Chewing gum magnates: they're just like us!

My blog posts are getting too long. Even I realize it. Who has the time, these days? In the interests of appealing to the youth market, I will attempt to make my blog more like US Weekly - lots of photographs and brief anecdotes. Here I present photos of me that are of general interest because I was in places that I recommend that others go to: Catalina and Long Beach. Both were fun!

The off-season is starting soon in Catalina and you can stay in places with beautiful views, as well as showers that have seen better days and whose unfortunate design may momentarily flummox you, for like $60 dollars a night. We recommend the Zane Grey Pueblo Hotel, once the getaway home of Mr. Zane Grey, noted Western author and apparently the scourge of Catalina Island, or at least the scourge of the Wrigleys (of the gum and the field) who basically owned Catalina back in the day.

This is a picture of the monument to Mr. Wrigley built by his wife... apparently he was supposed to be buried here but things didn't work out? Regardless, it was fun to hike up to, and there was a nice garden with endemic plants below it. I always get endemics and pandemics confused: pandemics are bad, endemics are good. I took some pictures of endemic cacti, but they are much more boring in picture form than they were in real life. In real life unusual cacti are very interesting, but on the internets pictures of unusual cacti rank right up there with pictures of other people taking pictures. I just did a flickr search for boring to see if there was some more boring type of picture than that, and I realized two things: those flickr pictures aren't boring at all, and I'm really bad at taking pictures. Here is one that Adrian took:


That is me in Long Beach carefully petting a zebra shark using only two fingers, which I don't totally understand the naming of because it looks a lot more like a leopard to me. Long Beach is also fun! Especially around the aquarium. It is also where you catch the boat to Catalina, so you can make a half-day of it. We can also recommend the Root Beer Float Icees sold outside the aquarium.

Vive la Résistance!

I'm trying desperately to have faith in Nate Silver when he says that the odds of an Obama victory are good, even accounting for the inevitable last-minute tightening (which sounds like what happens to your scrotum right before you punch a bigger dude in the face). I'm trying to resist this cringing mindset, this shtetl mentality that tells me that we can never really win, that some rough beast of a last-minute reversal is now slouching towards Bethlehem, PA. It's hard to feel any genuine confidence, though. I think one of the more interesting personality differences between liberals and conservatives is how we assimilate information that seems to bode ill for our respective causes: liberals, as you know, immediately panic and gnash their teeth and bewail their impotence in this cruel, cold world - I'm reminded of the Huffington Post article in the midst of the Palin bump that read something like "We're gonna frickin' lose this thing".

Conservatives, in contrast, seem to act like a John Wayne-type accused by his wife of being lost - you just clench your jaw and tighten your eyes and drive faster in the direction you're already headed. As some of you know, I've become addicted to reading the comments on the conservative blogs. Whenever the blog editors post some piece of bad news like "McCain down 12" all the commenters talk about how polls are totally biased and how they've been voting for years and no pollster has ever called them, so... you know. (I'd love to ask these commenters more about their thought process here - because honestly, no, I have no idea what you think that means. Are they implying that pollsters just yoink the newspaper's money and make up some numbers and call it a day? That would be a hilarious approach!).

So I say all this as a preamble to my basic reservation about writing any more about this election, which is that I suspect that whatever I have to say today will be rendered utterly moot by the hard left turn that the race will take tomorrow or the next day. This has been the craziest election of all time, so I don't think I'm being excessively cautious here. Nevertheless! I will forge ahead, conscious of my own impending mootness. I've just been struck by the most recent turn of the campaign. I'm talking here about the mutterings that reached their apex in the recent comments of Representative Bachmann (who, despite everything, I still believe to be our nation's hottest representative): her stated wish for a penetrating expose, one which would "take a great look at the people in Congress" and ask, are they now or have they ever been anti-American? That soft thump you heard at the end of the YouTube clip was the sound of my jaw dropping. Could it be? At this late hour of the campaign? Red baiting? What genius!

But, as Hegel pointed out, sometimes we are too quick to credit men and women of genius with what are, at least in part, the fruits of the labour of the world consciousness. What Hegel said of Julius Caesar applies equally well to the good Representative: "It was not merely [her] private gain but an unconscious impulse that occasioned the accomplishment of that for which the time was ripe". That is, it was not merely chance that Newton and Leibniz discovered the Calculus at the same time, but rather some combination of individual genius and a state of generalized cognitive readiness among the general population of thinking fellers (Hegel may actually be implying the existence of a for-reals collective unconscious here, but if so I'm politely ignoring that bit of idiocy on his part). I know I'm not the only one to notice the almost catalytic rate at which new memes seem to now be spreading through the blogs, the columnists, the rallies, the campaigns themselves, everywhere all at once. One day nobody has ever heard of Acorn, the next day people are showing up at rallies with hastily-printed bumper stickers about "Don't blame me, Acorn stole my vote". It's like that chemistry experiment you did in high school where you supersaturated the solution and then dropped one seed crystal in and suddenly the whole jar was crystalized.

