Sugar

I should probably preface this by saying that I’m pretty much of a geek for baseball movies. I’ve even watched crap like The Rookie, For Love of the Game, and Major League 2. You don’t, however, see baseball art movies very often, especially (mostly) foreign language ones. And so last night - after five commercials and five coming attractions trailers - we got down to the business of a Dominican kid called Sugar, who wanted more than anything to get that call to come play professional baseball in the United States.

The film opens with Sugar playing for A-ball scouts from the States, and learning how to throw a “spike curve,” a type of curve ball where the knuckle of the index finger is bent, generating a break more akin to a knuckleball in degree and timing, though it’s thrown like a standard curveball. He also spends time comparing notes with his friends about guys they know who have been signed and who have gotten that call to go play in the States. Sugar eventually gets the call, but there’s little suspense surrounding this plot point. The telling part of this early segment of the film is how quickly the Dominican kids get called up - and how quickly they can get sent back home when things don’t work out in the United States.

These kids see getting the call to play ball in the States as the ultimate achievement of their dream, but they are in no way prepared for the vagaries of life as a professional athlete - even at the level of A ball. For a Dominican kid who has practically nothing in the world, it’s a huge step up, of course; but there is no guarantee of permanence, no magical door that they pass through into some enchanted kingdom. It’s more like a revolving door, and some of the kids barely set foot on the other side of the door before they get shoved back into it and sent home.

Seeing this happen to one of his closest friends on the Class A Bridgetown (Iowa) Swing is but one of the many things that Sugar has to figure out - largely on his own - how to deal with once he’s gotten the call to go to the States. He also has to figure out how to speak English, how to communicate with the Higgins family (an ultraconservative elderly couple who are, oddly, forward-thinking enough to host a new foreign player every season in their farmhouse), and how to order breakfast at a restaurant.

The breakfast scene was maybe my favorite scene in the movie (a close second is when Sal waves from the bus window), and even though it was tender and heartfelt, it didn’t come off as corny. Sugar meets up with some Dominican kids he knows when he arrives in the States, and there is a scene at a Denny’s-style restaurant where they all sit there not knowing what to say when the waitress asks what they want to eat - until one of the guys asks for French toast. Then everyone else at the table also asks for French toast - in unison. Later, Sugar returns to the same restaurant and tries to order eggs, but doesn’t understand what the waitress means when she asks how he wants them cooked. She tries to explain, but he still does not understand, and so - with apparent frustration and in a defeated voice - he just orders French toast. After he gets his order, the waitress comes back with a plate of eggs - one each in the scrambled, over easy, and sunny side up style - and uses the visual aid to show Sugar what each means. Then she leaves the eggs for him, telling him they are on the house. Sugar’s English improves throughout the film, but he doesn’t become fluent and has difficulty expressing himself even if there are more and more things he can say. We have to read his expressions in his eyes, and it’s clear in this scene that he is both humbled and appreciative when he thanks the waitress for her kind gesture.

And yes, I know - it’s fiction; but unlike temporal causality loops and transporter beams, this kind of fiction shows us things that could actually take place in the real world. And this scene is a good example of what can happen when people care enough about other people to try to bridge the gaps between cultures - rather than just stare at each other across those gaps while scowling and holding a pistol and talking to their god on a two-way radio.

And we’re still in the baseball section of the film. I sort of hate to say anything more about where the story goes, because the way the story unfolds is one of the more captivating things about this very fine film. All stories need some element of conflict as their motive power; and typically, a series of smaller conflicts leads to the resolution of a larger conflict at the story’s climax, before the falling action ties most or all of the ends up in relatively neat little pieces. Sugar doesn’t quite work that way, and is a better film because of it. Those little conflicts are there, but they never erupt. What we see is Sugar himself struggling with how to deal with those conflicts; and the larger conflict is mostly a silent one - that of the cumulative impact on Sugar of all the little near-conflicts.

Like most of the kids in the Dominican who dream of playing baseball in the bigs, Sugar sees (if not always clearly) a specific trajectory that his life must take if he his to achieve his dream; what he does not - or, more likely, cannot - anticipate are all the little things along that trajectory that, when they take place, wind up pushing him farther and farther away from the original trajectory. What he never loses sight of is what he truly wants to be, and ultimately this is the story of a boy who has the courage and strength to adjust to extraordinary circumstances on his own terms - no small feat for a stranger in a strange land.

In addition to how well the story is presented, the movie also gets the baseball parts right. Major League Baseball is nice and all, but it’s not really what baseball is about. To really get what baseball is about, you have to look at the minor leagues, at the nomadic existence these guys live, all for the glory of getting out there under the lights to play for literally hundreds of fans in the sometimes sweltering midsummer Midwestern heat. It ain’t glamorous, but it’s real. While I was writing this little piece, I came across this article on the website for Minor League Baseball. It talks a bit about the movie, but more about how the filmmakers put in the work to get the baseball parts right. Have a go at the article, and then definitely have a go at Sugar - although I’m terribly sorry to say that you’re probably only going to have the one week to do so.

Stupid People Holding Signs

I saw lots of signs today - some while we were downtown, and others on the news tonight. One said, "Repeal Stimulus Or Retire." Another, shown on the news, said, "Obama = Abortion." I kind of feel bad for people who are so stupid that they believe those kinds of things - but mostly I just shake my head in wonder. I might feel worse for them, but the reason they are stupid is that the education system failed them - and the reason the education system failed them is because Republicans prefer not to fund education. They make it sound all patriotic - Republicans believe in smaller government and lower taxes and yadda yadda yadda - but you know what they're really doing, don't you? They're growing their base. By depressing education, Republicans ensure a steady stream of future voters - and wearers of signs.

Lymelife

There is no dearth of films excoriating the supposed virtues both of marriage and of middle class life in the suburbs; and while Lymelife attaches its overarching theme to this wagon train of self-medicated quasi-misanthropy, it makes the choice not to drop us into the usual perfectly idyllic suburb. Though set in New York, on Long Island, we find ourselves not in the posh digs of the Hamptons, nor on the gritty streets of Queens - but somewhere in between. The idea of purgatory is perhaps deliberately emphasized here - the principals are two families containing two failing marriages that have almost, but not quite, gone over the edge. What Lymelife does better than most films of its kind is to show how some of the pieces are picked up once Toonces drives that car off the road. And then there’s that ending...and so Lymelife both is and isn’t the kind of movie that it looks like it’s going to be; it doesn’t break any new ground, but neither is it entirely derivative of the previous contestants in its weight category.

The story is of the Barletts and the Braggs, two middle class families living on Long Island and trying to get through the rough years of early middle age and teenage offspring. Melissa Bragg (Cynthia Nixon) is in real estate and is having an affair with her boss Mickey Bartlett (Alec Baldwin) because her husband Charlie (Timothy Hutton) is letting his Lyme disease get the best of him mentally and emotionally. Mickey’s wife Brenda (Jill Hennessy) knows her husband is cheating, but she turns a blind eye - perhaps having naïvely elevated the concept of nuclear family above all else.

Scott Bartlett (Rory Culkin) and Adrianna Bragg (Emma Roberts) play witness to all of this while trying to navigate the murky waters of late adolescence and also coming to terms with the fact that they, despite (or, yes, perhaps because of) having known each other all their lives, have developed pretty strong feelings for each other. For the most part, they fly under their parents’ radar and do their own thing; and if Adrianna is perhaps a little more tuned in to what’s going on around her, neither of them actually misses all that much of what’s going on with their families.

There are some by-the-numbers scenes from the Coming-Of-Age Playbook, including: Vanquishing The School Bully, The First Kiss, and Losing Your Virginity; and while none of these things is particularly uncommon, they are handled here (particularly the first and third ones) fairly honestly. The sex scene is about as awkward as it can get, and the scene where Scott turns the tables on the school bully is, if not completely authentic, at least as right as the kid in Scott’s shoes would want it to be

Along with these scenes there are some genuine back and forth dialogue scenes between Scott and his brother Jimmy (Rory Culkin’s real-life brother Kieran) who is home from the Army on leave, between Scott and his dad after things between Scott’s parents have come to a head, and between Mickey and Brenda after Brenda discovers that Scott knows Mickey has been bagging Melissa on the side; and while the dialogue oftens rings true, the film doesn’t quite shake the shadow of melodrama. This could be due to the fact that it contains Alec Baldwin, who is a melodrama unto himself; factor in the real-life drama surrounding the infamous phone conversation he had with his daughter, and you start to get a feeling of self-reflexivity coming from this picture - a picture in which Baldwin plays an overbearing, quasi-abusive father.

The film’s tagline is: “The American dream sucks.” I’m pretty sure they were shooting for a send-up of the trappings of middle-class life in modern America, but I’m less sure that they achieve what they set out to do. In this context, the film feels similar to Sunshine Cleaning, which also tried to toe the line between drama and comedy. Lymelife does a better job of it, though - it stays inside the lines and occasionally changes lane after signalling first. Sunshine Cleaning, by contrast, just sort of swerves all over the road and is a danger to other drivers. The only trouble here is that I think Lymelife wants more to play up how ridiculous it is to so relentlessly pursue the American Dream - an objective that would seem to favor comedy as the means to the end. Ultimately, however, the drama weighs on the film, as it becomes clear that while said relentless pursuit is in fact ridiculous, it is also painful; and the film becomes a little too heavy to really achieve its objective. I think this is somewhere between a minor quibble and a major one; and so the film works, just maybe not as well as it might have done.

