Author: Mike

Hey guys. A few quick things. One is that ginandtacos.com has redone it's xml and rdf feeds, so if you are into doing that thing you can get notified to changes quicker and preview them. I use sharp reader for pc and various mac apps; these feeds haven't really been tested with the firefox live bookmarks/sage that everyone is using; so if there are problems drop a line and we'll clean it up.

Two is that I wrote about my favorite documentary of last year, LA Plays Itself, but there wasn't anyway that I could write about it without just going nuts for 2-3 pages, and since about 200 people saw it last year I've quarantined it off to the movie page and started it with commentary about the 77th annual Oscars nominees to give you something to go with.

The staff is also preparing something big, possibly for next week or the week after.
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Stay tuned.

2004 Sucked. That's ok because (a) 2005 is already much better and (b) there were some good things that happened last year, of which I'll put to (electronic) paper over the next week so I can remember those and forget the rest.

First off, the DVR. Although I've been around cable television for as long as I remember, after college I never signed up for it (I would make my parents tape the HBO shows I watched). Part of me would like to think this is a result of some sort of "there is nothing ever good on why aren't you reading more Proust?" cultural snobbery, but I really know it was more out of behavior avoidance to prevent myself from ending up awake at 3am, 50 pounds heavier, watching Carson Daly count down the top 70 moments of 1993.

In walks the DVR, a TIVO-like device offered through our comcast service. It tapes up to 80 hours, up to two channels at time. Whatever interface issues people complained about in the past have more or less disappeared, and anybody who can navigate a computer can handle this.

It makes it so that you can enjoy TV on your own time/on your own terms. Everyone who has one of these things raves about it, so I'll limit myself to a few things about specific shows that have changed since I started DVRing them.

First off, you can become a master at watching shows in fast-forward. I can watch 8 hours of Gilmore Girl in 30 minutes, stopping only to stare and blush at the scenes with Lane Kim in them. Thanks to the internet, I can use episode guides to find which episodes of Beavis and Butthead have the videos that cracked me up 10 years ago and see if they still do (they still do – "these guys are called smashing pumpkins, but they aren't smashing anything" – brilliant!).

One of the biggest impact is reserved for those shows where the parts that are good are completely seperated, like oil and water, from that parts that are awful. Which brings me to Boston Legal. I never watched The Practice until it's last year, where James Spader was brought on to try and breath new life into the failing show. Legend has it that David E. Kelley offered Spader a job playing a lawyer immediately after seeing "Secretary" for the first time; this makes sense as the vaguely sinister, sexually deviant, somewhat likeable but morally challenged character Alan Shore seems straight out of that movie. Later brought, of all people, William Shatner as the powerful, though possibly senile, named law partner Denny Crane. The show got cancelled anyway.

Rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater, ABC decided to take these two new characters and build a show around them. With no history of Awards and Strong Moral Dramatic Situations that The Practice evidently had going for it, Spader and Shatner are free to chew the scenery as much as they'd like (while poor Odo tries to keep them in check). Shatner (who just got a Golden Globe for this role) tells a jury that he hates old people, and that the jury can go ahead and find the drug company civilly-liable as they'll just increase the price of medication to cover the judgement. James Spader waxes reflectively on his love affair with a midget ("best two years of my life") and his "frequent flyer miles" he gets with the local escort agency with a reptilian charm you can't quite stop watching. buy priligy Canada buy priligy online no prescription

The rest of the show is a photocopy of a photocopy of any of those crappy David E. Kelley lawyer shows for which the fast-forward button was designed. There's some idealistic young lawyer with big boobs, there's some hard-headed "my-way-or-the-highway" lawyer that has a short skirt, and so on. Evidently not everyone watches Boston Legal via DVR, as ABC is now gutting the show a bit to keep the women making "Desperate Housewives" (the lead-in show) a huge-hit around for a second hour of TV.

The last weeks have seen the firing of one of the super-model women lawyers, Candice Bergen entering as a regular playing another named partner to rival Mr. Shatner, and one episode in which a women playing Spader's secretary (whose likeness to Maggie Gyllenhaal is notable) complaining that Spader is sexually harassing her (the in-joke is quite funny). It may be enough to keep the show interesting in the long run.

