Yeah, I know.  It’s French.  Although since Sarkozy took office, that’s not been anywhere nearly as derogatory as it was for much of our adult lives.

And not only is it among the most aggressively bloodthirsty national anthems in the world (the choruses end “To arms, citizens!  Form your battalions!  We’ll march!  We’ll march, and water our fields with the blood of the impure!”), but it is a living artifact the French Revolution, a time when “liberal” populism was co-opted by “A Better France” into an epic horror, of show trials and pseudo-judicial mass-murder in the name of rule by men, not laws, of a type that served as a model for every blood-sucking tyrant, singular or group, that ever followed.

Still, this version of France’s national hymn, “La Marseillaise” (which is apparently French for “Yes, We Can!”) by Mireille Mathieu – “the Sparrow of Avignon” – has been my non-stop earworm for the past week.

And it’s a wonderful version of that vainglorious, blood-soaked tune for so many reasons.

Golly: It was recorded at the height of Charles DeGaulle’s Gallocentric era, when France may have marched to the beat of its own percussionniste, but in marched with a purpose.  It was a time when the French – including pop-culteur icons like Mathieu – could sing unabashedly patriotic music without slathering it with post-modern irony.

Rdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrd – I never took French.  Oh, I hitchiked around France, getting by on my year each of high-school Latin and Spanish, my German accent, and my lack of fear of looking like an idiot in a foreign language.  I could read things pretty well, and when I tried to speak, people at best figured out what I was saying, and at worst heard my fluent German accent and at least figured I wasn’t a Yanque, so they cut me a break.  But real speakers of French have always tittered at my accent, especially since I roll my “r”s in a way that people who learn Parisian French – which is most of vous – do not.

So listen to Matheiu wrap that Avignon accent ardrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdround the song, and rdrdrdrdrdrdroll those Rs. “Mardrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdchons!  Mardrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdchons! She sounds like a six-barreled minigun!  Glordrdrdrdrdrdrdrieuse!

Frappe-O-Licious!: The more world politics I see, the more I realize the sheer worth of enlightened self-interest, both for individuals and nations.  And yeah, I know – “enlightened” and “French” aren’t usually in the same Zip code.  But bonne golly, this is a version that’d make a gallic Chuck Norris or Jack Bauer or Audie Murphy sit up at attention, and jump-start the cold, post-ironic heart of the most cynical Sorbonne academic trash.  It makes me marginally less ashamed of my family’s own partly Quebecois roots.

It was the first time I’d seen this song delivered outside of a fundamentally American context – which I can also not stop humming, by the way, although I guess that’s fairly obvious, since it’s the same song…

Anyway – Vive le cul-coups de pied!

Tagline of new Jesse Ventura “Conspiracy Theory” promo:

VENTURA: “I’m going to expose things that’ll blow your mind”.

Disney looks to take movie marketing beyond viral to voluminous.

The 1982 film Tron broke new – if unheralded – ground in visual effects as the first motion picture to rely largely on computer-designed elements. Like Michelangelo trying to paint the Sistine Chapel with rocks, the attempt to create a computer-generated movie with only 330MB of disc space produced a crude and compromised redention of what Tron‘s creators had hoped it would be. As such, the film modestly recouped it’s $17 million budget. Considering only a decade later that entirely computer-generated characters, like those of Terminator 2 or Jurassic Park, were atonishing audiences, Tron in hindsight seemed even more like a cellouid’s equivalent of Pong.

Nearly 30 years later, the sequel Tron: Legacy has little ground left to break in terms of visual effects. But the film appears destined to try and become a trendsetter on its own in the world of marketing:

By the time the movie arrives in theaters on Dec. 17, Walt Disney Studios will have spent three and a half years priming the audience pump. The most recent push came last week at Comic-Con International, the annual pop culture convention here. For the third year in a row, Disney teased fans with exclusive “Tron: Legacy” footage. No other movie has guest-starred here so often…

Disney isn’t merely content to draw out the world’s longest cinematic tease. Forgoing the traditional movie tie-ins of fast food restaurants and toys, Disney is aiming for a marketing effort so wide that the studio is no longer merely marketing a film but an entire culture.

