A New Development; Mark Your Calendars!

Well, we’ve finally hit 50,000 visitors here at your humble establishment, but like a birthday, it’s one of those artificial milestones that serve only to emphasize one’s length in the teeth. So, in attempt to shake things up a bit, I have invited a Guest Blogger to jump into the fray. Call it a Johnny Carson maneuver, bringing in a guest so I can maybe relax a bit and not feel so horribly guilty if I don’t feel like posting. It’ll also afford a bit of a change of perspective. After almost four years of blogging here, some of you have to be getting bored with the monotony. (Frankly, I get sick of my own voice, too.) Hopefully this Spankin’ New Addition will improve things around here, and encourage some of you to stop skulking in the shadows.

So, everyone extend your warmest welcomes to our new guest blogger here at Dr J’s, Nic. Let’s hope she enjoys herself. *applause* I, for one, am looking forward to having a fresh voice around here. Welcome aboard, Nic!

And with that, I’m going to sit back and savour the thought of finally becoming Johnny Carson and doing as little work as I absolutely have to do. Who knows, maybe it’ll energize this old crank. Okay, not bloody likely, but one can hope, non? Now it’s time for me to take the rest of the day off.

Libretto By Sir Mix-A-Lot

If you can find a way not to laugh at this, you're entirely too dour.  Ironically, it's more in the spirit of Gilbert and Sullivan than the utterly rancid film from which the footage was taken.

With A Parricidal Toe

Call it one of the Not-So-Good Doctor’s little pet theories, that the greatness of a writer is often verified by the amount of awful criticism that’s written about him. (Or her, of course.) Witness Shakespeare, about whom entire libraries of critical pretense have been built; witness Milton, against whose influence so many Leavisites and anti-Leavisites stood their ramparts and took their aim. And then there’s Joyce, whose Wake effectively necessitated the invention of dynamite, for good and for ill. For reasons that sometimes seem to Bloomian (Harold, not Poldy) by half, great writers seem to attract the radicals, from poseurs to partisans, from revolutionaries to lunatics, from the very best and the very worst of the often motley lot of the committed and committable. Think Blake. Think Coleridge. Think Dickinson and Whitman and Tolstoy and Kafka. It’s as if their individual greatness is not just determined but enshrined by the elaborate and usually absurd catacombs erected around them--- and by the vandals Hell-bent on breaking in.

No wonder, then, that so much genuinely dreadful criticism has emerged around T.S. Eliot. It’s rare anymore that I find anything about Big Tom worth reading, much less mentioning to anyone else not professionally obligated to do so something that should be read. Herewith, however, an exception. (Just cancel the print option following the link.) Can’t say I agree with all of the assertions contained therein, but the piece at least is lucid and relatively measured in its provocations. Speculations about personality and passion normally suggest a mug’s game, which Mr Eliot famously described poetry as at least once; but there’s a strong sense (as in sensibility), to my estimation at least, that the piece is hovering near something quite profound, even if never quite alights. I’d also take issue with some of the more sweeping-- one might say glib-- statements posed within (c.f., "Bloom’s whole protesting body of criticism"), and I’d complain too that most of the relatively few allowances for Eliot’s words in edgewise are of the all-too-common stock.

It occurs to me now that one of the least observed aspects about Eliot’s oeuvre is its prodigality, its initial rejection of and eventual reconciliation with so many of the literary, cultural, spiritual and intellectual forces that neared him, and of which the rejection and then acceptance of Milton is just the most obvious example. In a way, that’s part of what Four Quartets essays so carefully, the reconciliation of the many influences once chagrined and in those poems so sublimely included: Milton, the old man who died blind and quiet; the familiar compound ghost that Eliot claimed was both Yeats and Swift, but certainly seemed much, much, more like Yeats; even Shakespeare and Coleridge, included and responded to overtly yet gingerly, as if to negotiate less a peace than a detente with them and what they represent. The language of condition, of hypothesis and exploration, is as key to the Quartets as the language of negation is to King Lear. The possibility of resolution, of redeeming time and self, is pursued, or at least approached, forwardly yet tentatively, even parsimoniously, like the threading of a needle. Eliot as a critic never staked a position from which he could not retreat later. There’s something of this too in his poesis, of which every maneuver is less a step toward the block than the movement of a jar in a subtlety that minces subtlety; but it’s still a movement forward (or perhaps a still-move forward), which comprises, or seems to, the greater part of meaning. Criticism seldom has the patience for such progress, and so gets ahead of itself; no wonder, eventually, it typically qualifies or emends itself, often to the point of apparent contradiction. But apparent contradiction isn’t necessarily contradiction.

Yes, that’s the sort of thing nigglers and paradoxicists might say, often to cover their butts, and I’m sure that some would dismiss what I’ve postulated, tentatively and imperfectly, as kind of clerical obscurantism. (It may well be, though I don’t intend it.) But the quickenings of knowledge, much less realisation, are seldom if ever quick; and more, I’d suggest, they only manifest themselves, if they do, as small wisdoms from failure, from the exploration and discovery of inadequacy, and then humility. It’s only in and with humility that prodigality can come. The dystopic observations of The Waste Land (and the blitzed London in FQ) are thus just observations-- or figurations or characterizations, or whatever language suits you best. Traversion beyond requires the troubledness of self to know to go beyond the self and all its negative additions. The failure of this traversion is also the beginning of it, the servitude that becomes freedom, as humiliation and torment impend glory, a la the Christian example, and surrender inexplicably affirms. It’s so Heraclitean as to suggest an elementarity too causally neglected. Thus are the way up and the way down the same thing; thus are reconciliations born in the awkwardness of a return from the Garden of Gethsemane, and the genuine and cynical selves made new.

Or so I think right now, in what almost certainly qualifies as Intolerably Random Criticism. Were I smart, and I am very surely not, I’d prattle on about the misogyny against Celia Copplestone. But then, what was her fate, again? Hmmmmm....

---

This vague and surely failed approximation of depth is brought to you courtesy Dr J, in honour of a certain someone’s nearly-present birthday. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled prurience and vapidity. So, here ya go.

The Dragon In Winter

Colour me dense: not too long ago, I described Curse of the Golden Flower as "a cross between the Wars of the Roses with The Wars of The Roses." Today, however, with a kind of dear Gawd I'm such a motherforking idiot clarity, I recognized the real source-text (or cultural antecedent) for it. Golden Flower is really just a radical revision of The Lion In Winter. Both stories focus on an extended personal and political battle between a king and his wife, the queen in both basically imprisoned by her husband, and the various machinations worked on the three sons in the waging of that battle. One son, of course, has great military prowess and has his eye on the throne, though he's not the designated heir; the favoured son, and crown prince, is turbulent and childish and perhaps the most heavily compromised one of the lot; and the third son, the largely forgotten and disdained son, has his own aspirations, despite his apparent disconnect from the primary proceedings. Zhang Yimou's version, of course, amps up the violence and recasts the story as grand tragedy, where the original focused on the domestic sadomasochism more typical of an Edward Albee play. But there it is, our Golden Flower, structurally just The Lion In Winter with a Polonius-Ophelia subplot tacked on for good measure.

Ah, so much for my critical acumen. I should have caught the similarity right away, but didn't, so distracted was I by all the Shakespearean suggestions. I must be getting rusty. Excuse me while I sneak into a corner and beat myself half to death with my cluelessness. In a word: D'Oh!

For the record, those of you that haven't seen The Lion In Winter should do so as soon as you can. Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn are terrific as Henry Plantagenet and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and some of you will get a kick out seeing Anthony Hopkins and Timothy Dalton in their first film roles. The dialogue alone is worth the trip to the video store.

Legislators Gone Wild

In case you had any doubt that lawmakers everywhere are going totally around the bend....    