The ability to fast-forward through crap is one of the big selling points of the DVR, but I find it equally useful in re-visiting scenes that need a second (or third) viewing. So far, every episode of Boston Legal has ended with Spader and Shatner at night, seated in bubble chairs on the roof, cigars and brandy in hand, contemplating the events of the show against the void of the Boston skyline. The snark and defenses of the characters are dropped for that moment, and it's usually quite touching. It's certainly interesting enough for a mutiple viewing via the rewind-button.

(that went long – sorry, later in the week is best documentary, and best liberal breakdown, among others. stay tuned)

Since today is the day that they announced the 77th annual Oscar nominees, it seems as good as any day for me to discuss my favorite documentary of 2004. Since it was seen in about a dozen places across the country, and may or may not be legal for the director to sell (more on that in a minute), I'll keep it short and also discuss the Oscars.

This year look like every other Oscar with the normal Oscar bait movies sweeping every category. This is odd, as dragging out the same old guys from the 70s is getting tired. Look at the guys who are sweeping the nominations. I'll defend Clint Eastwood to the bitter end, but Scorsese and Nichols haven't made any real cinematic gems since 1976 (excluding HBO TV for Nichols, and count Goodfellas if you must). These are the same guys who had their decade 35 years ago, but it's time for something new to step on the stage.

With last year's welcome reception of indie-spirited "Lost in Translation" and under-the-radar critical hits "City of God" and "House of Sand and Fog" to the normal mix of contenders, I thought perhaps this may be the year that things change up. But after seeing Huckabee's and Zissou and realizing, no matter what I thought of them, that they were in no way ready for prime-time, I was wondering what the Academy would due to stay relevant for our culture.
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Which is to say, that i'm very happy they didn't nominate The Passion of the Christ for everything, which is something I was very worried about. They nominated it for makeup (how much like a horror movie!), and instead nominated a bunch of guys who were really good at some point – just not right now. Granted The Passion may have made for a more interesting evening, but I'm comfortable with it's awfulness not getting held up to higher scrutiny.

I am surprised at the obvious pandering of giving Jamie Foxx a nomination for both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor. Especially since he was the main Actor, not Supporting, in Collateral.
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Collateral was at it's best when showing the extended range of Los Angeles, the way the city goes on and on in all directions, and does it with a digital camera (giving hope for all of us running around with 3-ccds trying to make something decent) that improves on poor-quality tape instead of trying to mimic it, and in that sense, it's fair to consider Los Angeles the main actor in that movie.

Which brings me to the documentary in question, LA Plays Itself. This is a documentary by Calarts film professor Thom Andersen, combing over the depiction of the city of Los Angeles exclusively through movie clips set in the city he has taken from the past 100 years. It is three hours of clips of movies with narration over it, trying to makes sense of it all in various directions. It is dense, complicated, and difficult to follow at points. It is wonderful.

Some of the threads that Anderson tries to draw throughout the movie are depictions of police, from old Dragnet movies/tv episodes, and how they change around the time of Rodney King (the conclusion of "they become bizarre" is evident from the number of "Psycho Killer LAPD Cop" movies that are made, best shown by the T-1000 in Terminator 2).

He goes to the throat of the condescension of Woody Allen; he shows how foreign directors approach the city. He watches as the views of the idyllic place to go and live in the mid-century turn into the dystopic and dysfunctional land it has become in popular culture, and traces it to teenage culture and recessions. He contrasts liberal middle-class movies (think Alan Alda teaching his son to drive) with seldom-seen minorities and immigrant directors with the desperation and harsh humanity of Cassavetes.

Most importantly, Anderson loves his city in the way that acknowledges the bad but appreciates the good, and it shows in this movie. Coming from Chicago, a city that has a give-and-take relationship for it's identity from popular culture, I can appreciate this. Chicago is many things if you know about it solely from the media: fat and ignorant (*da bears!*), a collection of desperate or happy-go-lucky suburbs (American Beauty's 847 area-code, everything John Hughes has done), a great place for suburban kids to hang out (Ferris Bueller), the strangest mix of urbanity and the western-frontier with class anxieties (Blues Brothers).