Jazz Bass Guitarist Wayman Tisdale Dies

I read on the Interwebs today at work that jazz musician Wayman Tisdale had passed away after a two-year battle with bone cancer. The sadness I felt on learning of his passing had absolutely nothing to do with baskebtall - and everything to do with Wayman’s music. After basketball, he turned to bass guitar and eventually cut a number of jazz albums, and also toured in support of those albums. I blogged, back in November 2007, about a show he was to play at the Madame Walker Theatre downtown. I had to work the day he played the Walker back in 2007, but in the blog post, I said that I was going to get around to seeing him one of these days.

And sadly, that never happened. The Star’s report doesn’t say when he stopped touring - their report is almost all about Wayman Tisdale the basketball player. Those journalistic u-turns at the Star gave exactly one sentence to his music career. The report on ESPN’s website - you know, that sports network - gave three paragraphs to his music career. Not that it's news or anything that the Indianapolis Star sucks out loud.

I don’t know enough about jazz to know if his music was what hardcore jazz people consider good jazz or not, but I know enough about myself to know that I liked what I heard - and yes, that was just one report on NPR, but the news on NPR is so much better than the news you get anywhere else because they really get deep into the stories they report. The memory of that one report, and the music they played, made me look at the coming soon posters in the windows of the Walker every time I drove by the theatre. If he did play there again after the show I missed, then I missed his subsequent appearances, too. Should have done a better job of paying attention to that.

His CDs are available at Best Buy stores around town, and a few of them can be purchased on iTunes.

Wendy And Lucy

If you begin at Star Trek, then turn one hundred eighty degrees and start to march, you will wind up eventually at Wendy And Lucy; and in the process of so doing, you will cover nearly the entire spectrum of the cinematic experience. Other than the concept that both are, in fact, movies, there is practically nothing that the two have in common. I don’t want to spend the whole time comparing and contrasting, though - because enough has been said about Star Trek, while I imagine probably very little has been said about Wendy And Lucy.

It’s a very straightforward story about a woman called Wendy who is making her way across the country from Muncie, Indiana, to the west coast, with designs on getting up to Alaska, where she has heard there is good work to be found at a cannery (and if you think that this seems vaguely to echo The Grapes Of Wrath, I agree with you). She has brought with her on the trip a very few belongings, a few hundred dollars she has socked away, and her dog, Lucy; and when her aging Honda breaks down somewhere in Oregon, you don’t exactly get the idea that she was expecting smooth sailing from beginning to end on this trip.

And now I’m conflicted about where to go with this. If I give too much away, or tell you so much about the plot that you decide you don’t want to see the movie, what purpose will I have served? This review should really be just two sentences long, with the first sentence expressing that idea that I liked Wendy And Lucy so much that I have to go back and re-evaluate my 2008 top ten list to account for it; and the second sentence should simply be an imperative directing you, the reader, to Netflix Wendy And Lucy immediately.

Okay...now that I’ve said that, read on only if you want to find out nearly everything that happens. See, the thing is that not a whole lot happens in this movie; but most of the things that do happen have impact - as opposed, say, to Spock and Uhura in the turbolift, which is vaguely amusing but serves no real purpose - and to say that Michelle Williams did a tremendous job with this role without also saying a little bit about how she did such a good job with the role is just unfair.

After the car breaks down, the Walgreen’s security guard tells Wendy that she has to move the car off of the drug store lot - and then he helps her push it to a parking spot on the street and tells her where she can find a nearby grocery store. Williams does it all with her eyes, making no attempt to disguise her weariness at yet another thing that has gone wrong. In one of the few clumsy scenes in the film, she is detained for shoplifting at the grocery store and subsequently arrested. When she finally returns to the grocery store, her beloved dog, which Wendy had tied to a bike rack (“Do you know what the penalty for animal cruelty is in this state?” “No sir, I don’t.” “Well...it’s probably pretty stiff.”), has vanished.

Lucy is pretty much the only thing going right for Wendy, the only positive constant in her life at this point - and so the clumsiness in this scene is derived from how seemingly easily Lucy is lost. Is it possible that this could play out the way it’s depicted? Sure it is...but when you consider how carefully Wendy pays attention to all of the other little details, you have to wonder that she could slip so dreadfully on this biggest detail. That said, though, the story turns on Lucy’s being lost, so it had to be accomplished in some fashion - and it’s certainly less obtrusive a contrivance than, say, arbitrarily creating a time-travel loop in order to relieve yourself of the burden of having to pay attention to the continuity in one previous television series and six previous films.

Wendy spends the rest of the film accomplishing two things - getting her car to a repair shop and finding her dog. And you know what? Now that we get down to it...I don’t have the heart to tell you what happens. It’s so simple...but so powerful...you just have to watch it for yourself. Besides, Ryan and Troy already know what happened, and how many of the rest of you are actually going to watch this picture? (I hope, of course, that all of you will, and that you will tell others about it.)
What’s really great about this movie is that director Kelly Reichardt basically just lets the camera roll, steps aside, and lets us watch what happens to Wendy, lets us see how Wendy observes the world and interacts with it and with the people that she meets along the way. Reichardt doesn’t really employ either foreshadowing or misdirection, but that final scene with Wendy and Lucy still manages to sneak up on you and sort of take your breath away. For all of its bells and whistles, all of the things it manages to do right while going against the grain of the crappy type of movie that it is, Star Trek doesn’t even come to close to evoking the kind of emotional response that you get at the end of Wendy And Lucy.

Go from here, reader, and Netflix Wendy And Lucy immediately. And, if you’re interested, you can read an article about Wiliams and this picture, from a several-months-ago issue of Newsweek, here.

Star Trek

This movie actually works, and I’m a little bit flabbergasted by that fact. It’s possible that most of the young, hip people expected this. I don’t know. They might have known as soon as J.J. Abrams signed up, but I’ve never watched Lost, and I thought Alias sucked. I also think Heroes sucks, so seeing that that show’s bad guy was going to play Spock didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. And the trailer made it clear that this was going to be one of those movies just chock full of explosions and special effects, which are feeble quasi-cinematic devices designed to appeal to the kinds of people who think that John Grisham writes great literature and that the puzzles on Wheel Of Fortune are too hard.

And yet...the movie works. The effects are just effects - there’s nothing special about them. They make you feel sort of like you’re on a safe roller coaster ride. I still don’t know enough about Abrams to say that his direction turned the trick here - and so much of the movie is digital that calling what he did “direction” sort of feels like it cheats all the men and women out there who actually direct movies and don’t just string together a series of Flash animations inside Final Cut Pro while incorrectly believing that what they are doing is creating art.

Zachary Quinto, on the other hand, makes up in one fell swoop for all of the suckage that is Heroes. His Spock is precise and (largely) controlled, and does a tremendous job of toeing the line between Vulcan and human - between repressing emotion and allowing emotion to show. The original television series - and the opening scenes of this new picture - establish that Spock is a character of tremendous ability. What is less emphasized is Spock’s physical power, which Quinto demonstrates with wonderful aplomb in this new film.

The cast, to a person, is pretty solid, even if Karl Urban isn’t quite world-weary enough to be completely convincing as Dr. McCoy; it’s more than made up for in Simon Pegg’s boyish enthusiasm as Scotty, Anton Yelchin’s frenetically cool-headed Chekov - and even in Chris Pine’s smoothly arrogant Kirk. But for all of the ensemble’s excellence, this is Quinto’s - and, by extension, Spock’s - film, and he takes the lead and runs with it. Just to judge by the silly trailer, this might well have been nothing more than an effects-laden indulgence in geeky excess - a prequel made for the sake of making a prequel - but Quinto does an admirable (and dare I say...award-worthy?) job of injecting into this fanboy orgy an element of character-driven acting that elevates this summer popcorn production - if only slightly - above the other films of its ilk.

I don’t think there’s much point in talking about the story - a massive contrivance involving pissed-off Romulans, wormholes, black holes, Red Matter, and time travel in order to create an alternate reality where these versions of the original show’s characters can exist - because there’s no value in trying to make sense of its twists and turns, insofar as the story only exists as a catalyst to get the explosions and witty bon mots underway. (The entire concept of story and plot as the MacGuffin - how’s that for a damning indictment of the typical movie Hollywood churns out between Easter and Labor Day?)

