There's Something Wrong With My Pants

So there's been a lot on my mind recently. First there were GREs and LSATs, then there's still work and life and the living of it. And of course there are the eternal existential ponderings, the endless agonizing and ruminating upon the meaning(s) of the last six words of that last sentence. Wrapped up in the midst of all that monkeystuff, I was out of sorts for a pretty minute here a few weeks ago. Just scatterbrained and spentshot. Allow me to offer two brief short tastes with a common theme:

I'm walking to the T on a Monday afternoon, I've worked doubles all weekend and I'm just turning around back to Cambridge after a long night morning afternoon of studying and listening to whatever my iTunes puts to shuffle. There's a switchbacked trail of Tom Waits and Miles Davis and Townes Van Zandt and The Roots and Morphine and Nina Simone and Belle and Sebastian and U2 and even a gentle dressing of Pearl's Jam glazing my brain, and I'm walking without my legs, just a head bobbing atop feet loosely connected to the rest of my body, the hinges that bend doing most of their work simply not breaking their flex parameters and buckling beneath the flaccid heap of my shuffling frame. I get to Savin Hill and sit down at the end of the platform and pull out Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing, which is totally blowing the leftover fragments of my mind still receptive to creative expression. The train pulls in and I get aboard with my index finger holding my place and I sit down and stuff my backpack between my feet because I know--empty as the car is now--I don't want to be taken away from this book when somebody asks me to move my sack from the seat next-to. So I'm sitting there and reading up close (as such works demand) when I notice my fly is down. Even through the boxer briefs I prefer (the freedom of the former with the slim lines of the latter) I can feel the canned air of the train as it makes its way through the opening in my pants, but at this point I've passed a stop or two and there's nothing to be done without announcing to all, "I AM ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE YOU MEET ON PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION WHO HALF-CHEWS AND SPITS APPLE BITS HALFWAY DOWN THE CAR WHILE RATTLING ON TO NOBODY IN SOME STRANGE PIDGIN, OR WHO FARTS LOUDLY AND REPEATEDLY ON THE PLATFORM WHILE TALKING IRRITATEDLY TO HIS WIFE IN THE FISHING CAP WHILE SHE ROCKS WITH HER SHOPPING BAG AND PRETENDS NOT TO NOTICE, OR WHO WALKS INTO THE CAR PAINTED SILVER FROM NOSE TO CHIN AND OFFERS THE WELL-DRESSED WOMAN ACROSS FROM HIM A FIVE-TIMES-FOLDED DOLLAR FOR LISTENING TO HIS RANT ABOUT HOW EDUCATION IS WHAT WE NEED TO SAVE THE GOVERNMENT FROM THE PEOPLE. OH, AND MY FLY IS UNDONE, WHICH MAY OR MAY NOT BE INTENTIONAL AND MAY OR MAY NOT BE EVIDENCE THAT I, MYSELF, AM UNDONE IN MORE THAN THE USUAL WAY. AND THOSE GLOSSY STAINS ON MY WEEKEND-OLD PANTS ARE EITHER SEMEN OR YOGURT. YOU BE THE JUDGE, SINCE YOU WERE HEADING THAT DIRECTION ANYWAY."

I could just give an Excuse Me Smile while I zip up, just another guy on the train who's gotten there without thinking how or in what state of (un)dress, one more Joe on the way to his Average Eking-Out with Other Shit on his mind. But no, I don't. I put the book in one hand, a three-finger split, and with the other I pull my shirttail a little further down from out my zipped jacket, then the jacket down another inch or so until I'm pretty sure I'm covered between the coverage from above (shirt and jacket) and below (open book on lap). And it's about this time that I realize the adjustments I'm making to assuage the suppositions of my trainmates are exactly the kind of adjustments any of my trainmates would expect from someone with lassi spots on his shins and a shifty look in his eye who wanted to keep his fly open without raising too much untoward attention. At that point I give up entirely and just start reading distractedly while counting the stops to Harvard Square, at which point I walk out of the train with backpack in front while surreptitiously zipping with two fingers holding the pull and a pinky anchoring the bottom of the zipper.

So this entire experience wouldn't have stuck with me, nor would it have merited an in-depth explanation, were it not for my time in the security line at Logan International three days later. It's five in the morning and the woman helming the other queue is barking like a Jamaican fishmonger to everyone in the five or six lines not even under her auspices. "Take off dem shoes, chil', and ya belt, sah, and place dat bag flat on de belt, missus..." ad infinitum. Taken as I am by this woman's incessant incantations, I'm unconscious going through the line. I hear her addressing holiday travelers a full thirty feet away, personally and with an authority that only seems to grow with distance. With little more than a "missus" or a "sah," she manages to get the head she intends to turn, to turn. So I'm watching this display and doing what she asks, so as not to draw her attention away from the other, more interesting complaints and requests and suggestions she has rolling out towards the other sheep in the lines. Shoes in my hands, socks sweeping the floor cleaner than it has been swept by the thousands herded in front of me, yet less clean than it will be after those behind me, I unbuckle my belt because it has been recommended by both five years of post-9/11 air travel and the bewitching voice of the woman orchestrating miles of post-9/11 air travelers everyday. But maybe because it's so early or maybe because I've been on autopilot for such a stupefying period of time--and only half disregarding the two hours of sleep I managed to squeeze from the night before--I don't stop there. Before I catch myself from my reverie and sound a reveille I've got my whole pants situation undone and almost below-mast. Around the time I realize this I'm thinking shitshitshit they're gonna corral me in that purgatory past the screeners and the metal detectors and the woman with the voodoo voice and there won't even be any magazines and they'll hold me and search me and wand me and flag me for the no-fly and I might as well have taken up Islam or that whole Sikh thing in college like everyone else 'cause then I'd be able to righteously and rightfully bitch about unfair treatment and cultural biases and maybe by now I'd at least have hair long enough for a turban or one of those gingham-lookin' hats Arafat used to wear even though I can't grow a full beard and I'd never blow myself up for anything but I'd gladly blow up the spot in a second if only I could rhyme or play the guitar and maybe even then they'd get me at security for the long fingernails I'd grown to play those ol' Spanish tunes I like for the loops 'cause now you can't even carry on a nailfile or a pack of Chewels for the gelly centers, even if they hadn't been discontinued in '91.

Around such time I pull myself out of that deep divot of anxiety and hike up my pants and I suddenly couldn't give two shits if the TSA flunkies or my fellow herdees might have witnessed my absentmindedness 'cause goddammit I'm innocent. Like Adam, so am me--though given another minute or two I'd likely have been just as frisky-ass naked as Original Sin and looking for the nearest hot apple pie. No figgy leaf or nothin', just a pantsed white boy wondering where along that windy road behind he'd left his presence of mind. And his drawers.

"There is no tragedy in the death of an old man..."

"There is no tragedy in the death of an old man. Forgive him his shortcomings, and thank him for all his love and care." --from Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion, 2006

I remember waking up in my frat-house cell in early 1999, turning on the tube and learning of the death of Stanley Kubrick. His final, tarnished Eyes Wide Shut was due for release that summer, a project I had been anticipating throughout the years and years of its gestation. His first film since 1987's Full Metal Jacket, EWS would prove one of his most divisive films, opening amid rumors of extensive recutting by Certified Non-Genius Tom Cruise and a skirmish with the MPAA over an orgy scene that played as something more Disney than debauchery. I got a little choked up that morning upon hearing the news, mostly for all the films that the notorious perfectionist may have had left in his still-vibrant, 70-years-young mind.

So there was a similar choking-up this morning when I read that Robert Altman died yesterday at 81, until I recalled the above line from his latest work. Altman left us with an oeuvre far more extensive than that of Mr. Kubrick, and for that we can be grateful. His work during the 1970's was some of the most exciting filmmaking of that Golden Age, and his most recent entries (with a couple of exceptions) showed that his ear heart touch had not waned in the intervening decades. Altman's deft direction, his uncanny ability to coax from unheralded actors performances worth remembering, his eye for talent and ear for the subtleties of natural dialogue and its overlapping and interweaving, his ability to shift focus not only with his camera but with the microphones as well, have influenced every filmmaker worth his salt who has attempted to catch more than four people in a frame since 1970's M*A*S*H.

Like Kubrick, Altman never failed to make me wonder How'd he do that? His films employed none of the trickery we associate with most cinematic trailblazers, none of the explosions or fast cuts or CGI or other such recent flash-and-bang. What was remarkable about his films is the way that he managed to be the fly-on-the-wall, immortalizing mercurial, minute exchanges between actors within the infinite confines of a working movie set. He was one of the first directors to deploy zooms on his cameras and radio-mic every actor in a scene while still using booms to capture the soundscape of any given filmic landscape. He could do the long take like nobody in the business, and the sound editing on his films was nothing short of perfection. To watch Altman's work is to view the detonation of a tactical nuclear strike, to see the explosions of a moment amid the controlled chaos of everything surrounding the blast. And "controlled chaos" might be the best description of the man's best films. He was a master conductor on a grand stage, an illusionist orchestrating a celluloid medium in a way that always seemed orchestrated, never as haphazard as so many films nowadays, and yet the haphazardness of his famously improvisational sets was what made the orchestrations all the more apparent in the final product. And all the more amazing to witness.

