"It's 0-0." "Who's winning?"
Happy Opening Day to all!
The 2010 baseball season began today in earnest. A mid-day rally was held at Kiener Plaza in St. Louis, the Cardinals hosted the San Diego Padres, eventually losing in the 11th, and the great Mike Shannon began his 40th season as radio voice of the team. I had to work all day in Des Moines, but I marked the occasion by taking a resin bag into the office to keep in my cubicle.
To help celebrate this national holiday, here's
the link to a February piece from the statistical analysis website, baseballprospectus.com. It investigates and reveals just which Wrigley Field ballgame it was in 1985 that Ferris Bueller attended during his infamous day of truancy from Shermer High School a quarter century ago. In related news, the website, sausageprospectus.com, has determined that Abe Froman, the Sausage King of Chicago, was playing pinochle with his cronies at the Chicago Golf Club in Wheaton when he missed his lunch reservation at Chez Quis earlier that day.
A Moeller takes a wife
If you're a friend and/or you have a Facebook account, you probably already know that my twin brother, Aaron, the Ozzie Canseco to my Jose, is getting married, quite likely by year's end. Even though it was in rather poor form, I felt, to buy an engagement ring and make a formal announcement to everyone the same week that eight-time loser Elizabeth Taylor was being laid to rest, I'm terribly excited about the union. His fiancee is really terrific-- fun, funny, and smart, and I think he'll be quite good at marriage as he's easygoing and he's already used to being bossed around his whole life-- by me. It's a great development for me also because it looks better if both of us-- at 35-- aren't still living like college students. Now with the wedding toast audition out of the way, let's probe
my psyche just a little more.
I've never really been marriage-minded to this point in my life. For stretches, I haven't even been relationship-minded. I'm not opposed to marriage-- in fact, Aaron and I are the products (prodigies?) of several successful marriages, still I recognize that getting married is not for everyone, that it can exist within radically-different, yet still-acceptable structures and outlines, and also that each one deserves the utmost integrity as long as it has the solid foundation of two or more consenting adults.
Even though my role models in marriage are formidable in the family, it dawned on me this week that my heroes of fiction and entertainment (and Aaron's, too) have been overwhelmingly unmarried through the years. Since I live my life with one foot always in the realm of fantasy (this is not a gaming reference), perhaps this is why I've been traipsing happily through life thus far without even the mildest flirtation with the institution. The major players on "Seinfeld" were all single, same with "Newsradio," and most of the cast of characters on "Cheers." The few "M*A*S*H" spouses were necessarily absent, only images in photos and on film reels. Latka and Simka got hitched midway through the run of "Taxi," but everybody else on that show was what I would call even "soulfully" single. Only Mr. Carlson and Herb Tarlek had spouses on "WKRP," and they were two of the "suits." Among my newer favorites, Liz Lemon is a single woman and super awesome ("I want to go to there"), and only Shirley is married on "Community." Going back to even my earliest days in the mid-'70s, Alvy Singer and Annie Hall made being single fashionable, as did Mary Richards, and Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, and Chewbacca were all single a long time ago, far, far away. David Letterman (who is non-fiction) was unmarried from 1977 to 2009. These figures have all been sympathetically single. Only the unmarried cast of characters on "Entourage" seem like dicks.
Perhaps it's just that good marriages make for dull storytelling on the screen. Tony Soprano and the "Mad Men" ad execs are terrible husbands, Larry David could be described as 'so-so' at best. On TV, only characters played by Bob Newhart, Bill Cosby, Roseanne Barr, and their spouses seem to be very good at it.
So what's my point? Maybe only that I've internalized these characters to such a degree-- and I have
deeply internalized them, you must know-- that their lives have kind of become my own. Ours is the first generation in the American experience to be raised with the idea that it's permissible to have friends and co-workers stand in as life partners. It's a pragmatic form of living, as demonstrated by television's finest shows, that also helps to elevate dramatic tension, and better allows for the introduction of additional or visiting characters. Marriage can be a beautiful, fulfilling thing, but let's call it out for what it also can be. Married people often wind up quickly or gradually closing themselves off from the other people in their lives. We've all witnessed this phenomenon. A spouse-- by design and intent-- comes to take on many of the roles in their partner's life that may have been previously held by
multiple people-- friend, counselor, confidente, caretaker, role model, sex partner, etc., and let's face it, marriage is very nearly the mortal enemy of baseball road trips and television festivals.
