expoobident

The Debate Club

2012-01-23T03:39:00.000-08:00

A few months ago a friend sent me a link to a video of “slam poet” Taylor Mali doing his What Teachers Make.

The title refers to the framing device Mali uses to launch into his homage to what good teachers can do at their very best. It opens with him at some sort of dinner party where one of those evil yuppie lawyer-types starts dissing schoolteachers (“Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach”) and then asks Mali, a teacher, what he makes.

Now, I really enjoyed this monologue myself – but I must say that I am very glad that it is presented as a performance, and not as an anecdote. As much as he actually is personally a character in the story, if he were to claim the story was true, I would not believe it. Sorry.

Here’s the thing. Evil yuppie lawyer types do not put themselves in the position to be mercilessly cut down and humiliated by well-intentioned liberal poets at dinner parties. They don’t go to those parties. They go to other parties. This has been my experience.

Sure. There is a place where investment bankers and stock brokers and evil capitalists in general get a shellacking at the hands of a likeable schoolteacher. That place is In The Movies. Pretty much only there.

And, if you think about it, that’s also the place where they do most of their falling into giant cakes and into large piles of rotting fish. These are not occurrences that most people have any recollection of in the real world.

“Gosh. I’ll never forget that time that evil yuppie lawyer I knew fell into that giant cake, and we all laughed at him.”

Elsewhere. The Daily Show. Jon Stewart’s talking to N.Y. Times financial columnist Joe Nocera about, well, finance. How the stock market has become pernicious for the economy and what capital has gotten up to and all that bad stuff the good guys are always saying about the man. And Jon’s curious about how stock brokers and traders would explain what the market does in a better light.

“I mean, what would a guy say if he were sitting here in front of us? Would he say, like, ‘Look. You don’t understand. We actually bring a lot of value…,”

No, Jon. They wouldn’t say anything. Because they wouldn’t be there. They’re all at that party I mentioned earlier – the one the likeable teacher wasn’t invited to. Remember?

They’ve got no reason to show up anywhere and try to explain why their practices are correct, or justifiable, or beneficial to people as a whole. In many cases, it’s because they may know that their activities are none of those things.

Their approach – that of not showing up for a potentially humiliating dressing down- has been, and continues to be, a strikingly successful one for many people on many occasions. They know that the winning move is real simple: You get the power, then you do anything you want to, without necessarily having to explain it to people who are cleverer than you or, much less, face them in a free and open debate.

For example, every once in a while you’d get some fool-ass religious person who’d show up to debate the late Christopher Hitchens on, let’s say, whether or not there’s a God. And, usually, Hitchens would do the Mexican hat dance on their heads. (Evaluating the encounter objectively, I mean.)

But what’s really interesting are those people we’re always hearing about who work editing school textbooks in Texas. They’re working in stuff about Creationism or intelligent design or whatever you want to call it; recommending that Darwinism should be mentioned in the classroom as only one possible theory among many. They don’t show up to get pantsed by Hitchens. In fact, we don’t even know who they are. They’re just in there, right in that perfect place that they have to be in to get their shit done.

Sure. There are exceptions. Sometimes you do get a face-to-face. Even in civilian (by which I mean “not on TV”) life. I had one myself.

One mystical, magical afternoon about 7 years ago, my intercom buzzed and, when I answered it, it was an American guy, speaking English (I mean, this is weird because I live in Madrid) who wanted to talk to me about the word of the Lord. It was like a fucking birthday present. I couldn’t believe it was actually happening. I stood there, at my intercom, for about half an hour talking to the guy. He was no dunce, yet, if I do say so myself (since no judges or referee were present) I absolutely wiped the floor with the fellow as regards the existence, or non-existence, of all things supernatural. I used every single argument I had rehearsed silently, to myself, throughout the years in preparation for a debate like this which, I was convinced, would never really come. Sarcasm, theoretical propositions, satire, quotes from scripture, sincere pleas to post-enlightenment ideals. It was all there. He ultimately agreed to disagree and slunk droolingly away. It was a good day.

But things like that are largely an epiphenomenon- and the straight up face-to-face is, in any case, seldom as successful as the aforementioned “do whatever you like whenever you can get away with it.”

That’s how the Catholic Church did it. Do you think they kept everyone in the Middle Ages hunting witches and believing the world was flat by having lots of debates all the time? No. They just followed the property and the money and the power and then did as they pleased.

As did the Nazis.

Didn’t spend a lot of time debating clever progressives on radiophonic versions of Bill Maher.

“Thanks for tuning in to Real Time. Tonight’s debate: murdering all the Jews in the world. Pro and con. Our guests will be Martin Bormann and the rabbi Isaac Glickstein.

Rabbi, let’s start with you. If I’m correct, you’re opposed to the Murdering all the Jews in the World policy.”

“Good evening, Bill. Thank you. Yes, I am. And I’m opposed to it due to what I believe to be a series of very solid reasons…”

Hell, they probably even ended up using it to admonish underlings, or their unmotivated kids: Let me tell you something son, I didn’t get to kill tens of millions of people by going around debating comics and eggheads all over the place.

This sort of strategy is in play every time you see people complaining about how there hasn’t been enough debate about this, that, or the other public policy issue – sending troops into countries, last minute pork-barrel amendments to legislation. “Where was the debate?”

Politicians calling press conferences to issue a statement but not answer questions from reporters. Ronald Reagan trademark “I can’t hear the reporters’ shouted questions.”

The smart move is to neither debate nor explain.

Now I’m starting to wonder if it’s not even an incentive for certain kinds of people to join a cause – a tacit promise to them that they’ll never have to spar verbally with anyone who might make them look foolish. Promise them that they’ll always have enough friends with them to be able to shout down anyone who’s attempting to make a lucid point. (See: the Tea Party)

The truth is, those things we progressives have fun watching get debated- well, the facts are long established on them for any reasonable person. The jury is long in. The topics are only still in play socially and politically because of a subset of obtuse beings who can be rationally convinced of nothing.

Or- they decide not to be convinced because doing what they are currently doing is beneficial to them, if detrimental to others.

Sure, I like to see witty, clever people with views similar to mine walk all over conservatives on television. Yes, I like good television, and that’s all that ultimately is.

Did you catch Bormann getting schooled on Real Time last night?

Oh, yea. That was cool. ‘Specially when he fell into that giant cake and they all laughed at him.

Yea. Heh Heh.

Calling America

2011-11-15T15:15:00.000-08:00

Two points seem close together when you’re looking at them from a distance.

I remember a little cousin of mine from Ireland who was going to visit my parents in New Jersey. He wondered if we could go to Disneyland, was disappointed when we told him said magic kingdom wasn’t just a day trip away.

Then there’s the -“You’re from California? I have an uncle who lives in Monterrey.”

“Ya don’t say! I probably know him.” -kind of thing.

Here in Europe people might often assume things in the States are close together- but they think things nearer them are far apart, if you know what I mean. People in Spain may never visit Portugal, or be able to name its president, though looking at a map of the Iberian Peninsula one might be tempted to say, “Portugal is, like, more or less in Spain, isn’t it?”

There was a student of mine, years ago, in Aviles- a Spanish town on the Atlantic coast – waxing philosophical about the twists and turns of that crazy roller coaster ride called life, and how those unforeseeable tides had brought her to be living in Asturias, Spain, from her native region of Cantabria, Spain. Now, in case you’re curious, just let me tell you that the distance between Asturias and Cantabria is roughly comparable to the distance between Delaware and – a different part of Delaware.

Yea. Lecture me on the caprices of fate, lady. I was born in Philly. Now I’m living in a steel mill town in Northern Spain. You basically came down the highway.

And culturally, much like folks in diverse parts of the U.S. feel, Europeans understandably feel there’s a tremendous difference between the region they live in and other regions in the same country. Northern Spain has absolutely nothing to do with bullfighting or flamenco or sunny, hot weather. It’s mostly Celtic style stuff, musically and climatologically.

Italy? Venice and Milan are supposedly like Switzerland, in terms of standards-of-living and infrastructure development, while, much further south, Naples is said to be more like The Road Warrior starring the cast of the Sopranos.

And we also enjoy a distance between points on the political spectrum that Europeans regard as significant.

This needs to be explained as we hear so much talk in the U.S. media of European Socialism, or European-style Socialism. This comes principally from conservative or squarely middle-of-the-road circles, and is employed more often than not to talk about topics like national public healthcare and Europe’s current “not invading everybody all the time” policy.

There actually are political parties in Europe- political parties with the effrontery to consider themselves not just like each other. The current governments of the U.K, France, Germany and (still, I believe) Italy do not at all consider themselves socialists. Yes. There are socialist or social-democrat parties, but these aforementioned governments consider themselves the opposition to said collectives. They’re the conservatives.

Yet U.S. politicians and pundits alike have long batted around a sort of “we have a broad political spectrum over here, but they don’t” shorthand to explain whatever they feel like about European politics. While, at the same time, Americans feel that Europeans unfairly view them as uniform. “Europeans peg us all as rubes and gun nuts. They don’t understand that we (for example) didn’t vote for George Bush and are against the war in Iraq.” blah blah blah.

Either bigotry is a useful shorthand for comprehending certain real transatlantic differences, or vice versa. I don’t know. All I know is that we believe there really are progressives and conservatives in Europe and sometimes your country is run by one gang and other times by the other.

Sure, both sides have long done away with the concept of capital punishment and, for the most part, believe in the idea of universal public healthcare – much like, for example, both major U.S. parties might believe in public schools and public fire departments.

So what’s the difference? You might say.

Well, as you can imagine, the Right tweeks things. They tweek public healthcare, implementing budget cuts that mean longer waits and higher doctor/patient ratios. They tweek education. Teacher pay cuts and more students per class.

In Spain, they give more money to the Catholic church and to what are called semi-private schools. (these exist because when Franco died, and the Socialists enacted free public education for all, there simply weren’t enough public schools built to handle the load, so they had to subsidize some private and religious schools. This is still in force largely because it’s difficult, voter-wise, to undo it) They cut social spending in general and, in the past, have sold off profitable public companies.

And they will be running Spain again starting sometime next week, since there’s an early election on Sunday.

It’s the economy, stupid. They’re going to win on that one like all opposition parties have won practically everywhere since the recession began. In relative terms, the global financial crisis was not the governing Socialist Party’s fault. In absolute terms, the economy is pretty darn bad, and the socialists have not abracadabra fixed it.

Everybody shrug. What are ya gonna do? It’s the politics of alternation.

I’m thinking of the writings of Emmanuel Goldstein. Goldstein was a political philosopher who turned out to not even really exist in the work of fiction 1984. Thus, he’s about as nonexistent as anyone is ever going to get. (Either that, or his two levels of nonexistence cancel each other out and he has to be regarded as real, making him one of the key ideologues of Occupy Wall Street and its predecessors)

Goldstein analyzes Big Brother’s practice of historical revisionism. (You know, “It has always been A. It has never been B, despite what you think you remember.”) He says governance is naturally a process of trial and error , but – since history has ended and IngSoc is the dystopia’s sole political party- there can be no error. So error is erased. Disappeared down into the memory hole.

The flip side of that is how, in contemporary multi-party democracies, governance continues to be a process of trial and error. And when there is that error, voters tend to sanitize the error (or perceived error) by voting out the erroneous and voting in the other party. This happens time and again in politics and occurs in all sorts of institutions. Probably the only social configuration this doesn’t occur in is families. If the parents make an error (moving the family to a different town and it doesn’t work out well, for example) the kids don’t get to vote in new parents. So, those who made the mistake are charged with rectifying it. But that’s generally not the case. There’s more often a throw-the-bums-out response.

And the bums, whether they are bums or not, are about to get shown the door in Spain. Could the Socialist Party (my party, despite the fact that I can’t actually vote here) have done more sooner to alleviate the effects of the crisis? Potentially. I don’t know. At least we haven’t needed an EU bailout yet.

The good news seems to be that the Right here (the Partido Popular) may not be using the virtual certainty of a massive victory next Sunday to move further to the right. It actually seems to be distancing itself from its fringe figures – people who might be compared to Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin. It’s turning its back on certain media figures and actual, card-carrying members of the Popular Party (in English) have been forced to resign in recent days for making xenophobic comments on Twitter and for forwarding sexist email jokes.

They may be sincerely moving toward the center, or it may be that they know they need to be taken seriously in Brussels and Frankfort, and have to demonstrate to the EU central bank that they aren’t a bunch of loose cannons.

Is it good that the Right is moving toward the center and thus becoming more palatable? Here’s my take: Yea. Sorry, but Yea.

There’s Paul Bowles making a cameo at the end of the movie of The Sheltering Sky, quoting his own writing. He talks about looking up at the moon and wondering how many more times in a life a person may think to look up at the moon. 4 or 5 times? Even less?

How many more legislatures am I going to live through? Eight or nine? Less? Sure, I could hope that the Partido Socialista Obrero Español gets elected again and again in perpetuity –but that’s not going to happen. It just isn’t. And I can’t spend half of the rest of my life suffering four-year-long aneurisms. I can, however, cross my fingers and hope for people that aren’t insane.

OLD GUY GETS TOY, PHILOSOPHIZES

2011-10-31T16:24:00.000-07:00

Today I’ve fallen victim to my own catchphrase. It’s this: Language isn’t wrong. People are wrong.

Yea, it’s as senseless as it is useful and absolutely true.

I invented it years ago and employ it in dealing with Spanish people as regards English, with English speakers as regards Spanish, and in any sort of word translation argument. I use it to put the kibosh on debate, since it sounds reasonable and no one knows how to effectively rebut it.

People often don’t “like” how a word is translated in a foreign language. It sounds wrong to them.

-How do you say bocadillo in English?

-Sandwich.

-No. We have that in Spanish. I mean on a long roll.

-Still a sandwich.

-No. But that’s on sliced bread…

-Language is never wrong. People are wrong.

So today I’m out and about in Madrid looking for a cover for my new Sony e-reader, which my wife gave me for my birthday. At least I call it an e-reader, like I call other things a DVD player, or an MP3 player – things the Spanish call a DVD, or an MP3.

Now, when I’m giving English class I can go, “No. It’s a DVD player, or a videocassette recorder.” But in society, I can’t do that. It’s been decided that the reader is called an ebook. I say “e-reader” or “e-book reader” to salespeople and I’m basically referring to something that does not exist.

-You want an ebook cover?

-No. The ebook is the file. The device itself…

-Language is not wrong. The word for that device is ebook. You’re outnumbered on that, Gringo.

In any case, I have this e-reader thing and I must say, it’s totally phenomenal. It holds, like, a thousand books. It’s lighter than a paperback. You don’t have to hold it open. And you don’t have stick in a bookmark or fold the corner or place it open-face down on the table or whatever the hell you do. It remembers your page.

Ya say ya like bookmarks? They’re nice gifts and souvenirs and bring back pleasant memories? That’s what refrigerator magnets are for. (I’m going to go out on a limb right now and predict refrigerator magnets will never be effectively replaced with digital technology)

And, if you want to, you can spend your whole life reading and grow old and die before you ever even confront the concept of illegally downloading books. Thousands are available for free totally on the up-and-up through sites like project Gutenberg.

And all this digital stuff is getting more and more attractive to me for the most mundane of reasons: Everything takes up less space. No shelves full of records, or boxes of videos and DVDS. Movies and music fit on increasingly smaller drives. When you get to be 47 (yep, that’s me), and you’re not prone to moving into ever larger apartments, you start to run out of room. Now I don’t need more bookcases for my books. I can use the shelf space for…well…I dunno… some new thing I’m sure capitalism is hard at work inventing as I write this.

And there it is again: new technology changing the way we think and preferences about things. Would it have ever occurred to me that our apartment was getting cluttered with DVDs and books and CDs had the market not provided me with the ability to remedy that? Probably not. The opinion itself exists due to the existence of those tinier and tinier disk drives.

This reminds me of what I’m always telling the youngins about the appearance on the market- how many years ago now?- of videocassettes and home VCRs. You were, (and nowadays , still are) suddenly able to be in the mood to watch, for example, Bonnie and Clyde.

When I was little, there was no such thing as “I feel like watching Bonnie and Clyde tonight.” People would have looked at you like you were nuts. “What do you mean, You feel like watching Bonnie and Clyde? There’s no such feeling. It’s either on TV tonight or it isn’t.”

And cellphones. I’ve always felt that cellphones don’t exist to have the same conversations we used to have on landlines. They exist now to have new conversations about things we didn’t make phone calls about before.

I suppose these are merely examples of what’s recognized as the watershed concept in the proliferation of home computer use. Initially, I’ve read, pundits were predicting not much future for the home computer, largely because the companies selling those early home computers were orienting the consumer toward the idea of using computers for activities like household bookkeeping, keeping recipes on file and writing book reports. Essentially things people were already doing. “Now, with your home PC, you’ll be able to do it easier and faster.”

But it turned out people weren’t that interested in doing the same old stuff easier and faster. Then, in the 90s, something came along which gave everybody the chance to do a whole new thing that they couldn’t conceive of doing previously. And which couldn’t be done with anything else. It wasn’t the same old doing your income tax return, only faster. Now it was the internet.

Everyday People

2011-05-20T15:54:00.000-07:00

Not wanting to get all hand-holdy and brotherhood of man and I’d like to buy the world a coke on everybody, I really do I have to say that I find people to be largely the same all over. Seriously. Sometimes I even think I disappoint people here in Spain who ask me about the differences between Spanish people and Americans (by which, sorry, I do mean “people from the United States”). My response is “well, essentially, no real difference.”

At least I find scarce differences between Americans I actually know and Spanish people I know. Sure, I’m sometimes tempted to fall back on hoary clichés about fat, gun toting, flag waving throwbacks who live, I don’t know, in Texas, maybe? But the reality is that, even if they really do exist, I don’t personally know those folks, much the way I don’t know Spaniards who are bullfighters or something.

People tend to have wild prejudices, often harmless, about other nationalities: snobs, womanizers, drunkards, loafers, misers. More often then not, the principle prejudice one group has regarding another is that “they don’t like us,” which I always find hysterical. Americans and Spanish alike are convinced the French dislike them, a sentiment I’ve never remotely experienced in dealing with a French person.

In fact, the only experience I’ve ever had in this area is easily summed up: You get two people from similar economic backgrounds, and with comparable levels of formal education – okay, it also helps if they’re around the same age – and you’ve got two people who are really quite similar. The 34 year-old German I.T. engineer isn’t really going to be pulling some authoritarian trip while the 34 year-old Italian I.T. engineer is chasing the secretary around the table or something. They’ll look a lot alike.

Even the tendency to stereotype other nationalities is, ultimately, a thing they have in common. And, I guess, you’ve got to take the good with the bad, as people of comparable backgrounds and educations aren’t only similar in their love of The Simpsons and the Beatles but also, unfortunately, in their absolute and total stupidity and bullshit.

Euro-rapist Dominique Strauss-Kahn may be victim of some extremely elaborate frame-up, as some 60% of surveyed French people apparently believe, but this gigantic international espionage plot would only be as likely as any other. Not very. But, okay. I’ll allow them that. Stranger shit has happened. Could be. Ya never know. Stuff like that.

But that’s all as maybe. I prefer to start out with something I actually know, something quantifiable that maybe we can agree on. I’ll just put it out there and whoever wants to get on board with it can.

There is, I’ve noticed throughout the years, a strong tendency to mistrust the judicial systems of other countries, especially when a citizen of your country is involved.

Perhaps the development of nations can be divided along a north/south axis, or you can use terms like 1^st world and 3^rd world, or talk about economic powers and G20 countries and developing countries but, when it comes to due process of law, there’s a strong proclivity toward “We here in ____________ have a modern criminal justice system, and other countries do not.”

This I’ve seen time and again.

Americans were convinced Aruba could not effectively investigate the disappearance of vacationer Natalee Holloway in 2005.

During the search for Madeleine McCann (a little British girl who went missing in Portugal) her parents and The British media continually criticized the ineptitude of the Portuguese police for not being able to find her, playing on stereotypes of lazy, bordertown cops sipping Dr. Peppers and eating donuts.

More recently, there was the controversy of the U.S. exchange student who was convicted of murder in Italy, and whom everyone in the States seems to believe is innocent.

And these prejudices don’t just flow “South”, (to use a polite term to describe how Aruba, Portugal and Italy might be perceived by wealthier, Anglo-Saxon countries). They flow in all directions.

Remember Louise Woodward, the English nanny who was charged with killing a little kid in her care in the U.S.? There always seemed to me to be something not quite kosher (and, okay, I admit I’m from the States) in the British attitude toward that. In the U.K. press she looked to be the victim, widely portrayed as wrongly accused and in the hands of a corrupt, retrograde criminal justice system. She was attributed that variety of celebrity status generally reserved for photojournalists held hostage by the Taliban. When she was sent back to England, crowds gathered to welcome her at the airport.

Is it really possible that the U.S. can’t correctly prosecute a child negligent death case? Is it impossible that a U.K. citizen residing in the States might actually be guilty of something? Sure, she may have been innocent, but I don’t see how a knee-jerk media driven response would know that.

Spain is equally guilty.

There are 3,000 or so people currently on Death Row in the United States. 1 or 2 of them happen to be Spanish citizens. These guys somehow rate an occasional profile on any number of “60 Minutes” -type news programs. A reporter goes in to interview the guy, who’s in the prerequisite orange jumpsuit. They talk to his attorneys, family, friends, etc. And they never approach the story from the arguably reasonable angle that , “Hey, we’re against the death penalty here in Europe and these guys are slated to be executed.” No. They insist on coming at it from “They’re innocent.” They were framed or there was corruption or incompetence. We get phrases like “He has consistently asserted his innocence form day one,” his mom breaks into tears, “My boy couldn’t kill anyone.” You know the drill.

Why do they not think a Spanish person could be guilty of homicide in a foreign country? Nobody thinks that whenever a Spanish person is found guilty of homicide in Spain that it must be a frame-up.

This phenomenon, this “our compatriot in jail over there must be innocent” is so prevalent that it has quickly become, for me, one of those memes – like the aforementioned “parental assertion of a child’s innocence”, or high-minded reasons for military action, or denial of steroid use -that you just automatically filter out as just so much background noise.

Anecdotal Evidence

2011-04-06T15:41:00.000-07:00

I’m gobsmacked at how the chips in this global economic downturn have ultimately fallen.

Is it just age, or are things really going badly for the good guys?

I mean, I know every generation ends up looking around and thinking things are getting worse. Especially progressives. Maybe now it’s just my turn.

Sure, “getting worse” and “going badly” are pretty fuzzy terms. Here’s a more lucid turn of phrase: The disconnect between what people are willing to put up with, or even vote for, and what is in their best interest has never seemed so vast.

How have the wealthy and the stratospherically wealthy managed to so successfully instil such contempt for middle-income people in middle-income people? They’ve done it, and, judging by those mid-term election results in the states, done it really well. Unions are being busted, public services cut (Camden N.J. halving it’s police force is, for anyone who’s ever even glimpsed Camden, the frontrunner for scariest domestic headline thus far this year) , tax cuts extended and many of the bailed out financial institutions responsible for the crisis are posting record profits. All this while the right has managed to get many in the working class down on teachers.

The other day Rachel Maddow was trying to drum up the idea that Police and Firefighter unions were finally wising up and turning on those Republican officials whom they’d endorsed and who ended up stabbing them in the back. Good luck with that, Rachel. I haven’t seen that hope come to fruition yet.

I remember a recession back in the early 80s. My mother, a middle class woman from a working class background who generally voted democrat, was one day reading an article in some Penny Saver-type local newspaper out there in the suburbs. The article was about how some strikingly large number of people had turned out to apply for a very few school bus driver jobs.

And my mother was there, like, “Yea. Look. Now they’re all lining up to get these jobs. Last year (i.e. before the recession) they couldn’t find people to drive a bus. They were too good for it.”

“Well, Mom,” I said, “I imagine they all had better jobs then. What were they supposed to do? Quit them to drive a bus for less money?”

“I know. But I’m just saying.”