In the days to follow, you will be able to read see hear any number of tributes to Robert Altman. Perhaps the greatest tribute will be evident in the many points on the broad spectrum of talent and age and The Public Eye that the sources of these eulogies will inhabit. Kevin Kline and Lindsay Lohan and Elliott Gould and Neve Campbell and Donald Sutherland and Shelley Duvall and Ryan Phillippe and Meryl Streep and Robin Williams and Liv Tyler and Tom Waits and Julia Roberts and Tim Robbins and Robert Duvall and Julianne Moore and Clive Owen and Jennifer Jason Leigh and Warren Beatty and Julie Christie and Steve Buscemi and Tara Reid and Rene Auberjonois and Lili Taylor and Richard Gere and Kate Hudson and Tim Roth and Helen Hunt and Kenneth Branagh and Farrah Fawcett and Robert Downey, Jr. and countless others will doubtless all have their say as to Altman's legacy. And that's just a small sample of the casts he put together over the years, and only the actors still living to pay tribute. Most will credit him as the greatest director they ever had the privilege of working with, call it an "honor" and cite either a long friendship or a sadly foreshortened collaboration, but one fact remains: Anyone who could find the time, the patience, the wherewithal to put all of those names into the same career had something special that the casual observer might easily overlook. The fact that his casting call has hit its end doesn't leave me with regret the way Kubrick's did, but rather with the knowledge that any tapestry as rich in detail as Robert Altman's filmography will always stand up to multiple viewings.

R.I.P.

Sometimes Titles Don't Quite Cut It.

Okay. So I’ve seen some pretty fucked-up shit in my day. When I was working my first Mardi Gras on Bourbon Street, a guy walked in at like five in the morning with his scalp hanging over his left eye, cranium visible, sat down at the bar with blood streaming down his face and ordered a Hurricane. I called security, gave him some napkins and sent him to the street. Don’t know how that ended up. When I lived on Magazine Street three blocks from the St. Thomas Projects, gunshots were a nightly occurrence until they razed the complex. I always knew the bullets weren’t intended for me. And there was the time in Lexington this May when I was across the street having a drink and talking with a gangsta rapper from Louisville (of all places, and how gangsta I still don’t know), when somebody at the club next door decided to unload a magazine at a truncated high school graduation party. Gangsta L dropped to the bricks and took off his Wayfarers for the first time that night, while I turned around (a little looped for the Hennessey we were drinking), stood up, and wondered what was going on. Great moment for ignorance and Dutch Courage, me walking around the patio for a better look while thirty people shouted at me to get down with them behind the brick walls surrounding the joint’s sidewalk space. Kids ten years younger than me, growing up in my safe whitebread suburbanized hometown and yet knowing people who fire guns in crowded parties were scattering through the streets like so many…um…frightened children running for their lives from bullets that recognized no names. But none of that compares to what just happened outside our house in the DOT.

That’s Dorchester, Massachusetts. East Coast, represent. Or something.

So I’ve just gotten in from a long night of nothing at the Indian restaurant where I work. Mondays are the cruelest month of the week. Strangely enough, however, I found that my place caters the Wu Tang Clan’s shows when they play Boston. Apparently Meth, Ghost, and GZA love the spicy curry. Who knew? So I’m talking Wu shit with the owner’s son, who has been tight with the Clan for a few years now, been backstage while Meth smoked a pound of bomb grass, been close enough to Ghostface Killah to see that he’s bald underneath the shaved head, been driving lead when the Clan’s driver didn’t know how to get from the Needham location to the show that night. I mention all of this simply because the gangsta beginnings of the evening play into the eventualities that dropped mere moments ago.

Walking home from the T, I’m doing something I never do. I’ve been dropping verses with S. all night while we rehashed the career arcs of RZA and the gang and lamented the untimely (and yet completely predictable) demise of ODB, and I’m walking back through the deserted DOT from Savin Hill reciting “Winter Warz” from Ghostface’s first album, the unfadable Ironman, which I know by heart and haven’t truly appreciated in years. So the first verse is mental, all inside the noggin, and then I realize that ain’t nobody up, ain’t nobody out, it’s Monday night and it’s cold and I might as well drop a rhyme or two on the out-loud tip. Pardon the jargon. It’s a mood. Before I know it I’m rapping out loud, complete with the gaps in comprehension that come with the territory inhabited by the Wu and appropriated by pasty white boys walking through Dorchester, and I’m feeling good. When I reach my door I’ve just finished Cappadonna’s final verse and it all seems ordained to be so. Upstairs I go, out of the workies and into the sweats, and not ten minutes pass before I hear the screech of tires and the breaking of glass outside on the street.

Whitby Terrace is a dead-end, and apparently the folks coming up our way from Godknowswhere didn’t know that much. All I know is that the guy in front was driving a grey mid-90’s sedan and pulled into the driveway next door when he saw that the hill stopped past our house. Behind him came an older, blue/black pickup with room in the bed for a full-size pitchfork. How do I know the size of the bed? Because the motherfucker had a pitchfork. And he was using it.

So Pitchfork Johnny is holding his weapon like a bat, hands clasped just above the tines, when I get to the window to see what’s the rumpus. There’s already been a window smashed (don’t know whose), and he’s beating the hood of his own car with the handle while shouting at the woman who is apparently attached to the dude driving the sedan. The dialogue goes something like this:

Pitchfork Johnny: I know you got my FUCKing money. Gimme my FUCKing MONEY!

Woman: You ain’t nothin’ but a bitch, muthafucka, just a muthafuckin’ BITCH! You lucky my man don’t come out and fuckin’ KILL yo’ DUMB ASS!

PJ: Oh, so the CRACK’s working, huh? You fuckin’ CRACK whore you nothin’ but a CRACK whore with a fuckin’ CRACK WHORE FUCKin’ husband you fuck—

W: Fuck YOU!

Dude In The Sedan: Yeah, FUCK you you punk-ass—

PJ: You’ll be lucky to get out alive you FUCKin’ BITCH. Just SHUT YOUR FUCKIN’ MOUTH or I’ll fuckin’ put this shit right through your fuckin’ EYE!

So at this point the tines are pointed at Dude In The Sedan, whose relationship to Woman and PJ is unclear. Seems like PJ might have picked up Woman at a bar, gotten her high, and wanted to fuck. Then Dude In The Sedan comes in, claims Woman, rolls out. Evidently things did not end amicably at their Place Of Worship, as Whitby Terrace became a vehicular Ground Zero for the further goings-on.

Did I mention that the first motherfucker had a pitchfork? Yeah.

So PJ is chasing Dude around his car--wait…I’m getting ahead of myself. So there’s shoving going on between PJ and Woman, she’s getting right up in his face with full fist-pumping fury, he’s shoving her out of his face and keeping her at arm’s-length with the handle-end of the pitchfork. Some more skirmishing breaks out, and Dude gets out of his sedan and tries to break things up. No dice. PJ chases him back into his ride with the tines pointed at him. Dude rolls in the passenger side, slams the door, slides over to the driver’s seat, starts the car and PJ moves around the sedan methodically, stops in front to put the tines (on the third pass, the first two skittering off the glass like water from the proverbial duck’s back) through the windshield. PJ hops over to the driver’s side-—

--and at this point I’ve already dialed 911 on my cell, which patches through to the Staties. They connect me to Boston Metro PD, who ask me twice to confirm that I’m talking about a dude with a pitchfork and not just a knife. I confirm twice that I’m talking about a fucking pitchfork. I’m on tape somewhere, and I’d really love to hear it again sometime. But anyway—-

--and smashes out the window swinging the tine-end of the pitchfork like Big Papi. Dude rolls out the passenger side from whence he came. All the while there is shouting and screaming and people using words like Fuck Bitch Crack and Cunt. Oh, and Whore. Not sure how they all strung together, as I was on the line trying to describe the situation to the proper, incredulous authorities. Can’t blame ‘em, really. The authorities, that is. So…

At this point PJ is chasing both Dude and Woman around both vehicles, his pitchfork held in front of him with the totally-business-end pointing forward, and there ensues a game of Round Robin. They loop a figure-eight or two around both vehicles before PJ decides he’s had enough and stops, slamming the tines down on his own truck to emphasize his own consternation. And yes, I’m dressing up his mood in highfalutin’ terminology. Muthafucka was pissed. AND he was carrying a fucking pitchfork. Did I mention that? Yeah.

So at some point between me hanging up with 911 and the minute-or-so that the whole chasing-around-the-cars-shit happened, I’m realizing something that really sets me off. While I’m not consciously thinking of the fucked-up shit that I’ve seen, I’ve got some kind of moral compass twirling about inside me that winds up pointing towards revulsion. I realize that I can read horrible shit (B.E. Ellis’ American Psycho) and watch dramatized horror (Eli Roth’s Hostel and the like) and be subjected on a daily basis to the fucked-up goings-on in Iraq (3000 American boys dead and Saddam gets a death sentence, but from Gee-Dubs that’s like a Tic-Tac) and generally assume myself to have a pretty high tolerance for the bad shit that the world throws one’s way. But there was a moment there, as I was watching the happenings from the safety of my third-floor window, when I thought I was going to see at least one person impaled by a fucking pitchfork. Maybe two people. And I was shaken, stirred, moved. There was a moment of stark mental daylight at one in the morning when I saw that this was something I did not want to see. It’s strange how human nature operates, how--no matter what you've seen or how jaded you feel walking through the sevenday--your subconscious can clock in and reiterate that none of the monkeyshit floating before your eyes is monkeyshit to which you need to bear witness. I knew that I didn't want to see some sad motherfucker die on a pitchfork. At least not tonight, and certainly not before I had a beer to quell the nausea that would most certainly ensue. Honestly, that feeling was refreshing. Even if it has since deprived me of much-needed sleep.

To cut the long version somewhat shorter, the two parties involved (Dude and Woman, and Pitchfork Johnny) eventually peeled out down the street when they heard sirens roaring their/our way. By the time the cops arrived and 911 called back to have me walk downstairs and explain my seemingly absurd emergency call, the kids in question were probably no longer in the same ZIP. The cops seemed kind of miffed, too, like they missed something they could tell everybody at work and trade off of for like weeks. When I was walking back up Whitby and the cops were backing down the street, three people gave me shouts from open windows in the 35-degree cold to see what happened, who was it, what was being done. Nobody recognized the Dude or the Woman or Pitchfork Johnny. The guy two doors down on the third floor put it well: “They ain’t even from the block. I said to ‘em, ‘Not ‘round here you don’t. Not ‘round here.’”

