Mistress Of All Evil

Coda and Spoilers: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

2012-01-11T13:15:00.002-06:00

I guess it must be a great movie, because I am still thinking about it. And the point I want to make--if I didn't make it before, or make it clearly enough--is that the story of the mole is not the real story of the film. "Who is the mole?" is the plot, and it engages the mind and pulls the viewer through, but the real story is located in the few moments that edge that plot.

The real story, the story underneath the mechanics of who the suspects are, how to locate them, what has been compromised, is that political ideology has no reality. Humans work to uphold political ideals, but those ideals don't make anyone's life any better. It's the dispiriting realization that all the members of the Circus work to keep Britain safe from the Soviets, but that their lives as lived are no better for it.

The emotional cosh comes in some off-hand moments, especially at the end. [SPOILERS!!]

Gary Oldman, as George Smiley, goes to "The Cottage," a small cabin in a wood, fenced in and topped with barbed wire, where the captured mole is being held until he can be returned to the Russians in some unexplained diplomatic exchange. The mole here is Colin Firth, standing a bit awkwardly in this rustic location--he was "Tailor" and his urbanity is at odds with the natural surroundings. This is a man for cities, not trees and falling leaves. As he smokes casually, he unburdens himself to Smiley. I don't even remember if Smiley asks him any questions, even, but it is obvious what he wants to ask--Why?

"It was as much an aesthetic choice as anything," Firth says, blowing out cigarette smoke. "Britain had become so ugly." And that was the revelation, at least for me.

My experience of the Cold War was most vivid during the Reagan years, when those Bad Soviets drove so much of Reagan's world view and foreign policy. And at that time, we were deep into the 1980s aesthetic, where big hair and asymmetric clothes and neon colors signaled an era of excess. Greed was good, fortunes were being made in mergers and acquisitions, luxury goods were trickling down into department stores and within the reach of more and more people.

Oh, sure, it looks silly now, but at the time it was such a breath of fresh air after the drab Earth-shoe earnestness and ugliness of the 1970s. The Soviet Union, in contrast, remained stuck in the aesthetic of concrete construction and bland clothing. The popular image was of ugly people in drab clothing waiting in long lines to just buy bread.

Well, isn't it obvious how much better Western freedoms are? Sure it is! That's why the Soviet Union collapsed--Mikhail Gorbachev let his lovely wife Raisa go shopping in America, and it was all over!

What is apparent in every detail of the production design of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is that life in Britain of the 1970s wasn't much different than life in the Soviet Bloc. The work done by the Circus was no more noble or enriching than the machinations of their opposites of the USSR. That Colin Firth could stand on English soil and believe that Russian life was more aesthetically pleasing felt accurate after the two hours of living in the recreated world of the movie. Britain was ugly, and was about to get uglier as Thatcher policies inflamed class resentments. The thing about this mole--he was a traitor to the country, but he wasn't wrong.

The movie ends with brief vignettes of the lives of the characters we have been seeing, including Smiley walking into his home and approaching his faithless wife. She betrayed him with Bill Haydon (Colin Firth), herself a victim of Haydon's deliberate campaign to seduce her. He was under orders to do so, because the Soviet Spy (Karla) believed that this would exploit Smiley's weakness and make it harder for Smiley to see Haydon accurately and allow him to continue operating as a mole. And it worked--to a point.

So the future relationship between Smiley and his wife is now compromised--she was unfaithful, but she was targeted because of Smiley. How much is he to blame? And equally important, what else does he have to keep him tethered to life without her? She is far from perfect--is she better than nothing? What other options does he have, given who he is and what he does?

So much of this movie is told through the production design--the changing world signaled by the passing of the Old Guard and their short hair; the rise of the New Generation with their longer hair and casual shoes; the spare ugliness of the buildings and materials that surround the Circus; the ugly cars and grubby streets. Even the use of color is so restrained--some of the only bright spots are Benedict Cumberbatch's matching tie and handkerchief, which are themselves coded to convey his character's homosexuality.

Finally, the reality of the British spy game is so demoralizing because the whole point of Karla's putting a mole into The Circus was not because he had any interest in British intelligence--Britain was virtually useless and marginalized, a tiny island of no value. Karla was trying to hook the Americans, and using The Circus as bait for the big fish. All this human cost, all this pain, all these lives sacrificed and destroyed, and they were only the pawns of a larger game.

Smiley is no James Bond, and spy work is not glamorous, rewarding, or even useful, and the more clearly you see the work of espionage, the less you can see the difference between one side and the other. That's the real story LeCarre was telling, and that's the real story of the movie.

Wonderful.

Young Adult--A Review

2012-01-09T14:08:00.002-06:00

It is apprarently fashionable to hate Diablo Cody--especially to hate her breakout movie Juno. I am not going to get on that band wagon, since I thought Juno did exactly what it had to do--it had to announce that Diablo Cody knew what she was doing. Plus it was enjoyable as hell while telling a story that could otherwise have fallen into the hole of A Very Special Episode of The Facts of Life. Teen pregnancy, blended families, divorce, inappropriate relations between a high school teacher and student, the strains on a marriage of infertility and then parenthood--all were encompassed in the story which still managed to be funny, hopeful and open-hearted.

Young Adult is not another Juno, and I have no idea if Juno-haters will like this one better. I liked it, and the evidence of this blog is that I hate everything, so make of that what you will. Charlize Theron plays Mavis Gary, living alone in a high rise apartment overlooking the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, struggling to write the last installment of a high school novel series call "Waverly High." Despite her glamorous job title, docile purse dog and big city life, Mavis's life isn't what she thought it would be. Her apartment, for example--the view is great, the furniture is crap. She is a published author of a crap serial that is being remaindered even as she writes the last title. She's Charlize Theron for crap's sake, but much of her beauty is revealed to be a show as we watch her elaborate preparations for a date.

The movie shows us all of this, without feeling the need to spell it out explicitly for us. The dog, for example. It's a Pomeranian and she's bought a special travel case to cart him around in, but she does only the minimum of daily care for him. She never walks him, instead shoving him onto the tiny balcony of her apartment where she's placed a tiny square of artificial grass and (IIRC) a plastic fire hydrant. When she goes back to her small town hometown, she leaves him in the hotel room with a pee pad. This is a woman who gives the barest minimum effort and seems to resent even that much. She is a toxic mess on a mission of disaster.

What plot there is involves her receiving an email from her old high school boyfriend, announcing the birth of his first daughter. Mavis decides this is a cry for help, and she packs up and drives home in order to rescue Buddy from his marriage and baby. In a sharply observed juxtaposition, Mavis calls him from a bar, where she is downing drinks while dressed for serious clubbing. He answers the phone and we never even see his face, just his hands as he empties the milk from a pair of breast pumps into sealable bags which he labels and freezes. Of course, Mavis doesn't see this either--it is a phone call after all--but even if she were in the room with him, she wouldn't see what this means to him. She would only see it as disgusting evidence of his trapped status.

The movie proceeds to show us Mavis doing all she can to recapture the glory days of high school while avoiding the mess of her life. Out withe her dog, she is obviously being followed by a car--which turns out to be her mother, who she has obviously been avoiding. Back in her parents' house, she finds a large framed wedding photo still on the wall. When she asks her mother to take it down, Mom doesn't have any sympathy or understanding why it might be objectionable. "We are divorced, Mom." "Well, I thought it was a happy memory." "Of my failed marriage?" "The wedding wasn't a failure--remember the tirimisu?"

Added to the mix is Matt Freehauf, played by Patton Oswalt. Their lockers were next to each other all through high school, but she doesn't recognize him at all until she makes the connection to him as "the hate crime guy." He had been beaten savagely by some high school athletes who thought he was gay. It caused some attention until it turned out that he wasn't even gay and then even that attention dried up. Mavis uses him as a drinking buddy and a sounding board for her plans to escape with Buddy. Matt sees this as the delusional plan that it is, but he is obviously lonely and again--this attention is better than none. So he drinks with Mavis, listens to her reminiscences and tries to make her see what reality looks like.

The film cycles through her various attempts to fascinate and connect with Buddy, and his gentle Minnesota refusal to engage or to call her on her bullshit. The climax comes at a baby naming ceremony and reception at Buddy's house. Mavis embarrasses herself in front of the entire population of people she knows, and she runs from the scene to Matt, who offers her some sympathy and (more importantly) alcohol and sex to soothe the blow to her self-esteem. Even so, she is beginning to question herself when she meets Matt's younger sister the morning after. Sandra obviously idolized Mavis in high school and has continued to do so even now. As Mavis voices her self-doubt, Sandra quickly reassures her. "You are so much better than the people here" she says, and Mavis swallows this KoolAid. The "learning moment" was presented, and she resolutely refused it. More damning, Mavis so thoroughly returns to her self-centered ways that she destroys whatever relationships she might have built with Matt and Sandra--she slips out of town before Matt wakes up, and when Sandra asks "take me with you to Minneapolis" Mavis refuses. "You are good here" she says, which is brutal after Sandra has just explained how pathetic the people of Mercury actually are. It's like she not only bites the hand that feeds her, but she rubs salt in the wound as well.

The movie ends with a sly parody of the young adult genre. As Mavis drives back to Minneapolis, we hear her voice-over reading the last paragraph of her "Waverly High" book, intoning platitudes about how she was ready to leave the past (and high school) behind and face the real world. Which would be a cliche, except it is painfully clear that Mavis Gary has not made that leap herself.

Definitely worth the two hours of time to watch, and likely to be a regular repeat on a number of cable channels in the near future. Check it out.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy--A Review

2012-01-09T13:00:00.000-06:00

No, I haven't read the John LeCarre novel and I never saw the miniseries starring Alec Guinness. I don't even usually see spy movies or read spy novels. But how can you resist the cast list?

Gary Oldman
Colin Firth
John Hurt
Toby Jones
Mark Strong

And two of the 2011 Edition Pretty Boys: Tom Hardy and Benedict Cumberbatch.

With a cast like that, and a strong story (I mean! The book was written almost 40 years ago and it's still famous!) you know that there was going to be some Major Acting going on. And yes--these boys acted the hell out of this story.

If you've seen the trailer, you know the basics of the plot. At the height of the Cold War (this is 1973 after all) British Intelligence has a mole at the highest levels. John Hurt wants to find out who it is, but his suspicions threaten an intelligence source, and he and Gary Oldman get forced into retirement. Then John Hurt is killed, and Gary Oldman is persuaded that the mole is real and he's the right guy to figure out who it is. It's one of the top four men in the service, given code names Tinker, Tailor, Soldier and Poorman.

Now, if you are Britain and you believe your entire intelligence operation has been compromised, would you turn to this guy to keep you safe?

Um--NO. He's even a Russian Terrorist--this guy would be the mole and would simply mow down everyone who got in his way while demanding the Crown Jewels. At least!

Okay, what about this guy?

I don't think you even have to answer that one. Do you suppose he wears the plastic head thing to cover brain surgery and ECT scars?

No. Just---no.

Wow. Britain really is in trouble. A little heroin, and Russia has a new patsy.

And I see the gleam of psychotic break in his eyes.

No, if this is the man who is going to be the last defense against Soviet infiltrations, we should just start learning how to drink vodka and write in Cyrillic. This guy is going to kill everyone and then turn double agent himself and. . .

And. . .

And wait a second. What about THIS guy?

That level gaze! That firm set of the mouth! That almost but not quite beige hair and skin and raincoat that amounts to near total self-effacement! This is the kind of guy who is smart, who is going to play his hand close to his vest, who is never going to be corrupted in any way! Yes! We'll take him and England will be saved!

Which is to say that Gary Oldman does an amazing job as George Smiley. He is so restrained and so uncharismatic, and yet he is implacable and you just know that once he has been set to solve the problem, shit is going to get solved!

Which it does, but there is no triumph in it. The damage has been done and the human toll is paid. The movie ends with a series of glimpses of the people left after the mole is discovered and all of them carry visible emotional scars. George Smiley and his wife are distant from each other; Mark Strong has lost his closest emotional connection and his belief in the value of what he does; people who were forced out of their jobs remain marginalized and useless despite their talents and devotion; the heads of The Circus (what LeCarre calls the intelligence service) have all been broken, exposed, and destroyed; and yet the Cold War grinds on and the work continues regardless of the human lives eaten up because to stop would be even worse.

The look of the film is exquisite--muted sepia-flavored light, not quite nostalgia-inducing, but clearly signaling a time in the past. The cars are ugly 1970s freaks of British automaking, and George Smiley is driven around in something that looks remarkably like a cockroach. The Circus works in barely converted warehouse space, with ugly desks and walls, clearly stock scavanged and possibly dating back to WWII salvage. The generations are signaled quietly, with the Old Guard (most clearly lead by John Hurt) sporting crisp hair cut close to the neck, while the New Generation (notably Mark Strong and Colin Firth) letting their hair grow down to their collars.

The underlings are played by Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hardy, each sporting a weird blonde dye job that marks their connection despite the differences in their roles signaled by every other thing about them--Hardy is a mess in denims and tennis shoes, often unshaven, smoking compulsively and completely emotionally rattled. Cumberbatch is smooth-faced, tightly controlled, deferential and cool, invariably in a buttoned up three piece suit with matching tie and handkerchief and hard soled Oxford shoes. Not preternatually Sherlock-style cool, but when put in obvious fear for his life he remains collected and his panic is obvious in his widened eyes and slightly faster walk. And somebody couldn't resist the temptation--his suits are tailored just a hair too wonderfully for his character's position. As a movie-goer, I appreciated the visual treat.

It's a great movie, but the plot is a little too Byzantine for the two-hour running time. I think I followed it (LeCarre virgin that I am) but the emotional moments didn't have the impact they probably should have. The identity of the mole made no emotional impression on me--I didn't care about who the suspects were, so I didn't care if they were (or weren't) guilty. The effect on our hero Smiley was non-existent as well, since he had already been thoroughly betrayed by The Circus at the beginning of the story. Nor had the relationships between the characters been well enough established for us to experience any of their pain--in fact, the whole cast were kind of like scorpions sealed in a bottle, and they were busy stinging each other to death for one reason or another, many of them petty. In some lights, being a Russian mole was arguably a more noble motive for betrayal than mere career advancement.

Having said that, the pure intellectualism of the story-telling is satisfying. You couldn't do this work and feel unalloyed patriotism--it's clear that Smiley at least does the work because he believes it has to be done, and he intellectually accepts the price he has to pay to do so. It's an elegant and intellectual film and definitely worth seeing. It's a crisp, tart contrast to the wallowing Oscar-bait movies swamping the theaters.

We Saw ALL the Movies!

2012-01-08T00:39:00.004-06:00

The past month has been Movie Madness Chez Evil, and I saw more movies in four weeks than I have seen in the preceding twelve months. At least, if my math is right. I need to make a quick list of them all, or I will forget.

Even more amazing is how many of them were actually movies that I saw in actual movie theaters, not just rentals on my laptop. In order to remember which ones I should review, I will make a quick list here and then post actual reviews separately.

Thus, in no particular order except of how I remember them, the movies of December and January:

The Muppet Movie
Hugo
Young Adult
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
The Artist
Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows
We Bought A Zoo

Extra Bonus Movies (not seen in theaters)
The House of Flying Daggers
Citizen Kane
St. Trinian's
X-Men:First Class

Not a bad collection, and I didn't hate any of them--this is quite an endorsement, coming from me!

I will attempt to post one review per day of the theatrically viewed movies--the other ones, well, we'll see.

Confusion in College Football.

2012-01-04T23:11:00.001-06:00

Back in the day when I was an undergraduate, I lived in a dorm that housed and fed the football team. So I was privy to the utter ridiculousness of Big 10 football and the oxymoron that was the "student-athlete." A neighbor of mine was seduced by the supposed glamor of these man-boys, and she did their homework in return for the scraps of attention they gave her in dropping off and picking up the papers she wrote for them.

It is necessary in this transaction for all the parties to be not terribly bright--she was (willfully?) oblivious of the degree to which she was being crassly taken advantage of, and they weren't getting very good papers in return because she wasn't that great of a scholar herself. At least one regular customer of hers showed up after a game in which he was removed from the field due to a concussion--and there was really no way to see any difference in him.

So, I am rather jaded about collegiate football generally, and am not a fan of the game anyway. So I never kept up with the changes

So, this year, I heard that the "Doritos Fiesta Bowl" takes place in the "University of Phoenix Stadium."

Dudes--the University of Phoenix is an on-line university. The questions arise:

Does even a non-existent university need to have a football stadium? Has collegiate athletics gotten THAT corrupt?

Why would a college football championship be played in an imaginary university's stadium? More to the point, since "University of Phoenix" is a for-profit institution, does that just make the hypocrisy of college athletics obvious?

Yeah--send your hate mail to me, and feel free to explain what I have failed to understand, but football just does not make any sense to me. I am willing to be educated, but I can hold out little hope of your success.

The God of Carnage, a review

2011-06-25T16:15:00.000-05:00

Saw the play "The God of Carnage" at the Guthrie last night, and I'm still thinking about it. It's a chamber piece that is very much like "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" but with less acid. Two couples, a living room, 90 minutes--it's short, it's interesting, but ultimately is it meaningful?

The set-up is that Veronica and Michael Novak have invited Annette and Alan Raleigh to discuss the fact that the Raleighs' son Benjamin has hit Henry Novak in the face with a stick at a neighborhood park. We never see or hear from the boys--this is all about the parents. At first, it is deeply cringe inducing--it is all to easy to imagine the parents of my acquaintance getting into exactly this sort of nurturing community disciplinary action. Two boys got into an altercation on a playground, and the parents have to convene and establish a joint response. That's right--the parents get together and have this weird discussion about what happened and how it happened, and it was deliberate and does Benjamin understand that he has disfigured his playmate. And at some point, the veneer of cooperation comes off.

Which it should, because, really? Veronica Novak is furious that this eleven-year old hooligan has hit her son, and she wants to know that he's going to be punished to her satisfaction. She wants him to be disciplined, she wants to know he feels guilty and miserable, and she wants retribution. But she's such a civilized New Yorker, that she can only come at that vengeance obliquely. She asks if Benjamin feels guilty, if he understands the violence he has perpetrated, and she's very disappointed to hear that Benjamin--as a fairly typical 11 year old--knows he's in trouble, but isn't particularly upset about it. So, Veronica insists that Benjamin be brought over to apologize to Henry, but only if he fully understands the seriousness of his behavior, and Veronica wants both the Raleighs to be present as well. And she does it in the guise of "teaching Benjamin" and "helping him so it doesn't happen again." She skates between being a hostess--it is her living room where the play takes place--and being a protector of her children. She doesn't scale to the heights of Greek or Jacobean revenge plays, but not because she doesn't feel the emotional impetus to it. She just tries to keep it on the level of NYC social niceties.

The Raleighs start the evening trying to be conciliatory and businesslike. Yes, our son hit your son, and we do not approve of his actions. What must we do to rectify the situation? They are tentative, rather abashed--it is clear that both sets of parents deeply identify with their children, and Benjamin's action has shamed his parents. They are willing to do what the Novaks ask to resolve the situation. But those relationships don't stay static.

Alan declares his son a "savage!" A way to distance himself and his own self-image from his boy. Then Veronica slips in one too many comments about her disapproval of Benjamin, and Alan is roused to his son's defense. The evening wears on, alcohol is introduced, and hints appear that perhaps Henry wasn't particularly innocent. There are intimations that Henry may have taunted Benjamin past that boy's ability to stand it. "But that's not the point here!" Veronica says, because she doesn't want to hear anything to disturb her conception of Henry as an innocent victim, which the Raleighs are willing to indulge up to a point, in the hopes of smoothing over the event.

Then as the discussion continues and (inevitably wanders), we see a divide along gender lines. The men understand that boys define their masculinity through strength and fighting, and they both have fond memories of their own boyhood that involved shows of dominance and successful fights. The mothers are appalled--as a fundamental difference over the proper level of "civilization" begins to show. The men begin to rebel against the smothering "niceness" of the women's world views, and begin to bond with each other over rum and cigars. But marital loyalties can't be entirely transgressed, and soon the men find themselves having to back up their wives.

But the rum loosens the lips, dissuades the Raleighs from leaving, and each of the characters begins to show their anger and disappointment at the world and their lives. At least two characters declare this as the "worst day of my life." Which is in stark contrast to the larger world which is referred to--Veronica has written a book on Darfur, and Alan is an attorney who has a case at the International Criminal Court at the Hague. This "worst" is far from the worst these characters know about--and yet they fully believe their claims.

Throughout the play, Alan's cell phone goes off: one of his clients is a pharmaceutical company and a new report has just come out about serious side effects of one of its drugs. Alan is counselling his client to go on th offensive--accuse the report of being an attempt to manipulate stock prices in advance of a shareholders' meeting, don't recall the drug, refuse to acknowledge any responsibility. This is the opposite of his role as a penitent in the Novak living room, and you see how he came to this meeting solely to pacify his wife. She is obviously engaged in a battle for attention from her husband--the cell goes off one too many times, after one too many glasses of rum, and she grabs it from his hand and dunks it into a vase of tulips, ruining it. Alan ends up on the floor in a tantrum of anger and frustration, his own ability to control his emotions reducing him to a toddler. Is it any wonder that the children of these "adults" misbehave themselves?

This is a play that is well-crafted, but not outstanding. The Guthrie actors were quite good, and the characters were distinct, but the production didn't really say anything new about human nature, parenting, or why it's not a good idea to drink a lot of rum on an empty stomach. It is possible to imagine how some truly great actors might elevate this play, and it turns out that Roman Polanski is making a movie version with what might just be a dream cast. Jodie Foster as Veronica, John C. Reilly as her husband Michael, Kate Winslet and Christoph Walz as Annette and Alan. Just imagining those four sitting stiffly in an elegant living room is to see the inherent tension of the situation, and it is easy to see how the various alliance could shift and coalesce.

Sanibel Sunset

2011-04-20T19:27:00.000-05:00

I am sitting in a time-share condo on Sanibel Island watching the sun set. Well, since the building actually faces sort of South South-East, I am watching the effects of the sunset, as the sky goes from blue with brilliant white clouds to pink and purple, and now to a sort of steely blue with some oyster-colored spots. The Gulf went from a muted blue-green through silvery-gray, to now a pearly blue that is close to the color of the sky. Earlier, just before the sun set, there was an enormous cumulus cloud that was directly in the sun's rays, and the reflection of that light on the water left a shining white path as white as it gets at night, when the lack of light leeches all the color from the landscape and the full moon turns the black water bright.

I've been painting the last couple of days, sitting on the porch and looking at the view and painting. It's a little bit tricky, as there is a Building-Code-Required railing that runs right across my eye-level. It's a trade-off: it obscures the view, but then I don't fall to my death.

The last time I was here on Sanibel was some 13 years ago, when my kids were babies and travelling anywahere just ment doing the same jobs in a different location with slightly fewer things to keep the kids safe and occupied. In that time, Sanibel has hardly changed. A few restaurants have changed hands or closed, there are a few more people on the beaches, but the biggest change has to be the disappearance of the Australian Pines.

Australian Pines are a a feathery sort of evergreen, that were originally planted as windbreaks. They gave the island a sort of familiar, homey look to those of us from the Frozen Northland, where we are used to lots of piney woods. There were quite a few planted along the main road that runs up the length of the island, and they gave the road the feeling of a cathedral, as they arched high overhead. I remember one night riding in the back seat of an open convertible, laying my head back against the seat and watching the pines go by. My brother and husband were in the front seat, and because of the acoustics of a convertible, I could hear that they were talking, but nothing they were saying. It was just another noise, like the sound of the waves on the beach, and I let the wind whip my hair into my eyes as I say the night float overhead.

The trouble with Australian pines on an island on the Gulf of Mexico, however, is that sometimes there are hurricanes. And Australian pines have what was described to me as a "pancake" root system. Flat, thin, close to the surface. Far from being an effective windbreak, they tended to just topple over--especially the large ones that were 100 feet tall or more. Most of the damage done on Sanibel (as opposed to on Captiva or elsewhere) was not from the hurricane winds themselves, but from the Australian pines flying around.

So, sure, I miss them--they were introduced in the late 1800s and certainly have better claim to being here than most of the people, but with them gone, the island actually looks more tropical and exotic. I can live with the change.

And now the sun is completely gone. If I turn around just so, I can see the light of the Sanibel Lighthouse flashing about the building and trees. Lovely. Just lovely.

High Tops Are Back?

2011-04-20T11:17:00.000-05:00

Men with chainsaws arrived this morning at the place I am staying on Sanibel Island. Their mission? To take off the dead branches off the palm trees. The result? Instead of gracefully drooping fronds that wave and rattle in the breezes off the Gulf, they all look like this:

No lie.

Farewell, True and Faithful Companion

2011-04-20T10:28:00.000-05:00

Those of us who are fans of Doctor Who received sad news yesterday--Elisabeth Sladen, best known to us as "Sarah Jane Smith" passed away yesterday.

Sarah Jane Smith was my first companion, as far as I can recall. Back in the dark days of 1981-82, when the only way to get "Who" was through oddly timed reruns on PBS, I was introduced to the series by my college boyfriend. I had huge secondhand black-and-white TV in my dorm room, and there we watched Tom Baker and his 90 foot long scarf run from scary monsters and even scarier wobbly sets. There was such a wonderful theatricality to it all--the show seemed to be barely more than filmed theater. There were hardly any of the special effects or film tricks that had been developed even by then. Monsters were extras in costumes--some of them were good costumes, many of them weren't, but they were all evidently people in costumes and it was up to the actors and the audience to conspire in the imaginative act that this was somehow believable.

Sarah Jane was the Doctor's companion way back then, a lovely, kind, and smart presence who was absolutely fundamental in making the series work. After all, if someone as smart and brave as she was could be overwhelmed by what was happening, then it really was scary. If she got fooled by the Monster of the Week, what chance did I have against such a thing?

Due to things like, oh, class schedules and the whole being in college thing, my viewing was erratic and possibly the local station stopped carrying it. I did notice that she was replaced by a different actress who I didn't like as well, and the whole thing was wonderful, but kind of in the deep cultural background.

I came late to Russell T. Davies reboot of the Doctor Who franchise, which meant that I could line up the entirety of Davies reign on Netflix and watch the hell out of some fantastic television. Loved Christopher Eccleston from the first minute, where his first line was "Run." It was clear Davies knew what he was doing, and I was along for the ride.

And then he brought Sarah Jane back! And not just "Sarah Jane," but the real, actual Sarah Jane--Elisabeth Sladen's Sarah Jane! And she was spunky, and wise, and brave, and everything she had been back in the old series. But David Tennant wasn't Tom Baker, even though they were both The Doctor.

And in a lovely ans emotionally believable arc, Sarah Jane wrestled with her disappointment that she had been left behind, worked through her jealousy of Rose, recognized that she had a life of her own that was worth living, and said goodbye.

She also saved the world from Krillitanes and was given back her dog--the frankly pathetic attempt at robotics that Sladen convinced us she could love.

She made a couple of other appearances on the show, notably in the glorious party that was the finale of Season 4, flying the TARDIS home with all the beloved companions of the new series.

She also got her own series, a series which has been hovering just below the top of my Netflix queue for months and months. We saw some of it in that finale--her computer, her son, and K9. She even got a visit on her own show from Matt Smith, the 11th Doctor, in a two-parter called "Death of the Doctor."

I had no idea she was ill. The tributes coming from the creative team running Who have been deeply moving. But I can't help thinking there is a tribute that we will never see. A bit of background: John Barrowman, who plays Captain Jack Harkness in both "Doctor Who" and "Torchwood" was one of the Companions on that giddy flight at the end of "Journey's End." And Barrowman, being Barrowman, has a "thing" he (reported) likes to do.

He likes to unzip, and display his "meat and two veg" to unsuspecting actors. Apparently this is something that the "Torchwood" team is all too familiar with. And he's managed to do it to everyone, and the emphasis is on everyone. Except Lis Sladen. I don't know why. Maybe she was just too much of a lady for him to pull that sort of nonsense with, or maybe she was smart enough to recognize the warning signs and be absent from the unveilings. I'll never know. But I suspect, somewhere, John Barrowman will take a moment and bow his head in her honor.