Complete smoking bans, legislation against trans-fats, and now this; watch and regard with appropriate awe the stunning redefinition of "the public interest" to "whatever a bunch of self-righteous nilly-nags decides annoys them." 

Feared Science

Science? Science! We don’t need no stinkin’ science....

(This blog is shocked, SHOCKED, to discover there’s dissembling going on in that establishment!)

Actually, those numbers are appalling. Then again, these are the same intellectual paramecia that haven’t caught up with Darwin yet.

FOLLOW-UP, of a sort: Seems Republican self-delusion really is endemic these days. I guess you can’t be scared straight, but you can damned-well be shamed straight.

Once More Unto The Well

Received notice today of what has to be the most shameless cash-grab in some time, this collection called Van Morrison At The Movies. You can practically imagine the music execs sitting in an office, concluding to one another: Gee, we’re not making quite enough money on our film royalties. Let’s repackage the stuff we’ve got and see if some dunderheads will throw even more money our way!

The guys and gals with long careers, especially the dead guys, tend to get plundered in this way quite a lot, especially when execs discover they have ratty old recordings of Howlin’ Wolf doing a substandard set from an off night in 1956. How many more times will we have to endure the gormless stitching-together of "new" compilations from Elvis and The Beatles, so they can terrorize the countryside like little Shelleyean monstrousities? Such releases depend upon ignorance. Ignorance, of course, of what’s already out there, and more importantly the belief that something old can be fashionably remarketed as new, new, new. It’s pseudo-Orphic balderdash ("look! John Lennon is singing from beyond the grave!") and it’s despicably cynical. Besides, Lennon always sounded deathly.

So, to this album. It features only one unreleased track-- yet another of the seventeen billion versions of "Moondance" currently out there-- and several of the tracks are live recordings which were not used in the films with which they’re associated ("Domino," "Into the Mystic"). Of the nineteen tracks provided, eleven appeared on The Best of Van Morrison almost twenty years ago. And here’s the really cynical thing: most people likely to buy this album will do so for "Brown-Eyed Girl," nostalgic wonder-tune it now is, even though it has already been released on close to twenty different albums, half of which are soundtracks, and half of which are countless reissues of the sessions Morrison did for Bert Berns. (I’m not including bootleg concert versions.) I won’t even bother to wonder if it’s the censored or the uncensored version included here.

Stuff like this, rampant these days, puts the capitalise into capitalism. But at least, I guess, it’s not a Greatest Hits package for a tinny teeny-bopper with two whole albums beneath her increasingly low-riding belt. Now go brace yourselves. We’re going to be getting a "new" Tupac album every other year until our great-grandchildren slip gingerly into their graves. I hear the next one will feature him singing "Unforgettable" with Nat King Cole.

Surely He Can't Be Serious

     Yes--- and do call him Sherley.

Gloomy Tuesday

Once again, just trying out a new blog editor, this one Post2Blog courtesy Giveawayoftheday. Seems pretty handy so far, and infinitely less cumbersome than Windows Live Writer. Worth checking out, while you can, if you’re running your own blog, though I can’t say it’s a programme worth paying for. Like, though, how it has Imageshack and Flickr support built into it, as well as a thesaurus. Will this improve my writing? Not bloody likely. It’s a blog editor, not a miracle worker, damn it.

Not much worth reporting here, save for seeing The Last King of Scotland this weekend. Film’s pretty good, and Forrest Whittaker’s performance as Idi Amin deserves much of the buzz it’s receiving. Don’t think he’s quite the shoe-in for the Oscar that Helen Mirren is for The Queen, and it seems unlikely to me the Academy will give both top acting awards for (pseudo-)historical portrayals. Have also been enjoying old episodes of A Bit of Fry and Laurie, particularly Stephen Fry’s absurd, assing-good language-riffs.

Have also learned that one of my friends from my undergradling days just gave birth to a baby girl. This is wonderful news, of course, though I can’t help but feel a little old. Methinks I’m the only one from my coterie of friends still unmarried and unchilded. Let’s prefer to describe me as "mercifully unburdened." At the very least, it keeps Valentine’s Day remarkably affordable.

Oh, and one more thing (he writes, channeling Columbo): 24 officially jumped the shark last night with its last-minute revelation last night. I assume it was supposed to be a Big Surprise. It wasn’t. If you’ve seen L.A. Confidential, you should have seen the turn coming a mile away. I’m only surprised nasty revelation didn’t end with a taciturn uttering of "That’ll do, son." Oy vey.

Contractually Obligatory Friday Entry, or Fakes, Flakes and F**ks

    Sorry, folks, not much of an update today; am asea in email and the like and hoping eventually to get it all done before my fingers snap at the knuckles.  But a few short notes:

• It's comforting that for some people class still matters.  This guy's namesake, Francis the Talking Mule, didn't bray so shamelessly.
• Seems that old whipper-snapper Harrison Ford has had to take a stand.  Call it the Devo-lution of the Specious.  Fakes, fakes, why do there always have to be fakes....
  
• Two words this ex-English teacher never wanted to see pressed together:  Wiki Novel.  Can't wait for Stephen Colbert's The Unbearable Truthiness of Being.
• Ladies and gents, herewith your Creepy Headline Of The Day.  One has to wonder how one "probes" snow, though; strikes me as a technical impossibility. 
  
• One also has to wonder why our various political hacks leaders aren't making more hay out of this.  Except, maybe, that nobody wants to talk about foreign policy, much less matters of illegal detainment, since the Arar settlement. 
  
• And finally, it seems this blog will soon reach 50,000 unique hits, which (I'm told) is only six thousand less than Paris Hilton's had.  Which sucks more, I'll leave you to decide, though I assure you the Not-So-Good Doctor was much better at 22, too.
  

All right, perhaps more anon.  Friday's here and I need a beer....

Chats Nod Nod

(Go ahead, carbon-date that pun, if you dare.)

     Yes, another picture of the boys.  Seems the only shots of them that ever turn out are the ones taken immediately after they've been dozing.  As Mr Smart has put it, "For there is nothing sweeter than [their] peace at rest."

     A few scraps:

• As You Hawk It:  Some neat stuff here for you few, you precious few, Bardolators reading this.  Link courtesy RK.
  
  
• Burnt Sienna:  I remember when they tried telling this story about Sean Penn's State of Grace so many years ago; it didn't work then and I doubt it'll work now.
  
  
• Biden Time:  Never before have I seen a presidential candidate shoot himself in the face fresh out of the gate, but Joe Biden has done it.  His appearance tonight on The Daily Show, I think, did him ever further harm; his qualifications were staggeringly disingenuous, and Stewart (forgive the cliche) nailed him with them like so many German theses.  Biden in one day has managed to make Pat Paulsen look like FDR.  Fat lady has sung, fork's ready, nothin' left but the cryin'.  Sorry, Joe.  For what it's worth, PoliSci students will study your model for decades, in the same way they study McGovern's.
  
  
• A Cup O' Kindness Yet:  Delightedly received a ring from a friend and former-student tonight, one of a few such blasts from the past in the last while.  Reminds me, though, how much times have changed.  Selah.
  
  
• His Courage To The Sticking Place:  With everyone fussing about Daniel Radcliffe's pending nude scenes in the London revival of Equus, you'll forgive me for noticing the delicious irony that he's doing so at the Gielgud Theatre.  Somehow, I suspect Sir John would have appreciated the lad's, er, Courage.  (Yeah, his courage, that's the ticket.)     Seriously, though, you have the give the guy credit: Equus is a dark, demanding play, and certainly not an easy one to essay at his age.  He might be able to pull it off, no pun (shockingly) intended.  His co-star is the wonderful Richard Griffiths, which augurs well for the production as a whole.  The parents, though, that have got their knickers knotted up would do well to read the play before they prattle endlessly and ignorantly on about protests and boycotts.  Until they do, they'll continue to demonstrate much less maturity than a seventeen year-old. 
  
