Category: Uncategorized

I told this, the newest Worst Joke In The World, last night at dinner, which turned out to be an inadvertent prelude to a Night Of Canadian Hilarity.
Talked about the AM script, which has several Canadian settings and elements, and is, obviously hilarious. Talked about South Park, too.
Read this funny, slight Timothy Noah piece in Slate about “the novelty of seeing the words “danger” and “Toronto” in the same sentence.”
Saw the kooky Mayor of Toronto on The Daily Show. He reminded me of Robert Novak doing a bad Ed Koch.
But the surprise was a midnight screening of the first contemporary film to deal with the Torontonian Threat, a film I only recently learned was about the US staging a phony war against Canada, a film you might even call the 300-pound gorilla of Blame Canada Movies,Canadian Bacon.
It was largely funny, intermittently hilarious, but it had some really slack moments, too. Like Orgazmo, Gangs of New York or The Cremaster Cycle, Canadian Bacon feels made by a supreme creator, someone who can’t/won’t take (or doesn’t get) any suggestions or advice. They’re all unconventional concepts coming from auteurs with unassailable-seeming points of view, which may inhibit people from giving suggestions. Maybe the auteurs, having convinced themselves that no one else could understand their vision, closed themselves off to outside perspectives. Whatever, in any case, all thesemovies had tremendous promise, moments of greatness and unnecessary flaws.
Perhaps one IMDb user said it best: “Of course, only somebody like Roger Moore could make this movie.”

The Amtrak I took from DC to NYC this afternoon hit a person on the tracks, just north of the North Philadelphia station. While it took them nearly half an hour to inform us, it was immediately apparent to those of us in the first car that the person had died. Nearly two hours later, another northbound train stopped alongside, and TV news helicopters hovered overhead as all 2-300 of us climbed aboard.
Many people began trading our respective fragments of information. They’d seen a knot of policemen on the tracks, but had heard only there was “an obstruction” and a “mechanical problem”; while we’d been told immediately that the train had hit “a tresspasser,” later overheard to have been a “suicide,” but we never saw any sign of the accident. Finally, once the second train was underway, a conductor announced there had been “a fatality.”
In awkward cell phone conversations, we all tried to explain our delay, conflicted over sounding either too callously selfish or too fascinated.
[update: The Inquirer mentions the suicide in “Accident, derailment delay SEPTA riders.”]

For his article in Wired, “Inside the Soul of the Web,” Michael Malone spent 24 (cumulative) hours watching the randomly selected stream of Google searches that is broadcast in the company’s offices. If it’s not really informative, it’s inevitably interesting–and sometimes moving. (thanks, Jason)
Jennifer 8. Lee did essentially the same story last November, for the NY Times. [who seem to be monetizing their once fee-avoiding deeplinks. But, as Google helpfully points out, the article is here, for free.] We recall that the scroll is called LiveQuery, the map is called GeoDisplay, and Google has eerie, almost predictive power (PredictivePower?).
Almost. “That is a paradox of a Google log: it does not capture social phenomena per se, but merely the shadows they cast across the Internet.
‘The most interesting part is why,’ said Amit Patel, who has been a member of the logs team. ‘You can’t interpret it unless you know what else is going on in the world.'”
So unless you knew it was a question on Millionaire the night before, a quiz show which aired consecutively in five time zones, the meaning of five spikes in the frequency of “carol brady maiden name” searches would be lost on you.

In the spirit of Gawker, two datapoints make a trend. And when both of those datapoints come from Gawker itself, well, it doesn’t get any trendier than that. So what’s the scoop, you ask? Self-Indulgent, Dishonest Idiots and Starbucks.
Nick Denton tells the tale of having the mock-televangelical tax protestor Rev. Billy explode in his face at a friends’ happening. The Rev’s favorite stunt is setting up his pulpit in Starbucks and preaching against some corporate something-or-other. He’s clearly mastered the TV preacher’s self-righteous hubris, but based on his behavior the other night, seems to be reading from some abridged Bible, one without all that pesky “Blessed are the meek, the peacemakers, etc” crap. Well, when someone snaps a picture of him with walking out of an Office Depot with a box of Turbotax, we’ll see if he can crumble as abjectly as Jimmy Swaggart.
What the overly referential Reverend Billy is to televangelism, Fischerspooner is to pop/rock stars. They staged their first guerilla performance in Starbucks in 1998. Carl Swanson reports from their latest concert in the NYT, and now there’s a ga-ga Gawker review.
Like Rev. Billy, though, FS mocks only a few traits of manufactured rock stars (bad performances, lack of talent, diva behavior), while wholeheartedly embracing others. You know how, in Glitter, Billie/Mariah totally disses the guy who gave her her break and she…ahem. You can’t reference Glitter and hope for any credibility, not even in relation to Fischerspooner.
There’s a 2+ year gap in the meteoric rise of FS, at least as it’s told to/by Swanson. Written out of that history faster than Little Richard is Gavin Brown, the art dealer with the “honor” of being the first person to actually let them perform. It was thanks to some ad hoc performances during a 1999 Rikrit Tiravanija exhibit, and a later series of nightly shows in the gallery, that Fischerspooner got any attention at all. Brown helped them put out their first CD and organized some actual (i.e., non-Starbucks) concerts. Just before their UK record deal was announced, Brown got ditched for Deitch; Fischerspooner has been trying to fail upwards ever since.
Of course, if this Launch-a-Pathetic-Media-Grab-In-a-Starbucks movement continues, regular folks’ll learn to avoid the chain in droves, turning it into a niche-y, little Macchiatos for Masochists. Fortunately, like many other best-viewed-at-a-distance trends, you can follow along painlessly at Gawker.