ADDENDUM: It bears mentioning here, as I draw to a close and am still wired and probably won’t sleep much or well but might still try, that all the parties involved in the fracas this early morning were white and pasty as my Scots-Irish ass. It might be easy to assume differently, depending upon what you know of the DOT and what you assume from any of the reconstructed dialogue above. Don’t. Assume, that is.

Whose Country?

So I've been experiencing recently a long period of severe writer's block. Severe enough to merit electroshock, I was beginning to think. There have been false starts and aborted attempts at making a point and far too many hours spent actually working. You know, for, like, remuneration. In between shifts there was that bit on cats that I never could make work, and another about the trend towards documentary-style television sitcoms that just seemed too late-in-the-game to merit serious discussion, and yet another comparing the POW situation in Renoir's Grand Illusion and our current mess in Iraq. Who knows? Maybe these projects will one day come to fruition. Maybe they won't. Maybe they'll grab my fragmentary interest just long enough at some future time that I'll embark upon some misguided, unsolicited monologue in some crowded barroom somewhere and bore the pants off of every pretty lady in earshot.* Time will tell.

At the moment, however, there's a minor cultural curiosity that has gotten my britches in a serious twist for the past two months. It has aroused my ire, my spite, my loathing of everything easy and calculated and pandering and unoriginal and borderline-plagiarized. But first a quick setup:

This new paying gig I've got has me behind yet another bar on Saturdays and Sundays during our beautiful New England autumn, which means that I manage to catch roughly twenty minutes of every collected hour of American football being played across these United States. Sure, we don't have the satellite packages and multiple screens like we did on Bourbon Street, nor are there rampaging, elderly Aggies kissing after every A&M touchdown and drinking White Cadillacs. That's milk and scotch for the uninitiated, just in case elderly Texans embraced in full wrinkly smooch wasn't enough to put you off your feed on a Halloween afternoon. Anyway.

So seeing all this football means that I've also been exposed to the onslaught of corporate sponsorship associated with sporting events of all kinds. Mostly it's beer ads that deal primarily with the long and storied affiliation of drinking and football,** ads that are normally inoffensive enough when you realize that most every American beer commercial anymore portrays beer-swilling, football-watching males in exactly the "guy's guy" light that most of them fantasize about, no matter how ignorant or counterintuitive that light may seem to the rest of the world and women.

The beer ads don't bug me. Some of them are damn funny. Maybe I'm one of those guys.

What does manage to rankle me into fits of ire that I can no longer contain without venting, however, are the non-stop spots (sometimes six or eight per hour of game-time) of those damnably ubiquitous Chevy ads wanting to sell me big, gas-guzzling trucks, all set to the splendiferous strains of John Cougar Fucking Mellencamp's new hit*** "This Is Our Country."

Were this song merely the soundtrack for an American company wishing to sell me an American automobile, I could dig. At the very least, I could ignore. But that, folks, just ain't the case. Chevy has a number of ads set to this jangly pseudo-rock, the most disturbing of which features footage of a flooded New Orleans and the Pillars of Light at Ground Zero in NYC and WPA photographs of the Great Depression in a montage with sandstone arches over the canyons of Arizona/Utah and other such iconic images of What America Means To People Who Should Buy The New 2007 Silverado.**** I get it, alright? We are a nation that can trip and fall and meet with outsized opposition and rebuild itself. Kudos to us. The Spirit of Renewal is not something I question. What I will question is the wisdom of equating a gas-guzzler and images of Modern Americana at a time when we have American children dying overseas for a FUBAR Oil War that has us accelerating the tapping of reserves in pristine wildernesses like Alaska's North Slope (ANWR) to attempt to stave off the flow of blood and oil to and from the Middle East. Sadly, that's a more accurate picture of America right now.

But that's only sorta here or there. What I cannot, by any stretch of my imagination, get behind is the wholesale plagiarism of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" by a Hoosier hack like Mr. Mellencamp, who completely misses the point while appropriating yards of lyric from that poet of the Dust Bowl. A quick sample of JCFM's new ditty:

The Dream is still alive
Someday it will come true
And this country it belongs
To folks like me and you
So let the voice of Freedom
Sing out through this land:
"This is our country."

From the East Coast
To the West Coast
Down the Dixie Highway
Back home
This is our country.

Now take that bit and place it in context: a car company selling a huge truck to people who may or may not need a huge truck, in a country that places some momentary value on having a huge truck so as to better ramble through the nameless-and-named territories of a country built for just such a huge truck, propping JCFM's lyrics up against images (when not of destruction) of the kind of country through which such a huge truck might conceivably ramble and gambol. Might the next verse sound something like this?:

As I went walking
That ribbon of highway
I saw above me
That endless skyway
I saw below me
That golden valley
This land was made for you and me.

When the sun come shining
And I was strolling
In the wheat fields waving
And the dust clouds rolling
A voice come a-chanting
As the fog was a-lifting:
"This land was made for you and me."

This land is your land
This land is my land
From California
To the New York Island
From redwood forests
To the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.

Yeah, but that would be Woody's work. And that's where the visual of Chevy's ad breaks with the lyric of JCFM's version of events and strays hamfistedly into Woody's original. JCFM doesn't quite get the open-road vibe that Guthrie understands, mostly because JCFM's never been there. Not in his songs, at least, and certainly not in the last twenty-odd years. This is a man who doesn't even have about him the prescience of your Lee Greenwoods or your Toby Keiths (the latter of whom, BTW, is "Built Ford Tough"), a man who waits five years into a shite global situation to offer his "Real American" take on the drama unfolding. And let's not forget that the "our country" of which he speaks, the red states to which he panders, are the same God-fearing Americans willing to ignore homosexuals in their bid for equal rights under law, willing to kick out every immigrant making up a workforce that currently puts almost every pound of fresh American produce in their horns-of-plenty. What we're left with is a sad, dwarflike, pompadoured opportunist jumping on a rickety jingoist bandwagon as it passes him somewhere on Sunset between Hollywood and Horseshit.

So corporate synergy makes a certain kind of sense, and timing is everything when you're a has-been rocker whose best days are behind you even as your newest album is about to drop, but I could go the rest of my best days without hearing another strained strain of JCFM's forced bid at red-state appeal and still consider myself an American, albeit of a different sort. The sort who wants to catch Game Two without calculated, corporate-sponsored flag-waving intruding before the first pitch, the sort who wants his football uninterrupted when he has better things to think about than what keeps an aging "musician" in the limelight when "Pink Houses" (yeah, but ain't that America?) slides ever backwards in the rearview.

Happy Halloween, America. There's nothing scarier than the monkeyshit we don't call out and fight against. Get out and vote next Tuesday, and don't set your personal soundtracks to anything involving John Cougar Mellencamp. I leave you with this precious snippet, from his latest's first verse:

Well I can stand beside
Ideas I think are right
And I can stand beside
The idea to stand and fight.

Here's to better ideas, in or out of context. In the meantime, stand and fight such egregious pop trash. Peace.


*: Incidentally, "boring" is not the best means of getting the pants off of every pretty lady in earshot. Like, y'know, just FYI.
**: Less acceptable (though just as appropriate) tie-ins, mostly for their illegality: Michael Irvin as corporate spokesman for the Medellin Cartel ("I'd like to snort the world of Coke..."); Leon Lett proselytizing on behalf of marijuana use and its memory-defeating properties, allowing the user to get nabbed twice for inter-state trafficking within a four-month period. And that's just ex-Cowboys, folks. No mention here of Mark Gastineau (for domestic violence) and Ray Lewis (for totally not stabbing some guy) and Lyle Alzado (for blaming steroids to cover up the whole dying-of-AIDS thing) and Brian Bosworth (for making horrifically shitty action flicks while rocking that notched-upper-sideburns-and-pink-mullet look).
***: Yeah, it's a "hit" before it even comes out as part of some schlocky new album, strictly for its inescapability. By that notion of "hit," Stalin's Purges were a big "hit" in Russia, genocide has been a recurring "hit" in Europe and Africa and Southeast Asia and the American Era of Expansion, and Microsoft Windows is a huge "hit" regardless of how many times it crashes your whole shit. Here's to "hits."
****: I will not post any links to these TV spots, as they are so readily available to anyone watching television for the next three months. If you feel the need to seek them out online because you watch neither television nor American football and you're single and female and scorchingly attractive, feel free to drop me an email and we'll discuss. You'll find a link in the column to the right. Include photos.

Crikey.

By now everyone on the planet, Down Under and Up Here, has heard of the untimely passing of "The Crocodile Hunter." Barbed through the heart by a stingray in shallow waters off the coast of his island-continent, Steve Irwin went out doing what he loved: bringing Australia's native fauna into the world's living rooms. He has been publicly mourned by his Prime Minister, by the devoted fans who've set up a floral shrine outside his Australia Zoo, by Russell Crowe, and by millions of people the world over who grew to love his quirky, controversial, frontier approach to wildlife conservation. His death came as both a shock and an inevitability, for this was a man who thought nothing of sidling up to 16-foot saltwater crocs, of handling taipans mambas vipers cobras, of diving with every predator of the deep.

The saying goes that we make our own fun, and everything else is entertainment. Steve Irwin made his own fun, crafted a life around bringing that fun to every couchbound entertainment-seeker who caught his show. You could see the gleam in his eyes when he had some monster in a close-up's foreground, the twinkle of a kid bringing home a frog in his lunchbox. "Isn't she a beaut?!" he would whisper with that ripe-for-caricature Aussie awe. "She's gorgeous!" For many, Irwin's exploits were legendary in the pop-culture sense of the term, marveled over for an hour or so and forgotten as soon as the channel flipped. There might be a lingering awareness of the fact that he had his smiling mug in the mouth of a huge reptile, or had grabbed a venomous snake by the tail, but the specifics could tend to fade with each successive televisual moment. Entertainment is, after all, entertainment. It is evanescent and mercurial by nature, lasting only as long as the pixels flicker before the eye.