I want to say that this is the best documentary I've seen this decade. It may be true for a longer period of time, but there is something very new century about it.
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The internet has a lot of the kinks out of it, and we can now start to piece things together from varying sources to find something new – and the movie does have a feel of a very intense google search about it, piecing together elements faster than you can handle them.

The film does get very geeky at points, which is either a plus or a minus depending on your mindset. I'm not going to bother to convince you on those merits. I love statements like this realization of Blade Runner – "Perhaps [the reasons people still really are into Blade Runner] is that it makes us nostalgic for a dystopia that won't exist…instead of living in giant overrun cities with public transportation, we live in disconnected suburbs with no identity…instead of technology being dangerous and sexy, it is just efficient and takes away our jobs." which clarifies something about that movie that you were probably sort of thinking.

Now there's going to be a problem that's obvious; this movie seems custom made for film geeks, people who can measure their lives in movies and genres and influences and cinema trends. But it's also made for anyone who has a strong connection to any city. I'm very glad I got to see it in downtown Chicago. The movie had me leaving the theater extremely conscious of my experience of place, something that had never happened to me before with seeing a movie. I had to walk around for a while just go get my bearings straight. That feeling of having everything you felt going into the theater getting knocked on it's ass is probably the best thing you can hope for from a movie.

As this movie is entirely of clips of other movies, it may have a problem getting released on dvd (though i'm sure it'll show up somehow). I'll get you word when, and if, it does show up for netflix or online. Until then, here are two reviews of the movie that are worth reading. And thanks for making it this far :)

Collateral Damage: Los Angeles Continues Playing Itself

Interview: The Reality of Film

I'm so sorry that this is a week late. Seasonal issues, computer breakdown, work deadlines and (of course) Half-life 2 all contributed to keep this eulogy from being on time.

First Off: Visit the ODB 1998 Timeline if you haven't already. Second: This won't be an obituary – this will simply be several stories throughout the next day or two as to why we love Ol' Dirty the way we do. If you don't get it after this week, you never will.
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As many of you are fellow office workers waiting it out until the holiday (is everyone's office as dead as mine?) these will run long with many multi-media links to keep you entertained, and will be updated through Wednesday. Enjoy.

The Poster

For Christmas several years ago Ed got me a Ol’ Dirty Bastard "N***a Please" poster. He was a little disappointed that, as a result of keeping it in his trunk during the winter, it had gotten a little water damaged from the snow.
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I said that it was fine; a water-damaged ODB poster is far superior to a mint poster.
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I immediately took it to the prestigious frame show in the ghetto Urbana Lincoln Square Mall. The little old lady who ran the place usually worked with a different type of customer. I walked up to the counter and asked for their gaudiest, cheapest frame that they had. Sure enough, she was able to pick out the perfect one, which hangs on my wall to this day:

While trying to convince me on the merits of this specific cheap gaudy frame, she noted that this one would be a good one because, and I'll never forget this quote, “it will bring out the gold in his jumpsuit.” And damn if she wasn’t right.

She also noted that the poster was water-damaged. I wanted to make up an elaborate story about how it was an old family heirloom that was damaged during the Civil War, but I just said "oh yes, I know" to the poor old lady.

In Heaven

While discussing with some friends Ol' Dirty's chances of making into a Christian Heaven, I proposed that he has a pretty good chance of making it. Why? With the dozens of illegitimate children he has fathered, he can claim that he has followed the Pope's doctrine against using contraceptives throughout his life. It's as good of a chance as the man is going to have to get in there.
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It's important to not forget the important things in life with all the post-election depression: gin, tacos, and the following. Several links to cheer up your wednesday:

Here's an AP article that should make you angry. Evidently several anti-birth control pharmacists are refusing to dispense out birth control pill prescriptions based on personal moral grounds. Mind you it will often take a women at least a full-day to get the mess sorted out, in which case she may miss one of her pills. What's worse, state governments are moving to protect these actions:

Mississippi enacted a sweeping statute that went into effect in July that allows health care providers, including pharmacists, to not participate in procedures that go against their conscience. South Dakota and Arkansas already had laws that protect a pharmacist's right to refuse to dispense medicines. Ten other states considered similar bills this year.