I’ve often wondered if one or both my parents didn’t actually vote for Ronald Reagan. Where did this “poor people- or even people in our income group – are getting more than they deserve” attitude come from? (This degree of alienation reminds me of when Franco died here in Spain and reformers held a referendum on whether there should be democracy in Spain – and some people got up, went to the polls, and proudly voted NO; effectively voting that they should not be allowed to vote)

In Europe, the debt crisis is holding us hostage to the ever greater “need” to cut public sector spending. If we don’t cut, Standard and Poor’s lowers our credit rating, requiring us to pay higher interest on Spanish bonds and thus get deeper into debt and making it harder to climb out of the recession.

Lucky we get sage wisdom from high profile bank CEOs (from banks which received ultimately unnecessary bailout money). They say, with a straight face, that people will have to get used to working a little more and earning a little less.

Now they’re even talking about co-pays in our public healthcare system. Forget the concept that widespread recognition as to what sort of economic thinking was at fault in the global meltdown would lead to a long overdue crackdown on speculation and exotic financial products. Finance is doing just as well over here as in the States; which is to say, better than ever.

Yet, here, I still haven’t seen that uniquely North-American phenomenon of the middle class turning so rabidly against itself.

Perhaps what some say is right: that’s it’s the statistically discredited idea that they will someday be rich which causes middle-income people to side so often with the rich. “All I know is, if I am a millionaire someday, I don’t want Uncle Sam taking it all away from me…. Now where’s that Powerball lottery ticket? “

Whatever the explanation, this thinking seems to run deep in the breed. Some years ago, I saw some asshole from the airline industry explaining why airlines “have to” sell more tickets than there really are seats on a plane- the dreaded “over-booking”. And he mentioned the number of seats that people don’t show up for and how it might lead to planes flying with empty seats, which he characterized as “losing money”. But what struck me was the way he explained it. He seemed to have this perspective that we should all be willing to suffer some inconvenience so that airlines can make as much money on each flight as is possible. That that’s a goal that should be important to all of us. Like so much conservative rhetoric these days, it suggests other income groups should be putting the needs of the wealthy first.

And then just a couple of weeks ago, I was watching Jon Stewart (and I totally love Stewart and don’t want to get down on the guy – but I only want to point out how people can slip, unawares, into the sort of “not in my best interest” style thinking that makes the wealthy’s war on, well, everyone else so successful). His guest was some – I suppose, generally well intentioned- character who’d written a book about the benefits of city living. Apparently, city dwellers actually live longer, are better educated and earn more while using up fewer natural resources. Stuff like that.

And Stewart asked the guy at one point why post-war generations had this dream of moving out of the city into the suburbs. And the guy – and this is where it started to go wrong – suggested there was some sort of profit driven conspiracy on the part of the government and banks to get people to own their homes instead of renting them.

And he said something like, “In the city, we don’t own. We tend to rent because it’s more practical. Do you know how hard it is to buy and sell buildings when you’ve got to get maybe a couple dozen separate owners to agree?”

Stewart maybe nodded enthusiastically and said “Yea”.

But I was like Wait wait wait wait wait. No. In fact, I don’t think we do know how hard it is to buy and sell buildings when you’ve got to get maybe a couple dozen owners to agree. You know why we don’t know that? Because No One EVER Does IT. What are we talking about? Donald Trump? Who buys and sells buildings? You can’t let a commentary like that slide through. The guy is advocating renting because the 0.001% of us who are ever remotely involved in the buying and selling of an entire apartment building in the middle of a city find it difficult to do.

(It’s long been evident to me the “racket” being run on us by “the Man” is rental property. Here, in Europe, we have equity in our homes, and in 30 years or so, it belongs to you, for mortgage payments that are comparable to what you would pay in rent. And when people want to sell their apartment, they have no problem doing it. If, for some reason, you want to purchase an entire building in the middle of Madrid and turn it into rental spaces, yea, I imagine it’s really inconvenient)

In Stewart’s defence, I did see him on any number of other occasions suggesting TARP money should have gone directly to defaulting homeowners rather than to the imperilled banks that held their mortgages. I don’t know where he got this idea from, maybe it was his own, but it was rather intriguing. The concept was that the banks would ultimately receive the money through mortgage payments, and thus resolve their solvency problems, effectively getting “bailed out”, yet homeowners would avoid default and foreclosure. He sailed this idea by Joe Biden, White House Economic Advisor Austan Goolsbee, Congressional Oversight Panel Chair Elizabeth Warren, and hosts of others. They all kind of hemmed and hawed and squirmed away from the suggestion, saying things like, “Well, Jon, I think, in the long run, the homeowners are going to be the big winners.” ( I guess that sounded mostly like Biden)

But there was an element in everyone’s negative reaction to this plan which was – and I have to admit I almost felt a little this way down inside myself – along the lines of “You can’t be suggesting we just rescue poor people from their bad financial decision making” (Evidently, you can only rescue rich people from their bad financial decision making). None of them could respond effectively to Stewart’s queries as to why giant investment banks could be rescued by federal funds, but private citizens couldn’t be.

Yet I think the administration officials are right. Somehow, Americans wouldn’t put up with the idea of defaulted homeowners getting subsidized. They consider those homeowners deadbeats. Sadly, investment banks getting bailed out directly seems more palatable to middle-income Americans.

I’m reminded once again of something I studied in a sociology class back in college which seems to apply to so many situations. It was called Melvin Lerner’s “Just World Theory.” Basically, it posits that, while people will claim to understand that bad things may randomly occur to a good person, and vice versa, their actions and decision making seem to indicate a belief that people essentially get what they deserve.

Of course, that’s a crass oversimplification of the theory. It more specifically has to do with how we tend to attribute others’ misfortune to their character or behaviour, so as to convince ourselves we can avoid the same misfortune simply by not being like them.

Do Americans believe, in effect, that if they can avoid identifying with the middle or working class, they can avoid the misfortunes that the middle class faces?

That is probably not the answer. Largely, because it’s too complicated and because it doesn’t explain why middle income people in other countries, like in Spain for instance, have a different attitude.

Victory Lap

2011-02-05T15:54:00.000-08:00

This post is ultimately going to be about how Egypt will turn into a scary Islamist state. But I’m going to start somewhere else.

I’ll start right here in Madrid, during the U.S. democratic primaries of 2008. A group called Democrats Abroad got in touch with me and invited me to a meeting of Madrid residing Democrats to listen in on a conference call from Bill Clinton.

I went mostly out of curiosity. What sort of people, I wondered, are militantly of the U.S. Democrat Party, so much so that they would continue to organize under this rubric even while abroad? I understand what it is to be a Communist, or a Fascist, or a Social Democrat (like we have here in Europe) or a socialist (which I like to think I am). But what sort of ideological enthusiasm could exist in the Democrat Party which, compared to the above-mentioned groups, is, well, wishy-washy? What are the golden, shining ideals of the U.S. Democrat Party? Roosevelt and Johnson kind of stuff? By which I mean ideals and goals which have long been perfected and expanded upon by Social Democrats in other countries.

The regionalisms in the U.S. and the consequent existence of gun carrying Democrats and pro-choice Republicans, make both parties, in terms of the whole, vast spectrum of political ideology, kind of wishy-washy – part of some dull midrange politic that was undoubtedly electrifying in 1787 but no longer is.

So Luisa and I went to the meeting and all the people there were, yes, wishy-washy. Insipid, in the truest sense of the word. They were totally isolated intellectually and culturally from the Europe that surrounded them, and seemed to believe that the sun rose and set on the U.S. political spectrum. They thought acceptable political precepts ran the gamut from, for instance, being for the death penalty to having doubts about it. You could favor a private healthcare system or favor “some sort of reform”. You could sell guns without permits or favor background checks and waiting periods. This was their concept of the left and right. I was like, “Woah. You folks must really have The Man trembling in his boots with your liberal attitudes and progressive agendafying.”

Such weak “liberalism” could only win out, on occasion, in a system where the opposing party is equally dull. People like that wouldn’t stand a chance – and, indeed, stood not a chance – in something like the Spanish Civil War.

In 1936, when elements in the Spanish military staged a coup d’etat, it was to topple a government that was essentially a modern liberal democracy, in the U.S. vein. But the resulting Civil War came down to a battle between communists and anarchists on one side, and fascists on the other. The vast, democratic middle (the majority of the country) was swiftly pushed out of the spotlight. The protagonists of the conflict were those ideologues who had a clear and intransigent view of what kind of society they wanted. Either revolution, secularism and redistribution of private property, or church, militarism, and oligarchy. Proponents of liberal democracy, whose thinking could arguably be qualified as “well, whatever everybody votes for is okay with me” held no political ground. Merely thinking that there should be parliamentary representation and freedom of speech doesn’t cut it when the chips are down; or when other groups in your state have a much clearer agenda and put policy on their list of priorities, ahead of form.

Pro-democracy demonstrators in Egypt who want only the right to freely elect their government, and who are dentists and truck drivers, will go back to being dentists and truck drivers when the whole thing blows over. Those who remain in politics will be those who are in politics now and who’ve been in opposition politics in Egypt for decades: principally, the Muslim Brotherhood. Like Marxists or Fascists or even the Green Party, they have and agenda that goes beyond “that people vote.”

Back to Spain for a second.

The first party elected to govern after the fall of the Franco Regime (1975) who were not previously part of the Franco Regime was the Socialist Workers’ Party –PSOE. (There was a centrist party which governed from ‘76 to ‘81, but it was composed of ministers who had actually held minor positions in the Franco dictatorship)

The Socialists won largely (and don’t get me wrong. I’m totally glad they did) because they existed as an organization long before Franco died- to a great extent, in exile in France. They had a platform. They had an administrative structure, pamphlets, offices, telephones, interns, lawyers, accountants, slogans, headshots, posters, and CANDIDATES -candidates who were ready to jump right in there and run in elections, as soon as elections were to be had.

The only thing remotely similar to this in contemporary Egypt, from what I read, is the Muslim Brotherhood.

Thus, I’m worried about the possibility of an Islamist state in Egypt- worried about it more than almost any other factor in the equation. I don’t want to see any more women wearing those things over their faces, neither here nor there. Totally not okay.

I hope I’m wrong. Really. I hope it doesn’t end up in stonings and niqabs.

Yea, whenever somebody says “I hope I’m wrong,” I’m the first one who says “that’s bullshit. Nobody ever really hopes they’re wrong” But, I swear, I want to be wrong.

Yet, I fear it’s a fait accompli. Not only because of what any of us might imagine on our own, but because of much of the media’s sad counterproductive attempts at assuaging my fears. Literally, every single article I read and expert commentator I listen to, that attempts to explain why there’s not going to be an Islamist state, just ends up making me go “Uh oh. This sounds bad.”

For example, classifying the Muslim Brotherhood as “bumbling” and somehow “late to the party” as regards the sudden grassroots demonstrations does not cheer me up. The fact that they were supposedly inept in initially throwing their support behind Nobel prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei is not a good argument for why they’re not going to end up the predominant post-transition power, since it’s predicated on the absurd belief that groups which have been known to make errors never get anywhere, nor come to wield any real power, or gain popular support.

The N.Y. Times quotes sources as saying the Muslim Brotherhood wants only to see real democracy take hold in Egypt, and has no interest in monopolizing power. Hello?? Where has there ever been a political party which had no interest in majority control of the parliament? And of winning those majorities repeatedly?

Noam Chomsky tries to assuage my fears by pointing out U.S. hypocrisy. He tells me the U.S. isn’t really worried about a repressive islamist state springing up, since it already backs so many of those. It only wants to maintain some level of control and presence in the region. I think that’s what you call a straw man argument. U.S. hypocrisy has no influence over what people of good will think.

Elsewhere, we’re told that the Brotherhood have renounced violence, and that’s why they’re currently at odds with Al Qaeda.

But the trouble may come not in their use of violence, but in that they’ll simply be fairly elected by lots of people. Even by lots of women.

(Sure, women can decide who they want to vote for on their own, like they decide to wear niqabs on their own. But come on. Coercion for intelligent people isn’t defined exclusively as some maniac dad saying “You’ll wear the burka or we’ll throw acid in your face”. We look at every single aspect of the child’s upbringing, for both boys and girls, from their infancy until they’re about 17 or 18, and then ask if there’s been coercion. This is a key concept in understanding and confronting the atavisms that religiosity often leads to.)

I guess I’m just worried that maybe, right at this moment, somewhere in the offices of Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, somebody’s closing the file on Egypt in the “Corruption” Department and zipping it down the hall to the “Stoning” Department. And the close coordination of these departments will keep my email inbox jammed for years to come.

The New Superstition

2011-01-23T16:06:00.000-08:00

So now it turns out all the horoscopes are wrong (see here for example). I guess people are just lining up to be part of that new zodiac sign Ohpiuchus.

For those of us who don’t believe in Horoscopes, I imagine the news flash that they are wrong is basically a redundancy. They’re wrong in a field where “Right” will never exist.

I don’t believe in horoscopes, fortune telling, the paranormal, God – basically, I don’t believe in anything remotely involving the supernatural.

But, am I superstitious?

That’s tricky. I think, to the extent that I believe in causal associations between manifestly unrelated phenomena (which is , arguably, the definition of superstition), I’m pretty darned superstitious.

Example: I spent vast quantities of time and energy trying to get all the paperwork in order to bring my cat into Europe from the U.S. Signatures and vaccinations and permits and licences. Since no one could give me a definitive clear answer as to what documentation was required, I probably had more than was strictly necessary. I arrived at Madrid airport early in the morning, Dec. 31, 1994. And the Customs office was closed. The Objects to Declare corridor simply led to policeless office. Shut, dark, gate pulled down. I could have had guns and cocaine. Waltzed right into Spain.

The thing is that, as in many other similar occasions, I am firmly convinced that it was the getting so much paperwork prepared that caused the Customs office to be closed. If I had not had all the documents, it would have been open and I’d have been screwed. I’m unshakeable on this point.

But how could that be, Mike? (no one might ask) If you don’t believe in the supernatural, how can you be superstitious like that?

It’s easy. First of all, you’ve got to have a hankering for some sort of control in an essentially chaotic universe. And that’s a hankering that’s real easy to have. Then, all you need is enough faith in statistical probability to believe that random bad things are going to happen to you with pretty much the same frequency as random good things. So there’s that. Then over here you got your Karma. So there’s that too. (This is my blog entry in the style of H.I. McDunnough from Raising Arizona)

One of my best superstitions is the belief that it beams positive energy into society (read “good karma”) to violate all of the conventional superstitions; as I am , in a round about sort of way, contributing to a less superstitious world. Follow? And no, I don’t mean I intentionally spill salt or break mirrors. That would be expensive and time-consuming. But I will walk under the occasional ladder – and I find any encounter with a black cat to be really cool. Umbrellas opened indoors? Yes, do it. That’s good karma. And ALWAYS break chain letters. I’m totally serious.

And jinxes. Yeah. Totally believe in jinxes. Talking about some desirable outcome will probably jinx it- so don’t.

How to justify this conviction? Easy. You start out with the conviction that people can’t accurately foresee the future. Not clairvoyants, psychics, or gypsy fortune-tellers. Nobody can. Some stop there. “Future can’t be foreseen. Next topic.” But I’m more like, “What might the consequences be of our not being able to accurately predict the future?” And I think I get my answer from either something by Kafka or by Borges but I can’t, for the life of me, find where it is. And I have looked.

The upshot is essentially that anything you imagine with some degree of detail will not actually turn out that way. For good or for bad. If you picture a series of events in your mind, thoroughly and frequently, they will – by the nature of the future’s very unforeseeability – not happen the way you’re imagining them. (Is this sounding familiar? Because I don’t think I’m the only one who thinks this.)

So, if you want to avoid some negative event, you should probably think about it a lot. It may still break badly, but it won’t break badly exactly the way you think it will. Reciprocally – and anyone who’s ever used the word “jinx” agrees with this – when there’s a potentially good thing on the horizon, you’re better off not talking about it or turning it over a great deal in your head.

And the last aspect of my own New and Revised Superstitious Thinking (and, ultimately, what is the new zodiac symbol if not new and revised superstitious thinking?) is what I mentioned above about the comparable numbers of bad and good things that are going to randomly happen to you. It’s what my wife means when she refers to our “dosis of bad luck” whenever something kind of goes badly, or we lose something, or we break something (like, yes, a mirror, for instance). You’ve had a dose of bad luck. You’ve experienced it and accepted it – and you console yourself with the idea that it will, statistically, be offset at some point by something fortuitous.

Of course, the downside is when something fortuitous suddenly happens and afterward, if you’re serious about your superstitions, you’ve gotta be like, “Oh, oh. Now we’re in for it.”

Wrong on the Left

2010-10-06T04:30:00.000-07:00

Last week we had a strike here in Spain. It was a general strike against the government, a thing seldom, if ever, seen back in the U.S. The idea was that no one go to work, transport shuts down and stores are closed.

It was not particularly successful.

Basically the nation’s largest trade unions called it to coincide with other protests around Europe that same day. They want the government to back down on recent austerity measures taken to restart the economy; or, if not actually restart the economy, make Spain look a bit more solvent in the eyes of the global monetary system.

Luisa and I were not in favour of the strike – and did not strike ourselves – because, essentially, we would not do that to a Socialist government. Those’re our guys.

In a couple of ways the concept of “the strike” is different here from what it is in the states.

In España, whenever there is a strike in a given industry, it’s temporary. It lasts a finite amount of time- Transit strike? It’ll be a day or two, or Monday, Wednesday and Friday; none of that N.Y. –style stuff (which here they call a “savage strike”) in which workers simply do not work until there’s a negotiated resolution.

And, check it out, there are always legally mandated minimum services provided. So, the subway actually does work – in a “does it or does it not work?” kind of sense. There are merely fewer trains.

And “pickets” do not refer here to a group of picketers marching around in one place, usually employees out in front of where they work.

In the general strike, “pickets” referred to groups of union delegates going around from place to place informing – in finger quotes- people about the nature of the strike and trying to convince them not to go to work.

The behaviour of these people during the strike is one of those things that when I see what’s theoretically “the left” doing it, I really hate it. It’s stuff that, more than anything, tends to turn people off the left.

Most conservatives here didn’t want to go on strike simply because conservatives just don’t strike- they’re not into that “collective action” thing. And progressives didn’t want to strike against this, a Socialist, government. But a “general strike” was basically union leaders saying to everyone in the country– liberals, conservatives and non-union members – “You are going to be on strike. Get it?”

They put silicone in the locks of businesses so that they couldn’t open. There were reports of them threatening immigrants (Chinese, Arab, Bangladeshi) with their own shops beforehand; promising them harm if they didn’t stay closed. ATM screens were spray-painted over, rendering them useless. I suppose people weren’t even supposed to handle money, like on some orthodox Jewish holiday. They did all this while all the while claiming most people were actually in favour of the strike and wanted to strike.

Of course, there was plenty of the run-of-the-mill pulling cabbies and bus drivers out of their vehicles and beating them up; and assaulting both waiters and patrons alike at restaurants.

The best violent encounter was when picketers beat up a guy trying to enter his place of work and then claimed to police that he had assaulted them, with a binder, when they were merely trying to inform him of the motivations behind the strike. This got a lot of humorous play in the media as it’s predicated on the concept that a lone guy with a ring binder would decide to attack a group of thirty adult males.

However, the most really repellent thing in my book was when union leaders made a public appeal to grandparents who take care of their grandchildren during the day to refuse to do it on the day of the strike, so that the parents would be forced to stay home from work, since they had no daycare.

Fomenting conflict within family units. Yea. That’s really the way we want to go. It was one of what I call “Low Moments in the History of Progressive Politics”.

The first really low moment I witnessed on the left came when I was back in college- at the New School- during the first Gulf War.

The Student Union, which led in the politicized aspects of undergrad life and consequently led the anti-War movement, decided to rally around this guy named Sam Lwin. This was a New School student who had joined the Marine reserve to get money for college, done the training and everything, and now decided he didn’t want to go to war. He and a group of other conscientious objectors (despite being active, voluntary military personnel) were suing the Marine Corps to get out of being called up and sent to the Gulf. (Despite having occurred in 1990, there’s press on this whole story still floating around somewhere in cyberspace, so you can read up on it if you want to hear both sides)

Myself and a number of other people were all like “Aw, man. What the fuck?”

First of all, this was not the central issue. While other college kids around the country were chanting “Hell No. We won’t go. We won’t fight for Texaco”, at Eugene Lang College we chanted “Hell no. Sam won’t go. Sam won’t fight for Texaco.”( And I didn’t even know Sam). And this basically alienated a lot of potential demonstrators who would have loved to be active in some sort of broad based anti-war protests.

Second – well, essentially it just reinforced would so many conservative and middle-of-the-road people think about progressives: that they’re congenitally self-serving and would do stuff like join the Marine Reserve, collect the pay, and then refuse to be called up on moral grounds when the contract came due. I mean, upon hearing of this situation, many conservatives probably didn’t even blink.

Another great low moment in progressive politics was beheld by my wife, years ago, when she belonged to a radical political party called the LCR.

The was a demonstration – probably against Spain’s entrance into NATO-which turned violent. Lots of vandalism and tear gas and lots of people got arrested.

Apparently there was this one LCR member who got arrested for vandalizing something or throwing rocks or whatever, and it was a guy who was up against some sort of “three strikes” situation. He had a police record and if he got convicted for something this time he might actually go to jail.

So the guy’s in jail, and the LCR people get together to decide what they can do for him, and their answer is to claim that the cop who arrested him – a young guy, a rookie – had beaten him, and that they’d all witnessed it. The thinking being that the cops, in a relatively recent post-Franco police force, wouldn’t want to face brutality charges; especially the rookie, whose permanent record such accusations would go on.

Many party members were against this action, and it was one of the things that left my wife disenchanted with their whole approach. She ultimately left the party.

They went down to the police station, filed the brutality charges and ¡Voila! The guy was immediately released and all charges dropped. The rookie did not want any part of having this kind of accusation on his record.

Now, I don’t know how many police or conservatives actually know the truth of the above related anecdote, but practices like that can’t be helpful because it reinforces the worst stereotypes about the left: congenitally unscrupulous and self-serving.

And one can almost picture the veteran police officers talking to the young rookie in the locker room one day after the whole thing had blown over.

“Ya learned a valuable lesson kid. Ya might as well get a couple shots in on these fuckin’ hippies when you get the chance, ‘cause they’re always gonna say you did anyway.”

Lamentable

2010-08-15T06:19:00.000-07:00

I guess I have to apologize first for not being up on all the new movie releases. It’s just that a lot of them don’t come out here in Spain so I find myself out of the loop-

“Out of the loop”. Now there’s a term you don’t expect to find in a post about The Human Centipede.

This time, it’s strange, but I just can’t bring myself to post a photo that has something to do with the movie, or link to a trailer or anything like that. Just can’t do it.

The headline of the Village Voice’s review of the film was Tom Six’s Torture Porn Game Changer The Human Centipede. I believe that if there were two phrases I didn’t ever want to see in the same sentence, they would be torture porn and game-changer. (Another example might be, like, rape and televised. I’d like to see those words kept several sentences apart.) If anything didn’t need a game-changer, it’s torture porn.

I don’t know what saddens me more, the existence of this motion picture, or the possibility that someone is reading this post at this very moment because he did a key word search for torture porn or televised rape.

Full disclosure: I have not seen the film. But it appears to involve a level of depravity generally only achieved whenever Bob Saget tells The Aristocrats.

Fuller disclosure: I am now an old fuddy-duddy.

Observations such as “Gosh, the Hays Office would have had a field day with this picture,” just don’t cut it.

Would some old time Hollywood guy like Jack Warner or Louie B. Mayer have even understood what was being explained had this Tom Six character pitched this Human Centipede idea to them back in the day? Or would the meeting have looked more like someone trying to explain kabuki to a hamster?

“So the hook here, Mr. Warner, apart from this idea of a mad surgeon sewing his victims to each other, mouth to anus- to form, ya know, the human centipede- is the star power. I see Gary Cooper in the lead, with Barb Stanwyck sewed to his anus, followed by Joel Macrea, behind her. Then we round it out with a stellar roster of solid character actors – maybe Nat Pendleton, Una Merkel and, if we can get him, Thomas Mitchell.

And Selznick or Warner or Louie B. Mayer just kind of sitting there with a confused look on his face.