  
• The Art of the Kahn:   I was recently discussing the issue of women in comedy with someone, and (as you can imagine) the typical litany of names came up: Lucille Ball, Kate Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, Roseanne, and so forth, and none of whom I've ever found especially funny.  My movie selections of late, though, reminded me of one of the funniest women ever to grace the screen, and a woman too often forgotten when this subject comes up:  Madeline Kahn.  A marvel of comic timing, a tiny dynamo of pure presence, she could sing, dance, mimic and act, and she always made her work seem graceful.  More importantly, she was funny.  Genuinely and reliably funny.  Lucy often mugged to the point of humiliation; Kate often mugged to the point of haughtiness; Madeline mugged with dignity and panache (not an easy thing to do in a Mel Brooks movie), and as much as I rack my brain to think of another comedienne quite like her, I can come up with no true peer for her.  She was sui generis, a magnificently arch woman in what still largely remains a man's business.  Check out (again, if necessary) her brilliant parodies of Marlene Dietrich and Elsa Lanchester in Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, respectively, and you'll see exactly what I mean.  If she has a peer in the making, ironically enough, it's Meryl Streep, whose recent forays into comedy suggest a deliberate, and largely successful, honing of what used to be the one weakness in her game.  Cancer, cruelly, took Madeline too young, as it too often does.  But she'd have my vote for the best overall comedienne.  If anyone has any other nominees, I'd be glad to hear them, but I think the words sui generis would still hold true.

And once again, what seemed at the outset to be a short post has turned into a sprawl.  Oy vey.  Consider, digest, comment (or not).  Stuff looms, and I'm going to have practice my own art of the con.

The Man In The Brown Robe

    It has to be the most famous cloak in history, and now, it seems, you can own it--- providing you've got sixty thousand pounds to spare.  One wonders if Darth Vader's footprints are still on it.

Phoning It In

    As if cell-phones weren't already responsible for distracting people:

So we've introduced -- in a very responsible way -- adult content that's in behind proper age verification and that's compliant with provincial standards and regulations....  [emphasis added]

I assume "in a very responsible way" means "in a way only a twelve year-old can access," which should have all of those über-protective parents reconsidering the virtues of giving their kids their own phones.  (Actually, Moms and Dads: if they haven't figured out how to do it already, this won't make a difference.)  I can imagine the ad campaign now:  Reach out and touch.... 

You Know... Morons....

    Thirty-three years later, you'd think Mel Brooks' classic Blazing Saddles could be televised uncensored.  But apparently the worry-warts at CMT (Country Music Television) are still worried about the damage that can be done by certain words, and not just the usual suspects like "shit," "faggot" and "nigger."  Among the other offenders: ass, jerking off, and Methodists.

    Remember Madeline Kahn's "Its twoo!  It's twoo!?"  Gone.  Harvey Korman's brilliant litany of ragtags to hire (Rustlers, cutthroats, murderers...)?  Well, everything after and including "bull dykes" got the axe.  The ubiquitous shouts of Bullshit!!?  Gone too.  "Shut up, you Teutonic twat?"  Nixed too.  Even the references to rape ("...people stampeded and cattle raped!") were excised.  Even "Oh, blow it out your ass, Howard" got the silencing treatment.  Oy vey. 

    Now, I'm sure the folks at CMT thought they were doing something right, and, Hell, maybe they were even doing it for Randolph Scott.  (Randolph Scott!)  But taking the cuss words out of Blazing Saddles is like taking "Nazi" and "Hitler" out of The Producers.  You just don't do it, period.  Either you air the whole deliriously vulgar thing or you don't air it at all.  You might as well air Debbie Does Dallas without the nudity.  This coddling, prissy censoriousness offends me--- and I think most sane people--- more than a few peppered "bad" words.  Not just vandalizing a classic, it insults our collective intelligence.  And we've had more than enough of that in the past several years.  Right, Mr Cheney?

Sunday, Blasé Sunday

     Not much of an update, considering there's precious little to report, but a few scattered notes:

• Catching up on Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, I've concluded the show has become a study in devolution.  It's rare to see a show retrogress so completely; it has gone from promising to unwatchable in less than a season, and I think it's tied with Family Guy for greatest fall from grace in the past ten years.  The declines of both shows need to be measured with scuba gear.
  
  
•   Managed to see Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower, which is a visual splendour and an intellectual wet-dream for those well-versed in the High Tragic tradition.  You can, quite literally, play "Spot the Reference," with its imitations and intimations of Hamlet, King Lear, Coriolanus and about half the surviving Greek plays, though I tend to think of it, admittedly indulgently, as a cross between the Wars of the Roses with The War of the Roses.  I don't think the film works especially well on visceral or emotional levels, but it is great to look at, the plot's elaborate designs finally less interesting than the technical ones; it's beautiful rather than sublime, striking rather than stunning, but impressive nonetheless.  The spectacular conclusion, unfortunately, borrows too much from the Peter Jackson model--- CGI effects everywhere, with Zhang's assassins resembling Jackson's ring-wraiths, and his soldiers PJ's orcs, in a confrontation that doesn't make a lick of sense, and suffers immensely for its cartoonishness.  (It also ends with a song that's so misplaced as to be laughable.)  But, but, but---- the colours are magnificent, and the imagination of the imperial palace and its finer details is worth the price of admission on its own. 
  
  BTW, it seems film criticism has finally found its new Pauline Kael.  Anthony Lane, eat your fuck me awesome heart out. 
  
  
• Have been watching, as a matter of fact, a number of what used to be called "chop-socky" movies, and I realised that perhaps the biggest difference between the current crop and the ones with which I grew up is the role of women, not so much as heroines, but as equal candidates for slaughter.  Women used to be killed off, if they were, in largely discrete fashions.  These days, though, the trend has swung back to much older ways, by which women were saved for the most horrifying fates, like Lavinia's in Titus Andronicus or that of the eponymous heroine of The Duchess of Malfi.  I don't know what to think about this.  Intellectually, it makes sense that the standards be equal, and that female characters be decapitated, eviscerated, excoriated and generally decimated in the same ways that male characters have been.  So why does this trend disturb me?  Maybe it's just something in my programming, some vestige of chivalry that some would slough as chauvinism.  But I wonder if equal-opportunity bloodshed is really all that equalising, especially when the violence owes more to the Friday the 13th and now Hostel traditions.  There's also something invidiously "do I look fat?" about the question, by which any answer, any response whatsoever, is automatically wrong in at least one way or another. 
  
  
• The Canuckistani media are going wild with polls suggesting that Maher Arar's settlement from the Canadian government is too costly (read in: costing them too much).  It makes me wonder what these people would think they deserved if they went through even half of what Mr Arar did.  I suspect an egregious amount would become a paltry sum very quickly indeed.
  
  
• From torture to tortured analogies, let's put this assertion up on a crucifix and see if anyone cries.  (If so, Idiocracy will definitely prove prophetic.)  On the other hand, this might afford an exceptional opportunity for people to cease using the Lord's name in vain; "Thomas H. Cruise" would suit our profane purposes much more effectively, don't you think?  Especially, ahem, the vain ones.  Ah, little TC in a prospect of glowers.....

Enough for now.  Monday looms, and frankly I haven't been drinking enough.

A Rare Vindication

    Every now and then, a government does something right.   Or, at least one government does. 

    Let's hope--- against hope, probably--- that Mr Arar's vindication proves merely the first formal disputation of the sickening policy of rendition.  Let's hope, too, it cautions people against flip and insidious allegation; the ease with which you accuse should always be directly proportional to what you're willing to pay if you're proven wrong. 

