Author: Mike

1)

For some of you this may be a bombshell, but for all of you who went through the Catholic High School System this should be no surprise: Charter Schools have lower test scores than similar Public Schools. The report was put together by the American Federation of Teachers using the government's own numbers, and is reprinted here. Evidently the government delayed released the charter school's scores until the last possible moment.

Everyone I know who went through a public high school, no matter where they stand on the No Child act or school vouchers, will generally accept the argument that private schools are better than public ones. I went to a (Catholic) private school, and never accepted that for a second. Nevermind the idea that you can mandate religion classes instead of, say, writing or reading classes. Whenever you run something for a profit you are bound to cut corners and get creative in improving your bottom line in ways that do nothing to help with education (was anyone else subject to the daily 30 minutes of commerical watching that was the Channel One experience?).

2)

Governor Blagojevich to Pharmaceutical Industry: Fuck You.

Sometimes I'm damn proud to live in Illinois. Yup, our Governor is starting a (perhaps illegal) program to import drugs from Canada and European countries at a cheaper rate. "The federal government has failed to act," Gov. Blagojevich said in a statement. "So it's time that we do."

Don't even get me started on the nonsense of this debate. I absolutely hate that the Pharmaceutical Industry wraps itself in the Free Market rhetoric while they remain the most protected industry this side of New Deal agriculture. Bush moves to change tariffs a point to help protect U.S. steel and everyone shits themselves. An army of lobbyists push the President to make it illegal to import a product at a cheaper price from a foreign source (imagine him doing that to semiconductors from China!?!?!?!?) and sign a bill that prevents Medicare from negotiating lower drug prices and nobody blinks. Granted, I'm not a big city economist, but the idea that the government should be working very hard to artificially keep prices high seems a bit off.

And don't give me the "they need the money for research" scare tactic either. If anyone produces the cure for cancer or AIDS I'll post a mea culpa immediately. But the extra funds for research line is such a canard. Nevermind that the NIH, through taxpayer dollars, does a significant amount of the research that is then bought out by the industry. Some estimates say that a third of drugs marketed by the major drug companies are now licensed from universities or small biotech companies. What's more important is that so much of the research goes to changing existing drugs just enough to re-patent them. Quote Dr. Sharon Levine, associate executive director of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Group:

If I'm a manufacturer and I can change one molecule and get another twenty years of patent rights, and convince physicians to prescribe and consumers to demand the next form of Prilosec, or weekly Prozac instead of daily Prozac, just as my patent expires, then why would I be spending money on a lot less certain endeavor, which is looking for brand-new drugs?

Which is why millions and millions of dollars is spent R&Ding Clarinex, so that it can get out the same year as Claritin loses it's patent; nevermind that it's virtually the same drug that produces the same effects (the same can be said about Prilosec/Nexium and a million other combos). I'm sure somewhere the AIDS vaccine is in its final test stages.

But perhaps I'm being mean. Years of ripping off Americans with inflated rates for drugs has finally cultimated in one scientific breakthrough: we now have the means to keep Mike Ditka's cock rock hard throughout the night.

And you gotta love that.

If you haven't gotten a chance to play OkCupid's Virgin Game follow that link and do so immediately. You no longer need to be a member of the site itself.

OkCupid is a free internet dating/networking site that is actually free, and the guys who created it are pretty entertaining.

It's worth checking out just to take their personality quiz (you don't need to register to take this one either). I was "The Boy Next Door."

Anyway, when you sign up for the site you specify whether or not you are a virgin. After collecting that data for about 5 months, they unleash this game – randomly drawn sets of two images from their database, one person a virgin the other not one. You have to guess who is which. At the end they give you your score.

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I imagine many people had wished they did a better job reading the "terms and agreements." I couldn't beat 60% on it – tell me if you can.
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The guys who do the page are Harvard math nerds; they have data-mined the hell out of their stuff to statistically find out weird virgin facts which are available as advice on the game: "Of two men the exact same age, the one with more facial hair is more likely to be a virgin." The only real problem is that it doesn't tell you if you were right or wrong for each specific person, they just give you your overall score (I guess the terms and agreements weren't that flexible).

