go to bars or clubs or other places to hang out where slutty women might be found. But even if I did, the vast majority of men who try that go home alone, or require welder's thickness beer googles to get aroused by their catch.
A slight digression: Years ago, when I lived in San Diego, I was friends with most of the guys who worked at a video game arcade near SDSU. I would hang out there several nights a week, and through skillful application of social engineering skills and various minor favors and gifts, I eventually enticed most of them into hanging around after closing time and sucking my cock. Wait... what? No I mean we'd stay there after closing and put the games on free play for an hour or three. This was in the days before computer games or console games were up to the technological snuff of arcade games, especially in terms of multiplayer components, and it was great to get hours of head to head battles or even just solitary practice time on Street Fighter Alpha or some other game that usually had a crowd waiting to play. And since being the best at video games was important to me at that time, I valued the experience highly. But even then I often got bored and just hung out there out of habit, or because it was free and I was getting something other people wanted and couldn't have. I'd tell myself to stay home and write that night, but I'd been in all day, or I was tired after RL work and wanted to be out and unwind a bit, etc. And since it was free, and easy, I often did.
In that light, I can kind of understand the lingering attraction and addiction of cottaging or gay bar/bathhouse action. Even if you're growing sick of doing something, just the fact that you can do it, for free, makes it hard to stop doing. It becomes a habit, you get some ego boost out of it, you know other people would love to do it if they were allowed to, etc. And I was just playing arcade games for free; imagine how much more compelling it must be to get sex; the single strongest drive afflicting the male of our (and most other) species?
And that's why I can't imagine what it would be like to know I could just go to some bar a block from my apartment and get sex. Well, I mean with someone I want to have sex with. I live 20 miles from the setting of Milk and I'm not hideously disfigured; if I wanted to visit a gay bar and see what all that sex was like first hand (so to speak) there's nothing stopping me. But since I'm attracted to women, and since women are not wired to want sex the way men do, it seems almost like science fiction to contemplate it.
The funny thing is that I don't want that. Or at least I don't think I want that. Possibly I'm just telling myself I don't want it since I can't have it? It's easy for me (and most other "nice guys") to say I don't want "meaningless" sex of the type Chef talks about, but since I've never had it, and will likely never have easy access to it, how do I know? The straight guys who can nail groupies seem to enjoy them to the best of their ability, though eventually most straight men get tired of those sorts of games and settle down (while still indulging in some "strange" when the occasional presents itself).
Sure, sex is a drive for me, and as I've met various women in real life and through online dating, I see how sexual urges and attraction work. I feel far more interested in spending time with and getting to know the women I find sexually attractive than the ones I'm just so-so about. But I sublimate the interest in sex into a larger interest, since I don't just want them for their bodies. Having been in love with someone I got to sleep with, I know how much better sex is when there's a strong emotional aspect to it. Like virtually every other man (and quite a few women) alive, I'm horny enough that I'm not putting love as a prerequisite for sex, but I am holding to a standard that I have to at least really like her before I will have sex with her. However again, since that's the standard almost all women hold men to... am I really making that choice, or just finding a way to rationalize and agree with one that's been forced on me?
In a weird way, I think that the psychology of most gay men is closest to the psychology of straight men at a younger age. When a lot of straight guys are in their teens or maybe college years, quite a few of them see relationships and talking and interaction with women largely as a means to an end. They don't want to talk or romance or date; they just want pussy. They (at least the more successful of them, a fraternity that did not include me at that age) have just learned that those other things are required in order to get said pussy.
Between men and women who are starting to date, there is a usually unspoken but widely understood arrangement; the man wants sex, and the woman might be willing to give it to him, if he proves himself worthy to her. That proving takes a different form from man to man and for each woman, but most of the participants are well aware of the game going in. That dynamic is radically altered when gay men are involved, since they both want the same thing and they both know what the other one wants. That's one element of gay courtship that was fairly accurate in Harvey. Despite the fact that he was with an absurdly low number of partners; both of his boyfriends were total strangers when they met, and yet they were kissing within seconds, and fucking within minutes.
