Author: Mike

Let's get a working definition of a 'concept album' : "In a concept album…all songs contribute to a single overall theme or unified story." "Pet Sounds", Sgt. Pepper, "Dark Side on the Moon", "Double Nickels on the Dime", and "Ok Computer" are just some of the concept albums that people will debate for inclusion into the best of the best list. I'd like to put a new album, available online, into consideration: Denis Marshall's Betrayed. The unified story? The story of how Denis Marshall's ex-girlfriend gave him herpes.

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Ginandtacos.com didn't comment on it, but did anyone else notice a sense of sadness on the cultural left with Cardinal Ratzinger becoming Pope in April? I hate to pick on any one blog, but the excellent planned obsolescence had this odd moment of despair – "with the announcement of the accession of Benedict XVI. And I sat and cried in front of my television set, watching my relationship with the Church be severed once again.

"

I was actually quite happy. Not because I'm excited to see the old Pope's favorite right-wing henchman get the top job, but, by not picking someone from the third-world to usher in a new era of Catholicism, it was only a matter of time now until the Catholic Church became a matter of pure spectacle. Like any institution in its decline, half the fun is watching it kick and struggle. I knew this new guy was not going to try and save the church by running a saint factory (John Paul's grand total – 483 saints created, 1,345 people beatified; click here to see a timeline and get a sense of how fast he was churning out the new icons). My secret hope was, as Ratzinger was prefect of the position that used to be referred to as Holy Office of the Inquisition, I'd get to see a good ol' fashioned Inquisition in my lifetime.

And so it begins! Leaked to the New York Times today:

Investigators appointed by the Vatican have been instructed to review each of the 229 Roman Catholic seminaries in the United States for "evidence of homosexuality" and for faculty members who dissent from church teaching, according to a document prepared to guide the process. The Vatican document, given to The New York Times yesterday by a priest…Expectation for such a move rose this year with the election of Pope Benedict XVI, who has spoken of the need to "purify" the church…The seminary review, called an apostolic visitation, will send teams appointed by the Vatican to the 229 seminaries, which have more than 4,500 students. The last such review began about 25 years ago and took six years to complete.
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At each seminary, the visitors are to conduct confidential interviews with every faculty member and seminarian, as well as everyone who graduated in the last three years.

Among the other questions are these:

¶"Is the seminary free from the influences of New Age and eclectic spirituality?"

¶"Do the seminarians or faculty members have concerns about the moral life of those living in the institution? (This question must be answered)."

¶"Is there evidence of homosexuality in the seminary? (This question must be answered)."

A team is being assembled to weed out homosexuals and heresy in the Church! Awesome! One can almost imagine Bernard Gui questioning the kitchen staff in private, playing them off one another in a prisoner's dilemma, trying to find secret letters from long ago (or in these days, an old IM/email/browser history), and establishing Order through a full public confession (does Ratzinger read Foucault?).

Why is this urgent, you might ask? Well, because among your Opus Dei far right Catholics, it is common knowledge that (a) seminaries are under control of a "gay majority", (b) that this gay majority is causing the decline in priests, as it creates a hostile and liberal environment to study Christ, and (c) these homosexuals are behind the child abuse scandals.

For evidence that this is the worldview of that crowd, check no further than the amazon customer 'reviews' of Goodbye, Good Men : How Liberals Brought Corruption Into the Catholic Church, with it's talking points of

[the author] also makes it clear that homosexual behavior has been rampant, and largely ignored, on some seminary campuses. While his purpose is not to address the clergy sexual abuse scandal currently rocking the Church, the astute reader will wonder whether such behavior has contributed to the problem the Church is currently facing. Many observers tend to think that the two are related.

[different review] I used to think that a good Catholic fellow who believed and followed what the Church taught about such issues as abortion, contraception, homosexuality, the primacy of the Pope, transubstantiation, the immaculate conception, etc. would be a shoe-in for the priesthood…devout young men are being routinely TURNED AWAY from the seminaries for no other reason than that they hold and believe these eminently orthodox positions! Who are being accepted in their places? I think the current and growing scandal within the Catholic Church in America provides a clear-cut answer.

Nevermind that there's no evidence that homosexuals abuse boys (is it assumed that all straight men abuse little girls?). Who knew that teaching a philosophy of the spirituality of persecution would lead to a place where people actively seek out the experience of persecution? Everyone who has been to Catholic School remembers a priest who was probably gay. The idea that he was/is acting on behalf a liberal/secular agenda of destroying the Church and molesting children could only be put forth by those who can't admit that something is rotten at the core. Their immediate reaction is to find the nearest minority group to scapegoat.