For the rest of us, Irwin was--and remains--a hero by every definition. He did what we could only hope to do, given the opportunity and the balls-out willingness to stare Death in the face and say, "Not just now, thanks. You'll have your chance soon enough, but not just now."

"Daring" is a word too often used in this entertainment-driven world, a term applied most frequently to trivial pursuits of the mind, of creativity and essential passivity. That last Michael Winterbottom flick was daring, say, or the most recent frame hung on the walls at MOMA. Steve Irwin was Daring. His life required capitalization and, if available, block letters and boldface. And yet he also managed to come across as the most down-to-earth, self-effacing daredevil. He was wired differently than most of us, and it showed.

There's another cliché out there, that you should dress for the job you want, not the job you have. My fondest memory of Steve Irwin, the one I would cite to anyone who mentions his name, is of watching him snorkeling with sea snakes and diving to follow them--clad not in wetsuit trunks Speedo, but in his trademark khaki shorts and shirt. Underwater. Steve Irwin dressed for the job he had, and he did it well. If the clothes make the man, The Crocodile Hunter was more of a man than most of us can ever hope to be--and without ever sacrificing that childlike twinkle. The world is better for his having been here.

Crocs rule. R.I.P.

"everyday"

My good friend J. sent me the above link late last night, and it's easily the coolest thing I've seen all week. Noah Kalina has taken a candid self-portrait every day for six-and-a-half years (and counting), stitching them all together over some really ominous piano. It's a fascinating glimpse into a person's life. We are privy to his changing hairstyles, living arrangements, random friends/acquaintances in the background, clothes worn and discarded that magically move from desk to floor to back-of-chair, etc. The expressionless camera-presence is the only relative constant.

There's something about the immediacy of Kalina's face in these frames, the contextualization of a life-in-progress that goes on in the periphery around the static, almost serene center. It grabbed me in an unexpected way--much as van Gogh's Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear [below right] draws me in, or Schiele's Self-Portrait with Black Vase [below left], or any of Rembrandt's self-portraits with their luminous-yet-still-murky backgrounds. Each of these works makes me stare into the eyes at the same time I'm looking at what else is in the frame, curious to discover how the mind behind a famous face describes itself by what it makes available in the mise-en-scene.

But Kalina's photography here is more raw, less contrived than a painted self-portrait, where the artist must consider each individual brushstroke. To add another layer of reference to this deconstruction, the animation of his snapshots strikes me as almost pointillist. Like Seurat or Lichtenstein, the overall effect when one stands back from the framed work (or, here, the 6 minutes or so of animation) is something greater than the sum of its individual dots. The viewer is left to infer any stories implied by the changing periphery, and the questions that arise etch the piece with all the contours and textures of a 3-dimensional, 360-degree, "real" life: "Why the beaded necklace near the middle of the piece? Who gave it to him? Why did it suddenly disappear?" "Etc., etc., etc..."

everyday is also a declaration of the power of editing and scoring to alter the meaning of any individual frame in a film. As we have seen recently with the burgeoning craft of "alternative trailers," the image on celluloid is only part of the picture. [My favorite example, taken from one of my favorite films, follows at the end of this post. -N.] By changing the music or the surrounding visual elements of a filmic image, one can effectively re-invent any work in the medium. The Russian film pioneer Lev Kuleshov first described this phenomenon, what would later be called "The Kuleshov Effect." He showed static film of a man's impassive face, then a bowl of soup, then the man's face again, then a coffin, then the man's face, and on and on. Between juxtapositions he would ask his audiences to describe what the man might be feeling. The reaction was overwhelmingly uniform across several versions of the experiment: after the shot of the soup went back to the face, the man was happy because he could eat; after the coffin, the man was sad because someone he knew had died. Keep in mind that the shot of the man's face was the same, changeless and betraying no emotion. What the audience registered was the power of montage, of a filmed moment's context within an edited work rather than as a moment in and of itself. Kalina's blank stare asks his viewers to work the same sort of deduction based on the changing information along the edges of the frame, but at a pace much faster than Kuleshov ever considered.

There's another element at work here that subverts the essential voyeuristic nature of film even as it exploits it. Sure, we have this peek into another's life, and he can't see us watching--but he is staring directly into our eyes from the middle of the frame. It's rare in narrative film to have a character looking directly into the camera (Jonathan Demme uses the technique most unsettlingly in The Silence of the Lambs). It happens more often in documentary film, but for a person to offer, without stutter, "Welcome into my world, my life, my home" from the simultaneous remove and immediacy of a piece like everyday is startling, to say the very least.

Film history lectures aside, a brief admission: it's early yet this rainy Boston Sunday, I've only now hooked up my morning coffee, and everyday was the first thing I saw upon waking after a night of fitful, talkative sleep. I had a definite moment of existential crisis while viewing the piece, wondering where the last six-and-a-half years of my own life have gone while I watched those of another passing before my eyes. I have no doubt that my morning would have been considerably less thoughtful had Kalina scored his epic transformations with, say, The Black Eyed Peas. "Let's Get Retarded" would impart upon the viewer a completely different impression of his work and life than does the current piano score by Carly Comando. Were there also more glaring changes in angle and framing, I probably wouldn't have taken time out of a grey day to write this entry. Behold the power of film, right?

As it stands, this is the kind of project I would advise my kids to undertake as soon as they can wield a camera. It's the perfect complement to a written or video diary (or blog, for that matter), but without all the pressure that a daily catalogue of one's feelings tends to exert over time. A literal fraction of a second each day, and there exists in the digital ether a record of your life in stop-motion. Amazing. Wish I had thought of it years ago. Might start tomorrow. Cheers in the meantime to Mr. Kalina for having the bravery (nay, balls?) to show us the blink-and-you-miss-it passage of time as one man experiences it, at just under 24 frames-per-second.

Things I'm Not Going To Write About

[zzzz. zzzzyzzzzx. zzzSNAP. What the... Poopytrip! What month is it? September!? Okay... wellywell... Time for a bit of the ol' pipecleaner on the brainside. Don't we all need that from time to time? Like when it's been six weeks of monkeyshit in between you and your last blog post? I owe apologies to everyone who has logged on and been forced to witness the Basketcase-esque abomination that is two Wayanses latched together in a frontal-papoose-style arrangement. Scusilo. Je m'excuse. Et cetera. Ad infinitum.... So here's what I've been working on that will never get a full-length, exhaustive (read: boring) examination in these pages. Consider these open letters as being written to whomever* might be the intended recipient. Peace.]

Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones and NASCAR: There was an ad that hyped the TNT (read: AOL-Time/Warner) airings of NASCAR races, which are in the first place incomprehensible; in the second, inexcusable. I write this, mind you, as a man who spent his formative years in the American South. So take it how you will: am I merely offering apologia for My Redneck Past, or am I genuinely perturbed by Our Red States' Obsession With Men Turning Left? Take the latter. Anyway, the Stones are singing about a woman who's "Driving Too Fast" in this tune, and I can't help thinking it sounds like exactly what I'd expect from a group so...so...septuagenarian? It's a 6-minute track if you steal it, and it's only worth half that. The opening chorus goes something like: "I love you baby I love you too much. / I love you baby that I can't stop the fuss." The "fuss?" Is this some Britslang I ain't party to quite yet, or is it just lazy writing?

MJ: "Hey, Keith, what rhymes with "Much?"

KR: "Er...zzz...wha--Poopytrip! 'Fuss!'"

This is a band that rocked for a few good years (until around 1981ish) on riffs and beats lifted from The Great American Bluesmen. Now they're relegated to the rubbishbin of pop-redneck, corporate-salaried, AOL-Time/Warnerish hackery, re-examining a theme I thought Prince had killed with "Little Red Corvette."

P: "Baby, you much too fast [You got to slow dow-own!]."

Sure she drives too fast, Mick. You're old and crotchety and every old, crotchety man claims that everyone else--hot women included--drives too fast. Show the kind of restraint that Jimi and Bob and Kurt and Janis and Stevie and Hank and Woody and Buddy and Axl did and roll out with some dignity, okay?

Axl?: I'll believe he's still breathing when I hear Chinese Democracy.

Keith Richards and the 1967 Rolling Stones Death Pool: How. I mean. Really. Is it just your cholesterol's low, or what? Were it not for the smoking cigarette dangling from your lips at the Super Bowl, I would have assumed animatronics and Disney-style floofaroo. Kudos if you're not already animatronic. If you're already all gears and pulleys, then you aren't even reading this. With that in mind...

Animatronic Rolling Stones: It's really the only stop after Johnny Depp claims your swagger as his own in a movie based on a theme-park ride. Like Gibson did with his whole Man-On-The-Cross shit.

Mel Gibson? An Anti-Semite? Nah...: Really the ugliest story, but also the most predictable. Here's a guy whose father put out white-power, pro-Nazi newsletters as part of a radical-Catholic movement in Australia while Mel was off growing the Ubermullet that would eventually gain him Lethal Weapons 1 through IV. So when William Wallace switches from beer to SS-and-Sevens, all manner of donkeypiss spews forth. It's wildly ironic that the man who made the most wildly anti-Semitic movie of all time (The Passion of The Christ), when pissed, flails on and on about every Hebrew who's not already his Lord and Saviour. Pick a Jew and stick with it, Mel. Please. I liked The Man Without A Face, really. Cross my heart. No, not that cross, Mel. Just climb down and we'll talk.

Crosses: Better than crescents or Mogen Davids? Who decides? (5 USD on the latter...takers?).

War In The Middle East: Seriously, Lebanon. What? Rocks only beat scissors, and the paper comes from Washington. Be happy with the land you have and just be done with the rest. Thanks.

Nukes In The Middle East: Oh. What? I thought that was just North Korea and Libya and Iran and India and Pakistan and aren't all of these people just pissed off at each other? At US?!?! Okay. Lebanon, listen up: Sorry about that whole last shit. We're cool as long as we're cool, y'know? Just don't do anything I wouldn't, and leave a full tank when you drop off the keys. Rightyroo, rocknroll. Speaking of...