Straight men (homophobic ones especially) often rail against this sort of promiscuity, but I think a lot of their whining and condemning is born of jealousy. Not that they want gay sex themselves (though that's notuncommoneither), but they resent that other people get to have all the sex they want while they can't themselves. Speeches moralistically condemning homosexuality very often include comments about promiscuity, so it's not just that they're fags, it's that they're successful fags!
Ironically, when the subject turns to bastard babies on welfare, the condemnation usually falls on the mothers. They're sluts and whores for giving it up and getting pregnant, while the men who fuck 'em and leave 'em are not much blamed for their behavior. They might be blamed for not "taking care of they kids" but there's hardly ever any criticism of their sexual behavior. It's women our society holds responsible for moderating and controlling sex; men are supposed to fuck any woman who will let them. Unless they're gay men, in which case society says they're wrong in general, and doubly wrong for doing it so often.
I saw Milk, the biopic about Harvey Milk, 1978-assassinated gay rights activist/politician on a semi-date Monday afternoon, and rather doing my usual routine of jotting down some comments and a score, then leaving it to forever rot on my notes page, I'm going to type up a quick review. It beats doing actual work during my last half hour of consciousness for the day.
Milk is a biopic, one focused very tightly on Harvey's life. It plays almost like a dramatized documentary, with the events, as far as I know, only slightly fictionalized. That's a good choice, since the filmmakers had no real need to embroider them, they were so riveting. Quick summary: Milk was 40 and bored living in NYC, in the closet, working in the insurance industry. He met a guy and fell in love, and on his 40th birthday they dropped everything and moved to San Francisco, settling in the Castro district as it was becoming a gay haven. Milk got into politics gradually, starting as a community organizer working to fight against anti-gay discrimination and police brutality. He ran for city office several times and kept losing, though he got more votes each time. Milk finally got elected as one of 11 city supervisors after some redistricting allowed local areas to elect their own leadership, but after just a year on the job, with his local power and national prominence growing, he was assassinated, along with the SF mayor, by one of his fellow city supervisors.
The murders, and their aftermath, were huge news at the time, and archival footage of the reports are shocking to view even today. Skip to 2:20 in this one to see the dramatic announcement by Dianne Feinstein to the despairing, horrified crowd.
The movie covers most of those events, and a lot of others in Harvey's personal and professional life. To the scores.
Milk, 2008 Script/Story: 7 Acting/Casting: 8 Action: NA Eye Candy: 5 Fun Factor: 4 Replayability: 6 Overall: 7
It was a good movie, on the whole. Excellent performances by all the leads and supporting actors. It had a good script and did a good job portraying the mood of the times, though it was too focused on the individual to really capture the mood of the gay rights movement. It wasn't maudlin or tear-jerker in style, though it had the material to be that. It didn't flinch from showing gay men in love, though there's nothing more sexual than some kissing, and it has quite a bit less nudity than any actual street event in the Castro, then or now.
The things I disliked about it were not major, but there were enough of them to keep me from giving it a higher score. The main problem was that it was unfocused and got tedious and repetitious during the middle section: Harvey tries real hard and all his gay friends pitch in, but he loses another noble struggle to be elected to the city council. Another anti-gay ordinance is up for a vote somewhere else in the US and passes setting off rioting in the Castro. Rinse and repeat. The film is 128 minutes, and I think 100 would have been plenty. And made for a better movie without the overlong second act.
The opening was interesting. We got to know Harvey and saw him move to San Francisco, then find a purpose in life as events drove him to start some (very successful) neighborhood activism. His political rise was well-depicted, if rather simplified. A montage of scenes of him organizing the gay bars to dump Coors beer, in partnership with a strike by the Teamsters, was a nice example of how political coalitions are formed. Unfortunately that part blended into his efforts to gain political office, and that section went on and on.