Best of luck with the interrogations.
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yahoo photo number one:

Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area in New Orleans, Louisiana.

yahoo photo number two:

A young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005. Flood waters continue to rise in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina did extensive damage when it made landfall on Monday.

This one is too easy. I never knew "finding bread and soda from a local grocery store" could be made so innocuous or menacing based on the switching of one word and skin tone. For shame.

(shamelessly stolen from this quality livejournal)

This past weekend I had another close encounter with a cab driver, a situation that was exacerbated by my level of drunkenness. This brings the noteworthy stories that involve drunkenly dealing with a chicagoland cab driver to three. I would like to share these stories with you now.

DISCLAIMER: It is part of offical ginandtacos.com policy to not make this webpage into a livejournally diary of personal stories (current music – jade tree comp), but it is our policy to show the highs and, as will be apparent soon, lows of excessive gin and taco consumption. I hope you understand.

Jamaican Love Advice, February 2002.

Fellow ginandtacoer Erik Martin (who will be writing again shortly after his release from the Betty Ford clinic next week) and myself were drinking around the southwest burbs of Chicago. We had just seen an afternoon movie, whose name escapes me, and we wanted to spend the rest of the day bendering it up around the area.

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A9 Blockview maps.

Everyone, if you haven't already, check out a9's online map service. It's not as streamlined and user friendly as google maps, but it does offer a new feature for several cities.

Click on one of the cities listed, and then click on the map – you'll find a series of pictures in the bottom right corner.
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Keep playing with it, and you'll see that you can view images block to block across the city. It becomes addictive.

Google Talk

Google Talk appears to be offically open for business. As it's in beta-test, it requires a gmail account (yell in the comments if you need one) to register. It's compatible with AOL-IM (and many others), and features voip. I'm curious if the recent stock offering is part of a move to allow google talk to call into phone networks; we'll have to wait and see.

Hulk: Ultimate Destruction

Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, lives up to the hype (reviews here). Picture a sandbox world, like Grand Theft Auto, except you get to smash just about everything available. Run up the side of buildings and do a piledriver off the top, punt cars and use lightposts as javelins – the level of destructive creativity is amazing. The demo I played allowed you to take a car, rip it in half, and make metal gloves out of it. I've heard you can flatten a city bus and use it as a skateboard.
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Brilliant!

"But Mike," you say, "I'm too old, and too mature to play a video game. Especially one based, on all things, The Hulk. For shame." Lame, but understandable. Here's a quick highbrow beard that you can place around your enjoyment of this game, if you're the type that needs it – Thomas Pynchon's essay on the Luddite movement:

[Luddites] were bands of men, organized, masked, anonymous, whose object was to destroy machinery used mostly in the textile industry…[their] anger was not directed at the machines, not exactly. I like to think of it more as the controlled, martial-arts type anger of the dedicated Badass. There is a long folk history of this figure, the Badass. He is usually male, and while sometimes earning the quizzical tolerance of women, is almost universally admired by men for two basic virtues: he Is Bad, and he is Big.
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Bad meaning not morally evil, necessarily, more like able to work mischief on a large scale. What is important here is the amplifying of scale, the multiplication of effect….
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When times are hard, and we feel at the mercy of forces many times more powerful, don't we, in seeking some equalizer, turn, if only in imagination, in wish, to the Badass — the djinn, the golem, the hulk, the superhero — who will resist what otherwise would overwhelm us?

…[the novel Frankenstein] remains today more than well worth reading, for all the reasons we read novels, as well as for the much more limited question of its Luddite value: that is, for its attempt, through literary means which are nocturnal and deal in disguise, to deny the machine…To insist on the miraculous is to deny to the machine at least some of its claims on us, to assert the limited wish that living things, earthly and otherwise, may on occasion become Bad and Big enough to take part in transcendent doings. By this theory, for example, King Kong (?-1933) becomes your classic Luddite saint.

Before you point out that I'm advocating to "deny the machine" by playing a digitial simulacra of denial on a machine, all I can say is you were the one with the problem, and that Frankenstein was also printed on a press, and I can't even hear you as I'm riding a tractor-trailing symbol of capital-technocratic hegemony as if it were a skateboard:

I've always associated the idea of being "Ideologically Pure" in American colleges with the activist left community. Perhaps it's because of the community of activist vegans I knew and lived with for a year (long story – but don't worry faithful readers, it involves me eating lots of hamburgers!