“Umm. I don’t quite get what it is you’re explaining here. Is this a motion picture that you’re talking about?”

“Yea. I’m telling you it’s a torture porn game-changer. The kids’ll go wild.”

“And this is something that would be filmed? By people?”

“ Yea Yea. It’ll be really cool. Claude Rains, maybe, as the surgeon.”

“Oh, I see. It’s about Nazi medical experiments. You want to do it as part of the Why We Fight series?”

“No. No. It’s Entertainment with a capital E. We’ve already got the special rubber underwear made up so the actors can bite into it with their teeth and really look like they’re sewn together. Of course, the cast will need to rehearse coordinating the movements, since the creature has to move…”

Louie B. Mayer presses the intercom on his desk. Bzzzzzz. “Gloria?”

“Yes, Mr. Mayer?”

“Get some really violent security guards up here.”

“Right away, Mr. Mayer.”

Remember years ago when NASA sent out one of those deep space probes (Voyager 1 maybe) and put on board cultural artefacts like Beethoven and Chuck Berry recordings, and the voice of little children saying “Greetings from planet Earth”? This was in case some intelligent life form picked up the probe way out there somewhere. The recordings and such would allow them to know something about us.

Well, I think it’s time we sent out a new probe. It should have a copy of The Human Centipede on board. But the objective this time wouldn’t be to charm and impress the Galacticans. It would be to scare them off. If they’re really advanced, and capable of interstellar flight, perhaps they’d put something like a giant strip of police crime scene tape out somewhere near Jupiter. “Caution! Keep away from that blue planet. They’re not right.”

Yet some joyriding aliens would probably disregard the DETOUR signs and end up crash landing on Earth, where I’m certain really sick things would happen to them.

Hey, Come on Mike. Lighten up. It’s only a movie.

Well sure. I guess. It’s only a movie.

But I can’t help but wonder why it’s a movie. I mean the problem is not the movie, but the audience.

Like Bullfighting – that beloved Spanish festival which Cataluña has just outlawed. Enthusiasts will often argue that bulls are killed all the time for meat and such; and that Bravo bulls would be extinct were there no bullfighting.

And then any reasonable person will say that The Bulls are not the issue. The issue is why you want to watch it being killed. Why is it a spectacle? Why do you enjoy it? There are traffic accidents all the time but I still have no interest in Smash-Up Derby.

People being shot with guns is unfortunately common- though it is sometimes necessary (see WWII). But what about enjoying shooting people? Isn’t that a different thing?

It’s fascinating the current interest in the “art” of serial killing, or of torture in the form of – let’s call it “extreme surgery”. Real serial killers have rarely achieved the level of creativity and quantifiable success that screenwriters routinely produce these days. Saw scenarios don’t occur much in the real world. Likewise, no human centipedes have been discovered.

However, I can’t help but wonder if the police were to rescue a tragic and traumatized group of surgically joined people from some isolated underground chamber – And video footage of them (“it”?) were somehow leaked and put up online, how many people would actually go clicking on it, just to see it and see if they could stand it. And tell their friends they’d seen it. And then compare it either positively or negatively to other things of that nature they’d seen.

I learned long ago from Logan’s Run. There is no sanctuary.

Gunplay

2010-08-12T10:27:00.000-07:00

So federal gun rights now apply to municipalities,

(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/us/29scotus.html) Ain’t life grand? The nonsense just keeps getting thicker and thicker.

I remember one time watching a report about gun enthusiasts, in which they went to some kind of shooting range they had and fired hundreds of bullets into stacks of melons. Really. Melons. They didn’t even try to reason with the melons first. And they were all wearing that typical paramilitary garb they wear – camouflage and such - and I remember thinking, “Fuck. How many people have to die so that these idiots can have the opportunity to do this?”

Cause innocent people do get killed by guns, don’t they? And not just by shooting sprees (“going postal”), suicides and accidents. All guns used in homicides and hold-ups were – correct me if I’m wrong- originally manufactured for legal sale. There aren’t factories out in the woods somewhere manufacturing firearms exclusively for criminals. They sell them to supposedly law abiding people who usually end up shooting a neighbour, selling the weapon, or getting it stolen somehow.

But people who buy guns for personal protection never think they are going to end up falling into one of the above-mentioned categories. They seem to believe they’ll face, if they’re lucky, the sort of totally unrealistic vigilante style face-off situation which, if you actually watch the news, almost never presents itself.

Something like the scenario on display in Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino. Anybody see this one? Clint drives up to an attempted rape in progress, in his pickup truck, and confronts a group of young toughs. He pulls his vintage Korean War service pistol and scares them off pretty easily. This is a wet dream for gun enthusiasts. Clint’s armed. The thugs are not, for some reason. He happens upon the scene just as a felony is being committed, neither moments later nor moments earlier. There are no cops around nor, in fact, is there anyone around apart from the thugs, the victim, and her cowering, unarmed boyfriend.

I think gun nuts are waiting for this; looking around for it. But it seldom happens (though, if it has happened, I’m certain it’s duly recorded in NRA pamphleture) It’s fascinating that film scenarios which would seem to justify the widespread civilian possession of firearms generally involve phenomena that never, ever occur. I’m referring, for example, to zombie plagues, Soviet sneak attacks, alien invasions and various and sundry apocalypses. In these contexts, it’s always like, “Wow, good thing some of these guys had lots of automatic weapons!” (Remember those people heading to the hills awaiting the Y2K effect? Boy, were they disappointed.) But beyond that, widespread civilian gun ownership is hard to justify on a large scale.

More frequent are the tales of homes burglarized and guns stolen, later to be sold to violent criminals.

And I love how people who bought firearms legally and then go wipe out dozens at the local middle school are instantly orphaned by the gun lobby. I mean, prior to their flipout, they were one of the hundreds of thousands of law-abiding gun owners that the NRA is always referring to whenever the debate comes up. “By far, most citizens who choose to exercise their right to possess a firearm are law-abiding people who’ve never committed a crime or any act of violence.”

Then, when some character Kills 12 Then Self! the gun lobby immediately leaves him out in the cold. “No. We didn’t mean him. We meant those other thousands who have guns and don’t shoot them.”

The thing is, though, that some of those people who have guns and haven’t yet used them are going to use them over the next fiscal year and, when they do, the lobbyists will be like, “No. Those people are outside of the statistic we were referring to.” That’s kind of like saying “By far, most people who’ve ever driven above the legal limit of intoxication have not had an accident. (which, I’m guessing, is probably true) Our organization represents the interests of these people. Those thousands and thousands of Americans who drive inebriated without ever harming anyone.” But then, when a drunk driver kills somebody, “No. No. By definition, we didn’t mean him.”

Looking at it from Europe , I can never decide whether to feel pity for people on the American left or have contempt for them. Their entire social policy axis revolves around things long resolved over here: the death penalty, public healthcare, gay marriage, gun control. In the U.S. those are considered frontline progressive causes while, in Europe , even most conservative parties support them.

Full disclosure. When I was a kid, I did used to play “guns” with the other kids. Just “guns.” Really. We never called it Cowboys and Indians or Cops and Robbers- In fact, whenever children in movies set about playing “cowboys and indians” I totally can’t relate. We’d be sitting around on some kid’s front step in the summer and somebody would say, “Hey! Wanna play guns?” And the answer was usually “Yea!”

So we’d all go into our houses and get our guns. Guns that could be fired rapidly and simply went Click were the best ones. “Caps” (strips of paper with exploding bubbles of gunpowder) were tedious and laborious to load. If your parents hadn’t bought you your own guns and you had to borrow someone else’s, you usually ended up with one subpar, like one with a stiff trigger action or John Hasset’s air rifle. Now, by rights, John Hasset’s air rifle should have been a really bitchin weapon to have, since it wasn’t a toy. It was a real BB gun which, when not really carrying BBs, made a pretty significant sounding low range Boom. But, you had to use a lever to sort of bend it in half and bend it back between every single shot – and this was not as cool or effective as the rapid fire Click Click Click Clicks.

Game play involved picking teams (which generally ended up with my friend Pete Staffieri and I facing his badly armed younger brothers) and choosing the limits of the play territory (someone’s yard and surrounding hedges and tree terrain). Then we’d split up in different directions and go hunting each other. If you got shot, you had to count to twenty slowly (one hippopotamus, etc.) then you came back to life. The best thing was to come upon a dead enemy guy who was just finishing up his count. When he got to 19 you’d just start shooting him, so he had to start over.

I remember one time a kid came down from the other end of the block – and when you’re a child, the other end of the block is like Budapest or something. Paul Delaneva his name was, and he asked if he could play Guns with us. We were like “Sure.” But his thing was he wanted to play like they played it up at the other end of the block, which is that, when you’re shot, you’re just dead, permanently, so that the team with the last man standing is the winning team (whereas our way of playing was a sort of zero sum affair that went on as long as you liked.)

“Um, okay. I guess.” We said.

We started playing and the game, of course, lasted about a minute. We were all dead, real fast. I can’t even remember who won.

And the kids from our end of the street were all in agreement. “That was stupid. We’re not gonna play that way again. Go back where you came from. And tell those people up at the other end of the street that when they’re ready to play guns as God intended, they’re welcome to come down here.”

And on that day, I learned that getting shot to death, such that you cannot get up again, is no fun.

High School Confidential

2010-04-27T15:30:00.000-07:00

On Friday, April 16^th I gave a lesson on U.S. literature to an actual class of Spanish high school students.

It was really cool.

This was a class of 15 or so… sophomores I guess we’d call them back in the states, maybe 15 or 16 years old. In any case, they’re in their 4^th year of the 6 year long secondary school.

This term, Luisa’s giving a course on “Universal Literature” (yea, they could have just gone with “world literature”) at Pablo Picasso High School in Pinto, a town in the suburbs of Madrid where she’s worked for about 8 years. She brought in German teachers to lecture on German Lit., French teachers to give presentations on French Lit. etc. and then, me, to do U.S. Lit. And this experience oddly marks the first time in my life I’ve given any sort of class on what I actually received a degree in.

Luisa was expecting a full house that day as both myself and our niece Alba are “famous”, after a fashion, among Luisa’s students since she’s apparently always sharing anecdotes about us. There’s that plus the magical aura that the spouses of your teachers always seemed to have in the eyes of high school students. Remember? You’d be used to dealing with teachers in their professional capacity and the concept that they had husbands, wives and children always existed in that fairyland that was life outside of the school building that wasn’t your life outside of the school building, which was the only one you knew to be real.

“Look! Look! It’s Mr. Yeager’s wife. Cool.”

We got there late, and when we entered the classroom they were all there already with a sort of “we’re all in our places with bright shiny faces” vibe. I can’t guarantee they had their hands folded on the table in front of them but it was like that. All smiles.

I was really nervous. High school kids. I hated high school kids even when I was a high school kid (scratch that, especially when I was a high school kid) I thought they’d be contemptuous and disinterested. I guess I was expecting the Sweathogs.

Not at all. They were super calm and super-attentive and friendly and open. Didn’t diminish my nerves though. How was I coming off? (And this was all in Spanish, folks, except for the excerpt of The Raven I read in English)

Yea, The Raven (translated The Crow in Spanish. Are they different species?) I handed out a xeroxed sheet listing as many prominent U.S. literary figures as I could think of, and their works, but I focussed my lecture primarily on Poe, Mark Twain and Patricia Highsmith, trying to find that happy balance between what’s relevant and what would be attractive and interesting to teenagers.

I opened with a joke, as I’d learned to do back in my old vaudeville days, but in trying to be funny I’m always forgetting people you’ve just met may not know you’re trying to be funny – in fact, probably won’t.

So I’m like, “Okay. Who’s heard of the United States? Raise ‘em up.”

Stunned silence. Crickets. Stunned crickets.

But I did then manage to win them over with the classic “I’ve just made a joke that sunk” grin and chuckle, and they all loosened up. Sometimes you’ve gotta sacrifice that first joke, just to set the mood.

Biographical sketches. Influences. Story summaries. They seemed to be interested but it was one of those things where I was so nervous I wasn't sure if I was making any sense. Is it way too much information? Am I all over the place? Maybe they're all staring at me because I seem insane.

Then I look at the blackboard. I see things I've written. Nevermore. Balloon. Whitewash. 1849. Sociopath. Philly. What sense do they make? Am I writing things down randomly? Maybe it's like Nicholson in The Shining and I've really just written “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy” a thousand times.

(Apparently not. We checked their blog entries the following day - they each have a “Literatura Universal” blog- and they all seemed in agreement on the series of points I'd made.)

Clever kids. I'd hoped to play on their adolescent fuzzy mindedness to illustrate how people on the continent tend to confuse U.S. artists with British ones, asking them about certain english-language popstars and where said popstars were from, England or the States. The idea was that they'd get a lot of them wrong.

But they didn't. They new correctly where everybody was from. Even what towns they were from. I had to resort to David Bowie to get them to make a mistake. And most of them neither knew nor cared who he was.

Luisa, as people our age are prone to do, looked out at them incredulously, “No. Come on. David Bowie.”

And they were all suddenly like, “Oh, yea, right. Bowie. Him. Sure. Oh, he is good.”

The best part was when I talked about how Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train had been made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock, then namechecked “Hitchcock?” on them. Many rolled their eyes with a “hey, buddy, give us some credit” face.

It ended with applause and an unexpected session of group photo taking.

Their blog entries focussed a bit on the substance of the lecture, but they all appear mostly to have been interested in what a cute couple Luisa and I make.

The Loot of Memory

2010-04-07T15:03:00.001-07:00

This is Dick Cavett’s recent NYTimes blog on moving, as well as moving’s trusted companions – losing stuff and breaking stuff. (How many remember Jessie Jackson’s priceless SNL appearance back in the eighties, when he affirmed everyone was welcome in his Rainbow Coalition – except Dick Cavett… Okay, I guess no one.)

I’ve seen some of this moving and losing and breaking recently, and a certain amount of stealing. To stick with the vaguely humorous as opposed to the tediously angrifying, the highlight was the replacement of a new vacuum cleaner we’d bought for the new apartment. We bought it, left it there while workers were putting a new floor down and, when we went back a month later, what was in the closet-type space was an older vacuum of a different model.

“That’s unusual.”

Must be an honest mistake, we thought, because thieves don’t generally take things and replace them with a facsimile. I mean, like, sure, they do in old Cary Grant movies maybe about art heists. But not more rank-and-file thieves. Wouldn’t that be great? You get your wallet lifted in a crowd and find that it’s been replaced with a poorer quality wallet – with less money, and maybe pictures of someone else’s family.

Or in a bank robbery scenario: “What was unusual officer was that they took all the fifty and hundred dollar bills, and replaced them with fives and tens. Now that’s not gross stealing, I admit, but it’s definitely net value stealing as far as I’m concerned.”

Charles Foster Kane. There’s a guy who lost stuff while moving. He lost his sled Rosebud, or at least lost track of it. If you remember the film, he’s almost about to find it. The night he meets the woman who’ll become his second wife, he says he was on his way to a warehouse to look through lots of old possessions that had been shipped from out West. He’d have found Rosebud stacked in there, but he never makes it. Finally he’s reminded of it while staring into a snowball paperweight on his deathbed. This was appropriate, cause I think snowball paperweights are also things you tend to lose track of and remember fondly years later.

“Mom, where’s that old snowball paperweight?”

“I dunno. Wait. Didn’t Charles Foster Kane break that that time?”

This would’ve been my mom. In fact, he’d never have lost track of Rosebud had it been up to her. She would never allow me to lose anything. Not even the things I wanted to.

She was always getting free giveaway stuff from promotions or Philadelphia Phillies fan appreciation nights or political campaign paraphernalia. And then she would immediately get rid of it (because it was so god-awful tacky) by – what else? - passing it on to me. But, of course, I had to keep it. I was never allowed to get caught getting rid of something she was so desperate to get rid of in the first place.

“Michael, where do you have that Styrofoam beer mug with the straw built in and the Marine Corps insignia I gave you that time?”

“Um, err, gosh Mom.”

When my whole family drove me to my old Brooklyn apartment to clean it out definitively, I knew this would be a central dynamic of the trip: My mother thinking up things I’d been given over the years and asking me where they were. For example, a lamp which turned on by touching it anywhere. You couldn’t move it, or clean it, without turning it on and off, like, eighty times. And it was, absurdly, built to look like something from the turn of the last century.

I was ecstatic that one of the long line of subletters had taken it. Perhaps even the initial subletter, my college classmate Matt Lavine. Did he actually like it, or did he merely find it so hideous he had to get rid of it? – by giving it away to someone!

There was some good stuff missing from the apartment: like a massive Swedish Border Patrol coat I got at an army surplus store. I loved that coat, and it’s weird to think that somebody, somewhere, (on the east coast?) has it. But that’s okay Matt (or Kuwamu, or Portuguese tri-lingual guy, or blondheaded economics thesis guy. I actually did know all their names at some point) That’s okay Matt, cause I got some of your stuff. I got that camouflage cap and navy pea coat you think you lost.

And what’s that? Something flashes in the corner of memory’s eye. Wait, I almost had it. A railroad spike, yea, thickly coated with red latex paint. We used to jam it under doors to hold them open. Where was that? I can’t even remember exactly where it was or if it was mine or somebody else’s, but I definitely lost track of it. Where is it now? Maybe in a landfill next to someone’s snowball paperweight.

Years after Brooklyn, after my mother’s death, my brother and I had the task of packing up my parents’ house in New Jersey. We gave stuff away, sold stuff, kept stuff and copied stuff.

Well, principally gave stuff away.

I do worry about the rifle – my father’s old squirrel rifle with a couple dozen cartridges. Maybe I should’ve turned it over to the police or the F.B.I. as a responsible citizen might have, but I just got caught up in our super-enthused, random handing out of things to whatever neighbors happened to stop by. Johnny Ray records to this woman, cedar chest to the couple down the street, deadly weapon to that guy I barely know.

I oddly found myself looting everyday stuff from my parents’ house- I mean not things with sentimental value, but things easily available for purchase anywhere; largely because my mom, for some reason, had tons of still-wrapped, brand new stuff. Little round refrigerator magnets, coasters, socks, blank tapes, shower caddies and stationery. Lots of stationery.

“9 packages of Post-its. Yea. We can use these back in Madrid. And Q-tips. Jackpot! Can never have too many of them.”

Then my brother sets aside this sort of cheap old ceramic flower vase, made in the shape of a deer and a baby deer (doe and fawn?) snuggling up against each other.

“I don’t know,” he said, “It’s just a thing I remember from my whole life, always sitting there on some shelf somewhere.”

I’m like, “Hey, if we want to go that route, count me in.” The ban on sentimentalist stockpiling suddenly lifted, I immediately grab similar things, the flotsam of household memory – a couple of cameras from the fifties or forties which had ceased to be used long before they officially stopped working or the film for them was no longer available. But they were the things that, decade after decade, you always came across when you were looking for something else…and they’re really cool looking.

Then the main thing – potentially the longest term decorative item of any authentic attractiveness my parents had- a saki bottle my uncle had sent over from Japan in the 1960s while he was stationed there in the army. It’s shaped like a little house. When I was a kid, every few years I would uncork it to sniff the sake smell which lingered for, well, still.

Then there were some other strangely lost found items, or found lost items.

I was looking through some old correspondence from the woman who would ultimately introduce me to my wife, Luisa; letters stacked away in some old folder, unread since the first time they were read. And there it was: Gene, the girl, writing at one point that I reminded her (sense-of-humorwise and thinkingwise) of this friend of hers, a former classmate named Luisa (whom I would not meet, then marry, til years later)

Whoa. Cool, I thought.

I separated that letter from the couple dozen others, planning to show it to Luisa at the earliest opportunity – maybe even present it as a kind of gift. I then, immediately, proceeded to lose it. Accidently thrown out or whatever, no one will ever know.

That’s the lost found item, the found lost item was a cassette recording my brother and I had made one night in the mid-seventies when I was about ten years-old. We were just sort of watching TV and playing with the dog and joking around.

This tape got lost sometime in the 1980s – and every once in a while I would look for it, until I finally gave it up for definitively missing-in-action.

Found! Shockingly! on one of the last days of packing up a house to which we would never return.

And some other things we stacked up near Charles Foster Kane’s sled at Xanadu:

A sled (no, really)

·A birthday card to my mom signed by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness (chief poobahs of Ireland’s Sinn Fein party as well as, earlier, the IRA), sent to her by a friend in the Embassy in Belfast.

·My great-grandfather’s citizenship oath – in which he swore not to be in favor of abolishing organized government.

·A controversial (at least in our family) handwritten, unnotarized, unwitnessed Last Will and Testament, in which an aunt of my mom’s left everything to her.

· A picture of my dad on FANvision at Philadelphia’s Vet’s Stadium, when he was chosen employee of the month. (and yes, the Philly Phanatic was there)

· A letter from David Kaiser, the superior court judge who imprisoned Lenny Bruce on obscenity charges in Philadelphia. (my brother Marty used to walk his dogs) He was under investigation for corruption and he sent my parents a letter thanking them for their support in “these difficult times”, and adding “I’m certain these charges against me shall be proven false”. He blew his brains out after his conviction a few months later.

·A videotape of my dad on a local current affairs program, explaining at length, (and, boy, do I mean at length) a new sewage project the township was undertaking. (he served on the utilities board)

I kept almost all the old photos and documents and correspondence in a real world, cardboard box format. However, I also scanned nearly all of it, trying to guarantee its preservation for future generations. I even digitalized old audio recordings and records (this is a tedious process. There’s no drag and drop involved. You actually have to reproduce everything in real time while copying it)

Now, the latest news on this whole topic seems to be – and you read this in the Times and on the web and stuff- that, due to constant application changes and updates, digitalizing things is not particularly safe. Studies have shown digitalized documents are actually more likely to later become unrecoverable than stuff stored in a musty crawlspace. WTF, future?! (The sad part is the guy who invented the musty crawlspace is, in all likelihood, no longer receiving royalties for it.)

So I’ve got infinitely backed up material on disks, drives, cassettes and paper and, ultimately, in my memory – waiting to see which of those starts to wink out first.

Rosebud.

Words Will Have Their Way

2010-02-24T15:18:00.000-08:00

Yes, it’s snowing and it’s raining and it’s extremely cold in many places. This, to so many, puts the final nail in the coffin of all that “sky is falling” climate change nonsense.

Or so that’s the conclusion the climate change naysayers would have us draw.

See, said Climate Change, having been tagged “Global Warming” at some point (did somebody just shrug and say “seemed like a good idea at the time”?) led everyone to expect it would just get warmer and sunnier and more pleasant just about everywhere only a couple of beach party-like years before we were all appearing in, well, something like Costner’s Waterworld I guess.

The bad news is that scientists failed to effectively explain the complexities of global warming and when they show up now, claiming extra-snowy winters are perfectly consistent with their models, that’s just a little more information than many lumpen types and conservative opinion-makers are willing to heed.

So, in this article from the New York Times, columnist Thomas Friedman calls for a strategic renaming of the climate process. He thinks we’ll be able to pull the rug out from under the nut jobs by referring to it not as “Global Warming” but instead as “Global Weirding”, an all around, multifaceted enstrangening of weather patterns.

My word to him is well, hey, Good luck on that one, Tom. Heck of an idea. Hope it works out for you. I’m sure we’ll be hearing the term Global Weirding just as frequently as Global Warming by about 4 o’clock next Friday afternoon. And, yes, I am being sarcastic.

The problem with nomenclature about-faces, as anybody pinned with an unfortunate nickname on the first day of high school knows, is that it’s really difficult to later get out ahead of the curve on them. It’s far easier to just change high schools. You’ve got about as much chance of successfully changing Global Warming to Global Weirding in the popular lexicon as you’ve got of changing it to Global Mexican Hat Dance to Oblivion (my candidate).

Join me if you will on a journey down memory lane. The year is 1984. The place: (God Bless) The United States of America, widely regarded as the most famous country in the world. Michael Jackson wins a record 8 Grammy Awards. The Olympics are held in Los Angeles. And an idealistic young go-getter named Gary Hart is seeking the Democratic nomination for president.

Central to the Hart campaign is a dynamic, newly minted demographic: the young urban professional. These are socially liberal yet somewhat fiscally conservative baby boomers who hope to spark a renaissance in political activism and who happily refer to themselves as “yuppies”.