I am very excited by the prospect that Red-baiting will continue to play a role in this campaign, or at least in the Resistance movement that will have to be set up should Obama win. It's important to distinguish here between genuine frisson-inducing Red-baiting, and boring old Social Democrat-baiting, which is not exciting at all. Social-Democrat baiting is what McCain and Joe the Plumber are doing these days: implying that Obama wants to turn our beloved nation into France or Canada, with job-killing high taxes and soul-crushing universal health-care. Yawnsville. This line of attack is so boring because it is essentially fairly accurate, and we all know it. I'm sure Obama could talk at length about the drawbacks of single-payer plans and why there shouldn't be a National Health Service, but we all know that deep down he just thinks it's too difficult to accomplish politically, and he thinks there are perfectly reasonable alternative models for achieving universal health care. So the attack ad goes like this: "Barack Obama can present a coherent argument against Canadian and French health care plans, but when he does, there's no note of abject fear in his voice; he isn't truly terrified of spending his sunset years telling his children about what America was like when we were still free. Barack Obama: can American trust a leader who isn't scared of Canada?" Ugh, right? This is such a boring line of attack that I can feel all the strength draining from my body as I write about it.

In fairness, though, Social-Democrat baiting probably set the groundwork for what was to come. And there has been a pretty good narrative building for a while here: Obama's foolish "spread the wealth around" reply to Joe the plumber, Joe straight up calling Obama a socialist (and a great tap-dancer!), and so forth. Even Sarah Palin's quote about the "pro-America areas of this great nation" skirted the line of being an awesome return to blacklisting, but it crucially didn't quite get there. If you're feeling contentious, the obvious contrapositive to her statement is that there exist areas of our country which are anti-American. But we all know that's not really what she meant. What she actually meant is almost certainly true: some areas of the country are really into being patriotic, and some areas of the country are total slackers about it. And those slackers are ruining it for everyone. You can argue with that if you want to, but it's true.

I'm reminded of a kid at my high school who was having trouble drumming up attendance for a pep rally where an oversized teddy bear (standing in for the mascot of our rival boy's school) was to be beaten and burned in effigy. "The problem with this school," he said, "is that people have no school spirit. That's why we always lose." More than our lack of bench depth, more than the weakness of our passing game, it was our insufficiently fervid school spirit that truly held us back on the football field. This boy's sense of being hamstrung by the tepidness of his peers, is, writ large, a major complaint of the Fox News wing of the conservative movement (come to think of it, the kid eventually became president of the school's Young Republican club): the problem with this country is our shocking lack of nationalism. We would totally be able to kick ass in Iraq, if only people took it as seriously as they did WWII! I can think of several wry responses to this plaint, but that doesn't change the fact that it's undeniably true. If we had 11 million people fighting in Iraq, I think we'd be all set. We could assign practically every Iraqi male of trouble-making age his very own full-time guard. If we were more patriotic, then thousands of us would take to the streets whenever Hugo Chavez criticized our president and we'd burn the Venezuelan flag for the BBC news cameras which, tell the truth now, would be pretty fun. And also there would be no laws against fireworks so 4th of July celebrations would be way more exciting, and kids who lost their hands while holding onto these fireworks would be treated as American heroes and people would clap for them when they got off airplanes. In short, Sarah's absolutely right: if America isn't living up to it's potential, don't be blaming our small towns, cause they're ready when you are.

So Sarah didn't really cross into awesome territory with that quote. I do, however, think she has the potential to be the Newton to Bachmann's Leibniz. In her first critique of the Ayers connection, the "palling around with terrorists" phrase got all the play, but I liked the fuller quote: "Someone who sees America as imperfect enough to etc.". It's worth focusing in on the message here: Hey friend, Barack Obama thinks America is imperfect. Now I know that sounds reasonable, maybe America is a little imperfect, but he sees it as so imperfect. Just how imperfect, you might ask? I'm glad you did. Imperfect enough that you need to bomb it a little to make it better!