Skin-tight black uniforms with white and blue glowing light are part of Donatella Versace’s latest line. Recording artists such as Rihanna, Katy Perry and Lady Gaga are also doning Tron-esque clothes. Audi has even built a concept car based on Tron‘s signature light cycle. By modern marketing standards, Tron: Legacy isn’t an event – it’s a lifestyle.

From Disney’s standpoint – why not? The house that a mouse built is wagering a staggering $350 million budget on a sequel to a critical and commercial bomb from the 1980s.

Tron: Legacy simply represents another stage in Hollywood’s endless quest to find an increasingly difficult to target audience at lesser and lesser cost. The advent of DVR and the expansion of cable channels has made it easier for film’s most powerful advertising weapon – TV ads – to all but disappear.

While viral campaigns of making online converts one at a time have worked well for modestly budgeted films (see Paranormal Experience’s success), the margins for mainstream Hollywood fare rival Congressional budget deficits. Consider this – if Tron makes $1 billion worldwide it’ll be in the same league as Alice in Wonderland and considered a flop. Alice “only” cost $200 million and earned the same amount. Little wonder then if Disney will leave no marketing stone unturned this fall.

First it was Badfinger.  Notwithstanding the fact that they were discovered and signed to Apple Records by Paul McCartney, were British, and were a four-piece band featuring tight-yet-raw vocal harmonies and jangly-yet-melodic guitars, they were a fun pop band with none of the Beatles’ baroque pretensions.  But because their debut singles, “Come and Get It” and “No Matter What”, sounded just a tad like lost, pre-“Sergeant Pepper” Beatles songs, you – the assembled hordes of slavering Beatles fandom – sniffed and said “it’s almost like they’re trying to be the Fab Four”.  And despite the fact that they managed to release some of the most glorious pop music of the seventies, at a time when the former Beatles were mired in tortured megalomania, dreary pop or labored soul-searching…

…they never quite escaped it.  To the world’s eternal loss.

Then it was The Knack – the overwhelmingly infectious power-pop sensation led by the mildly-creepy and now-late Doug Fieger – the cover of whose debut album “Get The Knack”…

…was reputed to look sufficiently like “Meet The Beatles”…

…to start a nasty little whispering campaign against the band.

And then there was Oasis, who in the early nineties were rumoured (with a “u”, since they were British) to sound like the Beatles.  The unreasoning parochialism of Beatles fans struck again (although I didn’t care so much, since it was only Oasis).

And now – Lady Gaga has committed the unpardonable sin of L sitting at John Lennon’s piano….

Lady Gaga’s stirring up controversy yet again — but this time all she did was play a little piano. A photo of the “Bad Romance” crooner seated at John Lennon’s famous white Steinway recently hit the Web, and Beatles fans are up in arms.

John’s son Sean Lennon posted the photo on Twitter with the caption: “With gaga at mom’s house, she’s belting on the white piano…” The instrument was a gift from The Beatles’ frontman to Sean’s mother, Yoko Ono, and it sits out in the open at Yoko’s home.

In the pic, the singer wears typically skimpy Gaga-gear (a skintight body suit and thigh-high fishnets) while singing and tickling away at the keys. The image drew an outcry from some Beatles fans who considered Gaga unworthy of the iconic instrument.

My only wish:  that if it was the piano at which Lennon “composed” “Imagine” or “Merry Christmas (War Is Over)” or “Just Like Starting Over”, that Jerry Lee Lewis would get to go all ape-wild on it sometime before he dies (Wait – Jerry Lee’s alive, isn’t it?  Why, yes, he is).  Or maybe Pete Townsend.

OK, I have two wishes; that I am able to live long enough to have at least one moment of my life, even at the very end, without baby boomers caterwauling about how in-freaking-credible John Lennon was.

He was not!

And tell that Gaga chick to keep her mitts off Keith Moon’s drum kit.

I started writing this piece here…

I’m not gonna say Operation Repo is “the most addictive show on TV”, as TruTv’s tagline would have us believe.

But it’s mildly diverting on those Monday evenings when I don’t have more pressing or enjoyable business to see to.

I kinda like the characters; Lou Pizarro seems like a stand-up kinda guy, and the supernaturally laid-back Froy Tercero seems like the kind of fella I could pop a top with.

