Glenn Reynolds wants to know if Hollywood is swinging conservative. He quotes one of his readers: “At the moment it is almost impossible to imagine Hollywood producing a MASH or Catch 22 or Doctor Strangelove (Although I hasten to add Strangelove will always be in my top five movies.) It wouldn’t dare. They may still smile knowingly over their designer water at home but not in their films.” The terrifying “they.” ...
The Celestial Pictures DVD restoration of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin is maybe the clearest print of a Hong Kong movie I’ve ever seen. It’s beautifully vivid. The only thing that’d beat it would be Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and I’m not sure I can count that. OK, look, it’s this pretty: Look at those reds and blues. They pop. In fact, my only complaint may be that it’s a little too vivid, but I’m not sure that’s not just my modern eyes watching a 70s Technicolor epic. ...
[More character noodling. This is for Rob’s Starchild game.] “Is that Summer or Strummer?” “Eh, you know, whatever…” Kai Summer is immensely young, and the heavy overcoat he wears — down to his ankles, collar turned up to his ears — does nothing to hide this. It accentuates his slender frame, skinny like the loosely knotted tie he sometimes wears. His ragged boots swallow his feet whole. You could drop him into a Chicago winter and he’d vanish like he was just another bad poet with too much pride to work retail and not enough time to live. I’ve never seen him without the overcoat off stage. On stage, though, he’s someone else. He doesn’t get any bigger, but he uses his guitar to carve electric lines through the air in minor keys that owe more to madness than to music. If you squint just a little you can see a shimmering field of music around him like an aura of sound. I’ve noticed that people playing with him don’t get too close. I can’t blame them; I’d worry about getting sliced in two by a stray power chord. It is trivial to say that he is the best guitarist of his generation because at the ripe old age of 17, he is the first guitarist of his generation. Perhaps in the end, if Mother doesn’t have her way, he will be known merely as the man who found the possibilities. Perhaps someone else will be the man who developed them. But I wouldn’t bet on it. He is playing tonight at the Broken Metronome. He told me the other week that he hopes to jam with Mary Pagan someday. It’s the first personal confidence I’ve ever heard from him. Mary? Are you out there? Can you hear me? This critic thinks you should make Kai’s dream come true. From Lester Shots’ “Beating the Minutes” column in the ChicaGO alternative wheneverwecan.
Sherman Cafe, in Union Square, has free wireless. The coffee is pretty good, too. Good place to hang out on a Sunday afternoon.
You either like Charlie Kaufman movies or you don’t, and if you do, you’re already going to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, so no big review here. It’s in the top half of Kaufman films for me. OK, OK. Better than Human Nature and Adaptation, and on a par with Being John Malkovich. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind I sort of put off on the side because it’s a different beast. I thought it was completely comprehensible. The narrative wasn’t particularly chronological on one level, but on another level it was mostly linear, albeit with one big giant flashback in the middle. It’s all well and good to talk about how messed up a narrative is, but you’d think some people had never read any time travel stories… ...
And there you have it. As per my speculation yesterday, Zapatero’s threat to pull out his troops has Bush leaning back towards a UN resolution. Nicely done on Zapatero’s part. Now I’m going to go be sick s’more. Blah. You can tell I’m not well because I’m loopy enough to bitch about being not well here.
The popular right-wing talking point of the moment: " Spain did what Al Qaeda wanted." This is all very well and good, except that Spain is not pulling out of Afghanistan and that Spain is willing to stay in Iraq (original) under certain conditions — mainly a Security Council mandate. This actually looks like pretty smart diplomacy to me. To the degree that Bush needs Spain to stay in the coalition, he needs to bend to their demands. This would mean giving more say to the UN than he’d like, but those are the breaks of the game, right? ...
Another mashup from Kirt “Loki” Dankmyer today: “Hotel California”, by the Eagles. Read the lyrics (original), remember the times when they seemed like the deepest thing in the world, and… mash!
Mark Schmitt makes an excellent catch over at The Decembrist. Bush is using photos from the FY 2005 Federal Budget in his campaign material. This may or may not be illegal; it seems to me like it might be, but Schmitt knows better than I and he doesn’t think it is. Actually, come to think of it, I don’t think government documents are protected under copyright, so Bush has the right to remix those photos however he likes. Kinda shady of him to get the government to pay for the photos if he intended to use them later, though. And if he had his own private photographer pay for them and give them to the government, well, why is the government publishing campaign photos? No matter what happened, though, it’s definitely a slight erosion of the barriers between the campaign and the government. Not a scandal, but definitely an indication of character.
There appears to be a small uprising in Northern Iran. A little more information can be found here (original). The first link is to a site on the right side of the ideological spectrum, by the by, so you have to discount the people who are under the impression that this will immediately turn into a vast popular uprising supported by US troops. (Via Tacitus, whose commenters suffer in part from the same optimism. Ah well.)