). It's a bum rap that the hippie-esque left gets associated with the value of "relativism" – because those people tend to be more in line with a True Believer in The Cause, and tend to be distrustful of those who don't believe (or worse, believe only half-heartedly or have doubts), than any good old fashion antipositivist could imagine.

There were the vegans who, in private no doubt, loathed the vegetarians for not being willing to suffer enough in the cause. There were the vegans who raced to be even more pure than their brothers-in-arms. And there were the members of the GLBT community who might have been more comfortable leaving the Bs at the bottom of the rainbow (one wonders if there were secret GLT "Bs: make a choice already!" meetings).

And for those who the very idea of getting a college education reeked of indoctrination or those who felt that colleges didn't go far enough in ordering society there were schooling alternatives (Personally, for the purposes of designing society I'll always take my chances with the capitalists' Culture Industry than with Phish and white girls who have dreadlocks).

Mind you, the only 'conservatives' I knew were a few kids holed up in the local church and attached Newman House, more concerned about how they would match up in baby output versus their contemporaries than in matters of ideas. That and the various frat people I encountered were also more concerned with managing the upcoming weekend party (and the legal troubles afterwards) or young Republicans making little Michael-Mooresque pranks.

So I'm equal parts happy and horrified to see the New Yorker's profile on Patrick Henry College. I know Christian focused college have existed for quite some time, but I've always sensed that they were like a giant Newman House run amock. Lots of odd 'socials', lots of making sure you get married before you graduate, etc. Little did I know that the Will to Believe was as strong there as any campus activist group.

The school was originally started as a college for homeschooled children and as a repertoire for aides and volunteers for hard-right politicans. So picture classroom after classroom of children who have been 'untainted' by classroom interaction and having to deal with, or be inspired by, teachers who aren't their parents.

The article doesn't have any links to the webpage, but it is worth it to explore around. First up is the Statement of Faith all kids who matriculate to the college have to sign. Check it out. " The Bible…is the inspired word of God, inerrant in its original autographs … Man is by nature sinful and is inherently in need of salvation…" All I had to sign was a Academic Integrity agreement.
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Sadly I could not find the dress code students adhere to online. If it is anything more strict than a stained, slept-in comic book t-shirt, I would have been in major trouble…

A lot has been written on the high-level policies of these Christian Colleges – their bans on inter-racial dating, their Full Support of republicans on the march, their disturbing speakers and sources of funding, attitudes toward Evolution, etc. But little has beeen written on the student's day-to-day life. As smoking and drinking are strictly forbidden, I genuinely don't know how they would spend their free time. I thought perhaps they sat around and listened to Minor Threat.

I should have known the answer: they try and become the most pure. This must be hard on a campus of virgins, non-drinkers or drug takers.
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But they find their way. One student sent out an email reminding women to dress modestly for the Spring Dance because "

In a move closely watched by suburban townships and housing advocates across the country, the Supreme Court came down against homeowners today in Susette Kelo v. City of New London in a 5-4 vote. Susette Kelo lives in a middle-class home in the city of New London.

The city decided to claim eminent domain to seize her house and neighborhood to hand over to the New London Development Corporation, a private company who intents to use the property for private developments – specifically a development involving hotels and a marina.

At issue is determining whether or not there is any check to local governments claiming eminent domain as long as they are willing to compensate for whatever the property is worth. Let's clarify what this is not: (a) The intended use is not public (schools, roads, parks), or even for a third party developing a public use ("Taco Bell Presents: The Gordita Public Park"). It's entirely for the economic benefit of a third-party.

This is a hurdle to jump – as the 5th amendment is pretty specific in saying – "nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation." (b) The land in question is not blighted – a word that has a legal and regulatory meaning. Blighted property can be grabbed for whatever reasons with compensation – as the Supreme Court has determined in 1953. The area is question are full of safe, comfortable, older-middle class homes.
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Well The Supreme Court found in favor of the city and economic developers today.

For those of you who like such things, Neal Stephenson writes about the new Star Wars movies versus the old ones in a Times editorial. He's right to point out one of the important things about the Star Wars movies, at least the original ones, is that it made technology a 'fun' topic for movies. Everything before then had the new digital age as the end of democracy (Lucas's own THX-138) or the end of the current form of humanity (2001: A Space Odyssey). Star Wars predicted that the age of digitization would more or less involve silly drunken digital pictures, finding cheaper airline tickets and looking up tour dates for obscure bands – and not at all involve evolution replacing humanity by star babies or emotionally odd machines.

It's also funny where he asked "who was the republic fighting?" and nobody, including myself, was actually all that sure.