Sonia Pizarro, of course, is a gruff freak show, and Lynda Pizarro strikes me as the kind of budding sadist who will be working as a county bill collector at some point or another.

But I confess that my favorite episodes are the ones where rampaging roid-raging juice-monkey Matt gets maced, tazed or beaten to a pulp.

…until I read that the “reality” show is a scripted “recreation”.

I’m shocked.  Shocked.

Monday:  “Spike TV”, the cable channel best known for Ultimate Fighter matches and big jugs contexts?  Ran a “Band of Brothers” Marathon.

The “History Channel?”  “Pawn Stars” marathon, naturally.

Phones will all be turned off during tonight’s sign-off of 24 – in an electric perimeter than I can guarantee will be a lot more effective than any the Los Angeles Police ever set up in six seasons.

The first three Days of the Fox counterterror drams were as close to “Must-See” as any TV has ever been.  Four and Five were both decent.  Six was abysmal.  Seven was a worthy comeback, and eight has been almost back to early form.

For me, it’d be hard to top the first two seasons for personal immediacy, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 (Day One was actually produced before the “man-caused disaster”); a guy fighting for his country on the one hand and his family – his aggrieved wife and his bratty teenager – on the other, and his comrades at CTU (implausibly mole-riven as they were) on the third; the demands frequently conflicted with each other.

In other words, just like life for most of us, except with nerve gas and bullets instead of angry principals and tax bills.

As the show got further and further from the immediacy 0f the three way network of loyalty and duty – to country, family and comrades – the flabbier and more West Wing-y it seemed.   In the earlier Days, Bauer’s loyalty to his nation (wrapped up in the logically-stretchy but dramatically brilliant relationship with Dennis Haysbert’s President Palmer, and then the even-better one with the reptilian mass of gray areas, President Logan – bounced off his troubled family, Teri and Kim, provided a constant tension that, by Day Six, had decayed into the sloppy, formulaic ones with Wayne Palmer and Audrey Raines, whose coma was the only interesting thing about her on The Longest Day.   On Day Six, Bauer had no personal skin in the game; the day’s biggest failing was that it was all about a scenario, not about Bauer’s personal conflict.

In a way, one of the show’s most ridiculed moments – Tony Almeida’s resurrection from the dead on Day Seven – was one of its best.  For the first time, really, since Day Four, Bauer had an immediate, personal conflict – his longtime loyalty to Almeida – along with a judicious return of a personal life, loyalties and conflicts  in the form of Annie Wersching’s Renee “Agent Hotpants” Walker.  And implausible as it was (“What?  24 implausible?”), it worked, and the show pulled off the impossible – it actually re-jumped the shark, in the right direction this time.

And so 24 actually is going out on top (barring a Newhart-like dream sequence ending of some kind).

So leave me alone starting at seven tonight.  Dammit, I won’t have time.

After 21 years, Law and Order is going off the air.

I haven’t watched LandO Prime in close to ten years – since Angie Harmon left, maybe Elisabeth Roehm’s first season, if memory serves.  The show had some left-of-center sympathies back in its early years – which didn’t seem all that out of place during its first decade.  You’d expect a show about NASCAR drivers not to be conservative?

There are those who paint the show with broad brush based entirely on the past ten years or so of over-the-top lefty sympathies…:

Does anybody really care that Law & Order is finally going off the air after 21 years? I don’t sense the pangs of nostalgia that usually accompany such an announcement. News that Mary Tyler Moore, Cheers or M*A*S*H were going dark prompted lots of Essays About The Show’s Enormous Cultural Impact. Law & Order? Not so much.

The show squandered a pretty powerful legacy; had it left the air after 12 years, it might have gotten a bigger send-off.  The show is the father of the police procedural drama; the success of LandO helped launch a slew of other near-clones (CSI) and derivatives (House), and, indirectly, a cable network (TruTV and its real-life procedural fare).

And for all the show’s definite liberal bias this past ten years or so – which was getting unbearable even then – the show did have its moments of powerful balance.  Its episode on the death penalty, done about the time New York reinstated capital punishment early in Sam Watterson’s tenure on the show, was an excellent, balanced piece on the ambivalence about the practice.  It even did a show, during Angie Harmon’s hitch, that may have been one of the very few I’ve ever seen on network television on portraying the case for the right to keep and bear arms.