Listen. A quick word for the pharmacists out there: We understand that this is a major issue for you, in which dozens of academic articles about your integrity and professional responsibility and everything else will provide fodder for your discussions. Let me give you ginandtacos.com's (and by us, I mean everyone who isn't a pharmacist) opinion: we don't care what you think. You have about as much say in our moral lives as the waiter at the Olive Garden. To us you are the person at the dry cleaner's with an advanced degree – we show up, hand you a sheet of paper, and you get us our product. That's it.

If you wanted to advise people on their health decisions and options, you should have studied harder and gone to med school. If you hate the idea of people using birth control picket a Planned Parenthood in your free time. But when you are behind that counter, you are a service-industry worker, and you better do whatever the customer tells you.

There are dozens of policemen, prosecutors and judges who object to The War on Drugs, but they don't refuse to arrest people or put them in jail because of their personal beliefs. Nobody is paying you the $$$ that pharmacists make to give you a soapbox – they are paying you to do your job and you should be fired for not doing it. I hate to tell you this (no wait, I love to tell you this), but birth control is perfectly legal in this country, and it is your job to dispense it. Find another one if you had an objection to it. You are not the first people to realize you could object to the parts of a job you don't like by doing a half-assed job (that would be the employees of the White Castle in Chicago Ridge, circa 1957).

To state governments – you are lawyers; again if you wanted to be doctors you should have studied harder. If you want to pass laws against birth control by all means try – but don't sneak measures forcing the health care industry to do, or not do, whatever you want. Doctors are professionals; if they say that birth control is an appropriate medical solution for the patient's situation it is the job of other doctors, and distinctly not the job of state congressmen and pharmacists, to object.

With some time to cool down and reflect, here are my humble thoughts on the events of this election. First off, I take some solace that we are not the first Americans to deal with the red state-blue state divide. From John Updike’s introduction to this collection:

The [American literature of the] 1920s…are a decade with a distinct personality…the urban minority of Americans that produced most of the writing felt superior, if not hostile, to what H.L. Hencken called the “booboisie”, whose votes had brought on Prohibition, puritanical censorship, the Scopes Trial, and Calvin Coolidge.

How little has changed! Here we are, 80 years later, watching counties with cities go blue and the rural/exurbs go red, trying to convince people that we shouldn't be teaching Creationism in a science classroom!

It’s also important to remember that this isn't the second time this trick was pulled. The only campaign platform I can think of that is more outright cynical in it's manipulating people's values, fears and concerns was Nixon's "Law and Order" platform. "Law and Order'! Like "moral values", it's a nice way to convince white people that their way of life is under seige and only the Republican party can save them.

As Kerry was a prosecutor and Bush was elected in Texas on a platform of capital punishment and throwing teenagers in prison, I was surprised during the debates to not see any of the normal bullshit posturing of who is the most tough on crime. Little did I know that it was probably because the Bush team found a new urban minority population to terrorize suburban and rural (and sadly, increasing numbers of blacks and latinos) with.

Now do the numbers bear this out? We’ve had some time to crunch number and find new data, and by far Kerry’s biggest hit was among working class white people (where they are defined by white adults who do not have a four year degree from college). Clinton carried this group during his terms; Gore lost ground in 2000, the Democrats lost even more in 2002, and it looks like they all went rushing to the right in 2004.

The thing that really carried this group for Bush, I believe, is that the term ‘moral issues’ was not only gay marriage and abortion. These issues were major parts of energizing the base, but for Bush everything is a moral issue. Why reduce capital gains taxes? Because it is wrong to tax income twice. That simple. Is it good for the economy? Bad? It doesn’t matter – it’s a wrong thing to do.

Kerry is a legislator. I thought he ran a good campaign and was right on many issues, but at the end of the day he proposed what he did because he thought that they were good policy. His ideas weren't values as much as they were tools to create good policy (How un-French is that!) – Why did he want to roll back the capital gain taxes? To fund dock searches. In other words: to enact policy. The idea that it is Right or Wrong in and of itself, a notion crucial to the working-class vote, is never conveyed.