Batman Got on my Nerves

Now I can all see exactly the idea behind the Indiana Jones and Star Wars movies. When the kids of the 70s all had B-movies reels, Flash Gordon and diabolical Nazis in their pop culture vocabulary, they got the same products repackaged back to them as their “own” movies. My generation grew up on comic books.
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Not just any comic books – but the moody violence of Alan Moore and Frank Miller, and the expressionistic teen angst put to four-colors of the Image artists (Mcfarlane, Liefeld, Silvestri, Lee).

Harry Potter aside, there isn't much left in terms of new bankable franchises where the audience already knows most of the story walking into the theaters. The miners are getting deep, hitting the last remaining ores of 50s television (Bewitched, The Hooneymooners), late 60s/early 70s cinema (Guess who's coming to dinner?, The Longest Yard) and 70s television (Dukes of Hazzard, Starsky and Hutch).

It doesn't help that the some of America's “auteurs" are aping the sentiment by re-making successful foreign films as American films – the most egregious example being Soderbergh's "Solaris", and the most accomplished is probably a tie between "The Ring" and Christopher Nolan's "Insomnia."

He was running me amock.

And now Mister Nolan has inherited the Batman title.
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In the same way all of our parents knew what a swashbuckling space smuggler looked like, everyone my age knows who Bruce Wayne is, even if they've never read a comic book. I feel silly trying to expand an essay out of this movie; you probably already know if you are going to go and see it or not. So I'll make this short.

The first thing is that more money went to the supporting cast than extensive special effects, which was an excellent idea. There are less fireballs or bizarre Matrix-esque freeze frames, and more Michael Caine, Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman. Caine's old-school butler and Oldman's perplexed cop especially standout against the background. Chicago kids will love that the movie was filmed here – seeing the Batmobile fly over the Wacker Street bridge and later screech across Lower Wacker drive was a nice touch (I think the Merchandise Mart was Arkham Asylum).

It's been a day and the editing for the action scenes are still making me queezy. The editing is all Michael Bay – you never are quite sure where the actors are standing or what they are doing in relation to each other. This shouldn't be that hard – the movies where people kick and fight each other that audiences adore (the first Matrix, Crouching Tiger and other Hong-Kong action, Blade) all allow you to clearly see what is going on. They are entirely composed of mid-range shots with a strong linear focus to them (The vampire missed his kick, then Blade stabbed him with his sword). It's particularly bad with the chase scene, which should be a perfect Blues Brothers style pileup of cars (cinematically, if Chicago is good for anything, it’s for car chases). But the jump-cuts and non-sequitur shot sequencing gave nobody the simple, but essential, satisfaction of watching a car make a fast turn. This becomes even more of a problem during the last battle set on the El.

Perhaps the idea of perfectly framing a grown man in a rubber suit kicking someone was too much for Nolan to bear, and that he thought he could dodge, or perhaps even make atmospheric, a lot of what was going on by making it incoherent. It didn't work. It is notable that he didn’t do this in the beginning of the movie where it was just Bruce Wayne learning how to sword-fight in the hills.

He ridiculed me, calling me a bum.

The co-scriptwriter is David Goyer, who in addition to being an excellent comic book writer, brought you the script for the 2nd and 3rd Blade movies. Blade can get away with chatting it up about Big Ideas while delievering a roundhouse kick to someone – Christian Bale in a rubber suit cannot. The scenes where he's supposed to be the scariest as Batman come off as the most absurd. Bale plays the best asshole in current movies (see American Psycho, the new Shaft), and his Bruce Wayne is perfect – at least they keep the standing around in the Batman suit to a minimum.

At the end of the film you have gotten three movies – an excellent first one of the training of Bruce Wayne, a pretty good one of Batman's first days on the job, and a third one where Batman has to save the day that may make you dizzy. Don't feel ashamed to leave 2/3rds of the way through the movie.

Diehard Star Wars fans hate the new trilogy. It's important to realize why this has come to be.

It's not the normal revulsion that comes with the release of the next blockbluster hitting movie theaters – the hate is deeper than the normal cultural laments that go with a "Independence Day" or "I, Robot" debuting to 3,000 screens. It's also not the mild betrayal one feels when a childhood icon is cashed out a second time through – be it Your Favorite Alternative Band Going Back Out on Tour or Your Favorite Childhood Cartoon Characters on Ice. For us, Star Wars has been all about action figures and soundtracks that the cashing out part of it doesn't even register – and besides, didn't Lucas already cash out by re-releasing the first three with 'new footage', and didn't we line up to see it?

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