Of course, that was over a decade ago.  I’ve seen maybe three episodes of LandO since then; the show ran out of gas about the time the opening credits started displaying “INSERT NAME HERE” in the “Junior DA” and “Younger Cop” slots.  And as the creative fumes sputtered out, the show turned to a constant diet of conservaitve boogypeople – Ann Coulter standins and “militias” and crazed Christians stacking up abortion doctors like cordwood.  I’d imagine that someone learning about America from Law and Order would think the right wing in America is dangerous.

Uma Thurman’s latest, Motherhood, flopped badly in the US, bringing in only $40,000 toward a $3.5 million budget.

But that was great compared to its showing in the UK; opening weekend brought in a grand total of 11 viewers, including only one on its debut Sunday.  The total take for its UK opening weekend?

£88.

Barry Norman, the critic, said it was “astonishing” that only 11 people could be bothered to go and see a film starring Thurman. “The reviews were very poor indeed but that alone isn’t enough to explain it.”

True.

But the Tarantino Curse does explain it.  Working with Tarantino seems to have become a Faustian bargain for stars; make big bank now, and get on the train for palookaville later.

…Nick at Night, ESPN, The Family Channel, A and E, FX, Home and Garden, Lifetime, the Cartoon Network, Tru TV, the Food Channel, American Movie Classics, Discovery, the SciFi Network, The Learning Channel, Spike TV for Men, Comedy Central, Bravo, MTV, Hallmark and TVLand have in common?

All of them are beating MSNBC in the Cable network ratings.

Who’da thunk that America would prefer Burn Notice reruns, Hannity, Reba and King of Queens reruns, World War II in ND, Dick van Dyke, jai-alai matches, Everwood and Sopranos reruns, Rescue Me, Rebecca Kolls, sobby chick-drams, Adult Swim, Conspiracy Theory, Anthony Bourdain, Mad Men, Dirty Jobs, Battlestar Galactica reruns, What Not To Wear, Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, Reno 911, America’s Next Top Model and The OC to watching Rachel Maddow’s babble?

To: Kevin Spacey

From: Mitch Berg, Fan

Re: Career Opportunities

Dear Mr. Spacey,

It’s been a long time since you lit up the small screen with your performance as Mel Profitt on Wise Guy (perhaps the most unjustly-obscure great TV show of all time).  Verbal Kint?  Even American Beauty?  Seems like forever.

So I know you’ve been working hard to get back out of the dinner theater circuit.  So no doubt your agent told you this would be a great idea.

Perhaps you need to shoot for The Usual Suspects II: Weekend At Keyser’s.

Just saying.

That is all.

I laughed my brains out watching this BBC piece about “Fulla”, the highly successful Moslem competitor to the Barbie Doll.

No, not about the doll itself – I mean, cool and all.  Yaaay free enterprise!

The yuks came from the BBC’s video viewer.

I’ll put the spoiler below the jump.

(more…)

I was digging through some old headllines the other day.  I was amazed at what I found.  Here’s a sampling:

French Cops Say Top Cop A Flop (July 8, 1943)

(Vichy, France) (AP) – A leading association of French policemen condemned the film portrayal of a French police chief as “unrealistic” in a statement released today.

Jacques Omerde, spokeshomme for the Fraternal Order of Vichy French Law Enforcement Officers, said “the character of Jean Renault, played by Claude Rains in the recent hit movie Casablanca, is unrealistic and tres degradement.”

“Mr. Rains’ portrayal of a corrupt, semi-competent lothario besmirches the reputation and good name of the hard-working law-enforcement officers who work for the Vichy government.”

“Furthermore” Omerde concluded from the prepared statement, “the final scene – where Prefect Renault ignored the shooting of a German officer – would in real life be a gross violation of procedure.  There have been no real-life accusations of any such behavior”.

Omerde called on Casablanca’s director, Paul Henreid, to apologize.