Wow. Leave it to the Republicans to keep things interesting in Illinois. Guess what! They have narrowed their choices for their candidate for Senator to two people – both of whom are black! Sorry, but isn't this a little shameless? Since there are no consolation prizes for the 2nd place candidate, why list two people instead of waiting a few more days until you have an actual choice? But anyway, that's not the fun part. The fun part is that likely contender is:

Alan Keyes!

Remember Mr. Keyes during the 2000 primaries? When all the Republicans were trying to be the most compassionate conservatives they could be, Alan Keyes was throwing down bolts of thunder from the top of Mt.

I'm-Out-Of-My-Religious-Conservative-Fucking-Mind. Here are some quotes from the man, off his own webpage (no spin needed):

Take comfort America: If you get mugged remember it is the fault of Bill Clinton and post-structuralist moral relativism (are we really expected to believe that the guy who carjacks you is very well-versed in Foucault and Derrida?). You don't get many people calling the idea of free public education something that is rotten at the core of democracy. And I've heard many arguments for the 2nd amendment – the idea that we may be called upon as citizens to defend our borders does not come up very often.

This will be an interesting election if he is chosen.
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Has the man ever even lived in Illinois? I wonder if he can name 5 Illinois counties off the top of his head.

The scary part of this all is what it says about the direction of this country. 4 years ago he was an utter joke. He trolled around the debates like a mirror image of Dennis Kucinich – except on the religious nutjob side of the mirror things are a lot scarier. Does our country actually take his point-of-view seriously now?

Big week for movie stuff here. We now have an open letter to Frederick Wiseman, asking the man to cashout already. And, due to popular demand, a review of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.

This is a movie where two men in the early-to-mid 20s get very stoned and try to get White Castle. A lot of humorous things happen on their way that try and stop them, but through determination and luck, they get their wish.

Ok, full disclosure here: I was prepared to enjoy this movie from the first moment I heard this description. This site is, among other things, about the love for the consumption of gin and tacos, and we don't consider them mutually exclusive.
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Many a night of heavy drinking has been complimented with a epic journey to Flash Taco / Underdogs, Prime Time Pizza, or a Polish sausage stand in Maywood with slightly more protective glass than an embassy in sub-Sahara Africa.
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And I don't use the word epic lightly either. People will sing songs and tell tales of these drunken searches for food. There's the time that Ed and I (not drunk) filled a rental car with so many Crave Cases of White Castle sliders on a road trip that the smell left over the next day almost violated the renter's agreement.
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There was also the time that Erik and I (very drunk) quested to a Perkins just outside of UofW; that trip required Erik to match wits with a extremely drunk visiting German professor over Ludwig Wittgenstein while I had to convince a female body-builder and her swarthy immigrant companion with too much chest hair exposed not to leave us for dead in a Madison ghetto.

So this movie was after my heart from the start. I'm very happy, and even more surprised, to say that it didn't disappoint.
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Mind you, this is slacker stoner comedy with it's cultural awareness level turned up to 11. Many people compare it to Super Troopers, which I have not seen; the more obvious reference point is "Dude Where's My Car?"

Unlike DWMC, which thumbed it's nose to the idea of having a coherent series of solvable subplots of character development for the leads, the main characters of this movie are the staple "uptight-repressed guy" and "lazy relaxed genius guy." If you've seen any movie from the past 25 years aimed at 13-21 year old men, then you have an idea of how it will progress.

What makes this movie more entertaining is how likable and strong the leads are. That the half of the jokes that work more than balance out the half of the jokes that fall-flat on their face also helps. There is a cameo by Neil Patrick Harris which makes me laugh just thinking about it. There is a scene involving an insane redneck and his attractive wife which is so dumb that it is only saved by how funny the two main characters play it off (that and a gratuitous boob shot of course). The entire movie is worth watching just to see the two main stoners view a "pot kills" drug ad on TV while high, an ad so dumb it has to be taken from real life.