Plane Crashes and Emmys: Congrats, Monk. Congrats, Mister Carell. Congrats, Jon Stewart. O'Brien? Nice show. Don't hold you accountable in any way for anything that happened during that telecast. Your timing's never been flawless (but neither was Johnny's), but this time the flaws found a momentary audience. Fear not: Like the Emmys, the controversy and the crash will fade into distant memory soon enough...

Oliver Stone and World Trade Center: ...until Ollie comes out WAAAAY after the starting bell, murmurs a barely audible "Poopytrip!" and sets to work assassinating your character in 2011. On peyote and Cuban hookers.

Peyote and Cuban Hookers: Um... Yeah, how much por la noche? And how much if you don't melt into David Crosby?

Robert DeNiro: Really, Bob. Dead to me. Don't even bother calling this time.

John Mark Karr: "She loves me, she loves me not. She loves me, she loves me not. I was there in the room, I wasn't even in the state. I just wanted a hug from police officers, or the FBI." Can't skinny and goofy-looking qualify as a capital offense? Please? Just once?

The Chicken I Raped With A Beer Can Last Night: Sorry. I can only imagine how that hurt. If it helps matters any: you were delicious and you were dead. And I promise I'll work that entire carcass into a bitchin' leftover-chix soup. I try to roll like a Plains Indian (feathers, not dots) with that good shit, y'know, use every part of the proverbial buffalo. Even though you can't hunt them anymore, except by private arrangement. Buffalo, that is. Black gold, West-Texas plea. Yeah, um...

Buffalo: Sorry. I meant "bison," and never meant to understate your car-knocking-over ability. Kudos to great SUV-relocation potential, and long may you prosper.

My Pillow: A great place to spend the night. Cheers and

[zzzz...zzzzyzzzzx...zzzSNAP!]

*: Oh, or is it "whoever?" Did you really scroll all the way down here after the asterisk? There are greater problems on the horizon, mi amigo, than my grasp of interstitial M's. Focus.

Bugger Off, Little Man, And May Pestilence Follow Thee All Of Thy Days

[So it's been a few weeks now since I went completely culture-snob, but it's time I got the following off my chest:]

As a society, as a people, as a country at war with those who would seek to destroy our way of life, we have been fighting on the wrong front(s). Iraq and Afghanistan and (soon-ish enough) Iran are one thing, but Little Man is another. In fact, it would be a fair assessment to state that the new Wayans film represents many of the reasons crazy people want to fly planes into our skyscrapers. I don't think I'm engaged in hyperbole here. Really. Let me explain...

A few months back, I wrote about the furor surrounding the first trailer for United 93. This was a moment in American film that polarized our moviegoing public like nothing that had come before. Sure, there have been many and various shocks to the system over the last hundred-odd years of American film. Many of us know all the landmark moments by heart, but when was the last time you were in a theater to witness people screaming, crying, and/or walking out based on a trailer? It's fair to say that Paul Greengrass' film was a major turning point in the way America deals with the defining moment of this young century, and not only because it was the first film (almost five years on) to show us what it meant to have been on one of 9/11's doomed planes. U93 was gripping and terrifying and challenging and confusing and everything that one could hope to experience in a major motion picture. I use the term "experience" here with the full weight of its definition, which is to say that anyone who walked into the theater faced the unique and horrible prospect of willingly reliving in vivid detail the events of that thunderbolt morning. If filmic entertainments are meant to be candysnacks for our idle brains, U93 was a Twinkie with broken glass in the creamy center. But I digress.

United 93 screened in most houses across the country sans trailers, out of respect to the film's gravity and the memories of those lost on 9/11. One of the consequences, however, of trying to sell such a weighty film, is that its trailer must run alongside those hawking more trivial entertainments. And thus the towering scale of my anger: before sitting through a mediocre crime flick, I saw the trailer for U93 followed by one for Little Man.

That just ain't right, and I believe I owe a brief aside to establish context:

My first job was in a movie theater, and I worked my way up from the popcorn hustle to projection. It was a great gig upstairs in the booth, mostly for the fact that nobody ever personally gave the projectionist a hassle. If a flick was flickering out-of-frame, we found out and corrected the problem. Ditto any sound troubles, any houselight problems, et cetera. But the head projectionist, he who worked Thursday nights and reeled together the Friday platters from the shipping cans, was in charge of assembling the trailers that would screen before any given film in the multiplex. The guidelines were and are relatively lax and commonsense: don't put a trailer for Pulp Fiction on The Lion King, don't put rom-com trailers before a horror flick--basically, just don't confuse the demographic coming to see Film/Genre A with trailers for Films/Genres B,C,D, and so forth.

So how does one build awareness for a Genuine Moment In Film History like U93 without necessarily pairing its trailer with some less-worthy material? It's a challenge, to say the very least. I can almost understand the clusterfuck of confusion that led to U93 being followed by Little Man. Almost. But you can always put U93 last-in-line, and make sure that trailers and features bear some of U93's weight. Somebody upstairs (in the booth, not the heavens) must have been asleep at the wheel to let a spot for Little Man follow the most contentious trailer in recent memory. My surprise at the misstep might have led to my writing off what many other filmgoers deemed a totally decent effort (Lucky Number Slevin), as the bad taste in my mouth lasted well past that film's closing credits. Little Man has since haunted my awareness in a way that few such lamentable attempts at filmmaking have ever bothered me before.

Hence this preamble to the following diatribe:

Little Man is the latest effort in CGI minstrelsy from the Wayans brothers, who apparently are burdened by nothing resembling guilt, shame, or any emotion that might weigh on a human conscience. Their most recent effort was White Chicks, which may have set the lowest possible bar for suspension of disbelief in contemporary film. In that movie Shawn and Marlon (Wayanses, both) were somehow placed undercover (or was it witness protection?) as--you guessed it--white chicks, in the least convincing latex makeup jobs ever witnessed on celluloid.

But oh! how the people laughed at the silly black men in whiteface singing along to really-white emopop! And oh how funny it was to see the big black man fall for the black-man-in-anglobitch-drag-biting-toenails-at-the-dinner-table! What times those were, y'know, in like 2004, before the Civil War and Reconstruction and MLK, Jr. and everything that should have made such hideous displays cause for riots in the fucking streets!

So now we have Little Man, in which Marlon W. plays the world's smallest cat-burglar, forced to hide a diamond the size of his head in the handbag of an upper-middle-class black woman. She's got a clueless husband (Shawn W.) who encourages her to accept the "baby" placed on their doorstep by Marlon's accomplice, the ever-more-disappointing Tracy Morgan. The "baby," of course, is Marlon-the-cat-burglar with a shave and a bonnet and a rattle. Apparently the short bus stopped at Shawn's house before Tracy came by with his bundle of joy, because the lucky young couple have no idea that the "baby" is actually a "grown" man, a midget diamond thief who only wants to get back his "booty."

(Please ignore my cheap and loaded fingerquotes.)

So we're supposed to accept that all the many HILARIOUS! situations that ensue tip neither Shawn nor Wifey to the fact that "baby" is "Marlon-the-thief." Okay. Alright. So even when "baby" is shaving with an electric at the bathroom mirror, smoking a stogie (that never stinks up the rest of the house?), offering his googly-eyed milking-face to the nearest set of tits (cue Benny Hill boob-music), and otherwise convincingly playing an infant WITH TATTOOS!!!, we're to assume that the audience are the only ones privileged with glimpses behind the curtain of the great and powerful Oz, as it were?

Does this kind of reprehensible trash annoy anyone else, or am I the only person this film has managed to piss off without so much as a viewing? Can't we all just get on the bandwagon and declare the damned thing a heresy without ever seeing it?

I have, and I don't feel the least bit guilty about condemning this prisoner without a trial. No, because I saw the trailer. Right after United 93. Those two minutes hurt me in my most private, most American parts. And I wish this film the fate of a criminal, a terrorist, a foreigner locked away without warrant at Gitmo. If only...

Okay, I'm angry. Perhaps irrationally so, but I'm still angry. After all, I'm more than willing to believe that men in capes can fly and dodge bullets and otherwise kick ass, but the idea of Wayanses mugging as midget diamond thieves upsets me in ways I'm not sure I can fully describe. I know it's a trivial pursuit, bashing Little Man, and I should be above raising any debate involving what is most likely a ludicrous steaming turd of a movie. Its quality (or lack thereof) should speak for itself, and there is no reason to expect Little Man will be remembered. Only the most important (or popular) films of any given year survive the passage of time, and I have no doubt that this blip on the monkeyshit radar will go down in history by not going down in history in the first place. When the next thing after DVD comes out, you won't be able to find Little Man in the new format at your local rental house. Mere words are meaningless when one attempts to convey the insignificance, in the grand scheme of things, of a film such as this.

And still it manages to raise my hackles. When this execrable piece of filmmaking makes it to a video shelf, it might sit alongside such underrated classics as Little Big Man and Little Man Tate. Ouch. Ugh. You have no idea how much it infuriates me to even grace this film with a post. Can you imagine what it feels like to know that anyone Googling showtimes for LM might wind up with my words bounding forth from the search engine? But I must. (Write about it, that is.) These thoughts have haunted me long enough. Little Man's very existence represents everything I hate about Hollywood and the machines that create our entertainments, and it's no laughing matter. I am writing this as a public service for anyone who might actually want to see the flick, for anyone who might be in a custodial arrangement with a child who thinks midget thieves posing as babies are funny. I hope the message hits whatever passes for home.

The trailer should be everything most reasonable individuals require to know that they should never see this film. Any introduction that warns "From The Creators Of White Chicks" should be more than enough forewarning for the conscious amongst us. But I will still wager an eyetooth (which ones are those?) and my weaker testicle that the opening weekend gross for Little Man will pass $20M domestic, which is probably more than enough to warrant, in Hollywood's dollarsign eyes, a sequel--or if not a direct follow-up, then at least another fabulous new witch's brew of Wayanses and CGI. The die is cast, and it has a little Marlon-face on every side. Do what you can to avoid the next roll.

