Category: Uncategorized

These bus shelter posters in London seem so fake, it’s shocking to read the text: “CCTV and Metropolitan Police on busses are just two ways we’re making your journey more secure/Busses are getting better/Mayor of London. Police and CCTV on a bus? I saw that movie in 1994; didn’t seem very secure to me…
I was looking on Indiewire for the official MoMA Documentary Fortnight screening schedule announcement, so this headline made me flinch: “‘Failed Artist’ Allen Talks Up European Film”. Fortunately, it’s not about me or my “European film,” it’s Woody, who disingenuously (but accurately, especially lately) calls himself “very, very mediocre.”

It’s a phenomenon I’m well aware of, because I’ve done it myself. Even when I was growing up in North Carolina, my accent was never that strong; it certainly isn’t as strong as it is when I’m asking people in the South for something. Then, my accent deepens a bit, and I turn into Jethro Clampett before my traveling companions’ bemused eyes, a good old boy just trying not to get screwed at the rural gas station.
But I’m not the President of the United States. Bush very self-consciously hicks up his accent sometimes, for some reason(s) known to him. It should be researched, analyzed, and reported, but my theory is he does it only when he’s campaigning among the partisan faithful in certain states where he thinks Curiously Folksy George’ll play better (IA, NM, CO recently).
Want to try it out? Listen to this news conference with Chinese President Jiang Zemin from C-SPAN. Bush is in Crawford, but as soon as the mention of “the ranch…in Texas” is through, Bush goes nearly accent-free.
Now try this campaign speech in Alamogordo, New Mexico from NPR (the Bush story starts at 2:00), which is the strongest accent I’ve heard yet. [Note: NPR changed the stream. Now no audio/video of this stump speech seems to exist on the web. Why is that? It could be quite useful to hear politicians’ “entirely for local consumption” speeches repeated verbatim in multiple locations. “Sher am glad to be here in … Springfield with y’all”)

According to obviously not unbiased but nevertheless generally credible sources, Spike Jonze & Charlie Kaufman’s new film Adaptation is getting effusive response from preview audiences.
We saw the trailer for Adaptation; before the opening of Punch-Drunk Love, right after writing about the film’s just-launched weblog at SusanOrlean.com. Brimming with excitement for the film, anticipation building, the trailer made me want to run screaming from the theater. It was the worst trailer for a supposedly good movie since The Shawshank Redemption, which was almost buried by it’s horrible trailer.

< New Yorker Crankiness >: I hate amateur parallel parking, like the guy out my window this very minute, who just parked half a car-length from the sign and half a car-length from the next car. He even spent a few moments pulling up, backing up, focusing on getting straight and close to the curb, yet remained oblivious to his taking two spots. Even though Trent Lott wouldn’t approve, you could still fit a couple of Smart Cars in there. < /NYC>
Chowhound. I’ve been trying to remember this site, after hearing it on WNYC a few months ago. It’s the culinary findings of unnervingly energetic food fan Jim Leff, and it just turned up again on The Next Big Thing.

Production Still, Cremaster 2, 1999
Matthew Barney (photo: Peter Strietman)
Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle, pound for pound, the most comprehensive Barney Book ever. (You won’t wonder why there’s no free shipping.)

The best line from the awards ceremony at the PBR World Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas: “Well, retirin’ your best friend’s like shootin’ your best horse.”

I know of at least one place where you can get Vitamin Water in Paris:
I forget the name, but it’s a clean little deli on Rue Danielle Casanova, just north (and just east) of Place du Marche Saint-Honore (that’s where the Commes des Garcons Perfume Shop is).

Not being a rabid fan of Hunter S Thompson, Jerry Seinfeld, Beck, Leno, or their literary agents, I somehow missed the original brouhaha about Asterisk, the pranksterish pseudonym of some reasonably well-known writer/comedic person (rumors have/had it to be either Thompson himself or Jerry Seinfeld).
A rant-filled fax sent–seemingly from HST–to HST’s agent complained that some Asterisk was ripping HST off, but it turns out the fax itself was from Asterisk in the style of HST. Anyway, now 3AM Magazine has an interview with the as-yet-unidentified Asterisk. The Beck connection? A Spike Magazine reader named Andreas Gursky [thunk! Um, Spike, I think you dropped something.] pointed out a Fimoculous anecdote where Beck asked Seinfeld who Asterisk is during a taping of Jay Leno.
As a media circle jerk, it’s a bit tiresome, but because The Animated Musical has some pseudonymous characters in it, the idea’s been on my mind. Recently, a greg.org reader and very respected editor [thunk!] suggested I employ a pseudonym to write on topics other than my film projects. With the advent of online communication, pseudonyms aren’t just for Deep Throat anymore. In a world of complete Googlability, compartmentalizing one’s thoughts/activities/output is probably not all bad. But after you’ve admitted you liked Star Trek: The Motion Picture, I figure there’s nothing left to hide.

