Boarding Clip of the Week

Check this out. Slow-motion footage of skateboarders doing what skateboarders do while the cityscape around them is demolished (also in slo-mo). Fucking gorgeous, but one of these kids is going to lose an eye!

Recently Viewed

Metropolis (Tezuka, 2002) ***
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead ****
Sullivan's Travels *****

The anime version of Metropolis seems inspired by Fritz Lang's 1926 film, but it is certainly not a remake of the film. Osamu Tezuka's anime shares many idiosyncrasies of the genre--characters that don't conform to any specific body design, cutesy robots, chirpy voices--but also contains some rather stunningly creative visuals. I can't say I'm a huge fan of anime, nor do I sneer at it, but I'm perhaps not the best judge of this film, having only been exposed to anime through Akira. Still, I was reminded while watching this of Star Wars and Blade Runner, and on purely visual grounds this is an engaging and diverting piece. The film's use of popular music is particularly notable; there is a spectacularly destructive climax that incorporates Ray Charles' "I Can't Stop Loving You." The song is so anachronistically placed that one can't help but be amazed by the decision to use it at all.

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has some kind of hard-on for Michael Clayton, a film I found entertaining but not a must-see. After seeing Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, however, I'm amazed that the Academy almost completely ignored this gem, particularly in the acting nominations. Nothing against George Clooney or Tilda Swinton, but the performances by Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman blow the comparatively tame Michael Clayton out of the fucking boat. This tale of a crime caper gone wrong, told in flashbacks, gradually evolves into a portrait of a devastatingly dysfunctional family. Directed with precision by Sidney Lumet, this is an intense, profane surprise of a film that you will not soon forget. (It played in St. George for one week.)

I don't know what I expected out of Sullivan's Travels, aside from some insight into the Coen Brothers' homage, O Brother, Where Art Thou? Nor can I easily describe the movie. The first 10 minutes contain some of the most brilliantly executed slapstick I've ever seen, before the film veers into a kind of love story, a critique of social policies regarding the poor, a thriller involving a murderous hobo, and a broad satire of Hollywood film making. There is the additional joy of seeing the luminous Veronica Lake dress as a boy and, later in the film, silently weeping as her trademark locks fall across her eye just so. In short, this is a film that resists categorization. I can't think of anything like it. I loved it.

Site Maintenance Update

If you scroll down a bit on the sidebar, you will see a playlist from Last.fm, a streaming music website that may remind you a lot of Pandora, in that if you tell it which artists or genres you like, the site will generate a playlist of related artists and genres that you might also like. Additionally, the site allows one to compile personal playlists for use on one's blog, as you can see here.

For my playlist, I've tried to include songs and artists that don't get as much attention as they deserve, following the indie ethic of my college radio days. There is no other consistency to the playlist--it's pretty much all over the place. You will hear some underground hip-hop, world music, alt.country, punk and all kinds of other eclectic selections.

As of today, my playlist only contains 15 tracks, but now that I've played around with the site, I expect to keep adding songs to the list at least on a weekly basis. If you find yourself interested in setting up an account of your own at Last.fm, look me up.

I've also updated the links, deleting some that I had either lost interest in or that didn't seem to be posting regularly anymore. I also added a few, including Brandon's professional site, so he can tell you his news directly. Also on the list are Occasional Superheroine, one of the smarter comics blogs, and two pop culture sites I've grown to like: Sasha Frere-Jones is perhaps best known as the pop music critic for The New Yorker (where he maintains another worthwhile blog), and I found the Jane Dark site through a link on the SFJ site.

Let me know what you think of the playlist.

No Alarms & No Surprises

I can't imagine anyone will be surprised or enlightened about this story's confirmation of the Bush administration's continual duplicity, but I'm glad someone is crunching the numbers, even if the effort comes several years too late to be really useful to the nearly 4000 American soldiers and untold numbers of Iraqis who have been killed as a result of George W. Bush's ideologically motivated lies to the American people:

WASHINGTON - A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The study concluded that the statements "were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses."