This Blog Kills Fascists

In another of those weird confluences of time and fate, I've been listening again to the Mermaid Avenue albums around the time of this Independence Day. The estate and children of Woody Guthrie commissioned Billy Bragg, Wilco, Natalie Merchant, and Corey Harris to commit the late Woody's unfinished songs to wax (or vinyl, or plastic, as it were) during several studio sessions in 1997 and 1998. I can't think of a songsmith more fitting to ring in another year of our Strange American Democracy than Mr. Woody Guthrie. Was he a Socialist? Yes. A drunk? Okay. Generally an Odd Bird, and beautiful for the oddness? Absofuckinglutely.

Huntington's had more than a bit to do with the last, and maybe something to do with the former. Who's to say?

Most know Guthrie as the author of "This Land Is Your Land" and nothing else. The fact is that he spent his entire life crafting songs of rebellion, songs of unity, songs of putting democracy's tools in the hands of those folk who make democracy work. He also wrote offbeat odes to Hollywood actresses ("Ingrid Bergman"), gutwrenching love songs ("Remember The Mountain Bed," "When The Roses Bloom Again," and "At My Window Sad And Lonely"), strange quasi-Christian tunes ("Blood of the Lamb" and "Christ For President"), and ditties about the invisible people who have to clean up nasty-ass hotel rooms after people like us defile them ("Hot Rod Hotel"). He was a people's poet, the man who influenced Dylan and Baez and Arlo (natch) and pretty much everyone who's put pen to paper and guitar in the name of a cause since Black Monday, 1929. Think of him as the Bob Marley of our American Situation. It's not a stretch. He painted these words on his guitar, for chrissakes: "THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS." Show me a person who doesn't respect that, I'll show you a person I'd rather punch than reason with. Ironic, no?

There's a great documentary the BBC put out detailing the creation of the Mermaid Avenue tapes called Man In The Sand. Check it out if you're interested. Hell, check it out if you're not interested. We owe it to ourselves as Americans to understand that which has--and those who have--come before us. The film and the albums are a hell of an intro. Besides being the most transcendently beautiful, utterly American albums in recent memory, they are a document of what our parents and theirs went through during the first part of the so-called "American Century," the Twentieth. Not so strangely, there is an echo of our modern future in Woody's Depression-era lyrics...

Take this snippet as an example, from "Stetson Kennedy":

"I ain't the world's best writer, ain't the world's best speller,
But when I believe in something I'm the loudest yeller.
If we fix it so you can't make no money on war, well
We'll all forget what we was killin' folks for."

Or this bit, from a piece Woody wrote for the People's World:

"Look like the ring has been drawed and the marbles are all in. The millionaires has throwed their silk hats and our last set of drawers in the ring."

Tell me that the man had an agenda, tell me his politics were neither red-blooded nor American, and I'll tell you you're not seeing clearly this sunshiney morning. But don't tell me that his words don't ring too fucking true in this current day and age. This was a man who served during the last clean war, WWII. He knew no Halliburtons, no Rumsfelds, no Bushes, no Wolfowitzes, no Nixons or Vietfuckingnams. Maybe we need another Woody, somebody with a love for this country so deep and objective, a love loved in spite of and for our shortcomings and blemishes, a love for the idea of America. In closing, a note on America and that love taken from a larger piece:

"Because I seen the pretty and I seen the ugly and it was because I
knew the pretty part that I wanted to change the ugly part,
Because I hated the dirty part that I knew how to feel the love
for the cleaner part,

I looked in a million of her faces and eyes, and I told myself there
was a look on that face that was good, if I could see it there,
in back of all of the shades and shadows of fear and doubt and
ignorance and tangles of debts and worries,

And I guess it is these things that make our country look all lopsided
to some of us, lopped over onto the good and easy side or over
onto the bad and the hard side..."

That middle bit chokes me up. Excuse me. Ahem. Right, so... Follow this link here for the full lyrics to "This Land Is Your Land." I guarantee it's not the same song you belted out in your fourth-grade pageant. If you feel the love, the fire, the anger, drop a comment and tell me how the same heat is relevant in our current global climate. Peace.

Blood, Fireworks, and Dollar Bills

[A few thoughts on this, our nation's birthday.]

Given the recent outpouring of philanthropy amongst our country's wealthiest citizens, I though it might be time to reflect upon the nature of giving of oneself, be that "self" seated in the soul or in the pocketbook.

Bill Gates recently announced he would be taking a backseat at Microsoft in order to helm his (and his wife's, because I guess half of it's hers) philanthropic organization. Shortly thereafter, Warren Buffett (no relation to Jimmy, and even richer) decided that he would one-up the estimable Mr. and Mrs. Gates by donating approximately $31 BILLION (give or take a buck or two) to their selfsame outfit. Cheers and huzzah to all parties involved, and long may they prosper in their do-gooding. Word.

Coincidentally (because this is how all these thoughts wind up happening), I also just finished You Shall Know Our Velocity!, by Dave Eggers. Mr. Eggers wrote a brilliant novel about two lifelong friends who decide to travel around the world in a week to give away $32K (US). Will, the main character, received the money for being on a lightbulb (read the book) and decided that he must give it away in the most extravagant, eccentric fashion he could contemplate. So he and Hand (his lifelong friend) hit Senegal and Morocco and Latvia and Estonia (though not in that order) and put obscene amounts of currency directly into the hands of the impoverished and deserving.

Will and Hand also decided to strap some cash to a goat with medical tape and a message bearing lightningbolts alongside a line from a Scorpions tune, but that is merely a sidenote. Again, read the book.

The whole "impoverished and deserving" bit is what YSKOV! is about, really. Charity normally takes the form of anonymous people writing not-so-anonymous checks to people who collect said checks (often during obscenely extravagant shindigs) and afterward set about giving the collected monies to deserving parties. Those parties, when the charity is done right, are impoverished and, indeed, deserving. Sometimes people skim, and sometimes charities must pay obscene amounts for the obscenely extravagant shindigs. Alas, such is all in a day's work of giving. But by going directly to the source, by handing out cash in person to the people who need and deserve it, Will and Hand subvert the normal architecture of charitable giving. Will's mom asks him at one point, via telephone, if he doesn't find his mission to be a bit tacky. She means to bring to his attention that handing cash to a person, fingers upon palms, removes the filter of anonymity and distance that most Westerners associate with charity. Surely there must be some guilt that changes hands along with monetary notes, right?

It's an interesting point. After all, when was the last time that you put a quarter in a homeless person's cup, or responded with anything other than eyes-ahead ignorance when a person approached you for cash on the street? Myself, I don't give to anyone in person. But it hurts me when I claim no change at curbside, and it hurts me to reflect upon my stinginess in the comfort of my air-conditioned apartment while I write these words. Will's mom has a point that bears mentioning here: which kind of charity is the right kind of charity, and what are the proper methods and means?

Not all forms of contribution to our fellow humans must take the form of anonymous donation. Were anonymity the key that unlocks our wallets, there would be no Habitat For Humanity, no Save The Children or the like. These charities thrive on the fact that they put a face on need, and that face is multicolored, multiethnic, multineedy. What Will and Hand set out to do is neither tacky nor ill-conceived, though their doubts are what make Eggers' novel great. Reading it made me regret not pitching a bit into the cup of a less-fortunate, not listening to the story of a person who may or may not be in need, withholding the odd smoke from someone with no means to obtain one. Sad, really.

So, in this spirit of giving that the anniversary of the birth of our (outwardly) democratic society puts me, I went out yesterday and donated blood. Sure, it's a somewhat faceless operation, all needles and iodine and t-shirts and weary smiles from your friendly local phlebotomist, but the posters on the walls of the donation sites feature the sort of people I might be helping with my pint of A-Negative. Kids with sickle-cell anemia, people who need a new liver, a new heart, a new pancreas, a new lease on the life I so often take for granted. It's a pleasure to help. It makes me feel good. It doesn't cost a nickel. And it shows how one little prick can help a few people in need.

Take that last comment any way you want.

Every charity, no matter how nameless or faceless it may seem, should eventually help someone with both face and name. That's what helps me sleep at night, at any rate. I hope I'm not simply naïve. Why don't we all get out there during this weeklong celebration of America's independence and help someone else achieve some degree of that precious commodity, independence. It doesn't matter how, when, where, or why you do it--just do it. If it's a dollar or a pint, a billion or a houseraising, give a little back this week in appreciation of everything we hold dear as Americans and human beings. Timeframes are no concern, so if you're reading this next week, next month, next year, get out and give. Every marathon, as they say, takes a step to start. Let today's be the first step of many, and keep the race moving. Peace.

@#%&!

A couple of weeks ago I had the good fortune to watch the second season of Deadwood on DVD. This is how I catch most of my pay-cable shows, since I'm far too cheap (read: poor) to actually spring for the HBO. It's okay, though. Donations are accepted.*

Now, if you haven't been privy to the Deadwood thus far, it's the story of an illegal settlement in what is now South Dakota during 1877-78, a mining town devoid of law and/or order. The town was settled on Indian (Native American) land, without treaty, during a gold rush second (at that time) only to the 1849 strike at Sutter's Mill in California. Deadwood is a lawless town, not unlike many towns of the early American west, but this series marks the first time that such lawlessness and primal language, such utter disregard for civilization and its trappings (and yet, strangely, the attempt to hew civilization from rough stone, dirt, and gold ore) have been shown in any honesty to a viewing public. David Milch, creator and head writer of the show,** has a long history of putting questionable (read: potentially offensive and/or groudbreaking and/or envelope-pushing) material on television, a history that started with Hill Street Blues, on to NYPD Blue, and now he's accepted the opportunity to take salty talk back in time like a pottymouthed Doc Brown with a leather-chaps fetish. Huzzah to David Milch.