According to the logical system of Principia Mathematica, it is an axiomatic truth that the girl on the right must A: keep on her shirt OR ~A (not A): take off her shirt. I think Mr. Russell would be happy with the results.

You probably know if you want to see this movie or not. You certainly know whether you don't want to see this movie; you come to the movie with an idea of how much you'll let a boob shot serve as a narrative device. If you are in any way on the fence, trust us and run out and see it immediately.

Happy Birthday to me. Just so you kids know, at a Binny's Beverage Depot Sir Robert Burnett Gin sells for $12.95 for 1.75L.

Read that again. 1.75L. Most gins at 1.75L top the mark – Sir Robert Burnett stays under the mark.

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And it has a plastic bottle, so when the other creators of ginandtacos.
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com and I polish it for my b-day tonight and drop it on the floor, it will just bounce.

I'm not familiar with British customs, but if it is possible to knight a man twice it needs to be done to Sir Robert Burnett.

Last weekend, I went and flyered for a Get out the Vote in Swing States group with strong anti-Bush leanings in the amazing Millenium Park during it's opening weekend celebration. During that time, I learned how much I absolutely hate flyering.

I suppose I deserve bad luck, as I always turn away from people who are passing out flyers. Even if someone was to come up to me with a flyer for the "Gin-drinking-Buffy-fan-comic-books-and-tacos-club" I'd still not make eye contact and speed up my walking. I learned I'm not alone in this speeding up process.

It got to the point where I was really thinking that this election is going to be old overweight white men with bad mustaches versus everyone else. One particularly large man in ill-fitted shorts was holding six hotdogs, and gave me this look when I asked him if he wanted to help beat Bush in November that said "I'm an overweight middle aged white-man who is about to sit down and eat six hot dogs – I'm clearly ok with the direction this country is taking."

Every person over the age of 22 was avoiding us except one group: gay people. We eventually stopped counting the number of times two men holding hands came up to us and gave us encouraging words and listened to what we had to say. For those visiting our page from across the universe, Chicago has a very active gay community on the North Side called Boystown – it is relatively close to the Park (it shares a train line anyway) and thus a lot of gay couples were out for the day. And they all hate Bush. All of them. A lot. And who can blame them?

When this whole gay marriage thing came up from the administration, I thought Bush is just circling his wagons and energizing his base. He's not going to be losing votes. And then I learned I was wrong. According to a Jan 2001 post-election analysis by the Log Cabin Republicans: "Bush captured 25% of the gay vote [1.1 million votes] nationwide, a record number for a GOP presidential candidate." Can you believe 1 million gay people voted for Bush?!?! Remember back in those days? Bush didn't say a word about marriage or gay people – he was a "compassionate conservative" chock full of inclusion and bringing people together; Dick Cheney even had a gay daughter who campaigned for him! How progressive!

Mary Cheney, the only gay supporter of George Bush in 2004.
And they only had to pay her 0,000 to do it.
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I'm not going to even bother to describe how Bush ditched those million voters. I think what's worse for him is that by not just slighting them, but instead refering to their existence as undermining the entirety of Western Civilization (an insult you can't help but imagine you wouldn't forget), he's gotten them energized to support Kerry, a candidate that one needs to be blamed for the decline of Western Civilization in order to get excited about.

And what did Bush gain? Did he rally his own base? This is the big question, and I honestly don't think he is earning any votes. People who are so opposed to gay people that they blame them as disrupting all of life and want to pass an Constitutional Amendment with the speed and lack of debate as if it was a Highway Bill Amendment almost certainly were going to vote for Bush on election day anyway. I can't imagine someone who is so infuriated by gay people that they would let gay marriage decide their vote in an election in 2004 (with real problems like dirty bombs and occupations and half a trillion dollar deficits) not supporting Bush no matter what.