The core of the story is the development of the professional relationship and eventual friendship between Kirk and Spock, which puts the lion’s share of the responsibility for the film’s success on the shoulders of Pine and Quinto; and while I think that Quinto is more than equal to the task, I’m less convinced that Pine succeeds with his task of getting into Kirk’s skin. In his defense, though, it’s a tougher job than Quinto’s getting into Spock’s skin. The original Star Trek series was Kirk’s show, with Spock as the amusing alien sidekick; here, even after Kirk assumes the captaincy of the Enterprise, that hierarchy is subverted - Spock begins the journey as captain of the Federation’s new flagship. And trying to fill the space left by William Shatner’s ego is surely no small feat; and perhaps no one could have done it in such a way that we really get the sense of the TV Kirk - but Pine gets full marks for giving it the old college try.

That leaves just the Shatner Issue to be touched on before closing this little discussion of the new Star Trek film - and I haven’t read enough of the behind-the-scenes stuff to know what the current rumors are concerning why Abrams and company left Shatner out of this film, but I do have a couple of ideas that I will float. The first concerns the story, which is complicated enough to begin with that figuring out how to fit the Kirk from the original reality into the new reality while maintaining any kind of reasonable continuity would surely have brought about insurrection (heh...get it?) during the film’s writing phase.

But that’s pretty geekified. I think the real reason is much simpler - namely, that Shatner’s ego would have doomed the picture. Shatner would have forced his presence on too much of the creative development and would have pushed too hard to make the movie more about Kirk than it is (or ought to be). This film is being billed as a “re-boot” of the Star Trek franchise, a franchise whose specific culture emanates - rightly or wrongly - from Kirk; but to give the franchise a fresh start would require putting the focus on a character other than Kirk. In that case, the...erm, logical...choice would be Spock. Including Shatner would have ruined what they set out to do, and would almost certainly have resulted in a truly horrible movie.

Instead, what they have crafted is summer popcorn fare that is just smart enough to be taken seriously, while also being explosion-y enough to satisfy the nitwits who think that that sort of thing is high art. I don’t think this is a great movie by any stretch of the imagination; but it is much, much better than I thought it was going to be - and much, much better than movies of its kind usually are.

Debunking More World Net Daily Bullshit

E-mail etiquette dictates that you rig messages you send to hide the "to" addresses so that the only address a single recipient sees is his or her own; and while this is generally a sound practice, it can be, from time to time, irksome not to be able to send a blanket reply to all recipients of a particular e-mail. This is especially useful when a blanket e-mail contains false information that should be immediately debunked.

So as a public service, I am providing a link to an article on Snopes that debunks an e-mail going around about supposedly imminent terrorist attacks on the United States. I'm on the fence about Snopes, but more often than not think of them as reliable - largely because the information they provide is sourced, and can therefore be checked for accuracy.

In the Snopes article is a link to a story on World Net Daily - which is absolutely not credible in any way, shape, or form - that tells about the predictions of these imminent terrorist attacks. The problem: the article was posted on World Net Daily in 2005.

I just checked a calendar, and 2005 was four years ago. These terrorist attacks were imminent four years ago - but haven't happened yet. That does not qualify as either imminent or accurate. It does qualify as fear-mongering ultra-conservative right-wing bullshit.

Google the search string "Juval Aviv e-mail," and the Snopes article is the first thing you get. The link to the World Net Daily article is at the bottom of the Snopes page. It takes all of about a minute to debunk this kind of nonsense - practically no effort at all. The debunking was posted on Snopes in January 2009 - which means that five months later there are still people who believe this nonsense enough to pass it on.

Paging Lee Greenwood.

George Rickey: An Evolution

The latest in the city’s ongoing series of public art projects opens officially on Tuesday. George Rickey: An Evolution features ten large pieces sculpted out of stainless steel, installed at various locations arouns the heart of downtown. I don’t recall the extent of the first public art exhibit, the sculptures by Tom Otterness, but of the most recent three, this George Rickey exhibit is easily the most compact, with seven of the ten sculptures in an area bordered by Ohio, Delaware, Washington and Meridian Streets. #8 is just west of Meridian Street on Washington, and the other two are on Maryland, just west of Capitol.

Installation has been ongoing over the last week or so, and I just noticed yesterday that signs had been put up near some of the pieces that have already been installed. A brochure with a map is available at the Artsgarden (and probably elsewhere, but I don’t know for sure - the Central Library?), and further information can be culled from the exhibit’s web site, part of the larger Public Art Indianapolis web site.

The Big List #13

• How I Believe In God

This is a recent post from Roger Ebert’s Journal, the blog where the venerable film critic holds forth on topics both film-related and non-film-related. This one is non-film-related, and is one of the best pieces I have ever read on the nuances of religion and spirituality. Reading Ayn Rand’s philosophy brings one to some of the same questions. Both are refreshing. And given how pervasive religion is in this world, both need to be read by way more people than have actually read them - so support secularization, and pass ‘em on!

• Spirituality, Not Religion, Makes Kids Happy

(From a previous Big List that got started but not finished, an article from LiveScience that was posted (long ago) on MSNBC.) Boy, this is just asking for trouble, isn’t it? A scientific study that tries to say something about religion and spirtuality. We need more items like this and less items about religious extremists flying planes into buildings. So, once again...support secularization, and pass it on!

• Transgendered Mayor May Get Reality Show

Silverton, Oregon, mayor Stu Rasmussen, who is transgendered, may be getting his own reality show. For the most part, reality shows are a pox on television - itself largely a pox on humanity - and need to die immediately; but a reality show that documents (what a novel idea for a non-fictional teleplay!) how a small town in the Pacific Northwest is able to accept that a transgendered person is their mayor might actually be worth watching. The American people need to be more open-minded about nearly everything, and if they must watch television, they should be watching better television.

• Your Tax Dollars At Work!

Federal stimulus money will enable the state of Indiana to hire two thousand young people to work for the Young Hoosiers Conservation Corps this summer. These new state employees will be working with the DNR to beautify our state parks and other recreation areas. DNR has suffered from reduced funding for a long time now, with the result being that fees at parks are going up, while services are going away. The jobs created by these Federal stimulus dollars just might help to stem some of that tide. (Note to George W. Bush: This is what helping people - other than the criminals employed by Halliburton and Blackwater - actually looks like.)

Finally, for a bit of a laugh...

Bradley Whitford Says..."Waterboard Dick!"

Who? Bradley Whitford. Probably best known for playing Josh Lyman on The West Wing, but he was also in Revenge Of The Nerds 2: Nerds In Paradise. He’s also pretty astute in noting that we should waterboard Darth Cheney to get the information he claims to have about how waterboarding worked on high-value detainees. I think it would be fun to go even further than that - and I’m borrowing from George Carlin here, so I promise never to run for Vice President - and dip that fucker in brown gravy and then lock him in a small room with a wolverine who’s high on angel dust.

When Will Then Be Now? Soon!

Not American Violet. Or Lemon Tree. Also not Is Anybody There? Not even freaking Tyson, which is Sony Classics (not that that means anything to anyone). Wouldn't a Michael Caine picture be obvious at a theatre where so much of the clientele actually ponders the pros and cons of signing up for the life insurance that Alex Trebek pimps on daytime TV commercials? How about a movie in which the lead actress - a Palestinian! - won an award for her work from the Israeli Film Academy? Amy heard a piece on NPR last week about the film American Violet, and she was interested, and I'm sure she wasn't the only one. Naturally, she asks me if I think it will play Indianapolis, and what do I have to tell her? "Well, gee, if more people in New York had gone to see it..."

SNIKT!

NIH Draft Guidelines For Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research Funding

As you may have heard, President Obama overturned the restrictive Bush-era “policy” - which was really an effective ban - on Federal funding for research on human embryonic stem cells. Yesterday, the National Institutes of Health posted on their web site the list of draft guidelines that they plan to put in place to restrict the use of Federal funds for research on embryonic stem cells.

The guidelines allow Federal funds to be used only on stem cells that come from embryos created for reproductive purposes - and which (though this is not explicitly stated in the guidelines) would otherwise be thrown away. As well, the cells must be donated by the people for whom the embryos were created, and consent must be given at two separate points during the process. The guidelines further stipulate that certain research may not be funded with Federal dollars, even if the cells to be used in the research would otherwise be eligible for Federal funding.

And would you believe - as a hard-core liberal who backs science wholeheartedly - that I think these guidelines are entirely appropriate? It opens up a theoretically endless supply of new stem cells - you don’t imagine that barren women or guys firing blanks are going to stop having fertility treatments, do you? - and eliminates literally every objection that the religious right might have voiced in order to continue to obstruct this important scientific work.

Could the system theoretically be corrupted? Sure it could. After all, it’s being run by Americans with access to government money. Hell, in the current climate you would almost expect for it to be corrupted - but scientists are held to a higher standard than, say, bankers and other greedy scumbags. (They also do more important work, and they do it better, but whatever.) With apologies to Frank Zappa, they’re not in it for the money.

With that said, it is my sincere hope that everyone in the world (not named Palin) will visit the NIH website a week from now (see, especially, the page dedicated to stem cell information) and submit comments in support of these guidelines that will (finally) allow this very important work to begin progressing. According the information posted by the NIH yesterday, a URL will be set up for public comment once the guidelines have been published in the Federal Register, which they expect to happen by the end of next week.