The reason I'm so excited for Aaron-- and Alex, his wife-to-be-- is not that they're going to be entering into the social contract that is considered incorrectly by many to be fundamentally superior to otherwise equally-valid and substantive styles of living. It's that they seem to have found something that, combined with what they already possess, promises almost complete fulfillment. They've both landed in a place where no other life scenario seems to make sense, and that turn of events should be an inspiration to
anybody out there who wonders what potential fulfillment, whatever it might be, waits around the corner.
The times that try rich men's souls
This is not an easy time in history to be rich. Sure corporate profits are at an all-time high. The tax rates are regressive and at generational lows for the top brackets, with the corporate tax nearly non-existent. Oversight of Wall Street operations is a dusty museum piece, and taxpayers subsidize all of their investment risk. They own our government lock, stock, and barrel, and hold majority stakes in several other governments as well... But they feel unloved.
As Glenn Greenwald
tells us, the rich are tired of being blamed for running our economy cold into the ground. They spy socialists under every cushion. A president that gives them every piece of legislation they lobby for wrapped in ribbon and bows has, according to billionaire Charles Koch, "done more damage to the free enterprise system and long-term prosperity than any president we've ever had."
But Maine governor Paul LePage is striking back on behalf of the wealthy and powerful. He's delivering a blow for equal respect for the rich. At his state's office building for the Department of Labor,
he has seen to it that a public mural that honors working people in the Pine Tree State be taken down. He saw the mural for what it was-- "one-sided." "Were the bosses in the mural?" he wants to know. LePage is also ordering that the building's rooms be renamed. The rooms are named for Cesar Chavez and other historic labor figures from Maine or otherwise. Where are the names of the bosses and the employers? Just widen your peripheral a little there, governor. I bet you'll find them engraved on monuments nearby, on the street signs, the bridges, and all the buildings.
The patriot threat
Silly public officials, don't you know that only Muslims can be terrorists?
Congressman Peter King (NY) held public hearings earlier this month regarding the terrorist threat of Muslim Americans, claiming in his opening statements March 10th that "not one terror-related case in the United States in the last two years involved neo-Nazis." Only
one day earlier, Kevin William Harphan
had been arrested for trying to throw a bomb into the middle of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day Parade in Spokane, Washington in January. The Southern Law Poverty Center and
the U.S. Justice Department both say that white supremacists are being dangerously discounted as violent threats by FBI counter-terrorism efforts.
If you love your news sprinkled with irony, you'll enjoy this: Pottawattamie County and Treynor School District in western Iowa scheduled an emergency drill for Saturday based on a fictional scenario in which young male white supremacists open fire in the public school. According to county officials, the emergency training was a requirement to qualify for federal funds under the Department of Homeland Security. It was
canceled today because of
threats received by emergency organizers-- supposed intimidation and profanity-laced phone calls.
Robert Ussery, from a group that calls itself the Iowa Minutemen, denied the existence of the threats: "Most of the people who break the law and are involved in school shootings don't quote the Constitution or love their country." Since when is that exactly? Funny that Ussery would be so offended on behalf of white supremacists when he's not one. Perhaps he should spend some time in self-reflection instead trying to determine why America's anti-immigration movement is so attractive to white supremacists.
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Most of her obituaries do not do Elizabeth Taylor justice. She was a "star" certainly, a designation of celebrity that has lost all currency, and she was indeed
breathtakingly gorgeous. But why should we care? Ask writer
Kim Morgan about Taylor's most important film role:
Though Bonnie and Clyde helped kick-start the emerging '70s cinema, (Taylor's) Virginia Woolf was a formidable front runner and, in a few ways, more disturbingly violent. In it, words and deeds are doled out with a ferocious vitriol that remains unmatched -- at least in terms of eloquence. Nothing so nasty has ever been so sickly beautiful. It certainly helps when Liz is slinging the sadism. That this still beautiful, still young woman would dress herself down to mean-mouthed, muffin-topped middle age was brave enough -- but her words and actions -- funny, terrible, sad and at times, strangely sweet, showed that Taylor truly understood this woman.Alas, but no surprise, there is currently a "long wait" for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" in our Netflix queues.