While some people have emailed about the Animated Musical (specifically, how long the As-Yet-Unannounced thing’ll go on), more than a few have pointed out that a string of bad-to-middlin-but-with-a-couple-of-classic film references is an unlikely/inauspicious beginning for a great movie. One kind reader suggested I should “write what [I] know, rather than cut and paste a bunch of other peoples ideas.”
I have angsted a bit over describing the script indirectly like this, but I’m gonna stick with it for a while, at least until I’m satisfied with it creatively and I have some more substantial business/development/legal traction for the project. But then I read an excerpt of a letter from Abraham Lincoln in John Perry Barlow’s recently circulated Pox Americana. My script is based on the catalogs of movies I referenced in the same way South Park: The Movie was based on Abraham Lincoln’s letter.

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose – – and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose. If, to-day, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, ‘I see no probability of the British invading us’ but he will say to you ‘be silent; I see it, if you don’t.’

Read Sen. Robert Byrd’s Oct. 3 speech, which included this excerpt. Listen to it on MP3.
Other highly relevant research/source material, Bruce Schneier’s canonical Applied Cryptography. Last month in The Atlantic, Charles Mann wrote an interesting, disturbing article on Homeland Security, starring Schneier.

hello? Is this thing on? (sms posting) some gd disc 2 day, & nice emails re the movie. Thnx (gotta go. Opening. )

According to this Washington Post article [via Boing Boing], Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” is Sadaam Hussein’s campaign theme song for today’s presidential referendum. Before it became a the most popular Valentine song in England, it was the love theme for The Bodyguard. I imagine somewhere in the Pentagon, a psyops playlist is being revised; Whitney’ll have to find some other way of contributing to the (Bush, not Husseini) war effort.
With Houston off the (turn)table, I wondered what does Operation MC Hammer play? Most accounts of the 1989 US invasion of Panama universally mention just generic “rock music” or “hard rock music”; in Iraq I, it was “grunge and death rock”, but actual bands and titles are hard to come by. But not impossible. And the throwaway labels, “rock” and “grunge” turn out to obscure more than illuminate the actual operations.
Piecing together the US Military and FBI Psychological Warfare Compilation Tape, it seems that they’re programming more for themselves, not for their opponents. Like Robert Duvall’s Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, who clearly relishes the Wagner he blasts out of his chopper, when the ATF plays “These boots were made for walkin'” in Waco, it’s just a morale booster for their own guys. (Did it drive Koresh mad? Wasn’t he already there? And how many people actually put on those boots and walked out?) When it comes to psyops, you have to wonder whose heads are really being messed with.
The playlist so far:

Nowhere to Run, Martha and the Vandellas (Noriega/Panama)

You’re No Good, Linda Rondstadt.

Highway to Hell, AC/DC

We’re Not Gonna Take it, Twisted Sister

If I Had a Rocket Launcher, Bruce Cockburn

I Fought the Law, Bobby Fuller Four

Jimi Hendrix

Flesh for Fantasy, Billy Idol

Metallica (Iraq I)

Tibetan monk chants (Branch Davidians/Waco)

Achy Breaky Heart, Billy Ray Cyrus (reportedly a joke)

These Boots Were Made For Walkin’, Nancy Sinatra (not a joke)

“Pop music and Christmas songs”

Clock ticking

Busy signal

Jet engines

Screams of dying rabbits
[Correction: Two readers–neither of them Sandy Gallin–wrote to demand credit be given to Dolly Parton for that Whitney song. They were more worked up than the Klingons who corrected my (only other) previous error (ever). With fans like that…]

Just a few days ago, I stumbled onto the Blue Fugates, a Kentucky family with blue-skinned members sprinkled across the generations. Now, it turns out there’s a “blue feller” running for Senate in Montana. [read on, via boingboing]

Every once in a while, I remember that the Guardian has this thing called The Digested Read, where books are reviewed in the style of the book itself. I’m sure every review sends some British demographic laughing to the floor, but with my limited book learnin’ I can only understand a few. Some favorites:

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young (just saw him at a friends’ wedding)

The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton (“No sooner had Baudelaire returned to Paris than he would dream of leaving. How alike we are.”)