Beyond The Sea

I like Kevin Spacey. I like Bobby Darin, too. Okay...I like “Mack The Knife," and I don't have anything against the concept of Bobby Darin. But man...Beyond The Sea was tough to take. If there were truth in advertising, it would have been called Beyond The Sea: A Hagiographic Musicography. Spacey wore the hats of writer, director, and star in this picture (and he actually sang the songs), and it’s clear from the way Darin is portrayed in the film that Spacey thinks awfully well of him, even when his violent temper is on full display. We’re all of us more than willing not only to forgive, but oftentimes to overlook, the faults of our heroes, and that goes double for Spacey with respect to Darin. It’s even possible that Spacey is trying to absolve Darin of some of those faults by paying such a dazzling homage - complete with new song arrangements and some really fabulous choreography.

There are some nice moments in the first two acts - including when Darin, in brash fashion for a young guy getting his first invite to the club he’s always wanted to play, tells the manager of the Copacabana in Las Vegas that he won’t play the club if the black comedian Darin wants to open for him is barred from opening because of his color; but those moments get lost in the non-stop song-and-dance numbers and in Spacey’s unabashed worship of Darin. By the time the third act rolls around and real life has caught up to Darin’s fantasyland, it’s just not quite enough to redeem the film. It’s all well and good that Darin made an effort to save himself from himself, but the sharp juxtaposition of the rock-and-roll Darin from the first two acts to the beaten down, older Darin in the third act (throughout most of which he looks like an aged version of Napoleon Dynamite’s brother, Kip) is so unbalanced as to be jarring. Now that Spacey has this out of his system, I’m just going to hope that he never, never gets the green light to do it again.

One Billion Apps

I'm not into that whole cell phone thing - something that used to be a good idea and is now pretty much just the height of pretension - but the iPhone isn't bad. It's not quite as old as Jackson, arriving at the end of June 2007 rather than at the beginning, and in those couple of years, users of the iPhone have downloaded close to a billion apps for their adorable little fruit phones. Apple has a countdown ticker (okay, it's counting up, not down - but who ever heard of a "countup?") posted on their website, and they're giving away some spiffy stuff to the person who downloads the billionth app.



I sort of have to wonder, though - is this the kind of excess of capitalism that inspires envy around the world, or the sort of thing that makes people want to enroll in flght school just so they can learn to "fly straight?"

Random Notes On Writing, Movies, And Music

First, I was reading a profile of author Mary Gaitskill last night in Poets & Writers magazine, and I read that her stories and novels tend to be dark and sometimes a bit lurid. The article describes her first story collection, Bad Behavior, as having “caused a sensation in 1988 with its finely wrought portraits of Dexedrine addicts, masochists, call girls, and johns.” I’m all for supporting those things that cause sensations because it’s a helpful part of the process of exterminating conservative thinking. Also, the writing tends to be pretty good (paging Bret Easton Ellis). Turns out that one of the stories in that collection was made into the film Secretary, with James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal (in her first starring role). Never saw the movie, but sort of wanted to - and am even more interested now, though it will have to wait until I get around to reading the story first. (Unfortunately, no link to the story on the PW website.)

Second, for some reason I was thinking about the novel House Of Leaves at work tonight and I looked it up on Wikipedia, just to see what the venerable knowledge base had on what is easily one of the strangest - and yet oddly satisfying - novels I have ever read. Among other things, I found out that the novel’s author, Mark Danielewski, has a sister called Annie Decatur Danielewski, a singer who goes by the stage name of Poe - who had a hit single in the 90s called “Hello.” I loved that song. Pretty random. Pretty cool. Small world, yo.

Third, though there was no link to the Mary Gaitskill profile, the PW website did have a Postcard piece on novelist Tom Perrotta that talks about, among other things, why the main male character in Little Children has a different name in the movie than he does in the novel. There’s also a bit of information on the next film that will be adapted from one of his novels, and which will be directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who helmed Little Miss Sunshine.

Safari 4 Public Beta

I’ve never tried reviewing a piece of software before, so I don’t know exactly how this is going to turn out...but I’m going to have a go at it anyway. Apple recently released a public beta of the newest version of its web browser, Safari. Among the browser’s new features are two worth noting - the new location of the tabs for tabbed browsing, and the Top Sites splash page.



In Safari 4, Apple changed the way tabs are displayed when you enter tabbed browsing mode, moving the tabs from their former place under the bookmark bar (or under the toolbar, if you don’t have the bookmarks bar displayed) to the top of the window. Apple’s stated purpose for the change is to let you see more of the window you’re browsing, reducing the housekeeping clutter at the top of the window by up to one-third. It’s a lttle odd to get used to at first, but I didn’t find it off-putting, although some in the Mac community are grumbling about it.

The behavior of the tabs doesn’t change (much): CMD-T opens a new tab; CMD-C closes the current tab; and using the left and right arrow keys while holding down CMD and SHIFT lets you move from tab to tab. The only change is that you have to click on the adjustment triangle in the top right corner of the tab to change the tab’s position - you used to accomplish this by clicking anywhere on the tab and moving the mouse left or right.



The other new feature of note is Top Sites, a graphical splash page that displays the front pages of the sites you visit most often. Click on any of the pages and it swooshes up to fill the window as though you were loading it normally. Top Sites can display images in small, medium, and large sizes - the smaller the image, the more sites fit on the page. Small images lets you see your 24 most-visited sites; medium displays 12; and large shows 6. If one of the images has the top right corner peeled back to show a blue background with a white star, that means the site has been updated since you last visited. An edit button at the bottom of the page lets you delete any of the displayed images (the remaining images all move up one spot and the next site in line assumes the last position). Click on the Search History button and you can see your most recently visited sites in Cover Flow format, just like iTunes lets you view songs by cover art, sort of like fanning through songs in a juke box.

I do have a few minor quibbles with the new browser, though. There’s no longer a button you can push to stop a page in mid-load (although there is a keyboard shortcut to accomplish this), and the advancing blue bar showing page load progress in the address window is gone; but those are honestly very minor quibbles. It’s a solid piece of software, and it even feels a bit zippier than Safari 3. All new browser versions claim that they are the fastest browser ever in the whole history of the Internets, but this is the first time I can remember going to a new version of a browser and even having the vaguest sense that it’s actually faster than its predecessor.

Now, like I said, this is the first time I’ve ever written a sort-of review of software, and I’ve only been using the new public beta for a couple of days, so these are just first impressions, and not meant to be an all-inclusive list of new features. Click here to get more information on the new features from the Safari page on Apple’s website. Safari is a free download available for both Mac and Windows - so even if you haven’t had the good sense to buy a Mac yet, you can still benefit from the excellence of Apple’s software.

This Is What I'm Thinking About (#2)

Here’s another thing that I’m thinking about. I love Netflix. Have I mentioned this before? I know that it’s been around forever and that I was late to the party - although you might as well rename yourself Sisyphus if you want to attempt to catalog how many technology-related parties I’ve been late to - but now that I’ve started using it, I honestly can’t imagine ever going back to a bricks-and-mortar video store.

I just added four movies to my queue that I wanted to see to varying degrees when they came out, but never got around to seeing. I don’t know that I ever would have thought to look for any of these movies at the video store, and that they came to be added to my queue just now is pretty much completely random. The only reason I even loaded the Netflix web page when I did was to see how quickly it loaded in the new public beta version of Safari 4, which I downloaded and installed earlier today. (Initial reaction: I like the new browser, and the much-maligned new feature, which has the tabs for tabbed browsing positioned at the top of the window rather than below the toolbar, doesn’t bother me at all.)

So anyway...I loaded Netflix, logged in, and found that it did, in fact, load pretty quickly. For no good reason, other than that I was there, I arrowed down the page to see what the wacky movie gurus at Netflix were currently thinking I would be interested in, and somewhere down the page was Gia, with Angelina Jolie. Never saw it, but remember hearing about it because much of it featured Angelina Jolie naked. Never would have occurred to me to rent at a video store because I always go to the video store with Amy, and it’s not her kind of movie; but with Netflix, it’s easier to watch movies that Amy wouldn’t want to watch because I can keep them as long as I need to in order to fit them in after she’s gone to bed or in the afternoons on Tuesdays and Wednesdays when I’m watching Jackson. In this way, I’ve already managed, in less than a year, to catch about two dozen pictures I wanted to see when they came out but somehow managed to miss.

I added Gia, and then saw Girl, Interrupted in the overlay that popped up, showing me movies most like Gia. Again, never saw it but sort of wanted to - even though I read the book and didn’t think it was anything special. Added that, too. Somewhere in there, I also came across Bringing Out The Dead and Corpse Bride and added those. Not sure if Amy will want to watch any of them - okay, I know she won’t want to watch the Scorsese, but then I can’t think of any of his movies that she would want to watch, other than maybe The Age Of Innocence - but I do know for sure that I might never have thought to rent any of them at a video store.