Question: Who was the only person to say that we should roll back the capital gains tax cut because it was the right thing to do? Bill Clinton, during the DNC convention.

From now on, no more Senators running for office. Democrats need people who will talk about their beliefs in social justice as the most important personal thing they feel, and not just a series of good policy measures. This may not help, but it's the best hope we have. No matter what we will continue to watch the burden of funding our country falling upon work instead of wealth. Americans who depend on wages to survive (ie most of us) are getting screwed, and this is one of the most moral of issues we face. Here’s hoping that the Democrats can find someone to explain that to the people.

I need to put the Presidency aside for a minute (it's way too awful to think about). Another thing to get worried about is the Senate results. Alan Keyes' staunt-pro-life, anti-gay, anti-income-tax, pro-war-hawk platform collapsed in Illinois, and I'm proud to have casted a vote against it (and for Obama). But it turns out that many white men in red states won by running essentially on the same platform.

NBC interviewed John McCain last night. They congratulated him on his win, and Tim Russert (my favorite, god bless him) jumped at the opportunity to ask "there are many very culturally conservative Republicans entering the Senate, how will that effect more moderates like yourself?
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" McCain dodged it by pointing out moderate Arlen Specter was re-elected, a move that does nothing to address the new major problem of the Republican party.

That problem, which was hinted at during the Republican Convention, is that the party is going to be split between big-name moderates like McCain, Schwarzenegger and Giuliani, who are pro-choice, pro-stem cells, pro-balanced budget and centrists, and bible-thumpers with the most regressive set of social and cultural views imaginable on the other. And the second half of their big tent took a huge win last night. If 1994 was the year that the House ran off to the Right, 2004 may be the year the Senate did. Let's look at some of the winners in the Senate for 2005:

So I'm hearing from Republican friends (yes I have a few) that the major strategy on the right this year is going to be getting a large number of pollwatchers to go to polling places and just challenge the residency of every identifiable hispanic or african-american they can find. The challenge may or may not be effective, but it will slow voting to a halt in democratic areas, and may cause people to just go home rather than waiting the additional hours.

Not sure whether or not to believe gossip, a quick google search for residency laws is already showing a headache in the making. Random link from Maine:

Two years ago, however, Republicans challenged nearly every voter at the polling place on the University of Maine's Orono campus, creating long, slow-moving lines, according to people who were there.

Orono Republicans say they were just making sure that residency laws were enforced. Democrats charge that it was a deliberate tactic designed to discourage voters.

For people working the polls, it was a headache. "I don't know if it was a delaying tactic, but it definitely held things up," Orono Town Clerk Wanda Thomas said. "They were challenging just about everyone."

Now just replace 'student' with 'hispanic' or 'african-american' and we have a surefire way to create a hostile voting atmosphere. Democracy is on the march!

Wow, I love how when Iraqi's cultural legacy was looted nobody really was concerned. Now that we are realizing the looting had more military implications, people are coming out of the woodworks.
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Heads up for this editorial by Former ambassador Peter W. Galbraith:

On April 16, 2003, a mob attacked and looted the Iraqi equivalent of the Centers for Disease Control, taking live HIV and black fever virus among other potentially lethal materials. US troops were stationed across the street but did not intervene because they didn't know the building was important.

When he found out, the young American lieutenant was devastated.
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He shook his head and said, "I hope I am not responsible for Armageddon." About the same time, looters entered the warehouses at Iraq's sprawling nuclear facilities at Tuwaitha on Baghdad's outskirts.
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They took barrels of yellowcake (raw uranium), apparently dumping the uranium and using the barrels to hold water. US troops were at Tuwaitha but did not interfere.

I supported President Bush's decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein…
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In spite of the chaos that followed the war, I am sure that Iraq is better off without Saddam Hussein…It is my own country that is worse off…Someone out there has nuclear bomb-making equipment, and they may not be well disposed toward the United States. Much of this could have been avoided with a competent postwar strategy.

Ouch. I still also feel that this is a result of our military being too effective during the war.