This, my friends, is what separates glorious Red-baiting from snoozefest Social-Democrat-Baiting. You're actually full-on implying that the candidate is attempting to destroy America from within. This candidate does not believe that change is possible within the system as it exists, and so he will try to bring our nation to its knees through cunning and subterfuge. Anything he says cannot be trusted, because he's simply trying to assuage your fears, that he might rise as high in the ranks as possible, thereby to maximize the effects of the damage that he will eventually wreak. He is aided in this quest by a number of others who have similarly infiltrated the highest levels of government, where they wait for a pre-determined signal to strike. How many of these sleeper cells are there, you might wonder? This was my main complaint with Chris Matthew's cross-examination of Rep. Bachmann - he could have gone in for a number! If someone says that some members of Congress might be anti-American, you ask them to estimate how many. When they say it's impossible to estimate, you throw the number 57 out there! At least run it up the flagpole and see if they salute.

In any event, I really really hope that things continue down this path. In my opinion, the saddest moment in the history of the conservative movement was when William F. Buckley denounced the John Birch Society and Revilo P. Oliver and that whole crew and then never let them write for the National Review again. Those guys were so much more entertaining! And their threshold for diagnosing someone as a crypto-fellow-traveler was so low as to bring to mind a hilarious party game - "No, you're a communist!". Sure, Revilo hated the Jews a little, but his name was a palindrome, so that counts for something in the grand scheme of things. And to be fair, he also hated Christians - he called Christianity a "spiritual syphilis" which was creating lacunae in our brains and slowly dementing the human race. Which, speaking of, brings us to an entirely separate philologist who also hated Christianity (and maybe possibly the Jews a little?), Nietszche! Brief aside: I can only name three people with training in philology: Oliver, Nietzsche, and Ezra Pound. Coincidence, or is there some obscure, cursed Sanskrit text that if you offend the ancient Gods by attempting to translate it, you become sick to your empty core with Jew-hatred?

In any event: Nietzsche. I haven't read him since college, but one of the ideas that keeps popping into my head is the concept of the master and slave morality. This sounds like a Depeche Mode song, but in fact is a very interesting series of wild-ass speculations about how panty-waisted Judeo-Christian morality arose against the backdrop of strong-like-bull Greco-Roman morality. It gets a little complicated and there's a bit of Jew-baiting that goes on, but one of the interesting empirical questions that arises for me is this: is it possible for certain systems of thought, or systems of morality, to offer more to those who are on the outside looking in? Living in a backwater under a repressive government, or being a citizen of a small country whose fortunes are dictated by a distant but powerful empire, how do you understand your world and cope with the emotions that are engendered by your situation? Again, it's an empirical question, but I wonder if Christianity doesn't offer a more effective "tool kit" of coping skills for the permanently disempowered and disenfranchised than say, Islam. Not that Islam is in any way bad or anything! Islam is great! Big ups to all my readers in Saudi Arabia who find my blog when searching for Aikido moves! I guess what I'm saying is that I wonder if people who are Christian may experience a less distressing level of cognitive dissonance when they find themselves at the bottom end of a power structure, whether it's a geopolitical one or an interpersonal one. They think, hey, it's okay that I'm powerless, that doesn't make me a bad person, in fact it makes me a good person, because here I have this religion that tells me that being powerless is actually the key to being loved by God. Good luck getting into heaven, powerful people!

Which, to bring it back to William F. Buckley and the National Review wing of the conservative movement, is what I predict will happen if Obama wins the presidency. Those intellectual conservatives may be gritting their teeth at the moment, but I predict that in a few months they're going to be having a grand old time (the type of conservative who gets involved in burning Dixie Chicks CD's and whose main political belief is that you shouldn't criticize the president is a whole different story). I could be wrong about this (and again, it's an entirely empirical question), but I suspect that the ideology of conservatism is most ideally suited, on a purely emotional level, to being outside the corridors of government looking in. This is not to say that conservatism is a slave morality, just that some of the same principles may hold. Being given the reins to the very thing (government) that you profess to despise is no fun! Better to let the liberals try their hand and offer your refreshingly fair-minded advice. And criticism. And guffawing. And eye-rolling. Conservatives love knowing better than whoever is in charge, they love predicting that grand schemes will result in abject failure. They love it when, Cassandra-like, they are utterly ignored by the unwashed masses and then they are proven right and can smugly refrain from saying I told you so (I believe Cassandra was not allowed to say that either). Think of what a fun place to work the National Review must have been during the Clinton years! And, if the themes being sketched in this electoral race are the tropes that the resistance movement will hammer away at during an Obama presidency, there's some serious frisson-induction in store for the next four years. I just hope that the level of sheer pizazz doesn't diminish too much from these heady days. In short, free Michelle Bachmann!

A helpful, if tiny, guide to CA propositions.