I remember this. These people were all over the media enthusiastically explaining what a Yuppie was and how that’s what they were. What could be better than a Yuppie? They were young and successful. They had all the ideas. They set all the trends.

The Hart campaign failed – though that probably didn’t have anything to do with the fate of the “yuppie” –which for one reason or another (ultimately, another) became one of the BIG terms of the latter portion of the 20^th Century. Even Tom Wolfe, the coiner of both “good ol’ boy” and “the right stuff” went on record as wishing he had come up with “yuppie”.

But the term itself became too big for one demographic group to control. It was a Frankenstein word. It turned on its creator and sought to destroy him. “Yuppie” came to have absolutely no positive connotation for large numbers of people from scads of different tribes. It became virtually a synonym of the “contemptible”.

Yuppies were the gentrifiers of working class and poor neighborhoods. They were to blame for endemic consumerism. They made everything expensive and small. They shrunk the portions at our favourite restaurants and priced them out of reach. They took all the quality, tasteful music and made it wildly popular -turning Bowie, the Talking Heads and Paul Simon into muzak.

They ultimately became associated, ironically, with the ills of Reaganomics.

I still feel sorry for that hypothetical yuppie couple, sitting bewildered on the floor of their renovated brownstone sometime around 1988, nodding their heads in shock, staring off into space, saying, “I don’t understand. What happened? Where did we go wrong?”

What can we tell them? Vocabulary is a wild and untamed thing.

Want another example? Here’s the next decade’s bullet point: PC, meaning politically correct and political correctness.

I always get a kick out of the fact that the first time I heard this it was already abbreviated.

I was in the cafeteria at college, Eugene Lang College at the New School (Go Fighting Tigers!! …No. Just kidding. There were no fighting tigers at Lang)

They had apparently just changed the cups in the cafeteria to some more

environmentally friendly material – plastic to recycled paper or somesuch. And there was this girl, I think her name was Bernadette, I remember her vaguely, and she said “oh, PC cups-“

I was like, “What’s that?”

And she said, “Politically correct.” That was the first time I heard it.

And it was good. It was good to be politically correct. It was good to be sensitive on issues of gender and race and be environmentally conscious. Wasn’t it? Am I wrong?

But it didn’t take long for a very few wrongheaded lawsuits by some nutjobs to give the Right – and then ultimately vast segments of the Left- argument and motive to just fucking trouncify the concept. They bashed it and smashed it and dumped gunk on its head. It became synonymous with both Orwellian thought policing and abject cowardliness.

Political Correctness became second only to yuppies in its merit of contempt. To certify oneself as “politically incorrect” is currently the best way of saying “look how cool I am.”

Sure, I use it – but with the effect of shocking more than anything else, like an I Heart Joseph Stalin t-shirt.

It’s useless to remind people that if they’ve ever found themselves using the term African American it’s due to political correctness. Ever say Domestic Violence instead of wife-beating? Political correctness. Hell, have you ever separated your glass from your paper from your containers when you put the trash out? Used energy saving light bulbs? Bought into Global Warming arguments? Well, surprise, that’s all soooo PC.

Sometimes I think those who vocally disavow political correctness should be forced to drive around looking for leaded gasoline.

“20 dollars worth, please.”

“I’m sorry, sir. You’re going to have to look for a gas station that sells leaded gasoline, cause you’re obviously not the type of guy who goes in for all that political correct bullshit.”

But no amount of explaining or justifying or rationalizing is going to reverse Political Correctness’s fortune. History and the culture-at-large have rendered their judgement. And there’s apparently no appeals process.

Top Ten Movies of the Decade

2009-12-26T16:16:00.000-08:00

Are TOP TEN ever really just ten?

I think I’m ultimately going to have to go with the following as my top ten movies of the now closing first decade of the millennium. I’d prefer to say “in no particular order” but the truth is Russian Ark is pretty far out in front of the rest. Then Memento, Not One Less, and In the Mood for Love are all jockeying for second place, though I don’t know which one has it. Then the rest.

Russian Ark (Dir. Alexandr Sokurov. 2002)

Not since Wings of Desire has a film had so many good ideas going for it.

When it’s over, you don’t feel like you’ve seen a movie. You feel almost like you’ve been though a haunted house ride, or Wild West town for tourists, in which you could walk through it at your leisure and look at whatever you wanted. Obviously, it’s not the case, but that’s the illusion it creates.

The narrative path through a story is here juxtaposed onto the physical path through a building – the Hermitage in St. Petersburg – accompanied by a long dead French aristocrat. Cinematography is where a given mystery visitor chooses to look. Editing is accomplished by ushers and security guards waving you away from zones you may not enter. It’s mindbogglingly slow and transcendentally cool.

Memento (Dir. Christopher Nolan. 2000)

Before seeing it, I had read that no other film that year had generated so much commentary and analysis in the press and on the web. This I believe.

It goes backwards. It’s got suspense, humor and the most happening queen from Priscilla Queen of the Desert. The supporting cast is out of the Matrix. And it’s got fun Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat-style neurological issues. (personal weakness: amnesia is always good)

Ultimately it asks a phenomenally intriguing question: If you could tell yourself a lie, and you knew you would believe it, would you? And, if you would, what would the lie be?

In the Mood for Love (Dir. Wong Kar Wai. 2000)

This is one of those rare films that are so good that, when it’s over, you wonder how it’s possible that anyone could ever make a bad film.

It makes quality seem so simple, and reminds you how little you demand as a filmgoer: A simple story. Interesting leads. Quality music. Elegant wardrobe. Period detail. Pretty cinematography. A strong, poetic ending.

Now, is that so hard?

Not One Less (Dir. Zhang Zimou. Made in 1999; released in U.S. and Europe in 2000)

This is the feel good movie of the list. And what can I say, I felt good. I laughed. I cried. I fell in love all over again. All that stuff.

A minimally educated 13 year-old girl is put in charge of the local one room schoolhouse when the teacher must go visit his ailing mother. She fears the mayor (of this wretchedly poor village) doesn’t really intend to pay her. The teacher, concerned more than anything else about the high dropout rate, promises to pay her himself if, when he gets back, there isn’t one student less. The focus of the film is her attempt to keep all the students.

This picture, using an awesome cast of non-professional actors, keeps you in a constant state of “No. It’s not gonna go there!” and “Ah, come on. Don’t tell me …” And then, when it goes there, as it always does, it goes there in a way that is so incredibly right and perfect and preferable that you surrender to it happily.

Gerry (Dir. Gus Van Sant. 2002)

It was either this or Elephant that was going to make the list. I chose Gerry because it’s even slower.

These are both secretly genre films, with genre conflicts and genre themes and even, in the case of Elephant, genre heroes and villains. But run through some kind of indie, art installation sewing machine. The slowness of individuals walking for long periods of time becomes hypnotic after a while. (With Gerry, you get to feeling you’re on some kind of drug.) And at the end of each long, painfully slow walk, something does happen. And it’s usually not pleasant.

Bowling For Columbine (Dir. Michael Moore. 2002)

Sure it’s glib and biased but I totally can’t help loving this movie. It’s hysterical and sad, swift and imaginative. Infinitely quotable (When Terry Nichols’ brother says, “There’s a lot of nuts out there.”)

And I am one of the converted who loves to be preached to by people who agree with me. If not, why would I read The Nation?

Mou gaan dou -Infernal Affairs (Dir. Wai-Keung Lau. 2002)

This is the original Chinese film that that nonsensical bit of stupidity, The Departed, was based on. There are significant differences and, in every single case where The Departed did something different, it made a large mistake (like combining three separate females leads in the original version into one character) So, if you did happen to like The Departed, the quality of Infernal Affairs is an exponential multiple of that film’s quality.

This complex, noble (you heard me) and fiendishly clever policier should not be confused with other over-the-top John Woo, Ringo Lam type Hong Kong action fare (if anything, it’s less violent than The Departed) It’s more (and I mean this in a good way) like a Hollywood film; like a Michael Mann , or good Scorsese and DePalma.

Kudos to actor Tony Leung, who appears in two films on this list.

Coffee and Cigarettes (Dir. Jim Jarmusch. 2003)

I know this is cheating as some segments of this movie were filmed (and even released) in the 90s.

Vignettes of encounters between famous people, sometimes playing characters and in other cases playing themselves. If you like Iggy Pop and Tom Waits, you’ll love seeing them talk to each other. Ditto for Steven Wright and Roberto Benigni. Ditto for White Stripes. And, if you like Cate Blanchett, you’ll like her twice as much when she’s talking to herself.

The final segment, in which Alfred Molina tries to convince Steve Coogan (24 Hour Party People) that they’re distantly related, is the most fully realized and tightly scripted sequence, and is an absolute must-see. I always love it whenever celebrities are willing (Larry Sanders Show style) to portray themselves as jerks or weirdos.

This movie gets extra points from me simply because there are critics who directly hated it.

Before Sunset (Dir. Richard Linklater. 2004)

This sequel to the same director’s Before Sunrise is not quite as good, but I was just so jonesed when I heard there was even going to be a sequel to what is one of my all time favourite movies. I mean, Before Sunrise wasn’t even particularly famous or successful. Later, I was apprehensive that they’d blow it.

They didn’t.

It’s a romantic, real time story of people who are in love (for reasons which, for a change, we can understand) talking to each other about different stuff. The ending is elegantly downplayed and perfect.

Troy (Dir. Wolfgang Peterson. 2004)

Okay. I admit this might be an indication that I only believe there to be 9 great movies this decade.

But this does pass the bar as far as I’m concerned. It has the requisite number of good elements to make it a winner.

It’s got a relevant message. Homer warned us 2,800 years ago, and we still haven’t learned the lesson: the war’s not really about what your government is telling you it’s about.

It’s got that scene where Paris is losing the fight with Menelaus fairly and Hector knows that, by all rights, he just has to let him get killed. But…it’s his little brother.

It’s got Peter O’Toole’s last (to date) serious performance.

It’s got the fight between Hector and Achilles. This is one of the few duels in cinema history in which the players, at every moment, seem to really be trying to harm each other.

It’s got an admirable collection of shockingly beautiful people: Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom and, above all, Saffron Burrows.

Honorable Mention.

Ocean’s 12 – The biggest budget indie slacker movie of all time.

Final Destination – Wonderful teenage horror movie which, like all top notch sci-fi and horror, literalizes mundane dilemmas. High school students stalked by Death try desperately try to avoid getting killed in freak household accidents.

Agora – Cerebral period epic about sectarianism and science in 3^rd Century Alexandria. The most ambitious Spanish production to date (in terms of both theme as well as grandeur) and, in a way, the ultimate post-9/11 movie.

Blair Witch 2-Book of Shadows: Only a fair horror movie but a fairly sophisticated exploration (made, I truly suspect, by cerebral, brainy types) of our relation to recorded visual images and the manipulation of belief and memory.

Dark Christmas

2009-12-08T02:44:00.000-08:00

On December 25^th 274, the Roman Emperor Aurelian dedicated a temple to Sol Invictus on the supposed day of the winter solstice, and thus effectively invented Christmas. (The trees and the plum puddings and the Jesus bit would all get filled in later.)

1,676 years later, a merry group of Scottish nationalists celebrated the holiday by stealing the Stone of Scone, the traditional coronation stone of British Monarchs, from it’s perch in Westminster Abbey (Westminster Abbey, routinely the top answer given when random respondents are asked to “quick. Name an abbey.”) On another Christmas morning 24 years after that, one Marshall Fields, dressed in Arab clothing and claiming to have explosives strapped to his body, crashed his Chevy Impala through the northwest gate of the White House, sparking a four hour yuletide standoff with the police and secret service.

Not surprisingly, these holiday japes, much like the summary executions of Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu in 1989, never managed to become perennial holiday favorites the way, for example, the office Secret Santa or kissing under the mistletoe have. (Those not from Philadelphia may be happily surprised to learn that Gen. George Washington’s strategic crossing of the Delaware River to attack Hessian mercenaries at Trenton, New Jersey has, in fact, become a beloved holiday tradition. It is duly re-enacted, like a grade school nativity pageant, every year by an enthusiastic group of period-clad, boat rowing maniacs)

Does a colonial sneak attack during the war of independence count as an example of Christmas’s dark lore? It’s not for me to say. (remember Harry Shearer on Satan worship in Spinal Tap: “I believe, like most of us I think, that a man’s relationship with Satan is a very personal thing”)

I wouldn’t want to put limits around a definition of dark Christmas. I just, like most people, know it when I see it. It’s the black ice counterpart to the virgin snowscape.

In a way, the Wikipedia page on “December 25” I pulled so much information off of is, in itself, kind of a dark Christmas artefact. This was the “December 25” page mind you, not the “Christmas Day” page. The December 25 page is a cold, clinical log of raw data. Deaths and births. Significant events without comment. No holly strewn throughout the text in the form of customs, traditions or celebratory practices.

Tops in dark Christmas on the internet is this wild eyed psychotic witch hunt: av1611.org/othpubls/santa.html It’s an anti-Santa Claus page, which contains gems like

Black Pete, the ‘grandfather’ of our modern Santa Claus. Known in Holland as Zwarte Piet, this eighteenth-century German version, is—like his ancient shamanic ancestor—still horned, fur-clad, scary, and less than kind to children. Although portrayed as the slave helper of Saint Nicholas, the two are, in many villages, blended into one character. This figure often has the name Nikolass or Klaus, but has the swarthy appearance of the Dark Helper. (Renterghem, Tony van. When Santa Was a Shaman. St. Paul: Llewellyn Publications, 1995, p. 98)

And believe me, the whole page is that good.

More conventionally, the shadowland Christmas is celebrated in Tim Burton/ Henry Selick’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, where creepy Halloween aesthetics are mixed with Noël motifs. That’s alright. But it’s sort of a gimme and, if I remember correctly, it gets pretty standard fashion warm and fuzzy at the end.

A better example is everyone’s favourite scene from Gremlins, when Phoebe Cates explains why she doesn’t like Christmas, recounting that gruesome fable from her childhood. Her father, planning to surprise the rest of the family, had dressed up as Santa Claus and attempted to slide down the chimney of their home. But something went wrong.

Christmas came and went. And the family thought Dad had mysteriously disappeared. Until they began to notice the smell. Expecting to pull a dead cat or bird out of the chimney, the firemen instead pulled out the rotting corpse of her father.

Phoebe’s final line is the winner here: “And that's how I found out there was no Santa Claus.”

Maybe the best bizarro-world holiday feature so far is Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. It takes place at Christmas and runs like an anti-It’s a Wonderful Life: Tom Cruise’s Doctor Bill starts out perfectly happy and satisfied; then, thanks to a series of unusual adventures he undergoes throughout the film, he ends up worried, frightened and disturbed.

But my favourite comes from that place where Christmas is most truly lived. No, not in our hearts, but on television.

The darkest Christmas comes from the 80s horror anthology TV series Tales from the Dark Side, in an episode called Seasons of Belief, though fans don’t necessarily call it that.

It goes, more or less, like this.

A family on Christmas Eve. Typical suburban split-level. The parents are sitting in easy chairs, Dad reading the paper and Mom sewing, while the children, a boy and a girl, play on the carpet with Christmas presents they’ve already been allowed to start opening.

The kids, swiftly getting bored with the toys, ask their parents to tell them a story.

Now, it sort of gets established that these parents make up lots of stories all the time and are always exaggerating things- like maybe the father in Big Fish.

The father (E.G. Marshall) puts his newspaper aside. He’s going to tell them a story.

He picks up a notepad and writes a single word on it. He shows the kids the notepad and the little boy reads the word out loud.

“Grither.”

“Uh oh,” says dad, “Now you’ve done it.”

“Done what? It says grither”

The father winces, “you’ve said his name out loud. Now he’s woken up.”

“What’s a grither?” asks the little girl, while the father clenches his teeth every time they pronounce the word (though there’s always a winking complicity with Mom).

“He’s a creature that lives at the North Pole, on the opposite side of a mountain from Santa’s workshop. And he doesn’t like it when people say his name. He’s got large ears, bigger than an elephant’s. And every time someone says his name, his ears get bigger and bigger.”

This delights the children who, of course, begin to chant “grither grither grither grither…”

Mom picks up the story, “And when his ears get really big, he starts flapping them like wings, and then the Grither starts to fly. And he starts flying straight toward the person who’s saying his name. To kill them.”

The kids are listening more intently now.

“You see, the Grither was born on a sailing ship that got lost in the Arctic Ocean,” Dad continues, “They drifted about for weeks but saw nothing except icebergs and glaciers. Some passengers drowned or starved, others froze to death or committed suicide. The Grither was born out of the rage of all of those people who died.”

The kids are quiet now and it’s only the father who’s saying Grither.

“He’s very pale with red and white veins that show through like a roadmap. With arms as long as boa constrictors and claws as big as basketballs. And, of course, the ears. He lives in the hull of an abandoned ship floating on an ice flow. And the Grither only leaves the ship when someone says his name too many times, and he flies off to murder them.”

At some point the parents actually sing a song that the Grither supposedly sings while he’s flying. They go to the piano and sing it to the tune of Oh Come All Ye Faithful. (the weird thing is, if I remember correctly, that while the song is obviously being made up spontaneously, both parents seem to know the lyrics)

♫"Oh, I am the Grither
You cannot escape me,
For pleading is useless
And so are your prayers

♫The Grither is greedy,
For only one thing,
To keep you from taking
To keep you from taking
To keep you from taking
His name in vain."♫

“Can we stop him?” asks the little girl.

“The only way to stop the Grither once he starts flying toward you is to finish telling his story before he gets here. And it’s a story known by so very few…and the Grither is so very fast,… that hardly anyone has ever escaped him.”

At this point something starts beating loudly on the front door and the kids get totally freaked out. The kids hide or something and the thing outside starts to make horrible, frightening noises. Finally, with an exaggerated sense of drama, the father opens the door and…it’s Uncle Mike, stepping in from the cold winter evening, laughing and shouting “Merry Christmas!”

The parents laugh and take Uncle Mike’s coat. And Dad tells the children it’s time for bed.

“But…you’ve got to finish the story,” one of the kids says, “Don’t you understand? He’ll be here soon.”

“What? The Grither? No, I was just joking. There’s no Grither.”

“Stop saying it!!” screams the girl.

“Hey, stop. It’s time for bed.”

“Finish the STORY!!”

“There is no more story. I made it up!” says the father, “Don’t you understand? It’s a lie.” And then he goes into a long, adamant speech about how the Grither is no more real than Santa Claus. “And you don’t believe in Santa Claus, do you?”

The children sheepishly nod No.

“Santa Claus is just a happy story, and the Grither is just a terrible story. And the only thing they have in common is that neither one of them are coming to this house tonight.”

Suddenly, a strong gust of wind blows the door open. Uncle Mike is blown out of the living room while the parents are blown onto the floor. The little boy struggles to push the door closed again.

The door shut, the parents ask “Is everybody alright?”

“It’s too late,” the little girl says, “It’s out there. The Grither.”

Mom says, “No. There’s no Grither sweetie. It was just the wind.”

At which point two monstrous arms reach in through the large front windows of the living room. Giant claws grab each parent by the head and break their necks with a snap.

The arms retire and leave the children. Orphans. Christmas Eve.

Why do we like this so much?

Clearly the Grither represents some kind of anti-Santa Claus. My brother always thought that, contrary to Santa Claus’s practice of rewarding well-behaved children with gifts, the Grither’s job is to punish some variety of wrongdoing.

And the parents here do arguably seem bad parents in some respects (for whatever it might mean, the father seems too old to have little children) And they make up far too many tall tales.

In any case, you definitely have parents telling their children a story that is wildly inappropriate for Christmas Eve. It’s much more like something you’d tell on Halloween. Then the father caps it off with a firm declaration that there’s no Santa Claus- a declaration that is always a bad idea in any Christmas story.

Then there’s the title of the episode (as well as the short story it’s based on)- Seasons of Belief, and the emphasis placed on the admonition against taking the Grither’s “name in vain”. He’s an old Testament God figure. And god, Santa Claus and the Grither are all equally examples of how easy it is to get people, both children and adults, to believe something.

But I’ve always felt the Grither’s penchant for killing people who take his name in vain represented something else.

I don’t think that getting rewarded for good behaviour and punished for bad are really on opposite ends of any spectrum. It’s more like reward and punishment are at the same end of a moral spectrum, the end where there’s a sort of belief in a just world. At the other end there’s, like, randomness and chaos. And injustice. (even in the Old Testament, the Commandment against taking the lord’s name in vain is not one of the more reasonable Commandments, like not killing or stealing or lying. It’s a Commandment of an awesome power exercising arbitrary authority)

The more I see the episode on YouTube, the more I don’t think they’re bad parents. And I think the idea might be that the Grither kills them (and all his victims) for a reason that’s not particularly good. They don’t really deserve it. Deservedness is Santa’s department. Santa’s in charge of bringing presents to all the good little boys and girls and bringing lumps of coal to all the bad ones.

The Grither is the undeserved calamity of an arbitrary universe. It’s the car accident or the lightning bolt or the cancer. It’s the being orphaned. It’s the unfair.

Anyone who thinks they know of darker Christmas lore please fell free to leave a comment.

Oh, and remember

MERRY CHRISTMAS !(You wonderful old Building and Loan!)

Tipping Point

2009-11-06T03:31:00.000-08:00

Yea, sure. I’ve tipped, not tipped and been tipped. And I’ve been wanting to get into the whole concept of tipping for a long time now but I just couldn’t seem to find the right opportunity to bring it up. This might be my chance: a New York Times article from a few days ago which I’ve already shared off to various old friends who, like me, were once waitrons. It’s by some chap named Bruce Buschel , who is about to open a restaurant of his own and has come down from the mountain to reveal unto us 100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do (Part 1)

Here’s Bruce’s Times Bio: an author, magazine writer, co-creator of an Off Broadway musical, and director/producer of jazz films. I suppose we all just know what “jazz films” are.

This guy’s list has gotten comments ranging from “This should be a must for every server and restaurant employee to memorize”

to (more along the lines of my own reaction) “This makes me a bit nostalgic for the days I waited and bused tables. Incidentally, Bruce, you seem like the kind of diner whose food would get spit in.”

I mean, there are a few items that are okay – like I guess you shouldn’t refuse to seat three guests because a fourth hasn’t yet arrived (are there people who do that?) – but, for the most part, the guy got on my last good nerve.

He proposes no joking, no telling customers your name, no recommending dishes, – but you should ask customers why they didn’t finish what was on their plates and steam off wine labels to give to the patron if they’ve expressed interest in the vintage. I love that one. No drinking, he says, and no flirting. No flirting! If I hadn’t flirted on one particular night in 1989, I would not be married to the woman I’m married to and living in Madrid.

His bad tips fall essentially fall into two categories: Things many diners do not prefer, and things which are not in the server’s purview, such as

20. Never refuse to substitute one vegetable for another. Okay, I’ve seen Five Easy Pieces. I know substitutions are no biggie. But that depends on the kitchen staff and/or management. (I dealt with some cooks that, well, you’d want to make sure they weren’t holding a knife before asking them to substitute a veggie.)

Same goes for

4. If a table is not ready within a reasonable length of time, offer a free drink and/or amuse-bouche.

And

19. Offer guests butter and/or olive oil with their bread.

Any waiter on his/her first day of work at a new place will be informed of management policy regarding these… let’s call them gestures or policies or practices.

Yet the items on the list which really fascinate me are

14. When you ask, “How’s everything?” or “How was the meal?” listen to the answer and fix whatever is not right.

And 5. Tables should be level without anyone asking. Fix it before guests are seated.

Why on earth would a guy who’s about to open a restaurant think that the servers should be in charge of fixing the tables? I imagine it’s the same reason why the owners of famed hipster chowhaven Exterminator Chili (where both Michael Imperioli and I worked) thought it was server responsibility to mop the floor and take out the trash and do kitchen prep: Because it’s a wonderful thing to be demanding with employees whom you are not paying.

And that’s it, isn’t it? That’s tipping. That’s the tipping dynamic. Waiters get their money not from the owner, but from the customers, while the owner pays them something that, due to labor law small print, is well below the minimum wage –at least that was the case back in the day.