And then drop trou.

Random Thoughts on Oscars 2011

2011-02-28T09:02:00.002-06:00

This is not my fashion commentary. This is what would have been a live blog, except that it's already the next morning. So sue me--I was enjoying watching it.

Anne Hathaway walked the red carpet in a Serious Red Dress. Awww--she looks happy, relaxed, and ready for anything. Isn't it amazing that she's an American actress? She's beautiful in such a "you have a funny looking face" kind of way that American movies so rarely allow on-screen.

James Franco, however, has totally failed a softball interview in the "green room," which looks like a bar to me. This may ultimately be the explanation for why he spent the majority of the telecast holding his head verrrrrry still. Oh yeah, I just implied that Franco was drunk and/or hungover. It was like he was emitting anti-charisma particles most of the night.

Kirk Douglas! OMG--I was sure he was dead! Interesting fact from PulledItOutOfMyAss.com--earlobes continue growing even after the rest of the body stops. But isn't he being charming? He's milking this appearance like the biggest ham ever, and I start to worry that the orchestra is going to be ordered to drive him off-stage with the Official Oscar "Your Time Is Up" music before he even gets the envelope open. But no, it's good. I love the rapport he sets up with Hathaway and how she responds. And then the good looking Cane Caddy! Is he KD's personal assistant, or was he provided by the show? Either way, the hand over hand battle was well done. Oh, and then Melissa Leo and KD--give these two kids a show!

Then the ceremonial appearance of the Lifetime Achievement award winners--kind of sucky, Oscar telecast, to be sooo committed to sucking up to the "Younger Demographic" that the people you feel are sufficiently talented to deserve awards for a lifetime of acting directing and producing don't even get a second at the mic. But then I am unable to guess who is older--Kirk Douglas or Eli Wallach? IMDB to the rescue--it's Wallach, by almost exactly 1 year.

Lots of costume changes for Anne Hathaway--love the beaded number, and then she twists in it! She is now officially my favorite Oscar(TM) host ever.

In contrast, a surprising number of presenters are wearing the same thing they wore to walk the red carpet. I have come to expect multiple costume changes from everybody. Okay, Dion and Paltrow and Welch all changed, so the dressing rooms have been reserved for performers perhaps? Or maybe Anne "A Different Look For Every Category" Hathaway has used up all the closet space.

Cate Blanchett: her generation's Helen Mirren? Discuss.

Why is Russell Brand? My brain has such a hard time with him, because one part is screaming "LOOK AWAY FROM THE SKEEVE!" while a different part is saying "he's funny! He makes me laugh!" Tonight a new part of the brain weighs in with "Oh honey, no--clean-shaven is not the right look for you." And then I have to think about something else, lest the three-way brain battle causes my head to explode. Oh look! Helen Mirren speaks French and I can understand it! She's so cool.

ABC is proud to host the OscarsTM until 2020. You say that, ABC Lady, but somebody literally just screwed up your telecast. Local maybe? I got part of the OscarTM buffer--camera pans across statuettes with the envelopes leaning against them, then I got 2.5 seconds of what looks like young couple buying their first home ad, then a couple more seconds of OscarTM panning buffer, then the last half of the young couple ad--which turns out to be an ad for cat food, but cute as it involves young man giving young woman a kitten which is wearing a tag that says "will you marry us"--and THEN I got the first half of the cat food/new home buying ad, which ran up to the part where the second half had already aired, and then suddenly we were in the middle of one of your sentences where you were bragging about what a great job ABC does with the telecast. I call "Shenanigans!"

Obama has a favorite OscarTM song and it isn't "It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp?" Color me disappointed.

Kevin Spacey has a nice voice. Does he still make movies anymore? He's also kind of creepy looking in a way inconsistent with movie musicals.

My kids are already scouring the interwebs for "Autotune the Oscars" in order to download "Tiny Ball of Light." I kind of love "He Doesn't Own A Shirt" myself, mostly for the blatant pandering of it. Here you go kids!

Oprah, wearing a dress from the Dollly Parton Couture Collection. Honestly--do boobs like being pushed around like that? I'm thinking she's going to have some strange marks about her chestal area by the end of the night.

Billy Crystal is kind of unrecognizable in a weird way. Like a "lots of bad plastic surgery unless it's steroid therapy for lupus" kind of way. He's still funny, but it's like his expressions don't recognize his face--there's a weird disconnect when he mugs, where I have to mentally assemble what the different parts of his face are doing to get the emotion he's conveying. I hope things are ok in Chrystal World.

RDJ and Jude "I Used To Be Sooo Handsome" Law are bantering. The banter is awkward because it seems like RDJ is talking about tech issues from his Other Franchise, Not The One Jude Law Is In. RDJ is my third favorite Sherlock Holmes, behind Benedict Cumberbatch and Jeremy Brett. Which I guess means that the RDJ Sherlock Franchise is no longer necessary. Jude Law is not on my list of favorite Watsons at all--or if he has to be on a Watson list, he's down below the Jeopardy-playing computer and my aunt's Maltese.

Bob Hope Hologram--boy, do I see where Johnny Carson got his delivery. How many more awards seasons until the Bob Hope Clone is perfected to take over hosting duties?

Something about Celine Dion's face is so annoying that I close my eyes so I don't have to see her, and miss the first however many seconds of the I See Dead People Montage. Some of those faces just jump off the screen, don't they? Jill Clayburgh, Tony Curtis, Leslie Nielsen.

Halle Berry is having such a sad life right now--I wonder if the fact that she is gorgeous is any consolation to her.

Tom Hooper and James Cameron: Separated at Birth? I know I couldn't figure out why James "Smurfs in Fern Gully" Cameron would be at the OscarsTM this year. Let's go to the replay:

James Cameron


Tom Hooper

Nope--the age difference is too great for Separated at Birth. I'm going with "unacknowledged love child."

Portman wins Best Actress. After watching the clips, I was kind of hoping for an upset. God knows I'm more interested in seeing "Blue Valentine" and "Winter's Bone" than "Black Swan." The sad thing--Portman's life has nowhere to go but downhill from this moment. Trust me--pregnant is much more fun than newly post-partum, even without diaper changing and sleep deprivation. Pregnant, cute, dolled-up and Oscar-winning--nothing in the real world will live up to this moment. Ever again.

Sandra Bullock ragging Jeff Bridges--"ya think ya might wanna stagger these out a bit?" Give that woman a reality show or something. I don't want to watch her act, I want to watch her be Sandy. She too has had a terrible year. Does being gorgeous, funny, and universally beloved offer her some consolation?

Colin Firth wins! Of course he's charming--I think they must have charming lessons in school in England. Except Christian Bale skipped out of his. Maybe they're elective.

I like the speech somebody wrote for Steven Spielberg--the winner of the Best Picture will join such movies as [undeniably great films here]. The other nine (losing) nominees will join [undeniably great and unjustifiably OscarTM-less movies here]. That's a great way to say what everybody says--the honor is being nominated. The winning kind of misses the point sometimes (often). (But I still love "Shakespeare in Love" and you cannot take that away from me!)

And The King's Speech wins, everybody comes up to celebrate, and the orchestra plays over the third guy's chance at the mic, but He! Will! Not! Be! Denied! So he cleverly thanks the Academy and they let him talk. Ya know, HBC was so dang charming in that movie, that I might just have to go see it again.

What's the deal with this P.S.22 school choir? Damn! There's some cultural allusion I've completely missed--because you KNOW the OscarsTM wouldn't just pick some kids' choir--however good they are--and put them on the telecast unless they had already been a YouTube sensation of some sort.

And the show is over in less than 3.5 hours. Franco can go back to school--he did himself no favors tonight. But Anne Hathaway can come back next year. Please?

Oscars Frivolity

2011-02-27T11:59:00.000-06:00

Yes, I know you are all expecting deep insights into the geopolitical morass that are the Libyan demonstrations. . .but I'm punting! Because it's OscarTime (TM)!

Besides, I'm actually quite shallow.

So--this made me smile. It's a photo gallery of Hollywood stars at a pre-Academy Awards party from last night, as posted on a site I'd not seen before, called TooFab. Here is the first image that popped up.

Say what you want, but I kind of love Anne Hathaway letting her inner dork come out to play. Those glasses are the kind that Mia Thermopolis would have worn pre-Princess lessons if The Princess Diaries had been made today. Sure, she's Hollywood royalty, she's the youngest person to ever host the Oscars. . .and she's putting in an appearance at an event, but clearly all ready planning to put on the jammie bottoms that go with that jammie top and pull an all-nighter to memorize her lines.

But who is that she is standing next to? I can't quite tell who it is, and I'm sure I should be able to identify her. Hmmm. . .I'm going to have to look at the text under the photo because I can't quite place the face.

But wait! This is how we know "TooFab" is just a pretender to being a reliable gossip site. Because the only text underneath this photo is:

"HARVEY WEINSTEIN AND DIOR DINNER."

Who knew? I mean, Harvey has totally shed some pounds and upgraded his image since the whole Miramax/Disney failure, but that is quite the make-over. And I hadn't heard that Anne Hathaway had changed her professional name. "Dior Dinner" could be a stage name, although it's a little too vaudeville and burlesque for my taste.

Hey--TooFab, I've got some advice for you. Hire a webmaster. This is ridiculous.

This One Will Not Be Funny

2011-02-23T00:31:00.000-06:00

It's pretty rare that I use this blog to write about something that I am passionate about, something that is serious, something that I am not attempting to use humor to deal with. This is just too horrible.

Last night, I flew home from Las Vegas and arrived in the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport at 9:30. Every last seat of the large plane was filled and so even though I had packed a carry-on sized bag, I had checked it. As a result, my girls and I were standing at the baggage claim until 10:30 waiting for our luggage. There is a large television screen mounted above the carousel, and despite the lateness of the hour, Anderson Cooper was broadcasting about the protests and government crackdown taking place in Libya.

I hadn't seen anything remotely new related for a few days, and I was floored. It was less than a month ago that the protests began in Egypt, and it seemed that the entire Middle East was rising up against the limited benefits of "stability" and demanding civil rights and democracy. Tunisia, Egypt, and now Libya and Bahrain, refusing to accept more decades of repression and tyranny.

However, Libya is not Egypt, and Mommar Qaddafi is not Hosni Mubarak, and the military and the police were using extreme force to put down the Libyan protests. Qaddafi had shut down media outlets, and Anderson Cooper was getting what news he could through cell phone conversations with residents of the areas where the protests were happening. There was no video of the caller, and in the airport there was also no sound: only stock film clips running under the closed captioning of the dialog.

One caller admitted to being frightened, and hiding inside, because the military were shooting any young people who were found outside. At the same time, the caller felt that it was his obligation to take some risks in order to create a future for his country. He was afraid to die, but he was also afraid to let the moment pass without forcing the regime to change.

Periodically, Cooper turned to in-studio experts to analyze what was happening in Libya, and the situation remained horrifying. Qaddafi had called out helicopter gunboats and had ordered the military to fire and bomb his own citizens. The expert was appalled at this brutality, and felt that it showed how completely out of touch Qaddafi was with the political realities of his country.

When Cooper returned to the caller, something was happening that the caller couldn't explain. All that I could glean from the closed captioning was a sense of utter chaos descending, and the caller's desperate belief that Qaddafi would rather kill every last Libyan rather than step down from power. The caller began to plead, passionately and hopelessly "please, it is important that the media stop this. Call President Obama, contact someone who can get Qaddafi to stop the killing, because he will not stop. Please, do what you can to force him to stop killing people, because he would rather rule an empty country than give up his power. Please do what you can to make this stop!"

And then, in a move that smacked of every cynical movie or novel I have ever seen, Anderson Cooper cut off the call and faced the camera, saying "What do you think about this situation? The chat lines are open. Call us or post your thoughts on the web site."

I literally could not believe it. A profound human tragedy was taking place--live via cell phone connection--as a country tried to throw off a brutal dictator who had no qualms about gunning down his own population. There was a desperate cry for help to stop the slaughter. . .and Anderson Cooper simply turned it into a call-in show and an internet chat topic.

Qaddafi has been dictator for some 40 years of a country that is trying to end the corrupt regime. He has shown that he is willing to put down the protests in a brutal fashion. Surely there was something more to do that to open up public chat.

I have become embarrassed by my country, and this elevation of television/internet audience protocols over actual information and assistance is something we should all be embarrassed by.

How Did I Not Know This? Jimmy Buffet Has Let Me Down.

2011-02-22T21:16:00.000-06:00

It turns out that today is "National Margarita Day!"

Actually, every day is National Margarita Day, if you are me. Just like it's always 5 o'clock somewhere.

You're welcome.

Appreciating Shakespeare: the "Nooooooooo!" Edition

2011-02-09T09:43:00.001-06:00

Spotted this on Slate's Browbeat blog--a full eleven and a half minutes of people shouting "No." Check it out.

At about the 4:00 mark, I was thinking nostalgically of how Shakespeare railed against the heavens in the under-appreciated classic King Lear.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
    You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
    Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
    You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
    Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
    Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
    Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
    Crack nature's moulds, an germens spill at once,
    That make ingrateful man!

And he goes on from there for another three paragraphs, cursing his fate. Or earlier, when his two daughters between them refuse to allow him to drag his extravagant train of one hundred knights into their homes, he refuses to believe them and calls down curses. Although at the moment, he can't think of any specific revenge, he knows he will come up with something horrible:

No, you unnatural hags,
    I will have such revenges on you both,
    That all the world shall--I will do such things,--
    What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be
    The terrors of the earth.

Or, he could just keep screaming 'Noooooooooooo!"

Oh, that Shakespeare--you have to admire him. Especially after watching eleven and a half minutes that demonstrate how far we have fallen over 400 years.

Tiger Mama, Revisited Yale Law Revue Style

2011-01-20T13:31:00.000-06:00

Back when I was at the Yale Law School, we students had a tradition called "The Yale Law Revue" where we wrote parodic lyrics to popular songs and used them to make fun of our (highly) eccentric law school experience. Any foible was fair game, the more public the better.

I expect Amy Chua and her "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" to be prime targets.

In the spirit of those halcyon days of yore, I offer my own take on Amy Chua and the Tiger Mother. I offer you "The Battle Hymn of the Best-Seller."

Sing along--you already know the tune.

Mine eyes have read invective of a thousand Mommy Blogs
They say I am abusive, that I treat my kids like dogs
Of my derelictions they make damning catelogues
And the books fly off the shelves!

Glory glory hallelujah!
All you mommies--how I fooled ya!
My book reached number six
On the Amazon sales list
And the bucks keep rolling in!

Who Doesn't Love Legos?

2011-01-19T21:15:00.000-06:00

And Who doesn't think this is adorkable?

Even my cold dead heart feels a little flicker of warmth.

Apparently these are not actually Legos (TM) but "brick building sets" by a company called Character Options, and they should be available around Easter 2011. (Source)

The Mommy Wars, Explained for Daddys

2011-01-15T00:34:00.000-06:00

I guess I really have to do this.

Recently, I wrote about a (now all but antique!) article in the New York Times called "Frazzled Moms Push Back Against Volunteering," and I was pushing my take that this was Mean Girls All Grown Up. The article started with the heartbreaking tale of a mommy who was so busy planning fund raisers and designing t-shirts for the school that she didn't have time to help her own kids with homework. So she bravely took the radical step of cutting back on volunteering and now she has time to play ping-pong and Wii.

And then her kids come home and she plays with them too! Buh dum BUM!

I was snarky about this article. It pushed my buttons, and I went to town with my thesis that this was just another round in the "Mommy Wars" in which Stay at Home Mommies and Work Outside the Home Mommies accuse each other of being Worst Mommies and making Bad Choices about their priorities.

It seems I've missed the point. A Daddy went out of his way to point out to me that "the article was really about how schools are asking too much of their parents, and volunteer burnout is an issue."

Just like a man.

Because I don't think men get this--this exquisite sensitivity that women have to being judged by other women. Maybe this goes back to our different formative years on the playground. Boys went out at recess and played "King of the Mountain," where they literally hit each other over the head and pushed each other off whatever pile of dirt they were claiming, and this did not affect their friendships. Meanwhile, back in Girl World, the mere comment "nice knee socks" meant social death for the rest of the school year, if not longer.

So was I surprised that a Daddy didn't get the nasty digs and social posturing inherent in the "Frazzled Moms" article? I was, but I shouldn't have been. Because a man doesn't vibrate to the same resonances of social status as women do, and a man's identity isn't as tied up in his self-image of "Good Daddy" the way a woman is in her image of a "Good Mommy." A man can read that article and actually think that the pressure to over-commit to volunteering comes from the school and not from the other over-committed ~~parent~~ mother volunteers.

Let's take a look at what the article gives us.

First, there is that heartbreaking story of Jamie Lentzner, who once she stopped volunteering went home, played ping-pong and hosted Thanksgiving dinner for twenty-seven relatives and friends. This is not a woman who was forced by her school to overcommit--this is a woman who can't say no. Who hosts Thanksgiving dinner for that many people? Someone who likes to do that sort of thing, and would rather do that sort of thing than help her kids with school projects. This was not the school's fault.

Next up, a case of heartbreak and woe from the American South:

“Volunteerism is way down at our school this year,” said Gary Parkes, the PTA president at Carmel Elementary School in Woodstock, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta. At the school’s recent annual fall festival some games had to be closed down because of a lack of adult volunteer supervisors.

Did they cancel the "fall festival?" No. Did they fail to raise funds? No. Was this part of the school curriculum? No. Was there even a district employee interviewed? No. This was a case of a slightly smaller "festival" run by the PTA. Was this even a case of "frazzled moms" refusing to participate in a school's excessive demands for volunteer time? Not according to PTA President Parkes--there are fewer volunteers available because the economy sucks and they had to go get jobs to keep their families afloat.

Our next guest at the pity party is a former PTA president from Los Angeles who estimates that she attended over one thousand meetings in ten years as a volunteer. So that's an average of 100 meetings per school year. Consider, then, that California has only 180 mandated instructional days, and you realize that this insane woman was at meetings 55% of the days her kids were at school. That's not a volunteer position, that's a more than part-time job. And who did she compare herself too--the teachers? The principal?

“I know a woman — the work she did for the public schools was so critical — she made me look like a loafer,” Ms. Auerswald said.

So who exactly is setting this women up for self-destructive levels of volunteering? Is the school really demanding that mothers leave their children at home with babysitters, or is this a Competitive Mommying Olympics?

The next Martyred Mommy ran a book festival.

Ms. Jones is a mother of two in Keller, Tex., who works part time as a booking manager for professional speakers. This fall she was co-chairwoman of the Scholastic Book Fair, a commitment of five full days on top of the multiple meetings required to organize the event. And the decorating.

Her kids didn't even attend the school any more--they had moved to a charter school, and rather than find a substitute to take her place, Ms. Jones decided to keep volunteering. At a professionally sourced book festival that is a fund raiser run by Scholastic Books as a business proposition to sell their inventory and incidentally a way to raise some money for the school. Take a look at the Scholastic web site and tell me that this is something the school is asking parents to do.

Even when her kids changed schools, Ms. Jones couldn't break her volunteering habits.

“Selfishly, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is my chance for a clean break,’ ” she said. “I thought, ‘I can go somewhere where no one knows me, and I can sit silently under the radar and not volunteer.’ ” But, she explained: “My kids really like me volunteering. Their faces light up when I’m there.”

There are two more sob stories--the woman who was so busy she didn't have time to celebrate her own birthday, and the woman whose email filled up because the other volunteers didn't know the difference between "Reply" and "Reply All." The latter woman saw a need and developed volunteer coordination software which has become a business opportunity.

You know what is missing from these stories? Teachers. Classroom volunteering. Actual requests from the educators. It's all parent committees and PTA and extra-curriculars, and people who have no limits, but are unable to take any responsibility to Just Say No. (So why do we think this will work to keep kids drug free? Don't get me started.)

With the smallest of exceptions, the article presents a dichotomy of volunteering vs. staying home and raising your children. It's presented as an all-or-nothing situation: either you volunteer and leave your kids with baby-sitters and feed them frozen pizza, or you stop all volunteer activity and stay home to teach your kids to read. Because the author of this piece isn't actually investigating anything about how volunteers actually assist in supporting cash-strapped schools, or analyzing return-per-volunteer-hour of fund raising. Instead, it's a case of Judge-y McJudgerson disapproving of the way certain mothers spend their time, when they should be home with their children--playing ping-pong, and hosting enormous Thanksgiving dinners.

I myself am a "former volunteer." But I did volunteered doing things I enjoyed doing, and I said "no" to things that would demand more time than I wanted to give. I worked for years on the school book festival, but I never chaired it. And after my kids left the school, I stopped volunteering. Some things stopped entirely, or were radically revised, to reflect the interests and availability of the parents. Just because something has been done doesn't mean it needs to be perpetuated, and I am fine with change. I have always been fine with that.

Some parents (mothers) I know disapprove of the changes that came after they (and their kids) left the school. "The book festival doesn't raise nearly as much money as it used to when we were in charge" or "I can't believe they don't even bother to hold Teacher Appreciation Day every month!" They apparently think that some volunteers don't work hard enough. I have also heard parents (mothers) complain that some events are too lavish and labor intensive. Maybe they are all right. But this is the kind of catty innuendo that is the equivalent of "nice knee socks." It is not the fault of the schools.

Think about it--what is a school supposed to do to save these women from their own excesses? The PTA says "we'd like to raise money to pay for new library books/art supplies/band uniforms and we'd like to have a book festival/fall fun fair/Doughnuts for Dads program that we will organize and staff with our volunteers." Who at the school do these people suppose is going to say "No! Stop! Don't raise money! Don't donate! Don't try to fill a perceived need! You might make some kid eat frozen pizza for dinner if you do!"

Sure, maybe somewhere in this great country of ours, there are schools that really do specifically ask parents to volunteer in order to make ends meet. And maybe there actually are educational institutions that over-tax their volunteer base and need to deal with volunteer burn-out. This article, however, does not make that case in any way, shape or form. Instead, it uses innuendo and blame to turn The Woman Who Didn't Have Time To Wii into a victim of the American educational system.

I get what the article was pretending to do--it was pretending that this was a real problem with the way schools are run, and that's what the Daddy saw. What he couldn't see was the insidious smear campaign against women who are So Selfish as to do something outside the home, which invariably leads to the children suffering! Men leaving their wives! Broken homes and broken hearts and frozen pizza for the children! Stop the insanity and go back home, you selfish volunteering mommies! Your children are crying for you!

And don't tell me that I missed the point. Because I didn't.

Mommy Wars Take No Prisoners: "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior"

2011-01-11T09:26:00.001-06:00

Yale Law School Professor Amy Chua has decided to step outside her profession and training, and offer a parenting manual based on the extensive data set and broad longitudinal studies of . . . herself. We here at Chez Evil are cackling in glee and issuing an invitation to join our club.

We extend this invitation based on the article printed in Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal last Saturday, titled "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior." This is an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, which is itself titled "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," which we here at Chez Evil look forward to reading. Here are some juicy tidbits from the WSJ article:

A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:
• attend a sleepover
• have a playdate
• be in a school play
• complain about not being in a school play
• watch TV or play computer games
• choose their own extracurricular activities
• get any grade less than an A
• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama
• play any instrument other than the piano or violin
• not play the piano or violin.

As an Evil Fairy, I look forward to reading the thoughts of such a obviously like minded individual. I do have some concerns, however, and so I offer Professor Chua some advice for some changes that should be in the next edition.

The title must be changed. Compare the strength and hostile offensiveness of the WSJ title--"Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior"--to the weak and near literary metaphor of the book title. Sure, maybe tiger mothers are fierce, or something, but who can get immediately insulted and angry about that? It lacks the open aggressiveness of the article's claim of superiority, coupled with the racial and ethnic stereotyping inherent in limiting that superiority to the mothers of only one nation. Sure, Chua pretends that there are other, not-strictly-from-China mothers who "qualify," but that's just giving up the high ground. The book should just go for the jugular and call itself "Why Your Kids Are Genetically Inferior And You Suck At Parenting."

Correct the nomenclature. Chua calls Sophia and Louisa her "daughters." The correct term is "minions."

Drop the euphemisms. Chua offers this anecdotal definition of "strictness:"

[M]y Western friends who consider themselves strict make their children practice their instruments 30 minutes every day. An hour at most. For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part. It's hours two and three that get tough.

Can we do away with the pussyfooting around the term "practice their instruments?" The proper term is "enhanced interrogation," also known as "waterboarding."

Expand the principles outside schooling. Chua has missed the opportunity to apply her principles outside the limited scope of raising children in an environment where education has a positive value. Take what she says about the value of repetition:

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up. But if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something—whether it's math, piano, pitching or ballet—he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes it easier for the parent to get the child to work even more.

This is precisely the principle I use to run my successful Evil Enterprises. How do they expect to get any better and shoveling coal if they don't keep working at it? Whiners.

Once this little girl is good at shoveling coal, she will enjoy it and I can make her work harder.

Apply these principles to adult work. Look, it's obvious--what works for kids should also work for adults. Chua clearly sees how things like "union-mandated work breaks" are just caving in and creating failure. When her ~~minion~~ daughter had trouble learning a piano piece, Chua knew that the only solution was to bear down.

Lulu couldn't do it. We worked on it nonstop for a week, drilling each of her hands separately, over and over. But whenever we tried putting the hands together, one always morphed into the other, and everything fell apart. Finally, the day before her lesson, Lulu announced in exasperation that she was giving up and stomped off.
"Get back to the piano now," I ordered.
"You can't make me."
"Oh yes, I can."

This is why I just go ahead and chain my minions to their workstations--it cuts down on the backtalk. Chua continues:

I rolled up my sleeves and went back to Lulu. I used every weapon and tactic I could think of. We worked right through dinner into the night, and I wouldn't let Lulu get up, not for water, not even to go to the bathroom.

Because nothing fosters a successful business like dehydrated and urine-soaked workers.

Chua has simply failed to lift her sights high enough with this book. Because isn't it obvious? We are the ones who know what is best for those little people, and we don't need to put up with their complaints. They owe us because of all we have done for them--the spying, the interrogation, the abusive personal relationships. We don't do that for our own satisfaction! Absolutely not! We do it because it is for their own good, so they can be successful and get into law schools, where they can come out to a paucity of jobs and crippling debt, because that's success, baby!

NYT Re-Ignites the Mommy Wars

2011-01-11T08:26:00.001-06:00

Well, it's been a while since I've found myself in the front lines of the Mommy Wars--you know, that never ending battle about what women "should" be doing with their time, once they've reproduced. Because god knows we can't seem to allow women to make choices or -- the horrors! -- make mistakes and learn from them.

No, women are obviously better served by media outlets focusing on a small collection of unhappy women and then self-righteously smacking them down for daring to live their lives. The latest is this article "Frazzled Moms Push Back Against Volunteering."

I wish getting seriously pissed off counted as cardio exercise. Then I could recommend clicking on the link and reading that article. As it is--not so much. It's another salvo in the "Stay at Home Mommy" vs. the "Working Mommy" war--a war with no winners and a pointlessly inflated casualty rate. The twist here is that the "working mommy" isn't actually working at all--she's volunteering! At her kids' school! But lest you think that school volunteers are a good thing, the article writer manages to find over committed volunteers doing "unnecessary" things!

So, pared down to its essence, this is an article about women who should be at home tending to their husbands and children, but have the audacity to do something else with their time. And yes, the article includes the obligatory story of a Man Who Left His Wife Because She Spent Too Much Time Working. Women! They just don't know their place. Good thing the New York Times is here to Explain It All.

You see, these women are doing something outside their own homes. They are doing volunteering, but their time is spent on activities that the NYT reporter thinks are frivolous. Class T shirts, for example, or Teacher Appreciation Day, or Doughnuts for Dads Day. The implication is that these women are wasting their time, neglecting their families, and can't be trusted to make good decisions about how they spend their time. So their husband will leave them and their kids will be improperly parented and all of us NYT readers will be justified in our self-righteous condemnation of these Stupid Women.