I wasn't a fan of how the ending was played either. The movie opened with some news footage reporting Milk's and Moscone's deaths, (including the bit from Feinstein that's in the clip I embedded above). Also, for a bridging narrative device throughout the film we saw Sean Penn, as Milk, dictating notes into a recorder. He starts off by saying these tapes are to be played only in the event of his death by assassination. So even if you didn't know the real history, it wasn't any surprise that he was going to be killed by a co-worker, and since the film only had room for one other main character in the city government, it was obvious who the killer would be. Facts that made the movie's handling of that event very odd.
We didn't see Dan White (the killer) freaking out, or loading a gun, or stewing silently and crazily. We just saw him sitting up all night one night, and then awkwardly climbing into city hall through a downstairs window (to avoid the metal detectors in the lobby), walking calmly (and waiting) to see the mayor, and then (after blowing him away) doing the same to Milk. I assume some element of that was an editorial decision meant to contradict the infamous "twinkie defense" that got White such minimal jail time. In the movie White wasn't shown to be depressed, estranged from his wife, freaking out, binging on junk food, or any of the other facts presented in his (successful) legal defense. (On the other hand, he wasn't given some gratuitous homophobia either; the mayor was denying him his job after he cracked up and resigned, and Milk was a political enemy; it wasn't an overtly anti-gay statement.) At any rate, that approach made the ending abrupt, but not surprising. It also robbed the events of their power, since the audience wasn't given any build up or sense of dread for what was coming.
Those quibbles aside, I think the film is worth seeing for the quality of the performances and the events depicted, no matter how ham-fistedly some of them they were presented. I enjoyed it and found it thought and discussion-provoking. Also, not to toot my own horn (for praise or damnation) but I've been comfortable being around gay people for decades, have gay friends, don't get creeped out by homosexuality (the real kind, not just the lipstick lesbian type that serves as straight male-targeted porn), etc. So while this movie wasn't eye-opening or shocking or prejudice-challenging for me, it probably will be for a lot of other people, which would add a whole level of power and effect to their viewing experience that it didn't impart to me. Consider that bonus when you think you might want to view it, especially if you're going to drag along some slightly or largely homophobic friends/relations.
One other comment on the film, on a stylistic note. The director, Gus Van Zant, made an interesting choice in one area of stylism. He chose not to "Forrest Gump" the historical scenes, and didn't inserting Sean Penn's character, or any of the supporting characters, into the archival footage. I'm sure this was a conscious choice; after all, the technology existed more than a decade ago. That said, I found it jarring, since the film would routinely show some grainy footage of a street march, or a demonstration, or some other event from the 70s, and then cut to fictional reenactment of that scene, with Sean Penn giving a speech. The footage of Penn as Milk was crystal clear and modern though, and while everyone had on period costumes (and that horrible 70s hair), it was never less than obvious that this was a movie scene on a set, with extras and blue screen and such. I was almost reminded of some Saturday Night Live sketches, where they'll show crowd footage and then cut to Mike Meyers and Dana Carvey (or whoever's on the show these days) in the studio with half a dozen extras milling around. It wasn't a comical effect in the movie, but it was an odd choice for the film. I found it offputting; it was almost like watching a play, where a short video of some outdoor war was shown, and then after a moment of blackness you see 4 guys in togas with prop swords and another actor lying on the floor with ketchup on his robes. It required a suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience, and I'm not sure what benefit was derived from presenting the material that way, other than saving some money on post production special effects.
Another interesting aspect of things was how (male) gay relationships were presented, and how immediately and effortlessly sexual they were. Even in the greatly-sanitized presentation they received in the film. I'll get to that in a separate post though, since it digresses far from the substance of this, generally excellent, film.
Finally, here's one more collection of news footage and shots of frantic cops dashing around city hall in the aftermath of the assassinations, plus moving scenes of the tens of thousands of candle-carrying mourners who turned out to the vigil for Milk and Moscone.