One poster on the Times’s website remarked somewhat acerbically that all of Bruce’s advice was okay if he intended to provide his servers with health insurance and union scale overtime. The assumption being that he will not.

Another tipping –rooted problem I faced at two of the four restaurants I waitered at was the decision on the part of management to ultimately put lots of waiters and bartenders on each shift; like, way too many. Great. The customers end up getting almost personalized service. The only problem is for the staff which, instead of splitting the night’s tips between let’s say two, must divide them up among four or five. A lot less per person. But why wouldn’t management do this? It costs them virtually no more money to put on more staff members.

I guess I sound whiney to a tougher breed of New York waiter. They’d tell me those who can’t take the heat should get out of the kitchen – a breed like Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. Remember? “It takes brass balls to sell real estate.”

“Yea…I waited tables in New York. It’s a tough racket.”

But it’s not really a racket, is it? It’s a racket in Europe where professional waiters, earning a living wage, work in the field their whole lives. In U.S. cities, waiting tables is more like something you do when you’re a kid before moving on to something else, like teaching English in Spain or co-starring on The Sopranos.

There are some people who enjoy lifelong careers in swanky, top rated restaurants in the States, but I don’t think Bruce’s list of Do’s and Don’ts is meant for them. It’d be kind of weird to tell a middle aged man who’s spent years working at some 3 star meson to not use obscenities or call people “you guys”. No. He was referring to flunky types like me. (which makes his “don’t hustle the lobster” tip a little strange)

So what I want to get around to is basically I’m down on tipping. It’s exploitative, weird and creates insincere dynamics between people of good will. Lots of stuff I’ve done an about face on since moving to Europe (Juries – boooo!), while other principles have remained largely unchanged (Soccer is still really stupid) and I’m sorry but the practice of tipping falls into the first camp.

Now, and let’s be clear on this, being against tipping as a general social custom doesn’t mean I won’t tip when and where it’s expected, like Steve Buscemi in Reservoir Dogs or something. Of course I will – and I think and hope Europeans generally do, even though there was, back when I was waitering, this sort of strange belief that Europeans were just cheap or something. Not the case. If they didn’t tip correctly it was because they didn’t know they were supposed to.

Does tipping improve the quality of service you receive? Potentially, but it would probably have the same effect at the library or the post office, and we don’t tip there. Slipping some money to the police will also get you preferential treatment. Yet, for some reason, it’s frowned upon.

Another thing is I believe the practice is so stupid and inherently wacky that even people living way down deep inside a tipping entrenched society aren’t entirely clear on it. (And I’ve spent years compiling anecdotal evidence on this –from all sorts of Seinfeld episodes and Curb Your Enthusiasm and Randy Cohen’s Ethicist advice column in the Sunday Times.) People seem to think they know what every tipping situation is and how much to tip, then they will always come up against some new unforeseen unknowable.

There’s the Larry David moment where he calls to have someone come up and fix the air conditioning in his hotel room, and is later told by hotel staffers that the technician was a little miffed cause Larry hadn’t tipped him.

“But…the air conditioning was supposed to be working. Before I got here even.”

“Yea, but, ya know…just maybe to show him you appreciate it.”

Or a guy who wrote to Cohen about a super who refused to do his job for tenants who didn’t give him Christmas bonuses.

I can’t overemphasize what a joy it is to live where leaving a tip is honestly appreciated rather than a pre-requisite for not getting berated.

I must say however that on occasions – like my father on European holidays before me – I used to insist on leaving 15 or 20% gratuities. (please note reader how, in most contexts, the term “gratuitous” is a bad thing)

“I’m from a country where we know how to do things the right way.”

And the disdain you can expect from a server despite the fact that, contrary to “stiffing” him or her, you’ve simply given them an unearned, unexplained sum of cash, is comparable to that which a downtown waitron will hit you with if you undertip.

Finally, I want to clear up for everybody that this tipping post was in regard to the practice of leaving a gratuity for services rendered, and not at all about (and this was actually in Wikipedia’s disambiguation page and I’m totally not making it up)

Cow tipping, a rumored activity involving pushing over a sleeping cow

And especially not about

Henry Avray Tipping (1855-1933), British writer and garden designer

Though I am seriously thinking about doing something on him next week.

Hallowe'en Rave

2009-10-28T16:59:00.000-07:00

45. My current age, a beloved handgun calibre, and one hell of a malt liquor.

I’ve noticed that, throughout the years, it’s often been the case that a student (remember, I’m an English teacher ) will ask me when my birthday is on the day that just happens to be my birthday. How is that? I mean, statistically it’s not very likely.

Finally, this year I was paying a bit more attention and I saw how this came about.

Halloween.

My birthday’s 4 days before Halloween and, every year when that holiday’s about to roll around, I try to get the students in the mood by asking them to prepare a little conversation about the supernatural. Some of the more politicized will always say, “God and Jesus.”

I’m like, “Okay. That’s true. I respect that…not exactly Halloween staples though. Anybody else?”

We’ll finally get to talking about ghosts (“Anybody know anyone who claims to have seen –that’s called the Perfect Infinitive – a ghost?”. That sometimes gets an interesting response) Then vampires and zombies, mediums and clairvoyants, and we usually end up draining the last drops of vocabulary from the topic by chatting about the zodiac, which will often cause people to start asking each other what their sign is. When I say I’m a Scorpio, somebody’ll occasionally ask, “Oh, so when’s your birthday?” and now and then the answer will be, “Well, actually, it’s today.” (cue music and Happy Birthday singing)

Much like the SantaClausified christmas, Halloween is making increasing headway here in Europe. For evil reasons, it goes without saying. And while evil isn’t something you’d want associated with Christmas, for Halloween I guess it’s not such a problem.

Same thing happened with both Anglo festivities.

In Spain they were perfectly happy for centuries with the 3 Wise Men bearing gifts to kids on the 6^th of January (someone told me that, in Italy, it’s a good witch that brings the children presents!) Then somebody invented Hollywood and that’s all she wrote. What quaint European costumes struggling through post-war poverty could compete with the Kris Kringle laden U.S. media blitz?

Halloween iconography is also all over stateside entertainment exports. Every kid wants to A)dress up in costumes and B) get candy and C) well, do whatever kids are doing on US sitcoms.

And kids are essentially the problem, aren’t they? (not to offend any pro- procreation people out there, but I do want you to tread cautiously) Both these holidays have in common the idea of children getting stuff. You show them a scenario in which they get stuff and they’ll be right on their parents, pressuring them to make that scenario a reality.

I mean, for (counter)example, you’ve got Valentine’s Day. People here routinely regard Valentine’s Day as a department store driven scam, and do not subscribe to it.

And if you don’t want to march on Pride Day, you just don’t.

But festivities which involve kids (your kids!) receiving things for free create a more perilous tipping point. Many parents, to the chagrin of other parents, will just go in for it to keep the kids quiet. Then the other parents have to do it because of collateral peer pressure. Much like they have to buy their kids cell phones when they’re, like, eight years old or something.

I often think that the only reason 11 year-olds don’t drive cars is because the state makes it illegal. If driving licences were more in the legal category of cell phones or broadband internet connections, by which I mean if it were simply up to the parents to decide if their kids could have one, then you can bet your last skittle 11 year-old kids would be driving cars around.

Kids these days are spoiled, I guess that’s what I’m saying. Well…in my day, we had…What!? Who’s there?! Get out of here you kids!! Where’s my cane? Come back here! I know your names!!

Full Whack Birthday

2009-10-28T03:14:00.000-07:00

This is my absolute and total birthday montage from Luisa.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! Okay, it’s not.

2009-10-21T15:28:00.000-07:00

God, I was such a fan of Balloon Boy while he was airborne. (And before I even knew what the swiftly developing live news report was actually about.) I mean I thought he was going to fight crime and stuff like that. Perhaps he was on his way to the Rocky Mountain hideout of some arch criminal.

“I’m sorry Miss Lane, but unless our demands are met by noon tomorrow, I’m afraid this is the last time you’ll ever….BALLOON BOY!!!”

Later I imagined the governor solemnly awarding him the keys to the State, “Thank you once again, Balloon Boy.”

Then I started listening to the commentary and realized what the whole business really was – and wasn’t.

Didn’t we all just know that it was a hoax? Even the chopper pilots following the damned, ridiculous thing were probably like, “I understand I have to follow this thing, but it’s gonna be a hoax.”

When I was a kid, sure. I used to believe that Spritle and Chim Chim could systematically sneak into the trunk of the Mach 5 on Speed Racer, “Seems plausible to me.” But after any number of fake-o lost kid cases and then, especially, let’s face it, that Simpson’s episode where Bart pretends he’s fallen into a well. No way. And please, folks, if you’re willing to do anything to get on TV, don’t base your stunt on a Simpson’s episode. You’ll get caught. The show’s just too popular. Base it on The Ropers, or Mrs. Mouth from NY public access cable.

Wasn’t the kicker for all of us the fact that this family had been on TV before, on some reality show? I heard it and I’m like, “Oh, come on. You mean these people were already people who’d put their family on TV? Get out.”

Even if you’re falling for it cause maybe it’s possible – either that he’s in the thing or that he -Woops! Sorry!- turns out accidentally to not be in it – the wife swapping TV show precedent just trumps that.

“Hear about the technician that accidentally got locked in the satellite rocket and was shot into orbit?”

“Hmmm, well, I suppose that could happen.”

“Yea, and check it out. Turns out it was the streaker that ran behind David Niven at the Oscars that time.”

“No no no no no. That, No. It’s a hoax.”

Then, when it comes on that the Sheriff’s Department is going to press charges (these things always occur in places that have “Sheriff’s Departments”, instead of “the police”. Have you noticed?) CNN’s there calculating the costs for the fake-o balloon rescue situation: police cars and helicopters, fire department, ambulances, destroyed crops, flights cancelled at Denver airport. And, at the end, they add in – and I love this part- expenses incurred by the media. Over a hundred thousand all told. And I’m thinking, That’s weird. Are press outlets going to try to, like, get the money spent covering the story back? Because they’re still covering the story. Only now it’s a story about a hoax. But a story nonetheless. Yet I imagine they’re doing it for free now. They’re not still charging the family, or are they? Perhaps the family should try to cut their losses and formally ask the media to “please stop covering the story, if you intend to later sue us for it.”

And, if it’s a story now, wasn’t it a story then? Isn’t everybody thinking a kid is floating around in a balloon a story? Isn’t a family of wackjobs pulling a state wide public relations swindle a story? That’s what the press does. The audience is interested in seeing something, so they go out and cover it. If it turns out to be false, the media didn’t “lose money” in the sense that the fire department or the airport did. They sold advertising space and commercials. The reporters probably got paid no more than they would have gotten paid otherwise for covering something else.

Maybe the advertisers and the sponsors of these media should ask for a refund of their advertising dollars, since the story wasn’t true.

“What? The Gulf of Tonkin incident wasn’t true? How much money did we spend covering that story? Get legal on the phone.”

Communists in the State Department, WMD in Iraq, Babies ripped from incubators, you say? I say Refunds Refunds Refunds. Let’s get in line.

Gone to Soldiers

2009-10-19T15:35:00.000-07:00

So now there’s all this talk, both in the States and in Spain, about sending more troops to Afghanistan. I don’t know where to come down on this sort of issue.

I was totally in favour of a war in Afghanistan eight years ago, and guess I still have a vague “the only good Taliban…” style of thinking. But this is a tough call for a well intentioned progressive.

It’s a tough call mostly because it’s easier to be against a war than for it. I love to be against wars. I’m good at it. Get into a war, I’ll be against it: Vietnam, Granada, Panama (remember these oldies but goodies?) the 1^st Gulf War = You could always count me in for a “Count me out!”

Opposition permits you to be consistent, i.e. “I’m not there, and that’s fine cause I don’t think anybody else should be there either.”

But if you think there should be a war, that it’s worth it, you have to confront…and, when I say you, I mean me…you have to confront the ugly and disagreeable idea that you’re not going to go and you don’t want to go. You want someone else to go and do all the warring that you’re in favour of. Preferably, someone you don’t know.

I mean I could go to fight some war to prevent some really bad thing or put the definitive kibosh on some really bad people, couldn’t I? If I think, “Wow, women have to walk around covered in those things and get acid thrown in their faces. Somebody should really go and potentially sacrifice their life to put a stop to that.” I could, ya know, me, I could have technically gone. Fly to Pakistan, using Western dollars, buy some kind of gun somewhere on the Khyber Pass, join that there Northern alliance we were always hearing about, and pretty much get whacked way fast for a noble cause.

“Hear about Mike Watt?”

“No. I haven’t heard from him in a while. What’s he up to?”

“Check it out. Apparently the guy flew to Afghanistan or whatever, enlisted in something called the Northern Alliance, and was killed in some kind of battle/ambush type deal in the mountains.”

“So, he’s not still at Exterminator Chili?”

Sure, it sounds silly – let’s face it, it is silly- but then I think about the International Brigades that came to Spain – an actual true country that I am in right now – to fight against fascism. Those people were home in their countries that were at peace. They generally had no training or anything. And they said, “I’m going to go to that country and fight in that war for that thing.”

And hell, you don’t even have to go all the way back to the Spanish Civil War. Just look at the international brigades of jihadists who went to Iraq.

But Afghanistan is actually a war my country is currently in. I wouldn’t even have to pay my own airfare if I wanted to go – which, allow me to make abundantly clear, I do not.

I guess at this point I have to consider myself splendiferously lucky to have become 44 years old. They don’t want me in the army.

“Yea, I’m hear to enlist to go to Afghanistan and fight the Taliban.”

“Sir, how old are you?”

“44.”

“Ummm, do you have maybe a degree in engineering or chemistry or something?”

“Creative Writing. New School class of ’92.”

No. I don’t think they really see me tipping the scales in this current conflict.

Seriously though, I remember last year when the super’s oldest son stopped by our apartment to say goodbye to us. He was in the army and was about to be shipped off to Lebanon, which Spain has been at war with since 1996 – No. Just kidding. It forms part of an international peacekeeping force there.

And he was scared. Ya know, understandably. He was going to be off toting a rifle around some country where he didn’t speak the language and where the people (many of whom also had rifles) didn’t want him there.

And after he left I had one of those moments that you’re supposed to have if you’re all zen and leading the examined life: A moment of conscious gratitude for what you have.

I was totally appreciative – and I’ll thank anyone who feels they need to be thanked for this outcome – that I have never had to do that. Never had to be in the army. Never had to go to war. Never had to kill anybody, or decide whether or not they should be killed. Never had to face some kind of weird “my platoon-mates are raping somebody, what should I do?” kind of situation. Never had to be horribly maimed and disfigured. Thanks. Whenever I get minorly depressed about something, I think, “Well, that’s a bitch – But at least I never had to be in a war! “

And, even if none of the above-mentioned bad stuff ever happened, I recognize that, for me, war would be a terribly negative experience since I don’t even like to shower with other men. Get me? I mean, I prefer to pee in a stall. And you go to war not really with Kirk Douglas or Montgomery Clift, but with the gang from some street corner in Red Hook; with Two-Streeters from South Philly. It would be like being picked on by jocks in gym class – but there’s also a war at the same time! Even if I were an officer, I’m sure I’d somehow end up nicknamed “geekboy” and getting pantsed on the parade grounds.

The only writer, I think, who ever picked up on this sort of thing was Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five. Billy Pilgrim is in a living hell, and not just because he’s been taken prisoner by the Nazis in WWII –which, if you have that problem, should be the biggest problem that you have. The other Americans he’s with are all maniacs who want to kill him just because they don’t like him. And - SPOILER ALERT – one of them ultimately does. (This is only a spoiler for real people, since Billy Pilgrim knows right from the beginning who’s going to kill him)

The strange thing is that, in Spain, they had obligatory military service for men until around 1998, so lots of men of my generation have actually spent a brief period in the, albeit peacetime, army. Thus, besides language and other various cultural differences (like how Sesame Street over here includes a giant talking porcupine) I’ve got this other thing that I’ll never have in common with Spanish men my age. Men, all across the political, fashion and sexual orientation spectrum, had some flunky stretch in the military.

One day I was sitting around with a guy I shared an apartment with for a while, Juan. He was saying something about the army, where he had actually been an MP. An MP! Somebody I was hanging around with! Now there’s a social encounter I’d be not likely to have back in New York.

And he asked me if I had been in the army.

When I finished laughing hysterically, I said, “Now there’s a cultural schism for ya, Juan. If you were from the States a brief glance at me out of the corner of your eye, through the fog, and even if I were wearing a military uniform for Halloween, would tell you I’d never been remotely near the army.”

Although it occurs to me that everything I’ve just suggested is totally untrue. I have met people in NY and Philly who shockingly and inexplicably had actually been in the service; Usually, and this is funny, in the navy. The US Navy seems somehow more likely than the army –or the marines – to produce future downtowny grunge/hipster figures. Don’t know what’s up with that; maybe something to do either with their youthful desire to get out of East Buttfuck without being otherwise able to afford it, or with that Village People song.

Then, beyond those, there were the Israeli staff members when I worked at Brothers’ Bar-B-Q. These were attractive young immigrants who’d been in the Israeli Defence Forces, who had potentially killed people and knew karate (in that order).

So, ultimately, when it comes to Afghanistan, I imagine I’ll just leave it in the hands of my respective presidents. The deciders. (But here’s a thing though. We hear lots about Afghanistan and Pakistan nowadays. But what about that Eminem song “Stan”? Suddenly we don’t hear so much about that. Huh? Coincidence? Maybe just a little bit TOO convenient if you ask me.)

Our Top Story Tonight

2009-09-21T05:03:00.000-07:00

I know lots of well intentioned liberals out there are already blogging, chattering and preaching constantly to the converted about FoxNews. This must be because the network inspires a hate frenzy so overwhelming it can’t possibly be contained silently in a single head.

Here’s my share of that left blowing hot air.

Lately they’ve been giving a lot of play to a couple of topics. First there are the accusations of racism against the anti-healthcare reform movement. Then, there is this whole thing about ACORN, the coalition of community organizers, whose personnel were secretly filmed helping a guy posing as a pimp apply for a small business subsidy.

This is bias at its most insidious, from the news network that prides itself on being “fair and balanced,” a claim they can make due to the fact that many of their viewers undoubtedly think “bias” is only limited to broad, subjective statements. Most of us know partiality can be achieved through a variety of slithery methods – the first of which is the presence of clever-minded intentionality in your choice of lead story.

Maybe a lot of those demonstrators against healthcare reform are in that camp because they can’t deal with a black guy having been elected president. Maybe not. Maybe those too quick to jump into accusations of racism should be called out on it. But, in any case, that some people in a few contexts have suggested this possibility is not significant enough to be the lead story on an evening news telecast.

We’ve got the recession, finance reform, healthcare reform, Iraq, and Afghanistan on our plate – not to mention that Kanye West spectacle. Fox leads with Maureen Dowd raking Joe Wilson over the coals in her NYTimes column, and why the White House hasn’t publicly repudiated people out there who are accusing other people of racism.

That’s the big story. That’s the big crisis facing the nation this week: Some people are suggesting that other people might be racists. And there’s a certain angry, loud sector of the populace that gets its news from this source. They see this placed as the first story and they necessarily come to a value conclusion: This must be outrageous because, look! They’re making a big deal out of it on the news! Charlie Rangel and Maureen Dowd must be a bigger danger to us than the recession and Al Queda.

Afterwards, FoxNews pundits are kind enough to hold nightly roundtable discussions on “why the mainstream media isn’t picking up on this.”

And they’ve won. The mainstream media did have to necessarily start picking up on this and Obama was recently forced to comment on the whole issue. Of course he said opposition to him was not due to racism. (CNN’s John King asked him to comment on Nancy Pelosi’s statement that all the bitterness in public discourse reminded her of San Francisco in the 70s, when two of her colleagues ended up assassinated. What could Obama say to this? “No, it does not remind Speaker Pelosi of that.”?)

I’ll tell you why people think opposition to healthcare reform could be due to racism:

Because it certainly doesn’t seem to be based on reason, that’s why. The principal objections to the public option are easily countered. What’s left but prejudice, alien mind control, superstition and the international Free Mason conspiracy?

Apart from leading with something they want to turn into a BIG story, Fox has been guilty of any number of other crypto-biases over the years.

There was when Brit Hume interviewed a Saddam Hussein biographer just days prior to the invasion of Iraq.

The emphasis of this (probably last) pre-war biography of Saddam was on a rigorous psychological evaluation of the man’s character. The author intended to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein was a clinical paranoid.

“This is a man convinced that the rest of the world, and especially the United States, is somehow ‘out to get him’.”

And Brit Hume’s there, nodding intently. Fascinated.

Remember, this was while US aircraft carriers and destroyers were steaming into the Gulf, and armoured divisions were poised at the Kuwaiti border.

Brit says, “You mention in your book this idea of his sleeping in a different palace every night.”

“That’s right. He’s so convinced that someone is trying to kill him, he constantly changes his residence. It’s classic paranoid behaviour. He believes there’s a…a coalition… somehow conspiring against him.”

Now, Brit Hume is an intelligent guy. He knew that the dynamic of this exchange is downright comical, yet he chose not to point it out to his viewership.

My second favourite Fox segment was a roundtable debate about the Children’s Television Workshop’s decision to include an HIV-positive character on the South African edition of Sesame Street.

They brought on some activist from, I don’t know, Minnesota or wherever, who found this idea outrageous. Now this guy was not an educator, or a doctor. He didn’t work in television. He was not South African. He had no relevant relationship whatsoever to the topic at hand. Fox simply decided that, whenever anything happens anywhere, the “fair and balanced” approach is to find someone against it. That’s the definition of an evenhanded debate: Somebody for. Somebody against. What could be clearer?

Why should it matter that, in this case, not a single pertinent, involved individual was against this decision?

That brings me to …drum roll please. The all-time insidious FoxNews segment.

This was years ago. I can’t really remember who was anchoring, so I hope John Gibson won’t sue me for saying I’m pretty sure it was him.

He read a brief report about some scientist/ecologist who’d stated at a conference that the earth’s biosphere couldn’t endure it if both China and India reached US levels of economic development. Then he added, on his own, that “Dr._________ failed to mention studies which have consistently shown that nations actually pollute less as they become more developed.” End story.

Okay. But, I thought, stating that the earth couldn’t endure Chinese and Indian development is not necessarily a statement about pollution. Anybody marginally versed in Green Issues knows the guy was probably referring to resource availability, i.e. how much fuel, paper, potable water and arable land would be necessary for this sort of industrialization. Only conservatives locked in 1970s grammar school classes think the only environmental issue is pollution.

So let’s assume my previous paragraph was germane.

Gibson’s final comment (“Dr._______ failed to mention studies which have consistently shown that nations actually pollute less as they become more developed.” ) was really, in essence, “This scientist failed to volunteer information which would have weakened his own position.”

Yet that’s exactly what Gibson was doing. He made his statement without having any other individual there to call him on it, to say “hey, wait. This guy was talking about sustainable growth, and you countered him by mentioning only ‘pollution’, consequently misleading your viewers.’”

This misleading articulation of someone else’s argument is par for the course on Fox. You’ll constantly see their pundits explaining the (always erroneous) European Union point of view on something, so as to discredit it.

“I’ll explain the European position on this (Kyoto, International criminal court, etc.) and, in the same breath, I’ll explain to you why it’s wrong.” Somebody from the EU is never there at the table.

Remember Lenny Bruce in court? “So this cop comes in, and he does my act.”

Speak No Evil

2009-08-28T09:03:00.000-07:00

I read now that there is a bunch of internauts mounting a boycott of the Whole Foods supermarket chain because of its anti-union corporate policy and because its CEO, John Mackey, is rather conservative and opposes that a “public option” be included in upcoming (we hope) healthcare reform.

Here’s my take on it: Fine.

Just that, essentially. Fine. It’s all good either way.

Whether progressive or conservative, I think people have got to understand that boycotts, while largely political, fall under no legislative nor constitutional aegis (god! I’ve been waiting a long time to use that word) and are a perfectly useful method of working out social norms of behaviour and speech.

