Weekend Roeperian Roundup

(If you didn't notice this post yesterday it's because either Blogger or IE was possessed by a demon of Luke-infuriation. I'm working on moving exclusively to Firefox as of right now)

I made the most bomb breakfast this morning. I love scrambles. I love over easy eggs. Why has no one combined the two before? Maybe they have, I don’t know.

Regardless of the novelty, that is exactly what I made this morning

Green onions, mushrooms, hash browns, cheese, and a few eggs offering up their gooey goodness.

“They don’t even have a dining room.”

* * *

I’ve been trying to make some decisions lately. Stay in Seattle, move back to Spokane—move somewhere else.

Jesus.

I need to get back in school. Work sucks—the world of business sucks. I hate it, I barely pulled it off for a year, I can’t hang on for another 39 or whatever. I’d end up killing myself. I’d probably take a few other people with me.

That is the rationale for moving back to Spokane. Simplify. Focus on getting a good GRE score and a tuition waver. Also my friends. Whatever. I think this makes me an immature person.

Counterpoint: Seattle has more opportunities for just about everything.

Counterpoint: Boston does too. It probably has more, but also with an inverse proportion of friends and family.

I need to make some decisions.

“Look at this, fifth question and the poor prick used all his lifelines.”

* * *

Shannon told me I have to let whomever it may concern know that she doesn’t usually watch movies like A View From the Top. She mostly watches good movies, taught dramas with honest characterization and important themes. French movies. French movies with subtitles.

This is why you don’t give your girlfriend the URL to your blog.

“Like the president says, we have to keep going.”

* * *

Anyway, I think I have some ideas for a journo gig in Spokane. The Spokesman just started to transition their weekend thing to more of a weekly arts type thing, something to compete—I think—with The Inlander, the weekly independent paper that doesn’t return any of my emails. I apparently know a guy who knows a guy who might have robbed a guy. I don’t know.

I’m not going to say any more because I’m probably not going to do anything about it.

And I don’t want you bloodsuckers biting my steez.

“They did a whole Murder, She Wrote about that.”

* * *

I’m beginning to see Roeper’s logic in doing the vignette article thing. You get to complain about things without wasting too much of people’s time.

“What am I, a toxic person?”

* * *

DVD is the only way to watch television.

“Did you ever know anyone who uh, committed suicide?” “God . . . I lived in Seattle Tony.”

Read the full thing here.

Star Fecundity and Relationship Terrorism

I mentioned the other day that Mark Ruffalo has been in a ton of movies this year.

Today I opened up NYTimes.com and saw his face again. A.O. Scott's name was near it. Movie Review? Wuzzuh . . . He wasn't that poorly shaven in Collateral [these are the banal conversations I have with myself], and that only opened up a week ago . . . there's something fishy going on . . .

It turns out his new movie, or rather, newest movie, is called We Don't Live Here Anymore (reg. req.).

That makes four movies this year and three last year. That's a staggering number. So far, he's given varied and insightful roles in all of them. He wasn't even that bad in A View From the Top, which I watched under the threat of some serious relationship terrorism (unlike our country as a whole, my terror level stays at orange most of the time). I also missed 13 going on 30, so if anyone would like to comment on that movie, I'll probably figure out a way to ban your IP.

I can't wait for We Don't Live Here Anymore. It opens this weekend, but only in New York and LA. Let me know if anyone knows anything more about release dates. Mike, let me know if you get off your ass to see it.

Read the full thing here.

A third, even less well known, blunder

"You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never to get involved in a land war in Asia. And only slightly less well known is this: never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!" -- Vizzini, The Princess Bride

Mike brought up some good points about the people that were getting pissed off about Vonnegut's articles being so leftist.

The people on those forums who posted responses like "WTF, when did Vonnegut become so cynical?" Either A) haven't read any of his books or B) didn't understand any of his books.

That makes these people either A) Totally ignorant of his work or B) retarded.

He calls himself a "lifelong Northern Democrat"--which is to say he is a socialist. He always has been. Read God bless you Mr. Goldwater. Read Galapagos. Re-read Slaughterhouse Five because you obviously didn't understand it in high school and/or college.

When Mike said he was an "unabashed" liberal, I thought of another word, "smashmouth". Both are good.

He hits you over the head with his humanism--He forces you to confront his ideas through his dogged use of plain speech, repetition of themes and sarcasm. He often borders on polemics, but unlike Moore and Limbaugh and Franken and Coulter, he makes his case with insights into human nature, rather than the crude observations of individuals or policies that make those firebrands seem transient and unimportant.