I've seen this on several blogs today; it's been circulating virally w/o any attributed author. Evidence would indicate that the author is a fan of the U of Texas, but since it's quite clever and fairly literate, that seems unlikely. At any rate, it made me eloel, here it is:
After determining the Big-12 championship game participants the BCS computers were put to work on other major contests and today the BCS declared Germany to be the winner of World War II.
"Germany put together an incredible number of victories beginning with the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland and continuing on into conference play with defeats of Poland, France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands. Their only losses came against the US and Russia; however considering their entire body of work—including an incredibly tough Strength of Schedule—our computers deemed them worthy of the #1 ranking."
Questioned about the #4 ranking of the United States the BCS commissioner stated "The US only had two major victories -- Japan and Germany . The computer models, unlike humans, aren’t influenced by head-to-head contests—they consider each contest to be only a single, equally-weighted event."
German Chancellor Adolph Hiter said "Yes, we lost to the US, but we defeated #2 ranked France in only 6 weeks." Herr Hitler has been criticized for seeking dramatic victories to earn 'style points' to enhance Germany's rankings. Hitler protested "Our contest with Poland was in doubt until the final day and the conditions in Norway were incredibly challenging and demanded the application of additional forces."
The French ranking has also come under scrutiny. The BCS commented, "France had a single loss against Germany and following a preseason #1 ranking they only fell to #2."
Japan was ranked #3 with victories including Manchuria, Borneo and the Philippines.
The controversy here, if you've lucky enough not to follow college football, is that Texas, Texas Tech, and Oklahoma are all in the Big 12 southern division. All went 11-1 this year, and their losses were a perfect rock/paper/scissors. Texas beat Oklahoma, Oklahoma beat Texas Tech, and Texas Tech beat Texas. The determination of which one "won" their division, and would play in the Big-12 title game, was made by the BCS computer rankings. And they picked Oklahoma, at least in part since that team has been running up the score in every game this season (they broke the all time scoring record), and margin of victory is one of the factors in the ratings. Oklahoma won the Big-12 title game easily, since the northern division of that conference is much weaker than the southern, and now they're ranked #1 and are playing #2 Florida for the national championship. (Which is a crock this year, as it is most years, since there's no playoff system and we've got two 1-loss teams playing for the title while 6 or 7 other major conference 1-loss teams and two mid-conference undefeated teams are on the outside looking in.)
Texas beat Oklahoma by 10 points, yet lost to Texas Tech on a miraculous last second touchdown. Texas would have been the division winner by the tie-breaker system in most other conferences. Hence the BCS hate from Texas, and the general hate for the non-playoff system by all college football fans who want to see a winner crowned on the field.
It's funny; every year I enjoy following college football (I'd say watching, but since I don't watch TV I've only seen highlights online and at the gym) all season, and then wish I hadn't come December when the season ends and the bowls are announced and once again there's a complete failure to determine an actual champion.
I saw a condemning link to this from a fairly strident feminist blog (that I regularly read), and sure enough, it's hilarious. Yes, if promotes stupidly wasteful spending on worthless diamonds, and it perpetuates stupid stereotypes (of men and women). But so does most humor, has a great set, good acting, good direction and editing, and it's imaginative and creative. I laughed my ass off.
A couple of years ago I blogged about the similarly-funny Miller (?) beer commercials with their "Man Laws" and thanks to someone posting a link to me somewhere, I got absolutely deluged by angry feminist commenters. If you read that post you'll see what I mean, and might wonder that I didn't return fire. Trust me, I wanted to. Malaya asked me to let it go through, and so I did. And no, I wasn't threatened with the doghouse.
I found those Man Law beer commercials funny for their overall presentation. They were very creative; their fantasy concept, with the little The Onion-like vignettes of everyday life examined and faux-serioused by a mysterious high council of Man Law-makers. It was the little touches that made them enjoyable; the replays on the stadium-like overhead scoreboard, the ancient scribe handwriting the consensus-determined laws, the half-star cast of men arguing the points, etc.