Kerry et. al get a lot of flak for not really standing strong on the gay marriage issue, but I think that it reflect a lot of popular thinking among adults – "I'm sorta ok with it – I'm not 'not ok' with it." I think a lot of people are generally uncomfortable with it, but don't want to immediately sic the federal government on any minority group. I don't pretend to know what the gay community was thinking about four more years of Bush pre-gay-marriage debate – I imagine they were split like the rest of the country. Well, we can almost be certain, with the notable exception of Mary Cheney in all her self-loathing 2004 campaigning glory, nobody there likes him now – and that's a million votes Bush had that he has now lost.

Perhaps Bush is acting on principle on this and not on electioneering: That's the thought that actually scares me more. But I just don't see it. If he was really serious about a defense of marriage he would be attacking the 50% of boomers who get divorces. As far as I know, there hasn't been a single word.

1) Anchorman review on the movie page.

2) For those of you who read the excellent New York Times magazine article on current comic books, I have written up my thoughts on it. They'll eventually also work their way over to the comics page once a get a free moment.

3) I know we need to comment on the possibility of Dikta running for the Senate, but writing about it has that same feeling of a middle-aged virgin hiring a prostitute or a hungry man eating raw garbage – we don't want to admit that "it's come to this.

" If this keeps going on we'll comment though.

Don't worry.

After reading an excellent review of the history of the documentary, I decided to buckle down and figure out what is going on with the utter lack of Frederick Wiseman dvds. For those of you who don't know, Wiseman is of the most important figures in American film culture, a man who single-handedly redefined what we have come to consider a documentary to be, and none of his movies are available on dvd.
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He is the master of the cinéma vérité style, bringing the style so strongly to documentaries that documentaries that are not in a vérité style seem somehow inauthentic – hence all the ruckus over the "objectivity" of Michael Moore's new movie. One only has to see about 10 minutes of Wiseman's early films to realize how bogus the "vérité form = objective" argument is – nobody is objective with editing a film. Wiseman, who deals with no narration, only natural sound and long takes of people interacting with their surroundings, considers his films to be "reality fictions" – which is accurate as he can take these natural settings and make the most persuasive arguments out of them. For instance, his documentary "High School" (1968) contains nothing but long, uninterrupted shots of people interacting in a high school. The final products leads you to believe that education functions only to push kids through a meat grinder to make them compatible with America's Cold War empire. At one point the principal reads a letter to the student body from an alumni fighting in Vietnam (off-quoted from memory here): "Without all the guidance and preparation [my high school] gave me, I don't know how I would have ever been able to serve the military in Vietnam." The pride on the principal's face makes us wonder if this is what education was all about in the first place.

The man is still at the top of his game. In fact, two of the best movies he has done have come out in the recent past: "Public Housing" (1997) and "Domestic Abuse" (2001), like all his movies, show people trying to survive within the complex mechanisms of organized beuracracies (chicago's public housing community and abuse shelters in florida in these cases). So where are his dvds?

As a self-proclaimed movie geek, I love that almost everything is available on dvd these days. With a region-free player, a shipping address and the internet, anybody anywhere can have access to some of the best cinema once reserved for film libraries in New York and Paris. It's possible to think of movies being in the hands of the people everywhere, instead of cloistered film circles in isolated locations.

They are also changing the way film is being approached by an audience. Nobody I know has mentioned "The Day After Tomorrow" or "The Steppord Wives" – films with advertising budgets in the multi-million dollar range, but everyone I know is discussing, or trying to discuss, Outfoxed, a movie whose advertising budget consists of a series of emails and that is being mailed out on dvd.

So it pains me to learn that the (a) there are no Wiseman dvds available and (b) it is entirely his own choice. It's not being held up in litigation, no giant company is sitting on the right, or anything else that falls in the shady realm. Wiseman, having paid for the production of the movies, retains full rights to them.
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He sells them on VHS or 16mm reels (no dvd) for $400 a pop, mostly to universities or libraries (a price I imagine absurd even for a library).