This obviously pushes a bunch of buttons for me, and I just can't let it lie. Because articles like this are a big part of the problem that makes women's lives untenable right now--because life is uncertain, and we want the security of One Right Way to lead our lives that will guarantee a happy family, healthy and successful kids, a strong and lasting marriage. It's just not possible, of course, but that doesn't mean it's easy to accept.

Look, if everybody was exactly the same, this would be easy, right? If your marriage and my marriage were identical, we would have been able to create The Perfect Marriage under laboratory conditions and there would be no divorce. If every child needed the exact same education and home life, we wouldn't have parenting books and school would be a matter of making sure each kid had the right number of Learning Calories and life would be predictable.

Boring. But predictable.

But life isn't like that, and my solution isn't your solution. Or, as my mother used to say, "That's why Baskin Robbins has 31 flavors of ice cream."

You know what? Some women are driven and controlling, and they are going to exist in the workplace and as volunteer parents at your kids' school. If they are making volunteering miserable for you, then--don't volunteer. Just say no. Or limit your involvement to what you think is meaningful and valuable. Consider that the uber-volunteer isn't doing this just to make your life miserable. She's handling her own life and her own issues the best she can. Maybe she's wrestling with issues about her own parents, and wants to be involved in her child's life in a way her own parents weren't. Maybe she can't say no, and so has to take on everything she is asked to do. Maybe she just has a high metabolism and just runs faster than you do.

Is she judging you? Sure, probably. After all, you are judging her. Fair's fair.

The problem is that this article is little more than snotty coffeeklatch gossip dressed up in respectable clothing and published in a newspaper as if it is journalism. Dressed up in the smart couture of a NYT article, it seems like it's something that deserves consideration. But if you took this article and put it into Betty Draper's mouth, you'd reject its conclusions and despair that these women didn't have anything better to do than complain about such small things.

Remember this article, because next we're going to tackle "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior."

Because Doctors are Cool

2011-01-10T21:56:00.001-06:00

What do you get when you cross a quintessentially British Doctor with a quintessentially American Doctor?

Available for purchase from artist Bill Mudron here.

Linky goodness discovered via Pajiba, io9, Bleeding Cool, and Bill Mudron.

The Journal of Interesting Things--Old Navy Techno Hoodie

2011-01-08T19:38:00.000-06:00

Wandered into Old Navy and found a wall display of "Techno Hoodies" on sale so I bought one. Because I listen to my iPod while walking the dog, doing housework, falling asleep (but only sometimes). So I thought I'd try a zippered hoodie with built in earphones.

I love it! The earbuds are wired through the drawstrings, and are as good as the ones I usually use: hardly Bose quality, but good enough for me. The connector sits in the front pocket, which is large enough to hold my iPod Touch, and hey presto! I have audio without a dangling wire to get caught on things and rip the buds out of my ears!

An added feature is that I can plug into my computer as well, without having to untangle wires and sort the plug from the earbud ends. It's incredibly convenient. The hoodie is rather light weight, not the warmest sweatshirt that I own, but fine for layering and wearing in the house.

The only drawback? I only bought one, and it does have to go into the laundry occasionally. And they aren't available on the website anymore.

Steven Moffat's "Jekyll"--A Review

2011-01-08T19:19:00.000-06:00

Before he took over running "Doctor Who," Steven Moffat brought us "Jekyll."

The English are apparently more comfortable experimenting with format than Americans are; it is almost impossible to imagine American television executives green-lighting a "series" of only six episodes. What would we call it? It's not a "made for TV movie;" since it's more than two hours long . It's not a "mini-series," a format exclusively for filming trashy novels by Judith Krantz. Even sporting events are shorter than that! There's simply no American broadcasting model that would accept a six-hour, self-contained television show.

Thank god for the BBC, then, because Jekyll was fascinating. And while it kind of ran off the rails in the last two hours, it was definitely worth watching.

The Plot In Brief

Contemporary scientist Dr. Tom Jackman has a split personality that behaves badly. He's given up the rest of his life (wife, kids, job) in order to control the monster and hires a psychiatric nurse to manage him. As the violent personality become stronger, Jackman learns that he is a direct descendant of Dr. Jekyll and he's experiencing the Mr. Hyde--the novel wasn't entirely fiction after all! And now, mysterious people are after him. So this is a sort of a contemporary riff on "Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" rather than an adaptation or remake. What is the connection between Jekyll and Jackman? Who are the people in the black van?

Stop reading right now if you haven't seen this series and want to remain unspoiled, because brother am I going to spoil the hell out of it from here on. Just go stream this from Netflix and come back later. It's definitely a fun ride. If you do read on--don't say you haven't been warned.

The Plot In Not So Brief

In the brilliant first two to three hours, we are thrust headlong into the chaos that Jackman is trying to manage. The series opens with the mild mannered Jackman interviewing a psychiatric nurse while simultaneously strapping himself into what looks like an electric chair. Right away, we are shown the techniques Jackman is using to cope with the fact that half the time his body is running around with all the self control of a toddler but the authority of an adult. Just take a look at the face of James Nesbitt and you have to agree--he totally nails that "Dangerous Toddler" thing.

Awww! He's even got dimples!

The two halves have come to some sort of arrangement, but they don't get along. Jackman hides his family, his home, even his name from his other half. Hyde orders vicious drink combinations in order to leave Jackman with a hangover the next morning, and takes delight in forcing Jackman to "come to" in difficult situations. Middle of a date? In a room with a prostitute? In one instance, Jackman hisses "Just once could you tell me where you parked the car?" as he wanders forlornly clicking the key remote until a car responds. This was so much fun to watch as Jackman had to find new ways to outwit himself.

Jackman is married to Claire, played by Gina Bellman, who might actually be Sofia Coppola.

Gina Bellman

Sofia Coppola

They are estranged, and he won't tell her why he's left her and their boys. So she (quite sensibly) hired a private detective and is infuriated that there's not even an affair. For some reason, the detective didn't tell Claire about the Hyde thing, so he goes to find out why. On his way, he spots an omnipresent black van that has been following him, rather obviously, which he snots at the detective is a bit of a give-away. She asks him to sit still for a minute, and then drives away for good: because the detective agency doesn't have a black van. BAM! Brilliant set up! We have suspense, we have conflict, we have mystery! We have Moffat at the helm and we have James Nesbitt having obvious Big Fun! playing Hyde.

Sadly, what we don't have is a coherent plot, and the series runs off the rails as too many ideas are shoe-horned into the script, which will be discussed later. Let's finish the recap first.

Claire's detectives have been paid to follow him, and then paid even more to stop following him. Being detectives, they are do a bunch of internet research and inform Jackman that he is the last decendant of Dr. Jekyll, who died in Edinburgh in 1876, and he has his own Mr. Hyde. The company Jackman works for exists solely for the purpose of re-creating Mr. Hyde and then exploiting the genetic result. Curing cancer for start. They're the ones with the black van, and have been following him around trying to catch him as Mr. Hyde. When that hasn't worked, they take the wife and kids hostage and then there is a bunch of running around and putting people into life support machines and revealing secret basement laboratories with dripping water and plastic sheeting and things that jump out and scare you.

Skipping over the problematic parts of the plot, what seems to happen is that Jackman turns out to be (coincidentally) an exact genetic copy of the original Jekyll. The corporation tried to clone Jekyll, but wasn't successful--and the mistakes are kept in the secret basement lab and used to create extremely lucrative drugs that cure all kinds of things. It turns out Jekyll/Robert Louis Stevenson lied about the potion that brought out Hyde: there was no potion. Rather, it was the result of his falling in love, so the Evil Corporation cloned Jekyll's love-- Claire. Claire learns to accept Hyde as a part of Jackman, although there are limits. There is a lot of running from Bad Guys with Guns, a Big Bad female executive with an atrocious "American" accent. During all this, Jackman and Hyde have somehow integrated their personalities a bit, while separating their bodies, so in the end, Hyde gets shot and killed, but Jackman is uninjured.

In a silly epilogue, Jackman finds his biological mother, who is herself a Jekyll/Hyde and turns into the Big Bad female executive with the atrocious accent. Dunnn dunn DUNNNNNH!

The Problems With The Plot

God forbid we complain about too many ideas, but there are really just too many things left dangling. Not just "unresolved" so much as "WTF was that all about?"

A. What the heck is Hyde?
Traditionally, Hyde is interpreted to be the uncontrolled "dark side" of civilized humans--what Freud would have labelled "the id." Mama Jackman says that isn't the case here--Hyde is the fury and violence of love. Her proof is that the first time Claire realized she could kill someone was when she became a mother.

But wait--Hyde isn't just a manifestation of Jackman's violence--he is actually physically different from Jackman. Several characters point out that he's taller, narrower through the shoulders, has different eye color and a different hair line. (Did Hyde go get Nesbitt's hair transplant? snerk) This distinction is even demonstrated a few times as Jackman's wedding ring falls off Hyde's finger. This is later reinforced when they discover that they don't have to share injuries--Jackman notices that Hyde has a cut on his hand that Jackman doesn't have.So the two sort of share a body, but sort of don't, and that paradox continues throughout.

Then, Hyde "gets loose" and starts leaving messages all over the lab to the effect that "I am coming." It shows up on cell phone messages, computer screens, and bulletin boards. "He's in our heads!" exposits the head scientist. So, if he's just a genetic mutation, how does he do that?

B. What the Heck is the Deal With Mom?

Throughout the first three hours of the series, we are told that Tom Jackman was a foundling, abandoned at a train station: no parents or family at all. There is a raggedy old lady who shows up and claims to be "the closest thing you have to a mother." Then it turns out that she IS his mother. And she's been dead for fifteen years after an auto accident, but looks exactly the same as she looked 15 years ago. And she can disapparate from locked security rooms. AND she's got a Mr. Hyde side too, that has somehow picked up an "American" accent that carries quite a few English vowels, in addition to travelling from the Old South to New Texas and back within a few sentences.

So, why is there so much insistence on Jackman having no family at all if we are going to have Mom showing up? Why does everybody simultaneously insist that Jackman is actually a descendant of Dr. Jekyll--if all we know about where he came from was that he was left at a train station? And when Mom turns out to also be the Evil Head of the Evil Corporation--didn't anybody notice that she had a baby?

This is never explicated--any of it. But it does start to smack of the "Hyde syndrome" as being some sort of science fiction-y invented thing that simply cannot be explained by "genetic coding." In which case, why does Jackman have to be an exact duplicate of Jekyll anyway, because there is no way MOM is the a genetic duplicate of Jekyll--so where does Hyde come from? See also, supra.

C. How Incompetent Are Mercenaries Anyway? (Tale of a Red Shirt)

I have to admit I was not excited about the flashback/Apocalypse Now nonsense about the security head in the last episode. Sorry, but the guy was obviously a red shirt, and nothing about the set up scenes made him anything more than cannon fodder. Was the point to make this guy somehow seem more dangerous than the previous Heads of Security? It didn't, just reinforced the cliche of a "bad ass mercenary" who for all his "highly trained strike force" set up actually did the obviously stupid thing and walked up to stand next to Hyde with no weapon, no security plan, no evidence of considering the guy in any way dangerous. So what happens? What you expected to have happen. Let's briefly reconstruct the scene:

Ext. shot, rooftop. The Jackman wife and kids have just been whisked away by helicopter by the bad guys. Hyde is left standing in a sliced and bloody shirt on the edge of the roof, head down in an attitude of dejection.
Symes: The word is "now."
Mercenary: (Steps out from behind balaclava clad ninja gunmen. Mercenary is wearing ordinary fatigues--no body armor, no helmet, holding no weapon. Approaches Hyde, and claps a hand on Hyde's shoulder.) I have waited a long time to do this.
Hyde: (Raises his head, bares his predator teeth, roars, grabs Mercenary by the throat and throws him over the roof.) Is that the best you have?

I call shenanigans! There is no way some guy--hired solely for the job of taking Hyde alive--acts this stupid. It's not just that the guy was hired for this job, but that he was hired and given a year to train and plan for the apprehension. He's given all the money and weaponry he wants, he's got a dojo of muscular guys and over a year to plan for how he's going to do this. Surely he didn't think that "Kindly Irish Cop Taking Keys From Maudlin Drunk" was the right strategy to capture a psychopath? Hell, it doesn't even work on maudlin drunks very often either. It certainly doesn't work on the edge of a roof, when your only back up is a bunch of guys holding automatic weapons they've been ordered not to fire.

I mean, there are so many other ways to actually apprehend somebody! Incapacitate this dangerous guy before you get to close! Why do you think cowboys and Wonder Woman use lassos?

It's oddly difficult to find a picture of her actually lassoing somebody!

If you've got guns, use them to weaken the guy before you get within arms reach--like gangsters who shoot knee caps. In the Harry Potter books, Hermione Granger used a Full Body Bind spell. Even Winnie the Pooh dug a Heffalump trap, and he's a Bear of Very Little Brain!

Pooh, Piglet and the Heffalump Trap

So when the hard ass mercenary guy gets a four minute introduction and background, and then screws up the ONE thing he's supposed to do -- that's when I say "Now you're just jerking us around."

D. Important Plot Elements Introduced RIGHT Before They Are Necessary

There are a couple of these: Jackman mentions he's claustrophobic mere minutes before he's locked inside the containment box, meaning that Jackman goes mad and dies, leaving Hyde alone in the body. We couldn't have had that information in an earlier episode, even as character development from back when Jackman first meets Claire?

Similarly, we find out that injuries on Hyde suddenly don't show up on Jackman: a new fact that gets revealed in the last episode, right before we need Hyde to get gunned down and die but Jackman to live. This is a problem, because if Hyde and Jackman aren't linked, then they might as well be two different people as far as dramatic tension goes. All that "Hyde drinks to give Jackman a hangover" stuff is erased if "Hyde gets injured but Jackman doesn't"--the rules of the game are changed midway. Then, if something bad happens to Hyde, it doesn't happen to Jackman, so the physical peril that occupies so much of the last three hours of the series doesn't have a pay-off. And that's what happens. Hyde gets shot (multiple times), but Jackman's got a Get Out Of Jail Free card, because they don't share the injuries.

Moffat Trademarks?
There are some narrative tricks that show up in other Moffat works. Some of them struck me as treading the line between being "trademark" and being "cliche," but I do have to acknowledge that Moffat hasn't yet crossed the line permanently.

A. The Impossible Conversation
There is a frightening sequence when Jackman first tries to catch a glimpse of himself as Hyde, and sets up a video camera to watch himself sleep. The next morning, as he watches the tape, he finds himself carrying on a dialogue with himself that is chronologically impossible, since Hyde was taped several hours before:

Hyde: Pick a number! I bet I can guess it! Go ahead, pick a number!
Jackman: (whispers) 108.
Hyde: One hundred and eight! I got it right, didn't I?

Where have we seen that one before? Oh yes, in the fabulous Blink from Doctor Who, where David Tennant's time traveler is trapped in 1968, and has taped half a conversation that gets played off DVD easter eggs in 2007--and creates a coherent conversation with Carey Mulligan.

B. Dangerous Man in a Box

Late in Jekyll, Jackman gets put into a life support box of some vague technological purpose, which is tipped to vertical and dramatically opened--much like the later Pandorica.

C Eidetic (photographic) Memory

Hyde emerges from the box independent of the more restrained Jackman, and suddenly gains the ability to DVR his own memories and rewind, pause and zoom them. This allows him to go back to past events and re-view them to pick up on missed clues: both the Eleventh Doctor (in The Eleventh Hour) and Sherlock Holmes (in Moffat's brilliant Sherlock series) do this as well.

Conclusion

So, I've done a lot of complaining, and it would be reasonable to conclude that I didn't like it--but I did! James Nesbitt was such fun to watch as he transitioned between the mild mannered Tom Jackman and the dangerous Billy Hyde. The plot twists were fun as they happened, even if they don't hold up to examination.

There was some discussion about whether there might be a Jekyll 2, which hasn't happened yet, and frankly I'd just as soon Moffat focusing on Doctor Who.

Billy Elliot: The Musical--A Warning

2010-12-31T12:08:00.000-06:00

I expected to love Billy Elliot: The Musical. I mean--a musical about dancing and the importance of the arts! Okay, so I was a bit concerned when I remembered that the music was by Elton John, who is just so darned. . .Elton John-y. But some of his tunes were catchy, and the soundtrack to The Road to El Dorado isn't the least bit annoying.

And dancing. Theater and dancing. And such great reviews and its been running in London literally since the coal strike of 1984 and it won every single Tony Award since it opened on Broadway, including Best Musical, Best Non-Musical, and Best Use of Natural Materials and the President's Trophy from the Rose Bowl Parade.

And as a bonus, I hadn't seen the movie, so it wasn't like I already knew everything about the story. Sure, I knew the outline: coal strike in the north of England, young boy who discovers he loves to dance, conflict with his father who equates dance with homosexuality. No wonder Elton John was drawn to this story, right?

So the four of us from Chez Evil joined another family for dinner and a show. Lovely family, lovely dinner, lovely conversation, lovely theater.

Bad bad bad play.

First of all, the sound was heavily over amplified and badly mixed. Not the fault of the play or the actors, and probably the fault of local sound engineers and thus locally contained. But who let Nigel Tufnel onto the sound board? As a result, everything was loud and flat, hard to listen to and inspiring an instinctive desire to duck behind the seats in self protection. If there was any charm to the music, there was no way to hear it because it was delivered with all the subtlety of a brick aimed at your face.

Okay, so maybe I just should have put my earmuffs back on and listened that way. There was still the dancing, right? Again--hard to tell, due to being presented with the same level of nuance and delicacy as the sound. It was so fast, so frenetic, flailing arms and scurrying, as if the dancing had been choreographed at 33 1/3 RPMs but performed at 45. (Yes, I'm that old. Let's try for a simile from the digital age) It was as if the whole show had been filmed, and then digitally compressed to fit a shorter running time.

By the third scene, I was seriously worried that once again, it was my cold dead heart making it impossible for me to experience something transcendent. I decided I was going to be seriously miserable if I didn't find a way to enjoy this play. So during the "Expressing Yourself" number, I just gave up.

Let me sketch that number for you, in case you haven't seen the play--at least my pain can be used to prevent yours. Billy, wee bairn that he is, is taking some heat about liking to dance and words like "pouf" and "poncing" are being thrown his way. Because everybody knows that no heterosexual male would want to spend time surrounded by scads of girls wearing leotards--honestly, I do not understand men sometimes.

Anyway, Billy, being eleven, is being forced to defend what is probably a still unemerged sexual identity. Now his dance teacher has told him that he's talented enough to try to get in to the Royal Ballet School, and he doesn't know what to do so he goes to visit his best friend to get some advice. And he walks in to find his friend wearing a frilly skirt and shaking what we in America here call "his booty." And Billy is appalled. So Michael makes Billy dress up as well, leading to this bit of enlightened dialogue:

Michael: Here, put on my mam's dress.
Billy: But we'll get into trouble!
Michael: Nah! Me dad does it all the time.

Yes, folks, in 2010, Elton John has brought us a vision of sexual identity that is as sophisticated as an episode of "Three's Company." I was deeply embarrassed and uncomfortable with a show that actually instructs us that while ballet dancing doesn't equal homosexuality, cross dressing and show tunes do. Get your stereotypes right!

And so the rest of the night fell into every predictable plot device: Billy misses the chance to audition, because his father and brother find out about it and forbid him from dancing. Billy dances an angry dance (not as good as this one) and. . .intermission!

Act Two opens a year later, and Billy has given up dance. Except that a few minutes in, he's alone in the community room where he took lessons, and he dances again--even better than in Act One, because nothing hones a dancer's techinque like a year of not dancing and then not even warming up before launching into a personal version of "Swan Lake." Actually, this was the one bit I liked, as Billy danced with an adult doppelganger, engaging with his dreams of who he could be. And, yes, I'll go out on a limb and state for the record that Tchaikovsky is a better composer than Elton John.

Of course, his dad sees this, is deeply moved, and so changes his mind, but now Billy has to go all the way to London (which in actual geographic terms is like going from Boston to New York) which is a problem because everybody has been on strike from the coal mines and fighting with policemen and harassing the scabs, which means they don't have money for bus fare. But then everybody pitches in their widow's mite, and. . .there's still not enough. But somehow, one of the scabs has magically heard about this impromptu donation campaign--okay, that's pure hokum and not even remotely explainable except by "Musical physics" and the Theory of Narrative Causality--and donates some obscene amount of cash. So Billy goes, has some "funny" adventures where dad meets a danseur in tights! Oh! The visual humor!

(Rudolph Nureyev is not a joke)

Add in a Glasgow accent, and that's Comedy Gold(TM)! Get it?!? He's a poncey dancer and dad's uncomfortable with the costume and the evident maleness, but he's got a working class accent and dad's expectations are confounded! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. . .okay, it's not funny at all and rather insulting actually.

Blah blah blah audition blah blah blah wait for the letter, pretend you didn't get in because this is exactly how real people act around their heart's desire and the union caved and the strike is lost and Billy goes off to London and then we have a final number that is the curtain call as well The End.

When a play is this painful, you have two choices: either you leave, or you find something to think about. Leaving was not an option--the kidlets were really enjoying it. So I found myself admiring the enthusiastic dedication of every last person on stage. I began to wonder if they all learned their lines phonetically in order to approximate a Northern English accent. And I began to wonder about the miners.

Coal mining is not a job I have any connection with--I have never lived in mining areas, don't know anyone who has ever been a miner. It strikes me as a horrible job--you get up in the morning to go down into the dark, you do mind-numbing and dangerous physical labor for hours on end, then you come back up into the night. It's not a life I can imagine, and not one I'd necessarily want for my kids even if I did it. Add into the mix that the strikers are actually coming to blows with the police, and I don't know why Dad Elliot doesn't take any chance to get his kid out of there. Really--even if the strike succeeds, wouldn't he be better off somewhere else?

Which of course lead me to wonder about what happened to those mines in the intervening 26 years? Do those communities still exist? What do they do now?

According to the Durham Mining Museum, there is still coal mining going on in the Easington colliery, the one at issue in the play. There was an uptick in employment 1980-85, (the strike happened 1984-85) but generally employment has trended down after 1930. It was this Wikipedia page that really made me think.

Prior to 1984, coal mining was both nationally owned and heavily subsidized. Margaret Thatcher, whatever you think of her politics or techniques, was not crazy for thinking that it was a waste of taxpayer's money to keep coal mines open when it was cheaper to actually import coal than it was to mine it in Britain. Her goal in 1984 was to actually close the mines. So what brain trust was in charge of the coal miners' union that thought that the proper protest against closing the mines was to go on strike and effectively close the mines?

Maggie Thatcher: Close the mines!
Coal Miners' Union: Don't close the mines!
Maggie Thatcher: Don't close the mines!
Coal Miners' Union: Close the mines! Fire!

Remind you of anything?

Yup.

Add to that fundamental stupidity the fact that since the previous successful strike of 1970, most of the UK has switched to gas and heating oil, diesel and electricity to run homes, power plants and railroads. Coal was just not the foundation of the economy any more. Then Thatcher's government had foreseen the chance of strikes--how could they not--so the industries that required coal had already stockpiled in order to survive a strike. Not to mention that they could have apparently continued to import coal from Australia more cheaply than buying it locally.

To pile onto the doomed nature of this strike--apparently, the union never actually took a vote on the strike, meaning the strike itself was illegal. As a result, according to the wiki page:

Many miners were forced into debt as the union did not make strike payments to its members, only paying money to strikers on picket. The problem was compounded as the union's failure to hold an official ballot meant that the strike was illegal and social security rules prevented benefits being paid to participants of illegal strikes. Further, the rules meant that any benefits paid to partners or dependents of striking miners were calculated as if strike pay was being received.

So, who were the venal and corrupt idiots at the union? Frankly, this reads to me like something out of stereotypical Chicago politics, where the union leaders were embezzling from their members and selling out for their own benefit. Which is not to excuse the brutality of the government using police against their own citizens, nor the designation of them as "the enemy within." I'm sure there are many ways the whole situation could have been handled better from all sides.

But hey! It's all worth it if we got a Broadway play out of it, right?

Right?

More Whovian Goodness

2010-12-28T11:48:00.001-06:00

Because I am a complete geek and want to share the love, this website is brilliant: all my beloved Doctor Who characters animated Simpson's style. Treat yourself to some wasted time with all the variations. There's even a version of Eleven wearing the fez and carrying a mop.

Like I said: brilliant.

Doctor Who: A Christmas Carol

2010-12-28T11:20:00.001-06:00

I am a complete fan and addict of the "New" Doctor Who, and this Christmas just confirmed it. Not that I'm entirely a recent convert to the Doctor. No, I had my first Doctor back when he was Tom Baker.

Such wonderful insanity he brought to the role. I even have cloudy memories of trying to decide how I felt about Romana vs. Sarah Jane as companion. But the broadcast schedule back then was different. Each story was broadcast as a (roughly) half-hour show, with four or five episodes to complete the story, and it wasn't always possible for me to catch all of the individual episodes, much less follow an entire season's worth of episodes. Things got in the way.

It's hard to remember that back in those long ago days, we didn't have many choices to watch anything: no VCRs, no Tivo, no streaming, no Hulu, no On-Demand, no Netflix. You watched what was broadcast when it was broadcast, or you missed it. It was deprivation, I tell you! Worse than walking to school through snow up to my neck, uphill both ways! Kids today have no idea how we suffered back then!

Disruptive kids have no idea how easy they have it these days!

I watched more than a few episodes back when PBS ran Tom Baker's episodes, but I never actually reached critical fan-girl mass. So while things like college and life got in the way of my Doctor Who fan-initiation back then, I don't have to suffer any longer, due to the glory of Netflix streaming.

As a result, I was able to gorge on a veritable feast of New Who goodness, starting with Christopher Eccleston's turn in the re-boot and gobbling away at episodes through Tennant's tenure in a matter of mere months. And boy, was it good!

Which one is "your" Doctor--Nine or Ten?

But then. . . then. . .then came Eleven.

I love this Doctor. Love him to pieces. He's so damn alien! It's like Russell Davies wrote sci-fi and then had wonderful actors find the humanity in the madness. Now, Steven Moffat writes stories that probe the humanity of fairy tales, and has Matt Smith to make them odd again.

But he's so much fun! He's so light-hearted in a way Nine really wasn't, and Ten could only be occasionally. Admit it--Eleven danced at Amy's wedding exactly the way Nine could never have done. Actually, I think Eleven may have wormed his way into my heart by the fish-fingers-and-custard debacle, after he tossed away a plate of buttered toast and ordered it "And stay out!"

Which brings us to "A Christmas Carol."

Wouldn't you think Doctor Who had already done "A Christmas Carol?" Hasn't everybody? I admit, I set my expectations rather low, because we've seen everybody and their aunt do Dickens at Christmas. Plus, I had been gorging on entire seasons of Doctor Who. Now I had to revise my consumption habits--if one episode was weak, I wouldn't immediately have another one to watch.

Turns out, the Doctor was in very good hands. The episode started out (literally) at warp speed. A troubled space ship was bouncing around, the bridge staff hollering orders and emergency protocols, the whole thing a satiric riff on "Star Trek:" the lay-out of the bridge! The snappy quasi-military ambiance! The gratuitous lens flares! And then the African-American navigator with the eye-hardware shouting "I'm flying blind!"

Geordi LaForge--the original

The doors open, and Amy strides onto the bridge in her policewoman kiss-o-gram outfit, joined shortly thereafter by Rory in his gladiator wear. Oh, right--you're the people from the honeymoon suite. . . .

Things slow down as we drop to the Planet of Steam Punk! Michael Gambon is the resident Scrooge, who actually gets some pleasure out of denying other people's requests. No! I won't let your relative out of cold storage for Christmas! No, I won't clear a landing path for the spaceship! No, I won't talk to the president just because he called me!

And then the Doctor arrived. And we got one of my favorite versions of the Doctor--puckish, talking a million miles a minute, gawky, awkward, and yet so bloody brilliant that you know he's going to save the day somehow or other. His entrance was literally down the chimney, which he then lampshades by saying "Christmas. . .all the chimneys. . .I couldn't resist."