Fisherman’s Association Says Hemingway Story, Movie Just Big Fish Tale: (July 8, 1952)(Miami, FLorida) (AP) – The Association of Cuban-American Fishermen are crying “foul” over Ernest Hemingway’s latest novel, Old Man and the Sea.

“Cuban fisherman have a tradition of fraternalism”, said Juan-Carlos De Miel, president of the ACAF’s Miami chapter.  “84 day losing streak or no, nobody would have ostracized the old man.  Because as our anscestors said in Cuba, “It takes  a village to take care of an old guy”.

“Also, no fisherman worth his salt would have lashed a marlin to the side of a skiff.  Procedures would have prevented the shark attack that consumed the Marlin; it’s utterly unrealistic!”

“Finally, this book and movie portrays Cuban fishermen as rash, impetuous people, when in fact we are a group of solid professional fish extraction technicians”.

Paper Execs: TV Series Papers Over The Truth (July 8, 2004)(New York, NY) (AP) – The American TV series “The Office” “defames the American paper sales industry’s proud traditi0n of professionalism”, according to American Association For Paper Sales president Excedrine Ruff.

“Funny may be funny, but I can say with complete assurance that a manager like Michael Scott would never be permitted in the American paper sales industry”. 

“It’s defamatory”.

Silly?  Of course.  Casablanca, Old Man and the Sea and The Office aren’t about Vichy police procedure, the commercial fishing industry or paper sales.  They’re allegories about America’s status as a reluctant warrior, the Bible, and the dynamics of groups of people jammed together in an artificial situation. 

To find anything trivializing or defamatory in any of them requires, at best, an overly-literal reading – and at worst, a focus on grievance-mongering that’s become so common that the little parodies above could very well exist for real, for all we know, somewhere in the world of academe this past few decades.

But Casablanca, Old Man and the Sea and The Office are not literal descriptions of professions or industries.  They all aim for something else.

So, too, with Hurt Locker.

———-

The Hurt Locker doesn’t seem to leave a lot of people in the middle; people either love it (it’s up there with Avalon as the front-runner for Best Picture at the Oscars) or not love it (some veterans pan its realism).

Let me take a step back here.

There are very, very few people in the world who take their calling quite as seriously as soldiers (and sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen, for that matter); their trades are literally a matter of life and death for themselves, their comrades, everyone around them and, eventually, all of us.  Like cops, firemen, doctors, nurses and paramedics, theirs is a profession not merely of commitment – but where the consequences of lack of commitment are deadly.

Duly noted.  That is as it should be.

And people who take their professions seriously are justifiably critical of people who try to portray their profession inaccurately. 

Is Hurt Locker “accurate?” 

Not in the sense that, say, Band of Brothers strove for accuracy.  But BoB was history – a collective oral history of real events told by real people, who were portrayed as themselves, as they had been 50 years earlier.  It’s theme was very literal; a group of ordinary, teenage-to-twentysomethign Americans who did extraordinary things, and forged an extraordinary bond.  It was a story as powerful as any fiction.

Hurt Locker is a work of fiction.  It’s not literal history; its’ primary purpose isn’t accuracy, and isn’t supposed to be.

If it was, of course, it’ would have failed…:

The film, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by journalist Mark Boal (who was embedded with a bomb disposal team), stars Jeremy Renner as Staff Sgt. William James. Not deterred by protocol or his own safety, James is an adrenaline-addicted bomb defuser who occasionally puts his unit at risk, and at one point takes to the streets of Baghdad on a solo personal mission. Members of EOD teams in southern Iraq said in interviews arranged by the Army that “The Hurt Locker” is a good action movie if you know nothing about defusing roadside bombs or the military.

Sgt. Eric Gordon of San Pedro, an Air Force EOD technician on his second tour in Iraq, has watched the movie a few times with his friends. “I would watch it with other EOD people, and we would laugh,” Gordon said.

He scoffed at a scene in which a bomb is defused with wire cutters. “It’s similar to having a firefighter go into a building with a squirt bottle,” Gordon said.

An EOD team leader in Maysan province, Staff Sgt. Jeremy D. Phillips, said, “My interest is bringing myself and my team members home alive, with all of our appendages in the right place.”