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The TV comedy series "Community" is so brilliant. Cast and crew topped themselves last night with their episode that was a double homage to "My Dinner With Andre" and "Pulp Fiction." It's one thing to obsess on pop culture in the jokes. It's something else entirely for a situation comedy to have the ambition to so fully examine that cultural obsession, and to deliver a final product of an examination that doesn't sacrifice character or emotion. A
Salon critic
called Thursday night's episode "a totally unexpected yet spot-on observation that Quentin Tarantino and Louis Malle, who are about as different as two (film) directors could be, are united by their belief that talk isn't a substitute for action, but a
form of action." Score another one for the scripted word in the age of reality TV bullshit.
It takes real guts to base an entire episode so pointedly on Malle's "My Dinner With Andre," a movie that is now 30 years old and had only art house appeal
then. Dan Harmon, the creative mind behind "Community," seems to have developed his own little obsession with the exploration of why it is that we even
watch television. Last night, one of his featured players, the scary-talented Danny Pudi, added extraordinary new dimensions to his borderline-Asperger's character, Abed, portraying at least one other character (named Chad), while also offering up a great
Andre Gregory impression just when you thought you would never in your life see somebody do an Andre Gregory impression.
"Pulp Fiction" and "My Dinner With Andre" are two of my favorite films. How can I not love a television show that seems to be so aggressively courting
me? And that forces me to examine my own pop-culture-obsessed life? Yet I'm surprised also to read the online comments tonight from "Community" viewers who weren't familiar with one or both of the films and still had their minds blown.
Around the Globe
There was big news in the supermarket checkout line today. In the top-right corner of its cover,
Globe magazine reports that President Obama's gay lover recently attempted suicide.
Here's what I love about it: Not only has the tabloid fabricated the story of a gay relationship for the president, providing a photo of his supposed lover, and reporting on the man's alleged suicide attempt, but its not even the top story. The big headline involves actress Annette Funicello being recently rescued from her burning home. That's how well-regarded Funicello still is 46 years after "Beach Blanket Bingo."
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Unrelated blog note 9:19pm:Tiger Woods' new girlfriend is
the daughter of a former St. Louis Cardinals pitcher. Jeff Lahti was the closer on the 1985 pennant-winning club.
Ruins of Detroit
The city of Detroit, Michigan
has lost 25% of its population in only 10 years. U.S. Census figures had the city's population in 2010 as 713,777. (Mayor Dave Bing is
disputing the numbers.) It was 951,270 in 2000. Overall, Michigan was the only state in the union to lose population (0.6%) during the last decade, according to the Census.
"The Motor City" has long been that-- an industry town. With the initial explosion in automobile manufacturing, the population rose from 285,704 in 1910 to 1.85 million (at its height) in 1950. Vacant housing units account now for 22.8% of the city's total housing stock, and that's more than
doubled from the 10.3% of only a decade ago. It was reported two years ago that the
median home price in Detroit had dropped to a breathtaking low of
$7,500.
Today, the Huffington Post re-posted
a slide show of 20 images from a book called "Ruins of Detroit." The photography is extraordinarily beautiful even as it reveals a heartbreaking, devastating urban decay. Many of the images could be mistaken for those in a city that has been ravaged by war.
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ESPN's "30 for 30" is a wonderful sports documentary series. Watch as many of the episodes as you can, but
don't miss the special on the life and times of Fernando Valenzuela. "Fernando Nation" is on YouTube, and I'm taking the extra step here of linking you to
the first of four parts on the website so get to it. Fernando's rise to fame as pitching ace of the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1981 is one of the all-time great stories about baseball's important place in the American culture, but memories are quickly fading. It's a great time to reacquaint yourself with it, and it might even help get you in the mood for the new baseball season.