In other non-surprising but still horrific news, Mitt Romney, the Republican Mormon milkshake-loving presidential candidate, has encountered black people on the campaign trail. And what do you imagine he might do in the face of this unencountered species? Romney goes with what he knows: spouting racial stereotypes about "bling" to children and limply reciting outdated hip-hop lyrics. Far from being an amusing anecdote of Romney's travels (though I have no doubt his campaign staff will spin it as such), this story emphasizes Romney's inherent, if ignorant, racism toward people who were referred to in his religious texts for 130 years as "cursed". (Though, in this regard, the members of Romney's faith are, historically speaking, little different from most other U.S. religions.) Welcome to America, dawg!

Now that at least two of the leading Republican candidates have demonstrated that they value their religious teachings above and beyond comparatively recent documents like the U.S. Constitution, and have no qualms about imposing their non-scientific mythologies on everyone else, isn't it time somebody called bullshit? Here we have yet another disgraceful legacy of the Bush administration: our presidential candidates (or at least only the Republican candidates--so far) must now bear the seal of approval from Christendom, even if this seal has only been received in the candidate's imagination. Gods help us, if not them.

A Time to Break Silence

“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam
Delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 1967 at Manhattan's Riverside Church

The Year of Schrand Begins

My close personal friend and loyal Chazzbot reader Brandon R. Schrand has been chosen as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection for Summer 2008.

Pretty exciting news considering the high visibility of the award. You can look for Brandon's memoir at a B&N near you soon. Or you can pre-order it and say you were familiar with his work before he was an award-winning author. (There will be more and increasingly prestigious awards to come, I'm sure.)

I've written about Brandon before on the site, especially back when his late, lamented blog, Chronicle West, was still up and running. He's a fantastic writer and a great beer drinking raconteur. Among other adventures, he and I survived one of the most misguided group camping trips in modern memory.

You can read more details of the award at Brandon's new professional website. (A professional website! This is perhaps the new marker of true and/or potential fame in our wired culture. A site where you might avoid discussing misguided group camping trips, for example.) (Actually, I'm not sure anyone who experienced that camping trip actually wants to write about it, but that's another story.)

Chazzbot sends its warmest congratulations to Brandon and heartily recommends that you find any and all of his published writing and enjoy the shit out of it. (This is my favorite piece of his (in PDF format).) You'll be hearing more about this writer in the near future, and not just from me.

First, Jon D. Lee; now Brandon R. Schrand. Who says Chazzbot doesn't have its digital finger on the literary pulse of the new millennium?

The Return of Dave Sim

Dave Sim, in case you don't know, is the creator of Cerebus, a 300-issue comic book series that began as a parody of Conan, with a barbarian aardvark as the central character. By the end of the series, Cerebus had become something very different, something like a reinterpretation of the world's major religious texts (as perceived by the same aardvark). Along the way, the series touched (at times, brilliantly) on issues ranging from abortion, fascism, literature, religious power, political power, the banality of superhero comics, and the nature of God. Along the way, Sim also lost much of his initial fanbase with his provocative and occasionally deranged essays on feminism and women.

Though I find Sim's essays fascinating, the ideas they contain suggest that Sim has left the path of rational thinking. His work on Cerebus, however, remains a high point of the medium, and that includes everything from scripting and lettering to Sim's extraordinary talent as a cartoonist. Sim's work is among the best that comic books have to offer, and in my estimation, he ranks just above the Hernandez Brothers as a cartoonist whose work will/should stand for ages as a high point of comics writing and illustration.

Sim, who has long proclaimed that Cerebus would represent his life's work, is preparing a new series which will debut in April of this year, entitled Glamourpuss. Keeping in mind that Sim is an avowed misogynist, a new series that seems to be based largely on women in the fashion industry might give one pause for thought, e.g. Are you sure this is a good idea, Dave? On the basis of the illustrations posted on the website, however, Sim's cartooning skills are in full force and even show substantial improvement from the final issues of Cerebus.