After a suspenseful first day, and a numbingly boring second day, my stint as a potential juror ended immediately after call time on the third day, when answering a quick roll call (to catch the latecomers on their “last” day) won me an early discharge.
As a result, I’m getting my courtroom thrills elsewhere:

I started reading Hollywood on Trial, the screenwriter Gordon Kahn’s report from the receiving end of the HUAC inquisition and the studio betrayal, so when some too-smart prosecutor quizzed me with, “So what are you reading?” I could answer, “A book about people getting judged unjustly for what they read and wrote.” It turns out to be a remarkably raw, bitter, story.

255 years ago today, according to the remarkable Proceedings of the Old Bailey, a Mary Evans was tried for stealing a linen sheet from a Frances Divine:

Frances Divine. The prisoner came and desired me to let her have a lodging, which I did, she lay in my house one night; the next morning she took a sheet from the bed; I saw her with it, and charged her with taking it; she would not come back, but went away with it, and I never saw her till I took her up, to-morrow will be a fortnight.
Prisoner’s defence.
This woman is great with my husband, and keeps him from me, and she could have no claw against me, so she has laid this sheet to my charge. It is all spight.
Acquitted.

[thanks to fellow ex-fish Adam’s great v-2]

if u THINK the 42N cookies r2 xpensiv, ck 2 c if they r EROTIC b4 buying. If they R, u cant share W/ jury pals.

u no how A&E has law & order marathon? Voir dire=the L&O DVD Extras marathon.

…is mostly books, and gym stuff, since there are two gyms near the courthouse. I searched several used bookstores* for a paperback copy of Infinite Jest, which I could rip into more portable chunks. But I learned an obvious lesson: if you go to a used bookstore with a specific book in mind, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Here’s what I discovered instead:

• In the Blink of An Eye, A Perspective on Film Editing, by Walter Murch
• The Orwell Reader, 1956 ed. (without the inaccurate cover the Amazon reviewers complain about.)
• Among the Believers, An Islamic Journey, V.S. Naipaul — travel through the ancient (i.e., late ’70’s) Islamic world.
• The Believer, Among the things Dave Eggers has been up to. We’ll see.
• The real find: Hollywood on Trial: The Story of the Ten Who Were Indicted, 1st ed., 1948, by Gordon Kahn, a contemporary, insider account of the 1947 HUAC hearings.
  (Blacklist trivia: The blacklist era didn’t end until the director Otto Preminger openly hired Dalton Trumbo, one of the original Hollywood Ten, to write the script for Exodus, a 1960 movie about the founding of Israel. Preminger’s sleek, modernist house was across the street from mine. I’m looking at its English/Portuguese replacement right now.)
  * Shopping credits: East Village Books, 101 St Mark’s Pl (1st & A); Bookleaves, 304 W 4th St.

No, not Iraq, I mean one of the other hundred+ countries who aren’t “with us,” that “second largest landmass in North America,” the nation high-sticking our northern border, Canada.
I’ve fled to Canada for 1) research/groundwork for the Animated Musical, part of which is set in Montreal, 2) skiing in Mont Tremblant, a hothoused attempt to create a Quebecian Aspen or Park City, which ends up looking like Universal Studios CityWalk, 3) to get away from the incessant, empty haze of American media on the war, and 4) to hang out with my wife, who’s attending an astrophysics conference at said resort.
Here’s a status update: 1) rather than repeatedly dig their car out every morning, driveway owners in Montreal put up these temporary plastic tent garages, which look like crappy greenhouses. Also, they bilingualize everything, even things that shouldn’t be translated, like steak au poivre and croissant. That’s all I can reveal at this point. 2) It’s raining at Tremblant, so skiing is losing out to weblogging in a room full of telnetting physicists. 3) Canadian media, or the CBC, at least, is comparing the breach with the US over Iraq to the whole softwood export turmoil. Yep, coming to Canada’s certainly put the war in perspective for me. 4) well, one outta four ain’t bad.

skip church & beat the line 4 the davinci sho, 4get it. Godll cu & put 5k old ppl (who only sleep 4hrs/nt) in line ahed of u

Since I read a WWII novel in the buildup to GWII (If you can boil Gravity’s Rainbow down to a WWII novel), I thought I’d better go back to the Mother of All War Stories, another book you pretend to have finished in college, Thucydides’ History of The Peloponnesian War.
Considered the first clear attempt at fact- not myth-based history, HOTPW puts paid to the idea that there’s anything new in the art or business of war. I’m only about a quarter of the way in, still in the escalation to war between Sparta and Athens, the alliance and superpower, respectively, of their day, and page after page have played out in the news.
Some things change forever, but some things are painfully the same, no matter what you hear.