He scolds. He lectures. Most of all though, he resonates. That, I think, is what makes those who disagree with him so violently angry. His work will live on long after their petty complaints die a horrible memetic death.

Which proponents of unfettered capitalism will have that kind of longievity? I can't think of one, other than the lumbering market economy itself. And that can be undone--rather, it's dehumanizing effects can be reversed.

I have no idea why Vonnegut's brand of humanism is seen as a leftist cause. That's not what I mean. I do have an idea why it's seen as a leftist cause, and I think the reasoning is fucking stupid.

Humanism in this case has something to do with wanting Universal Healthcare and the idea that Life, Liberty and Property (or "the pursuit of happiness" depending on the wording) should mean more than just allowing people to make as much money as possible. It should mean letting each human being prosper with dignity and respect.

This rubs a lot of people the wrong way. What bastards these humanists be. Some fucking nerve.

I think there are two--maybe three, I'm undecided--essential problems facing Humanist public relations. First is that they (we) don't think money should be elevated above people. This concept is anathema to the founding principles of American corporate culture. In a legislative machine not just greased but fueled by soft money from big business, that's an daunting ideological hill to climb--a little like a land war in Asia.

Secondly, the humanist ethos is rooted deeply in what is called socialism. Socialism, in the minds of Americans alive during the Cold War, is inextricably linked to Soviet-era Communism. Through that it's linked to genocide, despotism, militarism, pressed cardboard cars, bread lines, thought police, and George Orwell's unimaginative talking barnyard.

That portrayal is at best unfair. Luckily, it's not shared by most of the rest of the world. My friend Rich would agree with me on that. He's from Europe. Before someone calls me an Arrogant Liberal, I'll ammend that: He's British. Not French. He's a charter member of the Coalition of the Willing. He's not a Communist or a member of the Taliban. He has democratically elected leaders and free healthcare. It's not perfect, but it's better than an HMO.

You can have Socialist programs outside a communist framework, and certainly without a totalitarian regime. I don't think a lot of people know that.

There is a third point that I almost hesitate to bring up because I'm not decided about it. I'm ususally pretty indiscriminate with my words anyway though so I'll just dive in. Protestantism. Specifically American Protestantism. Here's how I break it down. Protestantism as discussed here (I'm not advocating the reading of Time Magazine, God no) is a doctrine of personal responsibility and acountability. This is a good thing in the right circumstances, but too often it translates into:

"You can be anything you want to be ... and if you don't make it, you have no one to blame but yourself" -- Berkeley sociologist Robert Bellah (you should also never quote Time Magazine)

This is a problem in a democratic system when people genuinely believe that the Haves have because they work hard and the Havenots lack because they are lazy. The people with power--with money--having grown up in this environment, tend to view programs like welfare and worker's compensation with disdain and as a theft of hard earned money. Then when you have an evangelist like Casey Treat preaching that to be poor is an indication of sin, the problem only gets worse because public perception shifts even farther from the truth. The poor hear these word faith evangelists spew their scorched-earth, smash and grab theology and they become more distraught at the fact that God has shunned them, or that they are unworthy of God. That's not religious consolation, thats a bitter and dangerous pill.

More often than people like to admit, the poor are poor as a function of disenfrancisement and systematic oppression. I'm not talking about racial oppression, though that certainly happens. This is a class based thing. With wages that don't match inflation, the cliche "the rich get richer, the poor get poorer," is completely true. It takes money to make money. If you don't have any, how the hell are you going to get any? People don't see this because it isn't in the best interest of the policy makers to shed light on the subject.

So maybe the biggest problem of all (this makes four I guess) is that our legislators are self-serving morons who line their own pockets and have little desire and even less initiative to exact any kind of social change, because the poor don't vote anyway. Why push for education reform when you can get re-elected without it? Why fight for worker's rights when your slush fund is overflowing with corporate payouts? It's bullshit that, despite the passing of the McCain-Feingold bill, it's still perfectly fine to have one night an election term where all the soft money interests in America can spend as much money on a candidate as they want. They had one at the DNC and they'll definitely throw one for Bush. It's sickening and it's bad for democracy. But it's especially bad in a capitalistic democracy in which only money has any real power.

I think I'm really far off my initial topic so rather than scramble to right this sinking ship, I'll just abandon it--But I'll talk some more first . . .

My point is that Socialism is more or less facing a nasty quadruple-penetration in this country, and a lot needs to change before it even becomes a viable topic of discourse. This is a shame because the humanistic ethos seems like a no-brainer to me frankly. I think if more people knew the facts about it, there would be less resistance to it. At the very least there could be a more open political dialogue. And any kind of dialogue is better than any kind of silence.

