Real journalists don't twitter

Just that (okay, and this and this and this).

Children (and) of (watch) men revisited

I recently considered taking my 10-year-old son to see Watchmen. It was my idea, John Bob hadn't asked. It sounded like the type of movie I might like – intricate plot, deconstruction of a popular genre, dark and violent, visually interesting. Of course John Bob would want to see any superhero movie. I warned him that it might be boring or too violent for a ten-year-old, but he was more than willing to risk it.

I, however, had second thoughts. My tendency is to let the kids do whatever they want, even if I know they won't like it. Often best to learn for oneself, I think. But in practice I'm not so confident that's the best attitude. Once I took my daughter Jane Bob to a haunted golf course at Halloween. There were ample warnings against taking young children and the ticket taker begged me not to do it, but she wanted to and I respected her wishes. It was horrible. She screamed frantically the entire time. Not fun screaming. Absolute terror. It doesn't seem to have caused any long term damage,other than an irrational fear of golf, but nevertheless, I now sometimes think twice before exposing the kids to things everybody says they are too young to see.

So I asked a couple of comic book freaks at work what they thought about taking a 10-year-old to Watchmen. I'd have to be fucking out of my mind, they said. Watchmen is way too violent, has explicit sex and there's a blue guy walking around with his penis swinging for all to see.

A penis. Egads. Actually, I don't care a whit if the kids see nude people. We're not full frontal nudists at home or anything like that, but I don't see anything wrong with the human body. They certainly see enough of it in museums and I think that's great. I admit that I am, however, uncomfortable with watching R-rated sex scenes in popular movies with the kids. I don't think that it does them any harm, unless ten-year-olds are harmed by too much snickering. But still, it's uncomfortable for us all. I'd rather they get their jollies when the parents aren't around and I know they feel the same way. That's my general policy, but given the nature of popular movies, it sometimes happens. No big deal.

But what about the violence? The comic book guys from work said Watchmen is ultra-violent. That can't be good for children. But is it really bad for them? Especially if it scares them? I don't know.

So I asked my imaginary internet friend and superhero connoisseur Chrisv82, who had written an excellent review of Watchmen for advice. He basically said, “it's your kid, whatever.” Just what I needed to hear, so I decided it would be okay to take John Bob. He probably wouldn't like it, but it would be his choice to go and he'd have to live with any resulting nightmares. PTSD, or other forms of acute psychosis. It wouldn't be my fault.

But then a funny thing happened. I realized that I didn't want to see a violent movie. And further still, I didn't want to see another super hero movie.

I've apparently changed a lot. I used to really love ultra-violent films, at least well-written ones. A Clockwork Orange and Natural Born Killers are two of my all-time favorites. I'm not the world's biggest superhero fan, but I read and re-read Marvel comics as a kid and up until now had no problem with the various big budget superhero movies like the X-Men franchise or Ironman.

But I've had enough. No offense to my superhero-loving friends. I don't think anyone is crazy or lowbrow or anything negative for liking them. That story just no longer does anything for me. Yes, I know, the premise is interesting. We all dream about saving the world, or at least saving somebody we love, and the superhero stories give us that vicarious thrill. Watching the genre grow from the morally pure D.C. Comics beginnings through the tortured Marvel mutants, to the post-modern Watchmen psychopaths is interesting as well. I get the iconic-metaphorical aspects of the thing.

But now I find that I prefer the more old fashioned story in which ordinary people become heroes in extraordinary circumstances. Not only is it a better story, but it can be told in so many more creative ways.

I was reminded of that as a result of my tortured decision-making process about taking John Bob to see Watchmen. In order to gauge how he would react to violence , I decided to get Children of Men and watch it with him. That was a film I took Jane Bob to see (I thought it was better on second viewing) when everyone would have said she was too young. I don't think it did her any harm other than an irrational fear of England. Unfortunately though, John Bob had a play date and we watched it without him.

Children of Men is an incredible piece of film making. The cinematography is first rate. It is a nice telling of the realistic superhero formula in which the main character reacts to an extraordinary situation. And it has one of the greatest ultra-violence sequences in film history. From the entrance into the concentration camp to the ending in the boat, it documents an exquisite decent through the seven circles of hell. The ultra-violence is an integral part of an important story. It is beautiful.