It is for Sim's superior illustrations that I will seek out Glamourpuss. If you can divorce what a man thinks from what he produces, I encourage you to seek it out as well. For anyone interested in comics, Sim is and always will be a master of the art. (A somewhat frustratingly designed website is up featuring some of Sim's art to promote the series.)

This blog post explains, in more detail than I care to get into on my own blog, why so many of Sim's fans are torn between the beauty of his work and the ugliness of his ideas. And here is a short interview with Sim that is thankfully limited to his thoughts on the new series. I've expressed my enthusiasm for Cerebus earlier on this site.

New Hampshire (updated with links)

I'm waiting for some pundit to explain to me why Hillary Clinton's "unscripted" emotional moment signals a revival of her campaign, while Howard Dean's unscripted emotional moment from 2004 was a career-killing gaffe. (Which is not to say that Hillary will not make a career-killing gaffe during the remainder of the campaign.) Dean's outburst at least had the virtue of being unquestionably honest, if poorly expressed. Even so, I've never been able to figure out just why that killed his campaign, especially after being subjected to what were, to my mind, the infinitely more embarassing syntactical stumblings of candidate George W during that particular political season.

But when Hillary chokes back her tears, suddenly she is a front-runner again. Feminist pundits have been quick to point out that plenty of male politicians have shed a watery drop or two without risking their credibility, but whenever I see the by now familiar footage of Hillary's emotional confession, nothing about it seems authentic to me, unless what we are in fact seeing is an exhausted politician coming off of a resounding defeat in the Iowa contest.

Obama, by contrast, seems to be a more emotionally honest candidate, if that description is not a complete oxymoron. Few people who have seen or heard him speak would, I think, deny the man's impressive oratorical ability, or even the quality of his faith in America, but I keep asking myself: "Is that enough?"

A colleague of mine who supports Obama pointed out to me today that, for her, it's now all about the running mate. Obama needs to select, in her words, a "Cheney"--not another Great Satan who feeds on the documents of democracy and the blood of Iraqi children, but an older, experienced pol who knows his/her way around foreign policy.

Because I've spent much of my voting life in Utah, I've always had the luxury of voting my heart, if only because my non-conservative vote is meaningless here. So I voted for Jesse Jackson in 1988, and Ralph Nader in 2000. The one occasion where I felt I had to vote strategically was in the last presidential "election" when I was living in Ohio; at that stage, it was back to my grilled-cheese sandwich strategy. As it turned out, the Ohio election was a complete sham, and the Democratic nominee whose name shall not be repeated here chose to ignore the enormous discrepancies in the Ohio (and Florida and Michigan) polling for the sake of the country. If only he had known.

Anyway, next month's Utah primary gives me another opportunity to cast a potentially meaningful vote for the Democratic Convention. I was considering Richardson for my vote, but it looks like his candidacy is not going to survive much longer. So I'm back to my head versus heart problem. Experience over passion? Stirring speeches over crocodile tears? Bleh.

I'm not entirely certain why I doubt Hillary's tears. She strikes me as a bit too posed, a bit too polished, and she sets off my bullshit detector. Some might argue that my votes for Jackson or Nader serve as an indication that my bullshit detector is offline, but I've never felt embarassed by those votes (again, I have the luxury of casting what I know to be meaningless votes anyway). It's entirely subjective and emotional, but after the New Hampshire results, I didn't feel any sense of excitement or promise, only boredom at seeing a professional politician manipulate her way to a win.

Is Obama any different? Time will tell. Until South Carolina, I'm trying to choke down a rather bland sandwich.

More on Hillary and the NH incident:

Judith Warner on "Emotion without Thought" (with a lot of interesting comments)

A NYT article: "Women's Support for Clinton Rises in Wake of Perceived Sexism"

Maureen Dowd: "Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back to the White House?"

Hardball host Chris Matthews' inflammatory comments on the reason why Hillary Clinton is a candidate for president.

What's the Matter Here?

I've never been a tremendous fan of Natalie Merchant's records, though I do admire her distinctive, semi-lispy voice--instantly recognizable whenever it can be heard. Combined with the musicality of a crack band like 10,000 Maniacs, Merchant's voice often met the boys more than halfway, providing a melancholy tone to some stirring instrumentation (reaching a peak in songs like "Don't Talk," about an abusive drunk).