Is there any point in summarizing the plot? Michael Gambon is Scrooge, called in this version Kazran Sardick. He lends money to poor people and takes a family member as collateral, putting them in suspended animation, which also serves to lessen the population of undesirables: a solution Scrooge would have approved. He also controls the clouds on the planet, which serves to keep sky fish out of people's hair. Literally. But the Doctor needs Kazran to clear the clouds so the Star Trek clone ship can land safely, saving all 4003 people on board. Including Amy and Rory and their cos play outfits. Kazran won't do it, because there is nothing in it for him. In a nifty bit of reasoning (reminiscent of Moffat's other recent triumph, Sherlock) the Doctor concludes that Kazran's better instincts can still be reached.

This being Doctor Who (or more accurately, Steven Moffat's Doctor Who), he does it by going to Kazran's past and re-writing his memories. And we are treated to the delightful paradox of watching Michael Gambon watching a home movie of himself as a child as that past changes by the doctor's arrival.

His memories are being re-written as the past is re-written as we watch! "Who ARE you?" Kazran demands, and the Doctor answers coolly, "Tonight, I am the ghost of Christmas Past."

All this, and we're about, what, ten minutes in?

There's more--there's much much more. There is a Tiny Tim-esque urchin who throws a rock at Scrooge, there is a beautiful woman who is unfrozen for a series of Christmas Eves with the Doctor and the younger Kazran, there is a mad carriage ride through the sky pulled by a cloud shark, there is half a sonic screwdriver, there is enough plot to fuel five or six episodes of any other television show all crammed into a stuffed Christmas goose of this special episode.

But most of all, there is the Doctor as I love to see him--all ADHD and random and delightful and utterly rubbish at being human. Several of my favorite moments below, bulleted for easy digestion:

"Santa Claus. Father Christmas. Or as I know him--Jeff. See--here we are at Frank Sinatra's lodge. Christmas 1952. See Albert Einstein in the back with the blonde?"
Fezzes! (Fezzes are cool.)
The bow tie discussion! "Why do you wear that tie?" "Bow ties are cool." "What makes them cool?"
The young Kazran is a delightful skeptic. "Are you sure you are my babysitter?" Who wouldn't wonder when your new "babysitter" is actually jumping on your bed? With his shoes on! Not proper babysitter behavior. And a shout-out to Mary Poppins.
The failure of the infallible psychic paper! "I am universally acknowledged as a mature and responsible adult." Kazran: "It's just a bunch of wavy lines." Doctor: "Hmm. Shorted out--finally a too-big lie."
Jaws! Just the fin showing above the condensed fog in the storage room.
The Doctor failing prestidigitation--he makes a card appear inside the cracker and it still isn't the right card. "Are you sure that's not your card? I am very good at card tricks."
The Doctor accidentally getting engaged to Marilyn Monroe. Of course he did. She had extremely good taste in men.
Poor Kazran, having to look to the Doctor for advice about women. "My advice is to try to be rubbishy and nervous." "Why?" "Because you're going to be anyway, so if you pretend you mean to be it gives you some illusion of control." That and "Either you go kiss the girl or you go to your room and invent a new kind of screw-driver. Don't make my mistakes."

Sure, there were things that didn't work, things I could nitpick about. *cough* Blinovitch Limitation Effect *cough* But that's like complaining that you don't like almonds in your stuffing, and ignoring the absolute groaning sideboard of a Christmas feast. This episode was the television equivalent of that feast: I was literally laughing out loud and bouncing in my seat with joy.

In fact, I think I'd better to watch it again. Because, unlike in the bad old days, I CAN! And then I order the DVD/Blue Ray and watch it again and again. . . .

Unnecessary Items

2010-12-14T10:14:00.000-06:00

So I'm paging through Amazon's (online) toy store looking for Christmas gift inspiration for the various members of my family. Because not only do I need to find gifts for my family, but also find ideas to pass on to other members of the family who want to buy gifts for us.

Having the blackened nubbin of a cold dead heart is SUCH an inconvenience this time of year.

When, lo! And Behold! I stumbled across this!

Power Wheels Single Battery Toddler 6 Volt Charger

I didn't know you had to charge your toddler! Maybe that explained my kids' lethargy and good sleeping habits? Toddlers are quite small, so 6 volts seems about right to me. Such a pity that I found this after my own kids are no longer toddler sized. It would eliminate that pesky problem of having to actually feed them every day. How can you tell if your toddler is a "single battery toddler" rather than, for example, a "multiple battery toddler?" Does this come with an instruction manual? I could have used one of those for my kids when they were toddlers.

Oh, wait.

The product description seems to indicate that one is not supposed to plug the Actual Toddler into the wall.

For use with certain 6-volt Power Wheels vehicles. This charger must only be used with a Power Wheels Toddler 6-volt lead acid battery (sold separately).

Oh.

Well, so much for Truth in Advertising. It DOES say it's a "6 Volt Toddler Charger!" What was I supposed to think? Never mind, then.

Norris Church Mailer

2010-11-27T23:11:00.000-06:00

Norris Church Mailer died this past week. I just saw the headline.

Did y'all know I met her once? Really, I did. I had this wonderful friend who was an English professor at Concordia College in St. Paul, and she was tapped to organize a conference for the International F. Scott Fitzgerald Society and she called a bunch of her friends to be on the planning committee. Which I did for a bunch of months, and it was wonderfully planned and mostly I just sat an was awed by all the wonderful ideas that my friend came up with and that she actually made happen.

One of the events for the conference was this great Reader's Theater performance of selections of letters by and between F. Scott, his wife Zelda, and their frenemy Ernest Hemingway. Even better were the actors--George Plimpton was divinely suave as FSF, Norman Mailer was appropriately grouchy as Papa Hemingway, and Norris Church Mailer was her gracious Southern self as Zelda.

They were all staying at the Saint Paul Hotel after doing their Reader's Theater performance, and I was Mr. Plimpton's driver. (Dare I call him "George?")

At any rate, I had toddled down to the hotel to take him to the airport, and Norris wanted to come out and have a picture of the two of them with the statue of FSF just across from the hotel. Since there was no reason for me to be in the picture, I was the photographer.

And she was so delightful! So full of fun and life--and so unlike cranky and grumpy old Norman, who was probably suffering from arthritis as well as a hang-over, if what I overheard was correct. But Norris was gracious, and generous, and swept even reserved George Plimpton into posing with the statue. She wanted several shots, and was so obviously enjoying herself and engaging everyone around her.

I was pleased to see she had a new book out, but then this seemed so sudden. Nothing I had seen around the book publicity said anything about ongoing battles with cancer. According to the article I saw in the Washington Post, it had been going on for something like eleven years.

So now all three of them are no longer with us, which kind of shocked me. She was so much younger than her husband and George Plimpton, she should have been around for decades. I'm rather sad, as she was such a wonderful personality, so delightful to be around, and now she's gone and the world is just that much dimmer without her.

Photo by Christina Pabst from NYT.

Terrific Typos

2010-11-25T23:07:00.000-06:00

From LitLovers Blog:

Rowlings sentences are chock-full of clauses and phrases, comas and semicolons, some stretching out to 50 words!

Well, yes, there are indeed characters who are in comas--Neville Longbottom's parents in particular, if I recall correctly. Not sure that qualifies as "chock full" however.

Oh, and it's no surprise, but I endorse the position taken on Harry Potter--do go out and read them all if you haven't. Or if you haven't recently.

Why Reading Matters

2010-11-03T18:33:00.000-05:00

This is a rough draft of some thoughts that have been simmering in the crock-pot of my brain the last few days. See, I have decided to go back and try to take the road not taken, and apply for a graduate program in English Literature, and a key part of that process is to spend some time thinking about WHY I want to do this and where I want to go with it.

The first and easiest answer is that I want to do it because literature, and studying literature, and thinking about literature in a structured and critical way just makes me happy. It's like champagne for the soul, finding a great book and then rummaging around inside it and parsing why I enjoyed it so much. It's like eating chocolate, or crawling into a freshly made bed, or eating a really fine meal: it's a pleasure so great, it's physical.

So I can explain to myself why I want to spend time doing this, but there is really something more. I mean, I have a lovely life where I could just read books and think about them without committing to something as grueling as graduate school. There is something I want to do in addition to just reading for my own pleasure, some larger goal I have in the back of my mind.

The obvious end to graduate school is teaching, isn't it? People who become English professors don't get ther without going to graduate school, for instance, and there is a part of me that sees teaching English as a seductive career path. But why go to graduate school? Why not be a high school teacher, for example, or even do something entrepreneurial and write a book or monetize a blog or free lance for a newspaper/magazine? Why, and especially at my advanced age, go back to school?

I think that I want to go to school in part because I need the structure and support to launch myself: I don't really have the passion for launching a business venture, and the dreary necessity for commercializing oneself is draining my enthusiasm. At least from where I sit. Of course, one markets one's self even in academia, but before I do that, I'd like the chance to get my intellectual ducks in a row. And I need some deadlines and mentoring and expectations, etc. to motivate myself properly and get that accomplished. And THEN I can go do the monetization/networking/self-promotion as necessary. But I need a little space to think first.

Which brings me to the point of this post: what do I think about when I think about literature? There are two different answers. First, there is the activity of reading a particular work and analyzing it. Looking at the structures, the historical context, the plot, the themes, all the elements that make a book great. Great writers put a lot of thought and craft into a great book, and it often takes a lot of thought to figure out what all goes into a truly meaningful work. That's a lot of what I did as an undergraduate, and it's what I continue to do as a social reader. I drive my friends nuts, because what I have to say about a book often takes longer than a book club wants to spend on something most of them just read cursorily.

Second, though, is the larger question about why literature matters at all. And in this election season, I've been thinking about the importance of narrative and its role in our society. It's not just in books any more (if it ever was), but the stories we tell ourselves are incredibly important to things like what we do about Guantanamo, or who we elect as president, or whether we work to reverse health care reform, or how we engage internationally. History and diplomacy and foreign policy and politics and myriad other things are all fundamental exercises in narrative and that affects everybody.

I practiced law for about a decade, handling various disputes over medical care and automobile accidents and even a divorce. But only one, and even that was an appeal on a larger issue. But what makes law work the way it does is fundamentally about narrative. And the issue is how do the facts of a case make a compelling narrative and how does that narrative fit the prejudices of the judge?

Karon v. Karon, 435 N.W.2d 501 (Minn. 1989).

In one case, there was an issue about a divorce before the supreme court where I clerked. The man and woman had amicably settled their issues and went their separate ways. The wife had declined spousal maintenance (what most people know as "alimony"), which she had an absolute right to claim. In the final divorce decree, they had agreed to language that stated "there shall be no changes made to this decree." Well, of course, something changed. In less than five years after the divorce (the details are hazy, but I could look it up) the former wife was diagnosed/contracted MS and could no longer work. Now, it was important for her to have some form of spousal maintenance, because she really couldn't support herself alone. The issue for the court was whether there was some mechanism by which she could get some money from her ex-husband.

The details were technical and legal: did these people have the authority/ability to deprive the court of jurisdiction to amend the divorce decree? I mean, in a civil society based on laws, can two people agree that a court is not allowed into a area--an area that courts traditionally have every reason to be in--even if one of them changes their mind later? Can you ask a court to enforce the provision of a divorce degree that says the court has no jurisdiction over the divorce decree? At what point do the interests of the larger society have an interest in asking a husband to pay spousal support rather than having the woman go on welfare? These were juicy legal arguments, but in the end, they were really just ways of asking: was it fair, in light of the way the situation had changed?

There is a saying: where you stand depends on where you sit. And among the clerks, we felt there was a strong message of denial from the male justices. Post-feminist, young people that we were, we read it as a case of men insisting on the fiction of a fresh start. Of course, the husband in question had already remarried, and had a baby with his new wife. I thought at the time, and I continue to think, that there was a strong message of wish fulfillment that a man could walk away from decades of marriage as if it had never happened.

Of course, this played into the then current disapproval of dead-beat dads: it was the same narrative. A man felt he was entitled to walk away from a marriage of however long a duration, and have no lasting ties to the woman or the children of that marriage, and that was just wrong. It was bad for the children, it was damaging in the case of changed circumstances, and it was a moral hazard. You might not still be married, but you are not "status quo ante." You can't go back to where you were before you married, and there was no reason society should allow that.

At the time, the court had five men and two women on it, and the oldest and closest to antediluvian was the most vocal of the right for a man to walk away. On the morning of oral argument, there was a deep rift between the judicial camps, just as there was between the parties. The clerks, the parties, and the judges all went into the courtroom with the same two narratives, arrayed on one side or the other: the right to tabula rasa post divorce, and the continuing obligation of social ties in light of changed circumstances. She could have asked for spousal maintenance, and the court would have absolutely had the right to amend the amount of that maintenance and could have made it permanent. I certainly saw it as a gift she had given to her ex-husband, and I felt it was churlish and obnoxious for him to refuse to help her in this situation.

We were surprised, therefore, when one of the amici curiae stood up and pulled the roof down around all our ears. "You cannot go into this decree and alter its terms," she thundered, "because to do so is to establish the precedent that women are incompetent to contract. Women have fought since the Victorian era to be allowed to own their own property, to make their own contracts, and to be allowed to control their own legal and economic destiny. If you alter the plain terms of this divorce, you are doing so because you believe that this woman was not competent to make her own decisions and that you have a paternalistic right to go back and alter the plain terms of her wishes."

What this amicus had done was to change the narrative. It was no longer a division between the pro-wife and pro-husband forces. It was no longer an esoteric consideration of the ability of parties to deprive a court of its traditional jurisdiction. It became a question of whether women had the right to make their own decisions about their future and have those decisions be respected, regardless of what happened in the future.

And that became the dominant way of thinking about that case, at least among the men who still wanted to have the chance to walk away from a failed marriage without any lingering ties. They could decide in favor of the husband without being selfish or obnoxious--they were "honoring" the woman's wishes! Sure, it was a bad bargain she had made, but that was no reason to nullify it, right?

Okay, in a subterranean way, the final decision carried more than a whiff of paternalistic stink. It was a bad bargain. It was a bad enough bargain that it felt fundamentally unfair to enforce it. But if we considered that we were enforcing it against a disabled woman for her own good that made it okay!

A good feminist critic could parse this better than I can, but I'll give it a shot: a woman made a bargain that turns out to be against her best interests, although she couldn't have known that at the time. Once the unfairness became apparent, she sought to amend the deal. The court decided she couldn't amend the deal, because that wouldn't be in her own best interests, albeit in a vaguely theoretical way that was of no help in the present instance and that offered only limited prospective relief against a theoretical future hazard of future contracts involving theoretical women who were not in any way before the current court. Presumably, the next time Frima Karon got divorced, then, she would remember NOT to put a clause in that divested the courts of jurisdiction. Because there's no point in alleviating a difficult situation that is right in front of the court when you could imagine vague future circumstances that might be handled. If they ever happened.

But we were young, and had been ambushed. There was no way the clerks were able to assemble a compelling counter-narrative, especially since this one enabled the fantasy of no-strings divorce while dressing it in pro-feminist disguise. The reality of the court practice at that time was that the court retired to their conference room to make their decision immediately after oral argument, without consulting clerks or having any court staff present. And the amicus argument won the day. This is from the published decision:

Amicus for the Family Law Section of the Minnesota State Bar Association stated at oral argument that setting aside the stipulation and decree is insulting and demeaning to women. Counsel who argued on behalf of the association is a woman. She took that position in response to counsel for respondent's implication that women involved in divorce cannot understand or act to protect their rights even when represented by counsel; therefore, the state must protect them in the manner it protects children in the role of parens patriae. Amicus's argument is compelling.

Moreover, what effect would affirmance have on other contracts entered into by married women? Would such a decision supporting the respondent ultimately lead to turning the clock back, outlawing not only antenuptial agreements, but also allowing parties to contest the validity of all instruments and contracts entered into on behalf of married women? Would we also question the validity of deeds of conveyances and purchases of expensive personal property? Where would the protection end? In short, intelligent adult women, especially when represented by counsel, must be expected to honor their contracts the same as anyone else. Any other holding would result in chaos in the family law field and declining respect for binding agreements as well.

Four of the five male justices voted to deny the change in maintenance. Unsurprisingly, both the female justices dissented, as did my personal favorite of the judges (other than the one I worked for). Even today, Minnesota has what is now known as the "Karon waiver" as a tool of family law.

Narrative matters, and often matters more than logic, or past precedent, or demonstrable fact. Climate change is a matter of demonstrable scientific fact, as is that fact that a significant portion of that change is caused by human activity. Yet people still deny it. In order to understand why they deny it, it is important to understand a number of complex things about their thinking--which amounts to understanding the narrative they tell themselves.

In the most recent elections of November 2010, the voters of Oklahoma approved a law that prohibits the courts of that state from applying sharia law. Conservative commentators have decried the alleged goal of Islamic fanatics to use sharia to "impose a theocracy" on the United States. One can't help but wonder, however, if these commentators have any objection to using "Christian principles" as the basis of lawmaking? And while the logical inconsistency is apparent to me--sharia and "Christianity" are equally theocratic when used as the basis for legislation--there are people who subscribe to a different narrative than I do, that allows them to see the one as a threat, and the other as good governance.

The Women and Men of Brewster Place

What literature we read shapes our approach to social narrative. Back in 1982, Gloria Naylor published the book "The Women of Brewster Place" which assembled a number of short stories about African American women in more or less desperate circumstances. What these women had in common was that they all lived in the same street, and many of their harrowing stories were the consequences of the actions of bad men. Oprah Winfrey adapted the novel into a TV miniseries in 1989, and there was such a kick in reading stories where you could so easily be angry at the horrible men who had done such horrible things.

Then, in 1997, she published "The Men of Brewster Place" and suddenly all that self-righteous anger that had felt so good went sour. Because she was (and is!) such a talented writer, Naylor went back to the horrible stories of her earlier novel and re-imagined the men's roles. And surprise! The men weren't just monsters, but were flawed and stumbling human beings who were trying to do the right thing too. And it was no longer possible to just dismiss the women's misery as the fault of men, but a reader had to truly look at what happened from more than one perspective. Naylor demonstrated that there was more than one narrative that contributed to the "facts."

It is the underlying narrative that allows us to make sense of our lives and our world. Conspiracy theories make no sense to me, because I have never met anybody who would be able to sustain a successful conspiracy for any length of time. Obviously, other people have no difficulty accepting that George Soros and ACORN are manipulating large swaths of public activity for their own purposes. It's a compelling narrative to somebody, and the only way to overcome that mind-set is to understand what that narrative is and why it works.

So, as I look forward to the study of English literature, I find myself wanting to go beyond the realm of books. Certainly, since I was an undergraduate, the realm of social discourse has grown fantastically. Back in the old days, we had books, magazines, and a few TV and radio stations (which had the requirement of the "Fairness Doctrine" which meant that they had to broadcast "both sides" of an issue). Since that time, our choices for consuming narrative include an infinite number of broadcast, streaming, podcast, satellite, MP3, YouTube, and blog outlets. Fiction comes in the form of books, movies, YouTube videos, cable news, and any number of other formats. Yet the nature of narrative remains the same: our understanding of them as narrative may not yet have caught up to the reality of our media-saturation. And that fascinates me.

What You Should Do RIGHT NOW.

2010-10-28T18:42:00.000-05:00

What are you doing right now? No, seriously--what are you doing? Do you really need to do that? Right at this minute, especially. I mean, surely it could wait, right?

Fine. Then I will wait until you are finished.

Okay, NOW--stop everything and go watch "Sherlock" from the brilliant minds of Stephen Moffatt and Mark Gatiss, running Sundays on PBS.

It's Sherlock Holmes in 21st century London, but still the same prickly, irritatingly brilliant, self-absorbed charcter who used to stalk the foggy streets of Victoria's age. And amazingly, the more things change, the more they stay exactly the same: John Watson, former Army doctor, wounded in Afghanistan. He still writes about Holmes's adventures, but on a blog. And what Holmes can tell about a man from his cell phone rivals anything the 19th century version could tell from a bowler.

It's fast, it's sharp, but still it has all the flavor of Conan Doyle's aggravating hero. Kudos to the design team who found ways to use modern editing techniques to illustrate the Great Man's ratiocination (and isn't THAT a Victorian word!) Moffatt is currently Much Beloved for his masterly work on the rebooted Doctor Who series, and ~~obsessives~~ fans like me can see a great deal of similarity between the first episode of "Sherlock" and the first episode of Matt Smith's tenure as the Eleventh Doctor. In fact, Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock could easily be transplanted into the Tardis and be completely believable as the Doctor.

I have great respect and affection for Martin Freeman's Doctor Watson here as well: he's dazzled by Sherlock, but not such a fool as many Watson's have been. Freeman makes a wonderful foil--he is more human, if a bit PTSD, but every bit Holmes equal in heart. Which I wouldn't necessarily have expected, given that I know Freeman solely from his roles as the porn star stand-in in "Love Actually" and as Arthur Dent in the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" movie. In both of those roles, he was rather bumbling and overwhelmed by events. Here, however, he dives into Holmes's life and immediately fits in.

Sadly, there are only three episodes of this series--damn you, you wily Brits, and your insistence on quality over quantity! However, there have been promises of new episodes in 2011, which will have to be filmed around Martin Freeman's starring role as Bilbo Baggins in the upcoming "Hobbit" movie.

Yes. I am a geek. But just watch, and tell me you aren't glad that I am, so I could point you to this!

Bryan Ferry's Latest

2010-10-28T18:23:00.000-05:00

Yes, the man who gave us "More Than This" still has it. Sadly, the video director seems to have spent too much time perusing "Hot Russian Women Seeking Husbands" sites and three color processing effects from the 1960s.

So maybe it's not an accident that the album cover looks like a live action Vargas drawing?

Tarot For the Day

2010-10-18T11:37:00.000-05:00

Just for kicks, I downloaded a Tarot app to my DroidX phone. Yes, it's an upgrade--previously, all my fortune-telling chores were handled by a virtual Magic 8 Ball on my iPod. But tarot--that's like having TEN Magic 8 Balls all at once, or something. At any rate, even with a completely random, free app, tarot card reading, at least you get more than a mere yes-or-no answer.

So, offered for entertainment purposes only, here's my tarot reading for the day:

Your Position: Temperance. Keep emotions in balance. Synthesis. Create something new.
Cross/Opposition: Nine of Swords. Sense of despair or dread hangs over you. Temporary.
Immediate Future: Ace of Pentacles. Luck. Financial propositions, business opportunities.
Recent Past; Eight of Swords. Fear, doubt and anxiety. You can escape, but with some bruises.
Distant Past: Judgment. Recurring illness or problem. Old debts, old scars come back.
Long Term Future: King of Swords. Calm and self-assured, with a deep sense of inner strength and conviction.
Position You Will Soon Be In: Seven of Wands. Deep purpose and valor. Stiff competition and opposition.
External Influences: Six of Swords. Moving away from strife/difficult times to calmer waters.
Hopes/Fears/Concerns: Two of Pentacles. Success is achieved through skillful manipulation of goals and objectives.
Final Outcome: The Devil. Temptations. Addictions. Raw, primitive instinct.

As I was reading these, I went through the five stages of fortune-telling:

Hope that it would tell me something;
Skepticism that these things ever mean anything;
Consideration that maybe there was something in what the cards mean that I could at least take as ideas about things to do in my life;
Critical skepticism, trying to figure out how often a mix of "working toward calm" and "escaping old bad habits" would come up and be applicable to how many millions of people;
Total WTF?!?!?! The Devil? After all these cards saying that I am temperate, escaping doubt and anxiety and old scars and moving away from strife to calmer waters--and I end up with Addiction and Temptation?

Who knew that calm and inner strength, deep purpose and valor were the harbingers of addiction? Does that mean that the Buddha got Nirvana and heroin addiction confused?

Well, Kurt Cobain seemed to have, so maybe that's not a hard mistake to make.

[Drum hit here: Ba dum shish! I'm here all week! Try the veal! Watch for me on HBO!]

But seriously, if you think of people with whom you associate the terms "temperance" and "inner strength" and "conviction," don't you think of --well--the Dali Lama, or Gandhi. Not so much "raw, primitive instinct."

Oh yeah, right. "Entertainment purposes only." Well, I guess that was fun.

Let's Do Word Problems!

2010-10-18T09:45:00.000-05:00

Stick with it--I know you can do this!

A thirsty person has a lovely 22 oz. glass with some ice cubes in it. She has one-quarter of a 24 fl. oz. bottle of Diet Pepsi

and an unopened 12 oz. can of Diet Coke.

If she pours all the Diet Pepsi into the glass, and then fills the remainder of the glass with Diet Coke, does the resulting class of trademarked brands interact like matter and anti-matter and bring about the end of time and space as we know it? Or does the presence of the ice cubes operate as dilithium crystals, making faster-than-light speeds possible?

You know that Starfleet Academy gives this test to incoming cadets--I think it was originally posited by Montgomery Scott, who was perhaps enjoying his own lovely beverage at the time.

Henry VIII, a Review

2010-07-31T11:29:00.003-05:00

So much promise, so much wrong.

Back in 2005, when the Famille Evil went to England for the first time, one of the first things we did (after overcoming jet lag) was tour the Tower of London.

Yeah, so do everybody. I know. Shut up.

One of the first things the Yeoman Warder said on the tour was that "Henry VIII was the most despotic and tyrannical of English kings." And I was startled, because that was not the image that I had of the man.

Sure, he'd married a bunch of times, and cut off a head or two, but---Tudor England! The English Renaissance! The flowering of music and poetry and Protestantism! Finally the end of civil war, and a king whose first job was not to don armor and lead troops, but to write music and woo women and travel from palace to palace in a peaceful land, right?

Well, partially true, as all things are, but also Henry had a lot more people beheaded than I had realized, and the worst of it was how many of them were the people who had served him closely for years. A man who observed the letter of the legal process but bullied it to get his way. A man who would be interesting to see played by Ray Winstone.

And to be sure, we get a thug of a king. A man whose outsized desires and will simply flatten anyone who gets in his way. There is some charm, and in the early years he's rather attractive and you can see his charisma. He's terribly short of elegance or subtlety, things that the real Henry VIII is said to have had, but you can certainly find him appealing.

Coupled with Helena Bonham Carter, who acts the hell out of the role of Anne Boleyn, and you can see the greatness and the disaster of that marriage. Bonham Carter's Boleyn is fiery, whip smart, sensual and challenging. Why wouldn't a competitor like Henry insist on conquering her?

It is here, however, that the series takes its fatal wrong turn: Henry decides to get rid of Anne when she doesn't give him a son--but he starts skulking around outside the chamber doors to listen to the "trial" and to hear the verdict that was entirely pre-determined. And then. . .he cries. He cries! He actually stands in an empty hallway, half in shadows behind a column (as if THAT was ever going to happen--the man was positively surrounded by people at all times) and cries!

Oh boo bloody hoo, you jerk! YOU'RE the one who made the decision to throw her to the wolves. If you loved her so damn much, then you didn't have to do that. Instead, it becomes this pathetic pity party he throws for himself--the woman he loved is going to die and he did it and he didn't have to but blah blah blah whineycakes. Shut up.

It doesn't make the character complex, or more likeable, or anything, actually. It just makes him self-pitying and delusional. The rest of the series continues to fall down the melodramatic rabbit hole, to the point of being unwatchable. A real low point is his discovery that his fifth wife, Katherine Howard, is unfaithful. His advisor, Thomas Cranmer, can't bring himself to actually tell the king to his face, so he leaves a note on the prie dieu for Henry to find while at prayer. (He remains skulking behind a column to watch that Henry actually reads the note--a nasty reminder of the earlier scene.) Ah, but Henry does him one better--he reads the note, crumples it up in his fist and raises his hand to the sky while bellowing "NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!"

Ah, melodramatic posturing. It cracks me up every time.

Because of course it's silly. It's ridiculously silly. It's like bad opera, with him on his knees, his fist raised to heaven, shouting his denial to an unhearing god. . .except not that believable. At this point, my sympathies are all with Katherine Howard, played by Emily Blunt who is far too intelligent and far too good an actress to be saddled with this terrible role.