But it's the pottymouth I really want to talk about here. In the course of a single episode of Deadwood, one is treated to a plethora ("Si, Jefe, a plethora.") of Fucks, Cocksuckers, Fucking Cocksuckers, Motherfuckers, Cunts, Shitbirds, Shitbags, Shitferbrains, and Motherfucking Shitbird Cocksucker Cunts who may or may not have Shitferbrains. It's truly enlightening dialogue, people, and it's something we're not treated to everyday.

(Unless you work on an aircraft carrier. Or in a bar. But that's beside the besides...)

I also recently availed myself of the Netflix opportunity to see M*A*S*H again--the 1970 Robert Altman film, not the Alan Alda TV show. And, were it not for a spot that aired as an AMC promo for a subtitled-with-trivia airing of an edited version of Altman's film, I would not have known that M*A*S*H was the first (1970!) American motion picture to be released complete with an F-bomb. Amazing.

Nay. Fucking amazing.

Profanity is a strange, strange concept in this day and age. We are a country that has gone through a bloody revolution, a frontier-expansion period of Manifest Destiny that lasted (if you count Alaska) well into last week, gold rushes and industrial revolutions and union wars and Teamsters murders, two World Wars with a third on the way, and a major international asskicking in Vietnam, all of which must have had people saying something more profound than "Sugarbritches, I just got mama-effing shot by that...that...that dagblamed doodoohead." No. NO! Nonononono. That's not the way people talk. Life is not a Looney Tune, and nobody has ever really meant any utterance of "TarNAtion!" When their feet are to the fire, people cuss. Really cuss. Loud and often.

(Except for the Mormons. It's a well-known fact of anatomy that their bodies feature an outlet--not unlike an anus, though not as rosy-smelling--that blows every impetus for foul language out into the ether. I've also heard that rebellious Mormon children sneak into the trash bins at Salt Lake City Starbuck's-es to huff coffee grounds. It's sad, really, to see the brown stains around the mouths and nostrils of so many impressionable young inhibitionists. Sadder still to hear their half-hearted yet caffeine-riddled attempts at cursing through their angst. Tragic, even. But...)

I remember watching the first episode of Milch's NYPD Blue, way back before Zach Morris joined the show. I would have been fourteenish, and I remember Dennis Franz's Detective Sipowicz advising a female ADA to "Ipso facto this [grabbing crotch in handheld-camera closeup], you pissy little bitch." The partial female (and eventually--ugh--Franz-based male) nudity was cool, but mostly I remember the elation I felt hearing those words on broadcast television for the first time. These were words I heard my people using, but they were shocking in spite of the fact that they were an everyday and that I had heard them the Saturday night prior on SNL. Kevin Nealon was doing the Weekend Update, mentioned the fact that Tuesday night's NYPDB premiere would be the first show to air said words on television, therefore rendering the NYPDB's transgressions a tad bit late. Brilliant TV all the way around. Kudos fifteen years after the fact to all involved, should any of you be reading this. My heart goes out to all you bitches.

So Chicago Hope was the first primetime program to air the word Shit, and now it's on every episode of every show on FX (I like The Shield and IASIP, but I just don't get the appeal of Rescue Me***) and even a couple on TNT. Seinfeld (if I remember correctly) even aired a Son Of A Bitch or two during the last few years of its run. They definitely had an Ass in there at some point, and that show is the Gold Standard Of Class in my book.

A movie came out last fall called The Aristocrats, and its tagline was something like: "No Sex. No Violence. Unspeakable Profanity." We saw it at our local arthouse, and R.'s girlfriend A. walked out with 30 minutes left due to the aforementioned unspeakables. Let's allow her to represent Most Of America, while the other of us dirty cocksuckers (metaphorically speaking, here) shall represent Honest Americans Going About Their Entertainment. We sat through the entire film and heard the same unbelievably filthy joke told in numerous incarnations, spun out through various circumstances in an atomsmasher of filth and brilliance, and we laughed our pretty asses off for an hour and a half. Were we offended? No. Was A.? Abso-fucking-lutely. But what, then, was so horrifically offensive about the film? It featured an ages-old vaudeville joke, passed down through generations of dressing-cubicle-inhabitants and greenroom-junkies, that put the onus of a really nasty joke on the teller.**** The very thought of the joke (because the punchline, after all, is always the same) is the offense, as the joke's body changes like a shapeshifter from some much-more-offensive horror flick. And yet that very thought, it would appear, is enough to put a reasonably sensible girl into the lobby with two reels left. Strange.

One of Lexington's reliable local newscasts recently did a two-or-three night Special Report on the Power of Profanity. They claimed that Profanity is losing its power in our go-go modern world, where you can hear on television the same kind of filth you once had to join the Navy to witness. Must have been a slow news week. During one segment they showed a clip from The 40-Year-Old Virgin, in which Steve Carell's titular character screams out "KELLY CLARKSON!" while being waxed by a sadistic Vietnamese salon employee under the watchful glare of his friends. He didn't swear under the torture being visited upon him, and that was indicative of his stature as an uncorrupted male. Were he to have been a non-virgin at the point of his waxing, we might have expected something a little more colorful--if less creative--to have escaped his never-touched-pussy lips. But as it was, the news report used that clip as an example of how we can hope to curb ourselves of the cursing habit, how we can rid our mouths--if not our minds--of the filth that accumulates during lifetimes lived in Profanity's sewage-y wake.

But there's something to be said for Profanity, people, and I'll say it right now: It's Goddamned Mutherfucking Time To Legalize The F-Bomb In America. The S-bomb has already breached our perimeters, and we seem to be faring just as fucking poorly with, as without it. We live in an entertainment-driven society, a society driven by visions of brutality, violence, and anger that seem to be exempt from the rules we place on simple words. You can't say some shit on broadcast television, for instance, but you can show every form of sensational bloodthirsty childraping bodydesecrating whoreslicing gunshotbleeding vengeancekilling traumasurgeoning violence on any show named by abbreviation. Just look at Law & Order, L&O SVU, L&O CI, CSI, CSI:NY, CSI:Miami, ER--and that abbreviation rule excludes shows like Criminal Minds, Medium, Ghost Whisperer, Crossing Jordan, Cold Case, Without A Trace, Numb3rs, and every show like them that's not on the Big Four. Hell, take it back to any other example that's no longer on the air. On television as in film, there is plenty of wiggleroom when you're selling violence, but none when it comes to the profanity that such violence would seem to warrant. Are there simply very urbane, very civil crime victims out there that these shows have found and exploited? Or do we live in the midst of a vicious double standard that rates a heinous act lower than a dirty word on the big totem pole of propriety?

Yes, this society is still fighting its way out of the arms of the Puritans. Yes, this society is still figuring out a place in the world that doesn't involve colonialism on our part or another's. Yes, this society is fighting yet another nonsense war with spurious justifications. We should be angry, people, and we should be able to voice that anger and hear it voiced. Fuck a bunch of "Profanity." It's the trees, not the forest. We seem to be content watching all the manifestations of evil sold to us as entertainment, without any of the recoil, any of the moral encumberance, any of the guilt that should go along with them. We still live, for CHRISSAKES, in a country that won't let us see pictures of the 2500-odd flagdraped coffins we've flown home from Iraq.

And yet, somehow, you can't say "That's a fucking travesty" without drawing dirty looks from the parents of young children nearby, parents whose four-year-olds will eventually wind up the victims of IED's on the streets of Baghdad, or Teheran, or wherever we have to go next for oil.

That's fucked up. I hope you agree. If not, please take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. This is America, after all, and I can tell you to take a flying fuck at the moooooooooon. But be well and take it light, as your opinion is as good as mine.

Peace.

*: In unmarked bills (the larger the better) or checks made payable to "Cash" or "The Human Fund: Money For People." On second thought, let's just stick to the unmarked bills.
**: Third season currently airing Sunday nights at 9 PM (EST) on HBO. The fourth season has been sadly truncated to two two-hour specials set to air at some point in the next decade, or just way-the-fuck-after whenever they get around to filming them. Sopranos fans, you know what I'm talking about.
***: Ironically, even given the freedoms of language I'm talking about in this essay, Denis Leary seems to be pulling punches when he's not swearing more extravagantly.
****: Or, more appropriately, Penn (also the director).

Demonspawn, Bitches! Horror's New New Wave

Not to jinx it so close to its finish, but we're almost through the Week of the Beast without the world ending, the rivers running red with blood, or cats and dogs playing together. No mass hysteria, no comets or plagues or anything like that. Phew, right? [Pause to wipe nervous sweat from agnostic brow.] What a relief.

Tuesday was officially the epicenter of the WotB, its date (if you're given to such flights of imagination and are wont to drop the occasional meddling zero) ringing hell's bells with its trifecta of gonghammer sixes. And, of course, Tuesday also marked the release of a new take on Richard Donner's* 1976 classic, The Omen. As marketing ploys go, it was an unmitigated success. As films go, let me put it this way:

Had the world ended on Tuesday, had the Beast decided that now's a good time to run amok, twelve-million-dollars-worth of American moviegoers could count seeing the remake as a weight on their eternal souls.** Thank heaven (?) Satan is leaving all the destruction, terror, and mayhem to God these days. Beelzebub has realized it's best to stick with what he knows. He usually just does what comes naturally, laying low until the next Republican needs a slim margin in a major election.

But all that's sort of beside my point, which is this: isn't it strange how the newest thing in horror movies is creepy/haunted/undead/demonspawn children? We seem to have come full-circle from the time of the original Omen, passing through a wave of slasher flicks focused almost exclusively on teenagers and their value as hyperhormonal chainsaw fodder. What happened all of a sudden?