Libya attack begins
Another day, another illegal war. Is somebody keeping track of how many predominately-Muslim countries that is now that the United States has bombed?
It does not matter if the cause is just, or if the United States has the backing of the U.N. Security Council. This is another war being waged without the Constitutional authority of a Congressional declaration of war, more imperialist interference in the civil war of another nation.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mike Mullins, was on "Meet the Press" this morning claiming that the U.S. has the backing of the Arab League in their initiative. According to the head of that group Sunday,
it doesn't. Amr Moussa says the Arab League called for a no-fly zone, not air strikes, that is, "the protection of civilians and not the bombardment of more civilians." When asked about civilian casualties, Mullins also had the audacity to refer repeatedly to dead civilians as "collateral damage," a shocking and unfortunate official utterance in the post-Assange world.
The attacking countries have now made it more difficult for the anti-Gaddafi revolutionaries to achieve the Tunisian or Egyptian-style path to change. They've taken an Arab/nationalist movement, like others in the region boasting a large majority of civilian support, and turned it into another colonial interventionist war. Their action threatens the backing of the Arab League, and the U.S. is already warning of a long, drawn-out conflict, a "stalemate," and outcomes in which Gaddafi is permitted to stay in power.
Here we go again acting out another dramatic script written by a paranoid schizophrenic dictator, another attack from the skies that can be advertised on the ground as the latest Western Crusade. Where's the historical record providing evidence that Western intervention in the Middle East aids the cause of humanitarianism? If Obama, Clinton, and Mullins didn't think that their so-called "limited, very focused" bombing would lead to significant civilian casualties, why did they wait until all of the Western officials and diplomats had been safely flown out of the country? Why are there no efforts to help lead Libyan refugees likewise out of the country? This is another military action fueled by Washington perceptions of the American political climate, and you heard it here first that it's going to be another clusterfuck.
Meanwhile, in Bahrain, the U.S.-backed Sunni monarchy and the Saudis turned their military forces Gaddafi-style against freedom protesters in the predominately-Shiite nation. The kingdom of Bahrain has long been host to the United States' largest Middle-Eastern naval base, and you can place a safe bet that the U.S. will not be intervening with air strikes on behalf of revolutionaries there. In fact, we've been busy
training Saudi air force pilots on our own soil.
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The perjury and obstruction of justice trial of Barry Bonds begins in U.S. District Court tomorrow. Nothing to see here. Move along. Judge Susan Illston, who will oversee the trial, already admonished federal prosecutors in 2009 for even pursuing this disruptive and expensive (multimillion dollar) legal appeal, accusing them of chasing a media circus, and ruling that Fourth Amendment Constitutional rights were "callously disregard(ed)" when the government took Major League Baseball steroid test results and urine samples during a raid in 2004. The 2007 indictment against Bonds has had to be rewritten three times to get to this point in the legal proceedings.
While you're avoiding the story, make special effort to avoid ESPN's coverage. Reporter Mark Fainaru-Wada, formerly of the San Francisco Chronicle, was hired away by the "Worldwide Leader in Sports" after authoring the most-notable book on the BALCO steroid investigation, "Game of Shadows." Fainaru-Wada was the recipient of leaked testimony from the federal grand jury in this case that has been up to its ears in prosecutorial misconduct. Like Jeff Novitzy, the former FDA official who illegally took the private drug test results from the baseball players union, who threatened the wife and mother-in-law of Bonds' former trainer Greg Anderson, and who has been accused by two witnesses in the BALCO case of fabricating their testimonies, Fainaru-Wada's professional reputation is riding in large part on the trial verdict.
Phasing out nuclear energy
Is it surprising to anybody else that, after this past week, there's still political support anywhere for nuclear energy? A potentially long-term nuclear crisis is only beginning in Japan, and not a week after the emergency began, the legislature in Iowa is
preparing to approve a second nuclear plant in the state. (President Obama is
pushing ahead on plans to subsidize new plants at the federal level also.) Great timing.
Iowans are being told by many experts that "it can't happen here," yet why am I lacking confidence? Maybe because the people in Fukushima, Japan were surely told that same thing after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, and after the near-catastrophe and partial core meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979.