Although I understand that Watchmen may attempt to pull off that trick, I find myself skeptical. Will I take John Bob to see it? On that, I'm still pondering.

Ridiculous measures for ridiculous times

You've all probably noticed the news that AIG, possibly the biggest money losing company of all time, which has received $170 billion in taxpayer money, is paying humongous bonuses to its executives who lost such prodigious amounts of cash. It's easy to see that this latest outrage will result in increased calls for government legislation to limit executive compensation.

I don't think that's a good idea. Government has no business dictating pay scales to private companies. No, what we need to do is return to the days of the ridiculously high tax bracket. Bonuses for already wealthy people should be taxed somewhere around 95 percent. And I propose a special tax rate of 110 percent for executive bonuses at taxpayer-funded loser companies. That would end this particular form of looting toot sweet. No doubt they'd find another way to swindle us, but we can at least make it a helluva a lot more difficult.

He was a nice, quiet kid

Mark Ames has an article up on Alternet about the recent killing spree my a nice youn man with an assault rifle in Alabama which left 11 dead. Ames points out that the authorities promised to reveal the killer's motive then stopped talking about it altogether, claiming there was no motive. Ames then speculates that the killings were attributable to Reaganomics and the economic devastation it unleashed on America's middle class. Perhaps, but Ames wrote a book on the subject so it's not surprising he would find it as the root motive for anyone gone postal.

And perhaps that's true, I have little doubt that it's a contributing factor, but I'm not sure that the sorry plight of the working man in bumfuck is something the authorities would bother to cover up. I'm guessing the self-described survivalist who was obviously a gun nut was a big fan of conservative hate radio and Fox News. If I had to bet on why the authorities don't want to talk about the motive, I'd bet it's something to do with names like Limbaugh, Hannity or O'Reilly, the Republican party, right wing religious nuts, right wing bloggers, or some combination of the four whipping up irrational hatred among poor violent idiots across the land.

Just my guess, but since they ain't saying, guesses are all we got.

Notes on photography

This picture is another example of a practice exercise in lieu of any kind of creative idea. This is just a typical stand of trees. If I were to take this photo with a point and shoot, or even a high end color camera, it wouldn't be the least bit interesting. The composition is too busy, the colors uninteresting. Even the eye is likely to see nothing special here. Yet this is a scene of beautiful complexity. My assignment is to capture something of that. Then take that skill and use it for something more important than a picture of trees. In case you haven't figured it out yet, you can click on the photos and see a larger copy. Though the final product will be a 24 x36 on art rag.



In other photo news, I bought a car. People who have never lived in a great walking city like Paris or New York have a lot of trouble understanding how someone can live without a car. Actually, it's quite nice, especially for an artistic type. Apartments are nice in that respect as well. Never having to go to the dmv, to fuck with a fucking mechanic, no traffic jams, no mowing the lawn, no unclogging the drain. All that time just for art. Or drinking. Whatever. Anything beats drudge work.

Anyway, regular readers may have noted that I'm so fucking sick of New York City. Not having a car compounds the misery. Now at least I can get out for a day. Though I like cities, at heart I am a nature boy and suffer exponentially the longer I am cut off. And as a photographer, although it's healthy to be forced to photograph the same places endlessly, to have to struggle to see the beauty in the familiar, it's also nice to be able to see something different.

Of course what you usually end up with are tourist photos like these. Oh well. Tourists go to these places for good reason. And I do actually have a creative idea, but it requires some planning. Maybe I'll show you something in early April.

Notes on photography

These photographs are work from yet another one of those days that I was totally bereft of any creative gumption. As I've mentioned before, on those days I often photograph a color, just to have something to do, kind of like whittling. Today, I chose the ever-popular pink. Go pink.

Rush Limbaugh is a ...

What's the difference between Rush Limbaugh and the Hindenburg? One's a flaming Nazi gasbag, the other is just a dirigible.

I think it's very sad that flaming Nazi gasbags have now officially taken over the Republican party. Whither the moderates? Will they form a third party? Come out of the closet and declare themselves Democrats? Become independents? Or will their families simply put them on a chunk of ice and float them out to meet their lonely fate?