Of course there is no way to cram the entirely of Henry's reign into a mere four hours of screen time, and the focus on the six wives is a handy way to structure his life. I'm not even going to object to the various historical errors. What I object to is the cheap and cliched picture of the man that is presented here. The series opens with Henry at his father's deathbed, being told the most important thing for him to do as a king is to have a son. That vow to his dying father is then the presented as the most important thing for him to do, which has to be ridiculous--he made a vow to his father, but what about all the vows (coronation vow, marriage vows, etc.) he makes to God? What about his obligation to his own soul? Those are issues that would have been important to Henry, and which were thrown into question in his quest for a divorce from his first wife, his allegation that Anne Boleyn was a witch, and on and on.

But no--for the purposes of this mini-series, Henry has only one vow he needs to fulfill, and all the attendant chaos and death that attends his single-minded quest to have a son is just to be seen as hardships he has to face. It's too bad Anne Boleyn was beheaded, but the real sadness is that her death was uncomfortable for Henry, who had no choice, because he had to fulfill his promise to his dad.

Not buying it. Not liking it. Not recommending it.

My Darklyng, or Journalism Obviously Does Not Pay

2010-07-09T10:17:00.004-05:00

It's summer, you're looking to change things up a bit. Journalism is taking a big ole hit, and you need something to freshen up the dreary news thing. So, take a look around--what's hot these days? Vampires! YA fiction about vampires! Moody and beautiful YA vampires who don't actually attack anybody and who hang around directionless and personality-free high school girls!

But--seriously? My Darkling is what you give us?

I cannot begin to tell you how badly written this is. Truly bad. It makes Stephanie Meyer's books look like Nobel Prize-winning material. It makes your middle-schooler's posts to fanfiction.net look like a collaboration between Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. It makes the back of your breakfast cereal box read like Sonnets from the Portuguese.

Don't just take my word for it, let's have a sample from the first chapter. Our Heroine, teen Natalie, is obsessed with a fictional series of vampire novels written by a fictional author named Fiona St. Clair. For some reason, there is an open casting call for models to come audition to "play" the characters on the book covers. Natalie has slipped away from her normal suburban New Jersey life to come to the audition in Manhattan, which is taking place in room 701:

Natalie caught her breath: 7 was the second digit in 17, which was the magic number that unlocked some of the darkest mysteries in Fiona St. Claire's universe. Was it just an eerie coincidence that the casting was taking place in room 701—17 backward, with a 0 between the numerals?

Seriously? I mean, SERIOUSLY? If the call had taken place in room 908, you could add the 9 and the 8 together and even add the 0 and get 17! Or, room 435, where if you multiply the 4 and the 3 and then add the 5, you get 17! Or, room 8, which is what you get if you add the 1 and the 7! Just think how many "eerie coincidences" you could possibly have in any given building. Especially if you take the zip code the building is in and divide it by the area code, subtract the number of floors in the building, and add in the subway fare. . . .

My Darklyng is posted every Friday, and as of today, there are some 18 chapters. (Is it just an eerie coincidence that if you subtract the 1 from the 8 you get the second digit of 17?) Slate's introduction to it called it a "serialized vampire novel" and "a juicy summer read." So far, there are no vampires, and the thrills seem to consist of wondering if Natalie's mother will find out that Natalie took the train into the city without permission. My God! The nail-biting suspense of it all!

So, the high concept of this serialized novel (are they writing as they go? Surely something this bad is just whipped off late on Thursday night in time for posting on Friday) is the parallel social media links. Several of the characters have Facebook pages and/or Twitter accounts so you can follow what happens in "real time." You know, in case you don't have enough real people to follow, now you can follow two-dimensional fictional people as well.

Also, the story is "illustrated" with photos that purport to be of the characters and their surroundings. I'm not convinced that this is all that new or worthwhile, but if you are going to do this, shouldn't the photos actually look like what is described in the story?

For example, take this photo from Chapter 3--supposedly of the house where Natalie lives with her mother and step-father:

I'm not sure what you would call this architectural style. Italianate Queen Anne, maybe, or Cape Cod Second Empire, or even Collegiate Gothic, maybe--or just a hot mess of styles kluged together. What you would NOT call it is a "rambling ranch-style house at 65 Maple Crest Lane."

This is what a "ranch house" actually looks like:

Notice the fact that a ranch house is only ONE STORY TALL. Notice the fact that it is long and even--dare one say it--rather "rambling." Notice how a "rambling ranch house" is NOT three stories tall with a tower on one end.

I mean, geez, people! If you are going to specify the architecture and post a completely different type of picture on the SAME DAMN PAGE--why should I even click through to your Facebook and Twitter feeds? Because I'm sure the same attention to detail you spent on the ACTUAL BOOK PAGE is going to be higher than on the ancillary sites.

If you do click though, you get very little related to the plot of the book, and a lot of random internet crap. Remember the "Leave Britney Alone" video from a few years back? Well "Natalie" just posted it, because that's how you stay ahead of the internet.

In the end, this is not only badly written, but it's apparently failing to generate much interest on Slate. As of today, there are a total of 8 comments--cumulative from the six weeks of posted chapters. OMG--is that another eerie coincidence? Because 8 can be broken down to 1 plus 7. . . .

So, go ahead, see if you can stand to read this. If you can read all 18 chapters, I have a book I'll sell you--it's entirely composed of the subject lines of emails from my spam folder.

In Which I Contemplate Changing the Name of This Blog

2010-07-09T09:57:00.005-05:00

In which I only sort of contemplate changing the name of this blog. Because everything I'm seeing on the internet today is triggering a "Are You SERIOUS" reaction. So maybe I should just have a blog where I post the things that irritate me, or make me wonder whether there is Stupid Juice in everybody's triple-shot-mega-skinny-latte. Or juice-box, if you're not a coffee drinker.

Because while a Mistress of All Evil would obviously concoct some drippingly acidic potion that slimes greenly over the edges of a bubbling cauldron, that's just too much effort for the lameness that has presented itself from the internet today. I mean, do Diane Krueger's hideous shoes (terrible as they are) really merit using up the last of the eye of newt?

Photo credit: from Photobucket via here.

This is merely the worst of the recent trend in platform soles making an unfortunate comeback. I mean, we have photographic evidence of the 1970s--did we learn nothing? I guess it's true--those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. And boy, when it comes to platform soles, do I mean doomed.

I like Diane Kruger--I really do. She's lovely, she's ridiculously normal in the National Treasure movies, and she's never done anything to me personally. So why did she voluntarily put on these shoes. There is no way white shoes with thick soles will ever look like anything but Nurse Shoes/Old Lady Nursing Home shoes. Sure, she tried to make them look like sandals, what with the straps and all, but nope. Doesn't work. Just doesn't. They make her legs (fabulous movie-star legs that they are) look like sticks stuck into marshmallows. Hmmmmm, marshmallows. Suddenly I'm thinking about s'mores. And I hate s'mores.

Moving on.

Slate.com, I'm talking to you next.

On the Nature of Man

2010-07-07T20:40:00.003-05:00

Met my parents at a trendy restaurant to celebrate JoMama's birthday. This is a restaurant famous for its tea, and as you might expect, there is a line for the restrooms. In a bad move, the restaurant has only two bathrooms--not rooms with stalls, but single person-type almost-like-the-one-back-home type bathrooms.

Somebody came up with a way to make the best of a bad situation, or perhaps they just bowed to the inevitable, and rather than designating one room to each gender, they are labeled for both. This means that about 85% of the time, they are ladies' rooms. There are no urinals--I told you there were almost like the one you have at home. And so you share, just like you do at home.

So this afternoon, I ended up using the one after a guy. This was unusual, as there were four women in line waiting, and probably only about 2 male customers in the whole place. Nevertheless, I was the woman who got to use the bathroom after the man did.

Yup.

It happened.

Do you even have to ask?

Of course you don't.

Because he did.

He left the seat up.

*Disclaimer: Capt. Sweetie never ever ever ever EVER leaves the seat up, because he is a civilized person, and everybody in our household puts the WHOLE DAMN LID DOWN every single time. Because really? Who wants to look at a toilet bowl anyway.

Glee + Madonna: Less than the Sum of the Parts

2010-04-21T20:24:00.002-05:00

The much hyped "All Madonna" episode of Glee aired last night, and there were some great moments, but overall, not nearly as strong a show as one would want. I could recap, but Heather Havrilesky of Salon.com summed it up so wonderfully, there is no reason to.

However, I had to grab and keep this:

It's a great homage to vintage Madonna, nicely choreographed, well sung. . .and the best parts are totally the guys' reaction shots. Kurt is all but dancing along in his seat--how adorable is he? Meanwhile Puck is looking dubious, and Finn is apparently distracted some something shiny.

Meanwhile, the girls are totally working the hell out of those satin bustiers.

Reading

2010-04-15T21:41:00.002-05:00

Not writing. Too busy reading.

For the first time in ages I have more books waiting to be read and reviewed than I have ever had at one time. At least, since I finished my English degree, that is.

I posted a teaser and three book reviews over at the Book Blog of Evil. Go on over and check them out.

Julie & Julia: A Review

2010-03-14T22:39:00.002-05:00

So, you know that scene toward the beginning of the movie, when Amy Adams, as Julie Powell, is having "Cobb Salad Luncheon" with three of her alleged friends? And one friend keeps taking phone calls about the $190 million real estate package she's trying to put together, and another one is bragging about her new position as Vice President of Blahblahblah, and the third wants to interview Julie, but can't find a time to "fit her in," and there sits Julie, with her barely above entry level job and living in a walk-up in Queens over a pizza parlor?

Yes. That. Exactly that.

And okay--Julie Powell decides to cook her way through Julia Child and blog about it, and before the end of the year of her project she gets interviewed for the New York Times and literary agents and publishing houses are calling. So she gets a happy ending. But she's a totally narcissistic and self-absorbed jerk and she's mean to her husband and is in no way a role model.

Right?

And of course I'm not jealous or second guessing my own life or anything, just because this blog will be five frickin' years old by the end of the month, and I'm waaaay past 30 and of course I'm not wondering what the hell I am doing with my life, and whether I matter to anybody outside the tiny bounds of my own little life.

Of course not.

So--Julie & Julia. Meryl Streep is a National Treasure, and if Nicolas Cage makes another movie in that franchise he better bloody well find HER at the end of the trail of clues left behind by Woodrow Wilson and the Trilateral Commission or something. We watched the movie with both of the girls, and they literally cheered, cheered, when she came on the screen. Capt. Sweetie and I used the movie as parental propaganda, encouraging them to only date and marry guys who were as good to them as the husbands in the movie.

What is there to say about this movie that hasn't already been said a hundred million ways? Meryl Streep was fabulous, and it's hard to imagine a time when Julia Child was just a diplomatic spouse, and not Julia Child! If I got the time line right, she spent the better part of a decade on that first cookbook, retyping it with carbon paper and onion skins, and all those years she was just Paul Child's wife, moving from post to post across Europe. Only after he retired and they moved back to the US did she find a publisher for that first book. Only then did she become the icon of French cooking we know her to be.

Stanley Tucci--what a wonderful husband he made. He can marry my daughters if he wants to, as long as he remains in character as Paul Child. Amy Adams--is still darling and winsome and even as a self-involved and whiney proto-author, I'll still watch her. Nora Ephron directed this movie, which wasn't "The Hurt Locker," but also wasn't a "typical female rom-com" and she deserves some real credit for this movie.

Because I knew this was going to be what we did this evening as a family, I made more of an effort than I usually do, and I cooked. I mean, I cooked. We had a thyme chicken stew that took two hours to cook on the stove, and I made creme brulee, and since Sursels doesn't really like creme brulee I made two different flavors--white chocolate and dark chocolate, with fresh raspberries and whipped cream and I started researching recipes this morning and I went to the grocery at 4:30 and I COOKED until 8 this evening, when we had the stew and started the movie.

And the food was delicious and my family was wonderful and we all loved it. And when the movie was over we all went into the kitchen to torch the creme brulee, and Capt. Sweetie turned on "Burning Down the House" by the Talking Heads and we all danced around the kitchen and turned on the butane torch and melted the sugar and plopped fresh raspberries and squirted the Reddi-Whip and we all said "Oh man! This is delicious!"

For that kind of response, I would even cook more often, I think. But I will not do so with Julia Child's recipes, because they are still too hard. But I love her anyway.

Hold Your Horses!

2010-03-14T08:53:00.001-05:00

This is frickin' brilliant!

70 Million by Hold Your Horses ! from L'Ogre on Vimeo.

I came across this after wondering a bunch of links--isn't the internet amazing? Aren't humans wonderful sometimes?

Oscar Backlash! The Ryan Seacrest Experience

2010-03-11T12:58:00.002-06:00

The New York Times has the latest of Oscar backlash. No, not that Kathryn Bigelow isn't "really" a female director since she directed a "boy movie." No, not that "Avatar was robbed." Not even that Giuliana shouldn't have been stuck upstairs in the skybox. (Okay, I made that up. Nobody has said that.)

Ryan didn't ask about the designers. When interviewing A list celebrities, many of whom were actually nominated for their performances, he failed to make "Who are you wearing" his very first question, or even a question at all.

This from New York Times article.

The fashion designer Nicole Miller said she, too, was disappointed (and not just because Mr. Seacrest didn’t chat up the “True Blood” star Deborah Ann Woll, who was clad in a Miller gown). “It was almost like he wasn’t that interested in the designers,” Ms. Miller said. “He seemed more interested in the celebrities and their careers.”

Um. Yes. Given that the man had about 22 seconds per Famous Person, and the event was the Oscars--you know, that thing about MOVIES--and was NOT "Project Runway."

Don't get me wrong--I love the Oscars, and a very big part of what I love about the Oscars is the fashion. Well, obviously. But "who are you wearing" is not really a story. It's advertising. Learning what designer someone is wearing is why Al Gore invented the Internet. LOOK IT UP.

Maybe next year, stylists and publicists will make their clients' information available so E! can post it on the lower screen crawl, so people who care can read it.

Maybe the real "story" here isn't that Seacrest failed to ask about designers, but that the only people the NEW YORK TIMES (you know, the one that used to be called "the paper of record") interviewed about this were themselves fashion designers? It's not that there is a broad based backlash against Ryan Seacrest, as the article promotes--it's that people who care about the clothes than the people inside of them were disappointed. You know what? Mammogram technicians were also disappointed by the lack of X-ray films carried on the red carpet as well.

---The Mistress of All Evil is NOT wearing Marchesa or Armani Prive while producing this post.

Tiara Woes

2010-03-09T18:07:00.003-06:00

HEY EVERYBODY! GUESS WHAT DAY IT IS TODAY?

IT'S MY BIRTHDAY! AND BECAUSE IT'S MY BIRTHDAY AND I CAN DO ANYTHING I WANT TO DO. . .

I AM WEARING A TIARA.

Because, dammit, I am already married and not planning to ever do it again, I will never open Parliament, and I will never go to a Royal Ball in an outfit created by a fairy godmother where I will accidentally forget to give my prince my cell phone number so I will be forced to leave behind a glass slipper that he can use to trace me via DNA typing with the help of Gil Grissom.

So, for my birthday I am wearing a tiara, and you know what sucks? I keep trying to pull it down onto my face because I think it's my reading glasses.

Guys? I waited too long to start wearing a tiara.

Oscars 2010 Fashion Mistakes -- Sarah Jessica Parker

2010-03-09T09:30:00.002-06:00

SJP here is one unfiltered cigarette and John Hamm away from a cameo on "Mad Men." It's all about the accessories.

Oscars 2010 Fashion Mistakes -- Charlize Theron

2010-03-09T09:24:00.002-06:00

You don't even need me to comment on this one.

When you wear John Galliano, you get more than just "body conscious." You get "anatomically exaggerated."

I saw a performance of "How To Succeed In Business Without Even Trying" about 30 years ago. In one song, every woman shows up at the office party in the identical "Irresistible Paris Original" dress, which was a black halter dress with a large white flower at the neck. The only dress any of the men noticed was when the slutty secretary showed up with two large white flowers, pinned over each of her breasts.

Who knew Galliano was there too?

Oscars 2010 Fashion Mistakes -- Elisabetta Canalis

2010-03-09T09:14:00.003-06:00

This may be mean, since poor Elisabetta is not herself an Oscar invitee--she's a "plus one," and it is hardly fair to assault someone who's only claim to our attention is that she is dating George Clooney.

That's a fair assessment, but this is a fashion mistake. Maybe we can blame somebody else for it, though.

It's her undergarment. You can see it pretty clearly here, just as I saw it on television. It's a corset or something, with a panel that runs in a triangle down her abdomen and points straight at her ladybits.

Now, maybe, she decided she wanted to wear something sexy and glamorous under her red satin gown, something that would make her feel more fabulous than a pair of Spanx, and really, who can blame her? I mean, why pull a Bridget Jones buzzkill on Oscar night with a pair of practical and unattractive underpants.

Fortunately for her, somebody must have spotted it early in the evening and whispered in her ear, because most of the rest of the night she has her clutch or her wrap conveniently posed to hide the lines.

Oscars 2010 Fashion Mistakes -- Cameron Diaz

2010-03-09T08:41:00.006-06:00

You know I love the Oscars with an unreasoning affection--and I have to say beforehand that the fashions this year were uniformly great. Sure, I have quibbles, or personal preferences, but there was nothing this year that made me slap my forehead and scream "WHAT WERE YOU THINKING" at the screen.

And that does happen sometimes.

So even the "worst dressed" are only so in comparison--and are still better than just about anything anybody wore from about 1972 to 1990--just to pick some dates at random. So realize that most of these "mistakes" aren't really Big Mistakes. On the other hand--there is still Room For Improvement.

Let's start with Cameron Diaz.

Give the girl her due--in the past, she has looked like she just rolled out of bed and grabbed whatever was closest.

This was 2002, and whatever she meant to accomplish with the kimono inspired dress and International Festival accessories, it was the messy hair and lack of make-up that guaranteed this was going to be considered a very expensive bathrobe.

She has atoned for that look in the past, which is weird. I mean--why is Cameron Diaz at the Oscars so often? It can't be for her body of work, can it? Does the Academy value "Shrek" and "Charlie's Angels" so highly? Sure, fine, there was "Gangs of New York," but even Leo DiCaprio hasn't been to as many Oscars as our girl Cam here.

Cameron at 2007 Oscars

Cameron at 2008 Oscars

Which brings us back to the 2010 look.

It's fine. It's just fine. It's golden, it's formal, her hair and make-up are lovely.

It's just--meh. Frankly, the look is both generic and matronly. It makes her look "middle aged," which is a phrase I hate, but it's accurate. She looks like she's over 40 (she isn't) and she's got a bunch of kids in a minivan parked somewhere. She sent them off to hockey practice and came on over to the school fundraising formal.

I mean, whether you liked that 2002 bathrobe or not, it was unique. You couldn't imagine it on, say Drew Barrymore, like you can this one. Or just about anybody, really. Susan Sarandon could wear this, or Demi Moore, or Carey Mulligan. It just is a lovely shiny dress, but it fails to give us a quintessential Cameron Diaz look, and that's what I'm looking for at the Oscars.

Oscars 2010--The Red Carpet Pre Show

2010-03-07T17:33:00.031-06:00

It's 5:00 p.m. The Dog is fed.I have a large glass of white wine. Ryan Seacrest's mug is on my TV screen. It's time for the Oscars! This year's post is going to be an experiment--live blogging combined with editing the following day. And pictures! (From JustJared.com) So let's get started!

The telecast has already started out better than the Golden Globes, because Seacrest is alone on the carpet, and Giuliana has been sent to detention in the skybox with Jay Manuel. So no more awkward "how do you get that rockin' body" "interview" questions by the tone deaf Rancic. The show is also denied the "360 Glam Cam" that was almost as awkward as Giuliana's "interviews."

Is anybody who is anybody going to be here this early? Why, yes! The leading man in the Avatar juggernaut Sam Worthington and his anonymous girlfriend. (If Seacrest doesn't already know who she is, she must not be worth talking to, right?)

It used to be fashionable to complain about a "Best Picture" nomination if it wasn't accompanied by a "Best Director" nomination as well. What do we say about a "Best Picture" nomination with NO acting nominations? Answer: ANIMATION! Of course, there is some live acting in
Avatar: the lack of acting nominations just sums up the problems with that movie--technological break-throughs are all very fine, but you need a story and some emotional investment to make a movie.

Sam Worthington is sure working his Aussie accent--it's much more broad than it was in the movie. Is this on purpose? It's been said that anybody can sell anything to Americans if they do it with an accent: maybe this is Worthington's broadcast audition tape for any job in Hollywood. In fact, he's being quite open about being "at liberty" at the moment.

And now he and his girlfriend are being pushed off the dais in favor of Zac Efron: which, wait. Why is he here? He's not nominated, he's not got a movie out right now, he's not a past winner--is this the attempt to reach out to a Younger Audience? But how late can we expect 8-year olds to stay up?

Zac Efron is this generation's Rob Lowe--and we begin to see a theme, in which Hollywood is already developing replacements for currently established actors. Maybe they are clones!

Giuliana has changed outfits from the earlier "Countdown to the Oscars" time filler show she was hosting, while Jay Manuel is griping that he didn't have time to change, although he quickly realizes that this sounds dismissive of the designer outfit he is wearing, so he changes his tune. And--we are treated to a montage of what some people wore to other awards show as a time filler in case Seacrest can't find anybody worth televising.

But the Giuls 'n' Jay show gets shut off because Anna Kendrick is here! She's apparently decided to get the gauntlet out of the way by arriving early.There has been a lot of speculation about what she's going to wear and it's--blush and lots of pleating and structure, shoulder bearing, but not something that will photograph well—kind of washing her out.

It's a beautiful dress, it fits her beautifully, and she looks comfortable. It's just, well, kind of meh. You would think that a pastel dress would make her strong coloring stand out and emphasize her gorgeous face, but something is missing. She looks lovely, she looks fine--she doesn't pop or sizzle the way I want someone so young to be at her first Oscars.

The interview set up appears to be terribly squashed both physically and in terms of the amount of time Seacrest will spare any given celebrity. And here comes Mo’Nique, in royal blue and makes poor Anna look like Pasty White Chick, which she is so much not.

Mo’Nique doesn’t actually look good—the color is great, but the cut doesn’t do much for her, and she’s got a frickin’ bouquet on her head. She’s a big woman but she’s looking stuffed into her gown. Not good, honey. If course, later we find out that it's a tribute to Hattie MacDaniel, who wore a flower in her hair when she won for "Gone With the Wind" so Mo'Nique gets a pass on a questionable fashion choice because it is Historically Significant. And we can all breathe a sigh of relief that this doesn't mean Big Hair Flowers are the next Big Flower Pins.

Somehow, it's raining again in LA—just like at the Golden Globes. Seacrest expresses worry that actresses' heels will start sinking into the ground—but it’s all paved, so I don’t know what he’s been drinking. Coming up: Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon. Mariah has apparently covered up those Golden Globes of hers.Buh dum BUM!

Great ad for cervical cancer—it’s totally a perfume ad, with magic sparkles and everything. Followed by an ad for Dentyne Ice, with the slogan “practice safe breath”—gum as condom. Ads have rediscovered the old bait and switch. These are clever, but the cervical cancer ad gets run too frequently and loses its power.

The question for every awards show is: Is Mariah drunk? Has she already started her celebrations?
She might have—she’s looking off into the distance as if she's not able to focus her eyes. Maybe she's just tired of looking at Seacrest? She's wearing something that threatens to float in the breezes and show us more of Mariah than even Mariah wants to show us. Seacrest sounds genuinely panicked at the possibility, but Mariah reassures us that she has a "built in body suit." This solves one problem, but makes the status of her inebriation even more important--how will she pee?
At this point, it's only 5:24, and they seem to be cramming in all the ads they can. Ads are getting weirdly pre-empted before they finish by yet more ads.

Zoe Saldana and the mayor of L.A. have run into one another and Seacrest has failed his traffic cop training, so there seems to be a four or five way interview in progress. I love Zoe, and she’s in lavender and sparkles, which are two of my very favorite things, so I fail to remember what it is the mayor manages to say. But then we see the skirt.

This skirt has apparently sprouted lavender fungus from the LA rain. Some other commenters have likened the dress to plastic leis, or bathroom loofah poufs. Whatever it's actually supposed to be, it's random ruffles and an origami waistline, with ombre coloring to boot. It's all just too much on a small frame. If I could enforce fashion swaps, I'd throw away the entire skirt, and substitute Kate Winslet's skirt--dyed the appropriate lavender, of course. Then Zoe could keep the purple shoes and we'd all be a lot happier. (Except perhaps for Kate Winslet, at least until we got her another skirt.)

Joel Madden and Nicole Ritchie.He’s dj-ing. Nicole isn’t saying much, but she looks like she eats now, and it's a good look for her.
Vera Farmiga in crimson pleats and ruffles and matching lipstick.She’s lovely, and the dress is a statement, and she’s trying to convince us that nobody ever recognizes her in real life.She’s picking Hurt Locker and forgetting to pick Jason Reitman for Best Director.She’s fabulous and human and is even slouching a bit, which can’t be easy in that dress.

Ryan Reynolds is here without his wife, Scarlett Johansson, who is back in New York appearing on Broadway. That's fine with me, as he looks good enough all by himself.
Reynolds is presenting Best Picture nominee “The Blind Side” and Seacrest is asking how likely Sandra Bullock is going to actually win.Because presenters of a single nominee have all the inside information, don't they. We are treated to the less than absorbing factoid that Ryan and Ryan train at the same gym. This is the definition of “Too Much Information.” Reynolds reports he has taken his trainer with him to “The Green Lantern” shoots. The additional training is necessary, apparently, and he promises us a “snug costume.”

Sigourney Weaver coming down the carpet in vivid red, which is such a great color on her, plus is such a fearless choice. Back in the day, no one would have suggested that anyone over 30 wear such a vivid color, much less someone 60 years old an nearly six feet tall. Life is better these days.So what is her secret? Whatever it is, this is what a movie star looks like, Anna Kendrick, I'm talking to you!

James Cameron is in line behind Jason Reitman, which is awkward, and it’s totally like Ryan Seacrest point it and thus increase the awkwardness.OMG—Suzy Amis looks like a skeleton wearing a dress.I hope she’s well, because she looks like a cancer patient.You CAN be too thin.

[I can't find a photo that fully shows the Crypt Keeper look Amis is working, but trust me, it's as scary as Cameron's bad haircut was at the Golden Globes. She's got a great blue dress on, though, I'll give her that.]

Photo from here.

However, I am gratefully distracted by the "coming up" camera shots down the red carpet: Elizabeth Banks in inset is more fun to look at than JC and his death maiden.

Photo from here.

Maggie Gyllenhall in blue and black strapless nothing. It's Peter Skarsgaard’s birthday, but Seacrest says he won’t sing, because “Happy Birthday” costs too much.

I like this dress--it's simple lines are flattering, the print fabric is interesting--you don't see many patterns or prints at the Oscars. Maggie looks lovely and confident. Is this the Biggest Dress Of The Year? Of course not. But it's perfectly appropriate while being a bit out of the mainstream and expressing a bit of Maggie's own personality.

Elizabeth Banks makes it to the interview platform in a gray highly structured gown, with her hair tied back severely, and OMG flamenco ruffles. It's like the mullet of Oscar gowns: business up top, party from the knees down. I can't tell if E! actually believes we want to hear from Ryan Seacrest rather than looking at the dresses, or if they are so crammed for space there is no way to show the entire outfit. Or both, maybe.

Tom Ford drops in to make some compliments, and to mention his movie as well. Did you know he directed "A Single Man"? Which is a different movie than the Coen brothers' "A Serious Man," FYI. Ford has a fabulous accent, which he is working as hard as Sam Worthington did, and is –surprise, surprise—wearing Tom Ford! And so is Jay! Up in the skybox! Now text your prediction about who will win Lead Actress. Why?

Sigourney Weaver in red, talking about reading the Avatar script. Have you seen it yet? Not in Imax yet, but 3D—which she’s selling. Signorney has a Disney Movie coming out with pole dancing. . .is Miley Cyrus involved—and then she gets pushed off for Lenny Kravitz, who is irritated he has to speak. Or maybe it’s just talking to Ryan Secrest. But he’s going to be touring with U2?!?!