    Frankly, I think the Canadian government is getting off easily here, and that Mr Arar might well consider making an application to the World Court in Den Hague, even if the Bushies likely wouldn't recognise its decision.  It'd serve at least to illustrate their extraordinary disdain for international law.

    Worth singling out from The Star article: 

    "Canada fully understands, appreciates and shares the United States' concerns about security," said Harper. "However, this government – the government of Canada – has every right to go to bat for one of its citizens when the government believes a Canadian is being unfairly treated by another country."

Normally, this would cause Captain Obvious to roll his eyes to the tune of "No shit, Sherlock."  These days, though, there's a  peculiar comfort to it. 

It's A French Sign Of Loathing

    Some amusing bits herein.  Reminds me of the days when I deigned to date (well, kinda-sorta) and would incur the ire appropriate for my flippancy.  Remember getting, as they say, in Right Royal Shit after making the mistake of entering a bathroom immediately after my then-involvement had used it.  "Hey!" she said, eyeing my response to the unnatural waft.  "My Gawd," I said, "Coventry should have been so well evacuated!" 

 

    As you can imagine, I spent most of the rest of the night apologizing--- less for the remark, than for observing that, yes, women are capable of noxious emanations, too.  Of course, I was wrong about that.  Oh so wrong.  Women issue nothing but the sweetest odours.  All the perfumes of Arabia....

Eating Pussy, Unopposably

    At the risk of seeming cat-obsessed, I have to say that this is pretty impressive.  Thumbs?  Thumbs?!?  I don't need no stinkin' thumbs....

 

    Reminds me of the days when Trouble used to open cupboards and rip his way into Pringles containers to get at his food. 

Spamalot Redux

    Just discovered some non-spam emails headed round here have been getting unceremoniously dumped into my spam folder, which means that (agh!) even more of you may be waiting for responses from the Ever-So-Rotten McDoctor.  My apologies; so much for ever getting caught up on anything. 

 

    Been, beyond tending to minor aggravations unworthy of report, going through Kurosawa again, particularly Yojimbo, Sanjuro and Kagemusha.  One, I'm sure, can never watch too many samurai pictures, much less Kurosawa ones.  As I write this, Hitchcock's North by Northwest is playing in the background, with that brilliant score of Bernard Hermann's issuing vibrations everywhere.  It remains a staggeringly good movie, perfectly cast, and a marvel of comic timing.  All of us should age so well. 

Where It All Began

    For my Canadian readers, tonight at 8 the CBC is airing its adaptation of the Margaret Atwood novel The Robber Bride, starring Mary-Louise Parker.  Much as I'm reluctant to endorse anything connected to Ms Atwood, the film does (should, anyway) afford the opportunity to glimpse one of the Not-So-Good Doctor's local watering holes, providing the scene or scenes shot there didn't land with an enormous thud on the cutting-room floor.  Actually, a few of my readers may recognize it, too, after their own tipsy experiences there, which may or may not have ended with lullabies, rooftop dancing or *cough cough  * Other Stuff.  Those of you that haven't been there can at least see the place of most of the Not-So-Good Doctor's blotto experiences--- and, in fact, the place which first bestowed YT with the (albeit unoriginal) moniker "Doctor J." 

Hello Kitty...

    Cutest thing you'll see this week.  All together now:  Awwwwww.....

Just Givin' It Away

    Just a brief note here, as I have to catch up on email today and tend to other items silly and bizarre demanding my attention.  As some of you may have noticed, I've added a ticker for the website Giveawayoftheday.com, because it offers some neat little commercial applications, registered et al, for free for those that (you guessed it) download them on the day they're being made available.  Today's programme is Crystal Player, which is a pretty damned good little media viewer: versatile and smooth, it does all of the stuff (and then some) that Windows MP does, with none of the exasperation, intrusiveness or knuckle-dragging slowness.  It's definitely worth the minute to download if you're running some version of Windows. 

 

    Perhaps more later if time & energy allow. 

A Chip Off The Old....

    Quote of the week, courtesy Helen Mirren, after the Brass Ball Awards:  "You know when an Essex girl has an orgasm, she drops her fries." 

 

    Defamer, btw, finds this surprising.  "He," if the pronoun fits, has obviously forgotten Caligula.  (As for me, would that I could.)  But, FRIES?!?!?!?  Welcome to Linda Tony Blair's England.

No, Mister Bond, I Expect You To Die!

Feel free to come up with your own captions for this inexplicably sinister little darling. 

Read about the long overdue measure finally taken in his regard here. 

The Puff That Screams Are Made Of

     Words most likely to verify a double-standard:  "There is not a double standard."  

     I know a lot of restaurant and bar-owners who'd love to sue the government for the expenses they incurred for coverting their smoking areas and eventually removing them.  Which, I'm quite sure, many of them will do if the government doesn't reverse this awfully convenient and self-serving exception. 

A Little Slow

     Clod ever am that I (how's that for syntax?), it seems I'm intolerably behind on my correspondence.  My apologies to those waiting for replies, and surely looking at this blog indignantly and thinking, And the bastard still hasn't answered me yet!  I know, I know; I assure you, much contrition pends, shortly but surely.  Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa.

Hanging From His Arm

     So much for those bulging muscles.  (Strong enough for a man, but made for a....?  Dick Armey unavailable for comment.... Welcome to the world of Pumping Iron....)

Coming Through Slaughter

     Ya know, this makes me wonder how a certain someone's doing. 

Kiefer Madness

       Beginning this morning by trying out Windows Live Writer, in which this entry is being composed and which is so far giving me all the indications that it will have a very short life on my computer.  Typical of a Windows product, it slows my machine down to a drunken crawl (a mere stagger would be too much to hope for), and even with the much vaunted Microsoft techies behind it, I'm so far discovering Outlook Express was more versatile.  I hate editors that can't handle simple tabs right off the bat; but ones that leave their operations unclear send me into minor fits of fury because they guarantee greater fits of fury in the future. 

     The big story today, I'm assuming (barring Castro shuffling off this mortal coil), is the clamour surrounding the first four episodes of 24.  The nattering nabobs of Net-nuttery are going wild with the typical expressions of shock and guffaw:  They killed Curtis!  A nuke went off!  Valencia got pwn3d!!! w00t!!!  I'll refrain from noting the pernicious perspicacity of the lot, though you've surely already inferred my response.  I have to say, however, that I'm surprised by the surprise:  24 is as conventional as a sonnet, and significantly less predictable, so the hullabaloo seems to me to disprove the notion of audience savvy.  Five seasons through, with only two nuclear "problems," you had to know this season the producers had to detonate a nuke for real this time.  There was no choice.  They had no way left to ratchet up the stakes, to show audiences This Season Really Matters.  And after last season's frontal assault on its long-standing cast, you had to know a familiar figure was going to get iced in the early on.  It's the great poker lesson: the further on you go, the greater your raises have to be for them to have any significance, and 24's other raises were all used up.  It had to go nuclear; it had to continue feeding its familiar company to the slaughterhouse.  Had, had, had.  How appropriate.

     There are, supposedly, four more little nukes out there in 24's universe, of which I suspect two more will go off; there are, give or take, only a few more long-term characters to be thrown to the lions, and at least two more of them will be.  (Though likely not the new President, the show having gone to that well once too often; my bets are on Aaron, the stoically-decent Secret Service agent extraordinaire, and the ever-scowling Chloe, just to piss off all of her fans out there.)  In the meantime, expect the expected.  A few noticeable but decidedly minor actors will show up, and get killed off.  There will be a mole.  Someone at the very top of the power structure will be involved in the conspiracy.  Perimeters will be formed, and broken.  One or two Muslim characters will prove themselves heroic, to tonic charges that the show's Islamophobic.  Jack will suffer.  Jack will have to kill at least one more close "friend."  Even more people will be wounded in the thigh, as if to evidence the show's Fisher King neurosis.  Chloe will pout, commanders will be incompetent, lovers will be seperated, and cell-phones will prove once more the show's most important props. 