What I mean is that nobody is “censoring” (finger quotes again) anybody else. You’ve simply got some folks who, for whatever reason, don’t want to shop at some guy’s supermarket and so, consequently, do not.

I remember years ago when Milos Forman’s The People vs Larry Flynt came out. Forman and producer Oliver Stone made the rounds of the talks shows and news programs promoting the picture and militating against censorship, which was ostensibly the prime theme of the movie as it dealt largely with the efforts of various religious groups to get Hustler off the shelves.

Meanwhile, feminists like Gloria Steinem and someone named Diana Russell called for a boycott of the movie since it seemed to make a hero out of Flynt and defend Hustler Magazine, with that esteemed publication’s whimsical and light-hearted images of women in meat grinders and such.

And there was Stone, trying to draw a comparison between the boycott and garden variety repression of the 1^st Amendment. And then they trotted Milos Forman out and he says that the reception the film was getting reminded him of (I’m not making this up) when the Nazis came and arrested his father in Czechoslovakia during WWII.

And I’m like (and when I say “I’m like”, what I mean is “I say”) I’m like, “Hmmm, I was not aware of Gloria Steinem’s link to the Nazi war machine. Sure, she looks fabulous in leather, but…”

Really Milos and Oliver? These women calling for a boycott of The People vs Larry Flynt are like the Nazis, who conquered most of Europe and slaughtered millions of innocent people? Come on.

All they were doing was saying, Hey, we’re not going to see this movie and, if you happen to agree with us, please don’t see the movie either. That’s all. They were exercising a civil right that is so self-evident it isn’t even in the Constitution: Basically, it’s your right not to buy something that you do not want. And you can not want to buy something for any reason you feel like.

For example, you can decide not to go see a movie because you’re against Scientology and Tom Cruise is in it. Or, you can just not see movies that take place in Chicago.

“Benny, you mean you haven’t seen The Fugitive?”

“I told you I don’t see movies that take place in Chicago. I had a bad experience there once and that’s just the way I am.”

And that’s life.

Don’t get me wrong. If you won’t see a movie because Tom Cruise is in it, that’s not OK with me. I’ll probably think you’re a weirdo. And you’ll have to live with that. Welcome to society, where people judge you for your opinions.

“Have you heard this thing about Benny, that he doesn’t see movies that take place in Chicago?”

“What is he? Some kind of censorship, Orwellian, thought-police type guy?”

“No. I think he’s just a weirdo.”

“Oh. Okay.”

In Spain, a few years ago, a director named Julio Medem made a documentary about the “Basque Problem”. Some people thought he was a little soft on Basque terrorists, and they took to picketing the Spanish Oscars with placards and stuff. During the ceremony, many among the Spanish cinema elite felt they had to comment on the protestors, referring to them essentially as pro-censorship and “enemies of freedom of expression.”

Often it’s as if people aren’t clear on what censorship is. They toss around terms like “thought-police” and “big brother” while, to me, it seems doubtful that they’ve even read 1984. They can’t wrap their heads around the idea of disagreements being worked out in a thoroughly civil (and civilian) context.

During the Democrat primaries in 2008, some idiot (on FoxNews? I’m not certain) made a comment about Chelsea Clinton being “pimped out” when she took to the campaign trail for her mother Hillary. A lot of people got upset about this. The guy was widely criticized and he had to apologize. And when I say “he had to apologize” I mean simply that he apologized because he didn’t want to take any more heat, not because jack-booted storm troopers were kicking down his door. He reacted to criticism in a normal, civil fashion. That’s how society works out its norms, I think. Once again, I say “fine.” The 1^st Amendment gives you the right to say “nigger” as often as you want but, if you say it, people won’t …in essence, they won’t be your friend. They’ll say “That guy’s a racist”, and they’ll be right. And we’ll just continue on our way.

There were conservatives –in that situation with Chelsea - who found it necessary to point out that progressives had referred to Colin Powell as being “pimped out” when the Bush Administration sent him to the UN to spread lies about WMD in Iraq.

I say, Well, I guess if you found that characterization outrageous, that was your time to say something. But you didn’t.

To sum up: when nuts make Catcher in the Rye unavailable to other people by pulling copies out of the library and burning them in the street alongside their Rock ‘N’ Roll records, that’s called “censorship”.

But when a person decides not to buy something that they do not want, I think it’s just called something like “everyday activity among human folk.”

O.K. Now I'm Getting Angry

2009-08-25T05:13:00.000-07:00

Now there are TWO things that have everyone in Europe confused about what the hell’s going on with Healthcare in the United States.

First, obviously, is why there isn’t universal public healthcare. But now they can also be shocked and appalled at the U.S. system of…I guess you call it parliamentary democracy, where you’ve got “filibuster” as well as “filibuster-proof”. I just thank God I live in a world where supposedly intelligent people invented the concept of “filibuster-proof” so as to protect us all from their other tremendous invention, the filibuster. (And if you want to get into the idea of words that, when you repeat them over and over, begin to sound ridiculous, “filibuster” is right there at the top of the list).

“Why do they need 60 Senators to pass a law?” Worldwide reasonable people are asking. But, clearly, that’s not the fun question. The fun question these days is “Why can’t they pass public health legislation even though they do have 60 senators?” This is really difficult to understand and explain since, in most other developed democracies, a party cannot have this sort of internal dissent. We don’t have a conservative wing of the Socialist Party here in Spain. The Party has a platform (worked out at their annual assembly) and they ALL vote consistent with that platform or legislative agenda. There aren’t a couple of rogues that the party leaders have to negotiate with.

Oh, I almost forgot – guns!

Europeans no longer have to read about insane U.S. gun laws and lack of public healthcare in two separate articles. Now they’ve been conveniently combined for swift, easy reading.

“Look, Byoorst, here’s an interesting article about Americans opposing public healthcare and carrying automatic weapons.”

“Thanks, Ludmilla, that’ll save me a lot of time.”

(By the way, I find it an admirable mark of universal good will that average Europeans WANT Americans to have free public healthcare. It actually matters to them)

Elsewhere, in the field of unarmed debate, I can’t figure out why the democrats can’t get it together on the rhetoric. They’re constantly getting stumped in public appearances by strident numbskulls as if they were matching wits with Professor Moriarity.

For example, a guy from the State University of Whatever stands up and asks Obama how insurance companies could compete with a government run health option. Jon Stewart got it right. It’s a no-brainer. You just point out, to the guy’s face, that he attends a public university!

Yet Obama fumbled the ball. As he did comparing the (government run) post office to UPS and FedEx, foolishly saying that the Post Office was always in trouble. All he had to say was that private companies have managed to compete successfully with public courier services; as they compete effectively with public schools and universities. The police force is also free, yet people hire private security contractors. (and in the world of healthcare itself, as I’ve stated in previous posts, private medicine flourishes perfectly well in Europe)

Arlen Specter is on FoxNews (yeah, I know he’s hardly a real Democrat), debating a Republican who’d introduced a bill which would have obligated congress people to sign up for any public option. The idea being that, if you vote against the bill, you’ve admitted the public system wouldn’t be any good, and thus you’re a hypocrite. As was their plan, Specter mumbled and bumbled, trying unsuccessfully to wiggle out of it. And I’m watching, thinking, “What’s the matter with you, you idiot? Just tell him you’re wealthy enough that you don’t need a helping hand from the State, and that those resources should be saved for needy people.” But he didn’t say it!

It’s like the dog ate all the Democrat talking points.

Faced with the argument that “Government is the problem, not the solution” Dems have got to start pointing out (albeit with more or less veracity) that the U.S. Government is arguably the most powerful institution the world has ever known (apart from the international Free Mason conspiracy, of course). It put a man on the moon, split the atom, founded the U.N. and won the Second World War. It’s a get-shit-done institution.

STEP 1: Land on Moon

2009-08-15T04:06:00.000-07:00

First let me say that I don’t believe the moon landing was faked. I’m not one of those people.

However…

No, really, I know “however” sounds scary here, but I only want to say that, for the first time, I can almost – I mean almost – understand and sympathize with conspiracy theorists who doubt that we could actually have landed on the moon (in Spanish, landing on the moon is called the “alunizaje”. In English we only have the verb “to land” but in Spanish they have the verb “amerizar”, which is to land on water, and “alunizar”, to land on the moon. Problem is, it could only be translated back into English as the verb “to moon.”)

Now where was I? Right, sympathizing with those who suspect the moon landing was a fraud.

It’s just that I recently saw this documentary (National Geographic or Discovery Channel, any spot for teledocu-junkies) about rocket propulsion, from Werner Von Braun and the German V-1 launches to Werner Von Braun and early space flight; Plus all the soviet stuff too.

It had vast amounts of material on the Titan and Saturn rockets and how unstable and generally unperfected they were in the early 60s. They were described by engineers as essentially “giant aluminium balloons full of fuel”, whose only mission was to shoot into space, and then just kind of clumsily fall back down to earth when the fuel ran out. What about achieving orbit? Sure, but going orbital is a phenomenon which simply occurs under certain circumstances; not due to any fancy jazz the rocket has to pull.

Yet despite this relatively modest goal of flying upward then falling back down again, three or four out of every ten failed to do it. Many didn’t move from the launch pad, and the rest of the failures either crashed or blew up. And blew up good. (Since you couldn’t “land” them, as soon as something went wrong off the launch pad that was all she wrote. Just start running.) And this was all going on during, and after, the Mercury program, as late as 1963 and 1964.

So here’s the thing (and I guess this truly demonstrates the ambitious scope of Kennedy’s challenge to NASA)- watching how clumsy and dangerous and primitive rocket propulsion technology was in the early 60s, it really tests your sense of what’s plausible to know that in 1969, only 7 or so years later, they could actually send some guys to the moon, land one module on the surface while a separate one went about circling the moon (the fucking moon!), have somebody walk around on the moon, then launch successfully part of the module from the surface, link up with the orbital module in outer space (!), then fly back to the earth and land in the ocean – all while remaining alive and in a state of not- blown upness.

I mean I know they did – (I’m sure smarty-pants scientific types could explain how launching rockets from, and orbiting, the earth has nothing to do with launching from, and orbiting, the moon, but I bet they had to study math to know that) Still, if you’d seen this documentary with elemental rocket after elemental rocket crashing or malfunctioning in some way, just a few years earlier.

It’s almost as if, when cellphones were taking their first baby steps in the mid-nineties, someone had said that by the year 2000 we’re going to have the teleporter. And we did!

Here you go: Just as I was writing, Microsoft Word put a red squiggly line under the word teleporter because it doesn’t recognize it. (Ideally, I could right click and get other suggested words, like horseless carriage, rocket, or skateboard).

This I find a little fascinating (“Captain”) as teleporter is one of those things that exists as a word even if it doesn’t exist as a thing. Like android, for example. There really aren’t any androids but virtually all encyclopaedias and dictionaries have it listed. (There is a Borges story like that. Some guys compose a dictionary of nonsense words and ultimately those things come to exist.)

I remember years ago, watching TV late one night in Philly with my roommate, Pete. A commercial came on advertising a number you could call if you had an interesting invention and needed, I don’t know, funding to develop it or help with patent paperwork.

Pete said, “Let’s call them and tell them we invented the teleporter.”

Ha Ha, but then I thought, “Hey, that could be a million dollar idea.” (as if a million dollars would be your payoff if you invented the teleporter) – “We patent it, and when somebody actually figures out how to make one work, he has to come to us. And we clean up.”

Needless to say, the patent office wants all kinds of details about, ya know, how it works and stuff. (Same reason they wouldn’t let me patent my time machine - which, incidentally, is also in the dictionary)

There are a couple of problems I see as regards the teleporter.

First, they’ll probably be pretty expensive, especially at first. Most of us will probably have to wait and settle for a used one or something. But the real expense won’t come so much from the unit itself as from your monthly teleporter bills. A couple of inter-continental jaunts a week can really run into money. And, if you’ve got teenagers in the house, forget it.

Of course, if the future as we’ve come to expect it kicks into high gear and we end up having both teleporters and rocket jet packs, there’ll be a whole generation of jet-packed young hipsters claiming that teleporters are “for yuppies”.

Another thing occurred to me when we got a new desktop PC and, in order to install Microsoft Office and like manner of pirated software, I first had to find and download compression software. And I thought, Wow, compression software – a thing to make other things, things which 20 years ago I could hardly have conceived of, work. I mean, back in 1988, somebody from the future might have been able to explain the internet to me, and I might have gotten it. But I would have had a lot more difficulty conceiving of second tier things that would make I.T. work better.

This is potentially the same case we’ll face with the teleporter. We can comprehend the teleporter itself but, once we have it, it’ll be necessary to then get the new Lowfinder Switch Repose ® software by Panasonic if you want the thing to be worth a damn. And you’ll waste a lot of time and electricity on your trips to wet climates if you don’t have the WetLet ® potentiator by Shanghai’s GoSport, Inc. (And no, I don’t know what these things do, nor why they need to be done. That’s my point.)

Finally, I worry about stalkers and salespeople.

We got doors. Then we got door-to-door salesmen.

Later, we got telephones – followed by telemarketers.

So what’ll happen with the teleporters? You’ll be sitting there in your living room and then suddenly there’ll be some guy there, in your home with you.

“Sir, are you happy with your cable company?”

“What the…! Get the fuck out of here!”

“You look to me like a man who likes to save money. Am I right?”

Stalkers and obscene phone callers will be showing up IN your home.

And wrong numbers. An idiot beaming into your house three times in a row.

“Is Phil here?”

“I told you no Phil lives here. Now don’t beam back! Jeez.”

My only hope, considering all these potential problems the teleporter might bring, is that everybody doesn’t blame me for it all. Since I, well, ya know, I invented the thing.

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Anne Heche

2009-08-04T03:12:00.000-07:00

Seldom do I post a comment at the end of a New York Times article. A few months ago I couldn’t resist writing something to a columnist who went on about how unfairly Caroline Kennedy was being treated by, well, everyone – and I felt I really needed to throw my two cents in. But generally I don’t. I mean there’re too many millions of people out there in line first with their posts and I can’t even find the time or energy to keep my own Blog current.

Luckily, this time I can kill two birds with one stone since last Sunday’s profile of Anne Heche chose not to invite comments on the Times site. And- boy howdy!- I did have a few.

The following is from the article, check it out:

“We auditioned a lot of people,” says Colette Burson, the co-creator of “Hung.” “It is incredibly difficult to find beautiful, talented, funny women over 35.”

What do you think? Read it again.

I’m shocked that a person, especially a woman, could say something like this and not be immediately chased by an angry, torch-and-pitchfork-wielding mob back into whatever whole she crept out of.

That’s, obviously, my metaphorical shock. My real shock is that a line like that isn’t used by – let’s, for the sake of argument, call him a “journalist”, to ridicule Hollywood thinking or the current state of the culture or whatever. It was simply taken, at face value, as a statement that illustrates how cool, and ultimately unique, Anne Heche really is.

Now, I read and tend to enjoy the Times Sunday Magazine. Often there are fascinating pieces about people and phenomena that you’d not expected to hear anything about. Yet there’s an unfortunate tendency toward both the “sweetheart profile” and the “hatchet job” (sorry, my print news terminology comes mostly from old movies), transparently based on some sort of personal friendship with, or favour owed to, the sycophantically rendered celeb – or on a mysterious axe to grind in the opposite case.

I’ve noticed this time and again over the last- How many years? Well, when did The Talented Mr. Ripley come out? This was a version of the Patricia Highsmith novel directed by Anthony Minghella, who’d just come off a major success with The English Patient. The Times Sunday Magazine piece seemed to want to promote the idea that this film was going to be the second coming of Citizen Kane or something, and rated an extensive Sunday Times analysis; with Minghella going on and on about identity and man’s capacity for violence and blah blah blah. (just one “blah” never seems to be enough) I don’t know how many print pages it amounted to, but it was long, and it was the cover piece, all for a picture that, even among Matt Damon films, was only OK.

Later on there was a profile of Kate Beckinsale, subtitled Why We Love Her, calling her the new Katherine Hepburn.

Then another on Sofia Coppola, which I felt was totally to be expected, given the nature of Sofia Coppola and her social network.

And most recently it was this guy Zach Galafianakis, who is apparently doing comedy different from any comedy that has ever previously been conceived; heir to Lenny Bruce and Andy Kaufmann. I guess this is how he landed his part in The Hangover, as the untimely deaths of both Bruce and Kaufmann rendered them unable to do it. (by the way, I’m being sarcastic)

All of the above fall, on my scale, somewhere around the interest level of an OK Matt Damon movie.

Then, there are the hatchet jobs.

Julian Schnabel was mercilessly raked over the coals in a profile published at a time when he wasn’t even doing anything that would necessarily cause him to be news. No shows, no movies coming out. Some journalist just decided he wanted to hang out with him for a few days and, if Schnabel didn’t let him sit at the popular kids’ table, he would destroy him.

And, keep in mind, I don’t even like Julian Schnabel at all. Or, at least, I didn’t til I saw this crucifixion. The writer, a man, wanted to convince us that Schnabel is an intolerable bore and egomaniac – and, don’t get me wrong, he did. They can swing it that way successfully because A) there’re always good writers , and B) it’s true. He is an intolerable bore. But that’s true of a lot of people and I don’t really care. There was no danger of me inviting him to my birthday party.

Back to Anne Heche. I was more or less ambivalent about the woman until last Sunday’s article. Now I hate her, largely because the writer (a man) tried so hard to convince me that no one else is so committed as she, nor has suffered so unfairly at the hands of the media, nor is as “down to earth”. (and he had the temerity to characterize her career as “on an upswing” because she’s in a TV show that hasn’t aired yet!)

But I mostly hate her because she would in any way work with, or be in the same room with, the above-quoted Collette Burson person, who, I hope, does not have the misfortune to reach 35.

Post Apocalypse (that's a pun)

2009-06-12T15:30:00.000-07:00

The World Health Organization’s Dr. Margaret Chan today raised the crisis level for the global “swine”ish flu pandemic to 6.

And here’s the thing: That’s the highest level there is. 6. Really.

We’re currently at the highest alert level there is – and it amounts to little more than people wearing surgical masks out on the street in many cities where they tend to wear them anyway. I’m like, “Are you kidding me?”

What happened to Zombie Holocaust? Where’s that on the scale? 5 point 7? I guess it came and went when we weren’t looking. Or Twelve Monkeys. The entire human race living in subterranean bunkers, venturing to the surface only to collect air samples? Excuse me, but shouldn’t that be somewhere over 6 on the pandemic crisis scale?

I’m sure Dr. Chan is a fine physician, but it’s painfully evident she hasn’t read Richard Matheson’s I AM LEGEND or seen any of the film versions – not even the Heston one! (Matthias: “Definition of a scientist: One who understood nothing, until there was nothing left to understand.” This stuff is gold.)

I never imagined that the day the earth reached the top of the alert scale of a global viral epidemic I’d be downloading Johnny Mathis hits and doing the shopping. I thought I’d be sporting a mohawk, scouring a desolate landscape for food and fuel. (Okay, that’s not true. I thought I’d be horribly dead, either from the virus itself or eaten by looters. But still.)

THAT WHICH DOESN'T KILL YOU

2009-06-10T16:03:00.000-07:00

Not long ago I caught the French minister of Finance on Jon Stewart (okay, I know it’s called the Daily Show, but we really all just call it Stewart. Ya know, Stewart, Leno, Letterman) This is a woman named Christine Lagarde – bit of a hipster – regaled Jon with a kitschy black beret. Jon, euro-friendly progressive that he is, asked her, as soon as she came out, “Just how Socialist are you?” She chortled pleasantly, treating the question as the joke it sort-of was, and went on to patronizingly explain some relatively elemental things about European social welfare.

The thing is however, as Ms. Lagarde would have immediately pointed out on any European talk show, she is not a Socialist. There are Socialists in Europe, but she isn’t one of them. The party currently in power in France is Christian Democrat (yea, Sarkozy and them; don’t know Carla Bruni’s inclinations) and this party, and in its varied national forms, are what we regard as “The Conservatives”. Here in Spain they’re called the Popular Party, while the good guys here – and who are currently running things – are the PSOE, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party. (BTW. Conservatives have won, rather decisively, recent European parliament –and funkadelic – elections)

The point: well intentioned U.S. liberals should be careful of regarding Europe as some sort of static progressive monolith. Such assumptions might give them the way wrong idea about the change they’re trying to bring about, and which might ultimately be coming their way. The parties over here don’t necessarily resemble the Democrats and the Republicans, but there are many of them, and society is the product of a constant give-and-take among them.

Take national public healthcare, for example. This seems to be a great liberal crusade these days in the States. As well it should be. But remember this – and this is the big secret most advocates of private sector healthcare in the U.S. do not want Americans to know- There is private healthcare in Europe if you want it. Sure, you can go to private clinics or private specialists or have private insurance if you want. It’s all over the place. The Right’s claim that you won’t be able to choose is nonsense – and you should bring it up the next time somebody’s gets down on “Socialized Medicine”.

In fact (full disclosure here) Luisa and I actually have private health insurance. I get it through her and she gets it because she’s a public school teacher. This was likely due to some really tough union negotiations years ago. Teachers’ Unions held out for private insurance for all tenured teachers, and won it.

Why would they want private insurance? Now, that’s an interesting question and many U.S. progressives aren’t going to like the answer.

The private system actually is – and folks, I’m really sorry to have to break it to you – actually is faster, just like the right wing nut jobs always said. Here, in the public system, you can see a general practitioner virtually immediately, but you might potentially have to wait weeks to get an appointment with a gynecologist or a geriatric specialist, or even a pediatrician. Evidently, if your kid is sick, it’s absurd to wait so long to see a doctor.

Of course, the explanation as to why it takes so long to see these specialists, or to receive surgery and various other types of treatments, is because the system is largely underfunded. It’s a situation no different from the political/economic debate that might be had in the U.S. regarding public school funding. Parties on the left tend (we hope) to want to fund them more, creating a higher teacher to student ratios, while the right tends to reduce funding in the public sector (except for defence). That’s what happens with public healthcare in Spain and this tug-of-war is likely to occur anywhere national public healthcare is implemented.

The good news –if you want to look at it that way - is that doctors in the public sector are better. At least that’s the case here since, like teachers and other government employees, they have to take a really demanding battery of exams to get jobs in the public sector, which pays better, has lots of benefits, and is for life. Only a few positions in every field are opened up every year, and only the few who score highest on their exams get in. The private sector is much less demanding.

The “more qualified doctor” benefit is possible here because the government runs public healthcare in a very direct, hands-on fashion - like the Navy or something. I’m not sure that would ever be the case in the States.

Hope this clears up some ideas about “abstractly socialist Europe” to whomever it might concern over there in the States (or, as you call it, America)-

Fascinating, Captain

2009-06-01T14:46:00.000-07:00

Yes. I’ve seen the new Star Trek. Of course I did. It’s been there for me when I needed it and I’m not going to give it up now just cause it’s gotten old and stupid. Saw it the way it was meant to be seen – at the movies, surrounded by other geeks, with a giant tub of popcorn on my lap. (actually, I wonder if we’ve entered the era when techies are downloading it instead – What on earth will these digital downloads do to collectors at futuristic swap meets? “I’ve got a mint condition mp3 file from 2007, never opened.”)

Obviously, the picture’s bad. Goes without saying. I finally had to come to terms with the idea that there was once a TV show called Star Trek that was on back in the 60s. It was kind of good and you can still see it if you want – but there is not going to be another one.

Though I got strangely fascinated with one of the things that were bad about it.

It’s basically that you’ve got this actor playing Kirk, young Kirk from junior space camp or whatever and, evidently, he’s the main guy. The star. We know it cause we’ve seen the series and maybe the other movies. The problem –with the script, let’s say – is that everybody in the picture acts as if they know he’s the main character. All the secondary leads deal with him as if his problems are innately more important than their own, and as if his wishes and ambitions are more important than theirs. I mean, I’ve spent my life watching Star Trek, but this film plays out like everyone on the Enterprise has spent his or her life watching it.

This Kirk essentially stows away on the Enterprise and is soon quickly and inexplicably placed 2^nd in command, by a guy who’s just into him because, as I said, he knows Kirk’s bound for greatness or something. Sure, Kirk may have done something clever (recognizing that they’re flying into an ambush, blah blah blah. I won’t get into it) but he’s done nothing more clever than lots of other more minor characters do throughout the film. And none of these others are suddenly in the mix to be in command.