So I have a hard time deciding on California propositions. If I were making a state, I'd leave the whole direct democracy thing out of it. Too much work for everyone involved! Nevertheless, if you are a conscientious voter and want to see a variety of opinions on each issue before you decide, here is a table that I make every year. I didn't have the energy to learn about making tables in html, so you're stuck with tiny little images. They might get a little better if you click on them? In any event, the LA times editorial board is more conservative than you'd think, the SD Union-Tribune are actually conservative, the Republican party is the Republican party, and everyone else is a godless liberal.

Great art with douchebags

So we went to two Arclight screenings of the new restoration of The Godfather a few weeks ago - part one on Saturday, part two on Sunday. Part one went by without remark, except that I had forgotten how awesome Moe Green is ("Sonofabitch! Do you know who I am? I'm Moe Greene! I made my bones when you were going out with cheerleaders!").

Part two was a bit more unfortunate - we were seated a few rows in front of a sizable group of aging guidos who seemed to feel that the Godfather was a bit like Scarface, but longer and slower in parts. For those of you who haven't seen part two recently, it comes in at 3 hours and 45 minutes, including a 10 minute intermission, and there aren't really a huge number of "quotable" quotes aside from the obvious "I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart." But these guys were clearly relating to the movie on an entirely different level than we were.

Now, full disclosure, I've never actually seen Scarface, I've only seen the amazing Jersey boys from True Life: I Have a (Jersey Shore) Summer Share watching it as a sort of pre-game ritual to get amped up prior to going clubbing (these guys really do need to their sympathetic nervous system humming prior to a night of clubbing, because they routinely fuck and fight whilst in and around clubs). My understanding of how it works is this: most guidos have seen Scarface many, many times. When they decide to watch it one more time, they aren't exactly doing close readings of the film, sussing out how audience expectations of what it means to "see" or "observe" are undermined by the antihegemonic framing of the shots blah blah blah. Rather, they're doing what I did when I watched Goonies over and over again as a little kid: they're reveling in certain scenes, certain lines, certain ideas that just strike them as amazingly cool. In the case of Goonies, at the age of 8 or 9, I particularly loved the idea of the start of a hidden tunnel being tucked below the ash grill of a fireplace; much to my parent's chagrin I actually took a hammer and chisel to the tiles of our home fireplace, just in case there was a similar situation going on there (turned out not). I watched that Betamax tape over and over until the picture started getting fuzzy.

So, I'm not entirely unsympathetic to people who watch movies over and over again, but the fact of the matter is that my tolerance for repetition has progressively diminished as I've gotten older, and it's hard not to feel that there is something a bit childish about wanting to see the same stimulus on an endless loop. Of course, I can watch movies that are all great one-liners (Big Lebowski, Kicking & Screaming) multiple times, but I max out at about once every couple of years. Not that this repetition intolerance is necessarily a good thing: I feel like the rate at which I habituate to new works of art has gotten so rapid that it's hard to keep CD's in my car that I still retain any visceral pleasure from listening to - sometimes I get so desperate that I'm stuck listening to Big Boy in the morning on my way to work (Luther Lufeye's got your phone taps on the tens!).

So, if the only sin of these guidos had been that they had seen the Godfather many times before, it probably wouldn't have bothered me. The problem was that they kept reacting to the movie in ways that were clearly an extension of previous viewings in various living rooms with various inside jokes being made. They kept laughing in parts that didn't make any sense - there's a shot of a little red car that Michael bought for his son Anthony (except that he didn't buy it, Tom Hagen bought it because Michael was too busy being Machiavellian) sitting in the snow, and they all started laughing at this shot. Now, if they had started talking or texting or something, we could have gotten them in trouble with the Arclight ushers, those purple-shirted martinets who take the enforcement of movie theater etiquette very seriously indeed. But how can you complain about people laughing at a toy car? What are you, going to force them not to do it again? They also loved Frank Pentangeli (the guy who testifies against the Corleones in front of the subcommittee) for some reason - they couldn't stop laughing at his every line. It was mystifying and really, really distracting.

By far the worst part, however, was the scene in which Kay reveals that her miscarriage was, in fact, an abortion ("It was an abortion! An abortion, Michael! Just like our marriage!"), and then Michael leaps forward and slaps the shit out of her. The guidos laughed like it was the funniest physical comedy bit they had seen since the season finale of Carlos Mencia. Which, when you think about it, is pretty fucked up. I guess their thought process was that it's awesome when people hit other people out of the blue, and it's doubly awesome when people hit people they're not supposed to hit, and since men aren't supposed to hit women this was just a big pile of awesome. At the time I found their reaction distasteful but chalked it up to these dudes being serious losers who don't spend a lot of time with women, but Adrian and Amy were both so upset that they had a hard time paying attention to the rest of the movie.