       Further to wit:  Cynics will wonder how Jack can get around Los Angeles without once getting caught in traffic, how his superiors can ever dare to question his judgment, and how on earth Jack Bauer can have more lives than a Hindu cat.  Churls will wonder why the producers couldn't get the obvious choice to play Jack's father, and why major events always seem to happen at the turning of the hour.  Girls will wonder, idly to their great relief,  if they could still find bearded Kiefer hot or not.  (Boys, conversely, will cross their fingers for the return of Mandy, the show's occasional villainess, and Jack's eminently but malevolently sexy counterpart.)  And smart critics will wonder how the show can keep running at its frenzied momentum for the remaining years of young Kiefer's inexplicably long contract with FOX.  (How do you raise when you've already gone all-in?  You buy more chips, even if you're not allowed to do that, natch.)  I know I'm in the minority when I write this, but I will anyway: the show ran out of credibility three seasons ago, but it soldiers forward with its increasingly berserkered fervency to keep its exceptionally-punditocratic audience enthralled at any cost. 

     Necessity, we're incessantly reminded, is the mother of invention, and in the television world it's the mother of convention.  It's also the mother of desperation.  And that's what I saw writ large, like a revealing watermark, beneath 24's return.  Which makes me think two things:  that, yes, Mandy will be back, if Mia Kirshner can be lured back to reprise the part; and that sooner or later we'll see Jack kill the President, whomever he might be at that point and of course played by a Canadian, so he collapses, ambiguously, on the detonator of a nuclear bomb.

      A little too Bridge on the River Kwai?  And you know what that would be:  "Madness!  Madness!"

Six Degrees of Reverberation

    It's a small world:  Dave Barry reacts to Bob Dylan quoting Dave Barry--- on playing Van Morrison with Stephen King and Bruce Springsteen.  (And Mr Morrison has said that "Gloria" was just Bo Diddley.")  What goes around, comes around--- just about midnight, makin' ye feel so good, makin' ye feel alright....

 

    Key quote:  "...and the crowd would scream as only truly receptive booksellers can scream."

 

    SIDENOTE:  Because I never did write those notes on James Brown's passing, check out Rolling Stone's tribute here.  Writes Gerri Hershey, "James Brown leaves a cultural wake as wide as his dear friend Elvis did."  Actually, no.  Brown's was wider-- much wider-- than the one Elvis left.  He had only one peer as a genuine musical, to say nothing of racial, trailblazer, and that was Ray Charles; everyone else belonged to the second tier of significance at best, including Elvis, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Guthrie, Sinatra, Dylan, Hendrix, Johnny Cash, and yes, eventually Van Morrison, among others, all of whom became genre-definers in their own ways.  But Brother Ray and Godfather James belonged to an entirely different apogee, in the same way that Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson twained the invention of the modern American literary voice. Some re-invent image or melody or style or technique; it's the few, the very very very few, who reconceive rhythm, and its relationship to meaning, as (much as) we (ever) understand it.

The Land of Milk and Honey

 

    Not sure whether this idea is the result of inspired madness or lunatic brilliance, but as the line goes, it's probably a little from column A and a little from column B....   

 

    If you want a few really ripe larfs, I recommend reading up on some of the relevant "history."  (Click the pic for the Wiki entry.)  It all sounds like something out of an Ealing comedy, complete with the delicious irony of the mailing address being the UK proper;  too bad Alec Guinness isn't around to savour it all. 

 

    And, BTW, for those of you that want to "impress people and make friends...."   

 

The Pharisaic Hypocrisy Of Theory

    In a word:  Hallelujah.  If I still had any real reason to care about this sort of thing, I'd write a Dreiser-length supplement to it, but I don't so I won't.  (Me, snarky?  Neh-ver....)  I will, however, mark off this section for special consideration:

Until literature departments take into account that humans are not just cultural or textual phenomena but something more complex, English and related disciplines will continue to be the laughingstock of the academic world that they have been for years because of their obscurantist dogmatism and their coddled and preening pseudo-radicalism. Until they listen to searching criticism of their doctrine, rather than dismissing it as the language of the devil, literature will continue to be betrayed in academe, and academic literary departments will continue to lose students and to isolate themselves from the intellectual advances of our time.

In the immortal words of Jake Blues, "Yes!  Yes!  Jesus H. Tap-Dancin' Christ!"  Okay, he's no Reverend James, but this gets my hands clappin'.  Now if only I could do a cartwheel....

All This And Andy Rooney

    Ah, yes, I have been negligent, leaving this blog un-updated since Christmas Humphrey's Day, the only day of the year you're allowed and even encouraged to Bogart that joint.  I had meant to write something fuller on the legacy of The Hardest Working Man In Showbusiness, but leaving the update so long in the making it hardly seems necessary now; you've probably been bombarded with pieces doing the same, so I'll let the task pass.  So, instead, a few bits and pieces for your amusement, bemusement, and/or contusement.  (No such word as contusement you say?  Well, blast ye then.  Snort.)

• Those of you running programmes like Blog Torrent whom are also interested in Old Movies might find your fill of neat Out-Of-Copyright material at this site.  It offers some interesting curios and even a few minor classics, including Nosferatu, The Little Shop of Horrors, some Buster Keaton shorts, the Spencer Tracy Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Leslie Howard's The Scarlet Pimpernel, Helen Hayes in A Farewell to Arms, and that bizarre Roger Corman proto-horror film called The Terror, which features Jack Nicholson as (believe it or not) a Napoleonic soldier going up against Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre.  This should prove a site to watch:  in the next several years, a lot of classic movies will fall out of copyright into the public domain. 
  
      Also of interest, BTW:  Bluebeard, starring a young, or young-ish, John Carradine, sire of all those other Carradines and one of the great, gaunt character actors they just don't make anymore.  He had one of the great voices for the movies (many nicknamed him simply "The Voice"), and he starred in some of the best--- and some of the very, very, VERY worst--- movies ever made, including Les Miserables, The Invisible Man, The Bride of Frankenstein, Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, Jesse James, Blood and Sand, The Kentuckian, The Court Jester, The Ten Commandments (as Aaron), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and The Shootist.  He was also the great-granddaddy of the horror-movie stars that eventually came to include Karloff, Basil Rathbone, Christopher Lee, Vincent Price and Peter Cushing.  I point all of this out because, and this is a rare thing to say, he was an actor for whom there is no modern heir or equivalent.  Sometimes I wonder if there's be a market out there for me just to teach courses on the great character actors....
  
  
• It seems the Vatican is suddenly and not a little oddly prizing Oscar Wilde.  There are only about a dozen puns to be made here, all of which I'll surprise you by leaving alone. 
  
  
• RK already ran with this article on his blog, but the central issue (to me, at least) warrants calling it to your attention here, too.  The issue?  The spinelessness of the French intellectual establishment, which, like its North American counterpart, prefers to cluck in disapproving qualifications rather than affirm the importance of unmolested free speech.  Evidently Voltaire's been re-written; the establishment will not only disapprove of what you say, but it will defend to YOUR death your right to say it.  This timorousness is more than disgusting.  It is, in fact, a tacit collaborating with the terrorists of intellectual freedom, an endorsement by indifference.  Vichy-ssoise anyone?  *Harrumph*
  
  For what it's worth, I'm sure the North American academy would have respond no better.
  
  
• Which reminds me:  the less I say about this article, the better, right?    Sipping a bit from some leek and tater soup of my own, I'd like to aver that all women in positions of authority are sage, wise and benevolent, and never ever make the same mistakes we scumbag men have made and continue to make every second of the waking day.  Right? Right right.
  