Maybe that's naive of me.

But I'm a snot-nosed liberal arts major and I don't care that much about money, so I'm predisposed to bleeding heart syndrome. I think that makes me a threat to national security.

I wonder if Vonnegut hates dashes as much as he hates semicolons . . .

Read the full thing here.

My Apologies to Mr. Roeper

In my rage last night I complained that Richard Roeper and his column are just severely disconnected thoughts trickling from his brain without point or texture. This isn't entirely true.

It's only mostly true.

What's also true is that he's a pretty smart guy. I say that because I feel guilty and because he is, probably, smart.

By some uncanny luck, I stumbled across the column of another man. It is also basically just assorted musings in the vein of our Mr. Roeper. The stark difference is that it's brilliant.

The column appears to be written every other month or so--probably whenever the author feels like it. It appears in this magazine and it's written by Kurt Vonnegut (it's hilarious that the world's biggest luddite should have a webpage, much less an "official" one).

He's writing another novel. He's been writing it for five years. He almost seems resigned to not finishing it.

I think what makes me like Kurt Vonnegut so much is that he's so good at making people boiling mad, explosively mad. The interesting part is that he does it by asking people to respect human life and to love each other.

It's fascinating how mad this makes people.

Example:

This article is a merely a silly diatribe. I am very disappointed with the lack
of anything that i can sink my cognitive teeth in.
The election in Florda rigged? By virtually all recouning methods, Bush won. Time to get over the close call and move on!
The US feared and hated as the Nazis? Did the Nazis remove brutal dictators and spend billons of marks rebuilding the terrorized country?
The US dehumanizing millons of people? Where? If this is aimed at Iraq, it misses the mark by a lightyear!
Linking Bush to Hitler via Christianity?
Pure sleaze.
All the resources (money) has been taken by “psychopathic personalities”?
Is this really meant to be a serious article?
(BTW - i am a fan of the wonderful fiction written by KV. Welcome to the Monkey House was terrific. Perhaps he should stick to what he knows best, fiction)

Pointed. Pointed and blind.

Anyway, go to that website and search Vonnegut, there's about 8 pieces to read, they're all great. Some are more politicized than others.

This resonated with me:

“If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” --Vonnegut.

Dammit he's right; I'm a failure.

Read the full thing here.

I want one of those

I live on Highland Drive.

A rare bird, that.

It’s not a street, not an avenue, not a road. It is a Drive. That is the urban equivalent of lane. It’s a cart-track perched on a hill somewhere—paved, but otherwise indistinguishable from the dirt road I grew up on. It’s rutty, steep, quiet and out of the way.

Quiet.

Except the seven times nightly that sirens cleave the air and rattle my skull with ricocheting sound waves. Except when the water engine has to lay on its horn to warn people it’s turning onto the thoroughfare. You have to give fair warning to oncoming motorists because it’s impossible to see over the crest of the hill from Highland. It’s a goddamned death trap.

Tonight, it is also a sleep trap.

It’s 2 AM and I’m ready to crucify the great-grandchildren of whomever thought it was a good idea to put a fire station in a nook of a residential neighborhood whose only outlet to the rest of the world is Highland Drive—my quaint little cart-track.

Murdering the twice-removed progeny of a man who was once in charge of making poor city planning decisions would be a nice reprieve from the gut-twisting angst that has kept me awake waiting for the fire engine to come by. But I’d almost fallen asleep. I’d almost placated myself enough to dose off.

One nice thing about Seattle: it has emergencies you can set your watch by. The city is very efficient in that respect.

[Fade in, Sirens blare. Protagonist sits up, glances at watch]
Protagonist: Wha? Is it the worst possible time already? *

It’s always either at a crucial point in a movie or when I’ve finally almost convinced myself I’m not wasting my life doing a job I hate for a sum of money that is no longer justification in itself.

Tonight it was the latter.

Now I’m writing this to try and direct the rage at something useful and constructive like bitching to an online community of people whose unifying characteristic is a passing interest in my well-being. It’s also too muggy to attempt REM sleep.

So—ahem—fuck money, fuck job experience, fuck my bills—fuck the person who won’t stop calling my upstairs neighbor^†. She doesn’t want to talk to you. Fuck me for not attacking opportunities.

I don’t know why it’s so hard to find a job where someone will pay me to discuss issues and voice my opinion. Maybe it’s that I never actually look.