The Duane Arnold Energy Center in Palo, Iowa is one of 23 nuclear plants in the world that has the same 1960s-era, General Electric-designed boiling water reactor as the Fukushima reactor. (I grew up on a farm less than 10 miles away from the DAEC.) Of course, Iowa is at great remove from the so-called "Ring of Fire" of shifting tectonic plates in the Pacific Rim, but other natural disasters are capable of greatly impacting Iowa. Ninety percent of the structures in Palo proper suffered flood damage in 2008, and a technician at Duane Arnold told me last weekend that the flood waters that summer rose within 5 feet of flood level for the nuclear plant just outside of town (though he adamantly vouched for the safety of the plant).
And of course, natural disasters are just one of many threats that exist. Let's not dismiss or forget about the ongoing threat of terrorism against our nuclear plants, or the fact that we still haven't solved the dilemma of how to dispose of the continually-produced highly-radioactive waste materials. Nuclear disasters are of a different scale than any other. Earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and tornados can impact areas for generations, but nuclear devastation could stay with us for a million years. Chernobyl will be a dead spot for most living organisms on the planet even after humans have become extinct.
We're finding out now that Japan's nuclear power industry has been riddled with corruption over the years, but the U.S. also has a privatized nuclear industry that combines itself with too little public transparency and with corrupt federal and state energy departments in which industry leaders are often deputized to write the safety and environmental regulations.
In the mid-'80s in California (now we're
in the Ring of Fire), the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant was built less than
a mile from a major fissure in the Earth's crust. The Nuclear Regulation Commission, at the time,
fought against a mandate that the plant's emergency response plan provide for earthquakes. Shockingly, a quarter century later, it's still not required.
Few new plants have been built in the U.S in decades, and there's a reason they haven't. Companies won't invest in nuclear power unless they get waivers on liability, and therefore, plant construction requires tremendous subsidies from taxpayers (like the ones Obama was still preposterously pushing on Wednesday on Capitol Hill). The free market has even spoken then: the proliferation of nuclear energy is not feasible.
According to the Des Moines Register, Iowa currently derives 5% of its total energy from Duane Arnold. Here's my solution: Instead of adding another nuclear plant, how about every Iowan conducting a personal audit to cut back their energy usage by only 5% and we close the plant we've got? The original operating permit (in 1970) for Duane Arnold was for only 40 years, but in December, it was relicensed for another 20 years. We're driving in reverse.
I'm not advocating that all the plants in the U.S. be immediately closed, but shouldn't that be the eventual aim of our national energy policy, rather than increasing the number of plants we have because no politician has the balls to ask his or her constituents for personal sacrifice in their lifestyles? In the 1970s, there was a citizen movement in this country willing to boldly confront the powerful lobbying efforts of the nuclear industry, but like the peace movement and others, the "no-nukes" cause was allowed to be co-opted by the Democratic Party and destroyed. With every passing year between major incidents, the industry lobbyists come charging back. Do engaged citizens really have to be constantly reminded of the threat by new disasters? Let's try to be smarter than we've been.
I am by no means an energy expert or an expert on energy safety, but you also don't have to be a scientist (or even a mathematician) to count the number of nuclear episodes we've had to deal with in less than a century. In addition to Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, there have been at least three notable nuclear submarine events (in the 1960s and '80s), to say nothing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As of 2007, the United States alone has accumulated more than 50,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel, most of which has been transported across the country by railroad and on federal highways-- through your city and mine-- and shoved into a mountain in Nevada because what the fuck else are we going to do with it?
We're forced to think in longer time increments and of greater potential devastation when it comes to nuclear science. What will be left of our planet if we endure a Chernobyl or Fukushima-type contamination event-- somewhere--
every 25 years for the rest of human history? We're engaged in utterly irrational behavior.
What's so funny?