Now, I’ve seen this sort of dynamic a lot in movies and it irritates me – this sort of absurdly easy upward scaling. In Slumdog Millionaire it was absolutely nauseating.The kid wins kazillions of rupees on a TV game show by answering lots of easy, multiple choice questions the answers to which he picked up on random occasions during his not-too-gruelling Huckleberry Finn type adventures. All the while claiming the money doesn’t mean anything to him – he only wanted to get on TV so his girlfriend could see him there. If money and fame really weren’t important to him, I think the film should have redeemed itself in the end by having him err on the final question. But no. He guesses correctly and becomes a millionaire (before guessing, he asks the aforementioned girlfriend. She doesn’t know the answer. Apparently, she wasn’t clever enough to go through life gathering information the way he was)

I’m not yet a parent, but I really dislike the kind of message this kind of thing sends – the emphasis on easily acquired wealth and fame and success. This is not the kind of Sesame Street lesson you’d want your kids to get.

Elsewhere, we can see the concept of the “chosen one”. This is a phrase that shows up in some form in The Matrix, Dark City, the Harry Potter movies, and the second Star Wars trilogy.

Sometimes it’s the “foretold one” or just “The One”, but it’s essentially the same thing: some guy is inexplicably more powerful magicwise and more cool attitudewise than everybody else. This non-merited uber-status seldom falls onto a woman, unless you count Twilight, where the main chick is the only human whose mind the vampire stud can’t read.

This kind of thing may go back to Arthurian Legend, which I’ve read a little of. In Le Morte d’Arthur, it is somehow “prophesied” that Sir Galahad will be the one to finally find the Holy Grail - principally due to the fact that, when he first shows up, he sits down in the chair that is known as the chair where the prophesied grail finder will sit. (I don’t think I’m making this up. This is the way I really remember it.) In any case, Galahad is this perfect knight, not because he worked really hard and studied and passed his knight exams (insert requisite “knight school” joke) but because he was magically anointed by God so that no one can defeat him or harm him or outwit him. Because he’s, ya know, the chosen one.

So here’s my thing. I can’t help but wonder if the root of this idea comes from the very real institution of monarchy. Ya know, royalty, aristocracy, inherited titles. People were simply born to be the Duke or the king of whatever, or even the pharaoh of whatever. And the sycophants that surrounded them would routinely characterize them as gifted, talented and beautiful. All their subjects, obviously, had to make their beliefs adjust to a reality they were unable to do anything about, so they tended to regard the nobility as worthy, and capable, of governing; and as having attributes they had never developed or earned.

In Spain we actually have a King and, as limited as the king’s “responsibilities” are, non-critical thinking people are generally in agreement that he does them incredibly well. There’s a Queen, too, - and guess what. She also does an outstanding job. Crown prince, ditto. Basically, their ability to carry out their functions with uncanny acumen comes principally from having been born.

Maybe this runs deep in the breed. Maybe not just children, but everyone is in love with the concept of getting things they haven’t had to earn. The U.S. doesn’t have a monarchy, but it does have the Kennedys who, judging from that whole dust up with Caroline Kennedy last year, are all born qualified to govern in some capacity.

And, if the Kennedys don’t interest you, you’ve got Neo and Annakin Skywalker, equally “chosen” by some witchcraft of one variety or another. Or Harry Potter. Or that rich slumdog kid. Or any lottery winner, for that matter.

But don’t get me started. (good all purpose closing for any blog post)

Let The Real One In

2009-04-23T15:47:00.000-07:00

Here’s a thing (that’s an excellent all purpose opening for any post about anything)

Here’s a thing – just saw a TV news review of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, coming out on DVD this week or whatever.

The critic said, “Another movie about vampires…but real vampires (“vampiros de verdad”) not those florid, lovestruck adolescents we’ve been seeing so much of lately.” (see my comments on TWILIGHT in previous posts I think)

And there I am thinking – Ya know, Lady, I understand what you’re trying to say, or what you want to say. I’m not an idiot. The problem is with what you are saying.

There are no vampires. We’re on the same page with that, right? Hence there’re no real ones as compared to fakey ones. No poseur vampires who’ve unfortunately replaced the authentic ones we all grew up with.

I love this movement in cinema and literature and crypto-literature about giving us the real skinny where there is none.

WATCHMEN. There’s one. There were WATCHMEN and THE DARK KNIGHT the movies this last year, but I remember when the graphic novels came out back in the eighties. I was waitering at J.C. Dobbs in Philly and the whole staff was passing around Watchmen and Batman: the Dark Knight Returns. The idea seemed to be that these works fleshed out the gritty, sad reality behind…well… masked crimefighters. (More than 20 years later and I still can’t write that with a straight face.) Everyone enjoyed explaining to the uninitiated how this wasn’t at all like the Batman TV show with Adam West – (as if anything could be!) These were serious. Darker. And, okay, they were. But people really seemed to believe that the basis of that darkness was their portrayal of the difficulty, self doubt, and prejudices one might actually confront using his/her superpowers to battle arch criminals.

I was like “Have I woken up in Crazyland?!” (what’s that Will Ferrell line in Zoolander?)

“You do realize that no one has ever really dressed up in a secret identity and gone out to fight crime, don’t you? There simply is no (finger quotes here) what that’s really like.”

I even wondered if there were any cases of someone dressing up in costumes to fight crime – vigilantes and such. I remember the Guardian Angels providing non-sanctioned security on NY subways, but they didn’t wear masks and, if you asked one his or her name, I think they probably told you. Oh yea. There actually were some people who wore funny masks and costumes and sallied forth to mete out anonymous justice on their own. But they were called the Ku Klux Klan.

I hope I’m not freaking out any comic books fans, but there’s really no getting out of the KKK as a sort of real-world iconic basis for Batman. I mean, who would disagree that the reason the Klan doesn’t get much play is because of their insistence on maiming and killing innocent people instead of battling against, say, Magneto. Were that the case our whole attitude might have been different. You can just see them with the whips and the torches and stuff pulling the Riddler out of his house in the middle of the night. “Riddle me this, Klansmen!”

And in their secret identity of “Buford” sipping Pepsi outside the barber shop, “Who’s been takin’ all the jobs from the decent white folk in this town? Is it them there niggers? Or could it maybe be…The Catwoman!?”

And now they’re making this new Sherlock Holmes in which Holmes takes off his shirt and punches guys around. This is back to roots Holmes, - seems to be the pitch - not the posing snoot with the pipe and the deerstalker cap.

Yet he’s described in the novels as wearing that type of cap. There is no real Sherlock Holmes who doesn’t wear it. What’s more, for all its Guy Ritchie, cool-Britannia happeningness, there’s apparently no mention of Holmes’s coke habit (and it’s Robert Downey Jr.!)

Evidently, the be all and end all of this kind of nonsense is J.C. Jesus. The Real Jesus, of course. Not the prettified Jesus of Sunday school, Max Von Sydow or Jeffrey Hunter. I mean the authentic, hardcore Jesuses from LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST and THE PASSION. The ones who show us what it was really like to be able to heal lepers with your mind and create large quantities of food through magic.

Picture Willem Dafoe struggling to get into the role.

“I’m just trying to get the right facial expression of a guy who’s gonna get crucified and resurrect a few days later to open the gates of heaven for mankind. Do you think maybe he looked something like this?”

I hope someone on the set was kind enough to say, “Will, don’t give yourself a hernia. Nobody’ll know if you get it wrong since... in the history of the human race… no one has actually had that expression on their face.”

All of which reminds me we’ve recently had one of those periods which, for the religious, is called either Passover or Easter and for everyone else (especially teachers) is known as a week off with BEN HUR on TV a lot.

There are all kinds of surveys and studies carried out relatively frequently over here indicating how widespread atheism is becoming in Europe – Spain and Italy included. Don’t know exactly what the case is in Ireland, Poland or other Roman Catholic stalwarts (“stalwart”, now there’s a weird word). But, apart from the data on file, I think I can confirm this trend from conversations with students of mine.

These are all middle class professionals: engineers and sales managers and I.T. technicians. Many characterize themselves as “no creyentes” (non-believers) and are the second or third generation of such in their families and attended, exclusively, public schools.

What I find fascinating, and oddly reassuring, is the way they frequently don’t know (what I consider to be) real elemental info about Christianity and the Bible and…well…religious practices. Stuff I kind of know a lot about. The seven deadly sins (of course, they know them from seeing SEVEN) or sacraments or, and this happens a lot, what particular religious holiday is creeping up on us.

Besides Christmas and Easter, there are also state holidays based on things like The Ascension, The Assumption and, of course, my personal favourite, the Immaculate Conception.

“So what is this holiday on Monday,” I ask. (remember, these are English conversation classes)

“Hmmm, I dunno. I’m an atheist. Maybe it’s, like, Palm Monday…or the Assumption or something.”

“It is the Assumption, right. And, parenthetically, there is no palm Monday…but, in any case, what actually is, for religious people, the Assumption?”

“I guess people go to mass maybe. Could be, like, wreathes. Processions.”

“No, but I mean what supposed thing in the Bible are they commemorating?”

“Whew, I honestly don’t know. Something to do with Jesus? Or maybe when Noah spotted land?”

Now, this gave me pause because I think, if you wanted to go that route, the day Noah spotted land would have made a hell of a holiday. Don’t know why they never picked up on that. There could be a seafaring theme. Anchors and such. Rowing. Model ship building. Cool stuff about pairing off animals. (By the way, if something should come of this idea…©)

Before I go on, I want to make it clear that I do think learning and knowing of stuff is good. I’m in favour of information and intelligence in all its forms. If you know something, thumbs up to you.

Having said that.

I find it a little bit tedious when Islamic clergymen and scholars are trotted out on Spanish TV whenever there’s a terrorist attack here or some variety of jihadist incident, and their spin always seems to be that the real problem The West is facing is that it needs to understand more about what Islam really is.

And I watch it and I think, “You cannot ask Christians or, especially, atheists to learn more about Islam.” There should be no requirement for that. If they want to read up on it as a hobby, good. But if people who read a lot of Tolkien suddenly became a problem in our society, I’d be really angry if I were expected to read up on Tolkien to get along with them better. And this goes for any kind of superstition.

So, back to the middle class Europeans who aren’t up on what, whatever, “Pentecost” is.

I think it’s tremendous. I mean, it’s always good to be intelligent and well-read, like I said above. However, (I’m getting unfortunately serious here) if a truly secular society is ever to come about – as all we well intentioned progressives want – it’s not going to be at the hand of clever hipsters. It’s not going to be due to New School types knowing lots about Elaine Pagels’ The Gnostic Gospels, or Discovery channel documentaries on the Dead Sea scrolls, or fanzine interest in Mary Magdalene’s role in the early church. It’s principally going to come from successive generations of people who don’t know anything about all that.

There’ll always be few of us who stay up late watching The Learning Channel to be able to quote chapter and verse of the minutiae regarding some neo-platonic rabbi in the 1^st century, but I’m hoping most citizens are just going to be like, “The Ephesians? Weren’t those the people on Star Trek who could move so fast they were invisible?”

Fluency in the Language of Cranes

2009-03-30T15:59:00.000-07:00

Finally, we’ve got the TG07/1 Grúa 2 en 1 MODULIFT. Sleek, light, manageable. Small dimensioned for greater manoeuvrability. “Patient lift” these things are generally called on English language geriatric equipment sites. To us, it’s our crane. Our new big ticket item (thus supposed to help the economy, creating jobs in the hard hit crane design field.) It’s a French model, just on the market; so cutting edge the assembly instructions were available only in French. (I had to put it together just from the pictures) At home, we call it Le Crane.

We had been renting one, but after a few months of that I came to understand the oft- quoted Croatian proverb, “Renting a crane for many months is like throwing money down the vodocrpilište.”

This is a device for lifting Tina, Luisa’s mother, in and out of bed and in and out of chairs (wheel and otherwise). Post hip-surgery physical therapy hasn’t really gone so well, so we’re essentially down in the deep end of the pool in terms of caring for an elderly person. Lots of hospital style machinery and hygiene products. Lots of reminding Tina where she is and who you are.

We’re always joking that we’re in a road company MEMENTO but, of course, it’s not really the case. People with some form of amnesia (at least in the movies) seem to be able to think clearly about the present. They can put two and two together and then confront their amnesia in some sort of controlled, strategic fashion: a kind of “Help! I have amnesia!” reaction. But Tina doesn’t appear worried. Like she’s not entirely sure what people are and are not supposed to remember. It’s really as if Guy Pearce in MEMENTO not only had that anterograde amnesia but was also learning disabled in a more conventional sense. And drunk. And tired. (While all this might have made it significantly more difficult to find his wife’s killer, I think on the whole it would have made for a more entertaining film.)

On other occasions we joke that she, for all intents and purposes, seems to be living out a day from maybe the mid-1950s.

“What’s the matter, Tina?”

“My mother’s waiting for me. I was supposed to meet her at the bakery when I finished.”

But, in fact, the situation she claims to feel herself in isn’t all that detailed. And, evidently, if you were living in 1955 and you suddenly found yourself sitting here in our living room in Madrid in 2009, you’d certainly have a lot of questions which she doesn’t seem to have. It’s blurry, confused time travel.

And then there’s the land beyond memory loss.

Like when we tie her up. Or down, actually.

Tying a person up is one of those kooky things, we agreed the other day, that you thought you’d never find yourself doing.

This was much like when our niece Alba was shipped down to live with us after getting into varied and sundry types of trouble (including with the police), and a long held ideal of mine was swiftly challenged. I had honestly believed I’d never enter her room without knocking or informing her or whatever. A teenager’s room should be sacrosanct. If we learned anything from the 60s and that decade’s youthful ideals and its Patti Duke Show reruns, it’s that.

On her third day with us we were in there with the infra-reds and the habitat suits, DNA kits, ultraviolet scanners and hidden microphones.

“Wow, looks like I was totally wrong about myself. Go figure.”

So then you come to the thing of the tying up. And we’re not talking about playful, consensual bondage here. We’re talking about the Bellevue horror stories. “Tied to a bed,” “She was tied to the bed when inspectors entered the room.” Or “He had apparently been kept tied to a bed.”

Old people. Tied. Words you don’t want to see in the same sentence. It’s bad, isn’t it?

But there we were, in the hospital with Tina after she’d broken her hip and dislocated her shoulder. And, in her state of semi-delirium, she was constantly trying to pull apart the Velcro sling around her arm. She couldn’t understand what it was, why she was wearing it or what had happened to her.

We sat there in shifts – refastening the Velcro and sticking to the theory that we had to keep explaining her situation to her and convince her not to rip off the sling. Eventually, not thinking clearly after so much time without sleep, we starting to play around with ideas like, ”Maybe if, I don’t know, when the nurses aren’t around we could like…tie her other arm down with a stocking or something.”

“Shhh. Didn’t you see what happened to those people at Bellevue!? We’ll end up in a perp walk.”

Then we mention to one of the nurses, ”If only there were some way to get her to stop opening the sling.”

And they’re like, ”Why don’t we just tie her up?”

“What! You mean we can actually tie someone’s limbs down?”

“Down. Up. Whatever you want.” And she pulls out the assortment of padded Velcro strips, “Here. This is for tying them to the bed. This is for tying them to the bottom of the bed. This is for tying someone in a running position. This is your standard hostage-tied-to-a-chair rig.”

“Wow. Get out. Are you sure it’s not bad to…ya know… tie people up.”

“Didn’t you see the Exorcist?”

“Yea. I guess if you can tie the devil up, it must be okay.”

Now she’s home. The shoulder’s more or less healed but there’s this big problem with her left leg (yep, the left one, the one that’s not shorter due to the hip surgery – and, obviously, by “hip surgery” I’m not referring to some really happening downtown surgery)

She’s constantly lifting the leg up; either placing over the other, largely immobile, leg, or just sort of suspending it in mid-air. And I do mean constantly. Every minute. Like there’s an invisible helium balloon tied to it. (Also, anything you ask her to do: raise her arms, lean forward, pass you the salt. Shwing – that leg just shoots up in the air, and she looks at you like “there ya go”)

This tic, based on a neurological malfunction, not only causes sores on the other knee but causes her torso to slide forward and begin inching its way off whatever chair she’s on. Soon her ass is suspended over the floor, she doesn’t know what’s happening or why, and it’s no easy feat to get her back up (without our handy new crane, that is).

Finding herself significantly slunk down, she will call for help.

“Socorro!” or maybe “Auxilio!”. And you come in to her room from wherever you were and you say, ”What is it, Tina?” (Obviously, as soon as you enter you know what the problem is, but you ask anyway- just to keep things interesting)

And she can’t explain what the problem is. She knows there’s something wrong, but she can’t define or articulate it. (Remember. She’s in a state in which, if you ask her if she can get up and walk around, she’ll say she can)

So she’ll either shrug and make a vague head gesture toward the rest of her body or, to explain her calling you, she’ll just kind of make something up.

“There were some guys in here looking for you just now. So I thought I’d call you.”

“Really? Who were they?”

“I dunno. I think they were day laborers.”

“A group of day laborers here in your room looking for me? That’s unusual, don’t ya think?”

“Ya know, I do.”

So this thing of the leg is one area in which key behaviors are kind of winking out; not only memories or learned practices, but practices which bear directly on her safety and well-being and which should, consequently, be instinctual .

Much like another problem she has which has led me to believe that those Heimlich manoeuvre signs in restaurants should include right at the top: When choking, Rule number one, Stop eating!

It’s like a bad Mama Cass joke. Tina, while dining, will occasionally begin to cough and gag, but will continue to put food into her mouth. Basic survival stuff.

And that’s the case with the fucking leg. She doesn’t understand that she’s causing herself to fall on the floor and that she will not be able to A)prevent herself from falling or B) pick herself up.

So we’re back to the tying. This time using the fluffy Velcro strips to tie her foot to the leg of the chair. Hey! We don’t gag. Okay? We don’t go there. Just the tying. Okay, and a little drugging, with medical supervision. The tying and the drugging. That’s all. Besides the depositing her pension checks into our account. But that’s all. Oh god, who am I kidding? Get me the handcuffs and the orange jumpsuit.

Moondance Memories

2009-03-04T15:50:00.000-08:00

I’ve just recently heard or read or generally found out that the famed Moondance Diner at the corner of 6th Avenue and Grand Street is no longer. Sure wish the N.Y. zoning authority or people I know in the neighbourhood would have kept me up on such news.

Those who have seen my TV biopic (okay, there isn’t one) will remember that it was at the Moondance Diner where events which would ultimately lead to my living in Spain were first set in motion.

Out of work after the infamous ambush closure of Exterminator Chili (Church St. & Walker) in one of those late-80s years, I got a job at the Moondance, waitering alongside Jonathan Larson – yep, the guy that penned RENT and died right before the opening or something. I have to admit that I kind of didn’t really like the guy; sort of aloof and superior and not funny. “not funnyness” was hard to adapt to after Exterminator, as it was basically non-stop hysterics there right up until the moment they fired everyone (not to mention that we had Michael Imperioli tending bar right when he was filming Goodfellas)

Tips weren’t good at The Moondance as the food was cheap and they only had a licence for beer. The onion rings were, apparently, famous: cited in the Zagat guide or something, people enthusiastically ordered them as if they’d read about them in the Bible.

In the summer, when I first started, we had these polo shirts with Moondance written across the back. Fine. As autumn started to roll in the manager told me it was time to switch to the winter uniform - A white dress shirt and black tie. I was like, “Good one, Lester.”

“No. I mean it. White shirt and tie.”

Now, I know people are always saying “I honestly though he/she was joking” to emphasize the ridiculousness of something but, in this case, really, I actually thought he WAS JOKING. I mean, at Exterminator we made a fortune and yet weren’t required to play dress up.

So, okay. Shirt and tie. I’m on board.

Shiftwise, I get the Saturday night to Sunday morning round-the-clock bit. Just me and the African guys in the kitchen. Basically it was a ghost town all night til the clubbers started drifting in for onion rings.

Thing is, though, ghost towns, as we all know, are really cool.

One night I was there chatting with an old retired guy who came into Manhattan every Saturday to work on his project of, get this, walking every single block of the island and checking them off. World Beat music blasting from the kitchen. 2 or 3 a.m. in comes this Spanish girl (no, not my wife Luisa – but a friend of hers) She’s just had a bizarre, After Hours-style encounter with a cab driver. Essentially, she’d forgotten all her money back at the residence where she was staying (which was actually a convent of Spanish nuns that functioned as a sort of cheap B&B for Spanish tourists!) When she asks the cabbie (in Broken English – the Marianne Faithful song) to turn around and go back uptown cause she had no money, he sort of assaults her, tossing her out of the taxi but retaining her bag, with I.D. etc. Dazed, frightened, lost, she sees a rotating crescent moon in the distance and stumbles toward it.

One thing led to another (as things will tend to do) I eventually visited her, Gene (pronounced, more or less, hennay) in Spain and met Luisa. Moved here permanently in 1994 and we’re up to date.

Luisa and I always planned to go back to visit the Moondance one day as a sort of romance tourism but never found the time on trips to N.Y.

But then, one day, we’re watching Spiderman and “No way! Get out!”

“What? What is it?”

“That’s the Moondance Diner where I met Gene!”

“No way! Get out!”

Then it turns out to be used on Friends too. Monica works there and it’s portrayed as a kind of novelty theme restaurant, which it wasn’t but probably should’ve been.

Now, it’s gone. Wikipedia says the rent got too high, so it was moved to make way for –I’ll give you a minute to guess – If you guessed Luxury Condominiums you’re good at guessing easy things.

Kind of sad, since for years I’d been thinking of the Moondance as the only place I’d waitered, out of a sum total of 4, that was still standing. (though J.C. Dobbs, in Philly, has apparently reopened).

What’s cool, however, is that the Moondance Diner hasn’t simply rolled up and died but seems to be kind of out there, in the world, having adventures of its own. According to Wikipedia, it was first sold to the American Diner Museum in Providence, Rhode Island, then sold to a couple who carted the whole thing (remember, it’s a diner; it’s a prefab unit) out to a place called La Barge, Wyoming.

This from Wikipedia:

During its first Wyoming winter, in January 2008, the diner's walls buckled and the entire roof caved in under the weight of ice and snow. The rotating moon sign, kept safe in storage, was undamaged. By March 2008, the diner was mostly repaired and restored, and is open for business six days a week.

If this were a Sam Shepherd play, Luisa and I would continue our plan to visit the diner, renting an old Pontiac, or stealing one, and driving non-stop out to Wyoming to get some onion rings.

Or not. Maybe it’s enough just to think of it out there, on some windswept Wyoming plain, that crescent moon spinning slowly, lighting someone’s way down a lonesome road.

2009-02-15T16:08:00.000-08:00

As I tell everyone from the States who ever comes to visit us here, I’ve slowly but surely become more Stalinist since I’ve moved to Spain.

I just mean, in terms of opinions about public policy and the like, far more restrictive; far less in favour of an individual’s rights to do this or that and far more in favour of putting a cap on shit for the good of, well, ya know, the collective.

Europe has restrictions and prohibitions that would be unconscionable for well-intentioned American liberals and progressives, with their vague, 1st amendment based libertarian bent.

Like, for example (and I spent years debating this value with Luisa) in Austria and Germany and Holland and the like the Nazi Party and its attendant paraphernalia is banned. It’s illegal. If you call yourself a Nazi or distribute Nazi literature or swastikas, etc. you are so arrested.

More surprisingly, perhaps, there are political parties which are banned here in Spain: Basque nationalist parties. This are run by people who A) don’t recognize the nation of Spain and B) refuse to renounce violence as a legitimate form of policy making.

Now, for a lot of Americans, the idea of criminalizing political parties is anathema, since Nazis and the Klan are permitted to organize in broad daylight. (Remember the ACLU defending the rights of the Nazi Party to march through Skokie, Illinois?) And, where would skinheads be without swastikas? not to mention outlaw bikers.