Merchant sacrificed a great band for a solo career, one in which her sentimental and more cloying lyrical tendencies were allowed free reign. The Maniacs followed a similar course, and I find their early albums, particularly In My Tribe, to be their best. That album contains possibly the best pop song ever written about a literary figure this side of Dylan ("Hey Jack Kerouac"), a song which itself contains one of the best critical assessments of Allen Ginsberg ever written, in pop music or otherwise ("Allen baby, why so jaded?/Have the boys all grown up/and their beauty faded?"). The album also offers the most heartbreaking song about Los Angeles I've ever heard ("City of Angels," which ranks, in my estimation, just above NWA's "Fuck Tha Police" and Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Under the Bridge"), and a stunning first-person account of illiteracy ("Cherry Tree"). It's a gorgeous record.

Merchant left the band after another two albums, and I've never felt compelled to listen to an entire album of hers since. Apparently, I'm in the minority in this regard, as Merchant achieved much more success and widespread recognition with her pop solo albums than she ever did with the Maniacs, who never quite managed to break out of the college radio circuit.

The fact remains that hers is a original, appealing voice and that her solo career was a commercial success. All the more confusing and frustrating, then, is the state of her career now, as explained in a review of her recent string of performances in New York City, her first concerts there in four years. Writing for the NYT, Jon Pareles notes that Merchant has no recording contract, though she is still writing songs and, evidently, playing to enthusiastic crowds.

Merchant's situation provides yet another damning indictment of the recording industry today, an industry that seems intent on making itself extinct through the continued persecution of its fans, its failure to meet the consumer demands of its market, and its unabated pursuit of quick profit at the expense of developing and encouraging artistic talent.

Whatever your opinion of Natalie Merchant, the fact that this distinctive musical voice has no other venue to offer her songs other than live performance says a great deal about the music industry's ignorance and its imminent collapse. It's time that we had a more effective way of hearing the kind of music we prefer, and that artists like Natalie Merchant had a better way of reaching her audience.

Separated at Birth?

A Romulan plot? I wouldn't put it past them.

Iowa

I was pleased to see Obama squash Hillary in last night's Iowa caucuses. As much as I respect President Bill Clinton, I can't bring myself to fully trust or invest in Hillary. I don't like her proposals about funding higher education, for one thing, and she seems too invested in D.C. politics to really bring much new to the Oval Office, at least in terms of progressive thinking.

Don't get me wrong. I'd vote for a grilled cheese sandwich over the current Occupier of the White House, but in these initial stages before the Democratic Convention this summer, I am voting more with my heart than my head. Which is why I was also pleased to see Edwards come in second in the Iowa campaign.

Part of me, however, is concerned about what the new President will face upon entering office. Bush's legacy will include the world's largest bed of quicksand in Iraq, a colossal and ongoing national debt, a collective international sneer at what the United States has become politically and ethically, a plunging value on the dollar, a shrinking supply of oil, and a shredded Constitution. As Lou Reed once said about another glorious Republican legacy, it'll take more than the Angels or Iron Mike Tyson to heal this bloody breach.

So I find myself looking at the candidates whose experience might be up to the task. And that means looking at Clinton, or even McCain. Certainly a vote for McCain in Utah might go further than any Democratic selection, I cynically tell myself.

I don't like thinking in practical terms this early in the election season. I want to be encouraged by Obama's words of hope and Edwards' words of conviction. And, for the most part, I am. And yet. The voice in my head mutters, "Will that be enough?" Because our nation is in the shithole and it's going to take more than a glad hand and a winning smile to get us out.

I guess we'll see how things go until the convention. It seems that the Democratic ticket will be pretty much determined by February anyway, so it won't be too long a wait. In the meantime, I'm celebrating the victory of two guys who I desperately want to believe in. At this point, with little over a year left for Bush to keep fucking with us, I want to believe in anything.