Friday was a peculiar day. I woke to watch the terrible news on television about the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear threat in Japan. It was a terrifying ordeal to fathom on behalf of the people of Japan thousands of miles away. As the day carried itself along, and as I went about my work, I confess that the horrendous circumstances occurring on the other side of the world would slip from my mind. I was having a great day personally. The pace of work was atypically relaxing, even fulfilling. It was a Friday of course, the weather was spring-like in Des Moines for one of the first times this year, and I had plans to drive to Cedar Rapids to see friends that evening and to spend the weekend out of town.
As thoughts of Japan drifted in and out again from my head, I had a difficult time reconciling what I felt was a genuine concern for these other people with my own distracting
positive fortunes, as it were. I wasn't being
directly affected by this tragedy in the slightest, having never really known any Japanese people or persons on the scene there now, and I realized I wasn't absorbing their pain in any way other than in the abstract, like another in the series of tragedies that have hit other locales like Haiti and Chile in recent months. What I was feeling was far from apathy, but on with my life I was going too, disquietingly unperturbed except for my guilt. Most everyone around me was going on with their lives, it seemed, just the same.
What's my point? I'm not sure except that these thoughts ran through my head again when I read yesterday about comedian Gilbert Gottfried. The long-time comic was fired by the Aflac insurance company as the voice of their mascot duck after he tweeted
some jokes about the disaster.
Gottfried has not made his career speaking appropriately. While his voice work might be quite recognizable, his name and face are certainly best known in recent years from his participation in the series of Comedy Central celebrity roasts. These roasts are the very height of inappropriateness and tastelessness. It was Gottfried who quite famously, at one of these roasts, took the proverbial wrapper off the 9/11 tragedy for other comedians to then indulge themselves. In the days following the devastation at the Twin Towers, he joked that he couldn't get a plane into New York City because all of the flights were scheduled to connect at the Empire State Building. If you followed the link above, you probably recognize that the tweets about Japan are in this same vein.
One might actually argue that it's Gottfried's job, as a comic, to
make these jokes. Jokes about anything and everything. As a
company spokesman now, maybe not so much, but then Gottfried's relative value as a comedian-- that is, whether he's funny or not-- isn't defined for me by his corporate affiliations. I suspect they're only the financially lucrative part of his career that allow him to otherwise aim his stand-up act more narrowly. I think he's brilliant, and my attitude on that hasn't changed this week.
Now maybe because I haven't been directly affected by the unfolding tragedy, I'm not the best person to pass judgment, good or bad, on Gottfried's jokes (ones he's apologized for, incidentally), but it would also make me rather a hypocrite if I criticized him, as other relatively-unaffected people have. I also know that I personally prefer a little humor and deflation mixed in with my own tragedies. Perhaps I just have a rather unusually-large respect for the role of the comedian in society. His or her stated goal is to make us laugh. If Gottfried took to Twitter to remind us instead of the Red Cross phone number for donations (as plenty of others are already doing in his absence), that wouldn't be very funny either.
The problem with having a comedic line that's not allowed to be crossed is deciding who gets to decide where the line is. A new Comedy Central roast of Donald Trump is airing tonight, coincidentally, and comic Whitney Cummings
told a reporter on the red carpet that one of her jokes got axed by the network and The Donald before broadcast. The joke, if I may appropriate it from the link, was that Trump wanted to tear down (comedian) Lisa Lampanelli's vagina and build a high-rise, but he didn't want to have to evict a thousand black men.
You might think that this was more sensitively a joke at Lampanelli's expense, but the insult-spewing "Queen of Mean" could probably easily absorb it. According to Cummings, it was Trump who wanted it gone because of an element of truth contained in it. Apparently, the mogul
does have a history of evicting black people from their homes in his quest to trade on and develop real estate. The most cutting comedy is usually the comedy that contains the most truth, and Trump has a business reputation to be upheld that's been branded by television, and he's got a pretend presidential candidacy to promote as well.
Comedy is about risk. Wherever it's being set, Gottfried may have fallen over the line of appropriateness, and his jokes about Japan may have lacked even a terrific truth about the tragedy as well, but his job as a professional comedian-- as an authentic comic's comic, which he is by reputation-- is to
toe that line. If he doesn't sometimes stumble over it, then perhaps he isn't working close enough to it to begin with.