Although he was glad the film highlighted their trade, he disliked the celluloid treatment of EOD units. “There is too much John Wayne and cowboy stuff. It is very loosely based on actual events,” he said. “I’m honestly glad they are trying to convey to the public what we’ve been doing, and I wish maybe they had just done it with a little bit of a different spin on it,” he said.

Others are more supportive. Sloan, a former U.S. Army captain, said at the panel discussion that “The Hurt Locker” offered a perfect snapshot of modern conflict. “This is what’s going on for the men and women who are fighting this war,” he said.

All well and good, the pro and the con.  Those reviews are better than some I’ve seen, like this one on Yahoo…:

“The depiction of our community in this film is disrespectful,” said Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “We are not cowboys. We are not reckless. We are professionals.”

This is more or less the same review I got from a fellow from Big Hollywood that John Hinderaker interviewed on the Volume I Northern Alliance show a few weeks back; the show was anti-American, or at least anti-military, because it portrayed soldiers unrealistically – and some of that portrayal was at the very least unprofessional, to say nothing of not technically realistic; they do things, they say, that American soldiers realistically just don’t do, as professionals, warriors or people.

Which would be a valid criticism – except that the movie isn’t about what American soldiers do.  It’s not a how-to on disposing of bombs, or fighting a counterinsurgency.  It’s about war, and its affect on people who partake in it.  It’s about psychology, not combat engineering.

The big three criticisms seem to be that the Hurt Locker:

• is technically unrealistic,
• shows the American troops – from Jeremy Renner’s taut, layered Staff Sergeant Mackey to David Morse’s almost surfer-dude-like bird colonel to Christian Camargo’s flippant, risk-taking psychiatrist – as unrealistically unprofessional.
• that it show’s Renner’s character as an unrealistically bad human being.

As to the first charge?  Doy.  That was apparent in Mackey’s first incident – where he pulled on a piece of wire and dislodged eight artillery shells connected into a remote-controlled explosive.  The shells wiggled like empty milk cartons when Mackey pulled the wire; in reality, they weigh 80-100 pounds apiece.  Chalk it up to dramatic license.

As to the second charge?  I’ll refer back to my original review last summer.  I noted that the movie gave us a hint in the opening scene:

The new film The Hurt Locker opens with this quote, from former NYTimes war correspondent Chris Hedges, in white type over a black background:

The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.

As the movie rolled into the first scene, the last clause – “war is a drug” stayed highlighted.

…

…I had no idea what to say about the film.  Something didn’t quite add up.

Then I looked up the rest of Chris Hedges’ quote.   I found it, from a piece he wrote for Amnesty International back in 2002:

…one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by myth makers -historians, war correspondents, filmmakers novelists and the state-all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty. It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language and infects everything around it, even humor, which becomes preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death. Fundamental questions about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of our place on the planet are laid bare when we watch those around us sink to the lowest depths. War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks just below the surface within all of us.

And then it hit me.  It’s not a war movie – or should I say, it’s not just a war movie.  It’s a movie about war as a drug, and its affect on its addicts.

The movie isn’t about bomb disposal engineers.  The film could have been set among Israeli tank drivers or Danish commandos or British submariners, or for that matter professional infantrymen from the Roman centurion to Lee Marvin’s long-timer “The Sergeant” in The Big Red One to the yin and yang of Sergeants Barnes and Elias (Tom Berenger and Willem Defoe) in Platoon to any number of other portrayals of people who’ve made a living of the art, craft and hell of war.  It’s not about defusing bombs; it’s about war’s affect on a guy who does it for a living and a life.

The final criticism – which was levelled by the Big Hollywood critic on the NARN broadcast – was that near the end of the film…

SPOILER ALERT

(more…)

In my comment section, Jeff Kouba pointed me to a recent “book review” by the Strib’s Kristin Tillotson.

At least, it became a book review, of sorts.  But in the first graf, it was hard to tell (emphasis added):

Wells Tower is a serious wiseacre, the kind who gets away with it not because of his cleverness, but because he cuts to hard truths.

As a clever wiseacre with a thing for hard truths, I sat up and took notice!

 Written with startlingly original voice, careening imagination and an abiding fondness for what Teabaggers would call “the non-elites,” his stories are set in a surreal America we know, but aren’t sure we want to.