Richard Roeper gets to review movies and his editors gave him his own daily column. It’s all pointless musings in no particular order and with no unifying theme. It exists only to let slip the banalities from his over-round head—apropos of absolutely fucking nothing. He uses lots of these: *** to separate his disparate thoughts. It’s like a police blotter of stupidity. I’m drunk with jealousy.

I’ll make this easier. Don’t pay me. Give me food and shelter, handle my student loans and find someone to buy my car. You can throw things at me while I type if you want. The only catch is that you have to find me; I won’t be coming to you.

***

I think I just went semi-catatonic. I found myself staring at Shannon’s A&F bag out of the corner of my eye. My head was cocked at a weird angle. I can’t remember what I was thinking about. It’s been like 10 minutes. That’s probably an exaggeration.

***

I can’t survive another day in that place, it makes my soul weep.

***

I could go on I suppose, but it wouldn’t be anything I haven’t said before, and the Law of Diminishing Returns applies to catharsis just like it applies to field hands and bowls of Corn Flakes.

Besides, I have to get up soon to survive another day in that place.

***

* Those are the first and only two lines I’ve written in a screenplay about my life as a hopeless, angry fuckup. I envision it as Waiting for Godot meets Natural Born Killers [Insert rim shot here].

I need to stop watching so many Woody Allen movies. They aren’t funny anymore and I’m starting to sound like him. I also think he’s making me gray prematurely. You haven’t seen a bad movie until you’ve seen Sleeper.

† Ben swore a blue streak in his blog yesterday so I think I have to as well. Sorry.

Read the full thing here.

The Center for Idea Control

Mike posted a little something about comment spamming that was more or less for my benefit. In the interest of bringing something fruitful to the conversation I went out and did a little digging on blog authority. I found a whole bunch of bullshit and a lot of math majors struggling to find a thesis project.

I also found this guy's site. He uses a lot of jargon the I consciously avoided learning whilst taking stats in college, but he mitigates it with other, more common sense language--and scatterplots. I like scatterplots. Scatterplots let me pretend I understand statistical analysis.

It's interesting reading, I think I might finally pull the trigger and add a new link to my blogroll.

He also has a project called blogdex. Its purpose is to "objectively describe the information epidemics that occur regularly within informal social networks." This interests me greatly. I kind of cut my teeth on this stuff in my devisive Senior Seminar on Metaphysics and Epistemology. I did some research into memetics to provide a counterpoint to all the goddamned neo-Aristotilian epistemological crap spewing from the seminary students.

I see a problem with his methodology though. If blogdex is meant to facilitate an academic analysis--which it very well may not be--then putting it up for public consumption would have the potential to wildly exaggerate the "epidemics" he's trying to study.

This is dependent on how popular his site is of course, and since it appears to be link dependent, blogdex couldn't directly sway results.

But it will channel more bloggers to those particularly viral ideas, exposing more people to them and potentially generating more links. And on and on.

That's the problem with treating information as an organism, it feeds off attention. The effect is compounded when releasing findings on the information you've studied to the same meme pool the information itself exists in. But when the information set is human correspondence and the transmission agent is something as potent as the internet, there really isn't a way around it. Unless he was to not publish at all. Then I couldn't have written this blog. I'm sure no one wants that.

It's like giving hamhocks to a pride of lions and documenting with astonishment as they follow your Land Rover around--interesting but skewed. God that's a really bad analogy.

Of all the things those nuts (the Neo-Aristotelian/Thomist/Perceyans) took issue with, they had the toughest time arguing against memetics as a theory of information transmission. They basically thought it had some self-reference problems. They also said the idea was "very scary"--one of the better arguments I heard. The implications of memetics are scary, and also thrilling.

Read the full thing here.

Improvisation, Evolution, the I Ching

I associate Chris Cornell with Los Angeles. This is a seemingly random, neural-firing kind of association—like I associate Green Day’s Dookie with Warcraft II. It’s something that I don’t think I’ll ever really understand.

I’d like to ascribe some reason to it. I’d like to think it’s because they’re both seedy, both look like they need more one on one time with a loofah and because each has given birth to some awful music. I’d like to think Black Hole Sun fits into the equation somehow, as an expression of one of these things. The video, with its synthetic smiles and washed out cinematography certainly seems seems very LA.

So as all the various archetypes at odds in Collateral—the Feds, LAPD, the kingpin’s henchmen, our hero and antihero—descend upon a night club for a bit of climactic gun violence, it was fitting that some shit Cornell song or another would be thumping out of the theatre’s sound system. It annoyed me, set me on edge--just how I'd be if I was about to walk into the club they shoot holes in. I imagined this was the type of song any of these expendable people would listen to. It crystallized the Cornell/LA association.