Tina Fey in black? What a surprise. Michael Kors. She's texted with Alec Baldwin earlier today, and he is calm and ready, and it’s probably easier than SNL, because it’s only 20 minutes of material. Insert your own joke here about SNL also only having 20 minutes of material spread out over an unconscionably long time period. At least at the Oscars there are awards to give out to fill the time. That must be why SNL has musical guests.

So, is Amanda Seyfried is wearing Kate Hudson’s dress from the Golden Globes?

There is definitely a theme of highly structured torso armor going on this year--Kate Hudson's looks like it was immaculately constructed out of fondant icing--she looks less like a bride and more like the wedding cake, actually. Seyfried's looks like it's made out of bubble wrap, but it's definitely got the same sort of structural architecture to it. Hudson's was Marchesa, Seyfreid's was Armani Prive, I think, which make it perhaps the same as Lady Gaga's dress from the Grammys, but without the representational orbital paths around it.

Seyfried apparently opted to do without the bejeweled body-head stocking as well, but the bodice seems similar. Nothing wrong with that--I loved it on Gaga, and I like the version that is wearable by people from this planet as well. In her interview with Seacrest, we learn
Seyfried will be leaving Big Love, because she’s not working enough.

Seacrest hints that she'll be doing something called “Red Riding Hood,” which the two of them discuss in some sort of secret code that they understand, but that gives the average viewer (me) no clue about whether it's a movie, tv show, nightclub act or even a life-style change. Spell it out for us next time, if you actually mean to promote it guys.

Cary Mulligan went with black sequins, and a weird tea length plus train hemline. She just about pulls it off, but the heavy straps on her shoes end up making her legs look stumpy, and at a distance the look is all about her shins. Not really what a devastatingly lovely young woman with killer dimples should be reduced to, actually.

Apparently the beading on this gown is eccentric, containing tiny knives, forks, crowns, and other irregular items--which is exactly the sort of detail that takes this gown out of the basic, boring, black, and into something that suits Mulligan's youth.You can see those tiny items in the zoomed photo here.

I'm still not a fan of the hemline, which might actually be what I hate more than the shoes. If the entire dress were tea length, for example, we'd get less of the "proscenium arch curtain call for the shins" effect that spoils this look.

Sandra Bullock, heavily favored to win Best Actress tonight, wearing a sequins and kind of golden paillettes look.J&G think it would best be accessorized with an Oscar. I like her super shiny hair, and the bottom of the dress is apparently panne velvet, although it looks like liquid metal.

I think it's risky to wear beads over illusion netting this close to the Olympics, myself, but the asymmetic bodice is done so artfully that I like it the more I look at it. I'm not happy with the make-up in close-up, but I think its a matter of lighting. In some lights, it's absolutely fabulous, but in other lights it comes off as heavy and aging. In the picture above, it's just fine.
The interview with Seacrest is marred by the odd camera angle: the dress is interesting, but hard to evaluate this close. I’m seeing too much of her arm wrinkles at the top of her armpit—the cap cleaves don’t particularly do any favors in silhouette.

Diane Kruger is such a conundrum--such a lovely woman, who clearly revels in fashion, and yet so often looks terrible. Tonight is not a look I'd ever like to see again: severe hair, and a busy busy dress in black and cream.

She’s such a beautiful woman and is all but unrecognizable in an ugly dress. It's like a black, feathered anaconda is slithering down her torso, and as though she's got different micro-climates going on all up and down her body. Not sure why anyone thought it was a good idea to carve her up visually into thirds like that.

Tyler Perry, who is very very tall, promoting Precious—how he and Oprah kept it from going straight to DVD, so good for him.

The crawl tells us that Apolo Ohno thinks Pam Anderson is “a little too top heavy” to win DWTS.This is what we watch the Oscars for? Answer: NO.

Tim McGraw and Faith Hill promoting “The Blind Side.”Also the guy who played the football player--Quinton Aaron. Oh yes, Tim McGraw was in that one. Faith's dress is a small fail--weird deployment of lace that makes the whole thing look like it was repurposed from somebody's grandmother's attic.
Photo from here.
And due to some issues at home, I have to take a break from recapping. More to come in separate entries.

The Guthrie Theater's Macbeth, A Review.

2010-02-28T14:32:00.004-06:00

I saw the Guthrie Theater's production of Macbeth this weekend. It's a great play, and the production played it straight--no attempt to particularly modernize the play, although the costumes were strongly flavored from WWII. The play started fast, and kept going without an intermission for about two hours.

HOWEVER. (There is always a "however," isn't there?) I found myself thinking critically about the production itself, ejected from the story and into some choices about the play.

It starts with a bang. Literally. Warfare rolls across the stage as characters in battle fatigues rappel down from the ceiling and storm across the stage. There is handgun fire and hand to hand knife fights. Bodies fall and roll, lie for a time, then inobtrusively remove themselves from the stage. It could be distracting, but it's effective overall, as if the battle has moved to new ground, and the bodies were left behind. Macbeth is identifiable--even before he's been introduced by name--standing tall in the center of the fighting, his red beard marking him as Scots. Okay, technically, the witches came out first, but the sudden fury of the battle blots out their previous scene.

The problem is that the production never slows down again. Everything happens at breakneck speed, and at top volume. The wounded soldier stumbles on to tell King Duncan that Macbeth and Banquo have defeated both the Irish AND the Norwegians, but his speech about their bravery goes by in a blur, making them seem not like victorious generals, but like manic berserkers who have prevailed out of sheer love of bloody fighting. Which is precisely the image of Macbeth which is most undercutting to his role as a tragic hero. If he's a wildman who happens to be a useful weapon on the battlefield, then he's not a tragic hero--there is no arc to his story. If he likes to kill men on the battlefield, and then he starts killing men from his own side, then he a psychopath who goes mad, not a good man who struggles with bad choices and actions.

The witches are back, wearing grey raincoats and dreadlocks. Weird, sure, but not overtly supernatural. They predict Macbeth's future--thane of Cawdor and king hereafter, and the scene plays with so much skepticism from Macbeth and Banquo that they might as well have broken open some fortune cookies. "Ha ha," they poke each other, "what a bunch of crazy bitches these are. You're going to be king, what can they possibly say to me that would top that?" They don't seem to entertain even the flimsiest of notions that these witches might be telling the truth--because that would take time, soemthing this production doesn't have. A few seconds of doubt, or puzzlement would have made their belief in these predictions believable. But who takes fortune cookies seriously, or alters their behavior because of what they say.

So when messengers arrive seconds later to report that Macbeth is now thane of Cawdor, the audience is prepared for Macbeth to say something like "Wow. What a coincidence. I wonder if those witches had heard this messenger talking before he got here?" We are not prepared for him to gobble up Cawdor without chewing it and immediately look for the kingship. One of the enduring puzzles of the play is the question of the inevitability of the future. Would Macbeth be king even if he had never heard the witches' prediction? Or does the fact that they tell him he will be king change the way Macbeth acts? Is he a good man brought down by his susceptibility to ambition, or was he doomed by fate?

Hard to tell it's even a question in this production: Macbeth seems to take the witches' pronouncements as a To Do list and he has to check off all the items efficiently. Cawdor? Check. What's next on the list? King? Better write to my wife and get her on board.

Let's talk about Lady Macbeth, shall we? Mad shrew, frustarated SAHM, or violent sociopath? Rarely is she portrayed as a complicated human being, and why break that precedent here, right? Dressed in a white shirt and trousers, she's writhing on the couch with excitement at the idea of being queen, already her volume is turned up to 9. Where can she go from here?

I've seen the actress who plays Lady Macbeth in at least two other productions, and I've never warmed to her. She's incredibly good at sweeping onto and off of the stage, but doesn't really do much once she is there. She has a habit of emphasizing her words with a hand gesture: an upside down claw, as if she is gripping an orange underhanded. With her fingers splayed, she makes short, quick motions at waist height again and again. Her voice drips with contempt for Macbeth and even when he agrees to kill Duncan, her attitude doesn't change. At this point, Macbeth doesn't seem to feel he has any choice either: Killing Duncan is on his To Do list.

I could go on in tedious detail, but this is the problem that pervades the play. Macbeth never really acts as though he had any choice in the matter, so he just plans to go through the motions. Lady Macbeth starts out bloodthirsty, and even when she goes mad, there's no sense that she was ever anything but a monster, so why should be pity her?

The best example of what I am talking about is in Mulholland Drive, David Lynch's freaky detective movie. In a pair of scenes, Naomi Watts plays a character who is auditioning for a role in a movie. At home, she runs over her lines with her roommate, shrieking in cliched high-school-drama fashion "I hate you! I hate you!" A few scenes later, she's in the audition, and suddenly she is acting. The actor she is reading with is an old lech, using the scene to grab her ass. She grabs his arm, moves closer to him, and whispers in his face "I hate you." And man is it effective! Instead of a soap opera of shallow and inflated emotions, we see a woman poisoned by hate and self-loathing. It is a Master Class on how underplaying a role makes it incredibly powerful.

Macbeth could have used some of this underplaying. The most effective scene in the whole play was at the banquet, when Banquo's ghost appears. The actor playing Banquo appeared, his head and neck covered with stage blood, and he just looked at Macbeth. There was never a threatening gesture, never a moment of posturing. Instead, Banquo looked saddened that Macbeth should have killed him. And Macbeth loses it in a major way. In fact, the physical interaction between the two actors was so good, that Shakespeare's dialogue was unnecessary and unduly comic. Macbeth comes to himself and tries to apologize, claiming " I have a strange infirmity, which is nothing / To those that know me." One can only laugh, as this is soooo far from explaining Macbeth's weird behavior. . .and here it is that the scope of his madness is apparent, because he can't even behave normally or give anything like a credible explanation for his behavior. So he doesn't even try. And THAT is madness--when you give up attempting to explain yourself.

There were a few things that intruded on my enjoyment of the play, things that popped up into my mind like those goofy VH1 videos. Two of the characters, Ross and Lennox, were advisors to the king, and were the only two men who were never in military garb. They wore suits, and fedoras, and topcoats, and leather shoes, and one carried an attache case--because he was an attache, duh. But all I could see, as he hauled that briefcase around, was "the results of Oscar voting were tabulated by the accountants of Price Waterhouse."

Similarly, the actor who played Malcolm, King Duncan's son and the leader of the troops who finally defeat Macbeth, was played by an actor I had last seen in "The Importance of Being Earnest," which totally undercut the force of his lines. Duncan dead, Malcolm and his brother Donalbain realize that they are not safe either, so they plan to flee to England and Ireland respectively. However, I can't help but see this as an instance of "Bunburying"--Oscar Wilde's plot device where the character gets out of town by claiming he has a ailing friend in the country who wants to see him.

Similarly, when Macduff and Malcolm meet in England--the play signals their location by having them in leisure wear, drinking tea(!)--the scene just smacks of a set-up to a Wildean pun-off, and I had to keep reminding myself to "listen to the words, don't watch the body language!"

Oddly, this is the first time I have ever actually seen Macbeth performed, and I can't even claim I have read the entire play either. However, I'm not going to let a lack of academic grounding get in the way of my having very definite opinions about how this play SHOULD be staged. I'm glad I saw it, but I can't really recommend it.

What a Lovely Start to the Weekend

2010-02-11T22:11:00.003-06:00

Captain Sweetie has been travelling quite a bit lately, and flew home today from a quick trip to Boston. When he arrived home this evening, he brought a dozen red roses.

"Do you know why I brought home a dozen red roses?" he asked.

"Noooo. Why did you bring home a dozen red roses?" I had some guesses, but I can't say I really knew.

"Because today is the 29th anniversary of our first date."

Which is why Capt. Sweetie is a keeper.

Bright Star, A Review

2010-02-09T21:27:00.008-06:00

Or, as I think about it, "Bright Star: It's not you, it's me."

I wanted to love this. Everybody else seems to--just check out its 83% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, or Dana Stevens' video review over on Slate. Or the disappointment that it didn't get more attention from the Oscars, only a "kiss your sister" nomination for costume design.

But, I just didn't love it.

I will take full responsibility for that--it's clearly my problem, not the movie's. I just don't thrill to poetry. It's some faulty wiring in my English major literary obsessive-compulsive make-up, I think. So when Abby Cornish and Ben Whishaw trade lines of Keats, I get bored. There are plenty of reviewers who find that scene to be "sexy as hell." I keep thinking that I'm damn glad I didn't live back then, because I'm finding on-line solitaire to be more engaging that this movie.

The plot, for those of you who aren't already enormous Keats fans, is pretty simple. In 1818 or so, John Keats shares rooms with another poet in the village of Hampstead; then it was a rural village, now it has been swallowed by London and is a station on the Northern Line. He meets the 18 year old Frances "Fanny" Brawne, they fall in love, he writes poems, gets tuberculosis and dies, The End. The movie covers a period of about a year, from their first meeting to Keats' death in Rome.

So, Fanny Brawne is a seamstress, who is voluably vain about her stitching skills.

The only triple-pleated mushroom collar in two counties.

When we first see her, she is wearing some ridiculous get-up yellow and red, that stands out like a McDonald's billboard in the earth tones of her village surroundings. Admittedly, I have a problem with the fashions of the era, since the men's trousers reach up to their nipples and tend to look like they are designed to create permanent wedgies, while women's gowns look like pleated maternity sacks, topped with extreme bolero jacket/shrugs. Both genders are also be-hatted with the most exaggerated of millinery.

The Carrie Bradshaw of 1819

So Fanny, being passionate about fashion, manages to make these silly looks even sillier. Abby Cornish manages to wear these monstrosities with a straight face, so good for her. But really, after seeing her in the perfectly silly get-up of the opening scenes, I found it hard to take her the least bit seriously.

Ben Whishaw plays John Keats with a pathetic excuse for a moustache and a bit of a Beatles mop: his straggling facial hair makes Orlando Bloom look positively hirsute.

Leading men who don't yet shave.

So, I'm failing to clasp this movie to my bosom and declare us "Best Friends Forevah!" My bad.

Keats shares rooms with a Scottish poet named Charles Brown, and Brown and Fanny don't get along well at all. In fact, in a modern movie, their snappy dialogue would totally mark them as the fated lovers. They certainly have similar sartorial styles; Brown insists on wearing tight plaid pants and waistcoats, with a vulgar pattern that would make even Pat Field look away. Alas, it soon turns out that the war of wit between Fanny and Brown is the indication that they truly do not like each other. But Keats loves them both, and they both love Keats, which makes them mortal enemies.

I'm a real man, with a real beard. Sadly, you can't see the sartorial splendor of my tartan pants. I guess the Scotch don't have decent dress sense.

The movie is beautiful, with lovely visuals of Keats lying on the top branches of an apple tree in bloom, or Fanny reading a letter in a field of bluebells.

John Keats, seeking a nightingale nest on a dare.

Fanny Brawne, in a rare moment of paying attention to her sister.

Everyone is against the two of them coming together: Brown fears that Keats will be too distracted to write poetry, and Fanny's family aware that Keats is too poor to marry. But like the willful and Romantic souls they are, they hold hands, and sneak away to kiss in the grass.

Did non-engaged couples in the early 1800s snog this much? They never do in Austen novels. Fanny fails to endear herself to me as a character as she drags her younger brother and sister around Hampstead to places they are not supposed to be, just so Fanny can spend time with Keats. She even takes them to the rooms where Keats' younger brother is dying of tuberculosis. Her little sister asks to leave because "it smells bad." All I could think was that Fanny shouldn't be exposing her siblings to potentially fatal illnesses, and it would all end badly if little "Toots" Brawne died of TB as well.

Poor Toots Brawne: all this time passes and she never gets any bigger. Poor nutrition, I guess, and being generally neglected.

Later, when Keats and Brown go off for the summer to write, Fanny is short-tempered and nasty to her little sister, and ends up spending days in bed when Keats' letters don't come often enough for her. When she receives only a short letter from him, Fanny sends poor little Toots to the kitchen. "Fanny sent me to ask for a knife." "What does she want a knife for?" "To kill herself."

Yes, that's right, teenagers never change, do they. No, even back in the reign of George III, they were self-centered drama queens, mooning over a boy.

When Keats starts to cough, a room full of friends we have never seen before gather and convince him he needs to travel to a warmer climate and they will pay his passage. Fanny doesn't want him to go, but he says he has no choice, what with the passage already paid for. This is where a Regency self-help book would have been useful.

So he goes, and he never comes back, because he dies in February, and Fanny cries when she finds out, and she never takes off the ring he gave her, even though she lives for many years afterwards and marries and has children of her own.

For some reason, it never drew me in. Sure, I say that I have a cold, dead heart, but I cry at movies and books all the damn time. I cried my way through the "Twilight" books, even while deploring the bad writing and the hokey set-up. I cried through "Shakespeare in Love," even though I knew it was all fake. But I just didn't believe that the mouthy, vain, mean and fashion-obsessed Fanny was really truly in love with John Keats, so much as he was her first crush. And what was there about Fanny that Keats really loved? Sure, she looked great reading letters in a bluebell field, and she let him kiss her all the time; but what was there about their characters that made them a match? They lived in two halves of a small house, they were both the right age--and that was about it.

So, I'm dying to have somebody explain to me why this is a great movie, and how I can look at it so that I love it as much as everybody else does. I'd like to like this movie better than I do. As it is, though, I just don't.

Awash in Narrative

2010-02-09T21:17:00.002-06:00

I have apparently broken through my reader's block: I have just finished "The Little Stranger" by Sarah Waters on audio, and have started Geraldine Brooks' "The People of the Book." I am wrapping up Kelly Link's "Magic for Beginners" and simultaneously starting "Becoming Jane Eyre" ebooks, and I actually have a quaint and archaic hardcover of Kate Atkinson's "When Will There Be Good News."

Not to mention that I just finished watching the complete first season (half season?) of Glee, and Jane Campion's movie "Bright Star," which was the Netflix replacement for "Wag the Dog" which I also finished last week.

And yes, I am managing to keep them separate in my mind, thank you for asking.

It's Complicated, a Review

2010-01-30T21:36:00.002-06:00

Let's cut to the chase: Meryl Streep is a National Treasure, and when she dies she will have to be stuffed and displayed in the Smithsonian. If James Cameron would "performance capture" Meryl Streep, she could play ALL the roles in ALL American movies over the next 50 years, and they would ALL be better for it.

Alec Baldwin is riding a second wave of success, fueled by "30 Rock" and you can see him determined to just love what he is doing. Since Streep famously enjoys acting, this is a great match up--a rom-com for the menopausal. Which is about all it is--light on actual human emotion but as glossy as a Crate and Barrel catalogue. It's fun, it's frothy, it's like merangue or pop rocks--glitters for a few moments but has no real substance.

You probably know the set up: Baldwin and Streep play Jake and Jane Adler, married for 20 years, divorced for 10. Jake married his much younger mistress and is taking a second trip through the hell years of young children and fertility treatments. The last of their three children has finally moved out of Jane's house, and the 22 year old youngest is graduating from college. While in New York for the graduation, Jake and Jane have dinner, drink too much, and end up in bed together. Jake thinks it's great, and Jane goes to throw up.

Back home in Santa Barbara, Jake keeps coming around, bullying his way back into Jane's life as much as back into her bed. Jane starts out conflicted, then decides to enjoy it, then changes her mind, then changes it back again, and yadda yadda comedy conventions.

HERE BE SPOILERS

(I don't know why I do that--because I always talk about the ending of everything. Anyway--)

In the end, however, Jane decides Jake isn't her future, and he takes that pretty well. She gets a second chance at the shy and nebbishy Steve Martin (?!?!?), a relationship that was all but scuttled by Jake's reappearance in her life.

And it was fun, and it was frothy, but. . . .

And there is always a "but."

"It's Complicated" straddles so many lines so awkwardly, that I am inclined to believe that the movie might have been scripted as one thing, and edited as another. In the end, it's not a bad movie, but it's not really a rom-com, and it has the tantilizing sense of having been this close! to being something truly original. Something that explored the fall-out of a mid-life crisis ten years later, on the occasion of a second mid-life crisis. And oddly, it looks like Nancy Meyers might actually have had more insight into Jake's situation than Jane's.

From the bits of information dropped throughout the movie, we discover that while in his late 40s, Jake had an affair with a woman half his age, divorced his wife and married the mistress. After about four years, the new wife ("Agness," played by Lake Bell) ran off with another man, had a baby with him, then came back to Jake with the "hell child" Pedro. Now she wants another baby, this time with Jake, but he's got fertility issues and so his life has gotten dreary and stressful. Pedro is an unpleasant child, and neither Agness nor Jake seem to have much time for him. Jake is a partner in his law firm, and is ready to slow down his work life, but can't because Agnes thinks they need a bigger house and another baby.

In contrast, Jane's life looks pretty charmed. The kids are great and well launched. She owns a restaurant that is apparently doing incredibly well--so much so that she is building a huge addition so she can have her dream kitchen. And a really big bedroom that brings in the morning sun. And only one sink in the bathroom. Sure, Jake's still got more money than Jane does, but she's not poor by any stretch, and the rest of her life looks fabulous. She's past the years of raising small kids, she's past worrying about her career. Jake has all the problems of a young man with a young family, but he's too old to work that hard any more.

But wait! you say. This is a Nancy Meyers movie! This is supposed to be a movie about Jane! So you would think. But really, how complicated is Jane's life? She's divorced. Her kids are all out of the house. If she gets back together with her ex-husband, it's really her own choice. On the other hand, Jake's the one with the compelling story. Why did he cheat? Why did he pick Agness anyway--she's pretty harsh, demanding, and generally unpleasant. Why did he take her back and why is he raising this other man's child?

What seems to have happened is that he tried to cheat age by marrying a younger woman, but now sees the benefits of life he left behind. So, like any spoiled man-child, he tries to escape his current unhappy life for the fantasy of a different one. Toward the end of the movie, he claims he's left Agness for Jane. What Meyers shows us is Jane's reaction. The real drama is in the scenes we don't see--how Agness discovered the affair, their confrontation, Jake's decision to leave, etc. etc. That is where the heart of the drama lives.

But wait! There's more! Early in the film, Meyers has two scenes where Jane hangs out with her three best friends. In the first one, the talk is all that Jane needs to start having sex and dating (in that order apparently). In the second scene, she confesses having an affair with Jake, which is treated like karmic payback for Agness. The friends then disappear entirely, and when Jane wants any further relationship advice, she goes to see her therapist.

Again, this choice cheats the audience out of the real drama of the situation. These women have been her friends since before the divorce, so they clearly have feelings about the wisdom of her "taking back" the guy who cheated on her, and who is currently cheating on his wife with her. There is some snappy dialogue about how they all still hate Agness, so Jane gets a pass for stealing her husband, but really? Why would these alleged friends want to see Jane go backwards like that? None of them points out that this is a bad idea? That Jake is a manipulative bastard and she'd be better off without him?

Instead, Meyers gives us a sort of generic "you go girl, you deserve this" support group, when real female friendships of that length of time would surely be less superficial. Wouldn't they? I mean, schadenfreude is all very well and fun, but Jane is their friend, and they wouldn't want to see her get hurt again would they?

There is a great deal that is unsavory about the relationship between Jane and Jake. I can suspend disbelief, and possibly even believe, that the two of them might end up in bed together at their youngest child's college graduation weekend. But while Jake is exulting in his virility, Jane is busy throwing up and deeply regretting what she's done. Back in California, Jake pushes himself past her reservations, and again she's unhappy and appalled by what she's done. In fact, it's not clear what, if anything, she is getting out of this relationship. He pushes her around, eats her good cooking, guilts her into taking care of him, manipulates the kids into making her give him what he wants--has she learned nothing in the 10 years she's been mercifully free of him? Like what it feels like to NOT be pushed around like that?

The movie I would have liked to see would have actually been about adults in this situation. Alex Baldwin jealously peeking into her windows while she's having dinner with Steve Martin? It's not funny, and it's especially not funny for characters in their 50s. I wanted to see Meryl Streep confront this emotional leech of an ex-husband and give him the benefit of her decade of life without him. That would have been satisfying!

A word about the kids as well. In the movie's present, they are 22, 25 and 27, and the oldest is planning her wedding. Which means at the time of the divorce, they were 12, 15 and 17. They claim to be damaged by the divorce, they claim to be surprised to see their parents behaving amicably after "10 years of not being able to be in the same room." But Meyers utter fails to show us any damage. The daughter planning her wedding has no qualms or fears about marriage, despite the fact that her parents apparently had an acrimonious divorce. The youngest keeps asking if Dad can't stay over, "he can stay in my room" when Mom doesn't want him around--and then they all turn against Jane when it seems like the two of them might get back together. There's no emotional sense to the way these kids act: they are more or less merely plot devices.

And poor John Krasinski--in one extended sequence of TMI, he spots his future mother-in-law and father-in-law sneaking into a hotel, kissing in the elevator, and his first reaction is to hide it all from his fiancee. Why? Why is this a secret he has to keep, and why does he have to be "comical" in his clumsy attempts to keep her from finding out what is going on? If I were in her shoes, and I discovered my fiance had deliberately kept me in the dark about something like that--something where he had NO reason to be involved, and I had EVERY reason to know about it--I'd be questioning whether I was marrying a carbon copy of my manipulative and bullying father.

It's a sign of the charm of these actors that they can act like such unbelievable idiots, and we continue to like them. And the movie is lovely to look at. And there is a rather clever bit where Jake decides to pose himself suggestively on Jane's bed, with only her laptop to screen his man bits. Brilliantly, Jane has been using that computer to video message with her architect, and the three way screaming is truly humorous.

Baldwin is to be commended on his bravery: with his meaty man boobs and solid round belly, swathed in salt-and-pepper body hair, he is far from the Hollywood ideal of a sexy man. And yet, there is not a hint of self-consciousness in his performance. After the "nekkid in my ex-wife's bed" stunt goes horribly wrong, he confesses "I thought you would find me irresistible. It never even occurred to me that you wouldn't." And we believe him.

Dream Machine.

2010-01-28T10:25:00.004-06:00

As a book lover, I have dreamed about having a library in my house. In my dreams, it has always looked something like this:

As of today, it might just look like this:

MUCH more cost effective. Let's change the name, though, shall we?

Nagging Questions About James Cameron’s Avatar

2010-01-20T10:18:00.015-06:00

I saw Avatar about two weeks ago, and I fully intended to blog a review. However, the damn computer ate my meticulously assembled and snarkily crafted masterpiece, and after that, it just had been Too Long to Bother reconstructing it. However—James Cameron just won TWO Golden Globes for the thing, and once again his tone-deafness to human social interaction was thrust upon my consciousness. The man makes terrible acceptance speeches, which shouldn't be a surprise, since he writes terrible scripts.

He also makes terrible faces--this one makes me just want to smack him. He also has terrible hair.

So, with a nod of acknowledgment to MovieLine's own wonderful article, here are my own Nagging Questions about Avatar.

1. Does the DNA really matter?

There is much technical babble in the movie about how the ten foot tall blue cat people bodies inhabited by the humans were created by mixing human and Na'vi DNA, which meant that when one of the scientists was no longer able to participate in the program (what happened to him, anyway?) they imported his identical twin brother to operate the avatar. This is why crippled Marine Jake Sully ends up on a planet he has no information about: his DNA is the key to keeping an expensive avatar available.

But is it really about the DNA? After all, in order to drive the avatar, Sully climbs into a modified tanning bed/sensory deprivation tank and closes the lid. From then on, it's pure virtual reality video game. There is no physical contact between the two bodies, and no reason to believe that consciousness is somehow free to move across space—but only if there are trace amounts of DNA on the other end. This is clunky plot cooking—Cameron thinks he needs a newbie on the planet in order to show us the world through the experiences of someone who hasn't seen it before. This is the same hamfisted storytelling that sent Billy Zane chasing Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet through all the decks of the sinking Titanic with a gun! Why tell a story that is simple, understandable, and affecting when
you can amp up the melodrama instead?

Would a blood transfusion have given a REAL scientist enough compatible DNA, maybe?