  
• And from the "Oh-My-Gawd" file, this story gives new meaning to the term "dead letter office." 
  

And finally, over here, my old friend Zelda wondered, "What do you get someone who is turning 99?"  "A calendar," she and her good hubby decided, which has to be an unintentionally diabolical mixed-message.  Ms Barrett Browning comes too comically to mind:  How do we love thee, let us count(-down) your days....      (We shall but love thee better, indeed!)  It's better than a stop-watch, anyway. (One could riff on this for ages: Gone In Sixty Seconds? "All this and Andy Rooney!")

 

    Then again, cold-hearted bastard that I am, I might have been tempted to give an egg-timer, with the note, "Remember when it only took three minutes to get ha---"  Er, um, never mind. 

Doin' It To Death

    I never really thought I'd had to write this post.  More later on this very, very sad event, but it seems you can now count the genuine titans of modern music on one hand.  If you don't already own in, buy Startime! when you raid the stores, and we know you will, on Boxing Day.  Until then, take in Wikipedia's lengthy bio of the man, which even still only provides a broad summary of his astonishing legacy and impact.  The man practically invented funk, revolutionized R&B, and made the modern concert into the kinetic, mercurial marathon it now so often is.  And, breathtakingly, he was still a better dancer in his seventies than most are in their twenties.  A titan, a bad-ass stand-on-the-scene outta-sight muthafuckin' Titan. 

 

    But today's about celebrating a famous and even inspirational birth.  Let's do that now.  Happy Humphrey's Day, Happy Humphrey's Day everyone.

 

    Now I gotta get ready to act as a jungle jim for little ones.  Merry, well, you know....

The Twinkie Defense

    Now and then, I'm occasioned to temper my cynicism.  Sometimes that's a bit like swallowing one's tongue, especially considering how much this age tends to render yesterday's cynicism into tomorrow's prescience.  Even more oddly, those occasions tend to happen with figures normally dismissed out of hand.  Not long ago, I remember having to concede a few virtues on the part of Justin Timberlake, of all people, when he not only showed class in acknowledging an award he received really belonged to Johnny Cash, but then demonstrated a surprising degree of comic skill on Saturday Night Live.  In both instances, you could have knocked me over with a feather, but suddenly I had to give young Justin not just a new look, but worse--- credit.  He was so easy a target, and then suddenly he's showing glimmers of promise.  One begins to wonder if some bizarre carnivalism is setting in, whereby the good become awful and the awful become good.  It's a good thing, I think.  Proves you can still be pleasantly surprised.  Proves *I* can still be pleasantly surprised.

 

    So it's with a bit of happy trepidation I'm being forced to rethink Leonardo DiCaprio.  For me, he'll always be the little brat they brought in to "young-up" Growing Pains, which was like taking broken-down Lada and painting the bumper.  And of course, there's the stuff he's most famous for, the twinkie stardom of Titanic and The Beach, to say nothing of his plainly risible attempt at Shakespeare in Romeo & Juliet.  By that point, it was easy to deride him as a child-star who finally showed potential (in What's Eating Gilbert Grape? and The Basketball Diaries) and then sold out to setting a-flutter all the hearts he could.  He's still smirk-worthy in many ways, but it finally occurred to me today that the chap's making a Napoleonic assault toward legitimacy.  Since 2002, he has cozied up to Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorcese, and with each film he started to show more and more, wait for it, Genuine Acting Talent.  Gangs of New York was a bit of a mess, but with The Aviator and The Departed, he has been cultivating credibility.  But, I'll admit it; after The Departed, I would probably have said the first of its merits was that he got shot really well in it.  In the head.  From out of nowhere.  By a character we had largely forgotten.  Cooooooool....  All us not-so-pretty boys were not-so-secretly tittering with girlish glee.

 

    Then the bastard goes and does Blood Diamond.  Yes, the movie's preachy and a bit heavy-handed, yadda yadda yadda.  But for the first time, I saw something new in little Leo:  charisma.  Who knew?  It's a solid performance, it staggers me to say; it staggers me further to confess he reminded me of Humphrey Bogart more than a few times in it, and not simply at the level of awkward imitation.  He finds a snarl that isn't just snarkiness or petulance; he finds a menacing charm that's really rather impressive; he finds, forgive me, a leonine charisma that I had not imagined he might be able to convey, much less possess.  And, damn it, he pulls it off.  The movie offers lots of vignettes that seem meant to draw him, or his character at least, against the Bogart model.  There are bits right out of Casablanca (a get-out-of-here goodbye, no less), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Diamonds!  Diamonds!), The Big Sleep and Key Largo, as if to demand the comparison.  And--- Gawd help me for saying this--- little Leo doesn't come off too badly in the comparison. 

 

    Yes, that is hard to admit, damn it.  If he had failed, just imagine how many African Queen jokes we could have made.....

 

    But, suddenly it seems the boy has mettle, that he's finally going past that boyishness that puts him on magazine covers with despicable regularity.  So, I have to give the chap his props.  Maybe those three films with Scorcese helped him refine his sense of gravity, and to roughen some of those too-too-fine edges.  Colour me impressed, for now.  So I guess I owe little Leo a little mea culpa for the not-so-little fun I've made of him over the years, which I offer now, even if that cynical bastard in me hopes he gets suckered soon into Titanic II: Return of the Waifish Drowned.  Told from the iceberg's point of view, of course....  

 

    (See, eating crow isn't too awful.  Just do it one bite at a time.)

Why, You Shouldn't Have....

    I guess if you're going to pander, you might as well go for the gusto.

 

    Sorry, updates unlikely today.  Recovering from nearly two straight days of household renovation.  Oy vey. 

And Always, Twirling, Twirling, TWIRLING!

    Just in case you were jonesing for more angstrionic whingeing, it seems the diva of vapid-fire dialogue, that whirling dervish of allusive verbal diarrhea, is about to spin again.  Prepare to be dazzled by the dizzying display of dottily drivelsome damseltude!    Delight!  Delectate in the demi-grandiloquent dippiness!  The delicate debuDantescan drollery!  The delirious directionlessness!    The tediously dainty, dimply, Dopaminic digressiveness of it all!  I'm dillying!  I'm dallying!  I'm depressurizing!  Whee!!!!

 

    Whoa.... Damn, I'm getting ditzy just thinking about it....  Excuse me a moment while I throw up and grow my Y-chromosome back....

The Cutting Edge; or, Just A Little Off The Top

    Oh, an eternal dilemma:  to halve and halve not....  Er, NYT, just a little tip:  Point taken.  (Ahem.)  But no man wants to see the words "circumcision" and "halved" in the same headline.  Ever.  That is all.  You can go about your business.  Move along, move along.

I Was Gonna Make Espresso

    It's always sad when a class act like Peter Boyle passes.   Some of you may want to refresh yourself on two of his funniest moments from Young Frankenstein:  this one, featuring top hat and tails; and this one, featuring an almost unrecognizable Gene Hackman.  Unfortunately he had to do a lot of schlock over the years, but his performance in Joe was terrific.  He'll probably now be best remembered for Everybody Loves Raymond, which is something of a mixed blessing.  The show has become such a staple of syndication it necessarily garners the hatred that comes from over-exposure; but it also had the audacity (these days, anyway) to deliver the equivalent of a one-act play each week, in which the actors were responsible for generating and sustaining comedic momentum.  Boyle, in that ensemble, had to be the anchor by making a broad caricature believable and funny, and he did it did brilliantly, almost effortlessly.  In other hands, the words "holy crap" would have become tired on their third utterance; he turned them into an arabesque, each time slightly different, each time disarmingly, and almost inexplicably, riotous.  I should add another adverb there:  Unfailingly.  Few comedic actors, and even fewer comedians, learn the fine art of dealing with an inevitable line or an inevitable reaction; Jack Benny was probably the great master of this, and Johnny Carson and lately Jon Stewart its most obvious practitioners; but Peter Boyle was one of the select few that could act in this tradition and make it look easy. 