Rush Limbaugh and his wife are divorcing and experts say this could get ugly. I'm confused, are they splitting up or having sex?

I still can't believe no one ever investigated exactly what Limbaugh was doing in the Dominican Republic with a bottle of Viagra. Of course he was whoring around, but with what kind of whores? The D.R. is a mostly black country where sex tourists go to make it with underage girls and boys. So was Limbaugh fucking little black boys? That's what it sounds like. Where's the moral outrage from the Bible belt faction of the party? Or was it just young black girls? The fantasy of every true conservative. To play master and slave with a nubile young thang.

Rush Limbaugh admitted that he is addicted to pain killers and I'm sorry to say, hoagies. Limbaugh blames his addiction on a botched back operation and lesbians.

I have nothing against people using drugs, but dude ratted out his supplier. Dude's a narc. Nazi gasbag racist pedophile narc. And leader of the party of morality, no less.


Update: Oh god, sweet jesus, merciful Rush, I am so sorry, so terribly sorry, I am crawling on my hands and knees, heartbroken if anyone were offended by anything I wrote. I'd be happy to let Rush put on black face and suck my cock while calling me master if only he would forgive me. Please, please, please, forgive me. Please. Forgive. Me. Oh, please. Ho, please. Forgive.

Recommended reading

Haruki Murakami in Israel.

My answer would be this: Namely, that by telling skillful lies - which is to say, by making up fictions that appear to be true - the novelist can bring a truth out to a new location and shine a new light on it. In most cases, it is virtually impossible to grasp a truth in its original form and depict it accurately. This is why we try to grab its tail by luring the truth from its hiding place, transferring it to a fictional location, and replacing it with a fictional form. In order to accomplish this, however, we first have to clarify where the truth lies within us. This is an important qualification for making up good lies.

Hat tip to Jim Johnson.

Apotheosis now

There's an interesting interview with Laurence Fishburne in today's Guardian. What struck me about it was his repeated references to his intelligence.

“I'm black, smart and I don't hide my intelligence, I lead with it. I have very strong opinions about shit and I don't have a problem saying what I think. I'm thoughtful. But you know... I can't play dumb. A smart black guy is confronting for most people. But that's on them, not on me... And they didn't hire me because I'm a black guy but because of my intelligence."

Sounds to me like Fishburne had some bad experiences with people questioning his intelligence. That wouldn't surprise me. Wouldn't surprise me at all.

I don't think that anyone who knows the details of my life could accuse me of being a racist these days. I am about as color blind as one could possibly be without actually being blind. For whatever reason, genetic probably, I just don't spend a lot of time thinking about what people look like. Of course I notice superficialities when I first meet someone, but I quickly forget about those things and interact with people based solely on their personalities.

For example, I used to work with a severely deformed guy. His forehead was gigantic and malformed, each eye roved in a different direction, he was very short and had a hunched back. He was very smart and good at his job, albeit something of an asshole. We often clashed professionally and sometimes it degenerated into unprofessional shouting matches. I remember one day I went off on him in front a very nice, very liberal woman. Afterward, she asked me how I could talk to him like that. He was being an asshole I said, didn't you notice? Well, yea, but still. Still what? You know, his face... What's wrong with his face? I asked, genuinely not understanding what she was talking about. I had long ago forgotten what he looked like. And that's someone with truly freakish abnormalities. When it comes to something as superficial as the shade of one's skin, I forget about it almost immediately (culture is something else, but that's a different story).

But I was not always so blind. I come from a terribly racist time and place and as a child I was guilty of horrific racist behavior. I don't remember if I was actually racist in thought--I don't think so--but I was certainly racist in word and deed. Back then, pretty much all the kids in my little town and my little school were horrible little shits. Everyone tried to hurt everyone else almost all of the time. People were attacked for being black, for being blond, for being rich, for being poor, for being fat, for being skinny. Whatever a person was was cause for ridicule. Hurling racist crap at a black kid was just another way to hurt him. The words didn't have any meaning. Not for me, at least. Of course now I realize those words probably had all too much meaning. Although it no doubt hurt rich blond kids at the time, it's unlikely that being ridiculed for being rich and blond caused any lasting damage. But a black kid being ridiculed for being poor and stupid when that was what so many idiots thought to be the natural order of things was no doubt much more harmful. All of the black kids in my class ended up doing a lot of jail time. Some for stupid crimes like armed robbery and rape. I don't think it's crazy to suspect those outcomes were influenced by their sense of self worth which had to have been severely damaged by all the racist crap they suffered. The lives wasted and lost in that manner are uncountable. It's a terrible tragedy.