As in matters of war, the British press is out-reporting the US on the impending Oscar crisis. See, for example, this Observer article, “Glitz out as stars ponder Oscar protest.”
“A determination to ‘down-gown’, that is, to exchange frivolous glitz with muted glamour, has been announced as the tactic of choice by celebrities keen to demonstrate their sensitivity and political awareness but unwilling to boycott the ceremony altogether.” [italics added for shock and awe, -g]
“Ben Affleck is among those who has apparently not yet made up his mind [about wearing an anti-war totem of some kind] . Instead he has announced that the final decision will rest with his stylist.”
Just as peace descended on the ghetto, albeit briefly, when breakdancing supplanted gang warfare, maybe what our war-torn world needs most right now is a serious political and military down-gowning. I never thought I’d say this, but: Phillip Bloch, put down that breast petal; it’s time for you to save the world.

I’ve never mentioned it, but a couple of people asked, and it seems to be mildly popular, or at least amusing: I’m trying out the Japanese translator link at the top of the page. It’s a handmade URL that runs the greg.org front page through Excite Japan’s site translator. The output’s fairly accurate. Japanese will happily adopt a foreign word rather than use an awkward translation; Excite leaves some things as is, avoiding some Babelfish-style gaffes.
Of course, making translation available and building up a Japanese audience are two separate things. [Thanks to Jason for the heddo appu.]

On Poynter.org, Roy Peter Clark (if you lived in Hee-Haw country, you’d use your middle name, too) writes about the war networks’ using “one of the oldest and most powerful narrative devices ever conceived,” the countdown clock.

Clark points out that movies are frequently structured around the ticking clock: “from the Wicked Witch’s inverted hourglass to the 007 nuclear bomb timer at the end of Goldfinger (um, and every other Bond film?)… the Fox drama 24 Hours,” and his childhood favorite, High Noon.
Jon Stewart also had a hi-larious piece about these clocks last night on TDS.
Update: On that note, here’s how classics professor/kingmaker Donald Kagan–who headed the Project for the New American Century, the roadmap to Pax Americana we’ve been set upon, whether we know it or not–envisions the US in the 21st century: “You saw the movie High Noon? he asks. “We’re Gary Cooper.”
Hmm. If this Bush Doctrine (as it’s now called) isn’t repudiated, it’ll be more like High Noon meets Groundhog Day.

In this interlude before war, the US administration and its pundits are trying to sound reluctant, entirely forced into war by either evil Iraq or feckless France. This war, we are told, results from “failed diplomacy.” Bush supporters are rewriting November, pointing to signs–apparently apparent only after diplomacy’s declared dead–that France (and others) were duplicitous, diploming in bad faith, all the while set on derailing Bush’s war. Bush critics, on the other hand, place the blame squarely on the administration, decrying its diplomatic missteps, mistakes, blunders, post-9/11 hubristic bumbling, and/or lack of international awareness.
Does this miss the point, though? Isn’t it possible, likely, blindingly obvious, even, that what Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld want is to dissolve political bands? To create a US, free and unencumbered by multinational/international restrictions, obligations, responsibilities, and alliances, at least those the US isn’t able to control? viz. Kyoto. ABM Treaty. ICC, Geneva Convention. Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. NATO. UN. a Gulf War-size coalition. Are “failed” diplomacy, “doomed” inspections, a diminished UN (either fallen in line or declared irrelevant) actually strategic objectives of this administration?
Could this administration be consciously pursuing a strategy of disengagement from a multilateral world is considers an anachronism? Of setting out to reconfigure the world–in ways that even our “allies” may find painful, but too bad–to reflect their view of the US’ Unique Status, whether that unique status is derived from Providential annointing, a $400bn/year military, or some rationalized confluence of the two? The US stands, unparalleled, above the rest of the world, and the world must acknowledge it and adapt.
Of course, there was once a time when the US could claim its unique status derived from its ideas, from its founding principles. Advice to those who stopped at “dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another”: KEEP READING.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal (not American and Other)…

Malcolm Bruce, said the same thing about the Bush strategy: “This division may be exactly the outcome the Bush administration wanted” Listen to the NPR report from 03/18/03 while you can.]