Statecraft by Margaret Thatcher (“Indeed, although this book was largely written before September 11, I have needed to change almost nothing. That’s because I am right. Just like I always have been.”)

My harddrive is dead (or at least in a movie-of-the-week coma), and I’m on the road. Posting could be a bit erratic for the next couple of days. Rewriting several scripts from memory could be a bit erratic, too. Fortunately, I backed up my system last summer, so I’d only lose everything I haven’t posted to the weblog. (In the mean time, I bought Gravity’s Rainbow to read on the plane since my dvd doesn’t work, either. Thanks, Alex.)

From a link from Visible Darkness, an engrossing, intense weblog about a book project to examine documentary photography. (wonderful, but not for the blurb-addicted):
In one week on grad student Alex Golub’s weblog, he writes the good fight, assailing the academically-descredited-yet-still-pop-consciousness-gripping “anthro” brand/icon Margaret Mead; laments the lonely life of the actual Pynchon reader (achingly different from a “fan”), and recognizes the painful poignancy of the Oklahoma! revival in these “September 11”-besotted times. All well-written, but again, don’t think you can just skim the site while you put that conference call on mute.
Golub’s recap of Mead criticism hits home, especially since Mead (and by naive extension, anthro) was one of my first stops on my idealistic foray into filmmaking. Mead’s legacy: “Systematically and symptomatically bad fieldwork in which she gave up what she knew about the people she lived with in order to paint a picture that would fit in with the message she attempted to get across to the public.” (Fortunately, I was early swayed by the Maysles brothers’ “just show what you see” storytelling and their sense of fidelity to the people they lived with. Mead hasn’t really turned up here since.)
His analysis of his Gravity’s Rainbow Problem speaks for itself:

6) What you really want out of this party is not the free martinis or interesting gallery space or recognition that you are one of the people being published in the glossly lit-mag whose latest issue is the raison d’etre of this fete. What you want is to find someone, just someone (preferably an alto, although a strong colatura soprano or even a decent bass-baritone wouldn’t be too bad either) who has also read it and understands what it is you’re trying akwardly to express nine minutes into your five-minute monologue…

As for Oklahoma!, he casts an anthro/cult stud (I made that one up based on “anthro”; I’m sure it’ll bring in some interesting Google searches) eye on the musical’s “condensed symbolic account of the founding impulses of the United States of America.” Homogeneity and pacification figure strongly in his analysis, which isn’t as optimistic about the London revival others have praised for being darker and more ambivalent than you remember it from high school drama club.
While I hope he hasn’t fallen into the pit where he sees Mead (I haven’t seen Oklahoma! ever, even though I’m working on a musical now), his message in the end sounds too good not to be true:

It is not surprising that Oklahoma! should be playing on Broadway at a time when the radical uniqueness of the US’s project is more than ever obscured by a shallow, partisan patriotism. Nor is it surprising that the recuperation of the founding impulses of the United States seems so unlikely.
‘What have you given us?’ a man asked Benjamin Franklin as the delegates of the Constitutional Convention ended their secret meetings. ‘A republic,’ he said simply, ‘if you can keep it.’ We have been given a unique country and a valuable ideal. And we are turning it into Oklahoma!.

Sometimes you don’t find out what you’ve actually written until it turns up unexpectedly in your Google referrer logs.
Describing HotSaints.com in a Utah-themed entry (their motto: “Chase and be chaste!”), I said the target audience–single Mormons–were “thick as fiddlers” there. I’d picked up “thick as fiddlers” from my grandmother, whose birthday we were celebrating. As it turns out, the complete simile is “thick as fiddlers in Hell;” it’s use in the revival-happy, 19th century, rural South betrays a faith-based condemnation of musical instruments in general and the fiddle in particular, which was known as “the Devil’s instrument.”
No matter what you may have seen in Footloose, Mormons don’t share this hillbilly view. Revealing the 19th century roots of “chase and be chaste,” this quote from the prophet Brigham Young helps explain why Mormonism is called the “dancingest denomination” :

Our work, our everyday labor, our whole lives are within the scope of our religion. This is what we believe, and what we try to practice. Recreation and diversion are as necessary to our well-being as the most serious pursuits of life. If you wish to dance, dance, and you are just as prepared for prayer meeting as you were before, if you are [Hot] Saints.

As this Salt Lake Tribune article shows, though, the price of dancing is eternal vigilance.