And yeah, this isn’t much more than a testimonial for Netflix, but it was on my mind so I thought I would write about it. I’ve been making a conscous effort to do a lot more writing of late, including daily entries in my journal and around a page a day on the current version of the phantom novel I’ve been working on for...um, yeah, a long fucking time now. And hey...if I can sell someone on the joys of Netflix, there’s that as a bonus, too.

New Photos #4

Saturday was an excellent day for being out and about and we took advantage of that excellence twice during the day - first going to the zoo in the morning and then going to Southeastway Park for a picnic later in the afternoon. Amy’s punk ass brother and his fiancée were supposed to go with us, but begged off at the last minute, so it was just the three of us, and a boatload of food. Nothing particularly photo-worthy took place at the park during the picnic, so there are just two sets of photos from the zoo. The first set has various shots of Jackson wandering about the zoo, feeding the giraffe, and eating lunch. The second set contains various shots of the new Alaskan brown bear cubs hamming it up for the onlookers.

The pictures of the bears might look a little bit odd, and if they do it’s because they were taken from behind glass. The bear exhibit has a space where you can see the bears directly and also a space where you can watch from behind glass while they frolic in the water. They were frolicking while we were there, and I was only able to get a look at them from behind the glass. Hopefully the pictures are adequate.

This Is What I'm Thinking About

In Shane's most recent post over there at his Experiment In Living, he mentioned that it seemed like his friends weren't blogging much anymore, and that he missed knowing what was going on in their lives and what they were thinking. The last bit of that got me thinking...about simply blogging about the things one is thinking at any given moment. The idea stuck with me, and I had some thoughts while I was out taking a walk today, and I decided to write them down and blog them out. So here we go...

Just walking...downtown walking on a nearly perfect spring afternoon...across Jackson Street to look up and to the left at the imposing but elegant face of the Grand Hall at Union Station...then across Illinois to look above Pan Am Plaza at the hole in the skyline where the Hoosier Dome used to be...and then a bit later, Illinois Street again, this time at Vermont and passing Acapulco Joe's with its rich smells of onions and corn tortillas heavy in the air, almost its own atmosphere...and then walking down into the grass at the American Legion Mall, the library ahead of me and the city's skyline behind as I head toward where I think that new Moroccan restaurant is, somewhere near the Murat (it's actually on Ft. Wayne Avenue, one side of the triangle that comes to a point where Ft. Wayne meets North and Pennsylvania Streets, nearer the Federal Building than the Murat), and I change my mind about going in to get a menu when I realize that it's more of a sit-down place than a take-out place...and then I cross Pennsylvania and sit down at one of the picnic tables in Obelisk Square to write all of this down so I won't forget. And I think later tonight I may go to the Chatterbox and have a beer. Yeah...

Sunshine Cleaning

What to say about Sunshine Cleaning...well, it’s not Little Miss Sunshine 2, which I’m afraid a lot of people who are coming to see it this weekend are thinking it’s going to be. It’s not being billed as a follow-up to the 2006 Best Pitcure nominee, but it has enough in common with the earlier picture to trade on both its quality and its success. It is, however, being billed as a comedy, which is somewhat disingenuous because comedies are funny and this movie isn’t; it’s not entirely devoid of humor, but what humor there is takes up all of about two minutes and thirty seconds (and it’s no coincidence that that’s about how long your average movie trailer is).

The rest of the not quite two hours is sort of a study in various forms of self-pity, and to say that the material is dark is to understate things a bit. It certainly tries to be funny, and there is a solid cast of characters (in the metaphorical sense); but quirky ensemble putting on a black comedy is Coen Brothers territory, and they have set the bar so high that most other attempts at the form - including Sunshine Cleaning - wind up looking like cheap imitations.

See...there’s Rose (Amy Adams), a single mother who doesn’t make enough money working as a maid - she cleans the houses of her classmates from the high school cheerleading days, all of whom apparently majored in gold-digging - to put her son through private school. Why does the son need private school? Seems that the administrators at the public school have wearied of the little boy’s increasingly bizarre pattern of behavior, including a spate of licking that culminated with him licking the teacher’s leg. So Rose gets a tip, from ex-boyfriend turned cop Mac (Steve Zahn, who appears to be on the Roger Clemens “workout” program), who is married to someone else but is still bagging Rose on the side, that she should go into crime scene cleanup, a potentially lucrative field experiencing a growth phase.

She ropes her sister Norah (Emily Blunt, wearing a lot of the things that Axl Rose apparently chose not to wear in the video for “Welcome To The Jungle”) into the fray, which is convenient because Norah can’t keep a job for very long and needs money in order to...well, buy eyeliner, I suppose. Also, because with only one girl, the scene where they take the mattress out to the dumpster would not have been as funny. Now, as these two dynamic bringers of light to the dark times in people’s lives find out, you can’t just dispose of biohazards in the dumpster. Actual quote from the movie: “Who knew?” But, with hard work and a bit of luck, they get better at what they do...and they grow as people...and they get in touch with their inner demons.

The girls have had a hard time over the years coping with the death of their mother, by suicide, when they were very young - old enough to understand what had happened, but too young to understand why. Some of the best scenes in the movie have Norah and Rose’s son Oscar trying in their own ways to make sense of death: Norah goes “trestling" (climbing the support posts of a train trestle all the way to the top and hanging there while the train passes) and thinks about death as the train hurtles by, and Rose’s son Oscar uses a CB radio to try talk to whatever god he made up to make himself feel less insecure about being alive. There’s a lot of existential potential in those scenes, but they are brief and the potential is wasted.

The filmmakers might have taken the road less traveled, down philosophical and expository paths, giving these two talented actresses a real chance to flex their chops; but instead, they referred to their film school Screenwriting 101 notebooks and invented a major crisis to force all the little crises to a head (sometimes this is called a “climax”) and then tied up all of the loose ends (except for the interesting cleaning supplies salesman who also builds model airplanes and only has one arm) into a neat little ball that is supposed to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside (sometimes this is called “falling action”). And would you honestly believe that they work a cute little kitten into the ending, so as to all but ensure that warm, fuzzy feeling?

It’s such a crappy third act that if David Fincher had directed it and cast Brad PItt as the guy with one arm, you can bet it would be up for about half a dozen Oscars next year, including Best Visual Effects, just for making Brad’s arm disappear. If this film had actually been a comedy, the third act might have worked, even with the kitten included; but it just never got its funny legs under the morbid center of its dark, dramatic heart. Ultimately, it plays like a movie that isn’t sure if it wants to be serious or funny, and winds up spending so much time trying to be a bit of both that it never manages to do either one very well for very long.

Moscow, Belgium (#2)

Well, Chuck, he’s a boorish lout who drives a truck and wants to avoid involving the police when he has a fender bender, and she’s a mother of three who’s letting her husband sleep with someone half his age because she’s sure he’ll come back eventually. Let’s give a warm welcome to Johnny and Matty!

Moscow, Belgium is the story of two people who have been beaten almost all the way down, either by the world or by their own choices - you make the call! Of course, there’s an irony here, too, of sorts: if not for those choices that have beaten them down, their initial interaction after a parkig lot fender bender could not have happened the way that it did, and they never would have had the chance to know each other the way they wound up knowing each other.

Is it love, ultimately? Again...you make the call! It looks like it at first, then there’s a blowout, and sort of a reconciliation by the end. But hey now, wait, damnit, you’re spoiling it! Maybe, but you’re not going to watch it anyway. There are exactly two people I know of who read this blog that might wind up seeing this picture - and I’d say that the chances are about 75% that one or both of them will have seen it by the time they read this post. Most of the rest will not have heard of it - and probably wouldn’t see it anyway, ‘cause it ain’t in American.

Doesn’t need to be, either, and not because love is universal, or any fluffy romantic nonsense like that. For the first couple of acts, you can pretty much get what they’re saying just by watching the way they say it. No one’s trying to forge peace in the Middle East or make sense of a government bailout program here - it’s just two people who meet by chance, in a way that is not conducive to a budding friendship, never mind the possibility of eventually bumping uglies.

And yet that friendship manages to emerge, and it does so because the two characters are lonely, trapped in their own lives, so far removed from the dreams of youth that they’ve not only put their dreams on the back burner, they’ve turned off the stove and don’t even bother getting up to go into the kitchen very much anymore. You can see that loneliness in their eyes, in the crushing air of fatigue that they wear like an IV drip, in the tedium of daily tasks repeated over and over and over again.

There’s nothing special about watching two unlikely friends take the first steps in that unlikely friendship. What’s unique about Moscow, Belgium is its authenticity. Matty screams at Johnny in the parking lot after the fender bender because she’s got a lot of pent-up frustration, and when she tells him that he’s blind to the world up there in the cab of his truck, she means it one way and he takes it in a completely different way. Later, he shows up at her apartment to fix the trunk of her car, and her kids shout down from the balcony, aganist mom’s wishes, to tell him which car is hers. Matty wants nothing to do with him, but he manages to fix her car - so she invites him to stay for dinner. As the film progresses, the excellent screenplay fills in the details as the characters get to know each other.