2. Why aren't the Pandora Helicopters Powered by Dyson fans?

It's 2010, and we have a fan with no blades—in the 22^nd century, a bladeless helicopter would be AWESOME.

3. How do alien predators get enought to eat to stay alive?

One of the persistent problems with Avatar is the piling on of movie clichés—Pandora might look like nothing you've ever seen before, but the rest of the movie is the equivalent of the turkey tetrazzini you are still eating a week after Thanksgiving. You've seen it before, and it was better before it was rewarmed. (Or, as Shakespeare would put it, we're tired of the baked funeral meets which coldly furnish the wedding feast.) One of the worst instances of this is the behavior of the giant predator that chases Sully on his first day in the field.

The predator sneaks up behind Sully as he's facing down a herd of large, meaty, dumb hammer-head dinosaurites. So, once he's got Sully, Sigourney Weaver, and a third scientist within reach, as well as a herd of large, meaty, slow moving dinosaurs, does the predator grab dinner and run? Of course not! That wouldn't be sufficiently clichéd, so it has to stand stock still and scream. Same evolutionarily successful behavior as the ice monster from JJ Abrams' Star Trek too—what are the odds? So, does it tenderize the meat? Is that why they do it?

Then, rather than go after the LARGE, MEATY, SLOW MOVING HERD of meat snacks, or grabbing the two IMMOBILE scientists—the monster takes off after the Marine—the one guy who has any hope of out running the monster. Not that Sully has a realistic chance of outrunning a giant predator, but movie predators all seem to be victims of Zeno's Paradox¸ unable to ever actually close the distance.

4. Why does Cameron think the Na'vi live in harmony with nature when they brainwash it?

Or as MovieLine so delightfully puts it—isn't it kind of rapey? I mean, how do you tame a Pandoran horse? Do you approach it with gentleness and kindness, teach it to trust you, work with it daily over weeks and months, until the two of you learn to respect each other? Or do you take your USB ponytail, plug it into the animal's brain and violently override its will with your own? Oh, yeah, kind of rapey.

Then—in the case of the banshees—the poor animal has only one rider its entire life. Offensively patriarchal and violent. Oh yeah, that's right. We're talking about James Cameron again.

5. Why spell Na'vi with the extraneous apostrophe anyway?

This also appears to be one of those stupid conventions to signal "non-English" and "alien." It's not like the Na'vi have a written language that we ever see, and it's not like the apostrophe stands in for a tongue click, or an inhalation, or some other verbal interruption. Just spell the damn word "Navi," or even "Nahvi." Or for laughs, make them a race of grocers and sign makers, who are famous for their liberal use of extraneous apostrophes. "Banana's $.69/lb"—I know you've seen those signs.

6. How terrible a Marine is Sully—did the guy get ANY training in tactics and strategy?

So Sully decides to take a stand against the humans and he gathers 2000 warriors, a number that ridiculously worries the humans inside the compound. All the Na'vi warriors have is body paint and spears. Meanwhile, the (presumably) outnumbered humans have battle helicopters, ambulatory armor, and automatic weapons—just for starters. So, when you are badly outgunned, out armored, and generally more vulnerable than your enemy, the logical thing to do is—FULL FRONTAL ATTACK! Of course! Because as you ride over the fallen bodies of the numerous dead, it gives you the advantage of. . .the leverage of. . .Oh. Wait. It gives you EXACTLY NOTHING. Dumbass.

Now I'm no Marine, and I've never studied military strategy, but even I'm thinking "why don't you round up a herd of those hammer-head things with the skin that is impervious to bullets. Those ones that can knock over giant trees with their skulls. Then drive them in front of you and let them trample down the walls, smash the armor, and then you can take on the puny humans mano a mano." I mean, say what you want about George Lucas, but even the frickin' EWOKS had more sophisticated military strategies than Cameron's alleged Marine.

7. Did Sully HAVE to be the guy to ride the dragon?

This one is just offensive. Only 5 Na'vi in the history of the planet have ever raped ridden the leonopteryx—why did Jake Sully have to be the sixth one? Wouldn't that have been a great opportunity for one of the other stock red shirt Na'vi to have a moment of heroism? Someone who knew the risks, but was willing to sacrifice himself to save his people? Oh, wait—my mistake. That would have been good storytelling, and we're talking about James Cameron.

8. Does Cameron think that just because they won this battle the mining companies won't be back?

In the end of the movie, the puny humans are sent packing off-planet, under the watchful eyes of ten foot tall blue cat people carrying automatic weapons. "Only a few were allowed to remain" exposits Jake Sully in voice-over. And then the Na'vi go off and celebrate under their fiber optic Grandmother Willow. But the Native Americans didn't get to keep their land or way of life after the Battle of Little Bighorn, and the Empire Struck Back, so don't go thinking that this is Happily Ever After.

Oh, wait—this is MY mistake. This is just the set up for Avatar Part Deux; The Electric Boogaloo, and an endless series of video game spin offs and paperback series novelizations. Cameron learned SOMETHING from George Lucas in addition to "Awkward Dialogue 101."

9. Is Colonel Quaritch really JJ Jameson?

Separated at birth?

10. Where did Sully get his lighter?

After Sully outruns the stupid (and very very hungry--see #3 above) predator, he's stuck in the jungle at night at the mercy of advancing leopard/wolf/dogs. We see him dunking a branch into a convenient tree hollow full of kerosene and lighting the resulting torch. The guy just ran through the jungle and lost his gun, his pack, all his equipment—where did he get a Bic lighter from? Let's not even talk about why anything is flammable on a planet that is entirely bio-luminscent and where the Na'vi never build fires.

Worse to my mind is the scene at the end where Neytiri manages to struggle free from a fallen animal that had pinned her legs and kept her from saving Jake from Colonel Quaritch until she is able to shoot him in the chest with a HUGE arrow. And he still won't die! So she shoots him a second time, and the second arrow is the one that finally does the Bad Guy in. But where did that second arrow come from? The Na'vi are usually mostly nude, and while they carry honking big bows, I never saw a quiver.

Where did Neytiri store that second arrow? From the same place Bugs Bunny is always able to pull lighted sticks of dynamite? (Cartoon Law Amendment E)

11. Why do the alien Na'vi have human fingernails?

We already know why the females have breasts, but fingernails are not accounted for.

12. Did James Cameron give proper credit to the screenwriters of Fern Gully?

FernGully: the 1992 movie in which a non-human female teaches a jarhead about the importance of environmentalism, and then the bulldozers come and knock down the trees.

13. Is the Ambulatory Armor really just Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots?

Separated at birth--again?

14. Where is the Air Bender?

I'm certain there are more nagging questions—feel free to post them below

True Confessions: I Am a Dangerous Geek

2010-01-19T12:25:00.003-06:00

I finished Jasper Fforde's newest book, Shades of Grey, yesterday and promptly went to his website to enhance my experience.

In a short article on "The Big Idea" and his own preference for taking unusual paths in his writing, Fforde mentions that this particular dystopic post-apocalyptic fiction is set 700 years after the apocalpyse and explains why none of his characters discusses the "Something That Happened" in any detail:

So I chose my idea - Post Apocalyptic Dystopia - and then noted the well trodden path: The immediate aftermath of a global upheaval. The population in disarray, citizens fighting for survival in a new world order. Too obvious. How about seven hundred years afterwards, when the fall of mankind has no more relevance than the Dark Ages has to us today? I don't know about you, but I rarely talk about Edward III's scandalous claim to the French throne in 1337, but it's all people talked about then.

And of course, I immediately thought "Edward III had a scandalous claim to the French throne? Really? I mean, it was a claim through his mother, who was herself a scandal, but was Edward III's claim all that odd?"

I have managed to restrain myself from researching this issue. So far.

Golden Globes Red Carpet

2010-01-17T19:40:00.002-06:00

This is an experiment in live blogging the Red Carpet for the Golden Globes on E! Let's see how it goes.

Jane Lynch—Ryan Seacrest just showed Jane Lynch a clip of her on a previous interview when a bird pooped on her forehead. She's a good sport and an absolute Amazon. I'd love to see her crush seacrest between her eyebrows. She is awesome, and he remains a tool.

Ricky Gervais is looking good, and saiys it's because he only eats lettuce. How is somebody who has been doing interviews as long as Seacrest has still so bad? He's managed to make Gervaise un-funny.

Sophia Vergara has a great grey and red strapless which is great colors but is so architectural that she needs to be wheeled around on a dolly.

Mickey Rourke is looking pretty good with a pretty girl on his arm. Her English isn't really good enough to talk to Seacrest.

Maggie Gyylenhal looks fab in pink.

Peggy Olson/ Elizabeth Moss—looks exactly as awkward as her character would look. She looks like she's wearing her mom's dress. But nice to have her talk about her new marriage to Fred Armistad of SNL.

Ginnifer Godwin and Jeanne Tripplehorn. The Trip looks about a million years old, very matronly and mom-like. Ginnifer is so cute—love her short hair. They're plying up the sister-wife thing.

OMG, Toni Collette is looking GLAM in gold sequins.

Mr. Jay is manning the "Glamcam360", which is pointless, but better than the head to foot thing they used to do.

Trivia crawl is hard to keep track of. Neil Patrick Harris is being charming, and so did I really see that Gerard Butler used to be lawyer and was fired from a Scottish law firm for being late and hungover?

Sandra Bullock

Christina Hendricks in peach, shows off her gorgeous read hair and her curves.

Emily Blunt—the hair has definitely been in the rain. The pink dress is a little lighter than her skin, which I'm not loving, but I love Emily so I'll give her a pass.

On a break—there is still a lot of strapless mermaid going on, and lots of jewels, but no one is asking about the jewels—perhaps as a nod to Haiti? They're all borrowed anyway.

Adrian Grenier, who famously doesn't bathe. He's got a Haiti ribbon on his lapel.

Quentin Tarentino and two actors from Inglorious Basterds. He's wearing an American tuxedo and a Japanese tuxedo, telling a story about getting drunk with Brad Pitt.

Jennifer Morrison in a bdress that is a bunch of shreds. Not loving it.

Giuliana has Lea Michele, in a black de la Renta strapless. Kristen Bell in the background in a knee length dress. Lea is talking about singing Madonna songs for Glee. Gabourey Sidibe with long hair and great necklace. Patricia Arquette is looking a bit ravaged and not just the dress.

Giuliana got cut off mid interview so Seacrest can get on air with Sandra Bullock. Sandy in deep purple which is lovely, and an odd hairdo but lovely long earrings. She's so gracious about her role in Blind Side. Seacrest tells us she donated a million dollars to Haiti. Cool

Chace Crawford is such a pretty boy—he looks like a young Rob Lowe in many ways.

Fergie and Josh Duhamel are well turned out. Lilac on Fergie is so not a hip hop color. But the bling works.

Vera Farmiga, looking very JLH, and mercifully freed from that "Captain and Tenille" haircut from Up in the Air. She's lovely. Vera had a baby 14 days before she started shooting Up in the Air, and wearing a lovely black strapless mermaid dress.

Seacrest to Josh Duhumel: why did you renew your vows? Like we don't know Josh has been caught cheaten;.

January Jones with an odd headband, and trying not to do 60s.

George Clooney and his girlfriend Elisabetta Canalis. He's got a great beard—does he do anything badly? Telethon for Haiti—Cloons is such a nice human being. There will be music that will be buyable on iTunes the next day. "It's a hard time for people to be giving." No questions about who they were wearing—maybe Seacrest can be salvaged. Elisabetta is in something very complicated and snaky looking.

Could the ad for "Extrodinary measures" be any more manipulative looking? Since when is there audience demand for Brendan Frasier and Harrison Ford in something "heartwarming" rather than something fun like Indiana Jones meets the Mummy?

Marion Cotillard in lack Christian Dior—her accent is soo cute.b

Purple seems to be the color—Leona Lewis in lilack. Diane Kruger in something horribly pink/red ombre.

Anna Paquin and her co-star fiancé. Are not answering prying questions about their relationship.

Drew Barrymore in beige looks sleek, even with the glittery hedgehog on her shoulder.

Mariah carey looks personally affronted that it dares to rain on her.

Steve Carell—the perennial candidate. He looks genuinely delighted to have Gervais host tonight and is looking forward to it.

Amy Poehler and Will Arnett—she's in red which is a great contrast with her blond hair.

Tina Fey in houndstooth? At least it's not black. The skirt is the same shape as her umbrella, and tea length.

Julianna Margulies in black and red—for vanity's sake she skipped the red carpet.

It's the Sev in ruffles that stay up magically. The hair is terribly severe, but the overall look isn't weird.

Tina Fey with Seacrest—she's saying "I feel like it's someone elses turn." Alec Baldwin will be hosting the Oscars? How did I miss this? With Steve Martin? This could be awesome, squared. Tina "It keeps raining, and I'm worried my tattoos will start showing."

Mr. Jay shoing Chace Crawford in Dolce & Gabbana in the GlamCam 360—it is a nice tux. Mr. Jay is wearing a HUGE Camilla.

Heather Graham in a tight ponytail and a black sequined dress. Elie Saab, very nice. Giulliana can drop the "your body is rockin'" line.

Penelope Cruz with soft long hair and willing to hold her own umbrella. Too bad she's so homely, right? Anna Kendrick coming up! She's darling and very poised for being so young. Back after break with Penelope Cruz to talk about Haiti—Artists for Peace and Justice website and telethon on Friday.

Kristen Bell in the shorter dress—"I needed to move like a tiger: I swam here. Zoe Saldana in a fabulous red dress. Taylor Lautner, soaking up the.

Maria Carey's boobs are now talking to Seacrest. She's such a mess. Even with slicked back hair and a non-frilly dress, she's still too much. Does she have the dress on backwards? Is she getting ready to breastfeed the room?

Robert Downey Jr. and wife. He's great and complaining about how hard it is to keep

I can't keep up. Calista Flockhart is actually wearing a raincoat. Amy Adams showing off a baby bump in a dark green dress. Jon Hamm in a beard?

Toni Collette in GlamCam360—fabulous. Emily Blunt as well—the edges are rough and messy to my eye, but Mr. Jay likes it.

Maybe Ryan is finally getting good at this? He's smooth about greeting Harvey Weinstein while throwing to commercial. Mayabe I can stop hating him—as long as he stops being a tool.

I started blogging on Blogger, and two sentences inlost it all, so I switched to Word in order to have a post byt eh end of the evening. And what happens? Of course—Word stops working and eats a bunch of my entry. Damn. I am now saving during ad breaks.

Seal and Heidi Klum—she's in gray Atalier Versace and delightfully bossy, complaining about the stairs.

NPH pwns the GlamCam360—spewing a liquid spray that is captured and displayed in the round!

Mark Wahlberg talking about his fourth child and his wife who is home with the kids: "she's a machine." He's talking about an Entourage movie while Paul McCartney walks the red carpet.

Mr. Jay with Sandra Bullock is one of the "shades of the night—purple" which has a sheer panel in the back that looks like a corset or something.

Tobey Maguire for "Brothers" which Seacrest doesn't even say the name of it. "That movie"—neither one of them mentions the name. Good thing I know so much, huh? At the end, Seacrest finally says it.

Giuliana and Anna Kendrick. She's in white with silver detailing—a huge ruffle around her bust which I don't like. Giuliana has lost her mind over George Clooney and has totally punted on her interview with Anna. "So, were you concentrating on your lines, or were you thinking 'I want him.'" To her credit, Kendrick doesn't say "But he's so ooooooold! Yuck!" She clearly could have.

E! is bringing Joan Rivers back for Fashion Police. It's probably the right move—who watched Kimora Lee Simmons? And now they are trying to fill the last 10 minutes without

Christina Hendricks is wearing Christian Siriano. Her hair is down, she looks very young that way.

Amy Adams stumping Seacrest about what trimester is halfway through pregnancy; Jane Krakawski in purple, also newly engaged to the designer of "Psycho Bunny"?. Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson on the carpet.

Mr. Jay "Mariah Carey brings her own Golden Globes to the GlamCam. . ." He claims that the shoulder detail on her dress balances. . .her figure. He also loves Fergie's Grecian gown, which does look good on her.

Okay, now we're switching to NBC for the actual show!

Father Daughter Dialogue

2010-01-05T11:11:00.002-06:00

On the first day back to school after a lovely and relaxing Winter Break, things were running a bit behind schedule. I had to preserve this, because it so perfectly captures how things go these days. This is from an email that Captain Sweetie sent to me about his morning with Sursels:

She, as we headed out the door, sarcastically: "Daddy, I'm hoping that we can hold off on any snow shoveling or any other kind of distraction this morning." (I swear, she sounded EXACTLY like me, down to the one of voice.)

Then later, clearly not being able to let go of this, she said, "Why exactly were you running late this morning?"

Me: "I had to iron a shirt".

She: "Wouldn't it have been better to iron it last night?"

Me: "Yes, honey, but I was busy last night paying bills, and didn't check my shirt until this morning. Sorry we're running late, we'll still get there on time"

She: "Well, couldn't you.... oh never mind."

Quietly fuming about the delay

Me: "I think we're going to get there by 7:57. Not great, but not late"

She: "They have this middle school gathering thing on Monday. To sort of 'bring the school together'. It's kind of annoying."

Me: "Here we are, 7:56, not too bad!"

She: "We got lucky."

Who's kid is she, hunh?

The same sarcasm, the same inability to let things go.

The same need to MAKE THE POINT THAT YOU SCREWED UP AND IT'S INCONVENIENCING ME AND I DON'T WANT YOU TO DO IT AGAIN.

Oh yeah, un hunh, I know how to press her buttons because I INSTALLED THEM. Snap!

I love my family.

Snow Days The New Standards 2008

2010-01-05T11:06:00.002-06:00

I am totally addicted to this song. I wonder why--waking up to sub-zero temps, icy cold blue skies and blazing white snow piles. The roads have been scraped, but it's actually too cold for salt to melt the ice. We are driving on Braille roads until the sun comes out and the temperatures rise.

Yes, this is a song about how Minnesota winters feel, except that I don't think there is actually much looting by vagabonds--it's too dang cold even for them!

I love Chan Poling's ruined beauty--he's weathered a lot of hard life, actually, yet he still plays and sings as gorgeously as ever, and shows that music doesn't have to be only a young man's game. John Munson has such a rough voice--straining and then hitting those notes that brings such power to the lyrics.

And I want to take Steve Roehm home in my pocket and put him up on my mantle like an "Elf on the Shelf."

The Young Victoria, A Review

2009-12-27T22:47:00.003-06:00

The four of us went to see "The Young Victoria" tonight, because there is really rather a dearth of movies that all four of us want to (or can, even) see. And I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Honestly, I thought I knew all there was to know about Queen Victoria, and her times, just by osmosis. She was queen for practically ever, and what is there to learn about her romance with the man who became her husband, Prince Albert. Turns out, I was wrong--her early years were completely new to me.

George III was the longest reigning monarch before Victoria, and he lost the colonies, went mad, had his oldest son as his regent off and on until his death in 1820. His eldest son became George IV, and since he had no living legitimate heirs, the crown went to his brother William IV. Although William IV had 10 living children, they were all born out of wedlock with his longtime mistress and were not eligible to inherit. Victoria was the daughter of yet another of George III's sons, the Duke of Kent. Said duke died shortly before his father George III, and so Victoria was raised by her mother.

The Duchess of Kent was originally from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and could easily have returned home to Germany after the death of her husband. However, it was apparent even then that Victoria stood a good chance of inheriting the throne. George IV had no heirs, was estranged from his wife and she was presumably too old to have children. William IV took the throne at age 64 and had no living heirs either. So it looked possible that not only would Victoria inherit, she might also inherit while still a minor, which would probably mean her mother would act as regent.

Victoria's mother was advised, controlled, and possibly sleeping with an Irish military man named Sir John Conroy, and between them they kept the young Victoria isolated and dependent. Their plan was to keep her weak so that they would control her through regency in her youth, and possibly continue to control her even afterwards. The plan backfired, however, because Victoria resented and hated both Conroy and her mother, and because William IV managed to live until after Victoria's 18th birthday and no regency was necessary.

There is a wonderful scene at William's birthday reception when the King (ably portrayed by Jim Broadbent--that man is a treasure! Is there any movie he doesn't improve?) stands up and denounces Victoria's mother and announces his intention of living long enough to avoid a regency. He is visibly ailing, and the drama of the moment is tense because Americans probably don't know if there was a regency for Victoria or not. I sure didn't.

Jim Broadbent as William IV denouncing Victoria's mother. Check the gorgeous scenery!

As fascinating as the history is, the movie is a joy for its sheer beauty. The fabrics in the clothing and furnishings are gorgeously dyed and embroidered, the actors are all lovely to look at, the palaces are stunning and the gardens and landscapes are to die for. Emily Blunt makes Victoria young, vulnerable, determined, and very very human. Paul Bettany as Lord Melbourne is much more pleasant to look at than as the albino Silas in The DaVinci Code--you can see how Victoria came to depend upon him and even fall a little in love with him. Rupert Friend makes the young Prince Albert look good, even in badly fitted plaid pants.

Would I recommend this film? Absolutely. Would I see it again? Without question! I'd watch it just to look at the costumes again and marvel at the gorgeous colors that get deeper and richer as the film progresses--I'd love to hear a commentary by the costume designer about the source and dramaturgy of Victoria's dresses alone.

More In Sorrow . . .

2009-12-17T19:25:00.000-06:00

I removed my first friend from Facebook today.

Sure, "unfriend" was declared to be the word of the year by the New Oxford American Dictionary, but the experience of deleting is more poignant than the perkiness of "unfriend" would imply.

I am feeling rather sad about it, frankly.

Facebook is a relatively new addition to my life, and I joined only this year. Many of my FB friends are people I don't actually see that often, and the large FB experience is kind of like getting Christmas cards all year long. You get the occasional update of what these friends are doing, you occasionally get photos, where you can marvel at how much they have changed/how they look exactly the same/how big the kids are now. The contact isn't entirely one-way, but it's not really a medium for ongoing dialogue.

The successful ethic seems to be to treat it like an office party--be polite, don't do anything you'd be embarrassed to have your boss/mother/kids see, don't be too provocative and don't discuss money, religion, or politics. Or at least, do so with some decorum, since not everybody agrees.

This is what lead to my decision to unfriend my friend: politics. Specifically, the serial posting of hysterical, apocalyptic political tracts and rants. Someone has called it "the dog whistle of Fox News" and sad to say, that was exactly how it seemed. I'd be living my life, considering issues like health care reform, and TARP repayments, and (my personal issue) the unfathomable insistence of the Current Administration to continue the Bush/Cheney policies around Guantanamo, when SUDDENLY THERE WAS A CRISIS TO OUR AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE!! Some government agency employee that I'd never even heard of was an URGENT MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH and we had to SAVE THE CHILDREN and get this person fired/exposed/jailed/exiled!

And the post would go up, usually with a heading like "This person needs to be fired now!" There, among the rest of the Facebook feed: wry commentary of daily life, the amusingly precocious statements of kids, the mantras people used to make it through their days, the photos and videos and music links--suddenly there was this posting that can only be equated to the "red alert" klaxons of the old Star Trek series. We were suddenly under attack and PANIC IS THE ONLY OPTION!!

Followed soon afterward by a second, third, and even fourth posting of other members of the Echo Chamber of Eternal Hypervigilism weighing in on the same "issue.," using the identical source material but giving the impression that Something was Going On.

"What is this threat to Our Way Of Life," I think, and "Shouldn't I Be Aware?" I mean, I read a couple of different political and news e-magazines every day and they haven't mentioned anything about this IMMEDIATE ACTION NECESSARY item. So, I click the links. And then I read the article(s). And I truly don't get it. This? This?!? is what is SO DANGEROUS THAT YOU MUST CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES and LET THEM KNOW HOW YOU FEEL?

This first one I got sucked into was the Van Jones controversy. A smart young black man with a Yale Law degree and an NYTimes best-selling book on lifting people out of poverty by creating sustainable job growth in green industry, Jones was appointed to the Council on Environmental Quality to consult on green jobs creation. He also organized an advertising boycott of Glenn Beck's Fox News program to protest Beck calling President Obama a racist.

Beck retaliated, and suddenly Van Jones was moreterrifying than Osama Bin Laden. A summary of what happened can be found here, and pretty well summarizes my skeptical attitude about the whole thing. After a couple of weeks of this, Jones resigned, and THANK GOD OUR CHILDREN ARE SAFE NOW.

And I didn't get it--I still don't get it. I tried to understand and asked what was so frightening about this man. Sure, he had said some imprudent things, but what had he done? What was he poised to do? My friend wasn't able to articulate any specific threat--just a generalized horror and mistrust of anyone called "communist," "Marxist" or "community organizer." I was called naive because I didn't understand.

Kind of like the old saw "if you have to ask, you can't afford it." If I had to ask what was dangerous about a "self-avowed communist" then I was part of the problem.

There were other incidents after Jones resigned: global warming, Sarah Palin, ACORN, vaccines. All were links headed by a single sentence about how everything is a hoax and a conspiracy and "do your research." There were also posts about what she was up to while living in the middle of the chaos that is raising children--which was why we were friends in the first place.

The one that lead me to unfriend was the current tempest over Kevin Jennings. No, not the Jeopardy champion, but the "Safe Schools Czar." Republicans are calling for his removal FOR THE SAKE OF THE CHILDREN. Again, I have never even heard of this guy, but THERE IS NOT TIME TO LOSE HE NEEDS TO BE REMOVED AND NOT BE ALLOWED NEAR CHILDREN. So I looked him up. I see a man who understands the pain borne by gay school students and who works to alleviate that pain. A man who has created programs to prevent bullying and tormenting of homosexual students.

I also see a lot of people so frightened or disgusted by the idea of homosexuality that any action that does not actively discourage it is considered to be "promoting" it. I see organizations that continue to use innuendo and guilt by association even when retracting previous false claims.

So I post a link where Media Matters looks at the claims against Jennings and disproves them. I suggest that my friend look at what the facts are and evaluate the matter critically. I got this response:

Maybe you should do a little more research about what he's advocating and then decide.

That is what did it for me. The point I was making was that Jennings WASN'T doing what he was accused of. That the claims that he promoted underage sexual activity, or that he advocated pornography and dangerous sexual practices were NOT TRUE. That a man should not be fired from a government position for things he didn't do.

But for her, none of that mattered. She swallowed the nasty stories without question and lectured me on needing to do the research.

So I told her I would no longer engage and I unfriended her. Now I am feeling deeply sad about the whole thing and I'm not entirely certain why. She is a lively and highly social person, fun to be with, deeply committed to her children and an outstanding mother. She makes certain her kids have opportunities and she goes to every single one of their sporting and school events. She is generous with her time and her talents. I can't reconcile the person I know with the way she is so captivated by the politics of fear and hate. I can't believe that the woman who spends hours standing in freezing weather to watch her son play football, who drives her daughter to swim meets all over the state, has no sympathy in her political views.

In retrospect, I would say better than half her Facebook postings were extremely conservative political postings that did not admit of any consideration that there might be a different viewpoint. And when (gently! I promise I was gentle!) asked about her views, she simply reposted the same arguments.

So, I am mourning the loss of my friend--I lost her by unfriending her, but I think I had already lost her to her politics.

So You Think You Can Gleek?

2009-12-16T13:25:00.002-06:00

The good news is: You don't have to be in high school to be in a glee club!
The bad news is: You get to be judged by a Pussycat Doll? Seriously?

I may have to watch this show.

The Dog Circus--The Final Chapter

2009-12-12T20:10:00.004-06:00

So the saga of the lost puggle reached its end earlier this week with the successful location of a permanent home for the little guy. But not before further adventures. . .

Last Sunday I learned of a local group of puggle owners who met occasionally at large, open areas to let their dogs run. Organized through a "Meetup" website, they were scheduled to meet that very day. So I tucked the puggle into a red dog sweater against the cold and took him and Bermondsey out.

We went to the dog park first, to check that the posters were still up--there had been a grand total of NO responses to the notice and I wanted to be sure they were still up. We got to the park, and Puggle clearly knew where he was. He leapt out of the car, ran up to the gate, and wormed his way under the fence. The better to start running around and getting into other dogs' ways.