 

    RIP, Good Sir. 

 

    Now I have to watch Young Frankenstein again.  With holiday shopping heating up, maybe we all should. 

In Perfect Harmony....

    It seems Zelda has tagged me with a meme to name 5 songs that represent how I feel right now, including one Christmas song.   I should reject this out of hand for insisting on a Christmas tune, but it's Zelda, so here goes, assuming the added level of difficulty of not citing anything by Bob Dylan, Van Morrison or Leonard Cohen:

1. Ray Charles, "Baby, It's Cold Outside" (there, that gets the Xmas selection out of the way); alternate answer, Three Dog Night, "Joy To The World"
   
2. John Lee Hooker, "Chill Out (Things Gonna Change)"
   
3. Frank Sinatra, "That's Life"
   
4. Stevie Nicks, "Sometimes It's A Bitch"
   
5. The Band, "It Makes No Difference"; alternate answer, "The Weight"

Ah, not an especially ecstatic list, but then again 'tis the season.  M'kay, let's tag RB; I'm sure he needs something to do. 

Them Little Indians

    It hardly needs saying what I think the key quote is in this entry.  

Every Man and His Humour

    Something tells me Christopher Hitchens' pipeline of hate-mail has finally dried up.  I suspect, however, this piece should renew his supply. 

    Nice to see at least that Hitchens hasn't sacrificed verbal elan for the sake of political correctness; I imagine more than a few columnists are sorting out their indignation to respond to phrases like "bless their tender hearts" and "cunning minxes that they are." 

    Key quote:  "For men, it is a tragedy that the two things they prize the most—women and humor—should be so antithetical.  But without tragedy there could be no comedy."  True enough, that. 

Hasta La Vista, Baby...

Some key ways in which a Microsoft product is like a Significant Other:

• It's unfortunately necessary: there are too many things fun and functional you just can't do without it.
  
  
• In fact, you're probably stuck with it a priori; you're just expected to have it. People will wonder why you don't.
  
  
• On first encounter, it takes forever to get ready, telling you all the while, "Please be patient." As it prepares itself, it's in contact with its support team and exchanging all kinds of information about you, but you shrug it off because it looks good--- and, frankly, you're excited because it promises that you'll be able to do stuff with it that other products wouldn't let you do.
  
  
• At first, everything seems cool. At first. Keep in mind that what you like about it at first will become what you hate most about it later.
  
  
• Once it's in your life, it takes right over and starts telling you what to do. But you let it, for the reasons stated above.
  
  
• It has an almost unnatural fondness for cookies, which you casually dismiss as one its little eccentricities.
  
  
• It messes with your library first, promising to "organize" it. You learn quickly, however, that what's Yours is Its--- and what's Its is Its. This is okay, you tell yourself, until it takes you two hours to find something you used to be able to find in a minute.
  
  
• No matter what it suggests, it is NOT as limber as it proclaims to be. "User-friendly," you'll discover, applies to other people using it, not you.
  
  
• Once it is completely settled in, it insists on keeping track of everything you do. Then it goes off and does whatever the hell it wants to do and doesn't tell you a thing.
  
  
• Before long, not only is it chewing up half of your resources, it's also becoming wildly unpredictable. Or, in fact, predictably unpredictable: you just sit there, waiting for something to go wrong, which invariably it does.
  
  
• And when something does go wrong, it's your fault. There's also no arguing with it. Ever. So there. This, by the way, is that mysterious Sixth Law you heard about in high-school science class, but of which no one ever spoke directly. Now you know.
  
  
• Of course, it never tells you what's wrong. (Occasionally it offers "details." These will provide no help whatsoever.) It will simply, and almost huffily, stop responding. Quite often, you'll just have to give up, shut everything down and consign yourself to the interminable process of restarting. This will work for a while, but sooner or later, it won't--- and your product will insinuate that you are to blame for damaging or corrupting it. You may even have to bite the bullet and bring in another programme-- or worse, another person-- to help fix things.
  
  
• Soon enough, you're changing everything for its sake. If something is incompatible with your Microsoft product, it has to go. Eventually, you'll realize it has its tentacles everywhere.
  
  
• Two words: Usage Rights.
  
  
• Even occasional engagement with your Microsoft product will soon involve you in its dubious suggestions about things you need and ergo Must Have. Perform a minor task, and you'll be directed, with no trace of subtlety, to places to go to buy stuff you really don't want. Your product wants other products--- and even if you won't buy them, it will keep showing you ads, hoping you'll just cave to its pressure. Sometimes you will. This will stop nothing.
  
  
• Dare to flirt with a non-Microsoft product, especially those Open Source sluts that are just giving it away, and it'll feign compatibility with it until it can undermine those Other Products appropriately.
  
  
• As a matter of course, you'll soon be spending most of your time maintaining and updating your Microsoft product, ripping your hair out as you do. Pretty soon, you'll tell your product to update itself behind your back just to avoid the incessant asking.
  
  
• It'll turn out, your Microsoft product isn't half as stable as it suggested, nay assured, it was. Each week will bring a fresh array of insecurities and contradictions with which you'll have to deal like Alan Alda in a triage scene.
  
  
• But when you attempt to address those insecurities, your Microsoft product won't simply ask for validation. It will demand it. Constantly. And you will oblige it, because you have to.
  
  
• Eventually, it'll stop recognizing your equipment, and all those "plug-and-play" promises will become bitter memories of why you got yourself into this mess in the first place.
  
  
• After a while, you'll realize your product has become bloated, sluggish and downright impossible. Your misery with your Microsoft product will tempt you a million times to leave it, but you won't because it'll prove too much a central part of your existence. You depend on it. Besides, if you try to get rid of it, it'll probably take half your stuff with it. So, you mutter expletives under your breath when you deal with it, and you entertain fantasies of the day you'll finally rid yourself of it, even if you never do.
  
  
• Never do, that is, until a new Microsoft product presents itself, and you go through the maddening process of deciding whether or not to ditch your miserable old product for the new one. All that updating behind your back by your old product will force the issue, as it all but shuts itself down in preparation for its replacement. (And, yes, probably takes half your stuff.)
  
  
• Before you know it, you'll have to make the leap to the new Microsoft product: there are too many things fun and functional you just won't be able to do without it. In fact, you'll just be expected to have it. People will wonder about you if you don't....

Woolly Bully

    All together now:  ~~ One of these words doesn't belong here.... ~~  (At least according to the pictures I most certainly have not seen.   )

Carleton 'Tards

    Ah, Canadian universities: as ever, sanctuaries for tolerance and diversity....

The New Authorised Version

 

And yet, not a word about secondhand smoting....

     Marx was wrong when he said that religion was the opiate of the people; it's the crack-cocaine, complete with its dependency, agitation and paranoia.  Oh, and its persistent insistence on having its demands met.  