Only the climactic scene in (and then out in front of) the pub near the end of the film feels forced and a little convoluted; everything else is organic and true (and by the end, you can almost imagine that the convoluted pub scene might just have been necessary after all), bolstered by excellent pacing in the direction and tremendous acting by Barbara Sarafian and Jurgen Delnaet, as Matty and Johnny, respectively.

Moscow, Belgium is not an especially challenging film, but it is an immensely satisfying one, a real art film in what is, anymore, a sea of mid-major adaptations of obscure novels. It’s beautiful and charming in such amazingly unexpected ways. Don’t let the goofy-looking one-sheet fool you (that is not, in fact, Chris Elliott with red hair) - this one’s a winner.

Four Seasons Restaurant

We had the chance to have brunch this afternoon because I didn’t have to go in to work until two, so we rolled by Four Seasons Restaurant on Shadeland Avenue, just south of 21st Street. Had there been an emphasis on pancakes, this might well have been a carbon copy of the Blueberry Hill Pancake House, which occupies a former Perkins space on East Washington Street, near I-465. The décor - pastels and formica - is the same, and the staff appeared interchangeable, right down to the ethnic-looking fellow who leaned on a counter and just seemed to be watching everything.

Amy started with lemon chicken rice soup, which came out looking thick and opaque, though she said it was pretty good. Ever the geek for Greek, she went for the gyro sandwich, which came out exactly like you expect a gyro to come out - quite a lot of roasted lamb and beef rolled in pita bread with tomatoes, onions, and tzaziki on the side. This one was so full that she had to eat it with a fork, and the meat had the rich, aromatic flavor that good gyro meat should have - though I’ll be a coal miner’s daughter if it’s actually prepared in house.

I had a ham and Swiss omelette with onions (hash browns and whole wheat toast on the side), which was perfectly adequate without being at all remarkable. The Swiss cheese, unfortunately, was the processed cheese with “Swiss flavor” - a bush league move that was pretty disappointing. Pasteurized process cheese food has no place in any resepctable restaurant; but then again, this is not the kind of place that aspires to greatness.

Places like Four Seasons and Blueberry Hill Pancake House are perfectly fine if you want something simple and if you don’t mind eating where your food is just assembled, rather than prepared. It’s one of those places that you try once to see what it’s like, and you realize about halfway through your meal that there’s just no good reason ever to come back. It’s not that it’s actively bad - it’s just that there’s nothing you can get here that you can’t better at one of a half dozen or so other places in town.

Moscow, Belgium (#1)

Stop what you're doing, right this second, and go see Moscow, Belgium. Seriously. You probably only have a week, and who knows if you'll ever get around to adding it to your Netflix queue? Go, get a couple of beers (May I suggest the Beer of the Month, Leinenkugel's Classic Amber?), and have a go at this remarkable little film.

Jonathan Demme And Jenny Lumet On Rachel Getting Married

I was listening to NPR's Fresh Air on the way to work today and caught part of an interview with director Jonathan Demme and screenwriter Jenny Lumet, who worked together on last year's remarkable Rachel Getting Married. The interview originally aired back in October, but this was the first time I heard it. I didn't catch the whole thing, but you can listen to it on Fresh Air's website here. Two of the things they touched on were the use of handheld cameras (which caused a lot of problems when we played the film) and the dishwasher loading competition, which apparently had its roots in Lumet's childhood, when her dad and director Bob Fosse got into an argument after dinner at Lumet's house one night and then spent an hour and a half loading and unloading the dishwasher.

I'm posting this at work and don't want to spend too much time on it, so I'll come back to it later and add links - because I just know that you're dying for more things to click in my posts.

Chin National Day 2009 - Pictures And Links

So it took practically a month, but here are some pictures from Chin National Day 2009, along with a link to the website of the Chin People Of Indianapolis, which contains lots of other links to various information and resources concerning the Burmese refugees who are here in Indianapolis and the people of Chin State generally. Though not top five, one of the better non-fiction books I read last year was called The Iron Road: A Stand For Truth And Democracy In Burma, by James Mawdsley, an English fellow who did time - literally - in Burma for advocating freedom and attempting to petition the "government," on behalf of the Burmese people, for a redress of grievances. Last but not least is a link to a documentary I just read about today at work, called Burma VJ, a Danish film which doesn't release theatrically until 2010 but is currently doing the festival circuit, both in the United States and abroad.

New Photos #3

Okay, at long last here are some recent photos of Jackson. The first set just has a few photos of Jackson mugging for the camera, chewing on a hat, and playing in a big cardboard box. Buy all the toys you want for your little critters, and they'll still wind up having the most fun with empty cardboard cartons and big stacks of Pizza Express cups. The second set is from one part of an excellent walk along the downtown canal last month. (The largest part of why there have been so few new photos of Jackson is that we did not get out and about much on Sunday afternoons this winter because Jackson tended to get very cranky very quickly, a situation that does not make for good times out on the town. On this particular day, however, he was in excellent spirits, and we walked a considerable amont of the Canal Walk.) The final set is also part of the walk on the canal. When we walked by the State Museum, Jackson became very interested in the giant mastodont statues just off the sidewalk outside the museum, and he walked over the pebbly gravel and around among them long enough for me to get quite a few pictures. Hopefully, as the weather gets nicer and there are more chances to get out and about, there will be more opportunities to get pictures of Jackson exploring the world.

One...One New Photo! (And A New Computer)

No, really, there are lots and lots of photos from Chin National Day - I just haven't sorted through all of them yet. Also, I was about a week and a half basically disconnected from the Interwebs because of a dying modem. I got a new computer, though, and I'm pretty close to caught up. When I was going through the photos, this one of Jackson made me laugh out loud.



And here's what that new computer looks like:



Among other things, it has not escaped my attention that: an overrated piece of crap won Best Picture; Bobby Jindal made the Republicans look even more ridiculous (the second "rising star" to do so for the GOP in as many tries); the Colts failed to use any of the cap money saved by cutting Marvin Harrison on signing Albert Haynesworth; and that the men's Hoosiers may well post their worst season since World War I. That I have not commented on any of those things has less to do with whether or not they are interesting than with the fact that it's difficult to do much of anything else on the Internets when you're trying to download a 367 megabyte system update with a dial-up modem.

Chin National Day 2009

Somewhere back there in the blog logs I made mention of Chin National Day, a day set aside by the people of Chin State in the southeast Asian country of Burma - “you may know it as Myanmar...but it will always be Burma to me” - to commemorate “national unity, [and] simple truths of freedom, equality, and self-determination.” February 20th, 1948, was the day on which the people of Chin State - located in western Burma - rose up to demand their independence from the British. The Chin people continue to celebrate the anniversary of this important day in their history, and the people of Indiana - particularly on the south side, in Perry Township - are fortunate to have one of the largest populations of Burmese refugees of any city in the United States.

So...after Jackson had his nap Saturday afternoon, we bundled him up and headed down to the Perry Meridian Academy, which is attached to Perry Meridian Middle School, which is down on the south side on the northwest corner of 135 and Stop 11 (although technically I think Stop 11 changes names once you get west of 135). Their gym was packed, almost entirely with Burmese people, and so many of them were happy and smiling and clearly having a very good time. We got into the gym just as the speeches part of the afternoon was ending, so we didn’t stay in our seats for very long. People started clearing out, and we made our way to the cafeteria, where traditional food from Burma was being served.

Amy had a bowl of noodles with bits of hard-boiled egg in a light chicken broth, and I had a bowl of hominy and tripe (yes...tripe) in a thin broth of indeterminate origin. Each bowl also contained a deep-fried, salty cornbread dumpling. Served with these soups was a little bowl with salt, wedges of lime, and a small amount of an extremely spicy seasoning that contained chiles, lemongrass, and cilantro. Say what you will about people from Southeast Asia - they don’t screw around when it comes to heat in their food. The tripe was interesting at first - the texture was something akin to calamari, and it tasted vaguely of beef - but I found Amy’s bowl of noodles and hard-boiled egg more enjoyable in the end. The cornbread dumplings were very good, and the chile mixture (not pictured) was very good - though exremely spicy and not for the faint of heart.




We repaired back to the gym after we ate and were treated to a fashion show consisting of girls in elaborate dresses and boys in fancy sport coats parading up and down the stage; a dance in which the girls got to display some fancy footwork as they danced around and over a series of long poles that boys, situated at each end, were tapping rhythmically on the floor; and finally some wrestling, where the two opponents each had to take hold of a belt worn by the other and attempt to effect a takedown. Unfortunately, each takedown brought cheers and whistles from the sizable crowd, and all the noise scared poor little Jackson, so we had to beat a hasty retreat before the wrestling got too far along.

It was a little bit hot and cramped in the gym, with that many people, but it was still a lot of fun. I took about a million pictures, but my modem isn’t working and playing well with others and my Internet connection has been sketchy for the last couple of weeks, so I may not be able to post the pictures until I pick up my new laptop and get it set up and connected to the Interwebs on Monday night. However, I can post a link to a recent story in Poets & Writers magazine, about the state of literature in Burma; it's not a pretty picture. On a short list of the poorest countries with the most oppressed people on Earth, Burma would be at or near the top. Every word of every page of printed matter in Burma must be approved by government censors. There can be no defense of a such a policy, nor of an illegitimate faux governmental entity that supports such a policy. Quite a lot of Burmese people shook my hand and thanked me for coming to the Chin National Day celebration on Saturday - but we are the ones who should be thanking them, for having the courage still to smile, and to share their culture with the uncultured people of Indiana, who desperately need all the lessons they can get in diversity and tolerance.