Similar attention to detail is what makes this new diamond commercial funny. The concept; woman throws man into the doghouse for buying her overly-practical gift, isn't funny or original enough for a Seinfeld routine. What makes the commercial work is the overall quality and all of the little touches. The set design (I love the parole board room, with the lights and the replay projected neck-craningly overhead), the variety of regular guy-type men wearily resigned to endlessly folding (women's) laundry, the quick cuts between the flashback parole hearing and the currently (un)folding events, the softly-spoken propaganda continually blaring overhead "Apologize without caveats," the happy look on the wife's face after she kicks him down the hole, the doghouse standing alone in the grassy field, the (relative) subtlety of the diamond propaganda from the hidden, secret our-last-hope photo. The only misstep, I thought, was the meal. Real men not eating quiche is such an old and (by now) tired joke that I just sort of sighed at it, though I did enjoy the one crazy unshaven guy in the tux having his last little freak out. (Incidentally, by a lovely twist of fate I actually own that exact model of vacuum cleaner, and the whole reason I got it was that it's got dual suction, and no bags.)
The fact that feminist bloggers are railing against this one is funny, but I'll give the angry ones credit; at least they're consistent. They railed against the beer commercials that created a fantasy world with men as the powerful high commission of rules and law, and they're against this one that does the same thing for women. The common thread is that both commercials perpetuate age-old stereotypes and gender roles; the fact that they do it in such an amusing and fresh fashion is probably worse for them (in terms of outraging the easily-outraged) since it gets noticed (and blogged about *cough*) in a way that more hamfisted efforts do not.
The interesting thing, to me, is that I largely agree with the feminists who are complaining about these commercials. On larger issues, at least. I just think they undo themselves by being so condemning and holier-than-thou in their attitudes about silly and generally amusing things like these commercials. Protest Andrew Dice Clay style vulgarity and misogyny, or anti-birth control politics, or anti-choice laws. Don't get your proverbial knickers in a twist over fairly neutral, no-worse-than-dumb TV spots. It alienates the neutral majority by making you look humorless and monomaniacal.
The protesting ones would (I suspect) grant that there are plenty of worse examples of sexism and barbarism, and more important things to fight against, but that's the whole point. Now that we've had our consciousness raised about these issues, most people can see the problem with overt sexism and discrimination. So for the activist types, the battle must be shifted to the marginal issues, which makes commercials like these ground zero, since they subtly and cleverly reinforce outmoded gender roles and assumptions, and thus strengthen them far more effectively than some Cartman-like, ranting sexist right wing talk radio show host ordering women to get back into the kitchen and bake them a pie. I understand and even empathize... I just think it's bad strategy. And a bit humorless. Give people more credit; they can laugh at something even as they deplore the stereotypical, self-defeating reasoning behind it.
I mentioned some weeks ago that Malaya was getting married. "Got" is now the operative verb. The event was this past weekend, and she was hitched without a hitch, so to speak. I could write a fascinating blog post about the whole thing, but Malaya liked to be kept private and anonymous when we were together, and that urge hasn't changed now that we're apart. And since we're still friends, and she (and the new Mr. Malaya) both read this blog, I shan't indulge my faux-journalistic interests.
I will say that attending the wedding was an interesting experience for me. I encouraged her (and she me) to date and go on with her life after we broke up two years ago, I knew she was eager to get married, I knew she'd been seriously dating since earlier this year and living with the guy for the past few months. So it wasn't a real surprise when I got the wedding invite, and obviously the wedding wasn't a surprise. What was a surprise to me was how the event touched me. Not the ceremony or the guests or the clothing, but I could not look at them standing up in front, doing that deep eye contact "we're in love" thing. I wasn't jealous (though I was envious, not having anyone to do that with myself), and I didn't begrudge either of them their happiness... I just couldn't watch. Too many memories of Malaya looking up at me in just that way, and emotional conversations about how we'd always be together and how she'd always love me and that I must promise never to leave her.