I’m trying to wrap my brain around a thought process that prods Ms. Tillotson to swerve that far outside any rational connection to her theme to take a passive-aggressive, blovious swipe at what may have once been half of her newspaper’s audience.

And I’m still trying.

So I sent this email to Ms. Tillotson:

Ms. Tillotson,

I’m trying to figure out the point of the “Teabagger” slur in your review of Wells Tower’s short story collection.  It seems – labored? 

I’d suggest a couple of possibilities, but I’d hate to get written off as one of those with “pursed lips, bloviating and passive-aggression“, so I figured I’d let you put it all in your own words.

Mitch Berg

I don’t expect anyone from the Strib to respond to mere peasants, of course.  And if they do, it’ll be something…well, pursed, blovious and passive-aggressive, usually. 

But I’ll keep you posted.

Via Roger Ebert’s twitter feed:

Kathryn Bigelow wins the [Directors Guild] Award for “The Hurt Locker!” That makes Locker the favorite for Best Picture in the Oscars.

Now that is good news.

I loved Hurt Locker when I saw it last summer; if you haven’t seen it, by all means do.  It is one fantastic movie, and I’m hoping it hits the Oscars like a 152mm shell wired to a homemade detonator.

Rhetorically speaking.

J. D. Salinger is dead.

He’s most famous – at least among the non-English-Department crowd – for Catcher in the Rye:

“Catcher” was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly echoing Mark Twain, struck a brash new note in American literature: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

Though not everyone, teachers and librarians especially, was sure what to make of it, “Catcher” became an almost immediate best seller, and its narrator and main character, Holden Caulfield, a teenager newly expelled from prep school, became America’s best-known literary truant since Huckleberry Finn.

With its cynical, slangy vernacular voice (Holden’s two favorite expressions are “phony” and “goddam”), its sympathetic understanding of adolescence and its fierce if alienated sense of morality and distrust of the adult world, the novel struck a nerve in cold war America and quickly attained cult status, especially among the young. Reading “Catcher” used to be an essential rite of passage, almost as important as getting your learner’s permit.

Musta been a baby-boomer thing; I hated Catcher. 

No, that’s not true; I hated Holden Caulfield.  Viscerally.  Down in the pit of my stomach, I wanted to strangle that moopy little fop.  I don’t even know why.  I last read the book when I was 18; Caulfield filled me with revulsion so intense I could taste it.  Maybe that’s the mark of a good book – or maybe someone who probably wasn’t an especially sophisticated reader.  Not sure yet.

I probably should give Catcher another try, to see if the lack of post-adolescent emotion or hormones opens something up to me that I missed before.

Until then?  Sorry.

I work at a company that employs (like a lot of American companies these days) a very large number of south-Asian subcontractors.  Most of them come from one rather large Indian vendor.  And that vendor threw a little “Understanding India” session for us a few weeks back.

It was interesting, of course; other cultures fascinate me, India more than most.  I grew up around a fair number of South Asians in North Dakota (it’s a long story), and had some exposure to the culture.  Still the vendor session was fascinating.

And frustrating; to try to explain a culture as old, broad, multifaceted and complex as India in 90 minutes was a little like – well, trying to explain cricket to Americans.

And then I thought; how would I explain America to a foreigner new to the country?

Not all the usual “civics in ten minutes” stuff – the broad strokes of our history and culture.  I got to wonder – what’d be a good, entertaining crash course in “what is America” to someone who’d never been here before?

And I thought; almost every culture in the world, from the poorest village in rural Pakistan to the eighties in Manhattan, has one form of communication in common; the movie.  Even if you don’t speak a foreign language, you can often make out at least the broad outlines of what a movie is trying to say.

So my question is this; if you had to pick five movies to explain America to someone from another country who had only the usual civics-class understanding of our nation and culture, what would they be?

Leave comments.

British researchers have helped chimps produce their first video:

The apes created the movie using a specially designed chimp-proof camera given to them by primatologists.

The film-making exercise is part of a scientific study into how chimpanzees perceive the world and each other.

It will be screened within the Natural World programme “Chimpcam” shown on BBC Two at 2000GMT on Wednesday 27 January.