And we can hope that humanity will continue to evolve, to the point that eventually the pox that is conservative thinking will be exterminated. Only then will freedom ring, and perhaps one day Myanmar will become Burma once again.

The Wrestler

Finally got around to seeing Darren Aronofsky’s latest picture tonight after work, and it’s got me thinking about two other pictures - Aronofsky’s own Requiem For A Dream - to which The Wrestler bears some uncanny thematic similarities - and last year’s There Will Be Blood, from P.T. Anderson, which is similar to Aronofsky’s latest in that it’s largely a showcase for one particular actor.

The story is of Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke, in a role that’s probably going to win him an Oscar Sunday night), a professional wrestler who is past even the twilight of his career. Twenty years ago, he headlined Madison Square Garden in a now-legendary match against the Ayatollah - and now he’s making the rounds of east coast regional circuits and contemplating a nostalgic repeat of his classic match with the Ayatollah.

(There are echoes here of the real-life match between Hulk Hogan and the Iron Sheik from back in the eighties. Hogan won the match, and the WWF title - and thereby set the stage for the massive explosion of popularity that professional wrestling enjoyed in the late eighties and early nineties, and which it is still enjoying, to a somewhat lesser degree, today.)

Then he has a heart attack, and now it’s time to take stock of his life and finally look full in the face all of the important things he has, to varying degrees, been ignoring all his life as he tried - and failed - to make a living in the ring. This consists primarily of making peace with his estranged daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood) and making it known to the stripper, Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), he’s in love with that he is, in fact, in love with her.

All of it weighs on Randy, and Rourke brings this off brilliantly, with heavy, sad eyes, weary voice, and an air of resignation that hangs over him like a shroud. He goes through the motions of getting a job, calling on his daughter, and making awkward advances toward Cassidy; but the effort is Sisyphian, especially with respect to Stephanie. He manages to break through the space between their lives by buying her a present that Cassidy helps pick out - but then he misses a dinner date that he makes with her because he winds up partying with a girl he meets after Cassidy rejects one of his advances.

If the basic argument here sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same thing that happened to the Jared Leto and Marlon Wayans characters in Requiem For A Dream. Their addiction was smack - Randy’s is wrestling. It’s all he is, all he knows how to be - and the cruel irony is that the heart attack didn’t kill him; instead, it damaged him just enough to make him realize that everything he gave up for wrestling is all that he has left. Unfortunately, he doesn’t know what to do with any of it, and we get to watch the inexorable pull of the ring as he runs into more and more dead ends in his post-wrestling life. (Actually, that’s not exactly true - he does know what to do with all of those things he has now instead of wrestling; he just doesn’t know how to do any of them very well.)

Much of the film plays like a documentary, which I think is due to three major factors. The first is the film’s style - grainy photography, close shots, and handheld cameras (though not nearly as pervasive - nor as jarring - as those employed in Rachel Getting Married) that foster a feeling of gritty realism. The second is the virtually complete lack of melodrama - these are just real people trying to do the best they can, and failing more often than not. None of the characters in this film have any delusions of grandeur - nor are they made to appear as though they do when they obviously do not. The third, of course, is the ghost of Rourke’s own checkered past, which includes, most importantly, a largely unrealized potential as an actor. To the extent that this film works, I don’t think it’s unfair to say that it could not have worked without someone such as Rourke playing the lead.

That being said, however, the film is not without its flaws - the ending being foremost among them. (And this from someone who was a-okay with the abrupt ending of No Country For Old Men.) It’s pretty clear what’s going to happen to Randy, but waiting there in the wings - literally - is Cassidy, who is ultimately a stronger character than Randy because she does what he is unable to do. She walks off the stage in the middle of her set and goes to see Randy in his rematch with the Ayatollah - and in doing so breaks out of the funk that has become her own life. It could be argued that Randy remains true to himself by going back to wresting, even though he knows it will probably kill him; but the self to which he remains true is an incomplete, lesser self - and he chooses to remain that lesser self, despite the fact that his efforts to rise above it are sincere, if not motivated by his own designs.

I’m not arguing that there should have been a happy ending - nor even that there should have been a more complete, which is to say resolved, ending; but I think that Cassidy gets short shrift being left in the background as Randy takes to the ring. Marisa Tomei is up for an Oscar for this role, though she won’t win; and I don’t know that an extra scene at the end, giving a sense of where her character goes next, would have been enough to win a second surprising Oscar for her - but it would have gone a long way toward making The Wrestler a more satisfying film.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

I’m not an expert when it comes to Woody Allen movies; I can’t identify the line of demarcation between his classic films and the slightly goofier things he’s been doing lately. I know that I’ve only seen two of the classic movies (although one of them might be the classic Woody Allen Movie), Husbands And Wives and Manhattan; and I’ve seen a little less than half of the output since Small Time Crooks, including the most recent picture, Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

Not being an expert is the reason that I don’t know the answer to the next question, and so have to ask it: When Mia Farrow and Diane Keaton were to Allen, in their turns, what Edie and her ilk were to Warhol, were they always cast as lighter-than-air quasi-bimbos whose every utterance landed somewhere between banal and idiotic? The reason I ask is that Allen’s latest Superstar, Scarlett Johansson, fits that mold perfectly in both Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Scoop; her observations are only slightly more insightful than the bombshells of wisdom Deanna Troi dropped on the crew of the Enterprise.

It’s almost like Woody Allen doesn’t even take himself seriously anymore, perhaps knowing full well that most of his audience stopped doing so years ago. Apart from the slightly bohemian setting, Vicky Cristina Barcelona might as well be Husbands And Wives Redux, except that Allen has already made all of these points before, and did a better job of it in the previous picture. And yet...I sort of liked VIcky Cristina Barcelona, even though I don’t think it’s all that great a movie.

With all of the other movies out there to Netflix, though, is it even worth the time to hunt and peck through the Woody Allen oeuvre for the gems that might be there (among the ones that are not already well known as gems) - or should I just watch Match Point and call it a day?

Movin' Out

So on Sunday we went to a ballet. No kidding. An honest-to-Darwin ballet, although I think it’s actually billed as a musical; either way, it’s not the kind of thing that I would usually do. On the other hand...this was neither your usual musical nor your usual ballet - I don’t think. My experience with musicals, since high school ended, has been fairly limited, and pretty much begins and ends with The Sound Of Music, which is the only musical that I actually enjoy.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Murat - a few years back now, that wacky Twlya Tharp decided she was going to put together a stage production (the production notes say that the thing was “conceived by” Twyla Tharp - okay) that revolved around some of the better known “characters” in Billy Joel’s songs. I think it takes a pretty good songwriter to craft songs that actually make you think of the subjects of those songs as characters.

Right off the top of my head, I’m having trouble thinking of many other songwriters whose songs make me think of characters - or characters that seem as real as the characters in Billy Joel songs. Some Bob Dylan songs leap to mind - probably most people would agree with “Tangled Up In Blue” and “Hurricane” as the most notable examples, although since the latter is about real people I sort of discount it; and there are some Beatles songs that certainly fit the bill. Actually, there are lots of Beatles songs that fit the bill - “Eleanor Rigby,” “Ob La Di, Ob La Da,” “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” - although I think the best example has to be “Rocky Raccoon.”

Discounting “Hurricane,” the only song in that list that has characters that feel remotely real, in the tangible sense of the word, is “Tangled Up In Blue.” But Anthony working in the grocery store...saving his pennies for someday? Brenda and Eddie, who had had it already by the summer of seventy-five? Virginia, who is told that it’s better to laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints because the sinners are much more fun?

Yeah, those cats feel real to me. Does it have anything to do with the fact that Billy Joel is a New Yorker? Damn straight it does. (Due respect to Bob Dylan, but he ain’t a New Yorker. You gotta be born and raised on those mean streets. Perhaps I am mistaken and someone can correct me...but I don’t operate under the assumption that there are any mean streets in Hibbing, Minnesota.) I was born right here in Indianapolis, Indiana, but there is something about New York that resonates in my soul. My Dad is from Bayonne, New Jersey, which is close to New York, though not of it. Some kind of yen for the Big Apple probably passed through the blood. The fondness for beer certainly did.

But anyway...it’s not just the New York connection. There’s also a college connection. Everybody can think back to college and probably think right away of three or four songs - maybe even three or four albums - that form the beginning of the soundtrack of their college years (and if that’s not a Rob Gordon “all time top five” blog post waiting to happen, I’m sure I don’t know what is). One of those albums for me (while technically a compilation and not a real album) is the first two volumes of Billy Joel’s greatest hits. (Yes, there are two new songs on the album. Don’t even get me started on what a bunch of shit it is to put one or two new songs on a greatest hits package.)