And here's the thing: I could see myself laughing at something similar in another movie. Like, say our antihero (I'm imagining it's Billy Bob Thorton) is being bothered by a fat kid with cake all over his face and instead of giving the kid a zippy one liner to shut him up he just punches the kid in the face. I might laugh at that, even though in real life I'm firmly against punching kids in the face. But that would be a different situation, because that would be a fucking comedy. The authorial intent would be for this to be a thing that is funny precisely because it's not supposed to happen in real life. I'm pretty sure that Coppola did not intend for the abortion scene to be funny in any way. But I don't typically get this worked up about violations of authorial intention, so I don't think that's the whole story.

I think a more fundamental element of this situation is that I don't like sharing my aesthetic experience with people whose taste is fundamentally different than my own. I have no problem with the fact that there are people who enjoy films like Epic Movie (okay, I'm a little worried that it debuted at number one at the box office), but I don't want to have to be around those people when I'm trying to enjoy a good movie. If I go see Live Free or Die Hard (which, speaking of, featured a Bruce-Willis-beating-of-a-lady that I didn't particularly object to) I have the expectation that I'm not entirely on home turf, so I try to play by their rules - a little yelling at the screen is okay in certain scenes (but hey, asshole who was checking text messages when Bruce Willis was crashing his fucking car into a fucking helicopter: what the fuck are you looking for in a movie?). But when I'm there to watch a movie that is one of the greatest movies ever made, art-house rules are on. No talking to the screen, no laughing unless it's a joke or it's making you so uncomfortable that you have to laugh, and just, I don't know, try to appreciate it on a deeper level, you dipshit.

But that's the thing that was so frustrating and weird about the situation: I was there to watch the art-house movie that I loved, they were there to watch the hilarious action-comedy that they also truly loved, and it was the same goddamn movie. How do you resolve this situation? Who's movie was it? De gustibus non etc. It reminds me of the early years of the Simpsons, when literally every mook in the country thought that Bart was the funniest character ever with his shorts-related catchphrases, but at the same time there was this absolute genius happening in the background and it seemed like only you and your friends were noticing this. My dad, whose taste in television runs towards broad English comedies, always hated the Simpsons with a passion because he never got past that initial impression that it was somehow of a piece with it's lead in - Married: With Children. He thought they were both just shows about stupid people doing stupid things, and he never bothered to see if there was anything else going on. He was also hilariously bothered by the fact that the Simpsons were colored yellow. I had no response to this criticism.

So, while I may have advanced past the toddler developmental stage where watching the same movie over and over again seems delightful, I've somehow managed to get stuck in an adolescent stage where my identity is still defined in large part by the books that I read, the movies I watch, and the music I listen to. And when I feel people that I judge to be fundamentally different and inferior encroaching upon my territory, my first inclination is to freak out and label them poseurs and dilettantes. Which is to say, I appreciate the Muppets on a much deeper level than you do. At this juncture it is worth noting that Adrian truly does appreciate the Muppets on a much deeper level than any of us do, and has been doing so for some time, so step off if you were considering fronting (watching that video I'm left wondering if maybe all along Adrian only likes me because, like Beaker, I am a red-headed accident-prone scientist who tends to communicate monosyllabically?). In any event, I can recognize that this feeling of being threatened by assholes liking the same stuff that I like is a bit immature, but I simply can't shake it. Especially not if they're sitting behind me in a movie theater (why are they always sitting behind me?). I do appreciate the Godfather on a much deeper level than they do! I notice every time there's an orange! I stop breathing when there's a doorframe between Michael and Kay! I could probably remember a good five minute spiel from my time at Oberlin on the relationship between the Godfather, classical mythology, and Lacanian psychoanalysis!

So, here is why those guys were douchebags: men hitting women isn't funny, it's terrible. In certain contexts maybe it can be less terrible, but this movie isn't one of those contexts. I know this because Francis Ford Coppola is standing in line behind us and he'd like to tell you that this movie is deadly fucking serious and not funny, and frankly you're an asshole. Also, Marty Scorcese is here and he doesn't want to talk to you about a time share because he thinks you hate women. So suck it.

Obama is a finely-woven cotton fabric.

Sorry for blog silence, I was in the midwest for my BFF's wedding. Central Wisconsin: knows how to party. I have longer blogs that are backing up in my headspace, waiting to be written, but in the meantime, did you know that 10% of Democrats believe Obama is a Muslim? It's true! But! Help is on the way. Check out this Florida Democrat who is trying to set the record straight - Obama is in fact a closely woven cloth. N.B. - just watch the video for maximum hilarity.