It was easy to see how he could have gotten lost from any owner that he did have, as I couldn't remotely keep track of him. Fortunately, the red sweater stood out so when he was even remotely in view I could pick him out against the snow. Although for the first twenty minutes I couldn't find him at all. He just took off and ran.

Not being a complete dunce, I had left his leash on him, so when he did pass by, I was able to stomp on the leash and get some control over him. By the time I even found him again, Bermondsey was ready to go, so we headed over to the Puggle Meetup.

Is there a better way to learn about the nature of a certain dog breed than watching about 30 of them in a room? Not with puggles there isn't. All at once I could how the two breeds contributed to the dogs. Mr. Yips was the smallest of the puggles in the room, except for one that was still a puppy. Many of the dogs were pug sized, but quite a few were more like beagles with pug coloring. A couple were black, and one was a brindle color, although most were tan with black faces and ears.

They all had similar personalities--excessive curiosity and energy. In fact, 30 puggles in a room is like watching a science experiment. Truly. At one point, a couple of the puggles started running in a big circle around the room. Since every puggle needs to know what every other animal in the room is doing, more puggles joined the first two. Inside of two minutes, every single puggle in the room was running in the circle. It was like watching a science experiment on the formation of a tornado. Literally every single dog in that room had joined the vortex and was running in a circle. It's a good thing the breed is so small, or we would have seen furniture and people sucked into the maelstrom.

Because puggles are curious. Nosy, even. Watching a room full of puggles is like watching a room full of National Enquirer reporters and paparazzi at work. "Hey! There's the Loch Ness Monster!" And suddenly there is a stampede of dogs running to check out what is going on. "Alien spaceship on the White House Lawn!" Even dogs who don't have any idea what is going on join the stampede to go stick their noses in whatever business is happening.

Bermondsey was there too, and he was totally gob-smacked. He had literally no way to relate to this frenzy of dog nonsense. He climbed up onto my lap and watched, and even that wasn't far enough away from the mayhem, because occasionally a puggle would notice "Hey! There's a dog who's not participating! What's the deal with that?" and would come over and try to sniff out the story.

Some of the puggle group members tried to make us feel included. "Your dog can certainly go and play. It's not just for puggles." Which was a lovely thought, but Bermondsey had no interest in getting into that scrum. It was like inviting a chess player to join a rugby game--there was no overlap. Eventually, I put Bermondsey on a mat on top of a large wire kennel, which kept him out of the way of the craziness.

Mr. Yips was in his element, though. I left the leash on him, at least in part so I could reclaim him afterwards, and in part because I wasn't certain I could recognize him without the leash and the sweater. The leash proved problematic, because a larger puggle grabbed it--twice--and began leading Mr. Yips around by it. So a kind puggle parent removed the leash and returned it to me.

I managed to speak to the organizer of the meet-up and told her the story of poor, abandoned Mr. Yips, and she was shocked, appalled, and ready to help. She promised to send out an email to the group with his story to see if anyone could help. And that was the single best way to find a home for a lost puggle. Because it turns out that people who have puggles LOVE the breed, and people who have only one puggle want another one so they can have Doggie Buddies.

Because the email went out on Sunday afternoon, and in 24 hours I had six people who were interested in adopting Mr. Yips, three more people who wanted to help with the search for a new home for him, and one person who couldn't take another puggle, but offered to help with vetenary bills and neutering, as well as dog sitting over the holidays if necessary.

It was the kind of thing that makes you think that people are not such a bad species after all. I mean, it's embarrassing to belong to homo sapiens if one of them would leave a little dog alone and naked in a dog park. But when people come out of the woodwork to offer assistance of any kind, you have to realize that people are not all bad.

On Monday night, someone had contacted me about meeting Mr. Yips and introducing him to the puggle they already had. "Frankie" was four, and they had been thinking about getting a second dog to be a companion. So I took Mr. Yips over for a "puggle play date."

And even though he was not the dog of my heart, I started to have doubts about leaving him there. Because Frankie was aggressive and nosy, and suddenly Mr. Yips was being treated the way he had treated Bermondsey. Although, to be fair, Mr. Yips could give as good as he got, and did, while poor Bermondsey just suffered.

I left Mr. Yips there so the craziness could settle down, and within a couple of hours I got a phone call that they wanted to keep him. The only caveat I had was that they had to let me know how he was doing, what they named him, and if there was any problem, I would take him back.

Mr. Yips has been there for the rest of the week, and is now named "Vinnie." (I know--Frankie and Vinnie, it sounds like an episode of The Sopranos or something!) The owners even sent me some pictures of the two dogs, and have told me that they have settled down. Vinnie's sweet personality is showing through, and they are very happy to have him.

"Vinnie" is the one facing toward the camera--you can see he is a smaller, less stocky guy than Frankie, although they are both on the small side for the breed.

"Vinnie" is the one asleep on the blanket.

So a Merry Christmas After All. Especially for Bermondsey, who is very happy to have his house back the way he likes it--quiet, with him as the only dog.

Number Slutting, Plus 1

2009-12-12T09:50:00.001-06:00

OMG! It turns out that my last post was number 1000!

I have a thousand blog posts. Wow. I'm boggled.

CORRECTION: I have a thousand AND ONE posts now!

Dog Circus--Part 3: What's My Name?

2009-12-05T11:26:00.003-06:00

Trying to keep the Loaner Dog off the bed this morning sounded like this:

Get down.
Get DOWN.
Go ahead, get down.
Dog, get down

(repeat)

I'm thinking we should maybe start calling him "Gold Digger."

Dog Circus--Part 2, or The Dog Wars

2009-12-05T08:43:00.004-06:00

What is the hardest part of bringing a new dog home? Oh yeah--what happens at night. Where does he sleep? Does he sleep? Or does he keep you up all night with the whining and the scratching and the "but I want to be with YOU" nonsense.

I was forcibly reminded of this last night. I had managed to forget about this, so I had not made any plans about what to do with "Mr. Yips" come bedtime.

Baby gate? Didn't work. As demonstrated by the crash from downstairs and appearance of Mr. Yips on the bed.

Baby gate with a chair in front of it? Didn't work again. No crash this time, but the mini-thunder of paws coming up the stairs. And the appearance of Mr. Yips on the bed.

Now this is no fool of a dog, either. Because when Mr. Yips arrived upstairs, each time he checked the location of the Local Competition (that would be Bermondsey, both times in his own bed underneath ours), then he jumped up and snuggled himself next to me.

Oh yeah. Suck up to the Alpha--a key strategy for success in the pack. And he had the little touches right too. He found me, then positioned himself on the side of me away from Capt. Sweetie (because he's going to be clear about wanting to be "protected"). He curled up in the crook of my knee, and like sprinkles and a cherry on top of it all, put his little, trusting head on my knee.

Oh, he was good.

But while he had arranged matters to his own satisfaction, they were not universally approved. The Board of Directors of Chez Evil were consulted, a vote was called and taken and Mr. Yips' motion failed. So I brought the kennel up from the kitchen, and that's where he spent the night.

It went remarkably well. Mr. Yips went in happily, made a few sounds, and settled in and slept the night. So, more information--he has been kennelled.

This morning, however, we are seeing the re-escalation of hostilities in the Who Gets To Be On The Bed With The Alpha War. Bermondsey has currently established his Maginot Line on the Western Front, conducting trench warfare from under the bed. Capt. Sweetie has done excellent service in picking up the interloper and dropping him back on the floor as often as Mr. Yips jumps up.

In an attempt to engage in some Fifth Column work, Mr. Yips has sought out Sursels in her room. This is an inventive tactic, since the Allies (a term which here means "Bermondsey") have not recognized nor sought out this potentially strategic alliance with the kids in the family. So any inroads the Axis Dog makes with these lesser powers means he can establish bases from which to safely conduct his continued assaults with the goal of achieving Alpha Dogdom.

It's a dog's life in the modern army.

The Dog Circus-- Part I

2009-12-04T22:05:00.002-06:00

First, let me attempt to excuse my actions here, by saying in full disclosure that I have the mother of all head colds, and the result is that my brain activity is rather sporadic. I actually woke up this morning with so much pain in my head that any noise--and I mean any noise--felt like an assault with a blunt instrument. Yes, even the sound of the sheets when I pulled up the covers made my head ache. So, I'm pleading diminished capacity here.

Then, after a solid dose of Sudafed and Tylenol (both (TM)), I ran into the need to exercise the dog. Of course, I had no need to exercise the dog, but HE did, and he made it clear to me that I was expected to fulfull my obligations--head cold or no. So, I decided the most efficient way to maximize the ratio of canine activity to human inactivity was to go to the off leash dog park.

So that's what we did.

It was colder today than it's been yet this winter and something about the weather and the time made the park more empty than usual. Bermondsey and I made it around our usual track when a nice looking lady with a beagle and a Airedale asked me and the other dog walker "Do either of you have a Chihuahua?"

Well--OF COURSE NOT! But she went on to describe a dog that had been following her and her two dogs for about half an hour--the salient points that I heard were "small," "no collar" and "shivering." She also bandied about terms like "abandoned" and "abused," and I was suddenly in her power.

So I helped her go look for this dog--and we found him. Not a Chihuahua, at least, but what turned out to be a puggle--a "designer dog" that is a cross between a pug and a beagle. There was indeed no collar, and he looked naked and cold. Yes. I am a sucker. And an idiot. But my heart is in the right place.

Because the Nice Lady managed to snag him. And then we had a problem. Before we grabbed him, we could have called Animal Control and reported a stray dog and gone home in the glow of A Good Deed Done. I was actually calling Animal Control when the Nice Lady nabbed him, but once he was no longer actually straying, it seemed silly to let him go to have somebody else try to capture him.

This is where I clearly let my soft head and my soft heart reinforce each other. Because Nice Lady wasn't actually from the area, and so she had no idea where to take this dog. But I did. So I did the Grand Gesture, and the Noble Thing, and I took this dog to my car to see if we could find his owner.

Okay, so the idea wasn't immediately a stupid one. Dogs have chips, mostly, so they can be returned to their owners if separated. I knew how to get to the Humane Society. So I put Bermondsey and Naked Dog into the car with the intention of getting New Dog scanned, then taking the resulting information and returning him home to his (presumably) loving home.

This first sign that things were going to go badly was the way the two dogs behaved in the car. New Dog had Doggie Business on the brain, and ended up chasing Bermondsey around the car. WHILE I was driving. In fact, Bermondsey had jumped from the front seat to the back seat to the front seat to THE TOP OF THE DASHBOARD in about 40 seconds while trying to avoid the nose of New Dog.

I pulled over, got Bermondsey down onto the floor, and tucked Lost Dog under one arm as I drove with one hand toward the Humane Society. However, in less than a mile, I spotted a "Pet Hospital." Huzzah! They would surely have a scanner! Odds were good that Shivering Dog would have a home in the vicinity! Let's pull in and get this taken care of!

No chip.

No chip.

I am beginning to revise my assessment of the situation.

Small naked dog, alone in dog park. No collar. No coat. No chip. Not neutered. As Wayne Campbell would say; "FISHED YOU IN!"

It is not unheard of for people to abandon their dogs at a dog park, in the hopes that some dog lover with more heart than sense would rescue said animal and give it a new home.

Veterinary assistant sold me a slip leash with which I could tie Abandoned Dog to a seat belt and at least lower the level of mischief while operating my vehicle. I also leave my name and contact information in case someone contacts the nearest vet to look for a lost dog.

Then we went to the Humane Society. And by the time we got there, Weasel Dog had the slip leash around his hips and has nearly broken free and is nearly within nosing distance of Bermondsey, who has taken to huddling deep into the foot well of the front passenger seat. Nobody is happy with this turn of events.

Now, the Humane Society has its own problems and budget crises, etc. etc. So when I walk in with Somebody Else's Dog, I am informed -- immediately--"you can leave him here but we can't tell you what happens to him."

This is brilliant. For them. Because here I am, a Concerned Citizen hoping to reunite Lost Dog with Grieving Family. There they sit, Non-Profit Agency in era of lost jobs and home foreclosures, dealing with a lot of surrendered pets. If they can get me to NOT turn this dog in, then that is one less animal they have to deal with. So, without ever saying anything like "not adoptable" and "euthanasia" or "budget cuts and financial shortfalls" they sucker punch me right in my soft heart and make it impossible for me to leave said Problem Dog on their hands.

What would my kids say if they found out I had done that?

So the intake worker gives Naked Dog a collar, and the AHS store sells me a "recycled" leather leashe for $2, and I'm headed back home. I do have a list of the web sites the AHS recommends for connected Lost Dogs to Found Dogs. So I go home and connect to the internet.

I go to the "Lost Dogs" bulletin board, and don't find This Dog missing, so I post a "Found Dog" report.

I go to Craigslist and scan the "Lost Dogs" bulletin board, and don't find This Dog missing, so I post a "Found Dog" report.

I go to "LostAndPound.com," lather, rinse, and repeat.

I check with a couple of rescue organizations, but it looks like there isn't much they can do. See above, re: lots of surrendered animals, few adopters, plus "no foster homes."

Posters! I haven't made posters yet! I snap a picture with my camera phone and start to make a poster to put up in the park. After all, if someone lost him at the park, that's where they will look for him again.

Meanwhile, I have put Mr. Puggle's leash around a door knob and closed the door. He can reach food, water, a cushion--but he can't reach Bermondsey. This seems to be a good solution, until I hear the sounds of growling. That Dog has chewed through the leather leash, and is back to chasing Bermondsey.

So I grab the Other leash, tie it to the first one, and give him a rawhide bone. Back to making a poster!

And then the mayhem starts again. Yup. Chewed through the second leash as well.

So I go to fetch a baby gate. The babies are now 13 and 16, so the gate is pretty far back in the accumulation of history that is our basement. I manage to winkle it out and set it up. I print out the posters and go fetch the "babies" from school.

We are home half an hour later, to find the baby gate has been breached. Poor Bermondsey--he's got to feel like the French at Agincourt. We drop off backpacks and computers, re-establish gate fortifications, and head out to put up posters.

When we come back, the gate has been breached again, this time in a fashion that locks both dogs on the wrong side from food and water. And Bermondsey remains Not Very Happy About All This.

As I write this now, Other Dog has been in the house for about ten hours. I have learned some things about him. He only eats dry dog food--he actually didn't even touch any of the wet I put out for him. He is used to wearing clothes to go outside--I got out a dog jacket that Bermondsey wears when his hair is short, and Clothing Optional Dog doubled his tail wagging. Jacket means outdoors! Outdoors after eating is good!

He was not an abused dog--rather the opposite. As we ate dinner, Comfort Dog went into the parlor and settled himself luxuriantly on a cushion. After dinner, and Capt. Sweetie and I enjoyed the fire, Spoiled Dog splayed himself full on his back, and proceeded to serenade us with a collection of snores and tongue clicks.

He is immediately territorial, or defensive, or something He barks at unfamiliar sounds and at intruders. How he knows WHAT sounds are unfamiliar, or WHO is an intruder is not clear.

Right now, he is sleeping in the same room as Bermondsey, and they are doing a good job of ignoring each other. This is not a bad dog--this is a dog somebody has put some effort into. But it's 11:00 p.m., and nobody has called looking for him.

To be continued. . . .

That, however, was not the foremost thought on his mind. No, he was busy checking all the dogs in the area in case any of them just happened to be female. It was apparently a bonus in his little mind if she was in heat.

Steig Larssen and the Feminist/Misogynist Dichotomy

2009-12-01T10:25:00.000-06:00

I'm revisiting Steig Larssen's book The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo these days, and not of my own volition. I reviewed it on my book review blog some time ago, and recently received a comment in response to my review of the sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire.

As the commenter pointed out--I said I hated Dragon Tattoo and yet I gave it a B+. Which startled me. I remember hating it, and I have absolutely blocked out why I would have given it a B+. Is grade inflation so prevalent that I would give such a good grade to a book I would warn people away from reading? I mean, not only can't I recommend it, but I can't even go with the relatively moderate "Give it a shot and tell me what you think of it."

No, I found Dragon Tattoo to be so overwrought, so offensive, and so stupid on so many levels that I feel it is my public duty to save people from picking it up. "You will never get those hours back again," I would tell anybody. "Well, I might recommend it, except for the fact that the main character is an idiot and a Mary Sue with an inexplicable success rate with women, and the fact that much of what passes for prose is actually shopping lists, and that the mystery solution is so obvious that you will guess the perp about five hundred pages before the hero does, and the fact that there is a disturbing amount of horrific torture and murder of women which is graphically detailed. . .Actually, there really IS no reason to read this book, and there is no explanation for why it has been so well reviewed."

And I thought I had been harsh when I told someone that another book "was not a complete waste of time." I think Dragon Tattoo is a complete waste of time.

Now, Dragon Tattoo is the subject of a thoughtful article about the state of book publishing: "Dead, brutalized women sell books." Apparently the received wisdom in the world of publishing is that people like to read about rape, torture and murder of women--so much so that even a book where the victim is male has a woman's (dead) body on the cover.

Obviously, this is disturbing. I, for one, do not like to read torture porn, and I read a lot of fiction. Yet somehow the sense at the end of the article is that rape and murder and mutilation of women is about all that is keeping book publishing solvent. That can't be true, can it? It was only about a year ago that we learned that women buy and read a substantial majority of fiction in the country, and really, how many of them would choose violence if they had a realistic choice?

I can believe that women like to read thrillers, or mysteries, and the ones that are being published are also increasingly violent--which they read because they are what is available. That makes sense to me. The Silence of the Lambs was incredibly gory, but it also had a psychologically complex relationship at its heart, and maybe the torture was something some readers waded through to get to the parts that interested them: the relationship between Clarice and Lecter.

Unfortunately, the lesson taken seems to be "Gore sells" and we get a rush of other books that have all the blood and none of the relationships. And we read those books, because they are reviewed as the best of what is now being published.

There is a debate about whether the Steig Larssen books are "feminist" because they contain a strong female heroine who fights against the bad guys who are murdering and raping other women. Does a kick-ass dame in a leading role redeem a novel from being torture porn? Does the use of fictive violence against women serve as evidence of cultural disapproval of such violence, or is it a way to make such violence marketable in a way that straight misogynistic horrors couldn't be sold?

When an author wrestles with horrors, the activity is fraught with risk. I mean, there is a justifcation for representing the problem one is condemning, at the very least so the reader knows just what the writer is against. The problem comes when the writer turns out to be better and writing about the problem than writing about the condemnation of the problem. And I think that is what happened in Dragon Tattoo. The prose about sexual mutiliation, dismemberment and torture was so much more lively and engaged than the rest of the book that I was left with the sensation of having been subjected to a creep show under false pretenses.

Maybe that's why I was so generous with my grading--after all, my sense was that Larssen enjoyed writing about the violence, and that enjoyment overwhelmed the "moral" of the book. However, I seemed to be in the minority, since so many reviewers had recommended the book, they must have experienced it as more balanced, less celebratory of violence against women than I did.

There is an old, hoary joke about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln during the performance of "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theater. In it's entirety, the joke goes: "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?" In the case of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I find myself in Mrs. Lincoln's shoes--there is no way to consider the book "other than that."

Something Lost--A Moment for Nostalgia

2009-12-01T08:57:00.003-06:00

I was reading a "professional" blog by a friend of mine, about a "No TV on Sunday" rule and what the kids did instead. She writes about the newish "Nature Deficit Disorder," the idea that kids today are so overscheduled that they simply don't spend time outside.

God, parents have changed since I was a kid.

Did parents actually kick their kids out of the house back then, or am I manufacturing a memory? It seems like we spent a lot of time outside, especially during summer break--the door would open and we'd be outside for hours. I lived on a block that had a lot of kids, and we'd play games that ranged across half a block of back yards. From the bottom of the block to our back yard, there were kids in every house and we'd have to define the limits for hide and seek: "From here down to the Cowan's yard. Bobby's big tree is Home Base. No hiding in playhouses or garages or. . .okay, you can't hide inside."

Kid world was full of rituals that got passed on as new kids entered the neighborhood. My family moved onto the block when I was six, and we left the summer after I turned nine. In those years, only one other family moved in or out, so the pack of kids was pretty stable and large.

How to choose who is "It."

One kid was the tapper, and would decide "one shoe" or "two shoe." We'd sit in a circle with our feet in the middle, and the tapper would tap (0r pound) one shoe per syllable.

My mother and your mother were hanging up clothes.
My mother hit your mother in the nose.
What color was the blood?

The owner of the foot the tapper landed on would select a color. Speed was important, so favorite colors were often chosen. For some reason, we never tried to stump the tapper with hard to spell colors, which would only have increased the randomness factor anyway.

B-l-u-e spells blue and you are Not It.

Two shoes was harder to game--you couldn't immediately tell if "blue" or "orange" would end up back on your own foot, thus freeing you from being It. But it took so much longer. Or maybe the tapper would just use the shorter, non-interactive chants.

Ink-a-bink, a bottle of ink
The cork fell out and you stink
Not because you're dirty
Not because you're clean
But because you kissed a la-dy
Behind a magazine.

Another advantage to the Two Shoe Tap was that by the time you were finished, all the available kids were usually present. Otherwise, one might show up in the middle of a Hide and Seek round, and of course you had to start a new one. New Kid was always It, which means the previous It would have to all in all the hiders.

Ollie, ollie income free/New Comer!

This sucked if you had a really great hiding place, unless you could sneak around and emerge o from somewhere else, in order to keep your hiding location secret. The New Comer had a to lean against the tree, cover his/her eyes and count. "A hundred fast, or fifty slow." I always counted to a hundred as fast as I could, using my fingers to keep track of ten batches of ten.

Of course, hiders didn't just wait to be found. Their goal was to get to Home Base before they were tagged by It. So the hiding place had to be one where you could keep an eye on It in order to make a break for safety, preferably while It was not between you and Home Base.

While I lived there, we had to create a rule to prevent Its from loitering around Home Base, just waiting to catch the dumb or unlucky. So a mandatory "run around the house" was instituted, although you could strategically run only half-way around and double back to catch the incoming hiders who might have expected you to be on the other side of the house.

When a hider made a break for Home, It could either tag the hider, or call out hider's name and then try to tag Home first. Once the first hider was tagged, the rest of the hiders tended to burst out all at once--because we saw we were safe from being It, or because we were so far away we only saw the other hiders coming out of hiding.

Kid game rules were intricate and strictly observed and enforced. Cheaters who counted to fifty fast, or who didn't run all the way around the house were not allowed to play, which was a harsh sentence, since there were never any other kids around--we were all of us hiding and seeking. Cheaters were lonely outcasts, leading a bleak ex-patriot life of isolation. It was better to fail to catch any hiders and be It twice in a row than to suffer the stigma of being a Cheater.

Games like this tended to fall apart around 6 p.m., as the voices of mothers lifted across the air. "Susie! Kristin! Supper!" "Dinner-time!" The voices of the mothers were pitched high and lilted from yard to yard. Each mother had her own tune and syncopation, so even if you couldn't distinguish the words, you recognized the source. One father, over on another street, had a whistle like a Morse code: short short short long, all the same pitch, that you could hear for blocks. Except for him, the callers were all mothers. Fathers only got involved if you didn't turn up fast enough, and that was the International Symbol for "Oh jeez, are YOU in trouble."

My kids have never had this kind of freedom. Almost all the yards on our block are fenced in, so there is no way to roam up and down the block like we used to. The world has changed as well, and the mothers work away from home now too, so neighborhoods are pretty dead during the day time.

When my parents bought their house, they went into the back yard and counted the swingsets in the back yards to confirm the high percentage of kids available. On the block my kids have grown up on, there was only one other swingset. Currently, there is only one other family with kids at home--we have two lovely gay couples, four houses where the kids are out of high school or even out of graduate school, two apartment buildings and two triplex rental units. The neighbors are all lovely and the diversity is wonderful.

Still, I miss my experience of a tribe of neighborhood kids on my own kids' behalf.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th Anniversary Concert--in Pretend Real Time

2009-11-30T08:03:00.009-06:00

Oh boy, tonight HBO is airing the R&R Hall of Fame concert that took place last month. Live blogging begins!

Except it doesn't, because it's Monday morning, and the concert aired last night. But we can play "Let's Pretend" anyway.

7:12 p.m. Pulled up in front of the house after driving back from Thanksgiving in Kansas. The trunk has been unloaded and now it's time to unpack. R&RHOF concert starts on HBO at 8.

7:30 p.m. I've unpacked my suitcase, returned toiletries to their usual location, sorted laundry into baskets.

7:34 p.m. On the internet, checking email. Checking with family--does a day spent in the car with lunch at 2:30 mean never having to say you are hungry?

7:53 p.m. Back upstairs to turn on the TV and hang up the remaining pieces of unpacked clothing.

7:53:30 p.m. Dammit! How old do I have to be to remember that when HBO says something starts at 8, that means EST, not CST! The concert has already started, and a strangely hairy Sting is singing with Stevie Wonder.

7:53:40 p.m. Capt. Sweetie has arrived as well. "Superstition" remains a really great song. Stevie Wonder remains blind.

8:xx p.m. Okay, this live-blogging conceit is out the window, because I have no idea what time anything is happening. A strangely elderly and thin haired Paul Simon walks onstage. I have PTSD flashbacks to FIL turning on a Pat Boone special on Public Television. Is Paul Simon older than Pat Boone? He kind of looks like it.

Paul Simon at the R&R HOF concert.

Pat Boone, who was NOT at the R&R HOF Concert.

8:xx:27 p.m. According to the Internet, Pat Boone is a mere 7 years older than Paul Simon, while Paul Simon's wife, Edie Brickell, is 25 years younger than Art Garfunkel. If they leave on a train from Chicago traveling east at 87 m.p.h., will the signs of the prophets still be written on the subway walls?

8:whatever p.m. Art Garfunkel looks like an elderly clown, but he still has a wonderful voice.

8:diva o'clock. Stand back. That's Aretha!

8:diva o'clock:03. No. Really. Stand back. 'Retha is a big woman in red, which is not slimming. She still rocks the syncopation like nobody else.

8:2 divas o'clock. Annie Lennox is not HIV positive, but she wears a shirt saying she is on TV. This activism is confusing me.

8:xx p.m. Metallica comes onstage behind the notation "Inducted 2009." I have zero interest in Metallica, and now everybody is hungry. I go to call for pizza as Lou Reed comes on to do "Sweet Jane." Brilliant.

Pizza o'clock. Capt. Sweetie comes down to report that Ozzy Osbourne has just said "fuck" precisely elventy-seven times during two songs. Then ended his appearance by blowing kisses to the audience and calling "God bless you." We start drinking.

Pizza arrives as U2 is announced. Much fan boy/girl squee-ing from the alleged adults in the house. The teen-agers suffer the nerdiness in order to get fed.

Quarter past Bono. Springsteen and Patti Smith appear to do "Because the Night." Everybody chez Evil pronounces it "BE-cause" which sounds stupid. Patti has some trouble with the song, but the whiskey voice is still there.

Is that Bruce Springsteen or John de Lancie (known around these parts as "Q" from Star Trek TNG)? You be the judge.

Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For/Promised Land. More brilliance.

Mick Jagger and Fergie rip into "Gimme Shelter" and do the unimaginable--Bono steps away from the microphone and gets out of their way.

I didn't know Fergie had the chops to take on Jagger, but the two of them are FIERCE.

Hip for hip, lip for lip, these two are well matched. Possibly the best moment of the show. Jagger then refers to U2 as the "house band" and Bono confronts the reality that U2 should be playing "weddings, bar mitzvahs. . ."

Mom o'clock. Kid needs help with math, so I turn off the TV and dredge up geometry facts that are older than the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Thank gods HBO does re-runs.

VMI--Valuable Medical Advice

2009-11-09T10:06:00.001-06:00

I am not a doctor, and I read this on a web site so it must be true.

Right?

Bad flu epidemics can hit young adults hardest because they provoke their powerful immune systems into overreaction, so to stay healthy spend the next few weeks drunk and sleep-deprived to keep yours depressed.

Thanks to XKCD from Salon.com Table Talk