I have a somewhat bizarrely selective memory. I think I recall staying up all night (or most of the night) in college once while Billy Joel songs played in the background from one or the other of those CDs. I remember for sure playing hearts with Heather and Jason and Kristen in Kristen’s basement and at some point hearing the song “Don’t Ask Me Why.” The jazz band in high school played “Just The Way You Are” one year. I still think it’s the most overrated Billy Joel song ever. Storm Front and its quasi-megahit “We Didn’t Start The Fire” closed out the 80s just as I was really beginning to get into pop music. (And that’s pop as in “short for popular,” not the bubblegum crap, although I did like some of that back then. But let’s not dwell on that - nor on the fact that Debbie Gibson was my first concert.)

Billy Joel was also the back end of a double-concert weekend in the spring of my freshman year in college. Both shows were at Market Square Arena, and it’s still the only time I’ve ever gone to back-to-back concerts. The front end of that weekend was Rush, touring to support Counterparts. Best. Show. Ever. Also at that Billy Joel show? Amy, though I didn’t know her yet and had only even met her once to that point. She was in the front row with one of her friends from college. Why? Billy Joel apparently has - or had - a lackey who walks the crowd before the show and gives front row tickets to hotties. Two girls from the dining hall I worked at that year were also at that show and were in the front row.

One last Billy Joel memory...the Grammy awards (I think) for whichever year he would have been invited to play “The River Of Dreams.” There’s a long pause in the song between the second verse and the third chorus, and he held that pause for at least twice as long when he played on the show, and muttered into the microphone, “Valuable advertising time going by...valuable advertising time going by...valuable advertising time going by.”

But I digress. Several paragraphs ago, this was about going to the ballet on Sunday. By now, of course, you’ve puzzled out the fact that the show in question is “Movin’ Out,” which played the Murat this past weekend. It was a sort-of Valentine’s Day present for Amy. We don’t really do presents much anymore, at least not of the material kind. I have more than enough “stuff,” although I can never seem to get rid of any of it. I always tell myself that I’m going to read some of the books on my shelves and then sell or donate them...and yet the stack of library books next to my reading chair is always about a foot high.

Anyway...I had heard that “Movin’ Out” would be in town, but I assumed that tickets would be too expensive, or gone right away - the show was huge on Broadway and is on at least its second tour across the country. But when I checked Livemaster or Nationtickets - or what the hell ever - a couple of weeks ago, I discovered that both of those assumptions were wrong. Tickets were both available, and relatively cheap, at twenty-five bucks. That sealed the deal.

Unfortunately, I don’t have enough - which is to say any - experience with musicals or ballets of the live variety to really be able to review the production, except to say that I quite liked it. It’s a ballet in the technical sense because it’s a story acted out by players who don’t actually recite any lines; on the other hand, all of the musical numbers are actual songs sung by a band that was situated on a stage elevated above and slightly behind the dancers on the actual stage.

The story started out with Brenda and Eddie from “Scenes From An Italian Restaurant,” who got married and then divorced, as they did in the song; from there Brenda hooks up with Tony from “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song),” and there are a couple of characters called James and Judy who are also a couple (I think) and moved in the same crowd with Brenda, Eddie, and Tony. I don’t know the song with James and Judy, though. The fellows all wind up going to Vietnam (the lyrics in “Italian Restaurant” are changed slightly to have Brenda and Eddie get married in the summer of ‘65 rather than the summer of ‘75, because there was obviously no one being sent to Vietnam in 1975), one of them gets whacked, and then, even though “they couldn’t go back to the greasers,” all of the friends who survive manage to reconnect and move on with their lives.

The songs were mostly excellent, even if the guy singing them didn’t quite have the chops that Billy Joel had when he recorded the songs. That lack of chops in places took nothing away from the energy he projected, and was helped along by some very capable background vocalists - and it was clear that the singer, the “Piano Man,” don’tcha know, was channeling Billy Joel and doing a pretty good job for a dude who looked a lot more like John Popper than Billy Joel.

The best number was “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” and what you have to do immediately is forget the post-modern music video that you saw on MTV and even the somewhat goofy march of the lyrics. The number came during the first act, when the guys were in Vietnam, and the action on stage was a night battle, and the song was played as a relentless, heavy, chord-laden barrage that was practically a death march. Try to get your head around the lyrics of that song backed by the heavy guitars from R.E.M.’s Monster - not the poppy chords of “What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?” nor the acidic, sour drone of “Bang And Blame” or “Crush With Eyeliner,” but something more along the lines of “King Of Comedy.” And then throw in a dash of the Metallica album ...And Justice For All. Your head spinning yet? I think that was probably the idea.

The other exceptional musical number started with “Pressure” and stopped mid-song to go right into “Goodnight, Saigon.” It’s probably not a coincidence that those songs are back-to-back on the album they both appeared on (The Nylon Curtain). The latter is a very long song, and they didn’t play the whole thing, but they did do the most haunting lines - the ones that best spoke to the problem with the war in Vietnam:

They heard the hum of the motors
They counted the rotors
And waited for us to arrive

I didn’t follow along with all of the characters as well as I probably should have - that inexperience, again, with the form of the production (and I don’t think it helped that most of the guys looked an awful lot alike and so did the girls, except for the brunette, who I think was Brenda) - but it worked for me, mostly because I love Billy Joel’s songs. Amy was worried that I would not like hearing someone other than Billy Joel singing those songs, and I wondered ahead of time if that would be the case, but it wasn’t. Like I said, the “Piano Man” (credited as three different guys in the notes, although I believe the cast listing for our show said it was a guy called Jon Abrams) clearly had his role as troubadour down pat and did as good a job being Billy Joel as I could imagine being done by anyone who isn’t Billy Joel.

But here’s how I know that it really worked for me. Before we got our seats, we briefly perused the tiny souvenir stand set up in the theatre lobby. One of the items for sale was the cast recording on CD of the Broadway show. I thought before I saw the show that I would certainly not need a CD of, basically, Billy Joel covers, no matter how good they were. I have volumes one and two of his greatest hits, as well as a couple of other albums that I have ripped into iTunes - and I figured I could mix together a CD of the songs from the show if I wanted to re-live it. A day later, though...I’m not so sure. There was an energy to the show - actually, even though I hate this word because of its corporate connotations, there was a synergy to the show that elevated those songs in that combination to something more than they would be on a mix CD. I think that might be a very acceptable definition of art.

There's My Church, I Sing In The Choir

Charles Darwin was born on the same day as Abraham Lincoln. You may not have heard about that, what with all the talk about Lincoln's birthday and all the talk about how our grumpy new President is learning the hard way that it's a hell of a lot easier to run for President than it is to be President. Feel free to look away if evolution makes you uncomfortable; if it does not make you uncomfortable (and you're in the mood for a link-fest), click here for a post concerning evolution on Cosmic Log, the lovely blog run by MSNBC science editor Alan Boyle. The first point he makes is that quite a lot of religious congregations will be talking about religion and science this weekend, which has apparently come to be known as Evolution Weekend, a project devoted to dispelling the myth that religion and evolution can't get along. The really cool part? The guy who started the whole thing, Michael Zimmerman, is the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at our very own Butler University. Yeah...progressive religious thinking in Indiana. Who knew? (And yes...sigh...that is sarcasm.)

Roger Ebert And The Reader

I was having lunch at work yesterday when I stumbled upon this blog post by Roger Ebert, which intentionally takes the most circuitous route possible to - perhaps - explain how it is that Mr. Ebert came to interpret The Reader in the way that he did. I thought his review of the film was excellent because it got the point that Hanna's secret - not the Holocaust, not the love affair, not the trial and her subsequent imprisonment - is the central subject of the story, and that all of the resulting details and events follow from it. Some might say that this minimizes the atrocities committed by Hanna, but I disagree; the gravity of those atrocities - with the understanding that they are atrocities that would not have been committed absent the secret that troubles Hanna's soul - illustrates the power of that secret and its effect on the whole of Hanna's life.

I sort of wish that I had had Mr. Ebert's blog post to read while considering my own review of The Reader, because most of the above paragraph would have served well a review of that film, with respect to the construction of the story, and I only touched on it obliquely when I wrote my review. Alas, though, Mr. Ebert's blog post was from this past Sunday, so could not have been read before I wrote about the movie. For some reason, I neither mentioned nor linked to Mr. Ebert's review of The Reader when I wrote my own review of the film. The link can be found here, and the review is excellent. At some point along the line, Roger Ebert ceased to be just a reviewer of films and instead became a combination film reviewer and film historian - and is, above all, a fine writer.

Praise Song For The Day

A sampling of links concerning the poem written by Elizabeth Alexander for President Obama's inauguration, including the text of the poem posted on poets.org with permission of Graywolf Press, which is publishing a chapbook edition of the poem; a review of the poem from the Christian Science Monitor; and the author's website.

Things I Don't Understand

Why a package of socks would have a re-closable Ziploc-style device at the top of the bag.