All Over Again: Some Vues From The Cheap Seats

    Managed to see a couple of the flicks new to theatres, including Casino Royale and Deja Vu.  The former, I'd shrugglingly say, is only a marginal improvement over the recent Bond excursions.  Yes, it figures Bond in darker terms, and cheekily plays with--- or plays away--- some of the Bond mythology, but the action sequences are ludicrously true-to-form, and so about as thrilling as tap water.  Daniel Craig's turn as Bond is fine, even if he looks like Prince Charles' blond-headed nephew, and Eva Green sizzles reliably, though she's given precious little to do.  I gather, however, the filmmakers could only muster enough irony for the irrelevant flourishes regarding martinis and swimsuits.  The specious spectacles are as impossibly contrived as ever, with a high-altitude fight-sequence that's a birch's-leap away from Crouching Tiger, and a poker game that's obviously scripted by someone who knows the game but has never played a hand.  And only Bond could have a heart-attack in the middle of a poker game--- and return to the game with an undepeleted chip-stack.  So don't believe the hype, or any of the reviews; it's just more of the same, with a few cosmetic touch-ups--- or touch-downs.  As for the inauspiciously-titled Deja Vu, the less said the better.  It's just a cross between Minority Report and Laura, executed with the sophistication of Timecop.  It also proves a law that hardly needed re-proving, that any movie that fucks around with time eventually ends up fucking with itself--- and leaving time sadly wasted. 

 

    More delightfully, I've been rediscovering the many virtues of two older macabre comedies, Arsenic and Old Lace and the original The Ladykillers.  Of the former, I have to confess I had forgotten how good Cary Grant is in it:  his performance is a manic aria of antic genius, that characteristic cool of his as much a victim of the comic action as any of the bodies in the basement.  It's all farce--- and farce on top of farce, on top of farce, a kinetic piling on of ridiculously exasperating complications--- but it's a brilliant exercise in infectious lunacy, thanks largely to a terrific supporting cast that includes Raymond Massey, Peter Lorre, and Jean Adair and Josephine Hull as the dotty old aunts with the deadly decanter.  Most importantly, though, the movie's still laugh-out-loud funny.  I assure you, you'll never be able to hear the word "charge" again without chuckling, and certainly no movie in film history uses a bugle more effectively. 

    What Arsenic does for the bugle, The Ladykillers does for the minuet, Boccherini's in fact, and you'll be hard-pressed to find a better example of comic menace than Alec Guinness' performance, a parody of his friend (and onetime biographer) Kenneth Tynan that's touched with bits from Alistair Sim and Raymond Massey for good measure.  Guinness gets most of the laughs, his eyes somehow droller than droll, and it's a hoot how he weaves subtlety into what might otherwise be described as a caricature.  There's a bare second, for example, in which he manages to make Boccherini seem funky, but it's a perfect little arabesque that's both broad and wry at the same time.  (Tom Hanks tried creditably for both of those qualities in the Coen Brothers remake, and failed on the latter.  The temptation toward shamelsss mugging was probably just too great.)  The movie's not perfect--- it wraps things up a little too abruptly--- but it's still a hell of a lot of fun; and it and Arsenic and Old Lace will cause you keep your distance from those little lopsided old ladies.  They only seem harmless. 

 

    Is it worth adding that I also saw Robin Williams' Man of the Year?  No, it's not, save to make two brief notes: first, that it's one of a number of movies shot partially in my neck of the woods lately; secondly, that Williams has, I think, become terminally unfunny, the only laugh in that celluloid craptacular coming from Lewis Black, one of the few living practitioners of the manic aria.  Of course, the script is bad--- very, very bad--- and the flick goes entirely off the rails when it decides to follow the dead weight that is Laura Linney on a storyline.  (She's a vaguely competent actress, but she has a vampirical effect on every movie she's in, sucking every fluid ounce of life out them, like Meryl Streep used to do before she got cheeky.)  Robin, though, has become everyone's boring uncle.  He gestures wildly and says things that are supposed to be edgy and audacious, but it's all schtick and noise and distraction that's distracting no one.  He's not an expired talent by any means, as his dramatic roles prove quite well; but I'd suggest he look back on some of his great comedic forebears, like Cary Grant and Alec Guinness.  The former has a lot to teach him about sustained mania, and the latter a lot about going beyond the predictabilities of broad comedy.  Right now, Robin's movies are closer to Casino Royale and Deja Vu than they are to The Ladykillers or Arsenic and Old Lace.  They're familiar before we even see them, as contrived as they could possibly be, and they leave everyone too much apprised of time too sadly wasted.  Not just ours, frankly, but his.

Art's Like That

    I realized the other day a few more books that have mysteriously disappeared from my collection, including John le Carré's The Honourable Schoolboy and Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before.  When did I realize this?  Natch, while watching the film version of Eco's The Name of the Rose.  Take a moment to savour the irony.  (And all four of you that do will impress the Doc immensely.)

 

    Where did said books go?  Alas, if only I could say "honourable schoolgirls."   

Noblesse Oblique?

    A pithy observation, at a tilting slant, from Wallace Stevens, truer now than when he said it sixty-odd years ago:

There is no element more conspicuously absent from contemporary poetry than nobility.

    --- from "The Noble Rider and The Sound of Words," The Necessary Angel

Stevens' notion of nobility is considerably more complex than I'm indicating here, but even taken at the superficial level, the assessment seems on the mark.  I wonder if this has anything to do with my don't-give-a-shit mentality toward most contemporary poetry.  A note toward a supreme contradiction? 

'Tis The Season

    Forget the usual Christmas pap: enjoy the funniest two-and-a-half minutes from Saturday Night Live in years, featuring the magnificent Darlene Love. 

 

    (My younger readers here will probably only know Ms Love as Danny Glover's wife in the Lethal Weapon movies, but those of you a bit older will remember her for having one of the most distinctive voices in pop/soul-music.  She still sounds great.)

Conversation Pieces

    In the spirit of Overheard in New York and its kin, a few random chunks of conversation from recent days, mostly (and regrettably) noted, as the 'Lizabethans used to say:

• "She's got more than a little junk in the trunk.  She has a giant dump."  
  
  
• "A gangbang's the only way to go."  Said by a young woman in a context I don't even want to know.  One imagines she'll be a loving and loyal wife one day; perhaps the prototype of the soccer-team mom?  (A voice for Conservatism in the next twenty years, like the hippies that came to vote for Reagan?)

Less memorably, after a bit of a chat in which my knowledge of poetry came up, I was asked, "Are you gay or what?"  No, I said, I'm as miserable and sardonic as they come.  Obviously, my attempt at a quip fell largely flat, but for once I'm rather pleased to be so negligible.  Oh, the bewilderments of accidental company....

Under Milked Wood

    Hold hard, those ancient minutes in the cuckold's month. 

Dryden Pressed

    Watching some of the speeches from the Liberal leadership candidates last night, it occurred to me that the main reason Ken Dryden isn't in better shape is that he isn't in better shape.  Almost universally respected, he gave by far the best speech last night and demonstrated real strength for rough-and-tumble of campaigning.  The only reason I can gather for his weak showing is that he doesn't look like the typical Prime Minister: he's bulkier than the average leader, something that's not as absurd as it sounds.  Think Martin, Chretien, Trudeau, Turner, Mulroney, Campbell, all of whom were either lanky, like Trudeau, or average-with-a-gut, like Martin.  An odd thing to note, of course, though I wonder if there's something in the optic-driven political world that demands leaders in Canada be, if not "lean and hungry," then at least acceptable approximates thereto.  I can't help but wonder if that's what subconsciously influenced the formation of the Top Four.  Instead, Dryden gets dumped to the ignominious laureate of being "the conscience of the party," which is roughly equivalent to a suitor being told what a wonderful friend he is.  The best man never wins; he gets nudged, and then pressed, to the side, where he's remaindered to wistful stalwarcy.  It's a shame.  He deserved better.  Then again, maybe he's better off not being baloney's bridegroom.  There's no way that stuff's good for ya.

 

    FOOTNOTE:  Yes, I know there's no such word as "stalwarcy," but "stalwartness" is such an ugly word.  I like my invention better.

Brace Yourselves For Some Weighty Tomes

    Because, one suspects, slim volumes would be out of the question.

 

    I'll still have to wait, I assume, for the Balkanization of academia to allow a programme in Lanky, Cranky Canajian Studies.