Laurence Fishburne is about the same age as me. Given his apparent preoccupation with people knowing he is intelligent, I wouldn't be surprised if he suffered those same kinds of taunts as a child. I'm sure that kind of thing makes some people stronger. Not most though. Not most.

I wonder how much of that is still happening out there in the boonies. It's hard for me to tell. I live in a liberal wonderland where everyone is nice. I know it's not like that everywhere, but I also have no doubt that things have improved significantly. Kids these days can't get away with openly hurling racist epithets in school. They would be counseled. They would be punished. And there are so many more role models now than there were back then, Laurence Fishburne being one of them. With so many incredibly smart, successful people on the tv, only a genuine idiot would believe the old racist tripe about intelligence. Hopefully, we've reached the point where the black kid who is called stupid and inferior realizes the obvious; that it is the racist who is stupid and inferior.

Picture of today

Chuckling copy edits the Times

From one of today's editorials:

By defining Negroes not as human beings but as beasts, the nation rationalized subjugation and cruelty — and justified laws that stripped them of basic human rights.

Should read:

By defining some people not as human beings but as...

The Times, in that context, demonstrates the same mindset as those they criticize, though, granted, not anywhere close to the same degree.

Notes on photography

This was just one of those days when I was sick of New York and totally bereft of creative ideas. On those days I often spend a few hours walking around the cemetery, which is the quietest place in town and has a lot of interesting trees. So rather than do nothing, I worked on photographing the color brown. I don't know what it is about digital cameras, but they typically just don't get brown. I think I made a little progress.

Clowning around

In the space of twelve hours, I came across two references to The Day the Clown Cried, an unfinished and unreleased 1972 film directed by and starring Jerry Lewis--allegedly one of the worst films ever made. In addition to sounding interesting, the clown-in-Nazi-Germany angle reminded me of a real life clown I met who had worked the Nazi circuit back in the day.

The plot synopsis sounds great. A washed up clown in Nazi Germany gets sent to prison for making fun of Hitler. He's so bad he can't even make his fellow prisoners laugh, but the Jewish kids at the camp find him funny and he has a creative rebirth. The Nazi's, of course, don't like this so they simultaneously punish him by sending him to Auschwitz and offer him freedom if he is willing to put the kids in the gas chamber. As he's about to close the door on them, he has an epiphany and joins them in the chamber. He does his shtick as the gas envelopes them. They all die laughing.

Audiences, reportedly, were not so amused. Harry Shearer (Bassist for Spinaltap), said this about it in Spy Magazine:

With most of these kinds of things, you find that the anticipation, or the concept, is better than the thing itself. But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring,in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. Oh My God! - thats all you can say.

The backstory is as interesting as the plot. The financial backer couldn't cover costs, they lost the rights to the script during shooting, and Lewis was going broke and strung out on Percodan the whole time. So it's got an Apocalypse Now on prescription pain killers thing going on as well. It was never released due to the intense loathing it created in everyone who saw it. Lewis, however, considers it his lost masterpiece.

Sounds like my kind of movie. I hope to see it someday.

On a loosely related note, that reminded me of a clown I met in Italy a few years back. I was living in a VW Bus with a friend and his father. We were stuck in Genoa waiting for a boat to North Africa. In those days I would just drive off into random parts of cities to find a place to eat, drink and sleep. That night we ended up camping outside a small bar/restaurant in a working class part of town. Dry red wine was served in earthenware jugs on long wooden tables. The wine was so cheap it was almost free. Spaghetti was the only thing on the menu. The crowd was old and generally hostile towards us. We drank a lot of that wine.

An old man joined us with an empty glass and introduced himself as Tony. We were happy to share. He spoke English and, according to him, seven other languages. He said he had been a circus clown and as the jugs of wine came and went he told us stories of his travels around the world. Of particular interest were stories he told about traveling circuses in Nazi occupied parts of Europe during the war. Of course the chief problem with heavy drinking and storytelling is that it's very difficult to actually remember the stories. Unfortunately, the only thing that's stayed with me is that they were fascinating.