I'm drawing a line in the sand. It's weird to say this, but for christsakes, Mr. Wiseman take the money and run! Sell off the rights for Titicut Follies to Criterion, who would pick it up in a heartbeat, and let cheap dvds of your other great classic films flow free. I could not get a hold of Wiseman himself for an opinion, but Zipporah Films, the company he uses made it sound like the lack of mass availability was entirely his own choice ("this is how Mr. Wiseman has chosen to make his films available…there are no other factors outside of Mr. Wiseman compelling him in this direction").

Mr. Wiseman, your films should be standard issue for all people who want to find the best that American Cinema has to offer; even 35 years later they still evoke a very powerful statement of people trying to survive within America. They are mature works, demanding of an audience, and often produce profund emotional reactions in those who view them.
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So help out the American audience, who access to independent movie vendors who would show your films in increasingly limited, in finding your message.

If not, please consider leaving your estate to ginandtacos.com. We'll see that when the time comes, your film legacy will be carried out properly (ie used in gatorade and sedan commericals).

New York Times Magazine: Not Funnies. Last weekend the New York Times magazine ran a cover story surveying the current state of comics.
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They mostly stuck to top-tier (Fantagraphics, Drawn/Quarterly) North American comics (with a brief stop to drop by Gaiman and Alan Moore).

The article is amazing. Whoever wrote it really did their research. I highly recommend it to both fans and to people who are looking to pick up something new. It also hammers out two very important points, which I'd like to comment on:

1) The Decline of Robert Crumb – For most of the 90s, you couldn't discuss comic books without trying to make them all seem like descendents of Robert Crumb, the misogynistic, disturbed 60s comic book artist portrayed in the excellent Terry Zwigoff movie. Everything followed from him; Clowes and Ware and everyone else couldn't talk about what they were doing without bringing him up.

The problem was that it didn't fit. If you actually read the output of Crumb it's very limited and not all together great. I'm going to break with a lot of people in that I consider it mostly crap. Sure it's misogynistic and self-loathing (and something the movie only hints at, but unbearably racist); what's worse is how repetitive it is. Once you've gotten though about 10 comics of his you know what you are in store for. So why are people like Clowes, who has had one of the most expansive careers in comics, with every project varied and rich, going to bat for this guy?

The magazine points out that all these people, even Sacco, go through an intense self-loathing period in their comic art.
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Their comics reflect their otherness, their sexual misadventures, and their problems with other people. Crumb gives them the ability to say "this is ok.
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Keep doing this." And these comic artists keep working at it and don't give up; they eventually get the rawer edges of it out of their system, and can go off in exciting new directions. It's a shame Crumb never was able.

2) The Rise of Art Spiegelman The real focus point for looking at these new artists is art Spiegelman. Like a lot of indie musicians of the time period, comic book artists aren't just comic book artists. They are salesmen, producers, advertisers, promoters and a hundred other things. As late as 6 years ago, there wasn't a real industry to nurture your talent – so you had to create one yourself. And nobody has done this quite like Spiegelman. "He's as important as he thinks he is" is an excellent quote, because it's true on both accounds.

3) Diversity in Comics I was a little worried when I first saw that picture. Sure they are some of my favorite comic book creators, but at the end of the day they are guys with poor eyesight complaining about how awkward they are. Then I noticed Joe Sacco was in it. Sacco has been doing amazing work with journalistic comics – it really blows away anything like it. And the writeup they do of him is the best I've seen.

They have so many comics covered than just the normal run-of-the-mill Crumb descendents – "Persepolis" and "Blankets" are by far the two best comics of the past year, and they both get writeups. People should be throwing copies of "Persepolis" from the rooftops; the memoir of an Iranian girl growing up during the revolution is about as far from a 'typical' comic book as you can get.

So read the article. And then read some comics. And then let's discuss.