But here’s the thing about Spain and Germany and whatever other Euro-countries you care to mention – And I can’t emphasize this enough - You really do get the sense that they are democracies. Really. I live here and you’ll just have to believe me when I say that you don’t get the feeling that the thought police are going to be kicking your door down any minute. You get the feeling that, more or less, within reasonable parameters, we have parliamentary democracy, due process of law, and freedom of speech. None of that uncomfortable feeling that they’re going to be burning Catcher in the Rye in a bonfire in front of the library.

How do I explain the this? Essentially because the famous “floodgate theory” is wrong. Ya know, the floodgate theory. “If you start by banning the swastika, soon you’ll be banning Slaughterhouse Five. Ban one political party and you’ve opened the floodgate to ban all of them.”

Over here, they seem to believe – and I think have been proven correct – that you can do stuff like ban swastikas and the Nazis and, no, you don’t necessarily end up in some Orwellian nightmare. It’s simply, in the case of Nazism, a question of “some things are finished, the human race has moved beyond them, and they’re not coming back”. Nazism, like the belief that the earth is flat, is simply no longer on the table and a going option; and no one has the right, first amendment or otherwise, to promote that belief. Thus, and this is a good one (and I admit I’m not certain that this isn’t also the case in the States, though I seriously doubt it) Denying the Holocaust is actually a crime in Europe. If you publicly state that the Holocaust did not occur, it’s the shackles and orange jumpsuits for you, Bud. This may seem extreme to an American, but their idea is that you can’t tell susceptible minds that there was no Holocaust any more that you can allow a schoolteacher to teach kids, like, wrong math – or wrong spelling – permitting it on some freedom of speech argument.

I think the clever will, at this point, be starting to put together what’s up with the Darwin Anniversary link posted just before this on Facebook.

Europe has Holocaust deniers, which the U.S. seems to have no problems with. What America has – and, okay, you’ll say it’s not the same. But let’s not call it the same. Let’s just call it comparable. Can you allow me that much? Comparable – America has Intelligent Design. And/or Creationism, however you want to slice it. And a certain variety of ultra-liberalism regarding, not just freedom of speech but, democracy itself allows people to basically keep Creationism on the table. So many Copernican / Pastuerian / Darwinian level issues never get definitively trampled underfoot because the dominant ideology seems to be one of allowing people to preach and promote wackyheaded ideas and, heck, if you can form a political party which can gain control of your municipality or county or school board, you can change what’s taught and, as this is a democracy, that’s okay.

Nothing is , like, the human race has moved beyond that and you can’t go around trying to start it up again.

BEWARE, like that guy said in those Ed Wood movies.

The Oldening

2009-02-06T16:12:00.000-08:00

We don’t usually download movies from the web (or even buy them from street vendors), but a couple of weeks ago, as Luisa’s reading The Boy in the Striped Pajamas with her class, one of her students gave her a DVD with a pirated “Boy in…” as well as a few other films: The Changeling, Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona and Twilight.

Interesting phenomenon, Twilight. Apparently, the series of novels is massive big among the adolescent set (Adolescent, from the Latin “adolecer” = to lack) and the film version of the first book is almost as big.

Now, it’s weird keying into these crazes and fads and the new big thing (these kids and their rock-and-roll – Oh, get with it, Daddy-O). You , and I do mean you! Old person. You watch this things or listen to them or read them and the closest you can ever get to the wavelength is to think they’re “Yea, it was okay. Liked it. Has a good beat and ya can dance to it.”

You’re able to see maybe why it’s good, but not see why it’s soooo good. Know what I mean? You have an idea as to why it was successful but that’ll not explain why it’s so fucking, over-the-top successful.

Okay, take Twilight. The main character is this rather non-descript, not popular nor notably unpopular young girl. I mean, she’s not even particularly goth or marginalized. This chick is NON-DESCRIPT. And this unbelievably handsome guy, who happens to, like, fly and stuff, falls in love with her because he can usually read people’s minds, but he can’t read hers. He doesn’t know why this is the case and neither does she, yet it causes most of the really happening vampires in the pacific northwest to either be falling in love with her or trying to kill her- Specifically her.

I can see how identification with this character would appeal to a certain type of lonely, average, non-descript teenager – You become the center of everyone’s attention, not because of any aspect of your looks, your personality, or anything you’ve achieved; simply because of something magical. Like teenage boys fantasizing that you can just be you and look like you and play Nintendo all day, but for some reason Angelina Jolie shows up and she’s in love with you.

But even if you accept the above as potentially one explanation for the book and film’s success, it doesn’t explain SUCH success. You ask a kid if Twilight is really pound for pound any different from Buffy and the look at you like you’re nuts. To them it obviously is.

“But why is it actually better than Buffy or even Lost Boys?”

“Cause like, I dunno, it just is. Far better. “

Wonder how they used to explain that the Beatles were better than Jerry Vale. Could it be put in terms my mother could understand? “It’s just quality stuff, Mom. Why can’t you hear it?” I imagine only people who know a whole lot about music (notes and semi-tones and keys) could really articulate why the Beatles were better. (please, if anyone who does know a lot about music is reading this and knows that Jerry Vale was actually better than the Beatles, don’t tell me)

My wife Luisa, like me, couldn’t figure out what all the fuss is about Twilight and I just told her to relax. Nothing we can do. This is the situation we’ll be in from here on in in terms of understanding what kids are into, be it Twilight or Harry Potter.

The good news is we’re at least somewhat open to these new things. We can at least see that Twilight and Harry Potter or the latest pop icon are okay. Watchable. Listenable. Even if we don’t quite understand the frenzy. I don’t think this was the case with the war generation as regards the Rolling Stones or whatever. My parents literally (and by “literally” I of course mean “figuratively” ) literally couldn’t listen to it. Or things like Star Trek or the Monkees, it was like they couldn’t really see that there was something on the TV screen- they’d start fiddling with the antenna like the set was broken.

Maybe the generation gap is closing.

Can't Get Into A) football B)futbol C)soccer D)All of the above

2009-02-02T15:58:00.000-08:00

So, as of February 1st , I’ve been living in Spain for 15 years.

I think I have some vague recollection of watching the 1994 Super Bowl at my neighbors’ apartment the night before I left, and the annual coinciding of this sporting event with my moving anniversary (moving in so many ways) brings me to Living in Europe Observation # 7922. (don’t look for observations numbers 1 thru 7921, they only kind of exist):

Europe’s opinions have won me over on a wide variety of topics. I prefer the parliamentary system they have over here to the U.S.’s process. (we’ve got none of that supremely silly primary season; and prime ministers, under this system, always have a majority in their parliament – funkadelic –and consequently more stuff gets done.) I also now question the wisdom of the jury system. In Spain, juries are used very sparingly in criminal cases (professionals handle the whole thing) and nobody seems to be claiming our false acquittal or erroneous conviction rates are real high.

And I’m not even going to go into the stuff I was always in favour of, like national healthcare, etc.

But here is one thing all these people have not managed to change my opinion about – and it’s not for lack of trying – Football. And I do mean Soccer. Maybe, to avoid confusing or alienating anyone, I should just write it like they do in Spain: Futbol. (Briefly, years ago, it was called Balonpie over here – literally a combination of “ball” and “foot”, but that didn’t catch on. By the way, NFL style football is sometimes referred to as “rugby” in Spain. They see no point in wasting time distinguishing between the two)

I’ve given the sport any number of chances to impress me (the year I moved to Spain was a world cup year, and I swallowed the whole thing) and I do occasionally watch an important championship or cup match.

But, essentially, folks, it has not worked its magic on me. Like the food in a bad highway diner, it’s bad and there’s way too much of it. Now either soccer doesn’t actually have a “season” in the conventional sense or, and I think this might be the case, the current soccer season started sometime before I moved here in 1994 and is still going on. I mean there just really seems to be soccer, like, virtually 24/7. That’s the way it seems when your not a fan – and when I say “not a fan” I’m basically referring to me and most of the women on the European continent.

“Does soccer have what I’d call a season?” I ask students of mine.

“Yea, sure. It’s between September and June.”

“So there’s no soccer in July and August?”

And they’re like, “Oh, sure, THERE IS. Sure there’s soccer in July and August. You’ve got the King’s Cup and maybe a Euro Cup and exhibition matches and then pre-season play.”

“Is there any period when there isn’t any soccer at all on TV?”

This confuses them. “How do you mean?”

Remember Monty Python? “Why don’t you have the Spam, fried eggs, toast and Spam? That hasn’t got much Spam in it.”

That’s also how much soccer there is in the summer.

And the relative lack of ball control (compared to those sports in which you handle the ball with your hands – fill in requisite evolutionary, opposable thumb joke) makes game play frustrating and dull. The ball’s forever rolling out of bounds, and rolling to where people don’t want it to be, and rolling over to opposing players far more than balls are ever intercepted in football or basketball, for example. (I think they should work on a way to intercept the ball in baseball though I admit I’m not really sure how that’d work.)

Plus, they’ve got this horrible, entertainment killing thing called the “off sides” rule. This is basically that it’s illegal to make a forward pass unless there’s at least one other player between your team’s most forward player and the opposing goalie. This totally puts the kibosh on fast breakaway scoring and leads to any number of disallowed goals in every single game. Thus, soccer scores are generally like 1-0, 2-1, along those lines.

Finally, to an outsider, the sport generally seems to be rife with poor sportsmanship.

· Losses are systematically blamed on the officiating, far more so than in U.S. sports. (Check it out: there was actually a move a few years ago to allow replays of video footage a role in the officiating, but teams and fans alike were against it. They didn’t want definitive rulings. They wanted the refs to kind of arbitrarily keep splitting the number of called fouls somewhere down the middle. Or in their favour)

· The absence of allotted time-outs forces players to throw themselves down onto the pitch (the grass) and feign agony, screaming and weeping, every time they have the slightest problem (from a skinned knee to, like, a heal coming loose) because it’s the only way to get the referee to suspend play.

· Near the end of the season, teams routinely play to a tacitly agreed upon tie. This is because league standings are according to a point system, as opposed to tournament style playoffs (win= 2 points, tie= 1, loss = none) so both teams sometimes see it in their best interest to tie and get 1 point rather than risk losing and getting none.

· Once, there was some sort of controversy about ineligible players on the field or some other complicated thing which actually put the result of a match in dispute. Was it a tie or a win for one of the teams? Well, the League’s Board of Governors decided that the best way to resolve the situation was to play the game over again. BOTH teams refused and said that the Board should decide who won. (Yes, even the team which potentially had a second chance to try and win) They both preferred the victory be decided by some sort of committee hearing to replaying the match. That’s bad sportsmanship. If you had that kind of attitude back when I was in Little League, somebody would pour something really disgusting on you.

I’ve had Spanish soccer fans suggest, in conversations about why pro-soccer never seems to make it in the States, that Americans are close-minded. I explain that in the States there are three comparatively popular sports, with seasons rotating into each other. Variety. They shrug. Why would you want variety when you can have futbol?

Resident Evil

2009-01-16T10:54:00.000-08:00

I own, therefore I am.

Whereas back in the States I’d most likely have ended up an inquilino, Spanish custom has talked me into becoming a true vecino- my wife and I have a flat en propriedad (or an apartment or a condominium, as you like)

And I’m happy with it. Believe me. Anyone can see the benefit of not throwing euro after euro down that sinkhole that is monthly rent for any significant amount of time . So, if you’re going to be here for anything resembling permanently, I recommend buying. (Didn’t Bruce Lee say “Be an owner, my friend”?)

But, be aware of that which awaits beyond all those searches and tortured decisions, those down payments and mortgage approvals, those avales and escrituras : What awaits is a seemingly harmless bunch of people called…

Actually, I don’t know what it’s called. Back in the States I never got close enough to the thing to know. The condo board? The Residents’ Association? In Spanish, it’s the comunidad de vecinos. (What could sound more harmless? Community. Neighbors. A friendly fairy land where tweeting birds float down golden lanes of sunshine.) Basically, it’s a governing assembly formed by all those who own a flat in the building. (If you’ve seen Rosemary’s Baby, it was portrayed as a coven of devil worshippers – which is not really too far off the mark). I don’t mean to say every resident in the building actually attends the meetings – only a bare handful of the truly twisted. Our building has more than 50 flats and attendance is usually somewhere between 12 and 20 people.

Like I said, I don’t know much about them in other countries, but here it’s just sort of common cultural knowledge – like knowing that cab drivers cheat you or that Spam is annoying – that these collectives are the bane of every homeowner’s existence. People will trade stories about theirs, arguing with friends and co-workers to prove whose residents’ association is the worst, the vilest, the most irrational, the most corrupt, the most penny-pinching or, inversely, the most spendthrift. There was even a popular sitcom, whose title translates loosely as There’s Just No Living With These People (Aqui No Hay Quien Viva), which revolves around the misadventures of one of these associations.

My wife and I had reason to fear this organization even before moving in, since the previous owner of our flat had – shhhhh- illegally constructed a third bedroom on what had been a gigantic terrace. Could this get us in trouble? I called the Municipal Housing Authority and they told me, “Look, if it was built without the Resident Association’s permission, but no one’s filed a complaint in 8 years, it’s no longer a problem. It’s become legal.”

Whew. Thank you. But there was still that nagging question in the back of my mind: Why hadn´t the previous owner informed the comunidad? What difference could it have made to them?

So, criminal bedroom fears allayed, we moved in.

Before we barely had time to unpack we began receiving circulars informing us of an upcoming “emergency” resident association meeting. Apparently, everyone was in a panic because a gang of insane people had rented the commercial space on the ground floor and were planning on opening –A biker bar, maybe? Nazi Party headquarters? – no. A spa. Several residents (began the circular, and No. I don’t know exactly how many “several” is) have expressed grave concerns regarding potential flooding and humidity problems, as well as a fear of rat infestation (Huh?)

I wasn’t clear on the details but, hell, if people are expressing grave concerns, there must be something to it. I mean I, myself, am not one to express grave concerns lightly, so, if I do express grave concerns, you can be pretty sure I’m, well, ya know, gravely concerned. Expressly.

Dutifully, we attended the meeting, held (as it continues to be held) in a storeroom of the building’s groundfloor café. Tables had been pushed together in the shape of a big T.

INITIAL OBSERVATIONS ON AVERAGE RESIDENTS’ ASSOCIATION MEETING:

You spend (and when I say “you” I hope to mean reasonable homeowners, in general) You spend the first little while wondering when the meeting’s going to begin. – when someone’s going to call everyone to order. Then, slowly, insidiously, it begins to dawn on you that the meeting has already begun. Those people shouting in all directions, those standing and laughing, those having their own private conversations, those eating, those reading, those few serious-looking people over there in the corner speaking so lowly no one can hear them: all of this is the meeting.

My wife and I polled people to find out who, and where, the current president of the Residents’ Association was. We were informed (in a “Why would you want to know that?” sort of way) that “ he’s over there”, with the quiet group, sitting next to the Administrator.

Now, The Administrator. If your building has one of these characters, you’re in luck. This a business manager, who generally tends not to live in the building, contracted to take care of all of the relatively complex financial stuff like taxes , other things involving math, and, by and large, most of the paperwork involved in running a building. The catch is that you need a relatively large building, with enough residents to generate substantial monthly maintenance fees, to pay for said administrator. In small buildings, with just a handful of residents, the president is on his or her own when it comes to paperwork, and you just have to cross your fingers, hope he or she knows what he or she is doing (which he or she will not) , and basically settle for ending up so angry that you don’t speak to him or her for the rest of your life.

Meanwhile, back at the “Emergency” meeting, we sidled up to the administrator and the current governing board members (la feared junta directiva). Near them, a frustrated collection of spa engineers and spa architects were struggling vainly to be heard. Against the shrillest barrage of “grave concerns” yet witnessed, they were trying to explain the nature of the waterproof materials and the drainage systems to be used in the spa .

Discerning, with some difficulty, the few comprehensible phrases spat out by the screaming, redfaced anti-spa movement, we came to understand that the “grave concerns” regarding the spa seem to stem from a belief that…That… I don’t know. I could never figure it out. It was like they thought big firehoses were going to spray rat-infested water into the building through open windows. They had no level-headed, reasonable criticism of the spa’s design whatsoever.

Happily, the assembly would not permit the lack of any real problem to diminish the passionate nature, much less the length, of the meeting, which lasted well into the following Spring. (At one point, someone was nice enough to come in from the street to remind us all to put our watches forward to adjust for daylight savings time)

“So there’s really no problem with the spa plumbing ,” I finally commented to the Administrator, who was sitting calmly doing a sudoku puzzle.

“Oh, no. Not at all.”

“Then why are we all here?”

He regarded me with a wistful, sympathetic smile. “This is your first residents meeting, isn’t it?”

And that was actually one of the shorter meetings.

The dynamic generally involves many of the older residents seeming to enjoy disrupting the meeting and thus making it go on for hours. They chatter on and on to the person sitting next to them loud enough to disrupt your ability to hear the person who, theoretically, has the floor (pointless chatter along the lines of “These people move in here and they think they’re gonna be telling us what to do. Big man! Mister Big shot. Has all the answers. Why, when we moved in here, we had to....yak yak yak.”) But if they’re given the floor, and asked to simply state whatever they want to say to the assembly as a whole, they speak for about two seconds, or decline to speak at all. ( I sometimes suspect that some nefarious force has slipped various people at the meeting a hundred euros to guarantee that nothing gets discussed calmly or resolved difinitively,

i.e. “Okay, now remember, if the chatter dies down for some reason and it looks like somebody is actually explaining something clearly and concisely, say something real loud to somebody across the room, or get up declaring that you’re going outside to have a cigarette, or change the subject and begin talking again about something they were talking about 20 minutes earlier.”)

The remainder of the assembly tends to be composed of recent arrivals attending their first meeting. You generally never see them again.

Our Second Meeting.

This was the first meeting with the brand new administrator, the previous one having been forced out by a small cabal of residents in some sort of machiavellian power play worthy of a Fortune 500 Board of Directors.

On the agenda this time was

* A motion to convert the long unused coal-cellar in the basement (from when the building was built in the 1950s) into a storage space.
* A motion to build a door out onto the roof at the top of the righthand staircase.

Some newcomers argued the benefits of using the coal-cellar as a temporary storage space for when people are painting their apartments or having their floors polyurethaned and they’ve got to store their furniture somewhere.

The response of the mob to this proposal was a relentless barrage of “Let ‘em pay!...They wanna varnish their floors? Fine. Let ‘em pay to store their furniture some place. (slapping palm violently in ‘money in hand’ gesture) There’s no free ride in this life. ...why should we have to put up with a basement full of furniture?.”

All this with regard to a space in the basement the very existence of which was unknown to most people! Never used. Never seen. If somebody’s furniture was ever left down there you wouldn’t even know anything about it.

The second thing was to build a steel door to the roof so as to facilitate worker access when something needed to be done on the roof (roof repair, shingles, painting, wires, cable TV, dish antennas). As it was, workmen had to trudge through the concierge’s apartment, where he lives with his wife and three kids. They had to carry whatever materials they were using through the living room, through one bedroom, and out onto his deck, before climbing out onto the shingles to reach wherever they had to go. This practice was complicated, impractical and caused not insignificant inconvenience to the concierge and his family.

As you can imagine, the response to this proposal was, to put it briefly, along the lines of “Fuck ‘em.” There was more verbage, sure, but that was basically the gist of it .

We tried our level best to rebut that viewpoint, “The concierge’s wife and children aren’t employees here, and it might behoove us as a community to make some accomodation….” But halfway through that last sentence most people had already started screaming again (not necessarily about this matter, you understand. Anything’s a good target: sports, current events, footwear) In terms of eloquence and civility, the debate was on the whole reminiscent of the serene give-and-take Dr. Frankenstein used to have with those torch wielding villagers storming his castle.

Final Score: 1 -1. The coal cellar proposal was voted down but the doorway to the roof miraculously went through thanks to some residents who’d had the presence of mind to go around the day before collecting proxy votes from people too afraid or too sane to attend the meeting. These proxy votes are tiny scraps of legal flotsam which state, in effect, “I give the right to the bearer of this document to vote in my name.”

This tactic always manages to throw the angry mob types for a loop. “Wait! What just happened? I thought the people who screamed the loudest and had the reddest faces were supposed to win!”

It’s a shame people can’t store furniture in the basement, but I did come away from that meeting with an important insight. I finally understand why the woman we bought our apartment from didn’t ask the residents’ association for official permission to add on that third bedroom. Of course she wouldn’t. No sane person would. They would all have just said “no” for no reason at all. Cause they thought it was funny. Cause they consistently vote against anything anybody wants to do. Cause they prefer to inconvenience people. In essence, because they could say “no” and, ultimately, that’s what it’s all about.

What ever possessed us to attend that third meeting? This I ask myself every time the doorbell rings these days. You see, I am now the president of my resident’s association.

Much the way that in my country what you don’t want to be is “on jury duty”, it’s generally understood in Spain that nobody wants to be on their condo board. It’s a lot of thankless work, at best. At worst, people end up intentionally flooding your apartment, stealing your mail, or threatening you with physical harm.

But make no mistake: if you’re a newcomer to an old building, you will be on your Board, in some capacity – either president, vice president, or deputy vice-president – and you’ll be on it real fast, because A) everyone else will already have taken their turn and B) you’ll be stupid enough to attend a meeting. I mention this second circumstance since, though municipal codes may disagree, in our building you generally have to be at a meeting for them to rope you into being on the board.

If your residents’ association is a stickler for the law, and tags you for some slot despite your not attending the meetings, the quick thinking expatriot has a potential way out: pretend to not speak Spanish . If you should come up against some wiseguy neighbor who thinks he knows enough English to communicate with you, I suggest slipping into some totally made-up Samoan. (Spaniards are notoriously weak on Samoan dialects) And if you really are Samoan, well, you’re home free.

Initially, I was only supposed to be deputy vice-president, but the president got pissed off and resigned during the course of that very meeting (because of a dispute over the firing of yet another administrator.) Thus, everyone moved up a notch: The woman who was vice-president became president and I got bumped up to vice-president.

My wife nudged me and said, “Quick. We’d better figure out how to adjourn this meeting before somebody else resigns.”

“Yea,” I agreed, “At this rate, only a few people stand between me and being Mayor of Madrid.”

My vice-presidential term passed largely without incident.

I’d see neighbors in the lobby as they complained to the super about arguably serious problems: noise, water damage, break-ins. I’d blithely move through , humming, pretending not to hear.

And, frankly, I don’t like to toot my own horn, but it worked out pretty well. My humming and ignoring them even caused some neighbors to characterize me as one of the building’s top 10 vice –presidents ever. (the Nº1 vice-president was a woman who’d accidently been named vice-president despite having passed away the previous year; when the error was discovered, she was immediately bumped up to President)

Now my wife and I have been rotated into the presidency and the old humming-and-looking-the-other-way act gets me past all but the truly pathological, of which there are, unfortunately, many. When not mediating conflicts between next door neighbors that appear go back to the civil war (and which are sometimes about the civil war), I’m good humoredly signing anything any plumber or carpenter or electrician places in front of me , generally cheques for vast sums of money earmarked for – they assure me – absolutely necessary repairs. “If we don’t do it now,” they advise, “it’ll end up costing more in the long run.”

“That’s good enough for me. Where’s my pen?”

“Here ya go. Just make it out to Cash and, uhh, don’t worry about the VAT. This is just between friends.”

(Yes. I do know I will soon be imprisoned for all this.)

Our only hope, at this point, is to be such a bad Presidente and Presidenta that they’ll never, ever want us to do it again or even, in the best of all possibilities, that we’ll be impeached – driven from office in disgrace.

To this end, we’ve begun taking measures including, though not limited to, the following: Speaking exclusively in Samoan; Initiating a series of astronomically costly renovations (i.e. new lifts, with stewardesses, that do not go up and down but simply rotate on their own axis) ; Proposing unpopular new dress codes (every Thursday is “Naked Day” in the lobby!); Redoing the entire façade of the building in an as yet unspecified James Bond motif.

Obviously, the problem is that for us to be removed from office, somebody else has to be willing to step in, and they are not. So, when they find us switching the names around on all the mailboxes, they merely shrug and say, “Could be worse.”

In any case, if we do manage to finish out the whole year, the presidency probably won’t rotate back to us again until about 2057. With any luck, we won’t make it.