Well, not entirely. By the end of the night we were so drunk Tony had us practically weeping into our glasses. We could barely get our heads up off the table to wipe our eyes and have another drink. At the end, Tony summed up his life by waving his hands toward heaven and declaring(imagine heavy Italian accent): "It is all remember. It is all so beautiful."

It is all remember. It is all so beautiful. Now them's some words I want carved on my tomb. At the time I was thinking I could say the same thing, but then I made the mistake of moving to New York. And yes, now that I think about it, I remember a little dream I had when I fell asleep on the road while driving here. There was a clown, he had buck teeth and a nasally whine, and he was leading me into some kind of room, and some kind of smoke was enveloping us, and I was laughing...

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Kill chimpy, story on page 23

I wasn't bothered by the aroma of racism in the NY Post's infamous cartoon. Cops really did shoot a chimp. The basic premise of the cartoon didn't just come out of right field for no obvious reason. And many on the left have spent the past eight years calling George W. Bush “Chimpy.” If we don't like calling people chimps, we shouldn't call people chimps. And why are so many liberals so quick to identify chimps as blacks? Seems to me there's a lot of unconscious stereotyping going on here.

No, what bothers me is that the chimp representing Obama was lying dead in a pool of blood. It appears to me that the NY Post is calling for Obama's assassination. They certainly don't seem to be perturbed by the possibility. Calling for the president's assasination is bad enough in the best of times, but right now it is an active fantasy of a disturbingly large number of heavily armed Republican nutcases. Why isn't anyone in the media talking about that angle? It seems that there is some kind of unwritten rule against criticizing Republicans for inciting murder.

Hell, it appears there's an unwritten rule against criticizing Republicans for actually committing murder. When Republican Jim Adkisson recently shot up a church with the explicit intention of killing liberals, it made only the smallest ripple in the national news. As much as Bush and his sycophants bragged about the lack of terrorist attacks on American soil since 9/11, you'd think a terrorist attack on American soil would get quite a bit of airplay and analyis. And this Republican terrorist has since published a manifesto aimed at getting other Republicans to go on murderous rampages. Where's the outrage? Can you imagine the reaction if a Democrat shot up a megachurch and called on other Democrats to kill conservatives? Yes you can.

And worse, a Republican terrorist was recently found to have the ingredients for a dirty bomb and he was actively planning to build one. He wasn't even caught by the police. Had his wife not killed him, he may have realized his dream. As far as I know, this has gone completely un-commented on in the media. Think about it. A Republican terrorist actually has radioactive materials and is building a bomb and that gets no media attention. How can that be?

And you have morons like this guy, publicly calling for mass murder and ruminating about what to do with all the dead bodies. Chances are, these guys are little tips of big icebergs. How many of these Republican nutcases are out there plotting.

It's monumentally irresponsible for the media to ignore this groundswell of Republican terrorist activity. Hopefully, the police are doing a better job.We need a national campaign to expose these assholes and pressure their enablers to stop their hateful nonsense. Anyone who advertises with the NY Post, Fox, or any other Murdoch property should be boycotted. Let's see how much money they can make from people who are unashamedly pro-terrorist, who don't hide their desire to assassinate Obama behind lame non-apology apologies.

(Links via Sadly No)

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An illustrative example

I overheard two wingnuts discussing taxes as I was having a coffee at the botanic garden this morning. One said that on a $50 million profit, even a tax increase of one tenth of one percent(at this point he paused and you could see little gears spinning behind his eyes), which would be $500,000, could seriously harm business in this country.

Well, the little gears started spinning behind my eyes. I'm not a math wiz, so I started with 1 percent of $100 equals one dollar, then one percent of $1000 equals $10, until I eventually worked my way up to one tenth of one percent of $50 million is $50,000. That's $50,000 not $500,000.

I think that's just about right. The difference between $50,000 and $500,000 quite tellingly illustrates the vast chasm that separates wingnut beliefs from reality.

Update: Fixed my embarrassing math error. I knew the formula, just got confused about how many zeroes are in $50 million.

Picture of today

Pictures of the day