Hollywood’s production community, which is already losing thousands of jobs to Canada, is rapidly trying to unionize the primates.

Late word has it that both KTLK-FM and Janet Roberts’ “AM950” are trying to sign the chimps, pending figuring out their political sympathies.

Yesterday:

According to Jim Cramer, a victory by Republican Scott Brown in today’s Massachusetts Senate election will spark a market rally on Wednesday.

Today:

Stocks Post Biggest Drop Since October

As a part-time blogger and full-time wealth management advisor, can I give you some free advice?

Jim Cramer is an entertainer.

Nothing more.

You’re welcome.

It’s on the agenda:

One word for you:

Double-Gut-To-Face-y.

Please rectify the problem.

That is all.

I am a pretty skimpy TV watcher.  Less so than I used to be, but I’m not what you’d call a heavy consumer.

But what’s a guy to do when my two must-see series – 24 and Burn Notice – have their season premieres the same week?

Other than “call the pizzeria”, I mean?

If seeing James Cameron’s boffo blockbuster special effects extravaganza Avatar doesn’t give you a 3-D induced headache, apparently it will give you thoughts of suicide instead:

The beautiful alien planet Pandora depicted in James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ is so captivating that some audience members are becoming depressed and even suicidal when they fail to find meaning in real life after the film is over…

“I just watched avatar a few weeks ago and I’m feeling depressed and sad. It’s like I want to reach out and be in Pandora. I’d do anything to be in Pandora. I’ve tried so hard to dream about me being on Pandora but it hasn’t worked.”

“Ever since I went to see ‘Avatar’ I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na’vi made me want to be one of them. I can’t stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it. I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in ‘Avatar.'”

I’ll admit I felt the urge to grab a gun after seeing “Cool as Ice”, but I don’t think it involved the same motivations.

While there’s nothing amusing about the serious depression and social alienation that allows individuals to be driven to thoughts of suicide from a 3-D film with 2-D characters, Cameron’s opus isn’t the first nor the last work of science fiction to do so.  There’s Star Wars depression.  There’s Twilight depression.  Who knows, maybe even Mitch’s light posting this morning caused a few cases of SITD withdrawal.

But regardless of the source, the causes for such depression from a work of fiction seem as much culturally based as personality-driven:

Tamara Nichols, who practiced psychotherapy for 11 years, says, “[The genre] can provide a sort of a symbolic model for people who don’t fit into the more mainstream ideas of what a man should be, what a woman should be.”

…it seems that many people who read science fiction as children had similar experiences: raised outside their mother countries, moved frequently, had health problems, troubled childhoods, and/or were academically gifted. These circumstances led these people to delve more deeply into books than to reach out to other people.

A multitude of critics as varied as the floral and fawna on Cameron’s fictional Pandora have expounded on the political and social messages that Avatar and its appeal suggest.  But regardless of the film’s real or accidental messages (and Cameron leaves little doubt about environmental intentions of the movie), the concept that Avatar’s appeal is largely what filmmakers 50 years used to call a “sword and sandal spectacle” is seemingly too timid a conclusion for some to be willing to reach.  What would columnists and bloggers have to write about without broad, overreaching conclusions on social phenomena?  Especially when your protagonists are giant blue cat people.

Maybe that’s the real underlying message of Avatar – millions of people are secretly suicidal furries.

I’m interested in keeping up with each of these things…:

1. Shaun Cassidy’s latest career evolutions
2. Vikings trivia from the seventies
3. Reading Frankie Yankovic’s biography
4. Pat Buchanan’s Super Bowl picks through the years
5. Paint jobs on BOAC airliners from the fifties

…more than The Kardashians.

And the list is probably not done.

That is all.

To:  Would-be YouTube “Stars”

From: Mitch Berg

Re:  Your Activities

To whom it may concern:

You know who you are.  You make videos of yourselves sitting on the toilet chanting “I’m Sittin’ On Da Toilet”.  You have your roommates post videos of you, slobbering drunk, chanting “Hhhope ‘enn chanzhe” over and over. You scream yourself into incontinence over how “we” are treating Britney and importune us to “leave her alone”.

You are hereby directed to destroy your cameras and report to the nearest bar full of longshoremen for a long-overdue beating.

That is all.