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Firing Gilbert Gottfried was the easy part for Aflac, Inc. They evidently do 75% of their business in Japan, and in canning the comic, their head marketing officer
stated, "there is no time for anything but compassion and concern for these difficult times." That's excellent, and let's see that they stick to that too when it comes time to pay out their claims.
Louis and Buddy
Filmmaker Dan Pritzker, who also happens to be a musician and
one of America's richest men, shot a pair of films simultaneously in 2007 about New Orleans musical legends. One is "Louis," inspired by the life of the immortal trumpeter and America's vital musical figure, Louis Armstrong. Starring Oscar nominee Jackie Earle Haley in a villainous role, "Louis" was produced as a 68-minute,
silent, and mostly black-and-white film.
Last summer, the finished film played in five U.S. cities with Wynton Marsalis adding the musical score, and presenting that score live with a group of 11 other musicians in the five cities. There's no DVD release date yet, but the film can be saved in Netflix queues. Here's the
trailer for this unusual looking film.
The second film,
"Bolden!", is in "post-production," according to the Internet Movie Database, and may be released in theaters by the end of 2011. "Bolden!" expands upon the legend of one of Armstrong's predecessors on the New Orleans jazz scene-- Buddy Bolden, a man who may, in fact, have been the first improvisational jazz musician on the planet, and also therefore, the very progenitor of American popular music. The cornetist "King" Bolden, who will be portrayed by Anthony Mackie ("Half Nelson," "The Hurt Locker"), exists today in history almost entirely through our storytelling tradition. His Crescent City performances predate audio recordings. Folklore has it that a single wax recording of a Bolden ensemble existed and was lost when a storage shed was torn down in New Orleans in the early '60s. Indeed, only one
photograph of the man is known to exist.
Bolden's mind slipped into dementia and schizophrenia at an early age (likely due to alcohol) and he was done playing his horn in 1907 at the age of just 30 (Armstrong was 6 years old in 1907 in the New Orleans neighborhood of honky-tonks and "sporting houses" that Bolden primarily played). Never a man of financial means (a barber in his second career), Bolden spent the last 25 years of his life in the Louisiana state mental hospital, and the location of his burial in 1931 is unknown today. In 2007, Pritzker told the New York Times that Bolden was like "a shaman that turned on the lights."
This was Ken Burns' take on Buddy Bolden in 2001 when he presented his "Jazz" miniseries on PBS.
Exploring the spectrum of human sexual behavior
A professor in human sexuality at Northwestern University in Chicago is
in hot water following an after-school event that featured a naked (non-student) woman demonstrating sexual stimulation via a
"fucksaw." (Note: first-ever CM Blog reference to a "fucksaw." Note #2: "fucksaw" link above has an "add to cart" feature.) In the past, Professor John Michael Bailey's after-class presentations have ranged from featured question-and-answer discussions with homosexuals, swingers, and convicted sex offenders.
Bailey's students were reportedly warned in advance about the nature of the demonstration and urged to skip the event if they thought they would be uncomfortable. The university president, Morton Schapiro, said he was "troubled and disappointed" by the incident when he heard about it after the fact, but Bailey reportedly told his students, "Sticks and stones may break your bones, but watching naked people on stage doing pleasurable things will never hurt you." He issued a statement that read, in part, "I expect many people to disagree with me. Thoughtful discussion of controversial topics is a cornerstone of learning."
Meanwhile, a charming blog called "The Awl" has published
a piece by one of Bailey's former students, Joseph Bernstein, who suggests that the sexuality class was the best one he ever took in school. No shit, you're probably saying to yourself, but his reasoning lends added confidence:
"I was watching an academic defend his field in the context of his life (during a question-and-answer session). There were stakes. It wasn’t life-altering or anything quite so neat as that. But it was an educator taking seriously enough the intentions of his students to expect that they could handle facts that made them uncomfortable. I felt, more than anything, respected."I took a human sexuality course one semester when I was a student at Iowa State. That class, like Bailey's evidently, was quite popular on registration day, and I was often impressed with how casually and undramatically the information was presented by the professor. But then I had come to campus from a very small, Midwestern town and college students didn't have sex in those days.