(Technically, the official first entry of this particular brand of horror flick would be Rosemary's Baby, Roman Polanski's 1968 chiller. That film featured Mia Farrow being impregnated by a hairy beast of a Beast in a truly ugly nightmare-rape sequence. Rosemary is the unwitting participant in the proceedings, her husband having sold the Friendly Local Coven a 9-month lease on her womb. See the flick to find out how it all ends, but watch it with the lights out. Really.)

Six years after Rosemary gave birth to Satan's lovechild, the slasher flick was already terrorizing America's teenage demographic. That was the year Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre gave rural Texas a REALLY bad name. A little later, in 1978, John Carpenter set deranged manchild Michael Myers*** loose on teenagers celebrating Halloween. Two years after that, Jason Voorhees terrorized Camp Crystal Lake (and Kevin Bacon) in Friday the 13th. And in 1984, Freddy Krueger planted his flag in the dreams of a generation (and Johnny Depp, for one more pop reference) in Wes Craven's A Nightmare On Elm Street. All of these movies spawned legions of imitators and countless sequels, but not until Scream signaled the slasher-flick's demise (by going totally po-mo on its ass, before ironically falling into the same dead-eyed cycle of rehashings it originally sent up****) did the new new thing in horror drift across the Pacific in a fog-shrouded ghost ship from Japan.

(Pardon that image. It's not accurate. It was actually a fog-shrouded FedEx jet that delivered prints to film festival screenings populated by really hip devil-worshiping zombies cloaked in torn black parkas. On skis. In Utah. Anyway...)

With the rise of the Japanese horror (or J-horror) film in the mid-90's, Hollywood discovered that it was lagging sadly behind the curve of what people really think is scary. The slasher flick had grown bigger than its genre, to the extent that decapitations and dismemberments (ad infinitum) just weren't putting asses in the seats anymore. Into the vacuum rode J-horror movies like Ringu (remade in America as The Ring), Ju-On (The Grudge with Sarah Michelle Gellar), Kairo (this summer's upcoming Pulse), Gin Gwai (technically from Hong Kong via Thailand, but slated for a 2007 remake as The Eye), and Honogurai Mizu No Soko Kara (a mouthful, and the source of 2005's Dark Water). Instead of focusing on the exploits of a superhuman, undead/undying villain (a la Jason or Freddy), these films' "villains" are almost always ghosts seeking to right the wrongs done them in life. There are conclusions despite the evidence of sequels. These films were breaking box-office records overseas while setting the new standard for horror films on other shores. And, not surprisingly, Hollywood has been playing catch-up ever since.

(A quick thought on foreign films in Hollywood: nobody would think about "re-envisioning" The Seventh Seal or 8 1/2 or The 400 Blows. That would be taboo, right? For chrissakes, Gus Van Sant was almost--deservedly--crucified for his shot-by-shot take on Hitchcock's Psycho, and that was a Hollywood flick to begin with. But for some reason Japanese cinema has given us a different rule when it comes to remakes. Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai and The Hidden Fortress became The Magnificent Seven and Star Wars, respectively. And the kitana blade cuts both ways: after all, Kurosawa's Ran was an Asian appropriation of Shakespeare's King Lear. In the aforementioned J-horror case of Ju-On, the Japanese version's original director, Takashi Shimizu, was hired to helm the fucking-up of his own work for Japanese-owned Sony Pictures Entertainment. There's no mystery here, I guess, and I'm not calling for remakes of everything that comes across the A-pond out of some botched notion of equal time. I know that Cash Rules Everything Around the Hollywood Mainstream [CREAHM--get the money!*****], and nobody packs the house for an Austrian like Michael Haneke and his horrific excavations of the human psyche. I'm just saying.)

What each of these J-horror films has in common, besides any Asian origin, is that they all deal somehow with very young children as the perpetrators (or victims, but usually both in that case) of the horror.****** I won't go into any greater detail here, so as not to further bore all of you senseless with my reductive analyses of each film's storyline (get Netflix). Suffice it to say that the goings-on are supernatural in nature, taking the form of beyond-the-grave reprisals for the horrors visited upon children by the adults in the films. Young children represent a raising of stakes within the world of each film, an embodiment of vulnerability and dependence that, once betrayed, leads to otherworldly consequences. But instead of focusing on the exploits of a superhuman, undead/undying villain (a la Jason or Freddy), these films' "villains" are ghosts (and very young ghosts, too) seeking to right the wrongs done them in life. The element of mystery is key to J-horror, and the plotlines usually trace the unraveling of knotty circumstances surrounding the death of an innocent. That being said, and despite the evidence of sequels, the films conclude when the mystery is solved and some form of justice is meted out in the ghosts' names.

So there's a theory out there that every turn in the recent winding history of the horror movie serves as an onscreen portrayal of a society's most potent fears. The American horror flicks of the 1950's (check out Invasion of the Body Snatchers) were thinly veiled allegories of Cold-War paranoia, when even your neighbor (or his alien double) might be the guy who sells the Russkies the Bomb. Zombie movies (at least since George Romero's 1968 Night of the Living Dead) were thematically related, but on the other side of the divide. During the Vietnam-protest counterculture of the late 60's, the zombies were stand-ins for the military-industrial-political complex and every voter unhip enough to support it. Slasher flicks of the late 70's and 80's, which on the whole punished their victims for exploring their sexuality, reflected a strange, seemingly conservative expression of "sex equals death" in a bid for the post-sexual-revolution wallets of the wealthiest teenagers in America's history, the Baby Boomers' children. Later examples of the same genre (especially Craven's Nightmare and its sequels) can be read as early echoes of the AIDS crisis, when nobody knew if their wet dreams might cost them their lives.

The American horror flick experienced a brief denouement in terms of social relevance during the late 80's and early 90's, evidenced by trash like the Leprechaun series, Child's Play and its sequels, and latecomer goofs on Stephen King novels. Only recently has the genre revived itself, ushering in a new wave of American slasher flicks like Eli Roth's supercreepy Cabin Fever and Hostel, and recent big-budget remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (prequel coming this fall) and The Hills Have Eyes. These films owe a great debt to their predecessors in the slasher genre, but their human (if inbred, European, and inbred/deformed--in that order) villains separate them from the Asiatic herd. This American new wave--set apart in tone and content from the J-horror remakes that have flooded the American marketplace around them--are essentially revenge pictures, and have been interpreted as gory ruminations on post-9/11 America and our War on Terror. They are the cinematic expressions of "Let's roll," "Put a boot up their ass," "These colors don't run" and any such jingoism. A couple of them are also genuinely frightening.

During American horror's stagnation, the Japanese were churning out the precursors to the J-horror flicks to come. The animated films of those years (especially Urotsukidoji [Legend of the Overfiend, 1989] and others like it)--while not quite horror flicks, per se--were not wholly, thematically different from American post-WWII horror flicks of sabotage and Commie infiltration. The Manga films showed the first genuine emergence of a fantastical post-nuke paranoia wandering through that country's popular imagination, forty years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the forms that filmic paranoia took are astounding for the grandeur of their oddity. Just look at Urotsukidoji's promotional art [DVD cover pictured], at the mushroom-cloud of light on the Overfiend's chest as he prepares to devour an entire cityscape. Dominated by a famous scene featuring an army of fifty-foot sperm ransacking a hospital in search of impregnable human females, Urotsukidoji stands in testament to a nation and a people still reeling from the brink of nuclear annihilation, still dealing with the collective memory of millions scarred by radioactivity, fear, and loss. Until Russia (Ukraine now) releases anything similar twenty-plus years after Chernobyl, those Japanimation flicks will remain some of the scariest feats of human imagination in the wake of real, personal horror.

So what of this new new wave, then, the J-horror flick? Whether or not (or until) they're bastardized by Hollywood, these films have acquired rabid followings, spawned numerous sequels, and show thematic similarities that can't be coincidental. The ghostly kids, the omnipresent water imagery, the spooky posthumous vengeance, et cetera. And what is it with the children again, all of a sudden? Thirty years after Donner's The Omen, its remake comes out (scripted by David Seltzer, the same man who wrote the original) on 6/6/06, following what have been bumper crops of J-horror remakes that have tilled similar (if not Satanic) territory. Is it simply a glitch of the marketplace, a déjà vu of sorts during which Hollywood attempts to cash in on shit that other folks are doing with more panache? You be the judge. If CREAHM ain't the reason, I sure as hell can't figure it out. Maybe this is globalization in action, and the Japanese are outsourcing their horror-flick ideas like we do helpline operators to Bangalore. It's a mystery at the moment, but perhaps one that will find its solution (and valid interpretations) around the corner. Until then, as long as they aren't serving it up raw (sushi horror?), the kids in Middle America are sure to eat it up.

*: Now that I think of it, Donner's having a bit of a rough summer. Along with the pointless remake already mentioned, his 1978 Superman is also getting a coat of polish (and maybe some manscaping) from Bryan Singer's Superman Returns. Next we know they'll be giving us a remake of Lethal Weapon--as if all three LW sequels, 16 Blocks (also Donner's), Training Day (sorta), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang ('cause gay is the new black?), Die Hards I, II: Die Harder, and With A Vengeance, and Rush Hour plus two sequels (one done, one upcoming--maybe Chinese is the new white?) hadn't already run the mismatched-buddy action-comedy into the fucking ground.
**: In the interest of full disclosure, I was $5.25 of it. BTW, it sucked devilnuts.
***: Not to be confused with Mike Myers, whose recent lack of funny is even more frightening. Lose the no-longer-hilarious Scottish accent, Mike, or I'm gonna forget both the original Wayne's World and the first Austin Powers. Don't test me, bitch. It's been a long week.
****: You know your franchise has jumped the shark when a spoof comes out to spoof your spoof. To wit: Scary Movie, which, not really coincidentally, just released its fourth installment. I'm not even sure how to itemize the ways that franchise has tripped over its own limited cleverness, but I'm pretty sure it has something to do with a Wayans brother. Or maybe a Sheen.
*****: Dollah dollah bill, y'all.
******: Kairo (Pulse) is the lone exception, since every rule needs one. Still, you get the point.