I’ve never been to LA.

Tom Cruise describes the kind of place I expect to find if I ever go there:

“Sprawling, disconnected.”

Just like a Chris Cornell song—this Cornell song. Sound and Fury. Big sounds, layered guitar, throbbing base. Utter shit. It sprawls. Every note is drawn out and heavy with distortion. I guess it's technically Audioslave. But anyway you slice it, it's still Cornell's crappy self-indulgent lyrics. My apologies to Tom Morello, but your new band's singer sucks.

I’ve always liked the music in Michael Mann movies. It fits, despite my personal prejudices. I’ve always liked his camera work. The angles he dreams up fit mood at setting perfectly.

I’ve liked every movie Michael Mann has made. Even Ali. As far as I know he has never made a bad movie.

He never lets you forget where you are, who you’re with. He doesn’t waste the medium. He conveys meaning with every shot, every element—setting, music, everything. The little slider on the Plexiglas divider that separates the front and back seat of Max’ cab is always open, but Mann never shoots Cruise or Jamie Foxx through the hole. The glass is always in the way. It’s scratched, it has papers taped to it, there are fares posted. You only see the back of Foxx’ head, Cruise’s eyes. The characters are almost always obscured. When Mann tracks the cab, though, it’s usually from 100 stories directly above.

Disconnected.

Like LA, like Max, like the killer in the back seat.

Michael Mann makes movies the way Henry James wrote books, with obsessive attention to psychological details.

I hate Henry James. I might have mentioned that I like Michael Mann. James plods along, droning endlessly, obsessing over details, psychic minutia. Mann is obsessive too, but he doesn’t have the luxury of plodding along.

Cinema has a built-in metronome to deal with that.

Mann understands the pacing necessary to keep an action movie afloat. He manages to work in all the important stuff wherever he can find a moment. Revelatory glances are exchanged through gun fire. Max has a weird facial tick that always shows itself just before the camera cuts away. Mann puts this stuff in knowing you’ll miss a lot, but hoping that you’ll notice enough. That’s brave and elevates the script above formula.

It’s a familiar formula.

Cruise’s Vincent is one part Tyler Durden, one part T-1000 with a little cheeky Nihilism to keep the dialogue hip. He's the archetypal post-modern killer-philosopher.

Max has a back story that is similar to the 7/11 clerk that Brad Pitt and Edward Norton threaten to kill in Fight Club. He has dreams, but his life is on repeat. Vincent saves him from that.

Vincent kills a lot of people, but in a perverse way gives Max his life back.

Mark Ruffalo has been in every third movie I’ve seen this year. That’s an amazing feat in itself. He’s becoming one of my favorite character actors. He’s very good at transforming himself. This time he's the Latino cop who thinks there might be more going on than meets the eye.

His Detective Fanning is really close to fitting all the pieces together the whole movie. It takes a while, but he eventually gets it. Then just as he gets it, he gets it.

When almost every big budget motion picture is a thriller, all you can really ask from a director and screen writer working in that cramped intellectual space is that they try and kill off characters in unique ways at unexpected times.

Collateral gets high marks for both of those things. That it also manages Max' growth and dreams in very human terms makes a very satisfying experience.

As I said before though, this is essentially a movie of archetypal characters. Max is too human for his own good, Vincent is godlike. In the end it's a struggle against stasis--"Improvisation, Evolution, the I Ching"--it's about breaking free of the tethers that keep life in a holding pattern.

The one who does survives the night and gets the girl.

All in all it’s a great movie and Jamie Foxx does an amazing job. I got home and crossed him off my mental hate list of people who have made a career entertaining white people by doing the black thing.

That's a tough hole to dig yourself out of--just ask Martin Lawrence and Will Smith.

Asking if a Michael Mann movie is good is tautological as far as I'm concerned. "Good" is built in to every Michael Mann movie. This is conditional of course and part of the suspense of every Mann movie is worrying that this new one is going to suck. I call this inevitable downturn "Kevin Spacey Syndrome" (ex 1,2,3).

For one more year I can say with aplomb that Collateral is a Michael Mann movie and mean that it is good without reservation.

Mann goes too far toward the end though, getting very Terminator 2 with his shots of Cruise. It was like he was lifting shots directly from the James Cameron Action Movie Bible. I don't know what he was going for exactly, but I'm sure it wasn't this:

Regarding the blog title, you can tell Eastern Mysticism is hip again in Hollywood when sociopaths begin referring to it in screenplays.

Read the full thing here.