Fat Tuesday
Happy Mardi Gras Day, y'all.
Lent begins tomorrow, for those inclined, but today, revelers can still endeavor towards activities that will require penance in the morning.
Times-Picayune photographers in New Orleans count
the seven deadly sins.
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Just terrific. New Orleans gets Mardi Gras and Des Moines gets
a church stage heaving with uberdouche gasbags. I plead with the Democratic and Republican National Committees! Strip us of our first-in-the-nation caucuses. Do it this year! Save us! Save Iowa! We're like a glue trap for middle-aged, narcissistic, bloviating assholes in expensive suits.
Movie music
Salon has
a slide show this weekend of the 25 most indelible pieces of film music-- tunes from other sources that have been effectively "claimed" by particular movies. Among them are Vera Lynn's "We'll Meet Again" from "Dr. Strangelove," Stealers Wheel's "Stuck in the Middle With You" from "Reservoir Dogs," and Jackson Browne's "Late for the Sky" from "Taxi Driver." Each of those three choices, in particular, I thought were very good ones.
Here are five more fine suggestions, culled from my list of favorite movies, from my iPod, or from both:
1) "Tiny Dancer," written by Elton John and Bernie Taupin, performed by Elton John.
Property of: Cameron Crowe (
"Almost Famous," 2000)
2) "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding," written by Nick Lowe, performed by
Elvis Costello.
Property of: Sofia Coppola ("Lost In Translation," 2003)
3) "Build Me Up Buttercup," written by Mike d'Abo and Tony Macaulay, performed by the Foundations.
Property of: The Farrelly Brothers (
"There's Something About Mary," 1998)
4) "Sixty Minute Man," written by Billy Ward and Rose Marks, performed by the Dominoes.
Property of: Ron Shelton (
"Bull Durham," 1988)
5) "Twist and Shout," written by Bill Medley and Bert Berns, performed by the Beatles.
Property of: John Hughes (
"Ferris Bueller's Day Off," 1986)
Lovely tributes
On separate websites today, I came upon a pair of eloquent testimonials presented Monday by famous people
about famous people. Together, they articulately inform the human condition and qualify as a legitimate blog entry.
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The first is Arianna Huffington talking about her long-time friend, Bill Maher. While the rest of us were not laughing at James Franco and Anne Hathaway hosting the Oscars Sunday night, Arianna was snickering herself silly watching the telecast at the Sunset Tower Hotel in Los Angeles with Maher seated next to her providing an overlapping commentary.
Her article is largely an advertisement for the Huffington Post's Comedy page, but her feelings for Maher seem entirely genuine:
"Just after I moved to Washington, almost 20 years ago, I made my first appearance on Politically Incorrect. After I got divorced, his was the first show I did -- actually on the day my divorce was final. And I once even let him talk me into getting into bed with Al Franken. In a theater. On national television. During both parties' 1996 conventions. For eight nights in a row! Basically, to move forward after every big event in my life, I have to check in with Bill. Some people have therapy, I have Bill. He's much funnier and there's no co-pay."
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The second carries a warmer vibe still-- Tina Fey honoring her "30 Rock" co-star, Alec Baldwin, at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York. Fey and Baldwin are the lead players in the finest screwball romantic comedy that television (or film) has seen since the debut of "Moonlighting" 26 years ago. The show's approach to comedy and relationships is so fresh I wonder how many viewers never even realize that they're watching the ontogenesis of a Liz Lemon/Jack Donaghy love affair.
New York Magazine saw fit to publish
Fey's entire speech from last night, including this morsel:
"Alec is a writer’s dream in that he speaks quickly and memorizes well, and other stuff I don’t really understand. But I know that over the last five years, our writers have asked Jack Donaghy to do everything from imitate every member of Tracy Jordan’s family, to play his own Mexican doppelgänger, to, you know, act out a heartfelt good-bye scene with a live peacock trying to sodomize a Dick Cheney look-alike. And he has done each of those things with a grace and precision that is prophetic."
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More laughs from the Moeller Post's Comedy page: Jimmy Kimmel, last night, combining
Charlie Sheen audio with Charlie Brown video.