And yes, this is the chorus of every sad love song ever written. But see, it's amazing and unique when it happens to me! Since my emotions and romantic history and feelings are so much different than those of everyone else! *cough*
Anyway, from my seat at the dinner/reception I couldn't see the little two-person table the bride and groom were sitting at, so whenever the "everyone taps on their glasses so the couple will kiss" ritual broke out, I didn't have to avert my eyes. However, neither could I watch to see if I still felt that I had to, or if that surprising bit of sentiment had passed as quickly as it arose. It's not a big deal; I'm not digging up and digitally defacing old photos of Malaya/Flux, and I think everyone finds it difficult to watch their ex engaging in loving behavior with someone else. But it was interesting to find that urge/emotion/abhorrence in myself.
Of more fun at the wedding was my date. The IG eagerly volunteered to accompany me, when I mentioned the wedding to her last month. She did not waver from that, and since I didn't find a new/real girlfriend in the interim, and since the IG is excellent company, off we went. The IG doesn't dress up much, but she's got a lot more ability to wear "real" clothing than your average clueless "I can has flip flops for all occasions?" coed, so she was eager to get a (sexy) new gown and matching heels and do her hair and makeup for the event. I approved of the results, which you can (partially) see in the attached image.
IG would like to maintain her semi-anonymity (or at least not think about anyone other than me faffing to her graven image), and I'd like to remain clear of HCwDb for a while yet, so her face has been pixeled out. It's pretty enough to match the rest of her though, trust you me. And yes, the view down of her dress was even better from my vantage point than from the camera's. It was freezing during the reception, and my peripheral vision was regularly amazed at just how clearly goose bumps can stand out on the hairless flesh of a woman's upper chest.
So now Malaya's married and um... yeah. I don't know that this changes anything. Life goes on, etc. I'm not feeling more or less motivated to get into a serious relationship myself, and while I felt a bit dislocated and out of it the evening after the wedding, (I did 90 minutes at the gym, cardio and then weights, without ever realizing I had not turned on the ipod I was wearing around my neck.) the effects weren't lasting. I didn't have the urge to get laid or drunk or crazy, and in fact, I found myself very full of energy and in a somewhat euphoric mood late that night. I played happy music and danced while washing dishes and making nachos, and while I chipped another of the cheap Ikea plates I've been steadily destroying (and occasionally replenishing) over the past 2 years, I felt fine. Life, as they say, goes on.
I've gone through the 250+ photos I took in NM, and posted the 70 or so worth looking at on a photos page, in the long-neglected photos section. See them here, and prepare for a long loading time, since it's a huge page with a lot of large images. Despite that, most of them are 600 pixel wide thumbnails for full size shots that are 1200 pixels, so click the ones that have a link to see them much larger. These aren't as pretty as the Death Valley shots I posted a few years ago, but they're um... newer?
Here are a few sample shots, of higher quality than the cell phone cam ones I posted last week. See these and 65 more on the NM photo page. Or don't; I haven't checked my site stats in a year or more, so it's not like I'll ever know.
One of the countless desert-destroyed structures we saw near every road we drove in the high desert.
The blueness of the sky was constantly amazing to me. Incredibly clear air and cloudless skies.
A shot from Bandelier National Monument. These were Indian dwellings, a few centuries ago. They built them 2 or 3 stories high; the regular holes in the stone were drilled and fitted with wooden beams that formed the ceiling/floor between each level. Click for larger.
One of the 3 long ladders leading up to the large ceremonial cave in Bandelier. They look very easy in the photos, but were somewhat nervous-making to climb, with a 10 meter drop to rough stone, and guardrails to catch if you fell.
A view west along the Rio Grande Gorge. It's hard to judge the scale in the photo, but that river is about 200 meters down at the bridge, or so said the map.
